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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; story</title>
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		<title>Who Really Is “Anti-Science”?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/bruce-thornton/who-really-is-%e2%80%9canti-science%e2%80%9d/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=who-really-is-%25e2%2580%259canti-science%25e2%2580%259d</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 04 Oct 2011 04:09:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=107242</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The gulags of the climate change debate.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/gore34.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-107493" title="gore34" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/gore34.jpg" alt="" width="368" height="221" /></a></p>
<p>In any national election we can depend on the usual liberal ad hominem attacks on Republicans and their candidates. One chestnut already appearing is the charge that Republicans comprise the “anti-science party,” as even a Republican, presidential primary candidate Jon Huntsman, fretted recently. Huntsman’s angst arose over doubts expressed by some other candidates, particularly Texas governor Rick Perry, that human-caused climate change is an established scientific fact, as <em>New York Times</em> columnist Paul Krugman <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/29/opinion/republicans-against-science.html?_r=1">believes</a>: “The scientific consensus about man-made global warming — which includes 97 percent to 98 percent of researchers in the field, according to the National Academy of Sciences — is getting stronger, not weaker, as the evidence for climate change just keeps mounting.”</p>
<p>Well, apparently not all the evidence. Just recently, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904537404576554750502443800.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop">experiments</a> conducted at the CERN particle accelerator in Geneva by Jasper Kirkby (who is following up on over a decade of research by Danish physicist Henrik Svenskmark) suggest that variations in cosmic rays influenced by the sun contribute to increases or decreases in cloud formation, which in turn affect temperature changes. Kirkby had earlier speculated that confirming Svensmark’s research could “probably be able to account for somewhere between a half and the whole” of 20th-century warming. In other words, rather than accepting premature claims of  “consensus” on climate change, some scientists are doing what they should do: adopt George Orwell’s attitude toward saints, and assume that all hypotheses and theories are guilty until proven innocent.</p>
<p>This genuinely scientific sensibility was recently described by physicist <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903703604576588662498620624.html">Michio Kaku</a> writing in the <em>Wall Street Journal </em>about another consensus-smashing experiment, this one suggesting that Einstein’s cosmic speed limit, the speed of light, might not be as absolute as once thought. Writes Kaku, “No theory is carved in stone. Science is merciless when it comes to testing all theories over and over, at any time, in any place. Unlike religion or politics, science is ultimately decided by experiments, done repeatedly in every form. There are no sacred cows. In science, 100 authorities count for nothing. Experiment counts for everything.” This doesn’t sound much like the attitude of those self-styled defenders of reason and science Al Gore or Paul Krugman, who keep telling us that human-created climate change is an incontrovertible fact established by scientific “consensus,” and so anyone who entertains doubt about the theory is akin to a holocaust denier.</p>
<p>Non-scientists like Krugman and Gore are prey to such arguments from authority in part because of our culture-wide mistaken attitudes about what it is scientists do. Many of us assume that research scientists are cool rationalists objectively gathering evidence that conclusively establishes the truth of a theory. But science doesn’t work that way, as philosopher Mary Midgley points out. Science is not “something so pure and impersonal that it ought to be thought of in complete abstraction from all the motives that might lead people to practice it.” In addition to the usual human motives such as money, ideological prejudice, and fame, such a view leaves out “the importance of world-pictures. Facts are not gathered in a vacuum, but to fill gaps in a world-picture which already exists. And the shape of this world-picture––determining the matters allowed for it, the principles of selection, the possible range of emphases––depends deeply on the motives for forming it in the first place.”</p>
<p>These “world-pictures,” Midgley goes on, necessarily involve “symbolism,” which thus “is not just a nuisance to be got rid of. It is essential. Facts will never appear to us as brute and meaningless; they will always organize themselves into some sort of story, some drama. These dramas can be indeed be dangerous” for they can “distort our theories.” The way to guard against this distortion that arises from our “preferences,” Midgley suggests, is to practice the same sort of stern skepticism about them that Kaku recommends for all scientific theories. This means “criticizing them carefully” and “expressing them plainly” rather than hiding behind assertions of impartiality, objectivity, or arguments from the authority of some professional “consensus.”</p>
<p>The idea that disastrous climate change is caused by human activity illustrates the truth of Midgley’s observations, for it depends not just on the evidence (some of which itself is questionable), but on a “world-picture” and a “story” that often determines how the evidence is interpreted. That story is one of the oldest we know, the myth of the Golden Age, that time when humans lived without suffering, crime, or work because a benevolent earth provided like a mother everything humans need. Yet this paradise was lost with the advent of agriculture and cities, which brought in their wake oppressive rulers and laws, private property and greed for gain, cramped dirty cities, crime and punishment, trade and war––the Iron Age in which we unfortunates now live. The villain in this ancient melodrama is technologies like agriculture, metallurgy, and shipbuilding, all of which broke the harmony humans once enjoyed with the natural world, and thus alienated them from their true nature.</p>
<p>The rise of industrialism, widespread urbanization, and ever more sophisticated technologies and inventions has kept alive the Golden Age myth. In 1930 Sigmund Freud gave voice to this received wisdom when he wrote in <em>Civilization and Its Discontents</em>, “What we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery . . . and we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions.” These days, much of modern environmentalism indulges this ancient anxiety about the costs of civilization. Al Gore, the Elmer Gantry of the global warming gospel, preached the myth throughout his book <em>Earth in the Balance</em>, where he decried our “technological hubris” for its “increasingly aggressive encroachment into the natural world” and the resultant “froth and frenzy of industrial civilization.” In these new versions of the Golden Age, the apocalyptic scenarios claiming to show the effects of global warming provide a dramatic illustration of the wages of “technological hubris” and capitalist greed. Just as the Iron Age of myth would end when humanity became so corrupt that a disgusted Zeus destroys them, so too the climate change alarmists predict the end of our own civilization unless we begin to rein in our destructive, unnatural life-style of selfish greed and wasteful consumption.</p>
<p>Other ideologies, of course, contribute to the acceptance of the climate change narrative. Leftover Marxists, socialists, big-government liberals, and other haters of free-market capitalism have found in global warming hysteria a useful stalking horse for collectivist or dirigiste economics. That’s why at every anti-globalization rally you will see the hammer-and-sickle flying next to the Greenpeace banners. But for most people, the Golden Age narrative, dressed up in the quantitative robes of scientific research, provides what political philosopher Chantal Delsol calls a “black-market religion”: a story of good and evil, sin and redemption, devils and saints that gives meaning to their lives and makes them one of the righteous elect. Unfortunately, too many scientists who should know better let this story distort their work and short-circuit, through professional shunning and gate-keeping, the “merciless” testing of theories Kaku speaks of.</p>
<p>So when it comes to climate change, who really is “anti-science”–– the skeptics demanding more empirical proof before accepting as fact an as yet unproven theory that could generate public policies costing trillions of dollars and weakening our economy; or the true believers shrilly insisting on the basis of a presumed “consensus” that the question is settled, and that anyone who disagrees is “vile” (Krugman) or “<a href="http://www.mediaite.com/online/al-gore-delivers-angry-rant-against-anti-global-warming-pseudo-scientist-bllshit/">evil</a>” (Al Gore), a dangerous heretic to be scorned and demonized?</p>
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		<title>Harry Potter and the Vanishing Jihad</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/william-kilpatrick/harry-potter-and-the-vanishing-jihad/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=harry-potter-and-the-vanishing-jihad</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 18 May 2010 04:02:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[William Kilpatrick]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=60457</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Has J.K. Rowling sent us a coded message?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/harry.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-60460" title="harry" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/harry.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="462" /></a></p>
<p>The threat from Islam seems to be growing. For example, the last twelve months saw the largest number ever of attempted and successful terrorist attacks on American soil. Meanwhile, books such as Paul Sperry’s <em>Infiltration,</em> and Sperry and David Gaubatz’s <em>Muslim Mafia </em>warn that Muslim Brotherhood agents have penetrated deep into the corridors of power and influence.</p>
<p>Yet official America is still in denial. The words “jihad,” “Islam,” “Islamic terrorism” and just plain “terrorism” are off-limits in polite government and military circles. Attorney General Eric Holder couldn’t even bring himself to use the term “radical Islam” when questioned on the subject the other day. At the same time, the mainstream media continue to deny that Islamic beliefs are the main factor in terrorist attacks. Thus, several reporters portrayed Faisal Shazhad, the Times  Square bomber, as just another case of mortgage meltdown. Meanwhile, Comedy Central prudently decided that He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Depicted will not be depicted. And amazingly, the people who point to the increasing threat from Islam are still written-off as “alarmists.” Sometimes, as in the cases of Mark Steyn, Geert Wilders, and others, the “alarmists” are hauled before courts and tribunals to answer for their alarmism.</p>
<p>Every once in a while, for sanity’s sake, you need to take a break from such grim reports. So today I’m recommending you pull yourself away from the bad news on the blog sites, and escape into the world of fantasy. Take a breather. Ease up on yourself. For example, you could immerse yourself for a few days in one of the “Harry Potter” series. Forget about the jihad. Instead, transport yourself to the magical world of Hogwarts.</p>
<p>You could, for instance, pick up book five of the series, <em>Harry Potter and the Order of the </em><em>Phoenix</em><em>. </em>It’s almost as long as <em>War and Peace</em>, so it will provide many hours of diversion. Moreover, it’s a well-written, cleverly plotted book with plenty of mystery, humor, sharply drawn characters, and inventive gadgets. As with the other books in the series, the plot revolves around the struggle between Harry and his nemesis, Voldemort—who is referred to throughout as “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.” Hah, hah! Clever literary device, that. You know we’re safely in the realm of fantasy when people can’t even bring themselves to name the threat which faces them.</p>
<p>The story starts out with Harry being summoned before a court hearing at the Ministry of Magic. The charge?—unauthorized use of his wand in Muggle territory. Harry used his wand to repel an attack by creatures now in the employ of Voldemort—in effect, a terrorist attack. But since no one at the Ministry of Magic will believe that Voldemort has returned, they insist that Harry has made up the story. The Ministry, in short, is in denial about the threat from Voldemort. It’s also in denial about the extent of the infiltration of the Ministry by Voldemort’s agents.</p>
<p>Harry is (just barely) acquitted of the charge against him, but he remains the target of a media smear campaign that portrays him as an alarmist. <em>The Daily Prophet,</em> the most influential of the Wizarding community’s newspapers, never misses a chance to discredit Harry for warning about non-existent dangers. At the same time, its editors repeatedly ignore or deny rumors about Voldemort’s re-emergence.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, a climate of political correctness has settled over the school. The new headmistress, Professor Umbridge (in reality, a Ministry plant), teaches a course in “Defense against the Dark Arts” which effectively leaves her students defenseless. The newly revised course is purely theoretical and provides no actual practice of defensive spells. From now on, Professor Umbridge informs them, the class will learn about defensive skills “in a secure, risk-free way.” When Harry and Hermione complain that they will be left unprepared to deal with the dark forces, Professor Umbridge counters that they have nothing to fear: “…you have been informed that a certain Dark wizard is at large again. This is a lie…the Ministry of Magic guarantees that you are not in danger from any Dark wizard.”</p>
<p>Alas, as you can see, <em>Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix </em>isn’t going to provide much relief from jihad anxiety. Substitute Muhammad or Islam for He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, the Obama administration for the Ministry of Magic, Geert Wilders or Mark Steyn for Harry, and you’ve got the main story of our times—one that also involves re-emergent dark forces, stealth infiltrations, denial, and neutered school curriculums. For <em>The Daily Prophet</em> you could substitute <em>The New York Times</em> or the <em>Times</em> of London, and for Professor Umbridge you could substitute all those teachers and professors who, by whitewashing Islam, leave their students unprepared for the reality they will one day face.</p>
<p>Is J.K. Rowling’s fifth book actually a roman-a-clef?—that is, a novel describing real life under the cover of fiction. Is she sending us a hidden message in the style of <em>The Da Vinci Code</em>? Rowling lives in England, after all, and she must surely have noticed that cultural jihad is far advanced there. One report says that the Muslim population of England is growing at a ten times faster rate than the native population. And the growing population is becoming more aggressive. When Geert Wilders visited England after initially being banned by the UK government, some of the Muslim protesters called for his head—literally. In reply to this kind of belligerence, official England has responded more or less like Chamberlain at Munich. “Jihad” and “Islamic terrorism” were long ago dropped from the Establishment lexicon. The schools have deleted the Holocaust and the Crusades from the curriculum out of deference to Muslims. And the Archbishop of Canterbury (who, fittingly, looks like a wizard out of central casting) has resigned himself to the establishment of some forms of Sharia law.</p>
<p>Was Rowling making a veiled comment on the surrender of her society to Islam by a craven elite? It’s difficult to say, of course. Maybe she had something more conventional in mind—perhaps, the failure of the Establishment to warn sufficiently about the dangers of global warming. Or maybe the scene with Professor Umbridge was meant to allude to the failure of British schools to provide the kind of practical sex education that would prepare students to defend against sinister strains of STD’s.</p>
<p>But if she was alluding to the threat from Islam, you can see why it had to be veiled. <em>Wikipedia</em> informs us that the reasons an author might choose a roman-a-clef format include:</p>
<ul>
<li>Writing      about controversial topics and/or reporting inside information on scandals      without giving rise to charges of libel.</li>
<li>Avoiding      self-incrimination or incrimination of others that could be used as      evidence in civil, criminal or disciplinary proceedings.</li>
</ul>
<p>Good reasons to be careful what you say—especially in England where it is quite difficult to defend against libel charges, and where “hate crime” laws are often interpreted so as to make criticism of Islam a criminal matter.</p>
<p>Imagine if Ms. Rowling had written a short opinion piece expressing her fears about the stealth Islamization of England. You can bet that before you could say “Expecto Patronum” she’d be brought up, like Harry, before some court on charges of defamation or hate speech. Or better make that “unauthorized hate speech.” If you want to write something hateful about Jews or Christians or Geert Wilders, no one will bother you. But in today’s England, just as in Harry Potter’s parallel England, you really can be arrested for warning about a danger that no one wants to admit.</p>
<p>Young people, they say, are the hope of the future. But not if they don’t wake up and begin to understand the present. When the Potter books first appeared years ago, it was reported that librarians and teachers were delighted. Young people were reading again! Ah, yes, the joy of reading. But part of the enjoyment in reading certain stories lies in making the connections to real life. What if there is never any moment of recognition—never any point where one sees the connection between what one reads and the world one lives in?</p>
<p>Young people may delve into imaginative fiction, but they live in a very unimaginative world—one that more or less forbids them to make any connections other than the officially approved ones. You can read <em>The Crucible</em> and have class discussions about McCarthyism, just don’t talk about contemporary witch hunts conducted by the politically correct. You can read <em>The Lord of the Rings</em>, but just remember that it’s an allegory about the threat of atomic weapons, and the destruction of the environment. Professor Tolkien never meant to say that certain traditions and cultures were superior to other traditions and cultures.</p>
<p>There are some important lessons to be learned from <em>Harry Potter and</em> <em>the Order of the Phoenix</em>. And it would be nice to think that legions of young people are taking them to heart. But today’s youngsters (as well as the not so young) have been conditioned to believe what the Wizarding community has been conditioned to believe: that there is no danger, no dark forces mustering, no need to worry about deception and infiltration. And, although our leaders and teachers talk incessantly about “change,” they have somehow managed to convince us that nothing momentous or world changing could ever really happen in our times. Very few seem prepared to even imagine the kind of epic change that Islamization would bring. And very few are prepared for the kind of epic struggle that may be needed to halt it. So thanks to J.K. Rowling, whether she intended it or not, for reminding us that epic struggles sometime occur in real life as well as in fantasies.</p>
<p><strong>William Kilpatrick’s articles have appeared in <em>FrontPage Magazine, First Things, Catholic World Report, National Catholic Register, Jihad Watch, World</em>, and <em>Investor’s Business Daily.</em></strong></p>
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		<title>Avatar: A Hate Story</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/peter-sheldrick/avatar-a-story-of-hate/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=avatar-a-story-of-hate</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 05 May 2010 04:00:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Peter Sheldrick]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[James Cameron returns to project his self-loathing onto the movie screen.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/avatar.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-59551" title="avatar" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/avatar.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="539" /></a></p>
<p>Director James Cameron’s smug and biased attacks on corporations and America got old back in the &#8217;80s and &#8217;90s. I doubted that his first film in a decade had anything new to say, so I decided not to watch it at the theater but instead, to wait until it was released on DVD. It was time to see if Cameron, now in his semi-retirement, had finally grown up. Having watched the film, I can now safely say that &#8220;Avatar&#8221; is a gigantic, annoying, beautiful, overlong, loving and &#8212; at the same time &#8212; hateful film.</p>
<p>If a key ingredient to great filmmaking is to submerge the audience into a new, alternative world, then Cameron has executed this in a breathtaking and commendable way. In this respect, &#8220;Avatar&#8221; truly is mind-blowing. It is no exaggeration to say that the technical wizardry of the first ninety minutes is mesmerizing. Additionally, it is clear that every single dollar of the $400 million budget ended up on the screen.</p>
<p>I could forgive Cameron for the film not having much of a story. Jake Sully, a paraplegic played by Sam Worthington, is given an avatar of the Na’vi, a native culture on the planet Pandora. He is sent to study the species &#8212; at least that is the official story. In reality, however, Sully is working for the military and an entity known as “the Corporation.” He feeds them information so that they can exploit the planet and steal the precious energy source known as “Unobtanium.” It is clear why movie critics have never accused Cameron of subtlety.</p>
<p>Despite these conspiracies being typical of this filmmaker, one can enjoy the first ninety minutes if one realizes that it is not as much a film as it is an ode to nature. Cameron clearly cares passionately for the environment. He wants to connect to it both physically (the Na’vi use this fluffy-plug type thing on the end of their braids) and spiritually. Whether one agrees with Cameron&#8217;s position or not is irrelevant in so far as one can at least appreciate his heartfelt love for nature, of which every single scene is a testament.</p>
<p>While this love is Cameron&#8217;s main strength, it is also his downfall. After the mesmerizing first half, &#8220;Avatar&#8221; drastically shifts gears as Cameron suddenly goes from love of nature to hatred of her alleged oppressors &#8212; i.e. <em>Cameron’s</em> <em>audience</em>. It quickly becomes clear that his greatest passion is hate: of the supposed evils of Western civilization (in other words, of the white man), of the U.S. military and, of course, of capitalistic/corporate greed. As with that other neo-communist auteur, Michael Moore, hypocrisy is ever present: &#8220;Avatar&#8221; is a screed of hate against capitalism, while the director himself is one of its most fortunate beneficiaries.</p>
<p>The main problem with Cameron’s ideology is that he sees Western civilization as inherently evil. The premise of the film is that if a planet like Pandora existed &#8212; where peaceful humanoids live in harmony with nature &#8212; Westerners (and especially Americans) would destroy it in their quest for material wealth. As a Canadian, I must admit that I have far more faith in my American neighbors, who are the most inclusive and tolerant people on our planet.</p>
<p>In Cameron’s universe, it is not just America, but the white man who is evil. This is best exemplified in &#8220;Avatar&#8221; by Colonel Quaritch (Steven Lang), who is a brutish xenophobe with a deep-seated hatred for nature. This theme comes back throughout the film, but nowhere more so than near its conclusion when the Colonel first brutally and fatally stabs a dog-like creature, and then attacks Jake (as the Na&#8217;vi avatar), whom he considers a traitor to his race.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Cameron constantly points out that the Na&#8217;vi are connected to the land on which they live. We’re hammered with how the Na’vi are a species connected to the land. They are peaceful warriors and an example for us mere humans. They are wholly good, and we are completely bad. Because the last hour becomes as preachy as a priest at his fiery pulpit, the film ground to a halt. Certainly, there were explosions and the Na&#8217;vi are murdered in extraordinary and spectacular fashion, but beyond saying that white people are genocidal mass murderers, there is no story left to tell.</p>
<p>Ironically&#8211; an irony apparently lost on Cameron &#8212; the Na’vi’s great savior ends up being none other than the white man himself, Sam Worthington.</p>
<p>I felt empty when &#8220;Avatar&#8221; ended. It was as if I had witnessed an angry man’s vision of the world, a man who fails to see joy in a child’s smile, but who sees conspiracies around every corner. He is a man who sees his fellow neighbor as evil personified.</p>
<p>&#8220;Avatar&#8221; proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Cameron is not much of a man. He is a child on a never-ending temper tantrum. Like all members of his extreme political faith, he lives in a fairy tale world, and so it causes rage when that carefully constructed vision of how things should be doesn&#8217;t translate into reality. Perhaps this explains why he’s known to be a tyrant himself and why he&#8217;s had four failed marriages.</p>
<p>When all is said and done, &#8220;Avatar&#8221; is more about a man projecting his own self-hatred and self-loathing onto the screen than anything else. It’s all about Cameron, the man who doesn’t trust corporations, who claims that Western culture is ugly, racist and greedy. Yet, at the same time, Cameron is the man behind &#8220;Avatar&#8217;s&#8221; stunning box office records and its release on DVD and Blu Ray which made him even richer than he already was.</p>
<p>As an aside, there is a reason why the DVD has no special features and why the Blu Ray, while slightly better, only has the bare minimum: they are planning to release a special edition of &#8220;Avatar&#8221; shortly before Christmas. This edition will have all the features we missed the first time around. And Cameron, corporations&#8217; main critic, knows full well that fans of his films will buy this second edition as well, which means he will make double his profit. In other words, if he wants a conspiracy, he should look in the mirror.</p>
<p>Cameron’s delusions are, in the end, just that &#8212; delusions. Since he will not be satisfied by his childish temper tantrum in &#8220;Avatar,&#8221; audiences worldwide should brace for more of the same from him &#8212; coming soon, to a theater near you.</p>
<p><em>Peter Sheldrick is a screenwriter living in </em><em>Toronto</em><em>.</em></p>
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		<title>See No Qur&#8217;an, Hear No Qur&#8217;an</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/robert-spencer/see-no-quran-hear-no-quran/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=see-no-quran-hear-no-quran</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 16 Apr 2010 04:03:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Robert Spencer]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[What the Associated Press won't tell you about why the Chicago mass murder said he started to kill.]]></description>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/koran.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-58267" title="koran" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/koran.jpg" alt="" width="392" height="449" /></a></p>
<p>What’s that? The “gunman” was a Muslim? He said something about the Qur’an? Surely not! None of that is in the AP story, which is an object lesson in journalistic bias and obfuscation: “Source: Chicago gunman heard voices to kill family,” by Don Babwin for <a href="http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2010/04/14/20100414chicago-gunman-heard-voices-to-kill-family.html" target="_blank">Associated Press</a>, April 14 (thanks to Paul):</p>
<blockquote><p>CHICAGO – A person close to the investigation of a shooting in Chicago that left a woman and three children dead says the gunman told police that he committed the crime after hearing voices telling him to kill his family.</p></blockquote>
<p>Compare that to the Chicago Tribune story I discussed <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2010/04/chicago-muslim-murders-four-family-members-had-been-clutching-quran-and-saying-it-told-him-to-kill.html" target="_blank">here</a>. It says that “the man had converted to Islam several years ago while serving time in prison and had a dispute with his wife — one of the victims — because she would not adhere to his faith. He told police that he needed to take his family back to Allah and out of this world of sinners, a source said….The wife’s sister, Shirina Thompson, said the suspect had been talking about “going to Allah.” Both Thompson and a neighbor in Wisconsin said the man had fought with his wife in recent days because she refused to wear Muslim garb….Letisha Larry, one of the suspect’s sisters, said her brother had been acting strange, carrying around the Quran and telling family members that something in the book told him to kill someone.”</p>
<p>But AP has none of that. He was just “hearing voices.”</p>
<p>This is one of the reasons why we always post at <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/">Jihad Watch</a> the names of the reporters who write the stories. These whole process of news gathering and news reporting needs to be demystified, even in this Internet age, and news reports recognized not as objective, dispassionate accounts, but as the work of human beings with agendas. While it is possible that Kristen Schorsch, Annie Sweeney and Cynthia Dizikes of the Tribune are simply better, more thorough reporters than Don Babwin of AP, it is more likely that Babwin had access to exactly the same information that showed up in the Tribune report, but chose not to go with it.</p>
<p>He probably thought it would be “Islamophobic” to do so, or that to do so would fuel one of those fabled but nonexistent “backlashes” against innocent Muslims. So he probably decided it was better to cover up key facts about this incident. And the thing is, Don Babwin is no worse a journalist than thousands of others working today. He was just doing what they all do, in large and small ways, every day.</p>
<p>To expose them as they do this, and to inform you about what is really going on, is one of the main reasons why <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/">Jihad Watch</a> exists.</p>
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		<title>The Threat We Face</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jamie-glazov/the-threat-we-face/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-threat-we-face</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 31 Mar 2010 04:37:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jamie Glazov]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Crystallizing who our enemy is -- and the policies we need to prevail. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/jihad1.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-56687" title="jihad" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/jihad1.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="289" /></a></p>
<p>Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Jacob Laksin, the managing editor of Frontpage Magazine. As a fellow at the Phillips Foundation, he reported about the war on terrorism from East and North Africa and from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He is co-author, with David Horowitz, of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/One-Party-Classroom-Professors-Indoctrinate-Undermine/dp/0307452557"><em>One-Party Classroom: How Radical Professors at America&#8217;s Top Colleges Indoctrinate Students and Undermine Our Democracy.</em></a> His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Philadelphia Inquirer, The Weekly Standard, City Journal, Policy Review, as well as other publications.</p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/photo.jpg"><img class="size-full wp-image-56693 alignnone" title="photo" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/photo.jpg" alt="" width="241" height="320" /></a></p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Jacob, welcome to Frontpage Interview.</p>
<p>I’d like to talk to you today about your view of the terror war, how the Obama administration is handling it and how a U.S. administration should preferably and ideally be handling it.</p>
<p>I would like to begin this discussion by talking with you about the nature of the threat we face in general. You and I have had a few disagreements (I think) in our own private discussions about Islam and to what extent it represents the “problem” in terms of the enemy we face. Tell us a bit about your thoughts on this issue, in terms of Islam and in what way you deem it to represent, or not represent, “the threat” to us in this terror war. And share with us some of your travels to the Islamic world that have, perhaps, influenced your outlook.</p>
<p><strong>Laksin:</strong> First, thank you for having me, Jamie. It’s not often I find myself on this side of an interview, let alone in this space, but the honor is doubly great since one of my favorite interviewers is conducting it.</p>
<p>Islam is a complicated subject but I suppose where we disagree is in our definition of the threat it poses. You believe that Islam is the problem; I think there’s a good deal to that. Robert Spencer and others have made a convincing case that Islam is foundationally less tolerant, more supremacist, and more militant than other major religions and hence presents a unique threat. I’m willing to accept that argument, though more on empirical than doctrinal grounds: Wherever terrorism takes place today, Islam is usually connected. That is surely no coincidence.</p>
<p>But while I agree that Islam as such is <em>a</em> threat, I don’t agree that it is <em>the</em> threat. As I see it, Islamic texts may be immutable but Islam is not monolithic; it is a reflection of the society at large. Thus, Islam in Arabia is very different than Islam in Africa, and the differences are apparent even within the same continent. I’ve drunk boukha (a kind of fig liquor) with educated Muslims in Tunisia who have read the Koran, and I’ve been accosted and forcibly converted to Islam by a Muslim gang of young and likely illiterate thugs in East Africa. (I happen to be an atheist by persuasion, but when it comes to potentially life-threatening situations, I am not a stickler for principle.)</p>
<p>The lesson I draw from those experiences is that culture makes the difference. If you take the hothouse culture of, say, Saudi Arabia – tribal, puritanical, violent, sectarian – you are very likely to get something that resembles Wahhabi Islam. That also means that even if Islam ceased to exist tomorrow, the threat we associate with its terrorist followers would persist. I think this is what T.E. Lawrence was getting at when he wrote so lyrically of Wahabism that:</p>
<p><em> </em></p>
<blockquote><p><em>It was a natural phenomenon, this periodic rise at intervals of little more than a century, of ascetic creeds in central Asia. Always the voteries found their neighbors beliefs cluttered with inessential things, which became impious in the hot imagination of their preachers. Again and again, they had arisen, had taken possession, soul and body, of the tribes…the new creeds flowed like the tides or the changing seasons, each movement with the seeds of early death it its excess of rightness. </em></p></blockquote>
<p>I see it similarly. So, while it may sound paradoxical, I think it’s simplistic to blame Islamic texts, which many in the Muslim world have not read – even in Egypt, a relatively modern state by the Arab world’s standards, almost half the population is illiterate – for the threat posed by Islamic extremism. Meanwhile, arguably the worst “Islamic” terrorist organization of the last half century, the Palestinian PLO, was at least notionally secular.</p>
<p>All that said, I think the points of agreement here are more important than the differences. Whether you think that Islam is the problem, or whether you think the culture from which it emerges is the problem, the same policy implications should follow: a reduction in immigration from Muslim countries; a skepticism about the Western world’s ability to transport its values and forms of government to that part of the world; a vigilance about Muslim extremism in the U.S.; and a steadfast support for democratic countries like Israel that live surrounded by the threat. If there can be some agreement on these points, I will accept that the rest is academic. Finally, though I don’t fully agree with the thesis that Islam as a religion is the main threat, I am dismayed that this is considered a fringe view while the idea that Islam is a “religion of peace” enjoys the status of mainstream truth. In a saner, more observant world, that would be reversed.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Thanks Jacob, the debate on whether “Islam is or is not the problem” continues in many places and, obviously, also here at Frontpage and at NewsReal. So, while we disagree on several realms, we aren’t going to engage in a debate on it here today &#8212; and that is also not our purpose. For those interested, Robert Spencer has recently <a href="http://www.newsrealblog.com/2010/03/16/does-moderate-islam-exist-a-reply-to-john-guardiano/">crystallized his argument</a> at Newreal, and my own position is pretty much synthesized in <a href="http://97.74.65.51/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=475">my debate with Dinesh D’Souza</a>.</p>
<p>Let’s follow up on the policy implications that you mention should be put in place in countering the threat we face. You point to a reduction in immigration from Muslim countries. Why is this important in your view and how could it be administered, especially in a climate of political correctness – that appears to not only shape the boundaries of national discourse but also the policies of the country?</p>
<p><strong>Laksin: </strong>Several years ago, Daniel Pipes, <a href="http://www.cis.org/articles/2002/back802.html">writing</a> of Muslim immigrants in the U.S., posed this provocative but pertinent question:</p>
<blockquote><p>“[W]ill they insist on adapting the United States to Islam, or will they agree to adapt Islam to the United States?”</p></blockquote>
<p>It’s because I don’t think the answer to this is definitively clear cut that a restriction on immigration from majority Muslim countries – with exceptions made for refugees and political dissidents – is a reasonable precaution to take.</p>
<p>Recall that twenty years ago, an operative in the Muslim Brotherhood wrote a <a href="http://www.investigativeproject.org/document/id/20">strategy memo</a> advising supporters to</p>
<blockquote><p>“understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”</p></blockquote>
<p>It’s tempting too dismiss this as a fringe view, but unfortunately a Muslim Brotherhood-created organization, the <a href="http://www.gazette.net/stories/083106/princou195032_31945.shtml">Muslims Students Association</a>, is now ubiquitous on college campuses and its ideals converge frighteningly with those of its parent group (It is not surprising that the president of one college MSA chapter has been convicted of <a href="http://www.gazette.net/stories/083106/princou195032_31945.shtml">aiding terrorist groups</a>). Meanwhile, the leading the Muslim advocacy group, the Council on American Islamic Relations, has ties to a terrorist-funding charity.</p>
<p>I don’t mean to suggest that all American Muslims are extremists or anything like it; no doubt many would find the anti-American agendas and stealth jihad campaigns of such groups abhorrent and some – I am thinking for instance of the indefatigable Zuhdi Jasser of the <a href="http://www.aifdemocracy.org/">American Islamic forum for Democracy</a> – have labored to distance themselves from their more fanatical coreligionists and outline a vision Islam compatible with our secular democracy. At the same time, I’m very mindful of the fact that the United States has been more successful in integrating its Muslim immigrants and has fewer problems with <a href="http://www.city-journal.org/2009/bc1030jl.html">Muslim extremism than Europe</a> in no small measure because it has had less immigration from Muslim countries. The intifada-style riots that swept France in 2005 is something I don’t want to see repeated in this country, and a precautionary policy of restricting immigration seems to me a defensible way to do it.</p>
<p>Political correctness is, alas, an omnipresent factor in contemporary policy debates but I’m not sure that its impact on this issue will be decisive. First, the United States already has one of the most selective and restrictive immigration policies in the world. Moreover, the tightening of security restrictions after September 11 has made immigration from Islamic countries even more difficult. So, I think the roots of the kind restrictions I have in mind are already partly in place.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>What would a legitimate and effective “vigilance about Muslim extremism in the U.S” require in your view?<strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>Laksin: </strong>There are a number of things – from monitoring mosques with suspected terrorism ties, to closer scrutiny of Muslim advocacy groups like CAIR, to extending warrantless surveillance of terrorist communications (one of the many Bush administration counterterrorism policies whose value President Obama has <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/04/13/obama-administration-maintains-bush-legal-argument-terrorist-surveillance/">come to recognize</a> in office).  Ironically, I think government officials encourage such vigilance – if very inadvertently. Every time a high-ranking official goes on television to lecture the American people that [insert Islamic terrorist act here] has nothing at all to do with Islam, which is really a peace-seeking religion, you see, Americans grow more distrustful of the official spin. I know I do. A sure way to instill resentment of political correctness is to tell people that they don’t really see what is staring them in the face.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>You mention the importance of a steadfast support for democratic countries like Israel. The Obama administration is wavering from that. Your thoughts on Obama and Israel and what we are seeing happening right now? Why is the Obama administration more concerned about Israelis building apartments than about Islamic entities fanning the flames of anti-Semitism, engaging in terrorism against Israel and building bombs?</p>
<p><strong>Laksin: </strong>Last week there was a “fake news” hoax involving a spoof Associated Press story reporting that in private meetings President Obama had urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to get rid of the refrain “next year in Jerusalem” for this week’s Passover holiday because it would be provocative and jeopardize peace talks. That this story sounded credible to so many people is a telling commentary on the deterioration of the U.S.-Israel relationship under Obama. <strong> </strong></p>
<p>I don’t know why the Obama administration – or indeed any American administration – is so determined to forge a peace settlement where there is only one serious negotiating party. (Hint: it is not the one that has refused unequivocally to recognize the other party’s right to exist.) Perhaps its hubris on the president’s part: He really does believe the hype that he is the transformational president whose vision will win out through sheer force of charm and charisma. Or perhaps this administration, like others before it, has bought into the Arab states’ self-serving and demonstrably bogus assurances that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at the heart of all instability and terrorism in the Middle East. (In truth, of course, the conflict is nothing more than a convenient pretext for corrupt and repressive Arab regimes to focus their people’s fury on something other than the fact that they are ruled by corrupt and repressive regimes. They must secretly dread the day a peace deal is reached and they have no distraction from their failures.) Whatever the explanation, the administration’s conduct toward Israel has been reprehensible, especially when one considers the more pressing issues still to be addressed. I am not generally an admirer of Mike Huckabee, but I think he put it well the other day: “Israel is building bedrooms, and Iran is building bombs. Worry about the bombs, Mr. President.”</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Let’s narrow in a bit on the Obama administration and how it is handling the terror war overall. Your thoughts?<strong><br />
</strong><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>Laksin:</strong> With the notable exception of Iran, I think the Obama administration has a better record in this regard than it wants its supporters to know and its critics to believe. The little-told story of this administration is that, even it has a made a show of condemning the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policies, it has largely replicated them. (A <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/29/us/politics/29force.html?hp">report</a> in the <em>New York Times</em> this week tries, and fails miserably, to show that the administration has significantly changed the Bush-era policies.)  Despite the terrible decision, since aborted in New   York, to try high-profile terrorists in civilian courts, the administration has kept in place the military commissions system established under President Bush – much to the fury of the ACLU. With only the most cosmetic changes, it has continued the Bush policy of detaining terrorists without trial. It has further outraged the Left by continuing the Bush policy of <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/us/politics/25rendition.html">rendition </a> – that is, sending terrorist suspects to other countries for detention and interrogation – even as it pretended to wash its hands of the moral stain of harsh interrogation techniques. (The most severe of which, like waterboarding, were in any case ended five full years before Obama became president.) The administration has followed the Bush administration’s timeline for drawing down troops from Iraq and it has stepped up the military campaign in Afghanistan. Targeted assassinations of terrorists have actually increased under Obama.</p>
<p>All this is to the administration’s credit. Now, one could justly argue that this also makes Obama a hypocrite. For my part, I don’t really care. So long as the administration has preserved these vital counterterrorism tools in practice, it is of no concern to me that it has disavowed them in theory.</p>
<p>It’s in the places where the administration has tried to chart a genuinely new – as opposed to rhetorical – course that it has blundered. The now-scuttled decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York was strategically stupid and a very foreseeable a public relations disaster. The president’s order to close Guantanamo without having an alternative detention facility was ill-conceived and premature, something the administration has now discovered. (Yes, President Bush also wanted to close Gitmo, but he was wise enough to refrain from ordering it closed until a new location could be found.) Worst of all, perhaps, are the administration’s repeated threats to pursue criminal prosecutions of Bush-era CIA officers who presided over the harsh interrogations of high-value terrorist detainees. Not only was that program perfectly legitimate – it was legal, safe, effective and helped foil terrorist plots and save countless lives – but the administration’s threats will surely make an already risk-averse agency even more conservative. From a national security perspective, it all seems spectacularly self-defeating.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>When you say it is of “no concern” to you that the administration has disavowed the vital counter-terrorism tools in theory, are you dismissing the damage done by the verbalization of ideology by elites, no matter what is actually done? A leadership’s rhetoric, let alone any rhetoric that reaches a mass audience, has a massive impact on the psychology of a nation.</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>Laksin: </strong>A fair point. I suppose it’s cynicism on my part. If it comes out of the mouth of a politician, my personal policy is to regard it with suspicion, and so I tend to discount the importance of political rhetoric – too lightly, as you suggest. That admitted, though, I think you can make a good strategic case for the administration’s rhetorical approach. To the Left and our critics overseas, it offers the comforting illusion that they are being listened too. To the Right, it offers the quiet compliment of largely adopting its preferred policy agenda. In a twisted way, everyone wins.<strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>When you say how “spectacularly self-defeating” some of the Obama administration’s approaches to the terror threat are, what do you think accounts for this self-defeating approach? I stand on the ground that it is deliberate destruction and self-destruction. I have a hunch you might differ from this position. You attribute it more to naiveté? Or to what?<strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>Laksin: </strong>Motives are notoriously difficult to gauge, but if I had to guess I would say an excess of self-righteousness. On the KSM trial, the administration seemed determined to prove that it knew better than its critics – even to the extent that it has exaggerated the civilian courts’ successes in prosecuting terrorists. Why do that, particularly when you are keeping the military commissions system anyway?</p>
<p>We saw something similar in the health care debate. Sure, half the country opposed the legislation, but the president just knew that he was right, and darn it if the country wasn’t going to get the bill. On some level, I think the administration has internalized the liberal intelligentsia’s critique of the Bush administration, namely that it was too impulsive and insufficiently intellectual. Where Bush went with his gut, Obama goes with his head. If nothing else, Obama’s tenure has shown us that intellectuals don’t necessarily make wiser or better leaders.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Hypothetically: Obama calls you today and tells you he is rethinking his strategy in the terror war and needs to start hearing some different voices. He has heard you’re one of the main people to start listening to. He wants to know some changes he should make (and some changes he shouldn’t make) on a few realms in the short-term future. What do you tell him?</p>
<p><strong>Laksin: </strong>I would respectfully submit that he fire Eric Holder. From the ill-conceived move to try KSM in New York (after he’d already offered to plead guilty in a military tribunal), to the destructive witch-hunt of CIA interrogators, to the dangerously wrongheaded decision to read underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab the Miranda rights before he had been adequately interrogated, the most serious missteps that the administration has made in the terror war can be traced directly to the attorney general’s door. This needn’t continue. As this New York Times <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/29/us/politics/29force.html?hp=&amp;pagewanted=print">report</a> makes clear, there are a number of Justice Department lawyers who understand the stakes in this war and are willing to take the steps necessary to win it – and who are not going to repudiate a common sense approach to counterterrorism for narrow ideological or partisan grounds. Surely any one of them would be a suitable replacement. And if it&#8217;s advice the president wants, he could do worse than to consider what some of his critics are saying – starting, of course, with <em>Front Page </em>magazine! (I would apologize for the blatant self-promotion, but, perpetual campaigner that he is, I think the president would forgive it.)</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Jacob Laksin, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.</p>
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		<title>All the News Unfit to Print</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/andrea-levin/all-the-news-unfit-to-print/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=all-the-news-unfit-to-print</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 11 Mar 2010 05:01:07 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Andrea Levin]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Why won’t the New York Times report on the anti-Israel funders behind the Goldstone Report?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/nyt.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-54005" title="nyt" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/nyt.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="403" /></a></p>
<p>What the<em> New York Times</em> chooses to cover in the Arab-Israeli conflict – and what it excludes – is a story in itself. The paper’s silence, as of this writing, about an event that has rocked the Israeli media and public and triggered calls for government action once more raises serious questions about the paper’s news judgment. After all, the <em>Times </em>reports on no other foreign nation as minutely as it does Israel, whether about negotiations, housing permits in Jerusalem, Israeli gravel-use in the West Bank or a Tel Aviv polygamist.</p>
<p>The story being ignored is the Im Tirtzu campaign to expose the New Israel Fund’s connection to the defamatory Goldstone Report via its funding of groups that spurred the creation of and then contributed harsh commentary about Israel to the UN document. Originally founded as a student organization to counter anti-Zionist activity on campus, Im Tirtzu publicized revelations about the NIF-Goldstone ties in provocative ads across the country. The campaign began in January and has already prompted moves in the Knesset to intensify oversight of foreign political entities financing groups in Israel.</p>
<p>According to polls, the Israeli public by a significant margin opposes politically-based foreign funding of activity in Israel.</p>
<p>So why the silent treatment by the <em>Times</em>?</p>
<p>For starters, many of the very same NIF-supported NGO’s under fire for allegedly helping fuel the Goldstone calumnies against Israel are also preferred news sources of the <em>Times</em>, quoted regularly as reliable critics of Israeli society. B’Tselem and Yesh Din, for instance, are favorites, together cited at least 25 <em>times</em> in the last two years, typically charging the Israel Defense Forces or other official bodies with misconduct, and sometimes prompting entire stories focused on the NGO charges.</p>
<p>Gisha, another NIF grantee, has been invoked at least 10 times in the same period as an objective organization demanding “free movement” for Palestinians. Gisha allegations have triggered front page, multi-story coverage.</p>
<p>HaMoked, yet another New Israel Fund-financed NGO, has been cited by the <em>Times</em> denouncing Israel for its handling of residency issues for Palestinians. Still another, Bimkom, has appeared in the <em>Times</em> blasting Israel for the effects on Palestinians of the separation barrier. Two more favored by both the <em>Times</em> and NIF are Physicians for Human Rights and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel. The newspaper has cited the former assailing the Israeli military for ethics violations, the latter deploring alleged discrimination in traveling the roads. One more NGO that enjoys both the support of the NIF and the confidence of the <em>Times</em> is Breaking the Silence, which alleges abuses of Palestinians by soldiers.</p>
<p>The claims of all these groups are tainted by ideological bias and factual distortion. As Ha’aretz’s military correspondent notes with regard to Breaking the Silence, “Any organization whose Web site includes the claim by members to expose the ‘corruption which permeates the military system’ is not a neutral observer.” Indicative of the disregard for fairness and objectivity, the soldier “testimonies” posted on its Web site include no dates and no specifics, but are anonymous charges the military cannot investigate – or refute.</p>
<p>B’Tselem, created to “change Israeli policy in the occupied territories” and to monitor treatment of Palestinians there, has produced strikingly skewed and false categorizing of Palestinian casualties. The group has included terrorists such as Abdul Salaam Sadek Hassouneh, who murdered six at a Bat Mitzvah celebration in 2002, as “civilians” killed by Israel. Similar distortions minimizing violence against Israelis color much of B’Tselem’s work.</p>
<p>Gisha pursues legal measures against Israel charging “segregation” and has signed ads alleging Israel is an apartheid regime. Its reports minimize or ignore entirely the threats against Israel.</p>
<p>And so it goes with all the groups.</p>
<p>Yet the <em>Times</em> promotes their message and their standing, presenting them as mainstream, credible, worthy sources. Indeed, the paper avoids identifying their political hue, which is uniformly well to the left, if not radical. In <em>Times</em> parlance, they are merely Israeli “human rights groups.” Only once, for example, was any tagged correctly as an “Israeli leftist advocacy group” – and this not in a news story, but a summary brief. Perhaps accidentally.</p>
<p>Nor is this pattern regarding political labels applied consistently across the political spectrum. For example, on the few occasions when the Jerusalem  Center for Public Affairs has been quoted, the think tank has repeatedly been termed “conservative.”</p>
<p>Given all this, the absence of attention to the NIF-Goldstone connection is unsurprising, if journalistically indefensible.</p>
<p>The New Israel Fund must, moreover, be grateful for the <em>Times</em> silence; its American donors generally believe they contribute to the betterment of life for rape victims and battered women, for the enhancement of the environment and the strengthening of Israeli education. Most would not likely be happy learning NIF-funded publications had a hand in the Goldstone Report and smear Israel as an apartheid regime.</p>
<p>Most would probably not be contributors if they knew that, according to NGO-Monitor’s Anne Herzberg, there are NIF-funded groups that “demonize Israel at the UN, support boycott and divestment campaigns, promote ‘lawfare’ cases against Israeli officials and even advocate erasing the Jewish character of the state.”</p>
<p>Regrettably, the paper’s affinity for NIF-funded groups that blame Israel for the conflict and related problems is matched by its lack of attention to the genocidal demonizing of Israel in Palestinian society and the wider Arab world. Unmentioned in its pages, for instance, was a recent translation from Arabic by MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute) of yet another screed by a Muslim preacher in Nablus who calls Jews Nazis, exhorts his flock to kill all Jews and says:</p>
<blockquote><p>Palestine was subjected to a loathsome occupation of its land and holy places by these neo-Mongols, who perpetrated, on this holy, blessed, and pure land, acts of killing, assassination, destruction, expropriation, Judaization, harassment, and the fragmentation of the homeland. (January 29, 2010)</p></blockquote>
<p>In fact, a number of NIF groups would agree with much of what the preacher at the Bourin mosque had to say. But that only underscores the need for serious investigation of the New Israel Fund and the many politically extreme grantees enjoying millions of dollars of its largesse.</p>
<p>It underscores too the question about the news judgement of the <em>Times</em>, which has drifted increasingly away from objective reporting on Israel, has promoted its defamers, and continues to ignore the onslaught of Palestinian and broader Arab anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate indoctrination.</p>
<p><em>Andrea Levin is Executive Director and President of CAMERA, Committee for Accuracy in </em><em>Middle East</em><em> Reporting in </em><em>America</em><em>.</em></p>
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		<title>Imprisoned for Saving American Lives</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/john-l-work/imprisoned-for-killing-terrorists-in-iraq-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=imprisoned-for-killing-terrorists-in-iraq-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 22 Feb 2010 05:10:46 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[John L. Work]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Former U.S. Army Master Sergeant John Hatley is now serving a forty year sentence for allegedly killing terrorists in Iraq.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/john.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-51192" title="john" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/john.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="499" /></a></p>
<p>Former U.S. Army Master Sergeant John Hatley is now serving <a href="http://www.groesbeckjournal.com/news/2009-06-04/Front_Page/Hatley_family_Johns_still_a_hero.html">a forty year sentence</a> in Leavenworth prison. He was convicted by a 2009 Court Martial of murdering four Iraqi insurgent arrestees in Baghdad following a 2007 ambush and firefight, and dumping the bodies into a Baghdad canal.  Two other Sergeants with the Alpha Company 1-18 1<sup>st</sup> Infantry were also convicted and sent to prison.</p>
<p>Hatley&#8217;s wife, Kim Hatley, is leading a crusade to win clemency for her husband. I recently spoke with her by telephone. A veteran of six years as an Intel-analyst and Crypto-analyst with the U.S. Army 18<sup>th</sup> Airborne Corps, Mrs. Hatley has a nineteen-year-old son in the United States Marine Corps in Afghanistan.  She related some details of events that led up to the firefight, the shootings and the investigation that sent her husband to prison:</p>
<p>John Hatley was a highly decorated combat veteran of nineteen years and six months military service. He was deployed in Bosnia, Kosovo, Panama, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Operation Desert Storm and three tours of duty in Iraq.  The soldiers of Alpha Company 1-18 1<sup>st</sup> Army Infantry knew him to be the first into a hot spot and the last to come out.  Mrs. Hatley says that her husband was a legend in Alpha Company and treated the soldiers under his command as though they were family.</p>
<p>During daily 2007 patrol operations in the West Rasheed area of Baghdad, Hatley’s soldiers often found themselves under enemy fire.  The post-Hussein sectarian “insurgency” was well under way.  Hatley’s soldiers killed some of the attackers and captured many others.  Over the length of the insurgency, snipers and roadside bombs (IEDs) killed or crippled thousands of Americans.</p>
<p>As the war dragged on, tens of thousands of jihadists who were taken prisoner during or after fire-fights in Baghdad went to the Detention Holding Area Annex (DHAA), which is military terminology for a jail.  Astonishingly, the DHAA personnel released nearly all of them shortly after their arrests, for “lack of sufficient evidence to detain.”  Most of the prisoners were released.  The newly-freed insurgents immediately returned to the streets to resume killing and maiming American soldiers.  This insanity became known as the Catch and Release Program.</p>
<p>Adding to the stress of war, Hatley and his soldiers collected the scores of dead bodies that were regularly dumped onto Baghdad streets by terrorists.  Most of the dead were non-combatant civilians who had been tortured and mutilated prior to their executions.</p>
<p>Then, on February 27, 2007, an insurgent sniper killed Staff Sergeant Karl Soto-Pinedo, who was like a beloved son to Hatley.  Mrs. Hatley told me that her husband was grief-stricken to the point of dysfunction by Soto-Pinedo’s death.  On March 17, Spc. Mario Guerrero was killed by a road-side bomb explosion.  All the same, the patrols went on ceaselessly, from 4:00 a.m. to 9:00 or 10:00 p.m. – every day.  For months on end Hatley and his soldiers fought the war on three or four hours of sleep per night.</p>
<p>On a particular April day in 2007, Hatley’s unit once again came under fire. Four insurgents ran from a house where they hid during the fire-fight and the Americans soon captured them.  U.S. troops found small arms, sniper rifles and ammunition within that house. All of the captured insurgents field-tested “positive” for gunshot residue on their hands.</p>
<p>Hatley radioed the DHAA that he was en-route with the four detainees.  The DHAA refused to receive them, citing a “lack of sufficient evidence to hold.”  Hatley was ordered to release these terrorists who had tried to kill American soldiers.  Now, as the alleged story that came out in court goes, he discussed the DHAA release order with two of his subordinates, Sgt. Michael Leahy and Sgt. Joseph Mayo.  The Sergeants decided they had just about had their fill of Catch and Release, and that these four insurgents were not going free to return to kill and maim Americans. They subsequently drove the four terrorists to a nearby canal, fired one shot each into the backs of their heads, and dumped the dead bodies into the water.  Sgt. Jesse Cunningham, seated inside their parked vehicle, apparently watched all of it in the rear-view mirror. The bodies, however, were never found.  No local residents reported anyone missing.</p>
<p>By 2009, the Hatleys were stationed in Germany.  Sgt. Jesse Cunningham got himself into a jam with the Army for assaulting another non-commissioned officer and for falling asleep at his post – both serious offenses if proven.  Under investigation, Cunningham talked to a JAG lawyer and decided to trade what he knew about the 2007 Baghdad shootings to get himself off the hook.  He became “the snitch.”</p>
<p>Using Cunningham’s statement, the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division (CID) extracted confessions from both Leahy and Mayo.  Hatley refused to admit having done anything wrong.  The military trial was in Vilseck, Germany, from April 13 through 16, 2009.</p>
<p>Cunningham, Leahy and Mayo all took the witness stand against their former First Sergeant.  Mrs. Hatley, who was present for the entire trial, told me that Leahy and Mayo, who had already been convicted, looked to be in great distress on the stand during testimony and appeared to everyone that they did not want to testify against their First Sergeant. Both received bad conduct discharges and prison time.  Hatley received a dishonorable discharge to go along with his life sentence.  Members of the press openly wept when the sentence was handed down.</p>
<p>Mrs. Hatley now spends endless hours on the internet and the phone, mustering support for her husband’s release.  She sounds optimistic, despite the terrible situation.  She says that even in prison her husband has received meritorious staff reports, once for saving a choking prisoner’s life by administering the Heimlich maneuver.</p>
<p>The endless conflict goes on.  Soldiers and Marines deal with Rules of Engagement (ROE) that tie their hands and prolong the national agony of our overseas involvement in the eternal war that Islam declared against infidels nearly fourteen-hundred years ago.</p>
<p>Many officers in the military’s upper echelons remain willfully ignorant of Islamic doctrine and oblivious to its dynamics in the war.  They write the crippling ROE and the Catch-and-Release policies that have caused the deaths of innumerable American soldiers and Marines &#8212; and they sit comfortably behind their desks at the Pentagon.  In the meantime, men like John Hatley sit in prison.</p>
<p><strong>[For those wishing to help Kim Hatley win clemency for her husband, visit <a href="http://defendjohnhatley.com/">DefendJohnHatley.com</a>.]</strong><em><br />
</em></p>
<p><em>John L. Work is a contributor to <a href="http://www.newsrealblog.com/">NewsReal Blog</a>.  He is a retired Colorado Law Enforcement Officer and a free-lance writer.</em></p>
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		<title>The Times Finds A Lone Crazed Assassin</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/peter-collier/the-times-finds-a-lone-crazed-assassin-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-times-finds-a-lone-crazed-assassin-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 22 Feb 2010 05:05:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Peter Collier]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=51395</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What the Grey Lady won't tell you about professor Amy Bishop.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/bishop1.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-51443" title="bishop" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/bishop1.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="347" /></a></p>
<p><strong>Visit <a href="http://www.newsrealblog.com/">Newsreal</a></strong><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/us/21bishop.html" target="_blank"><em></em></a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/us/21bishop.html" target="_blank"><em>The New York Times</em>’ front page profile</a> on Saturday of professor Amy Bishop, who allegedly executed three University of Alabama Biology Department colleagues after being denied tenure, appears to be an exhaustively reported piece based on “numerous interviews with colleagues and others who knew her.” It portrays Bishop as violent and unpredictable, rejected by Harvard because of mediocre work and shunned by a series of neighbors and co-workers scared off by the suppressed rage that kept bubbling up to the surfaces of her social life, and also someone who may already have gotten away with the murder of her brother years earlier possibly because of her mother’s political connections in her home town of Braintree, Mass.</p>
<div>
<p>“Between brilliance and rage” is the caption of the photo of Bishop used by the<em> Times</em> for the story, although the piece makes no case for the former.  But is this all the news that is fit to print about the perpetrator of this murder spree in academe?  What about the “family source” who told the Boston Herald that Bishop was,</p>
<blockquote><p>“<a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/guideDesc.asp?catid=144&amp;type=issue" target="_blank">a far left</a> political activist who was ‘obsessed’ with <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1511" target="_blank">President Obama</a> to the point of being off putting”?</p></blockquote>
<p>What about the student who called her a <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/guideDesc.asp?catid=115&amp;type=issue" target="_blank">“socialist”</a>? What about one report that Bishop complained about a rule issued by University  of Alabama administrators regarding underclassmen living on campus because she believed it was destructive of “diversity.”  And what about the crowning irony of this case, whether or not she made this complaint: that two of the colleagues she allegedly killed were black and one was South Asian, and that Bishop thus wiped out the 14 person Biology department’s entire diversity in one burst of gunfire?</p>
<p>Considering the politics of Bishop’s <em>ressentiment</em> might have helped fill out the Times’ portrait of a psychopathic time bomb who had already gone off several times in her disordered life on her way to the Big Explosion on February 12 in Huntsville. There is no doubt, as the blogosphere has already noted, that the paper would have pursued even the vaguest hint that Bishop had been a fan of Glenn Beck or was a Tea Party fellow traveler as a major story line. For the Grey Lady, only the politics of the Right is personal.</p>
</div>
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		<title>Evan Bayh&#8217;s Exit and the Failure of Liberal Governance &#8211; WSJ.com</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/evan-bayhs-exit-and-the-failure-of-liberal-governance-wsj-com/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=evan-bayhs-exit-and-the-failure-of-liberal-governance-wsj-com</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 17 Feb 2010 18:59:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=50766</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The political retirement of Evan Bayh, at age 54, is being portrayed by various sages as a result of too much partisanship, or the Senate&#38;apos;s dysfunction, or even the systemic breakdown of American governance. Most of this is rationalization. The real story, of which Mr. Bayh&#38;apos;s frustration is merely the latest sign, is the failure [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>The political retirement of Evan Bayh, at age 54, is being portrayed by various sages as a result of too much partisanship, or the Senate&amp;apos;s dysfunction, or even the systemic breakdown of American governance. Most of this is rationalization. The real story, of which Mr. Bayh&amp;apos;s frustration is merely the latest sign, is the failure once again of liberal governance.</p>
<p>For the fourth time since the 1960s, American voters in 2008 gave Democrats overwhelming control of both Congress and the White House. Republicans haven&amp;apos;t had such large majorities since the 1920s. Yet once again, Democratic leaders have tried to govern the country from the left, only to find that their policies have hit a wall of practical and popular resistance.</p>
<p>Democrats failed in the latter half of the 1960s, as the twin burdens of the Great Society and Vietnam ended the Kennedy boom and split their party. They failed again after Watergate, as Congress dragged Jimmy Carter to the left and liberals had no answer for stagflation. They failed a third time in the first two Bill Clinton years, as tax increases and HillaryCare led to the Gingrich Congress before Mr. Clinton salvaged his Presidency by tacking to the center.</p>
<p>via <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704804204575069520491303964.html">Failure of Liberal Governance &#8211; WSJ.com</a>.</p>
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		<title>Magazine says W.H. Islam envoy misquoted; writer denies &#8211; POLITICO.com</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/magazine-says-w-h-islam-envoy-misquoted-writer-denies-politico-com/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=magazine-says-w-h-islam-envoy-misquoted-writer-denies-politico-com</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/magazine-says-w-h-islam-envoy-misquoted-writer-denies-politico-com/#respond</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 17 Feb 2010 03:16:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Affairs]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=50636</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A magazine that altered an article referring to President Barack Obama&#8217;s new envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, Rashad Hussain, says it did so because he was misquoted, but the author of the article is standing by her story. Hussain, now a deputy associate White House counsel, was quoted back in 2004 decrying [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>A magazine that altered an article referring to President Barack Obama&#8217;s new envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, Rashad Hussain, says it did so because he was misquoted, but the author of the article is standing by her story.</p>
<p>Hussain, now a deputy associate White House counsel, was quoted back in 2004 decrying the prosecution of a Florida professor accused of ties to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Sami Al-Arian. However, CNSNews reported Monday that the article quoting Hussain, published in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, was subsequently sanitized on the Web to remove the quotes and all other references to Hussain. The changes appear to have taken place in 2007 or later.</p>
<p>According to the original story, Hussain told a panel discussion at a Muslim Students Association conference in &amp;apos;04 that the criminal case against Al-Arian was one of a series of &#8220;politically motivated persecutions.&#8221; Hussain also reportedly asserted that Al-Arian was being &#8220;used politically to squash dissent.&#8221;</p>
<p>Washington Report news editor Delinda Hanley said Tuesday that Hussain&amp;apos;s quotes were taken down because the quotes attributed to him actually came from Al-Arian&amp;apos;s daughter, Laila Al-Arian, who took part in the same panel discussion. &#8220;Laila Al-Arian said the things attributed to Rashad Hussain, and an intern who attended the event and wrote up the article made an error, which was corrected on our Web site by deleting the two quotes in their entirety,&#8221; Hanley wrote in an e-mail to POLITICO.</p>
<p>However, the author of the article, Shereen Kandil, said Tuesday that she stood by her original report.</p>
<p>&#8220;When I worked as a reporter, I understood how important it was to quote the right person, and accurately,&#8221; Kandil wrote in response to an e-mailed query from POLITICO asking about the possibility of a misquotation.</p>
<p>&#8220;I have never mixed my sources and wouldn&amp;apos;t have quoted Rashad Hussain if it came from Laila Al-Arian. If the editors from WRMEA felt they wanted to remove Rashad Hussain from the article, my assumption is that they did it for reasons other than what you&amp;apos;re saying,&#8221; said Kandil, who also works in the Obama administration as a program analyst for the Middle East in the Environmental Protection Agency&amp;apos;s Office of International Affairs.</p>
<p>A White House spokesman, who asked not to be named, said Tuesday afternoon that Hussain &#8220;certainly doesn’t recall making that statement. He was on the panel to talk about his legal writing on civil liberties. Ms. Al-Arian spoke about her father.&#8221; The spokesman said he had no information about whether Hussain had requested the change to the story.</p>
<p>Reached by phone Monday night, Laila Al-Arian said she thought it was possible she made the statements ascribed to Hussain, but that no one from Washington Report called her to ask if the quotes did belong to her. &#8220;It&amp;apos;s kind of sad that a right-wing, pseudo-news website gets as much credence,&#8221; Al-Arian said about the CNSNews account. &#8220;I don’t remember Rashad being there. It&amp;apos;s possible that the quote could have been misattributed.&#8221;</p>
<p>via <a href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/joshgerstein/0210/Mag_says_WH_Islam_envoy_misquoted_writer_denies.html">Mag says W.H. Islam envoy misquoted; writer denies &#8211; Josh Gerstein &#8211; POLITICO.com</a>.</p>
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		<title>The Crooked Judges of Amsterdam</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/frontpagemag-com/the-crooked-judges-of-amsterdam/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-crooked-judges-of-amsterdam</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/frontpagemag-com/the-crooked-judges-of-amsterdam/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 09 Feb 2010 05:14:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=49422</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Dutch authorities are making sure Geert Wilders won't get a fair defense. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/wilders.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-49426" title="wilders" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/wilders-300x189.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="189" /></a></p>
<p>Geert Wilders&#8217;s &#8220;hate speech&#8221; trial in the Netherlands began just a few weeks ago, but the outcome already seems determined. As Robert Spencer discusses in <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/?p=49295&amp;preview=true">our lead story today</a>, the Amsterdam District Court has refused to allow Wilders to call fifteen of the eighteen witnesses he had hoped to bring forward in his defense. It is also highly unlikely that the three remaining witnesses will be able to defend Wilders in the manner he desired, because the court has decided that the three witnesses will only be heard behind closed doors. With Wilders denied the opportunity to mount a forceful defense against charges that he has incited discrimination against Muslims, the Dutch court’s proceedings increasingly resemble the kind of justice-mocking show trials one has come to expect from third-world dictatorships. Political and social commentator Pat Condell has produced a powerful video in which he comments on these dire circumstances surrounding the Wilders trial and their implications for free speech – and Western civilization as we know it.</p>
<p><strong>To watch the video, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96ZUZ9CPZII&amp;feature=player_embedded ">click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>The New Attack on Palin? Associate Her with John Edwards</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/petercollier/the-new-attack-on-palin-associate-her-with-john-edwards-3/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-new-attack-on-palin-associate-her-with-john-edwards-3</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/petercollier/the-new-attack-on-palin-associate-her-with-john-edwards-3/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 08 Feb 2010 05:11:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Peter Collier]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=48952</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The obsessive attacks on Palin take yet another morbid turn. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/palin.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-48953" title="palin" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/palin-300x188.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="188" /></a></p>
<p>Wednesday, February 3, 2010, marked a new turn in the obsessive attacks on Sarah Palin: associating  her with <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=631" target="_blank">John Edwards</a>.</p>
<p>In the <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/03/grifters-tale/" target="_blank"><em>New York Times</em></a> Timothy Egan sees them as a pair of ethically similar “grifters” using populism to con the American voter–“playing to outrage while taking care of themselves.” In Egan’s view, both ginned up and profited from fears among a broad segment of the public who increasingly resent the success and power of the elites and feel that “America is passing them by.”</p>
<p>Edwards did this an arrant fashion by tearing the labels off his Armani suits and driving someone else’s clunker to rallies where he preached his blow-dried version of class warfare.  Now Palin is doing the same thing, Egan believes, by “charging Tea Partiers $100,000 to stoke their fears.”  (Yes, she has promised to plow her take back into “the cause,” but Egan assumes that she is a cynic whose only cause is herself.)</p>
<p>The comparison between the pair is asymmetrical and tendentious.  Egan doesn’t consider Edwards’ banality of evil—notably the lying treachery committed against wife and family, and friends and supporters.  But while  Palin’s failings, notably her “incoherence” and her lack of response to Glenn Beck when he asked about her favorite founding father, are not in any way equivalent to Edwards’ evil, they are more fully explored. It’s clear by the end of his piece that Egan isn’t really comparing the two at all, but using Edwards’ nastiness to make Palin seem sleazy by association.</p>
<p>Andrew Sullivan posted a nuttier but more interesting piece on Palin   and Edwards on his blog on thursday   titled <a href="http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/02/my-john-edwards-failure.html" target="_blank">“My John Edwards Failure.”</a></p>
<p>He begins by acknowledging that he committed a double standard treating Palin harshly and giving a pass to Edwards.  But then he immediately reassures the reader that this doesn’t mean he is “backtracking” on Palin.  In fact, says Sullivan,</p>
<blockquote><p>“All I regret is not being  able to expose her for real yet.”</p></blockquote>
<p>A surprising admission of failure by someone who has spent the last year and a half obsessing on her private parts, producing sick innuendoes about her family, and licking his chops over the dull normal baby daddy, Levi Johnston, and the big revelation he’s supposedly getting ready to deliver. Hasn’t he run her to ground yet? What more could Sullivan have done to her after months of subjecting her to the blog equivalent of waterboarding?</p>
<p>In the rest of his post—about his deficiencies is not getting  the Edwards story—he cultivates a weepy tone while making a very big deal out of an inessential disclosure.  He ignored the Edwards story, he says, because of his “leeriness of investigating people’s sex lives” (obviously he made an exception in Palin’s case).  Then he grandiosely struts his “sensitivity” by saying that he also “felt protective toward Elizabeth” whom he didn’t want to hurt at a time when she was “faced with mortality” and that he grieved over her loss of a child.</p>
<p>The bottom line is that he made a mistake “in making an assumption of a baseline of decency in public officials” and won’t do it again. Of course this assumption never did apply to Palin whom Sullivan has been lighting up—especially on the circumstances of Trig’s birth–during all those months when he was studiously ignoring Edwards.</p>
<p>What we can take away from this jive confession is that Sullivan will feel it his duty to concentrate his fire even more fiercely on Palin now that he has “learned” from his kid glove treatment of Edwards.</p>
<p>As if he needed a justification to continue this loony quest.</p>
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		<title>Bin Laden Goes Green</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/rich-trzupek/bin-laden-goes-green/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=bin-laden-goes-green</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 05 Feb 2010 05:35:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Rich Trzupek]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=48430</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What does the world’s most notorious terrorist have in common with Al Gore? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-48431" title="obl-gore" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/obl-gore.jpg" alt="obl-gore" width="400" height="266" /></p>
<p>Judged simply by their content, it would be easy to misidentify the speaker who uttered the following quotes:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;The effects of global warming have touched every continent. Drought and deserts are spreading, while from the other floods and hurricanes unseen before the previous decades have now become frequent.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>Al Gore perhaps?</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;The world is held hostage by major corporations, which are pushing it to the brink. World politics are not governed by reason but by the force and greed of oil thieves and warmongers and the cruel beasts of capitalism.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>Sounds a lot like something you might read at the Daily Kos.</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;We must also stop dealings in the dollar and get rid of it as soon as possible. I know that this has great consequences and grave ramifications, but it is the only means to liberate humanity from slavery and dependence on America.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>That’s got to be George Soros, doesn’t it?</p>
<p>In fact, all three quotes are part of Osama bin Laden’s <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,584249,00.html">latest appeal to the world</a> in an audio tape released last week by the Arab news network Al-Jazeera. The idea, no doubt, was to appeal to more “mainstream” anti-Americanism around the world. Those who help sabotage American industry and our economy, in other words, punish the infidels. Perhaps not quite as spectacular as <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,582355,00.html">blowing up a CIA outpost</a>, but all contributions are gratefully accepted.</p>
<p>This is not to say that either Al Gore or George Soros are terrorist sympathizers (the jury is out on the Daily Kos). Rather, it’s to observe that radical messages tend to attract radicals. Bin-Laden’s self-serving green activism will resonate with people pre-disposed to distrust America, and alarmists like Gore have created the environment that allows this to occur.</p>
<p>There is much obvious, and laughable, hypocrisy in bin-Laden’s sudden concern for the environment. It was his terrorist organization, after all, that leveled the twin towers, which subsequently created the most horrendous air pollution disaster in the history of New York. If he’s really concerned about the environment, this Islamic warrior might also want to consider how Mother Earth fares in his ancestral home of Saudi Arabia.</p>
<p>The following is an anecdotal story, but one suspects it’s representative of a larger truth. I worked in Saudi Arabia, on and off, between 1996 and 1998, in the Red Sea port city of Yanbu. During my time there, I had occasion to drive up the coastal highway to observe operations at the <a href="http://www.yanbucement.com/profile.html">Yanbu Cement Company</a>, located about seventy kilometers north of Yanbu. (The bin-Laden family was then rumored to have an interest in Yanbu Cement, but I can not confirm it). At the time, Yanbu Cement operated three large kilns, essentially big rotating drums in which the ingredients that go into cement “cook” at high temperature.</p>
<p>In the United States, and in most all of the western world, cement kilns have to <a href="http://ecfr.gpoaccess.gov/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=ecfr&amp;sid=6e49a0f322a1b2a5dc0579dd3386ea91&amp;rgn=div6&amp;view=text&amp;node=40:6.0.1.1.1.17&amp;idno=40">utilize pollution control devices</a> to comply with environmental standards. Without such devices, these kilns would emit truly amazing amounts of air pollution. I was therefore shocked to observe a huge, menacing, dirty brown plume that ran for miles through the air above the Red Sea. Approaching Yanbu Cement, the source of that incredible smear on the atmosphere became obvious: none of the kilns at Yanbu Cement were controlled at all. The stacks belched out filthy plumes of soot at a rate that I have never observed then or since in over twenty five years of environmental practice.</p>
<p>This kind of story can be told again and again throughout the developing and third worlds. Those nations are not nearly rigorous about protecting the environment as the west, because environmental controls cost money to install and to operate. Accordingly, if everyone followed bin-Laden’s advice and, using the power of their purses, effectively transferred manufacturing capacity to such nations, the net result would be a far more polluted world.</p>
<p>But, of course, bin-Laden doesn’t really care about the health and welfare of the planet and its inhabitants. He’s just scrambling for talking points that he hopes will resonate with listeners who hate America. Al Gore and his disciples have unwittingly provided him with more ammunition to do so. That doesn’t make Gore a terrorist, but it’s surely further evidence of the unintended consequences that are bound to occur when you abandon science for the sake of a political agenda.</p>
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		<title>Howard Zinn’s History of Hate</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/john-perazzo/howard-zinn%e2%80%99s-history-of-hate/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=howard-zinn%25e2%2580%2599s-history-of-hate</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 02 Feb 2010 05:37:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[John Perazzo]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=48434</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[For the late Marxist historian, America was always the enemy.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-48435" title="432803681_00abee5883" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/432803681_00abee5883.jpg" alt="432803681_00abee5883" width="500" height="333" /></p>
<p>Howard Zinn, who died of a heart attack last week at the age of 87, was a scholar of extraordinary influence. Indeed, few academicians did more than the late Boston University professor to poison the minds of so many young Americans with a vulgar narrative of history in which the United States was forever cast as the villain.</p>
<p>The author of more than twenty books, Zinn was best known for his 1980 publication of A People&#8217;s History of the United States. Though its first press run consisted of a mere 4,000 copies, by 2003 the book had topped a million sales over the course of multiple editions. Today the title&#8217;s aggregate sales are approaching the two-million mark. A People&#8217;s History is assigned as required reading in high schools and colleges across the United States, not only in history classes but also in such fields as economics, political science, literature, and women&#8217;s studies. As a result, its author became a household name in academic circles and emerged as one of the most sought-after speakers on the college lecture circuit. As his colleague and admirer Noam Chomsky said last week, “The happy thing about Howard was that in the last years he could gain satisfaction that his contributions were so impressive and recognized. He could hardly keep up with all the speaking invitations.” Added Chomsky, Zinn&#8217;s “historical work changed the way millions of people saw the past.”</p>
<p>On this count, Chomsky was correct. At its root, A People&#8217;s History is a Marxist tract that paints the United States as the wellspring of earthly evil– a wretched embodiment of sexism, racism, and imperialism and a scourge not only to most of its own population, but also to a vast portion of humanity around the globe.</p>
<p>Zinn&#8217;s portrayal of America, the world&#8217;s standard-bearer for capitalism, reflected his deeply held conviction that free-markets breed greed, vice, and suffering. Having long maintained that “capitalism has always been a failure for the lower classes,” Zinn in March 2009 rejoiced in saying, “[T]he American capitalist system is falling apart. And good! I&#8217;m glad it&#8217;s falling apart.” He cited capitalism as the reason “why we have 45 million people without health care,” “2 million people homeless,” and “millions and millions of people who can&#8217;t pay their rent.”</p>
<p>In A People&#8217;s History, Zinn claims to present American history through the eyes of those whom the raging tide of capitalism has engulfed in poverty and oppression: American Indians, blacks, slaves, women, and the ever-exploited “workers.” In 1995 Zinn wrote candidly about the political agenda that underlay his work:</p>
<blockquote><p>“I wanted my writing of history and my teaching of history to be a part of social struggle. I wanted to be a part of history and not just a recorder and teacher of history. So that kind of attitude towards history, history itself as a political act, has always informed my writing and my teaching.”</p></blockquote>
<p>In an interview three years later, Zinn elaborated that his goal in producing A People&#8217;s History had been neither to write an objective history nor to write a complete one:</p>
<blockquote><p>“There&#8217;s no such thing as a whole story; every story is incomplete. My idea was [that] the orthodox viewpoint has already been done a thousand times.”</p></blockquote>
<p>When confronted by critics who suggested that his book was “not an unbiased account,” Zinn shot back:</p>
<blockquote><p>“So what? If you look at history from the perspective of the slaughtered and mutilated, it’s a different story.”</p></blockquote>
<p>In keeping with that perspective, Zinn wrote America&#8217;s story as an uninterrupted narrative of depravity. Born in sin, the nation, as Zinn saw it, would forever be morally defective – at least until such time as its leaders might finally awaken to the healing splendors of Marxism.</p>
<p>In Zinn&#8217;s telling, America&#8217;s “Founding Fathers … created the most effective system of national control devised in modern times, and showed future generations of leaders the advantages of combining paternalism with command.” The Declaration of Independence, Zinn said, was not so much a revolutionary statement about the God-given rights of man and the principles of limited government that logically flowed from it, as it was a cynical effort to manipulate people into rebelling against the King of England for the sole purpose of further enriching a handful of already-wealthy “white males.” And for good measure, Zinn condemned “the English invasion of North America” as “a barbarous epoch of history” that was “ruled by competition,” and whose noteworthy hallmarks included “deception,” “brutality,” “slavery,” the “massacre of Indians,” and “conquest and murder in the name of progress” – all as a result of the “powerful drive born in civilizations based on private property.”</p>
<p>The Pilgrims who came to New England “were coming not to vacant land but to territory inhabited by tribes of Indians,” Zinn explained – portraying those natives essentially as a peaceful network of brothers who had long lived in idyllic harmony with one another, until the fateful moment when white “invaders” (as Zinn put it) first arrived on the shores of North America.</p>
<p>From Zinn&#8217;s account, one would never learn that the history of American Indians was replete with inter-tribal conflicts of great violence, or that slave-trafficking played a very significant role in a number of Indian societies. Indeed, long before the first Europeans arrived in the New World, an elaborate slave-trading network had developed among the Indians of the Northwest coast, where slaves constituted as much as 10 to 15 percent of some tribes&#8217; populations. But in Zinn&#8217;s version of history, the only slavery that mattered was the white-on-black variety. The vices of nonwhites were deemed insufficiently interesting to merit mention. The lines between good and evil were drawn with clarity and boldness. There were no shades of gray; there was only white wrongdoing on the one hand, and the radiant goodness of nonwhites on the other.</p>
<p>As Zinn saw things, America&#8217;s moral failings were not merely the stuff of yesteryear. When the professor looked at modern America&#8217;s physical and social landscape, he saw nothing worthy of redemption. Rather, he saw a nation engaged in “the poisoning of the air, the seas and rivers”; a nation beset by profound economic injustice; and a nation that spent far too much money on its weapons of war, but far too little on the teeming masses who had been dealt a most unfortunate hand by capitalism&#8217;s unpredictable caprices. All of these flaws, Zinn maintained, were the bitter fruits of the free market.</p>
<p>Where there was crime, Zinn saw “a class of criminals” who had been “bred by economic inequity.” Criminals, in Zinn&#8217;s calculus, were merely people engaged in understandable rebellion against the “fierce competition” and “the contrasts of wealth and poverty” that epitomized America&#8217;s “culture of possession.” He explained that American society, “so stratified by wealth and education,” lent itself “naturally to envy and class anger.” And of course Zinn saw racism, observing not only that “a disproportionate number of prisoners in American jails” were “poor and non white,” but also that black children were “four times as likely as white children to grow up on welfare.” All these things, Zinn reiterated, were the result of capitalist society&#8217;s failings.</p>
<p>The disgust that Zinn plainly felt for America stood in sharp contrast to his more benign view of the most notorious Communist dictatorships of the 20<sup>th</sup> century. For example, Maoist China was, in the professor&#8217;s estimation, “the closest thing, in the long history of that ancient country, to a people&#8217;s government, independent of outside control.” Castro&#8217;s Cuba, similarly, “had no bloody record of suppression,” according to Zinn. And the Marxist Sandinista dictators of Nicaragua in the 1980s were allegedly “welcomed” by the people of that country, while the opposition Contras – who were supported by the United States, and whose presidential candidate emerged victorious when a free election was held – were described by Zinn as a “terrorist group” that “seemed to have no popular support inside Nicaragua.”</p>
<p>During the Cold War, Zinn supported the Soviet Union in its rivalry against the United States. And in a pamphlet titled Terrorism and War, which he penned after 9/11, Zinn depicted America as a veritable terrorist state, while painting its jihadist enemies as freedom fighters who were bravely defending themselves against the ravages of U.S. imperialism.</p>
<p>Just as Zinn held the United States in contempt, so did he despise America&#8217;s closest ally in the Middle East, Israel. Zinn maintained, for instance, that “after the Six-Day War of 1967 and Israel&#8217;s occupation of territories seized in that war (the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, the Sinai peninsula),” he personally “began to see Israel not simply as a beleaguered little nation surrounded by hostile Arab states, but as an expansionist power.” Missing from Zinn&#8217;s narrative was any acknowledgment of the fact that Israel&#8217;s role in the war was purely one of self-defense against an impending Arab invasion, and that the territories Israel captured in the battle were acquired not as a result of aggression, but in the course of a desperate fight for survival against the Jewish state&#8217;s would-be Arab exterminators.</p>
<p>During his long career as a professor and public speaker, Howard Zinn&#8217;s hatred for Israel and America alike became dominant themes of his writing and his pedagogy. As noted, he was more than candid about his burning desire to make his teaching of history “a political act.” His ultimate objective was to influence new generations of young students into becoming revolutionaries whose hatred for the United States would impel them to work toward “a transformation of national priorities” and a comprehensive “change in the system.” “The prisoners of the system will continue to rebel,” Zinn said in hopes that someday “our grandchildren, or our great grandchildren, might possibly see a different and marvelous world.”</p>
<p>That “world” was the Marxist utopia that had led to the deaths of so many throughout history – and that one of America’s leading historians encouraged his students and readers to pursue by any means necessary.</p>
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		<title>Walter Russell Mead: The Death of Global Warming &#8211; The American Interest</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/walter-russell-mead-the-death-of-global-warming-the-american-interest/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=walter-russell-mead-the-death-of-global-warming-the-american-interest</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 01 Feb 2010 16:27:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=48409</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The global warming movement as we have known it is dead. Its health had been in steady decline during the last year as the once robust hopes for a strong and legally binding treaty to be agreed upon at the Copenhagen Summit faded away. By the time that summit opened, campaigners were reduced to hoping [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>The global warming movement as we have known it is dead.  Its health had been in steady decline during the last year as the once robust hopes for a strong and legally binding treaty to be agreed upon at the Copenhagen Summit faded away.  By the time that summit opened, campaigners were reduced to hoping for a ‘politically binding’ agreement to be agreed that would set the stage for the rapid adoption of the legally binding treaty.  After the failure of the summit to agree to even that much, the movement went into a rapid decline.</p>
<p>The movement died from two causes: bad science and bad politics.</p>
<p>After years in which global warming activists had lectured everyone about the overwhelming nature of the scientific evidence, it turned out that the most prestigious agencies in the global warming movement were breaking laws, hiding data, and making inflated, bogus claims resting on, in some cases, no scientific basis at all. This latest story in the London Times is yet another shocker; the IPCC’s claims that the rainforests were going to disappear as a result of global warming are as bogus and fraudulent as its claims that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035.  It seems as if a scare story could grab a headline, the IPCC simply didn’t care about whether it was reality-based.</p>
<p>via <a href="http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2010/02/01/the-death-of-global-warming/">The Death of Global Warming &#8211; Walter Russell Mead&#8217;s Blog &#8211; The American Interest</a>.</p>
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		<title>Pol Pot: The Communist Monster Who Turned Cambodia into a Gulag</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/john-perazzo/pol-pot-the-communist-monster-who-turned-cambodia-into-a-gulag/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=pol-pot-the-communist-monster-who-turned-cambodia-into-a-gulag</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/john-perazzo/pol-pot-the-communist-monster-who-turned-cambodia-into-a-gulag/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 26 Jan 2010 21:27:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[John Perazzo]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[DTN Profiles]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=47735</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Pol Pot was the leader of the Khmer Rouge, the Communist Party that ruled Cambodia from 1976-1979. &#8220;Khmer Rouge&#8221; (or Khmer Reds) was the French rendering of the organization&#8217;s official name: the &#8220;Communist Party of Cambodia.&#8221; Inspired by what he had witnessed during a trip to Mao Zedong&#8217;s China, Pol Pot envisioned an agrarian Communist utopia [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-large wp-image-47738" title="Pol Pot" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Pol-Pot-1024x699.jpg" alt="Pol Pot" width="403" height="275" /></p>
<p>Pol Pot was the leader of the Khmer Rouge, the Communist Party that ruled Cambodia from 1976-1979. &#8220;Khmer Rouge&#8221; (or Khmer Reds) was the French rendering of the organization&#8217;s official name: the &#8220;Communist Party of Cambodia.&#8221; Inspired by what he had witnessed during a trip to Mao Zedong&#8217;s China, Pol Pot envisioned an agrarian Communist utopia where the very lifeblood of his nation could be poured entirely into agricultural projects of the grandest scale; this vision would prove to be the inspiration for the notorious &#8220;killing fields,&#8221; where many hundreds of thousands of slave laborers perished under the most oppressive conditions imaginable. <strong><a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1998">To learn the full story of this brutal dictator, click here.</a></strong></p>
<p>pp</p>
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		<title>Massachusetts Voters Oppose ObamaCare &#8211; WSJ.com</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/massachusetts-voters-oppose-obamacare-wsj-com/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=massachusetts-voters-oppose-obamacare-wsj-com</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/massachusetts-voters-oppose-obamacare-wsj-com/#respond</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 21 Jan 2010 18:15:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=47171</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Liberals are now trying to sell the fantasy, and maybe even convince themselves, that ObamaCare isn&#8217;t among the reasons Senator-elect Scott Brown is headed to Washington. One of the only Massachusetts exit polls doesn&#8217;t corroborate the story: Rasmussen reports that 51% of voters on Tuesday were opposed and 47% in favor—41% &#8220;strongly opposed&#8221; and just [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703837004575013080421218008.html"><img src='http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/OB-FI293_romney_G_20100121085127.jpg' alt='' /></a></p>
<p>Liberals are now trying to sell the fantasy, and maybe even convince themselves, that ObamaCare isn&#8217;t among the reasons Senator-elect Scott Brown is headed to Washington. One of the only Massachusetts exit polls doesn&#8217;t corroborate the story: Rasmussen reports that 51% of voters on Tuesday were opposed and 47% in favor—41% &#8220;strongly opposed&#8221; and just 25% &#8220;strongly in favor.&#8221; Health care was the decisive factor for 56%.Perhaps that&#8217;s because Bay State residents know something the rest of the country doesn&#8217;t. In 2006, then GOP Governor Mitt Romney brought about a universal insurance plan that bears an uncanny resemblance to ObamaCare—and a meticulous new study confirms that the result has been high costs in return for minimal benefits.</p>
<p>via <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703837004575013080421218008.html">Massachusetts Voters Oppose ObamaCare &#8211; WSJ.com</a>.</p>
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		<title>The War of the Weak</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/stephenbrown/the-war-of-the-weak/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-war-of-the-weak</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/stephenbrown/the-war-of-the-weak/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 21 Jan 2010 05:02:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Stephen Brown]]></dc:creator>
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		<category><![CDATA[afghan militants]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=47093</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Despite the media’s spin, the Taliban is losing the fight in Afghanistan. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-47094" title="kabul-608" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/kabul-608.jpg" alt="kabul-608" width="486" height="260" /></p>
<p>Terrorism is the weapon of the weak. The Taliban proved that once again last Monday with its attack on the government quarter in central Kabul. The attack killed 12 people, including seven terrorists, and left 71 people wounded. One of the dead was a five-year old boy that the Taliban fatally shot.</p>
<p>The main target of the latest Taliban assault on Kabul was the central bank, located next to the presidential palace. A suicide bomber tried to enter the bank but was shot by security before he could get inside. Other terrorists seized a shopping mall, ordering all vendors to leave, before taking up positions on the top floor and shooting it out for several hours with Afghan security forces before being killed. But the Taliban showed its particular revolting talent for death and destruction a few blocks away, where another suicide bomber detonated a vehicle disguised as an ambulance in front of the Ministry of Education, setting off a whirlwind of debris.</p>
<p>The purpose of the attack, like most other terrorist operations, was to get the attention of the international media. The Taliban are very media savvy and know that by targeting the well-protected government quarters in a city hosting a lot of foreign journalists, they would achieve their goal of capturing headlines worldwide, at least for a couple of days.</p>
<p>By penetrating Kabul’s defenses and staging such spectacular assaults (this is the third Taliban attack in the capital since last October), the Taliban also hoped to appear more powerful in the eyes of the world press than they really are. As one observer wrote, “The Taliban are using terrorism as a means of communication.”</p>
<p>Some in the media did fall for the Taliban’s propaganda line. <em>The New York Times</em>, for example, headlined its story about Monday’s assault, &#8220;Kabul Attack Shows Resilience of Afghan Militants&#8221;. In reality, it was Kabul’s inhabitants who were the resilient ones. The <em>Times</em> later reported merchants returned to their booths in the shopping mall and were conducting their business the day after the attack.</p>
<p>A Canadian national newspaper, <em>The Globe And Mail</em>, mistakenly saw in the Taliban assault a weakening of the Afghan presidency, titling its report, ‘The War at Karzai’s door: Kabul strike shows a leader losing grip.”</p>
<p>But rather than a show of strength, last Monday’s suicide attack was actually a sign of Taliban weakness. After nearly ten years the Taliban have not made any headway militarily in expelling the foreign troops from Afghanistan, let alone make good on their annual promise to capture Kabul. And due to the professionalism and toughness of NATO and American soldiers, the Taliban rarely stand up to them in battle, relying instead on IEDs and suicide bombers.</p>
<p>While suffering a disproportionate number of casualties of their own, the Taliban have also inflicted only a low rate of casualties on American troops. In Afghanistan, casualties have never been as high as they were in Iraq at the Iraq war’s worst point and are only a third the rate of those of Vietnam and World War Two.</p>
<p>IEDs and Kabul-like suicide attacks will also, like in Iraq, never gain the Taliban a military victory. One military analyst calls Islamic suicide bombers “an overrated tool”, saying they are reminiscent of Japan’s kamikazes that also sought to demoralize an overpowering enemy, but also failed. Unlike the Taliban’s suicide bombers, though, the kamikazes only attacked military targets.</p>
<p>Some Western media analysts stated the Taliban on Monday were also sending “a clear message” to the Afghan people that their government can’t protect them, since it can’t even protect itself from attack.</p>
<p>However, what concerned Kabul’s inhabitants after the Taliban assault, according to a <em>New York Times</em> story yesterday, was not their future security but rather the fact that bribery may have allowed the terrorists to bypass all the security checkpoints leading to their city. Corruption, they believed, is the only explanation for how the terrorists were able to enter the city with all their military equipment. “The government has police, intelligence guards and army soldiers in all the crossroads, so how can these people get in?,” wondered one Kabul resident, quoted in the <em>Times</em> story.</p>
<p>A report released on Tuesday by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), confirms that corruption is not only the main concern among Kabul’s inhabitants, but of all Afghans countrywide. More than security or unemployment, a UNODC survey showed the bribes ordinary Afghans are forced to pay government officials, teachers, doctors and judges are their chief complaint.</p>
<p>The average bribe, according to the report, is about $160; and Afghans on average paid a bribe two out of every five times they dealt with a government employee. In all, Afghans pay an astounding $25 billion annually in bribes, a quarter of their country’s economic output. “Bribery is a crippling tax on people who are already among the poorest the world’s poorest,” said the UNODC’s executive director.</p>
<p>It is here, in the area of corruption, that an analyst for the military news publication <em>Strategy Page</em> says the “real battle” in Afghanistan is being fought. The daily struggle against “poverty, illiteracy, ignorance and corruption” is the “real war.” But this all-important side of the conflict is not being covered by a foreign media distracted by the noise of battle.</p>
<p>It is this aspect of the war, however, that will probably decide the fate of Afghanistan. Such corruption left unchecked will cause Afghans to lose all confidence in their institutions to the point where the United Nations has warned it could topple the government. It is also this corruption and grinding poverty that supplies the Taliban and drug gangs with “a steady stream” of gunmen.</p>
<p>The Obama administration should be put almost unbearable pressure on President Karzai at the upcoming Afghanistan security conference in London next week to tackle the corruption morass. An honest, efficient government is the most important factor in Afghanistan moving forward, both militarily and economically, as well as a guarantee Afghanistan will not return to the terrorist state it once was.</p>
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		<title>The Ramparts I Watched</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/sol-stern/the-ramparts-i-watched/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-ramparts-i-watched</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/sol-stern/the-ramparts-i-watched/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 20 Jan 2010 05:08:26 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Sol Stern]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=46943</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Our storied radical magazine did transform the nation—for the worse.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div>
<div style="line-height: 20px;">
<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-46947" title="ramparts" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/ramparts.jpg" alt="ramparts" width="450" height="547" /></p>
<p><strong>[This article is reprinted from <a href="http://www.city-journal.org/">City Journal</a>]</strong></p>
<p><span>I</span>n 1965, I was a Berkeley graduate student, on track to become a tenured radical. Instead, I dropped out and joined an obscure, liberal Catholic magazine called <em>Ramparts</em>, headquartered in the sleepy Bay Area suburb of Menlo Park. A little more than a year later, I wrote a story exposing the CIA’s secret penetration and financing of the National Student Association (NSA). The article helped catapult our now-radical, San Francisco–based monthly to national attention and to a catalytic role in the protest movements of the time. The mainstream press celebrated my leftist colleagues and me as heroes of American journalism. <em>Ramparts</em>’ rise to celebrity status seemed to herald a new era of the media’s speaking truth to power. The reality was far less luminous, and <em>Ramparts</em>’ legacy, which a new book celebrates, was not a positive one for the country.</p>
<p><span>I</span> still remember the phone call I received one evening in February 1967 from an old classmate at the City College of New York. He had just picked up the next day’s <em>New York Times</em> at a Manhattan newsstand and noticed a front-page picture of me and fellow <em>Ramparts</em> editors Warren Hinckle and Robert Scheer. “It’s above the fold,” my friend exulted, and then read out the headline on the accompanying article: <span>ramparts: gadfly to the establishment</span>. The photograph, taken in <em>Ramparts</em>’ San Francisco office, was captioned <span>planning the next expose</span>.</p>
<p>There would be no more <em>Ramparts</em> exposés of CIA front groups. The media heavyweights now pursued the story far more effectively than our monthly magazine could have. Tom Wicker, the <em>Times</em>’s prizewinning D.C. bureau chief, assembled a team of experienced reporters to follow the money trail from the CIA-connected foundations named in my <em>Ramparts</em> article. The <em>Washington Post</em> jumped in with its own reporting team. Turning up new connections almost every day, the newspapers described how legitimate tax-exempt foundations laundered millions of dollars from the CIA and passed the funds to an agency-designated list of civic and cultural groups, labor unions, magazines, and book publishers.</p>
<p>It soon became clear that the CIA/NSA relationship was just one thread in an elaborate web of citizen front groups secretly supported, and sometimes even created, by the spy agency in the early days of the Cold War. Other beneficiaries of CIA largesse were highbrow magazines like <em>The New Leader</em> and <em>Encounter</em>; the international operations arm of the American Federation of Labor; and the American and European sections of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the anti-Communist organization founded in 1949 by public intellectuals such as Arthur Koestler, Sidney Hook, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. The top-secret project had been approved at the highest levels of the U.S. government.</p>
<p>Until the <em>Ramparts</em> story broke, the government could count on the mandarins of Washington journalism to protect national-security secrets. But as details of the front groups spilled out, editorials in the <em>Times</em> and the <em>Post</em> skewered the secret funding arrangement and compared it with the methods used by America’s Cold War enemies. CBS News broadcast a program narrated by Mike Wallace, “In the Pay of the CIA: An American Dilemma,” which described the maze of CIA-connected foundations and civic groups that had received agency money. Wallace interviewed apologetic American liberals who had been active in the funded organizations, including feminist stalwart Gloria Steinem and socialist leader Norman Thomas. According to one CIA operative, the <em>Ramparts</em> scoop led to “the biggest security leak of the Cold War.”</p>
<p><em><span>R</span>amparts</em> won a prestigious George Polk Award in Journalism that year, and newsstand sales shot up to more than 200,000 per issue, unheard-of circulation for a leftist publication. Paid advertising picked up, and so did the number of wealthy liberals eager to invest in our exotic venture. For <em>Ramparts</em>, the mission continued to be part journalism, part radical activism. Student rebellions and antiwar protests were sweeping campuses, and the Black Panthers were stirring up inner-city ghettos. <em>Ramparts</em> reported on and advocated for these outbreaks with a flair for publicity that we leftists would otherwise have denounced as a malignancy of consumer capitalism.</p>
<p>The magazine’s resident marketing genius was our flamboyant editor in chief, Warren Hinckle. Still in his twenties, Hinckle was a third-generation San Franciscan with working-class roots, a former city reporter for the <em>San Francisco Chronicle</em>, and the only <em>Ramparts</em> editor with traditional journalism training. He wore a black eye patch (the result of a childhood injury), expensively tailored three-piece suits, and patent-leather dancing pumps. He looked like a dandy, yet hung out with cops in the city’s Irish bars.</p>
<p>When we had learned from our source inside the NSA that the student group was about to preempt our story by announcing that it had severed the CIA relationship, it was Hinckle who came up with a brilliant maneuver to save our scoop. The full article, scheduled for the March 1967 issue, was tied up in the monthly production cycle. So Hinckle purchased a full-page ad in the <em>New York Times</em> that detailed most of the exposé. His counterstroke caught NSA and CIA officials off guard, as reporters for the <em>Times</em> and other papers began calling with questions about the secret funding.</p>
<p><span>L</span>ater that year, some of us were sitting around Hinckle’s office, discussing how to dramatize the story of the young protesters burning their draft cards at antiwar rallies. I proposed that we burn our own draft cards in solidarity. Hinckle agreed and then put his P. T. Barnum gloss on the idea. He collected the draft cards of the four editors listed at the top of the magazine’s masthead—Hinckle, Scheer, myself, and art director Dugald Stermer—and shipped them off to Carl Fischer, one of New York’s leading photographers. Fischer hired professional models and shot a studio photo of four raised hands holding our burning draft cards, with our names clearly visible. The image became the cover—no text—of the December 1967 issue. Hinckle then ran the photo as an ad on the sides of New York City buses.</p>
<p>I don’t know if burning our draft cards advanced the antiwar cause, but it surely added to <em>Ramparts</em>’ media luster. <em>Time</em> blasted our “publicity stunt,” giving us lots more free publicity. Then the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York apparently concluded that we had violated the Selective Service Act. His inclination to pursue the matter in court was doubtless reinforced after FBI agents visited our photographer’s studio and were told that our partly burned cards had been conveniently preserved in a drawer.</p>
<p>The four of us soon had invitations to appear at a federal grand jury convened at the Foley Square courthouse in lower Manhattan. The government paid our round-trip airfare from San Francisco. On the way, we stopped in Washington to hire Edward Bennett Williams, a celebrity defense lawyer and D.C. power broker. In New York, we checked into the stylish Algonquin Hotel for a few fun-filled days in Gotham. The Algonquin was virtually our second headquarters; we stayed there whenever we were in town, no doubt because Hinckle liked the association with the legendary <em>New Yorker</em> writers of the Algonquin Round Table of the 1920s and 1930s.</p>
<p>Even before our grand-jury date, <em>Ramparts</em> received yet another publicity boost from the <em>New York Times</em>. The paper’s legal reporter, Sidney Zion, was friendly with several <em>Ramparts</em> editors, so we gave him the scoop on the government’s draft-card investigation. His story ran on the <em>Times</em>’s front page and quoted legal scholars speculating that prosecution of the <em>Ramparts</em> editors would be a landmark free-press case. After the <em>Times</em> made us look like incipient First Amendment heroes, we appeared before the grand jury, took the Fifth Amendment on advice of counsel, and flew back to San Francisco. We never heard from the government again.</p>
<p><span>B</span>ut the press attention and the surging circulation couldn’t save <em>Ramparts</em> from a fall from grace—and it wasn’t government repression that brought us down (though CIA snoops did penetrate our office) but our own folly. The changing media climate could certainly have sustained a fiscally responsible mass-circulation New Left publication. But responsibility and restraint were alien words in the <em>Ramparts</em> offices. There were too many Algonquin Hotel junkets, flights around the world chasing stories that never panned out, and three-hour, booze-filled lunches at the priciest restaurants in our San Francisco neighborhood. Anyone who came to <em>Ramparts</em> with an “inside-the-establishment” exposé—like the Green Beret from Vietnam who wrote about why he had quit, or the ex–FBI agent who promised to prove that the CIA was behind President Kennedy’s assassination—not only wrote for the magazine but became a permanent staffer, adding to <em>Ramparts</em>’ ever-swelling payroll.</p>
<p><em>Ramparts</em>’ final binge came in August 1968. Throughout that politically tumultuous year, we had sought to cover the street protests and the antiwar insurgencies roiling the Democratic Party. Now, with <em>Ramparts</em> running on fumes and the great American credit card, Hinckle decided that we had to be in Chicago to do a special issue on the Democratic National Convention. After all the ferment that <em>Ramparts</em> helped stir up, it seemed inconceivable that we would miss the ruling party’s <em>Götterdämmerung</em>. Hinckle not only sent at least ten <em>Ramparts</em> writers, editors, and photographers to the Windy City; he also invited a cadre of our media friends to join the festivities, including Zion, future Pulitzer Prize winner Sydney Schanberg, and an about-to-be-famous writer named Hunter Thompson.</p>
<p>Our close ties to the radical antiwar movement led us to believe that we would have an insider’s perspective on the street combat. But we spent little time on the streets. Instead, we took a dozen rooms at the luxurious Ambassador East Hotel on the Gold Coast and often took our meals at the hotel’s Pump Room, where a huge black man, dressed in the full regalia (including scimitar) of a palace guard for an Ottoman sultan, greeted guests. Not surprisingly, our radical friends out on the streets expressed outrage at our flagrantly decadent quarters. After a week of bloody riots, Hinckle moved the entire operation to the Algonquin in New York—our home away from home—to write the Chicago story.</p>
<p>The project was doomed from the start. Even if <em>Ramparts</em> had been financially solvent, our monthly magazine had little chance of adding any insight to one of the decade’s most thoroughly covered events. Moreover, many mainstream reporters, now feeling liberated by the CIA revelations and their own newspapers’ increasingly critical coverage of the Vietnam War, were as sympathetic to the protesters as we were. And for political reasons, <em>Ramparts</em> was unwilling to publish the one story we <em>did</em> have exclusively: how Tom Hayden and a small group of radicals had set up shop in Chicago four months earlier to plan a massive violent confrontation with the “war machine,” otherwise known as the Chicago Police Department. When our 20,000-word convention spread came out at the end of September, it was stale news. By then, the creditors were pounding on <em>Ramparts</em>’ doors, and our financial backers were asking pointed questions about how their money had disappeared down the drain at places like the Pump Room.</p>
<p><span>I</span> never understood why Hinckle was so reckless with the magazine’s future. What I do know is that the miracle of the capitalist system’s bankruptcy laws insulated the editors from the consequences of that recklessness. Hinckle went off with Zion to start another muckraking magazine called <em>Scanlans</em>. The new monthly raised $1 million and published nine issues. The remaining <em>Ramparts</em> editors filed for protection and reorganization under Chapter 11. The court-ordered financial oversight allowed the magazine to continue publishing. But <em>Ramparts</em> soon found itself beset by internal strife—a common occurrence in the radical movements of the time. Scheer briefly became the new chief editor, but was ousted in a coup orchestrated by David Horowitz, Peter Collier, and other staffers, many of them former Berkeley graduate students whom Scheer himself had recruited.</p>
<p>I wasn’t around for the bloodletting. After the convention fiasco, <em>Ramparts</em> began to feel like a straitjacket, and I decided to try my hand at freelancing. I hadn’t yet broken with the Left, but it disturbed me that <em>Ramparts</em> would stretch or deny the truth to sell our counternarrative about America and the world. After all, we were keeping secrets for Tom Hayden as loyally as the mainstream-media barons had once kept them for the CIA. I winced when Scheer made a deal with the Cuban government for the rights to Che Guevara’s diaries that required us to publish a Fidel Castro rant, filled with Communist propaganda and denunciations of American “barbarism.” Other rosy articles we ran about the true socialism supposedly emerging in Castro’s Cuba also appalled me. Weren’t we supposed to be the <em>New</em> Left, as opposed to Communist tyranny as we were to U.S. imperialism?</p>
<p>I also felt partly responsible for creating the myth of the Black Panthers as righteous rebels fighting off brutal police oppression. In 1967, I wrote a hagiographic profile for <em>Ramparts</em> of Huey Newton, the Panthers’ “minister of defense,” and then published basically the same article in the <em>New York Times Magazine</em>—yet another indication of the changes in the mainstream media. It soon become clear to anyone who cared to look, however, that Newton and the Panthers were clever street thugs who used revolutionary slogans to avoid accountability for their crimes. As one of the New Left’s favorite black criminals, Soledad Prison inmate George Jackson, once put it, “Marxism is my hustle.” After my Newton article, <em>Ramparts</em> ran three more celebratory cover stories on Panther leaders—Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale, and (again) Newton.</p>
<p>When I learned that Horowitz and Collier had taken the <em>Ramparts</em> helm, I assumed that the magazine would become more intellectually serious, if somewhat duller. Unfortunately, Horowitz and Collier drank the Kool-Aid served by the Left’s most destructive elements. They published Hayden’s drivel calling the Black Panthers America’s “internal Viet Cong,” along with his exhortation for radical white youth to create “liberated zones” in cities and on campuses to serve as sanctuaries for their heroic Panther allies. <em>Ramparts</em>’ new editors then topped this foolishness with their own, proclaiming Hayden “one of the country’s most serious revolutionaries.” To me, the lasting image of <em>Ramparts</em>’ second incarnation was a cover depicting a burning Bank of America branch in Southern California. The radical students who firebombed it, said the accompanying text, “may have done more for saving the environment than all the teach-ins put together.”</p>
<p><span>I</span> was living and reporting in Israel in 1975 when I learned that <em>Ramparts</em> had finally closed its doors. I breathed a sigh of relief. By then, I no longer considered myself a leftist—in no small measure because of the Left’s growing hostility to Israel. In the early 1980s, Horowitz and Collier also had their much-publicized <em>Second Thoughts</em>, as they titled their book, and became prominent movement conservatives. In his powerful 1997 memoir, <em>Radical Son</em>, Horowitz devoted several chapters to his years at <em>Ramparts</em>. With brutal honesty, he explored the catastrophic consequences for the possibility of a decent Left that resulted from <em>Ramparts</em>’ misalliance with the Panthers and Hayden.</p>
<p>The more romantic assessment of <em>Ramparts</em>—that its spectacular rise in the 1960s represented a great leap forward for American democracy—runs through a new book by California writer and historian Peter Richardson. <em>A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of <em>Ramparts</em> Magazine Changed America</em> has stirred renewed interest in the magazine’s legacy, particularly in California, and has been reviewed favorably (twice) in the <em>New York Times</em>. To publicize the book, the author organized several public forums featuring Hinckle, Scheer, and other <em>Ramparts</em> alumni.</p>
<p>Collier, Horowitz, and I weren’t part of the conversation. Too bad, since we might have forced a reality check on the celebrations. At one recent session on the Berkeley campus, Scheer (who became the resident leftist columnist for the <em>Los Angeles Times</em> after leaving <em>Ramparts</em>) assured the audience that <em>Ramparts</em> not only smashed retrograde national taboos but “had very high standards. No question we were putting out as good a journal as anyone in the country. . . . We were edited by professionals, it had to be well written, fact-checked. And the fact is that we did not screw up. I can’t think of a major error.”</p>
<p>Richardson nodded approvingly as Scheer spoke. Yet as I watched the forum online, I wondered what he was really thinking. I knew Richardson only through a long telephone interview he did with me in March 2008. My impression then was that he was a California “progressive” and that his book would reflect the judgments of the vast majority of the magazine’s former staffers who remained on the left. Nevertheless, I shared everything I could remember with Richardson, gave him my view of <em>Ramparts</em>’ legacy, and hoped for the best.</p>
<p>When I read his book a few months ago, I was pleasantly surprised. Richardson gets most of the facts right about the major developments in the magazine’s 13-year history. He quotes at length my comments on the Chicago convention fiasco, which stand in the book without refutation. Perhaps unwittingly, Richardson also provides sufficient material to make a mockery of Scheer’s claims of rigorous fact-checking and no major errors. Readers can learn from the book, for example, that Hinckle indulged every crackpot conspiracy theorist on the JFK assassination. Early in 1967, <em>Ramparts</em> published staff member David Welsh’s claim that there were three assassins in Dallas in 1963. Our resident ex–FBI agent, Bill Turner, then wrote two articles supporting New Orleans DA Jim Garrison’s theory that Lee Harvey Oswald was a CIA agent controlled by conspirators deep within the U.S. government. “Very high standards,” indeed.</p>
<p><span>B</span>ut more important than <em>Ramparts</em>’ accuracy or lack of it is the historical claim in Richardson’s subtitle—that <em>Ramparts</em> “changed America.” Richardson argues that it was Scheer’s arrival at <em>Ramparts</em> in 1965 that “would change the magazine’s trajectory and the nation’s.” But when Richardson tries to specify what national changes Scheer and <em>Ramparts</em> actually stood for, the best he can offer is that for Scheer, “the main point of <em>Ramparts</em> was to apply what he had learned at City College about the American system, including the first amendment, limited government and checks and balances. . . . As for foreign policy Scheer’s main point was that other countries, including Cuba and Vietnam, should be allowed to make their own histories without interference from the United States.”</p>
<p>This is either naive or deliberately misleading. I speak with some expertise here, since Scheer and I were friends at City College in the late 1950s. We worked together in campus political groups in what was, for us, a prelude to the next decade’s New Left. We also took the same classes in the college’s government department, which did teach us about the Republic’s founding principles of checks and balances and limited government. But the passions that moved us were not those that moved the Founders. We were not liberals. We were socialists and anti-imperialists—though we distinguished our brand of socialism from that of the pro-Stalinist Left, which was still well represented at City College.</p>
<p>In 1962, Scheer and I reunited as Berkeley graduate students and, together with David Horowitz, started one of the first campus New Left journals, <em>Root and Branch</em>. Our signature issue was support for the Cuban Revolution, but it wasn’t because we thought Cubans “should be allowed to make their own history.” Rather, we believed that the revolution was a great leap forward for the socialist cause. We followed the lead of one of our intellectual heroes, Columbia University sociologist C. Wright Mills, in arguing that Fidel Castro was a new breed of revolutionary leader—more humanist, more open, even more hip than old-style bureaucratic Communists. In fact, we imagined Fidel and Che as fellow New Leftists.</p>
<p>Long before American liberals took up the cause, Scheer argued eloquently in <em>Ramparts</em> for getting out of Vietnam. I suppose you might say that such a withdrawal would have let the Vietnamese people “make their own history.” But the real reason that <em>Ramparts</em> was for total withdrawal of American troops was that we wanted the Communists to win and were sure that they would. In the view of most of the editors, the Communists were Vietnam’s rightful rulers. One of the most effective <em>Ramparts</em> covers was an illustration of Ho Chi Minh as George Washington crossing the Delaware.</p>
<p><span>T</span>he magazine’s liberal Catholic founder, Edward Keating, had chosen the name “<em>Ramparts</em>” in 1962 because it evoked the national anthem’s patriotic themes. Just so, Richardson argues, “<em>Ramparts</em> in its heyday was centrally concerned with American ideals—and especially the nation’s collective failure to live up to them.” I wish that were true. But like so much else about <em>Ramparts</em>, this claim is posthumous spin. Instead of urging Americans to take pride in the founding ideals of the Republic, <em>Ramparts</em>’ editors and writers were preoccupied with attacking America’s liberal institutions.</p>
<p>Above all, we hated the “Cold War liberals”—at times, even more than we did the political Right. Under assault from <em>Ramparts</em> and the rest of the youthful New Left, these liberals lost their nerve. The CIA revelations and the Vietnam debacle left them chagrined and repentant. Soon, many lost faith that American power could ever be used for good. That liberal failure of nerve has been harmful to the country. Worse, it rests on a faulty reading of history. Contrary to the <em>Ramparts</em> line, Cold War liberalism deserves credit for the greatest American achievement since World War II—winning the Cold War.</p>
<p>Philip Graham’s oft-quoted observation that journalism is the first draft of history applies with particular emphasis to the story of the CIA front groups. In the second draft of the story, historians plumbing the archives are learning that the American government’s secret decision to mobilize and fund anti-Communist groups was an indispensable part of the Truman administration’s policy of “containment” against the Soviet threat. George F. Kennan, the foreign-service officer who famously authored the policy, assigned to the CIA-funded groups the most crucial role in the strategy.</p>
<p>To understand why Kennan (with President Truman’s support) initiated the secret CIA program, recall that in 1949, Communist regimes, most of them closely allied with Moscow, ruled a third of the world’s people. The Soviets could count on a vast network of its own front groups, well organized from Moscow and already hard at work trying to undermine the fragile postwar democracies of Western Europe. The theory of containment assumed that America would block any Soviet military encroachments while carrying on the anti-Communist struggle in the political, economic, and cultural spheres. If the U.S. succeeded, we could defeat Soviet Communism without risking nuclear confrontation.</p>
<p>And that’s exactly what happened. One can argue about the ethics of the secrecy used to carry out the operation, but not about the results. It’s not a stretch to say that the full success of the containment policy, with its front-group component, was symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall two decades ago.</p>
<p><span>B</span>ut this wasn’t yet clear in 1967. In an early iteration of the moral-equivalency syndrome that many liberals today still embrace, <em>Ramparts</em> could pitch the CIA/NSA story as a morality tale exposing the perfidy of Cold War liberals. The CIA was no better than the KGB. They spy, we spy. They manipulate their students and intellectuals for national advantage, and we do, too. Logically, then, it’s the Cold War itself that’s the threat to American values, not our Cold War enemies.</p>
<p>The updated version of that syndrome maintains that the War on Terror, not the Islamist movement that seeks to bring down our civilization, is the greatest threat to our values. So I concede that Richardson is right in saying that <em>Ramparts</em> changed America, particularly the nation’s political and media culture. But the influence was mostly baleful. The liberal failure of nerve that <em>Ramparts</em> helped engender lives on, hampering the country at a time when our leaders must consider courageous policies, including the possible use of force, to prevent catastrophic threats to our nation and the West in far-off places like Iran.</p>
<p><em>Sol Stern is a contributing editor of </em>City Journal<em>, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and the author of </em>Breaking Free: Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice.</div>
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		<title>At Last, Some Decent Israeli Films</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/david-solway/at-last-some-decent-israeli-films/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=at-last-some-decent-israeli-films</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 19 Jan 2010 05:08:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Solway]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Film-makers emerge who don't care to please the anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish crowd.]]></description>
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<p>The Israeli film industry as a whole leaves little to the imagination and much to disappoint. It is dominated by political ideologues of a distinctly leftist slant who tend to see their country through the eyes of its enemies, favoring the Palestinian narrative, claiming to understand the policies and grievances of the surrounding Muslim nations, relentlessly critical of the army, the settlers and the so-called religious Right, and basking parasitically in the approval of the liberal elites who give out the international prizes and citations.</p>
<p>An excellent example of such opportunistic practices is provided by Ran Edelist who directed a documentary entitled <em><a href="http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1P1-135983867.html">Ruach Shaked</a></em> about an Israeli reconnaissance unit operating in the Sinai during the Six Day War. The film claims that the unit had killed 250 Egyptian prisoners of war, a revelation which caused a media firestorm and led to members of the Egyptian parliament calling for the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador and the suspension of diplomatic relations with Israel. Edelist has admitted that errors were made with regard to voice-over commentary and wrongly juxtaposed archival footage—in point of fact, the enemy casualties were actually <a href="http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Terrorism/Fedayeen.html">fedayeen</a> trying to infiltrate into Israel and no POWs were executed. Such films, however, are pre-screened and it is hard to believe that such obtrusive blunders were overlooked, yet Edelist and Ittay Landsburg Nevo, head of the left-leaning Israel Broadcasting Authority, defended the production whose pejorative effect on the political scene could have been predicted with even the most rudimentary foresight.</p>
<p>Similarly, Israel’s cable TV Channel 8 and the Jerusalem Cinematheque have been willing to fund anti-Zionist filmmaker <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyal_Sivan">Eyal Sivan</a>, a typical self-abnegating Jew who managed to avoid his military service, was a speaker at “Israeli Apartheid Week” in London in 2007, and signed a public document condemning “the brutality and cruelty of Israeli policy” during the summer 2006 war with Hizbullah. Israel’s Channel 2’s Keshet franchise has frequently aired the docudramas of <a href="http://www.jewish-theatre.com/visitor/article_display.aspx?articleID=869">Motti Lerner</a>, who plays fast and loose with the historical truth and believes, according to a paper he delivered at Brandeis University, that Israeli society is diseased, suffering from an “inability…to empathize with the Palestinians.” Along the same lines, Shimon Dotan’s documentary, <em><a href="http://www.altfg.com/blog/film-reviews/hot-house-shimon-dotan/">Hot House</a></em>, funded chiefly by Israel’s New Foundation for Film and Television, sympathetically profiles female terrorist Ahlam Tamini who murdered fifteen people, eight of them children, in the bombing of the Sbarro pizzeria on August 9, 2001. Yet, speaking for the Palestinians, Dotan comments: “We owe them empathy.”</p>
<p>Then we have Ari Folman’s recent <em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waltz_with_Bashir">Waltz with Bashir</a></em>, the recipient of many awards and critical accolades. Although an improvement over the general run of Israeli-bashing films, it nevertheless magnifies the strength and firepower of the enemy while appearing to stress the comparative weakness and fear of the IDF. Its effect is to demoralize. Israeli soldiers are portrayed as a cohort of flakes, freaks, wimps and anxiety-ridden semi-losers who have trouble reconciling the importance of their mission with the courage and resolution required of them—indeed, the central character is so traumatized he <em>cannot even remember</em> the operation and travels about interviewing his former comrades to fill in the yawning blank. And the entire context of the march into Lebanon, the reason it was deemed necessary by the Israeli high command, the years of indiscriminate shelling, incursions and kidnappings suffered by Israelis in the north of the country, is conveniently forgotten not only by the protagonist but by the director as well.</p>
<p>Israeli cineaste Hannah Brown, puffing what she calls Israel’s <a href="http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1261364558313&amp;pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull">smash hit</a> decade, revels in the acclaim flowing from the politically correct international festivals and derides individuals skeptical of this trend as right-wing “party poopers.” Regrettably, this doesn’t change the fact that “most directors are on the Left,” as she graciously allows, and that their partisan colors show through their productions. Any film by the widely celebrated, tediously pedantic and unfailingly depressing left-winger <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amos_Gitai">Amos Gitai</a> renders this obvious. As <a href="http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&amp;cid=1261364476523">Seth Frantzman points out</a>, Israeli directors tend to make films about a Jewish woman falling for a Palestinian suicide bomber (Dror Zahavi’s <a href="http://www.qantara.de/webcom/show_article.php/_c-310/_nr-617/i.html"><em>For My Father</em></a>) or a Jewish woman falling in love with an Arab who murders her brother (Keren Yedaya’s <em><a href="http://cineuropa.org/trailer.aspx?lang=en&amp;documentID=108740">Jaffa</a></em>). What is the message of such films? Frantzman asks, and replies: “That Israelis should ‘love the other’ to the extent that they love murderers.” That seems to be about right.</p>
<p>Fortunately, there are some notable film-makers who are more concerned with telling the truth than with making a reputation for themselves by catering to the anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish crowd. Eran Kolirin’s <em><a href="http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/bands_visit/">The Band’s Visit</a></em> is a fine companion piece to Eytan Fox’s <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walk_on_Water_%28film%29"><em>Walk on Water</em></a> and Gidi Dar’s <em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ushpizin">Ushpizin</a></em>,<em> </em>all superbly directed films with fascinating characters, a non-ideological theme and a credible story about evolving relationships that bring people closer together rather than set them apart in resentment and intransigence. These are beautifully composed and warm-hearted movies that affirm Israeli life, for all  its warts, avoiding both sentimentality and the lurid, selective episoding of the mainstream <em>mishpoca</em>.</p>
<p>Now comes a new film that joins the Reform Cinemagogue of refreshing, untendentious and largely non-sectarian productions, altering the jaundiced tone and acerbic flavor of their majoritarian predecessors. <em><a href="http://www.film.com/movies/lemon-tree/19012819">The Lemon Tree</a></em>, directed by Eran Riklis, already famed for <a href="http://www.fest21.com/en/blog/sharonabella/interview_with_film_director_eran_riklis"><em>The Syrian Bride</em></a>, is a sensitive, bittersweet look at the Israeli/Palestinian imbroglio which tries to be reasonably fair to both sides in the conflict. The story turns upon the status of a lemon grove owned by Salma Zidane, a Palestinian widow whose family has tended the lemon trees for generations. Her peace and modest prosperity is shattered when the just-appointed Israeli Defense Minister, Israel Navon, and his wife Mira move into their new home on the Green Line, which abuts directly on the widow’s property.</p>
<p>The issue is security, for the lemon grove furnishes perfect cover for Palestinian terrorists who might be planning to attack the minister’s home. At the same time, the widow’s livelihood is equally at stake. The minister oversees the construction of a fence between the two properties, preventing the widow from tending to her trees, which begin to wither from lack of water. He then orders the lemon grove razed—a scenario based on a similar, real-life situation involving former Israeli Defense Minister <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaul_Mofaz">Shaul Mofaz</a>. The emblem, of course, is unmistakable. The clash between the widow and the minister, between two homes, two narratives and two necessities, is obviously Riklis’ allegory of the Israeli/Palestinian standoff and of the “wall,” both physical and psychological, which divides them.</p>
<p>Plainly, the Israelis are not given a free pass. The minister is self-righteous, loud and aggressive, relishing his recent appointment, enjoying the perquisites of authority, and deaf to the legitimate needs of his Palestinian neighbor. The soldier who guards the Minister’s home is a good-natured idiot, who reflects rather poorly on the IDF. The Israeli military lawyer is a bully. To Riklis’ credit, however, the Palestinians are not depicted as romantic innocents who can do no wrong, or as the world’s chosen <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar_%282009_film%29">Na’vi</a> struggling to regain their illusory Pandora. We are afforded a glimpse behind the politically-generated image. The widow has a brief affair with the young lawyer she has hired to represent her as her case moves through the Israeli justice system. For this breach of “honor” she is threatened by the local clan chieftain with certain unspecified but clearly menacing consequences. This is still a primitive and misogynous society, as we are meant to see, caged in tribal preconceptions. The lawyer is a sympathetic figure but eventually succumbs to the allure of PR glory for having won a partial legal victory—the fence will remain but only half the orchard will be cut down—exchanging his disheveled attire for a shiny new suit, his unprepossessing office for an upscale address, a commitment for a career, and his unpretentious self for the heroic persona of defender of “the people.” He is on the make, like most of the Palestinian nomenklatura.</p>
<p>The film’s intentions are noble but, if it has a weakness, it concerns precisely the controversial nature of the fence, or “wall,” which, in the political and military framework of the hostility between two peoples, is the direct result of the Palestinian intifadas. The Minister may be a rather disagreeable figure, obstreperous and peremptory, but he surely does not deserve his wife’s growing estrangement over the raising of the fence and her decision to leave the marriage. The fence is meant to protect her too, despite her vicarious identification with the beleaguered widow. More importantly, the fence that Navon has ordered built, aka the “separation barrier” condemned by much of the world, and the partial lopping of the orchard, are not the product of personal caprice or of a policy of invasive sequestration. It is Salma’s own people who have made it inevitable, indeed who may be said to have built the fence on their own initiative by unleashing a campaign of terror against Israeli civilians.</p>
<p><em>The Lemon Tree</em> skirts the central issues of Israeli security and Palestinian responsibility, and in this way partly conforms to the “progressivist” and post-Zionist bias that actuates much of the Israeli intelligentsia, the media and the so-called “peace” faction. It does not in this regard bear adequate witness to the true situation that prevails in the country. The fact that it was co-written by Israeli-Arab <a href="http://www.a2palestinefilmfest.org/filmmakers.html">Suha Arraf</a>, a former journalist for the left-leaning <em>Haaretz</em> newspaper, might explain this partial skewering of reality. And yet it must be admitted that <em>The Lemon Tree</em> distinguishes itself from the general run of Israeli anti-Israeli films and “documentaries,” treating its characters in the round, introducing an element of human tenderness, leveling criticism on both parties to the conflict—a welcome departure from the norm—and thus constructing at least a theoretical fence between itself and the majority of one-sided cinematic lemons that have it in for Israel.</p>
<p><strong>[Editor&#8217;s note: To order a copy of David Solway&#8217;s new book <em>Hear, O Israel!</em>, <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Hear-O-Israel-David-Solway/dp/0973406534/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1256122893&amp;sr=1-1"><em>click here</em>.</a></em>]</strong></p>
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