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<channel>
	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Salon</title>
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	<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com</link>
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	<item>
		<title>Salon: Supporting the Keystone Pipeline is Racist</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/salon-supporting-the-keystone-pipeline-is-racist/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=salon-supporting-the-keystone-pipeline-is-racist</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/salon-supporting-the-keystone-pipeline-is-racist/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 14 Nov 2014 15:15:46 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[joan walsh]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Keystone XL Pipeline]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Salon]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=245284</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Those racists sure love their pipelines. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/walshsalon-e1415929170259.jpg"><img class="alignnone  wp-image-245285" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/walshsalon-e1415929170259.jpg" alt="walshsalon" width="437" height="292" /></a></p>
<p>You had to know this was coming because EVERYTHING IS RACIST. No really. If you can think of something, it&#8217;s probably racist. Especially at Salon. Unless it&#8217;s also sexist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic or phobiphobic.</p>
<p>The Keystone pipeline? <a href="http://weaselzippers.us/205318-salons-lib-crank-joan-walsh-says-mary-landrieus-calls-for-approving-keystone-driven-by-racism/">So racist. So very, very racist.</a></p>
<p>Salon&#8217;s Joan Walsh blasted Senator Mary Landrieu for her fake Keystone vote stunt of holding a vote on a bill that the White House already said it&#8217;s going to veto, not because it&#8217;s fake, but because it&#8217;s pandering to all those racist pipeline lovers.</p>
<p>Why would Senator Landrieu support a fake Keystone pipeline vote, Joan Walsh wonders, and comes up with the predictable answer.</p>
<blockquote><p>What Keystone does is let Landrieu poke a sharp stick in the eye of Obama, much hated by her white constituents. Any points Landrieu got for politely pointing to the role of race in Obama-hate are swept away by this craven move.</p></blockquote>
<p>Those racists sure love their pipelines.</p>
<p>It can&#8217;t be that they want jobs or that a Democrat wants to pretend she&#8217;s doing something to create jobs in this miserable Obama economy. No it&#8217;s racist. Because opposing Obama in any way, shape or form is racist&#8230; unless a progressive does it. And in that case it&#8217;s principled.</p>
<blockquote><p>In her Senate floor speech, Landrieu had the gall to hijack the old United Farmworkers saying, “Si se puede!” which had already been repurposed by Obama. It was to save Landrieu and other Southern Dems, of course, that the president postponed executive action to defer deportation until after the election – and look where that got him.</p>
<p>Now Landrieu, who’s partly responsible for dividing countless Latino families who might have been kept together had the president kept his promise, is speaking Spanish and borrowing the slogan of low-wage Latino laborers to back the pipeline. Shameless.</p></blockquote>
<p>So Landrieu is racist because Obama postponed illegal amnesty&#8230; to protect his own power base. Doesn&#8217;t that make Obama racist? And if Obama is racist, doesn&#8217;t that mean that opposition to the Keystone pipeline is anti-racist.</p>
<p>And if so, doesn&#8217;t that mean that Joan Walsh is racist for opposing the anti-racist Keystone pipeline?</p>
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		<title>Salon.com’s Infantile Leftism</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/david-horowitz/salon-coms-infantile-leftism/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=salon-coms-infantile-leftism</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/david-horowitz/salon-coms-infantile-leftism/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 03 Nov 2014 05:49:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Horowitz]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bush]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Election]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[joan walsh]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Salon]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=244360</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A progressive decline.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/joan-walsh.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-244361" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/joan-walsh-450x329.jpg" alt="joan-walsh" width="309" height="226" /></a>Joan Robinson was a famous Keynesian economist and also a not so famous Maoist. Nonetheless she had one shrewd observation about politics. People, she said, can no more see their own ideology than they can smell their own breath. The Internet magazine Salon, a large leftwing website for which I was a much unloved columnist fifteen years ago, provides an interesting case in point.</p>
<p>Joan Walsh was my editor at Salon, and soon became its editor-in-chief. Now she is described as “Editor-at-Large” but is more like its Matriarch-in-Residence. A recent election piece she wrote is titled, “America’s Nightmare Political Reality: Two Electorates Separate and Unequal.” In this, as in other similar articles, she displays the tawdry reality of her magazine’s current journalism. A teaser for the article explains the title: “Why conservatives prefer propaganda to reality.”</p>
<p>According to Walsh, Republicans have run their mid-term election campaigns against President Obama not because his feckless national security policies have left a power vacuum that terrorists have filled, not because his anti-military mania has helped to create 18 million refugees in the Middle East, not because he has run up a debt greater than that of all previous presidents combined, not because he has proudly violated the Constitution stripping congress of its authority and power, not because he has inflicted economic suffering on America’s minorities and poor, not because he has unleashed efforts by his administration to use the taxing power of government to crush his political opposition. Oh no. The Republican campaigns against Obama’s destructive agendas and incompetent performances are driven by hate, and racial hate at that.</p>
<p>According to Walsh,</p>
<blockquote><p>“The Republican Party is relying on Obama-hate to turn out its 96-percent-white, middle-class-to-wealthy base, while the Democrats, still trying to be a multi-racial party in a multi-racial country, are trying to court voters of every race and class.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Walsh is amazed at the extent to which the mainstream media clings to a reality that refutes this self-serving false narrative, which ignores how Democrat policies have hurt all economic classes but the wealthy, and in which the Republican Party is not 96 percent white and has a large working class and significant minority base. Here are Walsh’s own words:</p>
<blockquote><p>“It’s amazing the extent to which the mainstream media accepts that the GOP’s personalized, deeply disparaging campaign against Obama is just politics as usual.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Because, according to Walsh, Democrats and the media never treated George Bush this way.</p>
<blockquote><p>“While it’s true that dissatisfaction with President Bush helped Democrats ride back to controlling Congress in 2006, I’m hard-pressed to remember examples of Democrats campaigning against Bush so personally and gleefully.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Say what?!!! Has Walsh forgotten how Ted Kennedy described Bush’s invasion of Iraq &#8212; which was supported by the Democratic majority in the Senate before Democrats turned their backs on the war they had supported three months into the fighting – as a “fraud” concocted in Texas to serve Bush’s oil buddies? Has she forgotten how the Democratic National Committee launched a national television campaign to accuse Bush of lying to get authorization for the war, which became a vicious slogan “Bush lied, people died”? This was matched by another slogan based on the canard spread by Kennedy and Democratic leaders that it was all about Dick Cheney’s company Halliburton: “No blood for oil.” Actually America got no oil, but Bush got no apologies for these and other monstrous Democratic lies.</p>
<p>But how do Walsh and her crew observe her strictures about civility and honesty? Here are some headlines from her non-hatemongering magazine: “<a href="http://salon.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u=71cb3e8a6e9639c81023cd427&amp;id=da04b106fa&amp;e=0123fa23b3">Iowa’s Tea Party disaster: Joni Ernst’s shocking ideas about the welfare state</a>. How the wingnut potentially on the verge of joining the Senate uses shoddy history to justify her radical beliefs.” (Her shocking idea: “We have fostered<em>…</em>a generation of people that rely on the government to provide absolutely everything.”)</p>
<p>And this: “The Republican Party’s electoral philosophy: Cheating wins”</p>
<p>And this: “Yeah, the GOP is evil and will win — but the midterms are meaningless”</p>
<p>In 2001, I conducted a one-man campaign against reparations for slavery, proposed 137 years after the fact to be paid by people who were never slave owners to people who were never slaves. My efforts created a firestorm, and my editor Joan Walsh defended me against loony leftists who could not handle the truth in an article titled, “Who’s Afraid of David Horowitz?” But that was then. Now she and the staff of <em>Salon</em> have joined them.</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>
<p><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><strong>Subscribe</strong></a><strong> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <em>The Glazov Gang</em>, and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>LIKE</strong></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>Facebook.</strong></a></p>
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		<item>
		<title>Liberal Author: Obama Failed Because He Was Too Centrist</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/liberal-author-obama-failed-because-he-was-too-centrist/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=liberal-author-obama-failed-because-he-was-too-centrist</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/liberal-author-obama-failed-because-he-was-too-centrist/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 01 Nov 2014 14:08:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[barack hussein obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Salon]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[thomas frank]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=244006</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[It's time "liberals" stopped falling for all these centrists and raise Stalin from the dead.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div id="attachment_244007" style="width: 460px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/brand_stalin.jpg"><img class="wp-image-244007 size-medium" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/brand_stalin-450x313.jpg" alt="brand_stalin" width="450" height="313" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Non-Centrists and not Thomas Frank</p></div>
<p>Thomas Frank is mainly famous for being the author of &#8220;What&#8217;s The Matter With Kansas&#8221;. A better question might be what&#8217;s the matter with Thomas Frank. I&#8217;m not sure if this is a theory <a href="http://www.the-american-interest.com/blog/2014/10/27/forget-kansas-whats-the-matter-with-liberals/">or a mental illness.</a></p>
<blockquote><p>The moral of this story is not directed at Democratic politicians; it is meant for us, the liberal rank and file. We still “yearn to believe,” as Perlstein says. There is something about the Carter / Obama personality that appeals to us in a deep, unspoken way, and that has led Democrats to fall for a whole string of passionless centrists: John Kerry, Al Gore, Michael Dukakis, Gary Hart and Bill Clinton. Each time, Democratic voters are enchanted by a kind of intellectual idealism that (we are told) is unmoored from ideology. We persuade ourselves that the answer to the savagery of the right—the way to trump the naked class aggression of the One Percent—is to say farewell to our own tradition and get past politics and ideology altogether. And so we focus on the person of the well-meaning, hyper-intelligent leader. We are so high-minded, we think. We are so scientific.</p></blockquote>
<p>We are so insane.</p>
<p>Okay so Obama, the champion of wealth redistribution, tranny rights, mass illegal alien amnesty and unilateral power is too centrist.</p>
<p>I think it&#8217;s time that &#8220;liberals&#8221; just stopped falling for all these centrists who continue to refuse to abolish Congress and rename the country the People&#8217;s Republic of Ameristan because they&#8217;re so centrist&#8230; and perform a voodoo ritual to raise Stalin from the dead.</p>
<p>Finally they&#8217;ll have zombie gulags and brain redistribution under the slogan, &#8220;Your body didn&#8217;t grow that&#8221; and the proper liberal leadership they&#8217;ve been hankering for.</p>
<p>Or maybe just Warren 2016.</p>
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		<title>It&#8217;s Time to Nationalize Liberal Websites</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/its-time-to-nationalize-liberal-websites/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=its-time-to-nationalize-liberal-websites</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/its-time-to-nationalize-liberal-websites/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 09 Jul 2014 13:22:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Google]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Salon]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=235905</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Just imagine your Google searches taking only four to eight weeks to complete.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/6a00d83451c47869e200e54f23e5df8833-800wi.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-235906" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/6a00d83451c47869e200e54f23e5df8833-800wi.jpg" alt="6a00d83451c47869e200e54f23e5df8833-800wi" width="250" height="319" /></a></p>
<p>Richard (RJ) Eskow, a fellow of the Campaign for America&#8217;s Future, a project of George Soros, has issued a bold call for nationalizing Google and Amazon.</p>
<p>There is no doubt to any thinking Socialist that both companies would no doubt benefit from being nationalized and the vast improvements and service that would result from all those overpaid engineers and executives fleeing to be replaced by union members.</p>
<p>Just imagine your Google searches taking only four to eight weeks to complete.</p>
<p>Or Amazon charging you twice as much for your orders to subsidize free contraceptives for all customers.</p>
<p>But we&#8217;re ignoring the elephant in the room. Forget nationalizing Google or Amazon. It&#8217;s time to nationalize Salon. And while we&#8217;re at it, let&#8217;s nationalize Slate, Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and MSNBC.</p>
<p>Once they&#8217;re nationalized, they will be refocused on serving underserved communities by providing timely information about good nutrition, the history of the Underground Railroad and fun facts about highways. They would also contain announcements about upcoming contracts and transcripts of Congressional debates.</p>
<p>While they might lose some readers, by no longer being bound by the profit motive and the pageview counter, they would be free to make a genuine contribution to our society.</p>
<p>Maybe one day we can nationalize Google. Let&#8217;s start by nationalizing Salon.</p>
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		<title>The Left&#8217;s Mental State Captured in a Salon Screenshot</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-lefts-mental-state-captured-in-a-salon-screenshot/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-lefts-mental-state-captured-in-a-salon-screenshot</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-lefts-mental-state-captured-in-a-salon-screenshot/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 22 Mar 2014 13:32:46 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Salon]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=221617</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Don't let the voices in your head make you miserable while you're obsessing about how racist the GOP is.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Don&#8217;t let the voices in your head make you miserable while you&#8217;re obsessing about Chris Christie&#8217;s bridge and how racist the GOP is.</p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/salon-mag.jpg"><img class="alignnone  wp-image-221621" alt="salon mag" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/salon-mag.jpg" width="515" height="552" /></a></p>
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		<title>Crazy Salon Racist Rant: &#8220;How Did Irish-Americans Get So Disgusting&#8221;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/crazy-salon-racist-rant-how-did-irish-americans-get-so-disgusting/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=crazy-salon-racist-rant-how-did-irish-americans-get-so-disgusting</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/crazy-salon-racist-rant-how-did-irish-americans-get-so-disgusting/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 16 Mar 2014 18:23:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberal racism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Salon]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=221107</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[This is what happens when you get your history from cereal boxes and Howard Zinn. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/sean-hannity-ryan-adams-video.jpg"><img src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/sean-hannity-ryan-adams-video-450x299.jpg" alt="sean-hannity-ryan-adams-video" width="450" height="299" class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-221108" /></a></p>
<p>Salon Magazine has become a progressive trolling site. In recent weeks it has published articles accusing deceased director Harold Ramis of being a bigot, another article claiming that white belly dancers are displaying white supremacism and now <a href="http://weaselzippers.us/179522-lib-rag-salon-irish-americans-are-disgusting-have-allied-themselves-to-white-supremacy/">an article slurring Irish-Americans</a>.</p>
<p>And no, the author being Irish changes nothing. A Salon article, &#8220;Why blacks are stupid and lazy&#8221; would not be defensible simply because it was written by a black man.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s becoming obvious that Salon doesn&#8217;t care what it prints as long as it brings in pageviews.</p>
<p>Salon&#8217;s Andrew O&#8217;Hehir begins with the strange premise that the IRA deal severed &#8220;the last connection between Irish-American identity and genuine history&#8221;. </p>
<blockquote><p>
&#8220;On the other, it’s Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Pat Buchanan and Rep. Peter King, Long Island’s longtime Republican congressman consistently representing the most stereotypical grade of racist, xenophobic, small-minded, right-wing Irish-American intolerance.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>How exactly do O&#8217;Reilly, Hannity and King represent all Irish-Americans? As opposed to the author of the piece?</p>
<p>These men don&#8217;t even have much in common in style and substance aside from being Republicans.</p>
<p>There follows some cheerleading for the IRA and the claim that the Irish weren&#8217;t really white.</p>
<blockquote><p>Irish-Americans rapidly absorbed the lesson that the way to succeed in their new country was to reject the politics of class and shared economic interests and embrace the politics of race. One disgraceful result was the New York draft riots of 1863, the low point of Irish-black relations in American history, when Irish immigrants by the thousands turned on their black neighbors in a thinly disguised race riot. Irish-Americans were under no delusions that the ruling class of Anglo Protestants liked or trusted them, and anti-Irish and/or anti-Catholic bigotry endured in diluted form well into the 20th century. But by allying themselves with a system of white supremacy, the Irish in America were granted a share of power and privilege</p></blockquote>
<p>Again, Andrew O&#8217;Hehir clearly knows nothing about the draft riots which were&#8230;</p>
<p>A. Very much an issue of class since one of the core issue was the ability of the wealthy to pay to avoid the draft.</p>
<p>B. Was a German-Irish series of staged riots by the Democratic Party for political purposes targeting Republicans</p>
<p>C. Not remotely an attempt to get in good with the Anglo-Protestant, but were targeting Anglo-Protestant Republicans who were seen as preferring Black Protestants to white Catholics</p>
<p>&#8230;but this is what happens when someone like Andy O&#8217;Hehir gets his history from cereal boxes and Howard Zinn. </p>
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		<title>Failed Liberal Mag Dreams of a Communist America</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/failed-liberal-mag-dreams-of-a-communist-america/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=failed-liberal-mag-dreams-of-a-communist-america</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/failed-liberal-mag-dreams-of-a-communist-america/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 19 Jan 2014 00:47:52 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[american communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Salon]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=216722</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A democratic, accessible-to-all media will move to center stage in a socialist USA. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><iframe width="540" height="360" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/BXqKkYYALMU?feature=player_detailpage" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
<p>A liberal reviewer writing about the state of the media dismissively mentioned Salon Magazine as reading like it was written by the students of Evergreen College. And he was probably right.</p>
<p>Salon was a major presence on the liberal web before Atlantic, Slate and the Daily Beast began gobbling up all its traffic. Now it&#8217;s become a student newspaper tackling hot button issues involving transgender cafeterias and microcelebrity twitter outrages.</p>
<p>Considering how badly Salon is failing, it makes sense why it would look forward to the nationalization of the media, but it&#8217;s also just as stupid as you expect it to be. <a href="http://www.truthrevolt.org//news/new-book-lets-nationalize-fox-news-let-unions-decide-whats-news">Case in point, this</a>&#8230;</p>
<blockquote><p>Imagine a world without the New York Times, Fox News, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, and countless other tools used by the 1 percent to rule and fool. In a socialist society run by and for the working people it represents, the mega-monopolies like Walmart, Halliburton, Exxon-Mobil, and the corporations that run the tightly controlled “mainstream media” will be a thing of the past.</p></blockquote>
<p>Socialist countries do have independent media outlets. Salon and Fred Jerome apparently mean Marxist-Leninist. They just don&#8217;t say so because even their readers might question what there was to admire about Pravda.</p>
<blockquote><p>A democratic, accessible-to-all media will move to center stage in a socialist USA. In some ways this democratization of the media is already happening on the Internet. But the government’s ability to spy on and even turn off the Internet belies any real democracy. In a socialist democracy, working people will control the political process, the way in which they make a living, and collectively and individually, they will influence mass culture.</p></blockquote>
<p>If you&#8217;re following this megaton level of stupid, Salon envisions an all-powerful Socialist state where the government will not be able to spy on people or control the internet.</p>
<p>The government will control everything&#8230; but not the internet.</p>
<blockquote><p>Yet the media business, for those who now own and run it, is more than just a money-making operation. The owners also promote their political agenda.</p></blockquote>
<p>That&#8217;s the one thing that never happens in a system where the government literally controls the media.</p>
<blockquote><p>But what will the media be like in a socialist USA? There is no blueprint, but in a society that has erased corporate control, the articles in newspapers and magazines and online will not be filler between ads for teeth whiteners and weight-loss pills. There won’t be TV commercials for Coke, cars, or million-dollar condos. There will be no private corporations to create and sponsor the news.</p></blockquote>
<p>Sounds great, Fred. What will this free and independent ad-free media be like?</p>
<blockquote><p>In a socialist society a portion of the media would be reserved for news disseminated by the democratically elected governing bodies, that is, working people elected by and for working people.</p></blockquote>
<p>That is&#8230; the media will be controlled by the state.</p>
<blockquote><p>But state ownership is not the only way media can represent the interests of working people, to speak with or through their voices. In most cases, the media would be owned and operated by working-class organizations—labor unions, neighborhood associations, and cultural centers.</p></blockquote>
<p>Which would be funded by and controlled by the state.</p>
<p>Funny thing about working-class organizations like labor unions and cultural centers, they&#8217;re rarely run by working class people. Either in the USSR or over here. The people running them are usually as working class as Salon readers and writers.</p>
<blockquote><p>So news (and views) in a socialist society will be brought to you by a plethora of noncommercial sponsors.</p></blockquote>
<p>By plethora, Fred means the state. Most people don&#8217;t think of the &#8220;State&#8221; as a plethora.</p>
<blockquote><p>The government media will report on and discuss, for example, the major government plans for production, how to improve education, and more.</p></blockquote>
<p>I&#8217;m sure people will be rushing to tune into that&#8230;</p>
<blockquote><p>Union dues today pay for the publication, including staff salaries, of many union newspapers. In a socialist society, where money is allocated based on assessed social need and not on projected profits, government will subsidize many salaries in social, economic, political, and educational areas&#8230; So salaries at the media operations of smaller unions will most likely be covered by government subsidies.</p></blockquote>
<p>So all these media operations will be subsidized by a Socialist government that will in no way to try to dictate their content&#8230; unlike every other Socialist government on the planet.</p>
<p>But at least this amazing Socialist news will be really exciting&#8230;</p>
<blockquote><p>Some news will still come from local and national governments that set product-distribution quotas or help to negotiate them, sponsor trade and international exchange with other countries, and—if the world is still partly controlled by capitalist powers—organize defense against economic (as well as cultural, and possibly military) assaults.</p></blockquote>
<p>The harvest has been brought in with 99% efficiency, Socialist media reports. Workers have voluntarily, and not at all gunpoint, been herded to help in the harvest. Reports of bread shortages in the cities are being spread by Capitalist agents. Call 1-888-SQUEAL to report such subversive messages to Socialist media representatives.</p>
<blockquote><p>There will be many other features in the media of a socialist society. One would certainly be “never forget,” stories in words and pictures—on-air or online or both—describing battles waged previously during life under capitalism: tent cities for homeless families, “stop-and-frisk” police policies that singled out young black and Latino men, and the experience of unemployment and long-term joblessness. But “Never Forget” would also feature stories about fighting capitalist oppression through strikes and marches, and about heroes of past struggles.</p></blockquote>
<p>Why not recycle old issues of Pravda?</p>
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		<title>Camille Paglia and the Clash of Cultures</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/robert-spencer/camille-paglia-and-the-clash-of-cultures/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=camille-paglia-and-the-clash-of-cultures</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/robert-spencer/camille-paglia-and-the-clash-of-cultures/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 22 Aug 2013 04:40:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Robert Spencer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Camile Paglia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[clash of civilizations]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hillary Clinton]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[interview]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Salon]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Samuel Huntington]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=201569</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Will America's feminist "bête noire" be the next to be destroyed for speaking the truth?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/image.jpg"><img class="wp-image-201572 alignleft" alt="image" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/image-450x327.jpg" width="270" height="196" /></a>Camille Paglia or Samuel Huntington? It was hard to tell Wednesday when Paglia said in an interview with Tracy Clark-Flory in <a href="http://www.salon.com/2013/08/21/camille_paglia_it_remains_baffling_how_anyone_would_think_that_hillary_clinton_is_our_party%E2%80%99s_best_chance/">Salon</a> that “the escalating instability not just in Egypt but throughout the Mideast is very ominous. There is a clash of cultures brewing in the world that may take a century or more to resolve — and there is no guarantee that the secular West will win.”</p>
<p>This is the kind of talk that has gotten many another writer and commentator labeled as a racist bigot. Paglia’s “clash of cultures” is closely akin to Huntington’s “clash of civilizations,” which notwithstanding how obvious it is that just such a clash is taking place now, is widely derided in the mainstream media.</p>
<p>As Huntington famously observed in <i>The Clash of Civilizations</i>, “Wherever one looks along the perimeter of Islam, Muslims have problems living peaceably with their neighbors. The question naturally rises as to whether this pattern of the late 20th century conflict between Muslim and non-Muslim groups is equally true of relations between groups from other civilizations. In fact, it is not. Muslims make up 1/5 of the world’s population but in the 1990s they have been far more involved in intergroup violence than the people of any other civilization&#8230;.Islam’s borders are bloody, and so are its innards” (p. 256).</p>
<p>This is manifestly true, and even truer than it was when Huntington wrote it. So it is hard to understand how anyone can object to this, but after all, Leftist analysis is generally based on fantasy and fiction, and this case is no different. Mohammed Ayoob, a professor of International Relations at Michigan State University, wrote in <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2012/02/03/opinion/ayoob-clash-muslims-and-west/index.html">CNN</a> in February 2012 that “political scientist Huntington wrote in 1993 that cultural divisions preclude a defining global civilization, and the West and the Muslim world would never share the same values,” and that “many of us” believed this thesis to have been “discredited beyond repair.”</p>
<p>Ayoob did, however, say that Huntington’s thesis had been “reaffirmed” by the European Union’s ban on purchasing oil from Iran, and by France’s criminalization of denial of the Armenian Genocide. These decisions, he said, “sent the same message to the Muslim world: You are not our equals and are doomed to be judged by standards different from those by which we judge ourselves.”</p>
<p>Ayoob’s skepticism regarding Huntington’s thesis and placement of the blame entirely on the West for any clash with the Islamic world that may in fact exist is drearily typical among Leftist and Islamic supremacist pundits. And that’s why Camille Paglia, by offhandedly affirming the existence of a clash of cultures between the West and the global Islamic umma in the course of an interview about Hillary Clinton, may have set herself up for a firestorm of indignation from her ideological kin.</p>
<p>Despite her libertarian leanings, Camille Paglia’s Leftist credentials are impeccable, so she can say things like this in pro-jihad, pro-Sharia Leftist Salon. If Pamela Geller or Nonie Darwish or I had written exactly the same paragraph, Salon would have rejected it, or if it had appeared elsewhere, Salon would have vilified the writer as a racist, bigoted Islamophobe, fear-mongering for profit by talking about a mythical clash of cultures.</p>
<p>However, as <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2013/04/sam-harris-there-is-no-such-thing-as-islamophobia-this-is-a-term-of-propaganda-designed-to-protect-i.html">Sam Harris</a>, <a href="http://www.wnd.com/2013/07/lone-feminist-calls-out-islamic-misogyny/">Joyce Carol Oates</a>, and <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2013/08/all-the-worlds-muslims-have.html">Richard Dawkins</a> have recently learned, Camille Paglia will not be exempt. If she keeps talking about a “clash of cultures” that the secular West might lose, she, too, will be tarred as a “racist, bigoted Islamophobe,” impeccable Leftist credentials notwithstanding.</p>
<p>No one who dares speak out against jihad violence and Islamic supremacism is spared. Tuesday night PBS aired a BBC documentary about the life of Muhammad for which I was interviewed, and a small part of the interview briefly appears in the documentary, amid an avalanche of material about how Muhammad was essentially a modern-day Gandhi. This led to a small uproar on Twitter, with Leftists and Islamic supremacists tweeting angrily to PBS asking how they could dare to air the views (even for just a few seconds) of a hate-filled bigot like me. How do they know that I am a hate-filled bigot? Most, if not all, of the angry Tweeters probably never read a line I have ever written, and even if they have, wouldn&#8217;t be able to find any actual hatred or bigotry in it. But they have been told again and again and again that that is what I am about, and the people who tell them are people they trust, so they know it must be true.</p>
<p>Once I am completely demonized, marginalized, and out of the way, they will start in on the next target, until there will be no one left to say the smallest critical word about jihad violence, Sharia oppression, and Islamic supremacism. Camille Paglia may well find this out.</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>Praying for a White American Terrorist</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/praying-for-a-white-american-terrorist/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=praying-for-a-white-american-terrorist</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/praying-for-a-white-american-terrorist/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 17 Apr 2013 18:51:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Race In America]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Salon]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=186139</guid>
		<description><![CDATA["Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American," Sirota wrote at Salon. Not, let's hope he's caught. Or let's hope he doesn't strike again. Let's hope he's a white man. That's not just racism. It's completely amoral racism.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/praying_hands1.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-186140" alt="praying_hands[1]" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/praying_hands1.jpg" width="640" height="480" /></a></p>
<p>The reactions to the Boston Marathon Massacre were predictable. Alex Jones was going to cry false flag and the media was going to blather about right wing extremism.</p>
<p>Now a suspect, or another suspect, has reportedly been arrested. But before anything happened, the left was hoping he was white. Would his whiteness do anything to change the horror? Would it bring back the lives of the three people murdered, including a little boy?</p>
<p>No, but it would apportion blame in the way that the left thinks is ideologically correct. The loony David Sirota, who has become the go-to guy for bizarre quotes on race and violence, usually finding some backward way of blaming white people for everything, was open about his priorities.</p>
<p>&#8220;Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American,&#8221;<a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2013/04/salon-identifies-its-foremost-enemy-lets-hope-the-boston-marathon-bomber-is-a-white-american.html"> Sirota wrote at Salon</a>. Not, let&#8217;s hope he&#8217;s caught. Or let&#8217;s hope he doesn&#8217;t strike again. Let&#8217;s hope he&#8217;s a white man. That&#8217;s not just racism. It&#8217;s completely amoral racism.</p>
<p>Sirota looks at terrorism not through the lens of actual existing terrorist organizations, but race.</p>
<blockquote><p>Privilege tends to determine, he writes, which groups are — and are not — collectively denigrated or targeted for the unlawful actions of individuals</p>
<p>This has been most obvious in the context of recent mass shootings. In those awful episodes, a religious or ethnic minority group lacking such privilege would likely be collectively slandered and/or targeted with surveillance or profiling (or worse) if some of its individuals comprised most of the mass shooters. However, white male privilege means white men are not collectively denigrated/targeted for those shootings — even though most come at the hands of white dudes.</p></blockquote>
<p>One of the problems with Marxists is that they&#8217;re clever idiots. Sirota&#8217;s screed is a reminder why. Rather than examining the broader picture of events, they view them through the lens of a single category. Class, race or gender determines everything.</p>
<p>Sirota doesn&#8217;t need to know anything about the attack or any other attack. All he has to do is equate Adam Lanza to Nidal Hasan based on minority status. (Though Mother Jones, which Sirota formerly relied on, lists Hasan as a &#8220;White Dude&#8221; to increase the ranks of white dude killers killing in the name of white privilege.)</p>
<blockquote><p> Meanwhile, non-white or developing-world terrorism suspects are often reflexively portrayed as representative of larger conspiracies, ideologies and religions that must be dealt with as systemic threats</p></blockquote>
<p>Are they portrayed as such or are they actually members of larger conspiracies? That&#8217;s the basic factual question. But we&#8217;re not in the realm of facts here.</p>
<p>Sirota isn&#8217;t interested in discussing actual real world facts. His facile skill, the one most prized by today&#8217;s leftellectuals, is reducing all things to race.</p>
<p>Sure Hasan corresponded with Anwar Al-Awlaki, the Al Qaeda mastermind who found his way to half-white dude, Obama&#8217;s kill list. But that&#8217;s just more white privilege talking.</p>
<p>Asserting white privilege frees us from having to consider any facts. It preemptively delegitimizes all facts and reduces all dialogues to a catalog of grievances. Even debate becomes a crime.</p>
<p>After September 11, and I do mean right after, lefties hung up signs against the War in Afghanistan, that had not even started yet, arguing that we didn&#8217;t bomb any of the places McVeigh lived after Oklahoma City. Sirota brings up a variation of the same tired argument that misses the point.</p>
<p>If McVeigh had been part of an international Neo-Nazi group with thousands of fighters and millions of supporters operating in an area outside the United States, we would have bombed it. He wasn&#8217;t. Neither was Adam Lanza or the Columbine shooters. The 9/11 hijackers were.</p>
<p>Those are facts, which are a notorious form of white privilege. Muslim terrorism is a collection of organized international movements with a deep base of support from outside the country. It&#8217;s an invasive force. It&#8217;s also far more lethal. That holds true regardless of who carried out the Boston Marathon Massacre. The list of bombing plots averted by the authorities in the last 15 years are ample testimony to that. But while most people care about stopping the violence, lefties like Sirota would like us to racially classify the violence.</p>
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		<title>Salon Wonders If &#8220;Jihad&#8221; Can Survive Pamela Geller</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/robert-spencer/salon-wonders-if-jihad-can-survive-pamela-geller/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=salon-wonders-if-jihad-can-survive-pamela-geller</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 11 Jan 2013 04:45:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Robert Spencer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Alex Seitz-Wald]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[CAIR]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[My Jihad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Pamela Geller]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Salon]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=173188</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Alex Seitz-Wald embraces the role of CAIR's useful idiot with pride and gusto.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Alex Seitz-Wald of Salon is a bit of a dim bulb; on Tuesday he tweeted this:</p>
<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/robert-spencer/salon-wonders-if-jihad-can-survive-pamela-geller/seitz-wald/" rel="attachment wp-att-173190"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-173190" title="Seitz-Wald" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Seitz-Wald-450x271.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="271" /></a></p>
<p>He was referring, however, to my piece at Atlas Shrugs (which, incidentally, was about him and his ilk: &#8220;<a href="http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2013/01/atlas-exclusive-robert-spencer-the-monstrous-moral-inversion-of-the-islamophobia-industry.html" target="_blank">The Monstrous Moral Inversion of the &#8216;Islamophobia&#8217; Industry</a>&#8220;), which was not an interview at all, but a column. When someone on his side gently pointed this out, the intrepid journalist Seitz-Wald responded: &#8220;I&#8217;ll admit I didn&#8217;t even bother reading enough to determine if it was an interview or a column.&#8221;</p>
<p>In light of his confessed carelessness and obvious dim-bulb status, it is no surprise that he would fall for a war-is-deceit sharpie like Hamas-linked CAIR&#8217;s Ahmed Rehab, even if Rehab&#8217;s deception skills are decidedly second-tier. Salon is an <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2012/12/salon-muslim-brotherhood-tied-writer-uses-murder-by-insane-woman-to-defame-counter-jihadists.html" target="_blank">indefatigable exponent of the Leftist/Islamic supremacist alliance</a>, and so even if they had sent a more intelligent writer than Alex Seitz-Wald to do this story, Rehab wouldn&#8217;t have had to work very hard.</p>
<p>And ask Pamela Geller for comment in a story about ads she originated? Or me, who was involved in the process? Of course not! Salon has all the politically correct opinions; it doesn&#8217;t have to be fair and balanced!</p>
<p>&#8220;Can &#8216;jihad&#8217; survive Pam Geller?,&#8221; by Alex Seitz-Wald in <a href="http://www.salon.com/2013/01/09/can_jihad_be_rebranded/" target="_blank">Salon</a>, January 9:</p>
<blockquote><p>So you want to rebrand a word. It’s hard to think of a more difficult rebranding project than “jihad.”Since Sept. 11, the term has become synonymous with terrorism and villainy — but now a group of Muslims is trying to reclaim the word from the extremists, and redefine “jihad” to mean something normal and peaceful and good. They realize this won’t be easy.</p></blockquote>
<p>Which group of Muslims? Alex Seitz-Wald doesn&#8217;t tell you until much later in the article that it&#8217;s the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which the Justice Department named an <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/016754.php" target="_blank">unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case</a>. Nor does he mention, and may not know, that CAIR operatives have repeatedly <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/014963.php" target="_blank">refused</a> <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/016017.php" target="_blank">to</a> <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/014790.php" target="_blank">denounce</a> Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist groups. He says nothing about, and may not know, the fact that several <a href="http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2003/06/cairs-legal-tribulations.html" target="_blank">former CAIR officials have been convicted of various crimes related to jihad terror</a>. Nor does he mention, and may not know, that CAIR’s cofounder and longtime Board chairman (Omar Ahmad), as well as its chief spokesman (Ibrahim Hooper), have made <a href="http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=53303" target="_blank">Islamic supremacist statements</a>, or that its <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2011/01/cairs-honest-ibe-hooper-admits-dont-talk-to-the-fbi-poster-crossed-a-line-but-those-who-noticed-that.html" target="_blank">California chapter distributed posters</a> telling Muslims not to talk to the FBI.</p>
<p>Would such a group have an <a id="_GPLITA_0" title="Click to Continue &gt; by Text-Enhance" href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2013/01/salon-wonders-if-jihad-can-survive-pamela-geller.html#">interest</a> in obfuscating the meaning of jihad so as to foster the complacency of Americans? Alex Seitz-Wald doesn&#8217;t investigate this question.</p>
<blockquote><p>The campaign hinges on the idea that “jihad” has two commonly accepted usages. One is the violent, physical struggle most of us are familiar with. The other, which many Muslims and Islamic scholars consider the more correct definition, refers to the inner struggle to do good and follow God’s teaching; Muslims strive to attain this every day. This is the “proper meaning” being promoted by My Jihad, a public education campaign recently launched on billboards and on buses in Chicago.</p></blockquote>
<p>&#8220;More correct&#8221; is a marvelously weaselly phrase. Is the idea that jihad is violent struggle correct or not? Apparently even the war-is-deceit propagandists who saw in Seitz-Wald the easy mark that he is couldn&#8217;t bring themselves to tell him that violent jihad <em>wasn&#8217;t</em> correct in Islam; they could only go so far as to tell him that the interior spiritual struggle was &#8220;more correct.&#8221; Seitz-Wald doesn&#8217;t notice the incoherence: to say that 2 + 2 = 4 is not &#8220;more correct&#8221; than to say that 2 + 2 = 5; it is correct and the latter is incorrect.</p>
<p>But in Islamic law, jihad as spiritual struggle is not the correct or &#8220;proper meaning,&#8221; while violent jihad is incorrect; both are accepted understandings of the concept. A manual of Islamic law certified by the highest authority in Sunni Islam, Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, as conforming “to the practice and faith of the orthodox Sunni community” explained: “Jihad means to war against non-Muslims, and is etymologically derived from the word mujahada signifying warfare to establish the religion. And it is the lesser jihad. As for the greater jihad, it is spiritual warfare against the lower self (nafs).” After thus acknowledging the spiritual, “greater jihad,” the manual never mentions it again, but goes on for many paragraphs about the “lesser jihad,” that “war against non-Muslims,” giving rules for the taking of prisoners, the legal status of captive women, the subjugation of the infidels, and more.</p>
<p>This legal manual stipulates that Muslims must make war “upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians…until they become Muslim or pay the non-Muslim poll tax.” It specifies that the warfare against non-Muslims must continue until “the final descent of Jesus.” After that, “nothing but Islam will be accepted from them.”</p>
<blockquote><p>“The campaign is about reclaiming Islam, and not just ‘jihad,’ from both Muslim and non-Muslim extremists,” said Ahmed Rehab, the leader of the effort, in an interview. “Whether it’s the bin Ladens and the al-Qaidas of the Muslim world, or the Pam Gellers and Frank Gaffneys of the non-Muslim world, ironically — even though they come from the two opposite ends of the spectrum — they agree exactly on the same definition of ‘jihad’ and on the same worldview of Islam versus the rest of the world.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Note that Rehab follows common and tired Islamic supremacist talking points in tarring as &#8220;extremists&#8221; both Islamic jihadis and those who resist them. He is trying to imply, with Alex Seitz-Wald&#8217;s willing help, that those who resist jihad are just as lethal, just as dangerous, as those who commit it. The goal, of course, is to intimidate people into thinking there&#8217;s something wrong with resisting jihad. To equate Pamela Geller, a political activist working to defend free speech, the freedom of conscience, and equality of rights for all, with Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the murders of 3,000 people, is a monstrous smear. It sails right by dim Alex, who probably thought it was incisive if he thought about it at all.</p>
<p>Rehab is also trying to hoodwink non-Muslims into thinking that the view of jihad espoused by bin Laden and al-Qaeda is &#8220;extremist,&#8221; as if the mainstream understanding of jihad is the bicycling-through-the-meadows type he is pushing. And we, of course, are greasy Islamophobes who are, in our hate, endorsing the view of the &#8220;extremists.&#8221; He doesn&#8217;t tell the ever-credulous and starry-eyed Seitz-Wald, although he surely knows, that warfare against and subjugation of unbelievers is the mainstream Muslim understanding of jihad, as I detailed <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2012/12/hamas-linked-cair-applies-cosmetics-to-the-concept-of-jihad.html" target="_blank">here</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>In fact, the ads were directly inspired by Geller, the anti-Muslim blogger and activist, who has plastered her own billboards on subways and buses in New York. They label Muslims as “savages” and incite viewers to “<a href="http://www.salon.com/2012/09/20/anti_jihad_savage_ads_going_up_in_nyc_subway/" target="_blank">defeat Jihad</a>.”</p></blockquote>
<p>&#8220;Anti-Muslim&#8221; equals in favor of legal equality, the freedom to change one&#8217;s religion or have none at all, and the freedom of speech as our fundamental bulwark against tyranny. The appellation says more about Alex Seitz-Wald than it does about Pamela Geller, and is designed to imply that she is motivated simply by race hate, even though Islam is not a race, and not by any legitimate concern for the principles that are threatened by Sharia.</p>
<p>The quoted ad only suggests that &#8220;all Muslims are savages&#8221; if all Muslims support the bloody jihad against Israeli civilians like the Fogel family, murdered in their beds by Islamic jihadists whose deed was then celebrated in Gaza. I expect that Ahmed Rehab does support that jihad, but for him and other Islamic supremacist writers in the U.S. to suggest that all Muslims do is more than a little&#8230;&#8221;Islamophobic.&#8221; Doesn&#8217;t the Vast Majority of Peaceful Muslims reject jihad violence, as we are constantly told?</p>
<blockquote><p>“Everybody was talking about the ‘savage’ part, but to me, that’s just sort of an insult — she thinks I’m a savage,</p></blockquote>
<p>If the shoe fits, Ahmed.</p>
<blockquote><p>I think she’s an idiot, we’re even,” he said. “But the problem for me was the use of the word ‘jihad.’ When no one seemed to care about that, I realized that we have a problem.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Indeed. One that <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2012/12/hamas-linked-cair-applies-cosmetics-to-the-concept-of-jihad.html" target="_blank">cosmetics</a> won&#8217;t conceal.</p>
<blockquote><p>In billboards on buses and subways, smiling Muslims and non-Muslims share universal human aspirations, personalized by the individual “jihads” of the non-actor volunteers who share their struggles. In this context, a jihad is no more threatening than a New Year’s resolution. “My jihad is to stay fit despite my busy schedule,” one woman with a headscarf and a barbell says. Others deal with raising children, doing well at work, and making friendships with different kinds of people. To Rehab, jihad means that when you are “confronted with two choices, you make the right choice and not the easy one.”Ads have already gone up on buses in Chicago and San Francisco, and will soon go up in 10 other major American cities and a handful of international ones, including London, Sydney and Melbourne. There’s a website, Facebook page and Twitter hashtag where people can share their own personal jihads.</p>
<p>On Monday, Egyptian activists working with the group even unfurled a giant banner in front of the main church in Cairo wishing a Merry Christmas (Coptic Christians celebrate the holiday on Jan. 7) in contravention of hard-line Islamic proclamations that Christmas should not be recognized.</p>
<p>That may not sound so scary, but the opposition has been predictably vitriolic. The group’s Twitter and Facebook pages have received hateful messages from hard-line Islamists. Geller, predictably, is exercised.</p>
<p>She has written at least a dozen posts using the campaign’s #myjihad hashtag, which currently represent about two out of every three posts on the front page of <a href="http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/" target="_blank">her influential anti-Muslim blog</a>. Geller also seems determined to play a game of bait and switch to sabatoge [sic] the rival campaign. She registered the domain name MyJihad.us (the real URL ends in .org) and is even trying <a href="http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341c60bf53ef017ee6fa9dba970d-pi" target="_blank">to run copycat ads that are clearly designed to be confused with Rehab’s</a>.</p>
<p>In her ads, the peaceful Muslim is replaced with pictures of Osama bin Laden and the burning twin towers. She trying to get approval from the Chicago Transit Authority for the ads to appear on city buses, but they may be rejected for infringing on My Jihad’s copyright to the template.</p></blockquote>
<p>Funny how Seitz-Wald never raised that possibility, and neither did anyone else, when MPAC parodied one of our earlier pro-freedom ads. In any case, parody is not forbidden by copyright, and Seitz-Wald doesn&#8217;t tell you, and probably doesn&#8217;t know, that the only thing that is parody about our ads is the design; the quotes featured in our ads are all real usages of the term jihad by Muslims, or related to such usages. Rehab&#8217;s ads, by contrast, feature people using the term &#8220;jihad&#8221; in ways that have nothing to do with how the term has been traditionally understood in Islamic theology and law.</p>
<blockquote><p>One would think that My Jihad is exactly the kind of moderate Muslim voice that Geller — who claims to be so threatened by Muslim “extremists” — would want to promote. But in reality, “the extremists on both sides need each other for validation. And we’re a threat to both,” Rehab said.</p></blockquote>
<p>&#8220;Moderates&#8221; who support Hamas and dissemble about jihad&#8217;s meaning as enunciated by mainstream Muslim authorities throughout history. I myself am skeptical as to whether Seitz-Wald is really dealing with a &#8220;moderate Muslim voice&#8221; here, but no skeptical thought ever crosses the smooth contours of his brain.</p>
<blockquote><p>Rehab is the executive director of the Chicago chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR),</p></blockquote>
<p><em>Now</em> he tells us. But with no mention of the group&#8217;s links to Hamas or jihad terror, of course.</p>
<blockquote><p>but he’s doing this on his own time and with separate funds to keep it a grass-roots effort.</p></blockquote>
<p>Probably because the national office of Hamas-linked CAIR found his campaign too risible to support.</p>
<blockquote><p>What started as a Facebook group less than a month ago has grown into a sophisticated public relations campaign that has already raised $20,000 and recruited dozens of volunteers, most of whom are “soccer moms” who don’t want their kids to feel intimidated at school because of their religion, Rehab said. “These are the army of My Jihad,” he quipped. But can the popular conception of “jihad” really be changed with some ads and a hashtag?</p>
<p>“I would look at this conflict as I would any other product: We have an image problem,” said Arash Afshar, an Iranian-American marketing consultant who is not involved with the campaign. “This is exactly what Muslims should be doing … The way to combat an image problem is not to simply sit back and hope it goes away. You develop a branding strategy and motivate your already existing fan-base.”</p></blockquote>
<p>If Afshar and Rehab really want to change the image of &#8220;jihad,&#8221; they don&#8217;t need to attack Pamela Geller; they need to convince the Muslims who believe it has to do with violence to change their views. That they&#8217;re not making any effort to do that is telling.</p>
<p>Seitz-Wald concludes his article with a long and incoherent disquisition on how hard it will be for Rehab to change the meaning of &#8220;jihad.&#8221; It is incoherent because Seitz-Wald repeatedly asserts that the idea that jihad involves violence is wrong, improper, a &#8220;hijacking&#8221; of the term, but it never occurs to him to wonder why, if this understanding is indeed so illegitimate, it is so entrenched. Or if it did occur to him, he banished the thought quickly, before the thought police could possibly get wind of his ideological deviation. He&#8217;s a proper company man, and in this ridiculous hit piece he did a proper company job &#8212; no real depth of thought or genuine analysis is needed for Salon. As long as the article portrays Pamela Geller and the counter-jihad effort as evil, evil, evil, that&#8217;s good enough for the enlightened Leftist hatemongers and enemies of freedom that make up Salon&#8217;s core audience.</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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