The Flame has been discovered in seven Middle Eastern countries, though the number of infections found in Iran is more than the rest combined with 189 instances. There have been 98 infections detected in Israel and the Palestinian territories. Sudan was hit with 32 infections, a country whose regime is increasingly Islamist and friendly towards Hamas. There have been 30 infections found in Syria, 18 in Lebanon, 10 in Saudi Arabia and 5 in Egypt.

It is not believed at this time that the Flame targeted a specific industry or program like Stuxnet did. Instead, it is meant to act as the “the ultimate spy,” copying hard drive data, logging instant messages and other online communications, recording keystrokes, taking screenshots and even secretly turning on computer microphones to record nearby conversations. There is also the potential for sabotage because it can potentially delete information and change settings on computer systems, opening up doors for attack.

Some cyber experts think it was deployed in February or March 2010, while others think it has been active as far back as five years ago. It is unknown who authored the Flame, but suspicion immediately fell on Israel, possibly with U.S. assistance. Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs encouraged such suspicion during an interview, saying, “Whoever sees the Iranian threat as a serious threat would be likely to take different steps, including these, in order to hurt them.” He hinted at his country’s involvement, saying, “Israel is blessed to be a nation possessing superior technology. These achievements of ours open up all kinds of possibilities for us.”

The latest known cyber attack on Iran happened in late April. Iran announced that its oil industry was being targeted by foreign hackers, specifically its Oil Ministry and its Kharg Island terminal where the majority of Iran’s oil is exported from. “Data related to some of the users have been compromised,” the Iranian regime said, though it denied that there was any serious damage.

The Center for Middle Eastern Studies at UT Austin was planning to publish the book in honor of the late American scholar Elizabeth Fernea, a professor there whose life and work were focused on the Middle East.

At first, novelist Huzama Habayeb was delighted to contribute as one of fifteen Arab writers. But that turned to “horror,” as a Gulf News editorial put it, when she realized that the collection would also feature two Israeli women, Yehudit Hendel and Orly Castel-Bloom. Habayeb withdrew her manuscript, complaining to the Center that Israel is an “occupier” of her land “Palestine” – although she was born in Kuwait, raised in Jordan, lives in Dubai, and has never set foot in Israel.

The university accepted her withdrawal but moved forward with plans to publish. Taken aback by this, Habayeb determined to ban the book altogether. She urged other Arab contributors to withdraw their manuscripts. A friend, Egyptian novelist Radwa Ashour who is married to a Palestinian poet, was the first to go along. Then others got onboard.

The Center shrugged and said the book was already at the printers and would be published as is. Habayeb wasn’t about to give up. “There are academic boycott movements around the world protesting the Israeli occupation,” she said, then incorrectly claimed that “the only two countries where they don’t exist are the United States and Israel.” She threatened to embarrass the university: “It doesn’t need a genius to figure out that the Texas center wanted to resolve the issue quickly and silently.”

According to Dr. Kamran Scot Aghaie, the Center’s director, twelve authors asked to withdraw their contributions from the volume, with one additional request from the translator of another submission. “All the Arab writers whom I managed to contact withdrew their contributions,” Habayeb exulted.

The Center for Middle Eastern Studies refused to censor or discriminate against the Israelis, but the boycott led to enough withdrawals to make the book project no longer viable, so the publication was discontinued. Habayeb crowed to the Dubai-based website Gulf News,

I am so proud of having the book cancelled. I am a Palestinian and to achieve this, to be able to resist the illegal Israeli occupation of my homeland is something that I will cherish forever. It is my own victory in the struggle.

An opinion piece in the Gulf News gleefully reported that “Habayeb has a smile on her face this morning” and described her actions as “those of a resistance fighter.” It insisted that “academics the world over need to ensure that Israel is isolated for its immoral and illegal actions in occupying Palestine and repressing the Palestinian people.” (Dr. Aghaie offers another perspective on that: “The unfortunate reality is that in Middle Eastern Studies sometimes politics trumps academic ideals.”) The editorial closes by saying that “the pen is mightier than the sword” – an odd moral to draw from the censorship of nearly thirty writers.

The day was framed as a “teachable moment” with respect to an anti-bullying campaign. Yet once again, Diane Woods, a special-education teacher and the school’s anti-bullying coordinator, framed the incident in a manner that aligns itself, either inadvertently or by design, with a version of the confrontation that remain in dispute. She believes the incident would have ended differently if Zimmerman had walked away. “A child lost his life,” Woods said. “It may not be a racial thing here…And we see so much anger and aggression here…It starts with hitting now, and it leads to more deaths when they get older. And that’s what we’re trying to avoid.”

Apparently the school is also trying to avoid dealing with the possibility that Zimmerman did indeed walk away and was pursued by Martin regardless of his retreat. On March 26, the Orlando Sentinel published an account of the story where Zimmerman claimed he was walking away when Martin approached him from behind, and the two men exchanged words. Martin then allegedly punched Zimmerman in the nose, knocking him to the ground, got on top of Zimmerman and began beating him. “That is the account Zimmerman gave police, and much of it has been corroborated by witnesses, authorities say,” reported the Sentinel. “There have been no reports that a witness saw the initial punch Zimmerman told police about.”

An accurate account? It’s difficult to say for certain at this juncture, which is precisely the point. Thus, it is more than a little ironic that a Trayvon Martin Day to promote anti-bullying was named after the man who may turn out to have been the bully.

Such a possibility was apparently irrelevant for principal Coleman. “I wanted to do something in recognition of Trayvon Martin,” she said. “I wanted to capture this incident in order to bring about change…This wasn’t about…dealing with who’s right or who’s wrong” with regard to the incident. That’s nonsense. The implication of an “anti-bullying” event named Trayvon Martin Day is about as subtle as a sledgehammer: Martin is the victim, Zimmerman is the the bully, and his claim of self-defense is not credible.

Ms. Coleman and other school officials are certainly entitled to draw whatever conclusions they choose to draw from the incident. Yet foisting those conclusions on schools students–at the elementary level no less–constitutes nothing more than progressive activism masquerading itself as anti-bullying education.

The U.S. currently contributes annually about $250 million of the approximately $600 million budget of UNRWA, the UN agency that provides housing, education, and welfare to Palestinian “refugees.” The U.S. has funneled a total of $4.4 billion to UNRWA since it was founded in 1948.

Under the Kirk amendment, the funding to those no longer considered refugees would not necessarily end; they could be defined as poverty cases. But only the thirty thousand, instead of five million, would still be designated as refugees.

What explains the vast differential in numbers? Before and during Israel’s 1948-49 War for Independence, about 650,000 Palestinian Arabs (many of them very recent immigrants from other Arab countries) left the territories that became Israel. About thirty thousand of them are still alive today.

But in 1965 and 1982, UNRWA made decisions—unique in history, never applied to any other refugee population in the world—to define children and grandchildren, too, of displaced Palestinians as “refugees.” Hence the swelled numbers of today, with “refugees” kept in “camps” in Syria,Lebanon, Jordan, and even the Palestinian Authority. Jonathan Schanzer notes that, according to a study, if this situation persists their number will reach fifteen million by 2050.

Why define so many people as “refugees,” and why keep them in “camps” indefinitely? The answer, as Shoshana Bryen notes, was given in an interview to Lebanon’s Daily Star by the Palestinian ambassador to Lebanon, Abdullah Abdullah.

Abdullah told the Daily Star “unequivocally” that even if a Palestinian state were to be established in the West Bank and Gaza—that is, the much-vaunted “two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”—the Palestinian refugees “would not become citizens” of it. The reason is that “The state is the 1967 borders, but the refugees are not only from the 1967 borders. The refugees are from all over Palestine.”

American Jews are not alone in laying out the welcome mat for Beinart. Within the past week, the Jerusalem Post published an editorial welcoming Beinart into the “big tent” of “Zionism,” and commending his call for a boycott of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria as “well-intentioned” and somehow different from similar calls by foreign governments. In an unprecedented move, the Jerusalem Post’s weekly columnist Isi Leibler was compelled to condemn his own newspaper’s editorial as “idiotic.”

Why are we Jews laying out the red carpet to this man? And why, in general, are we Jews so friendly and deferential to our worst enemies?

One reason is that, despite the efforts of our enemies through the ages to portray us as super-sophisticated criminal masterminds, we Jews are actually very simple-minded and naive, at least where our enemies are concerned.

Beinart professes at every opportunity to love Israel and to even be a “Zionist.” He boasts that he even has an Israeli flag displayed on the wall of his six-year-old son’s room. This seems to render his Jewish audiences oblivious to Beinart’s repetition and endorsement of nearly every element of the Arab world’s anti-Israel narrative and his overwhelmingly negative characterization of Israel as an “undemocratic” society.

Not that Beinart isn’t also a clever debater. His principal tactic is to make so many false or misleading statements all at once that it is impossible to reply to or even to keep track of them all. Inevitably, some of them will sink subliminally into the minds of his audience, if they are the least bit open to suggestion. Also in his arsenal of debating tactics are distortions by omission and false assumptions implied by his tone and the drift of his argument. These methods are especially insidious since they do not require the “lie direct” and make it difficult for the audience to examine the implied assumptions on which they are based.

All three of these tactics were much in evidence during Beinart’s debate with Daniel Gordis at Columbia University on May 2. Within the space of six minutes, Beinart informed his audience that Israel’s rule over the Palestinians is “undemocratic” and “South African”  in character (he avoids using the inflammatory word “apartheid” when speaking to Jews not yet fully indoctrinated in hostility to Israel); that “occupied” Palestinians are not allowed to vote, while Israeli Jewish “settlers” in the “occupied territories” are; that Palestinians are stopped at checkpoints while Jewish settlers are waived through them; that Israel is sponsoring “settlement growth” in the “remote” Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba and in Ariel, which is “thirteen miles inside” the Palestinian territories; that Israel is “paying” Israelis to move to the “occupied” territories; and that Israel’s government is the obstacle to peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

The claim that Israel denies the Palestinian Arabs the right to vote is flat-out false. Palestinians have voted repeatedly in Palestinian elections without Israeli interference of any kind. The only reason they have not voted in the last few years is that Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, has refused to hold elections in open defiance of the Palestinians’ own constitution, and he has continued to rule his people without any legal mandate. That is Abbas’s own choice, not that of Israel or, for that matter, the Palestinian Arabs. The claim that Palestinians are forced to submit to searches at checkpoints while Israelis are automatically waived through is equally false. As Eli E. Hertz has pointed out, Israeli Jews are routinely subjected to searches at checkpoints whenever they go into a supermarket, restaurant or post office, or get on a bus—usually several times each day. In addition, they are frequently stopped at roadside checkpoints, just as Palestinian Arabs are.

Nor does Israel’s government pay anyone a single shekel as a reward for moving to a “settlement.” In fact, it issues so few permits for new houses in the so-called “settlements”—actually villages and suburban communities less than 15 miles from Israel’s 1949 armistice lines—that it is almost impossible for young Jewish couples with children to remain in them, much less for Israelis from within the “green line” to move to them.

Furthermore, there is no real similarity between Israel to apartheid-era South Africa. Israel has completely integrated public transportation, restaurants and markets, and has no legal restrictions on the right of the 1.2 million Arab citizens of Israel to live on or to own land anywhere in Israel. There are numerous integrated neighborhoods throughout the country, and Arabs serve as members of parliament, judges and government ministers. In fact, an Arab judge recently convicted former Israeli president Moshe Katzav of rape and sentenced him to prison. Could a black judge (of course there were none) have done that to a white president in apartheid South Africa?

[For the whole story behind Occupy Wall Street and how this movement marks a new phase in the rebirth of the communist Left, read the broadside by David Horowitz and John Perazzo, Occupy Wall Street: The Communist Movement Reborn. This essential pamphlet exposes the roots, leaders and hidden agendas of the radical movement and its war on capitalism and free societies.]

Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.  

While journalists savor chummy chitchats with Mrs. Obama about beets and Beyonce, FLOTUS is once again escaping hard questions about her cronyism, junk science and generous junkets at taxpayer expense.

Mrs. Obama’s 2012 campaign media blitz has already brought her to daytime airwaves (“The Ellen DeGeneres Show”), prime-time reality TV (“The Biggest Loser”) and children’s programming (“iCarly”). This week, she’s hitting up “Good Morning America,” “The View,” Rachael Ray’s cooking show, “LIVE! with Kelly (Ripa)” and Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.” Out: Let’s Move! In: Let’s Move … in front of the TV cameras!

My prediction? As soon as the fawning media frenzy dies down and Mrs. Obama’s book rises to the top of The New York Times best-seller list, POTUS will go back to claiming that FLOTUS is a “private citizen” who should be left alone. The Obamas’ Chicago strategists have long enjoyed invoking selective immunity for the first lady without challenge. Lapdog reporters have assisted in creating an impenetrable bubble of political protection around the profligate, policy-meddling first lady.

We’ve seen it before.

When conservatives challenged Mrs. O’s caustic 2008 campaign trail statements disparaging America and fear-mongering for votes, her hubby invoked the “civilian” shield. He threatened Republicans to “lay off his wife,” arguing that political spouses should not be subject to public scrutiny because they didn’t choose public life.

When Mrs. O’s lavish vacation in Spain — accompanied by an entourage of 70 Secret Service agents and 250 Spanish law enforcement officers — provoked a massive public backlash in 2010, then-White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs argued that the first lady was a “private citizen” who should be off-limits to tough questions about her behavior.

Horse-hockey.

Obama’s outspoken bitter half conscientiously and deliberately inserted herself into the public square long before the family moved to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue — whether it was organizing a Woods Fund panel with her husband and Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers, taking a publicly subsidized government job with Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, or parlaying her relationship with political mentor Valerie Jarrett into a cushy public job at the University of Chicago Medical Center, where she oversaw a patient-dumping scheme that benefited her political cronies.

Last year, former Democratic president Jimmy Carter thoroughly charmed Mariela’s father and uncle in Havana. “We greeted each other as old friends,” gushed Carter regarding his meeting with Fidel Castro.

“In 2002, we received him warmly,” reciprocated Castro. “Now, I reiterated to him our respect and esteem.”

“Jimmy Carter was the best of all U.S. Presidents,” gushed Raul Castro while seeing his American guest off personally and jovially.

In fact, for many prominent Democrats, Castro’s Cuba resembles the very Land of Oz, with Cubans laughing the days away. If this sounds hyperbolic, here’s “Conscience of the Democratic Party” George McGovern after a visit to Cuba in 1975: “Everywhere we were surrounded by laughing children who obviously loved Fidel.”

Here’s the late Frank Mankiewics, a lifelong Democratic factotum, who served as campaign chairman for presidential candidate George McGovern, press secretary for Senator Robert Kennedy and as head of NPR from 1977-1983: Mankiewics was greatly impressed by “the enthusiasm and unity of the Cuban people…they are proud of their accomplishments and sing songs about themselves and their country that reflect this self-pride.”

Mariela’s uncle Fidel ringingly endorsed Obama the first time around, while greatly fearing for the Democratic candidate’s life. “A profound racism exists in the U.S.,” Fidel revealed in an essay dated October 2008. “It’s a miracle that the Democratic candidate (Obama) has not suffered the fate of other Americans who dreamed of equality and justice like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King.”

For the record: Fidel Castro, forcibly overthrew a black Cuban head of state (Fulgencio Batista) and replaced his government with one where only nine percent of the ruling Stalinist party is black and where the prison population is 80-90 percent black. He jailed the longest suffering black political prisoner of modern history (Eusebio Penalver who suffered longer in Castro’s dungeon than Nelson Mandela suffered in South Africa’s). He sentenced other blacks (Dr. Elias Biscet, Jorge Antunez) to 20 year sentences essentially for quoting Martin Luther King Jr. in a public square.

And Chris Matthews isn’t alone in swooning over Obama’s charisma, verbal agility and smarts. Fidel’s leg also tingles: ”(Obama) has a habit of looking at his adversary with serenity and laughing at the verbal gaffes of an opponent who looks blankly into space,” continued Castro’s endorsement, where he also denounced McCain as “a habitual liar, who lacks an ethical code and is an instrument of the ‘Miami Mafia’” (i.e. overwhelmingly Republican Cuban-Americans.)

This week’s guest was Steve Emerson, founder and executive director of the InvestigativeProject.org. He is an internationally recognized expert on terrorism and national security and author. Consulted by the White House, National Security Council, FBI, Justice Department, Congress and intelligence agencies, Mr. Emerson is in great demand as one of the most astute, insightful and knowledgeable experts in the world today on the threat and prospects of militant Islamic terrorism. He has been quoted in more than 500 news articles and has appeared frequently on network television. His 2002 best-selling book, American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us, provides the first context and understanding for how one of the most notorious terrorist groups in the world could have plotted the worst terrorist attack on American soil without detection or scrutiny by American authorities.

To listen to the program, click here.

Or go to: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/radio-jihad/2012/05/30/the-jamie-glazov-show.

See you next Tuesday night!

What happens to a top left-wing operative when he loses control of a media operation so badly that the White House has to distance itself from its allied think tank? He gets a job offer from Nancy Pelosi.

After the use of bigoted language by ThinkProgress contributors turned into a growing scandal, the White House publicly distanced itself from ThinkProgress, an outlet of the Center for American Progress, which Time Magazine called the think tank with the largest influence on the Obama administration. Jarrod Bernstein, the White House’s liaison to the Jewish community, described the events there as troubling and stated that the Center for American Progress’s attitude was not that of the Obama administration.

This distancing has however proven to be only momentary with Faiz R. Shakir, ThinkProgress’s longtime Editor-in-Chief and Vice President at the Center for American Progress, who had made the site what it is, going off to work as a senior advisor and new media director for Nancy Pelosi. Moving Faiz Shakir into such a prominent role where he will be able to influence policy and messaging for a key Democratic Party figure, while keeping Danielle “Jewbags” Gilbert on as the DNC liaison to the Jewish community, is proof once again that the Democratic Party does not take bigotry seriously when it is directed at Jews. Not only that, but it even rewards the bigots with plum posts.

Faiz Shakir had co-authored the “Fear Inc.” report, which had implicitly claimed that Islamophobia was the product of a Jewish conspiracy, and had written positively about the Tunisian Islamist Al-Nahda Party and its genocidal head, Sheikh Rashid Ghannouchi, who has engaged in blatant anti-Semitism, and has said, “There are no civilians in Israel. The population—males, females and children—are the army reserve soldiers, and thus can be killed.”

During his time at ThinkProgress, Faiz Shakir had repeatedly attacked the Jewish State, endorsing the Hamas aid flotilla to Gaza and attacking Israel’s attempts to defend itself against terrorists. Unlike some of his more radical junior colleagues, like Ali Gharib and Zaid Jlani, his position has forced Shakir to be somewhat more discreet.

But Shakir’s sympathy for Islamists and antipathy for the Jewish State are no surprise at all considering his activities during his college days when he was a member of the Harvard Islamic Society.

While the Harvard Islamic Society’s affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood’s MSA is somewhat vague, its Constitution states that its independence does not preclude “affiliation with the Muslim Students Association of the United States and Canada.”

Yet another big city mayor feeding at the trough, Milwaukee’s corrupt mayor Tom Barrett has been working with the boulevard Bolsheviks of ACORN for years to fleece taxpayers. Like ACORN, Barrett has been willing to jettison his so-called social justice credentials when there’s big money involved. When serving in Congress, Barrett sold his soul years ago, siding with wealthy Indian casino interests against poorer tribes.

Various far-left groups, including the recently re-branded affiliates of ACORN, have been promoting the recall of Walker, fomenting unrest, and encouraging street violence inside and outside Wisconsin. The Occupy Wall Street protests, for example, are part of what ACORN’s sociopathic Marxist founder Wade Rathke calls an “anti-banking jihad.” The Working Families Party, another ACORN front group, participated in the protests by raising money and paying for rent-a-mobs in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park.

In 2010 Barrett launched “Take Root Milwaukee,” which grew out of his Milwaukee Foreclosure Partnership Initiative (MFPI). According to Barrett that useless feel-good program has “assisted thousands of families in Milwaukee [to obtain] housing counseling, engage in mediation to prevent foreclosure, and purchase and renovate foreclosed properties.”

As Milwaukee commentator Charlie Sykes quipped at the time, “Maybe Barrett simply wanted to give a shout out to ACORN as a way to make President Obama feel more at home when he visits…”

Affordable Housing Centers of America (AHCOA), which used to be called ACORN Housing, was one of the Barrett-endorsed groups participating in Take Root Milwaukee.

AHCOA was showered with at least $729,849 in taxpayer funding by the Obama administration last year despite powerful evidence of corruption and massive accounting irregularities at the longtime affiliate of ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now).

ACORN Housing was the largest affiliate of ACORN, the notorious group brought down by undercover videos showing its employees facilitating child prostitution in 2009. ACORN Housing changed its name two years ago to AHCOA to escape the stigma of being associated with ACORN, the former employer and legal client of President Obama. ACORN’s state chapters have restructured themselves and now go by names such as New York Communities for Change and Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, both of which have been heavily involved in organizing and financing the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Among the dead: 49 children and 34 women. The worldwide expressions of outrage at the massacre may be the impetus for further UN sanctions, as well as increasing the likelihood that Western nations will begin supplying the Syrian rebels with more sophisticated and deadly armaments. This, along with the increased effectiveness of the Free Syrian Army, could lead to a full scale civil war that could easily spread to neighboring Lebanon and other countries, or devolve into a religious war, which would dramatically worsen the humanitarian crisis now afflicting much of the country.

Eyewitness accounts from several sources indicate that the killing spree was conducted by the feared Alawite militia fanatically loyal to President Bashar Assad, the shabbiha. Filtering in from Alawite villages near Houla, the shabbiha attacks were conducted door to door, and were apparently planned and systematically carried out. To maximize the terror, children as young as five years old were either shot or hacked to death in the presence of their parents.

On Sunday, the UN Security Council unanimously condemned the attack — a potential turning point for the international community as both Russia and China voted along with the rest of the Council to condemn the Syrian government. The significance of this vote cannot be lost on Damascus. Russia and China have blocked every single previous attempt by the UN to condemn or sanction the Assad regime for its brutal crackdown. It is clear that the massacre has caused the two permanent members of the Security Council to begin a reassessment of their unflinching support for Assad in the face of more than 9,000 dead civilians since the revolt began.

And despite the extreme reluctance of Western nations — including the United States — to speak of military intervention, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey told Fox News on Monday that more atrocities like Houla could trigger “intervention” by the military.

In a statement, French President Francois Hollande said, “The murderous folly of the Damascus regime represents a threat for regional security and its leaders will have to answer for their acts.” But Russia, while voting with the rest of the UN Security Council to condemn Assad’s government for the massacre, believes that “both sides” are responsible for the massacre. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said, “Both sides have obviously had a hand in the deaths of innocent people, including several dozen women and children. This area is controlled by the rebels, but it is also surrounded by the government troops.”

Accounts from several eyewitnesses belie that statement. The attack began after Friday afternoon prayers in Taldou, a village outside of Houla, when several thousand protestors were fired upon by Assad’s troops. Activists on the ground say that 5 demonstrators were killed by the indiscriminate fire. In response to that attack, elements of the Free Syrian Army hit army checkpoints in Taldou. Assad’s forces responded by firing tank shells and mortars directly into a Sunni Muslim area of the town. Activists say about 15 civilians died in the barrage.

But the bloodletting began in earnest with the arrival of several dozen shabbiha militia. The militia has made a name for itself by conducting violent sweeps through suspected rebel areas, arresting most of the male population while looting houses and torturing prisoners. They are also known to stand behind army units and kill any soldier who refuses to fire at unarmed civilians.

This time, they came for blood.

An 11-year-old boy describes the attack on his family:

“My mum yelled at them,” said the boy. “She asked: ‘What do you want from my husband and son?’ A bald man with a beard shot her with a machine gun from the neck down. Then they killed my sister, Rasha, with the same gun. She was five years old. Then they shot my brother Nader in the head and in the back. I saw his soul leave his body in front of me.

After looting the house of “three televisions and a computer,” the militiamen caught up with the young man’s father, brother and uncle. They shot them as they were fleeing out of the door of the house. The boy escaped by smearing his brothers blood on his face and playing dead until the shabbiha left.

For some of us, the answer is obvious: voters in France, like voters across Europe, are sincerely concerned about Muslim immigration, and neither Sarkozy nor Hollande addressed the issue to their satisfaction.  But for Joignot and many other members of the fourth estate, the whole point is to pretend that the answer for these voters’ curious preoccupations lies elsewhere.  In such articles, it is verboten to actually examine the issue of Islam objectively; one needs to strike a tone which communicates the notion that any professed concern about Muslim immigration into Europe is, on its face, ridiculous, ugly, and racist.

Hence Joignot tells us that the success in France of what he calls “the extreme right” – a right that rejects, or pretends to reject, “xenophobia, racism, and anti-Semitism” even as it makes Muslim immigration its principal issue – is part of a continent-wide phenomenon that includes the inroads made by “the Danish People’s Party, the Dutch Freedom Party, the Austrian FPÖ and BZÖ, the True Finns, the Norwegian Progress Party, the Flemish Vlaams Belang, Law and Justice in Poland, Ataka in Bulgaria, the Northern League in Italy, the Sweden Democrats, [and] the Central Democratic Union (UDC) in Switzerland.”  This list is a preposterous mishmash, implying an equation between classical liberal parties and genuinely fascist ones.  That’s another must in these articles, by the way: throw all parties to the right of (say) Le Monde in the same basket, and label them all as extremists.

Next step: quote an “expert” or two.  Joignot drags in Jean-Yves Camus, a “specialist in the far right,” who instructs us that we are witnessing the emergence of a “radicalized new right.”  Also quoted is “Austrian political scientist” Anton Pelinka, who tells us that all the parties listed above “demagogically…denounce Muslim immigration to rally the losers of globalization.”  In other words, according to Pelinka, the voters who are drawn to these European parties by their positions on Muslim immigration aren’t really motivated, deep down, by the issue of Islam.  No: these are people who are frustrated because, thanks to globalization, they’re going through rough economic times – and they’re blaming their suffering not on the capitalists who are genuinely responsible for globalization, and thus for their financial woes, but on Muslims, who are, needless to say, innocent bystanders who are being unfairly victimized.

Breathtaking condescension toward voters is an important element of these kinds of articles.  You’ve got to send the message – without ever providing the slightest bit of evidence, of course – that voters who are concerned about Islam are ignorant bigots who are being exploited by cynical politicians.  The possibility that either these politicians or these voters have legitimate concerns about Islam, based on their own experiences and observations, can never be so much as hinted at.

The “most radical” of all the European politicians on the “extreme right,” says Joignot, is Geert Wilders, “who considers Islam not a religion but a ‘fascist ideology,’ homophobic and profoundly sexist.”  (Yep, that sounds like a far-right radical all right: concerned about fascism and sexism and homophobia.)  Needless to say, Islam is fascistic and homophobic and profoundly sexist; but Joignot mentions Wilders’s bluntness about this uncomfortable fact as if the absurdity of such a position were self-evident.  This is another standard element of these articles: cite a purely factual statement about some unconscionable, terrible, beastly aspect of Islam, and then act as if its very beastliness is evidence that the statement cannot possibly be true – and that it is therefore not Islam but the critic of Islam that must, in fact, be extreme.

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Imagine there are 100 cattlemen all having an equal right to graze their herds on 1,000 acres of commonly owned grassland. The rational self-interested response of each cattleman is to have the largest herd that he can afford. Each cattleman pursing similar self-interests will produce results not in any of the cattlemen’s long-term interest — overgrazing, soil erosion and destruction of the land’s usefulness. Even if they all recognize the dangers, does it pay for any one cattleman to cut the size of his herd? The short answer is no because he would bear the cost of having a smaller herd while the other cattlemen gain at his expense. In the long term, they all lose because the land will be overgrazed and made useless.

We can think of the federal budget as a commons to which each of our 535 congressmen and the president have access. Like the cattlemen, each congressman and the president want to get as much out of the federal budget as possible for their constituents. Political success depends upon “bringing home the bacon.” Spending is popular, but taxes to finance the spending are not. The tendency is for spending to rise and its financing to be concealed through borrowing and inflation.

Does it pay for an individual congressman to say, “This spending is unconstitutional and ruining our nation, and I’ll have no part of it; I will refuse a $500 million federal grant to my congressional district”? The answer is no because he would gain little or nothing, plus the federal budget wouldn’t be reduced by $500 million.

Other congressmen would benefit by having $500 million more for their districts.

The lack of realism among many highly educated people has been demonstrated in many ways.

When I saw signs in Yellowstone National Park warning visitors not to get too close to a buffalo, I realized that this was a warning that no illiterate farmer of a bygone century would have needed. No one would have had to tell him not to mess with a huge animal that literally weighs a ton, and can charge at you at 30 miles an hour.

No one would have had to tell that illiterate farmer’s daughter not to stand by the side of a highway, trying to hitch a ride with strangers, as too many college girls have done, sometimes with results that ranged all the way up to their death.

The dangers that a lack of realism can bring to many educated people are completely overshadowed by the dangers to a whole society created by the unrealistic views of the world promoted in many educational institutions.

It was painful, for example, to see an internationally renowned scholar say that what low-income young people needed was “meaningful work.” But this is a notion common among educated elites, regardless of how counterproductive its consequences may be for society at large, and for low-income youngsters especially.

What is “meaningful work”?

The underlying notion seems to be that it is work whose performance is satisfying or enjoyable in itself. But if that is the only kind of work that people should have to do, how is garbage to be collected, bed pans emptied in hospitals or jobs with life-threatening dangers to be performed?

Does anyone imagine that firemen enjoy going into burning homes and buildings to rescue people trapped by the flames? That soldiers going into combat think it is fun?

In the real world, many things are done simply because they have to be done, not because doing them brings immediate pleasure to those who do them.

Some people take justifiable pride in working to take care of their families, whether or not the work itself is great.

This week’s guest will be Steve Emerson, founder and executive director of the InvestigativeProject.org. He is an internationally recognized expert on terrorism and national security and author. Consulted by the White House, National Security Council, FBI, Justice Department, Congress and intelligence agencies, Mr. Emerson is in great demand as one of the most astute, insightful and knowledgeable experts in the world today on the threat and prospects of militant Islamic terrorism. He has been quoted in more than 500 news articles and has appeared frequently on network television. His 2002 best-selling book, American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us, provides the first context and understanding for how one of the most notorious terrorist groups in the world could have plotted the worst terrorist attack on American soil without detection or scrutiny by American authorities.

To listen to the program, click here.

Or go to: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/radio-jihad/2012/05/30/the-jamie-glazov-show.

The call-in # is: 347-857-1380

See you Tuesday night!

Memorial Day creation stories are as diverse as the interests championing them. African Americans point to the practice of freedmen decorating the graves of the Union war dead as the inspiration for the holiday. A recent New York Times piece detailed the competing claims of Columbus, Georgia and Columbus, Mississippi, places where Southern ladies draped the burial grounds of the Confederate dead in flowers, for inventing the annual commemoration ritual. In 1966, President Lyndon Johnson further confused matters by proclaiming Waterloo, New York as the birthplace of the holiday on the centennial of the town’s first event commemorating the Civil War fallen.

We know when Memorial Day started. We really don’t know where it started. The inevitability of spontaneous demonstrations of sympathy for the departed heroes from a war that claimed 620,000 men make the day’s multiple nativity stories all quite plausible. An event as traumatic as the Civil War couldn’t be forgotten. It simply had to be remembered.

American families back then couldn’t escape the horror of a war that put ten percent of the population under arms and put two percent of the population underground. The ten-year-long Afghanistan campaign’s 1,984 American deaths don’t even approach the number of Americans killed at Cold Harbor in ten minutes. This turn of events is something to celebrate and not mourn. But leaving much of the nation out of its wars does leave a nation unaware, and to a degree unappreciative, of the great sacrifices made to found a republic, liberate slaves, rid whole countries of totalitarian oppressors, and kill the terrorists who would kill us. The current lack of a shared sacrifice makes Americans less reverential of past sacrifices. We are not all in this together.

Losing a loved one in war makes every day Memorial Day. Not experiencing such a profound loss makes Memorial Day like every day. In either case, the day doesn’t change one’s perspective.

According to Ahram Online, the latest unofficial tally shows Morsi in first place with 25%, thanks to a tremendous last-minute surge. Two polls before the election showed 33% to 38% of voters were undecided, giving him room to grow. His growth came at the expense of his closest Islamist rival, former Brotherhood member Abdel Moneim Aboul-Fotouh, who presented himself as the consensus candidate that is acceptable to all.

The Brotherhood wisely moved to the right when Aboul-Fotouh campaigned as a centrist, bringing his numbers down. The most conservative Islamist elements of Egyptian society, specifically the Salafists, had endorsed Aboul-Fotouh and it appears that the Brotherhood won them over. In the final weeks of the campaign, the Brotherhood doubled-down on implementing Sharia Law.

Morsi forcefully declared, “We will not accept any alternative to Sharia, the Quran is our constitution and it will always be.” The Brotherhood had hardline clerics campaign for Morsi. One, Safwat Higazy, said at a rally that “We are seeing the dream of the Islamic Caliphate come true at the hands of Mohammed Morsi.”

It worked. The last polls showed Morsi in fourth or fifth place. He ended up taking the prize.

Now, the Brotherhood is moving to the center and is framing the contest with Shafiq as one between the old regime and the revolution. Sheikh Yousef al-Qaradawi, the top Brotherhood cleric, instructed Egyptians to pick Morsi. He said that the upcoming run-off is not about Islamism versus secularism but between “the revolution and the enemies of the revolution.”

A Brotherhood official confirmed that it is seriously considering offering Aboul-Fotouh and Hamdeen Sabahi, the secularist who came in third place, posts as vice presidents in exchange for their endorsements. If that happens, then the Brotherhood is virtually guaranteed to win the presidency.

The Brotherhood is also trying to appeal to Christians. A top official said, “Who killed them [Christians] in protests? Who prevented them from building churches? The old regime, not us.”

Elliot Abrams makes the point that a Morsi victory could be good for the West and the secularists in the long-term because the Islamists will have to accept blame for everything that goes wrong. Over time, the Islamist support will fall as Egyptians seek new alternatives. This is what happened to Hamas’ popularity in the Gaza Strip.

Ahmed Shafiq came in a very close second place at about 24%. He was supported by those who miss the Mubarak regime, Christians and some secular democrats. He was a long-shot candidate until the very end and his rise came at the expense of Amr Moussa, his closest secular rival. Moussa’s support began falling after his debate with Aboul-Fotouh where he mistakenly called Iran an “Arab country.”

Shafiq and the secularists as a whole also benefited from a backlash against the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamists as a whole. In February, 43% of Egyptians supported the Brotherhood and 40% supported the Salafist Nour Party. Within a few months, only 26% supported the Brotherhood and 30% supported the Salafists. It seems that many Egyptians were uncomfortable with the possibility of one party or one ideology controlling both the parliament (which the Islamists won with 75% of the vote) and the presidency.

In the chapter titled “History and War,” the Durants posit some hypothetical speeches and approaches concerning war.  First, an imaginary U.S. president says before the leaders of communist Russia:

If we should follow the usual course of history, we should make war upon you for fear of what you may do a generation hence….  But we are willing to try a new approach.  We respect your peoples and your civilizations as among the most creative in history.   We shall try to understand your feelings, and your desire to develop your own institutions without fear of attack.  We must not allow our mutual fears to lead us into war, for the unparalleled murderousness of our weapons and yours brings into the situation an element unfamiliar in history.  We propose to send representatives to join with yours in a persistent conference for the adjustment of our differences, the cessation of hostilities and subversion, and the reduction of our armaments….  Let us open our doors to each other, and organize cultural exchanges that will promote mutual appreciation and understanding….  We pledge our honor before all mankind to enter into this venture in full sincerity and trust.  If we lose in the historic gamble, the results could not be worse than those that we may expect from traditional policies.  If you and we succeed, we shall merit a place for centuries to come in the grateful memory of mankind.

Once the imaginary president concludes, “the general smiles,” write the authors, and retorts:

You have forgotten all the lessons of history and all that nature of man which you described.  Some conflicts are too fundamental to be resolved by negotiation; and during the prolonged negotitiations (if history may be our guide) subversion would go on.  A world order will come not by a gentlemen’s agreement, but through so decisive a victory by one of the great powers that it will be able to dictate and enforce international law, as Rome did from Augustus to Aurelius.  Such interludes of widespread peace are unnatural and exceptional; they will soon be ended by changes in the distribution of military power.

Now, consider how well this hypothetical exchange, written in 1968, applies to the current situation between the U.S. and the Muslim world:

First, the “imaginary” president has become all too real, in the person of Barack Obama.  Above and beyond his so-called “historic Cairo speech,” where he reached out to and cloyingly flattered the Muslim world, everything this man has subsequently said and done—from expunging all references to Islam in U.S. security documents, to ordering NASA to make Muslims “feel good” about themselves—far exceeds the expressed outreach of the imaginary president.

Next, the situation has changed in a way that makes it even more naïve and irrational for the U.S. to be so appeasing of the Islamic world.  Whereas the U.S.S.R was a nuclear-armed superpower—making dialogue and cooperation logical, practically risk-free options, since, as the imaginary president concluded in his speech, the alternative was war, anyway—that is not the case with the Islamic world, which is currently militarily inferior, and thus need not be appeased.

Quite the contrary, by giving one’s opponent time and freedom, “subversion would go on,” as the imaginary general correctly points out, whether Muslim nations like Iran grow to become nuclear powers, or whether Muslims in the West work to subvert their host nations.  This threat of subversion is especially apt considering that Islam’s own teachings promote subversion and deceitful tactics.