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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Life</title>
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		<title>Obama&#8217;s Lifeline to the Boston Bomber</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/how-obama-spared-the-boston-bomber-from-death/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=how-obama-spared-the-boston-bomber-from-death</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 02 May 2013 04:55:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bomber]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Boston]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[death penalty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Dzhokhar Tsarnaev]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Life]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[marathon]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[prison]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[The egregious missteps that will rob the Boston massacre's victims of justice -- and make us more vulnerable to jihad.  ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/dzhokhar-tsarnaev.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-188014" alt="dzhokhar-tsarnaev" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/dzhokhar-tsarnaev-397x350.jpg" width="238" height="210" /></a>The Obama administration is reportedly negotiating a plea bargain that would spare the life of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and that could allow the FBI to continue interrogating the suspect about other terrorist plots.</span></p>
<p>NBC News <a href="http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/bombing-suspect-plea-deal/2013/04/29/id/501923?s=al&amp;promo_code=13502-1">reports</a> that federal prosecutors and Tsarnaev&#8217;s lawyers “have begun very early discussions about a possible deal in which he could avoid the death penalty in return for a full accounting to the FBI of what happened and why as investigators continue working to find those answers for themselves.”</p>
<p>Talk of a legal settlement that would allow Tsarnaev to escape execution comes after high-powered attorney Judy Clarke, a death-penalty specialist from San Diego, was added to Tsarnaev&#8217;s legal defense team earlier this week. U.S. Magistrate Judge Marianne Bowler approved Clarke&#8217;s appointment Monday.</p>
<p>Clarke is credited with helping to secure life sentences for clients facing the death penalty such as Jared Loughner, &#8220;Unabomber&#8221; Ted Kaczynski, and 1996 Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph. Clarke&#8217;s fees will reportedly be paid by U.S. taxpayers.</p>
<p>Federal terrorism charges were laid against Tsarnaev last week after some lawmakers demanded the U.S. citizen be treated as an unlawful enemy combatant. Such a move would have given authorities a freer hand to question Tsarnaev about Islamic terrorist operations.</p>
<p>Tsarnaev had been subject to questioning by the FBI for about 16 hours when Judge Bowler suddenly appeared unannounced in the suspect&#8217;s hospital room early on April 22. Accompanied by a prosecutor and a public defender, Bowler &#8212; not law enforcement officers &#8212; read Tsarnaev his <i>Miranda</i> rights and the suspect immediately stopped cooperating with the FBI.</p>
<p>U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said Bowler made the right call. That decision was “totally consistent with the laws that we have,” he said Saturday. “The decision to Mirandize was one that the magistrate made,” Holder added.</p>
<p>But a legal expert said Holder is misstating the law, as handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court in the precedent-setting 1966 ruling, <i>Miranda v. Arizona</i>.</p>
<p>&#8220;Eric Holder was dead wrong when he said there was a legal requirement to Mirandize Dzhokhar Tsarnaev,&#8221; attorney Curt Levey, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Committee for Justice, told this writer in an interview.</p>
<p>&#8220;The Supreme Court&#8217;s ruling in <i>Miranda</i> says only that without a <i>Miranda</i> warning the defendant&#8217;s statements cannot be used to convict him in a criminal trial. There is no requirement that you be Mirandized. It applies only to the evidence that can be used to convict you.&#8221;</p>
<p>In other words, had it not been for Bowler taking the extremely unusual step of reading Tsarnaev his rights, the FBI could have continued trying to extract intelligence from the suspect that might have been useful in fending off future Islamic terrorist attacks.</p>
<p>This appears to be a new approach to judicial activism. Bowler seems to have usurped the powers of the executive branch by taking it upon herself to decide on behalf of the American government that assuring the admissibility of evidence gathered from Tsarnaev in court was more important than possibly obtaining more information from him about terrorist networks that could have saved American lives. It is not supposed to be Bowler&#8217;s decision to make.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, citing unnamed sources, the <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2317493/Saudi-Arabian-ambassador-Washington-DENIES-nation-warned-United-States-Tamerlan-Tsarnaev-2012.html">Daily Mail</a> (UK) reported that the Saudi government warned the U.S. last year that the other Boston Marathon bomber, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, killed in a shootout with police April 19, was a dangerous extremist. The security alert, which the Saudi embassy in Washington, D.C., and the Obama administration deny was issued, was separate from warnings about Tsarnaev that Russian intelligence provided to the Obama administration.</p>
<p>After Saudi Arabia rejected Tsarnaev&#8217;s December 2011 application to enter the kingdom to make a pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi authorities sent a written warning to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the British government last year advising that &#8220;something was going to happen in a major U.S. city.&#8221;</p>
<p>According to the newspaper, the &#8220;government-to-government&#8221; letter named Tsarnaev specifically but did not indicate when or where an attack would take place. The Saudis acted because they believed U.S. authorities should be intercepting packages intended for Tsarnaev to look for items used to make bombs.</p>
<p>Tsarnaev&#8217;s tourist visa for Saudi Arabia was rejected a month before he traveled to the Russian republic of Dagestan where he may have received training that allowed him to make and detonate the pressure-cooker bombs that he and his brother Dzhokhar set off at the Boston Marathon on April 15.</p>
<p>The Saudi official rejected the idea that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was trained by al-Qaeda during his absence from the U.S. in 2012. Saudi Arabia&#8217;s sources in Yemen said Islamic militants knew of Tsarnaev but mocked him, calling him &#8220;the volunteer,&#8221; the unnamed official told the <i>Daily Mail</i>.</p>
<p>&#8220;He was a gung-ho, self motivated jihadi who wasn&#8217;t tasked by a larger group,&#8221; the official said. Blowing up bombs at the Boston Marathon is &#8220;beneath&#8221; al-Qaeda, he said. &#8220;They don&#8217;t think like this. This is like a firecracker to them. They want something big.&#8221;</p>
<p>In a related development, three young men associated with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev are now accused of serving as his accomplices following the Boston Marathon bombing.</p>
<p>Under arrest for conspiracy to obstruct justice are Azamat Tazhayakov and Dias Kadyrbayev of Kazakhstan. Robel Phillipos, a U.S. citizen, is charged with making materially false statements to federal investigators. The trio attended the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth with Tsarnaev, according to <a href="http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/05/01/boston-police-3-additional-suspects-taken-into-custody-in-connection-with-bombing/">FBI affidavits </a>filed in federal court.</p>
<p>Days after the bombing, the three allegedly watched a movie in Tsarnaev&#8217;s dormitory room and then found a backpack containing fireworks. The gunpowder in the fireworks had been removed.</p>
<p>“Kadyrbayev knew when he saw the empty fireworks that Tsarnaev was involved in the Marathon bombing,” according to one of the affidavits. “Kadyrbayev decided to remove the backpack from the room in order to help his friend Tsarnaev avoid trouble. He decided to take Tsarnaev’s laptop as well because he did not want Tsarnaev’s roommate to think he was stealing or behaving suspiciously by just taking the backpack.”</p>
<p>The three men “collectively decided to throw the backpack and fireworks into the trash because they did not want Tsarnaev to get into trouble,” the document stated.</p>
<p>Tazhayakov and Kadyrbayev are also alleged to have violated the terms of their student visas.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/local_coverage/2013/04/tsarnaev_family_received_100g_in_benefits">Boston Herald</a> reports that the Tsarnaev family, including the two brothers and their parents, took in more than $100,000 in taxpayer-funded assistance from 2002 to 2012. The benefits included cash, food stamps, and Section 8 housing subsidies.</p>
<p>“The breadth of the benefits the family was receiving was stunning,” a person with knowledge of documents provided to a state legislative committee told the newspaper.</p>
<p>This means that Massachusetts taxpayers were almost certainly subsidizing the Boston Marathon bombers and their family as the two Tsarnaev brothers immersed themselves in the world of Islamic terrorism.</p>
<p>The state government has given more than 500 documents to the House Post Audit and Oversight Committee in the Massachusetts General Court, the state legislature.</p>
<p>“I can assure members of the public that this committee will actively review every single piece of information we can find because clearly the public has a substantial right to know what benefits, if any, this family or individuals accused of some horrific crimes were receiving,” said committee chairman Rep. David Linsky, a Democrat.</p>
<p>Welfare officials are investigating whether the Tsarnaev family notified the state about Tamerlan&#8217;s extended stay in Dagestan last year during which he may have interacted with Islamic terrorists.</p>
<p>The extent of the welfare payments made to the family surfaced despite official efforts to keep the information hidden.</p>
<p>Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, a Democrat and longtime supporter of welfare-rights groups such as ACORN, had earlier refused to disclose details of the welfare benefits, citing state privacy laws. The real motivation of Patrick, a left-winger often compared to his friend and ally Barack Obama, for failing to hand over the information was more likely that he was trying to defend his state&#8217;s out-of-control social programs from adverse publicity.</p>
<p>Adding insult to injury, if Dzhokhar Tsarnaev receives a sentence of life imprisonment, America&#8217;s taxpayers will be paying his bills for the rest of his natural life.</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>A Christian Looks At Horowitz&#8217;s &#8216;A Point in Time&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/jim-fletcher/a-christian-looks-at-horowitzs-a-point-in-time/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-christian-looks-at-horowitzs-a-point-in-time</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/jim-fletcher/a-christian-looks-at-horowitzs-a-point-in-time/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 18 Mar 2013 04:49:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jim Fletcher]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[a point in time]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Atheism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[book]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Christian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Life]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Religion]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=181870</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A compelling examination of the most pressing questions that theists and atheists alike must confront. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/jim-fletcher/a-christian-looks-at-horowitzs-a-point-in-time/pointintime-6/" rel="attachment wp-att-181872"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-181872" title="pointintime" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/pointintime-226x350.jpg" alt="" width="226" height="350" /></a>Reprinted from <a href="http://www.wnd.com/2011/11/370293/">World Net Daily</a>.</strong></p>
<p><strong>To order David Horowitz&#8217;s &#8216;A Point in Time,&#8217; click <a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/productlist.html?key=DBERMFBVMXYH">here</a>.</strong></p>
<p>One of life’s greatest blessings is watching a leftist figure things out. When the person also elevates us all by sharing newfound wisdom, it’s even better.</p>
<p>That’s just one reason David Horowitz is one of my favorite writers/thinkers. His elegant-but-deadly destructions of leftist thought have now melded with thoughtfulness in later life and make him one of the most compelling commentators of our time. His new book is a true triumph.</p>
<p><a href="http://superstore.wnd.com/books/biography/A-Point-in-Time-The-Search-for-Redemption-in-This-Life-and-the-Next-Hardcover">“A Point in Time: The Search for Redemption in This Life and the Next”</a> is simply wonderful. It represents the musings of a man looking at his own mortality, wondering just what is the meaning of our existence.</p>
<p>Horowitz opens by describing the progressive thinking of his parents and his father’s atheism. His father seems to have believed in a hoped-for utopia of justice, but Horowitz remembers the irony of pulling a book from the family shelf and reading the realism of Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. One can see that Horowitz was influenced by this, and presumably, after his formative years spent pursuing leftist policies and dreams, he came back to that realistic look at the sad old planet we inhabit.</p>
<p>It seems probable that Horowitz will not leave this life as his father did, still hopeful for a world that does not exist.</p>
<p>Some would say that this very slim volume by Horowitz is too dark, too morose. But I say that it is exhilarating. Listen to this: “Unlike my father, I do not look down my nose at the ancients but am impressed by their understanding of our case. How they were able to put a finger on the source of our distress: that alone among creatures we know our fate, and learn sooner or later that the world has no interest in it.”</p>
<p>Well. Although Horowitz’s new book will not meet with approval by all, particularly some conservative Christians, I ask that you give it a try.</p>
<p>For Horowitz’s ideological enemies today, I challenge you to give a nod to his courage in making himself vulnerable as he contemplates our lives as individuals. This is a man of great thought and feeling, and for one who has seen so much ideological savagery, he realizes what I believe to be basically a biblical truth: One day our arguments will not matter.</p>
<p>We learn halfway through the book that Horowitz has been forced to reflect on the meaning of life, due to his health concerns: diabetes and prostate cancer. But I don’t want to misrepresent the book. Horowitz does not share the hope many find in faith: “I wish I could place my trust in the hands of a Creator. I wish I could look on my life and the lives of my children and all I have loved and see them as preludes to a better world. But, try as I might, I cannot. And so I am left to ponder the pointlessness of our strivings on this earth and to ask impossible questions and receive no answers.”</p>
<p>Horowitz, you see, shares more in common with a man who has lost a daughter – because he has – than some of history’s figures he marvels at, men of faith like Mozart and Dostoevsky. He wants to believe in something greater than himself, but he struggles with the questions asked of all men since the species first appeared on the earth.</p>
<p>At the end of this wonderful book, Horowitz says: “My steps have slowed and my passions are dimmed.”</p>
<p>I hope not, because the world could use a thinker like David Horowitz. Interestingly, the last pages of <a href="http://superstore.wnd.com/books/biography/A-Point-in-Time-The-Search-for-Redemption-in-This-Life-and-the-Next-Hardcover">“A Point in Time,”</a> he points to a mystery that I think is a key to understanding everything, and I think the reader will pick up on what I mean. I hope Horowitz is able to pull that veil back enough to see that there is a world to come.</p>
<p>I dare say <a href="http://superstore.wnd.com/books/biography/A-Point-in-Time-The-Search-for-Redemption-in-This-Life-and-the-Next-Hardcover">“A Point in Time”</a> is a modern version of the book of Ecclesiastes, with observations that are particularly relevant for us in our time. You will not be disappointed if you dare to think deeply by reading this profound little book; I honestly believe <a href="http://superstore.wnd.com/books/biography/A-Point-in-Time-The-Search-for-Redemption-in-This-Life-and-the-Next-Hardcover">“A Point in Time”</a> will be good for you.</p>
<p>Let me end this review by saying something that a few of my friends might consider blasphemous: Horowitz has figured out a good bit of life, late in life – and he’s done it as well as Solomon.</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>Mubarak Verdict Roils Egyptian Election</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/rick-moran/mubarak-verdict-roils-egyptian-election/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=mubarak-verdict-roils-egyptian-election</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/rick-moran/mubarak-verdict-roils-egyptian-election/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 04 Jun 2012 04:40:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Rick Moran]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[egypt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Life]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mubarak]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[muslim brotherhood]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[prison]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[verdict]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=133866</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Islamists, secularists rush to exploit the angry crowd. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/mubarak-465.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-133873" title="mubarak-465" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/mubarak-465.gif" alt="" width="375" height="249" /></a>When Egyptian Judge Ahmed Refaat <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/list-of-sentences-handed-down-in-hosni-mubarak-trial-in-egypt/2012/06/02/gJQApEbz8U_story.html">gave a life sentence </a>on Saturday to former dictator Hosni Mubarak for being an accessory in the deaths of more than 800 protestors during the &#8220;Egyptian Spring,&#8221; the <a href="http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/64/43621/Egypt/Politics-/Rage-as-Egypts-Mubarak-is-spared-the-gallows.aspx">initial reaction</a> among many in the crowded courtroom was joyful. Many expected Mubarak to be found innocent, or receive a more lenient sentence. But outrage exploded across Egypt when Refaat <a href="http://www.thenews.com.pk/Todays-News-1-112361-Security-chiefs-freed-as-prosecutor-appeals-Mubarak-verdict">acquitted</a> the six security chiefs of the same crimes as their boss and <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/list-of-sentences-handed-down-in-hosni-mubarak-trial-in-egypt/2012/06/02/gJQApEbz8U_story.html">dismissed </a>corruption charges against Mubarak and his two sons. Chaos in the courtroom spilled outside where <a href="http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/64/43621/Egypt/Politics-/Rage-as-Egypts-Mubarak-is-spared-the-gallows.aspx">police battled </a>enraged demonstrators with stun grenades and truncheons. The verdict has possibly redefined the upcoming Egyptian presidential election &#8212; people may fear a return of Mubarak-style rule more than they fear the Muslim Brotherhood. On the other hand, Mubarak regime holdover and Brotherhood opponent Ahmed Shafiq is demonstrating that he may be able to leverage events in his favor, as the presidential race becomes muddier than ever.</p>
<p>The protests only grew in size when the demonstrators <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-18311960">moved on </a>to iconic Tahrir Square in Cairo where the largest and most determined protests against Mubarak&#8217;s 30-year-reign helped topple the dictator. Tens of thousands of Egyptians rallied and <a href="http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/64/43621/Egypt/Politics-/Rage-as-Egypts-Mubarak-is-spared-the-gallows.aspx">chanted</a> &#8220;Illegal! Illegal!&#8221; and &#8220;Either we get justice for our martyrs or we die like them!&#8221;</p>
<p>It is unknown how the verdict <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303830204577444483637631156.html">will affect</a> the presidential runoff election later this month that pits former Mubarak prime minister Ahmed Shafiq against the Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohamed Morsi. Both candidates were out on the hustings on Sunday trying to exploit the crisis for their own political gain. Both candidates <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303830204577444483637631156.html">have good cases </a>to make to different constituencies so the chances of one of them receiving a decisive advantage as a result of the turmoil are lessened considerably.</p>
<p>Mubarak&#8217;s conviction &#8212; along with the conviction on the same charges of his interior minister Habib al-Adli &#8212; could very well be overturned on appeal according to <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2012/06/03/mubarak-egypt-protests.html">several experts</a> on Egyptian law. &#8220;It&#8217;s a completely politicized verdict that is meant to calm the masses,&#8221; said Maha Youssef, a legal expert from the Nadim Center in Cairo. He added, &#8220;The essence of a ruling by a criminal court judge is not in the papers of the case but in his own personal conviction as someone who lives among the people and know what goes on in his society.&#8221;</p>
<p>A <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303830204577444394106951000.html?mod=googlenews_wsj"><em>Wall Street Journal </em></a>editorial offered similar thoughts:</p>
<blockquote><p>From its start last summer, the prosecution of Egypt&#8217;s deposed strongman Hosni Mubarak was a hasty, politicized circus. So it&#8217;s no surprise that the trial&#8217;s conclusion on Saturday has brought no closure or sense of justice.</p></blockquote>
<p>The editorial also pointed out &#8220;[t]he &#8216;accessory&#8217; charge is weak and could be overthrown easily on appeal.&#8221; Mr. Mubarak&#8217;s lawyers have <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303830204577444483637631156.html">already indicated </a>they will seek a retrial. The verdict will <a href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jlX1DR0WOXOAHakOJt6QpFKgNnZw?docId=4bbdbaa8b37a474fb06b8a8ca5f47a36">also be appealed </a>by the prosecutor because he feels the judge went too easy on the defendants.</p>
<p>But it is not so much the Mubarak verdict that has enraged democracy activists and others. It is the acquittal of the six security chiefs, as well as the dropping of charges against Mubarak&#8217;s sons, Gamal and Alaa, that have placed the former dictator&#8217;s verdict in the context of a society where <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/leading-articles/leading-article-darkness-starts-to-fall-on-the-egyptian-spring-7814720.html">nothing much has changed</a> despite Mubarak&#8217;s ouster. The protestors in Tahrir Square were <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-18311960">calling for</a> an end to military rule &#8212; just as they have for more than 15 months. The suspicion among the young activists who manned the barricades during the worst of the attempted suppression of the revolt is that the military will find a way to acquit the dictator on appeal and rig the election so that Shafiq emerges victorious. A huge demonstration is planned for Tuesday, and the Muslim Brotherhood is expected to participate, flexing its political muscle in the street where its candidate Mr. Morsi <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303830204577444483637631156.html">seeks to capture</a> the spirit and enthusiasm that was evident on Saturday and Sunday in protests across the country.</p>
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		<title>Revelations of Time</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/raymond-ibrahim/revelations-of-time/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=revelations-of-time</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 02 Nov 2011 04:19:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Raymond Ibrahim]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[a point in time]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[book]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[David Horowitz]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Life]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Marcus  Aurelius]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=110969</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[David Horowitz's new book offers an honest and moving reflection on life and death. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/dh.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-110971" title="dh" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/dh.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="513" /></a></p>
<p><strong>Visit <a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/">American Thinker</a>.</strong></p>
<p>David Horowitz&#8217;s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/159698290X/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=amerithink-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=217145&amp;creative=399373&amp;creativeASIN=159698290X">book</a> <em>A Point in Time</em> is at root an exposé on the nature of Time, that double-edged sword  which, by obliterating all in its path, highlights the precious from the  superfluous in our lives.</p>
<p>In  structure, the book consists of Horowitz&#8217;s reflections &#8212; from his  childhood and father to his deceased daughter and own mortality &#8212; not  unlike the approach of Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, whom the author  quotes at length and has apparently learned much from (and a better  instructor can scarcely be found).</p>
<p>But this is not an abstract or theoretical book; Horowitz often begins with the mundane and concludes  with the profound.  So chapters starting with anecdotes concerning his  pets progressively develop into philosophical reflections.  Nor does  Horowitz merely quote the great men; he participates in and synthesizes  their thoughts, showing their applicability to modern times.</p>
<p>For  instance, the stoic emperor asserts that things outside us &#8220;do not  touch the soul, for they are external and immovable; our perturbations  come only from our opinion of them, which is within&#8221; &#8212; words to be  echoed well over a millennium later by Shakespeare&#8217;s Hamlet: &#8220;Nothing  good or bad but thinking makes it so.&#8221;  Horowitz simplifies: &#8220;You cannot  alter the world, so do not make yourself miserable trying.&#8221;</p>
<p>Considering  that the author has spent a great deal of his career as an activist,  his musings &#8212; all of which lead to the inevitable conclusion that our  lives are but a tiny speck in the spectrum of time, soon to be forgotten  &#8212; make his reflections especially poignant; for here we have a man  whose profession wholly revolves around &#8220;making changes&#8221; coming to the  realization that &#8220;[t]his is nature&#8217;s way, to come and go.  Let it go.&#8221;   He even confesses to wondering whether, &#8220;knowing what I do now [i.e.,  the temporalness of life,] I would have been able to go forward at all.&#8221;</p>
<p><strong>To continue reading this article, <a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/10/revelations_of_time.html">click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>The World’s Oldest Sickness</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/david-solway/the-world%e2%80%99s-oldest-sickness/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-world%25e2%2580%2599s-oldest-sickness</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 07 Jun 2010 04:02:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Solway]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Albert Camus]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anthony Julius]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[antisemitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[apostate]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[arab countries]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[bernard lewis]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[black death]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Robert Wistrich]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[scapegoat]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Semitism]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[sickness]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[The Gaza flotilla incident reminds us that the destiny of the Jew is to be eternally unsafe in this world.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/anti.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-62242" title="anti" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/anti.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="409" /></a></p>
<p>The world is sick again with an old disease for which no cure has ever been found. It tends to go into remission here and there at various times but it invariably reappears, as virulent as ever, developing new strains as the bacillus adapts to the antibiotics of reason, shame or distraction. The disease is called anti-Semitism and it can afflict even those who would seem best prepared to resist it. Few are immune.</p>
<p>It can assume racial forms, the Jew regarded as a quasi-human deformity, as rodent, monkey or <em>untermensch</em>. International jurist Jacques Gautier, who finds it “<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uug1x_OTyr4">shameful</a>” that under the dispensation of the Human Rights community it is understood that Arabs will have legal and political rights in Israel while it is accepted that Arab countries can be <em>judenrein</em>, concludes that Jews do not enjoy human rights because they are not reckoned as <em>human</em>. Why extend the norms and principles that presumably govern human behavior and the relations between states to a people and a state tacitly considered as beyond the pale, as not quite “like us”? This is how double standards are implicitly justified. Judaism has also been condemned as a cultural and economic perversion that contorts the structure of society. This is a very old story. Indeed, whatever manifestation it assumes, anti-Semitism has been with us almost as far back as human memory goes. What historian Robert Wistrich has called the world’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/ANTI-SEMITISM-LONGEST-ROBERT-S-WISTRICH/dp/041365320X">longest hatred</a> is also the world’s oldest sickness.</p>
<p>It is, in fact, best construed as a universal epidemic, the emotional and intellectual equivalent of the Black Death that decimated Europe in the fourteenth century. The difference is that those who have contracted this septicemia of the mind do not die, except inwardly. Ironically, their victims are precisely those who do not suffer from the plague that has contaminated its bearers—except, of course, for those apostate Jews who are sick with the same morbid distemper. The list of such despicables would fill the devil’s Rolodex. But they too must eventually succumb to the fury of the demented carriers of the pathology. Unfortunately, the Israeli pharmaceutical firm <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/19/business/global/19drugs.html">Teva</a>, one of the world’s largest suppliers of antibiotic medicines, has no psychic or endocrinal equivalent to treat the malady.</p>
<p>In <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Anti-Semite-Jew-Exploration-Etiology-Hate/dp/0805210474/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1269178463&amp;sr=1-1">Anti-Semite and Jew</a></em>, Jean-Paul Sartre argues that anti-Semitism is not an idea but “first of all a passion” that is akin to hysteria. This passion connects schematically with “the idea of the Jew” to which individual Jews are made to conform irrespective of their personal attributes. For Sartre, anti-Semitism is founded in the “fear of the human condition”—of solitude, responsibility for oneself, and the terror of contingency. The Jew is made responsible for the inescapable distress of being human along the entire spectrum from the empirical to the ontological—an excuse for failure, a means of false absolution and a convenient repository of all we are unwilling to acknowledge about ourselves. As such he has been zoned for apartheid, whether metaphysical or social. Sartre concludes that “If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.”</p>
<p>For all his innovative phrasing, Sartre is really playing variations on the grizzled notion of the Jew as scapegoat, derived from <em>Leviticus</em> 16, which is true enough—witness the current U.S. administration’s treatment of Israel which, as historian Moshe Dann <a href="http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/is-obama-using-israel-as-a-scapegoat-for-his-foreign-policy-failures/">suggests</a>, is a species of <em>collective</em> scapegoating to cover its own foreign policy failures. Philosopher René Girard adds a certain twist to the etiology of this recurrent sickness and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Violence-Sacred-Ren%C3%A9-Girard/dp/0801822181/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1269178277&amp;sr=1-3">proposes the concept</a> of “ritual mimesis” or “mimetic victimage,” an ironic conflict-management elucidation of the scapegoat philosophy. In Girard’s thinking, the violence <em>between groups</em> in a given society is resolved by projecting it upon a third party—the Jew—who is then expelled.</p>
<p>In <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Eliot-Anti-Semitism-Literary-Form-Second/dp/0500282803/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1272197911&amp;sr=1-3">T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form</a></em>, Anthony Julius suggests an interesting comparison/contrast between Homeric mythology and anti-Semitism. They both “offer explanations intended to make sense of puzzling misfortunes in human life, the one by the intervention of the gods, the other by the intervention of the Jews.” The trouble is that “Jews are not malign Olympians who dispose of humankind by manipulative wizardry.” But tell that to the anti-Semite, who craves an easy explanation for what he does not comprehend in the larger world or cannot resolve in his own circumscribed life. By making the Jew responsible for all he cannot clarify, come to terms with or vanquish, the anti-Semite forfeits both courage and morality. What will he do when the Jew is no longer there? He would be like the parasite that has devoured its host and now faces starvation.</p>
<p>This suggests another definition of anti-Semitism. <em>Anti-Semitism is a form of spiritual parasitism</em>, the always tempting resort of the human leech who feeds his appetite for security, justification and self-acquittal from the life-blood of others—in this case, of course, from the body of the Jewish people. Put less offensively, anti-Semitism is blind ignorance, both of the world and the self. Psychologists like to call this psycho-reflex “projection” or “cathexis,” but these terms don’t even begin to cover the malice inherent in so invidious an emotional investment or to parry what Wistrich in his recent book, <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lethal-Obsession-Anti-Semitism-Antiquity-Global/dp/1400060974/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1272987204&amp;sr=1-1">A Lethal Obsession</a></em>, has identified as a “Judeophobic virus.”</p>
<p>Today, anti-Semitism has adopted a new expression, dubbed by Robin Shepherd in <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/State-Beyond-Pale-Europes-Problem/dp/0297856642/ref=sr_1_1/180-7579365-3343620?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1272987899&amp;sr=1-1">A State Beyond The Pale: Europe’s Problem with Israel</a></em> as “neo-anti-Semitism” which is “virulently anti-Israeli”. The Neurozone is gravely compromised, but the syndrome is making significant inroads on this side of the Atlantic as well. While not entirely ridding itself of its racial and socioeconomic baggage, neo-anti-Semitism converges on the Jew-as-Zionist, associated with the state of Israel as the modern embodiment of a discredited colonial enterprise. The purveyors of this claim affect not to be anti-Semitic, but their protestations are not convincing. It looks more like lying by ancillary focus.</p>
<p>The proof resides not only in the fact that Israel is unfairly and disproportionately singled out for opprobrium while flagrant and undoubted human rights offenders are generally given a free pass. It is also evident in the fact that Israel is conceived as no ordinary colonialist power. Israeli Jews are regarded as reviving the pestilence of Nazism, cleansing, or approving of the cleansing, of ethnic populations, aka the Palestinians—which is nothing short of a gross misreading of the historical archive and a wrenching misrepresentation of the present circumstance. For despite the fictions of a perjurious world, there can be no question that the Jewish people enjoy a religious, historical and <em>legal</em> right to their homeland, as Jacques Gautier, who spent twenty years studying the issue of ownership, as attorney and legal specialist Howard Grief in his <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Legal-Foundation-Borders-Israel-International/dp/9657344522/">The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under International Law</a></em>, and as many others have established beyond the slightest doubt. The effort to deny what is the cadastral address of the Jewish people is a pattern of what Melanie Phillips has called, in her new book of that title, <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/World-Turned-Upside-Down-Global/dp/1594033757/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1271700557&amp;sr=1-1">The World Turned Upside Down</a></em>.</p>
<p>Interestingly, the accusation that Israel is the new SS is the contemporary distortion of the theme of Albert Camus’ <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Plague-Albert-Camus/dp/0679720219/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1269197629&amp;sr=1-1">The Plague</a></em>, an obvious allegory of the Nazi invasion of Europe and North Africa. The wrinkle added to this fabric of defamation is that Jews <em>have no right to any kind of power or authority</em>. As Bernard Lewis writes in <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Semites-Anti-Semites-Inquiry-Conflict-Prejudice/dp/0753800330/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1269183330&amp;sr=1-1">Semites &amp; Anti-Semites</a></em>, Jews have no business being anything other than, at best, “a tolerated subject minority.” Therefore, “by appearing as conquerors and rulers the Jews have subverted God’s order in the universe.” This calumny, says Lewis, is both the Muslim and “the fashionable leftist or progressive line.” But it is only a symptom or manifestation of the same old sickness. To paraphrase Stephen Toulmin in <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Cosmopolis-Modernity-Stephen-Edelston-Toulmin/dp/0226808386/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1273011114&amp;sr=1-1">Cosmopolis</a></em>, it is, in effect, “the narrative of a past episode reflected in a more recent mirror.”</p>
<p>And yet the mystery persists. But whatever theory we advance to decrypt what may be largely unfathomable or at least not wholly explicable, one thing is certain. Anti-Semitism is here to stay. Jessica may elope with Lorenzo but she or her children or grandchildren will one day be forced to accept the indelible fact of origins. Anti-Semitism is not a contagion that, like Daniel Defoe’s description in <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Journal-Plague-Written-Citizen-Continued/dp/1151166510/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1269197558&amp;sr=1-1">A Journal of the Plague Year</a></em> of the catastrophe that visited London in the year 1665, will ever be “enervated and its malignity spent.” This is because anti-Semitism is unlike other forms of irrational hatred and operates under a different set of laws, which appear to be immutable.</p>
<p>Indeed, today once again, as we confront a new world-generation of venomous and commissurotomized anti-Semites, we might plausibly conclude that anti-Semitic sentiments and irruptions, in virtue of their millennial repeatability, have become entrenched in human consciousness as a <em>natural</em> inevitability. As I have <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Hear-O-Israel-David-Solway/dp/0973406534/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1272375783&amp;sr=1-1">written before</a>, “It is something that it is perceived in the depths of the psyche to have moved from the dimension of history over into the structure of nature. It is as if anti-Semitism has now become part of our synaptic equipment.”</p>
<p>As a result, the destiny of the Jew is to be eternally unsafe in this world, despite the narcotic of assimilation or the illusion of self-rejection. The time seems invariably to come when the Jew is thrown back on his identity and regarded not as a human being or as an ordinary citizen but as, <em>ab ovo</em>, a Jew. After which, measures are adopted. Of no other people can this be said. And this is why the Jewish people cannot afford the luxury of historical amnesia, self-betrayal or the hallucination of ultimate security, but must remain vigilant, conscious and always prepared for the resurgence of the plague.</p>
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		<title>Meet Anthony Weiner, the Dem Attacking Glenn Beck</title>
		<link>http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2463&#038;utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=meet-anthony-weiner-the-dem-attacking-glenn-beck</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 25 May 2010 13:00:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Discover The Networks]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[DTN Profiles]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[In February of this year, New York Democrat Anthony Weiner said, from the House floor: “Make no mistake about it. Every single Republican I have ever met in my entire life is a wholly owned subsidiary of the insurance industry.” In March, Weiner launched an assault against “right-wing” media, accusing them of having disseminated &#8220;an enormous amount of [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Weiner.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-61001" title="*Apr 14 - 00:05*" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Weiner.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="342" /></a></p>
<p>In February of this year, New York Democrat Anthony Weiner said, from the House floor: “Make no mistake about it. Every single Republican I have ever met in my entire life is a wholly owned subsidiary of the insurance industry.” In March, Weiner launched an <a href="http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2010/03/03/congressman-calls-fox-friends-liars-odonnell-thanks-him">assault</a> against “right-wing” media, accusing them of having disseminated &#8220;an enormous amount of disinformation&#8221; about the recently passed health-care legislation. Now he is accusing talk show host Glenn Beck of misleading his viewers into buying over-priced gold coins from a sponsor. This is the same Anthony Weiner who was once fined $47,000 for election-law violations.</p>
<p><strong><a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2463">To view the complete Anthony Weiner profile, click here.</a></strong></p>
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		<title>Ignoring Calls for Holocaust</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/david-swindle/ignoring-calls-for-holocaust/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=ignoring-calls-for-holocaust</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 24 May 2010 04:01:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Swindle]]></dc:creator>
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		<category><![CDATA[America]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[The Left's deafening silence on our modern-day Kristallnacht.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/islam_holocaust.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-60955" title="islam_holocaust" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/islam_holocaust-189x300.gif" alt="" width="189" height="300" /></a></p>
<p><em><a href="http://www.newsrealblog.com/">Visit NewsReal Blog</a></em></p>
<p>Remember in <a href="http://www.newsrealblog.com/2010/05/19/a-new-video-from-horowitzs-uc-san-diego-speech-this-ones-funnier/" target="_blank">our most recent video from UCSD</a> when David Horowitz  said to the cleverer-than-thou college communist, “Enough. Enough. It’s boring. You’re boring”? That sentiment keeps repeating in my head these days.</p>
<p>Socialist journalist Chris Hedges writing at <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=938" target="_blank">New Left Marxist</a> <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=938" target="_blank">Robert Scheer’</a>s online magazine <a href="http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/bp_and_the_little_eichmanns_20100517/" target="_blank"><em>Truth Dig</em></a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>The oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico, estimated to be perhaps as much as 100,000 barrels a day, is part of our foolish death march. It is one more blow delivered by the corporate state, the trade of life for gold. But this time collapse, when it comes, will not be confined to the geography of a decayed civilization. It will be global.</p>
<p>Those who carry out this global genocide—men like BP’s Chief Executive Tony Hayward, who assures us that “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume’’—are, to steal a line from <a href="http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0201-05.htm">Ward Churchill</a>, “little Eichmanns.” They serve Thanatos, the forces of death, the dark instinct Sigmund Freud identified within human beings that propels us to annihilate all living things, including ourselves. These deformed individuals lack the capacity for empathy. They are at once banal and dangerous. They possess the peculiar ability to organize vast, destructive bureaucracies and yet remain blind to the ramifications. The death they dispense, whether in the pollutants and carcinogens that have made cancer an epidemic, the dead zone rapidly being created in the Gulf of Mexico, the melting polar ice caps or the deaths last year of 45,000 Americans who could not afford proper medical care, is part of the cold and rational exchange of life for money.</p></blockquote>
<p>I’ve confronted many of my “progressive” friends with <a href="http://www.newsrealblog.com/2010/05/11/for-it-msa-student-confesses-she-wants-a-second-holocaust/" target="_blank">the video of Jumanah “Genocide Girl” Albahri</a> and <a href="http://www.newsrealblog.com/2010/05/14/albahri-just-icebergs-tip-campus-campaign-for-a-second-holocaust-is-national/" target="_blank">the Palestinian Nazi assault</a> to destroy Israel that it represents. The answer I get back from them is some variant of: <em>well this is bad but there are plenty of extremists out there.</em> Then they start talking about abortion clinic bombers, anti-gay cult leader (and registered Democrat) Fred Phelps, and violence in the Old Testament.</p>
<p>Next they start berating me for not focusing more on the “fat cats” on Wall Street and the horrific things that the super rich are allegedly doing to America. I ask them to tell me which books they’ve read on the economic crisis that I need to read too so I can become as enlightened as them. And they have no recommendations because all they’ve actually done is imbibed the articles of neo-communists like Hedges, Scheer, and their MSNBC representatives.</p>
<p>And… I… am… so… bored…</p>
<p>We are defined by who we choose to make our enemies. It’s a simple question that ultimately defines who we are politically: what is the single most dangerous threat today?</p>
<p>To leftists the answer is white collar criminals on Wall Street, corporations who accidentally pollute the planet, and anyone who stands in the way of universal healthcare (in other words, conservatives and Tea Partiers.) These are the Nazis, the “Little Eichmanns.” And what the neo-communist Left and the more moderate, “liberal Left” share is that both fundamentally agree on this point. The only difference is the methods each faction utilizes.</p>
<p>Genuine conservatives committed to the survival of free societies have a different answer to the question: those who are self-confessed Nazis, who display the Swastika, lionize Hitler, and are quite frank in their desire to enslave the world under the yoke of Sharia law.</p>
<p>And my progressive friends — who have not studied history or Islam since they’re so busy chronicling the excesses of capitalism — will then ask why.</p>
<p>And I’ll answer by conceding a point to them: the West certainly is like ancient Rome. If you want to call us an “empire,” fine. But remember why the Roman empire actually fell, who was responsible for it, and what Western civilization endured as a result. Barbarian hordes — who were far less advanced — sacked Rome and plunged Europe into centuries of darkness.</p>
<p>If we are Rome then Islamofascism is the barbarian at the gate. And just because we are more advanced technologically it’s no reason to think we are invincible. History clearly demonstrates otherwise. Brains will not save us. As the great Howard Bloom wrote in his must-read first book <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0871136643?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0871136643" target="_blank">The Lucifer Principle</a></em>,</p>
<blockquote><p><a href="http://howardbloom.net/islam.htm" target="_blank">Never forget the pecking order’s surprises. Today’s superpower is tomorrow’s conquered state. Yesterday’s overlooked mob is often the ruler of tomorrow. Never underestimate the third world. Never be complacent about barbarians.</a></p></blockquote>
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		<title>Judicial Power Grabs</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/thomas-sowell/judicial-power-grabs/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=judicial-power-grabs</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/thomas-sowell/judicial-power-grabs/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 24 May 2010 04:00:53 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[When Supreme Court justices aren't satisfied with their role.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/stevensjpg-ae647e7e8979c03c_large.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-60953" title="stevensjpg-ae647e7e8979c03c_large" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/stevensjpg-ae647e7e8979c03c_large-272x300.gif" alt="" width="272" height="300" /></a></p>
<p>You might think that being a Supreme Court justice would be the top of the line job for someone in the legal profession. But, many Supreme Court decisions suggest that too many justices are not satisfied with their role, and seek more sweeping powers as supreme policy-makers, grand second-guessers or philosopher-kings.</p>
<p>The latest example of this is the recent Supreme Court decision in the case of Graham versus Florida. The issue was whether the Constitution permitted a state to impose a sentence of life without the possibility of parole when the criminal was a youthful offender. The Supreme Court voted 6 to 3 that this was a violation of the Constitution.</p>
<p>If your copy of the Constitution doesn&#8217;t say anything about youthful offenders, do not worry that you have a defective copy. There is no such statement in the Constitution. What the justices cited as the alleged basis for their decision was the Eighth Amendment&#8217;s prohibition against &#8220;cruel and unusual punishments.&#8221;</p>
<p>Since 37 out of the 50 states permit sentences of life without the possibility of parole, such a sentence is not unusual. How about cruel? If it is cruel, then why is it OK to impose that sentence on people who are not youthful?</p>
<p>The case of Graham versus Florida involved a 16-year-old repeat offender, who was convicted of a home invasion robbery while on probation from a previous felony. He was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. The Supreme Court then over-ruled that decision.</p>
<p>The role of an appellate court is not to simply second-guess the decision of the trial judge and jury, much less usurp the responsibility of legislatures to make social policy. But the pretense of applying the Constitution gives appellate judges the power to do both.</p>
<p>The bolder justices go further, citing practices in other countries as supporting their decisions that are supposedly based on the Constitution of the United States. If justices can pick and choose which legal principles and practices they will follow, from the many widely varying principles and practices in countries around the world, then they can find a basis for doing just about anything they feel like doing.</p>
<p>This too goes counter to the very basis of American government, as a system in which &#8220;We the people&#8221; ultimately govern ourselves through representatives of our own choosing and the officials appointed by them.</p>
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<p>Once appellate judges are free to base their rulings on what people do in India, Egypt or Germany, Americans are no longer a self-governing people.</p>
<p>As if to add a touch of farce to lighten the tragedy of the dismantling of the Constitution, Supreme Court justices on opposing sides of the case of Graham versus Florida cited statistics seeking to show that there was national consensus for or against life sentences without the possibility of parole.</p>
<p>Appellate courts, including the Supreme Court, are not institutions equipped to make policy judgments like that. Legislatures exist to make policy judgments— and to be voted out of office if these policy judgments turn out to produce results that the electorate do not want. But there are no such corrective mechanisms in place if Supreme Court justices misjudge.</p>
<p>Finally, there is the old, moth-eaten argument cited by Justice John Paul Stevens, that the society is evolving and therefore the interpretation of the Constitution must evolve with it.</p>
<p>Nobody— from the moment that the Constitution was adopted in the 18th century to the present— has ever denied that societies evolve, and that their laws must evolve to meet changing circumstances. But, unless Justice Stevens is either stupid or dishonest, he cannot leap from a need for laws to change to the conclusion that it is judges who must be the ones to make those changes.</p>
<p>Just saying the magic word &#8220;change&#8221; does not justify judges grabbing the power to make whatever changes they please in the law. There are, after all, two other branches of the federal government, specifically charged with legislative and executive responsibilities and powers, not to mention the Constitutional Amendment process.</p>
<p><em>Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His Web site is www.tsowell.com.</em></p>
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		<title>The Meaning of Miss Muslim USA</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/christine-williams/the-meaning-of-miss-muslim-usa/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-meaning-of-miss-muslim-usa</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/christine-williams/the-meaning-of-miss-muslim-usa/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 20 May 2010 04:03:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Christine Williams]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[How much does the Left care about what would happen to Rima Fakih under Sharia Law? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/miss-usa-bikini-rima-fakih.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-60675" title="miss-usa-bikini-rima-fakih" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/miss-usa-bikini-rima-fakih.gif" alt="" width="375" height="457" /></a></p>
<p>The explosion in the blogosphere about the crowning of a Muslim Miss USA comes at a time when Americans have been tested to the limit, at least for the many patriots who recognize the threats to the American way of life since the declaration of the War on Terror.</p>
<p>Some pressing issues: Questions about <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1511" target="_new">Barack Obama</a>’s Muslim sympathies are still unresolved, complicated by his pitiful bowing to American enemies and plans to build a mosque on ground zero, a site of grief and trauma for New Yorkers and fellow empathizers.  So now with the crowning of a Muslim Miss America, it should come as no surprise that questions will be raised.   Rima Fakih has become more than a beauty queen.  She has become the battle ground between those critical of her crown (branded as racists) and politically correct appeasers.</p>
<p>From the moment he took office, Obama’s posture has served to divide America, racially and otherwise:  he took to insulting long-standing American allies while apologizing for America’s sins among the country’s worst enemies.  Obama snubbed British Prime Minister Gordon Brown on a visit to the White House right after he took office.  More recently his deplorable treatment of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has left Israel aghast.  Then there was his reading of the <em>riot act</em> to Afghanistan President<em> Hamid Karzai, </em>and his promise to unveil a detailed strategy on nuclear nonproliferation in the middle of a War on Terror. To top it off, the Obama administration’s support for illegal immigration at the expense of hard-working American citizens and <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/apr/16/obama-bowing-to-the-world/">the president bowing to foreign tyrants</a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>President Obama has disgraced the United States – again. During this week’s nuclear summit in Washington, he bowed when greeting Chinese President Hu Jintao.</p>
<p>The act was not only shocking but revealing. Mr. Obama has come under intense criticism for bowing to leaders in the past – the king of Saudi Arabia, the emperor of Japan. But never before has America’s commander in chief prostrated himself to a foreign tyrant on U.S. soil.</p>
<p>By bowing, Mr. Obama degraded and cheapened the office of the presidency; as commander in chief, he represents every American when meeting with other heads of state. He is supposed to embody the dignity of the Oval Office, reflecting our collective heritage as a self-governing, constitutional republic.</p></blockquote>
<p>Sadly, the crowning of Rima Fakih as Miss America comes at a bad time and has raised questions among the political Right.  Among them, conservative scholar <em>Daniel Pipes</em> who asserted in his blog that this and five other recent Muslim beauty pageant winners in the West indicate “<a href="http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2010/05/affirmative-action-in-beauty-contests">an odd form of affirmative action</a>.”<strong></strong></p>
<p>For even posing this question, <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/abraham/detail?blogid=95&amp;entry_id=63819">Pipes was branded a racist</a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>That rate of wins is enough to send Daniel Pipes to the moon. This is a perfect example of how some people are brainwashed to think one person who’s white and female should be a beauty standard, and someone of color like Rima Fakih could only win a contest due to affirmative action. His view is so sick it makes me sick.</p></blockquote>
<p>And let’s not forget, this not the first time that politics has run rough shod over the Miss USA pageant.  Carrie Prejean—despite the scandal surrounding her that followed—faced a grilling by openly gay blogger Perez Hilton about her conservative views regarding gay marriage.  Did the left come to her rescue?  No, she was then <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,517137,00.html">taken to the woodshed</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p><strong>Keith Lewis</strong>, who runs the Miss California competition, tells FOXNews.com that he was “saddened” by Prejean’s statement. Associated Press.</p></blockquote>
<p>So could it be true that Rima Fakih’s win represented affirmative action in action?  She is undeniably beautiful and the countdown of any beauty pageant is a close one, so who could prove either way?  At least we can still entertain discourse in our superior way of life:  democracy.</p>
<p>There is a win-win to this for all those who support freedom:  <a href="http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2010/05/rima-fakih-is-first-muslim-miss-usa.html" target="_blank">Rima Fakih is an icon of a liberated Muslim.</a> She would be brutally murdered under strict Shariah law—yes under those inferior cultures—for not wearing a head covering, let alone baring skin for a swimsuit competition.  Leftists can meditate on that as they contemplate how to berate America &#8212; and make excuses for Islamic gender apartheid &#8212; the next time around.</p>
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		<title>Among Criminal Muslims</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jamie-glazov/among-criminal-muslims/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=among-criminal-muslims</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jamie-glazov/among-criminal-muslims/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 05 May 2010 04:30:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jamie Glazov]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[A Danish psychologist who worked with young Muslims in a Copenhagen jail gives a harrowing warning to the West.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/muslim.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-59593" title="muslim" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/muslim.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="250" /></a></p>
<p>Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Nicolai Sennels<strong>,</strong> a Danish psychologist who worked for several years with young criminal Muslims in a Copenhagen prison. He is the author of <em>Among Criminal Muslims. A Psychologist&#8217;s Experience from the </em><em>Copenhagen</em> <em>Municipality</em>. The book will be out in English later this year. He can be contact at: <a href="mailto:nicolaisennels@gmail.com" target="_blank">nicolaisennels@gmail.com.</a></p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Nicolai Sennels, welcome to Frontpage Interview.</p>
<p>I would like to talk to you today about your experience working with young criminal Muslims in a Copenhagen prison. Let’s begin by talking about how you got into your line of work.</p>
<p><strong>Sennels: </strong>Thank Jamie.<strong> </strong></p>
<p>Well., many people think that I took the prison job because I wanted to get a closer look at Muslim mentality, failed integration and Islam. But I did not. I was just looking for a job and having worked as a social worker taking care of teenagers for several years part time while studying at Copenhagen University to become a psychologist, it was natural for me to apply for a job involving juvenile offenders. I had no idea that seven out of ten teenagers in the average Danish youth prisons have a Muslim background. Since I was the first psychologist at the institution I was very free to develop my position as psychologist.</p>
<p>The main job was to find out the young peoples&#8217; pedagogical and therapeutic needs and develop therapeutic methods fitted for those needs. And this I did and this is what my book is about. The unusual thing about my work is that I found out that my Muslim clients had certain psychological characteristics that my non-Muslim &#8211; mostly Danish &#8211; clients did not have. They were all between 15 and 17 years old, most of them showed antisocial behaviour and a big part of both groups came from homes with a certain lack of emotional support. I guess nine out of  ten were boys and though the main part came from less well functioning homes I also had many Muslim and Danish clients who&#8217;s parents and elder siblings were well educated, had normal jobs and so on.</p>
<p>I worked in the prison for a bit less than three years and had around 150 Muslim clients and 100 Danish clients. I conducted group therapies and individual therapies and with such a large amount of both Muslim and non-Muslim clients I had a relatively large background material for understanding and comparing their psychological development and the underlying conditions influencing this development. Normal &#8220;real&#8221; research projects of this kind &#8211; consisting of long and several qualitative interviews &#8211; most often only have 20-30 subjects as background material.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Ok, so some of your conclusions?</p>
<p><strong>Sennels: </strong>Well, one significant<strong> </strong>conclusion was that having been raised in a Muslim environment &#8211; with Muslim parents and traditions &#8211; includes the risk of developing certain antisocial patterns.</p>
<p>About two thirds of all teenagers accused for criminal actions in Copenhagen have a Muslim background. For years the explanation for this phenomenon has been that Muslims are discriminated against by Danish employers and are thus unable to find a job. The consequence is that Muslims are poor &#8211; and this poverty then gets the blame for the high crime rate among young Muslim men.</p>
<p>As a humanist and psychologist I have to expose and oppose this faulty explanation. Explaining psychological development and complicated human mental and behavioural patterns by pointing on the amount of kroner, Euros or dollars rolling in to a person’s bank account every first bank day of the month is a very materialistic and two-dimensional view on the human being. What is first of all deciding our actions is our own free will and motivation &#8211; which are first of all influenced by the emotional, cultural and in some cases religious frame that we grew up in.</p>
<p>It is easy to establish a statistical connection between poverty and criminal behaviour &#8211; but what comes first? I saw a lot of young teenagers sowing the seeds for their own future unemployment by not going to school, staining their criminal records and developing unattractive social habits such as aggressiveness, insecurity and lack of respect for authorities.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Did you find any real<strong> </strong>differences between Muslims coming from different parts of the Muslim world?</p>
<p><strong>Sennels: </strong>My experience from working with Muslims is that the culture developed under Islamic influence supports the development of certain psychological characteristics. I had Muslim clients from most of the Muslim world: most of the Middle East, Muslim countries in Africa, Pakistan and ex-Yugoslavia. I did not register any major differences between the mentalities between these countries. The only real importance deciding the impact of Muslim mentality was whether the client himself identified himself strongly as belonging to the Muslim society or not. There was a quantitative difference from the often less Islamic Muslims from e.g. ex-Yugoslavia and the clients from the Middle East who mostly identified themselves strongly as being Muslims.</p>
<p>By far the most of my 150 Muslim clients expressed strong loyalty to their God, Allah,  and their prophet but less than half was actively practising Islam by doing their prayers, Quran studies etc. But there did not seem to be any difference between the actively practising group and the group that could be called loyal but passive believers. Seen from the therapy room, the mentality stemming from Islamic influence on the societies where it is the dominating value system is so strongly rooted in the culture that Muslims are influenced by its dogmas and values no matter if they pray five times a day and can recite the Quran or not.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Draw for us a psychological profile of Muslim culture. How does it shape a human being&#8217;s mind and behaviour to grow up in such a culture?</p>
<p><strong>Sennels: </strong>The most important characteristics that I found concerns aggression, self-confidence, individual responsibility and identity.</p>
<p>Concerning anger, it quickly becomes clear that Muslims in general have a different view on aggression, anger and threatening behaviour than Danes and probably most of our Western world.</p>
<p>For most Westerners, it is an embarrassing sign of weakness if people become angry. This view on anger is probably consolidated already in early childhood. I have been working as a school psychologist for several years and bullying is a continuous problem at the schools that I work in. The interesting thing is that the children who are most likely to be the target of being bullied are the children that get angry the easiest. If people get angry we have a tendency to lose respect for them and in many cases we try to tease them to provoke them even more &#8211; with the pedagogical aim of helping the person to realize the childishness of his or her behaviour. Trying to get one&#8217;s will by acting aggressively or using threats is seen as immature and our reaction is often to ridicule or simply ignore them. Thus, the shortest way to lose face in our Western culture is to show anger.</p>
<p>It is completely opposite in the Muslim culture. While most of my Danish clients who had problems with anger felt embarrassed about it, none of my Muslim clients ever seemed to understand our view on anger. I spent countless hours doing Anger Management therapy with both Danish and Muslim clients and hence I had very good opportunities to experience the cultural differences concerning this specific emotion, ways of handling it and reacting to it.</p>
<p>In Muslim culture, it is expected that one should show anger and threatening behaviour if one is criticized or teased. If a Muslim does not react aggressively when criticized he is seen as weak, not worth trusting and he thus loses social status immediately.</p>
<p>This cocktail of cultural differences has sparked the ongoing debate on free speech all over the world. The free world&#8217;s criticism and jokes about Islam is met with anger and threats of terror. When a Danish cartoonist shows the Muslims&#8217; prophet with a bomb in his turban to illustrate the fact that Mohammed conducted dozens of massacres and called for global violent jihad against non-Muslims, the reaction of Muslim leaders and their followers was exactly to confirm Westergaard’s drawing: They responded with jihad on all possible levels &#8211; threats of genocide, terror, economical boycott, lawsuits and using democratic systems in our countries, EU and the UN to challenge and destroy our laws on free speech.</p>
<p>The wisdom and bravery of any child in any school yard to people using aggression to hide their own insecurity because of a simple drawing would lead to more jokes and logic as a mean to pedagogically point out obvious human weaknesses. Unfortunately most of our politicians are not as wise and brave as the average school child.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Expand a bit on the differences between Muslim and Western cultures in terms of self-confidence.</p>
<p><strong>Sennels:</strong> The concept of honor in the Muslim culture is &#8211; just like in the case with anger &#8211; opposite of our Western view. It is common in the Muslim culture to be exceedingly aware of one&#8217;s status in the group, other peoples&#8217; view of oneself and any signs of any kind of criticism. The aggressive response to anything that can make one insecure is seen as an expression of honorable behaviour. But what is honorable about that? What kind of honor needs to be defended by all means necessary &#8211; including the abolishment of women&#8217;s human rights, such as the right to pick their own sexual partners, clothes, husband and life style? What is honorable about anger and the lack of ability to ignore provocations and handle criticism constructively?</p>
<p>After listening to more than a hundred Muslim teenagers telling their stories about their feelings, thoughts, reactions, families, religion, culture, the life in their Muslim ghettos and their home countries, it became clear to me that to a Muslim such behavior is the very core of keeping one&#8217;s honor. But seen through the eyes of Western psychology, it is all an expression of a lack of self-confidence. According to our view, the base of being authentic and honorable is to know one&#8217;s strengths and weakness &#8211; and accepting them. The ability to think &#8220;your opinion about me, not mine &#8211; and mine counts to me&#8221; when provoked and being mature enough to handle criticism constructively is a source of social status in the Western world.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, the Muslim concept of honor transforms especially their men into fragile glass-like personalities that need to protect themselves by scaring their surroundings with their aggressive attitude. The show of so-called narcissistic rage is very common among Muslims. The fear of criticism is in many cases not far from paranoia. It is not without reason that self-irony and self-criticism is completely absent in the Muslim societies. Seen from a psychological perspective &#8211; whose aim is to produce self-confident, happy, free, loving and productive individuals; and not to please a hateful God or culture traditions &#8211; Muslim culture is in many ways psychologically unhealthy to grow up in.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Ok and how does individual responsibility fit into all of this?</p>
<p><strong>Sennels:</strong> To discuss individual responsibility, I need to first introduce the readers to the psychological term &#8220;locus of control.&#8221; Locus of control concerns if people see their life mainly influenced by inner or outer factors. In our Western culture, we see inner factors as more important than outer ones. Our point of view, our way of handling our emotions, our way of thinking, our way of reflecting, our way of reacting is all seen as ways that we decide our own lives. We may not always be aware of the way we think etc. and a whole industry has appeared because of that fact. Indeed, psychologists, therapists, psychiatrists, coaches plus countless self-help books and magazines are overflowing in our societies and are all aiming at helping us to become aware of how we decide our own lives.</p>
<p>None of these things exists in the Muslim world. The few psychiatrists they have are often educated in the West and whatever psychology and pedagogy that exists in Muslim countries does not have root in the Muslim culture but are ideas imported from the West.</p>
<p>Thus, when a Westerner experiences problems he asks himself: &#8220;What can I change in myself/my life to become happier?” This mentality showed it self clearly among my Danish clients. It was deeply rooted in them that talking about oneself can be a way of finding better ways of handling one&#8217;s own life. When having Muslim clients on my couch it was in most cases like having someone from another planet visiting me. Under normal conditions, Westerners and Muslims can communicate relatively easy &#8211; as long as it does not involve criticism. But in a setting where the whole concept is centred about that the Muslim client has to talk about his own feelings and thoughts because the psychologist thinks that it will help him to become more happy and able to live constructively, the &#8220;chain falls of the bike&#8221; as we say in Denmark. They shake their heads: in which way can they become happier if they expose the weaknesses that they have been taught since birth to hide in order to retain their honor? No way, José. I finally managed to develop a therapeutic method that to a certain extent could address these cultural difficulties, but therapy and Muslim mentality will probably never become real friends.</p>
<p>An important aspect of this difference concerning locus of control is that people who see their own lives mainly guided by outer factors &#8211; a fearsome God, a powerful father, influential imams, ancient but strong cultural traditions &#8211; very easily develop a victim mentality. It is thus not without reason that conspiracies and blaming the non-Muslims are so central in Muslim leaders’ rhetoric and politics. This victim mentality also dominates the mentality of Muslim immigrants, who often have a long row of demands for economic support and Islamization of our societies to satisfy their personal needs.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Well it becomes pretty obvious why Muslims cannot integrate into our Western society. Crystallize the reasons for us.</p>
<p><strong>Sennels:</strong> My experience is that you need three things to be able to integrate. You need to want it, you need to be allowed and you need to have the surplus. Very few Muslim immigrants fulfil these three criteria.</p>
<p>First we have to ask ourselves: why should Muslim immigrants want to integrate? They can live their culture, receive enough money, and have a full functioning social life with their Muslim friends without even learning our language &#8212; <em>or even working</em>. There is not really anything that makes it necessary to integrate. Of course there exist immigrant Muslims who want to adapt to the lifestyle and mentality in their new country but they are very few. In France <a href="http://www.lefigaro.fr/flash-actu/2008/10/29/01011-20081029FILWWW00603-l-islam-de-france-bien-integre-sondage.php">only 14 percent</a> of the millions of Muslim immigrants see themselves as &#8220;more French than Muslim.&#8221;  In Germany <a href="http://europenews.dk/files/BMIStudy.pdfhttp:/europenews.dk/files/BMIStudy.pdf">only 12 percent</a> of Muslims identify themselves as more German than Muslim.</p>
<p>A survey in Denmark showed that <a href="http://jp.dk/indland/krimi/article1424845.ece">only 14 percent</a> of the Muslims living here can identify themselves as being Danish and democratic minded. My experience from my Muslim clients is that they do not see their Muslim identity as compatible with leading a Western life style. Being a Muslim also means that you see yourself as very different and actually as a better person than non-Muslims. This mentality easily leads to apartheid and racism. This is probably the reason that even though Muslim immigrants are more than five times as violent as ethnic Danes &#8211; according to crime statistics <a href="http://jp.dk/indland/krimi/article1424845.ece">- three out of four victims of violence are Danish.</a></p>
<p>The second criteria &#8211; being allowed to integrate &#8211; is also not very common. There is an exceedingly strong social control in the Muslim society. Everybody is keeping an eye on everybody and if someone does not follow the cultural or religious codex they are met with strong criticism and risk to be excluded from their society &#8211; often even from their own family. In worst case &#8211; and there are many of those &#8211; especially Muslim women live under a constant death threat that keeps them from entering our Western life style that includes such human rights as to pick one&#8217;s own sexual partners, clothing style, friends, religion and life style overall. Most of my Muslim clients saw their religious and cultural background as the height of civilization and morality &#8211; leaving it would be seen as a kind of cultural and religious apostasy by their kinsmen. Such acts often have severe consequences in not only gangs like Hells Angels and other tribal communities but also &#8211; and especially &#8211; among Muslims.</p>
<p>Finally, it takes a lot of personal surplus to integrate into another culture. It involves changing a part of one&#8217;s identity from belonging to one group into belonging to a group with completely other cultural values and traditions. It is not just like changing a bad habit such as quitting smoking &#8211; integration goes much deeper concerning the individual&#8217;s psychology. I met a few Muslim girls who as part of Western inspired teenage rebelling wanted to integrate and did not care that they were not allowed. Those girls did not posses the personal surplus and ended up in complete identity crises, going too wild, doing drugs and having random sex with all kinds of strange men etc.</p>
<p>For these reasons I am completely convinced that Muslim integration will never happen to the necessary extent.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>What is your view of the future of Europe in terms of the skyrocketing Muslim population?</p>
<p><strong>Sennels: </strong>We are in the historical embarrassing situation that we have invited millions of people to our continent that do not want to integrate and are also not able to. Since the integration of Muslims will never happen &#8211; a fact I think that has already been proven years ago &#8211; we will end up with a significant part of our population that are actively working to Islamize our societies. There exist both Muslims and non-Muslims that see this Islamization as Islamic jihad &#8211; but it is more than that: it is human nature. People who do not feel at home where they live will naturally strive to change their surroundings. Muslims attempts to Islamize our societies have just begun &#8212; as they are feeling stronger and stronger in power and numbers. This process is pushed forward by Muslim leaders inside and outside Europe and helped on its way by a kind of collective cowardice called Political Correctness.</p>
<p>The World Economic Forum published a huge survey in 12 Muslim and 12 non-Muslim countries in their report &#8220;Islam and the West: Annual Report on the State of Dialogue, January 2008.&#8221; The report in general shows a great amount of distrust between the two groups of countries and discloses strong feelings of enmity. The last question in the survey is: &#8220;Do you think violent conflict between the Muslim and Western worlds can be avoided or not?&#8221; The report shows that a majority of the populations in all 24 countries believed that such a conflict <em>can</em> be avoided. But at the same time a majority of the 22 countries think that &#8220;the interaction between the Muslim and Western world is getting worse.&#8221; The majority of people still haven&#8217;t lost their hope but at the same time a majority see this hope getting smaller and smaller.</p>
<p>As Muslim immigrants push for Islamization and the original Europeans increasingly feel being exploited and threatened by growing and still more violent Muslim communities, a continent wide civil war might become unavoidable. We are already on our way to get our own European Islamic Gaza Stripes where non-Islamic authorities are met with flying stones and angry crowds while Islamic authorities such as imams, groups of elderly men and home made Sharia courts, are free to exercise their power. Such developments are very alarming and should be confronted with large amounts of police, strict laws, and cuts on economic support for families having more children than the country&#8217;s average and demands that Muslim organizations and leaders reform their version of Islam.</p>
<p>My guess is we will see more dead police men and kidnappings as a mean to negotiate the release of imprisoned Muslim religious or gang leaders, terror bombs, economical and practical support from Muslim countries to Muslim communities here in the West. Economic and police resources are already being drained by the many consequences of Muslim immigration and the need for profound reforming of our welfare system and for involving the army is inevitable in the long run. The feeling of safety and social coherence is already long gone in many parts in hundreds of European cities as a result of Muslims&#8217; antisocial behaviour and enmity towards non-Muslims.</p>
<p>As I see it, the greatest danger is that the common European will fall into strong negative feelings and that the population and our authorities will feel pressed to compromise our own humanistic values in order to overcome the catastrophe. The sooner we handle the problems the greater the chance is that we can keep our important and unique human values.<strong></strong></p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>It’s all pretty depressing what political correctness and the Left has achieved in engendering and overseeing<strong> </strong>this Muslim<strong> </strong>infiltration of our society. The Left wanted to destroy its host society and it shrewdly figured out how to do so through the weapon of “multiculturalism.” Talk a bit about where this might not all be hopeless, how those of us who care about or society’s values can fight back. What can we do to avoid the surrender that the West is engaged in as we speak?</p>
<p><strong>Sennels: </strong>Well Jamie, first let me stress that our “surrender” so to speak would not be enough. Only mass conversion would satisfy the rules of the Quran and its preachers. And even though Muslim leaders continuously claim that the only way to ensure global peace and morality is for all of mankind to become followers of their prophet, I am not so sure: Muslim countries are definitely less peaceful and morality concerning free speech, human rights and respect for human life is clearly less existent under Islamic rule than anywhere else.</p>
<p>Besides my suggestions mentioned above, the Western world has to put a complete halt to Muslim immigration and non-Western immigrants who did not already receive a citizenship. They should either fulfil a long row of criteria concerning integration or leave the country. Permanent citizenships to Muslim refugees should not be possible. I would like to mention that the average price for having an asylum seeker living in Denmark is 33.000 Euros (45.000 US dollars) a year. <a href="http://kulturkloeften.dk.linux11.unoeuro.com/2009/09/29/asylprisen-en-gennemsnitlig-asylans%25C3%25B8ger-koster-det-danske-samfund-ca-250-000-kr-om-aret/">According to UNHCR</a> the price for helping a refugee in a refugee camp close to his own country is 33 Euros (45 US dollars).</p>
<p>We should in general make it so unpleasant and the economic disadvantage so big that the consequences of non-integration would motivate resident Muslims to emigrate &#8211; preferably to a Muslim country where they can live in a culture where they already know the language, culture and religion and do not live under the pressure to integrate and do not feel stigmatized by anti-immigration organisations and Islam critics.</p>
<p>Responsible lovers and protectors of our Western culture should make an effort to write letters to the editors, and internet bloggers have to make sure that the information that our main stream medias consciously avoid to publish gets known. We need to create a UN exclusively for democratic countries and the EU&#8217;s power to force immigration onto its member states should be taken away. Oil should only be used for transport, while heating should be replaced by green energy and nuclear power &#8211; to avoid dependency on Arab oil.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Nicolai Sennels, thank you for joining us. You have shared some dark realities and warnings with us. I pray the West will eventually gain the will and capacity to defend itself.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><strong><em>Editor’s note: To get the whole story behind why the Left aids and abets the Muslim infiltration of the West, get Jamie Glazov’s new book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/United-Hate-Romance-Tyranny-Terror/dp/1935071602/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1239336437&amp;sr=1-1">United in Hate: The Left’s Romance With Tyranny and Terror</a>.</em></strong></p>
<p><strong><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/united.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-59616" title="united" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/united.jpg" alt="" width="350" height="515" /></a><br />
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		<title>Rejecting the Left</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jamie-glazov/rejecting-the-left/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=rejecting-the-left</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jamie-glazov/rejecting-the-left/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 27 Apr 2010 04:03:38 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jamie Glazov]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[The first visible minority national talk show host in Canada turns her back on the progressive faith.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Christine-Williams.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-58866" title="Christine Williams" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Christine-Williams.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="356" /></a></p>
<p>Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Christine Williams, the Producer and Host of the Canadian National Talk show <em>On the Line</em> on CTS TV, which has been recipient of 6 International Awards. A past news reporter, covering mostly crime and political assignments, Christine is also a regular<strong> </strong>National Columnist with Metro News and has participated in a Frontpage Symposium, <a href="http://97.74.65.51/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=33886" target="_blank">Homegrown Jihadis</a>. She studied Broadcast Journalism and then Graduated in Research Psychology from McMaster University.  She is also the first visible minority national talk show host in Canada. She can be reached at <a href="mailto:ChristineBWilliams23@gmail.com" target="_blank">ChristineBWilliams23@gmail.com.</a></p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Christine Williams, thank you for joining us.</p>
<p>It is a real honor for me to speak with you. Congratulations on the tremendous success of your show in Canada.</p>
<p>I would like to talk to you today about your own personal intellectual journey and how you came to see the lie of the progressive faith.</p>
<p>Let’s begin with your background. Tell us a bit about your parents, where you are from and your life as a new immigrant in Canada. Comment on the foundations you think this set for your eventual political discoveries.</p>
<p><strong>Williams:</strong> Thanks Jamie, good to be here again.</p>
<p>My parents immigrated to Canada from Trinidad when I was 5.  They were teachers who struggled to adapt as new immigrants. They both earned their Masters Degrees and placed a high value on formal education. I was the tiny, belligerent, and inquisitive kid who couldn’t sit still in class and asked a lot of questions. I did this in company sometimes, which was, on occasion, embarrassing to my parents.</p>
<p>As a visible minority in the divergent city of Hamilton, Ontario, I faced bullying in school. My dad was a tough gym teacher and taught me self-defense so I fought back against the bullies, even the big ones. My mother &#8212; with a proud Chinese heritage &#8212; instilled dignity in me. Socially, they were both submissive with passive personalities. They were apolitical, but loyal Pierre Trudeau supporters during the 60’s era of Liberal glory in Canada.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Tell me a bit about the bullying, your fighting back, and perhaps some lessons you took from the experience.</p>
<p><strong>Williams: </strong>When confronted with a bully, there’s a realistic fear of getting your keister kicked.  Bullies want power and they get it by forcibly conquering their victims especially when they cower. Victims become trophies, usually in front of spectators.  Bullies choose victims they deem to be weaker or unpopular for whatever reason. In my case, I was the ideal choice:  a tiny, visible minority girl in the late 60’s-early 70’s. It’s the amoral, survival of the fittest strategy: me being down meant they were up.  When victims do nothing, they invite other bullies to join in.  Eventually, their self-esteem and dignity get flushed and they become subservient, grovellers in the eyes of their peers. This was against my notion of what dignity meant, even from a young age.  I knew there was a risk in fighting back.  You could lose big time, but I was driven to send a clear message to bullies that I wasn&#8217;t an easy target.</p>
<p>Much of this was an unconscious process, but consistent with my mom&#8217;s value of human dignity. Deep down I was determined to not passively fall under the will of another human being. I’m not advocating violence here, but bullies need to be challenged. That could mean going to authorities.  In an alleyway confrontation, that’s another story: you either run, fight or take a beating.  I fought back and mostly won because of how my dad trained me.  The bullies eventually backed off and I ‘earned’ friends, even as the original unpopular visible minority.</p>
<p>Can we apply some of these lessons to our political environment today? Well let’s put it this way: the radical Left and radical Islam are bullying the West and free people on many realms. We’re not fighting back nearly enough.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Your parents were Trudeau supporters, why didn’t this stick with you in making you a liberal?</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>Williams: </strong>It wasn’t easy to make the break. “Trudeaumania” was catching. Trudeau was a highly intellectual politician and constitutional lawyer with robust charisma.  It was easy to fall under his spell, particularly for me when I observed the heroic stand he took against the FLQ during the October crisis of 1970, and the way he stood up against riotous Quebec Separatists. I was under 10 and still impressed. Trudeau also encouraged immigration from non-European locations, prompting a huge demographic shift in Canada that made him an instant sensation to visible minorities (creating loyal Liberal support to this day).</p>
<p>Now this one, I deplore: Trudeau also had an ambitious social agenda in favor of the welfare state. He fought nuclear proliferation, a stand I started to question in the face of Western enemies.  He socialized with communists which raised red flags and alienated our U.S. neighbors unnecessarily; recall Lawrence Eagleburger notoriously disparaging Trudeau&#8217;s 1982 peace initiative as the &#8220;pot-induced behaviour of an erratic leftist.&#8221;   Decades later, the groundwork set by Trudeau morphed into a destructive set of ideologies, perpetuated by the far Left that I found to be rather unappealing; ideologies that continue to promote individual disempowerment and state empowerment.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Ok, let’s go back a bit again. Tell us as you were growing up how you ran into the Left.</p>
<p><strong>Williams:</strong> Well, growing up I had lots of leftie family members and friends. I saw how some of them made decisions that were extremely detrimental to their own sense of well-being. It was their life, so I didn’t give it much thought. But deep down I internalized that some of these individuals were young and didn’t know how to exercise the power of choice for their own personal development because they didn’t think and didn’t have the tools to encourage their own thinking.</p>
<p>For example: going to parties, finding an instant mate, believing lies, getting knocked up, going on welfare for some time then repeating the cycle.  This is devastating, not only to the moms, but to the offspring born to such an environment. I don’t look down on people who make these mistakes, but I find it sad that such individuals are not taught how to be make choices that would yield fulfillment by furthering their own spiritual and psychological growth. Instead, leftie ideologues are screaming for more handouts and state-funded education for preschoolers. They exonerate these people from individual responsibility. And how about calling out for the responsibility of parents as well?</p>
<p>With the personal experience of raising my own family, returning to school and doing over 15-hundred live interviews, I contemplated what the gift of choice meant and how many people were caught up in a cycle of bad decisions and woeful consequences.</p>
<p>Then I started to notice inconsistencies and hypocrisies in the ideologies of the far left. They were critical of capitalism and the free market, citing economic inequities, yet they could never pinpoint a better alternative.  There was no recognition of the fact that people from oppressive regimes are diving through hoops to immigrate to our free society.  The leftist political elite was especially hypocritical, fattening itself off of the victimization of others, twisting facts and politicizing them for votes. They live a life of luxury off taxpayer dollars of which the lions share comes from the affluent &#8212; that they condemn. After the wine and caviar, they sanctimoniously parade themselves as champions of the poor, encouraging the victim complex and institutionalized learned helplessness through State handouts. Then they gleefully play the far left media like a fiddle, which makes them like the good guys to the public.  Their hidden motto: strengthen the State, weaken the population.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> As a talk show host, what have been some of your personal observations of leftists?</p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/chris1.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-58868" title="chris1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/chris1.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="309" /></a></p>
<p><strong>Williams:</strong> My daily program covers a variety of current day issues, including Political ones where I often put left and right wingers to debate so I have seen the many shades of Leftists over the years.  Some are hard core Leftists, but many of them I have found to be moderate Leftists who are rather pleasant and jovial.  Some even share commonalities with their conservative counterparts, but for many you find a sore point, something that turns them off of Conservatism. For some, it’s guilt for the past sins of their country, yet   even though they condemn our culture, they can’t find one that is more pure, one in which they are better off living in themselves. For others it’s personal guilt, they stereotype a Conservative as the old hat Christian &#8212; the stuffy shirt ominous Freudian super-ego, constantly pointing the finger at some aspect of their life.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> How about the Islamic community?</p>
<p><strong>Williams:</strong> I’ve noticed something peculiar about “moderate” Muslims: they are mostly leftists, yet liberal policies are the very ones steering the country more toward what they escaped under Sharia and what they continue to fight against.  It was moderates who intervened to reverse a plan for Sharia law in Liberal Ontario. Under the old regimes from where moderates came, Religion and State are oppressively intertwined, so when Conservatives even mention the need to protect our Judeo-Christian roots, it triggers a theocratic association and with it an irrational fear of being targeted for discrimination under a racist, Judeo-Christian rule. They don’t get it.  It’s not that anyone wants to preach religion from Parliament or The White House.  It’s about protecting the very freedoms that attracts immigrants here.  Back home they have been historically brainwashed from young about the Great Satan America with her lackeys in Canada, especially the conservatives&#8211; so there’s confusion accentuated by the Leftist illusion about being champions of the oppressed.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Your thoughts on feminism &#8212; leftist style?</p>
<p><strong>Williams:</strong> This one is so ridiculous I can laugh and cry at once. A true feminist cares about the dignity and advancement of women everywhere.  A healthy mind, a healthy soul and a healthy body is what I try to strive for and would like to see other women achieve the same. Personal choice determines outcome and education and awareness influence choice. The problem with radical leftist feminists: they are faux feminists who despise their own femininity; don&#8217;t like to talk about male-female differences, put down other women&#8217;s choices that differ from their own, and couldn&#8217;t care less about the plight of women abroad who don’t even have to right to choose; women who are getting burned alive, acid thrown in their faces, given as child brides, stoned for getting raped, mutilated and murdered to preserve the “honor” of a family.</p>
<p>These faux feminists also fight for a woman&#8217;s right to abortion on demand.  The real question is: whose demand?  Women are often coerced by someone at a very vulnerable time with no rights to informed consent and this is downplayed in our culture. In China, women are actually forced to have abortions with the one child policy.  Where are the radical feminist voices here, to encourage education for the moral, ethical, and economic advancement of women everywhere?</p>
<p>The problem is that most radical feminists need to sort out their own inner rage.  Many of them have their reasons to be angry, but when a cause is driven by resentment instead of genuine caring, nothing good and lasting can be accomplished.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Radical Islam and the Left in the culture war?</p>
<p><strong>Williams:</strong> Canadians are passive when it comes to the culture war and the threat of Islam. A lot of Canadians aren&#8217;t even familiar with the term &#8220;culture war.&#8221; We haven&#8217;t experienced a 9/11 here and since our collective media is very Left, cases highlighting the network of terrorists living in Canada and planning attacks in other countries have been downplayed.</p>
<p>In the case of the &#8220;Toronto 18&#8243; &#8212; with their thwarted plans to bomb the Toronto Stock Exchange along with other profile targets &#8212; this grabbed more attention, but because the plans failed, people continue to go about business as usual and minimize the threat. Canadians in many ways scoff at American efforts because they either don&#8217;t want to or are too scarred to admit this very real threat.</p>
<p>Take my country of origin for example: Trinidad was a model country of a predominantly Christian, Muslim and Hindu population living peaceably together, even celebrating each others’ holy days.  That was until the beginnings of aggressive Islamism in the late 80s. Abu Bakr, the leader of the Jamaat al Muslimeen, a Muslim group in Trinidad, had long-standing links with Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi. Under the leadership of Abu Bakr, the group staged an attempted coup d’état in 1990.  Since then, radical Islam is on the radar in a once very peaceful country.</p>
<p>Through the combined forces of political correctness and multiculturalism &#8212; Canada is now struggling with what reasonable accommodation means as conservative Muslims push for special rights according to their customs: to wear the niqab, have segregated swimming sessions, and even segregated living communities. The most dangerous aspect has been the effort to curb free speech as we saw with the Human Rights Commission shakedowns of Ezra Levant, Mark Steyn and Macleans Magazine.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> What concerns you about multiculturalism in Canada?</p>
<p><strong>Williams:</strong> Multiculturalism is a loophole which threatens our national security and rich heritage. Under the Multicultural Act, all cultures are deemed equal, including those that subjugate women. This clashes with our cultural mores. Yes, we are a country of many cultures, but equality, human rights and democracy are important to us and enshrined in our constitutions. The promotion of multiculturalism and sensitivity toward visible minorities has become a power tool of special interest groups.</p>
<p>Is racism alive and well in our culture?  It certainly is and obviously needs to be fought against.  It is insidious and appears in both subtle and overt forms.  But rather than tackle it directly, some groups have chosen to target free speech instead.  So when Mark Steyn reports about Radical Islam in Macleans Magazine, he and the publication get dragged to the Human Rights Commission because special interest groups cry that the report is promoting racism.  We need to get serious about fighting both racism and Radical Islam, not fighting the truth.  Free speech in the West has been an issue raised repeatedly by the O.I.C as a human rights issue, calling on the U.N. to adopt an International resolution to counter Islamophobia. Islamists wanting to push their global agenda against the &#8216;infidels&#8217; know how to manipulate the multicultural loophole very cleverly. We have to stand up to them and their agenda.</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> You have talked quite a bit about “choice” in this discussion. Free choice is obviously something that matters to you a lot and it is an issue that concerned you, and that you have thought about, since your youth. The radical Left and radical Islam do not allow choice. I think it is no surprise that you never became a leftist or an apologist for Islamism, for this reason (among others). Can you talk a bit about this?</p>
<p><strong>Williams: </strong>Choice is power, period.  It determines what you become.  On a practical level, carefully thought out choices usually produces favorable results.  However, if life deals unexpected blows, you can stand on something intangible, yet deeper: integrity, personal self worth and dignity. You emerge with an honored sense of self that no one can take from you.  For a culture to offer no choice to women,  it is an unconscionable, horrifying amputation of a woman’s human value. How anyone in our culture can undermine this is mystifying. But this is totally what the radical Left and radical Islam support doing.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> What concerns you the most about the radical Left’s alliance with radical Islam and the inroads that unholy alliance is making in our free societies? What do you think is the best thing concerned citizens can do to stand up to what the radical Left and Islamists are trying to perpetrate?</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>Williams: </strong>I see it as being about two things: courting the Muslim vote and lack of knowledge about the various branches of Islam. The radical Left has sucked up to leaders in the Islamic community without screening who they are.  This is actually a derogatory display of how they see all Muslims, virtually dumping all Muslims who appear integrated in the same pile.  They can’t be bothered to do their homework, so it’s an embarrassing expose of their own ignorance and how Islamists can use this ignorance against Western civilization.  The leftist elite is largely unable to differentiate between subtle radical agendas and the goals of honest moderate Muslims, which inadvertently leads to the unholiest of alliances because of their burning lust for the Muslim vote, particularly in multicultural Canada.  Concerned citizens need to understand their personal value in protecting the hard work of our founding fathers for the sake of the future generations and let their voices be heard by politicians.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Christine Williams, it was an honor and a privilege to speak with you today, thank you for joining us.</p>
<div>
<p><strong>Williams:</strong> Jamie, thank you for this honor.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>I appreciate that. I&#8217;d like to conclude by saying that I have been graced by your presence several times, and during each of those occasions it was very clear that one was in the company of a very special and unique person. Your intellectual sharpness is outweighed, perhaps, only by your noble and combative fearlessness. You are a true warrior for the truth, and the magnanimity that radiates from your mind and soul is something that one feels immediately &#8212; and cherishes. Thank you Christine for being who you are and for coming to the frontlines in our culture and terror war to fight for liberty and freedom. They don&#8217;t make many people like you anymore. It is a privilege for me to call you my friend.</p>
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		<title>The Limits of Power</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/thomas-sowell/the-limits-of-power/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-limits-of-power</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/thomas-sowell/the-limits-of-power/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 22 Apr 2010 04:00:20 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Why did some slave masters pay certain slaves throughout history?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/slaves2.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-58660" title="slaves2" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/slaves2.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="281" /></a></p>
<p>When I first began to study the history of slavery around the world, many years ago, one of the oddities that puzzled me was the practice of paying certain slaves, which existed in ancient Rome and in America&#8217;s antebellum South, among other places.</p>
<p>In both places, slave owners or their overseers whipped slaves to force them to work, and in neither place was whipping a slave literally to death likely to bring any serious consequences.</p>
<p>There could hardly be a greater power of one human being over another than the arbitrary power of life and death. Why then was it necessary to pay certain slaves? At the very least, it suggested that there were limits to what could be accomplished by power.</p>
<p>Most slaves performing most tasks were of course not paid, but were simply forced to work by the threat of punishment. That was sufficient for galley slaves or plantation slaves. But there were various kinds of work where that was not sufficient.</p>
<p>Tasks involving judgment or talents were different because no one can know how much judgment or talent someone else has. In short, knowledge is an inherent constraint on power. Payment can bring forth the knowledge or talent by giving those who have it an incentive to reveal it and to develop it.</p>
<p>Payment can vary in amount and in kind. Some slaves, especially eunuchs in the days of the Ottoman Empire, could amass both wealth and power. One reason they could be trusted in positions of power was that they had no incentive to betray the existing rulers and try to establish their own dynasties, which would obviously have been physically impossible for them.</p>
<p>At more mundane levels, such tasks as diving operations in the Carolina swamps required a level of discretion and skill far in excess of that required to pick cotton in the South or cut sugar cane in the tropics. Slaves doing this kind of work had financial incentives and were treated far better. So were slaves working in Virginia&#8217;s tobacco factories.</p>
<p>The point of all this is that when even slaves had to be paid to get certain kinds of work done, this shows the limits of what can be accomplished by power alone.</p>
<p>Yet so much of what is said and done by those who rely on the power of government to direct ever more sweeping areas of our life seem to have no sense of the limits of what can be accomplished that way.</p>
<p>Even the totalitarian governments of the 20th century eventually learned the hard way the limits of what could be accomplished by power alone. China still has a totalitarian government today but, after the death of Mao, the Chinese government began to loosen its controls on some parts of the economy, in order to reap the economic benefits of freer markets.</p>
<p>As those benefits became clear in higher rates of economic growth and rising standards of living, more government controls were loosened. But, just as market principles were applied to only certain kinds of slavery, so freedom in China has been allowed in economic activities to a far greater extent than in other realms of the country&#8217;s life, where tight control from the top down remains the norm.</p>
<p>Ironically, the United States is moving in the direction of the kind of economy that China has been forced to move away from. China once had complete government control of medical care, but eventually gave it up as the disaster that it was.</p>
<p>The current leadership in Washington operates as if they can just set arbitrary goals, whether &#8220;affordable housing&#8221; or &#8220;universal <a href="http://www.creators.com/opinion/thomas-sowell.html#" target="_blank">health care</a>&#8221; or anything else — and not concern themselves with the repercussions — since they have the power to simply force individuals, businesses, doctors or anyone else to knuckle under and follow their dictates.</p>
<p>Friedrich Hayek called this mindset &#8220;the road to serfdom.&#8221; But, even under serfdom and slavery, experience forced those with power to recognize the limits of their power. What this administration — and especially the President — does not have is experience.</p>
<p>Barack Obama had no experience running even the most modest business, and personally paying the consequences of his mistakes, before becoming President of the United States. He can believe that his heady new power is the answer to all things.</p>
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		<title>When Love Conquers Politics</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/william-doino-jr/when-love-conquers-politics/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=when-love-conquers-politics</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/william-doino-jr/when-love-conquers-politics/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 20 Apr 2010 04:15:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[William Doino Jr.]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[David Horowitz produces a profoundly moving and beautifully written memoir about his late daughter. ]]></description>
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<div><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/heart1.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-58479" title="heart1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/heart1.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="533" /></a></div>
<div>
<p><strong>This article is reprinted from <a href="http://insidecatholic.com/Joomla/index.php?option=com_news_portal&amp;Itemid=128">InsideCatholic.com</a>.</strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1596981032/insidecatcom-20"><em>A Cracking of the Heart</em></a><br />
David Horowitz, Regnery,<br />
188 pages, $24.95</p>
<p>David Horowitz remembers the moment well. The author of <em>Radical Son</em>, fresh off his political conversion, was having dinner with his family one night, explaining why he had become a conservative &#8212; and why they should, too. At that point, he admits, he was still &#8220;unable to speak about such matters without passions rising unbidden that were near ferocious.&#8221; His animus was the result of a recent break with hardened leftists, after witnessing them commit a series of heinous acts and then excuse them. The problem was that Horowitz was now inclined to assail anyone to his left &#8212; however decent &#8212; and on this night, he allowed his anger to overflow.</p>
</div>
<div>The conversation turned toward the danger of anti-war movements, whose purpose, Horowitz believed, &#8220;was to disarm democracies and encourage their enemies.&#8221; One of his children, Sarah &#8212; a liberal, then in her 20s, and active in the peace movement &#8212; was present to witness her father&#8217;s fury that night.</div>
<p>He describes what occurred:</p>
<blockquote><p>The assault continued until the moment I became aware of the expression on my daughter&#8217;s face. Sarah had been     silent throughout my tirade, which I hardly noticed as I barreled ahead. But all of a sudden her features came into my     view with an excruciating clarity. I saw that her eyes had grown red and liquid, and her face was convulsed as though     an immense weight was pressing inexorably down on her. Her expression in that instant was one of such mute and irremediable suffering that the distress of it has never left me.</p></blockquote>
<p>Suddenly, Horowitz, the newly minted &#8220;conservative,&#8221; realized he still had the reflexes of an ideologue and saw what it was doing to himself and the people he loved: &#8220;As the conversation shifted to other voices, I hid in my silence and thought: &#8216;Who is this angry person? What sort of individual could do this to his child?&#8217;&#8221;</p>
<p>There is a lesson here. Too many people, on both the Left and Right, allow political and philosophical difference to get in the way of their relationships, even to the point of destruction. This is not to say our fundamental beliefs don&#8217;t matter: Of course they do, especially for those of us who believe in eternal life. There are times, as the younger Horowitz himself painfully learned, where people close to us are so reckless, abusive, and extreme that there is no alternative but to leave them, at least until they reform. But that is not what we are talking about here. Most relatives or friends who have a falling out are basically good people who simply see the world differently.</p>
<p>Often, after one too many arguments, they retreat to their ideological corners, giving each other the silent treatment. When they finally realize how foolish they&#8217;ve been, they have to scramble to make amends &#8212; if there is time. Sometimes there isn&#8217;t, and they never do.</p>
<p>Gratefully, Horowitz&#8217;s relationship with his daughter didn&#8217;t reach that stage. It was, however, tragically cut short. In early 2008, at the age of just 44, Sarah Horowitz unexpectedly died. Her father has now written a memoir, <em>A Cracking of the Heart</em>, describing the lasting impact she had on those around her, not least of all himself.</p>
<p>The book marks a striking departure for Horowitz. Best known as the leader of FrontPageMag.com &#8212; and its high-temperature brand of conservatism &#8212; A <em>Cracking of the Heart</em> is a world away from those polemics. Profoundly moving and beautifully written, it is the kind of book that, once read, might actually help the reader heal a broken relationship, or at least prompt an examination of conscience. Even many at odds with Horowitz&#8217;s politics, as was his daughter, will find it rewarding.</p>
<p>Sarah was what is today known as a &#8220;special needs&#8221; child, but to those who knew her, Sarah was just special. She was born with a genetic disorder called Turner Syndrome, whose physical symptoms are severe: &#8220;A wide and webbed neck,&#8221; writes her father, &#8220;low-set and curled ears, low hairline, small stature, swollen hands and feet, drooping eyelids, dry eyes, cataracts, obesity, diabetes, infertility, arthritis . . . hearing loss . . . heart defects, and high blood pressure.&#8221;</p>
<p>Despite all this, Sarah led an amazingly productive life. She was a talented writer who obtained a Master&#8217;s degree in Fine Arts and pursued another in education; she became a childcare worker and all-around volunteer; she traveled to El Salvador, India, and Uganda on humanitarian missions, even going to Israel to climb the legendary fortress of Masada &#8212; successfully, despite her physical limitations.</p>
<p>Sarah&#8217;s life was eventful because she never regarded herself as disabled. She chose to forgo corrective surgery for her condition and declined disability benefits when she could have received them. She gave generously to the poor but repeatedly declined money from others, even when she could have used it. Facing challenges that would have disheartened most, Sarah not only survived but flourished, albeit in her own, unique way.</p>
<p>As he tells his daughter&#8217;s story, often through her unpublished writings, Horowitz reveals his own relationship with Sarah, revisiting the issues on which they clashed and converged.</p>
<p>The first concerned empathy. When he finished writing <em>Radical Son</em>, Horowitz sent a copy to his daughter, asking for comment. She generously replied, but scolded him for being one-sided, recommending he be &#8220;less dismissive of political opponents and more appreciative of their human complexity.&#8221; To Sarah, empathy &#8212; the ability to see and understand someone else&#8217;s situation, even when we may not approve of their ideas and acts &#8212; was essential to building a humane society.</p>
<p>Her father saw this as mere sentimentality, until his daughter opened his eyes. &#8220;If you see someone in the fullness of their humanity,&#8221; she wrote him, &#8220;you see how they are acting out their own confusion and suffering. This does not justify hurtful or evil acts. It doesn&#8217;t even always inspire forgiveness. But if you see someone this way, you respond more in sadness than in anger. And that is simply a more excellent state of being.&#8221; She persuaded her father to moderate his views on crime and punishment, and take a new look at the underclass: &#8220;When I see a homeless person destitute on the street, &#8221; he writes, &#8220;I think of Sarah, and my heart opens. If there is a criminal shut behind bars, I force myself to remember her compassion, and a sadness shades my anger. If there is a child languishing in need, I think of my daughter . . . .&#8221;</p>
<p>Sarah learned from her father, too. Chastened by his experience with Marxism, she remained wary of ideology, and actually wrote a story lamenting &#8220;the Left&#8217;s silence&#8221; about Communist atrocities. She was a liberal, but not a party-liner: She opposed the death penalty because it damages a nation&#8217;s soul, not because she believed the condemned were necessarily innocent. Toward the end of her life, Sarah became more spiritual, reconnecting with her Jewish heritage and the people of Israel. This, too, strengthened her integrity. As one of her friends told her father:</p>
<blockquote><p>She was for peace and justice but knew when things were not right in the positions and behaviors of the Left. A lot of     that had to do with what she learned from you . . . about philosophies that were all-encompassing and positions that     didn&#8217;t make sense. The older we got it became clearer and clearer that the Left was not our friend a lot of the time,     particularly on Israel.</p></blockquote>
<p>What united father and daughter most was their passion for justice. &#8220;Many of our discussions revolved around the Jewish concept of a <em>tikkun olam</em>, which means a &#8216;repair of the world,&#8217;&#8221; writes Horowitz. Though he pursued that goal from the Right, and Sarah from the Left, the issues that divided them actually became points of contact: &#8220;She was curious about my history, and I was eager to hear her opinions and answer her questions. Pursuing these ends, we were able to open lines of communication that our tangled family narratives had previously blocked.&#8221;</p>
<p>The day before she died, Sarah gave an interview to an online journal about death and dying. She spoke about the recent loss of her aunt, the pain she experienced, and the wise counsel of her rabbi: &#8220;Pay attention to the ways in which your relationship continues.&#8221;</p>
<p>That, in essence, is what Horowitz tries to do here, as he expresses his own grief. Replaying times he may have slighted his daughter, he pointedly questions himself. A &#8220;cracking of the heart&#8221; refers to that moment, reflecting the holiest days of the Jewish calendar, when he began a personal process of atonement, which continues to this day:</p>
<blockquote><p>The reflections of a mourner are a relentless accounting, and there is no bottom line. What words of hers did I fail to     understand when she was still there to explain them to me? What did I miss that her eyes were telling me when she     fell into her silences? Losing her is too hard, and there is no way to end it.</p></blockquote>
<p>Horowitz is hard on himself in this book, undoubtedly too hard, expressing the anguish of a father who wishes he could have done more, and given more, to a selfless daughter. But he should take heart. If it is true that the apple does not fall far from the tree, then Sarah&#8217;s inspiring life was not an accident, and her father deserves much credit for raising such a wonderful child.</p>
<p>By telling her story, combined with his own, Horowitz reminds us how love can always conquer politics; and how a love that unites can take us, as Sarah might say, to a &#8220;more excellent&#8221; place.</p>
<p><em>William Doino Jr. is based in Connecticut and writes on religion, politics, and history.</em></p>
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		<title>A Letter to Gaza</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/nonie-darwish/dear-gaza-resident/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=dear-gaza-resident</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/nonie-darwish/dear-gaza-resident/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 15 Apr 2010 04:06:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Nonie Darwish]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=58153</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why did your culture end up valuing hate over love and death over life?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/hate.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-58156" title="hate" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/hate.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="250" /></a></p>
<p>I recently received an email accusing me of hating Arabs and my father. This email is typical of Arab media accusations of my views regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict. Since most Arabs have no chance to read my book, <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Now-They-Call-Infidel-Renounced/dp/1595230319">Now They Call Me Infidel, Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel and the War on Terror</a></em>, which explains in detail my position, I will answer the email in this article. First, below is the translation of the Arabic language email which I received without a signature:</p>
<p><em>Salam to you,</em></p>
<p><em> </em></p>
<p><em>With all of our pride in your father we pray that Allah will bless him with entering paradise, which is the wish of every person after this short prideful meaningless life. I want to ask you, has your father become your enemy after his death? We in the city of </em><em>Gaza</em><em> take pride in your father and I live on a street by the name of Shahid Moustafa Hafez which also has a school by the name of Shahid Moustafa Hafez. We never forgot his sacrifice, so how could you become an enemy to the tortured Palestinian people who are still suffering at the hands of Arab Zionists? I ask Allah to give you health and strength.</em></p>
<p><em> </em></p>
<p><em>Awaiting your response and thank you in advance.</em></p>
<p>Here is my response:</p>
<p>Dear Gaza resident,</p>
<p>Your email touched me as sincere even though your accusations are wrong. I am not the enemy of Arabs and I assure you that I love my original culture and people. What makes me different is that I do not only love Arabs, but I also love the Jewish people. I am speaking my conscience.  I respect their right to live in peace in their tiny homeland, Israel. I understand how that could be puzzling and unbelievable to many Arabs, to love both Jews and Arabs.</p>
<p>We Arabs have suffered from an unnatural and consistent indoctrination into Islamic supremacy and Jew hatred for over 1400 years. Thus it has become unfathomable to the Arab mind to comprehend loving both Arabs and Jews and wishing both well. Our culture has deprived us for many centuries from loving all of humanity as equals, through intense religious indoctrination resulting in self-imposed isolation and non-integration with other cultures. This isolation and jihad against non-Muslims has become increasingly difficult to maintain. Muslims everywhere are trying desperately to save face, reform Islam’s image and deny the undeniable. But they also want to have their cake and eat it too. While they are telling the world Islam is a religion of peace, they still want to continue with the jihad against non-Muslim countries. While one leader says, let’s kill all the Jews and take over Rome, another says to Western media that Islam is a religion of peace and we are deeply offended by the anti-Islam rhetoric. To play this sick game, Muslim culture must live a dysfunctional double life where everyone is deceived, including Muslims.</p>
<p>Thus to do the kind of jihad that Bin Laden, Ahmadinejad, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, Assad, Nasser, Saudi jihadists etc, do and which is dictated by Sharia, Muslims find it hard to be honest. Thus, Muslims must claim victimhood in order to justify jihad. The entire Muslim world is using your people, the Arabs of the West  Bank and Gaza, to justify their jihad against not only Israel, but also all non-Muslim countries. That includes Iran, which supports Hamas and Hezbollah.</p>
<p>Your people in Gaza should have realized this game a long time ago, but you refuse to see and be open about who is your true oppressor. Arab and Muslim media is using and abusing your people in order to justify their Islamic jihad around the world. That is why they never want to resolve your problem and want you to suffer and live in constant terror against Israel.</p>
<p>Under Islamic law, non-Muslim countries are never equal to Muslim countries and actually their sovereignty as a non-Muslim nation must always be challenged by Islamic jihad. Islamic law codified jihad as a permanent war with non-Muslims to establish the religion. Muslims thus have to use Taquiyya, lies, to legitimize their aggression on Israel and the West. That is why Muslim countries can never abandon the constant hate propaganda, lies and misinformation about Israel and the West. If that ends, their jihad ends. The UN must be constantly bombarded by complaints from Arab countries against Israel. The Arab street must be constantly bombarded with ridiculous accusations and Zionist conspiracies. Lately on Syrian TV a Syrian intellectual accused Israel of stealing human organs in Haiti while they were helping them after the earthquake. This is not something new; it started in the 7<sup>th</sup> century, when the prophet Mohammed accused the Jews of treason to justify killing and expelling them and taking over their wealth. To explain this away, he stated that Jews are worthy of this treatment since they are the descendants of apes pigs and enemies of Allah. Muslims still use the same dynamic and the world still falls for it every time.</p>
<p>The Arab mind was trained to never venture outside of the box of Islamic superiority, and that prevented us from treating the rest of humanity as equals. It is alien to Muslim preachers today to preach love to all of humanity and wishing non-Muslims the same human rights as Muslims. I have never heard that from a Muslim preacher. Only after 9/11 and in the West today, do we see some Muslim preachers trying to preach some Western values and engage in interfaith dialogue, in order to rehabilitate the image of Islam in the West and attract more converts.</p>
<p>I often get mail from secular Muslims who ask me: <em>I can understand that you chose to leave Islam, but how can you support the Jews?</em> I get mail like this because, in the Muslim mindset, loving, accepting and feeling good about Jews or Christians and thinking of them as equals, is unthinkable and an act of treason to Islam itself and even worse. It is as though the whole religion of Islam is dedicated to hating and killing Jews.</p>
<p>After centuries of this kind of education, the Muslim world produced a dysfunctional society, unable to relate to the rest of the world. While wanting to convince the world they are a religion of peace, do not be afraid of Islam, they are still hell-bent on conquering the world for Islam. That is Islam’s dilemma today.</p>
<p>What I, and a few others, are trying to do is to bring the truth to both Muslims and non-Muslims to finally face this sick game. We want to encourage Arabs to look at Jews and others as human beings and not as enemies to conquer. What kind of God will tell his followers to kill more than half of humanity if they don’t submit to Islam? The Muslim world today is a disaster waiting to happen. Ahmadinejad, who is not an Arab, wants to continue the Islamic jihad against Jews by destroying Israel. I have news to especially the Left in Europe and America: Islamic jihad will not end with Israel; <em>you will be next. </em></p>
<p><em> </em></p>
<p>To my email writer: in your letter to me, I have noticed that your outlook on life is pessimistic describing it as short and meaningless pride. Your views are prevalent in Muslim culture and I have heard it thousands of times when I lived in the Middle  East. I remember even when we laughed and giggled as young girls, we were immediately silenced as being improper and that Allah somehow does not like us to laughing for no reason or in public. Even a heartfelt laugh to a Muslim was not going to get you friends, but critics. Your message to me and to Muslims is that life on earth will not get us happiness and the only escape from such misery is the everlasting happiness in the pleasures of Allah’s paradise after dying in jihad. But why take the Jews with us? They want to live and enjoy life and to make the earth, right here, a better place.</p>
<p>Our rejection of life is not a coincidence: since jihad does not value life, then it must value death. The first casualty of the jihad principle is peace and that is why I never learned peace as a value in Gaza. I have never heard a peaceful song in Arabic. To think of peace with the Jews is equal to treason to Islam. Rejection of peace has detrimental consequences to the healthy functioning of the Arab personality, family, society and the whole region. It is not a coincidence that Saudis reject under the law any celebration of Valentine’s Day, <a href="../2010/02/12/hating-valentine%25E2%2580%2599s/">reject celebrating love between a man and a woman</a>, teaching peace and compassion to their children towards the others. Just look at our Islamic law books and see the most cruel and unusual punishments ever created in any culture on earth. Only a culture that demands war and terror can promote such cruelty.</p>
<p>As to your question about hating my father, again I want to assure you that I adore and respect my father more than all of the people of Gaza. Actually I love him and wish him heaven not because he killed Jews, but because he was a good human being who was respected by many including the Israeli soldiers who killed him. He was known even to Israel as a cut above his peers and had integrity and honor.  My father was the victim of the blood-thirsty culture of death all around him. He is one of the many thousands and even millions of victims of the jihad ideology, practiced over the last 1400 years.</p>
<p>Dear Gaza resident, yes, I cannot blame the Jewish people, or the government of Israel, for what you call the ‘misery’ of the Palestinians. I can only blame Arab and Islamic culture which used and abused you and which you allowed. I believe that this is an Arab self-inflicted crisis that has nothing to do with Israel.</p>
<p>Arab education has never told us the truth about the Israeli people and the story from their side and what Jerusalem means to them. We were told that Jerusalem was a Muslim city simply because Mohammed dreamt one night that he went to the farthest mosque but he never mentioned Jerusalem. The Koran never mentioned Jerusalem, which is mentioned hundreds of times in the Bible as the heart and soul of the Jewish people. We as Muslims never respected other religions holy cites and always claimed them to Islam; even Spain and India are being claimed as Muslim land. It was the tradition of Muslim conquerors to convert churches and temples to mosques and that is exactly what happened to the Jewish Temple Mount when 100 years after the prophet Mohammed died, Muslim conquerors built the mosque right on top of it. Just imagine if Jews or Christians had built a temple on top of the Kaaba in Mecca. This is how Islam has treated the Jews. It is time for Muslims to seek redemption and forgiveness and to extend the hand of reconciliation and peace to the Jewish people.</p>
<p>Nonie Darwish</p>
<p><em>Author: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Cruel-Usual-Punishment-Terrifying-Implications/dp/1595551611">Cruel and Usual Punishment; the terrifying global implications of Islamic law.</a></em></p>
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		<title>The Dr. Ruth of Counter-Terrorism</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jamie-glazov/the-dr-ruth-of-counter-terrorism/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-dr-ruth-of-counter-terrorism</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 13 Apr 2010 04:09:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jamie Glazov]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[arabic script]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Dr. Joan Lachkar]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Dr. Nancy Kobrin explains how a culture that forces males to be terrified of females leads them to murder and suicide.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Kobrin.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-58025" title="Kobrin" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Kobrin.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="431" /></a></p>
<p>Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Dr. Nancy Kobrin, a psychoanalyst with a Ph.D. in romance and semitic languages, specializing in Aljamía and Old Spanish in Arabic script. She is an expert on the Minnesota Somali diaspora and a graduate of the Human Terrain System program at Leavenworth  Kansas. Her new book is <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Banality-Suicide-Terrorism-Psychology-Islamic/dp/1597975044" target="_blank"><em>The Banality of Suicide Terrorism: The Naked Truth About the Psychology of Islamic Suicide Bombing.</em></a></p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Nancy Kobrin, welcome to Frontpage Interview.</p>
<p>Congratulations on your book. Tell us about its significance and what makes it different from all other books on suicide terrorism to date.</p>
<p><strong>Kobrin: </strong>Thank you so much Jamie. I must say how indebted I am to you and the entire staff at Frongpagemag.com because you provided the opportunity and invaluable space to discuss and debate my theory for the suicide attack with other colleagues. If it hadn’t been here at Frontpage, I wonder if this book would have ever been written. My thanks and gratitude to you all.</p>
<p>This is a psychological study and its significance is that it is the first to address early childhood development and its crucial role that it plays in suicide terrorism with regard to the psychology of extremism and gender – specifically with the emphasis on the devalued female in Arab Muslim shame honor cultures which have developed suicide terrorism. This is not to blame the female or the mother but to understand the power and control of her and its devastating consequences.</p>
<p>To the best of my knowledge and to date, I know of no other book or theory, which has made the link between the horrific abuse of the female and its ramifications with regard to murder-suicide, her split-off body parts and the alleged honor killing. I hasten to add that we are only at the beginning of understanding the phenomenon and we are in the model T stage of integrating a more in-depth or shall we say psychodynamic approach to the knowledge that we have about terrorism.</p>
<p>Because I understand non-verbal communication and ninety-five percent of what we communicate is nonverbal, the focus of the book is primarily on the nonverbal predatory behavior of these terrorists by looking at the imagery.</p>
<p>It is understandable that we tend to stress the terrible nature of the incitement of the ideologies of Jihad and violence, which are indeed extremely important. However, by over focusing on its “verbiage”, this tends to obscure an already confusing and terrorizing picture. The ideologies act like a girdle, which harnesses the pre-existing rage of a fragile abused child grown into a “time-bomb” of a personality. I’ll give an example later in the interview when I address the issue of the female suicide bomber, how we can easily miss a “hidden communication” in this terrorism, precisely because it is so deeply terrorizing.</p>
<p>This is why people are always mystified by the “nice guy or gal jihadi next door.” The mask of “peace” is so well developed, giving perfect cover for a rageful personality. It hides the embroiled rage and it is so terrorizing that “We just don’t want to go there. . .” This is also why Islam can present itself as a religion of peace when it is a religion of <em>two pieces</em> – Jihad and Peace – two sides of a coin. If we are going to be effective in filleting the phenomenon of Islamic suicide terrorism, it is imperative that the imagery be taken into consideration and factored in with the ideologies. When read together, then other questions can be raised concerning the psychological function of religious and cultural practices.</p>
<p>How did I come to this realization? I recall the first psychiatric child patient that I ever had to interview. It was on a locked ward and I was tasked to establish a rapport with a five year old boy who was hospitalized for setting fires &#8212; immolation.  I was told to talk with him and engage him through a game of checkers. No sooner did we sit down that he had his foot on top of mine under the table. I said to myself – OMG, alpha male dominance. I realized that he was absolutely terrified of me.</p>
<p>Terror is not to be equated with fear. It is nameless dread, non-verbal which encapsulates a complete sense of utter vulnerability, tantamount to death<em>. </em></p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> It took very long to get the book into print. How come?</p>
<p><strong>Kobrin:</strong> You know, I didn&#8217;t quite understand it at first myself but it turned out to be a valuable experience and it taught me a lot about terror. It was a humbling experience.</p>
<p>In January of 2002 I took a month sabbatical in Jerusalem. Suicide bombings became an every day occurrence. Lots of suicide bombings were going on. It was there when I came across the image of Shakespeare’s Othello who commits murder-suicide that I grasped the violent simplicity of Islamic suicide terrorism. Let us recall that Othello was a North African, a Moor and military man who married Desdemona the daughter of an Italian senator. He murders her and then commits suicide. Islamic suicide terrorism grounds itself in this kind of death though it is a hybrid of murder-suicide, serial killing by the suicide bomber proxy and a jihadi honor killing. But this is territory that few want to explore.</p>
<p>The book was sketched out in 2002. Bottom line – it was at two different publishing houses before it wound up at Potomac. I believe the two other presses were too “freaked out” to publish it because of the function of terror, especially the terror of retaliation, being targeted. Again, people have a very poor understanding of terror. The terrors run so deep that we tend to be dissociated from them. Most of us live in denial, busy with our daily lives. It is too terrifying to recognize the impending death threat of power and control, so we disengage. It is also too terrifying to tap into this primitive unexplored territory (i.e., the unconscious motivations behind terrorism).</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> What is your background? What influenced you to come up with your ideas about suicide terrorism?</p>
<p><strong>Kobrin: </strong> I have always followed my passion and my studies evolved. I did a doctorate in comparative literature, romance and semitic languages. I am dyslexic so I came to be fascinated with verbal and nonverbal language very early.</p>
<p>While writing my dissertation, I wound up on a training analyst’s couch; this is when it all came to life. I discovered a new world in depth but fascinating in its valuing the simplicity of explanation. I found the analytic experience extremely helpful and interesting.  I became very interested in trauma.</p>
<p>I was following all the research coming out of Israel concerning the victims of terrorism and it dawned on me that I needed to understand the mind of the perpetrator. So I started studying this on my own after the truck bombs went off in Lebanon in the early 1980s. I then realized that it had to be looked at functionally &#8211; victim-perpetrator together as a kind of unhealthy bonding. The terrorists do not have a sense of intimacy &#8212; they bond by maintaining a connection to those they murder and over whom they take control.</p>
<p>The summer before 9/11 Dr. Joan Lachkar invited me to participate in a seminar on suicide terrorism in Los Angeles. She wrote a very important dissertation on the narratives/fantasies in the Bible and the Quran. I also had some questions, which I sent to the Interdisciplinary  Center in Counter Terrorism in Tel Aviv and the Israeli who identified Osama Bin Laden wrote me back. This fellow informally mentored me and inspired me to study the history of terrorism. He does not necessarily agree with my theory but I remain deeply indebted to him. He has practical knowledge of the “Matzav” = the situation that is unparalleled and unequalled.</p>
<p>While I was schlepping back and forth to Israel, I realized that the jihad was going on in Minnesota. We have the largest population outside of Mogadishu of Somalis in the world. I familiarized myself well with the peoples, the cultures and af-Somali, the language. I am a very practical person. I went into the community as well as the county jail and did prison interviews. So I have hands on experience right in my own back yard. I want to stress that the major of Somalis are law abiding good people who want to put food on the table, clothe their children and send them to school. However, there is an element that seeks jihad.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Talk some more about Arab culture and its views of mothers.</p>
<p><strong>Kobrin: </strong>In Arab Muslim culture you are never ever permitted to separate from your mother, ever. This means that you are glued to her and she is more important than your wife. It means that you are not permitted to establish your own sense of self, i.e. separate from her. Your wife is ultimately devalued and the upshot is that you harbor unbelievable, disavowed rage toward your mother, in essence one has no real effective father – the father is too busy with his other wives and women.</p>
<p>This creates tremendous ambivalence, on the one hand to want to bond with mother (ummi) and on the other hand at the same time remaining terrified of her, resulting in a confusing sense of identity. Perhaps this is why Muslims struggle so and are always fighting to prove their identity.  Proving their existence becomes a more pervasive force than life itself. “I’d rather die by blowing myself up than looe my identity as a Muslim brother.”</p>
<p>Counter terrorist experts are often taught that Arabs need very strong fathers because the father is absent and that is what they respond to. However, this is <em>merely the symptom of the problem</em><span style="text-decoration: underline;"> </span>– that the devalued female has been internalized by them and they can not relate to the female. They, the males, are terrorized by her and her body. The mother is larger than life, almost in a category un-to-herself. This is where the bitter paradox comes in as much as males can idealize the female, they can also feel enormously terrorized by the female body.</p>
<p>The end result of these tragic forces leave these males very confused. If we could put them on the couch we might suggest they are in desperate need of sex education. The males are not only confused, they suffer from severe deprivation ending up depriving themselves of very basic human needs. The irony is that they shame/blame everyone for depriving them but ultimately they are the real “deprivers.” So instead of love for the mother/female, the replacement becomes the destruction of her. In psychodynamic terms this is known as primitive envy. In essence the very love that is required to maintain healthy love bonds, is the very thing that makes them feel powerless and impotent so they must defend against this by becoming killers and murderers. We however pay the price. Sometimes I think of myself as the Dr. Ruth of counter-terrorism. I kid you not.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Your position on Islam?</p>
<p><strong>Kobrin: </strong>I take the same position as my colleague Ibn Warraq – I believe that there are millions upon millions of moderate Muslims but Islam itself is not moderate, especially those who identify with Sharia law.</p>
<p>Having said that – I endorse Tawfik Hamid’s position that the ummah, the world-wide Muslim community unwittingly <span style="text-decoration: underline;">and</span> wittingly engages in passive terrorism. All too often they can too easily hide behind the mask of peace and let the jihadis do the dirty work.</p>
<p>This is <em>not</em> acceptable and they need to be called on it.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Revenge and deprivation in and of themselves clearly does not explain female suicide bombers as in the recent bombings in Moscow. Tell us your views on why.</p>
<p><strong>Kobrin: </strong>Actually it is quite simple and bizarrely clever – this kind of terrorism and rage is about the prenatal mother. The male terrorists make a concrete image of the prenatal mother &#8212; the female suicide bomber who is repeatedly described by the media as if she were pregnant, symbolized by hiding the bombs under her clothing. This is a good example of a not so hidden communication per se but one that is readily missed if a person does not know well his or her own terrors from our first years of life. In some instances the female suicide bomber has actually been pregnant and in other instances, faux pregnant bellies have been made for the female suicide bomber to hide the bombs. It is a “two-fer” for the male terrorists – they get to kill off their own females while at the same time murdering us.</p>
<p>The prenatal mother is the essence of dependency needs. It is the time in life when everything is taken care of for us. While it might not be perfect, nonetheless it is a time of encapsulation where the majority of one’s needs and vulnerabilities are taken care of. Yet after the female being devalued for centuries, the female suicide bomber can find honor and respect within the twisted psychology of the male dominated terrorist group.</p>
<p>Yes, it can be reported by the media and the foiled female suicide bombers can say that they were “seeking revenge” but the complexity of the early life history of these devalued and abused females make them ripe to be brain washed which harnesses their own unconscious rage about having been manipulated and abused to turn this outward by murdering others. It is uncontrollable unleashed rage, which exceeds murder itself because body parts are created in the process as in serial killing. Simply stated it is a way of maintaining a bond with the mother of pain – a part objection connection – her dismembered body parts which are now the body parts of the targeted innocent victims.</p>
<p>The female suicide bomber merely internalizes the male rage of the female as self-hatred. She becomes victim-victimizer as my colleague Dr. Anat Berko has named her. The female suicide bomber is the most expandable of the terrorist chain. The Islamic female suicide bomber image is in stark contrast to Christianity where the prenatal mother, Mary and her post-partem motherhood with Jesus, are sacred images, venerated and cherished.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> What can we do to fight to this pathology and enemy we face?</p>
<p><strong>Kobrin:</strong> We must invest in the little Muslim girl. We must help all those who live under a death threat. For brevity here I refer your readers to the last chapter of my book where I make a series of suggestions.</p>
<p>In addition to this I have recently also started to work on a conceptual dictionary of this peculiar language of the terrorists, which I call Desperanto. I hope to map out images, use of objects by terrorists and their tough talk, using open sources from journalism, etc. to show other primitive  nonverbal and verbal communications in this vein, in order to help counter terrorist experts expand their understanding should they so desire. I believe that these communications can be extracted from what we know about terrorism and from it, a language can be built which in turn can be hooked up with the ideologies. I parallel this understanding of communication to an abused child in play therapy. If a child took a car and rammed it repeatedly into the back of a truck, we would wonder if he or she had been anally raped. While it is not exactly the same and we do not have terrorists in therapy nor am I advocating that, we should still try to map out the nonverbal communications in a more systematic manner. My hunch is too that the people who work in biometrics have a good sense of this body language but alas, I have not had the opportunity to work with them. This would help us make better interventions, earlier as well as better profiling. The reason why it is so difficult to profile is that the psychopathology is very early developmentally and it takes us outside our comfort zone.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Nancy Kobrin, thank you for joining us. This is all fascinating, original and frightening stuff. Hope to talk to you again soon.</p>
<p>I encourage all our readers to order Dr. Kobrin&#8217;s new book:<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Banality-Suicide-Terrorism-Psychology-Islamic/dp/1597975044" target="_blank"><em> The Banality of Suicide Terrorism: The Naked Truth About the Psychology of Islamic Suicide Bombing.</em></a></p>
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		<title>The Left Squashes Life&#8217;s Little Pleasures</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/dennis-prager/the-left-squashes-lifes-little-pleasures/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-left-squashes-lifes-little-pleasures</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 13 Apr 2010 04:00:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dennis Prager]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=58037</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why every poll has concluded that liberals are less happy than conservatives. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/happy.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-58045" title="happy" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/happy.jpg" alt="" width="425" height="282" /></a></p>
<p>Reading the onslaught of angry  denunciations of Burger King by mental health organizations and mainstream media  reporters this past week reminded me of a characteristic of the Left not often  commented on: a certain joylessness, even an antipathy to the little joys that  contribute more than almost anything else to most people&#8217;s ability to endure the  difficulties of life.</p>
<p>These characteristics further  reinforce the view that Leftism functions as a (secular) religion. Like medieval  Christians who wore hair shirts and Puritans who thought dancing was  sacrilegious, the Left, consciously or not, is uncomfortable with many of the  joys &#8212; with notable exceptions such as sex and drugs &#8212; that people  experience.</p>
<p>Needless to say, the Left always has  noble explanations &#8212; usually, the protection of people&#8217;s emotions and health &#8212;  for opposing and even banning many joys of life. But the end result is fewer of  these little joys that mean a great deal to people.</p>
<p>Burger King&#8217;s ad was innocuous and  innocent. It featured the company&#8217;s royal mascot running through a building,  knocking a person over and crashing through a glass window to deliver the new  Burger King Steakhouse XT burger. Called &#8220;crazy&#8221; by those present, he was  finally tackled by men in white coats. &#8220;The king&#8217;s insane,&#8221; the ad noted, for  &#8220;offering so much beef for $3.99.&#8221;</p>
<p>This has triggered a storm of  criticism from activists (a term which, unless otherwise specified, means  liberal or left).</p>
<p>Michael Fitzpatrick, executive  director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, called the ad &#8220;blatantly  offensive &#8230; I was stunned. Absolutely stunned and appalled,&#8221; he said. David  Shern, president and chief executive of Mental Health America in Alexandria, Va., echoed this assessment. And reporters  from the Associated Press to the Washington Post all  agreed.</p>
<p>If this were isolated, it would be  worth mentioning only in the context of wondering why people who run mental  health &#8212; and most other activist &#8212; organizations seem to have little common  sense. They should listen to William Gardner of Los Angeles, who wrote to  me:</p>
<p>&#8220;I am a father of a 24 year old son  with mental health issue. I am particularly tuned to protecting my son&#8217;s  self-image. My son and I have both seen the Burger King Ad that you have  referred to. It did not occur to either of us that the Burger King Ad was  offensive in any way. Why would I raise my son to be hyper-sensitive about his  disability? My objective as a parent is to strengthen him. Making him  hyper-sensitive would have the opposite effect.&#8221;</p>
<p>But the Left has problems with much  else as well: smoking (including cigars and pipes); virtually all kids games  that can make a kid feel at all bad or get hurt; wood-burning fireplaces; cars;  most jokes or any flirting in the workplace; incandescent light bulbs; cool  homes in summer; and more.</p>
<p><strong>Smoking</strong></p>
<p>One of life&#8217;s great little pleasures  is tobacco. Just watch old war reportage to see the serenity and joy a cigarette  brought to a wounded soldier. Though I do not smoke cigarettes, I have been  smoking cigars and pipes since I was in college (my father still smokes cigars  daily at age 91), and it would be difficult to overstate how much I enjoy  both.</p>
<p>No one opposes educating the public  about the dangers of cigarette smoking. Cigarette smoking shortens the lives of  up to a third of smokers, often in terrible ways, and that is what public health  organizations should be saying. But the battle against smoking and tobacco has  become a religious crusade for anti-smoking zealots, who are almost invariably  on the Left. If the Left hated Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro as much as it hates  &#8220;Big Tobacco,&#8221; the world would be a better place.</p>
<p>But because the Left hates the fact  that people smoke (tobacco, not marijuana, which the Left defends) it uses  totalitarian (I use that term with no exaggeration) tactics to eliminate it.  Just as the Soviets removed Trotsky from old photos, anti-smoking zealots have  forced the removal of cigarettes from old photos &#8212; from photos of FDR, from the  famous Beatles photo &#8212; and from movies whenever possible. Torture and murder  are ubiquitous in films, but smoking is all but banned &#8212; even cigars are now  banned from James Bond films.</p>
<p>Smoking has been banned in entire  cities, outdoors as well as in. In Pasadena, Calif., one cannot even smoke in a cigar  store. That the Left has contempt for Prohibition reveals a lack of  self-awareness that is quite remarkable.</p>
<p>Kids Games such as Tag, Dodgeball,  Soccer, Touch Football, Monkey Bars</p>
<p>Virtually every game I played as a  child during school recess is now banned because organizations such as the  National Program for Playground Safety deem games in which kids are &#8220;running  into each other&#8221; as too dangerous. Someone might get hurt.</p>
<p>Until a few years ago, just about  every American boy, and many girls, played dodgeball. No more. This joy, too,  has been eliminated from American life. &#8220;We consider it inappropriate to use  children as human targets,&#8221; said Mary Marks, physical education supervisor for  Fairfax County, Va. And it may hurt the feelings of kids who  are eliminated. For the same reason &#8212; potential hurt feelings of those  eliminated &#8212; musical chairs is no longer played in some  schools.</p>
<p>Some might argue that these bans are  not because of Leftism but because of fear of lawsuits. But in light of how  leftwing the trial bar is, that only reinforces my  argument.</p>
<p><strong>Pinups</strong></p>
<p>For men working in, let us say, a  car repair shop, there is not much by way of excitement or visual beauty. So the  typical repair shop or factory had its pinup calendar &#8212; a calendar featuring a  photo of a beautiful woman in a sexy pose, usually clad in no more than a  bikini, sometimes less. The Left, in another totalitarian move, has banned  pinups. The reasons: Sexism and possible Hostile Environment. How can a woman  possibly work or bring her car into a repair shop where there is a picture of a  scantily clad woman? The same people who clamor for a woman&#8217;s right to walk in  public with no top on (because men are allowed to) have banned photos of women  with no top on.</p>
<p><strong>Flirting at  Work</strong></p>
<p>A joy in life since the advent of  men and women has been men flirting with or &#8220;chatting up&#8221; women. No more.  Virtually anything related to a male reaction to a fellow employee who is female  can be grounds for his losing his job and worse. What began as a campaign  against bosses trading professional advances for sexual favors has degenerated  into the elimination of essentially all the fun &#8212; and, yes, potential emotional  hurt &#8212; of man-woman dialogue. At work, a man never knows what comment to what  woman will trigger his being sent, a la Communist regimes, to a &#8220;re-education&#8221;  program, being fined, having charges leveled against him, being humiliated,  having a permanent mark on his employment record, and, of course, losing his  job.</p>
<p>There is no question that some men  went too far in their sexually charged comments to women. But as a rule, we have  wildly overreacted. Women are not wimps. But the Left has inculcated a sense of  victimhood into large numbers of women and thereby rendered them weak &#8212; just as  it has, in ways too numerous to mention, emasculated men. I deplore crude  comments. But in the America I grew up, it was legal to  speak crudely, and either decent men would shut the crude man up or women would  give the man a well-earned smack across the face.</p>
<p>Today, any hint at the sexual  tension that naturally and joyfully exists between the two sexes has been  banned. In the attempt to eliminate all pain caused by potentially inappropriate  comments, the Left has done what it tries to do about all pain &#8212; ban actions  that may lead to it. As a result, gone are the joys of the man-woman repartee in  the workplace.</p>
<p><strong>Cars</strong></p>
<p>For most Americans, the car is not  only a source of much pleasure, it is also rightly identified with individual  liberty. But here, too, to the extent the Left is able to, it will tell you what  kind of car you can drive and, if possible, get you out of your car and into  mass transit.</p>
<p>The Home</p>
<p>To the Left, your home is not your  castle; it is another place of too many joys that the Left would like to  ban.</p>
<p>One joy I particularly identify with  is the wood-burning fireplace. In California, activists on the Left, aka  environmentalists, have banned them from being built in all new homes. Too many  harmful emissions. Meanwhile, at the other end of the temperature spectrum,  activists wish to determine how low you can set your air conditioner, lest you  use more energy than the Left believes you should.</p>
<p>Do you like your present light  bulbs? The Left has banned them in favor of CFLs that contain mercury. These new  bulbs give a fair number of people headaches, emit less pleasant light, are  initially much more expensive and, if broken, necessitate opening windows even  in winter, and people and pets must leave the area. The EPA has issued a  16-point procedure to follow if a CFL bulbs breaks.</p>
<p>Indeed, if the Left had its way, the  house would eventually become an anachronism as everyone gradually moves into  space-saving, less polluting, less energy-wasting apartments.</p>
<p>Every poll has concluded that  liberals are less happy than conservatives. There are many reasons for this, and  given the importance of little joys to happiness, the Left&#8217;s religious-like  opposition to many of them is surely one of those reasons. The problem for the  rest of us, however, is that, like most unhappy people, many folks on the Left  don&#8217;t like seeing anyone happier than they are.</p>
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		<title>The Importance of Being Karl</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/dick-morris/the-importance-of-being-karl/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-importance-of-being-karl</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/dick-morris/the-importance-of-being-karl/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 05 Apr 2010 04:00:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dick Morris]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=57278</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The first half of Rove's memoir is something you’ve never seen before.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/rove.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-57279" title="rove" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/rove.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="389" /></a></p>
<p>The second half of Karl Rove&#8217;s memoir, &#8220;Courage and Consequences,&#8221; you&#8217;ve already read if you have followed the intricate and specific defenses the Bush administration put forth to parry Democratic attacks.</p>
<p>But &#8230; the first half you&#8217;ve never seen before. Here we meet a vulnerable, human, sensitive man struggling to rise above a plebian background and make his way in the world. The transition from the honesty and appealing openness of the first half and the institutionalized, politically correct defenses of the second perhaps illustrates the changes that power brings to us all.</p>
<p>Yet it is to Rove&#8217;s credit that he can reach back to the days when he was still a regular person and bring that young man back to life in the pages of his memoir.</p>
<p>You meet his troubled mother who ended her own life, his father&#8217;s pursuit of his dreams and the sense of abandonment of a young man facing college costs with no help &#8230; and then of a grown man in the full flush of his career success, meekly and humbly going back to school to get his B.A. We follow Karl&#8217;s rise through the ranks of professional young Republicans, his relationships with the likes of Lee Atwater (the universal mentor of young talent) and his early encounters with the Bush family.</p>
<p>The Rove account of the 2000 election and its aftermath is a page-turner that will rank with any Robert Ludlum novel — gripping, inside and compelling.</p>
<p>His rendition of the early Bush campaigns keeps the flavor of the innocent young operative feeling his way through rough-and-tumble politics.</p>
<p>Karl not only takes us inside his mind, he brings us into his body, as well. He is forever somatizing his political troubles. He gets sick to his stomach when bad news breaks. He feels dizzy when he learns of the machinations of the 2000 recount. He gets a sickening feeling when he reads a bad column.</p>
<p>Beautifully written throughout and easily readable, Karl&#8217;s memoir is an important contribution to the literature of the Bush presidency and, more importantly, a riveting account of a young man on the way up the ladder of America&#8217;s political consulting industry.</p>
<p>You won&#8217;t know Karl Rove until you read this book. And he is well worth getting to know.</p>
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		<title>Victory for Free Speech at Duke; Pro-Life Group&#8217;s Rights Restored</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/sara-dogan/victory-for-free-speech-at-duke-pro-life-groups-rights-restored/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=victory-for-free-speech-at-duke-pro-life-groups-rights-restored</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/sara-dogan/victory-for-free-speech-at-duke-pro-life-groups-rights-restored/#respond</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 01 Apr 2010 04:34:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Sara Dogan]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Student Center]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[
<p>Duke University has reversed a decision by its Women&#8217;s Center that prohibited the Duke Students for Life (<span class="caps">DSFL</span>) student group from holding a discussion on student motherhood at a Women&#8217;s Center venue during the group&#8217;s &#8220;Week for Life&#8221; event. </p>
]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Duke University has reversed a decision by its Women&#8217;s Center that prohibited the Duke Students for Life (<span class="caps">DSFL</span>) student group from holding a discussion on student motherhood at a Women&#8217;s Center venue during the group&#8217;s &#8220;Week for Life&#8221; event. </p>
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		<title>Faith and Fiction</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/david-forsmark/faith-and-fiction/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=faith-and-fiction</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/david-forsmark/faith-and-fiction/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 31 Mar 2010 04:04:17 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Forsmark]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[A thriller writer and an FBI veteran eschew sermonizing for suspense in two Christian fiction hits.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/enemies.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-56712" title="enemies" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/enemies.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="449" /></a></p>
<p><em><strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1595547134?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=1595547134" target="_blank">The Long Way Home</a></strong></em><strong> </strong><strong><br />
By Andrew Klavan<br />
Thomas Nelson, $14.99, 352  pp.</strong></p>
<p><em><strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0805449787?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0805449787" target="_blank">Enemies Among Us</a></strong></em><strong><br />
By Bob Hamer<br />
Fidelis, $14.99, 336 pp.</strong></p>
<p>As an avid reader of contemporary  fiction, I&#8217;m wary of two phrases that tend to raise a red flag with  me: “Suitable  for all ages” and “Christian fiction.”</p>
<p>The former generally means  the book is either so benign that it’s devoid of reality, while the  latter usually signals a warning that sermonizing and pat plot resolutions  lie ahead.</p>
<p>But two terrific writers &#8212;  an acclaimed veteran thriller writer and a legendary veteran federal  agent whose life could be the basis for several thrillers — neatly  avoid those pitfalls without sacrificing immediacy or suspense.</p>
<p>Edgar Award-winning mystery  writer <a href="http://www.davidforsmark.com/4609/our-winter-of-no-pc-content" target="_blank">Andrew  Klavan</a> and first-time  novelist Bob Hamer, a retired undercover FBI agent, each has produced  an exciting thriller that is appropriate for teens and their elders.   Their new books would be equally at home on the mystery section shelf  at Barnes and Noble and at Family Christian Stores; and best of all, neither insults  the reader&#8217;s intelligence nor spends more time preaching than entertaining.</p>
<p>Klavan’s <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1595547134?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=1595547134" target="_blank">The Long Way Home</a>,</em> is the second entry in his “Homelanders” series, which is about  a young man trying to clear his name on murder charges while fighting  a group of homegrown Islamofascist terrorists.  That sounds like a tall  order for a high school senior, but that’s only the half of it —  Charlie West can’t remember any details of the past year that got  him into this fine mess.</p>
<p>But Charlie’s partial amnesia  isn&#8217;t the most unusual thing about him in the very girl-oriented world  of “Young Adult Fiction.”   He’s a guy, but not a misunderstood bookworm  or awkward geek—and he’s not about to be thrust into a world of  magic. Charlie is a church-going, patriotic, athletic and popular kid.  And,  fortunately for his current predicament, his sport is karate, not football.</p>
<p>As <a href="http://www.davidforsmark.com/5703/the-last-thing-i-remember" target="_blank"><em>The  Last Thing I Remembe</em>r</a>,  the series&#8217; first book, opened, Charlie was being tortured by terrorists  without a clue about how he got there. He spent the rest of the book  running for his life at a pace that would exhaust Richard Kimble.</p>
<p>Charlie’s still on the lam  from both the police and the Homelander terrorist group, and there are  still a satisfying amount of action set pieces (including a great escape  from a killer in a library that turns into a flight from a whole police  department), but <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1595547134?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=1595547134" target="_blank">The Long Way Home</a></em> gives us time to take a breath  as Charlie secretly returns to his home town.</p>
<p>As he enlists his loyal friends  — and his dream girl, who he frustratingly finds out fell in love  with him during the year of his life that he can’t remember — the  tale allows for more character development and rounds out Charlie’s  emotional life for the reader.  Stories of the hero who returns home to  right past wrongs fill a niche in classic mystery lore, and Klavan does  a fine job in adapting it for a younger audience.</p>
<p>Think <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000FJGWBM?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=B000FJGWBM" target="_blank">Memento</a> meets <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000I5XOW8?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=B000I5XOW8" target="_blank">The  Fugitive</a>, spiced with the plot twists and relentless suspense of 24 and  just a touch of the classic kid mysteries like The Hardy Boys, and you’ll  have an idea of the treat in store when you pick up Klavan’s Homelanders  novels.</p>
<p>Hamer, meanwhile,  is certainly  following the old saw to “write what you know about.” His nonfiction  debut, <em><a href="http://97.74.65.51/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=35982" target="_blank">The  Last Undercover</a></em>,  was about his five-year infiltration of the pro-pedophile group NAMBLA.  Among  his other real-life adventures are posing as an arms dealer with the  Russian mob and busting the world’s largest counterfeiting ring run  by the North Koreans. But he chose a different yarn to launch his career  in fiction.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0805449787?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0805449787" target="_blank"><em>Enemies Among U</em>s</a> is a  crackerjack novel about undercover FBI agent Matt Hogan’s investigation of  a charity that may be providing covert funding for terrorists. His superiors  have become worried that Hogan is becoming overly aggressive and even  reckless in the field, so they assign him the nice, quiet case of checking  out a charitable clinic that may have ties to bad guys.  Of course, the  assignment turns out to be as dangerous as any he’s ever taken.</p>
<p>Hamer brings a wealth of inside  knowledge and telling detail to his story. The twist is that the suspicious  charity is run by Christians, rather than the usual Muslim suspects,  and we don’t know if the clinic&#8217;s staff is filled with allies or dupes  of the terrorists.</p>
<p>The veteran FBI agent also  paints a realistic portrait of the bureaucratic and legal hoops that  agents must jump through in order to pursue the bad guys. Warrants aren’t  issued on the spot while the agent is driving across town in hot pursuit,  and getting instant lab results on forensic evidence.</p>
<p><em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0805449787?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0805449787" target="_blank">Enemies Among Us</a> </em>is the  first novel to be published under Ollie North’s Fidelis imprint, a  new Christian publishing house that aims to be a little grittier and  less overtly preachy than their brethren.  Enemies is the perfect  start.</p>
<p>Unlike most books in the genre,  Matt is struggling with his faith, while his wife is the steadfast one. The  Hogans have a very healthy (off-scene) love life, and the book does  not stop dead in its tracks to sermonize even when it would seem perfectly  natural to do so. The characters&#8217; ideological and spiritual struggles  are seamlessly woven into the story in a way that is perfectly natural,  which makes the characters come alive instead of killing the pace of  the narrative.</p>
<p><em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1595547134?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=1595547134" target="_blank">The Long Way Home</a> </em>and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0805449787?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0805449787" target="_blank"><em>Enemies  Among U</em>s</a> are exemplary in the way the authors make their points without  stacking the dramatic deck or overt sermonizing&#8211; and they can be enjoyed  by all ages. In these cases, that’s a good thing.</p>
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		<title>The Bigger the Government, the Less You Are Needed</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/dennis-prager/the-bigger-the-government-the-less-you-are-needed/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-bigger-the-government-the-less-you-are-needed</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 16 Mar 2010 04:00:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dennis Prager]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[What the Left destroys in people.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/government.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-54665" title="government" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/government.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="302" /></a></p>
<p>Among the things left and right,  religious and secular, agree on is that one of the few real needs human beings  have is to be needed.</p>
<p>When we are not needed, life feels  pointless.</p>
<p>The need to be needed is universal.  Men need it; women need it. The sexes may feel needed in different ways, but the  depth of the need is the same. Many women feel particularly alive when needed by  their young children; many men feel worthy when needed by their family and/or  their work. That is why most women navigate difficult emotional straits when  their adult children leave home and assume independent lives, and why most men  find it so crushing to lose their job &#8212; not necessarily because of loss of  income, but because of the loss of meaning that comes from no longer being  needed.</p>
<p>Only when we are needed do we  believe we have significance. Give a boy a special task &#8212; just about any task  &#8212; and he blossoms. Give a girl a person &#8212; in fact, almost any living being &#8212;  who depends on her, and she blossoms.</p>
<p>Of course, there are also myriad  unhealthy ways of feeling needed. If an unwed teenage girl has a baby in order  to feel needed, it is usually a bad thing for her, for the child and for  society. If a boy joins a gang to feel needed/significant, it is bad for him and  society.</p>
<p>Though not consciously intending to,  over time, the left destroys people&#8217;s ability to be needed and, therefore, to be  or feel significant.</p>
<p>As I regularly note, the bigger the  government, the smaller the citizen. One can add: The bigger the government, the  less significant the citizen &#8212; especially men.</p>
<p>This is easy to explain because it  is definitional. The more the state does, the less its citizens are needed to  do. One well-known example is the way welfare robbed so many men of significance  when women and their children came to depend financially on the  state.</p>
<p>And it goes further than that. In  order to feel significant, men not only need to have others depend on them, they  also need to depend on themselves, on their own work and initiative. But that,  too, is destroyed as the state gets bigger. Fewer and fewer people work for  themselves (which leads to, among other things, the disappearance of that  quintessentially American ideal of the risk-taking  entrepreneur).</p>
<p>It gets worse. As being needed and  significant shifts from the individual to the state, the state increasingly  determines who is needed and who has significance.</p>
<p>That means, first of all,  politicians. Obviously, whoever controls the ever-expanding government has the  most significance in a society.</p>
<p>Another significant group in the  leftist state are media people. They are significant in a non-leftist state such  as America, as well. But there is a huge  difference. Since American media are largely independent of government, there  are a far greater number of significant media people in America than in the much smaller world of  consolidated state media in Europe or Latin  America. There is nothing like the BBC or French Radio and  Television in the United  States. Therefore, no one in American media is  nearly as powerful as are the heads of the BBC or RTF. So the American state  cannot anoint who is significant in media.</p>
<p>Another significant group in the  leftist state is intellectuals. They, too, are largely determined by the state,  which funds nearly all education and intellectual life. One reason intellectuals  in America and Europe are so  often estranged from American culture is that intellectuals have rarely had the  fame or significance here that they have had in Europe. There are no American intellectuals who have had  the celebrity or influence that Jean-Paul Sartre did in France, for  example.</p>
<p>So, too, artists take on greater  prominence as the leftwing state grows. And they, too, are funded and celebrated  by the state.</p>
<p>In the ever-expanding state that the  left creates, the vast majority of individuals lose significance in that they  are simply less needed as the state takes over many of their roles. Fifty years  ago, the men of the local Rotary Club had prestige and societal significance. So  did fathers. So did clergy. With the ascendance of the left and the expansion of  their state, much of their power and societal significance has  eroded.</p>
<p>Now, as the state expands further  into health care, the same will happen to doctors as power and prestige are  transferred from them to the heads of dozens of new government health regulatory  agencies. Over time, neither you nor your doctor will fully decide your  treatment.</p>
<p>Indeed, over time, if the left has  its way and the state keeps expanding, you will also not decide what temperature  to keep your house or how to get to work. Nor will you be needed to educate your  children (that is already the job of the state, and much of Europe now bans home schooling), or to raise and  discipline your children (the state will ensure you are doing it correctly, and  spanking is now illegal in 25 countries). Fathers will be needed primarily (and  after divorce, only) as providers of child and spousal support.</p>
<p>In  short, you will be needed essentially for one thing: to finance the one thing  that is truly needed &#8212; the state.</p>
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