Former CBS News president Richard Salant (1961 - 64 and 1966 - 79) explained the major media's role: "Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have." ...and to this very day most Americans haven't noticed they're being brained washed! ~ N. Hooben
Saturday, August 30, 2008
What About Our Rights
Updated February 2010...see update post below.
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Iraq has signed its first major oil deal with a foreign company since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, a spokesman for the Iraqi Oil Ministry said Saturday.
Iraq's oil fields currently produce around 2.5 million barrels a day.
It was the first time in more than 35 years that Iraq has allowed foreign oil companies to do business inside its borders.
The contract with the China National Petroleum Corporation could be worth up to $3 billion. It would allow the CNPC to develop an oil field in southern Iraq's Wasit province for about 20 years, said Oil Ministry spokesman Assim Jihad.
Iraq's Cabinet must still approve the contract, but Jihad said that would happen soon, and work could start within a few months.
The Chinese company will provide technical advisers, oil workers and equipment to develop the al-Ahdab oil field, providing fuel for the al-Zubaidiya power plant in Wasit, southeast of Baghdad, bordering Iran, Jihad said.
Once development begins, the field is expected to start producing a preliminary amount of 25,000 barrels of oil a day and an estimated constant daily amount of 125,000 barrels after three years, he said.
Iraq currently produces about 2.5 million barrels a day, 2 million of which are exported daily, Jihad said. That is close to its status before the U.S.-led war that toppled Saddam in 2003, but below its levels prior to the Persian Gulf War in 1991.
Iraqi Oil Minister Hussein Shahrastani told CNN in July that he is confident Iraq will be able to double its production in the next five years.
As it did with other international companies, the Saddam regime had a partnership contract with CNPC signed at the end of the 1990s that entitled the company to share profits. The current contract, however, will only be a "service contract" under which CNPC is simply paid for its services, Jihad said.
He said Iraq has provided "security guarantees" for CNPC, as it would for any other foreign company that will work in Iraq's oil fields.
Jihad called it a major and significant move for Iraq.
Iraq sparked a scramble for lucrative oil contracts in June, when Shahrastani opened bidding to 35 international companies for long-term contracts to redevelop six oil fields.
The Oil Ministry continues to negotiate short-term, no-bid contracts with several U.S. and European oil companies, including Exxon Mobil Corp., Royal Dutch Shell, Total SA, Chevron Corp., and BP.
Iraq has among the largest oil reserves in the world with an estimated 115 billion barrels -- tying Iran for the No. 2 status behind Saudi Arabia's 264 billion barrels, according to estimates from the Energy Information Administration.
CNN's Jomana Karadsheh contributed to this report.
Update Post Feb 26, 2010 from Planck's Constant
By Bernie on 24 Feb 2010
Can you imagine anyone during WWII carrying signs asking why we are attacking Germany, a country that never attacked us directly? How about signs with "No Blood for Beer" as if America could not buy or produce any beer on its own, but had to get it from Germany or else?
Most uninformed individuals think that we went to Iraq for oil. Indeed, a common refrain found on blogs is "The war [in Iraq] and the occupation are all about the neocons desire to control Middle East oil."
As I wrote:
Update Post Feb 26, 2010 from Planck's Constant
Why are We in Iraq and Afghanistan
By Bernie on 24 Feb 2010
First of all, this question would not have been posed half a century ago. Back then, we had fewer Liberals and Muslims in America, that is to say, fewer idiots, and so fewer silly questions.
Can you imagine anyone during WWII carrying signs asking why we are attacking Germany, a country that never attacked us directly? How about signs with "No Blood for Beer" as if America could not buy or produce any beer on its own, but had to get it from Germany or else?
Most uninformed individuals think that we went to Iraq for oil. Indeed, a common refrain found on blogs is "The war [in Iraq] and the occupation are all about the neocons desire to control Middle East oil."
As I wrote:
As for neocons desire to control middle east oil, isn't it cheaper just to buy it? Gold is more precious than oil, yet we didn't invade South Africa (which controls most of the world's gold supply) to CONTROL GOLD. When we need it - we buy it.
Starting a war to control oil only drives the price higher. You are rather naive. If the US wanted to control Arab oil, it would have invaded Israel and set up a Palestinian state. With no tensions in the middle east, oil would have dropped to $12 a barrel, about 4 bucks more than the cost of producing it.
That's how you control oil.
As for idiots of the Muslim kind, a commenter to my article Islam is the Fastest Growing Religion - Not gives us his twisted view of why we are in Iraq and Afghanistan: "you want what muslims have... and are murdering for it!"
First of all, Muslims have nothing that we can't buy elsewhere. As for oil, the majority of it is bought from non-Muslim countries: Canada, Colombia, Norway, the United Kingdom, Venezuela, Equatorial Guinea, and many other countries. "The diversity of the US oil supply makes it difficult to cut off the country's supply of oil altogether." [Link]
At present, we produce 40% of all the oil we need. We don't need to spend billions on a war to control oil, because if we want, we can exploit the oil we already have here in the states 1.
So unless Iraq is the only country left with oil, why waste one bullet on a Muslim to get his oil? Isn't it cheaper to simply buy it?
As for being in Afghanistan, certainly the country has no valuable assets other than donkey dung and opium. No person in his right mind would invade Afghanistan for its 'riches.'
Caption (ISAF Photo at top - by U.S. Air Force TSgt Laura K. Smith):
[Click on image(s) for larger view]
For more of my articles like this see Blood for Oil
First of all, Muslims have nothing that we can't buy elsewhere. As for oil, the majority of it is bought from non-Muslim countries: Canada, Colombia, Norway, the United Kingdom, Venezuela, Equatorial Guinea, and many other countries. "The diversity of the US oil supply makes it difficult to cut off the country's supply of oil altogether." [Link]
At present, we produce 40% of all the oil we need. We don't need to spend billions on a war to control oil, because if we want, we can exploit the oil we already have here in the states 1.
So unless Iraq is the only country left with oil, why waste one bullet on a Muslim to get his oil? Isn't it cheaper to simply buy it?
As for being in Afghanistan, certainly the country has no valuable assets other than donkey dung and opium. No person in his right mind would invade Afghanistan for its 'riches.'
Caption (ISAF Photo at top - by U.S. Air Force TSgt Laura K. Smith):
HERAT, Afghanistan--Afghan Border Police (ABP) members provide security during the processing of illegal narcotics which were seized during an ambush on 14 Dec 2008. This was the largest seizure to date by the 4th Brigade of the ABP.
Notes
(1):
NEW TOWN, N.D. (AP) — An oil boom on American Indian land has brought jobs, millions of dollars and hope to long-impoverished tribal members who have struggled for more than a century on the million-acre Fort Berthold Indian Reservation.
In little more than a year, oil companies have put dozens of money-producing rigs on remote rolling prairie and sprawling badlands that are home to small cattle ranches and scattered settlements of modular housing. Although other tribes around the nation have oil interests, industry officials said none has likely experienced a recent windfall of this scale.
...
The reservation was the last area to be targeted by companies in the state's oil patch because of onerous federal requirements. But a 2008 tax agreement standardized the rules for oil drilling.
[Click on image(s) for larger view]
For more of my articles like this see Blood for Oil
Obama Is A Muslim...There is no substantial proof that he is not!
Update 2011: See video here and here (Its been established that Obama is a Sunni Muslim.)
Update 2009: click here Obama Admits He Is A Muslim (So it stands to rule that he lied while campaigning for the presidency...but I knew that! Why didn't you? Was it because all the racists were voting for change...change in color that is!)
In his quest for the presidency of the United States, Barrack Husein Obama will deny his Muslim identity for no other reason than to obtain votes from an ever increasing number of ignorant Americans. He has consistently worded his speeches to belittle Christianity as can be seen here and here. Whereas he claims to be a Christian ( Black Liberation Theology ) he has ridiculed the greatest story written in the Bible, The Sermon On The Mount. It's from the Sermon On The Mount where true Christians obtain many of their basic tenets including The Lord's Prayer and to include warnings of false prophets, "Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves." For those of you who do not believe Obama is ravenous I would like to say, "Blessed are the ignorant." but rather Obama's mentor and pastor of twenty years has already damned you by the power of his god...not my God. --- Norman E. Hooben
A few related stories follow: (You should also review this A Muslim By Any Other Name Is Still A Muslim )
ELECTION 2008
Muslims in fed terror probe making donations to Obama
Will candidate follow other Dems who gave back jihad-tied funds?
Posted: August 29, 2008
1:00 am Eastern © 2008 WorldNetDaily
Islamic leaders tied by federal investigators to the radical Muslim Brotherhood in America – including one under active investigation for alleged terror-financing – have recently donated to Sen. Barack Obama's campaign for president, according to Federal Election Commission records reviewed by WND.
Jamal M. Barzinji earlier this year gave Obama $1,000, a gift that records show has not been returned. Other Democratic candidates, including Rep. Jim Moran, have refunded donations from Barzinji since federal agents raided his Virginia home and offices in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
Obama's top Muslim adviser resigned earlier this month over controversy surrounding his ties to an alleged Muslim Brotherhood front connected to Barzinji, who heads a network of Islamic charities and businesses.
Barzinji remains at the center of an active federal investigation into terrorist financing that involves recently convicted terrorist supporter Sami al-Arian. A grand jury is still hearing the widening case in Northern Virginia.
A federal court affidavit alleges "Barzinji is not only closely associated with PIJ (as evidenced by ties to al-Arian, including documents seized in Tampa), but also with Hamas." The Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or PIJ, and Hamas are two known terrorist groups outlawed by the U.S.
Barzinji in November 2000 was arrested and charged with domestic abuse and resisting arrest, according to Fairfax County Police Department criminal records.
Nancy Luque, a Washington-based lawyer for Barzinji, says her client does not support terrorism and that the government is conducting a witch hunt. Barzinji has not been charged with a crime in the years-long probe.
According to recently declassified FBI documents posted by the Investigative Project on Terrorism, Barzinji and another board member of an Islamist think tank in Herndon, Va., were listed among "members and leaders of the IKHWAN."
The Ikhwan is an Arabic reference to the Muslim Brotherhood, which follows the credo: "The Quran is our constitution, the prophet is our guide; Death for the glory of Allah is our greatest ambition."
Osama bin Laden, his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and "blind sheik" Omar Abdel-Rahman all belong to the Muslim Brotherhood.
U.S. prosecutors recently declassified an internal Ikhwan document outlining a long-term plan to infiltrate U.S. institutions and Islamize America.
Barzinji has met in the U.S. with key leaders of the Egyptian-based Brotherhood, but he told the Washington Post in 2004 that he and his colleagues abandoned links to them years ago. He said he helped persuade the Brothers to participate in elections as an alternative to armed struggle.
Barzinji noted, "It was one of our main contributions to the Ikhwan movement worldwide."
Democratic Rep. Jim Moran of Virginia was forced to return $3,750 in donations from Barzinji in 2002 after the donations were revealed in the press.
Barzinji donated $1,000 to Obama on Feb. 6 of this year – one day after his colleague Omer Totonji also donated $1,000 to his campaign. Totonji's father, Ahmad Totonji, also is a subject of the federal investigation. His Herndon, Va., home and offices were raided by agents after 9/11.
That same month, Omar Barzinji of Sterling, Va., contributed $500 to Obama's campaign. He works for Islamist publisher Amana Limited, whose offices also were searched after 9/11.
The Obama campaign, which did not return calls, was rocked earlier this month when its top Muslim adviser, Mazen Asbahi, had to step down over a firestorm surrounding his ties to an alleged Muslim Brotherhood front connected to Jamal Barzinji.
Asbahi, a Chicago lawyer, served on the board of an Illinois-based subsidiary to the North American Islamic Trust, or NAIT, recently named by federal prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator in a major Hamas terror-financing case.
Barzinji was the former secretary of Saudi-funded NAIT, which controls hundreds of radical mosques in the U.S., including the Washington-area mosque connected to at least two of the 9/11 hijackers.
In fact, Barzinji's signature appears on the property deed to that mosque, the Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center, according to Paul Sperry, author of "Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington." Dar al-Hijrah is run by leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Barzinji is listed in FEC records as a "board member" of the Islamic Society of North America, a sister organization to NAIT and also an unindicted terror co-conspirator.
Esam Omeish
Also, Dar al-Hijrah trustee Esam Omeish gave $250 to Obama the same month as Barzinji.
Omeish was forced to resign his government-appointed position to the Virginia Commssion of Immigration after a video surfaced showing him advocating violent jihad. Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine, a Democrat on Obama's short list for running mate, had named Omeish to the panel.
Omeish is president of the Alexandria, Va.-based Muslim American Society, which was founded by members of the radical Muslim Brotherhood and is the representative of the Muslim Brotherhood in the U.S., according to recent testimony and evidence provided by FBI agent Lara Burns in the terror trial of the Holy Land Foundation.
According to Sperry in the book "Infiltration," Omeish in 2004 used his home to bond out a terrorist suspect jailed for allegedly casing the Chesapeake Bay Bridge.
And from The Corner we have this:
Update 2009: click here Obama Admits He Is A Muslim (So it stands to rule that he lied while campaigning for the presidency...but I knew that! Why didn't you? Was it because all the racists were voting for change...change in color that is!)
_____________________________
In his quest for the presidency of the United States, Barrack Husein Obama will deny his Muslim identity for no other reason than to obtain votes from an ever increasing number of ignorant Americans. He has consistently worded his speeches to belittle Christianity as can be seen here and here. Whereas he claims to be a Christian ( Black Liberation Theology ) he has ridiculed the greatest story written in the Bible, The Sermon On The Mount. It's from the Sermon On The Mount where true Christians obtain many of their basic tenets including The Lord's Prayer and to include warnings of false prophets, "Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves." For those of you who do not believe Obama is ravenous I would like to say, "Blessed are the ignorant." but rather Obama's mentor and pastor of twenty years has already damned you by the power of his god...not my God. --- Norman E. Hooben
A few related stories follow: (You should also review this A Muslim By Any Other Name Is Still A Muslim )
ELECTION 2008
Muslims in fed terror probe making donations to Obama
Will candidate follow other Dems who gave back jihad-tied funds?
Posted: August 29, 2008
1:00 am Eastern © 2008 WorldNetDaily
 Jamal M. Barzinji |
Jamal M. Barzinji earlier this year gave Obama $1,000, a gift that records show has not been returned. Other Democratic candidates, including Rep. Jim Moran, have refunded donations from Barzinji since federal agents raided his Virginia home and offices in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
Obama's top Muslim adviser resigned earlier this month over controversy surrounding his ties to an alleged Muslim Brotherhood front connected to Barzinji, who heads a network of Islamic charities and businesses.
Barzinji remains at the center of an active federal investigation into terrorist financing that involves recently convicted terrorist supporter Sami al-Arian. A grand jury is still hearing the widening case in Northern Virginia.
A federal court affidavit alleges "Barzinji is not only closely associated with PIJ (as evidenced by ties to al-Arian, including documents seized in Tampa), but also with Hamas." The Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or PIJ, and Hamas are two known terrorist groups outlawed by the U.S.
Barzinji in November 2000 was arrested and charged with domestic abuse and resisting arrest, according to Fairfax County Police Department criminal records.
Nancy Luque, a Washington-based lawyer for Barzinji, says her client does not support terrorism and that the government is conducting a witch hunt. Barzinji has not been charged with a crime in the years-long probe.
According to recently declassified FBI documents posted by the Investigative Project on Terrorism, Barzinji and another board member of an Islamist think tank in Herndon, Va., were listed among "members and leaders of the IKHWAN."
The Ikhwan is an Arabic reference to the Muslim Brotherhood, which follows the credo: "The Quran is our constitution, the prophet is our guide; Death for the glory of Allah is our greatest ambition."
Osama bin Laden, his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and "blind sheik" Omar Abdel-Rahman all belong to the Muslim Brotherhood.
U.S. prosecutors recently declassified an internal Ikhwan document outlining a long-term plan to infiltrate U.S. institutions and Islamize America.
Barzinji has met in the U.S. with key leaders of the Egyptian-based Brotherhood, but he told the Washington Post in 2004 that he and his colleagues abandoned links to them years ago. He said he helped persuade the Brothers to participate in elections as an alternative to armed struggle.
Barzinji noted, "It was one of our main contributions to the Ikhwan movement worldwide."
Democratic Rep. Jim Moran of Virginia was forced to return $3,750 in donations from Barzinji in 2002 after the donations were revealed in the press.
Barzinji donated $1,000 to Obama on Feb. 6 of this year – one day after his colleague Omer Totonji also donated $1,000 to his campaign. Totonji's father, Ahmad Totonji, also is a subject of the federal investigation. His Herndon, Va., home and offices were raided by agents after 9/11.
That same month, Omar Barzinji of Sterling, Va., contributed $500 to Obama's campaign. He works for Islamist publisher Amana Limited, whose offices also were searched after 9/11.
The Obama campaign, which did not return calls, was rocked earlier this month when its top Muslim adviser, Mazen Asbahi, had to step down over a firestorm surrounding his ties to an alleged Muslim Brotherhood front connected to Jamal Barzinji.
Asbahi, a Chicago lawyer, served on the board of an Illinois-based subsidiary to the North American Islamic Trust, or NAIT, recently named by federal prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator in a major Hamas terror-financing case.
Barzinji was the former secretary of Saudi-funded NAIT, which controls hundreds of radical mosques in the U.S., including the Washington-area mosque connected to at least two of the 9/11 hijackers.
In fact, Barzinji's signature appears on the property deed to that mosque, the Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center, according to Paul Sperry, author of "Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington." Dar al-Hijrah is run by leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Barzinji is listed in FEC records as a "board member" of the Islamic Society of North America, a sister organization to NAIT and also an unindicted terror co-conspirator.
Esam Omeish
Also, Dar al-Hijrah trustee Esam Omeish gave $250 to Obama the same month as Barzinji.
Omeish was forced to resign his government-appointed position to the Virginia Commssion of Immigration after a video surfaced showing him advocating violent jihad. Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine, a Democrat on Obama's short list for running mate, had named Omeish to the panel.
Omeish is president of the Alexandria, Va.-based Muslim American Society, which was founded by members of the radical Muslim Brotherhood and is the representative of the Muslim Brotherhood in the U.S., according to recent testimony and evidence provided by FBI agent Lara Burns in the terror trial of the Holy Land Foundation.
According to Sperry in the book "Infiltration," Omeish in 2004 used his home to bond out a terrorist suspect jailed for allegedly casing the Chesapeake Bay Bridge.
And from The Corner we have this:
No Obama News? What about the Fairness Doctrine? [Andy McCarthy]
It is outrageous that McCain's choice of Sarah Palin for Veep has overwhelmed Obama campaign news after that historic, moving celebration of change and hope last night. I, for one, will not stand for it. Here then, in the interest of fairness, is some Obama campaign news, from World Net Daily (italics mine):
Muslims in fed terror probe making donations to Obama
Will candidate follow other Dems who gave back jihad-tied funds?
Islamic leaders tied by federal investigators to the radical Muslim Brotherhood in America – including one under active investigation for alleged terror-financing – have recently donated to Sen. Barack Obama's campaign for president, according to Federal Election Commission records reviewed by WND.
Jamal M. Barzinji earlier this year gave Obama $1,000, a gift that records show has not been returned. Other Democratic candidates, including Rep. Jim Moran, have refunded donations from Barzinji since federal agents raided his Virginia home and offices in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
Obama's top Muslim adviser resigned earlier this month over controversy surrounding his ties to an alleged Muslim Brotherhood front connected to Barzinji, who heads a network of Islamic charities and businesses.
Barzinji remains at the center of an active federal investigation into terrorist financing that involves recently convicted terrorist supporter Sami al-Arian. A grand jury is still hearing the widening case in Northern Virginia.
A federal court affidavit alleges "Barzinji is not only closely associated with PIJ (as evidenced by ties to al-Arian, including documents seized in Tampa), but also with Hamas." The Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or PIJ, and Hamas are two known terrorist groups outlawed by the U.S.
Barzinji in November 2000 was arrested and charged with domestic abuse and resisting arrest, according to Fairfax County Police Department criminal records....
According to recently declassified FBI documents posted by the Investigative Project on Terrorism, Barzinji and another board member of an Islamist think tank in Herndon, Va., were listed among "members and leaders of the IKHWAN." The Ikhwan is an Arabic reference to the Muslim Brotherhood, which follows the credo: "The Quran is our constitution, the prophet is our guide; Death for the glory of Allah is our greatest ambition."...
U.S. prosecutors recently declassified an internal Ikhwan document outlining a long-term plan to infiltrate U.S. institutions and Islamize America.
Barzinji has met in the U.S. with key leaders of the Egyptian-based Brotherhood, but he told the Washington Post in 2004 that he and his colleagues abandoned links to them years ago. He said he helped persuade the Brothers to participate in elections as an alternative to armed struggle. Barzinji noted, "It was one of our main contributions to the Ikhwan movement worldwide."...
Barzinji donated $1,000 to Obama on Feb. 6 of this year – one day after his colleague Omer Totonji also donated $1,000 to his campaign. Totonji's father, Ahmad Totonji, also is a subject of the federal investigation. His Herndon, Va., home and offices were raided by agents after 9/11.
That same month, Omar Barzinji of Sterling, Va., contributed $500 to Obama's campaign. He works for Islamist publisher Amana Limited, whose offices also were searched after 9/11.
The Obama campaign, which did not return calls, was rocked earlier this month when its top Muslim adviser, Mazen Asbahi, had to step down over a firestorm surrounding his ties to an alleged Muslim Brotherhood front connected to Jamal Barzinji.
Asbahi, a Chicago lawyer, served on the board of an Illinois-based subsidiary to the North American Islamic Trust, or NAIT, recently named by federal prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator in a major Hamas terror-financing case.
Barzinji was the former secretary of Saudi-funded NAIT, which controls hundreds of radical mosques in the U.S., including the Washington-area mosque connected to at least two of the 9/11 hijackers.... Barzinji is listed in FEC records as a "board member" of the Islamic Society of North America, a sister organization to NAIT and also an unindicted terror co-conspirator
The Jihad Candidate By Rich Carroll
Conspiracy theories make for interesting novels when the storyline is not so absurd that it can grasp our attention. 'The Manchurian Candidate' and 'Seven Days in May' are examples of plausible chains of events that captures the reader's imagination at best-seller level. 'What if' has always been the solid grist of fiction.
Now visualize the television photos of two jet airliners smashing into the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan and remind yourself this act of Muslim terror was planned for eight years.
How long did it take Islam and their oil money to find a candidate for President of the United States? As long as it took them to place a Senator in Illinois and Minnesota? The same amount of time to create a large Muslim enclave in Detroit? The time it took them to build over 2,000 mosques in America? The same amount of time required to place radical Wahabbist clerics in our military and prisons as chaplains?
Find a candidate who can get away with lying about their father being a 'freedom fighter' when he was actually part of the most corrupt and violent government in Kenya's history. Find a candidate with close ties to The Nation of Islam and the violent Muslim overthrow in Africa, a candidate who is educated among white infidel Americans but hides his bitterness and anger behind a superficial smile. Find a candidate who changes his American name of Barry to the Muslim name of Barrack Hussein Obama, and dares anyone to question his true ties under the banner of 'racism'. Nurture this candidate in an atmosphere of anti-white American teaching and surround him with Islamic teachers. Provide him with a bitter, racist, anti-white, anti-American wife, and supply him with Muslim middle east connections and Islamic monies. Allow him to be clever enough to get away with his anti-white rhetoric and proclaim he will give $834 billion taxpayer dollars to the Muslim controlled United Nations for use in Africa.
Install your candidate in an atmosphere of deception because questioning him on any issue involving Africa or Islam would be seen as 'bigoted racism'; two words too powerful to allow the citizenry to be informed of facts. Allow your candidate to employ several black racist Nation of Islam Louis Farrakhan followers as members of his Illinois Senatorial and campaign staffs.
Where is the bloodhound American 'free press' who doggedly overturned every stone in the Watergate case? Where are our nation's reporters that have placed every Republican Presidential candidate under the microscope of detailed scrutiny; the same press who ran other candidates off with persistent detective and research work? Why haven't 'newsmen' pursued the 65 blatant lies told by this candidate during the Presidential primaries? Where are the stories about this candidate's cousin and the Muslim butchery in Africa? Since when did our national press corps become weak, timid, and silent? Why haven't they regaled us with the long list of socialists and communists who have surrounded this 'out of nowhere' candidate or that his church reprinted the Hamas Manifesto in their bulletin, and that his 'close pastor friend and mentor' met with Middle East terrorist Moammar Gaddafi, (Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya)? Why isn't the American press telling us this candidate is supported by every Muslim organization in the world?
The most blatant fact is that this candidate has ZERO interest in traditional American values and has the most liberal voting record in US Senate history. Why has the American main stream media clammed-up on any negative reporting on Barack Obama? Why will they print Hillary Rodham Clinton's name but never write (Hussein) his middle name? Is it not his name? Why, suddenly, is ANY information about this candidate not coming from main stream media, but from the blogosphere by citizens seeking facts and the truth? Why isn't our media connecting the dots with Islam? Why do they focus on the negatives about American soldiers, while Islam slaughters non Muslims daily in 44 countries around the globe? Why does our media refer to Darfur as 'ethnic cleansing' instead of what it really is; Muslims killing non Muslims! There is enough strange, anti- American activity surrounding Barak Obama to peek the curiosity of any reporter. WHERE IS OUR INVESTIGATIVE MEDIA? Answer? The media are fellow travelers with this crypto Muslim liar.
A formal plan for targeting America was devised three years after the Iranian revolution in 1982. The plan was summarized in a 1991 memorandum by Mohamed Akram, an operative of the global Muslim Brotherhood. 'The process of settlement' of Muslims in America, Akram explained, 'is a civilization jihad process.' This means that members of the Brotherhood must 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.'
There is terrorism we can see, smell and fear, but there is a new kind of terror invading The United States in the form of Sharia law and finance. Condoning it is civilization suicide. Middle East Muslims are coming to America in record numbers and building hate infidel mosques, buying our corporations, suing us for our traditions, but they and the whole subject of Islam is white noise leaving uninformed Americans about who and what is really peaceful. Where is our investigative press? Any criticism of Islam or their intentions, even though Islamic leaders state their intentions daily around the globe, brings-forth a volley of 'racist' from the liberal crowd. Lies and deception behind a master plan - the ingredients for 'The Manchurian Candidate' or the placement of an anti-American President in our nation's White House? Is it mere coincidence that an anti-capitalist run for President at the same time Islamic sharia finance and law is trying to make advancing strides into the United States? Is it mere coincidence this same Muslim candidate wants to dis-arm our nuclear capability at a time when terrorist Muslim nations are expanding their nuclear weapons capability? Is it mere coincidence this candidate wants to reduce our military at a time of global jihad from Muslim nations?
Change for America? What change?To become another Islamic country?
This Could Present A Problem For Israel
Cross-posted from the Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/29/AR2008082903594_3.html?wpisrc=newsletter
In Israel, A Clash Over Who Is a Jew
Ultra-Orthodox Contest Conversions
In Israel, A Clash Over Who Is a Jew
Ultra-Orthodox Contest Conversions
By Griff Witte
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, August 30, 2008; A01
ASHDOD, Israel -- Yael converted to Judaism in 1992, and for the next 15 years she lived in Israel, celebrating the major holidays and teaching her children about the Jewish faith.
But when she and her husband sought a divorce last year, she said, the ultra-Orthodox rabbis in charge of the process had some questions. Among them: Did Yael observe the Sabbath? Did she obey the prohibition on sex during and after menstruation?
Dissatisfied with the answers, the rabbis nullified her conversion. Yael did not need a divorce, they ruled, because she had never been married. She had never been married because she had never been Jewish. And because she had never been Jewish, her children were not, either.
"I was in shock. I couldn't believe it," said Yael, 43, who would allow only her Hebrew name to be published out of privacy concerns. Blond, blue-eyed and athletic-looking, Yael is baffled by the ordeal. "My kids grew up Jewish," she said. "They don't know anything else."
Yael's personal trauma has become a cause for Israeli soul-searching over what it means to be Jewish, a term that carries both religious and ethnic dimensions. The case has set off a roiling debate between those who see themselves as saving Judaism and those whose first priority is to safeguard the Jewish state.
On one side are ultra-Orthodox leaders who are using their long-standing dominance of Israel's rabbinical court system -- which has authority over marriages, divorces and conversions -- to tighten restrictions governing who can become Jewish. They see themselves as defending the religious purity of a people who, according to their interpretation of Jewish law, need to live apart from other groups.
Those on the other side are much more concerned with demographics: They believe that at a time when the number of Arabs living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is poised to surpass the number of Jews, Israel needs all the converts it can get. This group includes secular Jews, but it is led by the religious Zionists, who form the core of the settlement movement in the occupied territories and who feel it is their duty to populate the biblical land of Israel.
The stakes have escalated since Yael's conversion was tossed out: When she appealed to the High Rabbinical Court of Israel, it not only upheld the original decision but also threw into doubt the legality of thousands of other conversions.
"There is a cultural war going on between various segments of Jewish society," said Benjamin Ish-Shalom, chairman of the Joint Institute for Jewish Studies. A trim man with a philosophical bearing who relishes any discussion of Judaism, he helps administer a government-funded education program for Israelis who need help getting through the rigorous process of conversion.
Over the past two decades, Israel has admitted hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, over the objections of ultra-Orthodox leaders who spoke out against allowing non-Jews to enter the country. Many of the immigrants lacked the paperwork to prove their Jewish ancestry. Others had fathers or grandparents who were Jewish, but did not qualify as Jewish themselves because Judaism is passed down through mothers. Until now, ultra-Orthodox leaders have not acted as forcefully to invalidate immigrant conversions.
To Ish-Shalom, facilitating conversion has been good for the converts, good for Judaism and good for the state. "Israel needs people. It needs loyal people," he said.
At the moment, there is rough parity between the Palestinian and Jewish populations in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, according to Eliyahu Ben-Moshe, a demographer and former deputy director of Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics. Because of a high Arab birth rate, Ben-Moshe said, they are expected to establish a clear majority in the coming decades -- a terrifying prospect for Israeli policymakers as the well of diaspora Jews who are willing to immigrate to Israel dries up.
The ultra-Orthodox, Ish-Shalom argues, are damaging that effort by requiring converts to heed strict standards. Ultra-Orthodox leaders don't disagree. They believe that God originally expelled the Jews from the land of Israel because of their lack of religious devotion and that the secular nature of the modern Israeli nation is unacceptable. As a result, many are anti-Zionist.
"There's something more important than the state of Israel and Zionism," said Moshe Gafni, a member of Israel's parliament who represents the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party.
Wearing the customary ultra-Orthodox uniform of black pants and white shirt, Gafni speaks forcefully and with deep conviction: "Unlike Christians, we Jews are not missionaries. If someone really wants to join the Jewish people, we're going to make it difficult for them."
Gafni's view is rooted in his interpretation of Jewish law. To him, there are two kinds of Jews: those who were born of Jewish mothers into the faith, and those who can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are willing to abide by Jewish law and accept the hundreds of mitzvoth, or commandments, that govern an observant Jew's daily life.
To admit others, he said, would be to destroy the integrity of a community that, according to God's will, needs to stay distinct.
While the ultra-Orthodox are only about 11 percent of Israel's Jewish population -- approximately the same share as the religious Zionists -- they have wielded increasing power in recent years as high birth rates swell their numbers. Ben-Moshe said he expects them to double their share of the Jewish population within the next 20 years.
Israel's notoriously unstable political system, too, has helped raise their influence: Mainstream Israeli politicians usually need ultra-Orthodox parties in their governments to build a majority coalition.
Over time, the ultra-Orthodox have grown bolder in challenging the Israeli government's efforts to convert non-Jewish immigrants.
Unwittingly, Yael became a part of that campaign when her husband filed for divorce.
A Protestant by birth who grew up in Denmark, she moved to Israel in 1988 to be with her Jewish boyfriend. Because there is no civil marriage in Israel, she needed to convert to marry him here. The process took a year of intense study of Jewish prayers, holidays and traditions.
"Ordinary Israelis don't know half of what I learned," she said while sitting at her kitchen table in this city by the Mediterranean. Like most ordinary Israeli Jews, her level of observance was not up to the standards of the ultra-Orthodox.
Still, she had no idea that her conversion could be nullified -- especially 15 years after the fact. In their 51-page decision, the rabbis in Ashdod who heard the divorce petition wrote that "most of the converts lie to the rabbis when they promise to keep the mitzvoth after the conversion. . . . How can one bury one's head in the sand and continue letting into the vineyard of the Jewish people these total non-Jews?"
Yoseph Sheinin, chief rabbi of Ashdod, did not take part in the ruling, but he praised it as a means of correcting the government's mistakes. "The idea of Zionism was to bring Jews here. The moment they brought Gentiles here, they bankrupted the movement," he said.
When Yael appealed to the High Rabbinical Court in Jerusalem, she was again subjected to tough questioning -- most of it focused on prohibitions relating to sex. "It was all about our private life -- our very private life," she said. "It was simply terrible."
In a lengthy ruling, the Jerusalem judges attacked Rabbi Chaim Drukman, a religious Zionist who oversaw Yael's conversion along with thousands of others as part of an aggressive government effort to increase the Jewish population of Israel. Every one of those conversions, the court ruled, should be called into question.
Drukman said the decision strikes at the heart of the Zionist project. "We feel a responsibility for the people of Israel," he said, his bookshelves lined with copies of the Talmud. "They don't. They only care about their small circle."
Indeed, the backlash against the ruling has prompted proposals for alternative courts that would take a more lenient view of Jewish law, or the institution of civil marriage.
Susan Weiss, a lawyer whose Center for Women's Justice is handling Yael's appeal to Israel's Supreme Court, said she is hoping that the case helps to "change the system from its roots."
Until then, however, the government and the rabbinical courts continue to work at cross-purposes -- with the government spending millions of shekels annually to bring people into the fold of Judaism, and the courts trying to keep them out.
Former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, a major advocate for easing the conversion process, used to "pound on the table and say, 'If I had to convert, I would not pass,' " said Avigdor Leviatan, head of Israel's conversion office. "The problem lies with the rabbinical courts. There the system collapses."
Special correspondent Samuel Sockol contributed to this report.
Friday, August 29, 2008
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Extra, Extra, Read All About It !
AP Lies about Obama’s Red Mentor
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
![[logo+AP.gif]](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCGVFX21T1JgC7c8ssYrn9jiHc-D9PAoi0A-lXVvIhTuY7uTmbjLcfLrtUz642Uo0N055Hr2a5mM5FbpGZ5B2UF8PdkX7rbN47Vbe1RikL7NOAqB-_a5gDAyUKl2imqXd1mCIMKKt_LS3I/s1600-rw/logo+AP.gif)
![[150px-Hammer_and_sickle_svg.png]](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgS3FXtk5wrjt4zaLpT3u2NYYWb4qpjJ0_tM5nr8l0zQlsxRXeyIdxow9eVOBr1_ahSSID7k5kkNWRcGMAfCzFM5W5RV2Iv41ichqPb-08JYPCdSz9bNjsu97PD9Zd8j_WUqgFHlENjgbVO/s1600-rw/150px-Hammer_and_sickle_svg.png)
Cross posted from Do the Right Thing
http://dotherightthing-cyberpastor.blogspot.com/2008/08/ap-lies-about-obamas-red-mentor.html
H/T to redhawk.
H/T to redhawk.
By Cliff Kincaid,
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Family Security Matters
The influential Associated Press (AP) wire service has belatedly run a story about Barack Obama’s Marxist mentor without mentioning the smoking-gun evidence that the mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, was a Communist Party member. The dishonest story, which represents damage control for the Obama campaign, was written by AP writer Sudhin Thanawala.
AP is one of the largest news agencies and serves thousands of print and electronic media outlets.
Under the innocuous headline, “Writer offered a young Barack Obama advice on life,” the story calls Davis, a member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) when it faithfully echoed the Stalinist line, merely a “left-leaning black journalist and poet” known for “leftist politics” and someone who might be accused by some of having “allegedly anti-American views.”
Davis was not a “journalist” in any real sense of the term. He was a propagandist and racial agitator for the CPUSA. He was also a recruiter for the communist cause.
Media Bias.
The slanted AP story features quotes only from supporters or friends of Davis and Obama. But those picked to defend Davis are themselves interesting.
Ah Quon McElrath, identified as merely “a friend” of Davis’s and quoted by AP, was actually an organizer for the communist-controlled International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). The ILWU was led by Davis’s friend and associate, secret CPUSA member Harry Bridges. Davis wrote for a newspaper, the Honolulu Record, which was controlled by the CPUSA and subsidized by the ILWU.
McElrath is quoted by AP as saying, “You could get a lot of strength from a person like Frank who had suffered all the discrimination...that a black man goes through in America.”
Davis went to Hawaii in 1948 after consulting with Bridges and Paul Robeson, another secret CPUSA member. He was a mentor to Obama during the years 1975-1979 and died in 1987.
Obama supporter Dr. Kathryn Takara is quoted in the AP piece as saying that “Frank was part of a group of black vanguard intellectuals.” Takara was the associate producer of a program about Davis that, like the AP story, ignored his CPUSA affiliation. So while she knows a lot about Davis, she seems blind to the evidence of Davis’s service to the communist cause.
In fact, Davis was a hard-core but secret CPUSA member with a history of involvement in CPUSA fronts who was so much of a Stalinist that he opposed U.S. participation in World War II during the Hitler-Stalin Pact, but then supported U.S. involvement after Nazi Germany invaded Soviet Russia.
Strangely, the AP article quotes John Edgar Tidwell, a University of Kansas professor who edited Davis’s books, as declining by e-mail an interview request because Davis has allegedly become the victim of a “McCarthy-era strategy of smear tactics and condemnation by association.” Tidwell knows that Davis was a secret CPUSA member and cites evidence in one of his books, including from one of Davis’s private letters, to prove it. Davis refused to deny his CPUSA membership as late as 1956, when a congressional inquiry had named him as a member of the communist underground.
So “McCarthyism” has become telling the truth about communists? Why has Tidwell taken such a low-profile during the presidential campaign when he should have so much to offer about Davis - and possibly Obama? Why the silent treatment?
The Big Question
Not surprisingly, AP leaves many major questions unanswered. The wire service notes that Frank Marshall Davis is referred to in Obama’s book Dreams From My Father “only as Frank.”
But why? What does Obama have to say about this curious omission? Could it have something to do with the fact that, by the time Obama wrote his book, he knew that Davis was a Communist? And that he deliberately covered this up? Or did he know it earlier?
This is the key question: What did Obama know and when did he know it?
Why didn’t AP ask this question? Was it afraid of the answer? Or did the campaign not want to comment?
There are more questions: Other than what was reported in Obama’s book, and by Davis’s friends and associates, what was the nature of the relationship between the two of them? Did Davis ever try to recruit Obama into the communist cause? Did Obama leave this out of his book, too?
AP does note that Davis was “an important influence” on Obama but doesn‘t mention Davis‘s communist views and how he took the Stalinist line before, during, and after World War II.
AP even uses the term “mentor,” noting that Obama “struggled to find mentors in his search for a black identity.” But the failure to mention that Davis was a Communist means that AP deliberately ignored the newsworthy significance of the relationship.
Davis “published several volumes of poetry,” AP said, failing to note that they include poems praising the Soviet Red Army and mocking Christian missionaries.
Strange Silence
AP quotes John Edgar Tidwell in a book as saying about Davis, “He made his vision into a beacon, a light shedding understanding and enlightenment on the problems that denied people, regardless of race, national origin or economic status, their constitutional rights.”
But AP doesn’t quote Tidwell as confirming that Davis was a Communist, a member of a political party funded and controlled by Moscow. And AP doesn’t note the evidence that Davis and his comrades tried to take over the NAACP in order to transform its Honolulu branch into a front for the Stalinist line.
What’s more, AP doesn’t note that Davis accused prominent black author Richard Wright of “treason” for breaking with and exposing the CPUSA.
“In spite of his writings,” AP says, “Davis scholars dismiss the
idea that he was anti-American.”
Why not tell us what was in those writings? Like the private letter in the possession of Davis scholar Tidwell in which Davis tries to recruit a prominent poet to the CPUSA.
Which of course raises the disturbing questions that must be asked:
- Did Davis recruit Obama?
- Was Obama, like Davis, Bridges and Robeson, ever a secret CPUSA member?
- Could Obama’s possible secret relationship with the CPUSA help explain why the first person ever to publicly mention that “Frank” was Frank Marshall Davis, and that he had a relationship with Obama, was Gerald Horne, a writer for a CPUSA publication?
Interestingly, Horne made this disclosure or boast at a reception for the CPUSA archives at Tamiment Library at New York University. The interesting title of his talk was, “Rethinking the History and Future of the Communist Party.”
Horne referred to “Frank Marshall Davis, who was certainly in the orbit of the CP - if not a member…” Of course, we know he was a member.
So how and why was Horne in a position to disclose this blockbuster information about Davis and Obama? Did he have inside information?
Two things are clear: All of Davis’s personal papers should be immediately released in the name of the public’s right to know. And Davis’s FBI file, also in the possession of Tidwell, should be released as well (AIM has filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the same file).
These are questions that must be answered because, other than Obama’s recent Berlin speech, where do we find any solid evidence of his opposition to the communist philosophy?
The Delay
Coming more than five months after AIM ran its first story exposing Davis’s influence over Obama, there is no excuse for AP’s blatant dishonesty. It seems to represent another example of what Andrew Walden of the Hawaii Free Press has referred to as a campaign to create a CPUSA-free version of Hawaii history.
It is noteworthy that the AP writer, Sudhin Thanawala, who is based in Honolulu, wrote a previous story about Obama’s upbringing which began, “Growing up as a young man of mixed race, Barack Obama benefited from the spirit of tolerance that defined Hawaii’s racial climate.” Nothing about the CPUSA, which was a major influence in Hawaii, was in that story, either. This piece quoted Takara as well.
Some supporters of Davis and Obama, including Davis’s self-proclaimed son, have been waging a vigorous defense of Davis, even on Obama’s official website, and this pressure could have gotten to AP. But this alleged son, Mark Davis, has no credibility, having written erroneously that his father was not a CPUSA member and not Obama‘s mentor.
If the AP wire service were doing its job, it should have broken this story, rather than running something five months later trying to distort and obscure the truth.
AIM is urging its supporters to monitor where this dishonest AP story is appearing and protest to the appropriate editors that it deliberately ignores the truth about Davis‘s communist affiliations, which were documented in numerous congressional hearings and reports in addition to Tidwell-edited books. These editors can ask AP to correct the record and publish the truth.
Obama Campaign Influence?
The blatant fraud and deception in the AP story may reflect thinking at the highest levels of the Obama campaign that, if the complete truth about the Obama-Davis relationship were made known, the candidate would be sunk. They must understand that Obama’s baggage would prevent him from getting a security clearance in the U.S. Government (none is required for a presidential candidate).
After all, they must be asking themselves, what American in his or her right mind would vote for a candidate who took “advice about race and college” - to quote AP - from a Communist pawn of Moscow?
Viewed in a national security context, the Frank Marshall Davis scandal is far more serious than Obama and his wife and children hearing Jeremiah Wright’s anti-American and anti-white sermons. Indeed, the Davis influence on Obama may help explain why Obama would attend Wright’s church, take his children there, and be receptive to his message for many years. It also may explain why Obama would admittedly attend socialist conferences and pick Marxist professors as friends in college before launching his political career in the home of communist terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.
But if you didn’t know that Davis was a Communist, this pattern of associations with unsavory characters cannot be traced back to Obama’s formative high-school years.
So the AP story looks like an attempt to put the best possible face on something that could fatally wound Obama and leave him in the position this November of being perceived as a fringe McGovern-style candidate without McGovern’s legislative credentials and war record.
Depths of Dishonesty
Let me explain how dishonest this AP story is.
AP called my public relations representative shortly after I held a May 22nd briefing through America’s Survival, Inc., releasing two reports that featured extensive documentation about Obama‘s communist connections. One, by Herbert Romerstein and myself, examined Davis and his influence on Obama in Hawaii. The other examined Obama’s communist and socialist connections in Chicago. This material was provided to the AP reporter and I personally followed up, offering any additional information which might be needed.
I didn’t hear back.
Now I know why. The reporter all along was carefully planning a piece designed to whitewash Davis and try to save Obama’s campaign from the biggest scandal of all - his association with an identified communist.
Who or what is the reporter scared of? Or is the reporter just blatantly dishonest? Whatever the motive, this is more evidence of a notorious pro-Obama media bias that we must quickly act to overcome.
Indeed, the AP story has to be understood in the context of media support for Obama becoming a major issue of the campaign. It should be remembered that Obama’s campaign strategist, David Axelrod, is a former Chicago Tribune reporter, and Obama’s press spokesperson is Linda Douglass, formerly of CBS News, ABC News, and the National Journal.
Was the AP’s Thanawala performing a free service for the campaign? Whatever the case, the story is itself a scandal and another low point for journalism. It also provides an opportunity for the truth to come out - about Obama and his lapdog press corps.
*AP’s main number in New York is: 1-212-621-1500. AP is run by a board of directors and its managing director for U.S. news is Michael Oreskes, a former New York Times journalist. The AP executive editor is Kathleen Carroll.
Family Security Matters Contributing Editor Cliff Kincaid is the Editor of Accuracy in Media, and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org.
Posted by dean
------------------------------------------------------------------
A note from Radarsite: This could be, should be, would be a devasting blow to the Obama campaign. But unfortunately it's explosive impact has been, and will continue to be muffled by a sympathetic MSM, led by the media giant AP. As we have seen time and again Obama has been awarded some special place in our media's rarified elitist universe, inviolate and immune from even the most damaging facts. He has become a symbol and an idol, and as such has been virtually unassailable.Until now.
Now, some chinks in his armor are beginning to appear. His vulnerability is becoming more and more problematic. He is actually losing ground among women and young voters -- something that would have been all but inconceivable just a few months ago. Truth will be our salvation. And articles such as this one will be our ammunition.
We simply must defeat Barack Obama. If he wins, we lose. We lose everything. - rg
JBlog:
Total Score 80
Radarsite: AP Lies about Obama’s Red Mentor Cross posted from Do the Right Thinghttp://dotherightthing-cyberpastor.blogspot.com/2008/08/ap-lies-about-obamas-red-mentor.htmlH/T to redhawk. By Cliff Kincaid,Tuesday, August 5, 2008Family Security MattersThe influential Associated Press (AP) wire serv... Dateline: 2008-08-05 4:07pm PT (2190 words)
Radarsite: AP Lies about Obama’s Red Mentor Cross posted from Do the Right Thinghttp://dotherightthing-cyberpastor.blogspot.com/2008/08/ap-lies-about-obamas-red-mentor.htmlH/T to redhawk. By Cliff Kincaid,Tuesday, August 5, 2008Family Security MattersThe influential Associated Press (AP) wire serv... Dateline: 2008-08-05 4:07pm PT (2190 words)
The views expressed in these blog posts are those of the author and not of the Sun-Times News Group.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Churchill's Parrot: Obama v McCain in 60 seconds or less
"Let's all go to the movies."
(Click on the link below.)
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Democrats...aah excuse me, I mean, Dictators In Action!
Watch out Massachusetts, you're next!
CALIFORNIA SCHEMIN'Big Brother to control thermostats in homes?
Proposed mandate would grant utility companies unlimited remote access to regulate temperatures
Posted: January 11, 2008 1:00 am Eastern - By Chelsea Schilling
© 2008 WorldNetDaily.com
Add thermostats to the list of private property the government would like to regulate as the state of California looks to require that residents install remotely monitored temperature controls in their homes next year.
The government is seeking to limit rolling blackouts and free up electric and natural gas resources by mandating that every new heating and cooling system include a "non-removable" FM receiver. The thermostat is also capable of controlling other appliances in the house, such as electric water heaters, refrigerators, pool pumps, computers and lights in response to signals from utility companies. If contractors and residents refuse to comply with the mandate, their building permits will be denied.
The proposal, set to be considered by the commission Jan. 30, requires each thermostat to be equipped with a radio communication device to send "price signals" and automatically adjust temperature up or down 4 degrees for cooling and heating, as California's public and private utility organizations deem necessary.
Claudia Chandler, assistant executive director for the California Energy Commission, told WND the new systems would be highly beneficial to residents.
"From the Energy Commission's perspective, all we're doing is ensuring that this new technology is included in new homes instead of the older programmable technology," she said.
The Programmable Communication Thermostat, or PCT, will allow power authorities to control home temperatures while denying consumers ability to override settings during "emergency events." Nowhere in the proposal does it clarify what type of situation would qualify as an "emergency," but Chandler offered her own explanation: "An emergency is when the utilities need to implement rolling blackouts and drop load in order to be able to meet their supplies because the integrity of the grid is being jeopardized."
 |
She claims residents will be able to manually override controls in all cases, but the 2008 Building Efficiency Standards (Page 64), known as Title 24, specifically states: "The PCT shall not allow customer changes to thermostat settings during emergency events."
Michael Shames, executive director of California's Utility Consumers' Action Network, told WND he believes the idea of a chip consumers are unable to override is not feasible. While he considers the technology to be a positive development, he said denying consumers control over their own appliances is a highly problematic concept.
"The implications of this language are far-reaching and Orwellian," he said. "For the government and utility company to say, 'We're going to control the devices in your house, and you have no choice in that matter,' that's where the line is drawn. That sentence must be removed."
Additionally, no provisional exceptions for people with health conditions worsened by excessive temperatures are mentioned in the current proposal; however, the Energy Commission spokeswoman said existing supply problems are more worrisome to Californians with health issues than the projected solution.
"I actually was more concerned in the 2001 electricity crisis that folks on critical medical devices like respirators, kidney dialysis machines and things like that were going through rolling blackouts," Chandler said. "That's a very challenging thing to face. Moving somebody's temperature up by a few degrees really seems mild by comparison."
Jim Gunshinan, managing editor of Home Energy, based in Berkley, Calif., told WND the changes would also provide consumers with an option to control thermostats via the Internet.
"That means someone can turn on the air conditioning before they leave work for home and have the house comfortable when they walk in the door. Or if they forgot before leaving home for a ski trip, they can remotely lower the thermostat at home and save money."
Gunshinan claims the new system is needed because it will be more beneficial to the environment than building new energy facilities for the state.
"Since utilities have old, inefficient and dirty power plants on reserve to use during peak demand hours, dropping demand will mean less use of these dirty power plants and less pollution."
Some critics say California authorities will be incapable of enforcing compliance if homeowners and renters bootleg heating and cooling systems from other states, block radio reception with inexpensive FM transmitters or simply install window air conditioning units and space heaters, a bypass method that could use more energy than traditional units.
Concerned California residents expressed outrage with the proposal in several online postings:
"I hate this state. Why don't we just fly a communist flag while we are at it? We are planning a move out of state. I'm done."
"This is insane. Please, everyone reading this, take action. Write your representatives, call the RINO governor, call your local radio programs and, lastly, write letters to the editors of your local papers. Dear God, just when I thought California couldn't get much worse!"
Other opponents of the state proposal expressed concern that its mandatory nature is a sign of increasing "Big Brother" government control.
The California Energy Commission invites public comment until the proposed adoption date, Jan. 30. Written responses must indicate "Docket No. 07-BTSD-1." Members of the California Energy Commission are appointed by the governor. Concerned individuals can also contact California state legislators.
Dumber and Dumber - The dumbing down of America
Now who could have predicted this one? Just about anyone! For it was all planned by your government dictators at the U. S. Department of Education.
"... the teachers should deliberately reach for power and then make the most of their conquest" in order to "influence the social attitudes, ideals and behavior of the coming generation..."
SAT scores stay at lowest level in a decade
By ASSOCIATED PRESS - August 26, 2008
For a second straight year, SAT scores for the most recent high school graduating class remained at the lowest level in nearly a decade, a trend attributed to a record number of students now taking the test.
The 1.52 million students who took the test is a slight increase from last year but a jump of nearly 30 percent over the past decade. Minority students accounted for 40 percent of test-takers, and 36 percent were the first in their families to attend college. Nearly one in seven had a low enough family income to take the test for free.
"More than ever, the SAT reflects the face of education in this country," said Gaston Caperton, president of the College Board, which owns the test and released the results today.
The class of 2008 scored an average of 515 out of a possible 800 points on the math section of the college entrance exam, a performance identical to graduating seniors in the previous year.
Scores in the critical reading component among last spring's high school seniors also held steady at 502, but the decline over time has been more dramatic: the past two years represent the lowest reading average since 1994, when graduating seniors scored 499.
By comparison, the highest average reading score in recent decades was 530 by the class of 1972, although that score dropped dramatically within five years to near present levels. The latest math average is just five points below the 35-year high of 520, reached three years ago.
Those historical highs are tempered by the test's more selective reach a generation ago, said Jim Hull, a policy analyst for the Center for Public Education, which is affiliated with the National School Boards Association.
"You only had the best of the best taking the test," he said. "The SAT has become far more inclusive."
Average scores also remained constant on the writing portion of the SAT, which was added to the entrance exam in 2006. For the second year in a row, the average score was 494 — a three-point drop from its debut year.
The writing test is still a work in progress, with many colleges waiting for several years of data before factoring that portion into admissions decisions.
But the College Board released data today suggesting that scores on the newest portion of the exam are the most accurate gauge of first-year success in college. Studies by the University of Georgia and the University of California support the group's findings, it reported.
Males on average scored four points higher than females on the reading section (504 vs. 500) and 33 points higher on the math test (533 vs. 500), but females on average outscored their counterparts on the writing test, 501 to 488.
Average ACT scores released earlier this month showed a slight decrease, for the class of 2008 — 21.1 compared to 21.2 a year ago, on a scale of 1 to 36. With 1.42 million test-takers, the rival exam still lags behind the more-entrenched SAT, but is growing at a faster rate.
That trend is only likely to continue, said SAT critic Bob Schaeffer of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, who called the new three-part SAT a "flop." Nearly 800 colleges now consider the SAT an optional test for admissions, according to the group
The Communist Party of the United States is made up of 100% Democrats and approximately 50% Republicans...it's no wonder we're falling through the cracks!
"For years, leaders in education, industry, the media, banking, etc., have promoted those with the same Weltanschauung (world view) as theirs...." - Blue Prints for a World Revolution (1928)
"One day we shall start to spread the most theatrical peace movement the world has ever seen. The capitalist countries, stupid and decadent ... will fall into the trap offered by the possibility of making new friends. Our day will come in 30 years or so... The bourgeoisie must be lulled into a false sense of security." - The Lenin School of Political Warfare in Moscow
"Toward Soviet America by William Z. Foster. Head of the Communist Party USA, Foster indicates that a National Department of Education would be one of the means used to develop a new socialist society in the U.S." (1932 - New books are published urging World Order)
Dare the School Build a New Social Order? is published. Educator author George Counts asserts that:"... the teachers should deliberately reach for power and then make the most of their conquest" in order to "influence the social attitudes, ideals and behavior of the coming generation..."
SAT scores stay at lowest level in a decade
By ASSOCIATED PRESS - August 26, 2008
For a second straight year, SAT scores for the most recent high school graduating class remained at the lowest level in nearly a decade, a trend attributed to a record number of students now taking the test.
The 1.52 million students who took the test is a slight increase from last year but a jump of nearly 30 percent over the past decade. Minority students accounted for 40 percent of test-takers, and 36 percent were the first in their families to attend college. Nearly one in seven had a low enough family income to take the test for free.
"More than ever, the SAT reflects the face of education in this country," said Gaston Caperton, president of the College Board, which owns the test and released the results today.
The class of 2008 scored an average of 515 out of a possible 800 points on the math section of the college entrance exam, a performance identical to graduating seniors in the previous year.
Scores in the critical reading component among last spring's high school seniors also held steady at 502, but the decline over time has been more dramatic: the past two years represent the lowest reading average since 1994, when graduating seniors scored 499.
By comparison, the highest average reading score in recent decades was 530 by the class of 1972, although that score dropped dramatically within five years to near present levels. The latest math average is just five points below the 35-year high of 520, reached three years ago.
Those historical highs are tempered by the test's more selective reach a generation ago, said Jim Hull, a policy analyst for the Center for Public Education, which is affiliated with the National School Boards Association.
"You only had the best of the best taking the test," he said. "The SAT has become far more inclusive."
Average scores also remained constant on the writing portion of the SAT, which was added to the entrance exam in 2006. For the second year in a row, the average score was 494 — a three-point drop from its debut year.
The writing test is still a work in progress, with many colleges waiting for several years of data before factoring that portion into admissions decisions.
But the College Board released data today suggesting that scores on the newest portion of the exam are the most accurate gauge of first-year success in college. Studies by the University of Georgia and the University of California support the group's findings, it reported.
Males on average scored four points higher than females on the reading section (504 vs. 500) and 33 points higher on the math test (533 vs. 500), but females on average outscored their counterparts on the writing test, 501 to 488.
Average ACT scores released earlier this month showed a slight decrease, for the class of 2008 — 21.1 compared to 21.2 a year ago, on a scale of 1 to 36. With 1.42 million test-takers, the rival exam still lags behind the more-entrenched SAT, but is growing at a faster rate.
That trend is only likely to continue, said SAT critic Bob Schaeffer of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, who called the new three-part SAT a "flop." Nearly 800 colleges now consider the SAT an optional test for admissions, according to the group
The Communist Party of the United States is made up of 100% Democrats and approximately 50% Republicans...it's no wonder we're falling through the cracks!
Help Save America By Throwing Out The Politic Elite
(That means all incumbents!)
Monday, August 25, 2008
Must I keep Warning You ?
From Cassandra to Jesus Christ, it is amazing how often the doomed choose to ignore those who warn them of their coming fate.
And now they will pray among us!
August 24, 2008
Obama's Islamist problem
Democratic presidential candidate Barak Obama's appearance before a large evangelical congregation in Orange County over the weekend underscored an evident imperative of his campaign: Emphasize his Christian faith and put to rest insistent rumors that he secretly adheres to the Islamic creed of his father and youth.
The effort to minimize any grounds for fearing Obama has an abiding, if covert, attachment to Islam has prompted him to risk offending Muslims in order to avoid off-message controversies and photo ops. It is, therefore, curious in the extreme that he is giving a prominent role at next week's Democratic convention to a leader of an organization identified by the Department of Justice as a Muslim Brotherhood front organization and an unindicted co-conspirator in a terrorism financing conspiracy.
Mattson of ISNA to pray at Demo Convention
Dr. Ingrid Mattson is the president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), an organization created by the radical, Saudi-financed Muslim Students Association. She will represent the Muslim community at the first-ever interfaith prayer service at a Democratic nominating convention.
Now, we know from the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) trial that ISNA is one of many Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated groups operating in America. We also know from a Brotherhood document entered into evidence in that case (which is currently being retried after the first prosecution resulted in a mistrial) that, "The work [of Brotherhood members] 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 believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions."
The question is why would Barak Obama's campaign – which has prevented Muslim women wearing headcoverings from being in the background of photographs with the candidate and which recently fired a Muslim-outreach coordinator who had ties to another unindicted HLF co-conspirator – allowed itself to be put in such company?
Presumably, the response will be one heard from the Bush administration: ISNA is a large, "mainstream" Muslim-American organization that is an appropriate vehicle for outreach to that community. In fact, Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England and former Under Secretaries of State Nick Burns and Karen Hughes are among the senior U.S. government officials who have lavished praise on the group and legitimated ISNA by meeting with Dr. Mattson and others.
The difference is that, for whatever reason, Sen. Obama clearly is exercising care about his public associations with Muslims. Given that, one would think that he would want, in particular, to avoid any actions that could be described as a "third term" for a Bush administration that has repeatedly embraced and allowed itself to be influenced by Muslim Brotherhood fronts.
Certainly, such would seem to be the message of Sen. Obama's cashiering of Mazen Asbahi, his campaign's erstwhile Muslim coordinator. The problem was not simply that Asbahi had served on a board with Jamal Said, who the government chose not to indict but nonetheless implicated in the HLF racketeering conspiracy in support of the terrorist group, Hamas.
It was that the board on which Messrs. Asbahi and Said served was for a company owned by yet another Saudi-funded, Brotherhood front and un-indicted coconspirator: the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT). The company, Allied Asset Advisors, is, as the Wall Street Journal put it: "a subsidiary of the North American Islamic Trust...which is supported financially by the government of Saudi Arabia, holds title to many mosques in the U.S. and promotes a conservative brand of Islam compatible with the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood and also akin to the fundamentalist style predominant in Saudi Arabia." NAIT is, in other words, a powerful instrument in the Islamists' campaign to dominate and radicalize the Muslim community in America. ISNA's Dr. Mattson is an ex officio member of the NAIT board of directors.
Another problem for Sen. Obama would have been that Allied Asset Advisors is one of a growing number of companies that engages in Shariah-Compliant Finance (SCF). This practice ostensibly eschews investments involving interest, pork, gambling and other activities considered impure by authoritative Shariah advisors. Far from being just one of many religious-based "socially responsible" investing options, however, SCF is a vehicle for legitimating the Islamists' repressive, totalitarian Shariah code and establishing its seditious tenet that Muslims here will not be governed by the U.S. Constitution and laws.
Whatever the reasons for the Democratic presidential candidate's sensitivities about the Islamic faith, he has an obligation to make clear his attitude towards the Muslim Brotherhood, its mission in America and his willingness to be associated with its front organizations. It is still the case that most Muslims in this country do not want any part of Shariah law. It behooves Sen. Obama to make known now whether he is willing to embrace those who do, and his true attitude towards their ambition to impose the Islamists' barbaric code here through such subterfuges as Shariah-Compliant Finance.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributor Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy and a columnist for the Washington Times.
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Lights Out on Liberty
Cross-posted from Hillsdale College: http://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis/archive/issue.asp?year=2008&month=08
Mark Steyn
Author and Columnist
Mark Steyn
Author and Columnist
Mark Steyn's column appears in the New York Sun, the Washington Times, Philadelphia’s Evening Bulletin, and the Orange County Register. In addition, he writes for The New Criterion, Maclean’s in Canada, the Jerusalem Post, The Australian, and Hawke’s Bay Today in New Zealand. The author of National Review’s Happy Warrior column, he also blogs on National Review Online and appears weekly on the Hugh Hewitt Radio Show. He is the author of several books, most recently America Alone: The End of The World as We Know It. Born in Toronto, Mr. Steyn lives with his family in New Hampshire.
The following is adapted from a lecture delivered at Hillsdale College on March 13, 2008, while Mr. Steyn was in residence as a Eugene C. Pulliam Visiting Fellow in Journalism.
ON AUGUST 3, 1914, on the eve of the First World War, British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey stood at the window of his office in the summer dusk and observed, "The lamps are going out all over Europe." Today, the lights are going out on liberty all over the Western world, but in a more subtle and profound way.
Much of the West is far too comfortable with state regulation of speech and expression, which puts freedom itself at risk. Let me cite some examples: The response of the European Union Commissioner for Justice, Freedom, and Security to the crisis over the Danish cartoons that sparked Muslim violence was to propose that newspapers exercise "prudence" on certain controversial subjects involving religions beginning with the letter "I." At the end of her life, the Italian writer Oriana Fallaci—after writing of the contradiction between Islam and the Western tradition of liberty—was being sued in France, Italy, Switzerland, and most other European jurisdictions by groups who believed her opinions were not merely offensive, but criminal. In France, author Michel Houellebecq was sued by Muslim and other "anti-racist groups" who believed the opinions of a fictional character in one of his novels were likewise criminal.
In Canada, the official complaint about my own so-called "flagrant Islamophobia"—filed by the Canadian Islamic Congress—attributes to me the following "assertions":
America will be an Islamic Republic by 2040. There will be a break for Muslim prayers during the Super Bowl. There will be a religious police enforcing Islamic norms. The USS Ronald Reagan will be renamed after Osama bin Laden. Females will not be allowed to be cheerleaders. Popular American radio and TV hosts will be replaced by Imams.
In fact, I didn’t "assert" any of these things. They are plot twists I cited in my review of Robert Ferrigno’s novel, Prayers for the Assassin. It’s customary in reviewing novels to cite aspects of the plot. For example, a review of Moby Dick will usually mention the whale. These days, apparently, the Canadian Islamic Congress and the government’s human rights investigators (who have taken up the case) believe that describing the plot of a novel should be illegal.
You may recall that Margaret Atwood, some years back, wrote a novel about her own dystopian theocratic fantasy, in which America was a Christian tyranny named the Republic of Gilead. What’s to stop a Christian group from dragging a doting reviewer of Margaret Atwood’s book in front of a Canadian human rights court? As it happens, Christian groups tend not to do that, which is just as well, because otherwise there wouldn’t be a lot to write about.
These are small parts of a very big picture. After the London Tube bombings and the French riots a few years back, commentators lined up behind the idea that Western Muslims are insufficiently assimilated. But in their mastery of legalisms and the language of victimology, they’re superbly assimilated. Since these are the principal means of discourse in multicultural societies, they’ve mastered all they need to know. Every day of the week, somewhere in the West, a Muslim lobbying group is engaging in an action similar to what I’m facing in Canada. Meanwhile, in London, masked men marched through the streets with signs reading "Behead the Enemies of Islam" and promising another 9/11 and another Holocaust, all while being protected by a phalanx of London policemen.
Thus we see that today’s multicultural societies tolerate the explicitly intolerant and avowedly unicultural, while refusing to tolerate anyone pointing out that intolerance. It’s been that way for 20 years now, ever since Valentine’s Day 1989, when the Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa against the novelist Salman Rushdie, a British subject, and shortly thereafter large numbers of British Muslims marched through English cities openly calling for Rushdie to be killed. A reader in Bradford wrote to me recalling asking a West Yorkshire policeman on the street that day why the various "Muslim community leaders" weren’t being arrested for incitement to murder. The officer said they’d been told to "play it cool." The calls for blood got more raucous. My correspondent asked his question again. The policeman told him to "Push off" (he expressed the sentiment rather more Anglo-Saxonly, but let that pass) "or I’ll arrest you." Mr. Rushdie was infuriated when the then Archbishop of Canterbury lapsed into root-cause mode. "I well understand the devout Muslims’ reaction, wounded by what they hold most dear and would themselves die for," said His Grace. Rushdie replied tersely: "There is only one person around here who is in any danger of dying."
And that’s the way it’s gone ever since. For all the talk about rampant "Islamophobia," it’s usually only the other party who is "in any danger of dying."
War on the Homefront
I wrote my book America Alone because I wanted to reframe how we thought about the War on Terror—an insufficient and evasive designation that has long since outlasted whatever usefulness it may once have had. It remains true that we are good at military campaigns, such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our tanks and ships are better, and our bombs and soldiers are smarter. But these are not ultimately the most important battlefronts. We do indeed face what the strategists call asymmetric warfare, but it is not in the Sunni triangle or the Hindu Kush. We face it right here in the Western world.
Norman Podhoretz, among others, has argued that we are engaged in a second Cold War. But it might be truer to call it a Cold Civil War, by which I mean a war within the West, a war waged in our major cities. We now have Muslim "honor killings," for instance, not just in tribal Pakistan and Yemen, but in Germany and the Netherlands, in Toronto and Dallas. And even if there were no battles in Iraq and Afghanistan, and if no one was flying planes into tall buildings in New York City or blowing up trains, buses, and nightclubs in Madrid, London, and Bali, we would still be in danger of losing this war without a shot being fired.
The British government recently announced that it would be issuing Sharia-compliant Islamic bonds—that is, bonds compliant with Islamic law and practice as prescribed in the Koran. This is another reason to be in favor of small government: The bigger government gets, the more it must look for funding in some pretty unusual places—in this case wealthy Saudis. As The Mail on Sunday put it, this innovation marks "one of the most significant economic advances of Sharia law in the non-Muslim world."
At about the same time, The Times of London reported that "Knorbert the piglet has been dropped as the mascot of Fortis Bank, after it decided to stop giving piggy banks to children for fear of offending Muslims." Now, I’m no Islamic scholar, but Mohammed expressed no view regarding Knorbert the piglet. There’s not a single sura about it. The Koran, an otherwise exhaustive text, is silent on the matter of anthropomorphic porcine representation.
I started keeping a file on pig controversies a couple of years ago, and you would be surprised at how routine they have become. Recently, for instance, a local government council prohibited its workers from having knickknacks on their desks representing Winnie the Pooh’s sidekick Piglet. As Pastor Martin Niemoller might have said, "First they came for Piglet and I did not speak out because I was not a Disney character, and if I was, I’d be more of an Eeyore. Then they came for the Three Little Pigs and Babe, and by the time I realized the Western world had turned into a 24/7 Looney Tunes, it was too late, because there was no Porky Pig to stammer, ‘Th-th-th-that’s all folks!’, and bring the nightmare to an end."
What all these stories have in common is excessive deference to—and in fact fear of—Islam. If the story of the Three Little Pigs is forbidden when Muslims still comprise less than ten percent of Europe’s population, what else will be on the black list when they comprise 20 percent? In small but telling ways, non-Muslim communities are being persuaded that a kind of uber-Islamic law now applies to all. And if you don’t remember the Three Little Pigs, by the way, one builds a house of straw, another of sticks, and both get blown down by the Big Bad Wolf. Western Civilization is a mighty house of bricks, but you don’t need a Big Bad Wolf when the pig is so eager to demolish the house himself.
I would argue that these incremental concessions to Islam are ultimately a bigger threat than terrorism. What matters is not what the lads in the Afghan cave—the "extremists"—believe, but what the non-extremists believe, what people who are for the most part law-abiding taxpayers of functioning democracies believe. For example, a recent poll found that 36 percent of Muslims between the ages of 16 and 24 believe that those who convert to another religion should be punished by death. That’s not 36 percent of young Muslims in Waziristan or Yemen or Sudan, but 36 percent of young Muslims in the United Kingdom. Forty percent of British Muslims would like to live under Sharia—in Britain. Twenty percent have sympathy for the July 7 Tube bombers. And, given that Islam is the principal source of population growth in every city down the spine of England from Manchester to Sheffield to Birmingham to London, and in every major Western European city, these statistics are not without significance for the future.
Because I discussed these facts in print, my publisher is now being sued before three Canadian human rights commissions. The plaintiff in my case is Dr. Mohamed Elmasry, a man who announced on Canadian TV that he approves of the murder of all Israeli civilians over the age of 18. He is thus an objective supporter of terrorism. I don’t begrudge him the right to his opinions, but I wish he felt the same about mine. Far from that, posing as a leader of the "anti-hate" movement in Canada, he is using the squeamishness of a politically correct society to squash freedom.
As the famous saying goes, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. What the Canadian Islamic Congress and similar groups in the West are trying to do is criminalize vigilance. They want to use the legal system to circumscribe debate on one of the great questions of the age: the relationship between Islam and the West and the increasing Islamization of much of the Western world, in what the United Nations itself calls the fastest population transformation in history.
Slippery Slope
Our democratic governments today preside over multicultural societies that have less and less glue holding them together. They’ve grown comfortable with the idea of the state as the mediator between interest groups. And confronted by growing and restive Muslim populations, they’re increasingly at ease with the idea of regulating freedom in the interests of social harmony.
It’s a different situation in America, which has the First Amendment and a social consensus that increasingly does not exist in Europe. Europe’s consensus seems to be that Danish cartoonists should be able to draw what they like, but not if it sparks Islamic violence. It is certainly odd that the requirement of self-restraint should only apply to one party.
Last month, in a characteristically clotted speech followed by a rather more careless BBC interview, the Archbishop of Canterbury said that it was dangerous to have one law for everyone and that the introduction of Sharia to the United Kingdom was "inevitable." Within days of His Grace’s remarks, the British and Ontario governments both confirmed that thousands of polygamous men in their jurisdictions are receiving welfare payments for each of their wives. Kipling wrote that East is East and West is West, and ne’er the twain shall meet. But when the twain do meet, you often wind up with the worst of both worlds. Say what you like about a polygamist in Waziristan or Somalia, but he has to do it on his own dime. To collect a welfare check for each spouse, he has to move to London or Toronto. Government-subsidized polygamy is an innovation of the Western world.
If you need another reason to be opposed to socialized health care, one reason is because it fosters the insouciant attitude to basic hygiene procedures that has led to the rise of deadly "superbugs." I see British Muslim nurses in public hospitals riddled with C. difficile are refusing to comply with hygiene procedures on the grounds that scrubbing requires them to bare their arms, which is un-Islamic. Which is a thought to ponder just before you go under the anaesthetic. I mentioned to some of Hillsdale’s students in class that gay-bashing is on the rise in the most famously "tolerant" cities in Europe. As Der Spiegel reported, "With the number of homophobic attacks rising in the Dutch metropolis, Amsterdam officials are commissioning a study to determine why Moroccan men are targeting the city’s gays."
Gee, whiz. That’s a toughie. Wonder what the reason could be. But don’t worry, the brain trust at the University of Amsterdam is on top of things: "Half of the crimes were committed by men of Moroccan origin and researchers believe they felt stigmatized by society and responded by attacking people they felt were lower on the social ladder. Another working theory is that the attackers may be struggling with their own sexual identity."
Bingo! Telling young Moroccan men they’re closeted homosexuals seems certain to lessen tensions in the city! While you’re at it, a lot of those Turks seem a bit light in their loafers, don’t you think?
Our Suicidal Urge
So don’t worry, nothing’s happening. Just a few gay Muslims frustrated at the lack of gay Muslim nightclubs. Sharia in Britain? Taxpayer-subsidized polygamy in Toronto? Yawn. Nothing to see here. True, if you’d suggested such things on September 10, 2001, most Britons and Canadians would have said you were nuts. But a few years on and it doesn’t seem such a big deal, nor will the next concession, or the one after that.
The assumption that you can hop on the Sharia Express and just ride a couple of stops is one almighty leap of faith. More to the point, who are you relying on to "hold the line"? Influential figures like the Archbishop of Canterbury? The politically correct bureaucrats at Canada’s Human Rights Commissions? The geniuses who run Harvard, and who’ve just introduced gender-segregated swimming and gym sessions at the behest of Harvard’s Islamic Society? (Would they have done that for Amish or Mennonite students?) The Western world is not run by fellows noted for their line-holding: Look at what they’re conceding now and then try to figure out what they’ll be conceding in five years’ time. The idea that the West’s multicultural establishment can hold the line would be more plausible if it was clear they had any idea where the line is, or even gave any indication of believing in one.
My book, supposedly Islamaphobic, isn’t even really about Islam. The single most important line in it is the profound observation, by historian Arnold Toynbee, that "Civilizations die from suicide, not murder." One manifestation of that suicidal urge is illiberal notions harnessed in the cause of liberalism. In calling for the introduction of Sharia, the Archbishop of Canterbury joins a long list of Western appeasers, including a Dutch cabinet minister who said if the country were to vote to introduce Islamic law that would be fine by him, and the Swedish cabinet minister who said we should be nice to Muslims now so that Muslims will be nice to us when they’re in the majority.
Ultimately, our crisis is not about Islam. It’s not about fire-breathing Imams or polygamists whooping it up on welfare. It’s not about them. It’s about us. And by us I mean the culture that shaped the modern world, and established the global networks, legal systems, and trading relationships on which the planet depends.
To reprise Sir Edward Grey, the lamps are going out all over the world, and an awful lot of the map will look an awful lot darker by the time many Americans realize the scale of this struggle.
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