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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; speech</title>
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		<title>Hillary at Georgetown: Tolerance, Empathy and Submission</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/howard-rotberg/hillary-at-georgetown-tolerance-empathy-and-submission/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=hillary-at-georgetown-tolerance-empathy-and-submission</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/howard-rotberg/hillary-at-georgetown-tolerance-empathy-and-submission/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 18 Dec 2014 05:30:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Howard Rotberg]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Clinton]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[empathy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Georgetown]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hillary]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tolerance]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247690</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What it really means to "empathize" with one's enemies. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/aunnamed.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247691" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/aunnamed.jpg" alt="aunnamed" width="332" height="212" /></a>In my book, <i>Tolerism: The Ideology Revealed (second revised edition, Mantua Books), </i>I quote the great philosopher of the post-World War 2 era, Karl Popper, who formulated the following dilemma about tolerance (which has become known as “the Popper Paradox”):</p>
<blockquote><p>If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. … We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.</p></blockquote>
<p>And so, I write that excessive tolerance of the intolerant illiberals has become a full-blown ideology which I call Tolerism.   Tolerism, in my view, elevates the virtue of tolerance over the fundamental Biblical value of Justice.</p>
<p>Tolerism also includes a type of cultural Stockholm Syndrome, where, as in the case of some hostages or abused women, some begin to identify with their captors or abusers.</p>
<p>It consists often of psychological denial, and it accepts United Nations Human Rights Councils led by Iran, Syria and other leading human rights abusers. Tolerism reflects a moral equivalency between terrorists and victims, and even a seeming masochism where we seek out painful retribution as a kind of catharsis for our supposed misdeeds.  Tolerist “compassion,” especially in the work of Karen Armstrong, assumes that there is equivalency in compassion between the “frequently unkind West” and Islam &#8212; which unfortunately in its present state is not at all compassionate to Coptic Christians, Yzedis, Jews, gays, women who seek freedoms, or even minority Muslim groups like the Ahmadis.</p>
<p>I believe that the ideology I call tolerism is expanding ever more rapidly beyond mere tolerance and unilateral compassion.   It is now becoming an excessive <i>empathy</i> where the quest to share some other group’s feelings is beginning to cause our liberals to accept the false facts and illiberal values of our enemies and in fact sometimes to convert or submit to Islam.  We are seeing some young people convert to Islam and go so far as to join the forces of ISIS.  We are even seeing young Western women convert to Islam and marry men whose attitudes toward women are almost barbaric. Submission indeed.</p>
<p>Ms. Clinton, of course, served as Secretary of State during the Obama administration’s new Middle Eastern doctrine of giving more “respect” to the Muslim world in word and deed.  As President Obama stated in Cairo during his first major overseas appearance:</p>
<blockquote><p>I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect; and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles – principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.</p></blockquote>
<p>Hillary herself has a close relationship with Huma Abedin, who is connected to the Muslim Brotherhood, as are her parents.  Ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and allowing its operatives into the Obama administration would be seen as treasonous if the country was not so immersed in Tolerism.</p>
<p>Clinton is not apologetic in the least over her relationship with Abedin. Now that Clinton feels that she should be President at a time when Islamist threats all over the world have only increased during the Obama years, she feels that her “feminine” skills give her the special qualification to right the ship she helped to tip over during her tenure as Secretary of State.</p>
<p>So, in her recent speech at Georgetown University, she contended that when women participate in peace processes, “often overlooked issues such as human rights, individual justice, national reconciliation, economic renewal are often brought to the forefront.”</p>
<p>Clinton’s talk (for which she apparently was paid $300,000) was at the launch of the Action Plan Academy, an organization which aims to explore how countries can craft strategies to help women rise into leadership roles on security issues and provide training and workshops.</p>
<p>“Today marks a very important next step,” Clinton told an audience of diplomats and other officials from all over the world, “shifting from saying the right things to doing the right things, putting into action the steps that are necessary not only to protect women and children but to find ways of utilizing women as makers and keepers of peace.”</p>
<p>Of the hundreds of peace treaties signed since the early 1990s, between or within nations, she said, fewer than 10 percent had any female negotiators and fewer than 3 percent had women as signatories.</p>
<p>“Is it any wonder that many of these agreements fail between a few years?” Clinton asked, implying, without any evidence at all, that women produce better peace agreements than men.   If I was paying part of the $300,000 I would really have expected a better discussion of past female leaders like Ms. Bhutto in Pakistan (who transferred nuclear technology to North Korea), Golda Meir in Israel,  and Margaret Thatcher in Britain,  and current leaders Angela Merkel in Germany and Cristina Kirchner in Argentina. America itself has seen women leaders in security matters – former Secretaries of State Madeleine Albright and Condoleeza Rice (and Hillary Clinton), National Security Advisor Susan Rice, and first female Ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick.</p>
<p>Instead of discussing any of them, she raised the idea that two women were involved at a high level in brokering peace in the 40-year struggle between the government of the Philippines and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and other Islamic groups in the southern island of Bangsamoro (meaning Muslim land), which has killed hundreds of thousands and displaced more than a million..</p>
<p>Unfortunately, whether these two women were in fact instrumental or not, the issue of the Philippines submitting to Muslim rule over areas of its impoverished, yet potentially oil-rich, south, after 40 years of conflict and the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the displacement of over a million people, is factually quite complex.  Some argue that it was external pressure that helped this second peace initiative on the same territory for which the first peace treaty failed; and most recognize that this second one is very much up in the air as to its sustainability.</p>
<p>Under the proposal, Islamic Sharia law would apply to Muslims in the region, but the country&#8217;s justice system would (hopefully) continue to apply to non-Muslims. The Moro group has renounced the terrorist acts of extremist groups, but at least three smaller Muslim rebel groups oppose the autonomy deal and have vowed to continue fighting for a completely separate Muslim homeland.</p>
<p>And one wonders, once the Muslim groups are granted jurisdiction over limited areas of government, whether this is viewed by them as a first step to future demands for full Sharia law.   But Hillary is not interested in waiting to see how it turns out before attributing it to the presence of some women working on the negotiations.</p>
<p>This is a complex problem that Hillary obviously simplifies for partisan political purposes, i.e. the female vote in America.  Some commentators feel that the potential natural resource riches available to foreign business concerns is what eventually pushed the Philippine Government into the deal, rather than any great feminine talents as Hillary contends.  Moreover, some believe that the United States and other Western governments have backed the autonomy deal partly to prevent the insurgency from breeding extremists who could threaten their own countries.</p>
<p>But the topic of feminine talents for security and diplomacy and her preference to cite Muslims as examples rather than American female icons is not the main concern caused by Ms. Clinton’s remarks.   The really scandalous part of the speech is when she cited feminine skills as a component of something she called “Smart Power” as follows (emphasis added):</p>
<p>“This is what we call Smart Power, using every possible tool…leaving no one on the sidelines, <b>showing respect even for one’s enemies</b>, trying to understand, and insofar as is psychologically possible, <b>empathize with their perspective and point of view</b>, helping to define the problems [and] determine a solution, that is what we believe in the 21st century will change the prospect for peace,” she said.</p>
<p>What does it mean for a possible future President to seek to show “respect” for one’s enemies?</p>
<p>Respect, according to the Oxford Dictionary is defined as “a feeling of deep admiration for someone or something elicited by their abilities, qualities, or achievements.”</p>
<p>And here is where we begin to climb down into a terrible ethical hole.   Islamists, with their history of beheadings, other murders, torture, persecution of ethnic and religious minorities, and gays, and their forced genital mutilation of young girls, their abuse of women and their general disregard for individual human rights, do not deserve our “deep admiration” and do not show any great “qualities” or “achievements” &#8211; unless your idea of an achievement is grabbing vast areas of Iraq and Syria from under Obama’s nose, without his bothering to object until it was too late.</p>
<p>Let’s dig a little deeper also into the whole concept of “empathy” for one’s enemy.   The idea of empathizing with the enemy was first popularized by the film, <i>Fog of War, </i>about former Defense Secretary in the Johnson administration, Robert McNamara, who made it one of the eleven lessons he learned. The concept of empathy is also something that has received the study of humanist psychologists, who are well-meaning in their attempts to aid interpersonal relationships and help people understand and therefore overcome misunderstandings in difficult relationships.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Carl Rogers, an important American academic psychologist of the twentieth century promoted the concept of empathy, or being empathetic as a process leading one to perceive the internal frame of reference of another with accuracy and with the emotional components and meanings which pertain thereto as if one were the person, but without ever losing the &#8220;as if&#8221; condition. Thus it means to sense the hurt or the pleasure of another as he senses it and to perceive the causes thereof as he perceives them, but without ever losing the recognition that it is “as if I were hurt or pleased and so forth.  If this &#8220;as if&#8221; quality is lost, then the state is one of identification.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Rogers reasoned that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p style="color: #232323;"><i>An empathic way of being with another person means entering the private perceptual world of the other and becoming thoroughly at home in it. It involves being sensitive, moment by moment, to the changing felt meanings which flow in this other person, to the fear or rage or tenderness or confusion or whatever that he or she is experiencing. It means temporarily living in the other&#8217;s life, moving about in it delicately without making judgements;  &#8230;It means frequently checking with the person as to the accuracy of your sensings, and being guided by the responses you receive. You are a confident companion to the person in his or her inner world.</i></p>
<p style="color: #232323;"><i>To be with another in this way means that for the time being, you lay aside your own views and values in order to enter another&#8217;s world without prejudice. In some sense it means that you lay aside your self; this can only be done by persons who are secure enough in themselves that they know they will not get lost in what may turn out to be the strange or bizarre world of the other, and that they can comfortably return to their own world when they wish.</i></p>
</blockquote>
<p style="color: #232323;">One can only conclude that real “political” empathy is for only the strongest, most intelligent intellectuals and politicians of our time, who are most secure in their liberal values and their constitutional limits and duties.  If the person is not so strong, this journey into what can be “a strange or bizarre world” may result in the person feeling more comfortable in <b>that</b> world or identifying with that world.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Feeling more comfortable in that world may result in something way more than tolerant empathy, and may result in conversion or submission.   This is not a job for postmodernists, but only for those with the clearest and most certain confidence in American values.  Without clear values, and a fixed sense of right and wrong, and good versus evil, postmodernist empathy will make it harder and harder for the empathizer to return to their own world, especially if his President has said that America is no more tolerant than Islam, that American standards of justice are no better than Islam’s and that countries that have banished all Jews and most Christians share the same view of dignity of all persons.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">And so, when the President stated that America and the Muslim world share mutual respect (i.e. admiration); and that they share the same principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings; then one wonders if empathy will more likely lead to submission.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">If Hillary Clinton calls for more respect and empathy for the enemy, she is a poor choice to lead a country as important as America is to the notion of individual freedoms and human rights based on Judeo-Christian values.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Since the election of Obama, we have a very large problem on our hands.   The moral and cultural relativism and postmodernism of our university campuses are now in the White House.  Can the historical America survive another four or eight years of tolerism and empathy before it, too, like some European countries, begins to submit to Islamist values, with acceptance of Sharia law as an alternative to its Constitution, Muslim religious teachings in public schools, and tolerance for “no-go” areas?    America failed its young by failing to properly vet Obama’s background and associations before electing him;   this time, before Americans place Hillary Clinton in the White House they had better study carefully the notions of tolerance, empathy and submission if America is to remain a great country.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.</b></p>
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		<title>Imam Joe Biden Schools an Infidel</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/robert-spencer/imam-joe-biden-schools-an-infidel/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=imam-joe-biden-schools-an-infidel</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 12 Dec 2014 05:53:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Robert Spencer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ayaan hirsi ali]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Joe Biden]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muslim]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sharia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[West]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[But Ayaan Hirsi Ali declines to argue with the vice president. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/6a00d83451c36069e20168eb9dbef6970c.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-247267" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/6a00d83451c36069e20168eb9dbef6970c.jpg" alt="6a00d83451c36069e20168eb9dbef6970c" width="301" height="271" /></a>The courageous ex-Muslim human rights activist <a href="http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/the-real-war-on-women/article/2556984"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Ayaan Hirsi Ali</span></a> recently recounted that at a speech in Washington not long ago, she met Vice President Joe Biden. Biden seized the opportunity to tell her that “ISIS had nothing to do with Islam.” Hirsi Ali politely disagreed, whereupon Biden began a lesson in the teachings of the Religion of Peace: “Let me tell you one or two things about Islam.”</p>
<p>Unfortunately, Hirsi Ali didn’t hear much of Imam Joe’s Islamic wisdom: “I politely left the conversation at that. I wasn’t used to arguing with vice presidents.”</p>
<p>This wasn’t just Joe being Joe, saying another foolish thing that, if he were a conservative Republican, would have ended his political career in an avalanche of ridicule long ago. For in confronting Hirsi Ali and assuming he knew more about Islam than she does, Biden was reflecting what virtually every policymaker in Washington believes – on both sides of the aisle.</p>
<p>Even though Ayaan Hirsi Ali was raised a Muslim in a Muslim country, and educated in Islam from an extremely early age, and despite the fact that Joe Biden has almost certainly never opened a Qur’an, Biden was sure that what she said about Islam must be wrong – it just had to be. Why? Because her opinion of the religion was negative, and the possibility that such a view could have any merit whatsoever is inconceivable in Washington circles. Those who hold it <i>must</i> be ignorant.</p>
<p>It’s almost certain that Biden would never have confronted Karen Armstrong in a similar way. If Biden is familiar with what Armstrong says about Islam, such as her world-historically ridiculous claim that “Muhammad eventually abjured violence and pursued a daring, inspired policy of non-violence that was worthy of Gandhi,” he would no doubt warmly approve and even applaud. This would not be because Armstrong has done more formal study of Islam than has Hirsi Ali – she hasn’t. <span style="color: #222222;">Nor would it be because Imam Joe himself made a careful and judicious examination of Islamic texts and teachings, and came to the reasoned conclusion that Armstrong’s representation of Islam was more accurate and true to the </span><i style="color: #222222;">ding an sich</i><span style="color: #222222;"> than Hirsi Ali’s.</span></p>
<p>On the contrary, Biden would favor Armstrong’s Islam over Hirsi Ali’s solely and wholly because the former confirms his view of the world and appears to bear out what he wishes were true, and the latter does not. This is likewise the stance of all of Biden’s colleagues in the Obama Administration. John Kerry, like Biden, confidently takes a stand on what he believes Islam is all about, based not on any study of his own or anyone else, but on what he wishes is true and hopes is true.</p>
<p>Indeed, on these fantasies are based numerous foreign and domestic policies. <span style="color: #222222;">The idea that new Israeli concessions will end the Palestinian jihad against Israel and make possible a two-state solution with Israelis and Palestinians living side by side in peace is based on a determined refusal to consider the possibility that the Palestinians really mean the jihadist rhetoric that they pump out endlessly on official Palestinian Authority and Hamas airwaves about destroying Israel utterly.</span></p>
<p>The idea that stable, secular, Western-oriented republics could ever have been constructed in Afghanistan or Iraq was based on a refusal to confront what Sharia really is and to study the degree to which the populations in both countries were attached to it. Ultimately, the United States oversaw the adoption of Constitutions in both countries that enshrined Sharia as the highest law of the land – something that would never have been done had not Washington policymakers been listening to smooth apologists who assured them that Sharia was benign and completely compatible with republican government and Western principles of human rights.</p>
<p>Those policymakers are still entrenched, despite their abysmal track record. There is no accountability for them, for those who would hold them accountable believe in the same fantasies that led to the policy errors. Joe Biden’s interaction with Ayaan Hirsi Ali played out with dreary predictability: it was inevitable that Biden would think his fantasies and wishful thinking to be defensible, established fact, and unthinkable that he would regard the judgment of a Somali ex-Muslim woman with unconscious ethnocentric and chauvinistic paternalism: <i>she is just wounded by her anomalous experiences</i>, he might have thought to himself, while Joe Biden – Joe Biden! – man of the world, savvy political thinker, diplomat, statesman, and humorist, would gently and affably set her straight, and introduce her to the pluralistic open-mindedness that are the hallmarks of what make us great in the West.</p>
<p>That open-mindedness, that openness to non-Western cultures and people, the linchpin of the multiculturalist imperative, is what Biden and Kerry treasure so much and are trying to protect when they assure the world that Islam is a religion of peace and that those who commit violence in its name are violating its core principles. But even as they preen about their open-mindedness, Biden and Kerry and the rest are actually quite close-minded. When he heard Ayaan Hirsi Ali speak, Biden had an opportunity to hear truths that existed outside of his habits of thought. A truly open-minded person would have adjusted his thinking to fit reality.</p>
<p>Instead, Biden placed himself in the preposterous position of attempting to lecture an ex-Muslim, someone who had once revered the Qur’an and studied it deeply, about the true tenets of Islam. In this latest exercise in making himself ridiculous, Biden is a symbol of the entire Western world, staking its life and future on fantasy and wishful thinking. In response to his foolish nonsense, Ayaan Hirsi Ali was polite. If they ever encounter Biden face to face, those pious believers in Islam who know that what she says about their religion is accurate, and hate her for revealing it, will be substantially less so.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Top 10 Lies from Obama&#8217;s Nullification Speech</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/danielhorowitz/top-10-lies-from-obamas-nullification-speech/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=top-10-lies-from-obamas-nullification-speech</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 28 Nov 2014 05:13:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Horowitz]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[executive action]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Illegal Aliens]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Immigration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[The falsehoods of a Radical-in-Chief.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/barack_obam.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-246249" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/barack_obam-450x299.jpg" alt="U.S. President Obama announces executive actions on immigration during nationally televised address from the White House in Washington" width="309" height="205" /></a><strong>Reprinted from <a href="https://www.conservativereview.com/">ConservativeReview.com.</a></strong></div>
<div></div>
<div>“The one [a president] can confer no privileges whatever; the other [the king] can make denizens of aliens, noblemen of commoners; can erect corporations with all the rights incident to corporate bodies.”</div>
<div>    – Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 69</div>
<div></div>
<div>Lie #1: Every President has Taken Executive Action on Immigration: No other president has ever issued an amnesty of anywhere near this scope, created it out of thin air, or built it upon a prior executive action instead of a statute. And in the case of President Eisenhower, his executive action was to deport 80,000 illegal immigrants.</div>
<div></div>
<div>Lie #2: Illegal Immigrant Crossings are Down: Actually, this is the third straight year that border crossings have gone up, not to mention the entirely new wave from Central America.</div>
<div></div>
<div>Lie #3: It does not grant citizenship or the right to stay here permanently: Under the royal edict, the work permits can be renewed every three years, and most likely, they will be renewed at the same 99.5% acceptance rate as DACA applications.  And once they get Social Security cards, they are going nowhere.  So yes, this is permanent.  And yes, they will be able to get green cards, which puts them on an automatic path to citizenship: “we are reducing the time that families are separated while obtaining their green cards.  Undocumented immigrants who are immediate relatives of lawful permanent residents or sons or daughters of US citizens can apply to get a waiver if a visa is available.”</div>
<div></div>
<div>Lie #4: Only 5 Million: Make no mistake about it.  Obama’s illegal amnesty will not just apply to 5 million individuals.  It will apply by default to all 12-20 million illegals in the country as well as the millions more who will now come here to enjoy the permanent cessation of borders and sovereignty.  Given the numerous options for people to become eligible for amnesty, ICE and CPB will be restricted from enforcing the law against anyone because each individual has to be afforded the opportunity to present themselves and apply for status.  There is no way those who were here for less than 5 years will be deported and there’s no way the new people rushing the border and overstaying their visas will be repatriated.</div>
<div></div>
<div>Lie #5: Deport Felons: Obama claims he is going to focus on deporting felons. Yet, he has done the opposite.  36,000 convicted criminal aliens were released last year, 80,000 criminal aliens encountered by ICE weren’t even placed into deportation proceedings, 167,000 criminal aliens who were ordered deported are still at large, 341,000 criminal aliens released by ICE without deportation orders are known to be free and at large in the US.  Again, this is cessation of deportations for everyone. They are leaving no illegal behind.</div>
<div></div>
<div>Lie #6: Don’t deport families: Obama is playing the family card. It works like this: people are encouraged to come here illegally, Obama grants them amnesty, then their relatives all get to come, even though they would otherwise be ineligible under public charge laws.  Yet, at the same time, because the bureaucracy will be flooded with applications of illegals, and those are the applications that will be prioritized, those families who came here legally will have to wait longer to be united. There is no longer an incentive to enter the legal immigration process.</div>
<div></div>
<div>Lie #7: They have to pay taxes to stay: Aside from the absurd notion that they would turn someone away for not paying taxes, almost every one of these illegal immigrants lacks a high enough income to incur a net positive tax liability.  Hence, by paying taxes, he actually means they will collect refundable tax credits!</div>
<div></div>
<div>Lie #8: Background Checks: Just the thought of a criminal background check of people coming from the third world on a lawless program is a joke.  But the reality is that Obama has already done this with DACA, and 99.5% of applications were approved, including those of criminals.</div>
<div></div>
<div>Lie #9: Cracking Down on Illegal Immigration at the Border: Obama promises to beef up resources at the border.  But as we’ve seen over the past few years, what good are more agents if they are explicitly intimidated into turning a blind eye.  Moreover, there is no promise to build a fence or implement a visa tracking system, so any talk of enforcement is an insult to our intelligence.  Moreover, he is unilaterally abolishing the Secure Communities program, the only successful interior enforcement program left after he abolished 287g state-federal cooperation in 2012.  At a time when we are facing threats from Islamic terror and deadly diseases, this invitation to the world will present a security nightmare.</div>
<div></div>
<div>Lie #10: Scripture tells us, we shall not oppress a stranger: It’s great to see him quoting the Bible for once, but nice try.  There are different variations of this verse throughout the Bible, but each one uses the Hebrew word “Ger” to describe what Obama translates as “stranger.”  A Ger is a convert to Judaism.  The commandment was not referring to people who illegally migrate to a nation state.  And more importantly, it is downright offensive to Americans to insinuate that not granting them benefits is tantamount to oppression, especially given the fact that they have been the biggest recipients of our generous legal system.  Moreover, if there is oppression taking place it is to the American taxpayer and worker and those who suffer from gangs like MS-13.</div>
<p><em>Daniel Horowitz is Senior Editor of Conservative Review. Follow him on twitter @RMConservative.</em></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<title>Bill Whittle: Silence Drudge!</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/bill-whittle-silence-drudge/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=bill-whittle-silence-drudge</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/bill-whittle-silence-drudge/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 03 Nov 2014 05:45:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[TruthRevolt.org]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=244355</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A Truth Revolt video. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #000000;"><strong>If someone was trying to limit or suppress your First Amendment rights in America today, what would that Tyrant look like? A dictator in a military uniform? Or a soccer mom in a corner office?</strong></p>
<p style="color: #000000;"><strong>In this weeks Firewall, meet Susan Ravel of the FEC and Lois Lerner of the IRS &#8212; two smiling tyrants weaponizing the government against conservatives and following direct orders from the very top of the Democratic leadership. See the video and transcript below. </strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/hF_XeBRci8k" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p style="color: #000000;">TRANSCRIPT:</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Hi everybody; I’m Bill Whittle and this is the Firewall.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Let’s say someone wanted to take away that uniquely American right — the one upon which all of this success and prosperity and happiness and freedom is based: Your First Amendment right to freedom of speech. What would that tyrant look like?</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">This, right? Someone like this. Or this. Or this. Nah. Not here. That’s not how tyranny looks in America:</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">((ANN RAVEL))</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">This smiling, normal-looking woman is Ann Ravel. She heads the FEC — the Federal Elections Commission.  She’s a Democrat in a Democratic administration pursuing the Democratic party’s goal of intimidating, jailing and otherwise harassing their political opponents, who are mean because they don’t like being told what to do, or to think — the way nice people do. So she has been ordered to weaponize the government against unregulated speech — we don’t call it “free speech” any more because that term is archaic and also probably racist.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">It’s not like she doesn’t want to! As a typical progressive Democrat, Ann Ravel has two overriding psychological needs:</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">First, regulate everything. How on earth with people like Ann Ravel and, for that matter, the President of the United States, ever be able to feel secure when the American people are just running around starting businesses willy-nilly, or irresponsibly making internet videos that don’t conform to the Official Truth, or reading news stories — “news stories!” — on places like Fox or the Drudge Report.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">No, the idea of something being unregulated — like, say, the internet — is anathema to these control freaks, so the chance to regulate something — anything — is good to go right out of the gate.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Even better:  Ann Ravel not only wants to regulate the internet, she wants to target those regulations against conservatives on the internet.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">You see, apparently, a couple of ads were run, for free, on YouTube. Those ads said mean things against President Obama, and that’s wrong! So now, this smiling, ordinary-looking, soccer-mom-type fascist tyrant is threatening regulate content on Websites like the Drudge Report — weaponizing the government and using it’s coercive power to stifle criticisms of DEMOCRATS. Drudge, you may remember, cut his teeth by exposing the fact that Monica Lewinsky — unlike all of the other liars and bimbos before her — had actual, physical evidence of President Clinton’s philandering, predatory infidelities against unknown, powerless young women. But the Drudge Report said mean things against a Democratic President, and that’s wrong!</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">According to the lights of people like Ann Ravel, this what can happen without regulations and the threat of punishment, and sites like The Drudge Report have no First Amendment protections for a free press because saying mean things about Democratic Presidents is not news. It unregulated opinion. Saying mean things against Republican Presidents — THAT’S NEWS.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Ann Ravel says she will also be looking into videos like the one you are watching now, Thought Criminal. Needless to say, I had assumed my license to speak my mind was printed on a piece of parchment, sealed in nitrogen behind bulletproof glass in the National Archives, but that doesn’t cut much ice with fascists like Ann Ravel, or the people that give her her marching orders.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Now for those of you who say it cannot happen here, that this is all a tempest in a tea party, let me show you another face of fascist tyranny in America: Lois Lehrner, director of the Exempt Organizations Unit of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. On May 23rd, 2013 she was placed on administrative leave following allegations that she had used the IRS — in other words, weaponized the government — to target Tea Party groups for genuinely excessive, illegal, immoral and utterly shameless scrutiny, which in one case I happen to have first hand knowledge of. She was cited for Contempt of Congress in 2014, because apparently, all of the email regarding these selective examinations and enforcements disappeared when her hard drive failed. And the legally required back ups failed. And something like one thousand other IRS computers hard drives also failed. Plus THEIR back-ups. Some emails, however, sent just before these unfortunate coincidences indicate her discussing these issues with the Department of Justice, which means it was directed by this guy, which means it was directed by this guy. This same guy, who when asked if there was any evidence of corruption in the IRS, replied “not a smidgeon.” Unregulated laughter is punishable by law, oh, and by the way: prepared to be audited.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">((BILL OF RIGHTS))</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">None of this means anything to these people: First Amendment Right to free speech; Second Amendment right to self-defense, Fourth Amendment right to be secure in our Persons, Houses, Papers and Effects; the Tenth Amendment admonishment that those powers not specifically granted the Federal Government are reserved to the States, or to the People — it’s all just parchment for them — a bit of decoration, like Washington crossing the Delaware — suitable for framing in a museum that no one visits anymore.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">It’s certainly not the law, because as we know, the law is what the Chicago political machine says it is.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Nice Bill of Rights you got there. Be a shame if something happened to it.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Netanyahu’s Statements and Policies</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/netanyahus-statements-and-policies/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=netanyahus-statements-and-policies</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 03 Oct 2014 04:50:38 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Decoding the Israeli prime minister's message to the Obama administration. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/5618435092089408259no.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-242294" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/5618435092089408259no.jpg" alt="5618435092089408259no" width="315" height="200" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Netanyahus-statements-and-policies-377946">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">Although commentators overlooked it, the Obama administration did it again. They blindsided Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on the eve of his trip to Washington.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The last time it happened was in May 2011 when US President Barack Obama set out his policy toward Israel and the Palestinians as Netanyahu was in flight, en route to Washington to meet with him.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In that speech Obama announced his support for an essentially full Israeli withdrawal to the entirely indefensible 1949 armistice lines in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria. Obama adopted this position despite the fact that Netanyahu and the Israeli public rejected it and viewed it as a threat to Israel’s survival.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">This time the Obama administration didn’t blindside Israel on the eve of Netanyahu’s visit with another hostile pronouncement in relation to the Palestinians. This time they did so in relation to Iran.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In an address on Saturday night before the National Iranian-American Council, Phillip Gordon, the White House’s coordinator for the Middle East, said that if US-Iranian talks on Iran’s nuclear weapons program lead to an agreement, they can pave the way for the reestablishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries. In his words, “A nuclear agreement could begin a multi-generational process that could lead to a new relationship between our countries.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Gordon’s statement was a blunt departure from the White House’s previous position that the only gain Iran would make by obeying binding UN Security Council resolutions that prohibit the Islamic theocracy from enriching uranium would be the abrogation of economic sanctions that were adopted to force Iran to end its illicit nuclear activities.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In accordance with US law, diplomatic relations with Iran are contingent on Iran’s cessation of support for terrorist organizations and other unlawful activities.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In his remarks to NIAC – a group that the vast majority of Iranian-Americans view as the unofficial lobby of the Iranian regime – Gordon said that due to the importance of the nuclear issue, to make progress in nuclear talks, the US is willing to ignore Iran’s support for terrorism and other crimes.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In his words, “The nuclear issue is too important to subordinate to a complete transformation of Iran internally.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">FACED WITH this boldfaced US declaration that it will not only do nothing to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power, but is also endorsing continued Iranian sponsorship of Hezbollah, Netanyahu opted to avoid yet another direct confrontation with the White House. Rather than directly call the administration out for its role in enabling Iran to become a nuclear state, Netanyahu sufficed with his usual rhetoric. He gently chided Obama for his pro-Iranian policy during his public remarks at the White House. And in all of his public statements, Netanyahu underlined how and why Iran and its nuclear weapons program are a greater threat to the free world than Islamic State.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">There are probably two reasons for Netanyahu’s reticence. First, a confrontation would be futile.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Even before Gordon’s speech, it was obvious to Netanyahu that Obama’s goal is not to prevent Iran from getting nuclear bombs. The goal of Obama’s Iran policy is to reinstate US-Iranian relations.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Obama sees himself as a reincarnation of Richard Nixon. He will be for US-Iranian relations what Nixon was for US relations with Communist China.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Obama doesn’t mind if Iran has a bomb in the basement so long as he can drink tea with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in the drawing room.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Given Obama’s absolute commitment to his goal, there was no point in having a confrontation with him. Netanyahu’s rejection of Obama’s position, made through his repeated warnings, was directed toward other ears. Netanyahu’s statements and warning were directed toward the American media, the American public and the American political class. His goal is to develop and strengthen support for an Israeli policy that would run counter to Obama’s policy of embracing Iran even at the cost of enabling Iran to become a nuclear power.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The only problem with Netanyahu’s rhetoric is that it isn’t credible. At this point, it is hard to believe Netanyahu has a policy to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">During his five-and-a-half years in office, Netanyahu has taken only sporadic action against Iran.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The cumulative impact of those actions has been limited, in part due to the Obama administration’s policy of leaking Israeli operations to the media.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Moreover, in light of the episodic nature of these actions, it is hard to view them as integrated components of an overall strategy whose aim is to destroy or significantly degrade Iran’s nuclear installations. In other words, it doesn’t appear that Israel has a policy of any kind for dealing with Iran’s nuclear weapons program.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">All we have is Netanyahu’s Churchillian rhetoric, which in itself will do nothing to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As the media analysts were quick to point out, whereas Netanyahu sought to focus his discussions with Obama on Iran, Obama was keen to focus his discussions with Netanyahu on the Palestinians.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Netanyahu’s unwillingness to focus specifically on the Palestinian issue was notable mainly because in his limited remarks on the issue, he signaled that he has a new strategic vision and policy for contending with the Palestinian conflict with Israel.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The first aspect of Netanyahu’s apparently emerging policy came out on Monday during his speech at the UN General Assembly. There Netanyahu criticized PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas more honestly and assertively than he ever has before.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Slamming Abbas for his libelous charge that Israel enacted a genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, Netanyahu said that the deranged moral universe in which Israel can be accused of genocide is “the same moral universe where a man [Abbas] who wrote a dissertation of lies about the Holocaust, and who insists on a Palestine free of Jews, judenrein, can stand at the podium and shamelessly accuse Israel of genocide and ethnic cleansing.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Netanyahu then further distanced himself from the PLO-centric framework for building peaceful relations between Israel and its neighbors. He noted that the rise of Sunni jihadist forces and the Iranian nuclear threat have brought major Sunni Arab states to the conclusion that their best bet is to work with Israel to meet and surmount the growing dangers. This new regional landscape in turn can provide a means of resolving the Palestinian conflict with Israel in a manner that will not endanger Israel.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Netanyahu’s suggestion, repeated at the White House Wednesday, that neighboring Arab states may develop new means of resolving the Palestinian issue, rings true in light of the diplomatic support Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates gave Israel in its war against Hamas this summer. And even though the Egyptian government later denied the reports, talk persists that Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi did in fact offer the Palestinians sovereignty over a large swathe of Sinai adjacent to Gaza as a means of establishing a viable Palestinian state without sovereignty over Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The assessment that a policy is slowly being developed along these lines was reinforced on Tuesday by Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Repeating Netanyahu’s reference to a regional alliance structure that can be used to resolve the Palestinian conflict with Israel, Ya’alon said that it is irrational to even consider an Israeli withdrawal from Judea and Samaria in the aftermath of the war in Gaza.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The emerging policy apparently involves the application of Israeli sovereignty over all or parts of Judea and Samaria, along the lines I set out in my book The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East, in combination with an Egyptian offer of Sinai territory to the Palestinians in conjunction with the demilitarization of Gaza.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">From the administration’s behavior following Obama’s meeting with Netanyahu on Wednesday, we learned that the administration is adamantly opposed to any revision of the current PLO-centric framework, which is predicated on Israeli concessions to an intransigent PLO.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Shortly after Netanyahu left the White House, the administration bitterly attacked and threatened Israel, because the Jewish state refuses to obey the administration and deny Jews the right to buy and own property in eastern, southern and northern Jerusalem. The administration was enraged because in line with Israel’s refusal to adopt anti-Semitic housing policies, the Jerusalem Planning Board approved the construction of housing for Jews and Arabs in the city.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Also on Wednesday, Channel 10 reported that Secretary of State John Kerry is seeking to scuttle the developing Israeli alliance with Egypt and other anti-jihadist Sunni states by bringing Qatar, Hamas’s principal Sunni state-sponsor, into the mix. Kerry is reportedly trying to organize a regional peace conference that would coerce Israel into accepting the so-called Saudi Peace Initiative from 2002. That initiative would require Israel to surrender to all the PLO’s territorial demands and accept millions of foreign, hostile Arabs into its shrunken, indefensible territory.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In light of Obama’s absolute commitment to the anti-Israel, PLO-centric policy model for dealing with the Palestinian rejection of Israel, for the next two years there will be no change in US policy on the issue.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Under these circumstances, Netanyahu’s task is to lay the foundation in Washington for support for an Israeli policy that abandons the PLO as a partner and moves beyond the failed two-state model. Here, Netanyahu’s statements at the UN and the White House indicate that this is the path he has embarked upon.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Unfortunately, while Netanyahu may prefer to lay the groundwork for a new policy indirectly and cautiously, Abbas’s bid to convince the US to support the passage of a Security Council resolution that would require Israel to withdraw from Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem a week after the 2016 presidential elections will likely force Netanyahu present an alternative to the PLO-centric two-state plan sooner rather than later.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">After the 2016 elections, Obama will be unconstrained by concerns for Democratic candidates.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Most of the Security Council resolutions against Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria were passed after the 1980 presidential elections when the then lame duck Jimmy Carter felt free to attack Israel at will.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">To avoid a repetition of that experience in late 2016, Netanyahu will have to offer an alternative to the failed two-state plan ahead of the 2016 presidential nominating conventions.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Netanyahu’s statements in the US this week present us with a mixed picture of his leadership.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Netanyahu appears more resolute on the Palestinian threat than he has in the past. This is a good thing. But on the most pressing threat Israel faces today, his strong words rang hollow. The only way to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power is for Israel to attack Iran’s nuclear installations. Until Israel adopts a policy for doing so, words will not suffice.</span></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Obama&#8217;s 15 Worst Moments At The UN</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ben-shapiro/obamas-15-worst-moments-at-the-un/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-15-worst-moments-at-the-un</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 26 Sep 2014 04:57:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ben Shapiro]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=241841</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Moronic platitudes, internal contradictions, and morally disgusting sentiments.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class="field-body">
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/obama-un-speech.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-241845" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/obama-un-speech-450x253.jpg" alt="obama-un-speech" width="342" height="192" /></a>Speaking at the United Nations on Wednesday, President Obama performed the signal feat of cramming his head so far up his own ass that his head actually emerged from his mouth again, thereby creating the first human Escher loop. His speech at the United Nations was chock-full of moronic platitudes, internal contradictions, and morally disgusting sentiments.</p>
<p>Here are the top fifteen:</p>
<p><strong>“Together, we have learned how to cure disease, and harness the power of the wind and sun.”</strong> Which is, of course, why disease remains rampant in Africa – so much so that Obama is sending 3,000 troops there to combat Ebola virus – and why America garners a whopping 4.13 percent of her electricity from wind and 0.23 percent from the sun. But the Godking hath reined global forces to his chariot, and shall ride the moonbeams!</p>
<p><strong>“We are here because others realized that we gain more from cooperation than conquest.”</strong> Well, no. We are here because civilized nations banded together to defeat Nazis and then communism, not because of some global revelation about the power of cooperation. This is a third grade rendition of history.</p>
<p><strong>“</strong><strong>We believe that <span style="text-decoration: underline;">right</span> makes might – that bigger nations should not be able to bully smaller ones; that people should be able to choose their own future.”</strong> If Obama believes this, he has the mental capacity of a chipmunk. Obviously, right does not make might. If it did, millions of Jews would still be living in Germany and Poland, the Soviet Empire never would have risen, and the Yazidis would be decimating ISIS. We actually believe that it is the duty of right to grow its defense capacity and then fight for its principles – both notions foreign to President Obama.</p>
<p><strong>“</strong><strong>While small gains can be won at the barrel of a gun, they will ultimately be turned back if enough voices support the freedom of nations and peoples to make their own decisions.”</strong> Again, no. Millions of voices have cried out for freedom in North Korea and China for decades, to no avail. It isn’t about raising voices. It’s about strategically outflanking evil nations and crippling their capacity to continue functioning.</p>
<p><strong>“My message to Iran’s leaders and people is simple: do not let this opportunity pass. We can reach a solution that meets your energy needs while assuring the world that your program is peaceful.“</strong> Iran’s mullahs are still laughing at this one.</p>
<p><strong>“America is and will continue to be a Pacific power, promoting peace, stability, and the free flow of commerce among nations. But we will insist that all nations abide by the rules of the road, and resolve their territorial disputes peacefully, consistent with international law.”</strong> The Chinese politburo is still laughing at this one.</p>
<p><strong>“On issue after issue, we cannot rely on a rule-book written for a different century.”</strong> Who wrote this rulebook? And why, if Obama is presenting a new rulebook, do his rules so closely conform to those of his leftist predecessors?</p>
<p><strong>“Islam teaches peace. Muslims the world over aspire to live with dignity and a sense of justice. And when it comes to America and Islam, there is no us and them – there is only <span style="text-decoration: underline;">us</span>, because millions of Muslim Americans are part of the fabric of our country.”</strong> Well, actually, there is a “them” – as in the <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2014/09/04/myth-tiny-radical-minority">huge portion</a> of Muslims who support the goals and aims of al Qaeda and ISIS.</p>
<p><strong>“The ideology of ISIL or al Qaeda or Boko Haram will wilt and die if it is consistently exposed, confronted, and refuted in the light of day.”</strong> Then why are we bombing them? Why not send pamphlets? (Note: to support this notion, Obama actually cited a sheikh who has endorsed murder of US soldiers in the Middle East.)</p>
<p><strong>“Next year, we should all be prepared to announce the concrete steps that we have taken to counter extremist ideologies&#8230;”</strong> Next year. Always next year.</p>
<p><strong>“There is nothing new about wars within religions. Christianity endured centuries of vicious sectarian conflict. Today, it is violence within Muslim communities that has become the source of so much human misery.”</strong> Nothing like citing history from centuries ago to downplay Muslim sectarian violence today.</p>
<p><strong>“But the only lasting solution to Syria’s civil war is political – an inclusive political transition that responds to the legitimate aspirations of all Syrian citizens, regardless of ethnicity or creed.”</strong> And what, pray tell, would this magical political solution look like, given that last year President Obama was busily telling the UN that Syrian dictator Bashar Assad must go, and this year is busily telling the UN we must bomb those who oppose Assad?</p>
<p><strong>“[T]he countries of the Arab and Muslim world must focus on the extraordinary potential of their people – especially the youth.”</strong> This would be a grand idea, except for the inconvenient fact that a disproportionate number of terrorists are Muslim and Arab youths. Oops.</p>
<p><strong>“No God condones this terror. No grievance justifies these actions. There can be no reasoning – no negotiation – with this brand of evil. The only language understood by killers like this is the language of force….the violence engulfing the region today has made too many Israelis ready to abandon the hard work of peace. But let’s be clear: the status quo in the West Bank and Gaza is not sustainable.”</strong> Self-defense for America, but not for the Jews, according to the President. The Jews must continue to pursue the “hard work of peace,” even if they’re experiencing rocket fire every day; America, however, can bomb the hell out of ISIS even if ISIS is located thousands of miles away and largely threatens other Muslims. The hypocrisy is rank, and moral equivocation repulsive.</p>
<p><strong>“In a summer marked by instability in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, I know the world also took notice of the small American city of Ferguson, Missouri – where a young man was killed, and a community was divided. So yes, we have our own racial and ethnic tensions.”</strong> Officer Darren Wilson can chat with the YouTube “Innocence of Muslims” filmmaker below the bus as he becomes a symbol of all American racial intolerance, despite complete lack of evidence. Thanks, Mr. President!</p>
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		<title>An Emboldened Iran Takes the Stage at the United Nations</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/an-emboldened-iran-takes-the-stage-at-the-united-nations/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=an-emboldened-iran-takes-the-stage-at-the-united-nations</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 26 Sep 2014 04:48:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=241812</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why prospects for cooperation with the Islamic Republic look dimmer than ever. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #232323;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/rouhani_3048708b.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-241813" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/rouhani_3048708b-411x350.jpg" alt="rouhani_3048708b" width="281" height="239" /></a>On Thursday, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani addressed the United Nations in a <a href="http://www.un.org/en/ga/69/meetings/gadebate/25sep/pdf/IR_en.pdf"><span style="color: #1255cc;">speech</span></a> replete with anti-Western sentiments, anti-Semitism, tiresome tropes regarding the genesis of terror, and promises to continue pursuing his nation’s nuclear program.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">While acknowledging that terror had become a global issue, Rouhani sought to put the blame everywhere else. “Today’s anti-Westernism is the offspring of yesterday’s colonialism,” Rouhani insisted, proceeding to take a none-too-subtle shot at America, noting that “certain intelligence agencies have put blades in the hands of madmen, who now spare no one.” Apparently omitted from this list of madmen is Syrian President Bashar Assad, who has received direct support from Iran in the form of financial assistance, and despite all denials to the contrary, hundreds of Revolutionary Guard troops <a href="http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/iran-670210937"><span style="color: #1255cc;">fighting</span></a> in that nation. Iran also supports <a href="http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/05/senate-sanction-bill-target-hezbollah.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Hezbollah</span></a> and <a href="http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/65462.pdf"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Hamas</span></a>, both of whom have been designated as terrorist organizations by the U.S. State Department.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Thus, it was no surprise that Rouhani characterized the last war between Hamas and Israel as a conflict in which “thousands of innocent Palestinians in Gaza” were victims of the “Zionist regime’s aggression,” even as he characterized his own nation—the one that has <a href="http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/183332#.VCRAc-fFm3c"><span style="color: #1255cc;">openly boasted</span></a> about sharing missile technology with Hamas to improve their ability to hit Israeli cities—as one of “tranquil secure and stable nations&#8221; in the Middle East.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Rouhani also aligned himself with the American left’s thoroughly misguided notions about the root of terror, “that germinates in poverty, discrimination, humiliation and injustice” that “grows in a culture of violence.” <a href="http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/183332#.VCRAc-fFm3c"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Several studies</span></a> have thoroughly debunked that contention, yet it provides Rouhani and other apologists the opportunity to obscure the reality that Islamic fundamentalism is the primary driver of terror throughout the world. Thus, Rouhani expresses “astonishment” that groups like ISIS “call themselves Islamic” and that the Western media “repeats this false claim, which provokes hatred of all Muslims” and is &#8220;part of a (sic) Islamophobic project.” Like every other religion, Rouhani insists Islam is peaceful, and like every other prophet, the taking of even one innocent life is condemned by the prophet Mohammed.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Not quite. The Qur’an is <a href="http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/quran/023-violence.htm"><span style="color: #1255cc;">filled</span></a> with verses promoting violence and death against unbelievers, all the innocence in the world notwithstanding. Furthermore, the concept of <a href="http://www.inquiryintoislam.com/2010/06/what-is-abrogation-in-islam.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">abrogation</span></a> explains that later verses in the Qur’an take precedence over earlier ones. Almost all of the violent verses appear later in the book.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Rouhani nonetheless continued his deceptive characterization of the real problems of the Middle East. “The strategic blunders of the West in the Middle-East, Central Asia and the Caucuses have turned these parts of the world into a haven for terrorists and extremists,” he insists, citing Iraq, Afghanistan and the “improper interference in Syria” as examples. He further insists the Middle East wants democracy—even as it impossible to believe he is unaware of the reality that democracy and Sharia Law are fundamentally incompatible systems of governance.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">That reality made itself plain last week, when six Iranians were given <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/09/iran-happy-dancers-get-suspended-sentences-201491913331993392.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">suspended</span></a> sentences of six months and 91 lashes for “obscene behavior” for appearing in a video singing the American pop song “Happy.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">They got off easy. In August, 16-year-old Ateqeh Rajabi was <a href="http://www.meforum.org/1000/why-do-muslims-execute-innocent-people#_ftnref2"><span style="color: #1255cc;">hanged</span></a> in the Iranian town of Neka. She was executed for having sex with her boyfriend. She was one of several victims executed for sexual “crimes” that violated Sharia Law.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Unsurprisingly, Rouhani addressed the issue of sanctions, calling them a “strategic mistake against a moderate and independent nation under the current sensitive condition of our region.” He falsely framed the issue as one where the “will of Iranian people,&#8221; rather than the economic squeeze imposed on his country, reinvigorated the current negotiations that were continuing in good faith, even as he warned that any other solution to Iran’s pursuit of nukes would be a “grave mistake.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Rouhani made it clear that his nation remains &#8220;committed to our peaceful nuclear program” and that the &#8220;avoidance of excessive demands in the negotiations by our counterparts is the prerequisite for success in the negotiations.” He then tied those negotiations to the “beginning of a multilateral collaboration aimed at promoting security, peace and development in our region and beyond.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">In short, Iran wants to use nuclear negotiations as a bargaining chip in the fight against terror.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The Obama administration has sent out <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/09/25/rouhani-ties-iran-cooperation-on-mideast-violence-to-nuke-deal/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">conflicting signals</span></a> with regard to such a scenario. Publicly they claim they will not share intelligence, or coordinate military activity, with the nation <a href="http://www.state.gov/p/us/rm/2013/202684.htm"><span style="color: #1255cc;">still designated</span></a> &#8220;world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism&#8221; by the State Department. Yet prior to bombing ISIS in Syria, the administration notified Iran about it, and <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/23/us-syria-crisis-usa-iran-idUSKCN0HI2F220140923"><span style="color: #1255cc;">reassured</span></a> them they would not target the government of Bashar Assad, who remains a terrorist-abetting proxy of Iran. Furthermore, an unnamed Iranian official told Reuters that &#8220;military and security issues are being shared to fight against IS.” Secretary of State John Kerry also revealed he was &#8220;open to have a conversation at some point in time if there&#8217;s a way to find something constructive.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Rouhani reiterated that a “historic” nuclear agreement with Iran is one where the West can show “that it does not oppose the advancement and development of others and does not discriminate when it comes to adhering to international rules and regulations.” He doubled-down on those questioning his nation’s motives, insisting “the notion that Iran seeks to control other Muslim countries in the region is a myth fanned in the recent years in the context of an Iranophobic context,” and that those who do so “breed imaginary enemies to sustain tensions and sow division and conflict.” He called for a “right approach” to the terror problem, insisting the proper solution comes from “within the region and regionally provided solution (sic) with international support and not from the (sic) outside the region.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">As it stands now, Rouhani’s “solution” aligns perfectly with an Obama administration seemingly convinced it can fight a proxy war from the air, while the nations of the Middle East ostensibly cobble together the “boots on the ground” necessary to degrade and destroy ISIS and other terror entities congealing in the caliphate that straddles Iraq and Syria. In the meantime, Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-abaci <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-25/islamic-state-said-to-plot-subway-attacks-in-u-s-france.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">revealed</span></a> that ISIS terrorists captured in his nation said the group is planning subway attacks in Paris and the United States.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">One wonders when—or is that if—it will occur to the Obama administration that prolonging this conflict emboldens terrorists, not only in the Middle East, but all over the world, including the 40 ISIS fighters from America the administration <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2765635/Obama-administration-confirms-American-ISIS-fighters-returned-US-FBI-looking-congressman-spilled-beans-week.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">admits</span></a> have returned home. With regard to Iran, prolonging the conflict allows them to use it as leverage in what ought to be seen as fruitless negotiations over Iran&#8217;s nuclear program.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">In fact the negotiations are now bordering on the absurd, as the administration has reportedly floated a proposal that allows Iran to <a href="http://www.manilatimes.net/breaking_news/republicans-worry-us-let-iran-disconnect-scrap-nuclear-centrifuges/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">disconnect</span></a> thousands of centrifuges, rather than dismantle them. A senior administration official offered the administration’s rationale to the <i>New York Times,</i> insisting that “it takes a lot of time to put a cascade together, and piping is one of the most time-consuming parts of that laborious process.” Yet other experts noted this idea has been floated many times over the last decade, a reality that likely indicates a certain level of desperation on the part of the P5+1 nations who are under pressure to complete a deal—even a bad one&#8211;by Nov. 24.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Toward that end, the Obama administration has been touting the idea that Rouhani is a “<a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/359045/rouhani-obamas-moderate-iranian-lifeline-anne-bayefsky"><span style="color: #1255cc;">moderate</span></a>,” a notion that calculatingly ignores his abysmal human rights <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/irwin-cotler/human-rights-rouhani_b_5283081.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">record</span></a> and the reality that he is little more than a front man for the genuine seat of power in Iran: Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his band of nihilistic mullahs. Mullahs who yearn for the re-emergence of the Twelfth or Hidden Imam that will bring about a period of chaos. In 2010 Khamenei <a href="http://www.thememriblog.org/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">claimed</span></a> he met the Hidden Imam and said he was assured that his reemergence would occur while Khamenei was still Supreme Leader.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Rouhani’s speech at the U.N. should be seen for exactly what it is: a more aggressive &#8220;charm offensive&#8221; by the latest representative of the world’s foremost sponsor of state terror. Moreover, a nuclear Iran would precipitate a nightmarish nuclear arms race in the most unstable region in the world. And despite every obfuscation on the part of the Obama administration, and their equally weak-kneed European allies, those are the real stakes. Stakes that include the real possibility of Iran supplying such weapons to terrorists.</p>
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		<title>The Incredible Lightness of Being Barack Obama</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/the-incredible-lightness-of-being-barack-obama/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-incredible-lightness-of-being-barack-obama</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 25 Sep 2014 04:56:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=241762</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A speech of clichés, platitudes and moral idiocy. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/85.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-241763" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/85-433x350.jpg" alt="85" width="318" height="257" /></a>Barack Obama’s address to the U.N. General Assembly was so insubstantial, so full of airy platitudes, and so adulterated with the gaseous clichés of bankrupt internationalism and progressive bromides that I thought at any minute he might just float away.</p>
<p>First was the obligatory call “to renew the purpose of the U.N.’s founding,” which apparently is “to observe and enforce international norms,” the most important being “to ensure that no nation can subjugate its neighbors and claim their territory” and to promote “the path of diplomacy and peace and the ideals this institution is designed to uphold.” Such phrases are so common and uncritically received that we forget “international norms” do not exist. Different peoples have different “norms” about, for example, the use of violence to achieve their aims. Nations will sign treaties that seemingly express our norms, but that doesn’t mean they believe in them. More often, such treaties are mere mechanisms for one nation to get what it wants from another. The sorry history of U.S. arms-control treaties with the Soviet Union and then Russia, treaties the Russians violated for decades to improve their nuclear arsenal at our expense, is just one example.</p>
<p>As for seizing territory by force, the U.N. did nothing to prevent Turkey from seizing northern Cyprus, or China from seizing Tibet, and more recently Russia from seizing Crimea. The Serbs’ attempts in the &#8217;90s to “claim territory” were stopped not by the U.N., but by American bombs. So too was Saddam Hussein’s aggression against Kuwait. Nor should we be surprised at the serial failure of the U.N. to enforce its lofty founding principles. Nations belong to the U.N. because they think they can use it to advance their interests, not “to enforce international norms,” especially when their own “norms” see nothing wrong with using duplicity and force to achieve their aims. Indeed, the continuing violence justified by other “norms” since the U.N.’s founding has claimed some 41 million lives. The U.N. serves the conflicting, zero-sum interests of the member states, not the “path of diplomacy and peace.”</p>
<p>From that preposterous beginning, the speech went downhill. “Islam teaches peace,” the President intoned. No, Islam teaches <i>submission</i>. There is no peace for those who refuse to submit, even for Muslims considered heretics by other Muslims, but especially for “polytheists” or “infidels.” In their case, Islam teaches jihad against them if they refuse to accept the “call” to convert. Far from being extremists “who have perverted one of the world’s great religions,” as Obama scolded, the proliferating jihadist outfits that are kidnapping, torturing, raping, beheading, and enslaving people around the globe are acting on the doctrines and past practices of Islam’s founding fathers.</p>
<p>So Obama might think that their “nightmarish vision . . . would divide the world into adherents and infidels,” but it is traditional, orthodox Islam that divides the world into the <i>dar al harb</i>, the “house of war” against which the faithful must wage jihad, and the <i>dar al islam</i>, the “house of Islam,” the ummah of faithful Muslims. Obama may really believe that “No God condones such terror” like the beheadings perpetrated by Islamic State, but it is the Koran, the literal words of Allah, that says <span style="color: #272727;">at 8.12: “</span>I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.”</p>
<p>Such “willful blindness,” as Andrew McCarthy has called it, to the traditional motivations of today’s jihadists depends on clichéd lies like those Obama trades in. Perhaps that blindness explains his astonishing praise in his U.N. speech for Sheikh Abdallah Bin Bayyah, whose group has endorsed Hamas, who supported a 2004 fatwa calling on the faithful to murder U.S. soldiers in Iraq and another forbidding any “normalization” of Israel, and was associated with an organization whose founder called for “<span style="color: #2f2d2f;">the death of Jews and Americans.”</span></p>
<p>Then there is the last refuge of the morally addled, moral equivalency. In his remarks on the Arab war against Israel, Obama can’t resist this cowardly cop out. Speaking of the endless and fruitless “peace process,” Obama intones, “We cannot afford to turn away from this effort––not when rockets are fired at innocent Israelis, or the lives of so many Palestinian children are taken from us in Gaza.” Of course, it is not Israelis “taking” these children, it is the Hamas jihadists who use them as human shields, sacrificing their own children in order to gin up international condemnations in order to isolate Israel. Worse yet, such a sentence completely ignores the most important dimension of this violence: the decades of wars and terrorist attacks instigated by Arabs whose doctrinal hatred of Jews has compelled them since 1947 &#8212; when they violated a U.N. resolution with impunity–– to serially refuse a state for the Palestinian Arabs or agree to “two states living side by side, in peace and security,” yet another stale cliché useful for pretending to say something when one has nothing important to say. In reality, the Palestinian Arabs have made it clear that what they want is to destroy Israel.</p>
<p>Yet nothing matches the surreal moral idiocy of Obama’s next indulgence of moral equivalency:</p>
<blockquote><p>I realize that America’s critics will be quick to point out that at times we too have failed to live up to our ideals; that America has plenty of problems within our own borders. This is true. In a summer marked by instability in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, I know the world also took notice of the small American city of Ferguson, Missouri––where a young man was killed, and a community was divided.</p></blockquote>
<p>Here is one of the staple dogmas of the Progressive mind: the sins and crimes of America that require apologies and reparations, even as the millions of dead, tortured, and imprisoned in other nations are shrugged off. Obama began his presidency with the “apology tour” in which he donned the hair shirt of American guilt for its imperialist depredations, its racist sins, and its global exploitation of others. Then as now, Obama ignores important distinctions. To equate the atrocities of Islamic State or Hamas, or the shooting down of a passenger jet in Ukraine that cost nearly 300 lives, with what probably will turn out to be the justified shooting of a lawbreaker assaulting a police officer, bespeaks either delusion or the sophistic pandering to an audience comprising the representatives of nations most of which are some of the planet’s most brutal and murderous regimes.</p>
<p>This speech proves once again that Obama is not a serious man. His badly trained mind is a warehouse of the sort of leftist and progressive received wisdom and dull clichés that pollute our universities, media, and popular culture. He represents the moral idiocy and fashionable self-loathing that signals to our enemies and rivals that the United States can be had.</p>
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		<title>Of Politicians and Moral Courage</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/of-politicians-and-moral-courage/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=of-politicians-and-moral-courage</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 12 Sep 2014 04:54:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[How Obama's lack of moral clarity will make it impossible for him to address threats to America. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/09102014_Obama_ISIS_Speech.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-240836" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/09102014_Obama_ISIS_Speech.jpg" alt="09102014_Obama_ISIS_Speech" width="282" height="250" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Column-One-Of-politicians-and-moral-courage-375120">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p>Leaders are not elected. Politicians are elected. Their election in turn provides politicians with the opportunity to become leaders.</p>
<p>You don’t become a leader by telling people what they want to hear, although doing so certainly helps to you get elected. A politician becomes a leader by telling people what they don’t want to hear.</p>
<p>If they are lucky, politicians will never have to become leaders. They will serve in times of peace and plenty, when it’s possible to pretend away the hard facts of the human condition. And they can leave office beloved for letting people believe that the world is the Elysian Fields.</p>
<p>Certainly this has been the case for many American politicians since the end of World War II.</p>
<p>This is not the case today. In our times, evil rears its ugly head with greater power and frequency than it has in at least a generation. As Americans learned 13 years ago this week, evil ignored is evil empowered.</p>
<p>Yet fighting evil and protecting the good is not a simple matter. Evil has many handmaidens.</p>
<p>Those who hide it away enable it. Those who justify it enable it. Those who ignore it enable it.</p>
<p>To fight evil effectively, a leader must possess the moral wisdom to recognize that evil can only be rooted out when the environment that cultivates it is discredited and so transformed. To discredit and transform that environment, a leader must have the moral courage to stand not only against evildoers, but against their far less controversial facilitators.</p>
<p>In other words, the foundations of true leadership are moral clarity and courage.</p>
<p>On Wednesday two American elected leaders gave speeches. In one, a leader emerged. In the other, a politician gave a speech.</p>
<p>The first speech was given by Texas Senator Ted Cruz.</p>
<p>On Wednesday evening, Cruz gave the keynote address at the inaugural dinner of an organization that calls itself In Defense of Christians.</p>
<p>The purpose of the new organization is supposed to be advocacy on behalf of oppressed Christian communities in the Middle East.</p>
<p>Ahead of the dinner, The Washington Free Beacon website questioned Cruz’s decision to address the group. Several Christian leaders from Lebanon and Syria also scheduled to address the forum had records of public support for Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, and Hezbollah, and had made egregiously anti-Semitic statements.</p>
<p>For instance, Church of Antioch Patriarch Gregory III Laham blamed jihadist attacks on Iraqi Christians on a “Zionist conspiracy against Islam” aimed at making Muslims look bad.</p>
<p>Probably the organization’s leaders assumed that Cruz would give their group bipartisan credibility and never considered he might challenge their anti-Jewish prejudices. No American politician in recent memory has made an issue of the rampant Jew-hatred among Middle Eastern Christians. Probably they figured that he’d make an impassioned speech about the plight of Christians under the jackboot of Islamic State, enjoy warm applause, leave the hall and clear the path for other speakers to blame the Jews.</p>
<p>Cruz did not follow the script. Instead he used the opportunity to tell his audience hard truths.</p>
<p>In a statement released by his office, Cruz summarized the events of the evening.</p>
<blockquote><p>“I told the attendees that those who hate Israel also hate America&#8230; that those who hate Jews also hate Christians. And that anyone who hates Israel and the Jewish people is not following the teachings of Christ.</p>
<p>“I went on to tell the crowd that Christians in the Middle East have no better friend than Israel. That Christians can practice their faith free of persecution in Israel. And that ISIS [Islamic State], al-Qaida, Hamas and Hezbollah, along with their state sponsors in Syria and Iran, are all part of the same cancer, murdering Christians and Jews alike. Hate is hate, and murder is murder.”</p></blockquote>
<p>For his decision not to take the low road, Cruz was subjected to angry boos and heckling from the audience, whose members angrily rejected his remarks.</p>
<p>“After just a few minutes, I had no choice,” Cruz said. “I told them that if you will not stand with Israel, if you will not stand with the Jews, then I will not stand with you. And then I walked off the stage.”</p>
<p>Cruz’s action was an act of moral leadership.</p>
<p>He stood before his audience of fellow Christians and told his co-religionists that their hatred of Jews and Israel is un-Christian. He told them as well that their bigotry blinds them to their own plight and makes them reject their greatest ally in securing their future in the Middle East.</p>
<p>Cruz’s strategy for fighting Islamic oppression of Christians involves uniting all those oppressed and attacked by jihadists. In all honesty, it is the only policy that has a chance in the long term of securing the future of the Christians of the Middle East.</p>
<p>For Cruz to reach this conclusion, he first had to possess the moral clarity to recognize that Christian Jew-hatred is a major obstacle to securing the future of the Middle East’s Christians.</p>
<p>In other words his strategic vision is anchored in moral courage.</p>
<p>The same evening that Cruz was booed off the stage by an audience of anti-Semitic Christians, US President Obama gave a speech to the general audience where he set out his rationale for fighting Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and his strategy for doing so.</p>
<p>In some ways, it is unfair to compare Obama’s speech to Cruz’s. Cruz addressed a narrow constituency and Obama gave his speech to all Americans, and indeed to the entire world.</p>
<p>A more apt comparison would be between Cruz’s speech to the pro-terror Christians and Obama’s speech to an audience that included Muslim Brotherhood leaders in Cairo in 2009.</p>
<p>Indeed, the chief reason that Cruz’s speech was an act of leadership, and Obama’s was the address of a politician, is that Obama’s speech reflected his remarks in Cairo and his subsequent speeches to Muslim audiences and about Islam throughout the intervening years.</p>
<p>Neither during his speech in Cairo nor in subsequent remarks has Obama ever called out the world’s Muslims for their bigotry against Jews, Christians and others. Neither during his speech in Cairo nor in subsequent addresses has Obama spoken out against Islamic terrorism or the jihadist world view that stands at the foundation of Islamic terrorism.</p>
<p>Rather, throughout his presidency Obama has denied the existence of the jihad, its ideology and the fact that it is a force shaping events throughout the world.</p>
<p>Wednesday’s speech was no exception.</p>
<p>At the outset of his remarks, Obama insisted that Islamic State, or (ISIL has he calls it), “is not ‘Islamic.’” Obama may be right, and he may be wrong.</p>
<p>That’s for Muslims to determine. But whatever the truth is about Islam and jihad, the fact is that hundreds of millions of Muslims believe that Islamic State and other jihadist groups and regimes, of both the Shi’ite and Sunni variety, are accurate expressions of Islam. This is why thousands of Muslims from Europe and the US are flocking to Iraq and Syria to join Islamic State.</p>
<p>Obama’s policies for contending with Islamic jihadists are a natural extension of his refusal to speak hard truths to Muslims or speak truthfully about Islamic terrorism and jihadism. His whitewashing of jihadist Islam on Wednesday night similarly was reflected in the strategy he set out for fighting Islamic State.</p>
<p>As Fred and Kim Kagan noted in The Weekly Standard, Obama’s decision to use counterterror strategies for fighting Islamic State is a recipe for failure. What Obama referred to as “a terrorist organization,” is actually an insurgency that fights battles against standing armies and wins.</p>
<p>Counterterror operations cannot work against such a force.</p>
<p>So, too, Obama&#8217;s asserted that his strategy for fighting Islamic State has been tried and succeeded in Somalia and Yemen. Yet by all accounts, jihadist forces in both countries are not only undefeated, they are becoming stronger.</p>
<p>Obama’s strategy involves joining US air power with anti-Islamic State forces on the ground in Iraq and Syria. Yet aside from the Kurds, all the forces on the ground in both countries are deeply problematic.</p>
<p>Just hours before Obama’s speech, the leadership of Syria’s “moderate” rebel forces was decapitated in an explosion. And for all their moderation, the leaders were part of an anti-Assad coalition that included Islamic State.</p>
<p>Although he is an Alawite, Bashar Assad and his forces are members of the Shi’ite jihadist coalition led by Iran that includes Hezbollah.</p>
<p>These forces are more dangerous than Islamic State. Yet US air strikes against Islamic State will redound to their direct benefit.</p>
<p>Obama’s refusal to acknowledge the existence of jihad – of both the Sunni and Shi’ite variety – makes it impossible for him to devise a realistic strategy for defeating jihadists. He rightly defines Islamic State as an enemy of the US, but because he denies the existence of jihad, he is incapable of putting Islamic State in its proper strategic context. Among the many forces fighting on the ground in Iraq and Syria today, you have two jihadist forces – one Shi’ite and one Sunni – that are fighting each other. Both are enemies of America and its allies.</p>
<p>To be sure, Islamic State must be confronted and defeated – just as Iran, Hezbollah, al-Qaida, Hamas and Boko Haram need to be defeated.</p>
<p>Defeating only one group empowers others, and so you keep ending up where you started.</p>
<p>Yet rather than understand that while jihadist forces may oppose one another, the threat they pose to the free world is indivisible, as Obama focuses on Islamic State, he is enabling Iran to expand its power in Iraq and Syria, and to complete its nuclear weapons program.</p>
<p>Last week the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that Iran continues to hide key information about its nuclear program from the UN nuclear watchdog, despite its agreement to provide the IAEA with full transparency last November.</p>
<p>The Iranians continue to bar IAEA inspectors from the suspected military nuclear installation at Parchin. Negotiations on a nuclear accord between the US and its partners and Iran are going nowhere. According to Western diplomatic sources, the failure to reach an accord owes entirely to Iran’s refusal to compromise on any substantive nuclear issues.</p>
<p>While Iran refuses to provide transparency to the IAEA, its guiding strategy is clear to the naked eye. It is prolonging negotiations to buy time to complete its nuclear program.</p>
<p>However, Obama, who insists that Islamic State “terrorists are unique in their brutality,” refuses to see the true picture.</p>
<p>The truth revealed on Wednesday night is that Obama cannot lead a successful war against the forces of Islamic jihad that threaten humanity. He cannot do so because he rejects the moral clarity required to confront the danger.</p>
<p>He cannot successfully lead the war because, as we saw once again on Wednesday night, he is not a leader. He is a politician.</p>
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		<title>Obama Will Fight ISIS by Arming ISIS</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obama-will-fight-isis-by-arming-isis/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-will-fight-isis-by-arming-isis</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 11 Sep 2014 04:55:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[We can’t defeat terrorists by arming terrorists.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Screen-Shot-2014-09-11-at-12.46.36-AM.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-240761" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Screen-Shot-2014-09-11-at-12.46.36-AM-418x350.png" alt="Screen Shot 2014-09-11 at 12.46.36 AM" width="293" height="245" /></a>“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” Samuel Johnson said. A few centuries later his fellow Englishman, Winston Churchill, quipped, “The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative.”</p>
<p>It’s not true of the United States, but it is true of Barack Obama who, having exhausted every alternative that involved appeasement or pretending that ISIS wasn’t a threat, has decided to do the right thing.</p>
<p>As long as he gets enough applause for doing it.</p>
<p>With his approval ratings, particularly on American leadership and national security, lower than Assad’s, he decided to exploit September 11 to butch up his foreign policy image.</p>
<p>After spending the last few years ignoring ISIS, he delivered a carefully timed speech vowing to take it on. The speech might have been a little more credible if it had not come from the man whose inaction allowed ISIS to take over parts of Iraq and Syria and who early this year was dismissing it as a JV team.</p>
<p>The scoundrel who lied and claimed that he had defeated Al Qaeda has been reborn again as a patriot who is promising to… defeat Al Qaeda. Even his usual boast of defeating Al Qaeda has been carefully walked back to a claim of having defeated “much of al-Qaida’s leadership in Afghanistan and Pakistan”.</p>
<p>That brief moment of near honesty is diminished only by the fact that the war on Al Qaeda had moved on to the Middle East long before Obama even took office. It was Obama who decided to divert away from fighting Al Qaeda in the Middle East on a failed attempt to defeat the Taliban and an even more failed attempt to negotiate peace with the “moderate” Taliban.</p>
<p>Obama’s strategy is a kitchen sink approach that promises air strikes for the patriots and multilateral coalitions for the appeasers. There will be coalitions with Sunni Arabs and with a new “inclusive” Iraqi government. There will be coalitions with everyone. A UN session will be chaired. Syria will be bombed and “terrorists who threaten our country” will be hunted down.</p>
<p>And all of it will happen without a single American soldier being put at risk.</p>
<p>It’s an utterly incoherent and calculatedly unobjectionable speech by a failing politician that fails to address why we’re in this mess and what past policies we have to rethink to get out of it.</p>
<p>In a telling sign, Obama’s giant goodie bag of ISIS proposals also includes arming ISIS.</p>
<p>“Across the border in Syria, we have ramped up our military assistance to the Syrian opposition. Tonight, I again call on Congress, again, to give us additional authorities and resources to train and equip these fighters,” Obama said. “We must strengthen the opposition as the best counterweight to extremists like ISIL, while pursuing the political solution necessary to solve Syria’s crisis once and for all.”</p>
<p>It was the Syrian crisis that turned ISIS into an army. Some of the groups now loyal to ISIS once fought alongside the Syrian opposition that he would like to arm.</p>
<p>Some still do.</p>
<p>Not only does Obama know this, but he refrained from fully committing to arming the Syrian rebels precisely because there was no way to do so without risking the weapons falling into the hands of ISIS.</p>
<p>Hillary Clinton wrote in <i>Hard Choices</i> that he had refused to arm the rebels. Last year Defense Secretary Leon Panetta had testified that Obama had vetoed a proposal to provide weapons to them.</p>
<p>At a press conference Obama had said, “We have seen extremist elements insinuate themselves into the opposition, and you know, one of the things that we have to be on guard about &#8212; particularly when we start talking about arming opposition figures &#8212; is that we are not indirectly putting arms in the hands of folks that would do Americans harm.”</p>
<p>Reports in the <i>New York Times</i> suggested that the administration had not been able to find any “moderates” who could safely be armed with heavy weapons because the actual fighters on the ground are all Islamic Jihadists.</p>
<p>Now Obama is not only reversing one of the few sensible things he did and championing a policy that he knows quite well is wrong, but is also attempting to make Congress complicit in his destructive folly.</p>
<p>Obama was willing to give F-16 jets to the Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt. If he was holding off on heavy weapons transfers to the Jihadists in Syria, it was because he knew that there was a very high risk that those weapons would end up being used against Americans. And that he would pay a political price.</p>
<p>ISIS became much more lethal when it acquired American equipment that had been provided to the Iraqi military. ISIS allies in Syria had already been photographed with American humanitarian aid and when the Jihadists of the Islamic Front turned on the Free Syrian Army that is the typical vector for US aid, it easily seized their supplies and warehouses.</p>
<p>While the FSA isn’t ISIS, parts of it are aligned with ISIS and the other parts are jockeying for power.</p>
<p>Some Jihadist commanders with the FSA and other non-ISIS groups fight ISIS and its allies. Others are its allies. Telling them apart is hard even with a map and a room full of charts. Fighters drift back and forth. The “moderate” Syrian rebel that we arm and train today will be the “extreme” terrorist tomorrow and there is absolutely no way to tell where a weapon that we provide will end up.</p>
<p>Arming the Syrian opposition is the same thing as arming ISIS. The Syrian Jihadists fighting it don’t “reject its extreme ideology” as much as they’re angling for their piece of the Caliphate. The Al Nusra Front was fighting ISIS before it pledged allegiance to ISIS. The Sunni opposition consists of a lot of wannabe Caliphs trying to collect enough bakeries and oil wells to cash in for a Caliphate.</p>
<p>Obama insisted once again in his speech that ISIS is not Islamic. “No religion condones the killing of innocents&#8230; ISIL is a terrorist organization, pure and simple. And it has no vision other than the slaughter of all who stand in its way.”</p>
<p>The vision of Islam, past and present, has been the slaughter of all who stand in the way of the religion’s supremacy. But the attempt to portray ISIS as a unique entity that is detached from all other Islamic terrorist groups is a misleading effort to justify an incoherent policy.</p>
<p>“These terrorists are unique in their brutality,” Obama claimed. “They execute captured prisoners. They kill children. They enslave, rape and force women into marriage. They threatened a religious minority with genocide.”</p>
<p>There isn’t anything unique about these things. Wahhabi Jihadists have been doing all of them for centuries. And these tactics date back to Mohammed.</p>
<p>ISIS isn’t unique in its brutality. It’s unique in its successes. And its successes can be credited to Obama’s Arab Spring and his refusal to admit that his policy of ignoring Iraq had failed.</p>
<p>“America is safer,” Obama claims. But that’s a lie.</p>
<p>America is less safe than ever. Not just because of ISIS, but because of a leadership that allows such crises to become severe threats because it refuses to address what they really are.</p>
<p>Obama’s speech promises action against ISIS while denying what it is. If Obama follows through on his policy, instead of defeating ISIS, he will arm it. It’s an old mistake being repeated all over again.</p>
<p>We can’t defeat terrorists by arming terrorists.</p>
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		<title>Obama&#8217;s Attempt at an ISIS Strategy &#8212; on The Glazov Gang</title>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 11 Sep 2014 04:00:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[A Radical-in-Chief searches for a policy to confront -- and deny the existence of -- Jihad.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/o32.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-241019" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/o32-333x350.jpg" alt="President Obama Makes Statement On The Sequestration" width="225" height="236" /></a><strong>[<a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf">Subscribe</a> to <em>The Glazov Gang</em> and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang">LIKE</a> it on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang">Facebook.]</a></strong></p>
<p><span id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" tabindex="0" data-ft="{&quot;tn&quot;:&quot;K&quot;}"><span class="hasCaption">This week&#8217;s Glazov Gang was guest-hosted by <a href="https://www.facebook.com/MPHaus.US" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=1419257612">Michael Hausam</a> and joined by Shillman Fellow <strong>Mark Tapson</strong>, Award Winning Journalist <strong>Victoria Taft</strong> and Screenwriter/Author <strong>Michael Walsh</strong>. </span></span></p>
<p><span id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" tabindex="0" data-ft="{&quot;tn&quot;:&quot;K&quot;}"><span class="hasCaption">The guests joined the show to discuss <strong>Obama&#8217;s Attempt at an ISIS Strategy, </strong>analyzing a Radical-in-Chief&#8217;s search for a policy to confront &#8212; and deny the existence of &#8212; Jihad. The panel also focused in on <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/the-obama-dojs-subversion-of-the-irs-investigation/"><strong>The Obama DOJ’s Subversion of the IRS Investigation</strong></a>.</span></span></p>
<p><span id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" tabindex="0" data-ft="{&quot;tn&quot;:&quot;K&quot;}"><span class="hasCaption">Don&#8217;t miss it!</span></span></p>
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<p><strong>To watch previous <em>Glazov Gang</em> episodes, </strong><a href="http://jamieglazov.com/"><strong>Click Here</strong></a><strong>.</strong></p>
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		<title>The Obama Undoctrine</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-obama-undoctrine/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-obama-undoctrine</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 29 May 2014 04:58:38 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Afghanistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[China]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[foreign policy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=226472</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Foreign policy that stands for everything and nothing. And has accomplished nothing.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/BN-CX877_Obama0_G_20140523133623.jpg"><img class=" wp-image-226482 alignleft" alt="BN-CX877_Obama0_G_20140523133623" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/BN-CX877_Obama0_G_20140523133623-450x300.jpg" width="315" height="210" /></a>Afghanistan is lost, Iraq and Libya are in the middle of civil wars, Russia is carving off pieces of Ukraine and China is escalating its conflict with the rest of Asia. There isn’t a single element of Obama’s foreign policy that has proven successful. Instead it’s been one international disaster after another.</span></p>
<p>Obama just smiles into the camera and announces that “America has rarely been stronger relative to the rest of the world.” Anyone who disagrees is engaging in partisan politics. Or reading statistics.</p>
<p>Having signed off on Iran’s nuclear program while its Supreme Leader boasts that the holy war will only end with America’s destruction, he claims that the “odds of a direct threat against us by any nation are low.”</p>
<p>“From Europe to Asia, we are the hub of alliances unrivaled in the history of nations,” he proclaims. Meanwhile Russia and China humiliate our European and Asian allies for their worthless alliance hub.</p>
<p>“When a typhoon hits the Philippines, or schoolgirls are kidnapped in Nigeria, or masked men occupy a building in Ukraine, it is America that the world looks to for help,” he boasts.</p>
<p>And yet the masked men go on occupying buildings and Boko Haram goes on killing Nigerians. America has never been stronger than under Obama. And yet it’s incapable of actually doing anything, except maybe joining New Zealand, Sweden, Taiwan, Israel and Chile in providing disaster aid to the Philippines.</p>
<p>And if that doesn’t work, he can always sanction the typhoon. It should do as much to stop the wall of water it as it did to stop Russia and Iran.</p>
<p>Obama’s speeches come from a world that exists only inside his own teleprompter. Another leader might have been reeling from a string of international failures, but he boldly triumphs over reality. The worse things are, the bigger the party he throws to celebrate his victories.</p>
<p>Obama’s speech focuses on Afghanistan, but never mentions the Taliban. Imagine an FDR speech that pretended that Japan didn’t exist. That’s the depth of denial it takes for Obama to claim victory.</p>
<p>After using up the lives of 1,600 American soldiers fighting the Taliban without ever defeating them, he takes a victory lap for defeating Al Qaeda in Afghanistan when the CIA had told him back in 2009 that there were at most 100 Al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan.</p>
<p>Thousands of Americans have been lost to an enemy whose existence Obama won’t even acknowledge as he takes another victory lap for losing another war.</p>
<p>With the VA scandal reminding everyone that he doesn’t just throw away the lives of soldiers abroad, but also at home, Obama is changing the subject with one Mission Accomplished speech after another. Like a politician caught with his mistress who begins taking his wife everywhere, he is suddenly in love with the military and can’t get enough photo ops with anyone wearing a uniform.</p>
<p>Even if they work for the post office.</p>
<p>In Obama’s teleprompter reality, a withdrawal is equivalent to success. Setting a withdrawal timeline with no regard for results deserves a victory parade. He wants credit for withdrawing from Afghanistan by the end of his term. Not only is he repeating the timeline mistake of his disastrous surge, but the timeline is once again pegged to a political, rather than a strategic, date.</p>
<p>Obama takes credit for troop removals, rather than outcomes. But if he doesn’t care that Al Qaeda in Iraq is more powerful than ever or that the Taliban control the future of Afghanistan, why didn’t he immediately withdraw the troops? Are we supposed to cheer his inability to either commit to winning a war or pull out? Is indecisiveness the virtue of a great leader?</p>
<p>Do we really need more applause lines about how long it took him to lose a war?</p>
<p>The West Point commencement address dresses up past failures as new successes and lays out a vision for the future by a lame duck leader who has failed at every foreign policy initiative. The address is an expanded version of his 2002 anti-war speech as a Chicago state senator that first brought him to the attention of his future backers. It straddles an awkward line between anti-war and interventionism.</p>
<p>Twelve years later, Obama hasn’t changed.</p>
<p>He’s still posturing as a fake centrist by setting up interventionist and isolationist straw men on both sides. Instead of defending his policies on their merits, he tries to make them seem reasonable by depicting his critics on the right and the left as extremists. After six years of foreign affairs failures, Obama is still talking as if he’s the &#8220;reasonable&#8221; centrist trying to steer a&#8221;‘sensible common sense&#8221; path.</p>
<p>At least those are the favorite buzzwords that his speechwriters throw in to influence the “folks.”</p>
<p>Obama wants to have his cake and eat it too. He wants applause for being an interventionist and for being a non-interventionist. In one sentence he sounds like JFK and in another like Eugene McCarthy.</p>
<p>He wants to send in the troops and then get credit for pulling them out. He wants to threaten other countries and then appease them at the negotiating table. He wants to set red lines he doesn’t stand behind and apply sanctions that mean nothing. And he wants to pass off this game in which the bad guys always win and America always loses as his smart power doctrine.</p>
<p>That’s not a doctrine. That’s an undoctrine.</p>
<p>The Obama Undoctrine is all things to all people. It respects international opinion, except when it doesn’t. It doesn’t believe in military solutions, but sometimes it does. It believes in taking military action to protect our interests, rather than foreign human rights, except when it believes the opposite.</p>
<p>In Libya, Obama sent in the jets when Libyans in Benghazi were threatened, but not when Americans in Benghazi were threatened.</p>
<p>The world may look to America for help, but Americans shouldn’t.</p>
<p>The shiny new Obama Undoctrine proposes such groundbreaking ideas as partnering with countries fighting terrorism. This is a bold new idea from the &#8217;50s. Other bold new ideas include using international institutions like the League of Nations, ahem, the United Nations, to stop new wars from starting.</p>
<p>Anyone who wants an example of the “leadership” and “strength” of the Undoctrine should look at Iran. That’s not some nasty Republican sneering at the Undoctrine.</p>
<p>It’s Obama’s assertion in his address.</p>
<p>After admitting that any nuclear agreement with Iran is a long shot, he says of his appeasement, “This is American leadership. This is American strength.”</p>
<p>Obama’s idea of American leadership and strength is being repeatedly humiliated and led around by the nose by a bitter enemy determined to obtain nuclear weapons in order to destroy the United States.</p>
<p>If that’s Obama’s idea of leadership and strength, just imagine his idea of weakness.</p>
<p>Then there’s NATO. He describes it as “the strongest alliance the world has ever known.” That would have sounded more impressive before NATO staked out Ukraine for the bear and went home.</p>
<p>And if you want something more effective, try the UN. While Obama cuts the military to the bone, he will be “investing” more money in UN peacekeeping operations.</p>
<p>If we’re going to spend all that money on a military, it should be one that doesn’t run away at the first sign of trouble. That way we would at least be getting some bang for our buck. But maybe a small army of child molesters spreading cholera that runs away at the first sign of trouble embodies the Undoctrine.</p>
<p>“I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being,” Obama declared. “But what makes us exceptional is not our ability to flout international norms and the rule of law; it is our willingness to affirm them through our actions.”</p>
<p>Or as his nursery school teacher probably put it, “You’re special. Just like everyone else.”</p>
<p>This mess of contradictions is the Obama Undoctrine. It stands for everything and nothing. And it has accomplished nothing.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Kangaroo Courts on Campus</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/thomas-sowell/kangaroo-courts-on-campus/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=kangaroo-courts-on-campus</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 13 May 2014 04:10:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Campus]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Crime]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[How the entire learning atmosphere is effected by university rape hysteria. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/ww.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-225416" alt="ww" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/ww-450x320.jpg" width="324" height="230" /></a>There seems to be a full-court press on to get colleges to &#8220;do something&#8221; about rape on campus.</p>
<p>But there seems to be remarkably little attention paid to two crucial facts: (1) rape is a crime and (2) colleges are not qualified to be law-enforcement institutions.</p>
<p>Why are rapists not reported to the police and prosecuted in a court of law?</p>
<p>Apparently this is because of some college women who say that they were raped and are dissatisfied with a legal system that does not automatically take their word for it against the word of someone who has been accused and denies the charge.</p>
<p>There seem to be a dangerously large number of people who think that the law exists to give them whatever they want — even when that means denying other people the same rights that they claim for themselves.</p>
<p>Nowhere is this self-centered attitude more common than on college campuses. And nowhere are such attitudes more encouraged than by the Obama administration&#8217;s Justice Department, which is threatening colleges that don&#8217;t handle rape issues the politically correct way — that is, by presuming the accused to be guilty and not letting Constitutional safeguards get in the way.</p>
<p>Anything that fits the &#8220;war on women&#8221; theme is seen as smart politics in an election year. The last thing Attorney General Eric Holder&#8217;s Justice Department is interested in is justice.</p>
<p>The track record of academics in other kinds of cases is not the least bit encouraging as regards the likelihood of impartial justice. Even on many of our most prestigious college campuses, who gets punished for saying the wrong thing and who gets away with mob actions depends on which groups are in vogue and which are not.</p>
<p>This is carried to the point where some colleges have established what they call &#8220;free speech zones&#8221; — as if they are granting a special favor by not imposing their vague and arbitrary &#8220;speech codes&#8221; everywhere on campus.</p>
<p>The irony in this is that the Constitution already established a free speech zone. It covers the entire United States.</p>
<p>Have we already forgotten the lynch mob atmosphere on the Duke University campus a few years ago, when three young men were accused of raping a stripper?</p>
<p>Thank heaven that case was handled by the criminal justice system, where all the evidence showed that the charge was bogus, leading to the district attorney&#8217;s being removed and disbarred.</p>
<p>If all the current crusades to institutionalize lynch law on campuses across the country were motivated by a zeal to protect young women, that might at least be understandable, however unjustified.</p>
<p>But those who are whipping up the lynch mob mentality have shown far less interest in stopping rape than in politicizing it.</p>
<p>Many of the politically correct crusaders are the same people who have pushed for unisex living arrangements on campus, including unisex bathrooms, and who have put condom machines in dormitories and turned freshman orientation programs into a venue for sexual &#8220;liberation&#8221; propaganda.</p>
<p>They laughed at old-fashioned restrictions designed to reduce sexual dangers among young people on campus. Now that real life experience has shown that these are not laughing matters, the politically correct still want their sexual Utopia, and want scapegoats when they don&#8217;t get it.</p>
<p>There is a price to pay for allowing unsubstantiated accusations to prevail, and that price extends beyond particular young men whose lives can be ruined by false charges. The whole atmosphere of learning is compromised when male faculty have to protect themselves from accusations by female students.</p>
<p>People today are amazed when I tell them about a young African woman who had just arrived in America back in 1963, and who was so overwhelmed by everything that she fell far behind in my economics class. I met with her each evening for an hour of tutoring until she caught up with the rest of the class.</p>
<p>There is no way that I would do that today, and there is no way that she would have passed that class otherwise. Instead, she would have returned to Africa a failure. There are many unintended consequences of lynch law policies that poison the atmosphere on campus and diminish American life in general.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Rice, Rutgers and Academia Today</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/rice-rutgers-and-academia-today/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=rice-rutgers-and-academia-today</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 08 May 2014 04:48:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jack Kerwick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Condoleeza Rice]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Losing the battle between civility and barbarism on our campuses. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Condoleezza-Rice-Pentagon.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-224982" alt="Condoleezza-Rice-Pentagon" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Condoleezza-Rice-Pentagon-450x300.jpg" width="288" height="192" /></a>Condi Rice will not be this year’s commencement speaker at Rutgers University after all.</span></p>
<p>Due to the controversy generated by some students and faculty over Rutgers’ decision to invite the former Secretary of State, Rice decided to back out, explaining that she didn’t want to be “a distraction” at a college graduation.</p>
<p>This whole ugly affair is revealing, not just of the atmosphere of this one institution of higher learning, but of the atmosphere of the contemporary academic world.</p>
<p>It’s true that President Robert Barchi did not succumb to the students’ and faculty’s demands that the school disinvite Rice due to her involvement in the Iraq War. But neither did he utter a syllable’s worth of <i>condemnation </i>of their tactics<i>, </i>proving that, as always, the lion’s share of grease always goes to the leftist squeaky wheel in the world of higher education.</p>
<p>Beyond this, Barchi passed the buck, and actually encouraged the notion that the anti-Rice forces were in the right.  Barchi insisted that he hadn’t “the power” to rescind the invitation to Rice—implying, of course, that <i>had </i>he the power, he would’ve done so. Only the Board of Governors, Barchi continued, has that power.  “If you want to discuss ways of how we can (choose a commencement speaker) going forward, where we can guarantee that the Board has more input when they arrive at the discussion,” he told protestors, then “I think we can do that.”</p>
<p>Translation: We won’t make the mistake of inviting a Republican ever again.</p>
<p>The notion that, as Barchi suggests, the controversy over Rice reveals that the Rutgers community welcomes a marketplace of ideas, a vigorous exchange over contentious issues, is more than a fiction; it is a <i>lie. </i></p>
<p>And that is the real scandal that the Rice affair unveils, the dirty secret that academia, the one place in American life where it <i>should </i>be possible to discuss, genuinely discuss, all manner of disputable topics, is nothing of the kind.</p>
<p>The faculty and students of Rutgers didn’t <i>disagree</i> with their school’s decision to invite Rice.  They <i>refused </i>it.  Between the one and the other lies the difference between civilization and barbarism.</p>
<p>There was no spirited discussion over the administration’s selection of Rice for commencement speaker. Rather, the invitee’s enemies employed the kinds of strong-arm tactics for which leftist student and faculty activists have become known.  To see that this is so, we need only consult those of Rutgers’ students who <i>wanted </i>for Rice to speak at Rutgers.</p>
<p>The Rutgers College Republicans, the Eagleton Undergraduate Associates, and Greek Life at Rutgers University were among those student groups that petitioned Barchi to denounce the anti-Rice forces for having engendered a “hostile campus environment” on campus.  Speaking on their behalf, Donald Coughlan, chairman of the New Jersey College Republicans, wrote that all it took was a “small minority of the student body and intolerant faculty members” to frustrate the desires of an “overwhelming” majority of students that had looked forward to hearing Rice speak.</p>
<p>Not only had Rice’s detractors “protested loudly” from the time that it was announced that she would be the commencement speaker.  Not only did dozens of them hold a “sit in” at Barchi’s office.  Disgruntled faculty fired off an email to all students urging them to participate in a “teach-in” to rally against Rice.</p>
<p>Coughlan notes that “most students…who do not share the opinions of” these professors and who know them well were “intimidated” by the emails.</p>
<p>A college education is, or is supposed to be, an education into the best of what students’ civilization has to offer, an inheritance, comprised as it is of millennia worth of achievements both intellectual and moral, at once encourages and requires for its appreciation the cultivation of the virtues of head and heart, mind and character.</p>
<p>As the situation at Rutgers clarifies for all with eyes to see, this civilizing mission has been radically turned on its head.  Coercion and intimidation, after all, are the tried and true methods of choice of the savage, the barbarian.  Infinitely worse, though, is that it is <i>faculty</i>—those entrusted with taming the beast that is the next generation—that have instructed their students in the art of wielding these weapons as they crusade for one cause after the other.</p>
<p>And university administrators cower.</p>
<p>This is the academic world today.</p>
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		<title>Tony Blair on the Islamist Threat</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/mark-durie/tony-blair-on-the-islamist-threat/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=tony-blair-on-the-islamist-threat</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 01 May 2014 04:48:46 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Durie]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=224447</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The damage we do when we deny the challenge of Islam itself.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/ipeI1.gif"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-224448" alt="ipeI" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/ipeI1-450x313.gif" width="315" height="219" /></a>Tony Blair delivered a major speech on April 23 entitled, “Why the Middle East Matters”. In summary, he argued that the Middle East, far from being a “vast unfathomable mess” is deep in the throes of a multi-faceted struggle between a specific religious ideology on the one hand, and those who want to embrace the modern world on the other.  Furthermore, the West, blinded up until now as to the religious nature of the conflict, must take sides: it should support those who stand on the side of open-minded pluralistic societies, and combat those who wish to create intolerant theocracies.</p>
<p>In his speech Blair makes a whole series of substantial points:</p>
<p>He states that a ‘defining challenge of our time’ is a religious ideology which he calls ‘Islamist’, although he is not comfortable with this label because he prefers to distance himself from any implication that this ideology can be equated with Islam itself. He worries that “you can appear to elide those who support the Islamist ideology with all Muslims.”</p>
<p>He considers Islamism to be a global movement, whose diverse manifestations are produced by common ideological roots.</p>
<p>He rejects Western non-religious explanations for the problems caused by Islamist ideology, including the preference of “Western commentators” to attribute the manifestations of Islamism to “disparate” causes which have nothing to do with religion.  Likewise he implies that the protracted conflict over Israel-Palestine is not the cause of this ideology, but rather the converse is the case: dealing with the wider impact of Islamist ideology could help solve the Israel-Palestinian conflict.</p>
<p>According to Blair, what distinguishes violent terrorists from seemingly non-violent Islamists – such as the Muslim Brotherhood – is simply “a difference of view as to how to achieve the goals of Islamism”, so attempts to draw a distinction between political Islamist movements and radical terrorist groups are mistaken.  Blair considers that the religious ideology of certain groups like the Brotherhood, which may appear to be law-abiding, “inevitably creates the soil” in which religio-political violence is nurtured.</p>
<p>He considers “Islamism” to be a major threat everywhere in the world, including increasingly within Western nations. The &#8220;challenge&#8221; of Islamism is “growing” and “spreading across the world” and it is “the biggest threat to global security of the early 21st Century.”</p>
<p>Because of the seriousness of the threat of this religio-political ideology,  Blair argues that the West should vigorously support just about anybody whose interests lie in opposing Islamists, from General Sisi in Egypt to President Putin in Russia. He finds it to be an absurd irony that Western governments form intimate alliances with nations whose educational and civic institutions promote this ideology: an obvious example of this would be the US &#8211; Saudi alliance.</p>
<p>In all this, one might be forgiven for thinking that Blair sounds a lot like Geert Wilders, except that, as he takes pains to emphasize, he emphatically rejects equating Islamism with Islam. Tony Blair and Geert Wilders agree that there is a serious religious ideological challenge facing the world, but they disagree on whether that challenge is Islam itself.My Blair’s speech is aimed at people who do not wish to be thought of as anti-Musilm, but who need to be awakened to the religious nature of the Islamist challenge. He is keen to assure his intended audience that if they adopt his thesis they would not be guilty of conflating those who support radical Jihadi violence with all Muslims.Two key assumptions underpin Blair’s dissociation of Islamism the religio-political ideology from Islam the religion.</p>
<p>First, Blair presupposes that Islamism is not “the proper teaching of Islam”. It may, he concedes, be “an interpretation”, but it is a false one, a “perversion” of the religion, which “distorts and warps Islam’s true message.”  He offers two arguments to support this theological insight.One is that there are pious Muslims who agree with him: “Many of those totally opposed to the Islamist ideology are absolutely devout Muslims.”</p>
<p>This is a fallacious argument. It is akin to asserting that Catholic belief in the infallibility of the Pope cannot be Christian merely because there are absolutely devout protestant Christians who totally oppose this dogma.  The fact that there are pious Muslims who reject Islamism is not a credible argument that Islamism is an invalid interpretation of Islam.</p>
<p>Blair’s other argument in support of his belief that Islamism is a perversion of Islam is an allegation that Christians used to hold similarly abhorrent theologies: “There used to be such interpretations of Christianity which took us years to eradicate from our mainstream politics.”  This is a self-deprecating variant of the <i>tu quoque </i>logical fallacy, in which another’s argument is attacked by accusing them of hypocrisy. Here Blair rhetorically directs the<i> ad hominem</i><i> </i>attack against himself and his culture. In essence, he is saying “It would hypocritical of us to regard Islamist ideology as genuinely Islamic, because (we) Christians used to support similarly pernicious theologies in the past (although we do not do so today).”</p>
<p>This logic is equally fallacious: observations about the history of Christian theology, valid or not, prove nothing about what is or is not a valid form of Islam.</p>
<p>Blair’s second key assumption is a widely-held view about the root cause of “the challenge”. The fundamental issue, he argues, is people of faith who believe they and only they are right and do not accept the validity of other views. Such people believe that “there is one proper religion and one proper view of it, and that this view should, exclusively, determine the nature of society and the political economy.” “It is not about a competing view of how society or politics should be governed within a common space where you accept other views are equally valid. It is exclusivist in nature.”</p>
<p>Hilary Clinton <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20120803000739/http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2012/07/195782.htm">has expressed</a> a very similar understanding of extremist religionists, who “define religion in such a way that if you do not believe what they want you to believe, then what you are doing is not practicing religion, because there is only one definition of religion.”</p>
<p>Such views about religion may reflect the secularist Zeitgeist, but they offer a very weak explanation for the challenge of radical Islam.  The problem is not that Islamists believe they and only they are right.  The problem is all the rest of what they believe.Consider this: Tony Blair himself believes his goal is valid, true and worth fighting for, namely a tolerant, open, democratic society, and the Islamists’ goal of a sharia society is invalid.  He does believe that his view should determine the nature of society.  Likewise many religious groups believe that they follow the one true religion, including the Catholic Church, which Tony Blair formally joined in 2007: Mother Theresa of Calcutta certainly did not consider alternative religious views equally valid to Catholic dogma.  But none of this certainty of belief implies that Tony Blair or Catholics in general are disposed to become terrorists, cut hands off thieves or kill apostates.</p>
<p>Blair’s argument manifests the paradox of tolerance. His vision of a good society is one in which people must respect the views of others as “equally valid”. At the same time he argues that we should disallow and combat Islamism because it is “perverse”. He is asking for Islamism not to be tolerated because it is intolerant.If Blair’s explanation for Islamist nastiness is flawed, what then is the explanation? This takes us back to Islam itself.  Does Blair’s position on Islam hold water?</p>
<p>Blair’s arguments for his positive view of Islam are weak. The validity of Islamism does not rest or fall on whether there are pious Muslims who accept or reject it, nor on whether Christians have advocating equally perverse theologies in the past.  In the end, Islam as a religion &#8211; all mainstream Muslim scholars would agree &#8211; is based upon the teachings of the Sunna (the example and teaching of Muhammad) and the Koran. Islam’s religious validity in the eyes of its followers stands and falls on how well it can be justified from those authorities.There are at least three respects in which Islamist ideologies claim strong support from Islam &#8211; that is, from the Koran and Muhammad.</p>
<p>One is the intolerance and violence in the Islamic canon.  The Koran states &#8220;Kill them / the polytheists wherever you can find them (Sura 9:5, 2:191). Muhammad, according to Islamic tradition, said “I have been sent with a sword in my hand to command people to worship Allah and associate no partners with him. I command you to belittle and subjugate those who disobey me …” He also said to his followers in Medina, &#8220;Kill any Jew who falls into your power.&#8221; Following in Muhammad’s footsteps, one of Muhammad’s most revered companions and successors as leader of the Muslim community, the Caliph Umar, called upon the armies of Islam to fight non-Muslims until they surrender or convert, saying “If they refuse this, it is the sword without leniency.”</p>
<p>It will not do, in the face of many such statements found in the Koran and the traditions of Muhammad, to throw one’s hands up in the air and say there are also bad verses in the Bible.  If Jesus Christ had said such things as Muhammad did, Christianity’s political theology would look very different today and medieval Christian Holy War theology – developed initially in response to the Islamic jihad – would have come into being as part of the birth-pangs of the religion, just as the doctrine of the Islamic jihad did in the history of Islam.</p>
<p>Islamist apologists find it relatively easy to win young Muslims over to their cause precisely because they have strong arguments at their disposal from the Koran and  Muhammad’s example and teaching.  Their threatening ideology is growing in influence because it is so readily supported by substantial religious foundations.  Islamism may not be the only interpretation of Islam, but by any objective measure, it is open for Muslims to hold it, given what what is in their canon.</p>
<p>Blair makes a telling over-generalisation when he states that Islamist ideology is an export from the Middle East.  Another important source has been the Indian sub-continent.  Today Pakistanis today are among the most dynamic apologists for Islamism. Abul A’la Maududi, an Indian (later Pakistani) Islamic teacher and founder of Jamaat-e-Islami was writing powerful texts to radicalise Muslims more than 70 years ago &#8211; including his tract <i>Jihad in Islam</i> (first published in 1927). His works remain in widespread use as tools of radicalization by Islamist organisations. Maududi’s theological vision was driven, not by Middle Eastern influences or Saudi petrodollars, but by his life-long study of the Koran and the example of Muhammad.  The spiritual DNA of Maududi’s Islamist theology was derived from the Islamic canon itself.</p>
<p>The second point to understand about Islamist ideologies is that the conflation of politics and religion, which is one of Blair’s main objections to Islamism, has always been accepted as normative by the mainstream of Islamic theology.  It is orthodox Islam.  As <a href="http://www.pewforum.org/2006/04/27/islam-and-the-west-a-conversation-with-bernard-lewis/">Bernard Lewis pointed out</a>, the separation of church and state has been derided by most Muslim thinkers since the origins of Islam:  “Separation of church and state was derided in the past by Muslims when they said this is a Christian remedy for a Christian disease. It doesn’t apply to us or to our world.”</p>
<p>The third point about Islamist ideologies is that their vision of a closed society in which non-Muslims are second-class participants is in lock-step with the conservative mainstream of Islamic thought.  Here again Bernard Lewis:  “It is only very recently that some defenders of Islam began to assert that their society in the past accorded equal status to non-Muslims. No such claim is made by spokesmen for resurgent Islam, and historically there is no doubt that they are right. Traditional Islamic societies neither accorded such equality nor pretended that they were so doing. Indeed, in the old order, this would have been regarded not as a merit but as a dereliction of duty. How could one accord the same treatment to those who follow the true faith and those who willfully reject it? This would be a theological as well as a logical absurdity.” (<i>The Jews of Islam</i>, Princeton University Press, 1987, p.4).</p>
<p>Tony Blair is right to call the world to engage with and reject radical Islamist ideology. This is a defining global challenge of our time.  He is also correct to affirm that this ideology is religious.  But he is profoundly mistaken to characterize it as un-Islamic.  The fallacious arguments he puts forward for distinguishing Islam from Islamism are nothing but flimsy rhetoric.  The hard evidence against separating Islamism from Islam is clear, the sentiments of some pious Muslims non-withstanding.</p>
<p>Islamism is a valid interpretation of Islam, not in the sense that it is the only ‘correct’ or ‘true’ one, but because its core tenets find ready and obvious support in the Islamic canon, and they align with core principles of 1400 years of Islamic theology.  (To make this observation is not the same thing as saying that all pious Muslims are Islamists!)</p>
<p>Blair is right to call for the West to combat “radical Islam”, but the reason why “radical” is a correct term to use for this ideology is that <i>radical</i> means “of the root,” and Islamist ideas are deeply rooted in Islam itself. Islamism is a radical form of Islam. This explains why the radicalization project has been advancing with such force all over the world.</p>
<p>In order to combat radical Islamic views we do need to have a frank and open dialogue about the dynamics of radicalization. Blair is concerned about the damage being caused by denial about Islamism, but he indulges in his own form of blinkered thinking, which is just as unhelpful.  He was right to identify Islamist ideology as the soil in which violent jihadi ideologies &#8220;inevitably&#8221; take root, but fails to identity mainstream Islam itself as the soil in which Islamism develops. In reality the Islamist movement is but the tip of the iceberg of the Islamic movement, a deeper and broader revival of Islam across the whole Muslim world.</p>
<p>When countering radical Islamic ideologies, Western leaders should refrain from putting themselves forward as experts on theology, who are somehow competent to rule on whether a particular interpretation of Islam is valid or “perverse”. There is something ridiculous about secular politicians ruling on which manifestations of Islam are to be judged theologically correct. As Taliban Cleric Abu Qutada once said, “I am astonished by President Bush when he claims there is nothing in the Quran that justifies jihad violence in the name of Islam. Is he some kind of Islamic scholar? Has he ever actually read the Quran?”</p>
<p>Ritual displays of respect for Islam should not be naively used as sugar to coat the pill of opposition to the objectionable beliefs and behaviour of some Muslims. Leaders need to be absolutely clear about what values they stand for, and insist on these values. They should not need to express a theological opinion about what is or is not valid Islam in order to challenge the anti-semitism of Palestinian school textbooks, the denial of basic religious rights to non-Muslim guest workers in Saudi Arabia, incitement against Christians in Egypt, the promotion of female genital mutilation in the name of Islam in the Maldives, or the UK practice of taking child brides.</p>
<p>In this post-secular world, our leaders need to “do God” with less naivety.  They need to grasp that the inner pressure they feel to manifest respect for Islam whenever they object to some of its manifestations is itself a symptom of the ideology of dominance which powers the Islamist agenda.  They should resist the pressure to mount an apology for Islam.  The mullahs can do that.</p>
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		<title>Netanyahu at AIPAC: Rebutting Obama, Affirming Israel</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/davidhornik/netanyahus-aipac-speech-rebutting-obama-affirming-israel/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=netanyahus-aipac-speech-rebutting-obama-affirming-israel</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 05 Mar 2014 05:39:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[P. David Hornik]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[The lowdown on the Middle East—for those able to listen.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/bibi-e1393950872492-635x357.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-220269" alt="bibi-e1393950872492-635x357" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/bibi-e1393950872492-635x357-450x347.jpg" width="315" height="243" /></a>On Sunday, even before Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu had arrived in America for his current visit, President Obama was portraying him in an <a href="http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-03-02/obama-to-israel-time-is-running-out">interview to Bloomberg’s Jeffrey Goldberg</a> as the obstacle to Israeli-Palestinian peace.</span></p>
<p>At the same time, Obama lavished praised on Netanyahu’s opposite number on the Palestinian side, Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, calling him “somebody who has been committed to nonviolence and diplomatic efforts to resolve this issue.” Abbas, in another one of countless such instances, has just <a href="http://palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&amp;doc_id=10832">sent a representative</a> to glorify a Palestinian who murdered an Israeli mother and her two children, and has also sent a wreath to honor a suicide bomber who killed eight Israelis on a bus.</p>
<p>But as for Netanyahu, Obama told Goldberg: “When I have a conversation with Bibi, that’s the essence of my conversation: if not now, when?” And: “where you’ve got a partner on the other side who is prepared to negotiate seriously…for us not to seize this moment I think would be a great mistake.”</p>
<p>And if Netanyahu were to keep failing to seize the moment and make peace with this ideal partner, Obama—as <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/davidhornik/threatening-for-peace/">Secretary of State John Kerry did last month</a>—foretold dire consequences. He claimed Israel was “already more isolated internationally,” and warned of an “absence of international goodwill…the condemnation of the international community,” a situation in which America’s “ability to manage the international fallout is going to be limited.”</p>
<p>As commentators have noted, this is a direct threat to a democratic ally from a president who has great difficulty taking credible stances toward the likes of Syria, Iran, and Russia.</p>
<p>Netanyahu, for his part, in his <a href="http://www.algemeiner.com/2014/03/04/full-transcript-prime-minister-netanyahu’s-speech-at-2014-aipac-policy-conference/">speech to AIPAC</a> on Tuesday night, took pains to depict Israel for what it is—a humane democracy radically different from its enemies. He described his recent visit to an Israeli army field hospital on the Golan Heights that treats Syrian civilians injured in that country’s civil war, and said the patients there have</p>
<blockquote><p>discovered what you’ve always known to be true: in the Middle East, bludgeoned by butchery and barbarism, Israel is humane; Israel is compassionate; Israel is a force for good.</p></blockquote>
<p>It should not need pointing out—but it does at a time when a U.S. president and secretary of state keep berating Israel for allegedly not even wanting peace, or not wanting it as much as that exemplar of democratic, peace-loving values, Abbas.</p>
<p>From there Netanyahu turned his focus to the Iranian nuclear issue. Again, his words contrasted sharply with Obama’s in his Bloomberg interview.</p>
<p>There, after Obama described the current Iranian regime as “capable of changing” and as “strategic…not impulsive…respon[sive] to costs and benefits,” Goldberg asked him: “If sanctions got them to the table, why wouldn’t more sanctions keep them at the table?”</p>
<p>The essence of Obama’s reply:</p>
<blockquote><p>The notion that in the midst of negotiations we would then improve our position by saying, “We’re going to squeeze you even harder,” ignores the fact that [President Hassan] Rouhani and the negotiators in Iran have their own politics. They’ve got to respond to their own hardliners&#8230;.</p></blockquote>
<p>Netanyahu, not surprisingly, painted a much gloomier picture of the situation. Referring to Iran’s current purported moderates, its “smiling president and “smooth-talking foreign minister,” he said that “if you listen to their words, their soothing words, they don’t square with Iran’s aggressive actions.”</p>
<p>Even in the midst of the diplomatic talks, Netanyahu stressed, Iran keeps building intercontinental ballistic missiles, “whose only purpose is to carry nuclear warheads” and that “can strike, right now, or very soon, the Eastern seaboard of the United States….” And as he also noted:</p>
<blockquote><p>It’s not only that Iran doesn’t walk the walk. In the last few weeks, they don’t even bother to talk the talk. Iran’s leaders say they won’t dismantle a single centrifuge, they won’t discuss their ballistic missile program. And guess what tune they’re singing in Tehran? It’s not “God Bless America,” it’s “death to America.” And they chant this as brazenly as ever. Some charm offensive.</p></blockquote>
<p>As well as being effective rhetoric, this is, it should be pointed out, factually true.</p>
<p>On the Palestinian issue, Netanyahu reiterated his basic positions that what prevents peace is the Palestinians’ ideological negation of the Jewish people and their right to the land, with the accompanying “fantasy of flooding Israel with refugees”; and that only Israeli forces—not foreign troops—can ensure Israel’s security.</p>
<p>Again, the former position puts him squarely at odds with Obama’s paean to Abbas as peace angel; and the latter one is a rebuff to Kerry’s efforts to get Israel to accept foreign deployments in the Jordan Valley.</p>
<p>Netanyahu’s last topic was the BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) campaign against Israel. While saying it did not “mean that the BDS movement shouldn’t be vigorously opposed,” Netanyahu stated that “BDS is nothing but a farce.”</p>
<p>And he explained what he meant:</p>
<blockquote><p>Beyond our traditional trading partners, countries throughout Asia, Africa, Latin America…these countries are flocking to Israel. They’re not coming to Israel; they’re flocking to Israel.</p>
<p>They want Israeli technology to help transform their countries as it has ours. And it’s not just the small countries that are coming to Israel, it’s also the superpowers. You know, the other superpowers: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Intel, Facebook, Yahoo. They come because they want to benefit from Israel’s unique ingenuity, dynamism and innovation.</p>
<p>And I could tell you the BDS boycott movement is not going to stop that anymore than the Arab boycott movement could stop Israel from becoming a global technological power. They are going to fail….</p></blockquote>
<p>Again, this may fly in the face of Obama’s and Kerry’s admonitions about the isolation supposedly overtaking Israel, but it is factually accurate and is the reason most Israelis don’t take these warnings seriously. (For recent overviews of Israel’s thriving trade and other ties with both state and nonstate actors, see <a href="http://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/boycott-mirage/">here</a>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303426304579402771597851680">here</a>, and <a href="http://www.theettingerreport.com/Overseas-Investments/How-Isolated-is-Israel-.aspx">here</a>.)</p>
<p>Netanyahu’s AIPAC speech was essentially, then, a well-crafted rebuttal of the threats and delusions emanating from Washington, which does not believe Israel understands much about the region and remains blind to its insights. Israel will manage regardless.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Bill de Blasio’s Red Apple Agenda</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/bill-de-blasios-red-apple-agenda/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=bill-de-blasios-red-apple-agenda</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 11 Feb 2014 05:55:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[State of the City speech delivers a goody bag for criminals, illegal aliens and welfare voters.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/BN-BL397_NYSTAT_G_20140210131313.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-218509" alt="BN-BL397_NYSTAT_G_20140210131313" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/BN-BL397_NYSTAT_G_20140210131313-450x347.jpg" width="315" height="243" /></a>The further left a radical politician wants to go, the more likely he is to wrap his agenda in a mainstream Republican brand. In his interview with Bill O’Reilly, Obama compared himself to Nixon (not for the reason most Republicans would expect) and in his State of the City address, Bill de Blasio compared himself to Fiorello H. La Guardia; a former Republican mayor of New York City.</span></p>
<p>The constant mentions of La Guardia, a universally popular figure, were a poor mask for a radical address filled with ugly divisive rhetoric, class warfare and schemes that will bankrupt the city.</p>
<p>If William Wilhelm Jr., aka Bill de Blasio, had been more honest, he would have compared himself to Mayor Dinkins, his old boss, who was sitting in the audience, while the first Democratic mayor since the end of the disastrous Dinkins era unveiled a package of class warfare, high taxes and ID’s for illegal aliens.</p>
<p>But Dinkins, despite being almost as friendly with Al Sharpton as De Blasio, was a moderate compared to Red Bill whose State of the City address was another call for a Red Apple. For all his many shortcomings, Dinkins had never embraced divisive rhetoric to the same extent that Bill de Blasio did in his address.</p>
<p>Instead of simply laying out a series of programs, Bill de Blasio ranted about the rich (a group that he is a member of) and announced that he wanted to discuss “the core values we share as New Yorkers pursuing progressive change.”</p>
<p>Not every New Yorker is a fan of progressive change, especially once he finds out that it means dangerous streets, high taxes, poor services and lots of buck passing, but Red Bill was really saying that non-progs who weren’t committed to his extremist program had no place in the city that his corrupt allies had taken over.</p>
<p>Instead of uniting New Yorkers, Bill de Blasio harped on his “Tale of Two Cities” story that is as much a work of fiction as the Dickens original.</p>
<p>If you believe Red Bill, the biggest problem in a city with a $70 billion annual budget is that the taxes aren’t high enough and that not enough money is being spent on education and social services.</p>
<p>“The children of this city deserve billions more in educational resources and now is the time to provide it,” De Blasio demanded.</p>
<p>The question is, how many billions more?</p>
<p>New York City debt is at $110 billion and the school budget has already hit $25 billion. Not only is the school budget for a single city bigger than the entire state budgets of Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska and South Dakota combined, but Bill de Blasio is claiming that it somehow still isn’t high enough.</p>
<p>“Raising taxes on the rich makes our commitment to our kids more than just words. It makes that commitment REAL. It makes that commitment fair,” Bill de Blasio ranted.</p>
<p>Our commitment to his kids is about the same amount of money it cost to put a man on the moon. That’s more than the average public school grad will ever do no matter how much Red Bill raises taxes. New York City already spends $19,000 per student. It can spend $190,000 per student and it still won’t match the results in Utah which spends $8,224 per student. But some things, money just can’t buy.</p>
<p>In the city budget, the Department of Social Services eats up $9.3 billion and Health and Welfare consumes another $5.5 billion. Eight billion goes to pensions for city workers; a number that will skyrocket under Bill de Blasio as his union backers cash in their support for the 150 pending municipal union contracts that he mentioned in his address.</p>
<p>“We will navigate towards a future that is progressive and fiscally responsible,” De Blasio boasted. It’s safe to say that he doesn’t know what the words “fiscally responsible” mean or that they go together with “progressive” the way that “safe” goes together with “nuclear disaster.”</p>
<p>Another $4.7 billion of the city budget already goes to debt service and $865 million goes to the City University of New York, whose total budget is $2.5 billion. In his address, Bill de Blasio pledged to incorporate a dedicated science, technology, engineering and math program into CUNY “to start preparing more graduates of our public high schools for jobs in the city’s tech industry.”</p>
<p>“Our aim is that within eight years, the majority of skilled technology-related jobs in New York City are being filled by those educated in New York City schools,” Bill de Blasio added.</p>
<p>That fanciful plan fails to take into account the fact that <a title="" href="http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2013/03/07/officials-most-nyc-high-school-grads-need-remedial-help-before-entering-cuny-community-colleges/" target="_blank">80% of public school grads</a> need remedial education in reading and writing to even get started at CUNY.  Unlike Bloomberg, Bill de Blasio didn’t discuss any plans for reforming schools. That’s not surprising considering what his backers in the educational unions think of reforms that would actually force them to do their jobs for a change.</p>
<p>Instead, Red Bill continued his bizarre showdown with Governor Cuomo over universal Pre-K. Cuomo had already promised universal Pre-K, but Bill de Blasio insisted that he was “asking Albany to allow New York City to tax itself – its wealthiest residents” for a program that Albany was already going to pay for.</p>
<p>The red and red-faced mayor also demanded that Cuomo give him the power to raise the minimum wage. Like most radicals, Bill de Blasio is unable to keep from picking fights even with fellow Democrats.</p>
<p>Bill de Blasio pledged to shift money from “corporate subsidies” to “tuition assistance.” Considering how huge the education budget is and that the unemployment rate is at 8 percent for the general population and at 30 percent for the young, that’s a formula for handing out a lot of useless diplomas with no jobs.</p>
<p>But that’s an economic logic that extreme leftists like Bill de Blasio are incapable of understanding.</p>
<p>Red Bill threatened Wall Street, but <a title="" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/02/business/finance-jobs-leave-wall-street-as-firms-cut-costs.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">it’s already shifting</a> jobs outside the city. While other cities are providing incentives to lure Wall Street firms, Bill de Blasio is giving them more reasons to leave while promising a science and technology diploma for every CUNY illiterate who can point to a picture of a cat.</p>
<p>Since all those grads without jobs will need someplace to live, Bill de Blasio repeated his promise of 200,000 units of subsidized housing for 500,000 people living at someone else’s expense to be achieved by blackmailing developers. Considering the kind of developers who will be willing to meet his demands, it’s a formula for the disastrously mismanaged housing that can be experienced in Sochi or the Bronx.</p>
<p>For those New Yorkers looking forward to the return of Dinkins era crime, Red Bill took credit for scrapping Stop and Frisk, which kept down gang violence and shootings of mainly black men, and he offered municipal ID’s to illegal aliens so that they can obtain “bank accounts.”</p>
<p>“We will protect the almost half-million undocumented New Yorkers whose voices too often go unheard,” Bill de Blasio said. But their voices were heard when they cast someone else’s votes for him.</p>
<p>Bill de Blasio boasted that shootings were down. In fact, murders had risen by 33%, an <a title="" href="http://nypost.com/2014/01/28/nyc-sees-33-percent-spike-in-murders/" target="_blank">increase that police sources</a> blamed on Red Bill’s dismantling of the successful Stop and Frisk program.</p>
<p>With his first State of the City address, Bill de Blasio had demonstrated that he had nothing to offer working people. His address was full of goodies for gang members, illegal aliens and welfare voters.  It had nothing to offer New Yorkers except more crime, taxes, bankruptcy and the fast lane to Detroit.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>Ann-Marie Murrell</strong>&#8216;s video interview with <strong>Daniel Greenfield</strong> on <em>Robert Gates’ Revelations Confirm Horowitz&#8217;s “Party of Defeat,”</em> <em>Abandoning Iraq, </em><em> How Americans Died For a War Obama Didn&#8217;t Believe In</em>, <em>The Release of Terrorist Lawyer Lynne Stewart</em>, <em></em>and much, much more:</p>
<p><strong>Part I:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/xwp_CUfwAss" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Part II:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/TywIVHDnwxc" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe> <b></b></p>
<p><strong>To sign up for <em>The Glazov Gang,</em> <a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.</b><br />
<b></b></p>
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		<title>Obama&#8217;s Tired Song and Dance</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obamas-tired-song-and-dance/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-tired-song-and-dance</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obamas-tired-song-and-dance/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 29 Jan 2014 05:55:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=217523</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[America sees the president sweat through another overused and failing routine. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/widemodern_obamasotu_140128425x283.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-217529" alt="widemodern_obamasotu_140128425x283" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/widemodern_obamasotu_140128425x283.jpg" width="324" height="251" /></a>There comes a time in a pop star’s career when the songs that enthralled fall flat, the lyrics that seemed daring grow stale and the atmosphere that tied it all together blows away into thin air. A time when everyone knows the words to all the songs because there are no more new songs, only the old songs that no longer touch the emotions of the audience and the new songs that are poor pastiches of the old.</span></p>
<p>There comes a time when the fans grow restless and the lead singer whose voice once moved millions begins to sweat, sensing that the music has betrayed him and that the audience hears every false note.</p>
<p>Last night was that moment.</p>
<p>Obama opened his State of the Union address, full of its old familiar riffs on green energy, education, infrastructure and an end to war, with unity. Not a call to unity, but a presumption of unity. With his approval ratings underwater, his sixth State of the Union was about claiming credit and shifting blame.</p>
<p>The rhetoric, cynical and hypocritical, had a frantic edge to it. The man who keeps boasting that he will rule unilaterally in the imperial style with a pen as his scepter and a phone as his Fasces, was suddenly talking about the chamber, speaking with one voice and crediting the American people for everything.</p>
<p>Unity, like every other Obama gimmick, is only a tactical pose to be discarded a moment later. The Justin Bieber of politics cannot change and before long he’s back to threatening a unilateral campaign against the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights and invoking Marx’s hoary old specter of class warfare sleeping under a bench in Zuccotti Park after a long day of wandering ominously around Wall Street.</p>
<p>Otherwise it’s the same old out-of-tune piano whose racial ivories the crooner-in-chief tickles as he sings all the old promises of fixing the roads and bridges that never seem to get fixed and implementing the modern high tech educational solutions that never seem to work. The bored audience cheers and laughs mechanically out of tribal duty in all the right places when their party’s political Applause light flashes.</p>
<p>Michelle Obama’s starvation lunches for schools and jazzercise tour have lowered obesity levels, according to her husband, and ObamaCare is a huge success, according to the guy it’s named after. Afghanistan is a success. The economy is a success. Unemployment is a success. Democrats loyally clap sweaty palms at how wonderful everything is, but for some reason much of the country is out of work.</p>
<p>But Obama doesn’t pause. Instead he launches into his next set and it’s back to the War on Women, to the topical references that reassure MSNBC listeners that he is still with it even if those references are a few years out of date. It’s back to assurances that only with billions more of Chinese money borrowed and squandered on his policy gimmicks will we finally be able to compete with China.</p>
<p>And it’s the same old promises that the War on Terror has been won and we can relax now.</p>
<p>Strip away the year and it’s hard for the listener to tell whether he’s listening to a cut from the 2008, 2011 or 2014 SOTU album. Clip all the static about competing with China by building bridges so that babies with Asthma can attend free pre-K with Google and you catch snippets of the new stuff.</p>
<p>You can tell that it’s 2014 because Obama is walking back his old false claim that “Al Qaeda is on a path to defeat” by clarifying that while “al-Qaida&#8217;s core leadership on a path to defeat,” all the affiliates are spreading around the world. It’s an odd definition of defeat that sees a terrorist group’s affiliates bigger, better armed and more powerful than ever before. But word games, instead of responsibility, is what the hottest vocal teleprompter act from 2008 does best.</p>
<p>Obama is never wrong. Sometimes the facts are wrong. Sometimes your eyes and ears are wrong. Often reality is wrong. But he is never wrong.</p>
<p>“The debate is settled,” Obama declares at a time when the debate is really taking off in Europe. “Climate change is a fact.”</p>
<p>Climate change, like Al Qaeda’s path to defeat, is a slippery road. Al Qaeda is rising in Syria and Iraq, but is on a path to defeat. The freezing temperatures are proof positive of Global Warming. The debate is settled and the facts are in and if the debate later becomes unsettled, SOTU 2015 will have to redefine climate change to mean that the core temperatures at the center of the earth are much too hot.</p>
<p>According to Obama, “climate change” is causing droughts and coastal flooding that can only be fought by fighting carbon. California’s droughts are actually caused by liberal environmental policies, not by the dreaded carbon scourge, and the hoax that coastal flooding is caused by turning up the heat on cold nights is unscientific nonsense that wouldn’t even be endorsed by most professional Warmists.</p>
<p>But in Obamaland, the problem is often the solution. The politician who racked up trillions in debt promises that illegal alien amnesty will shrink deficits by a trillion. Blowing up welfare doesn’t lead to reduced deficits in the real world, but in the unreal world where floods are caused by eating too much meat and the bigger Al Qaeda gets, the closer it comes to defeat, the problem is the solution.</p>
<p>Unable to find any moderate Taliban willing to accept his surrender, Obama is declaring victory in Afghanistan and urging Congress to let him free all the Gitmo terrorists or at least transfer them to civilian custody because the war is over. The Gitmo terrorists don’t agree that the war is over and they prove it every year with a higher recidivism rate than pedophiles. But perhaps just as Al Qaeda is on a path to defeat through victory and the freezing temperatures are on a path to Global Warming, they too are on a path to rehabilitation even if they appear to be headed in the opposite direction.</p>
<p>Maybe they’re just taking the long way around to peace the way that Obama is taking the long way around to success.</p>
<p>There was a time when Obama’s speeches captivated mainstream audiences. Now they don’t even move his base. The speeches, like old songs, remind them of when they believed, stirring the ashes of dead idealisms and old passions, but offer nothing real and nothing new, only the specter of Hope and Change wandering around Wall Street with a hand out for Organizing For America donations.</p>
<p>There comes a time when the audience learns to instinctively break down the gimmicks that once made a musician seem fresh and new. And with Obama down to his sixth State of the Union, there is nothing here but gimmicks; policy proposals that he isn’t serious about, excuses for failed policies and threats that he will unilaterally implement bad new policies with his pen, his phone and his teleprompter.</p>
<p>The songs are old, the music falters and under the hot lights, the audience can see the lead singer sweat.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>Ann-Marie Murrell</strong>&#8216;s video interview with <strong>Daniel Greenfield</strong> on <em>Robert Gates’ Revelations Confirm Horowitz&#8217;s “Party of Defeat,”</em> <em>Abandoning Iraq, </em><em> How Americans Died For a War Obama Didn&#8217;t Believe In</em>, <em>The Release of Terrorist Lawyer Lynne Stewart</em>, <em></em>and much, much more:</p>
<p><strong>Part I:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/xwp_CUfwAss" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Part II:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/TywIVHDnwxc" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe> <b></b></p>
<p><strong>To sign up for <em>The Glazov Gang,</em> <a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.</b></p>
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		<title>Fight the Next War, Not the Last One</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/fight-the-next-war-not-the-last-one/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=fight-the-next-war-not-the-last-one</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 27 Jan 2014 05:55:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=217287</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why dwell on Obama when the Hillary campaign is mounting its assault? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/pict.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-217292" alt="pict" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/pict-450x337.jpg" width="270" height="202" /></a>Tuesday night President Obama will deliver another campaign speech, this one marketed as the State of the Union address. As such, we can expect to hear, through the usual white noise of “I,” “me,” and “my,” vacuous bromides like “moving America forward,” and empty promises “to grow the economy, strengthen the middle class, and empower all who hope to join it,” as White House flack Dan Pfeiffer said. So after token references to economic growth, we can expect to be served heaping helpings of “income inequality” and “economic mobility,” the redistributionist chum for his hungry progressive base.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Is anybody surprised at once again experiencing the mendacity of hope? Is there anything we don’t know about the incompetence, arrogance, and political thuggery of this administration? Obama and the Democrats represent the toxic stew of old-style Progressive government by technocratic elites, Sixties grievance politics, stealth pacifism, guilt over America’s sins, class warfare, redistribution of wealth to buy votes, crony socialism for the progressive 1% to secure campaign-contribution kickbacks, and pork for public employee unions to garner votes as well as bucks. The wages of this faux populist elitism are a sluggish recovery, anemic economic growth, a real </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" title="" href="http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm" target="_blank">unemployment rate</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> of 13%, a 3% decline over the last decade in the workforce </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" title="" href="http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000" target="_blank">participation rate</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, the monstrosity of Obamacare, the failure to exploit this country’s petroleum and natural gas riches, the looming bankruptcy of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and the explosion of debt and deficits to finance the whole disaster. In other words, precisely the policies guaranteed to stop economic growth and to weaken the middle class.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As for foreign policy, it would be surprising to hear a whole lot about that on Tuesday night. Five years of Obama have seen American prestige and influence damaged across the globe. Enemies and rivals have been appeased and strengthened, friends and allies scorned and compromised. Russia and China are rushing to fill the vacuum left by American retreat. The Middle East in particular is one spark away from explosion. American lives and dollars have been squandered by Obama’s abandonment of Iraq and Afghanistan. Reliable if thuggish allies in countries like Libya and Egypt have been surrendered to jihadists or civil war. Our stalwart friend Israel has been bullied and endangered. Al Qaeda and its affiliates are rampaging across the region. And Iran––our enemy for 35 years, the most vicious and lethal state sponsor of terrorism, the murderer of thousands of Americans––currently is being not just appeased into becoming a nuclear power, but bribed with sanctions relief to do so. Given the brazen shamelessness of Obama, I fully expect him to ignore all those disasters on his watch, and in full Neville “peace in our time” Chamberlain mode, tout as a “breakthrough” his agreement with Iran that does nothing to stop the mullahs from acquiring the bomb.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Equally predictable will be the reaction to the speech. The Congressional Democrat shills and touts will pop up on the carefully crafted applause lines, while Joe Biden grins maniacally. The courtiers in the media will declare Obama’s reading of the words of others to be the greatest oratory since Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and carefully parse the banalities, clichés, tired jargon, preposterous claims, and outright lies for more signs of their messiah’s rhetorical, political, and intellectual brilliance. The far-left of the base, who differ from other Democrats only in their honesty about their statist intentions, will whine that Obama didn’t promise to raise taxes on the “1%” even more, dismantle the NSA, shut down Guantanamo, shutter every coal-fired electricity plant, go on a Keynesian spending binge, destroy our drones, and slash defense spending to the bone, as they cast longing gazes on Cherokee princess Elizabeth Warren.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But we know all that. For five years we conservatives have been like Cassandra, wandering desperately around Troy accurately predicting its destruction and being dismissed as insane. Or in our case, as racist, heartless, greedy, and downright evil. No amount of empirical evidence debunking the claims of income inequality and the lack of mobility, or explaining the adverse effects of raising the minimum wage, or detailing the ongoing collapse of Obamacare, or adding up the fiscal failures of stimulus spending, or exposing the sweetheart deals to “green energy” hustlers, or documenting Obama’s serial lies, has made much of a difference. His celebrity besotted, vulgar-rich 1% lifestyle on the taxpayer’s dime, his abuse of executive power to make or unmake laws for political advantage, his demonization of his political enemies and rivals even as he simpers piously about “civility,” his attempt to kill the Fox News messenger, his siccing of government agencies like the IRS and Department of Justice on conservatives, all have been amply publicized. And despite all that, his job </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" title="" href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/president_obama_job_approval-1044.html" target="_blank">approval numbers</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> average 43%, up over 3 points since December 2, when they should be at least 10 points lower, and heading south.</span></p>
<p>Forget the speech. Forget yet once again cataloguing Obama’s crimes and misdemeanors. When we’re not preaching to the choir, we come off like the Ancient Mariner, a gray-beard loon grabbing voters’ sleeves to make them hear yet again the tale of the political albatross hanging around the country’s neck. We need to seize the opportunity created by the dissatisfaction with Obamacare, which has penetrated the fog of self-interest, ignorance, and indifference that helped reelect Obama. The strong likelihood that Obamacare will continue to hit more and more people in the wallet means that there will be a larger, more receptive audience come November’s midterm elections.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But Republicans have to be ready for that opportunity, with savvy, competent candidates and spokesmen who can explain the issues and link voter angst to the specific policies that created them, and who have workable alternatives to offer. They have to break the usual Republican circular firing squad, whether in Congress or the primaries, and concentrate their fire on the political enemy. They have to cleverly mock those who would whine about the metaphor in the previous sentence, and abandon the “preemptive cringe,” as Margaret Thatcher called it, they sometimes indulge when the other side squeals about “racism,” “war on women,” “polarization,” “incivility,” and “extremists.” Instead, they should model their responses on Ronald Reagan’s brilliant </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" title="" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi9y5-Vo61w" target="_blank">riposte</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Jimmy Carter in the 1980 debate, “There you go again,” using the same tone of mild amusement at a sulky child’s tantrum.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">And Republicans have to start dismantling the carefully crafted persona of Hillary Clinton––or “Planet Hillary,” as The New York Times Magazine absurdly put it in a worshipful profile––who currently is riding out Obama’s political storm in the safe haven of accolades, awards, Time magazine puff pieces, and $200,000 speeches from companies investing in the future. Republicans can’t let voters forget every gaffe, corrupt deal, and scandal from 1992 until today, or stop reminding them that she has no achievements other than buying her mediocre political career with the coin of humiliation at the hands of her philandering husband. Voters have to be reminded of her politicized opposition to the 2007 successful surge of troops in Iraq, and her public accusation that General Petraeus was lying about the evidence of that success. Most important, all Americans must never let anyone forget that on her watch 4 Americans died in Benghazi, while all she had to say was “What difference does it make!” after lying to a grieving father that an obscure moviemaker was to blame.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Whatever damage Obama can do in the next 3 years, 8 years of Hilary Clinton will make it worse. Every dysfunction inflicted on the country by 100 years of the progressive assault on limited government, self-reliance, and self-government will continue to worsen, while the debt clock ticks ever closer to the midnight of bankruptcy. Conservatives need to fight the next war, not refight the last one.</span></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Brown&#8217;s Abuse of Ray Kelly: A Metaphor of the Academy</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/jack-kerwick/browns-abuse-of-ray-kelly-a-metaphor-of-the-academy/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=browns-abuse-of-ray-kelly-a-metaphor-of-the-academy</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 12 Nov 2013 04:27:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jack Kerwick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Free Speech]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Ray Kelly]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[The totalitarianism permeating higher education.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/ray-kelly1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-210426" alt="ray-kelly" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/ray-kelly1-422x350.jpg" width="295" height="245" /></a>Two weeks ago, New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly arrived at the prestigious Brown University to deliver a speech.</p>
<p>It never happened. Student protesters, determined to silence Kelly, shouted him down.</p>
<p>In an attempt to abate the hostility of his audience, Kelly is said to have remarked:  “I thought this was the Academy…where we’re supposed to have free speech.”  A Brown administrator on the scene also expressed incredulity regarding the “inability” of these Brown students’—self-avowed “social justice activists” —“to have a dialogue[.]”</p>
<p>Jenny Li, the (Brown) student who organized the anti-Kelly demonstration, explained that in advance of Kelly’s appearance, she and other students petitioned the university to cancel the event. However, when administrators refused to accommodate them, Li and her fellow activists “decided to cancel it for them.”  Their victory in doing so, Li adds, is “a powerful demonstration of free speech.”</p>
<p>Christina Paxson, President of Brown, expressed her “deepest regret” to Commissioner Kelly and assured everyone that the protesters’ conduct is at once “indefensible” and “an affront both to civil democratic society and to the university’s core values and the free exchange of views.”</p>
<p>To date the disrupters have not faced any disciplinary action.</p>
<p>The significance of this episode has little to do with its specifics and everything to do with the fact that it supplies us with a microcosmic perspective on <i>the contemporary university. </i></p>
<p>First of all, <i>no one</i>, much less an eminently sensible man like Ray Kelly and seasoned academics like the aforementioned Brown administrators, can possibly believe that the contemporary Academy is an oasis of “free speech” and open-ended dialogue.</p>
<p>In fact, as anyone who’s spent any amount of time there knows all-too well, the university is much more like a <i>puddle </i>of free speech and dialogue than an oasis.</p>
<p>While the incident in question admittedly involves <i>students,</i> the latter are simply marching to the beat of the drums of the faculty and administration, not just of Brown, but of colleges and universities throughout the country.  They at once reflect and reinforce an academic <i>culture</i> that has been at least a half-of-a-century in the making.  <i> </i></p>
<p>It is at once tragic and scandalous—and let there be no mistakes about it, this <i>is </i>one of the great scandals of our age—that there is far <i>less </i>individuality and “free speech” in our country’s liberal arts and humanities departments than can be found among any random collection of construction workers or plumbers.</p>
<p>While there <i>are</i> exceptions (yours truly is a case in point), the overwhelming majority of academics in the liberal arts are left-wing ideologues.  This is no criticism—just a brute fact.  There is indeed a prevailing ideology, an <i>orthodoxy, </i>really, that draws the lines of acceptable inquiry, of discourse.  For lack of a better name, we can call this orthodoxy “Political Correctness,” for it is the same orthodoxy that has long drawn the lines of acceptable discourse in the popular culture.</p>
<p>The only difference is that non-academics, like construction workers and plumbers, say, have the daring and imaginativeness to transgress the orthodoxy’s boundaries.  Academics, in contrast, seek to <i>strengthen </i>these strictures on speech.</p>
<p>In other words, the relationship between the academic and his society has been radically subverted.  Worse, the lion’s share of the blame for this subversion rests upon his (or her) shoulders.</p>
<p>There is another point that can’t be lost upon us.</p>
<p>Traditionally, a liberal arts education was intended to render students preeminently <i>civil </i>by making them into articulate, knowledgeable conversationalists capable of both drawing upon the inheritance of their civilization—Western civilization—as well as enriching it.  It was an education that required great humility from those who would undertake it, for the present generation, it was understood, was just one voice in this millennia-old conversation linking the past with the present and future.</p>
<p>The attitude on display at Brown and exemplified by Jennifer Li is not only entirely incompatible with a traditional liberal arts education; the former and the latter are mutually antithetical.  There are two reasons for this.</p>
<p>For one, today’s students, like their teachers, are generally contemptuous toward the past.  The past is viewed as a “dark age” ridden with “white racism,” “sexism,” “homophobia,” “speciesism,” “xenophobia,” etc.  The present bequeathed to us by our past, as Barack Obama memorably remarked, is something the needs to be “fundamentally transformed”—i.e. <i>destroyed.</i>  As for future generations, while lip service is routinely paid to them, it is not difficult to show that if the interests of unborn human beings threaten to impede present designs, then they too must be marginalized.</p>
<p>Secondly, academics and the student activists who they are busy away creating are <i>angry. </i> And they spare no occasion to express that anger.  Since at least the time of the 1960s the expression of anger has been treated as tantamount with the expression of <i>authenticity.  </i>However, since no one cares to try to reason with an angry person—regardless of how authentic he may fancy himself to be—about any topic, much less controversial topics, conversation is impossible with the perpetually angry.</p>
<p>And so too is a genuine liberal arts education impossible as long as pride and anger are the emotions that the academy insists upon fostering.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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