There IS a struggle in progress for America -- but the soul of the country has long been lost.  Nothing much is left today but a hollowed-out husk of a nation that once led the world from the pinnacle of power and influence.  Like the Roman Empire, America died at its own hand.

All we have left today are memories of a time of grandeur.  And even those pictures from the past are fading into nothingness.

And it was quick. Oh, how swiftly we succumbed to the assault on our foundation.  We thought it was solid -- built on granite of the ages -- only to learn that it wasn't granite, it was, in fact, sand, a house built on sand.  And like that proverbial house, it was swept away by our own avarice, our own covetousness, our own selfishness, laziness, our inability to grasp the obvious, which was simply -- that America had chosen the lap of luxury over the eternal fight for freedom. Added to all the above was the loss of American's will to preserve the most precious gift their ancestors had to give -- freedom and liberty. 

When Americans finally reached a point in the evolution of the country that they no longer VALUED freedom, the fate of the country was sealed.

America's founders knew -- and understood fully -- that freedom is not free.  It exacts a price. It is bought, over, and over again, with blood.  It can be obtained no other way.  Blood is the ONLY acceptable currency when purchasing one's freedom.  A peoples simply GIVEN freedom do not value it.  They cannot -- for the know nothing of its cost. And they soon lose it.  Freedom once lost is almost never regained. 

Once a people have acquired their freedom -- it must be maintained.   It, too, requires blood payment.  Even more important is the fact that to maintain one's freedom WILL is required.  A people must have the will to do that which is necessary to maintain their freedom -- or they will most certainly lose it.

Americans used to take pride in the expression: It's a free country."  You don't hear that much anymore.  Because we are not a free country -- anymore.

The state America finds herself in today is the culmination of a process that was begun many decades ago to slowly distance Americans from their birthright.  Yes, freedom is, or at least WAS, a birthright of modern Americans.  It bought and paid for by the men and women we are supposed to be remembering on this Memorial Day.  

G. K. Chesterton once said:  "The way to love anything is to realize it might be lost."  America has had at least two generations without the realization that "freedom" MIGHT be, or COULD be, lost.  They were the low hanging fruit for the leftist/globalist/multiculturalist agenda that has so successfully stripped America of its liberty.

So, how do you go about separating a people, a nation from its heritage, its history, and its core values?   Consider the following words carefully:  "The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history, Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster ..."  ......- Milan Kundera

Mr. Kundera was spot-on.  Today we use the word "revisionist" to describe the process he lays out above.  And it is absolutely effective.

We have a generation of Americans who haven't a clue WHO they are.  They have been taught that American culture is no better or worse than the culture of any other nation on earth.  "Multiculturalism" has been force-fed our young scholars in the government controlled public education system in America.  Their young minds were soaked in leftist propaganda for twelve years before they are delivered up to the masters of socialist and Marxist thought at the thresholds of the nation's colleges and universities we laughingly refer to as "institutions of higher learning."  I submit, they are a lot of things, but institutions of higher learning they are not.

They no longer believe in American Exceptionalism.  Even the American President denies the existence of an exceptional America pushing his own country from a leadership position in the world to just another member of the pack following ... WHOM or WHAT ... exactly?

Our young have been taught that the way to accomplish anything is to compromise.  Even when you are right ... compromise. 

Right never wins in compromise.

One of the greatest politicians ever produced by the state of North Carolina was Senator Jesse Helms.  As far back as 1959, Mr. Helms said:  "Compromise, hell!  If freedom is right and tyranny is wrong, why should those who belive in freedom treat it as if were a roll of Bologna to be bartered a slice at a time?"

But that is precisely what America did.  We compromised -- and we traded our freedom away.  We made a Faustian deal and the bill has come due.

What happened to our reason and to our common sense?  Regrettably, we traded and compromised it away, as well. 

Our national memory?  Almost gone.  Does anyone even remember what Memorial Day is all about, anymore?

Memorial Day was a day originally set aside as a day to remember our war dead and to honor those men and women who fought in all the wars of the United States.  Here, in the American South, we celebrate the Confederate dead as well as the US dead.  After all, Memorial Day began as a Southern holiday to honor the Confederate dead by cleaning their grave sites and cemeteries.

No longer.  Today we "celebrate" Memorial Day. 

There is something fundamentally WRONG about that. Where's the quiet contemplation owed America's warrior's for their sacrifice.  After all, Memorial Day, indeed, every day of freedom in America is a day bought and paid for in the blood of America's warriors.  This calls for solemnity -- not celebration.

No, I don't expect anything to change as a result of my comments here.  Unfortunately, we are too far down that slippery slope to ever climb back up.  But -- it needed saying.  A friend reminded me, only a couple of days ago, "someone needs to say these things."   And now-- someone has.

This is one of those situations where the inquiry could easily have been politicized to make the boss look good. Gov. Christie initially blasted the NYPD and got into a public spat with NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly and Congressman Pete King (R., NY). Christie’s first statements echoed the CAIR Islamophobia talking points; nevertheless, the governor seemed to tone it down and argue that his quarrel was more with the fact that he had not been informed of the NYPD surveillance (while he was U.S. attorney) than over the fact that the surveillance had happened.

As I’ve noted, the substantive condemnation of the NYPD’s investigative activities is absurd — it is well established that mosques and Muslim businesses in fundamentalist Islamic communities (not all Muslim communities) have been hubs for the spreading of Islamic supremacist ideology and jihadist plotting. In addition, the governor’s “failure to inform” complaint is overwrought because there is immense reason to believe local police in Jersey were informed even if he and the other feds were not. (And if the feds were not, it is because the local Jersey police did not feed the information to the feds, just as the feds and cops in New York don’t always share.)

Obviously, the attorney general did not politicize the investigation — neither he nor the governor appears to have slanted things to bolster the governor’s previously expressed concerns. As the Associated Press reports (hat tip,Robert Spencer), the NYPD surveillance was spurred not by bigotry or profiling people just because they were Muslims; the cops were following leads (information or tips regarding suspicious and potentially threatening activity) whenever they investigated in the Garden State.

Given that the AP has spearheaded the jihad against the NYPD, channeling Islamic supremacist organizations like CAIR (which has notorious ties to Hamas and a history of championing terrorists), we should not be surprised to find that the AG’s rationale for concluding the surveillance was legal is buried several paragraphs into its story. Nor is it surprising that the story emphasizes the disappointment of Muslim community “leaders” rather than the propriety of the surveillance — and it is dismaying that state authorities, including the governor and the attorney general, feel the need to go to great “outreach” lengths not to offend these Muslim community activists (whose profession calls for them to be in a constant state of agitation).

It is especially unfortunate, moreover, that NYPD’s detractors (AP and Muslim activists in particular) continue to emphasize the fact that the surveillance activities focused on “students.” If journalists did their homework (or were not so Islamophilic), this would be a strong point in the NYPD’s favor.

As I detail in The Grand Jihad, the Muslim Students Association — which now has hundreds of chapters in North America — is the the first building block in the Muslim Brotherhood’s American infrastructure. It has a rigorous program in which students study the writings of such Islamic supremacist icons as Hassan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb and Abul Ala al-Mawdudi, and participate in various forms of proselytism (dawa or what Robert Spencer aptly calls “stealth jihad”).  There is extensive empirical evidence that many students who go through this Brotherhood-prescribed indoctrination end up sympathizing with, facilitating, or even participating in violent jihadism — to say nothing of promoting the sharia agenda that imperils American civil liberties. (See, e.g., this report from Steve Emerson’s Investigative Project on Terrorism.) If anybody in the Muslim community ought to be drawing the attention of the authorities and the public at large, it is the Muslims Student Association — which, by the way, evolved over the years into the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the most important Islamist group in the United States, and one that was designated an unindicted coconspirator by the Justice Department in the Holy Land Foundation Hamas financing case because it was shown to have abetted the transfer of funds from the U.S. to Palestinian jihadists.

It is, of course, easy for me to cite these facts aloud. I am not seeking or holding public office in New Jersey, so it is of no moment to me, as it obviously is to the Christie administration, that New Jersey has a large, politically active Muslim population. Nonetheless, my unsolicited advice (which I’m sure the governor is just dying to hear) is that good policy makes good politics: It is better to convey the strong message to the Muslim community that it is obliged to help us discredit sharia supremacism than to convey the strong message that we are obliged to walk on eggshells around the Muslim community. Stop worrying about Islamist organizations like CAIR, ISNA and MPAC — they don’t speak for most rank-and-file American Muslims, so don’t confuse their popularity in the left-leaning media with popularity generally.

The self-ordained “leaders” of the Muslim community went predictably berserk over Attorney General Chiesa’s conclusions. It is unfortunate that he felt the need to announce the establishment of a “Muslim community outreach committee” to appease this insatiable grievance enterprise. But that said, kudos to the Christie administration for doing the right thing and acknowledging the legality and propriety of the NYPD surveillance. Thanks, also, to Gov. Christie for not sticking his thumb on the scale against the NYPD despite the public bickering between him and New York officials — many lesser public officials would not have been as scrupulous

SOURCE: Ordered Liberty

(Please note: Due to the Shavuot holiday, this blog will be on hiatus until Monday night)

THE NARRATIVE

It all starts with the narrative. Coverage of the lawsuits can be minimized as much as possible, but sooner or later it has to be reported on. The media is as lazy, as it is corrupt and stupid, so they usually garner their talking points from liberal talking point distributors like Think Progress and Media Matters.

The narrative on the Catholic lawsuits is problematic because it's a clear case of religious freedom being infringed on. That means this problematic fact has to be countered by...

• Talking Point #1: The lawsuit isn't religious, it's political.
• Talking Point #2: The lawsuit isn't from the Catholic Church, but from a small group of extremist bishops.
• Talking Point #3: Most Catholics love abortion and the Catholic Church is out of step with modern American Catholics.
• Talking Point #4: Both sides need to compromise. Obama has already faked a compromise. Not the Catholic Church needs to give in.
• Talking Point #5: Molestation

You can see all four talking points in just the headlines of the news stories on the screenshot above. I didn't choose this screenshot, these are the first listed stories, which also tells you something. You have to click outside to find the fifth one, but it's there.

It's pretty sad when the propaganda is not only this obvious... but when you don't even need to read past the headline to see it.

This shows how much contempt the media has for us and for its own profession. This isn't between the lines stuff. This is talking point headlines. It's the journalism equivalent of a cop selling crack to crack babies. It's a level of treason to one's own integrity and professionalism that there's nowhere lower to go except printing actual press releases without altering a word.

I'll even go you one worse. Only one of the outlets listed is the Huffington Post and it has the mildest headline of the bunch. What does it tell you when HuffPo looks moderate compared to the Star Ledger or the Palm Beach Post?

Three words. Cancel your subscription. Don't take out ads in these papers. Kick the propagandists out into the cold hard new media world. If the Obama Administration is going to have a propaganda arm, it should be the one paying them out of its campaign coffers.

VIVE ISLAM

The Hollande victory is quite an ugly thing and as I mentioned last week, I covered some of the key figures in a piece at Front Page entitled, France's New Burqa Friendly Government.

But there's also this rather important point.

Hollande certainly did not discourage the estimated 500,000 Turks in France from coming to such a conclusion. A few days before the runoff election he sent out a letter which stated that he was very attached to the relationship with Turkey and that if elected he would increase the closeness of that relationship.

“Europe,” he wrote, “which has agreed to begin negotiations for full membership of Turkey, remains true to its principles “to bring together different peoples, cultures and beliefs.”

Hollande, who lost the Catholic and Jewish vote, but won the Muslim vote, has not done that; instead his government reflects the Leftist-Islamic alliance that brought him to power. It is a government, that for all its assurances, is likely to turn a blind eye to the burqa, a knowing wink to the repression of women, and a blind eye to the preaching of Jihad on French soil. And it will do its part to open Europe’s door to Turkey, which will mean the end, not only of France, but of Europe.

THE ARAB SPRING IS ALMOST OVER

The Egyptian election is about to wrap up with the likely runoff two to be a Muslim Brotherhood thug and a regime proxy. The election will come down to what it was always about, a showdown between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Egyptian government.

The Twitter activists that neo-conservatives fell in love with are weeping and wailing, but they're really nerving themselves up for the inevitable-- throwing in with the Muslim Brotherhood and assuming the true role that they always held as the enablers of an Islamist dictatorship.

Iran 2.0. Now in Egypt.

If the regime wins, the Brotherhood will retreat snarling to its corner while the US and the EU pressure the Egyptian government into more "democratization". If the MB wins, then game over. The mask will hold up for a little bit, long enough to harvest infidel money and tighten its grip on the military. And then Egypt will turn into Iran.

Either way the great obscene lie of the Arab Spring is dead, its rotting stench is filling up the pages and sites of the media that propagandized it. The rest will be devoted to explaining why the MB is the best and most democratic choice for Egypt, with op-eds written by the Twitter activists to explain why they're backing the MB because "it can be influenced" and will mean the end of the old regime.

This is exactly what I predicted from the start, and there's no great credit in that, because plenty of others did too. It's just a matter of learning from the past and looking at a thing as it is, rather than as it should be.

The MB has the innate organization and numbers to win an election, but the regime will likely have voter fraud in its corner, and quite a few Egyptians who never wanted a revolution, and just want things to go back to an orderly and peaceful system.

ORTHODOX JEWS ARE THE NEW CATHOLICS

Ever since Orthodox Jews took a public stand against gay marriage in the New York State election for governor and then in the battle for Weiner's seat and SD-27 seat that Lew Fidler lost to a Russian Jewish Republican, but in true Democratic fashion is trying to steal anyway, there suddenly seems to be a rash of attacks.

It's almost as if Orthodox Jews are getting the Catholic treatment.

There are now constant stories accusing the Orthodox Jewish community of being a gang of pedophiles. Here's a snapshot of the media coverage.

Who knew Goebbels was still around?

The parallels with a similar campaign run against the Catholic Church are a little too obvious. While stories on Muslims spin positive, Orthodox Jews are being hit with an aggressive smear campaign. Come out against gay marriage and for traditional values, and suddenly Anderson Cooper is screeching that you're all a bunch of pedophiles.

While the media refuses to discuss Jihad, it turned Deborah Feldman, a compulsive liar, into a media star for a string of lies attacking Orthodox Jews. While her 15 minutes are long up, CNN just ran an op-ed from Feldman trying to jump on the pedophile bandwagon.

This is now the narrative. Any mainstream media coverage of Orthodox Jews will now have a "sidebar" accusing them of not coming to terms with "sex crime problems". People like Feldman, will be kept around to pop up out of the box and provide a quote for the occasion. The New York Times already uses people like Shmarya Rosenberg as their source for the Orthodox community. That would be of using Christopher Hitchens as their source on Catholics or Wafa Sultan as their source on the Muslim community, which no liberal paper would do.

This is hard-coded bias and it's a message, just like the redistricting aimed at ending Orthodox Jewish political representation.

You don't get this kind of treatment for carrying out multiple terrorist attacks in America. You do get it for refusing to accept men marrying each other in public ceremonies. Liberals were willing to mostly ignore Orthodox Jews, so long as they didn't challenge their hegemony. But now it's a new ball game.

THE MUNIR MAN

On the website for CROE-TV, the Coalition for the Remembrance of The Most Honorable Elijah, Muhammad’s broadcasting arm, which puts out several television shows featuring Munir Muhammad, such as Muhammad and Friends, former listed guests include Valerie Jarrett, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Barack Obama.

There are also lesser lights like former Chicago mayor and brother of the former Chief of Staff, Richard M Daley and Senator Dick Durbin, alongside Louis Farrakhan; powerful men and women who have in their time come to sit down and chat with Muhammad Munir, opposite the red and white crescent flag of the Nation of Islam leaning against the wall in the corner of the studio.

Illinois politicians didn’t just give Munir Muhammad lucrative policy gigs, they donated thousands of dollars directly to his organization. An organization whose reason for existence is promoting the ideas of a bigot, whose views, aside from skin color, have little to distinguish them from those of Aryan Identity groups.

Governor Blagojevich had doled out some 50,000 dollars in state money to Munir’s hate group and even proclaimed February 12, 2006 to be “Coalition for the Remembrance of Elijah Muhammad Day” and encouraged citizens of the state to recognize the organization for its “ongoing commitment to ensuring the legacy of this influential African-American leader”—an influential leader who had described white people as devils and “born murderers”.

That's an except from my article on Chicago's Hate Connection

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN, THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON LIBERALISM

Studies show that New Yorker approval for Mayor Bloomberg goes up when they forget that he exists. It goes down whenever he opens his mouth to express exactly the kind of ideas that you expect from an out of touch billionaire.

Bloomberg, for those who have spending time in the real world and forgot that he exists, has been on a campaign to bring "issues" to the attention of the establishment and get past all that partisan bickering. Which usually means ramming through policies so liberal even Obama won't touch them.

The report noted that Canada allows its provinces to set different immigration standards to attract the type of employees each region needs.

The mayor quickly endorsed a similar proposal for US states — and then some.

“There’s no reason why you have to have a common immigration policy for all of America,” he argued. “You could let each state do it differently.

“I would argue the federal government should go one step further. They should deliberately force some places that don’t want immigrants to take them, because that’s the only solution for these big, hollowed-out cities where industry has left and is never going to come back unless you get some people to move there.”

There's a break here, from an almost sensible proposal, to let states run their own immigration policy-- it's not really sensible, because immigrants can just enter states that are immigrant friendly and move to other states, and all it takes is one open borders state to flood the country-- but Bloomberg doesn't actually seem to understand that proposal.

Instead Bloomberg uses a proposal that states control their own immigration policy as a jumping off point to proposing that the government forcibly ship immigrants to states that don't want them.

Who exactly benefits from this arrangement, except the Democratic Party? Do states benefit from having people they don't want forced on them? Do immigrants benefit from going to places that don't want them? What's the point of punitive immigration except to make people like Bloomberg feel good about themselves?

Also don't we already have this exact policy. It's called federally mandated affordable housing. If you aren't building it, your town is guilty of racism, discrimination, hate crimes, crimes against humanity and other fun stuff.

Bloomberg caused a ruckus last year during an appearance on “Meet the Press,” where he proposed opening the door to immigrants on the condition that they agree to live in Detroit for five to 10 years, restoring that struggling city by starting new businesses.

Does this really make Detroit a better place or a worse place? Is Detroit's problem that it doesn't have enough people on welfare?

URI L'TZEDEK HATE GROUP STILL HATING

I wrote briefly about Uri L'Tzedek and Elisheva Goldberg two weeks ago in my piece on them. Uri L'Tzedek is a radical left group targeting the Orthodox Jewish community, intimidating small businesses and trying to get its "inspectors" in all over the place.

Elisheva Goldberg is the "Rosh Beit Medrash" there. She's a radical left-wing activist who works for Peter Beinart and conducts Anti-Israel activism at the Open Zion blog. The Uri L'Tzedek website makes no secret of her other job and clearly supports her activities there.

Goldberg's job is generating attacks on Israel as an illegitimate racist settler state, etc, you know the drill. She celebrated Yom Yerushalayim with a rant about "Greater Israel".A Jewish school is attacked for not promoting the terrorist perspective. It's just non-stop hate and lies.

A typical example is Goldberg lying and claiming that Netanyahu tells American audiences one thing in English and another thing in Hebrew. She claims that Netanyahu tells American audiences that he will give up Yerushalayim, but tells Israeli audiences in secret JewSpeak(TM) (Hebrew) that he wouldn't. Clearly this is a major breaking story.

Elisheva Goldberg unknotted her Keffiyah and as a knower of JewSpeak(TM)  rushed to transcribe Netanyahu's secret remarks in JewSpeak (TM), where he said such things as,

"I will continue to say to them that Jerusalem will remain forever the united capital of the State of Israel and the united capital of the People of Israel."

Shocking stuff. The great investigative journalists at Open Zion had uncovered that Netanyahu secretly supports an undivided Jerusalem. And by secretly I mean he says it all the time. It was the opening to his 2012 speech to AIPAC... in English.

 Thank you for the warm reception. It could be heard as far away as Jerusalem – the eternal and united capital of Israel.

And even more covertly Netanyahu said it in a speech at the UN.

I often hear them accuse Israel of Judaizing Jerusalem. That's like accusing America of Americanizing Washington, or the British of Anglicizing London. You know why we're called "Jews"? Because we come from Judea.

In my office in Jerusalem, there's a -- there's an ancient seal. It's a signet ring of a Jewish official from the time of the Bible. The seal was found right next to the Western Wall, and it dates back 2,700 years, to the time of King Hezekiah. Now, there's a name of the Jewish official inscribed on the ring in Hebrew. His name was Netanyahu. That's my last name. My first name, Benjamin, dates back a thousand years earlier to Benjamin -- Binyamin -- the son of Jacob, who was also known as Israel. Jacob and his 12 sons roamed these same hills of Judea and Sumeria 4,000 years ago, and there's been a continuous Jewish presence in the land ever since.

And for those Jews who were exiled from our land, they never stopped dreaming of coming back: Jews in Spain, on the eve of their expulsion; Jews in the Ukraine, fleeing the pogroms; Jews fighting the Warsaw Ghetto, as the Nazis were circling around it. They never stopped praying, they never stopped yearning. They whispered: Next year in Jerusalem. Next year in the promised land.

It's right here in English. No Double Secret Translation necessary.

We are often told that Arabs say different things to domestic and international audiences. In fact, they are notorious in pro-Israel circles for doing so.  But yesterday Bibi showed us that Israelis are guilty of exactly the same thing.

That's what Elisheva Goldberg claims. What she proves is that Israelis say what they mean. But Elisheva Goldberg and Peter Beinart lie compulsively, just like the Islamic terrorists who benefit from their advocacy.

But this isn't about one of Beinart's Anti-Israel trolls. It's about Uri L'Tzedek and the kind of people who play leading roles in them. If you are uncomfortable with Elisheva Goldberg's Israel bashing, then you should also be uncomfortable with Uri L'Tzedek and any restaurant that uses their Tav HaYosher seal... and you should tell the owner that.

THE PRISON FROM HELL

Israeli prisons are as we know horrible hellholes where poor terrorists have to go on hunger strikes, just to get some headlines. You can see some truly heartbreaking photos of their degradation here. I don't know how they get all that food down.

But now a Muslim journalists/activist has become a connoisseur of Israeli and Muslim prisons and it turns out he prefers Israeli prisons.

 Ozkose spoke to the AP at the office of Milat, a new newspaper with an Islamic background. The 33-year-old journalist was on board the Mavi Marmara, the Turkish aid boat bound for Gaza that was the target of a deadly raid by Israeli commandos in 2010, and he was held with other passengers in Israeli detention until they were deported.

In the interview, Ozkose described the Israeli detention center as “five-star” in comparison to the Syrian jail, where he slept on a concrete floor, saw naked prisoners and sometimes heard people crying out in anguish.

Oddly enough prisons in the Muslim world actually are bad. Hunger strikes there don't work too well because it's not a strike if they're not feeding you anyway.

REBUILDING AND UNBUILDING

In light of my recent piece on the Post-American Skyscraper, Edward Cline has reminded me of the essay collection on the failure to rebuild the WTC.

HOW STONED ARE WE?

Frame Seven: "How stoned am I? Look into my eyes, dude. I mean, man, check it out. This is visionary weed, man. I can see, see the future. I see myself as, whoa, President of the United States, man. How far out is that? Hey, don't bogart that...."

It would actually almost be better if the last three years had been a haze in the mind of an undergrad.

ISRAEL IS ALSO THE NEW ARIZONA

The US also viewed negatively government officials' use of the term "infiltrators" to refer to asylum seekers, as well as officials who directly associations asylum seekers with the rise in crime, disease and terrorism. Interior Minister Eli Yishai was specifically flagged as an instigator.

...I guess "infiltrators" is the incorrect term for people who infiltrate your country. Maybe they should be called "Undocumented Infiltrators

Mr. Glyn contends that I was “unfair” in portraying Mr. Christie as a “tough-talking moderate” whose record does not match his rhetoric. I’d realize Christie is really a “tough-talking conservative,” Glyn asserts, if only I were one of “the citizens of New Jersey who know him best.”

As it happens, I am a citizen of New Jersey, so my reasons for examining his record closely go beyond my day job. It is based on that examination that I see Christie as wildly overrated. Sure, his YouTube smackdowns of overmatched lefty hacks are catnip for the Right. The routine gets old fast, though. The tantrums have become as mundane as “Pass the salt.” Christie now erupts not only at teachers’-union drones but at NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly, New York congressman Pete King, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, anti-sharia “crazies” who resist Islamic supremacism, all those “completely intellectually dishonest” conservatives who think Romneycare may not have been a fabulous idea, and, one infers, just about anyone who happens by when Governor Grumpy is having a bad day . . . which seems to be often. Plus, there’s not much rain in them big winds: Christie’s bully-boy études do not drown out his nonstop symphony to “bipartisanship,” nor obscure that it is “compromise” with the Left that sends him into (not infrequent) frissons of self-adulation.

To be sure, Christie is a very talented politician and a deft extemporaneous speaker. He has done some good things in a heavily Democratic state dominated by municipal unions. He is certainly, as blue-state governors go, better than average. That does not make him a conservative, much less the “consistent conservative” of Glyn’s portrayal.

On that score, Glyn’s reliance on Quinnipiac’s recent poll misses the point. The university was polling the governor’s job approval, not his adherence to conservative principles. I have my problems with Christie, but I’d probably have been among the 59 percent of New Jerseyans who approve of the job he’s done.

But job approval is relative. When Christie sought the GOP gubernatorial nomination in 2009, I preferred Steve Lonegan, who actually is a consistent conservative. I was deeply disappointed when Christie made like a Democrat and attacked Lonegan’s conservative proposals: a flat tax, a $5 billion spending cut, and the shuttering of government agencies. It was what you’d expect from a cardboard cut-out northeastern GOP moderate proponent of progressive taxation and the welfare state — which is exactly what Christie has proven to be. Still, Christie was clearly preferable to the loathsome incumbent Democrat (and now part-time Obama bundler, full-time embezzlement suspect), Jon Corzine.

Politics is not about getting everything you want; it’s about choosing between available alternatives. My choice in New Jersey, a union-dominated Democratic-machine state, is the hard Left’s unsustainable statism or the more realistic Christie’s moderate (but ultimately unsustainable) moderate statism. That’s no contest. But neither is public approval (especially in this state) a testament to Christie’s conservatism. At a new high of 59 percent, a plateau at which he surely will not stay (Farleigh Dickinson puts it at 56 percent), Christie’s approval rating is just a few points higher than the national approval rating of President Obama, who also remains popular in our blue, blue Garden State.

In the post Glyn targets, my point was that Christie would be a poor choice as Mitt Romney’s running mate — a conclusion with which Glyn actually agrees. If the objective in making the pick is to improve Romney’s chances by balancing the ticket with someone more conservative than Romney, that purpose would not be served by selecting a near-clone of Romney. Another moderate northeastern GOP governor with a soft spot for socialized medicine is not going to energize tea partiers and other Romney-indifferent conservatives. Furthermore, my principal contention in the post, not mentioned by Glyn, was that Christie has been adamant about not being ready to be president. Given that readiness to assume the office is generally taken to be the salient qualification for the No. 2 slot, Christie would seem to be unsuitable on his own account. In any event, my main purpose was not to trash Governor Christie — as a governor for New Jersey, he may be the best we can do at the moment. My post addressed the claim, still making the rounds, that he’d make a good veep choice.

But if Mr. Glyn wants to make this about Christie’s record, fine. Let’s begin with the centerpiece of Glyn’s critique, which purports to address my complaints about what he gently calls “Christie’s differing views on Islam in America” — but what would more accurately be described as Christie’s Islamist sympathies.

I have to say Glyn “purports” to address my complaints because, although he correctly says they are “my main bone of contention,” he studiously avoids describing them. As Glyn must know — because it is linked to in my post — I have laid out my objections to Christie’s (literal) embrace of Islamic supremacists in exacting detail. To summarize, not only did Christie appoint to the state bench a lawyer named Sohail Mohammed, who, besides slandering the Justice Department’s prosecutions of (now convicted) jihadists, served as a board member of an Islamic-supremacist organization (the American Muslim Union); as U.S. attorney, Christie also personally championed a Hamas operative named Mohammed Qatanani and, more shockingly, put his federal office in the service of that operative, in opposition to the federal government’s worthy effort to deport him. Reportedly, U.S. Attorney Christie physically embraced Qatanani, praising him as “a man of great good will,” at an Islamic center in Passaic that was closely linked to the Holy Land Foundation Hamas-financing case — which the Bush Justice Department was prosecuting at that very time. (Indeed, Qatanani’s predecessor as imam of the mosque was one of the defendants convicted in the HLF case — and Qatanani praised and prayed for all those defendants while calling for the end of the “occupation” by Israel and the U.S. of, respectively, Palestine and Iraq.)

Instead of outlining the extensive case I’ve made, Glyn changes the subject to Pamela Geller’s bracing declaration that Christie has taken the Garden State on “its first step to becoming a sharia state” — as if that were an accurate synopsis of what I’ve said. Was Ms. Geller’s statement bombastic? Well, no more so than Christie’s typically sulfurous outburst, upon being called on the Sohail Mohammed appointment, that those who dared question him were bigoted sharia “crazies” who opposed the appointee just because he is a Muslim. But regardless, the case I made was not bombast. It was built on facts that Glyn fails even to mention, much less attempt to refute.

Glyn’s account of the objections lodged against Christie in a recent NRO column by Daniel Pipes and Steve Emerson, two conservative experts on Islamic supremacism, is incomplete. Glyn implies that Pipes and Emerson took issue only with Christie’s bloviating against the NYPD’s surveillance of New Jersey Muslims.

In reality, the NYPD issue was only one facet of a broad indictment against Christie’s Islamist sympathies, which Pipes and Emerson corroborated with extensive citations to supporting materials, as is their wont. It also included Christie’s aforementioned support of Qatanani; his appointment of Sohail Mohammed; and his endorsement of the firing of a state employee for burning three pages of the Koran while off duty at a demonstration (the employee got his job back upon successfully suing the state for violating his constitutional rights). Pipes and Emerson did not merely “disapprove of Christie’s outspokenness against the NYPD’s surveillance of Muslim college students in New Jersey,” as Glyn puts it. Here’s what they actually said:

Christie has hugged a terrorist-organization member, abridged free-speech rights, scorned concern over Islamization, and opposed law-enforcement counterterrorism efforts. Whenever an issue touching on Islam arises, Christie takes the Islamist side against those — the [Department of Homeland Security], state senators, the NYPD, even the ACLU — who worry about lawful Islamism eroding the fabric of American life.

Glyn even gets wrong the sliver of the Pipes-Emerson column he discusses. Christie blasted the NYPD surveillance in a manner that, as Commentary’s Jonathan Tobin points out, echoed the objections of Islamist organizations like CAIR — complaining about the law-enforcement attention given to Muslim businesses and mosques. I suppose it is understandable that a pol who hugs a Hamas guy at a Hamas-friendly mosque would feel that way. But to most of the “us” that Glyn claims Christie is “one of,” the NYPD surveillance seems like a pretty good idea. Yet, when New York Republican Pete King said as much, Christie (natch) said King was just a know-nothing congressman who was using Christie’s name to get himself on TV, not a famous former prosecutor of terrorists like Christie.

Well, maybe I don’t know as much about prosecuting terrorists as does the governor, with his all his vast experience, but I vaguely remember that defendants often connected at Muslim businesses and were urged to commit terrorist atrocities at mosques — where, in addition to plotting attacks, jihadists also stored and exchanged weapons. I also seem to recall local police and FBI agents’ being upbraided by an angry public after both the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and 9/11 because they failed — out of fear of being accused of profiling, bigotry, etc. — to investigate what was going on in certain Islamic communities that everyone knew were hotbeds of fundamentalism.

Maybe Christie started to remember that, too; or maybe he just calculated that he’d gotten himself on the wrong side of the surveillance debate. Whatever the case, he retreated, lamely implying that his beef was not really with what NYPD did but with the fact that they’d failed to inform him — Christie having been Jersey’s U.S. attorney when the NYPD surveillance began.

Glyn buys this feint hook, line, and sinker. This is the other side of the story: Even if Christie did not know what the NYPD was up to, the local police in New Jersey did. NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly has explained that Newark police officers accompanied NYPD cops on the surveillance operations and were fully briefed. (The then-director of Newark’s police department denies that his officers participated but admits that he received NYPD’s extensive report; his former deputy admits that the locals showed the NYPD around Newark but — shock, shock — claims they had no idea why they were doing it.)

Christie’s beef is the same one the FBI and the Justice Department grouse about constantly: The NYPD insists on operating outside the federally controlled Joint Terrorism Task Force structure. That is, because New York City remains the jihad’s top terror target, because the failure of the feds to share intelligence is legendary, and because many terror plots targeting the city are hatched outside the city (such as the 1993 WTC bombing, almost all preparations for which were carried out in, yes, New Jersey), Ray Kelly’s department does not permit the FBI and the Justice Department to control or limit its counterterrorism investigations. At best, even if we give Christie the benefit of the doubt on channeling CAIR’s “Islamophobia” campaign, he is being petty over a turf battle.

Most of Glyn’s remaining portrayal of Christie as a “consistent conservative” is mistaken — even apart from its conspicuous failure to mention Christie’s squishiness on illegal immigration and Second Amendment rights. Yes, Christie is to be commended for state-pension reforms, but he has neither dealt realistically with the magnitude of the problem nor actually balanced the budget.

New Jersey has an unfunded pension liability of over $41 billion. To “balance” the budget (as the state constitution requires), Christie is doing what his spendaholic predecessors have done: He is pretending that he is not required to make the state’s full pension payment. (What do you suppose would happen to a CEO in a private-sector, SEC-regulated business who tried that?) He has skimped on more than $5 billion — money he is spending on government programs (or, as he puts it, “core services”). The pension bomb is kicked down the road, to explode on some future governor, who will have to make the tough choice Christie is ducking: pay the mounting debt, slash pension benefits, or drastically cut other spending.

Christie also claims to have “balanced” the budget without raising taxes. That is true only insofar as incometaxes are concerned. But the real problem in Jersey is property taxes. They are among the highest in the country and have risen sharply on Christie’s watch. To be fair, Christie was right to slash state rebates that lessened the pain: Property taxes are a local issue, and the rebates effectively subsidized the out-of-control municipal spending. By reducing the rebates, Christie appropriately encourages property owners to rein in their local governments. That’s as it ought to be. Moreover, as Glyn notes, Christie got the legislature to cap local property-tax increases at 2 percent — not exactly a boon to home owners who need tax decreases, but better than we were doing under Christie’s predecessors. But it is disingenuous to tell homeowners who are paying more that their taxes haven’t been raised. And it is irresponsible to pretend, as Christie does, that New Jersey can reduce taxes and achieve fiscal sanity without paying down its mushrooming debt and radically slashing the size and scope of government.

Truly laughable is Glyn’s claim that Christie’s response to Obamacare shows he is a “consistent conservative.” Unlike Republican governors across the country, Christie declined to sign New Jersey onto the multi-state lawsuit against the “Affordable Care Act” (now being weighed by the Supreme Court). His handwringing about needing more time to study the 2,000-page statute and being reluctant to expend state funds on the suit were insincere: Christie is an accomplished lawyer, the issues are well known, and the filing fee would have set the state back by only $1,000.

The dirty little secret is that Christie is an Obamacare enthusiast — which is no doubt why he so staunchly defends Romneycare. As recently detailed by Mike Proto of Americans for Prosperity (whose New Jersey chapter is run by Christie’s aforementioned nemesis, Steve Lonegan), the governor has walked the tightrope of quietly facilitating Obamacare without overtly embarrassing his conservative rah-rah chorus. Not only has Christie shrunk from the court challenge; before the ink from Obama’s signature was dry, Christie joined Democratic governors in the rush to claim federal funds that Obamacare doles out to states that set up its hyper-regulated “high-risk” insurance pools. Apparently, Christie had studied the statute enough to know New Jersey’s haul could be $141 million; but with conservatives demanding a fight to overturn Obamacare, most Republican governors refused to apply.

The health-insurance-exchange legislation that Glyn applauds Christie for vetoing was passed, in part, because Christie had signaled support for Obamacare — which is also why Obama’s Health and Human Services Department sent seemingly compliant New Jersey an $8.5 million down payment. Christie’s veto came on the last possible day, only after weeks of conservative grumbling, and with a conciliatory message to Obama that “my Administration . . . stands ready to implement the Affordable Care Act if its provisions are ultimately upheld” by the Supreme Court. As Cato’s Michael Cannon observes, even if the justices uphold Obamacare, there is no requirement that states create its pernicious “exchange” bureaucracies. But Christie’s eagerness to submit is no surprise to Garden State conservatives. Proto notes that Christie speeches echo Obama’s desire for universal health insurance, and the governor consistently supports funding increases for “FamilyCare” — New Jersey’s version of the “public option,” which now extends taxpayer subsidies to families at 350 percent of the federal poverty level.

The brute fact is that, while Christie is not a hardcore statist, he is a mild progressive — which is to say, a “compassionate conservative” in the Bush mold who wants to make government “work,” not drastically reduce its size and scope. The governor likes government, particularly its “investments” in everything from green-energy boondoggles like his Offshore Wind Economic Development Act (because “climate change is real” and it is time to “defer to the experts” who say it is anthropogenic) to the creation of new state bureaucracies within existing state bureaucracies to provide government services for children and the elderly.

Thus, though New Jersey’s fiscal outlook continues to be bleak, with looming tens of billions in unfunded liabilities, Christie has just proposed to increase government spending. Not to worry though, because the governor insists, “We have left the dark times.”

Well . . . not exactly. To justify his increased spending, Christie did what progressives do: He declared we can afford all this government (and soon more) because, thanks to his bipartisan leadership, Jersey’s condition is so improved that growth will soon soar to 7.4 percent, with tax revenues consequently surging. This week, however, Moody’s burst his balloon. The investors’ service projected growth at only 3 percent for fiscal year 2013 — about what it is now — and surmised that the governor had significantly overstated revenues in trumpeting the state’s supposed recovery. (In 2011, Christie’s second year in office, both Moody’s and Standard & Poor’sdowngraded New Jersey’s credit rating to Aa3 — only California and Illinois rank lower.)

Then the next shoe dropped: The state’s legislative budget officer (New Jersey’s analogue to the federal CBO) announced that revenue would fall $1.3 billion short of Christie’s projections — prompting the governor, with his usual grace, to inveigh, “Why would anybody with a functioning brain believe this guy?” and to belittle the budget officer as “the Dr. Kevorkian of the numbers.” By the next day, at least some functioning brains decided “Dr. Kevorkian” wasn’t so inept after all: Christie’s state treasurer conceded that revenues would come up nearly $700 million short of what Christie projected just two months ago. The treasurer also mentioned in passingthat Christie will fill part of the gaping budget hole by diverting $260 million in transportation funds to other spending needs . . . and then borrowing $260 million in order to preserve the transportation spending. Christie, in fine Keynesian fettle, explains that this government spending cannot be cut because it is necessary to put people to work — New Jersey’s unemployment rate, at 9.1 percent, being even worse than the nation’s.

Borrowing more millions to pay current operating expenses — heaping more exorbitant debt, with interest, onto the backs of New Jersey’s children — is exactly the practice Christie lambasted his statist predecessor over. He promised to bring it to an end. But now the dilemma: Christie wants to keep his conservative cheerleaders cheering by cutting income taxes while preserving his “reach across the aisle” cred by not only maintaining but expanding the welfare state. As always, the “have it all” fantasy relies on the mirage of epic growth. When that growth inevitably fails to materialize, a governor can either get real or start playing budget voodoo with borrowed money. The “consistent conservative” has made his choice.

I’m far from the first to observe that there is much less to Chris Christie than meets the conservative ear. A blue state could — and usually does — do a lot worse than Christie for its governor. But if “Christie is one of us,” then a lot of “us” aren’t.

SOURCE: NRO

— Andrew C. McCarthy is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

The number of preppers in the United States today is steadily increasing, but the vast majority of people out there still see no reason to start getting ready for "the end of the world as we know it". Most people just assume that things will always somehow get better or that they will somehow be immune to whatever calamities are heading our way. Most people always seem to have a "good excuse" for why they do not need to prepare.

The following are the top 50 excuses for not prepping....

1. "The U.S. Economy Is The Greatest Economy On The Planet - There Is No Way That It Could Ever Collapse"

2. "Once Barack Obama Wins The Election Everything Will Be Better"

3. "Once Mitt Romney Wins The Election Everything Will Be Better"

4. "When Things Get Really Bad The Government Will Take Care Of Us"

5. "When Disaster Strikes I Will Just Steal From Everyone Else That Has Been Busy Preparing"

6. "The Rapture Will Be At Any Moment So I Don't Have To Worry About Prepping"

7. "The Economy Has Always Recovered After Every Recession In The Past And This Time Will Be No Different"

8. "The People That Are Running Things Are Very Highly Educated And They Know Exactly What They Are Doing"

9. "Wal-Mart Will Always Be There"

10. "Our Politicians Are Watching Out For Our Best Interests"

11. "The 2012 Apocalypse Is Almost Here And We Are All Doomed Anyway - So Why Even Try?"

12. "Preppers Do Not Have A Positive Mental Attitude"

13. "If An Economic Collapse Comes I Will Just Go On Welfare"

14. "There Are Some Things You Just Can't Prepare For"

15. "Prepping Is Too Expensive"

16. "We Are Not Like Other Countries - U.S. Cities Are Designed To Withstand Major Earthquakes"

17. "I Need To Save Up For Retirement Instead"

18. "The Stock Market Has Been Soaring So Why Worry?"

19. "I Don't Have Room To Store Anything"

20. "Prepping Is For Crazy People"

21. "I Don't Believe In Conspiracy Theories"

22. "All The Food I Store Is Going To Go Bad"

23. "I Would Rather Spend My Time Watching American Idol"

24. "All The People Who Freaked Out About Y2K Look Really Foolish Now, Don't They?"

25. "I Don't Want To Look Like Those Idiots On 'Doomsday Preppers'"

26. "An EMP Attack Could Never Happen"

27. "There Will Never Be A Nationwide Transportation Disruption In The United States"

28. "Instead Of Being So Paranoid, I Would Rather Just Enjoy Life"

29. "If Society Falls Apart I Wouldn't Want To Continue To Live Anyway"

30. "There Will Never Be Another World War"

31. "I'm Too Lazy To Grow A Garden"

32. "If You Assume The Worst Is Going To Happen Then You Don't Believe In America"

33. "Deficits Don't Matter"

34. "I'll Always Be Able To Get A Job In My Field"

35. "If There Is A Financial Collapse All Of My Debts Will Be Wiped Out So I Might As Well Live It Up Now"

36. "If Things Hit The Fan I Will Just Go Move In With My Relatives Who Have Been Busy Prepping"

37. "Those That Believe That There Will Be Massive Riots In American Cities Someday Are Just Being Delusional"

38. "My Spouse Would Think That I Have Finally Lost It"

39. "I Don't Know Where To Start"

40. "I'll Just Deal With Problems As They Arrive"

41. "I Don't Have To Prepare For A Natural Disaster - That Is What FEMA Is For"

42. "We'll Never See Martial Law In The United States"

43. "I Don't Want To Scare My Children"

44. "Once I Get Rid Of All My Debt Then I Will Start Thinking About Prepping"

45. "My Relatives Already Think That I Am A Nut Job - I Don't Need To Make It Any Worse"

46. "If People At Work Find Out That I Am Prepping It Could Hurt My Career"

47. "If There Really Was A Good Reason To Prepare They Would Tell Us About It On The News"

48. "People Have Been Predicting Doom And Gloom For Years And It Hasn't Happened Yet"

49. "The United States Is The Greatest Nation On Earth - There Is No Way That It Could Collapse"

50. "I Don't Plan On Becoming A Card Carrying Member Of The Tin Foil Hat Brigade"

American Dream

The Washington Post headlined their above-the-fold story on the new documents, “Martin was shot at close range.” But other reports noted that the newly released pictures were consistent with Zimmerman’s story. He had bloody lacerations on the back of his head, two black eyes, his nose was swollen, and as a doctor’s report released earlier in the week showed, his nose was broken. Martin’s autopsy showed there were injuries to his knuckles. 

There are also previously unreleased eyewitness and ear-witness reports indicating that Zimmerman was being pummeled by Martin. But there was a report from the Sanford police’s lead investigator that there was probable cause to charge Zimmerman. And one policeman said this could have all been avoided had Zimmerman never left his car. But as attorney Mark Geragos pointed out on CNN’s AC360 with Anderson Cooper, this is not evidence, just an opinion. 

According to Alan Dershowitz, a liberal lawyer, writing in The New York Daily News, if this evidence that appears to support Zimmerman’s version of events “turns out to be valid, the prosecutor will have no choice but to drop the second-degree murder charge against Zimmerman—if she wants to act ethically, lawfully and professionally.” 

Dershowitz said that the special prosecutor, Angela Corey, “was aware when she submitted an affidavit that it did not contain the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. She deliberately withheld evidence that supported Zimmerman’s claim of self-defense.” As I argued in an earlier AIM Report, the media and certain politicians have played leading roles in fanning the flames, and this story has a long way to go. 

After that went to press, Dershowitz went even further in an interview on Fox News Channel’s “Huckabee,” with former Gov. Mike Huckabee, in which he accused Angela Corey of being “aware of most of the evidence in general outline” and said she made “a deliberate, willful, unethical, unprofessional, and illegal decision to withhold that evidence…from the courts and from the affidavit that she filed in support of an overblown second-degree murder prosecution.” 

He said Ms. Corey should be investigated for submitting an affidavit that she knew to be a half-truth, which he equated to a lie. And, he said, she sees her job to do justice for Trayvon, and to avoid riots, not to see justice for Zimmerman. He added that she has raised expectations for a conviction, but that no reasonable jury will convict on second-degree murder charges based on the evidence. He said that if there are riots because Zimmerman isn’t found guilty or because the charges were dropped, she will be responsible. 

Dershowitz also said that the prosecutor “made up” the notion that Zimmerman had “profiled” Martin because he was black, though there was no evidence to support that. 

In an expanded version of the Dershowitz-penned article cited above, he also had some tough words for The New York Times. He accused the Times of “generally biased” reporting against Zimmerman, suggesting that “if the police had done their job properly the evidence would point to Zimmerman’s guilt.” He also blasted them for using “uncorroborated gossip,” in citing a woman who had called an investigator with an opinion that Zimmerman “has racist ideologies,” though she refused to identify herself. 

“I think the New York Times should ask itself whether it would have published the contents of a phone call from an unidentified person that made similar inflammatory charges against Trayvon Martin,” Dershowitz wrote. “I believe that the publication of such unsourced gossip—which would be totally inadmissible in any trial—violates the New York Times' own policies. It has some explaining to do.” 

Now, it turns out, according to the Orlando Sentinel, that four of the witnesses cited in the documents changed their initial story of what happened, and in at least three of those four cases, the changed version was damaging to George Zimmerman’s case. 

The release of the documents in support of the second-degree murder charge against George Zimmerman, along with evidence of changed memories, have only complicated and exacerbated an already racially charged prosecution.

Roger Aronoff is the Editor of Accuracy in Media, and can be contacted at roger.aronoff@aim.org.

According to data released by USDA last January, the number of Americans receiving food stamps, the aid given by the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program or SNAP, a year ago in August 2011, hit an all-time record: 45.8 million people, the equivalent of 15% of Americans.

Though a slight increase (1.1%) from a month earlier, 45.3 million Americans receiving that help was actually a massive 31% deterioration, compared to June 2009 -when, unrelatedly, the National Bureau of Economic Research announced that the last recession “was over.”

Of all states, surprisingly, the one with the largest food stamps recipients is Texas, with 4.12 million people on the program, followed by California with 3.82 million, according to the USDA and the spending then hit a record $6.13 billion.

An important detail can be read in this informative article, which enlightens us on why are so many PhDs on food stamps, welfare, and how the situation has worsened in recent years even for highly educated people.  

Obama, Black America, Islam, Globalism and Communism

When Barack Hussein Obama was elected back in 2008, “hope” was the order of the day.  It was very misleading as he brought hope of chaos and disintegration to our country, our economy, our traditions and our morale.

Indeed, this president has some specific interests, and at the top of his agenda are:  The cause of Black America.  Communism.  Globalism.  Islam and their perennial will for world domination, which Mr. Obama is actively facilitating within our borders and worldwide.  But, there is still something else up his sleeve.

Obama’s love for Africa -and Islam

Obama is loyal to many causes, except the cause of America.

He is loyal to Islam, thanks to his American liberal mother who introduced him to her two men:  His father, Barack Obama, Sr., who was from Kenya and who met his mother at Russian language class in Hawai’i University.  After divorcing Obama Sr., Stanley Ann Dunham married again, to another Muslim, Indonesian Lolo Soetoro, who was attending college in Hawai’i.  However, when Suharto came to power in 1967, Indonesian students studying abroad had to return home and the Soetoro family moved to Jakarta -and with them went Barack Hussein Obama, who, from 6 to 10 years old, attended local Jakarta schools.  

While many grant most importance to the two father Muslim figures in his life, we would be remiss if we did not give enough credit the sharp influence represented by his American liberal mother.  

Obama was influenced among others by Saul Alinsky and Frank Marshall Davis.  Davis was born 1905 in Arkansas City, Kansas.  He died in 1987, aged 81 in Honolulu, Hawai’i, where he lived since 1946.  He was a political and labor movement activist as well as another Chicago street organizer.  As we can see, Hussein Obama had a most “rounded” radical liberal upbringing.  

Obama Pledges Billions for Africa Hungry

Hussein Obama knows how to take care of his people, whether they are Muslims or Africans.  When he wants, Obama makes the world turn.

Indeed, last Friday, Hussein Obama said that “the United States has a "moral imperative" to lead the fight against hunger and malnutrition in Africa despite shrinking national budgets around the world.”

Does bankrupt America have any “moral imperative... regarding Africa or any other country for that matter?   No.  

Obama’s new topic of interest is food security which is been used as the new nom de guerre for “securing food to prevent global unrest.”  As per the White House three days ago they announced that:  “This weekend, the G-8 and African partners will launch the next phase of these efforts: the New Alliance for Food and Nutrition Security. The New Alliance is a commitment by G8 nations, African countries and private sector partners to lift 50 million people out of poverty over the next 10 years through inclusive and sustained agricultural growth.”

The American people must find out if Congress was consulted prior to Obama making his pompous announcement.  Or are they following the Panetta line, that they will only “inform” Congress after the decision has been made with the global authorities?

Obama said that the funds, $3 billion, would be raised in private sector pledges to help boost agriculture and food production in Africa.  So far, 45 companies worldwide have pledged those more than $3 billion to help solve scarce nutrition, in order to avoid potential threats to global security.  He added that U.S. and other donor nations would continue to make "historic investments" in development, though twisting his words, he offered no new American government pledges -for the time being.

Among the contributing companies, is the New Jersey-based, Cargill, Inc., international producer and marketer of food, agricultural, financial and industrial products.   Cargil should actually be making contributions to our system, to help those over 45 million get food.  

It gets worse

At a symposium in Washington, Obama said: “As the wealthiest nation on earth, I believe the U.S. has a moral obligation to lead the fight against hunger and nutrition and to partner with others.”   In the audience were U2 singer Bono and several African heads of state.

Conclusion

With 45.3 million Americans receiving food stamps because they don’t have enough means to buy food, the man cannot find anything better to do than create another global organization to raise private and government funds to go to the rescue 50 million Africans over the next 10 years -through inclusive and sustained agricultural growth.  

As president of the United States, his priority number one should be to alleviate our problems.  Therefore, if he’s going to raise private funds, the only goal should be to devote those funds for the well-being of Americans.  

But, what else can one expect of Hussein Obama?

His roots have been deeply ingrained in his blood by his American liberal mother who gave him a Muslim father and another Muslim father-figure.

Obama has never received any patriotic education, the love for America was never taught in his home, whether in Hawai’i, in Indonesia or in Kenya.  His was an upbringing surrounded by people who hated America, who saw America as their greatest enemy, the reason for all what’s wrong in the world.  And they, were here to fix the problem.  

As democracy made acceptable the hate towards one’s country, it gave birth to treacherous liberalism, progressivism, which are the antithesis of honor, love and respect of one’s country.  

However, the “democracy” of the traditional democratic lineages in our country were mostly worried in amassing wealth among a few, while advocating mostly  social benefits -and still the American dream, somehow, was kept alive.  But in no way, that “aristocratic democracy” would have wanted to open the doors of our country for the Muslim takeover, or for the surrender of our country to the global agenda of the United Nations and their other organizations, as Hussein Obama is intending to do ever since he received the reins of our country.  

The main difference between Obama, Clinton and our former aristocratic democrats was that the latter enjoyed being leaders of the world superpower.  And only with Obama we have heard for the first time an American president apologizing for our country.  A true disgrace!

Obama’s actions speak for him.  His words never say how great America is, or how noble our people are...  Obama never speaks of the need for a great American craftsmanship.  And he says no word of us having pride in our work, of the need for us to excel in whatever we do.   And about American history?  The only mention he has made about our history, is that he “wants to change it.”  

And, after ruining our country even more than she ever was, with a debt at almost $16 TR, he still has the nerves to say that ““As the wealthiest nation on earth... we have the moral obligation...”    

Under normal circumstances, one could think the man is insane.  But, his attitude towards our country and people is disrespectful, heinous and detrimental to the maximum, in other words, what he is doing against America the Beautiful, is pure evil.

Meanwhile, the American Congress does not seem to be sensitive enough to defend the rights, well-being and interests of the American people -and unless they wake up sooner rather than later, they all will risk being considered his accomplices.  

Elections are coming, and Americans must be sure not to repeat the same mistake again.     

There is only one party for which Americans of any affiliation must vote in this 2012 elections, is America.  

Americans elected Obama as president but they did not know that in reality they were giving the keys of our country to America’s worst enemy, because the reason for him to become president, was not to take care of our country or to nurture our people and allow America to continue being the superpower in the world.  Helped by a large part of the American people, his has been a progressive takeover of America for his own evil purpose.  .  

One only thing is important now:  make sure Mr. Obama is only a one term president.

Goodwill Ambassador Eliana Benador is a global strategist and founder of Benador Associates. For speaking requests  kindlycontact her here. Stephen E. Hughes is Director of Research at Benador Associates.

Every now and then we wonder why we can't win wars anymore. The answer is that we don't fight wars, we fight endless police actions in the name of stability. Nearly every war we fought in the last hundred years was about stabilizing a region in an endless game of domino theory. Most of the wars were morally right, not so much because we fought them for the right reasons or in the right ways, but because our enemies were genuine monsters.

Our defense plan and foreign policy for generations has depended on maintaining an international order that would provide for common defense and common markets, and that most of all would allow for international stability. Stability has been the absolute good, instability the absolute enemy. It's not right or wrong that we care about, but the regional stability that maintains stable markets and keeps us from having to send peacekeeping forces to another hellhole.

This is the Pax Americana. This is why we did something about Iraq and Libya, countries out of step with the Arab League. It is why we will almost certainly bomb Syria and why we pressure Israel. It is also why we have done nothing about a genuine genocide in Sudan, whose regime has the support of the Arab League. It is why we will keep on pushing Taiwan into China's embrace, while trying to checkmate China's expansionism. It is why we will keep putting money and troops behind the United Nations.

United States governments have lost the ability to think of national rights and interests, apart from the international order. The two have become one and the same. It is presumed that what is good for the international community is good for America, even when that clearly is not the case because it is presumed that the infrastructure of international law and stability is an overall good.

The United Nations was not simply inept, like the League of Nations; it was a relic of another age even as its delegates trooped into the modern glass and steel building on Turtle Bay. It had been built to counter the wrong threat. The problem no longer lay with rogue industrialized nations on a conquering spree, but with an international ideology determined to subjugate civilization with its own worldwide alliance.  

American power and wealth made the international order possible, but aside from the Korean War, it proved to be of very little use against Communism, which simply infiltrated it and took it over. The international order was a dream of Western liberals, and their sympathies inevitably lay with the barbarians at the gate, not with the civilization within. Their dream of inclusiveness filled the UN with legions of Third World dictatorships, giving us a choice between allying with monsters or letting the Soviet Union ally with them.

The same story is repeating itself with Islam, except we didn't spend the Cold War pretending that the Warsaw Pact were our allies, while our enemies were a handful of Communist terrorists who needed more moderate influence from the Mecca of Moscow. We bombed countries to overthrow Communist dictatorships, we did not bomb them to install "moderate" Communist dictatorships-- as we keep doing now.

The international order was useless against Communism, it is even more useless against Islam, which is not a rogue state acting outside the body of international law, but nations and non-state actors bound together by a common religion with the aim of subjugating those it considers inferior. The international community cannot do anything about Islam, because Islam is a sizable part of the international community. Nor does the international community want to do something about Islam.

International orders are based on voluntary action and after all the champagne flutes are lifted to toast peace, no one particularly wants to go out and enforce it. Not against a big target. The League of Nations folded out of sheer gutlessness. The United Nations hasn't gone the same way because it has yet to encounter a major war that would expose its uselessness. Had the Cold War gone hot, we would be reading about the United Nations in the history books. When the conflict with Islam truly explodes, the United Nations will be one of the first casualties.

The international order does not exist to prevent war, but to maintain the illusion that the current level of stability and order is due to a new plateau of human enlightenment, rather than because the combination of factors waiting to turn the simmering grudges and power vacuums of yesterday's conflict into tomorrow's war have not yet come to term. Then the tanks cross the Polish border, the planes crash into the towers and the illusion begins to collapse. The ability is gone and there is a sharp diving line between those members of the international order who will fight and those who will cower in a corner.

American elites have always had a strong Transatlantic tendency. Throughout the 19th Century, the United States was pulled to the West, but increases in communications and transportation technology, combined with government centralization, drew it back to the east and across the ocean into a European alliance to protect the mother country and the continent and patch together the ragged pieces of a post-colonial European order. From the 1940's onward, the United States was tasked with arbitrating the conflicts between the European Left and Right, and between its moderate and immoderate left.

The Pax Americana realized many of the European plans, tying together international law with free enterprise, generous international aid and a dose of moderate policing. It was a post-colonial colonialism based on ideas that we insisted were universal, even though the only countries which really held them to be self-evident truths were the colonial powers and their offspring. But mostly it all depended on American power. It still does.

The only thing worth knowing about international affairs is that everyone hates the United States and every other country in the world that isn't their own. The degree of hatred varies with prominence, proximity and exposure. Everyone hates their neighbors, even if they don't have much prominence or exposure. Most hate prominent countries with a great deal of exposure. Even minor countries that are far away, but have a great deal of exposure end up being hated after a while.

Mostly this hatred isn't violent. It takes the form of resentments, stereotypes and grudges funneled into soccer matches and angry wars of words between politicians over some minor trading dispute or the position of a few islands on the border. Small reminders that we aren't an enlightened breed, we aren't noble people, we are often petty and territorial. We are only human, and the international order that we built is only human. It has the same petty hatreds and resentments, and the same cowardice and criminality that we are capable of. The international order is a mob, and mobs are ugly things. They will tear apart the weak while fleeing the strong. A mob has less morals in a group than its individuals do. And this is the international order that we have staked our future on.

If the United States is going to survive the century, it will have to do so as a rogue nation. The international order has no future, and dying for it is madness and suicide. The international order is cooperative and turning cooperation with a system that disdains individual nations and rewards internal alliances into our supreme value in international affairs is suicide. 

We have fought two useless destructive wars on the terms of the international order, with international alliances aimed at stabilizing regions, and turning rogue states into good members of the international community. We failed both times, and we lost far more men and women on these stabilizing exercises than we did in fighting the wars. We recently fought a third war with nothing to gain for it and plenty to lose. We are likely to launch a fourth war this year for the same reason, and continuing doing this road is madness. 

The United States can survive without the international order, but it cannot survive the international order. It cannot survive if it continues thinking of its survival only in terms of the international order. That will mean economic suicide, demographic suicide and strategic suicide. 

The international order values integration above all else. Its only values are cooperative values. The internationalists have replaced, "My Country Right or Wrong" with "The International Order Right or Wrong". And the international order has been consistently wrong for sixty years. The order today represents our enemies who wish to destroy us demographically and militarily. They want to grind us down as a separate entity and incorporate us as tools and resources into the order. That will mean not only the death of our individualism, our economy and our independence-- it will mean the death of everything when the international order falls to the Jihad.

To survive, we have to stop thinking of global stability and global markets, and start thinking of ourselves. We have to go back to discover what our national interests are and what our moral values are, instead of confusing our interests and morals with internationalism. To survive as a nation, we have to become a nation once again.

FWW launched its campaign in January 2012, claiming GE corn “hasn’t been tested for human safety” and contains DNA traits that “are potentially unsafe.” What utter nonsense.

All biotech crops, including GE sweet corn, have gone through years of testing, studies and approval processes by the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Nutrition, Agriculture Department’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, Environmental Protection Agency and other labs, before being placed on the market. In fact, biotech crops have been tested far more rigorously than any other foods (including organic products), hundreds of peer-reviewed studies have determined that they are safe to eat. In the 16 years since such crops were first introduced in 1996, people have eaten more than two trillion servings of foods containing biotech ingredients – without a single documented case of injury to a person.

We all want safe, nutritious food, grown under the best agricultural and environmental practices. That’s what makes biotechnology so important. By precisely inserting specific traits into the genetic makeup of important food crops, scientists have been able to make many foods safer, equally or more nutritious, and better for the environment. The following traits are especially important.

Herbicide resistance. Corn that is resistant to Roundup or other herbicides enables farmers to employ no-till techniques to control weeds, instead of using cultivators to bury them too deep to grow. This preserves soil nutrients and organic matter, increases water absorption and retention, and significantly reduces erosion – improving soil fertility and crop yields, while reducing irrigation and fuel costs.

Insect resistance. A single gene (derived from a natural soil bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt, and inserted into the corn genome) enables corn plants to make a protein that is harmless to humans, but disrupts the digestive system of insects that munch on the plants’ roots or kernels, while leaving ladybugs, butterflies and other beneficial insects unaffected. The Bt gene augments corn plants’ natural defenses, slashes insecticide spraying (by up to 85% for sweet corn), dramatically reduces corn borer (caterpillar) and rootworm (beetle larvae) damage, keeps roots healthy and plants alive, and minimizes the amount of insect-damaged corn ears that are left to rot in fields or are rejected by consumers and thrown out by grocers.

By killing insect borers in the ears, Bt corn largely eliminates pathways for fungal contamination that leads to dangerous levels of fumonisin in corn meal. This fungal toxin causes fatal diseases in horses and is linked to esophageal cancer in people and neural tube defects (like spinal bifida) in developing fetuses.

These benefits are hugely important for US farmers; for consumers who want safe, affordable, nutritious food; and especially for farmers and consumers in poor, drought-stricken, insect-plagued regions like Africa. They mean less land must be devoted to crops, leaving more for wildlife habitat, thereby improving biodiversity and ensuring sustainable agriculture. They explain why 10% of US sweet corn is already Bt (Syngenta introduced its Bt sweet corn more than a decade ago), 70% of processed foods in American diets contain ingredients from biotech crops (including corn, squash, soybeans, canola, sugarbeets and papayas), 88% of all corn (field and sweet) grown in the USA is biotech, and 17 million farmers in 29 nations (90% in developing countries) grow biotech crops on 395 million acres.

Wal-Mart doubtless understood all or most of this – and was not going be bamboozled or intimidated by a few noisy activists who did not represent its customers, sound science or the public interest.

Those activists may actually believe their allegations. They certainly know how to generate letters and phone calls, harass businesses, and frighten urban consumers who’ve never been on a farm, know little about how their food is produced, don’t understand genetics or biotechnology, and are thus susceptible to clever hoaxes and ridiculous claims by activists, who are often enlisted and paid by organic producers and retailers that profit mightily from their land and labor-intensive alternatives to conventional food.

In any event, Wal-Mart didn’t cave. So a few months later Food and Water Watch sent out a “we give up” letter, whining that Wal-Mart had “ignored the petitions, calls and public pressure” it had orchestrated. (Its 370-word letter included nine separate pitches for contributions.)

FWW also announced that it was launching a new campaign – to get state and federal laws passed, requiring that all GE foods be labeled. The proclaimed justification for labeling is that “people have a right to know what’s in their food and how it is produced.” The real reason is that labels will make it easier for anti-biotech activists to single out and stigmatize biotech products, generate consumer anxiety, and intimidate grocers into taking nutritious and perfectly safe products off their shelves.

While “progressive” (anti-business) states like California and Oregon may go along with this nonsense, responsible legislators will tell the activists to take a hike. Or they could require that all foods carry relevant (and spooky) safety labels, and consumers be offered more detailed information (prepared by competitors). For instance, lawmakers could mandate that organic products carry warnings like these.

* No studies have ever demonstrated that organic products are safer or more nutritious than milk, meat, fruits or vegetables produced by conventional or biotech methods.

* Various organic crops were developed using gamma rays, x-rays and potent chemicals like colchicine, to induce numerous (mostly unknown) mutations in seeds, in the hope that a few might be beneficial.

* Many organic farmers regularly spray live Bt spores and proteins, copper sulfate, petroleum oils and other insecticidal chemicals, to control crop pests. Some secretly use chemical herbicides and insecticides.

* Random testing has found that biotech corn meal has fumonisin levels well below the 500 parts per billion regulatory limit, whereas pure (non-blended) organic corn meal is often far above the limit – with some organic corn meal testing at 9,000 or even 16,000 ppb: 18-32 times above safety standards.

* Mad cow disease was first found on an English organic farm – and some organic dairy farmers continue milking cows infected with mastitis until the animals die, rather than treating them with antibiotics.

* The deadly spinach E. Coli outbreak several years ago was traced to a farm that was in transition from conventional to organic. Organic produce is always more susceptible to bacterial contamination, because the farmers rely on manure instead of chemical fertilizers (many derived from nitrogen in the air).

All these statements are true – but largely irrelevant. Thanks to regulations, inspections, and responsible practices by seed producers, farmers, processors and retailers, America’s food is generally very safe. The few occasional E. coli and salmonella outbreaks could be prevented by irradiating the most susceptible fruits, vegetables and meats – but anti-biotech activists also oppose irradiation. Go figure.

We’d all be better off if these ridiculous attacks on conventional and biotech (and organic) foods were simply thrown out with the garbage. Most critically, Third World farmers and families would suffer far less poverty, malnutrition, starvation, Vitamin A deficiency and deprivation, if anti-biotech activists (especially in Europe) would end their fanatical obsession about “potential” biotech “contamination” of conventional and organic foods (and flowers!) imported from Africa and other impoverished regions.

Meanwhile, let’s all congratulate Wal-Mart for taking a principled, ethical, scientific stand.

____________

Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Congress of Racial Equality and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death (www.Eco-Imperialism.com)

Curtis was referring to Marcus Luttrell, whose 2007 best-seller "Lone Survivor" tells of four Navy SEALs, Luttrell among them, whose 2005 mission in Afghanistan was compromised when two unarmed Afghan goatherds discovered the SEALs hiding deep in Taliban territory. I had written a column discussing the excruciating fact that the thought of being brought up on legal charges in a military court back home weighed so heavily on these young Americans' minds that they decided not to save their own lives and their mission by killing the two Afghans, but rather to take their chances against the veritable Taliban army the pair would summon against them.

"It was the stupidest, most Southern-fried, lame-brain decision I ever made in my life," Luttrell later wrote of his decisive vote to let the two Afghans go. As a result of the decision the SEALs made on an Afghan mountaintop far from any courthouse, 19 Americans -- Luttrell's three SEAL teammates and 16 more special forces -- would be killed that same day.

But no one went to court.

In Evan's case, the leader of his elite sniper squad chose the other path. It was May 2007, in insurgent-controlled Iskandariyah, Iraq. When an unarmed Iraqi man compromised the team's "hide" and refused to cooperate quietly, the team leader chose not to risk drawing local insurgents to their position, but instead ordered Evan to kill the man. As a result of this decision, all of our soldiers came home that day.

But then they went to court. Long saga short, Evan Vela became the only soldier convicted of the killing. He was sentenced to 10 years at Fort Leavenworth military prison -- the shortest sentence of the so-called Leavenworth 10, as Curtis reminded me this week, using the nickname for a group of veterans who are incarcerated for a variety of desperate, blurry, fog-of-war shootings.

Listening to the procedural review of Evan's case, I am struck again by the ghastly surrealism of their plight -- the penalties the U.S. government has forced on its most dutiful sons for not committing, in effect, suicide as the Navy SEALs did in choosing to escape prison rather than death.

Meanwhile, literally thousands of incarcerated terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan have been granted clemency or otherwise found their freedom. Recently, Ali Musa Daqduq, a Hezbollah mastermind who confessed to kidnapping, torturing and killing five American soldiers in 2007, walked free in Iraq. In December 2011, President Obama turned over Daqduq to an Iraqi court, which released him this month. According to the most basic moral calculus, this is neither fair nor right. As Republican Rep. Allen West of Florida recently wrote to President Obama, it's an "utter betrayal."

I steal another glance at the Carnahans, now focused on the court proceedings. Like the other Leavenworth families, they have been counting off the years by trials, appeals, clemency boards and pleas for congressional support. Back in early 2009, there were flutters in the news about a possible pardon for Evan from outgoing President Bush. Then nothing. No pardon. Which was, to my mind, unpardonable. George W. Bush should have pardoned Evan and the other soldiers, now prisoners, whom he ordered into a confusing, rules-restricted war against an army without uniforms on a battlefield without lines.

And so, the Leavenworth 10 sit in prison: Michael Behenna, Corey Clagett, John Hatley, William Hunsaker, Larry Hutchins, Michael Leahy, Joseph Mayo, Michael Williams, Evan Vela. Newcomer Derrick Miller has joined them. Miller last year drew a life sentence after unsuccessfully claiming self-defense in the killing of a suspected Afghan insurgent who had penetrated his defensive perimeter.

Memorial Day -- the day we mourn our war dead -- is coming. President Obama, give these men another chance at life. Pardon them.

SOURCE: Diana West

When I first met Vidal in the late 1980s in Jerusalem, I had little inkling of the life-experience and artistry that lay behind his celebrity. I remember my surprise when he casually explained to me at a reception that he regarded cutting hair as being akin to architecture with a human element. When he invoked modernist architects like Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier or Mies van der Rohe, I frankly thought he must be kidding me. Only much later did I begin to appreciate that in his creative work, form and function did genuinely coalesce. 

It was not until the mid-1990s, when I was teaching in London, that I really came to know the personality behind the flamboyant popular icon. Sitting next to him at a dinner-party in London, I discovered him to be an immensely likeable, friendly individual, refreshingly irreverent about formal rules with a very British style of self-deprecating humor. His very gentlemanly manner concealed a determined, self-disciplined perfectionist and a shrewd entrepreneur who knew exactly what he wanted and how to achieve it. 

Vidal firmly believed that people create their own destinies and that success (as his own life demonstrated) was a combination of creativity, focused will-power and hard work – even if an element of luck could never hurt. 

Ten years ago, when I became the head of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the study of Antisemitism (SICSA) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, my contact with Vidal became more regular and intense. It was only then that I learned how much his rags-to-riches story also had a Jewish dimension; how he had been raised in a Jewish orphanage in London’s East End during the Great Depression; how the ugly antisemitism which he encountered as a child in 1930s London during the rise of the Mosleyite blackshirts, left an enduring mark on his psyche. Vidal was not at all reticent in speaking about these experiences. He liked to recount how by the age of 17 he was already battling the local fascists and anti-Semites on the streets in the East End of London. This activist revulsion against anti-Jewish hatemongering would never leave him. 

Vidal’s decision to volunteer two years later to fight in Israel’s War of Independence was probably the single most decisive experience in his life. In conversation, he often highlighted 1948 – the year that he spent in the Palmach, helping to stop the advance of the Egyptian Army from the Northern Negev – as the turning point which forged his identity and gave him the confidence to succeed in life. His eyes would twinkle as he recalled the sense of personal exhilaration at having taken part in the rebirth of the Jewish nation after 2,000 years of crushing oppression at the hands of the Gentiles. He liked to say that while America (to which he had moved in the 1970s) gave him his freedom, it was Israel that created his sense of Jewish dignity. 

In 1982, convinced by Prof. Yehuda Bauer, Vidal established the world’s first center for research into anti-Semitism in Jerusalem. Though he lived in far-off Los Angeles, the work and the future of our center was never far from his mind. No less important was his contribution in promoting the work of the Hebrew University, whose commitment to learning, science, tolerance and cultural pluralism he highly valued. 

Vidal instinctively understood the need for a high-level research center devoted to the in-depth study of anti-Semitism and for the proliferation of knowledge about it, in order to prevent any repetition of the Holocaust and the havoc which anti-Jewish persecution had wrought throughout history. In this respect, he was unusual among the Anglo-Jews of his day. Few perceived as clearly that anti-Semitism was an ongoing threat, never far beneath the surface even in times of relative calm. 

Vidal always took immense pride in our scholarly output and the public outreach work that the Sassoon Center has been able to initiate during the past decade. We shared a common conviction that it was imperative to get academics to fight anti-Semitism in the public arena and not only in the study-room – something much easier said than done if one wishes to maintain the highest intellectual standards. 

At our last meeting in California two years ago, Vidal openly wondered if most of his fellow-Jews in America had really learned anything from the Holocaust or fully grasped the predicament of an embattled Israel. We met in Santa Barbara, where I had arrived to give a public lecture and Vidal graciously decided to travel from Los Angeles so that we could spend the entire day together. 

As always, he looked trim and well-groomed. He was remarkably warm and encouraging on a personal level while reminiscing freely about his own life and career. His serenity was all the more striking since we both knew he was probably living on borrowed time. Insistently, he dwelt on his Jewish roots. He told me that ever since he could remember, he had carried within him this seemingly inexplicable and mysterious sense of Jewish difference. Though he remained a Universalist who passionately believed in the oneness of mankind, for him Jewish uniqueness was simply a fact. 

At his request, I updated him on the current anti-Zionist campaigns and global efforts to delegitimize Israel. He remarked that thirty years ago, when he established the Center, it seemed that nationalist anti-Semitism, Christian religious fundamentalism and Holocaust denial would be the major concerns. Now he realized that radical Islam, left-wing hatred of the Jewish State and the boycott campaign against Israel were no less troubling. But few if any of his celebrity friends (some of whom we would visit that day) saw the gravity of the hour. Certainly, they might acknowledge that anti-Semitism was a problem, but not in the United States. Even in Britain, the country to which Vidal still felt strongly attached, there was only a limited awareness among his friends of how toxic the atmosphere surrounding discussions of Israel had already become. 

It was a sobering conversation, especially with the dark Iranian cloud looming ever larger on the horizon. Nevertheless, he was hopeful that the United States would not abandon Israel in its hour of need. Repeatedly, Vidal would come back to the sheer miracle of Israel’s survival and its stunning achievements in the face of adversity. He had been here at its birth when 600,000 Israelis successfully fought off five invading Arab armies. The “first start-up nation” was not only still in place but a thriving, powerful country with six million Jews, determined to defend themselves. It had grown by a factor of ten in just over 60 years. 

Since the 1960s, through his willingness to experiment, his visual awareness and sense of style, Vidal Sassoon helped make the world a better and more beautiful place. Through the Center, which I have had the privilege to direct during the past decade, he also helped ensure that the world was a safer place for the Jewish people. Vidal is no longer with us but his legacy lives on in every one of us.  It is now our collective responsibility to maintain these crucial goals with the same generosity of spirit and vision as Vidal himself. 

Prof. Robert S. Wistrich is the director of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His latest book, From Ambivalence to Betrayal: The Left, the Jews and Israel, was just release by the University of Nebraska Press. 

Last year New York Magazine put Obama in a Kippa and stuck him on the cover as the "First Jewish President." Before that he had already been dubbed the "First Asian-American President", cementing his appeal as all things to all people. And why not, when we live in a wonderful time when anyone can be anything they want.

Elizabeth Warren, with her strong northern European features, and an ancestor who participated in the "Trail of Tears", can be recognized as a "Woman of Color," and, when challenged on her claim, the media rolls out a dozen pieces suggesting that Cherokee ancestry is some sort of vague unstructured concept that can't be quantified with rigid standards such as actually having a Cherokee ancestor.

Over in Florida, that infamous white menace, George Zimmerman is standing trial and if the trial doesn't go Holder's way, the attorney general will charge him with a hate crime. In a saner world, there would be more chances of Holder going to jail for the mass murder of Latinos as part of a plot to subvert the Bill of Rights; than there would be of a Latino man being lynched as a white racist. 

But we don't live in a sane world, we live in a post-racial world, where everything is racial and nothing is racial. Where race is meaningful and meaningless, everywhere and nowhere, where everyone who wants to be someone has a victim identity in their wallet and an essay on the plight of their people. 

The age of Obama is truly a post-racial one, not in the sense that race doesn't matter, it actually matters more than ever, but that it no longer exists as a concrete identity. Race, gender and sexual orientation are just variables that you adopt if you like, but once you've adopted them, then you insist that they are an inescapable part of you and that you are one of the oppressed.

Forget being famous for fifteen minutes, that's trite in the age of YouTube and Reality TV where anyone can be famous if they really want to. We live in a country where anyone can be black, gay or Cherokee and have a full time career resisting white oppression, a career that pays surprisingly well, despite living in a nation in the thrall of the Caucasian heteronormative patriarchy. 

As a nation we are always making history. Not the old-fashioned kind of history of annexing frontiers, winning wars or going to the moon. Instead we make history by shoving some member of a minority group up to a new office. Get a black governor, an Eskimo attorney general and a transgender secretary of defense together to make some history. Have we had a gay Asian president in a wheelchair yet? No. Then we have to get on it right away. History doesn't make itself.

Like jaded foodies, our elites' idea of history is constantly ordering more exotic dishes from the menu of multiculturalism. This election the American people will be asked to decide whether it's more historic to reelect a half-black sorta Muslim or a sorta Latino Mormon. We had the Obama last time we went out, what if we try a Mitt? But next time we need to try something really different to remind us that we are a truly great nation because we elect people of different backgrounds to show the power of our American dream. 

Is it any wonder that Elizabeth Warren became the first woman of color at Harvard Law? Harvard needed a Cherokee and Warren needed a job. It didn't matter whether Warren was as Cherokee as a Detroit Jeep, it was the idea of having a woman of color that mattered because it meant that Harvard was catching up with the times in the modern age of 1996 and it wasn't just a bunch of white guys assailing the establishment, it was a bunch of white guys and a woman of colorless color, who had truly known oppression, fighting the power.

Political identity is propaganda. We'll never have that post-racial society that politicians occasionally talk about because racial tensions and the promise of a post-racial society are just too useful to those same politicians. Until recently politicians did their best to consolidate a united national identity, but in the last half-century they discovered what urban machine politicians always knew, that there is more power in dividing people than in uniting them. Identity is arbitrary and politicians know how to wear a dozen faces. Obama is a Christian in America, but a Muslim when he visits the Muslim world. Elizabeth Warren was a Cherokee on campus, but a paleface on the campaign trail. And their enemies are always white, even when they're as brown as George Zimmerman.

The liberal establishment is white, but wears blackface as often as it can. It pretends to be black, female, gay and any other group it can, even though its actual composition is fairly close to its conservative opposite numbers. And both are in their own way representative of America, not in the crude quota way, but in the actual reality of the country. It's not race that matters, but the perception of race, the narrative of race, the baggage of race and the ways that all of these can be transformed into tools of power. We are not a country divided by race, we are a nation divided by the exploiters of race. It's not class, race or gender that divides us, but a professional class of dividers who maintain power by maintaining divisiveness. 

Race, gender and ethnicity are political codes. Everyone can become an oppressor by being one of the oppressed, even if they're actually one of the oppressors. All the oppressors are oppressed because it justifies the oppression that they inflict on others. All the innocent are guilty and all the guilty are innocent. The sins of the slave owning great-great-grandfather are passed down to his descendants, but no one is responsible for sending an entire nation into the chains of debt slavery.

The oppressive system needs to recruit the professionally oppressed to justify its power. Most accusations of bigotry and political incorrectness boil down to opposition to a system and its right to protect the oppressed with oppression and the discriminated against with discrimination. The system isn't out to fight racism, it needs racism to live. It needs a divided population to turn to government to arbitrate all its disputes. If racism did not exist, the government would have to invent it so that it could wield unlimited power over individuals, businesses and entire states.

Racism must be a problem because government must have power. Just as every other form of conflict across every possible dividing line must be maintained, emphasized and constantly attacked with new regulatory methodologies. And the politicians who oppress a nation must play their identity games, accepting honorary induction into one group or another, or being elevated entirely because they are natural members of that group. 

We have a government that aspires to be all things to all people led by men and women who aspire to be all things to all people. Transcendental figures who promise to heal the wounds that they have inflicted on us, even while gouging them deeper, who pledge to teach us to be better people if we ignore everything that they do, and who are always just like us-- even when they are nothing like us.

In the post-racial America that is deep in debt, yet having endless conversations about race, you can be anything you want, so long as there isn't a regulation against it. You can change your gender and your sexual orientation, you can be a Cherokee or a Kenyan, you can be a historic victim achiever who breaks through the ceiling of history to make everyone feel proud of themselves for not being prejudiced. 

Just so long as you're a liberal.

The stories are different now. The Husseiniya was shut down last week. Yesterday’s euphoria is melting into today’s harsh reality. In Cairo, home to the Muslim Brotherhood and the sharia jurists of ancient Al-Azhar University, “democracy” has meant the rise of Sunni supremacists. Turns out they don’t do bridge-building. Their tightening grip has translated into brutalizing dhimmitude for Christians and increasing intolerance of Shiism — which the Sunni leaders perceive less as Islam than as apostasy, an offense that sharia counts as more grievous than treason.

In our struggle “to define the Republican response to the increased power of political Islam,” we are said to be “vying” with “another faction among the right-wing that is equally powerful . . . the neoconservatives.” Counting among their number such heavyweights as GOP senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, they are portrayed as “rather admirably insisting that the Muslim Brotherhood be given a chance.” After the tumultuous Bush years, my friends Norman Podhoretz, Paul Wolfowitz, and Bill Kristol must be having a good laugh: It may have taken a motley crew of despicable Islamophobes, but the Left has suddenly decided that neocons may not be the root of all evil after all.

For all its pretensions to sober analysis, the Salon hit piece usefully demonstrates how nonsensical policy debates about the Arab Spring have become. There is no common understanding of basic terms. “Islamophobia” was coined by the Muslim Brotherhood and seamlessly adopted by its Western confederates. Taken literally, the word would mean “irrational fear of Islam” — and thus it would rarely need to be spoken, Islamic supremacists having given us much to fear quite rationally. But in common parlance, to sneer “Islamophobe” is like what sneering “neocon” has hitherto been: lefty demagoguery — in this case, the belittling of anyone who is critical of Islam and its sharia framework, regardless of how colorable the critique.

Most people know an insult when they hear one. When it is rank character assassination posing as argument, people of good will tune it out. More consequential, though, is the degrading of the term “democracy.”

As applied to the “Islamophobes,” Mr. Smith’s invocation of “democracy” — as in, to hell with it — is an outright perversion. Like the giants of neoconservatism, critics of Islamic supremacism (what Salon gently calls “political Islam”) are lovers of democracy. We believe the world would be a better place if every country adopted it. We agree the United States ought to be its promotional beacon. But that is mainly because when we speak of “democracy,” we mean American democracy. That is a culture of liberty so deeply rooted in the United States that it predated by a couple of centuries the American Revolution, the U.S. Constitution, and the first federal elections.

SOURCE: National Review Online

Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Reportedly, in the last two presidential elections, democrats lost the veterans vote by big margins.  However, now it seems that the Obama campaign intends to reverse the trend by arguing that Mitt Romney would cut veterans’ benefits. But, what kind of ruse, bribery or coercion will president Obama use to help candidate Obama get those military votes...? 

CAIR

CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, used to have a link to a group of Muslim or pro-Muslim Veterans supporting Obama -but it appears no longer in their site.  However, the organization has a “presidential voter guide,” and everyone would do well to check CAIR’s website to see how well informed and prepared they are, using our system with unparalleled dexterity, -and readers would then understand that “they” are well informed and prepared, while on our side, we are still thinking this is just a bad dream...  But, it is a reality and not a good one.  Americans would do well to organize themselves better than they have been up until now.  

A military issue

Roughly two months ago in Afghanistan, March 11, one of our men allegedly killed a group of 16 villagers.   The soldier, Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, a 38-year-old father of two, had been injured twice in combat over the course of four deployments and had an exemplary military record, having been twice decorated for his excellent service during his years in the war in Iraq.

Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, who had been injured twice in combat over the course of four deployments, had an exemplary military record.  He is the 38-year-old father of two infant children.   According to Bales’ lawyer,“The family was counting on him not being redeployed.  He and the family were told that his tours in the Middle East were over.”  But, they were not.

Apology to Afghans

Obama and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta immediately issued an apology to President Hamid Karzai for the killing of 16 Afghan civilians, allegedly, by an American soldier.

“I condemn such violence and am shocked and saddened that a U.S. service member is  involved, clearly acting outside his chain of command,” said Panetta. “This tragic incident does not reflect the commitment of the U.S. military to protect the Afghan people and help build a strong and stable Afghanistan.”   Right!

Obama called the unprovoked shooting “tragic and shocking” and promised Karzai that the U.S. will conduct a swift investigation into incident.

Of course, ISAF, the UN branch which now closely watches over NATO, also weighed in and sincere apologies were extended as well.  It is important to remember that both ISAF and UN are now heavily funded by Muslim countries, and NATO depends on them.

Entrapment by Liberalism

Sergeant Bales is in the meantime in solitary confinement.  And his children must be missing him without understanding why is he not with them. The man whose goal was to protect his people and his country, the man who has been through the atrocities of war in faraway lands, extirpated from the love of his wife and the joy of his children, sacrificing them for our security and safety,  has ended up engulfed in the atrocities that our own administration and the political leadership of our military are committing against our patriotic military men and women and their families.

Liberals and liberal governments worldwide have become the peste corrupting the world.  It is liberals with their twisted and suicidal minds and attitudes that “love the enemy” and truly hate their own peoples.  Naturally, our liberals and the liberal government we have in America are, sadly, no different.  

But, at the same time, for liberalism to exist and flourish in our midst, it had to  find a fertile environment in a well-established, comfortable and trusting conservatism, which slowly and surely is showing “patience” and indifference to all the wrongs that are happening.  Conservatives are now passive, too much for comfort, and they have become the reflection of the liberals suicidal attitudes.

The Bales defense under attack

Meanwhile, the Bales defense lawyer, John Henry Brown, is rightfully objecting to a routine background check required by the military.  "I don't think a defense lawyer should be 'vetted' by the government," Browne wrote in an email to Reuters on Thursday. "It is intrusive and has a chilling effect on the right to counsel." And, of course, he is right.  

Though it may be "standard procedure" for obtaining security clearance to access classified information, especially of the night the alleged attack happened, there are some regulations to take into consideration.

MILITARY JUSTICE PERSONNEL: Defense Function: Right to Counsel

The following are cases regarding regulation to Right of Counsel:

“United States v. Lee, 66 M.J. 387 (in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to have the assistance of counsel for his defense; one element within this Sixth Amendment right to counsel is the right of a defendant who does not require appointed counsel to choose who will represent him; further, counsel provided to or retained by the accused must provide reasonably effective assistance; third, where a constitutional right to counsel exists, there is a correlative right to representation that is free from conflicts of interest...”

and:

“United States v. Rhoades, 65 M.J. 393 (under the Sixth Amendment, the accused in a criminal proceeding has the right to the assistance of counsel for his defense... and the accused may be represented by civilian counsel; the right to counsel of choice under the Sixth Amendment.... “

Afghan villagers, survivors, recall alleged Sergeant Bales attack

With the imprimatur of the Obama liberal tyranny, search engines are now flooded with the above headline.  

First, the military in Afghanistan, interviewed villagers that had allegedly witnessed the attacks.  As an astonishing move, those witnesses were freed before Mr. Brown and his associates could interview them.

Adding insult to injury, we are informed that the so-called witnesses bear, just like many Afghans, only one name...  dubious and convenient to set up our man.

The Obama style:  same attack on our people, benefitting his own interests, whether it is against our military, or also in the rising racial issue, or his global, communist, and indeed, his Muslim agenda.

Reminder: Why are we in Afghanistan?

It was  due to the 9/11 massacres perpetrated against our people, thousands of innocent, unsuspecting civilian victims, in times of peace, who were trapped in the airplanes and in the towers.  Muslim terrorists in those airplanes, crashed into the Twin Towers in New York, thus attacking one of the most important financial centers in the world.

From the 19 Muslim terrorists, 15 were from Saudi Arabia.  The planner and instigator, was Osama Bin Laden who, with his jihadi group Al Qaeda, were based in Afghanistan.   That’s how we ended up waging war in Afghanistan.  

Under normal circumstances, the country of origin of those Muslim terrorists, should have been expected to fight and eradicate their own terrorists.

But we did go to war and we stayed there over 10 years, with loss of men and women abandoning their families, their little sons and daughters living with one parent...   and so much sacrifice...  

And, what for?  So that Mr. Obama around the tenth anniversary of the attacks, ask the FBI and the Military to remove all mention of Islam and Muslim terrorism from America’s history records.  

In fact,  for this most treacherous, anti-American and anti-patriotic president and his team, Islam and Muslim world, are the ones he actually represents and ally with.  And he goes out of their way to show that we in America, also have terrorists....  What kind of a president is this one?

Conclusion

Afghan “survivors remember” the night where our man allegedly attacked them killing 16 people, including 9 children.  Well, those are casualties of war -by a man who deserves being treated with respect, because after all the wars he participated in, he should never have been sent to that snake war nest that’s Afghanistan.  Sergeant Bales, deserves to be treated for PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder which ravages the majority of our returning military men and women.

Time to remember the 9/11 attacks perpetrated on thousands of American civilians in times of peace.  And, we must remember how many of our men and women jumped and hit the floors -because they did not want to die incinerated alive...  

There were thousands of victims who were massacred, but, victims have been also their families who in a senseless horrific attack, lost their loved ones, their father, their mother, their children, their relatives and their friends...

And, for all of us, who on that day witnessed either directly or on our television screens how after the collapse of one tower, a second damned airplane collapsed on the second tower... and after that, when the fumes of the buildings whose fire had engulfed so many loved ones, we were breathing that air of sadness...

So, the thousands and thousands of accounts of our 9/11 survivors are there, witnessing of the horrors of Islam and Muslim terrorism.

Now we must stand up and defend Sergeant Bales, a hero of the wars in Iraq and a victim.  For, which soldier with good conscience and a patriotic heart can live with the atrocities committed by the current regime against our own country and our own military?

No treacherous American leadership will ever get to erase that from our minds or our hearts.

Copyright©ElianaBenador  
Art©StephenEHughes  
Visit Eliana's blog at www.elianaschoice.blogspot.com
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Goodwill Ambassador Eliana Benador is a global strategist and founder of Benador Associates. For speaking requests  kindly contact her here. Stephen E. Hughes is Director of Research at Benador Associates.

Edward Klein’s unauthorized biography of Barack Obama, The Amateur: Barack Obama in The White House (Regnery) has generated some criticism from the right for badly mangling the facts about Obama and infanticide. The book is also being strongly attacked by the Soros-funded media machine as a “smear.”

But he has the goods on Obama—in the form of tape-recorded conversations with Wright, who is spilling the beans on Obama’s “conversion.” Sean Hannity’s website has posted some of the blockbuster Klein-Wright tapes.

Janet Maslin of The New York Times calls the book “skimpy, bitter,” but does not dispute the statements from Wright. Instead, she dismisses them, saying that “any biographical subject has bitter ex-friends and associates. And if they feel snubbed enough, they will talk.”

She writes, “The Rev. Jeremiah Wright asserted to Mr. Klein that during the last presidential election he was offered a bribe by the Obama camp, a payoff to stop speaking in public. Mr. Wright also says that even when Mr. Obama made this request directly, he would not cooperate. Among the reasons: he had speaking engagements scheduled, a family to support and college tuitions to pay.”

There is no reason, however, for Wright not to talk openly and honestly about his conversations with Obama when he wanted to join Wright’s church.

As we have pointed out in the past, Obama acknowledges in Dreams from My Father that his grandfather was a Muslim (page 104) and that he spent two years in a Muslim school in Indonesia studying the Koran (page 154). In The Audacity of Hope, he says (page 204) that “my father had been raised a Muslim” but that by the time he met his mother, his father was a “confirmed atheist.”

His stepfather was not particularly religious and his mother professed “secularism,” Obama wrote (pages 204-205), but as a child he went to a “predominantly Muslim school,” after being first sent to a Catholic school. His mother, he said, was concerned about him learning math, not religion.

According to Klein’s book, Wright told Obama, “Well, you already know the Muslim piece of your background. You studied Islam, didn’t you?” Obama replied, “Yeah, Rev, I studied Islam. But help me understand Christianity, because I already know Islam.”

Asked if he converted Obama from Islam to Christianity, Wright said, “That’s hard to tell. I think I convinced him that it was okay for him to make a choice in terms of who he believed Jesus is. And I told him it was really okay and not a putdown of the Muslim part of his family or his Muslim friends.”

The phrase “That’s hard to tell” is mind-boggling, in view of Obama’s claim to be a practicing Christian.

When Obama’s statements as President are examined, we find something else curious. The Koran teaches that Jesus was not divine. Obama, in his Easter message this year, spoke of Jesus as “a son of God,” not “the Son of God,” which is what the Christian faith teaches in John 3:16-18.

Obama’s statements about the importance of Islam are so numerous that they have been put into a video with over six million views titled “Obama Admits He Is A Muslim.” The video concludes with film of the 9/11 attacks and the quotation “…I am one of them,” as if Obama admitted being a Muslim. But Obama’s statement, “…I am one of them,” is taken from an Obama quotation shown earlier in the video, in which he says, “Many other Americans have Muslims in their families or have lived in a Muslim-majority country—I know, because I am one of them.”

The video has been picked apart by critics, who also note that it leaves out instances in which he calls himself a Christian. But Wright’s words to Edward Klein are enough to raise the controversy all over again.

As for Wright, author Ed Klein notes his “Marxist ideology” and says that “Wright’s influence on Obama was unrivaled for more than twenty years,” the time when Obama attended Wright’s church.

However, when he writes about Wright being Obama’s “substitute father, life coach, and political inspiration wrapped into one package,” he is missing one step in the process.  Obama’s first substitute father was Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis, who was Obama’s mentor during Obama’s teenage years in Hawaii.

As the result of this omission, Klein’s book ultimately fails the test of completely explaining Obama. The public will be able to fill the gap when Paul Kengor’s book, The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis, the Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor, comes out in July.

As we have pointed out before, the Obama campaign apparatus, which has claimed Obama is a baptized Christian, also asserted that the mysterious “Frank” in Obama’s book, Dreams from My Father, was just a black civil rights activist. We know better. The ruse is over.

Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism, and can be contacted at  cliff.kincaid@aim.org.