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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Sydney</title>
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		<title>Has the West Lost the Will to Live?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/mark-tapson/has-the-west-lost-the-will-to-live/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=has-the-west-lost-the-will-to-live</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/mark-tapson/has-the-west-lost-the-will-to-live/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 18 Dec 2014 05:38:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Tapson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Australia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hostage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jihad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Lindt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Sydney]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Terrorism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247687</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Is returning to business-as-usual after terrorist attacks a sign of strength or giving up?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/sydney-hostage-crisis-in-photos-05.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247688" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/sydney-hostage-crisis-in-photos-05-450x337.jpg" alt="CAFE SIEGE SITUATION" width="300" height="225" /></a>When it became too obvious to deny that the hostage crisis in Sydney, Australia was an act of Islamic terrorism, Prime Minister Tony Abbott asked Aussie citizens for calm, <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/12/15/hostage-situation-reportedly-unfolding-in-sydney-chocolate-shop/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">saying</span></a>, “The whole point of politically motivated violence is to scare people out of being themselves. Australia is a peaceful, open and generous society – nothing should ever change that. And that’s why I would urge all Australians today to go about their business as usual.” That’s what a politician is expected to say. But what he should have said is that the time for business-as-usual is over.</p>
<p>Recently my friend Doris Wise Montrose – founder of <a href="http://cjhsla.org/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors</span></a> and its related site for self-defense instruction, <a href="http://cjhsla.org/jewscanshoot/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Jews Can Shoot</span></a> – brought to my attention something she found disconcerting. It was a Facebook post by a very popular Israeli news blogger, a brief update on the <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/video-cctv-footage-released-of-stabbing-in-israeli-supermarket-9905059.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">knife attack</span></a> perpetrated by a young Arab on shoppers in a Jerusalem supermarket. This update was accompanied by mention of the blogger’s own mundane shopping trip to a different supermarket, and a photo of the contents of his cart.</p>
<p>Doris commented to him that connecting the two experiences in the same breath, in the same tone, seemed oddly cavalier. The blogger replied that it was simply an acknowledgement that this is the way of life in Israel – her citizens refuse to be cowed; they proudly carry on even with terrorism in their midst. Business as usual.</p>
<p>Last month novelist Jack Engelhard, who writes a weekly column for Israel’s <i>Arutz Sheva</i>, wrote an <a href="http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/16006#.VIAUezHF-Sr"><span style="color: #0433ff;">op-ed</span></a> questioning precisely this attitude of proudly taking terrorism in stride. He noted that in the wake of four rabbis being hacked to death in a Jerusalem synagogue, for example, Israeli life went on as before. Engelhard wrote: “Hurray for Jewish bravado,” but</p>
<blockquote><p>are Israelis getting too used to this? Is this a case of Israelis proving that nothing can stop them, or is this a case of Israelis accepting their fate as sheep doomed to be slaughtered? When will it end… how can it end… when no matter what happens ‘everything is back to normal’?</p></blockquote>
<p>You often hear the cliché that if we let the terrorists change our way of life, change who we are, then they win. But they <i>have</i> changed our way of life and who we are as a culture. Look at what has become of air travel in the wake of 9/11 and the bungling Shoe Bomber: passengers shuffling along like cattle in long security lines, removing our shoes and laptops, submitting to invasive scans by the useless TSA, etc. This is but one example of our “new normal,” and as incidents like the Boston Marathon bombing and the Jerusalem synagogue butchering and the Sydney hostage-taking become more and more common, they too will become our new normal.</p>
<p>The jihadists need not carry out another 9/11 or a nuclear strike in order to ultimately prevail. Terrorism is a war of attrition, a strategy of <a href="http://foreignpolicy.com/2010/11/23/death-by-a-thousand-cuts-2/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">death by a thousand cuts</span></a>. That means we live with the subtle but ever-present expectation that a so-called “lone wolf” like the Sydney gunman, or a suicide bomber, or a well-trained team of merciless slaughterers like the Mumbai or Nairobi terrorists could strike anywhere at any time: a mall, a café, a market, a school, a synagogue, a subway, anywhere.</p>
<p>For the victims of terrorism life doesn’t go on at all, and it is forever altered for the surviving family members and friends. The rest of us live with the knowledge that next time, it could be us or our loved ones. The psychic attrition is incalculable, and it sits in our consciousness like a cancer no matter how much we tell each other that we must not live in fear.</p>
<p>In an <a href="http://blogs.forward.com/jj-goldberg/197232/holocaust-lesson-dont-just-mourn-fight-back/#ixzz3L6nz9euR"><span style="color: #0433ff;">address</span></a> to the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust earlier this year, J.J. Goldberg of the <i>Jewish Daily Forward</i> praised those Jews during the Holocaust who “fought back by surviving another day in the face of the inhuman killing machine, and then another day and another. They fought back by maintaining their humanity and dignity in the face of utter depravity.”</p>
<p>But that is not fighting back; it certainly is not victory. It’s simply a dignified surrender. To accept living under the cloud of terrorism while declaring stubbornly that it won’t change us is a terrible self-delusion. It is a fatal misconception to believe that simply denying terrorists the satisfaction of terrorizing us is any kind of a victory at all. Our humanity and dignity mean nothing if depravity wins, if our civilization succumbs to a hungrier, more ruthless one, if the world enters a Dark Age under a totalitarian theocracy. The only victory worth having will come when we bring the terrorism to an <i>end</i>.</p>
<p>The West is in decline for a number of reasons, one of which is its cultural capitulation in the face of an ascendant Islamic fundamentalism. It is as if we, or at least our leaders and elites, have lost the cultural will to live. We need to get in touch with a sort of cultural rage, a fierce determination to crush threats to our culture, our values, and our liberty. We need to demonstrate that our tolerance has reached an end, that there will be no more coexistence with an ideology openly dedicated to our destruction. “Never mind <i>normal</i>,” as Jack Engelhard put it. To paraphrase his wish for Israel, for once let our blood “be exceptional and cause for nausea and trembling” among our enemies. Show the jihadists that there will be no more business-as-usual capitulation, and that they can expect us to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kc8fqgbU_SU"><span style="color: #0433ff;">unleash hell</span></a> in retaliation for a single drop of Western blood.</p>
<p>We have a President who actually announced to the world that “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” At the rate we’re going, it won’t. One thing is certain: the future will belong to the culture that is not hamstrung by cultural self-doubt, that is not mired in apologetic self-abasement, that is not burdened by historical guilt induced through decades of politically correct indoctrination, and that burns with a will to win, no matter how long it takes or what it costs. The future will belong to the lions, not the lambs.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss Shillman Journalism Fellow <strong>Mark Tapson</strong> on the <strong>Glazov Gang</strong> discussing<strong> Fighting the Culture War</strong>:</em></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/v5gR4E5UPB8" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.</b></p>
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		<title>The War Comes to Australia</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ari-lieberman/the-war-comes-to-australia-1/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-war-comes-to-australia-1</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ari-lieberman/the-war-comes-to-australia-1/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 16 Dec 2014 05:55:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ari Lieberman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[CAFE]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hostage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jihad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Lindt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Man Haron Monis]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Sydney]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247563</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the Sydney café jihadist was no lone wolf. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/EPA_man_haron_monis_jtm_141215_16x9_992.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247519" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/EPA_man_haron_monis_jtm_141215_16x9_992-450x318.jpg" alt="EPA_man_haron_monis_jtm_141215_16x9_992" width="344" height="243" /></a>The hostage saga in Sydney ended in <a href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/second-group-of-five-hostages-emerges-from-sydney-cafe/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">dramatic fashion</span></a> yesterday as Australian police and SWAT teams stormed a downtown café after a 16-hour standoff with armed hostage taker, Man Haron Monis. Monis, identified as a Muslim cleric with a criminal record that included sexual assault and accessory to murder, was killed during the operation as were two hostages, identified as a male and female in their 30s.</p>
<p>Monis, an Iranian national, requested refugee status and asylum in Australia in 1996 and sought to repay Australia’s benevolence by engaging in a vituperative letter-writing campaign directed at the families of fallen Australian soldiers who served in Afghanistan. The letters, in which Monis expresses opposition to the war in Afghanistan, refers to the fallen soldiers as “pigs” and compares them to Hitler. Australian authorities <a href="http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/547043/Sydney-cafe-gunman-on-bail-alleged-violent-offences"><span style="color: #0433ff;">charged him</span></a> with “using a postal or similar service to menace, harass or cause offense [sic]” for which he received a relatively mild sentence of 300 hours of community service.</p>
<p>Australian police ought to be commended for their efficiency and professionalism in quickly subduing the terrorist and preventing more bloodshed, yet the incident raises more questions than it answers. How was a man with such a shady past, with no viable means of supporting himself, who was charged with such serious crimes, allowed to walk on bail and why was his refugee status not revoked? These are questions that the Australian justice system and immigration authorities will have to grapple with in the coming days.</p>
<p>More problematic is how the Australian government will seek to label this incident. Monis’s former lawyer sought to distance his ex-client from any connection to Islamic terrorism, noting that Monis’s actions reflected those of a “random individual” and were not reflective of a “concerted terrorism event or act.” His lawyer’s comments will surely be echoed by Australia’s Muslim community as well as its multiculturalist amen corner.</p>
<p>But the facts of this case dictate other, more malevolent conclusions that point toward radical Islam. Monis was a radical Islamist who espoused the ideologies of the Islamic State. During the hostage standoff, he issued demands that demonstrated unyielding devotion to Islam. He insisted that authorities provide him with an ISIS flag and that the government officially label the incident an ISIS attack. Monis also forced his terrified victims to display an Islamic <span style="color: #0433ff;">shahada </span>flag in both the window of the café and in the numerous <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2874985/He-says-eye-eye-runs-dies-Hostage-reveals-terrifying-demands-Sheikh-killed-Lindt-Cafe-terror-crisis.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">videos</span></a> released of hostages relaying messages.</p>
<p>Australia has not been immune from the scourge of radical Islam currently sweeping across multicultural Europe. It is a liberal democracy that unwittingly plays host to radical Islamists who have taken advantage of Australia’s liberal democratic character to advance their pernicious schemes.</p>
<p>On September 18, Australian security forces <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/17/world/asia/australia-terror-arrests/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">thwarted</span></a> a plan by Australian Muslims to kidnap and behead Australian citizens in public and drape their bodies in an Islamic State flag. And on December 15, Australian authorities <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2014/dec/15/two-sydney-men-charged-funding-australians-fighting-isis"><span style="color: #0433ff;">charged</span></a> two Muslim terrorists with providing funding for Australian Muslims seeking to fight with ISIS.</p>
<p>Monis was not a lone wolf as some would have us believe. There comes a point when collectively, so-called lone wolf attacks must be viewed as coordinated strikes, actively encouraged by fundamentalist ideologies. Those who claim otherwise, who refuse to acknowledge the obvious and absurdly label these attacks as acts of “<a href="http://freebeacon.com/issues/ted-cruz-video-makes-compelling-case-for-awarding-purple-heart-to-fort-hood-terror-victims/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">work place violence</span></a>” or “random acts of violence,” are being disingenuous and placing politics above the needs of national security.</p>
<p>Whether it is a shooting spree at Fort Hood, a beheading in Woolwich, a bloodbath at a Jerusalem synagogue or, as in this case, a hostage standoff and murder, these incidents and countless others too numerous to mention, represent nothing short of an attack on Western civilization. The attackers may not have known each other but were nevertheless inspired and guided by the same radical Islamist ideology, an ideology that seeks to dominate, subjugate and restore Islam to the same standing it experienced some 1,000 years ago.</p>
<p>This radical ideology easily spreads like a virus through 21<sup>st</sup> century mediums like Facebook and Twitter but also finds home in the mosques and madrassas of the Middle East and the West where Muslim clerics routinely call for the <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ari-lieberman/western-indifference-to-the-palestinian-culture-of-hate/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">murder of Jews</span></a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GadPZpP-DdI"><span style="color: #0433ff;">annihilation of Western civilization</span></a>. Unfortunately, many in the West, in the name of multiculturalism and tolerance, have preferred to ignore this malevolence and have allowed it to metastasize like a malignant cancer.</p>
<p>So long as Western governments continue to bury their collective heads in the sand, fail to draw the necessary conclusions and take decisive action, we can unfortunately expect more future tragedies like that which just occurred in Sydney.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.</b></p>
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		<title>Jihad in an Australian Chocolate Shop</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/robert-spencer/jihad-in-an-australian-chocolate-shop/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=jihad-in-an-australian-chocolate-shop</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 15 Dec 2014 05:33:46 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Robert Spencer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[chocolate shop]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hostages]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ISIS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jihad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Sydney]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247427</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Jihadist hostage-taking comes to the West.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/kj.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247461" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/kj-450x253.jpg" alt="kj" width="274" height="154" /></a>The details are still sketchy, but this is what is apparently confirmed as of this writing (8PM EST Sunday night): <a href="http://www.news.com.au/national/a-man-is-holding-several-people-hostage-at-martin-place-cafe/story-fncynjr2-1227156241649">as many as 50 people</a> have been taken hostage in the Lindt Chocolat Café in Sydney, Australia’s central pedestrian mall, Martin Place. Some of the hostages have been forced at gunpoint to hold up the black flag of Islamic jihad against a window of the café.</p>
<p>The flag says in Arabic, “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet” – the Islamic confession of faith. It will thus be hard to claim this one was workplace violence, but the mainstream media and Western leaders are no doubt already strategizing on ways to do so. Falling quickly into politically correct lockstep and ignoring the jihad flag in the window, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/live/2014/dec/15/sydney-siege-reports-of-hostage-situation-inside-martin-place-cafe-live">insisted</a> that “we don’t know the motivation” of the gunmen.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, police have evacuated the area, as well as the Sydney Opera House, where apparently a suspicious package has been found. Abbott issued a statement declaring that while “this is obviously a deeply concerning incident but all Australians should be reassured that our law enforcement and security agencies are well trained and equipped and are responding in a thorough and professional manner.”</p>
<p>That is no doubt true, but this is an unprecedented event in the West. There have been jihad attacks, and hostage situations, but this is the first jihadist hostage event in a Western country since the Islamic State issued this threat <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/09/21/isis-audio-threat-canada_n_5859062.html">in a September video</a>: “We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women, by the permission of Allah, the Exalted. This is His promise to us; He is glorified and He does not fail in His promise. If we do not reach that time, then our children and grandchildren will reach it, and they will sell your sons as slaves at the slave market.”</p>
<p>In that video, Islamic State spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani told Muslims:</p>
<blockquote><p>If you can kill a disbelieving American or European — especially the spiteful and filthy French — or an Australian, or a Canadian, or any other disbeliever from the disbelievers waging war, including the citizens of the countries that entered into a coalition against the Islamic State, then rely upon Allah, and kill him in any manner or way however it may be.</p>
<p>Do not ask for anyone’s advice and do not seek anyone&#8217;s verdict. Kill the disbeliever whether he is civilian or military, for they have the same ruling. Both of them are disbelievers. Both of them are considered to be waging war [the civilian by belonging to a state waging war against the Muslims]. Both of their blood and wealth is legal for you to destroy, for blood does not become illegal or legal to spill by the clothes being worn.</p></blockquote>
<p>Al-Adnani also made this specific threat: “You will pay the price as you walk on your streets, turning right and left, fearing the Muslims. You will not feel secure even in your bedrooms. You will pay the price when this crusade of yours collapses, and thereafter we will strike you in your homeland, and you will never be able to harm anyone afterwards. You will pay the price, and we have prepared for you what will pain you.”</p>
<p>The chocolate shop siege in Sydney could well be a fulfillment of that threat, and a harbinger of things to come not only in Australia, but in Western Europe, Britain, Canada and the U.S. And for the first time at least in recent memory, we see Islamic jihadists taking hostages in the West, as they have for so long in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.</p>
<p>If the fate of these hostages is determined according to Islamic law, and there is every indication that it will be since the hostage-taker appears to be a devout and observant Muslim, they could be freed outright, ransomed, enslaved or killed:</p>
<blockquote><p>“As for the captives, the amir [ruler] has the choice of taking the most beneficial action of four possibilities: the first to put them to death by cutting their necks; the second, to enslave them and apply the laws of slavery regarding their sale and manumission; the third, to ransom them in exchange for goods or prisoners; and fourth, to show favor to them and pardon them. Allah, may he be exalted, says, ‘When you encounter those [infidels] who deny [the Truth=Islam] then strike [their] necks’ (Qur’an sura 47, verse 4)” — Al-Mawardi, <em>al-Ahkam as-Sultaniyyah</em> (<em>The Laws of Islamic Governance</em>).</p></blockquote>
<p>Over the last few months, the world has recoiled in horror as the Islamic State released several videos of the execution of their decision to kill numerous hostages. But that was far away, in lands most people have only ever seen on television. Now we may be forced to witness the same scenes unfold on the streets of our own cities and towns – just as the Islamic State has threatened.</p>
<p>Epitomizing the West’s absolute lack of preparedness for this, despite Abbott’s reassuring words, was this from a reporter for the <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/live/2014/dec/15/sydney-siege-reports-of-hostage-situation-inside-martin-place-cafe-live">UK’s Guardian</a>: “I am seeing a lot of people tweeting/asking about the supposed police raids taking place in Lakemba at the same time as the siege. <strong>Ray Hadley</strong>, a conservative presenter with 2GB, said raids of homes in Lakemba, which has a large Muslim population, were taking place now.</p>
<p>Sources have told my colleague <strong>Michael Safi</strong> there are no raids underway in that suburb. About 20 police are touring the Lakemba mosque as part of a police induction day, which may have been the source of those reports.”</p>
<p>So police were at the mosque for outreach as a jihad hostage situation began to unfold in downtown Sydney. The black flag of jihad that the hostages were forced to hold against the window showed up the bitter irony in this. Instead of challenging Muslim leaders to fight against this Islamic State ideology that they ostensibly reject, police were busy reassuring Muslims that they were not “Islamophobic,” just as jihad came to their very doorstep.</p>
<p>As Australians, and in due course Americans and Britons and Canadians, grow accustomed to the new possibility that a stop for a cup of coffee could result in one’s head being separated from one’s body, the time for this politically correct unreality about the jihad threat is over. Realism about the nature and magnitude of the threat is long overdue. The patrons inside the Lindt Chocolat Café, now hostages, deserve nothing less, as do the rest of the citizens of the embattled and besieged West.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<title>The Most Adorable Muslim Beheading Sign You Will Ever See</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/the-most-adorable-muslim-beheading-sign-you-will-ever-see/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-most-adorable-muslim-beheading-sign-you-will-ever-see</link>
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		<pubDate>Sun, 16 Sep 2012 16:24:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=144290</guid>
		<description><![CDATA["It was an outrage," NSW Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione told reporters in Sydney today. "To see a young child with a placard thrust in his hand calling for the beheading of a person is simply something I cannot comprehend. It's just not what we teach our children."]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Welcome to Sydney, Australia, where Islam is introducing its version of family values to the country. Aren&#8217;t they so cute?</p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/A2z6J64CAAEWvxM.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-144291" title="A2z6J64CAAEWvxM" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/A2z6J64CAAEWvxM-225x300.jpg" alt="" width="225" height="300" /></a></p>
<p>Australian officials are bewildered and outraged by this adorable display of a Muslim family teaching its children to kill non-Muslims.</p>
<blockquote><p>NSW Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione says he was outraged to see children holding signs that called for the beheading of anti-Islamists at a Sydney protest. &#8220;It was an outrage,&#8221; he told reporters in Sydney today. &#8220;To see a young child with a placard thrust in his hand calling for the beheading of a person is simply something I cannot comprehend. It&#8217;s just not what we teach our children.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>But Andrew fails to see that it is what Muslims teach their children. And Muslims may hold Australian citizenship, but they are not Australians. They are Pakistanis, Indonesians, Malaysians or Lebanese who happen to  live in Australia and hold local citizenship. Their allegiance is to the Religion of Peacefully Beheading People.</p>
<p>The Muslim family is not doing anything wrong by their standards. Islam, from Mohammed&#8217;s day, killed people who offended him. This is their religion and Australia, like America, Canada and Europe, is<a href="http://m.smh.com.au/nsw/sydney-violence-has-no-place-in-our-country-gillard-says-20120916-25zyq.html"> going to have to come to terms with that.</a></p>
<blockquote><p>Prime Minister Julia Gillard says the violence seen at a Sydney protest against an anti-Islam film has no place in Australia. Six police officers were injured during clashes outside the US consulate yesterday.</p>
<p>‘‘I absolutely condemn the violence that we saw yesterday,’’ Ms Gillard told reporters in Brisbane where she addressed the Queensland ALP state conference. She said the anti-Islam film, which was made in the US, was ‘‘truly repulsive’’ but ‘‘there is never any excuse for violent behaviour’’.</p>
<p>‘‘To anybody who wants to replicate that behaviour today, I just want to say very strongly that this kind of conduct has no place on the streets of our country,’’ the prime minister said.</p></blockquote>
<p>But it does. If Islam is going to be in Australia then Salafists beating Sydney cops and tykes holding up KILL THE INFIDELS signs is going to be part of Australian life.</p>
<p>As <a href="http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/violence_works/">Andrew Bolt points out, &#8220;Violence Works.&#8221;</a></p>
<blockquote><p>Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has called for YouTube to consider taking down a video that ridicules the Prophet Mohammed which sparked a violent protest in Sydney yesterday.</p></blockquote>
<p>Conroy joins Obama and probably every Euro politician in calling for censorship. As if the riots are about the video, rather than about the power of violence.</p>
<p>The<a href="http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/these_responses_arent_good_enough/"> gap must be closed, Gentlemen</a></p>
<blockquote><p>But in response to the violence in Sydney, and to similar outbreaks across the world, Foreign Minister Bob Carr said he had asked all Australian diplomatic posts to “redouble their efforts” in closing the gap between Islamic and western societies&#8230;.</p>
<p>“I have asked Australia’s diplomatic posts around the world to redouble their efforts to bridge the gap between civilizations to encourage the overlap of cultures and the dialogue between faiths,” the Foreign Minister said.</p></blockquote>
<p>Poor Bob. Doesn&#8217;t he see that the civilizations are already overlapping? When there are children holding signs calling for beheadings in Sydney, then the civilizations have already overlapped and <a href="http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/these_responses_arent_good_enough/">he doesn&#8217;t like the results</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>NSW Premier Barry O’Farrell said he was “horrified” by the street battles and clashes with police yesterday. “We’ve got 200 different nationalities in this city but what we saw yesterday was the unacceptable face of multiculturalism,” Mr O’Farrell said.</p></blockquote>
<p>Why not call it what it is, the Muslim face of multiculturalism&#8230; because Islam is not multicultural. It is for one culture, its culture, and for beheading all other cultures.</p>
<blockquote><p>Tony Abbott said the ugly scenes did not fairly reflect the Islamic people of Australia. The Opposition Leader said newcomers to Australia were not expected to surrender their heritage, but were expected to surrender their hatreds.</p></blockquote>
<p>But what if heritage is indivisible from hate? What if religion commands you to hate and kill to protect your identity? What then?</p>
<p>How do you deal with people whose family values can be seen displayed in the lovely outing above? Is there any place for such people in Australia, America or Canada? Sure, so long as we understand that as a result, there will eventually no longer be any place for anyone else. Just Muslims, their hatreds, their holy books and their way of life.</p>
<blockquote><p>Nationals senator Barnaby Joyce said politicians should speak out to protect Australia “from what we might become years down the track”.</p>
<p>“It’s not xenophobic to ask what is in your national interest and what values we support and what actions we will condone,” Senator Joyce told the Nationals’ federal conference in Canberra.</p></blockquote>
<p>No, it&#8217;s sane and sanity has become a rare commodity.</p>
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		<title>Sexual Starvation and Jihad Fantasies</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/miranda-devine/sexual-starvation-and-jihad-fantasies/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=sexual-starvation-and-jihad-fantasies</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 28 Jan 2010 05:10:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Miranda Devine]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=48088</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Dr. Jamie Glazov provides the best psychological explanation for what drives Islamist suicide bombers like Abdulmutallab.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-48089" title="rage" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/rage1.jpg" alt="rage" width="450" height="337" /></p>
<p><strong>[This article is reprinted from <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/">The Sydney Morning Herald</a>.]</strong></p>
<p>The 23-year-old Nigerian charged with trying to detonate a bomb on a Northwest Airlines flight over Detroit on Christmas Day was<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2010/01/11/why-the-rich-muslim-boy-became-a-terrorist-by-jamie-glazov/"> lonely and sexually repressed</a>, according to messages left on an Islamic website.</p>
<p>As a US Senate Homeland Security committee continued to argue this week about how to handle Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the emotional anguish in his web posts provides an insight into fanatical Islam and what drives often hapless young men to become suicide bombers. Much as we would like them to be, they are not monsters.</p>
<p>Being the son of a wealthy banker, and living in London, Abdulmutallab had no real beef with Western life, did not complain about racism or express concern for downtrodden Muslim brothers.</p>
<p>But, like the September 11 bombers, who visited strip clubs before their date with destiny, when his devout religious beliefs conflicted with his corporeal desires, he found that blowing himself up along with a whole lot of infidels was preferable to being sexually frustrated.</p>
<p>As the <em>New York Post</em> put it: &#8220;The bomb wasn&#8217;t the only thing burning in his pants.&#8221;</p>
<p>On the Islamic Forum of the Gawaher website in 2005 and 2006 were more than 300 posts by Farouk1986 &#8211; Abdulmutallab&#8217;s middle name and birth year.</p>
<p>Under the heading: &#8220;I think I feel lonely,&#8221; Farouk1986 complains he has never found &#8220;a true Muslim friend&#8221;.</p>
<p>&#8220;As I get lonely, the natural sexual drive awakens and I struggle to control it, sometimes leading to minor sinful activities like not lowering the gaze.</p>
<p>&#8220;And this problem makes me want to get married to avoid getting aroused … but I am only 18.&#8221; In another post, he writes &#8221;the hair of a woman can easily arouse a man&#8221;.</p>
<p><strong>To continue reading this article, <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2010/01/27/sexual-starvation-and-jihad-fantasties/">click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Sexual Starvation and Jihad Fantasies</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/miranda-devine/sexual-starvation-and-jihad-fantasties/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=sexual-starvation-and-jihad-fantasties</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/miranda-devine/sexual-starvation-and-jihad-fantasties/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 27 Jan 2010 05:04:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Miranda Devine]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=47792</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Dr. Jamie Glazov provides the best psychological explanation for what drives Islamist suicide bombers like Abdulmutallab.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-47804" title="rage" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/rage.jpg" alt="rage" width="450" height="337" /></p>
<p><strong>[This article is reprinted from <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/">The Sydney Morning Herald</a>.]</strong></p>
<p>The 23-year-old Nigerian charged with trying to detonate a bomb on a Northwest Airlines flight over Detroit on Christmas Day was<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2010/01/11/why-the-rich-muslim-boy-became-a-terrorist-by-jamie-glazov/"> lonely and sexually repressed</a>, according to messages left on an Islamic website.</p>
<p>As a US Senate Homeland Security committee continued to argue this week about how to handle Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the emotional anguish in his web posts provides an insight into fanatical Islam and what drives often hapless young men to become suicide bombers. Much as we would like them to be, they are not monsters.</p>
<p>Being the son of a wealthy banker, and living in London, Abdulmutallab had no real beef with Western life, did not complain about racism or express concern for downtrodden Muslim brothers.</p>
<p>But, like the September 11 bombers, who visited strip clubs before their date with destiny, when his devout religious beliefs conflicted with his corporeal desires, he found that blowing himself up along with a whole lot of infidels was preferable to being sexually frustrated.</p>
<p>As the <em>New York Post</em> put it: &#8220;The bomb wasn&#8217;t the only thing burning in his pants.&#8221;</p>
<p>On the Islamic Forum of the Gawaher website in 2005 and 2006 were more than 300 posts by Farouk1986 &#8211; Abdulmutallab&#8217;s middle name and birth year.</p>
<p>Under the heading: &#8220;I think I feel lonely,&#8221; Farouk1986 complains he has never found &#8220;a true Muslim friend&#8221;.</p>
<p>&#8220;As I get lonely, the natural sexual drive awakens and I struggle to control it, sometimes leading to minor sinful activities like not lowering the gaze.</p>
<p>&#8220;And this problem makes me want to get married to avoid getting aroused … but I am only 18.&#8221; In another post, he writes &#8221;the hair of a woman can easily arouse a man&#8221;.</p>
<p>He also writes of &#8220;my dilemma between liberalism and extremism … how should one put the balance right?&#8221;</p>
<p>He talks at one point about his fantasies: &#8221;The bad part of it is sometimes the fantasies are a bit worldly rather than concentrating in the hereafter.&#8221;</p>
<p>He tries instead to focus on more acceptable &#8220;jihad fantasies&#8221;.</p>
<p>&#8221;I imagine how the great jihad will take place, how the Muslims will win Insha&#8217;Allah and rule the whole world, and establish the greatest empire once again!!!&#8221;</p>
<p>As the youngest of 16 children and the son of his father&#8217;s No. 2 wife, he reportedly spent most of his childhood at an English boarding school in West Africa. The trajectory to extreme violence of this gentle, pious young man who wanted so much to be good and consequential, and yet was consumed with guilt about sex, fits with much of what is known about other Islamist suicide bombers.</p>
<p>Perhaps the best psychological explanation comes from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/United-Hate-Romance-Tyranny-Terror/dp/1935071602/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1264299706&amp;sr=8-1-catcorr"><em>United in Hate: The Left&#8217;s Romance with Tyranny and Terror</em></a>, the recent book by Jamie Glazov, the managing editor of <em>FrontPage Magazine</em>.</p>
<p>In a chapter entitled &#8220;To Hate a Woman&#8221;, he describes in chilling detail the oppression of women in parts of the Muslim world and the &#8220;theological justification&#8221; for violence against females &#8220;from the very moment of their birth&#8221;.</p>
<p>Islamist hatred of women has &#8220;fertilised the soil in which … terrorism and the new death cult have grown&#8221;.</p>
<p>He claims there is an &#8220;Islamist war on private love [which] derives most of its energy from a deep-seated misogyny. Women&#8217;s empowerment, independence and self-determination, especially the sexual variety, pose a threat to Islamism&#8217;s very existence.&#8221;</p>
<p>Islamist misogyny, he claims, comes from Islam itself. &#8220;The notion that women are by their very nature inferior to men is the underpinning of the entire structure and derives its legitimacy from numerous traditional teachings.&#8221;</p>
<p>It is no coincidence that the Arabic word &#8220;fitna&#8221; has two meanings &#8211; beautiful woman and social chaos.</p>
<p>Glazov writes that in many Islamic societies, &#8220;women are supposed to dehumanise themselves in order to be tolerated … Women are considered to be the incarnation of shahwa [desire] which comes from the devil. In this environment the pathological notion arises that a man and a woman cannot be alone without the ominous threat of evil in their midst.</p>
<p>&#8220;The men denigrate the object of their lust so as to diminish their own shame. In this dynamic of sexual repression and misogyny, love is reduced to violent domination which becomes directly intertwined with terrorism against societies that allow women freedom, especially sexual freedom.&#8221;</p>
<p>Practices such as polygamy and repudiation &#8211; in which a man can divorce his wife by pronouncing certain words &#8211; conspire to &#8220;minimise the possibility of private love even among married couples&#8221;.</p>
<p>&#8220;Islam teaches that the sexual act is dirty and consequently surrounds it with rituals. The objective is to build a wall between the lovers themselves.&#8221;</p>
<p>Polygamy, Glazov writes, has a disastrous effect on Muslim boys who grow up with &#8220;all kinds of siblings born of different women which gives them the idea that none of these women, including their own mother, was good enough to be cherished alone. The boys internalise this misogyny which leads in turn to self hate.&#8221;</p>
<p>Their psychological abandonment of their mothers is &#8220;directly connected to their urge for terror and suicide&#8221;.</p>
<p>Female genital mutilation, in which a woman&#8217;s clitoris &#8211; or entire external genital organs &#8211; is removed is an attempt to &#8220;deny women even the possibility of personal happiness and sexual satisfaction&#8221;.</p>
<p>Glazov writes of Saudi instructional TV programs about wife-beating and cites a report from the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences which estimated 90 per cent of Pakistani wives had been beaten or sexually abused for offences such as cooking an unsatisfactory meal.</p>
<p>These stories are not remote from Australian concerns. The Islamic Women&#8217;s Welfare Council of Victoria, in a 2008 report, since removed from its website, concluded that some Australian Muslim religious leaders condoned rape within marriage, polygamy and domestic violence.</p>
<p>In gang rape trials, Muslim men have mounted the defence that their strict religious upbringing made them believe they could rape Australian non-Muslim girls.</p>
<p>This week, in Melbourne, an Afghan refugee is being tried for allegedly strangling his wife with her veil after complaining she was &#8220;becoming Australian&#8221;. The jury was told the victim had claimed her husband punched her and told her her only purpose was to have babies.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><strong>To order <em>United in Hate</em>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/United-Hate-Romance-Tyranny-Terror/dp/1935071602/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1264299706&amp;sr=8-1-catcorr">click here</a>.</strong></p>
<p><strong><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-47806" title="united" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/united2.jpg" alt="united" width="350" height="515" /><br />
</strong></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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		<description><![CDATA[Our storied radical magazine did transform the nation—for the worse.]]></description>
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<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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