Madrid, March 31, 2012, by El Marco

Thursday’s general srike in Madrid, unlike Barcelona’s, was largely a pacific affair. Two communist unions, the CCOO and the UGT, did their best to shut down the capital of Spain, and were met with solid resistance from the retail sector. The two unions, which represent a majority of unionized Spanish workers, failed to paralyze the retail sector, with approximately 80 percent of businesses remaining open. 17% of Spanish workers belong to unions with membership being voluntary. Huge mobs of union-led protesters attempted to force the closure of retail shops in the streets adjacent to the Puerta del Sol Plaza in Madrid’s city center.

Above, Spanish riot police guard a shop after a mob of thousands move down the street to their next target. A few minutes later the gates were reopened for business, but the riot police remained.

Union vandals have covered an entire city with stickers and graffiti in opposition to the new Spanish government’s proposed fiscal and labor reforms. Store windows, ATMs, and government ministry signs were targeted. Even stoplights and walk signals were covered with union stickers.

I arrived late on the Gran Via, after the mobs moved down to the Puerta del Sol around noon. Anarcho-syndicalist flags dominated the scene. The Occupy Movement in the States claims their inspiration came from these anarcho-syndicalists when they occupied plazas across Spain in the spring and summer of 2011.

Like the Occupy Movement in the U.S., many young people have joined the old guard communists. These sixteen year olds shared a joint while nearby thousands besieged the many businesses that defied the strike.

The A on his necklace stands for anarchy and the V on the partially obscured shirt on left stands for Vendetta the anarchist slasher movie. Add to that a Clockwork Orange T-shirt and a faux Jew-killer scarf, and your statement is made. The kid in green sports a totalitarian message on his shirt. PUBLIC SCHOOL –  OF ALL –  FOR ALL. Note the environmentalist watermelon green. Green has been the new red for years now.

Above is a CGT union flag. The CGT is one of a number of powerful anarcho-syndicalist unions in Spain. The CCOO union along with the UGT and CGT claim to represent more than 75 percent of Spanish union workers.

The Communist Party played the dominant role in creating the CCOO. In recent years it operates in a pact with the UGT which is the official union of the PSOE, the social democratic party in Spain, which acts much like the Democrats in the USA.

CGT derives from the anarcho-syndicalist tradition, but members include Trotskyites and Maoists along with anarchists. CGT has approximately 70,000 members whereas CCOO and UGT are much larger…around 1,000,000 and 750,000 members respectively.

Unions direct special attention to attracting young people and converting them to the cause.

Proud communists in Puerta del Sol Plaza, Madrid. Note that this thirty-something’s T-shirt is also Clockwork Orange.

Clockwork Orange is an ultra-violent cult movie by Stanley Kubrick. It seems to carry as much weight here as V for Vendetta does among young Occupy anarchists in the U.S..

Here, a shoe store is besieged by thousands of chanting protesters. Unlike American protesters from the left or the right, Spanish leftists carry very few signs. The one above says “Labor reform, legal violence.” A cordon of riot police protects the shoe store as protesters rail against the owner and employees inside.

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After throwing a few eggs into the shoe store, and besieging it for thirty minutes, the mob moved down the street to a store specializing in traditional Spanish clothing and adornments for women. The store being protested is on the left, under the awning on the corner, above.

Employees of the store and police can be seen on the left, facing the unionists at the front door of the store.

Here, the store owner and two staff join the police to face a mob of thousands.

This woman led the chanting and haranguing in front of the store. This store was targeted for approximately thirty minutes before the eggs were thrown and the mob moved on to the next shop. Each time the mob moved, a new group of police would intercede with a cordon at the front door of their next target. They would leave several officers to protect each targeted shop after the mob left.

The sign above reads: Combative Strikes against Aggressive Reforms.

Nearby, a crowd formed around this man. He insisted that he had a right to work, and would not be deterred by the strike.

I did not hear the entire conversation, but I do know that he was called a “bag of garbage” and “a fascist.” He was calm, well spoken, and even tempered, and they were not.

This poster is from the Juventudes Comunistas (Communist Youth) and the PCE (Communist Party of Spain.) It shows a young foot with a skateboarder’s shoe about to stomp on a capitalist rat with a Jewish head.

This image is indistinguishable from Nazi images printed in Der Stürmer in the 1930s and 1940s.

Much of the demonstration dissipated for Siesta. The plazas and streets emptied as protesters observed the time-honored tradition of “Spanish yoga” which is practiced between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. every day. It should be noted here that only half of Spaniards take their siestas lying down, while the other half do it standing up, drinking wine or beer at the tapas taverns which are ubiquitous in every Spanish city and town.

Protesters reappeared at 4:30 in the afternoon for a “Siesta Strike” in front of Madrid’s City Hall, where they lay in the street and blocked traffic. The “Siesta Strike” and march were organized by 15-M, which is the Spanish “ingidnados” movement. This is the movement that inspired the Occupy Wall Street movement in the U.S.

Approximately 40,000 Siesta strikers marched from City Hall to the Puerta del Sol plaza, which is the birthplace of Spain’s Occupy movement.

The 15M march was composed of mostly young bohemians and anarchists. They carried very few signs, and were much more pleasant than their famously naughty U.S. counterparts. I saw no American style leftist tantrums or nastiness. I didn’t even hear an angry word. No one spit on the police, or hurled abuse at them. Although earlier in the day police were instrumental in protecting retail outlets, this crowd seemed entirely too relaxed to seek confrontation.

This was all the force needed to protect the Ministry of Education and Sports. In New York, many more police are needed to protect the city from the Occupy movement. The people of Madrid should be very proud of the degree of civility displayed during this general strike.

Vandalism was a different matter. Almost every ATM in central Madrid was rendered inoperable by cement-like stickers, and I saw two machines that had their screens smashed. I saw the woman, above, attempting unsuccessfully  to scrape stickers off the ATM screen using her CCOO union card.

AFTERMATH: I cannot exaggerate the amount of graffiti and sticker damage done in Madrid’s general strike. These stickers are like cement, and cannot be ripped off. They have to be removed with special tools and solvents.

After the strike, the scraping begins, on a bank building in this case.

The translation of this clever sticker: Don’t have a job? Take advantage of your free time!

There was violence in Barcelona, and other parts of Spain during this general strike, but very little in the center of Madrid. The responsible people of Spain, including those in the new center-right government, are deeply concerned that this radical protest movement will get out of control and damage Spain’s image internationally, a la Greece.

Spain’s unemployment rate is already 22.8pc, rising to more than 51pc for youths, the highest since records began. That being said, I must say that visiting Spain, from Extremadura to Valencia, Barcelona and Madrid recently, I felt much safer than in many American cities. The Spanish people conduct themselves in such a friendly and civil manner that I am left with deep admiration for their society. If it weren’t for the statistics I read, it would be difficult to perceive that Spain is experiencing such a disastrous economic crisis.

One policeman’s perspective. That’s the Ministry of Education and Sports sign above his head.

Here is the shoe store in the afternoon open for business, but look at all the garbage left by protesters.

It seems that many people in Madrid enjoy ripping these posters and stickers, which requires quite a bit of effort. All over the city it seems as if an army of citizens were each doing their part in removing the posters and stickers. The Madrid strikers failed to intimidate the retail sector, with the vast majority of stores remaining open for business. The overburdened business sector of Spain is praying for fiscal and labor reform.

November 23, 2011, by El Marco

I recently traveled from Colorado to New York the weekend before the demise of the revolutionary social experiment in lower Manhattan known as Occupy Wall Street’s “Camp Anonymous.” I went intending to capture for posterity photographic images of the people and infrastructure that comprised that hopeful utopian “model community for a new world.”

A pamphlet entitled Mutual Responsibility OWS I picked up at one of the information desks stated:

The global reality is not the currency or market fluctuations, but rather a direct result of the new global, integral, and social restructuring taking place. Until now, we developed ourselves on a personal level. Now humanity is approaching a new phase, and the old world must make way for the new world. We are dealing with the natural law of development. Everything that we considered true up until yesterday no longer works …

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” – Buckminster Fuller 

Utopian futurist Buckminster Fuller, in the mid 1960s, popularized a “new model structure” for the way we would all live in the future. The geodesic dome hasn’t exactly transformed the global human condition as promised. Today, the Occupy Wall Street revolutionary utopians are offering a “new model social structure for the entire global community“. The OWS big thinkers created an entire revolutionary community in Zuccotti Park, near Wall Street. It thrived and grew for two months until the liberal billionaire mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, ordered police and sanitation workers to relegate it to the trash-heap of history.

This is the first in a series of photo-essays which will bring you into that model utopian community created by the anarchists and Marxists of the OWS revolutionary movement. These people are convinced, each in his or her own way, that this new movement will bring down the entire global free enterprise system, and replace it with their kinder, better, wiser, revolutionary … uh, you know … revolutionary thing.

These were the first Occupiers I encountered in Zuccotti Park. They are self-described anarchists. Above, the boy on the right wears a shirt with the motto of Anonymous, an international activist hacking group which set its sights on Wall Street earlier this year. On March 2, 2011, Anonymous issued a press release:

Attention Brothers: The opportunity to create financial chaos and public unrest and from that, there will be a previously unachieved amount of lulz to be had. Charge your lasers and aim them at the New York Stock Exchange. 

We are not merely human. Anonymous is something much more for we possess neither fear nor mercy. It is time to show the world the true power and the true face of the faceless, the nameless and the ghosts of society.

Like Icarus, the powers that be have flown too close to the sun and the time has come to set the wings of their empire ablaze and watch the system their power relies on come to a grinding halt and come crashing down around them. We must strike at the heart of their empire by once again throw a wrench into the machine, but this time we face a much bigger target; the global financial system. This time our target is the New York Stock Exchange.

Colleen, age 20, from Johnston State College in Vermont.

  Zuccotti Love

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This Floridian spent every day, all day, soliciting funds for the commune’s women’s group. Panhandling seemed to be the only productive activity I witnessed during my four days inside the Zuccotti Park commune. The woman above, and many like her, have to turn in the majority of their funds to the Central Committee, which in turn passes it on to the Finance Committee, some of whom were staying in $700 a night hotels nearby.

Most protesters still can’t define their goals beyond ending capitalism and making life more fair, which means they want other people’s money. Meanwhile, donations of goods and cash pile up, with a reported $500,000 on deposit. (now over 600,000 – El Marco)

The cash marks an embarrassment for a movement supposedly railing against capitalism and wealth, especially now that a radical group called the Alliance for Global Justice is legally sponsoring the protest. By lending its tax-exempt status — for a 7 percent cut! — the global-justice group allows donors to deduct their contributions from federal taxes and gives its own board control over the money.

The alliance, based in Washington, is a hotbed of far-left causes that range from backing hunger strikes in California prisons and supporting Hugo Chavez to denouncing the CIA and oil companies. Its Web site says the group sponsors operations in the Gaza Strip, with Hamas, and boasts of an alliance with Anarchists Against the Wall, which contests Israel’s security barrier in the West Bank. – NYPost

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Free Wi-Fi, yeaaaay! The masked man, above, is wearing a Guy Fawkes mask, named for a member of a 1605 plot to blow up the British House of Lords. The mask was designed for a comic book, V for Vendetta, which was made into a movie of the same name in 2006, and is popular with angry adolescent males. The movie’s hero never removes his mask as he kills policemen by the score, and detonates landmark buildings in a dystopian London of the future. Anonymous, Wikileaks, and anarchists around the world have adopted this mask as a symbol. Julian Assange, of Wikileaks, wore one of these masks at Occupy London Stock Exchange recently.

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This truck is owned by supporters of Julian Assange and Bradley Manning. They were parked beside Zuccotti Park most of the time I was there. They sleep in the back, on sofas, and hand out Free Bradley Manning stickers. Manning is the U.S. soldier “whistleblower” accused of stealing hundreds of thousands of documents from the US Military and handing them over to Assange and his Wikileaks organization. Manning has become a total celebrity to the anti-American left, on the level of cop-killer Abu Mumia Jamal.

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When I queried this fellow about where one could find fascists in New York, his reply encompassed practically anyone who doesn’t support the Zuccotti Park commune, and especially “the bankers.”

The statement below was published by OWS Mutual Responsibility, in a flyer distributed at all information desks at the park.

“The free market, and its tycoons, will continue to thrive and be a central factor in this new stage of global development on condition that we learn together how to establish the relations between us and organize a social structure that truly benefits all. Economic prosperity cannot be achieved without considering universal social wellbeing.”

This sounds strangely like core fascist ideology of the twentieth century. This fellow might be surprised to know that Mussolini was hailed by Lenin as the most perfect socialist in the world.

Ludwig von Mises noted that the National Socialist slogan Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz – the commonweal ranks above private profit — “implies that profit-seeking business harms the vital interests of the immense majority and that it is the sacred duty of popular government to prevent the emergence of profits by public control of production and distribution.”

Doug Schoen, the longtime professional pollster and Democrat, an adviser to the Clintons, (polled) Occupy Wall Street camp in New York’s Zuccotti Park. Here’s his piece in the Wall Street Journal.

What did he find? “The protesters have a distinct ideology and are bound by a deep commitment to radical left-wing policies. “Then Schoen says:

Our research shows clearly that the movement doesn’t represent unemployed America and is not ideologically diverse. Rather, it comprises an unrepresentative segment of the electorate that believes in radical redistribution of wealth, civil disobedience and, in some instances, violence. Half (52%) have participated in a political movement before, virtually all (98%) say they would support civil disobedience to achieve their goals, and nearly one-third (31%) would support violence to advance their agenda.

Coming in at about the same time was a poll taken of one hundred of the Occupiers by New York Magazine which found an unnamed number wanted to “burn it [Wall Street] down” and that 34 percent believed the United States government was “no better than, say, Al Qaeda.” – American Spectator

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I ran into a lot of young kids from the ‘burbs, who skipped school to spend time in Zuccotti Park.

One 17 year old who was staying in the park told me that this was the moment he had been waiting for his whole life. “I always wished I was born in the 1950s, so I could be the exact right age to be there in the ’60s,” he said. The myth of the idyllic “Summer of Love” has been airbrushed, packaged, and sold to these kids, as a utopia lost in the psychedelic mists of time. The 1960s mythical utopia seems to be the main historical reference point for many of today’s youngsters.

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The legacy of harm done by the counter-culture movement of the 1960s was on display everywhere in Zuccotti Park. Damaged young people rubbed shoulders with broken-down old hippies. The smell of potent modern hybrid cannabis was constantly in the air. The young man, above, was in such a state that he stared at the sky for minutes on end before bending down to add another little squiggle to his poster-board. It appeared to me that he was so high he couldn’t speak, or even acknowledge the presence of people around him.

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David Everitt-Carlson, a homeless liberal blogger in New York City is seen begging, painting and pontificating at Camp Anonymous. After a few years in Asia, he hit bottom in Vietnam, and was recently repatriated by a US State Deparment program for indigent expats. The government picked him up at the airport and delivered him to a homeless shelter in midtown Manhattan. He has enjoyed becoming a bit of a cause célèbre for an eager press looking for a new “poster-child” to “put a different face on the issue” of homelessness. As the photo above illustrates, he is still a flaming liberal, but after living eight weeks among the crack-heads and murderers that inhabit his new “homeless” world, a few rays of reality have pierced the fuzziness of his artsy-lefty mind-box. From his blog:

The last few months have been fraught with soul searching. “How did I get here?”  …  And what I have come to realize is that once one succumbs to the psychological mind frame that allows a person to live as a “professional homeless,” the battle has been lost. You will have become what you fear most. And compromises must be made to live on a state owned bed and just $200 in food stamps and $45 cash a month that the government allows you. One of the men in my room at the shelter is a loan shark for crack heads. He loans them $20 and they give him back $40. [talk about greed!] Another can sell three packs of cigarettes a day at the shelter, one by one, and pocket maybe $20. And not a one of them is looking for a job – they already have jobs. In fact, in my entire time at the shelter I have not met one single person who mans the commercial job hunt and is really trying to work themselves out of the system – rather, they learn how to gig the system – how to get the most out of it that they can in legal or less than legal ways. It is not exactly a breeding ground for role models.

I love it when liberals are mugged by reality. Hopefully he keeps having epiphanies like this and develops into a mature conservative who can really do some good in the world by creating wealth and employment for himself and others. Good luck, and I hope you find your way out of your liberal box, sir!

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 Help me paint peace – Day 51

On the weekend, the park was packed with people who didn’t necessarily support the “tear it all down” mindset of the Occupiers. The man above is from Shanghai, China, and is protesting China’s recent crackdown in Tibet. The day before I took this photo, a nun immolated herself, bringing the two week total of self-immolation to twelve. This man was surprised when I expressed sympathy for the death of the nun in my first sentence to him. He told me that the Occupiers were oblivious to China’s current crackdown in Tibet.

I didn’t speak with this young man, but I suspect that he is one of that very rare species of protester known as the conservative infiltrator. Such people regularly appeared at anti-war/kill George Bush rallies after 9/11.

Ady Lambert was one of the few bright spots that I encountered working around Zuccotti Park. She radiated calm sanity, in her red tartan scarf and headphones. Of course she’s not OWS just an observer like me. I include her as a sort of visual interlude. I’m sure she has a brilliant future in photography and in the fashion industry.

Raz Drastic, from New York’s lower east side, is a singer-guitar player in the retro-punk style. His top issues are: corporate greed, reforming the economy, and smaller government. What … smaller government? Raz, you rascally rebel! You should be with the Tea Party. Raz’s Facebook page says his favorite activities are drinking Jack Daniels, communicating with aliens, and just being retarded. That being said, he was one of my favorite people who I encountered in the park, with a calm, congenial, and lucid personality.

Stu McGowan from Burlington, Vermont.

 Roll over, JFK.

Just passing through.

Occupy Wall Street baby, Khloe Smith, with her mother, panhandling. This woman and her red-bearded husband were a permanent feature on the corner of Liberty and Trinity, which is known around the world as Ground Zero. Directly across the intersection, the new World Trade Center Plaza is reaching skyward, while on this side, a neo-primitive community of panhandlers raises money for the global anti-capitalist revolution.

Baby Khloe, with daddy and mommy. Daddy is a  homeless poet. I bought one of his poems. It is arrhythmic, and includes:

Why is it I hate my life and sometimes I wish I was a victim at Columbine?
Why did you give me two beautiful Daughters to be so proud of, Without a way to respectfully take care of them?
How is that people see me as less of a man asking for help?
Instead of a man with a plan with no alternative left?

What is the difference between me and him?
And her? And them?
Why am I considered the least of the bunch?

 

Mommy and daddy entertain tourists, for cash, by simulating sexual positions with a bronze statue. Note the excited man with camera giving the thumbs up in the background.

This famous statue is of a business man, sitting in a park with briefcase open, head bowed as he works. It survived the collapse of the World Trade Center, at which time this area was covered in several feet of debris.

NEED donations to get a cage for my three pet rats … need $420 for cage and food.

“We are at the start of the Global Era. We have come to the conclusion of our natural development as individuals. In the new world, no individual will be able to enjoy while others are starving because everyone’s basic needs must be met. However, along with basic necessities, all people will receive a basic education about the process humanity is going through, which will expand our awareness beyond our personal concerns.” – Mutual Responsibility, OWS

Brings to mind Karl Marx’ maxim, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” doesn’t it?

This mentally ill young man, Jeremy Clinch, told me that due to his bad behavior, the commune had prohibited him from receiving food, and evicted him from the Zuccotti Park. Now he sits on the sidewalk, begging for food. He asked me to go to MacDonalds and buy a meal for him. He told me he didn’t want to eat the communce food anyway, because the week before it had made everyone sick for two days.

Clinch made the front page of the NY Post, under the headline Occupy Wall Street Animals Go Wild ... ZOO-COTTI!. He was assaulted by a delusional Turk named Iskender, who took exception to the early morning tantrum Clinch was throwing. Though this young man struck no one, the Turkish thug who decked him was allowed full communal privileges while Clinch was exiled.

In a bizarre rant after the dust settled, Iskender told The Post that Clinch “is a police agent.”

“He is a Bloomberg agent, disturbing and disrupting the protest,” said Iskender, who after the fight donned a message board that read, “USA-Turk Army Ended My Diplomatic Career 6 Times,” and also charged that “AC Tropicana Casino Robbed My $30K Pay For My Driving Job.” NYPost

They cut off Jeremy’s food and exiled him! How inhumane. Too bad our government doesn’t have the power to exile Stalinists, like the Zuccotti park communards exile the mentally ill.

Yes, at the “leaderless” Zuccotti Park utopia, people can be banished for life, just as in many primitive societies. Even the mentally ill. Where’s the compassion?

This is the now infamous Jew-hater, Danny Cline. A full month after his anti-semitic rant shocked right-thinking America, he was still an honored and protected member of the commune. Here he stands, wearing stolen police netting, like some form of primitive war trophy.

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The day before, Cline was in full panhandling mode. With Sharpie in hand, he had just written on  his abdomen $1 donations – U CAN TOUCH

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Cline was teamed up with one of the many official Occupy beggars who ringed the park day and night with white five gallon buckets. I didn’t observe this activity for more than two minutes, but during that time, I took a number of shots of offended New Yorkers, including a ten year old girl and her mother. I won’t publish that photo as the photos above suffice to illustrate why this commune was hated by local residents.

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The right to live ones’ life, in privacy and Freedom, in whatever way one wants, so long as others are not harmed, should be a sacred principal in a Democracy. – H. Zinn

Marxist-Leninist Howard Zinn’s toxic People’s History of the United States reads like 1940s Stalinist anti-American propaganda, and is widely revered by the left. Zinn’s quote on this sign sounds like the hippy credo of the 1960s. Who is it that determines in anarchy, what constitutes harm?

Ali is from Egypt, and he has been harmed by the Zuccotti Park commune’s very existence. He has an elaborate food cart at one end of Zuccotti Park. When I asked if the commune was giving him good business, he bitterly complained about his plight since the occupiers showed up. “They buy nothing! They all eat in the park. I had many good customers every day, but now they don’t come here.” I also spoke with the men at Charlie’s Pizza. They are also immigrants to America, and they were apoplectic when they described how Occupiers came in at all hours, stoned or drunk, demanding food for free, and even fighting with staff and customers. Other area businesses have had similar experiences.

At a lower Manhattan community board meeting in October, residents also talked about how fed up they were:

“They are defecating on our doorsteps,” fumed Catherine Hughes, a member of Community Board 1 and a stay at home mom who has the misfortune of living one block from the chaos. “A lot of people are very frustrated. A lot of people are concerned about the safety of our kids.”

Fed up homeowners said that they’ve been subjected to insults and harassment as they trek to their jobs each morning. “The protesters taunt people who are on their way to work,” said James Fernandez, 51, whose apartment overlooks the park.  – NY Post

 

Peter Cushing Allan, second from left above, is an entertainment industry attorney and local resident. He went into the commune to share his feelings with Occupy organizers. I heard him say, in the most civil of terms and tone, that he thought that one month was long enough to make a political point by occupying the park, but now in the seventh week, they had gone too far. He said it was time for the Occupiers to leave the neighborhood. In the photo above, Allan reacts when three Occupiers (two were out of the frame, on right) shouted in unison, “No, you get out!”

What Mr. Allan doesn’t realize is that these anarchists and Marxist-Leninists are in it for the revolution that they believe will topple the world economic system for the greater good of the human race.

Like proto-occupier Ratso Rizzo in the movie Midnight Cowboy, this young Occupier just wants to go to where the sun keeps shinin’ thru the pouring rain. When I took this picture, the young person above was speaking to four camera crews, like he was some kind of star.

Everybody’s talking at me.
I don’t  hear a word they’re saying
Only the echoes of my mind.
People stopping staring,
I can’t see their faces,
Only the shadows of their eyes.

 

Occupy Miami Beach – Please donate for needed supplies: sun-screen, beach towel, sunglasses, tiny umbrellas, boogie board, swimsuit. Thanks.

Why doesn’t the commune supply this Occupier’s NEEDS out of the $600,000 they have in the bank? The least they could do is buy him some tiny umbrellas and a bathing suit.

Here, a local resident tries to talk some sense into leftist numbskulls. These two have won life’s lottery by being born in the USA, and they don’t have a clue how lucky they are. Liberal indoctrination has completely debilitated them. I would love to send these two to a country with fewer opportunities than here for a few years to make a living. We could call it a re-education program. I can’t help but think of the book Hijack by Black Panther Tony Bryant, and his taste of life in Cuba, where he learned the hard way how good life is in the USA.

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 Full-time commune resident

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I don’t recall the Tea Party ever needing legal fundraisers. In the background, one of many references to slavery. None of these references allude to the debt the politicians are running up for future generations to pay. One of the major concerns of the various Occupy movements in campuses around the country is student debt. Most in the Occupy movements everywhere want student debt forgiveness, i.e., that the productive tax-payers pay for everybody else’s higher educations.

The new concept of “wage slavery” is important to most of the protesters. This means that in a free market, workers are forced to “sell” or “rent” themselves into “wage slavery” under threat of starvation. Noam Chomsky wrote, “People should not be forced to rent themselves in order to survive.” You mean like prostitution, Gnome? That is what you lefties fully support as a respectable profession! Leftist lunacy shifts so fast. One day hookers are part of the noble working class, and the next day all wage earning work is dishonorable and equated to slavery. I have personal friends who are escaped slaves and they now work for wages here in the US. I will introduce them to this nutty concept and post their responses in the future.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the history of anti-semitism, “Debt is Slavery” is a Jew-hating concept that has led to many pogroms in Europe over the centuries. In our society, debt is a choice free people make. Slavery means the buying and selling of human beings who have lost their freedom, and who have no choices.

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This man is an example of New York’s permanent protester class. He has been seen at every leftist anti-American protest since the ’60s. At least fifty percent of the participants in Occupy marches in New York are recycled anti-war leftists who also participate in protests supporting Hisbollah, or welcoming Irans’ president Ajmadenijad when he comes to New York. When the common business man statue isn’t being sexually harassed, it has to put up with this kind of abuse. For some reason, this veteran lefty thought it appropriate to sit for hours in this position, without moving a muscle day after day.

This is Amaz,who told me that Barack Obama is the most perfect man in the universe. He also told me that the word caucasian means “dead Asian,” and that because white people are dead Asians, they can’t produce melanin to color their skin. He told me way too many other things also, as he is a self-regarding sage with his own complex, religio-racial world-view.

Anti-fracking hysteria is an issue about which the vast majority of protesters agree. Energy independence would provide many jobs and make staples more affordable for the “99%,” bringing us lower utility bills, lower prices for food and all other consumer goods. Remember the statement from Anonymous, at the top of this post:

Innocent people may stand to lose something from this but the powers that be stand to lose much more.

A popular sign at Occupy Wall Street is “Fracking makes 99% sick, and 1% rich.” This is pure myth. No one has ever been made sick by fracking, yet President Obama and the Democrat Party are so beholden to the radical environmentalist lobby that they are throwing all kinds of roadblocks up to thwart this ultra-safe technology.

Pieman, Aron Kay, is another professional protester, famous on the left since the days of Berkeley’s Free Speech movement. His role, as a Yippie in that movement, was to popularize throwing pies in the faces of speakers with whom the flower-power Marxists of that time disagreed. This human pig-man has done more to shut down free speech in this country than any one I know of.

Ben Cohen serves free Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream out of a freezer that was permanently situated on one side of the “kitchen” in the Zuccotti Park commune. The day I took this photo, he was digging ice cream for hours, which was quite impressive. When I asked him about the multi-city protests he spearheaded with his left-wing Democrat organization True Majority in September 2008, he stunned me by denying any memory of his activities.

On the first anniversary of the Tea Party movement, I wrote:

This phenomenon might instead have been dated to September 25, 2008, and the movement called the Ice Cream Party, had the November election turned out differently. Ben Cohen, of Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream, is the founder of the Soros funded radical leftist “grassroots group” True Majority. Cohen claims 700,000 members and says he organized over 251 events in 41 states to protest against a bill in the House which would eventually become Bush’s $700,000,000,000 TARP bailout of Wall Street. The protests also included a laundry list of unions and leftist groups including ACORN.

Mr. Cohen denied that he had been involved. I couldn’t believe that he would lie to me in front of all those children waiting for ice cream. Of course, left wing protests against big government bail-outs died out immediately once Obama won the election. When the Tea Party emerged in February, 2009, protesting against TARP and Obama’s $780 billion Porkulus bill, the left was at first silent, and then started screaming racism.

Now that Barack Obama has utterly disappointed true hardcore leftists like Ben Cohen, rather than direct their anger at the government and their own Democrat Party, which would be racist, they now channel their anger against “the capitalist system.” Shame on you, Ben Cohen, for not remaining true to your small government principals of the pre-Obama era. In retrospect, we can now see that Cohen’s “Ice Cream Party” had nothing to do with principals, but was just an anti-Bush movement. The proof is that you haven’t had a negative word to say about all of Obama’s massive spending and bailouts.

Another mega-bucks celebrity figure who frequented the Zuccotti Park commune was Russell Simmons. Known for being a recording and fashion industry entrepreneur and author, he also is the founder of a fee-based credit card company called UniRush Financial. I somehow doubt that he was trolling the Occupy crowd for new customers. Self-styled Hindu-Buddhist-vegan-yogi Simmons seemed to me to be uncomfortable greeting some of the anarchists within the Occupy Wall Street community. With a net worth of $350 million, Simmons is a “capitalist pig” who “hoards cash,” according to the rhetoric of Occupy Wall Street. “Capitalist pig” Ben Cohen sold his company to UniLever Corporation, one of the world’s largest conglomerates. As far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing more hypocritical in the world than a “filthy rich” commie sympathizer.

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 Dehumanization of the capitalist “pigs” is a staple of the Occupy movement.

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This is an anti-semitic poster from an OWS activist web site. Note that the occupiers are all holding giant pins, with which to destroy the hideous, stereotypical, Jewish tycoon which symbolizes capitalism. Karl Marx was born and baptized a Lutheran in Trier, Germany. His early writings for that city’s newspaper were pure anti-semitic diatribes, similar to those written by Martin Luther. Marx went on to become the leading anti-semite of the nineteenth century, according to James Carroll, in his seminal book, Constantine’s Sword, which is a chronicle of anti-semitism as the central tragedy of western civilization.

Ben Cohen and Russell Simmons, you are hanging out with anti-semites, who also happen to hate you because you’re part of the 1%.

A gay, Jewish civil servant, on left, reacts in horror to the comments of this sign-carrying radical Israel-hating non-Jewish Jew. The man with the sign supports Hamas and other Jewicidal groups, and I also photographed him surrounded by muslim men and women who were delighted by his anti-Israel exhortations.

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Anarchists had the largest and most centrally located propaganda operation of the Zuccotti Park commune. In the October 22, 2011, issue of the broadsheet published by the commune, The Occupied Wall Street Journal, in an article entitled Enacting the Impossible on Consensus Decision Making, David Graeber writes that at the very first meeting of their 12 person central planning committee anarchists dominated:

“The anarchists in the circle made what seemed at the time an insanely ambitious proposal. Why not let them operate exactly like this committee, by consensus.

It was, in the least, a wild gamble, because as far as any of us knew, no one had ever managed to pull off something like this before. Consensus process had been successfully used in spokes-councils  —  groups of activists organized into separate affinity groups, each represented by a single “spoke” — but never in mass assemblies like the one anticipated in New York City. Even the General Assemblies in Greece and Spain had not attempted it. But consensus was the approach that most accorded with our principles. So we took the leap.

The direct democratic process adopted by Occupy Wall Street has deep roots in American radical history. It was widely employed in the civil rights movement and by the Students for a Democratic Society. But its current form has developed from within movements like feminism and even spiritual traditions (both Quaker and Native American) as much as from within anarchism itself. The reason direct, consensus-based democracy has been so firmly embraced by and identified with anarchism is because it embodies what is perhaps anarchism’s most fundamental principle: that in the same way human beings treated like children will tend to act like children, the way to encourage human beings to act like mature and responsible adults is to treat them as if they already are.”

Thus the old guard Marxist/hippy radicals joined with younger anarchists who typify this movement.

Note the spelling of AmeriKKKa on the cardboard sign above. That’s how Obama’s pastor and mentor of 22 years, Reverend Wright spells it too. Wright and Obama have both embraced this movement, and even stroked it a little.

The man in the hardhat is Charles Helms, Communications Director, and Assistant to the President, of the Hudson County, NJ, AFL-CIO. He joins with Marxist-Leninists at the Zuccotti Park commune.

This woman sang revolutionary songs of a type that were so bizarre that I was flabbergasted. The one that I recall, the refrain was Plaster my legs, referring to broken legs. Very strange. Note that she is wearing a purple heart. I wonder if she got it stumbling on her hammer and sickle, drunk on Cuban rum …

All persons or entities that deliberately harm America financially or otherwise are nothing less than HOME GROWN TERRORIST.
THE RICH refusing to pay their fair share
THE BANKS with their mortgage and foreclosure schemes
THE CORPORATIONS exporting jobs out of the country
WALL STREET with its underhanded manipulation of the market

Name me one game in the world, played by humans of any age, that doesn’t breed dishonest men, or dishonest four year olds.

A large percentage of OWS participants are 9/11 truthers, or followers of Alex Jones, who on the fifth anniversary of 9/11 led a howling mob of thousands to Ground Zero to scream insults at the families of victims of the 9/11 attacks. I encountered a number of truthers who had come to New York on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 to demonstrate at Ground Zero, and stayed to join the Occupy Wall Street movement on September 17.

Another union man, peddling a communist newspaper.

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 Stupid, stupid, stupid.

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Recent reports in the New York newspapers say that Outlaw Bobby Steele is one of the few protesters left in Zuccotti Park, after Mayor Bloomberg’s cops and Sanitation Department kicked OWS out of the park.

Steele was actually a very pleasant guy, who said that he had worked on Wall Street for a decade. I think it’s a safe assumption that was before he got his facial tattoos.

This is the delusional Turk who punched out Jeremy Clinch and enjoyed the full support of the central committee of the Zuccotti Park commune until the bitter end.

 CAMP ANONYMOUS, Always Here, Always Watching

Well, they’re not always here; they’re gone now. The residents, business-owners, and workers (a.k.a. the 99%) in the area are breathing a collective sigh of relief. I’m glad I was there to document this leftist debacle for history. In Zuccotti Utopia part 2, I will chronicle the infrastructure and daily life of the revolutionary Occupiers of Zuccotti Park.

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 We are Legion
We do not forgive
We do not forget

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Denver, November 2, 2011 – by El Marco

What follows is a close look at the leftist lawfare campaign of uncivil agitation as it unfolded in Denver last week. Denver, like other cities that have Occupy manifestations, is faced by a core of protesters from anarchist groups, labor unions, and communist organizations, often obscuring their affiliations, mixed in with a mishmash of confused students, concerned citizen activists, children, and all sorts of evil clowns.

Hello. My name is 99%.   This fifteen year old was among a group of seven ranging from age 13 to 18 years young.

We have all heard the Occupy Wall Street movement (OWS) described as a grassroots movement. We have been told that it just sprang up after Adbusters, a Canadian left-wing magazine, floated the idea on the internet. The Dominant Liberal Establishment Media (DLEM) has continued repeating this implausible propaganda line since September, despite emerging evidence that OWS has actually been orchestrated by a who’s who list of American radical extremists. It has become clear that Adbusters is just one of a host of leftist organizations, supported by the Tides Foundation and/or George Soros, that have been jointly planning the OWS movement since at least February 2011.

Last week, Occupy Chicago protesters stormed City Hall to let Mayor Rahm Emanuel know their displeasure in the recent arrests of the Occupy campers at Grant Park on Michigan Avenue. They were lead by radical anti-war activists Joe Iosbaker (SEIU) and Andy Thayer, who we have reported on in the past for their ongoing investigations by the FBI. In September of 2010 they were targeted for suspicion of providing material support to Hamas, the F.A.R.C. and other terrorist organizations. Hat Tip: Rebelpundit

Names like Stephen Lerner (SEIU) or Wade Rathke (ACORN founder) are among those exposed as main strategists behind OWS. Stephen Lerner said of OWS events, “It’s a confluence of planned and unplanned demonstrations…. We (radical organizations) build on each other. We go ping-ponging back and forth.”

Also, Dave Swanson, a former communications director for ACORN, said: “we’re planning to model our behavior on the actions that happened earlier this year in Tahrir Square, Cairo, Egypt, in Tunisia, and the actions you see in Spain and Greece and countries around the world when governments get even a fraction as bad as ours has gotten.”

Also, AFL-CIO trained anarchist, Lisa Fithian, is the top street-level organizer of the Occupy Wall Street movement. As a longtime community organizer and direct-action agitator, she was a key organizer of the violent demonstrations that caused the shutdown of the 1999 WTO meetings in Seattle. Fithian famously said: “When people ask me, ‘What do you do?’ I say I create crisis, because crisis is that edge where change is possible.”

And David Fenton, who has ties to the Weather Underground, Bill Ayers, and Barack Obama, has been shown to be involved in promoting OWS marches. Fenton Communications has created public relations strategies for communist countries. Fenton was the photographer for Bill Ayers’ Weather Underground terrorist organization in the 1970s and served on the board of the Chicago Woods fund with Ayers and Obama, where they doled out 200 million dollars to radical organizations.

OWS is the culmination of a process that surfaced at the One Nation rally in Washington, D.C. in October, 2010. The Democrat Party invited a long list of labor unions and communist organizations to publicly support the Obama administration. I photographed and wrote at the time:  “The lines between the Democratic Party, labor unions, socialist and communist organizations, were blurred at the One Nation Working Together rally at the Lincoln Memorial … . Organized by One Nation Working Together, which is headed by the cream of the Dem crop at the Democratic National Committee. The rally was a showcase for the most radical elements of the Democrat party base. This movement also has its roots in the 2009 astroturf campaign organized by Obama For America/Organizing for America and labor unions to bully and intimidate the Tea Party movement.

Viva la Revolucion. This little clown, wearing the cop-killer Guy Fawkes mask made popular in the movie V for Vendetta, told me he is just thirteen years old. I have photographed many children at the Occupy Denver rallies. They are brought by parents, or often grandparents, and I could devote an entire essay to this theme alone.

In this case, these kids deferred to the man with the pony-tail who can be seen here carrying astroturf signs wrapped in a black plastic bag. Small astroturf operations like this can be seen throughout every rally. For me, this is a shocking insight into the lengths to which radicals will go to indoctrinate children. I don’t know who this adult is, I just hope he’s not their school teacher.

OCCUPY THE WORLD This 17 year-old is another member of the children’s troupe. As of October 15, the Occupy movement became a global movement with violent rallies in many cities in North America, Europe and Asia. In Rome that day, the Occupy protesters injured forty policemen, some severely, and also attacked ATMs and banks with their firebombs, iron bars and sledgehammers.

“On October 15, 2011, OWS rallies were held in more than 900 cities around the world, with violence breaking out most notably in Rome, where tens of thousands of demonstrators converged. According to a Reuters report: “Hundreds of hooded, masked demonstrators rampaged in some of the worst violence seen in the Italian capital in years, setting cars ablaze, breaking bank and shop windows and destroying traffic lights and signposts.” Meanwhile, 175 protesters were arrested in Chicago and 92 were arrested in New York.” – Discoverthenetworks.org

Tim Holland, a rapper, addressed a crowd of 600 before the Oct 22 march. His remarks are a typical sampling of Occupy speech:

“How many of you are all upset about the massive inequities in America? How many of you are tired of our overseers waging wars around the world? This must end. We want a living wage. We want to live like human beings. … This global occupation movement is the first populist movement in the U.S. since the ’30s, since the ’60s, this is a struggle that has been going on since civilization began, the people of the world are united, and they have tried to divide us, through race-baiting, through class warfare, through splitting us up between sexual preferences, religions, but look around you. Are you prepared for the long struggle that we have ahead of us? Because corporate America will not go easily. It is equivalent to the Civil War, to the Civil RIghts movement of the ’60s.”

Another speaker intoned about the infighting between anarchists and socialists, which has been a feature of the movement in New York from the start. Socialists naturally want to tell everybody exactly what to do and the anarchists just want to … well… be anarchists. Behind-the-scenes meetings apparently produced some concessions to mollify the anarchists and make them fall into line just a little.

In Denver on October 22, it was announced that anarchists were awarded “security positions”.

OWS Marxist-Leninists produced this poster in October, showing entwined anarchist and communist symbols in the upper left and European peasant-workers, standing arms linked, in early 20th century garb. If these OWS anarchists knew any history, they wouldn’t go anywhere near the communists. I suggest they do a little reading about Nestor Makhno and his anarchist army in Ukraine. However, the poster illustrates the thorniness of the issue for OWS, and is an attempt to quell infighting in the ranks.

Occupy Denver marching with anarcho-syndicalist flag. The red and black flag is a symbol of anarcho-syndicalist and anarcho-communist co-operation, black being the traditional color of anarchism, and red being the traditional color of socialism. Amazingly, these are the building blocks of the Occupy movement, a reality which the mainstream press glosses over as they carry water for the Obama administration and the left in general.

On October 14, 2011, the website BigGovernment.com reported that it had succeeded in acquiring a vast email archive (more than 3,900 emails) containing “messages shared by the left’s anarcho-socialist activists during the strategic and daily tactical planning of the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ and broader ‘Occupy’ campaign this fall.” These emails document what BigGov describes as the extensive “involvement of socialists, anarchists, and other radicals” in the OWS movement, along with the “heavy union involvement from the beginning of the ‘Occupy’ movement, as well as discussion about the role of the Democratic Party, and how the movement should respond to President Barack Obama.” Further, the emails show that OWS’s objectives are to promote extreme levels of economic and governmental destabilization; to create social unrest throughout the democratic world; and to form alliances with other radical causes, including the anti-Israel movement.

A number of the OWS emails give evidence of a “Trojan Horse” strategy designed to deceive the public about the Occupy movement’s real agendas. As OWS organizer John McGloin put it:

“[F]irst you get large numbers of people to join by showing how reasonable you are. Then when the numbers are big enough, they will feel their oats, get impatient, and start demanding more than you could have imagined. (Never underestimate mob mentality.) But if you talk about overthrowing governments, capitalism or wholesale changes, most of the 99% will be scared off, and we’ll never have the power we need to affect real change. In order to fight the global corporations I estimate we need a minimum of 15 million Americans on the street. There are not 15 million radical socialist/anarchists in the US.  We need people without political agendas, but with anger at corporations.” – Discoverthenetworks.org

This is the heart of Occupy Denver utopian community, which was cleared out and evicted by police from Civic Center Park a week earlier. I don’t know the details of who allowed them to re-Occupy the park, but it certainly didn’t take long for them to turn it into a reasonable facsimile of a garbage dump.

This is the utopian free clothing and stuff collection and distribution department. All of this mess is directly across from the western entrance to Colorado’s State Capitol Building.

This is “Krusty’s kitchen”, which is named after the misanthropic evil clown of The Simpsons cartoon show. Yes, it stinks (not only of cannabis,) and yes, the people doing the food handling are vagrant-scented, but hey, a utopia has never been built in a week, and there are no reports of rats … yet.

Since everything in this utopia is done on a volunteer basis, some things just don’t get done, like keeping things neat and orderly for example.

This photograph was taken at noon, next to the kitchen on the sidewalk across from the Capitol Building. Note the orange armband, which marks this protester as one of the volunteer marshall/workers of the fledgeling OD community.

This photo was also taken at noon, and highlights what is so very wrong about the entire Occupy movement. Young runaways, the mentally ill, drug addicts and alcoholics, rapists and child-predators have all been causing problems at Occupy utopias in cities across America.

This literature is the only literature I’ve seen offered in my several visits to Occupy Denver. I was given four copies and a CD for free. Sorry, I haven’t had time to glean any gems to share with you. The symbol for the Leading Light Communist Organization is an AK-47 rifle, a book, and a rising sun.

What, no Howard Zinn? These people really are hard line. They had keffiyas for sale, as well as T-shirts mocking the police.

Occupy Denver participant, ready to march.

I actually recorded this comrade, and this is what he was chanting: “We want Global Equality, No More Capitalist Economy” Other oft-used chants included: “NO WAR BUT CLASS WAR! NO WAR BUT CLASS WAR!”, “POLICE ARE THE ARMY OF THE RICH! POLICE ARE THE ARMY OF THE RICH!”, “1-2-3-4, WE DECLARE A CLASS WAR!”, “EL PUEBLO UNIDO NO SERA VENCIDO”, “ANTI-AH, ANTI-CAPITALISTA”, “CAPITALISM IS A SYSTEM OF DESTRUCTION”.

This guy is a permanent fixture of the Occupy Denver movement. Normally you can’t really see his face, because he is constantly yelling at the top of his lungs, incoherently. He should become the poster child for the entire movement, as they have become affectionately known to critics as flea-baggers.

DON”T JOKE WITH US WE ARE SERIOUS – OK, OK, you’re right. You evil clowns are no joke. Let’s look at some of the “serious” protesters.

If you want to know where this guy is really coming from, I’d take the red shirt as a clue. When the Soviet Union collapsed, I wondered what would become of all of the millions of radical communists in western European countries and in North America. How would they react to the implosion of everything they believed in? What would they morph into? I think I’m finally looking at the answer, as communists seek to take advantage of the economic turmoil to create a violent revolution.

More Jacobin dehumanizing and eliminationist rhetoric. This gives a peek at what is running riot in their heads. Extreme leftists crave violence and some don’t hide that fact.

This is one of many guillotine signs, complete with maniacally detailed blood dripping and pooling artwork. For brevity, I’m only including this one guillotine shot, although the others were delightful also, especially the one with the pink pig having his head chopped off while he’s eating out of a trough of money.

Khaddafy-ize, at this point in history, can only be interpreted as meaning “to execute in the street in a brutal fashion.” Here, this man advocates executing the wealthy, the Zionist bankers, the Congress and the Supreme Court, and everybody else in the 1%.

Anti-semitism has been reported coast to coast at Occupy camps and marches. This is the first significant example I have seen in Denver.

CORPORATIONS ARE THE SYMPTOM, CAPITALISM IS THE DISEASE.

Mort Zuckerman says the door to the Occupy Wall Street movement “…was opened by the Obama administration, going after the ‘millionaires and billionaires’”.  The life-long Democrat says that “…to fan that flame of populist anger … is very divisive and very dangerous for this country.”

Violence is a big theme. I have, again, only included a few examples.

Citizen journalist Ringo the Gringo captured this communist speaker at the Occupy Los Angeles camp a few days ago, letting the cat out of the bag: after dismissing nonviolence as a dead end, he admits that for the Occupiers to achieve their goals, violence and bloodshed will be necessary:

Occupy L.A. Speaker: “One of the speakers said the solution is nonviolent movement. No, my friend. I’ll give you two examples: French Revolution, and Indian so-called Revolution. Gandhi, Gandhi today is, with respect to all of you, Gandhi today is a tumor that the ruling class is using constantly to mislead us. French Revolution made fundamental transformation. But it was bloody.

India, the result of Gandhi, is 600 million people living in maximum poverty. So, ultimately, the bourgeoisie won’t go without violent means. Revolution! Yes, revolution that is led by the working class. Long live revolution! Long live socialism!”

 

Mufti-woman is a regular speaker at Occupy Denver rallies. She is a full time, living, breathing evil clown who rants against Israel and the capitalist system into a megaphone she carries with her everywhere. The megaphone also has a very loud police style siren, which she likes to play with when she’s not getting enough attention. What is most notable about her, in my mind, is that she is accepted as a rational leader by this crowd. She fits right in, and here leads the group discussion that launched the disastrous Oct.29 march.

The crowd listens and applauds her as she screeches and acts as MC before the series of actions which culminated, by design, in mob action and violence against the police.

Many in this crowd wear the keffiyeh popularized by Marxist Arab terrorist Yassir Arafat.

On October 2, New York Magazine published the results of a poll it had conducted with 100 committed, long-term OWS protesters in New York City. …. 45 percent said that capitalism “can’t be saved” and is “inherently immoral”;  35 percent said the U.S. government is “no better than, say, Al Qaeda.” –  Discoverthenetworks.org

Mufti presented as peoples’ heroes two demonstrators who had been arrested by police, in Denver, and in New York. The first was William Hall, a.k.a. Billy “Reno,” who claims that he is a veteran Special Forces soldier who served in East Africa. It appears to those dedicated to exposing military “posers” that Reno is lying about his service.

I emailed my friend, Major Diggs Brown, a National Guard Special Forces officer (Green Beret, and author of Your Neighbor Went to War,) because I thought that this Reno character didn’t sound smart enough to be in the Special Forces. He replied that it sure looks like the guy is a poser, and pointed me to this comment thread, where Reno is busted by people who actually served in the theater and units Reno claims to have served in.

“My name is Reno. I was arrested in a tent. Right here, I was hauled out of a tent in 22 degree weather. (crowd: YAY!) I went to jail, and they wouldn’t let me have my medicine (MMJ?) so I had to hunger strike it ’til they let me out. …

The Anarchist Black Cross, and this kitchen, they’re the only people who are getting our people out of jail. So let’s have a hand for the Anarchist Black Cross (crowd: YAY! big applause + drumming) and Krusty’s Kitchen over there. Every time they see us serving food, it gets at them, ’cause they can’t charge people for it, and any time we give something away,  it gets at them, ’cause they can’t charge people for it, so what they do, is they put people in jail to try to silence this movement. We’re not going to let that happen today, are we? OCCUPY DENVER!!!”

The next heroic arrestee presented by Mufti was jailed along with hundreds of others for blocking the Brooklyn Bridge in New York. She is now traveling on behalf of OWS to inspire other OWS class warriors by her virtuous example.

Mufti: “I have the pleasure and the honor of introducing this lady who was at Occupy Wall Street. She was arrested (crowd: Yay!) on the Brooklyn Bridge” (crowd: louder Yay!)

The young woman had nothing interesting to say except: “I’m happy to go to jail for it, honestly. What better way to get arrested, but for a cause?” … “I was in jail for six hours, in a holding cell, I had prison food, but it was absolutely worth it.”

Cameron Kelly also travelled from OWS in New York. She is seen here holding up the first edition of the new propaganda news-sheet, Occupied Wall Street Journal. The publication is funded by the Tides Foundation.

“I am here from OWS, I got here yesterday. I am bringing a message of solidarity from Occupy Wall Street. Our big problem in Occupy Wall Street, well we have two main issues right now that we’re really working on, and one is fracking, which I know you know about here in Colorado. They want to do fracking in New York, and we are going to put our bodies down in front of these machines that want to frack.

Second issue: police brutality. We all know what happened in Oakland, and our thoughts and prayers go out to Scott Olson. Every time we march now, we have to keep him in mind. In New York, the police are also getting out of hand … They’re starting to clamp down. They’re starting to fight back, and we’re going to fight back more! FIGHT BACK!” (big cheers from crowd)

Scott Olson is OWS’s first seriously injured martyr. He is also founder of I Hate the Marine Corps.com and an outed Jew-basher. The lawyers of OWS will use Olson, and any other person who is injured or killed in one of their orchestrated provocations, to wage propaganda and crippling lawsuits against cities, states, and law enforcement agencies. This is lawfare, and it is a central element of radical warfare against free societies.

Mica Park, an environmentalist, spoke next:

“Fossil fuel companies put profit before people and the planet.” … “This current centralized dirty energy system supports the status quo, and those in power will do anything, including destroying our planet, to keep it that way and to continue this plantation economy, where the 99% are enslaved by debt to keep the 1% rich.”

Then she started attacking my home province, Alberta, and its plans to expand oil exports to the US:

“The Keystone Pipeline is like a carbon BOMB, desecrating the earth from start to finish, we should be investing in electric transportation, light rail and cars, (big applause) … The Keystone Exxon Pipeline … in Alberta has destroyed huge amounts of land, and wasted huge amounts of natural gas and fresh water. The pipeline will go through Native American sacred grounds, through farmlands and aquifer sources, spilling along the way, to Texas so that it can be refined and shipped around the earth to be burned.  It’s a carbon bomb, raising carbon in our atmosphere to 600 parts per million. That’d be game over for the planet. Next Saturday, would you like to march with me on the Canadian consulate in Denver?” 

The art on the sign above mystified me so I asked what the long thing wrapped around the globe was. That’s the Alberta-Texas pipeline!! I was shocked that OWS environmentalists were fanning the assault on the energy sector.

Both fracking technology and the Keystone Pipeline are of utmost importance to the U.S. and Canadian economies. The positive economic impact on jobs and federal, state and provincial revenues cannot be overstated. IT’S HUGE! This is one of many areas where OWS works in tandem with the Obama administration, which is actively working through the EPA to make fracking/drilling projects and the pipeline very expensive and difficult to proceed with. Radical environmentalist organizations have immense power over corporations in this country and destroy whole industries, using environmental lawfare, and junk science. Think the spotted owl (logging) and the Delta smelt (agriculture).

DISMANTLE EMPIRE! I WANT A FUTURE FOR ALL LIFE!

My daddy has dreadlocks, and every time he draws a pipeline it looks like a joint. SHEEESH!! This kid doesn’t stand a chance. Maybe tomorrows eco-terrorist?

Occupy Wall Street is not just about bankers on Wall Street and their fat bonuses. OWS is about attacking every sector and industry listed on the stock exchanges that radicals do not approve of. Energy, manufacturing, financials, and agriculture have all been under attack by lawfare and lunatic over-regulation for a very long time. Now the gloves are off, and these eco-warriors and their anarchist buddies want to destroy it all to “save the earth.”

P. J. O’Rourke wrote metaphorically of throwing the communists out the front door (collapse of Communism in eastern Europe) and having them crawl back in through the window as environmentalists (green movement) and OWS is providing yet more evidence. After all, their stated goal is collapsing the capitalist system and they aren’t kidding. What better way to do it than attack every productive sector and force industries out of business or out of the country? Their vaunted concern for jobs is just another lie.

 The leading vanguard of OD marches is a constantly changing affair. From time to time, anarchists usurp the lead, en masse, from establishment OD marchers led by El Comandante. This is often comical, and results in some verbal spats and tensions, mostly on the part of El Comandante and his immediate subordinates. The anarchists appear to be less uptight than the socialists, and seem to genuinely enjoy the tussle.

Tanner Spendley, known on this blog as El Comandante, exalts as he jockeys his forces to overtake the anarchists who have temporarily seized the vanguard as they approach Denver’s Federal Reserve.

Because Spendley (above, with fists raised) behaves in public like the Maximum Leader of the “leaderless” OD marches, I dubbed him “El Comandante” in my previous article. The person in orange, I dubbed “Drill Sergeant,” based on her behavior. Spendley has become one of OD’s most recognizable spokespersons and regularly leads marchers from Civic Center Park to the Federal Reserve and back to the park, where he barks orders directing the civil disobedience du jour.

On Oct. 22, El Comandante ordered marchers to block Broadway, the main thoroughfare between Civic Center Park and the State Capitol, blocking traffic in downtown Denver.

Part of the O.D. marching ritual is to occupy the plaza in front of Denver’s Federal Reserve, and do revolutionary chanting and speechifying. Paulistinians (Ron Paul) trade off the mic with Alex Jones conspiracy cranks and hard-line Marxists railing against the existence of the Fed.

Jeannie Hartley (the blond woman speaking into the mic in photo above) is another leader of the leaderless, almost equal in power to El Comandante. She spends a lot of her time giving interviews to the drooling fawns of the Dominant Liberal Establishment Media. Her speaking style ranges from giving motherly instruction on who should get arrested and who should not, to well timed tearful sobbing about this or that evil consequence of living in a world oppressed by imperialist America. Her shirt reads “Fight for your Class, Not for your Country.” Gee, wonder why I’ve never seen one of those at Wal-Mart.

AlGore TV described Hartley as ” Occupy Denver media coordinator Jeannie Hartley”, the NY Times called her “a media liaison with Occupy Denver” According to her Facebook page, she is a yoga and Zumba instructor and also a “Professional Singer Songwriter musician keyboards guitar”, and the page lists her “thoughts” as:

“This is changing our world now even though our journey ahead is a long one with a myriad of challenges. The many problems that have held us done (sic) for so many years are no longer being swept underneath the carpet. Occupy Wall Street is a revolution to be sure that is only increasing in size, strength and purpose hourly. Occupy Colorado and Occupy Denver are as intregral (sic) to this monumental task as any other occupy movement in the world. We WIL (sic) succeed.”

This is the soon to be famous Frankie Roper clowning for photographers in front of the Federal Reserve. He would later go on to attack a black motorcycle police officer, and it would be falsely reported by the DLEM that he was severely beaten and sent to the hospital with facial wounds.

 This is Frankies’ crew from Occupy Colorado Springs, in town create a little mayhem.

Above, Mark and Barb Cohen wear caps of the National Lawyers Guild which identify the wearers as “legal observers”. The Cohens were co-founders of Recreate 68, which caused mayhem at the 2008 Democratic convention in Denver. Several people clad with these green caps and carrying video cameras were present at this march to gather evidence for lawsuits in the wake of any troubles. The National Lawyers Guild first appeared in 1922, and has been called “the legal bulwark of the Communist Party”.

The NLG’s earliest antecedent was an agency known as the MOPR (the Russian initials for “International Class War Prisoners Aid Society”), which was formed by the Communist International (Comintern) in 1922 as part of its effort to infiltrate American legal organizations. Soon thereafter, MOPR became known as International Red Aid (IRA). In 1925 an American section of IRA was established under the name International Labor Defense (ILD), which in 1936 helped to organize the NLG.

In 1999, NLG member Chip Berlet, who is also an activist with Morris Dees’s Southern Poverty Law Center, described the Guild’s saturation with Communist and far-left ideologies: “The cacophony at some [Guild] meetings … [arises from] debates featuring cadres from Leninist, Trotskyist, Stalinist, and Maoist groups, along with Marxists, anarchists, libertarians, and progressive independents — interacting with a preponderance of reluctant Democrats — all intertwined with multiple alternate identities as lawyers, legal workers, labor organizers….”

The NLG’s National Immigration Project … rejects “all deportations and manipulations of the border carried out in the interests of capitalism,” encouraging local NLG chapters to “develop training programs and legal clinics to support mass defense efforts against deportations.” According to the Guild, government raids against “undocumented working people” constitute “an effort to terrorize and silence immigrant communities.”

Following 9/11, NLG provided legal advice — translated into several Middle Eastern languages — for immigrants contacted by the U.S. government during its anti-terrorism initiatives. These materials advised immigrants to refuse to talk to investigators — because “[t]he FBI is not just trying to find terrorists, but is gathering information on immigrants and activists who have done nothing wrong.” Discoverthenetworks.com

Lawfare is “the use of law as a weapon of war.” It is one of several alternative war-making concepts outlined in a 1999 Chinese book that set forth new types of offensive actions available to an international actor that seeks to undermine a military force. The international left has become adept at using lawfare in many arenas including against law enforcement. Both congressman John Conyers and Weather Underground terrorist Bernadette Dohrn are or have been members of the guild. Radicals are trained to harass the police and disobey every attempt of law-enforcement to control a deliberately orchestrated volatile mob action.

The trouble started when El Comandante (above, to left of statue) veered off the permitted march route, gesticulating wildly that the marchers should follow him up the steps to the Capitol. This created confusion on Broadway, and split the march, with about half following El Comandante (Spendley), and the other half returning as planned to Civic Center Park.

The marchers around me verbally expressed surprise when El Comandante summoned them off the route to the park, and led them up to the Capitol Building. I estimate the entire march of October 29 to have numbered no more than 1,000 although the DLEM claims 2,000. Protesters told me earlier that OD’s permit was for a march to support medical marijuana legislation.

Here is a blowup of the previous photo, showing Spendley gloating, and summoning protesters to a confrontation with State Troopers.

I scampered up the stairs and found that the verbal abuse of cops had already begun. The man on the right, with the kaffiya and armband, is an Occupy Denver “official security anarchist.” Frankie Roper can be seen, with the orange bandana, launching into his confrontation with State Troopers. The trooper walking towards the camera will soon be the target of Roper’s insanity. It seemed to me that the troopers were taken by surprise.

Jeannie Hartley is seen here giving instructions while Frankie hurls abuse at State Troopers. The National Lawyers’ Guild films the developing confrontation, looking for evidence to use against the troopers in court. Anarchists can be seen streaming forward, screeching, and soon the mob wil reach a number between 400 and 500, howling abuse at the troopers. I’m immediately struck by the zen-like calm and mild humor with which the troopers absorb the abuse without reacting.

Jeannie Hartley gives motherly advice like:

“There is a difference between those of you that consider yourselves arrestable, and non-arrestable. … If you consider yourself non-arrestable, that means that you don’t want to get arrested. Do you get my drift? If you think that you are arrestable, that’s your choice. But each person should decide that for themselves. I’m not gonna tell you what to do, but you need to make the choices you personally know you can live with.”

All the while, as lawyers and the arrestables team-up to harass the police, Mufti-woman incited the mob with her megaphone, chanting as she strutted along the skirmish line.

The mob of four to five hundred were met by twelve to eighteen State Troopers on the steps of the Capitol. I arrived there at that same moment, and was amazed that security was so light. It took about ten minutes for bicycle police to arrive and form a second line with their bicycles. Another fifteen to twenty minutes passed before riot police arrived on the steps to form a third line.

Is it possible that no one in law enforcement looks at Facebook? The Occupy Your State Capitol Day memo was up there for all to see, and Occupy mobs swamped state capitol buildings in a number of states. Authorities in Colorado are aware of the  7.5 million dollars of damage protesters did to the Wisconsin state capitol building. Repair cost estimates were made, by historical architects from U.S. Park Service. Cari Anne Renlund, chief legal counsel for the Wisconsin state Department of Administration testified that much of the damage was done to the beautiful antique marble floors and walls.

Frankie Roper, zombie from Colorado Springs, made repeated attempts to push his way through the thin blue line. He soon singled out the thinnest part of the line, and possibly the oldest of the troopers, on whom he spewed very personal venom.

The protesters were repeatedly told they were not allowed in or near the Capitol Building, as they had no permit to demonstrate there. Up and down the line, troopers were singled out by individual protesters, who concentrated on breaking through the line. The smiley-faced man in the center of the photo above is using a crossed-arm technique developed in Cuba by people to resist Fidel Castro’s goon squads. In Cuba, the difference being that the people are resisting totalitarian communist state agents, while here communists and anarchists are using it on police in an attempt to get their way by undemocratic means.

Roper repeatedly tried to advance through the line in order to provoke the police for the Lawyers’ Guild cameras, which were trained on this scene for over twenty minutes.

The troopers really showed their training and courage as they held the line and waited for reinforcements. Note how the protesters carefully avoid laying hands on law enforcement. They have been schooled in the art of how to provoke by yelling, screaming, and shoving — right up to the line of what would be considered assault.

Can a regular citizen appreciate what these officers are now facing around the world from this Occupy movement? In Europe, officers are being butchered and incinerated (Rome: 40, Athens: 100’s) by Occupy communists and anarchists. While liberal polititians and media coddle and support the radicals, these officers’ lives will be in danger as this lunatic fringe gains ground.

The calm courage of the troopers only seemed to infuriate some of the protesters even more as they tried every foul combination of words to incite trouble.

Roper’s zombie buddies were also harassing individual officers. Hey liberals, try staring at a living, screaming, leftist zombie who’s showering spittle in your face for twenty minutes and see if you like it. Where is it written that a citizen has a right to do this to anyone?

The arrival of riot police only enraged the mob more.

The din was unbelievable. It included drumming on police cars parked nearby, megaphone led chanting, and Mufti marching around with her police siren. When the crowd thinned out, this black car had big orange 99% spray-painted all over it. The person in the middle here is one of El Commandante’s crew, with orange tape letters SECURITY on the back of his coat.

Meanwhile, El Comandante was waging his own battle. He tried to lead a gaggle of hand-picked activists up the side of the Capitol steps, and was politely rebuffed by police.

His little platoon seemed to exhibit signs of attention deficit disorder, possibly induced by pharmaceuticals or a medical plant which can be bought at over 400 stores in Denver.

Imagine trying to employ a guy like El Comandante? You’d have a riot within a week.

I love the Dana Carvey look-alike. He’s right out of central casting. Very funny. The girl looks like she’s enjoying the male contact. El Comandante is taking himself much too seriously.

Having failed to invade the Capitol, El Comandante called a retreat back to the park. I remember him shouting “Let’s go down there and build a community!!” I can hardly wait for the South Park puppet parody.

Hartley shooed the mob from the Capitol down to the park using her megaphone. As the anarchists scurried away, I heard calls to “Set up the tents!”

Frank Roper went down to the park with his fellow zombies, and got in some big trouble. They attempted to obstruct a moving police motorcycle with a sort of soccer free-kick blocking action. As the cop moved through the park, they ran in front of his motorcycle in a group of about seven men. As the cop failed to yield, and moved by them, Roper pushed the officer’s bike over. He then darted away, trying to escape the area. The portly black motorcycle cop must have been a football player, as he sprinted and tackled Roper like an NFL pro. The police hogtied Roper hands and feet, and removed him from the park. He was sent to the hospital, and it was reported in the news that he was severely beaten and received facial wounds. One radical posted a video saying that Roper had had his face split open by the cops. He was released immediately from the hospital, as he was actually uninjured. No doubt the makeup is what got him into the hospital rather than into jail.

Jeannie Hartley went on AlGore TV, where she lied her yoga pants off.

Olbermann: Tell me about the scene on Saturday. The protesters were described as unruly. Are the police being truthful in that statement?

Hartley: To be honest, I have to tell you what I saw.  What I witnessed was not anyone being unruly.

Olbermann: Tell me about the scene on Saturday. The protesters were described as unruly. Are the police being truthful in that statement?

Hartley: To be honest, I have to tell you what I saw.  What I witnessed was not anyone being unruly. What I saw was several police officers chasing en masse into the park, running towards one little guy in a tree, and then chasing after another man and throwing him down onto the ground, and putting him in a choke hold, with officers surrounding him. I saw tear gas being dispersed, I saw rubber pellets being shot into the crowd towards people that from my vision were not being unruly. …who from where I was standing were not being unruly at all. We’d had a perfectly peaceful march a perfectly peaceful rally and it turned into something much worse.

… It was extraordinary, the amount of police force that was present, before anything was, by their definition, unruly…

KO: Is there any thought of going to the in Denver or the state courts?

H: Yes, That is something that is in the works. We have an amazing legal team. We are also working with the National Lawyer’s Guild. I can’t address (details) as I’m not an attorney, but I can promise you that’s in the works.

JH: People are in the streets because of injustice. So for the police force to inflict more injustice upon us is not going to make us leave, it’s going to make more people come into the streets.

Liar, liar, yoga pants on fire!

 Dressed to riot: a few Occupy-ers had invested in gas-masks; many more wore goggles and bandanas to protect themselves from the tear gas they dearly wished to provoke.

Back to the evil clown paradigm, for haters of corporations, who could be more devilishly evil than that purveyor of dead cows, salt, and Happy Meals, Adolf McDonald? This young man proudly told me he bought the shirt in China. Leisure time and money enough to travel the world, gee, the American free market system makes life hard to bear for the 99%, doesn’t it?

Even the Occupy participants who were not dressed like clowns or anarchists are zombie-like in a way. They join along in this movement, shouting out chants like WE ARE THE 99%, as if by doing so, it will end the human characteristic of greed. They believe that some people being rich makes other people poor. They believe that if someone creates production, and employment for others, and by doing so makes a profit, that they are somehow stealing that money from everyone. They believe in the zombie economics of the radical left. In 1897 Winston Churchill said of Radicals: It reminds me of a man who, on being told that ventilation is a good thing, went and smashed every window in his house.

The supposed malign effects of  “income inequality” on well-being, then, aren’t really the issue for the left. The faux-populist rhetoric of income inequality is the camouflage for the true goal. As one protester instructed another: “It’s about taking down systems, it doesn’t matter what you’re protesting.” Capitalism must go in order to redistribute wealth as a means for advancing ideological preferences and goals, and achieving the radical egalitarianism that the left considers to be “social justice”––the same old socialist dream that littered the 20th century with corpses, and whose milder yet still pernicious forms have brought several European countries to the brink of insolvency. In the end, what the protesters are really angry about is that the world of reality does not live up to the world of their utopian dreams. FPM

Denver, October 16, 2011  –  by El Marco

“Occupy Denver” returned to the streets with a vengeance Saturday after being expelled, having their camp forcibly removed from Veterans’ Park by police at 4 a.m. Friday morning. October 15 was declared International Day of Action, which saw radical socialist/anarchist Occupy protests and violence in European and American cities.

The Occupy Denver crowd reached approximately 2000 – 3,000.

Chanting “Whose street? Our street!,” Occupy Denver blocked off Broadway street in front of the State Capitol Building for much of Saturday afternoon and evening.

Colorado State Troopers ringed the State Capitol to protect a gathering of veterans, as well as a State Congressional prayer meeting. Already wary after protesters disrupted a press conference on the Capitol steps by rushing the building en masse late last week, troopers stood guard all day and into the night.

This was the scene across from the Capitol at noon, as protesters gathered before the planned march on the Federal Reserve Building six blocks to the north. Left-wing protesters have the clenched fist as their symbol just as the Tea Party uses a teabag. The term “Fister” is now commonly used to describe any fist-pumping leftist protester.

The crowd, which later distilled into a hot-headed mob battling police, included an odd mixture of liberals dominated by organized communist, trade union and anarchist groups, as well as a large presence of 9/11 Truthers and Ron Paul libertarians. Tie-dyed psychedelic geezers from the ’60s tottered about amongst more recent generations of drug-users, and the smell of medical marijuana mingled in the air with the sounds of the zombie-like chanting made famous by the Occupy Wall Street protesters in New York.

An Occupy Denver community organizer leads the bizarre chanting ritual. Never have I seen anything that comes as close to a mind-control exercise in a free society.

The orange tape insignia on this woman’s arm indicates that she is a leader. I was told that any questions I had could be addressed to someone with this type of insignia. When I first saw this militant-looking marking, it reminded me of the Order of the Double-Cross, made famous in the Charlie Chaplin movie, The Great Dictator.

Charlie Chaplin, complete with fist pumping, comically portrays a famous mid-20th century socialist dictator speaking out against Jewish bankers and capitalists in general.

A self-described union activist swore allegiance to the labor movement and revolutionaries in general. He wore a shirt with the image of Emilio Zapata, the famous Mexican guerilla army leader of the 19th century. The back of his shirt was imprinted with Zapata’s words, “It is better to die on your feet, than to live a lifetime on your knees.”

 The man on the right was the main leader, who did the most talking. He led the march, barking orders and conducting maneuvers with military precision. He is definitely the main character of the day, and I will refer to him as El Comandante. The vast majority of the speeches/zombie chants throughout the day reminded me of:

Love that gay patriotic humor.

This speaker was definitely a community organizer with assigned responsibilities. He’s the guy who hands out the orange armbands to other organizers so that everything will run smoothly.

The crowd in this shot included an anarchist (right), a 9/11 truther (with sign The War on terror is a hoax,) and a flag-waving socialist. Many, if not most, of these people are remnants of the massive anti-war movement that seemed to disappear when Obama was elected. They’ve been sitting around with nothing to do but drugs, and you can expect to see more and more of them on the streets as this “new movement” grows.

Hippy geezer activists, with orange double-cross insignia, reliving their ’60s glory days. The days of yoer when the music set the tone for the REVOLUTION.

Today there is a new anthem for this modern day movement … and it is a great song that serves as a perfect  …

MUSICAL INTERLUDE:

Hat Tip: ZOMBIE

This leather-clad woman brought her own megaphone and spoke in a faux-Russian accent about “extra-terrestrial financing,” and other important topics relevant to the day’s march.

She calls herself Mufti which is a reference to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hitlers guest in Berlin and fellow genocidal war criminal during WWII.

Ever since Karl Marx defined his vision of a future utopia, socialists have been awaiting the complete collapse of the world-wide free enterprise system, and the beginning of a cataclysmic international Marxist revolution. This mans sign means the beginning of that revolution is near.

The Occupy Wall Street movement is supported by Communist Party USA, the Islamic Republic of Iran, communist dictator Hugo Chavez, China, as well as the AFL-CIO, SEIU, Algore, Nancy Pelosi, Bill Ayers, Barack Obama, the Democrat Party and Marxist-Leninists generally.

The violent Jacobin tendency among socialists was evident in many of the signs carried at this march.

They start training them for the revolution very young these days. Note the proud father looking on as his daughter hoists her protest sign, background left.

Above we see a classic astroturfing operation. Handmade signs produced by a radical organization are intended to lend a “spontaneous grassroots feel” to what is a highly organized leftist operation. Nobody has ever witnessed this type of activity at a tea party, even in Washington, D.C. when there were a million participants. Yet  astroturfing is standard procedure of every leftist or Obama administration-organized “action” that I have photographed.

 Mini-Astroturfer

I have a number of photographs of children who you could tell were very uncomfortable at this strange event. Ryan Shaw from Parker CO holds an astroturf sign, above. He was brought here by his grandmother, who told me that he didn’t want to attend because he was afraid he would be arrested, and that could ruin his dreams of becoming a U.S. Marine. Hang in there Ryan in a few years you will be a free man.

 OBAMA NATION OF DESOLATION

Neo-cannibals seemed to be everywhere. Above, a sign adorned with a skull with a red anarchist ‘A,’ and bloody knife and fork recall the peak of the psychedelic revolution in 1969, when Charles Manson and his crew of hippy chicks went on a murder spree and bragged about defiling the corpses of their wealthy victims with flatware.

President Obama’s friends, infamous terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn, shocked the world by publicly rejoicing and declaring the three-fingered fork sign as a new revolutionary symbol. This guy looks ready to chow down.

One day the poor will have nothing to eat but the RICH!   More evidence of a growing neo-cannibal tendency on the left? This photo records the return of the Manson hippy chick cult type to the anti-american protest scene. What’s with the plastic fork pasted to her sign à la Bernardine Dohrn? Are the “RICH” the picnic luncheon meat of her utopian vision of future America?

“Dohrn was criticized for comments she made about the murders of actress Sharon Tate and retail store owners Leno and Rosemary LaBianca by the Charles Manson clan. In a speech during the December 1969 “War Council” meeting organized by the Weathermen, attended by about 400 people in Flint, Michigan, Dohrn said, “First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach! Wild!” In greeting each other, delegates to the war council often spread their fingers to signify the fork.” – Wikipedia

I was young and stoned once but at that time I recoiled in horror when the news of Dohrn’s violent exhortations became headline news. I remember the day when I heard her statements. I followed the news of the Weather Underground carefully in real time and it became a snippet of reality that helped make clear to me that those with violent lunatic impulses inevitably rise to the forefront of radical leftist movements. – El Marco Touchy Feely Moment

Here are three protesters who definitely brought their own signs. This is the real grassroots movement that will save America and the world?

One of the focuses, understandably, of the rally was the desperate need in America for jobs. While the blame for the unemployment situation was placed on the “bankers” for “ruining our economy”, many of the participants appeared to be the authors of their own misfortune.

Pop-culture fashion today dictates that women and men put huge tattoos across their chests, arms, legs, backs, hands, and if they are really daring, on their faces. Top that off with a matted mass of mop-like dreadlocks and a few rings and studs piercing nostrils, eyelids, and lips, and you may be out of luck when it comes to finding a job. Add to that habitual drug use, including the chronic lethargy, munchies, and short-term memory loss caused by smoking high potency modern cannabis, and you have created a person that not even the most open-minded liberal will employ. But it’s always easier to blame others than to face the reality of bad choices that ruin a person’s life.

 This fellow is the lone representative in this post of the many, many photographs I took of people who were there to support legalization of drugs as their main issue. When I asked him about his shirt, he told me that it is from a glass-pipe shop in Denver, which supplies drug users with paraphernalia. When I asked him what the most expensive pipe there costs, I was surprised when he said $7,000.

 Joe Sacco has a degree in film making. I asked him if he would turn down a job with a salary of $74,000, and he said that  he would consider it, depending on the benefits package. He made it clear that his sign is totally serious. Note the high quality, expensive astroturf signs stacked in the background.

Many college grads voiced their grievances about the fact that they didn’t immediately get high paying jobs right out of school. Choosing fields of study that are not in high demand, or racking up debt rather than working and saving, were their choices. The consequences of getting a degree in art history or an advanced degree in basket weaving, like Stanley Ann Dunham, can be living on food stamps when one is unwilling to take a job below one’s qualifications. Boo Hoo.

 EDUCATE AMERICA   FUND PUBLIC EDUC                  PEOPLE BEFORE PROFIT           HAIRCUTS BEFORE JOBS

 Yadda yadda yadda. To whom is his sign addressed? The job fairy!

Tragically, this little girl looks like she’s already on a course that may damage her possibilities. Please, sweetheart, don’t get any tattoos or piercings. According to one professor I heard speaking on the subject, fewer university students are disfiguring themselves these days and the fashion seems to be going out of style as the weak economy presents them with a serious reality check. An amazing number of the protestors have prominent tattoos.   Slavery was another theme. I didn’t ask any of them if they’ve met someone who has actually been a slave. I personally know two men who escaped slavery in Africa and made it to America. Simon Deng and Francis Bok both love America, even though they are not wealthy here. They were both tortured for yaers by their Arab masters and forced to drink water and eat food with animals.

What these protesters refer to as slavery, i.e. working for a paycheck, looks like Nirvana to the vast majority of the world’s population. People who think like these leftists are slaves to their own sense of entitlement and are victims only of a culture of unwarranted grievance.

 Another Jacobin threat of violence? At least she’s not a slave.

 This is a utopian airhead leftist who, on her own, has come up with the Pol-Pot formula for a perfect socialist society.

 Capitalism Kills People & Destroys the Environment.

 The REVOLUTION is NOT an apple that falls when it is ripe. YOU HAVE TO MAKE IT FALL.”   – Che Guevara

More violent thoughts from the highly indoctrinated youth of America. Did you learn that in art school from your commie professors?

Michelle Malkin linked to a video of a Denver University student at Occupy Denver saying “There’s a lot of stuff that needs to change, and if it doesn’t, violent revolution will come. If you get the thirteen families that own the world, including George Bush and his administration, get them in front of the White House and hang them and shoot them, because they deserve that.”

 When the march to the Federal Reserve got underway, it was done with an odd kind of lefty militancy, complete with drummers, drill Sergeants and El Comandante barking orders and leading the way.

Lots o’ rage. People who didn’t appear angry for the last  hour now seethed with white-hot anti-capitalist passion.

 As they approached the Federal Reserve, the anarchists moved in to lead the march with locked arms.

Anarchism, according to the sign in front, is a totalitarian ideology. TRUE TRANSFORMATION TAKES 100%. No deviation allowed.

 The socialists, left, and the anarchists, right, take turns giving speeches to the crowd in front of the Chase Bank. Every time violence breaks out in recent years, the socialists say, “Oh, that was the anarchists. They aren’t part of our movement.” This is always a lie. They are allies, they are joined at the groin, and they share the same aim: toppling western civilization and free democracies worldwide.

 El Comandante has retaken the lead in front of the Federal Reserve. Time for some more zombie chanting, and then the Long March back to Civic Center Park, where they started.

Police vehicles loaded with  heavily armed riot teams followed along with the mob at every block. The man with the humorous sign was the only counter-protester that I saw.

UPDATE: No that is not me, my beard is much longer, but I am curious about his tee-shirt, Team America maybe?

This Somali taxi driver looked at the passing protesters in perplexity. He asked me what they were doing. I explained that they are demonstrating because they are angry that there are not enough jobs, and they hate the free market economic system. On top of his cab, an ad: From ASPIRATION TO REALITY. Argosy University, aspire to be.

He calmly said to me, “I’m working, and I’m studying. What do they mean, there’s no jobs?” From his textbook I saw that he is studying DNA in a biology textbook. Bet you this guy is going to be a doctor some day.

 As the marchers neared Civic Center Park, a couple of dozen plonked themselves down on the street and refused to go any farther, sending El Comandante into a rage, background center right. “Not f##king here. Get up.” He told them they should occupy the street in front of the Capitol.

 They rose in awe of El Comandante’s power, and followed as he led to the Capitol.

El Comandante led them to the front of the capitols west side where 200-300 sat on Broadway St. and started with the zombie chanting again.

The occupation of the street seemed to be a tantrum in reaction to Governor Hickenlooper’s order to clean them out of the park on Thursday night. Up until that moment, protesters had considered the Governor to be a radical like them. He was outed as a radical during his tenure as Mayor of Denver, when it was revealed that he established and funded the Chinook Fund, which he specifically created to support organizations that were too extreme leftist for other liberal foundations to channel money to. Now they see him as a traitor, no longer an extremist but a sellout.

Sitting away from the crowd I spotted a group of neo-cannibals handing out free water. I took a chance and asked for a bottle and came away without a bite or a scratch. The sign on the right, is that about cannibalism, slavery or rape?

Not all of the crowd was extreme. There were people there with whom the average Tea Party-er could wholeheartedly agree. Ben Meyer was there in honor of his college friend, who committed suicide after being offered a credit card with a $50,000 limit on it by a big bank. The friend lived off the credit card, paying  his rent, and when that ran out, compounded with his student loans, it became too much for him to bear.    STOP PREDATORY LENDING! It’s wrong, it’s dangerous, and it’s not fair to young people.

I was also very attracted to this lady’s um, message. Her sign should read, “RE-ENACT GLASS-STEAGALL” and I am 100% in agreement. By separating investment from lending, and breaking up the banks into smaller institutions, a number of essential reforms are achieved, including cutting the size of the “too big to fail” institutions.

I left at this point knowing there was trouble to come. Rioting and skirmishes with police went on well into the night in Denver and around the world.

UPDATE: Barney Frank supports protesters, raises Wall St. cash

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See also my Photo-essay: – Remembering and Understanding 9/11

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Why not leave a comment?

THANKS FOR VISITING!  –  NEVER FORGET  and  NEVER GIVE IN !

……….EL MARCO………..

Ten years later we find America in a state of confusion and disunity concerning the meaning and lessons to be drawn from the Islamist terror attacks of 9/11. This article is offered both as a remembrance of those who were killed by an act of war, and a plea for understanding the nature of the ideology that motivated the terrorists. The decision by a Sharia promoting imam to build a triumphalist mosque adjacent to the 9/11 site has highlighted a great schism in America. There are those who understand the threat posed by fundamentalist Islam and those among us who are unable to. Understanding the threat and confronting it effectively at home and abroad is one the of great challenges America faces today.

This is the scene as I first saw it as a young photographer visiting New York City in 1975. I had no inkling then, that I would be drawn back repeatedly to the towers as a favoured subject over the next 3 decades. This photo was taken from the observation deck of the Empire State Building,

In the center left foreground is the wedge-shaped, 21 story, Flatiron Building completed in 1902. It is one the first skyscrapers ever built, and for years was famous (incorrectly) as the tallest building in the world. The Empire State Building itself held the world’s-tallest record for 41 years until 1972. The most famous symbol of freedom in the world can be seen in the harbor, (distant background right). The Statue of Liberty Illuminating the World is the full name given by the French to their colossal gift, seen between the southern tip of Manhattan and New Jersey.

Each structure in its time inspired the world, with beauty, size, and above all the message of hope that liberty, and man’s creativity thereby unleashed, might lift humankind out of poverty and above tyranny. The World Trade Center (WTC) took its rightful place among them as a symbol of freedom and modernity in 1972.

This is the scene that greeted workers if they looked up as they ascended from subway train to street level on a long spiral stairway. Simplicity of design combined with sheer magnitude produced pure Op Art moire patterns that constantly changed and attracted the human eye.

The photos above show the two towers on the right and the Marriot Hotel on the left. Many escaped from the towers through the hotel before it was shorn in half by the first collapse and later the second.

On an ordinary work day this is how they appeared, serene, magnificently modern and beckoning all to come in and take a trip to the top.

Looking way up one might catch a glimpse of Jan Demczur, the Polish immigrant window washer, and his amazing scaffold machine. He spent each year going up and down, cleaning with a bucket, water, some rags, and a squeegee in all but the most severe weather. On 9/11 he used his metal squeegee to pry open an elevator door, gouge through drywall and create a hole large enough to save five men. They were able to exit the area minutes before the building collapsed.

The Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges through a 100mm telephoto lens from atop the World Trade Center.

Brooklyn Bridge through 300mm lens.

I photographed the World Trade Center over the decades for the beauty, in my eyes, of art icons that played with light and sky. Symbolically, in my mind, they stood for international freedom of commerce and the hope that free markets could draw the world together and help foster peace and security in the world. The Islamists who destroyed them also understood their meaning and attacked them for that reason.

When first I heard, my thoughts were not of the structures at all, but of the thousands of workers who perished so violently and Islam’s obvious hand in it. As news of the devastation unfolded, what I had instantly concluded was confirmed: that bin Laden and Wahabi Islam had struck a blow against western civilization and the very promise that modernity and liberty holds out to the world.

For a brief period after 9/11 the NY Times suspended wielding its pen as a partisan left-wing dagger and did some excellent reporting and should be applauded for that. The “life sketches” done in the days and months after 9/11 offer a unique and inspiring look into what these towers really were: a great combination of free individuals, working and struggling and fulfilling their hearts’ desires. The lives of the victims are clearly described and collectively tell the much greater story of America.

The fabled teeming masses of Manhattans streets are no longer faceless. These life sketches revealed a cross section of American life frozen, researched, and clearly reported. The stories emerged slowly of a group of almost 3,000 American lives halted at the same time and place. Their families and friends live on and gave details to numerous reporters, of the lives lost, that combined, read like nothing else ever written.

All people who want to to know the truth about the American people, unsullied by ideological reporting, should read about those who perished on 9/11/2001. Their lives, their struggles, their loves, and their stories are revealed and together create a portrait of why America has long been the great beacon of hope to a world in despair.

Paul McCartney of The Beatles wrote a song on 9/11 in New York where he happened to be that day. It’s called Freedom, and he sang it at a benefit concert for 9/11 victims, to an audience of rescue workers, cops and firefighters. For this he was vilified by the radical left and “peace activists” in print and on the radio.

This is my right, A right given by God,

To live a free life, To live in freedom,

Talking about freedom, I’m talking about freedom,

I will fight for the right, To live in freedom

And do you want to try and take it away,

You will have to answer, Cause this is my right

Here’s what a Ukrainian friend who suffered tyranny in his homeland had to say about the left-wing reaction to good Sir Paul and his plucky song with it’s Churchillian tone.

“For writing this hardly political but rather morally upright song, McCartney himself immediately became the object of attacks from the self-proclaimed “peace” activists. He was maligned for wanting to “fight for the right to live in freedom” as opposed to “negotiate for the right to live in freedom” or “work together for the right to live in freedom.” McCartney would perhaps be their hero if he had responded to 9/11 by writing a song called American Idiot. But he wrote a song called Freedom, and for that New York’s own public radio WNYC (an affiliate of the taxpayer-funded NPR) arrogantly dismissed Sir Paul as a “pro-war Beatle.” Given that the same people have never denied the “right to fight” to any anti-American entity or ideology, such hypocritical piousness exposed them for what they are — immoral turncoats unworthy of the great culture of freedom that for two centuries has been the beacon for all the genuine freedom-loving people in all corners of the world (regardless of the turncoats’ claim to the contrary).

Thus McCartney’s simple, morally upright tune has inadvertently become a litmus test that continues to reveal two opposing mindsets in our society. The dividing line between these mindsets is the same line that divides the rational from the irrational, truth from fiction, reality from delusion, integrity from corruption, courage from cowardice, and moral standards from moral relativism. And in the heart of this division gapes a void that once was the World Trade Center.” – Oleg Atbashian

This is a scene from near “ground zero” in November 2001. Here we see the wrought iron fence of Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church which is directly across the street from the WTC site. The church was founded in 1766 and George Washington worshiped here before and after the revolution.

These are the words of Christopher Hitchens in an article titled, Solidarity – Our first duty is to stand together against bin Ladinism, in the Wall Street Journal on Sept. 11 2006.

“The beginning of wisdom is to recognize that the United States was assaulted for what it really is, and what it understands as the center of modernity…

But here I am, writing that it was “the United States” that was assaulted. And there was the president, and most of the media, speaking about “an attack on America.” True as this was and is, it is not quite the truth. …more than 80 nationalities could count their dead on that day. It would have been far better if President Bush had characterized the atrocity as an attack on civilization itself, and it would be preferable if we observed the anniversary in the same spirit.

The time for commemoration lies very far in the future. War memorials are erected when the war is won.

On that day, we learned what we ought to have known already, which is that clerical fanaticism means to fight a war which can only have one victor. Afghans, Kurds, Kashmiris, Timorese and many others could have told us this from experience, … Does anyone suppose that an ideology that slaughters and enslaves them will ever be amenable to “us”? The first duty, therefore, is one of solidarity with bin-Ladenism’s other victims and targets, from India to Kurdistan.”

As true and clear as Hitchens words are about half of Americans and a much higher portion of Europeans, either disagree with him or have no idea what he’s talking about. This points to the greatest and indeed our only true weakness here in the west: the division between those who appreciate and understand that western freedoms are sacred, are in peril, and need to be defended at all costs, and those who don’t, or worse, support the other side.

Airline employees from many companies and countries signed this poster in memory of the crew of flight 175 who died when they were crashed into the WTC south tower. The scene is St. Pauls memorial fence.

A Korean man writing on canvas at St. Paul’s fence. Note “Thanks Israel for destroying Iraq’s reactor in 1991!” comment bottom foreground. Imagine how different the world would be if Iraq’s push for a bomb was not thwarted at that time.

“I was there. I looked up and my heart cried for you because I knew there was no escape” is the cri de coeur of an eye witness.

St. Paul’s was used as a staging center for search and rescue personnel. This is the front entrance barricade and directly behind the officer in the center and a little to the right is Ground Zero. These NYPD cops were the only bright faces I saw in the area that day in late November 2001. One officer told me that in the days after 9/11 three feet or more of dusty material covered the ground where they stood. The area still had a sickening odor of death. These cops had seen it all and took it as part of their duty to show a strong confident even cheerful face to the public. Or was it just their way of trying to survive all they had seen with their better natures intact?

Here is what the great Canadian writer Mark Steyn wrote on the 5th anniversary of 9/11:

“One man in the Twin Towers that Tuesday morning must have understood. John O’Neill, a dogged counter-terrorism guy with a whiff of the old-school G-man about him, had just quit the FBI and started work as head of security at the World Trade Center. He made it downstairs where the confabs with rescue workers were punctuated by the thud of bodies from the first jumpers landing on the lobby roof. In the plaza outside, body pieces fell randomly over chairs set up for a lunchtime concert. In the final moments of his life, John O’Neill must have felt his world come full circle. Six years earlier (as vividly recounted in Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower) he’d organized the capture in Pakistan of Ramzi Yousef, the man behind the first World Trade Center bombing and a terrorist who’d planned to crash a plane into CIA headquarters.

“In The New York Times, Thomas Friedman wrote: “The failure to prevent Sept 11 was not a failure of intelligence or co-ordination. It was a failure of imagination.” That’s not really true. Islamist terrorists had indicated their interest in US landmarks, and were known to have plans to hijack planes to fly into them. But men like John O’Neill could never quite get the full attention of a somnolent federal bureaucracy. The terrorists must have banked on that: after all, they took their pilot-training classes in America, apparently confident that, even if anyone noticed the uptick in Arab enrollments at US flight schools, a squeamish culture of political correctness would ensure nothing was done about it.”

Five years on, half America has retreated to the laziest old tropes, filtering the new struggle through the most drearily cobwebbed prisms: all dramatic national events are JFK-type conspiracies, all wars are Vietnam quagmires. Meanwhile, Ramzi Yousef’s successors make their ambitions as plain as he did: they want to acquire nuclear technology in order to kill even more of us. And, given that free societies tend naturally toward a Katrina mentality of doing nothing until it happens, one morning we will wake up to another day like the “day that changed everything.” September 11th was less “a failure of imagination” than an ability to see that America’s enemies were hiding in plain sight. They still are.”

– Mark Steyn, New York Sun, Sept. 11 2006

The graveyard behind St. Paul’s where revolutionary war heroes rest. Ground Zero can be seen through the trees. The crater created by the collapse of the towers ended exactly at the back of this churchyard, without disturbing the fence or graves.

These Ladder 10 firefighters lost six of their brothers on 9/11. The rough look of the business next door and the new concrete underfoot attests to the proximity of this station to Ground Zero.

This was the scene in the mid 1980s when I popped into Trinity Episcopal’s idylic grounds a few blocks from St. Paul’s.

Adam and Eve in Manhattan

Mourners kneel at the edge of “the pit” near the corner of Liberty and Trinity streets. – Sept.11 2006

Salman Rushdie the persecuted Indian moslem writer had this to say November 2, 2001.

“Of course this is “about Islam.”…..This paranoid Islam, which blames outsiders, “infidels,” for all the ills of Muslim societies, and whose proposed remedy is the closing of those societies to the rival project of modernity, is presently the fastest growing version of Islam in the world.

This is not wholly to go along with Samuel Huntington’s thesis about the clash of civilizations, for the simple reason that the Islamists’ project is turned not only against the West and “the Jews,” but also against their fellow Islamists. Whatever the public rhetoric, there’s little love lost between the Taliban and Iranian regimes. Dissensions between Muslim nations run at least as deep, if not deeper, than those nations’ resentment of the West. Nevertheless, it would be absurd to deny that this self-exculpatory, paranoiac Islam is an ideology with widespread appeal. – continued below

An Iraqi writer quotes an earlier Iraqi satirist: “The disease that is in us, is from us.” A British Muslim writes, “Islam has become its own enemy.” A Lebanese friend, returning from Beirut, tells me that in the aftermath of the attacks on Sept. 11, public criticism of Islamism has become much more outspoken. Many commentators have spoken of the need for a Reformation in the Muslim world.

The restoration of religion to the sphere of the personal, its depoliticization, is the nettle that all Muslim societies must grasp in order to become modern. The only aspect of modernity interesting to the terrorists is technology, which they see as a weapon that can be turned on its makers. If terrorism is to be defeated, the world of Islam must take on board the secularist-humanist principles on which the modern is based, and without which Muslim countries’ freedom will remain a distant dream.” –  Salman Rushdie

NYPD and FDNY banners listing names of the fallen heroes of their respective services.

FDNY …. 343 …. killed  —–  NYPD …. 23 …. killed

Port Authority Police Dept. banner listing officers killed on 9/11

PAPD ….  37 ….  killed ………  one K-9 unit member, Sirius, was also killed.

This photo from September 11, 2006 shows a London bobby passing the Ladder 10 truck.

One aspect that has struck me about the life sketches from the Times is how different the types of people who worked in the WTC were from the terrorists. The New Yorkers were young and old, men and women, of all classes, educational and national backgrounds, races and religions. The terrorists were all Arabs, all male, mostly middle class, educated, mostly Saudi nationals and all Wahabi Muslims.

Winston Churchill in 1921 warned the world to be wary of the Wahabis.

“The Wahabis profess a life of exceeding austerity, and what they practice themselves they rigorously enforce on others. They hold it as an article of duty, as well as of faith, to kill all who do not share their opinions and to make slaves of their wives and children. Women have been put to death in Wahabi villages for simply appearing in the streets. It is a penal offense to wear a silk garment. Men have been killed for smoking a cigarette, and as for alcohol, the most energetic supporter of the temperance cause in this country falls far behind them. Austere, intolerant, well armed, and bloodthirsty, in their own regions the Wahabis are a distinct factor which must be taken into account, and they have been, and still are, very dangerous to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina”    – Winston Churchill, House of Commons, 1921, The Culture and Glories of the Arab Race

In 2005 Christopher Hitchens wrote in the british Mirror newspaper:

“We know very well what the “grievances” of the jihadists are. The grievance of seeing unveiled women. The grievance of the existence, not of the State of Israel, but of the Jewish people. The grievance of the heresy of democracy, which impedes the imposition of sharia law. The grievance of a work of fiction written by an Indian living in London.

The grievance of the existence of black African Muslim farmers, who won’t abandon lands in Darfur. The grievance of the existence of homosexuals.

The grievance of music, and of most representational art. The grievance of the existence of Hinduism. The grievance of East Timor’s liberation from Indonesian rule. All of these have been proclaimed as a licence to kill infidels or apostates, or anyone who just gets in the way.

They demand the impossible – the cessation of all life in favour of prostration before atotalitarian vision. Plainly, we cannot surrender. There is no one with whom to negotiate, let alone capitulate.”  –  Hitchens

The parents of Renee Tetreault Newell visited ground zero Sept 11 2006. Renee Newell was killed when American Airlines flight AA11 was crashed into the WTC north tower at 8:46 am September 11 2001. Renee was an employee of American who was accompanying a friend who was afraid to fly alone.

Saint Nicks Greek Orthodox Church was destroyed by the collapsing towers. The Marriot is on the left.

Since the Wahabi sect consolidated power in Arabia in 1932, they have promoted their totalitarian absolutist version of Islam on a progressively widening scale. Osama bin Laden is the product of Saudi Wahabi schooling. Saudi King Abdullah or the Shia clerics of Iran are little different from bin Ladin in terms of their most cherished religious goal: an entire world which bows to Mecca and obeys Sharia law under penalty of death.

Contemporary Sunni and Shiia Islam take their place in line behind international Socialism and national Socialism/Fascism as the latest models of ruthlessly violent group insanity to threaten Western civilization. For Western leaders to believe that Islam is less dangerous than Communism or Nazism is to commit a terrible error. There are a number of aspects that make 21st century Islam infinitely more dangerous, the fanatical suicidal religious impulse being one and the proliferation of nuclear weapons another.

Some leftists woke up after 9/11 and became what are known in New York as liberal hawks. But not enough heard the wake-up call. Diverse Islamic groups and nations are doing everything in their power to obtain a nuclear device with the intention of using it on the United States. Why not on Europe? Because Islamists know that demographically they will own it, soon enough, unless Europeans drastically change immigration policies. There is scant time or collective will in Europe for any hope on that front. The U.S. is the only force of magnitude that poses a moral and military challenge to Islam’s global surge. Only a united west can hope to survive. In order for that unity to emerge millions of  liberals will have to switch sides and support the war effort.

The question remains: if 9/11 didn’t cause a great awakening among the liberal left and socialists of the west, what will?

This is a late afternoon view from the top of the World Trade Center in the mid 1990s. To the west a small pleasure craft is coming into New York. Maybe it was Dan Marino?

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SEE El Marco’s June 6th rally photo-essay – Stop the Mosque at Ground Zero – Part II

Who says it’s not a MOSQUE?  Read El Marco’s photo-essay – Prayer Time at the Ground Zero Mosque

See other El Marco Photo-Essays on Islam:

• Islam Clouds Bali’s Horizon
• 9/11 Families Rally Blasts Obama’s Show Trial Travesty
• Cartoons To Die For

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Why not leave a comment?

THANKS FOR VISITING!  –  NEVER FORGET  and  NEVER GIVE IN !

……….EL MARCO………..

October 25, 2010, DENVER – by El Marco

Colorado gubernatorial candidate Tom Tancredo is an extraordinary man with no shortage of friends, and detractors. Tancredo has been branded a racist by the political left for being a leading critic of illegal immigration, and yet he earned a standing ovation from the NAACP. Recently I was in New York to photograph the start of the Sudan Freedom Walk, and learned things about Tom Tancredo (and Obama) that few Americans know anything about. I discovered that while many in the Sudanese refugee community feel betrayed by President Obama, they reserve a special place in their hearts for Tom Tancredo.

It was in front of the United Nations Building in Manhattan that I first heard a Sudanese human rights activist mention Tancredo’s name in connection to U.S. foreign policy. When I asked for details, I was intrigued by the depth of feeling for Tancredo in the comments I heard. I learned that in 2001, then Congressman Tancredo was the primary sponsor and author of the Sudan Peace Act, which was later signed into law by President George W. Bush. That act focused on stopping a decades-long genocide as well as Sudan’s slave trade and the Sudanese government’s use of force to support slaving.

I met with escaped slaves and refugees from Sudan who are now community leaders and human rights activists in Boston, New York and Philadelphia. They offered me rare insight into a man who now stands poised to be the next Governor of Colorado. During the time I spent with the Sudanese (Sept. 15-27) Tancredo was not on anyone’s radar as a real contender. Now that Mr. Tancredo has surged in the polls and rearranged the political landscape, I thought it a good idea to ask my new Sudanese friends what thoughts they had about his candidacy and his detractors.

First I called a young man named Francis Bok at his home in Boston. He was taken during a massacre by arab slavers at age seven and miraculously escaped slavery when he was 17 years old. I photographed candidate Tancredo holding Bok’s autobiography after a campaign stop outside Tony Rigatoni’s Restaurant in Golden, Colorado on Oct. 22.

Here is what Francis Bok had to say about Tancredo and Sudan:

He should be considered for governor because he’s someone that has a vision, he’s someone that is always looking years in front of him, he’s someone that is visioning for others. And those others are us. I have met him myself. I have seen him speaking clearly and loudly on behalf of my people. I have no doubt in my mind that he will do something positive for the people of Colorado. He is a leader. He has already shown, and demonstrated that leadership during his time in Congress. And I’m sure If we had someone like him in the leadership in Washington, my people would not have to worry about what will happen on January 9, 2011 (separation referendum thanks to Congressman Tancredo’s efforts), because he would have already begun to start speaking out.

I told Bok that the left have labeled Tancredo a racist:

It doesn’t make sense that people call Tom a racist. After all we have witnessed since 9/11 2001, I don’t think anyone should actually be allowed to come in without being screened, without being asked where are you from, and what are they about. I came here as a refugee myself to this country, I came here legally. I’m on record, I have documents that allow me to live here.

He is someone that we appreciate his work on foreign policy during his time in Congress about Sudan. I think he is very well known. The government knows him, the people of South Sudan, the people of Darfur, and all the other marginalized groups of Sudanese people know who he is, and what he stands for. And I think he deserves a chance to be of benefit to Colorado. I do support him. If I had power, I would endorse him.

Francis Bok speaking about Sudan in New York.

Asked about the Obama administration’s commitment to peace, Bok said:

We are so worried now about how the U.S. is going to protect us on this. Because we don’t see them speaking that much. I am not willing to be once again forced into slavery by the northern Sudanese oppressors. For over 50 years my people have been oppressed and marginalized by these people who reached power in 1956. My people want to be a free nation, and rule ourselves like other societies. Three million southern Sudanese people have been slaughtered by the radicalist, extremist fundamentalist regime in Khartoum.

We know very, very well that we are not being supported like the previous administration has done concerning the issue of Sudan. Both slavery and genocide are in Darfur and southern Sudan, and with this referendum, we’re just afraid. A miracle has to happen to help the people of Sudan. I’m praying every day because I do not want to see my people continue to be kept under apartheid by the radicalist regime.

Simon Deng speaking about the islamization of his homeland on June 6, 2010 in New York

Simon Deng was enslaved as a child after being abducted by an arab. He escaped after three years and is now a leading voice against slavery. He is the leader of the Sudan Freedom Walk and is an associate of the American Anti-Slavery Group. I phoned Deng at his home in Harlem, New York.

Tom did a lot in Congress. He’s a good friend.  When it comes to friends, and the friends of Sudan, he is a person the people of Sudan will never forget, especially those who stand up for freedom. I think that Tom is among the few elected officials in Congress that said to themselves, the people of southern Sudan deserve what everybody on earth deserves. That’s freedom.

The government of Sudan went wild for decades massacring and enslaving the people of southern Sudan, and that’s what the Sudan Peace Act is all about. And it’s the courage of individuals, we call them friends of Sudan, that the people of Sudan will never forget. Though we are not there yet. We still need every person of conscience to lead us to freedom. I wish I could be in Colorado to help one who helped us.

El Marco: On Tom Tancredo’s Facebook page, he says the two things he accomplished in Congress he’s most proud of are, first The Sudan Peace Act and second, making the issue of illegal immigration a national issue. What do you think about the issue of illegal immigration and secure borders?

Of course when it comes to immigration, I am an immigrant myself.  But I went through the process. I didn’t break any law, I waited for my turn, I followed the process, the way those who came before me followed the process. And of course, for anyone to say ‘let’s break the process’ and let’s dump the system and process”, then we would not have laws on the books guiding us. Of course, everybody deserves a chance for freedom, but we have to do it according to the system and the laws of the land.

Dr. Abdelgabar Adam, founder and president of Darfur Human Rights Organization, speaks to CNN in New York’s Dag Hammerskjold Plaza about the upcoming referendum to determine if South Sudan will separate from the Arab north.

I called Dr. Adam at his home in Philadelphia and asked him to speak about Sudan and Tancredo.

For my organization, I can not endorse a specific candidate. But there are certain people who compel me personally to speak up for them, and Tancredo is one of these. Tom Tancredo was very supportive of human rights issues in Sudan, particularly in Darfur. All the Darfuris remember Bush’s ability to make decisions regarding the genocide in Darfur, and Tom stood behind him. He was very supportive at a time when the issue was not well known to the media. Tom’s name always comes up when we speak about the position of the U.S. government in the issue of Darfur, for him supporting Bush to the end. Bush recognized what was happening in Sudan, and Darfur in particular.

What was the immediate effect on the ground once the Khartoum regime signed the Comprehensive Peace Agreement?

The CPA’s short term effects were six years of peace in South Sudan, violence almost was avoided in the south. People had peace, people were moving around, creating infrastructure for the new country of South Sudan. And, in Darfur at least we had a period of almost no fly zone, People were moving around, it was not a real peace, but violence was intermittent. Not like now: air raids every single day these days. That would never happen while George Bush was in power.

How do you see the Obama administration’s current stance towards Khartoum?

Now, this last week, the Obama Administration started talking, at a time when we expect them to walk the walk. Talking itself will not solve the problem. We need someone who can step up the position of the U.S. government and lead the world to stop the genocide in Darfur and bring peace to South Sudan. Obama falls very short of that.

Multilateralism is a failure in international policy at this time. A failure because there is no strong international leader who will step up. When we look at what Bush did during his second term, he was very decisive. At that time we had a no fly zone in Darfur. And the government of Sudan was very much scared and were ready to do what Bush wanted them to do. In about 24 hours, we had this Comprehensive Peace Agreement in South Sudan. It was signed with a warning of just 24 hours. That’s the kind of legitimate international leader we need to see, and Obama is not that person.

When did the situation start deteriorating again?

When the position of the Obama government became unclear. They didn’t know what they wanted, and the tools they were able to use on Sudan. Bush was very clear. Some senators at that time were even calling for military intervention. Some Republicans and some Democrats, including Joe Biden, John Kerry, and a lot of Republican senators. When it comes to decisive action, trust me, Republicans stand first.

Is there any way to influence the Obama administration to change their posture? I notice someone sent John Kerry to Khartoum, and when he came back he was speaking only about cooperation with Khartoum, with all carrots and no sticks.

That’s the problem with the Democrats in power. They want to explore ideas that have been explored and didn’t work time and time again, while Republicans, for us, they make decisions and they stand by them.

Garelnabi Abbas Abusikin

Garelnabi Abusikin is the son of a chief of the Zaghawa tribe. His father was a leader in Karnoi, Darfur. He has seen many atrocities and was separated from his family by war. Speaking the truth about the islamist Khartoum regime is a horrific act of courage for this young man:

In the US, I spoke about Darfur. I testified for the Judgment on Genocide mock court held at the UN Church Center in NY in November 2006. When the government in Sudan found out, they arrested my mother and sister. They beat my mother and shaved my sister’s head bald. They told my mother to tell me to be silent. My mother told me “Don’t worry about us. We are like dead bodies who will never feel the skinning.” She told me to keep talking. To never stop talking. The more people talk about it, the fewer people die. FreeLibrary

I reached Abusikin at his home in Philadelphia.

Obama always kept saying in public and in the news, “I’m going to stop the genocide, and when I become president, no more genocide.” I met Obama face to face in Philadelphia, at the Sheraton Hotel, with the Sudanese community of Philadelphia. We met him, and he promised us, the first thing, he was going to stop the genocide. After he became President, and after we worked for him (campaigning) he forgot us totally, he forgot us. Now every day he talks with the Sudan government, and he gives them more time to kill people. Of course, I feel very bad. And also, this is a shame as a human being.

Obama, his father comes from Kenya, and Sudan and Kenya have a border. Obama’s father’s tribe is called Luo. Luo is the same tribe who also live in Darfur. No matter what, if his tribe lives in Darfur, or doesn’t live in Darfur, he should say something. Now is the time to say something. He doesn’t even say “President Bashir, from today, don’t kill people in Darfur. stop raping the women in Darfur, and stop killing the children in Darfur. If you continue killing children in Darfur, we’re going to take action, we’re going to do something to you. We’re going to do something to your regime.” But he never says that.

The Sudan government killed my father. My family is in a refugee camp for nine years. I have a lot of good friends, more than a thousand, who died in Sudan. I think that Obama is close to the Arab Muslim, more than the African. Because Sudan’s problem is between Africans and Arab Muslims. Arab Muslims, in the north, they kill us. They kill Christian people, more than three million in South Sudan, for no reason. And also, they killed two million in Nuba Mountain. Today, in Darfur, we don’t even know how many people died.

I have to say something very important to Obama. We, the Darfurians in the United States, I am an activist in Philadelphia, in New York, and in Washington we’re going to talk to all the Darfurians. I am an American citizen, and many Darfurians are American citizens. We are not going to vote for Obama at all. Because what he said before is different than what he is doing today. He said, “My father comes from Kenya, and I know what is happening in Sudan”, he went to Darfur in 2006, he visited all the Darfurian refugee camps in eastern Chad, he promised us when he become President, he was going to stop the genocide. Now he never even talks about it. He never says anything about Sudan now, about the genocide. So, next time, from here to 2012, it’s not too far away, we are not going to vote for him.

We need somebody to say something. Because America has the power. We need somebody to open his mouth and say “Bashir, don’t kill people in Sudan.” Bashir and the Arab Muslims kill us for more than 55 years in Sudan. From 1956 to today, we die. An awful lot of people.

Some people in the United States, they think Bush is a criminal. But we, in Africa, especially in Sudan, worship him as a hero. Because he brought peace in South Sudan. When he was in office, he told every day “Bashir, you stop killing the people.” President Bush helped us a lot. And today we feel really bad that Bush is not in office.

All Darfurians, all the Sudanese community in America are angry at Obama. We are 6,000 Sudanese in Philadelphia, and 5,500 are angry at Obama. I helped Obama to become President. I walked house to house. I was a volunteer. At that time I was a student at Rutgers University. I didn’t go to most of my classes, because I helped Obama. Why did I help Obama? It”s not about color, it’s not about African, or white, or black or latino. It’s because he claimed “I understand the Sudan situation.” But he didn’t understand nothing. Even if he understands, he doesn’t want to do nothing.

Tomorrow, when the election comes, he’s going to say, if he sees white people, he’s going to say “Oooo – my mother is from white people”. And if he sees black people, he’s going to say “my father’s from black people.” No, we don’t have time to listen. We don’t have time to think about him. We need to stop genocide in Sudan. We don’t care if you are white or black, it’s enough that you are a human being. Today is 2010. And we’re still dying like animals in the Sudan. Sudan’s government kills people every day. Two hundred, three hundred. Why? He should say something!

I haven’t met Tom Tancredo personally, but I always hear about him. What I hear is that he is a great person, and he always helps people. I hear a lot of people talk about Tom Tancredo,especially Dr. Abelgabar Adam, and also Sudan Freedom Walk’s leader, Simon Deng. Those are two heros from Sudan, those people walked from New York City to Washington D.C. for 21 days.

We, as Sudanese marginalized people, we want to help him. We thank Tom Tancredo a lot, and we hope he is going to win.

Tancredo’s leadership in foreign affairs is relevant to his qualifications to run for governor. Many congressmen and senators (including Senator Barack Obama) travel to conflict areas around the world and treat those trips as photo-ops and subject matter for empty rhetoric. Tancredo’s trip to Sudan propelled him to sponsor legislation that corralled the world’s greatest human rights catastrophe into a framework for peace. Not only did he achieve important action, he did so in a bipartisan way, with co-sponsors on the bill including Democrats as recalcitrant as Barbara Lee and Cynthia McKinney. It’s very telling that his Facebook page says the Sudan Freedom Act is Tom Tancredo’s proudest lifetime achievement.

I first heard Tancredo speak at a tea party campaign stop in Conifer, Colorado, late in the evening of October 20. Started in July, 2010, the 285 Corridor Tea Party is one of the nation’s newest. Tancredo didn’t mention foreign policy, but spoke only of state and national domestic issues to the standing room only crowd. Tancredo is a gifted speaker whose natural humility and detailed plans for Colorado’s future had me completely captivated. It’s no wonder he is surging in the polls. Enthusiastic support is coming from many directions, including a lead in the polls among hispanic voters. The latest polling shows Tancredo with all the momentum in a statistical tie with his Democrat opponent Denver mayor John Hickenlooper.

After a long day of speaking and pressing the flesh, Tancredo still had time to share a laugh with a voter after the crowd departed. Tancredo is a happy man and a happy warrior and Colorado will be lucky to have him as a governor.

__________BEST OF PHOTO-ESSAYS by El MARCO____________

President Obama’s Rwanda Moment

Stop the Mosque at Ground Zero

Prayer Time at the Ground Zero Mosque

____________________________________________

Other El Marco Photo-Essays related to Islam:

• 9/11 – NEVER FORGET – NEVER GIVE IN
• Islam Clouds Bali’s Horizon
• 9/11 Families Rally Blasts Obama’s Show Trial Travesty
• Cartoons To Die For

______________________________________

Why not leave a comment?

THANKS FOR VISITING!  –  NEVER FORGET  and  NEVER GIVE IN !

……….EL MARCO………..

Washington D.C. Oct. 3, 2010 – By El Marco

The lines between the Democratic Party, labor unions, socialist and communist organizations, were blurred at the One Nation Working Together rally at the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday. Organized by One Nation Working Together, which is headed by the cream of the Democratic National Committee, the rally was a sort of coming out moment for the radical leftist base of the Democratic Party.

National Campaign Manager of One Nation Working Together, Leah Daughtry, was CEO and top organizer of the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado, where Barack Obama was nominated to be candidate for President. Many of the rally’s top organizers work for Obama for America, which changed to Organizing For America after Obama was elected to the presidency. Organizing For America is the president’s personal, all purpose “grassroots” political campaign agitation corps. They coordinate closely with labor union and radical communist groups.

The page on the National Education Association’s website (NEA) inviting its members to travel to the rally quotes its president: “NEA is proud to be standing with our brothers and sisters in the labor and social justice movement …” The term social justice movement is a catch-all phrase for everyone to the left of Santa Claus including Marxist and Stalinist  “anti-war” umbrella groups. This rally had been touted as “a collection of over 400 liberal groups“, but a glance at the official list shows that it includes the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and other fanatical revolutionary groups that have struggled for decades to destroy the “capitalist system” and topple western democratic governments.

The majority of rally participants were union members who came on free buses. They were given T-shirts, and handed signs when they arrived. Many carried free lunch boxes to what was, for all intents and purposes, an anti-capitalism, pro-Obama rally.

According to the AFL-CIO web site, unions sponsored some 1,400 buses to get the grassroots out to the rally. At an average of 50 passengers per almost full bus, that’s 70,000 free rides.

“Social justice” organizations involved include the Communist Party of America, National Council of La Raza, Green Party, Progressive Democrats of America whose goal is to extend the 2008 victory into a “permanent progressive victory”, International Socialist Organization, Ramsey Clarke’s communist and anti-American umbrella group ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) Coalition, and myriad organizations for Obama, who promoted showing up at the march as “community service”.

The speakers included numerous pastors, rabbis and imams. Various holy texts were cited calling for social justice. “When the Gulf of Mexico was poisoned by the greed of big oil, the fish were denied justice” said Rabbi Arthur Waskow. Imam Khalid Griggs (above) claimed that Mohammed set an example of always treating the oppressed with compassion, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. The fact that Mohammed was a leading supplier to the slave markets of his day was not mentioned.

Union members made themselves comfortable or napped during speeches. Each union had a designated area which divided them with steel barricades. Most unions supplied their members with colorful shirts. The National Education Association (NEA) had the largest presence along with the United Auto Workers (UAW). The NEA was given the best location at the front with the most shade (above right.) NEA members were provided free buses and food allowance to travel from their home states. I spoke with NEA members (above right) from Detroit and Chicago who were bussed in for the day. The weather was cool and fresh, and as the day progressed more people snoozed.

Many speakers mentioned comprehensive immigration reform. That got almost no response from organized labor. There was a lot of mention of green jobs, including by speaker Van Jones, a communist who was Obama’s first green jobs czar. The Sheet Metal Workers International Association above displayed a handmade sign calling for a revival of the American nuclear industry which was killed by radical environmentalists with help from the Democrat party.

There were dozens of communist groups represented. The International Socialist Organization did good business selling books and signing up new members. Books by Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn and Karl Marx were selling briskly. One could say they hit the Jackpot, or in capitalist terms they “made a killing”. Note the large clenched red fist on their banner. Now imagine if you can, a world ruled with a clenched red fist.

Young communists hold a banner near the reflecting pool.

The Communist Party USA declared its loyalty to the Democrat Party on its official website in an article titled Why We March and Vote :

“Millions are coming forward to counter fear and hate with unity and hope, and to protect the democratic majorities in Congress. The Communist Party USA and Young Communist League stand with them.

While thousands are rallying in Washington for jobs, hundreds of thousands of other patriotic Americans who can’t make it will be there in spirit. They will spend their day canvassing door to door, phone banking, registering new voters and talking to their neighbors and co-workers about the issues.”

Most of the area along the reflecting pool was uncrowded. Throughout the rally walking from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to any area was not a problem. The photo above was taken at 2 p.m. The rally was from 12:00 to 4:30 p.m.

College Democrats and their Marxist friends happily held signs distributed by communist organizations and the NAACP in front of an anti-tea party banner.

The Socialist Workers Party started by asking $2 each for signs, but even when they tried giving them away, there were hundreds of signs left over. The International Socialist Organization, based in Chicago, is making common cause with the most radical elements of Islam and the gay liberation movement.

Unlike a tea party gathering, where almost all signs are homemade, this rally had few that weren’t mass produced. One exception was this man whose message was echoed by featured speakers like Al Sharpton and liberal icon Ed (who?) Shultz. Shultz boomed from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial:

“The conservative voices of America, they are holding you down. They don’t believe in your freedom. … For the last two years President Obama he’s had to put up with the word no. 40 people, 40 people in the United States Senate has held down the working man of America.

…we as one nation must stand together, must fight the forces of evil, the conservatives in this country across the board want it for them. They don’t want it for the people. They talk about the Constitution but they don’t want to live by it. They talk about our forefathers but they want discrimination.”

There were signs aimed at the FBI, which has recently raided “peace groups” offices. Evidence that leftist groups are involved with terrorist groups in Middle East and Latin America is what prompted the raids. Veterans For Peace is supporting Bradley Manning, who is accused of being a traitor for leaking thousands of military documents to Wikileaks. Secrets that were published are said to endanger U.S. troops and Afghan allies fighting in the field. The photo above shows the scene at 2:20 PM.

This photo was taken at the height of the rally, at 2:40 p.m. I couldn’t decide whether to include it, as it seems unbelievable that such a highly organized event could fail to achieve it’s objective. This area can be seen (photo below) on the right side of the reflecting pool. The long area of rail with no crowd is the same area shown in the photo above. Telephoto compression makes the area look much shorter than in the photo above.

This photo (above) was taken around 3 p.m. At this point widespread littering was becoming apparent.

The sidewalks around the mall were the most crowded areas. Most of the litter seen here is from radical left handouts and communist newspapers. The communists were everywhere, selling or giving away printed material and signs. Trash like this, as well as thousands of union signs like the SEIU FORWARD sign, littered the entire area from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington monument and into the downtown area. Maybe they were just showing solidarity with their brothers in the garbage collectors union.

There was much talk from the podium of unity, from individuals and representatives of groups that push identity politics. Much rhetoric and signs were devoted to attacking “those who hate” in the abstract, and often specifically the tea party.

This was one of the few handmade signs I saw, carried by a union member. Charles Trotter, of the Union of Electrical Workers, came from Chicago to tell President Obama that workers are hurting for jobs. Many stickers and printed signs had slogans such as “Fund Jobs, Not War” or “Jobs Not War!” For years the left have claimed that the U.S. uses war to stimulate the domestic economy. Now they seem to be saying that war is partially responsible for a lack of jobs at home, which is a reversal of the standard theme.

The scattered blue boxes contained free lunches given to union workers that travelled from out of state. These boxes were left at the base of the Washington monument along with other trash as attendees returned to the buses.

The World War II Memorial was also left littered with garbage. I felt awful for the visiting WWII veterans and their families. Many vets traveled from across the country for a visit to their memorial only to find that it was being used as a lounge for union workers who were uninterested in the rally they were bussed in to attend.

See What others say:

Accuracy in Media goes into the radical roots of key organizations and individuals involved in the rally here.

Moonbattery has an ariel overview comparison of the Glenn Beck rally and the One Nation Trashathon here

Nice Deb says communist groups were explicitly welcomed to participate in the rally.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

SEE El Marco’s June 6th rally photo-essay – Stop the Mosque at Ground Zero – Part II

Who says it’s not a MOSQUE?  Read El Marco’s photo-essay – Prayer Time at the Ground Zero Mosque

____________________________________________

El Marco distills life and Politics into Art  at – Art and Politics Blog.com

Enjoy El Marco’s Art Photography at – Looking at the World.com

_______________________________________

See other El Marco Photo-Essays on Islam:

• 9/11 – NEVER FORGET – NEVER GIVE IN
• Islam Clouds Bali’s Horizon
• 9/11 Families Rally Blasts Obama’s Show Trial Travesty
• Cartoons To Die For

______________________________________

……….EL MARCO………..

Why not leave a comment?

THANKS FOR VISITING!  –  NEVER FORGET  and  NEVER GIVE IN !

Sudanese refugees say Obama broke his promise to them.

Sept. 24, 2010 – by El Marco

A small group of Sudanese former slaves and refugees, both Christians and Muslims, are walking from New York City to Washington, D.C. The walk began on Sept. 15 in front of the United Nations, and will culminate on Capitol Hill, Oct. 7th. They want to call the attention of the American people, and the Obama administration, to the increasingly explosive crisis of genocide and slavery in Sudan.

Sudan is less than 100 days from a referendum that is the culmination of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), which was a welcome example of what the United States can do when it uses its influence effectively. That agreement, a major focus for the Bush administration, is seen by experts as endangered by a lack of resolve on the part of Obama and his team at the State Department.

Human rights activist and former slave Simon Deng is leading the fourth Sudan Freedom Walk to call attention to the impending disaster his people face in South Sudan. Deng, now a U.S. citizen, sees the upcoming referendum as a stark choice for the people of South Sudan:

… whether they’re going to remain under the islamization and arabization, under enslavement, or they’re going to choose freedom for the first time. I, for one, don’t want to go back to being a slave again. I’ve tasted freedom. I’m proud today to stand in this country, as a free man, speaking to free people.

Of course they’re going to chose freedom. Because freedom is a God given right to all human beings. That being said, we, the people of South Sudan, for sixty years we went through a lot at the hands of the sitting governments in Khartoum. They slaughtered three and a half million South Sudanese. They enslaved thousands. They turned their arms and guns on the people in the Nuba Mountains. They turned their arms and guns on the people in the Blue Nile. And the world came to their senses by saying what happened in western Sudan in Darfur region is genocide.

Simon Deng addressed his remarks to Obama on Sept. 15, before the start of the Sudan Freedom Walk in New York.

The Secretary of State, a month ago, Hillary Clinton, said that the problem in South Sudan is a “ticking time bomb”. We don’t want to go back. We don’t want to go back to Islam. We don’t want to go back to enslavement. We don’t want to go back to arabization. We are proud as Africans in that continent. Sudan is the land of the blacks.

And that is why we don’t want to turn our backs to our brothers in Darfur. …  after southern Sudan becomes independent next year we’re still going to be their voice because they’re being victimized the way we’re being victimized in that country. We’re going to Washington to ask our (United States) government that CPA that we talk about it is the legacy of the American government and, I’m speaking directly to President Obama, he was there with me when we talked about the issue in the South Sudan as a senator, shoulder to shoulder, when we talked about the Southern Sudan. I’m asking you, why are you distancing yourself from me, why are you distancing yourself from the issue of Sudan? Why are you putting heavyweights to be envoys here and envoys there, and you’re sending someone who has to learn on the job to be the envoy, knowing the magnitude of the problem in the Sudan? Why not Colin Powell? Why don’t you call him? Colin Powell even said it himself: “If the President calls on me, I will pick up the phone.” Call on him tomorrow, Mr. President. I’m walking to Washington, and I’m looking forward to discuss this matter with you.

Mr. Deng and other Sudanese refugees say that then Senator Obama promised them during a meeting in Philadelphia in 2008 to make peace in Sudan his first priority when he became president. Many Sudanese in Philadelphia campaigned door to door for Obama because they believed his promise. They say that the Obama administration has only played lip service to the plight of South Sudan and Darfur. They also say that Obama’s perceived lack of interest has emboldened the Khartoum regime and imperiled the indigenous peoples who are being brutalized by the regime in Khartoum.

President Obama’s appointment of his close personal friend General Scott Gration is seen by many Sudan activists as nothing more than a political appointment for an Obama crony who has no expertise on Sudan. Gration is said to be out of his depth and only biding time until he is rewarded with the ambassador’s post in Kenya. John Prendergast, of the ENOUGH anti-genocide project recently wrote:

“Every administration that comes into office over the last two decades thinks it can convince the Sudanese government to change its behavior through dialogue and constructive engagement alone, … It usually takes a year or two to figure out that this won’t work, that a more forceful approach is required that mixes sticks with carrots. . . . President Obama has been no different, and has deferred to General Gration, who remains convinced that nice guys finish first in diplomacy. [Obama] will slowly become disabused of this misconception, but the cost to Sudanese civilians for this macabrely slow learning curve will likely be excessively high.”  – Politics Daily

Prendergast, in a New York Times op-ed published July 12, 2010, referred to the U.S. administrations policy in Sudan as: “President Obama’s Rwanda moment … unfolding now, in slow motion.”  A Sept. 3, Wall Street Journal article titled Obama is Still AWOL on Sudan, was subtitled : The country may soon return to war, and the perception of U.S. indifference isn’t helping. The article went on to say, “if the current U.S. policy gridlock remains, the next round of Sudanese bloodletting could be the worst yet.”

Francis Bok, also a U.S. citizen like Deng, was taken by an islamic militia and made a slave at the age of seven. He was enslaved for ten years, until his miraculous escape about which he has written a book. His plea for action from the Obama administration, in front of the U.N. building, brought tears to the eyes of listeners and to himself.

Since Sudan gained its independence from Great Britain in 1956, the people of South Sudan never had freedom. I was born in 1979. I grew up in war. I was a slave for ten years. I didn’t live with my parents. Every time I think about my childhood, I think about just tomorrow. I’m begging you, I’m begging you: save us.  On January 9, to become our own (country) — God wants us to be like you (free).

I ask you also, for our brothers in Nuba Mountain and the Blue Nile — everybody that has been suppressed and oppressed for all this time, for people have suffered greatly. I have been to Sudan nine times since the CPA (Comprehensive Peace Agreement) in 2005. Every time I come back home I become very emotional. Because we talk about this, and we never see results.

Imagine 1,000 dying a week in your state: people that you know their names, you know the neighborhoods, innocent kids who do not yet know what this war is about. Why are they dying? While we are sitting watching. This building, the United Nations, where all the leaders from around the world come, talk about peaceful coexistence for all human beings, why are they saying “Never again,” and again and again our people are dying?

Today we are starting the journey of freedom that has been started some years ago by Simon Deng – someone who never forgot where he came from. He’s lived here quite a long time. He has every choice, like me, like any other immigrant who came to this country, to better his life and his family’s, yet again he devoted, he dedicated his whole life, so to speak, on behalf of millions, not just Sudanese. And so did I since I came here. I worked, I tried my best, and I did everything I could. And I’ll continue until my people are free at last.

Sudanese tyrant Omar Al Bashir, brother-in-law to Osama bin Ladin, has been accused by the International Criminal Court of three counts of genocide, five counts of crimes against humanity (which includes murder, extermination, forcible transfer, torture and rape) and two counts of war crimes (for intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population and pillaging).

After warring against the Christians of southern Sudan for decades, Khartoum began attacking the black Muslims of Nuba mountain, the Blue Nile, and Darfur. The Islamic regime has long used fatwas, or religious decrees, to declare black African Muslims opposed to Khartoum’s arabization policies, as apostates that have renounced Islam. These fatwas give Arab Sudanese a free hand to kill the indigenous population and seize their land with the help of the government.

The Arabs also freely take slaves. The riches of the slave trade was what originally brought the Arabs to Sudan centuries ago. Arabs exported black Africans to the slave markets of Arabia until the British fought to stop the trade in the late 19th century. After the British left in 1955, Arab Sudanese returned to their old ways with a vengeance. Today slaves cost as little as 10 dollars in Sudan.

Symbolically turning their backs to the U.N. above are Francis Bok (tall center left), Dr. Abdelgabar Adam (President of the Darfur Human Rights Organization,) Simon Deng and his wife Monica, and Rev. Dr. Herbert Daughtry Sr, of Brooklyn’s House of the Lord Church.

Participants at the start of the walk symbolically turned their backs on the United Nations, as the U.N. has “turned its back on the indigenous black Africans of the Sudan”. When asked recently why the world ignored the conflict in Sudan for so long, Deng said:

” (T)he government of Sudan was waging war on the Africans, who happened to be Christians. At that time, they were calling it “jihad against the infidels”. The world, in my opinion, didn’t want to get involved because they didn’t want to be accused of being anti-Islam and anti-arab. … Since the crime was committed by somebody and the victims happened to be Christians and, especially, black people in that part of the world, who cares? But today, the atrocity is still going on. According to the Sudanese government, the African culture is a savage culture that needs to be changed and transformed into an arab culture.”

Deng says that in recent years, the Sudanese government has “turned their guns on their fellow Muslims.” They kill them because, although they have become Muslim, they have not accepted arabization. “They didn’t take the whole package, and they are paying the price today. … They still maintain their language as Africans, and they still maintain their culture as Africans, and today they are paying the price.”

Of the U.N., Deng said:

“The U.N. is a failed organization. … Anybody who tells me that the U.N. is the right place to go, he has to tell me which U.N. they are talking about. Is it the U.N. that I know? The U.N. that walked away from Rwanda, after telling Rwandans, ‘we will protect you, we will give you safety.’? And anyone who, in their right mind, thinks that U.N. is the right place to go, let’s go to Rwanda and ask those skeleton bones ‘Do you believe in the U.N.?’ … The U.N. failed because they don’t follow their principles. Article 1 of the U.N., what is it talking about? Article 4, when it talks about enslavement … here you had the U.N. telling us that you can buy a human being for $10, and they did nothing.”

Deng holds no hope for UN action for reasons that include,the influence wielded by the 57 voting Muslim member states, and perceived apathy towards human rights violations committed by islamic leaders, at that institution.

The walkers started the first of 23 days by crossing Manhattan, from the U.N. Headquarters to the George Washington Bridge, and on to New Jersey.

I caught up a week later with the Sudan Freedom Walk in Langhorne, Pennsylvania. Walking past a field full of large ears of corn, Dr. Adam, a physician, told the American supporters walking about the severe malnutrition predominant among Sudanese refugees in camps. Adults survive on 1,000 calories a day of durum flour porridge, sometimes supplemented with sugar and salt. The walkers were headed for Newtown Friends School, where students have been raising money and supplies to send directly to Sudanese refugees in Chad. Deng and Adam have had a long partnership with the school, which has hosted them as speakers a number of times.

Right to left, above, Garelanbi Abusikin, Simon Deng, Martha Bixby of Save Darfur, Mark Feinman (General Counsel of Darfur Human Rights Organization,) Dr. Adam (founder and president of DHRO,) and Rona Wronker.

The Sudan Freedom walkers spoke to 200 children at Newtown Friends School. After watching a slideshow of the school children’s aid being delivered to refugees in Chad, Dr. Adam told the kids, “You are all heroes in my eyes.” He asked the children to “Call the White House and leave a message. Ask Obama to intervene to guarantee fair and free elections, to protect civilians and stop genocide in Sudan. Probably Obama will listen to you.”

Newtown Friends school student Jake, Simon Deng, Garelanabi Abusikim (a Darfuri refugee,) and students Sam, Janine, and Michael and Dr. Adam (background).

The students above are on the school’s Darfur Task Force, which raised over $12,000 and many supplies for refugees. Deng told them, “Even more important than money and clothing, you raised hope for somebody.”

Dr. Adam, Abusikin, and Deng rest in the shade of an old Quaker barn in Pennsylvania before continuing on their walk southward towards Washington D.C..

Garelnabi Abusikin was one of those who campaigned door to door for Obama. He says he was present in the room in Philadelphia when Obama promised the Sudanese refugees that he would make Sudan’s wars, and the plight of its victims, his number one priority as President. Today Abusikin is disappointed and angry at the failure of Obama to keep his promise. He has taken a leave of absence from his job to join the Sudan Freedom Walk and help draw public attention to the crisis in Sudan.

When Garelnabi was 11 years old, 27 members of his family were killed by government backed militia in an attack that destroyed his village.

See video of the September 15 press conference in front of the U.N., including several very moving speeches, here.

The public is encouraged and welcomed to join the walk. See here for the schedule, and click on the donate button at their web site to donate.

______________________________________________________________

SEE El Marco’s June 6th rally photo-essay – Stop the Mosque at Ground Zero – Part II

Who says it’s not a MOSQUE?  Read El Marco’s photo-essay – Prayer Time at the Ground Zero Mosque

____________________________________________

El Marco distills life and Politics into Art  at – Art and Politics Blog.com

Enjoy El Marco’s Art Photography at – Looking at the World.com

_______________________________________

See other El Marco Photo-Essays on Islam:

• 9/11 – NEVER FORGET – NEVER GIVE IN
• Islam Clouds Bali’s Horizon
• 9/11 Families Rally Blasts Obama’s Show Trial Travesty
• Cartoons To Die For

______________________________________

……….EL MARCO………..

Why not leave a comment?

THANKS FOR VISITING!  –  NEVER FORGET  and  NEVER GIVE IN !

New York, NY  September 16, 2010 – by El Marco

This year’s anniversary of the 9/11 islamic terrorist attacks brought thousands of opponents and supporters of the controversial “ground zero mosque” to lower Manhattan in New York City. The American people yet again have been served a false narrative by the dominant liberal establishment mass media. Just as the MSM joined the administration in smearing the Tea Party movement as racist and a hotbed for right-wing terrorism, they now have extended that propaganda theme to those who oppose the mosque at ground zero.

With headlines like Angry Protests Mar Solemn Day, Both Sides Desecrate Vigil, and Rallies Rage in Downtown Duel, New York papers painted a scene of divisive struggle between roughly equivalent numbers of protesters at the anti-mosque and pro-mosque rallies. Nothing could be further from the truth. Those at the Stop the Mosque Rally were well apart from the radicals and communists who marched and chanted political slogans on the streets of lower Manhattan.

The photo above shows the 9/11 Remembrance/Stop the Ground Zero Mosque Rally hosted by Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer. According to the New York Times, what is seen here is a crowd of 2,000 persons. The New York Daily News, “reported” that the crowd (above) contained “hundreds,” despite the fact that it stretched 40 abreast for three city blocks. Local NYC News Channel 10 reported live that there were 30,000 people at this rally. Channel 10 should be applauded for doing their job, and the rest of the media stands exposed as corrupt and untrustworthy.

The Stop the Mosque rally hosts, Geller and Spencer, instructed participants not to bring signs, only flags, in order to emphasize the sanctity and solemnity of the occasion. They also emphasized in their promotional blog posts that it was to be a “remembrance rally”. That was very much the tone of the rally I witnessed and photographed just next to 51 Park Place, the site of the proposed Cordoba House mosque/community center.

The second rally in question was near City Hall. It was  described by the New York Times as being made up of “supporters of the proposed Islamic center” and “organized by a number of left-wing anti-war and pro-Palestinian groups, including the International Action Center. (IAC)” By describing the organizers as “left-wing anti-war,” the Times obscures the true nature of the organized opposition to the mosque project. The IAC is an umbrella group for Marxist, Stalanist and Castroist groups like the World Workers Party (WWP) which supplied hundreds of professionally printed signs. The communist umbrella organization World Can’t Wait was also a main sponsor of the anti-mosque rally.

This technique of labeling militant Marxist revolutionary operations as “anti-war, pacifist, or left-wing” has been employed for decades by the dominant liberal media to mislead the public about who exactly is organizing domestic opposition to U.S. foreign policy. The “pro-mosque” rally was a highly politicized combination of communists, islamists, and hispanic open border radicals.

I attended the leftist rally up until just before the Stop the Mosque Rally started at 3 p.m. I estimated 1,500 leftist protesters inside the staging area at 2:45, with many more arriving at the time of my departure. The AP reported a total of 1,000 leftists.

Signs like the ones above were available by the hundreds. Note the signs about freeing Lynn Stewart the “People’s Lawyer.” All the major themes of the radical anti-American left were on display, including: Bush/Cheney War Criminals, Jobs not Hate-Say No to Tea Party Bigots, Worker Defense Guards Against Racist Anti-Immigrant Attacks. There were also signs denouncing President Obama for continuing with many of the Bush/Cheney anti-terrorism policies. Note also that the communist-produced signs are perfectly in sync with the liberal media/administration theme branding opponents of the Cordoba initiative mosque as racist bigots.

I saw one group of around 100 protesters chanting “Racists Go Home, Leave Muslims Alone” towards an open top double decker tour bus stopped at a traffic light. It was packed with appalled tourists who looked on in amazement as protesters vented their rage at them.

Three blocks away on the relatively secluded side street where the Stop Islamization of America Remembrance rally was assembled, there was a completely different tone. These were people who share an informed awareness of the challenge America and the west face from both islamist terrorists and their stealth jihad co-religionists like Imam Rauf.

Pamela Geller welcomes the huge anti-mosque crowd.

Geller and her associate Robert Spencer sparked the ground zero mosque debate when they held their first rally on June 6, 2010. The corporate liberal media practically blacked out that rally too. But for the blogging of Geller and Spencer, no one would have known about the opposition movement to the Cordoba House mosque. In suppressing news of the June 6th rally, the liberal media showed their determination to keep the public in the dark.

What unfolded at the anti-mosque/remembrance rally was a heartfelt plea by 9/11 survivors and first responders for Imam Rauf to show sensitivity for the sanctity that ground zero holds for the vast majority of Americans. Speakers included 9/11 family members, first responders, and refugees from violence in muslim countries.

Fabrizio Bivona and Rosa Leonetti addressing the anti-mosque remembrance rally. Mr. Bivona is a firefighter, paramedic and RN. He was a first responder on 9/11.

Bivona said, “I listened to the imam say he didn’t know the pain this was going to inflict. I hear the imam say he wants to bridge gaps and bring muslims and non-muslims together. Does that look like it’s happening? I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he didn’t know then, but he knows now. There should be no doubt in his mind. When seventy five plus percent of the people say “Don’t do this,” when family members who’ve been victimized are standing out there and saying “Please, don’t do this,” – so the answer to anyone’s question if this guy’s doing this to be provocative, or if he’s doing it to build bridges, well we’re going to find out tomorrow if he continues with this monstrosity, or if he stops this disaster now. … Let’s honor the fallen.”

Rosa Leonetti is a 9/11 family member. Her sister’s husband, Lieutenant Joseph Gullickson of the FDNY’s Ladder 101 in Red Hook, Brooklyn, perished on 9/11, rescuing the victims of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.

“It did not matter to the four hundred and eleven emergency workers (who died) what the race, religion, nationality or ethnicity of the men and women and children were within those towers. … We have shown much respect and, above all, tolerance during these very long nine years. … tolerance for a mayor who puts his own business interests in the middle east ahead of the long suffering of family members … tolerance is not reserved for just one religion or one ideology … Do not ask us, the family members, to be tolerant of those who demonstrate selfish self serving behaviors and attitudes.”

“Abdel Faisel Rauf is quoted this week as saying that if we don’t do this right … anger will explode in the muslim world. Well, imam, anger is exploding in America too. He stated that if this situation is not handled correctly, it could become something very dangerous indeed. Does that sound like tolerance to you? It actually sounds more like a threat. Mr. Rauf, Americans do not like to be threatened.  Tolerance is not reserved, nor should it be parceled out, to those who use the excuse of building a cultural center when what they are erecting is a rabat. … A rabat was typically raised in the midst of the conquered infidel as a symbol of strength and superiority.”

When Ms. Leonetti mentioned the word rabat, I was sure that she had also seen the same article as I, just a day or two before in the New York Post by Amir Taheri. He explained much about Islamic supremacist colonialism, and the types of buildings constructed by muslims historically during the process of conquest.

This is how some in the crowd reacted when Rosa Leonetti said “Mr. Rauf, Americans do not like to be threatened.”

There were also video addresses by former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton and media-man Andrew Breitbart. Bolton reminded the crowd about the ground zero imam’s many outrageous public statements, including that Osama bin Laden was made in the U.S.A., and that America has more blood on its hands than the terrorists. Bolton brought up questions about the United States State Department’s funding of Imam Rauf’s trip to the middle east, and that Department’s policies concerning Islamism.

Joseph Nassralla, Coptic Christian human rights activist, made a heart wrenching speech on behalf of the much persecuted Christians of Egypt. Robert Spencer wrote:

“Nassralla garnered national attention last June at the first rally Geller and I hosted against the Ground Zero mosque, when Keith Olbermann and other hard-Left pseudo-journalists trumpeted and misrepresented a misunderstanding between Nassralla and some others in the crowd as a racial incident.”

The liberal/left media turned what was shrugged off by those involved into a yarn about intolerance in America. Nassralla’s startling speech put the lie to the leftist spin as he told of how, after escaping from Egypt, he is terrified by the growth of intolerant Islam in New York City and America.

Wake up America! I came from Egypt. Egypt was Coptic, was Christian. 1,400 years Islamists conquered our country. You know it’s written in the Koran that war is deceiving. They can lie to build this mosque here – on my dead body. I escaped from Egypt for freedom here. Where I can go? You need me to go to the moon now? …

I’m sorry to show you my picture. This is one of our dear friends in Egypt. One of eight – eight of them on the Christmas night. In the name of Islam, they said “Allah hu akhbar,” and they killed them in front of the church.

Three thousand persons buried here, in this same area. …In ten years, if this mosque built here, using taqiya, using islamize of this country, you cannot stop them. It’s gonna be too late. … I’m saying to you, “WAKE UP AMERICA!!” You don’t need to be like this picture. Stop islamization of America.”

Sam Khoshbaten, is a true Muslim moderate. He is an Iranian activist, organizer of the No to Ajmadinejad Committee. Khoshbaten spoke about oppression under the Islamic Republic of Iran and told the crowd, “Together we can eliminate the dark cloud of terrorism, by uniting with the brave people of Iran in their struggle for freedom.”

Dutch MP, Geert Wilders, came from Holland for the rally. His speech was historic and Churchillian and ignored by the MSM. If Winston Churchill or the great cold warrior John F. Kennedy were alive today I believe they would be warning us precisely the way Geert Wilders is.

Excerpts:

“The tolerance that is crucial to our freedom requires a line of defense. Mayor Bloomberg uses tolerance as an argument to allow Imam Rauf and his sponsors to build their so-called Cordoba Mosque.

Mayor Bloomberg forgets, however, that openness cannot be open-ended. A tolerant society is not a suicidal society. It must defend itself against the powers of darkness, the force of hatred and the blight of ignorance. It cannot tolerate the intolerant – and survive.

“Most Americans do not want this so-called Cordoba Mosque to be built here. They understand that it is both a provocation and a humiliation. They understand the triumphant narrative of a mosque named after the Great Mosque of Cordoba which was constructed where a Christian cathedral stood before the land was conquered by Islam.

“Nine years ago, when the news of the terrible atrocity in New York reached Europe, Muslim youths danced in the streets. In a poll, two thirds of the Muslim immigrants in the Netherlands expressed partial or full understanding for the 9/11 terrorists.

If a mosque were built here on Ground Zero such people would feel triumphant. But we, we will not betray those who died on 9/11. For their sakes we cannot tolerate a mosque on or near Ground Zero. For their sakes loud and clear we say: No mosque here! For their sakes, we must draw the line. So that New York, rooted in Dutch tolerance, will never become New Mecca.”

For full speech text, go to my brand new Communities at the Washington Times column.

Andrew Breitbart was there in spirit and via a video address.

“Political correctness got us into this problem in the first place. … Many in the media elite have been putting their heads in the sand since 9/11. Radical Islam is not just killing our soldiers. They’re also waging a propaganda war against us. Those who have read Bernard Lewis, those who have read Mark Steyn, and those people who have chosen not to act like ostriches have found themselves being called all sorts of names by those who have acted like ostriches. That is what we face today. It’s a battle of those who have the will to face up to the challenges that we face in America in 2010,  nine years after 9/11. Americans have every right to congregate at ground zero at the WTC to represent the majority point of view. Do not let Katie Couric and her cavalcade of the politically correct media elite tell you that you don’t have the right to be here. This is a strong message, not just to the radical islamists that we have the backbone to stand up to the war that we face against them, but to those that would cower in the face of that peril, our media elite.”

Nelly Braginskaya lost her son on 9/11. She explained, in her heavy Russian accent, that most families who have a grave site for those murdered that day have a small fragment of bone, or perhaps a jacket, or something with only a bit of DNA in the grave. Ground Zero is the real grave site, and for many blocks around, the remains of the victims were scattered with the ashes of the buildings.

“Everybody say “let people pray” like it only about religion. But this is not about freedom of religion. This is about geography. You (muslims) can pray, but a little bit farther (away from ground zero). What’s big deal? God will hear you if you will pray.”

Ilario Pantano, candidate for U.S. Congress, addressed the crowd.

“…  on 9/11 it wasn’t New York that was attacked, it was America that was attacked. It was freedom that was attacked. And we can’t forget not only what happened, not only the murderous intent that killed 3,000 Americans. We can’t forget for a moment that they wanted to kill 50,000 Americans, or maybe 100,000 Americans. … We can’t forget that since those attacks, hundreds of thousands of men and women around the world have been killed by jihadists, in the name of radical Islam. From Egypt to Bali, from Baghdad to Kabul, no one can forget there was a car bomb here in Times Square six months ago. Folks, if  you think this is over, it’s just beginning.

… So what’s my opinion about a mosque at ground zero? NO MOSQUE HERE. …”

Pantano tied in Iran’s actions against Israel with the Gaza Flotilla, and pointed out Imam Rauf’s involvement with the Gaza Flotilla, and questioned where the money for the mosque is coming from.

In the crowd there were families of those murdered on 9/11, military veterans, New Yorkers, and people who had travelled from around the country and from abroad to be here today. Above, three U.S. Marine Corps veterans listened intently to Pantano.

Attorney Larry Klayman attended the rally. He has filed a suit on behalf of  9/11 first responders. The suit seeks $350 million in damages against the developers of Park 51, claiming that the plans for the mosque have resulted in “emotional, mental and physical” damage to those impacted by 9/11.

Wave Chan, a New York Tea Party organizer, has filed a non-profit corporation to raise money to make an offer for the Park 51 property. He got the idea from Debra Burlingame, who was the sister of the pilot of Flight 77 which was hijacked by jihadis and flown into the Pentagon murdering Burlingame’s brother and 188 other souls. Chan hopes to get a memorial built at 51 Park Place. He noticed that the Preview of the 9/11 Memorial doesn’t show a single image of an airplane, makes no reference to terrorism or jihad, etc. Chan lives not far from ground zero. For many hours on 9/11, 2001, Chan did not know whether his brother, who works in the Financial District, survived the attack.

First responder FDNY firefighter Steve Sharp thanks Ms. Geller for her work. Many off-duty firefighters and police officers from New York City and other parts of the country were in the crowd.

The liberal media has smeared as racist the majority of Americans who oppose the islamist/leftist alliance. This is more than just another example of the left’s loathing of western values and civilization. This unholy alliance between the media, the administration, the extreme left and islamists is an unprecedented threat to civil society in the West.