<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0"
	xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
	xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/"
	xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
	xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
	xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/"
	xmlns:slash="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/"
	>

<channel>
	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Free Speech</title>
	<atom:link href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/tag/free-speech/feed/" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
	<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com</link>
	<description></description>
	<lastBuildDate>Wed, 31 Dec 2014 07:56:08 +0000</lastBuildDate>
	<language>en-US</language>
		<sy:updatePeriod>hourly</sy:updatePeriod>
		<sy:updateFrequency>1</sy:updateFrequency>
	
	<item>
		<title>Obama: Against Free Speech Before He Was For It</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/robert-spencer/obama-against-free-speech-before-he-was-for-it/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-against-free-speech-before-he-was-for-it</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/robert-spencer/obama-against-free-speech-before-he-was-for-it/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 22 Dec 2014 05:08:16 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Robert Spencer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free Speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hack]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[North Korea]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Sony]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247884</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[As long as Muslims aren’t offended, he’s a free speech champion.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="color: #0433ff;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/gall.obama_.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247885" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/gall.obama_-406x350.jpg" alt="gall.obama" width="302" height="260" /></a><a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2014/12/19/sony-the-interview-hackers-gop/20635449/">As far as Barack Obama is concerned,</a></span> Sony was wrong to capitulate to threats from North Korean hackers and pull the movie <i>The Interview</i>. “I wish they had spoken to me first,” said the free speech champion. “I would have told them do not get into a pattern in which you’re intimidated by these kinds of criminal attacks.”</p>
<p>Remember: this is the same man who <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/09/25/remarks-president-un-general-assembly"><span style="color: #0433ff;">said this</span></a> at the United Nations on September 25, 2012.  “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”</p>
<p>Why did he say this? Because he was blaming a video about Muhammad for the murderous jihad attacks on September 11, 2012 in Benghazi. In that same speech, he called the video “crude and disgusting” and said: “I know there are some who ask why we don’t just ban such a video. And the answer is enshrined in our laws: Our Constitution protects the right to practice free speech.”</p>
<p>Yet this was just empty verbiage. Before he made that speech, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/14/white-house-innocence-of-_n_1885684.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">the Obama White House asked Google to remove the Muhammad video from YouTube</span></a>. In fact, this was one of the first things the White House did, even as the Benghazi jihad attack was still going on. <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2014/05/white-house-contacted-youtube-during-benghazi-attack-darrell-issa-says/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">ABC News</span></a> reported that “a still-classified State Department e-mail says that one of the first responses from the White House to the Benghazi attack was to contact YouTube to warn of the “ramifications” of allowing the posting of an anti-Islamic video, according to Rep. Darrell Issa, the Republican chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The memo suggests that even as the attack was still underway — and before the CIA began the process of compiling talking points on its analysis of what happened — the White House believed it was in retaliation for a &#8220;controversial video.”</p>
<p>And it didn’t just believe this – it acted upon this belief. An email circulated among Obama Administration officials while the attack was still going on, entitled, “Update on Response to actions – Libya,” stated: “White House is reaching out to U-Tube [sic] to advice ramification of the posting of the Pastor Jon video.”</p>
<p>So the first thing Obama did in response to the Benghazi jihad attack was move to restrict the freedom of speech, and protect Muslims from material that some of them found offensive. Google refused this preposterous and unconstitutional request on free speech grounds, although later a court ordered the video removed.</p>
<p>In those days, Obama never warned anyone not to “get into a pattern in which you’re intimidated by these kinds of criminal attacks.”</p>
<p>Indeed, the most ominous aspect of the Benghazi jihad attack for the long term health of the United States as a free society was the Obama Administration’s desire to blame it all on our freedom of speech. Obama’s declaration that “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam” was essentially a call for the U.S. to censor itself and voluntarily restrict our freedom of speech so as not to say anything that offends Muslims.</p>
<p>Yet restriction of the freedom of speech creates a protected class (whichever group cannot be criticized), thereby destroying the principle of equality of rights for all people before the law, and paves the way for tyranny by making it possible to criminalize dissent.</p>
<p>But now that a free speech case doesn’t have to do with outraged Muslims, Obama is suddenly a champion of free expression. This isn’t about endangering people, either: the North Koreans are just as capable of going on a bloody rampage as Islamic jihadists are.</p>
<p>For whatever reason, Obama shows a strange solicitude for the sensibilities of Muslims that he doesn’t appear interested in offering to the North Koreans. And as long as he opposes the freedom of speech in any context, his support for it in any other context rings hollow.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.</b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/robert-spencer/obama-against-free-speech-before-he-was-for-it/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>31</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Trashing the Constitution</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/trashing-the-constitution-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=trashing-the-constitution-2</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/trashing-the-constitution-2/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 09 Dec 2014 05:23:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Congress]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[constitution]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[First Amendment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free Speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rule of law]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247029</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[America's fiercest warriors for freedom reveal Obama's assault on our rights at Restoration Weekend. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong style="color: #232323;">Below are the video and transcript to the panel discussion “Trashing the Constitution,” which took place at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 20th Anniversary Restoration Weekend. The event was held Nov. 13th-16th at the Breakers Resort in Palm Beach, Florida. </strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/113571263" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Paul Erickson: </strong>Cinderella, Superman and Pinocchio were walking through the woods one day when they came upon a sign advertising a beauty contest.  Cinderella smiled at her two companions and said, “I’ve got this.”  She comes back an hour later with a trophy.  They continue on their journey until they see another sign, this one advertising a competition for the world’s strongest man.  Superman puffs out his chest, says, “I’ll be right back,” and about an hour later he comes back with a trophy.  Finally, just before sunset, the trio spies a final sign calling for a contest to find the world’s greatest liar.  Pinocchio scratches his nose and says, “No problem,” but an hour later he returns in tears with no trophy.  He manages only to blurt out, “Who is Barack Obama?”  When Pinocchio finally composes himself, his unbelieving companions ask how he possibly lost.  Pinocchio said, “I was in first place and then Barack Obama said, ‘I’m a constitutional scholar.’”</p>
<p>And so we find ourselves in 2014, gathered to discuss the trashing of the American Constitution.  My name is Paul Erickson.  I’ve been a part of the vast right-wing conspiracy since 1980 when I cast my first vote for President and for Ronald Reagan, and then serving eventually in his first administration.  Today’s topic has been one of the three animating issues of my avocation in politics since the days of my senior year at Yale when the Algonquin Round Table of my Yale political union party of the right stalwarts first formed the Federalist Society and I was privileged to take Nino Scalia’s final seminar at the University of Virginia School of Law before his elevation to the federal bench and his eventual donning of the black robes of justice.  But with us today are some very special individuals whose expertise makes me happier than President Obama with an open border.  I’ll introduce each of the experts in turn as they speak with plenty of time for your questions and a timely lunch.</p>
<p>Sean Noble is the founder of DC London, a one-stop shop for expert political messaging and campaign services.  Most of us first met Sean during his tenure as Arizona Congressman John Shadegg’s chief of staff.  His smiling, vicious campaign expertise has earned him the sobriquet “el sol diablo” from Arizona Democrats, many of whom speak English.  Sean has five children and is a Los Angeles Dodgers fan, but unlike Clayton Kershaw, his children have never let him down in the World Series.  His last thought of the day on his blog before he was swept up in the 2014 mid-term election analysis was a timeless quote by Margaret Thatcher.  “You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it.”  I’m happy to have him charging the breach once again today.  Sean Noble.</p>
<p><strong>Sean Noble: </strong>Thank you, Paul.  Well, it’s an honor to be here today and to be at this conference.  This has been a wonderful experience.  I was completely motivated by Dennis Prager last night.  I thought he spoke real truth to power.  We are at a very interesting point in American history, and it’s something that’s kind of evolved over the last few years as Barack Obama’s been in the White House, and that is that we have seen the absolute destruction of not only the hope of what the American dream is, but the actual expectation that people have about what America is and what Americans should believe in, and it’s one of those things that is why the First Amendment is so important, because we have to have a vigorous debate about what it means to be an American, what it means to believe in policy, to fight against policy, those kind of things, and yet in Barack Obama we have someone who is actually wanting to erase the First Amendment, and that is to squelch speech of anyone who wants to be critical of him.  A few months ago my organization, American Encore, put together an ad that we ran nationally online, and whoever’s running the AV, if you could run that ad.</p>
<p><strong>Ad Audio:</strong>  Where would America be without free speech?  We haven’t always agreed with what’s said, but until now we’ve always agreed on each other’s right to say it.  The Obama administration recently proposed new rules at the IRS to control the speech of certain nonprofits, to legalize the IRS’s inappropriate targeting of conservative groups.  Now the right to free speech is dependent upon who is speaking, and it’s up to the IRS to make that call.  The Obama administration is proposing new tax rules, unfairly scrutinizing nonprofits, another line of attack against these groups.  The American Civil Liberties Union says the proposed rule threatens to discourage or sterilize an enormous amount of political discourse in America.  Tell President Obama don’t use the IRS to kill free speech.</p>
<p><strong>Sean Noble: </strong>So what the IRS proposed was pretty egregious, and Cleta is actually going to talk a little bit more about that.  I’m going to leave that to her, because she’s the actual expert on that front, but needless to say, the IRS is one of the most feared agencies of the federal government, obviously, and what’s particularly egregious about what they were doing is the fact that they were targeting not just organizations, which Cleta will talk about, but targeting individuals.  Obama had a hit list of folks in the White House in which they were actually breaking the law and getting the individual tax returns of individual Americans and businesses and then leaking that kind of thing to the press.  There were five nonprofit organizations that the IRS illegally provided confidential information to a supposed newspaper outfit.  It’s really a leftist organization.</p>
<p>One of those groups was Americans for Responsible Leadership, which is an organization that I put together and had been targeted for some activity in a ballot proposition in California, so we had a situation where the IRS was targeting individuals and organizations and then we had a state agency in California at the behest of Jerry Brown, who was the governor at the time and wanting to expose what was going on with a donation that came from Americans for Responsible Leadership to a ballot initiative fighting a tax increase that Jerry Brown wanted, and in California there’s an agency called the Fair Political Practices Commission.  Now it’s fair, they call it &#8220;Fair Political Practices,&#8221; as long as it’s liberal political practices.  If it’s not then it’s clearly not fair, and what they did is they specifically targeted the chairman of the commission.  It was a woman named Ann Ravel, and here you had a situation in which this organization decided they wanted to expose who was behind this contribution because they don’t believe in anonymous free speech, and they went to great lengths.  They couldn’t under the law actually find that information out because it’s not allowed, so what they did is they made up a law in the sense that they said we’re going to audit a report.</p>
<p>Now, it’s kind of complicated, but under the California Statute if you give a big political donation in a ballot initiative and you’re an organization, then you’re required to, the next January, file a report that says we did this.  Well, they wanted to audit a report that had not yet been filed, so that’s the authority they asserted, that they’re using their audit authority of a report that hadn’t been filed, and they took that all the way to the State Supreme Court, and on Sunday night before the election at 11:00 at night California time, the State Supreme Court voted unanimously 7 to 0 to allow the commission to force that disclosure from these organizations, which is just a complete overreach.  Now, the reason we know it’s an overreach is because the next year they went to the legislature and they actually passed a statute to give them the authority that they had asserted the previous year.</p>
<p>Now, Ann Ravel was then, this last year, has been put on the FEC, the Federal Elections Commission by President Obama.  That was the thank you to trying to expose these anonymous contributions and target those who would speak, and what was among the first things she did after she got to the FEC?  She’s proposing a rule, and she’s starting hearings in which she says that if you are a blogger and you talk about politics or you talk about campaigns then you need to be regulated by the Federal Elections Commission.  Think about the chilling effect that that would have on speech.  Not only is it so anyone who does opinion writing on a web site, who has a blog, frankly, the next step would be their Facebook pages.  Now we’re talking about individual Americans who would be targeted by a federal government agency and told what you can and cannot say, and when you can and cannot say it, and how much of it you can say.</p>
<p>That is the reason that we have to be stalwart in our defense of the First Amendment.  Because ultimately the biggest challenge we have is that the enemies of ours on the First Amendment are the press and liberal Democrats and left.  The press because their influence over the American people has been waning for years and years.  Newspapers are not nearly as influential as they used to be, and now an organization can be involved in the process and have just as much influence or more than the local newspaper.  They don’t like that.  Their power has been taken away, and secondly, the unions.  We hear all this stuff about “dark money.”  The left has been involved in this stuff since the 1940s with labor unions, and it wasn’t until labor unions’ influence started to wane, along with the newspapers and the media influence started to wane, that the left woke up and said wait, we’re losing control of the message, of the narrative.  We can’t have a level playing field because when conservatives have a level playing field with us, they’re going to win because our messages resonate with the American people, and so that’s why we’ve seen such an assault on the First Amendment, and in my mind it’s just so ironic that it’s the press that is leading the assault on the First Amendment, and they are protected, so you notice when Harry Reid put through the Senate a constitutional amendment to essentially regulate the First Amendment that &#8212; all the amendment language by Senator Udall from New Mexico is there &#8212; and at the very end of it, none of this amendment applies to the press, the way they define it.  They would not define bloggers as the press, which is the problem, so that’s why they have the FEC targeting these things.</p>
<p>So I would ask that you stay totally up on this.  Watch Ann Ravel at the FEC.  She’s a very scary person and doing the bidding of the left, and our hope is that we can expose them for what they’re trying to do and make sure we continue to have a robust debate in America under the First Amendment.  Thank you.</p>
<p><strong>Paul Erickson: </strong>Thank you. Charles Johnson is a writer and a thinker, not always the same thing.  You’ve recognized his words from coast to coast, from the Los Angeles Times to the Wall Street Journal.  His thinking has been recognized as the recipient of both the Robert Bartley Fellowship and Eric Breindel Award at the Wall Street Journal as well as being named to the Publius Fellowship at the Claremont Institute.  He earned his credentials in the vast right-wing conspiracy when he was named a junior prince of darkness at the Phillips Foundation.  We know that as the Robert Novak Award.  He’s most recently authored “Why Coolidge Matters,” and he’s here today to remind us why the Constitution still matters.  Charles Johnson.</p>
<p><strong>Charles Johnson: </strong>Hello.  So I’m actually probably the most optimistic on this panel, probably because I’ve seen that Barack Obama can be beaten and even humiliated, and so what I kind of want to think about, and forgive me, I’ve been very busy over the last few months electing a lot of Republicans, and what we’ve been doing is kind of thinking a lot about why it is that President Obama was elected in the first place, and I want to tell just a quick story.  In 2004 I went to the Democratic Convention in Boston, where I’m from.  My parents got tickets.  Our shop was closed down because it was right near where the convention was being held, and so I decided to go and have a look for myself, and what was remarkable there was how quickly people glommed onto this freshman senator who had no experience, and every time you’d ask them, “Why are you guys big fans of Barack Obama?” they would recite his story.  They would say he’s black.  They would make a big deal about this, and it occurred to me, when I worked with Andrew Breitbart and many others in the vast right-wing conspiracy, the not-so-vast right-wing conspiracy, that he really wasn’t vetted and what we did is we expected the press to really do the job for us, and it really didn’t happen, and so what I’ve kind of taken as my kind of life mission is hunting Democrats and RINOs for sport, and business is very, very good, especially after this last election, but I would caution you, just because we’ve elected a Republican Senate does not necessarily mean that we’ve elected a conservative Senate and that’s something very important to kind of keep in mind.</p>
<p>Now, as I mentioned earlier, I got my start with Andrew Breitbart, and he really had this idea about vetting the President, and really focusing on him, and so I’d find all sorts of things that were damaging to him and to the First Lady.  I found some stuff surrounding Barack Obama’s life in Indonesia as well as in Hawaii as well as in Chicago, and really it’s become clear to me that what we need to do on kind of the conservative right is start to vet these candidates very seriously, and that’s what we did this last election cycle.</p>
<p>One of the projects I worked on most recently was with Michelle Nunn in Georgia.  Now, Nunn is an extreme liberal Democrat, and she was kind of coasting on this moderate reputation.  Well, what we did is we took apart her entire life story and we went through every single chapter of it and found out that she had been in favor of bringing lots of immigrant children into the United States.  We took that piece of the puzzle and made sure that everyone saw it in sort of rural Georgia, and we also kind of looked into her past when she was hitting her opponent for outsourcing, and what we found is that her ancestors owned slaves.  Now, I know what you’re thinking.  Lots of people in Georgia owned slaves.  What’s the big deal?  But a lot of people in black talk radio really don’t like it that her family owned slaves, and so we made sure that they all saw that, so they weren’t enthusiastic to vote for her.  And these are the kind of things that we need to be thinking much more strategically about.</p>
<p>It’s my contention that we can defeat the liberal media.  We can actually replace it in many respects.  I was one of the first journalists to publish the name of Nina Pham, who’s this woman who had Ebola.  I had it 12 hours before NBC.  The liberal media was basically stopping that from getting out to the public because they realized that if there was a face behind this Ebola stuff it would be bad for them politically.  The media would sort of be forced to cover it, and I was talking to journalists in Texas and they were basically suppressing this information, and my attitude is what’s the worst that can happen?  And I published her name on my site, got a million page views in under a day, and what ended up happening next was really remarkable.  I had all these journalists criticizing me for providing information, and some of them even filed complaints about me violating HIPAA with Twitter, and so they kicked me off Twitter, and so I had to go to Twitter court to get reinstated.</p>
<p>But it’s my contention that right now we’re at a very, very good point.  I’ve been part of the team that’s been publishing these Gruber videos. [Applause.] Thank you.  If you had told me a week ago that Gruber would be trending on Twitter, this obscure policy analyst, I would have thought you were insane, and it’s kind of amazing that all this type of nerd research has paid off in quite amazing fashion, but there are people who are now publishing videos on Gruber that, when I started with Rich Weinstein in July, we had sort of a strategy of how to get this video out to the country, and I’ve been very excited to see kind of what’s happened there.</p>
<p>But I would say that the best thing we can do with Barack Obama is really realize that he is a lame duck, but he also has the executive orders, and so what we’ve got to do is we’ve got to shape events around him and run out the clock, and I think it can be done if only we start actually publishing material and really be aggressive towards every step of what he’s trying to achieve, and I think one of the kind of complaints that I had with a lot of conservatives is they spend a lot of time complaining about the liberal media, but I think that what we really need to start focusing on is replacing it and having it lose market share, and in particular, as we kind of start with Hillary Clinton, she has some of the highest negatives of anyone who’s ever run for President, and we should be exploiting this constantly and mercilessly, but we should also be strategic about it.  The Washington Free Beacon has published a lot of material surrounding Hillary Clinton.  I think it’s a mistake to release all of it right now, that we should basically have a strategy going, like with the Gruber tapes where we released the material in staggered stages, and I’m working on kind of the Hillary bomb right now that I think will be quite helpful.</p>
<p>But I want to say just very briefly, I think we can actually win the narrative, and one of the things I’ve learned from Andrew Breitbart is that if you frame news in the right context, in a pro-America, pro-citizen context, you can really change the debate.  We shifted the debate from talking about all these children who were sent here to dealing with the national health concerns of all these people coming with Ebola and really we’re winning the arguments among the American people, and I think there’s all this question about how can the Republican Party reach out to Hispanics, reach out to immigrants, but if you really think about last Tuesday’s election returns the Democrats have a serious problem with America.  They lost something like 22 percent of the white vote.  This is not a majority coalition thing, so I think, going back to thinking about the 2004 when Barack Obama came, really the dream, or the nightmare, that was Barack Obama is coming to an end, and in fact he is the exception to the rule, and I think it’s only a matter of time before we can kind of defeat him, and I think it’s much more important right now to defeat Obama-ism than to defeat Obama, because we need to stop them from kind of doing this kind of strategy in the future with other candidates and so we need to be proactive about neutralizing those kind of candidates now.  So with that, I’ll hear some of your questions.</p>
<p><strong>Paul Erickson: </strong>Andrew McCarthy graduated from New York Law School and taught at both his alma mater and at Fordham University Law School.  He’s a contributing editor at National Review.  He’s the author of both “Willful Blindness, a Memoir of Jihad” and “The Grand Jihad, How Islam and the Left Sabotaged America,” detailed accounts of the campaign the Middle East Quarterly describes as an attempt to insinuate Islamic Sharia law into the fabric of American society.  The books are almost prosecutorial in tone, which would be appropriate since Andrew was the chief assistant U.S. attorney in New York who led the successful prosecution against Omar Abdel-Rahman, the blind sheikh who’s behind bars because of Andrew.  What have you done in the war against terrorism today?  What many people do not know is that his investigations of President Obama led to discovery that Michelle Obama is a virgin.  Much like his war on terror, every night President Obama sits on the edge of Michelle’s bed and describes in vivid detail everything he’s about to do, and then nothing happens.  To tell us what we should be doing, Andrew McCarthy.</p>
<p><strong>Andrew McCarthy: </strong>And here I thought we spent all weekend talking about executive action.  Well, so you’ve heard from the most optimistic person on the panel, so I guess I’d be the most pessimistic person on the panel, but that probably comes with the territory of writing a book about executive lawlessness in the Obama administration.  The day my book, which is called “Faithless Execution:  Building a Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment,” the day that the book came out there was an announcement that Obama had released five Taliban commanders in exchange for Bowe Bergdahl, who turns out to be a deserter, and what dawned on me at that point was the problem for a writer writing a book about executive lawlessness in the Obama administration is that at a certain point in time the writer has to stop writing so they can bind the book and get it to the stores and sell it.  The Obama administration goes merrily along, so I guess it was only natural that by the time the book came out I was four or five impeachable offenses behind, and that unfortunately is a pattern that has only picked up pace over time.</p>
<p>Now, what I get all the time about this is look, it’s politically impossible to impeach Obama, so why even talk about it?  And there’s a few answers to that, but I think the most important one is Edmund Burke, the father of modern conservatism really, famously said that the power of bad men is no indifferent thing, and Edmund Burke obviously didn’t know Barack Obama, but I think he had Barack Obama in mind, and I know the framers had Barack Obama in mind because one of the things that they spent the most time about in their deliberations was how to rein in the dangerous potentials of the presidency that they were creating, which was quite intentionally created as an awesome source of power because it’s in the presidency that we basically have most of the national security responsibility of the United States.  The problem of course is if you’re going to create an office that is that powerful, anything that powerful has the potential to be very destructive, so they wanted to make sure that they could rein in the power of the presidency if it ever fell into the hands of somebody who was not only corrupt but potentially incompetent or who at the very least had a different idea of what the government should look like than the constitutional framework that the framers gave us.</p>
<p>So here’s the thing.  They came up with dispositive powerful checks on the presidency, and there’s primarily two of them in the hands of Congress.  I mean, they hope that the best check on the presidency would be the ballot box.  Right?  They assumed that if somebody was, or had demonstrated himself during his candidacy to be corrupt, incompetent or power hungry that the public wouldn’t elect such a person, and certainly wouldn’t reelect such a person, so I guess maybe they had higher hopes for what the American people would end up to be than has proven to be the case, but they did come up with two checks for Congress.  One of them, and the one that they expected was going to be used the most, was the power of the purse.  To the extent that the President needs resources to carry out schemes that contravene the Constitution, that funds, those resources have to come from Congress, so the thought was that Congress would be able to check the President by basically pulling back the purse strings.  The problem with that is, and we’re seeing this with immigration, for example.  We’ve heard any number of times all weekend long people talk about the President’s lawless executive amnesty plan.  Well, it’s lawless all right, but there are vast components of it that the President can actually implement without violating the law.  For example, the President can pardon every crime committed against federal law in the United States.  He could pardon tomorrow every crime committed by an illegal alien in the United States, and even classes of people outside the United States who violated federal law, and talk about resources.  You know he talks about he has his pen and his phone?  He doesn’t even need his phone for that.  He just needs the stroke of a pen.</p>
<p>The point is, there’s certain things that a President can do because the office is so powerful that even the power of the purse is not a check for.  The only other check that the system provides is impeachment.  Now, we hear impeachment and we think, oh, well, it’s inconceivable, and certainly the Republican establishment has taken the position since the Clinton days that, oh, that impeachment thing was a debacle and we never want to talk about it again.  The &#8220;i-word&#8221; is not to be mentioned on Capitol Hill.  We had the crazy specter about a year go where they had a hearing in the House about executive lawlessness, and you had a bunch of liberal law professors explaining to members of Congress that one of the major checks on lawlessness in the Constitution is impeachment.  Professor John Turley, who is a self-described left-winger called Obama’s manner of governance the most profound constitutional crisis that had arisen in his lifetime, and he lived through Nixon.  Right?  So you had these law professors saying impeachment, impeachment, impeachment, and you had these congressmen kind of ducking under their desks at the very mention of the word, saying to these professors, look, that’s a word we don’t say up here.</p>
<p>It’s a word that the framers not only said in the Constitution but that Madison described as indispensable.  He thought that without impeachment it would be impossible to rein in what they called the maladministration of the executive branch, whether it was corruption, incompetence or what have you, and they put impeachment in very intentionally as the ultimate decisive check on that kind of behavior, and the reason it’s important to talk about it is because it’s the only check if you decide that you’re not going to impeach the President and you decide that we are going to take this off the table and never even discuss it, that’s fine.  That’s a political choice that you can make, but when you make it &#8212; and this is the reason I wrote the book.  I want people to have their eyes open about this.  If you make that choice, you must make it mindful of the fact that there are certain abuses of presidential power that only impeachment can check, and if you deprive yourself of your only arsenal for combatting those abuses of power, you are going to get those abuses of power.</p>
<p>Now, why is this so important?  And I’ll leave it with this.  There have been checks on President Obama’s abuses of power over the last six years because there have been elections to worry about, his own elections as well as congressional elections, and don’t think public pressure doesn’t work.  Don’t think political pressure doesn’t work.  Remember when Obama just came to the presidency and the Democrats controlled both the Senate and the House.  What was one of the first things they wanted to do?  They wanted to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Manhattan civilian court, the place where I used to work.  They weren’t able to do it, and the reason they weren’t able to do it is even in blue, blue New York the people rose up and protested against it, and that lit a fire under Congress, and Congress lit a fire under the White House, and the White House had to pull back and withdraw from the plan, so they are responsive to political pressure.  It’s not easy to do, and it’s certainly not easy to keep up the pressure, but they do respond to it.  But look, up until now, President Obama has had mid-terms to worry about twice and his own reelection to worry about once.  Now there’s nothing else, so you have somebody who has this vast power, who no longer has the political check of an election coming around the corner, and who has a lot of mischief that he can make over the last two years, and I think we’ve gotten every indication in just the last week that’s exactly the way things are going to go.</p>
<p>So yes, right now there’s no political will to remove President Obama from power, but I think we’re in for a very bad time unless we change that climate, and that doesn’t mean impeaching the President necessarily, but what you have to do, because of the way our system is designed, is go back to a time when impeachment was a credible threat that would bring the President to heel, or at least back him up before he would engage in corrupt or unlawful schemes.  If we don’t have that, I’m sorry to say I think we’re in for a very, very bad time the next two years.  And on that happy note …</p>
<p><strong>Paul Erickson: </strong>Anticipating Andrew’s cheery comments, Matt Drudge this morning on the Drudge report put up a banner headline that said “Impeachment Insurance” under the smiling face of Joe Biden.</p>
<p>Cleta Mitchell is one of the truly indispensable players in the American conservative movement.  Last night you heard a list of her many accomplishments.  Today I would add only two.  I’ve had the high honor of serving with Cleta on the Board of American Conservative Union and watched her expert chairmanship of the American Conservative Union Foundation during a crucial time in that organization’s history.  In presidential campaigns and critical causes I have had to evaluate and hire some of the finest election law attorneys in the land.  Cleta is simply the finest election law lawyer in America, period.  She has been my lawyer.  The consigliore of the vast right-wing conspiracy and Freedom Center Annie Taylor Award winner, Cleta Mitchell.</p>
<p><strong>Cleta Mitchell: </strong>Well, good morning.  Yes, on that cheery note … but I want to talk about three things, but I’ll probably meander and talk about more than that, but I want to focus on three.  I want to talk about the IRS, I want to talk about campaign finance and how it works together, and then I want to talk about some of the scariest things that are going on in America today.  Those two things, but I’ve been working, I think I said last night, five years ago is when I first started realizing something had changed in the IRS.  I want to talk a little bit about some of the things that I think we have not looked at and I really hope that Congress will do, because I think that one of the most frightening things to me is something that Congress has yet to investigate, but I have to believe, and I just know what I know what I know.  I used to tell my daughter when she was growing up, particularly when she was a teenager, “I may not know today, I may not know tomorrow, but I will find out,” and interestingly, when I would find out things, she would just go, “Mom, how did you find out?”  I say, “I may not know today, I may not know tomorrow, but I will find out,” and I think we will find out, because I absolutely believe that this IRS looks at publicly available campaign finance reports, looks at contributions that people make, and decides who it’s going to subject to IRS personal and business audits based on their political contributions.  I think that’s a pretty frightening thing, but I absolutely believe it has happened, and I think that we have to get to the bottom of that.</p>
<p>I absolutely believe the IRS looks at organizations like the David Horowitz Freedom Center, does not have to disclose its donors publicly but guess who it does disclose its donors of $5000.00 or more to?  You have to disclose those to the IRS.  The IRS uses that information, I believe, to target people for audits and further government inquiry, and I think that there are so many things.  Sean made reference to the IRS leaking confidential taxpayer information.  I know they’ve done it.  They’ve done it to my clients.  They’ve done it to other conservative groups.  Again, he made reference to the release of confidential tax information of Koch Industries.  That’s a criminal offense.  There have been no prosecutions, and in fact that’s a 6103 violation.  You should really do something with your life when you can start quoting sections of the tax code by number.  A 6103 violation is one in which the IRS is prohibited by law for any agency or IRS employee to release confidential taxpayer information, but guess what happens if you believe your confidential taxpayer information has been violated and you ask for information about that?  The IRS has turned that on its head and said we can’t tell you that information because whoever did it, whoever did that to you, the perpetrator, is protected by Section 6103 from having their information disclosed to you.  Now that is so unbelievably bizarre, but these are things Congress needs at look at and fix.  The IRS has failed to answer multiple subpoenas from the House committees.  They’ve just disregarded them.  They’ve said, subpoena from Congress?  So, your point is?  And I think that Congress has got to reassert its legislative prerogative.</p>
<p>Let’s not forget, contrary to what Joe Biden said in the vice presidential debate in 2008, Article 1 of the Constitution is the legislative branch.  That’s what the founders started with.  They started with the people’s representatives.  The executive branch is in Article 1, but we’ve let that get completely out of whack, and I think Congress needs to undertake what I call the great unwinding.  The great unwinding of a federal government, an administrative regulatory state that was built over a century by people who fundamentally disagree with us, and I think with our founding principles, and that’s what I think we as conservatives need to be talking about.  We don’t need new programs.  We need to get rid of what’s there, the great unwinding.  We have multiple situations where members of the Obama administration have gone before Congress and perjured themselves.  Let’s start with the IRS commissioner in March of 2012, who went before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and when asked is there targeting of conservative organizations going on today, and he said no.  Well, the last time I checked, lying to Congress is a federal crime.  Perjuring yourself before Congress under oath is a federal crime.  Just ask Roger Clemens.  And I want to know from the new attorney general nominee, and I’m going through and preparing and getting this to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the number of administration officials who have gone before the Congress in the last six years and lied under oath.  And they need to be prosecuted.  They are criminals.</p>
<p>Sean mentioned the FEC and its proposal to regulate Internet activity.  Everybody in this room write this down.  FEC.gov.  Comments are due by January 15.  There is no reason why everybody in this room should not write a paragraph, go online, submit comments.  Have ten of your neighbors do it.  The last time the FEC started talking about regulating Internet political speech they were inundated with so many thousands of comments they said uncle.  We have to do that again.  We have to get everybody we can think of, your organizations, your individuals, write FEC.gov.  Comments close January 15.  Tell them you want to come testify.  That’ll scare them to death.  If they think they’re gonna have thousands of people wanting to testify, they’ll collapse.  January 15.  No reason not to do it.  Do it.  We have to get those comments.  We did that with the proposed IRS regulations, the one that Sean talked about, the IRS C4 regulations.  More than 160,000 comments we were able to generate saying don’t do this.  I mean, there might have been ten that said they were for it.  Of course, they were all submitted by people who are close to the New York Times, but they finally withdrew those proposed regulations, but guess what?  They’re working on reissuing them next year, so be vigilant.</p>
<p>Campaign finance.  I want to talk about that for just a minute.  Understand when they say campaign finance reform, here’s what they mean.  They say campaign finance reform.  They mean shut up conservatives.  That’s what that means.  Never be misled by what they mean.  Here’s what that bill that Sean referred to, the Harry Reid thing.  Let me reiterate what he said to you.  It was a proposed constitutional amendment to amend the First Amendment.  Think about that.  This great thing that the left supposedly reveres, crucifixes in urine, protect all that, etc. etc.  But they wanted to amend the First Amendment to allow elected politicians to decide what you a can and can’t say.  How’s that been working out for conservatives so far?  And guess what?  Every Democrat in the Senate voted for it.  Every one of them, and would you like to know what the political headline said the day after it was defeated, because it didn’t get the necessary two thirds?  All the Republicans voted against it.  “GOP Kills Campaign Finance Reform”</p>
<p>So that brings me to my third point.  Everybody’s got to buy this book.  Everybody’s got to read this book.  You gotta give it to everybody for Christmas, and you gotta talk about it:  “Stonewalled.”  It’s just out by Sharyl Attkisson.  It’s everything we know, but documented.  The lies, the deception, the chilling activity to which she was subjected, to which others have been subjected about the extent to which this government is going to spend our money to lie to us and to keep us under surveillance.  I’m going to read you one paragraph because this is a panel about the Constitution.  I’m going to sit down.  The big chill is on.  Now, mind you, her computer was hacked, classified documents were planted on her computer, deep in her computer.  Her phones were tapped, etc., etc.</p>
<p>Many sources, she writes, including congressmen, become wary of communicating the ordinary way.  One evening I’m talking with a member of Congress on my regular mobile phone about a somewhat sensitive news matter.  He’s avoiding giving straight answers.  I keep pressing.  Finally, sounding exasperated, he blurts out, “Sharyl, your phone’s bugged.”  I can’t argue the point.  We decide to meet in person and work out alternative ways to communicate.  It’s the new reality in a society where journalists and politicians suspect their government is listening in.</p>
<p>Now, that’s just the tip of the iceberg, people, but I am telling you, this is a lawless administration.  There are not enough hours in today’s program to go through all the ways that this government, under this administration, is violating the statutes and the Constitution, and we have to do everything we can do to keep them from continuing and being successful, and that’s what we’re about to do.  Thank you.</p>
<p><strong>Q&amp;A</strong></p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>This is for Andrew.  You say that without any further election and without the power to impeach that we have basically disarmed and can’t do anything about President Obama’s lawlessness.  What about his doing further damage to the Democratic Party?  Does he care?  Do the Democrats care?  I mean, he’s already hollowed the party out.  Couldn’t he do even more damage in the next two years by his lawlessness, and would that be a deterrent?</p>
<p><strong>Andrew McCarthy: </strong>Look, in a vacuum, if that was the only consideration, sure it would be a deterrent, but let’s take a step back.  I was watching the news the day after the election results, or I guess the day after Obama spoke about the election results and indicated that he was actually doubling down on the executive amnesty, and the commentators presenting the news seemed baffled by it, and they just said this guy just doesn’t get it.  The electorate just spoke and he seems to have a tin ear.  He just doesn’t get it, and I sat there and I’m thinking about the commentators.  No, no, you don’t get it.  I mean, after six years you don’t get who this guy is.  He is trying to advance an ideological agenda, and his Alinsky-ite tactics are such that he has a long-range ambition but he has a very disciplined approach about going about it, which is you never go further than you think the political climate of the moment will allow you to go, but you always keep your eye on the ball, and you compute your activities in terms of what you think your political environment is, and that’s why it’s more dangerous now because he doesn’t have any elections to worry about, and will that hurt the Democrats in the short term, just like Obamacare did?  Sure, but they still got Obamacare, which was what they wanted.</p>
<p>If Obama’s successful in what he’s doing now, two things to bear in mind.  Cleta just listed them.  We could go through a thousand things, but the amnesty could result in as close to permanent as anything you get in politics, a permanent electoral majority for Democrats, no matter how unpopular some of their policies seem to be at the moment.  That’s why they’re pushing so hard to get it, and the second thing is, if you think you’re rid of Barack Obama in January of 2017, I got news for you.  By then he’s going to have put about 400 like-minded progressive activist lawyers on the federal bench who will be serving for 30 to 40 years and advancing the same agenda, so his work continues after he’s gone on the basis of the laying of the pavement that he’s doing now, so I don’t think he’s worried about the short-term interests of the Democratic Party.  I think he’s worried about, and moving toward, the long-term objectives of progressive ideology.</p>
<p><strong>Sean Noble: </strong>I’ll just add one thing.  It’s obvious he doesn’t care about the interests of the Democrat Party because a few weeks before the election he was, in prepared remarks &#8212; this is what’s astounding.  In prepared remarks, he said, “I’m not on the ballot this year, but you can be sure that my policies are, every single one of them.”  Now that was him trying to assert his role.  That was a gift for us.  We used that quote in commercials against members of Congress, against Senators, against a Secretary of State candidate in Arizona, a governor’s candidate, because we realized that while he was trying to assert himself in prepared remarks, it was a disaster for him to be saying that because we could use that against the Democrats that we were running against, so he doesn’t care about them because he’s such a narcissist.</p>
<p><strong>Georgette Gelbard: </strong>Georgette Gelbard from California.  This is mainly for Andy.  What would it take to limit executive orders for all Presidents going forward, and do you think that that’s a good idea for the future?</p>
<p><strong>Andrew McCarthy: </strong>I think it’s been unfortunate that the concept of the executive order has been kind of tainted in this whole escapade about not just immigration but other things as well.  There’s nothing in principle wrong with an executive order.  The executive branch is very extensive.  The President is the head of the executive branch, and as long as the President is just directing the proper activities of the executive branch, executive orders are a good thing.  They’re a little transparency for the executive branch.  The problem is when the President uses his executive directing power as camouflage for when he’s actually usurping the power of Congress and the courts either to write the law or to interpret the law, and this President has used executive orders for that purpose.  That’s the problem, and it’s not the number of executive orders, it’s what he does with them.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>Hi, this question’s for Charles.  Which conservative candidate are you researching for 2016 and why?</p>
<p><strong>Charles Johnson: </strong>So I’ve researched almost all the conservative candidates, and the guy for me is clearly Cruz.  I know he’s controversial, but I’ve known Ted Cruz before he was an exclamation point on the right and an expletive to the Republican establishment and the Democrats.  What’s interesting, last year he told me his strategy for the shut-down.  He said look, people aren’t going to remember what the shut-down was about.  They’re going to remember that we stood up for them, and it’s interesting that in nearly every Senate race, except one, which was Scott Brown in New Hampshire which he lost, they were asking for Ted Cruz.  He was filling rooms in Alaska, and I’m a chess player.  It’s my hobby, and Ted Cruz is a chess player.  He’s advancing the ball, and I know there’s this silly notion right now that we need an executive or we need a governor, but the reason it’s silly is we need somebody with an executive temperament, and I’ve gone through a lot of the candidates on the right, and if you’re a governor you have a staff, and your staff can cause you a lot of trouble.  We’ve certainly seen that with Governor Christie and with some others, so I think for the moment I would go with him.  There’s a lot of stuff on Hillary.  I was talking with the FBI agent who investigated her for Whitewater, who’s actually a gay Democrat, believe it or not, one of the main ones, and there’s so much material there that the Republican Congress did not use because they were afraid of how hot it would be, and I think basically the problem right now is we’re going to have a GOP civil war, which is going to play out over the next two years, and it’s very intensive.  You talk to staffers, and there’s a serious fight for the soul of the right that’s about to take place, and right now we’re at the bleeding Kansas moment, but it’s going to get ugly.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>Will there be any problems with Ted Cruz and the fact that he’s born in Canada?</p>
<p><strong>Charles Johnson: </strong>No.  This is a debate that a lot of people have.  The answer’s no.  John McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone.  George Romney was born in Mexico.  The question of natural born is at birth are you a citizen, and his mother is from Delaware.  It’s still in the continental United States.  It’s still a state, I believe, even though Joe Biden’s from there.  No, a lot of people are trying to use this to disqualify him, which is kind of craven but no, he’s clearly eligible.</p>
<p><strong>Andrew McCarthy: </strong>I thought he was born in Kenya.</p>
<p><strong>Cleta Mitchell: </strong>Here’s one of the things I think is important and it goes to Charles and all.  This book makes pretty clear the extent to which the Obama administration has gone out of its way to attack journalists, to spin the stories, one after another, from fast and furious, Benghazi, the healthcare.gov, the IRS, all of it.  But guess what’s interesting about that?  No matter how much of our money they spend, no matter how hard they have tried and how well they have succeeded with what I call what is the state-owned media, NBC, CBS, ABC.  As I’ve said, we might as well be in Venezuela for all the independence they show for the government, but notwithstanding all of that, guess what, the people still know.  They have a low opinion of this president and contrary to Mr. Gruber, we’re not stupid, and we tell each other, and because we have these other outlets and ways to get information everywhere from Charles Johnson to Fox News and Andrew McCarthy, and all, we get the information.  We share it with each other, which is why, circle back to why is the FEC doing what it’s doing?  Why has the IRS been doing what it’s doing?  Because they’re trying to shut down those channels of communication, but we will not let them.  We’re not gonna let them, but you can buy the book, but you’ll have to look for it.</p>
<p><strong>Paul Johnson: </strong>The last question before lunch, the gentleman in blue.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>Yes, I think that despite what was on Drudge this morning about our very loving vice president, my understanding is Harry Reid and other Senate Democrats are not enthralled at the present time with Barack Obama.  Do you not think there’s an opportunity for them to think Joe Biden is a better hope for them in 2016 than Barack Obama?</p>
<p><strong>Paul Erickson: </strong>Sean?</p>
<p><strong>Sean Noble: </strong>Well, I think that everyone on the left, well, not everyone, the Democrat establishment is all in for Hillary, and that’s going to be Biden’s demise because they –</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>I’m not talking about the presidency.  I’m talking about &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Sean Noble: </strong>Well, I think that it’s going to be very difficult for the Democrats to win a presidency if their previous president gets impeached, so they will do everything they can to prevent any type of impeachment proceedings.</p>
<p><strong>Paul Erickson: </strong>Please thank our panel.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/trashing-the-constitution-2/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>3</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>The Tyranny of Silence</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/deborah-weiss/the-tyranny-of-silence/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-tyranny-of-silence</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/deborah-weiss/the-tyranny-of-silence/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 20 Nov 2014 05:45:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Deborah Weiss]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Flemming Rose]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free Speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islamist violence]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tyranny of silence]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=245555</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A target of Islamist violence explains that only America has real free speech.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-245559" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the.jpg" alt="the" width="256" height="283" /></a>Even amidst death threats and Islamist violence, <a href="http://www.tyrannyofsilence.net/">Flemming Rose</a> remains a staunch advocate for freedom of speech.  In a Europe with ever-increasing speech restrictions, he argues for the equivalent of a global First Amendment.</p>
<p>On October 13, 2014, both the <a href="http://www.cato.org/events">Cato Institute</a> and the <a href="http://www.newseum.org/event/free-speech-cartoons-and-the-prophet/">Newseum</a> in Washington, DC, hosted Rose, author of the recently published book, <em>The Tyranny of Silence</em>. Rose and his paper maintain high security generally. But surprisingly, the only apparent security at these two events consisted of security guards from institutions holding them. Cato had approximately 75 people in attendance, including a young man from <a href="http://www.thefire.org/">FIRE</a>. The Newseum had a smaller audience, consisting of about 35 people, most of whom were older and likely Newseum members, as only members were sent prior notification. Both audiences were attentive, responsive and had numerous questions for the editor during Q&amp;A. Additionally, both events were taped for online viewing.</p>
<p>Rose is an editor of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyllands-Posten"><em>Jyllands-Posten</em></a>, a Danish newspaper, notorious for its 2005 publication of twelve cartoons of the Muslim Prophet Mohammad. Considered blasphemous, the drawings provided Islamists with an excuse to riot across the Muslim world and destroy Danish embassies, killing approximately 200 people.</p>
<p>Preceding these events, Danish author <a href="http://www.signandsight.com/features/588.html">Kåre Bluitgen</a>, wrote a children’s book on Islam’ s Prophet and wanted to include illustrations. Bluitgen sought to commission several illustrators for the Mohammad images. Two declined and one agreed on the condition of anonymity. The illustrators cited safety concerns stemming from death threats to <a href="http://www.salman-rushdie.com/">Salmon Rushdie</a> in the United Kingdom and the murder of <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3974179.stm">Theo van Gogh</a> in the Netherlands, both of whom allegedly “blasphemed” Islam. Questions arose as to whether fear caused the illustrators to engage in self-censorship concerning Islam, and whether individuals in the media should cater to a small minority that reacts violently to discussion deemed offensive.</p>
<p><em>Jyllands-Posten</em> asked members of the illustrator’s union to draw Mohammad as they saw him. The newspaper accepted submissions for seven to ten days. It subsequently published twelve illustrations along with an article addressing free speech and self-censorship. “No one could have anticipated” what would follow, Rose explained. The cartoons were the purported cause of violence that erupted throughout the Middle East, making Rose and his newspaper the center of a media storm. All context was lost.</p>
<p>Rose had sought a debate about ideas and a civil way to maintain a dialogue. Yet jihadists threatened to bomb the <em>Jyllands-Posten’s</em> offices and murder the cartoonists, forcing several of them into hiding. Both Rose and <em>Jyllands-Posten</em> have had to maintain heavy security ever since.</p>
<p>Several Muslim organizations filed a complaint against <em>Jyllands-Posten</em> accusing it of violating <a href="http://merlin.obs.coe.int/iris/2006/8/article105.en.html">the Danish Criminal Code</a>. The statute prohibits public ridicule of religious dogma or public statements that cause a group to feel “threatened, scorned or degraded” due to race or religion. However, using a narrow legal interpretation of the statute, the Danish government decided not to pursue the case, stating that it did not meet the necessary pre-requisites for prosecution.</p>
<p>Rose stated that self-censorship in Europe has worsened since the <em>Jyllands-Posten</em>’s publication of the cartoons. Rose was confronted with numerous anti-free speech arguments. “Isn’t it hurting the religious feelings of people with deeply held beliefs?” “Isn&#8217;t it a smart business decision not to use language in newspapers that might offend readers?” “Isn’t is just good manners not to insult someone’s beliefs?”  <em>(paraphrasing)</em> But Rose, without missing a beat, had an articulate and persuasive answer for each point. He insisted that the omission of language regarding Islam did not constitute simply a business decision, as all readers occasionally face offense. Nor did it stem from good manners, as the motivation was not to be polite. Rather, it was self-censorship based on fear and intimidation.</p>
<p>Rose ardently advocated for the equivalent of a worldwide First Amendment, arguing for a free marketplace of ideas including religious doctrine. “Religious feelings cannot demand special treatment” he proclaimed, noting that people might have other deeply held beliefs where they could claim equivalent offense.</p>
<p>European laws balance freedom of expression against other rights such as the right to privacy and the right not to be offended. Therefore, European countries have various laws prohibiting hate speech, religious denigration, and racism. However, “almost absolute” freedom of speech, with exceptions for incitement to violence and defamation of individuals, “makes America unique.” Free speech is “not a balancing test” against the so-called right not to be offended. Offensive speech is constitutionally protected if it’s true or mere opinion.</p>
<p>Rose aptly noted that hate speech restrictions have not reduced violence. Indeed, riots have always erupted in countries where hate speech, blasphemy laws and other speech restrictions exist, but have been violated. Proponents of hate speech laws claim that hate speech leads to violent acts, but there is no evidence to support their claims. In countries where freedom flourishes, offensive expression incites minimal violence.</p>
<p>Rose also noted a seeming paradox: where immigration rises causing an increase in diversity of race and religion, there’s a decrease in the diversity of ideas allowed expression.</p>
<p>When asked if he thought there is a proper role for government censorship, Rose answered with a resounding “no!” Rose noted that while <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Westergaard">Kurt Westergaard</a>, cartoonist of Mohammad with a bomb in his turban, became victim of an assassination attempt, some believe he deserved his fate. And, the Netherlands’ Minister of Justice professed, “if we had hate speech laws, then Van Gogh would be alive today.” Rose thinks both of these positions are outrageous because they condemn speech while justifying the violence in response to it.</p>
<p>Rose explained that many people fail to distinguish between words and deeds. And, “America is becoming more isolated” as tyrannical countries tighten speech restrictions. While American laws allow freedom, increasingly the citizens are plagued with peer pressure and political correctness, pushing for self-censorship.</p>
<p>Yet, “the right not to be offended” is the only right Rose believes individuals should not have in a democracy. Freedom should be paramount.</p>
<p>Refusing to be silent in the face of Islamist intimidation, Rose exercises that freedom courageously and without qualms.</p>
<p><em>Andrew Harrod, JD, PhD, contributed to this report. Follow Andrew on Twitter at @AEHarrod.</em></p>
<p>&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8211;</p>
<p>This article was commissioned by <a href="http://www.legal-project.org/">The Legal Project</a>, an activity of <a href="http://www.meforum.org/">The Middle East Forum</a>.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.  </strong></p>
<p><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><strong>Subscribe</strong></a><strong> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <em>The Glazov Gang</em>, and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>LIKE</strong></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>Facebook.</strong></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/deborah-weiss/the-tyranny-of-silence/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>6</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Ignoring Anti-Semitism in the Name of Palestinian Solidarity at UC Davis</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/richard-l-cravatts/ignoring-anti-semitism-in-the-name-of-palestinian-solidarity-at-uc-davis/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=ignoring-anti-semitism-in-the-name-of-palestinian-solidarity-at-uc-davis</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/richard-l-cravatts/ignoring-anti-semitism-in-the-name-of-palestinian-solidarity-at-uc-davis/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 06 Nov 2014 05:35:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Richard L. Cravatts]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free Speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[students for justice in Palestine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[UC Davis]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=244598</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Who gets "free speech" and who doesn't. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/justice-for-Palestine.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-244602" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/justice-for-Palestine-450x304.jpg" alt="justice-for-Palestine" width="306" height="207" /></a>Since its founding in 2001, the radical campus group Students for Justice in Palestine has had as its mission to demonize Israel and promote a campaign to accuse the Jewish state of apartheid, racism, brutal occupation, and crimes against humanity, among other accusations. Its radical behavior has created a toxic atmosphere on campuses where its programs and events have regularly morphed into what has been categorized as being anti-Semitic in nature. Now, apparently in an effort to bring that same vituperative ideology to the faculty, a group on the UC Davis campus calling itself Faculty for Justice in Palestine recently decried a letter sent to the UC Davis administration by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) which warned that</p>
<blockquote><p>“In the wake of the recent crisis, anti-Israel organizations are placing increasing pressure on academic institutions to engage in . . . ‘Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions’ (BDS) activities,” and that school officials should be aware that groups were undertaking a campus campaign “all in an effort to isolate and demonize Israel and Jewish communal organizations. These efforts serve only to polarize students on campus, inflame existing tensions, and often isolate and intimidate Jewish students.”</p></blockquote>
<p>In an opinion piece that ran in <em>The California Aggie</em>, the UC Davis student newspaper, professor of English Joshua Clover and professor of Asian American studies Sunaina Maira preposterously claimed that the ADL, far from being a civil rights organization, “is an avowedly Zionist lobbying organization with a long history of attempting to silence criticism of the Israeli state,” and claimed that the group’s intention was actually to suppress Palestinian activism and obscure the predations of Israel, a view that professor Maira was bound to harbor, given that she is a member of the American Studies Association Council which voted for an academic boycott against Israeli scholars and an organizer in the <a href="http://www.usacbi.org/">U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott</a>of Israel.</p>
<p>The paranoid notion that the ADL’s letter amounts to “unacceptable interference by off-campus interests” which is “baldly racist,” and which somehow “chills” political advocacy on the UC Davis campus, is, of course, ridiculous. More troubling is that this statement reveals that the professors naively believed that pro-Palestinian activists can institute an ideological assault against Israel, call for Jewish academics to be shunned from the community of world scholars while simultaneously singling out and attacking the Jewish state as an illegal, colonial occupier on stolen Palestinian land, and libel and harass Jewish students and other supporters of Israel by making them complicit in, and responsible for, the actions of their government in perpetrating what activists define as an “illegal occupation” without anyone with opposing views answering back these slanders with counter-arguments and opposing views.</p>
<p>The faculty members’ motivation was purportedly to “show support for Palestinian solidarity activism,” but several working definitions of anti-Semitism, including those by the U.S. State Department and the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, suggest that such actions, in targeting Israel and holding it to a different standard of behavior than all other nations—something which the actions and speech of UC Davis’s Students for Justice in Palestine and the organization American Muslims for Palestine clearly do—is one criteria by which speech and actions can be considered anti-Semitic, which of course the professors here conveniently ignore or of which they are sadly ignorant.</p>
<p>Whether or not these Professors for Justice in Palestine believe the activism they support is anti-Semitic is not relevant; anti-Semites rarely admit to their behavior, or to the consequences of their actions and speech. And their accusation that the ADL sent its letter to Chancellor Katehi, not on its own merits, but in an underhanded attempt to “silence criticism of the Israeli state” is also consistent with a pattern that David Hirsh of Engage in Britain has termed the “Livingstone Formulation,” part of which is “the counteraccusation that the raisers of the issue of antisemitism do so with dishonest intent, in order to de-legitimize criticism of Israel. The allegation is that the accuser chooses to ‘play the antisemitism card’ rather than to relate seriously to, or to refute, the criticisms of Israel.”</p>
<p>So not only did the professors reject some of the claims of underlying anti-Semitism in the ADL’s letter itself, they also decided that those organizations and individuals who made efforts to expose that anti-Semitism were not authentic, but were merely attempting to promote their own, pro-Israel agenda.</p>
<p>Protestations and defenses aside, the issue is far more obvious than the UC Davis professors care to realize, and much less insidious. Those who speak back to ideologues do so not to suppress criticism of Israel; academic freedom grants the professors the right to spew forth any academic meanderings they wish, but it clearly does not make them free from being challenged for their thoughts.</p>
<p>The core issue is that just as the pro-Palestinian activists on the UC Davis campus and elsewhere have the right under the umbrella of academic free speech to express their views – no matter how factually inaccurate, vitriolic, or repellant they may be – those within and outside academia with opposing views also have the right, under the same precepts of free expression, to question the those views, and to call them anti-Semitic, or racist, or genocidal, or merely historically inaccurate or incorrect if, in fact, that is the case. Also, a recently-leaked memorandum from the Binghamton University chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine revealed that the true intention of the anti-Israel activists on campus is not, as it regularly claimed, dialogue and debate, but a strategy, not only of refusing to engage in conversation with any pro-Israel groups or individuals, but to actively, and corruptly, interfere with, shut down, and otherwise suppress any pro-Israel sentiment on campuses.</p>
<p>That type of behavior violates the concepts of academic freedom and academic free speech—rights that campus radicals prefer to exploit themselves while denying the same freedoms to others and deeming speech with which they disagree “hate speech.” Spirited debate between people with opposing views is acceptable; shutting down or preventing the speech of one side of the argument, and not permitting those views to be aired in the marketplace of ideas, is not. Even though the professors claim that “the rhetoric of ‘civility’ has become the new discourse through which administrations seek to suppress political engagement,” what thoughtful administrators are trying to achieve by calling for civility in scholarly debate is reasoned, thoughtful, and fact-based discourse—not riotous, offensive, and violent expressions, regardless of the supposed sanctity of the cause.</p>
<p>That may have been the motivation for the 2013 resolution passed by the ASUCD Senate, Senate Resolution 21, which sought to condemn and identify Islamophobic speech at the UC Davis. The resolution, which was passed after a controversial Ayn Rand Society event on radical Islam, “Islamists Rising,” was held, defined Islamophobia as “the irrational fear of Islam, Muslims or anything related to the Islamic or Arab cultures and traditions.” The authors of the resolution wished to use the resolution to suppress speech by critics of radical Islam, and were successful in categorizing any view about Islam with which they did not agree to be outside the bounds of acceptable speech; in fact, it was henceforth categorized as “hate speech” and unwelcomed on campus. Presumably criticizing the genocidal charter is Islamic Hamas, or the group’s unending attacks on Israeli civilians for the purpose of murdering Jews, could thereby be considered a type of hate speech, Islamophobic, or contrary to the accepted values of the UC Davis campus.</p>
<p>The suggestion that people be careful with their speech when assessing other people was apparently overlooked during a 2012 event at UC Davis at which two Israelis –a Jewish man and a Druze woman—were to speak and whose appearance was effectively shut down by members of Students for Justice in Palestine and others who had decided, in advance, that “Events like these are not welcome on our campus anymore.” During the presentation, a protestor used the “heckler’s veto” to silence the speakers, standing up and screaming to the podium that Israel has “turned the land of Pales­tine into a land of pros­ti­tutes and rapists and child moles­ters,” and ask­ing the speaker, “How many women have you raped? How many chil­dren have you raped? You are a child moles­ter.”</p>
<p>And pro-Palestinian activists on the Davis campus obviously were not concerned about civility when three Jewish students tried to speak on behalf of Israel at UC Davis at a November 2012 protest against Israel’s Operation Pillar of Defense. The Jewish students were first shouted down with chants of “Leave our space!” “Shame on you!” “F**k Israel,” and “Long live the Intifada!” and then forced against a wall of windows while angry protestors threatened them with closed fists and physical aggression. When pro-Palestinian activists shout “Long live the intifada,” it is, of course, a grotesque and murderous reference to the Second Intifada, during which Arab terrorists murdered some 1000 Israelis and wounded more than 14,000 others, so the fact that this is what passes as intellectual debate about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict on campus is clear evidence that any hope of rational discourse or productive discussion has vanished. Civility has devolved into acrimony, and one can reasonably wonder, based on their language, what the true intentions are of those who defame, demean, and libel Israel in their effort to promote Palestinian self-affirmation.</p>
<p>Liberal-leaning academics at UC Davis and on other American campuses seemingly hold the notion that free speech is only good when it articulates politically correct, ideologically-acceptable views of protected victim or minority groups—and especially, as in the case, the perennially suffering Palestinians. But true intellectual diversity — the ideal that is often bandied about but rarely achieved — must be dedicated to the protection of unfettered speech, representing opposing viewpoints, where the best ideas become clear through the utterance of weaker ones.</p>
<p>For Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, for instance, the protection of free expression for all views was essential, not only to allow discourse of popular topics, but, even more importantly, in instances where unpopular or currently-controversial speech is deemed offensive and unworthy of being heard. “If there is any principal of the Constitution,” he observed, “that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other, it is the principal of free thought — not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.”</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
<p><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><strong>Subscribe</strong></a><strong> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <em>The Glazov Gang</em>, and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>LIKE</strong></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>Facebook.</strong></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/richard-l-cravatts/ignoring-anti-semitism-in-the-name-of-palestinian-solidarity-at-uc-davis/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>15</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Berkeley&#8217;s Jihad Against Bill Maher</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/robert-spencer/berkeleys-jihad-against-bill-maher/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=berkeleys-jihad-against-bill-maher</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/robert-spencer/berkeleys-jihad-against-bill-maher/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 29 Oct 2014 04:58:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Robert Spencer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Berkeley]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bigot]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bill Maher]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cancel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[commencement]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free Speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=244000</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The latest neo-fascist effort to destroy free speech and stifle debate about Islamic supremacism.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Maher-726.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-244001" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Maher-726-450x335.jpg" alt="Maher 726" width="361" height="269" /></a>This whole Bill Maher controversy is as illuminating as it is entertaining. Bill Maher was a darling of the Left when he was criticizing Christianity, but now that he has turned his gimlet eye to Islamic supremacism, the foes of free speech have turned against him with venom. Maher is scheduled to give the fall commencement address at the University of California-Berkeley, but Muslim students there have begun a petition drive to get him canceled.</p>
<p><span style="color: #0433ff;"><a href="http://www.dailycal.org/2014/10/26/students-spring-opposition-bill-maher-announced-keynote-speaker/">The Daily Californian</a></span> reported Sunday that</p>
<blockquote><p>the Change.org petition was authored by ASUC Senator Marium Navid, who is backed by the Middle Eastern, Muslim and South Asian Coalition, or MEMSA, and Khwaja Ahmed, an active MEMSA member. The petition, which urges students to boycott the decision and asks the campus to stop him from speaking, has already gathered more than 1,400 signatures as of Sunday.</p></blockquote>
<p>Anticipating that this petition would be outed as the fascist endeavor it is, Navid explained:</p>
<blockquote><p>“It’s not an issue of freedom of speech, it’s a matter of campus climate. The First Amendment gives him the right to speak his mind, but it doesn’t give him the right to speak at such an elevated platform as the commencement. That’s a privilege his racist and bigoted remarks don’t give him.”</p></blockquote>
<p>The campaign against Maher is called “Free Speech, Not Hate Speech.”</p>
<p>“Free Speech, Not Hate Speech”: this is the mechanism that today’s Leftist and Islamic supremacist authoritarians are using to shut down any free and open discussion of how Islamic jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence and oppression. This slogan was thrown at me last May when I spoke at Cal Poly; I responded (as you can see toward the end of <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2014/05/cal-poly-free-speech-under-attack-in-academia"><span style="color: #0433ff;">this video</span></a>) by pointing out that “hate speech” is in the eye of the beholder, and the one who is granted the power to determine what is or isn’t “hate speech” has been given extraordinary control over the public discourse, such that any opinions disliked by the ruling elite can be stigmatized and ruled out of bounds by means of this label.</p>
<p>Anyway, this was predictable: now that Bill Maher, despite his impeccable Leftist credentials, has dared to criticize Islam, he is “racist and bigoted,” and must be denied a platform. The reality is that anyone and everyone, no matter who they are and what they have done, is targeted in exactly the same way by Islamic supremacists and Leftists. They are determined that there be no genuine public debate about Islam and violence (and Islamic violence). They are determined to tar those who deviate from the “Islam is a religion of peace” line with smear labels that will make the broadly uninformed majority shun them and be intimidated into thinking that it is wrong to question the mainstream line.</p>
<p>There is no free speech, no free debate, no honest discussion about these issues in American academia today, or in the mainstream media. Maher is so prominent that he has shaken the Left’s stranglehold preventing public discussion of these issues, but they are circling the wagons now, and either Maher will be driven out of the circles of the enlightened elites, or will stop talking about this altogether. My money is on the latter.</p>
<p>There is, however, just a small chance that this targeting of Maher will bring mainstream attention to this neo-fascist effort to destroy the freedom of speech altogether and stifle public debate about jihad and Islamic supremacism.</p>
<p>Certainly the controversy itself has drawn mainstream attention: <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2014/10/28/cair-spokesman-compares-bill-maher-to-grand-dragon-of-the-kkk-video/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">MSNBC</span></a> had Ibrahim Hooper of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations on to discuss whether Berkeley should cancel Maher, and Hooper promptly likened Maher to “the grand dragon of the KKK.”</p>
<p>The way that Leftists and Islamic supremacists operate in order to demonize and destroy anyone who dares speak the truth about Islam and jihad is on full display during Hooper’s MSNBC appearance: first, they claim that someone who points out that Islam has doctrines encouraging violence and supremacism is “calling all Muslims terrorists” and charge him or her with racism and bigotry. Then they proceed as if those charges are already established as true, and demand that the truth-teller be denied a platform, canceled from speaking engagements, etc., because of this racism and bigotry.</p>
<p>The next step, if the Islamic supremacist campaign to get Maher disinvited from Berkeley succeeds, will be to use their victory as evidence of the correctness of their claims, when in fact it is only evidence that many event organizers and public officials don’t like controversy and will make whatever concessions they need to make so as to avoid it. If the campaign succeeds, then a few months from now, when Hamas-linked CAIR is trying to get Maher canceled from some other event, “Honest Ibe” Hooper will say, “The University of California at Berkeley was so disgusted with Maher’s bigotry that they canceled his planned appearance as their fall commencement speaker…”</p>
<p>Then a few more cancellations, and it will look as if all decent folk are shunning Maher out of disgust with his “hatred,” when all that is really going on is the victory of Hamas-linked CAIR’s intimidation and smear tactics.</p>
<p>Now what is needed is a public discussion of how Hamas-linked CAIR and other Islamic supremacists are trying to stifle free discussion of the jihad threat, and smear and destroy everyone who dares discuss that threat honestly. How about it, MSNBC?</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>Robert Spencer</strong> on <strong>The Glazov Gang</strong> discussing<span id="productTitle" class="a-size-large"><strong> The Fog of Jihad-Denial</strong>:</span></em></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/S8kxWhX0S50" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/robert-spencer/berkeleys-jihad-against-bill-maher/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>81</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Freedom from Speech</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/freedom-from-speech/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=freedom-from-speech</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/freedom-from-speech/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 17 Sep 2014 04:23:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fire]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[First Amendment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free Speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[freedom from speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Greg Lukianoff]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=241006</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A new book exposes the Left's war on free expression -- and how universities led the way. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/freedom-from-speech-slider.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-241131" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/freedom-from-speech-slider-438x350.jpg" alt="OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA" width="300" height="240" /></a>“Freedom From Speech,” a 61-page broadside written by Freedom for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) president Greg Lukianoff, deftly illustrates the evolving assault on free speech. “The public’s appetite for punishing attempts at candor gone wrong, drunken rants, or even private statements made in anger or frustration seems to be growing at an alarming rate,” Lukianoff warns.</p>
<p>The author cites a range of incidents to make his initial point, covering a large and diverse cast of characters. They include former Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling, <i>Duck Dynasty’s </i>Phil Robertson, chef Paula Deen, actors Gary Oldman and Mel Gibson, media’s Don Imus and Juan Williams and others, all of whom elicit varying degrees of sympathy, even as they have all fallen prey to the “modern American censor” who demands that &#8220;there must be zero tolerance for anything that anyone might find offensive, regardless of the context.”</p>
<p>Using former Mozilla Corporation CEO Brendan Eich’s firing for opposing same-sex marriage in California in 2008—a position he reminds us was held by a majority of Americans, as well as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama before they “evolved”—Lukianoff outlines the difference between the First Amendment and freedom of speech. The former protects freedom of speech and the press as they relate to issues of the state, while the latter embraces a whole range of additional cultural values. Values that ought to be defined by the idea that a free and open exchange of ideas—no matter how upsetting—must be maintained. Lukianoff explains his focus is on free speech itself, and he believes that there is a growing hostility towards it as a cultural value.</p>
<p>Unsurprisingly, his first target is American higher education, and he notes that FIRE has been “busier than ever” during the 2013-2014 school year.</p>
<p>Yet while he believes there has been a &#8220;bleeding out&#8221; from the so-called ivory tower, he notes the phenomenon has spread across the globe. He concedes that suppressing speech is part of many nations’ DNA, but he is concerned that  countries that share America’s classic liberal tradition have been equally vulnerable to the assault. He is especially troubled by the European Court of Justice&#8217;s “right to be forgotten&#8221; ruling imposed on Google and other search engines, all of whom are now required to remove references about private parties unless the companies can present a public interest justification for the information. He notes the vagueness of the standard and the implications for a stunted free press that derives from it. The impetus behind the cultural hostility is chilling: “people all over the globe are coming to expect emotional and intellectual comfort as though it were a right,” Lukianoff explains.</p>
<p>The emanations of those expectations are chilling. The author begins noting that our advance in terms of science and technology has brought unparalleled wealth and comfort, that in turn drives our desire for intellectual comfort. It is an intellectual comfort “at odds” with the three pillars of modern society, namely democracy, capitalism and determining truth. And while he insists all ideological points of view can embrace censorship, he notes the divide between progressive and conservatives is based on morality. Conservatives have many sources for determining morality, such as sacredness, loyalty and respect for authority, while progressives embrace one: the &#8220;care ethic.”</p>
<p>It is this one dimensionality that explains why “the push for sensitivity based censorship increasingly comes from the left wing of the spectrum,” he writes.</p>
<p>Lukianoff cites several examples of the now-familiar speech codes that infest many universities, but he discusses other disturbing trends as well. One is the disinvitation phenomenon; Lukianoff chronicles several high-profile speakers whose disinvitations took three forms: either their invitations were revoked, they were forced to withdraw in the face of protests, or they were subjected to a &#8220;heckler’s veto” by students and faculty who didn’t want their sensibilities offended.</p>
<p>Yet the most daunting form of censorship cited by the author is “trigger warnings.” “Seemingly overnight, colleges and universities across America have been fielding student demands that their professors issue content warning before covering any material that might evoke a negative emotional response,&#8221; Lukianoff reveals. These trigger warning arose in Internet chat rooms and were initiated to help those who suffered from post traumatic stress disorder (PSTD) arising from experiences such as rape. They subsequently took root on college campuses and have evolved to the point where virtually any subject that elicits student discomfort of any kind is expected to have one. Lukianoff sounds the ominous warning. &#8220;The idea that we can tackle truly hard issues while remaining universally inoffensive—an impossible pipe dream even if it were desirable—seems to be growing increasingly popular,” he writes.</p>
<p>He also explains the daunting effect trigger warnings have on professors, who can face removal or the loss of tenure for subject matter that has the potential to offend. Seven professors penned an article for <i>Inside Higher Ed, </i>stating that the movement “has already had a chilling effect on [their] teaching and pedagogy.” Doubtless it has, but as Lukianoff notes that trigger warnings remain a &#8220;formidable weapon&#8221; because those who oppose them “are accused of being insensitive to the needs of &#8216;vulnerable groups.&#8217;” Furthermore, casting any doubt on <i>any</i> assertions of vulnerability constitutes “‘victim blaming’ which only a coldhearted monster would do,” Lukianoff explains. He see the future as a “global race to the bottom, and it is being run most fiercely in higher education. In the process, candor, discussion, humor, honest dialogue and freedom of speech are imperiled,” he contends.</p>
<p>His solutions for the problem include litigation, as well as re-igniting “the old-fashioned intellectual habits of epistemic humility, giving others the benefit of the doubt, and actually listening to opposing opinions.”</p>
<p>In conclusion, he tells us to expect more writing from him on the subject.  If “Freedom From Speech” is indicative of Lukianoff’s insight, readers would be well-advised to keep track of his future endeavors. Americans need to know what is threatening one of the bedrock principles of our nation’s birthright, and Greg Lukianoff is making it his mission to keep us informed. In short, “Freedom From Speech&#8221; is a highly worthwhile read &#8212; both for pleasure and for a better understanding of the grave threat on the march.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/freedom-from-speech/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>10</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Yes, ICANN</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/deborah-weiss/yes-icann/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=yes-icann</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/deborah-weiss/yes-icann/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 07 May 2014 04:17:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Deborah Weiss]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free Speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ICANN]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Internet]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[oic]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=224893</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Obama’s surrender of internet oversight threatens free speech worldwide.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/hh.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-224942" alt="hh" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/hh.jpg" width="260" height="194" /></a>Recently, the Obama Administration announced that it would transfer its oversight of internet domain management to a yet-to-be-named international multi-stakeholder.  Many are concerned that this will lead to the suppression of speech in capitulation to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and other free speech tyrants.  And though some on the left insist that these concerns amount to nothing more than alarmist folly, the concessions have already begun.</p>
<p>The internet originated in America, initially launched as a government experiment in networks.  Over a period of two decades, it grew to include researchers and think tanks.  In 1992, the “network of networks” opened its doors to the commercial world, and the internet as we know it today was birthed.</p>
<p>A global system of domain management was needed.  Someone had to keep a list of domain names and assign them numbers for internet users worldwide.  This had to be done by a central body in order to prevent multiple individuals, organizations or other entities from winding up with duplicative domain names, causing confusion.</p>
<p>Initially, domain management was conducted informally. Then, in 1998, the Department of Commerce (DoC) recognized ICANN, a California-based non-profit organization, to perform this function.  In a cooperative arrangement, the DoC’s National Telecommunications Information Agency (NTIA) would retain some minor administrative tasks regarding internet management, but would also have a critical oversight function over ICANN to ensure that the internet is free, secure and stable.</p>
<p>NTIA’s contract with ICANN is set to expire in September of 2015.  On March 14, 2014, the Obama Administration announced that it would decline its option to renew the contract and instead allow ICANN oversight to transfer to the “global multi-stake holder community”.</p>
<p>Despite some alarm on the right that ICANN will fall into the hands of China, Russia or the UN, both ICANN and the NTIA have been clear that they will not agree to transfer oversight responsibilities to any government entity or to the United Nations.  What is not clear is what entity is qualified to assume this function or whether ICANN might wind up without an oversight body altogether.</p>
<p>Currently, there is bipartisan concern that US relinquishment of domain oversight will have negative consequences for freedom of speech.   The Wall Street Journal referred to it as “America’s internet surrender.”  Newt Gingrich warned that “every American should worry about Obama giving up control of the internet to an undefined group. This is very, very dangerous.”  Even former President Bill Clinton has been extremely vocal on the issue, proclaiming that “I just know that a lot of these so-called multi-stakeholders are really governments that want to gag people and restrict access to the Internet.”</p>
<p>Two legislative bills are now in the works to prevent the Obama Administration from moving oversight of ICANN out of US hands.  The first is a bill sponsored by Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn, which would stall the transfer until the Government Accountability Office could do a study on the transfer’s impact.  The second bill, sponsored by Congressman Mike Kelly, would prohibit the administration from making the transfer without congressional approval.</p>
<p>Because ICANN has no control over website content, fraud or email spam, some on the left erroneously assume that this precludes the possibility of stifling free speech on the internet.</p>
<p>Others naively believe that if attempts at censorship through domain name assignments were to occur, it would be met by “stiff opposition” from domain registry operators and ISP’s…. as if this would be sufficient to stop the likes of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and other tyrannical free speech oppressors.</p>
<p>In truth, ICANN has already started to crack under the OIC’s pressure.</p>
<p>In January 2012, ICANN announced that it would expand its gTLD program (top level domain suffixes) allowing potential approval of numerous additional suffixes, for example, .IBM, .Canon, .sports, .health, .church, or .bible.</p>
<p>Subsequently, Asia Green IT System, LTC (“AGIT”), a Turkey-based company, applied for two gTLDs:  .Islam and .hahal.</p>
<p>The UAE, which sits on ICANN’s Government Advisory Committee (GAC), twice objected to AGIT’s applications and tried to prevent the sale of both domain names. Other countries including Egypt, Bahrain, Qatar, and Oman and Kuwait also protested.</p>
<p>After AGIT responded, determinations were made in AGIT’s favor.</p>
<p>Then, in October, the OIC joined ICANN with Observer status.  In November 2013 the OIC Secretary General wrote a letter to the GAC Chair demanding that AGIT’s application be denied.  The Chair refused.</p>
<p>After each objection to AGIT’s applications, objectors were told that there was insufficient evidence that the Muslim community supported their objection or that the application approval would hurt their community’s interests.</p>
<p>In response, the OIC gathered its Council on Foreign Ministers and unanimously adopted the “Resolution consolidating the OIC’s Position to Preserve gTLDs with Islamic Identity”,  on December 11, 2013.  The resolution:</p>
<ul>
<li>asserted that gTLDs with an “Islamic identity” are of such “sensitive nature” that they are a concern to the entire Islamic nation;</li>
<li>that OIC Member States plan to formulate a “unified position” regarding the management of gTLDs with Islamic identities to prevent their “misuse”;</li>
<li>that the registration of any domain names of gTLDs must ensure that no religion is “offended”;</li>
<li>that the sale of the .Islam and .halal domains should be preserved for Member States; and</li>
<li>that OIC Member States should become active in ICANN.</li>
</ul>
<p>Then-Secretary General of the OIC, Ekmelledin Ihsanoglu followed this up with a letter to the Chairman of the ICANN Board of Directors, Steve Crocker, noting that the OIC is the “sole official representative of the Muslim world” and that it supports the UAE’s objection to the sale of the domain names .Islam and .halal.  He argued that the resolution’s unanimous approval “nullifies” the GAC’s observation that the Muslim community doesn’t support the UAE’s objections and that the sale of these domain names won’t harm the Muslim community.</p>
<p>As a result, ICANN made a decision to “defer” action on the .Islam and .halal domain suffixes until AGIT resolves all conflicts with the objectors, namely the OIC and its member states. By requiring a private company to negotiate with speech-suppressing governments ICANN effectively punted on its responsibilities.  Its “deferral” is tantamount to a denial of the applicant’s request.</p>
<p>This is a free speech battle.  Though ICANN doesn’t directly control website content, it does control the sale of domain names, which consist of words that represent subjects.  The OIC should not be permitted to bully ICANN into reserving Islam-related domain names for OIC Member States only.</p>
<p>First, there is no right to be free from offense in the sale or ownership of domain names, nor should there be.  Second, the words Islam and halal are not inherently offensive to the Muslim community, therefore it’s obviously not the domain name itself to which the OIC objects. Rather, the OIC wants to ensure that these words are used with only positive connotations.  To ensure that the domains suffixes are confined to OIC-approved content, only OIC Members States are to be trusted.</p>
<p>Even assurances by AGIT that it would not “misuse” the suffixes, failed to appease the OIC. The OIC wants ownership of the words, not just in the form of domain strings, but in common parlance as well.</p>
<p>The OIC has been calling for the equivalent of blasphemy codes for over a decade in the form of UN resolutions to combat “defamation” of Islam.  It is on a perpetual quest to stifle criticism of Islam-related topics, ever seeking out new international legal instruments to achieve its goal.</p>
<p>Suppression of these suffixes is only the tip of the iceberg.  Free speech advocates who fear internet freedom is at risk should be taken seriously.  America has been doing an exceptional job of keeping the internet free, secure and stable, and should remain its trusted steward.  If internet oversight leaves her hands, further concessions to free speech tyrants like the OIC can be expected.</p>
<p>America should not relinquish ICANN oversight to the global community for the sake of “fairness” or political correctness.  As the saying goes, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”</p>
<p><i>Deborah Weiss, Esq. is a regular contributor to FrontPage Magazine and the Washington Times.  She is a contributing author to “Saudi Arabia and the Global Islamic Terrorist Network” and the primary writer and researcher for “Council on American Islamic Relations: Its Use of Lawfare and Intimidation”.</i></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/deborah-weiss/yes-icann/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>10</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>What the Left Did Last Week</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dennis-prager/what-the-left-did-last-week/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=what-the-left-did-last-week</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dennis-prager/what-the-left-did-last-week/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 17 Apr 2014 04:47:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dennis Prager]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ayaan hirsi ali]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Brendan Eich]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Censorship]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Charles Krauthammer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free Speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Honor Diaries]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[totalitarianism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=223579</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Left's ongoing transformation of America.  ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/censorship-10-5-25.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-223580" alt="censorship-10-5-25" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/censorship-10-5-25.jpg" width="280" height="187" /></a>In his column last week, Charles Krauthammer crossed a line. He declared the American left totalitarian. He is correct. Totalitarianism is written into the left&#8217;s DNA.</p>
<p>Krauthammer wrote about a left-wing petition &#8220;bearing more than 110,000 signatures delivered to the [Washington] Post demanding a ban on any article questioning global warming.&#8221;</p>
<p>He concluded:</p>
<p>&#8220;I was gratified by the show of intolerance because it perfectly illustrated my argument that the left is entering a new phase of ideological agitation — no longer trying to win the debate but stopping debate altogether, banishing from public discourse any and all opposition. The proper word for that attitude is totalitarian.&#8221;</p>
<p>America is engaged in a civil war — thank God, a non-violent one, but a civil war nonetheless. It is as divided as it was during the Civil War in the 19th century. The issue then was slavery — a huge moral divide, of course. But today, the country is divided by opposite views about much more than one major issue. The left and right are divided by their views of morality, politics, society, religion, the individual and the very nature of America.</p>
<p>The left seeks to, as candidate Barack Obama promised five days before his first election, &#8220;fundamentally transform the United States of America.&#8221;</p>
<p>That is what the left is doing. There is almost no area of American life in which the left&#8217;s influence is not transformative, and ultimately destructive.</p>
<p>Beginning with this column I will periodically, perhaps regularly, devote this space to that transformation and destruction. My reason for doing so is that most Americans, including more than a few Republicans and more than a few Democrats, simply do not know what the left is doing to their country.</p>
<p>So, here is some of what the left has done in the last week or two.</p>
<p>—The left-wing directors of Mozilla, the parent company of the browser Firefox, compelled their CEO, Brendan Eich, to resign after he refused to recant his support for maintaining the man-woman definition of marriage. Even though his gay employees acknowledged how fairly he treated them individually and as couples, the mere fact that he believes that marriage is between a man and a woman rendered him unacceptable as an employee of Mozilla/Firefox. (For more details, see my column of last week, &#8220;Uninstall Firefox.&#8221;)</p>
<p>The Wall Street Journal condemned Mozilla. The New York Times has not taken a position.</p>
<p>—Brandeis University rescinded its invitation to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, perhaps the world&#8217;s foremost activist on behalf of women in the Islamic world.</p>
<p>Hirsi Ali, an African woman born into a Muslim family and raised Muslim, who now teaches at Harvard, was scheduled to receive an honorary degree at the forthcoming Brandeis graduation ceremony. Brandeis rescinded its invitation after protests led by a Muslim student and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an Islamist organization, erupted over Hirsi Ali&#8217;s criticism of the way women are treated in many parts of the Muslim world.</p>
<p>The Wall Street Journal condemned Brandeis. The New York Times has not taken a position.</p>
<p>—The University of Michigan canceled a showing of the documentary &#8220;Honor Diaries.&#8221; The film features nine women who are either Muslim or come from a Muslim country. They speak about honor killings, female genital mutilation, forced marriages at young ages, and the denial of education to women in Muslim communities. They praise moderate Muslims. But the University of Michigan cancelled the film lest a non-moderate Muslim organization, CAIR again, label the university &#8220;Islamophobic.&#8221;</p>
<p>—Six weeks ago, a University of Wisconsin student released a video he had made of a guest lecturer in the freshman general education course &#8220;Education 130: Individual and Society.&#8221; The lecturer, the political and organizing director for Service Employees International Union Local 150, delivered a diatribe, with obscenities, against conservatives, whites and Republicans. Last week. When confronted with the evidence that classrooms at their university were being politicized, the faculty of the University of Wisconsin reacted with indignation — at the student who made the video. And then the faculty passed a resolution demanding that the university ban recording any of its classes.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s hard to blame the faculty. Given the intellectual shallowness and the left-wing politics that pervade so many liberal arts classes, the University of Wisconsin faculty has every reason to fear allowing the public to know what professors say in class.</p>
<p>—Today is the cutoff date for public reactions to the California Supreme Court&#8217;s ethics advisory committee&#8217;s proposal to forbid California judges from affiliating with the Boy Scouts, which the left deems anti-gay. Given the Left&#8217;s animosity to traditional value-based institutions, it is not surprising that it loathes the Boy Scouts. What is remarkable — actually, frightening — is how easy it has been for the left to make it <i>illegal </i>for a judge to be a leader in the Boy Scouts. This is the now case in 22 states. It will soon be the case in California as well.</p>
<p>This was just one week — and only selected examples — in the left&#8217;s ongoing transformation of America.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dennis-prager/what-the-left-did-last-week/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>128</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Sweden&#8217;s Totalitarian Face</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/fjordman/swedens-totalitarian-face/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=swedens-totalitarian-face</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/fjordman/swedens-totalitarian-face/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 11 Apr 2014 04:47:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Fjordman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free Speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hate Speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ingrid Carlqvist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Multiculturalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Sweden]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=223150</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Dissidents flee. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/mouth-taped-censorship.gif"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-223151" alt="mouth-taped-censorship" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/mouth-taped-censorship.gif" width="300" height="203" /></a>On April 4 2014, in Malmö District Court in Sweden, the provocative artist Dan Park was sentenced to three months in jail for hate speech (&#8220;hets mot folkgrupp&#8221;) for his works of art. The prosecutor even wanted the artist examined for mental illness, similar to the way </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.d-intl.com/2014/03/31/swedish-prosecutor-takes-a-page-from-the-soviet-manual-2/?lang=en">Communist</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> dictatorships have treated dissidents. The court did not support this suggestion, however. </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.d-intl.com/2014/04/04/dan-park-tanker-overklaga-domen/">Park</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> and his defense lawyer have indicated that they will appeal the verdict.</span></p>
<p>Ingrid Carlqvist, the editor of the newspaper <i>Dispatch International</i>, <a href="http://www.d-intl.com/2014/04/04/ledare-domen-mot-dan-park-innebar-ett-forbud-mot-satir/">commented </a>that the verdict essentially amounts to a ban on satire in Sweden, at least if the satire involves ideologically protected immigrant groups.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">At the same time, and with a heavy heart, Carlqvist announced her own decision </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.d-intl.com/2014/03/29/good-bye-sweden-you-wont-get-me-for-insanity/?lang=en">to leave</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> her native Sweden. The repressive and totalitarian atmosphere in the country has simply become intolerable, especially if you happen to be a critic of Islamization, Multiculturalism or mass immigration. You then run a real risk of physical attacks. The level of political violence as well as street crime is only rivaled by the level of ideological censorship and repression. In combination, this has created a society plagued by levels of tension that are growing increasingly dangerous.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Malmö is Sweden’s third largest city. It is set to become the first Scandinavian town with a Muslim majority population. In recent years, it has achieved a certain notoriety for its crime problems.</span></p>
<p>The wave of robberies the city has witnessed is part of a “<a href="http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/938">war against Swedes</a>.” This was the explanation given by young robbers with immigrant background for why they are robbing native Swedes. The sociologist <a href="http://www.dn.se/nyheter/sverige/invandrare-krigar-mot-svenskar-med-ran/">Petra Åkesson</a> interviewed boys between 15 and 17 years old, both individually and in groups. “When we are in the city and robbing, we are waging a war, waging a war against the Swedes.” This argument was repeated several times. “Power for me means that Swedes shall look at me, lie down on the ground and kiss my feet.” The boys explained, laughingly, that “We rob every single day, as much as we want to, whenever we want to.”</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yet suggesting that the ongoing rise in violent crime might have something to do with mass immigration of alien and aggressive cultures is quite literally banned by law. In March </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2008/03/free-speech-swedish-style.html">2007</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> during a rally supported by SSU (the Social Democratic Youth League) a man carried a sign reading, “While Swedish girls are being gang raped by immigrant gangs the SSU is fighting racism.” He was promptly arrested and later sentenced to a fine. His crime? He had “expressed disrespect for a group of people with reference to their national or ethnic background.” The local </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.thelocal.se/10440/">court</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> rejected the man’s free speech argument because even free speech has its limits, and he had clearly acted in too provocative a manner.</span></p>
<p>So-called “Islamophobia” is treated as a serious offense. In <a href="http://www.thelocal.se/49902/">August 2013</a>, Swedish prosecutors charged a 22-year-old non-Muslim Swedish man for honking his car horn outside the Fittja mosque near Stockholm, citing his intention to disturb the Muslim congregation there during prayers.</p>
<p>Expressing disrespect for ethnic Swedes, whites and European culture seems to be just fine, though. That’s not merely allowed under Multiculturalism, but virtually encouraged. Sweden’s allegedly conservative Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt has stated that the original Swedish culture was merely <a href="http://www.dn.se/nyheter/politik/reinfeldt-det-ursvenska-ar-blott-barbari">barbarism</a>; everything good was imported from abroad. He said this in 2006 following a visit to the town of Södertälje, near Stockholm.</p>
<p>A <a href="http://www.thelocal.se/article.php?ID=2063">police station</a> in Södertälje was in September 2005 hit by shots from an automatic weapon, following a direct confrontation between aggressive immigrant youths and the local police. The trouble started after a Swedish girl was called a “whore” and reacted negatively to the epithet.</p>
<p>If a leading politician had said that African, Asian or Islamic culture was “merely barbarism,” there would have been a huge public outcry and calls for his immediate resignation due to “racism.” His career might have been over. Yet disrespecting and mocking the traditions of the majority population is apparently no problem.</p>
<p>This phenomenon seems to exist in all Western countries with a white majority population, and only there. Only Europeans are expected to denigrate their own culture and meekly give their country away to outsiders. Multiculturalism is in essence an anti-European ideology. Under the seductive and highly misleading slogans of “diversity” and “tolerance,” it entails unilaterally dissolving European nations and their distinct identities.</p>
<p>Mona Sahlin has held various posts in Social Democratic cabinets, among others as Minister of Democracy, Integration and Gender Equality. In 2007 Sahlin was elected leader of the Social Democratic Party, which has been Sweden’s largest party for generations and often its dominant political force. She stepped down as party leader after losing the 2010 elections, when she was the left-wing candidate for Prime Minister.</p>
<p>The radical organization Expo is – unfortunately – very powerful in Sweden today. It was founded in the mid-1990s by the now-late Marxist activist Stieg Larsson. He ironically went on to sell tens of millions of books of crime fiction after his death.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.mynewsdesk.com/se/pressroom/expo/pressrelease/view/mona-sahlin-ny-ledamot-i-stiftelsen-expos-styrelse-593633">In 2011</a>, after having been a serious candidate for Prime Minister only a few months earlier, Sahlin joined <a href="http://stiftelsen.expo.se/styrelsen.html">the board</a> of the organization Expo. The journalist and dissident writer Ingrid Carlqvist <a href="http://www.d-intl.com/2013/06/12/how-expo-silenced-debate-in-sweden/?lang=en">has documented how</a> Expo came to have a powerful unofficial influence over the Swedish public debate on immigration, or the total lack of such. Sweden is partially paralyzed by a climate of fear. You risk being fired from your job and socially demonized by the left-leaning press if you say anything remotely critical of mass immigration. As a matter of fact, you risk being fired without saying anything at all in public. It can be enough merely to give a small donation as a private citizen to democratic dissident websites <a href="http://avpixlat.info/2013/10/25/bli-inte-forvanad-om-du-blir-av-med-jobbet-2/">such as Avpixlat</a>.</p>
<p>Expo has contributed negatively to this totalitarian climate. Some of its harshest critics have even compared it to Stasi, the secret police in the Communist dictatorship of East Germany (DDR). The few who dare speak up against mass immigration in Sweden risk being physically attacked as well. Expo has been accused of having too close a relationship with violent left-wing organizations.</p>
<p>In 2007 the leading Expo member Charles Westin was the editor of a book about alleged right-wing extremists. In addition to contributions by radical left-wing academics such as Mattias Gardell, it <a href="http://www.dn.se/ledare/signerat/valdets-politik/">contained a chapter</a> written by the extremely violent left-wing organization Anti-Fascist Action (AFA).</p>
<p>AFA have for years staged very violent attacks on people who dare to question mass immigration or oppose Islamization. Some of their victims have been attacked with axes even in their private homes. AFA often post videos on the Internet where they brag about such attacks. They have done this with near-impunity for many years. The political Establishment looks the other way.</p>
<p>Among AFA’s many targets have been members of a perfectly democratic and legitimate political party, the Sweden Democrats. These attacks have continued even after they earned representation in the Swedish Parliament in 2010. Expo’s board member and spokesman Daniel Poohl, who is not democratically elected himself, has publicly stated that it’s “<a href="http://expo.se/2008/inte-odemokratiskt-att-frysa-ut-sd_2165.html">not undemocratic</a>” to deny the Sweden Democrats access to political influence.</p>
<p>In early 2011 Mona Sahlin went directly from being the national leader of the very powerful Swedish Social Democratic Party to sitting on the board of Expo together with Charles Westin. That a leading politician sits on the board with a person who has cooperated openly with groups beating up members of a legal opposition party might have raised a few eyebrows elsewhere, but not in Sweden.</p>
<p>Bruce Bawer, the author of bestselling books such as <i>While Europe Slept</i>,<i> </i>has previously warned that “<a href="http://www.nysun.com/opinion/while-sweden-slept/44831/">Though</a> two<b>-</b>thirds of Swedes question whether Islam is compatible with Western society, this issue is simply not open for public discussion. To quote Jonathan Friedman, a New Yorker who teaches social anthropology at the University of Lund, ‘no debate about immigration policies is possible’ because Sweden’s ‘political class,’ which controls public debate, simply avoids the topic.”</p>
<p>Dissidents from the Sweden Democrats have been the targets of violent events that recall China’s Cultural Revolution. Protests have been staged by the youth divisions of other parties.</p>
<p>The British historian Roland Huntford warned in his 1971 book <i>The New Totalitarians</i> that Sweden has perfected the methods of suppressing individual dissent while maintaining the outward workings of a democratic system. He feared that similar methods might be adopted elsewhere in the Western world.</p>
<p>That time — the early 1970s — was just before the wave of non-European immigration hit Scandinavia. Huntford’s book therefore does not deal directly with this issue. But he does pinpoint the serious repression of dissent in Sweden and its dangerous lack of intellectual defenses. Perhaps that is the nation’s most damaging flaw. He also noted the extensive Socialist indoctrination, the all-intrusive bureaucracy and the fact that after generations of Social Democratic dominance, the country seems to view itself as an ideological state. It is not hard to see how these factors could become very toxic when combined with mass immigration.</p>
<p>It’s just a 40 minute drive by car across the Øresund Bridge from the troubled town of Malmö in southern Sweden to Denmark’s capital city Copenhagen. Sweden shares a land border with Finland in the north plus a longer sea border across the Baltic Sea. Norway and Sweden share a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norway%E2%80%93Sweden_border">1,630-kilometer</a> long land border which happens to be one of the least protected national borders in the world.</p>
<p>Sweden is now becoming so repressive, and the problems related to rampant mass immigration so big, that the country could represent a future security threat to neighboring nations.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/fjordman/swedens-totalitarian-face/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>163</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Demonizing SCOTUS</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/demonizing-scotus/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=demonizing-scotus</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/demonizing-scotus/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 10 Apr 2014 04:35:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[attack]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Center for American Progress]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free Speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Protest]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Supreme Court]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=223078</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Left launches an attack against conservative justices. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/o-SUPREME-COURT-facebook.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-223080" alt="o-SUPREME-COURT-facebook" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/o-SUPREME-COURT-facebook-450x350.jpg" width="315" height="245" /></a></span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Left-wing activists and U.S. senators have launched a pressure campaign targeting the more conservative members of the Supreme Court in hopes of forcing them to abandon First Amendment protections in the Constitution.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In the Left&#8217;s view, Americans and the corporations they use to make money can&#8217;t be allowed to freely express themselves politically by giving money to candidates for public office because that might halt the country&#8217;s ongoing slide into leftist chaos. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">American leftists have long believed that if they can&#8217;t get what they want through the ballot box, they&#8217;ll get it through the judicial system. If they can&#8217;t get what they want from the judges, they&#8217;ll smear and intimidate those judges, Hugo Chavez-style, until they give in. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Get ready for Justices Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito, and others to be viciously attacked and demonized by the Left using the techniques of </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Rules for Radicals</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> author Saul Alinsky.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In the manner of Soviet era propagandists, these neo-Marxist activists are planning to depict the nation&#8217;s highest court as a tool of the wealthy powers-that-be that conspire against middle-class families. Senate Majority Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has taken to the floor of the Senate to denounce wealthy libertarian donors Charles and David Koch, who underwrite many right-leaning causes.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Some strategists on the Left picture the new movement as a left-wing answer to the “Impeach Earl Warren” movement of the 1960s, which they say set the stage for the high court to become more conservative later on.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">According to </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Hill</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> newspaper, </span></p>
<blockquote><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8220;Democrats say the present-day court lacks the experience to understand the corrupting influence of money in politics, because none of its members have held publicly elected office. Warren served as governor of California before presiding as chief justice from 1953-1969, when the court issued landmark rulings celebrated by liberals in </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Brown v. Board of Education</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> and </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Miranda v. Arizona</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">.&#8221;</span></p></blockquote>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But the current Supreme Court wishes &#8220;to dismantle all limits on giving, piece by piece, until we are back to the days of the robber barons, when anyone or anything could give unlimited money, undisclosed, and make our political system seem so rigged that everyone will lose interest in our democracy,” said Senate Rules Committee Chairman Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.). Schumer, incidentally, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/01/schumers_plan_to_abolish_the_tea_party.html">laid out</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> a blueprint to destroy the Tea Party movement at the Center for American Progress Action Fund earlier this year.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">An added bonus to this new effort to influence the high court is that the Left&#8217;s agitation may help to pump up voter turnout in the November midterm elections by energizing the Democrats&#8217; extremist electoral base.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Sixties radical </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1170">Robert Borosage</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, co-director of </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=7331">Campaign for America’s Future</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, said the Left&#8217;s “legal groups will be doing a full-fledged, increasingly severe critique of the court as a court for plutocrats.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Carrying their message of hatred and class warfare, activists and Democratic senators are accusing the conservative-leaning justices of acting out of political bias to further the Republican Party&#8217;s agenda. These radicals have it exactly backwards. The jurists deemed conservative don&#8217;t vote reliably as a bloc &#8212; but when they do they tend to be acting as </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">originalists</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> trying to faithfully interpret the Constitution without glomming a political agenda onto the plain meaning of the words. They are enforcing the great national charter, not rewriting it as the Left would prefer they do.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">These increasingly obnoxious groups are taking cues from President Obama who </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/politicolive/0110/Justice_Alitos_You_lie_moment.html">scolded</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the assembled Supreme Court justices at the 2010 State of the Union address for upholding the First Amendment. In that speech the former part-time adjunct constitutional law lecturer misrepresented the landmark </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Citizens United v. FEC</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> decision when he claimed it &#8220;reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections.&#8221; In response, Justice Samuel Alito was famously caught on camera mouthing the words &#8220;not true.&#8221; </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Georgetown University Law Center professor Randy Barnett offered a sports analogy to describe what these groups are now doing to the Supreme Court.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">“The Left clearly tried to work the refs on the Affordable Care Act,” Barnett said. “They worked the refs after </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Citizens United</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, which helped set things up for the Affordable Care Act challenge. If it seems to work, why not continue? It’s unfortunate, I think, that they’ve been encouraged in this behavior by its apparent success.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Democrats are also backing this campaign to distract from the Obama administration&#8217;s many failures, especially the bungled Affordable Care Act that has already taken health care insurance away from millions of Americans.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">“This very well likely is also about finding an issue other than health care and the economy in 2014,&#8221; Barnett said. &#8220;This is like attacking the Koch brothers from the floor of the Senate every other day. It’s another way of trying to gin up the base of the Democratic Party.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In 2010 elected Democrats did chastise and attempt to embarrass Supreme Court justices during speeches in Congress after political spending provisions were circumscribed in </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">One popular rumor floating around the nation&#8217;s capital is that Chief Justice John Roberts infamously voted to uphold Obamacare in 2012 because he was stung by criticism and sought to prevent a similar blow-up from happening following the rendering of that decision.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">One of the groups trying to strong-arm the Supreme Court is the Progressive Change Campaign Committee which is running online ads encouraging supporters to back legislation that would fund political candidates with tax dollars.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">PCCC boasts that the far-left </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Nation</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> magazine gave it an award for “Most Valuable Campaign” of 2011 and that MSNBC’s unhinged talk show host Ed Schultz has called PCCC “the top progressive group in the country.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Founded in 2009, the grassroots-funded PCCC </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://boldprogressives.org/2014/04/supreme-court-doubles-down-on-citizens-united-time-to-fight-back/">reacted</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> in horror April 2 when in </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the Supreme Court struck down some of the limits on how much individuals can donate to electoral campaigns. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8220;With those limits gone, it will be even harder for everyday people to have their voices heard in Washington. In response, PCCC is launching ads in Washington to make clear that not only should Congress pass a Constitutional Amendment to counteract the power of money in politics — it needs to pass the Government by the People Act, which would fit within recent Supreme Court rulings and would match small-dollar donations with public funds.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The creepy corporatist legislation to which PCCC </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.demos.org/publication/government-people-act">refers</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> really ought to be called the Perpetuation of Big Government Forever Act. The measure would create a massive campaign contribution subsidy scheme paid for by U.S. taxpayers.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Specifically, it would form a Freedom from Influence Fund to match contributions of up to $150 to participating candidates 6-to-1 or more. It would provide a $25 refundable tax credit for small contributions and matching funds in the final 60 days of a general election for candidates in high-cost races. It would also create People PACs, or small donor committees, that aggregate the donations of individuals.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">According to their official website biographies, PCCC was founded by left-wing activists Stephanie Taylor and Adam Green. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Taylor, currently a Ph.D. candidate in American history at Georgetown University, is a veteran union organizer &#8220;and a pioneer in the area of scalable field, using technology and field to achieve results.&#8221; Green, who has a law degree from the University of Virginia, worked four years as Director of Strategic Campaigns and Civic Communications Director for MoveOn. Green was also press secretary for Sen. Tim Johnson&#8217;s (D-S.D.) 2002 re-election campaign. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">PCCC and its allies are gearing up in anticipation of the Supreme Court&#8217;s upcoming ruling in </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores Inc</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">. The court is expected to determine whether the federal mandate on employers to offer birth control coverage violates the Constitution.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Senate Rules Committee Chairman Schumer plan to conduct hearings on the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">McCutcheon</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> decision, according to </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/202898-dems-the-left-seeking-to-demonize-justices#ixzz2yJrZkm00"><i>The Hill</i></a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> newspaper.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">After the ruling was released, Leahy said, “five justices once again have decided to rule on the side of moneyed interests and against the American people.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It&#8217;s been said in political circles that personnel is policy. If that&#8217;s true, Americans should be very concerned about Leahy&#8217;s senior counsel at the Judiciary Committee. That lawyer is the race-obsessed radical </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/mumia-abu-jamals-lawyer-to-obamas-justice-department/">Debo Adegbile</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> who recently lost his fight to become the Justice Department&#8217;s top civil rights enforcer. The Senate rejected Adegbile&#8217;s nomination after conservative groups pointed out his support for unrepentant cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal. A staunch affirmative action supporter, Adegbile, formerly head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, doesn’t appear to believe that white Americans are entitled to civil rights protection.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Meanwhile, the Left is essentially threatening to riot if the Supreme Court strikes down the Obamacare mandate forcing employers to provide birth control options in their employee&#8217;s health care insurance packages.</span></p>
<p>Democrat Shenna Bellows, who is challenging moderate Sen. Susan Collins (R- Maine), participated in a rally outside the Supreme Court to put pressure on the justices to leave the mandate alone.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">If the ruling comes down the way the Left fears, with any luck the unrest caused by progressives will happen soon before the November election, just in time to disgust conservative and middle-of-the-road voters.</span></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/demonizing-scotus/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>13</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Taqiyya and Blasphemy Laws in the UK</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/enza-ferreri/taqiyya-and-blasphemy-law-in-the-uk/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=taqiyya-and-blasphemy-law-in-the-uk</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/enza-ferreri/taqiyya-and-blasphemy-law-in-the-uk/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 07 Apr 2014 04:06:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Enza Ferreri]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[blasphemy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free Speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sharia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[soccer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[UK]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=222784</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Britain's chilling move to classify Islam criticism as "racism."]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/pl.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-222807" alt="pl" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/pl.jpg" width="281" height="197" /></a>In British law, race and religion are increasingly becoming deliberately confused for the purpose of accusing critics of Islam of racism.</p>
<p>A soccer fan <a href="http://www.gazettelive.co.uk/news/teesside-news/police-race-hate-probe-leads-middlesbrough-6525349">was recently arrested </a>on suspicion of inciting racial hatred after allegedly ripping up pages of the Qur&#8217;an and throwing them at a match. While on bail, he was also banned from attending any football games, visiting St Andrew&#8217;s &#8212; the stadium of the incident &#8212; and going to any city where his team, Middlesbrough, was playing.</p>
<p>Insults against Islam are taken very seriously in Britain, and the world of soccer is particularly sensitive to them. After the incident, the Middlesbrough Football Club suspended six more people and vowed to ban anyone convicted of the “crime” from the Riverside Stadium, its home ground, for life.</p>
<p>A Middlesbrough club spokesman said it operates on a &#8220;zero tolerance policy&#8221; towards all forms of discrimination, and supports football&#8217;s pledge to &#8220;eradicate racism in all its forms.&#8221;</p>
<p>Nobody could answer the question of what &#8220;race&#8221; Islam is. Muslims belong to all races, including white. But we know that the word “racism” has lost its original sense, and indeed any sense.</p>
<p>Originally the concept of racism had a place and an important role in both ethical and political discourses.</p>
<p>Now, it’s best avoided because it’s lost its positive characteristics, its usefulness, and has instead become a tool for intolerance, intimidation, restriction of freedom of speech and other freedoms: in short, a means of oppression.</p>
<p>The 19th-century German philosopher Gottlob Frege, one of the founders of modern logic, distinguished between the two dimensions of a concept: its meaning (or reference) and its sense.</p>
<p>The meaning or denotation is the class of objects to which the concept refers, while the sense or connotation is the concept&#8217;s descriptive qualities.</p>
<p>There is an inverse proportion between the two: the larger the meaning, the narrower the sense and vice versa.</p>
<p>A concept like &#8220;universe,&#8221; just because it has as reference an all-including class of objects, has practically no sense, in that it has very little descriptive, or delimitative, power.</p>
<p>Defining a word means exactly that: giving it borders that restrict it and in so doing make it precise.</p>
<p>Since the word &#8220;racism&#8221; has started being used to refer to many attitudes, behaviors and ideas that have little or nothing to do with racism in the strict sense, its meaning has become progressively larger and larger, correspondingly decreasing its sense.</p>
<p>When today I hear about someone or something being called &#8220;racist,&#8221; I hardly ever believe that it’s true. The likeliest explanation, I think to myself, is either yet another case of excessive political correctness or a personal attack. The descriptive capability of the term has gotten lost or at least has dramatically eroded.</p>
<p>There is at the moment a worrying trend: what has for a long time been a common Leftist ploy &#8212; the shouting of “racist” to shut down any criticism of Islam &#8212; is now on its way to being enshrined in British law.</p>
<p>The soccer case is one example of this attempt. Another is what’s happening to Tim Burton, the Radio Officer of the party <a href="http://libertygb.org.uk/v1/">Liberty GB</a>, which will contest the May 22 European Parliament Elections for Britain (donations to help with the election campaign are welcome).</p>
<p>Burton will appear at Birmingham Magistrates&#8217; Court, England, on April 8, charged with racially aggravated harassment for a few tweets in which he called prominent British Muslim Fiyaz Mujhal <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/taqiyya-trials-in-europe/">“a mendacious grievance-mongering taqiyya-artist.”</a></p>
<p>Mujhal, founder and director of the organisation Tell MAMA (Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks), was exposed by <i>The Telegraph</i> newspaper last year for having massaged some facts and figures about “anti-Muslim attacks” following the Woolwich murder of soldier Lee Rigby. For this and other discrepancies between police official figures of anti-Muslim crimes and the inflated ones of Tell MAMA, the organisation, which had received £375,000 from the UK government, had its public funding discontinued.</p>
<p>The obvious paradox here is that Tell MAMA, clearly in desperate search for “Islamophobic” crimes that could justify its requests for public funds, didn’t find a sufficient number of them of a serious enough nature. So, first it exaggerated them both quantitatively and qualitatively, calling “attacks” simple posts on Facebook and other social media. Then, when this manipulation had become well known, it used the same tactic against the people, like Tim, who called the bluff, in a self-perpetuating cycle.</p>
<p>Burton’s trial is very worrying for anyone who holds dear freedom of speech and basic civil liberties. One of the worrisome aspects is the conflating of “religion” with “race.” Tim Burton is accused of racially aggravated harassment for tweets concerning Islam. Not only is Islam clearly not a race and Muslims can and do belong to all races, but also the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service considers those two charges (racially- and religiously-aggravated crimes) as distinct and separate ones.</p>
<p>The Crown Prosecution Service, though, despite officially paying lip service to this distinction, in Tim Burton’s case is trying to conflate the two because it does not have sufficient ground to get a conviction on the “religiously aggravated” charge, which requires stronger evidence, so has decided to prosecute using the easier “racially aggravated” one.</p>
<p>As the CPS&#8217;s own <a href="https://www.cps.gov.uk/publications/prosecution/rrpbcrbook.html">website</a> says, it is “more difficult to prosecute for inciting religious hatred as opposed to racial hatred.”</p>
<p>The attempt to “racialise Muslims” clearly exists but <a href="http://tellmamauk.org/liberty-gb/">not, as Tell MAMA says, on the part of Liberty GB</a>. It exists on the part of British Islam apologists and their allies, the politically correct establishment.</p>
<p>Since there are no blasphemy laws in the UK and criticism of any religion, including Islam, is theoretically tolerated, only two alternatives are left to British Muslims who want to protect Islam from the expression of the uncomfortable truths of its supremacist and violent nature. One is to invoke the introduction of a blasphemy law; the other, subtler and more effective, is to turn existing equality, anti-racist, “hate crime” laws into a sharia-style blasphemy law.</p>
<p>The Macpherson Report, which followed the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence in London in 1993, reached the conclusion that the British police force is “institutionally racist” and, with the alleged intent of redressing the balance, established that absolutely anything perceived by a “victim” as a racist incident is <i>de facto</i> a racist incident: simple perception becomes legal reality, whether it’s true or not.</p>
<p>This makes the endeavor to legally treat anti-Islam criticism as racist even more dangerous, as it may render it subject to the ruling of the Macpherson Report.</p>
<p>An attempt had previously been made by the Labour government, when the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_and_Religious_Hatred_Act_2006">Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006</a> was passed, to formulate it in such a way that it could criminalize the criticism of Islam, the Quran and Muhammad. This was made impossible by the opposition of the Catholic Church and the Church of England, as well as various <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/oct/12/religion.immigrationpolicy">evangelical Christian groups which threatened to use this law against the Quran</a>, which is full to the brim with incitements to religious hatred. Therefore the bill had to be amended.</p>
<p>But what went out legally by the door of Parliamentary procedure is now being reintroduced surreptitiously through the window of the politically correct law enforcement and prosecution establishment.</p>
<p>This is why <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/611180575630378/">Liberty GB will hold a public protest outside the courthouse</a> and considers this trial crucially important.</p>
<p>The point of the Liberty GB campaign is, firstly, to show to the British and Western public what taqiyya – lying to infidels for the good of Islam &#8212; is and to show the whole nature of Islam in relation to non-Muslims through it. For this reason, Islam scholar Professor Hans Jansen is scheduled to appear at the trial and give evidence as an expert witness on taqiyya. We’ve christened this a “taqiyya trial.”</p>
<p>Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the goal is to defend free speech and stop the effective use of anti-racist legislation as blasphemy laws.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
<p><b>Make sure to </b><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/enza-ferreri/taqiyya-and-blasphemy-law-in-the-uk/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>80</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Campus Free Speech: For Jew-Haters Only</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/charles-jacobs-and-ilya-feoktistov/campus-free-speech-for-jew-haters-only/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=campus-free-speech-for-jew-haters-only</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/charles-jacobs-and-ilya-feoktistov/campus-free-speech-for-jew-haters-only/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 03 Apr 2014 04:45:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Charles Jacobs and Ilya Feoktistov]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free Speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[northeastern]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Protest]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[students for justice in Palestine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[suspended]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[University]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=222565</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A torrent of anti-Semitism follows the university's suspension of Students for Justice in Palestine. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/55.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-222668" alt="55" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/55-450x343.png" width="284" height="216" /></a>Two weeks ago in Boston, Northeastern University suspended a student group &#8212; Students for Justice in Palestine (NU SJP) &#8211; for an assortment of infractions against Jewish students and those who support Israel. The stunts that got them suspended were consistent with the strategy of anti-Israel forces at universities around the country: Campus enemies of Israel directly target the free speech of pro-Israel student groups by having their speakers disinvited, their members </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://freebeacon.com/issues/pro-israel-students-called-kike-dirty-jew-at-university-of-michigan/">intimidated</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, and their events </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/opinions/vassar-and-the-bds-war-on-campus/2014/03/27/">shouted down</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">.  So it is with a fair amount of gall that SJP has now launched a shrill campaign, aided by Massachusetts media, claiming that free speech is a value they cherish and that theirs has been abrogated by the University.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The reason this duplicitous campaign has gotten a warm response in some circles has to do with a double standard in academia and the media. When it comes to certain protected groups, free speech is trumped by “sensitivity.” Two-thirds of universities have speech codes meant to provide a safe environment for minority groups. The use of certain offensive words is forbidden and the use of certain offensive symbols can shut down a campus. However, these protections hypocritically do not extend to pro-Israel Jews. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Anti-Semitism is defined as treating Jews as you would treat no others. SJP attacks the only Jewish state. It does not deny post-WWII Germans or genocidal Sudanese or Rwandans their right to self-rule. Only the Jewish people may not have a state. SJP is an anti-Semitic organization and anti-Semitism is the only hatred still accepted on American campuses.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">On February 16</span><sup style="line-height: 1.5em;">th</sup><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, members of a Mississippi State University student group </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/students-wanted-desecrating-university-mississippi-statue-article-1.1664367">vandalized</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the statue of Ole Miss’s first black alumnus with a noose and a Confederate-type flag. Campus police posted a $25,000 reward for finding the suspects, the three students were caught and the FBI is planning to charge them with hate crimes. Their student group was suspended. The students’ actions were widely covered and roundly condemned in the national media.</span></p>
<div id="attachment_222566" style="width: 325px" class="wp-caption alignright"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/unnamed.png"><img class=" wp-image-222566" alt="unnamed" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/unnamed-450x345.png" width="315" height="241" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Tori Porell&#8217;s &#8220;favorite thing ever.&#8221;</p></div>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Among the infractions that got Northeastern SJP suspended was vandalizing the statue of a Jewish alumnus twice in two days by taping over the statue’s mouth with the message: “Zionism = Racism” superimposed over a Jewish star.  Upon seeing a photo of the vandalism posted to Facebook, the group’s president, Tori Porell, commented, “This is my favorite thing ever.”</span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> National and local media also covered the act of racist vandalism at Northeastern and SJP’s suspension, but in this case, media sympathy (</span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/03/28/crossed-lines-protest-and-free-speech-northeastern/PrRFtt0WUHCiZoBEcDGtDI/story.html">led by the Boston Globe</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, of course) was not for the victimized minority group, but for the punished victimizer’s supposed loss of “free speech.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In the current campus climate, ‘free speech” arguments are typically invoked on behalf of those who offend and intimidate Jews, Christians and conservatives. When NU SJP </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5Dv_PcP4aU">marched</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> across campus a little over a year ago shouting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” &#8212; a genocidal call for the destruction of the only Jewish state, nothing was done in response. In contrast, when Yale’s Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity members marched across campus in 2010 shouting, “No means yes, yes means anal,” Yale </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://bigthink.com/focal-point/no-means-yes-yes-means-anal-frat-banned-from-yale">suspended</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the frat for 5 years and the US Department of Education forced the university to institute greater protections for female students.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">When Arizona State University’s Tau Kappa Epsilon posted pictures of themselves at an MLK party this past January dressed in urban street clothes and sipping alcohol from watermelon cups, the university immediately </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2014/01/21/Arizona-State-University-frat-suspended-after-using-watermelon-cups-during-MLK-Day-party/3771390327283/">suspended</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the chapter.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yet SJP leaders have posted photos of themselves posing with terrorists’ machine guns. They come to protests wearing t-shirts glorifying gun violence and designated terrorist groups like Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. These terrorist groups explicitly call for the murder of all Jews and have murdered hundreds of Israelis (and in the case of Hezbollah, Americans as well). Yet nothing has been done to sanction these particular Northeastern University students.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The offense that finally earned SJP its suspension was what Northeastern terms “dorm storming” in the student conduct list of don’ts.  They entered student dorms in the middle of the night and slipped fake eviction notices under bedroom doors telling students that they are being kicked out for no reason, because that’s exactly what Israel does to the Palestinians. Even the ACLU considers the violation of privacy with the intent to intimidate and single out students to be outside the bounds of free speech at universities. In 2013, three San Jose State University students were </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.mercurynews.com/crime-courts/ci_24566367/san-jose-state-students-charged-hate-crime">charged with hate crimes</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> for writing racial slurs on a black student’s dorm room message board. Nobody would dare call that “free speech.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Indeed, SJP’s message wasn’t meant for the uninvolved student, who will maybe take a half second look at the piece of paper before throwing it away. This action was aimed directly at Jewish pro-Israel students. The clear message was:  “We who hate you can reach you at the very door to your room. We can come back again. And we will try to make others hate you as we do.”</span></p>
<div id="attachment_222567" style="width: 325px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/unnamed.jpg"><img class=" wp-image-222567" alt="unnamed" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/unnamed-450x337.jpg" width="315" height="236" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">NU SJP protest against free speech for pro-Israel students.</p></div>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">While demanding freedom of speech for themselves, SJP and its supporters are perfectly happy to suppress the free speech of pro-Israel Jews. An SJP violation that contributed to its suspension was the disruption of a Holocaust Awareness Week event put on by Huskies for Israel in 2013. In this case, NU SJP actively plotted to violate the free speech rights of Jewish students. SJP sent an email to its members calling for a “creative disruption” of the event. The goal: “we need to show them that war criminals are NOT welcome at Northeastern,” emphasis theirs. At the event, SJP members </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppCV6EHksK0">chanted slogans</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> en-masse and disrupted the free speech of the speakers. </span><b style="line-height: 1.5em;"><br />
</b></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Speaking to an SJP meeting in 2013, SJP faculty advisor M. Shahid Alam </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://youtu.be/mUS2XAGq4Bg">bragged</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> how he has made pro-Israel students in his classes afraid to argue with his anti-Israel lectures, “because they can sense that they will get no support from the class.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Northeastern Law School’s chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, which is closely affiliated with SJP, has put out a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://mondoweiss.net/2014/03/northeastern-concerned-influenced.html">poorly-argued legal brief</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> about supposed violations of SJP’s free speech rights. Yet the brief demands the suppression of free speech rights for Zionist groups like Americans for Peace and Tolerance:</span></p>
<blockquote><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">At the same time, it is important that groups such as ZOA and APT not be allowed to marginalize politically oppressed student groups through hate speech. To that end, we ask the University to adopt a more comprehensive hate speech policy that provides for transformative justice, anti-oppression training and, at the prerogative of the victim, disciplinary action.</span></p></blockquote>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">(Stalin must be smiling in his grave.)</span></p>
<div id="attachment_222568" style="width: 282px" class="wp-caption alignright"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/unnamed2.png"><img class=" wp-image-222568" alt="unnamed2" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/unnamed2-389x350.png" width="272" height="245" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Anti-Semitic cartoon posted by NU SJP.</p></div>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The National Lawyers Guild even invoked a standard anti-Semitic smear, claiming that Northeastern has bowed to pressure from wealthy Jewish donors when it suspended SJP. </span><b style="line-height: 1.5em;"></b><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">(“No free speech for rich Jews!”) This was echoed by NBC News “journalist” Nona Aronowitz, who interviewed us, NEU’s Hillel director and pro-Israel students and then simply ignored in her “</span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nbcnews.com/news/education/pro-palestinian-students-charge-universities-censorship-n58896">report</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">” every one of our points which did not fit her preconceived narrative.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">On March 19</span><sup style="line-height: 1.5em;">th</sup><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, as Northeastern SJP held a rally demanding that the university reinstate it, a Jewish student was watching. Here is his reaction:</span></p>
<blockquote><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">I stood across the street and watched in complete awe as they shouted messages of hate, screamed how Zionism was racism, and that they were in no way being anti-Semitic. They continued with their chants of &#8220;from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.&#8221; When I hear that, I hear anti-Semitism, I hear a call for the complete destruction of the Jewish state and all that they call home.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">I am what they call a member of the &#8220;Zionist war/propaganda machine,&#8221; and while I stood across the street and watched this rally, I kept a folded Israeli flag underneath my jacket. I kept on wanting to unfold it and hold it up high, but I was scared. I was afraid for one of the first times in my life as I heard their chants of anti-Semitism, full of hatred and shouting for intifada and increased violence. I was scared, but I am even more afraid of the idea of what happens when nothing is done, when nobody stands up.</span></p></blockquote>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">When it comes to women, blacks, Latinos and gays, hate speech that creates a “hostile campus environment” is punished. Their right to live hostility-free limits the free speech rights of those who hector them. Yet the right to hate and hector Jewish students, argue the mainstream media and the National Lawyers’ Guild, is “protected free speech.” </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Jewish students need our help. Brownshirt tactics cannot be tolerated even when masquerading as free speech or academic freedom.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It is about time that the only hatred still acceptable on college campuses – the hatred of Jews and the only Jewish state &#8211; is treated like all other hatreds. The entire Jewish community must publicly stand up and fight to protect our students.</span></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/charles-jacobs-and-ilya-feoktistov/campus-free-speech-for-jew-haters-only/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>130</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>‘Academic Justice’: Inside the Abyss of the Academy</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/academic-justice-inside-the-abyss-of-the-academy/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=academic-justice-inside-the-abyss-of-the-academy</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/academic-justice-inside-the-abyss-of-the-academy/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 27 Feb 2014 05:25:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jack Kerwick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[academic justice]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free Speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Harvard]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Harvey Mansfield]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Herrnstein]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Sandra Korn]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=219805</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The mentality behind a Harvard student's call to abolish campus free speech and thought. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/sandra-korn-300x234.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-219820" alt="sandra-korn-300x234" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/sandra-korn-300x234.jpg" width="300" height="234" /></a>Sandra Korn is a Harvard University undergraduate student and a writer for <em>The Harvard Crimson</em>.  In a recent edition of the school’s paper, she argues for abandoning the traditional value of “academic freedom” in favor of what she calls, “academic justice.”</span></p>
<p>Korn may still be but a student, but both the lines along which she thinks as well as the ease with which she articulates her thoughts reveals to all with eyes to see the character of the academic environment in which she’s been reared:  those whom she wishes to deprive of academic freedom are just those academics who refuse to endorse the leftist ideology of Korn and her professors.</p>
<p>Korn singles out as instances of teacher-scholars who should have been stripped of their academic freedom just and only those figures who are noted for their penchant for smashing the sacred cows of the left.</p>
<p>Richard J. Herrnstein is one such example.  Herrnstein is probably most distinguished for having co-authored, along with Charles Murray, the now famous, <em>The Bell Curve</em>. However, the thesis that IQ differences vary with race and that, to at least some extent, these differences are genetic, is one that he defended two decades earlier, back in 1971.  Because of this position of his, militant student activists disrupted Herrnstein’s classes and demanded that, along with sociologist Christopher Jencks (another thought criminal), he be fired.</p>
<p>Quoting Herrnstein, Korn relays that while claiming to have not been “bothered…personally” by the attacks against him, Herrnstein admitted that he was deeply troubled by the fact it was now “hazardous for a professor to teach certain kinds of views” at Harvard.  Korn replies that this was precisely the point of “the SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] activists—they wanted to make the ‘certain kinds of views’ they deemed racist and classist unwelcome on Harvard’s campus.”</p>
<p>Harvey Mansfield is another person upon whom Korn sets her sights.  She charges Mansfield with “publishing…sexist commentary under the authority of a Harvard faculty position” and avows that she “would happily organize with other feminists on campus to stop him” from continuing to do so.</p>
<p>Korn admits that while it could very well be the case that student activists are guilty of infringing upon the academic freedom of the Herrnsteins and Mansfields of the world, this “obsession with the doctrine of ‘academic freedom’ often seems to bump against something [that] I think [is] much more important: ‘academic justice.’”</p>
<p>The “obsession” with academic freedom Korn thinks is “misplaced,” for “no academic question is ever ‘free’ from [such] political realities” as “racism, sexism, and heterosexism.”  After all, since “our university community opposes” such things, “it should ensure that this research…promoting or justifying oppression…does not continue.”  This is in keeping with the demands of “academic justice.”</p>
<p>So too does the craving for “academic justice” account for the decision of the American Studies Association at Harvard to boycott “Israeli academic institutions until Israel ends its occupation of Palestine.”  The ASA, Korn explains, are interested, not in resorting to “the ‘freedom’ game” of “those on the right,” but in achieving “social justice.” Thus, they “take the moral upper hand.”</p>
<p>Korn concludes by reiterating the central thesis of her essay that our “obsessive reliance on the doctrine of academic freedom” prevents us from considering “more thoughtfully what is just.”</p>
<p>In a sane world, a world that hasn’t been subverted by decades of leftism, it would be viewed as nothing less than a scandal that any college student, let alone a student at one of the world’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning, would hold Korn’s views, to say nothing of publishing them. Traditionally, the university had been regarded as among the premiere civilizing institutions, the place where students were educated in just those intellectual and moral habits that would enable them to formulate, articulate, and defend their own convictions while treating those of their opponents with respect and even charity.</p>
<p>The academic world inhabited by the Korns of our world is a radically different kind of place.  Views with which one disagrees are not to be refuted, but condemned, and their proponents demonized.  The university exists not for the sake of acquiring and conveying truth and knowledge, but for the sake of “social justice”—i.e. a totalizing leftist ideology that is to be imposed, “by whichever means necessary,” upon both students and faculty alike.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/academic-justice-inside-the-abyss-of-the-academy/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>50</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>The Witch-Hunters of the Israeli Left</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/steven-plaut/the-witch-hunters-of-the-israeli-left/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-witch-hunters-of-the-israeli-left</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/steven-plaut/the-witch-hunters-of-the-israeli-left/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 03 Feb 2014 05:10:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Steven Plaut]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Campus]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free Speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[University]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=217833</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Free speech for communists, but not for pro-Israel Zionists. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/maxresdefault.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-217842" alt="maxresdefault" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/maxresdefault-442x350.jpg" width="309" height="245" /></a>For the past couple of weeks the Radical Left in Israel has been screaming about the &#8220;right&#8221; of communist teacher Adam Verete, employed as a civics teacher in a northern Israeli high school, to turn his classroom into an anti-Israel indoctrination center.  He used his classroom time to urge his students to refuse to serve in the Israeli military.  In other words, the Left insists the communist teacher has the &#8220;right&#8221; to advocate law breaking in his classroom, all in the name of freedom of speech.  After launching an investigation of the teacher, the ORT school system, to which his school belongs, at the insistence of the Minister of Eductaion, merely slapped Verete&#8217;s wrist and did nothing.  Had Verete been a &#8220;Kahanist&#8221; using his classroom to advocate his agenda, he would have been dismissed faster than you can say Jiminy Cricket, and probably also jailed.  </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The leading far Leftists defending the right of Verete to indoctrinate in the classroom include <a href="http://new.bostonreview.net/BR21.3/Tamir.html">Yuli Tamir</a>, w</span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">ho once led the campaign to fire a different teacher (and rabbi), Yisrael Shiran, because Shiran wrote a letter OUTSIDE HIS CLASSROOM with which Tamir disagreed.  Shiran in that letter claimed that the school curriculum was improperly teaching the controversial ideas of the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin as unchallengeable dogma.  He was dismissed for this &#8220;crime&#8221; at the initiative of Tamir, but later sued the Ministry of Education for wrongful dismissal and won a large damages award.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Other defenders of the communist teacher include those Israeli &#8220;intellectuals&#8221;  and &#8220;academics&#8221; who insisted that the Nobel Prize-holding Prof. Yisrael Aumann be proclaimed a pariah undeserving of an honorary PhD because he holds opinions disliked by the Left.  Many of the same leftists defending the &#8220;right&#8221; of Verete also lead the campaign to indict and prosecute rabbis who wrote a controversial book; they insist these rabbis are guilty of the thought crime of expressing opinions that the Left considers to be &#8220;intolerant.&#8221;   And a great many of these leftists were among those who demanded that the freedom of speech of non-leftists be suppressed after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin based on their &#8220;theory&#8221; holding that non-leftists exercising freedom of speech produce murder.  It goes without saying that not a single leftist in Israel has ever protested the selective denial of free speech rights to &#8220;Kahanists.&#8221;  </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">While the radical Left in Israel has a very long record of demanding that the freedom of speech of non-leftists be suppressed, one of the most outrageous examples of the anti-democratic assault by the Left has been ignored in recent years and overlooked in the debate over freedom of speech in recent days.  It involves the case of Prof. Nahum Rakover.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Rakover is retired professor of law from Bar Ilan and Tel Aviv Universities and now serves as president of a small college in Israel.  In the past he served also as deputy attorney general.  He is an expert in Jewish law.  In the early 1990s he held a side position as deputy legal advisor for the government of Israel, this in the days of the Rabin-Peres government and the initiation of Oslo appeasement.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It was at this time that Israel’s Supreme Court made a controversial ruling recognizing homosexual &#8220;marriages,&#8221; when it ordered El Al to allow a gay steward to receive a spousal ticket for his partner.  The judges in that learned opinion cited Michel Foucault, gay Marxist deconstructionist and pseudo-philosopher, as a legal basis for the decision. The Court&#8217;s decision was written by leftist Justice <a href="http://anneinpt.wordpress.com/2012/05/31/haaretz-reporter-uri-blau-to-be-indicted-for-possessing-classified-documents/">Dalia Dorner</a>.  (She later prevented the <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3262325.stm">defamation suit</a> proceeding against Arab propagandist and film maker Mohammed Bakri for falsely claiming that Israeli soldiers carried out atrocities in the Battle of Jenin.)</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Knesset (parliament) then held hearings on the Dorner decision about the stewards.   In these hearings, Rakover was invited in to say what Jewish Law and the Torah think of gay marriage. Rakover answered truthfully that the Torah considers it an abomination and that granting a spouse ticket to a gay partner is no different from giving it to someone practicing bestiality with his dog.  </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">That sent the PC camp into ionospheric orbit.  The Left launched a merciless venomous ad hominem assault against Rakover, demanding his dismissal from his civil service post.  It should be noted that Rakover did not even state his OWN opinion about &#8220;gay marriage,&#8221; only the Torah’s, a task for which he was getting paid as part of his job.  The real issue of course is not whether you agree with the opinion described by Rakover.  The real issue is whether Rakover or the Torah have the right to hold an unfashionable opinion about anything.  The Israeli Left unanimously said no!</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Within days, Professor Itzhak Galnoor, a Hebrew university leftist from political science, who had earlier been a Peace Now leader, attacked Rakover.   Galnoor, today part of the semi-Marxist <a href="http://www.abebooks.com/Varieties-Marxism-Jerusalem-Leer-Foundation/11196992329/bd">Van Leer Institute</a>, has long advocated the position that any criticism of the Radical anti-Israel Left or questioning of its motives amounts to &#8220;McCarthyism&#8221; and should be suppressed.  See <a href="http://isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/Editorial%20-%20Steven%20Plaut%20-%20Itzhak%20Galnoor%20-%20The%20Leftwing%20McCarthyism.htm">this</a>.   Galnoor was at the time serving as the Labor Party-appointed head of the civil service, a position from which he introduced affirmative action quotas and dumbed-down standards.   Galnoor opened up internal persecution of Rakover in the civil service and led the campaign to get him dismissed from his position.  Demands for the dismissal of Rakover also filled the leftist press.  Among those demanding that Rakover be prevented from exercising his freedom of speech were the far-leftist Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), whose current <a href="http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/11860">president</a> is a Stalinist,  and Tel Aviv University Prof. Asa Kasher, who claims to be an expert on ethics.  </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Rakover’s reputation and name were dragged through the mud by the anti-democratic McCarthyist Left.  Never mind that he is one of Israel’s greatest legal minds and was only stating what appears in black and white in the Torah.  Citing the Torah became in effect a hate crime in PC Israel.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In 2002 the Israel Prize in Jewish Law was given to Prof. Nahum Rakover.  This was newsworthy because Rakover had been the victim of the McCarthyist assault against freedom of speech launched by the Israeli Labor Party and the rest of the Left in the 1990s.  It is also noteworthy because in recent years the Israel Prize has so often been granted to radical anti-Israel leftists.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But the radical Left&#8217;s selective devotion to freedom of speech, where everyone has the right to agree with the radical Left but no one has the right to disagree with it, continues to run amok.</span></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/steven-plaut/the-witch-hunters-of-the-israeli-left/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>42</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Obama&#8217;s  Double Standard on Offending China and Muslims</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obamas-double-standard-on-offending-china-and-muslims/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-double-standard-on-offending-china-and-muslims</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obamas-double-standard-on-offending-china-and-muslims/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 13 Jan 2014 16:25:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[China]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free Speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[innocence of muslims]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=215224</guid>
		<description><![CDATA["It sends a message and has a certain chilling effect."]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/6a00d8341c630a53ef017d3c5d0556970c-640wi.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-215225" alt="174256_filmmakermedia_AJS" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/6a00d8341c630a53ef017d3c5d0556970c-640wi-425x350.jpg" width="425" height="350" /></a></p>
<p>A while ago the Jimmy Kimmel Show had a kid roundtable that offended people in China. It offended them enough that it became a domestic and internal controversy complete with protests and <a href="http://washington.cbslocal.com/2014/01/12/white-house-responds-to-petition-regarding-jimmy-kimmels-china-remarks/">a White House petition that passed</a> 100,000 signatures.</p>
<p>The White House responded to the petition by writing, &#8220;The Federal government cannot force ABC to remove this show. The First Amendment of the Constitution protects free speech, even if individuals might personally find it offensive or distasteful. It may be upsetting when people say things we might personally disagree with, but the principle of protected free speech is an important part of who we are as a nation.&#8221;</p>
<p>That&#8217;s all true, unfortunately it&#8217;s not the way that Obama does things. Not <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Hollywood/2012/09/14/Obama-YouTube-video-removal-investigation">when the people offended are Muslims</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>The White House asked YouTube on Tuesday to review an anti-Muslim film posted to the site that has been blamed for igniting the violent protests this week in the Middle East.</p>
<p>Tommy Vietor, spokesman for the National Security Council, said the White House has &#8220;reached out to YouTube to call the video to their attention and ask them to review whether it violates their terms of use.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>That&#8217;s a roundabout request to remove a video. And while Obama can&#8217;t ask ABC to remove a video that offends China, his people can ask YouTube to remove a video that offends Muslims and then jail the director.</p>
<p>There&#8217;s<a href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2012/09/activists-troubled-by-white-house-call-to-youtube-135618.html"> a clear and troubling double </a>standard here.</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;I am actually kind of distressed by this,&#8221; said Eva Galperin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. &#8220;Even though there are all these great quotes from inside the White House saying they support free speech&#8230;.by calling YouTube from the White House, they were sending a message no matter how much they say we don&#8217;t want them to take it down, when the White House calls and asks you to review it, it sends a message and has a certain chilling effect.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>After that precedent, there&#8217;s every reason for China to expect Obama to do what they want and hiding behind the First Amendment won&#8217;t work because when you urge the removal of a video and jail the man behind it, you are clearly not committed to the Bill of Rights.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s all a matter of priorities. Tender Muslim sensitivities come before those of everyone else.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obamas-double-standard-on-offending-china-and-muslims/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>3</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Danish Muslim Apostate Faces Hate Speech Charges</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/andrew-harrod/danish-muslim-apostate-faces-hate-speech-charges/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=danish-muslim-apostate-faces-hate-speech-charges</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/andrew-harrod/danish-muslim-apostate-faces-hate-speech-charges/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 02 Jan 2014 05:10:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Andrew Harrod]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Denmark]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free Speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hate Speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[jail]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Yahya Hassan]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=214411</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The death of free speech in Europe. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Yahya_HAssan_788776y.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-214413" alt="Yahya_HAssan_788776y" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Yahya_HAssan_788776y-450x338.jpg" width="270" height="203" /></a>“Muslims love to take advantage of” free speech, <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2013/11/06/death-threats-against-teen-poet-reignite-denmarks-muslim-debate/">Danish-Palestinian poet Yahya Hassan says</a>, “and as soon as there is someone else saying something critical against them, they want to restrict it.”  In an action <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/andrew-harrod/many-things-rotten-in-denmark/">previously indicated by this writer</a>, Hassan is now personally facing this double standard in Danish “hate speech” charges for his anti-Islam comments.</p>
<p>Following Danish-Iranian artist <a href="http://www.firoozeh.dk/">Firoozeh Bazrafkan</a>’s conviction under Danish Penal Code Section 266b (in Danish <a href="https://www.retsinformation.dk/Forms/R0710.aspx?id=121398">here</a>) for condemning Islam as misogynist, a <a href="http://cphpost.dk/news/yahya-hassan-not-worried-about-racism-charge.7967.html">local Muslim Aarhus politician demanded a similar prosecution of Hassan</a>.  His poetry “says that everybody in the ghettos like Vollsmose and Gellerup steal, don&#8217;t pay taxes and cheat themselves to pensions,” the Somali-Dane <a href="https://denkorteavis.dk/2013/dan-ritto-socialdemokratisk-fusk/">Mohamed Suleban</a> stated after reporting Hassan to the police on November 27. “Those are highly generalizing statements and they offend me and many other people.”  Authorities are currently considering Section 266b charges for, according to <a href="http://www.internationalfreepresssociety.org/2010/12/the-scandal-of-danish-justice/">one English translation</a>, any public “communication by which a group of persons are threatened, insulted or denigrated due to their race, skin color, national or ethnic origin, religion or sexual orientation.”</p>
<p>The 18-year-old Hassan’s eponymous debut book contains about 150 poems, “many of which are severely critical of the religious environment he grew up in” according to <i>Wall Street Journal</i> reporters <a href="http://www.weltreporter.net/en/bomsdorf">Clemens Bomsdorf</a> and <a href="http://topics.wsj.com/person/J/ellen_emmerentze-jervell/7659">Ellen Emmerentze Jervell</a>.  Written in all capital letters, Hassan’s poems treat “issues like the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, child abuse, and the interplay between violence and religion” with “[p]rofanity and vivid analogies.”  <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/dec/12/yahya-hassan-poet-denmark-muslim-row"><i>Yahya Hassan</i> has sold 80,000 copies</a> following an October 17 release in the comparatively small Danish market and is expected to exceed 100,000 copies by Christmas.  Hassan’s publisher <a href="http://www.gyldendal.dk/boeger-til-voksne/skoenlitteratur-digte/9788702153521/yahya-hassan?utm_source=gyldendal_dk&amp;utm_medium=stor_slider&amp;utm_campaign=yahya_hassan">Gyldendal</a> reports that Danish poetry books are fortunate to sell 500 copies.  A <a href="http://cphpost.dk/news/yahya-hassan-assaulted-at-central-station.7798.html">recent book forum honored Hassan as the debut author of the year and an English translation of his poetry is underway</a>.</p>
<p>Hassan first became prominent with an October 5 Danish newspaper interview entitled “<a href="http://politiken.dk/debat/ECE2095547/digter-jeg-er-fucking-vred-paa-mine-foraeldres-generation/">I F**king Hate My Parents’ Generation</a>.”  In it he blamed poor Muslim parenting for the juvenile delinquency and social maladjustment experienced by many Danish Muslim youth such as Hassan himself.  With more than <a href="http://cphpost.dk/news/young-poet-threatened-after-tv-appearance.7282.html">85,000 social media shares</a>, the interview became the most shared <i>Politiken</i> article of the year.</p>
<p>Days thereafter Hassan recited from his “LANGDIGT” or “LONG POEM” before his book’s release on the Danish news program <a href="http://www.dr.dk/tv/program/deadline/"><i>Deadline</i></a>.  Extract:  “between the Friday prayers and the Ramadans/you want to carry a knife in your pocket/you want to go and ask people if they have a problem/although the only problem is you.”  Such verses brought Hassan more death threats than any other previous <i>Deadline</i> guest.  Hassan has subsequently reported <a href="http://cphpost.dk/news/charges-filed-for-threats-against-yahya-hassan.7951.html">27 Facebook threats against him</a>, of which the police investigated six as serious and pressed charges in one case of a 15-year old boy.  A subsequent assault against Hassan occurred on November 18 in Copenhagen Central Station by a <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Young+Danish+poet+Palestinian+origin+Islam+critic+injured/9183727/story.html">24-year old Palestinian-Danish Muslim</a> who had previously received a seven-year terrorism sentence.</p>
<p><a href="http://cphpost.dk/news/event-with-high-profile-poet-cancelled-over-safety-concerns.7862.html">Hassan now wears a bulletproof vest and receives protection</a> from Denmark’s domestic intelligence agency <a href="https://www.pet.dk/English.aspx">PET</a> at speaking engagements.  A <a href="http://cphpost.dk/news/million-kroner-poetry-reading-goes-off-without-hitch.7896.html">November 26 reading by Hassan from his book</a> in a school in the Danish town of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odense">Odense</a>, moreover, required an estimated one million kroner in security costs, more than the amount spent on a high-risk soccer game.  Several hundred policemen had observed the school for two days before the event occurred with road checkpoints, a bomb sweep, and a five kilometer no-fly zone around the school.</p>
<p>Police safety concerns had forced the cancellation of an earlier, sold-out reading at a public library in Odense’s troubled district of Vollsmose.  Along with Hassan, Culture Minister <a href="http://www.ft.dk/Folketinget/findMedlem/RVMAJE.aspx">Marianne Jelved</a> and several other Danish politicians <a href="http://cphpost.dk/news/event-with-high-profile-poet-cancelled-over-safety-concerns.7862.html">criticized the Vollmose cancellation</a> as “completely unacceptable.”  Jelved demanded that police in Vollmose “make the necessary precautions” in order “to hold on to what democracy is, or otherwise we reduce it day by day.”</p>
<p>Yet Suleban’s charges might succeed in silencing Hassan where violence has failed.  <a href="http://www.cepos.dk/english/employees/jacob-mchangama/">Jacob Mchangama</a>, legal affairs director at Denmark’s liberal think-tank <a href="http://www.cepos.dk/english">Cepos</a>, sees a “strong case” against Hassan, particularly given a “range of similar preceding cases” like Bazrafkan’s.  Hassan’s media attention and public popularity, though, might make conviction difficult, as “his poems are important social commentary.”  Hassan’s acquittal “for making statements similar to what other people have been convicted for,” Mchangama nonetheless observed, “will expose a random legislation where no-one can be sure of what is legal to say.”</p>
<p><a href="http://cphpost.dk/news/when-hate-speech-begins-free-speech-ends-or-does-ite.7046.html">Calling for Section 266b’s abolition</a>, Mchangama further questions the law’s “arbitrary limits.” What “is sufficiently degrading” and why should, for example, homosexuals receive protection, but not disabled people.  Mchangama also sees no “good science” correlating speech laws with “less hate crimes.”  Other commentators, moreover, have argued that speech trials simply bring more attention to the offending statements.</p>
<p>Hassan’s case presents speech codes functioning not just as a <i>de facto</i> blasphemy, but also as a <i>de facto</i> apostasy law protecting Islam.  How, after all, can an atheist like Hassan, who says that there is “something wrong with Islam,” decide upon his religious views without rigorous testing of all faiths?  For that matter, how could anyone answer Hassan’s call for a “reformation” in an Islam that “refuses to renew itself” without similar scrutiny?  Such questions aside, Hassan remains committed to his criticisms, stating that he does not “care about getting convicted of racism.” Muslims threatening violence can likewise “all come and get me if they want.  I don’t give a s**t about these morons.”  “I know these people,” Hassan adds, “They can’t handle criticism…they’re not interested in dialogue.”</p>
<p><i>This article was commissioned by</i> <a href="http://www.legal-project.org/"><i>The Legal Project</i></a><i>, an activity of the </i><a href="http://www.meforum.org/"><i>Middle East Forum</i></a><i>.</i></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/andrew-harrod/danish-muslim-apostate-faces-hate-speech-charges/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>48</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Lynching Free Speech</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/lynching-free-speech/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=lynching-free-speech</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/lynching-free-speech/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 27 Dec 2013 05:53:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free Speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Internet]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mobs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[social media]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[spying]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=214006</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The weapon of choice in the Left's war on thought criminals. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/0803_freespeech_630x420.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-214009" alt="0803_freespeech_630x420" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/0803_freespeech_630x420-450x327.jpg" width="315" height="229" /></a>The end of free speech will not necessarily come when there are soldiers in the streets, secret police in the alleyways and a mustachioed man screaming at you on a television set that can&#8217;t be turned off no matter how hard you turn the knob or click the buttons.</p>
<p>Some of these things existed in totalitarian countries, but they were there to sweep up the hardened dissenters who refused to be silenced. The vast majority of citizens did not have bugged phones or men in trench-coats following them around.</p>
<p>That was what their friends and neighbors were for.</p>
<p>The first line of offense by a totalitarian society against freedom of speech is crowdsourced to the people in the streets. No secret police force is large enough to spy on everyone all the time.</p>
<p>Nor does it need to. That is what informers are for.</p>
<p>Some of the informers are committed fanatics. Others do whatever they are told. And the worst do it for the pleasure of destroying someone else. Whatever their varying motives, ideology or malice, such people become even more dangerous in groups where they become a morality mob.</p>
<p>The Two Minutes Hate in George Orwell&#8217;s <i>1984</i> is repeated on a regular basis in our society today with hysterical lynchings like those of of Justine Sacco; one of a long list of disposable victims of opportunity. The Two Minutes Hate was a Pavlovian exercise to stimulate the hate reflex. Modern counterparts like #hasjustinelandedyet with its overt malice are the genuine thing.</p>
<p>The process by which these ugly events happen has a good deal in common with any other form of mob violence. There are familiar elements from Shirley Jackson&#8217;s disturbing story, <i>The Lottery</i>. The crowd knows what is coming. It derives pleasure from a victim who does not yet know what is about to happen and eagerly anticipates the moment of shocked revelation when that will change.</p>
<p>&#8220;When is Justine landing?&#8221; they whisper eagerly to each other. Sadism is no good if the victim doesn&#8217;t know what is being done to her. The anticipation sharpens their appetite.</p>
<p>Behind it all is a moral structure. The crowd in the Two Minutes Hate does not randomly lash out. The very name with its time limit is a demonstration of civilization. For two minutes they will become hateful animals in reaction to a profound ideological offense. And then they will turn the outrage machine off.</p>
<p>Anyone can be a mob, but they are a morality mob. They do horrible things because the ends, such as fighting racism, justify the means. They hate for two minutes and then go back to their daily lives.</p>
<p>Structure maintains the illusion of morality. Like <i>The Lottery</i>, it has to pretend that it isn&#8217;t random so that the participants can make believe that they are doing this for some nobler reason than the primal joy of bashing another human being&#8217;s head in with a rock.</p>
<p>Modern social media is <i>The Lottery</i>. Sometimes you win the lottery and become famous. Your Twitter feed gets turned into a CBS sitcom. Other times you lose the lottery and your equally stupid tweet gets you picked to be stoned to death.</p>
<p>Each time you participate in the global mass of the Internet, you are pulling a ticket out of the lottery. And even if you don&#8217;t participate, a crazy lesbian waitress can tell the world that you refused to give her a tip, a former friend can make your letter go viral and what passes for reporters in the new media looking for pageviews can make you a target to fill a daily quota.</p>
<p>The Internet is going crazy for, the headlines on the same sites that create the frenzy say. The Internet is exploding. The Internet lashed out. The Internet lynched someone. But it&#8217;s not the Internet. It&#8217;s the cowardly individuals in the morality mob hiding behind their collective malice in a hashtag who want to hurt someone from the physical and moral safety of the mob.</p>
<p>The morality mob is attracted to pettiness. It rarely takes on big things because it knows its own weakness. A morality mob is a bully without the courage and it needs easy targets that it knows it can hurt.</p>
<p>The modern Internet morality mob began in China. &#8220;It was just the latest example of a growing phenomenon the Chinese call Internet hunting, in which morality lessons are administered by online throngs and where anonymous Web users come together to investigate others and mete out punishment for offenses real and imagined.&#8221; That is how the New York Times described it.</p>
<p>The phenomenon has since spread to America, but it began in a collectivist society ruled by the iron hand of the Communist Party.</p>
<p>Totalitarianism relies on harnessing the darker emotions in the human catalog; fear, hate and the sense of power that derives from causing harm to another beneath the mask of the self-righteous inquistioner whose moral authority allows him to both inflict and enjoy the torment.</p>
<p>Beneath these responses is a deeper sense of helplessness and insecurity. The anonymous mass of society has become even more chokingly cramped and anonymous on the Internet than in the biggest twentieth century cities. For some of the uglier faces in the crowd, the only way to feel real is to hurt someone. And their leftist ringleaders know exactly how the game is played.</p>
<p>The morality mobs on the Internet are of the left which holds the commanding heights of social morality dictating what behaviors are acceptable and which are not.</p>
<p>Morality mobs crowdsource the left&#8217;s values enforcement. While its activist groups concern themselves with Phil Robertson, its morality mobs band together to target ordinary people. The organized left can make examples out of famous people while the ad-hoc left can make examples out of ordinary people by making their morality mob lynchings go viral.</p>
<p>The left responded to criticism of its actions in the Phil Robertson case by arguing that they are not violating the First Amendment. And they aren&#8217;t. But free speech can be structurally suppressed without ever officially involving the authorities in the dirty work.</p>
<p>If the outcome is the end of free speech, then the details of how it got that way become academic. If instead of a top-down solution, the actual death of free speech involves a mid-level intervention by an oligarchy of media and new media outlets, activist groups and fearful businesses banding together to make free speech impossible while the authorities go on smiling and insisting that speech is still free; then the destination is the same.</p>
<p>Only the road we took to get there will have changed.</p>
<p>The First Amendment was not just a legal safeguard against government abuses, but a statement that an open society is best. The letter of the law protects the people from government intervention, but the spirit of the law is an argument for an open society in which the freedom to worship, to speak and to protest against the government make all our freedoms possible.</p>
<p>The left aspires to a society in which dissent is suppressed. And a society without dissent is totalitarian whether it is ruled by the hateful mob of the Two Minutes Hate or by Big Brother.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/lynching-free-speech/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>125</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Chilling Effect for Me, But Not for Thee</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/andrew-harrod/chilling-effect-for-me-but-not-for-thee/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=chilling-effect-for-me-but-not-for-thee</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/andrew-harrod/chilling-effect-for-me-but-not-for-thee/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 13 Dec 2013 05:09:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Andrew Harrod]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free Speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Intisar A. Rabb]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[law school professor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[robert spencer]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=213077</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Scholars at Georgetown explain why certain speech against jihad just shouldn't be allowed. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/yh.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-213079" alt="yh" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/yh.jpg" width="270" height="198" /></a>“I don’t apply the same standards” as in the United States, the Muslim Harvard Law School professor <a href="http://www.law.harvard.edu/news/2013/09/17_intisar-a-rabb-to-join-hls-faculty.html">Intisar A. Rabb</a> stated at a November 21, 2013, Georgetown University conference with respect to “hate speech” restrictions and Islam abroad.  In connection with her concern about an American Muslim’s terrorism conviction “chilling speech,” Rabb’s acceptance of “just a different legal regime” abroad revealed troubling double standards towards Islam.</p>
<p>Raab addressed the final panel of “<a href="http://www.eventbrite.com/e/acmcu-20th-anniversary-conference-muslim-christian-relations-in-the-21st-century-challenges-registration-8854631441">Muslim-Christian Relations in the 21st Century:  Challenges &amp; Opportunities</a>,” a controversial conference (see <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/andrew-harrod/karen-armstrongs-911-british-empire-blowback-thesis/">here</a>, <a href="http://freebeacon.com/georgetown-university-hosts-911-truther/">here</a>, and <a href="http://juicyecumenism.com/2013/12/04/georgetown-universitys-one-way-street-of-christian-muslim-understanding/">here</a>) marking the 20<sup>th</sup> anniversary of Georgetown’s <a href="http://cmcu.georgetown.edu/">Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding</a> (ACMCU).  Rabb opposed a recent appeals court conviction affirmation for <a href="http://www.investigativeproject.org/4212/mehanna-ruling-draws-line-between-speech">Tarek Mehanna</a>, as elaborated in an <a href="http://www.orrick.com/Events-and-Publications/Pages/default.aspx?SearchType=Both&amp;Keyword=Tarek%20Mehanna">amici curia brief in Mehanna’s appeal</a>.  Therein Rabb and others warned of a “serious chilling effect” on speech from convicting Mehanna for translating the book <a href="http://www.archive.org/stream/39WaysToServeAndParticipate/39WaysToServeAndParticipateInJihad_djvu.txt"><i>39 Ways to Serve and Participate in Jihad</i></a> for the website <a href="http://at-tibyan.com/"><i>at-Tibyan</i></a>.</p>
<p>The federal government considered the book, website, and Mehanna’s “disfavored political and religious beliefs” all supportive of Al Qaeda.  The <a href="http://www.investigativeproject.org/documents/case_docs/2264.pdf#page=7">appellate opinion</a> noted that Mehanna had a <a href="http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/first_amendment?quicktabs_10=0#quicktabs-10">First Amendment</a> right to praise Al Qaeda, but Al-Qaeda-coordinated advocacy was terrorism support.  “Under the Government’s theory,” amici curia warned, “translating an al-Qa’ida text is lawful, as is espousing beliefs…supporting al-Qa’ida,” but together these “legal acts gives rise to criminal liability,” a particular concern for scholars researching terrorism.</p>
<p>Rabb at Georgetown therefore demanded that action beyond speech underlie any terrorism support conviction.  Yet, unmentioned by Rabb, Mehanna had traveled in 2004 to Yemen, irrespective of any translation work charge.  The appeals court rejected his “rose-colored glasses” presentation as a “devoted scholar…protected by the First Amendment” and found a jury conclusion “virtually unarguable” that Mehanna “went abroad to enlist in&#8230;terrorist training.”</p>
<p>Legal issues aside, amici curiae did not consider Mehanna’s reading and website choices objectionable.   <i>At-Tibyan</i>, for example, “primarily” concerned “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Muhammad_al-Maqdisi">Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi</a>…a theologian and a jurist” who “endorses rebellion against…illegitimate Muslim regimes.”  Among “innumerable mainstream theological texts,”<i>39 Ways</i> also involved “basic…Sunni jurisprudence,” namely the “individual duty (<i>fard ‘ayn</i>) incumbent on all Muslims” to “contribute to wars of self-defense.”  “All collections of the words and deeds of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad (<i>hadith</i>) and all Islamic law books” endorsed this “standard position in all Sunni legal schools.”</p>
<p>The amici curiae cited a <a href="http://www.onislam.net/english/ask-the-scholar/international-relations-andjihad/jihad-rulings-and-regulations/174990.html?Regulations">2003 fatwa</a> from “mainstream Muftis” at <a href="http://www.onislam.net/english/"><i>OnIslam</i></a>, “[o]ne of the most popular websites in the English-speaking world devoted to Islam.”  The muftis considered whether for Muslims it is “necessary to fight alongside Afghans” or otherwise resist American-led forces in Afghanistan.  Citing Quran verses legitimating fighting against non-Muslims, the muftis answered that the “Muslim Ummah (nation) is considered one body, which if a single organ aches all the other organs will share the feelings of agony.”</p>
<p><a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/about-robert-spencer.html">Robert Spencer</a> of the website <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/"><i>Jihadwatch</i></a> could not have explained <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/br0nc0s/managed-mt/mt-srch.cgi?search=fard+ayn&amp;IncludeBlogs=1&amp;limit=20">such doctrines of jihad in a more troubling manner</a>.  Questions in the brief about targeting civilians aside, the cited Islamic doctrine justified the killing of military personnel “attacking” Muslim nations, cold comfort to, among others, beheaded British soldier <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Lee_Rigby">Lee Rigby</a> or the <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/f/fort_hood_texas/index.html">13 Americans of the Fort Hood shooting</a>.  Rabb’s brief could only confirm the criticisms of Islam by individuals like Spencer or Holland’s <a href="http://www.geertwilders.nl/">Geert Wilders</a> and incite <a href="http://www.doveworld.org/">Terry Jones</a> to burn another Quran.</p>
<p>Unlike Rabb, though, Spencer has faced <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23064355">exclusion from the United Kingdom</a> and Wilders <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-13883331">criminal prosecution in Holland</a> for their comments on Islam, while <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/andrew-harrod/thrown-in-prison-for-shredding-the-koran/">destroying a Quran is prohibited hate speech in countries like Belgium</a>.  Such domestic legal actions accord with the <a href="http://jonathanturley.org/2011/12/13/criminalizing-intolerance-obama-administration-moves-forward-on-united-nations-resolution-targeting-anti-religious-speech/">longstanding international agenda</a> of majority-Muslim nations in the <a href="http://www.oic-oci.org/oicv2/home/">Organization of Islamic Cooperation</a> (OIC) to prohibit criticizing Islam.  This agenda has culminated in the March 24, 2011, <a href="http://www.refworld.org/pdfid/4db960f92.pdf">United Nations Human Rights Council Resolution 16/18</a> with troubling implications for free speech even after Western-induced modifications.</p>
<p>In this context, Rabb’s invocation of the proverbial “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect">chilling effect</a>” on free speech prompted my question about criticizing Islam.  Rabb’s “each regime is different” response allowed for “dignity laws” as a “prerogative” for other democracies dealing with anti-Islam speech grouped by her with Nazism.  Muslim-majority countries also had such laws, Rabb indicated, a worrying statement in light of <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-12621225">Islamic blasphemy laws</a>.</p>
<p>Critical issues involving Islam, however, were not absent from the conference.  <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/george-soross-evangelicals">George Soros-financed</a> leftist evangelical <a href="http://www.newevangelicalpartnership.org/?q=node/6">Richard Cizek</a>, for example, recalled during a panel how a fellow evangelical had once told him that “insults in Lynchburg produce riots in Lahore.”  Convicted terrorism financier <a href="http://www.investigativeproject.org/profile/100">Sami Al-Arian</a>, meanwhile, discussed with me in the audience viewing the conference’s morning segment before going home to comply with his house arrest.</p>
<p>“Islamophobia” critic <a href="http://nathanlean.com/">Nathan Lean</a> was also in the audience.  <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2013/09/international-islamophobia-conference-promotes-sharia-agenda.html">Called a “stalker” by Spencer</a>, Lean has repeatedly tweeted an article supposedly containing Spencer’s address and wife’s picture, a “clear attempt to intimidate me.”  Addressed by me on this matter, Lean curtly replied that it is “not appropriate” to discuss Spencer at a Christian-Muslim understanding conference and walked away.</p>
<p>Thus Lean, Rabb, and others, concerned about fundamentally necessary anti-terrorism laws infringing intellectual inquiry in the United States, exhibited little principled concern about uninhibited discussion of Islam.  Yet as the conference and Mehanna’s conviction show, the needs of security and liberty demand robust debate precisely with respect to Islam.</p>
<p><i>This article was sponsored by</i> <a href="http://www.legal-project.org/"><i>The Legal Project</i></a><i>, an activity of the Middle East Forum.</i></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/andrew-harrod/chilling-effect-for-me-but-not-for-thee/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>4</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Missouri State to Ban Nerf Guns?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/sara-dogan/missouri-state-to-ban-nerf-guns/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=missouri-state-to-ban-nerf-guns</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/sara-dogan/missouri-state-to-ban-nerf-guns/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 26 Nov 2013 05:25:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Sara Dogan]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Campus Roundup]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Campus]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Conservative]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free Speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nerf gun]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[school]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=211460</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How students are reacting to the PC madness. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Griff_Nerf.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-211547" alt="Griff_Nerf" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Griff_Nerf.jpg" width="280" height="217" /></a><i>A regular column dedicated to reporting on the slanted teaching, mis-administration and sheer insanity of our nation’s colleges and universities.</i></p>
<p><i></i><b>Top Stories:</b></p>
<p>• The director of public safety at Missouri State University is <a href="/articles/5412/20131106/use-of-nerf-guns-in-humans-vs-zombies-role-playing-game-worries-missouri-state-administrator.htm">raising concerns</a> about the use of fluorescent nerf guns in a popular campus roll-playing game of Humans vs. Zombies. &#8220;I don&#8217;t know that it is necessarily a danger to campus. It is a disruption to campus,&#8221; safety director Don Clark told a local radio station. “We cannot tell people that ‘if you see someone with a gun, it might be a Nerf gun, so just disregard it.’” The University is considering a ban on the Nerf guns despite a student government poll showing that students overwhelmingly oppose such a ban.</p>
<p>• An administrator at Furman College in South Carolina was <a href="/2013/11/13/video-did-school-admin-try-to-confiscate-conservative-fliers/">caught on video</a> attempting to confiscate flyers critical of Rev. Jesse Jackson from conservative students who were distributing them outside an event where Jackson was speaking on campus. Video taken of the incident shows Furman Special Events Coordinator Gayle Warth demanding that a student distributing the flyers turn them all over to her. When the student refused, Warth claimed that he could not distribute materials without “pre-approval.” A spokesman for the university defended the administration stating, “Furman is satisfied that no one was prevented from expressing their opinions.”</p>
<p>• The student government at the University of California Berkeley <a href="/corner/363501/uc-berkeley-students-ban-use-illegal-immigrant-andrew-johnson">passed a unanimous resolution</a> barring the term “illegal immigrant” from their discussions and communications. “No human being is illegal,” states the resolution which holds that the term is “racially charged” and leads to “punitive and discriminatory actions aimed primarily at immigrants and communities of color.”  The resolution suggests that student government members substitute other terms including “‘Foreign nationals,’ ‘undocumented immigrants,’ ‘immigrants without papers’ and ‘immigrants seeking status.’” UCLA passed a similar measure last summer.</p>
<p>• The University of Texas—Austin chapter of the Young Conservatives of Texas (YCT) were <a href="/_news/2013/11/19/21537743-texas-young-conservatives-group-cancels-catch-an-illegal-immigrant-game">forced to cancel</a> a planned “Catch an Illegal Immigrant” game on campus after administrators issued strong condemnations of the event and implied that participants might face disciplinary action.  Vice President for Diversity and Community Engagement Gregory Vincent wrote in a <a href="/news/2013/11/18/yct-game/">public statement</a>, “If the members of YCT carry out their plan for ‘Catch an Illegal Immigrant,’ they are willfully ignoring the honor code and contributing to the degradation of our campus culture.” Movie star America Ferrera also got involved, leading a campus solidarity march of hundreds of students and activists to protest the event.</p>
<p><b>Further News from the Campuses:</b></p>
<p><b>When Opposing Jihad Is ‘Racist’ </b>[FrontpageMag.com]</p>
<p>“Islamophobia” has broken out at Washington University of St. Louis, sparking outrage, grief, an “open solidarity forum,” and an avalanche of groveling apologies from university administrators.</p>
<p><a href="/2013/robert-spencer/when-opposing-jihad-is-racist/">Read more</a></p>
<p><b>Rescuing Free Speech at Brown </b>[Intercollegiate Review]</p>
<p>Many students, Americans, and believers in the First Amendment were rightly outraged by the protest of Ray Kelly at Brown University. The NYPD Commissioner was invited to talk on Oct. 29 about the role of proactive policing. But, after a half hour of raucous interruptions, Ray Kelly departed, unable to speak a single sentence.</p>
<p><a href="/index.php/2013/11/15/rescuing-free-speech-at-brown/">Read more</a></p>
<p><b>UC Berkeley Student Government Bans Use of the Term ‘Illegal Immigrant’ </b>[FoxNews.com]</p>
<p>The student government at the University of California, Berkeley has censured use of the term, “illegal immigrant.”</p>
<p><a href="/us/2013/11/10/uc-berkeley-student-government-bans-use-term-illegal-immigrant/">Read more</a></p>
<p><b>Some Faculty Demand Skin Color-Based Hiring </b>[The College Fix]</p>
<p>Some faculty at the University of Arizona have said they believe there are not enough people of color employed as professors on campus and are clamoring for administrators to enforce a way to even out the numbers.</p>
<p><a href="/post/15316/">Read more</a></p>
<p><b>University of Wisconsin Regents Revise Systemwide Speech Code </b>[TheFire.org]</p>
<p>There is good news for free speech at Wisconsin’s public universities, as the University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents voted in October to revise a system-wide discriminatory harassment policy that previously contained language declared unconstitutional by a federal court.</p>
<p><a href="/article/16502.html">Read more</a></p>
<p><b>Brown University Retreats From Free Speech</b> [Frontpagemag.com]</p>
<p>As champion of New York’s controversial stop-and-frisk policy—one riddled with accusations of racial profiling and saddled with a recent federal court ruling against it—police commissioner Raymond Kelly could count on some tough questions from students when he stopped at Brown University last month to talk about proactive policing.</p>
<p><a href="/2013/stephen-beale/brown-university-retreats-from-free-speech/">Read more</a></p>
<p><b>Committee Created to Deal with In-Class Social Media Presents Latest Research </b>[StateNews.com]</p>
<p>The committee created after <a href="/article/2013/09/going-behind-the-camera">English professor’s anti-republican rants</a> to address the best practices on the use of social media and technology in classrooms, has begun its research — with few findings so far.</p>
<p><a href="/article/2013/11/committee-created-to-deal-with-in-class-social-media-presents-latest-research">Read more</a></p>
<p><b>Public College Cites High Cost of Obamacare in Canceling Students&#8217; Health Plans </b>[Campus Reform]</p>
<p>Officials at one one of the nation&#8217;s oldest and most elite historically black colleges are citing the Affordable Care Act (ACA) as the reason they have cancelled a school-wide affordable health care plan they had offered students.</p>
<p><a href="/?ID=5235">Read more</a></p>
<p><b>Napolitano’s Move from DHS to California Schools Chief Draws Protests </b>[Washington Times]</p>
<p>While many across the political spectrum are happy to see Homeland Security Secretary <a href="/topics/janet-napolitano/">Janet Napolitano</a> leave her job in Washington, some who live on the West Coast say they’d just as soon not see her out there, after it was revealed Friday that she’s poised to take over as head of the <a href="/topics/university-of-california/">University of California</a> school system.</p>
<p><a href="/news/2013/jul/12/napolitanos-move-california-draws-protests/">Read more</a></p>
<p><b>At Sinclair, Liability Concerns Trump Students&#8217; Expressive Rights</b> [TheFire.org]</p>
<p>Earlier this semester, when students from Sinclair’s chapter of Young Americans for Liberty (YAL) wanted to put together a “free speech wall” event, the group’s event request was denied by the school’s Student Leadership Development office, citing—you guessed it—“liability issues.”</p>
<p><a href="/article/16501.html">Read more</a></p>
<p><b>Students suffer ObamaCare sticker shock as premiums soar, plans get cut </b>[FoxNews.com]</p>
<p>While millions of Americans are watching their individual polices get canceled due to ObamaCare regulations, the new health care rules are also having a major impact on college campuses.</p>
<p><a href="/politics/2013/11/18/students-suffer-sticker-shock-from-obamacare/">Read more</a></p>
<p><b>Texas Student Group Under Fire For &#8216;Catch An Illegal Immigrant&#8217; Game On Campus</b> [FoxNews.com]</p>
<p>The Young Conservatives of Texas (YCT), a student club at the University of Texas at Austin, is holding a “Catch an Illegal Immigrant” game on the school’s campus to “spread awareness and to spark a political discussion about the issue,” organizers said.</p>
<p><a href="/latino/news/2013/11/18/student-group-under-fire-for-catch-illegal-immigrant-game-on-campus/">Read more</a></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/sara-dogan/missouri-state-to-ban-nerf-guns/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>6</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Brown&#8217;s Abuse of Ray Kelly: A Metaphor of the Academy</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/jack-kerwick/browns-abuse-of-ray-kelly-a-metaphor-of-the-academy/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=browns-abuse-of-ray-kelly-a-metaphor-of-the-academy</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/jack-kerwick/browns-abuse-of-ray-kelly-a-metaphor-of-the-academy/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 12 Nov 2013 04:27:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jack Kerwick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[boo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Brown]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cancel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free Speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[heckle]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ray Kelly]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[speech]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=210317</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The totalitarianism permeating higher education.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/ray-kelly1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-210426" alt="ray-kelly" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/ray-kelly1-422x350.jpg" width="295" height="245" /></a>Two weeks ago, New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly arrived at the prestigious Brown University to deliver a speech.</p>
<p>It never happened. Student protesters, determined to silence Kelly, shouted him down.</p>
<p>In an attempt to abate the hostility of his audience, Kelly is said to have remarked:  “I thought this was the Academy…where we’re supposed to have free speech.”  A Brown administrator on the scene also expressed incredulity regarding the “inability” of these Brown students’—self-avowed “social justice activists” —“to have a dialogue[.]”</p>
<p>Jenny Li, the (Brown) student who organized the anti-Kelly demonstration, explained that in advance of Kelly’s appearance, she and other students petitioned the university to cancel the event. However, when administrators refused to accommodate them, Li and her fellow activists “decided to cancel it for them.”  Their victory in doing so, Li adds, is “a powerful demonstration of free speech.”</p>
<p>Christina Paxson, President of Brown, expressed her “deepest regret” to Commissioner Kelly and assured everyone that the protesters’ conduct is at once “indefensible” and “an affront both to civil democratic society and to the university’s core values and the free exchange of views.”</p>
<p>To date the disrupters have not faced any disciplinary action.</p>
<p>The significance of this episode has little to do with its specifics and everything to do with the fact that it supplies us with a microcosmic perspective on <i>the contemporary university. </i></p>
<p>First of all, <i>no one</i>, much less an eminently sensible man like Ray Kelly and seasoned academics like the aforementioned Brown administrators, can possibly believe that the contemporary Academy is an oasis of “free speech” and open-ended dialogue.</p>
<p>In fact, as anyone who’s spent any amount of time there knows all-too well, the university is much more like a <i>puddle </i>of free speech and dialogue than an oasis.</p>
<p>While the incident in question admittedly involves <i>students,</i> the latter are simply marching to the beat of the drums of the faculty and administration, not just of Brown, but of colleges and universities throughout the country.  They at once reflect and reinforce an academic <i>culture</i> that has been at least a half-of-a-century in the making.  <i> </i></p>
<p>It is at once tragic and scandalous—and let there be no mistakes about it, this <i>is </i>one of the great scandals of our age—that there is far <i>less </i>individuality and “free speech” in our country’s liberal arts and humanities departments than can be found among any random collection of construction workers or plumbers.</p>
<p>While there <i>are</i> exceptions (yours truly is a case in point), the overwhelming majority of academics in the liberal arts are left-wing ideologues.  This is no criticism—just a brute fact.  There is indeed a prevailing ideology, an <i>orthodoxy, </i>really, that draws the lines of acceptable inquiry, of discourse.  For lack of a better name, we can call this orthodoxy “Political Correctness,” for it is the same orthodoxy that has long drawn the lines of acceptable discourse in the popular culture.</p>
<p>The only difference is that non-academics, like construction workers and plumbers, say, have the daring and imaginativeness to transgress the orthodoxy’s boundaries.  Academics, in contrast, seek to <i>strengthen </i>these strictures on speech.</p>
<p>In other words, the relationship between the academic and his society has been radically subverted.  Worse, the lion’s share of the blame for this subversion rests upon his (or her) shoulders.</p>
<p>There is another point that can’t be lost upon us.</p>
<p>Traditionally, a liberal arts education was intended to render students preeminently <i>civil </i>by making them into articulate, knowledgeable conversationalists capable of both drawing upon the inheritance of their civilization—Western civilization—as well as enriching it.  It was an education that required great humility from those who would undertake it, for the present generation, it was understood, was just one voice in this millennia-old conversation linking the past with the present and future.</p>
<p>The attitude on display at Brown and exemplified by Jennifer Li is not only entirely incompatible with a traditional liberal arts education; the former and the latter are mutually antithetical.  There are two reasons for this.</p>
<p>For one, today’s students, like their teachers, are generally contemptuous toward the past.  The past is viewed as a “dark age” ridden with “white racism,” “sexism,” “homophobia,” “speciesism,” “xenophobia,” etc.  The present bequeathed to us by our past, as Barack Obama memorably remarked, is something the needs to be “fundamentally transformed”—i.e. <i>destroyed.</i>  As for future generations, while lip service is routinely paid to them, it is not difficult to show that if the interests of unborn human beings threaten to impede present designs, then they too must be marginalized.</p>
<p>Secondly, academics and the student activists who they are busy away creating are <i>angry. </i> And they spare no occasion to express that anger.  Since at least the time of the 1960s the expression of anger has been treated as tantamount with the expression of <i>authenticity.  </i>However, since no one cares to try to reason with an angry person—regardless of how authentic he may fancy himself to be—about any topic, much less controversial topics, conversation is impossible with the perpetually angry.</p>
<p>And so too is a genuine liberal arts education impossible as long as pride and anger are the emotions that the academy insists upon fostering.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/jack-kerwick/browns-abuse-of-ray-kelly-a-metaphor-of-the-academy/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>29</slash:comments>
		</item>
	</channel>
</rss>

<!-- Performance optimized by W3 Total Cache. Learn more: http://www.w3-edge.com/wordpress-plugins/

Object Caching 1411/1495 objects using disk
Content Delivery Network via cdn.frontpagemag.com

 Served from: www.frontpagemag.com @ 2014-12-31 03:59:59 by W3 Total Cache -->