El Norte in the Year 2054!!!

Pinkerton beat me to it. All this talk about "reforming" immigration, building a protective fence, stopping and expelling "illegal" immigrants (Oops, entrants, I mean migrants, or is it immigrants?) is just that: talk.

We have been hoodwinked. Government has been dragging its feet for years...for what??? Here's "what:"

Washington Nuevo, Districto de Colombia, January 7, 2054 -- In our chronicle of the formation of the North American Union, we must pay special attention to the period half a century ago, at the beginning of the 21st century. In those critical years, it became clear that the logic of continental integration was unstoppable. And yet few saw the coming Paradox of Prosperity, which proved to have so many ironic, even tragic, manifestations. In fact, the most crucial event in our story occurred 50 years ago today.

In 2000, the second president of the Bush Dynasty, George W. Bush, won the White House. Outreach to Hispanic voters was a major plank in his "compassionate conservative" platform, and that solicitude to Latino concerns included Mexican in-migration. As he said during the 2000 campaign, "Family values don't stop at the Rio Grande." Indeed, the 43rd president's first meeting with a foreign leader, in February 2001, was with Mexican president Vicente Fox, whom Bush gallantly described as "an old friend."
 
The two amigos agreed on a joint plan to help ease the passage of people, goods, and services across the 2100-mile border between the countries, and also to begin to "normalize" the status of Mexicans living in America. A few sticklers about national sovereignty were upset; they noted that even before meeting Bush, the Mexican president had been bold about claiming extraterritorial influence north of the border. Fox liked to say that he was the leader of 118 Mexicans -- that is, 100 million in Mexico, plus another 18 million Mexican-Americans in the US.
 
However, both men's visionary hopes had to be put aside after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 -- at least for awhile.

It appears that there is every intention of creating the North American Security Perimeter and forming an economic block that stretches from Canada on the North to Panama on the South, using the agencies of NAFTA and CAFTA.

An economic block today, what about tomorrow? Within fifty year a new, planned America, with a completely new cultural base will be in place...without our input or consent.

Here's "The Why."

Response to Bungee Prince Charlie's Coming to the Colonies to Plead Islam's Cause

In a "warm-fuzzy" article, the London Telegraph reported that Prince Charles thinks the colonists in America are too harsh on Islam. He wants to come to spread the love and have a group hug with Bush, et al. Here are two pieces from that article that give the entire jist:

Prince Charles to plead Islam's cause to Bush
By Andrew Alderson, Chief Reporter
(Filed: 29/10/2005)

The Prince of Wales will try to persuade George W Bush and Americans of the merits of Islam this week because he thinks the United States has been too intolerant of the religion since September 11.

Khalid Mahmood, the Labour MP for Birmingham Perry Bar, was also at the meeting at St James's Palace. "His criticism of America was a general one of the Americans not having the appreciation we have for Islam and its culture," he said.

It is one thing to put out Sampson's eyes with searing heat, with Sampson unable to resist. It is quite another to put out one's own eyes with searing ignorance and no resistance. Lost. poor Bungee Prince Charlie has spent decades trying to find himself. He has been unsuccessful because of a lack of self--there is no "there there." Islam may be his latest persona, which, as a true believer now, he feels compelled to proselytize. However, his mission to America on behalf of Islam to try to peddle poison as nutrients puts Charles a full step beneath the old medicine shows and magic elixirs. We are not sure he knows just what he is promoting, not in any depth. He just doesn't seem bright enough to know enough about Islam to be evil, but we could be wrong. We cannot forget, for example, that a carrier of typhoid can be just as dangerous as an infectee.

On our sister website, 6th Column Against Jihad, we have gone to great lengths to spell out what makes Islam toxic. We have detailed its poisonous lethality at length, but we have done it by going to the roots of Islam. We have chosen to focus on Islam's very principles, rather than repeating myriad, well-known, and already very well publicized facts so beautifully covered in books, blogs, and websites from outstanding authors. It is one thing to know and document all the contradictions and envenomizations of the Koran, for example, or document all of the historical travesties committed by Islamists for the past 14 centuries. No one can doubt the value of such factual material, and one must have reasonable knowledge of these. However, beneath those facts lies the core question to answer, "What is it that makes this fact or the other about Islam evil?" Answering that question explains what makes Islam "tick," and defeating Islam absolutely requires knowing its principles as well as the principles which constitute the antidote to Islam.

Islam invalidates itself right at its fundamentals, and it cannot under any circumstances mount a rational defense of itself at that level. Knowing its fundamentals cuts through Islam's facade like a blowtorch through warm butter.

Specifically, on 6th Column Against Jihad, we have assembled a set of short articles, in plain English, which go right to the core of Islam and lay it bare. These are our rejoinder to Prince Charles and are presented for anyone to read:

Basics of Islam (I, II, and III; Lies of Islam: Islamic Deception Practices)

Fundamental Ideas Needed to Create Muslims

Introduction

Root Rot (Part 1, Metaphysics)

Broken Tools (Part 2, Epistemology)

Obedience Training (Part 3, Ethics)

Muslim Identity and Purpose (Part 4, Politics)

Erasing Life (Part 5, Esthetics)

Summary: Pulling It All Together

Why Islam Is Untrue. The Real Reasons

From D.C. Watson: Could It Be True?

Could it be true? Was Ibrahim Hooper from CAIR also former childhood star "Spanky", of "Little Rascals" fame?

SPANKY
Spokesman for "Our Gang"

IBRAHIM HOOPER
Spokesman for CAIR

YOU'VE GOT TO READ THIS IF YOU OWN ANYTHING: Is your private property in jeopardy?

Posted: October 29, 2005
1:00 a.m. Eastern
By Henry Lamb

© 2005 WorldNetDaily.com

In the United States of America, where private property was considered to be sacred by the Founders and where the right to private property is guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment, your private property is not in jeopardy – unless: 1) your property lies within a municipality, 2) your property lies within a county, or 3) your property lies within federal land.

There was a time when local elected officials created building and zoning ordinances to ensure that structures met minimum safety standards and to separate residential from commercial properties. These ordinances had to be acceptable to the people governed by them, or the local elected officials would be replaced by new officials more responsive to the will of the governed.


This fundamental principle of freedom gives meaning to the idea that government is empowered by the consent of the governed.

In recent years, this principle has been replaced by a new idea, advanced by the President's Council on Sustainable Development. Goal number 8, of the PCSD, says:

"We need a new collaborative decision process that leads to better decisions; more rapid change; and more sensible use of human, natural and financial resources in achieving our goals."

This new decision process empowers professionals to make the policy decisions that govern how people must live and empowers bureaucracies to implement and enforce these policies.

During the sustainable-development epidemic of the 1990s, the federal government provided millions of dollars in grants to the American Planning Association to develop a master plan that would bring all communities into compliance with the PCSD's vision of sustainable development.

The 1,500-page plan is called Growing Smart Legislative Guidebook: Model Statutes for Planning and the Management of Change.

Prodded by state-level planning professionals and enticed by the promise of federal funding for implementation, state governments rushed to enact state comprehensive planning laws fashioned by the American Planning Association. Invariably, these state laws require counties to develop local comprehensive land-use plans that conform to the regulations set forth in the APA's master plan.

Municipal and county governments, dependent upon state and federal government funding, have no choice but to comply with the dictates of the state's comprehensive planning laws. Consequently, it no longer matters what the people who are governed want; they must comply with the regulations designed and decided by the professionals, and implemented and enforced by government bureaucrats.

These regulations may be so detailed as to dictate the varieties of plants that may be used for landscaping, the color of paint used inside and outside structures, the size and color of business signs, and require that materials used for construction be certified as "environmentally friendly" regardless of the cost.

One of the more onerous concepts introduced in the master plan is the idea of "Amortization of Non-Conforming Uses." This scheme allows structures that do not meet the new regulations to continue in use for a specified period of time. If the structures are not brought into compliance by the deadline, the owner loses his right to the property, which could be taken by government, without compensation.

No private property within any municipality or county is safe from this new vision of sustainable development.


People who have a property interest in federal land are in even greater jeopardy. Ranchers who have invested thousands of dollars and years of sweat-equity in fences and watering systems are seeing their grazing allotments reduced to the point of economic non-viability. Loggers are now prohibited from harvesting timber on vast stretches of the national forest. Miners and drillers who pay for leases and invest millions in equipment are denied the right to extract natural resources from federal land. People whose families have invested in summer cabins on federal land are discovering that their permits are not being renewed, and the cabins are being confiscated or destroyed. Off-road vehicle enthusiasts are finding it increasingly difficult to use federal land. Even sightseers and bird watchers have discovered that new signs are spawning all across federal lands that read: "Area Beyond This Sign Closed – All Public Entry Prohibited."

Ownership of private property means that the exclusive right to use the property belongs to the owner. Restrictions on the use of private property, imposed by any authority other than by elected officials accountable to the people who are governed is usurpation of a fundamental principle of freedom.

This "new collaborative decision process" called sustainable development effectively extinguishes the rights of property owners, as well as the idea that government is empowered by the consent of the governed.




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Henry Lamb is the executive vice president of the Environmental Conservation Organization and chairman of Sovereignty International.

The Racial and Religious Hatred Bill: A Milestone on Britain's Road to Dhimmitude

This excellent essay succinctly explains the sinking into dhimmitude of the British. The remarkable "Racial and Religious Hatred Bill" attempts to curb "disharmony among the religions" by making any utterance or published criticism or "expression of hatred" that is deemed to be offensive a prosecutable offense. Muslims have agitated for this bill as they "are not protected" against "hatred" as are "other religions."

The British are afraid as well they should be. Freedom of speech is enshrined in the American Constitution. The British have no written Constitution and are ruled by Parliament and "common law." The bill has not been to law. It is still under advisement. We hope that Parliament thinks long and hard before squelching free speech, an ancient right and privilege of the British people.

Read the essay and visit the accompanying links.

Here is a link to the bill.

Understanding "Understanding Condi"

It gives us no pleasure to state that we have lost considerable respect for Dr.Condoleezza Rice. In fact, acknowledging this is darned near painful This has come about through what we have read and have heard coming from Dr. Rice herself since she has become a high profile personage as secretary of state. Now the main stream media pays much more attention to citing her thoughts.

Dr. Rice is an extremely bright, highly educated, and highly accomplished professional. She did everything she has done on her own power, not climbing the affirmative action ladder for racial cripples. She deserves nothing but praise for these accomplishments. As a person, she seems top drawer. Borrowing from an old game, we could easily imagine a “cross country bus trip” with her as a seatmate. She would be charming, fascinating, and bedazzling with all she knows.

We also acknowledge that she came up through racially hard times, very hard times, in a place where injustice against those of her race was the norm. To be hated for nothing you have ever done to anyone but just because your racial heritage is not “modal” in the eyes of the majority has to be among the bitterest of pills. She, and all black Americans, should never have had to endure that. We, ourselves, are intimate with the social world she endured because we grew up in the segregated, racist Deep South starting some ten years earlier than she did—but our experiences are not germane here, except to exult in the death of that era.

No, it is what Condi tells us about herself and her personal philosophy that cuts so deeply.

Diana West, in her Jewish World Review column, Understanding Condi, 29 October 2005 adds to the philosophical profile of Dr. Rice in ways we were not privy to. Ms West begins by citing Dr. Rice’s “gotcha” comment: “…[W]hen the Founding Fathers said, `We the people,' they didn't mean me." Fair enough and accurate enough, as it goes. Then the trouble starts.

Says Ms West,

“…Ms. Rice drops it [the “gotcha” comment] in by way of illustrating the historic flaws of democracy, American-style; and this she drops in by way of dismissing the current flaws of democracy-building in the Muslim world.” What follows is astonishing: "We should note that unlike in our
Constitutional Convention, the Iraqis have not made a compromise as bad as the one that made my ancestors three-fifths of a man."

Has Dr. Rice heard that there is this thing called “Islam”?

Ms West hits the ball out of the part with this rejoinder:

“But it is the miracle of that 18th-century document that it contained the blueprint for abolition. By contrast, the 2005 Iraqi Constitution (also the 2003 Palestinian Authority constitution and the 2004 Afghanistan constitution) contains provisions for a sharia state under which all men are not created equal, and freedom of conscience is denied.”

Dr. Rice continues:

"Across the empire of Jim Crow, from upper Dixie to the lower Delta, the descendants of slaves shamed our nation with the power of righteousness and redeemed America at last from its original sin of slavery. By resolving the contradiction at the heart of our democracy, America finally found its voice as a true champion of democracy beyond its shores."

To which, Ms West responds:

"In this worldview, it's not, say, the 700,000 casualties of the Civil War plus one assassinated president who redeemed that original sin of slavery, but rather the civil rights movement that helped overturn Southern segregation laws a century later. Indeed, it was only at this relatively late date, if I'm reading Ms. Rice's words correctly, that America could finally sally forth as a "true champion of democracy"—which makes you wonder who it was who went to Belleau Wood in 1918, St Lo in 1945, and Chosin Reservoir in 1950.

"The implication seems clear: American democracy wasn't all that much to be proud of until the civil rights leaders Ms. Rice calls the "impatient patriots" — Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, for instance — came along. This supports one of her main policy points; namely, that even in America "democratization is a long and difficult process, not a singular event." So much for the miracle at Philadelphia."

Of course, we do not have the full transcript of one of these very typical speeches by Dr. Rice, but we have no reason to doubt Ms West. She is a superb journalist and thinker, possibly the best of today’s columnists. One of the reasons she is so very good is that she “gets it.”

Dr. Rice apparently does not “get it.” As a result, for the second time in this Bush presidency, we have a secretary of state who is not philosophically up to the job. Whether we have ever had one who ever was, other than Founders, could be debated ad infinitum.

Dr. Rice’s great deficiency is that she has no philosophy with which to focus that brilliant mind and extensive education, knowledge, and experience. In that sense, she is just another George Bush “chip off the old block.” And, it does not matter which George Bush we speak of—neither is a man of any substantive ideas with which to conduct the affairs of America.

Of course, Dr. Rice has some philosophy. We all do. We cannot avoid it as long as we possess the faculty of consciousness. She like most people has picked up this and that as she grew up, as she schooled, and as she has conducted herself through life. One of the problems of philosophy via “seine netting” is that your catch is an indiscriminate pile of EVERYTHING scooped by the moving net. She, like most people who have a “seine net philosophy of life,” has errors and serious conflicts. She has errors of omission and commission, and a whole lot of conclusions derived from feelings, random thoughts, some focused thoughts, and stuff passively accepted from adults and others around her. In this common means of arriving at a personal philosophy, nothing gets integrated in order to weed out the contradictions, or even to be able to recognize them.

Dr. Rice deals with the world in part, and surprisingly, through some American Negro prism from her formative years, one she and the rest of black America must now drop as obsolete and deleterious. As Diana West points out, American history and the profound significance of the measures to eliminate the evil of slavery do not begin for her until the Martin Luther King era. What a major disappointment from such a brilliant person.

Then, she makes some enormous epistemological errors, not the least of which is extending a blank check to that abysmal excuse for a constitution and a so-called “democracy” in Iraq. She seems to be saying: Why, we did not start out perfect, so why should they? Well, Dr. Rice, we started out by standing on the shoulders of Western civilization and the greatest thinkers of the world. We, America, were sired by the Enlightenment, the enshrinement of reason, the first since the Golden Age of Ancient Greece. The Enlightenment gave rise to the cardinal Rights of Man, derived from the nature of man and implemented through reason. Our Constitution is a masterpiece. Rereading it a couple of days ago for umpteenth time, we were just overwhelmed with its majesty.

Add to that our 218 years of life as a nation, which is unlike anything in history. We harnessed religion and abolished slavery. We provided the fertile means for the development and flourishment of capitalism, which has freed us all from the agonizing life before capitalism.

Once again, we should never have had slavery, not for one person, not for one day, ever. And, having abolished it, we should have had the human decency to welcome former slaves and their progeny into our national company to enjoy the same protection of the Rights of Man which they have as much as any of the rest of us. We should never have abused these men and women of color. And, worst of all since emancipation, we should never have reenslaved them with the welfare state, which has aborted their efforts at self-esteem and slowed their progress to a crawl. But, we made it, some 218 years late, but we are here.

What in Iraq compares in any way to anything in America? How can Dr. Rice see anything comparable or extend Iraqis any kind of blank check?

The answer “ain’t purdy.” She does this because she has the same thinking error that George Bush has, aside from not properly appreciating our own national history and philosophical development. Time after time, she proclaims, “Islam is a great religion.” Like GWB, she sees what Islam causes to be solely the result of those few who somehow bizarrely distort Islam. Has she read nothing about Islam? How can THE Secretary of State remain so ignorant? Citing Ms West again:

Only "cynics," as Ms. Rice said—the same people she said "once believed that blacks were unfit for democracy"—argue "that the people of the Middle East, perhaps because of their color or their creed or their culture or even perhaps because of their religion, are somehow incapable of democracy."

That goes far beyond “disappointing,” all the way to frightening. Yes, indeed, the answer is: Islamists, “…because of their religion, are somehow incapable of democracy.” Those who are Islam’s true believers ARE INCAPABLE OF DEMOCRACY. Maybe if Dr. Rice read Robert Spencer, Ibn Warraq, Serge Trifkovic, among many others, and some of the great blogs and websites, which tell the truth about Islam, she would drop the George W. Bush cognitive anchor.

The simple fact is that as long as Iraq adopts a constitution, which makes Islam the state religion and gives shari’a a major role in making and enforcing the laws of Iraq, our efforts in Iraq are doomed. For sure, they are doomed in the long run under such conditions, but the long run may turn out to be the intermediate term or the short run. These are not people in the tradition of Western civilization and the Enlightenment. They are in the tradition of Arabic tribes—tribes to this day, if you believe such still exist. They think with their feelings and their penises, and nothing higher. They are said to be among the best educated of the Middle Eastern Islamics, but that is akin to calling people who are able to read parts of a primer as educated. Yes, of course, a few Iraqis seem highly educated; most are at a primitive level of education compared to the Western world.

For all of the sins against blacks in America, let us never lose sight of the fact that these slaves were manumitted into Western culture, which their contemporary leaders want to destroy. Even those who became black rednecks, to borrow a term from Dr. Thomas Sowell, did so in a young nation, which stood on centuries of Western knowledge and tradition, which had percolated even down to white trash in the South, though it might have been hard to recognize in its popular form. Suppose those blacks had been released from slavery in Iraq? Just try to think of that without shuddering.

As for democracy, Dr. Rice, try this thought. In your childhood, in the dismal days of racist Alabama of the mid-20th century, you experienced democracy. No, it was not that bastardized, one-term-fits-all “democracy” slung around today as though it had meaning like “republic” has. This was the literal democracy of MAJORITY RULE. The white majority ruled, and the black minority suffered. That is not the case in a republic.

Democracy prevails in Iraq. In the north, Kurd majorities rule. In the south, Shiite majorities rule. In the middle, Sunni majorities rule. Why in the name of Hell would anyone want more “democracy”?

Dr. Rice joins many others bemoaning the status of women under Islam. Isn’t ½ a person in Islam less than 3/5ths of a person as our Constitution spelled it out before our Civil War? What about slaves? Under Islam, they are ½ of women. That makes them something like 1/4th people. And what about dhimmis? They can keep their own religion as long as they live in indentured servitude to Muslims, having no rights and an existence subject to eradication at the slightest whims of Muslims. This is majority rule, with the Muslims being the democrats.

An Islam-free and shari’a-free constitution, one based on the Enlightenment concept of Rights of Man, would go a long way to enfranchising women, abolishing slavery, and abolishing such a hideous status as that of dhimmitude. Yes, yes, it took us until 1919 to enfranchise women fully, but the American woman prior to 1919 was infinitely better off than most Muslim women today.

We had hoped for so much more from Dr. Rice. Having said that, however, let us be very, very clear about one thing. If, perchance, Dr. Rice runs against Senator Clinton in 2008, we will vote for Dr. Rice “early and often.” After all, there is “disappointing,” and then there is “really, really bad.”

Battles Change, Wars Don't

Hanson, retired professor from the University of California, reflects on the similarity between wars, ancient and modern, and thinness of the veneer of civilization, then and now. Human nature is what it is. The reactions of humans in their capacity to use the most violent and bloodthirsty ways of humilitating, punishing, and eliminating enemies hasn't changed.

War is like water — its fundamental character remains unchanging precisely because the nature of the humans who fight it is constant over the centuries. True, the pump — the delivery system of flint, arrows, firearms, nuclear bombs, guided missiles and satellite weapons — radically changes the face of battle with each generation. But the essence of war nevertheless stays the same, as we are reminded when we study the distant past.

Limb-lopping, terrorism, biological attack, roadside executions, kidnapping of diplomats, murders of school children, all these and more occurred 2,400 years ago in the Peloponnesian War 2,400 years ago between factions of the Spartans and the Athenians. Barbarism exists when "fear, honor, and self-interest drive hostilities."

And then a warning (hopefully not a premonition):

Study of the Peloponnesian War should also remind us that it is not assured that the wealthiest, most sophisticated and democratic state always triumphs over less impressive enemies. After all, Athens, for all its advantages, finally lost its war. And as Thucydides reminds us about the democratic empire's lapses, arrogance and major blunders, more often the chief culprit was its own infighting and internal discord than the prowess of its many enemies.

Read it all.


The Folly of Apology

Americans need to muster the necessary grit to win.

Doesn't it burn you when hearing and reading statements from American leaders and journalists that are downright dhimmi-talk, apologizing to Islamic barbarians, heartening the enemy?

The stories about the video of US troops burning the bodies of dead Taliban are disgusting––but not because of anything our troops may have done to the corpses of fanatical murderers. What’s disturbing is the groveling reaction of our government and military officials, who are falling all over themselves to apologize to people who cheer every time an American is killed.

Remember what type of people the Taliban are? Like the jihadists we are fighting in Iraq, they are murderers whose religious beliefs warrant any kind of brutality and atrocity against the “infidel.” These are the people who, when they ran Afghanistan, tortured and murdered their own citizens in a soccer stadium built with Western money. These are the people who behead and murder, the people who kill women and children. And these are the people whose corpses we are supposed to worry about mistreating, whose religious beliefs, the ones that justify murder, we are supposed to be respecting.

I know all the rationales for the apologies and investigations and anxious assertions of how much we respect Islam. We need to win the “hearts and minds” of all those alleged “moderate” Muslims who hate us only because they don’t understand us, don’t realize how much we admire their wonderful religion, don’t quite get everything we’re doing for them, and who are abetted in their misunderstanding by the bad behavior of some of our troops. So the State Department has issued “talking points” to U.S. embassies “to explain to foreign journalists and officials that the alleged misconduct was an aberration that did not reflect American values,” as the New York Times reported.

This false belief that Muslims only react to Western deeds also puts a powerful weapon into the hands our enemies, who can then deflect their true intentions and manipulate our behavior, as the jihadists of Palestine have been doing for decades. How else explain the bizarre spectacle of the terrorist Mahmoud Abbas being welcomed to the White House, at the very moment we claim to the world that we are at war with those who use and endorse terrorism? When has Abbas ever condemned terrorism as categorically evil and unacceptable in any circumstance, rather than condemning terrorism for being the wrong tactic at the wrong time? How can we keep saying terrorism “won’t work” when we are giving financial and moral support to a Palestinian regime that incorporates terrorists like Hamas that say explicitly they want to destroy Israel and will use any means necessary to do so?

More important, when our enemies compel us to apologize and investigate and assure the world how much we really respect Islam, they validate their estimation of our spiritual weakness and corruption. From their perspective, why else would we apologize, unless we had doubts about the rightness of our cause and the beliefs that drive our actions? The jihadists, after all, are convinced of the rightness of their belief, one validated by Islam and its traditional intolerant and arrogant disdain for the infidel. So why should they ever apologize? They believe they are right, and that Allah sanctions their slaughter. Christians can be brutalized, as is happening right now in Alexandria, where Egyptian Copts are being murdered and terrorized by Muslim mobs. Christian churches can be desecrated, Christians and Jews murdered and mutilated on videotape, and we never hear even from secular Muslim leaders the sort of anxious protestations of regret that the leaders of the most powerful nation on earth indulge in.

Read it all.

Did We Say That We Wanted to Be Transformed?

It's Un-American to Complain About or Even Point Out the Changes That Few Americans Want

Multiculturalism is transforming America. For decades policies have been foisted upon unsuspecting Americans who now are suddenly noticing that they are having to make the changes once expected to be made by immigrants moving into a country. America as we knew it is being abolished to be replaced by an unrecognizable landscape.

What Is Multiculturalism?

In America,

1. "multiculturalism"

came into wide public use during the early 1980s in the context of public school curriculum reform. Specifically, the argument was made that the content of classes in history, literature, social studies, and other areas reflected what came to be called a "Eurocentric" bias. Few if any women or people of color, or people from outside the Western European tradition, appeared prominently in the curriculums of schools in the United States. This material absence was also interpreted as a value judgment that reinforced unhealthy ethnocentric and even racist attitudes.

Observers noted that teaching and administrative staffs in schools were also overwhelmingly white and/or male (whiteness being pervasive at the teaching level, maleness at the administrative level, reflecting the politics of gender and class as well as race in the educational system). Eventually parallel questions were raised (once more) about the ethno-racial or cultural biases of other institutions, such as legislatures, government agencies, corporations, religious groups, private clubs, etc. Each of these (interest groups) has in turn developed its own response and policies regarding multiculturalism.

Finally, "multiculturalism" may also have become a popular term as "race" lost much of its former credibility as a concept. Scientists agree that, in terms of DNA genetics, "race" has no significant meaning as a way of categorizing human differences. Intermarried families offer the puzzle of a parent and child considered as belonging to two different races--clearly an absurd idea given that race was thought of as biologically passed from parent to offspring. Thus "culture" began to replace "race" as a term for distinguishing among distinct human groups.

2. Is there any justice in this world? Apparently not in America. As America is the expression of white colonialism, White Americans can not be just and immigrants were moved in to increase America's justice quotient.

3. Melt or get out of the pot! In the past, Americans expected immigrants to assimilate. No more. The European culture that created the American base is considered to be oppressive and must abolished.

Then multiculturalism becomes a movement that insists that American society has never been white, but always in fact multiracial and diverse. This movement seeks to preserve distinctly different ethnic, racial, or cultural communities without melting them into a common culture. Here the common culture is seen as white supremeacy, a culture of bigotry and discrimination, and the remedy as an emphasis on the separate characteristics and virtues of particular cultural groups.

4. Out of Africa?

Most controversial in this regard is the movement known as "Afrocentrism," which in various versions seeks to document the centrality of African cultural traditions to the foundation of American and Western history, and to celebrate that African tradition so as to increase the self-esteem and educational success of African-American students. Critics of Afrocentrism dispute both its intellectual claims --- the scholarship and historical conclusions it advances --- and its educational claims --- especially regarding the effect of an ethnically-centered curriculum on the academic achievement of students.

Defenders of multiculturalism have published a number of respected books to substantiate their scholarly claims. They point out that critics of Afrocentrism rarely investigate whether or not the traditional Eurocentric curriculum has artificially improved the performance of white students. See, for example, debates about the cultural biases of "standardized" tests like the SAT or the GRE, on which many of the questions assume a body of cultural knowledge more likely to be found among white suburbanites than students in the ghetto or barrio. Or consider arguments that white males in the past created an artificially easy time for themselves in college admissions and job competition by excluding women and minorities. Critics of Afrocentrism have had more success challenging some of the details of its historical claims than in refuting the general charge of Eurocentrism. Many middle-of-the-road writers claim to reject both "-isms" as making the same mistake of asserting a dominant "center." They instead advocate models of cultural hybridity and impurity that see each culture as a changing node in a network without a single center.

5. Is Identity Political?

One problem with certain strands of multiculturalism is their reliance on "identity politics." "Identity politics" refers to the tendency to define one's political and social identity and interests purely in terms of some group category: race, ethnicity, class, gender, nationality, religion, etc. Identity politics became more popular after the 1960s for many of the same reasons that multiculturalism did. The critique of America's "common culture" led many people to identify with a particular group, rather than with the nation --- a nation, after all, whose policies they believed had excluded or oppressed them. People increasingly became Native-Americans, African-Americans, Latino-Americans, Asian-Americans, Gay-Americans, etc., in an explosion of hyphenation.

This movement for group solidarity did in many cases provide individuals with the resources to defend their interests and express their values, resources that as disparate individuals they could not possibly attain. As the American economy began to decline in the late 1980s, the scramble for a piece of the shrinking pie increased the tendency of people to band together in groups that together might have enough power to defend or extend their interests. American society is now often seen as a battleground of special-interest groups, many of them defined by the racial, ethnic, or cultural identity of their members. Hostility between these groups as they compete for scarce resources is inevitable. In defense of identity politics, others point out that these divisions between cultural groups are less the voluntary decisions of individuals than the product of discrimination and bigotry in the operation of the economy and the social institutions. It is these that divide people up by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, etc., privileging the dominant group and subordinating the rest, they claim.

Multiculturalism is complex, involving at least seven Critical Contexts.

1. Cultural Studies
2. Liberation Movements
3. Post Colonialism
4. Globalization
5. Postnationalsim
6. Postmodernism
7. Poststructuralism

Where is basic "American" history and the study of "American" culture? It won't be found as we remember it, for the forces that are transforming and abolishing America are re-writing history, marginalizing those that remember, and labeling as racists, bigots, or "un-American" those that complain or make mention of the changes. Even the U.S. Constitution is being downplayed in favor of "international" law.

An excellent explanation of who, why, and how this happened is given by Peter Brimelow in a speech entitled "Immigration's Impact on Education and Multiculturalism." Follow the links to an eye-opening revelation of how America is being abolished and why.

I don't recall reading about the abolishing of America in mainstream newspapers. From time to time reports about studies were given about the effect of immigrants on education, healthcare, crime, but no one explained the why, the how...and especially the who!

This is why Americans don't have a chance. Perhaps contacting your congressmen could help, but with all the special interest lobbyists and the "transformed" educational system, who is there to listen?

Is it too late? It is possible to turn back the tide or an avalanche or a tsunami? I'm afraid it maybe too late. All the talk of border control and immigration control in on the news and Washington is just that-- talk.

Nothing will come of it. Politicians will prattle on and the Minute Men Patrol will stand a lonely vigil while their leaders and special interest groups betray them and us as they abolish America and as Americans become strangers in their own land.

An Alternate Solution to the "Islam Problem"

From time to time, we hear various solutions to the "Muslim problem." Islam is so profoundly anti-life, anti-human, anti-knowledge, anti-reason, anti-progress, anti-reality, anti-, anti-, anti- EVERYTHING, that it has become a serious pest. All the rest of us in the infidel world are beginning to tire of always having to turn around to clean up after some mess some Muslim or other has made.

They make the messes, and yet they blame all of us infidels for them. They have the emotional maturity of two-year-olds; they do not play well with others, they're in a constant state of pique--which they discharge by throwing temper tantrums--they seek immediate gratification, they want what they want and they want it NOW, all their problems are ALWAYS the fault of others, they NEVER consider taking any responsibility for themselves, they have no insight, they are professional victims who blame everyone else in the world for their hideous way of life, their unhappiness, their frustration and their hostility--all because they have a total disregard and antipathy for the requirements that reality places on them. Reality is, for them, the enemy; they don't understand anything about it; when it comes to reality, they are slow learners who just can't grasp the fact that reality always wins in the end, and that it won't change to accommodate them and their whims, wishes, and desires.

We infidels are a tolerant lot; even under the malignant influence of the Postmodernists, though, our patience is finite, and one day, we will have to solve the "Islam Problem." We cannot, and will not, indefinitely put up with their attacks, whether they involve murder and mayhem or da'wa, on our way of life.

We're willing to give them time to grow up, and we even supply a role model for a happier way of relating to reality. Many individual Muslims throughout history have observed infidels, and consciously or subconsciously, some have seen that there is something more satisfying beyond the restrictions of Islam.

Among those who understand that Islam is, indeed, a problem for all the rest of us, numerous suggestions for a solution have been offered.

One so-called "solution" is to cave, to give in; that's the Postmodernist-Leftist-Liberal "solution." Europe, Canada, Central and South America, Africa, and parts of Asia have already made the decision to become dhimmis, but we, and with any luck, Australia, will not go that route. So caving is out--at least for a few of us.

A second "solution" is to destroy their three holiest sites: the Kaaba in Mecca (the meteorite that they believe was built under the supervision of Adam to resemble the heavenly house of Allah), the Mosque of the Prophet Mohammed in Medina (the burial site of Mohammed and his family), and the Dome Mosque in Jerusalem (for an explanation of the nature and importance of both the initial "vision" of Mohammed, and his "night voyage" to Jerusalem, please see http://www.6thcolumnagainstjihad.com/CUBED_P6htm).

Victor Mordecai, the pen-name of a respected authority on Islamic terrorism, says that if these sites were destroyed, it would prove to Allah's followers that he was not "the greatest" after all, and that they would feel the need to find themselves a "strong" God--maybe even the Christian God--and that the effort to make a world wide caliphate would then fizzle.

If all else fails, and Islam doesn't change its moral code to one that no longer maintains as its "standard of the good" the conversion of the entire world into an Islamic planet, the destruction of these sites certainly remains a viable option, as does a much wider path of destruction throughout the Islamic world. If it comes down to an "us vs. them," situation, we're on our side, and while we do not presently have the political will to carry out this version of a solution, we certainly have the capability.

There actually is a third solution, but while it would be an uphill climb for those few Muslims who really want to "give peace a chance," and lead productive, happy lives, it is a solution taken from their own history and would not require them to leave Islam. Doubtless, it would be considered heretical in the worst way by the current crop of mullahs and ayatollahs, and by many of their ordinary Muslim neighbors and family members, but it does offer a potential solution.

That having been said, once upon a time, after Mohammed died and before al-Ghazali, the "father of Islamic fundamentalism" won the battle to mold Islam into the shape we see today, there was actually a group that didn't feel threatened by the beliefs of other religions, that understood that human beings had free will, that considered debate to be a good thing, that realized that innovation wasn't a sin, that believed that questions needed to be raised and answered, that considered much of the content of the Koran to be allegorical, that realized that knowledge was beneficial to humankind--well, you know; it was definitely not the version of Islam that we have all come to know and hold in so much contempt today.

These guys were a sort of a philosophical "flash in the Islamic pan" called "Mu'tazilites."

The Mu'tazilites were "rationalists," who believed that truth could be discovered with the use of reason; they were very active in the scholarship that exixted during that window of opportunity between the death of Mohammed and the meeting of religious authorities a couple of hundred years later, when it was decided at an Islamic version of the "Conference of Nicea" what Islam was to "look like" from then on.

During that brief period, even some Muslims were free to think, to question, to debate, to discover--all the good stuff that later became known as the "Golden Age."

Greek philosophy, upon which this sort of thinking was based, had spread with Alexander the Great throughout the still pagan world, and that included the Arabs. It was the Greek way of thinking, especially Aristotelian thinking, that led to all the great centers of learning where scholarship thrived--Alexandria, Byzantium, Pergamum, Damascus, etc.

The reason the Mu'tazilites were able to take such great advantage of Greek philosophy without undue interference, even though they were Muslims, was because Islam hadn't yet become crystalized into the form we see today. There were many varieties of Islam, among them these Mu'tazilites, who, because 1) of their own non-fundamentalist views (as described above); 2) of the relative disregard that the first dynasty of caliphs, the Umayyads (661-750), had for the Koran (one of them is even said to have stuck a Koran with a lance and shot it to pieces with arrows); and 3) of the fact that the attraction of Islam for the Bedouins was not for its spritual qualities, but for an opportunity to participate in wars leading to booty and wealth (some estimates of the number of true, believing converts to Islam at the time of Muhammed's death were fewer than one thousand).

The Mu'tazilites, who were against the establishment of a theocratic state, were seriously opposed by many fundamentalist groups who wanted one. The fundamentalists prohibited debate, said that question about Islam were not permitted, that innovation was a sin, that the Koran had been revealed from Allah and contained all the knowledge that was worth knowing and was the literal word of Allah. Scientific discoveries of the sort being spread about by the Mu'tazilite scholars and their ilk seriously contradicted much of what was contained in the Koran, so science, among other things, was a "no-no."

The Mu'tazilites could have gone on and continued to influence Islam, but they shot themselves in the foot. For all their "rationalism," despite certain bits of very advanced thinking, they had some very serious flaws. The most important was that they had not yet developed any concept of "rights," a problem that enabled them to behave in a self-destructive manner later on.

When the "godless" first dynasty of caliphs was overthrown, the second dynasty, the Abbasids, took their place. These latter were convinced that the Mu'tazilites' relative indifference to religion--Islam in particular--was a form of opposition to religion. Certainly, the Mu'tazilites' open opposition to a theocratic state was a problem for the Abbasids, who wanted to establish one. All the authority would come from Allah, but (of course) they, the Abbasids, would be his only legitimate representatives, and thus the only ones who could communicate his will.

There were many significant points of disagreement between the Mu'tazilites and the new, more fundamentalist-inclined dynasty, and the Mu'tazilites weren't well treated because of that. One of the most contentious differences was whether the Koran was eternal, something that had been in existence for all time, and merely revealed to Mohammed at the moment of his "vision" (for an explanation of just what this was, along with the famous "night voyage to Jerusalem" that is causing so much trouble between the Palestinians and the Israelis today, please see: http://www.6thcolumnagainstjihad.com/CUBED_P6htm), or whether it had been created de novo at the moment of the "vision." The Mu'tazilites believed that it was created de novo, and not that it was eternal.

The Abbasids treated the Mu'tazilites poorly, but nevertheless, one of the Abbasid Caliphs took their side on the particular issue of the eternal vs. the finite existence of the Koran. He began a campaign to force all government officials, and many others, to state that this was their belief. To encourage them to do so, al-Ma'mun, the Caliph in question, took to imprisoning, torturing and executing people until and unless they confessed this belief. The whole thing turned into a sort of Muslim predecessor of the Spanish Inquisition. This process of imprisonment, torture, and execution continued throughout the reigns of three caliphs.

The Mu'tazilites jumped right on this bandwagon; their own intolerance of superstition, mythology, literalism, etc. was extreme, and so they were pleased with this movement in support of their own view, even if it was only of one part of their belief. When the persecution of "eternalists" ended, it was under the reign of a caliph who was himself very intolerant of the entire Mu'tazilite position, and the tables were turned; the Mu'tazilites now became the persecuted.

That was how the Mu'tazilites shot themselves in the foot, and quite possibly contributed to the failure of Islam to develop along a more reasonable line. Had they merely held firm, and gathered about them more and more followers who believed as they did, and not climbed aboard the persecutorial wagon, it is entirely possible that Islam might have evolved differently. Even the Asharites, followers of the fundamentalist al-Ashari, who were among the more traditional groups opposing the Mu'tazilites (and who were considered to be the ones who were responsible for their final defeat), left a teensy bit of room for a less literalist way of thinking, in that they believed that knowledge that depended solely on the most traditional sources was not always entirely reliable, and that it sometimes needed to be confirmed by reason.

It was the strict fundamentalists, though, who in the end, won the battle for control over the direction that Islam was to take, and it was they who were responsible for what Islam is today.

The bottom line, and the reason for giving this mini-history of early Islam here, is that Islam actually included a way of thinking that, had it survived, had the potential of becoming something that could have become something very different from the hard-core anti-life, anti-knowledge, anti-human nature entity that we see today, and which makes of its followers the miserable, non-productive, frustrated, hostile, humans they are today, who have been taught that all the very things that characterize human beings are morally corrupt.

If those Muslims who have succeeded in "compartmentalizing" their beliefs--that is, who accept the more reasonable aspects of Islam, and reject those aspects that make it impossible for them to work productively with non-Muslims--the problems of both Muslims and non-Muslims would be significantly reduced, and Muslims could be a happier people. Nobody ever accuses them of being dumb, it's just that their substantial intellects are held prisoner by a viciously anti-life system that causes them to lose out on patents, non-politicalized Nobel Prizes, accomplishments equal to those of any of the infidel world--oh, it is a very sad thing.

It is the Mu'tazilite tradition that gives Muslims a stepping stone, from within the history of Islam itself, to a form of their religion that could accomplish this. If that could be done, thinking about other "solutions" could be abandoned. Islam could keep its stories, its scriptures, its festive practices, its rituals, and still not put its very existence at risk.

They just have to adopt a form of their religion--and the Mu'tazilites had sown the seeds of such a form--that permits them to have a moral code that does not insist that its "standard of the good" be the imposition of Islam on everybody else.

This shift in emphasis requires the kind of respect for reason that the Mu'tazilites had just begun to have, and that the West later adopted and refined.

Good luck, all you Muslims. There is still time.

How To Tell If There Is A Terrorist At The Airport

One indicator of beating them is being able to joke and laugh at them:

You Want to Know Why We are Not Winning This "War on Terrorism"?

We have people within our own government who chronically sabotage us. Bleeding Hearts say these are well-meaning people who do not understand. We offer no charity of this kind--the stakes are too high.

[We are reprinting this from an excellent new website, American Congress for Truth. Visit and support them.]


School for Shar'ia : Islamist School Wins Dept of Education Blue Ribbon for Excellence Award

http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/1169

Islamist School Wins Dept of Education Award
By Beila Rabinowitz, Militant Islam Monitor

http://www.pipelinenews.org/index.cfm?page=rabinowitzschools%2Ehtm

October 20, 20005 - Philadelphia, PA - PipeLineNews.org - Jihad through Da'wa [conversion of non-Muslims] in the form of domestic Islamic education has gotten a boost from an unlikely source, the U.S. government.

The administration has just presented the New Horizons Islamic School in Pasadena, California the United States Department of Education's "Blue Ribbon for Excellence" award.

This first ever award to a Muslim school appears to validate the predictions which cleric Yusuf Qaradawi made a decade ago, at a Muslim Youth conference in Ohio.

"...Some countries will fall to the armed Islamic jihad, but in others, such as the United States, victory will come through Da'wa - the teaching of Islam to non-Muslims - which will trigger Westerners to convert to Islam 'in droves.' We will conquer America not by the sword but by Da'wa."
Qawadari has since been banned from the U.S. due to his terror connections, but his vision of Da'wa transforming America into a United States of Allah, is reflected in the curriculum used in schools like that of New Horizons and as developed by affiliates such as ISNA [The Islamic Society of North America]. the BIAE [The Board of Islamic and Arabic Education] and the UK based IBERR [International Board for Education Research and Resources].

The BIAE, based in Los Angeles - which plans the curriculum of the New Horizons School together with the Islamic Center of Southern California even offers an Islamized version of the Pledge of Alliance on their website. It begins with the phrase - "As an American Muslim I pledge alliance to ALLAH and his Prophet." http://www.biae.net/pledge.html

Another component of the Wahhabist funded domestic Islamic educational network is The Islamic Schools League, the mission of which reflects the role of Islamic education inculcating the fard [religious obligation] to convert non-Muslims to Islam.

"For the League, the success of Islamic schools is not an option; it is a must. Our vision is achievable. Our mission requires that we all work together in support of Islamic schools. Ultimately this service is to Allah (swt)."
The Da'wa agenda is also promoted by the Bureau for Islamic and Arabic Education (BIAE), which "aims to increase the impact of Islam on the daily life of both Muslims and non-Muslims everywhere."

As the curriculum provider for the Islamic School of Pasadena, the BIAE underscores the conflict of interests between Islamic education, and the goals of the US Department of Education. The latter insisting that, "schools singled out for national honors will now reflect the goals of our nation's new education reforms for high standards and accountability." This begs the question as to who will be held accountable for the decision to present an award to an Islamist school which aims to replace the Constitution with shari'a. http://www.ed.gov/programs/nclbbrs/index.html

The clash between the Islamo-fascist weltanschauung of the Islamic school enterprise in the U.S. and the ideals of American education is evident in the activities of Amina Al Sarraf [a consultant and author of textbooks and syllabi for Islamic schools] who serves as the interim principal of the Islamic School of Pasadena.

Most recently Al Sarraf spoke to ISNA [Islamic Society of North America] a Wahhabist Da'wa front.

ISNA is the foremost distributor of Islamist educational materials in North America. ISNA is the founder of the New Horizons schools - such as the one lead by Al Sarraf - both in North America and abroad.

A recent report by Freedom House - "Saudi Publications on Hate Ideology Fill American Mosques" highlighted the dangers posed by Wahhabist publications because they incite hatred and ultimately promote violence in the United States. http://www.freedomhouse.org/religion/news/bn2005/bn-2005-01-28.htm

ISNA's lead role in this activity is beyond doubt.

Without challenging Freedom House's main finding, ISNA merely criticized the report as "misleading." ISNA's executive director Louay Safi, who runs their "Educational Leadership Program," is a founder and board member of several other Islamist organizations such as the IIIT, whose offices were raided during the Virginia based Operation Greenquest crackdown on terror funding . http://www.isna.net/index.php?id=35&backPID=1&tt_news=361

This year's ISNA speakers were predominantly radical Islamists, and included the North American spokesman of Al Muhajiroun - Kamran Bokhari.

Noted Middle East authority, Dr. Daniel Pipes called Al Muhajiroun, " the most extremist group operating in the West today." The group's leader and founder, Omar Bakri Mohammed recently fled the UK after being linked to the London bombings. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,22989-1693739,00.html

In addition to ISNA, New Horizons is affiliated with both the Board of Islamic and Arabic Education , and the Islamic Center of Southern California.

ISNA and the BIAE clothe their Da'wa aims in candy-coated aspirin - "to be a source of enlightenment [and] to increase the impact of Islam on the daily life of both Muslims and non- Muslims everywhere."

The New Horizons curriculum was developed in conjunction with the Islamic Center of Southern California , which then designated the BIAE to create the curriculum.

"The ICSC is lead by Imam Muzzamil Siddiqui, former ISNA president, and influential Islamic cleric. Siddiqui instructs Muslims to interact with non-Muslims on the premise that "every non Muslim is a potential Muslim", which is the quintessential expression of Da'wa." Siddiqui's latest "conversion success story" involves former ICSC congregant Adam Gadahn who was last seen with his face covered in a kaffiyeh, on an Al Qaeda videotape threatening bloody attacks on the United States.

As a consultant New Horizons' principal Al Sarraf has helped write Islamic elementary schools textbooks which are published in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, under the supervision and financing, of IBERR, the International Board of Educational Research.

IBERR's treasurer and chairman is Yusuf Islam. IBERR plans Islamic syllabi and curriculum for Sharia schools.

Yusuf Islam [the former Cat Stevens] has been linked to terror funding and was denied entry into the US in 2004 on the grounds that he posed a threat to national security.

Islam's IBERR works closely with New Horizons Schools both in the US and abroad.

In 2001 Yusuf Islam attended a meeting together with the heads of several California Islamic Schools - including the New Horizon School.

Ameena Al Sarraf participated in a curriculum, syllabi, and textbook planning session in California together with Muzammil Siddiqui and other radical Islamists.

Plans to broadcast Islamic programs via satellite to the schools have been in discussion with funding provided by Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

A 2002 report on an IBERR meeting in the UK lists Amira Al Sarraf as part of their textbook editorial group .Another member of this writing group was Ameenah Bilal Philips.

Phillips is an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombings, who called "Saudi missionary" Gulshair Shukrijumah - the father of dirty bomber wannabe Adnan Shukrijumah - his mentor.

Phillips, himself a convert to Islam, is considered a leading Islamic educator. He also worked closely with former American Muslim Council [AMC] president Abdulrahman Alamoudi.

Almoudi was jailed for 23 years on terrorism charges.

Philips led a program - organized by Alamoudi - which was used as a "cultural information" course that distributed Wahhabist propaganda and resulted in the conversion of scores of American soldiers stationed in Saudi Arabia to Islam.

On his personal website Philips responded to a question about execution 'etiquette' according to the Koran. http://www.bilalphilips.com/qa/d_000003.htm

"We were instructed to carry out the cutting of hands or heads, stoning people to death, lashing, etc. in public and the greatest gathering of Muslims, excluding the two Eids and Hajj, is on Fridays.public executions do keep crime levels down (in Saudi Arabia), and that is a fact."
Of Amira Al Sarraf ISNA touts:

" will travel to Washington, D.C. in November to receive the award from the Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings, at an awards ceremony attended by the other private schools recognized with this honor. At the ceremony New Horizon will receive a flag and a plaque signifying its Blue Ribbon status."

If the United States Department of Education's intent is to encourage schools to develop curricula which embodies (sic) the "goals of the nation's new educational reforms," we suggest that making awards to Islamists schools immediately cease.

Rather, the Dept. of Education must turn a critical eye towards Islamic schools in the United States, shutting those down who because of their fundamentalist teachings resemble madrassas.
To do otherwise could ultimately lead to violence against all non-Muslims.

Instead of presenting the ISNA backed Pasadena's New Horizons Islamic School with a Blue Ribbon award, the United States Department of Education should be asking the Senate Finance Committee - which listed ISNA as a group which "promotes and finances terrorism" - about the implications of this schools association with it.

A new generation of ISNA modeled students - indoctrinated from an early age in the importance of establishing an American caliphate - is emerging from schools like New Horizon, where previously one had to look to Pakistan for similar models.

Failure on the part of the Department of Education to exercise due diligence - rescinding New Horizon's award - will mean that Wahhabism has become legitimized as the template for future Islamic education in North America.

How did the Palestinians descend into barbarism?

The Israelis are usually held up as the blame for the barbarous behavior of the Palestinians in recent years. Could this be true, or is there another explanation? Bret Stephens at WSJ offers he following:

Many explanations have been given to account for the almost matchless barbarism into which Palestinian society has descended in recent years. One is the effect of Israeli occupation and all that has, in recent years, gone with it: the checkpoints, the closures, the petty harassments, the targeted assassinations of terrorist leaders. I witnessed much of this personally when I lived in Israel, and there can be no discounting the embittering effect that a weeks-long, 18-hour daily military curfew has on the ordinary Palestinians living under it.
Yet the checkpoints and curfews are not gratuitous acts of unkindness by Israel, nor are they artifacts of occupation. On the contrary, in the years when Israel was in full control of the territories there were no checkpoints or curfews, and Palestinians could move freely (and find employment) throughout the country. It was only with the start of the peace process in 1993 and the creation of autonomous Palestinian areas under the control of the late Yasser Arafat that terrorism became a commonplace fact of Israeli life. And it was only then that the checkpoints went up and the clampdowns began in earnest.

How, then, can this be explained?

Consider a statistic: In the first nine months of 2005 more Palestinians were killed by other Palestinians than by Israelis--219 to 218, according to the Palestinian Authority's Ministry of Interior, although the former figure is probably in truth much higher. In the Gaza Strip, the departure of Israeli troops and settlers has brought anarchy, not freedom. Members of Hamas routinely fight gun battles with members of Fatah, Mahmoud Abbas's ruling political party. Just as often, the killing takes place between clans, or hamullas. So-called collaborators are put to the gun by street mobs, their "guilt" sometimes nothing more than being the object of a neighbor's spite. Palestinian social outsiders are also at mortal risk: Honor killings of "loose" women are common, as is the torture and murder of homosexuals.

Atop this culture of violence are the Hamas and Fatah leaders, the hamulla chieftains, the Palestinian Authority's "generals" and "ministers." And standing atop them--theoretically, at least--is the Palestinian president. All were raised in this culture; most have had their uses for violence. For Arafat, those uses were to achieve mastery of his movement, and to harness its energies to his political purpose. Among Palestinians, his popularity owed chiefly to the fact that under his leadership all this violence achieved an astonishing measure of international respectability.

Mahmoud Abbas, the successor to Arafat may not be a violent man, but "his fate as a politician rests in the hands of violent men, and so far he has shown no appetite for confronting them."

That is the problem with Islam. Many Muslims are not violent, although they accept Jihad as a concept. Extremists such as Hamas, Hizbollah, Al Qaeda are merely extensions of the original extremist, Mohammed, who set down the rules for Jihad more than 1350 years ago. Even Muslims become tired of war and violence. Eventually a period of peace and quiet will come about because EVERYONE will be exhausted in the effort both the Jihadists and the defenders must expend in this new round of the eternal conflict between Muslims and non-Muslims.

The Palestinians have been abandoned by their wealthier co-religionists in the Gulf States, and the American taxpayer will not suffer the support of these barbarians that hate them forever. No amount of tax (jizya) money will quell their hatred nor will a state diminish their rage.

Their future is obvious:

Talk to Palestinians, and you will often hear it said, like a mantra, that Palestinian dignity requires Palestinian statehood. This is either a conceit or a lie. Should a Palestinian state ever come into existence in Gaza and the West Bank, it will be a small place, mostly poor, culturally marginal, most of it desert, rock, slums and dust. One can well understand why Arafat, a man of terrible vices but impressive vanities, spurned the offer of it--and why his people cheered wildly when he did. Their dignity has always rested upon their violence, their struggle, their "prisoners of freedom."

Good luck, Mr. Abbas. No politician can survive in the hands of violent men.

US Government Seeks to Promote Arabic and Sharia Studies?

"Know your enemy" may not be the impetus behind the U.S. government's decision to familiarize American students with Arabic and Sharia as well as to help "Saudi teachers improve their English." Ooops!!! For the Saudis, this may be A way to "know" their American enemy and to indoctrinate those American students sent to them.

Students should be taught about Sharia and how to read Arabic and other Middle Eastern languages. The students that enter these programs must be carefully screened and warned against the taqiyya and kitman tactics used by Muslims to beguile the impressionable and easily led.

The kicker is that this arrangement was made in April 2005 on Bush's Crawford, Texas ranch when "Saudi Arabia's then Crown Prince, now King Abdullah and George Bush pledged to increase the number of students traveling between their countries, as well as visitors and business travelers." That's all we need -- more Saudis.

Dubya... what were you thinking????

UPDATE It gets worse.Over 10,000 Saudi Students U.S. Bound

"In total, 21,000 Saudis are expected to take part in a government-sponsored program following the adoption of new measures by the Ministry of (Saudi) Higher Education."

Prospective students can submit their applications to the Ministry of Higher Education through a Ministry special office or its website for nine different specializations and will be able to benefit from assistance with their visa applications at the US embassy and its diplomatic missions throughout the country.

Fahd al Manur, a student who decided to enroll in the program told Asharq al Awsat, “I do not fear traveling to the US since Americans are a friendly people. Relations between our two countries have greatly improved recently and travel procedures are easier nowadays after being almost impossible following September 11th 2001.” Studying in the US would be a dream come true, he added, despite recent events. King Abdullah’s visit earlier this year strengthened bilateral relations and “reassured Saudis.”

Currently studying in the U.S., Mohammad al Mateeri described the initiative as an important step and described how in eight years of living in the US, “I have never been hassled, save for an increase in security checks to which a country is entitled to when protecting its citizens.”

Someone is braindead. They must not realize that, one way or another, the acquired knowledge someday will be turned on us. The poor and ignorant are busy trying to survive while making a living. The college educated are those that plan, finance, and carryout Jihad. Jihad means "Struggle for Allah," which is not necessarily an exercise in violence with an explosive ending. Jihad is pushing forward the aims and goals of Islam using any means necessary and possible. Turning a Western education against the West is already a proven tactic.

This is not rocket science. More Saudis in the United States is not a smart move.

What are the rights and restrictions of Dhimmis in Moslem Countries?

Although Islam is not the official religion of countries of the West, Muslims are quickly entering, occupying, and agitating for Sharia. Soon, this could be you!

What is Dhimma? Who are Dhimmis?

• Dhimma is the policy of treatment of Jews and Christians living in Islamic countries. Therefore a dhimmi is a Jew or a Christian living in an Islamic country. This policy does not apply to other peoples or religious groups, such as Hindus, for whom a strict policy of 'conversion or death' exists.
•
 
What are the rights and restrictions of Dhimmis in Moslem countries?

• "The vile and ignorant dhimmis (non-Muslims in an Islamic country) must be humiliated, belittled and rendered abominable and able to be distinguished by their appearance." For example, "different colored shoes, one white the other black"; for males badges such as an "ape for a Jew and a pig for a Christian: for women yellow veils." The distinctive dress shows the Muslim that the dhimmi is to be treated as an inferior - not to stand up for her or shake his hand, not to give them Muslim charity. He is to expect respect and deference from the dhimmi who shall not join a group of Muslims or raise his voice in their presence. The non-Muslim is to stand aside if the pathway is narrow. It is haram (unlawful) for him to slaughter animals; reserved for him is the cleaning of lavatories and sewers, and carrying away rubbish and refuse. His house should be painted a dull color and be no larger than that of a Muslim neighbor.
- from various medieval Muslim documents, compiled in The Dhimmi, by Bat Ye'or

What follows details some of the "rights" that were extended to those groups with the status of "Dhimmi": Jews, and Christians - there are still a few remaining Christians unfortunate enough to remain in "Muslim lands".

• "No Jews or Christians are allowed to live in Saudi Arabia. Jews may not even set foot in Saudi Arabia, while Christians are allowed temporary residence. No churches are allowed in Saudi Arabia. The American government does not allow its soldiers, who are stationed in Saudi Arabia to prop up the Saudi king against his own people as well as his fellow Muslims, to have an open display of Judaism or Christianity.

• Outside of Saudi Arabia, pre-existing synagogues and churches are allowed, but no new ones may be built, and permission must be obtained to repair old ones. Synagogues and churches may never be apparent, no Jewish stars, no crosses, no church bells. They may never be higher than any mosque. There may be no public processions, and funerals must be discreet.

• Jews may not enter mosques on penalty of death. In the "good old days", Jews were killed for coming too close to a mosque. Jews were never allowed into the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, or onto the Temple Mount. Arafat looks forward to the time when this condition can be restored. He used the opening of the tourist tunnel as practice for the Jew-killing he plans to do in the future. It is an amazing example of the dhimmi mentality that still exists, that Arafat was exonerated for killing Jews, and Netanyahu was blamed.

• Jewish and Christian religious "leaders" in Muslim lands may only serve with the permission of the Muslim authorities. The Muslims allowed the Babylonian Jews to keep an official "Head of the Community" and "Head of the Yeshivas" for several hundred years, but then abolished it. The Turks continue to choose who may be the Greek orthodox patriarch, and Mubarak chooses the Coptic Pope. Every couple of centuries they would murder one or the other of these guys to remind them who is boss. Needless to say, they do not complain much out loud.

• In fact, it is forbidden to complain out loud. Anything taken as a criticism of Islam or Muhammad is punished by death. A non-Muslim proselytizing a Muslim is killed. A Muslim who converts is killed. A non-Muslim who becomes a Muslim and then reverts is killed.

• ... A Jew who struck a Muslim was killed. There is no such thing as a Muslim murdering a Jew; at most it is manslaughter and the killer pays a fine. There is no such thing as the rape of a Jewish woman by a Muslim. (The idea that Sephardic Jews are "pure Jews identical to the ones who originally lived in Judea" is idiotic.) Jews may not testify in a court of law against a Muslim, and have no legal recourse to anything done to them by a Muslim.

• - Samuel Fistel

Read the rest.

The Road to Serfdom - In Cartoons

The concepts and progressive steps of Hyack's The Road to Serfdom are put forward in simple illustrations. Everyone should get the point.

Three Killed in Church Riot in Egypt

What caused the riot?

Coptic Christians, the ancient Christian sect that predates Islam by over 1,000 years is under pressure to convert.. to convert to Islam. Conversion to Islam is simple: repeat a few simple words and, lo and behold, you are a Muslim. One doesn't need to know a thing about Islam before conversion and many don't. One important fact that all should know before repeating those few simple words is that once the commitment is made, you can't change your mind. Those that do pay the price of their lives.

The demonstration in Egypt was about a play entitled "I Once Was Blind But Now I See," about "a poor young Copt who is drawn to Islamist militants who then try to kill him." What did he do to deserve to be killed? Was he an informer or commit a criminal act? No, he became disillusioned with Islam. Islam didn't live up to his expectations and he decided to leave: he became an agnostic which is a criminal act to Muslims. That's right. Individuals that become Muslims share the same principle as do made members of the Mafia -- they cannot leave on pain of death.

Although the production was shown on a DVD two years ago, militants are thought to have distributed them "to stoke sectarian tensions ahead of (upcoming) legislative elections November 9."

The Interior Ministry described the protesters as "fanatic elements" who "escalated a negative reaction to a play." The ministry said about 5,000 Muslims marched to the church after Friday noon prayers at mosques.
"The police tried to prevent (the demonstrators) from approaching the church and attacking it, but the protesters did not heed the warnings and started to hurl stones at the church, security forces and pedestrians," the ministry said.
The riot was sparked by the distribution of a DVD of a play that was performed at the church two years ago. The play, "I Was Blind But Now I Can See," tells the story of a young Christian who converts to Islam and becomes disillusioned.
The church's director, the Rev. Augustinous, said it was difficult to explain the reaction to a one-time performance that took place two years ago.

The church director, the Rev. Augustinous played down the possibility that the DVD was offensive: the "Christian hero is ultimately saved by a Muslim friend." Copts walk a thin line. Once the majority, today they represent only 10 percent of Egypt's population of 70 million and must appear as inoffensive as possible. The showing of the DVD, even in private, violated the rules -- nothing that shows Islam in bad light is permitted; violators are severely punished.

Books, articles, blogs, and messages that criticize Islam are considered to be an insult. Even authors and bloggers in the West are sometimes verbally threatened, sued, attacked physically, sentenced to death, or even killed. These are examples the most well known in the West. In the Muslim world there are thousands of the witting and non-witting that have threatened or murdered for "insulting Islam."

Muslims claim that there is no compulsion in religion," meaning that each is free to choose and practice. The riot in Egypt shows the lie to this claim: Muslims are willing to commit violence to drive out or silence practitioners of other religions. In this case they killed two birds with one stone, using outrage over an event that occurred two years ago for political reasons and to drive home the dhimmi or zimmi status of the non-Muslim population, reminding them what Islam allows or disallows for their non-Muslim subjects.

Many find dhimmitude too hard to bear. It is easier to "revert" as they call conversion, or go along with the claims and demands of the Muslim overlords. From time to time Egyptian Copts complain to authorities that their members, especially young women, have been kidnapped and forced to convert. Muslim authorities tend to do nothing. The practice is widespread throughout the world where forced conversions and riots are sparked at the slightest pretext of offense. But then, what doesn't offend Muslims?

Europeans and Americans would be wise to think very hard and carefully to invite more Muslims to live among them. After all, Egypt was once a predominately Christian country. Look what happened in the space of a few centuries and regard how Islam treats non-Muslims in Saudi Arabia, and in the areas of Nigeriawhere Islam is spreading through the usual way: violence, intimidation, and deception.

What Can the Individual Do? Read on.

Often, people like us, the grass-roots Americans, tend to feel that there is little we can do to stand up to these juggernauts which are trying to rule and ruin our way of life. Yet, the evidence of individual efficacy is all around us, and it is growing. We truly are beginning to sense a sea change within Americans, although it is much too early to become very definite and predictive.

One of the proudest moments for Americans came recently when the 9-11 families, with the added support of other Americans, literally stopped that Freedom Center travesty planned for the Ground Zero site. That center would have been a monument to anti-Americanism and would have relegated 9-11 to some basement backroom. Take Back the Memorial took back the memorial and stands as a terrific example of just what we citizens can do.

Someone recently steered us to what happened on a MSNBC show hosted by Tucker Carlson. Mr. Carlson interviewed Ibrahim Hooper, the mouth of CAIR (Council for American-Islamic Relations) and literally pinned Hooper with important questions, so much so that Hooper was reported to be sweating as he did all he could to duck, evade, and avoid answering the repeated questions.

The bottom line is that we get what we allow and we stop what we refuse to accept. It is just that simple.

Recently, another delicious example came along. Commedienne Joan Rivers on tour in England was interviewed on the BBC. Well, let's let the London Times tell it:

Decorum was thrown to the winds on BBC Radio 4's Midweek chat show today when Joan Rivers had a furious row with the black British commentator Darcus Howe.

The American comedienne is famous for her barbed humour and is rarely lost for a sharp retort, but she was left gobbling with anger when Mr Howe slipped in a sly aside saying that the word "black" offended her.

"What? No! What? Now just stop right there!" said Rivers, thumping the table. "Black does not offend me. How dare you! How dare you say that! Black offends me? You know nothing about me! You just sat down there... How dare you!"

Mr Howe compounded his offence by repeating: "The use of the term 'black' offends you."

Rivers repeated his words incredulously. "The use of the term 'black' offends me? Where the hell are you coming from? You have got such a chip on your shoulder! I don't give a damn if you are black, white..."

Laughing, Mr Howe said: "I do."

Ms Rivers burst out: "... but don't you dare call me a racist!"

While this Black Panther droned on about his own alleged racial victimization, Joan interrupted:

"I'm so bored with race... I think people should intermarry, everyone should be part this and part that and race shouldn't mean a damn thing."

She said that drawing distinctions between black and white was about hatred.

As presenter Libby Purves tried to keep the peace, describing this as an American ideal, the two protagonists brushed her aside to square up to each other.

"The reality is you married a white woman and you have two mixed race children. Let them go forward," Rivers said to Mr Howe.

He objected: "I don't have two mixed children, I have two children."

"Children, yes! But you are making them choose," said Rivers.

Hearing the exchange is exhilarating, but we do not have that available, so this commentary must do:

Mr Howe's fatal comment came as he said the audience for a new film about him and his estranged son included "hundreds and thousands of Caribbean children". He went on: "And since 'black' offends Joan..."

As the row got out of hand Purves tried to intervene, saying the comment was not personal, but Rivers was having none of it. "I think this is a language problem," said Mr Howe.

Rivers said: "I don't. I think this is a problem in your stupid head. You had a child. You left him. Your wife said you weren't there. You married a woman, you deserted her, now your son comes back and he's got problems. Where were you when he was growing up, till he was eight years old?"

As Ms Purves helplessly said: "I have great sympathy with both sides but..."

Rivers screeched: "Both sides? Then you're a racist!" There was a brief silence until she started to backtrack. "Er, er, er, how stupid... Let's continue. But don't you dare call me that. Son of a bitch."

Ms Purves: "Can we just..."

Rivers: "Yes, let's continue about this wonderful father who left his three children."

After an exchange of more insults Mr Howe made a belated attempt to make peace, saying: "No, she's not a racist."

You should read the whole article and listen to the interchange.

Joan Rivers took on this pompous racist and refused to accept his intimidations. She get in his face and ripped the phoniness off it. And, guess what? She won. How many Americans do this to Farrakhan, Jackson, Sharpton, Bond, Belafonte, NAACP, the Congressional Black Caucus--the vilest racists in all of America?

Ms. Rivers said that Britons have been stopping her on the streets as she tours England to thank her for standing up to this racist bully.

Well, that is where it is at. CAIR and the like, as well as all of the black race-baiters, cannot and will not succeed when grass-roots Americans stand up and tell them "Enough!"

STOP SEVERE INJUSTICE AGAINST AN AMERICAN SOLDIER

On this blog, we have published remarks to the House of Representatives by Representative Curt Weldon on 19 October 2005, and we have published some resource materials regarding the subject of Rep. Weldon's speech: the ungodly attempt by U. S. government agencies and personnel to ruin as much of the life of an outstanding American soldier as possible. And, the efforts involve pettiness, cheap tricks, lies, and flexing "the system" in order to crush the existence of Lt. Col. Anthony Shaeffer, United States Army, who blew the whistle on the Operatin Able Danger cover-up.

In short, here is the issue: Col. Shaeffer, a military "spook," worked on Operation Able Danger, a project which used a sophisticated program called "data mining" to identify from non-classified, commonly available sources potential dangers from groups like al Qaeda. By January 2000, they specifically identified Mohammed Atta and the Brooklyn cell of al Qaeda as serious threats. DoD would not let them pass on their findings, and no one in DoD listened. Not only this, but Operation Able Danger found out about the planned attack on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen two weeks ahead. Able Danger team members went nuts trying to pursuade DoD not to allow the Cole to enter Yemeni waters. No one listened. Even though Operation Able Danger was subsequently terminated, with every effort made by DoD to destroy its documents, its programs, and all traces to it, a number of people who worked the project tried to tell their findings to the 9-11 Commission. No one listened, and they lied about being approached.

Lt. Col. Shaeffer was the first to come forward, but there are now ten who worked the project and have come forward. All tell the same story. To the best of my knowledge, only Col Shaeffer has been singled out for punishment.

You must read Rep. Weldon's speech, which we have blogged on this site and which is on the congressman's website. I had the unexpected opportunity to watch most of this speech via C-SPAN on 19 October. I was riveted by what the congressman had to say and so enraged by the injustice that I must do what I can to let Americans know what is going on and encourage them to stop this NOW.

Despite having earned a bronze star and having served as a Defense Intelligence Agency operative for 23 years, LTC Shaeffer now has had his security clearance stripped and is under threat to have all his retirement and medical benefits stripped. He is not being allowed to retire, the means by which DoD keeps him from being able to talk to the press. DIA and DoD people have been spreading lies about him in order to discredit him. They have compiled some sort of dossier of his "sins." To show the quality of their approach, they cite the fact that the colonel owes some $2000 in indebtedness. In addition, he stole government property.

Most of us would be damned glad to owe only $2000. And, as for the theft of government property, this goes back to the colonel's days as a 15 year old. He took some ball point pens from his military father's office to pass out to his classmates, a fact volunteered by the colonel long before anyone thought to ask. This is petty. What is vicious is the lying about the colonel. One DoD type told congresspersons that the colonel was carrying on an affair with someone in Congressman Weldon's office--someone Col Shaeffer does not even know!

We cannot let this stand, as Americans. We cannot let certain forces within government silence this man and intimidate all other service personnel who profess their allegiance to the Constitution rather than some tribal-like organization of government.

And, yes, we can stop this travesty. Our role model comes from the Take Back the Memorial group's efforts to stop Ground Zero from becoming a liberal-leftist, anti-American, taxpayer funded monument to all the sins of the USA, relegating the honoring of those who died at Ground Zero on 9-11-2001 to some out-of-sight basement room. These fine citizens, joined by volunteers who threw in support, did take back the memorial. What they did stands as the role model. Let us now apply the same to end the injustice already done to Col Shaeffer, to restore what he has earned to him, and to prevent any further injustice to him.

It is unique for us to join with Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga) about anything. However, she has joined the fight against the injustice to Lt. Col. Shaeffer. We will fight along with her to make this right just as we fight along with all sorts of other Americans of all sorts of diverse backgrounds but who share the fight to defeat jihadists.

Let us also not lose sight of the Operation Able Danger cover-up and help Representative Weldon expose and rectify the governmental corruption which endangered us all back then. If it gets away with the cover-up, none of us will enjoy the proper protection the Constitution requires of our government.

At a minimum, contact Cong. Weldon via his website to register support. Email your own congresspersons and senators. Let's reaffirm that right trumps might.

OPERATION ABLE DANGER: Resources

These are but a tiny smattering of articles about Operation Able Danger. They are enough to allow one to get up to speed very quickly.

Press Conference of Rep Curt Weldon: 9/11 Commission and Operation "Able Danger"
9/11 Commission suppressed the evidence

ABLE DANGER...AND DANGER ENABLERS
BY MICHELLE MALKIN • AUGUST 12, 2005 12:14 PM

Able Danger , From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Able Danger was a small, highly classified U.S. Army intelligence program under the command of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command (USASOC). It was created as a result of a directive in early October 1999 by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Hugh Shelton, to USASOC to develop a campaign plan against transnational terrorism, "specifically al-Qaida." According to claims made by Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer and confirmed by four others, Able Danger had identified the 9/11 attack leader, Mohamed Atta, and three other 9/11 hijackers as possible members of an al Qaeda cell operating in the United States by mid-2000, more than a year before the attack. Data mining has been cited as the method by which this information was found. The claim appears to contradict the official conclusion of the 9/11 Commission that American intelligence agencies had not identified Atta as a terrorist prior to the attack. This has resulted in a political controversy that has begun to damage the credibility of the 9/11 Commission.

To follow is a simple listing of documents (hotlinks on Rep. Weldon's website) about Operation Able Danger, found on Congressman Weldon's website.

--Able Danger Resources and Links--

Committee Hearings:

Judiciary Committee Hearing on Able Danger and Intelligence Sharing -- (Senate - September 21, 2005)

Able Danger in the News:

UPI - Congressman wants new Able Danger probe

GSN Magazine - Did DoD lawyers blow the chance to nab Atta?

New York Times - Able Danger Articles
Related Documents:
Speeches and Floor Statements - CONGRESSMAN WELDON SPEAKS OUT ON SMEAR CAMPAIGN AGINST LTC SHAFFER; CALLS FOR INVESTIGATION 10.20.2005

Speeches and Floor Statements - DEFENSE INTELLIGENCE AGENCY USING FALSE CLAIMS TO SILENCE COLONEL SHAFFER 10.6.2005

Speeches and Floor Statements - WELDON TESTIFIES BEFORE SENATE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE ON ABLE DANGER 9.21.2005

Press Release - PENTAGON AFFIRMS WELDONS CONCERNS; TROUBLING QUESTIONS REMAIN UNANSWERED 9.2.2005

Press Release - WELDON ENCOURAGES PENTAGON TO KEEP LOOKING; WARNS AGAINST PREMATURE CONCLUSIONS ON ABLE DANGER 8.23.2005


More Documents on Congressman Weldon's website.

OPERATION ABLE DANGER: Rep. Curt Weldon's Statement to House of Representatives, 19 October 2005

Representative Curt Weldon (R-PA) has been serving America as a real hero by bringing to light the DoD and State Department coverup about 9-11. This coverup includes that "9-11 Commission." Operation Able Danger was exposed by very patriotic Americans who are now suffering for helping their country. On 19 October 2005, Congressman Weldon gave a riveting speech to the House of Representatives, an update about Operation Able Danger, and the travesty launched by the U. S. Government, most particularly the Defense Intelligence Agency, to ruin the man who first came forward, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer. As of the evening of 20 October, the text of Congressman Weldon's speech was published on his website.

We consider what the congressman had to say so important that we are taking the liberty of republishing the entire text along with this admonition: DO NOT LET THEM GET AWAY WITH RUINING THIS SOLDIER.

CONGRESSMAN WELDON SPEAKS OUT ON SMEAR CAMPAIGN AGINST LTC SHAFFER; CALLS FOR INVESTIGATION


WASHINGTON, Oct 20 -

Last night, Congressman Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), Vice Chairman of the House Armed Services and Homeland Security Committees, gave a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives decrying efforts within the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to smear the reputation and career of 23-year defense intelligence officer, LTC Anthony Shaffer. Congressman Weldon also brought forth new information on the destruction of data and findings of the Able Danger planning effort.

Below, is the full text of the floor speech as recorded in the Congressional Record.

ABLE DANGER FAILURE -- (House of Representatives - October 19, 2005)

Page: H8979

"The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Reichert). Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 4, 2005, the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Weldon) is recognized for 60 minutes.

Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I rise tonight to talk to our colleagues and through our colleagues to the American people about an issue that troubles me greatly.

I have been in this institution 19 years, and during those 19 years I have been on the Committee on Armed Services. Currently, I am the vice chairman of that committee and chairman of the subcommittee that oversees the purchase of our weapons systems. In the past I have chaired the research subcommittee. I have chaired the readiness subcommittee, and I have spent every available hour of my time working to make sure that our military troops were properly protected and have the proper equipment and training.

I am a strong supporter of our military. Whether it was in the last 2 years of the Reagan administration, the four years of the Bush administration, the 8 years of the Clinton administration, or the current administration of President George W. Bush, I have been a strong supporter of our military. I am a strong supporter of President Bush. I campaigned for him. I am a strong supporter of Secretary Rumsfeld. I say all of that, Mr. Speaker, because tonight I rise to express my absolute outrage and disgust with what is happening in our defense intelligence agencies.

Mr. Speaker, back in 1999 when I was Chair of the defense research subcommittee, the Army was doing cutting-edge work on a new type of technology to allow us to understand and predict emerging transnational terrorist threats. That technology was being done at several locations, but was being led by our Special Forces Command. The work that they were doing was unprecedented. And because of what I saw there, I supported the development of a national capability of a collaborative center that the CIA would just not accept.

In fact, in November 4 of 1999, 2 years before 9/11, in a meeting in my office with the Deputy Secretary of Defense, Deputy Director of the CIA, Deputy Director of the FBI, we presented a nine-page proposal to create a national collaborative center. When we finished the brief, the CIA said we did not need that capability, and so before 9/11 we did not have it.

When President Bush came in after a year of research, he announced the formation of the Terrorism Threat Integration Center, exactly what I had proposed in 1999. Today it is known as the NCTC, the National Coun ter ter ror ism Center. But, Mr. Speaker, what troubles me is not the fact that we did not take those steps.

What troubles me is that I now have learned in the last 4 months that one of the tasks that was being done in 1999 and 2000 was a top-secret program organized at the request of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, carried out by the general in charge of our Special Forces Command, a very elite unit focusing on information regarding al Qaeda. It was a military language effort to allow us to identify the key cells of al Qaeda around the world and to give the military the capability to plan actions against those cells so they could not attack us as they did in 1993 at the Trade Center, at the Khobar Towers, the U.S.S. Cole attack, and the African embassy bombings.

What I did not know, Mr. Speaker, up until June of this year, was that that secret program called Able Danger actually identified the Brooklyn cell of al Qaeda in January and February of 2000, over 1 year before 9/11 every happened. In addition, I learned that not only did we identify the Brooklyn cell of al Qaeda, but we identified Mohamed Atta as one of the members of that Brooklyn cell along with three other terrorists who were the leadership of the 9/11 attack.

I have also learned, Mr. Speaker, that in September of 2000, again, over 1 year before 9/11, that Able Danger team attempted on three separate occasions to provide information to the FBI about the Brooklyn cell of al Qaeda, and on three separate occasions they were denied by lawyers in the previous administration to transfer that information.

Mr. Speaker, this past Sunday on ``Meet the Press,'' Louis Freeh, FBI Director at the time, was interviewed by Tim Russert. The first question to Louis Freeh was in regard to the FBI's ability to ferret out the terrorists. Louis Freeh's response, which can be obtained by anyone in this country as a part of the official record, was, Well, Tim, we are now finding out that a top-secret program of the military called Able Danger actually identified the Brooklyn cell of al Qaeda and Mohammed Atta over a year before 9/11.

And what Louis Freeh said, Mr. Speaker, is that that kind of actionable data could have allowed us to prevent the hijackings that occurred on September 11.

So now we know, Mr. Speaker, that military intelligence officers working in a program authorized by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the general in charge of Special Forces Command, identified Mohammed Atta and three terrorists a year before 9/11, tried to transfer that information to the FBI were denied; and the FBI Director has now said publicly if he would have had that information, the FBI could have used it to perhaps prevent the hijackings that struck the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the plane that landed in Pennsylvania and perhaps saved 3,000 lives and changed the course of world history.

Mr. Speaker, I rise tonight because we have been trying to get the story out about Able Danger and what really happened. Unfortunately, Mr. Speaker, I have to rise tonight to tell you that as bad as this story is, and as bad as it is that the data was not transferred to the FBI, and as bad as it is that the 9/11 Commission totally ignored this entire story and referred to it as historically insignificant even though it was authorized by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, even though Louis Freeh has now said it could have provided information to prevent the attack against us, the 9/11 Commission ignored it. Not because the commissioners ignored it, but because someone at the staff level on the

9/11 Commission staff decided for whatever reason that they did not want to pursue the Abel Danger story.

Mr. Speaker, in August and September I met with the military officials involved with Abel Danger and one by one they told their story, until, Mr. Speaker, leaders in the Defense Intelligence Agency, including the deputy director, decided they do not want the story told. I think because they perhaps are fearful of being embarrassed and humiliated.

So what direction had they taken, Mr. Speaker?

They have gagged the military officers. They have prevented them from talking to any Member of Congress. They have prevented them from talking to the media. And the Defense Intelligence Agency has began a process to destroy the career and the life of Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffer.

Now, it might be easy for us to ignore this, Mr. Speaker. We all have busy careers and worry about reelections every 2 years and worry about our own families and our jobs. But I cannot do that in this case and neither can this body, and neither can the other body. You see, Lieutenant Colonel Shaffer took an oath to defend our Constitution. He took the words ``duty, honor, country'' seriously and devoted 23 years of his life in four deployed intelligence operations of our military to protect America.

During the time he served our country, he has received the Bronze Star, an award that does not come easily, for showing acts of courage, leadership, and bravery in the course of his activities.

[Time: 20:30]

He has received public commendations from previous directors of the Defense Intelligence Agency, including General Patrick Hughes, including generals at Special Forces Command, and including Admiral Wilson of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He has received dozens of letters and commendations for his work. The laudatory comments I reviewed in his files are unbelievable.

But, you see, Mr. Speaker, there is a problem. The Deputy Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency was in a meeting with Lieutenant Colonel Shaffer almost a year before 9/11, and Lieutenant Colonel Shaffer showed him a disk in his office with information about al Qaeda and Mohammed Atta, and the Deputy Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency stopped the briefing and said, you cannot show me that. I do not want to see it. It might contain information I cannot look at.

Now, Tony Shaffer was not in the room alone, Mr. Speaker. There were other people, and we know their names. So we have witnesses. Now, the Deputy Director has denied that meeting and denied he was there and denied this particular story, but the fact is he knows that we are going to pursue it.

So what has happened to Lieutenant Colonel Shaffer, Mr. Speaker? The Defense Intelligence Agency has lifted his security clearance. One day before he was to testify before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, in uniform, they permanently removed his security clearance. And now our Defense Intelligence Agency has told Colonel Shaffer's lawyer that they plan to seek a permanent removal of his pay and his health care benefits for him and his two children. Why, Mr. Speaker? Because Lieutenant Colonel Shaffer, like Commander Scott Philpot of the Navy, like J. D. Smith, and like a host of other Able Danger employees, has told the truth.

Now, Mr. Speaker, I sat here in the 1990s and I sat here during the 9/11 investigation and watched a ridiculous situation develop with Sandy Berger, the National Security Adviser under President Clinton. He walked into the National Archives before he was to testify before the 9/11 Commission looking through documents. He took documents out of the archives and stuffed them in his socks and pants so that no one would see them as he left the National Archives. Now, that is a felony, tampering with Federal documents and removing classified information regarding our security and information that the 9/11 commission needed to see.

Sandy Berger initially lied about it. He said he did not do it. Then he admitted it, and he was given a punishment. And, oh, by the way, his security clearance was temporarily lifted, but he will get it back again, for lying, for stealing, and for committing an act of outrage against our country's security. Lieutenant Colonel Shaffer, a Bronze Star 23-year military veteran, simply told the truth and now his life is being ruined.

His career is ended. He is no longer in military intelligence. They have taken his security clearance, and they are about to destroy him as a person. They are about to deny him the basic health care and the salary that he has earned, and they are doing it in this way. This is outrageous. It is evil. They do not want to fire Tony because they also do not want him to talk to the media. So by suspending him and removing his pay and his health care, they hurt him bad, but he cannot talk because he is under suspension and his lawyer has advised him that to talk to the media, to talk to Members of Congress, even when he is not being paid, would cause him further problems and totally prevent him from ever having this gross problem reversed. Mr. Speaker, this is outrageous. Mr. Speaker, this is not America.

Over my 19 years in Congress, I have led 40 delegations to the former Soviet Union. I have sat in the face of the Soviet Communists and confronted them on full transparency. I sat at the table with President Lukashenko of Belarus, who has been called by our Secretary of State the last dictator in Europe. I took both delegations to North Korea, Mr. Speaker, and sat across the table from Kim Gye Gwan and I told him we abhor the way they treat their people, the way they lie about what is happening, and the way they distort information.

Mr. Speaker, I took three delegations to Libya to meet with Qadhafi, and I told him that we are absolutely outraged at what Libya did in helping complete the Lockerbie bombing and the bombing of the Berlin nightclub.

You know, Mr. Speaker, I never thought I would have to take the floor of this Chamber and make the same statements about the Defense Intelligence Agency. As a supporter of the President, as a supporter of the military, Mr. Speaker, if we allow this to go forward, then we send the signal to every man and woman wearing a uniform that if you tell the truth, you will be destroyed if a career bureaucrat above you does not like what you are saying. If you tell the truth, we will take your health care benefits away from your kids. If you tell the truth, we will ruin you.

Mr. Speaker, this is not America. Mr. Speaker, this is not what I have been told by Secretary Rumsfeld that we are doing with our troops in protecting them, in giving them the best equipment and the best training. This is not what I spend hours in committee hearings on. This sends the wrong signal to America's troops. It tells them, do not be honest. Do not respect the fact that you have to be truthful. If there is somebody that the truth offends, then you better be silent.

Mr. Speaker, I have today asked for an independent investigation of the Defense Intelligence Agency and their efforts at destroying Tony Shaffer's life. This is outrageous, Mr. Speaker. They trumped up charges against him. They said while he was overseas in Afghanistan, forward deployed, that he forwarded cell phone calls from his official phone to his personal phone; and when they checked that out, it ran up a cost to the taxpayers of about $60. The second verbal charge they gave him was that he went to a course at the Army War College and he got reimbursed for his travel, his mileage and tolls, 100-some dollars. And they said he received a commendation for which he was not entitled, even though it was signed by his commanding officer and the acting Secretary of the Army.

But they went beyond that, Mr. Speaker. They went beyond that with this man. They said he had $2,000 of debt, personal debt. Well, I would like to have every Pentagon employee tomorrow, I would like to have the senior leadership show us what debt they have in the Defense Intelligence Agency so we can make that public.

They even went to this length, Mr. Speaker: the Defense Intelligence Agency wrote in an official document that Lieutenant Colonel Shaffer stole public property. A serious charge. Well, when you check what that public property was, it was an assortment of pens, government pens. But what they did not say in the Defense Intelligence report was that he took those pens when he was 15 years of age and was with his father when he was on assignment at one of our embassy outposts. He took the pens to give to other students at the school when he was 15 years of age. And by the way, Mr. Speaker, it was Tony Shaffer himself who admitted to that thievery when he applied for his security clearance. So the Defense Intelligence Agency knew that during his entire career of 23 years, but they put that in the document against him.

This is a scandal, Mr. Speaker. It is an outrage. It is a travesty. Everyone that worked with Tony Shaffer, the Navy officers, the private citizens have all said the same thing. This is a scandal to get Tony Shaffer because he has told the truth.

Now, this Defense Intelligence Agency and this Deputy Director had the audacity to have their legal counsel send Tony Shaffer's lawyer a letter on September 23. I cannot put that letter in the RECORD because it is privileged information, but it will eventually come out. But in that letter, in the second to last paragraph, the legal counsel for the Defense Intelligence Agency says to Mr. Shaffer's lawyer, he cannot receive any more classified information from the Defense Intelligence Agency because I checked and his security clearances have all been removed. Therefore, he is not allowed to look at anything that is secret or confidential.

Now, that is a letter sent by the general counsel of the DIA on September 23 of this year. Two weeks later, Mr. Speaker, to show the stupidity of the Defense Intelligence Agency, they send seven packages to Mr. Shaffer's lawyer

[Page: H8981]

of his personal belongings, which the Deputy Director of the DIA told my staff 3 months ago did not exist any more. And in those seven boxes, Mr. Speaker, were five classified memos. The Defense Intelligence Agency sent five classified memos to Lieutenant Colonel Shaffer, which they told him on September 23 he was not allowed to have access to.

Mr. Speaker, that is a felony; and I have asked the Inspector General and the legal officials to investigate and prosecute the Defense Intelligence officials who sent five classified documents through the mail or by hand delivery to Tony Shaffer.

In addition, Mr. Speaker, the Defense Intelligence Agency, in its absolute total stupidity, included in those boxes $500 worth of Federal property, including a multi-hundred dollar GPS system owned by the Federal Government, which they sent to Tony Shaffer, I guess to keep. They also sent, Mr. Speaker, 25 pens, brand new, and marked on them is ``Property of the U.S. Government.'' The Defense Intelligence Agency, in its absolute utter stupidity, sent Tony Shaffer Federal property which they accused him of taking when he was 15 years of age.

Mr. Speaker, there is something desperately wrong here. There is a bureaucracy in the Defense Intelligence Agency that is out of control. They want to destroy the reputation of a 23-year military officer, Bronze Star recipient, hero of our country, with two kids because people in defense intelligence are embarrassed at what is going to come out.

And what is going to come out, Mr. Speaker? Well, we are going to find out, Mr. Speaker, that that unit, Able Danger, not only identified Mohammed Atta before 9/11, not only did they try to pass that information to the FBI, not only was that large data destroyed in the summer of 2000, but now, Mr. Speaker, I can add a new dimension to this whole story. Yesterday, Mr. Speaker, I met with another Able Danger official. I was not aware of this official's knowledge because he does not live within the Beltway.

This official, Mr. Speaker, has impeccable credentials. I cannot reveal his name today. I will to any Member of this body, any of our colleagues that want to come to me, I will tell you privately who this official is, and you will agree with me when I tell you his name that he has impeccable credentials. This official yesterday, Mr. Speaker, in a meeting in my office, told me that he has never been talked to by the Pentagon. He has never been talked to by the Defense Intelligence Agency in their supposed investigation. He has never been talked to by the 9/11 Commission staff in their investigation; yet this official had a leadership position in Able Danger.

This official told me that there is a separate cache of information collected from over 20 Federal agencies in 1999 and 2000 on Able Danger that still may exist. Now, the Pentagon has told us all this material was destroyed, and now I have a senior official telling me there is a second pot of information that may well still exist.

Furthermore, at the hearing over in the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, when Senator Specter asked why this data was destroyed, the witness who destroyed the data said, well, I was told that we could not keep this data for more than 90 days because it might involve information that contains U.S. persons, so we had to destroy it.

[Time: 20:45]

Well, I found out that is not the story. The reason the data was destroyed was because Special Forces Command asked the Army for that data and within a matter of days, that data was destroyed so the Army would not pass it to Special Forces Command. Yet there still is, was and I hope still is a massive pot of data.

But furthermore, that official that I talked to yesterday will also say that there was no 90-day requirement, as was testified before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary. He said on a regular basis they kept information from Able Danger data mining for months and months and months. In fact, he will say he had a discussion with a lawyer in DOD named Schiffren who told him do not worry about it, just fill out a document, sign your name that you need it, put it in the box, and you can keep it as long as you want.

Mr. Speaker, that is entirely contradictory to what the Defense Intelligence Agency has been telling us, to what DOD has been telling us. Now we have someone who is willing to come forward and say that 90-day period is not real, they kept Able Danger information for months and months and months.

Mr. Speaker, there is something desperately wrong here. A sitting President of the United States resigned his position because he tried to cover up a third-rate burglary when some low-level operatives from the Republican committee to reelect him broke into the Democrat headquarters in Washington, D.C. No one was killed. No money was stolen. No State secrets were stolen. It was a third-rate burglary, but it caused the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

Mr. Speaker, we are talking about the deaths of 3,000 Americans.

Mr. Speaker, we are talking about 2.5 terabytes of data about al Qaeda. That is equal to one-fourth of all of the printed material in the Library of Congress.

Mr. Speaker, we are talking about Mohammed Atta and three of the terrorists that attacked us on 9/11.

Mr. Speaker, we are talking about military intelligence officers, including an Annapolis graduate who will command one of our destroyers in January of 2006 who risked his entire career to state on the record I will swear until I die that I saw Mohammed Atta's face every day starting in January of 2000, a year and a half before 9/11.

Mr. Speaker, this is not somebody off the street, this is a graduate of Annapolis, a 23-year Naval officer who will command one of our destroyers in January who is agreeing with Lieutenant Shaffer. We have three other people who have testified under oath that they saw the same photograph, and the person I met yesterday will testify that he had the name of a Mohammed Atta before 9/11 but not the face.

Mr. Speaker, this is not some third-rate burglary coverup. This is not some Watergate incident. This is an attempt to prevent the American people from knowing the facts about how we could have prevented 9/11 and people are covering it up today. They are ruining the career of a military officer to do it and we cannot let it stand. I do not care whether you are Democrat or Republican, you cannot let a lieutenant colonel's career be ruined because of some bureaucrat in the Defense Intelligence Agency. If we let that happen, then no one who wears the uniform will ever feel protected because we will have let them down. Anyone who wears the uniform of this country who is serving today expects us to back him or her up and that is not happening. We are seeing lying, distortion.

Mr. Speaker, do you know, Wolf Blitzer on CNN told my staff that a Department of Defense employee told him that Lieutenant Colonel Shaffer was having an affair with one of my employees. How low can we go, Mr. Speaker? How low can we go to allow this Defense Department to try to ruin the reputation and the personal life of a lieutenant colonel with a Bronze Star? To Wolf Blitzer, Mr. Speaker.

We need to know the name of that defense official who told Wolf Blitzer who told my staff, and he is not the only one. I have other media people who will come forward in this grand effort to destroy the reputation of a uniformed military officer, to create scandalous accusations. He does not even know my staff, to accuse him of stealing pens when he was 15, to take away his health care benefits for his two kids because he is telling the truth.

What do we stand for if not the truth? Is it more important that we be politically correct? Is it more important that I not rock the boat because my party is in the White House, because I campaigned for Bush, and support Don Rumsfeld. Is that more important? If that is more important, I do not want to be here. I will leave. I will leave my post, but I will not do it until we get justice for this man and for these people who the 9/11 Commission called historically insignificant.

Mr. Speaker, there is something wrong inside the Beltway.

Mr. Speaker, there is something desperately wrong when a military officer risks his life in Afghanistan time and again, embedded with our troops under

[Page: H8982]

an assumed name with a false beard and a false identity, forward deployed with our troops, gets castigated, gets ridiculed, gets some low life scum at the Pentagon spreading malicious lies about this individual, and then say to his lawyer, we are going to take away his health care benefits, we are going to take away his salary.

Mr. Speaker, if we allow this to stand as Democrats and Republicans, then none of us deserve to be here. When we all go overseas and meet the troops, we tell them how proud we are of them. We provide funding for them. We give them training and take care of their families. What we are allowing to happen right now is the Defense Intelligence Agency to ruin the career and the life of a man who spent 23 years protecting his Nation. If Lieutenant Colonel Shaffer was telling this story alone in a vacuum, that would be one thing. But he has been corroborated over and over again. I have met with at least 10 people who fully corroborate what Tony Shaffer says. Those meetings with the FBI, the FBI employee still works there and she told the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, I set those meetings up with the FBI to transfer information about al Qaeda and Able Danger. So she is still there and she testified.

What we have here, I am convinced of this now, is an aggressive attempt by CIA management to cover up their own shortcomings in not being able to do what the Able Danger team did: They identified Mohammed Atta and the al Qaeda cell of Brooklyn 1 year before Ð9/11. But even before that, as the story unfolds, you are going to hear the story that they also identified the threat to the USS Cole 2 weeks before the attack, and 2 days before the attack were screaming not to let the USS Cole come into the harbor at Yemen because they knew something was about to happen.

Mr. Speaker, bad news never comes easy; but in a democracy, the bad news has to come out so we can make sure it does not happen again.

Mr. Speaker, this whole thing started, not to embarrass anyone, this whole thing started because none of us knew that Mohammed Atta was identified before 9/11. It started because this Congress, this body in particular, tried to establish what is now in place back in 1999, a national collaborative center, but the CIA said we did not need it. The American people deserve to have the answers here. They deserve to know why 3,000 people died. They deserve to know what we could have done and should have done to better prepare ourselves and to work to prepare for the next incident. The American people need to know where those multiple terabytes of data is. Is it still being used? We know in January of 2001, General Shelton was given a 3-hour briefing on Able Danger. So even if they destroyed the data back in the summer of 2000, in January of 2001 there was enough material to give General Shelton, Commander of the Joint Chiefs, a 3-hour briefing.

Mr. Speaker, there is something here. I am not a conspiracy theorist, but there is something desperately wrong, Mr. Speaker. There is something outrageous at work here. This is not a third-rate burglary of a political campaign headquarters. This involved what is right now the covering up of information that led to the deaths of 3,000 people, changed the course of history, led to the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, and has disrupted our country, our economy and people's lives.

Mr. Speaker, we could ignore this. I cannot. If it means I have to resign from this body, I will resign. I will not allow, after 19 years in this body and as a vice chairman of the Committee on Armed Services, bureaucrats in the Defense Intelligence Agency to concoct stories, to talk about the theft of pens when this lieutenant colonel was 15 years old, to talk about this man's personal debt of $2,000. I would hate to check the indebtedness of Members of Congress. I know mine is more than $2,000.

Mr. Speaker, this is not America. I had a group of college students down from Drexel University. There were about 20 of them, including representative students from eight other nations. We talked about this. Of course we have talked about all of the problem countries in the world. We talk about our values as a Nation, the need for a democracy to have people involved, to have transparency, to have people who respect the rule of law and the Constitution.

How do I tell them that is what is working here, Mr. Speaker, when the Pentagon says that these people who simply want to tell the truth are not allowed? They are saying it is for classified purposes, yet the DOD lawyer on the Senate side there is nothing classified about any of the information. It is not about classified programs. I would be the last to want to see anything classified revealed. I have seen many, many instances where I have been given sensitive information that only a few people in the Congress and the country had. I would never reveal it. It is not about that. This is not about the DIA, this is not about the CIA, this is about CYA. It is about CYA by bureaucrats in the Defense Intelligence Agency and possibly some political operatives that do not want the facts to come out about Able Danger and the information that the Able Danger team put together. And in the process, they are going to destroy a man, a man who has been recognized by his country, who has a family, and who simply wants to do the right thing.

Mr. Speaker, I hated to take the floor tonight, but I did not know what else to do. We have committees of Congress working on this. I want to thank the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Wolf), chairman of the FBI Appropriation Committee on Oversight. He is as outraged as I am. I want to thank the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Sensenbrenner), who is looking at this, and the gentleman from California (Chairman Hunter). The Committee on Armed Services has a full-time staffer assigned to get to the facts of this. I want to thank the gentleman from New York (Mr. King), chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security, because he is looking at this. I want to thank the gentleman from Michigan (Chairman Hoekstra) and the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He has met with Tony Shaffer and has offered to get more information. I want to thank my colleagues on the other side of the aisle for standing up and beginning to ask questions, and I want to thank Senator Specter and Senator Biden, who attended a Committee on the Judiciary hearing and expressed their outrage. I want to thank Senator Sessions, Senator Kyl, and Senator Grassley, who were all there. In fact, Senator Grassley called it a coverup.

Mr. Speaker, I cannot tell you the number of Members who have come to me and said this is unacceptable. I would hope that as a result of what we have heard tonight every Member of Congress will ask for an inquiry. The gentlewoman from Georgia (Ms. McKinney) wrote a letter to the chairman of the Committee on Armed Services asking for an investigation. We have from Republicans to Democrats, left to right, conservatives to liberals. What is happening here is unacceptable. It is unimaginable. It is un-American. All over the world tonight, young Americans are wearing our uniforms. They are doing a great job. They make us all proud when we travel overseas. They make us proud because of the pride they have. When I talk to them, they say I am glad to be doing what I am doing. I am doing the right thing for our country. I will go any place the Commander in Chief sends me. Whether I am in Afghanistan or Iraq, they will tell me that.

[Time: 21:00]

Whether we are in Kosovo or Somalia, they will tell us that. Whether we are at Hurricane Katrina, whether we are at Hurricane Andrew, or whether we are out in California, the earthquake, or the Midwestern floods, our troops are all the same. They respect our country. They respect our Constitution. If we allow this travesty to continue, Mr. Speaker, then we have let all of those people down for some nameless, faceless bureaucrat who is fearful that the information will finally come to light, that the DIA just did not get it.

Back in 1999 and 2000, they did not have a clue. They had millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars, and could not do what a 20-member team did in being able to identify Mohammed Atta before the 9/11 attacks. DIA does not want that to come out, Mr. Speaker. They do not want that to come out. Heaven forbid the Defense Intelligence Agency, with hundreds of millions of dollars, would have a 20-member team do what they could not

[Page: H8983]

do because they were using new technology and new software. They do not want that to come out. That is why that Deputy Director, when he was at that meeting, said, I do not want to see this. Do not show it to me. And that is why today that Deputy Director is trying to ruin the career of Lieutenant Colonel Shaffer.

The only way to resolve this, Mr. Speaker, is to have a full independent investigation by the Inspector General of the Pentagon. I have asked Secretary Rumsfeld today to do that. I would ask my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to join me in that request. Let the independent inspector for the Pentagon go in, not DIA. DIA cannot investigate itself. It does not have the capability to do that. It does not have the integrity to do that. Let the Inspector General do the investigation and while that is being done, protect Lieutenant Colonel Shaffer. He does not deserve to have his career ruined or destroyed for telling the truth.

And while we are at it, Mr. Speaker, if DIA is going to continue to press this ridiculous set of facts, then as I said earlier, I want DIA prosecuted for the five felonies they committed in sending classified documents to a person that 2 weeks earlier they said was incapable of receiving classified information. And if this continues, I want DIA held responsible for illegally transferring $500 of public assets to a person, that in the process of sending that stuff to him, DIA committed fraud against the taxpayers. I want them held accountable: DIA's stupidity; DIA's incompetence.

We have a new nominee for the head of DIA, and I am going to ask every Senator to fully explore each of these issues before that person is confirmed. I will meet with every Senator personally and go over all of this information. And I would encourage the Senators and the House Members to interview the other people who worked with Lieutenant Colonel Shaffer and to get their assessments of what is going on there. They will all tell them the same thing: Shaffer is being abused and used as a scapegoat. If they can ruin Shaffer, they can silence the story.

It cannot happen, Mr. Speaker. We cannot let it. That is not what America is about. That is not what we say to our enlisted personnel when they sign up for duty. That is not what we say when we pass our defense bills every year.

This man is being maligned and mistreated. He is being harassed. The most scurrilous accusations, totally unfounded, have been given to the American media; and I will name names, and I will ask for an investigation of the people who made those statements to these media people because it all needs to be put on the record.

And as someone tomorrow who will chair another hearing on our defense oversight to try to get the best value for the dollars for our military, I ask all of our colleagues, Mr. Speaker, on both sides of the aisle to join us. This is not Republicans or Democrats. It is about what is fundamental to this country. I would ask our constituents across America we represent to join us, to express their outrage, to e-mail, make phone calls, write letters to the Secretary of Defense, the President of the United States, to Members of Congress to simply let the story be told. Let the Able Danger story finally come out to the American people. Let them understand what really happened. Let Scott Philpott talk. Let Tony Shaffer talk. Let the others who have been silenced have a chance to tell their story to Congress and openly to the American people. In the end, the country will be stronger. [END]"

###

More information on Able Danger on Congressman Weldon's website.

Did Someone Wake Up President Bush, or Is This the Sound of the Alarm Clock?

INVASION USA
Chertoff declares:
Expel all illegals
Homeland Security chief aims
to eliminate 'catch and release'

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Posted: October 18, 2005
2:29 p.m. Eastern
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© 2005 WorldNetDaily.com


Michael Chertoff
Anyone who enters the United States illegally should be expelled without exception, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told a Senate hearing today.

"Our goal at DHS is to completely eliminate the 'catch and release' enforcement problem, and return every single illegal entrant, no exceptions," he said.

"It should be possible to achieve significant and measurable progress to this end in less than a year."

Chertoff said U.S. authorities are immediately returning thousands of Mexicans entering the country illegally, but "other parts of the system have nearly collapsed under the weight of numbers."

"The problem is especially severe for non-Mexicans apprehended at the southwest border," he said.

"Today, a non-Mexican illegal immigrant caught trying to enter the United States across the southwest border has an 80 percent chance of being released immediately because we lack the holding facilities," Chertoff explained.

"Through a comprehensive approach, we are moving to end this 'catch and release' style of border enforcement by reengineering our detention and removal process."

As WorldNetDaily reported in May, the president of a labor organization representing Border Patrol employees and a Texas congressman criticized a Homeland Security bill passed by the House for failing to fund construction of new detention facilities to hold illegal border-crossers from countries other than Mexico, resulting in their automatic release pending a later hearing date.

A Zogby poll earlier this year indicated Americans were not pleased with the Bush administration's handling of illegal immigration.

The poll showed a huge majority – 81 percent – believed local and state police should help federal authorities enforce laws against illegal immigration. Only 14 percent disagreed.

Voters also were asked, "Do you support or oppose the Bush administration's proposal to give millions of illegal aliens guest worker status and the opportunity to become citizens?" Only 35 percent gave their support, and 56 percent said no.

The biggest opponents of illegal immigration are Democrats, African-Americans, women and people with household income below $75,000.

When it came to the status of the nation's borders, respondents were asked, "Do you agree or disagree that the federal government should deploy troops on the Mexican border as a temporary measure to control illegal immigration?" A clear majority – 53 percent – agree, while 40 percent disagree.

Is the Fate of America to Be Based on the 'Fate of Made in the U.S.A.'? Is China the Spoiler?

The trouble with competing in business in an envious world is that the lean and hungry will do almost anything to relieve you of everything you have, including your life. The same can be said governments, especially those that are willing to exploit and kill portions of their populations in the global race for economic supremacy. The population of the United States has enjoyed an unprecedented period of peace and prosperity that was unheard of in world history. Naturally prosperity has come at the expense of less fortunate nations, some of which are surging ahead, no holds barred, intent on winning the economic war and bringing down the United States.

The players in this war are various. The most obvious is China. Although parts of China remain poverty stricken, the economy of China is surging ahead and is expected to soon overtake that of the United States. They have accomplished this 'miracle' by exploiting the environment, their enormous population of peasants, by exacting obedience to Communist and communal rule, and by partnering with strange bedfellows.

One of the most troubling is our neighbor to the south: Mexico.

Chinese President Hu Jintao’s recent visit to Mexico City to meet with Mexican President Vicente Fox marked a new beginning in Sino-Mexican relations with both leaders signing agreements in the areas of bilateral trade, mining and energy. “The motive of my visit is to deepen the strategic association between Mexico and China,” president Hu Jintao told journalists gathered at the Presidential Palace.

The trip to Mexico was the first for Hu Jintao since becoming head of state and was designed to promote further business and diplomatic cooperation. Earlier this year, Chinese vice-president Zeng Qinghong and Jin Qinglin, chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), visited Mexico to discuss the development of bilateral ties.

This strange development is unexpected because Mexico "has traditionally viewed China as a key contributor to the country's sub-part economic growth,due in large part to China's use of cheap labor to outmaneuver Mexico in the U.S. exports market." Bilateral cooperation is now being pursued because Mexico has realized that a partnership is more realistic than attempts to battle China's cheap labor that is often done in Laogai or slave labor camps.

The proposal is to set up Mexico as a "Singapore-like way-station" for U.S. bound Chinese goods," China is now Mexico's second-largest trading partner behind the U.S. and direct flights between Mexico and China have begun as millions of Chinese citizens are expected to travel overseas to Mexico as well as other destinations. Worrisome is also Chinese attraction to Mexico's oil. China is now flexing its muscles, willing to "intrude into America's backyard."

American companies in competition with China and other countries that use "cheap labor" are going down the tubes. One of the latest of note is Delphi Corp., the "largest U.S. auto parts company." It appears that perhaps manufacturing in the United States is "becoming extinct."

Manufacturing in the U.S. used to account for one in three jobs; now it represents one in nine. When held in comparison to business and human resource practices by countries such as China, American manufacturing can't be profitable.
China uses the Laogai system; the American manufacturing system, especially the UAW, GM, Ford, and Chrysler

have crafted contracts that turned the companies into mini-welfare states, providing above-average hourly wages (today's average for all manufacturing: $16.60), rich fringe benefits and strong job security. For example, laid-off UAW workers essentially get full salary and benefits indefinitely. With limited competition, companies could pass along common labor costs to consumers and compete on styling and performance. No more. The protected market has given way to imports and foreign firms with nonunionized U.S. plants. Price competition is fierce.

Now comes the reckoning. The market and the welfare state collide. According to the UAW, Delphi is seeking deep cuts in both wages (to about $10 to $12 an hour) and total labor costs including fringes (to $20 to $25 an hour). In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Delphi chief executive Steve Miller indicated that once retirees become eligible for Medicare at 65, he wants to eliminate any supplementary health insurance coverage.

The envy of the world, many American workers have lived high on the hog. With China at America's border in Mexico, Venezuela, and Cuba, will it be possible to maintain the style of life to which we have become accustomed? Can American manufacturing survive? Vladimir Lenin once stated: "The road to America is through Mexico."

Millions of the world's citizens pour through the borders every year. Many come to work, but high-paying manufacturing jobs that used to lure Americans and illegal entrants alike are no longer there. Is it because American labor has priced itself out of the market?

Although Americans can't compete effectively with slave labor and the sweatshop conditions found in other countries,

The fate of American manufacturing lies largely in American hands. Of course, some labor-intensive production will go abroad. But in many industries, job losses and cost-cutting -- though devastating to individuals -- can sustain production and restore profitability. The U.S. steel industry now produces more than in the 1980s, though it has lost two-thirds of its jobs. Elsewhere, innovation and high-value manufacturing should create jobs. Consider United Technologies. It makes jet engines, elevators, air conditioners and helicopters. Despite extensive foreign factories, much skilled manufacturing remains here. On one popular helicopter, air frames are assembled in the Czech Republic; the high-value electronic systems and blades are mainly American.

But one giant unknown clouds everything: China. Until now, its booming U.S. exports have mostly displaced exports from other countries. As China modernizes -- moves into more advanced industries -- this could change dramatically. The combination of low wages, a huge market and an artificially low currency confers staggering competitive advantages. They constitute a powerful magnet for foreign investment in many sectors, whose output could subsequently be exported. Unless the currency rises substantially, the United States could lose many industries that, by all other economic logic, it shouldn't. Therein lies the real threat of extinction or something close to it.

Increased competition between the U.S. and China for oil and markets signal increase in prices and perhaps a degrading of the style of life for many in the United States.

Thank the Year 1905: Big Ideas That Have Changed the World

It is so easy to rail against, to decry, to be a Cassandra that one can diminish the importance of the good and great on the planet. So many humans are inferior in so many ways that they can seem to be all humans, if one does not keep context. So, here is a reminder of just how good man can be and how good man can make life and has made life for us. Enjoy the sunlight from man's mind.



Article published Oct 19, 2005
Big ideas that have changed the world

Thank the year 1905 for:
The laser. Solar cells. Computer chips. Optical switches.

And don't forget The Bomb and nuclear energy.

An unparalleled flurry of scientific thought marks 1905 as a year of monumental discovery. Five brainy papers that revolutionized physics and other natural sciences were published that year.

Had it been one paper each by five scientists, it still would have been a remarkable feat. But that all five were written by one 26-year-old is next to incomprehensible - about as easy to grasp as E=mc€.

"Any one of them could have won him the Nobel Prize," University of Florida physics professor Jack Sabin said of the genius Albert Einstein. "1905 was the greatest year for physics since (Isaac) Newton."

Recognizing that, UF's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the department of physics sponsored a symposium Tuesday commemorating "Einstein's Miracle Year." Sabin, associate dean of the college, said Dean Neil Sullivan said "we couldn't let 2005 go by without some type of event marking what a fantastic year 1905 was."

Several speakers recounted Einstein's life and work before an audience of more than 60 people crowded into Dauer Hall. Among them were students, faculty and members of the general public.

Fred Gregory of UF's history department, who specializes in the history of science, talked about the early influences that led Einstein into natural science.

One of his earliest influences was a compass he was given at about age 5. Later influences were the political climate of late 19th century Germany and a couple of books questioning science and conventional religion that he read in early adolescence.

"He was not a favorite of teachers," Gregory said. "He had an anti-authoritarian streak and (the books) were right down his alley."

In his miracle year, Einstein wasn't even a full-time researcher; he was working in a patent office in Bern, Germany. But his prolific writings of 1905 began with his doctoral dissertation that proposed a new theory of molecular dimensions.

In other published papers that year he also proved the existence of atoms, devised his theory of relativity - which he followed up a few weeks later with his famous equation on energy, E=mc€ - and laid the foundation for quantum physics.

The excitement Einstein created with his theories a century ago was reflected in Arthur Hebard's voice as he spoke about another 1905 milestone, "the photoelectric effect." That complex study on the relationship of electrons and electromagnetic radiation, he said, led to today's laser and solar-cell technology, among other things.

"His genius really spread across the map," said Hebard, a UF professor of physics who conducted an experiment with ultraviolet light to help explain the photoelectric effect. "It's his different ways of looking at space and time."

He said Einstein's equation E=hf-W - which explains the photoelectric effect - "is just as important as E=mc€."

Before the seminar, Sabin said Einstein's work of 1905 was not instantly recognized or accepted.

"In my opinion, the theory of relativity was the most revolutionary of those discoveries, and it took a long time for it to get accepted," Sabin said. "In fact, it was normally thought that he should have won the Nobel Prize for that, but the old Swedes on the committee thought it was wrong."

It was 16 years later, in 1921, that Einstein won the Nobel Prize for physics - for the photoelectric effect, not his theory of relativity.

Einstein's general theory of relativity, Sabin said, holds that light is attracted by gravity just as mass is. That means that you should be able to see the bending of light rays close to the sun, he said. And just as Einstein thought, you can.

Gregory said Einstein's work "remains with us because it forces us to confront what we normally do not think about - that our lives on spaceship Earth are part of a vastly larger drama.

"We occasionally catch glimpses of its mystery - in Einstein's results, for example - and these snatches of the whole remind us of how much there is yet to discover," he said.

Bob Arndorfer can be reached at 352-374-5042 or arndorb@gvillesun.com.


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Religion's Blindspot

Every time some terrorist pulls off something horrible, we hear a lot of questions like, "How can they sleep at night?" or, "How can they look at themselves in the mirror?"

The underlying assumption is that because they have done something terrible, they should feel intensely guilty.

Unfortunately, they don't feel guilty.

How can this be? How can you blow up school children, people gathered in a market place, office workers in a couple of skyscrapers, and not feel guilty?

The answer to this lies in a "blind spot" we have. Here it is: Far too many people believe that because 94% of the population shares a belief in the divine, that we are all essentially alike and because of that, one of these days we will all get along.

Unfortunately, it isn't the shared belief in the divine, whatever form it takes, that unifies us; it is a shared MORAL CODE.

A MORAL CODE is the codification of values. It is a set of values we have chosen to guide our thoughts and behaviors. Among most peoples of the world, human life has been, to one degree or another, selected as the fundamental value by which all others are measured. Human life is the "standard of the good;" those thoughts and behaviors which tend to promote human life are considered "good," while those thoughts and behaviors which tend to threaten human life are considered "bad."

Not so with Islam. The Islamic "standard of the good," by which all other values are measured, is the spread of Islam. Any thought or behavior, up to and including murder and mayhem, which tends to support the spread of Islam, is considered "good," while any thought or behavior which tends to threaten the spread of Islam is considered "bad."

That's why, when a terrorist blows up 50+ people on a subway, he can sleep peacefully that night, and look at himself with satisfaction in the mirror the next morning. Because of his MORAL CODE, he thinks he has done something "good."

It is in this respect that Islam must change if they are to join the rest of the earth in peace and productive work. They can keep Allah, the Kaaba, the Pillars, praying five times a day, the Hajj, and whatever other trappings they want; they must, however, abandon the spread of Islam as their fundamental "standard of the good."

Until and unless we recognize that it isn't a shared belief in the divine that unites us, but rather, a common moral code, this conflict will continue.

Faces of America

America has many faces. Here is one of our favorites.

The proposed Iraqi constitution will not bring freedom to Iraq or security to America

An op-ed from the Ayn Rand Institute:

The Advent of Freedom?

By Onkar Ghate

As the world eagerly watches the Iraqi constitutional referendum, the
Bush administration and its intellectual supporters herald the
occasion as a historic step toward freedom in the Middle East and
security for America. This view betrays an appalling ignorance of the
nature of freedom and the requirements of our national self-interest.

Politically, as America's Founding Fathers understood, to be free is
to possess the ability to exercise one's rights to life, liberty,
property, and the pursuit of happiness. To be free means that no other
men, whatever their number or position, can coercively prevent an
individual from taking the steps rationally required to support his
life. It means no one can force him to accept beliefs or dogmas,
control what he can or cannot say, seize the material wealth he has
produced and earned, or dictate the goals he must live for.

A constitution is valuable only if it strictly delimits the power of
government to that of protecting each individual's rights. History
demonstrates that government is, potentially, the worst violator of
man's rights. A proper constitution declares off-limits any
governmental action that would trespass on an individual's rights, no
matter whether that action is proposed in the name of the king, the
common good, God, or public morality.

The draft Iraqi constitution, however, grants virtually unlimited
power to the state.

As liberals have demanded in America for over a century, private
property will be eviscerated. Although the proposed constitution
nominally protects property rights, it explicitly allows that private
property can be seized by the government "for the public interest." By
contrast, public property "is sacrosanct, and its protection is the
duty of every citizen." (In practice, this means that if the
government takes a citizen's money, business or home, he must stand
aside--and then defend with his life what the government has stolen
from him.) The state will dictate whether an Iraqi can sell land to
foreigners. It will manage the oil. It will provide to its hapless
citizens "free" education and health care, "a correct environmental
atmosphere," and work "that guarantees them a good life."

The government will also, as conservatives have long dreamed for
America, enforce religious morality. "Islam," Article 2 declares, "is
the official religion of the state and is a basic source of
legislation: No law can be passed that contradicts the undisputed
rules of Islam." Experts in Islamic law will sit on the Supreme Court.
The state will guarantee protection of motherhood and the "ethical and
religious value" of the family. Citizens will have freedom of speech,
of press, of assembly--so long as no one says or does anything that
violates "public morality," i.e., the dogmas of Islam.

And as if to leave no doubt that the state can exert total control
over the individual's life, Article 45 adds that the government can
restrict or limit "any of the freedoms and liberties stated in the
constitution . . . as long as this restriction or limitation does not
undermine the essence of the right or freedom." Of course, part of the
essence of any right or freedom is that it is inviolable.

We in America had no reason to expect freedom from the drafters of
Iraq's constitution. Like many of our own intellectuals on the left
and the right (some of whom were advisers in Iraq), Iraqi
intellectuals are either tribal or religious collectivists (or both).
Whichever the case, they deny the individual and his rights. The
tribalists deny material independence to the individual and seek to
control his every economic step. The religionists, more numerous and
powerful, deny spiritual independence to the individual and seek to
dictate his every conviction and purpose in life. It is no accident
that the draft constitution is both "keen to advance Iraqi tribes and
clans" and eager to promote Islam. Freedom's intellectual
preconditions do not exist in Iraq.

In the long term, whether Iraq's religious collectivists seize the
machinery of state by a protracted, bloody civil war or by the ballot
box will make no difference to America's security.

Nor did we have any reason to think that our self-defense requires, at
the price of our soldiers' lives, "imposing freedom" on Iraq or the
Middle East. It is true that free nations pose no threat to us. But
neither do semi-barbarous nations when they and their citizens are
demoralized--when they know that taking up arms against us guarantees
their devastation. This is the lesson America's military should have
taught the Islamic totalitarians and their legions of collectivist
supporters and sympathizers in the Middle East after 9/11--indeed,
after Iran's embassy takeover in 1979. But this is not the lesson
conveyed by Operation Iraqi Freedom, which espouses Bush's "calling of
our time": selflessly to bring freedom to those hostile to the idea.

Freedom is an intellectual achievement, which requires disavowal of
collectivism and embrace of individualism. Sadly, no matter what the
referendum's result, this is not what we are witnessing in Iraq.

__________________________________________________________________
Onkar Ghate is Dean of the Objectivist Academic Center at the Ayn
Rand Institute in Irvine, CA. The Institute promotes the ideas of Ayn
Rand--best-selling author of Atlas Shrugged and The
Fountainhead and originator of the philosophy of Objectivism.



Copyright (c) 2005 Ayn Rand(R) Institute. All rights reserved.

The Ayn Rand Institute, 2121 Alton Pkwy, Ste 250, Irvine, CA 92606

SCOTUS Justice Breyer's Fog Machine

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer has a new book, ,Active Liberty: Interpreting Our Democratic Constitution, which he and the traditional media are hawking. A radio talk show played a snippet of a speech given by Justice Breyer, in which he discussed the theses of his new book. According to him, he wrote the book to justify two processes dominating today's Supreme Court of the United States: (1.) We must transcend the original intent of the Constitution because the Founders who wrote it could not possibly have forseen the modern world and its unique problems; and, (2.) SCOTUS decisions must reach out to foreign jurisprudence, even to distant inhabited planets if need be, to embrace the living law.

If you want to know what ails the Supreme Court of the United States, Justice Breyer has given you an epistemological dossier worthy of House, M.D. However, to understand this mess and its context, you have to think in terms of basic principles.

Hearing what Justice Breyer said in support of his book convinced me of a few things. What those on the Right cite as condemnable jurisprudence by SCOTUS really miss the true damage that SCOTUS “interpretations” and “decisions” commit. And, let’s get rid of that erroneous notion that we cannot understand the complexity of their legal thinking, unless we, too, are legalistic scholars. Every American can understand the Constitution, and that’s all that is needed. The rest is intentional obfuscation.

There’s really nothing hard to understand here, not in terms of fundamental principles. Justice Breyer gave away the whole store. He never seemed to appreciate what he said on the radio or in his screed. And, alarmingly but typically, the Right missed it all. The Left did not miss any.

People in America, day in and day out, absorb a malignant anti-intellectualism coming from their public education, a.k.a., government schools. Ideas in general are and contextual thinking have been become severely devalued in our culture. Rap and rock are typical examples among many representing this cultural dysfunction. It is not just that people do not think with any context; they are not even curious. Thus the blindness, deafness, and dullness among our American Schmoos allow cultural poison to percolate undetected.

When Justice Breyer indicates that the Constitution has become dated, what is he ignoring? For starters, he ignores the obvious amendment process. However, he meant much more, and that more is really ominous.

The Left have truly invested themselves into epistemological subjectivism, meaning, what is true for you is not necessarily true for me, etc. Variants of this subjective approach to reality and knowledge include these gems: You cannot understand blacks unless you are black; you cannot understand women's issues unless you are a woman; you cannot understand Islam and Muslims unless you are one and know the Koran in the ancient, original Arabic. There is an equivalent statement for each and every pressure group.

What's wrong with this subjectivism? It attempts to overthrown nature and the nature of the human mind. As entities which come from and are part of reality, existence, the universe, the cosmos, or whatever is one's favorite term for the same, humans have a specific identity, as humans. That ought to be obvious. As humans, we have one choice and only one choice with regard to that identity: We must learn it in order to use it because Mother Nature will not let us change it at will. Knowledge and truth are the result of learning anything, including just what Mother Nature has handed us.

One of the first things we learn is that humans are much more alike than different in terms of the basics of their identity as humans. We know that and a lot more because the nature of the human's mind is to form concepts in order to master knowledge about any aspects of reality. If the concept is accurate, it applies to all members of the concept. And, concepts can be learned by other humans about all sorts of things, including races, genders, and, you name it.

Thus, while we may not experience just what some black person does that is unique within his own body, we understand being black, blackness, the black experience, black history, black food, black subculture, black music. How? By means of concepts. Were this not so, there would be no reason whatsoever to seek any form of education at any level.

Until proven inadequate or wrong, concepts stand, essentially forever, if they have been well formed. Thus, the concepts formed about humans, their behaviors, and their institutions across the centuries since humans could write down concepts, remain immutable. A number have been revised as knowledge expands, but when our Founders developed the Constitution, they drew upon centuries of tried and true knowledge as well as the corroboration of their own experiences.

The men who developed the Constitution were thinkers. They wrote the Constitution as an integrated set of concepts and premises. They tied those concepts and premises to the human context: human nature, human institutions, knowledge, and experience; human history and legal history; human failures, foibles, and evils; morality (a concept applicable only to humans); and Aristotelean-based philosophical principles, to mention a few. The Constitution they devised applied AS A SET OF PRINCIPLES to free peoples—then, now, and until human nature changes in some indefinite future (don't hold your breath for this last one).

Justice Breyer does not see and appreciate the function and value of the Constitution—OR, he does not WANT to. He either cannot think or does not want to. None of these is a good alternative. Which apply to him, I do not know for sure. However, there is a big clue. His second belief, expressed in the radio broadcast of his talk, belies the fact that he has an agenda and is working it by means of undercutting the Constitution. The success of selling that agenda depends on the successful selling of conceptual inadequacy of the Constitution, which I hasten to add, it does NOT have.

The Constitution “lives” in the sense that truth endures through all times, and its truths serve us well now, over two centuries after its origination. Knowing truth means using concepts and premises in proper epistemology. What is so impressive is how fundamental and correct the concepts and premises of the Constitution really are, attested to in part by how few times the Constitution has been amended. The Founders wrote concepts and premises for all men for all times, and that is clearly indigestible to Breyer and his ilk.

If you buy the type of epistemological subjectivism that Breyer is selling, you condemn yourself to a nightmare universe. That universe says A is not A, except when it is, and, when it is depends on A being "living." When A lives, it changes all the time according to what groups want or wants from any person or persons.

Truth in this scheme has been torn from its anchors in reality. When your mind accepts this, it has been readied for the next step.

Justice Breyer very obviously is a one-world socialist of the Left, along with the other justices of SCOTUS who are on the Left. The remaining justices are one-world theocrats of the Right. See why we are in so much trouble with SCOTUS?

Europe and the rest of the world, are socialist. To Leftists, Europe is the “paragon of the quintessence.” Its legal, political, and ethical thinking are “progressive,” which most people know by now to mean socialist or communist, as if there is any difference except in minor details. To socialists, we in the USA need to become like Europe, which holds itself as superior in every way. Lefties do not see Europe as having negatives. Importing European legal thinking through SCOTUS decisions furthers one-world socialism.

Justice Breyer is wrong on both his beliefs. If you do not deny yourself seeing the truth, look anywhere in Europe to see if you can find anything objectively superior to America. This is a “no brainer.”

Conceptual inadequacy lies outside the Constitution, particularly in SCOTUS. Bad thinking and working agendas gave us such travesties as the Kelo versus New London decision (private theft of private property as “legal” eminent domain). One after another horrible decisions comes from the Left, the Right, and the so-called “swing vote” justice or justices.

We have endured decades of judicial activism, from a socialist SCOTUS doing everything in its limited intellectual capacity, to end America as a bastion of individualism, freedom, and capitalism. Inadequate presidents have nominated justice after justice to SCOTUS for far too many years of America's history. Few justices have proved capable of preserving and protecting the Constitution. Justice Breyer is one of the least memorable and more incompetent justices.

His book is not worth the money.

The future of the Supreme Court is THE most important domestic concern facing America and Americans for the foreseeable future.

Zawahiri Reiterates the Triumphal Goals of Islamic Imperialism.

Why has the media given Islam a pass?

It is hard to believe that there are no journalists that have studied the tenets of Islam and have come the conclusions that any thinking person would make: Islam was dangerous then and is now. Thousands of contemporary examples of Jihad violence (scroll down) demonstrate that there has been no change in the either the goals nor the tactics of Islam.

Zawahiri, second in command to Al-Qaeda, the world's best known Jihadist group, has sent a now very public letter to al-Zarqawi, the head of Iraq's insurgency. The letter is explains much about the insurgency and once again illustrates what we all know to be true about Muslims -- the ultimate goal is Islamic imperialism, seizure of the world's resources, and enslavement of human capital for the glory of Allah.

This isn't a new concept and the press should recognize this fact. Perhaps they can't bring themselves to state the obvious when the facts apply to Iraq because of their hatred for George Bush, or perhaps they are afraid of becoming victims themselves. Walid Phares at FrontPage gives a credible explanation and tells why the letter is important:

This letter should not raise eyebrows that the jihadists have designs on Iraq and Baghdad: that is old news. The fact that this surprises the media only shows what a poor job these commentators do of researching and reporting on events.

If the Zawahiri letter is important, it is because of its clarification of what was always the grand design of the jihadis, not because it is revealing some deep secret. The letter is important because it was written by the number two of the organization and states clearly what are the strategic intentions, even though they were announced, discussed and applied long ago. In short, the public has them now in English and signed by Doktor Ayman personally. It cuts down tons of poor interpretations of the jihadist wars in the region, including the false explanation that jihad terror was born “because” of the removal of Saddam Hussein.

Red the Rest.

Blinding Ourselves with Mercy

Let's get really politically incorrect.

The tragedy to Pakistanis from the earthquake is considerable. No one denies that. It also affects an almost unfindable number of people in the moonscape of eastern Afghanistan. Almost left out of consideration is the extent of the tragedy to those in India.

While India is not the best of allies by a long shot, it is far better than Pakistan. Pakistan is Muslim and virulently Islamic. Pakistanis dance in the streets at everything bad that happens to us, in meganumbers. They love to shout "Death to America," burn our flags, behead, burn with acid, and literally worship bin Laden.

Mushareff is a typical third world thug who knows how to play Bush like a Wurlitzer. Bush calls him a "friend." Meanwhile, Mushareff pardons Professor Khan, protects bin Laden, will not tell us where bin Laden is, and will not let us go get him. His hand is always in the USA till. He will not end madrassas or training camps for Muslim terrorists. At root he is totally beholden to the Muslim rabble of Pakistan while appearing to be of the First World. Only Bush thinks he is as he portrays himself

If there is anyone in Pakistan who likes the USA? Please tell me who it is and how that person is still alive inside Pakistan.

Already Bush has thrown $50 million at Mushareff for quake relief. Where is that money going to go? Sorry, into whose pockets will that money go? Will the USA get credit or blame for the quake, for not helping enough, for not helping quickly enough, etc.? Remember, Muslims and liberals uncannily think alike in so many ways. The Imam Pelosis are already firing up their boilers for this Friday's vomitus within Pakistan and all of Islamia.

Private monies, materiel, and personnel should have no restrictions, should private persons choose to help Pakistan. Public monies should have all sorts of strings attached. This is a time to use that public money in a way that benefits the USA the most by dangling it a dollar at a time before greedy Mushareff and surrendering it dollar by dollar only after he concedes to just exactly what we want, and our list should be long. At a minimum, we want intelligence and some different behaviors, including the soma of bin Laden. Now is a good time to squeeze Pakistan for them.

Let me go on record right now to say that criticism of the USA for this earthquake from Pakistan and the Muslim cesspool world will shortly sound exactly like the Democrat Party post Hurricane Katrina. That means we will be damned mightily no matter how many or how large the altruistic sacrificial offerings we make to Pakistan. Only Bush thinks they are our friends, and it will be Bush who will be blamed for the earthquake by Islamists as well as Leftists. What irony!

So, if you are damned if you do and damned if you don't, the smart money is on doing what benefits you and disregarding your damners.

NO! To the U.N. Taking Over the Internet

(Letter to the Editor, from the Ayn Rand Institute.)

A cabal of countries, including Cuba, Syria, China and Iran--now
backed by the European Union--is demanding that control of the
Internet be surrendered to the United Nations.

These and other thug-nations restrict their own citizens' ability to
receive and broadcast news and grievances from inside their
blood-soaked walls. China, for instance, currently has many
individuals jailed for being "cyber-dissidents" and it engages in
massive censorship of the Internet. It recently passed a law mandating
that only "healthy and civilized" news may be read by its citizens--to
be determined, of course, by the same "civilized" officials who
brought us Tiananmen Square.

This world-wide web of tyrannies, hiding behind the veneer of
technical complaints, now seeks to control not just what its own
citizens are able to see and say on the Internet, but what every
individual on the face of the planet is able to see and say. If the UN
is given control of the Internet, we can expect free trade and freedom
of speech to be crushed.

The Internet was created in and by the land of the free, America. It
has now become the object of an alarming power-grab by the world's
dictatorships and their puppet, the UN. America must not surrender its
citizens' freedom to the mercy of a debating society for dictators.

Yaron Brook
President of the Ayn Rand Institute
Irvine, CA

2121 Alton Parkway #250
(949) 222-6550 ext. 236

Copyright (c) 2005 Ayn Rand(R) Institute. All rights reserved.

“Muslim Opinion” Be Damned

America’s attempts to appease “Muslim opinion” are depraved and suicidal.

By Alex Epstein

To listen to most of our foreign-policy commentators, the biggest problem facing America today--four years after Sept. 11--is the fact that many Muslims are mad at us.

“Whatever one's views on the [Iraq] war,” writes a New York Times columnist, “thoughtful Americans need to consider . . . the bitter anger that it has provoked among Muslims around the world.” In response to Abu Ghraib, Ted Kennedy lamented, “We have become the most hated nation in the world, as a result of this disastrous policy in the prisons.” Muslim anger over America’s support of Israel, we are told, is a major cause of anti-American terrorism.

We face, these commentators say, a crisis of “Muslim opinion.” We must, they say, win the “hearts and minds” of angry Muslims by heaping public affection on Islam, by shutting down Guantanamo, by being more “evenhanded” between free Israel and the terrorist Palestinian Authority--and certainly by avoiding any new military action in the Muslim world. If we fail to win over “Muslim opinion,” we are told, we will drive even more to become terrorists.

All of this evades one blatant truth: the hatred being heaped on America is irrational and undeserved. Consider the issue of treatment of POWs. Many Muslims are up in arms about the treatment of prisoners of war in Iraq and at Guantanamo--many of whom were captured on battlefields trying to kill Americans. Yet these same Muslims are silent about the summary convictions and torture--real torture, with electric drills and vats of acid--that are official policy and daily practice throughout the Middle East.

Or consider “Muslim opinion” over the U,S, handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which the United States is accused of not being “hard enough” on Israel--a free nation with laws that protect all citizens, Jew and Arab alike--for Israel’s supposed mistreatment of Palestinians. Yet “Muslim opinion” reveres the Palestinian Authority, a brutal dictatorship that deprives Palestinians of every basic freedom, keeps them in unspeakable poverty, and routinely tortures and executes peaceful dissenters.

So-called Muslim opinion is not the unanimous and just consensus that its seekers pretend. It is the irrational and unjust opinion of the world's worst Muslims: Islamists and their legions of “moderate” supporters and sympathizers. These people oppose us not because of any legitimate grievances against America, but because they are steeped in a fundamentalist interpretation of their religion--one that views America's freedom, prosperity, and pursuit of worldly pleasures as the height of depravity. They do not seek respect for the rights of the individual (Muslim or non-Muslim), they seek a world in which the rights of all are sacrificed to the dictates of Islam.

The proper response to Islamists and their supporters is to identify them as our ideological and political enemies--and dispense justice accordingly. In the case of our militant enemies, we must kill or demoralize them--especially those regimes that support terrorism and fuel the Islamist movement; as for the rest, we must politically ignore them and intellectually discredit them, while proudly arguing for the superiority of Americanism. Such a policy would make us safe, expose Islamic anti-Americanism as irrational and immoral, and embolden the better Muslims to support our ideals and emulate our ways.

President Bush, like most politicians and intellectuals, has taken the opposite approach to "Muslim opinion": appeasement. Instead of identifying anti-American Muslims as ideological enemies to be discredited, he has appealed to their sensibilities and met their demands--e.g., sacrificing American soldiers to save Iraqi civilians and mosques. Instead of seeking to crush the Islamists by defeating the causes they fight for--such as Islamic world domination and the destruction of Israel--he has appeased those causes, declaring Islam a "great religion" and rewarding the Palestinian terrorist Jihad with a promised Palestinian state. Instead of destroying terrorist regimes that wage war against the West--including, most notably, Iran--he has sought their "cooperation" and even cast some as "coalition partners."

Such measures have rewarded our enemy for waging physical and spiritual war against us. "Condemn America," they have learned, "and American leaders will praise your ideals and meet your demands." "Attack America via terrorist proxy," terrorist states and movements have been taught, "and America will neither blame you nor destroy you, but redouble its efforts to buy your love."

Every attempt to appease "Muslim opinion" preserves, promotes, and emboldens our enemies. Every concession to angry Muslim mobs gives hope to the Islamist cause. Every day we allow terrorist regimes to exist gives their minions time to execute the next Sept. 11. America needs honest leadership with the courage to identify and defeat our enemies--“Muslim opinion” be damned.

Alex Epstein is a junior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, CA. The Institute promotes the ideas of Ayn Rand--best-selling author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead and originator of the philosophy of Objectivism.

President Bush's Speech on Terrorism: Meaning and Implications

Controversial journalist, political analyst with the Center for International Affairs of the Rockford Institute, former spokesperson for the Bosnia Serb government, author of controversial books, and, "noted Islamophobe," Srdja Trifkovic has examined President Bush's speech on Terrorism with the jaundiced eye of one who has lived on Islam's "bloody borders." He finds "meaning" and "implications" for present and future action.

Trifkovic found only one piece of hard news: "In the end the only piece of hard news concerned his claim that ten serious al-Qaeda terrorist plots have been disrupted since 9-11..." The rest is rhetoric, significant for "what was said and what was omitted...cause for great concern."

Trifkvic has picked apart and analyzed every word and phrase of the President's in this excellent essay and Hugh Fitzgerald, in his two comments, does him a similar service at JihadWatch as points to some areas that were either glossed over or that need revision.


Although lengthy, both are excellent. Don't miss a word.

House Plus

Alistair Quimby commented on our 22 September piece about the television program House, M.D.. He said, in part,

"I hope you're right about the upturn, particularly when you use House M.D., possibly my favorite T.V. show, as an example. By the way, the CSI's are great, along with another one that you didn't mention, Without a Trace. It awes me that these shows are so popular while being so deeply rooted in reason and benevolence."

As for predicting the early rebirth of reason as reflected in certain art, such as contemporary television, we do not read tea leaves or work the night shift for the Oracle of Delphi, but it is startling what is on television lately (past several years). Mr. Quimby puts it very well as "It awes me that these shows are so popular while being so deeply rooted in reason and benevolence." Nothing happens by accident, so something must account for so many really good programs. Only time will tell.

By contrast, look at the comedies. Except for Desperate Housewives, the sitcoms are worse than ever, and they are utter dogs. End of discussion about them.

Mr. Quimby is quite correct that we did not mention programs other than House, M.D.. We wrote about House just as the fall television series was getting underway, and many other new and returning programs had not made the scene. As of now, most of the fall season is in full swing, and it would be remiss not to cite other, very good programs.

So, Mr. Quimby, let us begin by reiterating how enjoyable are House and the three CSIs. You were absolutely right about Without a Trace. It is a favorite.

From that curious "cable network" offseason, we must mention The Closer, Monk, and Wanted. Monk is a little too slapstick, and Wanted is a little too violent, although it presents a no-bull-sh__ approach to a very hard job, one that creates much professional and personal struggle. The Closer shows great brainpower, personal strength and high self-esteem, in a brilliant woman.

Numbers makes heroes of mathematicians and scientific crime fighters. It is just plain "neat." Cold Case resurrects unsolved cases, long dead ended, leaving families and loved ones without closure. A great team reconstructs, deducts, and inducts to achieve closure and leaving you feeling that justice has been done. E-Ring pits military and civilian brains against all sorts of huge military-related problems while contending with typical, and fully disgusting, bureaucrats who do all they can to keep problems from being solved.

NCIS solves interesting crimes but with serious interference from irrelevant silliness which really undercuts what the program could be. Alias is too physical and too fantastic. If this season does not show a different trend soon, we will stop watching. Killer Instinct might turn out to be good, but the stories are not being sufficiently carried by the main characters, who seem too intellectually light-weight. The same may be said for some others as well. The science fiction fall programs are too weak to discuss.

All of the really good stuff, and note how much of it there is, shows people of the mind using their minds to deal with horrendous odds. And, they win. Good wins. We are experiencing heroes again. All sorts of personalities go into these stories, showing that intelligence may be married to morality in all sorts of personality packages. Furthermore, most of these characters take their work and themselves seriously.

Nothing happens by accident. The laws of identity and causality, the cardinal laws of Reality, permit nothing else. Leaping from metaphysics to esthetics through epistemology and ethics, begs the question: Are we watching early cultural change toward reason. We hope so, Mr. Quimby.

Well, There Goes the Internet...Maybe

Breaking America's Grip on the Net

After troubled negotiations in Geneva, the US may be forced to relinquish control of the internet to a coalition of governments

You would expect an announcement that would forever change the face of the internet to be a grand affair - a big stage, spotlights, media scrums and a charismatic frontman working the crowd.
But unless you knew where he was sitting, all you got was David Hendon's slightly apprehensive voice through a beige plastic earbox. The words were calm, measured and unexciting, but their implications will be felt for generations to come....

Welcome News to Some

Most of us only care about whether or not we can get on. Does it really matter who controls the" 'root servers,' which act as the basic directory for the whole internet?"

In early days, an enlightened Department of Commerce (DoC) pushed and funded expansion of the internet. When it became global, it created a private company, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) to run it.

But the DoC retained overall control, and in June stated what many had always feared: that it would retain indefinite control of the internet's foundation - it's "root servers."

ICANN Strategic Planning Issues Paper - September 2005

Internationalization is an important apsect of ICANN's strategic planning for two major reasons: First the continued rise of the Internet as a truly global means of communication will place demands on ICANN to encourage all relevant parties to take part in the ICANN process and also to accommodate all Internet users as members of the ICANN community. Second, as the broad group of international entities involved in Internet co-ordination evolves, ICANN will need to demonstrate its truly global nature in order to maintain its legitimacy.

Hmmm. Sounds like the U.N., don't you think?

Although the proposal was sponsored by the E.U, the threat is actually made by the U.N. that has been drooling over revenue that is and could be produced through the internet.

What can the U.S. do? According to blogger Brett Fausett, the U.S. can do "a lot," and does the U.S. have to "acquiesce?"

The only leverage wielded by the other governments of the world is the threat to start their own root zone, which would speak volumes about whether their concerns are really about stability and security.

According to Carl over on CaveBearBlog, most commentators are "mixing two separate issues: that of multiple roots and that of singularity of content of the various top level domains (TLDs.)

It is quite possible to have multiple root systems that are entirely consistent with one another. The key is that the TLDs have the same content no matter which root system is used to find them...

Carl stated in 1999

It wasn't that many years ago in the United States when there was one big, monolithic telephone company.
It was taken as gospel by many that the stability of the telephone network depended on there being one unified, monolithic telephone company.
We've seen through that.  Today we have a flourishing competitive telephone system filled with all kinds of commercial and technical offerings that were inconceivable during the days of "Ma Bell".

We routinely use directory services in a multiplicity of forms -- telephone books published by local telephone companies or entrepreneurs, 411 services in various shapes and forms,  web pages, or even on CD-ROMs (indeed a well known Supreme Court case involved a telephone directory published on CD-ROM).

These telephone directories are not published by any unified authority, there is no regulatory body sitting over them.  And we as consumers are not damaged or harmed by this.  And the telephone system continues to work just fine.
Yet, on the Internet there are those who wail and gnash their teeth at the thought that the Domain Name System, the Internet's "white pages" might have multiple points of entry.

Indeed, the whole series of documents from NTIA -- including the Green and White Papers -- and the existence of ICANN is founded on the notion that there is but one root system for the Domain Name System.
I assert that those nay-sayers are wrong.

I assert that just like the telephone system can have multiple publishers of telephone directory services, the Internet can have multiple roots to the Domain Name System.

There is no doubt that as a purely technical matter, the Internet can have multiple root systems for the DNS.  It has had these for years.
The question is whether to recognize the value and use of multiple root systems and not foreclose them.
Let's get a bit more specific.

When I say "multiple root systems", I mean a regime in which you, or I, or anybody can set up a set of computers to serve as a suite of root servers for the DNS.

In other words, you, or I, or anybody could establish a group of computers to operate in parallel with, and not necessarily in administrative coordination with, the legacy A-L.root-servers.net computers now operated by NSI, IANA, ICANN and others.
From a technical point of view all that a root server group does is to give its users a way to find the DNS servers that handle the various Top Level Domains (TLDs).  The root servers do not themselves answer queries about what names are inside the various TLDs.  Those questions are passed on to the TLD servers themselves.

That is a subtle point and a point that is often lost when discussing the DNS.

It bears repeating -- all that a root server does is to answer queries about how to find a server handling a TLD named in the query.  In other words, a root server only answers queries such as "Where do I find a server that contains the list of names in .com?".

Do we really need yet another governmental-style bureaucracy? If it ain't broke...well, you know the rest. The proposed "fix" will be be no improvement.

Robert Spencer Hits One Out of the Park

This morning, 7 October 2005, Robert Spencer appeared briefly on Fox and Friends First. He was interviewed by Brian Kilmeade and Alyson Camerata. The entire event was superb.

The context, of course, was the advertised threats to the subway system in New York City from jihadists coming from Iraq.

The interviewers first presented Mr. Spencer's new book, Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and did so by hailing its best attributes: its truthfulness and clarity. At least Mr. Kilmeade seems to have read the book.

Then Mr. Spencer was asked questions about Islam and Muhammad. One of the most important questions was whether Islam is really a "religion of peace," as touted. Mr. Spencer laid out the facts and cited koranic specifics requiring Muslims to impose Islam by force on non-Muslims. He also stated that Islam stands unique among religions in its dictum of "convert, be dhimmified, or die." Neither of the Fox interviewers flinched or went politically correct here or with anything else Mr. Spencer said.

Other questions concerned Muhammad, whom Mr. Spencer classified as a typical regional warrior of the 7th century, but who has become the template for the ideal man for all times in the thinking and teachings of Islam since Muhammad died in 632 C.E.

Another good question involved the Battle of Badr and its meaning. The interviewers tied the meaning of this battle in which Muhammad and his forces, although seriously outnumbered, won, to the current situation in Iraq. The interviewers drew the conclusion that if the USA gives up and leaves Iraq before the job has been done, this will be interpreted by Islamists in exactly the same way as the Battle of Badr, and they will feel free and totally optimistic about the outcome in their bringing the war to us in the USA. Mr. Spencer concurred.

We have seen many interviews of Mr. Spencer. He has always been good, but he has not been given the correct opportunities for his prodigious knowledge to be made available during the interview. Usually, the interviewers, to draw on the famous quote of Jack Nicholson from A Few Good Men, "...can't handle the truth." This time, the interviewers did handle the truth and let Mr. Spencer shine.

Kudos to the Fox team and to Mr. Spencer.

By the way, is it just us, or are others beginning to notice a shift toward the truth about Islam in many areas of the USA? Even though he is light years away from proper recognition, President Bush, for example, can now say "Islam" without stumbling over his own religious correctness. Others seem less reticent to be so politically correct about the nature of Islam. Perhaps it is too early to call a trend, but we are taking note of what might be a few cultural harbingers of a much needed change.

Security Breach at Nuclear Plant--Are We Beginning to "Get It"?

This week has seen an unprecedented upsurge in concerns about U.S.-Mexico border security, at least by private individuals; television news broadcasts, radio talk show hosts (and their guests), and even some politicians are increasingly voicing complaints about the Federal government's failure, for whatever reason, to mount an effective effort to plug this brazenly open invitation to terrorists to enter our country.

Viewed from the air, the flow across the border looks like an entire colony of ants on the move.

Here's a widely reported event illustrating just the tiniest hint of potential problems that could be brought upon us by our elected leaders' shaky compliance with the terms of their oath of office, wherein they promise to uphold the Constitution and take the necessary measures to protect our nation from enemies from within and without.

Security at the Crystal River nuclear power plant was breached last week when three Mexican nationals falsified Social Security numbers to obtain employment.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and numerous state and federal agencies are "investigating the issue." The Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE), a recent creation of the Department of Homeland Security, arrested the illegal aliens and charged them with violating U.S. immigration laws.

Reports claim that the Mexican nationals deliberately falsified Social Security numbers to obtain employment with Texas-based Brock Specialty Services, a contractor who works for Progress Energy – owner and operator of the Crystal River power facility located north of Tampa, FL.

Representative Ginny Browne-Waite (R – FL) expressed concern at the ease of the security breach, "Of all the places where an illegal alien should not be, this is like at the top of the list."

Spokesmen for Progress Energy and the NRC DISMISSED CONCERNED, commenting that employees and residents in the surrounding areas were "never in any danger," even if the illegal immigrants intentions were malevolent (which they deny).

Well, THAT certainly makes me feel better!

Declaring War on SCOTUS, in the name of the Constitution of the United States

OK, the gloves came off regarding taking back the 9-11 Memorial at Ground Zero in New York City, and the home team won. The liberal anti-Americans will not get to build their anti-American memorial at Ground Zero. Just what happened to win and how serve as model and inspiration for all Americans. Now, it is time to take on the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS), and fight it all the way to the win.

Right now, there is no way to tell how Chief Justice Roberts will influence SCOTUS, so we have to deal with what we know. We know that we have some really anti-Constitution justices who have made some disastrous decisions. Which justices? All. Those on the right have done their share along with those on the left.

SCOTUS has lately fallen into some glib classification of having four justices on the right, four on the left, and a swing vote justice. This is the gang that cannot think straight, judging from its decisions, books, speeches, interviews,and other statements.

The job falls to us, American citizens, to straighten out this mess. It might require amending the Constitution so that justices no longer have lifetime appointments. Those are some of the longer range issues we must concern ourselves with.

Right now, we have a bloody good issue to take to the streets, so to speak, and this issue is eminent domain. Never forget that on 23 June 2005, SCOTUS ruled on a case known as "Kelo versus the City of New London, Connecticut." Lead by Justices Souter, Breyer, Kennedy, Ginsburg, and Stevens, the Supreme Court dealt the Rights of Man, THE single most important principle underlying America, a mortal blow. In this decision, they declared that the property of any America may be taken by the initiation of force by any government to be used as it sees fit. In this case, the theft was sugar-coated to be made more pallatible by indicating that the theft was to give one man's property to another, because the government would improve the community, thus receive greater tax revenues.

The implications of this ruling are horrendous. For one, it makes all men (who are their own property) as well as the material things they own the property of the State. There is no way to minimize around this implication, and it will happen until this decision has been reversed.

In the future, we will deal frequently with this decision, its meaning, and what to do about it. For the moment, interested persons should consult the Institute for Justice website in order to get involved.

Numerous stories pepper the press these days about how opportunistic community governments are using the Kelo decision. Here is one of the latest:

Florida city considers eminent domain -- The Washington Times: "
By Joyce Howard Price
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published October 3, 2005

Florida's Riviera Beach is a poor, predominantly black, coastal community that intends to revitalize its economy by using eminent domain, if necessary, to displace about 6,000 local residents and build a billion-dollar waterfront yachting and housing complex.

"This is a community that's in dire need of jobs, which has a median income of less than $19,000 a year," said Riviera Beach Mayor Michael Brown. He defends the use of eminent domain by saying the city is "using tools that have been available to governments for years to bring communities like ours out of the economic doldrums and the trauma centers."

Mr. Brown said Riviera Beach is doing what the city of New London, Conn., is trying to do and what the U.S. Supreme Court said is proper in its ruling June 23 in Kelo v. City of New London. That decision upheld the right of government to seize private properties for use by private developers for projects designed to generate jobs and increase the tax base. "Now eminent domain is affecting people who never had to deal with it before and who have political connections," Mr. Brown said. "But if we don't use this power, cities will die."

Mr. Frederiksen said people with yachts need a place to keep and service them. "And we want to develop a charter school for development of marine trades."

Most of the arguments FOR this theft are to be found in this article excerpt (in bold). Every effort will be made to cloud the issue with all sorts of altruistic sounding arguments and tooting the "common good" horn.

Every argument deserves a "so what!" What is yours is yours, until you legally part with it.

Defend it now. Truly, American survival is at stake.

Lyndon Baines Bush, the 43rd

I have finally lost all confidence in George W. Bush as President of the United States, and I have concluded that he is one of our weakest presidents. Many conservatives in their self-appointed roles as Bush's claque make every excuse possible for Bush, e.g., right wing talk radio, for one. However, all of these efforts are like painting over a grease spot. The paint adheres briefly then gives way to what it was trying to cover.

In fact, George W. Bush uncomfortably reminds me more and more of Lyndon Johnson. Obviously there are differences in style and principles, enough to be able to separate out each man from the other. Over time, I have come to see more and more parallels between the two men.

The only real strength I see in Bush is his dedication to his evangelical Christianism and his tenacious clinging to loyalty from and to his subordinates. In my view, this is why he appointed Harriet Miers to become a justice of the Supreme Court. She can keep her mouth shut about all the inner sanctum secrets, and she is an evangelical Christian. That's all, folks. As Ann Coulter put it correctly, there may be a small number of lawyers qualified even for consideration to the Supreme Court, and you can use their legal behaviors and legacies as data to judge their orientations and quality of thinking, including their willingness to uphold the Constitution. Ms Miers is not among these highly qualified persons.

George Bush refuses to fight the war with Islam to win. First off, he will not identify, thus know the nature of the enemy. With regard to religion, he is "stuck on stupid." In his most recent speech, just this morning, he proclaimed that all of these jihadists do not represent Islam because Islam is a great religion. Thus, we continue to grind up American service personnel and treasure to little avail because he will not identify the enemy and fight properly, in accordance with the correct identification.

He is fighting Iraq like Johnson fought the senseless war of Vietnam. ILike Vietnam, Iraq is a war of altruism, in which the leader perceives America's duty to be that of self-sacrificial service to the world, to right the wrongs while absorbing all of the costs, including the lives of American military youth. It reminds me of Don Quixote--only he was certifiable. Part of this altruism is to allow these Iraqi savages to choose a constitution that virtually guarantees that all of America's losses will have been in vain. They are being allowed to vote themselves into Sharia, and even if in diluted form now, Sharia and Islam will soon devour Iraq--you can make book on that.

Bush has blindness about borders that defies understanding. Take Iraq. Syria and Iran send men and materiel to chew up Americans and undo everything we have been doing since March 2003. Bush won't fight Congress for a proper Supreme Court nominee, and he won't fight Syria and Iran, nor will he put the screws to Saudi Arabia to stop supplying the slaughterers of Americans.

At home, Bush will not deal with illegal immigration. He is either pathologically blind about the border problem, or he is downright evil and is working some nefarious plan subrosa. Either way, he is working against America.

No one could ever accuse Bush of having a "vision thing," either Bush president. In fact, he seemed to have dialed out of his vigilance and duties for a long time now. The best illustration of how dialed out he has been came in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He had no public involvement for days, which left Americans thinking that he might not have noticed the effects of Hurricane Katrina.

This projection of apparent uninvolvement by Bush is what is killing his poll numbers. People hate the war in Iraq because they sense Bush has put it on auto pilot and gone on mental vacation. Thus, in Iraq, we are fighting NOT TO WIN. Shades of Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam.

Domestically, Bush is a Democrat in drag, a sheep in Republican's clothing. Big spending and big government bother him not. When he leaves office, we might as well have had John Kerry and Al Gore, given the damage he will leave.

Therein lies the greatest tragedy. Which Democrat would be better than Bush? I will not hold my breath awaiting a reasonable answer, and Hilary Clinton is not the answer or any answer to anything. Which Republican would be better that Bush? It is a little too early to say, but the answer is not Captain Queeg McCain. As the King of the Hill might say about McCain, "He ain't right."

Right now, and for the rest of the Bush second term, we could only hope that fate would put Dick Cheney into the Oval Office. He has grit and does not suffer fools lightly. I think he would throw out all of those Islamic fifth columnists Rove and Norquist bring in to whisper in Bush's ears. I think he would switch the war machine from "muddle along" to "win and win it now." I think he would also tell Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and that corrupted ilk to follow the advice he gave to Senator Lahey. I am not sure, of course, but I think he might have been the far, far better choice for president over President Lyndon Baines Bush.

In Today's Nervous World, Only An Idiot Would Dress This Way In Public

Is this a joke? Nope, it's supposed to be cool. Now imagine one of these walking toward you or getting on your bus or subway car.

Honda Fuel Cell Technology -- A Possible Reprieve From Dependence on Foreign Fossil Fuel?

Take a look.

An Unnoticed Menace - The Shanghai Cooperation Organization

While our attention has been focused on the "War on Terror," and Iraq, a new organization has been quietly assembling, arming, maneuvering, and, perhaps, preparing for war.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) will celebrate its fifth anniversary in June 2006. This is not a cause for celebration for us in the West.

What is the ultimate mission of the SCO and its potential impact on Central Asia and the Middle East? What are the long-term goals and objectives for the region and for the world? The member and observer states are an unlikely crew. Members: Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikisan; Observers: India, Iran, Mongolia, and Pakistan.

Russia and China already have completed joint exercises and are exchanging technology and personnel in an "evolving relationship."

Immediately after the completion of their historic joint military exercises, Russia and China announced plans to hold additional joint exercises in 2006. Both countries anticipate expanding the exercises to include SCO member states Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, as well as observer states India, Iran, Mongolia and Pakistan. “It is possible by the time we decide to hold such exercises with China; other SCO countries would be willing to join, like India,” one Russian official said. Russian Defense Minister Ivanov concurred, “I think that future Russia-China military exercises will be held and other members of the SCO will probably take part in them.”   
 
Russia and India are scheduled to hold their first joint army drill next month, with mock raids on terrorist facilities taking place in the Indian province of Rajastahn, on the border with Pakistan. Andrei Kokoshin, a former secretary of the Russian Security Council and a member of parliament said the impending follow-up to the Peace Mission 2005 exercises could be part of a Russia-China-India triangle which supports the increased activity of the SCO. “The exercise might focus on maintaining stability in Central Asia and ensuring the security of oil supplies via sea routes,” Kokoshin said.
 
Chinese, Indian and Russian naval assets working in unison to protect oil supplies in the Persian Gulf? This comment shows another disturbing aspect of the emerging confederacy, an increased willingness to use its combined military strength to secure strategic energy reserves located in the Middle East. The mere thought of the Persian Gulf clogged with warships enforcing multilateral allegiances and interests is enough to make any analyst stay up all night.

General Yury Baluyevskiy, Chief of Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, further elaborated on the topic of SCO military cooperation, “I do not rule out that, if a decision is made by the SCO, of which Russian and China are members, the armed forces of our countries may be involved in performing certain tasks.” General Baluyevskiy failed to elaborate on what those “certain tasks” would include. 
 
Observer country Pakistan is also becoming more active in the military aspects of the SCO. In September, Chinese General Liang Guanglie, a member of the Central Military Commission and Chief of Staff of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), met with Pakistani General Ehsan Ul Haq, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to strengthen military-to-military ties. During the meeting in Beijing, the two generals exchanged views on issues of common global and regional interest, as well as army building.
 
The most troubling development of the past month related to the SCO is the growing prospect of a nuclear-obsessed Iran joining the organization as a permanent member. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the newly elected conservative President of Iran, is a proven U.S. antagonist and a firm believer in spreading revolutionary Islamist ideology throughout the Muslim world. His recent comments at the U.N. concerning the U.S. show a preparation for confrontation with the U.S. Making matters worse, Iran is planning to build up its military forces. Iran had planned to double its military budget by 2010, but thanks to record oil revenues, that timetable has been adjusted to 2008.

What Does This Mean?
This is a menacing and frightening group of states whose interest is inimical with that of the West, especially of America.

The SCO is a menacing confederacy of powerful nations arising out of the shadows of the Cold War that could cause tremendous global instability and even lead to world war. Geopolitics aside, the SCO has the potential to become the most powerful alliance on earth, combining Russia’s energy, military and technology expertise; China and India’s economic and human capital; and Iran’s enormous energy resources and growing military capabilities. This unique combination makes the SCO a formidable adversary for the U.S.
 
In February, Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) chief of staff General Liang Guanglie said the Peace Mission 2005 exercises would, “protect the peace and stability in our region and the world.” The world? The world has been led to believe that the SCO is a regional alliance designed to address issues of mutual concern such as terrorism, separatism and extremism - whatever they may mean at the moment for the members of the SCO. With military operations scheduled for 2006 and an expanded list of participating nations, the military threat posed by the SCO is starting to take shape.

Leaders and analysts all over the world are now coming to the realization that they have been mislead. I know that my level of concern has been raised.
Read the rest.

The Culture Wars Are In Fall Swing. Take Action Now --- If You Value Freedom of Speech

Did you know that in America there are now "protected classes of individuals" against whom no public criticism can be made? Both the Senate and the House have proposed legislation that makes this criticism a crime, punishable with a fine and long imprisonment. They are attempting to usurp the will of the American people and abrogate our traditional and cherished freedom of speech.

Our founding fathers had heated discussions while writing the Constitution. Some refused to affix their signatures unless the ten amendments of the famed Bill of Rights was included. The First Amendment to the Constitution:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

H.R. 2662 A Bill: "To provide Federal assistance to States and local jurisdictions to prosecute hate crimes, and for other purposes."

Sec. 3. Definition of Hate Crime.
"In this Act, the term 'hate crime' has the same meaning as in section 280003(a) of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994(28U.S.C.994 note).

In the United States, speech is not a crime "unless it is tied to a criminal action." Until now. In the past, "criminal action," meant violence or inciting to violence. That was then. Now there are protected groups and classes against which no public criticism can be made. Although not a comprehensive list, these include: gender, disability, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, age, and religion.

Defining a Hate Crime According to the Journal of Social Issues,

The federal government defines hate crime as criminal conduct motivated in whole o in part by a "preformed negative opinion or attitude toward a group of persons based on their race, religion, ethnicity/national origin, or sexual orientation"(FBI hate crimes data cited in F.M. Lawrence, 1999, p. 35). The contributing authors of this issue emphasize various definitional aspects of hate crimes and hate speech that reflect both the range of harms and vagaries of social and political responses to this unique crime category...For example, some of the article suggest tat bias toward a hate crime victim is based on a perception of difference or "otherness" that is particularly significant to the perpetrator...These articles clearly depict the perpetrators' aversion toward the victim not as an individual, but as a representative of a group perceived as possessing a reviled set of characteristics...The primary aim is to send a clear message to the victim and his or her community. The message could be a simple as a message of rejection, for example, "I don't like you gays." Or the message could be more specialized, for example, "You Jews will no longer control the United States government;" If they add: "we will root you out and destroy you," advocating violence, it becoes a crime.

There is a difference between advocating violence and criticism. It is now a crime in America to say: "I don't like you." It is now a crime in America to say: "I don't want to associate with you because I find your behavior reprehensible." It is now a crime in America to simply criticize based on the characteristics of one in a protected class.

Is the "intent to subjugate the victim and his or her community--momentarily or permanently--to an inferior social and political standing?" What about the commentary that this and other websites make about our concern regarding the growing influence of Muslims and the effects of Islam here abroad? Should our critical speech be viewed and prosecuted as a crime?

H.R. 2662 and the Senate version, S1145 will have more than a chilling effect on free speech. Speech will be frozen. We might as well throw the Constitution out the window as it will have become just another piece of paper, a testament to a failed experiment, one that the American people voluntarily threw away.

Do a Google search and reac the message boards about this issue. There are many facets and possible consequences that were not covered here. If feel the chill on back as I do, contact your legislators before its too late.

Write Elected Officials.

The Myth of the Shi'ite Crescent

Who controls whom in the Middle East? Does it depend of language, ethnicity, or religious ideology? The answer is too complex to for a simple answer.

TEHRAN - A specter haunts the Middle East - at least in the minds of Sunni Arabs, especially Wahhabis, as well as a collection of conservative American think tanks: a Shi'ite crescent, spreading from Mount Lebanon to Khorasan, across Mesopotamia, the Persian Gulf and the Iranian plateau.

But facts on the ground are much more complex than this simplistic formula whereby, according to Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Kuwait, Tehran controls its allies Baghdad, Damascus and parts of Beirut.

Seventy-five percent of the world's oil reserves are in the Persian Gulf. Seventy percent of the Gulf's population is Shi'ite. As an eschatological - and revolutionary - religion, fueled by a mix of romanticism and despair, Shi'ism cannot but provoke fear, especially in hegemonic Sunni Islam.

For more than a thousand years Shi'ite Islam has been in fact a galaxy of Shi'sms. It's as if it was a Fourth World, always maligned with political exclusion, a dramatic vision of history and social and economic marginalization.

But now Shi'ites finally have acquired political representation in Iraq, have conquered it in Lebanon and are actively claiming it in Bahrain. They are the majority in each of these countries. Shi'ism is the cement of their communal cohesion. It's a totally different story in Saudi Arabia, where Shi'ites are a minority of 11%, repressed as heretics and deprived of their rights and fundamental freedoms. But for how much longer?

Read the rest.

it's obvious that the Shi'ites are on the rise. Now that Iran is going nuclear, does this mean that Iran, will become the center of the Muslim world or even the "Shi'ite Crescent?" Who's to know?

Part 2 - Who's In Charge, Qom or Najaf?

TEHRAN - Syria, Lebanon and Iraq are crucial protagonists in the specter of a Shi'ite crescent, according to the Saudi royal family, King Abdullah of Jordan and conservative American think tanks. Once again, the facts on the ground are much more complex than a simplistic formula.

Syria, although 86% Muslim, is a multiethnic and multiconfessional country. The Sunni majority cohabits with 13% of Alawites (who are Shi'ites), 3% of Druze and 1% of Ismailis. The Alawites derive from a schism in the 9th century around the 11th imam, al-Askari, who they consider the last legitimate descendant of the Prophet Mohammed. Sunnis as well as Western scholars consider them Shi'ites. But many Islamic scholars are not so sure.

Since the early 20th century, Syrian nationalists have never accepted the creation of Lebanon, Jordan and much less Palestine - which became Israel. Alawites - a persecuted minority for centuries - have reached their current enviable position in Syria thanks to the Ba'ath Party ideology, which has always been secular and nationalist.

It's all so very confusing.

Sharia Goes Global

Sharia seems to be something that happens "over there," away from North America, Australia, or even from Europe. Make no mistake: Sharia eventually move in wherever Muslim society has become influential. Sharia had toehold in North America. Fortunately sensible Canadians vetoed the enforcement of Sharia in Canadian law.
Perhaps they took a look at what is happening as Sharia is spreading into Muslim and non-Muslim areas of the world.

There are two types of Sharia a characterized by Paul Marshall, a senior fellow at Freedom House's Center for Religious Freedom. According to Marshall, not all Muslims see Sharia in the same way. Some are appalled by the strict and violent form that is spreading through the world due to the influence of Saudi Arabia and Wahabbism.

An interview with Marshall gives us an overview of this troublesome form he calls 'extreme Sharia.'

FP. In the book and in its title, you refer to something called “extreme Sharia.” Tell us the difference between Sharia and extreme Sharia.
 
Marshall: I’ve spent a good chunk of the last three years in many parts of the Muslim world interviewing people about Sharia. One thing I quickly learned was that Muslims mean very different things when they use the term. Sharia's root meaning is "the way" or "path to the water" and to most Muslims it implies doing God's will, not necessarily imitating the Taliban. In Indonesia, polls show 67 percent support for "Sharia" but only 7 percent objecting to a woman head of state. There it seems to means something like the American polling term "moral values." Polling in Iraq shows a similar pattern: 80% support for Sharia combined with 80% support for equality of men and women.
 
To many Muslims, criticism of Sharia as such sounds strange because, much as they might disagree with stoning adulterous women or cutting off the hands of thieves, the word implies “justice” or “goodness.” So I use the phrase ‘extreme Sharia’ to describe the laws implemented by the Saudis, Iran and others throughout the world.

"The state enforced imposition of retrograde Sharia law is central to the project of Islamist terrorists worldwide, whether in Iraq, Nigeria, Tajikistan or Indonesia. Their explicit, continually reiterated, program is, in brief, to restore a politically unified worldwide Muslim community, the ummah, ruled by a single ruler, a Caliph, governed by the most reactionary version of Islamic law, Sharia, and organized to wage jihad on the rest of the world. We are in a battle with what is most accurately called the Caliphate movement.

Muslims and non-Muslims alike are the targets of extremists. According to Marshall, many Muslims are afraid of speaking out, afraid that they will become targets. Is this a cop out?

A major factor is intimidation of those Muslims who object. This can range from death threats to fear of being branded “un-Islamic.” Even in Indonesia, the major home of moderate Islam, one high-ranking Member of Parliament told me he is “terrified” of the Islamists. When Muslim scholar Ulil Abshar-Abdalla wrote an article on the historical particularity of Islamic law, he had a fatwa pronounced against him warning that the punishment for insulting Islam is death.
 
Elsewhere, Muslims who criticize the extremists’ agenda can be attacked by vigilantes or become victims of apostasy and blasphemy laws.

According to Marshall, this intimidation is happening to Muslims in all corners of the world, supporting my trumpeted thesis that violence and extremism drive contemporary Islam and moderate Muslims seem powerless to stop it.

Read the Rest.

Jury Throws Out Muslim Man's Frivolous Lawsuit - Can You Believe It?

Would you sue if someone called your favorite piece of artwork "garbage?" Apparently Muslims feel that they can and should sue at the slightest provocation.

HAYWARD — A federal jury has rejected the lawsuit of a Muslim businessman who accused two Hayward police officers of making derogatory remarks about Islam.

Easa Begzad, who owned a Foley Street factory that manufactured Afghan sweets, sued the city of Hayward for allegedly violating his civil rights after police detained and hospitalized him following a police call to his business in 2002.
But after a civil trial that lasted nearly two weeks, a jury in U.S. District Court in San Francisco returned a verdict late Thursday afternoon in favor of the two officers. The jury rejected Begzad's demands for $1 million from the city.

Begzad could not be reached for comment Friday, and his Fremont attorney, Salim Khawaja, also did not return calls.
Randolph Hom, an assistant city attorney for Hayward, said the testimony of Begzad and the two people who claimed to see or overhear the incident did not stand up in court.

"The key to the victory was that the jury believed the officers and rejected the testimony of Begzad, his friends, family and treating physician," Hom said Friday in a written statement. "Cases like this often turn on the credibility of witnesses."

What would have happened if the jury had believed the witnesses? Would the city have been required to pony up $1 million? Why did the case even go to a jury. Immediately it should have been dismissed as frivolus, without merit, and a waster of the court's valuable time.

Read the Rest.

Would we have bought Russian products during the Cold War or products from Nazi Germany during WWII.? Aren't we are war now with Jihadists that are honored all over the Muslim world? Over at JihadWatch, Hugh Fitizgerald gives a solution: Don't buy their products or shop where they are sold.

CAIR keeps asking Muslims to keep careful records of any slights to Islam, and clearly, by its own activities -- for someone's or some country's deep pockets are making CAIR quite ready to go to court at a moment's notice. But the number of cases like this that are frivolous can be controlled if the expense of trying such a case is somehow pushed back onto the plaintiff. If it cannot or will not be done by the law, private parties can make sure that those who bring such lawsuits suffer.

How? By instituting their own private boycotts. No one need buy these "Afghan sweets." No one need stock them in their stores. Customers can make known in the friendliest possible manner to store-owners who carry them that they will find it difficult to continue to shop at such-and-such a store, if it carries such goods. One is, after all, free to buy or not to buy, free to engage the services of, or not to, and economic considerations are only part of why we choose a store or not. In 1956, would you have bought Soviet goods, had there been any to buy? Would you, in 1939, bought a Voigtlander camera? Of course not. Why not do something to discourage the likes of Ease Begzad, and his friends, the tellers of tale tales, hoping to make a cool million from remarks they apparently fabricated.

And even had they not fabricated them, the idea of such a lawsuit is idiotic. It should never have gotten anywhere. Why did it? On what grounds?

It's About Time!

We first heard this on televised Fox News, and we looked for it this morning in print press outlets but could hardly find it. The Las Vegas Sun reprinted a Associated Press clip, of which we are taking a snippet:

Las Vegas SUN, September 30, 2005, FDNY Chaplain Resigns After 9/11 Remarks, by MICHAEL WEISSENSTEIN, ASSOCIATED PRESS

NEW YORK (AP) - The fire department's new Muslim chaplain abruptly resigned Friday after saying in a published interview that a broader conspiracy, not 19 al-Qaida hijackers, may have been responsible for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Habib told Newsday in an interview published Friday that he was skeptical of the official version of the attack on the World Trade Center, which killed 343 firefighters. The 30-year Guyana native joined the department as chaplain on Aug. 15 after the FDNY's Islamic Society recommended him for the part-time position, which pays $18,000 a year.

Scoppetta said Habib, who was educated in Islamic law in Saudi Arabia and preaches at a New York mosque, had appeared qualified and passed a background check.

(Italics mine)

Finally, an American organization with "balls" ignominiously dumps an Islamist for the right reasons. However, the question screams for an answer: Why in the hell was a "Muslim chaplain" ever considered in the first place?

Let's add a little perspective. Would Jews invite a Nazi to minister to their spiritual needs, as they see them? Well, surely there must have been some nice Nazis, weren't there? After all, we are told there are peace-loving, loyal Muslims in the West. That must be true, right?

The parallels between Nazism and Islam are not academic. E.g., this weekend, we will publish Part 2 of Crusader's "Truth About Islam" on 6th Column Against Jihad. Part 2 of Crusader's brilliant article has many photographs showing just how intimate Muslims were with the Nazis during the Nazi heyday. Also, Mein Kampf continues to be the number one best seller in Turkey, a supposedly semi-Islamic country.

Our enemies are Islamists, of course, as those who have done even the minimum of reading know. Worse than Islamists are the Americans and Westerners who are the appeasers of Muslims. The doctrines of Islam are as plain as day and are in no way hard to find or understand. Islam spells out its evil, just as Nazis spelled out theirs. Appeasers try to pretend that what is, is not, that the facts are somehow not facts, and that Muslims are a life-loving, friendly lot. Well, if there are such Muslims, please come forward and tell us how you value peace and what you mean by "peace," in plain language divested of taqiyya.

Appeasers hire "Muslim chaplains," as though they are just another variety of folk who love and worship a benign God of all. Incrediblym, appeasers hire Muslim chaplains to go to where the wounds are still the freshest and sorest, like the New York Fire Department! Appeasers ask no tough questions, so that rather mainstream Islamists get a foothold without detection of their standard orientation to Islamic jihad. Appeasers will avoid learning how similar are Islam and Nazism.

The only break Islamists need is the opportunity to buy a one-way ticket back to their sand box of choice, not to walk among free men as though they are equals.

From Big Business to Environmentalists, the Cry Is: 'We're Running Out of Oil.' Oh, Really!

All of us have learned that conventional oil sources were formed during geologic times when pressure was applied to the decaying bodies of plant and animal remains and in recent years the supply of this oil is dwindling.

Is this the only source of the world's oil? According to Mike Thompson,perhaps not.

In 1901 big oil began in East Texas, in Beaumont, where Hurricane Rita stormed ashore, with a 23-year-old brick maker, Patillo Higgins, bad boy turned Christian who, in search of fuel for his break-making business, took hunch on a local salt dome and found a 100,000 barrel-a-day gusher. Life in America or in much of the world has never been the same.

Almost instantly, the world leaped from its harsh, backward, countless millennia of using animal horsepower, torches, candles, log fires and whale-oil lamps. Virtually every nation witnessed firsthand the radical transformation of every human life on Earth. Spindletop’s outflow of petroleum sparked incalculable changes, including internal-combustion engines, cars, planes, electric-power generation, more lethal wars, corporate industrial power, plastics, new clothing materials, insecticides, bountiful farms, instant communication, and even cheap globetrotting for Everyman. We also, some critics say, gained the relatively quick ability to foul fatally our planetary nest for all humanity, for all time.

Oil has created vast fortunes and has been used politically to manipulate and control billions. Oil has given individuals freedom over their lives or has been used as a mechanism so that individuals and nations are controlled by a powerful class of élites who govern and mold public and social opinion and morals.

The two groups are joining forces to gang up on us the consumers:

If the gas tank is nearly empty, then Big Oil can raise the price and profits of fuel into the financial and economic stratosphere.

If the gas tank is nearly empty, then Environmental Supremacy can dictate how the whole world must live in its rapidly approaching Spartan future.

From Texas to Saudi Arabia, big oil has been singing the same song. Why? To control the prices and the lives of everyday folk.

The record of failing (or refusing) to assess accurately the potential supply of oil creates all sorts of global instability in economics, politics, and the lives of everyday folk. That instability, in turn, is what causes people to turn to the "experts" for more guidance and governance. By mentioning only proven reserves, the conjoined evil twins of Big Oil and Environmental Supremacy engage in a seemingly omniscient, but purely deceitful, fallacy--also known as "spin."

Together, they and their sycophantic parrots in the opinion-molding business ignore the existence of virtual oceans of unconventional oil that can run the world as we know it perhaps for many additional centuries at affordable prices, even with commonsense environmental practices in force.

They haven't told us the following:

There are three types of unconventional oil and very likely a fourth:

1. Heavy Oil: pumped and refined exactly like the more desirable "light, sweet" oil, but with extra sulfur and metal contaminants that must be removed, which adds slightly to its cost. The massive, serpentine oil field that stretches from Trinidad in the southeast corner of the Caribbean Sea, west to Venezuela on the northern coast of South America, then south along the east side of the Andes Mountains and probably southeast again, into Argentina and the South Atlantic trench off the Falkland Islands, is believed to contain at least 1.2 trillion barrels of "heavy." Refined into gasoline, it would add less than 50 cents to a driver’s cost per gallon of gas.

2. Tar Sands: especially abundant in Canada’s Alberta province. Such geologic areas hold an estimated 1.8 trillion barrels of oil and for years quietly have served as a major source for gasoline used mostly in the American Midwest. Since Canada has been able to cut production costs in half, tar-sands oil no longer can be considered a fringe petroleum solution to global energy needs.

3. Oil Shale: essentially oil-soaked rocks that are costly to process and require huge amounts of water. Nevertheless, shale holds more oil than all conventional sources combined, and it exists not only in the U.S. but in energy-hungry emerging giants India and Brazil, plus Malagasy and many other smaller countries.

4. Perpetual Petroleum: a vital gift from God or Mother Nature, depending upon your gender-influenced spiritual outlook--virtually inexhaustible, self-renewing oil that oozes up constantly from inside the earth! Nothing less than a miracle, this amazing method of eternal, internal production is the essential finding by the late Dr. Thomas Gold, described in the Washington Post’s 2004 obituary for him as "one of the great celestial thinkers of the last century." I interviewed Dr. Gold for a full hour in the late 1980s on my weekly South Florida radio program, and he explained to my huge audience in great, riveting detail his thesis, which also was reported that same year extensively in The Atlantic Monthly, one of America’s most distinguished periodicals ever since its founding, in 1857.

According to Thompson, in the laboratory, Dr. Thomas Gold found that hydrocarbon methane does form when iron oxide, calcite, and water are subjected to mighty pressure and heat, the kind that exists 100 miles beneath the Earth's crust.
Other scientists are replicating Dr. Gold's experiments. It's more than a shock to understand how we as citizens and consumers are being manipulated. It's a shock to understand how billions are denied the use of this resource as they live in abject misery, controlled by vicious and inhumane dictators and mind-controlling mullahs. It is ironic that millions of Muslims live on top of the largest known source of geologic oil, yet most live without a steady of electricity, running water, or political stability in order to perpetuate the Jihad against the West.

Will Professor Gold's findings free us from enthrallment to either Middle Eastern oil billionaires influenced by mullah-minders? Will Professor Gold's findings be translated into an affordable source of energy for the regular folks here in the United States and in energy-and-cash starved Africa and Asia?

Who is the culprit here for the scarcity of refined petroleum products? The cat is out of the bag. High energy prices can no longer be based on scarcity of oil but on the price of refining. Could it be that big oil has decided not to build additional refineries in order to maintain high profits? They can no longer point to the scarcity of oil or even for the reliance on Middle Eastern oil as an excuse for maintaining high profits.

Professor Gold and other scientists have demonstrated that inexpensive energy is possible. It's now up to the petroleum refiners to do their part.