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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; movie</title>
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		<title>Hollywood’s Last Stand</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/hollywoods-last-stand/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=hollywoods-last-stand</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/hollywoods-last-stand/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 30 Dec 2014 05:50:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-American]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hollywood]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[movie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[North Korea]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[the interview]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[villains]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Americans are the only safe villains left.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/article-2656810-1EB7C4F100000578-425_634x351.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-248363" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/article-2656810-1EB7C4F100000578-425_634x351-450x249.jpg" alt="article-2656810-1EB7C4F100000578-425_634x351" width="331" height="183" /></a>Americans are the only people in the world who go to see movies in which they are the villains.</p>
<p>Russians stayed away from Jack Ryan Shadow Recruit with its Slavic villains (though Chinese audiences liked it well enough). And movies with Chinese villains can’t get made because the People’s Republic has more devastating penalties for offending studios than a mere hacking. Instead of leaking private emails, the studios simply aren’t allowed to release their movies in the world’s second biggest film market.</p>
<p>Hollywood’s titans take a break from patting themselves on the back for their commitment to freedom of expression and eagerly rush to work with the censors of the Chinese Communist Party to make their movies acceptable to China.</p>
<p>Muslim villains can’t appear in movies at all since September 11. The last time a movie had a villain named Mohammed, the filmmaker ended up hauled out of his home and tossed into jail. Hillary Clinton, Hollywood’s choice, <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/white-house-ordered-prosecution-of-mohammed-filmmaker/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">had assured grieving Benghazi family</span></a> members that instead of punishing their son’s killers, she would “have that person arrested and prosecuted that did the video.”</p>
<p>With script control like that, it’s no wonder that you don’t see many Muslim movie villains. Not when Hillary is planning her presidential victory tour.</p>
<p>What does all that leave Hollywood scriptwriters with? Aliens, comic book villains and North Korea.</p>
<p>North Korea is a perfect villain because it isn’t a film market. Even possession of an American film can mean death. You can’t release the next weepy melodrama or comic book movie there which makes it fair game. And so a small nasty country with no sense of humor became the favorite movie villain of a gutless entertainment industry.</p>
<p>James Bond took on North Koreans in Die Another Day, the North Koreans invaded the White House in Olympus Has Fallen (or rather a radical faction of North Koreans, even before the Sony hack Hollywood was staking out a cautious position) and took over America in the Red Dawn remake.</p>
<p>These cinematic victories over North Koreans (or North Korean extremists) were hollow displays of Hollywood cowardice and the panicked response to The Interview stripped the hollow pretense of that courage away. And all that remains is the Great American Villain.</p>
<p>If Hollywood can’t even pick on North Korea, a country with no political or economic influence in the West, then it has no safe targets left. All that Hollywood can do is continue exporting anti-Americanism in movies which make the American military and American traditionalists into the villains.</p>
<p>Anti-American movies are a safe export. By making anti-American movies, Hollywood saves Russia and China a lot of money on propaganda. Instead of having to manufacture their own stories about the Yankee Devils, they can buy them directly from the Yankee Devils.</p>
<p>Or as Lenin was said to have put it, “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”</p>
<p>The entertainment industry has made anti-Americanism into its biggest export. In another age, Hollywood exported the values of a vibrant and promising nation. Now it exports dystopian fantasies, post-apocalyptic societies, corporate made satires about corporations and other narratives which depict the collapse and fall of America as the inevitable outcome of its dysfunctional society and warped values.</p>
<p>North Korea could never make better anti-American movies than Hollywood does. It’s one reason why Hollywood movies play to large audiences in countries like China and Russia where America is disliked.</p>
<p>This is the courageous storytelling that the entertainment industry prides itself on as it cringes before dictators while abusing Americans. But courage was never Hollywood’s strength. Before Hollywood studios were allowing Chinese Communists to censor their movies, they had extended that same privilege to Nazi Germany.</p>
<p>Joe Kennedy warned Hollywood, “You guys are going to be responsible for pushing the United States into war against the Nazis unless you stop your anti-Nazi films, your anti-Hitler propaganda.”</p>
<p>But Joe was wasting his time. Between Hollywood’s Communists (the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League changed its name to American Peace Mobilization once Hitler and Stalin made their dirty deal) and the native cowardice of the studio bosses, there wasn’t much to censor.</p>
<p>The Nazi as the standby villain had to wait until the actual Nazis had been defeated. Real Nazis were too dangerous to offend. So were Communists and Islamic terrorists. And now even North Koreans.</p>
<p>Regardless of who was behind the Sony hack, the industry reacted with kneejerk appeasement. That was the way that MGM had reacted to Nazi demands for censorship. Before theaters were turning their backs on The Interview, British theaters were turning up their noses at Chaplin’s self-financed The Great Dictator because it might offend Hitler at a time when appeasement was still the watchword.</p>
<p>While The Interview has been compared to The Great Dictator, Chaplin made his movie because he genuinely thought that Hitler needed to be opposed. By contrast The Interview is a typically ironic muddle with no moral center whose only reason for existing is its own miserably unfunny absurdity.</p>
<p>What Chaplin had was a point of view. Hollywood tends to have a political agenda, but nothing it will fight for or defend. Nothing that it truly believes in.</p>
<p>Hollywood has a long history of pandering to totalitarian regimes and ideologies. The difference is that it no longer does so under American colors. Instead it pretends to speak truth to power with its anti-Americanism while pandering to every dictator abroad.</p>
<p>With its British stars, Australian locations and Qatari investors, there isn’t much American about Hollywood these days except its anti-Americanism. That is one reason why Hollywood movies often perform better abroad than they do at home. Hollywood is becoming irrelevant in America. North American box office receipts fell 5 percent this year and 15 percent during the summer.</p>
<p>But that doesn’t matter because the international box office is holding strong.</p>
<p>A post-American entertainment industry naturally draws on American villains. Its stock of foreign villains is now exhausted. After the Sony hack, studios rushed to cancel North Korean themed movies before even waiting for the outcome of the investigation. And without North Korean villains to implausibly seize the White House and invade America, that leaves Americans as the villains.</p>
<p>At a time when few countries are willing to tolerate being ‘villainized’ in Hollywood films, Americans are still expected to subsidize their own demonization.</p>
<p>Unlike North Korea, Hollywood doesn’t take them seriously.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.</b></p>
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		<title>PUMP to Kick Oil Addiction</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/edwin-black/pump-to-kick-oil-addiction/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=pump-to-kick-oil-addiction</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 16 Sep 2014 04:00:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Edwin Black]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[addiction]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fuel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hollywood]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[movie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[OIL]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Pump]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=240960</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A new Hollywood movie empowers the quest to get us off oil. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/vz.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-240964" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/vz-328x350.jpg" alt="vz" width="246" height="263" /></a>ISIS has trebled its forces within recent months and in large measure finances its expansion with $10 million to $20 million per week in illicit oil sales from as many as 70 captured oil wells.</p>
<p>Iran now has multiplied its centrifuges to almost 20,000, enabling it to convert its 5 percent and 20 percent enriched uranium to 90 percent weapons-grade HEU within a 7-week breakout period. With sanctions lifted, Tehran’s monthly oil revenues have soared to almost 3 million barrels per day, generating billions of dollars per month.</p>
<p>Tiny Qatar, with only about 280,000 citizens, provides Hamas with some $400 million annually. Qatar exports more than 600,000 barrels of oil per day helping to establish an estimated $200 billion petrodollar reserve.</p>
<p>Oil is driving it all —and more.</p>
<p>American petroleum use accounts for about one-quarter of global consumption, depending upon whose numbers you’re refining. Kicking our oil addiction is an old mantra that is preached daily from the sidelines by an army of expert energy analysts and security insiders. A slick, kinetic new Hollywood movie, <a href="http://www.pumpthemovie.com/">PUMP</a>, is breaking out of the wooden oil documentary mold to help power a concerted national effort to get off of oil.</p>
<p>PUMP’s point is easily distilled: if simple fuel choice were implemented, it would quickly dilute the power of petroleum and those who sell it. PUMP combines flashy cinematography and rock music with irrefutable testimony by the likes of former Shell president John Hofmeister, Tesla founder Elon Musk, analyst Annie Korin, and Auto Channel editor Marc Rauch. I also appear in the film with the inside historical story of corporate crimes committed by General Motors and Standard Oil to cripple the electric mass transit system, which proliferated in the first years of the twentieth century, and replace it with oil consuming buses — in other words, how we got here.</p>
<p>As I wrote in my book <em>Internal Combustion </em>and subsequent works, we never needed to be addicted to oil. Never. The electric car was invented in about 1835. Until the run-up to WW I, most of the motor vehicles in America were electric-powered, until Edison’s plans were subverted by the car industry and the manufacturers switched to gas-burning internal combustion vehicles.</p>
<p>The much-vaunted hydrogen fuel cell that uses water as a feedstock is based on technology developed back in 1835. Some years ago, I drove an ordinary showroom Hydrogen-powered Chevrolet Equinox all over Southern California on a single tank of hydrogen. That hydrogen fuel was zapped from simple water, filled at a public Shell station on Santa Monica Boulevard that maintained a hydrogen pump on the side. Hydrogen supplies are abundant in the US — it’s the ingredient needed for unleaded gas.</p>
<p>More than 17 million compressed natural gas (CNG) vehicles operate worldwide. A petroleum car can be converted to natural gas in a day. But in America, less than 120,000 operate —in large measure because Honda, America’s major NGV car manufacturer, stubbornly refuses to mass market its own vehicle beyond a few thousand per year.</p>
<p>Methanol, ethanol, a basket of other alcohol and alternative fuels — all can power an automobile with virtually equal ability. This is the so-called “Open Fuel Standard” that goes hand-in-hand with the flex-fuel-designed vehicles that more than 17 million Americans drive – yet many don’t know it. A minor adjustment in the software and the fuel system would allow fuel democracy — any alt fuel from anyone willing to provide it.</p>
<p>That is the message in PUMP:  Fuel democracy to protect American democracy. Unlock the car engines the way we want to unlock our cell phones.</p>
<p>Until we have a moment of truth with ourselves, America is destined to not only be addicted to oil, but addicted to all the terrible trappings that come with oil.</p>
<p>PUMP opens September 19 at many theater screens across America, including the AMC 25 in Times Square. You can <a href="http://www.pumpthemovie.com/">locate a PUMP</a> screening anywhere in America. Prepare to get angry. Getting off of oil is easier than we think — if we mobilize national will. There has never been a better or more critical time to energize this than now.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<title>Bad Company</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-tapson/bad-company/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=bad-company</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-tapson/bad-company/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 17 Apr 2013 04:45:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Tapson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[movie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Redford]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[terrorists]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[the Company You Keep]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Weathermen]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Redford’s new movie glamorizes the Weathermen.]]></description>
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<p>In 2004, former Hollywood heartthrob Robert Redford executive-produced <em>The Motorcycle Diaries</em> a cinematic love letter to the young <a href="http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=6946">Ché Guevara</a>. In 2007 he directed the talky anti-war bore <em>Lions for Lambs</em>, starring himself as an activist professor who is appalled when two of his students enlist and fight in Afghanistan instead of protesting our involvement here at home. The 2010 movie <em>The Conspirator</em> was Redford’s <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Hollywood/2010/10/05/Sucker-Punch-Squad--Robert-Redford---s-The-Conspirator-Takes-Aim-at-Bush">thinly-veiled attack</a> on Bush’s war on terror posing as a docudrama about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Now Redford sets the sights of his cinematic activism on idealizing the domestic terrorists of the <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6808">Weather Underground</a>.</p>
<p>Redford, founder of the <a href="http://www.sundance.org/">Sundance Institute</a>, and a progressive activist with <a href="http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=9685">connections to the leftist puppetmaster George Soros</a>, produced and directed the new film<em> The Company You Keep</em> from a screenplay adapted from a 2004 novel by Neil Gordon. In addition, Redford also stars in the movie as an attorney whose former identity as a Weatherman radical is exposed by a pushy journalist hungry for a career-launching story. Still wanted thirty years later for a deadly bank robbery in his militant past, Redford goes on the run to prove his innocence by finding the real shooter and convincing her to give herself up.</p>
<p>Along the way he reaches out to old comrades, fugitives like himself who have also created new identities and lives for themselves, like the professor who teaches Marx and anti-colonialist <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frantz_Fanon">Frantz Fanon</a> in his popular class. They are all – including the two women (played by Julie Christie and – surprise! – <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6149">Code Pink</a> ally <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1116">Susan Sarandon</a>) who are the most unrepentantly violent of the gang – painted as idealists who simply got carried away in their resistance to the United States government, which they believed was committing genocide abroad and murderous suppression of dissent at home. “We made mistakes, but we were right,” a smug Sarandon’s character tells the journalist.</p>
<p>That quote could sum up the theme of the movie. <em>The Company You Keep</em> pays lip service to rejecting the movement’s violent excesses; for example, when the journalist himself begins to display an empathy with the radicals after listening to Sarandon’s moral pontification, an FBI agent warns him, “Terrorists justify terrorism. Don’t get confused here.” But at the same time the movie absolves those who participated in that violence – and who would do it all over again – by minimizing it as passionate excess. “People make mistakes,” says Redford’s character, who is clearly the voice of moral authority in the film. Of <em>course</em> people make mistakes – this is the most facile truism of all time. But most people know better than to set off bombs to kill innocent people, which is not simply a bad choice or youthful indiscretion – <em>it’s terrorism</em>, and those who try to absolve them of it are terrorist sympathizers.</p>
<p>Redford’s sympathy for the domestic terrorists shows throughout the movie. His character tells the young journalist, “A smart guy like you? Thirty years ago you would’ve been part of the movement.” Right, because smart, idealistic, capable people naturally drift toward radical, anti-American violence. The murderer played by Julie Christie is depicted as a passionate idealist whose principles never flagged even after all these decades on the run. When Redford’s character urges her to turn herself in, she responds defiantly, “I’ll turn myself in when the politicians and corporations turn themselves in for all they’ve done.” Spoken like a true member of Occupy Wall Street.</p>
<p>Redford’s co-producer on the project, Nicolas Chartier, <a href="http://www.deadline.com/2011/07/robert-redford-shia-la-beouf-team-for-the-company-you-keep/">described</a> <em>The Company You Keep</em> as “an edge-of-your-seat thriller about real Americans who stood for their beliefs, thinking they were patriots and defending their country’s ideals against their government.”</p>
<p>Real Americans who stood for their beliefs? Patriots?  The Weather Underground never considered themselves patriots. They penned a Declaration of a State of War against America – or as they spelled it, AmeriKKKa. They advocated the overthrow of capitalism. They aspired to take over the U.S. government, establish re-education camps for their opponents, and were prepared to kill as many as 25 million “diehard capitalists” who were incapable of being reformed. They sought to launch a race war. They weren’t “defending their country’s ideals” – they were seeking to eradicate them.</p>
<p>As <a href="http://www.theblaze.com/stories/not-ready-upcoming-weather-underground-movie-to-show-real-americans-who-stood-for-their-beliefs-not-ready/">The Blaze</a> notes, some of the terrorist group’s most prominent members remain belligerent and unrepentant to this day, including its co-founder <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1529">Bernadine Dohrn</a>, who calls the American government “the real terrorist” <a href="http://www.theblaze.com/stories/bill-ayers-wife-american-govt-is-real-terrorist-while-right-is-racist-armed-and-hostile/">in this interview</a> from November 2010. Her husband, Weather Underground co-founder and President Obama’s <a href="http://www.moonbattery.com/archives/2008/02/obamas_radical.html">old friend</a> <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2169">Bill Ayers</a>, now a radical academic like his wife, <a href="http://www.theblaze.com/stories/bill-ayers-restrained-weather-underground-just-like-wikileaks-against-violent-us-i-never-denounced-wu-violence/">still has not denounced the group’s violence</a>. “I don’t regret setting bombs,” he famously said in 2001. “I feel we didn’t do enough.”</p>
<p>Despite this, they are now considered influential and respected members of the academic community, which speaks volumes about the ideological slant of our institutions of higher learning. Ron Radosh points out in <a href="http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2013/04/04/a-hollywood-and-academic-rehab-for-new-left-terrorists-and-black-panther-murderers/?singlepage=true">his piece</a> about the movie that Weatherman Kathy Boudin — who served 22 years for her role as the getaway driver in a deadly 1981 Brinks robbery — was recently made adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of Social Work and also appointed a scholar-in-residence at New York University. Radosh quotes <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/344537/columbia-university-david-horowitz">David Horowitz</a> as pointing out that Boudin, on whom Susan Sarandon’s character is obviously based, is a “murderess who betted the cold-blooded massacre of three law-enforcement officers, including the first African-American on the Nyack police force; a woman whose actions left nine children fatherless and who has shown no genuine remorse for that.”</p>
<p>Robert Redford knows that today’s young generations learn about history, when they learn about it at all, from either <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=939">Howard Zinn</a> or Hollywood. The progressive propaganda that runs through movies like <em>The Company You Keep</em> shapes their perspective on the past. Considering that the movie has <a href="http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=companyyoukeep.htm">earned</a> barely half a million dollars in its first two weekends, it’s not shaping that perspective for very many people – so far. But it will live on, on DVD and television, and perhaps be recommended in classrooms, further rehabilitating the reputations of unrepentant killers.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Hollywood&#8217;s Undying Love for Communist Angela Davis</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/hollywoods-undying-love-for-communist-angela-davis/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=hollywoods-undying-love-for-communist-angela-davis</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 15 Apr 2013 04:54:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Angela Davis]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Beyoncé]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jada Pinkett Smith]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jay-Z]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[A vicious totalitarian's legacy is whitewashed by some of the country's biggest celebrities. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/hollywoods-undying-love-for-communist-angela-davis/angeladavisarrestassoledad/" rel="attachment wp-att-184725"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-184725" title="angelaDavisArrestAsSoledad" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/angelaDavisArrestAsSoledad.jpg" alt="" width="240" height="205" /></a>Recently,<em> The Daily Beast</em> disgraced itself by providing a <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/04/03/exclusive-bill-ayers-on-the-weathermen-obama-s-crap-job-more.html">platform</a> for communist Bill Ayers to spread <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/david-horowitz/the-daily-beasts-disgraceful-interview-with-bill-ayers/">unchallenged lies</a> about his background in the Weather Underground terrorist organization, which is presently the subject of an exonerating new film by leftist actor Robert Redford. The film, <em>The Company You Keep</em>, is not unlike the prior whitewash of communism Redford presented in the 1973 film <em>The Way We Were</em>, co-starring fellow left-winger Barbra Streisand. Following in Redford&#8217;s footsteps, some of the biggest names in Hollywood have just released an equally mendacious portrait of radical Angela Davis in the documentary <em>Free Angela &amp; All Political Prisoners</em>, a work that further popularizes Davis&#8217;s fictional persona as a &#8220;social justice&#8221; advocate and racial equality icon of the Sixties. What audiences will be robbed of in this historical distortion, however, is a truthful look at Davis&#8217;s &#8220;political&#8221; career &#8212; filled as it is with violent militarism, racial hatred and complicity in murder.  The documentary will also not reveal the destructive work Davis continues today by promoting the release of black criminals back into black communities to further terrorize their populations (<a href="http://bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/bvvc.pdf">90% of the victims of black criminals </a>are black).</p>
<p>Thus, while Davis&#8217;s celebrity followers set out to whitewash a brutal totalitarian&#8217;s legacy, it would seem to be an appropriate occasion to take a look back at the true historical record of Angela Davis&#8217;s life.</p>
<p>Davis grew up in a middle class family from Birmingham, Alabama, and later <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1303">attended</a> New York’s communist Little Red Schoolhouse (LRS). Later at Brandeis University, she spent her junior year in France, meeting Algerian revolutionaries during the visit. After graduating, she spent two years as a member of the faculty at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. She came back to America for a teaching position at UCLA, where she worked for Herbert Marcuse, a fellow Marxist.</p>
<p>In 1967, Davis <a href="http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAdavisAN.htm">joined</a> the Black Panther Party (BPP). Founded in 1966, the <a href="http://www.gayrva.com/news-views/women-sexuality-and-the-black-panther-party/">BBP</a> was motivated &#8212; not by a vision of racial harmony &#8212; but black separatism, racial hate and the use of violence to achieve its objectives. It also <a href="http://www.franciscodacosta.com/articles/BPP.html">advocated</a> an end to the capitalist system that “oppressed” blacks and demanded that the federal government provide black Americans with full employment, guaranteed income, as well as their own jurisdiction within the U.S.</p>
<p>BPP founders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale were ruthless practitioners of political violence.  In 1968, the BPP <a href="http://www.marxists.org/history/usa/workers/black-panthers/">made</a> “Mao’s Red Book” required reading for its members. Davis, like many women in BBP, rose to prominence by partaking in violence and getting arrested for it.</p>
<p>In 1968 Davis joined the Communist Party, declaring, “The only path of liberation for black people is that which leads toward complete and radical overthrow of the capitalist class.&#8221; Davis was fired from UCLA in 1969, when her Communist association was revealed. The ensuing First Amendment case resulting in her reinstatement turned Davis into a national figure.</p>
<p>In 1970, Soledad Prison guard John Mills was killed, a crime for which three convicts, George Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo and John Cluchette (subsequently known as the &#8220;Soledad Brothers&#8221;), were held responsible. Jackson, a BPP member like Davis, was her lover, and the two maintained a secret <a href="http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=1608">marriage</a> while Jackson was in prison. A deadly plot was hatched to get Jackson out of jail for which Davis bought an arsenal of weapons just <a href="http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=1608">two days</a> prior to the slaughter. On August 7, 1970, George Jackson&#8217;s 17-year-old brother, Jonathan, charged into a Marin County courtroom and took several people hostage, including Judge Harold Haley, the prosecuting assistant DA, and two jurors. The assailants taped a sawed-off shotgun (owned by Davis) to Haley&#8217;s chin. In the ensuing escape attempt, a shootout took place during which Haley&#8217;s head was blown off, and Jonathan Jackson was killed. A week after the horrific event, an arrest warrant <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/08/home/davis-shooting.html">charging</a> Davis with murder and kidnapping was issued.</p>
<p>Davis had already fled the state, using a series of aliases and disguises to avoid detection. Two months later, she was arrested in New York City by the FBI. Her trial took place in 1972, after more than a year of delays <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/Articles/Angela%20Davis%20and%20Larry%20Cott.pdf">caused</a> by the disqualification of several judges and a change of venue. The prosecution advanced its case based on love letters found in Jackson&#8217;s cell after he was killed during another escape attempt (in that incident, Jackson bound three security guards and <a href="http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=1608">slit</a> their throats). Davis had kept constant company with Jonathan Jackson in the days leading up to the attempted kidnappings.</p>
<p>Davis, acting as her own attorney, spoke for 80 minutes, giving her version of the events. She claimed her interest in George Jackson was based on an effort to &#8220;free all oppressed men and women and the Soledad brothers,&#8221; that she spent considerable time with Jonathan Jackson because she was fearful of being attacked by &#8220;extremists&#8221; after she lost her job at UCLA, and that she purchased guns because, growing up, her father taught her to be fearful of racial violence. She claimed Jonathan stole the guns from her, and that her love for George happened after her own incarceration, &#8220;because like him, I was a political prisoner.&#8221; After that speech, Davis never testified again. Because she acted as her own attorney, her testimony was never subjected to cross-examination.</p>
<p>Davis was subsequently implicated by more than 20 witnesses in the plot to free George Jackson. In turn, Davis&#8217;s defense team presented several alibi witnesses, almost all of whom were fellow Communist friends. They testified Davis was in LA at the time of the kidnapping and murder of Haley. Prior to the trial, the defense team had filed a steady stream of motions, all based on the idea that white prejudice would tilt the scales of justice unfairly. They also used psychiatrists, psychologists and a handwriting expert to pick a jury based on how they would interact as a group.</p>
<p>The defense team did their work well. The first vote by the jury, which was packed with Davis sympathizers like radical activist Mary Timothy, was 10-2 for acquittal. After they reached a unanimous verdict and Davis was acquitted, the majority of the jury attended a music festival victory celebration with her. Juror Ralph Delange, exiting the court after the verdict, gave a revolutionary clenched fist salute to a cheering crowd. &#8220;I did it because I wanted to show I felt an identity with the oppressed people in the crowd,&#8221; he explained to reporters. &#8220;All through the trial, they thought we were just a white, middle class jury. I wanted to express my sympathy with their struggle.&#8221;</p>
<p>A triumphant Davis moved on, continuing to promote her Communist agenda. In 1979, her efforts earned her the International Lenin Peace Prize awarded by the police state of East Germany. The Soviet government-appointed panel that awarded her the prize said that her work had “strengthened peace among peoples.” Davis twice ran for Vice President of the United States, in 1980 and 1984, on the Communist Party ticket. She remained in the party until her expulsion in 1991, for opposing the coup against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.</p>
<p>Davis, like many &#8220;rehabilitated&#8221; radicals, is a <a href="http://feministstudies.ucsc.edu/faculty/singleton.php?&amp;singleton=true&amp;cruz_id=aydavis">college professor</a> at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in the Feminist Studies Department. The department awarded a Ph.D. to BPP founder and cop killer Huey P. Newton while Davis was on the faculty. Davis, who has subsequently become a Distinguished Professor Emerita in her department, remains fixated on what she terms the &#8220;prison industrial complex,&#8221; and when she lectures, she tells her audiences to envision a world where there are no prisons at all.</p>
<p>In a 1998 essay, Davis <a href="http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Prison_System/Masked_Racism_ADavis.html">revealed</a> that she considers prisons the &#8220;corporatization of punishment&#8221; and that the &#8220;great majority of people have been tricked into believing in the efficacy of imprisonment, even though the historical record clearly demonstrates that prisons do not work.&#8221; She further insists that &#8220;conversations about &#8216;race relations&#8217; will hardly dismantle a prison industrial complex that thrives on and nourishes the racism hidden within the deep structures of our society.&#8221; Thus, she advocates &#8220;increasing strands of resistance to the prison industrial complex into a powerful movement for social transformation.&#8221;</p>
<p>A 2007 special report released by the <a href="http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/bvvc.pdf">Bureau of Justice Statistics</a> reveals where that &#8220;social transformation&#8221; would inevitably lead. It notes that between 8,000 and 9,000 black Americans are murdered annually in the United States and that 93 percent of these murders are perpetrated by other blacks. In Davis&#8217;s world, these criminals would never be imprisoned at all, or they would be freed from prison to perpetrate additional crimes that, as the statistics reveal, disproportionally victimize &#8220;people of color&#8221; about whom Davis professes to be so concerned.</p>
<p>Davis has never expressed remorse for her aggressive promotion of violent militarism &#8212; or recanted her devotion to the bloody ideology of Marxism. She is adored by her fellow leftists, for whom her association with assorted thugs, murderers and anti-white racists never dampens their enthusiasm. While her followers bring her to campuses to rail against the evils of capitalism, she collects tens of thousands of dollars per diem in speaking fees.</p>
<p>Jada Pinkett Smith, her husband, Will Smith, and rapper Jay-Z, <a href="http://www.blackenterprise.com/news/angela-davis-documentary-debuts-at-film-festival/">produced</a> <em>Free Angela &amp; All Political Prisoners </em>and are currently out promoting the lie of Angela Davis being a peace-loving &#8220;social justice&#8221; advocate. In an <a href="http://www.npr.org/2013/04/04/176239047/jada-pinkett-smith-respect-for-angela-davis-turmoil-and-hair">interview</a> with NPR, Pinkett Smith said that Davis &#8220;became this figure that embodied justice and freedom, and that people all over the world that were fighting for justice and freedom, you know, used her as the symbol in which to forge ahead.&#8221;</p>
<p>Pinkett Smith continued:</p>
<blockquote><p>I look at Angela Davis now as being a figure that was really in the middle of the building blocks of the America that we have today, and that she was really part of a time where America was shifting its consciousness, and she was a big part of that. And I look at this story as being one of the reasons and parts of the path of how we&#8217;ve gotten to have an African-American president, or even for myself or my husband or, you know, my kids to exist in the way that we do.</p></blockquote>
<p>As for Jay-Z, perhaps his feelings regarding Davis are best expressed by the reality that he and his wife, singer Beyonce Knowles, just recently made headlines by <a href="http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/04/06/republicans-blast-beyonce-jay-z-for-supporting-murderous-regime-in-cuba-trip/">spending</a> their fifth wedding anniversary in Communist Cuba, legitimizing Castro&#8217;s murderous regime in the process. Burnishing his ignorance even further, Jay-Z has <a href="http://babalublog.com/2013/04/05/jay-z-and-beyonce-in-cuba-promoting-the-racist-castro-dictatorship/">worn</a> a Che Guevara T-shirt on many occasions, indifferent to the fact that Guevara was not only a Marxist <a href="http://reason.com/blog/2012/09/19/hey-urban-outfitters-che-guevara-was-a-m">murderer,</a> but a self-avowed <a href="http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Che_Guevara#Che_Guevara.27s_racist_remarks">racist</a> as well. &#8220;The Negro is indolent and lazy, and spends his money on frivolities,&#8221; Guevara wrote in his autobiography, &#8220;Motorcycle Diaries.&#8221;</p>
<p>Angela Davis&#8217;s persona is no less subject to such deliberate mythologizing. NPR host Michel Martin gushed during her interview with Pinkett Smith:</p>
<blockquote><p>[Davis] is like a lot of figures from the &#8217;60s in the sense that, at the time, these were people who evoked hatred in some quarters. And now, some of these figures have just become really beloved, you know, cultural figures.</p></blockquote>
<p>Sadly, turning totalitarians and cold-blooded killers into &#8220;beloved&#8221; folk heroes and role models is all too common on the Left. It was just recently revealed, for instance, that Columbia University has <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/david-horowitz/this-is-columbia-university/">hired</a> former Weather Underground terrorist and convicted cop-killer Kathy Boudin. Boudin spent 22 years in prison for her role in an armored truck robbery in which two policemen and a Brinks guard were killed. NYU Law School added to the insult, <a href="http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/04/02/where-is-the-former-weather-underground-radical-who-spent-22-years-in-prison-for-robbery-that-left-2-cops-dead-teaching-at-columbia-of-course/">awarding</a> Boudin the Sheinberg Scholar-in-Residence, apparently for her lecture on “the politics of parole and re-entry” given at the university in March.</p>
<p>The situation is no different with Davis. Hollywood supporters like Pinkett Smith and Jay-Z conceal the fact that she was a member of an organization dedicated to violence, or that she was an unrepentant Communist for most of her life, embracing a hideous ideology responsible for the deaths of more than <a href="http://www.victimsofcommunism.org/history_communism.php">100 million</a> people.</p>
<p>Nor does it matter that this &#8220;innocent&#8221; woman changed her appearance and used several aliases to evade arrest for her complicity in the Marin county murder. That she continues to <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/mar/11/jury-isnt-out-on-angela-davis/?page=all">champion</a> the idea that any black American held in prison is a &#8220;political prisoner&#8221; irrespective of the crime committed &#8212; even as she hypocritically supported the imprisonment of Soviet dissidents and championed the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 &#8212; can all be swept under the rug to honor this &#8220;great woman,&#8221; as film director Shola Lynch <a href="http://www.takepart.com/article/2013/04/02/free-angela-davis-shola-lynch">refers</a> to her. The truth about Davis, however, is nothing like the story her acolytes tell. As the facts make clear, Davis is just another totalitarian monster who has human blood on her hands &#8212; because of her vicious attempt to bring her morbid ideals into earthly incarnation.</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>Jamie Foxx Celebrates Murdering &#8216;All the White People&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/ben-shapiro/jamie-foxx-celebrates-murdering-all-the-white-people/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=jamie-foxx-celebrates-murdering-all-the-white-people</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 13 Dec 2012 04:35:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ben Shapiro]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Why white liberals cheer jokes about their demise.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/ben-shapiro/jamie-foxx-celebrates-murdering-all-the-white-people/jamie-foxx-516x340/" rel="attachment wp-att-169143"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-169143" title="jamie-foxx-516x340" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/jamie-foxx-516x340.jpg" alt="" width="233" height="199" /></a>Dominated for decades by a Hollywood establishment intent on convincing them that America is an evil and racist place, indoctrinated for years by a university system that says the founders were early Nazi incarnations, today’s white liberals celebrate their own demise. Literally.</p>
<p>That’s what happened Saturday night on <em>Saturday Night Live</em>. With Jamie “Our Lord And Savior Barack Obama” Foxx hosting, things were bound to get dicey in a hurry. And Foxx didn’t disappoint. He launched into a monologue about his new movie, <em>Django Unchained</em>, which looks to be a fantasy about a former slave killing slaveholders in the antebellum South:</p>
<blockquote><p>“I play a slave. How black is that? I have to wear chains. How whack is that? But don’t worry. I get free. I save my wife and I kill all the white people in the movie. How great is that?”</p></blockquote>
<p>The crowd laughed and cheered. After all, what’s not to love about a man celebrating a racial genocide, especially when he loves Barack Obama?</p>
<p>The same feeling that led the crowd to cheer Foxx’s racist proclamation led them to cheer his similarly racist rant about the glories of President Obama’s second term – which, Foxx said, would demonstrate his “black” side, as opposed to his “white” first term. In his second term, said Foxx, Obama would rename himself “Barack Dikembe Mutombo Tupac Mandela Hussein Obama X.”</p>
<p>All of this would be simply cutting-edge humor back in the 1960s and 1970s. In the world of Richard Pryor, proclaiming the black desire to kill white folks was an ugly sentiment, but at least it mirrored a similarly ugly sentiment in areas of the country that longed for the days of Jim Crow. It was a response to the times.</p>
<p>Now, this sort of talk is tired. More than anything, it reinforces the notion that America is just as racist now as it was when Richard Pryor made the same jokes forty years ago. That’s nonsense. In point of fact, more black Americans are racist against white Americans than vice versa. Black on white crime is significantly more prevalent than white on black crime.</p>
<p>But you’d never see that on television. On television, virtually all crimes are committed by white people, typically upper class white people. Oh, sure, the initial suspect may be a member of a minority. But when push comes to shove, there’s a nefarious white person in the back manipulating the minority in order to harm the minority community. In <em>The Shield</em>, the real villains aren’t the minority drug dealers who murder cops – it’s white corrupt cops like Vic Mackey, who use them as pawns, or white police assistant chiefs like Ben Gilroy, who deliberately deplete police resources in minority communities in order to drive down real estate values.</p>
<p>And you don’t have to rely on scripted television to reinforce the images of white guilt. Take a look at shows like <em>Cops</em>, which follow criminality across the country with real footage. John Langley, who created the show, told me, “I show more white people than, statistically, what the truth is.”</p>
<p>There’s a reason that the Hollywood left pushes that skewed view – it’s trying to overcome what it sees as America’s continuing, deep-seated racism. But the monster it fights was slain long again, although the tail may still lash. Of course there are racists out there. They are horrible, evil, despicable people. But the notion of irrevocable institutional racism is a figment of the liberal imagination. As we move through time, the true racists die off. Sadly, black racism is growing. In fact, in many ways, black racism is increasingly a problem of the young, told by the left that their lives are a series of grievances rather than a series of decisions.</p>
<p>The effect is predictable: white liberals think they’re guilty for the problems of blacks, and black liberals agree. Imagine a white person going on national television and joking about murdering all the black folks – and imagine that getting laughs. You can’t, because it wouldn’t happen in today’s America. But Jamie Foxx does exactly that, and white liberals chortle, relieved at their own broad-mindedness.</p>
<p>This isn’t to sound the alarm about a race war. It isn’t coming. What <em>is</em> happening is a media war on non-minorities, convincing them that they are guilty for the sins of their ancestors, and must therefore bow their heads before the racism of those their ancestors sinned against. But the time has come to move beyond all of that. America already has. Only Hollywood hasn’t.</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>&#8216;Skyfall&#8217; Returns to &#8216;Bond&#8217; Roots</title>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 19 Nov 2012 04:30:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dr. Joseph A. Yeager]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[New movie is a gift to Brits who still love Queen and country. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dr-joseph-a-yeager/skyfall-returns-to-bond-roots/skyfall_11_h/" rel="attachment wp-att-165689"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-165689" title="Skyfall_11_h" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Skyfall_11_h-450x321.jpg" alt="" width="315" height="225" /></a>Quantum of Solace, the 22nd film in the venerable James Bond series, was arguably the most innovative of them all. Rejecting the ethos that defined Bond’s universe from Ian Fleming&#8217;s Casino Royale, published in 1953, to its cinematic incarnation in 2006, Quantum of Solace presented a bleak, manichean view of geopolitics wherein a greedy West, with willing assistance from a shadowy organization called Quantum, plundered an innocent and helpless third world. There were bows to Marxism, broadsides against capitalism, and shots across the bridge of the CIA.</p>
<p>Suffice it to say Quantum of Solace wore its cynical politics on its sleeve. A red sleeve.</p>
<p>But the ideology of the politics was less innovative than their mere introduction.</p>
<p>Bond films had always been notable for their apolitical tone. Born in 1962, the very apogee of the Cold War, Bond films nevertheless largely steered clear of political shoals. Yes, James Bond, the &#8220;Queen&#8217;s loyal terrier,&#8221; was basically patriotic and the Soviet Union was sometimes obliquely depicted as inimical, but by the standards of the age, politics were conspicuously muted.</p>
<p>That all changed with Quantum of Solace. And it changed in a postcolonial, postmodern manner that would not have pleased founding producers Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, let alone Ian Fleming, the man who authored it all.</p>
<p>Longstanding Bond observers surely wondered, had current producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, under the influence of Paul Haggis and Marc Forster, permanently turned James Bond against queen and country? (Historian <a href="http://www.juancole.com/2008/11/quantum-of-anti-imperialism.html">Juan Cole</a> gleefully suggested something to that effect.)</p>
<p>But Skyfall, the follow-up to Quantum of Solace, answers the query with a thunderous no.</p>
<p>Skyfall’s plot, for the film’s first half, is murky and nebulous. We learn that villains of some sort have acquired a list of Western agents embedded in terrorist organizations around the globe. We see those agents exposed, to mortal effect, on Youtube. And we witness a bomb blast at MI6 headquarters. But as they used to say in old England, what was it all in aid of?</p>
<p>The shroud is lifted after agent 007 and his MI6 cohort capture arch-foe Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem) and extradite him to the UK. Under interrogation, Silva relates his past as an MI6 agent in Hong Kong where, under orders from intelligence chief M (Judi Dench), he was hung out to dry, captured by the Chinese and tortured forte et dure. Silva attempted suicide by crushing a cyanide capsule lodged in a tooth, but the poison, rather than kill its consumer, merely scarred and disfigured him, physically and mentally.</p>
<p>Silva then, unhinged by the experience, has himself become a cyberterrorist bent on murdering M and destroying the organization she controls. From this point on, Skyfall offers a chiseled, linear and straightforward quest for revenge by Silva, coupled to James Bond’s exhaustive and frenzied efforts to thwart and destroy the malign shade of missions past.</p>
<p>Director Sam Mendes realizes the tale at a very high level. While Skyfall drags slightly in the middle, the tension and suspense mount exponentially and resolve in a slam-bang ending that is equal parts action and tragedy. The post-climax coda is a bittersweet and valedictory brew tinctured with optimistic revivification. It all packs a whipsawing wallop of conflicting emotions calculated to leave the audience with a certain sense of pride and good cheer.</p>
<p>Skyfall is a beautifully crafted film. Its cinematography, in contrast to that of Quantum of Solace, leans to the beautiful and the picturesque. Aerial shots of Shanghai at night are breathtaking and contrast powerfully with the stark Scottish landscape where the final pitched battle occurs.</p>
<p>The editing is old school. Contra Quantum of Solace, scenes unfold in a leisurely manner and cameras linger. Even the action sequences, jolting as they are, nevertheless do not disorient through rapid-fire, chaotic edits, as they did in Skyfall’s predecessor.</p>
<p>Acting in Skyfall is top-class. Daniel Craig, already the last word in Bondian toughness, manages to ratchet up his hard-bitten masculinity yet another notch.</p>
<p>Bardem’s Silva will go down in Bond lore as the creepiest villain in series history to date. Silva is an entirely different personality from No County for Old Men’s legendary Anton Chiguhr, but inspires a similar unease and dread.</p>
<p>The criminally underutilized Berenice Marlohe, in the role of distressed dame Severine, delivers a quirkily spellbinding performance. Her giddily terrified interchange with Bond in a Macao casino may be the highlight of the film.</p>
<p>Dame Judi Dench, in her final—and most extensive—turn as M, departs on a note that will draw attention from Oscar voters. She is careworn and fragile, yet also pugnacious and determined. It is an appealing and highly sympathetic performance that sets the audience up for heartbreak rarely realized so powerfully in action and adventure films.</p>
<p>But Skyfall’s unmistakable rejection of the astigmatic pathos and the pernicious self-loathing found in Quantum of Solace is what defines this film.</p>
<p>Skyfall is unabashedly patriotic. Bond, confronted by a mocking Silva, cockily tosses his love of country in the villain’s face. Union Jacks fly. The English bulldog, the four-legged twin of Winston Churchill and talismanic symbol of British tenacity, features prominently. Hence, a ceramic bulldog improbably survives the explosion in M’s MI6 office. M wills the bulldog to Bond. When Bond unwrapped M’s symbolic bequest, the audience in my west Texas theatre erupted in cheers and applause. One can only imagine the response in England itself.</p>
<p>Skyfall venerates tradition and it honors the aged. Bond is twice labeled old-fashioned and on both occasions accepts the jibe as a badge of pride. Judi Dench, the septuagenarian warhorse, is every bit as heroic as Bond himself. What’s more, she pairs with an equally elderly Kincade (Albert Finney) at Bond’s childhood home (named Skyfall), as silver tigers pitched against Silva and his battalion of young cyber-savages. The homage to a generation rapidly disappearing is as touching as it is unthinkable had Quantum of Solace been the template for future Bond films.</p>
<p>Skyfall is an archaizing, historically literate Bond film. The Reformation is mentioned in the context of Bond’s childhood estate of Skyfall. Winston Churchill is referenced when MI6, hoping to avoid another attack from Silva, relocates to the ancient subterranean passages of London. M quotes verses from Tennyson. Adele’s portentous title track could have been written for Shirley Bassey or Nancy Sinatra. Bond pulls his 1964 Aston Martin out of mothballs to spirit M away to Skyfall. He shaves—and is shaved—with a straight razor. The new Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) states that sometimes the old ways are better. Bond’s most technologically sophisticated gadget is a radio transmitter. A monocle and a trilby would not have gone amiss.</p>
<p>This film, much like Fleming’s novels published in austere, post-war Great Britain, is powerful medicine for British spirits at low ebb. Skyfall suggests that Great Britain’s past should not be scorned and reviled. On the contrary, there is much in the nation’s history and traditional culture that should be admired and even revived. For a people steeped in the rituals of masochistic flagellation, Skyfall is a corrective absolution. It is a gift to the people of the United Kingdom.</p>
<p>The 23<sup>rd</sup> instantiation of cinematic James Bond leaves the series with a new roster of dramatis personae. In addition to the above-mentioned Harris in the role of Moneypenny, Ralph Fiennes moves into Dench’s seat as M, and Ben Whishaw revives the role of Q made famous by Desmond Llewellyn. James Bond is thus recharged, rearmed and poised to extend his astonishing half-century run. It’s not out of the question that he could outlive the nation that gave him birth. Then again, the new, old James Bond offers hints for how to revive and prolong Britannia. It is up to the Brits to listen.</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>California CAIR: Bring Blasphemy Laws to the U.S.</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/lloyd-billingsley/california-cair-bring-blasphemy-laws-to-the-u-s/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=california-cair-bring-blasphemy-laws-to-the-u-s</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 15 Oct 2012 04:36:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Lloyd Billingsley]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Claims anti-Islam filmmaker has "blood on his hands" after Libya attack. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/lloyd-billingsley/california-cair-bring-blasphemy-laws-to-the-u-s/cair_kyr_pocket_guides-646x511/" rel="attachment wp-att-148347"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-148347" title="CAIR_KYR_Pocket_Guides-646x511" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/CAIR_KYR_Pocket_Guides-646x511.gif" alt="" width="315" height="237" /></a>SACRAMENTO – Rashid Ahmad, northern California leader of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, has been asked by his non-Muslim friends what he thinks of recent events in Libya.</p>
<p>“When I saw the demonstrations and learned of the ambassador’s death, I said, ‘Did these crazy people lose their minds? This guy [Ambassador Stevens] was trying to help the Libyans and they killed him,’” <a href="http://www.sacbee.com/2012/10/08/4890535/qa-rashid-ahmad-leader-of-council.html">Ahmad told Steve Magagnini of the <em>Sacramento Bee</em></a>.</p>
<p>“But now the U.S. government says it might have been a planned attack by an al-Qaida affiliate, and the Libyan people were also victims. We are ashamed this happened and believe the reaction in the Muslim world is way out of line.”</p>
<p>Note the reference to the “ambassador’s death,” which he says “happened,” as though Chris Stevens, whom Ahmad calls “this guy,” had died of natural causes. The CAIR boss gives no hint that violence, killing, murder, terrorism or assassination had anything to do with the ambassador’s “death.”</p>
<p>Rashid Ahmad neither identifies nor condemns the “crazy people” responsible for the murder of Chris Stevens and three other Americans. And the killers were only “way out of line,” something one might say of a misbehaving child. The U.S. government says it “might” have been a planned attack by an al-Qaida affiliate, but Rashid Ahmad fails to say if he agrees. But he does hold forth on the “Innocence of Muslims” video.</p>
<p>“People feel extremely hurt and offended by the film,” Ahmad told the <em>Bee</em>. “But there’s a huge debate in Northern California over what should happen to the filmmaker.” Actually there isn’t.</p>
<p>Few here have seen the video and the default position is that it may be offensive but the U.S. government should take no action against the filmmaker. The huge debate here is over the push for even higher taxes in a state on the verge of bankruptcy.</p>
<p>“Some say there should absolutely not be any prohibition against free speech,” explained Ahmad, billed as someone who came to the United States from Pakistan in 1970 to study engineering at UC Davis.</p>
<p>“In France, Germany and other European nations, there are laws against hate speech,” Ahmad told the <em>Bee</em>. “Holocaust deniers and others who belittle Nazi crimes during World War II are subject to criminal penalties. Just like there are laws against hate crimes in the U.S., there should be laws against hate speech that leads to violence or criminal activities. Because of the film we’ve lost so many lives – the filmmaker has blood on his hands.”</p>
<p>So in the view of CAIR’s Rashid Ahmad, it is the filmmaker who has “blood on his hands,” not those crazy people who killed Chris Stevens and three other Americans, nor those perpetrating violence in wake of the video. Ahmad comes clean on those too.</p>
<p>“The poor and desperate will listen to any firebrand, especially if they feel their leaders are American puppets,” Ahmad explains. “If (Hosni) Mubarak – the Egyptian dictator propped up by the U.S. – was still in charge, you’d see more extreme protests. Let’s not ignore the elephant in the room – America’s unbalanced support of Israel over the question of an independent Palestine. . . America has to be seen as a fair superpower in dealing with Israeli-Palestinian relations.”</p>
<p>The implication is unmistakable. Unless America does what CAIR wants, abandoning a key ally, punishing a filmmaker,  and taking away the free-speech rights of Americans, more violence and presumably “death” is surely on the way.</p>
<p>Steve Magagnini describes CAIR as an organization that “defends the civil rights of 60,000 Muslims in the Sacramento region, and has often spoken out against terrorist acts linked to Muslim extremists.” The journalist provides no examples of the terrorist acts CAIR has “often” spoken out against, and note that these acts are only “linked” to Muslim extremists. But he does get around to that subject in his final question to Rashid Ahmad:</p>
<p>“CAIR’s been invited to White House dinners, but two of its former leaders have been the subject of congressional hearings linking them to groups funding Palestinian terrorists. What’s the truth?”  It’s a soft underhand lob down the middle of the plate and Ahmad is ready:</p>
<p>“Those accused of sending money to Palestinian terrorist groups were no longer with CAIR. And CAIR would never endorse that or any violent organizations.”</p>
<p>That’s where the journalist leaves it. No hard questions about CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood or anything like that. But the interview did establish that endorsing violence such as the “death” of an ambassador would be “way out of line.”</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>“Murderous Realism” Turns Thirty</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/lloyd-billingsley/%e2%80%9cmurderous-realism%e2%80%9d-turns-thirty/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=%25e2%2580%259cmurderous-realism%25e2%2580%259d-turns-thirty</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 01 Oct 2012 04:02:07 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Lloyd Billingsley]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[The Marrakesh One-Two]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Movies and Muslims, the ongoing story.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/tm3.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-146376" title="tm3" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/tm3.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="198" /></a></p>
<p>Next year <em>The Marrakesh One-Two</em> by Richard Grenier turns 30 but with a video about Islam in the news, Muslim mobs murdering American ambassadors, and Islamic nations calling for international restrictions on freedom of speech, the time to look back is now.</p>
<p>“The Arab world depicted with murderous realism,” said a front-cover endorsement from U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, a Democrat who previously served (1975-1976) as United States Permanent Representative to the United Nations.</p>
<p>When Grenier was tapping out his novel, Ronald Reagan was still in his first term. The Ayatollah Khomeini prevailed in Iran, where only a few years earlier Iranian “students” invaded the U.S embassy and took 52 Americans hostage, holding them for 444 days. Col. Gaddafi ruled in Libya, a nerve center of terrorism that Reagan bombed in response to attacks on Americans in Europe.</p>
<p>In the <em>Marrakesh</em> story, wealthy Arab oil interests tap filmmaker Burt Nelson to make a movie about Mohammed and Islam the equivalent of Hollywood biblical epics such as Nelson’s <em>Song of Jesus</em>.  Trouble is, Nelson says, “we’ve got to cut out Mohammed,” too holy to be shown or even speak, according to Arab advisors.</p>
<p>The model here is <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074896/"><em>The Message</em></a> (1977) by Moustapha Akkad, starring Anthony Quinn and subtitled <em>The Story of Islam</em>.  Akkad, a Syrian who had worked with Sam Peckinpah, suggested the presence of Mohammed with a shadow. Orthodox Muslims denounced the film and the Nation of Islam took hostages.</p>
<p>Nelson plunges into the Koran for research. He finds reams of “Allah is merciful” along with instructions such as: “You are also forbidden to take in marriage married women, except captives whom you own as slaves.” Further, “men have authority over women because Allah has made the one superior to the other.” Also, “Those of you who divorce their wives by declaring them to be their mothers should know that they are not their mothers.” To which Nelson says, “Which was a good point to clear up. I mean, I was sure it had led to a lot of misunderstanding until Mohammed cleared it up.”</p>
<p>Nelson also researches biographies of Mohammed who, “struck me as kind of a gamey figure for a religious leader” and yet had “a very interesting life.” Nelson finds that “Mohammed is marrying a new girl every time you turn around,” and “if Mohammed wants something bad enough, you get the impression Allah is going to tell him it’s okay.”</p>
<p>Nelson brags that “I knew my onions on Islam.” He can identify characters such as Mariya, “an Egyptian slave of Mohammed’s and mother of his son Ibrahim.” He is familiar with Alisha bint Abi Bakr, “the beautiful six year old Mohammed married, but the wedding wasn’t celebrated until she was nine.”</p>
<p>CIA business and a coup attempt against the king of Morocco disrupt the movie production and send the filmmaker to a series of countries including Libya. Incidents there prompt Nelson to say, “They’re all faggots. I’m not going to argue about it.”  (See chapter 9 of <em>Marrakesh</em> for full quote)</p>
<p>Nelson fails to get his movie in the can but <em>The Marrakesh One-Two</em> did get published by Houghton Mifflin. A major house did not hesitate to publish a comic novel about Islam because some ayatollah, Muslim student group, or politician might not like it. It was Grenier’s second novel after <em>Yes and Back Again</em> (1967). He was a critically acclaimed writer but not a mega-seller on name alone. So it seems the publisher simply liked the story and went with it.</p>
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		<title>Is It Time for ‘Make Your Own Mohammed Movie Month&#8217;?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/is-it-time-for-%e2%80%98make-your-own-mohammed-movie-month/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=is-it-time-for-%25e2%2580%2598make-your-own-mohammed-movie-month</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 20 Sep 2012 04:50:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[blasphemy]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Our freedom of speech is under siege by the international Islamist theocracy -- here's one way to fight back.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/0915-Nakoula-interviewed-youtube-video.jpg_full_600.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-144793" title="0915-Nakoula-interviewed-youtube-video.jpg_full_600" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/0915-Nakoula-interviewed-youtube-video.jpg_full_600.gif" alt="" width="375" height="251" /></a>When South Park’s depiction of Mohammed was censored due to Muslim threats, professional cartoonists and ordinary people responded with “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.” The situation is much graver now than it was two years ago when there was general support for the idea of being able to depict Mohammed and few attacks on those responsible.</p>
<p>The man behind the Mohammed movie has been threatened with prison and has become the subject of a media witch-hunt whose sole purpose appears to be disclosing his personal information to his killers. The private and public arms of the Obama administration, its Department of Justice and its media spin corps, are acting to intimidate and punish anyone who dares offend the international Islamist theocracy.</p>
<p>The issue is not the merit of the Mohammed movie or the character of Nakoula Basseley Nakoula. Free speech is not about the merits of the speaker, but about maintaining freedom of speech for everyone. The Mohammed movie has become an opportunity for Islamists and domestic appeasers to implement a de facto blasphemy law dealing with Islam in the United States.</p>
<p>Nakoula is being transformed into a cautionary tale and that tale has no place in a free country. It is a fossil of the Muslim world where uppity Christians and Jews are punished for having the temerity to stand up to their Muslim masters. Once the informal punishment of Nakoula has been accepted, then it’s only a matter of time until the informal arrangement becomes formalized into law.</p>
<p>The freedom of speech establishment has decided that the First Amendment does not apply here. The national ACLU is obsessed with Catholic schools, OWS and drone strikes. It is going after the Alabama penal system for not allowing HIV prisoners to work in prison kitchens. The Southern California ACLU is suing Disney on behalf of a Muslim woman who wants to wear her gendered Islamic garb of inferiority to work. If there is going to be resistance to this, it is going to have to come from ordinary people.</p>
<p>Intimidating everyone who draws a Mohammed cartoon stops working when tens of thousands of people are drawing them. Turning one man into an example of what happens when you make a Mohammed movie stops working when there are thousands of Mohammed movies being made.</p>
<p>Making a movie sounds daunting, but it’s not. It’s something that you can do on your own or with a few friends.</p>
<p>A movie does not have to be two hours. It does not have to be 90 minutes or even 30 minutes. Short films can be as little as 5-10 minutes. Even shorter projects can be only 30 seconds. What matters is not the running time, but the impact, and that comes with the subject matter. Imagine a version of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Na_TwIoUJZY">this video</a> that tackles Mohammed instead of Jesus and you can see the possibilities.</p>
<p>Making an online video does not require expensive equipment. You probably already have the basic requirements in your phone, camera and laptop. All you really need is something that can record video. Your PC or Mac computer already comes with basic video editing software and if it doesn’t, YouTube has a built in video editor that you can use for simple operations.</p>
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		<title>Drawing a &#8216;Red Line&#8217; to Protect Free Speech</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/mark-tapson/drawing-a-red-line-in-the-sand-for-free-speech/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=drawing-a-red-line-in-the-sand-for-free-speech</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 18 Sep 2012 04:50:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Tapson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Is the First Amendment safe in the Obama era? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Protest_AP453512792815_620x350.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-144376" title="Protest_AP453512792815_620x350" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Protest_AP453512792815_620x350.gif" alt="" width="375" height="247" /></a>Even as Islamic violence against American embassies swells around the world, and evidence emerges of its coordination and premeditation, our own government and media continue to insist that the source of it all is an hilariously incompetent YouTube film that offended Muslim hair-trigger sensitivities.</p>
<p>Americans abroad have been killed this last week. The black flag of jihad has been raised over our Egyptian embassy. Our Libyan ambassador was sodomized, murdered, mutilated and dragged through the streets. As with Salman Rushdie’s novel <em>The Satanic Verses</em>, the Danish cartoon riots, and Geert Wilders’ film <em>Fitna</em>, the Islamic uproar ostensibly due to the micro-budgeted <em>The Innocence of Muslims</em> has been riotous and murderous, but the blame is once again falling on the “provocateur,” not the rabid mobs looting and killing in the name of cultural sensitivity. Thanks to a president who always sides with the Islamic world over America, our kneejerk official response was to blame the seeming religious bigotry of the filmmaker.</p>
<p>Our State Department, which is in “meltdown,”  as Charles Krauthammer put it, has been scrambling to find the right wording for a response to all this, culminating in spokesman Jay Carney’s laughable pronouncement that “this is not a case of protests directed at the United States writ large or at U.S. policy; this is in response to a video that is offensive to Muslims.” So far, our official responses are all variations on the theme of “Nothing excuses this violence, <em>but</em> we also strongly condemn religious bigotry.” This neatly echoes the left’s attitude toward free speech in general these days, which is “Sure I believe in free speech, <em>but</em> hate speech must be punished.”</p>
<p>You cannot believe in free speech and then qualify it with a “but.” You either support free speech or you don’t. Honoring freedom of speech means you stand up for the right of others to say disagreeable or offensive things. If the left truly believed in free speech, the totalitarian concept of “hate speech” would not even exist. But they don’t, and so they are colluding with the OIC’s campaign to impose sharia blasphemy laws on the West.</p>
<p>The OIC, or <a href="http://discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=7453">Organization of Islamic Cooperation</a>, is the world’s largest Muslim assembly, consisting of 57 member states (you know, the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpGH02DtIws">same number of U.S. states</a> candidate Obama campaigned in). Its primary aim is “conducting a large-scale worldwide effort to confront Islamophobia” and make it an international crime. “We sent a clear message to the West regarding the red lines that should not be crossed,” the OIC leader <a href="http://www.humanevents.com/2008/06/25/george-orwell-meets-the-oic/">arrogantly declared</a> after the shrewdly orchestrated Muslim mayhem around the world protesting such infidel abominations as the Danish cartoons.</p>
<p>“Red lines” – a phrase reminiscent of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Clash-Civilizations-Remaking-World-Order/dp/0684844419/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1272000969&amp;sr=8-1">Samuel Huntington</a>’s famous observation that “Islam has bloody borders.” Except that the red lines the OIC is referring to aren’t geographical – they are the ever-tightening limits that Muslim fundamentalists are imposing to choke off our freedoms. Free speech “is not a value that the Muslims share with America as a whole,” <a href="http://revolutionmuslim.blogspot.com/">declared</a> the American group Revolution Muslim in response to an offending episode of Comedy Central’s satirical show <em>South Park</em> two years ago.</p>
<p>It’s also not valued by our administration, either. The government has <a href="http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-administration-asks-youtube-to-review-innocence-of-muslims-video-20120913,0,610679.story">asked </a>YouTube to review the 14-minute <em>The Innocence of</em> <em>Muslims</em> trailer and determine whether it violates the site&#8217;s terms of service. Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, expressed his concerns over the repercussions for our soldiers abroad, who are already in grave danger from our own military leadership’s suicidal counter-insurgency idiocy. Dempsey <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/09/12/joint-chiefs-chairman-urges-pastor-to-withdraw-support-anti-islam-film/#ixzz26QKiCkfR">urged</a> controversial anti-Islam Pastor Terry Jones to consider withdrawing his support for the film – which goes to show that if all it takes is one Florida pastor’s opinion to set off the entire Muslim world’s bloodthirsty outrage against America, maybe they’re the problem and not him.</p>
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		<title>Islamic Violence Needs No Spark</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/joseph-klein/islamic-violence-needs-no-spark/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=islamic-violence-needs-no-spark</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/joseph-klein/islamic-violence-needs-no-spark/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 18 Sep 2012 04:24:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Klein]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ambassador]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chris Stevens]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Christians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Embassy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Libya]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[movie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muhammad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[offensive]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Salafists]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=144496</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A look at the mindless violence in the last few months exposes the lie that a YouTube video caused embassy attacks. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/egypt-libya-embassy-attacks-morsi.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-144500" title="egypt-libya-embassy-attacks-morsi" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/egypt-libya-embassy-attacks-morsi.gif" alt="" width="375" height="252" /></a>The Obama administration is willfully misleading the American people on the source of Islamic violence and throwing the First Amendment&#8217;s protections of free speech under the bus to boot.</p>
<p>In full dhimmitude mode, President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and UN Ambassador Susan Rice have been busy blaming an obscure anti-Muslim video for the killing of our ambassador to Libya, John Christopher Stevens, and three other Americans on the eleventh anniversary of 9/11.  They refuse to place the blame where it belongs &#8211; on the Islamists themselves who do not need an excuse to incite violence against the &#8220;infidels.&#8221; Never mind that the interim president of Libya Mohamed al-Magariaf publicly took issue with the Obama administration&#8217;s apologist explanation for the killings of the Americans in his country:</p>
<blockquote><p>It&#8217;s clear from the timing, on Sept 11th, and from the detailed planning of the attacks, indicates that behind it there was experienced masterminds. It was not a spontaneous act in protest of the movie. This has been prepared for a long time, on this specific day.</p></blockquote>
<p>The video was nothing more than a convenient pretext for the latest episode of the continuing Muslim jihad against everything we stand for in the West. Consider, for example, the long list of targeted acts of terrorism on Christian civilians and church workers by devout Muslims, displayed on the website <a href="http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/Pages/ChristianAttacks.htm">ReligionofPeace.com</a>. The list goes back to 9/11/2001.  Here are a few incidents that occurred just this year alone.</p>
<p>On August 14, 2012, Salafis stormed a Christian-owned store in Asyut, Egypt and murdered the owner.  On the same day, a 14-year-old Christian girl was gang-raped and murdered by five Muslim men in Sahiwal, Pakistan.  On August 10, 2012, a Christian man was gunned down by Islamists in Jolo, Philippines on his way home from church.  Four days before that, in Okene, Nigeria, Muslims entered a church and shot members with machine-guns, slaughtering at least nineteen, including the pastor. A Christian doctor was brutally blinded by Salafist Muslims in Shubra el Khayma, Egypt on July 26, 2012.  About a month earlier, two Christians were reported murdered by Muslim Brotherhood activists in El Sharqiya, Egypt.  In Kenya, on July 1, 2012, Muslims threw grenades into two churches and then shot dead fleeing Christians including children. And in Tunisia, the birthplace of the Arab Spring, a video captured the image of an execution earlier this year in which a man&#8217;s throat was cut for embracing Christianity by Muslims who offered prayers as they sliced.</p>
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		<title>The Rape of Christopher Stevens</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/raymond-ibrahim/the-rape-of-christopher-stevens/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-rape-of-christopher-stevens</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/raymond-ibrahim/the-rape-of-christopher-stevens/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 17 Sep 2012 04:50:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Raymond Ibrahim]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[9/11]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[anti-Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[attacks]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Embassy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[movie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=144305</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Where is the outrage, let alone a spoken word, from the White House and media?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/steve.jpg"><img class="size-full wp-image-144410 alignleft" title="steve" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/steve.jpg" alt="" width="350" height="263" /></a>By obsessing over the 14-minute YouTube Muhammad video and its maker, the mainstream media ultimately exonerates the inexcusable and murderous response of the Islamic world.</p>
<p>There is only one question: did those who make this movie break any law?  No, they did not—and so the matter should end there, and the media should move on.  Focusing on those who did not break any American laws as a way to take the focus off those who murdered and initiated an act of war against the United States is not only misleading; it validates and gives Islamic blasphemy laws precedence over American freedoms.</p>
<p>Worse, even if making movies deemed offensive to Muslims was illegal in the U.S., the fact is, these embassy attacks, which “coincidentally” began on September 11, have nothing to do with the movie.  On September 10, I wrote an article titled “<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/2012/09/jihadis-threaten-to-burn-us-embassy-in-cairo">Jihadis Threaten to Burn U.S. Embassy in Cairo</a>.” The demand that the U.S. release its imprisoned jihadis, including the Blind Sheikh, was behind these threats.  There was no mention of  “offensive movies.” My source, <a href="http://new.elfagr.org/Detail0777.aspx?secid=1&amp;nwsId=182500&amp;vid=2">El Fagr</a>, an Arabic website, reported all this on September 8.</p>
<p>In other words, several days before Muslims were angry about this movie they were threatening to burn down the U.S. embassy in Cairo.  I had even seen sporadic Arabic reports, from months back, talking about “extremist elements” threatening the embassy.  The movie is just a pretext—aided and abetted by the media, not to mention the Obama administration: Hillary Clinton called the video “<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/13/clinton-anti-islam-video-_n_1880804.html">disgusting and reprehensible</a>,” wording which is more befitting those who murdered (and possibly raped, see below) Americans; the U.S. embassy itself apologized for those who “<a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444017504577645681057498266.html">hurt the religious feelings of Muslims</a>”; and the administration <a href="http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-administration-asks-youtube-to-review-innocence-of-muslims-video-20120913,0,610679.story">asked YouTube to remove the</a> 14 minute trailer.</p>
<p>Thus the U.S. administration validates Islam’s blasphemy laws and, <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/12083/obama-administration-war-on-persecuted-christians">once again</a>, aligns itself with America’s jihadi enemies.</p>
<p>Seventy-year-old, retiring Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) put it well, when he suggested that the administration’s response to the embassy attacks was akin to a court asking a rape victim for an apology, saying: “It&#8217;s like the judge telling the woman who got raped, ‘You asked for it because of the way you dressed.’”</p>
<p>Nor is the rape entirely allegorical.  According to the Arabic website <a href="http://www.tayyar.org/Tayyar/News/PoliticalNews/ar-LB/usa-killed-lybia-zek-970.htm">Tayyar</a>, “the American ambassador in Libya [Christopher Stevens] was sexually raped  before being killed by the gunmen who stormed the embassy  building in Benghazi last night [Tuesday, September 11],  in protestation of a film insulting to the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings upon him.”</p>
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		<title>Arab Spring’s Bitter Fruits</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/arab-spring%e2%80%99s-bitter-fruits/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=arab-spring%25e2%2580%2599s-bitter-fruits</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/arab-spring%e2%80%99s-bitter-fruits/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 14 Sep 2012 04:44:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Flynn]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ambassador]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[attack]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Benghazi]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chris Stevens]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Christian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democracy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Embassy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Libya]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[movie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muhammad]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=143877</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[This is what Libyan democracy looks like. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/libya-embassy-attack.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-144040" title="libya-embassy-attack" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/libya-embassy-attack.gif" alt="" width="375" height="261" /></a>“As-Salamu Alaykum. My name is Chris Stevens, and I am the new U.S. ambassador to Libya. I had the honor to serve as the U.S. envoy to the Libyan opposition during the revolution, and I was thrilled to watch the Libyan people stand up and demand their rights. Now I’m excited to return to Libya to continue the great work we’ve started.”</p>
<p>Thus begins a State Department propaganda video, complete with Middle Eastern music and Arabic subtitles, aimed at establishing that the U.S. government holds a friendly disposition toward the Libyan people. The feeling isn’t mutual.</p>
<p>Tuesday, on the 11<sup>th</sup> anniversary of 9/11, Middle Easterners outraged by the existence of an obscure anti-Islamic film called “Innocence of Muslims,” stormed the American embassy in Cairo and the consulate in Benghazi. The man behind the movie, identifying himself as Sam Bacile, told the <em>Wall Street Journal</em> that he hoped his film would show “Islam as a hateful religion.” Muslims rebutted this portrayal by attacking foreigners who had nothing to do with the motion picture. In Libya, a mob armed with guns but not a sense of self-irony killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, an idealistic Berkeley grad who fell in love with North Africa after an ’80s stint in the Peace Corps. The Barbary Coast-barbarians parading the American ambassador’s corpse around like a trophy are the people the American government aided to overthrow their government.</p>
<p>This is what democracy looks like?</p>
<p>In the Middle East, the enemy of our enemy isn’t necessarily our friend. But the State Department occasionally regards the enemy of our allies as our friends. As the Ayatollah Khomeini engineered the ouster of the Shah in the late 1970s, the U.S. ambassador to Iran helped the unholy man’s ascension, which Jimmy Carter reflected bitterly upon in his memoirs. William Sullivan, hired by Carter after showing insolence to the Johnson administration as ambassador to Laos during the Vietnam War, apparently surprised the president by treating him as he had treated his Democratic predecessor. The 39<sup>th</sup> president noted that Ambassador Sullivan “had been carrying out some of my directives half-heartedly, if at all,” and that “Sullivan thought we should not oppose Khomeini’s take-over because his rule would lead to democracy.” More than three decades after the Islamic Revolution dashed the hopes of Western leftists such as Sullivan, a similar mindset, immersed in the hype and hope of the Arab Spring, swept the Obama administration, which apparently left the outposts in Cairo and Benghazi lightly defended.</p>
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		<title>A King Lear for Girls</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/mark-tapson/a-king-lear-for-girls/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-king-lear-for-girls</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 09 Jan 2012 04:35:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Tapson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Feminist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iron Lady]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Margaret Thatcher]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Meryl Streep]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[movie]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=118403</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The leftist fantasy of the new film "The Iron Lady."  ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/The_Iron_Lady_3.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-118406" title="The_Iron_Lady_3" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/The_Iron_Lady_3.jpg" alt="" width="336" height="504" /></a></p>
<p>The new film “The Iron Lady,” starring Meryl Streep as former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, initially presented the left-leaning filmmakers with a quandary: how to put forth an Oscar-worthy portrayal without simultaneously honoring a revered icon of the right. They seem to have solved it by making this film about a feminist icon, not a conservative one.</p>
<p>Due for wide release in the U.S. this month, “The Iron Lady” depicts Thatcher’s professional and personal rise and decline, from provincial grocer’s daughter to the top of the political order and back down again to – as the film portrays it – lonely and doddering irrelevance. Along the way we see her confrontation with powerful trade union strikers, forceful defense of free markets, persistence in the face of sexist derision from her political peers, triumph in the 1982 Falklands war, and Churchillian refusal to appease IRA terrorists (looking over that list makes me wish Ms. Thatcher had been our president for the last 3 years&#8230;).</p>
<p>The film features Streep, the most Oscar-nominated actress in history, in the role of a lifetime which will surely earn her another Oscar nod. It has been as polarizing as the extraordinary Iron Lady herself. Some critics have given it – or at least Ms. Streep – glowing reviews, while others, and some of Thatcher’s family and former friends and colleagues, have called it an unkind portrayal. One friend of the family said, prior to the film’s release, that Thatcher’s children were “appalled at what they have learnt about the film. They think it sounds like some left-wing fantasy.”</p>
<p>Norman Tebbit, an advisor who worked closely with Thatcher for eight years and who complains that the filmmakers didn’t reach out to him and others who really knew her, wrote in the UK’s Telegraph Online that “she was never, in my experience, the half-hysterical, over-emotional, over-acting woman portrayed by Meryl Streep.”</p>
<p>But some on the left feel the film does not go far enough in its unkindness toward England’s modern-day Boadicea. As Stuart Jeffries wrote in the British left-wing The Guardian online, her time was an &#8220;era of rage about what Thatcher, economy destroyer and warmonger, was doing to Britain… It will be a shame if &#8216;The Iron Lady&#8217; overlooks that deep anger in favour of exclusive focus on Thatcher as a woman triumphing against the odds.&#8221;</p>
<p>And yet that is the focus the filmmakers gave it. Streep and British director Phyllida Lloyd, who have both stated that “The Iron Lady” is “King Lear for girls,” have made it less about Thatcher’s bold conservatism and very much about “a woman who smashed through the barriers of gender and class to be heard in a male-dominated world.”</p>
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		<title>Hollywood Shrugged</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/daniel-flynn/hollywood-shrugged/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=hollywood-shrugged</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 19 Apr 2011 04:15:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Flynn]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[eloise in paris]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[james gould cozzens]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mason dixon line]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[max shulman]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[movie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Northeast]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[state takeovers]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Though five decades late, the film debut of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" is perfectly timed.  ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Atlas-Shrugged-Movie-Poster.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-90743" title="Atlas-Shrugged-Movie-Poster" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Atlas-Shrugged-Movie-Poster.gif" alt="" width="375" height="374" /></a></p>
<p>Ayn Rand’s <em>Atlas Shrugged</em> has finally made the journey from the bookshelf to the silver screen. Coming 54 years after publication date, <em>Atlas Shrugged</em> the movie would seem, particularly given the author’s history of employment by RKO and Universal studios, strangely late. A similarly delayed cinematic appearance of James Gould Cozzens’ <em>By Love Possessed</em>, Kay Thompson’s <em>Eloise in Paris</em>, Max Shulman’s <em>Rally Round the Flag, Boys!</em>, or any other title from 1957’s nonfiction bestseller list would seem a non sequitur. But <em>Atlas Shrugged</em>, alone, reads more 2011 than 1957.</p>
<p>Not only has the first installment of <em>Atlas Shrugged</em> hit when millions of Americans scurry to prepare their taxes, but it does so in the wake of bailouts and partial state takeovers of industries. <em>Atlas Shrugged</em> the movie is not five decades late. It is, despite its modest weekend performance, perfectly timed.</p>
<p><em>Atlas Shrugged</em> is a book about a strike by the creators, inventors, entrepreneurs, and other drivers of the economy. Society’s producers mysteriously drop out of society. That theme alone is worth the cash-register’s admission price.</p>
<p>The high-tax, closed-shop states of the Northeast and Rust Belt have been losing population relative to the rest of the country for decades. Like the Looters and Moochers of <em>Atlas Shrugged</em>, the ruling class in these states remains obtusely perplexed at their waning economic and political clout. Last December’s congressional reapportionment subtracted eleven seats from states in the Northeast and Midwest, and, save for Katrina-ravaged Louisiana, none anywhere else. The twelve states gaining seats are located either West of the Mississippi or South of the Mason-Dixon line. More striking than the geographic concentration is the common political attributes of the states gaining seats and of the states losing seats. All the states losing seats in Congress impose an income tax and, save Louisiana and Iowa, enforce a closed shop. The new seats will go overwhelmingly to right-to-work states without an income tax.</p>
<p>When the last Northeasterner won the presidency in 1960, his region’s formidable political power included 133 electoral votes. Next year, the northeast (New England, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania) will send just 96 electors to the Electoral College. “Where did all the people go?” is a less important question than “Why did all the people go?” Jobs, and the people, dropped out for many of the same reasons they did in <em>Atlas Shrugged</em>. They may not have gone to Galt’s Gulch, but they undertook an exodus nonetheless.</p>
<p>“Profit” is a dirty word in <em>Atlas Shrugged</em>. When asked why she has decided to build the John Galt Line, railroad executrix Dagny Taggart bluntly explains that she did so to make a profit. A horrified onlooker interjects, “Oh, Miss Taggart, don’t say that!” Taggart’s interaction with failed banker Eugene Lawson provokes a similarly perverse outburst. “I am perfectly innocent, since I lost my money, since I lost all of my own money for a good cause,” a defensive Lawson informs Taggart. “My motives were pure. I wanted nothing for myself. I’ve never sought anything for myself. Miss Taggart, I can proudly say that in all of my life I have <em>never</em> made a profit!”</p>
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		<title>Who Chose Hamas to Lead Them?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/dov-fischer/who-chose-hamas-to-lead-them/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=who-chose-hamas-to-lead-them</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 10 Jun 2010 04:01:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dov Fischer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[America]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Daniel Parker]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Dr. Chaim Weitzmann]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=62414</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Gazans seek sympathy -- after voting in terrorists who vow to exterminate Jews. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/hamas-parade.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-62416" title="hamas-parade" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/hamas-parade.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="285" /></a></p>
<p>To understand the people of  Gaza, who now  lay claim to the passions of humanitarians-without-a-cause, one might begin by  considering Gazans’ freely elected leadership: the Hamas terror network.  And to understand Hamas, one might begin  by looking closely at the <a href="http://sirenschronicles.com/2009/01/02/us-policy-helped-build-hamas-power-base/" target="_blank">Hamas logo</a>. The logo’s center features swords and a  golden-domed structure, but the squiggle at the top-center of the logo is most  descriptive. One squiggle is worth a thousand words. That squiggle is not an  Arabic symbol but the map of Israel.</p>
<p>Look even more carefully:  the squiggle – the map of Israel depicted on the Hamas logo – primarily is  <em>pre-1967</em> Israel.  It is Israel <em>without</em> the Gaza Strip.  Hamas has no designs on the Gaza Strip  it controls.  Rather, leveraging  Gaza as a springboard for its actual aspiration,  Hamas illustratively has designs on the only Palestine it ever has coveted:  the Palestine that now is called “the State of  Israel.”  As <a href="http://scaredmonkeys.com/2010/06/04/yikes-helen-thomas-tells-jews-%E2%80%98get-the-hell-out-of-palestine%E2%80%99-and-go-back-to-germany-poland/" target="_blank">Jew-hating journalist Helen Thomas</a> recently said about  Israelis, “Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine. Remember, these [Arab] people are  occupied, and it’s their land.”  The  Jews, Thomas added, can go back where they come from – “Poland.  Germany. . . . And  America and everywhere else.”  (Reflecting ignorance all too common  among the White House press corps, Thomas is unaware that the majority of  Israelis are children of the Middle East, descendants of the <a href="http://www.hsje.org/forcedmigration.htm" target="_blank">850,000 Jews  exiled by Northern African Arab dictatorships</a> during the years  Israel was being  founded.)</p>
<p>The  only “Palestine” that ever existed was always  synonymous with the Jewish homeland that later was renamed &#8220;Israel&#8221; in 1948.  Rent a copy of the 1960 movie &#8220;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053804/" target="_blank">Exodus</a>.”  Listen dispassionately to the dialogue.  Don&#8217;t take sides.  Just listen for definitions. The British, fairly or  unfairly, are depicted as the bad guys in the movie, trying to keep the Jews out  of &#8220;Palestine.&#8221;  Paul Newman is trying to get the Jews into &#8220;Palestine.&#8221; Everyone watching the movie  perceives that &#8220;Palestine&#8221; is a name that refers  synonymously with &#8220;Israel.&#8221; Thus, what we seem to have  had here is a failure to communicate. It could not be simpler: For the past two  thousand years, since the Romans renamed the land of Israel after they expelled and exiled the Jews,  &#8220;Israel&#8221; always was  synonymous with &#8220;Palestine,&#8221; and &#8220;Palestine&#8221; always was &#8220;Israel.&#8221;</p>
<p><a href="http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Golda_Meir" target="_blank"><em>There never ever was an Arab Palestine  entity</em>.</a> Who, after all, ever was its leader? Try to name  <em>any </em>leader  who <em>ever</em> in history led a sovereign &#8220;Palestinian Arab&#8221; people of &#8220;Arab Palestine.&#8221; What  year was that entity founded? What was the name of its capital city &#8212;  <em>any</em> capital city? Where is the drawing or photograph of its seat of government, or  the place where its governmental leader lived? What was the name of its  currency? Whose face, what slogan was on that currency? When did it fall? In  which Olympic Games did it compete? Which issue of Encyclopedia Britannica had  an entry for its government?</p>
<p>Consider this way:   <a href="http://www.cityofpalestinetx.com/" target="_blank">The American  city of Palestine, Texas was founded in 1846.  It was so named in honor of  an early settler there</a>, Daniel Parker, who hailed from Palestine, Illinois.  That Palestine was <a href="http://www.pioneercity.com/history.html" target="_blank">chartered in  1811.  It drew its name in 1678 from the French explorer, Jean LaMotte, who  looked at the land and named it &#8220;Palestine&#8221; because it reminded him of the  Biblical Promised Land of the Jews, flowing with milk and  honey</a>.  No one associated &#8220;Palestine&#8221; with the Arab community, not even  the French in the 1600s.  Rather, the name was associated with the Jews and  their Biblical Promised Land. The same with Palestine, Arkansas (pop.  741) and East Palestine,  Ohio.</p>
<p>Before the Jewish  country was named “<em>Israel</em><em>” in 1948, even the most ardent Jews  identified the Jewish homeland as “Palestine.” Today’s Jerusalem Post</em>, the  English-language daily newspaper of Israel, originally was called the <em><a href="http://www.jpress.org.il/publications/PPost-en.asp" target="_blank">Palestine Post</a></em>.  The pre-government institution that laid  Israel’s political foundation  was the <a href="http://www.virtualjudaica.com/Item/21187/Memorandum" target="_blank">Jewish Agency for Palestine</a>, headed by Dr. Chaim  Weitzmann, who became Israel’s first head of  state.</p>
<p>It is this “Palestine” – namely, the  State of Israel – that Hamas forthrightly is determined to seize.  The squiggle tells all.  To attain the power to pursue its dream  of eradicating Israel from the map, Hamas first  engaged in more than a decade of bloody terror, <a href="http://www.cfr.org/publication/8968/" target="_blank">killing some 500  people in the course of more than 350 terror attacks</a> since 1993.  Hamas popularized suicide bombing.  Then, during the January 2006 general  elections held freely and with minimal intimidation within the areas of Gaza and  the segments of Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank”) controlled by the Palestine  Authority, the Palestinian Arab electorate voted Hamas into power.  <a href="http://www.elections.ps/template.aspx?id=291" target="_blank">Hamas  won 74 seats, compared to 45 for runner-up Fatah. </a> Former President <a href="http://www.palestine-info.co.uk/En/default.aspx?xyz=U6Qq7k%2BcOd87MDI46m9rUxJEpMO%2Bi1s7fEv4BvqAHWSSctkp9fPMS5RHXh2THa6FUQzspXreoheHsOR%2B%2BgIqahlt%2BMx8Mqc%2Bx4CGBZpPkLOAyecV87jZ638BXAcbCPh5evI2umg4IeA%3D" target="_blank">Jimmy Carter monitored the vote</a> and declared the  election of Hamas “fair and square,” deeming them free, fair, just, and  transparent.  That is, the  Palestinian Arab voters freely chose to be led by a group of terrorists and  suicide-bomb architects <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20050511025028/http:/www.state.gov/s/ct/rls/45394.htm" target="_blank">outlawed</a> <a href="http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/site/en/oj/2005/l_340/l_34020051223en00640066.pdf" target="_blank">throughout</a> the <a href="http://www.mofa.go.jp/policy/other/bluebook/2005/ch3-a.pdf" target="_blank">world</a>.   After winning parliamentary elections, Hamas terrorists in Gaza proceeded to launch a  bloody internecine war against their political competition, Fatah terrorists  loyal to Palestine Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. <a href="http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3409548,00.html" target="_blank">More than 600 Arab terrorists</a> killed each other during  the next eighteen months.   Ultimately, Hamas won and seized the reins of power in Gaza.  By virtue of the freely expressed will  of the people of Gaza, Hamas now enjoys popular support to lead  Gazans with the Hamas vision.</p>
<p>On March 5, 1933, the German  people cast their ballots, resulting in Adolf Hitler’s ascent to power as  chancellor of Germany.  The voters knew Hitler’s agenda, and he  prosecuted the agenda he promised them.   Mass terror followed, and the world was submerged into a war that brought  death to tens of millions.  By the  end, America and  England gained an upper hand and had  enough.  In one midnight hour, the  Allies dropped more than 2,300 tons of aerial bombs on Hamburg. During the <a href="http://ww2db.com/battle_spec.php?battle_id=55" target="_blank">bombing  of Dresden</a>, the allies dropped more than 3,900 tons of bombs in two  days, killing some 25,000 Germans.   As the debate raged over whether these aerial bombings had been overkill,  an underlying justification always lay in the recognition that the German  civilian population had elected the Nazis and, by the power of their ballots,  willingly brought the war and destruction on others – and, by the end, onto  themselves.</p>
<p>So it is with Gazans and the  Hamas terror vision for which they voted “fair and square.”  In a world that has seen Iranian  civilians rise up and, <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jun/22/neda-soltani-death-iran" target="_blank">like Neda Soltani, give their very lives</a> trying to  liberate themselves from the yoke of an Islamofascist regime led by Ayatollahs  and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the stark contrast from the people of Gaza is striking.  <a href="http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=c4c_1185534648" target="_blank">Gazans  celebrate death</a>.  <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jr2aQoCh4Ik" target="_blank">They  celebrate terror</a>.  Given  a free choice, they have opted for a vision of terror aimed at wiping out  innocent Western lives and eradicating Israel off the face of the  earth.  In the face of such  contemporary persecutions as the <a href="http://www.savedarfur.org/" target="_blank">Sudanese terror in Darfur</a> and the Turkish oppression of  the Kurd minority that now numbers more than two million refugees, can anyone  truly make a “fair and square” argument that the people of Gaza are victims of  anything other than their own tragically violent predilection to support terror  over coexistence and war over peace?</p>
<p><em>Dov Fischer is a legal affairs consultant and adjunct  professor of the law of civil procedure and advanced torts. He was formerly  Chief Articles Editor of UCLA Law Review and writes extensively on political,  cultural, and religious issues.  He is author of General Sharon’s War  Against Time Magazine and blogs at <a title="http://www.rabbidov.com/" href="http://www.rabbidov.com/" target="_blank">www.rabbidov.com</a></em></p>
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		<title>Jeffrey Goldberg: Leon Wieseltier, Andrew Sullivan and Anti-Semitism &#8211; The Atlantic</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/jeffrey-goldberg-leon-wieseltier-andrew-sullivan-and-anti-semitism-the-atlantic/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=jeffrey-goldberg-leon-wieseltier-andrew-sullivan-and-anti-semitism-the-atlantic</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/jeffrey-goldberg-leon-wieseltier-andrew-sullivan-and-anti-semitism-the-atlantic/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 11 Feb 2010 16:54:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=49898</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Here are a couple of observations about Leon and Andrew, based on a more careful reading of Leon&#8217;s piece, and a look back at some of Andrew&#38;apos;s greatest hits. 1 I don&#8217;t mean this as a cop-out, but Chait says much of what I would say, but better. 2 Like Chait, I don&#8217;t believe that [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Here are a couple of observations about Leon and Andrew, based on a more careful reading of Leon&#8217;s piece, and a look back at some of Andrew&amp;apos;s greatest hits.</p>
<p>1 I don&#8217;t mean this as a cop-out, but Chait says much of what I would say, but better.</p>
<p>2 Like Chait, I don&#8217;t believe that Andrew is an anti-Semite. I have no doubt that if Andrew happened to come upon a Jewish person being harassed or otherwise tormented, he would ride his ridiculous bicycle into the fray and beat back the anti-Semites with a stick. And he certainly passes the Anne Frank Attic Test.</p>
<p>3 But: His evolution from wild-eyed Zionist to vitriolic Israel-basher is one of the more painful things I&#8217;ve witnessed recently, and not only because we are friends, or were friends. In the old days &#8212; meaning last year, and before &#8212; Andrew was an intemperate defender of the Jews. I remember one exchange in the run-up to the Iraq War in which he told me that seeing the movie &#8220;The Pianist&#8221; made him even &#8220;more pro-war.&#8221; Now he has flipped, to the other extreme.</p>
<p>4 The question of whether Andrew is or is not personally anti-Semitic isn&amp;apos;t entirely relevant. What is relevant is that he sometimes uses his blog to disseminate calumnies that can cause hatred of Jews, and of Israel. I know this from personal experience, because the anti-Semites who e-mail him copy me. Andrew&amp;apos;s posts on Israel and on Jewish political power in America have lately given comfort to some very repulsive people. This doesn&amp;apos;t mean, of course, that the role of AIPAC shouldn&amp;apos;t be debated openly, but it should be done without prejudice; without the axiomatic assumption that American Jews who love Israel are disloyal to America; and without the Judeocentrism of the neo-Lindbergh set.</p>
<p>via <a href="http://jeffreygoldberg.theatlantic.com/archives/2010/02/weighing_in_on_leon_wieseltier.php">Leon Wieseltier, Andrew Sullivan and Anti-Semitism &#8211; Jeffrey Goldberg</a>.</p>
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		<title>Former Texas Rep. Charlie Wilson dies at 76 &#8211; washingtonpost.com</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/former-texas-rep-charlie-wilson-dies-at-76-washingtonpost-com/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=former-texas-rep-charlie-wilson-dies-at-76-washingtonpost-com</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/former-texas-rep-charlie-wilson-dies-at-76-washingtonpost-com/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 10 Feb 2010 22:11:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=49732</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[DALLAS &#8212; Charlie Wilson, the former congressman from Texas whose funding of Afghanistan&#38;apos;s resistance to the Soviet Union was chronicled in the movie &#8220;Charlie Wilson&#38;apos;s War,&#8221; died Wednesday. He was 76.Wilson died at Memorial Medical Center-Lufkin after he started having difficulty breathing while attending a meeting in the eastern Texas town where he lived, said [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/10/AR2010021002564.html?hpid=topnews"><img src='http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/PH2010021002680.jpg' alt='' /></a></p>
<p>DALLAS &#8212; Charlie Wilson, the former congressman from Texas whose funding of Afghanistan&amp;apos;s resistance to the Soviet Union was chronicled in the movie &#8220;Charlie Wilson&amp;apos;s War,&#8221; died Wednesday. He was 76.Wilson died at Memorial Medical Center-Lufkin after he started having difficulty breathing while attending a meeting in the eastern Texas town where he lived, said hospital spokeswoman Yana Ogletree. Wilson was pronounced dead on arrival, and the preliminary cause of death was cardiopulmonary arrest, she said.Wilson represented the 2nd district in east Texas in the U.S. House from 1973 to 1996 and was known in Washington as &#8220;Good Time Charlie&#8221; for his reputation as a hard-drinking womanizer.Actor Tom Hanks portrayed Wilson in the 2007 movie about Wilson&amp;apos;s efforts to arm Afghani mujahedeen during Afghanistan&amp;apos;s war against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Wilson, a member of the House Appropriations Committee, helped secure money for weapons.In 2007, Wilson had a heart transplant at a Houston hospital. Doctors had told Wilson, who suffered from cardiomyopathy, a disease that causes an enlarged and weakened heart, that he would likely die without a transplant.&#8221;Charlie was perfect as a congressman, perfect as a state representative, perfect as a state senator. He was a perfect reflection of the people he represented. If there was anything wrong with Charlie, I never did know what it was,&#8221; said Charles Schnabel Jr., who served for seven years as Wilson&amp;apos;s chief of staff in Washington and worked with Wilson when he served in the Texas Senate.</p>
<p>via <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/10/AR2010021002564.html?hpid=topnews">Former Texas Rep. Charlie Wilson dies at 76 &#8211; washingtonpost.com</a>.</p>
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		<title>Tolerance for Terror</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jamie-glazov/tolerance-for-terror/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=tolerance-for-terror</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jamie-glazov/tolerance-for-terror/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 27 Jan 2010 05:08:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jamie Glazov]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Why the Obama administration resists the appropriate response to the threats to our freedoms and lives.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-47758" title="Obama 2008" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/obaman1.jpg" alt="Obama 2008" width="450" height="335" /></p>
<p>Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Howard Rotberg, an author of several books who has just released his latest book, <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Tolerism-Ideology-Revealed-Howard-Rotberg/dp/0973406526">Tolerism: The Ideology Revealed</a></em> (Mantua Books). He blogs at <a href="http://secondgenerationradical.blogmatrix.com/" target="_blank">secondgenerationradical.blogmatrix.com</a>. He has previously been interviewed by Frontpage (<a href="http://97.74.65.51/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=30923" target="_blank">Fatwa on a Book</a>) about the fate of his 2003 novel about a Jewish professor’s worry about Iran developing nuclear weapons and the professor’s problems with political correctness.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Howard Rotberg, welcome to Frontpage Interview.</p>
<p><strong>Rotberg:</strong> Thank you for having me</p>
<p>What inspired you to write this book?</p>
<p><strong>Rotberg:</strong> Basically, I began to understand that, in a world that was treating Islamist terrorism with tolerance and submission, as opposed to a due recognition of the war declared upon us, much of our “intelligentsia” was prisoner of a certain ideology that inhibited an appropriate response to the threats to our freedoms and lives.</p>
<p>As a result of my novel, <em>The Second Catastrophe,</em> being, essentially, banned in Canada because of the objections of some 18 year old Islamists, I was becoming aware that the very people who proclaimed their tolerance were in fact the least tolerant of all when it came to listening to, and debating, contrary opinions. In other words, political correctness, moral and cultural relativism and moral equivalency were combining to create a certain ideology in the West. I decided it was high time to write about the values and ideologies that have handcuffed much of our media and academic elites from critiquing the fascistic aspects of Radical Islam, and elevating the alleged “right’ not to be offended over the human rights of all victims of Islamist rage, including their own people.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Tell us a bit about your background that has influenced you in your thoughts and outlooks.</p>
<p><strong>Rotberg:</strong> My paternal grandparents and aunt were murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and my father barely survived as a slave laborer there. As a member of the “Second Generation,” I was becoming alarmed at how “tolerance” was being called the most important value in the West. My background as a lawyer and as an observant Jew taught me that the most important value is justice, not tolerance. I knew that had the West “tolerated” Hitler, I would not be here. And I wondered why the West was so intent on tolerating Radical Islam and submitting to values inimical to liberal freedoms, feminism, separation of church and state, human rights and all the other great values that so many Americans and Canadians had struggled so hard to attain. As I looked out on political culture in the age of Obama, I sensed a very serious ideological problem.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> What is the difference between tolerance and Tolerism?</p>
<p><strong>Rotberg:</strong> Over the years, such philosophers as Karl Popper and John Rawls had struggled with the idea of toleration and what limits must be placed on the tolerance of the <em>intolerant</em>, who, without such limitations could destroy the tolerant and the ways of tolerance. As the Second World War becomes a distant memory, we have noticed an alarming development: Instead of warnings about appeasement of Evil, we are told by the post-religious that there is no good and evil, only “competing narratives” which in a world of cultural relativism, means that western distinguished historians are given no more respect than mere polemicists, and that liberalism in Israel is given no higher respect than the totalitarian propaganda machines of its neighbours. The causes of Tolerism, then, are political correctness, cultural and moral relativism and moral equivalency.</p>
<p>Tolerism, the ideology, involves not just a tolerance of what should be <em>intolerable</em>, and the failure to set reasonable limits on tolerance, but an <em>in</em>tolerance of opposing viewpoints within liberal democracies, and an element of self-hatred, cultural masochism, and delusions about the difference between social tolerance and political tolerance. Those who seek justice are mocked with the allegation that we are seeking “vengeance,” as Spielberg did with his dastardly re-writing of history in the movie <em>Munich</em><em> </em>to show that Israel, and, impliedly, the Bush administration, were all about retribution and vengeance instead of the supposedly enlightened trait of tolerance. Tolerism, then, is the ideology of those who have attempted to cast off the Judeo-Christian ethics of justice and morality, and the sanctity of human life and fundamental liberties, and instead seek to undermine the great liberal democracies by their unwillingness to accept that tolerance has limits and that justice is far more important.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>How do Tolerists view the United   States and its place in the world?  Is Obama a Tolerist?</p>
<p><strong>Rotberg:</strong> Obama gave the highest civilian honor, the Medal of Freedom, to the horrible Mary Robinson, who presided over the U.N. Durban conference where the illiberals brought into the mainstream the absurd view that the Israelis are the new Nazis and the Palestinians are the new Jews. Obama’s equivalency of American tolerance and justice with that of Muslim countries in his first major foreign policy speech at Cairo was so absurd that it showed that he is not just “tolerant” but a proponent of the new ideology of “Tolerism” – which implies not just a sympathy for opposing views but an “indulgence,” that is a treatment of those views with <em>excessive</em> <em>leniency</em>. The idea that America is comparable to Saudi Arabia is surely laughable, except that if the American President believes that, the Founding Fathers must be turning over in their graves. And therefore one can see the relevance of Obama’s past associations with Reverend Wright, William Ayers, <a title="Bernadine Dohrn" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernadine_Dohrn" target="_blank">Bernadine Dohrn</a>, and Rashid Khalidi.</p>
<p>There is no better proof that Obama is a Tolerist than examining his responses to the Fort Hood Massacre. By continuously referring to the Islamist Major Hasan (whose emails, statements and entire life-view was that of a terrorist Islamist) as an “extremist,” Obama creates a vile moral equivalency. For example, I might be regarded by some an “extremist” because some of my views are extreme relative to the mainstream, but I would not care to share that terminological status with the likes of Hasan. America must wake up; its soldiers must carry guns, and its President must understand who is the enemy, before America descends into a British-like fantasy world of submission and tolerance of a parallel Sharia universe, where universities actively promote radicalization of Muslim students.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>What is the connection between Tolerism and anti-Semitism?</p>
<p><strong>Rotberg:</strong> There are several: Firstly, to the extent that Tolerism contains a large dose of self-hatred, or the hatred of America and Israel standing for all that is good – liberal freedoms and human rights- a large number of Tolerists (think Naomi Klein here) begin to hate America and the Jewish state equally. These haters of all that is good relate well to Radical Islam which is the repository of unbridled hate for all things Jewish and American. While historically, up until the 1940s, Islam accepted Jews as dhimmis, Radical Islam has never accepted Jews in the Middle  East, which is, according to them, Dar-Al-Islam, once and forever Muslim territory, notwithstanding the continual presence of Jews for 3500 years.</p>
<p>Secondly, Tolerism posits a type of moral and cultural relativism that resents states like America and Israel striving for the morality and justice advocated in the Bible. As well, if Islamic totalitarian theocracies or Palestinian death cults are as morally valid as any other position, then the Jewish narrative must by its nature be extremist and hence suspect.  This is why there is such little regard paid in the topic of “refugees” for the nearly one million Jews who were expelled from Arab countries in the 1940s, and were taken in and resettled by Israel. The United Nations then can create a separate organization for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) and be utterly silent about the Jewish refugees from Iraq, Libya, Syria, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia and Lebanon.</p>
<p>Thirdly, I referred to Spielberg’s travesty of a movie, Munich, which portrays the Jew-nation of Israel as vengeful and intent on retribution, compared to the supposed Christian virtues of tolerance and mercy. This is a theme that is best explored in Shakespeare’s <em>The Merchant of Venice</em>, where a proper reading of this classic shows a man so marginalized and abused by society that he ends up, <em>as a result of this marginalization,</em> vengefully obsessed with retributive justice, which of course is denied to him, because the very Court proceeding has been corrupted by Portia impersonating the Judge.  An improper reading, such as was done by the Englishman Michael Radford in the most recent movie version of <em>The Merchant of Venice</em>, makes the Jew Shylock the archetype for the supposedly vengeful Jews and Americans exacting a negative form of Justice against the poor, oppressed terrorists or the Iraqi terror state. The fact that the worst terrorists have university educations and come from above average income families is irrelevant to the anti-Semitic fantasy that the intolerant Americans and Israelis are the new Nazis and supposedly deserve the terrorism inflicted on them. It is all anti-Semitic in nature.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>How do we find the limits of tolerance?</p>
<p><strong>Rotberg: </strong>Starting with the great philosophers of Toleration, we would have to accept, like Karl Popper that “if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed and tolerance with them … We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.”</p>
<p>But just as important, we have to begin to discuss how Tolerism and its associated ideologies are behind many of the delusions about the nature of the war that has begun against us, and the nature of the enemy.  We must learn that Terrorism is successful precisely because it creates what I call a “Cultural Stockholm Syndrome” or a cultural response similar to the “Patty Hearst Syndrome” where we begin to indentify with our terrorist oppressors and begin to accept small benefits from them as part of a submission to their will and values.  The idea that the West can defeat terrorism by more tolerance of the evil perpetrators of murder directed at civilians, is, quite frankly, preposterous.</p>
<p>In the book, I explore a variety of ways to find a suitable limitation for tolerance, and I refer to writings of such heroic writers as David Solway, David Horowitz, Charles Krauthammer, Daniel Greenfield, Vijay Kumar, and even moderate Muslims like Tarek Fatah (who has called for a clear statement by Islamic theologians that Jihad must henceforth be only construed as an individual inner struggle for spirituality rather than be construed as an outer-directed violent struggle against Jews, Christians and Hindus). I hope that my book induces further discussion of what are the limits of tolerance.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Howard Rotberg, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.</p>
<p>To order Howard Rotberg’s new book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Tolerism-Ideology-Revealed-Howard-Rotberg/dp/0973406526">click here</a>.</p>
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		<title>A Victory for Free Speech</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/a-victory-for-free-speech/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-victory-for-free-speech</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/a-victory-for-free-speech/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 23 Jan 2010 02:19:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[The Cato Institute’s Ilya Shapiro explains why the Supreme Court’s ruling this week was a win for free expression and democracy.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-47330" title="supreme_court" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/supreme_court.jpg" alt="supreme_court" width="421" height="306" /></p>
<p>Can the government suppress free speech critical of elected politicians? In the home of the First Amendment, that may seem an unusual question to pose. But that was the question before the Supreme Court this week, as it handed down a landmark ruling in the case of <em><a href="http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-205.pdf">Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission</a>.</em></p>
<p>In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court <em>struck down </em>a ban on corporations and labor unions using money from their general funds to produce and air campaign ads in races for Congressional and presidential races. Also overturned was a ban on corporations and unions airing campaign ads 30 days before primary or 60 days before general election.</p>
<p>The case in question dates back to January 2008, when the conservative non-profit group Citizens United produced a documentary critical of then-presidential candidate <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=18">Hillary Clinton</a> titled <em>Hillary: The Movie</em>. When the Federal Election commission used the McCain Feingold campaign finance law to <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/21/AR2010012103582.html?hpid=topnews">limit Citizen United’s ability to advertise the film</a> during the 2008 presidential primaries, the group sued to protest the restriction on free speech.</p>
<p>This week, the Supreme Court ruled in Citizen United’s favor. In so doing, it won approval from free-speech advocates and strident criticism from many on the political Left. To discuss the case and its political implications, <em>Front Page</em> turned to <a href="http://www.cato.org/people/ilya-shapiro">Ilya Shapiro</a>, a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute and editor-in-chief of the <em>Cato Supreme Court Review. </em></p>
<p><strong>FP: The Supreme Court’s decision has certainly stirred its share of controversy. How do you view the Court’s ruling? </strong></p>
<p><strong>Shapiro:</strong> This is a big win for free speech. It is the most significant ruling on campaign finance since [the 1976 case] <em><a href="http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0424_0001_ZS.html">Buckley vs. Valeo</a></em> and it continued the trend of this court of allowing greater speech in the political arena. It’s a victory for the marketplace of ideas and it’s a victory for democracy.</p>
<p><strong>FP: Some, especially on the Left, don’t see it that way. The <em>New York Times</em> <strong><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/opinion/22fri1.html?ref=opinion">despairs</a></strong> this morning that the decision is a “blow for democracy” that paves the way for “corporations to use their vast treasuries to overwhelm elections.”  Is there any merit to the objection that the court’s ruling will distort democracy by empowering corporations while diminishing the voice of regular citizens?</strong></p>
<p><strong>Shapiro:</strong> I think the concern about corporations is misplaced. Most corporations are not Exxon. They are smaller companies or non-profits. With the disclosure rules that are in place, voters will still be able to judge which candidate is in the pocket of some corporation, whether it’s the ACLU or the Sierra Club, or the Cato Institute for that matter. We still have laws in place going back to 1907 that prevent direct contributions to candidates.</p>
<p>To the extent that there has been a diminution in the public’s faith in the democratic process, the government is probably more to blame than the corporations. Earmarks, special tax breaks, the dispersal of government goodies and baddies – these types of actions harm democracy much more. McCain Feingold was never about regular citizens. It was a creature of the Beltway. There was no great call from the hinterland to get money out of politics.</p>
<p>I don’t think democracy will be diminished as a result of the ruling. What we could see is more ads like the Swift Boats ads during the 2004 presidential campaign or the Hillary movie. But the way the law stood, some government bureaucrat could have simply banned books that were critical of a political candidate in an election year. That would have been far worse.</p>
<p><strong>FP: In part, there is a partisan argument here. Democrats complain that if you make it easier for corporations t o spend money in political campaigns, you empower Republicans, since the Left considers corporations and Republicans natural allies. </strong></p>
<p><strong>Shapiro:</strong> I think that argument is laughable. It’s not at all clear which party would benefit from this ruling. Corporations are highly strategic about what they do with their money. It’s because they want political influence that they donate money to both parties. Goldman Sachs <a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contrib.php?cycle=2008&amp;cid=N00009638">gave more money to Barack Obama than to any other candidate</a> in the last election cycle. They were the number-one donor to his campaign. You could go down the list of Fortune 500 companies and find <a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contrib.php?cycle=2008&amp;cid=N00009638">similar contributions</a>. So when Obama <a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2010/01/reactions-to-the-supreme-court.html">rails</a> that this ruling will help Wall Street, it’s a little rich. He set the record for donors from big companies.   </p>
<p><strong>FP: Another common claim among critics of the ruling is that corporations don’t deserve the same First Amendment rights as individuals.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Shapiro:</strong> No one is saying that corporations are human beings. But corporations are groups of private individuals who have legal rights. Take <em>Front Page</em> magazine. It’s not an individual. But the government can’t raid your office and just seize your computer. That would be a violation of the Fourth Amendment. Similarly, corporations have First Amendment rights. Think of it this way: <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=977">George Soros</a> can spend as much as he wants in an election, but if you and a hundred other people get together to spend your money, suddenly, that can’t work. Individuals don’t lose their rights just because they come together to magnify the effects of their donations.  <br />
<strong><br />
</strong><strong>FP: Some claim that this decision bespeaks a political agenda of the court’s conservative majority, that the court had no business hearing the case and seized on it for political purposes.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Shapiro</strong>: Justice Roberts has actually addressed this point in his concurring decision. In legal doctrine, you have something called <em>stare decisis</em>, which means that you don’t reverse a precedent even if it’s wrong. People rely on legal precedent. But in this case the precedent was not that old. On top of that, no one relies on having less speech. No one says, ‘I have an interest in self-censorship.’ The court used the smaller issue of the Hillary film to get at the larger issue of how free speech can be regulated. The court is acting properly when it upholds the Constitution.</p>
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