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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; prison</title>
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		<title>The Obama Doctrine: Undermine the Military, Coddle Enemies and Distance Friends</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ari-lieberman/the-obama-doctrine-undermine-the-military-coddle-enemies-and-distance-friends/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-obama-doctrine-undermine-the-military-coddle-enemies-and-distance-friends</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 09 Oct 2014 04:35:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ari Lieberman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Andrew Tahmooressi]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Clint Lorance]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Military]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[murder]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[prison]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sentence]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=242733</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Two cases of injustice toward soldiers highlight the administration's warped priorities. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div id="attachment_242737" style="width: 341px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/10200569180172727.jpg"><img class=" wp-image-242737" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/10200569180172727-394x350.jpg" alt="Clint Lorance" width="331" height="294" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Clint Lorance</p></div>
<p>On October 1, former Navy Lieutenant Commander and 22-year veteran Montel Williams <a href="http://www.theblaze.com/blog/2014/10/01/watch-montel-williamss-emotional-plea-for-president-obama-to-save-sgt-tahmooressi/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">addressed</span></a> a congressional committee on the subject of Afghan war veteran and US marine, Sgt. Andrew Tahmooressi. Tahmooressi was imprisoned by Mexican authorities in March 2014 after mistakenly veering into Mexican territory while driving along a poorly lit section of the border and was found to be in possession of firearms, illegal under Mexican law, but permitted under US law. In an impassioned plea punctuated by heartfelt emotion, Williams drew the logical conclusion concerning the Obama administration’s handling of the matter – that the government is unconcerned about the fate of its soldiers.</p>
<p>For six months, the administration has allowed a marine, diagnosed with PTSD, to languish in a Mexican jail when one phone call from the Commander-in-Chief could liberate him. Instead, the administration has allowed Tahmooressi’s case to wind its way through the notoriously corrupt and bureaucratic Mexican justice system. While the administration’s handling – or rather mishandling – of the Tahmooressi case can at best be described as neglectful, its handling of the case involving another US soldier is downright Kafkaesque and malevolent.</p>
<p>In July 2012 First Lieutenant and platoon commander Clint Lorance was leading his platoon on a patrol in Kandahar in an area known to be a hotbed of insurgent activity. Lt. Lorance was informed by pilots who reconnoitered the area that motorcycle-mounted Taliban terrorists were active in the vicinity. The Taliban routinely employ motorcycles to track US patrols. Moments later, Lorance spotted Afghans riding motorcycles near his patrol. With the information that he already had at his disposal and with the safety of his platoon being paramount, Lorance immediately made a command decision during the fog of war and ordered one of his snipers to neutralize what he considered to be a threat to the well-being of his men. Two Afghans, later found to be unarmed, were killed.</p>
<p>What happened next could have been taken out of a chapter from Orwell’s 1984. Shortly following the incident, Lorance was stripped of his weapon and assigned a desk job. In January 2013, he was charged with murder in connection with the incident and in August 2013, a military court found him <a href="http://nation.foxnews.com/2013/10/15/allen-west-obamas-military-contempt-outrageous-treatment-clint-lorance"><span style="color: #0433ff;">guilty of murder</span></a> and violating the army’s Rules of Engagement and handed down a 20-year sentence.</p>
<p>Lorance is a hero who volunteered to put his life on the line for the cause of freedom and to serve his nation. His lengthy army service has shown him to be nothing but an <a href="http://www.freeclintlorance.com/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">exemplary soldier</span></a> whose service record is peppered with commendations and citations. But instead of being treated like a hero, he is treated like a criminal by the very government he swore to protect.</p>
<p>Nothing saps the morale of an army more than knowing that its government doesn’t have its back. This case, as well as the Tahmooressi case, demonstrates with utmost clarity that the Obama administration at best, doesn’t give a damn about its soldiers. A more cynical approach would suggest that the administration is actually working to undermine the morale of its troops.</p>
<p>Some might find these truths too hard to swallow. After all, why would the president keep the United States embroiled in the longest war of its history and then work to actively undermine the ability of the United States servicemen and women to perform their mission? A logical question, indeed. But when one takes a closer look at Obama’s foreign policy, where <a href="http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704416904575121710380216280"><span style="color: #0433ff;">enemies are coddled</span></a> and <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ari-lieberman/obama-vs-netanyahu/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">friends are distanced</span></a>, nothing this administration does seems logical.</p>
<p>Consider also the case of Bowe Bergdahl, a <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2014/08/04/bergdahl-roommate-chairman-of-joint-chiefs-told-us-bowe-was-a-deserter/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">confirmed deserter</span></a> and possible collaborator, who placed members of his own unit in jeopardy after they launched a frantic search for him. The Obama administration, without informing Congress, released five hardened Taliban terrorists, who will likely return to terror and place additional US personnel in danger, to gain Bergdahl’s release. Heroes are prosecuted and allowed to languish in foreign prisons while Obama places his priorities on releasing deserters for hardened criminals.</p>
<p>During his impassioned address to the committee, Montel informed the members that his 21-year-old son had asked him if he should join the military, to which he responded, “No, because our government doesn’t respect you enough.” Sadly, Montel’s assessment hits the proverbial nail squarely on its head.</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>Leader of Jihadist Onslaught in Iraq Released on Obama’s Watch</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-klein/leader-of-jihadist-onslaught-in-iraq-released-on-obamas-watch/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=leader-of-jihadist-onslaught-in-iraq-released-on-obamas-watch</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 16 Jun 2014 04:16:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Klein]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Abu Bakr al Baghdadi]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[al Qaeda]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iraq]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[prison]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[release]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Terrorism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=234134</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The catastrophic consequences of a Radical-in-Chief's defeatism.  ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Abu-bakr-al-Baghdadi.jpg"><img class="alignleft wp-image-234147 " src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Abu-bakr-al-Baghdadi-450x299.jpg" alt="Abu-bakr-al-Baghdadi" width="318" height="211" /></a>On October 22nd, 2007, Osama bin Laden admitted in an audio tape, entitled &#8220;Message to the people of Iraq,&#8221; that al Qaeda was losing the war in Iraq because it had made mistakes and no longer had the allegiance of Sunni insurgents who had switched sides. When Barack Obama became president on January 20, 2009, the war in Iraq was essentially won. The al Qaeda-backed insurgency was reduced to smoldering embers. George W. Bush’s surge had succeeded.</p>
<p>Safely behind bars at the time was Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, an al Qaeda-linked point man who was imprisoned at Camp Bucca in Iraq, after being captured by U.S. forces in 2005. According to a Pentagon assessment at the time, al Baghdadi “would kidnap individuals or entire families, accuse them, pronounce sentence and then publicly execute them.”</p>
<p>However, the Obama administration decided to shut down the Bucca prison camp and hand over its prisoners to the Iraqi government, including Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, in 2009. The Iraqi government later released him. Al Baghadi boasted to the U.S. soldiers who had held him prisoner, “I’ll see you in New York.”</p>
<p>The release of al Baghadi and other jihadist insurgents from the Bucca prison, coupled with President Obama’s decision to withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011 rather than follow the military’s advice to leave a residual force behind, turned the smoldering embers of the once defeated al Qaeda-backed insurgency into a raging out-of-control conflagration.</p>
<p>Abu Bakr al Baghdadi has re-emerged to become the leader of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).  The jihadist group split with “core” al Qaeda after it refused to obey “core” al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri’s order to withdraw ISIS’s forces from Syria back to its home in Iraq and leave the Syrian fighting to the more local Syrian al Qaeda affiliated operatives. ISIS instead consolidated its seizure of territory in Syria from weaker rebel groups. Then, using its bases in Syria to launch more aggressive attacks in Iraq, ISIS in recent days has taken control of large portions of northern and western Iraq including Iraq’s second largest city Mosul. ISIS freed at least 1,000 militants held in prisons in Mosul, adding more jihadists to its swelling ranks. It has looted hundreds of millions of dollars from northern Iraqi banks and taken sophisticated military equipment left behind by fleeing Iraqi soldiers. ISIS has attracted Sunnis disaffected by Iraq’s Shiite Prime Minister al-Maliki’s imperious attitude towards the Sunni minority population.</p>
<p>ISIS’s goal is to create an Islamic caliphate stretching across Sunni-dominated areas of Iraq and Syria. It has also threatened to destroy Shiite holy sites in Iraq and move towards the capital, Baghdad. Under al Baghdadi’s leadership, ISIS has been ruthless, methodically executing its opponents and imposing strict Sharia law wherever it has established control. The United States now has a $10 million bounty on Baghdadi’s head.</p>
<p>The Obama administration has been completely clueless on the dangerous situation that has been brewing in Iraq since its decision to release from U.S. custody Baghdadi and the other prisoners in the Bucca prison camp in 2009 and the total withdrawal of U.S. soldiers from Iraq in 2011. Indeed, the administration has been delusional in its belief that everything has been going so well in Iraq because of Obama’s policies.</p>
<p>Back in 2010, Vice President Joe Biden made this preposterous claim:</p>
<blockquote><p>I am very optimistic about Iraq. I think it’s gonna be one of the great achievements of this administration. You’re gonna see 90,000 American troops come marchin’ home by the end of the summer. You’re gonna see a stable government in Iraq that is actually movin’ toward a representative government. I’ve been there 17 times now. I go about every two months, three months. I know every one of the major players in all the segments of that society. It’s impressed me. I’ve been impressed, how they have been deciding to use the political process, rather than guns, to settle their differences.</p></blockquote>
<p>Was Abu Bakr al Baghdadi one of “the major players in all the segments of that society” with whom Biden was impressed?</p>
<p>Commenting on his decision to pull all U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011, President Obama said that “in Iraq, we’ve succeeded in our strategy to end the war.” He added “the tide of war is receding” and “we’ve renewed American leadership in the world.”</p>
<p>In the middle of 2012, after U.S. troops had been totally withdrawn, Antony J. Blinken, the national security adviser to Vice President Biden wrote that violence in Iraq was “at historic lows.”</p>
<p>And during a presidential debate with Mitt Romney during the 2012 campaign, Obama said: “We ended the war in Iraq, refocused our attention on those who actually killed us on 9/11. And as a consequence, al-Qaeda’s core leadership has been decimated. What I would not have done is left 10,000 troops in Iraq that would tie us down. That certainly would not help us in the Middle East.”</p>
<p>While Obama has bragged about decimating “core” al Qaeda with drone attacks, his focus has been on yesterday’s leaders. There is a new generation of jihadists, inspired by the successes of Baghdadi in the battlefield now encompassing Syria as well as Iraq.</p>
<p>“Not since Osama bin Laden has a leader been held in such reverence among Sunni fighters, scored such stunning and shocking victories, and threatened so much of the established order,” wrote Graeme Baker, an online editor with Al Jazeera. “Baghdadi supporters speak of him as al-Qaeda mark two, the leader of a new generation working to bring about the Islamic caliphate envisioned by Bin Laden.”</p>
<p>Tragically, President Obama is making the same mistake in Afghanistan. He has publicly announced his timetable for complete withdrawal of American troops. And he agreed to release five high level Taliban leaders with ties to al Qaeda from Guantanamo in exchange for an American soldier who left his post without permission and may have deserted his platoon.  As reported by AirForceTimes, Rob Williams, the U.S. national intelligence officer for South Asia, told the Senate intelligence committee that four out of the five prisoners swapped for Bowe Bergdahl “are expected to resume activities with the Taliban.”</p>
<p>Albert Einstein is said to have famously proclaimed, “The definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing over and over, and then expecting different results.” That describes President Obama’s policies towards the jihadists to a tee.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><strong>Don&#8217;t miss Daniel Greenfield on this week&#8217;s <em>Glazov Gang</em> discussing &#8220;<em>How Obama Surrendered Iraq&#8221;</em>:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/WUz9-fhF9uw" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Over 1,000 Days in Iranian Prison for U.S. Marine</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/majid-rafizadeh/over-1000-days-in-iranian-prison-for-u-s-marine/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=over-1000-days-in-iranian-prison-for-u-s-marine</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 06 Jun 2014 04:45:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Majid Rafizadeh]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Amir Mirzae Hekmati]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[death sentence]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[prison]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[spy]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=233338</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How Obama's appeasement has increased the suffering of Tehran's  American captives.  ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Amir-Mirzaei-Hekmati-399x266.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-233339" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Amir-Mirzaei-Hekmati-399x266.jpg" alt="Amir-Mirzaei-Hekmati-399x266" width="353" height="235" /></a>A US citizen’s first ever visit to see his aging grandparents and relatives quickly turned into his arrest and death sentence by the Islamic court of Iran. 31-year-old Amir Mirzae Hekmati, who was 28 at the time of the trip, had traveled to Iran to celebrate with his extended family in Tehran.</p>
<p>Before reaching Tehran, Hekmati called his mother Behnaz Hekmati, to tell her about his excitement about the trip, saying he would call her back when he got settled. But his mother never received another call. <a href="http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/america-tonight/america-tonight-blog/2013/9/24/jailed-in-iran-thestoryofexmarineamirhekmati.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">According to his mother</span></a>, Amir’s computer, cell phone, and all of his IDs were taken away. That is when the excruciating ordeal for the Hekmati family began.</p>
<p>The irony is that Amir was born and raised in the United States, and he had no connection to the Islamic Republic other than being born to parents who left Iran for the U.S. in 1979— at the time when the Islamist state was created after the Islamic Revolution.</p>
<p>Amir&#8217;s father Ali, a professor of microbiology, was recently diagnosed with brain cancer, and the Hekmati family is imploring the Islamic Republic to release their son so he can see his ill father. His mother Behnaz pleaded with the Iranian government, &#8220;Please just let Amir come home… Amir didn&#8217;t commit any crime, he didn&#8217;t do anything. Just let him to come home and make his family happy again.&#8221;</p>
<p>His first trial did not go involve proper due process. It was neither a transparent nor fair trial. It was conducted in complete judicial secrecy, with Hektami convicted and sentenced to death for spying.</p>
<p>Hektami joined the US Marines, to serve this country and to offset the cost of college for his parents, according to his sister Sarah.  Amir served as a translator and linguist. Sarah<a href="http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/america-tonight/america-tonight-blog/2013/9/24/jailed-in-iran-thestoryofexmarineamirhekmati.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;"> told America Tonight</span></a> “[Anmir] never wanted to impose anything on my family… He loved traveling and he loved learning languages, and he felt like this was a good opportunity to experience that.”</p>
<p>Amir was coerced into false confession. He was taken into the most notorious prison in the Islamic Republic, Evin. Although he was kept in Evin for several months, the Islamic Guard denied that he was being held there. Even the United Nations and Pakistani Embassy, which has an Iranian Interests Section in Washington, DC, could not get a clear answer.</p>
<p>Some of the reasons that the Iranian Islamic guard does not permit anyone to contact a detainee is to keep the truth about the innocence of the person within the prison walls, threaten the person, impose miserable prison conditions like prolonged periods of solitary confinement, or draft a fabricated story and elicit a forced confession.</p>
<p>The Islamist state of Iran is well known for eliciting forced and false confessions through threats and other methods of torture.</p>
<p>The Iranian state TV broadcast Hekmati&#8217;s confession in this <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpG23Nl9QaQ"><span style="color: #0433ff;">video</span></a>. The confession was evidently forced, as <span style="color: #0433ff;"><a href="http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/america-tonight/america-tonight-blog/2013/9/24/jailed-in-iran-thestoryofexmarineamirhekmati.html">his sister stated</a>,</span> “I barely recognized him… He looked like he lost 50 to 60 pounds, easily. And it seemed very forced and scripted. He was using words that I knew he didn’t know.”</p>
<p>It only took a couple of months to sentence this American ex-Marine to death. Iran&#8217;s Press TV reported that he was &#8220;tasked with carrying out a complex intelligence operation and infiltrating the Iranian intelligence apparatus.&#8221;</p>
<p>After many people, such as Terry Mahoney, a former Marine sergeant who has never met Amir, called for his release and held events, and after the issue drew international attention, the Islamic court overturned his conviction for espionage, and instead charged him with &#8220;cooperating with hostile governments&#8221; with 10 years in prison.</p>
<p>The Islamic Republic has long been playing this political game against the United States by arresting, torturing, imprisoning, and sentencing prisoners to death. Hektami is one of the few American citizens unjustly held in an Iranian prison. The Islamist Iranian authorities are being emboldened and now threatening to extend the prison time of Pastor Saeed Abedini for alleged crimes related to his faith and efforts as a Christian pastor. Reportedly, he suffered injuries and was beaten and yanked from a hospital bed to prison.</p>
<p>There is still no news of Robert Levinson, 65, a retired FBI agent, who vanished and suddenly disappeared in the Islamic Republic six years ago. He would be considered to be the longest-held American hostage ever. He is held by the Iranian intelligence services. The American hostages need a strong government to ensure that the Islamist state of Iran follows international laws. If the government does not cause the clerics to submit to the law, an advocacy and international campaign by ordinary citizens is required to spotlight these unlawful and inhumane acts committed by the Islamic Republic of Iran.</p>
<p>These atrocities continue even under the presidency of Hassan Rouhani, the so-called moderate who is viewed as a reformist and a favorable political figure by the liberal media and the Obama administration.</p>
<p>The Obama administration continues its thaw with the Islamist state of Iran and has released billions of dollars to this Islamist government. These conciliatory actions have not yielded any positive changes in the attitude of the Islamic Republic &#8212; instead these moves have only emboldened the Islamist state to ignore the United States and continue its arrests, torture, death sentences, and threats against Americans and US interests.</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>Gitmo: Closing Up Shop?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/gitmo-closing-up-shop/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=gitmo-closing-up-shop</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 04 Jun 2014 04:58:53 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Afghanistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bowe bergdahl]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Gitmo]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[swap]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=233270</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What the Bergdahl fiasco may be foreshadowing. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #232323;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/man-in-suit.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-233273" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/man-in-suit-450x300.jpg" alt="man-in-suit" width="297" height="198" /></a>Lost in the furor surrounding President Obama’s decision to swap five high-level terrorists for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl is a potential ulterior motivation for the deal lurking in the background: fulfilling the president&#8217;s 2014 State of the Union <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/01/28/obama-s-new-guantanamo-deadline-unlikely.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">promise</span></a> to completely shut down the prison at Guantanamo Bay.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">&#8220;This whole deal may have been a test to see how far the administration can actually push it, and if Congress doesn’t fight back they will feel more empowered to move forward with additional transfers,” a senior GOP Senate aide <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/02/bergdahl-deal-could-be-first-step-to-emptying-gitmo.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">told</span></a> the Daily Beast’s Josh Rogin. “They’ve lined up all the dominoes to be able to move a lot more detainees out of Guantanamo and this could be just the beginning.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The principal domino is the notion, getting <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/05/guantanamo-a-perverse-incentive-to-keep-troops-in-afghanistan/371779/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">play</span></a> in the precincts of the left, that once a war ends, the prisoners of that war must be released. In an exchange with Fox News’s Megyn Kelly Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2014/06/03/Inhofe-Bergdahl-Swap-Part-of-Obamas-Obsession-to-Close-Gitmo"><span style="color: #1255cc;">addressed</span></a> the absurdity of that contention. &#8220;So they should have turned Hitler loose and that would have been the end of the war,” he said. &#8220;This isn&#8217;t right, and I just &#8212; it&#8217;s hard for me and people I talk to, a lot of people in Oklahoma, just this morning about this, they can&#8217;t figure out why in the world would we turn loose the five most dangerous people who hate America, who want to kill Americans, who have the equipment and the following to revive the Taliban and that&#8217;s what they are doing.&#8221;</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">It’s part of an agenda a long time in the making. In October of last year, the <i>Washington Post</i> <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/hagel-appoints-new-envoy-to-rejuvenate-efforts-to-close-guantanamo/2013/10/08/6fc99800-301e-11e3-9e92-5dd16061dbe8_story.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">reported</span></a> that Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel appointed Paul M. Lewis, a Democratic lawyer for the House Armed Services Committee and a former judge advocate in the Marine Corps, to a newly-created Pentagon position as special envoy for Guantanamo closure. The appointment fulfilled a promise made by Obama the previous May to create special envoy positions at both the State and Defense Departments to pursue that agenda.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The strategy here was to perpetrate yet another end-run around Congress, which had <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/afghan-wars-approaching-end-throws-legal-status-of-guantanamo-detainees-into-doubt/2013/10/18/758be516-2d0a-11e3-97a3-ff2758228523_story.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">blocked</span></a> the administration from releasing or transferring many of the then-remaining 164 detainees, and taking only a small number of them to trial. The administration was exploring the possibility that the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan would facilitate challenges regarding the United States’ legal authority to continue holding them. The declaration of the war’s end could force that determination to be made about Afghan Taliban captured on the battlefield and allow them to file new appeals in federal courts. “In the words of the Supreme Court, the authority to detain — if you’re detaining based on someone being a belligerent — can unravel as hot wars end. And I think that’s a real question,” Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, chief prosecutor for military commissions at Guantanamo said at the time.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The word “end” is key. When the president announced his intentions to ultimately withdraw from Afghanistan in 2016, he nonetheless <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/obama-hails-approaching-end-of-us-combat-mission-in-afghanistan/2014/05/28/5f9ee2a2-e6ab-11e3-8f90-73e071f3d637_story.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">stressed</span></a> that our combat mission in that nation would end this year, even as 9,800 troops will remain until 2015, and half that number until 2016. An administration official briefing the press prior to that announcement stressed that 2014 would be the end of our “combat mission,” even as he further noted that the U.S. remain open to &#8220;training Afghan forces and supporting CT [counter-terrorism] operations against the remnants of Al Qaeda.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">One is left to wonder what the legalistic difference is between “combat&#8221; and counter-terrorism “support,” but the overall motive remains clear: declaring the war over, regardless of events on the ground, paves the way for the release of enemy combatants—and in turn, the closure of Gitmo.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">One is also left to wonder about the legality of the latest exchange as well. Current law, included as <a href="http://www.theblaze.com/blog/2014/06/02/obama-gave-congress-five-hours-notice-of-gitmo-transfer/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">part</span></a> of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for 2014, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/bergdahl-release-arrangement-could-threaten-the-safety-of-americans-republicans-say/2014/05/31/35e47a2a-e8ff-11e3-afc6-a1dd9407abcf_print.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">requires</span></a> the Secretary of Defense to notify Congress 30 days prior to any prisoner transfers, to explain the reason for doing so, and to provide assurances that none of the released detainees would be able to re-engage in activities harmful to the United States or its interests. That law replaced one that was even stricter, and while Obama signed it, he issued a <a href="http://www.coherentbabble.com/Statements/SShr3304-PL113-66.pdf"><span style="color: #1255cc;">signing statement</span></a> contending it was an unconstitutional infringement on his powers as commander in chief, allowing him to override it.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Ironically, the move to a less strict statute requiring only that Congress be notified was due in some part to concern over Bergdahl’s well-being. And while both the Bush and Obama administrations have transferred prisoners to other countries, this swap was the first under the new requirements. Requirements that  were ignored by Obama for reasons best explained by a senior GOP senate aide. “The whole reason the administration ignores reporting requirements is because they know there is no consequence for ignoring them,” the aide said.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">No legal consequences at any rate. As the <i>Wall Street Journal</i> <a href="http://online.wsj.com/articles/trading-with-the-taliban-1401662373"><span style="color: #1255cc;">explains</span></a> presidential power &#8220;is never stronger than in the role of Commander in Chief,” and Congress’s attempt to restrict it may be unconstitutional. Furthermore, Obama already ignored the War Powers Act of 1973 to intercede in Libya and Congress did nothing more than grumble about it. Thus it seems likely that he would be more than willing to push the envelope in whatever way he deems necessary to empty Guantanamo Bay.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Congress is well aware of that reality, and several GOP Senators were working to restrict further releases of Gitmo prisoners before the Bergdahl swap took place. Obama <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/obama-win-guantanamo-prison-short-lived-23848782"><span style="color: #1255cc;">scored</span></a> an initial victory in his effort to close the prison when the Senate Armed Services Committee approved giving him the authority to transfer detainees to the United State if Congress votes to close the facility. Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) chairman of the Armed Services Committee hailed the provision. Inhofe, the top Republican on Committee, voted for the overall defense bill, but will work with the GOP-controlled House to kill it. During the session, two GOP senators won support for key amendments. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) won support for establishing a process in which any administration plan aimed at closing Gitmo would be subject to a joint resolution of disapproval from both houses of Congress, and Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) won support for a one-year ban on transferring Gitmo prisoners to Yemen.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Ayotte’s amendment theoretically prevents the prison’s closure in 2014, because half the remaining prisoners are Yemeni and they would presumably be sent back home, despite the reality that other released detainees from that nation have <a href="http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2010/05/former_gitmo_detaine_4.php#"><span style="color: #1255cc;">resumed</span></a> their terrorist ways. Yet as Rogin notes, timing is key:</p>
<blockquote>
<p style="color: #232323;">The GOP effort, however, will take longer than seven months to have any effect because the defense policy bill won’t even be considered in the Senate until after the election. Typically, the defense bill is passed in late December. There’s no chance Congress will pass an appropriations bill this year, meaning Congress can’t remove the funding for transfers. That gives Obama plenty of time to use the current looseness of the law to push forward the releases of many more prisoners.</p>
</blockquote>
<p style="color: #232323;">Perhaps not. As the National Review’s Andrew McCarthy <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/379417/taliban-swap-and-high-crimes-and-misdemeanors-andrew-c-mccarthy"><span style="color: #1255cc;">explains</span></a> pressure can be brought to bear, not because the president might be overstepping his authority with regard to the requirements of the NDAA, but because Obama &#8220;has returned five senior commanders to the Taliban and Haqqani network <i>while those violent jihadist organizations are still conducting offensive attacks against American troops</i>, who are still in harm’s way and still conducting combat operations pursuant to a congressional authorization of military force.” (italics original)</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">This point is critical because it not only undermines leftist contentions regarding prisoner exchanges, it reveals the utter fecklessness of the president’s desire to end the war, even as our terrorist enemy remains willing to pursue it. &#8220;The Taliban and Haqqani have not surrendered or settled; they are still working hard to kill our troops,” McCarthy writes. &#8220;It is thus mind-bogglingly irresponsible for the commander-in-chief to replenish their upper ranks.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">House Armed Services committee chairman Buck McKeon (R-CA) has <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/katherinemiller/house-armed-services-chairman-there-will-be-hearings-on-berg"><span style="color: #1255cc;">promised</span></a> to hold hearings on the prisoner swap. As of now, he is focused on the violation of the 30-day notice in the NDAA. Any investigation would be far better served focusing on what McCarthy terms the Commander-in-Chief’s &#8220;profound dereliction of duty.” If Republicans pursue the prisoner exchange within that context, Obama’s efforts to continue transferring enemy combatants out of Guantanamo Bay prison becomes a political millstone of gargantuan proportions, even before the details of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl’s <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/03/us/us-soldier-srgt-bowe-bergdahl-of-idaho-pow-vanished-angered-his-unit.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">dubious past</span></a> are  fully confirmed. Regardless, Obama likely remains determined to push the legal and political envelope in pursuit of that odious agenda. Republicans and perhaps even some thoughtful Democrats should be determined to push back just as hard. American lives may depend on it.</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>Releasing Murderers for Peace</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ronn-torossian/releasing-murderers-for-peace/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=releasing-murderers-for-peace</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 01 Apr 2014 04:19:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ronn Torossian]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=222237</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The insanity of the "peace process." ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/abbas-released-terrorists-550x317.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-222239" alt="abbas-released-terrorists-550x317" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/abbas-released-terrorists-550x317.jpg" width="283" height="221" /></a>If one believes the narrative told by the mainstream media and the Obama Administration, peace will come when Israel returns strategic parts of the Jewish homeland (which Israel won in a defensive war), releases terrorists, allows the return of millions of Palestinian Arab refugees, divides Jerusalem, abandons Holy sites to Muslim control and carries out a series of other “concessions.” Then, the Arabs will suddenly and miraculously recognize peace.  Anyone who believes this tale surely believes in flying elephants. (My </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.5wpr.com/">PR Firm in NYC</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> is selling The Brooklyn Bridge also if you are interested.)</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Most recently – it was ignored by every single mainstream worldwide media outlet – </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/pa-official-jews-have-no-right-to-western-wall/">two Palestinian Authority officials stated that Jews must be forbidden from praying at the Western Wall</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> and at the Temple Mount. Located in Jerusalem, The Temple Mount is Judaism&#8217;s holiest site, of which The Western Wall is located at the foot of the western side of the Temple Mount. It is the location of the two holy temples of Jerusalem, the latter of which was destroyed by the Romans in 70 C.E. Currently, Jews pray freely at the Western Wall (except when being showered by rocks being thrown by Arabs), although Jewish prayer is restricted at the Temple Mount.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">This week, Tayseer Al-Tamimi, former Chief Justice of the Palestinian Authority Religious Court, said, “Allah decreed that the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque is Islamic and belongs to Muslims alone. It is part of the religious belief of a billion and a half Muslims, and the Jews have no right to it… or the right to pray in any part of it. The Al-Aqsa Mosque includes all its courtyards… and specifically, its western wall.” In December 2013, on official Palestinian Authority TV, the Palestinian Authority Minister of Religious Affairs Mahmoud Al-Habbash said that &#8220;The Al-Aqsa Mosque will remain, by divine decree, a Muslim mosque, will not be shared with anyone, will not be forfeited, and no one besides Muslims will pray in it.” In the interview he said that the Western Wall is “an authentic part of the Al-Aqsa Mosque only.” </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">An Israeli non-government organization, Palestinian Media Watch, released translations of these comments, yet the world media has ignored this story. Publicizing these speeches would not support the narrative that media pursues &#8212; Israel is the &#8220;apartheid state&#8221; and Arabs are oppressed.  The reality is that Israel offers all citizens – and religions – freedom of prayer, and more. While Jews – until today – have limited visitation to the Temple Mount, the Arabs worship freely throughout Israel. Meanwhile, Palestinian Arabs – and the Arab world – are clear that they do not accept Jews. Now which one is intolerant?</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Only two years ago, in 2012, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said, “Jerusalem is a Muslim and Christian city, and there will be neither peace nor security until the Israeli occupation, settlements, and settlers leave the city. Jerusalem’s identity is Arab, and the city’s and Christian holy sites must be protected from Israeli threats.” Abbas said, “there will be no peace or stability before our beloved city and eternal capital is liberated from occupation and settlement.” Talk of concessions and co-existence is always directed at Israel, and focused on pressuring the only Jewish State in the world.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">What is it that the Arabs have sacrificed (other than countless terrorist martyrs)? Abbas and the entire Palestinian Arab world say Jews will not be permitted to pray – or live – in Jerusalem, the holiest city for Judaism.  Despite this – and regular acts of terror – Israel is expected to continue with this absurd “peace” process?</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The next step in this “peace” process is Israel being expected to release murderers in pursuit of peace. Logical &#8212; if you live in an insane asylum. These negotiations are leading nowhere and the Palestinians continue to get concessions from Israel – </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Kerry-destroy-Abbas-peace/2014/01/01/id/544682/">in a desire to destroy Israel piece by piece through this sham “peace process.”</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">  How can peace be made with people who say Jews cannot live anywhere they choose?</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Murderers going free is not peace, and cannot lead to peace. </span></p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss Secular Palestinian Leader <strong>Mudar Zahran</strong> on <strong>The Glazov Gang</strong> calling out John Kerry on his “peace plan” for the Mideast:</em></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/i-UBjuUOBHw" height="380" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
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		<title>Junius Irving Scales,  An American Communist</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arch-t-allen/junius-irving-scales-an-american-communist/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=junius-irving-scales-an-american-communist</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 11 Dec 2013 05:06:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arch T. Allen]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=212858</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A case study in how an individual was drawn to the Communist Party in the United States. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Junius_Scales.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-212872" alt="Junius_Scales" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Junius_Scales.jpg" width="350" height="509" /></a>Yale historian Glenda Gilmore, in her award-winning book about radical roots of the civil rights movement,<a title="" href="#_edn1">[i]</a> recalled a childhood event in her native Greensboro:  “When I was about eight, I visited an abandoned mansion in our neighborhood.  Here, everyone whispered, was where the Communist had lived.  No one really understood what a Communist was; rather, the lesson lay in what became of them.  They left their homes, they lost their families, and they went to prison.  That’s what happened to . . . the rich golden-haired boy who had grown up in that house.”</p>
<p>The rich golden-haired boy was Junius Irving Scales.  Born in 1920 to a prominent North Carolina family, Scales was named for his grandfather, a Confederate colonel, and Scales’ father was named for the colonel’s brother, governor of North Carolina after Democratic “redemption” of the state from Republican Reconstruction.  As a boy, Scales lived in a 34-room mansion built by his father in a new development of his, just west of the then-city limits of Greensboro.  According to Scales, his father, a lawyer and real estate developer, was then a millionaire several times over.  Among the family’s servants was a black woman born into slavery; she wore a servant’s uniform and attended to young Scales.</p>
<p>The family fortune faltered in the late 20s, however, and they left the mansion and rented a home in Chapel Hill.  Scales was an avid reader, and at age 15 he became a fixture at Chapel Hill’s Intimate Bookshop.  There, as expressed by Gilmore, Scales “breathed in the radical politics that mingled in the bookstore’s dust.”<a title="" href="#_edn2">[ii]</a>  In the 30s, according to Gilmore “varying shades of liberals, Socialists, anti-Fascists, and new Communists came together to create a hotbed of agitation among students and professors at the University [of North Carolina] . . . .”<a title="" href="#_edn3">[iii]</a>  Scales enrolled at the University, where he soon became disenchanted with his classmates; disenchantment led to depression, and he attempted suicide.  Later he found some like-minded friends interested in radical politics, and as Gilmore concluded, “Radical politics held out a lifeline to Scales.”<a title="" href="#_edn4">[iv]</a></p>
<p>That lifeline led Scales into advocacy and activities for union organization and racial equality.  His new affiliations developed during the Communist Party’s Popular Front strategy of aligning with liberal advocacy groups and portraying communists as merely “liberals in a hurry.”<a title="" href="#_edn5">[v]</a> Scales soon considered himself a communist, and he joined the Communist Party USA in 1939, on his 19<sup>th</sup> birthday.<a title="" href="#_edn6">[vi]</a></p>
<p>Despite some early doubts about the Party, Scales became committed to it after the Party district organizer took him to Greensboro.  Gilmore concluded that “No ideological lesson could have been more effective for Scales than visiting [the Party organizer’s] ‘run down little house’ across town from the thirty-six-room mansion that had sheltered Scales during his unhappy early childhood.”<a title="" href="#_edn7">[vii]</a>  With his new ideological commitment, Scales engaged in organizing black and white college students to promote union organization and racial equality, thinking, according to Gilmore, that the Communist Party “furnished the only platform from which he might work to overthrow white supremacy.”<a title="" href="#_edn8">[viii]</a></p>
<p>Scales recalled later that he had explained to University history professor R. D. W. Connor his motivation in joining the Party:  “I told him that there were four main things:  fear of war and Fascism; the plight of Negroes, especially in the South; the helpless, unorganized condition of most workers; and the belief that socialist redistribution of the wealth would be the basis of the brotherhood of man.”<a title="" href="#_edn9">[ix]</a></p>
<p>With his new commitment, Scales attended a Communist Party school at a secret location north of New York City.  The curriculum included study of what Scales called “the Negro question” but focused on the study of Soviet Communism.  Attending the school, Scales said, gave him “an undreamed-of grasp of Marxist-Leninist theory . . .” and aroused “a sort of exultation and decisively chang[ed] my plans for the future:  henceforth the socialist revolution would be the determining force in my life. . . .  I was going to become a professional revolutionary. . . . I had taken sides!  I had chosen to be with the wretched of the earth on their march to a better world.”<a title="" href="#_edn10">[x]</a></p>
<p>The revolutionary march would have to wait, however, for after Pearl Harbor Scales enlisted in the Army. During his service he complained about his limited assignments and lack of promotion, attributing them to his Communist affiliation.  Upon his discharge he returned to Chapel Hill in 1946, resumed his education at the University, and returned to his Communist activities.  He later reported that the Party in Chapel Hill had grown in the late 40s from one to four, and soon six, “clubs,” its term preferred over “cells.”  The clubs catered to different constituencies:  students, faculty and their wives, white townspeople, and blacks.<a title="" href="#_edn11">[xi]</a>  Scales recalled later that there were approximately 200 Communists, including 30 blacks, in Chapel Hill then and that the University was the main center of Communist activity in the Southeast.<a title="" href="#_edn12">[xii]</a>  Most Communists kept their membership secret, even though membership was legal, but during the war some became open members, perhaps because of our alliance with the Soviet Union.</p>
<p>In 1947, pressured by the Party, Scales announced publicly that he was a Communist.  He professed his motivation as hoping “that I may in a small way dispel some of the dangerous illusions and falsehoods about Communists . . . .  As a Southerner, I am especially glad to belong to the only organization which fights for the full and complete equality of the Negro.”<a title="" href="#_edn13">[xiii]</a>   Scales became the Party’s district chairman for the Carolinas in 1948, a district chairmanship soon expanded to four states.</p>
<p>After the convictions of some national Party leaders for conspiring to overthrow the government by force or violence, the Party in 1951 ordered Scales to go underground.  He left Chapel Hill, his wife, and their three-month old daughter for New York.  For three years he led a secret life, using assumed names, pretending to be a traveling salesman, and holding clandestine meetings with other Communists in his four-state district.  Scales’ underground activities ended abruptly in 1954, when FBI agents, pistols drawn, confronted him and commanded, “We’ve got you Scales!  Don’t move.”<a title="" href="#_edn14">[xiv]</a>   They charged him with violating the so-called membership clause of the Smith Act of 1940.</p>
<p>Other events paralleled Scales’ Communist activities and arrest, of course, and some add context to his indictment:</p>
<p>&#8211;A major event occurred in 1939, when Whittaker Chambers, a former Communist and courier for a Soviet spy ring, attempted to warn President Roosevelt personally of Soviet infiltration of his administration.  Chambers was allowed to meet only with a Roosevelt assistant, whose notes taken at the meeting, later made available to investigators, recited that Chambers reported that several high administration officials were Soviet agents.  Included on the list were White House assistant to the president Lauchlin Currie, assistant secretary of the treasury Harry Dexter White, and state department official Alger Hiss. Nothing came of Chambers’ allegations until investigations began in 1945.<a title="" href="#_edn15">[xv]</a></p>
<p>&#8211;That year, the <i>Amerasia </i>spy case became the first of the postwar spy cases.  At the offices of <i>Amerasia</i>, a pro-Communist publication about American-Asian relations, American intelligence agents discovered two briefcases filled with numerous classified documents from the State Department and American intelligence agencies.  Six people were charged initially with espionage for the Communists, but after a grand jury proceeding only two, the editor of the publication and a State Department employee, were indicted and convicted, and only for the lesser crime of unauthorized possession of government documents.  A cover-up, orchestrated by Lauchlin Currie and other high-ranking officials, had kept the grand jury from delving too deeply into the case.  But the case provoked charges of Communist infiltration of the government and countercharges of a witch-hunt.<a title="" href="#_edn16">[xvi]</a></p>
<p>&#8211;Also in 1945, just two weeks after the end of the war and our alliance with the Soviets, Elizabeth Bentley, a former Communist and courier for her Soviet-spy lover, walked into an FBI office and began to tell her story.<a title="" href="#_edn17">[xvii]</a>  Whittaker Chambers soon joined her as an FBI informer and corroborated much of her story.  A grand jury investigated her charges and heard her testimony, but Chambers was not called before it for corroboration; no indictments were issued based on her testimony.</p>
<p>&#8211;Separately, however, Chambers’ allegation to investigators that Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy, an allegation denied by Hiss under oath, led to Hiss’ conviction for perjury.<a title="" href="#_edn18">[xviii]</a>  Just weeks after Hiss’ conviction, Senator Joseph McCarthy gave his 1950 speech alleging that the State Department was infiltrated by a number of Communists.  A national sensation and much controversy followed.<a title="" href="#_edn19">[xix]</a></p>
<p>&#8211;Of major significance for Scales, Eugene Dennis, the leader of the Communist Party USA since 1945, and other national Party leaders were prosecuted under the Smith Act for conspiring to advocate and organize for the overthrow of the government by force or violence.  Some scholars suggest that these prosecutions were prompted by the earlier failure to obtain any indictments after Elizabeth Bentley’s grand jury testimony and by the grand-jury cover-up in the <i>Amerasia </i>spy case.<a title="" href="#_edn20">[xx]</a>  Whatever the motives for the prosecutions, Dennis and the others were convicted, and most received maximum five-year prison sentences.  The Supreme Court affirmed the convictions in 1951, the year the Party ordered Scales to go underground.<a title="" href="#_edn21">[xxi]</a></p>
<p>&#8211;Also in 1951, a year after physicist Klaus Fuchs confessed to espionage concerning the Manhattan Project and was convicted in Britain, the Rosenbergs were tried and convicted in New York of espionage related to the project; they were executed in 1953, the year before Scales’ arrest.<a title="" href="#_edn22">[xxii]</a></p>
<p>Although arrested during that controversial era of conspiracy and espionage, Scales was charged with neither.  He was charged under the Smith Act’s clause making it unlawful to be a member in an organization <i>knowing</i> that it advocated the overthrow of the government by force or violence.<a title="" href="#_edn23">[xxiii]</a>  He was one of only a few people so charged, and his case became the leading one and resulted in a Supreme Court decision on the constitutionality of that clause.<a title="" href="#_edn24">[xxiv]</a></p>
<p>The indictment charged that from 1946 to 1954 the Communist Party USA was such an organization and that Scales was a member of it with knowledge of the Party’s illegal purpose.<a title="" href="#_edn25">[xxv]</a>  Scales was tried in Greensboro in 1955, convicted, and sentenced to six years imprisonment, but a retrial was ordered because of a new Supreme Court ruling regarding defendants’ access to FBI files on witnesses testifying against them.</p>
<p>Scales left the Party in 1957, the year after Nikita Khrushchev acknowledged Stalin’s terror.  Scales later summarized the effect on him:  “[M]ost of what the capitalist press and the professional anti-Soviet experts had been saying about the Soviet Union for years was <i>true</i>. . . .  Stalin—my revered symbol of the infallibility of Communism  . . . had been a murderous, power-hungry monster! . . .   My idol had crumbled to dust forever.”<a title="" href="#_edn26">[xxvi]</a></p>
<p>By that time, the CPUSA had fewer than 20,000 members, less than a fourth of its peak soon after Scales had become a member.<a title="" href="#_edn27">[xxvii]</a>  The FBI reported the membership in North Carolina in 1957 was a mere thirty.<a title="" href="#_edn28">[xxviii]</a></p>
<p>Scales was retried in 1958, again in Greensboro. The government proposed and the trial judge gave instructions to the jury requiring that Scales’ membership had been “active” as opposed to “nominal” or “passive” and that he had the specific intent to bring about the violent overthrow of the government “as speedily as circumstances would permit.”<a title="" href="#_edn29">[xxix]</a>  The government presented testimony about the character of the Party from five ex-Communists, two of whom had been bona fide members and three of whom had become members as FBI informers.  Along with two others who had dealt with Scales, Ralph C. Clontz Jr. testified regarding Scales’ activities. Clontz was a graduate of Davidson and Duke Law School and had served as an Army intelligence officer during the war.  After his discharge, while a student at Duke, he had become concerned about Communist activities and offered to the FBI to try to penetrate the Communist Party.  Clontz testified extensively.  Scales called ten witnesses.  His mother and aunt testified to his good character and conduct, and others testified that Scales’ statements to them were inconsistent with any advocacy of violent overthrow.  Scales did not testify.  The jury convicted him, and he was sentenced to six years imprisonment.<a title="" href="#_edn30">[xxx]</a></p>
<p>The federal court of appeals and the Supreme Court rejected Scales’ constitutional and other arguments and affirmed his conviction; the Supreme Court was divided, 5-4.  The Court summarized the evidence it held sufficient to support Scales’ conviction, further summarized as follows:</p>
<p>Regarding the CPUSA and its reconstitution in 1945, a former bona fide Communist had testified that during the pre-1945 leadership of Earl Browder the Party claimed that change to a communist society could be achieved through peaceful, democratic means.  But in 1945 the Party replaced Browder with Dennis and returned to the principles of Marxism-Leninism, including Lenin’s teaching that communism could only be achieved by violent revolution.  Another bona fide former Communist had testified that after the 1945 reconstitution she attended a Party training school where various Party officers and functionaries were “reeducated” in the principles of Marxism-Leninism, including that Party members were to prepare workers to be ready to take power when a revolutionary situation arose.  Specifically, she said “the class was told that the coalition of workers and peasants which had proved so successful in Russia should have as its counterpart in America a coalition of workers and Negroes, especially in the South.”  She attended and taught other, similar classes, where the teachings were that “the means would be forcible” and that the Party should win the confidence of “the working class, . . . the Negro people, the poor farmers, other national groups, and in this way, in the course of struggle, constant struggle taking the forms of strikes and demonstrations and picket lines and marches and various kinds of activities to train the working class and the people for revolutionary battle.”<a title="" href="#_edn31">[xxxi]</a>  Other witnesses described similar Party training-school instruction, including that the only way to change the capitalist system was that it “had to be taken away by force and violence . . . .”<a title="" href="#_edn32">[xxxii]</a></p>
<p>Regarding the testimony of Clontz and two other witnesses about Scales’ activities, the Court found it of “special importance in two ways:  it supplies some of the strongest and most unequivocal evidence against the Party” based on the statements and activities of Scales and “his high Party position” . . . ; and it appears clearly dispositive as to the quality of [Scales’] Party membership, and his knowledge and intent . . . .”<a title="" href="#_edn33">[xxxiii]</a>  Clontz had sent Scales a postcard expressing interest in Communism, and Scales responded by sending him a box of Communist literature.  They began to meet.  At an early meeting, Scales said that for the Communists to succeed a forceful revolution would be necessary, and in a subsequent meeting Scales explained the basic strategy for bringing about the revolution—the Party as the vanguard of the working class would “bring the working class . . . and what [Scales] termed the Negro nation, together to bring about a forceful overthrow of the Government.”<a title="" href="#_edn34">[xxxiv]</a>   After Clontz joined the Party at Scales’ invitation, Scales engaged him in a course of instruction, where Scales “repeatedly told Clontz of the necessity for revolution to bring about the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.”<a title="" href="#_edn35">[xxxv]</a>  Scales arranged for Clontz to study in New York at a Party school, where he had private instruction from a teacher who, like Scales, told Clontz “that the only . . . means . . . would be forceful means . . . ,” and, again like Scales, “that ‘the revolution basically would come about by combining the forces of  . . . the Negro nation and the working class as the vanguard.’”<a title="" href="#_edn36">[xxxvi]</a>  Another witness who had attended the same Party school testified that in a course on Negro history he and other students, mostly from the South, were taught that the Negro people were the only revolutionary group within the United States that Communists could align with “‘and hope to reach . . . gains through the avenue of force and violence, by overthrow of the Government . . . .’”<a title="" href="#_edn37">[xxxvii]</a></p>
<p>After the Supreme Court affirmed his conviction in 1961, Scales began to serve his six year sentence.  He served only 15 months, however, as President Kennedy commuted his sentence on Christmas Eve 1962.</p>
<p>While the Supreme Court decision and the commutation attracted much commentary, Scales and his wife tried to avoid attention.  They secluded themselves in New York, where he worked as a proofreader at The New York Times. Attention returned to Scales in 1977, when a UNC-Chapel Hill professor wrote a play about Scales’ conviction. A production of the play toured North Carolina, playing in courthouses with audiences acting as juries.  Of 29 performances, it is reported that 28 resulted in acquittals and one in a hung jury.  According to Scales’ daughter, he came to Raleigh and saw the play, and as a result he decided to come out of seclusion and write his memoir</p>
<p>His memoir, <i>Cause at Heart:  A Former Communist Remembers</i>, was published in 1987 and reissued in 2005.  An oral history, <i>A Red Family:  Junius, Gladys &amp; Barbara Scales</i>, based on interviews in 1971, was published in 2009<i>. </i> In both books, Scales projects himself as a kind and gentle man, motivated to join the Party only by his concerns for working people and blacks.  Historian Gilmore, who came to know Scales and found him to be a “sweet, gentle man,” accepts his explanation that he joined the Party “because it was only among Communists that he found nonracist people who cared about the poor.”<a title="" href="#_edn38">[xxxviii]</a></p>
<p>Scales’ apologia may explain his early attraction to the Party during its Popular Front pretensions, but it is difficult to reconcile it with his continued activities in the Party after 1945 when it abandoned those pretensions and returned to Marxist-Leninist principles.  The Party, and indeed Scales himself according to the testimony against him, taught the doctrine that revolution could occur only by force and violence.  In his memoir and in the oral history, Scales denies that he personally advocated force or violence, and he belittles the witnesses against him, especially Clontz, who testified that he did.</p>
<p>Whatever his true thoughts about Communist revolution, Scales’ expressed recollections about his Communist past lack the anguish and critical self-examination expressed by other ex-Communists, such as Arthur Koestler and others in <i>The God that Failed</i> and Whittaker Chambers in <i>Witness, </i>or more recently David Horowitz in <i>Radical Son</i> and Ronald Radosh in <i>Commies</i>.  But, after <i>Cause at Heart </i>was published and Scales toured the state and spoke on some campuses, he issued a formal statement, prompted by “thirty years of struggling with the demons of his allegiance with the Communist Party.”<a title="" href="#_edn39">[xxxix]</a>  Scales began the statement consistently with his earlier explanations of why he had become a Communist, but he added something new:</p>
<p>“Along the way I became a closed-minded ideologue.</p>
<p>“I became a total apologist for the Soviet Union—a country devoid of basic freedoms.</p>
<p>“My tortured ideology became partly destructive of the very things that were constructive.</p>
<p>“I became arrogant, narrow, and sectarian in my outlook . . . .</p>
<p>“But still, with all the wrong turns and missteps I made, those ideals of human brotherhood that led me into the Communist Party and out of the Communist Party are the same ones that I will advocate as long as I live.”<a title="" href="#_edn40">[xl]</a></p>
<p>Scales died in 2002, predeceased by his wife, also once a Communist.  Although both had broken with the Party, they remained socialists.<a title="" href="#_edn41">[xli]</a></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: small;"><em>Arch T. Allen is a retired lawyer in Raleigh, North Carolina, and contributing writer for Raleigh Metro Magazine (<a href="http://www.metronc.com" target="_blank">www.metronc.com</a>).  He presented this paper to a history club of which he is a member.</em><br />
</span></p>
<div><strong>Notes:</strong><br clear="all" /></p>
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref1">[i]</a> Glenda E. Gilmore, <i>Defying Dixie:  The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950</i> (2008).</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref2">[ii]</a> <i>Id</i>. at 206, citing Junius Irving Scales and Richard Nickson, <i>Cause at Heart:  A Former Communist Remembers</i> 46-46, 63 (1987, 2005).</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref3">[iii]</a> <i>Defying Dixie</i> 201-02.  <i>See also </i>Gregory S. Taylor, <i>The History of the North Carolina Communist Party</i> 146-85 (2009).</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref4">[iv]</a> <i>Defying Dixie  </i>at 222.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref5">[v]</a> Stephen Koch, <i>Double Lives:  Stalin, Willi Muzenberg, and the Seduction of the Intellectuals </i>(2004 ed.)</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref6">[vi]</a> <i>Cause at Heart</i> 64-67.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref7">[vii]</a> <i>Defying Dixie </i>293-94, citing <i>Cause at Heart</i> 71.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref8">[viii]</a> <i>Defying Dixie</i> 304.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref9">[ix]</a> <i>Cause at Heart </i>191.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref10">[x]</a><i> Id. at 99-101.</i></p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref11">[xi]</a> <i>Id.</i> at 161-62.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref12">[xii]</a> Mickey Friedman, <i>A Red Family:  Junius, Gladys &amp; Barbara Scales</i> 48, 50 (2009).</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref13">[xiii]</a> <i>Defying Dixie</i> 427; <i>Cause at Heart</i> 188-89.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref14">[xiv]</a> <i>A Red Family</i> 74.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref15">[xv]</a>M. Stanton Evans and Herbert Romerstein, <i>Stalin’s Secret Agents:  The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government</i> 78-80 (2012).</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref16">[xvi]</a> Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh, <i>The Amerasia Spy Case:  A Prelude to McCarthyism </i>(1996).</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref17">[xvii]</a> Kathryn S. Olmsted, <i>Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley</i> (2002).</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref18">[xviii]</a> Allen Weinstein, <i>Perjury:  The Hiss-Chambers Case</i> (1978, 1997).</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref19">[xix]</a> M. Stanton Evans, <i>Blacklisted by History:  The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies </i>(2007).</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref20">[xx]</a> <i>Stalin’s Secret Agents</i>, 211-21.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref21">[xxi]</a> <i>Dennis v. United States,</i> 341 U.S. 494 (1951).</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref22">[xxii]</a> Ronald  Radosh and Joyce Milton, <i>The Rosenberg File:  A Search for the Truth</i> (1984, 1997).</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref23">[xxiii]</a> 18 U.S.C. 2385.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref24">[xxiv]</a> <i>Cause at Heart</i> xxvii-xxviii.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref25">[xxv]</a> <i>Scales v. United States</i>, 367 U.S. 203, 205-06 (1961).</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref26">[xxvi]</a> <i>Cause at Heart </i>301-02.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref27">[xxvii]</a> Larry Schweikart and  Michael Allen, <i>A Patriot’s History of the United States </i>646 (2004).</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref28">[xxviii]</a> <i>History of the North Carolina Communist Party</i> 205.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref29">[xxix]</a> <i>Cause at Heart </i>xxxvi.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref30">[xxx]</a> <i>Scales v. United States,</i> 260 F.2d 21, 28-36 (4<sup>th</sup> Cir. 1958).</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref31">[xxxi]</a> <i>Scales v. United States</i>, 367 U.S. at 237-38.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref32">[xxxii]</a> <i>Id</i>. at 239.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref33">[xxxiii]</a> <i>Id</i>. at 243.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref34">[xxxiv]</a><i>Id</i>. at 245.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref35">[xxxv]</a> <i>Id</i>.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref36">[xxxvi]</a> <i>Id.</i> at 247.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref37">[xxxvii]</a> <i>Id.</i> at 251.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref38">[xxxviii]</a> <i>Defying Dixie </i>5, citing <i>Cause at Heart</i> 66-67.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref39">[xxxix]</a> <i>A Red Family</i> 151.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref40">[xl]</a> <i>Id.</i></p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref41">[xli]</a> <i>Id.</i><i> </i>at 130.</p>
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		<title>Nelson Mandela: The Untold Story</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/jack-kerwick/nelson-mandela-the-untold-story/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=nelson-mandela-the-untold-story</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 10 Dec 2013 05:20:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jack Kerwick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ANC]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ilana Mercer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mandela]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[prison]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Terrorist]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Some inconvenient facts.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/nelson-mandela.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-212657" alt="nelson-mandela" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/nelson-mandela-450x343.jpg" width="315" height="240" /></a>Given that the entire planet seems to be of one voice in both mourning the loss of Nelson Mandela and celebrating his life, most will find it inconceivable that anyone would think to so much as suggest that Mandela was anything less than the saint that his admirers are working tirelessly to depict him as.</p>
<p>But truth is truth and Mandela was no saint.</p>
<p>Mandela was a proponent of “democratic socialism” who, along with the South African Communist Party, unleashed a torrent of violence against his political opponents that included the bombing of government sites. He was convicted of “sabotage” and attempting to overthrow the government—charges to which he openly confessed at his trial.  And in spite of having been released from prison in 1990 after serving 27 years and eventually becoming South Africa’s first black president, he remained on the United States Terror Watch list until as recently as 2008.  The late Margaret Thatcher characterized Mandela’s African National Congress as a “typical terrorist organization.”</p>
<p>Ilana Mercer is a writer and former resident of South Africa who knows all too well about Mandela and his legacy.  One of her books, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Into-Cannibals-Pot-Lessons-Post-Apartheid/dp/0984907017">Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa</a>, </i>includes a chapter chock full of interesting, but inconvenient, facts regarding the man who is now being lauded as never before.</p>
<p>Mercer informs us that long before apartheid came crumbling down, the government of South Africa offered to release Mandela from jail as long as he promised to renounce violence.  Mandela, though, “refused to do any such thing [.]”  Mercer adds that Mandela’s “TV smile has won out over his political philosophy, founded as it is on energetic income redistribution in the neo-Marxist tradition, on ‘land reform’ in the same tradition, and on ethnic animosity toward the Afrikaner.”</p>
<p>In 1992, two years <i>after </i>Mandela was set free, he was videoed at an event surrounded by members of the South African Communist Party, his own African National Congress (ANC), and “the ANC’s terrorist arm, the Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), which Mandela led.”  Courtesy of YouTube, all with eyes to see could now witness “Mandela’s fist…clenched in a black power salute” as the members of MK sang their anthem, a little song according to which they reaffirm their pledge to “‘kill them—kill the whites.’”</p>
<p>Mandela remained a socialist to the last, Mercer assures us, even though he cleverly—but transparently—“rebranded” it. Mandela’s was a <i>racial </i>socialism, a point established beyond doubt by the remarks he made in 1997.  Mercer quotes Mandela insisting that “the future of humanity” cannot be “surrendered to the so-called free market, with government denied the right to intervene [.]”  Mandela also declared the need for the “ownership and management” of the South African economy to reflect “the racial composition of our society” and criticized “the…capitalist system” in South Africa for elevating to “the highest pedestal the promotion of the material interests of the white minority.”</p>
<p>For the conceit of those Westerners who assume that Mandela’s thought is a justified response to the evils of apartheid, Mercer has just the treatment. She reminds us that Mandela and his ANC “had never concealed that they were as tight as thieves with communist and terrorist regimes—Castro, Gaddafi, Arafat, North Korea and Iran’s cankered Khameneis.”  Mercer further reminds us that in addition to once cheering, “‘Long live Comrade Fidel Castro!’” Mandela referred to Gaddafi as “‘my brother leader” and Arafat as “‘a comrade in arms.’”</p>
<p>Moreover, though awarded by President George W. Bush in 2003 with the Medal of Freedom Award, Mercer observes that Mandela couldn’t resist issuing the harshest of indictments against America.  “‘If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world,’” Mandela said, “’it is the United States of America.’” He added that “‘they,” meaning Americans, presumably, “don’t like human beings.’”</p>
<p>And what is Mandela’s legacy to his native South Africa?  It is the purpose of Mercer’s book to show that it is nothing to write home about.  “Since he [Mandela] came to power in 1994, approximately 300,000 people have been murdered.”  “Bit by barbaric bit,” she writes, “South Africa is being dismantled by official racial socialism, obscene levels of crime—organized and disorganized—AIDS, corruption, and an accreting kleptocracy.”</p>
<p>Mercer’s book is a rarity inasmuch as it supplies us with a brutally frank account of the real South Africa that Nelson Mandela helped to bequeath to the world. While the rest of the world is busy singing hosannas to Mandela over the next few days, those of us who are interested in truth would be well served to visit it.</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>The Perfect Home for Liberals</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/the-perfect-home-for-liberals/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-perfect-home-for-liberals</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/the-perfect-home-for-liberals/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 04 Dec 2013 05:38:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Equality]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[gated community]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Guns]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Liberals]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[prison]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=212254</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Their own "Gated Community."

]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Their own &#8220;Gated Community&#8221;:</p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/PerfectHome1.jpg"><img class="size-full wp-image-212262 aligncenter" alt="PerfectHome" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/PerfectHome1.jpg" width="500" height="468" /></a></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>The Cuban Hostage Crisis: Day 1460</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/humberto-fontova/the-cuban-hostage-crisis-day-1460/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-cuban-hostage-crisis-day-1460</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/humberto-fontova/the-cuban-hostage-crisis-day-1460/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 03 Dec 2013 05:10:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Humberto Fontova]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Alan Gross]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Castro]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cuba]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hostage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[prison]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=212190</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why has the Obama administration abandoned Alan Gross? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/alan-gross-photo.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-212199" alt="alan-gross-photo" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/alan-gross-photo-450x322.jpg" width="270" height="193" /></a>On December 3<sup>rd</sup>, 2009, Castro’s KGB-trained police arrested Alan Gross, a U.S. citizen working in Cuba on contract for the U.S. Agency for International Development. Mr. Gross has languished in a KGB-designed prison cell ever since. His crime was bringing cell phone and Internet equipment into Castro’s fiefdom to help Cuba’s tiny Jewish community communicate more freely with the outside world.</p>
<p>A reminder: Pre-Castro Cubans enjoyed some of the most advanced communications systems in the world. In 1958 Cuba boasted more phones and TVs per capita than most European countries. Today, Castro’s fiefdom has fewer Internet users per capita than Uganda, and fewer cell phones than Papua New Guinea. The Stalinist regime is very vigilant in these matters.</p>
<p>By the way, introducing cutting-edge communications equipment into Cuba didn’t always land Americans in torture chambers. In 1957 ATT presented Cuban “Dictator” (according to every media mention) Fulgencio Batista with a Golden Telephone for his regime’s enthusiastic welcome of all of their latest technology. This Cuban “dictator” reveled in the fact that Cubans had better, more abundant and cheaper means of communications than most Europeans. You might recall the scene from Goldfather II where Hyman Roth and Michael Corleone pass the Golden telephone around Batista’s conference table. This one scene contains an element of historically accuracy.</p>
<p>In March 2011, after he had lost almost 100 pounds from his prison ordeal, a Castroite court finally got around to actually trying their American hostage Alan Gross. They condemned him to a prison sentence of 15 years for working for an agency of the U.S. government “that aimed to destroy the Revolution through the use of communication systems <i>out of the control of authorities</i>.”</p>
<p>And there’s the hitch: “<i>control of the authorities.” </i>Not even Gadaffi’s late regime, or Assad’s in Syria or Hu Jintau’s in China seek to <i>control </i>cell-phone and Internet access<i>.</i></p>
<p><i>Censor? </i>Absolutely<i>. </i>But outright <i>control </i>of all<i> </i>means of communication is a fetish peculiar to Communists, which no longer applies to the mainland Chinese regime, though it certainly remains despicable and dangerous. No “control-freaks” have ever shackled the human body and mind with the fanaticism and efficiency of Communists. The Castro regime, lest we forget, was founded in 1959. Essentially the same people are running it today as ran it then. Many of the Russians and Spanish Reds who designed Castro’s judicial and prison system had worked for Stalin.</p>
<p>Trotsky&#8217;s murderer, Ramon Mercader, for instance, served as Cuba&#8217;s &#8220;inspector of prisons&#8221; in the 1960&#8242;s and was favorite companion of Raul Castro&#8211;and especially!—of <a href="http://www.hfontova.com/che.html">the starstruck Che Guevara, who had appointed him to the prestigious post.</a> Upon his death in Havana in 1978, the man who hacked Leon Trotsky to death with an ice-axe was buried with honors in the Cuban capitol. Later his ashes were transferred to Moscow.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, the Castro regime never suffered for lack of veneration from “Trotskyists.” Upon the 30<sup>th</sup> Anniversary of Che Guevara’s death Trotskyist Christopher Hitchens wrote in the New York Times that: “1968 actually began in 1967 with the murder of Che. His death meant a lot to me. He was a role model.”  The famously erudite Hitchens was here referring the man who admired and befriended Trotsky’s murderer.</p>
<p>Senator Marco Rubio was among the first to comment on Alan Gross&#8217; sentence: “With Mr. Gross’ sentencing, the Castro regime has effectively demonstrated the hopeless and dangerous naiveté of this administration’s policy toward the regime. The Obama administration’s insistence on moving forward with policies that put more money in this terrorist-sponsoring regime’s coffers is baffling and runs contrary to everything America should stand for.”</p>
<p>“When it is a question of annihilating the enemy,” pronounced Stalin’s chief prosecutor Andrei Vishinsky, “we can do it just as well without a trial.” Alan Gross was certainly “tried”&#8211; but by some of Vishinsky’s most devoted disciples.</p>
<p>Former political prisoner Armando Valladares, who somehow escaped the firing squad but spent 22 torture-filled years in Cuba’s Gulag, described his trial very succinctly: “not one witness to accuse me, not one to identify me, not one single piece of evidence against me.” <i>Senor</i> Valladares was arrested in 1961 for the crime of refusing to display a pro-Castro sign on his desk. Shortly after his arrival on U.S. shores, <i>Senor</i> Valladares was appointed by Ronald Reagan as U.S. ambassador to the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations, a setting where both Fidel Castro and Che Guevara traditionally basked in wild ovations. Modern history records few U.S. diplomatic tweaks as slick, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Longest-Romance-Mainstream-Media-Castro/dp/1594036675/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1376276049&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=the+longest+romance+humberto+fontova">or U.S. ambassadors as effective.</a></p>
<p>On July 17, 2012 Armando Valladares published a letter to Alan Gross in The Daily Caller. Among its highlights:</p>
<p><i>Alan P. Gross</i><br />
<i>Havana, Cuba</i></p>
<p><i>Dear friend:</i></p>
<p><i>That is how I am compelled to address you, because even though we have never met, we share a common bond: I too lived behind the iron bars now surrounding you in Cuba — in my case for 22 years.</i></p>
<p><i>Like you, I was convicted by the Cuban authorities without a single shred of evidence against me.</i></p>
<p><i>I have no doubt that your greatest pain right now must be the realization that the U.S. government has turned its back on you. There was a time when the words “I am an American citizen” meant something. It gives me great sadness to say that inside the Communist boot that now tramples upon your dignity is the foot of the American president, Barack Obama.</i></p>
<p><i>The more Castro’s thugs oppress you and make your family suffer, the more your jailers torture you, the harder things get for you — the more this administration seeks to reward them with new concessions. Under any previous U.S. administration, Democrat or Republican, you would not still be in jail. The American president, who has made a habit of publicly bowing to foreign powers, bows to your torturers and would-be executioners. Meanwhile, the adult daughter of Cuba’s dictator recently visited the U.S. to applaud and show her support for President Obama. She receives a visa to come to the United States and a Secret Service escort. And you? You suffer the torture of imprisonment.</i></p>
<p><i>The Obama administration must step up its efforts to press for your release through its diplomatic channels. Should those diplomatic efforts fail, then they must be followed by real action, including the suspension of flights and remittances to Cuba until such time as you are allowed to return to the United States. If the Obama administration even threatened to do this it is my considered judgment that you would be on the next flight back to your home in Washington, D.C.</i></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Kennedy Family Rules</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/lloyd-billingsley/kennedy-family-rules/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=kennedy-family-rules</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/lloyd-billingsley/kennedy-family-rules/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 18 Nov 2013 04:18:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Lloyd Billingsley]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[assassination]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[JFK]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kennedy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Martha Moxley]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Michael Skakel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[prison]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[RFK Jr]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ted Kennedy]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=210920</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Will America’s royal family spring a convicted murderer?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/skakel.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-210921" alt="skakel" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/skakel-450x345.jpg" width="315" height="241" /></a>On November 22, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald gunned down John Fitzgerald Kennedy as his presidential motorcade passed the Texas Book Depository in Dallas. The assassination was captured on film and so was the assassination of the assassin, so it is only right that 50 years later JFK should be getting attention. The conspiracy theorists are out in force and PBS has become a virtual JFK channel even as other stories confirm the lingering clout of the Kennedy family.</p>
<p>In 1960 JFK defeated Richard Nixon by a whisker and in his search for an Attorney General, the new president looked no farther than his brother, Robert Francis Kennedy. Robert wanted to be president in the footsteps of his brother but Sirhan Sirhan assassinated RFK on June 5, 1968. Robert F. Kennedy’s widow, Ethel, is the sister of Rushton Skakel, father of Michael Skakel. In 2002 Michael Skakel was sentenced to 20 years to life for murdering his neighbor Martha Moxley with a golf club in Greenwich, Connecticut, on October 30, 1975. Judge Thomas Bishop recently awarded Skakel, now 53, <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/michael_skakel/">a new trial</a> on the grounds that his attorney Michel Sherman was negligent. That comes as good news to Skakel’s cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr.</p>
<p>In 2003 RFK Jr. wrote a lengthy <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/01/a-miscarriage-of-justice/304759/">article in the <i>Atlantic</i></a> charging that Michael Skakel was innocent and his imprisonment a miscarriage of justice. Kennedy recently squared off on Fox News with detective Mark Fuhrman, author of<i> Murder in Greenwich: Who Killed Martha Moxley?</i> That 1998 book made a strong case that Michael Skakel bludgeoned Martha Moxley to death with a golf club. Four years later Skakel had been convicted and imprisoned. Furhman told Fox’s Geraldo Rivera he has no doubt of Skakel’s guilt. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. denounced Fuhrman and charged him with botching the O.J. Simpson case.</p>
<p>The author shows how the Greenwich police practically served as a private security force for the wealthy Skakel family. The local police, inexperienced with murder cases, also botched the investigation, particularly the crime scene. The 6-iron murder weapon was from a set owned by the Skakels, and the evidence pointed strongly to someone in the family, particularly Michael, known for violent behavior. So Martha Moxley had good reason to fear him.</p>
<p>The police tendered a theory of some mysterious transient and did their best to block Fuhrman’s investigation. The case went cold and Michael Skakel continued his privileged life. When busted for drunk driving his family avoided criminal charges by packing him off to a remote school for alcoholism treatment. In 1994, after graduating from Curry College, Michael Skakel worked on the reelection campaign of Edward Moore Kennedy, JFK’s youngest brother and better known as Ted.</p>
<p>In the Kennedy tradition Senate seats are proprietary, like a dukedom. True to form, Ted Kennedy was elected to the Senate in a 1962 special election to fill the seat of his brother John F. Kennedy. He was also involved a case that showed special treatment for the Kennedy family.</p>
<p>On July 18, 1969 Ted Kennedy drove a car off a bridge in Chappaquiddick, Massachusetts. Kennedy escaped unharmed but 28-year-old passenger Mary Jo Kopechne died. George Killen, detective with the Massachusetts state police, and chief of a never-revealed investigation of the case, told author Leo Damore that Ted Kennedy “killed that girl the same as if he put a gun to her head and pulled the trigger.”</p>
<p>In the 1988 <i>Senatorial Privilege: The Chappaquiddick Cover-up</i>, Damore showed how the Kennedy family deployed their influence to quash investigations of the incident and shield Kennedy from accountability. He got only a two-year suspended sentence for leaving the scene of an accident and in 1970 was reelected to the U.S. Senate. There he became an object of derision even to liberal Democrats. “Every image that the Democrats have to overcome – that they overtax the Middle Americans, try to meet social problems only with a proliferation of programs, are the junior partners of vociferous but marginal interest groups, look too carelessly at the credentials of the Third World movements and leaders, and neglect the security of the nation and of the free world – is kept alive by this buffoon.” That is from “Hamalot,” a 1987 <a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/politics/hamalot">article by Henry Fairlie in <i>The New Republic</i>.</a></p>
<p>Meanwhile, the old newsreels of JFK’s Camelot confirm that the Kennedys were something of a royal family for the world. They do not, unfortunately, tell the whole story. Viewers don’t learn much about family patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy, FDR’s ambassador to England, who had <a href="http://hnn.us/article/697">problems with Jewish people</a>. In 1940, when the Nazis occupied Poland, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and France, Joe Kennedy wrote in the <i>Boston Globe</i> that <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/primary-resources/kennedys-democracy-finished/">“Democracy is finished in England. It may be here.”</a>  Finest hour indeed. That helped kill his political career, but he still had the kids.</p>
<p>For the whole story see <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Kennedys-An-American-Drama/dp/1893554317"><i>The Kennedys: An American Drama</i></a> by Peter Collier and David Horowitz. In his review of that book, P.J. O’Rourke called the Kennedys “sewer trout.” Even so, if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. succeeds in getting Michael Skakel off the hook the Kennedy clout will have outlived JFK by more than half a century. That would also answer the question Mark Fuhrman posed in <i>Murder in Greenwich: </i>“Are there two systems of justice in this country – one for the rich, and another for the rest of us?”</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>Obama&#8217;s America: Even Convicts are Going on Disability</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/obamas-america-even-convicts-are-going-on-disability/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-america-even-convicts-are-going-on-disability</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/obamas-america-even-convicts-are-going-on-disability/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 23 Oct 2013 13:35:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[disability]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[prison]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=208214</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why shouldn't that man get the disability benefits he's entitled to from his purse snatching accident?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/court3-2-300x300.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-208225" alt="court3-2-300x300" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/court3-2-300x300.jpg" width="300" height="300" /></a></p>
<p>Everyone is going on disability these days. It&#8217;s the easiest job you can find. At this rate, pretty soon the entire country will be on disability and it&#8217;ll be fine as long as the 1 percent do their part.</p>
<p>Why shouldn&#8217;t cons go on disability. It makes sense. They <a href="http://freebeacon.com/feds-paid-prisoners-1-million-in-disability-payments/">have a lot of trouble finding jobs in prison </a>and they are experienced at running cons.</p>
<blockquote><p>The Social Security Administration (SSA) gave more than $1 million in improper disability benefits to 440 prisoners, according to the inspector general.</p>
<p>The Inspector General for the SSA (IG) based its report on a sample of 100 beneficiaries, and found that one-fourth had improperly received disability while they were incarcerated.</p></blockquote>
<p>No worries. What&#8217;s one-fourth between Obama voters?</p>
<blockquote><p>Roughly 317 prisoners received $879,000 in disability insurance, and 123 more were paid $143,000 despite the SSA having suspended their benefits. A total of $1,022,000 erroneous payments were made.</p>
<p>One man was able to collect $22,056 in disability benefits while he was imprisoned in Staten Island, N.Y.</p></blockquote>
<p>I blame the Republicans for this. Why shouldn&#8217;t that man get the disability benefits he&#8217;s entitled to from his purse snatching accident? How is he supposed to earn a living with tennis elbow?</p>
<p>This is America. This is America on Obama.</p>
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		<title>The Mass Jailing of Turkish Secularists</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/michael-van-der-galien/the-mass-jailing-of-turkish-secularists/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-mass-jailing-of-turkish-secularists</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 06 Aug 2013 04:30:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Michael van der Galien]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[prison]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Protest]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[recep tayyip erdogan]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[sentence]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Why protesters fear they are losing the battle against Islamism. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/turkey-protests-3june2013.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-199562" alt="turkey-protests-3june2013" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/turkey-protests-3june2013-450x319.jpg" width="315" height="223" /></a>Monday, August the 4th, was one of the most important days in modern Turkish history. Two hundred seventy-five (275) individuals known to be secularists stood trial for supposedly planning a military coup. In the end, <a href="http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/17-sentenced-to-life-in-turkeys-ergenekon-coup-plot-trial-including-ex-military-chief.aspx?pageID=238&amp;nID=52034&amp;NewsCatID=339">some 200</a> of them were convicted, with many receiving <a href="http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/17-sentenced-to-life-in-turkeys-ergenekon-coup-plot-trial-including-ex-military-chief.aspx?pageID=238&amp;nID=52034&amp;NewsCatID=339">lifelong sentences</a>.</p>
<p>The government had vilified the suspects from day one. Without further ado, they were thrown in jail, where they received worse treatment than the convicted terrorist and PKK-leader Abdullah Öcalan.</p>
<p>Their crime? According to the prosecutors and AKP officials the suspects planned to wreak so much havoc in Turkey &#8211; by carrying out (fake) terrorist attacks and generally polarizing society &#8211; that the Turkish people would eventually support a military coup just so order could be restored again.</p>
<p>Among the suspects were many officers. One of them was General Ilker Basbug, who served as the army’s chief-of-staff until he retired in 2010. Once enjoying the quiet life of a retiree, Basbug was arrested. According to the charges, he was the &#8220;terrorist&#8221; group’s leader. Yesterday, Basbug was sentenced to life in jail.</p>
<p>Other suspects included journalists and even writers. Apparently, such &#8220;subversive&#8221; individuals pose a significant threat to democracy by writing down their opinions and analyses. Like General Basbug, several of them were convicted on Monday. One of them, Tuncay Özkan, received an aggravated life sentence as well. Journalist Adnan Bulut was sentenced to six years, while former journalist-turned-politician for the main opposition party (the CHP), Mustafa Balbay, was sentenced to 34 years and eight months in prison.</p>
<p>Before the verdict was announced, the latter made clear what he thought of the allegations against him. “A warm autumn is coming,” he said. “They want to take over this case. We will not let it happen. This case is political. They want to hide away the case from the public.”</p>
<p>Yet another journalist who was convicted for being part of this conspiracy is Gülen Kömürcü, who worked for the <em>Aksam</em> (&#8220;Evening&#8221;) newspaper when she was arrested. This &#8220;dangerous terrorist&#8221; was sentenced to seven years and six months. After her conviction Kömürcü received dozens <a href="http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/17-sentenced-to-life-in-turkeys-ergenekon-coup-plot-trial-including-ex-military-chief.aspx?pageID=238&amp;nID=52034&amp;NewsCatID=339">of friendly well-wishes</a> from Turks who, like the suspects, believe the case to be political in nature.</p>
<p>And there certainly is something to say for that.  AKP-leaders have for years publicly commented on the case. Even Erdogan himself has made several statements about it, going so far as to accuse his political opposition of defending &#8212; in the words of the Erdogan-friendly <a href="http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/17-sentenced-to-life-in-turkeys-ergenekon-coup-plot-trial-including-ex-military-chief.aspx?pageID=238&amp;nID=52034&amp;NewsCatID=339">Today’s Zaman</a> &#8211; the “Ergenekon terrorist organization.” Note that this was before anyone had been convicted of any wrongdoing. In no other country would political leaders have spoken about an ongoing investigation in such a polarizing manner.</p>
<p>Such details do not seem to bother Erdogan. He even made clear that this was a highly personal case to him, since he had received &#8220;<a href="http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/17-sentenced-to-life-in-turkeys-ergenekon-coup-plot-trial-including-ex-military-chief.aspx?pageID=238&amp;nID=52034&amp;NewsCatID=339">personal threats</a>&#8221; from the plotters. He made no secret of his view that the suspects &#8212; all of them &#8212; were clearly guilty and deserving of the most severe possible punishment. Again, he did so before any conviction had been handed out. Worse still, he even had the gall to lambast the Istanbul Bar Association when it criticized the case’s chief prosecutor for using Ergenekon as a means to retaliate against the government’s rivals; a statement that was not exactly controversial, since just about the entire opposition felt the same.</p>
<p>After the announcement of the verdicts, secular Turks responded with disbelief and outrage. On <a href="http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/17-sentenced-to-life-in-turkeys-ergenekon-coup-plot-trial-including-ex-military-chief.aspx?pageID=238&amp;nID=52034&amp;NewsCatID=339">Twitter</a> and <a href="http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/17-sentenced-to-life-in-turkeys-ergenekon-coup-plot-trial-including-ex-military-chief.aspx?pageID=238&amp;nID=52034&amp;NewsCatID=339">Facebook</a> many have replaced their usual avatars with a solid black image. The reason? They mourn what they consider to be the death of Turkey’s secular system.</p>
<p>Perhaps that requires an explanation: Until a few years ago many people still had faith in the judiciary and in the military, both of which were considered bulwarks of secularism. Whenever a government wanted to mix politics with religion, one of the bulwarks intervened and set matters straight.</p>
<p>Sadly, secularists now conclude, those days are no more. They see the verdicts in the Ergenekon case as the ultimate proof that these &#8220;bulwarks&#8221; of secularism no longer exist. To them, the trial’s outcome is <a href="http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/17-sentenced-to-life-in-turkeys-ergenekon-coup-plot-trial-including-ex-military-chief.aspx?pageID=238&amp;nID=52034&amp;NewsCatID=339">the final nail in the coffin</a> of laïcité in Turkey. Not only, they say, has the military become powerless, but the AK Parti now also controls the country’s judges, which is why they are actively cooperating with <a href="http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/17-sentenced-to-life-in-turkeys-ergenekon-coup-plot-trial-including-ex-military-chief.aspx?pageID=238&amp;nID=52034&amp;NewsCatID=339">political (show) trials</a>.</p>
<p>One of the most worrying aspects of the case is the fact that not only military officers and (former) politicians have been convicted, but journalists as well. Members of the Turkish opposition understand that this is a very dangerous development since it touches on the very foundation of democracy: No democracy can survive without a free and independent press. Besides, what do the government and the judges in this case believe &#8220;writers and journalists&#8221; will do during a coup? Throw pencils at AKP-officials?</p>
<p>The answer is, critics say, that the government fears journalists’ ability to shape public opinion. Every single one of the arrested and convicted journalists is an ideological secularist, with a long history of criticism aimed at the ruling AK Parti. These professionals now have to pay for their outspokenness by spending many years, if not the rest of their lives, in jail. One of them, the aforementioned Tuncay Özkan, was even sentenced to life in solitary confinement. How were the prosecutors able to do that? Simple: they accused all the suspects of being members (or at least supportive) of a terrorist organization. That way, the judges could carry out higher sentences than would normally be the case. As a result, journalists will be imprisoned for many years, even decades, rather than months (or not at all).</p>
<p>Not only secular Turks, but foreigners too have responded with outrage to such severe punishments. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) <a href="http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/17-sentenced-to-life-in-turkeys-ergenekon-coup-plot-trial-including-ex-military-chief.aspx?pageID=238&amp;nID=52034&amp;NewsCatID=339">made clear</a> that locking up journalists is always unacceptable. “I am deeply alarmed by today’s convictions and harsh sentences that are of unprecedented length and severity in the entire OSCE region,” OSCE media freedom representative Dunja Mijatovic said. “Criminal prosecution of those with dissenting views violates the fundamental right to free expression and the country’s OSCE commitments to develop and protect free media.”</p>
<p>She continued: “The damage of today’s verdicts on free expression and media freedom in Turkey is immeasurable. I reiterate my call to the authorities for urgent and fundamental legislative reforms to improve media freedom, as well as the transparent and swift trial of all imprisoned journalists.”</p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/17-sentenced-to-life-in-turkeys-ergenekon-coup-plot-trial-including-ex-military-chief.aspx?pageID=238&amp;nID=52034&amp;NewsCatID=339">European Union agrees</a> with that sentiment, saying that it has serious concerns &#8220;over the rights of the defense, the lengthy pre-trial detention and the excessively long and &#8216;catch-all&#8217; indictments&#8221; that are too general.</p>
<p>Be that as it may, for now, the convictions stand. It will take some time for the convicts to appeal to higher courts, especially on a European level. In the meantime, we can only conclude  that the polarization of Turkish society continues unabated <i>and </i>that the freedom of speech finds itself in an increasingly more perilous state. After all, these convictions will cause editors, newspaper owners and journalists to censure themselves even more than they have been doing for the last few years.</p>
<p>As <a href="http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/17-sentenced-to-life-in-turkeys-ergenekon-coup-plot-trial-including-ex-military-chief.aspx?pageID=238&amp;nID=52034&amp;NewsCatID=339">I wrote</a> last week: “That’s why the freedom of speech may not only be on trial in Turkey, but may very well have already been sentenced to death. The prosecution and the judge want to end its life, and dissenting jurors, who understand what is at stake, are too afraid to intervene on the defendant’s behalf.”</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>Muslim Prison Prayers Led to Gang Organization, Attacks on Non-Muslims</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/muslim-prison-prayers-led-to-gang-organization-attacks-on-non-muslims/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=muslim-prison-prayers-led-to-gang-organization-attacks-on-non-muslims</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/muslim-prison-prayers-led-to-gang-organization-attacks-on-non-muslims/#respond</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 13 Jul 2013 14:34:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[prison]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Ken Falk, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana, filed a motion in Lindh’s name in April asking the judge to find the prison warden in contempt.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/islam-prison-britain-gangs.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-194978" alt="islam-prison-britain-gangs" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/islam-prison-britain-gangs.jpg" width="400" height="273" /></a></p>
<p>In other shocking news, letting Neo-Nazis hold Brotherhood rallies in priso<a href="http://creepingsharia.wordpress.com/2013/06/29/u-s-prison-warden-muslim-prayers-led-to-muslim-gangs/">n would also lead to gang organization and attacks on non-members.</a> Islam is a gang. Its religion is no different than that of the Crips and Bloods. It&#8217;s just older.</p>
<blockquote><p>The warden of a U.S. prison holding high-risk inmates, including American Taliban fighter John Walker Lindh, insisted Thursday that he was obeying a court order to allow daily group prayer by permitting inmates to pray in pairs within their cells.</p>
<p>Warden John Oliver told a federal judge that when the prison allowed group prayer earlier this year, Muslim inmates formed gangs and bullied other prisoners.</p>
<p>The prison converted a recreation room into a “meditation room” to accommodate group prayer in March, but Muslim inmates, who make up more than half of the 42 people in the unit, used the inmate-led prayers to set up a prison gang, Oliver said.</p>
<p>Some Muslim inmates “shunned” others by banning them from the prayer group, controlled access to food and claimed the room as their territory by leaving prayer rugs and other religious items there. Oliver said this intimidated inmates of other faiths and deterred them from using the room.</p>
<p>Ken Falk, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana, filed a motion in Lindh’s name in April asking the judge to find the prison warden in contempt.</p>
<p>A U.S. District judge ruled in January that barring Lindh and his fellow Muslims from engaging in daily group prayer violates a 1993 law that bans the government from curtailing religious speech without showing a compelling interest. The judge issued an order demanding that the prison allow group prayer.</p></blockquote>
<p>To be fair, conquering territory for Islam and bullying non-Muslims is a vital part of the Islamic faith and should not be curtailed without a compelling interest.</p>
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		<title>A Pastor&#8217;s Fate Inside the Mullahs&#8217; Archipelago</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/raymond-ibrahim/horror-in-iran-american-imprisoned-for-christianity/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=horror-in-iran-american-imprisoned-for-christianity</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 03 May 2013 04:40:17 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Raymond Ibrahim]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[christianity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Pastor Saeed Abedini]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[The vicious torture continues of Saeed Abedini for his crime of refusing to renounce Jesus Christ. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/pastor-saeed-abedini.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-188006" alt="pastor-saeed-abedini" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/pastor-saeed-abedini.jpg" width="272" height="204" /></a>In January, an American Christian was sentenced to an eight-year prison sentence on charges of “endangering national security” in Iran.  A 32-year-old married father of two from Boise, Idaho, Pastor Saeed Abedini traveled to his country of origin last year to visit family and help build an orphanage, only to be arrested and sent to Tehran’s brutal Evin prison.</p>
<p>According to <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/02/22/imprisoned-american-says-iranian-captors-waiting-for-me-to-deny-christ/">Fox News</a>, Abedini, a Muslim convert to Christianity—also known as an apostate deserving of death under Islamic Sharia law—is “facing physical and psychological torture at the hands of captors demanding he renounce his beliefs.” In a recent letter smuggled to family members, he recounted the “horrific pressures” and “death threats” he endures: “My eyes get blurry, my body does not have the strength to walk, and my steps become very weak and shaky…  They are only waiting for one thing… for me to deny Christ. But they will never get this from me.”</p>
<p>Indeed, the authorities’ words are “Deny your faith in Jesus Christ and return to Islam or else you will not be released from prison. We will make sure you are kept here even after your 8 year sentence is finished.”</p>
<p>While Pastor Abedini’s medieval-style sufferings may come as a surprise to many Americans, they are regular features of the Islamic Republic of Iran.  Recall the persecution of Pastor Youssef Nadarkhani, another Muslim who converted to Christianity.  He too was imprisoned, placed on death row, and tortured to renounce Christ for nearly three years.  Then, likely due to the international scandal his story caused for Iran, he was released—only to be <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/12/30/iran-re-arrests-pastor-nadarkhani-on-christmas-day/">rearrested again</a>, on Christmas Day, adding insult to injury.</p>
<p>And just as Tehran claims that Abedini was arrested for “threatening national security,” so was Nadarkhani formally accused of anything and everything—from being a “<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/islams-predictability-apostasy-execution-and-lies/">Zionist spy” to running a brothel</a>—even as Iran’s official <a href="http://www.worthynews.com/10672-unofficial-translation-of-pastor-youcef-nadakhanis-death-sentence">Supreme Court ruling</a> made clear that Nadarkhani was</p>
<blockquote><p>convicted of turning his back on Islam [i.e., apostatizing], the greatest religion the prophesy of Mohammad at the age of 19. He has often participated in Christian worship and organized home church services, evangelizing and has been baptized and baptized others, converting Muslims to Christianity. He has been accused of breaking Islamic Law…  During court trials, he denied the prophecy of Mohammad and the authority of Islam. He has stated that he is a Christian and no longer Muslim. During many sessions in court with the presence of his attorney and a judge, he has been sentenced to execution by hanging…</p></blockquote>
<p>Nor are pastors Abedini and Nadarkhani the only ones to be so obviously persecuted for their Christian faith: countless are the Christians and Muslim converts to Christianity that Iranian authorities harass, imprison, and torture in an attempt to have them renounce Christ.  A few recent examples follow:</p>
<p><a href="http://www.mohabatnews.com/index.php?option=com_content&amp;view=article&amp;id=6339:christian-prisoners-in-shiraz-still-held-after-more-than-a-year&amp;catid=36:iranian-christians&amp;Itemid=279">Mohabet News</a> reported that four Muslim converts to Christianity were arrested in February during house-church worship and “taken to the Revolutionary Court of Shiraz several times in a pitiful condition with their hands and feet chained.”  They were charged with the usual: “participating in house-church services, evangelizing and promoting Christianity … and disturbing national security.” The report elaborates on the “obvious mental and physical torture” Iran’s converts to Christianity experience in prison.</p>
<p>Another house church pastor, Benham Irani, remains behind bars even as his family expresses concerns that he may die from <a href="http://www.assistnews.net/STORIES/2012/s12070102.htm">continued beatings</a>, leading to internal bleeding and other ailments. The verdict against him contains text describing him as an apostate who “can be killed.” According to one activist, “<a href="http://www.bosnewslife.com/20292-iran-pastors-mistreated-in-prison-activists-say">His ‘crimes’ were being a pastor</a> and possessing Christian materials.”</p>
<p>A six-year prison sentence for Pastor <a href="http://www.bosnewslife.com/22377-breaking-news-activists-outraged-as-iran-upholds-6-year-prison-term-for-pastor">Farshid Fathi Malayeri</a>—<a href="http://barnabasfund.org/US/News/Archives/Six-year-jail-sentence-for-Iranian-church-leader-upheld.html">whose crime was to convert to and preach Christianit</a>y—was upheld last year following an unsuccessful appeal hearing.  A woman, Leila Mohammadi, who had earlier converted to Christianity was arrested when security agents raided her house. Imprisoned for five months in Evin prison without any word on her fate, she was later <a href="http://www.assistnews.net/STORIES/2012/s12010160.htm">sentenced to two years in prison</a>.</p>
<p>A <a href="http://mohabatnews.com/index.php?option=com_content&amp;view=article&amp;id=4779:status-of-five-christian-converts-in-shiraz-unknown&amp;catid=36:iranian-christians&amp;Itemid=279">June  report</a> indicated that, five months after five Christian converts were arrested, their condition and fate was still unknown. They were accused of “attending house church services, promoting Christianity, propagating against the regime and disturbing national security.” Being imprisoned for 130 days without word “is an obvious example of physical and mental abuse of the detainees…. one of the prison guards openly told one of these Christian detainees that all these pressures and uncertainties are intended to make them flee the country after they are released.”</p>
<p>A young woman who had recently converted to Christianity and was an outspoken activist against the Islamic regime, <a href="http://www.assistnews.net/STORIES/2012/s12060119.htm">was found dead</a>, slumped over her car’s steering wheel, with a single gunshot wound to her head.</p>
<p>Then there are Iran’s many other faces of Christian persecution, including <a href="http://www.worthynews.com/11615-revolutionary-guards-close-church-properties">shutting down churches</a>, <a href="http://www.compassdirect.org/english/country/iran/article_1395833.html">regular crackdowns on house-church gatherings</a>, <a href="http://blog.beliefnet.com/pray_for_the_persecuted_church/2011/08/iranians-seize-6500-of-bibles-burn-300-claim-they-are-protecting-youth.html">confiscating Bibles and other Christian literature</a>, and <a href="http://www.compassdirect.org/english/country/iran/article_1406358.html">banning church services in Farsi</a>.</p>
<p>For all that, Iran’s persecution of Christians is a minor reflection of a much bigger, rarely reported humanitarian crisis: Christian suffering from one end of the Islamic world to the other, which I document in my new book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1621570258/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=1621570258&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=uhurnetw-20"><i>Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians</i></a>, by connecting-the-dots and exposing the same patterns of persecution.</p>
<p>For example, what happens to Christians in Iran—arrested and harassed for being apostates to Christianity or for preaching Christ—happens in countries as different from Iran as Indonesia, Egypt, and Nigeria.  Countries that share neither race, language, or culture—only Islam.</p>
<p>Patterns are not only evident in the Muslim world’s persecution of Christians, but in the Obama administration’s indifference.  The U.S. State Department has <a href="http://www.christianpost.com/news/pastor-saeed-abedini-excluded-from-state-departments-iran-prisoners-list-94837/">excluded Abedini</a> from its Iran Prisoners List—commensurate with the fact that it regularly <a href="http://cnsnews.com/news/article/state-department-purges-religious-freedom-section-its-human-rights-reports">whitewashes the sufferings of Christians under Islam</a>, and even failed to cite Egypt and Pakistan as “nations of particular concern” despite the fact that Christians there are being hounded mercilessly, as documented in the book.</p>
<p>The persecution of Pastor Abedini, an American citizen in Iran, is the tip of the iceberg of the persecution of Christians under Islam—persecution that, try as they may, the mainstream media, the Obama administration, and all the politically correct powers that be, cannot ignore out of existence, especially now that it is  fully exposed and documented in <i>Crucified Again</i>.</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>Obama&#8217;s Lifeline to the Boston Bomber</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/how-obama-spared-the-boston-bomber-from-death/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=how-obama-spared-the-boston-bomber-from-death</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 02 May 2013 04:55:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bomber]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Boston]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[death penalty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Dzhokhar Tsarnaev]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Life]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[marathon]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[prison]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[The egregious missteps that will rob the Boston massacre's victims of justice -- and make us more vulnerable to jihad.  ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/dzhokhar-tsarnaev.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-188014" alt="dzhokhar-tsarnaev" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/dzhokhar-tsarnaev-397x350.jpg" width="238" height="210" /></a>The Obama administration is reportedly negotiating a plea bargain that would spare the life of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and that could allow the FBI to continue interrogating the suspect about other terrorist plots.</span></p>
<p>NBC News <a href="http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/bombing-suspect-plea-deal/2013/04/29/id/501923?s=al&amp;promo_code=13502-1">reports</a> that federal prosecutors and Tsarnaev&#8217;s lawyers “have begun very early discussions about a possible deal in which he could avoid the death penalty in return for a full accounting to the FBI of what happened and why as investigators continue working to find those answers for themselves.”</p>
<p>Talk of a legal settlement that would allow Tsarnaev to escape execution comes after high-powered attorney Judy Clarke, a death-penalty specialist from San Diego, was added to Tsarnaev&#8217;s legal defense team earlier this week. U.S. Magistrate Judge Marianne Bowler approved Clarke&#8217;s appointment Monday.</p>
<p>Clarke is credited with helping to secure life sentences for clients facing the death penalty such as Jared Loughner, &#8220;Unabomber&#8221; Ted Kaczynski, and 1996 Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph. Clarke&#8217;s fees will reportedly be paid by U.S. taxpayers.</p>
<p>Federal terrorism charges were laid against Tsarnaev last week after some lawmakers demanded the U.S. citizen be treated as an unlawful enemy combatant. Such a move would have given authorities a freer hand to question Tsarnaev about Islamic terrorist operations.</p>
<p>Tsarnaev had been subject to questioning by the FBI for about 16 hours when Judge Bowler suddenly appeared unannounced in the suspect&#8217;s hospital room early on April 22. Accompanied by a prosecutor and a public defender, Bowler &#8212; not law enforcement officers &#8212; read Tsarnaev his <i>Miranda</i> rights and the suspect immediately stopped cooperating with the FBI.</p>
<p>U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said Bowler made the right call. That decision was “totally consistent with the laws that we have,” he said Saturday. “The decision to Mirandize was one that the magistrate made,” Holder added.</p>
<p>But a legal expert said Holder is misstating the law, as handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court in the precedent-setting 1966 ruling, <i>Miranda v. Arizona</i>.</p>
<p>&#8220;Eric Holder was dead wrong when he said there was a legal requirement to Mirandize Dzhokhar Tsarnaev,&#8221; attorney Curt Levey, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Committee for Justice, told this writer in an interview.</p>
<p>&#8220;The Supreme Court&#8217;s ruling in <i>Miranda</i> says only that without a <i>Miranda</i> warning the defendant&#8217;s statements cannot be used to convict him in a criminal trial. There is no requirement that you be Mirandized. It applies only to the evidence that can be used to convict you.&#8221;</p>
<p>In other words, had it not been for Bowler taking the extremely unusual step of reading Tsarnaev his rights, the FBI could have continued trying to extract intelligence from the suspect that might have been useful in fending off future Islamic terrorist attacks.</p>
<p>This appears to be a new approach to judicial activism. Bowler seems to have usurped the powers of the executive branch by taking it upon herself to decide on behalf of the American government that assuring the admissibility of evidence gathered from Tsarnaev in court was more important than possibly obtaining more information from him about terrorist networks that could have saved American lives. It is not supposed to be Bowler&#8217;s decision to make.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, citing unnamed sources, the <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2317493/Saudi-Arabian-ambassador-Washington-DENIES-nation-warned-United-States-Tamerlan-Tsarnaev-2012.html">Daily Mail</a> (UK) reported that the Saudi government warned the U.S. last year that the other Boston Marathon bomber, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, killed in a shootout with police April 19, was a dangerous extremist. The security alert, which the Saudi embassy in Washington, D.C., and the Obama administration deny was issued, was separate from warnings about Tsarnaev that Russian intelligence provided to the Obama administration.</p>
<p>After Saudi Arabia rejected Tsarnaev&#8217;s December 2011 application to enter the kingdom to make a pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi authorities sent a written warning to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the British government last year advising that &#8220;something was going to happen in a major U.S. city.&#8221;</p>
<p>According to the newspaper, the &#8220;government-to-government&#8221; letter named Tsarnaev specifically but did not indicate when or where an attack would take place. The Saudis acted because they believed U.S. authorities should be intercepting packages intended for Tsarnaev to look for items used to make bombs.</p>
<p>Tsarnaev&#8217;s tourist visa for Saudi Arabia was rejected a month before he traveled to the Russian republic of Dagestan where he may have received training that allowed him to make and detonate the pressure-cooker bombs that he and his brother Dzhokhar set off at the Boston Marathon on April 15.</p>
<p>The Saudi official rejected the idea that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was trained by al-Qaeda during his absence from the U.S. in 2012. Saudi Arabia&#8217;s sources in Yemen said Islamic militants knew of Tsarnaev but mocked him, calling him &#8220;the volunteer,&#8221; the unnamed official told the <i>Daily Mail</i>.</p>
<p>&#8220;He was a gung-ho, self motivated jihadi who wasn&#8217;t tasked by a larger group,&#8221; the official said. Blowing up bombs at the Boston Marathon is &#8220;beneath&#8221; al-Qaeda, he said. &#8220;They don&#8217;t think like this. This is like a firecracker to them. They want something big.&#8221;</p>
<p>In a related development, three young men associated with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev are now accused of serving as his accomplices following the Boston Marathon bombing.</p>
<p>Under arrest for conspiracy to obstruct justice are Azamat Tazhayakov and Dias Kadyrbayev of Kazakhstan. Robel Phillipos, a U.S. citizen, is charged with making materially false statements to federal investigators. The trio attended the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth with Tsarnaev, according to <a href="http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/05/01/boston-police-3-additional-suspects-taken-into-custody-in-connection-with-bombing/">FBI affidavits </a>filed in federal court.</p>
<p>Days after the bombing, the three allegedly watched a movie in Tsarnaev&#8217;s dormitory room and then found a backpack containing fireworks. The gunpowder in the fireworks had been removed.</p>
<p>“Kadyrbayev knew when he saw the empty fireworks that Tsarnaev was involved in the Marathon bombing,” according to one of the affidavits. “Kadyrbayev decided to remove the backpack from the room in order to help his friend Tsarnaev avoid trouble. He decided to take Tsarnaev’s laptop as well because he did not want Tsarnaev’s roommate to think he was stealing or behaving suspiciously by just taking the backpack.”</p>
<p>The three men “collectively decided to throw the backpack and fireworks into the trash because they did not want Tsarnaev to get into trouble,” the document stated.</p>
<p>Tazhayakov and Kadyrbayev are also alleged to have violated the terms of their student visas.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/local_coverage/2013/04/tsarnaev_family_received_100g_in_benefits">Boston Herald</a> reports that the Tsarnaev family, including the two brothers and their parents, took in more than $100,000 in taxpayer-funded assistance from 2002 to 2012. The benefits included cash, food stamps, and Section 8 housing subsidies.</p>
<p>“The breadth of the benefits the family was receiving was stunning,” a person with knowledge of documents provided to a state legislative committee told the newspaper.</p>
<p>This means that Massachusetts taxpayers were almost certainly subsidizing the Boston Marathon bombers and their family as the two Tsarnaev brothers immersed themselves in the world of Islamic terrorism.</p>
<p>The state government has given more than 500 documents to the House Post Audit and Oversight Committee in the Massachusetts General Court, the state legislature.</p>
<p>“I can assure members of the public that this committee will actively review every single piece of information we can find because clearly the public has a substantial right to know what benefits, if any, this family or individuals accused of some horrific crimes were receiving,” said committee chairman Rep. David Linsky, a Democrat.</p>
<p>Welfare officials are investigating whether the Tsarnaev family notified the state about Tamerlan&#8217;s extended stay in Dagestan last year during which he may have interacted with Islamic terrorists.</p>
<p>The extent of the welfare payments made to the family surfaced despite official efforts to keep the information hidden.</p>
<p>Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, a Democrat and longtime supporter of welfare-rights groups such as ACORN, had earlier refused to disclose details of the welfare benefits, citing state privacy laws. The real motivation of Patrick, a left-winger often compared to his friend and ally Barack Obama, for failing to hand over the information was more likely that he was trying to defend his state&#8217;s out-of-control social programs from adverse publicity.</p>
<p>Adding insult to injury, if Dzhokhar Tsarnaev receives a sentence of life imprisonment, America&#8217;s taxpayers will be paying his bills for the rest of his natural life.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Kerry’s Shocking Demand to Israel: Free Terrorists</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/davidhornik/kerrys-shocking-demand-to-israel-free-terrorists/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=kerrys-shocking-demand-to-israel-free-terrorists</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 26 Apr 2013 04:42:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[P. David Hornik]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Free]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[John Kerry]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Terrorist]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[The latest Obama-proposed path to “peace” includes freeing the murderers of women, children and the elderly.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/DownloadedFile.jpg"><img class=" wp-image-187177 alignleft" alt="DownloadedFile" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/DownloadedFile.jpg" width="217" height="163" /></a>It may seem amazing, but in the wake of the Boston attack the Obama administration is pressuring Israel to free terrorists guilty of particularly heinous acts of murder.</p>
<p>On Wednesday the Knesset “<a href="http://www.jpost.com/Diplomacy-and-Politics/MKs-decry-US-demand-to-release-terrorists-as-gesture-to-PA-310921">discussed</a> America’s demand that Israel release terrorists as a good will gesture to the Palestinian Authority.” The demand is part of intensive efforts by Secretary of State John Kerry to revive Israeli-Palestinian negotiations on a peace settlement—efforts that are amazing in their own right considering that the Palestinian Authority has consistently shown for 20 years that it is incapable of accepting Israel and not interested in a state “living in peace” beside it.</p>
<p>Kerry—with Iran at the brink of a nuclear capability, Syria a maelstrom of clashing terror factions, Egypt close to economic collapse, and North Korea threatening nuclear aggression—has in recent weeks been meeting with PA president Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah, Riyadh, Amman, and Istanbul.</p>
<p>Abbas’s preconditions for resuming negotiations are the same as they have been for years: Israel committing beforehand to a withdrawal to indefensible borders, prohibiting Jewish building in Judea, Samaria, and parts of Jerusalem, and releasing terrorists from prison. Israel is reportedly, at this point, rejecting all these demands.</p>
<p>The Obama administration is also “<a href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/kerry-pushes-economic-plan-for-peace/">preparing</a> a multi-billion dollar economic initiative that would bring international businesses and major infrastructure projects to the West Bank”—again, nothing essentially new but, rather, part of a 20-year tradition of Israeli, U.S., and European efforts to bribe the Palestinians into adopting Western norms and practices of peace, prosperity, and tolerance.</p>
<p>Meanwhile the terrorists the U.S. is pushing Israel to release include the killers of:</p>
<p>● <a href="http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1990-09-26/news/9003200598_1_bureij-camp-gaza-strip-amnon-pomerantz">Amnon Pomerantz</a>, stoned by a mob in Gaza in 1990 and then burned to death in his car</p>
<p>● <a href="http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Terrorism-+Obstacle+to+Peace/Palestinian+terror+before+2000/Fatal+Terrorist+Attacks+in+Israel+Since+the+DOP+-S.htm">Yigal Vaknin</a>, stabbed to death in an orchard in 1993</p>
<p>● <a href="http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1988-11-01/news/8803040075_1_firebombs-bus-passengers">Rachel Weiss</a> and her three young sons Ephraim, Netanel, and Raphael, all burned to death in a firebomb attack on a bus in the Jordan Valley in 1988.</p>
<p>● <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menahem_Stern">Menachem Stern</a>, a 64-year-old acclaimed historian stabbed to death in Jerusalem in 1989</p>
<p>And, again, it is unsurprising and “traditional” that freeing terrorists is seen as the way to propitiate Abbas, who systematically instills a cult of hero-worship of terrorists and most recently <a href="http://www.palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&amp;doc_id=8809">officially honored</a> a terrorist named Issa Abd Rabbo who, in 1984:</p>
<blockquote><p><i>killed two Israeli university students, Ron Levi and Revital Seri, who were hiking south of Jerusalem. At gun point he tied them up, put bags over their heads and then shot and murdered both. He is serving two life sentences in an Israeli prison…. </i></p></blockquote>
<p>It is, sadly enough, a bipartisan tradition, with then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice having been <a href="http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=32158">full of praise</a> in August 2008 for a release by the left-leaning Olmert government of 198 Palestinian security prisoners including two convicted murderers—then, too, as a “gesture” to Abbas.</p>
<p>On Wednesday in the Knesset, Ofer Akunis, a deputy minister from Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud minister, claimed Israel has no intention of complying with Kerry and releasing the terrorists. MK Orit Struk of the Bayit Yehudi party, part of the governing coalition, called the demand</p>
<blockquote><p><i>shocking…not just because of the danger that these terrorists will return to terrorist activity once they are released, but because the release of terrorists is an energizing shot of encouragement to terror and terrorists.</i></p></blockquote>
<p>It seems obvious enough. It is true that Israel has itself freed many terrorists as ransom for Israeli soldiers or civilians held by terror organizations—sometimes, in my view, <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2011/davidhornik/defending-the-gilad-shalit-deal/">justified as a lesser evil</a> than abandoning the captives to their fate. Freeing terrorists to butter-up the likes of Abbas is a different matter, especially when called for by leaders of a democracy that is itself subject to terror.</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>Imprisoned Cuban Rappers Tormented While Jay-Z &amp; Beyonce Partied</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/humberto-fontova/as-beyonce-and-jay-z-partied-in-cuba-imprisoned-cuban-rappers-tormented/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=as-beyonce-and-jay-z-partied-in-cuba-imprisoned-cuban-rappers-tormented</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 15 Apr 2013 04:30:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Humberto Fontova]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Beyoncé]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Castro]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[The suffering of Castro's political prisoners is especially brutal for black artists. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/humberto-fontova/as-beyonce-and-jay-z-partied-in-cuba-imprisoned-cuban-rappers-tormented/cn_image-size-beyonce-jay-z-cuba/" rel="attachment wp-att-185774"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-185774" title="cn_image.size.beyonce-jay-z-cuba" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/cn_image.size_.beyonce-jay-z-cuba-450x325.jpg" alt="" width="270" height="195" /></a>As Jay-Z and Beyonce filmed their tourism commercial for the Castro regime last week some Cuban rappers were languishing in KGB-designed dungeons and suffering hunger-strikes not far from the cameras. Angel Arzuaga and Marcos Lima <a href="http://www.capitolhillcubans.com/2013/04/tweet-of-day-two-rappers-imprisoned-in.html">were among them.</a> These Cuba rappers’ crimes (according to the criminal code of Jay-Z’s hosts and commercial beneficiaries) consisted of playing and even <em>listening</em> to rap-music.</p>
<p>But this Cuban version of rap, you see, failed to properly express the mass genuflections to Jay-Z’s hosts (the Castro regime) which are a requirement of Cuban music as recorded under the Castro-Stalinist regime. These Cuban rappers failed to issue the obligatory hosannas and hallelujahs to the racist and Stalinist beneficiaries of Jay-Z’s tourism infomercial.</p>
<p>The “edgy”  and “irreverent” Jay-Z, by the way, in a spanking new rap song, disses the critics of his Castroite infomercial as “idiots.”</p>
<blockquote><p><em>The Negro is indolent and spends his money on frivolities and drink, the European is forward-looking, organized and intelligent…The Negro has maintained his racial purity by his well known </em><a href="http://www.hfontova.com/che.html"><em>habit of avoiding baths.</em></a></p></blockquote>
<p>Che Guevara wrote these lines in his famous “Motorcycle Diaries.”  But you will search Robert Redford’s famous movie based on the book in utter vain for their mention. Redford, this muscular champion of “artistic freedom,” by the way, meekly acquiesced in screening &#8220;The Motorcycle Diaries&#8221; for Che&#8217;s widow (who heads Cuba&#8217;s Che Guevara Studies Center) and Fidel Castro for their approval before release.</p>
<p>&#8220;N**ger!&#8221; taunted my jailers between tortures,” reported the world’s longest suffering black political prisoner about his torment. &#8220;We pulled you down from the trees and cut off your tail!&#8221; laughed my torturers. For months I was naked in a 6 x 4 foot cell. That&#8217;s four feet high, so you couldn&#8217;t stand. But I felt a great freedom inside myself. I refused to commit spiritual suicide.”</p>
<p>That wasn’t Nelson Mandela.  No, the prisoner was a black Cuban named Eusebio Peñalver<strong>, </strong>whose incarceration and torture at the hands of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara’s Stalinist regime stretched to 29 years, surpassing Nelson Mandela&#8217;s record in time behind bars and probably quintupling the horrors suffered by Mandela during this period.</p>
<p>Sr. Peñalver served several months of this almost thirty-year sentence in a &#8220;punishment cell&#8221; barely big enough to stand in, where he languished naked and in complete darkness.</p>
<p>&#8220;Castro&#8217;s apologists,” he said in an interview with this writer, “those who excuse or downplay his crimes &#8212; these people be they ignorant, stupid, mendacious whatever&#8211;they are accomplices in the bloody tyrant&#8217;s crimes, accomplices in the most brutal and murderous regime in the hemisphere.&#8221;</p>
<p>More perspective: according to anti-Apartheid activists a grand total of 3,000 political prisoners passed through South Africa’s Robben Island prison in roughly 30 years under the Apartheid regime. Usually about a thousand were held. These were out of a South African population of 40 million.</p>
<p>According to the Human Rights group Freedom House, a grand total of 500,000 political prisoners have passed through Castro’s various prisons and forced labor camps. At one time in 1961, some 300,000 Cubans were jailed for political offenses. This is out of a Cuban population in 1960 of 6.4 million.</p>
<p>A calculator will easily reveal the grotesque disparity between the repression practiced by Jay-Z’s tourism clients and Apartheid repression. Fox &amp; Friends, by the way, recently invited a Frontpage columnist to discuss <a href="http://foxnewsinsider.com/2013/04/08/beyonce-jay-z-criticized-for-celebrating-in-this-communist-country/">these ironies and grotesqueries.</a></p>
<p>But why pick on Jay-Z? Should we expect more sense from a ghetto-raised rapper than from the ultra-educated daughter of worldwide conservative icon Margaret Thatcher?  Meet the Iron Lady’s daughter, Carol, during her own Cuba visit (<em>i.e.</em> enrichment of the Stalinist regime) three years ago:</p>
<blockquote><p>I hoped to get a snap taken…standing by a wrought-iron image of the revolutionary HERO Che Guevara&#8230;. Che is your constant companion on any trip to Cuba. His image is everywhere-more so than Fidel himself. Such was his presence <a href="http://babalublog.com/2013/04/12/why-pick-on-jay-z-part-ii-meet-the-iron-ladys-daughter-carol-thatcher/">that our tour was dubbed &#8220;On Yer Bike With Che.&#8221;</a></p></blockquote>
<p>But why pick on the Iron Lady’s daughter?  Here’s libertarian icon Murray Rothbard, whose relationship with Ron Paul was such that he even wrote the preface to one of Paul’s books. Ron Paul regards Rothbard as one of America’s “greatest men” and “greatest heroes of freedom.” <em>Rand</em> Paul, by the way, considers it an honor to have met Murray Rothbard and a “privilege” to have once driven him to the airport.</p>
<p>In 1967 Murray Rothbard seemed highly bereaved and aggrieved to hear of Che Guevara’s whacking. Here’ the libertarian icon’s encomium to the Stalinist who outlawed private property under penalty of torture-chamber and firing-squad:</p>
<blockquote><p>Che is dead, and we all mourn him. Long live Che!  Why? How is it that so many libertarians mourn this man?&#8230;What made Che such an heroic figure for our time is that he, more than any man of our epoch or even of our century, was the living embodiment of the principle of Revolution… we all knew that his enemy was our enemy–that great Colossus that oppresses and threatens all the peoples of the world, U. S. imperialism… The most fitting memorial to Che was the intensely moving speech about his death delivered by his old comrade-in-arms, Fidel Castro.</p></blockquote>
<p>But why pick on Murray Rothbard?</p>
<p>When it comes to the factual Che Guevara, amigos, what we have here is a serious failure to communicate. Today the world&#8217;s largest Che mural (the one Carol Thatcher smilingly posed before) adorns Cuba&#8217;s Ministry of the Interior, the headquarters for Cuba&#8217;s KGB- and STASI-trained secret police. Nothing could be more fitting</p>
<p>But a corrective to all this “ignorance” <a href="http://www.hfontova.com/che.html">does exist.</a></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>Afghan Woman Forced to Marry Her Rapist</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/frank-crimi/afghan-woman-forced-to-marry-her-rapist/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=afghan-woman-forced-to-marry-her-rapist</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 07 Feb 2013 04:15:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frank Crimi]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[A day in the life of a Sharia slave.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frank-crimi/afghan-woman-forced-to-marry-her-rapist/634305-gulnaz/" rel="attachment wp-att-176645"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-176645" title="634305-gulnaz" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/634305-gulnaz.jpg" alt="" width="287" height="218" /></a>A year after she was pardoned from prison on the condition she agree to marry her rapist, a young Afghan woman, faced with distressingly few options, has now reluctantly wed her attacker.</p>
<p>In 2009, Gulnaz, then 16 years old, gained international attention after she was raped by her cousin’s husband and sentenced to 12 years in an Afghan prison for “forced adultery,” during which time she gave birth to a daughter fathered by her defiler.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, being imprisoned for having the temerity to be a victim of rape is not unusual in Afghanistan, evidenced by the fact that more than 50 percent of Afghanistan’s female prison population has been <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/8934132/Afghanistans-women-languishing-in-prisons-10-years-after-fall-of-Taliban.html">jailed</a> for moral crimes, such as “forced adultery” or “zina” (extramarital sex).</p>
<p>Yet, nevertheless, after spending two and a half years in jail, Gulnaz was offered a <a href="http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=106328">pardon</a> in December 2011 by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, albeit on the condition Gulnaz marry her rapist.</p>
<p>Karzai’s decision, however, wasn’t particularly surprising given that the Afghan police and judicial response to violence inflicted upon women &#8212; deeply rooted in Afghan custom and Islamic law &#8212; is to either ignore the crimes or, in most cases, send the women back to their abusers.</p>
<p>Still, Karzai’s decision engendered enough international and domestic outrage to prompt the Afghan president to graciously release Gulnaz without the precondition she wed her rapist.</p>
<p>Sadly for Gulnaz, presidential decree notwithstanding, her family was bent on having her marry her attacker, a decision based on the fact Gulnaz’s status as an unwed mother made her a social pariah who had brought shame upon her family.</p>
<p>In fact, reports surfaced that prior to her release Gulnaz’s brothers had threatened to kill her daughter, threats which prompted Gulnaz to seek sanctuary in a women’s shelter. There Gulnaz spent over a year while her family and the rapist’s family haggled over terms of the marriage.</p>
<p>Those marital conditions included a reported demand for the rapist’s family to give a daughter to Gulnaz’s family, part of the traditional Afghan practice known as “baad,” whereupon women are given away to pay family debts or settle disputes.</p>
<p>Unfortunately for Gulnaz, the Afghan government was reportedly tag teaming with her family to help persuade the young woman to go ahead with the marriage, persuasion which, <a href="http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/asia/afghanistan/article3677718.ece">according</a> to Gulnaz’s lawyer, Kimberley Motely, included Gulnaz being “systematically brainwashed” by Afghan officials.</p>
<p>Moreover, Motely <a href="http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/asia/afghanistan/article3677718.ece">said</a> Afghan officials were “repeatedly denying her documentation for an asylum application” for Gulnaz, making Gulnaz a virtual prisoner in the women’s shelter.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, given the traditional Afghan hostility toward allowing women the freedom to escape abusive male relatives and family members, women&#8217;s shelters in Afghanistan more often than not resemble prisons masquerading as sanctuaries.</p>
<p>To that end, the Afghan government requires that a woman can’t move out of a shelter, most of which are run by NGOs and the United Nations, unless she is going to the home of a male relative.</p>
<p>However, that rule can prove problematic if, as in many cases, those same male relatives have abused or threatened to kill the woman or girl in the first place, a fact which leads many Afghan women afraid to seek help from Afghan police and judicial authorities.</p>
<p>Moreover, the Afghan government has taken extra steps to ensure that women’s shelters are not seen as enticing options for women fleeing abusive homes and marriages. As the head of Afghanistan’s juvenile prisons has said, “People really hate it when girls run away.”</p>
<p>To that end, the Afghanistan Supreme Court in October 2010 ruled that any Afghan woman who fled her home and went anywhere other than to the police or a close relative would be locked up as a precaution against them having illicit sex or engaging in prostitution.</p>
<p>So for Gulnaz, the only unsavory options open to escape her torment entailed either a return to jail or forcible return home, unpalatable choices which led to her decision last week to leave the women’s shelter to go marry her rapist.</p>
<p>While some may question Gulnaz’s decision as one which will leave her still vulnerable to further abuse or worse from her new husband or her family, others are more pragmatic in their opinion.</p>
<p>One such person is filmmaker Clementine Malpas who first brought Gulnaz’s plight to world attention in a documentary she made aimed to shed light on Afghan women jailed for moral crimes.</p>
<p>Malpas <a href="http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/asia/afghanistan/article3677718.ece">said</a>, “Marrying the man she told us had raped her isn’t what we had hoped for Gulnaz but the current cultural context of Afghanistan leaves very few options, especially for a woman with a child out of wedlock.”</p>
<p>To that end, Gulnaz reportedly made her choice in order to give her daughter hope for a better future. Specifically, Gulnaz’s little girl, having been born in prison, was considered to be illegitimate, a disgrace to her family and, as a consequence, never to be accepted by Afghan society unless her parents marry.</p>
<p>For Gulnaz and her little daughter, as well for as countless other Afghan women and girls mired in similar situations, acceptance back into the good graces of Afghan society can come at a terrible price.</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>Federal Court Rules that Failure to Castrate Bank Robber is Cruel and Unusual Punishment</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/federal-court-rules-that-failure-to-castrate-bank-robber-is-cruel-and-unusual-punishment/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=federal-court-rules-that-failure-to-castrate-bank-robber-is-cruel-and-unusual-punishment</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/federal-court-rules-that-failure-to-castrate-bank-robber-is-cruel-and-unusual-punishment/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 06 Feb 2013 02:13:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ACLU]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[prison]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tranny rights]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=176440</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Founders would have considered castrating a criminal to be Cruel and Unusual Punishment. But Liberalism, in its infinite wisdom, considers it a civil right.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/federal-court-rules-that-failure-to-castrate-bank-robber-is-cruel-and-unusual-punishment/ophelia-azriel-delonta/" rel="attachment wp-att-176442"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-176442" title="Ophelia Azriel De'lonta" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Ophelia-Azriel-Delonta-350x350.jpg" alt="" width="350" height="350" /></a></p>
<p>If you want to see the kind of insanity that happens when Democrats take over the criminal justice system, look no further than the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.</p>
<p>This is the story of Michael A. Stokes, a bank robber serving a 73 year sentence, who decided to rename himself Ophelia Azriel De&#8217;lonta and pretend to be a woman. And that would be fine. 73 years is close to life and if you&#8217;re going to be spending 1983 to 2056 in a cell, then you might as well find creative ways to pass the time, whether it&#8217;s befriending a mouse or claiming to the messiah. And since Stokes is now 52, he would 96 by the time he&#8217;s released. Which is pretty old to rob banks or star in Gypsy.</p>
<p>But in a Democratic run justice system, it&#8217;s not enough for the inmate to be crazy, the court has to be just as crazy as he is.</p>
<p>So this is also the story of the Virginia Department of Corrections which not only allowed Michael Stokes to dress up as a woman, but also paid for his psychological counseling and hormone therapy. But that wasn&#8217;t good enough for Ophelia and all the other people living in Michael&#8217;s head. He wanted Virginia taxpayers to pay to castrate him in the hopes that would finally turn him into a woman.</p>
<p>While Virginia taxpayers might have been open to castrating Stokes, they weren&#8217;t willing to pay $20,000 to do it, when a good veterinarian could do it for 50 bucks and a shot of whiskey.</p>
<p>And the story would have ended there, but then the ACLU came on the scene and sued the Virginia Department of Corrections for not providing &#8220;medical treatment&#8221; for Stokes&#8217; problem, by which they did not mean electroshock therapy or hiring an exorcist.</p>
<p>Around this time Michael A. Stokes tried to manually castrate himself, which would have saved the State of Virginia even more money, but he failed at that as badly as he failed at bank robbery or being a man.</p>
<p>Clearly this was proof that Stokes&#8217; big heaping bag of crazy was a serious medical condition that required immediate castration by competent professionals.</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;This is not a choice. Transsexuals are born and not made,&#8221; said psychiatry professor George R. Brown at East Tennessee State University, an expert in gender identity disorder. &#8220;If you didn&#8217;t have this condition, why would you want to have your genitals removed, if not by a competent surgeon but by your own hand?&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>I&#8217;m not a professor of psychiatry, but I will go ahead and guess that it&#8217;s a symptom of a severe mental breakdown. Crazy people also try to chop off their fingers. Does that mean they were really born fish?</p>
<p>Assuming that the things that crazy people do to themselves establishes some form of genetic identity is well&#8230; crazy.</p>
<p>Stokes had a criminal record that included 17 different convictions. <a href="http://hamptonroads.com/2011/06/inmates-rights-dont-include-genderchanging-surgery">He was found guilty</a> of robbery seven times, three times for weapons violations, one for malicious wounding, one for sodomy, and two for drug offenses. And apparently some of these crimes were even carried out to raise money for his sex change operation.</p>
<p>Now that he was in prison, Michael switched to holding up the taxpayers to pay for his plan to become a woman using the ACLU as his gun.</p>
<p>But the craziness marched on to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Hearing the case were Justice Diana Gribbon Motz, the first woman from Maryland to sit on the Fourth Circuit, Justice Albert Diaz, the first Puerto Rican to sit on the Fourth Circuit and Justice Robert Bruce King, who, unless he got a sex change operation or moved to Puerto Rico, would always be just another white guy.</p>
<p>King and Motz were Clinton nominees. Diaz was an Obama nominee who was nearly kept off the bench by a Republican filibuster but who made it anyway. And brilliant legal scholar that he is, Diaz wrote an opinion claiming that the failure to castrate Stokes violates the Eight Amendment&#8217;s Cruel and Unusual Punishment provision thereby making it Unconstitutional</p>
<p>This is your justice system. This is your justice system on crack.</p>
<blockquote><p>De’lonta’s complaint alleges that, in light of their knowledge of her ongoing risk of self-mutilation, Appellees’ continued denial of consideration for sex reassignment surgery constitutes deliberate indifference to her serious medical need in violation of the Eighth Amendment.</p>
<p>&#8230;just because Appellees have provided De’lonta with some treatment consistent with the GID Standards of Care, it does not follow that they have necessarily provided her with constitutionally adequate treatment.</p>
<p>&#8230;although Appellees and the district court are correct that a prisoner does not enjoy a constitutional right to the treatment of his or her choice, the treatment a prison facility does provide must nevertheless be adequate to address the prisoner’s serious medical need.</p></blockquote>
<p>There is a story about the family who lets a boy pretend to be a chicken because they needed the eggs. The left has similarly become entangled in insanity because it needs the power that comes from it.</p>
<p>Who is the real lunatic in this story?</p>
<p>Is it Michael Stokes, the bank robber who tried to castrate himself with some disposable razor blades and who gets upset every time he sees his female therapist? Or is it Diana, Albert and Robert? Or is it the entire system that pandered to the insanity of a mentally ill man instead of sending him to a mental institution, and that will end up spending 20 grand to castrate him because the failure to castrate a criminal who wants to be castrated is now considered to be an Unconstitutional form of Cruel and Unusual Punishment?</p>
<p>The Founders would have considered castrating a criminal to clearly be Cruel and Unusual Punishment. But Liberalism, in its infinite wisdom, considers it a civil right.</p>
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		<title>U.S. Government and Churches Must Intervene for Pastor Saeed Abedini</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/faith-j-h-mcdonnell/u-s-government-and-churches-must-intervene-for-pastor-saeed-abedini/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=u-s-government-and-churches-must-intervene-for-pastor-saeed-abedini</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 31 Jan 2013 04:36:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Faith J. H. McDonnell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[8 years]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Christian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Pastor Saeed Abedini]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[prison]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sentence]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=175649</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[American citizen sentenced to eight years in notorious Iranian prison.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/faith-j-h-mcdonnell/u-s-government-and-churches-must-intervene-for-pastor-saeed-abedini/pastor-saeed-2/" rel="attachment wp-att-175650"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-175650" title="pastor saeed 2" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/pastor-saeed-2.jpg" alt="" width="271" height="220" /></a>The good news is that Pastor Saeed Abedini, an American citizen arrested on a visit back to Iran, did not get the death sentence. That was a real possibility. The Iranian Revolutionary Court Judge presiding over the 32 year-old husband and father of two’s case, Judge Abbas Pir-Abassi, is known internationally as one of Iran’s “hanging judges” because he has sent so many to the gallows, <a href="http://aclj.org/iran/american-father-husband-abandoned-iran-handed-hanging-judge">according to the American Center for Law and Justice’s (ACLJ) Jordan Sekulow</a>. And the Islamic Republic of Iran has a long history of arresting, torturing, and killing Christians, as well as Baha’is, human rights activists, and others.</p>
<p>No, instead Judge Pir-Abassi verbally convicted and <a href="http://aclj.org/iran/lies-and-conviction-iran-mocks-justice-convicts-sentences-american-pastor-saeed">sentenced Abedini to eight years in prison</a> for “threatening national security.” But actually, since the pastor is to serve his sentence at the <a href="http://aclj.org/iran/american-pastor-saeed-facing-hell-on-earth-in-iran-evin-prison">notoriously brutal Evin Prison</a> in Tehran where he has already been beaten and tortured on a regular basis since his arrest on September 26, 2012, there is <em>no</em> good news. Lisa Daftari for <em>Fox News </em><a href="http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/12/19/american-pastor-imprisoned-without-notice-charges-while-visiting-family-in-iran/">says</a> that Abedini has been beaten by both prison guards and by other prisoners “who self-identify as members of Al Qaeda.” Family and other advocates fear that Abedini may not survive eight years of such treatment. Sekulow notes that although Iranian law requires a written verdict, there has only been Pir-Abassi’s verbal sentence. But Iran is not really known for legal integrity and consistency.</p>
<p>Abedini left Iran in 2005, but he left Islam years before that. He became a Christian at age 20, after his search to be a more devout Muslim – including being recruited out of high school by radical Islamists for suicide bomber training – left him in despair. Not long after his conversion, Abedini became a leader to particular group of Iranian Christians who, like he, were converts from Islam. Daftari says that Abedini was a “Christian leader and community organizer developing Iran&#8217;s underground home church communities for Christian converts.” He built a network of 100 such underground churches in 30 cities in Iran, and married Naghmeh in 2004. Naghmeh Abedini had left Iran with her family when she was nine years old, and met Abedini on a return visit.</p>
<p>Pastor Abedini loves the United States. He loves the freedom of religion and he and Naghmeh have chosen to raise their son and daughter here. He loves his church community in Idaho, which has committed to prayer and action on his behalf. And it would be a good guess from most of the photos we see of the Abedinis and their children that he likes Disneyworld quite a bit, too! But he also loves Iran, and he and his wife had previously returned for a visit in 2009. On that trip, Abedini was arrested when he arrived at the airport to fly back to the United States. Mrs. Abedini <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2265626/American-Christian-pastor-Saeed-Abedinis-wife-father-await-possible-death-sentence-Iran.html?ito=feeds-newsxml">told</a> the <em>Daily Mail</em> that Iranian authorities first threatened Abedini with death for apostasy from Islam. And Daftari reports that they released him “after he signed a written agreement in which the government would not charge him for his Christian activities, and he would be allowed to enter and exit the country so long as he ceased all official house church activities.</p>
<p>It was for such secular humanitarian efforts that Abedini was in Iran. In addition to visiting family, he was overseeing the construction of a non-sectarian orphanage on property belonging to his family in Rasht. Mrs. Abedini indicated that it was the ninth time he had been to Iran since the 2009 visit. But sadly, although Abedini kept to his agreement, the Iranian government did not keep to theirs. Sekulow reports that the evidence used by Judge Pir-Abassi for his sentence of threatening national security “was of Pastor Saeed’s Christian activities primarily during the early 2000s, when under President Khatami house churches were not perceived as a threat to Iran.”</p>
<p>Since Abedini’s arrest, his wife and friends have been working to bring international attention and pressure to his case. On September 8, 2012, less than three weeks before they arrested Abedini, the Iranian authorities acquitted and freed Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani after almost three years’ imprisonment. Nadarkhani’s advocates, including the ACLJ and Christian church and human rights groups, are convinced that Iran responded to the huge outcry on the pastor’s behalf.</p>
<p>Yet even while Iran is sensitive to pressure, the Islamists continue to play cat-and-mouse games, <a href="http://juicyecumenism.com/2013/01/04/another-iranian-pastor-and-another-and-another/">arresting one while releasing another</a>, calling Nadarkhani <a href="http://juicyecumenism.com/2012/12/28/youcef-nadarkhani-imprisoned-again-iranians-take-pastor-on-christmas-day/">back to prison</a> on Christmas Day – then releasing him again, and, of course, doing little to nothing for those Christian prisoners who are not as well-known to the media and the West. For instance, on Christmas 2012, Iranian authorities <a href="http://mohabatnews.com/index.php?option=com_content&amp;view=article&amp;id=6045:fifty-christians-temporarily-arrested-concern-over-the-wellbeing-of-rev-vruir-avanessian&amp;catid=36:iranian-christians&amp;Itemid=279">arrested some 50 Christians</a>, including Reverend Vruir Avanessian, 60, an officially ordained pastor of Armenian descent. Another pastor, Benham Irani from Karaj, has been in prison since May 2011. According to <a href="http://presenttruthmn.com/blog/iran/action-pastor-behnam-irani/">Present Truth Ministries</a> and others who have contact on the ground in Iran, Irani is very ill. He has been suffering from intestinal bleeding for over a year. Most of his <a href="http://dynamic.csw.org.uk/article.asp?t=news&amp;id=1357&amp;search=">health problems</a> have been caused by the brutal beatings he has received from other prisoners and from prison guards and from being denied medical care.</p>
<p>A concerted effort for all of Iran’s unjustly imprisoned and persecuted believers is needed by the international community and particularly by the United States government and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/PrayForPastorSaeedAbedini">U.S. churches</a>. The ACLJ has closely monitored and reported on the Obama Administration’s somewhat lackluster advocacy on behalf of Abedini. They were pleased to receive a report of “a clear and unequivocal call for Pastor Saeed’s release” issued by Secretary of State Nominee Senator John Kerry after he was challenged to such by Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL). Rubio and 11 other senators sent a bi-partisan <a href="http://c0391070.cdn2.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/pdf/clinton-saeed-abedini-senate-letter-iran.pdf">letter</a> on January 15 to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, urging her “swift engagement with international community to advocate for [Abedini’s] release.” Thirty –seven House members sent a similar <a href="http://c0391070.cdn2.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/pdf/signed-letter-sec-clinton-pastor-saeed-abedini-iran.pdf">letter</a> the same day.</p>
<p>In his <a href="http://aclj.org/iran/senator-kerry-nominee-secretary-of-state-issues-clear-unequivocal-call-pastor-saeed-release">response</a> to Rubio, Kerry said:</p>
<blockquote><p>The U.S. government remains concerned about U.S. citizen Saeed Abedini, who is detained in Iran on a charge related to his religious beliefs. Mr. Abedini&#8217;s attorney had only one day on January 21, 2013, to present his defense. We remain deeply concerned about the fairness and transparency of Mr. Abedini&#8217;s trial. I, along with the U.S. government, condemn Iran&#8217;s continued violation of the universal right of freedom of religion and call on the Iranian authorities to respect Mr. Abedini&#8217;s human rights and release him. The Department of State is in close contact with the Abedini family and is actively engaged on this case.</p></blockquote>
<p>Other U.S. government officials have <a href="http://aclj.org/iran/free-saeed-roundup-american-government-responses">responded</a>, as well. Some members of Congress have issued individual statements, as has the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, the White House, and the State Department. The National Security Council has also weighed in.</p>
<p>David French at ACLJ <a href="http://aclj.org/iran/free-saeed-time-unified-national-international-response">comments</a>, “While these words are welcome, neither the White House nor State Department have engaged at the high level this case requires. As a former state department official noted today on Fox News (which has been invaluable in its relentless coverage of Saeed’s case), high-level engagement is critical.” He explains that only the highest-level engagement will convey “the right message” to the United Nations and the European Union.</p>
<p>French continued, “Let’s be clear, however, the international community will take its cues from America.  If our own government isn’t out front in supporting one of its own citizens, we cannot expect the UN and EU to lead.” But we must not forget that the international community and even the U.S. government will take <em>its </em>cues from the churches. If Christians in America and beyond don’t bother to support one of their own “citizens,” they cannot expect the secular world to take the lead. Thankfully, the ACLJ reports that almost 80,000 people have signed their <a href="https://aclj.org/iran/save-american-pastor-from-iranian-prison-sentence">international petition</a> on behalf of Saeed Abedini. <a href="http://aclj.org/iran/save-american-pastor-iranian-abuse-imprisonment">An additional petition</a>, asking the Obama Administration and U.S. government to engagement has garnered almost 254,000 signatures. Christians are undoubtedly well represented among the signatories.</p>
<p>Some church leaders in the mainline church denominations are most probably underrepresented. They are not familiar with, or are horrified by the politically conservative ACLJ; they don’t believe that Muslims should leave their faith for Christianity; or they are loath to criticize the foreign policy of the Obama Administration.  For whatever reason, just as they failed to get involved in advocacy efforts for Youcef Nadarkhani, some mainline church leaders take less interest in the fate of Iranian Christians than they did in <a href="http://www.theird.org/page.aspx?pid=2082">two American hikers</a> who were arrested as spies in Iran in 2009 and imprisoned in Evin Prison. Episcopal Church bishop John Chane and Catholic bishop Theodore McCarrick, along with representatives of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) helped negotiate the release of hikers Bauer and Fattal on a trip to Iran in September 2011.</p>
<p>In contrast to some church leaders’ lack of interest, the leadership of the Anglican Church in North America is preparing a statement to go to all of the bishops, clergy, and Christians of the denomination, urging prayer and action on behalf of Abedini and all of Iran’s persecuted Christians. Individual church members in other denominations should urge their leaders to similar actions. Although citizens of all faiths and of no faith will also show their concern and work on behalf of the human rights of these persecuted Christians, and that effort is accepted with great gratitude and humility, Abedini’s fellow Christians have a special accountability to speak out on behalf of him and all of Iran’s persecuted believers.</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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