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		<title>A Question for Truthful Girl</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/david-swindle/a-question-for-truthful-girl/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-question-for-truthful-girl</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 17 May 2010 04:15:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Swindle]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=60426</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[My email to Jumanah Imad Albahri, who alleges she was "coerced" to verbalize support for genocide of the Jews.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/ask11.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-60427" title="ask1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/ask11.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="331" /></a></p>
<p><strong>Visit <a href="http://www.newsrealblog.com/">Newsreal</a></strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.newsrealblog.com/2010/05/16/muslim-student-who-admitted-support-for-jewish-genocide-now-says-death-to-israel/" target="_blank">Robert Spencer has a recent post</a> highlighting a statement made from someone claiming to be Jumanah Imad Albahri, the UCSD student whose words supporting the extermination of the Jews have been heard by over 300,000 people on YouTube and even more on cable television and talk radio. <a href="http://www.newsrealblog.com/2010/05/16/muslim-student-who-admitted-support-for-jewish-genocide-now-says-death-to-israel/#IDComment75684167" target="_blank">Albahri herself showed up in the comments to deny authorship and direct readers to her own statement.</a></p>
<p>It’s been almost a week since David Horowitz’s talk at UCSD and Albahri is all of a sudden <a href="http://fortruthforjustice.wordpress.com/2010/05/16/ucsd-muslim-student-responds-to-david-horowitz-event/" target="_blank">finally trying to explain herself at a new blog she has recently created. </a></p>
<p>I have emailed Albahri. Here is what I said:</p>
<p>Ms. Albahri,</p>
<p>I’ve read your blog post in which you try and explain  the remarks you made Monday night at David Horowitz’s talk.</p>
<blockquote><p>“Towards the end of the exchange, I became emotional. I could no longer hear Mr. Horowitz speaking and so did not even hear his injection of Hezbollah’s credo of &#8217;rounding up&#8217; Jews in his last tangent.  I could no longer contain my anger at being implicitly and improperly labeled a terrorist, an anti-Semite, and a proponent of genocide. The answer I was coerced into giving grossly misrepresented my beliefs and ideologies.”</p></blockquote>
<p>I have a hard time believing your explanation that all of a sudden you could not hear what he was saying. You seemed to be able to communicate with him perfectly fine and hear what he was saying up until he asked his question. The video speaks for itself.</p>
<p>I have a question: if you oppose anti-Semitism and you oppose Islamists’ quest to instigate a second Holocaust, what have you ever done to challenge these tendencies within the <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6175" target="_blank">MSA</a> itself and Islam as a whole? If you do not hold  such views yourself, why are you a part of an organization who <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=7440" target="_blank">regularly hosts speakers</a> who call for the  destruction of Israel and the extermination of the Jews?</p>
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		<title>Politically Incorrect Fiction</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/davidforsmark/politically-incorrect-fiction/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=politically-incorrect-fiction</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/davidforsmark/politically-incorrect-fiction/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 12 Mar 2010 05:04:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Forsmark]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=54174</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[New novels challenge the liberal mainstream narrative. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0399156208?ie=UTF8&amp;amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;amp;linkCode=as2&amp;amp;camp=1789&amp;amp;creative=390957&amp;amp;creativeASIN=0399156208"><img class="size-full wp-image-54196 alignnone" title="I, Sniper" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/isniper.png" alt="" width="375" height="500" /></a></p>
<p>In <em>I, Sniper</em>, Stephen Hunter’s latest thriller, a Vietnam War hero is assumed to be a crazed killer, but a veteran FBI agent smells a rat.</p>
<p>As the agent and his colleague dare to challenge the media&#8217;s &#8220;narrative,” he delivers a wonderful rant that combines critiques of the mainstream press that Thomas Sowell and Bernard Goldberg have advanced:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;The narrative is the set of assumptions the press believes in, possibly without even knowing that it believes in them. It&#8217;s so powerful because it&#8217;s unconscious. It&#8217;s not like they get together every morning and decide &#8216;these are the lies we tell today.&#8217; No, that would be too crude and honest. Rather, it&#8217;s a set of casual non-rigorous assumptions about a reality they&#8217;ve never really experienced that’s arranged in such a way as to reinforce their best and most ideal presumptions about themselves and their importance to the system and the way they&#8217;ve chosen to live their lives. It&#8217;s their way of arranging things a certain way what they all believe in without ever really addressing it carefully. It permeates their whole culture. They <em>know,</em> for example, that Bush is a moron and Obama a saint. They <em>know</em> Communism was a phony threat cooked up by right-wing cranks as a way to leverage power to the executive. They <em>know</em>Saddam didn&#8217;t have weapons of mass destruction, the response to Katrina was f&#8212;-ed up, torture never works, and mad Vietnam sniper Carl Hitchcock killed the saintly peace demonstrators. Cheney’s a devil, Biden’s a genius. &#8230;The story was somewhat suspiciously concocted exactly to their prejudices, just as Jayson Blair&#8217;s made-up stories and Dan Rather&#8217;s Air National Guard documents were. And the narrative is the bedrock of their culture, the keystone of their faith, the altar of their church. They don&#8217;t even know they&#8217;re true believers, because in theory they despise the true believer in anything. But they will absolutely de-frackin-stroy anybody who makes them question all that. &#8230;&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>And this from a fellow who&#8217;s not only a former journalist but also a Pulitzer Prize winner (for his film criticism).</p>
<p>As this long, hard winter (sorry, Al Gore) winds down, here are a few red-hot reading choices to help you stave off that last bit of cabin fever by five authors who dare to challenge the intelligentsia’s conventional wisdom.</p>
<p><strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1416565159?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=1416565159">I, Sniper</a><img style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=fronmaga-20&amp;l=as2&amp;o=1&amp;a=1416565159" border="0" alt="" width="1" height="1" /></strong> by Stephen Hunter</p>
<p>“Someone once defined a newspaper gun story as ‘something with a mistake in it.’&#8221;</p>
<p>While <em>I, Sniper</em> (Simon &amp; Schuster, $26) ostensibly is about iconic hero Bob Lee Swagger taking down snipers who have killed several Vietnam-era radicals and framed a war hero for the crime, Hunter’s crosshairs are really on the mainstream media in general and the New York Times in particular.</p>
<p>Hunter, a former film critic for the Washington Post, obviously is fed up with the media’s narrative about Americans who love their guns and the warriors who fight for our freedom.</p>
<p>After someone has taken out an actress who collaborated with the North Vietnamese and made a fortune out of exercise videos, then shot two Chicago academics who were &#8217;60s domestic terrorists (yes, the resemblance is intentional), FBI agent Nick Memphis has this exchange at a press conference:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;Do you have any opinions, special agent, on the use of &#8216;trained killers&#8217; in the military and the risks such men pose for society when they return to civilian world? I mean this seems to dovetail neatly with the report released by the Homeland Security Agency some months ago that &#8211;&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;You must be from the <em>New York Times</em>.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;Yes sir,&#8221; the young man said.</p></blockquote>
<p>This is Hunter’s sixth novel featuring Bob Lee Swagger, a combination of Sergeant York and Jack Bauer whom Hunter uses as an archetype of the small town, gun-handy American who does his duty as a matter of course and confounds the bad guys with toughness and know-how.</p>
<p>While the political jabs and media commentary are fun, <em>I, Sniper</em>’s main goal is to entertain, and it does.  In many ways this could be considered the ultimate Swagger tale. If this, indeed, is the final adventure for the 60-something hero with the stainless steel hip, it would be a fitting sendoff.</p>
<p>Though if Bob goes into retirement, I will certainly miss lines like this:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;I sure wouldn&#8217;t want to be in your shoes,&#8221; said Bob. &#8220;I can&#8217;t help out with the papers. Never read ‘em. I get my news from Fox.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0399156208?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0399156208" target="_blank"><strong><em>The Midnight House</em></strong></a><strong> </strong><strong>by Alex Berenson</strong></p>
<p>Speaking of New York&#8217;s Old Gray Lady, former Timesman Alex Berenson certainly hasn&#8217;t adopted the paper’s narrative that the United   States under George W. Bush became a lawless nation of torturing and liberties-violating rogues.</p>
<p>In the press material for <em>The Midnight House</em> (Putnam, $25.95), his latest best-seller, Berenson says:</p>
<blockquote><p>“If you take a fair-minded view of what the United States has actually been doing the last eight to ten years, you really can’t conclude that is torture.  When you’ve got one set of lawyers arguing that someone can be held in a room that is 46 degrees, while another set of lawyers argue it must be at least 48 degrees, you’d be hard pressed to say we’re torturing people.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Berenson also doesn&#8217;t cotton to the so-called experts&#8217; insistence that harsh interrogation techniques don’t work on terrorists.  In <em>The Midnight House</em>, he proposes an effective secret interrogation base in Poland where a group of interrogators goes considerably farther than Americans have actually gone — and his main concern is what the adverse effects might be on the good guys, not the bad &#8216;uns.</p>
<p>The Midnight House has been disbanded by the “new administration,” and someone is killing the retired interrogators one by one. CIA agent John Wells, on a well-deserved vacation after saving the nation from yet another big terrorist strike is put on their trail.</p>
<p>Like all of Berenson’s books, <em>The Midnight House</em> is well-researched, intelligent and suspenseful.  Unlike the others, this is not an action-packed yarn where Wells saves the world from terrorists. Rather, this is more of a whodunit with a jaded look at the bureaucracy that “Homeland Security” has become.</p>
<p>This book is less Vince Flynn and more John LeCarre — if LeCarre weren&#8217;t such a pedantic bore, that is.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0399156135?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0399156135" target="_blank"><strong><em>The First Rule</em></strong></a><strong> </strong><strong>by Robert Crais</strong></p>
<p>Under the media&#8217;s current narrative, private military companies like Blackwater are the bad guys du jour. In Robert Crais’ excellent series of private eye novels, PMC contractor Joe Pike has mostly served as the dark Doc Holliday to series hero Elvis Cole’s Wyatt Earp.</p>
<p><em>The First Rule</em><em> </em>(Simon &amp; Schuster, $26.95) is the second novel featuring Pike, an ex-LAPD patrolman, former Marine, current gun shop owner and sometime mercenary whose protective instincts would even impress Sandra Bullock’s character in <em>The Blind Side.</em></p>
<p>Crais’ recent books have tended to stress the human need for family and the vital role of fatherhood, but Pike here takes on Serbian mobsters whose first rule is the direct opposite &#8212; family is nothing next to the criminal brotherhood.  But when the criminals kill a family that Pike loves, they learn a new primary rule: don’t incur Pike&#8217;s wrath.</p>
<p>The first rule for mystery or suspense fans should be read all the Robert Crais you can get your hands on.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316045187?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0316045187" target="_blank"><strong><em>Hollywood</em></strong><strong><em> Moon</em></strong></a><strong> </strong><strong>by Joseph Wambaugh</strong></p>
<p>In the dark days of the &#8217;60s and &#8217;70s, when “pig” was the word of choice for police among elite radicals, real-life L.A. cop Joseph Wambaugh changed the mainstream narrative with such powerful novels as <em>The New Centurions</em> and nonfiction masterpieces like <em>The Onion Field</em>.  The books were dark enough to appeal to critics but also told the truth about policing in a turbulent era. Wambaugh helped restore cops to their rightful place as American literary heroes (and led to a lot of cops taking writing classes hoping to emulate him.)</p>
<p><em>Hollywood Moon</em> (Little, Brown, $26.99) is the third book in his series about the LAPD&#8217;s wild and woolly Hollywood Station. As Wambaugh examines the near-impossibility of doing good police work under the federal oversight placed on the LAPD after the Rodney King riots, he offers a collection of riotous, bawdy, tawdry and tragic vignettes that one might hear a few beers into a good night in a cop bar; the yarns ofter are tied together with one overriding crime or group of criminals.</p>
<p>In <em>Moon</em>, a hen-pecked identity thief decides to recruit his clueless gopher to kidnap his ruthless wife and find out where she’s been hiding all the money they’ve been scamming.</p>
<p>Think of the usual Wambaugh antics taking place under a full moon, and you’ll get the picture.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0061929379?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0061929379" target="_blank"><strong><em>Pirate Latitudes</em></strong></a><strong> </strong><strong>by Michael Crichton</strong></p>
<p>I had to laugh at some of the critics who lamented that <em>Pirate Latitudes </em>(Harper $27.99), Michael Crichton’s last novel, which was posthumously discovered in his computer, was “not up to his usual standards.”  Most of these were the same blowhards who lambasted Crichton for trashing their narrative of man-made global warming in his provocative bestseller, <em>State of Fear</em>.</p>
<p>Crichton’s final novel, however, contains neither a political point nor a warning about the dangers of arrogant technology.  Instead, it’s just a swashbuckling entertainment about a British privateer attacking a Spanish stronghold for king, country&#8211;and a 50 percent share of the booty.</p>
<p><em>Pirate Latitudes</em> has the feel of a very polished first draft or the novelization of an action-packed miniseries, rather than a completed Crichton novel — which makes sense, since it wasn’t.  Still, it&#8217;s a fast moving, thoroughly enjoyable adventure; think <em>The Guns of Navarone</em> meets a Wilbur Smith sea-going swashbuckler. While it may not be as good as either, or up to Crichton’s normal standards, it’s a good, if imperfect, way to say bon voyage to one of the more dominant writers of his generation.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312380429?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0312380429" target="_blank"><strong><em>The Lock Artist</em></strong></a><strong> </strong><strong>by Steve Hamilton</strong></p>
<p>As long as we’re talking about books that have no relation to the topic at hand, I&#8217;d like to take a point of personal privilege. I’ve long been an admirer of Steve Hamilton’s Alex McKnight mystery series set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, describing it as Travis McGee in a cold climate.</p>
<p>After a lackluster stand-alone novel set in upstate New York, Hamilton returns to Michigan for an utterly original thriller set in Milford, one of my favorite small towns in the Detroit metro area.</p>
<p>In <em>The Lock Artist</em> (Minotaur, $25.96) Mike, a mute teenager, is known as “The Miracle Boy” since surviving an infamous atrocity as a toddler. He comes to the attention of an organized crime boss because a high school prank reveals his skill with locks of all kinds to the wrong people.  (On the plus side, it also brings him into contact with the girl of his dreams.)</p>
<p>Like all top thriller writers, Hamilton takes this unusual situation and relates it to everyday emotions and common fears and insecurities, from the longing to fit in, to the satisfaction of being really good at something.</p>
<p>As silent Mike tells his story in flashback from his prison cell, the reader finds an uncommon connection with this anti-hero and will root for him to find redemption.  Even the most jaded mystery readers who think they’ve seen it all will love this one.</p>
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		<title>Indicting the Anointed</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/davidforsmark/indicting-the-anointed/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=indicting-the-anointed</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/davidforsmark/indicting-the-anointed/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 25 Feb 2010 05:03:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Forsmark]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell shows that people known as “intellects” might just not be that very smart.
]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em> </em></p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/intellecutuals.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-51989" title="intellecutuals" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/intellecutuals.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="497" /></a></p>
<p><em>Intellectuals and Society</em><br />
By Thomas Sowell<br />
Basic Books, $29.95,<br />
Review by David Forsmark</p>
<p>George Orwell famously said some things are so foolish that only an intellectual could believe them, for no ordinary man could be such a fool.</p>
<p>Thomas Sowell has made a career out of debunking those very things—most famously elite assumptions about racism and economics in classic books like <em>Ethnic America</em>, <em>Race and Culture</em>, <em>Knowledge and Decisions</em>, and <em>The Vision of the Annointed.</em></p>
<p>I’ve often defined a postmodern intellectual as someone who is trained to be sure he knows better.  Thomas Sowell, however, is a true intellectual in the best sense.  His mind is not only open to the fact that he might <em>not</em> know better, his superb new book explains why it is impossible for one dictator or a small group of elites to know better than the great unwashed how to run their lives.</p>
<p>A constant theme of Sowell’s work is that elites regularly—and with disastrous effect—substitute their assumptions for the actual on the ground knowledge of the masses of people.  In <em>Intellectuals and Society</em>, he singles out so-called “intellectuals,” those whose profession is trafficking in ideas, and the echo chamber they tend to inhabit.</p>
<p>He charges that such people may be “intellects,” but that doesn’t mean they are very smart.</p>
<p><em> </em></p>
<blockquote><p><em>“The capacity to grasp and manipulate complex ideas is enough to define intellect but not enough to encompass intelligence, which involves combining intellect with judgment and care in selecting relevant explanatory factors and in establishing empirical tests of any theory that emerges. Intelligence minus judgment equals intellect.  Wisdom is the rarest quality of all &#8212; the ability to combine intellect, knowledge, experience, and judgment in a way to produce a coherent understanding.”</em></p></blockquote>
<p>Of course, once you have spent a lifetime debunking things that are accepted as Gospel by the “intellectual class,” and prove Orwell’s thesis on a daily basis, the term “pseudo- intellectual&#8221; starts to lose its meaning:</p>
<blockquote><p><em>The term “pseudo- intellectual&#8221; has sometimes been applied to less intelligent or less knowledgeable members of this profession. But just as a bad cop is still a cop &#8212; no matter how much we may regret it &#8212; so a shallow, confused, or dishonest intellectual is just as much a member of that occupation as is a paragon of the profession.</em></p></blockquote>
<p><em> </em></p>
<p>Recently, Boston College’s Alan Wolfe, a prime example of the above definition&#8211; wrote an intellectually dishonest pseudo-review of <em>Intellectuals and Society </em>for the usually rigorous <em>New</em><em> </em><em>Republic</em>—<a href="http://www.newsrealblog.com/2010/02/10/the-closing-of-the-liberal-mind-tnr-attacks-thomas-sowell/">which David Horowitz dispatched quite nicely</a>.</p>
<p>Wolfe’s review might as well have been titled, “I Represent That Remark.”  (I have done a couple of radio interviews with Wolfe, and found him to be less than impressive.) While Horowitz doubted that Wolfe, who protested the lack of musicians and novelists in Sowells’ discussion, had read the parameters of the discussion on page 2, I think it’s more likely Wolfe made it to the page 4 definition of pseudo-intellectuals, felt the pang of self-recognition, and then went on his <a href="http://www.tnr.com/book/review/the-joyless-mind">very personal rant</a> against Sowell.</p>
<p>Wolfe, ironically supplies the perfect example of how intellectuals who share the currently anointed vision of the world make what Sowell calls “Arguments without Arguments:”</p>
<p><em> </em></p>
<blockquote><p><em>Although many intellectuals are especially well-equipped by talent and training to engage in logically structured arguments using empirical evidence to analyze contending ideas, many of their political or ideological views are promoted by verbal virtuosity and evading structured arguments and empirical evidence. Among the many arguments without arguments are claims that opposing views are &#8220;simplistic&#8221; and opposing individuals unworthy, as well as assertion of &#8220;rights&#8221; and attributing to adversaries a belief and panaceas or golden ages.</em></p></blockquote>
<p><em> </em></p>
<blockquote><p><em>…Before an explanation can be too simple, it must first be wrong.  But often the fact that some explanation seems to simple becomes a substitute for showing that it is wrong.</em></p></blockquote>
<p>Usually, economists who discuss Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” do so in the context of business and the economy.  In<em> Intellectuals and Society</em>, Sowell not only gives the best explanation of why the invisible hand of self-interest works better than a central plan, he then applies it to subjects as far afield from economics as war and police shootings.</p>
<p>Sowell argues that the intelligentsia devalue “mundane knowledge” in favor of special knowledge.  However, mundane knowledge is what it takes to actually get anything done.</p>
<blockquote><p><em>Someone who is considered to be a &#8216;knowledgeable&#8217; person usually has a special kind of knowledge &#8212; perhaps academic or other kinds of knowledge not widely found in the population at large. Someone who has even more knowledge of more mudane things &#8212; plumbing, carpentry, or baseball, for example &#8212; is less likely to be called &#8220;knowledgeable&#8221; by those intellectuals, for what they don&#8217;t know isn&#8217;t knowledge.. .. It is by no means certain that the kind of knowledge mastered by intellectuals is necessarily more consequential in its effect in the real world.</em></p></blockquote>
<p><em> </em></p>
<p>For instance, it may be impressive that a physicist understands Bernoulli’s principles of aerodynamic lift, but you wouldn’t want him in the cockpit second guessing your pilot.  Sowell argues that the smartest man cannot know even 1% of what would be required to run the lives of the people in a community, but that is what experts, politicians and intellectuals attempt in their hubris.<em> </em></p>
<blockquote><p><em>Despite the often expressed dichotomy between chaos and planning, what is called &#8220;planning&#8221; is the forcible suppression of millions of people&#8217;s plans by government imposed plan.</em></p></blockquote>
<blockquote><p><em>&#8230;.what is called &#8220;social&#8221; planning are in fact government orders over writing the plans and mutual accommodations of millions of other people.</em></p></blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p style="text-align: left;"><em>That is why free markets, judicial restraint, and reliance on decisions and traditions growing out of the experiences of the many &#8212; rather than the presumptions of elite few &#8212; are so important to those who do not share the social vision prevalent among intellectual elites.</em></p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p style="text-align: left;"><em>The intellectuals’ exultation of “reason&#8221; often comes at the expense of experience, allowing them to have sweeping confidence about things in which they have little or no knowledge or experience.</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p><em>Intellectuals and Society</em> is one of those books you want to read with a red pencil, to highlight nuggets like those above for later use.</p>
<p>While intellectuals’ visions cause social and economic disruption in many areas, none are so immediately deadly as their approach to war and foreign relations.  Sowell indicts the anointed for ignoring all empirical evidence and experience to the contrary, and insisting that the next dictator—from Hitler to Ahmadinejad—is the one who can be dealt with diplomatically.</p>
<p>Sowell concludes with a list of the anointed intelligentsia’s assumptions which have turned the world upside down, of which, he says, a complete refutation would fill volumes. “More important,” he says ruefully<em>, “It fills our schools and colleges.”</em></p>
<p><em> </em></p>
<blockquote><p><em>The intelligentsia have treated the conclusions of their vision as axioms to be followed, rather than hypotheses to be tested.</em></p></blockquote>
<p><em> </em></p>
<blockquote><p><em>Some among the intelligentsia have treated reality itself as objective or illusory, thereby putting current intellectual fashions and fads on the same plane as verified knowledge and the cultural wisdom distilled from generations of experience…</em></p></blockquote>
<p><em> </em></p>
<blockquote><p><em>They have filtered information in the media, in the schools, and in academia, who to leave out things that threaten their vision of the world.</em></p></blockquote>
<p><em> </em></p>
<blockquote><p><em>Above all, they exalt themselves by denigrating the society in which they live and turning its members against each other.</em></p></blockquote>
<p><em> </em></p>
<p>Of course, as he points out early in the book, an intellectual is someone who can lecture a police department on how many shots are sufficient to bring down an armed suspect under stressful conditions—when he himself has never even fired a pistol on a range.</p>
<p>Long before the<em> Freakonomics </em>phenomenon<em>, </em>Thomas Sowell was making this kind of real life critique from an economist’s point of view.<em> Intellectuals and Society</em> is accessible, witty, practical, brilliantly argued, and essential reading.  It’s sure to infuriate self-important elites.</p>
<p>In other words, it’s a typical Thomas Sowell book.</p>
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		<title>The Times Finds A Lone Crazed Assassin</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/peter-collier/the-times-finds-a-lone-crazed-assassin-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-times-finds-a-lone-crazed-assassin-2</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/peter-collier/the-times-finds-a-lone-crazed-assassin-2/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 22 Feb 2010 05:05:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Peter Collier]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[What the Grey Lady won't tell you about professor Amy Bishop.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/bishop1.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-51443" title="bishop" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/bishop1.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="347" /></a></p>
<p><strong>Visit <a href="http://www.newsrealblog.com/">Newsreal</a></strong><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/us/21bishop.html" target="_blank"><em></em></a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/us/21bishop.html" target="_blank"><em>The New York Times</em>’ front page profile</a> on Saturday of professor Amy Bishop, who allegedly executed three University of Alabama Biology Department colleagues after being denied tenure, appears to be an exhaustively reported piece based on “numerous interviews with colleagues and others who knew her.” It portrays Bishop as violent and unpredictable, rejected by Harvard because of mediocre work and shunned by a series of neighbors and co-workers scared off by the suppressed rage that kept bubbling up to the surfaces of her social life, and also someone who may already have gotten away with the murder of her brother years earlier possibly because of her mother’s political connections in her home town of Braintree, Mass.</p>
<div>
<p>“Between brilliance and rage” is the caption of the photo of Bishop used by the<em> Times</em> for the story, although the piece makes no case for the former.  But is this all the news that is fit to print about the perpetrator of this murder spree in academe?  What about the “family source” who told the Boston Herald that Bishop was,</p>
<blockquote><p>“<a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/guideDesc.asp?catid=144&amp;type=issue" target="_blank">a far left</a> political activist who was ‘obsessed’ with <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1511" target="_blank">President Obama</a> to the point of being off putting”?</p></blockquote>
<p>What about the student who called her a <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/guideDesc.asp?catid=115&amp;type=issue" target="_blank">“socialist”</a>? What about one report that Bishop complained about a rule issued by University  of Alabama administrators regarding underclassmen living on campus because she believed it was destructive of “diversity.”  And what about the crowning irony of this case, whether or not she made this complaint: that two of the colleagues she allegedly killed were black and one was South Asian, and that Bishop thus wiped out the 14 person Biology department’s entire diversity in one burst of gunfire?</p>
<p>Considering the politics of Bishop’s <em>ressentiment</em> might have helped fill out the Times’ portrait of a psychopathic time bomb who had already gone off several times in her disordered life on her way to the Big Explosion on February 12 in Huntsville. There is no doubt, as the blogosphere has already noted, that the paper would have pursued even the vaguest hint that Bishop had been a fan of Glenn Beck or was a Tea Party fellow traveler as a major story line. For the Grey Lady, only the politics of the Right is personal.</p>
</div>
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		<title>The Left&#8217;s Top 25 Journalists &#8211; The Daily Beast</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/david-swindle/the-lefts-top-25-journalists-the-daily-beast/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-lefts-top-25-journalists-the-daily-beast</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 19 Feb 2010 14:05:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Swindle]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Given that almost four times as many American journalists identify themselves as “liberal” than as “conservative” (thanks, Pew, for that little detail), our exercise in tagging the 25 most influential journalists who sit somewhere to the left of center on the political aisle was considerably more complex than the one last week in which we [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Given that almost four times as many American journalists identify themselves as “liberal” than as “conservative” (thanks, Pew, for that little detail), our exercise in tagging the 25 most influential journalists who sit somewhere to the left of center on the political aisle was considerably more complex than the one last week in which we identified the top 25 on the right. Classifying our journalists as being “on the left” protects us from being derailed by pesky questions of taxonomy—whether someone is “liberal,” “progressive” or “radical”—although everyone on this list could be said, plausibly, to belong to one of those categories. What unites them all, broadly, is their belief (expressed or implied) that “their side” is currently in power in Washington. The list below distills responses canvassed from about 75 academics, politicians, journalists, and denizens of corporate America.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-02-17/the-lefts-top-25-journalists" target="_blank">Read the whole thing at </a><em><a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-02-17/the-lefts-top-25-journalists" target="_blank">The Daily Beast</a></em><a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-02-17/the-lefts-top-25-journalists" target="_blank">.</a></p>
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		<title>Islamic Indoctrination vs. Education</title>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 18 Feb 2010 05:07:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Nonie Darwish]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Why are Islamist “guest speakers” brainwashing students at New York's Clarence High School?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/sharia.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-50694" title="sharia" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/sharia.jpg" alt="" width="590" height="364" /></a></p>
<p>Remember the Muslim Television executive, Muzzammil Hassan, who decapitated his wife near Buffalo, New York? His TV station, Bridges TV, was created to promote the idea that Islam is a religion of peace and friendship. This station’s goals perfectly fit with the intense Saudi PR machine, which is spending tons of money to change the image of Islam in the West &#8212; even if it takes denials, fabrications and outright lies.</p>
<p>Several years ago, I debated Othman Shibly, a U.S. citizen of Syrian origin and a Sharia expert, on a Bridges TV program directed by his son, Hassan Shibly. Both bearded men are fierce apologists for Radical Islam and defend Sharia. Dr. Shibly holds a Sufi/Radical Islamist ideology and hides behind a thin veneer of &#8220;moderate&#8221; Islam, but that façade does not fool someone like myself from the same background. The Shiblys make no attempt to repudiate the claims of men like Hizbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, or other radical Islamists like Sheikh Ahmad Kuftaro, the Mufti of the Syrian Ministry of Religion under the regimes of both Hafiz and Bashar Assad and Kuftaro’s protégé, Sheikh Rajab Deeb. My interview with the two men was never aired and the Shiblys never sent me a copy of the taped interview as they promised.</p>
<p>That brings me to an email I recently received from a concerned American mother, who said that she was horrified at what her child is being taught by Islamic guest speakers at her child’s high school, Clarence High School in Clarence, New York. The speakers are none other than Hassan and Othman Shibly, who are now lecturing our kids on Islam at New York state public schools. That is done with the help of politically correct apologist educators.</p>
<p>Under their curriculum on the Ancient World, the New York State public schools as well as many other states around the country, require students to be taught about Islam, the spread of Islam, the Golden Age of Islam and the conflict between Muslims and Christians as part of the Crusades. That topic almost always turns political and accusatory when Muslims get very emotional about their history, jihad and religion. Islam by nature is extremely political and promotes a very elaborate legal system that Muslims must live under. To accommodate Islamic education with Western principals of freedom and the Bill of Rights is an impossible task. The two ideologies are at opposite poles in terms of the role of government,  human rights, as well as women and minority rights.</p>
<p>Thus, the two systems must eventually become villains. To avoid being politically incorrect, public schools prefer to use Muslims experts or clerics rather than public school teachers to teach the topic of Islam. Our educational hierarchy refuses to see that many devout Muslim experts have a political agenda and are themselves indoctrinated and thus always on the defensive or offensive. I can only imagine what the poor American kids are subjected to. I was on the receiving end of such indoctrination when I was a young Muslim girl.</p>
<p>This is what the mother wrote to me:</p>
<blockquote><p>“Hello Mrs. Darwish:</p>
<p>I need your help addressing a serious problem I&#8217;m currently trying to handle. Recently, my child came home from school and told me about a presentation his Global Studies 9 class had that was given by a man by the name of Hassan Shibly. My child was shocked and visibly shaken at home and told me about the things this man said to the class. The pretext for the presentation was for Mr. Shibly to talk to the class about Islam and dispel some of the ‘misunderstandings’ and ‘Islamophobia.’ Here are some of the things he said to these boys and girls:<em></em></p>
<p><em>‘ The September 11</em><em><sup>th</sup></em><em> attacks occurred because of </em><em>America</em><em>’s blind support of </em><em>Israel</em><em> and the men who carried out the attack were not Muslims, but atheists.’</em></p>
<p><em>‘Terrorism is an example of people reacting with their hearts and not their minds…if someone insulted your mother, wouldn’t you retaliate against them? Allah is more important than anything to a Muslim, and if you insult Allah, a Muslim can do anything to defend his belief.’</em></p>
<p><em>‘The news media lie…when a Muslim does something, they’re labeled as a Muslim while people of other religions who commit crimes are never identified by their religion.’”</em></p></blockquote>
<p>She added that Hassan Shibly’s father, Othman, also came to speak at the school but to a different class. She expressed her outrage that these men were invited into a school to indoctrinate underage, impressionable minds with hate a filled ideology and a hidden agenda. She stated that she alerted the principal to a few links that show Shibly&#8217;s affiliations and added that she doesn&#8217;t think the principal is convinced. She concluded by saying that so far a decision has not been made whether to bring the Shilbys back to teach or not.</p>
<p>I was speechless after reading this woman’s e-mail. That is outrageous and what is worse is that I have heard similar claims from mothers in California where I live. I wanted to tell all the concerned mothers of America to stand up against this kind of “education” and never feel helpless. We must all speak out before the indoctrination strikes America at the heart. Perhaps this can be one of the causes of the Tea Party Movement. There are powerful forces trying to indoctrinate American children when it comes to Islam. Like I was as a Muslim kid, our kids are being discouraged and shamed from thinking for themselves when it comes to 9/11 or finding out the truth about Islamic terrorism. Their minds must never wander or, Allah forbid, blame Muslim culture or Islam for producing a never ending flow of terrorists.</p>
<p>Muslim propaganda is relentless in trying to misportray Islam in the eyes of the West. While mainstream mosques and Muslim leaders across the globe are shouting jihad, death to America, death to the Jews, and encouraging Muslims to take over the West, our children are told if you fear such threats you are an Islamophobe. When mainstream Muslim schools and universities teach that apostates must be killed and that jihad means <em>“to war with non-Muslims to establish the religion”</em> and that jihad is a permanent war institution against Jews Christians and pagans, we are told to never dare misinterpret this as encouraging violence. Islamic education, like communism and Fascism, must control children’s minds, which is the best system to produce adults who will submit.</p>
<p>I am not the one who compared Islam to communism and fascism; this comparison was made by none other than the most prominent Muslim scholar of the 20th century, Sheikh Abu Ala Maududi, who stated in his book, “Islamic Law and Constitution,” on p. 262, that the Islamic State:</p>
<blockquote><p>“<em>seeks to mould every aspect of life and activity…. In such a state no one can regard any field of his affairs as personal and private. Considered from this aspect the Islamic State bears a kind of resemblance to the Fascist and Communist states.” </em>Maududi added <em>“Islam wishes to destroy all states and governments anywhere on the face of the earth which are opposed to the ideology and program of Islam</em>.”</p></blockquote>
<p>I wonder if the Shiblys will condemn this popular Muslim scholar to their students or perhaps call him an atheist. <em> </em></p>
<p>Muslim petro-dollar powers have penetrated our educational system with permission and support from the highest levels of our governments. I cannot blame many teachers and school principles forced to teach this garbage and who are themselves subjected to demeaning sensitivity training on Islam. I blame the people on the top who are hell-bent on promoting Muslim propaganda with the blessings of Saudi Arabia.</p>
<p>If such propaganda continues, future generations in America will gradually become confused. They will doubt their instincts and their sense of good judgment will be weakened. Like the restless and confused populations of the Middle East, they will build tolerance to violence, extremism, hatred, discrimination, anti-Semitism and oppression of women and minorities.</p>
<p>Because of my background, I can smell and taste Muslim propaganda. It is coming to a school near you. The danger is, believe it or not, if you grow up with such propaganda, it can feel and sound normal and even holy. Intentionally or unintentionally, in the name of tolerance, we are bringing up a generation of Americans who will tolerate Islamic Jihad, in the name of cultural relativism and compassion.</p>
<p>Islamic tyranny, like all tyrannies, must use lies, propaganda and fabrications to justify the Muslim duty of jihadist violence to expand and conquer the world for Islam and Sharia. That is why the Arab world is having great difficulty in modifying its hate-filled educational system. Instead of changing, it is trying to change us and desensitize us to its violence.</p>
<p>If this is not immediately corrected, it will be one of the biggest mistakes in American history. What Mr. Shibly was teaching our kids is outright Arab propaganda justifying jihad, 9/11, retaliation as self-defense, and conspiracy theories against Israel. How monumentally foolish and dangerous it is to allow the likes of the Shiblys to have access to American high school kids.</p>
<p><em>Nonie Darwish is the co-founder of <a href="http://www.formermuslimsunited.com/" target="_blank">FormerMuslimsUnited.com</a> and the author of <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Cruel-Usual-Punishment-Terrifying-Implications/dp/1595551611">Cruel and Usual Punishment</a></em>.</em></p>
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		<title>Rashad Hussain’s Samigate</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/robert-spencer/rashad-hussain%e2%80%99s-samigate/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=rashad-hussain%25e2%2580%2599s-samigate</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 17 Feb 2010 05:05:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Robert Spencer]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[An Obama appointee’s defense of jihad leader Sami al-Arian is covered up.]]></description>
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<p>Someone is covering up for Rashad Hussain. But who?</p>
<p>And what did Barack Obama know, and when did he know it?</p>
<p>Rashad Hussain is the Obama administration’s newly appointed special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), the thuggish international organization that is engaged in a full-scale campaign to intimidate Western governments into adopting hate speech codes that will effectively quash criticism of Islam – including jihad violence perpetrated in its name. Rashad Hussain is an apposite choice for this position, since several years ago he defended a notorious U.S.-based leader of a jihad terrorist group.</p>
<p>But someone doesn’t want you to know that, and made a clumsy attempt to cover it up.</p>
<p>In 2004, Rashad Hussain, then a Yale law student, declared that the investigation and prosecution of University   of South Florida professor Sami al-Arian, who ultimately pled guilty to charges involving his activities as a leader of the terror group Palestinian Islamic Jihad, was a “politically motivated persecution” designed “to squash dissent.”</p>
<p>Journalist Patrick Goodenough of Cybercast News Service reports that Hussain’s remarks in support of Al-Arian were published in the jihad-enabling <em>Washington Report on Middle East Affairs</em> in November 2004. But now all that has gone down the memory hole. The <em>Washington Report</em>’s archived version of this November 2004 article lacks two paragraphs that were included in the original version: the ones quoting Rashad Hussain. Otherwise the article is unchanged.</p>
<p>The <em>Washington Report</em> editors, caught red-handed, decided to brazen it out, and blame their accusers – a tried-and-true tactic that is also frequently employed by jihadists in the West. They insist that there was no cover-up, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a venomous Islamophobe: according to Goodenough, “WRMEA news editor and executive director Delinda Hanley denied there was a ‘cover-up,’ and implied that anti-Muslim discrimination was behind the fact this was now being raised.”</p>
<p>Sure. It’s just “anti-Muslim discrimination” to be concerned about Rashad Hussain’s support for Al-Arian, a vicious suicide-bombing supporter who chanted “Death to America” and “Death to Israel,” and clearly meant it. When two Islamic Jihad suicide bombers killed eighteen people in Israel in 1995, Al-Arian called them “two mujahidin martyred for the sake of God.”</p>
<p>But there was no cover-up! It was all a mistake, you see: according to the <em>Washington Report</em> now, Sami Al-Arian’s daughter, Laila Al-Arian, actually said the words that were attributed to Rashad Hussain.</p>
<p>But this explanation doesn’t make sense, since the article was altered just to remove the quotes, not to change the name of the person quoted. Also, the author of the original story, Shereen Kandil, contradicts the <em>Washington</em><em> Report’s</em> explanation, telling Goodenough:</p>
<blockquote><p>“When I worked as a reporter at WRMEA, I understood how important it was to quote the right person, and accurately. I have never mixed my sources and wouldn’t have quoted Rashad Hussain if it came from Laila al-Arian. If the editors from WRMEA felt they wanted to remove Rashad Hussain from the article, my assumption is that they did it for reasons other than what you’re saying. They never once contacted me about an ‘error’ they claim I made.’”</p></blockquote>
<p>Was the <em>Washington Report</em> covering for Rashad Hussain at its own discretion, or at the behest of someone else? Did Barack Obama himself know about this cover-up? Did  someone in the White House or the State Department find out about Hussain’s defense of Al-Arian, and act to cover for the bright young special envoy before this defense was discovered and he became known as a terror apologist?</p>
<p>Or is the Obama Administration wholly uninvolved – and unaware of the fact that the President has chosen as an envoy to the world’s leading organization of Islamic states a man who has openly declared his support for an admitted leader of a jihad terror group? Alternatively, is Hussain’s disdain for the war on terror and support for Al-Arian precisely what Obama thought might make him appealing to the OIC? In 2007 Hussain declared that federal law should prohibit “the targeting of non-citizens solely on the basis of their racial, religious, or ethnic backgrounds.” In other words, airport security officials should keep on pretending that eighty-year-old Iowa grandmothers present just as much of a terror risk as do young Muslim males. It’s an outrage to common sense and a waste of resources, but it pleases Barack Obama, Rashad Hussain, and the Islamic countries to which the Administration is so desperately and fruitlessly reaching out.</p>
<p>Whoever is covering up for Rashad Hussain should come clean. And in the process, Obama should reevaluate the wisdom of sending a man like Hussain, with the views that he holds, to an organization such as the OIC – as should question whether he should really be sending an envoy to the OIC in the first place.</p>
<p>But Obama is in far too deep for that.</p>
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		<title>A Soundbite (on Howard Zinn) Heard Round the World</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/david-horowitz/a-soundbite-on-howard-zinn-heard-round-the-world-3/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-soundbite-on-howard-zinn-heard-round-the-world-3</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 12 Feb 2010 06:35:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Horowitz]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=50079</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[One critical voice unleashes the Left's totalitarian attack dogs. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/alterman-300x2251.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-50080" title="alterman-300x225" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/alterman-300x2251.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="338" /></a></p>
<p>I knew when I responded to an NPR request for a comment on the late, unlamented <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=939" target="_blank">Howard Zinn</a> that I was asking for trouble — from the anti-American, Marxoid, neo-Communist left.  But I did it anyway because Howard Zinn’s life was so <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=939" target="_blank">dedicated to evil and specifically to the support of mass murderers and self-declared enemies of his country</a>, that someone with a brain unfogged by leftwing claptrap had to do it. As it turned out, if I had not contributed my soundbite it would have been left to <a title="Noam Chomsky" href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1232" target="_blank">depraved</a> <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=642" target="_blank">radicals</a> — in this case <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1232" target="_blank">Noam Chomsky</a> and <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=642" target="_blank">Julian Bond</a> — to promote Zinn’s malevolent work to an NPR audience of millions. I was somewhat surprised that the leftists at NPR turned to me since I have been effectively erased as a public intellectual from their airwaves along with a legion of other non-progressives.</p>
<p>Only one of my books, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Radical-Son-Generational-David-Horowitz/dp/0684840057/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1265996107&amp;sr=8-1" target="_blank"><em>Radical Son</em></a>, has ever enjoyed five minutes of airtime attention on NPR. Oh — there is an exception. Before I voted for Ronald Reagan — or made the vote public — I was indeed a guest on “Fresh Air” to talk about <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Kennedys-American-Drama-Peter-Collier/dp/0671447939/ref=sr_1_11?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1265996150&amp;sr=8-11" target="_blank"><em>The Kennedys</em></a>, which I co-authored with Peter Collier. Although it is a book show and I have written more than a dozen well-received books since, the show has studiously avoided recognizing my existence; that is, for 25 years.</p>
<p>So this 30-second appearance was a rarity and came as a surprise to me. But evidently one 30-second appearance is too much for the totalitarians of the progressive left who have predictably launched an organized harassment campaign against the reporter who interviewed me and her boss. The <a href="http://mediamatters.org/blog/201002040038" target="_blank">smear crowds</a> at <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=7150" target="_blank">Media Matters</a> and <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=7092" target="_blank">FAIR</a> have been hard at work ginning up the Pavlovian attack dogs to make the lives of NPR employees as miserable as they can.  These witch-hunts by the way are intimidating and effective. We’ll see how soon before NPR asks my opinion again.</p>
<p>Among the <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualprofile.asp?indid=1312" target="_blank">witch-hunters</a>, <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualprofile.asp?indid=1312" target="_blank">Eric Alterman</a>, as usual, <a href="http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100301/alterman">provides the most amusement</a>, complaining that I was not “qualified” to make a comment on Zinn:</p>
<blockquote><p>“Horowitz, on the other hand, does not claim to have known Zinn personally, and shares neither his goals nor views. He has no specialized knowledge of Zinn whatsoever. The single qualification that David Horowitz possessed to be included in the piece on Zinn’s obituary was that he could be depended upon to be deeply critical of the deceased.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Actually, I am eminently qualified to comment on Zinn, having written a portrait of him and his writings in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Unholy-Alliance-Radical-Islam-American/dp/0895260263/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1265996375&amp;sr=8-2" target="_blank"><em>Unholy Alliance</em></a>, and having devoted hundreds of thousands of words to my area of expertise, which is the <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/guideDesc.asp?catid=115&amp;type=issue" target="_blank">Communist</a> and neo-Communist left. Alterman, on the other hand, is himself something of an impostor, having secured a sinecure as the “Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College.” If there was to be a single testimony to <a title="One-Party Classroom" href="http://www.amazon.com/One-Party-Classroom-Professors-Indoctrinate-Undermine/dp/0307452557/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1265997816&amp;sr=8-1" target="_blank">the debasement of the American university by tenured leftists</a> this could be a candidate, since Alterman has no discernible literary interest, let alone expertise, that would qualify him for such a position. (<a href="http://www.ericalterman.com/" target="_blank">Alterman’s degrees</a> are in government, history, and international relations.) In fact, since <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Shakespeare-existential-view-David-Horowitz/dp/B00005XVOO/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1265996488&amp;sr=8-1" target="_blank">I have written a book about Shakespeare</a> I am more prepared to teach English than he is. However, I lack the principal qualification for a post in the English Department at Brooklyn College, since I am not a brain-dead, anti-American leftist.</p>
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		<title>Endangering Lives to Sell Newspapers</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/alan-m-dershowitz/endangering-lives-to-sell-newspapers/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=endangering-lives-to-sell-newspapers</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 12 Feb 2010 05:05:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Alan M. Dershowitz]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=49647</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How some Israeli and American Jewish media incite violence.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/goldstone-043009.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-49980" title="goldstone-043009" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/goldstone-043009.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="314" /></a></p>
<p>It all began with an innocent enough request for an interview about the Goldstone report and my <a href="http://www.alandershowitz.com/goldstone.pdf">49 page response</a> to it. The Israeli Army radio station asked to interview me.  The interview was conducted by an experienced host, Razi Barkai.  Unbeknownst to me, Barkai had an agenda.  He wanted to get me to say that I thought that Goldstone was a “moser.”  He wanted me to use this Hebrew word, whose meaning I did not understand, because in Israel, this obscure theological term has taken on a meaning of its own.  According to The Forward, “the term moser entered Israeli political discourse in 1995 in the wake of Rabin’s assassination by radical settler supporter Yigal Amir, when Amir cited some rabbis’ designation of Rabin as a moser as part of his justification for carrying out the murder.”  The Forward quoted Michael Karpin, an Israeli journalist and the author of a book on Rabin’s assassination, as follows: “After the assassination, when Amir was interviewed by the police and he mentioned the term moser, people tried to find out what it is…Nobody used it here before the assassination.”</p>
<p>Unfortunately, I was totally unfamiliar with the “inside baseball”—or in this case “inside Israel”—use of this esoteric term.</p>
<p>Several times during the interview, Barkai tried to get me to agree that Goldstone was a moser, a word he pronounced with a thick accent.  Since the interview was being conducted in English, I thought he was asking me to agree with him that Goldstone was a “monster.”  I would never use the term “monster” since it suggests an inherent, even genetic, flaw in a person, without regard to what he has said or done.  I was clear throughout my interview that I believed that Goldstone had exploited his Jewishness to lend illegitimate credibility <a href="http://cgis.jpost.com/Blogs/dershowitz/entry/arguments_ad_hominem_in_defense">to a false report</a>. In this respect, he had betrayed his people and deserved to be condemned in the marketplace of ideas.  Accordingly, when Barkai asked me the following question, “Do you hint, Professor, that he is a moser, someone who betrays his own people?,”  I focused on the part of the question I understood.  Believing that he is someone who betrays his own people, I answered the question in the affirmative.  Barkai had sprung the trap.  Now he had me.  He could send out press releases indicating that I had called Goldstone a moser, even though I never used the word and had no idea what it meant.</p>
<p>The story spread quickly around the world, and I was condemned, largely by the extreme left, for advocating Goldstone’s murder.  As soon as I heard this, I immediately demanded a clarification from Barkai, which he ran on the air.  I repeatedly emphasized, in subsequent interviews, that “I certainly did not mean to imply that any physical harm should come to Goldstone.”  But this didn’t stop the incitement by those in the media more interested in sensationalism than truth.</p>
<p>M.J. Rosenberg, the former Director of Policy Analysis for Israel Policy Forum, wrote in his Palestine Note blog that I was “calling for Goldstone’s murder.”  Even more insidiously, the Forward, a mainstream Jewish newspaper, ran a lengthy piece strongly implying that I must have known the theological (or “Halachic”) implications of “moser.”  They went so far as to find an elementary school classmate at Etz Chayim Yeshiva in Boro Park who told them, quite erroneously, that I “must have heard it as a child.”  (Another classmate wrote the Forward a letter confirming that he too had never heard it—and he was a <span style="text-decoration: underline;">good</span> Yeshiva student!)  The Forward then went on to quote another rabbi to the effect that “a moser can become a capital crime” under certain circumstances.  At the very bottom of the article, so as not to detract from its sensationalism, the Forward included the following disclaimer:</p>
<p>“I do not want any harm to come to Richard Goldstone,” Dershowitz said.  “I want him to be responded to in the marketplace of ideas.”</p>
<p>An article in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency by Ron Kampares was even more irresponsible.  It “reported” the following:</p>
<p>“Most recently, Alan Dershowitz likened him to a “moser”, a Jewish traitor deemed in some interpretations as worthy of a death sentence.”</p>
<p>This was written days <span style="text-decoration: underline;">after</span> I had made it clear that I wanted no harm to befall Goldstone.  A response to the JTA article by Debra DeLee, President and CEO of Americans For Peace Now, accused me—also days after I made my position clear—of calling Goldstone a “moser,” which she said is “a term reserved in traditional Jewish law for a Jewish traitor who should be killed.”</p>
<p>She also showed her ignorance of the fact that I had written a 49 page substantive response to the Goldstone report, by saying that I “could have—and should have—aired substantive disagreements about the report that Judge Goldstone authored following the Gaza War.”</p>
<p>Finally, a columnist for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz (Bradley Burston) described me as “Kahane-sounding,” a reference for the radical rabbi who did in fact call for violence—as contrasted for my call for peace based on a two-state solution and the end of civilian settlements.  But no matter, its sells newspapers.</p>
<p>It’s bad enough that there are some religious extremists on both sides who actually incite their followers to commit violence.  But when elements of the mainstream Israeli and Jewish media twist the truth in the interest of sensationalism to imply—or state outright—that I am calling for the murder of Richard Goldstone, it is those irresponsible members of the media (and of Americans For Peace Now) who become the inciters.</p>
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		<title>Paying Tribute to Terror</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/rich-trzupek/paying-tribute-to-terror/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=paying-tribute-to-terror</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/rich-trzupek/paying-tribute-to-terror/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 11 Feb 2010 05:00:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Rich Trzupek]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Why the United States cannot buy off the Islamic fanatics of the Taliban.  ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/child_suicide_bomber.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-49545" title="child_suicide_bomber" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/child_suicide_bomber-300x209.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="209" /></a></p>
<p>It has been widely reported, <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/78351-report-plan-being-considered-to-buy-off-taliban-for-1b-or-so">most recently by Al-Jazeera</a>, that the Obama administration and the British government have been contemplating paying off “moderate” elements of the Taliban in Afghanistan – to the tune of perhaps one billion dollars – as a means of pacifying resistance in that troubled nation. That proudly defiant American slogan, “millions for defense, but not one penny for tribute,” which traces its roots to the eighteenth century, would fall to the wayside if this attempt at appeasement turns into public policy.</p>
<p>The idea that “moderate” Islamic terrorists exist and that their loyalties can be bought are central concepts to the philosophical construct that Obama has brings to the war on terror. The President naively believes that the majority of Muslim terrorists are misunderstood, disenfranchised freedom fighters who want nothing more than to take control of their lives and prosper. A billion dollars or so will go a long way, in Obama’s view, toward helping them organize their communities in a peaceful, loving way.</p>
<p>The reality behind the fanatic, ultra-fundamentalist mindset that guides the Taliban has been revealed time and time again. <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8499578.stm">This disturbing BBC interview</a> of a thirteen year old Pakistani girl named Meena is another reminder of the true nature of the Taliban, and the way that fundamentalist Muslims treat women in general.</p>
<p>At one point, Meena described how her family turned her nine-year-old sister Nahida into a suicide bomber:</p>
<blockquote><p>“They attached a bomb to my sister Nahida. They tied rectangular pieces to both her arms, and a black strip was wrapped around both her legs. Then they connected the whole thing. She told my brother the bomb was heavy and she could not walk. He said she would be comfortable once she was sitting down in the car. They gave her medicine. But she was crying very loud for my mother. She kept going to her and hugging her. When my sister looked down at the bomb, she shivered. Then my brother and my father started beating my mother, and they were shouting: ‘Why you are distracting the girl from her mission?’ I heard my sister saying: ‘Where is Meena? I want to see her.’ But I didn&#8217;t have the strength. My heart couldn&#8217;t take it.</p>
<p>My mother fainted when they put her in the car. My brother said my sister&#8217;s attack was in Afghanistan.</p>
<p>I always think about my sister. She was healthy and a very nice girl. She was younger than me, but she was wiser. My mother used to tell me that I was an idiot, but she was very wise.”</p></blockquote>
<p>No doubt that someone, probably claiming to be an American who has lived in the Arab world for at least a decade, will deny that this sort of thing could ever happen. We see that all of the time, at <em>Front Page</em> and other sites that dare to point out the horrors that accompany strict adherence to Islamic teachings.</p>
<p>These sorts of denials should come as no surprise. The Quran expressly allows <a href="http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/Quran/011-taqiyya.htm">Muslims to lie to non-Muslims</a> whenever they can advance the teachings of the prophet Muhammad through the use of such deceptions. Muslim apologists can lie through their teeth about this sort of evil, but there are far too many examples of it for people who cherish liberty to ignore.</p>
<p>Which brings us back to the Taliban. You can’t pay someone off to abandon an ideology this evil and deluded. Does anyone believe that we can purchase the loyalties of people who think that they are fulfilling the “will of God” by strapping high-explosives to a nine-year-old girl, drugging her and sending her on a mission to blow herself up? Why on earth would anyone want to? The west is at war with an ideology, not impoverished, deluded freedom fighters who would abandon their evil ideas if only they could afford a big screen TV.</p>
<p>From painful experience, we know what happens when you try to appease evil fanatics. The fanatics make promises that they don’t intend to keep, wait a while, and then go back to work on their agenda. Dropping a billion dollars on the “moderate Taliban” in Afghanistan would amount to nothing more than providing terrorists with a grant that will cheerfully put to the worst use possible.</p>
<p>Ideas like this are an insult to our men and women in uniform on the front lines in Afghanistan and will ultimately place them in greater danger. Worse, trying to pay off terrorists makes it more likely, not less, that more fanatic Muslim fathers are going to be able to get their hands on enough C-4 to turn nine year old girls into bombs.</p>
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		<title>The New Attack on Palin? Associate Her with John Edwards</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/petercollier/the-new-attack-on-palin-associate-her-with-john-edwards-3/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-new-attack-on-palin-associate-her-with-john-edwards-3</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 08 Feb 2010 05:11:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Peter Collier]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[The obsessive attacks on Palin take yet another morbid turn. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/palin.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-48953" title="palin" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/palin-300x188.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="188" /></a></p>
<p>Wednesday, February 3, 2010, marked a new turn in the obsessive attacks on Sarah Palin: associating  her with <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=631" target="_blank">John Edwards</a>.</p>
<p>In the <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/03/grifters-tale/" target="_blank"><em>New York Times</em></a> Timothy Egan sees them as a pair of ethically similar “grifters” using populism to con the American voter–“playing to outrage while taking care of themselves.” In Egan’s view, both ginned up and profited from fears among a broad segment of the public who increasingly resent the success and power of the elites and feel that “America is passing them by.”</p>
<p>Edwards did this an arrant fashion by tearing the labels off his Armani suits and driving someone else’s clunker to rallies where he preached his blow-dried version of class warfare.  Now Palin is doing the same thing, Egan believes, by “charging Tea Partiers $100,000 to stoke their fears.”  (Yes, she has promised to plow her take back into “the cause,” but Egan assumes that she is a cynic whose only cause is herself.)</p>
<p>The comparison between the pair is asymmetrical and tendentious.  Egan doesn’t consider Edwards’ banality of evil—notably the lying treachery committed against wife and family, and friends and supporters.  But while  Palin’s failings, notably her “incoherence” and her lack of response to Glenn Beck when he asked about her favorite founding father, are not in any way equivalent to Edwards’ evil, they are more fully explored. It’s clear by the end of his piece that Egan isn’t really comparing the two at all, but using Edwards’ nastiness to make Palin seem sleazy by association.</p>
<p>Andrew Sullivan posted a nuttier but more interesting piece on Palin   and Edwards on his blog on thursday   titled <a href="http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/02/my-john-edwards-failure.html" target="_blank">“My John Edwards Failure.”</a></p>
<p>He begins by acknowledging that he committed a double standard treating Palin harshly and giving a pass to Edwards.  But then he immediately reassures the reader that this doesn’t mean he is “backtracking” on Palin.  In fact, says Sullivan,</p>
<blockquote><p>“All I regret is not being  able to expose her for real yet.”</p></blockquote>
<p>A surprising admission of failure by someone who has spent the last year and a half obsessing on her private parts, producing sick innuendoes about her family, and licking his chops over the dull normal baby daddy, Levi Johnston, and the big revelation he’s supposedly getting ready to deliver. Hasn’t he run her to ground yet? What more could Sullivan have done to her after months of subjecting her to the blog equivalent of waterboarding?</p>
<p>In the rest of his post—about his deficiencies is not getting  the Edwards story—he cultivates a weepy tone while making a very big deal out of an inessential disclosure.  He ignored the Edwards story, he says, because of his “leeriness of investigating people’s sex lives” (obviously he made an exception in Palin’s case).  Then he grandiosely struts his “sensitivity” by saying that he also “felt protective toward Elizabeth” whom he didn’t want to hurt at a time when she was “faced with mortality” and that he grieved over her loss of a child.</p>
<p>The bottom line is that he made a mistake “in making an assumption of a baseline of decency in public officials” and won’t do it again. Of course this assumption never did apply to Palin whom Sullivan has been lighting up—especially on the circumstances of Trig’s birth–during all those months when he was studiously ignoring Edwards.</p>
<p>What we can take away from this jive confession is that Sullivan will feel it his duty to concentrate his fire even more fiercely on Palin now that he has “learned” from his kid glove treatment of Edwards.</p>
<p>As if he needed a justification to continue this loony quest.</p>
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		<title>Rep. Paul Ryan clashes with Obama over budget &#8211; washingtonpost.com</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/rep-paul-ryan-clashes-with-obama-over-budget-washingtonpost-com/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=rep-paul-ryan-clashes-with-obama-over-budget-washingtonpost-com</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 08 Feb 2010 03:56:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=49252</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Rep. Paul D. Ryan says he is determined to make sure the Republican Party is viewed as &#8220;the alternative party, not the opposition party.&#8221; That is a goal President Obama embraced when he visited House Republicans at their policy retreat in Baltimore last week, and he singled out Ryan as someone he would like to [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Rep. Paul D. Ryan says he is determined to make sure the Republican Party is viewed as &#8220;the alternative party, not the opposition party.&#8221;</p>
<p>That is a goal <a href="http://www.whorunsgov.com/Profiles/Barack_Obama">President Obama</a> embraced when he visited House Republicans at their policy retreat in Baltimore last week, and he singled out Ryan as someone he would like to work with &#8212; even mentioning budget legislation the Wisconsin Republican co-wrote.</p>
<p>Released two days before the unusual back-and-forth session between Obama and the GOP, the bill sponsored by Ryan and five other House members would seek to reduce the deficit and spur economic growth by cutting the tax rate on corporations, shifting future Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries to private insurance plans, and both raising the retirement age gradually to 70 and reducing the growth of benefits to make Social Security solvent. Even Democrats have acknowledged that it is one of the few plans offered by a member of either party that would lower the long-term budget deficit.</p>
<p>via <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/04/AR2010020404238.html">Republican lawmaker&#8217;s budget plan gets Obama&#8217;s attention &#8211; washingtonpost.com</a>.</p>
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		<title>Unholy Alliance: Zinn, Chomsky, Bin Laden</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/petercollier/unholy-alliance-zinn-chomsky-bin-laden/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=unholy-alliance-zinn-chomsky-bin-laden</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/petercollier/unholy-alliance-zinn-chomsky-bin-laden/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 03 Feb 2010 05:08:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Peter Collier]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=48535</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The ties that bind two leftist ideologues and an arch terrorist.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-48609" title="zinnch" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/zinnch.gif" alt="zinnch" width="450" height="356" /></p>
<p>Every so often we experience what Jung called synchronicity—the sudden perception of a possibly meaningful pattern in apparently unrelated events. I had one of these moments myself last week.</p>
<p>The first element was the passing of <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=939" target="_blank">Howard Zinn</a>.  I believe as much as the next guy that every man’s death diminishes me, but to be honest, in this case I was hard pressed to feel a sense of loss.  <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/Articles/Matt%20Damon%20Rewords%20US%20History.html" target="_blank">Matt Damon</a> might regard him as Parkman’s equal, but in truth Zinn was <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=939" target="_blank">a savage parody of a historian</a>, one of those radical hacks whose every word subtracts from the sum total of human knowledge.The best and worst that can be said of his <em>People’s History of the United States</em> is that it has benumbed the faculties of many young people over the last couple of decades. It is perhaps the best example in recent years of the way in which some of the fecal matter thrown onto the wall of our intellectual culture not only sticks but becomes a lasting act of defacement.</p>
<p>In checking out the obits on the internet, I ran into <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1692" target="_blank">Amy Goodman’s</a> tribute to Zinn at <a href="http://democracynow.org/" target="_blank">democracynow.org</a>.  She interviewed by telephone <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2001" target="_blank">Alice Walker</a>, <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2131" target="_blank">Naomi Klein</a> and <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1232" target="_blank">Noam Chomsky</a>. Predictably, all three remembered Zinn as a rebel truth teller to the end, someone whose passing embodied the kitschy defiance of Joe Hill’s last words: “Don’t mourn, organize.”  But the Chomsky’s interview appeared to have a little something more.</p>
<p>To digress for a moment, I should say that while <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Anti-Chomsky-Reader-Peter-Collier/dp/189355497X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1265065908&amp;sr=8-1" target="_blank">many of my friends have tried to deconstruct the complex intellectual pathology</a> behind Chomsky’s<a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1232" target="_blank"> lifelong effort to affirm the transcendent evil of America</a>, I’ve always thought of him simply as someone with a truth problem—not only in what he says but even more in what he says about what he has said.  He associated himself with a rancid group of French Holocaust deniers, for instance, but when called on it claimed he was only defending their rights to free speech. Long after the fact, he continued to supply backup for <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1998" target="_blank">Pol Pot’</a>s <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1998" target="_blank">genocide in Cambodia</a>, but when called on this, he said that his detractors were just a bunch of neo-Nazis out to get him (a compartmentalized response that ignores his support for exactly such neo-Nazis in the Holocaust denial matter.)</p>
<p>When it comes to the truth, in other words, Noam Chomsky is slipperier than a whole school of fish.  Lying for him is an art form, a squid’s ink which he emits and then uses as cover to escape from responsibility for what he has just said.</p>
<p>Even so, it was a shock to see Chomsky’s response when Goodman asked him about Zinn’s 1967 book <em>The Logic of Withdrawal</em>. Chomsky replied that it was brilliant and that Zinn, because the reviewing establishment was ignoring it, asked him to write about it in <em>Ramparts</em>, which he did. According to the transcript of the interview on Goodman’s website, Chomsky went on to describe Ramparts as “a left wing journal I was running then.”  (<a href="http://www.democracynow.org/2010/1/28/howard_zinn_1922_2010_a_tribute" target="_blank">See here.</a>)</p>
<p>Chomsky never “ran” Ramparts. He was a distant voice in the years I was an editor at this premier magazine of the <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=118" target="_blank">New Left</a>–someone a coast away who tended to repeat over and over again criticisms he initially made in the New York Review of Books of the intellectual elite that ran the Vietnam War. My strongest memory of him is from 1967. I solicited an article more or less on what had become his standard topic.  It arrived poorly written and requiring considerable work. Because he didn’t like the changes I made, Chomsky told me that he would never again write for <em>Ramparts</em> and in fact did not for several years. (I recently reviewed the <em>Ramparts</em> experience <a href="http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Life-along-the--Ramparts--4371" target="_blank">here</a>.)</p>
<p>Claiming to have run a publication that kept him at arm’s length would have been an odd lie, even for a mendacity addict like Chomsky. My colleague David Swindle found a <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/dn2010-0128" target="_blank">link to the audio of the Goodman show</a>.<a href="http://www.archive.org/details/dn2010-0128" target="_blank"></a> I listened to it and Chomsky appears actually to have said “a left wing magazine that was running then,” without the “I.”  Vile phrasing for someone who is accounted to be an expert in language, but not the bald faced lie that the printed transcript suggests and not the synecdoche that it first appeared for the body of lies which comprises Chomsky’s oeuvre since the ’60s.</p>
<p>But back to the rush of synchronicity I alluded to above. It came a day after the Goodman interview, when <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=690" target="_blank">Osama bin Laden</a> spoke up from whatever dreary cave in which he is presently immured.  After attacking the Great Satan for causing climate change in a diatribe that called up a possible <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1939" target="_blank">Jon Stewart</a> monologue (“…the arch terrorist provided a kiss of death for global warming theory today by offering his unqualified support for it just as <a href="http://www.newsrealblog.com/?s=climategate" target="_blank">the East Anglia Climategate</a> was calling the whole deal into question…”), bin Laden got down to the business of blackguarding America as a global terror state.  And who did he cite as proof for this theorem? None other than Chomsky himself.  Bin Laden had praised him two years earlier for showing how public opinion is <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Manufacturing-Consent-Noam-Chomsky-Media/dp/B00005Y726/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&amp;s=dvd&amp;qid=1265066608&amp;sr=8-3" target="_blank">“manufactured”</a> by decadent democracies; now he gave it up again for his hero: “Noam Chomsky was correct when he compared the U.S. polices to those of the Mafia.”</p>
<p>Bin Laden, Zinn, and Chomsky. How synchronous their harmonies.  How collaborative the ideas in their weave.  How much they deserve each other.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
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		<title>Andrew C. McCarthy: The Attorney and the General &#8211; National Review Online</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/andrew-c-mccarthy-the-attorney-and-the-general-national-review-online/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=andrew-c-mccarthy-the-attorney-and-the-general-national-review-online</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:12:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=48532</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Michael Hayden, the former CIA director, penned a superb op-ed in the Washington Post on Sunday. Succinctly, he tallies the wages of having Attorney General Eric Holder make national-security decisions. Unlike the attorney general, Hayden is a real general, and very much worth heeding. He shows that these decisions have been premised on left-wing political [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Michael Hayden, the former CIA director, penned a superb op-ed in the Washington Post on Sunday. Succinctly, he tallies the wages of having Attorney General Eric Holder make national-security decisions. Unlike the attorney general, Hayden is a real general, and very much worth heeding. He shows that these decisions have been premised on left-wing political calculations that always shortchange intelligence collection and the pursuit of American interests. Holder’s judgments are not based on what America’s safety requires or on what the law maximally permits U.S. intelligence to do in wartime.</p>
<p>As Hayden points out, the policy decisions that President Obama has allowed Holder to make are significant — not only taken one by one, but in their cumulative effect on the ethos of our intelligence agencies. “Intelligence officers,” he writes, “need to know that someone has their back.” After Holder forced the release in April of classified memos prepared by Bush Justice Department lawyers, laying out interrogation tactics and the legal rationale for permitting them, “CIA officers began to ask whether the people doing things that were currently authorized would be dragged through this kind of public knothole in five years. No one could guarantee that they would not.”</p>
<p>The paralysis wrought by this decision transcends the narrow subject of interrogations. All intelligence collection is infected. If you can’t/don’t collect intelligence in a war against a secretive, transnational jihadist network, you stand to lose — and a lot of Americans stand to die. Thus, Hayden concludes, “Some may celebrate that the current Justice Department’s perspective on the war on terrorism has become markedly more dominant in the past year. We should probably understand the implications of that before we break out the champagne.”</p>
<p>via <a href="http://article.nationalreview.com/423597/the-attorney-and-the-general/andrew-c-mccarthy">The Attorney and the General &#8211; Andrew C. McCarthy &#8211; National Review Online</a>.</p>
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		<title>The State Of The Union Address Obama Should Give</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/frontpagemag-com/the-state-of-the-union-address-obama-should-give/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-state-of-the-union-address-obama-should-give</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/frontpagemag-com/the-state-of-the-union-address-obama-should-give/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 27 Jan 2010 05:22:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=47772</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A Frontpage symposium on the president’s big speech. 
]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-47773" title="eng_obama_GB_BM_Bay_760520g" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/eng_obama_GB_BM_Bay_760520g.jpg" alt="eng_obama_GB_BM_Bay_760520g" width="480" height="320" /></p>
<p>In a culmination of his controversial first year in office, President Obama will deliver the State of the Union address this evening. <em>Front Page</em> magazine turned to a panel of experts for their advice on the speech that the president should give and the political priorities that he must address in 2010. &#8212; <em>The Editors</em></p>
<p><strong>Brian Riedl</strong></p>
<p>Life After Debt</p>
<p>New budget estimates show that – under current policies – the national debt would triple to $22 trillion over the next decade. This additional debt, which is overwhelmingly driven by rising spending, would total $130,000 per household.</p>
<p>In a perfect world, President Obama would announce:</p>
<p>1) specific reforms to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid</p>
<p>2) a repeal of TARP and the stimulus</p>
<p>3) a plan to devolve much of the federal government to the state and local governments closer to the people they serve</p>
<p>4) an abandonment of his massive health care bill.</p>
<p>Alas, this is not going to happen.</p>
<p>Perhaps more realistically, the President should back up his proposed three-year freeze on some discretionary spending with statutory spending caps – and promise to veto any spending that exceeds the cap. He should follow a bipartisan recommendation to take Social Medicare, Medicare, and Medicaid spending off autopilot, and force Congress to budget for these programs. He should restore his campaign promises to reduce earmarks down to 1994 levels, scour the federal budget line-by-line for wasteful spending, and produce a health plan that truly bends the cost curve downward.</p>
<p><em>Brian Riedl is a Senior Policy Analyst and Grover Hermann Fellow in Federal Budgetary Affairs at The Heritage Foundation.</em></p>
<p><strong>David Horowitz </strong></p>
<p>Nowhere Left to Turn</p>
<p>In my view, the problem for Obama is that no matter what he says, no one&#8217;s going to believe him &#8212; not the right, not the left, not the center. In a year in office has acquired a massive credibility problem, which is not helped by the way by his overexposure. Consider his problem. To go forward with his leftist agenda is political suicide as every poll since August has shown. But what will he gain if he tacks right? He will further alienate his base but will he persuade any conservatives that he is not an incompetent menace? Or reassure the independents who have deserted him that he just made a mistake, and is not fundamentally dishonest (which even <em>Newsweek</em>’s Evan Thomas, who recently thought of him as a &#8220;<a href="http://newsbusters.org/blogs/kyle-drennen/2009/06/05/newsweek-s-evan-thomas-obama-sort-god">God</a>,&#8221; now believes) and not to be trusted? I almost think it would be better for him to skip the State of the Union, and spend the evening firing most of the people around him, which would be the first step in convincing everybody that he&#8217;s serious about changing course.</p>
<p><em>David Horowitz is editor-in-chief of</em> Front Page <em>magazine, the author of numerous books, and the president and founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.</em></p>
<p><strong>Peter Collier </strong></p>
<p>A Teachable Moment</p>
<p>I&#8217;d like to hear Obama say that he is going to go back to the drawing boards with health care and will work consensually to solve this complex problem incrementally rather than through some arrogant holistic solutions that will make us sicker and poorer in one gesture.</p>
<p>I&#8217;d like him to hear him admit that the stimulus plan was a bust and that, contrary to his mendacious spokesmen, his administration has failed utterly in the effort to create jobs.</p>
<p>I&#8217;d like to hear him tell the nation to read his lips on no new taxes.</p>
<p>I&#8217;d like to hear him acknowledge that the way voters came forth in elections in Massachusetts, New Jersey and Virginia to show that while they want to be intelligently governed they refuse to be ruled represents a quintessential American moment.</p>
<p>I&#8217;d like to hear him tell the democracy activists in Iran that he is deeply ashamed by his failure to support their cause and that he no longer harbors fantasies that his contemptible silence will bring talks in which he will be able to use his overrated eloquence to turn their mullah tormentors away from their desire to get the Bomb.</p>
<p>I&#8217;d like to hear him say that he is disillusioned with the Palestinian thugocracy his policies see as morally superior to the Israelis.</p>
<p>I&#8217;d like to hear him say that he has rethought his negative take on American exceptionalism and now, after a regrettable apology tour, sees that the US is a shining example for the world rather than just another country.</p>
<p>I&#8217;d like, in other words, for an admission, however oblique, that he has learned something in his first year in office.</p>
<p>But I&#8217;m not holding my breath.</p>
<p><em>Peter Collier co-authored seven books with David Horowitz, including the widely read</em> Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the ‘60s<em>. He is also the author of many other books including, biographies on the Fords, Rockefellers, and Kennedys. He works at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.</em></p>
<p><strong>Alan Dowd</strong></p>
<p>The Pride Before the Fall</p>
<p>If someone had told President Obama that one year after his inauguration his party would lose statewide races in Virginia and New Jersey, fumble signature initiatives like health care and cap-and-trade, surrender the seat Ted Kennedy had held since 1962—to an unknown state senator—and give the once-demoralized Republican Party an opportunity to win back Congress, he would have laughed at that someone. One thing is certain: He’s not laughing right now as he prepares for his first State of the Union address.</p>
<p>The smartest course of action for the president may the most difficult for him to take, because it would require him to learn from, and listen to, his predecessors. That, of course, would presuppose that he believes he can learn something from his predecessors. The Clinton model of retreating from an ideological crusade and “pivoting” to practical and politically palatable policies could be helpful to Obama’s sinking administration. But don’t count on him to embrace that model. Obama seems far more ideological than President Clinton and has yet to convey the appearance of humility, which Clinton so effectively used to his advantage as a candidate and president. I actually hope Obama keeps listening to the “full speed ahead” mantra of the far left. If he does, by this time next year there will be a Republican Congress in place to check his statist agenda.</p>
<p><em>Alan Dowd writes on U.S. politics and U.S. foreign policy.</em></p>
<p><strong>James Carafano </strong></p>
<p>Time for Return of the Straight Talk Express</p>
<p>It used to be said “politics should stop at the water’s edge.” With the threat of global terrorism, where security is concerned politics should stop at our “doorstep.” Sadly, none of that is happening in Washington. In his first year in office, on security issues, Obama never switched from campaigning to governing. All of his initiatives were “political calculations” to try to show he was not weak on national security, but at the same time didn’t lose the “base.”</p>
<p>That has to stop. Obama has nothing to show for a year in the world. His foreign policies have not been shrewd and pragmatic. They have been laughable. He dithered on Afghanistan. He lost the bubble on homeland security. He caved to the Russians and Chinese.</p>
<p>Stop the insanity, Mr. President.</p>
<p>Here are five commitments he could make to turn things around.</p>
<p>1) State flatly terrorism is job #1.</p>
<p>2) Declare we are in Afghanistan to win and winning is more important than arbitrary deadlines.</p>
<p>3) Admit we are living in the margin of error of when Iran will detonate a nuclear weapon. We need unilateral US sanctions&#8211;now. We need robust missile defense&#8211;now. We need to highlight the regime’s horrific human rights record&#8211;now. We need to draw red lines&#8211;now.</p>
<p>4) Call for adding $50 billion a year to the defense budget to buy the equipment our men and women in uniform need to protect this generation of Americans and the next.</p>
<p>5) Forget about immigration “amnesty.” Granting amnesty would just make the challenge of securing the border worse. We need security, enforcement, and legitimate worker programs. That has to be Obama’s priority—now.</p>
<p><em>Dr. James Jay Carafano is the deputy director of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies and director of the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation. </em></p>
<p><strong>Ariel Cohen </strong></p>
<p>A Reset on Russia</p>
<p>President Barack Obama’s Russia policy is defined by the Administration’s view that America is overstretched globally, and that without assistance from a major power, such as Russia or China, Washington cannot achieve its goals. Some in the Administration believe that America is in decline and their job is to manage it. The policy of “outstretched hand” toward Russia (as well as other unfriendly powers) follows from this notion. So far, President Obama has failed to achieve any impressive results.</p>
<p>Russian officials say that the Obama Administration listens better [than that of George W. Bush], but “did not offer anything substantive.” Others compared Obama with Gorbachev – in terms of presiding over a great power in decline and referring to his naïveté. A senior Russian official half-jokingly said the U.S. concessions were “birthday presents for President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin.”</p>
<p>Sure, the Kremlin will pocket the U.S. concessions and ask for more. It was blatantly clear to this author as early as September 2009, (after spending ten days with the leading Russian foreign policy experts), that the Obama Administration did not – and will not — receive any quid-pro-quo for the significant concessions it provided to Russia as a part of its “reset button” policy.</p>
<p>Another systemic problem Obama faced in Russia is the duopoly of power. Obama spent many hours talking to Medvedev, whereas the real decision making lies with Putin. Talking to the wrong guy is a bad negotiating strategy.</p>
<p>It is too expensive to have a U.S. president learning on the job. Misreading Russia’s great power agenda, overestimation of one’s own negotiating capabilities, misplaced and idealistic faith in the merits of arms control, and dialogue at all costs all this brought Barack Obama’s Russia policy into dangerous shoals. One hopes that the President will learn his lessons and that his second year in office will benefit the United States in the Administration’s dealings with Putin &amp; Co.</p>
<p><em>Ariel Cohen, Ph.D., is Senior Research Fellow in Russian and Eurasian Studies and International Energy Policy at the Katherine and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Policy at The Heritage Foundation.</em></p>
<p><strong>Andrew Klavan</strong></p>
<p>Here is my suggested text for the State of the Union in its entirety:</p>
<p>&#8220;My fellow citizens of the world. I come before you today to gaze into the middle distance and speak in ringing phrases.  For make no mistake:  the time for phrases that do not ring is past.  Already, in only the first year since I have fulfilled my awesome destiny, I have created millions of jobs—not just ordinary jobs that you have to work at for pay, but jobs beyond your wildest imagination, over the mountain of your deepest desires, and down the hallway of your fondest dreams.  I have sent many troops to Afghanistan—many, many troops who are running here and there with serious faces, shouting “Let’s go,” and firing their rifles so that the isolated extremists who have gathered together in great numbers to attack us will know that I am become Shiva, destroyer of worlds.</p>
<p>“But there is much still to do.  Even as we speak, a child is crying—a little, sad, pitiful child with big eyes, crying enormous tears that will cost hundreds of billions of dollars to dry.  So let me be very clear:  the bridge from yesteryear leads to the cloudbanks of a golden perfection where the prospect of a horizon awaits a mighty century.  At this, we must not fail.  Thank you—and God bless us, every one.&#8221;</p>
<p><em>Andrew Klavan is the author of best-selling novels </em>True Crime, Don’t Say a Word, and Empire of Lies. <em>He blogs at</em> <a href="http://andrewklavan.com/">AndrewKlavan.com</a>.</p>
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		<title>Reporter roughed up outside Coakley fund-raiser &#8211; BostonHerald.com</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/reporter-roughed-up-outside-coakley-fund-raiser-bostonherald-com/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=reporter-roughed-up-outside-coakley-fund-raiser-bostonherald-com</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 13 Jan 2010 16:45:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=45959</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A Weekly Standard reporter says he was roughed up last night outside a Washington, D.C. fund-raiser for Attorney General Martha Coakley by someone he believes is associated with her U.S. Senate campaign.John McCormack, the magazine’s deputy online editor, writes about the incident outside the Sonoma restaurant in an online dispatch entitled: “We Report, We Get [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>A Weekly Standard reporter says he was roughed up last night outside a Washington, D.C. fund-raiser for Attorney General Martha Coakley by someone he believes is associated with her U.S. Senate campaign.John McCormack, the magazine’s deputy online editor, writes about the incident outside the Sonoma restaurant in an online dispatch entitled: “We Report, We Get Pushed.”According to McCormack’s account, Coakley took two questions from reporters after the event, but declined to respond to his question. McCormack wrote he asked Coakley whether she stood by statements she made during Monday’s debate about terrorists in Afghanistan.</p>
<p>via <a href="http://news.bostonherald.com/news/politics/view.bg?articleid=1225332&amp;srvc=home&amp;position=active">Reporter roughed up outside Coakley fund-raiser &#8211; BostonHerald.com</a>.</p>
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		<title>When Security Trumps Common Sense &#8211; by Dennis Prager</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/dennis-prager/when-security-trumps-common-sense-by-dennis-prager/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=when-security-trumps-common-sense-by-dennis-prager</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 06 Jan 2010 05:03:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dennis Prager]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=44973</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I am not prepared to obey rules that hurt the innocent while doing nothing to prevent terrorism.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-44974" title="Airplane-Bathroom-Sign" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Airplane-Bathroom-Sign.jpg" alt="Airplane-Bathroom-Sign" width="385" height="288" /></p>
<p>If the government prohibits airline passengers from getting out of their seats during the last hour of a flight, I hereby announce that I will get out of my seat either to escort someone who needs to use the lavatory or because I do. I understand that I may be arrested, but I am willing to make this a cause celebre.</p>
<p>Aside from a genetic incapacity to be directed by irrationality, I will make this protest on behalf of fellow passengers who are in pain because of this idiotic rule. What are diabetics, for example, supposed to do? And considering the fact that &#8220;the last hour of a flight&#8221; is always more than an hour, often considerably more &#8212; given the frequent delays in approaching airports and given the approximately 15-20 minutes between landing and passengers actually disembarking.</p>
<p>I am not prepared to obey rules that hurt the innocent while doing nothing to prevent terrorism.</p>
<p>When exactly will airline passengers be permitted to relieve themselves? Seatbelt signs are now illuminated &#8212; meaning passengers are not allowed out of their seats &#8212; for at least the half hour it takes to leave the gate and achieve optimum altitude. And on many planes, those signs are (often pointlessly) illuminated for much of the flight after that as well.</p>
<p>Therefore, if passengers are not allowed to get up during the last hour, that would mean that on a two-hour flight, passengers would be fortunate to have a total of 20 minutes when they could stand to stretch, get a book or go to the lavatory.</p>
<p>Furthermore, since passengers are also not allowed to &#8220;congregate&#8221; outside the lavatories, passengers will actually have to compete with one another in order to get to the bathroom. The slower ones, or the ones seated furthest from the lavatories, may not have any chance to go to the bathroom in a two-hour or longer flight.</p>
<p>These useless, dignity-robbing, rules could have been averted if available technologies and a more intelligent approach to catching terrorists had been adopted.</p>
<p>One such technology is full-body scanning.</p>
<p>According to Robert Poole, adviser to the White House and Congress on airport security following 9-11, the explosives &#8220;which the terrorist concealed in his underwear would have been detected had he been required to pass through one of the 15 millimeter-wave body-scanners now in use at Schiphol (Amsterdam Airport).&#8221;</p>
<p>And Charlotte Bryan, a former top TSA and FAA official, told CNN that a body scanner could have stopped Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, terror suspect on Northwest 253.</p>
<p>The major objection to the scanner comes from the ACLU and from libertarians on &#8220;privacy&#8221; grounds. This objection led the House of Representatives to ban full body scans. That the ban was led by a Republican, Utah Congressman Jason Chaffetz, who continues to defend his opposition to body scanning, only shows that the left has no monopoly on foolishness.</p>
<p>But it was House Democrats who overwhelmingly voted to ban body scans. Only a fifth of the Democrats in the House voted against the ban while two-thirds of the Republicans voted against it.</p>
<p>The ACLU, which can almost always be depended on to say something foolish and advocate a position that harms society, calls the process &#8220;virtual strip search.&#8221; And Chaffetz declared, &#8220;I just think it&#8217;s too invasive. Nobody needs to see my kids &#8212; I have a son and two daughters &#8212; and see my wife naked in order to secure an airplane!&#8221;</p>
<p>So, the leftist and libertarian opposition centered on the issue of privacy. And the conservative opposition &#8212; to conservatives&#8217; credit, the smallest of the opposing groups &#8212; centered on &#8220;nudity.&#8221;</p>
<p>It is difficult to say which one is more idiotic. Both illustrate what happens when dogma supersedes common sense.</p>
<p>What privacy are we even talking about? I cherish my privacy, but anyone who actually looks at the scans made by the whole body scanner cannot seriously talk of either privacy or nudity. They are indeed &#8220;virtual&#8221; images, meaning no skin is shown and the human figure looks metallic.</p>
<p>The ACLU and Rep. Chaffetz have read too many Superman comics &#8212; they imagine the superhero&#8217;s &#8220;X-ray vision.&#8221; But that is not possible. There is no skin shown. So how can there be &#8220;nudity&#8221;?</p>
<p>I willingly relinquish whatever &#8220;privacy&#8221; I lose by being scanned for the even more precious value of staying alive.</p>
<p>Those who think that TSA employees will be leering at naked bodies have a little too much sex on their minds. Same-sex TSA employees will be looking at metallic-like images of thousands of bodies that pass through airport security. Look on the Internet at those images and then tell me that they are &#8220;nude.&#8221; A necrophiliac would be bored.</p>
<p>As a conservative, I am embarrassed by people who put thousands of lives in danger under the guise of protecting their wives and daughters from appearing &#8220;naked.&#8221;</p>
<p>So until my government does something intelligent &#8212; like screening for dangerous people, not dangerous weapons (as Israel so successfully does) &#8212; to protect this frequent flyer, I will not play the pretend game of &#8220;do something&#8221; that prohibits me from relieving myself on the grounds that terrorists only blow up planes after going to the bathroom during the last hour of a flight.</p>
<p>I will surrender a lot of things to stay alive. But I will not surrender my intelligence. That and being told when to urinate are the real losses of dignity, not a full body scan.</p>
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		<title>Feds assess terror watchlists after airline attack &#8211; AP</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/jlaksin/feds-assess-terror-watchlists-after-airline-attack-ap/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=feds-assess-terror-watchlists-after-airline-attack-ap</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 28 Dec 2009 18:23:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=43829</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Federal authorities met Monday to reassess the nation&#8217;s system of terror watchlists to determine how to avoid the type of lapse that allowed a man with explosives to board a flight to the U.S. even though he was flagged as a possible terrorist. A senior U.S. intelligence official said authorities were reviewing the procedures that [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Federal authorities met Monday to reassess the nation&#8217;s system of terror watchlists to determine how to avoid the type of lapse that allowed a man with explosives to board a flight to the U.S. even though he was flagged as a possible terrorist.</p>
<p>A senior U.S. intelligence official said authorities were reviewing the procedures that govern the lists, which could include how someone is placed on or moved between the various databases.</p>
<p>The Obama administration has ordered investigations into how travelers are placed on watch lists and how passengers are screened, as critics and administration officials questioned how the 23-year-old man charged in the Christmas Day airliner attack was allowed to board the flight.</p>
<p>via <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091228/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/us_airliner_attack;_ylt=AjHUUlfHqK7LZb_2xXCgCj.s0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTNpcnJyZ2QwBGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMDkxMjI4L3VzX2FpcmxpbmVyX2F0dGFjawRjY29kZQNtb3N0cG9wdWxhcgRjcG9zAzEEcG9zAzIEcHQDaG9tZV9jb2tlBHNlYwN5bl90b3Bfc3RvcnkEc2xrA2ZlZHNhc3Nlc3N0ZQ--">Feds assess terror watchlists after airline attack &#8211; Yahoo! News</a>.</p>
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		<title>Andrew Sullivan Unhinged &#8211; by Peter Collier</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/petercollier/andrew-sullivan-unhinged-by-peter-collier/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=andrew-sullivan-unhinged-by-peter-collier</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/petercollier/andrew-sullivan-unhinged-by-peter-collier/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 28 Dec 2009 05:09:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Peter Collier]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=43748</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The blogger as slavish Obama apologist.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-43749" title="sullivan" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/sullivan.gif" alt="sullivan" width="450" height="299" /></p>
<p>Andrew Sullivan seems increasingly unhinged these days. The creepy, Torquemada-like obsession with Sarah Palin continues as he rummages through her book in a deranged act of <em>explication de texte</em>, functions as a one man birther movement laying out loony speculations about the owners of the orifices out of which Trig and Tripp slid, and continues to worship the sleazy dudeitude of Levi Johnson.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Sullivan slavishly justifies Obama on every count, including his administration’s sneaky efforts to smuggle “progressives” into policy making positions under the radar of Congressional scrutiny. Recently it was support for his appointment of Hannah Rosenthal as head of the Office to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism. Because she seems to share some part of his own fanged venom for Israel, Sullivan sees her as a Promethean truth teller being shut down by what his soul mate Pat Buchanan once called “the amen corner.”</p>
<p>After my old friend Ron Radosh rightly criticized her for attacking Israel’s U.S. Ambassador Michael Oren as a result of critical remarks he made about the egregious organization J Street, Sullivan hit him as a “neo con likudnik.” But when Sullivan tuned in to his own esteemed <em>Atlantic</em> colleague Jeffrey Goldberg for an opinion, Goldberg instead confirmed Radosh’s position, indicating that he was absolutely baffled that Rosenthal should make someone like Oren the first target of what is supposed to be a campaign against anti-Semitism. (Doesn’t she find a crusade worth undertaking in the way that the new addiction to Jew hatred has migrated from the Middle East to Europe and is presently getting established in our own country, where people like Sullivan can experiment with Walt-Mearshemerism as a no fault gateway drug?)</p>
<p>Even when Sullivan is good he’s bad. Today he gives good coverage to cell phone images of the bloody street action in Teheran. (And indeed, he has been good on Iran in all the months since the election was stolen.) But even here, his pro-Obama contextualizing of events neutralizes his support of the protestors. What moral does he draw from their incredible bravery in defying the regime’s street thug murderers? That the world is lucky to have “Obama’s reticence” at this critical moment because by not criticizing the obscene Iranian regime, our President “removes from Ahmadinejad the convenient weapon of demonizing the protests as pawns of the Great Satan.”</p>
<p>Take a moment to get this straight: it’s a good thing we have a president who, to keep himself pure for that ultimate negotiation on nukes that will never come, refrains from using some of that synthetic eloquence of his to put us on the side of people who are getting cut down in the streets. By such scurvy logic, it was wrong of Ronald Reagan to go to Moscow and speak to and about the dissidents and their heroic struggle against totalitarianism because it might have given ammunition to wardens of the gulag. And wrong to have been unequivocally on the side of Solidarity. And so on.</p>
<p>Word smuggled out of Teheran has told us that the protestors themselves would like a little U.S. affirmation so they won’t feel they are dying in the dark. And the citizens of our own country could certainly use the reassurance about the values we stand for, via a word or two in behalf of the demonstrators, especially after being subjected to a punishing year-long Presidential apology tour for American exceptionalism. But from Obama we get only beseeching admonitions that are far too little and always too late and always undermined by the reluctance with which they are delivered. This has become a vain, small-minded and morally anemic presidency that only someone like Andrew Sullivan could love.</p>
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		<title>Dick Cheney: Conservative of the Year &#8211; HUMAN EVENTS</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/jlaksin/dick-cheney-conservative-of-the-year-human-events/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=dick-cheney-conservative-of-the-year-human-events</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 22 Dec 2009 06:36:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=42822</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In Washingtonian “inside the Beltway” terms, the most amazing aspect of former Vice President Dick Cheney’s new clout is that he is achieving it the old-fashioned way: talking about public policy. He is not running for President or any other office. He has not formed a PAC or a D.C. lobbying firm. He is not [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>In Washingtonian “inside the Beltway” terms, the most amazing aspect of former Vice President Dick Cheney’s new clout is that he is achieving it the old-fashioned way: talking about public policy. He is not running for President or any other office. He has not formed a PAC or a D.C. lobbying firm. He is not dishing on former colleagues, not spreading gossip, not settling scores. He is, instead, writing a memoir about his extensive career in public service, and giving occasional speeches and interviews, mostly on national and homeland security policy, long his central focus.</p>
<p>How is it, therefore, that someone who has no political ambitions can cause so much angst at the White House and in the mainstream news media? The irrefutable answer is that what Cheney is saying, primarily on foreign policy, defense and anti-terrorism, makes sense to more and more American citizens growing increasingly worried by the Obama Administration’s insouciance when U.S. national interests are threatened, both at home and abroad. Since the only real, long-term way to deal with persuasive positions on substantive policy matters is to refute them with sounder policy arguments, it is not hard to understand why the Obama White House is near panic. Where are they going to go to find a better policy inside his administration?</p>
<p>via <a href="http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=34906&amp;s=rcmc">Dick Cheney: Conservative of the Year &#8211; HUMAN EVENTS</a>.</p>
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