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
This isserious... I did not come up with the title of this blog; I got it from my Congresswoman's email with the name in the subject line:
This is serious for all the reasons pointed out by Congresswoman Roby but it is also serious from another point of view. The average American knows little or nothing about any of the things Roby is addressing (I was going to use average voter, but I would be more correct with average American). The other day I was listening to some woman scream and holler on a YouTube video about just what it is Obama has failed at while at the same time bragging about all of his accomplishments (which were just echoing Obama's own words) that were obvious all lies. This is serious because we have altogether too many brainwashed, un-informed people that have no idea that America's freedom is at stake with every day Obama is allowed to stay in office. I have openly told Congresswoman Roby that there's no one in Congress with the intestinal fortitude to do anything about Obama's removal from office...she just looked at me an went on about something else (that was about two years ago at a town hall meeting in Enterprise, Alabama). Other than that, I like Congresswoman Martha Roby...and just in case you're interested, I included her email newsletter. I hope ya'all take her serious...seriously! ~ Norman E. Hooben
Friends,
Iran is on quite a roll. By now you've seen the news that the Obama
Administration has lifted
sanctions on Iran, releasing $100 billion in assets to them. Then,
the Administration engaged in a "prisoner" swap with Iran, releasing
seven Iranians who were accused or convicted of serious crimes in the United
States in exchange for Americans held hostage by Iran for doing nothing wrong.
Of course, this is in the wake of Iran detaining 10 U.S. Navy Sailors after
their boats mistakenly veered into Iranian waters, brazenly firing rockets
within a few miles of an American aircraft carrier, and aggressively ramping up
its ballistic missile program.
First of all, we are all thankful that
the Americans held hostage by Iran are now free. So many have hoped and prayed
for these souls, and we all rejoice in their coming home.
However, the
details of the deal should concern all Americans. The seven Iranians the
president just released were accused or convicted of serious crimes. The
Americans Iran finally freed- a pastor, a teacher, and a reporter among them -
had done nothing wrong. The moral equivalence assigned to them by this
“prisoner” swap is galling, to say nothing of the money that will now apparently
flow to the Iranians.
We are also thankful that the sailors were
released unharmed and our boats were returned. But, on the front pages of most
every major newspaper and on the nightly news, Americans saw the images of our
sailors kneeling, hands behind their head being detained by Iranian authorities.
People around the world saw those images too, and Iran didn’t miss a golden
opportunity to use this incident for propaganda purposes on their state-run
television. It
was disturbing, and not something we should simply ignore or dismiss,
especially given Iran’s past actions.
That’s why I’m bewildered at
President Obama’s attempt to sidestep Congress and pursue sanctions relief for
Iran. He and Secretary of State John Kerry continue to ignore and make excuses
for Iran’s actions to protect their legacy nuclear deal.
Granting Iran
sanctions relief is a bad idea, and I'm working to build support for legislation
that would walk back these actions by President Obama and Secretary Kerry. We
could vote on the bill before the end of January, and I hope that Congress can
send a strong, bi-partisan message that it's
time to hold Iran accountable for its actions.
Ending Common Core and
Federal Coercion in Education:
Recently, Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds Act to empower states
and local governments in education decisions, effectively pushing back on
federal government overreach. Hopefully by now you have seen this news and read
about the important provisions in this bill. But I wanted take a moment to share
with you this good article about ESSA and more specifically my language
included in the bill to "take away the Department of Education's ability to
attach curriculum and assessment policy strings to special grants and
waivers."
Some have misrepresented this bill and its impact, which is a shame. I worked
hard to include strong “state authority” language in this bill, and I was proud
to join Senator Jeff Sessions and other members of the Alabama delegation to
support its final passage.
I am always grateful for "District Work" periods that allow me the
opportunity to get around AL-02 and meet with folks from a variety of
backgrounds. This week I'm traveling the district, meeting with students, civic
clubs, business leaders and others, giving them an update on legislative action
and hearing from them.
I'll be around the district, from Prattville to Troy to Evergreen and many
other stops in between. I look forward to meeting with and hearing from many of
you. Be sure to check my Facebook and Twitter feed for updates from the
road!
Stay In
Touch:
You can keep up with the latest news by finding me on Facebook
and Twitter
where I post updates daily. Please let
me know if there’s anything my office can assist you with. My staff
and I work for you.
In early June 2012, investigative reporter Michael Patrick Leahy at Breitbart.com[1] revealed a scathing critique of Warren published by highly regarded Rutgers Law Professor Philip Shuchman which was uncovered in the 1990-1991 edition of the Rutgers Law Review.[2]
The 60-page analysis concerned a book Warren co-authored, As We Forgive Our Debtors: Bankruptcy and Consumer Credit in America. Shuchman wrote:
Most of their study replicates several earlier research publications. These are hardly mentioned. The writers make extravagant and false claims to originality and priority of research. There appear to be serious errors in their use of statistical bases which result in grossly mistaken functions and comparisons. Some of their conclusions cannot be obtained even from their flawed findings. The authors have made their raw data unavailable so that its accuracy cannot be independently checked. In my opinion, the authors have engaged in repeated instances of scientific misconduct. [emphasis added]
Professor Shuchman argued that Warren and her co-authors jumped to conclusions, proclaimed new findings which were not new, and most importantly, ignored or did not accurately reflect data.
On page 240 of the Rutgers article, Schuchman asserted that some of the finding reached reached conclusions which were not supported by the data:
Burgeoning consumer credit and increased volatility, they say, are the two primary systemic factors that caused the “startling increases” in consumer bankruptcy in the 1980′s. But these increases are less than in other recent periods and are only about one-sixth more than the increases in business bankruptcies, which suggests that consumer credit is not the cause of the increase in personal bankruptcy filings. [footnotes omitted]
Professor Shuchman went even further (at pp. 243-244), and suggested that the data was presented in such a way as to preclude verification:
This book contains so much exaggeration, so many questionable ploys, and so many incorrect statements, that it would be well to check the accuracy of their raw data, as old as it is. But the authors arranged matters so that they could not provide access to the computer printouts by case, with the corresponding bankruptcy court file numbers, thus preventing any independent check of the raw data in the files from which they took their information. [footnotes omitted]
Leahy followed up with an examination of whether, as some had claimed, Warren and her co-authors were cleared of the charges made by Professor Shuchman:[3]
Twenty-two years later, Professor Shuchman’s charges of “scientific misconduct” against Elizabeth Warren and her co-authors remain publicly unanswered and unresolved. These unresolved charges associated with her first major book raise continue to raise questions that hang over Elizabeth Warren’s entire body of academic work.
The next three articles in this series will address the conduct of three institutions enmeshed in this scandal: The University of Texas, the National Science Foundation, and Harvard University.
Leahy looked into investigations conducted by The University of Texas, and concluded that the investigations were inadequate:[4]
The lack of serious scrutiny of Ms. Warren’s academic research has continued for the subsequent two decades. Questions about Ms. Warren’s empirical studies have not been fully explored, and specific policies she has promoted–in particular those that led in 2010 to the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act and its onerous Consumer Financial Protection Bureau–have been imposed upon the public.
Breitbart News is not alleging that Sullivan, Warren, and Westbrook engaged in scientific misconduct. We are, however, presenting evidence that suggests the 1991 investigation conducted by the University of Texas into the allegations brought by Philip Shuchman in his scathing sixty page review[5] of the book Sullivan, Warren, and Westbrook co-authored in 1989 was neither thorough nor exculpatory.
Warren’s research also has been criticized by law professor Todd Zywicki.[6] In September 2010, before Warren was a declared candidate for political office, Zywicki wrote[7] that Warren’s much publicized findings as to medical bankruptcies was suspect:
Consider Ms. Warren’s much-ballyhooed study on the alleged link among health problems, medical expenses and personal bankruptcy filings. Published in the February 2005 issue of Health Affairs, the report was timed to head off bipartisan bankruptcy legislation that was enacted later that year. Ms. Warren and her co-authors claimed that “at least” 46% of personal bankruptcy filings in 2001 (the year from they collected the data) were the result of “medical causes,” and that this represented a 23-fold increase over 20 years.
Both conclusions are extremely suspect. First, the study provided an implausibly broad definition of “medical bankruptcy”—including any filer who reported uncontrolled gambling, drug or alcohol addiction, or the birth or adoption of a child.
Equally dubious, the authors classified a bankruptcy as having a “major medical cause” if the individual had accumulated more than $1,000 in out-of-pocket medical expenses (uncovered by insurance) over the course of two years prior to filing—regardless of income, and even if the debtor did not cite illness or injury among the reasons for bankruptcy….
In contrast to Ms. Warren’s studies, a battery of analysis, including research done by the Department of Justice’s Executive Office of the United States Trustee (which oversees the administration of bankruptcy cases), and by David Dranove and Michael Millenson of Northwestern University, concluded that fewer than 20% of bankruptcies are caused by health problems or medical expenses.
Last year Ms. Warren and her co-authors were back with an even more dramatic study, in the American Journal of Medicine, timed to promote President Obama’s health-care reform law. Drawing on 2007 filings, the authors concluded that 62% of bankruptcy filings were the result of medical issues and that the odds that a bankruptcy had a medical cause had doubled between just 2001 and 2007. This study was also flawed.
After Congress made it harder for people to skip out on their debts in 2005, the number of bankruptcy filings plummeted. In 2001, the year Ms. Warren used for the first study, there were 1,452,030 personal bankruptcy filings; in 2007 there were 822,590. Even if we are to accept the methodologies of the two studies for the sake of argument, there were 670,838 “medical bankruptcies” in 2001 and 510,828 medical bankruptcies in 2007—a drop of 160,000 per year. Yet Ms. Warren’s article nowhere acknowledges that the absolute number of bankruptcies and purported medical bankruptcies declined.
Smilar criticisms of Warren’s methodologies and conclusions were made by writer Megan McArdle:[8]
Does this persistent tendency to choose odd metrics that inflate the case for some left wing cause matter? If Warren worked at a think tank, you’d say, “Ah, well, that’s the genre.” On the other hand, you’d also tend to regard her stuff with a rather beady eye. It’s unlikely to have been splashed across the headline of every newspaper in the United States. Her work gets so much attention because it comes from a Harvard professor. And this isn’t Harvard caliber material–not even Harvard undergraduate.
So I think it matters on two levels. One, it matters how we evaluate the work–and I’ve been disappointed at how uncritically some people I really respect have been willing to accept the 2001 and 2007 findings. Not because I don’t think that there are medical bankruptcies in the United States; I do! I think medical bills are certainly the primary cause of some of those filings, though I don’t know how many, and I’ve also been writing about bankruptcy long enough to know that assigning any one cause to the ultimate financial meltdown is, in many cases, impossible. (If you have nice consumer goods and no health insurance, does a car accident count as a “medical bankruptcy” or a budgeting deficiency? If you lived right up to the edge of your income, was a job loss, or your spending pattern, to blame? How you answer these questions depends on a large number of prior value judgments that are hotly contested in our society.)
It matters that we get this stuff right. I am among the majority who would like to see bankruptcies reduced in this country, and we’re not going to be very effective at that if we run around thinking we can cure 2/3 of them by putting a national health care system in place, when in reality a third or less have any strong causal relationship with medical bills. Obviously, this was also held out as an argument for PPACA, making an implicit promise to the American people which I believe to be false.
But it also matters because a large part of Warren’s prominence comes from the fact that she’s an academic. If she came from . . . well, the sort of think tank that publishes this sort of advocacy science . . . she would have considerably less glamor, and power.
And perhaps it mattes most of all because this woman is now under consideration to head a powerful new agency. If this is how she evaluates data, then isn’t that going to hamper her in making good policy? If we’re going to have a consumer financial protection agency, I want one that has a keen eye to the empirical evidence on consumer welfare–not one that makes progressives most happy by reinforcing their prior beliefs.
Megan McArdle[9] pointed out the weakness of making the causal connection on such a wide scale of medical bills and bankruptcy, since bankruptcy filers themselves did not identify medical expenses as the cause of the bankruptcies (emphasis mine):
Elizabeth Warren has another study out showing that medical expenses contribute to more than half of all bankruptcies–indeed, this time, it’s 70%, up from the 50% she found in 2001.
Now, it is possible that this is true. The fact that it seems to disagree with every other study I’ve ever read that is not authored by Elizabeth Warren, and also, the self-reports of the people in her study (only about a third of whom attribute their bankruptcy to a health problem) could just be a fluke. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s wrong.
Yet upon closer examination, it turns out that it is not just wrong, but actively, aggressively wrong. Warren and her co-authors have obscured important and obvious facts that call the integrity of the work into serious question.
The text itself raises a huge red flags. It’s hard to believe that more than half of people who have been pushed into bankruptcy by a medical issue don’t understand this fact. Perhaps they are not the brightest bulbs on the Christmas tree, but could it really be true that most people catapaulted into a financial crisis by their medical bills don’t even notice that health care expenses are their main problem?
McArdle elaborated on other allegedly misleading aspects of the study, and then followed up with:[10]
She’s a professor at Harvard, and the head of the Congressional TARP oversight panel. This conveys a certain responsibility to present data in the most illuminating way, not in the way that will induce journalists to say things that aren’t true.
The post 2005 increase in bankruptcies isn’t being driven by medical bankruptcies. It’s simply rebounding from what every single analyst at the time, including Elizabeth Warren, agreed was an unsustainable drop.
Source: Your News Wire(Originally posted December 12, 2015) Putin’s 2016 New Year Speech – I’m Going To Defeat The Illuminati
Vladimir Putin
by Baxter Dmitry ~ Brave Vladimir Putin appears set for a face off with the Illuminati in a last minute, desperate attempt to stop the outbreak of World War III, Kremlin sources claim. Putin, whose pets include a black Labrador, brown bear, and 1.5 million Chechans, has decided on his 2016 New Years resolutions a remarkable three weeks early, proving yet again that he is two steps ahead of Barack Obama, the Turkish air force, and ISIS. “In 2016 I will stop the Illuminati from starting world war three. And quit smoking,” Putin announced to a star struck Kremlin tour group, before fixing them with his trademark pitiless stare. “I will do this…with my bare hands,” he continued. According to Kremlin sources the tour group burst into spontaneous applause. His new year’s resolution speech comes after Illuminati member Jacob Rothschild accused Putin of being a traitor to the New World Order, amid Russia ‘going rogue’ in their fight against ISIS in Syria. Putin, the proud dad of two pretty amazing kids, can bench press 220 and listed his interests as “dioxin, polonium 210, thallium, and bending lead pipes” in his high school yearbook.
"...and I hope he includes Henry Kissinger!" ~ Storm'n Norm'n
Over at American Thinker I responded to JBD's reply with the following:
Marco Rubio was born May 28, 1971, in Miami, Florida, to Mario Rubio (Cuban citizen) and Oria Garcia (Cuban citizen). Both his parents were Cubans citizen when Marco Rubio was born and who had immigrated to the United States in 1956 and waited to become naturalized U.S. citizens until 1975.
Sure enough it was posted as seen below:
Not too long later I checked in again and low and behold, it disappeared. Gee, for a moment there I thought maybe I forgot to post it properly...
So I posted it again ↓
Less than two minutes later it was gone ↓
Did you ever hear the expression, "There's something rotten in Denmark." It's starting to smell over there at American Thinker.
The editorial below has a link to a syllabus/course in "Understanding Islamophobia in America" which is a complete waste of time in my opinion. By this point in time if the reader has little or no knowledge of Islam, I provided this brief introduction:
Islam ~ Dictionary.com noun 1. the religious faith of Muslims, based
on the words and religious system founded by the prophet Muhammad and taught by
the Koran, the basic principle of which is absolute submission to a unique and personal
god, Allah. 2. the whole body of Muslim believers, their
civilization, and the countries in which theirs is the dominant religion.
Islam
~ Winston Churchill
That religion, which above
all others was founded and propagated by the sword—the tenets and principles of
which are instinct with incentives to slaughter… How dreadful are the curses which
Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as
dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic
apathy. The effects are apparent
in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture,
sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the
followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life
of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity.
Islam
~ Pakistani President Musharraf (born and raised a Muslim but college educated
in the west)
Islamic countries will remain backward
unless they concentrate more on scientific and technological development…the time had come for Islamic nations
to take part in collective self-criticism.Once such an assessment is made, it
would not be difficult to realize that the entire Islamic world was far behind
the developed world…the unhealthiest, the Muslim Ummah, or the Islamic world was
presently living in darkness.Today we
are the poorest, the most illiterate, the most backward, the unhealthiest, the
most un-enlightened, the most deprived, and the weakest of the entire human
race.
Islam ~ Plancks Constant
Before Islam made them
stupid, before Islam hobbled their minds, before Islam stifled their
creativity, Arabs were inquisitive, smart, inventive, clever fellows who made
great contributions to civilization. That is to say, they were just like their
Semite cousins the Jews.
The photo edit above was provided to drive home a point...provided by Storm'n Norm'n
After all the terrorist attacks (bombings, beheadings, burning alive, and whatever else you may have heard of) committed by Muslims (AKA Islamists) for no other reason than their victims are not
See Video Below
Muslims, you should have a fear...and if you want to call it Islamophopbia then be my guest. Further, there should be no separation from so-called radicalized Muslims and Muslims; it's Islam any way you look at it! It is written in their books, their Quran, in their charters, and whatever else they subscribe to... all Muslims believe that they should dominate the world and if that's not enough to fear then you may have a problem...and I don't have to be a doctor to diagnose it.
Meanwhile, whether you know it or not, Islam (rather it's countries like Saudia Arabia) is paying for our destruction by donating large sums of money to colleges and universities throughout the country for the sole purpose of indoctrinating professors who in turn will pass their ideology onto their students. One such university is the subject of the following editorial. When you have finished reading I sincerely hope you come down with the same malady that I contracted; Georgetownophobia! They scare the you-know-what out of me! ~ Norman E. Hooben
"Ikhwan-101" – Georgetown Profs Team
Up With Suspected MB Front
by Abha Shankar ~ IPT News
Two of Georgetown University's top faculty in religion are partnering with a private Virginia think
tank long suspected of serving as a front for the Muslim Brotherhood.
The think tank in question, the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), twice has been the subject of law enforcement investigations, once during the 1980s and again starting in 2003. Its senior leaders were listed among "members and leaders of the IKHWAN [Muslim Brotherhood]" in the United States in records obtained by the IPT from a closed FBI investigation through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Georgetown professors John Voll and Jonathan Brown each are listed as faculty members at the Fairfax Institute, an IIIT school. Voll and Brown also occupy senior faculty positions at Georgetown's Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU).
The center received a $20 million gift from Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal in 2005.
The Fairfax Institute offers certificates in Imam and Muslim Community Leadership and in Islamic Thought. That may sound benign on its face, but the Institute's parent, the IIIT, long has touted the "Islamization of Knowledge," a program which makes Islam the key to solving society's ills.
In implementation plans, IIIT co-founder Ismail al-Faruqi made it clear his institute's outreach was not about teaching Westerners about Islam. Rather, its purpose is to infuse superior Islamic principles to add revelation to Western academic pursuits which are based solely on "reasoning."
While the Muslim community in the undeveloped world "is in many respects backward," Faruqi wrote in 1982, "...in the respect of possessing the truth, the ideological statement of it which is most conducive to religious, ethical, and material prosperity at the same time, the ummah is second to none. Because of Islam, the ummah alone possesses the vision required for the felicity of humankind, for history to be as Allah (SWT) has desired it to be."
During a 2010 lecture, Voll described Faruqi, a Muslim Brotherhood luminary who was murdered in 1986, as "a good case of the modern intellectual who is a believer and provides a good example for thinking about what it means to be a 'believing intellectual' in the modern era." ACMCU founding director John Esposito was a student of Faruqi's at Temple University.
IIIT, located about 22 miles from Washington, D.C. in Herndon, Va., also was investigated for possible terror financing. A 2003 search warrant affidavit alleged that the think tank was part of a network of up to 100 non-profit and for-profit organizations, inter-related through corporate officers and holding companies that facilitated terrorist funding. Financial records reviewed by law enforcement officials exhibited "a convoluted web of multiple transactions between related corporations and charities that made it virtually impossible for federal investigators to ascertain where the money ... ultimately went."
Some of the money that was clearly traceable included direct payments to a Florida think-tank which then was home to at least four members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad's Shura Council, in effect, its governing board. One of those directors, Ramadan Shallah, has led the terrorist group since late 1995. Sami Al-Arian, a former University of South Florida professor who created the World and Islam Studies Enterprise (WISE), self-identified as the PIJ board's secretary. Al-Arian also ran a charity called the Islamic Committee for Palestine (ICP) which was described as "the active arm of the Islamic Jihad Movement Palestine" but was called ICP in America "for security reasons." ICP rallies routinely featured PIJ spiritual leader Abdel Aziz Odeh and PIJ imagery.
IIIT President Taha Jaber Al-Alwani "spoke at ICP conferences with Al-Arian, Shallah, Sheik Odeh (spiritual leader and co-founder of PIJ) and Sheik Rahman (the 'Blind Sheik' convicted of conspiracy to blow up New York tunnels and the United Nations in New York in October 1995). Inasmuch as ICP conferences were, in essence, PIJ conferences, Alwani has long been a supporter of PIJ," the 2003 affidavit said.
In a 1992 letter to Al-Arian, Al-Alwani referred to WISE as "a part of us and an extension of us." Records also list Al-Alwani as chairman of the WISE board of trustees.
In a 2014 IIIT promotional video, Voll says the institute helps American
academics "have a more global view of Islam."
A look at past statements by Voll and Brown shows their consistent pattern of embracing and defending Islamists, including Al-Arian, who was deported from the United States a year ago and is believed to be in Turkey.
A 2007 article Voll co-authored with Esposito described Al-Arian as "a proud and committed American and Palestinian professor and activist" and claimed that both Al-Arian and the American justice system has become "casualties of the erosion of civil liberties post-9/11."
Brown, likewise, has played down the threat from radical Islamists, and has alleged rising Islamophobia to have led to wrongful convictions in a number of federally-prosecuted terrorism cases.
Muslims care about a lot of issues, Brown said last May at a conference organized by the Islamist groups Muslim American Society and the Islamic Circle of North America. That includes events in Kashmir, the Palestinian cause and more. "Or whether it's here in America, whether it's Muslims targeted for entrapment by the Justice Department or whether it's Muslims who are convicted of crimes that they didn't commit because the justice system is biased against them. Because racism and stereotypes against Muslims are allowed to influence the outcome of trials."
This, he claimed, has a chilling effect on free speech.
"It's scary to get up and speak out about Palestine, it's scary to get up and speak about how Muslims who are accused of terrorism might not be guilty and we need to give them the benefit of the doubt."
In a July 2011 interview with The Egyptian Gazette, Brown dismissed any danger from Islamists gaining power in the Egyptian elections following the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak: "I do not think life in Egypt will dramatically change if the president or ruling party are self-proclaimed 'Islamists.' Egypt is already a very Islamic society: no-one drinks in the street, people dress conservatively, even the financial system has to justify its operations in terms of Islam."
"The country is too important to write off and this is not 1979," he added. "The 'Islamic threat' so often touted by Western pundits has been undermined by factors like AK Party rule in Turkey, and it will be less frightening when people see that Egypt is not much different from before."
But once in power, the Brotherhood moved to amend the Constitution to entrench its hold on government, and violently suppressed public protests. Brown was right to distinguish Egypt from Iran in 1979, though. Egypt, unlike the Islamic Republic, still had an independent military which forced the Islamists from power after spontaneous street demonstrations attracted millions of people demanding change.
Voll and Brown already enjoy ample interaction with Islamists through their Georgetown faculty posts.
The ACMCU had to postpone a program on "Egypt and the Struggle for Democracy" in the fall of 2013, after it was revealed that the only Coptic Christian panelist invited was a member of Egypt's Nazi Party.
At a 2012 IamY (Inspiring American Muslim Youth) convention, Brown claimed Muslims were falsely implicated in terrorist cases and blamed Islamophobia for this. As an example, he cited the case of a Staten Island man who was "tried for including the Hizballah channel in a cable package he's offering." The Staten Island man, who Brown claimed was "not even doing anything...just offering a cable channel," in fact pleaded guilty to providing support to the terrorist group Hizballah and was sentenced to 5½ years in prison.
Brown further asserted that al-Qaida operative Tarek Mehanna was convicted "because he simply put up on his website some al-Qaida videos with translations." Mehanna was sentenced to 17½ years in prison in 2012 on terrorism-related charges that included travel to the Middle East to obtain military-type training at a terrorist camp to prepare for jihad against U.S. interests, including American and allied troops stationed in Iraq.
He also criticized the long prison sentences meted out to several senior officials tied to the Holy Land Foundation for funneling millions of dollars to the U.S.-designated terrorist group Hamas: "You have people now, people who ran the Holy Land Foundation charity organization in this country in prison for 60-80 years. Underground, for what? Feeding orphans?" In 2008 a federal jury found all defendants in the trial guilty on all counts of helping finance Hamas.
Brown's boss at Georgetown University, John Esposito, testified as an expert witness for the defense.
In comments provided to the IPT, Jeffrey Bale, an expert on violent political and religious extremism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (MIIS), California, expressed concern at "the affiliation of Professors Voll and Brown with a school linked to the IIIT, a well-known component of the Muslim Brotherhood network in the U.S."
"Both students and other observers who recognize the essentially anti-democratic agendas of such Islamist groups should be concerned about this formal affiliation with the Fairfax Institute because it is another indicator of the pro-Islamist biases of these particular academics," Bale said.
Despite its known radical ties, IIIT continues to operate ostensibly as a legitimate academic institution that seeks to "bridge the intellectual divide between the Islamic tradition and Western civilization" through various funding and outreach programs with mainstream American universities and colleges and government-funded institutions.
In 2005, in line with its funding of WISE at USF in the 1990s, the Virginia think tank offered to endow a chair in Islamic Studies at the University of Central Florida outside Orlando. IIIT also made a $1.5 million grant to George Mason University in 2008 to help expand its Islamic studies program.
IIIT tax records list similar grants, including $25,000 to Georgetown University in 2010; $597,000 to Nazareth College in Rochester, N.Y. between 2008-2012 as well as an additional $500,000 gift for Nazareth to fund the IIIT Chair of Interfaith Studies; $25,000 to Clarion University Foundation in 2009; $5,000 to Binghamton University (The State University of New York) in 2009; and $10,000 to the Eastern Mennonite University in 2010.
In addition, IIIT signed a memorandum of agreement with Shenandoah University in Winchester, Va., to promote academic exchanges that included hosting a program on Islam in collaboration with the radical Muslim Student Association and Student Life's Intercultural Programs at Shenandoah University.
Not every university has taken IIIT's money, however. In 2008, Temple University – where Faruqi once taught Esposito – refused $1.5 million in funding from IIIT for a chair in Islamic studies after concerns were raised about IIIT's alleged ties to terrorist organizations.
In addition to Georgetown professors serving on the faculty of the Fairfax Institute, the IPT investigation found that the Institute recently offered a course taught by instructors from Georgetown University's The Bridge Initiative titled, "Understanding Islamophobia in America."
"Students will learn about the history of the term 'Islamophobia' and its earliest manifestations; its parallels with similar prejudices that have affected other groups through time; the primary mechanisms that drive Islamophobia in the United States; its emergence in both liberal and conservative discourse; its manifestations in mainstream and social media; and creative ways to counter it," a course syllabus posted on the institute's website reads.
It comes as little surprise that the Initiative's project director is John Esposito.
