Pam Geller on the NY Times's "Distortions, Inaccuracies, and Lies"

From Atlas Shrugs:

As expected, the New York Times did an extraordinarily nasty and fallacious piece on me. It is full of distortions, inaccuracies and lies from beginning to end.

Referring to me using terms like "socialite," "dilettante," and other words invoking silly, superficial, purposeless women, is downright farcicial. Show me a socialite who is fighting for American values 20 hours a day. I don't even have lunch, let alone gala charity events. The only thing worthwhile in this piece is the actual interview, which is, frankly, all that really matters. But let's have a cursory look at this piece, shall we?

The numbers quoted from my divorce settlement are grossly, wildly inaccurate. I don't want to air dirty laundry in public, but there is absolutely no truth to what Anne Barnard and Alan Feuer "reported" about this. And although I do not want to get into personal matters, how do they know that my deceased ex "didn’t always agree" with what I was saying? Did they employ a ouija board? Just for knowing, this claim also is patently false.

Of course they hold up my lack of journalistic "credentials" as a disadvantage. Clearly we see how this "advantage" has rendered the New York Times and the rest of the fraternity of credentialed journalists hopelessly inaccurate and incapable of objectivity and responsible journalism. Why no piece like this on Daisy Khan, or Feisal Abdul Rauf, or Sharif El-Gamal?

Here is credentialed journalism: they say without explanation that I "posted doctored pictures of Elena Kagan, the Supreme Court justice, in a Nazi helmet." They don't bother to mention that the Kagan photoshop came after it was revealed that Kagan had cited in her thesis a German Marxist who became a Nazi when Hitler took power. They claim that I said that "a young Barack Obama slept with 'a crack whore,'" without mentioning that in that post I was making a point about unfair journalists (like these Times writers), constructing a reductio ad absurdum about media bias.

Just to show how avid and careful they were in their quest for the facts, they have me video blogging from an Israeli beach. Won't Fort Lauderdale be surprised to find out that the Zionist war machine is now occupying Florida beaches? Richer still was their reference to "arching her bikini-bared back provocatively." Please. I was submerged in the water with my kids in the background. Talk about easily titillated! I never arched my back except to swim away. They've been spending too much time with the Taliban. And they fault me for equating Palestinians with Hamas. The Palestinians elected Hamas, but who cares?

I know they spoke to Pamela Hall, but she is not mentioned in the article. They asked her what my worst traits were, but she must not have given them any grist for their mill.

It's revealing how many times they refer to my "Long Island-accented voice" and upbringing. It says more about them than it does about me. It's elitist, it's snobbish, and it's condescending.

But while they have room for that, you'll notice that the Muslim Brotherhood is nowhere mentioned in this piece, although I referred to them extensively. Even when they referred to the halal Campbell's Soup story, they declined to mention ISNA or the Muslim Brotherhood, only referring to a nameless Islamic group. Why is the New York Times so solicitous or afraid of the Muslim Brotherhood, that they won't mention its name? Nor do they mention the mega-mosque's earlier name, Cordoba Initiative, although it was only known as such for many months.

They refer to my work as a "crusade," but never refer to the supremacists' jihad as anything nefarious. They refer to my work as waging "a form of holy war," but never, ever discuss the real holy war against the West.

They say Paypal branded me a hate site. I know that facts are irrelevant, but they didn't.

In talking about my role in the mosque controversy, they say:

Two days later, Ms. Geller invited readers to protest the “9/11 monster mosque being built on hallowed ground zero,” in a post that was among the first to spread the misimpressions that the project was at the World Trade Center site and would solely house a prayer space.

Who's misimpressioning here? The site of the building is Ground Zero. You can have your own opinion, but you can't have your own facts. That building was hit by the landing gear from one of the planes, and destroyed. It is part of the Ground Zero attack site. And I never said that the building would solely house a prayer space. (Note "prayer space": the Times can't bring itself to call it a mosque, even though the prayer space in this building will be a mosque.)

Even the links they provide are deliberately deceptive. When deriding me for calling Sharif El-Gamal a thug, they don't link to his rap sheet or his threatening of a moderate Muslim. They only link to the post about his being a tax deadbeat, which is not about his thuggishness.

They minimize the mortal threat to Rifqa Bary's life, mischaracterizing her father's death threat to her for leaving Islam for Christianity as Rifqa having "accused her parents of abuse." They say I helped draw "vociferous objectors to a hearing this summer on a since-scrapped proposal for a mosque on Staten Island." Here again, they make no mention of the fact that it was a Muslim Brotherhood mosque. "Vociferous objectors" is Times-speak for patriots and defenders of freedom.

As far as the public school madrassa in Brooklyn goes, I referred extensively to Pamela Hall's seminal work. She was responsible for taking what should have been a Pulitzer-Prize-winning picture of the Almontaser-sanctioned "Intifada NYC" t-shirt. They quote the head of the school, Dabah Almontaser, saying: “New York is the cosmopolitan city of the world. They figured that if they could do it here, they could do it anywhere. And sadly, they did.” Do what? Fight for justice? Stand up against the jihad against Israel? Stand up against a public school being made into a madrassa? I would do it again. And going to Almontaser for her take on the madrassa is like going to the fox for his take on the henhouse.

They gave space to hit-and-run insults from anonymous people at the New York Observer, which was swarming with doctrinaire leftists like Mike Tomasky and Joe Conason, and note: they made no mention of the fact that I worked all my life, from the time I was thirteen. I worked full-time from the time I was seventeen. My high school was on split session; I got out at noon and worked til eight. I worked through college, and never stopped working until I left to raise my children in my late thirties. "Socialite," my eye!

The New York Times said: "And Ms. Geller said, without evidence, that the center’s financing might be tied to terrorists." We know that Rauf is a leading member of the Perdana Organization, the single largest financier of the Turkish terrorist group's jihad flotilla against Israel. Rauf and Daisy Khan have received funding from the Xenel Corporation. The connection between Xenel and al Qaeda, according to the Orlando Sentinel, was persuasive enough that the city of Orlando decided to cancel the contract it had previously awarded to Xenel. The involvement Bin Laden-tied Xenel led to the cancellation of a different 100-million-dollar project in Florida. If such ties would cancel a convention center, why not a 100-million-dollar Islamic supremacist mega mosque at the site of largest attack on American soil by these same players? And yet the Times says I have no evidence.

They ridicule the idea of taqiyya, calling it "the hiding of true beliefs, religiously sanctioned for Muslims, usually minority Shiites, under hostile rule." They don't mention that the idea of religious deception in Islam is not just held by Shi'ites, but is founded on the Koran, which tells Muslims that they can pretend to be friends with unbelievers to "guard themselves against them" (3:28). A hadith explains this as meaning "We smile in the faces of some people, but behind their backs we curse them." That sounds like Rauf, with his love for religious dialogue in English and rejection of it in Arabic, to me.

They claim that I am branding Rauf a "radical Islamist," when in fact his own words are those of a radical: "We tend to forget, in the West, that the United States has more Muslim blood on its hands than al Qaida has on its hands of innocent non Muslims. You may remember that the US-led sanctions against Iraq led to the death of over half a million Iraqi children. This has been documented by the United Nations. And when Madeleine Albright, who has become a friend of mine over the last couple of years, when she was Secretary of State and was asked whether this was worth it, said it was worth it." Referring to jihadis, he says: "How do you tell people whose homes have been destroyed, whose lives have been destroyed, that this does not justify your actions of terrorism? It's hard. Yes, it is true that it does not justify the acts of bombing innocent civilians, that does not solve the problem, but after 50 years of, in many cases, oppression, of US support of authoritarian regimes that have violated human rights in the most heinous of ways, how else do people get attention?" Rauf calls Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi "a very very well known Islamic jurist, highly regarded all over the Muslim world" -- Qaradawi has approved of Palestinian suicide bombings and genocide of the Jews. It was on Qaradawi's authority that Hamas began to use women in suicide attacks. He has called for "drastic" punishment of homosexuals. (Video here.)

They refer to the pain expressed by those who oppose the Ground Zero mega mosque as "heckling." And I had to laugh, of course, when the New York Times said that Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin were getting their talking points from me. Has anyone told Rush yet?

Barnard and Feuer write, "Opposition to Park51 grew — and with it, antipathy for Islam." It wasn't "antipathy for Islam" -- that is more of that racist-Islamophobic-anti-Muslim nonsense. It was outrage at the lack of compassion and sensitivity to the pain and the grief the mega mosque organizers were causing. To suggest that I provided the vocabulary to express this grief, under the guise of "worries about Islam," is laughable. It is justifiable concern about slaughter in the name of jihad, Islamic supremacism, the subjugation of women, and gender apartheid. The dead can't speak.

They're snarky about anyone who goes off the reservation, but they actually refer to the disinformationalists and propagandists of Media Matters as a "media tracking group," and not the left-wing propaganda hate site that it is, void of facts -- like this article. They say: "Her claims were disputed often enough that the liberal media-tracking group Media Matters called on stations (ineffectually) to stop presenting her as an expert." They do not and cannot, however, cite one example where I was actually wrong; instead, they just resort to ad hominem attacks. The Times is implying in this that I was so inaccurate that the smear machine Media Matters called on stations to stop featuring me in the interests of accuracy, when actually Media Matters was afraid that some of the truth was getting out to the public despite their best efforts. That they mention Loonwatch, a Goebbels-style hate site, speaks volumes.

And they say this about the EDL: "Ms. Geller went on to champion as patriotic the English Defense League, which opposes the building of mosques in Britain and whose members have been photographed wearing swastikas. (In the interview, Ms. Geller said the swastika-wearers must have been “infiltrators” trying to discredit the group.)" They don't mention that the EDL unequivocally supports Israel, waves the Israeli flag, has a Jewish division, has Hindu and Sikh members, and does have an ongoing problem with leftist infiltrators joining their rallies in order to try to discredit them by making racist or neo-Nazi statements.

They expose themselves completely when brushing over the death of Aqsa Parvez. They never mention why she didn't have a headstone in the first place (because she brought dishonor to the family, which is why she was murdered, and that dishonor did not merit her being remembered after death). They put "honor killings" in quotes, as if it were something I made up. In all their combing through my site, they seem to have missed this post. Is it any wonder that these reporters don't understand the whole idea of compassion and decency in regard to the Ground Zero mosque, when they put the term "honor killings" in quotes?

One thing the Times got right: the picture of me accompanying the article is accurate!

Charlie Cook on How Democrats Squandered Election 2010

Washington's best political analyst, Charlie Cook, says that if the Democrats lose control of Congress in November, it's their own fault:

Running against former President George W. Bush worked for the first few months of 2009 in special elections but doesn't work so well now. While voters are happy to blame him for the beginning of the recession, he no longer seems to be terribly relevant; attacking him doesn't seem to get much traction these days. Candidates have found that running on the effectiveness and success of their economic stewardship doesn't work, nor on efforts to address climate change or on the new health care law.

Since voters aren't happy at all with Washington or anything that has happened in Washington in years, Democrats don't have much to brag about. Therefore, they have to run against their challengers, just in the same way that Republicans were advised to run by their equally astute advisers in 2006.

So Democrats are now trying to portray the field of Republican challengers and open seat candidates as the most sordid group since "Gov. William J. Lepetomaine" and "Attorney General Hedley Lamarr" put together their group of ax murderers, cattle thieves, and other miscreants to go after Sheriff Bart and the idyllic town of Rock Ridge in Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles.

For those with young children, it may be a good time to make sure the Disney Channel is paid up on your cable and the DVD player is in good working order. You really don't want your kids watching commercial television these days, given the negative ads that are already running by candidates on both sides.

There is no question that Democrats have their backs to the wall. It's unprecedented to see so many incumbents running behind their challengers.

While the Cook Political Report has a general policy of not putting unindicted incumbents in categories worse than our "Toss Up" column, which is akin to the critical ward of a hospital, we are now looking at moving a dozen or so Democratic House incumbents into the Lean Republican column (Sen. Blanche Lincoln is already there).

Furthermore, only one GOP incumbent today seems to be a candidate for moving into Lean Democratic. With less than a month to go to the election, something could obviously happen that would change the trajectory of this election -- but it would have to be something pretty dramatic, and I don't see that happening.

The Coming Ice Age by Elaine Jarvik

Forgive the plug, but I just have to add a link to the website for Salt Lake City's Pygmalion Theatre's production of my cousin Elaine Jarvik's new play, The Coming Ice Age.

It's about someone's difficult transition from the family home to "senior living." The show runs from October 21st through November 6th. Golden Girls is off the air, so if you happen to find yourself in Utah, you might want to buy a ticket...

UPDATE: Salt Lake Tribune article, here.

Pam Geller on the Trial of Geert Wilders

From BigJournalism.com:

The real hero of freedom is not Daisy Khan, but Geert Wilders and others who stand with him. The real ones under threat are not Daisy Khan and the Imam Rauf, but people who have spoken out, even accidentally like Molly Norris, and those who are opposing their Islamic supremacist plan to put a mosque at Ground Zero.

Geert Wilders is our proxy. We are all on trial. Our freedom of speech is on trial. The Organization of the Islamic Conference means to shut us all up. That’s what they were doing in Chicago last week.

Wilders is us. If you value your freedom, stand with him.

Nat Hentoff on Justice Brandeis and the Fourth Amendment

From Jewish World Review:

As Sen. Frank Church said long ago when he was the first to discover the omnipresent spying on us of the National Security Agency (NSA), eventually, "no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything. … There would be no place to hide."
Not at all surprisingly, President Obama has extended the reach -- and just about total lack of accountability -- of the NSA.

But if the Republicans take control of Congress after the midterm elections -- and then under a new Republican president in 2012 -- is there any certainty that we may begin to be under the protection of the Fourth Amendment again?

Insofar as the tea partiers will continue to be an influence on the Republicans -- having already been instrumental this year in re-electing some -- I have not, as I've reported, seen much concern among them about our vanishing privacy (though I admire the tea partiers declared devotion to the Constitution).

As of this writing, I have no idea who will be the Republican presidential candidate in 2012, but I'm not aware that any of the potential leading Republican candidates are impassioned about the Fourth Amendment.

Even if she's not a candidate, the perennial newsmaker Sarah Palin will be an influence on the 2012 elections. She probably doesn't remember, but I was the first national columnist to recommend to John McCain that she be on his ticket, having read of her independence of party orthodoxy in Michael Barone's invaluable "Almanac of American Politics," as governor of Alaska. Anyway, I strongly recommend to firebrand Palin what Justice Louis Brandeis wrote in his dissent in the first Supreme Court wiretapping case, Olmstead vs. United States (1928):

"Discovery and invention have made it possible for the Government, with means far more effective than stretching upon the rack, to obtain disclosure in court of what is whispered in the closet. … The progress of science in furnishing the Government with means of espionage (on American citizens) is not likely to stop with wiretapping." Was he ever right!

"Ways may some day be developed," Brandeis continued, "by which the Government, without removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court." (He didn't foresee the Patriot Act's giving the FBI permission to sneak into our homes when we aren't there and photograph those papers.)

The time did come, as Brandeis prophesied, when the Government "will be enabled to expose to a jury the intimate occurrences of the home" -- and any of our communications in almost any form, if this Obama legislation becomes and remains law.

What Brandeis also warned -- and this should be remembered during the midterm and 2012 elections: "The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness. They recognized the significance of man's spiritual nature, of his feelings, and of his intellect. … They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone -- the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by civilized men. To protect that right, every unjustifiable intrusion by the Government upon the privacy of the individual, whatever the means employed, must be deemed a violation of the Fourth Amendment."

And must be deemed as being at the core of what Barack Obama continuously subverts in "the liberties we cherish."

I deeply hope the tea partiers will add Justice Louis Brandeis to their reading as they work to restore the Constitution's separation of powers. Consider the effect on new generations growing up under government insisting on back doors into what we say, feel and think. Sending Obama -- and any Democrat or Republican who supports his "big brother" mentality -- back into private life is the change we must believe in to get our basic freedoms back.

Bob (Trach) Trachinger, 1924-2010

Professor Robert Trachinger, aka "Trach," died last month. I was his teaching assistant for three semesters at UCLA, for "Issues in Broadcasting." He chose me again and again to work for him. It was an honor.

Trach was a great teacher, a great guy, and a great inspiration. He taught me how to teach. He had been a network vice-president, as well as a television engineer and technical director for ABC Sports, and ABC News, and KABC, where he worked on network football and the Olympics. He developed slow motion video for sports replays as well as an underwater television camera. Working for him was a delight. He had a twinkle in his eye. His classes were packed, and always had a waiting list. I was lucky to have known him. Here's an excerpt from his UCLA obituary:

Robert Trachinger, innovative ABC television executive and TFT professor, passed away Sunday, September 19, in Rancho Santa Fe, CA, at the age 86.

Trachinger's work in broadcasting began in 1950, at ABC, where he worked on a broad spectrum of programming, including the early live serial “Space Patrol”, innovative documentaries such as “Decision to Die" and on live coverage of the Kennedy-Nixon debates and the Academy Awards.

He worked side by side with Roone Arledge, then President of ABC Sports on “Wide World of Sports” and the Olympic Games telecasts, beginning with the Winter Games in Innsbruck in 1964 and concluding with the landmark Summer Games in Los Angeles in 1984.

“The Hollywood Reporter” recently called Trachinger “a technical wizard,” acclaimed in engineering circles for his innovative thinking and for his contributions to broadcast technology. He was responsible for developing the first hand-held TV camera, the first underwater TV camera (field-tested in his own swimming pool) and slow-motion videotape for replay at sports events, introduced on-air in 1961.

The winner of three Emmy Awards, Trachinger retired from ABC as a vice president in 1985.

In addition to his professional career, Trachinger had a deep commitment to education and to mentoring young people. At his death he was a Professor Emeritus of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, having taught courses in production and ethics in media from 1968 to 1998.

He was instrumental in introducing classes in live TV production into the TFT curriculum. The van for remote production that is still parked at the School, between Melnitz and East Melnitz, was acquired for the School by Trachinger through his many industry connections.

Here's a link to his Hollywood Reporter obituary.

Philippa Foot, 1920-2010

I was saddened to learn of the death of British moral philosopher Philippa Foot, at the age of 90.

She had been my landlady at Oxford, when I moved to England to try to produce documentary films (and considered studying philosophy there). Her house at 15 Walton Street was just as one would imagine the home of an Oxford don. Books, velour chairs, velour curtains, lovely views of the hills.  I found it through a listing in the New York Review of Books, to which she had been a regular contributor--until, she explained to me, the clique that ran NYRB decided she wasn't to appear in it anymore.  She was the granddaughter of President Gover Cleveland. She was the daughter of "Baby Ruth," of candy-bar fame. Her father was a British coal baron. Once, she told me she did not like the horsey, doggy, hunting British country life in which she had grown up. She preferred the life of the mind, and she managed to live in it, as an Oxford philosopher, author, and intellectual.

More than that, Philippa Foot a kind soul, and a generous one.  In England, she took me under her wing, introduced me to her sister Marion, who introduced me to London Society at the Garrick Club (at a dinner with pillar Anthony Howard), had me as a guest at Cleveland Hill (there introduced to classicist M.I. Finley, known as "Finley of Harvard" and uncle George Cleveland, son of the American President, who ran a summer stock theatre in Tamworth, New Hampshire), and variously extended unsolicited kindnesses. When Professor Foot came to teach at UCLA, where I was in film school, she invited me to a party at her home, at which my father met Christopher Isherwood--an evening he talked about for years.

All my memories of Professor Foot are good ones. She not only taught "virtue philosophy," she lived it.

Here is an excerpt from her obituary in The Telegraph:

In a key article, Moral Arguments (1958), Philippa Foot challenged this relativistic stance, suggesting that anyone who uses moral terms at all (bad, good and the like), whether to assert or deny a moral proposition, must abide by certain agreed rules for their use . The only recourse of someone who fails to accept the rules, she wrote, would be “to abjure altogether the use of moral terms”.

In her view the distinction between statements of fact and value is based on two false assumptions: first, that any individual may, properly, base his beliefs about matters of value on premises which no one else would recognise as valid; secondly, he may refuse to accept another’s evaluation because their standards are not ones he accepts.

The first assumption is refuted, she argued, by an appeal to the basic idea that words, while they may not have an intrinsic meaning, do have a proper use: “It is surely clear that moral virtues must be connected with human good or harm, and that it is quite impossible to call anything you like good or harm.” Against the second assumption, she put forward the tentative idea that a moral question can be argued down to a point which reveals an “ultimate end” beyond which it is ridiculous to inquire, as it does not make sense to ask: “Why do you hate pain?” or “Why do you want to feel happy?”

In her book Natural Goodness (2001) Philippa Foot rebutted the philosophical distinction between descriptive meaning (which deals with facts) and evaluative meaning (dealing with moral qualities). In the case of living things — plants, animals and humans — she argued that evaluations simply state a special class of fact. Natural goodness can apply as well to physical parts of living beings as to their actions: to say that a tree has good roots, in her analysis, is logically the same as to say that a person performs a good deed. The underlying logic has to do with the assumption that good roots or good actions are those that are necessary in the lives of individuals of that species. Moral goodness should therefore be understood as the natural flourishing of humans as living beings.

And here is an excerpt from her obituary in The Guardian:

Foot pooh-poohed what she called the "rigoristic, prissy, moralistic tone" so frequent in moral philosophy, and the way it had lost touch with real life. "I do not know what could be meant by saying that it was someone's duty to do something," she said, "unless there was an attempt to show why it mattered if this sort of thing was not done."

Non-cognitivist theories (Hare's prescriptivism, Ayer's emotivism, more recently Allan Gibbard's expressivism), which variously deny that moral statements can be true or false, render moral judgment so subjective and capricious that, strictly speaking, it might just as well extend to "the wrongness of running round trees right-handed or looking at hedgehogs in the light of the moon".

But she opposed such theories not just because they were too wide, but because they were too narrow. In the 1950s she had begun, along with Anscombe, to shift the focus away from what makes an isolated action good or bad, to the Aristotelian concentration on what makes a person good or bad in the long-term. Morality, she argued, is about how to live – not so much a series of logically consistent, well-calculated decisions as a lifetime endeavour to become the sort of person who habitually and happily does virtuous things. And "virtuous", for Foot, meant well-rounded and human. She condemned as moral faults "the kind of timidity, conventionality and wilful self-abnegation that may spoil no one's life but one's own", advocating "hope and a readiness to accept good things".

Foot continued, and modified, her onslaught on subjectivism in ethics throughout her life. She also attacked utilitarian theories, which see goodness as a matter of actions' consequences, and tend to equate the badness of failing to prevent an evil outcome with perpetrating it. In a paper on abortion (The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of Double Effect, 1967), she used what became a much-cited example to pinpoint fine distinctions in moral permissibility where an action has both good and bad results – the dilemma facing the driver of a suddenly brakeless trolley-bus that would hit five people unless he steered it on to another track into only one person.

Unlike many philosophers, Foot never strained our basic intuitions in the interests of pursuing some wild theory to its (il)logical conclusion. She said that, in doing philosophy, she felt like a geologist tapping away with a tiny hammer on a huge cliff. But her resolute tapping hit many fault-lines and reduced several inflated edifices. "Very tender and adorable, yet morally tough and subtle, and with lots of will and self-control," was how Murdoch described her.

In Human Goodness (a paper included in the book Natural Goodness, 2001), Foot wrote that wisdom and temperance are important virtues, but that often we revere those who lack them and live chaotic lives, which, she added, is probably not "just romantic nonsense". "Of course what is best is to live boldly, yet without imprudence or intemperance, but the fact is that rather few can manage that." She, however, was one of those few.

Here's an excerpt from the NY Times obituary by William Grimes:

In her early work, notably in the essays “Moral Beliefs” and “Moral Arguments,” published in the late 1950s, Ms. Foot took issue with philosophers like R. M. Hare and Charles L. Stevenson, who maintained that moral statements were ultimately expressions of attitude or emotion, because they could not be judged true or false in the same way factual statements could be.

Ms. Foot countered this “private-enterprise theory,” as she called it, by arguing the interconnectedness of facts and moral interpretations. Further, she insisted that virtues like courage, wisdom and temperance are indispensable to human life and the foundation stones of morality. Her writing on the subject helped establish virtue ethics as a leading approach to the study of moral problems.

“She’s going to be remembered not for a particular view or position, but for changing the way people think about topics,” said Lawrence Solum, who teaches the philosophy of law at the University of Illinois and studied under Ms. Foot. “She made the moves that made people see things in a fundamentally new way. Very few people do that in philosophy.”

Robert Spencer on the Plight of Molly Norris

From Human Events:

Molly Norris’s cause should be taken up by all free people – not least the President of the United States. Obama could have explained that human beings control their own reactions to things. If Muslims chose yet again to riot and murder because of Terry Jones or Molly Norris, that would be a choice they would be making out of an unlimited array of other choices. Instead, Western authorities have fallen into the Islamic supremacists' trap and are starting to behave in just the way they want them to: thinking that they must not do certain things, because if they do, there will be violence from Muslims. Yet that violence is in every case solely the responsibility of the perpetrator, not of anyone else.

Obama could have said that the idea that Molly Norris would have to give up her career and live in hiding because of cartoons is unconscionable. He could have told the Islamic world that cartoons depicting Muhammad did not harm Muslims, and that the willingness of some Muslims to commit murder over such depictions was the only thing that made people care to draw Muhammad in the first place.

Obama could also have said that to threaten people with death because of cartoons was destructive to free speech and hence to free societies — and as such, it was something that the U.S. would do everything it could to resist. He could have announced that Molly Norris and others who were threatened for exercising their freedom of speech would be given full round-the-clock protection — and that if violent protests and riots over cartoons broke out in areas where American troops were deployed, those troops would put down those riots and protect the innocent to the fullest possible extent.

Apparently when Muslims behave with violent irrationality, Obama thinks that it is entirely the responsibility of non-Muslims to clean up the mess they make. In these dark days we don’t have any leaders who will stand up for the freedom of expression, explaining its importance as a bulwark against tyranny. Molly Norris, wherever she is, and the embattled free people of the United States, deserve better.

Who is Franklin Graham?

After seeing his impressive performance with Christiane Amanpour on ABC This Week, I took a look at his website for Samaritan's Purse, where I found this biography:

William Franklin Graham, III, born July 14, 1952, is the fourth of five children born to evangelist Billy Graham and his wife, Ruth Bell Graham. Raised in a log home in the Appalachian Mountains outside Asheville, North Carolina, Franklin now lives in the mountains of Boone, North Carolina.

He was born into a heritage rich in Christian ministry. By the time of Franklin's birth, Billy Graham was already known around the world as a spiritual leader, but he wasn't the only spiritual giant in the family. Franklin's maternal grandfather, Lemuel Nelson Bell, was a medical missionary to China for more than 20 years, a respected moderator of his denomination, the Presbyterian Church in the United States, and a co-founder and executive editor of Christianity Today.

At age 22, after a period of rebellion and traveling the world, Franklin committed his life to Jesus Christ while alone in a hotel room in Jerusalem. Soon after that, Dr. Bob Pierce, founder of Samaritan's Purse (and World Vision), invited Franklin to join him on a six-week mission to Asia. It was during that time that Franklin felt a calling to work with hurting people in areas of the world affected by war, famine, disease, and natural disasters..

(Note the log cabin reference...I wonder if he has considered running for President?)

FOIA Failures Continue in Obama Administration

From The Daily Caller: (ht FOIABlog):

To find out if other groups — including news outlets, commercial interests, individuals, and other nonprofits — were experiencing the same problems with their FOIA requests, CREW created a survey, which was distributed by the American Society of Access Professionals on the group’s private list-serve. Because CREW did not have access to the list-serve, and thus cannot quantify the list’s demographics, the organization wrote in its report that the results are “not scientific or statistically valid, [but] are definitive on at least some topics.”

Here are some of CREW’s more notable findings:

- “Two of the touted reforms – creation of agency chief FOIA officers (CFOs) and agency FOIA public liaisons – have had virtually no influence on the work of agency FOIA professionals,” the report says. According to the survey results, more than 60% of respondents said that the CFO position had no effect on their job, did not make processing requests clearer, and did not make their overall jobs easier. Comments on the position included, “Chief FOIA Officer? Seriously, there is no position description for FOIA, it’s everybody do everything,” and “Did not know this position existed.”

- Roughly 63% of respondents said the fact that FOIA is “not an administration priority,” was a problem.

- While “the vast majority of respondents are aware of Attorney General Holder’s FOIA guidelines,” which President Obama and the DOJ announced in 2009, “the majority reported no change at their agencies as a result of those guidelines.”

Document of the Week: Judge Ricardo M. Urbina's Decision in Jarvik v CIA

I've posted the decision in this FOIA case on Scribd. After some four years, and two lawsuits, I have received precisely zero documents from a Freedom of Information Act request for information about American involvement, alleged by the Uzbek government during show trials following violence in Andijan, blamed on Islamist extremist terrorists, in May, 2005--an event that led to the closure of a US air base supporting the war effort in Afghanistan and expulsion of US military and NGO personnel. IMHO, it is continuing secrecy around this fiasco that has harmed US national security and prolonged the Afghan war. However, under current FOIA law, an Exemption 1 claim on the basis of national security permits a court to make a decision in secret, on the basis of secret evidence, after hearing from only one side. The plaintiff is neither permitted to see the evidence, nor to respond to claims made to the judge.

Well, IMHO the outcome of such an Alice-in-Wonderland process can't be termed a surprise. I'll be dealing with the issue of the unfairness of the concept of ex parte secret evidence in my book: Jarvik v CIA: The Story of A FOIA Case for Edward Mellen Press.  I think that public trials are the best way to fight against extremism and terrorism--not through secret military action or secret court procedures. The reason that the United States has failed to prevail since 9/11 is that our government has pursued a strategy of secrecy, that has--as in the case of Wall Street's "black box" hedge funds--incentivized corruption, incompetence, bankruptcy and failure.

It has also given rise to conspiracy theories, since even the facts of 9/11 have never been laid out in a court of law, as part of an open and public adversarial process. Secrecy breeds distrust.

The time has come for the American government to abandon secrecy, militarism and police-state tactics, and instead to try to the prescription of Justice Brandeis for dealing with international terrorism: "Sunlight is the best disinfectant." Urbina Decision 20100928[1]; Jarvik v. CIA; 9-28-2010; FOIA Case

Charlie Cook's Election Forecast

From the Cook Political Report, based on latest polling data:

HOUSE: The Cook Political Report's current outlook is for a Republican net gain of at least 40 seats. A turnover of 39 seats would tip majority status into Republican hands....

SENATE: ...In the Senate, there is equal uncertainty. We could see Republican gains of seven or eight seats, but they could be as high as nine or 10. A GOP gain of 10 seats would flip control of that chamber.

Dutch Put Geert Wilders on Trial...

From the Financial Times:

The 47-year-old bleached-blond Mr Wilders is answering charges relating to his claims in a 2007 newspaper column that the Koran is “fascist”, and for encouraging Muslims to tear out pages of their holy book in a 2008 film. “Geert Wilders is convinced he has said nothing that is reprehensible,” Bram Moszkowicz, his lawyer, said.

The trial is expected to last a month and could result in a fine and a prison term of up to two years.

Analysts say Mr Wilders will use the trial, which has faced repeated delays, as a platform to reinforce his credentials as a political outsider, despite his new role in support of the government.

“He has established himself as the anti-status quo figure, so he will try to turn the trial into a political event, to try to prove that indeed he is correct that there is no freedom of speech in the Netherlands,” says Dick Houtman, professor of cultural sociology at Erasmus University in Rotterdam.

Here's the schedule, from the website Wilders On Trial:

The provisional planning of the proceedings will be as follows:

October 4th, 6th and 8th: trial proceedings
October 12th: indictment
October 15th: defence
October 19th: replication and rejoinder
November 2nd: verdict

Christiane Amanpour on ABC This Week: Holy War: Should Americans Fear Islam?

Full transcript on the ABC News website...

Secrecy News on Pentagon's Operation Dark Heart Censorship

Steven Aftergood's conclusion:

By censoring Anthony Shaffer’s new book “Operation Dark Heart” even though uncensored review copies are already available in the public domain, the Department of Defense has produced a genuinely unique product: a revealing snapshot of the way that the Obama Administration classifies national security information in 2010.

With both versions before them (excerpts), readers can see for themselves exactly what the Pentagon classifiers wanted to withhold, and can judge for themselves whether the secrecy they tried to impose can be justified on valid national security grounds. In the majority of instances, the results of such an inspection seem disappointing, if not very surprising, and they tend to confirm the most skeptical view of the operation of the classification system.

The most commonly repeated “redaction” in Operation Dark Heart is the author’s cover name, “Christopher Stryker,” that he used while serving in Afghanistan. Probably the second most common redactions are references to the National Security Agency, its heaquarters location at Fort Meade, Maryland, the familiar abbreviation SIGINT (referring to “signals intelligence”), and offhand remarks like “Guys on phones were always great sources of intel,” which is blacked out on the bottom of page 56.

Also frequently redacted are mentions of the term TAREX or “Target Exploitation,” referring to intelligence collection gathered at a sensitive site, and all references to low-profile organizations such as the Air Force Special Activities Center and the Joint Special Operations Command, as well as to foreign intelligence partners such as New Zealand. Task Force 121 gets renamed Task Force 1099. The code name Copper Green, referring to an “enhanced” interrogation program, is deleted.

Perhaps 10% of the redacted passages do have some conceivable security sensitivity, including the identity of the CIA chief of station in Kabul, who has been renamed “Jacob Walker” in the new version, and a physical description of the location and appearance of the CIA station itself, which has been censored.

Many other redactions are extremely tenuous. The name of character actor Ned Beatty is not properly classified in any known universe, yet it has been blacked out on page 15 of the book. (It still appears intact in the Index.)

In short, the book embodies the practice of national security classification as it exists in the United States today. It does not exactly command respect.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, David Swanson writes on Op-Ed News:

Shaffer and others in the military-spying complex knew about U.S. al Qaeda cells and leaders before 9-11 and were prevented from pursuing the matter. Shaffer believes they could have prevented 9-11. He so informed the 9-11 Commission, which ignored him. The Defense Intelligence Agency retaliated against Shaffer for having spoken up. We knew this, but the book adds context and details, and names names.

Russian TV Highlights Pentagon Book-Burning...(Heck of a PR Job, Sec. Gates!)

Meanwhile, Federal News Radio reports author Army Reserve Lieutenant Colonel Tony Shaffer believes that the Pentagon's book burning had more to do with revenge, Wikileaks, and General McChrystal than protection of US National Security...

Joshua Foust: In Defense of Hamid Karzai

From Foreign Policy's AfPak Channel blog:

It’s not hard to imagine ousting Karzai; it’s much harder to conceive of anyone better at the moment. Gul Agha Sherzai, the current governor of Nangarhar and former governor of Kandahar; Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Uzbek militia commander from the North; and Ismail Khan, the former potentate of Herat, all command constituencies, though none with the same degree of multi-ethnic support as Karzai. Abdullah Abdullah, who contested the election last year, also has many supporters, though again, not as many as Karzai.

But even if one of these men were to unseat the Afghan president, there’s no guarantee that they would be any better. In fact, they could be worse. Imagine if Ismail Khan were president – could he exercise any real control outside of Herat? Similarly, Gul Agha Sherzai, the prominent government of Nangarhar, was hyped last year as a presidential contender… but if Karzai’s relationship to the narcotics industry is a problem, Sherzai is worse (he’s also much more violent, and allegedly has a large harem of “dancing boys” at his mansion -- surely not the man the U.S. would want in Kabul). Additionally, Sherzai’s tenure of Kandahar was so bad the Taliban were welcomed in 1994 as liberators from his violent, capricious style of rule. Western pundits also fawned over Dostum and Ashraf Ghani -- but neither has been able to secure more than scattered, occasional support from Afghan voters. Each one of these men face a critical shortcoming: they represent their communities, but not Afghanistan. Only Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah enjoyed broad support in the last election.

Complaints about Karzai are focused too much on the man and not enough on the presidency. Good man or no, having an office as poorly situated as the Afghan presidency makes any officeholder destined for failure. Were another president to step into the post, he would be faced by the same pressures -- forced to manage the same perilous balancing acts. So maybe it’s less a question about Karzai than about U.S. expectations. If those can’t be met, Washington has a much bigger problem on its hands.

Huffington Post Compares Censored Operation Dark Heart to Original

Marcus Baram based his story of Pentagon censorship on a Federation of American Scientists report by Steven Aftergood:

The most common redaction in the entire book is Shaffer's cover name, "Christopher Stryker," and other popular redactions are references to the National Security Agency, the abbreviation SIGINT (signals intelligence) and comments like "Guys on phones were always great sources of intel," notes Aftergood.

He also reports that only about 10% of the redacted passages, such as the identity of the CIA station chief in Kabul and a physical description of that station, have "some conceivable security sensitivity."

Among the more unnecessary redactions: the name of "Deliverance" star Ned Beatty -- "which is not properly classified in any known universe" -- but is blacked out on page 15 of the book. Overall, the national security classification exemplified in the new book "does not exactly command respect," writes Aftergood.

Here's a link to the FAS website's article:http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/2010/09/dark-contrast.pdf.

Pentagon Burns Books in Name of National Security...

The book is called Operation Dark Heart: Spycraft and Special Ops on the Frontlines of Afghanistan -- and the Path to Victory
by Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, and the Pentagon has bought the initial press run to burn before reading, according to this article in Digital Journal.

I just have one question: Has anyone considered the public diplomacy implications of this story for US credibility in relation to freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and so forth in the struggle against Islamist extremism?

IMHO, I'd say that after the handling of Abu Gharib torture pictures, this is the second worst P/R move I've seen since 9/11 from the United States government.

The author has been quoted as saying: "The whole premise smacks of retaliation. Someone buying 10,000 books to suppress a story in this digital age is ludicrous."

So is a publisher like St. Martin's for agreeing to such a repugnant deal. Of course, the story has already been picked up by Iran's Tehran Times...

PBS NewsHour Debates Obama Administration Internet Surveillance

Pamela Geller on 60 Minutes' Coverage of Bloomberg Ground Zero Mosque

From Atlas Shrugs:

Considering it's CBS, yes it could have been worse, but it was pretty bad. I am called a "conspiracy theorist" for speaking the truth and investigating the stealth jihadists behind the mosque. You can write to CBS here.

Thug devleoper Sharif El- Gamal is treated with kid gloves. No mention of his rap sheet, his bullying of moderate Muslims against the mosque, or of the fact that he was just evicted from his office. He was a waiter a couple of years ago, and suddenly became a BSD developer on the medicare fraudster's dime: his financier, Hisham Elzanaty, was a large funder of Hamas (exposed in the Holy Land terror funding trial) while defrauding medicaid out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Worse still, Imam Feisal Rauf was packaged like a big fuzzy teddy bear. Nothing about his previous first performance on 60 minutes. It was right after 911, and Rauf blamed America for the 911 attacks. "Osama Bin Laden is made in the USA." Watch that video here.

He, too, was given a free pass. Nothing on his sanction of Hamas or his role in the jihad warship flotilla. Imam Rauf, the self-described "head coach" of the global strategic initiative -- audio here (his "players" include "the President of the United States, or the President of Malaysia, or the President of England" [sic]), said the following in tonight's 60 minutes episode:

"It's my duty as an American Muslim to stand between you, the American non-Muslim and the radicals trying to attack you."

More threats from this snake. He is going to save us ..... from jihadists? Who is going to save us from him? Please, Rauf, get out of the way, we'll save ourselves, thankyouverymuch.

His motive to build a mega mosque on Ground Zero was made painfully clear in this quote in the NY Times back in December 2009, announcing the Ground Zero mosque, and subsequently scrubbed from the article.

“New York is the capital of the world, and this location close to 9/11 is iconic,” Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf

A presence so close to the World Trade Center, “where a piece of the wreckage fell,” Imam Feisal added, “sends the opposite statement to what happened on 9/11.”

How's that?

“Building so close is owning the tragedy."

Rauf is the self-described "head coach" of the global strategic initiative and I'm the "conspiracy theorist?"

Then again, CBS minutes thinks Oliver Stone is a ......... genius. So much for investigative journalism.

Agustin Blazquez's CHE: THE OTHER SIDE OF AN ICON to Premiere in Miami & Paris

My favorite Cuban-American filmmaker sent me this press release today:

"BE INFORMED TO BE FREE."
---Agustin Blazquez

PRESS RELEASE, September 20, 2010
Contact: AB INDEPENDENT PRODUCTIONS
1-3O1-949-8791 ABIP.USA@verizon.net

World premiere of the documentary CHE: THE OTHER SIDE OF AN ICON, produced & directed by Agustin Blazquez at the Miami-Dade College’s Tower Theater, on October 8 & 9 (6:45 pm) & 10 (4:30 pm), 2010. Sponsored in part by the Miami-Dade College. Also an screening at the University of Miami's Casa Bacardi on October 13, 2010 (6:30 pm) and a premiere at Maison de l'Amerique Latine in Paris, France, sponsored by Zoe Valdes, Ricardo Vega & Lunaticas Production,s on October 18, 2010 (9:00 pm).

This film profiles the life of the man killed in Bolivia, as well as "Che", the icon, who lives on today. It presents the real man behind the myth, his legacy and why he has become so popular among the youth, revolutionaries and terrorists of the world. It explores the dangers of believing in Che's carefully constructed fake public image--herein lies the real Che. This documentary is based on sources who worked directly with him, knew his family in Argentina and Havana --who were intimately acquainted with Che's personal and political trajectory as well as his academic scholars.

With the testimonies of:
Abel N. Morales, Agustin Alles Soberon, Antonio de la Cova, Armando M. Lago, Barbara Rangel Rojas, Barbara Rojas, Emilio Izquierdo, Ernesto Betancourt, Enrique Encinosa, Enrique Ros, Felix Ismael Rodriguez, Gustavo Mata, Humberto Fontova, Jaime Suchliki, Javier D. Souto, Jorge Beruff, Margot Menendez, Pedro Corzo, Roberto Bismarck, Rolando Castaño, Roberto Martin Perez & Sergio G. Muñiz

Narrator GUSTAVO REX, asistant & interviewer in English Jaums Sutton
interviewers in Spanish Ana Maria Lamar & Vivian Gude
final song You Don’t Know Che by STEVE PICHAN video on www.YouTube.com/Jaums,
additional music Rodolfo Guzman, Virginia Alonso, Springfield United Methodist Church Choir, Caryl Traten Fisher, Rafael Monteagudo, Carlos Molina & Marisa Molina
Spanish & English subtitles / taped on HD & 16.9 widescreen / time 114 min.

distributed by www.CubaCollectibles.com

Tickets will be for sale two days before each show at the theater box office
1508 SW 8th Street, Miami, FL 33135, ph. 305 643-8706
$6 (General Admission), $5 (Students, Seniors, & members of the Miami Film Society),
$4 (individuales packages of 5 tickets for $20)

DVDs of CHE: THE OTHER SIDE OF AN IDOL will be for sale the days of the shows.
The proceedings will benefits the
UNCOVERING CUBA EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATION (UCEF)
A non-profit organization [501 (c)(3)]
All donations are tax deductible and your cancelled check is your receipt

NOTE: The Uncovering Cuba Educational Foundation Corporation (UCEF) is a Maryland tax-exempt non-stock corporation that held its first organizational meeting on August 18, 2003. Founded by Agustin Blazquez and James W. Sutton, it is an official non-profit corporation. The purpose is to educate the general public and the news media regarding the history of Cuba and current events within the island, particularly from the firsthand point of view of its citizens and Cuban Americans.

You can view clips from the film on YouTube, at this URL:http://www.youtube.com/user/jaums.

Fouad Ajami on the Bloomberg Ground Zero WTC Mosque

From today's Wall Street Journal:

It was in 1965, Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf tells us, that he made his way to America as a young man. He and a vast migration would be here as American identity would undergo a drastic metamorphosis.
The prudence of days past was now a distant memory. These activists who came in the 1990s—the time of multiculturalism and of what the late Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called the "disuniting of America"—would insist on a full-scale revision of the American creed. American liberalism had broken with American patriotism, and the self-styled activists would give themselves over to a militancy that would have shocked their forerunners. It is out of that larger history that this project at Ground Zero is born.

There is a great Arab and Islamic tale. It happened in the early years of Islam, but it speaks to this controversy. It took place in A.D. 638, the time of Islam's triumphs.The second successor to the Prophet, the Caliph Omar—to orthodox Muslims the most revered of the four Guided Caliphs for the great conquests that took place during his reign—had come to Jerusalem to accept the city's surrender. Patriarch Sophronius, the city's chief magistrate, is by his side for the ceremony of surrender. Prayer time comes for Omar while the patriarch is showing him the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

The conqueror asks where he could spread out his prayer rug. Sophronius tells him that he could stay where he was. Omar refuses, because his followers, he said, might then claim for Islam the holy shrine of the Christians. Omar stepped outside for his prayer.

We don't always assert all the "rights" that we can get away with. The faith is honored when the faith bends to necessity and discretion.

Erin O'Connor on Jonathan Franzen

From her blog, Critical Mass:

Granted I have not finished the novel. And perhaps the tenderness and compassion will appear magically in the last few pages and will wash over me with such power that it will mitigate the pinched and cramped effects of the first 450 pages. But I’m having my doubts. Freedom is not a compassionate or tender novel. It’s angry, bitter, and deeply troubled. It’s written from a narrative perspective that struggles to see its central characters through anything other than a sour, sardonic lens. And, in titling the novel Freedom, it elevates this struggle–or tries to elevate it–to the level of philosophical meditation. The result is a jaundiced and dysphoric work that–while compulsively readable in the manner of The Corrections–is hardly a tender or compassionate account of “the many ironies of life under late capitalism.” Rather, it reads like a claustrophobic tautology: a blanket indictment of middle-class Americanness that sees Americanness as an ugly inevitable distortion of humanity caused by the irredeemably flawed premises of America itself.

Jay Wertz on Oren Jacoby's Lafayette: The Lost Hero

I saw a preview of Lafayette: The Lost Hero at the Society of Cincinnati last weekend, and enjoyed it before it aired on PBS Monday night...yet only now found an excerpt from this thoughtful review to share, by Jay Wertz from HistoryNet:

Leading a small command at the Battle of Brandywine, September 11, 1777, he was wounded in the leg but recovered quickly. Given command of a division shortly after his 20th birthday, he went on to earn the trust and admiration of George Washington, particularly through the long, hard winter of 1777–78 at Valley Forge.

These experiences and those that lay ahead in Lafayette's long life are told in a story that unravels through unique scenarios in the program. It's as if Jacoby went shopping in the mall of documentary techniques and put one of each in his basket. In Lafayette: The Lost Hero Jacoby bends and twists through different techniques to glide easily through the biography and make it entertaining. He shows a map with all the places named Lafayette in the U. S. A. and takes us to some of them; he uses clips from several Lafayette movies, etc.

Reenactors recreate battles in the film. Courtesy of Thomas Beckner - Storyville Films.The all-important first five minutes had me hooked as Revolutionary War reenactors arrive on a benign landscape to stage a scene for the documentary. The often folksy-sounding narrator reminds us that living history interpreters do so to try to understand how life was in times past. I concur and have been broadcasting that message for more than two decades, since I began filming authentic historical reenactments with the 200th anniversary Yorktown Victory Celebration. Jacoby's opening scene hooked me, and I was delighted that the style and content held my attention to the end.
Besides negotiating French arms, men and warships for the American war effort and leading a significant command at the Battle of Yorktown, Lafayette impressed the new nation in other ways. His love of liberty that brought him to the American cause extended in his mind to all citizens, and he encouraged the young nation to rid itself of the hypocritical scourge of slavery. He even bought the freedom of an African-American who acted as a military spy in his Yorktown command. Many of Lafayette's feelings and thoughts are revealed in excerpts from his memoirs, convincingly delivered in the show in a gently accented voice.

James R. Gaines, a Lafayette biographer, picks up much of the weight of the narrative early in the program. With Sabine Renault-Sabloniere, another biographer and Lafayette descendent, the audience is led through the Marquis' early life, long association with America, his uncomfortable and ultimately tragic role in the French revolution and the love bond he shared with his wife. Hearing her words are also among the more poignant moments in the program.

Although I enjoyed most of the cornucopia of techniques used in the program, the animated maps were a little creepy—literally; instead of animated arrows, color blobs creep down the maps. And when Mme. Renault-Sabloniere comes to the U. S. to visit that iconic symbol of French-American friendship, the Statue of Liberty, she is interviewed by Public Radio's Sarah Vowell. Vowell's dull-headed conversation with Lafayette's 6-times great-granddaughter could definitely be used as evidence in a French snob's derision of Americans. Garrison Keillor would have been better. These are minor aberrations, however, in a really engaging program about a remarkable man whom modern Americans have known precious little about.

Bruce Bawer on Rev. Terry Jones' Cancelled Koran-Burning

From City Journal:

It’s clear, of course, that Jones—who at the last minute canceled the bonfire, declaring that “God is telling us to stop”—is a nut. He’s apparently made a career of spewing hate at Jews, gays, and just about everybody else who doesn’t belong to his tiny church, which seems to be some kind of wacky cult.

But that’s neither here nor there. The real story here isn’t about Jones but about the rest of us and what we’ve allowed to happen to our civilization since 9/11. Who would have imagined, on the day the Twin Towers fell, that nine years later we’d be so scared of Muslim reactions that the plan of some crank to burn a few copies of the Koran would become the lead story on the evening news and cause the president himself to plead with the guy to call it off? Imagine a modern-day Rip Van Winkle who’d fallen asleep before 9/11 and awakened to all this nonsense. For such a person, the degree of attention accorded to Jones would have been nothing less than incomprehensible. What in God’s name, Rip would ask, had happened to America? How could we have become so timid, so terrified, so quickly? How could an American president, in the middle of war and economic crisis, give so much as a moment’s notice to such a piddling non-story?

Needless to say, the truly important things went unsaid on those network news reports. Nobody pointed out that we wouldn’t be fretting like this if there weren’t something very special about Islam. You could announce plans to burn a stack of Bibles, or the Bhagavad-Gita, or the Dhammapada, or the Book of Mormon, or Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, or a truckload of copies of The Watchtower, or any other non-Muslim religious text without making the White House and Pentagon call emergency meetings and put embassies around the world on alert. How little time it’s taken for us to get used to paying Islam a unique degree of “respect”!

One of the network news reports—I don’t remember which—showed an anti-American demonstration by Muslims in Kabul reacting to Jones’s planned Koran-burning. The demonstrators were burning an American flag and stomping on it. Neither the reporter nor the anchorperson commented on this fact. Plainly, in their view, the burning of an American flag was not worth remarking upon. After all, in recent years Muslims around the world have burned countless American flags, not to mention the flags of pretty much every other Western democracy. Since 9/11, we’ve grown used to seeing the revered symbols of Western democratic values routinely desecrated in the Muslim world.

And we’ve also grown used to the fact this is most assuredly not a two-way street. American flags can be burned by the hundreds, by huge crowds, in the major squares of Muslim capitals, and that’s apparently hunky-dory with us. But when a guy in Gainesville whom nobody ever heard of decides to burn a few Korans, everybody from the president on down begs him to reconsider. Obama to the contrary, this isn’t about “our values as Americans”; it’s not about “freedom and religious tolerance.” It’s about fear. Nine years after jihadists murdered 2,977 people on American soil, the sight of American leaders quaking in their boots at the thought of some clown’s offending the Muslim world is nothing less than obscene.

Rafael Medoff's Yom Kippur Al Chet

"For the Sin of Silence During the Holocaust"
by Rafael Medoff

On Yom Kippur, in synagogues throughout the country, American Jews will lightly strike their chests while reciting the Al Chet, the litany of confessions for sins committed during the previous year. "For the sin of lying.... For the sin of gossiping.... For the sin of being disrespectful...." and so on.

Some years ago, one of the most prominent rabbis in America made a startling suggestion--that American Jews should add an Al Chet to acknowledge the community's failure to respond adequately to news of the mass killing of European Jews during the Holocaust. Although the proposal evidently was never implemented, statements made recently by several prominent Jewish leaders have gone a long way in that direction.

The Al Chet suggestion came from Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik (1903-1993), longtime head of Yeshiva University's rabbinical school and a key figure in the shaping of Modern Orthodox Judaism. In a taped lecture at YU's Wurzweiler School of Social Work on December 24, 1973, Rabbi Soloveitchik remarked that "during the Holocaust period," many American Jews were not sufficiently concerned "with our brethren, with our fellow Jews, and we let millions of Jews go down the drain."

Therefore, he said, "to the list of Al Chets of the chatayim [sins] we enumerate on Yom Kippur, we should add another Al Chet. Perhaps it would be the worst, the most horrible one - Al chet shechatanu lefanecha bera'inu tzoras nafshoseihem shel acheinu bais Yisroel shehischananu eileinu v'lo shamanu['For the sin that we have sinned before You by seeing the suffering of our Jewish brethren who called to us and we did not listen']."

Statements of this sort were unheard of in the first decades after the war, when there was little public discussion among American Jews about their response to the Holocaust. Perhaps the memories and the wounds were too fresh. Perhaps the fact that many of the Jewish leaders whose records merited scrutiny still held positions of leadership discouraged a serious reckoning.

That began to change in the 1960s and 1970s, as a younger generation of American Jews started asking questions about the actions of their elders. Articles about the subject began appearing more frequently in Jewish periodicals. Activists in the Soviet Jewry movement cited American Jewry's lethargic response to the Holocaust as an impetus for their own protests. "We didn't want to repeat the mistakes of that generation," Glenn Richter, director of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, recalls.

By 1981, there was sufficient interest in the topic to bring about the creation of the American Jewish Commission on the Holocaust, a committee of Jewish communal figures intending to produce the first comprehensive examination of US Jewry's Holocaust record. The acrimony that engulfed the commission's work and led to its dissolution revealed still-lingering sensitivities. Critics of the Jewish leadership cried whitewash, while defenders of the establishment circled the wagons. But the controversy did galvanize a healthy public discussion.

New scholarly research in the 1980s permanently reshaped the debate. Monty Penkower (The Jews Were Expendable, 1982), David Wyman (The Abandonment of the Jews, 1984), Haskel Lookstein (Were We Our Brothers' Keepers?, 1984) and others revealed unflattering new information about American Jewry and the Holocaust. They chronicled the missed opportunities to press for Allied rescue of refugees, the petty in-fighting between Jewish groups that sapped communal time and energy, the unsavory attacks by Jewish leaders against the activist Bergson Group. What the historians found essentially confirmed what the critics had suspected.

During the past several years, remarks made by several prominent Jewish leaders have dramatically illustrated how much attitudes have changed over the years. At a conference of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, Michael Miller, executive director of the New York Jewish Community Relations Council, and Seymour Reich, past president of B'nai B'rith and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, sharply criticized their predecessors' wartime record. Reich declared: " I have come here today, as a veteran of the Jewish establishment, to say unequivocally: the Jewish leaders in the 1940s were wrong."

Rabbi Dr. David Ellenson, president of Reform Judaism's Hebrew Union College, has gone so far as to assert that Rabbi Stephen Wise "failed miserably" in his response to the Holocaust. The news from Europe was certainly unprecedented, he said, but Jewish leaders such as Wise "had an obligation to be sufficiently flexible and imaginative to deal with unprecedented situations." Rabbi Ellenson's bold statement was significant not only because Wise was the most prominent American Jewish leader of the 1940s, but also because he was the founder and longtime leader of the very institution over which Ellenson himself now presides.

These Jewish leaders who have criticized the wartime Jewish establishment may not have phrased their remarks in the form of an Al Chet, but they certainly spoke in the spirit of the forthright acknowledgment Rabbi Soloveitchik evidently had in mind.

Dr. Rafael Medoff is director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, www.WymanInstitute.org

Schools Matter: Why Fenty Lost...Michelle Rhee!

From Jim Horn's Schools Matter blog:

With days to prepare for the inevitable, the Washington Post has a lengthy political obituary this morning for the defeated Fenty, and Michelle Rhee and the corporate ed deformers get two lines. The Post's editors would rather focus on Fenty's tin political ear and forget that the voters have soundly rejected the billionaire boys club (BBC) who want to take over DC and the DC Schools. Fenty was deep into the pockets of the white oligarchs, and his bowing to Broad and Gates and the Waltons to put Rhee in charge of schools was and is the most visible symbol of a political hand-off to philanthro-capitalism in the nation's capitol. Now Fenty's defeat is the most visible symbol of the voters' repudiation of government run by venture capital and vulture philanthropy "supermen."

Robert McCartney has a commentary in WaPo this morning that points out many of policy faults of the snarling Michelle Rhee, but somehow they are painted, too, as personality flaws, rather than the steamrolling and bullying by a corporate board intent upon making DC the urban model for corporate education. In spite of all the flaws, McCartney urges Gray to go slow, dance the soft shoe, and keep Rhee. Right.

Valerie Strauss has a slightly different take, urging Gray to act swiftly to make it clear who is running the schools. Unfortunately, she misses the revolutionary aspect of this historic vote and fails to attribute the Fenty drubbing to voters sick of corporate hubris without boundaries and corporate welfare run amok. Strauss goes on to argue that the acceptance of the $75 million from the Duncan RTTT bribery fund will assure that DC Schools are locked in to BBC's policies, whether or not Rhee is fired. What an odd conclusion, when in fact, the one-shot $75 million represent less than 10 percent of DC's annual school budget of almost $760 million. Since when would a superintendent or mayor be held hostage by such a commitment.

If Gray wants to be the conciliator, his first act should be to fire the one person who stands most squarely in the way of that goal. Not only would firing Rhee serve that aspiration, but it would also send a message to the Foundation Supermen that he is not for sale, a message that will make DC voters that could once again have a voice in their city.

Courtland Milloy: Why Fenty Lost

From The Washington Post:

What happened Tuesday involved more than just the unseating of a mayor with an abrasive style. It was a populist revolt against Fenty's arrogant efforts to restructure government on behalf of a privileged few. The scheme was odious: re-create a more sophisticated version of the plantation-style, federally appointed three-member commission that ruled the city for more than a century until 1967.

The Fenty troika eerily mirrored the old antebellum system of control, which featured a chairman for public works, which is what Fenty was, in essence; a chairman with expertise in legal maneuverings, Nickles; and a chairman for education and welfare issues, Rhee.

It all makes for a kind of friendly fascism in which D.C. government serves the interest of business leaders and landed gentry. Remarkably, his approach became much ballyhooed: Fenty, his supporters raved, was making the trains run on time. That people were falling off the caboose and being railroaded out of town was just the price of progress.

Washington Times: US Government Must End Pro-Sharia Policies

...According to an article published today, by R. James Woolsey, Andrew C. McCarthy and Harry E. Soyster:

Our study does not perfectly replicate the Team B work of a generation ago. We have not been encouraged by our government, which, under administrations of both parties, has been immovably content to wear its blinders. Nor have we been invited to review classified information. These, however, have hardly been insuperable obstacles. What Americans need to know is ready to hand in the public record. The problem isn't access to information, it is coming to grips with what available information portends for our security.

Shariah is the crucial fault line of Islam's internecine struggle. On one side of the divide are Muslim reformers and authentic moderates - figures like Abdurrahman Wahid, the late president of Indonesia and leader of the world's largest liberal Muslim organization, Nahdlatul Ulama - who embrace the Enlightenment's veneration of reason and, in particular, its separation of the spiritual and secular realms. On that side of the divide, Shariah is defined as but a reference point for a Muslim's personal conduct, not a corpus to be imposed on the life of a pluralistic society.

The other side of the divide is dominated by "Islamists," who are Muslim supremacists. Like erstwhile proponents of communism and Nazism, these supremacists - some terrorists, others employing stealthier means - seek to impose a global theocratic and authoritarian regime, called a caliphate. On this side of the divide, Shariah is a compulsory system that Muslims are obliged to wage jihad to install and to which the rest of the world is required to submit.

For these ideologues, Shariah is not a private matter. They see the West as an infidel enemy to be conquered, not a culture and civilization to be embraced or at least tolerated. It is impossible, they maintain, for alternative legal systems and forms of government like ours to coexist peacefully with the end-state they seek.

It is not the burden of our study to broker competing claims about which side of the Shariah divide represents the "true Islam." There are approximately 1.4 billion Muslims in the world, and their understandings about their belief system, as well as their practices with respect to it, vary widely. There may not be a single "true Islam." If there is one, we do not presume to pronounce what it holds.

What cannot be denied credibly, however, is that Shariah is firmly rooted in Islam's doctrinal texts, and it is favored by influential Islamic commentators, institutions, traditions and academic centers. For more than a half-century, moreover, Shariah Islam has been financed lavishly and propagated by Islamic governmental entities (particularly Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Organization of the Islamic Conference) through the offices of disciplined international organizations, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood. We know from an internal 1991 memorandum authored by one of the Brotherhood's U.S. leaders that its mission is a "grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and 'sabotaging' its miserable house."

***

...Most important, we must protect our way of life regardless of the ultimate resolution of Islam's internal strife. We can do a far better job of empowering non-Shariah-adherent Muslims who are our natural allies, but we cannot win for them - they have to do that for themselves. Irrespective of whether they succeed in the herculean task of delegitimizing Shariah globally, we must face it down in the United States, throughout the West and wherever on Earth it launches violent or ideological offensives against us.
If we are to face down Shariah, however, we must understand what we are up against, not simply hope that dialogue and "engagement" will make the challenge go away. The brute fact is that Shariah adherents perforce support objectives that are incompatible with the U.S. Constitution, the civil rights it guarantees and the representative government it authorizes. Our security depends on confronting them, not sitting silent as they gradually efface our liberties.

Gray Beats Fenty in DC, Rangel Beats Adam Clayton Powell, IV in NYC

The people have spoken!

What did they say on Primary Day?

1. DC voted AGAINST the Democratic establishment. Fenty was a stand-in for the Obama administration. His schools chancellor--who was following the US Department of Education "Race to the Top" playbook--may have cost him the election. Michael Bloomberg showed not only that his endorsement is worthless, but that he is a weak loser who backed a loser. If I were NYC politician, I'd launch a recall campaign against Bloomberg immediately, if not sooner, and take away his job as Mayor of NY.

My campaign slogan: No Bloomberg--no WTC Mosque!

2. Charlie Rangel did what Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. didn't. He ran hard and won, despite a Congressional investigation. If I were the Democrats, I'd drop all charges against him. They need Rangel more than Rangel needs them...

Finally, the Tea Party victory in Republican primaries. It's very good news for the Republican Party--although I fear the Tea Party may be a fake put together by Dick Armey and some K Street Lobbyists to keep everyone from leaving the Republican Party. However, at least it leveraged a protest vote that cost some Establishment figures their jobs.

That sends a message that puts fear into the hearts of incumbents...Their spoiler role was played to a "tea."

As the NY Post headline read yesterday: "Bums Away!"

Is Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf an Extremist?

Hugh Fitzgerald says he is, at JihadWatch:

Now that Feisal Abdul Rauf has chosen - most unwisely I think-- to obliquely threaten us all with violence if we do not surrender to his demands and the demands of those who in "anger will explode in the Muslim world," let's go back and make sure we know not what the websites devoted to presenting him as a "moderate" say, but what Feisal Abdul Rauf is on record as saying. He is, this Feisal Abdul Rauf, slippery as he is, unambiguously on record as refusing to denounce a clear terrorist group devoted entirely to destroying an entire Infidel nation-state, that is, Hamas. Furthermore, he is also on record as wanting Muslims in the countries of the non-Muslim West to temporarily accept the secular laws but to work to change those laws and replace them, where they in his view need replacement -- that is, when they do not conform to the Shari'a -- so that the secular laws of the country become more and more those of the Shari'a. People do not understand what that means. That means he, Feisal Abdul Rauf, is calling for the overthrow -- not, given current circumstances, the violent overthrow, but still the overthrow -- of the American Constitution, that is, of our legal and political institutions.

You can read Fitzgerald's entire analysis, here.

More about Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf by Ibn Warraq in National Review Online, here... and again, in an article entitled "The Two Faces of Feisal Abdul Rauf," here.

Pam Geller: 40,000 Protest Bloomberg Ground Zero WTC Mosque

Full story at Atlas Shrugs.

Geert Wilders' speech at JihadWatch:

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf claims the right to build a mosque, a house of Sharia here - on this hallowed ground.

But, friends, I have not forgotten and neither have you. That is why we are here today. To draw the line. Here, on this sacred spot. We are here in the spirit of America's founding fathers. We are here in the spirit of freedom. We are here in the spirit of Abraham Lincoln, the President who freed the slaves.

President Lincoln said: "Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves."

These words are the key to our survival. The tolerance that is crucial to our freedom requires a line of defense.

More rally videos, here...

Robert Spencer on Gen. Petraeus on Koran Burning

From JihadWatch.com:

I oppose the Qur'an-burning. I don't like the burning of books. I'd rather that the contents of the Qur'an, and the ways that jihadists use those contents to justify violence, be known. However, these people are free to do what they want to do. Petraeus would do better to tell the Afghans that in America we have freedom of speech and expression, and that we put up with speech and expression that we dislike without trying to kill the speaker. He would do better to tell them that their likely murderous rage over this event is an outrageous overreaction, and that any bloodshed over this would be a heinous crime, far dwarfing any crime they think the people in Florida are committing.

The idea that in wartime one should be careful not to do anything that the enemy is likely to respond to with irrational and even murderous anger may seem tactically wise at first glance, but ultimately it is a recipe for surrender. One is already accepting the enemy's worldview and perspective, and working to accommodate it, instead of working on various fronts, not just the military one, to show why it is wrong and should be opposed.

Of course, to that Petraeus and his ilk would respond, Well, we are not at war with Islam or the Qur'an, and so to burn the book is a needless provocation. This ignores, however, the war that the Organization of the Islamic Conference and other Muslim groups are waging today against the freedom of expression -- and ignores also the ways in which Islamic jihadists use the Qur'an to justify violence and make recruits. Without approving of the burning, Petraeus should be defending the Florida church's right to do as they please, and using it as a teaching moment in Afghanistan to say, We are going to defend our vision of society, no matter what you bring against us.

Prosecute Michelle Rhee's Hatch Act Violations!

Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy has noted today that Michelle Rhee's campaign work on behalf of Mayor Fenty appears to violate the Hatch Act, although she flatly denies it:

"I'm here as a private citizen," D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee said at Saturday's campaign rally for Mayor Adrian M. Fenty. "I consulted with my lawyer, and he told me it was okay to be here as a private citizen."

Why does Rhee play games like that? The Hatch Act tells government employees not to use their positions to influence elections. Maybe that "private citizen" ruse puts her in compliance with the letter of the law, but she sure comes off as showing an arrogant disregard for the spirit of it.

Who's right, Milloy or Rhee?

There's one sure way to settle the issue--prosecute Michelle Rhee in US Court. If a jury of 12 DC citizens convicts her, she's wrong. If they don't, she's right.

Her own lawyer is hardly an unbiased source. As a DC resident and taxpayer, I've found her obvious and high-profile political campaigning on behalf of Mayor Fenty both offensive and egregious.

Mayor Barry has been prosecuted for less, and repeatedly.

So, if Gray wins the mayoralty race in DC, I hope he'll ask the District Attorney to launch a full-scale investigation of Michelle Rhee's actions--both to teach her a lesson, and to set an example for our children that no one in America is above the law...even Ivy-league "Teach for America" alumni.