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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Rights</title>
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		<title>Quarreling with Quarantine</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/mallorymillett/quarreling-with-quarantine/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=quarreling-with-quarantine</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 07 Nov 2014 05:25:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mallory Millett]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[civil rights]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ebola]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Polio]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[quarantine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Rights]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[As a survivor of Bulbar polio in my childhood, let me tell you what a real “civil rights” violation is. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/re.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-244508" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/re.jpg" alt="re" width="275" height="176" /></a>Now I&#8217;ve heard everything! Quarantines are a violation of civil rights?</p>
<p>Here&#8217;s the civil rights violation: Not quarantining people who have deadly diseases. One of the few mandated obligations of our government is to protect its citizens. Exactly when and how did the sense of this get lost?</p>
<p>It seems every other day there&#8217;s a national argument breaking out because people no longer realize that the government&#8217;s main purpose is to keep us safe from threats both within and without the country.</p>
<p>When I was twelve years old I was diagnosed with Infantile Paralysis. Polio. This struck directly after my graduation from elementary school at the start of what was to be a grand slope of a summer, culminating in the glorious start of high school. I vividly recall that week, which began on such a high note and then unraveled into what we assumed was flu— crushing for such an eager little beaver who was about to step out to conquer the world.</p>
<p>The doctor who delivered me into the world came for a house call and decided it was, indeed, the flu.  However, the next day, it alarmed my well-seasoned mother when the doctor called saying he wanted to come back and take another look.</p>
<p>I tiptoed out of my sickbed to spy while my mother whispered to my sisters, Sally and Katie: &#8220;This is frightening, girls! Never have I had a doctor call <em>me</em> to ask if he could come back to look at my child. Never!&#8221;</p>
<p>This turned out to be the last great summer epidemic of polio.  It was the end of May. Dr. Salk came out with his vaccine the following November. But at that moment people were contracting the disease in droves and dropping like insects on a dog-day August afternoon.</p>
<p>When Dr. Flannigan returned the following day, it was only moments before he called an ambulance to whisk me off to the city&#8217;s public hospital in St. Paul, Minnesota.</p>
<p>Ancker Hospital was the only possible option when one was diagnosed with the dreaded polio. No private hospital would take you. So, in fear and trembling, I was torn from the sanctuary of my childhood bedroom amid sirens blaring and with my traumatized mommy gripping my hands as if it were to be our last moments together on earth.</p>
<p>They took us to an isolated room, attached but separate from the hospital. Tests were performed. One was a spinal tap, which taught me for all time the true meaning of God-awful pain. I learned then and there I could never withstand torture by Nazis or the Japanese as I&#8217;d always fervently believed. My first experience with profound all-engulfing pain taught me well that I would do anything to make such agony stop.  Turn in my devoted mother. Beg them to do it to anyone else.  Just make it stop.</p>
<p>After several tormenting hours we learned that not only did I have polio but that I had the most vicious form of all: Bulbar polio &#8212; the type that lands you in an iron lung. It had a 97% fatality rate.</p>
<p>Here is where my story has true relevance to current history: this was the fifties, the last period in our country when people behaved as adults, acting reasonably and seeing to it that they responded to such crises with care and maturity in order to protect each other.</p>
<p>I was instantly quarantined. My mother and sisters were quarantined in our home. I was placed in the Bulbar polio ward along with everyone else who had the exact same thing as I did. I was tearfully torn away while clinging to my bewildered mother as we both realized it might be the last time we would ever see, smell or touch each other in this lifetime.</p>
<p>I was installed in an open ward with about twelve beds occupied by people of both sexes, all ages. The only segregation was with respect to our particular strain of this killer, crippling disease. We were the Bulbar people. Those with spinal polio were elsewhere.</p>
<p>My mother and sisters were confined to our home, which they could not leave under any circumstances. An enormous yellow poster declaring that the premises were under quarantine was plastered over the front door of our innocent white house and no one could enter or leave for what I believe was thirty days. The groceries were ordered by phone and left on the steps down by the public sidewalk.</p>
<p>Health officials stormed my bedroom and <em>every single thing</em> was removed and burned. My dolls and teddy bears; my desk, bed and radio. Everything was taken from my little-girl room and destroyed.</p>
<p>Meanwhile I plotted like a wily cat to stay alive. Lying in that fevered and terrifying illness my mind raced as to how I could escape the drift of death, which was moving throughout that room. Every night some one or two of my fellow inmates died.</p>
<p>They always died at night, it seemed, and they had the exact same illness as I had. I was twelve years old and my lot was to quietly wait until it was my turn to be wheeled out as a corpse covered in a white sheet. After about a week this became highly notable and so I concocted a scheme to survive.</p>
<p>A patient with Bulbar succumbs under the tsunami of phlegm their body produces. As there were only two suction machines on the floor and half-staff at night, people were drowning in their own mucous.</p>
<p>I figured the only thing that might possibly get me out of that room and back at home would be if I stayed awake all night, every night.  If I just piled high the pillows and sat up very straight maybe I wouldn&#8217;t suffocate in the never-abating ocean of snot.</p>
<p>Another thing which insured my alertness was the specter of the iron lung. There were only four of them in the hospital and they were strung up and down the sides of the hallways, as there wasn&#8217;t space in the rooms for such enormous contraptions. My two goals were to stay alive and then to elude that iron lung.</p>
<p>I stayed up all night every night doing crossword puzzles and reading, and then slept all day. Opening my dazed eyes from time to time I could contemplate the lung’s hideous form with some poor soul captured in its clutches just outside my doorway. Often there would be a heart-pounding stir as health workers suddenly burst into the room to perform an emergency tracheotomy with blood spurting everywhere and the pulsing of a life-and-death drama. This could happen at any time, during lunch or dinner; at midnight, upon whomever death had come to perch.</p>
<p>We were all perfect strangers locked in a sweaty struggle against death and atrophy, which oddly made us instant intimates.  Even as a preadolescent what struck me most profoundly in those days and nights in that desperate room was the unceasing passion, heroism, self-sacrifice, and committed devotion of every person who labored to keep us alive.</p>
<p>I was such a desperate child longing for my family and home, convinced that I would never again see the people I loved. No one was allowed to visit; not even my mother. I was fortunate enough to have a window and in those days you could open them. I think we were on the eighth floor or so. My family would gather on the street corner below and as they waved up at me, I hung out of my window pleading, &#8220;Get me out of here!!&#8221;</p>
<p>Many, many people died in that room with me. Each time someone expired they were replaced by another Bulbar victim. One was a four-year old girl named Bernadette, whom I had befriended and taken under my older wing. The blow of her death stung deeply and I was gripped with shock for weeks.</p>
<p>Nurse Kaci Hickox, who recently returned from treating patients in Ebola-stricken Sierra Leone, is &#8220;fighting for her freedom&#8221;? She says &#8220;no&#8221; to quarantine? Doctor Craig Spencer, who contracted Ebola, lied about his movements after returning to the US? We find out he was out and about all over New York City? What kind of dedicated doctors and nurses are these people? They&#8217;re scientists, no?  We deserve much better.</p>
<p>Nurse Hickox says quarantine is a violation of her civil rights.  No, it is, in fact, your civic duty to accept quarantine. Have we really become such unspeakably self-involved, narcissistic, immature, mindless citizens? What a sad country we have dwindled to. How can it be that it isn&#8217;t commonly understood that quarantine is a vitally important, adult, necessary action in these scenarios? I can hardly contain my outrage at these persons&#8217; indifference.</p>
<p>Back in the days of my childhood it never ever occurred to us to fight or resent or argue with the quarantine. For God&#8217;s sake, neither I at my callow age nor my family of various ages —nor anyone in that room with me— ever would have considered quarreling with the quarantine. On the contrary, I would have been horrified had I infected anyone else; nor did my mother and sisters bristle at their captive state.</p>
<p>They, we, waited it out, grateful to be surrounded by educated, thoughtful, concerned people who took care to confine us along with the disease. The plan worked and I got to walk out free and healed at the end of summer, just in time to attend the first day of high school.</p>
<p>These days I find myself consumed with a deep longing for that time in America when people actually grew into adults. We used to be quite wonderful people. Will we ever again be surrounded, nursed or even governed by caring grown-up fellow citizens?</p>
<p><em>Mallory Millett resides in New York City with her husband of over twenty years. CFO for several corporations, she is a long-standing member of The David Horowitz Freedom Center and sits on the Board of Regents for the Center for Security Policy. </em></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>&#8216;To Hell With the Constitution!&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/to-hell-with-the-constitution/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=to-hell-with-the-constitution</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/to-hell-with-the-constitution/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 04 Sep 2014 04:50:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[citizens]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[constitution]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=239942</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The long road of soft tyranny that led to Obama. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/600x393.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-239944" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/600x393-450x347.jpg" alt="600x393" width="289" height="223" /></a>In 1902 Theodore Roosevelt intervened in a strike by Pennsylvania coal miners, exceeding his Constitutional authority as president. When this was pointed out to him by Republican House whip James E. Watson, Roosevelt allegedly yelled, “To hell with the Constitution when the people want coal!”</p>
<p>This outburst reflected the novel Progressive view of the Chief Executive. Instead of the Constitution’s limited powers focused on specific needs, such as national defense, beyond the capacity of the individual states or local governments to address, the President needed more expansive authority in order to serve the “people.” Over 100 years later, Barack Obama has governed on the same assumption, one that undermines the Constitution’s structure of balanced powers and limited government, and puts at risk our political freedom and autonomy.</p>
<p style="color: #272727;"><span style="color: #000000;">In January of this year Obama famously asserted, much less honestly than did T.R., his willingness to shed Constitutional limits: </span>“We’re not just going to be waiting for legislation in order to make sure that we’re providing Americans the kind of help they need. I’ve got a pen and I’ve got phone.” And he’s been true to his belief during his nearly six years in office. He has changed his own signature legislation, Obamacare, 42 times. He has also used his “pen and phone” to change immigration laws, gun laws, labor laws, environmental policy, and many other statutes that should be the purview of the legislative branch, to which the Constitution gives the law-making power.</p>
<p style="color: #272727;">Other presidents, of course, have used signing statements and executive orders. But Obama has pushed this traditional prerogative far beyond the bounds that presidents in the past were usually careful to respect. But the ideas behind this expansion of power are not peculiar to Obama, and transcend any one man. They come from the Progressive worldview that rejects the Constitution’s philosophical vision of humans as driven by conflicting “passions and interests,” and eager to amass power in order to gratify both. The Progressives, on the contrary, believe that human nature can be improved, and that technocrats armed with new knowledge of human behavior and motivations can be entrusted with the concentrated power necessary for managing that improvement and solving the new problems created by industrialism, technology, and the other novelties of modernity.</p>
<p style="color: #272727;">In terms of the federal government, the key to this new vision is the executive branch, led by an activist president. Woodrow Wilson was quite explicit about these ideas. In 1890 he wrote of the need for a “leader of men” who has “such sympathetic and penetrative insight as shall enable him to discern quite unerringly the motives which move other men <i>in the mass</i>.” He knows “what it is that lies waiting to be stirred in the minds and purposes of groups and masses of men.” This sympathy is one “whose power is to command, to command by knowing its instrument,” and the leader possessing this “sympathy” cares only “for the external uses to which they [people] may be put.”</p>
<p style="color: #272727;">More frightening still are Wilson’s comments further expanding on this “sympathy.” “Whoever would effect a change in a modern constitutional government must first educate his fellow-citizens to <i>want</i> some change. That done, he must persuade them to want the particular change he wants. He must first make public opinion willing to listen and then see to it that it listens to the right things. He must stir it up to search for an opinion, and then manage to put the right opinion in its way.” Gone are the notions that free people decide their own political fate and choose representatives to serve their interests and principles, their autonomy protected by the Constitutional structure of checks and balances. Now an empowered elite presumably wiser about human nature will, like Plato’s Guardians, manipulate the people’s opinions so that they make the “right” choice. These ideas are on a continuum that at the extreme end lie Mussolini’s fascism and Lenin’s communism.</p>
<p><span style="color: #272727;">The president, then, must transcend the Constitution’s outmoded limits on government power. In 1908, for example, Wilson complained that the president was merely a “legal executive” and “guiding authority in the application of the law and the execution of policy,” which is the Constitution’s charge that the president “</span>shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” For Wilson, this was too limited an authority, for the president could only veto bad laws, and was not “given an opportunity to make good ones.” And explicitly rejecting the Constitution’s vision of clashing “factions” driven by conflicting “passions and interests,” Wilson writes, “You cannot compound a successful government out of antagonisms.” So much for Madison’s governing principle in <i>Federalist </i>51 that “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” The Progressive collectivist “people” possessing uniform interests must have a “President as the unifying force in our complex system.”</p>
<p>We see in Wilson’s writings another Progressive assumption still with us today: defining Americans as an abstract, collectivist “people.” This unitary “people” rejects the Founders’ recognition of America’s great variety of economic interests, passions such as religion, and regional folkways that characterize the citizens of the United States. Indeed, it is just this variety that threatened political freedom, for a flawed human nature is intoxicated by power, and always seeks more power in order to gratify its peculiar needs and interests by forming “factions” of the like-minded. As John Adams wrote in 1787, the “selfish passions in the generality of men” are the “strongest.” Knowing that this selfish inclination is rooted in a human nature unchanged since the days of Athens, and so cannot be improved or eliminated, the Founders sought merely to balance faction against faction so that no one faction can amass enough power to threaten the freedom of all.</p>
<p>The proponents of centralized power, however, require a more homogeneous “people” to justify expanding government power. Such a “people” will have similar interests that only the central government can effectively identify and serve. Interests like “social justice,” “social duties,” and “social efficiency,” cannot be fulfilled by local or state governments, or by the parochial aims of civil society or the market, or by churches divided by sectarian beliefs. The federal technocrats of government agencies, more knowledgeable than the people about what they really want and need, must be given the power to trump those clashing local interests and manage polices that serve the larger “social” good––as defined not by the people in all their variety and complexity, but by federal bureaucrats and technocrats.</p>
<p style="color: #272727;"><span style="color: #000000;">Go back to Obama’s “pen and phone” statement and read what follows to see this same collectivist vision at work: </span>“And I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions and administrative actions that move the ball forward in helping to make sure our kids are getting the best education possible, making sure that our businesses are getting the kind of support and help they need to grow and advance, to make sure that people are getting the skills that they need to get those jobs that our businesses are creating.” The president assumes that in a country of some 330 million people, “the help they need” and their views on improving job creation, education, or job training are all the same, and thus one man can formulate policies that advance them, cutting out the several hundred representative of Congress, and state and local governments.</p>
<p style="color: #272727;">The obvious danger is one evident from the 20<sup>th</sup> century’s history of totalitarianism from the Bolsheviks to the Khmer Rouge. Elites convinced of their superior knowledge and insight into human behavior and the proper aims people should pursue, demand the coercive power to achieve these goods. But true to the Founders’ vision of a flawed human nature, power is “of an encroaching nature,” as Madison and Washington both warned. It intoxicates and corrupts those who possess it. Moreover, it requires weakening the autonomy and freedom of the people, whose various interests will contradict the “vision of the anointed,” as Thomas Sowell dubs them, who claim to know what’s best for everybody, and use their power to neutralize or eliminate those who resist this superior wisdom.</p>
<p style="color: #272727;">We need to recognize that for over a century this Progressive vision has revolutionized the federal government, which now has a size, scope, cost, and coercive power that would have horrified the Founders. The ideas underlying this vision––for example, the notion that the federal government and its agencies are better able to “solve problems” than are local and state governments, or civil society––are taken for granted as self-evident even by many Republicans. Thus focusing on the spectacular incompetence of Barack Obama can blind us to the dangers that will continue after he has left office. Obama vowed to “fundamentally transform America,” but that transformation had started long before he became president.</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>I&#8217;m Make-Believe Outraged!</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/im-make-believe-outraged/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=im-make-believe-outraged</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/im-make-believe-outraged/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 20 Jun 2014 04:52:20 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[TruthRevolt.org]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=234480</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A Truth Revolt video. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/rOZ4KUD6C7s" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p style="color: #000000;">TRANSCRIPT:</p>
<blockquote style="font-style: italic; color: #8f8f8f;"><p>I&#8217;m Make-Believe Outraged!</p>
<p>I’m Andrew Klavan and this is the Revolting Truth.</p>
<p>I am make-believe outraged at some of the things I’ve been hearing lately.  I am pretending to be deeply offended and I demand an insincere and meaningless apology.</p>
<p>Everywhere I turn there’s a celebrity or a politician or a businessman or a teenager on YouTube or some guy somewhere saying something that forces me to play at being shocked and hurt as if I had nothing better to do than just sit around pretending to be shocked and hurt as if I had nothing better to do&#8230;  than that.</p>
<p>There are pundits calling Muslims terrorists as if Muslims were killing people all around the world through acts of terror. There are conservatives insisting on their constitutional rights to free speech and gun ownership as if the constitution protected free speech and gun ownership.  There are even broadcasters calling fat women fat as if fat women were, y’know, fat.</p>
<p>You can’t just go around speaking plainly like that!  I am pretending to be shocked and I demand an insincere apology.</p>
<p>And another thing.  I will not have people openly behaving as if they were exactly who they are. Christians publicly praying as if they were Christians!  Gays kissing people of their own sex as if they were homosexual!  Women acting feminine!  Men acting like men!</p>
<p>This sort of thing is make-believe outrageous!  I’m not going to be forced to live in the world as it is!  I demand hypocrisy or, so help me, I’ll recoil in feigned horror at the basic facts of life.</p>
<p>Before individuals thoughtlessly open their mouths and say something I disagree with — or recklessly behave in a way completely in keeping with human nature — I want them to display a trigger warning so I can prepare to pretend I’m traumatized.</p>
<p>Everyone knows the truth will set you free.  And we can’t have that.  This is America.  I am make-believe outraged and I demand an insincere apology!</p>
<p>I’m Andrew Klavan with the revolting truth.</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>
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		<title>What of America&#8217;s Future?</title>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 09 Apr 2014 04:45:10 +0000</pubDate>
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		<description><![CDATA[Distinguished authors discuss the coming collapse of Big Government and how conservatives should respond. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong>Editor’s note: Below are the video and transcript of the panel <em>What of America&#8217;s Future?</em> at the Freedom Center’s West Coast Retreat, held at the Terranea Resort in Palos Verdes, California from March 21-23, 2014:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/90698156" height="281" width="500" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">So we have a very, two very distinguished authors today, and we have a continuing conversation, which is essentially about what is the future of America, and so I thought we would start by having a few opening remarks from both Michael and Charles and then we&#8217;ll do a little bit of discussion here and then we&#8217;ll open up to the floor with questions.  So Michael how &#8217;bout we start with you and you give your thoughts.</span></p>
<p><strong>Michael Lotus: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Sure the book is called &#8220;America 3.0&#8243; and of course there must be a 1.0 and a 2.0, right?  We, my coauthor and I have been for many, many years conservatives, libertarians, and tryin&#8217; to figure out what&#8217;s going to happen.  Is this current, very serious situation we&#8217;re in sort of the beginning of the end of the United States, or is some period we are going to survive and get through and reach new broad sunlit uplands?  And we decided that the second scenario is more likely; that there are fundamental strengths to the United States that are underappreciated and my coauthor is an anthropologist by training, and so we bring in a somewhat unusual set of analysis to this.  There is a French anthropologist – and I&#8217;ll say that speaking to a room full of conservatives in a sentence that begins there is a French anthropologist isn&#8217;t likely to have a happy ending, but this does. </span></p>
<p>There is a gentleman named Emanuel Todd, and Todd has an extraordinarily interesting analysis showing that the political frameworks that exist and the political ideas that exist in societies are highly correlated with the type of family life they live, and we are all speaking English.  Who in here is descended exclusively from people from England?  No one.  Okay.  The English-speaking culture is very powerful, and one of the things that makes it so powerful and enduring is it is what&#8217;s called the absolute nuclear family.  It&#8217;s the most individualist type of family.  People pick their own spouses.  They&#8217;re expected to leave the family home and start their own homes.  They don&#8217;t rely on extended family networks.  They rely on free association and civil society.  I could say more about this, but that&#8217;s the gist of it.  That&#8217;s made the United States and the other English-speaking countries very resilient, also very resistant to totalitarian-type ideologies.  You need to be very sneaky to get a totalitarian-type ideology past the English-speaking people and that&#8217;s what political correctness is and the modern progressivism.  It&#8217;s in the guise and wrapped in the flag of real American values and tryin&#8217; to sneak things in in a clandestine kind of way.</p>
<p>So why is it that things seem so bad right now?  Well what&#8217;s happening is the 20th century legacy economy, the industrial era economy of the United States, that&#8217;s America 2.0.  America 1.0 is the era of the founding, muscle power, animal power, small face-to-face government, the world of the founders.  The second version is falling apart, and the institutional arrangements that were made to accommodate it are also failing, and what happens when a system starts to fail is the people who are incumbents and benefit from it double down and try to be more coercive and to keep it going in that way, and that&#8217;s what we&#8217;re seeing now.</p>
<p>So the question isn&#8217;t whether or not the 20th century legacy state is going to disintegrate.  It&#8217;s a question of how and when and on what terms, and what we wanted to do is start putting on the table proposals for what the next stage is going to look like, and a key feature of this is the technology we have today, and that&#8217;s coming and is improving all the time, plays to the strengths of the individualistic network-type free-associating American character and American mindset.  What did we hear over this weekend?  It&#8217;s just simply amazing.  We hear black conservatives didn&#8217;t know there were any other black conservatives.  They found each other through the net, right?  We heard about counterattacking against attacks on people like ourselves who have our values using social media, right?  So these new tools, both politically and of course on the business side.<br />
I heard a talk the other day from a gentleman who was talking about business back-office functions moving to the cloud, and he was focusing on how programmers are gonna lose their jobs, which people always do, right? But what it means is the sophisticated possible back office computer technology that only big businesses can have now, the person with a one-person business is gonna be able to get virtually for free.  Okay.  So we&#8217;re gonna see fantastic improvements in what&#8217;s available to us to be productive, and so we need to move toward a government model that&#8217;s gonna facilitate that and make individual and startup-type businesses more possible, and I think I probably overstayed my introduction.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle:</strong> <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Oh, you&#8217;re okay. </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Charles?</span></p>
<p><strong>Charles Kesler:</strong> <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Is this a question about the future?</span></p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yes.</span></p>
<p><strong>Charles Kesler: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Well, I have written about, a book about liberalism, American liberalism and unlike David Horowitz&#8217;s many books, the library really of books, very excellent books that he has written, David&#8217;s entrée in the subject really came from radicals, from radicalism, and what I am focusing on is mainstream liberalism, the liberalism of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and Obama.  And I think it&#8217;s the first book to try to put Obama in the context of his own Democratic Party and his own sort of liberal milieu as a leading Democratic spokesman, and my argument is that he aspires to be the fourth face on the liberal Mount Rushmore beside Wilson and FDR and  –</span></p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle:</strong> <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Which is the cover of the book.</span></p>
<p><strong>Charles Kesler: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Right and LBJ, and that if ObamaCare &#8212; and today is the fourth anniversary of the passage of the Obama Care Bill &#8211; </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">if Obama Care sticks, he&#8217;ll make it.  I mean that will be his sovereign contribution.  That will be a thing he&#8217;s remembered for.  The one sentence that every president gets would be he passed national healthcare, and in his own view that is the only triumph he is going to get I think.  He knows that the House of Representatives is unlikely to switch from the GOP.  The Senate might become Republican in this election year, and so that&#8217;s it, and he&#8217;s got to defend that to the last because his whole legacy is invested in that achievement, and it is from the liberal point of view a great achievement.  It&#8217;s something that liberals have been questing for for 100 years and no one was able to achieve before him, not FDR, not even LBJ.  I mean liberals got healthcare for the poor in Medicaid, healthcare for the aged in Medicare but not cradle-to-grave, as we used to say.  That only came really with ObamaCare.  That&#8217;s really his achievement.  </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But the problem is, he, as you may have noticed, his administration has run into some trouble, and the source of that trouble is that if you look at Europe today, you can see that the standard model of the welfare state is not working. </span>And the same problems are coming to America.  They haven&#8217;t quite hit us with force that they&#8217;re beginning to hit in Europe, but they&#8217;re coming to America.</p>
<p>And so I think liberalism really does face a crisis. In some ways it&#8217;s at its peak right now – I mean Obama persuaded us that liberalism could live again; that you could believe in progress again; that you could have breathtaking across-the-board rapid political change like the New Deal, like the Great Society.  That&#8217;s what he tried to do and in part did deliver in his first two years in office.  Now it&#8217;s all on the defense of trying to preserve those achievements.  But unfortunately, there seems to me two causes of I think what will be a kind of crisis for liberalism in the next few years.  One is fiscal – as in Mrs. Thatcher&#8217;s immortal words, the problem with socialism is you quickly run out of other people&#8217;s money, and we can&#8217;t pay for today&#8217;s welfare state much less tomorrow&#8217;s – welfare state, and the second crisis is philosophical because if you live on the campus of a modern university as I do, you see this a lot.  Liberals don&#8217;t really believe, avant-garde liberals, academic liberals don&#8217;t believe in right and wrong, justice and injustice anymore.  They&#8217;re thoroughgoing relativists or nihilists – so they can&#8217;t believe in liberalism.</p>
<p>They can&#8217;t believe that liberalism is really right in the old-fashioned sense of the term, and so it&#8217;s left as a kind of a hollowing phenomenon that gets more and more hollow every year, and all that&#8217;s left really is self-interest.  Liberals like liberalism because it gives power to liberals, and that fact I think is becoming more and more transparent, and so it seems to me that something has to give in the next few years, and we hope of course it&#8217;ll be in a conservative direction, but my analysis doesn&#8217;t make that inevitable.  I mean I think you could also move in a truly left-wing, much more openly socialist direction as well.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">And that&#8217;s a good place to pause for a second, but we go to a lot of these conferences and we hear bad news and we live under President Obama and Harry Reid, and that&#8217;s bad enough news, but what is the breaking point?  Maybe Michael, I&#8217;ll throw this question to you and then Charles?  But what is the breaking point?  A lot of people have said we&#8217;ve already hit the breaking point –and you don&#8217;t believe that from your book –</span></p>
<p><strong>Mike Lotus: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Not yet.  No –I live in Illinois.  It&#8217;s much worse in Illinois and we still haven&#8217;t hit the breaking point yet.  So Mrs. Thatcher said you run out of other people&#8217;s money and Herb Stein said if something can&#8217;t go on, it won&#8217;t.  You&#8217;re absolutely right that the intellectual vision of liberalism is a non-realistic, areal vision and it can&#8217;t ultimately succeed.  They&#8217;ll always spend a lot more money than they can have and they do things &#8217;til they break.  Okay.  And we see that right now.  We see the deficits going up and the debt going up so fast that it&#8217;s ultimately going to break.  $130 trillion, whatever it is.  So the question isn&#8217;t when, it isn&#8217;t if there will be a massive, painful default to hundreds of millions of people who have been relying on this and who have basically done nothing wrong, expected to have Medicare, Social Security and other things and whatever Obama Care purports to give them, and they&#8217;re not going to get it.  </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">So the question is starting to put proposals in place to wind this up, basically have a national bankruptcy, and have an open process rather than one that&#8217;s done behind the table and done in a sort of crony capitalist fashion.  And I think it&#8217;s important to start proposing big and radical changes because you are going to get vilified and attacked, full-scale nuclear attack, no matter what you do.  One of the things we talk about in the book is breaking up the larger states that are going bankrupt.  They&#8217;re ungovernable.  Okay.  All the scholarships shows that thriving economies attend to be small, a few million people.  The genius of the founders was creating a federal system that allowed lots of local activity with a fairly minimal overlay to create a free-trade zone and a single unitary defense policy and let everybody play their own game, and we have to move back toward that.</span><br />
So the stress and ultimate giving way of this 20th century legacy state is an opportunity for us, even though it&#8217;s gonna be a difficult transition and it&#8217;s gonna be difficult to persuade people this is happening until very bad things are happening like welfare checks bouncing and things like that.</p>
<p><strong>Charles Kesler:</strong> <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yeah, I mean I think we live in a period when big thinking by conservatives is more necessary. </span>I mean Mark Levin&#8217;s book on possible constitutional amendments.  Michael&#8217;s book is very much worth reading for the picture he paints of what America could look like after we successfully negotiate this coming time of troubles. And knowing there is a possible future – this is really the nice thing about your book – knowing there&#8217;s a possible future encourages you, empowers you to think more radically –about what&#8217;s possible.</p>
<p><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;">Michael Lotus:</strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Right.  Right.  And it ties into your book too &#8217;cause your book is really the story of the 20th century liberalism which is always motivated by a vision.  They always have a vision, and how often are we just reacting?  Reacting tactically, reacting to their initiatives.  What are we caught up in?  Stopping ObamaCare.  Right?  We want to be initiating action.  One thing we need to do to do that, and my coauthor and my&#8217;s vision is to think through what the future would look like if we got our way.  One of the things that happens – try this with your friends.  You ask a conservative, and you say all right, things go our way; two, four, six, eight-year election cycles.  We elect great people.  We&#8217;ve got 42 governors.  We&#8217;ve got two terms of a great president.  We&#8217;ve got eight Supreme Court justices.  We get everything we want.  What does America look like?  What is the America where your grandchildren are starting school look like?  And they almost never have any picture.  They tend to say we gotta go back to something, or they&#8217;ll just start talkin&#8217; about Barak Obama again, and one of the things we did in our book that&#8217;s conscience is at the beginning of the book we say we go back 1,500 years to our cultural roots and we go forward to the Year 2040 to try to imagine one generation down the road. </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">So in that span of time any one president is gonna be relatively modestly consequential.  So this is the only sentence in this book that will contain the name Barak Obama, and that required some self-discipline, but we all need to think that like that.  This guy has been elected twice.  We&#8217;re stuck with him.  Reagan said we aren&#8217;t going to defeat communism.  We&#8217;re gonna transcend communism.  We&#8217;re gonna transcend Barak Obama.</span></p>
<p>And by the same token, one of the very interesting paradoxes of this weekend is we hear two things; one big message and one more muted, and I think we should turn the volume up on the more muted one.  The big one is the menace of progressivism and what a threat it is to us and how destructive it is and how powerful it is and how it dominates this and that sector of American life, but the subtext is it doesn&#8217;t work.  It never works.  It doesn&#8217;t make people happy.  It doesn&#8217;t put food on the table.  It&#8217;s ruinous, and we know what happened.  The Soviet Union fell apart, and I was old enough to think when Reagan started talkin&#8217; to Gorbachev, he&#8217;s being duped.  The Russians, they&#8217;re the communists.  They&#8217;ve got thousands of ballistic missiles.  They&#8217;ve got the tanks.  They&#8217;ll never go away.  We&#8217;re just gonna have to be on guard forever and they went whoof.  This thing we&#8217;re up against is – Americans are smarter.  American progressives are smarter than Soviet communists.  What they&#8217;ve built is a little stronger.  Okay.  But the epic failure of that website, that&#8217;s a sign that these guys are taking on things so far beyond what they can dream of accomplishing that they&#8217;re gonna fail.  So we don&#8217;t wanna be standing there without a game plan when they fail.  We wanna be ready.  Just like Milton Friedman said, they don&#8217;t wanna turn to us &#8217;cause they know it&#8217;s gonna hurt.  We&#8217;re gonna have to get the inflation out of the system.  We&#8217;re gonna have to change the way we&#8217;ve done things.  They will turn to us when everything else has failed.  So we wanna be ready with the alternatives &#8217;cause everything is going to fail.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">So let me turn to you for a second Charles.  So let&#8217;s assume – you said a couple minutes ago that it could go either way with the crisis of liberalism.  Sure they could fail and then we have this conservative resurgence in our country, but what&#8217;s the alternative and what&#8217;s the catalyst for that alternative where maybe things fail, and I mean for example, I mean Sally&#8217;s work on ObamaCare.  Say ObamaCare fails. </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">I mean and the two options are single payer or going back to a more market-based system.</span></p>
<p><strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Charles Kesler: </span></strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Well I think on that narrow question, I think the left is already preparing the post-ObamaCare  debate.  I mean there is a lot of chatter on the left now, hearings in the Senate about single payer again because I think we&#8217;re set up now for a failure of ObamaCare. </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">They may not wish it but I think it&#8217;s dawning on them that it&#8217;s likely, and so how do they react to that, and their reaction will of course be to blame it on the insurance companies, blame it on the surviving private part of the healthcare economy and say, well, we tried it.  We tried capitalism.  We tried free-market economics.</span></p>
<p>And now we have to go to, the only alternative is full socialist nationalized healthcare, the single payer plan, but I think in the larger question, where do they go?  The only way to pay for modern liberalism is with massive tax increases on the middle class. <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">That&#8217;s where the money is.  And so that&#8217;s the plausible alternative to turning towards a more conservative or free-market model of America, and a value-added tax, a wealth tax, there are disincentives to simply raising the income tax enormously or adding brackets, though they would be happy to do that I think. But to get the amount of money they would need you really have to socialize the economy. And in order to do that, that means more than 50 percent of the economy has to be run through the government. And the only way to do that is probably a massive new tax, a new kind of tax – On top of all the existing ones.</span></p>
<p><strong>Michael Lotus: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Which will provoke outrage and resistance and hopefully successful resistance, and if the resistance fails when they do it, socialism will fail in America at a lower level, and we&#8217;ll be more damaged and need to recover from a lower level, but it ultimately cannot work, and it especially can&#8217;t work in a country like ours.  You can get away with a little bit of socialism in Denmark where you&#8217;ve got a couple of million people who all eat the same food and they&#8217;re all cousins and they all get along and they all trust each other.  This is a county of hustlers.  This is a country of people who are individualists, and they cooperate by voluntary agreement, and when you tell them do it or else, and they don&#8217;t see what&#8217;s in it for them, they gonna resist it. </span></p>
<p>And I&#8217;ll just mention – we seem to be having a dramatic technical effect to my left here.  Whenever things get really bad and we start to see a major institutional failure in American life, mass political movements arise.  The progressive movement just didn&#8217;t come out of the blue.  It didn&#8217;t come off of flying saucers.  It came around because the transition from an agrarian to an industrial economy was incredibly disruptive, and millions of people wanted something different to happen.  They wanted the government to protect them when there were downturns because they couldn&#8217;t go back to the farm &#8217;cause there was no farm to go back to.  By the same token we&#8217;re gonna have change on that scale.<br />
It&#8217;s funny we saw the Tea Party start with the TARP bailouts, and I thought this is right on schedule.  Right?  In all mass political movements, just like the anti-war movement that ultimately at least got the draft repealed, right, and probably caused us to lose the Vietnam War, but mass political movements start out with enthusiastic amateurs who look like kooks, who then mature into more effective and more productive politicians and then they take over one of the major political schedules.  I think we&#8217;re more or less on schedule.  But yeah, it&#8217;s certainly the case we could get to a much more damaged level in America before we begin to turn it around.  I hope that doesn&#8217;t happen.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">I think the NSA didn&#8217;t like what you were saying Charles, because they turned off your mike but we got you a hand mike.</span></p>
<p><strong>Charles Kesler:</strong> <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">President Putin?  President Putin? Who knows who&#8217;s listening?</span></p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle:</strong> <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yeah.  Who knows?  Let me play devil&#8217;s advocate for a second here.  Newt Gingrich in private conversations we have had when he comes into town and public conversations probably in front of this group on many occasions had said that California is the harbinger of things to come for the rest of the country.</span><br />
So let me channel the assertion, or challenge the assertion of both of you about the appetite for taxes.  I mean Californians in large numbers, I mean a large majority passed income tax increase and sales tax increases that affected not only the wealthy, but will also impact, or already are impacting, the middle class.<br />
So is there a new generation of Americans who have bought into this idea that we need to pay more in taxes because government should be bigger and doing more?</p>
<p><strong>Michael Lotus: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Well I don&#8217;t know why he thinks – California is a one-party state the way Illinois is and Massachusetts is.  There is no organized resistance to it.  So you&#8217;re punching into a vacuum here.  But another thing is this, if we had a federal government that had a less-heavy hand, different communities in this country are gonna want different levels of a welfare state, and people in Minnesota are gonna have more progressivism and more of a benevolent state than people in Texas, and we should have that diversity.  We have 320 million people.  We should have a wide variety of ways to do this, and if the Californians think we wanna not have offshore drilling in our seacoast.  I&#8217;ve never been to this part of California before.  It&#8217;s just so beautiful.  Why would anyone wanna leave, right? And I have to go back to Chicago.  It&#8217;s 30 degrees colder.  Say we just won&#8217;t drill &#8217;cause God forbid something should happen, right?  Well let them.  It&#8217;s their state, right?  So I don&#8217;t know if everyone is suddenly gonna buy into the idea that we&#8217;re gonna have to have more taxes across the nation.  I just don&#8217;t see that happening.</span></p>
<p><strong>Charles Kesler:</strong> <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yeah.  California is increasingly atypical I think.  But you also have the strangely unacknowledged fact that at the lower levels of political office in cities and in counties within California half of the elected officials are Republicans. I mean so the party which does seem dead as a statewide party, there are no statewide officeholders in California who are Republican. But there is a lot of local and county officeholders who are Republican, so at the grassroots there are still signs of life, and indeed real strength in the Republican Party.  So even in California it&#8217;s not impossible that if things get worse before they get better that you could see a kind of recrudescence of the Republican Party and even of some version at least of conservatism.</span></p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong>Let&#8217;s open it up to questions from the audience.  Michael?</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><strong>Audience Member:</strong> </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As a physician, there are other alternatives to the way that single payer can work.  I&#8217;m against them all, but the way it can work is not just by taxing people, but reducing services.  Reducing the opportunity of individuals to get their hips replaced or their knees done, cutting off expensive equipment for MS, cutting off chemotherapy if you&#8217;re over 60, and look at Medi-Cal in this state.  I mean as a physician we can&#8217;t afford to take care of these people.  They get absolutely horrible quality care, but they do have insurance, so that&#8217;s a way that single payer can work.  It&#8217;s devastating.  It&#8217;s not a system that anybody would really, any of us would want to be a part of. But it&#8217;s another alternative.</span></p>
<p><strong>Charles Kesler:</strong> <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">No, that&#8217;s quite true, and my wife, Sally Pipes, knows much more about the subject than I do, but her cousin who is a cataract surgeon in Canada was just told by a regional regulatory agency that he&#8217;s doing his surgeries too quickly, too many patients.  He is seeing too many patients, and so instead of an average wait time of five weeks, seven weeks, now there&#8217;s a, what is the? Five months. Five months a patient must wait for the cataract operation, and that&#8217;s to save money. Because the government doesn&#8217;t want to spend more. But there are plenty of patients who want them. But it&#8217;s an entirely amoral or immoral top-down bureaucratic nightmare.</span></p>
<p><strong>Michael Lotus:</strong> <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Right.  The only way that we&#8217;re gonna improve delivery of healthcare is if we give people a voucher-like sum of money to then have it provided competitively.  That&#8217;s the only way anything is ever improved.  It&#8217;s the only way you ever drive cost down to drive innovation, and unless Republicans start perhaps at the state level proposing these types of alternatives and pushing them and proving them in the field so that people will believe in them then we&#8217;re not gonna get anywhere.  We&#8217;re just saying we&#8217;ll give it to you but not funded as much, you just look like a scrooge.  There is a guy who was running for the Senate in Illinois who lost to one of the old guys, a guy named Doug Truax, who I think we&#8217;ll hear from again.  Doug&#8217;s an insurance broker and he did some arithmetic and said for a fraction of what we pay for the – the overwhelming majority of people who are uninsured are in something like 30 locations.  They&#8217;re basically inner-city-type locations.  You could set up health clinics where you have young people come out of medical school.  You forgive their loans, and you have older doctors who are retired or close to it supervise them so you got the people with the brand new skills but who aren&#8217;t experienced, and the guys who are highly experienced and they&#8217;ll work.  It&#8217;s not gonna be that expensive and you can treat all these people.  You think this is creative thinking.  This will cost something like a tenth of what it would cost to do it through the ObamaCare-type approach.  We need to have 50 laboratories of democracies at least with these types of innovations coming, and we need to be thinking and proposing this stuff, &#8217;cause if we try to oppose ObamaCare with just, &#8220;please, stop!&#8221; It&#8217;s awful.  Stand in front of the train, we&#8217;re gonna get run over.</span></p>
<p><strong>Charles Kesler: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Michael&#8217;s book calls for what, 71 states?</span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><br />
</span></p>
<p><strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Michael Lotus: </span></strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Well it&#8217;s so funny, we wrote this thing and the stuff we mentioned supposedly happening 2040, we tried to be ultra-conservative, all this stuff started coming along.  California is ungovernable.  California should probably be multiple states, right? So we say three, and then a fairly realistic and well-supported effort to turn it into six starts makin&#8217; it into the newspapers.</span><br />
So it&#8217;s not like we&#8217;re just delusional.  These ideas are afloat out there in the world.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yeah.  Art Laffer in his book, his most recent book on California, suggests that California should be cut into multiple states, and then the gentleman you&#8217;re referring to, Tim Draper, the venture capitalist from  the Bay Area is going around the state.  I met with him last week and he&#8217;s hell bent.  This will and eventually has to happen.</span></p>
<p><strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Michael Lotus: </span></strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">One curious historical fact, when Texas came into the union the treaty provided that it could divide itself into five states without having to get permission from the federal government.  So if the Texans ever want to divide themselves up and gerrymander themselves, we&#8217;ll probably have two dark blue senators and four red senators, I mean eight senators all the Texas&#8217;s.</span></p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">I&#8217;m afraid if we divide California into six states we&#8217;ll have 12 dark blue senators –It was a little bit of a commentary on what&#8217;s going on in Canada and the healthcare system there.  There are 60,000 or so I think he said refugees that would be coming to the United States would not be able to and a critique on how we need to be using those resources and the data coming out of the Canada system to help fight ObamaCare in the U.S.  I think that&#8217;s a fair.</span></p>
<p><strong>Michael Lotus: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">That&#8217;s a fair summary.  Yeah.  I mean it&#8217;s interesting too that we have Canadians fleeing to the USA.  We also have medical tourism, right? Where people are flying to India and all kinds of other places.  One of the things that happens to is you build up a bureaucratic monster and market forces start to eat at the edges.  As it gets worse and worse, people are paying their property taxes, but then they&#8217;re doing other things to educate their kids outside the public school system, right?  Or people are looking for tutoring and after a while you gotta hope they&#8217;re gonna say wait a second, why am I paying twice?  Right.  And that can be a point of entry to revolt against the system we have now.</span></p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle:</strong> <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">I mean, Norm go ahead.</span></p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">What you&#8217;re talking about, Michael, is sort of what Walter Russell Mead is talking about in his death of the blue state model. I see two difficulties in the transition from where we are now, 2.0, to 3.0.  The first is a huge debt overhang that&#8217;s already there and encased in law. The second is the sclerotic, purposefully sclerotic nature of our government. </span>And it&#8217;s very difficult, and then the founders set it up that way to get from where we are now to somewhere else.</p>
<p>And there are so many people with vested interest in the status quo. <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It&#8217;s gonna be a huge revolution anyway, but hopefully a peaceful one, hopefully a political, strictly political one.  I think you&#8217;re gonna see – and thank you for mentioning Walter Russell Mead.  He&#8217;s great and we&#8217;re influenced by him, and it&#8217;s, we seem to be thinking along very similar lines.  You&#8217;re right.  The debt overhang is unbelievable, and so what&#8217;s gonna happen?  We say it&#8217;s gonna get repudiated.  It&#8217;s not gonna be paid.  So the only question is how is that gonna be worked out, and what&#8217;s gonna happen is we&#8217;re gonna see people losing their medical care and nickels and dimes and they&#8217;re gonna try to save money on the margins and your taxes are gonna go up and the quality of what you get is gonna come down, and we&#8217;re gonna basically be surfs and not get anything for our money.  </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Now I don&#8217;t know about you, but the American I live in is composed of people who tend to get irritated if their hamburger doesn&#8217;t have a tomato on it when they ask for it, and if their app on their phone doesn&#8217;t work exactly right they raise hell.  I&#8217;m hoping that if the basic things we need to live are being taken away from us we can get ourselves organized.  This event shows that people are getting themselves organized.  So hopefully they&#8217;ll be resistance to that throughout and we&#8217;ll be able to stop that kinda doubling down.  The rest, all the people who are incumbents who benefit from – that&#8217;s what happens every time there&#8217;s a major change, right? </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">We fought a Civil War against a huge community of people who had a vested interest in something that was completely embedded in our society.  The first slaves were sold a few years after the first Europeans settled here, right?  That was part of America.  Then it went away.  We don&#8217;t wanna do it with armed conflict, but we&#8217;re gonna have to make a lot of that go away, and what you might do is the public sector workforce you tell &#8216;em look the money is not there.  The taxpayers aren&#8217;t gonna pay it.  The technology is letting people hide their money.  </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">You know bitcoin is like the ModelT of what&#8217;s coming.  Bitcoin is like this like thing that&#8217;s like what is it, but it&#8217;s gonna be harder and harder for the government to find the tax money from people who are determined not to let the government see it.  Okay.  We have the creepy state that spies on us all the time.  But some of those tools are gonna be available to us, and the government&#8217;s gonna have to get things by agreement.  So we&#8217;re gonna have to tell &#8216;em look, you&#8217;re gonna get so many number of pennies on the dollar of what you are promised, and they aren&#8217;t gonna like it and they&#8217;re gonna fight politically, and I see no other way it works out.  So we should be ready for them.  We should be ready with our proposals.  Here is what you guys are gonna get.</span></p>
<p>Well that ties back into the whole business of kind of losing the cultural battle &#8217;cause we haven&#8217;t fought it.  Really.  Charles&#8217; book shows that.  All the smart people, the novelists and the creative people all are on the left.  I never understood why that is, but we need to try to keep that from always being the case, and you&#8217;re right.  People are being energetic and creative about trying to solve problems who might say, well, of course I&#8217;m a liberal &#8217;cause I care about poor people.  That&#8217;s just &#8217;cause they don&#8217;t know who we are or understand what we are.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">And your point about the world decentralizing, that&#8217;s absolutely right, and one of the things we say in the book is our constitution is futuristic.  Woodrow Wilson thought it was outdated.  He might have been a tough fit for an industrial era hierarchical society, but we&#8217;re moving completely away from that.  What the founders actually lived with is kind of like the future we&#8217;re heading towards except we&#8217;re gonna be massively more productive.  Our work and our homes are gonna be located in the same place much more as they lived in.  The idea of a job, that&#8217;s like everyone gets a job where someone else owns the capital in a building away from where you live and you go there and come back and they write you a check, that&#8217;s gonna disintegrate.  I don&#8217;t know about you, but I&#8217;m not psychologically prepared for that new world yet.  I don&#8217;t know quite what it&#8217;s gonna be like, and our government certainly isn&#8217;t built to accommodate it.  So it&#8217;s gonna be big changes.</span></p>
<p><strong>Charles Kesler: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But on the other hand, I mean the danger of excessive personalization, decentralization is that you retreat into a series of private communities and you lose the sense of a public good that you have in common. And so there are many scenarios where increasing decentralization goes with increasing centralization in government because people retreat into their private world of their friends and their work peers. And pay no attention to politics.  They lose any sense.  They are alienated from politics. And one of the differences with the founding period and today is that I think that&#8217;s much more prevalent today than it was then, that we&#8217;ve given up on that.  The market is much superior, and it&#8217;s so superior it can satisfy all of our needs for the playlists that we want, the kind of food that we want, the kind of television or movies that we&#8217;d like to see. So what do we need government for? And it maybe it&#8217;s easier to just turn your back on it than it is to overthrow it. And so one of the problems is it may be that in today&#8217;s hyper decentralized economy you lose the sort of critical mass you need to make a political revolution to make a political difference.</span></p>
<p><strong>Michael Lotus:</strong> <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">And I detect a fourth person on the stage.  Alexis de Tocqueville is the ghost speaking there a little bit.  But I quibble with this still.  I think that the network technology and the social media, which is gonna get better and better and better, doesn&#8217;t create a mirage of companionship and friendship and new association.  It&#8217;s real.  My coauthor and I did not meet in person once when we wrote the book, and we probably only had four or five hours of telephone communication over a year.  It was all email, and our friends who would look at things, it was all – there are people who I talk to every day who are very close to me, who are very dear to me who I never see in person, and those are real friendships, right?  And the black conservatives who found each other, this is fantastic, right?  These are real connections.  Okay.  And the means to do that are gonna get better and better.  So the prospect of the kinda Tocquevillian retreat into your personal world and shunning the outer world is certainly always possible, and there is always gonna be some of that, but I hope that that&#8217;s not going to be a general trend, and I don&#8217;t think the technology necessarily pushes us in that direction.</span></p>
<p><strong> Brian Calle:</strong> <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">I was in a conversation about this in the Bay Area this week with another venture capitalist who is actually starting a ballot initiative that would do not exactly what you&#8217;re proposing, not by congressional district, but by percentage of votes statewide.  So Democrats get 65 percent of the vote, they get 65 percent of the Electoral College that&#8217;s for that presidential nominee.  Likewise, Republicans get 35 percent, they would get 35 percent.  I&#8217;m not sure I would be ready to pass judgment as to whether or not it&#8217;s a good or bad idea just yet, but I would say we must look at this holistically, which is that if we do it in California where that might be beneficial to a particular party, what if they do it in Texas that way? Or what if they do it in Arizona that way?  And so I think you have to look at the consequences as a whole, but on face it&#8217;s more representative so it might be a good idea, but there are some proposals for that already floating.</span></p>
<p><strong>Charles Kesler:</strong> <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Hmm.  Yeah.  I mean one of the downsides is it potentially opens you up for recounts in every district, whereas now you have a statewide recount which involves every district, but still it&#8217;s the aggregate total that you&#8217;re fighting over. The amount of chicanery possible. If every district has a delegate and the popular vote decides it, it would be enormously multiplied.</span></p>
<p><strong>Michael Lotus: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Right.  There is also a positive to the winner-take-all version because if you had it that it&#8217;s divided pro rata or divided by district in somewhere, you&#8217;re gonna be able to run national campaigns focused on national-type issues and not have to go to each state and seek to make local-type deals and the smaller states are gonna get left out entirely.  They&#8217;re not gonna be considered.  You can win the whole election from California, New York, Illinois, a couple of other places, and I think the system we have now forces you to pay attention to at least the medium-size states and try to get a few of those into your column.  So the Electoral College is something people always seem to not like, but I think it&#8217;s very much a not broke and don&#8217;t fix it part of the U.S. Constitution and I&#8217;m not super, super inclined to see it changed.</span></p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">And on that note we are going to end.  Thanks very much to our two panelists.</span></p>
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		<title>Staking Out Israel’s Lawful Claims to the West Bank</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ari-lieberman/staking-out-israels-lawful-claims-to-the-west-bank/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=staking-out-israels-lawful-claims-to-the-west-bank</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ari-lieberman/staking-out-israels-lawful-claims-to-the-west-bank/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 30 Oct 2013 04:15:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ari Lieberman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[claim]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=209047</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the Jewish State has a superior case for sovereignty in Judea and Samaria than the Palestinians. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/israel-west-bank-settlements-e1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-209048" alt="israel-west-bank-settlements-e1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/israel-west-bank-settlements-e1-443x350.jpg" width="310" height="245" /></a>Proponents of fairness and equity who have advocated against some of Israel’s most pernicious detractors have often advanced several well-reasoned arguments against further Israeli West Bank withdrawals and Palestinian statehood. Key among those arguments are that the Palestinian leadership is rejectionist, duplicitous, incites violence, is non-democratic and, in general, is not committed to a two-state solution recognizing Israel’s rights to exist within safe and secure boundaries. While all of these positions are accurate and by themselves would constitute sound reasoning to reject additional Israeli territorial concessions, there exits one reason above all others that favors the Israeli viewpoint; simply that Israel’s legal claims to the West Bank are far superior to those of the Palestinians’ under international law.</p>
<p>International laws are generally created by nations when entering into treaties with one another or more informally, through international custom.  General Assembly resolutions have no binding legal authority. In fact, the United Nations charter which spells out the powers of the General Assembly does not convey rule-making powers to that body.</p>
<p>Israel’s legal claims to the West Bank are rooted in the San Remo Conference of 1920, an international meeting of the post-World War I Allied Supreme Council. On July 24, 1922 the League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations and a body which, under its charter had the authority to enact international laws, confirmed decisions hammered out at San Remo and resolved to establish the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine.</p>
<p>The League’s preamble, adopting the principles enumerated in the Balfour Declaration, recognized the Jewish “historical connection” to the Land of Israel and resolved to help facilitate the establishment of a Jewish nation there. At the time, Palestine consisted of land east and west of the Jordan River, encompassing all of modern Israel, Judea &amp; Samaria, Gaza and what is referred to today as Jordan. The League entrusted Britain with being the mandatory authority whose aim would be to facilitate Jewish immigration to Palestine and to act as trustee until an orderly transition could be made to full Jewish sovereignty.</p>
<p>Article 5 of the Mandate prohibited Britain from ceding or leasing any part of the mandate territory to a foreign power. However, in 1923, Britain acting in contravention of Article 5 did precisely that and despite Jewish protest, gifted Eastern Palestine to Emir Abdullah thus creating a new Arab entity called Emirate of Transjordan. In so doing, Britain ceded 76% of Palestine to Arab rule leaving a paltry 24% for a Jewish homeland.</p>
<p>In February 1947 Britain announced that it would unilaterally terminate its mandate thus setting the stage for UN intervention. Following Britain’s announcement, the UN sent a team of international observers, known as UNSCOP, to Palestine to investigate and suggest a blueprint for the future of the territory and its inhabitants. After completing its investigation, UNSCOP formulated a plan, based on demographic patterns that involved the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states on roughly a 50-50 basis. Jerusalem and its environs were to be designated international zones.</p>
<p>In November 1947, the UN adopted UNSCOP’s findings and voted in favor of the partition. The UN General Assembly’s partition plan was merely a suggestion and had no legal binding authority. The Jews accepted the partition plan and the Arabs flatly rejected it, setting the stage for the first Arab-Israeli War and an Arab invasion.</p>
<p>Had the Arab’s accepted the partition, international boundaries between Jewish and Arab states would have been established and the matter settled. In the absence of such a settlement, the only legal, binding authority was the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, which designated the whole of Palestine, including the West Bank, as the future Jewish homeland.</p>
<p>The first Arab-Israel War ended in 1949 and resulted in an Israeli victory and strategic defeat for the Arabs. Israel and Jordan negotiated a ceasefire agreement that was formalized into an armistice agreement. Neither side recognized armistice demarcation line as an official border. The agreement left Jordan in control of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, territory that it illegally seized during its land grab. Shortly thereafter, Jordan annexed these territories, an annexation not recognized internationally save for Britain (only with respect to the West Bank) and Pakistan.</p>
<p>The Jordanian occupation of the West Bank lasted for 19 years. During that time, there was not a single UN resolution condemning Jordan’s illegal occupation. While this fact alone does not buttress Israel’s legal position, it does lend credence to the notion that the General Assembly can hardly be considered an impartial body.</p>
<p>On May 22, 1967, Egypt, in violation of international maritime law, closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. The act was accompanied by aggressive Egyptian military deployments, violations of Israeli airspace and genocidal rhetoric. On June 5, 1967 Israel launched a preemptive strike against Egypt, destroying the bulk of Egypt’s air force in under 3 hours.</p>
<p>Contrary to the realities taking place on the ground, Egypt’s Nasser convinced King Hussein of Jordan that Israel was reeling. Hussein, lulled into believing these false claims, ordered his army to attack Israel. Jordanian Hunter jets bombed Kfar Saba and Netanya while Jordanian artillery shelled Israeli population centers in West Jerusalem. Jordanian infantry then began to take up positions in the demilitarized zones. In response to Jordanian aggression, Israel counter-attacked, taking over East Jerusalem and the West Bank in a matter of days.</p>
<p>While the UN considers war and conquests therefrom to be illegal, Article 52 of the UN Charter provides an exception to the illegality of war in cases involving self-defense. Israel acquired the West Bank (territory illegally seized by Jordan in 1948) through defensive conquest. Since Israel had the legal right to defend itself against aggression, its territorial conquest resulting from a defensive war is legal and binding. There is not a single case in history where a nation was forced to relinquish territory it had acquired through defensive conquest.</p>
<p>Following the war, a Soviet sponsored resolution requiring Israel to withdraw from <i>all</i> the territories acquired during the war was rejected by the United Nations Security Council. Several additional drafts were submitted and rejected. The UNSC finally settled on Resolution 242 with a language formulation that deliberately omitted the word “all” and merely required Israel to withdraw from “territories occupied in the recent conflict.” The omission of the word “all” was extremely significant in that it provided implicit recognition to at least some of Israel’s territorial gains.</p>
<p>Israel has fully complied with Resolution 242 by virtue of its withdrawal from Sinai, Gaza, Kuneitra (in the Golan Heights) and some 40% of the West Bank. Thus Israel maintains a strong legal claim to the West Bank, superior to all other claims, based on the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, Resolution 242 and basic principles of International law.</p>
<p>Notwithstanding Israel’s valid legal claims, Israel has been widely condemned in various quarters for its “settlement” activity in the “occupied” territories. The strongest condemnations emerge from the EU and the Muslim world though the United States position has been more equivocal and has varied from administration to administration. The United States has in the past opposed settlement activity as a matter of policy but with some very minor exceptions, has refused to term such activity “illegal.”</p>
<p>President Ronald Reagan explicitly stated that settlements were “not illegal” a position reinforced by President George W. Bush who provided implicit recognition of the legitimacy of settlements when he noted that, “In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949…”</p>
<p>Those who condemn settlement activity rely on Article 49, Clause 6 of the Fourth Geneva Convention which states that, “the Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”</p>
<p>As previously noted, the claim that Israel is an “Occupying Power” as defined in Article 49 is dubious at best. Israel maintains a valid, legal claim to the West Bank, far superior to those of the Palestinians or any other entity. But even if Israel was to be given the designation of “Occupying Power,” Article 49 would still be inapplicable.</p>
<p>Israel has not transferred or deported any part of its population into the West Bank. Individual Jews, with varied motivations, voluntarily moved into these territories. Moreover, many Israelis were born in the West Bank thus further highlighting the inapplicability of Article 49. Article 49 does not impose on Israel any duty to prevent its citizens from developing or moving into the West Bank.</p>
<p>Ambassador Morris Abram, a member of the U.S. staff at the Nuremburg Tribunal who was intimately involved with the drafting of the Fourth Geneva Convention, forcefully noted that Article 49(6) <i>“was not designed to cover situations like Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, but rather the forcible transfer, deportation or resettlement of large numbers of people.”</i> Other acclaimed and notable scholars such as Eugene V. Rostow, Dean of Yale Law School and former US Assistant Secretary of State, Stephen M. Schwebel, President of the International Court of Justice, Nicholas Rostow, university counsel and vice chancellor for legal affairs of the State University of New York, David M. Phillips, professor at Northeastern University School of Law and Fulbright Scholar and Professor Julius Stone, international lawyer and prolific author have voiced similar positions and have highlighted the absurdity of applying Article 49(6) in the context of Israeli settlements.</p>
<p>On July 9, 2012 a committee, headed by the respected former Israeli Supreme Court justice Edmond Levy, concluded that Israel’s presence in the West Bank was not an “occupation” within the meaning of Article 49 and that the settlements were not illegal. Recently, 1,000 jurists of various nationalities signed a petition supporting the findings and conclusions of the Levy Report and submitted it to the EU&#8217;s foreign policy chief and one of Israel’s shrillest critics, Catherine Ashton.</p>
<p>It is unlikely that Ashton was moved by the petition but it is demonstrative of the wellspring of support that Israel maintains internationally and that in at least some circles, sanity still prevails. The settlement enterprise, inspired by the original Zionist ethos of building and developing the land will continue to be a source of controversy but from the perspective of international law, it is on rock-solid footing.</p>
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		<title>Restoring Israel&#8217;s Rights: The Levy Report</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arlene-kushner/restoring-israels-rights-the-levy-report/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=restoring-israels-rights-the-levy-report</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 28 Oct 2013 04:30:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arlene Kushner]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=208692</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A new campaign kicks off to promote the Jewish State's legal claim to Judea and Samaria.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/levy_report_1_0.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-208762" alt="levy_report_1_0" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/levy_report_1_0-396x350.jpg" width="277" height="245" /></a>The Jewish people’s considerable rights to the land of Israel are founded upon several bases:</p>
<p>Jews have been on the land for close to 4,000 years, most notably within eastern Jerusalem (where the Old City and the Temple Mount are located), and Judea and Samaria – all places where ancient Israelite heritage is marked.  Jews, in fact, are the indigenous people of Israel, present not only historically, but with continuity over the centuries.</p>
<p>In modern times there are legal precedents for establishing the Jewish claim to Israel: This is with reference to the San Remo Conference, the Mandate for a Jewish Homeland in Palestine, confirmed in international law, and more.</p>
<p>These Jewish rights have certainly not diminished over the years.  Yet there is a prevailing perception that this is the case – that there has been a rethinking of what properly accrues to the Jewish State of Israel.  A revisionist perception, we might say.</p>
<p>This perception has been fueled by Palestinian Arab leader Mahmoud Abbas and his cohorts, who – in insisting <i>ad nauseum</i> that Israel’s proper place is behind the “1967 border” – reveal themselves to be major advocates of the dictum that, “If you<b> </b><em>tell a </em><em>lie</em> big <em>enough</em> and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”</p>
<p>Of course this business of a “1967 border” is a lie: there was no border established to Israel’s east after the War of Independence ended in 1949, only a temporary armistice line.  The armistice agreement was not even with a “Palestinian people,” but with Jordan.  Nor did Security Council Resolution 242 require Israel to pull back fully from Judea and Samaria, which was secured defensively during the Six-Day War in 1967.</p>
<p>But why bother with facts when a myth more favorable to the political interests of the Palestinian Arabs can be successfully generated?  Today, a good part of the world believes that Judea and Samaria consist of “Palestinian land,” which Israel must “return.”  The president of the United States speaks in such terms.  Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, called “settlements” (pejoratively), are referred to either as “illegitimate” or &#8220;illegal,” and the stumbling block to peace. Eastern Jerusalem, today part of the united capital of Jerusalem under full Israeli sovereignty, is called “Arab Jerusalem.”</p>
<p>It must be noted, however, that this Palestinian Arab myth could not have been successfully generated had successive Israeli governments self-confidently and persistently presented truths to counter the lies. Regrettably, since Oslo, this has not consistently been the case.</p>
<p>While no Israeli government has ever declared Judea, Samaria and the eastern part of Jerusalem to be “Palestinian land,” some have skirted close to embracing this position by behaving “as if.”  (A subject that perhaps merits a whole other article.) Some Israeli leaders to the left have swallowed the notion in its essence, speaking in terms of what the Israelis owe the “Palestinians.”  Some others are ideologically opposed to any such concept but timid about bucking a position that is politically correct internationally. This requires a determined strength, as significant parts of the international community, e.g., Europe, are predisposed to a pro-Palestinian Arab, anti-Israel position.</p>
<p>The good news here is that we may be about to witness a shift in the situation.</p>
<p>The current Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, is not ideologically committed to a notion of eastern Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria as “Palestinian land.”  He is neither Ehud Olmert nor Ehud Barak.</p>
<p>Rather – with the single notable exception of the Iranian nuclear issue – Netanyahu is a man whose style is marked by a tendency to play along, rather than making waves.  There is substantial reason to believe he has done this, again and again, in the mistaken belief that this will lessen the pressure on Israel and accrue favor within the international community. In point of fact, this is counterproductive.</p>
<p>In January, 2012, Netanyahu appointed a committee – popularly referred to as the Levy Committee – to examine the status of Israeli building in Judea and Samaria. Edmund Levy, former Justice of the High Court, headed the committee; its other members were Alan Baker, international lawyer and former adviser for the Foreign Ministry, and Tehiya Shapira, retired Tel Aviv District Court Judge.</p>
<p>The Committee’s Report, which was released on July 8, 2012, is 90 pages long in the original Hebrew.  (Only summaries exist in English.)  It consists of both conclusions and recommendations and provides legal arguments and research.</p>
<p>The accusations currently being leveled by the international community against Israel as a violator of “international law” because of building in Judea and Samaria are countered by the Levy Report conclusions.  That is, because of both historical and legal factors, the decades-long presence of Israel in Judea and Samaria is not “belligerent occupation.” Israel’s situation is unique (sui generis) and Israel has the legal right to settle in Judea and Samaria.<b> </b></p>
<p>The Report then offers a number of important recommendations, consistent with the conclu­sions, regarding adjustments in Israeli policies and practices in Judea and Samaria. These recommendations would<b> </b>clarify the rights of Israeli citizens living in Judea and Samaria, who currently find themselves at a serious disadvantage: The Israeli legal system default there favors Arabs.</p>
<p>At present, law-abiding, tax-paying Jewish Israeli citizens who bought their homes in Judea or Samaria in good faith and with the assistance of multiple government agencies can be forced to abandon those homes, if ownership of the land on which their homes are located is challenged by local Arabs, <i>before</i> the issue of who actually owns the land has been properly adjudicated.</p>
<p>These and a host of similar situations are violations of basic rights for Jews that should not be permitted to continue. Levy Report recommendations speak to these concerns.</p>
<p>I have it from an impeccable source that when Prime Minister Netanyahu first saw the Report, he declared, “Ah, this is just what we need.”</p>
<p>But information about the report was leaked, and Netanyahu, confronting the international furor that would result from its official adoption, did an about-face.  He referred the Report to the Ministerial Committee on Settlements, where it was tabled without discussion.  To this day, it sits in a drawer somewhere, effectively never having seen the light of day.</p>
<p>And so, the Levy Report disappeared from the radar screen of public awareness.  But it was not forgotten by Israeli activists and politicians with a nationalist orientation, who understood its enormous importance.</p>
<p>In the fall of 2012, a small group of seasoned activists formed an ad hoc committee to pursue plans for securing the adoption of the Report by the government. International lawyers and politicians were consulted, the political climate was assessed and assessed again; and plans for a campaign evolved through several permutations.  Persons and organizations of prominence who would lend their names to the campaign were sought (FP editor Jamie Glazov and FP parent organization, the David Horowitz Freedom Center, are both listed).  Additionally, and necessarily, backers to provide funds were secured.</p>
<p>As the plans for the campaign have coalesced over the last few months, the Campaign Committee has become convinced that the timing is right.</p>
<p>This is, first, because of the farcical “negotiations” with the Palestinian Authority.  If there are going to be such negotiations (certainly not advocated by the Campaign Committee) it is important that Israel negotiate from strength, and this means stating Israeli rights without equivocation. There is scant time to delay on this. It’s one thing to concede that Israel “must” withdraw from at least part of Judea and Samaria, because this is “owed” to the Palestinian Arabs, and quite another to say that it is Israeli land by right and any concessions to the Palestinian Arabs would be a matter of choice and discretion.</p>
<p>Then there has been an encouraging shift within the government, with a greater number of ministers and deputies who are nationalist or who tend to be opposed to the notion of a Palestinian state, such as: Moshe Ya’alon; Naftali Bennett; Danny Danon; Yisrael Katz; Tzipi Hotovely; Ze’ev Elkin; Uzi Landau; Yair Shamir; and Uri Ariel. Add to this list Yuli Edelstein, Speaker of the Knesset.</p>
<p>Lastly, there is Prime Minister Netanyahu’s second Bar Ilan speech of October 6.</p>
<p>(An English translation can be <a href="http://imra.org.il/story.php3?id=62031">found here</a>.)</p>
<p>Instead of speaking of a “two state solution,” as he had previously, he emphasized Jewish rights in the land.  A change of tone that many consider significant.</p>
<p>And now, at long last, the Levy Report Campaign is kicking off.</p>
<p>The Campaign Committee is operating with the assistance of Regavim, a fine Israeli organization that works “to ensure responsible, legal &amp; accountable use of Israel’s national lands and the return of the rule of law to all…aspects of the land.”  (See <a href="http://regavim.org.il/en">http://regavim.org.il/en</a>) <strong> </strong></p>
<p>The campaign is envisioned in two stages – first within the Knesset and then more broadly within the public domain.</p>
<p>It is so new that neither a name nor a logo are yet in place.  But the services of the educator who will work with the members of the Knesset have been secured.  There will be major social media aspects to this effort, as well as organizational work done within the Knesset – in large part by Knesset members themselves – to generate significant and sustained support for the Report.  Already, members of the Knesset approached informally have expressed considerable enthusiasm.<strong><br />
</strong></p>
<p>The goal of the campaign, of course, remains acceptance of the Levy Report by the government. Right now a process is being set in place that will take time to unfold, step-by-step.  It would be foolish and unrealistic to anticipate immediate acceptance.  First the climate must be created.</p>
<p>The Campaign Committee believes this effort will provide support for the prime minister, so that he is bolstered from within the nation – and thus better able to resist outside pressures.  As well, the campaign should, in time, shift public perceptions regarding Israel’s rights.</p>
<p>If all proceeds well – something to be fervently hoped for – there will be subsequent reports following this first announcement.</p>
<p><i>Full disclosure:  Arlene Kushner was a member of the ad hoc committee that initiated the campaign for the Levy Report, and remains an active member of the Campaign Committee today.  She is an author, freelance journalist, and blogger, whose material can be found at <a href="http://www.arlenefromisrael.info/">www.arlenefromisrael.info</a>. </i></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.</b></p>
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		<title>De Facto Amnesty for Child Rapists</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/volpe/charged-with-raping-your-legal-citizen-child-u-s-will-not-deport/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=charged-with-raping-your-legal-citizen-child-u-s-will-not-deport</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 11 Sep 2013 04:07:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Michael Volpe]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Amnesty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Children]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Deportation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Illegal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Immigration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rape]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=203576</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The newest “prosecutorial discretion” directive for deportation cases. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Espinoza.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-203581" alt="Espinoza" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Espinoza.jpg" width="260" height="274" /></a>A new directive by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will allow even more criminal illegal aliens to avoid being deported.</p>
<p>The new directive, titled <i>Facilitating Parental Interests in the Course of Civil Immigration Enforcement Activities, </i>was<i> </i>issued by ICE&#8217;s new director, John Sandweg, to all ICE agents on August 23, 2013, and it referred to the euphemistic moniker of “prosecutorial discretion,” which has been used repeatedly to administratively direct ICE agents in the field to no longer apply immigration laws if individuals fit into the definition of the directive.</p>
<p>In this case, Sandweg directed all ICE agents to use “prosecutorial discretion” regarding individuals ICE detainees who are parents or caregivers to children living in the USA.</p>
<p>The directive identified three specific categories: 1) primary caretakers of minor children without regard to the dependent&#8217;s citizenship; 2) parents and legal guardians who have a direct interest in a family court proceeding involving child welfare proceedings in the United States; and 3) parents or legal guardians whose minor children are U.S. citizens (USCs) or lawful permanent residents (LPRs).</p>
<p>This latest prosecutorial discretion memo follows in a long line of similar memos authored by a variety of high-level Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials, each of which has reduced the scope of illegal aliens who are to be prioritized for removal.</p>
<p>The so-called <a href="http://www.ice.gov/doclib/secure-communities/pdf/prosecutorial-discretion-memo.pdf">“Morton Memo,”</a> authored in 2011 by then-ICE Director John Morton, instructed ICE agents to treat any illegal alien not convicted of a crime as a low priority. <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/volpe/obama-administration-redefining-dangerous-illegal-aliens/">Then, in December 2012, another ICE memo instructed ICE agents to treat anyone with two or fewer misdemeanors as a low priority</a>. (ICE still considers even one felony conviction as a high priority). With this new directive, all illegal aliens considered primary caregivers for children, here legally or illegally, will also be treated as a low priority.</p>
<p>Recently, Congress has gotten into the act. Earlier in September, <a href="http://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=3ad9f59c-d459-42c0-9deb-3377c41c0855%5d">liberal California Senator Diane Feinstein sent a letter to outgoing DHS Director Janet Napolitano urgin</a>g DHS to consider applying prosecutorial discretion to farm workers.</p>
<p>Jessica Vaughan is a policy analyst with the Center for Immigration Studies, <a href="http://www.cis.org/vaughan/new-amnesty-parents-and-nannies">and in a blog post</a>, she likened the new directive to the parental version of the DREAM Act. In that same blog post, Vaughan singled out a criminal illegal alien previously featured in <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/volpe/illegal-immigrant-pedophile-may-be-released-in-chicago-area/">Front Page Magazine.</a></p>
<p>Amado Espinoza-Ramirez is a suspected serial child molester, who’s accused of acts that include incest. After making bond in a criminal court in Chicago, Illinois in early September 2011, ICE took custody of Espinoza-Ramirez. ICE decided to release rather than hold him in an ICE facility because there wasn’t enough bed space in ICE facilities and he no longer fit their definition of dangerous. He was released with a tracking monitor. He subsequently maneuvered out of that tracking monitor, missed all subsequent court appearances, and is considered a fugitive, while being charged in criminal and immigration court in absentia.</p>
<p>The<a href="http://dailycaller.com/2012/03/24/congressman-blasts-ice-for-releasing-alleged-child-rapist/"> two reasons</a> identified by ICE at the time for releasing rather detaining Espinoza-Ramirez were that Espinoza-Ramirez was only suspected but not convicted of criminal acts and that he had a legal citizen child.</p>
<p>Espinoza-Ramirez is still a fugitive and likely back in his home country of Mexico. However, were he to be apprehended, the same principles would still be in place, and arguably, Espinoza-Ramirez would be eligible for release under the new directive.</p>
<p>This new directive did not escape the ire of Congress. The Chairman the House Judiciary Committee, Bob Goodlatte, immediately issued a statement linking this policy to a tough-on-criminal-illegal-alien bill passed out of his committee called the SAFE Act.</p>
<blockquote><p>The primary reason why our immigration system is broken today is because our immigration laws have largely been ignored by past and present administrations.  It’s imperative that we prevent this from happening again by taking away the enforcement on/off’ switch from the President.  That’s why the House Judiciary Committee approved the SAFE Act, which prevents the Executive Branch from unilaterally turning off immigration enforcement by granting states and local governments the authority to enforce federal immigration laws.</p></blockquote>
<p>Not everyone was attacking the directive. The American Immigration Council (AIC) defended the directive, <a href="http://immigrationimpact.com/2013/08/26/ice-policy-on-parental-rights-addresses-long-overdue-problem-in-immigration-system/">stating in a blog post</a> that this was nothing more than a sensible first step toward immigration policy which places priority in not breaking up families.</p>
<blockquote><p>The directive, signed by Acting ICE Director Jon Sandweg, reminds ICE officers that they must continue to review all cases individually and &#8220;continue to weigh whether an exercise of prosecutorial discretion may be warranted&#8221; while considering such factors such as whether the immigrant is a parent, guardian, or primary caretaker of a U.S. citizen or a minor.</p></blockquote>
<p>Tough deportation policies against criminal illegal aliens was one of the main promises of all those who have been proponents of comprehensive immigration reform. The public has been promised repeatedly that criminal illegal aliens will be pursued with vigor and all dangerous illegal aliens would face deportation. A series of memos (including this last one) prove that President Obama has no intention of getting tough on dangerous illegal aliens.</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>Gun-Grabbers Go Full Femme-a-Gogue in Colorado</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/michellemalkin/gun-grabbers-go-full-femme-a-gogue-in-colorado/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=gun-grabbers-go-full-femme-a-gogue-in-colorado</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 04 Sep 2013 04:10:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Michelle Malkin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Abortion]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Colorado]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Contraception]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[gun]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Rights]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Second Amendment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Women]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=203119</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Exposing the true misogynists who want to strip women of the right to defend themselves. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/gty_gun_control_rally_ll_121218_wg.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-203120" alt="gty_gun_control_rally_ll_121218_wg" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/gty_gun_control_rally_ll_121218_wg-450x342.jpg" width="270" height="205" /></a>COLORADO SPRINGS — Out: The boy who cried wolf. In: The girl who cried birth control. Desperate Democrats are imposing false-alarm feminist politics on a high-stakes recall election in Colorado this month. It&#8217;s a golden opportunity for independent-minded women to reject empty femme-a-goguery and tear up the Sandra Fluke card.</p>
<p>On September 10, Colorado Springs and Pueblo will decide whether to boot two top state Democrats (state Senate Majority Leader John Morse and state Sen. Angela Giron) over their support for radical gun- and ammo-control measures spearheaded by outside special interests. Left-wing billionaires Michael Bloomberg of New York City and Eli Broad of Detroit have poured $700,000 between them into defending the endangered Colorado Democrats.</p>
<p>A whiff of elitist progressive panic is polluting the Rocky Mountain air. Polls show &#8220;moderate&#8221; Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper, who was against anti-Second Amendment gesture theater before he was for it, losing favor here. The libs&#8217; gun-control laws (including more intrusive background checks and ammo mag limits) have driven manufacturing jobs away, made it more difficult for law-abiding gun-owners to conduct business, and done little to increase public safety. No wonder Hickenlooper has barely lifted one of his wavering, wet fingers in the wind to assist the recall targets.</p>
<p>Extremist liberal groups are filling the vacuum. They&#8217;re trotting out ridiculous fear-mongers to demonize Morse&#8217;s GOP challenger Bernie Herpin and Giron&#8217;s challenger George Rivera as misogynistic zealots hell-bent on confiscating every condom, morning-after pill and key to an abortion clinic in the Pikes Peak region. Exhale. Consider the newly formed 527 political action group &#8220;We Can Do Better, Colorado,&#8221; which put out ominous mailers and TV ads created by a Chicago-based firm. The spots are narrated by an angst-filled female who asks:</p>
<p>&#8220;What would you call someone who supports a ban on common forms of birth control? Interferes with our personal decisions?&#8221; &#8230;</p>
<p>&#8220;Someone who supports a plan that could even allow police to investigate miscarriages and question the grieving woman like a criminal?&#8221;</p>
<p>The narrator frets that if birth control warriors don&#8217;t rise up against the Neanderthals, they might soon be calling Herpin and Rivera &#8220;state senators.&#8221; Gasp! The Republican challengers appear in the ads as shadowy threats in black-and-white photos. All that&#8217;s missing are the wire hangers.</p>
<p>Locals here also report that their college-age children are receiving push calls zeroing in on GOP opposition to taxpayer-subsidized birth control, abortion and the so-called Personhood amendment — none of which sparked the recall in the first place and are not at issue in the special elections.</p>
<p>The reality? Both Herpin and Rivera are pro-life, mainstream Republicans focused on increasing economic opportunity and government accountability. Their recall campaigns have zeroed in on the control freak Democrats&#8217; underhanded subversion of transparency and the deliberative process during their gun-control hearings.</p>
<p>The true misogynists are Morse, Giron and their Bloomberg-bolstered gang who shut out Colorado citizens, disparaged Second Amendment-supporting rape victims and female concealed-carry permit holders, and cut off the testimony of countless sheriffs who opposed the sovereignty-infringing gun-control measures. Women voters here and across the country should not forget that these Nanny Staters told grandmothers, mothers and daughters last spring that they don&#8217;t need handguns to defend themselves, because &#8220;rape whistles,&#8221; &#8220;call boxes&#8221; and &#8220;ballpoint pens&#8221; are sufficient.</p>
<p>The gun-grabbing femme-a-gogues think they can do what they did to Colorado U.S. Senate candidate Ken Buck in 2010: hammer the GOP into submission and defeat over their phony &#8220;reproductive rights&#8221; agenda. Enough. &#8220;Our bodies, our choice&#8221; does not just apply to abortion and birth control. It applies to every woman&#8217;s right to defend herself as she sees fit.</p>
<p>The Dems&#8217; presumptuous paternalism aims to keep independent women both physically and intellectually disarmed. I say: Think and act with your lady smarts, not your lady parts.</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>Capital, Capitalists and Capitalism (Part III)</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson/capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-iii/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-iii</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 09 Aug 2013 04:12:17 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Hendrickson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[law]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=199956</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Rescuing the definition of "capitalism" from the clutches of the Left.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/stock-footage-woman-s-hand-counts-the-money.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-199957" alt="stock-footage-woman-s-hand-counts-the-money" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/stock-footage-woman-s-hand-counts-the-money.jpg" width="283" height="220" /></a>Editor’s note: The following is the third installment of the FrontPage series “Capital, Capitalists and Capitalism” by Dr. Mark Hendrickson. Click the following for <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson/capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-i/">Part I</a> and <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson/capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-ii/">Part II</a>. </em></p>
<p>Capitalism. “The economic system in which all or most of the means of production and distribution&#8230;are privately owned and operated for profit, originally under fully competitive conditions.”<sup>1</sup></p>
<p>Perhaps the greatest difficulty in any discussion about capitalism is overcoming the widely divergent concepts of what <i>capitalism </i>means and settling upon an agreed definition. For the political left, the term <i>capitalism </i>is so heavily laden with negative connotations that leftists have employed it as a label of derision, scorn, and condemnation, if not an outright curse, for more than a century-and-a-half. Karl Marx may be long gone, and the grand socialist experiment in central economic planning widely discredited after the collapse of the USSR two decades ago, but many people still loathe capitalism and yearn for a radical alternative to it. Both the anti-globalization protests of the late 1990s and the Occupy Wall Street movement of the current decade have held demonstrations prominently featuring signs proclaiming, “Kill capitalism!”</p>
<p>The dictionary definition given above is correct as far as it goes, but let’s expand on that definition so that we may increase our chances of engaging in intelligent discussions about it. The late economist Hans F. Sennholz, who earned his doctorate in economics (he also earned one in political science) under Ludwig von Mises and later guided me through my doctorate, preferred the phrase <i>private property order</i> to <i>capitalism</i>.</p>
<p>Indeed, <i>private property order</i> is a less problematical term. First, it describes a real-world political-legal system instead of another contentious ideology, another “-ism.” Second, as stated earlier, all human societies require capital as a factor in economic production, regardless of whether capital is privately or publicly owned. <i>Private property order</i> is a more precise, accurate, and illustrative descriptive term than <i>capitalism</i> as a name for a particular order and organization of economic production.</p>
<p>If we were starting from scratch, I would favor adopting Dr. Sennholz’s term. However, given the left’s constant misuse of the term and leftists’ Orwellian attempt to mutilate the term by bastardizing its definition, it is important to rescue the word from their malign distortions.</p>
<p><i>Free market economy</i> and <i>free enterprise system</i> are two other acceptable alternative terms for the <i>private property order</i> or <i>capitalism</i>. The key distinctions between <i>capitalism </i>and alternative systems involve the role of government and the related question of who is in charge of economic production.</p>
<p>In a truly free market—genuine capitalism—the “means of production and distribution&#8230;are privately owned and operated,” and the government does not tell individuals or companies what to produce, how much to produce, how to produce it, what wages it should pay or what prices it should charge, etc. Under capitalism, the government does not redistribute property from some citizens to others, nor does it pick economic winners and losers in the business world by favoring some with subsidies, bailouts, insulation from competition, etc., or weighing down others with discriminatory taxes, regulatory requirements, and other economic hindrances.</p>
<p>Under capitalism, the proper role of the government is to act as a night watchman, impartially defending everyone’s rights—upholding legal contracts, upholding clearly defined property rights, punishing fraud, theft, etc. To use a metaphor from sports, the government in a capitalistic system plays the role of the referee, enforcing the rules of the game, but does not become an active participant in the economic contest that determines who prospers.</p>
<p>In a free market, all transactions are voluntary. No business can compel anyone to purchase its products or services. Every day, providers of goods and services compete with other providers (actual and potential, within their line of business and between different product choices) for customers. Those providers of goods and services who fail to provide what consumers want at a price consumers are willing to pay either amend their business plan or go broke. Only those providers who excel at fulfilling the most highly valued wants of consumers will survive and prosper.</p>
<p>This is the doctrine of <i>consumer sovereignty</i>. Under capitalism, the consumer sits in the position of the crowd watching Rome’s gladiatorial games, rendering the fateful verdict of “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” on the various business enterprises seeking their approval and patronage in the competitive marketplace.</p>
<p>Ludwig von Mises described <i>consumer sovereignty</i> in these clear, succinct passages: The consumers’ “buying and their abstention from buying decides who should own and run the plants and the land. They make poor people rich and rich people poor. They determine precisely what should be produced, in what quality, and in what quantities.</p>
<p>“The consumers determine ultimately not only the prices of the consumers’ goods, but no less the prices of all factors of production. They determine the income of every member of the market economy.”<sup>2</sup></p>
<p>“All production must bend to the consumers’ will. From the moment it fails to conform to the consumers’ demands it becomes unprofitable. Thus free competition compels the obedience of the producer to the consumer’s will and also, in case of need, the transfer of the means of production from the hands of those unwilling or unable to achieve what the consumer demands into the hands of those better able to direct production. The lord of production is the consumer.”<sup>3</sup></p>
<p>We can plainly see today that government in the United States often abandons the night watchman, impartial referee role, and instead actively intervenes in economic activity. It frequently overrules the preferences of consumers and usurps a significant portion of the sovereign control that consumers wield in a truly capitalistic system.</p>
<p>Interestingly, the political left and right have been in agreement about the injustice of at least one type of government intervention: federal bailouts of big Wall Street firms during the financial crisis a few years ago. Millions of Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street Americans have denounced those bailouts, condemning them as “crony capitalism” or “corporate capitalism.”</p>
<p>This is where the linguistic waters have been muddied. The use of the adjectives<i> crony</i> and <i>corporate </i>is correct, but to use the noun <i>capitalism</i> in this context is utterly incorrect, because in genuine capitalism, government would not intervene to save private corporations from their mistakes. To describe such a clearly non-free-market practice as a form of capitalism is to mutilate the meaning of the word. Neither <i>crony capitalism</i> nor <i>corporate capitalism</i> is capitalism. Linguistically, they are oxymorons; in practice, both are rejections of capitalism, because they denote the replacement of free markets with politically rigged markets.<sup>4</sup></p>
<p>The distortion of words’ meanings can cause great mischief, for by associating <i>capitalism</i> with offensive, non-capitalistic policies, the left believes that capitalism is something pernicious. This can blind them from seeing true capitalism which, when rightly understood and practiced, remedies some of the most serious human problems about which the left professes concern.</p>
<p>Plainly, capitalism in its pure form does not exist today. Government intervenes in economic activity in myriad ways. Perhaps pure capitalism can never be attained, since imperfect human beings are incapable of adhering perfectly to any ideal—although the United States came close to achieving that ideal (at least, for white males) and thus can rightly be said to have been predominantly capitalistic during its first century. Realistically, capitalism may be what Ayn Rand called an “unknown ideal,”<sup>5</sup> but it is an ideal worth striving toward, as we shall now see by comparing capitalism with alternative economic systems in the following subsections.</p>
<p><strong>Read Part IV of this series in the next issue of FrontPage Magazine. </strong></p>
<p><strong>Notes:</strong></p>
<p><sup>1</sup> Webster’s, p. 268.</p>
<p><sup>2</sup> Mises, <i>Human Action</i>, pp. 270-1.</p>
<p><sup>3</sup> Ludwig von Mises, <i>Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis,</i> (trans. J. Kahane), Indianapolis: Liberty Fund/Liberty Classics, 1981, p. 400.</p>
<p><sup>4</sup> To distort the meaning of the word “capitalism” by joining it to an incompatible practice like cronyism is a favorite demagogic tactic of anti-capitalist ideologues. It is the same intellectual deception that they employ when the federal government overrules, suppresses, and prevents the operation of free markets—like it did to cause economic downturns in the 1930s, 1970s, or 2000s—and then, when the inevitable economic dislocations appear, anti-market ideologues blame “the free market” rather than the government intervention that stifled free markets.</p>
<p><sup>5</sup> Ayn Rand, <i>Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal</i>, New York: Signet Books, 1967.</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 Premature Mirandizing of a Terrorist</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-premature-mirandizing-of-a-terrorist/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-premature-mirandizing-of-a-terrorist</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-premature-mirandizing-of-a-terrorist/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 29 Apr 2013 04:55:36 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ACLU]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[boston marathon]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Crime]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[criminals]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Dzhokhar Tsarnaev]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Miranda]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rape]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Rights]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Terrorist]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=187490</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the Obama administration gives jihadists more rights than their victims -- and the deadly cost we'll pay for it.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Dzhokhar_transcript_pullout.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-187492" alt="Dzhokhar_transcript_pullout" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Dzhokhar_transcript_pullout.jpg" width="225" height="184" /></a>The last showing of <i>The Longest Day</i> ended at the Paramount Theater before midnight. After the lights had dimmed and the patrons filed out, their minds still filled with the sights and sounds of soldiers fighting and dying at Normandy, the eighteen-year-old girl who had stood behind the concessions counter handing them popcorn and sodas went home.</span></b></p>
<p>It was late at night when she began walking home from the bus stop, but crime rates in Phoenix, Arizona were only beginning the upward rise that would take hold in the seventies.</p>
<p>In 1963, the year that Lois Ann Jameson was walking home, there had been 222 rapes. Ten years later, that number would stand at 637. Today there are over 2,000 rapes a year in Phoenix; ten times as many. But one of those rapes would be hers. And it would lead to a new standard of protection for murderers and rapists.</p>
<p>Ernesto Miranda wasn’t famous yet. The days when he would be selling autographed Miranda warning cards were still ahead of him. For now he was only another son of Mexican immigrants, a tattooed felon working temporary jobs and a rapist on the prowl.</p>
<p>Miranda abducted the girl, drove her out to the desert and raped her. He was arrested, questioned and confessed to the crime. The rest should have been straightforward except that no one had told him that he was entitled to a lawyer. The head of the Phoenix office of the ACLU stepped in and the Miranda warning was born.</p>
<p><em>Miranda v. Arizona</em> was part of a string of decisions by the Warren Court that had begun the year of Lois Ann Jameson’s rape. The decisions invented rights which not only obligated taxpayers to provide accused criminals with lawyers, but also made it impossible to question a suspect without his lawyer.</p>
<p>In the case of Lois Ann’s rapist, Justice Earl Warren, who proved to be a bigger threat to the Constitution than King George III, went beyond inventing the right to a government lawyer, to invent the rapist’s right to be told of a right to a government lawyer.</p>
<p>Warren inverted the Fifth Amendment to claim that the confession of a criminal who had not been told that he did not have to incriminate himself was a violation of the ban on self-incrimination. And he held that it should be assumed that all criminals did not know that they did not have to confess.</p>
<p>Fifty years after a concession stand girl was raped by a career criminal in the desert, terrorist bombs went off at the Boston Marathon. One of the perpetrators, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, lay in his hospital room telling investigators bits and pieces about the attack.</p>
<p>Dzhokhar’s older brother and mother had been on a terrorist watch list, the two brothers had reportedly been planning a second wave of attacks in New York City and the FBI had not ruled out the possibility of a third bomber due to the difficulty involved in detonating the bombs without a clear line of sight.</p>
<p>Even though Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was in no shape for a court appearance and investigators still wanted to continue questioning him under the public safety exemption of <em>New York v. Quarles</em>, a Federal judge barged into the hospital room to present the charges against him and read him his rights.</p>
<p>There was no urgent need for a US attorney and a federal judge to rouse a terrorist listed in severe condition and read him rights. Judge Marianne Bowler’s appearance in the hospital was a calculated attempt at aborting the investigation. The only reason she gave for her actions was the intense television coverage of the capture. Bowler, a Clinton appointee, had some experience in the Muslim world and no explanation except that the case needed to move forward because it was on television.</p>
<p>The premature Mirandizing of terrorists had become a routine practice under Attorney General Eric Holder. The Christmas Day bomber was interrogated for less than an hour before being read his Miranda rights. Like Dzhokhar, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was read his rights in the hospital while he was still receiving treatment.</p>
<p>Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had warned that other terrorist attacks might be on the way before being read his rights. Holder took responsibility for the decision, even though Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair stated that it was a mistake. A few months later, Blair was gone and Holder remained.</p>
<p>That year Faisal Shahzad attempted to detonate a car bomb in Times Square; an attack that the Tsarnaev brothers reportedly attempted to finish. Once again, Holder made the decision to Mirandize him. Responding to the criticism, Holder promised to seek a new exception to Miranda from Congress, even though he had failed to make full use of the public safety exception already in place.</p>
<p>Three years later, the Boston bombings show that nothing has changed. Holder has tripled down on Miranda even in the face of a major terrorist plot. And Holder’s policy is that of an entire administration which treats terrorism as a crime and grants it the same liberal protections that criminals receive.</p>
<p>Obama could not completely dismantle the law enforcement infrastructure of the War on Terror, but he did his best. The enemy combatant became the unprivileged belligerent. The Bush administration’s use of “enemy combatant” had clearly defined terrorists as members of enemy forces while the Obama administration’s substitution of “unprivileged belligerent” hid their status and nature in vagueness.</p>
<p>Obama did his best to prevent Islamic terrorists from even being labeled “unprivileged belligerents.” Obama and Holder tried to move the trial of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to a civilian court. Only loud protests by New Yorkers forced a change in their plans. When Obama finally authorized the SEALs to go after Osama bin Laden, he did so hoping to capture him and exploit the political boost to take down Guantanamo Bay and the use of military courts against Al Qaeda terrorists.</p>
<p>The SEALs preempted Obama’s effort to save Osama from the military court system, but he did succeed in trying Sulaiman Abu Ghaith in the civilian court system. Abu Gaith was Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law who had served as a spokesman for Al Qaeda and after September 11 had threatened the United States, saying, “The planes will not stop.”</p>
<p>Given the choice between national security and the liberal virtue of giving criminals more rights than their victims, Obama chose the latter over the former. The difference between criminals and terrorists is that a failure to get a confession from a criminal leads to a lost conviction, but a failure to extract intelligence from a terrorist can mean the deaths of hundreds or even thousands.</p>
<p>When the ACLU and the weight of liberal opinion stood behind Lois Ann Jameson’s rapist, they were endangering countless women. The tenfold increase in rapes was largely attributable to the left’s legal and social programs. Now when they stand behind monsters like Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, they are opening the door to the Muslim rape of America, to massive acts of terror that could have been stopped and countless dead who could have been saved.</p>
<p>The liberal campaign for murderers and rapists covered their hands in the blood of innocents, but their campaign for terrorists will cover it in the blood of a nation.</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>Academics or Agitprop Artists?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/fjordman/academics-or-agitprop-artists/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=academics-or-agitprop-artists</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 10 Apr 2013 04:20:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Fjordman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Academia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Daniel Pipes]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[David Horowitz]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islamophobia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Norway]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Rights]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[robert spencer]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=184709</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[When "scientists" smear human rights promoters as "fascists." ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/fjordman/academics-or-agitprop-artists/razieh20100831063916560-2/" rel="attachment wp-att-184735"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-184735" title="razieh20100831063916560" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/razieh20100831063916560.jpg" alt="" width="294" height="208" /></a>In late 2012, the academics Øystein Sørensen, Bernt Hagtvet and Bjørn Arne Steine, among others, published a work in Norway called <em>Høyreekstremisme. Ideer og bevegelser i Europa</em> (“Right-wing extremism. Ideas and Movements in Europe”) I figure prominently in this <a href="http://www.abforlag.no/index.php?ID=Bok&amp;counter=271">book</a>, which in my view symbolizes the decay and intellectual dishonesty in modern academia.</p>
<p>Co-editors Bernt Hagtvet and Øystein Sørensen, both of them professors at the University of Oslo, <a href="http://www.frifagbevegelse.no/politikk_ff/article6377695.ece">suggest</a> that my ideology is anti-democratic and dangerous and will lead to oppressive and authoritarian societies. It is unclear how this could be the case, since I want to move power away from unelected supranational organizations such as the EU, and back to the people, and reduce state interference in the lives of individual citizens. I must be the first alleged “Fascist” in history who wants <em>less</em> state power over the lives of individual citizens.</p>
<p>The chapter written by Vidar Enebakk on “Fjordman’s radicalization” is particularly incompetent and ridiculously politicized. For example, he refers totally uncritically to <a href="http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/religion/report/2011/08/26/10165/fear-inc/">the report</a> “Fear, Inc. The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America” from 2011, which was published by the left-wing organization The Center for American Progress, with several Muslim collaborators.</p>
<p>This report was clearly intended to smear people in North America and other Western countries who oppose Islamization and sharia law in any significant way. It also tied Breivik’s terror attacks directly to the emergence of so-called “organized Islamophobia.”</p>
<p>Yet Enebakk claims without a single critical remark on page 63 that the authors of this report mapped and identified “a small network of experts on disinformation, who have largely defined the anti-Muslim hate rhetoric in the USA in the wake of September 11<sup>th</sup> 2001.”</p>
<p>Knowledgeable individuals such as the Harvard-educated Daniel Pipes are dismissed without further evidence or explanation as “experts on disinformation,” while the words of those who warn against the dangers of Islamic global expansionism and Jihadist aggression are smeared unfairly with the label “hate rhetoric.” If anything, they are warning <em>against</em> hate.</p>
<p>Mr. Enebakk and too many others like him in this manner take the partisan ideological statements of decidedly left-wing organizations at face value and treat them as the Gospel Truth. At the same time, they casually dismiss conservative viewpoints simply as unfounded and irrational “hate.” Enebakk has done virtually nothing to check if some of the statements made by these “Islamophobes” are actually correct, a behavior that violates the most fundamental principles of genuine research and critical investigation.</p>
<p>What we see here is classic <em>agitprop</em>, or agitation propaganda directed against ideological opponents. This kind of aggressive character assassination unfortunately has long traditions among left-wing activists, dating back at least to the Bolsheviks and the Soviet Union.</p>
<p>Science is a method, not a title. Vidar Enebakk likes to wrap himself in the mantle of “science” and pretends to be a scientist, but he does not behave like one, and is therefore unworthy of the title.</p>
<p>Among those allegedly engaged in “systematically spreading Islamophobia in the USA,” Enebakk names Robert Spencer, Frank Gaffney, Daniel Pipes and David Horowitz. He claims that not only do they spread propaganda and disinformation in the darkest corners of the Internet, they also operate a “well-organized and interconnected network that has systematically financed, produced and disseminated rhetoric of hate and Islamophobia in the United States.”</p>
<p>Notice how hopelessly unscientific this is statement is, written by a person who is supposed to have had scientific training. This is politics, not science. Enebakk describes “rhetoric of hate” (<em>hatretorikk</em>) and “Islamophobia” as being virtually the same thing. He has repeatedly accused me falsely, but very aggressively, of encouraging violence. I have written that I support both the First and the Second Amendment to the US Constitution; that is, freedom of speech and the right to bear arms. I stand by this statement and see nothing wrong with it.</p>
<p>Enebakk does not explicitly blame me for Breivik’s terror attacks, but he goes very far towards blaming me personally for shaping the killer’s mindset, thereby portraying me as a de facto indirect accomplice in the worst mass murder in recent Scandinavian history. This claim that I have a moral, if not legal, co-responsibility for the murder of 77 people has been suggested by a number of writers in Norway, among them the left-wing activist Eivind Trædal.</p>
<p>The defense lawyer Geir Lippestad has stated that Breivik had become radicalized already at the age of <a href="http://www.dagbladet.no/2011/10/18/nyheter/innenriks/terror/18672278/">21</a>, around the year 2000, although his actual terror plans developed later. The exact date remains disputed, but Breivik apparently had already written comments online in June 2003 warning about the possibility of future civil wars due to Muslim immigration.</p>
<p>At this time I was working in the Middle East, in Israel and the Palestinian territories in a (not terribly effective) observer mission called TIPH in the city of Hebron. At that point I had not published a single essay about Islam under any name, although I was extensively reading critical websites and books about Islam, by Ali Sina, Ibn Warraq and other ex-Muslims.</p>
<p>It is thus well documented, and admitted by Breivik himself, that he had become “radicalized” and had started on his so-called manifesto before he had read a single word I had ever written.</p>
<p>Enebakk further notes – correctly this time – that I have argued that the current immigration policies could lead to serious ethnic conflicts in some Western countries. I still fear that this could indeed be the tragic outcome at some point if the current policies are not changed, but I warn against this. I certainly don’t “recommend” civil war, as some of my critics have perversely accused me of doing. Who in their right mind would do such a thing, anyway?</p>
<p>It is striking to notice how aggressive many left-wing self-proclaimed intellectuals can be in demonizing those who question their beliefs. Apparently, if conservative writers point out the negative consequences of policies supported by left-wing ideologues, then conservative writers are to blame for the existence of these problems. As such, those who point out real problems related to Muslim mass immigration to Europe and the Western world are accused of spreading “hate,” whereas many groups who have supported and promoted this mass immigration while suppressing any real discussion of its consequences largely go free.</p>
<p>By following this logic, Vidar Enebakk devotes very little space to discussing real problems caused by mass immigration, yet enthusiastically smears anyone who disagrees with his views. In my case, he is engaged in what can only be labeled a systematic attempt at character assassination.</p>
<p>I have briefly engaged him in direct discussions online, but soon found these efforts to be fruitless due to his chronic lack of honesty. For instance, I noted that while he loves to wear the mantle of a scientist, he does not always follow the most basic scientific principles, such as basing his statements on demonstrable facts. He has earlier made <a href="http://www.verdidebatt.no/debatt/cat1/subcat11/thread170730/">public claims</a> that “Fjordman” is really a name used by an entire group of people, and that I have not actually written all of the essays I claim to have written. This conspiracy theory is, of course, totally without basis in reality.</p>
<p>Yet when I pointed this out to him, Enebakk did not apologize for having made baseless accusations against my person but instead immediately made another false accusation against me, namely “<a href="http://snaphanen.dk/2012/11/21/pressens-morke-side/">plagiarism</a>”. He has a background in studies of the history of science and has previously been a Visiting Scholar at the <a href="http://no.linkedin.com/pub/vidar-enebakk/3/858/b25">University of Cambridge</a> in England. He earlier evaluated some of my quite extensive writings on the history of science and found them to be “scarily good.” Yet later on, he suggested that they were not as impressive after all, since I had simply engaged in “plagiarism”.</p>
<p>In the common understanding of the term, <a href="http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/plagiarize">Plagiarism</a> implies that one outright steals the work of other people without giving proper credit, and pretends it is his own work. This practice is not just immoral, but can in some cases be illegal. Enebakk thus publicly and falsely accused me of engaging in potentially illegal activities, without providing the tiniest shred of evidence to support it — since none exists.</p>
<p>As a matter of fact, one of my essays that is reproduced in full in Breivik’s so-called manifesto or compendium deals with medieval science in Europe vs. the Islamic world. In <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2008/08/fjordman-on-science-and-religion.html">this 2008 essay</a> I praised the work of scholars David C. Lindberg, Toby E. Huff and Edward Grant, leading authorities on science during the Middle Ages. I have never had any contact with Mr. Grant and bought his book <em>Science and Religion </em>with my own money. I thereafter publicly praised his work in very positive terms and recommended that other buy his book, giving full credit to the author and providing page references to the quotes from it that I used in my essay.</p>
<p>I have openly cited leading international authorities in this particular field, praised them by name and recommended that others buy their books. I did all of this entirely for free, simply because I respect their work.</p>
<p>Yet instead of applauding me for doing this, Enebakk responded by accusing me of engaging in shady and possibly illegal activities. Clearly, this is a person who is <em>not</em> interested in honest debate.</p>
<p>Vidar Enebakk is engaged in systematic character assassination, not research. His obsessive preoccupation with me gives Mr. Enebakk a profile resembling that of a cyber-stalker — a bit like Anders Behring Breivik once was.</p>
<p>He is a living symbol of the decline of modern academia.</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>Pro-Gay and Anti-Israel? ‘Pinkwashing’ to the Rescue</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/cinnamon-stillwell-and-reut-r-cohen/pro-gay-and-anti-israel-pinkwashing-to-the-rescue/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=pro-gay-and-anti-israel-pinkwashing-to-the-rescue</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 25 Mar 2013 04:32:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Cinnamon Stillwell and Reut R. Cohen]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA['Pinkwashing]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gay]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[UCLA hosts another hate-fest against the only safe country in the Middle East for homosexuals. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/cinnamon-stillwell-and-reut-r-cohen/pro-gay-and-anti-israel-pinkwashing-to-the-rescue/steve-rhodes/" rel="attachment wp-att-182927"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-182927" title="Steve-Rhodes" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Steve-Rhodes.jpg" alt="" width="244" height="197" /></a>What’s a pro-gay, anti-Israel activist to do when faced with the fact that the Jewish state is the <a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/02/pinkwashing_sexual_assault_on_israel.html">only nation</a> in the Middle East in which not only is it illegal to discriminate against homosexuality, but where homosexuality is celebrated with an annual <a href="http://www.tel-aviv-gay-vibe.com/non-stop-city/2013-pride-parade#.UUiylDefgp4">gay pride parade</a>? To such activists, the answer is obvious: invent a <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/03/04/pinkwashing-another-conspiracy-theory.html">bogus theory</a> called “<a href="http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/02/26/pink-anti-semitism-is-no-different-from-brown-anti-semitism/">pinkwashing</a>” that accuses Israel of touting gay rights in order to downplay its alleged oppression of the Palestinians.</p>
<p>The University of California, Los Angeles’s <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/search.php?cx=015692155655874064424%3A-cjrsa07xqe&amp;cof=FORID%3A9&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;q=center+near+eastern+studies+cnes&amp;sa=Search">Center for Near Eastern Studies</a> recently jumped into the fray with <a href="http://www.international.ucla.edu/cnes/events/showevent.asp?eventid=9901">a lecture</a> comically titled, “Pinkwashing: Gay Rights and Queer [sic] Indigeneities” (the term “<a href="http://www.definition-of.com/indigeneity">indigeneities</a>,” an invented piece of <a href="http://www.culanth.org/?q=node/116">academic jargon</a>, is derived from “indigenous”). In a sparsely attended presentation rife with post-colonialist rhetoric, <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/search.php?cx=015692155655874064424%3A-cjrsa07xqe&amp;cof=FORID%3A9&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;q=nada+elia&amp;sa=Search">Nada Elia</a>, a professor of gender and global studies at Antioch University in Seattle and a member of the <a href="http://www.usacbi.org/about-us/">organizing committee</a> of the U.S. Campaign for the Academic &amp; Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI), attempted to align her support for “Palestinian queer activism” with her devotion to all things anti-Israel.</p>
<p>Stating up front that she prefers to be called a “scholar-activist,” Elia wasted no time describing Israel as “a settler-colonial power that violates human rights” and therefore, “has an image problem.” Despite the multicultural and multi-religious <a href="http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/myths3/MFroots.html#6">nature</a> of Israeli society, she maintained that “a Jewish state is an exclusive state,” and that:</p>
<blockquote><p>As [Israel] persists in its desire to be a Jewish state, it can only indulge in image-fixing . . . to cover up for the crimes it is unrepentant for.</p></blockquote>
<p>In order to achieve these nefarious goals, Elia claimed Israel, “uses ‘gay-friendly’ as a mask to distract from the reality.” Worse, she noted, referencing <a href="http://forward.com/articles/2070/israel-aims-to-improve-its-public-image/">a quote</a> from Wayne Firestone, the president of Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life, “the Foreign Ministry [Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs] is sending out the ‘cool, hip people’ to distract from the reality of war.” She lamented that this “propaganda” is only “fixing the image, not the policies.” Never mind that Israel truly is a bastion for “cool, hip people” in the region, as its thriving economy demonstrates; to tell the world as much is considered criminal.</p>
<p>Pointing to the efforts of the Israeli government, Israeli and American citizens, and the <a href="http://israel21c.org/blog/jewish-week-marketing-a-new-image/">Brand Israel group</a>, a volunteer coalition of marketing and communications executives, to draw attention to Israel’s vibrant society, Elia concluded, “This is where the gay market comes in.” Although Israel is by no means the only nation or entity to engage in “gay tourism” and “gay marketing,” she attributes sinister motives to an endeavor that, as she put it, presents Israel as “gay-friendly, unlike the homophobic Palestinians. Israel is civilized; Palestinians are barbaric, homophobic.” Perhaps she should ask gay Palestinians themselves, particularly those who have found <a href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/secret-freedom-at-tel-avivs-palestinian-queer-party/">acceptance</a> and <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/cuny-welcomes-queers-against-israel/">safety</a> in Israel—<a href="http://www.law.tau.ac.il/Heb/_Uploads/dbsAttachedFiles/Nowhere.pdf">limitations</a> based on security concerns notwithstanding—just how “homophobic” their culture really is.</p>
<p>Elia referred to the experience of “queer Palestinians” on several occasions, but only to bash Israel:</p>
<blockquote><p>Israel may be gay-friendly for tourists, citizens . . . but not for Palestinians. Israel is the greater purveyor of institutionalized violence regardless of sexuality. . . .  The queer Palestinian community in Israel has long known that it is disenfranchised not because it’s gay, but because it’s Palestinian.</p></blockquote>
<p>This claim conveniently omits the <a href="http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/21419/for-gay-palestinians-israel-offers-a-chance-at-survival/">grisly details</a> regarding the “institutionalized violence” and “disenfranchisement” meted out to gays in both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, including honor killings by and of family members, jail sentences for sodomy (which was decriminalized in Israel in 1987), abduction, torture, rape, and murder.</p>
<p>Tacitly acknowledging the danger to gay Palestinians accused of collaboration, Elia still blamed Israel:</p>
<blockquote><p>A lot of queer Palestinians are suspected of being collaborators. There is some degree of truthfulness because Israel knows—every Palestinian is spied on somehow— if there is suspicion that a Palestinian is gay, they are arrested and then recruited. They threaten to ‘out them.’ This increases the homophobia. It’s aggravating the circumstances of gays in Palestine.</p></blockquote>
<p>Anti-Israel activists have been <a href="http://www.quitpalestine.org/actions/gaymen2.html">plying</a> this conspiratorial charge for years, but Menachem Landau, a veteran of Israel’s Shin Bet intelligence agency quoted in a 2003 <em>Reuters </em><a href="http://www.glapn.org/sodomylaws/world/palestine/psnews003.htm">article</a>, questioned the logic at hand: “Gays are already treated with suspicion in Palestinian society. So what good are they for covert work?” Moreover, Palestinian police have <a href="http://jewishquarterly.org/issuearchive/articled87d.html?articleid=218">been known</a> to torture gays into spying on other homosexuals, while Palestinian terrorists groups—much <a href="http://www.phyllis-chesler.com/128/forced-female-suicide">as they do</a> with “dishonored” women—have tried to coerce them into carrying out suicide bombings.</p>
<p>Elia’s criticism of Israel even extended to gay rights, as she claimed that, “pinkwashing denies there is homophobia in Israel.” Yet she admitted, in a rare moment of lucidity, that “I don’t know any country where there is no homophobia.” She later described “pinkwashing” as a “twenty-first century manifestation of the Orientalist agenda” and, alluding to Rudyard Kipling’s <em>T</em><em>he White Man’s Burden</em>, added:</p>
<blockquote><p>Prior to that colonial powers pretended to save brown women from brown men. Now it’s a matter of saving the brown gays from, primarily, the brown men. It’s the burden of the white gay international.</p></blockquote>
<p>Actually, it’s left-wing academics such as Elia who see the world in “brown and white” terms.</p>
<p>Beyond peddling the “pinkwashing” meme, Elia proffered a revisionist history aimed at delegitimizing Israel. She denied that, “coming out of the Holocaust [Jews] had to find a safe place,” and instead cited “European” and “imperial expansion” as the impetus for Israel’s founding as a “colonialist-settler movement.”</p>
<p>Claiming, against all evidence, that the “Zionist narrative” viewed the early Arab inhabitants of Palestine as a “subhuman people who shouldn’t exist,” Elia invoked the well-known phrase—<a href="http://www.meforum.org/1877/a-land-without-a-people-for-a-people-without">originated by</a> nineteenth century Christian writers—“a land without a people for a people without a land” to imply that the early Zionists set out to destroy a civilization. In fact, Jews and Arabs coexisted in the region, despite tensions, <a href="http://www.fsmitha.com/h2/ch17jeru2.htm">long before</a> Israel’s founding and could have done so afterward had the Arabs accepted the offer of their own state in 1948, or some of the many <a href="http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/myths3/MFpeace.html#6">offers spurned</a> since.</p>
<p>Elia ascribed malevolence to Israel’s founding and repeated the <a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/08/m-zionism_and_the_married_to_another_man_story.html">thoroughly debunked</a> anecdote about two rabbis who, following a fact-finding mission from Vienna to Palestine in the late nineteenth century, were said to have sent back a cable reading, “The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.” That the story has no basis in history was either unknown or disregarded, both by Elia and her audience, which judging by its behavior during the question and answer period was made up primarily of sycophants. It included two academic members of the USACBI “<a href="http://www.usacbi.org/about-us/">organizing collective</a>” who share Elia’s anti-Israel views: <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/blog/2012/01/farewell-to-ucla-sondra-hale">Sondra Hale</a>, professor emerita of anthropology and women’s studies at UCLA, and <a href="http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/national/battle_professors">Sherna Berger Gluck</a>, professor emerita of women’s studies and history at California State University, Long Beach. Elia was in her element.</p>
<p>No audience member asked an obvious question: In light of Israel’s purported “settler-colonialism” and “pinkwashing” and the discrimination gay Palestinians face in their own society, what are the alternatives? Had they done so, Elia might have elaborated on her utopian proposal, outlined in the lecture’s <a href="http://www.international.ucla.edu/cnes/events/showevent.asp?eventid=9901">announcement</a>, for “a queer state, which allows individual citizens to define themselves as they wish, without losing power, entitlement, or safety.” Given the reaction that a Jewish state has elicited in the region, one can only imagine how a “queer state” would be received. Yet Elia and her fellow travelers prefer a fictional “queer state” to an actual country where gays are welcomed—a sure sign that, for them, bigotry trumps reality.</p>
<p>NB: If you wish to make your views known to University of California, Los Angeles Chancellor Gene Block, he can be reached at:</p>
<p><em>Email: </em><a href="mailto:chancellor@ucla.edu" target="_blank">chancellor@ucla.edu</a><br />
<em>Phone: </em><a href="tel:310-825-2151" target="_blank">310-825-2151</a><br />
<em>Fax: </em><a href="tel:310-206-6030" target="_blank">310-206-6030</a></p>
<p>The office of Antioch University Seattle President Cassandra Manuelito-Kerkvliet may be contacted at:</p>
<p><em>Email: </em><a href="mailto:cmanuelito@antioch.edu" target="_blank">cmanuelito@antioch.edu</a><br />
<em>Phone: </em><a href="tel:206-268-4105" target="_blank">206-268-4105</a></p>
<p><em>Reut R. Cohen (</em><a href="http://www.reutrcohen.com"><em>www.reutrcohen.com</em></a><em>), a journalist, researcher, and photographer, co-wrote this article with Cinnamon Stillwell, the West Coast Representative for</em> <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/"><em>Campus Watch</em></a><em>, a project of the</em> <a href="http://www.meforum.org/"><em>Middle East Forum</em></a><em>. She can be reached at</em> <a href="mailto:stillwell@meforum.org"><em>stillwell@meforum.org</em></a><em>.</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>Israel and the Sad History of Jewish Property Rights</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/benjamin-manaster/israel-and-the-sad-history-of-jewish-property-rights/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=israel-and-the-sad-history-of-jewish-property-rights</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 21 Feb 2013 04:30:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Benjamin Manaster]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[The anti-Semitic legacy behind the rejection of the Jewish homeland. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/benjamin-manaster/israel-and-the-sad-history-of-jewish-property-rights/israel-flag-johnk85-2/" rel="attachment wp-att-178302"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-178302" title="Israel-Flag-Johnk85" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Israel-Flag-Johnk851-445x350.jpg" alt="" width="267" height="210" /></a>After reading Jan Gross’s &#8220;Golden Harvest,&#8221; the Polish historian’s ground breaking study of the Holocaust, I began to understand what for so long had perplexed me &#8212; how it is that so many people feel impelled to weigh in on the affairs of Israel and the Jews.    While murder and mayhem remain constants in the world, no other nation attracts so much critical attention.  (The United Nations has passed far more resolutions with respect to the state of Israel than the rest of the world combined.) And in a remarkable display of moral hubris, the heirs and descendants of those who extinguished their Jewish populations in the forties have felt themselves entitled to render moral judgment on the survivors and their progeny.</p>
<p>Jews for millennia were spurned as Christ-killers and heretics by Church and Mosque respectively and denied standing in the communities where they lived.  While rejecting Judaism itself, the Christian Church laid claim to the Jewish Bible, which it annexed<strong>, </strong>abridged, and renamed the “Old Testament.”  And over time the Christian world came to regard as patrimony whatever else the Jews possessed. (Islam in its ascendance picked up where Christianity left off.) To this day the mainstream Protestant churches in America stand foursquare with Fatah and Hamas, averring the Palestinian cause and condemning Israel.  Jew killing has never been a moral problem for them, but the Jewish claim to the land of Israel disturbs them deeply.</p>
<p>Landless for two thousand years, dependant on the reticence of peoples ill-disposed toward them, Jews survived precariously, lorded over by gentile “hosts” in societies that were variously hostile.  When so inclined, their hosts would confiscate their property, issuing and enforcing decrees against them. Subject to the will and whim of others, Jews remained dependant on their sufferance and largesse.  As tenant farmers and as tradesmen, they owned only what was allotted them, allotments that could be reduced or removed, dispossessing them at will.  At times dispossession would encompass their very existence – witness the Crusades, the Inquisition, innumerable pogroms, and, ultimately, the Shoah.   A sense of entitlement seems to have passed into the DNA of formerly host societies, and continues in altered form until this day – e.g., the violent hostility of the Arab/Persian world which remains at war with Israel and the turpitude of Western nations who support or excuse it.    Even in our own time, Europeans afford themselves a privileged position with respect to Jewish interests, threatening and cajoling Israel to redistribute its property to its enemies.</p>
<p>Financially reliant on petro-dollars, the West in its cupidity has chosen to appease the Arabs and support them in their conflict with Israel, no matter that Arab hatred of the Christian West runs second only to their Jew hatred.  Islam’s jihadist ambitions and its utter rejection of a Jewish or Christian presence in the Middle East are inconvenient truths suppressed to win favor with the Arabs for their oil money.</p>
<p>But in spite of their great wealth, Arab societies are in a shambles, and, who better to blame for it than Jews?  At the heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict are generations of impoverished refugees living shiftless lives on United Nations handouts for more than sixty years.  They are portrayed as victims, no more responsible for themselves than children.  (A comparable number of Middle Eastern Jews fled persecution in their home countries and found refuge in Israel where they were absorbed and integrated into the fabric of the country.)  The wealthy Arabs states, without the least diminution in their lavish lifestyle, could have transformed the condition of their poor relations but chose instead to “drive the Jews into the sea.” Oil rich Arabia dwarfs Israel physically and economically, but it is Israel that is held responsible for Arab poverty, just as Jews for centuries were held responsible for crises in the West.  The “Zionist Entity” with its “settlements” is the moral culprit, and justice demands that, “like a cancer,” it be cut out. The benighted ways and terroristic activities of the Arabs are excused or rationalized away.  Israel’s refusal to cede its heartland is “the main obstacle to peace.”</p>
<p>A nomadic people, Arabs for centuries moved hither and yon throughout the Middle East.  Only with the arrival of the British and the development of a Jewish homeland did some claim an identity related to the sparsely populated area called “Palestine,” originally a Roman appellation.  The wealthy Arab states, which deflect dissent by inveighing against Israel, decry the suggestion that a place for their brethren could be found elsewhere in the vast land mass of the Middle East.</p>
<p>From his research, Gross learned that the nations (primarily Poland in his work but all of Europe by implication) regarded the existential situation of the Jews as theirs to determine.    Those to whom Jews were required to answer, be they German or Pole or Russian or Ukrainian or Italian or Greek or Spanish or Turk (to name some of the more significant actors in their long and tragic history), could deny them acceptance and remove whatever security they enjoyed.  Indeed, their status could be altered at will, even when they had been living in a locale for centuries.  Whatever the Jews possessed could be taken and they themselves sent packing.  Without moral or legal standing, their possessions could be absorbed as common property.  The host giveth, the host taketh.</p>
<p>Gross illustrates this point with examples from the war years in Poland where Jews were often blackmailed by their so called protectors – Poles who, for their own reasons, hid them.   According to his research, extortion for safe keeping was not at all exceptional.  The major motivation of “benefactors” was to gain access to the hidden property of Jewish victims.  (It was an axiom of belief that even the most impoverished of Jews had hidden away riches.)  And when Jews resisted their demands, their Polish protectors took umbrage &#8212; threatened them with violence or betrayal to the Germans.  Since the Jews were doomed and defenseless, their stubborn hold out was denying Poles their due.  Polish Jews were favoring the Germans over their fellow countrymen.  And, for many Europeans, Jewish “intransigence” is a source of consternation to this day.  They are much displeased when “shitty little Israel” will not jump at their command.</p>
<p>Of course, not all Europeans are hostile and certainly the majority of the American people hold Israel in high esteem &#8212; a loyal friend who shares their deepest values.  But Europeans generally, as well as Arab sympathizers in this country, demand that Judea (from which the Jews derive their name) and Samaria &#8212; lands documented in the holy books of both Judaism and Christianity, and recorded in the annals of history as theirs for three thousand years &#8212; be surrendered to their enemy. For its recalcitrance, Israel is threatened with economic reprisals and denounced in international forums.  Some Europeans regard the very existence of Israel as an injustice &#8212; an insult to their moral sensibilities.  They embrace the Arab narrative with respect to “Palestine,” a narrative that denies the historic connection of Jews to their ancient land. Wars and mass murders committed by the Arabs give them no pause.   Like Poles, Ukrainians, and Baltic people in the forties, so-called peace organizers support these self-confessed killers and organize public protests on their behalf.  Jews must surrender the land, i.e. the real property of their people.  Refusal, their critics claim, is pointless.  Surrender is inevitable.  Israel will perish if it does not give way.  (They know what’s best for Jews.  They always have.)   The land in question, including much of Jerusalem and its environs, will be redistributed to “displaced Arabs” who have been dealt a perceived injustice.  Under certain circumstances, Jews might be permitted to retain a small portion of their ill-gotten gain.  (When a gain is Jewish, it is ill-gotten by definition.)</p>
<p>In the star chamber of world politics, the privileges of ownership are available to some and not others &#8212; Israel in particular.  Its de-legitimization by the Left, abetted often by Jewish leftists, fits well with the Left’s disparagement of property rights in general.  Arab failure, in repeated attempts, to destroy Israel and rid the region of its Jewish presence elicits their sympathy.  Immersed in relativism and empathetic to all forms of failure, they accept Palestinian Arab claims <em>ipso facto</em> and dismiss those of the Israelis.   Israel’s improbable success and contributions to the world at large make it all the more troubling in their eyes.  Though the existential threat to it from Iran grows by the day, it fails to arouse their concern.   Jewish tragic history has been relegated to a footnote and deemed no longer relevant, Jewish survival a parochial anomaly with no place on their “universal” agenda.  The success of capitalist Israel, thriving in the face of worldwide opposition, adds insult to the injury suffered by the Arabs.  For the Left, pacifism, gay marriage and unlimited abortion occupy the moral high ground.  Jewish land is an oxymoron, a Zionist pipedream, internationally condemned to requisition and redistribution by the United Nations.  Alas, the “holy land” belongs neither to Jew nor Arab, but is the common property of any and all people.</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>Off With a Bang: Assault on Second Amendment Begins</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/off-with-a-bang-assault-on-second-amendment-begins/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=off-with-a-bang-assault-on-second-amendment-begins</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 08 Jan 2013 04:40:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[New Congress and an emboldened President Obama are after much more than an "assault weapons" ban. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/off-with-a-bang-assault-on-second-amendment-begins/bidenobama-12-12/" rel="attachment wp-att-172527"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-172527" title="bidenobama.12.12" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/bidenobama.12.12-438x350.jpg" alt="" width="263" height="210" /></a>President Obama is planning an aggressive, in-your-face, blitzkrieg-style campaign against Americans&#8217; fundamental Second Amendment right to self-defense.</p>
<p>After a madman murdered 26 people including 20 young schoolchildren last month at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, Obama initially urged a reinstatement of the expired federal Assault Weapons Ban. The demonstrably useless law lapsed in 2004 and had no detectable impact on crime. It was designed to cater to big-city liberals and their irrational fear of firearms.</p>
<p>But the Obama administration&#8217;s plans to assault the Bill of Rights grew more ambitious over the Christmas holidays. The administration has now had an opportunity to brainstorm more extensively with the left-wing gun-grabbing lobby, which is heavily financed by radical financier George Soros.</p>
<p>The president is hoping to use the bloody Newtown massacre to impose sweeping new restrictions on firearms and to create a massive new database to track and spy on law-abiding gun owners. Americans are wise to be wary of such proposals. Governments the world over have used such databases time and time again to crack down on internal dissent, lay the groundwork for gun confiscation, and clear the way for genocidal slaughter.</p>
<p>Citing multiple sources &#8220;involved in the administration’s discussions,&#8221; the Washington Post <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/white-house-weighs-broad-gun-control-agenda-in-wake-of-newtown-shootings/2013/01/05/d281efe0-5682-11e2-bf3e-76c0a789346f_print.html">reports</a> that the Obama White House is now &#8220;weighing a far broader and more comprehensive approach to curbing the nation’s gun violence than simply reinstating an expired ban on assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition.&#8221;</p>
<p>According to the newspaper:</p>
<blockquote><p>A working group led by Vice President [Joe] Biden is seriously considering measures backed by key law enforcement leaders that would require universal background checks for firearm buyers, track the movement and sale of weapons through a national database, strengthen mental health checks, and stiffen penalties for carrying guns near schools or giving them to minors&#8230;</p></blockquote>
<p>Vice President Biden &#8220;guaranteed&#8221; Boston Mayor Thomas Menino that President Obama would push through sweeping firearms restrictions before February.</p>
<p>“He said, ‘Tommy, I guarantee you, we’ll get it done by the end of January,’” Menino said, according to the Boston Herald. “They’re going to get it done.&#8221;</p>
<p>Obama may intend to bribe and blackmail businesses in order to win their support for his assault on law-abiding gun owners, the Post article suggests.</p>
<p>&#8220;[T]he White House is developing strategies to work around the National Rifle Association that one source said could include rallying support from Wal-Mart and other gun retailers for measures that would benefit their businesses,&#8221; the article stated.</p>
<p>The Obama White House is coordinating its strategy with New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an outspoken enemy of the Second Amendment. Bloomberg co-founded Mayors Against Illegal Guns with Boston&#8217;s Menino.</p>
<p>Biden&#8217;s working group is reportedly gearing up to present a package of recommendations to the president soon. After that the Community Organizer-in-Chief intends to head up a public-relations campaign to further inflame the public before the passions generated by the Newtown murders cool.</p>
<p>“They are very clearly committed to looking at this issue comprehensively,” said Dan Gross, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, which is participating in Biden&#8217;s group.</p>
<p>Despite ceaseless cheerleading by their allies in the mainstream media, leftists probably won&#8217;t be able to shoot holes in the Second Amendment easily.</p>
<p>Lawmakers from both parties are opposed to further crackdowns on the ownership of guns, which author David B. Kopel notes are already &#8220;the most severely regulated consumer product in the United States — the only product for which FBI permission is required for every single sale.&#8221;</p>
<p>Newly sworn-in Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said gun control proposals now being discussed –including a plan by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) to create a national gun registry– are unconstitutional. The federal government doesn&#8217;t have &#8220;any business having a list of law-abiding citizens&#8221; who choose to exercise their right to keep and bear arms, he said.</p>
<p>After Newtown &#8220;within minutes, we saw politicians run out and try to exploit this tragedy, try to push their political agenda of gun control,&#8221; Cruz told &#8220;Fox News Sunday.&#8221;</p>
<p>What happened in Newtown is &#8220;a tragedy, but it’s not a tragedy that should be answered by restricting the constitutional rights of all Americans.&#8221;</p>
<p>Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) also cautioned against taking aim at gun owners&#8217; rights.</p>
<p>“I think you need to put everything on the table, but what I hear from the administration — and if the Washington Post is to be believed — that’s way, way in extreme of what I think is necessary or even should be talked about. And it’s not going to pass,” the new freshman senator said on a Sunday TV talk show.</p>
<p>Heitkamp said mental health-related proposals have to be part of any package aimed at reducing violent crime.</p>
<p>“Let’s start addressing the problem. And to me, one of the issues that I think comes — screams out of this is the issue of mental health and the care for the mentally ill in our country, especially the dangerously mentally ill. And so we need to have a broad discussion before we start talking about gun control,” she said.</p>
<p>Obama&#8217;s sudden reversal on gun rights shouldn&#8217;t come as a surprise. Obama has a long anti-gun track record that he carefully distanced himself from when he began running for the presidency. In his academic days he <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/white-house-weighs-broad-gun-control-agenda-in-wake-of-newtown-shootings/2013/01/05/d281efe0-5682-11e2-bf3e-76c0a789346f_print.html">told</a> a colleague: &#8220;I don&#8217;t believe people should be able to own guns.&#8221;</p>
<p>As a candidate for state office in 1996, Obama <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/white-house-weighs-broad-gun-control-agenda-in-wake-of-newtown-shootings/2013/01/05/d281efe0-5682-11e2-bf3e-76c0a789346f_print.html">promised</a> to ban &#8220;the manufacture, sale &amp; possession of handguns.” Seeking his U.S. Senate seat in 2004, Obama advocated blocking citizens nationwide from receiving concealed-carry permits.</p>
<p>This documented antipathy toward Second Amendment rights stands in stark contrast to Obama&#8217;s statements on the presidential campaign trail in 2008 when he <a href="http://cnsnews.com/blog/gregory-gwyn-williams-jr/flashback-obama-i-will-not-take-your-guns-away">promised</a> to respect Americans&#8217; individual right to bear arms.</p>
<p>&#8220;When you all go home and you&#8217;re talking to your buddies and you say, ah &#8216;He wants to take my gun away.&#8217; You&#8217;ve heard it here, I&#8217;m on television so everybody knows it. I believe in the Second Amendment. I believe in people&#8217;s lawful right to bear arms. I will not take your shotgun away. I will not take your rifle away. I won&#8217;t take your handgun away.&#8221;</p>
<p>But that was before the Newtown opportunity came along. Obama never allows a gut-wrenching crisis to go to waste.</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 Left&#8217;s Renewed Assault on the NRA</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/joseph-klein/left-vows-to-exploit-and-politicize-newtown-tragedy/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=left-vows-to-exploit-and-politicize-newtown-tragedy</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 18 Dec 2012 04:58:38 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Klein]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=169864</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Anti-Second Amendment zealots vow to "exploit" and "politicize" the Newtown massacre.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/joseph-klein/left-vows-to-exploit-and-politicize-newtown-tragedy/jerrold_nadlerx390_5c66f/" rel="attachment wp-att-169881"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-169881" title="Jerrold_NadlerX390_5c66f" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Jerrold_NadlerX390_5c66f.jpg" alt="" width="262" height="193" /></a>While much of the country mourns the horrific death of the 26 children and adults murdered at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut at the hands of an alleged mentally unstable individual who also killed his mother, the Left lost no time in shamelessly exploiting the tragedy.  In fact, Democratic Congressman Jerrold Nadler (NY) used the word &#8220;exploit&#8221; in urging President Obama to take advantage of the Newtown massacre to prod Congress into passing stronger gun control legislation.</p>
<p>The Left&#8217;s avowed goal is to use what happened to galvanize support for cutting the Second Amendment into pieces and disarm law-abiding Americans. To accomplish that purpose, they are committed to discrediting and destroying the National Rifle Association.</p>
<p>Some unhinged leftists have taken to social media to literally call for NRA President David Keene and NRA members to be shot.</p>
<p>For those leftists who would not go quite that far, they have called for an all-out political war to take down the NRA. For example, in a clarion call to its readers, the progressive Daily Kos proclaimed:</p>
<blockquote><p>After Connecticut, we can&#8217;t stay silent and just hope that something like it will never happen again. We have to stand up to the political power of the NRA, and we have to do it right now while their support is weakest.</p></blockquote>
<p>CREDO, a progressive group, organized a march on NRA headquarters in Washington, D.C. These zealots blamed the NRA for the shooting. &#8220;To stop the senseless killing we must first stop the NRA,&#8221; they said in announcing their march. Evidently, these progressives have as little regard for the NRA&#8217;s constitutional right to petition their government under the First Amendment as they do for the right of individuals to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment.</p>
<p>The mainstream media is also jumping on the anti-gun bandwagon. &#8220;We need to get guns and bullets and automatic weapons off the streets,&#8221; CNN anchor Don Lemon demanded during an anti-gun tirade. During the same tirade he said that mental health is a &#8220;secondary issue.&#8221;</p>
<p>Jeff Greenfield, a political analyst now with PBS who used to work for CBS News, CNN, and ABC News compared the Newtown shootings to the sinking of the Titanic, which cost 1,522 passengers and crew members their lives, and to the horrible 1911 fire that broke out in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in lower Manhattan and killed 146 garment workers, mostly young female immigrants, who were trapped inside. In both of these earlier cases, Greenfield argued, the tragedies spurred tighter regulations. Now, Greenfield wrote, it was time to  &#8220;politicize the Newtown school shooting, starting right now&#8221; and clamp down on gun ownership.</p>
<p>The progressives who demand stricter gun control measures refuse to look at the consequences of their own actions that have made it very difficult to get mentally unstable individuals off the streets and institutionalized if they represent a danger to themselves or others.  The American Civil Liberties Union is one of the main culprits.</p>
<p>While the ACLU has little use for the Second Amendment, which it has said is only &#8220;a collective right,&#8221; despite the Supreme Court&#8217;s opinion to the contrary, the ACLU endangers communities by advocating the release of potentially violent individuals into society without adequate safeguards, monitoring to make sure they are taking their meds, and intervention if necessary. The ACLU even helped defeat a bill in the Connecticut Senate that would have allowed the state to institutionalize those persons whom it had reason to believe posed a threat to themselves or others. The ACLU charged that the bill would &#8220;infringe on patients&#8217; privacy rights by expanding [the circle of] who can medicate individuals without their consent.&#8221; Did the ACLU ever stop to worry about the rights of ordinary citizens to go about their business without the risk of coming face-to-face with an unsupervised mentally deranged shooter? Obviously not. Would the children and adults killed in Newtown Connecticut be alive today if that bill had passed?  We&#8217;ll never know, thanks in part to the ACLU.</p>
<p>There is room for honest debate on whether to tighten background checks and to consider more restrictions on the sale of military-style semi-automatic rifles. But the Left&#8217;s gun prohibitionists have no interest in reasonable dialogue or in seeking a sensible solution to prevent more carnage that addresses all relevant factors including mental health rather than focus single-mindedly on gun control. They are using the slaughtered kids as props for their radical anti-Second Amendment agenda.</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 Threat of Sharia and the Leadership of America’s Two Parties</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/eric-allen-bell/the-threat-of-sharia-and-the-leadership-of-america%e2%80%99s-two-parties/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-threat-of-sharia-and-the-leadership-of-america%25e2%2580%2599s-two-parties</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 27 Aug 2012 04:11:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Eric Allen Bell]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=141678</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Do we have the will to protect American citizens from the application of foreign laws?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/women.jpg"><img class="size-full wp-image-141705 aligncenter" title="women" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/women.jpg" alt="" width="320" height="392" /></a>                                     <strong> Yes, there IS a war against women!</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: left;">Imagine you were a teenage girl in Pakistan, and your parents married you off very young.   The marriage is a disaster but you have no rights.   You flee with your daughter to the U.S., you hide out for two years until the detective he hires finds you. In Pakistan, under the Islamic law there, the means of obtaining a divorce is only available to a man, but never of course to a woman.  He demands full custody of your daughter.  Oh, and he’s accused you of adultery.</p>
<p>You consider flying to Pakistan, to contest the divorce, but adultery is a crime under Islamic Law in Pakistan, a crime which is punishable by death.  You will literally be arrested the moment you de-board the plane, in Karachi.   You could face prison time, or even be stoned to death.  And in Pakistan, your testimony under Islamic law is worth only half that of a man’s.  Then you remember, you’re in America now and you have rights.</p>
<p>So, you petition the American courts, filing for a real divorce.  But unfortunately, your husband has a Pakistani judge as an expert witness who he flies in to testify in the Maryland court – and the judge accepts his view of Shariah’s “best interests of the child” as the same as Maryland’s “best interests of the child. You and your daughter are simply outgunned.</p>
<p>And to your surprise, you find out that the American courts have been convinced to bow to Islamic Law (the Sharia), and you are now without any money, you have lost your home, and you have even lost your daughter.</p>
<p>Does this sound just too crazy to be true – like something that just could not happen in America?  In fact, this kind of reckless disregard for American law, in American courts, is actually more common than one might think.  This scenario resembles what happened to one woman in <a href="http://theshariahwaronwomen.org/a-mother-loses-her-child-in-maryland/">Maryland</a>, and it’s happening all over the country.</p>
<p>In the case of <a href="http://theshariahwaronwomen.org/a-mother-loses-her-child-in-maryland/">Joohi Hosain of Maryland</a>, the court shockingly abandoned American standards, in making their ruling.  The court ruling stated that the best interests of the child should be determined not by American law, but by <a href="http://theshariahwaronwomen.org/a-mother-loses-her-child-in-maryland/">applying Pakistani customs and an adherence to Islamic standards</a>.</p>
<p>But sadly, the story gets even worse.  The radical Islamist website, <a href="http://shariainamerica.com/">ShariaInAmerica.com</a>, is celebrating this and other cases like it, as <a href="http://shariainamerica.com/mission/">victories for Sharia Law in America</a>.  As part of a larger initiative to bring America more into alignment with Islamic Law, they rejoice over the court’s ruling, and <a href="http://www.abedawad.com/experts.htm">provide resources</a> for others who support the advancement of Political Islam in America, as to how they can prevail by <a href="http://counterjihadreport.com/2012/04/03/icnas-shariah-for-america-campaign-hides-extremist-beliefs-and-associations/">imposing Sharia Law onto our American legal system</a>.  And, it is working!</p>
<p>While the <a href="http://www.redstate.com/breeanneh/2012/08/21/radical-islam-joins-the-dnc/">Left is bending over backwards, to appease radical Islamist interests</a>, and much of the Right is too cowardly to take a stand, cases like these continue to grow.  The <a href="http://shariahinamericancourts.com/?page_id=305">Center for Security Policy has identified at least 50</a> cases.  But the  Islamist site, <a href="http://www.ShariaInAmerica.com">ShariaInAmerica.com</a> lists having over <a href="http://shariainamerica.com/by-state/">72 victories for Sharia Law</a>, and counting, and boasts that many have triumphed over our American law.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2011/02/cpac-former-cia-director-tells-of-sharia-threat/">JudicialWatch.org</a> cites former Central Intelligence Agency Director Jim Woolsey, a foreign policy specialist who has worked for both Democratic and Republican administrations, <a href="http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2011/02/cpac-former-cia-director-tells-of-sharia-threat/">as saying</a> that the United States is, not only at war with terrorists such as Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, but also with those who, over the long run, want to impose Sharia law.  The former CIA Director indicated that Sharia is a theocratic dictatorship, extremely opposed to democracy and a movement to eliminate and <a href="http://www.investigativeproject.org/case/65">destroy western civilization</a>.  He has also pointed out that the radical Islamic group, the <a href="http://shariahthethreat.org/">Muslim Brotherhood, is largely behind the effort to bring Sharia</a> to the United States.</p>
<p>So, is it really true, that this spike in verifiable cases, where American law is eclipsed by Islamic law, is part of a larger and more sinister objective, on the part of Islamists?  Can we really go the way of Turkey, Lebanon, Bangladesh, Kosovo, Indonesia and so many other nations – nations who, over time, have fallen to Political Islam through the advancement of Sharia Law?  It goes without saying, of course, that every nation which has allowed the advancement of Sharia into its culture is a nation where citizens do not enjoy the human rights that we enjoy today, under the law, in America.</p>
<p>Some might argue that such a scenario for America would be a bit extreme.  Perhaps a more likely scenario would be radicalized enclaves (like the Jamaat ul Fuqra enclaves that are already established across America), that result from Islamic birth rates and immigration continuing to expand and more and more demands being made for special accommodation – such as what is brewing in much of Europe.  Others have asserted that we may face a challenge not unlike the Cold War, where an enormous amount of our focus and resources are used up in order to protect our sovereignty and our liberty.</p>
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		<title>What is Sharia?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dr-hans-jansen/what-is-sharia/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=what-is-sharia</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 16 Jul 2012 04:05:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dr. Hans Jansen]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Where does it come from, and why does it matter so much?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/sharia.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-137522" title="sharia" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/sharia.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="267" /></a><strong>Reprinted from <a href="http://www.libertiesalliance.org/">libertiesalliance.org</a></strong><a href="http://www.libertiesalliance.org/">.</a></p>
<p>The Islamic Sharia is a system of law. It is a collection of prohibitions, admonitions and commands about human behavior. The Sharia is not an internal matter that only concerns Islam and Muslims. The Sharia includes a large number of provisions about people who are not Muslims. These rules are usually prohibitions that carry severe penalties if violated. These provisions of the Sharia make life unsafe and uncertain for someone who lives under Sharia law and who is not a Muslim.</p>
<p>Under Sharia law, someone who is not a Muslim possesses no inalienable rights. If I am wrong here, I will be relieved, and happy to stand corrected and receive your e-mails pointing out why I am wrong. But if I am right, a prisoner in Guantanamo Bay possesses more rights than a Jew or a Christian who lives under Sharia law.</p>
<p>Unlike the legal systems of most modern nation states, Sharia law is not subject to democratic supervision. Like international law and rabbinic law, Sharia law is an academic affair: experts discuss and debate the rules until they reach an agreement. Sharia law does not know a parliament or a government that acts as legislator, but the rules of the Sharia come into being by being agreed upon by the experts, that is, the Islamic religious leaders, the professional Muslims, the Ulama, Ayatollahs, or whatever these dignitaries are called.</p>
<p>Like me, most of you will be only superficially familiar with international law. The pretensions of international law have never been put to the test of a free and democratic vote. It was, to say the least, interesting to note how often the accusers of Geert Wilders in 2010 and 2011 appealed to what they regarded as generally accepted international law in order to silence Geert Wilders. As international law demonstrates, communities of academic specialists, in their isolation, have a tendency to develop a degree of pedantry that an elected lawgiver could never afford. Up to a point, this is exactly what has happened to the Sharia.</p>
<p>Religions are not democratic even if they sometimes may preach or tolerate democracy. Hence, the way in which the rules of Islamic law come into being is undemocratic. This implies that allowing the Sharia, or a part of it, to be the law of the land in a Western nation will diminish the democratic character of that nation. It means giving away legislative power to unelected self-appointed men, who are unknown and anonymous, who operate from far-away mosques in Pakistan or Afghanistan. In a democracy, this is not the ideal arrangement. One may have legitimate religious reasons to nevertheless prefer such an arrangement, but it entails something worse than taxation without representation; it entails legislation without representation.</p>
<p>Western policymakers do not take Sharia law too seriously because it is an academic and religious affair, a system of law that springs not from the power of a state but from the minds of religious scholars. In the Muslim world, to the contrary, the authority of the Sharia is overwhelming. The colossal prestige of the Sharia in the world of Islam is easy to explain: Islamic theology identifies Sharia law with the will of God; and Sharia specialists are the religious leaders of the Islamic community. No government in the Muslim world can afford to alienate these specialists of religious law if it wants to remain in power.<br />
<a name="1387e771ab14ab6c_more"></a><br />
Each and every Islamic country nurtures its own equilibrium between its government and its religious specialists. This ever-changing equilibrium is the stuff of PhD-dissertations. Nevertheless, most Islamic countries possess legal systems that are influenced by, but not identical with, traditional Sharia law. To the leaders of the radical Islamic movements this non-identity of national law and Sharia law is a permanent source of anger. The smallest discrepancy between Sharia law and the law of the land is permanent fuel to the fire of their propaganda machines since such a difference supplies proof that a human lawgiver wanted to take God&#8217;s place, and attempted to improve on Go&#8217;ds work, which is blasphemy since God must remain the only law-giver.</p>
<p>Sharia law is not a practical system of law developed in courts. It is the product of the deliberations of scholars, and it does not spring from the practical concerns of judges, barristers, prosecutors or defenders. Consequently, Sharia law is poor on procedure. It is a theoretical, abstract system of law thought out in academies. This explains most of its weaknesses.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, Muslim theology claims that Sharia law is divine. If unfamiliar new questions arise for which the Sharia has to provide an answer, Sharia specialists, at least in theory, put forward a solution that is based upon the four principles or ‘roots’, of the Sharia. These four principles will reemerge again and again in all discussions concerning the Sharia. They are Koran, Hadith, Analogy and Agreement.</p>
<p>The fourth root, Agreement or Consensus, is for all practical purposes the most important criterion. Once a consensus has emerged it becomes unnecessary to consult the other sources. Theory and theology, however, attach the greatest value to the authority of the first of these four roots, to the Koran, but in practice the wording of the Koran may have to be supplemented or interpreted by the other sources, or by another passage from the Koran itself.</p>
<p>Here we meet with an important principle from both Sharia law and Koran interpretation. This principle, ‘abrogation’, naskh in Arabic, is often misunderstood. ‘Abrogation’ means that a verse from the Koran that was revealed early might be repealed, or ‘abrogated’, by a verse that came down at a later point in time. Sometimes even an element from one of the other three sources can abrogate the contents of a verse from the Koran. Muslim scholars analyze all possible cases in depth.</p>
<p>The most famous example of abrogation is of concern to anyone who is not a Muslim: the abrogation of Sura 109, a Sura from the Mecca period that preaches religious tolerance. This Sura is abrogated by later verses from Medina that command the Muslims to fight and kill the unbelievers wherever they find them.</p>
<p>Whatever problem Sharia scholars are confronted with, in a few generations they will work out an agreement; and then Muhammad’s directive applies that ‘God will not permit [his] people to agree on an error.’</p>
<p>This important directive plays a central role in the Sharia system. Its application has a number of unforeseen consequences. Abolishing a Sharia regulation on which agreement had been reached, implies that Muhammad’s umma did go wrong. But according to Islam’s Prophet, it did not. Hence, it is out of the question to go back on regulations once they are agreed upon. Examples of cases where this creates difficulties and embarrassment are numerous: just think of the Sharia punishments for apostasy, adultery or theft.</p>
<p>A famous example of abrogation is the prohibition of wine. In early verses, the Koran speaks well of wine; later verses forbid wine. But how do we know which verse comes first? This we can only know from the Muslim Sharia experts. How do they know? Well, since wine is forbidden, the verse that forbids wine must be later than the verse that praises wine. Outsiders will suspect circularity, but to traditional Muslims this all enjoys the support of the Most High, and reconfirms that they would be at loss without the scholarship and learning of the experts who embody religious authority in Islam.</p>
<p>The friends of Islam see the alleged flexibility of Islamic law as an indication of its humane and liberal character. This, however, is a mistake. Flexible laws are not humane but dangerous, since citizens do not know for what they can be arrested and executed. Islamic law, flexible as it is reported to be, is unanimous on a large number of points. Agreement, consensus, that is what the system is build upon. No important disagreements exist on the points of law that are important to whoever is not a Muslim, whatever the friends of Islam may say. Not respecting the majesty of Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, is generally seen as a capital crime. If the courts or the governments do not execute the offender, spontaneous informal volunteers may feel justified to take this task upon their shoulders, whatever the cost to them personally.</p>
<p>Modern Western scholars have called into doubt the origins of the Sharia. They believe that the Sharia is the continuation of Roman provincial law as it was in force in the Roman Empire in the Middle East on the eve of the Arab conquests. A number of 20th century scholars wrote about the relationship between Roman and Islamic law. It is easy to see that the figure of the mufti is a continuation of the scholar of jurisprudence well known from Roman law, and other examples abound.</p>
<p>Strong influence from Talmudic rabbinic law on the Sharia is undeniable, and no miracle, since the Talmud and the Sharia both came into being in Iraq, in roughly the same period, 7th till 9th century AD. Fatwa’s are, of course, the exact functional equivalent of the rabbinic teshuvot, and the responsa from Roman law.</p>
<p>Muslims believe that their religious specialists derived the rules of the Sharia from its four sources: Koran, Hadith, Analogy and Consensus. However, modern Western scholars have come to believe that the rules of the Sharia were not derived from the four ‘roots’, but that the rules and provisions were anchored in these four ‘roots’ only in retrospect. This is again the stuff of PhD-dissertations. These academic questions, however, should not detain us here, we have a more important duty: to explain why we should concentrate on the Sharia, and not on the Koran or Muhammad, when we want to defend ourselves against the onslaught of Islam.</p>
<p>Modern Western scholarship on the Koran and the life of Muhammad has made great progress since the turn of the century. Consequently the traditional positions concerning Muhammad and the Koran have shown themselves to be untenable.</p>
<p>Whether Muhammad really existed, is more uncertain than ever. Two centuries of patient scholarship have created serious doubts about the historicity of the prophet of Islam. These doubts will not go away, no matter how small and insignificant the number of academics that works in this field may be.</p>
<p>The general picture which the Koran and the Islamic tradition offer of the setting in which Muhammad worked, first as a prophet, then as both a prophet and a statesman, the general picture of Mecca and Medina in the beginning of the 7th century AD, is not confirmed by the results of archeological research and inscriptions as far as these are available. This, of course, may change when research progresses but it is not a good sign, especially since what has been found, at first sight appears to contradict the traditional views.</p>
<p>The literary tradition about Muhammad’s biography does look like an unsystematic collection of mutually contradicting sermons that nevertheless all want to convince the audience that a certain Muhammad was the Messenger of God. The literary material that has been preserved does not look like an historical record at all. This is not necessarily fatal, but it is not a good sign. Numismatics does not confirm Islam’s version of the early history of Islam. This by itself is not conclusive, but it is not a good sign. There are discrepancies between what we know about the ancient Arab calendar and the reported stories about Muhammad. This needs not be fatal, but it comes close to being so.</p>
<p>True Muslims, however, do not share these doubts about their beloved prophet. The guild of Muslim religious leaders, on the other hand, will go further than simply not sharing these doubts; they will be infuriated when modern Western scholars unmask the Muslim version of the early history of Islam as a narrative created by theological necessities, as sermons that are disguised as history. It goes without saying that many Muslims will be ready to put on heavy armor to defend their religion against such attacks.</p>
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		<title>Islamizing the Temple Mount</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/giulio-meotti/islamizing-the-temple-mount/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=islamizing-the-temple-mount</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 31 May 2012 04:35:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Giulio Meotti]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[holy site]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jews]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[praying]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Rights]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[temple mount]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=133421</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Denying the Jewish people their right to pray at their most holy site.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/temple_mount.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-133426" title="temple_mount" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/temple_mount.jpg" alt="" width="346" height="259" /></a>It’s the House of God. For centuries, Jews have remembered the destruction of the holy Temple in Jerusalem by crushing a glass at weddings or leaving unpainted a patch of wall in their homes. The Temple Mount is the magnificent edifice that has served the faithful as a symbol of God’s glory for 4,000 years. It’s Mount Moriah mentioned in the Book of Genesis. It’s the site where humanity received the gift of monotheism. It’s where God’s “shechina,” or presence, dwelt. Even the secular imagination, Jewish or not, has been shaped by the “Holy of Holies,” the most sacred site of the Jewish people. It’s there that King David raised a sanctuary for the Ark of the Covenant and King Solomon and Herod built the Temples.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: medium;"> </span>The Roman emperor Hadrian covered those ruins with a pagan temple to Jupiter; the Crusaders used it as a garbage dump to defile its Jewish significance and turned the area into a stable for their horses; the Arabs later built their own Islamic holy sites on top of those of their defeated enemy.</p>
<p>Many devout Jews today don’t set foot on the Temple Mount, afraid that they may be stepping on the ground covering the ruins of the Holy of Holies, allowed only to the High Priest on Yom Kippur. That is enough to keep them away. But there are those who believe they have a right to pray on the grounds where the Temple stood, particularly on Tisha be’Av, the anniversary of its destruction (Maimonides too prayed there). Though many respected rabbis forbid praying on the Mount, other very important Jewish leaders permit it. And there is a growing and brave movement, led by Rabbi Yisrael Ariel and Professor Hillel Weiss, which is trying to build awareness among the Israeli public on the Temple Mount. They are leading a historic battle for the rights of the Jews in their most holy site.</p>
<p>In theory, Israel currently controls the Temple Mount. In reality, since 1967, when the Israeli army seized the “holy basin” from Jordanian forces, the Jewish State gave up religious freedom for the Jews. Immediately after the liberation of Jerusalem, then Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan handed over the keys of the Temple Mount to the Waqf, the Muslim religious trust that serves as custodian of the site, which includes four Muslim minarets.</p>
<p>Historically it should be noted that only under Israeli rule was the site open for everyone, Muslims, Christians and Jews. The Islamic Waqf is now attempting to deliberately destroy all evidence of Jewish claims to this site, while using terror and intimidation to impose its exclusive claim to the sacred mountain. The Waqf has proceeded on two fronts: de-Judaize the Mount by archeological destruction and to Islamize it by preventing the Jews from praying there.</p>
<p>Freedom of worship for all religions, including free access to the holy places of all faiths, has always been a cardinal principle of Israel. And by and large, Israel has honored this principle, even under extremely difficult circumstances. It is ironic that Judaism’s holiest site should be the only place in Israel where this principle is violated.</p>
<p>Nothing justifies the infringement of religious rights to the Temple Mount. That infringement undermines respect for the rule of law in Israel by making a mockery of the law that guarantees freedom for all faiths. The Islamic Waqf has removed every sign of ancient Jewish presence at the site. At the entrance, an Arab sign says: “The Al-Aqsa Mosque courtyard and everything in it is Islamic property.” Today, Jews are barred from praying on the Mount and are not even allowed to carry any holy articles with them. With Muslim clerics supervising visits, Israeli police have frequently arrested Jews for various violations, such as singing or reciting a prayer even in a whisper.</p>
<p>A few days ago Israeli police issued new draconian instructions for non-Muslims who ascend to the Mount. Non-Muslims are now not even permitted to close their eyes while on the Mount or do anything that could be interpreted as praying. Jewish women have been arrested following claims by police and Waqf officials that they were praying on Temple Mount.</p>
<p>Why is it a crime for a Jew to mention God’s name on Temple Mount? And why is the State of Israel complicit in enforcing this anti-Semitic rule?</p>
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		<title>U.N. Still Stupefied on Syria</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/joseph-klein/u-n-still-stupefied-on-syria/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=u-n-still-stupefied-on-syria</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 10 Jun 2011 04:16:52 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Klein]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bashar al assad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Council]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Human]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[inner city press]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[oic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[president assad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Press]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Rights]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[security council members]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[security council resolution]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Condemnations of Israeli self-defense come more easily than condemnations of state-sponsored massacres. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/ban-ki-moon1.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-95694" title="ban-ki-moon1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/ban-ki-moon1.gif" alt="" width="375" height="289" /></a></p>
<p>The United Nations Security Council continues to sink lower and lower in an effort to find language acceptable to all members condemning the Syrian government&#8217;s ruthless massacre of its unarmed citizens. Meanwhile, under the leadership of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whom Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently called a &#8220;reformer,&#8221; more than 1000 civilians have been killed to date.</p>
<p>Rather than confront directly the evil of mass murder imposed by the Syrian regime, the latest draft resolution proposed by the United Kingdom “calls upon all sides to act with utmost restraint.” This moral equivalency between the acts of government forces and protesters was an attempt to win over Security Council members such as India who complained that there were “armed extremists among the protesters” and wanted the council to condemn the demonstrators as well.</p>
<p>The draft resolution does little to bring international pressure to bear on the Syrian regime. Instead, it reportedly declares that the “only solution” is a “Syria-led political process.” Apparently, some members of the UN Security Council still believe that the &#8220;reformer&#8221; side of President Assad will show up sooner or later.</p>
<p>According to a report by <em>Inner City Press</em>, the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) threw an additional monkey wrench into the drafting process. The OIC issued its own statement on May 22, 2011 calling upon the Syrian security forces to show restraint and to refrain from targeting innocent civilians. But the OIC objected to including, with attribution, a quote in its own words critical of the Syrian regime in the UN Security Council resolution. The resolution authors removed the OIC language from the most recent draft circulated to the Security Council members for their review.</p>
<p>Even this latest watered-down, moral-equivalency-version of the resolution is meeting resistance from Russia and a possible veto. The following is a transcription by <em>Inner City Press</em> of comments made on the latest draft by Russia&#8217;s Permanent Representative Vitaly Churkin:</p>
<blockquote><p>Amb. Churkin: No, because we&#8217;re not persuaded it can establish dialogue and reach a political settlement to put an end to violence in Syria. We are concerned it may have an opposite effect.</p>
<p>[Questioner]: Russia&#8217;s been pretty strong all along, so you&#8217;re basically saying &#8212; I don&#8217;t want to put words in your mouth &#8212; that this is a veto situation?</p>
<p>Amb. Churkin: You know, someone else made even before us our position. It is exactly as I&#8217;ve described it to you now. We don&#8217;t think this helps.</p></blockquote>
<p>While the Security Council did not hesitate to refer members of the Libyan regime to the International Criminal Court for possible prosecution, nothing of the sort is presently contemplated for the leaders of the Syrian regime. When asked at a press conference held on June 8, 2011 at UN headquarters in New York whether he would recommend a referral of Syrian authorities for possible prosecution for human rights violations, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Mr. Luis Moreno Ocampo, demurred. He had no jurisdiction to investigate in the absence of a formal Security Council referral, he said, because Syria is not a signatory to the Rome Statute, which is the treaty establishing the International Criminal Court.</p>
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		<title>The Necessity of Israel</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/david-solway/the-necessity-of-israel/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-necessity-of-israel</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/david-solway/the-necessity-of-israel/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 03 May 2011 04:00:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Solway]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[dhimmitude]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[international jew]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[muslim neighbors]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[necessity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[region]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Rights]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[test]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[united nations human rights council]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[university campuses]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[A country we cannot do without.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/tel-aviv.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-91925" title="tel-aviv" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/tel-aviv.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="300" /></a></p>
<p>As everyone knows, Israel is the one nation on earth whose right to exist is being constantly questioned and challenged. It is the disproportionate target of the United Nations Human Rights Council which devotes the majority of its sessions to attacking the Jewish state while giving the world’s most egregious Human Rights violators a Get Out of Jail Free card. Israel is subject to a worldwide BDS campaign and to the vicious defamation of Israel Apartheid Weeks hosted on our morally debased university campuses. The ideology of the left demonizes Israel as a racist and conquistador nation that must be delegitimized, launching books, blogs, resolutions and flotillas against its very existence. Meanwhile, its Muslim neighbors have vowed to physically erase it from the map of the world, killing indiscriminately, firing rockets at its civil centers with the regularity of a metronome, and preparing for its version of the Final Solution.</p>
<p>Why should this be so? Are we witnessing the geographic displacement of a millennial prejudice from the diaspora to the nation, with Israel as the collective incarnation of the “international Jew”? Is the current assault on Israel merely the contemporary form of the age-old pogrom? Has the West embarked on a political and economic entente with the petro-tyrannies of the Muslim Middle East, selling its soul in the process to a triumphalist Islam, as Bat Ye’or has persuasively argued in <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Eurabia-Euro-Arab-Axis-Bat-Yeor/dp/1611473144/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1303920701&amp;sr=1-1">Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis</a> </em>and <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Islam-Dhimmitude-Where-Civilizations-Collide/dp/0838639437/ref=sr_1_4_title_0_main?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1303920758&amp;sr=1-4">Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide</a></em>? The answer to such rhetorical questions is self-evident.</p>
<p>But bigotry and baseless aspersion are never openly admitted. Rather, for antisemites and anti-Zionists, Israel is regarded as a geopolitical irritant, a historical mistake, an artificial construct that should never have been established, however validly and legally. For the Quartet negotiators (the UN, The EU, the United States and Russia), and particularly for <a href="../2011/04/27/the-munich-three-find-their-target-israel/">Britain, France and Germany</a>, it is as if UN Resolution 242, guaranteeing “secure and recognized boundaries,” has no legitimate force. For Islam, Israel is an interloper in the region, despite the indisputable historical fact that Israel and Judea predate the Arab occupation of the Holy Land by more than a thousand years. For the so-called “realist” school of international relations, Israel is a political liability and therefore ultimately dispensable.</p>
<p>Moreover, Israel is by no means a great power. It is by normal census standards sparsely populated, and it covers about as much territory as Wales or New Jersey—as former mayor of New York Ed Koch <a href="http://blogs.jpost.com/content/war-against-jews-goes">says</a>, one “might need a magnifying glass to see Israel” in a World Atlas since it could easily “disappear in the crease of a page.” In the larger scheme of things, presumably, its absence would scarcely be noticed.</p>
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