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		<title>Israeli Right to Dominate Election</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ari-lieberman/israeli-right-to-dominate-election/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=israeli-right-to-dominate-election</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 30 Dec 2014 05:45:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ari Lieberman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=248368</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How the Left lost Israel. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Benjamin-Netanyahu.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-248369" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Benjamin-Netanyahu-427x350.jpg" alt="Israel's PM Benjamin Netanyahu meets with Canada's PM Stephen Harper on the side lines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York" width="322" height="264" /></a>In early December, Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu fired his justice and finance ministers and called for the dissolution of the parliament and new elections. Frequent internal bickering coupled with open dissention from within the ranks of his coalition partners made Netanyahu’s position untenable and forced him to act resolutely. Elections are due to be held on March 17, 2015 and if past elections are any guide, this one promises to have the requisite amount of drama and mudslinging.</p>
<p>Navigating the labyrinth of the Israeli electoral process is a daunting task. Unlike the United States which has a 2-party system, Israel is a parliamentary democracy which maintains a multi-party system of government. There are 120 parliamentary seats up for grabs in Israel’s parliament or Knesset, as it is called in Hebrew. The party which garners a majority of Knesset seats may lead but no single party in Israel’s history has ever won a majority of parliamentary seats. Parties are therefore required to form coalitions to obtain the requisite majority which often makes for strange bedfellows.</p>
<p>The economy and the security situation are two likely factors that will figure most prominently in voters&#8217; minds when they go to the polls in March. Barring an unforeseen event like a major corruption scandal, Prime Minister Netanyahu of the center-right Likud party, who has led the country since 2009, will almost certainly be the next prime minister in a coalition composed of centrist and right-wing parties.</p>
<p>Since the signing of the Oslo Accords between Israel and the PLO in 1993, there has been a rightward shift in Israeli political thinking making the likelihood of a center-right coalition more probable. This rightward trajectory has only been strengthened by Palestinian duplicity, the emergence of the Iranian nuclear threat, terrorist groups like ISIS and general upheaval in the Arab world. Netanyahu is perceived as a seasoned and experienced leader who can successfully navigate Israel through these threats. He is also credited with strengthening the Israeli economy by privatizing state-owned industries, lowering tax burdens and streamlining bureaucratic processes which hampered private sector activity.</p>
<p>The two largest parties of the center-right bloc are the Likud and Yisrael Beitenu parties. The latter is headed by Avigdor Lieberman, who currently holds the position of minister of foreign affairs. He has at times clashed with Netanyahu but the two maintain ideologically similar positions. A massive police corruption investigation into Yisrael Beitenu’s dealings has hurt the party’s standing in the polls whose splintered seats will likely go to other center-right or right-wing parties.</p>
<p>A new center-right party headed by ex-Likud minister Moshe Kahlon, called Kulanu, is projected to win between 9 and 10 seats. The right-wing Bayit Yehudi party headed by Naftali Bennet (who currently holds three ministerial portfolios) is projected to be one of the biggest beneficiaries of the current election. His party is expected to win at least 15 seats, a net gain of four, according to recent polls.</p>
<p>The former minister of finance who was fired by Netanyahu, Yair Lapid, who heads the “centrist” Yesh Atid party, is expected to be the big loser with a whopping loss of 10 seats, down to a paltry 9. Despite his criticism of Netanyahu and his party’s expected poor showing in the upcoming elections, it would be unsurprising to find him once again in a governing coalition headed by Netanyahu’s Likud party.</p>
<p>Israel no longer has a center-left party. Most of the large parties who maintained this label have dramatically shifted their positions well to the left of the Israeli mainstream which explains their consistently poor showing in recent Israeli elections. Much of Israel’s constituency views their positions on security as either naïve or dangerous. Indeed, it was the Israeli Left that rehabilitated Yassir Arafat’s international image, from terrorist pariah to international statesman. And it was the Israeli Left that exposed Israelis to a reign of terror in early 2000 through gross miscalculation and misguided foreign policies.</p>
<p>The largest leftist party is the Labor party which garnered a paltry 15 seats in the last election. Up until 1977, the Labor party was Israel’s dominant party but its credibility was tarnished by political scandal, leftist ideologues and elitist policies which disenfranchised a large segment of Israel’s constituency. A smaller leftist party called Meretz received just 6 seats. Their combined strength represents a mere shell of the center-left’s former years of dominance.</p>
<p>A third leftist party, formed just before the last election, called Hatnua, also received 6 seats. Its leader, Tzipi Livni, served as minister of justice in the current Likud-led coalition before she was fired by Netanyahu.</p>
<p>Ideologically, Livni is a leftist but in reality she is devoid of any principle and will sell herself to the highest bidder in an effort to maintain a position of influence. Within a relatively short period of time, she switched parties on three occasions, abandoning Likud to join the now near-defunct Kadima party and then forming her own Hatnua party after losing a bid for Kadima’s leadership. She has now joined forces with Labor conditioned upon an agreement that allows her to serve as prime minister on a rotating basis with Labor’s head, Isaac Herzog.</p>
<p>There are also three ultra-orthodox parties vying for seats in the upcoming elections. They are the UTJ party, the Shas party and a newly formed party which splintered from Shas called Ha’am Itanu. The ultra-orthodox parties primarily concern themselves with religious affairs and securing government funding for their respective religious institutions. They tend to lean rightward but will just as easily form a coalition with a leftist bloc for the right price. In the last election, the ultra-orthodox parties were marginalized. It is too soon to say what impact, if any, they will have in the upcoming election.</p>
<p>There are three Arab parties with a combined total of 11 seats that generally vote as a bloc. They are all anti-Israel and aside from engaging in parliamentary polemics, have no effect on Israeli policy.</p>
<p>The Obama administration would naturally like to see the emergence of a leftist coalition, one more compliant with Obama’s demands concerning Israeli concessions. This is unlikely to occur. Israelis are <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ari-lieberman/the-white-house-stabs-israel-in-the-back-again/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">distrustful</span></a> of Obama and for <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ari-lieberman/obama-vs-netanyahu/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">good reason</span></a>. They have no illusions about the prospects of peace with the Palestinians and will vote for a leader who they feel has the requisite experience in dealing with emerging threats. Despite Obama’s open <span style="color: #0433ff;"><a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ari-lieberman/obama-vs-netanyahu-whos-the-real-coward/">disdain</a></span> for Prime Minister Netanyahu, Israel’s center-right seems poised to lead again.</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 Left’s Religion of Unhappiness</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-lefts-religion-of-unhappiness/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-lefts-religion-of-unhappiness</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 03 Oct 2014 04:54:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[hatred]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=242278</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The left doesn’t want to be happy; it wants you to be miserable.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Unhappy_0.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-242279" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Unhappy_0.jpg" alt="Unhappy_0" width="295" height="264" /></a>There is no one that the left hates more than a man who does not hate, who goes through the day without outrage and who does not spend his life stewing with vindictive resentments.</p>
<p>Leftists call it “privilege” now. They have called it apathy, escapism and a hundred other things. They will find a thousand other names for it as they march through the future centuries grinding their teeth.</p>
<p>Privilege is the accusation that the very lack of resentment and grievance, neurotic responses to simple phrases and a cloud of free-floating anger, represents an ignorant oppression. The happy are only happy at the expense of the unhappy and must recognize the unhappy privilege of their happiness.</p>
<p>Leftists are missionaries of unhappiness. Their creed is salvation through anger. Their governing philosophy is to make others miserable in order to teach them how they have overlooked the misery of others. They are forever spreading misery around the world for the sake of the greater good.</p>
<p>If the left sees anyone being happy, it must immediately set out to ruin the fun. The simple joy of others turns out to be only a cover for monstrous abuses that they are determined to make everyone else see. If it’s an object, it was made by oppressed workers. If it’s a social group, it’s discriminatory. If it’s food, it makes you sick. If it’s a sport, it’s abusive. If it’s art, then it’s escapism from the misery the left creates.</p>
<p>To be of the left is to confuse perpetual outrage with righteousness. The professional leftist believes that the path to utopia on earth lies in constantly denouncing thought criminals until they have all been unthought so that only their kind of ethical and empathetic people walk the earth.</p>
<p>Like most utopians, they plan for a utopia that they could never actually live in.</p>
<p>Leftists without grievances are like an army without guns. The leftist isn’t seeking freedom from capitalism, religion, nationalism, racism, sexism, office dress codes, bar codes and any of the other great evils of the moment. His resentments came before his ideology. They are in a very real sense his ideology. These are just outrage fuel for the willfully outraged whose resentment is both culture and religion.</p>
<p>The perpetually aggrieved deeply resent those who are oblivious to their anger. It is the theme that dominates the literature, the music and the political writings of an infuriated left throwing its anger at a mindless mass that is perfectly happy collecting paychecks, living in the suburbs and watching television. It is not their prosperity that the left hates, but their uncomplicated happiness.</p>
<p>It is this uncomplicated happiness that the left sets out to ruin at all costs.</p>
<p>The left views simplicity as dishonest. It is full of secret agendas and projects this in paranoid fashion. It is always finding the subtext in everything because it brings the subtext to the table. It is forever carrying around Rorschach inkblots in its head and shouting about all the terrible things it sees around it.</p>
<p>Leftist activism is drama. It is deliberately destructive and disruptive. It glories in taking the happy lives of ordinary people and wrecking them. It plays the part of the troubled sibling, the one who is driven to destroy the happiness of the rest of the family out of his or her own willful unhappiness.</p>
<p>Happiness is a choice. It is not dependent on the condition of the individual, but on his state of mind. The essence of enduring happiness is a state of stability. Leftist politics are instability incarnate; the opposite number of happiness. That is why the left acts as the destroyer of happiness.</p>
<p>The left does not think that anyone should be happy.  It is not unhappy because it is personally enmeshed in suffering. The ideological leaders of the left tend to come from the upper classes. They know no hunger except when they are dieting. They experience so few material shortcomings that they treat poverty as a lifestyle; slumming in poor areas and showily living on a few dollars a day.</p>
<p>It is the happiness of others that makes the left unhappy. It is convinced that this happiness is unearned and illegitimate because it does not take into account how unhappy this happiness makes the left.</p>
<p>Deriving its happiness from the unhappiness of others, the left must see the destruction of happiness as moral and its victims as immoral. Happiness is selfish, it insists, while the awareness of how many evils are hidden beneath the simplistic façade of happiness is ethically enlightening. And yet its own obsession with destroying the happiness of others is the selfish way in which the left finds its happiness.</p>
<p>The left is only truly happy when it is destroying something. Its sublime transcendent moments are revolutionary. Their joy is derived not from what is being created, but from what is being destroyed. Every leftist revolution from the reign of Madame Guillotine to Obama’s election was full of vicious glee at things coming undone. Under the banner of equality, the left inaugurates inequality. Through calls for peace, it brings war and with cries of prosperity, it ushers in an age of terrible poverty.</p>
<p>The left is satanic in its original sense of ‘antagonist’. It represents the darker side of human nature. It is the ideology of those who cannot let their anger go, who gain a perverse enjoyment from their grudges and define themselves less by what they are for than by what they are against. Its followers are motivated by an endless resentment that cannot be appeased because the resentment is their purpose.</p>
<p>It is impossible to meet the left halfway or to compromise with it because it is not seeking the stable balance that so many conservatives are. It finds its true purpose in the chaos of conflict. It gains its meaning in opposition not in co-existence. To compromise with the left is to rob it of its purpose. And the left pushes back against any such efforts through renewed bursts of radicalism.</p>
<p>Conservative parties lose when they fail to come to terms with this antagonistic dynamic and assume their opponents on the left also seek a stable state that they can find common ground on. Stability is the enemy of the left. Stability is privilege. Stability is happiness. Stability is everything that the left despises.</p>
<p>The left has learned to cloak its animosity and destructive aims in positive rhetoric. It destroys economies, families and freedoms in the name of equality. Its cheering mobs realize too late that its cause is not the equality of opportunity, happiness or liberty, but poverty, misery and slavery.</p>
<p>The left does not redistribute wealth. It redistributes want. It does not want everyone to share in the happiness of others, but to be burdened with a larger burden of their miseries.</p>
<p>The left’s greatest vulnerability is its meanness of spirit. It has suffered its worst defeats at the hands of the happy warriors of the right. Its defeat comes when its malaise is contrasted with happiness, when its deep suspicion of humanity is met with patriotic optimism and when its alarmism is met with laughter.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><em>Don&#8217;t miss Shillman Journalism Fellow <strong>Daniel Greenfield</strong> on The Glazov Gang discussing <strong>&#8220;ISIS Rising&#8221;</strong>:</em></p>
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		<title>Reasons for Political Hope</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/reasons-for-political-hope-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=reasons-for-political-hope-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 03 Oct 2014 04:52:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=242261</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Four key factors working against the Left this election season. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/vote-here.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-242263" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/vote-here-450x337.jpg" alt="Americans Go To The Polls To Elect The Next U.S. President" width="308" height="231" /></a>Many Republicans are excited about the midterm elections. They see a good chance of taking over the Senate, which means they can neutralize Obama’s last few years in office. Many also are hopeful about the presidential election in 2016, though Hillary Clinton will enter that race with decided advantages. Regaining the presidency, some believe, will lead to a reprise of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, in which the country was turned from its leftward drift under Jimmy Carter.</p>
<p>Yet even if this scenario unfolds as the Republicans hope, it is doubtful the deeper structural problems of the country will be solved. The entitlement Leviathan, nourished under governments dominated by both parties, is unlikely to be reformed as significantly as it must in order to ward off looming fiscal catastrophe. Too many Republican politicians are enablers of government spending, voting to keep funding handouts like the $20 billion a year in agricultural subsidies. Others are plotting “comprehensive immigration reform,” aka amnesty, to ensure a steady supply of cheap labor.  Too many have seemingly accepted the disastrous cuts in military spending that put at risk our ability to defend our interests and security.</p>
<p>Then there are the nearly 66 million American people who reelected as president an inexperienced narcissist, serial liar, racial divider, and manifest failure. Whether they did so out of juvenile idealism, hope for racial reconciliation, or the lure of more government handouts doesn’t really matter. This lack of judgment and basic information, or sacrifice of principle to self-interest, bespeaks an electorate significant numbers of whom are unlikely to support any politician or party that seriously attempts to halt runaway entitlement spending, debt, and deficits, or to rebuild our military deterrence and reassert our will globally.</p>
<p>Yet despite these obstacles, the political order created in 1787, assaulted as it has been over the last 100 years, still possesses resources for putting us back on the right track. If we fail to take advantage of those resources and modern information technologies, we will have no one blame but our fellow citizens or ourselves for our country’s decline.</p>
<p>First and foremost, we still hold elections every 2 years, and elections have consequences. We can remain mystified that 66 million voters chose Barack Obama over Mitt Romney in 2012, but think how much worse it could have been without the 2010 midterm “shellacking,” as Obama called, that gave the House of Representatives to the Republicans. We can disagree over what the Republican House should or shouldn’t have done with their power, but they at least slowed down the slow-motion train-wreck of the Democrats’ progressive policies.</p>
<p>Regular fair and transparent elections mean that changing course is always possible. It may be that things will have to get much worse than they are now to wake up those 4 million Republicans who stayed home in 2012, or those 5 million voters who gave Obama the victory. And there’s a chance that the pain of correction will be much more severe, much more socially disruptive than anything we’ve seen in many years. But we still will have the legal right to change course when that moment comes.</p>
<p>Second, despite decades of assault on federalism, sovereign state governments still exist. They still remain what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in 1932 called a “laboratory” in which citizens can “try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” In recent years states have gone their own way on issues like gun control, voter identification laws, same-sex marriage, right-to-work laws, reduction of public employee unions’ political power, limits on abortion, or legalization of marijuana. Particularly important are the states’ right to set tax laws and business-friendly regulations that lure investment and people.</p>
<p>A comparison of California with Texas illustrates this phenomenon. As <i>Forbes</i> <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2013/07/03/texas-v-california-the-real-facts-behind-the-lone-star-states-miracle/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">reported</span></a> last year on the country’s two most populous states, “California’s state and local tax burden ranks as America’s 4th-highest compared to Texas at 45th.  California taxes a 42 percent larger share of state income than does Texas, California’s restrictive energy policies discourage oil extraction, even though it has the largest proven shale oil reserves in the nation; while its industrial electrical rates are 88 percent higher than in Texas.” As a result, in 2011 Texas’ per capita GDP surpassed California’s. No surprise, then, that between 2000 and 2012, Texas’ population growth rate doubled California’s, and that 183 Californians moved to Texas for every 100 Texans moving to California.</p>
<p>Increasing red-state success in growing their economies and liberating people from the intrusive Leviathan state will attract more and more people, even as the bankrupt blue-state policies of ruinous tax rates and over-regulation will drive more and more people away. We could then see a return to the Founders’ idea of federalism as “islands of intolerance in a sea of tolerance,” with people free to feet-vote for the political and social order they find congenial.</p>
<p>Third, American civil society––those 1.5 million associations and organizations separate from government––is still vigorous, though not as much as it was at its peak in 1970. People still belong to groups like the PTA and the Rotary Club, and still attend more than 350,000 churches. The pushback by churches and religious organizations against Obamacare’s requirement that they offer abortifacients and birth control in their health plans illustrates the impact civil society can have on public policy. More significant is the rise of the Tea Party, a truly grassroots movement that quickly organized in 2009, and by the summer its members were confronting politicians at “town-hall” events, a display of direct political accountability to the people more typical of early America or ancient Athens. There is no question that the Republicans’ victory in the 2010 midterm was made possible by Tea Party activists.</p>
<p>Finally, new communication technologies have broken the monopoly liberals once held over information and commentary. Before the rise of talk-radio in the 80s, political opinion was controlled by a few score network news anchors, magazine editors, and syndicated columnists. Today there are hundred of thousands of voices and opinions on cable news networks like Fox News, blogs, on-line magazines like <i>FrontPage</i>, websites, social networks like Facebook, and video sites like YouTube. It’s clear that the persistence of Fox News in reporting the Benghazi debacle and the IRS scandal have kept these administration failures alive in the public square.</p>
<p>Of course some of these sites are frequently venues for misinformation, propaganda, and transient trivia. But they also provide ordinary citizens with a democratic virtual town square in which lies are exposed, truths hidden by the establishment media revealed, and opinions aired to raucous challenge and debate. Don’t forget, the Tea Party could become a national organization nearly overnight because of a YouTube video and the Drudge Report. Still protected by the First Amendment, this virtual town square gives everyone the opportunity to exercise their right to free speech, and to mobilize resistance to the political status quo.</p>
<p>The resources, then, are there, and they more than any one election give us hope. We just have to make use of them. It is still in doubt whether the 2 terms of Barack Obama have represented a permanent change in the American political character, a shift much farther to the left than this country has ever experienced; or whether the unique circumstances of electing the first black president will be a one-off, and the nation will return to its traditional center-right character, and restore our fiscal sanity and our global leadership. Whatever the outcome, it will be the responsibility of the people to use resources of the Constitution to get our country back on track.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
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		<title>Excerpts from David Horowitz&#8217;s &#8216;Take No Prisoners&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/excerpts-from-david-horowitzs-take-no-prisoners-1/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=excerpts-from-david-horowitzs-take-no-prisoners-1</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 20 Aug 2014 04:57:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=239073</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Unveiling the battle plan for defeating the Left. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #323333;"><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/611d4mEhzuL._SL300_.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-239015" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/611d4mEhzuL._SL300_.jpg" alt="611d4mEhzuL._SL300_" width="266" height="266" /></a>Editor&#8217;s note: Below are select excerpts from Freedom Center President David Horowitz&#8217;s new book, &#8220;Take No Prisoners: The Battle Plan for Defeating the Left.&#8221; </em></p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><em><strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Take-No-Prisoners-Battle-Defeating/dp/1621572560/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1406631034&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=take+no+prisoners">Order your copy of &#8220;Take No Prisoners.&#8221; </a> </strong></em></p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><strong>On the failure of the Republican Party to answer the Democrats’ accusations:</strong></p>
<blockquote>
<p style="color: #323333;">Republicans have lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections, yet they seem unable to learn basic facts from their losses. Year after year and election after election, the Democrats’ campaign themes are monotonously the same. They scare voters by accusing Republicans of imaginary crimes. And always the same crimes: Republicans wage wars on women, on minorities, and on the vulnerable. They defend the rich and don’t care about the poor. Their policies inflict pain on working families to benefit the wealthy few. Year after year, the Democrats repeat these attacks, and year after year, Republicans fail to come up with effective responses. Worse, they don’t present voters with answers that neutralize the attacks, or take the battle to the enemy camp. (p. 1)</p>
</blockquote>
<p style="color: #323333;"><strong>On how the Republican Party can become effective again:</strong></p>
<blockquote>
<p style="color: #323333;">In losing the political war over Iraq, Republicans lost the national security narrative, which is why they are tongue-tied today when it comes to issues of war and peace. Call it the ‘Iraq War Syndrome.’… Three years later, when Obama delivered Iraq to Iran, no Republican accused him of betraying the Americans who gave their lives to make Iraq independent and free…The only way to reverse this dangerous trend is for Republicans to renew their role as guardians of the nation’s security, to educate the electorate about the threat posed by Islamic supremacists, and to challenge the Democrats’ seditious efforts to appease their malign agendas. It is also the Republicans’ only path to an electoral majority. (p. 37-38).</p>
</blockquote>
<p style="color: #323333;"><strong>On how Progressives view their strategy:</strong></p>
<blockquote>
<p style="color: #323333;">Progressives do not openly call for the creation of a totalitarian state, but that is the logic of their desire: to compel people to do what is good for them, down to the last Big Gulp. Lenin and the Bolsheviks did not set out to create a gulag state that would execute millions and crush human liberty… If you believe that the cause of human suffering is ‘society,’ and if you believe that by fundamentally transforming society you can change human nature and end human suffering and need, what means will you deny yourself, what opposition will you not suppress, to see that the transformation takes place? Because progressives see themselves as social redeemers and their goal as saving the world, they regard politics as a religious war… it is why the politics of personal destruction is their politics of choice and why they can commit character assassinations without regrets. Obama never apologized for accusing his opponent of killing a cancer patient during the election campaign, because saving humanity means never having to say you’re sorry. (p. 44)</p>
</blockquote>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
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		<title>Pro-Israel Hollywood Speaks Out</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/mark-tapson/pro-israel-hollywood-speaks-out-1/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=pro-israel-hollywood-speaks-out-1</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/mark-tapson/pro-israel-hollywood-speaks-out-1/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 20 Aug 2014 04:42:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Tapson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gal Gadot]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hollywood conservatives]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=239070</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Hollywood conservatives get bolder.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/gal-gadot.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-238912" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/gal-gadot-450x253.jpg" alt="gal-gadot" width="352" height="198" /></a>Many celebrities recently have voiced their concern for innocents dying in Gaza. Unfortunately, since the entertainment biz leans heavily to the left, they do so by turning a blind eye to Hamas’ responsibility and unfairly bashing Israel. But there is more support for Israel in Hollywood than one might suspect, and more and more conservative stars are daring to express that support unabashedly.</p>
<p>In the wake of their highly controversial participation in an open letter from Spain’s artistic community criticizing Israel’s “genocide” of so-called Palestinians, husband-and-wife actors Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz seemed shocked at the backlash they received, including from colleagues in Tinseltown. Outspoken Hollywood conservative Jon Voight <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/jon-voight-pens-letter-ignorant-723007">blasted</a> Bardem and Cruz and their ilk in his own open letter defending Israel. Bardem and Cruz both followed up with statements attempting to clarify their position and defending themselves against charges of anti-Semitism.</p>
<p>Now Dean Cain, of television Superman fame, <a href="http://virtualjerusalem.com/culture.php?Itemid=13884">said</a> recently on Fox’s <em>Outnumbered</em> that in the Gaza conflict, it is Israel that best represents Superman’s credo, “truth, justice, and the American way.” He declared that as a democracy threatened by terrorists, Israel deserves our wholehearted support. “Clearly Hamas are terrorists,” said Cain, “and if rockets were being fired from Mexico into my home town of San Diego, Americans wouldn’t accept that for a minute. We’d be taking over that part of Mexico and making it part of California.” Dean must be thinking of the pre-Obama America; today’s anti-colonialist President is more likely to surrender San Diego to Mexico.</p>
<p>Another superhero – Gal Gadot, who will play Wonder Woman in the upcoming <em>Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice</em> – <a href="http://www.inquisitr.com/1393189/wonder-woman-actress-gal-gadot-speaks-out-on-israel-gaza-crisis/">spoke out</a> as well via social media, posting this on Facebook:</p>
<blockquote><p>I am sending my love and prayers to my fellow Israeli citizens. Especially to all the boys and girls who are risking their lives protecting my country against the horrific acts conducted by Hamas, who are hiding like cowards behind women and children…We shall overcome!!! Shabbat Shalom!</p></blockquote>
<p>Gadot is a former Miss Israel who served two years in the Israeli Defense Forces. In a 2011 interview, she stated that</p>
<blockquote><p>I don’t feel like I’m an ambassador for my country, but I do talk about Israel a lot – I enjoy telling people about where I come from and my religion. I find that people in the U.S., especially in Hollywood, tend to have positive opinions on Israel – both Jewish and non-Jewish people alike. But when I travel to Europe, people often don’t know as much about Israel, and sadly a lot of them have a negative impression of the country.</p></blockquote>
<p>Perhaps she <em>should</em> be an ambassador, because she handled that last sentence very diplomatically. That was in 2011; these days Europe is a raging hotbed of open Jew-hatred. In any case, bravo for her.</p>
<p>Others in the entertainment industry have spoken out as well, among them: the always blunt shock jock Howard Stern, who <a href="http://www.tpnn.com/2014/07/24/howard-stern-obliterates-caller-if-youre-anti-israel-then-youre-anti-america/">asserted</a> that if you’re anti-Israel, you’re anti-American; the even blunter comedienne Joan Rivers, who <a href="http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/entertainment/2014/08/04/joan-rivers-tells-selena-gomez-to-shut-up-about-gaza-conflict/">advised</a> pro-“Palestinian” pop stars Rihanna and Selena Gomez to “shut up, put on pretty clothes, and get themselves off of drugs”; Israeli supermodel Bar Refaeli, who <a href="http://instagram.com/p/qyK3WCsUYO/">Instagramed</a> her respect for the “Brave young men who have protected our country from terror. My heart goes out to their families. They will always be remembered and respected #RIP”; <em>Big Bang Theory</em> actress Mayim Bialik, who donated money to buy bulletproof vests for the IDF; and actors and perennial Twitter warriors Adam Baldwin and Nick Searcy.</p>
<p>A particularly compelling voice was that of Ryan Kavanaugh, CEO of entertainment studio Relativity Media and grandson of a Holocaust survivor. In an <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ryan-kavanaugh-gaza-hollywood-stand-725333">open letter</a> to industry paper <em>The Hollywood Reporter</em>, Kavanaugh wrote a passionate defense of Israel and urged his Hollywood cohorts to “be thankful you live in and around Hollywood,” because</p>
<blockquote><p>If you&#8217;re a woman, gay, Christian, Jewish or just non-Muslim and reading this, be thankful you don’t live in Gaza. Not only would you not be allowed to read this, you probably would be publicly executed. If you’ve ever voiced an opinion that isn’t shared by Hamas publicly or merely attended a meeting where people are discussing anything Hamas does not support, be thankful you don&#8217;t live in Gaza, as you probably would be publicly executed.</p></blockquote>
<p>He pointed out that “Israel is one of the most creative nations on the planet, in every dimension of life — invention, research, technology and yes, the arts.” By contrast, Hamas is “one of the most anti-Western, anti-creative, violent forces on the planet”:</p>
<blockquote><p>So when we see some in Hollywood — truly gifted artists and good people — aligning themselves with views that would be supported by Hamas, which fires rockets frequently and indiscriminately at innocent Tel Aviv citizens, we have to wonder what they&#8217;re thinking. Are they thinking?</p></blockquote>
<p>No. Thinking is an impediment to pushing an anti-Israel narrative that doesn’t conform to the facts. It also frequently contradicts feeling, which is what celebrity progressives rely on to form their passionate political positions.</p>
<p>Kavanaugh pulled no punches about Hamas being “virulently committed to killing Jews and destroying Israel.” Paraphrasing Benjamin Netanyahu, Kavanaugh states that “If Israel were to put down its arms tomorrow, Israel would be decimated and all its citizens killed within 24 hours. If Hamas were to put down its arms tomorrow, there would be immediate peace.” Then he asks his Hollywood colleagues, “How can a Hollywood community so tolerant … tolerate this utter tyranny?”</p>
<p>Of course, the answer to this question is that Hollywood progressives <em>aren’t</em> tolerant – progressivism is ultimately totalitarian. Instead of standing up for Western liberal democracies like Israel (or the United States, for that matter) that support human rights, civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the rest, Hollywood leftists have allied themselves, either unwittingly or intentionally, with Islamic supremacists sworn to bring those democracies to their knees.</p>
<p>If more showbiz conservatives keep speaking out, perhaps their progressive counterparts will have less of a stranglehold on Hollywood.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<title>Why Conservatives Win Elections and Lose the War</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ben-shapiro/why-conservatives-win-elections-and-lose-the-war/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-conservatives-win-elections-and-lose-the-war</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 16 Apr 2014 04:42:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ben Shapiro]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Elections]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Health Insurance]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=223541</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How the Right is sowing the seeds of its own demise. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/healthcare-human-right.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-223543" alt="Occupy Wall Street supporters march call" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/healthcare-human-right-450x332.jpg" width="315" height="232" /></a>On April 1, 2014, President Barack Obama triumphantly announced that 7.1 million Americans had selected a health insurance plan through Obamacare. In doing so, he nastily labeled his political opposition uncaring and unfeeling. &#8220;Why are folks working so hard for people not to have health insurance?&#8221; Obama asked. &#8220;Why are they so mad about the idea of people having health insurance?&#8221;</p>
<p>That night, Comedy Central&#8217;s Stephen Colbert sat behind his desk at &#8220;The Colbert Report,&#8221; playing his version of a conservative: vicious, mean and cruel. &#8220;I wish I could come to you with some good news, but the worst imaginable thing has happened: Millions of Americans are going to get health care.&#8221;</p>
<p>This is why conservatives lose. They lose because while they proclaim that Obama&#8217;s signature legislation fails on the merits, raising costs and lowering access to vital services, the left surges forth with a different message: Conservatives are rotten to the core.</p>
<p>This message doesn&#8217;t just emanate from politicians in Washington. Entertainers like Colbert parrot back White House talking points in the guise of mockery. For many young people who get their news from Colbert, the only conservatism they see comes out of the mouth of a hard-core leftist playing a conservative who doesn&#8217;t exist. There is no conservative sitting up nights wondering how to deprive Americans of health insurance. But many young people don&#8217;t know that. They simply assume that the person Colbert is parodying <i>must </i>exist — otherwise, his satire isn&#8217;t satire at all, but a political smear job, an ugly and stereotypical blackfacing of conservatives.</p>
<p>For Colbert, to be funny, one of two alternatives must be true: Either his repulsive character must be based on a core reality — conservatives are evil — or his audience must believe in that core unreality.</p>
<p>With the help of Obama and an entertainment industry dedicated full time to the defacing of conservatives&#8217; character, the latter has certainly become the case. Too many Americans now perceive conservatives as morally deficient. All it has cost is hundreds of millions of dollars and several decades of consistent attacks springing from Hollywood and the political world.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s why so many Americans now seem comfortable giving the government power to violate freedom of conscience for conservatives: Evil people don&#8217;t deserve freedom and therefore, can be deprived of it. People who consider themselves civil libertarians suddenly find their inner totalitarian when it comes to Christian-owned bakeries. That can only happen when those people become convinced that Christian-owned bakeries are fronts of hatred and darkness. And <i>that </i>can only happen when they are falsely maligned as such, over and over again.</p>
<p>Conservatives can win short-term political fights and lose the war for hearts and minds. And that&#8217;s precisely what has happened, thanks to the lack of moral clarity on the right. It&#8217;s not enough to be good on policy. Americans must think of you as good. By neglecting that deeper battle, conservatives sow the seeds of their own destruction — and the destruction of American freedoms, as well.</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>Welcome the Hip-Hop World into the Conservative Tent</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ronn-torossian/welcome-the-hip-hop-world-into-the-conservative-tent/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=welcome-the-hip-hop-world-into-the-conservative-tent</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 20 Mar 2014 04:59:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ronn Torossian]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Beyoncé]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bill O'Reilly]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Conservatism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hip-hop]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=221413</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Hip-hop crosses racial and class boundaries -- and so should the Right. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/featured-image-hip-hop.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-221436" alt="featured-image-hip-hop" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/featured-image-hip-hop-437x350.jpg" width="262" height="210" /></a>Conservatives were outraged at my article, <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ronn-torossian/bill-oreilly-is-wrong-jay-z-is-worthy-of-americas-respect/">Bill O’Reilly Is Wrong: Jay-Z Is Worthy of America’s Respect</a>, published earlier this week.  While hip-hop transcends cultural, racial, ethnic, social and class lines, it hasn’t yet transcended political lines. Conservatives have little understanding of what hip-hop is and the tremendous impact this powerful movement has had upon popular culture. Worse is that they condemn it without knowing anything about it.</p>
<p>At CPAC this month, former Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie, who is running for Senate in Virginia, spoke of the need to reach out to minorities and other groups instead of letting the left “fill that vacuum.” He claimed, “I do think we have huge opportunities here to make gains with young voters.”  However, consider the recent blanket condemnations of Jay-Z, the greatest rapper alive and one of the greatest artists of all time. How can one even begin to think that the Right is even remotely inclusive or that anyone in the communities that love hip-hop &#8212; black, white, young and not-so-young &#8212; would ever vote for a conservative?</p>
<p>Forty-four-year-old family man Jay-Z is absolutely not a gangster rapper. For Bill O’Reilly to selectively criticize hip-hop, saying that young males idolize “these guys with the hats on backwards” and “terrible rap lyrics,” and that these “gangsta rappers” and “tattoo guys” need to speak to kids and tell them that they’ve “got to stop the disruptive behavior or you’re going to wind up in a morgue or in prison” is a double standard. What does wearing a hat backwards have to do with anything? Why not mention Marc Zuckerberg’s hood? What makes these “gangsta rappers” different from actors in violent movies like Vin Diesel or Jason Statham? Or someone with offensive speech like Howard Stern?</p>
<p>If conservatives hope to succeed in reaching the minds – and votes – of an enormous segment of society that crosses all American boundaries, they need to better understand hip-hop.  News flash: The majority of hip-hop consumers aren’t black, and hip-hop reflects the mosaic that represents this great country.  While there are countless terrible things that are indefensible about the hip-hop industry, many of these problems are shared by the likes of Madonna, Lady Gaga, Brittney Spears, Miley Cyrus, Justin Bieber and other popular white performers.</p>
<p>Moreover, the reality is that so much of hip-hop is uplifting and positive. Countless movies, video games and other forms of entertainment unfortunately celebrate bad behavior &#8211; yet conservative media targets hip-hop.  This double standard should come to an end.</p>
<p>Bill O’Reilly claimed Beyoncé is not a good role model for young girls, stating,</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;She puts out a new album with a video that glorifies having sex in the back of a limousine. Teenage girls look up to Beyoncé, particularly girls of color. … Why on earth would this woman do that?&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>Why didn&#8217;t O’Reilly ask this question during the many years of the amazingly successful cable series &#8220;Sex in the City,&#8221; which glorified sex among single women? (Beyoncé at least is married.) As David Letterman rightly noted, why didn’t O’Reilly comment on Miley Cyrus swinging nude on a wrecking ball or her “twerking” Robin Thicke at an awards show watched by teenagers? O’Reilly said, “I missed that. I don’t know how.”  Selective commentary – even if his statements are right.</p>
<p>Conservatives should spend more time listening to hip-hop and<b> </b>making an effort to understand urban culture. (Hint: Accentuate the positive.) Like the music or not, hip-hop is the most popular form of music today and it isn’t going anywhere. It’s a new way of thinking, which crosses racial and demographic boundaries.  Kids today in Scarsdale dress the same as kids in Harlem, and South Central doesn’t look that different style-wise than Beverly Hills. (This white, 39-year-old <a href="http://www.5wpr.com">PR firm</a> owner listens to hip-hop daily – and so do people older and younger, in every state in the nation, of every color of skin.)</p>
<p>Hip-hop moguls like Jay-Z, Sean Combs, and Usher are people who have that hip-hop spirit – <em>there&#8217;s nothing getting in my way, nothing stopping me from getting where I want to go</em>.  Hip-hop is about ownership, about self-reliance, and empowerment.<b> </b>What could be more conservative than that? Conservatives are hypocritical when attacking the capitalist business of hip-hop. Hip-hop and the urban culture has helped to create an entire new area of economic opportunity for people who were generally outside of the system.  How many millionaires have been created because of this industry? How many jobs?</p>
<p>Hip-hop is about creation &#8212; owning something.  Is that not the story of this great country? And is not the cultural significance of that – particularly for the underprivileged and immigrants amongst us &#8211; something conservatives must celebrate? At some point, people of the hip-hop world, who have mostly been locked out, should be heard by conservatives in the land of opportunity.  Even if certain attributes of the hip-hop business aren’t good, one must not throw the baby out with the bathwater.</p>
<p>Recently, I went shopping without a watch while wearing a sweat suit. The store was empty, but still I had to wait a long time for one of the countless salespeople to come over to see what I wanted. I asked to see an expensive watch, and the clerk asked me, with a straight face, if I was a construction worker before he took the piece out of the case. That “language” certainly sent me a message – if you aren’t dressed our way we don’t think you can buy from us. It also sent me away. They ignored the fact that I could easily afford the uber-expensive watch.</p>
<p>In many ways, the message the watch store sent me is the message conservatives are sending hip-hop fans. Tattoos and hats on backwards don’t define a person. Hip-hop culture is bigger than the Beatles – it has impacted culture indefinitely and isn’t going anywhere. Youth culture is always revolutionary and wants to do things differently – from Elvis’s swiveling hips to Madonna in the ‘80s.</p>
<p>The Right’s attacks on hip-hop are wrong and misguided. When we conservatives proclaim our desire to be inclusive, how can we have so little tolerance and understanding of a phenomenon as popular and American as hip-hop?  Hip-hop crosses over boundaries – now conservatives need to let them in.</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 Anti-Zionist Challenge to the Jewish Establishment</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/the-anti-zionist-challenge-to-the-jewish-establishment/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-anti-zionist-challenge-to-the-jewish-establishment</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/the-anti-zionist-challenge-to-the-jewish-establishment/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 19 Feb 2014 05:40:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[anti-Zionism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[boycott]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[J Street]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jewish]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[right]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=219191</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the target of groups like J Street is not the Right, but the leftist Jewish establishment.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/jews-boycotting-israel.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-219192" alt="jews boycotting israel" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/jews-boycotting-israel.jpg" width="287" height="214" /></a>Originally published by the<a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-Ed-Contributors/Our-world-The-anti-Zionist-challenge-to-the-Jewish-establishment-341701"> Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p>There is a difference between speech and war. Both are forms of expression, to be sure. But the essence of the former is engagement, and the essence of the latter is destruction.</p>
<p>This distinction is apparently too subtle for many of Israel’s Supreme Court justices. On Sunday, the Court heard arguments on the constitutionality of the 2011 Anti-Boycotts law. The law allows targets of boycotts to sue boycotters for damages in civil courts, and empowers the finance minister to revoke the non-profit status of NGOs that engage in boycotts. It is being challenged by a consortium of foreign-funded, radical, anti-Zionist NGOs.</p>
<p>The essence of boycotts is destruction, not engagement.</p>
<p>True, boycotters express an opinion when they boycott their targets. But just so, armies express an opinion when they bomb enemy targets.</p>
<p>The question is not whether in levying boycotts, the boycotters are expressing a position. It is whether the primary purpose of a boycott is to express an opinion or to annihilate its target.</p>
<p>As a form of economic warfare, boycotts aim to harm the profitability of targeted entities and either force them to toe the boycotters’ line, or force them out of business. That is, the aim is either coercive or eliminationist.</p>
<p>As a form of cultural warfare, the goal of boycotts of cultural or academic institutions is to place their targets outside of polite society, and so annihilate them culturally, professionally and socially.</p>
<p>In other words, unlike other forms of expression, the principle aim of boycotts is not engagement, or even incitement. It is destruction. Therefore, the question of whether or not boycotts are also a form of speech is entirely irrelevant.</p>
<p>But not for Israel’s Supreme Court justices. In their hearing on Sunday, the justices insisted that boycotts are primarily a force of engagement and as such, protected speech.</p>
<p>Or at least some boycotts are.</p>
<p>As they argued it, there is a distinction between boycotts of Israeli entities within and beyond the 1949 armistice lines.</p>
<p>In maintaining faith with the absurd claim that boycotts are indistinguishable from newspaper columns, and then making a distinction between boycotts within the armistice lines and boycotts of Israeli entities operating beyond them, the Court did more than show its hand. It exposed a leftist establishment’s incapacity to deal with the anti-Zionist Left.</p>
<p>For the past 25 years, the leftist establishment has coalesced around the view that there is a distinction between Israel within the 1949 armistice lines and Israel beyond those lines. The former is entirely legitimate.</p>
<p>The latter is the bane of Israel’s existence.</p>
<p>The justices tried to convince the attorneys for the petitioners to accept their view. But the anti-Zionist petitioners would have none of it. As they see it, since Israel is a democracy, and the vast majority of Israelis do not agree with their views, the entire country is illegitimate.</p>
<p>As Dan Yakir from Association for Civil Rights in Israelexplained, all of Israel is tied up to the so-called occupation.</p>
<p>So if the justices think it is okay to boycott the areas of the country that they would like to part with, they have to accept a boycott of areas of the country they wish to keep.</p>
<p>Building on this view, Adalah’s Hassan Jabareen insisted that all of Israel is politically disputed. And as a consequence, all of it is the legitimate target of boycott.</p>
<p>The petitioners’ rejection of all of Israel, rather than just parts of it, puts the justices and the leftist establishment as a whole in a difficult position.</p>
<p>They have to make a choice between the public, which sees no distinction between Ariel and Tel Aviv, and the anti-Zionists who also see no distinction between Ariel and Tel Aviv. That is, they have to decide what is more important to them – being Zionists, when that mantle is worn by the type of Jews they have spent their lives trying to distinguish themselves from, and being anti-Zionists, and so denying their right to exist.</p>
<p>The Israeli leftist establishment’s dilemma is not unique. The American Jewish establishment faces the same brutal choice. The American Jewish establishment followed along after the Israeli leftist establishment when it embraced the PLO in 1993. Ever since, the American Jewish establishment has drawn a distinction between consensus Israel, within the 1949 armistice lines, which they supported, and controversial Israel, outside those lines, which they marginalized, or debased.</p>
<p>And just as the activist Israeli Left has joined the campaign to destroy the Jewish state and so is now forcing the leftist establishment to either side with the public it holds in contempt or with the anti-Zionist Left that rejects Israel completely, so the activist American Jewish Left has become a leading voice in the campaign to criminalize Israel. Today it is forcing the Jewish establishment to make a choice between siding with all Israelis, including the Israeli Right, or siding with the likes of J Street whose aim is to delegitimize the organized American Jewish community’s right to defend Israel.</p>
<p>On Monday, a new documentary about J Street called The J Street Challenge, debuted in Miami. The film, produced by the social action group Americans for Peace and Tolerance, shows how J Street, which claims to be pro-peace and pro-Israel, seeks to eliminate American Jewish groups on the Right and weaken overall American Jewish support for Israel by delegitimizing the American Jewish organizational structure.</p>
<p>In July 2010, as the IRS was engaged in delaying and denying the applications for the non-profit status of groups that campaigned for limited government, J Street asked the IRS to cancel the non-profit status of American charities that support Israeli entities located in or operating beyond the 1949 armistice lines.</p>
<p>Since then, a dozen completely legitimate, law-abiding charitable organizations have been embroiled in lawsuits or audits and have been forced to fight for their institutional lives.</p>
<p>The J Street Challenge provides footage of speeches by J Street leaders and founders who question Israel’s right to exist and defame the American Jewish community for supporting Israel. In one such speech, J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami used the classical anti-Semitic imagery of a Jewish hydra suffocating the world in his description of the American Jewish establishment.</p>
<p>As he put it, “I think we’re taking on much more than AIPA C. I think it is the Conference of Presidents. It’s the American Jewish Committee. It’s the lobbying structures of the Federations. It’s the network of JCRCs, the community relations councils. It’s a multi-layered, multi-headed hydra.”</p>
<p>The most outspoken critics of Israeli anti-Zionist NGOs and J Street are on the Right. And that makes sense. It isn’t hard for rightists to make the distinction between speeches and extortion.</p>
<p>But the primary target of these groups is not the Right.</p>
<p>It is the leftist Jewish establishment, in Israel and in the US. And as J Street’s nearly unchallenged rise in the US, and the Court’s self-defeating incoherence on the boycott campaign indicate, over the decades, the establishment Left has become so dependent on rejecting the Right for its own sense of identity, that it is no longer clear whether its members are capable of siding with the hated Right against their common foes.</p>
<p><em>The author’s new book, The Israeli Solution: A One- State Plan for Peace in the Middle East, will be released on March 4.</em></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>A Witness</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jay-nordlinger/a-witness/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-witness</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jay-nordlinger/a-witness/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 17 Jan 2014 05:19:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jay Nordlinger]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Black Book]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Conservative]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[David Horowitz]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[right]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=216652</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A conservative appreciation of David Horowitz.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><strong><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/lpk.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-216665" alt="lpk" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/lpk-450x293.jpg" width="284" height="185" /></a>Originally published by <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/368222/witness-part-i-jay-nordlinger">National Review Online.</a><br />
</strong></em></p>
<p>I’ll tell you what the “smart” view of David is: He was a radical of the Left who became a radical of the Right. He was an extremist then and is an extremist now, with the same nasty and flamboyant style. Express this view, and almost every liberal and conservative head will nod: “Yup, yup, that’s how it is.” It is nonsense. No one will contradict you if you say it — but you’ll be a fool.</p>
<p>I cherish a comment that Hendrik Hertzberg, the <em>New Yorker</em> writer, once made to Collier &amp; Horowitz. He said, “You were apologists for Communism then and you are apologists for anti-Communism now.” They are not merely apologists for anti-Communism; they are anti-Communists, as all decent people are (though they will not necessarily be published in <em>The New Yorker</em>).</p>
<p>If you want to classify David politically, you can call him a conservative — with a healthy dose of Hayek in him. “My life experience had led me to conclude that not only was changing the world an impossible dream, but the refusal to recognize it as such was the source of innumerable individual tragedies and of epic miseries that human beings had inflicted on each other in my lifetime through the failed utopias of Nazism and Communism.” Seldom will you read a more conservative sentence. And you will read many more like it, in David’s collected writings. He is constantly inveighing against ideologies, party lines, rigidities.</p>
<p>David is known as a hothead and flamethrower. A rhetorical goon. He can be that. He can also be coolly cerebral. And he can be elegiac, lyrical — as in personal memoirs such as the one about his late daughter, <em>A Cracking of the Heart</em>. He has many moods, many styles. And make no mistake: He can do style.</p>
<p>Christopher Hitchens was supposed to be the most stylish writer and polemicist of his time. But consider an exchange between him and David on the radio. David said something rude — i.e., something true — about Castro. And Hitchens, with his practiced sneer, said, “How dare you? How <em>dare</em> you?” David replied, “Christopher, aren’t we getting a little old for how-dare-yous?” The more stylish person in that exchange was not Hitchens (who, like Paul Berman, would do some political sobering up).</p>
<p>The question of David’s reputation, or standing, is interesting: He has legions of fans, and legions of detractors, some of whom occupy high places. The Left won’t deal with him, of course. He has their number, he has kept book on them — and they resent it. Writes David, “An ideological <em>omertà</em> is the Left’s response to its vindicated critics, especially those who emerged from its own ranks.” I’m reminded of something a liberal intellectual and policymaker once said to Abigail Thernstrom (who migrated from left to right). He said, “I don’t like debating you, Abby, because you always know what I’m thinking, and you know what I’m going to say before I say it.”</p>
<p>And the conservatives? Have they welcomed David with open arms, gratitude, and delight? Not really. They have often been snippy and scornful about David. Grudging about him. How to explain it? I’m sure I can’t, satisfactorily, but I will have a go:</p>
<p>David, they say, can be harsh, obnoxious, and generally impossible. I have no doubt he can. He can also be a peach. Furthermore, David is an activist — not just an intellectual, but an activist. And some conservatives are uncomfortable with activism. They would rather observe, opine, and sigh. David wants to take up cudgels and win. He says to lazy or defeatist conservatives, “Wake up! Fight back! The Left is eating your lunch, but it need not be so!” David is fearless in an environment marked by some fearfulness. He is an upsetter of the apple cart, and the upsetting of the apple cart is not very conservative. When David goes into a university and makes a fuss about the curriculum, some conservatives are embarrassed. They say, “Stop making a fuss. It may cause them to dislike us even more. Plus, aren’t we born to be an oppressed minority?” Some conservatives are content with dhimmitude. And, frankly, there are conservatives who have the sneaking hope that they will be approved by the <em>New York Times</em> et al. “Look, I may be on the right, but I’m not an extremist and nuisance like Horowitz, you know. You can bring me home to dinner.”</p>
<p>Willmoore Kendall once made a wicked remark about Cleanth Brooks, his colleague at Yale: “Cleanth is always the second-most-conservative person in the room.”</p>
<p>In a way, David is a man without a home — an independent, a republic unto himself. Speaking at his alma mater in 2009, he said, “Fifty years ago, my radical views caused me to feel like an outsider at Columbia. Returning as a conservative, I find myself an outsider still — and again it is because of my political views.”</p>
<p>As I was reading <em>My Life and Times</em>, I kept writing in the margins, “True, true!” And as I read about David’s thoughts and experiences, I couldn’t help thinking of my own. Other readers will find the same, I’m sure. I kept thinking, “Yes, that’s what I saw, that’s what I heard, that’s what I felt.” Take the matter of human rights: The people around me constantly yelled about Pinochet’s Chile, Marcos’s Philippines, and, above all, apartheid South Africa. And yell they should have. But what about the people behind the Iron Curtain? And in China, North Korea, and Vietnam? And in Cuba? If you prick or torture them, do they not bleed? Aren’t human rights for them, too?</p>
<p>Obviously, no one can agree with David on every point in the hundreds of pages of Volume 1, or in the thousands of pages of the volumes to come. That would be absurd. In all likelihood, David doesn’t agree with David on every point. (Do you agree with everything you’ve said for the past 25 or 30 years?) But I always want to know what David has to say. Early in that Columbia speech, he praised a professor, saying, “He was there . . . to teach us <em>how</em> to think and not to tell us <em>what</em> to think — therefore to respect the divergent opinions of others. I am afraid this is a vanishing ethos in our culture and a dying pedagogical art in our university classrooms today.” Oh, yes. Like everyone else, David will sometimes tell you what to think. But he is more interested in suggesting how you should think.</p>
<p>Once he was asked, “Do you ever feel that you are wasting your breath? Do you think that truth will ever matter? No matter what you prove or disprove, in the end the truth will remain in the shadows of what people want to hear and want to believe.” David answered, “I agree more than I care to with this observation.” For my part, I can say that David has not wasted his breath. He learned important things in the first stages of his life, and has learned important things since. He has wanted to impart what he knows, and he has many beneficiaries. Everyone? Of course not. Enough beneficiaries, though — more than most ever have.</p>
<p>What has driven him, I think, is what drove Whittaker Chambers and lots of others who left Communism and dedicated themselves to anti-Communism: a desire to tell the truth, and to have other people know the truth. A desire to be free of lies, and to counter them. “Live not by lies!” Solzhenitsyn implored, during the long years of the Soviet Union. Lies want to govern everything, and do, if you let them. David was sick of lies: about the Soviet Union, about the Panthers, about Vietnam, about everything. And he burns to know and tell the truth, insofar as that is possible.</p>
<p>This quality — a respect for the truth, an aversion to lies — has always existed in him, even if it has been suppressed or superseded at times. Age 14, he was walking across the Triborough Bridge to attend a rally for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the atomic spies for the Soviet Union. A political mentor was explaining to him that lying was justified, for revolutionary purposes. David knew this was wrong — felt in his stomach that it was. “The renegade Horowitz,” even then!</p>
<p>“Great is truth,” they say, “and will prevail.” It will, yes — but even if it didn’t, it would still be great.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>David Horowitz</strong> discussing <a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/productlist.html?key=DBERMFBVMXYH">The Black Book of the American Left</a> in <strong>The Glazov Gang&#8217;s</strong> two-part video series below:</em><br />
<b></b></p>
<p><strong>Part I:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/QL9WUvnJ_Cs" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Part II:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/eeN2K6romr8" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>To sign up for </strong><em><b>The Glazov Gang</b></em><strong>: </strong><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><b>Click here</b></a><strong>.</strong></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>A Left-Wing America Stands Alone</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/a-left-wing-america-stands-alone/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-left-wing-america-stands-alone</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/a-left-wing-america-stands-alone/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 26 Dec 2013 05:50:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[America]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[liberal]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=213911</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[While Europe goes right, America stays left back.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/obama-biden.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-213914" alt="obama-biden" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/obama-biden-438x350.jpg" width="307" height="245" /></a>American progressives like to think of their country as backward and reactionary compared to Europe. And they have never been more right than now when Europe and the rest of the First World have gone right while America under Obama has been left back.</p>
<p>Recently Australia, Japan and Norway welcomed in conservative governments. Tony Abbott, Australia’s new prime minister, is a former heavyweight boxer who attended Oxford and is putting a spoke in the wheel of the Global Warming ecohoax. Japan is casting off its pacifism and standing up to the People’s Republic of China and Norway gave its left-wing government the boot and moved in “Iron Erma” in a coalition with the libertarian Progress Party which opposes taxes and immigration and supports free enterprise.</p>
<p>Australia, Japan and Norway are not outliers. The majority of First World countries now have conservative governments.</p>
<p>Canada has embraced a patriotic foreign policy and energy exploration under Prime Minister Stephen Harper. In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his conservative Likud party have continued to move Israel’s economy toward free enterprise. And even in the UK, Prime Minister David Cameron, for all his follies, is a conservative, even if he is more McCain than DeMint, and has pushed for deregulation and welfare reform.</p>
<p>Sweden’s center-right coalition government has won re-election for the first time in a century. Norway and Sweden, countries that Americans used to consider the very embodiments of Socialism, now both have conservative governments.</p>
<p>In Germany, Angela Merkel will serve a third term as chancellor.  The Netherlands still has a conservative government which has come out against multiculturalism and the welfare state.</p>
<p>In Spain, the center-right People’s Party won the biggest majority of any party in three decades and is projected to win reelection. In Poland, the center-right Civic Platform continues to govern. In Greece, it’s the center-right New Democracy. In Portugal, it’s the Social Democratic Party and the People’s Party (somewhat on the right, despite their names). In Iceland, it’s the conservative Independence Party and the Progressive Party (also on the right, despite its name.)</p>
<p>Even Europe’s left-wing parties have had to adapt to the new economic environment. Denmark’s Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, who has been in the news lately for all the wrong reasons, has suffered a severe setback in municipal elections and is scrambling to hold her left-wing government together. And even Thorning-Schmidt only made it this far by embracing welfare reform, cutting corporate taxes and slashing unemployment benefits.</p>
<p>The rule of the radical left in the United States is very much an outlier in the rest of the First World where conservative and center-right parties predominate. The conventional First World response to the economic crisis has been to cut spending and reform welfare, while in the United States has spent more money than ever before and expanded welfare.</p>
<p>Much of Europe now favors less federalism and less immigration. The United States has expanded its federal government dramatically and both Democratic and Republican leaders support amnesty for illegal aliens at a time when immigration is politically toxic everywhere else.</p>
<p>The American left insists that historical inevitability is on its side, but it has lost nearly everywhere else.</p>
<p>America stands alone under the rule of the left, in uncontrolled spending, uncontrolled immigration and the iron hand of the welfare state.</p>
<p>America’s massive wealth and resources have allowed the left to act as if it could borrow against them indefinitely to finance its big government schemes. Smaller countries don’t have the luxury of running up infinite debts and not worrying about how they will be paid back or pretending that impossible rates of economic growth will compensate for trillion dollar deficits.</p>
<p>America is the left’s economic fantasyland because it has so much that they imagine that it will take a long time to bankrupt.</p>
<p>Europe is dominated by parliamentary democracies where it would have been difficult for an executive to stay in office on popularity and racial guilt after his actual policies had been completely discredited. In a parliamentary democracy, the 2010 midterm elections wouldn’t have just meant a Republican House of Representatives, but would have booted Obama out of the White House.</p>
<p>Conservatives denounce populist politics in America, but it’s actually the remnants of the system that safeguards political power from populist elections that has kept the Senate and the White House in the hands of the left while turning over the House of Representatives to the Republicans creating a crisis in which the populist body could do nothing, while Obama unilaterally ushered in an imperial presidency.</p>
<p>Another major difference is that America has a higher percentage of minorities than most other First World countries. In many First World nations, the left has assembled minorities into a welfare coalition. But such a coalition is much more potent in the United States because of demographics.</p>
<p>Finally, there is the Obama factor.</p>
<p>Hillary Clinton would probably have lost in 2012. Most Democratic hacks would have. But the cult of personality built around Obama by the news and entertainment industry has been very hard to breach. Only the “If you like your health plan” lie has finally put a serious dent in his likability and trust ratings.</p>
<p>Obama is something unique. He’s the end product of a venture by liberal billionaires from the financial and tech sectors to build a radical Trojan horse politician. They invested a great deal of money into their project and the dividends have been huge. No other First World country has been victimized by such a calculated scheme or had so many resources invested in hijacking its democracy.</p>
<p>Some 6 billion dollars were raised and spent in the 2012 election. Those are astronomical amounts of money and they are probably only the tip of the iceberg. Beating that kind of spending isn’t easy.</p>
<p>While the rest of the First World moves on, America remains trapped in the defunct economic and political grip of the left. After dedicating enormous resources to taking over the Democratic Party and then the country, the left has turned the United States of America into its Soviet Union, a country out of time, its economy and society wracked by the discredited political and economic theories of the left.</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>Dumb Politicians Won&#8217;t Get Elected</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/walter-williams/dumb-politicians-wont-get-elected/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=dumb-politicians-wont-get-elected</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/walter-williams/dumb-politicians-wont-get-elected/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 24 Dec 2013 05:03:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Election]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Politics]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Spending]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Voters]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=213779</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[When trashing the Constitution is the politically smart thing to do. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/VoteHereSignBethelFellowshipSTP640.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-213800" alt="VoteHereSignBethelFellowshipSTP640" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/VoteHereSignBethelFellowshipSTP640-432x350.png" width="302" height="245" /></a>Politicians can be progressives, liberals, conservatives, Democrats or Republicans, and right-wingers. They just can&#8217;t be dumb. The American people will never elect them to office. Let&#8217;s look at it.</p>
<p>For years, I used to blame politicians for our economic and social mess. That changed during the 1980s as a result of several lunches with Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., which produced an epiphany of sorts.</p>
<p>At the time, I had written several columns highly critical of farm subsidies and handouts. Helms agreed, saying something should be done. Then he asked me whether I could tell him how he could vote against them and remain a senator from North Carolina. He said that if he voted against them, North Carolinians would vote him out of office and replace him with somebody probably worse. My epiphany came when I asked myself whether it was reasonable to expect a politician to commit what he considered to be political suicide — in a word, be dumb.</p>
<p>The Office of Management and Budget calculates that more than 40 percent of federal spending is for entitlements for the elderly in the forms of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, housing and other assistance programs. Total entitlement spending comes to about 62 percent of federal spending. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that entitlement spending will consume all federal tax revenue by 2048.</p>
<p>Only a dumb politician would argue that something must be done immediately about the main components of entitlement spending: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Senior citizens indignantly would tell him that what they&#8217;re receiving are not entitlements. It&#8217;s their money that Congress put aside for them. They would attack any politician who told them that the only way they get Social Security and Medicare money is through taxes levied on current workers. The smart politician would go along with these people&#8217;s vision that Social Security and Medicare are their money that the government was holding for them. The dumb politician, who is truthful about Social Security and Medicare and their devastating impact on our nation&#8217;s future, would be run out of office.</p>
<p>Social Security and Medicare are by no means the only sources of unsustainable congressional spending.</p>
<p>There are billions upon billions in handouts going to farmers, corporations, poor people and thousands of federal programs that have no constitutional basis whatsoever. But a smart politician reasons that if Congress enables one group of Americans to live at the expense of another American, then in fairness, what possible argument can be made for not giving that same right to other groups of Americans? Making a constitutional and moral argument against the growth of handouts would qualify as dumb.</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s examine some statements of past Americans whom we&#8217;ve mistakenly called great but would be deemed both heartless and dumb if they were around today. In 1794, James Madison, the father of our Constitution, irate over a $15,000 congressional appropriation to assist some French refugees, said, &#8220;I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.&#8221; He added, &#8220;Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.&#8221;</p>
<p>In 1854, President Franklin Pierce vetoed a bill intended to help the mentally ill, saying, &#8220;I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for public charity&#8221; &#8230; and to approve such spending &#8220;would be contrary to the letter and the spirit of the Constitution and subversive to the whole theory upon which the Union of these States is founded.&#8221;</p>
<p>Grover Cleveland vetoed hundreds of congressional spending bills during his two terms as president in the late 1800s. His often stated veto message was, &#8220;I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution.&#8221;</p>
<p>If these men were around today, making similar statements, Americans would hold them in contempt and disqualify them from office. That&#8217;s a sad commentary on how we&#8217;ve trashed our Constitution.</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>Monica Crowley: Defeating the Leftist Revolutionaries</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/monica-crowley-defeating-the-leftist-revolutionaries/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=monica-crowley-defeating-the-leftist-revolutionaries</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 03 Dec 2013 05:54:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
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		<category><![CDATA[Monica Crowley]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=212167</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Left is engaged in a war -- when will conservatives wake up? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong>Editor’s note: Below is the video and transcript of the speech given by Monica Crowley at the Freedom Center’s 2013 Restoration Weekend. The event was held November 14th-17th at The Breakers resort in Palm Beach, Florida.</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/80242225" height="281" width="500" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><a href="http://vimeo.com/80242225">Monica Crowley</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user15333690">DHFC</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>
<p><strong>Monica Crowley:</strong>  I am really happy to be here today in a room full of fellow happy warriors and fellow freedom lovers.  Very good for the soul.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>I want to thank David Horowitz.  He&#8217;s a good personal friend and also a fearless fighter for all of the things that we value and all of the gifts that the Founding Fathers gave to us.  Every single day you&#8217;re out there fighting the fight, David.  Thank you for this extraordinary weekend and for what you do 24 hours a day, seven days a week.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>David is a real hero of this republic.  I also want to thank Elizabeth Ruiz.  I don&#8217;t know if she&#8217;s in the room, but this doesn&#8217;t come off without her.  She puts the whole thing together, and she is a heroine in her own right.  Thank you.</p>
<p>I also, again, want to thank [Moray] for that great introduction.  Before I came here yesterday, I gave a speech in Ohio, and it was a corporate event, and the CEO was the one who introduced me.  So he was reading from my biography, and he said, &#8220;Monica holds a Ph.D. in internal relations.&#8221;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>I swear, I’m not making this up.  Internal relations.  So, of course, when I got up, I had to correct him and say, &#8220;I have a Ph.D. in international relations.&#8221;  Then I thought about it, and I thought, damn it, damn it.  Clearly, I chose the wrong path because internal relations sounds a whole hell of a lot more fun!</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>One of the many reasons why I love to be at this Restoration Weekend every year is that all of us gather together and we do some serious and necessary truth telling.  Sometimes it&#8217;s hard to do in this environment given all of the pressures that we&#8217;re under from the White House, the Congress, the media to do truth telling in a very serious and honest way, but that&#8217;s what we do every weekend here &#8212; every year here at Restoration Weekend.  So let&#8217;s do some &#8212; let&#8217;s continue some serious truth telling here.</p>
<p>We are in a war.  We&#8217;re in a war.  It&#8217;s not a war that we chose, but it&#8217;s a war that&#8217;s been brought to our doorstep every single day for decades by the Left.  They are chronically and constantly waging a war relentlessly against America, against the American Constitution, against the American free market economics, and against American values.</p>
<p>They never rest.  I said that David, how he fights this battle 24 hours a day, seven days a week, thank God he&#8217;s doing it and others are doing it because the Left certainly never rests.  They all sleep with their eyes open.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>But it&#8217;s not merely Leftism that we&#8217;re battling.  We&#8217;re also battling the animating spirits of Leftism, which is the ideology of control.  We talk a lot about freedom and liberty, but the other side talks in very clear terms. They dress it up.  When they dress it up &#8212; let&#8217;s make no mistake about what we&#8217;re dealing with here &#8212; it is an ideology of control, and I don&#8217;t care if you&#8217;re talking about socialism, communism, fascism; any kind of totalitarian or authoritarian philosophy operates under a broader rubric of an ideology of control.</p>
<p>We have a president who &#8212; and I know it&#8217;s tough to believe that this president, who came out of the swamps of Chicago machine politics, who learned at the knee of the communist revolutionary Frank Marshall Davis, who studied under Marxist professors and by his own admission sought out fellow Marxist students as friends, who trained intensively in the revolutionary tactics of Saul Alinsky, who launched his political career in the living room of Marxist revolutionaries and domestic terrorists, who worked hand in glove with the socialists of ACORN and the thugs of the SEIU, who for two decades sat in the pews of the radical anti-American preacher, who tried desperately to bury that past, who spoke about the fundamental transformation of the nation, who demonized and punished his adversaries, who waged war on entire news organizations, Fox News, and who spent his firm term slamming into place radical wealth redistribution and socialized medicine.  I know that it&#8217;s really tough to believe then that he and his administration would now be caught in a house of cards, and not the fun House of Cards starring Kevin Spacey &#8211;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>&#8211; but the real house of cards that he has built.  This is a house of cards built on lies, corruption, cronyism, hypocrisy, surveillance of journalists, and a targeting and destroying of political opponents.</p>
<p>What I’m describing here is the classic tin-pot dictatorship.  We never thought it could happen here, and yet, here it is.  It&#8217;s taken a while.  Those of us in this room knew what was going on from the beginning before he was even elected president, but now it&#8217;s starting to dawn on more and more people what is really happening here.</p>
<p>It took a catastrophe of socialized medicine to wake a lot of people up because it affects every single person in America, either directly or indirectly.  That&#8217;s when you get people&#8217;s attention, when it directly affects them.</p>
<p>So even though you had all of these revelations of epic abuses of power &#8212; the Benghazi terror attacks and subsequent cover-up, the IRS scandal, which, in my opinion, is the most dangerous scandal in American history &#8211;</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>&#8211; and the reason the IRS scandal is the most dangerous scandal in US history is because in the past when presidents have abused their power with the IRS &#8212; JFK, Lyndon Johnson.  Richard Nixon was accused of this, as well &#8212; it was always elites against elite.  It was Lyndon Johnson against Richard Nixon.  Elites against elites.  This is the elite versus us.  It&#8217;s the elites versus the American people.  That&#8217;s what makes it so incredibly dangerous.</p>
<p>So we&#8217;ve had Benghazi, the IRS, we had the Department of Justice spying on journalists as a way to send a message to them and to anybody else to shut up or else, stop probing, stop reporting, as if they were doing that anyway, or else.  The NSA domestic surveillance program, another way of spying on everybody in this room, but it&#8217;s another way of exercising intimidation against the American people.  It&#8217;s a way of saying, &#8220;Shut up or else.&#8221;</p>
<p>Do you remember the arguments that the Left used against President Nixon when Watergate happened?  They said, &#8220;Well, he may not have ordered the break-ins.  He may not have known about the break-in, but certainly President Nixon encouraged an environment where the break-in could have taken place, where the break-in did take place, where it was going to be considered somewhat normal or even expected.&#8221;  That was the argument that the Left used on President Nixon.</p>
<p>There is no question in any of these cases that Barack Obama set the environment for this.  I happen to believe he ordered all of these things, but that&#8217;s me.  He certainly, at the very least, set the environment for all of these things to transpire.  And, yet, it was only over the last couple of days where he pretended to be the ultimate stopper of the buck, at least on Obamacare.</p>
<p>But I need you to remember that none of these things are just merely a function of his thuggery.  They&#8217;re also a function of this ideology of control that I mentioned.  This is not simply incompetence or mismanagement.  This is not simply naiveté or inexperience.  This &#8212; and by this I mean all of this, everything that&#8217;s happened every single day in this presidency &#8212; is the logical result of the ideology of control.</p>
<p>Health reform was never about healthcare or health insurance for Obama and the Left, and let&#8217;s keep in mind that Obama and the Left, they are not your father&#8217;s and grandfather&#8217;s Democrats.  Why some people, even some of our fellow conservatives or Republicans, why they are still continuing to treat him as if he is a normal president is beyond me.  He is not normal.  In a lot of ways, he&#8217;s not normal.  But this presidency is not normal.  He is not Jimmy Carter.  He is not Bill Clinton.  He&#8217;s a completely different ball of wax.</p>
<p>I had a conversation with one of my colleagues at Fox Business &#8212; this is a couple of months ago &#8212; and his wife is from Nicaragua, and she was there during the whole communist uprising and so on.  And she said to him, and he reported this to me, that she knew from 2007 that Barack Obama was not a Democrat, he was not even merely a Leftist, and he was not even just a radical.  She said he is a revolutionary; he&#8217;s a revolutionary.  And that word has stuck with me ever since because there is no more apt description for him and for the far Left in revolutionary.</p>
<p>So for the revolutionaries, health reform was never about healthcare and health insurance; it was only and always about one thing &#8212; government power and control.  Gun control was never about guns.  It was only and always about government power and control.  Immigration reform for the revolutionaries has nothing to do with immigration or securing the border; it&#8217;s only and always about government power and control.</p>
<p>Nothing for the Left, nothing the government does is ever about its superficial reason; it&#8217;s only and always about expanding government power and control over you.  And so it is with all of these scandals that I mentioned, and so it is now with socialized medicine, the lies, the corruption, the cronyism, the targeting of political opponents and surveillance and hypocrisy, it all stems from an ideology of control.</p>
<p>And for those who are still trying to explain all of this away with mild-sounding descriptions like incompetence, I would encourage you to get over that really quick because this is the opposite of incompetence.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>The Leftists always know exactly what they&#8217;re doing.  Sometimes it doesn&#8217;t always pan out according to their timeline, which is what you&#8217;re now seeing with Obamacare, and I want to deal with this in just a moment.</p>
<p>But what you see now with this house of cards that may not be collapsing, maybe it&#8217;s collapsing, I don&#8217;t know yet &#8212; we&#8217;ll have to wait and see how this plays out &#8212; but what you&#8217;re seeing is the very logical consequence of a sick and destructive ideology of control.  You see this across the board, as I mentioned, in all communist, socialist, fascist, totalitarian, authoritarian regimes, and now here it is right here in the United States.</p>
<p>I think a lot of us would do well to understand that these are not just the mere crimes of big government but that these are the Orwellian horrors of a nation that is under the [jack hood] of essentially and effectively totalitarian control.</p>
<p>One of the things that the media &#8212; and, listen, I work in the media, and I have had people who work in the mainstream media, fellow conservatives &#8212; and they&#8217;re few and far between &#8212; but I&#8217;ve had them pull me aside and say they&#8217;ve never seen it this bad.</p>
<p>I had a woman stop me in Rockefeller Center one day.  This is before the election last year in October.  I was walking through Rockefeller Center.  I had my iPod in, minding my own business, and she flagged me down and she told me she worked for one of the Big Three networks on the evening newscast.  She didn&#8217;t tell me which one, and I didn&#8217;t ask.</p>
<p>But she said, &#8220;Monica, I&#8217;ve been in this business for 30 years, and it&#8217;s always been biased.  It&#8217;s always leaned to the Left, but I&#8217;ve never seen anything like this.&#8221;  And I said, &#8220;Well, what do you mean?&#8221;  She said, &#8220;Every morning at 10 AM, we have a staff meeting for what we&#8217;re going to do for the evening news that night, and people literally say out loud, &#8220;How do we protect Barack Obama today?&#8221;</p>
<p>One of the things that the press has not covered, and which they still aren&#8217;t covering, is the bigger picture.  And I know a lot of us are out there in the trenches every day trying to deal with the minutia of Obamacare and the cancellations and everything else, and we are going to talk about that here in a second, but it&#8217;s very important for all of us not to lose the forest for the trees and to keep our eye on the bigger picture because Obama and the revolutionaries never take their eye off the bigger picture, ever.</p>
<p>Bigger picture is what Obama and his administration and his agenda are really all about.  Do you remember in 2008 during the campaign, Obama used the same phrase over and over again, &#8220;the fundamental transformation of the nation.&#8221;  And part of his great genius was that he &#8212; as soon as he said that phrase, he took a step back and he let the American people supply their own meanings to what they thought he meant by that.</p>
<p>Some people thought, &#8220;Oh, well, we&#8217;re finally going to fix the economy,&#8221; or, &#8220;We&#8217;re finally going to get rid of that horrible cowboy, George W. Bush,&#8221; or, &#8220;We&#8217;re finally going to have the first black president.&#8221;  That&#8217;s what they thought he meant.</p>
<p>But now five years in, we have to say, &#8220;No, let&#8217;s think about what he meant by that phrase.&#8221;  And now we have five years of evidence as to exactly what he meant by the fundamental transformation of the nation.  He meant moving America away from a nation built on individual liberty and economic freedom and toward a government dependency and welfare state, and to do it with all deliberate speed.</p>
<p>Remember that for decades, the Left has always had this grand project, and David Horowitz knows this better than anybody because he was on the inside.  The grand project is three objectives, and they&#8217;re all interrelated.</p>
<p>The first one is grow government as fast and as widespread as possible.  The objective of that is to lock as many people into dependency on that growing government as possible, and that&#8217;s an endless feedback loop because if you&#8217;re growing government, you&#8217;re expanding the pool of people dependent on government, and if you do that, then you&#8217;re constantly justifying the need for ever growing government.</p>
<p>And the ultimate objective of those three things is to acquire, to achieve a permanent Democrat voting majority so that you never again get a Ronald Reagan as president.  You never even get a George W. Bush.  It&#8217;s over.  Why do you think they&#8217;re working so hard now to flip Texas?  Because if Texas goes red to blue, it&#8217;s literally over.  You will never get a Republican president again.</p>
<p>I have a friend who was at the Clinton Global Initiative last year, and on the stage was Hillary Clinton and somebody else, some moderator &#8212; I can&#8217;t remember who &#8212; and the actress Eva Longoria, a real favorite in this room, I know.  She is pretty, though, but she is, you know&#8211;.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>So at some point &#8212; and it takes real courage, so you&#8217;ve got to give Eva her props on this &#8212; it takes real courage to interrupt Hillary Rodham Clinton, but what was reported to me was that Hillary was in the middle of some monologue about something and Eva Longoria jumped up, grabbed the microphone, and very passionately started talking about the need to make Texas into a blue state and they were going to do it through a whole variety of ways, not least of which is amnesty, which, of course, they&#8217;re continuing to push &#8212; amnesty, grass roots mobilization, trying to get the immigrant made legal so that they can then vote, and then you flip Texas, and then it really is over.</p>
<p>This is what they&#8217;re doing.  This is what they have always done.  This is their eye on the bigger prize.  This is their grand project.</p>
<p>So when Obama becomes president, he sets the bow doing the fundamental transformation of the nation in order to effect that grand project, and the first thing he does is set out to immediately attack the four main pillars of American capitalism &#8212; the industrial base, the financial sector, the energy sector, and the healthcare sector.</p>
<p>You undermine those four main pillars of American capitalism, you undermine American capitalism, and if you do that, you undermine global capitalism.  And that&#8217;s what all of this is about.  Remember, they never take their eye off the bigger picture, and neither must we.</p>
<p>I want to focus for a second on the last one, the healthcare sector, because Obamacare, it is the defining issue of our time.  Remember that as soon as Obama came into office and everybody was screaming about the economy &#8212; the economy was falling apart and people were screaming for jobs, and he had won for a lot of reasons, but in large part because he was campaigning on this idea that he would fix the economy.  So he comes in and immediately turns to Nancy Pelosi and says, &#8220;Give me some sort of stimulus bill.  I don&#8217;t even care what&#8217;s in it.  Give me something.&#8221;  She takes about three to four weeks.  Every special interest in the world loads on their goodies, nearly $1 trillion stimulus, signs into law, doesn&#8217;t read it.  Nobody in Washington, except for our hero Louie Gohmert here, actually reads anything.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Louie, we respect and admire you so much.  He&#8217;s another hero of this republic, Louie Gohmert.  Doesn&#8217;t read it, but he gets it off of his desk to that the next &#8212; literally the next day, what can he focus on?  Healthcare.  Nobody was talking about healthcare reform in January and February of 2009.  Everybody thought that the system needed reform.  Nobody was saying it doesn&#8217;t need reform, but it wasn&#8217;t immediate, and it wasn&#8217;t urgent.</p>
<p>So why did he do it?  Because when you look at the history of any regime that operates under an ideology of control, one of the very first things that they do when they come in and seize power is seize control of the healthcare system for one reason.  If the government controls their healthcare, the government controls you.</p>
<p>Healthcare is the cornerstone of the socialist state.  It is the crown jewel of the welfare state.  And that&#8217;s why he went immediately to that within two months of being sworn in and spent the next year-and-a-half ramming it through.  And now here we are.</p>
<p>They knew that healthcare was the biggest lever that they could use &#8212; the revolutionaries, I&#8217;m talking about &#8212; that they could use to effect that fundamental change, that fundamental transformation of America that they&#8217;d been waiting so long to be able to carry out.  Healthcare reform was the biggest lever.  That&#8217;s why they went at it.  That&#8217;s why they were able to grab the brass ring and make that change.</p>
<p>Unfortunately for them, fundamental transformations have real and direct consequences on real people.  People now are immediately suffering under this, and that&#8217;s the only reason you hear word one from the president about fixes and so on, which are all bogus, but unlike the IRS and Benghazi and the DOJ and everything else, healthcare does affect everybody.  I&#8217;m not sure that they anticipated that.  They may have and just didn&#8217;t care, or maybe they didn&#8217;t anticipate it.  I don&#8217;t know.  But what&#8217;s coming back at them now in terms of blowback is incredibly powerful and incredibly devastating.</p>
<p>I want to share with you a personal story.  This is somebody I know in California who had a very grave childhood cancer.  He&#8217;s now 20 years old, but at age eight, he was diagnosed with neuroblastoma, stage four, and the doctors didn&#8217;t think he would survive, but he did.  And he&#8217;s now cancer-free, although he has a whole series of related issues that plague him every single day &#8212; tumors and all kinds of things.  At least once every two weeks, he&#8217;s back in the hospital with something.</p>
<p>In California, he told me he&#8217;s covered by Kaiser. And here&#8217;s the e-mail that he sent to me two weeks ago.  He wrote, &#8220;Monica, my friend just got her notice that her son&#8217;s health insurance is being cancelled. He has the same cancer I have. He has a special group of doctors, and they keep him going.</p>
<p>&#8220;My Kaiser sent me my renewal package.  It went up another $300 a year.  They say my plan was grandfathered in, so I hope that means I can keep it.  Before they did that, I was looking at my plan going up to $1,800 a year.  The past two years, it has shot up by $800.</p>
<p>&#8220;I went to the website to see what plan is in my range.  It said I do not qualify and would have to go on straight Medicare, but I’m not eligible for Medicare because I&#8217;m only 20.  I have a very specialized medical plan for my ongoing problems.  It took them 10 years to find out that I suffered from two kinds of seizures.  I take very special medicine.  If I am dumped, the odds are a Medicare doctor would not spend the amount of time on me, constantly checking and adjusting my medicines.  If they do not get it right, I will die quickly,&#8221; he wrote.  And I want you to remember that phrase &#8220;die quickly.&#8221;</p>
<p>He continued, &#8220;Which is what I think Obamacare want.  This is highly stressful.  I just know that I&#8217;ll be getting a cancellation letter.  There are not enough doctors and clinics to handle the amount of people getting dumped.  More and more are opting out of treating patients on Medicare and Medicaid.&#8221;</p>
<p>This is a real person  This is a real person in California named Raymond, who&#8217;s only 20 years old, and he fought stage-four cancer and survived, only now to have to fight Obamacare.</p>
<p>A couple of weeks ago, I&#8217;m sure you may have seen the story of another real-life Obamacare victim.  This is the story of another cancer survivor.  She published a piece in The Wall Street Journal on the editorial page, Edie Littlefield Sundby.  And this was before we even knew the extent of these Obamacare horrors, and we&#8217;re only seeing the beginning of this now.</p>
<p>But she wrote about her stage-four gallbladder cancer in The Wall Street Journal, and she also talked about how her policy was being cancelled as of December 31st, and at the very end of her piece, she wrote what Raymond wrote.  She wrote, &#8220;If I don&#8217;t have my doctors and I don&#8217;t have this care from people that have been treating me for all of this time, I may die.&#8221;  And at the very end she said, &#8220;Which may be the point.&#8221;</p>
<p>So now we have people coming up publicly who are really sick who are telling us these stories.  This is painful and heart-wrenching stuff from people for whom the revolutionaries in the White House and their obsessive experiment with social engineering and socialized medicine.  For them, this is a matter of life and death.  This is not some philosophical fundamental transformation of the nation.</p>
<p>Dan Pfeiffer, who is one of President Obama&#8217;s top aides, he took to Twitter after Ms. Sundby&#8217;s piece ran and basically blamed her and blamed her insurance company, an insurance company, by the way &#8212; and we all know how easy it is to demonize them.  This insurance company shelled out $1.2 million to keep her alive.  She said she loved her insurance company and they were good to her.  This is what Dan Pfeiffer tweeted, &#8220;United Healthcare dropped her coverage because they&#8217;ve struggled to compete in California&#8217;s individual healthcare market for years and didn&#8217;t want to pay for sicker patients like Ms. Sundby.&#8221;</p>
<p>So, in other words, sorry, Edie, but this is a Hunger Games-like competition now, and if you fall behind, you die.  You know what that is?  That&#8217;s death panels.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>So it turns out that Governor Palin was right, like she&#8217;s right about mostly everything.  Turns out she was right.  She was roundly mocked and pounded into the ground for making those comments early on about death panels &#8212; 100% true.</p>
<p>You know who else is 100% true?  Ted Cruz and Mike Lee.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Ted Cruz and Mike Lee didn&#8217;t shut down the government; Barack Obama and the revolutionaries shut down the government because they knew with a corrupt media that the Republicans would get blamed for it anyway.</p>
<p>Ted Cruz and Mike Lee got painted as villains in this story for shutting down everybody&#8217;s beloved government.  Number one, they didn&#8217;t do that.  But, number two, they did something else that doesn&#8217;t get &#8212; it doesn&#8217;t get aired, it doesn&#8217;t get spoken out loud, but I think it&#8217;s a very true fact.  When they did what they did, leading into the government shutdown, Senator Cruz&#8217;s filibuster-like speech on the Senate floor and so on, when they led the charge, they centered it on Obamacare.  It was all about defunding Obamacare and then later delaying Obamacare, which now a lot of Democrats are into, so, of course, Cruz and Lee were right all along.</p>
<p>But what they did in that period of time while they were getting pounded, they did something really important which the media will never tell you.  They drew the public&#8217;s attention to Obamacare.  They talked to us and focused everybody on the fact that Obamacare is socialized medicine, and it is a total calamity.</p>
<p>So when the actual calamity came a couple of weeks later, people were ready to hear that message.  They had paved the way for the American people to understand this calamity, so when the calamity actually came down the pike, they saw it for real.  That was a huge service that they performed by doing that.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Conservatives are always right about everything.  We are.  We are.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Sometimes it takes longer for the general public to see that come along, but we are always right, which is why the Left and the revolutionaries are constantly trying to demonize us, tarnish us, and try to marginalize us however they can.</p>
<p>When you are talking about Barack Obama and the far Left, the revolutionaries, you have to understand that you are dealing with very sophisticated Leftist psychology &#8212; this is something that David can talk to &#8212; very sophisticated Leftist psychology that they have been honing into an art and a science for decades.</p>
<p>I can give you one little example of this.  Barack Obama is a master of projection.  Projection is accusing somebody of what you, yourself, are guilty of doing.  Yasser Arafat did this all the time, accusing the Israelis of what he, himself, was doing.  Obama and Pelosi and Reid and the Democrats all the way down the line are so good at projecting onto conservatives, projecting onto Republicans what they themselves are doing right in front of everybody&#8217;s face.</p>
<p>When I used that phrase from Raymond&#8217;s e-mail, that &#8220;under Obamacare I will die quickly,&#8221; think about where you heard that phrase before.  Congressman Alan Grayson, who lost, and unfortunately, now he&#8217;s back in Congress.  Remember during the whole debate he stood on the House floor and said, &#8220;Republicans want you to die quickly.&#8221;  Again, what they want.</p>
<p>Yesterday on the House floor, Congressman Jim McDermott was railing against the Upton bill.  &#8220;If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.&#8221;  And he actually used the word socialism out loud.  And I had to stop, and I said, &#8220;What did he just say?&#8221;  He said this, meaning the Upton bill, this is socialism.  Again, I mean that&#8217;s blatant.  That&#8217;s not even dressed-up projection, right?  That&#8217;s like so blatant right out there.  This is what they do to try to cover up what they&#8217;re doing and to try to deflect what they&#8217;re doing.</p>
<p>I want to talk a little bit about something that happened in Ohio when I was giving this speech on Thursday.  It was to a healthcare group, and so they wanted me to focus solely on Obamacare, which I was happy to do.  And during the Q&amp;A, and everybody in this company based in Canton, Ohio, they were all conservatives and all anti-Obamacare, and they see their healthcare-related industries just falling apart.</p>
<p>But I was warned that there was at least one, maybe two liberals in the audience.  That&#8217;s fine.  I can handle anybody.  So when I opened it up for Q&amp;A, this woman came to the microphone and somebody before her had asked about the navigator program.  Is James O&#8217;Keefe in the room anywhere?  Is he still here?  He&#8217;s gone?  Okay.  James O&#8217;Keefe is another hero of the Republic, doing the kind of journalism that mainstream journalists should do.  Amazing.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>And I was asked about the navigator program and I raised O&#8217;Keefe&#8217;s videos of the fraud and the encouraging people to lie to the federal government, all felonies, and this woman stood up after I had my answer about the navigator program and how it is ACORN, and she stood up and she said, &#8220;I take issue with that.&#8221;  Now, right away, I knew by her tone I was dealing with a liberal.  &#8220;I take issue with that.&#8221;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And I said, &#8220;Explain, ma&#8217;am.  I&#8217;m all ears.&#8221;  And she said, &#8220;Well, I am a navigator in Ohio, and I can tell you that we are all just so faithful to this program, and none of us would ever engage in this kind of fraud and corruption.  We would never do that.  We are highly trained individuals.&#8221;</p>
<p>And I listened to her go on and on, and I said, &#8220;So is that true for across the board, in your experience, with what you&#8217;re doing?&#8221;  &#8220;Yes, absolutely.&#8221;  &#8220;Do you think it&#8217;s true across the board in Ohio?&#8221;  &#8220;Well, I can&#8217;t speak for the rest of the state, but every navigator I know, Ms. Crowley, is totally honest and wants this thing to work.&#8221;</p>
<p>So then I brought up the day before when Kathleen Sebelius &#8212; or two days before when Kathleen Sebelius was in front of the Senate Committee and Senator John Cornyn asked her about the navigator program and the fraud and corruption, and he said point blank, &#8220;So is there anything in this federal law, the Obamacare law, that requires these navigators to undergo a background check and a full vetting for security reasons?&#8221;  And she blathered on, but ultimately, her answer was no.  So he said, &#8220;So it&#8217;s possible to have a convicted felon doing &#8212; acting as a navigator and doing this and having access to all of people&#8217;s intimate information?&#8221;  And she said, &#8220;Yes, it&#8217;s possible.&#8221;</p>
<p>So I raised it with this woman, and she said, &#8220;No, it is part of the federal law.&#8221;  I said, &#8220;Excuse me?&#8221;  She said, &#8220;It is part of the Obamacare law.  I read it.&#8221;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>So I said, &#8220;Well, I&#8217;ve read the Obamacare law, too, and the Secretary of Health and Human Services says it&#8217;s not in there.&#8221;  And she said, &#8220;Well, she&#8217;s wrong.&#8221;  And I said, &#8220;Secretary is wrong about a lot of things.  I think that&#8217;s something you and I can agree on.&#8221;</p>
<p>This is what we&#8217;re dealing with here.  Again, it gets back to this ideology of control that I was talking about.  The navigators are ACORN.  They&#8217;re the extension of ACORN.  President Obama was trained by ACORN.  This is corruption at the grass roots level.  That&#8217;s what the Left does.  That&#8217;s what they need to get to get these things done and get them through and get them at least semi-operational.</p>
<p>So those navigators that you see in the James O&#8217;Keefe (inaudible), these are the same people from ACORN.  This is the same corruption.  This is the same revolution you have seen for decades in America on the Left.</p>
<p>The reason that the president now is going to do everything he can to salvage this &#8212; and the Upton bill passed yesterday, and the Landrieu bill is floating around the Senate &#8212; Obama threatened to veto any legislation, &#8220;If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.&#8221;  Again, you get back to this reality, this truism that he never takes his eye off the bigger prize.  Even if that means losing Democrats, he will happily do that.</p>
<p>Would he like to have big majorities of Democrats in the Congress like he did his first two years?  Absolutely.  Then he could go straight to Congress instead of having to deal with the hassle of doing everything himself lawlessly, unconstitutionally, illegally through the bureaucracy, through executive orders, through this just waive parts of the law he doesn&#8217;t like.  He could just go to Congress and do it.  So would he prefer that?  Of course.  But if that means sacrificing his bigger picture, the fundamental transformation of the nation, he&#8217;s not willing to do that.</p>
<p>These Democrats who are running scared now, trying to flee the scene of the Obamacare accident, they&#8217;re more interested in self-preservation than in the fundamental transformation of the nation.  But he&#8217;s not running again as far as we know.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Never know with him.  Never know.  I don’t to make &#8212; I don&#8217;t want to get too presumptuous here.  He&#8217;s not running again, so he doesn&#8217;t care.  He doesn&#8217;t necessarily care about his own party.  I&#8217;ll give you an example.</p>
<p>(In) 2010, before Obama signed Obamacare into law, Blanche Lincoln, who is one of the last remaining moderate Democrats from Arkansas, one of the last ones left in the Senate, she requested a meeting with President Obama, and he gave it to her.</p>
<p>So she went to the White House, and she begged him &#8212; and I mean begged him &#8212; not to do it this way.  She said, &#8220;Please, Mr. President.  Let&#8217;s break this apart.  Let&#8217;s do this in a piecemeal way.  Let&#8217;s get Republican buy-in.  Let&#8217;s try to get some public support for this.  We don&#8217;t have either one.&#8221;</p>
<p>And he heard her out and then he looked at her, and he essentially said, &#8220;Blanche, you&#8217;re out of luck.&#8221;  And she said, &#8220;Well, if we do it this way, I&#8217;m going to lose reelection in Arkansas.&#8221;  &#8220;Sorry, I can&#8217;t help you out there.  This is more important.&#8221;</p>
<p>More important than her, more important than her seat, more important than the party.  She lost re-election.  The entire blue dog Democrat coalition for the most part got wiped out in 2010 all over socialized medicine.</p>
<p>Now you have a situation where you move out of theory, you&#8217;re in practice, real people like Raymond and Edie getting hurt by this thing, Democrats running wild.  So Obama comes out last 48 hours, mea culpa, doesn&#8217;t really mean it.  Here&#8217;s a little fix, the constitutionality of which is deeply under question.  Can&#8217;t really do what he&#8217;s doing as far as I know.  Does it anyway.  Trying to stop the bleeding on the Democratic side just so that he doesn&#8217;t have to hear them yammering in his ear.  He doesn&#8217;t care about them per se; he only cares about salvaging this because without this, the whole house of cards falls apart.</p>
<p>This is the most massive wealth redistribution scheme in American history.  Think about it this way.  Before Obamacare, nobody said that the system was perfect.  People realized across the board that it needed reform.  The question was what kind of reform.  But before Obamacare, 70% of the American people were happy with their health insurance.  80% were happy with their healthcare.</p>
<p>So why do you need to go and nationalize about one-sixth of the US economy?  You do it because you&#8217;re operating with an ideology of control.  You do it because you want the fundamental transformation of the nation.</p>
<p>So now we&#8217;ve got there and they&#8217;re going to start demonizing the insurance companies once again, making them the bad guys.  They&#8217;re going to try to demonize the state insurance commissioners because they&#8217;re trying to kick it back to the states.  So far on the record, you have two state commissioners saying, &#8220;We&#8217;re not going to do this.&#8221;  They&#8217;re both Democrats &#8212; Washington State and Arkansas.  Very tough to demonize them.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s all now coming apart so far, but let&#8217;s not get too ahead of ourselves here because what I think is happening, and I could be wrong about this, but what I think you&#8217;re seeing is a controlled explosion.</p>
<p>Now, there may be parts of the explosion that they didn&#8217;t necessarily anticipate, like the website.  I don&#8217;t think that they thought the website would be this screwed up, although I just saw a report this morning that said the flags were up in July saying this is not going to be ready and they went ahead anyway.  There may be other parts that are outpacing their overall plan for this, but I think what you&#8217;re seeing is a controlled explosion.</p>
<p>Remember that President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Kathleen Sebelius, Tom Harkin, all of the revolutionaries, are all on record over the last several years talking about how Obamacare is simply a way station on the way to single payer.</p>
<p>All these things were built into the cake.  It was supposed to unfold this way, again, maybe not as chaotically or as fast.  Maybe they&#8217;re caught off guard by how things seem to be sliding from beyond their control.  But I still think for the most part that what you&#8217;re seeing is what they want ultimately.  Maybe they feel a little panicked because they can&#8217;t control the politics of it to the extent that they could, but again, eyes on the bigger picture.  If they&#8217;re trying to get us there, then this needs to happen.</p>
<p>Talking about consequences, I see some folks, even on our side, still talking about unintended consequences of Obamacare.  Most, if not everything, you are seeing, is intended.  Let&#8217;s take the cancellations.  Give you one specific example of intended consequences.  The cancellation notices.  January of 2010, before the bill was even signed into law, Eric Cantor goes to the President and starts asking about this, and on tape, the President says, &#8220;Well, yes, it&#8217;s possible that millions of people could lose their plans.&#8221;  Of course he knew.</p>
<p>And then the policy people and the political people started to have an internal debate in the White House.  &#8220;Well, do we let the President go out and say, &#8220;If you like your plan, you can keep it,&#8221; because that&#8217;s not really accurate, said the policy people.  And the political people said, &#8220;Well, we&#8217;re never going to get this if we go out with the truth.  If we go full-out socialist, forget it.  We&#8217;ll never get it done.&#8221;</p>
<p>The policy people lost that argument to the political people.  So we know &#8212; we have evidence that, of course, this president knew.  He designed the thing.  I&#8217;m so tired of people trying to give the guy the benefit of the doubt.  He designed the thing.  Socialized medicine has been the 100-year dream of the Left, and they&#8217;re not going to just let it go.</p>
<p>The controlled explosion is going to continue, and we&#8217;re going to see this unravel in various kinds of ways, some of which they probably think they can control; other ways, they probably can&#8217;t.  But I will say that I think the next step after the individual market cancellations, you&#8217;re going to get the employer market, which is going to be affected.  I just got a letter uncovered with employer coverage not through Fox but a different employer.  I got a letter two weeks ago from United Healthcare saying, &#8220;No changes now, but we can&#8217;t guarantee your plan is going to be in existence as of 2014,&#8221; next year.  That&#8217;s going to be the next wave, and that&#8217;s tens of millions of people who are going to be affected by this.</p>
<p>So what you&#8217;re going to see in this controlled explosion is that the Left &#8212; they&#8217;re going to argue that now we need to grow the number of people who are going to be eligible for the subsidies.  That&#8217;s going to be their next argument because people now, especially in the middle class that Obama&#8217;s always claiming he loves and wants to protect in advance, and he&#8217;s doing the exact opposite, they make too much to qualify for the subsidies, but they don&#8217;t make enough now to meet their premiums that are doubling and tripling.</p>
<p>So you&#8217;re going to see now Obama and his team come out and say, &#8220;Well, now, we can&#8217;t leave these people stranded.  So now we&#8217;re going to up the baseline of people who are qualified for subsidies, and they&#8217;re going to continue to up it until pretty soon George Soros is going to qualify for a subsidy.  You&#8217;re going to have everybody in America and you&#8217;re going to have the effect of single payer by that point because everybody will kind of be in the same system.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s going to be the next step because, remember, their goal is single payer, full-on socialized medicine.  They are not going to let anything stop them from doing it.  Mark my words on this.</p>
<p>So what do we do about any of this?  And then I&#8217;m happy to open it up to questions.</p>
<p>I don&#8217;t pretend to have the answers about how we tackle this because it&#8217;s so big and it&#8217;s so powerful and it&#8217;s coming at us nonstop here.  But I have a couple of things that I want to throw out by way of solutions or by way of how we fight this battle.</p>
<p>The first is that we&#8217;ve got to make the moral case for the free market &#8212; moral case, not the economic case &#8212; the moral case for the free market.  Very few people out there are doing it.  Americans for Prosperity does it.  David does it, obviously.  Steve Forbes does it.  But we need to get with the program to make the moral case for capitalism because you know what?  We&#8217;ve been painted into a corner as evil, villainous capitalists, capitalists for a long time, and it&#8217;s time we fought back making the argument that capitalism is the most moral of all economic systems.  That&#8217;s one thing because the Left never wastes a moment trying to make the moral case for class warfare and wealth redistribution, so we&#8217;ve got to make the moral case on our side.</p>
<p>Secondly, a couple of specific things we should be doing &#8212; messaging &#8212; and I know a lot of folks here over the weekend have been talking about messaging and languaging, how we get our message across in ways that people who aren&#8217;t attuned to politics every day will absorb and listen to.  I think they&#8217;ve all been 100% right.</p>
<p>Remember that the Left argues in emotional terms because they don&#8217;t have anything else.  They don&#8217;t have facts.  They don&#8217;t have history.  So they have to argue with emotion.  So you get Grandma pushed off the cliff by Paul Ryan.  You get Grandpa eating cat food.  You get little Johnny drinking dirty water and having a bad education.  They argue with emotion and they gain a lot of traction that way.</p>
<p>We tend to argue with cold, hard facts &#8212; right? &#8212; as conservatives because we have the facts on our side, so we talk about $17 trillion in debt or the unemployment rate or the deficit &#8212; cold, hard numbers, but they&#8217;re cold.</p>
<p>We have to learn to speak in more emotional terms about what we stand for.  Technology, very important.  (In) 2008, I remember when Twitter was new, the Obama campaign &#8212; and this is one of the great ironies of the Obamacare website falling apart because they made their name.  They got the campaign off the ground.  They won in large part because they had such a command of technology.</p>
<p>Barack Obama in 2008 was directing tweets to his followers to his supporters at Jay-Z concert.  He was micro-targeting them, and John McCain, God love him, was campaigning with smoke signals, right?</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>We still haven&#8217;t improved that much since then so technology and grass roots, which is what David &#8212; &#8220;True the Vote.&#8221;  I know Katherine Engelbrecht is here on election integrity.  It&#8217;s all about mobilizing grass roots.</p>
<p>Remember, when you go back home to your communities, grass roots communication is so important.  It is the most important thing.  This is what the Left does so well.  They&#8217;re the unions.  That&#8217;s your ACORN and everything else.</p>
<p>You make a phone call to a person, it amplifies the message times three.  If you talk to them face to face, it amplifies by eight.  The Left knows this.  That&#8217;s why they do it.  We&#8217;ve got to do the same thing.</p>
<p>And, finally, reaching the millennials, the young folks, the &#8220;yute,&#8221; as Joe Pesci said in My Cousin Vinny, the &#8220;yute&#8221;.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>I&#8217;ll leave you with this because it&#8217;s an important point.  Brand new [Quinnipiac] poll this week, they broke it down by age group, and what caught my eye was the &#8220;yute&#8221; &#8212; 18 to 29.  They are now incredibly disillusioned with President Obama, give him a 54% job disapproval number, and on issue after issue, they are increasingly disagreeing with him, and even more surprisingly, given their Congress &#8212; sorry, Louie &#8212; has a 9% job approval, they now trust the Republicans in Congress to handle the big issues of the economy &#8212; jobs, the federal budget, healthcare &#8212; over the Democrats by two to five points.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s the group that we should be reaching and we should be doing everything we can to try to get to them because we have a real opening there.</p>
<p>I don&#8217;t think all is lost.  I&#8217;m a happy warrior, very optimistic about America, and I think we owe it to the Founding Fathers and to, frankly, every generation that has fought so hard for freedom before ours and every generation to come that we fight this battle now.  Our battle may not be on the beaches of Normandy and Iwo Jima, but I think this battle is just as historic because freedom is just as at stake.  That&#8217;s why we fight.  This is our fight.</p>
<p>Thank you.  God bless you.</p>
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		<title>If You Want a Conservative Child</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dennis-prager/if-you-want-a-conservative-child/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=if-you-want-a-conservative-child</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dennis-prager/if-you-want-a-conservative-child/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 18 Nov 2013 04:10:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dennis Prager]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Children]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Conservative]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[right]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[teach]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Values]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=210953</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How to make sure the right values endure into adulthood.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Children-reading-001.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-210954" alt="Children-reading-001" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Children-reading-001.jpg" width="251" height="218" /></a>In my last column, I proposed some explanations for why many conservative parents have left-wing children.</p>
<p>In a nutshell, American parents who hold traditional American values — such as belief in small government as the basis of liberty, in a God-based moral code, that American military strength is the greatest contributor to world peace and stability, or in American exceptionalism, not to mention in the man-woman definition of marriage or in the worth of a human fetus — are at war with almost every influence on their children&#8217;s lives. This includes, most importantly, the media and the schools.</p>
<p>Here, then are some suggestions for raising a child with American, i.e., conservative, values.</p>
<p>First, parents who are not left-wing need to understand that if they do not articulate their values on a regular basis, there is a good chance that after one year, let alone four, at college, their child will adopt left-wing views and values. Do not think for a moment that values are automatically transmitted. One hundred years ago they may have been — because the outside world overwhelmingly reaffirmed parents&#8217; traditional values — but no longer.</p>
<p>You have to explain to your children — repeatedly — what America and you stand for. (That, if I may note, is why I wrote &#8220;Still the Best Hope&#8221; and why I started PragerUnversity.com.)</p>
<p>Second, they need to know what they will be taught at college — and now in many high schools — and how to respond. When they are told from day one at college that America and its white citizens are inherently racist, they need to know how to counter this libel with these truths: America is the least racist society in the world; more black Africans have immigrated here of their own volition than were came here forcibly to be slaves; and &#8220;racist&#8221; is merely one of many epithets — such as sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, and bigoted — that the left uses instead of arguments.</p>
<p>Third, when possible, it is best that your child not go to college immediately after high school. One reason colleges are able to indoctrinate students is that students enter college young and unworldly. It is very rare that adult students are convinced to abandon their values and become left-wing. Why? Because they have lived life and are much less naive.</p>
<p>For example, someone with life experience is far more likely than a kid just out of high school to understand that the best formula for avoiding poverty is to take personal responsibility — get a job, get married and then have children — not government help.</p>
<p>Teenagers who spend a year before going to college working — in a restaurant, for a moving company, at an office — will mature far more than they would after a year at college. And maturity is an inoculation against leftism.</p>
<p>If your home is Jewish, Catholic, Protestant or Mormon, another option for the year after high school is to have your child devote a year to studying religion in some formal setting. The more your child knows, lives and adheres to the principles of any of these religions, the less likely he or she will convert to Leftism, which has been the most dynamic religion of the last hundred years. For example, it is a fundamental belief of each of these Judeo-Christian religions that the root of evil is within the evildoer. But it is a fundamental belief of leftism that people murder, steal and rape overwhelmingly because of outside influences such as poverty and racism. The moment your child understands that people who commit evil are responsible— not poverty or racism — they cannot be a leftist.</p>
<p>Fourth, don&#8217;t be preoccupied with instilling high self-esteem in your child. It is the left that believes that self-esteem is a child&#8217;s right, something that parents and society owe children. Conservatives believe that everyone, including children, must earn self-esteem. Indeed, the belief in earning — rather than in being given — is conservative.</p>
<p>Fifth, teach character. The left has essentially defined a good person as one who holds progressive social positions — on race, the environment, taxes, health care, etc. That is why the left, including the feminist left, could so adore Bill Clinton who regularly used his positions of power to take advantage of women: He held progressive positions.</p>
<p>If your child recycles or walks five kilometers on behalf of breast cancer, that is lovely. But if your child refuses to cheat on tests or befriends an unpopular kid at school, that is character. And teaching that definition of character is more often done in a conservative (usually a religiously conservative) context.</p>
<p>It is not all that hard to produce a son or daughter able to withstand left-wing indoctrination. You just have to understand that it doesn&#8217;t happen automatically.</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>Livni&#8217;s Political Strategy</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/caroline-glick/livnis-political-strategy/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=livnis-political-strategy</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/caroline-glick/livnis-political-strategy/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 30 Oct 2013 04:40:26 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[negotiations]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Palestinian]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[tzipi livni]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=209013</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The politics of demonization and self-aggrandizement. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/tzipi-livni2.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-209014" alt="tzipi-livni2" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/tzipi-livni2.jpg" width="270" height="199" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Livnis-political-strategy-330004">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p>For Justice Minister Tzipi Livi, all politics are personal.</p>
<p>She can be trusted, because she is good. Her opponents must be rejected, because they are evil.</p>
<p>In her speech at The Jerusalem Post’s Diplomatic Conference in Herzliya last Thursday, Livni insisted that the only “legitimate” basis for opposing a Palestinian state is ideological. Livni stridently rejected the notion that one can oppose the establishment of a Palestinian state – in the two-state solution framework – for security reasons.</p>
<p>As she sees it, everyone cares equally about security. And since she cares about security just as much as her political opponents do, the question of whose policy will better protect the country is illegitimate.</p>
<p>She’s nice. She cares. So she’s just as competent as the next guy.</p>
<p>There’s just one problem with Livni’s claim.</p>
<p>She has a track record.</p>
<p>ISRAEL ENACTED two major strategic initiatives that have her signature on them: the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, and UN Security Council Resolution 1701 from 2006 that set the terms for the end of the Second Lebanon War.</p>
<p>Both were massive failures. Both caused Israel’s national security to deteriorate. And in both cases, Livni’s political opponents warned that her strategies were wrong-headed, dangerous and unhinged from strategic realities.</p>
<p>Livni built her career on her support for the withdrawal of all Israeli civilians and security forces from the Gaza Strip.</p>
<p>It was her decision to jump on the expulsions bandwagon, and her fervent castigation and demonization of all her former colleagues and voters, that caused then prime minister Ariel Sharon to promote her from the backwaters of the Absorption Ministry to center stage at the Justice Ministry.</p>
<p>Within months Livni became second only to Ehud Olmert in seniority in Sharon’s government.</p>
<p>As justice minister, Livni ignored the law and trounced democratic norms to repress opponents of the withdrawal.</p>
<p>Licensed buses transporting law abiding citizens to legal protests were unlawfully intercepted en route by police.</p>
<p>Protest organizers were subjected to warrantless, middle-of-the-night searches, unlawful seizure of private property and arbitrary arrests without charge.</p>
<p>13-year-old girls were arrested for participating in protests. They were jailed for four months without charges being brought against them.</p>
<p>And Livni, who since her 2003 ideological transformation from nationalist to radical leftist has presented herself as the guardian of Israeli democracy, oversaw the entire process.</p>
<p>We know what happened after Israel withdrew from Gaza. Just as all of Livni’s opponents warned, Israel was shelled by more rockets, mortars and missiles than ever before. Tel Aviv and Jerusalem are now in range of Gaza’s terror armies.</p>
<p>Hamas took over Gaza, and transformed it into a hub for the global jihad, linking the jihad against Israel to the jihad against Egypt and the rest of the world.</p>
<p>Gaza, which before the withdrawal was never more than a tactical nuisance, became a regional strategic threat.</p>
<p>As the war the next year showed, Israel’s decision to cut and run from Gaza, and its willingness to forcibly expel ten thousand of its most productive citizens from their homes, was a profound expression of weakness. Just as the withdrawal opponents warned, it invited the aggression that Hezbollah visited on us.</p>
<p>As foreign minister during the war, Livni was responsible for organizing Israel’s diplomatic defense and managing relations with the US and Europe.</p>
<p>She chose a strategy of preemptive capitulation. Against the will of prime minister Ehud Olmert, Livni began negotiating the cease-fire in the early days of the war, vacuously insisting that there was no military solution to a terrorist organization’s war of aggression.</p>
<p>The result of her dubious efforts was 1701, which from Israel’s perspective is arguably the most problematic Security Council resolution ever passed. Not only did 1701 treat Hezbollah, a terrorist organization that fought an illegal war against Israel, as a legitimate party simply by ignoring it. It made Hezbollah the victor in the war by ensuring it would retake control of Lebanon’s border with Israel without any serious opposition.</p>
<p>THESE TWO strategic initiatives are Livni’s national security track record. As their failures show, whatever her intentions may be, she is totally incompetent to understand, secure or advance Israel’s national security.</p>
<p>From her egomaniacal insistence that she is The One who will bring the peace, it is apparent that Livni has never accepted responsibility for the damage she has caused the country.</p>
<p>But she does seem to recognize that she cannot defend her actions on their merits. Just as the only card she plays in her favor is egomaniacal self-aggrandizement, so the only card she plays against her opponents is aggressive demonization.</p>
<p>Sunday the cabinet approved the release of another 26 terrorist murderers from prison. The release is second of four tranches that will bring about the release of 104 terrorist murderers from prison. This is the price that Livni and US Secretary of State John Kerry convinced Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to pay for the privilege of having Livni sit across a negotiating table from Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat.</p>
<p>In a bid to block the cabinet decision, on Saturday night the Jewish Home (Bayit Yehudi) party released a statement saying that Israel mustn’t endanger the public just so that Livni can sit at a table with chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat.</p>
<p>The statement attracted a lot of media attention because it was on the mark.</p>
<p>Livni’s negotiations are endangering Israel’s national security. Hundreds of Israelis have been murdered over the years by terrorists Israel released early from prison for political reasons. More will certainly be murdered by those now being released.</p>
<p>And that isn’t all. The act of releasing terrorists emboldens other terrorists to strike. When they see these murderers welcomed home as heroes after serving a fraction of their life sentences, wouldbe murderers understand that they have a free hand to kill Jews.</p>
<p>Then there are the lessons the Palestinians have learned over 20 years of negotiations. They know that Israel deals with terrorism with kid gloves when negotiations are taking place. Out of fear of angering their Palestinian “partners” Israel’s leaders have consistently failed to take effective action against terrorist attacks that occur while the PLO is supposedly talking peace with us.</p>
<p>So just by sitting down with Erekat, Livni is constraining the freedom of action of the IDF to protect the country.</p>
<p>The recent spate of terrorist attacks, and the IDF’s timid response to them, made this clear, yet again.</p>
<p>The Jewish Home party’s statement neatly encapsulated all of these incontrovertible charges. Since she has no substantive defense against them, she responded with rank demonization and criminalization.</p>
<p>Speaking to Army Radio, Livni’s surrogate, Environmental Protection Minister Amir Peretz, said, “The Jewish Home party has become a messianic and extremist home. The incitement and hatemongering is egregious&#8230;. Angry statements like this&#8230; can lead to murder.”</p>
<p>AND THERE you have it. Livni, the egomaniacal failure, is competent because she says she cares; and her opponents, who were right about the Gaza withdrawal, right about 1701 and are right about the terrorist releases and the negotiations, are murderers.</p>
<p>Livni promised the audience at the conference last Thursday that she will never quit politics again. Let’s hope her word on that score is as solid as her national security credentials.</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>Gut Check: The Right Way to Rebel</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/greg-gutfeld/gut-check-the-right-way-to-rebel/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=gut-check-the-right-way-to-rebel</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/greg-gutfeld/gut-check-the-right-way-to-rebel/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 02 Oct 2013 04:34:46 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Greg Gutfeld]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Conservatives]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[David Mamet]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[leaving the left]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[true rebels]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=205904</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[So, let's say you realized, that, try as you might, you're not like the rest of them.....]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/greg.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-205909" alt="greg" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/greg.jpg" width="256" height="195" /></a><strong>Reprinted from <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/">Breitbart.com</a>.</strong></p>
<p>So, let&#8217;s say you realized, that, try as you might, you&#8217;re not like the rest of them.</p>
<p>You&#8217;re different. You don&#8217;t instantly agree with <em>them</em>. Their assumptions are no longer yours. Maybe, secretly, they never were. But now, you find yourself the odd man out as they rant, they rave, they ridicule.</p>
<p>You realize&#8211;in a quiet, private moment&#8211;that you aren&#8217;t a liberal. What next? What do you do? Can you let go from the safety net of agreeable party conversation and follow your own path? It&#8217;s quite a leap. Anyone who has done it will tell you&#8211;it&#8217;s never easy. See: David Mamet.</p>
<p>And I know&#8211;I know&#8211;you&#8217;ve never considered, ever, that you might be a conservative. Because, for the longest time, being a conservative was met with edgy derision and mockery. The &#8220;typical conservative,&#8221; as identified by the media and those in entertainment, is a cloddish clown&#8211;a humorless scold devoid of contemporary caché and hip fashion. Some of them make you angry. Some make you laugh at their earnestness. Some&#8230; you just don&#8217;t get. They&#8217;re weird.</p>
<p>I get it. I was there, once, facing a new terrain of oddballs. It&#8217;s important to note, however, that this stereotype&#8211;although true in some parts&#8211;in the larger sense is false. And it is a stereotype created by a movement and its proponents in the media that has owned the narrative since I was in diapers (at least ten years). The idea that conservatives are somehow more intolerant and angry than liberals is a lie. Both have their fair share, but the nature of conservatives is &#8220;live and let live.&#8221; It&#8217;s a shame that a few of them still don&#8217;t get that part. But all in all, the oddballs are oddly cool.</p>
<p>How do you make that transition from left to right? How do you accept that you are now the hated? The reviled? The dork? The hater of women, minorities, and women minorities? Should you even bother, if bothering means you&#8217;ll be smeared as a racist? Is it better just to walk out of one group and avoid the other? Disown any identification and remove yourself from such ideological battles? That would be easy, if you did not live in a liberal world. But if you do live there, then what do you do? How do you come out of the closet, as a rightie, without ruining your life?</p>
<p>By asking that question, you answer it. The animus directed at one who leaves the fold explains the value of the journey out. Its struggle dictates the meaning. The slings and arrows one experiences means, quite simply, that you are onto something. For the anger toward your move is a sweaty reaction to courage that others (like the attackers) lack.</p>
<p>If you were to define real rebellion&#8211;the act of a true recalcitrant&#8211;it would be through the condemnation of your leap. Consider that by becoming a liberal&#8211;moving from right to left&#8211;you will be the recipient of the age old &#8220;strange new respect.&#8221; You will be lauded. You will gain opportunities afforded to the cool who made that leap already. You will keep friends, and make more. You will experience opportunities that are available only to those who speak what pretends to be daring, when it is solely predictable. That observation tells you that there is nothing rebellious about it. Ariana reaped a new life from it. So did David Brock. And every celebrity on the wane. It&#8217;s the lifeline for dead ends.</p>
<p>Consider the opposite, my dear troubled liberal. Moving right cannot be done at night. The first time you reveal a traditionally conservative thought (you are pro-life, you believe in American exceptionalism, you decry dependence and government interference, you balk at racial politics, you embrace free markets while eschewing punitive taxes and regulations*), it cannot be hidden. The spotlight finds you, and, like a magnifying glass on a spider, it seeks to fry.</p>
<p>For that alone, your change is worth it. There is nothing more rebellious, truly, than turning right. There is nothing more daring than standing alone, facing the onslaught of a smirking media, and saying, &#8220;Here I am, I am not you.&#8221; There is nothing edgier than saying to the edgy, &#8220;You lie. You are as edgy as a frisbee.&#8221;</p>
<p>The colonial rebels were resisting the same thing. They didn&#8217;t want to be overtaxed, controlled from afar, or have all aspects of their lives regulated. They were TRUE rebels, not fake Sean Penn champagne rebels. That&#8217;s what the country was founded on, and that&#8217;s what we&#8217;re in danger of losing. (It&#8217;s STILL what defines us. Unlike every European country, we find &#8220;security,&#8221; i.e. a safety net available at our beck and call, beneath us. That may be the most significant manifestation of the American mindset. THAT is American exceptionalism. &#8220;Rugged individualism&#8221; is NOT dead. We&#8217;re NOT that far from the frontier, nor do we wish to be. We&#8217;ll leave a stultifying, deadening desire for &#8220;security&#8221; at all costs to the ossified empires of the past. We want freedom, and the risk is the exhilaration.</p>
<p>The only way I truly changed was interpreting the rejection of my &#8220;change&#8221; as validation. It was liberating. It was freedom. And it&#8217;s the only way to convey the value of such transformation to the young and confused. It is time to accept that a peculiar creaking creepiness exists in certain places on the right, for it will only open doors to new recruits, relieved that you understand their reticence.</p>
<p>And when they come, accept their own weirdness with open arms.</p>
<p>____________</p>
<p>*NOT all conservatives believe in &#8220;all&#8221; the same things, however. It&#8217;s the problem we have with many newbies who wish to climb aboard. By forcing them to accept every conservative idea, they see it as too hard and choose the other direction because it&#8217;s easier. Give them time, and do not appoint yourself the bouncer of a movement because it makes you feel superior or &#8220;more conservative.&#8221; That only makes you irritating. Likewise, new converts who embrace all ideas and principles with hard-charging relish should pull back on labeling others around you for not being as &#8220;hardcore.&#8221; Chances are, those people were conservative when you were reading Highlights.</p>
<p><em>Greg Gutfeld is a mainstay on <a title="This external link will open in a new window" href="http://www.foxnews.com/" target="_blank">Fox News</a> as co-host of <a title="This external link will open in a new window" href="http://www.foxnews.com/on-air/the-five/index.html" target="_blank">The Five </a>and the host of <a title="This external link will open in a new window" href="http://www.foxnews.com/on-air/red-eye/index.html" target="_blank">Red Eye</a>. He&#8217;s also the NY Times best-selling author of <a title="This external link will open in a new window" href="http://ggutfeld.com/" target="_blank">The Joy of Hate: How to Triumph over Whiners in the Age of Phony Outrage</a>. For more from Greg check out his <a title="This external link will open in a new window" href="http://ggutfeld.com/" target="_blank">official site</a> or follow him on <a title="This external link will open in a new window" href="https://twitter.com/greggutfeld" target="_blank">Twitter</a>.</em></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>Subverting the Cultural Occupation</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-tapson/subverting-the-cultural-occupation/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=subverting-the-cultural-occupation</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-tapson/subverting-the-cultural-occupation/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 11 Sep 2013 04:10:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Tapson]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=203441</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why conservatives can no longer afford to dismiss pop culture. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/article-jayz-obama3-1106.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-203764" alt="article-jayz-obama3-1106" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/article-jayz-obama3-1106-450x314.jpg" width="315" height="220" /></a>In a recent <i>National Review </i>piece, Jim Geraghty pondered the alliterative question, “<a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/campaign-spot/356351/can-conservative-comments-celebrities-change-culture-jim-geraghty">Can Conservative Comments from Celebrities Change the Culture?</a>” He’s worried that by touting two celebrity quotes that espoused conservative values, the right is wading into the shallow waters of pop culture and degrading the serious business of politics. His concern couldn’t be more misdirected.</p>
<p>A few weeks ago, rock star/globetrotting activist Bono <a href="http://www.drudge.com/news/171132/bono-capitalism-takes-more-out-poverty">asserted</a> that capitalism pulls more people out of poverty than aid does. As if this concept emanating from such a pop icon weren’t refreshing enough to conservative ears, hip actor Ashton Kutcher gave a Teen Choice Awards acceptance speech around the same time, in which he stated that opportunities for success arose from hard work and personal drive; it was an inspirational antidote to the left’s “you didn’t build that” message, delivered to a young, impressionable audience (<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuBSRC1zpHw">this video</a> of that speech has garnered over 3.6 million views).</p>
<p>The right, aware more than ever before of the importance of reclaiming the culture (although many simply pay lip service to that), pounced on these statements as hopeful signs that our ideas were beginning to breach the wall of the left-dominated cultural stronghold. This made Geraghty squirm:</p>
<blockquote><p>I’m still chewing this over, and trying to decide whether this represents a necessary tactic in an era of celebrity-obsessed pop culture, or whether it’s just the latest version of the conservative tendency to instantly adopt and celebrate any celebrity who happens to echo some of our arguments.</p>
<p>After all, when we say it’s shallow and silly and superficial for Democrats to emphasize their Hollywood star supporters at their political conventions, and to hold campaign events with Bruce Springsteen and Jay-Z and such . . . we’re <i>not wrong.</i></p>
<p>Politics may be entertaining at times, but politics and governing are supposed to be distinct from entertainment. Not everything in life is supposed to be a fun show! Sometimes the country’s problems and potential solutions are complicated, detailed, involve trade-offs, and require a bit of thinking to evaluate.</p></blockquote>
<p>It’s disheartening that after losing two elections to the most celebrity-obsessed and pop culture-connected president in history, too many on the right still dismiss this most critical element of political war. As <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-tapson/notes-toward-winning-the-culture-war/">I’ve written before</a>, conservatives lost in the political arena last November because for decades the radical left laid the groundwork for it in the <i>cultural</i> arena, while we turned our backs on it. Disengagement isn’t how you win a culture war.</p>
<p>“If you’re going to try to transform every aspect of the public’s evaluation of public-policy decisions into a flashy, glamorous, sexy, exciting thrill,” Geraghty joked, “pretty soon we’ll see campaigns rolling out Katy Perry in a latex dress!” – which of course is <a href="http://www.sheknows.com/entertainment/articles/975025/katy-perry-endorses-president-obama">exactly</a> <a href="http://news.nationalreview.com/images/582/clip_image007_0001.jpg">what the left</a> <a href="http://research.fuseink.com/cp/MTAxNTQ1OQ">did</a>, and her candidate won (and if you don’t know who Katy Perry is, you’re part of the problem, not the solution).</p>
<p>Geraghty scorns the Perry-in-a-latex-dress-tactic as appealing to “people with no actual interest or knowledge of what’s going on in the political world,” and yet he grudgingly concedes that it works, and that we need our own “effective vote-getting tactics, especially with the young. But how likely are we to win if, through our own decisions, we legitimize the notion that campaigns ought to be duels of celebrities?”</p>
<p>It’s not a matter of dueling celebrities; for one thing, we don’t have enough celebs on our side to compete, and not one with half as much cultural influence as Perry. It’s not a matter of dumbing down political discourse; it’s a matter of embracing the reality that the culture is the battleground that matters now. We <i>must</i> recognize the power of pop culture and its primacy as a medium for disseminating, as Geraghty himself puts it, “conservative ideas, messages, and arguments to audiences that may otherwise never encounter them.”</p>
<p>Geraghty asserts that the Bono and Kutcher quotes may be “swell” (<i>swell</i>? He just lost everyone younger than 65), but the right shouldn’t be touting those pop icons as political authorities because they’re just showbiz stars.</p>
<p>This grossly underestimates the power of showbiz stars today. Bono and Ashton Kutcher <i>are</i> political authorities for countless millions here and abroad; their ilk are the only public figures that many young people trust and listen to, because they’re <i>cool</i>. Obama’s young, politically ignorant/brainwashed fans don’t admire him because they have carefully weighed the political arguments of both sides and rationally sided with his agenda; they admire him because he’s <i>cool</i>. They see him chatting with Letterman and Fallon, hanging with Jay-Z and Beyoncé, and appearing on <a href="http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/halloween-party/n12185/"><i>Saturday Night Live</i></a>, and instead of feeling that this degrades the office of the presidency, it speaks to them. They see First Lady Michelle on <a href="http://d1n0t8embjb5t8.cloudfront.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/michelle-obama-vogue.jpg"><i>Vogue</i></a> <a href="http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1037427/thumbs/o-MICHELLE-OBAMA-VOGUE-COVER-570.jpg?5">covers</a> and <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/01/michelle-obama-makes-cameo-in-nickelodeons-icarly/">Nickelodeon</a> and <a href="http://www.politico.com/politico44/2013/08/michelle-obama-releasing-rap-album-but-she-doesnt-170422.html">a rap album</a>, and that speaks to them.</p>
<p>But Geraghty thinks we shouldn’t lower ourselves: “I feel like we sometimes forget conservatives recoiled from American popular culture for a lot of good reasons.” Maybe so, and look where that got us.</p>
<blockquote><p>We’re tired of big corporations telling us stories about how bad big corporations are. We’re tired of seeing some of our religions mocked and demonized while others are protected by political correctness…</p>
<p>We’re tired of seeing our own military revealed as the bad guys behind the conspiracy, southerners depicted as ignorant hicks, suburban parenthood portrayed as soul-crushing conformity, and so on.</p></blockquote>
<p>We are mocked and demonized precisely because decades ago our side began shunning pop culture as unserious and demeaning, and we abandoned it to the left, who shrewdly filled that void. It’s also the very same reason we find ourselves losing at the ballot box, and will continue to do so until we engage the left on their cultural turf.</p>
<p>That doesn’t mean we should engage them <i>in the same way</i> – we shouldn’t be about dumbing down the level of discourse, but about elevating it. We shouldn’t be about emotional manipulation, but about enlightening ideas. We shouldn’t be about preaching, but about seducing converts to our values. The way to do that is primarily culturally, not politically.</p>
<p>We cannot afford to be dismissive of how crucial pop culture is in the larger political scheme. Even when our politicians win – which will happen less and less often as long as we are in denial about this – they too often disappoint or even betray us. We cannot look to them to turn this country around. Instead, America will change course only when our values and ideas begin to subvert the occupation of our cultural territory.</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>How Melanie Phillips Became a Culture Warrior</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-tapson/how-melanie-phillips-became-a-culture-warrior/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=how-melanie-phillips-became-a-culture-warrior</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-tapson/how-melanie-phillips-became-a-culture-warrior/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 15 Jul 2013 04:32:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Tapson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Britain]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Conservative]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[family]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Melanie Phillips]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=196717</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[An enemy of the Left tells her story. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/melanie-phillips-010.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-196784" alt="melanie phillips" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/melanie-phillips-010.jpg" width="251" height="164" /></a>FrontPage Mag readers almost certainly are familiar with British journalist Melanie Phillips from her book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Londonistan-Melanie-Phillips/dp/1594031975/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1373522826&amp;sr=1-2"><i>Londonistan</i></a>, which chronicled England’s multicultural slide into submission to Islam, or from her more recent book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/World-Turned-Upside-Down-Global/dp/1594035741/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1373522826&amp;sr=1-1"><i>The World Turned Upside Down</i></a>, about the West’s slide into secular mass derangement. But few readers may know about Phillips’ own journey from the political left to social conservatism. She takes us on that journey in the short autobiography she just released on her own publishing imprint, <a href="https://www.embooks.com/">EMBooks</a>, an ebook called <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Guardian-Angel-ebook/dp/B00CMA0KP6/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1373522826&amp;sr=1-6"><i>Guardian Angel: My Story, My Britain</i></a>.</p>
<p>This quick and compelling memoir of her personal and professional life “is the story of my culture war: the account of my battles with the hate-mongering left.” It spans her youth and her decades as a journalist, editor, prominent columnist, and author, reflecting the disturbing changes in British culture and society that she witnessed along the way. Those changes left two Britains in their wake: one “adhering to decency, rationality, and duty to others,” and the left, “characterized by hatred, rampant selfishness, and a terrifying repudiation of reason.”</p>
<p>In 1977 she joined the staff of the<i> </i>progressive <i>Guardian</i>, one of Britain’s most influential newspapers. The attitude there, as among progressives in general, Phillips acknowledges, was that “we were the embodiment of virtue itself… We were the left; therefore everyone who was not the left was the right. The right was evil; everyone not on the left was therefore evil… and everything not on the left was politically extreme.” The significance of this was that the left had hijacked the middle ground and substituted its own extreme values as the center of political and moral gravity.</p>
<p>Phillips herself was not driven by ideology, which meant that she found herself increasingly in confrontations with the <i>Guardian</i>’s left, “who had replaced truth with ideology, and whose weapon of choice against all dissent was vilification and demonization.”</p>
<p>It also opened her eyes about the left’s anti-Semitism; Phillips didn’t consider herself a Jewish writer, but the <i>Guardian</i> unofficially did, and this set her apart “from those who were going along with the great secular onslaught on the Judeo-Christian roots of the West.” Questioning the paper’s double standard in its coverage of the Middle East – giving Palestinian terrorists a pass while waging a seeming vendetta against Israel – she was shocked to realize that her cohorts were blinded by the prejudice of political correctness, which conferred victim status on certain “Third World” groups while holding “oppressive” developed countries like Israel to impossible standards.</p>
<p>By challenging their twisted thinking, Phillips had aligned herself with the oppressor. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 to crush the terrorist presence there, the <i>Guardian</i>’s chief leader-writer cornered Phillips and referred to it as “your war.” “At that moment,” she writes, realizing that she represented the Jewish “other” to him and to others at the paper, “the iron entered my soul.” It was a turning point of no return. The scales fell from her eyes and she understood that she was “wrong to have assumed that the liberal left was on the side of the angels. I now realized that, on the contrary, there was a gaping moral hole at its heart.”</p>
<p>When she wrote a column in 1987 placing the responsibility for the crisis in British schools to the breakdown of teaching, her <i>Guardian</i> colleagues were dismayed that she did not blame Margaret Thatcher’s “heartless” spending cuts, and in their eyes, “[l]iterally overnight, I became ‘right-wing.’” And indeed, “[i]ssue by issue, my writing during the 1980s and 1990s reflected the fact that Britain was undergoing a cultural revolution. And, as society changed, so too did my own attitudes change.” She saw her “former comrades on the left… embracing lies over truth, injustice over justice, rule by the strong over the weak – and even destroying the very basis of what it was to be a human being.”</p>
<p>Her biggest break with the left, however – “the most visceral, the most ferocious, the cultural Rubicon” – was over the breakdown of the family. “The fragmentation of the family was leading to the fragmentation of moral values – but any attempt to tell people how they should behave was damned as ‘theoretical imperialism,’ while tell them that lifestyle choice was the only acceptable doctrine was not.” Her defense of the traditional family unit marked her as a “right-wing extremist,” even an “Old Testament fundamentalist.” Gradually she saw that what the left hated about her was that “they understood that the banner behind which I was actually marching was the Biblical moral law which put chains on people’s appetites.”</p>
<p>In 1993 she left the <i>Guardian</i> and joined the <i>Observer</i>, and in 1996 she published <i>All Must Have Prizes</i>, about the ideological dogmas that were unraveling British education. “Most teachers, I wrote, were unaware that they were the unwitting troops of a cultural revolution, being now taught to teach according to doctrines whose core aim was to subvert the fundamental tenets of Western society.” This brought howls of condemnation from the left, naturally, but “[o]n and on I marched, straight into the guns. What else could I do?”</p>
<p>In March 1996 she won the Orwell Prize for political writing, and in 1998 left the <i>Observer</i> for the Rupert Murdoch-owned <i>Sunday Times</i>. “Was I now a conservative?” she asked herself. Though she resisted the label and was no devotee of the free-market and hyper-individualism, she was being invited to speak at conservative venues, and</p>
<blockquote><p>Much that such people said resonated with me. They seemed to be refreshingly rooted in the real world rather than frolicking in the neverlands of theory and wishful thinking; they looked soberly at facts and evidence and had an open mind; in disagreement they were courteous and did not resort to abuse.</p></blockquote>
<p>She went on to write for the <i>Guardian</i>’s nemesis, the <i>Daily Mail</i>, and she increasingly addressed the threat of Islamic extremism. When 9/11 came, “the twin tracks of my isolation on social and cultural issues and my isolation on Israel were finally joined.” For understanding that Israel and Britain faced the same Islamic enemy, she was now labeled “Melanie the warmongering Zionist Jew.” She subsequently published <i>Londonistan</i>, a book that highlighted “the unbridgeable chasm between myself and the left,” which felt like a “very bad divorce.”</p>
<p>Phillips still rejects a political label; she remains focused instead on preserving the values of Western civilization. “And that requires moral, political, and religious leadership of the highest order – and buckets of courage” – which she certainly has.</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>Don&#8217;t Let the War on Obama Kill the War on Terror</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/dont-let-the-war-on-obama-kill-the-war-on-terror/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=dont-let-the-war-on-obama-kill-the-war-on-terror</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 19 Jun 2013 04:45:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-war]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Assad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iraq]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[John Kerry]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[right]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[War on Terror]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=193424</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The John Kerry Way is no model for the GOP. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/national-security-agency-seal_transcript_pullout.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-193708" alt="national-security-agency-seal_transcript_pullout" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/national-security-agency-seal_transcript_pullout.jpg" width="258" height="210" /></a>In 2004, Senator John Kerry famously inaugurated his motto of, “I was for it, before I was against it.” These days, the former Senator and current Secretary of State is applying that motto to Syria where he was for Assad, before he was against Assad.</p>
<p>Kerry’s cynical turn was emblematic of a whole gang of Democrats who had been for the war when it was popular and rushed to come out against it when it wasn’t. Kerry joined the likes of Al Gore and Hillary Clinton in initially backing the Bush Administration’s policy because it was their policy to begin with.</p>
<p>Invading Iraq and removing Saddam Hussein had been a policy explored by the same Democrats who went on to become the loudest voices against it; sometimes after voting for it. And that hypocrisy made them unelectable.</p>
<p>Everyone remembers the loathsome spectacle of mainstream Democrats suddenly embracing creatures like Michael Moore and Cindy Sheehan for no other reason than that they made useful weapons against George W. Bush. That alone should keep us from embracing the equally repulsive Julian Assange and Glenn Greenwald.</p>
<p>At least the Democrats went deeper to their side of the spectrum, further to the left, once they realized that they could score political points over Iraq, but some Republicans are going not deeper into their own side of the spectrum, but also to the left.</p>
<p>It’s an ugly spectacle in which a man who escapes to a territory held by an enemy nation and reveals information about intelligence gathering that goes far beyond any domestic surveillance and that alerts enemy states to our capabilities becomes a patriot because his revelations are temporarily damaging to Barack Obama.</p>
<p>Americans should be watchful of what their government does. But that watchfulness should be based on actual actions, not on potential actions.</p>
<p>The IRS scandal is so compelling because there is clear evidence that political targeting had occurred. The NSA scandal is apolitical. It’s about how extensive the information gathering capabilities of the government have become. It’s a valid topic, but it’s also an apolitical topic.</p>
<p>The IRS was used to suppress dissent. The NSA was not. Turning the IRS into a weapon of political destruction is all on Obama, but the NSA has been making people apolitically uncomfortable for a while now.</p>
<p>It’s sensible to distrust what Obama is capable of doing with the NSA, but preemptively shutting down defense and intelligence capabilities out of fear of what Obama might decide to do with them would cripple our national defense.</p>
<p>Kerry and his fellow Democrats did not stop and think before turning the War in Iraq into collateral damage in their war on George W. Bush. We might want to pause before turning the War on Terror into collateral damage in a war on Obama.</p>
<p>Recent attempts to depict drone strikes or extensive information gathering as some gimmick that Obama cooked up on the golf course are as dishonest as the revisionist history that was peddled by Gore and Kerry. If those things are to be opposed, then they should be opposed honestly.</p>
<p>Obama did not invent the War on Terror. He inherited it and mismanaged it. It’s one thing to take issue with that mismanagement and another to take issue with the war. And that is what we’re really talking about.</p>
<p>The War on Terror has mostly been pared down to clumsy intelligence gathering and drone strikes. Take those two off the table and the war is over. It’s not over in the sense that a victory has been achieved or peace has been obtained. It’s over in the sense that we revert back to a pre-9/11 reality in which Islamic terrorism is treated like organized crime.</p>
<p>That outcome is not one that Obama opposes. Instead it’s one that he has fervently worked toward over the years.</p>
<p>We can attack Obama from the right for bungling the War on Terror or we can attack him from the left for continuing the War on Terror and that will just push him in the direction that he already wants to go.</p>
<p>Obama left the remnants of the War on Terror in place because it was the politically safe thing to do. Federal law enforcement has been blinded and neutered when it comes to dealing with Islamic groups, but “smart” intelligence gathering programs and drone strikes have been used to fill the gap to avoid domestic terrorist attacks and accomplish foreign policy objectives.</p>
<p>Both of those tactics have failed. The Boston Marathon bombings and the defeat in Afghanistan are proof of that. The only way to hold Obama accountable for the loss of all those lives is to explain how he tied the hands of the FBI and American soldiers in fighting the real enemy, instead of hooking up with enemy propagandists like Glenn Greenwald who claim that we are the real enemy.</p>
<p>It’s only sensible to have a national conversation about the tactics that we are using to fight terrorism, but giving the anti-war movement the microphone turns the conversation into a choice between doing something and doing nothing. And not even Obama is self-destructive enough to choose doing nothing because once a bomb goes off in a crowded place, there are political consequences to having done absolutely nothing.</p>
<p>Kerry became a walking cartoon because of his dishonesty. Like so many Democrats, he wanted to change his views without admitting that they had changed. If we are going to have a conversation, then it should be an honest one.</p>
<p>We face an extensive conspiracy of Muslim terrorists operating in global organizations on a large scale, and as individuals and cells locally. These groups and individuals communicate through everything from burner phones to coded posts on abandoned forums to Xbox Live game console chats making tracking them a challenge.</p>
<p>Yes, a lot of this would be less of an issue under President Allen West, but under Barack Obama the options are limited. We can’t have the War on Terror that should exist. We can advocate for it, but for now we are stuck with the shambling skeleton of the War on Terror that is. That War on Terror is a mixed bag, but we should be wary of tossing it completely overboard for a temporary political advantage.</p>
<p>The mismanaged War on Terror in its current state may not stop the next bomber. But then again it might.</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>German Left Ramps Up Attacks on Islam Critics</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/andrew-harrod/german-left-ramps-up-attacks-on-islam-critics/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=german-left-ramps-up-attacks-on-islam-critics</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 18 Jun 2013 04:15:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Andrew Harrod]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free Speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[germany]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Internet]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=193410</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The future for free speech in Europe gets darker. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/shutterstock_3359855.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-193533" alt="shutterstock_3359855" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/shutterstock_3359855-450x300.jpg" width="270" height="180" /></a>National parliamentarians from <a href="http://www.die-linke.de/dielinke/aktuell/"><i>Die Linke</i></a>, Germany’s post-communist Left Party, recently presented the federal German government with a Minor Inquiry (<i>Kleine Anfrage</i> or KA) concerning the government’s policy towards the conservative German website <i>Politically Incorrect</i> (PI).  This is only the latest effort by left-wing multiculturalists to quash open discussion, and criticism on Islam by designating the discourse “anti-democratic”and “right-wing extremist.&#8221;</p>
<p>As the online <a href="http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/btgo_1980/index.html#BJNR012380980BJNE011600311">rules of order</a> for the German parliament or <i>Bundestag</i> explain, the KA in <a href="http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/btgo_1980/__104.html">Section 104</a> allows the <i>Bundestag</i>’s president to receive questions for the federal government about “certain delineated areas.” Normally the president calls upon the government to answer the questions in writing within 14 days, although agreement with the KA authors can extend this time limit.  As the German-language <a href="http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleine_Anfrage_(Deutschland)">KA Wikipedia entry</a> explains, this procedure serves as a means of parliamentary control over the government by calling upon it to give account of a given state of affairs.</p>
<p><i>Die Linke</i>’s May 13, 2013, KA (document 17/13573, available in PDF format <a href="http://www.bundestag.de/dokumente/">here</a>) notes that “Islam-hostile internet portals” like PI with its “tens of thousands of visitors daily” and parties such as the Freedom Party (<a href="http://diefreiheit.org/home/"><i>Die Freiheit</i></a>) and Germany’s <i>Pro</i> movement (<a href="http://www.pro-nrw.net/"><i>Pro NRW</i></a><i>/</i><a href="http://www.pro-deutschland-online.de/"><i>Pro Deutschland</i></a>) “warn against a supposed ‘Islamization of Europe.’”  In PI reader comments, meanwhile, Muslims “are collectively humiliated and denigrated in a racist, xenophobic, insulting, hate-filled, and at times violence-glorifying manner.”</p>
<p>Referenced by the KA and previously reported by this author (see <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/andrew-harrod/74-year-old-german-woman-convicted-of-hate-speech-against-muslims/">here</a> and <a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3619/euro-islam">here</a>), PI and <i>Die Freiheit</i>, with common members such as <a href="http://www.bayern.diefreiheit.org/michael-sturzenberger/">Michael Stürzenberger</a>, have conducted a petition drive for a referendum to stop a proposed Center for Islam in Europe-Munich (<a href="http://www.zie-m.de/"><i>Zentrum für Islams in Europa-München</i></a> or ZIE-M).  The KA references a story from the Munich-based German national newspaper <a href="http://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/islamgegner-michael-stuerzenberger-der-grosse-agitator-1.1654428"><i>Süddeutsche Zeitung</i></a> discussing how Stürzenberger commonly compares the Koran with Adolf Hitler’s <i>Mein Kampf</i> and <i>Die Freiheit</i> rallies have featured signs stating “Christ is truth, Muhammad is a lie.” Previously reported by this author as well (see <a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/05/silencing_speech_on_islam.html">here</a> and <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/andrew-harrod/german-government-ramps-up-monitoring-of-conservatives/">here</a>), the KA also notes that the Bavarian Office of Constitutional Protection (<i>Verfassungsschutz</i>) has recently begun monitoring Bavarian chapters of PI/<i>Die Freiheit</i> due to “anti-constitutional” sentiments.</p>
<p>A previous August 18, 2011, <i>Die Linke</i> KA (<a href="http://www.bundestag.de/dokumente/">17/6823</a>)  had also dealt with PI/<i>Die Freiheit</i> in the wake of the July 22, 2011, massacre perpetrated in Norway by <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/anders_behring_breivik/index.html">Anders Behring Brevik</a>.  This earlier KA bemoaned in Germany an “increasing hostility to Islam precisely among high earners and people with high levels of education.” In this context “populist and xenophobic campaigns against ‘Islam’” appeared to the “extreme right in Europe” as a “recipe for success for their propaganda” and an “entrance ticket into the political middle.” <i>Die Freiheit</i> was one of several attempts to found “anti-Islam parties” while PI had become a “central forum of Islam haters in the German-speaking area.”</p>
<p>Yet in citing an article from Berlin’s leftwing <a href="http://www.taz.de/!75174/"><i>Tageszeitung</i></a> (<i>taz</i>), the 2011 KA noted that the federal <i>Verfassungsschutz</i> had not deemed PI’s outlook as anti-constitutional given PI’s self-professed “pro-Israeli, pro-American” character.  The article noted additionally PI’s “emphatic profession of loyalty to the <i>Grundgesetz</i>,” Germany’s Basic Law or constitution.</p>
<p>The government’s answer on September 5, 2011, (<a href="http://www.bundestag.de/dokumente/">17/6910</a>) to the various questions concerning matters such as membership and statements of PI/<i>Die Freiheit</i> and other groups in the 2011 KA continued this analysis. With respect to <i>Die Freiheit</i>, there were “not sufficient indications” to classify <i>Die Freiheit</i> as “rightwing extremist.” The “overwhelming majority of PI entries,” meanwhile, “made no use of classical rightwing extremist argumentation patterns, but rather was to be situated within the Islam-critical spectrum.” While some PI contributions had “anti-Muslim or in parts even racist content,” these were “practically exclusively” in the comments section and were “even there the exception.” Thus a “rightwing extremist effort (still) did not allow itself to be discerned” at PI.</p>
<p>Not to be deterred, <i>Die Linke</i> responded on October 31, 2011, with yet another KA (<a href="http://www.bundestag.de/dokumente/">17/7569</a>) about “anti-Muslim agitation” citing several sources such as newspapers warning against PI, <i>Die Freiheit</i>, and other groups.  In this KA, <i>Die Linke</i> indicated that it was not so much interested in a “secret service surveillance of the Islam- and Muslim-hostile scene” by the federal <i>Verfassungschutz</i> as a “societal ostracism of this body of thought just like every other form of racism and anti-Semitism.” Among other questions, <i>Die Linke</i> wanted to know what connections PI had to “religious groupings from the evangelical, dogmatic-Catholic, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Catholic_Church">old Catholic</a> milieus.” The government’s response (<a href="http://www.bundestag.de/dokumente/">17/7761</a>) on November 17, 2011, however, reiterated the position taken in 17/6910 and noted that “individual statements” did not suffice to define an entity as “extremist” but rather demanded an “overall observation.”</p>
<p>In 17/13573 <i>Die Linke</i> repeated many of its previous questions and inquired whether the federal government still maintains its previous outlook in light of recent Bavarian decisions.  This is the latest <i>Die Linke</i> salvo in an ongoing campaign to bring about a self-proclaimed political “ostracism” of PI/<i>Die Freiheit</i> and other groups.  Yet the irony was not lost on Stürzenberger, who pointed out to PI that <a href="http://www.pi-news.net/2013/05/anfrage-der-linke-an-den-bundestag-zu-pi-und-freiheit-wegen-antimuslimischen-rassismus/"><i>Die Linke</i></a>, with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Left_(Germany)">much of its roots in East Germany’s Communist Party</a>, is itself an object of federal <i>Verfassungsschutz</i> <a href="http://www.welt.de/newsticker/news1/article116739259/Linke-kritisiert-Beobachtung-durch-Verfassungsschutz.html">surveillance</a>.</p>
<p>The future of a free and open discussion of Islam in Germany seems perilous with the likes of <i>Die Linke</i>, a totalitarian-legacy group, continually demonstrating its propensity to use the German federal government as a tool of intimidation against Islam’s critiques.</p>
<p><em>This article was commissioned by <a href="http://www.legal-project.org/">The Legal Project</a>, an activity of the <a href="http://www.meforum.org/">Middle East Forum</a>.</em></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>The Killer in the Tel Aviv Gay Lounge Was &#8230;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/steven-plaut/the-killer-in-the-tel-aviv-gay-lounge-was/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-killer-in-the-tel-aviv-gay-lounge-was</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 11 Jun 2013 04:08:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Steven Plaut]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Arrest]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bar Ha-Noar]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gay]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[gay bar]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[killing]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[right]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[shooting]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Tel Aviv]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[How the Israeli Left tried to blame an anti-gay hate crime on religious Jews -- and failed miserably. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p dir="LTR"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/HUg_1455171i.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-192616" alt="HUg_1455171i" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/HUg_1455171i-450x318.jpg" width="270" height="191" /></a>It is now almost exactly four years since <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8180069.stm">the murderous attack on the homosexual</a> recreational center in Tel Aviv.   In August of 2009, a man with a gun entered the &#8220;Bar Ha-Noar&#8221; (the &#8220;Youth Bar&#8221;), a Tel Aviv gay lounge, murdered two and wounded others.  Then he escaped.</p>
<p dir="LTR">The reaction of the media and the chattering classes at the time is of interest.  The world media suddenly filled with self-righteous condemnations of Israel&#8217;s supposed violent intolerance towards homosexuals.  Never mind that the treatment of gays in Israel is at least a billion times better than in any Arab or Moslem country, and never mind the &#8220;gay pride&#8221; marches held in Israel all the time.</p>
<p dir="LTR">Israel has a long history of experiencing the adage that no good deed ever goes unpunished.  The world is full of <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/03/15/zionism-meet-feminism.html">anti-Semitic radical feminist organizations</a> calling for the destruction of the Middle East country that has had a woman Prime Minister, a woman Chief Justice, women university presidents, and countless women-owned and -managed businesses large and small.  In Arab countries rape victims may be executed for immodesty, women slaves may be sold in slave markets, and women may be prohibited from driving, but feminists just need to understand that this is their culture.  The only really intolerable oppression of women in the Middle East is in the territories that Israel &#8220;occupies.&#8221;</p>
<p dir="LTR">A similar trend has been growing among radical homosexual groups.  Homosexuals may be &#8220;kneecapped,&#8221; tortured and murdered by the &#8220;vice squads&#8221; of the Hamas and the PLO, but groups like &#8220;<a href="http://queersagainstapartheid.org/">Queers against Israel Apartheid</a>&#8221; serve as cheerleaders for the jihad.  <a href="http://www.algemeiner.com/2012/06/13/adl-lgbt-group-slam-cuny-for-sponsorship-of-anti-israel-pinkwashing-conference/">&#8220;Lesbian and Gay Studies&#8221; departments</a> at universities hold Bash-the-Jews conferences.   They are cheered on by the <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/4208">tenured pogromchiki</a>, including <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2010/steven-plaut/collaborators-in-the-war-against-the-jews-judith-butler/">Judith Butler</a>.  Anti-Semitic homosexual groups operating under various names cropped up all over the world to denounce Israel and Zionism in general, and to back anti-Israel terrorism.  Some leftist academics in Israel invented the nonsense word &#8220;<a href="http://isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/TAU%20-%20Aeyal%20Gross%20-%20pinkwashing%20claims%20basis%20for%20NYT%20Israel-bashing.htm">pinkwashing</a>&#8221; to refer to the fact that supporters of Israel like to mention the tolerance towards homosexuals in Israel as a point in Israel&#8217;s favor.   The militant anti-Israel homosexuals and their academic supporters, invariably far Left, insist that mentioning such tolerance is merely a conspiratorial cover-up to divert attention away from Israel&#8217;s crimes against Arabs.</p>
<p dir="LTR">The Israeli local media at the time, along with just about any public figure having an opinion or a bully pulpit, presumed the attack on the bar/lounge was perpetrated by anti-homosexual religious right-wingers.  Their entire set of evidence for this was that the targets were homosexual and it all took place in a gay center.  Later Jack Teitel, the deranged ex-American who was jailed for acts of violence against Arabs, missionaries, and an anti-Israel leftist professor, tried to take &#8220;credit&#8221; for the attack, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/02/world/middleeast/02israel.html?_r=0">fueling the media feeding frenzy</a> against the religious Right.  All until the police proved he was grandstanding and had had nothing to do with the attack on the gay bar.  It appears that all his violent attacks were actually against heterosexuals.</p>
<p dir="LTR">Back in 2009, there were hints in the small print of the back pages, and these were mentioned in these cyber-incitements I post, that it just might be that the attack was not a hate crime at all but rather the act of one of the gay people who frequented the Tel Aviv center and who had some sort of personal non-political grudge.</p>
<p dir="LTR">This past week the police in Israel arrested four people whom the police are convinced were involved in that attack, including the shooter himself.  One of the arrested was a senior activist in the gay center.  The police are being uncharacteristically boisterous about their certainty that they caught the correct perps.  The media are still under a gag order about the details and the names.</p>
<p dir="LTR">But even with all the coyness, from remarks by the police it is now entirely clear that the attack on the Tel Aviv gay lounge 2009 was not a &#8220;hate crime&#8221; at all and was not carried out by anyone with an anti-gay political or religious agenda.  In fact it was <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/activist-in-israel-s-gay-community-arrested-over-deadly-2009-attack-on-tel-aviv-youth-center.premium-1.528090">carried out by other homosexuals</a>.</p>
<p dir="LTR">Without being too candid and clear (yet), the police are saying the perps had themselves been members or participants in the &#8220;bar&#8221; and had acted out of &#8220;personal revenge&#8221; motives.  They are not openly saying what personal revenge means, allowing people to imagine unpaid loans or sales of defective merchandise as the motive.  But if we cut to the chase, it is almost certain that the murderer was a jilted lover of someone in the club and went on a rampage.</p>
<p dir="LTR">Now no one thinks that heterosexuals are incapable of going on jealous rampages or committing multiple murders, and no one thinks that the massacres in Newton or Norway involved homosexuals, to name but two.  But at the same time let us keep in mind the kneejerk reaction of the entire world media and of the radical homosexual organizations in particular in blaming anti-gay hatred, religion, and Zionism as responsible for the violence.  It will be interesting to see how many of these homosexual organizations now step forward and apologize, or whether they prefer to maintain their posture as anti-Semitic cowardly pansies even after the truth has come out.  The refusal of the gay militants and of the media in 2009 to consider jilted gay love as the possible motive behind the Tel Aviv attack may be the worst form of homophobia around these days.</p>
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