The assignment was a way to make a few extra dollars during the holidays. Texas Drifter was appointed to settle the affairs of a recently deceased derelict.

Describing the deceased's efficiency apartment is an easy exercise in recalling on scene details. The residence was one room that consisted of half a kitchen, small dinning area, a smaller living area with a couch that folds out into a bed (opened); a small black and white television with a coat hangar for an antenna sitting on a cardboard box next to the door that entered the bathroom.

The rest room can best be described as a public sector facility at a downtown bus station that had not been cleaned for twenty years. The hide away bed was covered with clothes for sheets, and part of the carpet from the floor which was being used as a blanket.

There are no words to describe the apartment's smell; possibly because the clothes closet was being used as an in-house dumpster. The left sink was filled with dirty pans, plates, and silverware. The right sink was brimming over with empty bean and dog food cans.

Next to the moldy generic bean and quality dog food cans set a pancake hot plate which contained one can of half opened beans and one half opened can of dog food. It was later learned that the deceased had been using the hot plate to warm the beans and dog food before mixing them into a bowl known as ghetto chile.

A handwritten note was found behind the hot plate that said, "Remove paper labels before heating to prevent fire". Your instructor was almost afraid to open the refrigerator. Utter amazement cannot describe how this later surveillance instructor felt when he discovered that the interior of the icebox was cleaner than most hospital operating rooms.

What I found was a sanitized refrigerator full of prescription drugs arranged by names of those who had been prescribed the medications. It was later learned that the deceased had taken it upon himself to store and administer medications for the area's homeless population.

The freezer unit of the icebox contained what appeared to be the deceased's private papers, along with some type of diary. At this point, the instructor started looking for a place to sit down and review the new found documents.

The apartment's curtains had been replaced with the most recent Sunday newspaper comics. These paper curtains provided the only color and access for light to the otherwise dimly lit apartment. While dragging a chair over to the window; there was a knock at the door.

A surprised vagabond stated that he had come by to read the Sunday Comics and see if there was any ghetto chile left. I said that there was no chile left to which he shrugged his shoulders, and quipped while walking over to read the curtains, "There goes Thanksgiving Dinner".

Texas Drifter asked isn't there some place else where you can go for Thanksgiving Dinner?

The response, "Not and be with friends; besides that, being put on display for publicity is advertising not compassion.

I suggested that the tramp take the curtains with him since I was busy. The response was "If I do that, nobody else will be able to see the funnies."

He then asked if he could turn on the radio. I responded that I had not seen a radio. The homeless man then walked over to the television and turned it on with the following remarks, "when it don't have a picture, it's a radio."

Upon finishing the "funnies," the homeless man walked over and turned the "radio off." As he was leaving, he said "this place won't be the same without our ghetto chile." 

By this time, the instructor had reviewed all of the personal papers except the diary. The first twenty or so pages of the diary detailed how the deceased had been a working parent with a spouse who traded partying for the sanctity of marriage.

The deceased problems started when the adulterous spouse well known in Democrat Party, had retained a divorce attorney also a Democrat, to conduct a high profile bogus child abuse campaign against the deceased. The net result of this government assisted smear campaign was that the deceased losing his reputation, children, and job.  

As the instructor was about to get lost in the diary, there was another knock at the door. This time the instructor was confronted by three homeless people asking if they might reclaim property they had loaned the deceased. Knowing that I had to get rid of the apartment's contents anyway; I said sure come on in and take what's yours.

Amazingly, no one started gathering up things until after they had finished reading the "funnies." I used this quiet time to continue reading the diary.

It seemed that the Democrat Party judge had set the deceased's child support payments at a rate based on deceased's salary before he lost his job because of the government's fraudulent child abuse investigation. The judge said that his Democrat Party court would not tolerate lazy child abusers.

The deceased was unable to find comparable work because employers are not inclined to hire suspected child abusers. This resulted in the deceased not being able to obtain employment and make the full court ordered payments.

A part time job and partial payments did not satisfy the Democrat Party judge who ordered the deceased to forfeit: their driver's license, vocational license, and all custody and visitation rights with his children. As this was not enough, the liberal lesbian judge also ordered the deceased to spend six months in county jail.

By now more homeless people were showing up to claim property previously "loaned" to the deceased. The "radio" along with all the small items were long gone by now. I found myself giving permission for the intruders to take the furniture and anything else they could carry off. My primary interest was in finishing the last few pages of the diary.

It turned out that the one week early court ordered release from jail for the deceased required medication based maintenance therapy from one of the judge's largest re-election financial contributors.

This led to the deceased being required to take more types of prescription drugs than street dealers ever dream of selling. The court ordered prescription drug abuse achieved the desired results, and eventually led to the deceased being classified as "disabled" by other bureaucrats.

The final words in deceased diary still haunt me: "They can destroy my career; they can take away my family; and they can even make me a drug addict; but Democrats can not take away my desire to help the less fortunate."

My reflections were interrupted by somebody asking about the rest of the drugs. I had completely forgotten about the icebox full of prescription drugs. As it turned out, none of the "dregs of society" had taken anybody's drugs but their own. The person asking me about the drugs wanted to know how long the place would be open so the rest of the people could come by and pick up their medications.

I informed the person asking the question that the electricity would be left on for the rest of the weekend. My response was followed by another question about taking up, the rest of the carpet for blankets since winter was only a few weeks away. Again my response was take what you need.

Within another couple of hours, the efficiency apartment had been stripped bare except for the icebox and the curtains.

An older homeless woman approached and said "it would be nice if you told everybody to leave the curtains as kind of a memorial." After getting everyone's attention, I said that I had been given a suggestion that the curtains should be left as a memorial to a good person who made a difference.

One of the dirtiest of the homeless people said "thanks." To which I responded what for? The answer was simple, "for respecting what dignity we have left."

This Texas drifter's plans became closing out the deceased's utility accounts on Friday. Maybe that old man was right - exploiting other people's misery for publicity is not charity?

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Marshall's Law Townhall - MarshallsLaw.BlogTownhall

But who ever heard a book causing the death of millions? Rachel Carson's Silent Spring was the driving force behind eliminating DDT throughout the world. Her fraudulent claims of bird egg thinning, and widespread declines in bird populations have all been thoroughly debunked by numerous studies.

Many need to read Junkscience.com's 100 things you should know about DDT to fully understand DDT history. The Malaria Clock totals up malaria deaths of more than 90 million to date, with almost 15 billion cases where malaria has caused immense suffering and poverty.

Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) was first produced by Dr. Paul Mueller in 1939. He found that DDT quickly killed flies, walking sticks, potato beetles, aphids, and especially mosquitoes. After several unprecedented successes, including in 1943 when the U.S. Army used DDT on its soldiers to kill body, head, and crab lice, for his work with DDT Muller won the Nobel Prize in 1948.

Gas chromatography was universally used in pesticide analysis in the 1960s. Often, it failed to differentiate between DDT and other chemicals. DDT has been mistaken for other organochlorides routinely in the methods used about the same time Silent Spring came out.

Others have mistakenly claimed that some mosquitoes have become resistant to DDT, but forget about its repellency. The continued efficacy of DDT in Africa, India, Brazil, and Mexico - where 69% where all reported cases of malaria now occur - shows that repellency is very important in preventing indoor transmission of malaria.

Carson should have stuck around long enough to see how the mosquito population has drastically increased over the last 30 years.

Today, the evolving door of science is determining that some man-made chemicals are more toxic than thought. Thalidomide, used by some pregnant women to prevent morning sickness, was found to cause severe birth defects. Aspartame, an existing artificial sweetener, has been found to produce symptoms of MS in healthy individuals.

However, Alar (daminozide) used extensively in the 60-80's, was sprayed on fruit (mainly apples) to regulate their growth and enhance their color. The EPA decided to ban Alar altogether because of carcinogenicity concerns. It turns out lab tests have shown over 5000 gallons per day of apple juice must be consumed before any tumors could develop, and drinking less that 100 gallons of water in one day could cause death.

Unfortunately, DDT has been put in the same category as the first two truly toxic materials. In frequently asked questions on DDT use for disease vector control, the World Health Organization (WHO) provides some very salient points for use of DDT. Senator Tom Coburn's plea to the European Union on DDT is so well described in Environmentalism, Human Health, Africa. It also depicts how nicotine breathed in from common cigarettes is 100 times more toxic than DDT.

John Berlau (Research Fellow, Competitive Enterprise Institute) says, "Not a single study linking DDT exposure to human toxicity has ever been reported."

In Paul Driessen's column in Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, he writes about how DDT expert Dr. Gordon Edwards used to eat a spoonful of DDT whenever he gave a lecture about it.

Driessen also confirms how the EPA head William Ruckelshaus had never attended a single day's session in seven months of EPA hearings on the use of DDT, and who admittedly had not even read the transcript, banned it for virtually all uses.

After seven months of testimony, EPA Administrative Law Judge Edmund Sweeney stated "DDT is not carcinogenic to man...The evidence in this proceeding supports the conclusion that there is a present need for the essential uses of DDT."

What's worse is there is a contingent of people who are OK with the loss of life in developing countries without DDT because of fears of world overpopulation. Shocking as it sounds many believe third-world populations are third class citizens anyway. They believe fewer numbers of them will only aid the perceived problem of world overpopulation. They are the ones who put differing values on life.

We have heard a lot over the past year or so about how President John F. Kennedy wouldn't be able to garner his political party's nomination for the presidency in today's Democrat Party. An examination of his political platform and the principles he embraced would today place him on the right side of the aisle. So, why is it that in just under fifty years the political ideology of the most revered Democrat to hold office in modern times is shunned by the party he served? It's because his party - the Democrat Party - isn't the party of Democrats any longer.

Sure, there are still some issues that Democrats view in the same light they did back in the 1960s. Democrats are more prone to being anti-war than their Conservative counterparts. They still believe in a larger role for government in the private sector. And they still believe that government has a significant role to play where poverty and the disenfranchised are concerned.

Many, like Kennedy - and Roosevelt before him - also continue to believe in a strong national defense, although they still possess a great deal of concern about the "military industrial complex."

But today's Democrat Party agenda, while holding to these core issues, has evolved into a completely different political party, complete with a foreign - as in not of the Democrat Party of old - agenda. In fact, many a Democrat has come forward to espouse, "It isn't your Dad's Democrat Party anymore."

Today's Democrat Party is led by a zealous, almost fanatical faction of the party; the Progressives. This faction is more pronounced in the House of Representatives and is led by Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco and her Progressive Caucus. While the Progressive ideology is less apparent in the US Senate, it does drive the Democrat majority's agenda on the major issues, especially where spending and entitlement are concerned. In the Executive Branch, the Obama Administration is born of the Progressive movement. In the Judiciary Branch, which is supposed to be apolitical, newly seated Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor joins former ACLU lawyer Ruth Bader Ginsberg as the most notable Progressives.

Democrats, born of Anti-Federalist factions, established their political party on an agenda including states' rights, strict adherence to the Constitution and in opposition to a national bank and wealthy, moneyed interests. These precepts grew to include opposition to corruption, high taxes and tariffs. And while the Democrat Party developed to include the promotion of social welfare, labor unions, civil rights and regulation of business, it advanced this support with an eye toward balance and respect for the need for that balance.

The Progressive Movement, through three attempts at mainstreaming its philosophy, has arrived, through the social activist movement, to champion a political agenda that includes: electoral reform (including the abolition of the Electoral College), environmentalism and pollution control to an extreme degree and to the point of national detriment, same-sex marriage and the mainstreaming of alternative-lifestyles, hate-crime legislation, universal healthcare, abolition of the death penalty, affordable housing regardless of economic viability, pro-union policies, and the misguided notion that radical Islamic aggression should be treated as a law enforcement issue instead of an act of war, to name but a very few.

Further, one of the most powerful influences in the Progressive Movement - aside from the neo-Marxists of the Frankfort School and the ideological manifestation of political correctness - is the radical ideology of Saul Alinsky, whose Rules of Radicals mandated:

1) Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.

2) Never go outside the experience of your people.

3) Wherever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy.

4) Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules

5) Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.

6) A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.

7) A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.

8) Keep the pressure on.

9) The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.

10) The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.

11) If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.

12) The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.

13) Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

As for ethics and morality, Alinsky said:

"The judgment of the ethics of means is dependent upon the political position of those sitting in judgment..."

"The morality of a means depends upon whether the means is being employed at a time of imminent defeat or imminent victory."

"You do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral garments."

"Goals must be phrased in general terms like 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,' 'Of the Common Welfare,' 'Pursuit of Happiness' or 'Bread and Peace.'"

The Progressive element within the Democrat Party, as it operates today, employs the "ends justifies the means" strategy of achieving their goals in a most egregious manner, and whether the goals are in the best interest of the "Common Good" or simply put forth in an effort to strengthen the Progressive ideology.

Examining the standard operating procedure "slash-and-burn" tactics of Nancy Pelosi, we see that she and the members of the Progressive Caucus think nothing of:

▪ Usurping the long-established House committee legislative process by crafting legislation behind closed doors and unto themselves.

▪ Colluding with organizations emanating from the Progressive movement like the Apollo Alliance, a special interest group that counted among its higher-ups the now former Green Jobs Czar, Van Jones, and who helped to craft the disaster of a "stimulus bill" - which stimulated the special interests of the Progressive Left, the ire of the mainstream American people and little else.

▪ Advancing falsehoods in an effort to advance their ideological agenda - a perfect example of this is presented in Ms. Pelosi's attack on the CIA and intelligence community in which she changed her story several times about being briefed on enhanced interrogation techniques used on radical Islamist terrorists.

Further, Ms. Pelosi and her Progressive Caucus illustrated their contempt for the election process, the Constitution and the rule of law by swearing in Bill Owens prior to the certification of the congressional special election in New York's 23rd Congressional District. They did this simply to pad the vote for their healthcare proposal, HR3692.

The Progressive movement has grown to include globalists like George Soros and Peter Lewis, and organizations like MoveOn.org, Media Matters and Center for American Progress. It also counts among its political pawns organizations like CodePink, Emily's List, ACORN and America Coming Together.

The Progressive agenda, in its current form, in advancing three core issues in healthcare reform, climate change legislation and immigration reform, would not only "fundamentally change the United States of America," as Pres. Obama has told us he intends to do, but crash the dollar and set the stage for a global currency, which will lead to global regulation, authority and last, but not least, a global government.

To compare and contrast, Democrats, as core tenets, embrace a "strict adherence to the Constitution and opposition to a national bank and wealthy, moneyed interests." Progressives are usurping the Constitution and using the "national bank and moneyed interests" to move the country to a global new world order.

The surprising fact in all of this is that the Progressive Caucus in the US House of Representatives consists of 79 members, most from California, New York, Illinois or Massachusetts. Put into context, the Progressives in the US House - where all financial legislation is supposed to originate - account for roughly one-third of the 258 Democrat members and roughly one-fifth of the total of members. Yet, they control the committee chairmanships and manhandle the agenda.

Some glaring questions beg to be asked:

▪ If the actions and intentions of the Progressives in elected office is to marginalize the Constitution and move our nation toward the surrender of our sovereignty, why won't the rank-and-file Democrats remove them from leadership, if only to preserve their legislative authority and power?

▪ If Progressives - as they have demonstrated through word and deed - are so hell-bent on marginalizing our country, the Constitution and our currency in both stature and in the ability to affect global policy, why won't rank-and-file Democrats in Congress collude with the GOP in an effort to preserve the Union and her currency?

▪ If Progressives are so few in number, why do rank-and-file Democrats in Congress allow them to be seated in leadership positions, especially in light of the destruction Progressives are inflicting upon the Democrat brand with centrists and independent voters?

And last but not least, what - besides divisiveness, elitism, censorship, political correctness and the silence of honest debate - has the Progressive movement ever contributed to the people of the world?

There are quite a few things wrong with our country today. We are fighting an internal cancer in constitutional illiteracy while, at the same time, battling aggressive radical Islam and the encroaching neo-Marxism of the Progressive movement. While constitutional literacy will take at least a generation to restore and the conflict with radical Islam promises to be one that will outlast several generations, the potency of the neo-Marxist Progressive movement can be neutered almost immediately, but it must be neutered from within the Democrat Party.

This truth begs one last question: Do Democrats have the will to take back their party?

Let's hope, for the sake of our country, that they do.

Frank Salvato is the Executive Director and Director of Terrorism Research for BasicsProject.org a non-profit, non-partisan, 501(c)(3) research and education initiative. His writing has been recognized by the US House International Relations Committee and the Japan Center for Conflict Prevention. His organization, BasicsProject.org, partnered in producing the original national symposium series addressing the root causes of radical Islamist terrorism. He is a member of the International Analyst Network. He also serves as the managing editor for The New Media Journal. Mr. Salvato has appeared on The O'Reilly Factor on FOX News Channel, and is a regular guest on talk radio including on The Captain's America Radio Show airing on AM1220 WSRQ and on the Internet catering to the US Armed Forces around the world and on The Roth Show with Dr. Laurie Roth syndicated nationally on the USA Radio Network. His opinion-editorials have been published by The American Enterprise Institute, The Washington Times & Human Events and are syndicated nationally. He is occasionally quoted in The Federalist. Mr. Salvato is available for public speaking engagements. He can be contacted at contact@newmediajournal.us.

The implication is that Obama favored the funding ban in order to get the bill out of the House and now opposes it. The bishops have been "betrayed," Donohue claims. 

But who played into whose hands?

One of the sharpest critics of the political left on the scene today, Donohue may be failing to confront the left-wing and even socialist tendency in his own church. The shocking truth is that the bishops, their lobbyists, and the Vatican itself worked hand-in-glove with Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a pro-abortion Catholic. In fact, according to one sensational report, Catholic lobbyists were "summoned" into Pelosi's office to make a deal.

Information about Catholic lobbying on Capitol Hill during House deliberations over health care legislation has been leaking out in bits and pieces. Now, however, Julia Duin of the Washington Times has put it all together. Rather than feeling betrayed by Obama, her extraordinary article describes "jubilation" by the bishops and their lobbyists over the health care legislation as they meet this week in Baltimore, Maryland, for a conference.

"The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops was taking a lot of the credit for getting more than 60 Democratic votes on Nov. 7 for a last-minute amendment to President Obama's health care bill that says no federally subsidized insurance plan can cover abortion," she reported.

Duin said she approached the issue with keen interest. "I was curious about what kind of behind-the-scenes work the USCCB [U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops] staff did," she said. "We all knew that various bishops were calling House members; retired Washington Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick's call to Mrs. Pelosi's office from Rome is well known, as was Chicago Cardinal Francis George's call to House Minority Leader John A. Boehner of Ohio to make sure Republicans didn't scuttle the amendment."

"Although Cardinal McCarrick walked away when I approached him about his call from the Vatican, some of the others involved in the lobbying were more forthcoming," she said. "There were four USCCB staff members shuttling between various offices on Capitol Hill that weekend, especially on Nov. 6, the day before the Stupak amendment and the final bill passed. And they didn't come uninvited. 'We were summoned to the Hill by the speaker,' one of the quartet told me. 'She needed the votes.'" Duin names the names of those staffers. I have emailed the USCCB asking how many of them are registered as lobbyists on Capitol Hill.

Did they not understand that the anti-abortion amendment put forward by Rep. Bart Stupak was a temporary measure to get the bill passed and let the Senate work its will on the legislation? This is an obvious story for the Catholic press, but one that should interest the secular media as well. In other words, were the bishops used? Or did they let themselves be used? 

The end result, as Donohue now fears, will likely be socialized medicine without any new restrictions on abortion. It will be a major victory for Obama and his socialist backers.

If socialized medicine comes to America, Obama will have the Catholic bishops to thank. They kept the House bill alive, working at the direction of Speaker Pelosi, when it appeared that the whole package was going to go down to defeat.  

Writing on the Newsrealblog associated with Frontpagemag.com, Calvin Freiburger points out that the official position of the bishops on so-called universal health care is shared by the forces on the political left. But it's difficult to get these basic facts reported in the major media. Too often it has simply been reported that the bishops were opposed to the Obama plan. In fact, their opposition was largely limited to the abortion matter.

Freiburger notes that Catholic Priest Jonathan Morris, a Fox News analyst, was on Sean Hannity's program and tried to claim that the bishops favor some vague "universal right to have access to basic health care" but not "socialized medicine." Freiburger quotes from an official USCCB document in which they explicitly call for the federal government to have a role in guaranteeing that "right." There is no question that the bishops favor a strong federal role. Indeed, they want the legislation to cover illegal aliens. National health care could also be a device to subsume many of the costs currently being born by Catholic Hospitals.

"The modern Left has successfully hijacked many religious institutions, and conservatives do themselves no favors by denying the problem," notes Freiburger.

The fact is that many conservative Catholics do understand the problem and they have contacted me, encouraging more coverage of what the bishops have been doing. One told me, "The USCCB has virtually handed over to the government every activity that used to be understood as the proper realm of private, voluntary charity." He points out that Catholic Charities gets billions of government dollars. Indeed, in 2008, according to the organization's own figures, federal government revenue accounted for 67 percent of its $3.9 billion total income. 

This Catholic, who has worked in Washington, D.C. for many years, is so cynical that he even doubts that many of the bishops mean it when they say they're opposed to abortion being covered under the health care bill. He said, "Look for any 'opposition' to the billions that the federal government spends on 'family planning.'" The implication is that their anti-abortion position is more rhetorical than real. 

Raymond Arroyo, the host of Catholic television network EWTN's "The World Over" program, has stated that half or more of the bishops voted for Obama, despite his radical pro-abortion record.

Interestingly, Arroyo is on the board of directors of Donohue's organization. Perhaps they should begin a discussion of what the bishops knew and when they knew it when it comes to the national health care scheme being pushed through Congress. It's getting pretty late, however, for answers.

            Cliff Kincaid is the Editor of Accuracy in Media, and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org.

While the kowtower-in-chief's press shop feeds paeans to free speech into Obama's globetrotting teleprompter, the White House is still waging war on vocal foes at home. Obama has lectured his critics in Washington to stop talking and "get out of the way." He has stacked his carefully staged town halls with partisan stooges and campaign plants throughout the year. The president recently derided limited-government activists in the Tea Party movement with a vulgar sexual term used by left-wing cable host Anderson Cooper on CNN and the MSNBC smear merchants (just Google "teabagging" and you'll see what they mean).

There are now more muzzled watchdogs in the Obama administration than on the sidelines of the Westminster Kennel Club show.

Most recently, two EPA lawyers critical of the "fatally flawed" cap-and-trade system - peddled by their agency, the White House and the Democratic majority - were told by their superiors to yank a video they posted to YouTube explaining their views. Despite including a caveat that the opinions expressed were their own and not the agency's, the couple faces possible disciplinary action by the feds. While demanding the video be yanked, the EPA disingenuously claims it tolerates all dissenting views of its employees.

The clampdown follows on the heels of the Obama EPA's stifling of veteran researcher Alan Carlin's dissent. He dared to challenge the agency's reliance on outdated data to support its greenhouse gas "public endangerment" finding. Carlin's report was squelched; his office is now on the chopping block.

In China, O proclaimed himself "a big supporter of non-censorship." But his FCC "diversity" czar, Mark Lloyd, is bent on re-engineering public airwaves by redistributing free speech rights from conservative haves who earned their success to minority have-nots who demand talk radio entitlements in the name of "media justice."

And among Obama's closest advisers is a husband-and-wife duo who specializes in marginalizing and stifling the Democratic Party's most effective enemies. Just days after White House interim communications director Anita Dunn - the administration's resident Mao cheerleader and Fox News-basher - stepped down to take a planned role as a "consultant" behind the scenes, her husband, Robert Bauer, stepped up and shoved aside White House counsel Greg Craig.

The problem? Former Clinton lawyer Craig wasn't tough enough for Chicago-on-the-Potomac.

Obama needed an intimate ally who will put hardball politics ahead of policy and the law. Bauer fits the bill.

A partner at the prestigious law firm Perkins & Coie, Bauer served as counsel to the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and Obama for America. He has served as Obama's personal attorney, navigating the corrupted waters of former Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich's pay-for-play scandals in Illinois. He also served as legal counsel to the George Soros-funded 527 organization America Coming Together during the 2004 campaign.

That get-out-the-vote outfit, helmed by Patrick Gaspard (the former Service Employees International Union heavy turned Obama domestic policy chief), employed convicted felons as canvassers and committed campaign finance violations that led to a $775,000 fine by the Federal Election Commission under Bauer's watch.

During the 2008 campaign, Bauer pooh-poohed GOP complaints about voter fraud. While decrying the Republicans' "fear message," it was Bauer who was on a fear-inducing crusade - pulling out all legal stops to silence conservative critics of Obama's ties to the radical left.

As I've noted previously, and in light of Obama's self-serving praise for political dissent abroad, I note again: It was Bauer who lobbied the Justice Department unsuccessfully last fall to pursue a criminal probe of American Issues Project (AIP), an independent group that sought to run an ad spotlighting Obama's ties to Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers.

It was Bauer and his legal goon squad who attempted to sic the DOJ on GOP donor Harold Simmons and sought his prosecution for funding the ad. In a parallel effort launched the same week as Bauer's legal efforts, a nonprofit called "Accountable America," spearheaded by a former operative of the Obama-endorsing MoveOn outfit, began trolling campaign finance databases and targeting conservative donors with "warning letters" in a thuggish attempt to depress Republican fundraising.

It was Bauer who tried to bully television stations across the country into pulling the spot. Team Obama then summoned their troops to bombard stations, many of them owned by conservative-leaning Sinclair Communications, with 93,000 e-mails to squelch the commercial.

With Bob "The Silencer" Bauer now working from the inside and Anita "News Commissar" Dunn working from the outside, Obama has a state media police apparatus the Chinese regime itself could love.

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November's elections showed that the American people are waking up to the economic disasters Barack Obama is inflicting on America. The voters are upset and angry about Obama and his congressional cohorts creating debt for our children and grandchildren that can be paid only by Middle Class taxes and inflation, taking over whole industries such as health care, and deceiving us with the expensive Stimulus bill that creates only government (not private sector) jobs.

Some of the popular homemade signs carried at the Tea Party rallies said it all. "I love my country, but I don't trust my government."

In the most controversial election on November 3rd, New York House District 23, Republican Party leaders made the mistake of nominating a pro-abortion, pro-same-sex-marriage, pro-Obama Stimulus package, pro-Card Check feminist (who ultimately endorsed the Democrat), and then giving her nearly a million dollars of national Republican campaign funds. Conservatives rebuked the Party by running a real conservative on the Conservative Party ticket, who was then endorsed by a prestigious list of Republicans led by Sarah Palin, Dick Armey, Jim DeMint, and the Club for Growth.

The conservative, Doug Hoffman, lost narrowly to the Democrat (who got 49 percent of the vote), but the race taught several valuable political lessons. The road to Republican victory is to nominate a real conservative because the voters absolutely will not accept an appointed liberal, feminist, or RINO.

The voters will not be fooled by slogans that we must "broaden the base" of the Party and become more "inclusive" by adopting the other Party's positions. Conservative Republicans want to be "inclusive" like Ronald Reagan, and they welcome the Tea Party people, Joe the Plumber, and those who realize that jobs are the big issue today.

The 2009 elections show that conservatives are winning the Independents, the same Independents who voted for Obama in 2008 and are now disillusioned with his brand of "change." Conservatives can win if they dominate the Republican Party as they did in 1980.

The Gallup Poll shows that conservatives now outnumber liberals nationwide 40 percent to 21 percent. And self-identified conservatives outnumber self-identified liberals in all 50 states (even in Massachusetts!).

Another lesson we learn from the New York race is that a Third Party is not the way to go. If there ever were a viable Third Party, it is the New York Conservative Party, which has had a respectable place on New York ballots for many years, but it still couldn't elect Doug Hoffman.

Conservatives who are in the political game to win must participate in Republican primaries and precinct caucuses and nominate conservatives on the Republican ticket. That route is vastly easier, less expensive, and more productive than trying to build a Third Party.

Other November elections that were happy news for conservatives included the big victory of authentic conservative Bob McDonnell as Governor of Virginia (a state that went for Obama in 2008), and the amazing victory of Chris Christie as Governor of blue-state New Jersey (despite incumbent Jon Corzine spending $25 million on reelection).

In Pennsylvania, overcoming three-times-as-much spending by the trial lawyers, conservatives elected Republican Judge Joan Orie Melvin to the crucial vacancy on the state supreme court. This court had been tied 3 Democrats to 3 Republicans, and will control redistricting, which could mean the gain or loss of three or four Republicans in Congress.

On November 3rd, Maine became the 31st state to uphold the traditional definition of marriage by a vote of the people. Maine voters repealed Maine's new state law allowing same-sex marriage.

The pro-homosexual New York Times has sunk into deep depression about what it called "a crushing loss" for the homosexual agenda, which had counted on winning because it spent "far more money" and "geography was on their side" in New England, the most pro-gay section of the country. The gays now fear revival of the pre-Olympia Snowe slogan, "As Maine goes, so goes the nation."

As the old adage reminds us, coming events cast their shadows before them. Conservatives are gearing up with hope for the 2010 congressional elections.

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 Phyllis Schlafly was named one of the 100 most important women of the 20th century by the Ladies' Home Journal. She has been a national leader of the conservative movement since the publication of her best-selling 1964 book, A Choice Not An Echo, and a leader of the pro-family movement since 1972, when she started her national volunteer organization now called Eagle Forum.

Mrs. Schlafly is the founder and president of Eagle Forum, a national organization of citizens who participate as volunteers in the public policymaking process. It maintains offices on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. and in Alton, Illinois. She is also the founder and president of Eagle Forum Education & Legal Defense Fund, a think-tank which has its national headquarters at the Eagle Forum Education Center in St. Louis.

Totally Unbecoming of an American President
Embarrassing and Humiliating to the American People!!!

Will someone in Obama's Regime please take him aside and explain to him that the American President does not, repeat: does not ever, under any circumstances, BOW to another world leader -- at anytime or for any reason!

Obama's bowing in Japan is past embarrassing. This gives the impression that Obama is representing an America in a state of "submission" to the country to which he, Obama, is bowing!

I have lived through embarrassing presidential administrations before, a number of them: Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Clinton, and now OBAMA. But, I have to tell you, the Obama regime is the worst for dragging America down and placing her in submission to other countries and organizations, such as the corrupt UN, and other "entities" we know nothing about -- yet.

Where are the shrinks when we need one? I want to hear a certified shrink tell me why Obama feels he must submit to any world leader on the globe let alone ALL OF THEM!!!

If there was ever a pathetic sight in the history of the world it was/is the President of the United States of America bowing, period. It matters not to whom he is bowing.

Yes, I have known since day one of the Presidential campaign, that Obama suffers from a massive inferiority complex. He wants, no, he NEEDS, to be loved BY EVERYONE! He craves that love and adoration so much that he is willing to crawl to the tattered and tarnished thrones of "has been" foreign powers and prostrate himself in a sign of total submission just to receive a moment's notice from them. Obama gives the impression he is begging scraps from their tables. His conduct in the presence of other world leaders is AWFUL, just AWFUL!

Obama's minions are trying to sell the American public the story that Obama was only observing protocol. Protocol my Aunt Fanny! There is NO SUCH PROTOCOL. None. Nowhere in the protocol handbook for the American President does it say an American President must bow to a foreign leader!

This is past embarrassing. This is into the "Realm of Unreality."

Ok, the bottom line: If the President wants to fly around the world and play some sort of "I submit" game then I want it clear, to all the leaders around the globe, that he, sure as heck, is NOT BOWING FOR ME and for the majority of Americans who find his antics embarrassing and humiliating -- and not a little insane!

J. D. Longstreet is a conservative Southern American (A native sandlapper and an adopted Tar Heel) with a deep passion for the history, heritage, and culture of the southern states of America. At the same time he is a deeply loyal American believing strongly in "America First". and also  "The Carolina Post" .  

Raymond Arroyo, host of Catholic television network EWTN's "The World Over" program, says that the evidence indicates that groups funded by the Bishops through the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD) are actually "subverting" Catholic teaching on matters such as homosexual rights and abortion. He regrets that money being spent on such causes is coming at the expense of Catholic schools and hospitals facing funding shortfalls and possible closure.

Arroyo, whose November 13 show featured  two major critics of the CCHD, is a graduate of the National Journalism Center (which also produced ACORN whistleblower Hannah Giles). He is a conservative who has a worldwide Catholic audience and can shake up the Bishops and the Vatican itself.

A regular guest on the Laura Ingraham radio show, where he comments on moral and religious issues, Arroyo has risked the wrath of the Catholic Bishops by devoting his EWTN program to exposing alleged corruption in the church. The Bishops are meeting in Baltimore this week.

An on-air caller to the EWTN show read a statement from a local Catholic Bishop claiming that EWTN is "not a good source of Catholic information" and disputing some of the allegations against the CCHD. But Arroyo shot back, quoting from an October 2 memorandum from Bishop Roger P. Morin, chairman of the CCHD, admitting that CCHD had funded groups in support of abortion rights and same-sex marriage, contrary to church teaching.

The timing of Arroyo's show was important. The annual CCHD collection is being held in churches this coming weekend-November 21 and 22. The theme of this year's collection is "Families are struggling. Faith is calling."

But Arroyo wanted Catholics to know that the CCHD has been plagued by charges of mismanagement and scandal. A group called Reform CCHD Now is urging Catholics to put coupons in collection plates, rather than money, informing the Bishops that the CCHD must be thoroughly overhauled.

In a video, the American Life League (ALL) has labeled the CCHD the "Catholic Campaign for Anti-Catholic Activities."

Arroyo noted that the evidence shows that while the bishops have been defending traditional marriage in states where it has been under attack, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is funding pro-homosexual organizations through the CCHD.

EWTN's coverage of this controversy has to be extremely worrisome to the Bishops. If there is one thing they do not want, it is another sex-related scandal. The sex abuse scandal involving pedophilia by Catholic Priests reportedly cost the church more than $1 billion.

But in another shocking development that adds to the current controversy, a blogger at the Free Republic has uncovered a convicted child pornographer on the staff of a Baltimore group, Alternative Directions, Inc. (ADI), which has received funding from the Baltimore CCHD. The group has received additional funding from the national CCHD for an ADI project called Out for Justice.

"I really don't want money from my church collection paying a child pornographer's salary," the blogger said.

Michelle Kelly of ADI said, "I don't know," when asked if the staffer in question had been convicted as a child pornographer. The Free Republic blogger says the staffer is a registered sex offender in Maryland because of the child pornography conviction. 

Kelly tried to differentiate between ADI and Out for Justice, even though the latter is described as a project of the former in the Fall 2008 ADI newsletter. She said Out for Justice is applying for its own separate legal status. Under further questioning, she hung up the telephone. 

On the website of the Baltimore CCHD, the groups are listed together as one entity and in receipt of $30,000. It declares, "A second year CCHD organizing grant will enable this project to continue to address and empower largely unrepresented persons inside and outside the prison system, with special attention on reentry into society."

Out for Justice is listed as being located at the same offices as ADI.

Out for Justice is listed as the recipient of $30,000 from the national CCHD. The organization is described as former prisoners, "a largely unrepresented group in the political and social arenas." One of their legislative goals is a bill to have the state of Maryland adopt a policy to encourage the employment of ex-convicts. Another is to deny private landlords the right to ask about the criminal background of an individual and deny housing based on that background.

Responding to this legislative priority, the Free Republic blogger, a Catholic, said he didn't want his money going to change the law so sex offenders "can live near me or my children."

Both Alternative Directions, Inc. and Out for Justice collaborated with the Open Society Institute, a George Soros-funded organization, on a report, Bearing Witness, from the Justice Policy Institute. The recommendations include stopping the practice of sending drug criminals to prison and developing "alternatives to incarceration."

Another one of the contributing organizations to the report was listed as "Mayor Sheila Dixon's Office of Criminal Justice."

Dixon is currently on trial on charges of stealing gift cards intended for Baltimore's needy families.

While federal funding of the corrupt organization ACORN has been the subject of much press attention, money being provided to ACORN and other controversial groups through the Catholic Church has been mostly hushed-up by major media organizations. 

But the Catholic Bishops themselves have suspended funding to ACORN, after disclosing that $7.3 million was given to the organization and its affiliates by the CCHD from 1998-2008.

It turns out that ACORN, however, is just one of several controversial "community organizing" groups that have been funded by the CCHD. Another is the Gamaliel Foundation, which originally sponsored Barack Obama's work as a community organizer in Chicago and recently held a conference in Washington that featured Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett as a speaker. Gamaliel still gets CCHD money. 

It is into this controversy that Arroyo, whose website features photographs with top Catholic officials and politicians, has stepped.

Arroyo's guests on the program were Michael Hichborn of the American Life League (ALL) and Rob Gasper, founder of Bellarmine Veritas Ministry, which has been responsible for some of the eye-opening exposés of the CCHD. Together, they are members of the ReformCCHD now coalition.

The CCHD is said to be dedicated to fighting poverty, but Arroyo noted that it doesn't fund any groups involved in providing direct services to the poor such as soup kitchens. Instead, the CCHD mission is said to be "to address the root causes of poverty in America through promotion and support of community-controlled, self-help organizations and through transformative education," its website says.

Arroyo wondered how his guests had unearthed the shocking information about church funding of anti-Catholic causes. They replied that they simply went to the websites of the CCHD and the organizations being funded and put the information together.

Hichborn of ALL says either the CCHD is incompetent in how it awards grants and is therefore unworthy of funds or "is being run by pro-homosexual, pro-abortion socialists who got caught" and doesn't deserve the money in that case. Either way, he concludes, "this funding must end." 

            Cliff Kincaid is the Editor of Accuracy in Media, and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org.

Victories in Islam are like a Russian doll, with each victory leading to a larger victory, and Islam is exerting increasing influence on Western cultures through immigration, oil economics, cultural exchange, education, political correctness, political contributions, and the threat of terror.

"Walking the Plank: To a Dhimmi Nation" reveals how America has been systematically submitting to Islam for decades as American businessmen and politicians endorse Islamic causes in exchange for oil, money, and power.

Submission to Islam as an attitude of concession, surrender and appeasement towards Islamic demands under coercion and constant fear of reprisal. As a pacifist reaction to aggression, submission to Islam is an attitude of servitude resulting from cowardice, vulnerability, bribery and extortion. It is the state of "dhimmitude," where a dhimmi is a non-Muslim entity that accepts the conditions of Islamic law and remains safe by peacefully surrendering to Islamic terms.

The book suggests that the world trade center bombings of 1993 and 2001 were designed to further enable Islamic expansion in the United States by destroying evidence of who the world's real imperialists are, and by giving Muslims permission to feel aggrieved and demand special protection status.

In what may be the largest organized crime ever in history, the author contends that global warming and the recent financial crisis and bailout are part of a profitable scheme, or financial jihad, to transfer trillions of dollars into Islamist Saudi coffers and drive America into generations of dhimmitude.

Most Americans agree that Bush kept us safe from another terrorist attack after September 11, 2001. But just because we are not witnessing violence and death on American soil, we cannot assume that we are safe from jihad. The reality is that violent attacks are not necessary for jihad if other methods achieve the same results.

Those who do not understand jihad and Islamic doctrine tend to attribute the reasons for Islamic grievance to poverty, desperation, and misunderstanding. They often believe that being nice will solve our differences, that cooperation, aid, and commerce will alleviate tense situations, and that everyone just wants harmony and happiness. We believe that if the unsatisfied only had a good income, or an education, or if they do not perceive discrimination, they will be content. This is wishful, delusional thinking. As demonstrated in Saudi Arabia, widespread prosperity does not stop terrorism. It actually enables the spread of Islam via stealth and manipulation that is backed by the threat of terror. The lack of gratitude  from Islamic recipients of aid and cooperation is because Islamists view all concessions as victories for Islam and their due from non-Muslims. What Americans do not understand about Islam is that its victories are like a Russian doll, always followed by a larger one.

After eight years of compromising liberties for security, an agenda to Islamicize America is well underway. Religion, politics, finances, education, oil, culture, and terrorism are inseparable in jihad. September 11, 2001 may be the only large scale act of terror necessary to advance and achieve a takeover.  American are still in denial of something we cannot comprehend and do not wish to know about. The explosion of the World Trade Center on 9/11 caused much more than rubble, the horrible death of 3,000 people, and insurance payouts at the end of corporate money trails. Files and files of evidence went up in a poof of smoke that day. Evidence in those files could have proven a web of extensive financial and political associations through ownership titles, transactions, statements, etc. revealing who the world's real imperialists are. At the expense of American citizen's lives and security, half a century of transactions involving Middle Eastern petrodollars vanished.

My insight to Islam began with my marriage to a Moslem who came to America on a student visa pre-9/11. In the late 1970's to mid 1980's, I read the Koran at his suggestion and subsequently learned that by persuasion, intimidation, terror, stealth or force, Islam intends to make the whole world submissive to its oppressive ideology. My former husband was not shy about expressing his thoughts on what he believed were American deficiencies and cultural inadequacies. He enlightened me to the fact that Muslim people and Muslim leaders carefully scrutinize our society, our politics, and our presidents, just like the Iranian President Ahmadenijad openly and smugly does today. Our studious and disingenuously friendly Muslim acquaintances appeared on the surface to be quite moderate, however they were serious Muslims who told me that democracy, capitalism and American politics was corrupt to the core, and against the law of God. They spoke of Americans as superficial and greedy. They often said that Islam will rule the world someday because it is the fastest growing religion and a complete way of life. They believed Islam superior over all other religions because it is inclusive of politics, social behavior, economics, and worship.

While scrutinizing and insulting Americans, Muslim students flocked to the United States to attend our universities. I doubted that Islam was so complete if Muslims felt it necessary to leave their countries, which they always presented as nearly a paradise, for a formal education in a non-Muslim country. I wondered why they came here since they regularly belittled our way of life, our holidays, our politics, our financial system, our values, our hygiene, and our manners. In my early twenties, I began to fall prey to this "white guilt" indoctrination. I realized later that those friendships were conditional and hinged solely on my willingness to learn about, practice, and approve of Islam.

During those years, President Jimmy Carter was trying to show Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini what a nice guy he was. It was humiliating to watch CNN and see the Iranian students seize the embassy in Teheran in November 1979, holding the staff hostage until January 1981. Like most of America, this was my introduction to "radical" Islam. It happened early in a marriage that I was determined would work. I would have done anything to help my now X-husband integrate happily into America. I believed the stories of how horrible the Shah was. I began to practice "moderate" Islam and read the Koran.

Though reading the Koran is not required in Islam, by the time I finished reading it, I knew I was not a Muslim, and I knew it would cause a problem for me and my children if I ever stopped practicing it. Hoping it would not mean the end of my marriage, I knew I would eventually have to find the courage to tell my husband, who was becoming more radical every day, that I could not practice Islam any longer. The more I learned and practiced the religion, the more was required of me, including disassociations with friends, family, culture, and values to the extent that I felt like a traitor to myself, my family and my country.

Jimmy Carter continued his weak stance too, persuading the Tehran regime that it could get away with anything. Far from showing Khomeini that the United States disapproved of his comments and activities, the U.S. government pathetic and helpless approach convinced Khomeini and all Muslims that the Islamic revolution was big, strong, and right.

Americans, including myself, should have learned from the hostage situation in Teheran that submissiveness to anti-American radicals does not work. Appeasement did not convince Tehran that America was its friend, only that it was so weak as to make aggression all the more justifiable. Realizing that Ronald Reagan would be tougher, the revolutionary students released the American embassy hostages when Iran was suffering from an Iraqi invasion that Iranians called "The American Imposed War." They hated Reagan for that war.

I knew that no matter how softly I explained my decision to quit practicing Islam, it would probably mean the end of my marriage. As action and time would later prove, I was correct. The experience was and still is a microcosm of what goes on in politics. The divorce was definitely cruel and unusual by the standards of Western culture. To borrow benign and politically correct words from who was then a future President Bush, it was "not pretty."

Years later when the twin towers came down, I was not surprised. I remembered warning words from my former husband that "Muslims (not terrorists) will attack America someday if American politicians do not stop promoting democracy throughout the world."

Americans cannot conceive the difference between the goals of Islam and the goals of a free society. Westerners take freedom and truth for granted, so they cannot imagine a society that does not honor those virtues. The differences between freedom and totalitarianism are indescribable when one has not experienced the alternate. American naïveté makes us dangerously exploitable and predictable. We do not have the agenda or the experience to fully understand true oppression. I found out that Islamic motives are so offensive that describing them is an offensive act in itself-to the extent that it is actually labeled politically incorrect and hate speech. The Islamization of the West warning creates a "kill the messenger" situation.

"Political correctness" supports a political agenda; a wolf in sheep's clothing. Political correctness does not describe truth, honesty or morality. Rather, it disguises and enables an oppressive agenda against freedom and truth and holds citizens hostage in their own countries. Political correctness toggles a victim into an aggressor and turns free thinkers into silenced, meek and conquered slaves. Virtue, self-respect, truth, reason, creativity, freedom, and dignity are useless in a politically correct atmosphere because they are the very virtues that will expose an oppressive agenda.

Though many free thinkers have been trying to send a warning about Islamofascism, there are still too many in blissful denial. As a result, we have been kowtowing to Islamist demands ever since 9/11.

So how long does it take to get the message that this is an ideological revolution with huge ambitions, an agenda that will use oppression, intimidation, terror, deception, bribery, extortion, and our own love of freedom-just to remove freedom from the American mindscape. This is the duality that aims to force America to submit to a totalitarian ideology behind a veil of religion.

In the name of fairness the 9/11 tragedy was exploited by Muslims to demand special treatment at the expense of valid American concerns. After 9/11, religious and racial profiling gave way to preferential treatment for Muslims over Non-Muslims as they hijacked the opportunity to cry victim.

Between 2001 and 2008, mosque numbers in America increased from around 100 to 2,300, with most of them funded by Saudi sources. On the 2008 anniversary of 9/11, NYPD provided extra security for Islamic mosques.

In 2006, the Department of Homeland Security gave out small amounts of grant money to synagogues and Jewish schools after they received threats from Muslims. A number of mosques, whose anti-semantic and anti-capitalist agenda generates fearful and defensive reactions, then began to help themselves to some of the available grant money.

Even though we have not been physically or violently attacked on American soil since September 11, 2001, we are easily falling for a variety of jihad tactics. The tactics may change but the seditious goal of Islamic jihad is always the same. Muslims in the U.S. are literally using-up American tax dollars and sense of fairness to promote policies that will use-up our Democracy in favor of Islam.

Muslims regularly demand special privileges in the workplace and in schools, labeling those who object as "racists" and "Islamophobes." Tolerance and fairness has been mis-applied for an ultimate agenda of intolerance for generous, innocent, naive Americans, not the formerly defined terrorists. We have literally tied ourselves helplessly in knots in an effort to be politically correct and to tolerate an ideological supremist agenda that does not ever intend to integrate into our freedom loving, free-thinking American society.

A statement on a Muslim Brotherhood memo entered into evidence in the 2007 Texas based Holy Land Foundation case:

 "The Ikhwan (the 'brothers') must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and 'sabotaging' its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions."

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Introduction to  "Walking the Plank to a Dhimmi Nation"  by Mary Christina Love is the first (the introduction) in an excellent series of articles written with the insight of 1st person experience to the ulterior motives of the muslim in America.  Follow this series if you are interested in learning the truth behind Islam. Truth such as you will not hear it from any apologist, main stream media or liberal.

Mary Christina Love

The purpose of this blog is to inform others of the virulent fantasy called Islam and do my part to help save the Free World from it. I understand Islam because I was married to a Moslem and I read the Koran. I also practiced Islam for several years, and lived in an Islamic country under Sharia Law.

First of all, I fell for the misconception that Islam is a religion, and secondly that it is peaceful. Because I had grown up as a Christian  in a Christian culture, I had taken Christianity for granted and thought all people were basically the same.  I would learn later that I did not really understand the reason Christ came and died on the cross. In the end, it  was Islam that helped me understand Christian values and why Jesus' life, death, and  teachings are so important. 

I read the entire Koran and to my disapointment, I only found threatening and hateful incitement. I found no encouragement toward wisdom, love, forgiveness or enlightenment in the Koran. I kept reading it, hoping to find something loving, enlightening,  and beautiful that would justify my efforts, but found none. Instead I found the Koran to be the most blasphemous and pathetic piece of literature I have ever read; totally devoid of love, grace, hope, enlightenment, salvation, and reason. Before I finished reading it, I knew I was not a Muslim.  I read on to try to understand what Muslims believe and what they do not understand about Christianity.

Reading the Koran helped me understand Islam; not as a religion, but as a cruel and unforgiving Totalitarian political-ideological system that mandates its own belief system and form of worship. I realized that the "religion" part is a "facade" for intolerance, bigotry, hypocricy, control, brainwashing, fear,  and indoctrination. (Things that lead to and promote hatred for non-conformists). After I finished the Koran, I understood why it mandates the killing of apostates.

I also now know and appreciate why Jesus Christ lived, died on the cross, and why it is necessary for him to come again.

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Unfortunately, the virtually sole candidate brought up play in such matters is summarized by the word "fascism." But the extremities of Nazi Germany generally don't fit well with the relatively mild forms of mischief gotten up to in Western democratic states. Actually, the best parallel I can think of is the way that the Communist party and its fellow travelers tried to impose a cultural line on intellectual life, a process at its peak in the United States and in Britain during the 1930s, while continuingfor many decades longer in countries like France and Italy.

The experience described below by George Orwell in 1937 is a wonderful example of how history is repeating itself. I want to add quickly that I am not speaking here of subservience to a foreign state (the USSR) or even the kind of discipline exercised on party members, but how it permeated into the broader cultural, media, and intellectual scene.

To sum up the three themes:

--There is a party line which should be followed by everyone, even if they aren't in the party.

--Those who don't follow it will be called all sorts of awful names which even horrifies the victim since these insults have nothing to do with what he was trying to do or say. In those days, it was fascist or Trotskyist; today it is racist, neo-conservative, or Islamophobic.

--The line is justified because not following it is said to lead to terrible results (historically, the triumph of fascism and big business; today, the triumph of racism, Islamophobia, and big business). Another reason is that telling the truth would help the enemy, in those days, fascism or capitalism, in these days, Republicans, George W. Bush, or various reactionary, Christian fundamentalist, or fuddy-duddy forces.

--The punishments are not torture, prison, and execution but ridicule, denial of a teaching job or tenure, or just not getting your book or articles published.

The particular examples cited by Orwell pertain to the treatment in Britain of the Spanish Civil War. Orwell, a militant socialist but not a Communist, went to Spain to fight and, partly by accident, ended up in the POUM militia. This was a socialist group, mainly in Catalonia, which did not follow the Communist party line and believed that such things as peasant land seizures and workers running factories would strengthen rather than weaken the Spanish Republic in its war against the Fascist forces.

The Communists, however, wanted to control the republic and saw the POUM as a barrier. It repressed the group using bloody attacks, executions, and denunciations of it as fascist or Trotskyist. Orwell would call this in a letter, "Fascism being imposed under the pretense of resisting Fascism."

Wounded by a sniper, Orwell headed back to Britain for treatment and here our story begins. He quickly discovered that the Communists would suppress the truth out of self-interest and goals, while fellow travelers and "well-intentioned" people would do so because they believed that knowing the truth would not lead the masses in the right direction.

Remember, too, that it doesn't matter how stupid any idea or belief is as long as it is fashionable.

Now to Orwell's experience in 1937. As soon as he reached France, he contacted the left-oriented New Statesman about writing an article on his experiences. As he recounted in a letter to a friend:

"Of course they said yes, but when they saw my article was on the suppression of the POUM they said they couldn't print it."

So to buy him off, they offered to let him review a new book on the war. But, Orwell continued, "once again when they saw my review they couldn't print it as it was "against editorial policy." They did, however, offer to pay him the full fee for the review, which Orwell saw as "hush-money." The magazine was desperate to ensure he wouldn't reveal publicly its policy of censorship.

Orwell wrote that the editors warned it would "cause trouble" or, in Orwell's words, "blow the gaff on the Communist party.....They were evidently very anxious to prevent me giving away the fact that they are covering up important pieces ot the news."

Orwell also lost his publisher which, he explained, "is of course part of the Communism-racket" and as soon as it realized he had been with the POUM and would be critical of the Stalinists, explained it would be unable to publish the book even though they hadn't seen a word of the text. Orwell found another publisher and his Homage to Catalonia became a classic.

But this is how things worked then and work today. Blacklisting was not merely a technique of Senator Joe McCarthy. Back then, it was forbidden to write about Soviet concentration camps or antisemitism, or the economic incompetence of the USSR because that would allegedly "help" the bourgeoisie, or fascism, and hurt the cause of the workers.

Today, one cannot write about lots of things because they allegedly wouldn't be good for people to think or believe. In the 1930s that was also true, except all the things designed to do good through self-censorship actually did immense harm. In fact, Orwell wrote as much in another letter:

"A number of people had said to me with varying degrees of frankness that one must not tell the truth about what was happening in Spain, and the part played by the Communist Party, because to do so would be to prejudice public opinion against the [Republican] Spanish Government and so aid [General Francisco] Franco [the fascist leader]."

Today we know that the Communists, including NKVD agents dispatched for the purpose, tortured and murdered huge numbers of people for the crime of having a view of their own. We also know about the Gulag of concentration camps and the framing of hundreds of thousands of people, many crimes of the USSR which were hidden from the world by those supposedly so solicitous of the rights of man and the worker's cause. Of course, the result was that more people died and no effort was made to help them.

Another result was that the Republicans lost the war. You see, if you shut up about the misdeeds of those with the good fortunate of being dubbed "progressives" you do more harm both because of the people they victimize and since their weaknesses undermine whatever good there might be in the wider cause.

And all of this also shows one other thing: the cowardice of intellectuals. If the Wicked Witch of the West demanded that they surrender Dorothy, they probably would, and pronounce the deed just retribution for Dorothy's house landing on the Wicked Witch's sister. Disproportionate force, you know. And after all the Wicket Witch of the East was a civilian.

It is a cowardice both physical - though they beat their chest to advertize alleged courage in defying forces that in fact will do nothing to them-and moral. Dorothy Parker ridiculed such people long ago in a poem where she wrote: "Their one ambition is to get themselves arrested,/So that they can come out and be Heroes."

Yet nowadays even such minimal inconveniences are avoided, replaced by the feather-lined mattresses of rewards for alleged heroism with no pain or risk whatsoever. The pain is suffered by others, including victims of the causes rationalized by the self-described virtuous.

Leaping to the defense of courageous democrats crushed by left-wing (at least in rhetoric) dictatorships might not make them look like courageous battlers for progressive causes.

Publishing the "Danish cartoons" or telling the truth about the radical Islamist threat might hurt someone's feelings. Remember, it is always more popular to avoid hurting the feelings of people who might want to kill you in response.

Ah yes, to paraphrase Bob Dylan once put it, we've been in this movie before.

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 Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan).

LatmaTV : There was a terrible attack today on the United States. An army psychiatrist, Nadal Malik Hasan ran into a mess haul screaming "Allahu Akhbar"! and shot 13 soldiers to death. With us here in the studio is Lt. Paul Nortly who was wounded from the shooting. Good evening...

Paul Nortly: Good evening, sir.

LatmaTV: Paul, an Arab terrorist shoots at soldiers in the heart of an American army base. How did this happen?

Paul Nortly: Um...ahh..(consults with lawyer before responding..) What Arab, what terror?

LatmaTV: The terrorist who murdered 13 soldiers.

Paul Nortly: Why jump to conclusions?.. Here in America, we don't have things like that. Maybe he was angry at his girl friend. Maybe it's a shooting accident. (turns to lawyer..."is that ok"?...lawyer nods approvingly)

LatmaTV I dont understand, why are you trying to..

CONTINUE TO Caroline Glick's website

by Aaron Velasquez

One has only to wait for the word "greed" to be uttered in conversation to know that one is speaking to a Leftist, or more properly, a Marxist. Indeed, "Greed" is the rallying cry of the morally superior relativist. Wall street greed, corporate greed, Republican greed, your greed if you disagree. "Greed" is the great Satan that caused our current economic turmoil, according to any properly programmed left-winger.

To be sure, a conservative would tell you that the human characteristics of acquisitiveness and desire fuel our entire world economy, and he would probably tell you that this is a Good Thing. A Marxist/Democrat would call this "greed" and say that it is a Bad Thing.

The leftist utters the word as if he has no greed, as if Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, Lenin and Stalin, Mao and company were motivated by a higher calling, and thus, were completely greed free. A refutation of greed becomes the central tenet of a good Marxist, and we are all supposed to share our misery equally, under the thumb of our greedless leaders.

The trouble with this scenario is that the left does indeed have its own version of greed. Leftists may decry the love of money, but they themselves love nothing so much as power. It is the lust for power, the greed for power that is the wolf, clad in a fluffy sheepskin of moral superiority, false piety and sham concern for the masses. A dictator, a Soviet leader, an Ayatollah, a Democratic demagogue and a micromanaging President are all greedier than the fattest fatcat banker, but they don't want money, they want power. They want nothing more than to tell everybody else what to do. That is the hole in the rhetoric. That is the lie. The left is power-mad.  

Before 9/11, the United States had fought two wars on behalf of Muslims, the Gulf War under George Bush Sr. and the Kosovo War under Bill Clinton. In fact during the second half of the 20th century, the only wars that the United States fought that were not against Communism or Nazism-- were fought on behalf of Muslims. That is not a fact that you will glean from any of the usual media portrayals of the United States foreign policy as hostile to Muslims. In fact US foreign policy was about as helpful to Muslims as you can imagine.

Until 9/11, the United States had never invaded and occupied a single sovereign Muslim country. The closest it came was the First Barbary War in 1801, in response to piracy against American vessels and the liberation of  North Africa from Hitler's Vichy allies in WW2. And of course the misguided attempt at participating in a peacekeeping force in Beirut.

Not only that, America had developed much of the oil wealth that would keep the Gulf States in gold, skyscrapers and slave labor. And when the leaders of the Gulf States seized American oil companies, the United States government did not fight a war, as England did when Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, instead the US government paid oil companies to take the loss... out of taxpayer money.

The fear of a Communist takeover helped turn America into one of the biggest patrons of Muslim countries, from the Middle East to Turkey, Indonesia and Pakistan. America willingly closed its eyes to Indonesia's genocide in East Timor, and even supplied them with weapons. America provided the weapons and funding that Pakistan would channel into the Taliban. And naturally we ignored Turkey's pesky little genocide of the Armenians and avoided ever discussing the issue.

So by 9/11, not only had America repeatedly sent soldiers to fight and die for Muslims in two wars... but it had robbed its own taxpayers rather than challenge them over the nationalization of the assets of American companies, and had proved willing to aid and even overlook the genocides of Muslim regimes. So naturally by the warped logic of leftists and Muslims... American foreign policy was "oppressive" to Muslims.

The root of the leftist critique of American foreign policy typically rests on two planks. The first blames America for supporting dictators in Muslim countries. This would be a more legitimate critique if there were any free and democratic Muslim countries around. As it was, America simply supported whoever was in power and wasn't allied with the USSR. This might have been an immoral policy, but during the Cold War it was a continuation of the same kind of thinking that caused the US to ally with the USSR against Nazi Germany.

The left's implication was always that by supporting dictators in Muslim countries, the United States was preventing the rise of more legitimate governments. It is not clear where these legitimate governments were or how they were ever supposed to arise. Syria is a dictatorship without us ever supporting Assad. Egypt was a dictatorship when it was allied with the USSR under Nasser. It is still a dictatorship now that it is allied with us under Mubarak. When the Shah of Iran was overthrown, the left wing appeasement corps working for Jimmy Carter decided not to interfere. The result was not a democratic government or even a leftist one, but a radical Islamist one under the Ayatollahs.

The second plank is of course Israel. The United States did decide to finally cultivate Israel as an ally back under JFK in the 60's. This was in sharp contrast to far longer US ties with the House of Saud or the Eisenhower Administration's willingness to destroy England's economy in order to protect Egypt's nationalization of the Suez Canal. And the United States has provided Israel with billions in aid. As well as providing billions in aid to Egypt and Jordan. Not to mention the aid given to Turkey and Pakistan. Or the cost of the first Gulf War undertaken to liberate Kuwait and protect Saudi Arabia from Saddam Hussein.

As a matter of fact the US relationship with the Saudis has been far more uncritical and generous than with Israel. At no point in time has the US tried to force the Saudis to stop treating half their population like cattle, end their dependence on Southeast Asian slave labor... or even done much of anything for US citizens who find themselves in Saudi jails on trumped up charges.

There is of course no doubt that US arms sales to Israel have angered Muslim nations, just as US arms sales to Taiwan have angered China. But at the same time there is also no doubt that the same general sense of hostility would exist in both cases, even if the US is able to sell out Israel as successfully as it sold out Taiwan.

In any case, to argue that American support for Israel oppresses Muslims, is to argue that American support for any country that Muslims have a grievance against-- which at latest count includes a sizable portion of the globe, oppresses Muslims. As such the United States would not be allowed to have any allies that have not first been approved by Muslims. Which would turn over American foreign policy to Islam.

If America is forbidden from allying with both Muslim countries and non-Muslim countries, that Muslims oppose, then American foreign policy would be in the hands of Muslims. Which is exactly what Muslims and their American spokesmen accuse Jews of.

Furthermore, the countries hostile to Israel are the very same Arab dictatorships that we are being hypocritically assailed for supporting. Which means that this plank also resolves itself into one of those arguments that we can't win. If we support existing Muslim governments, we're oppressing Muslims. If we interfere with them, we're oppressing Muslims. If we support non-Muslim governments in countries that have Muslim minorities... you guessed it, we're oppressing Muslims.

When the tide of logic passes, it becomes quite clear that both these planks are hollow and rotten. They represent Catch 22 arguments in which America loses no matter what it does. If we support Arab countries, then we're upholding their tyrannical regimes. If we fail to support them, then we're hostile to the Muslim world. If we create a Palestinian Arab state, then we're to blame because it's not big enough. If we wash our hands of the whole affair, then we're isolationists.

The bottom line is that there is absolutely nothing that we can do that will not lead to accusations that we are oppressing Muslims, followed by terrorist attacks.

But the fact of the matter is that the United States has done more for the Muslim world than anyone else. When Afghanistan was invaded by the USSR, no Arab country stepped forth in their defense. Instead they all remained silent because of their own Soviet ties. Instead it was the United States that sent arms and advisors to the Mujahadeen.

After the overthrow of the Shah, the United States could have provided legitimacy to any one of a number of factions, instead Carter decided to legitimate the Ayatollah Khomeni. The result was the first Shiite Islamist regime in the world. And it would not have happened had the United States not undermined the Shah and then treated Khomeni as Iran's future under the Green Belt Strategy.

When Saddam invaded Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia, it was the United States that led a coalition to liberate Kuwait and back Saddam down. When Yugoslavia tried to preserve itself against Kosovar Albanian Muslim terror, it was the United States that bombed Yugoslavia, and handed the Muslim Albanians their victory. And after decades of Soviet backed terrorism by Arafat had failed to destroy Israel, it was the United States that stepped in and muscled Israel into providing him with a state.

Indeed the rise of Islamism can be credited to American foreign policy. While the USSR tried to back Arab Socialist states such as Saddam's Iraq, or Assad's Syria or Nasser's Egypt-- the United States embraced Islamist tyrannies such as the House of Saud and General Zia-ul-Haq in Pakistan. We backed the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan over the Soviet puppet regime. We continued funding Arafat's Fatah, even as it became one of the world's leading innovators in suicide bombings and martyrdom. With Kosovo, we helped create the first Muslim state in Europe, and a direct route for smuggling slaves and drugs into Western Europe, as we fought on the same side as Al Queda and Iran... against our former Serbian allies.

If anything the Muslims of the world should be getting down on their knees and thrusting their asses into the air five times a day to thank us, not Allah. Allah did not provide the Stingers with which to shoot down Russian aircraft, or fund the ISI's terrorist factories and back a regime which all but legalized the rape of women. Allah did not send thousands of aircraft to bomb Serbian civilians until they finally gave in and signed on to the Muslim rape of Kosovo. Nor did Allah's tanks protect Mecca and more importantly Ridyah from coming under the jurisdiction of Uday and Qusay Hussein.

Finally America provided a hospitable home for Muslim immigrants, giving them profitable employment, letting them bring along their entire clans and not asking too many questions about the money they sent to "charities" back home. And for all this, we were repaid with 3000 dead in a single day. Nor for this alone, but also because we had helped liberate Afghanistan and protect Saudi Arabia. For all the countless billions spent and the lives lost protecting Muslims, for being an open people willing to take in the stranger and ask no questions, four of our planes were hijacked (a feat previously held by Arafat's goons, who had already received a state from us) and aimed at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the White House.

And afterward did Americans react by going out and beating random Muslims or rounding them up in stadiums... as leftist feverish fantasies would have it? No. Instead America embraced Muslims as never before. We fought two wars, the bulk of which we spent trying to rebuild infrastructure, put up generators and supply food, water and medicine to two hostile Muslim countries. We taught tolerance to each other until it was coming out of our ears. We reassured ourselves that every religion has a few or a few hundred million bad apples. We made a point of getting to know a local Muslim family. And of course we assured them that we didn't hold it against them.

Just as we're doing right now. Over and over again. When a Muslim screaming Allah Akbar opens fire, we assure ourselves that most Muslims are good people. By contrast when a Muslim gets a flat tire, he blames the CIA. Despite everything that America has done for Muslims-- our only reward has been hatred and ingratitude. Maybe instead of thinking of what America owes them, it's time that Muslims everywhere thought about what they owe America.

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Sultan Knish - From NY To Israel Sultan Reveals The Stories Behind The News

We very carefully use the word "camp" rather than prison or prisoner of war camp. This is because of an ongoing and profound ambiguity not only in U.S. government perceptions of how to define those held there, but also due to uncertainties in international law, particularly with regard to the Geneva Conventions of 1949. Were the U.S. facility at Guantanamo a prison, then its residents would be criminals. If it were a POW camp, then they would be enemy soldiers being held under the rules of war.

It has never really been decided which these men are, and therefore their legal standing has remained unclear.

War vs. Criminal Justice

The ambiguity began shortly after 9/11, when then-U.S. President George W. Bush defined two missions: waging a war on terror, and bringing Osama bin Laden and his followers to justice. Both made for good rhetoric. But they also were fundamentally contradictory. A war is not a judicial inquiry, and a criminal investigation is not part of war.

An analogy might be drawn from Pearl Harbor. Imagine that in addition to stating that the United States was at war with Japan, Franklin Roosevelt also called for bringing the individual Japanese pilots who struck Hawaii to justice under American law. This would make no sense. As an act of war, the Japanese action fell under the rules of war as provided for in international law, the U.S. Constitution and the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). Japanese pilots could not be held individually responsible for the lawful order they received. In the same sense, trying to bring soldiers to trial in a civilian court in the United States would make no sense. Creating a mission in which individual Japanese airmen would be hunted down and tried under the rules of evidence not only would make no sense, it would be impossible. Building a case against them individually also would be impossible. Judges would rule on evidence, on whether an unprejudiced jury could be found, and so on. None of this happened, of course - World War II was a war, not a judicial inquiry.

It is important to consider how wars are conducted. Enemy soldiers are not shot or captured because of what they have done; they are shot and captured because of who they are - members of an enemy military force. War, once launched, is pre-emptive. Soldiers are killed or captured in the course of fighting enemy forces, or even before they have carried out hostile acts. Soldiers are not held responsible for their actions, but neither are they immune to attack just because they have not done anything. Guilt and innocence do not enter into the equation. Certainly, if war crimes are in question, charges may be brought; the UCMJ determines how they will be tried by U.S. forces. Soldiers are tried by courts-martial, not by civilian courts, because of their status as soldiers. Soldiers are tried by a jury of their peers, and their peers are held to be other soldiers.

International law is actually not particularly ambiguous about the status of the members of al Qaeda. The Geneva Conventions do not apply to them because they have not adhered to a fundamental requirement of the Geneva Conventions, namely, identifying themselves as soldiers of an army. Doing so does not mean they must wear a uniform. The postwar Geneva Conventions make room for partisans, something older versions of the conventions did not. A partisan is not a uniformed fighter, but he must wear some form of insignia identifying himself as a soldier to enjoy the conventions' protections. As Article 4.1.6 puts it, prisoners of war include "Inhabitants of a non-occupied territory, who on the approach of the enemy spontaneously take up arms to resist the invading forces, without having had time to form themselves into regular armed units, provided they carry arms openly and respect the laws and customs of war." The Geneva Conventions of 1949 does not mention, nor provide protection to, civilians attacking foreign countries without openly carrying arms.

The reasoning behind this is important. During the Franco-Prussian war, French franc-tireurs fired on Prussian soldiers. Ununiformed and without insignia, they melded into the crowd. It was impossible for the Prussians to distinguish between civilians and soldiers, so they fired on both, and civilian casualties resulted. The framers of the Geneva Conventions held the franc-tireurs, not the Prussian soldiers, responsible for the casualties. Their failure to be in uniform forced the Prussians to defend themselves at the cost of civilian lives. The franc-tireurs were seen as using civilians as camouflage. This was regarded as outside the rules of war, and those who carried out such acts were seen as not protected by the conventions. They were not soldiers, and were not to be treated as such.

An Ambiguous Status

Extending protections to partisans following World War II was seen as a major concession. It was done with concerns that it not be extended so far that combatants of irregular forces could legally operate using their ability to blend in with surrounding civilians, and hence a requirement of wearing armbands. The status of purely covert operatives remained unchanged: They were not protected under the Geneva Conventions. Their status remained ambiguous.

During World War II, it was U.S. Army practice to hold perfunctory trials followed by executions. During the Battle of the Bulge, German commandos captured wearing U.S. uniforms - in violation of the Geneva Conventions - were summarily tried in field courts-martial and executed. The idea that such individuals were to be handed over to civilian courts was never considered. The actions of al Qaeda simply were not anticipated in the Geneva Conventions. And to the extent they were expected, they violated the conventions.

Holder's decision to transfer Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to federal court makes it clear that Mohammed was not a soldier acting in time of war, but a criminal. While during times of war spies are tried as criminals, their status is precarious, particularly if they are members of an enemy army. Enemy soldiers out of uniform carrying out reconnaissance or espionage are subject to military, not civilian, justice, and frequently are executed. A spy captured in the course of collecting information is a civilian, particularly in peacetime, and normally is tried as a criminal with rules of evidence.

Which was Mohammed? Under the Geneva Conventions, his actions in organizing the Sept. 11 attacks, which were carried out without uniforms or other badges of a combatant, denies him status and protection as a POW. Logically, he is therefore a criminal, but if he is, consider the consequences.

Criminal law is focused on punishments meted out after the fact. They rarely have been preventive measures. In either case, they follow strict rules of evidence, require certain treatments of prisoners and so on. For example, prisoners have to be read the Miranda warning. Soldiers are not policeman. They are not trained or expected to protect the legal rights of captives save as POWs under the UCMJ, nor protect the chain of custody of evidence nor countless other things that are required in a civilian court. In criminal law, it is assumed that law enforcement has captured the prisoner and is well-versed in these rules. In this case, the capture was made without any consideration of these matters, nor would one expect such consideration.

Consider further the role of U.S. covert operations in these captures. The United States conducts covert operations in which operatives work out of uniform and are generally not members of the military. Operating outside the United States, they are not protected by U.S. law although they do operate under the laws and regulations promulgated by the U.S. government. Much of their operations run counter to international and national law. At the same time, their operations are accepted as best practices by the international system. Some operate under cover of diplomatic immunity but carry out operations incompatible with their status as diplomats. Others operate without official cover. Should those under unofficial cover be captured, their treatment falls under local law, if such exists. The Geneva Conventions do not apply to them, nor was it intended to.

Spies, saboteurs and terrorists fall outside the realm of international law. This class of actors falls under the category of national law, leaving open the question of their liability if they conduct acts inimical to a third country. Who has jurisdiction? The United States is claiming that Mohammed is to be tried under the criminal code of the United States for actions planned in Afghanistan but carried out by others in the United States. It is a defensible position, but where does this leave American intelligence planners working at CIA headquarters for actions carried out by others in a third country? Are they subject to prosecution in the third country? Those captured in the third country clearly are, but the claim here is that Mohammed is subject to prosecution under U.S. laws for actions carried out by others in the United States. And that creates an interesting reciprocal liability.

A Failure to Evolve

The fact is that international law has not evolved to deal with persons like Mohammed. Or more precisely, most legal discussion under international law is moving counter to the Geneva Conventions' intent, which was to treat the franc-tireurs as unworthy of legal protection because they were not soldiers and were violating the rules of war. International law wants to push Mohammed into a category where he doesn't fit, providing protections that are not apparent under the Geneva Conventions. The United States has shoved him into U.S. criminal law, where he doesn't fit either, unless the United States is prepared to accept reciprocal liability for CIA personnel based in the United States planning and supporting operations in third countries. The United States has never claimed, for example, that the KGB planners who operated agents in the United States on behalf of the Soviet Union were themselves subject to criminal prosecution.

A new variety of warfare has emerged in which treatment as a traditional POW doesn't apply and criminal law doesn't work. Criminal law creates liabilities the United States doesn't want to incur, and it is not geared to deal with a terrorist like Mohammed. U.S. criminal law assumes that capture is in the hands of law enforcement officials. Rights are prescribed and demanded, including having lawyers present and so forth. Such protections are practically and theoretically absurd in this case: Mohammed is not a soldier and he is not a suspected criminal presumed innocent until proven guilty. Law enforcement is not a practical counter to al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. A nation cannot move from the rules of counterterrorism to an American courtroom; they are incompatible modes of operation. Nor can a nation use the code of criminal procedures against a terrorist organization operating transnationally. Instead, they must be stopped before they commit their action, and issuing search warrants and allowing attorneys present at questioning is not an option.

Therefore - and now we move to the political reality - it is difficult to imagine how the evidence accumulated against Mohammed could enter a courtroom. Ignoring the methods of questioning, which is a separate issue, how can one prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt without compromising sources and methods, and why should one? Mohammed was on a battlefield but not operating as a soldier. Imagine doing criminal forensics on a battlefield to prove the criminal liability of German commandos wearing American uniforms.

In our mind, there is a very real possibility that Mohammed could be found not guilty in a courtroom. The cases of O.J. Simpson and of Jewish Defense League head Rabbi Meir Kahane's killer, El Sayyid Nosair - both found not guilty despite overwhelming evidence - come to mind. Juries do strange things, particularly amid what will be the greatest media circus imaginable in the media capital of the world.

But it may not be the jury that is the problem. A federal judge will have to ask the question of whether prejudicial publicity of such magnitude has occurred that Mohammed can't receive a fair trial. (This is probably true.) Questions will be raised about whether he has received proper legal counsel, which undoubtedly he hasn't. Issues about the chain of custody of evidence will be raised; given that he was held by troops and agents, and not by law enforcement, the chances of compromised evidence is likely. The issue of torture will, of course, also be raised but that really isn't the main problem. How do you try a man under U.S. legal procedures who was captured in a third country by non-law enforcement personnel, and who has been in military custody for seven years?

There is a nontrivial possibility that he will be acquitted or have his case thrown out of court, which would be a foreign policy disaster for the United States. Some might view it as a sign of American adherence to the rule of law and be impressed, others might be convinced that Mohammed was not guilty in more than a legal sense and was held unjustly, and others might think the United States has bungled another matter.

The real problem here is international law, which does not address acts of war committed by non-state actors out of uniform. Or more precisely, it does, but leaves them deliberately in a state of legal limbo, with captors left free to deal with them as they wish. If the international legal community does not like the latter, it is time they did the hard work of defining precisely how a nation deals with an act of war carried out under these circumstances.

The international legal community has been quite vocal in condemning American treatment of POWs after 9/11, but it hasn't evolved international law, even theoretically, to cope with this. Sept. 11 is not a crime in the proper sense of the term, and prosecuting the guilty is not the goal. Instead, it was an act of war carried out outside the confines of the Geneva Conventions. The U.S. goal is destroying al Qaeda so that it can no longer function, not punishing those who have acted. Similarly the goal in 1941 was not punishing the Japanese pilots at Pearl Harbor but destroying the Japanese Empire, and any Japanese soldier was a target who could be killed without trial in the course of combat. If it wishes to solve this problem, international law will have to recognize that al Qaeda committed an act of war, and its destruction has legal sanction without judicial review. And if some sort of protection is to be provided al Qaeda operatives out of uniform, then the Geneva Conventions must be changed, and with it the status of spies and saboteurs of all countries.

Holder has opened up an extraordinarily complex can of worms with this decision. As U.S. attorney general, he has committed himself to proving Mohammed's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt while guaranteeing that his constitutional rights (for a non-U.S. citizen captured and held outside the United States under extraordinary circumstances by individuals not trained as law enforcement personnel, no less) are protected. It is Holder's duty to ensure Mohammed's prosecution, conviction and fair treatment under the law. It is hard to see how he can.

Whatever the politics of this decision - and all such decisions have political dimensions - the real problem faced by both the Obama and Bush administrations has been the failure of international law to evolve to provide guidance on dealing with combatants such as al Qaeda. International law has clung to a model of law governing a very different type of warfare despite new realities. International law must therefore either reaffirm the doctrine that combatants who do not distinguish themselves from noncombatants are not due the protections of international law, or it must clearly define what those protections are. Otherwise, international law discredits itself.

Cinnamon Stillwell is the West Coast Representative for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.

In the wake of the horrific attack at the Fort Hood military base in Texas earlier this month, and the mounting evidence that the shooter, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, was motivated by Islamist beliefs, the media has turned to Middle East studies "experts" for enlightenment. Instead, what the media, and, by extension, the American public, has received is the moral relativism and obfuscation that too often meets any effort to address Islamism or jihadism in an intellectually honest manner.

Writing for the Washington Post's "On Faith" blog, John Esposito, professor and founding director of the Saudi-funded Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University, extends his long tradition of issuing apologias for radical Islam by conflating Hasan's actions with "extremists" of all religions. In the process, he professes ignorance as to why there might be suspicion directed towards Islam in the wake of 9/11, the worst Islamic terrorist attack in U.S. history:

Why this common tendency and double standard towards Islam and Muslims post-9/11? We judge the religion and majority of mainstream Muslims by the acts of an individual or an aberrant minority of extremists. Yet, when Jewish fundamentalists kill a prime minister or innocent Palestinians or Christian extremists blow up abortion clinics or assassinate their physicians, somehow the media is capable of sticking to all the facts and distinguishing between the use and abuse of a religion.

Having written this post while news of Hasan's fanatical leanings and possible terrorist connections was still developing, Esposito warns against a "rush to judgment" that might, as he puts it, "negatively impact the American public's perception of Islam." Heaven forbid Americans start to suspect that Islam itself contains the seeds for Islamism. Contrary to popular belief, this awareness need not implicate all Muslims. Rather, it asks the faithful to address Islamist violence and aggression by implementing theological and cultural reform.

Esposito continues the moral equivalency and non sequiturs in a later "On Faith" post:

No major faith, including the five major world religions I have studied and taught, threatens the safety and security of the U.S. or its citizens. Religious extremists of any faith are a threat but they should be treated as any other extremists, religious or non-religious.

Yes -- but the 14, 374 terrorist attacks worldwide over the past eight years weren't perpetrated at random by members of diverse world religions. They were executed by radical Muslims, every one.

Ingrid Mattson, professor of Islamic Studies and Christian-Muslim Relations, director of the Macdonald Center for Islamic Studies at Hartford Seminary, and president of the Islamic Society of North America, is well-known for expressing her own Islamist sympathies. This may be why, in a November 8, 2009 New York Times article, Mattson made this clumsy attempt at obfuscation:

I don't understand why the Muslim-American community has to take responsibility for him. The Army has had at least as much time and opportunity to form and shape this person as the Muslim community.

Arguing that the U.S. military was responsible for cultivating Hasan's Islamist beliefs is laughable. So is the idea that the Muslim-American community bears no responsibility. After all, the "community" includes radical clerics such as Anwar Al-Awlaki, the former spiritual leader of the Virginia mosque Hasan attended (and who has since praised Hasan for the attack), along with organizations such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), whose sole purpose is to intimidate into silence anyone who connects Islamic terrorism with Islam.

If not for the politically correct environment created by apologists such as CAIR, Mattson, and her academic cohorts, the numerous warnings from Hasan's colleagues about his predilection for fanatical and threatening commentary might not have gone unheeded or been met with naïveté and incompetence. When people are afraid to speak the truth for fear of being branded racists or "Islamophobes," it can have dire consequences.

Then there's UCLA law professor Khaled Abou El Fadl, who has his own problematic history of dismissing concerns about Islamic terrorism, opposing counterterrorism efforts, soft-pedaling jihad, and promoting sharia law. In the same New York Times article, El Fadl, claiming to have "counseled Muslims conflicted about enlisting" in the military, elaborates:

In the Koran it says that war is to end the state of oppression and to uplift the oppressed. Is it an army that defends the oppressed, or have you slipped into becoming the oppressor? People from the military who contact me, that's what I find they're torn up about.

It should be self-evident that the U.S. military, which has liberated so many peoples from tyranny, is not an oppressor. El-Fadl here questions the legitimacy of U.S. military involvement in the Middle East and, by extension, the ability of Muslims to serve in the armed forces with a clear conscience. In his view, they are all victims of an internal conflict.

Muqtedar Khan, Director of Islamic Studies at the University of Delaware, takes the claim of victimization a step further. Khan echoes El Fadl and lends backhanded support for the belief that motivated Hasan and which is a canon of Islamist ideology: that the U.S. is at war with Islam. In a guest article for the Washington Post's "On Faith," Khan claims that Hasan:

... was in an army that was at war with his co-religionists and he had difficulty dealing with that. He was frequently taunted and harassed for being a Muslim by his own colleagues. After years in the military and after years of caring for soldiers as a doctor, he did not feel as if he belonged and perhaps that was the key to why he could turn on his own.

In fact, the U.S. military invested significant resources in Hasan's lengthy career -- and trusted him with the mental health of its soldiers -- only to be rewarded by treason and mass murder. Furthermore, the claims that Hasan was discriminated against have not been verified and do not stand up to scrutiny. For instance, it's well-known that enlisted personnel would never taunt or insult an officer.

In the same article, Khan laments the coming mythical wave of "Islamophobia" -- a wave that has never manifested despite endless claims by Islamism's apologists. As he put it:

... this episode will once again provide fodder for talk shows and websites, which exploit such isolated events to ratchet up Islamophobia.

He continues:

Americans must not allow this isolated event to fall back on stereotypes about Islam and resuscitate the prejudices that all of us have worked so hard to curb.

It's ironic that Khan would decry prejudice when he himself refused to share an academic panel at the University of Delaware with IDF veteran and Campus Watch adjunct scholar Asaf Romirowsky in October, 2007. Khan made various excuses for his bigotry, but none of them held up, and as a result of his actions, Romirowsky was uninvited from the panel. (Khan, in an act beyond parody, was later awarded a sizable State Department grant to "initiate a dialogue on religion and politics.") Yet Khan would deign to lecture the American public about imaginary "Islamophobia" and counsel Muslims "to share the message of peace, tolerance and pluralism" in the wake of the Fort Hood attack. He might want to take his own advice.

Despite these efforts at dissemblance, the facts in the Hasan case speak clearly to a jihadist agenda. Americans rightly concerned about the culture of political correctness and willful blindness towards Islamist ideology that has infected the U.S. military, intelligence agencies, and so many other institutions need only look to the denizens of the Ivory Tower for an explanation. Instead of explaining events like the Fort Hood shooting to the American public, all too often Middle East studies academics refuse to state the obvious and choose to obfuscate rather than clarify the events at hand. The rush to judgment against those who express valid concerns about Islamism only adds to the self-censorship that was in large part responsible for allowing Hasan to remain in the military and murder his fellow soldiers in cold blood.

Cinnamon Stillwell is the West Coast Representative for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum. She can be reached at stillwell@meforum.org.