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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Laws</title>
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		<title>Obama vs. Us</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/walter-williams/obama-vs-us/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-vs-us</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 18 Nov 2014 05:35:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[constitution]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[executive]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Freedom]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[law]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=245393</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Have we reached the "post-Constitution" stage of our history? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/2014-10-12-obama.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245394" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/2014-10-12-obama-438x350.jpg" alt="2014-10-12-obama" width="332" height="265" /></a>Suppose you saw a person driving his car on the wrong side of a highway, against the traffic. Would you call him a stupid and/or incompetent driver? You say, &#8220;Williams, what kind of question is that? Of course he&#8217;s one or the other!&#8221; I&#8217;d say, &#8220;Hold your horses. What are his intentions?&#8221; If the driver&#8217;s intentions are to cause highway calamity, one can hardly call his actions stupid or incompetent. Given his intentions, he is wisely acting in a manner to achieve his objectives.</p>
<p>This observation lies at the heart of my colleague Dr. Thomas Sowell&#8217;s column last week, in which he says, &#8220;Pundits who depict Obama as a weak, lame duck president may be greatly misjudging him, as they have so often in the past.&#8221; After suffering an elective trouncing at the polls, President Barack Obama issued Congress an ultimatum, saying that if it doesn&#8217;t enact the kind of immigration law that he would like, he will unilaterally issue an executive order to change the nation&#8217;s immigration laws. This threat, along with other abuses of his office, is not a sign of presidential stupidity or incompetence.</p>
<p>Obama is doing precisely what he promised during his 2008 presidential campaign, to cheering and mesmerized crowds: &#8220;We are going to fundamentally change America&#8221; and &#8220;We will change America. We will change the world.&#8221; Obama is living up to those pledges by subverting our Constitution and adopting the political style of a banana republic dictator. He showed his willingness to ignore the Constitution when he eliminated the work requirement in welfare reform laws enacted during the Clinton administration. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare, was enacted by Congress and hence is the law of the land. Obama has used executive orders to change the law on several occasions. Ask yourself whether our Constitution permits the president to unilaterally change a law enacted by Congress. For a president to do so is for him to behave like a banana republic dictator.</p>
<p>As Sowell says, &#8220;people who are increasingly questioning Barack Obama&#8217;s competence are continuing to ignore the alternative possibility that his fundamental values and imperatives are different from theirs.&#8221;</p>
<p>The recent elections, which gave Republicans control of both houses of Congress, clearly indicate a repudiation of much of Obama&#8217;s agenda. But the question is whether the Republican majority has the courage to act on that repudiation and stop the president from running roughshod over the Constitution. Because Article 1 of the Constitution grants Congress the power of the purse, there is not much a president can do without a budget appropriation. The question is whether Congress has the guts to exercise its power.</p>
<p>We can rightfully condemn the president for picking and choosing which laws of the land he will obey and which he won&#8217;t, in violation of the Constitution&#8217;s Article 2, but is his administration&#8217;s executive branch that much of an exception to the other branches of the federal government — the legislative and judicial branches?</p>
<p>The legislative branch is bound by Article 1 of the Constitution. Section 8 of Article 1 delineates the scope of congressional power to tax and spend. Nowhere within Article 1, Section 8 is Congress granted the authority to tax for at least two-thirds of the federal budget.</p>
<p>The courts are bound by the Constitution&#8217;s Article 3. Part of the courts&#8217; responsibility is to ensure that the executive and legislative branches of government uphold the Constitution. In that respect, the courts have been grossly derelict, particularly during and after the New Deal era.</p>
<p>Seeing as all branches of federal government ignore most of the provisions of the Constitution, I think we can safely say that we&#8217;ve reached the post-Constitution stage of our history. Washington politicians are not to blame. It&#8217;s the American people who&#8217;ve lost their love and respect for our Constitution. Washington&#8217;s politicians are simply the agents for that contempt.</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>
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		<title>Westwood Neighborhood Council vs. the Islamic Republic of Iran</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jamie-glazov/westwood-neighborhood-council-vs-the-islamic-republic-of-iran/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=westwood-neighborhood-council-vs-the-islamic-republic-of-iran</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 25 Sep 2014 04:40:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jamie Glazov]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islamic  Republic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Laws]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Roozbeh Farahanipour]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Westwood Neighborhood Council]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=241695</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Business Director Roozbeh Farahanipour scores a victory against the Mullahs in Los Angeles.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/roozbeh.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-241779" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/roozbeh.jpg" alt="roozbeh" width="225" height="225" /></a>FrontPage Interview’s guest today is Roozbeh Farahanipour, a former Iranian journalist, democracy activist and political prisoner in Iran. He is the head of the Marze Por Gohar resistance movement (MPG), an Iranian opposition movement seeking the establishment of a secular republic in Iran. He was a student leader in the 1999 uprising, just one year after creating MPG. He was recently elected for the third term to his seat as Business Director of the Westwood Neighborhood Council in Los Angeles.</p>
<p>While the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) is trying to dupe the West, particularly the U.S., into lifting sanctions without making any real compromises, Farahanipour has been leading the Westwood Neighborhood Council in taking a powerful step ahead to enforce existing sanctions law under its territorial jurisdiction.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Roozbeh Farahanipour, welcome to Frontpage Interview.</p>
<p>Tell us a little bit about the Westwood Neighborhood Council’s September 10<sup>th</sup> ruling on Iran Sanctions.</p>
<p><strong>Farahanipour:</strong>The Council passed a motion to ensure enforcement of Federal, State and Local laws on divestment and sanctions in regards to the Islamic Republic of Iran. It is a motion to crack down on illegal business, and an important step in keeping the neighborhood safe from IRI intelligence and terror activities under the guise of a business environment. There was a second motion which banned the Islamic Republic’s symbol as well as other regime signage and all illegal IRI advertisements.</p>
<p>And it is important to stress, Jamie, that we didn’t propose new sanctions; we are simply asking that <em>existing</em> Federal, State and Local sanctions laws be enforced.  It’s already the law, and we don’t want illegal activity in our neighborhood.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Did any other organizations support your motion?</p>
<p><strong>Farahanipour: </strong>Yes, the WestwoodCommunity Council came out in support, as well as various community leaders. Most importantly, California State Senator Joel Anderson flew in from Sacramento to speak in support of the motions. He authored California’s AB221, the law that divested California taxpayer money from being invested in companies engaged with the Islamic Republic of Iran. He understands how the enforcement of the above mentioned laws enhance our security.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Why is a motion like this so important in Westwood? And what would you say sets Westwood apart from the rest of Los Angeles?</p>
<p><strong>Farahanipour: </strong>The Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, often nicknamed ‘Tehrangeles,’ a portion of which is officially regarded as “Persian Square” is a powerhouse of anti-Regime, and pro-Democracy activity.  Home to a massive Iranian expatriate community, Westwood was once the safe-haven of Iranian refugees fleeing the Islamic Republic.  In recent years, many Iranian immigrants, like myself, are still in fact refugees seeking political asylum.  Sadly, however, drizzled in-between those seeking safety and a better life, are businesspeople and other individuals closely-tied to the ruling regime back in Tehran, sent here with an agenda, a goal and a mission.</p>
<p>That’s precisely why this motion is so important.  Westwood is one of the last-remaining anti-Regime fronts in the Diaspora.  The Ayatollahs saw this, recognized this, and feared this; that’s why they sent their cronies here in order to change that status quo.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Give us some examples of the illegal activity being conducted in Westwood.</p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/rooz1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-241780" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/rooz1-255x350.jpg" alt="rooz" width="203" height="279" /></a><strong>Farahanipour:</strong> There are numerous businesses who openly advertise &#8212; exclusively in Persian of course &#8212; that they administer official Consular and Legal services for nonexistent Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran.  Not only is that illegal under sanctions law, but it raises questions of money-laundering and regime personnel freely roaming Los Angeles, carrying out whatever the Ayatollahs demand.</p>
<p>Furthermore, there is quite a bit of activity regarding sanctioned businesses, including the import of banned items for sale, and businesses being openly conducted with specifically sanctioned Iranian businesses, including Iran Air, the Islamic Republic’s official airline.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>What would you say to those who would argue that selling tickets for Iran Air is no big deal? With the US (P5+1) and Islamic republic being in negotiations, they would allege that there is an easing up of sanctions on Iran Air and other similar Iranian businesses anyway.</p>
<p><strong>Farahanipour:</strong> Iran Air is sanctioned not only by the State Department, but also by the Treasury Department for its well documented involvement in transferring weapons and ammunition to terror groups around the world. It’s an absolute myth that Iran Air is strictly a passenger/civilian airline, as it is yet another instrument for the Iran Regime’s international terror machine. It is owned by the Regime, and is utilized at the will of the Revolutionary Guards Corps. With that in mind, their ability to have sales in Los Angeles is unlawful, suspicious and concerning. Don’t forget, Iran Air doesn’t have any flights to or from the US.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Very concerning and disturbing. Is this only happening in Westwood or elsewhere in Los Angeles, and even in the U.S.?</p>
<p><strong>Farahanipour:</strong> This isn’t only happening in Westwood; it is certainly happening throughout Los Angeles and Orange County south of here, and no doubt in other parts of the US and Canada within major Iranian communities. It is a big problem.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>How would you summarize your overall concern with this issue?</p>
<p><strong>Farahanipour:</strong> This is first and foremost about safety and security, and upholding the rule of law in our neighborhood. We do not want Westwood becoming a breeding ground for illegal, unlawful activity.  We aren’t asking for anything more than existing laws to be enforced and upheld, and I haven’t met anyone who disagrees with that yet, unless they personally are engaged in these illegal businesses.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>The Westwood Neighborhood Council’s motion is quite a strong message to the Regime and its supporters.  Do you have another message to add?</p>
<p><strong>Farahanipour:</strong> Yes, I’d like to tell them that their front businesses, their money laundering, and their intimidation aren’t welcome here.  Their trickery, their propaganda and their attempts to sell politics under the guise of ‘culture’ will not survive here either. Westwood is the frontier for a new day in Iran. A democratic, secular and liberal Iran—nothing like the deeply oppressive, regressive and destructive regime strangling my homeland, today.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Roozbeh Farahanipour, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview and thank you for defending this nation from those who seek it harm.</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>
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		<title>Destroying Household Jobs</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/thomas-sowell/destroying-household-jobs/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=destroying-household-jobs</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/thomas-sowell/destroying-household-jobs/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 02 Oct 2013 04:15:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[extension]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Laws]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[low-skill]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[minimum wage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Poor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Unemployment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[worker]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=206010</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Obama's latest attack on the poor through wage-control regulations. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/National-Unemployment-Rat-007.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-206011" alt="National-Unemployment-Rat-007" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/National-Unemployment-Rat-007.jpg" width="270" height="218" /></a>Despite evidence from around the world that minimum wage laws can price low-skilled workers out of jobs, the U.S. Department of Labor is planning to extend minimum wage coverage to domestic workers, such as maids or those who drop in from time to time to do a few household chores for the sick and the elderly.</p>
<p>This coverage is scheduled to begin in January 2015 — that is, after the 2014 elections and nearly two years before the 2016 elections. Politicians show a lot of cleverness in protecting their own interests, even if they show very little wisdom as far as serving the public interest.</p>
<p>If making household workers subject to the minimum wage law is expected to produce good results, why not let those good results begin early, so that voters will know about them before the next election?</p>
<p>But, if this new extension of the minimum wage law opens a whole new can of worms — as is more likely — politicians who support this extension want to insulate themselves from a voter backlash. Hence artfully choosing January 2015 as the effective date, to minimize the political risks to themselves.</p>
<p>The reason this particular extension of the minimum wage law is likely to open a can of worms is that both household workers and those who employ them will face more complications than employers and employees in industry or commerce.</p>
<p>First of all, ill or elderly individuals who need someone to help them from time to time are not like employers who have a business that regularly hires people and may have a personnel department to handle all the paperwork and keep up with all the legal requirements when government bureaucrats are involved.</p>
<p>Often the very reason for hiring part-time household workers is that some ill or elderly individuals have limited energy or capacity for handling things that were easy to handle when they were younger or in better health. Bureaucratic paperwork and legal technicalities are the last thing they need to have to add to their existing problems.</p>
<p>The people being hired to do household chores also have special problems.</p>
<p>Often such people have limited education, and may also have limited knowledge of the English language.</p>
<p>Why make it harder for ill or elderly people to get some much-needed help in their homes, and harder for low-skilled people to get some much-needed jobs?</p>
<p>Despite all the talk about how we need more people with high-tech skills, there is also a need for people who can help clean a home or carry groceries or do other things that need doing, and which do not require years of schooling. As the elderly become an ever growing proportion of the population, there will be a growing demand for such people.</p>
<p>More precisely, there would be more jobs for such people if the government did not step in to complicate the hiring process and price potential workers out of jobs, with minimum wages set by third parties who do not, and cannot, know what the economic realities are for either the ill and the elderly or for those whom the ill and the elderly wish to hire.</p>
<p>Minimum wage laws in general are usually set with no real knowledge of the economic realities and alternatives for either employers or employees. Third parties are simply enabled to indulge themselves by imagining what is &#8220;fair&#8221; — and pay no price for being wrong about the actual economic consequences.</p>
<p>That is why countries with minimum wage laws usually have much higher rates of unemployment than those few places where there have been no minimum wage laws, such as Switzerland or Singapore — or the United States, before the first federal minimum wage law was passed in 1931.</p>
<p>Government interventions in labor markets have already created needless complications, and not just by minimum wage laws. The welfare state has already taken out of the labor market millions of people who could perform work that would be well within the capacity of inexperienced young people or people with limited education.</p>
<p>With welfare, such people can stay home, watch television, do drugs or whatever — or else they can hang out in the streets, often confirming the old adage that the devil finds work for idle hands.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Minimum Wage Madness</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/thomas-sowell/minimum-wage-madness/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=minimum-wage-madness</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/thomas-sowell/minimum-wage-madness/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 17 Sep 2013 04:20:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Labor Unions]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Laws]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[low-wage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[minimum wage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Unemployment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[workers]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=204450</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The surest way to harm low-wage and minority workers. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/minimum_wage_onpage.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-204454" alt="minimum_wage_onpage" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/minimum_wage_onpage-450x302.jpg" width="189" height="127" /></a>A survey of American economists found that 90 percent of them regarded minimum wage laws as increasing the rate of unemployment among low-skilled workers. Inexperience is often the problem. Only about 2 percent of Americans over the age of 24 earned the minimum wage.</p>
<p>Advocates of minimum wage laws usually base their support of such laws on their estimate of how much a worker &#8220;needs&#8221; in order to have &#8220;a living wage&#8221; — or on some other criterion that pays little or no attention to the worker&#8217;s skill level, experience or general productivity. So it is hardly surprising that minimum wage laws set wages that price many a young worker out of a job.</p>
<p>What is surprising is that, despite an accumulation of evidence over the years of the devastating effects of minimum wage laws on black teenage unemployment rates, members of the Congressional Black Caucus continue to vote for such laws.</p>
<p>Once, years ago, during a confidential discussion with a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, I asked how they could possibly vote for minimum wage laws.</p>
<p>The answer I got was that members of the Black Caucus were part of a political coalition and, as such, they were expected to vote for things that other members of that coalition wanted, such as minimum wage laws, in order that other members of the coalition would vote for things that the Black Caucus wanted.</p>
<p>When I asked what could the black members of Congress possibly get in return for supporting minimum wage laws that would be worth sacrificing whole generations of young blacks to huge rates of unemployment, the discussion quickly ended. I may have been vehement when I asked that question.</p>
<p>The same question could be asked of black public officials in general, including Barack Obama, who have taken the side of the teachers&#8217; unions, who oppose vouchers or charter schools that allow black parents (among others) to take their children out of failing public schools.</p>
<p>Minimum wage laws can even affect the level of racial discrimination. In an earlier era, when racial discrimination was both legally and socially accepted, minimum wage laws were often used openly to price minorities out of the job market.</p>
<p>In 1925, a minimum wage law was passed in the Canadian province of British Columbia, with the intent and effect of pricing Japanese immigrants out of jobs in the lumbering industry.</p>
<p>A well regarded Harvard professor of that era referred approvingly to Australia&#8217;s minimum wage law as a means to &#8220;protect the white Australian&#8217;s standard of living from the invidious competition of the colored races, particularly of the Chinese&#8221; who were willing to work for less.</p>
<p>In South Africa during the era of apartheid, white labor unions urged that a minimum wage law be applied to all races, to keep black workers from taking jobs away from white unionized workers by working for less than the union pay scale.</p>
<p>Some supporters of the first federal minimum wage law in the United States — the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931 — used exactly the same rationale, citing the fact that Southern construction companies, using non-union black workers, were able to come north and under-bid construction companies using unionized white labor.</p>
<p>These supporters of minimum wage laws understood long ago something that today&#8217;s supporters of such laws seem not to have bothered to think through.</p>
<p>People whose wages are raised by law do not necessarily benefit, because they are often less likely to be hired at the imposed minimum wage rate.</p>
<p>Labor unions have been supporters of minimum wage laws in countries around the world, since these laws price non-union workers out of jobs, leaving more jobs for union members.</p>
<p>People who are content to advocate policies that sound good, whether for political reasons or just to feel good about themselves, often do not bother to think through the consequences beforehand or to check the results afterwards.</p>
<p>If they thought things through, how could they have imagined that having large numbers of idle teenage boys hanging out on the streets together would be good for any community — especially in places where most of these youngsters were raised by single mothers, another unintended consequence, in this case, of well-meaning welfare policies?</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Catholic Cardinal Calls for End to Blasphemy Laws</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/andrew-harrod/catholic-cardinal-calls-for-end-to-blasphemy-laws/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=catholic-cardinal-calls-for-end-to-blasphemy-laws</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 21 May 2013 04:22:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Andrew Harrod]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[blasphemy laws]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cardinal Angelo Scola]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Catholic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Laws]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sharia]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=190084</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A bold statement against increasing Islamic oppression in both the Middle East and the West. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/angelo-scola-20100906-80-size-620.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-190135" alt="angelo-scola-20100906-80-size-620" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/angelo-scola-20100906-80-size-620-450x285.jpg" width="270" height="171" /></a>Speaking at a conference in Milan, Italy, on May 8, 2013, that city’s archbishop, Cardinal <a href="http://www.vatican.va/news_services/press/documentazione/documents/cardinali_biografie/cardinali_bio_scola_a_en.html">Angelo Scola</a>, called for the abolition of blasphemy laws worldwide.  Such a step would significantly help protect globally the freedom of speech and religion desperately needed by Christians in particular while countering Islamic fanaticism with freedom.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.ansa.it/web/notizie/rubriche/english/2013/05/08/Archbishop-Scola-speaks-against-blasphemy-laws_8672151.html">Once favored to become pope</a>, Scola made his remarks at the <a href="http://www.unicatt.it/home?rdeLocaleAttr=en">Catholic University of the Sacred Heart</a> for the opening of a conference focusing on Roman Emperor Constantine’s 313 <a href="http://www.ctlibrary.com/ch/1990/issue28/2809.html">Edict of Milan</a> granting imperial toleration to Christianity.  Scola advocated a “healthy secularism” allowing religious freedom, defined by him as a “true litmus test” for a civilized society.  To Scola, this “freedom means above all encouraging religious pluralism and opening to all forms of religious expression,” including “eliminating laws that criminally punish blasphemy.”</p>
<p>As the Catholic cable television channel EWTN reported online, the role of blasphemy laws in Muslim-majority countries in persecuting Christians and other religious minorities formed the global context of Scola’s remarks.  As <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/andrew-harrod/persecuted-on-all-sides-christians-in-the-modern-world/">reviewed previously by this writer</a>, the authors of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Persecuted-The-Global-Assault-Christians/dp/1400204410"><i>Persecuted:  The Global Assault on Christians</i></a> have extensively documented that “Christians are the single most widely persecuted religious group in the world today,” a “terrible trend…on the upswing.”  Moreover, “it is in the Muslim world where persecution of Christians is now most widespread, intense, and, ominously, increasing.”  Abolition of Muslim blasphemy laws, often used to prohibit propagation of Christian beliefs contradicting Muslim doctrine, would eliminate one important instrument of Islamic repression.</p>
<p>Such religious freedom would protect not just private rights, but also public peace.  “Religious freedom,” <a href="http://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/blogs/faith-and-foreign-policy/posts/preventing-another-attack-international-religious-freedom">notes</a> Scola’s fellow Catholic, Professor <a href="http://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/people/thomas-farr">Thomas F. Farr</a> of Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, &amp; World Affairs, “the evidence shows, can be an antidote to religion-related extremism, including terrorism.”  Freedom, analyzes Farr, dilutes fanaticism by forcing various faiths to justify their claims intellectually without coercion in a marketplace of ideas.  “What if,” speculates Farr,</p>
<blockquote><p>Osama Bin Laden had been raised in a Saudi Arabia that allowed for religious freedom?  What if, instead of being steeped exclusively in the toxic teachings of Wahhabism and Sayyid Qutb, he had been exposed to other forms of Islam, to critics of Islam, to other forms of religious belief, and to liberal religion-based arguments about justice and the common good?</p></blockquote>
<p>Christians like Scola and Farr have a perfectly sound theological basis for faith-based advocacy of religious freedom.  As the prominent Protestant pastor and theologian <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Piper_(theologian)">John Piper</a> has <a href="http://www.worldmag.com/2006/02/being_mocked">written</a>, numerous Biblical verses relate that “Christ did his work by being insulted” in stark contrast to Islam in which the “work of Muhammad is based on being honored.”  As the somewhat religiously eclectic but committed freethinker <a href="http://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/jeffersons-religious-beliefs">Thomas Jefferson</a> wrote to a majoritarian-Christian America in his landmark 1779 (adopted 1785) <a href="http://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/virginia-statute-religious-freedom">Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom</a>, “all attempts to influence” individual religious belief</p>
<blockquote><p>by temporal punishments, or burthens, or by civil incapacitations…are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do, but to extend it by its influence on reason alone.</p></blockquote>
<p>Ironically, Christian calls for religious freedom with respect to Islam would manifest precisely the Christian concept of the “<a href="http://www.zenit.org/en/articles/pope-calls-church-militant-an-apt-description-for-faithful-on-earth">church militant</a>” (<i>ecclesia militans</i>).  Muslim entities like the 57 Muslim-majority member states (including “Palestine”) of the <a href="http://www.oic-oci.org/home.asp">Organization of Islamic Cooperation</a> (OIC) have often tried to hide advocacy of <i>de facto</i> Islamic blasphemy laws behind a supposedly “ecumenical veneer” of opposition to “defamation of religion” in general.  Christian calls for religious freedom, come what may in criticism and/or condemnation of any particular faith, ostentatiously breaks ranks with this united front claimed by some Muslims, leaving them to defend religious repression on their own.</p>
<p>European opponents of blasphemy laws like Scola, though, will have to begin actually with their own continent.  Scola’s native Italy as well as seven other European countries (out of a total of 45, or 18%) had blasphemy laws according to a <a href="http://www.pewforum.org/Government/Laws-Penalizing-Blasphemy,-Apostasy-and-Defamation-of-Religion-are-Widespread.aspx">2011 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life</a> study.  Somewhat similar to blasphemy laws, laws against “defamation” of religion also existed in 36 European countries (80%), while collectively religious restrictions of various sorts exist in 47% of countries worldwide.</p>
<p>As many have already noted (see <a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/05/blasphemy_of_jesus_goes_unprosecuted_in_germany.html">here</a>, <a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/12/free_speech_roundup.html">here</a>, and <a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/10/different_rules_for_islam.html">here</a>), ultimately arbitrary European enforcement of such laws today more often than not involve the Islamic faith of recently arrived immigrant communities, not Europe’s historically dominant Judeo-Christian beliefs.  Accordingly, concerns about limiting free speech with respect to Islam played a role in the 2012 abolition of the blasphemy law in one of the eight European countries listed by Pew in 2011, <a href="http://www.rferl.org/content/dutch-parliament-revokes-blasphemy-law/24785198.html">Holland</a>.  The Dutch precedent is a model to follow for all faithful people who believe that they have a religious truth that will set free, a truth that need not fear freedom.</p>
<p><strong>This article was sponsored by <a href="http://www.legal-project.org/">The Legal Project</a>, an activity of the <a href="http://www.meforum.org/">Middle East Forum</a>.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <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">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>OIC Ramps Up &#8216;Islamophobia&#8217; Campaign</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/deborah-weiss/oic-ramps-up-islamophobia-campaign/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=oic-ramps-up-islamophobia-campaign</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 28 Feb 2013 04:11:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Deborah Weiss]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[blasphemy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free Speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hate Speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Laws]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Organization of Islamic Cooperation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[United Nations]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=179276</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[International Islamic blasphemy codes move one step closer to being realized.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/deborah-weiss/oic-ramps-up-islamophobia-campaign/kaffash20130201102509687/" rel="attachment wp-att-179328"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-179328" title="kaffash20130201102509687" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/kaffash20130201102509687-450x332.jpg" alt="" width="288" height="213" /></a>The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) has long been on the forefront of the Islamist mission to establish the equivalent of Islamic blasphemy laws in the West.  Now, during its 12<sup>th</sup> Islamic Summit held in Cairo February 7-8, 2013, the OIC set forth new and creative ways to silence, and ultimately criminalize criticism of Islam.</p>
<p>The OIC is a 57-member state organization that claims to represent 1.5 billion Muslims around the globe.  As the second largest international organization in the world, behind only the UN, and as the largest Islamic organization in the world, it is obviously quite powerful.  Though it is arguably the largest voting block in the UN, most people have never heard of it.</p>
<p>One of the OIC’s primary aims for at least the last fourteen years has been the international criminalization of speech that is critical of any Islam-related topic, including Islamic terrorism, Islamic persecution of religious minorities and human rights violations committed in the name of Islam.</p>
<p>Since 1999, the OIC has set forth UN resolutions that would “combat defamation of religions.”  These resolutions condemned criticism of religion, but in the OIC’s interpretation, it applied only to Islam.  True statements of fact constituted no exception.</p>
<p>Support for the resolutions declined once the United States and other Western countries caught wind of the true meaning of “defamation of religions” and its inevitable chilling effect on freedom of expression.</p>
<p>In 2011, at the State Department’s request, the OIC drafted an alternative resolution that was intended to retain freedom of expression and still address the OIC’s concerns about alleged Islamophobia.  The result was Resolution 16/18 to Combat Intolerance Based on Religion or Belief.</p>
<p>The US State Department and numerous Christian organizations were elated, believing that the OIC had abandoned its mission to protect Islam from so-called “defamation,” and instead replaced it with the goal of protecting persecuted religious minorities from discrimination and violence.  In other words, many assumed a paradigm shift away from providing legal protections to a religion and toward legal protections for people.</p>
<p>But the OIC had some very creative interpretations of the language embodied in the new resolution.  By its manipulation of words such as intolerance and incitement, giving new meanings to what many thought was plain English, the OIC made it clear that it had not dropped its ultimate goal of protecting Islam from “defamation.”</p>
<p>Almost immediately upon its passage and the passage of a similar resolution in the General Assembly, the OIC set out on the unconventional task of “implementing” Resolution 16/18, contrary to the norm of leaving UN resolutions in the realm of the theoretical.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, the U.S. State Department acted as a willing accomplice in this effort, holding the second “Istanbul Conference” in December of 2011.  But, in its implementation phase, rather than moving toward the preservation of free expression, the OIC successfully moved the process in the opposite direction:  toward speech restrictive policies.</p>
<p>Though the U.S., thus far, has not pushed for the enactment of “hate speech” laws, it has “advocated for other measures to achieve the same result.”  Indeed, at this Administration’s behest, all national security training materials and policies “de-link” any interpretation of Islam from Islamic terrorism.  Many U.S. government agencies have now made it verboten to mention Islamic terrorism or assert anything negative about Islam.</p>
<p>The OIC’s task is easier in the EU countries, most of which already have some sort of hate speech restrictions.  They vary from country to country.  Some are cast as laws against the “denigration of religions”; some are “hate speech” laws; some are “public order” laws and some are “incitement to religious hatred” laws.  Additionally, the penalties can range from civil fines to jail time depending on the country.  The U.S. is the last hold out on retaining true freedom when it comes to matters of speech.</p>
<p>This past February, the OIC held an Islamic Summit, a high-level meeting held every three years.  It is the OIC’s largest meeting.  Heads of State and high ranking officials from member states attend.  The purpose of the meeting is to provide guidance pertinent to the realization of the objectives provided for in the OIC Charter and to consider other issues of importance to member states and the Islamic Ummah.  This year’s theme for the agenda was “The Muslim World:  New Challenges and Expanding Opportunities.”</p>
<p>Though the summit focused largely on Syria, Mali, and the “Palestinian issue,” the OIC also made it clear that it would ramp up its efforts to defeat “Islamophobia.”</p>
<p>The OIC is fastidiously working on the creation of legal instruments to address and combat “Islamophobia.”  Renewing its commitment to mobilize the West to comply with Islamic blasphemy laws, the OIC vowed to push for nation states to enact laws that will criminalize the “denigration of religions” during in its next Istanbul conference, anticipated to take place this June.</p>
<p>Further, it is requesting that the UN start an international mechanism that could serve as an “early warning system” against instances of discrimination and intolerance on religious grounds.  Specifically, the OIC is proposing the creation of an observatory at the Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights, presumably analogous to the Observatory on Islamophobia that the OIC already maintains.  The difference would be that the new observatory would be overseen by an internationally sanctioned entity (the UN) and would expand to all religions.</p>
<p>It is fair to say that since Islamist organizations have coordinated campaigns across the world that encourage and solicit reports of either real, feigned, staged or imagined incidents of “Islamophobia,” the new “empirical data” that such an observatory would collect, would still be drastically skewed.  No other religion has a worldwide campaign instructing its members to report unpleasant truths as “bigotry” or to complain about slights as minor as “hostile looks.”</p>
<p>Additionally, the OIC is continuing to use the language embodied in pre-existing legal instruments in order to make it harder for Western countries to object.  For example, Resolution 16/18 mirrors some of the language in the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).  ICCPR, Article 20 states “the advocacy of religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law.”  The U.S. rightly signed a reservation to this clause, effectively opting out, insisting that Americans retain the right to exercise their First Amendment freedom of speech.</p>
<p>Further, though Article 20 makes such speech illegal, it leaves the definition of these terms open to interpretation and does not specify that the illegality must be criminal in nature.  Despite this, Rizwan Saeed Sheikh, spokesman for the OIC Secretary General, insists that pursuant to Article 20 the “denigration of symbols or persons sacred to any religion is a criminal offense.”</p>
<p>Such claims are indicative of the legal and linguistic gymnastics that the OIC will use to achieve its goal to “combat defamation of Islam” and to export Islamic blasphemy laws, labeling them as something aesthetically easier to swallow.</p>
<p>At the Summit, OIC members also unanimously elected Iyad Madani to the post of OIC Secretary General.  His term is to commence in 2014 when current Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu’s term expires.  This is the first time that the OIC will be headed by a Saudi.</p>
<p>Though the current OIC regime is comprised of sticklers for Islamic blasphemy laws and staunch advocates for the obliteration of Israel, it is likely that the OIC will become even more extreme under Madani.  Compared to the Wahabbis in Saudi Arabia, Ihsanoglu and gang can be considered reformers pushing “Islam lite.” The election of a former Saudi Minister to head the largest Islamic organization in the world and lead the UN’s most powerful voting bloc is a bad omen of what’s to come.  Indeed, it would come as no surprise if under its new leadership, the OIC’s old leadership would be labeled “Islamophobic.”</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <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">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Gun Culture and Gun-Control Culture</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/gun-culture-and-gun-control-culture/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=gun-culture-and-gun-control-culture</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 19 Dec 2012 04:57:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Columbine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[control]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Guns]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Laws]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Michael Moore]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[shootings]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=170074</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The leftist dog whistle that promotes hatred of rural America. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/gun-culture-and-gun-control-culture/1-300x298/" rel="attachment wp-att-170092"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-170092" title="1-300x298" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/1-300x298.jpg" alt="" width="238" height="231" /></a>Hardly had the blood been scrubbed off the floors in Newtown than everyone who was anyone had begun shifting the blame from Adam Lanza to some intangible social failure.</p>
<p>Back in 2002, Michael Moore trundled his bulk over to Colorado to exploit the Columbine massacre for a general rant about gun culture, American foreign policy and how hard it was to find a shop selling bacon grease by the ton at two in the morning.</p>
<p>In his film, which won an Oscar for Best Documentary, Moore gave his audience what they wanted, lots of scenes of &#8220;hicks and hillbillies&#8221; buying, selling and giving away guns all over the place to illustrate the murderous ravages of American gun culture. Some of those scenes were staged, but it didn&#8217;t matter since Moore was catering to an audience that had nothing but contempt for working class Americans and would believe any awful thing about them.</p>
<p>What did gun culture have to do with a plot by two disgruntled dorks with tastes in pop culture far afield from the rural gun-loving dystopia that Moore was doing his best to depict? About as much as gun culture has to do with headcases like Adam Lanza or Jared Loughner.</p>
<p>Your average school shooter is unhappy and angry, irreligious, incapable of fitting into a community and filled with rage that he exercises through violent fantasies. His culture isn’t gun culture. It’s loner culture. Video games do not cause him to kill, but they are how he entertains himself until he can get a taste of the real thing.</p>
<p>Adam Lanza, Dylan Kleibold, Eric Harris, Seung-Hui Cho, James Holmes, One L. Goh and Jared Loughner had as much in common with what the Michael Moore Fan Club thinks of as &#8220;gun culture&#8221; as Michael Moore does with the working class. Whatever gun culture they had was not the American Scots-Irish culture of the hunter, the rancher and the militia member, but the urban posse of emasculated men of no worth that brandish weapons as a way to get respect.</p>
<p>The gun culture of the school shooter is the lobby scene in The Matrix, the frag or be fragged multiplayer gaming culture of Halo and Doom, and the Joker killing his way across Gotham. None of these products of mass entertainment make one a killer, but they are also far more illustrative of the type of gun culture that defines school shooters, than anything that Michael Moore and the MSNBC talking heads mean by gun culture.</p>
<p>For most Americans there is no gun culture, only the ownership of guns. To the extent that any gun culture has developed it was in response to a gun-control culture that sought to demonize the ownership of firearms. The traditional and religious culture of the American gun owner has little in common with the power fantasies of the school shooter. To the gun owner, a firearm is a necessary tool. To the school shooter, it is a way to stop feeling powerless, a way to get beyond the ersatz joys of killing bots and avatars, of watching Keanu Reeves spin through the air while filling a mob of policemen full of lead, with the joy of the real kill.</p>
<p>For all the loose talk about American gun culture, no one really seems to be able to define what it is. Defining gun culture by the entertainment industry drifts too far into Hollywood and Detroit, and away from the rural culture that is the real target of gun-control culture.</p>
<p>Instead there are a thousand articles written in children&#8217;s blood crying out, &#8220;We can&#8217;t just do nothing.&#8221; Something must be done. Now. Last week. If only we ban more weapons, we can be as safe as Norway, home of the worst shooting spree of all, or Connecticut, which already has an assault weapons ban. For the children&#8230; who had no one to protect them when a gunman came to their school and will still have no one to protect them when gun-control culture gets its way.</p>
<p>After these come a torrent of armchair psychology analyses of America&#8217;s gun culture, which are only slightly more elegant versions of Michael Moore&#8217;s thesis about rural America. And those are what gun culture is really about. After all how can you be confident of your own superiority unless you have a documentary and a hundred articles affirming it for you by the traditional method of putting down the people at the bottom of the ladder.</p>
<p>What liberals think of as gun culture is really shorthand for rural America. It&#8217;s what liberals won&#8217;t say, but it&#8217;s what they mean. Americans are still sentimental about the village, so, for now, the number of movies that portray the rural community as ideal, rather than a hive of small-minded bigots, is still rather high. But there are backdoor ways of getting at the same topic, and talking about gun culture is one of them.</p>
<p>When liberals talk about &#8220;gun culture&#8221;, they mean the same thing that Barack Obama did when he told his San Francisco fundraiser friends about the people out there who still cling to their bibles and their guns. It isn&#8217;t about the guns really, though gun-control culture is worried about having that much personal autonomy in the hands of people who don&#8217;t share their values and like their independence, it&#8217;s about rural America. And rural America, like guns, is another symbol that stands in for traditional America.</p>
<p>The left cannot talk about how much it hates this country. Gun culture is one of its dog whistles. Talking about gun culture allows the left to publicly vent its hatred for America. But the truth about gun culture is that the left has a great deal more in common with Dylan Klebold, Eric Harris, Adam Lanza and Jared Loughner. Far more than those shooters had with any phantom conservative gun culture.</p>
<p>The American left, like any high school shooter, is bitter, angry, disgruntled and filled with contempt for the rest of the country. Stuck in a country made of flyover country, the left treats Americans to their own Columbine Massacre every time it defends criminals and terrorists, every time it wrecks American manufacturing and laughs all the way to the bank as it bankrupts Americans.</p>
<p>And both the left and the shooters agree that the people should not have guns.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>World Leaders Rally for Blasphemy Laws</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/andrew-harrod/world-leaders-rally-for-blasphemy-laws/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=world-leaders-rally-for-blasphemy-laws</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 24 Sep 2012 04:39:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Andrew Harrod]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[blasphemy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[european union]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Freedom of speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Laws]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[oic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[United Nations]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=145247</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[But a few courageous voices condemn the global assault on free speech. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/534248_408834099172020_837931714_n.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-145281" title="534248_408834099172020_837931714_n" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/534248_408834099172020_837931714_n.gif" alt="" width="375" height="255" /></a>In response to the <em>Innocence of Muslims</em> global controversy, <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/andrew-harrod/turkey-pm-pushes-international-blasphemy-laws/">Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan</a> called for recognizing “Islamophobia as a crime against humanity” and “international legal regulations against attacks on what people deem sacred.”  In the statement&#8217;s wake, the number of political leaders around the world openly musing about restrictions on anti-Islamic speech has only increased.</p>
<p>Erdoğan’s Turkish compatriot, <a href="http://www.oic-oci.org/page_detail.asp?p_id=58">Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu</a>, secretary general of the <a href="http://www.oic-oci.org/home.asp">Organization of Islamic Cooperation</a> (OIC), a grouping of 56 Muslim-majority states (including Turkey) and the Palestinian Authority (PA), said on <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/19/us-protests-religions-blasphemy-idUSBRE88I1EG20120919">September 19, 2012</a> that the international community should “come out of hiding from behind the excuse of freedom of expression” used by Western countries against a decade-long campaign by the OIC to effect universal blasphemy laws.  Ihsanoglu described the “deliberate, motivated and systematic abuse of this freedom” as a threat to global security. The Human Rights Commission of the Saudi Arabian-headquartered OIC, meanwhile, called for the halting of “growing intolerance towards Muslims” and for “an international code of conduct for media and social media to disallow the dissemination of incitement material.”</p>
<p>That same day, Ihsanoglu’s counterpart at the United Nations, <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/19/us-protests-un-idUSBRE88I1CW20120919">Secretary General Ban Ki-moon</a>, decried at a news conference the making of <em>Innocence of Muslims</em> as a “disgraceful and shameful act” that represented an abuse of “freedom of expression…a fundamental right and privilege.”  Using “freedom of expression to provoke or humiliate some others’ values and beliefs” was not worthy of protection. Rather, Ki-moon indicated that such freedom only deserved protection when “used for common justice, common purpose.”  Like Erdoğan’s previously analyzed bizarre understanding of intellectual freedom, Ki-moon would apparently allow majorities to prohibit an individual’s expression deemed not serving a “common” collective goal, a fundamental inversion of the traditionally recognized need to protect minority views in a free market of ideas.</p>
<p>Rounding out the number of international organizations now apparently ready to implement the medieval-sounding idea of blasphemy laws, <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/organizations/a/arab_league/index.html">Arab League</a> Secretary General <a href="http://www.crcica.org.eg/cv_nabil_elaraby.html">Nabil al-Araby</a> stated at league headquarters in Cairo, Egypt on <a href="http://www.egyptindependent.com/news/arab-league-eyes-blasphemy-bill-syria-solution">September 19, 2012</a> that the league, the OIC, the European Union (EU), and the African Union (AU) were about to formulate an international agreement penalizing blasphemy.  Indeed, the next day, al-Araby, Ihsanoglu, EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy <a href="http://ec.europa.eu/commission_2010-2014/ashton/about/cv/index_en.htm">Catherine Ashton</a>, and AU Commissioner for Peace and Security <a href="http://au.int/en/dp/ps/commissioner/biography">Ramtane Lamamra</a> issued a <a href="http://ansamed.ansa.it/ansamed/en/news/nations/spain/2012/09/21/Islam-Arab-League-EU-AU-speak-against-religious-hatred_7508756.html">joint statement</a> on the eve of Muslim Friday prayers, which was designed to quell further violence resulting from <em>Innocence of Muslims</em> and the subsequent publication by the French satire magazine <a href="http://www.bivouac-id.com/billets/les-nouvelles-caricatures-de-charlie-hebdo/"><em>Charlie Hebdo</em></a> of cartoons mocking Islam’s prophet Muhammad.</p>
<p>“While fully recognizing freedom of expression,” the <a href="http://www.consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/cms_Data/docs/pressdata/EN/foraff/132512.pdf">statement</a> stressed the “importance of respecting all prophets, regardless of which religion they belong to.”  The statement added to its respect for a prophet pantheon the declaration that the “anguish of Muslims at the production of the film insulting Islam, posting of its trailer on the internet and other similar acts, is shared by all individuals and communities who refuse to allow religion to be used to fuel provocation, confrontation and extremism.”  The statement also professed a desire to “ensure that the recent events do not undermine the relationships of trust and respect we have built up over so many years among our peoples, communities and states,” citing amiable relationships perhaps previously unnoticed by many Europeans. In an act of moral equivalence between filmmakers and rioters/terrorists, the statement then proclaimed that the “international community cannot be held hostage to the acts of extremists on either side.”  The four officials then concluded by stating that they “reiterate our strong commitment to take further measures and to work for an international consensus on tolerance and full respect of religion, including on the basis of UN Human Rights Council resolution 16/18.”</p>
<p>This last reference to resolution 16/18 is a red flag to anyone concerned about the implications of “respect of religion”  according Islam for freedoms of speech and religion.  As <a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/08/defending_free_speech_leaves_top_obama_department_of_justice_official_speechless.html">this author</a> and others have analyzed, resolution 16/18 is the latest incarnation of the previously mentioned OIC efforts to effectuate international blasphemy laws.  Although watered down by American diplomatic efforts from its original OIC formulation, the resolution in its present form still contains ambiguous phrases capable of justifying Islamic restrictions on free expression.  Indeed, the report by the Italy-based news organization <em>ANSAmed</em> on the statement said that it “stressed the organizations’ engagement in promoting anti-blasphemy measures within a UN resolution on human rights.”</p>
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		<title>The Threat of Sharia and the Leadership of America’s Two Parties &#8212; on The Jamie Glazov Show</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/jamie-glazov/the-threat-of-sharia-and-the-leadership-of-america%e2%80%99s-two-parties-on-the-jamie-glazov-show-tuesday-september-4-2012-8-9-pm-pacific/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-threat-of-sharia-and-the-leadership-of-america%25e2%2580%2599s-two-parties-on-the-jamie-glazov-show-tuesday-september-4-2012-8-9-pm-pacific</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/jamie-glazov/the-threat-of-sharia-and-the-leadership-of-america%e2%80%99s-two-parties-on-the-jamie-glazov-show-tuesday-september-4-2012-8-9-pm-pacific/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 05 Sep 2012 04:02:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jamie Glazov]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[America]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[constitution]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Eric Allen Bell]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Laws]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sharia]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=142650</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Counter-Jihad warrior Eric Allen Bell takes listeners' calls for the full hour.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/women.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-142652" title="women" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/women.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="490" /></a><strong>Yes, there IS a war against women!</strong></p>
<p>Join <em>The Jamie Glazov Show</em> that aired on Tuesday, Sept. 4, 2012 at 8-9 pm Pacific (11-12 pm EST) on Blog Talk Radio.</p>
<p>This week’s guest was Counter-Jihad warrior Eric Allen Bell, who discussed his recent Blockbuster Frontpage article: <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/eric-allen-bell/the-threat-of-sharia-and-the-leadership-of-america%E2%80%99s-two-parties/">The Threat of Sharia and the Leadership of America’s Two Parties.</a></p>
<p>To listen to the program, <a href="http://www.blogtalkradio.com/radio-jihad/2012/09/05/the-jamie-glazov-show">click here</a>.</p>
<p>Or go to:<a href="http://www.blogtalkradio.com/radio-jihad/2012/09/05/the-jamie-glazov-show"> http://www.blogtalkradio.com/radio-jihad/2012/09/05/the-jamie-glazov-show</a>.</p>
<p>See you next Tuesday night!</p>
<p><strong>You can make sure that </strong><a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/donate.html?key=ASY2NUM6OSJ9" target="_blank"><em><strong>Jamie Glazov Productions</strong></em></a><strong> continues to take you where no other media </strong><a title="Powered by Text-Enhance" href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/06/15/communist-website-denounces-the-glazov-gang-1/"><strong>programs</strong></a><strong> dare to go. Help us by </strong><a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/donate.html?key=ASY2NUM6OSJ9" target="_blank"><strong>clicking here</strong></a><strong> and making a tax deductible contribution today.</strong></p>
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		<title>Israel&#8217;s Right to Blockade</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/joseph-klein/israels-right-to-blockade/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=israels-right-to-blockade</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 11 Jun 2010 04:00:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Klein]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[article]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[authority]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Blockade]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[civilian population]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[declaration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[enemy countries]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[international law experts]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Remo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[San]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[san remo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[southern Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[suicide bombings]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=62470</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Counting the ways in which the law is on the Jewish state's side. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/blockade.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-62714" title="blockade" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/blockade.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="224" /></a></p>
<p>Does Israel&#8217;s blockade of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip and its enforcement of the blockade comply with international law? The evidence suggests that the answer is an overwhelming yes:</p>
<p>The <em>1909 Declaration Concerning the Laws of Naval War</em> (the London Declaration), the first international instrument to acknowledge the legality of blockades, specifically recognized the right of nations to blockade their enemy.</p>
<p>So does the <em>San Remo Manual</em>, which is a compilation by international law experts of agreed upon international law on blockades and related subjects. The blockade must be declared against a belligerent, and notified to all belligerents and neutral states (Article 93). The declaration must specify the commencement, duration, location, and extent of the blockade and the period within which vessels of neutral States may leave the blockaded coastline (Article 94). The blockade may be enforced and maintained by a combination of legitimate methods and means of warfare provided this combination does not result in acts inconsistent with the rules set out in the San Remo Manual (Article 97).</p>
<p>A blockade is prohibited, according to the <em>San Remo Manual</em>, if (a) it has the sole purpose of starving the civilian population or denying it other objects essential for its survival; or (b) the damage to the civilian population is, or may be expected to be, excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated from the blockade (Article 102).</p>
<p>Hamas is the self-declared enemy of Israel, sworn to its destruction, as set forth in Hamas&#8217; Charter. Hamas has backed up its belligerency toward the Jewish state by suicide bombings and thousands of rocket attacks launched from Gaza against civilians in Israel. Hamas&#8217;s armed terrorist militia is funded, trained and armed by Israel&#8217;s enemy countries, including most notably Iran which has managed to smuggle some arms to Hamas via land routes, and has attempted to do so by sea.  If Iran were as successful in arming Hamas with sophisticated rockets and other weaponry as it has been in arming Hezbollah on Israel&#8217;s northern border, Israel would face an imminent existential threat on both its northern and southern borders.  Thus, the predicate for a blockade &#8211; a state of belligerency with the blockaded belligerent &#8211; is clearly established.</p>
<p>When Israel withdrew unilaterally from Gaza in 2005, it had made arrangements with the Palestinian Authority for freedom of movement across the Israeli-Gaza border on the understanding that the Palestinian Authority would implement certain specified security arrangements. Those arrangements were never implemented. Nevertheless, even after  Hamas&#8217; victory in parliamentary elections and its stated refusal to abide by any agreements reached between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, Israel did not immediately institute a blockade.  Only after Hamas kidnapped an Israeli soldier from the Israeli side of the border, took forcible control of Gaza from the Palestinian Authority and began launching rockets from Gaza into southern Israel did Israel restrict the flow of most goods entering into and leaving Gaza.</p>
<p>Hamas&#8217; supporters, including the Free Gaza Movement which helped organize the flotilla in which the fatalities occurred after Israeli commandos met armed resistance when they boarded one of the ships, argue that the blockade is nevertheless illegal under international law. Under Article 102 of the <em>San Remo Manual</em> (quoted above), they argue, the blockade is illegal because Israel&#8217;s purpose is to starve the Gazan population and deprive them of other necessities for survival, and the damage to Gaza&#8217;s civilian population is disproportionately excessive in relation to any legitimate military need.</p>
<p>However, this argument ignores two basic facts (not &#8220;biased opinions&#8221; as some might allege):</p>
<p>First, food and medical supplies have been permitted continuously into Gaza during the blockade, including even during Operation Cast Lead, showing that Israel&#8217;s purpose was certainly not to starve the Gazan civilian population or to deny them other necessities for their survival. Since the end of Operation Cast Lead, the amount and variety of supplies permitted into Gaza have increased, despite the fact that there is still no agreement on effective security arrangements in accordance with Israel&#8217;s understanding with the Palestinian Authority and that Israeli&#8217;s kidnapped soldier is still in Hamas custody without access by the International Red Cross.</p>
<p>Second, Israel tried to work out a compromise with the flotilla organizers which would permit its humanitarian cargo to be delivered to the Gazan civilian population. Israel proposed on several occasions that once it had the opportunity to inspect the ships for arms and supplies that could be used for military purposes and to remove them, all other cargo on the ships would be delivered to the civilians in Gaza through international agencies.  Israel&#8217;s offer was an attempt to balance its military security requirements with mitigation of damage to Gaza&#8217;s civilian population by allowing the bulk of the cargo to reach them through reliable means. Both Hamas and the Free Gaza Movement leaders rejected the offer.</p>
<p>Aside from the fact that Muslim Brotherhood members and other Islamic jihadists were participating in the flotilla &#8211; raising questions about the true humanitarian nature of the mission &#8211; the organizers of the flotilla admitted that their main purpose was to break the blockade: &#8220;This mission is not about delivering humanitarian supplies, it&#8217;s about breaking Israel&#8217;s siege on 1.5 million Palestinians.&#8221;</p>
<p>The Free Gaza blockade runners&#8217; willingness to deny the Gaza civilian population the humanitarian aid they claimed to be carrying if they could not succeed in breaking the blockade shows that Hamas&#8217; supporters &#8211; not Israel &#8211; were the ones willing to put Hamas&#8217; military objective of breaking the blockade over the needs of Gaza&#8217;s civilian population.</p>
<p>Israel&#8217;s enforcement of the blockade, including its boarding of the ships in the flotilla which refused inspection at an Israeli port, was fully in compliance with the following provisions of the <em>San Remo Manual</em>:</p>
<p>98. Merchant vessels (defined as a vessel, other than a warship, an auxiliary vessel, or a State vessel such as a customs or police vessel, that is engaged in commercial or private service) believed on reasonable grounds to be breaching a blockade may be captured. Merchant vessels which, after prior warning, clearly resist capture may be attacked.</p>
<p>103. If the civilian population of the blockaded territory is inadequately provided with food and other objects essential for its survival, the blockading party must provide for free passage of such foodstuffs and other essential supplies, subject to:</p>
<p>(a) the right to prescribe the technical arrangements, including search, under which such passage is permitted;</p>
<p>and</p>
<p>(b) the condition that the distribution of such supplies shall be made under the local supervision of a Protecting Power or a humanitarian organization which offers guarantees of impartiality, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross.</p>
<p>104. The blockading belligerent shall allow the passage of medical supplies for the civilian population or for the wounded and sick members of armed forces, subject to the right to prescribe technical arrangements, including search, under which such passage is permitted.</p>
<p>The ships on which there was no violent resistance to an inspection encountered non-violence from the Israeli side.  But on the one ship carrying Turkish activists, who had declared their jihadist intentions, Israeli soldiers descended with only paintballs in hand (pistols not drawn) and encountered violent resistance.  They had the right to protect themselves and their colleagues with lethal force once they were attacked by packs of assailants using knives, metal rods, clubs, etc. who had also begun to take the soldiers&#8217; pistols away from them.</p>
<p>Hamas&#8217; supporters turn a blind eye to the terrorist group&#8217;s violence against innocent Israeli civilians and to its crimes against its own people.  Here is an excerpt from a speech delivered by Hamas MP Fathi Hammad, which aired on Al-Aqsa TV on February 29, 2008:</p>
<p>Fathi Hammad: [The enemies of Allah] do not know that the Palestinian people has  developed its [methods] of death and death-seeking. For the Palestinian people, death has  become an industry, at which women excel, and so do all the people living on this land.  The elderly excel at this, and so do the mujahideen and the children. This is why they  have formed human shields of the women, the children, the elderly, and the mujahideen,  in order to challenge the Zionist bombing machine. It is as if they were saying to the  Zionist enemy: &#8220;We desire death like you desire life.&#8221; (Emphasis added)</p>
<p>There can be no real peace so long as the Hamas terrorists and their state sponsors such as Iran want more innocent Jews to die for death’s sake and will settle for nothing short of Israel’s extermination, even at the expense of innocent Palestinian civilians. The Free Gaza Movement and their supporters should spend their time seeking to free Gaza from the grip of Hamas, not trying to end Israel&#8217;s lawful blockade.</p>
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		<title>In Defense of Freedom</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/deborah-weiss/in-defense-of-freedom-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=in-defense-of-freedom-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 10 Jun 2010 04:00:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Deborah Weiss]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[America]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[American Exceptionalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Attorney General Ashcroft]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[september 11 2001]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=62536</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Ashcroft’s speech at the Heritage Foundation reminds us of a time when securing freedom was a government priority.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/ash.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-62538" title="ash" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/ash.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="331" /></a></p>
<p>Last week, The Heritage Foundation’s second annual “Protect America Month” came to a close.  The program was designed to express commitment to America’s national security, advocate for increased defense spending, point out the constitutional basis for government’s role in protecting America, and to examine the threats to the United States.  John Ashcroft, former Attorney General of the United States, delivered the closing speech.</p>
<p>Attorney General Ashcroft began by asserting his belief that “the defense of America is tantamount to the defense of freedom.  And freedom is worth defending.”  He astutely reviewed his understanding of the definition of freedom, and how American exceptionalism plays a vital role in contributing and sustaining freedom around the globe.</p>
<p>He rejected the common argument that freedom and national security must be balanced.  Rather, freedom is the highest value with no parallel.  However, in order to maintain it, it must be secured.  Therefore, the two are not counterweights to each other.  Rather, national security protects America’s freedom, and ensures that freedom stays intact.</p>
<p>Ashcroft explained that the ability to engage in the pursuit of happiness increases freedom, while the provision of happiness by the government impairs freedom, and often comes at a high cost.  In other words, when needs are converted into rights, freedom shrinks.  Most importantly, the imposition of that which is not wanted constitutes the denial of freedom regardless of the virtue of that which is being imposed.</p>
<p>Freedom is under attack.  Nine years after September 11, 2001, Americans have become complacent.  Many have a false sense of security.  But the former Attorney General encouraged the audience not to surrender to the terrorist threat, and always be mindful of those who sacrificed their lives for the cause of freedom.</p>
<p>Ashcroft believes that the number one responsibility of the federal government is to protect its citizens.  The way he believes national security is enforced is through the rule of law, so that people are on notice of what they can and cannot do.</p>
<p>In analyzing habeas corpus doctrine, the use of military tribunals and indefinite detention, Ashcroft reviewed numerous Supreme Court cases including Hamdi, Quirin, and Eisentrager.  He also discussed the DC Court of Appeals case, titled Maqaleh v Gates.</p>
<p>When asked about his positions on specific policy and legal matters, he emphasized the reasoning process that should support these decisions.  They included the following:</p>
<ul>
<li>Be aware that policies send a message that can deter behavior or invite behavior;</li>
<li>Determine if the conduct in question constitutes a war crime or merely violates a domestic criminal statute;</li>
<li>Ensure that all three branches of government are acting within their appropriate constitutional limits;</li>
<li>Know that the executive branch can make faster decisions to ensure the protection of America’s national security than can the legislative branch;</li>
<li>Acknowledge the fact that military tribunals, while operating under different rules than federal courts, still result in outcomes that are fair and respect the true facts;</li>
<li>In deciding whether a defendant should be tried in a military tribunal versus a federal court, determine your objective.   If national security information in involved, minimize the release of this information to our enemies;</li>
<li>If a person with US citizen status is fighting against the US with America’s enemies, perhaps he should be treated as an enemy;</li>
<li>Laws should be clear and certain.  If the geographical location of the occurrence doesn’t provide clear rules, then look to the circumstances surrounding the case;</li>
<li>America should make sure that she runs prisons only in locations where she can maintain control of what occurs within them;</li>
<li>Finally, Americans should distinguish between detention for the purpose of punishment and detention for the purpose of removing enemy combatants from the stream of battle.</li>
</ul>
<p>The former Attorney General also noted that America’s reckless financial conduct will have grave national security implications for future generations who might be unable to finance their defense.  Moreover, if America reveals a lack of self-sufficiency to the world by becoming a debtor to the world, it signals America’s weakness.  Funding national security should be one of government’s main priorities.</p>
<p>America’s current Attorney General, Eric Holder, appears to have no clear rules guiding his decisions in reference to which defendants go to a military tribunal versus a federal court.  His decisions appear to be arbitrary and capricious.  Though he is the head of the Department of Justice, national security does not seem to be his paramount priority.  He refuses to acknowledge the Islamist ideological threat, favors the closing of the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center, opposes the Patriot Act (responsible for disrupting numerous terrorist plots in the US) and is critical of enhanced interrogation techniques.  Instead, he has stated that engagement in “dialogue” with the Muslim community is a priority for his Department, as is the prosecution of so-called “hate crimes.”  Though he is not an expert in Islamic theology, he nevertheless asserts with seeming authority the claim that that those who commit terrorist acts in the name of Islam behave in a way that is “un-Islamic” and contrary to Islam’s actual teachings.</p>
<p>By contrast, John Ashcroft led America through its toughest times after the largest terrorist attack on US soil following September 11, 2001.  He made fighting terrorism his number one priority.  He reorganized DOJ to ensure that suspected terrorists were prosecuted when the evidence warranted it.  Under his leadership, DOJ dismantled numerous terrorist cells throughout the US and over 150 plots throughout the world.  Ashcroft’s role in the execution of the War on Terror was one of the most difficult of any cabinet member.</p>
<p>Ashcroft’s speech at the Heritage Foundation expressed a love of freedom, an appreciation of American exceptionalism, an understanding of the threats to liberty, respect for the law, Judeo-Christian values, and a deference to “we the people.”  The Left, of course, has consistently expressed its venom toward John Ashcroft and the entire War on Terror. But Ashcroft’s speech reminded me of the time after September 11, 2001, when, however briefly, the country came together to face our common enemies.  Our government united us in the cause for freedom and our shared American values.  My, how things have changed.</p>
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		<title>Surviving the Sixties (Not)</title>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 31 Mar 2010 04:09:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Solway]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Who tells the truth about the '60s? Gitlin and Judt or Collier and Horowitz?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/ayers_dohrn.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-56709" title="ayers_dohrn" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/ayers_dohrn.jpg" alt="" width="376" height="354" /></a></p>
<p>In 1695, the Puritan divine Timothy Cruso, after whom Defoe may have titled his <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Surprising-Adventures-Robinson-Crusoe-Mariner/dp/1434622894/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268581986&amp;sr=1-5">famous novel</a>, <a href="http://www.librarything.com/work/5633298">wrote</a>: “The days wherein we live are extremely evil, but we have yet a sad and doleful prospect of the next age becoming worse…We see such crowds and swarms of young ones continually posting down to hell, and bringing up so much of hell in the midst of us…we cannot but use some Christian endeavors to open the eyes of these <em>mad prodigals</em>, and to fetch them home.”</p>
<p>Christian endeavors aside, such fears and imprecations are fashionable in every age and testify as much to the unavoidable incompatibility of the generations as to the progressive regression of history. Nevertheless, I sometimes wonder if a time does not eventually come in which the apocalyptic cliché manifests as ineluctable fact, in which the fears of troubled parents are ultimately realized in their refractory offspring.</p>
<p>This was certainly how it was during the student revolution of the 1960s, when university campuses were turned into raucous boot camps for a new generation of political radicals, utopian socialists and psychedelic epicureans—an incoherent “rainbow coalition” that did some good (the Civil Rights Movement) and much harm (rampant drug addiction, anarchic turmoil and rioting, neo-Marxist blueprints for a “better world.”) This sense of entitlement ballooned into the intrusive policies of the welfare state.</p>
<p>Some observers feel that the ideological residue of these “mad prodigals” was on the whole beneficial. Morris Dickstein, for instance, in a beautifully written memoir, <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Gates-Eden-American-Culture-Sixties/dp/0674341554/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268600251&amp;sr=1-1">Gates of Eden</a></em>, feels that “the culture of the sixties had a liberating effect on many of our lives.” True, he cautions that “while we need to remain free, we don’t need to be perpetually liberated,” but, in the final analysis,  concludes that “Utopian hopes may be disappointed but can rarely be forgotten.” Todd Gitlin goes even further in <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sixties-Years-Hope-Days-Rage/dp/0553372122/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268668934&amp;sr=1-1">The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage</a></em>, which is not nearly as temperate as Dickstein’s book. The late Canadian historian and broadcaster Pierre Berton, in his <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/1967-Canadas-Turning-Pierre-Berton/dp/0770427766/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268914989&amp;sr=1-2">1967: A Chronicle of Canada’s Centennial Year</a></em>, comments that we “were all high in 1967, like somebody who had just won the lottery,” and asks rhetorically, “Without that great adventure, what kind of people would we be now?”<em> </em></p>
<p><em> </em></p>
<p>Peter Collier and David Horowitz, however, are not so sanguine. In<em> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Destructive-Generation-Second-Thoughts-Sixties/dp/1594030820/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268600363&amp;sr=1-1">Destructive Generation</a></em>,<em> </em>they meticulously chart the disruptive legacy of the period. The generation of the Sixties are now in their sixties. They no longer live in communes but occupy positions of influence in the media, the universities and government, instructing their epigones to continue the struggle to consolidate a political religion built on the “luminous” precepts of equality, fraternity and “social justice.” This is the platform of the New Left, which has issued in the disorder of multicultural relativity in which we are now immersed, the malign dogma of political correctness, the globalizing of resentment, the “unholy alliance” with Islamic extremism, and the postmodern dismantling of the concept of discoverable truth.</p>
<p>It also engendered a social activism that has infiltrated the judiciary, sponsored the uninformed and sanctimonious meddling of the swarming NGOs and polluted the writing of history, transforming it, à la Howard Zinn, William Blum and Noam Chomsky, into a species of disinformation and overt propaganda. <em>Destructive Generation</em> reminds us of “the ability of the Left to wage a culture war after its international commitments [i.e., its advocacy for Communism] had been revealed to be bankrupt. The Sixties created the victim groups that now tear at the fabric of the American enterprise.”</p>
<p>These strictures and insights resonate with me. I was at UC Berkeley at around the same time as Horowitz, participated in the student takeover of Sproul Hall, and fellow-traveled with the leaders of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Movement">Free Speech Movement</a>. We reveled in our self-proclaimed status as rebels with a cause, who would remake America and the West in our own bearded image. Of course, not everyone in the revolutionary cadres was <em>politically</em> committed to the dismemberment of society as we knew it. Many came along for the jubilant sex, the acid trips and the music, as did the Woodstock hordes and the plankton-like, free-floating hippies who were content to “let it all hang out.” Visiting Belgrade in the late Sixties, I recall keeping company with a group of young Serbian drop-outs, one of whom spent hours every day listening to British shortwave and taping Beatles and Rolling Stone songs. When I asked him about the political situation in Yugoslavia and his sentiments regarding Marshal Tito, he replied, “Politics is for old men.” But back in Berkeley, and especially in <a href="http://www.marxists.org/history/france/may-1968/">Paris in May 1968</a>, this was definitely not the case.</p>
<p>For, apart from the hangers-on and hangers-out, we saw ourselves as the new <a href="http://www.exlibris.org/nonconform/engdis/fifthmonarchists.html">Fifth Monarchy Men</a>, a <a href="http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/new_model_army.htm">New Model Army</a> of youthful saints marching toward the dawning millennium, chasing our quixotic dream that conflict, hatred, inequality and injustice could be abolished once and for all and replaced by an idyllic world in which the economy would be regulated by an enlightened class of sages and benefactors, poverty would cease to exist, racial prejudice and social disparities would be a thing of the benighted past, everyone over thirty would be put out to pasture, and we would all make love, not war.</p>
<p>Greil Marcus in <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lipstick-Traces-History-Twentieth-Century/dp/0674535812/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268600188&amp;sr=1-1">Lipstick Traces: A Secret history of the Twentieth Century</a></em> remembers those days fondly. “In the fall of 1964, in Berkeley,” he writes, “I was, day after day, for months, part of the crowd that made up the Free Speech Movement…It was a period of doubt, chaos, anger, hesitation, confusion, and finally joy—that’s the word…This event formed a standard against which I’ve judged the present and the past ever since.” Facing the disappointment of a movement fragmenting into dead ends, into “situations without a future” (a quote from French philosopher Guy Debord), Marcus subsequently found an anticlimactic reminiscence and justification of “this public life in punk,” in Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols. What a comedown! More importantly, I believe Marcus was wrong in his premature obsequies. As Collier and Horowitz attest, the future of the 1960s is all around us in the present of the 2000s.</p>
<p>The “<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Confederacy-Dunces-John-Kennedy-Toole/dp/0802130208/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268673365&amp;sr=1-1">confederacy of dunces</a>” that we were did incalculable damage to that future. A patchwork collection of Marxists, socialists, Ayers-type guerillas, professional demonstrators, street warriors, Black Panthers and Pantherettes, erotic hedonists, druggies, neo-Rosicrucians, pseudo-<a href="http://www.maharishi.org/">Maharishis</a> and, to make a very long story short, utter narcissists, gave us the inchoate and largely brain-dead Western world we now call home. The belief in the redistribution of income and the leveling of hierarchical structures of rank and privilege energized us in the Berkeley and Paris days. At the same time, particularly among the politically engaged core, we embraced the conviction that society’s ills could be cured by the wise rule of a patrician caste of far-seeing legislators and philosopher-kings—namely, us. That these two axioms were in blatant contradiction with one another escaped our sagacity entirely. We were, as the French say, <em>mi-figue mi-raisin</em>, half fig half raisin. In effect, ideological blivets.</p>
<p>What were we reading then? Aside from the pap productions of the Beats—mainly Jack Kerouac’s <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Road-Penguin-Great-Books-Century/dp/0140283293/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268755423&amp;sr=1-1">On the Road</a></em> and Alan Ginsberg’s <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Other-Poems-Lights-Pocket-Poets/dp/0872860175/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268755199&amp;sr=1-1">Howl</a></em>, as well as Henry Miller’s printed wet dreams, J.D. Salinger’s <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Catcher-Rye-J-D-Salinger/dp/0316769177/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268755766&amp;sr=1-1">The Catcher in The Rye</a></em>, <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/TIBETAN-Natural-Liberation-Through-Understanding/dp/0553370901/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268756516&amp;sr=1-1">The Tibetan Book of the Dead</a></em>, Carlos Castaneda’s <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Teachings-Don-Juan-Yaqui-Knowledge/dp/0520256387/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1269290629&amp;sr=1-1">The Teachings of Don Juan</a></em> and Timothy Leary’s <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Politics-Ecstasy-Leary-Timothy/dp/1579510310/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268755996&amp;sr=1-6">The Politics of Ecstasy</a></em>, all <em>de rigueur</em>—our hallowed texts were Plato’s <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Plato-Republic/dp/0872201368/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268746357&amp;sr=1-1">Republic</a></em> and <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Laws-Plato/dp/1605125296/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268746405&amp;sr=1-1">Laws</a></em>, Hegel’s <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_5?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&amp;field-keywords=hegel+phenomenology+of+spirit&amp;sprefix=hegel">Phenomenology of Spirit</a></em>, Marx and Engel’s <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/German-Ideology-including-Feuerbach-Philosophy/dp/1573922587/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268745407&amp;sr=1-1">The German Ideology</a></em> and <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Communist-Manifesto-Complete-Published-Prefaces/dp/1599869950/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268746285&amp;sr=1-1">The Communist Manifesto</a></em>, and, of course, our beloved guru Herbert Marcuse’s <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/One-Dimensional-Man-Ideology-Advanced-Industrial/dp/0807014176/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268745889&amp;sr=1-1">One-Dimensional Man</a></em> and his seminal essay “<a href="http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/pubs/60spubs/65repressivetolerance.htm">Repressive Tolerance</a>.”</p>
<p>The more popular and less onerous bibliography inspired us during our vedic moments, of which there were many. From our revered philosophical ancestors, we drank the heady potion of social revolution, dialectical materialism and the imperative to restructure our world to consort with our political delusions, which, as I’ve suggested, were both pyramidical and egalitarian. From Marcuse, who taught at UC San Diego, we learned the value of epistemic subversion, which meant imposing a moratorium on conservative thought and instead teaching leftist and socialist doctrines to the exclusion of all others. The current Academy with its panoply of culturally destabilizing and intellectually frivolous “studies” programs is the lineal heir of that ostensibly “liberating” but patently oppressive ideology, as is the statist political establishment in most Western countries today.</p>
<p>The more serious curriculum we undertook obviously demanded a certain kind of specialized intelligence which did not prevent a certain kind of generalized stupidity from taking hold of our minds. Though in one sense we were all different from each other, at any rate in terms of the maquillage we sported, in another sense we were all the same, practicing what Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn in <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Leftism-Sade-Marx-Hitler-Marcuse/dp/0870001434/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268829801&amp;sr=1-5">Leftism: from de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse</a></em><strong> </strong>called “identitarian” politics, as we all moved massively to the Left. Tony Judt in his just-released <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Ill-Fares-Land-Tony-Judt/dp/1594202761/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1269305234&amp;sr=1-1">Ill Fares the Land</a></em> gets it wrong, as he does most things, when he dismisses the collectivist impulse of the Sixties radicals, whom he believes were concerned only with their individual “needs and rights.” As I indicated above, one can be a narcissist and a communitarian at the same time without registering the contradiction. One elevates one’s sense of self-importance by identifying with the masses and speaking on their behalf while magnanimously assuming the burden of leadership. The real problem was that we understood Hegel and Marx—or at least thought we did—but had absolutely no comprehension of the empirical world and of how politics and economics actually work. We were blinded by our vision.</p>
<p>No less distressing, it was as if we had suffered what I’ve elsewhere called a <em>chronosectomy</em>, a temporal amputation, released from the concrete dynamic of history and oblivious of what had come before. We did not believe in the substance of past time, which we regarded as an undifferentiated fantasy or macabre nightmare from which we had suddenly awakened, but invested our faith in the flux of the present and the halcyon future that must inevitably emerge from it. The past was not something to pore over and profit from but to ignore or even expunge from the record, except insofar as it conformed to the theoretical armature of thesis-antithesis-synthesis we had imbibed from Hegel and Marx. In short, we were the generation that sprang from the forehead of Zeus, without parents, without an archive, befuddled by theory and living wholly in present time. We then proceeded to make a holy mess of things.</p>
<p>Some Sixtiers were lucky enough or smart enough to escape the great dumbing-down: Morris Dickstein, for example, for all his nostalgia, takes a measured look back, David Horowitz experienced an intellectual metamorphosis, as he recounts in <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Radical-Son-Generational-David-Horowitz/dp/0684840057/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268674123&amp;sr=1-1">Radical Son</a></em>, and others have, early or belatedly, managed to pull themselves out of the mental quicksand that swallowed an entire generation and its descendants. The erstwhile “good” communist Milovan Djilas’ prerequisite book, <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/New-Class-Analysis-Communist-Harvest/dp/015665489X/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268748446&amp;sr=1-3">The New Class</a></em>, provided a much-needed corrective, showing how leftist thinking had created a realm of autocratic “managers” and powerful bureaucrats that led to the corruption and overthrow of democratic principles. At one point considered Tito’s successor, he was in a position to know. In the light of what is happening all around us at this very instant, Djilas’ book, for which he spent many years in prison, makes indispensable reading.</p>
<p>Though we are still capable of various exploits—technological innovation and expertise, administrative complexity, the circulation of grievances, the planning of agendas—the lamentable fact is that we have become a society of adroit manipulators locked inside an obsolete world-view, “posting down to hell, and bringing up so much of hell in the midst of us.” Barring a miracle, I see no satisfactory solution to the quandary we are in. Perhaps George Steiner is right when he <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bluebeards-Castle-Towards-Redefinition-Culture/dp/0300017103/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268599777&amp;sr=1-8">places his hope</a> in small, monastic flares of intellectual light dotted here and there across the cultural landscape, reviving Max Weber’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Weber-Political-Writings-Cambridge-History/dp/0521397197/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268599681&amp;sr=1-7">notion</a> of frail enclaves of enlightenment as the last resort of a civilization sinking into darkness. One thinks, too, no doubt a tad melodramatically, of Walter M. Miller Jr.’s <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Canticle-Leibowitz-Walter-Miller-Jr/dp/0060892994/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268601156&amp;sr=1-1">A Canticle for Leibowitz</a></em> with its obscure abbey in the Utah desert where historical knowledge is kept alive in a blighted world, even if it’s only a sacred shopping list. But is this a feasible scenario? For as Barry Lopez says in <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Arctic-Dreams-Barry-Lopez/dp/0375727485/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1268599638&amp;sr=1-1">Arctic Dreams</a></em>, “The good minds still do not find each other often enough.”</p>
<p>It may be necessary to start looking harder.</p>
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		<title>Murder in Cuba</title>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 02 Mar 2010 05:04:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Humberto Fontova]]></dc:creator>
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		<category><![CDATA[Orlando]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Police]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[president]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Press]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[prisoner of conscience]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[raul castro]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[regime]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Reina Luisa Tamayo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Son]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[strike]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Tamayo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Worthless]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[A black civil rights activist is killed by the Castro regime, but where is the international community’s outrage?
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				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/zapataorlando..jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-52628" title="zapataorlando." src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/zapataorlando..jpg" alt="" width="450" height="338" /></a></p>
<p>On Feb 23, black human rights activist <a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00688/CUBA_PIXEL_SIZE_185_688960a.JPG">Orlando Zapata-Tamayo</a> died after an 83-day hunger strike and a series of savage beatings by his Cuban jailers.</p>
<p>Some background is in order. Shortly after Jimmy Carter visited Fidel Castro in 2002, <a href="http://www.opednews.com/populum/uploaded/fidel-castro_jimmy-carter-20532-20090804-35.jpg">played baseball</a> with him, and returned home proclaiming Castro “a committed egalitarian who despises any system in which one class or group of people lives much better than another,” Zapata-Tamayo was beaten and arrested by Castro’s police for the crime of “disobedience.”</p>
<p>In their twisted way, Castro’s secret police had a point: Tamayo, a humble rural plumber and bricklayer, had studied the (smuggled) works of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi and had attempted some “civil disobedience” to protest the Stalinism imposed on Cuba by the Castro brothers, Che Guevara and their Soviet puppeteers. So Cuba&#8217;s Stalinist rulerspounced. Samizdats <a href="http://cruzarlasalambradaseng.wordpress.com/2010/02/24/seven-steps-to-kill-orlando-zapata-tamayo/">smuggled</a> out of Cuba by eye-witnesses report that while gleefully kicking and bludgeoning Tamayo, his Communist jailers yelled: “Worthless Ni*ger! Worthless peasant.”</p>
<p>Tamayo’s “disobedience” continued in proportion to his beatings and tortures. Tamayo remained, literally, “bloodied but unbowed.”  Even Amnesty International recognized his plight and designated him an official “Prisoner of Conscience.” His exasperating defiance simply prompted the regime to more merciless beatings and to bump-up his sentence to 36 years in Castro’s dungeons.</p>
<p>A little perspective: After conviction for planting bombs in public places (by a judiciary process declared scrupulously fair by the attending international press and human rights organizations) Nelson Mandela got a lighter sentence than did Tamayo for a peaceful protest.  Needless to add, the regime that jailed Mandela was universally embargoed  and condemned&#8211; and with particular virulence by the <em>precise </em>parties who hail Castro (who forbids any and all international  human rights groups/observers from so much as setting foot in his fiefdom). That goes for Nelson<em> </em>Mandela himself. In 1991, he gushed, &#8220;There&#8217;s one place where Fidel Castro stands out head and shoulders above the rest. That is in his love for human rights and liberty!&#8221;</p>
<p>One might think that the Congressional Black Caucus would take an interest in the abuse of a black dissident. Not so. The CBC visited with Raul Castro last year and returned hailing him as “one of the most amazing human beings we’ve ever met. Castro is a very engaging, down-to-earth and kind man.”  After Raul Castro received that compliment from the Congressional Black Caucus, Tamayo was beaten comatose by his jailers and left with a life-threatening fractured skull.</p>
<p>Eighty three days ago, already injured perhaps beyond recovery (certainly with Cuba’s medical facilities), and hoping his death might alert a two-faced “international community” to the plight of Castro’s subjects, Zapata-Tamayo declared a hunger strike. In his weakened condition, he finally succumbed to the regime&#8217;s tortures last week.</p>
<p>“They finally murdered my son,” wept Reina Luisa Tamayo this Feb. 24 upon news of her son’s death. She continued:</p>
<blockquote><p>“They finally got what they wanted.  They ended the life of a fighter for human rights.  My son was tortured.  But he didn&#8217;t die on his knees. He died bravely. My son&#8217;s death gives me much strength, valor, I want the world to demand the release of all the other prisoners of conscience, that this not happen again. And no&#8211;I don’t accept Raul Castro’s apology. He’s an assassin.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>Her son’s body was delivered to her by Castro’s secret police, who demanded that he be buried quickly and without fanfare.  Castro’s police have also blanketed Tamayo’s rural home town to further “emphasize” this last directive. All press agencies that have earned a Havana bureau were very slow in reporting Tamayo’s death (though a skinned knee or sprained toe in Guantanamo would have buzzed through all news wires within seconds).</p>
<p>These agencies were very prompt, however, in reporting “President” Raul Castro’s official reaction.  “We are really sorry about his death, a lamentable accident,” said Raul Castro. He further insisted:</p>
<blockquote><p>“In half a century in Cuba there have been no extrajudicial killings. We haven’t killed a single person. Here, there is no torture. Killings and torture only happen in Guantanamo.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Amazingly, and despite Tamayo&#8217;s death, many in the press believe the regime&#8217;s spin. In 2006, one of the Castro-approved “reporters,” Anthony Boadle of Reuters, claimed that “There are no credible reports of disappearances, extrajudicial killings and torture in Cuba since the early 1960s, according to human rights groups.&#8221;  The late Orlando Zapata-Tamaya would probably disagree.</p>
<p>For those willing to see through the regime&#8217;s propaganda, Castro&#8217;s murder tally is not difficult to dig up.  Simply open <em>The Black Book of Communism</em>, written by French scholars and published in English by Harvard University Press, neither an outpost of the vast right-wing conspiracy. Here you&#8217;ll find a tally of 14,000 Castroite murders by firing- squad. &#8220;The facts and figures are irrefutable. No one will any longer be able to claim ignorance or uncertainty about the criminal nature of Communism.&#8221; So wrote the <em>New York Times</em> (no less!) about the book.</p>
<p>The Cuba Archive project headed by scholars Maria Werlau and the late Armando Lago estimates the death toll from Castro&#8217;s regime, including firing squads,  prison beatings and deaths at sea while attempting escape, at slightly over 100,000.  This project has been lauded by everyone from The Miami Herald to the Boston Globe (no right-wing outposts) to the Wall Street Journal.</p>
<p>Castro&#8217;s chief hangman, Che Guevara, had laid down the rules very succinctly: &#8220;Judicial evidence is an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution. We execute from revolutionary conviction.&#8221;</p>
<p>Fast forward to that period Boadle assures us is untainted by any &#8220;extra-judicial killings.&#8221; A 17-year-old named <a href="http://www.cubanet.org/ref/dis/05210401.htm">Orlando Travieso</a> was armed with only a homemade paddle when he was machine-gunned to death in March 1991. His “crime,” as spelled out perfectly judicially in Cuba’s legal code, was trying to flee Cuba on a tiny raft. Loamis Gonzalez was 15 when he was machine gunned to death for the same “crime.” The “criminal” Owen Delgado was 15 when Castro’s police dragged him out of the Ecuadorian Embassy where he sought asylum and clubbed him to death with rifle butts.</p>
<p>Boadle will be pleased that these boys and thousands upon thousands of others who perished in similar fashion well after the early 1960s were all deemed &#8220;criminals” by Castro’s judicial system.</p>
<p>Angel Abreu and Jose Nicol were 3, Gisele Borges and Caridad Leyva were 4 and Cindy and Yolindis Rodriguez were 2 on July  17, 1994, when their mothers held them in a tight embrace on the deck of a tugboat. Castro’s coast guard rammed the tugboat and water-cannoned them from their screaming mothers arms and into a turbulent sea to drown. Boadle will be pleased that Castro’s regime ruled this—quite judicially— an &#8220;accident,&#8221; exactly as they rule Tamayo’s death.</p>
<p>May Orlando Zapata-Tamayo rest in peace, may his family accept our condolences, and may his murderers eventually face justice.</p>
<p><em><strong> </strong></em></p>
<p><em><strong>Humberto Fontova is the author of four books including Fidel: </strong></em><em><strong>Hollywood</strong></em><em><strong>&#8216;s Favorite Tyrant and Exposing the Real Che Guevara. Visit </strong></em><em><a href="http://hfontova.com/"><em><strong>hfontova.com</strong></em></a>. </em></p>
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