We begin with Rosen and his involvement with State Department advisor Steven Kim. Kim is a naturalized citizen from South Korea who was indicted in 2009 for telling Rosen that the intelligence community believed North Korea’s response to additional UN sanctions would be another test of its nuclear capabilities. Rosen published a story to that effect on June 11, 2009, noting that the CIA had received the information form sources inside North Korea.

That story was posted the same day a top-secret report was made available to Kim, arms expert with security clearance, and 95 other members of the intelligence community. Using the surveillance techniques described above, the FBI built a case that the information Rosen received came directly from those documents. Yet Kim did not obtain unauthorized access to top-secret information, steal or sell documents or secrets, or collaborate with the enemy. He gave exclusive information to a reporter, a reality that occurs every day. Furthermore, according to the New York Times, four months prior to disseminating the information for which he was indicted, Kim was asked by a State Department press officer to speak to Rosen about North Korea, “and the two began to talk and exchange e-mails,” the paper reported.

Despite this reality, Kim is facing 15 years in prison for violating the Espionage Act.

The Washington Post explains that in building the case against Kim, the DOJ resorted to the aforementioned tactics to build their case. Thus, despite having substantial amounts of evidence gleaned from Kim’s computer and phone records, Justice insisted they needed access to two days’ worth of Rosen’s personal emails, and all of his email exchanges with Kim. Those records necessitated a subpoena.

In an affidavit obtained by the Post, FBI agent Reginald Reyes revealed the DOJ’s rationale for seeking it. “From the beginning of their relationship, the Reporter asked, solicited and encouraged Mr. Kim to disclose sensitive United States internal documents and intelligence information about the Foreign Country” he wrote. “The Reporter did so by employing flattery and playing to Mr. Kim’s vanity and ego.”

More importantly, Reyes further declared there was evidence that Rosen had broken the law “at the very least, either as an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator.” A federal judge signed off on the search warrant.

The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald explains the implications of targeting Rosen. “Under US law, it is not illegal to publish classified information,” he explains. “That fact, along with the First Amendment’s guarantee of press freedoms, is what has prevented the US government from ever prosecuting journalists for reporting on what the US government does in secret. This newfound theory of the Obama DOJ–that a journalist can be guilty of crimes for ‘soliciting’ the disclosure of classified information–is a means for circumventing those safeguards and criminalizing the act of investigative journalism itself.”

Fox News’ Brit Hume echoed that assessment. “The Obama-Holder Justice Department is now prepared to treat the ordinary newsgathering actives of reporters to seek information from government officials as a possible crime,” he warned.

As in the AP case, the DOJ again insisted it followed guidelines that require them to obtain information by other means prior to subpoenaing reporters’ phone records. According to the office of Ronald Machen Jr., the U.S. attorney for the District, the government “exhausted all reasonable non-media alternatives for collecting this evidence before seeking court approval for a search warrant.”

According to the Huffington Post, “non-media alternatives” is the key phrase obscuring an inconvenient truth. “The DOJ didn’t contact the AP before secretly obtaining two months of journalists’ phone records, nor did it contact Fox News before getting Rosen’s records, a break with the way the government traditionally deals with media outlets,” it reported.

The U.S. attorney’s statement contained more hair-splitting. “Based on the investigation and all of the facts known to date, no other individuals, including the reporter, have been charged since Mr. Kim was indicted nearly three years ago,” said a released statement.

The key word here is “charged.” Yesterday afternoon, one Fox staffer under DOJ scrutiny became three. In an incredible revelation, the emails of two additional Fox staffers, reporter William La Jeunesse and producer Mike Levine, appeared in an Inspector General’s (IG) report–on the Fast and Furious gun running scandal!

It remains unclear whether those emails were leaked by DOJ employees to whom they were sent, or the DOJ once again issued secret subpoenas to obtain them. ”What we don’t know at this point is if the sources within the Justice Department may have shared those emails with investigators, or if the Fox employees’ accounts were directly accessed by investigators,” Fox News correspondent Shannon Bream reported. ”It’s simply a question we cannot answer at this point.”

We do know that La Jeunesse broke numerous stories outlining the details of Fast and Furious, and Levine was also involved in reporting on the scandal. Yet according to Bream, none of the three men targeted were ever contacted by the administration.

Adding insult to injury, the IG’s Fast and Furious report reveals even more abuse by the DOJ: it confirms that U.S. Attorney for Arizona Dennis Burke intentionally leaked a document aimed at smearing Fast and Furious whistleblower John Dodson. Furthermore, additional emails uncovered by the IG reveal other DOJ officials also discussed smearing Dodson, one of whom was Tracy Schmaler, the former Director of the Department’s Office of Public Affairs. She was forced to resign after it was discovered she was colluding with the radical leftist advocacy group Media Matters to smear those attempting to cover DOJ scandals.

Fox News’ executive vice president of news, Michael Clemente, made it clear the network would not be intimidated by the DOJ. ”We are outraged to learn today that James Rosen was named a criminal co-conspirator for simply doing his job as a reporter,” Clemente said statement. “In fact, it is downright chilling. We will unequivocally defend his right to operate as a member of what up until now has always been a free press.”

Last Wednesday, in testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Holder denied any knowledge of the AP investigation, claiming he recused himself. “I was not the person involved in that decision,” he insisted. “I was recused in that matter as I described in a press conference held yesterday. The decision to issue this subpoena was made by the people presently involved in the case.”

It remains to be seen if Holder is also going to claim ignorance regarding Rosen, La Jeunesse and Levine.

Last Tuesday might have provided a clue. Holder told NPR he isn’t sure how many times the DOJ has seized similar information during his tenure. ”I’m not sure how many of those cases … I have actually signed off on,” Holder said. “I take them very seriously. I know that I have refused to sign a few, pushed a few back for modifications.”

Holder also declined to say whether the the Justice Department’s policy on searches of reporters’ records will be reviewed.

As for the president, last Thursday Obama defended the DOJ’s seizure of AP phone records–even as he failed to mention his administration has pursued more government officials for leaks than all previous administrations combined. “And so I make no apologies,” he said about going after “information that might compromise” the missions of U.S. personnel “or get themselves killed.”

Again, it remains to be seen if the president will also defend the efforts undertaken by the DOJ with regard to the staffers at Fox News.

Despite the attempts by the American left to equate this administration’s appalling behavior with Bush administration supporters calling for prosecution of reporters at the New York Times and other new organizations that exposed top-secret information regarding the eavesdropping on potential terrorist phone conversations, or terrorist financing schemes, no journalists were even accused, much less prosecuted, for revealing top-secret information.

Last week, in an interview with Democracy Now, James Goodale, former general council for the New York Times, revealed the likely motive for the administration’s determination to criminalize reporting of classified information. ”Obama has classified, I think, seven million–in one year, classified seven million documents,” he explained. “Everything is classified. So that would give the government the ability to control all its information on the theory that it’s classified. And if anybody asks for it and gets it, they’re complicit, and they’re going to go to jail. So that criminalizes the process, and it means that the dissemination of information, which is inevitable, out of the classified sources of that information will be stopped.”

That reality raises an extremely important question: who’s going to stop the Obama administration?

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Fourteen days after the September 11, 2012 attacks, Obama appeared at the United Nations to deliver a eulogy for the man he had not troubled to save and to declare that the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.

Obama denounced the “crude and disgusting video” that had “sparked outrage throughout the Muslim world” and explained that it couldn’t be banned only because of the pesky Constitution. Two days later, the man behind the video, a Coptic Christian protesting the Muslim persecution of Christians in Egypt, had been arrested. The actual perpetrators of the attack still walk the streets of Benghazi.

That lopsided injustice appeared to have been the plan all along. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had told Charles Woods, the father of murdered Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods, that the administration was going to arrest and prosecute the man who made the video.

It was the only promise that Obama and Clinton made about Benghazi which they faithfully kept. Everything else was a lie. Doubletalk had become an administration habit. Obama would say one thing and do another. Or he would loudly tell a lie and quietly speak some version of the truth in order to hedge his bets.

On May 13, 2013, standing alongside British Prime Minister David Cameron, Obama said, “The day after it happened, I acknowledged that this was an act of terrorism.” The phrasing suggested an admission, rather than an assertion. A thing that had to be dragged out of him. But even that much was not true.

At the United Nations, Obama had not used the word, terrorism. On 60 Minutes, he carefully avoided calling it a terrorist attack. There and on The View, he took refuge in delaying tactics about a developing investigation that was doomed from the start because the FBI had no power to take any action in a city run by the same terrorist militias that had carried out the attacks.

In campaign speeches, Obama mentioned acts of terror, plural and unspecified, while administration proxies like Susan Rice blamed a YouTube movie trailer for the carnage and Obama and Clinton spent $70,000 on an apology commercial denouncing the video in Pakistan.

There was no question that the dominant message coming out of the White House after the attacks was that the trailer for The Innocence of Muslims was to blame. The infamous talking points trimmed away any mention of terrorism and reduced a heavily armed attack to a spontaneous protest over an online movie trailer.

This Sunday, Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer was sent to do a tour of the morning shows where he declared that Obama’s whereabouts during the attack were irrelevant and that the process by which the talking points were altered was likewise irrelevant.

At his joint press conference with Cameron, Obama had taken the same line, declaring the investigation a “sideshow” and insisting that there was nothing there and that no one had known what was going on. Gregory Hicks, the lead diplomatic figure in Libya, however had testified that everyone there knew that it was a terrorist attack and that it had nothing to do with the video.

At 2 AM, local time, Hicks had briefed Clinton. Despite everything the one man in the position to know what was happening was saying, the administration chose a disastrous and dishonest narrative instead.

The dishonesty isn’t ending any time soon.

At a joint press conference with Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan, a known supporter of terrorism, Obama once again shifted the blame to Congress for a lack of security and the failure to intervene.

The myth that the State Department lacked the funds to provide security in Benghazi was the defense against accusations of administration malfeasance. But it’s a myth that fell apart when Charlene Lamb, the deputy assistant secretary of state for diplomatic security, testified in Congress that budget issues had not prevented the hiring of more security personnel.

The Washington Post had pointed out that Congress would have provided supplemental security funding if it had been requested. Despite pleas from diplomats on the ground, it was not. Instead the State Department’s bureaucrats and donor diplomats were busy squandering money on all sorts of wasteful vanity projects.

The State Department had plenty of money. It just chose to use it in the wrong ways. It had millions to spend on embassy art, ridiculously overpriced Kindles and even on an Afghan YouTube channel.

At the press conference, Obama went so far as say, “We’re going to need Congress’s help in terms of increasing the number of our Marine Corps Guard who protect our embassies” when under him, not only were 20,000 Marines being fired, but at the presidential debate, Obama had mocked Romney’s objections to his drastic naval cuts by saying that we no longer needed outdated horses and bayonets.

The real reason that the Marines had not been there protecting Benghazi was the same reason that no military forces came to the rescue once the attack began. It was the same reason that Obama blamed the video and used the United Nations as a forum for denouncing that video, instead of denouncing terrorism.

The issue was never the budget. It was appeasement.

The United States was not incapable of using armed force over Benghazi. Obama’s first Libya lie, the one that led to the war, was the claim that Gaddafi forces were about to carry out a massacre in Benghazi. No such massacre had occurred anywhere or was going to occur, but it was enough for Obama to go to war, without ever admitting that he was at war.

Was the military power that was leveraged to defend Benghazi incapable of being leveraged to defend the mission in Benghazi? Was overthrowing Gaddafi really easier than protecting American diplomats and security personnel under siege?

Benghazi was, from beginning to end, a story of appeasement gone bad. The serial lies by a serial liar have covered up the ugly truth that American lives were sacrificed on the altar of appeasement. Four men are dead and a fifth has been locked up to keep the lie alive.

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The Enemy Within from DHFC on Vimeo.

Jeffrey Wienir: The title of this panel is The Battle Within.  And in light of the Boston Marathon attack, jihad and the defense of our society here at home — or lack thereof — has been on the forefront of everyone’s minds.

Robert Spencer: It came out this morning in the news that William Plotnikov who was a Canadian Islamic jihadi who had traveled to Dagestan was captured in Dagestan and interrogated.

And under interrogation, he gave the name of Tamerlan Tsarnaev to Russian authorities, who then passed on the name to the FBI with great concern.  And that this was not the only time that Russian authorities had alerted the FBI to Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s jihadi connections.

This was also not the only government that alerted the FBI to Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s jihadi connections.  Came out last week that the Saudis had alerted the FBI to the jihad activity of Tamerlan.

Now, the Saudis denied it the next day.  But before they denied it, a Homeland Security official confirmed it and said that he had actually seen the written memorandum that the Saudis had sent to the US government warning them about Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

And so it seems as if some people are covering for themselves by denying this.  But there is this unfortunate fact that this was already confirmed.  So we have two governments that informed the FBI about the Boston Marathon jihad bomber.

And we know, because Barack Obama told us and we know he’s always trustworthy, that the FBI looked into Tamerlan Tsarnaev and didn’t find anything to concern them.  And so that he was able to build the bomb in his apartment.  Built the bombs in his apartment and set them off at the Boston Marathon.

And of course that’s easier said than done.  He had to buy all the materials to construct the bomb.  And a lot of those materials have aroused suspicions of investigators in other cases and led to the cracking of jihad terror plots.

But in this case, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, even though he was on a terror watch list and even though two governments had told us about him, nothing, nobody was watching him.  Nobody was paying attention.  Three people are dead.  Well over 200 are wounded.  Many are maimed and disfigured for life.

Now, why did this happen?  How is it that this massive intelligence failure took place?  I think the roots of it go back to 2010 and 2011 when the Islamic advocacy groups in the United States, chiefly the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which is a Hamas-linked Muslim Brotherhood front group and others like it began to complain about the nature of the counterterror training that was going on in the FBI and in other agencies.

And they said that this training was Islamophobic and offensive.  And that it featured people like me and others like me.  And material that spoke honestly about the nature of the jihad threat and how it is rooted in the Qur’an and Islamic teaching.

It is rooted in the Qur’an and Islamic teaching.  It’s an unfortunate fact that most people do not want to recognize.  And these Islamic groups did not want it recognized and they claimed that this material, this training material linked Islam with terrorism.

Now, of course, it’s jihad terrorists who link Islam with terrorism when they set off these bombs and then say, as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev did, that they did it to defend Islam.  I didn’t make him say that, he said it himself.

And innumerable other jihad terrorists in the United States and around the world have explained and justified their actions by quoting the Qur’an and quoting Islamic teaching.  It is therefore essential for FBI members to know this material so that they can spot danger signs in people like the Tsarnaev brothers and take appropriate action.

You cannot defeat an enemy that you cannot understand and do not know his motives or goals.  So I suggest to you that this is what happened.  The — in 2011, 57 Muslim groups led by Farhana Khera of Muslim Advocates, wrote a letter to John Brennan, who was then the Deputy NSA Advisor, and demanded that he remove all this material about Islam from any counterterror training.

And Brennan immediately complied.  And it seems as if the whole thing was set up because the day that — her letter was dated October 19, 2011.  And on that same day there were several Obama administration officials who announced publicly that there was a lot of Islamophobia in the counterterror training and they were going to scrub all the terror training materials.

And so it seems to have been a coordinated effort on the part of the Muslim advocacy groups and the Obama administration to target this information and take it out.  So they took it out.  And so what happens?

Not only did they take it out, but John Brennan assured Farhana Khera in a response letter that they would re-educate all the agents who had been educated by this Islamophobic counterterror training and the Islamophobic counterterror trainers.  Re-educated, as if this is Mao’s China.

And so we can presume that it was all done because you can be sure that the Islamic advocacy groups made sure that it would be done.  And so what happens?  Now we have an FBI, and I’m sure that they, actually I know 100% that there are still good agents within the FBI and other intelligence agencies who know what’s true and are doing their best to protect Americans despite the official fog of political correctness under which they must work.

But primarily we have in the FBI agents who are deliberately mis-educated and misled about the nature of the Islamic jihad threat.  So then the Russians and the Saudis come and they say, “We’ve got information about this jihadi, Tamerlan Tsarnaev.”

I expect that the FBI got that and they thought, “Oh, he’s a jihadi.  Well, that’s good.  That’s an interior spiritual struggle that will improve him as a human being.  (laughter)  Isn’t that wonderful.  More power to him.”

And they let him go because they did not know what to look for and they did not know how to understand what they were seeing if they did see it.  And so the Boston Marathon bombing has to be ascribed to the failure and the deliberate failure of the Obama administration to speak realistically about the jihad threat.

It is the agency’s failure to take the proper account of the Russian and the Saudi intelligence that led directly to those people being killed in Boston.  And so we’ve been talking a lot this morning, we talked a lot this morning in the earlier panel about the nature of the opposition that we have to form.  And how we do not really have an effective opposition to Obama and the Left at this point.

And so I will conclude by very strongly saying this is essential that we must reverse this.  And that an essential part of what we ask for and demand of any effective opposition to Obama and to the dominant political culture has to be that this, as Andy would call it, willful blindness, this absolute denial about the reality of the jihad threat has to change.

Right now, the Republican establishment has done nothing.  There are a few rumblings from some Congressmen here and there but essentially they’ve done nothing about this massive intel failure and done nothing to investigate exactly how it is connected to the scrubbing of the training materials.

There ought to have been an investigation launched the next day by John Boehner into why the FBI was so woefully unprepared and so willfully ignorant that it missed all the signals about Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

And yet not only did John Boehner not do that, but nobody’s even saying he ought to have.  And so this is absolute that if we do not want to see more Boston Marathon bombings and more jihad terror on American soil, then we have to demand that our counterterror training be realistic however politically incorrect that is.  And be honest about the nature and the magnitude of the jihad threat.

If we do not, then we’re going to see many, many more people dead. Thank you very much.  (applause)

Daniel Greenfield: I’m going to be speaking without a microphone so if you can’t hear me, shout and I’ll try to shout back.  And just keep in mind that with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s classification by being in the same room with me you might also be an honorary part of the hate group.

Now, on the way here I was watching CNN, obviously not by choice because nobody really watches CNN by choice anymore.  CNN is now the captive audience news network.

If you’re sitting somewhere where you have nowhere else to be (technical difficulty) where no way to get out, you’re sitting in the airport like me and CNN is playing then you have two choices.  Either you watch CNN or you plug your ears and close your eyes.  And it’s hard to do that for an hour.

CNN has actually fallen so far that when MSNBC fell below CNN it was noted as a complete disaster because CNN was the dog in the race.  If you’re losing to CNN then you’re a complete disaster.

But in any case, I was watching CNN and CNN was covering, first of all, they had a guy there defending squatter’s rights, because of course your property doesn’t belong to the govern — doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to the government.  They didn’t build that.

Then they began going into the minutia of the case.  They were going into every detail, into every — they were burying the audience with an avalanche of facts, most of them minor and most of them irrelevant.  The one thing they weren’t talking about, obviously, is the motivation, the I word, Islam.

Now, Islam is obviously, the I word is the thing that you don’t talk about in the news anymore.  That’s a thing that’s absent from media’s coverage.  When the media does talk about Islam, it talks about radical Islam which apparently comes from some You Tube videos.  You watch some You Tube videos and you become a radical Islamist.  It has no connection to Islam whatsoever.

Now, we know the Obama administration is a big believer that You Tube videos are very dangerous.  They’ve got a guy in prison now for uploading a You Tube trailer which apparently caused Benghazi.  So you upload a video to You Tube and bombs go off.

It has nothing to do with those nice people who go to mosques and read the Qur’an and wage their internal spiritual struggles through jihad.  That’s a radical Islami created by You Tube videos.  That’s the narrative that we have in the  media and this is something that the media doesn’t talk about.

Now, if the medias reported Pearl Harbor this way then the report would be there was a very nice young man named Yoshika Takawuri who was flying a plane.  Now, he was born in Tokyo.  He moved for a while with his parents to the country.  He liked to play the flute.  He had four brothers and three sisters.  And for some reason he bombed Pearl Harbor.

We have to understand why this nice young man who liked to play flute bombed Pearl Harbor.  We have to do some inward searching.  We have to understand what we did that made this young man so upset with us and all the hundreds of other young men who did this.

Well, we can’t assume that these young men are part of some collective ideology.  Or that they’re part of some common movement because that would just be bigoted.  It would just be crazy and stupid and we can’t draw those connections.

Now, one of the best examples of the media has been doing in this is if you’ve seen the New York Times,  New York Times has done all these sympathetic stories.  They’ve interviewed everybody who ever knew him.  And they’ve gotten all these positive quotes.  He was a very nice guy, we had no idea that he was going to blow up people at the Boston Marathon.

They interviewed, they found his old coach.  They wove an entire story in which he became radicalized because if you missed out on a tournament because of his immigration status because he couldn’t get to the trip because he was on the terrorist watch list and had a domestic violence dispute.

And, you know, because of that (inaudible) he had no choice but to turn to terrorism. And also again he had trouble fitting in so again he had no choice but to turn to terrorism.  And all the spot — during all these interviews, during all these volumes and volumes of sympathetic quotes, the one person they did not interview was his ex-girlfriend who had the domestic violence complaint against him.  Not a single American paper, radio, television network went to interview her.

It took The Sun, which is a UK tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch to actually go there and interview her.  When they asked her she said that one, he beat her because she wouldn’t wear a hijab.

Two, he tried to get her to memorize Qur’an verses and then said that his current wife and collaborator was much better at memorizing Qur’an verses.  And, you know, considering the increasing evidence that she was — that Katherine Russell was part of this, you can see she memorized the Qur’an very well.

And three, that he taught her to hate America.  Now, these are three really rather major points because they destroy the narrative that he became radicalized at the last minute when he couldn’t get into the tournament and he gave up his boxing dreams and he turned to jihad.

That destroys the narrative.  The narrative was destroyed, anyway, because, for example, we know that in 2007 he flew home to beat up his sister’s boyfriend because the boyfriend wasn’t a Muslim.

So this guy wasn’t radicalized supposedly by some You Tube videos last year.  This was who he always was.  But this — her interview destroyed the narrative completely because it tells us this is who he was all along.  This isn’t someone he just became because of a few setbacks in life.

Now, no American newspaper wanted to touch this.  If, for example, he had a girlfriend who said that he was a Tea Party activist and that he liked to read the Constitution a lot and that he made her memorize parts of the Constitution.

And that he beat her when she wouldn’t memorize the Constitution, you know, she would be with Diane Sawyer.  She would be Barbara Walters.  She would be with Anderson Cooper.  She would be on every channel all the time and she would be on the cover of Time and Newsweek and with the headline, “We knew he was dangerous because he was memorizing the Constitution.”

But memorizing the Qur’an verses, beating her because she wouldn’t wear a hijab, which, by the way, is a completely optional choice and is in no way enforced on women except, you know, in this case and in the other few million cases in every Muslim country where it’s actually mandatory.

And those cases where acid is thrown in the face of the women who don’t wear it.  But otherwise it’s a complete optional choice.  And we’re bigots if we try to imply that Muslim women don’t have the agency to wear the hijab on their own without acid being thrown in their faces, even though that’s the way it actually is.

But getting back to that.  So The Sun was the only paper, it’s a UK tabloid.  But if you go into the National Enquirer, being the only one to get a story in the UK, it’s a bit strange.  Okay, now that the story was out, nothing.

Finally, the Wall Street Journal, which is also owned by Rupert Murdoch, did an interview with the ex-girlfriend.  Now, obviously this was the chance to follow up on all the things she said.  Now, here are the three things that the Wall Street Journal piece with the ex-girlfriend did not contain.

Islam, the I word.  No mention of the hijab.  No mention of the Qur’an.  No mention of religion whatsoever.  It just really stated that he was a bully of no specifically defined religion.  And that was that.  That was the — this was the Wall Street Journal which is owned by Rupert Murdoch and it still couldn’t remotely do an honest piece on that.

And since then, no interviews, no coverage whatsoever.  But now the question is, was the media completely unable to find her?  Did it take the UK tabloid to do that?  The media, The New York Times was able to find his old coach.  Was it unable to find his ex-girlfriend?

In fact, one of the first things we knew about Tamerlan Tsarnaev was that he had a domestic violence complaint.  That was not followed up on.  Any of the newspapers like the The New York Times which claim to be big opponents of the War on Women kind of minimize it, they try to make it like it was no big deal whatsoever.

Okay, well, it was a domestic violence complaint.  It was dropped.  No big deal.  Now, if it had been a Republican Congressman with a domestic violence complaint that was dropped, it would be a very, very huge deal.  But here they were implying strongly that it was not an issue.

Now, incidentally, the way — the kind of domestic violence that Tamerlan Tsarnaev practiced is approved by most Qur’anic wife beating manuals which say that you can slap your wife really hard.  So if anything, he was following the proper Islamic practice.

But the media’s coverage completely eliminates a basic vital factor.  This was the woman who he was with back then.  This was the woman who knew whether he was actually being radicalized or not.  And the media has completely ignored this because the media really does not want to deal with this part of the story.

And the media doesn’t want to deal with this story because they don’t want to deal with motive.  In a crime you have motive, opportunity and means.  You investigate a crime by looking, who had the opportunity to do it?  Who had the means to do it?  And who had the motive to do it?

Now, with the bombing we look at opportunity.  We look at means.  We look at who was there, who knew how to build a bomb?  But who had the motive to build a bomb?  Now, to answer that, you have to deal with who would want to blow up the Boston Marathon?

And the media after the attacks went, who would possibly want to blow up the Boston Marathon?  We don’t know.  We can’t possibly think of anyone.  Maybe the Tea Party.  It was patriots.  (laughter)  They couldn’t find a conceivable motive.

Now, this doesn’t end here, as Robert Spencer’s pointed out.  It’s — this is for the future because those connections have to be made.  You investigate a crime by making these connections.  You have to make these leaps and think who would want to do this?  Which angle, which leads do we chase down?  Which angles do we (inaudible).

If we were living in a society where everybody is filming everyone all the time and thank you for filming this right now, if we were living in a society, everyone is filming everyone all the time then how long would it have taken to catch them?

How long would the FBI and the law enforcement have been chasing down the Tea Party terrorists that the establishments wanted them to find?  That the media was saying that they have to find?  We don’t know.

The connections can’t be made and it’s hard without a motive.  And without a motive then you’re after the dead end.  You have to figure out, well, who would want to do it?  We don’t know why anyone would want to do it.  Nobody possibly wants to do it.

And these connections make it impossible to investigate the crime.  We still — Robert has talked about the FBI but it begins really with the media.  Well, if the media says that these connections are invalid.  You cannot assume that because someone is a terror — because someone is a Muslim that he might be a terrorist.

You cannot assume that because someone is a jihadist he might be a terrorist.  You cannot assume that because somebody has jihadist videos on their You Tube player that he’s terrorist.  This is a local matter.

So when the Russians came to the FBI and said, “This guy’s dangerous.”  Well, yeah, sure, he’s a Chechen nationalist.  He’s dangerous to the Russians but why would he be dangerous to us?  What’s the connection to us?  We’re not in Chechnya.  It shouldn’t matter to us.

And you know 13, 14 years ago we were going, why does this guy in Afghanistan matter to us?   I mean, the Taliban, they’re fighting the Russians.  Al Qaeda?  They’re fighting the Russians.  Why — what do they have to do with us?

What does Afghanistan have to do with New York and Washington?  And we found out what Afghanistan has to do with Washington and America.  Because Islam is trans-national.  Islamic terrorism is a trans-national terrorist group.

Just because the Syrian jihadists, the Mali jihadists, the jihadists in France, the jihadists in the United States, the jihadists anywhere are part of a trans-national movement.  Just because they’re fighting on the front in Chechnya or in Israel or in Africa or in Asia and Thailand, anywhere, they’re still part of a trans-national movement just like the Communist Party was back in the day.

If you took a Communist member and you took them out of Russian, you brought him to the United States, he would be a Communist here.  He’d be trying to undermine the United States here.  He wouldn’t just be a Communist over there.

With Islam it’s the same exact way.  And drawing these connections when the media says that these connections are off-limits then the Islamic groups can go to the media and say, “You cannot — these (inaudible) guys and the FBI are drawing these connections.  And you said these connections are off-limits.  We cannot draw these connections.”

And then the FBI is forced to remove these connections.  And we have terrorism without a motive.  We just have to look at means and opportunity.  And that cripples any investigation.  It leaves any investigation barren.

And if we don’t do that, if we can’t — ignorance can destroy any struggle.  If we don’t know what we’re fighting against, then we can’t fight.  A midget can kill a giant if the midget gets enough time.

We can’t be defeated by Islamic terrorism even if there was — even if they deploy a weapon of mass destruction in an American city we — they still can’t defeat us.  But they can defeat us if we ignore them, if we do nothing, if we just keep closing the barn door after the horses got out.

The way to win — the most important element is to make these connections by restoring the knowledge.  By restoring the knowledge of these connections between Islamic terrorism and that it’s not some sort of You Tube phenomenon.

It’s a religion.  It’s an ideology.  And it exists around the world and it’s coming here because that is the battle within.

Andy McCarthy: A couple of days after the — I guess it was only about a day or two after the Boston Marathon bombing we learned that while CNN was speculating about whether the Tea Party had pulled it off, the military in lectures that it was giving about hate groups actually had characterized hate groups to include Catholics and evangelical Christians along with Hamas and Hezbollah.

When that news broke, I happened to be — I can’t remember if it was on Lou Dobbs or — I’m like the Grim Reaper.  Every time something goes boom and people die I’m suddenly in demand again.  So I was — I have recently done a lot of press.

But I was — as the panel I was on was speculating about who might have done the Boston Marathon, I was almost moved at that point just to confess on behalf of Catholics and Right Wing nuts everywhere.

But it really does bring up the elephant in the room that we won’t look at.  And my co-panelists here have talked about the success and failure comparatively of the pressures outside government to recognize reality.

So I think with that landscape being set, probably the most useful thing I could do is talk about the mentality inside government where I spent most of my professional career dealing with this.  Because it’s one thing if the outside pressures are effective and which outside pressures are effective versus which ones aren’t.

It’s quite another thing to look at it from the perspective of the people who are hearing the message and obviously ignoring it.  And what I thought was most depressing when I was listening to Robert’s remarks is that this is not what ha– what we have seen in the last four weeks is not something new.  It’s a repetition of a chapter we’ve seen again and again and again.

The first notorious, what turns out to be jihadist attack in the United States even before the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was the murder of Meir Kahane, the founder of the Jewish Defense League, at a hotel in New York City at a conference where he was giving a speech in, I think it was November of 1990.

He was killed by a guy named El Sayyid Nosair who turned out to be a member of the Blind Sheikh’s growing cell in the New York metropolitan area.  And the thing about it was, they took boxes and boxes of evidence out of Nosair’s home and out of the work locker that he maintained.  He was actually an electrician for the New York Supreme Court down in Manhattan.

And they took all kinds of stuff out of his work locker.  All kinds of stuff out of his home.  And when we finally looked at it after the World Trade Center was bombed several years later, it was voluminous evidence connecting him to a wide jihadist network.

Nevertheless, the day after the shooting, the chief of detectives of the New York City police department got up at a press conference and said that the assassination had been the work of a lone gunman and that they weren’t looking at any other angle.  They weren’t looking at any kind of religious or ideological motivation.

Basically the stories that went on in the media for the next several days, even, you know, all based on leaks that were coming out of the police department and the FBI, was that Nosair was a madman.  And he just wantonly killed Kahane for no apparent motivation.

And as the weeks went on they said, “Well, you know, he may have some connection to this Blind Sheikh but we don’t even know whether they know each other or have ever spoken with each other.”

And of course if they had looked at the evidence that they had collected they would’ve known that they actually had cassette tapes recording conversations between Nosair and the Blind Sheikh, which Nosair would then know — for part of this time the Blind Sheikh was in Egypt.

Nosair would take those tapes into mosques and use them for recruitment and fundraising for jihadist activities.  He turned out to be the emir for marksmanship for the jihadist cell as they referred to him.

And these guys, it turned out, were engaged in regular paramilitary training, including three almost consecutive weekends in July of 1989 when the FBI had gone out and actually done surveillance on them as they practiced shooting at a target range in Calverton, Long Island.

So we were actually investigating them.  We knew who they were.  We knew what they were about.  In fact, the target practice that they were doing in Long Island, the FBI had to surveil them to Long Island.

The surveillance actually began at a mosque in Brooklyn.  The fellows would take boxes of guns that they had in the basement of the mosque and load them into vans and drive to Long Island to do the training.

So there was all kinds of evidence about who these guys were.  And plenty of evidence about what motivated them.  And yet we were not only surprised by Nosair, we were surprised by the World Trade Center bombing in 1993.

And that’s even though they had an informant inside the cell until about seven months before the bombing who was listening to them talk about bombings that they were hoping to do in New York.  And yet we’re caught unaware.

So why does that happen?  And why does it still happen?  Because it’s the same — we’re seeing the same phenomenon again and again.  It has not changed.  Not in 20 years.  And the main reason is the FBI as the kind of point of the counterterrorism sphere in government.

But the rest of government’s national security edifice, while it gets bigger and bigger, while it gets more and more richly funded, has the same basic problem that they had in 1990 and it’s really a problem that goes back to the 1970s.  And that is they will not, no matter how clear it is, acknowledge the straight line causation from ideology to violence against America.

That they can know that there is an ideological basis for violent attacks against the United States, no matter what the ideology that we’re dealing with for the last 20 years is radical Islam.  But it could be any ideology.

They have internalized what I would suggest to you are bad lessons that they learned in the 1970s and ’80s.  It has become part of training.  It has become part of the framework with which they look at the world.  And it is the everyday reality of how they carry out their mission.

They will not look at ideology until it crystallizes into action.  And of course what we’ve learned with mass murder attacks is that once it crystallizes into action it’s way too late.

But if you want to go back to what has to be dismantled to change this, it’s not just, as Robert in particular talked about, the absolute necessity that if you’re going other protect the country you have to master the ideology of the enemy.  We have to get past basically a framework that they have built up that makes them think it’s unconstitutional to look at ideology.

And that’s how they could actually interview a guy like Tsarnaev, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who they have been told is a radical Islamist.  Who they can then interview and find out face-to-face in talking to him that he’s an Islamic supremacist.

And nevertheless close the investigation based on no derogatory information was found because he’s only talking about and believing Muslim supremacism.  He hasn’t done anything yet.  And what they feel is that if he hasn’t done anything yet they’re not able to do anything about it.

There’s three reasons why this exists.  The first part is in the Watergate era there were scandals involving the CIA and the FBI about domestic spying.  And as always happens in government, they have over-corrected from those abuses.

Secondly, there’s a stream of Supreme Court cases involving the First Amendment which basically protect — go from the American principle of protecting dissent under the First Amendment and broaden it into protecting radical anti-Americanism.

And the law enforcement I think has internalized that to the point where they don’t believe that they can act simply because somebody even preaches the need to destroy the United States.  They don’t think that that violates the First Amendment.

And they have decided that if something doesn’t violate the First Amendment, it means it can’t be investigated, either, which is two very different things.  And really a suicidal way to look at the world.

And the third thing I think is that we have a number of statutes that were passed beginning in the 1970s that have made it progressively more difficult for the government to keep non-Americans out of the country who are attached to radical movements.

So that unless you have somebody who you can identify as part of a terrorist organization overseas, it’s very difficult to keep people out of the country on ideological grounds.

So in closing, let me just say that the government has in its regulatory — the way it polices itself it has made ideology very, very difficult to look at and to connect the dots that are inevitable between ideology and action.

And unless we can get them to undo that and get back to something that’s more faithful to the First Amendment and more recognizes that the Constitution never was a suicide pact, we will continue to be in danger.  (applause)

Robert Spencer: I have no idea about that. But I can tell you that it’s a pattern.  That there were a number of jihad plots to bomb synagogues in the New York City area over the last couple of years.

And they were completely swept under the rug, even though these guys were manifestly Islamic jihadis with exactly the same ideology as that of the Boston Marathon bombers and the 9/11 hijackers and all the rest of them.

And it’s a recurring theme.  As a matter of fact, one of them was just sentenced to five years in prison.  Five years.  Now, if he had succeeded in bombing the temples, many, many people, and possibly hundreds of people could’ve been killed.  And he got five years.

And I think that that’s indicative of something that is amiss in the way these things are treated.  That there is — and I think that it is connected to the absolute refusal to look at the jihad ideology.

So they see these as some sort of nuts who are doing mischief instead of as part of a larger effort to kill Americans, to kill Jews in particular because they’re the worst enemies of the Muslims as specified in Qur’an.  And to ultimately subjugate the United States under the rule of Islamic law.

Andy McCarthy: And let me just add to that that there’s been a real effort over the last 25 years or so to federalize all counterterrorism so that the big nubs of counterterrorism from a law enforcement perspective and an intelligence perspective domestically are now the joint terrorism task forces which are run by the FBI but are participated in by the local police in every place.

There’s been some push back on that mainly in places like New York which are targets of terrorism.  So I think Ray Kelly in particular in New York has been a real trailblazer in the kind of counterterrorism Robert was talking about before which is intelligence based and is premised on the idea that we want to prevent terrorist attacks rather than content ourselves with indicting people after Americans have been killed.

So they actually go out into the community and collect evidence.  What the Obama administration wants to do is have us delegate that to our partners in the Islamic community, which happen to be Muslim Brotherhood front organizations.

So that the idea is the police wouldn’t go into the communities and collect information anymore.  We’d rely on the Islamic Society of North America to come to us to tell us whenever there’s a problem.

So I think that’s a lot of why the local areas, at least the prudent ones, are very resistant to the idea of anymore federal control because they have a better sense of what they can expect out of our partners than perhaps the Obama administration does.

Jeffrey Wienir: Aaron?

Unidentified Audience Member: We hear a lot from the Islamists about Islamophobia.  And that’s why they’re not supposed to do all these things you’re talking about.

Does anybody know the actual numbers of hate crimes that have been committed against Muslims in this country and how that compares to other categories of hate crimes like for instance against Jews and so forth and so on?

Daniel Greenfield: It’s eight times more.  (multiple speakers)  Anti-Semitic hate crimes are eight times more frequent –

Unidentified Audience Member: What numbers are they?

Daniel Greenfield: It’s about — actually, it’s even more than that.  Holder yesterday cited some statistics that are new and that I hadn’t seen that — and he sort of contradicted his own presentation.

Holder yesterday spoke about the Boston Marathon bombings and spent the bulk of his remarks speaking — warning against Islamophobia.  And backlash.  And saying how very important it was for us to welcome Muslims into our communities and not to think that they had anything to do with jihad terror at any time, in any place, anywhere.

And he cited hate crime statistics.  I believe, I’m going from memory and so I could be wrong on this, but it’s something around this neighborhood.  He said there was something like 70 cases investigated.  He didn’t even they say they were actual established hate crimes.  But 70 cases investigated of anti-Muslim attacks in the US.

And then he also mentioned in passing that there were 800 anti-Semitic hate crimes in the US in the last year.  (multiple speakers)  But he didn’t seem to notice the irony.

Unidentified Audience Member: I think we need to publicize that.

Daniel Greenfield: Oh, absolutely.

Unidentified Audience Member: That you were — (multiple speakers)

Robert Spencer: Well, if you had read Jihad Watch like I did this morning you would know all about it.

Jeffrey Wienir: We have time for two quick questions.  And then (inaudible).

Unidentified Audience Member: We need to publicize it.

Unidentified Audience Member: Good morning, and thank you.  Very impressive presentations by all three.  I basically have a split question.  What specifically ought to be done in the face of this willful disregard of the Islamist threat?

In the face of no action on the part of let’s say the Obama administration and other local administrations, do you have a list of five steps that ought to be — however many to change what concrete step?

The other, I read a very good book by a lady named Miss [Jayro] about the Oklahoma City bombing that tied it to meetings that the bombers had in the Philippines with Islamists.  That has been totally swept under the rug.  And I wonder if anybody had a comment or any further insight or support for that idea?

Andy McCarthy: Well, first of all, we had — we did go through this experience before.  There was a time when the Left took over much of the justice system.  And it pushed things into the soft on crime category.

It said that the way to fight crime was not to actually go out and arrest criminals or lock them up.  It was to deal with the root causes of crime.  These days we’re dealing with the root causes of terrorism which again is poverty and failed boxing careers.

So we did this before.  People got fed up because crime was high.  Entire cities became nearly unlivable.  And the idea was that we began hitting Democrats on soft on crime policies that don’t work, that destroy entire cities and destroy entire neighborhoods.

And until Democrats are forced to turn around — the Bush election was one of the — Bush, Senior, was one of the climactic points because you could — Dukakis was pounded precisely on being on soft on crime.  And the Democrats realized that soft on crime is political death.  Eventually the way they realized that going against the NRA was political death.

The way to deal with this is to make the point over and over again that the Obama administration, that the Democrat, their entire root causes of terrorism thing, that their entire Islamophobia industry, which they’ve manufactured, they’re the ones with the Islamophobia industry, not us.
That the entire Islamophobia industry they’ve manufactured equates to soft on terrorism.  Obama’s pushing to close Guantanamo Bay again.  This is exactly the time to hit him for being on soft on terrorism.

Obama’s been hiding behind the Osama bin Laden killing all along.  But Obama’s original plan for Osama bin Laden was to arrest him and give him a civilian trial.  This was in the Vanity Fair story.

He wanted to use the Osama bin Laden arrest to completely dismantle the military justice system and close Guantanamo Bay because now I have Osama bin Laden and I’m going to give him a civilian trial.

This is soft on terrorism.  And just as we hit soft on crime policies for destroying cities we have to hit soft on terrorism policies for destroying cities.

Jeffrey Wienir: Last question.

Unidentified Audience Member: I asked this question at CPAC and, Robert, your answer was brilliant I thought.  And I wanted to share it with everyone.

Robert Spencer: Thanks.  (laughter)

Unidentified Audience Member: As a mom of three children, one of the main issues that I’m involved in is in exposing common core curriculum.  Here in Texas we’ve got CSCOPE that’s in 875 school districts.

And can you connect the dots between the desensitizing our children to the threat through this education of common core curriculum, CSCOPE, the text books and all of that?

Robert Spencer: Well, the big text book manufacturers like Houghton Mifflin and the others, Prentice Hall, all the people, these large publishing firms that they churn out these text books for public high schools.  And they all are actually dealing with Muslim Brotherhood groups like the Council on Islamic Education to vet their material about Islam.

Now, they didn’t say, “Let’s go and collaborate with the Muslim Brotherhood.”  But they wanted to be fair and to promote multiculturalism and all that and diversity.  And so they consulted what they thought were reputable Muslim moderate groups to help them make sure that their material on Islam was correct.

What they didn’t know was that this material was — these groups were Muslim Brotherhood connected.  And that the material that was being vetted was actually being transformed into what is essentially proselytizing material for Islam.

And so if you look at — if you have access to high school history text books it is actually very common most of them contain material that is sharply critical of Judaism and Christianity.  And particularly of Christian history and the Crusades and the Inquisition and all that.

But say not a word critical about Islam even in connection with some of the most bloody jihads in history in India and elsewhere.  And actually there have been some materials that even force students into making Islamic professions of faith in order to get the answer right.

I was an expert witness in a case on a work book that was used in a school district in California a few years ago that had true-false questions like, “Allah is the only god and Mohammed is his prophet.  True or false?”  And it didn’t say Muslims believe that Allah is the only god and Mohammed is his prophet.  They left that part out.

And so it’s extraordinary how this material is so widely diffused.  And its effects are devastating because our children are coming out of school believing exactly what the media wants to believe and exactly what the Obama administration wants them to believe that any critical word about Islam or jihad is hateful and bigoted and racist.

And that Islam is a wonderful thing in totality.  That we ought to welcome uncritically and without any examination of the possibility of jihad activity or Islamic supremacism into our communities.

Unidentified Audience Member: What are we going to do about it?

Unidentified Audience Member: How do we fight back?

Unidentified Audience Member: He asked a question, give us five things.  What are we going to do about it?

Robert Spencer: Well, raising awareness is one of the things that we’re doing.  And so if you have access to school districts, to school boards, if you have children in the schools you can point out this material.  You must point out this material.  And protest its being used.  And demand that it be replaced.

And there has to be critical mass on these things.  There can’t be just one person over here and one person over there.  But the more people do it the more it will happen.  And also in terms of the training.

I spent the talk talking about the training material.  Well, the training material needs to be reversed to what it was before 2010.  And there was a great deal that was absolutely true and accurate about Islam, about the contents of the Qur’an, about Mohammed in the training material for agents.

And that was entirely appropriate because it illuminates the motives and the goals of the jihad terrorists.  And so if there is sufficient public call and if we can compel our politicians and representatives to make that call that this material be corrected and that the political correct blinders be taken off, then a great deal of this will be on the way to being reversed.

Andy McCarthy: You know, you don’t have to do five things.  You got to do one thing.  If we can’t take note of ideology and what it means and what its potential is and what it can do, then you can spend as much money as you want on counterterrorism and everything else you will not be safer.

You can spend as much money on all this other stuff.  You will not have kids who are better educated.  If you’re going to put blinders over your eyes or put a big blanket over what the actual problem is and make it so politically incorrect to take note of it that nobody takes note of it, then you’re not going to be safe.

And I found in all my years in the government that it often didn’t matter what the regulations were.  There’s an ethos in the government that comes from the top down and convinces everybody who’s a line agent on up that if you want to advance, if you want to have a good career, there’s a certain set of attitudes that you have to adopt.  And there are certain truths that you’re not allowed to probe.

And from my perspective, as far as investigations are concerned, until you can make investigations like what a trial is like.  You know, once people get killed and we actually have a trial, then we get to prove motive.  We get to prove intent.  We get to lay bare exactly what happened and exactly why it happened.

But we don’t do that before terrible things happen.  And we don’t inculcate in our law enforcement and our intelligence that you have to approach investigations just like you would prove what happened after something terrible happened.

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On the bright, beautiful, and crisp fall day that was early morning, September 11, 2001, few Americans were familiar with stealth jihad, or considered Islamic terrorism a threat to America.  Yet, there was a voice crying in the wilderness, warning of a danger that already existed here.  That voice belonged to Steven Emerson, whose documentary film titled Jihad in America was aired by PBS on November 21, 1994.  Islamic militant groups in America, including CAIR (the Council on American-Islamic Relations) began their protestations and intimidation even before the broadcast date.  Since the airing, the use of intimidation has been ramped up and gone global, having a stifling impact on terrorism/jihad-related broadcasts in the mainstream media throughout the Western world. This oppressive atmosphere has affected the conduct of Western governments, including the Obama administration.

Emerson’s newly released Jihad in America: The Grand Deception is a must-watch documentary — an educational tool for Americans to learn about the network of stealth Islamist jihadists in the U.S. that has grown in the aftermath of 9/11.  The fact that evil lurks just under the surface in America (brought to life last month at the Boston Marathon) seems to be difficult to acknowledge, yet ignoring it is at our peril.  Unfortunately, Americans have a short memory span, and most prefer to turn away from unpleasant realities, especially in the Obama Age.  Hence, all the more reason to circulate information about this essential documentary.

The 70-minute documentary by Steven Emerson’s Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) deals with the covert structure and growing influence of the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan al-Muslimun) and other such radical Muslim groups, masquerading under the deceitful moniker of apolitical religious groups, as well as civil rights groups in the U.S. This IPT documentary reveals how the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) has infiltrated the highest institutions of the land, including the Obama White House, the U.S. Congress, U.S. Departments of State and Homeland Security, Hollywood, the mainstream media, law enforcement in various states, the publishing industry and American museums.  The film not only presents examples of MB infiltration, but reveals how the MB and its affiliates intimidate policymakers to submit to their demands by their use of our open democracy to undermine our institutions, all of which is done to further their quest for global rule under Sharia law.

This film includes previously unseen interviews with articulate and most courageous Muslim individuals, former FBI agents and federal prosecutors, a prominent Hollywood director, journalists, as well as a top official of the Muslim Brotherhood.  This documentary features secretly recorded audio and video speeches of radical Islamists, including individual preachers and groups, original MB documents, and unsealed federal documents.

In an interview Steven Emerson had with Lou Dobbs of Fox News on January 21, 2013, the host introduced The Grand Deception as follows: “Our guest [Steven Emerson] says that the ‘Muslim Brotherhood and other radical Islamist off shoots are hiding in plain sight right here in the U.S.’”  What followed is Emerson’s explanation of the documentary title. “A group of Muslim Brotherhood activists secretly got together in Philadelphia in 1993 in a meeting that was actually wiretapped [the wiretaps have since been declassified] by the FBI.  They [the MB activists] openly talked about deception as the primary campaign tactic that they would use to change the image of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood in the U.S. by creating new front groups, by changing the terminology, and by claiming they were against terrorism publicly, but in fact raising funds for Hamas privately. The word deception is the word that I used in the title because that is exactly what is going on throughout the country with these radical Islamic groups.”

One of the radical Islamists the documentary presents is a Brooklyn, NY-based Imam named Siraj Wahhaj, an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, who, according to Emerson, had been invited in 1991 to give an invocation to the U.S. Congress (the first Muslim to so) and would subsequently be recorded saying about the U.S., “You know what this country is? It is a garbage can, it is filthy and sick.” The film also points out that this anti-American, hate-spewing Imam, was invited to appear at anti-terrorism conferences and was paid by the U.S. government.

Muslim Brotherhood victories in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya have provided encouragement for the hundreds of MB cells worldwide, including those in the U.S.

The film shows Attorney General Eric Holder undergoing congressional drilling in 2010 from Rep. Lamar Smith, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, on how he refused to acknowledge the role of radical Muslims in terrorism on American soil and refused to use the words “radical Muslim” or “Muslim.”

In another frame of the film, Dr. Mamoun Fandy, an Egyptian-born American scholar, President of the Fandy Associates think tank and a senior fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace, declared that the MB is the “mother” of all radical Muslim groups.  He pointed out that “instead of isolating the MB, the West and the U.S. [especially under President Obama] have engaged them and regarded them as “moderate.” According to Fandy, the West was tremendously naïve about the nature and intentions of the MB.  According to Emerson (in conversation with this writer), Fandy was let go by Georgetown University because of his views on the MB.

The film records the spiritual leader of the MB, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, speaking to a Muslim audience in Toledo, OH and revealing the goals of the MB.  “We will conquer Europe and we will conquer America for Islam through religious proselytization” (dawa in Arabic). MB documents captured by the FBI in 1991 further reveal this insidious plan by the MB to conquer America for Islam.  It includes increased immigration and settlement as part of the MB’s plot of stealth Jihad, just as they have done in Europe.  Their aim is to destroy Western civilization from within by destabilizing “their miserable house,” and replacing it with God’s religion — Islam.

Others in the film include Kamal Helbawy, an MB leader who is quoted as saying “Anything mentioned in the Quran, we believe 100%.” Amir Abdel Malik Ali is shown addressing a Muslim Student Association event at UCLA in 2011, shouting “I will die to establish Islam in America,” and Dr. Zudhi Jasser, founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD), who, in an interview with Emerson, pointed out that “for Islamists like the MB their utopia is establishing Sharia [Islamic law] rule in America.”

Following the airing of the film, Hussam Ayloush, executive director of CAIR in Los Angeles, accused Emerson of stirring up anti-Muslim feelings.  Ayloush employed the typical tactic used by Muslims when caught with the ugly truth about Islamists’ goals in the West. The Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) has been calling for a ban on what they consider “Islamophobia,” which is nothing less than an attempt to kill free speech.  The Obama administration has, however, concurred with the OIC and has banned references to Muslim or Islamic terrorism.  Emerson has challenged CAIR’s Ayloush to an open debate to discuss the facts featured in the film. To date, there has been no response from Ayloush.

This reporter asked Emerson for a conclusive remark on Jihad in America: The Grand Deception.  Emerson expressed disappointment at the lack of outrage on the part of the major media and cable TV networks to the collusion between the U.S. government (the Obama administration) and the Muslim Brotherhood.  He said that the TV networks refused to show his film.  Emerson is nevertheless optimistic that the truth he has revealed about the Muslim Brotherhood deep penetration into the highest echelons of the U.S. government and society will be become widely known in spite of the media and government obstructions.

For all Americans, Jihad in America -The Grand Deception is a must see.

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The Gang discussed Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s Islamic Engravings on a Cabin Wall. The dialogue occurred in Part II and focused on how a jihadist has explained that Allah made him do it — but the media still can’t find a motive.

Part I focused on: When Scandals Rocked Obama’s World.

To watch both parts of the two part series, see below:

Part I:

Part II:

You can make sure that Jamie Glazov Productions continues to take you where no other media programs dare to go. Help us by clicking here and making a tax deductible contribution today. To see the archives of The Glazov Gang, click here.

I still remember the shock of joy I felt at the news of the release of one such prisoner in February of 1987. Christian dissident Alexander Ogorodnikov had spent almost nine years in the Gulag for his leadership of the Christian Seminar, an underground movement that had sprung up in answer to the needs of young Christians of many denominations who had found faith in Jesus Christ and were hungry for a way of following Him in their daily lives that the institutional churches could not offer. It was because of this authenticity and practicality that the movement, which encompassed thousands across Russia, so threatened the Communist authorities that they arrested and imprisoned its leaders.

For years advocates had prayed, written letters to Congress, and sent “Return Receipt Requested” missives to Soviet government authorities and Gulag officials on Ogorodnikov’s behalf. At conferences and special gatherings we all added our names and personal messages on letters to Ogorodnikov himself – which he rarely received, but of which the Soviet authorities kept meticulous track.

In late 1986, I was one of a few dozen participants in a conference at Princeton University, hosted by Dr. Ernest Gordon, retired dean of the school’s chapel, and founder of the Christian Rescue Effort for the Emancipation of Dissidents (CREED). Rolling his R’s in disgust as only a Scotsman can do, Gordon read aloud a letter that Ogorodnikov had written to his mother in May, but only now had reached the West. As a former Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders infantry regiment officer and prisoner of the Japanese during WWII, on the Burma Railway, Gordon understood Ogorodnikov’s agony.

Ogorodnikov was in the depths of despair. He had already been in Soviet prison camp for seven and a half years. We were heartbroken as Gordon read how Ogorodnikov begged his mother to appeal to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet to order his execution by firing squad. As an Orthodox Christian, he would not commit suicide. “This is the only way for me to end the prospect of lifelong, painfully slow torture,” Ogorodnikov explained.

Soviet authorities intended to break Ogorodnikov because of his refusal to compromise, be silent, or even leave the Soviet Union rather than be sent to the Gulag as they had suggested when he was arrested in 1978. He suffered from malnutrition and related diseases. As a result of beatings and other mistreatment he was left partially paralyzed in his face and arm. His eyesight was also damaged because of the deliberate darkening of his cell.

Frequently Ogorodnikov was thrown into the shizo, punishment cell, where the temperature was below freezing. He wrote to his mother that he was “systematically deprived of books” and “constantly tortured by hunger and cold.”  He revealed that he was forbidden to pray and that his cross had been brutally torn from his neck 30 times.

“I have spent a total of 659 days on hunger strikes to protest their refusal to let me have a Bible and a prayer book,” he said. Forced feedings were often administered brutally during hunger strikes. The Soviet government had destroyed Ogorodnikov’s marriage to Yelena Levashova, the mother of his son, Dima, pressuring her to leave him by indicating that he would never be free. And they made him feel alone and forgotten by the world and his fellow Christians by keeping from him all the letters that had been sent to him over the years.

There was deep concern over Ogorodnikov’s fate in the notorious Perm Camp 36 if the United States and the world community did not intervene. And the United States and the world did – including President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who successfully linked human rights to national security in their foreign policy. On February 14, 1987, Ogorodnikov was informed that General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev had personally ordered his release. Later that year, I met Ogorodnikov – the flesh-and-blood answer to prayer – when he was the surprise guest at Dr. Gordon’s next CREED conference.

After his release, Ogorodnikov never rested. He fought for justice for other dissidents and raised funds to take care of those who had been physically and/or mentally broken by the Gulag. He also ministered to Armenian refugees who had fled from Islamist-dominated Nagorno-Karabakh. Even in freedom he was constantly harassed by the KGB, but he continued his work. He founded a new political party, the Christian Democratic Party, and an associated organization, the Christian Democratic Union of Russia (CDUR) that established the first private school in the Soviet Union.

In January of 1991, I was part of church two-week mission team to Moscow to encourage and help Ogorodnikov as he prepared to open the first soup kitchen in the Soviet Union. Ogorodnikov took us to see the building that would serve as the new soup kitchen, and he took us to see orphans in State custody that would soon be taken care of in a private, Christian orphanage. Our team provided hundreds of pounds of food to Ogorodnikov and his helpers who were already feeding the homeless on the streets and in the train station and feeding the old-age pensioners in their own flats. Our presence was also a declaration to the Soviet authorities that Ogorodnikov had friends and supporters of all that he was doing for Russia.

My meeting with Sasha.

A new biography Dissident for Life: Alexander Ogorodnikov and the Struggle for Religious Freedom in Russia, by Koenraad De Wolf (English edition 2013, Eerdmans) is a tribute to Ogorodnikov and all of those steadfast believers – in freedom, in human dignity, in God – “crushed, but not destroyed” by the Soviets. Their oppression and persecution was eloquent testimony, exposing the lies at the foundation of the Communism system and helping to bring down its edifice.

Dissident for Life brought back all the memories of my own experience of Alexander Ogorodnikov. But it also made me reflect on the significance of that experience as I had never realized while it was happening and wonder what experiences, what relationships in today’s ongoing cosmological fight for our freedom may ultimately be those that will make a similar difference.

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The incident began when four Muslims surrounded the priest and told him to hand over his cell phone. One thief knocked him unconscious. The attack may have been motivated by criminality and not jihad, but the two are part of a common trend.

There are over 750 government-designated “Sensitive Urban Zones” in France, referred to as “No-Go Zones” by Dr. Daniel Pipes. About 5 million Muslims live in these areas of France where law enforcement doesn’t exercise decisive control. When the authorities do have to step in, a violent backlash quickly arises. There are many videos of Muslim worshippers holding illegal prayers in the streets when their mosques overflow without any response from police.

On New Year’s, about 1,200 cars were set on fire and police clashed with residents in the Muslim-majority districts of Strasbourg and Mulhouse. In August, a two-day rampage was sparked when a Muslim was arrested for driving without a license around the time of a funeral. Massive riots have broken out in these no-go zones because of the hostility to reasonable law enforcement. Over half of the French prison population is Muslim, where many are radicalized.

A lack of integration is the most common factor in Islamic terrorists. These unassimilated areas are not just breeding grounds for criminals, but for extremism as well—particularly when foreign Islamist governments and organizations get involved.

The Saudi Arabia-based Muslim World League, described by Andrew McCarthy as “the Muslim Brotherhood’s principal vehicle for the international propagation of Islamic supremacist ideology,” is helping finance the construction of 200 new mosques. The French Council of the Muslim Faith wants to eventually double the 2,500 mosques in the country.

Qatar, the supposed U.S. “ally” that subsidizes the Muslim Brotherhood, is also active in France’s Muslim community. It is financing mosques and the Union of Islamic Organizations in France, the Muslim Brotherhood’s main branch there. It demands the government to pass a law against “Islamophobia.” The Qatari government is also investing $65 million in the suburbs where over 1 million Muslim immigrants live.

This isn’t purely an act of humanitarianism or a business investment. The Qatari constitution is based on Sharia Law. The Christians in Qatar, almost 6% of the population, are allowed to practice their faith but cannot proselytize  to Muslims. Hypocritically, Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani publicly pledged in December 2011 to “spare no effort” to proselytize the Islamic teachings of Muhammad al-Wahhab, the founder of what is often called “Wahhabism.”

In 2011, a secret French intelligence report warned of extremist trends in the city of Marseille, thanks to “self-appointed” and charismatic imams. Only a “relatively low” number of the 250,000 Muslims living there support violent jihad, but “Islamic fundamentalism has progressed to the point where it has won over the majority of the Muslim population.”

French President Sarkozy was not afraid to challenge the Islamist trend, even if it opened him up to false charges of “Islamophobia” and bigotry. In the months leading up to the election, his government instituted new requirements for citizenship, including language fluency, passing tests on history and culture and pledges of allegiance to “French values.”

On the one hand, Soeren Kern, who has closely watched the underreported Islamist trends in France, said Hollande’s victory over Sarkozy was “the first time that Muslims have determined the outcome of a presidential election in a major western European country; it is a preview of things to come.”

Hollande’s government has endorsed 150 new mosque projects including a mega-mosque in Paris that was touted as a step towards “progressively building a French Islam.”  Hollande also promised to grant amnesty to all 400,000 illegal Muslim immigrants and to modify the laws so non-citizen Muslim residents can vote in the municipal elections in 2014.

On the other hand, Hollande’s government has taken some action to encourage assimilation.

In August 2012, the French government re-designated 15 of the no-go zones as “Priority Security Zones.” Soeren Kern reported that this was part of a plan to reassert authority over the most crime-ridden zones. Aware of the resistance ahead, the French government deployed riot police, detectives and intelligence personnel. If the campaign is successful, another 40 of the no-go zones will become “Priority Security Zones.”

The Islamist trend in France must be reversed. Pew found that the current 6.5 million-strong Muslim population in France, which is 7% of the population, will grow to about 10.3% by 2030. That’s nowhere near a majority, but it’s enough to swing elections, politically Balkanize the country and create a cesspool for criminals and terrorists.

This article was sponsored by the Institute on Religion and Democracy.

Once favored to become pope, Scola made his remarks at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart for the opening of a conference focusing on Roman Emperor Constantine’s 313 Edict of Milan granting imperial toleration to Christianity.  Scola advocated a “healthy secularism” allowing religious freedom, defined by him as a “true litmus test” for a civilized society.  To Scola, this “freedom means above all encouraging religious pluralism and opening to all forms of religious expression,” including “eliminating laws that criminally punish blasphemy.”

As the Catholic cable television channel EWTN reported online, the role of blasphemy laws in Muslim-majority countries in persecuting Christians and other religious minorities formed the global context of Scola’s remarks.  As reviewed previously by this writer, the authors of Persecuted:  The Global Assault on Christians have extensively documented that “Christians are the single most widely persecuted religious group in the world today,” a “terrible trend…on the upswing.”  Moreover, “it is in the Muslim world where persecution of Christians is now most widespread, intense, and, ominously, increasing.”  Abolition of Muslim blasphemy laws, often used to prohibit propagation of Christian beliefs contradicting Muslim doctrine, would eliminate one important instrument of Islamic repression.

Such religious freedom would protect not just private rights, but also public peace.  “Religious freedom,” notes Scola’s fellow Catholic, Professor Thomas F. Farr of Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, & World Affairs, “the evidence shows, can be an antidote to religion-related extremism, including terrorism.”  Freedom, analyzes Farr, dilutes fanaticism by forcing various faiths to justify their claims intellectually without coercion in a marketplace of ideas.  “What if,” speculates Farr,

Osama Bin Laden had been raised in a Saudi Arabia that allowed for religious freedom?  What if, instead of being steeped exclusively in the toxic teachings of Wahhabism and Sayyid Qutb, he had been exposed to other forms of Islam, to critics of Islam, to other forms of religious belief, and to liberal religion-based arguments about justice and the common good?

Christians like Scola and Farr have a perfectly sound theological basis for faith-based advocacy of religious freedom.  As the prominent Protestant pastor and theologian John Piper has written, numerous Biblical verses relate that “Christ did his work by being insulted” in stark contrast to Islam in which the “work of Muhammad is based on being honored.”  As the somewhat religiously eclectic but committed freethinker Thomas Jefferson wrote to a majoritarian-Christian America in his landmark 1779 (adopted 1785) Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, “all attempts to influence” individual religious belief

by temporal punishments, or burthens, or by civil incapacitations…are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do, but to extend it by its influence on reason alone.

Ironically, Christian calls for religious freedom with respect to Islam would manifest precisely the Christian concept of the “church militant” (ecclesia militans).  Muslim entities like the 57 Muslim-majority member states (including “Palestine”) of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) have often tried to hide advocacy of de facto Islamic blasphemy laws behind a supposedly “ecumenical veneer” of opposition to “defamation of religion” in general.  Christian calls for religious freedom, come what may in criticism and/or condemnation of any particular faith, ostentatiously breaks ranks with this united front claimed by some Muslims, leaving them to defend religious repression on their own.

European opponents of blasphemy laws like Scola, though, will have to begin actually with their own continent.  Scola’s native Italy as well as seven other European countries (out of a total of 45, or 18%) had blasphemy laws according to a 2011 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life study.  Somewhat similar to blasphemy laws, laws against “defamation” of religion also existed in 36 European countries (80%), while collectively religious restrictions of various sorts exist in 47% of countries worldwide.

As many have already noted (see here, here, and here), ultimately arbitrary European enforcement of such laws today more often than not involve the Islamic faith of recently arrived immigrant communities, not Europe’s historically dominant Judeo-Christian beliefs.  Accordingly, concerns about limiting free speech with respect to Islam played a role in the 2012 abolition of the blasphemy law in one of the eight European countries listed by Pew in 2011, Holland.  The Dutch precedent is a model to follow for all faithful people who believe that they have a religious truth that will set free, a truth that need not fear freedom.

This article was sponsored by The Legal Project, an activity of the Middle East Forum.

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But is Nigeria more multicultural than Sweden? Yes, if you’re referring to the fact that it has over 250 native ethnic and linguistic groups with a wide range of cultures, from Fula to Hausa to Yoruba. But if you’re talking about multiculturalism as an ideology that compels public servants to view the establishment of greater and greater ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity as an undivided virtue, regardless of all objective evidence to the contrary, Nigeria has nothing on Sweden. While only a tiny minority of Nigeria’s population is of foreign origin, over 25% of Sweden’s inhabitants have a foreign background. And people like Borg are determined to drive that number steadily higher, by hook or by crook – on the insane grounds that a nation like Sweden should look to a nation like Nigeria as a model for its own future development.

Indeed, it’s a measure of the utter irrationality of the modern religion known as multiculturalism that a Western politician like Borg is able to lavish such praise on an overpopulated, underdeveloped African country whose very name is synonymous with cheesy Internet scams; a country that has a life expectancy of 47 years, a 32% illiteracy rate, a political culture rife with corruption, and a deplorable human-rights record; a country where twelve of the 36 states are governed according to sharia law,  where over a hundred people perished in Muslim riots over the 2002 Miss World pageant, and where jihadist violence has taken hundreds of lives in recent years.

What the hell is up with Sweden? It’s a question people have been asking for decades, and in a new book, The Swedish Story, Swedish blogger Jon Sjunnesson sets out to answer it. And he does an effective job of it: even for those of us who have paid no small amount of attention to Sweden over the years, Sjunnesson’s book offers a helpful overview of the Swedish national character and the history of the Swedish welfare state, perceptively singling out the distinctive traits that have made Sweden the “extreme experiment” that it is and succinctly summing up some of the more notorious episodes in modern Swedish history.  But this isn’t all: he also illuminates socialism and the socialist mind in a way that I think will be useful for Americans – for what he’s drawn here is a vivid map of the territory into which our president and many of his cronies and supporters wish to lead us.

Take education. Of course, real education means, above all, helping students learn how to think critically. In a country like Sweden, however, schools and universities are primarily sites of indoctrination whose purpose is to create good socialists. If the Swedish system celebrates kids who are great at sports while all but punishing kids who stand out academically (“Excellence of bodies yes, brains no”), part of the reason is a fanatical devotion to equality of result, and part is an awareness that kids with first-rate minds are potential critics of the system. Hence socialism’s preference for mediocrity over excellence.

And, one might add, for social science over hard science. Yes, Sweden awards Nobel Prizes in chemistry, physics, and medicine, but its educational system discourages an interest in math and science – because, you see, experts in these fields end up serving industry, which exploits workers and produces environmentally hazardous waste. For decades, consequently, Sweden has suffered a deficit of scientists, engineers, doctors, and technicians. Students who choose to enter these fields, furthermore, tend to be so ill-prepared that they “need remedial classes.” There’s also a lack of plumbers, construction workers, and other laborers – for just as Sweden’s social engineers distrust science, they look down on vocations involving manual labor.

In Sweden, the brainwashing starts early – not in school, but in day care. No fewer than 85% of Swedish children under age three are in municipal (or municipally administered) day care. This figure is probably the highest percentage in the world. It is, Sjunnesson notes, the kind of experiment in mass, government-controlled child-rearing that Plato envisioned in his Republic and that “was central in Orwell’s and Huxley’s dystopias.” If you’re a Swedish parent who doesn’t want your kid brought up to be a good little socialist soldier – well, good luck: you have few if any real alternatives. Parents who don’t put their kids in day care “are often suspect in the eyes of social authority.” As for home schooling, it’s forbidden under a 2010 law (the only such legislation in the EU aside from a German ban enacted in 1938 because “the Nazi party did not want anyone else to school the young”). In any event, the cause of home schooling hasn’t gained much traction among Swedes, who have been efficiently trained to view any expression of unease over state-run education as “deranged” and to accept the socialist proposition that children belong not to their parents but to the state.

Sjunnesson makes a crucial point about the high tax rates in Sweden and other Nordic countries. The high taxes are necessary, of course, to fund the welfare state. But they serve another purpose. Socialists recognize members of the middle class, who are all too frequently driven by an ambition to better their circumstances, as a potential threat to the authority of socialists, whose machinations make such ambitions harder to fulfill. How to nip this nuisance in the bud? Easy: impose sky-high taxes on them. For, as Sjunnesson points out, people who have been able to accumulate some savings in the bank are better positioned to “stand up against authority” and “rise with self-confidence”; they’re not “as servile as if they had nothing.” Sweden’s tax system, then, is designed to make it extremely hard for Swedes to save money – and it works: compared to other Western countries, “Swedes have unusually small amounts of savings.” And consequently, people who might otherwise be vocal critics of the socialist welfare state are very aware of being dependent on it, knowing that if they get sick or lose their jobs they won’t have their own resources to fall back on. Confiscatory tax, then, serves not only as a means of enriching and expanding the socialist state, but as a form, itself, of socialist control.

“Meek as sheep”: that’s how Sjunnesson describes his fellow Swedes. They’re afflicted with a “silent conformism,” the result of a “spiral of silence” driven by a “fear of exclusion” and a perceived need to maintain a social order founded on perceived consensus views. Whether the perceived consensus views actually are the consensus views doesn’t matter: “When no opposing views are heard, people do not believe there are any even if they themselves dissent.” Those who do dare to dissent are branded as extreme – even though those “extreme” views may be thoroughly mainstream in other Western countries – and are often targeted for violence by self-styled “anti-fascists” who behave exactly like fascists. Sweden is, note well, a country in which members of the anti-establishment Sweden Democrats Party are demonized for dissenting civilly and peacefully, while certain entertainers are celebrated for singing about their desire to commit acts of violence against Sweden Democrats. Then there’s the story of how a frank Fox News report on the Islamization of the city of Malmö led an irate member of Parliament to demand that the Swedish counterpart to the FCC close down Fox News’s operation in Sweden. As Sjunnesson sums it up: “freedom of speech means little in Sweden.”

There’s much more of interest in this book. About, for example, the inculcation of virulently anti-male attitudes at all levels of the Swedish educational system. (“Boys cry when they hear how bad they and their father are and men have always been.”) About how the system rewards irresponsibility on the part of young unmarried mothers and the men who impregnate them. (“With a baby, a single parent sidesteps all waiting lines and the child may be the only means to an apartment for decades.”) About a national self-hatred so fierce that “schools have asked pupils not to wear [Swedish flag] t-shirts or wave the yellow and blue flag as it could be interpreted as racist.” About a country where adults admire and envy youth beyond all reason, and accordingly exhibit greater levels of hedonism and infantilism than their counterparts anywhere else on the planet. And about levels of anti-Semitism that made international headlines yet again just the other day, when Israel’s Eurovision delegation was harassed and threatened on the streets of Malmö.

For an American reader, Sjunnesson’s book about a supposedly free country where the media march in lockstep and where dissent can be dangerous carries a special resonance in the wake of revelations that the IRS has targeted conservative groups and the Justice Department has snooped on AP and Fox News journalists. To some observers, the depth of the Obama administration’s hostility toward any hint of criticism in the media has been especially puzzling, given that most news media have in fact been absurdly supportive and protective of Obama throughout his presidency. But to a true socialist government, any dissent is intolerable. In Norway, where the domination of the news market by state-run TV channels and radio stations and by state-subsidized newspapers already give the government a very strong hand in shaping the media message about itself, officials have now gone a step further, proposing that the state award grants to fund journalistic projects of its own choosing – an outrageous suggestion in a democratic country, but a no-brainer for those with a socialist mindset.

In socialist countries, after all, the state doesn’t exist to serve the people; the people exist to be shaped into unquestioning servants of the state – servants who accept that the state is them and that they are the state. In such countries, it’s taken for granted that there’s no need to place any limit on state power or to provide mechanisms to protect citizens from that power, because, by definition, as Sjunnesson puts it, “the state always is good.” We may mock the European Union for banning jugs or bowls of olive oil on restaurant tables, but this is what socialism does: the powers that be need to have their fingers in every pie, need to minimize the number of situations under which freedom may actually be experienced, need to accustom citizens to a society in which their lives are increasingly regulated. They need, in short, to create a country in which the land and the system are, in the minds of the general public, one – a country, that is, in which the people simply cannot imagine the nation itself without the socialist state.

No so-called democracy on earth has gone as far in this direction as Sweden. For the Swedish people, Sjunneson says, “the country is the welfare state…Swedes have have no home but the welfare state and no identity outside its yarn” – outside, in other words, its narrative about itself. Winston Smith, Orwell’s narrator in 1984, suggests that the only hope of overthrowing the totalitarian government of his native Oceania lies with “the proles”; Sjunneson, for his part, believes that his fellow Swedes are so brainwashed by welfare-state propaganda that the only way Sweden can save itself at this point is by admitting “one million new immigrants from India, China, Africa and Latin America” who have service skills or technical knowhow, who have no truck with jihadism or multiculturalism, who want to move to Sweden not for a handout but to study hard and work hard, and who will, in time, found more rigorous schools and start more vigorous businesses.

A pipe dream, I fear. Yet Sjunneson’s portrait of his country is a cautionary tale whose lessons the rest of us ignore at our peril.

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Erakat used his speech to attack Israel’s alleged “apartheid” policies in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and  to trumpet the Palestinians’ commitment to a peaceful resolution of the conflict with Israel based on “two states on the 1967 line.” At the same time, he praised Secretary of State John Kerry for trying to bring the parties together and move the peace negotiation process forward. “I know his heart is there,” Erakat said.

Erakat denied that the Palestinians were imposing any conditions on resuming negotiations with Israel. Then, in the next breath, he insisted that Israel must first meet its “obligations” to freeze all settlement activities and free Palestinian prisoners. It must also accept what he repeatedly called in shorthand “two states – 1967.” By referring to “Israeli obligations” instead of “conditions,” Erakat tried to sugarcoat the Palestinians’ continued obstruction of peace negotiations.  Erakat, the Chief Palestinian Negotiator, wants certain major issues in dispute with Israel to be decided first in the Palestinians’ favor before they will agree to even sit down with Israeli negotiators.

If Israel does not accept “two states – 1967,” Erakat warned, there will be “consequences.” He mocked the current relevance of Israel’s security concern that the 1967 line was indefensible. “Missiles today cannot be stopped by walls,” he said.

Israelis have every reason to be suspicious of Erakat’s “two states-1967″ formula for durable peace, even aside from their legitimate security concerns. The Palestinians have not given up on their so-called “right of return” demand, which would send potentially millions of Palestinian refugees back to live within the land of pre-June 1967 Israel and effectively destroy its Jewish identity.

Indeed, Erakat noted that the Palestinians just marked the anniversary of Israel’s independence in 1948 which they call “nakba” or the Great Catastrophe. “In May 1948, Palestine as a nation was interrupted,” he said. This sounds like the Chief Palestinian Negotiator still considers Israel a temporary interloper on what the Palestinians claim was their land alone before May 1948.

Moreover, there is nobody on the Palestinian side who can deliver a secure and lasting peace, despite Erakat’s claims to the contrary in his UN speech. Israel withdrew from Gaza unilaterally in 2005, uprooting thousands of settlers in the process. All that Israel has gotten in return are thousands of rockets fired from Gaza into Israel and aimed at civilian population centers by Hamas and its other jihadist allies. For his part, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas objected to attaching the label “terrorists” to Hamas. During a March 15, 2013 interview on Russian TV, as transcribed by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), Abbas declared: “As far as I am concerned, there is no difference between our policies and those of Hamas.”

Back in 2008, Abbas demonstrated his lack of interest in a negotiated peace fair to both sides when he rejected a peace proposal from Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that would have given the Palestinians approximately 94% of the West Bank. The Palestinians rejected Israel’s offer because they did not get 100% of what they wanted, including the full “right of return” and every stone of East Jerusalem under Palestinian rule.

Here is what Saëb Erakat himself said about the rejected offer during a television appearance in March 2009, as transcribed by MEMRI:

“Abu Mazen [Palestinian President Abbas] could have accepted a proposal that talked about Jerusalem and almost 100% of the West Bank, but it is not our goal to score points against one another here. Our strategic goal, when we strive for peace, is not to do so at any price. We strive for peace on the basis of an Israeli withdrawal to the June 4, 1967 borders, the establishment of an independent Palestinian state, with East Jerusalem as its capital, and with the West Bank and the Gaza Strip geographically connected… There will be no peace whatsoever unless East Jerusalem – with every single stone in it – becomes the capital of Palestine…

Olmert, who talked today about his proposal to Abu Mazen, offered the 1967 borders, but said: ‘We will take 6.5% of the West Bank, and give in return 5.8% from the 1948 lands, and the 0.7% will constitute the safe passage, and East Jerusalem will be the capital, but there is a problem with the Haram and with what they called the Holy Basin.’ Abu Mazen too answered with defiance, saying: ‘I am not in a marketplace or a bazaar. I came to demarcate the borders of Palestine – the June 4, 1967 borders – without detracting a single inch, and without detracting a single stone from Jerusalem, or from the holy Christian and Muslim places. This is why the Palestinian negotiators did not sign.”

Saëb Erakat’s speech to the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People and his “two states-1967″ formula continued the Palestinians’ intransigent and deceptive approach to negotiations with Israel. The Palestinians remain the victims of their own delusions.

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Another person who has previously won the same award is William Nygaard, the Norwegian publisher of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, who on the morning of 11 October 1993 was shot three times and nearly killed outside of his own home in Oslo. The percentage of Muslims in Norway at that point probably did not much exceed 1%. It was even less in Japan, where the translator of the same novel was murdered. Merely one percent or less of Islamic culture can thus be enough to get people killed for criticizing Islam. This should serve as a reminder of just how toxic Islam truly can be to any free society.

After it was announced in 2013 that he would receive this prestigious award for free speech, one newspaper asked Per Fugelli about who he would like to be stuck in an elevator with. He replied the politician Christian Tybring-Gjedde, so he could “beat him up.” A funny and tolerant guy, Professor Fugelli. Tybring-Gjedde is an MP and a notable member of the right-wing Progress Party (Fremskrittspartiet). His party advocates lower taxes and is critical of certain aspects of mass immigration, although some of their voters feel that the party has gone soft over these issues after its current head Siv Jensen took over from long-time party leader Carl I. Hagen.

The left-wing activist Eivind Trædal published a major essay in the newspaper Dagbladet entitled “junk people” in which he singled out a number of named individuals for attacks, among them Tybring-Gjedde, the author Bruce Bawer, and me, for spreading “hate” against Islam and thereby creating a climate of hate which allegedly fostered Breivik.

Tybring-Gjedde had to take sick leave for a while in late 2011 due to repeated death threats against him. Members of the ruling Labour Party, including Eskil Pedersen, the leader of Labour’s youth league AUF, had accused individuals from the rival Progress Party of laying the groundwork for Anders Behring Breivik’s massacre by “misusing“ freedom of speech to say negative things about mass immigration or Islamization.

Pedersen and a few others survived the Utøya massacre by escaping the island in a ferry, originally a military landing craft, which had room for many more people. This triggered critical remarks from some of the other survivors, among them Bjørn Ihler. Eskil Pedersen believed that the country was under attack and did not trust any member of the police after he had escaped. He has stated that he thought this was a coup d’état involving the police and the armed forces, and claims that other AUF members thought the same.

Breivik did in fact show up at Utøya wearing a fake police uniform. Nevertheless, it is somewhat odd for the leader of the country’s largest political youth organization to say openly that he thought it was a coup d’état by the police against a youth summer camp. What is most thought-provoking, though, is that the same Eskil Pedersen just a few months earlier had tried to use the police to shut up people he happened to disagree with.

In May 2011 he pressed criminal charges against a Member of Parliament, Christian Tybring-Gjedde from the rival Progress Party, for “racism.” The case was soon dismissed. Tybring-Gjedde had stated that in the Grorud Valley in Oslo, which has one of the densest concentrations of immigrants in the country, blond girls have to dye their hair dark to avoid harassment, children are threatened with violence if they have pig meat in their lunch box and native boys risk being physically assaulted by immigrants who think they don’t get enough time on the local football team. These are merely truthful statements. In fact, reality is often much worse than this.

The reaction of Eskil Pedersen and others of his ilk to hearing that the natives no longer feel safe in parts of their own country due to the immigration policies supported by the ruling elites is to try to silence political opponents who speak truthfully about this. This betrays a totalitarian impulse.

After Breivik, Per Fugelli was among those who were most aggressive in blaming the Progress Party and its leader Siv Jensen indirectly, if not directly, for Breivik’s massacre, since they spread totally unfounded “Islamophobia” by pointing out problems related to Islamic culture and Muslim immigration. He has more than once made questionable associations with Nazi Germany against those who criticize Multiculturalism.

In May 2013, on the day when he was about to formally receive his Freedom of Expression Prize, Fugelli stated that people who worry about such things as crime related to Gypsy gangs or certain types of organized crime need a sedative for their baseless “anxiety.” Professor Fugelli, a medical professional, recommended that politicians should take a Valium pill before they speak about issues related to immigration.

Obviously, once could assume that this was intended as some kind of joke on the good professor’s part. If it is, however, it’s not a terribly funny one, given that certain repressive regimes have considered those who oppose their ideology as “insane” individuals in desperate need of forced medical or psychiatric treatment. Just ask brave dissidents from the Soviet Union such as Vladimir Bukovsky.

It’s also not the first or only time that Mr. Fugelli has indicated, jokingly or otherwise, that individuals who disagree with his views should be treated medically for their alleged delusions, with or without their consent.

During the Multicultural craze of the 1990s, the Norwegian novelist Torgrim Eggen in an essay entitled “The psychotic racism” warned against the possibility of “race wars in the streets” as a result of mass immigration. This essay was available on the Internet as late as in 2007 and 2008 when I linked to it from The Brussels Journal, but it has since then conveniently gone missing. The solution to these problems was not to limit mass immigration but to limit criticism of it. According to Eggen, xenophobia and opposition to mass immigration should be viewed as a mental illness, and the solution to xenophobia “is that you should distribute medication to those who are seriously affected. I have discussed this with a professor of Social Medicine, Dr. Per Fugelli, and he liked the idea.” Fugelli had apparently suggested putting anti-psychotic drugs in the city’s drinking water.

This may sound too extreme to be meant seriously, but Fugelli has continued to chastise all those who are critical of mass immigration. Eggen warned that arguments about how ordinary people are concerned over mass immigration shouldn’t be accepted, because this could lead to Fascism: “One should be on one’s guard against people, especially politicians, who invoke xenophobia on behalf of others. And if certain people begin their reasoning with phrases such as ‘ordinary people feel that,’ one shouldn’t argue at all, one should hit [them].”

In May 2013 Fugelli was a participant on Dagsnytt Atten, one of the most important daily news magazines and debate forums on the state broadcaster NRK. In addition to radio, it is also broadcasted on TV. On May 13, 2013, when he had been specifically invited to talk about his free speech award, during a conversation with Anders Heger, an influential publisher in the publishing house Cappelen Damm, Fugelli indicated that those who want to deport foreign gypsies should themselves be arrested and thrown in jail.

The issue was not about killing or abusing anybody, but merely whether to send back newly-arrived foreign organized beggars who cause problems. Per Fugelli thus advocated that those who disagree with his views on how to deal with foreign beggars should be thrown in jail. He said this in plain words on the country’s largest media outlet when he was there specifically to talk about freedom of speech.

So the person who had recently won one of the country’s most prestigious free speech awards has publicly advocated that those who use their free speech in a manner which he disagrees with should be beaten up, medicated or thrown in jail.

In the autumn of 2011, the author Torgrim Eggen complained in the national newspaper VG that some people make rude or threatening comments about others, whose political views they happen not to share themselves. It’s nice that he is concerned about this issue, of course, but he forgot to say anything about whether or not we should hit people who point out the negative results of mass immigration.

In the spring of 2013, the journalists Kjell Erik Eilertsen and Ole Asbjørn Ness from the medium-sized business paper Finansavisen, owned by businessman Trygve Hegnar, interviewed young people of ethnic Norwegian background about how it’s really like for them to grow up in the Grorud Valley in inner-city Oslo. They told a tale of constant, daily humiliations and abuse, until many native families simply move away from the area.

The article met with a storm of reactions on two of the major dissident websites in Norway and was translated to English at the website Gates of Vienna, which the weekly newspaper Morgenbladet has charmingly defined as the “Gates of Hell.” Yet the story largely met with silence from bigger media outlets. The state broadcaster NRK was at the same time busy inventing a positive and charming Multicultural version of this area.

My initial thought when reading about this was the deafening silence of “nice” people like Per Fugelli, or Gutmenschen as the Germans call them. What is their reaction to this? Virtually nothing; they just turn their backs to these problems caused by their own policies and pretend they don’t exist. I am sure these abused young natives, who tell horrifying tales of being robbed, beaten up or called “white infidel whore” on a regular basis in what once was their country, would have been delighted to receive some backing from a self-appointed brave “humanitarian” such as Mr. Fugelli. Sadly, they received none.

Perhaps if they asked him, Professor Fugelli would explain to them that the assaults and abuse they experience are all imaginary and can be cured with some anti-psychotic drugs. And if that didn’t work, maybe he would smear them with “Nazi” accusations or threaten to beat them up. Per Fugelli represents the dark and hypocritical face of humanitarian Norway.

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Reprinted from IsraelNationalNew.com. 

I used to know a man whose family were German aristocracy prior to World War II. They owned a number of large industries and estates. I asked him how many German people were true Nazis, and the answer he gave has stuck with me and guided my attitude toward fanaticism ever since.

“Very few people were true Nazis,” he said, “but many enjoyed the return of German pride, and many more were too busy to care. I was one of those who just thought the Nazis were a bunch of fools. So, the majority just sat back and let it all happen. Then, before we knew it, they owned us, and we had lost control, and the end of the world had come. My family lost everything. I ended up in a concentration camp and the Allies destroyed my factories.”

We are told again and again by experts and talking heads that Islam is the religion of peace, and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace. Although this unquantified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless fluff, meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the specter of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam.

The fact is that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history. It is the fanatics who march. It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars world wide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or execute honor killings. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals. The hard, quantifiable fact is that the “peaceful majority” is the “silent majority,” and it is cowed and extraneous.

Communist Russia was comprised of Russians who just wanted to live in peace, yet the Russian Communists were responsible for the murder of about 20 million people. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. China’s huge population was peaceful as well, but Chinese Communists managed to kill a staggering 70 million people. The average Japanese individual prior to World War II was not a war-mongering sadist. Yet, Japan murdered and slaughtered its way across Southeast Asia in an orgy of killing that included the systematic murder of 12 million Chinese civilians – most killed by sword, shovel and bayonet. And who can forget Rwanda, which collapsed into butchery? Could it not be said that the majority of Rwandans were “peace loving”?

History lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt; yet, for all our powers of reason, we often miss the most basic and uncomplicated of points. Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by the fanatics. Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence. Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don’t speak up, because, like my friend from Germany, they will awaken one day and find that the fanatics own them, and the end of their world will have begun.

Peace-loving Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Rwandans, Bosnians, Afghanis, Iraqis, Palestinians, Somalis, Nigerians, Algerians and many others, have died because the peaceful majority did not speak up until it was too late. As for us, watching it all unfold, we must pay attention to the only group that counts: the fanatics who threaten our way of life.

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When President Gerald Ford learned that his Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld had compiled a file of instructive observations and quotations about effective leadership and management, he asked to read them. An impressed Ford promptly designated them “Rumsfeld’s Rules” and distributed them to the senior members of the White House staff. Since then they have been read by presidents, government officials, business leaders, diplomats, members of Congress, and others. Rumsfeld was finally asked to collect them between covers and elaborate on them, and the result is the just-published Rumsfeld’s Rules: Leadership Lessons in Business, Politics, War, and Life.

Donald Rumsfeld boasts a ridiculously distinguished résumé from the arenas of business, government, and the military: naval aviator, Congressman, top aide to four American presidents, ambassador, the CEO of both a worldwide pharmaceutical company and a leading company in broadcasting technologies, and of course, as he is most well-known, the 13^th and 21^st U.S. Secretary of Defense (the only man in American history to serve twice in that post). He is also the author of Known and Unknown: A Memoir, a weighty tome but one of the most important political memoirs since the 9/11 attacks forever altered our geopolitical landscape. He now chairs the Rumsfeld Foundation, which supports leadership and public service at home, and funds global finance projects, fellowships, and charitable causes that benefit our armed forces and their families (all proceeds of Known and Unknown, for example, go to the Foundation’s military charities).

In the course of that multifaceted career, Rumsfeld collected his “Rules,” advice and maxims based on his own experiences and the wisdom of others. While he cautions that “rules cannot be a substitute for judgment,” he emphasizes in his new book that these

are insights into human nature, timeless truths that have survived the changes in our culture… Most have broad applicability and can be useful whether you aspire to be a leader in government, church, business, sports, or the military. They convey distilled wisdom that can… serve as guideposts in decision-making.

As Rumsfeld himself notes, the Rules are not all his, nor are they all rules. Some are life lessons or pearls of wisdom from others, who are quoted in the book – everyone from Thomas Jefferson, Confucius, Frederick the Great, Gen. Curtis LeMay (“I am unable to distinguish between the unfortunate and the incompetent, and I can’t afford either”), Margaret Thatcher, Von Clausewitz, Churchill, and the ubiquitous strategist of war, Sun Tzu (“He who defends everywhere, defends nowhere”), to Sammy Davis Jr. and Lewis Carroll (“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there”). “Truth be told,” Rumsfeld admits, “I don’t know if I’ve had a truly original thought in my life. I enjoy being around people smarter than I am, who know more than I do, and who have done things I haven’t done.”

Grouped thematically in chapters, the Rules address managerial basics – or what should be basics, but are too often in frustratingly short supply in the real world: “Starting at the Bottom,” “Running a Meeting,” “Thinking Strategically,” “Battling Bureaucracy,” “Planning for Uncertainty,” and so forth. “Be willing to learn from those at the top,” goes one rule. “If you’re working from your inbox, you’re working on other people’s priorities,” goes another. “Don’t overcontrol like a novice pilot. Stay loose enough from the flow that you can observe and calibrate.” “When negotiating, never feel that you are the one that must fill every silence.” “If you don’t know what your top three priorities are, you don’t have priorities.”

In a plainspoken style that suits his direct, no-nonsense character, Rumsfeld fleshes out the Rules with personal anecdotes and examples drawn from his vast personal experience. While his leadership advice is undeniably useful, and in many instances particularly so for someone just starting out in a management position or still striving for one, these illustrations are very often the most compelling parts of the book. He tells why, for example, Dick Cheney considers his first interview with Rumsfeld – back in 1968 when Cheney was seeking an internship on Capitol Hill – “the worst interview” of his life. He discusses the differences in personalities and leadership styles of the presidents for whom he worked. He even draws upon his sports experience as a young wrestler for leadership lessons.

Along the way, Rumsfeld sprinkles in a surprising amount of welcome dry humor. “In politics,” he writes, for example, “every day is filled with numerous opportunities for serious error. Enjoy it.” At another point he asserts that “the act of calling a meeting about a problem can in some cases be confused with actually doing something.”

The last handful of chapters are perhaps the most interesting, dealing as they do with the vastness and extraordinary integrity of military culture (“Lessons from the World’s Most Successful Leadership Organization”), the unique difficulties of managing the people within the White House (“Inside the Oval Office”), a passionate defense of capitalism and of America as a force for good in the world (“The Case for Capitalism”), and perseverance through mistakes and criticism, on both the personal and national levels (“The Optimism of Will”).

In closing, Rumsfeld again stresses that “leadership is not about following ironclad rules; it’s about one’s instincts. Leadership is not composed of a collection of maxims; it comes from one’s own independent judgment.” It requires “the courage to venture out into the world and make mistakes and, yes, even fail.” Nonetheless, Rumsfeld’s Rules is a very readable, insightful guide with practical advice to becoming a wiser and more effective leader. It is also an insightful window onto the leader behind the book.   

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David Horowitz:  We need leaders like Ted Cruz.  And that’s why we are honored to have him on the platform today.  (applause)

Ted Cruz:  Thank you.  Thank you very, very much.  Thank you very, very much.  It is great to be joining you all this evening.  You know, I will observe, David, Washington is a strange, strange place.  People are very, very surprised when you actually go there and do what you said you were going to do.  (laughter)

I want to start by observing for all of you non-Texans, I apologize that Louie Gohmert is so soft-spoken.  (laughter)  That he has no opinions or courage or willingness to charge into the fray.  And no sense of humor whatsoever.  For the love of God, tell a joke once, Louie.  (laughter)

I will point out that he described being mistaken for James Taylor.  I haven’t had that experience.  (laughter)  But I have, in fact, been on an airplane once when a page went over asking for Tom Cruise to please come up.

And I walked up fairly sheepish.  I said, “I’m — I think maybe you’re looking for me.”  (laughter)  You have never seen so many disappointed flight attendants.  (laughter)  Yes, it was, they’re just, like, “Oh.”

And I have to admit, Louie, your story of your five-year-old also remind me or Caroline, our eldest, who’s five.  And in the course of the senate campaign there was one Saturday morning about 6:30 in the morning.  And I was at home in the bedroom and I was on the phone doing a radio interview.

And Caroline came bursting into our room to come play with mommy and daddy.  And Heidi, my wife, ran over and grabbed Caroline, pulled her out and said, “Not now, sweetie.  Not now.  Daddy’s doing a radio interview.”  Caroline crossed her arms and she said, “Politics, politics, politics.  It’s always politics.”  (laughter)  So, Louie, I feel your pain.  (laughter)

And, you know, Bill, I have to say the Star Wars analogy at the end I thought was really quite compelling and I’m really waiting for the next presidential cycle when we can put Bill on national television and have him do a Jedi mind trick.  (laughter)  These aren’t the candidates you’re looking for.  (laughter)

And I will confess as I sat there, I had an image suddenly of Jimmy Carter saying, “Barack, I am your father.”  (laughter)  And let me say additionally, the host of this gathering, David Horowitz, is a man who is utterly fearless.  (applause)

And that is a very, very rare commodity.  You know, David reminds me of a Texan, Chuck Norris.  (laughter)  Now, some people wear Superman pajamas.  Superman wears Chuck Norris pajamas.  (laughter)  And Chuck Norris wears David Horowitz pajamas.  (applause)

But David is someone who understands we’re fighting to take our country back.  He understands the severity of the threat in significant part because he’s been on the other side.

You know, we were visiting over dinner about how couple of months ago Jane Mayer in The New Yorker Magazine wrote a nasty hit piece.  And David knew about that because he’s had a nasty hit piece written on him by her as well.  Where she recounted that some time ago I’d talked about the fact that Barack Obama was four years ahead of me at Harvard law school.

And I made the point that when he and I were both students there were more Communists on the Harvard law school faculty than there were Republicans.  There were quite a few who were self-described Marxists.

And she wrote this as a sensational, horrible Joe McCarthy has returned because this is terrible.  And then the media all went crazy.  I have to admit, our response in our office is we put up on Facebook a clip from Casablanca that MSNBC is shocked, shocked to discover there are Marxists at Harvard.  (laughter)

I’m just impressed they think it’s a bad thing.  (laughter)  Hey, that’s making real progress.  If they’re running away from it, I am glad of it.  My favorite was actually this obscure blogger that was attacking me and said, “Cruz just doesn’t understand the difference between Marxist and Marxian.”  (laughter)

I confess that is correct.  I have utterly no idea what the difference is between Marxist and Marxian.  And I would welcome anyone to make that argument to the American people.

I want to thank you all for being here.  I want to thank you all for being engaged in the fight to turn our country around because it is — we are facing enormous perils.  We are facing enemies abroad and at home.

And everyone’s here because we love this country.  We love what the United States of America has meant for the world.  And we are committed to doing everything we can to preserving this nation as a bacon — beacon of freedom to the world.

What I want to talk to you all tonight about is three different things.  Number one, defending national security.  Number two, preserving US sovereignty.  And number three, restoring growth and opportunity.

Let’s start with national security.  The major focus of this gathering.  We have all sorts of challenges.  We have a challenge that you all have done a terrific job examining.  The challenge of radical Islamic terrorists.

And what a sad statement that we are living in a country where the president of the United States is unwilling to utter the words radical Islamic terrorist.  You’re not going to win a war on terror if you’re not aware you’re fighting a war on terror.

And we have perils across the globe.  We have number one the nation of Iran which I think may well pose the greatest national security threat to this entire country as Iran is proceeding by all appearances headlong towards developing nuclear weapons capacity.

And a nuclear Iran poses, in my opinion, an existential threat to this nation and to the nation of Israel.  And if there’s one principle we have learned from history it’s that bullies and tyrants don’t respect weakness.  The only thing they respect and understand is strength.

And one of the things that is so concerning about this president’s foreign policy is that I think it is hard to imagine that the Iranian leaders are doing anything but scoffing at the prospect of any serious repercussions from their proceeding to gaining nuclear weapons.

That is extraordinarily dangerous not just for what it would do for the region.  Because once Iran acquired nuclear weapons we would immediately see proliferation throughout the region.  And that’s just what we need is a bunch of nations with unstable governments and major radical Islamic elements in their society have nukes throughout the Middle East.

But it also exponentially increases the chances that those weapons would tragically be used against the nation of Israel or the nation of the United States.  There are only two places those weapons would be used.

A second threat that has been driven home recently is you look at North Korea.  North Korea’s a nation that has nuclear weapons.  It is a nation whose leader is explicitly and openly drawing up targeting plans to launch those nuclear weapons to US cities.

One of the cities they targeted was Austin.  (laughter)  I have to admit, I was speaking at a gathering in Austin and someone from Austin observed that it must’ve been a mistake.  They could not have meant to target the People’s Republic of Travis County.  (laughter)

But, you know, look it is easy to make light of this.  Because we don’t think they have the technology to miniaturize their nukes and put them on an ICBM and get them here.  So they probably can’t do that.  Isn’t that comforting?

Although, again, our intelligence services are disagreed on that.  So some of our intelligence services think in fact they can do it.  Others in the intelligence community think they can’t.  So there’s a reasonable disagreement.

But think of the consequence.  We have an unstable new leader who we don’t understand publicly declaring hostilities and an intention to target and potentially fire nuclear weapons at US cities.  These are dangerous times.

And what does the President of the United States do?  He sends John Kerry.  By the way, how much better would it be if he’d sent John O’Neill?  (applause)  Now, John O’Neill would get their attention.  (laughter)

But he sent John Kerry to offer a peace offering that we’ll pull down our missile defense from the Pacific if they agree to back down slightly for the moment sort of.  (laughter)  That’s what you call effective negotiation.

And one of the things that underscored is just about a month ago was the 30 year anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s SDI speech.  How many of you all remember that speech?  You remember the reactions of the Left?  Of the newspapers, of the academy.  Star Wars.

This was a crazy cowboy war in space.  Cannot happen.  I have to admit, I thought of that back in December when I traveled to the nation of Israel.  And it was right after they had just seen an incredible rocket attack.

Thousands upon thousands of rockets and the Iron Dome system, the missile defense system there had intercepted nearly 90% of the rockets that were coming in to kill their citizens.  And it reminded me, how many of you remember the analogy in the ’80s, it’s like a bullet hitting a bullet.  It is impossible.

Let me tell you something, you guys go home to your computers.  Let me encourage you to google the following.  Iron dome wedding.  It’s one of the most amazing videos.  It is a home video that was taken of a wedding occurring in Israel.

And the wedding photographer, you hear the music, people are celebrating.  And a whole wave of rockets comes in.  And the wedding photographer just goes up and you see them being intercepted by the Iron Dome missile one after the other after the other.  And it looks like fireworks over the wedding.  It is a spectacular video and demonstration of what can be done.

And the first thing that occurred to me when we see North Korea targeting US cities is, “Why don’t we have missile defense along the Pacific that if some lunatic fires an ICBM we can take it down and we can retaliate in a way that no lunatic would do so and threaten the United States of America?”  (applause)

And a third example that you all have talked about already quite a bit is Benghazi.  You know, Benghazi is something the more you look at it, the worse it gets.  We had about two months ago a hearing in the Armed Services Committee.  And we got a fair number of questions answered.

We had Leon Panetta, the outgoing Secretary of Defense.  And we had General Dempsey, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff both testify.  We discovered a lot of things.  Number one, we discovered that during the attack of Benghazi the President received one briefing ten to 15 minutes long at the — in the first hour of the attack. And after that, neither the Secretary of Defense nor the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had any other conversations with President Obama.

We learned that during the entire time of the attack, neither the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff nor the Secretary of the Defense had any conversations whatsoever with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

We learned that the Defense Department had sent additional defenses to Yemen at the request of the embassy there but didn’t send it to Benghazi because State never requested those additional defense.

But the Defense Department said had additional forces been sent there, that attack could’ve been prevented.  We learned that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said it was, quote, surprising that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she didn’t know that our ambassador had requested additional security because it was not safe in Benghazi.

We learned that after the attack occurred for 22 days the site remained unsecured.  Because the State Department never requested the Defense Department to go in and secure the site.  And as a result you had news crews like CNN walking on and discovering secure documents because we didn’t bother to lock it down.

We learned quite a bit and yet there are a lot of open questions.  To date, Congress has yet to hear from the survivors of Benghazi.  The people who were there.

And by the way, we also learned the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said he thought it was obvious, immediately obvious that it was a coordinated terrorist attack because when the rooftop of the annex received multiple incoming mortar shells, spontaneous protestors don’t have the ability to fire multiple mortar shells and hit a single rooftop.

That can only be an organized military attack, which he said he knew the instant it occurred.  Now, if you look at some of the news that has broken in the last week it has gotten substantially worse.

We now know that there were four self-described whistleblowers within the State Department, several of whom have retained counsel.  And they are alleging that they have been threatened retaliation if they describe what happened in Benghazi.

Just today The Weekly Standard reported the change in the talking points that the intelligence community presented versus what the State Department edited.  The first talking points from the intelligence community said this was an attack with major elements of Al Qaeda.

And I would encourage all of you to go and read that Weekly Standard article that is out today and just read the memos side by side.  Because the intelligence community wrote what occurred and then State edited it all out.  And what was an organized terrorist attack that took the lives of four Americans became a spontaneous protest against some silly, ridiculous internet video.

And the administration sent the UN ambassador on five Sunday shows to tell the American people statements that were categorically false.  And that by all appearances now they knew were categorically false.

Now, I am encouraged that on Wednesday the House will be having an additional hearing.  And I think it — I hope it will be a revealing hearing.  There needs to be real accountability.

And by the way, Hillary Clinton said, “What does it matter whether it was terrorism or not?”  You know, there’s some statements that are self-refuting.  Jay Carney, the White House Press Secretary, said, “Benghazi was a long time ago.  Can’t you guys forget about it?”  He didn’t say that, but that’s what he meant.

But what we haven’t heard anything about is a single person apprehended.  A single person killed who was responsible for Benghazi.  What does this administration effectively say when there is no effort to track down and apprehend or kill the attackers who murder the sitting US ambassador for Americans?  It encourages those attacks all the more.

What do you think Iran and North Korea think as they watch that?  Say, “Well, gosh, you can attack Americans with impunity.”  And apparently what happens instead is the State Department will apologize for an internet video.

That only encourages further violence.  These are dangerous times.  And I encourage all of you, this is a group that is focusing on the underlying root core issues.  Is focusing on being serious about protecting our national security.  And I encourage that because these are times when not many in Washington seem focused on doing that.

Let me talk about a second priority.  Preserving US sovereignty.  One of the methods that those on the Left have used to attack this country is not through bullets and bombs.  It’s through undermining the institutions of rule of law in our country.  And making us more and more subject to international institutions.

Before I was elected to the US Senate I served as the Solicitor General of Texas, the chief lawyer for the State in front of the US Supreme Court.  And the biggest fight in my tenure as Solicitor General was a case called Medellin versus Texas.

Medellin began with a horrific crime where two teenage girls were horribly murdered in Houston in 1993.  But the case took a very, very strange turn because the World Court, the judicial arm of the United Nations, issued an order to the United States to re-open the convictions of 51 murderers across this country.

It’s the first time in the history of this country any foreign court has ever tried to bind the US justice system.  Texas stood up and fought the World Court.  I had the honor, I argued this case twice in front of the US Supreme Court.

On the other side were 94 nations, all of which came in against us.  All of which argued that the US justice system should be completely subservient to the United Nations and the World Court.

And also on the other side, sadly, was the President of the United States.  And it was actually President George W. Bush.  Now, I will say as an aside, I got my start in politics working for George W. Bush on his presidential campaign.  I remain a big fan of his in many respects.

Indeed, I met my wife, Heidi, on the Bush campaign.  We were one of eight marriages that came out of that campaign.  (laughter)  So a lousy joke that I’ve told all over the State of Texas is, “Whatever else anyone thinks of George W. Bush, in our house he will always be a uniter and not a divider.”  (laughter)

But in this instance, he received some really, really poor advice because George W. Bush signed a two-paragraph order that purported to order the state courts to obey the World Court.  And so Texas stood up and we fought the United Nations.  We fought the World Court, we fought 94 nations and we fought the President of the United States.

Who I would note, by the way, was the former governor of Texas.  Was a Republican.  And a friend.  And yet nonetheless, the State of Texas went before the US Supreme Court and I had the honor of representing the State saying the President has no authority whatsoever under our Constitution to give away US sovereignty.  (applause)

And by a margin of six to three the US Supreme Court agreed.  Ruled the World Court has no authority in our courts and the President has no ability to make our courts subject to the World Court of the United Nations.  (applause)

And I would point out as a quick aside that in Texas we were willing to stand up against a Republican president, against the former governor of Texas, even though he was a friend and a good man.  Where are the Democrats standing up against President Obama’s abuse of power?

Fifty-five Democrats in the Senate and yet crickets chirping as we have had a president disregard the Constitution over and over and over again.  It’s a real question about our democratic system when one of the two major parties treats it as a partisan game rather than recognizing any limits on presidential authority.

About six weeks ago I was proud to stand side by side with my friend Rand Paul in a 13-hour filibuster on this administration’s drone policy.  (applause)  Other than Ron Wyden, not a single Democrat joined us in that.

Does anyone doubt if it had been President George W. Bush that every Democrat would’ve been there lighting their hair on fire?  (laughter)  That we would’ve been debating impeachment proceedings if it were a Republican president implementing the exact same policy.

And yet the Democrats apparently did not choose to do anything to hold the President accountable to the Constitution.  Third and final point, first two were foreign.  The third and final one is domestic.  Restoring growth and opportunity.

First two were pessimistic.  I hope the third will be far more optimistic.  By the way, one of the great things, Louie, of going third, is all of my jokes are funnier when people have had three glasses of wine.  (laughter)  There is a method to the madness.

Louie Gohmert:  I’m still not setting my hair on fire, though.  (laughter)

Ted Cruz:  I thought that’s how you got that way.  (laughter)  I think the top priority of every elected official should be restoring economic growth.  Economic growth is the precondition to solving every other problem we have.

You know, the last four years our economy has averaged 0.9% growth a year.  There’s only one other period since World War II of four consecutive years of less than 1% growth.  That was 1979 to 1982.

It’s coming out of the Jimmy Carter era.  Same failed economic policies, out of control spending, out of control debt, out of control taxes and out of control regulations.  And it produced the identical stagnation.

Every other problem depends on getting growth back.  If you want to see the 23 million American people out of work back to work, we’ve got to have growth.  If you want to turn around our out of control deficits and our unsustainable debt, you have got to have growth.

If you want to ensure that we remain the strongest military force in the world to protect our national security, we must have growth.  There’s a reason just a few years ago the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said the greatest national security threat to this country was our national debt.

I’ll tell you when I was traveling overseas I met with a CIA station chief in one of our foreign bases.  And I asked, “What do you see as the greatest threat?”  And given all of these threats, I envisioned all sorts of things.

And the immediate response that was given to me was the national debt and the economy of this country.  Which was really striking for someone on the ground dealing with serious hostiles but yet he said, “Look, if we don’t have the economic strength.”

How did we win the Cold War?  Ronald Reagan bankrupted the Soviets.  If we bankrupt ourselves, that’s how we undermine our national security.  And I think economic growth should be a bipartisan objective.

Republicans and Democrats should be willing to work together to get growth back.  And of all the reasons growth matters, the most important is that growth is integral to opportunity.

For a long, long time I’ve been arguing for what I call opportunity conservatism which is that every principle we as conservatives talk about should focus like a laser on opportunity.  On easing the means of assent up the economic ladder.

You know, a lot of folks have agonized about why we lost.  Why Republicans lost in 2012.  And I think it comes down to two words:  47%.  And I don’t mean the comment.  Look, I think Mitt Romney is a good and decent man.  And anyone can make an ill-advised comment.

What I mean is the narrative in the last election.  The narrative of the last election was the 47% of this country who are not paying income tax, who are dependent on government, we don’t have to worry about them.

I got to tell you, I can’t think of an idea more antithetical to what we as conservatives believe than that.  For one thing, it buys into the notion of the Left that the economic pie is fixed.  That it never changes.

And if that’s right, the arguments for wealth distribution make a lot of sense.  If the economic pie never changes, it’s very hard to justify so few having so much more than so many.  What we understand as conservatives is the economic pie isn’t fixed.

That it is growing and dynamic and indeed the free market system in the United States of America has been the greatest engine for wealth creation, for opportunity, for prosperity in the history of the world.

In my view, Republicans should be the party of the 47%.  Look at unemployment right now.  Unemployment is not evenly distributed.  College graduates right now, unemployment’s 3.8%.  If you’re a high skilled college graduate, you got a pretty robust labor market.

Those without high school degrees, unemployment’s 12%.  Hispanics, it’s nearly 10%.  African Americans, 14%.  Young people age 16 to 19, it’s over 25%.  You know, one-third of young people aged 25 to 29 have moved back in with their parents.  Makes a lot of parents excited.  (laughter)

The people who have been hurt the most by the Obama economy are the most vulnerable among us.  Because look, when you pound small businesses with taxes, with regulations, job killing regulations, who do you think gets hurt?

You know what, the CEOs do fine.  John and Sherry, you all are wonderful.  You all are doing fine.  (laughter)  Relatively speaking.  But when you pound small businesses the people that lose their jobs are those starting to climb the economic ladders.

Those are the people that get laid off or never get hired to begin with.  Take something like Obamacare, and by the way I think we need to repeal every single word of Obamacare.  (applause)

But who’s getting hurt by Obamacare?  If you’re a young person right now, you’re coming out of school because of Obamacare the odds are substantially higher you’re not going to find a job because more and more small businesses are not hiring or are laying people off.

If you do get a job, the odds are substantially higher your employer’s not going to offer health insurance because more and more employers are dropping health insurance because of Obamacare.

And if you’re lucky enough to get a job that has health insurance it is absolutely certain your premiums are going to be substantially higher.  Three years ago when Obamacare passed, President Obama promised the American people the average American family’s premium would drop $2,500.

Has anyone seen that happen?  And that was, by the way, by the end of his first term.  He gave a time commitment for the date on which that would happen.  In fact, the average American family’s premium has gone up by $3,000.  $5,500.

And who do you think gets hurt the most in that?  Look, the rich can afford another $5,500.  They’re not happy about it but they can afford it.  Someone who is struggling to make ends meet, to put food on the table, $5,500 out of their pocket is a major hardship.

Seniors, there are 14.8 million seniors on Medicare Advantage.  A heavy percentage of which are low income.  38% of Hispanic seniors are on Medicare Advantage.  Because of Obamacare, half of them are going to lose their Medicare Advantage.  Seven million seniors.

Why is it that Republicans don’t ask President Obama, “Why are you taking away the Medicare Advantage from half of the 38% of Hispanic seniors that are relying on it?”  Why are low income seniors getting hammered by this failed policy?

When we debated the Obamacare repeal on the floor of the Senate I read a newspaper article from Oklahoma about a single mom there who was working at a fast food restaurant.  And she described how she and all of her co-workers had their hours forcibly reduced to 29 hours a week because their employer would go out of business otherwise.

And what this single mom said was, “Look, I have two little kids at home.  I can’t feed my kids on 29 hours a week and neither can the other single moms who are working here.”

We need to understand that the most successful way to lift people up is a robust economic system, is economic growth, is a system — two-thirds of all new jobs come from small businesses.  When you have stagnation, the people at the bottom get hammered.

We need to champion lifting them up because there’s no nation on earth that has allowed so many millions to come from all over the world with nothing and achieve anything.

And I would note two things in conclusion.  One, in my life as in all of your lives, the ideas of opportunity are not abstract.  This is not an academic university seminar.  We all understand this in our own lives.

For me, my dad’s from Cuba.  He grew up in Cuba.  As a kid, when he was 14 he began fighting in the Cuban Revolution.  Actually fighting alongside Fidel Castro.  He didn’t know Castro was a Communist.  None of the kids did.

But he spent four years fighting in the revolution.  When he turned 17, he was thrown in prison and tortured.  My dad was beaten almost to death.  Today my father is a pastor here in Dallas.  Many of you all know him.

To this day his front teeth are not his own because they were kicked out of his mouth in a Cuban jail when he was a teenager.  He fled Cuba in 1957.  He came to Texas, landed in Austin.  He was 18, couldn’t speak English, had $100 sewn into his underwear.  And he washed dishes making $0.50 an hour to pay his way through the University of Texas.

He got a job, started a small business, worked towards the American Dream.  Now, my dad has been my hero my entire life.  But you know what I find most incredible about his story?  How commonplace it is.

Every one of us here has a story just like this.  We could walk up here one at a time and tell the exact same story because all of us are the children of those who risked everything for freedom.

And I think that’s the most fundamental DNA of what it means to be an American is to value freedom and opportunity above all else.  That’s what’s being threatened.  That’s why we’re here fighting.

And the last point I’ll make is change can come quickly.  It’s easy to get down at the status quo.  To hear horror after horror after horror and think there’s nothing we can do.  I want you to think back to 2005.  2005 George W. Bush had just been re-elected president.

Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and we had a large majority of the governorships all over the country.  Democrat consultants were going on television publicly crying in their beer talking about a, quote, permanent Republican majority.

That was 2005.  2006 we lost Congress.  2008 Barack Obama was elected.  2009 Obamacare passed.  And here we are today.  Politics can change fast.

Now, I’m convinced Republicans are in a very good position to win a majority of the Senate in 2014 if we stand for principle.  And I can tell you in the next two years I intend to work very, very hard to make that happen.

We can turn this around and it can happen quickly.  And so I will tell all of you, I am honored.  I am humbled.  I am blessed to be able to stand with you to stand shoulder to shoulder as together we’re working to preserve freedom, to preserve this nation as a shining beacon of hope and change.  As a shining city on a hill for the world.  Thank you and God bless you.  (applause)

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Huma Abedin, former Secretary of State Hillary’s Clinton’s long time aide with extensive ties to Muslim Brotherhood groups, was granted an arrangement by the State Department to do outside consulting work, even as she remained a top advisor in the Department. Abedin did not disclose either the arrangement, or how much she earned from it, on her financial report, despite a requirement that public officials must disclose significant sources of income. Clinton advisor Philippe Reines contended she was under no obligation to do so.

Abedin, who has served Clinton for 15 years, became a “special government employee” when she returned from maternity leave in June 2012, according to an unidentified source familiar with the arrangement. According to several sources who spoke to Politico, Abedin did work for outside clients, and one of her friends confirmed they totaled four entities in all: the State Department, Hillary Clinton, the William Jefferson Clinton Foundation and Teneo, a firm co-founded by Doug Band, a former counselor for Bill Clinton.

Teneo, which promotes itself as a company that “brings together the disciplines of government and public affairs, investor and public relations and investment banking advisory in an integrated approach that allows us to provide clients with unparalleled strategic counsel and operational support,” has advised clients such as Coca Cola and MF Global, the brokerage firm that went bankrupt while it was being run by Jon Corzine, former Governor of New Jersey, and big-donor “bundler” for Barack Obama’s re-election campaign.

The disclosure was revealed as Abedin’s husband, disgraced former Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner, has begun preparations for a New York City mayoral run next year in an attempt to resuscitate his career. The city’s Conflict of Interest Board requires mayoral candidates to disclose personal financial information, including spousal sources of income, but that part of a candidate’s filing is not made public. Furthermore, because Abedin relinquished her job as deputy chief of staff last June, that change abrogated her requirement to disclose private earnings for the rest of the year on her own disclosure forms. The change of Abedin’s employment status was done so quietly, she continued to be identified in news reports as employed in her former job. On March 1, Abedin was tapped to run Clinton’s post-State Department transition team, comprised of a six-person “transition office” located in Washington.

Good government groups have questioned the potential conflict of interest that representing the public, while maintaining private clients, suggests. “If she was being held out as a deputy chief of staff, it would be highly unusual for her to be a part-time employee or a consultant,” said Melanie Sloane, executive director of CREW, an ethics watchdog group. “Being a deputy chief of staff at the State Department is generally considered more than a full-time job.”

It is not clear what role, if any, Hillary Clinton played in approving Abedin’s transition to her new job. State Department officials, as well as people who work with the Clintons, refused to talk on the record about the arrangement. And while Weiner released a copy of the couple’s 2012 tax return revealing income of more than $490,000, he also declined to discuss what portion of that income was earned by Abedin apart from her job at State, which paid her around $135,000 for the year. The remaining amount of approximately $365,000 combines consulting fees for both husband and wife, sources said.

The change in Abedin’s status permitted her to work from home in New York, rather than at the State Department’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., allowing her to spend more time with her husband and child. While Abedin was pregnant, Weiner was forced to resign from his congressional seat when it was discovered that he had Tweeted sexually charged messages, as well as nude photos of himself, to several women. Weiner vehemently denied the allegations at first, saying his account had been hacked. But mounting political pressure forced him to admit the truth and abruptly resign.

Abedin’s arrangement is similar to those of other Clinton loyalists who received compensation for their work on Clinton’s government staff, and her political action committee, while she was a U.S. Senator from New York. Furthermore, while there is no exact number of State Department officials who have a similar arrangement, a Department source told Politico it was “not uncommon.”

Perhaps not. But Abedin is anything but a common government employee. While the mainstream media remains temporarily focused on Abedin’s role with regard to her husband’s political campaign, it remains calculatingly incurious about her work with the William Jefferson Clinton Foundation, and the tens of millions of dollars in donations it has received from such entities as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the governments of Kuwait and Qatar, Saudi businessman Nasser Al-Rashid, who has close ties to the Saudi royal family, Sheikh Mohammed H. Al-Amoudi, reputed to be one of the richest men in the world, and a group called Friends of Saudi Arabia and the Dubai Foundation.

Abedin’s earlier career also remains below the radar as well. She began working with Hillary Clinton in 1996, as the then-First Lady’s intern. She remained a loyal staffer as Clinton transitioned to the Senate, and the State Department.

During part of that time, Abedin had another job as well. From 1996-2008, she also worked as assistant editor of the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs (JMMA), a publication founded by Abdullah Omar Naseef.

Naseef was also secretary general of the Muslim World League in Saudi Arabia, a highly significant Muslim Brotherhood organization Osama Bin Laden once characterized as one of his terrorist group’s chief funding sources.

Using that connection, Naseef founded the Rabita Trust, a designated terrorist organization. In the late seventies, he hired Abedin’s parents to run his newly formed Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs (IMMA). Editing its journal has remained a family enterprise to this day, and Naseef’s tenure as a member of the journal’s advisory editorial board, seven years of which coincided with Huma’s Abedin’s tenure there, lasted until 2003–the same year he was named as a defendant in a civil case brought by victims of 9/11. Naseef was dropped from the suit in 2010, when a court decided it lacked jurisdiction over him.

Dr. Saleha Abedin, Huma’s mother, still edits the JMMA. She took over when Huma’s father, Syed Zainul Abedin, passed away. Both of Abedin’s parents, as well as her brother, Hassan Abedin, have deep, documented ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Furthermore, her mother runs the International Islamic Committee for Woman and Child, which is part of yet another terror-designated organization known as the Union of Good.

It remains impossible to understand how Abedin received security clearance to work at the State Department, which allows her access to top-secret documents. Even if one makes the case that she should not be tainted by the dubious relationships maintained by her family members, it is impossible to disassociate her from her own relationship with Abdullah Omar Naseef and his organization.

Yet in a testament to the power of PC-inspired denial, when these and other sordid relationships were documented in a letter sent by Reps. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Trent Franks (R-AZ), Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA), and Tom Rooney (R-FL) to the State Department’s Deputy Inspector General, politicians in both parties, as well as the mainstream media, accused Bachmann of engaging in a McCarthy-esque smear campaign.

The letter to the Inspector General was sent in June, the same month Abedin relinquished her position as deputy chief of staff. Whether one assumes this to be a mere coincidence or not, there is no denying that Abedin’s change in status was kept secret for nearly a year. The Obama administration could quickly put an end to this controversy by revealing the contents of Abedin’s responses contained in Standard Form 86, a “Questionnaire for National Security Positions.” That questionnaire should have been completed prior to Abedin serving in her capacity at State beginning in 2009.

No doubt a State Department up to its neck in the Benghazi scandal is too busy to respond.

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Youssef has been rotting in jail in California on trumped up charges since September 27, 2012. Youssef’s real offense was to produce the anti-Islam video the Obama administration falsely blamed for the attack in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012.  The truth is that Islamist jihadists took the lives of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in a pre-mediated terrorist attack.  The Obama administration knew the real cause of the violence well before it chose to make Youssef and his crude video the scapegoat.

Youssef was on probation after being convicted on federal financial fraud charges in Los Angeles in 2010 and serving approximately a year of his twenty-one month sentence in prison.  One of the conditions of his probation was that he was barred from using “any online service at any location” without the prior approval of his probation officer. While on probation he produced the anti-Islam video. He used aliases and brought in actors who were allegedly not aware of the real purpose behind the roles they had been asked to play. No doubt he had violated the terms of his probation, which could be used to justify revocation of the probation and his return to prison. However, the public display of Youssef being hauled in, his being held in solitary confinement according to his lawyer, his shackling in court and the threat of a new prison sentence in excess of the sentence for which he was originally convicted all point to one thing: The Obama administration’s goal all along was to punish Youssef for blasphemy against Islam – a crime under Sharia law – and to make sure that the Muslim world was fully aware of the punishment. Youssef’s probation violations served merely as a pretext.

Indeed, spontaneous mob violence in response to the video became central to the false narrative that the Obama administration concocted. It was trying to cover up its own failure to secure the Benghazi consulate adequately against the potential danger of an Islamist terrorist attack about which the CIA had previously warned. The video provided an alternative justification for what triggered the violence. The Obama administration’s public display of resolve to catch and prosecute the video producer was meant for the Muslim world’s consumption.

E-mails recently released show how the State Department pressured the CIA to remove any specific reference to al Qaeda and to remove the adjective “Islamic” before the word “extremists” from the infamous talking points that were supposed to inform the American people about the Benghazi attack. State Department and White House officials wanted to retain the talking points’ assessment that “the demonstrations” (replacing the word “attacks”) were believed to have been “spontaneously inspired by the protests at the US Embassy in Cairo and evolved into a direct attack against the US Consulate and subsequently its annex.” However, they insisted on omitting the unambiguous CIA statement in its earlier drafts of the talking points that “we do know that Islamic extremists with ties to al-Qa’ida participated in the attack.”

State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland got involved in the back-and-forth on the talking points. In one email dated September 14, 2012, she expressed her frustration that the CIA had not gone far enough to satisfy her own “issues or those of my building leadership.”

Who did Nuland have in mind when she referred to her “building leadership”? We do not know for sure if it was then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton herself. However, what we do know is that Clinton was busy pushing the video narrative at the very same time as these e-mail exchanges were taking place. Indeed, on September 14, 2012 – the same day as Nuland’s e-mail citing the unresolved issues of her “building leadership” – Hillary Clinton hammered away at the video. At a memorial service at Andrews Air Force attended by President Obama, Hillary Clinton and family members of the fallen heroes, Clinton vowed to the father of Navy Seal Tyrone Woods, who was killed in the attack, that the Obama administration would “arrest and prosecute” the producer of the video.  In her remarks at the service, she denounced the “awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with” as the cause of the violence.

Clinton was not alone in pushing the false video narrative. President Obama told the United Nations General Assembly on September 25, 2012 that a “crude and disgusting video” was responsible for sparking “outrage throughout the Muslim world.” Obama delivered this distortion of the truth on the world stage two weeks after the Benghazi attack, by which time there was no doubt the Benghazi attack was a pre-mediated Islamist terrorist assault that had nothing to do with Youssef’s video.

Obama declared to the General Assembly: “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” Just two days after Obama’s UN speech – and barely two weeks after then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s vow to the Benghazi victims’ families to “arrest and prosecute” the video producer – Youssef was arrested and held without bail. The charge was that Youssef had violated the terms of his probation linked to his prior conviction for the non-violent crime of bank fraud.

The Obama administration would settle for nothing else than significant jail time for Youssef.  It wanted to send him away for at least two years, more than the term of his original sentence and far in excess of a sentencing guideline range for a probation violation of four to 10 months. Moreover, Youssef had already served approximately a year of his original 21 month sentence for which he does not appear to have been given full credit in determining his sentence for violation of the terms of his probation.

The Obama administration brought in the Criminal Division chief for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles, Robert Dugdale, to personally handle Youssef’s case. Dugdale usually handles such high profile cases as a Mexican Mafia trial, not violations of probation for non-violent crimes. Indeed, according to his office’s website, the Criminal Division led by Dugdale consists of approximately 190 Assistant United States Attorneys and 70 support staff. There were plenty of lower level attorneys to deal with Youssef’s case if it were truly a typical instance of a probation violation or a garden variety fraud case.

Dugdale’s Criminal Division website states: “As a result of the events of September 11, 2001, DOJ [Department of Justice], of which the USAO [United States Attorney's Office] is a part, has refocused its efforts to prevent terrorist crimes before they occur and to bring those who participate in the planning and execution of such crimes to justice. This is the first priority of both DOJ and the USAO.”

Yet while the jihadist terrorists who committed the murders in Benghazi remain at large, the Obama administration decided to use the Los Angeles U.S. Attorney’s Office Criminal Division chief to make Youssef the scapegoat, in order to prove to the Muslim world that it would spare no effort to punish “those who slander the prophet of Islam.”

Rather than risk a longer sentence than what he was originally put away for, Youssef took a deal for a one-year term.

On November 7th – the day after President Obama was re-elected – U.S. District Court Judge Christina Snyder, a Bill Clinton nominee, sentenced Youssef to one year in prison where he remains today.  Youssef was brought into court in shackles to hear his sentence. Only one pool reporter – from the Associated Press, which ironically now finds itself a target of the Obama administration’s anti-First Amendment fervor – was allowed in court.

Youssef’s attorney delivered this prescient statement of Youssef’s to the media on the courthouse steps: “The one thing he wanted me to tell all of you is President Obama may have gotten Osama bin Laden, but he didn’t kill the ideology.”

We can stipulate that Mark Basseley Youssef produced an “awful Internet video” as Hillary Clinton put it. And we can also stipulate that he committed probation violations, used aliases and misled his actors. However, when the only person in prison in the aftermath of the Benghazi attack is someone who produced a controversial film in the exercise of his First Amendment rights and not the jihadist murderers, something is very wrong in America under the Obama administration.

As Michael W. McConnell, a former judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit who now directs the Stanford Constitutional Law Center stated, “It sends exactly the wrong message abroad, because when people are becoming violent to try to pressure the U.S. to violate someone’s constitutional rights, we ought to be going out of our way to make it clear that we will not accede to that kind of pressure.”

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Monica Lovinescu, a Paris-based literary critic and journalist who encouraged intellectual resistance to Romania’s communist regime from the microphone of Radio Free Europe from 1964-92, passed away five years ago, on April 21,  at the age of 85.

The daughter of influential interwar academic Eugen Lovinescu, and a mother who was to die in a communist prison, Monica Lovinescu enjoyed tremendous prestige and influence in her native Romania. She was considered a moral and intellectual model in arguing that communist crimes were equal to those of the Nazis, and her work angered dictator Nicolae Ceausescu to the point that he ordered the beating in 1977 that left her in a coma. She recovered to return to her seat behind the microphone, where she observed the downfall of Ceausescu’s regime in 1989. I started listening to her broadcasting as a teenager. For me and many other Romanian intellectuals, Monica Lovinescu and her husband, philosopher Virguil Ierunca, were the voices of moral clarity. They still are.

When the New York Jets football team chose Oday Aboushi with the eighth pick of the fifth round of the April 2013 NFL Draft (141st pick overall), the organization knew that it was getting an elite player who could wreak havoc on the field – one of the top offensive linemen in the entire draft. At 6-foot-5, 310 pounds, no doubt, Abousi is an imposing figure. What the Jets didn’t know, though, was the type of havoc he could potentially cause off the field.

Although Aboushi was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, he proudly refers to himself as a “Palestinian-American.” His parents both arrived in the U.S. from the town of Beit Hanina in the West Bank. The first time he had been to the area was during his freshman year of college. In an article published by ESPN, the sports network stated about Aboushi’s trip, “It was a completely different world, although filled with the same kinds of people he knew growing up in Brooklyn.”

One long-time friend of the family is Linda Sarsour, a rabid anti-Israel activist, who has Hamas-related family serving prison sentences in Israel and has herself been questioned by U.S. authorities. Less than one year ago, Sarsour posted on her Twitter account, “Nothing is creepier than Zionism.” In a May 2012 tweet, she claimed that the al-Qaeda “Underwear Bomber,” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who plotted to blow up a civilian aircraft, was actually a CIA operative.

When Aboushi was chosen by the Jets in the draft, Sarsour used that same Twitter account she placed her fanatic missives on to post two dozen messages about it, including Twitter conversations with Aboushi. She also tweeted photos of herself with Aboushi.

Sarsour holds the position of Executive Director of the Arab American Association of New York (AAANY). Oday Aboushi’s sister, Tahanie, who also uses Twitter to attack Israel, is a lawyer for the organization. Together with the Executive Director of CAIR-NY, Muneer Awad, Tahanie Aboushi condemned ads speaking out against Islamic jihad – ads which would soon be placed throughout New York City’s subway stations.

Awad, like Sarsour, is obsessed with Israel and has used Twitter to attack the Jewish state. He tweeted “GOP kissing Israel’s ass hurts Israel,” and condemned a speech made by President Barack Obama in praise of Israel as “racist and untrue.” For Awad to state such things makes sense, given the fact that the organization he works for, CAIR, has its roots with Hamas.

And like Sarsour, CAIR-NY went out of its way to praise the Jets drafting of Aboushi. The group called the signing “an American dream story.”

Far from being an American dream, Oday Aboushi has exhibited this exact type of extremism. He too has targeted Israel with his Twitter account, one tweet even having anti-Semitic overtones. This past January, he posted a photo depicting an old woman looking down while three clearly Orthodox Jews talk to each other in the background. The caption reads, “88 year-old Palestinian evicted from home in Jerusalem by Israel authorities to make room 4 Orthodox Jews.”

The photo contains the logo of Middle East Monitor (MEM), an anti-Zionist publication based in England. The picture has recently been used in a smear campaign against Israel and her observant Jewish citizens. Aboushi chose to be one of the smear merchants.

On April 19, one week before the NFL Draft, Aboushi wrote a tweet exalting a fundraising dinner sponsored by Islamic Relief (IR), an organization with numerous ties to terrorism. He wrote, “Beautiful NJ fundraiser event for the kids of Palestine in refugee camps.” The affair was held in Hasbrouk Heights, New Jersey and was titled, ‘A Night for Palestine.’

In May 2006, Israel labeled Islamic Relief a front for Hamas after arresting the group’s Gaza program manager, Ayaz Ali, for providing “funds and assistance to various Hamas institutions and organizations.” Ali admitted that he had cooperated with local Hamas operatives.

As well, in 1999, IR collected and sent more than $6 million to Chechen rebels with ties to al-Qaeda. The same year, IR received $50,000 from Human Concern International (HCI), a charity that the U.S. Department of Treasury described as a “Bin Laden front.” Shortly after the September 11 attacks, IR itself was investigated by the Treasury Department as a possible source of funding for al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations.”

Besides Twitter, Oday Aboushi also has a Facebook account. Currently in the ‘Likes’ section of his Facebook page is the imam of the Islamic Center of Temecula Valley (ICTV), Mohamed Mabrouk. Mabrouk was previously the imam of the Islamic Society of Greater Lansing (ISGL). Both of these mosques have ties to terrorism.

Last March, ICTV held a conference and banquet at the Anaheim Hilton, titled, ‘Muhammad (pbuh): The Prophet for Our Times.’ The event was co-sponsored by Islamic Relief. Among the speakers for the function was the imam of Brooklyn’s al-Taqwa mosque, Siraj Wahhaj. Wahhaj had previously been named by the U.S. government as an “unindicted co-conspirator” for a trial dealing with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Wahhaj had been linked to the bombmaker of the attack, Clement Rodney Hampton-El, and during the trial, he was a character witness for the spiritual leader of the attack, Omar Abdel Rahman, whom Wahhaj has openly praised.

According to the January 2006 ISGL Constitution, which is located on the official ISGL website, the ownership of the mosque property was “entrusted” to the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT). And according to the ISGL website, ISGL is a subsidiary of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). In 2007 and 2008, both NAIT and ISNA were named by the U.S. Justice Department as “unindicted co-conspirators” for two federal trials dealing with the financing of millions of dollars to Hamas. ISNA, as well, was co-founded by Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) convicted terrorist Sami al-Arian.

Oday Aboushi, himself, is an observant Muslim. While playing football for the University of Virginia, during the month of Ramadan, he would fast every day from sunrise to sunset. This bit of information has made its way into a number of articles written about Aboushi, in admiration for his commitment to his religion. But what cannot be praised or tolerated are the radical behavior and associations that Aboushi has embraced.

During one of his post-draft interviews, Aboushi mentioned how each of the teams interested in picking him sat him in a room and “grilled” him with questions for up to a quarter-of-an-hour. He said that these “formal meetings” were attended by all the team staff, including athletic director, head coach and owner.

At their meeting, either the Jets didn’t ask the right questions about Aboushi’s personal background and affiliations which might conflict or cause damage to the Jets’ image or Aboushi didn’t answer the questions honestly. The only other possibility is that the team only cares about Aboushi the exceptional athlete and nothing else.

In April 2009, the Jets front office contacted the NFL to ask that the date of its home opener be moved, as it was going to coincide with the Jewish high holiday of Rosh Hashanah. The team did the right thing to complain on behalf of their Jewish fan base, and they need to do the same in the case of their Islamist draft pick.

As of now, Aboushi’s name sits atop the Jets website roster. How long he will remain there is up to management.

Beila Rabinowitz, director of Militant Islam Monitor, contributed to this report.

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At the May 5 event, church leader Rev. Ed Bacon said that he “literally had my life changed and my thinking changed because of these two leaders,” referring to MPAC leaders Maher Hathout and Salam al-Marayati. He went so far as to say that the Islamic Center of Southern California, where Hathout is a spokesman and Muslim Brotherhood texts are used, is “my mosque.”

At the event, both MPAC leaders denounced terrorism and said Muslims must provide a counter-narrative to the violent themes that radicalize. Hathout said that too many Muslims are “soft” in confronting the radical ideas and have a “gang” mentality where they automatically side with other Muslims against non-Muslims.

However, Hathout said America is run by an elite minority beholden to lobbyists. He said that American democracy is threatened by “Islamophobia”  driven by supremacists who believe “the other” doesn’t deserve equal rights.

Al-Marayati rightly pointed out that there is an ideological struggle and reform in Islamic teaching is needed, but attributed the conflict to anger over the aggression of America and its allies.

“When a superpower is aiding and abetting oppression and there are grievances, and people react in a violent way, they [Americans] look at the violence and they say it is not time to deal with the grievances,” he said.

He claimed that there is a “cottage industry” of anti-Muslim activists that is part of a “larger machine,” including the military-industrial complex and special interests. These conspirators “want more contracts for more weapons to countries that only use these weapons against their own people or against civilians.”

MPAC held its last annual conference at this church, where Reverend Ed Bacon denounced “evangelical Zionism” as an evil on par with slavery. The church and MPAC held a press conference to declare their critics “right-wing extremists” who are “hateful.”

The critics noted that MPAC was founded by Muslim Brotherhood ideologues, including Senior Adviser Maher Hathout’s brother who was a “close disciple” of the group’s founder, Hassan al-Banna. Maher Hathout says he remains “very proud” of his time in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, but emphasizes it was 60 years ago. His brother said they came to the U.S. to spread the “Islamic Movement” of al-Banna.

After coming to America, one or both of the Hathout brothers was connected to the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood, as a 1989 document shows. MPAC has maintained a close alliance with U.S. Brotherhood entities ever since. In 1997, Maher Hathout promoted Hassan al-Banna as one of the “reformists,” along with other Islamists like Rachid al-Ghannouchi, who MPAC still hosts. In 1998 and 1999, he and al-Marayati legitimized Hezbollah’s attacks on Israeli soldiers.

In 2000, Hathout said a “general intifada” would overthrow Arab governments guilty of “treason” for not confronting the “butchers” of Israel. Around this time, MPAC started becoming more conscious of the language it was using. Hathout said he regretted the “harshness of my remarks” when they received negative attention, but not the message. Tellingly, a radical named Mahdi Bray continued to serve as MPAC’s Political Director.

In 2003, MPAC criticized  the designations of Hamas and Hezbollah as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, suggesting that it was done out of “political considerations.” Its 2010 policy paper characterized the Muslim Brotherhood as a moderate “conservative” group that could be used to counter Al-Qaeda’s influence. In 2012, I debated al-Marayati and challenged MPAC to confront the Muslim Brotherhood. He replied that it was a “ridiculous” suggestion and “it’s not worth our time.”

To be fair, MPAC’s overall tone has changed.  Maher Hathout criticizes the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and says he’s on the side of the opposition, though he has “great respect” for the group and believes Egyptian President Morsi is “sincere.” During last year’s convention at All Saints Church, he said that Sharia Law’s penal code is not applicable for today and “we don’t want to enforce Sharia anywhere.” He also said Muslims must “chase out the ideology of death” and oppose blasphemy laws.

Al-Marayati criticized CNN for reporting suggesting that religion and mosques are causing extremism. He seemed to suggest that this network enabled the Boston bombings to happen. He said that the “rise in Islamophobia” is causing law enforcement to look in the wrong places. Apparently, one of those wrong places in his opinion is the Islamic Society of Boston, where the bombers worshiped.

He pointed out that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was thrown out of a Friday service after he confronted an imam for exalting Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a non-Muslim. He didn’t mention that the mosque has deep Muslim Brotherhood ties, promoted the theme that the U.S. government persecutes Muslims, justified hitting women and children and had radical guest speakers. The radicalism at the mosque scared away a moderate Muslim who then started speaking out about it.

This is contradicted by what Islamist terrorists tell us. Their grievances flow out of their ideology. The Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader, Sheikh Yousef al-Qaradawi, said the conflict with Jews “is not driven by nationalistic causes or patriotic belonging; it is rather driven by religious incentives.” He then goes on to talk about a prophetic battle “between the collective body of Muslims and the collective body of Jews i.e. all Muslims and all Jews.”

Osama Bin Laden said the same thing. In discussing the core of the war with the West, he explained, “There are only three choices in Islam: [1] either willing submission [conversion]; [2] or payment of the jizya, through physical, though not spiritual, submission to the authority of Islam; [3] or the sword — for it is not right to let him [an infidel] live. The matter is summed up for every person alive: Either submit, or live under the suzerainty of Islam, or die.”

The message of MPAC and its allies to interfaith audiences is that Islamist terrorism is what happens when you ignore their advice.

This article was sponsored by the Institute on Religion and Democracy.

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