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		<title>The Top Anti-Muslim Hate Crime Hoaxes of 2014</title>
		<link>http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/FrontpageMag/~3/HAqLzJ1U9Ao/</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/robert-spencer/the-top-anti-muslim-hate-crime-hoaxes-of-2014/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 29 Dec 2014 05:55:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Robert Spencer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fake]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hate crime]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muslim]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=248313</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Faking “Islamophobic” hate crimes is a big business.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div id="attachment_248315" style="width: 314px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/1098205_734437936582467_220314144_n-352x350.jpg"><img class="wp-image-248315" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/1098205_734437936582467_220314144_n-352x350.jpg" alt="1098205_734437936582467_220314144_n-352x350" width="304" height="302" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Navjoat Aulakh</p></div>
<p>On Christmas morning, a man drove up to the Islamic Cultural Center in Fresno, threw rocks through the windows, and then entered the center and destroyed things inside. The local ABC outlet, KFSN, <a href="http://abc30.com/news/fresno-police-calling-islamic-cultural-center-burglary-a-hate-crime/451696/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">reported Friday</span></a> that “Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyer says it is clear the incident is a hate crime which is why the FBI is also investigating this case.” But <a href="http://www.fresnobee.com/2014/12/27/4303923_suspect-identified-in-fresno-islamic.html?rh=1"><span style="color: #0433ff;">on Saturday</span></a>, it turned out that the incident was not an “anti-Muslim hate crime” at all: the vandal was <a href="http://www.fresnobee.com/2014/12/27/4303923_suspect-identified-in-fresno-islamic.html?rh=1"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Asif Mohammad Khan, a Muslim</span></a>. The destruction at the Islamic Cultural Center in Fresno was yet another in a long series of fake hate crimes designed to prop up the fiction that Muslims in the U.S. are routinely targets of discrimination and harassment.</p>
<p><span style="color: #0433ff;"><a href="http://www.fresnobee.com/2014/12/27/4303923_suspect-identified-in-fresno-islamic.html?rh=1">According to Khan’s sister Samia,</a></span> the vandal is (like the recent French attackers who screamed “Allahu akbar” while trying to kill infidels) mentally ill. She also said that he was a devout Muslim who prayed five times daily. Dyer revealed that Khan had in recent days written that Osama bin Laden was the most inspirational person in his life. Dyer explained that Khan’s vandalism of the mosque “was not geared towards the Islamic community, it was not geared to the Islamic faith or any of those things and was simply to get back at a few people at the center who had belittled him and in his eyes bullied him.”</p>
<p>Dyer and other law enforcement authorities were extremely unlikely to consider it as they investigated Khan’s crimes, but the Hamas-linked <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=154325C2-EF71-48FD-B33C-B5A584CFB8CF"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Council on American-Islamic Relations</span></a> (CAIR) <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/023204.php"><span style="color: #0433ff;">and</span></a> <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/023150.php"><span style="color: #0433ff;">other Muslims</span></a> have on many occasions in the past not hesitated to stoop even to fabricating “hate crimes,” including attacks on mosques. CAIR and other groups like it want and need hate crimes against Muslims, because they can use them for political points and as weapons to intimidate people into remaining silent about the jihad threat.</p>
<p>This has happened many times in 2014. Here are five of the most egregiously manipulative examples:</p>
<p><b>1. The Saleh and Akbar viral video.</b></p>
<p>In October, the Muslim bloggers Adam Saleh and Sheikh Akbar released a video entitled “Racial Profiling Experiment.” It showed the duo in Western clothing, coming to blows in front of an indifferent NYPD cop. In the second part of the video, they pass by the same cop in Muslim garb, arguing mildly – only to be harassed and frisked by the same policeman.</p>
<p>The video went viral. The Huffington Post hysterically proclaimed that it offered a “small glimpse into the ugly world of racial profiling.” Hamas-linked CAIR called for an investigation. But then it turned out that the whole thing had been staged. <a href="http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/NYPD-racial-profiling-hoax-video-675432"><span style="color: #0433ff;">The Smoking Gun</span></a> called the video a “cynical and duplicitous attempt to capitalize on New York City’s documented racial profiling problems.”</p>
<p><b>2. The German mosque arson.</b></p>
<p>Another “Islamophobic” hate crime took place in Germany in February, when there was an arson attack at the Central Mosque in Cologne. But in October, a Muslim who had been held in a psychiatric ward ever since he had been arrested (as the mainstream media and law enforcement officials have now apparently agreed that all Muslims who commit acts of violence are mentally ill) <a href="http://www.blazingcatfur.ca/2014/10/10/mosque-arson-in-germany-turk-confesses-to-attacks/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">confessed</span></a> to having set the fire.</p>
<p>“I wanted to make a clear sign,” the arsonist explained. “Because<b> </b>they treated me badly at the Koran school. It has always hurt me.” He also had tried to burn down two other mosques; it wasn’t reported whether or not he had been to Qur’an school and been treated badly in all three. But until he was apprehended, his arson attacks provided rich material for the “Islamophobia” mythmakers.</p>
<p><b>3. The burned Qur’ans in Dearborn.</b></p>
<p><span style="color: #0433ff;"><a href="http://www.pressandguide.com/articles/2014/06/17/news/doc5399f810f0f03443588853.txt?viewmode=fullstory">Last June</a></span>, after three burned Qur’ans were found in front of the Karbalaa Islamic Educational Center in Dearborn, the mosque’s imam, Sheikh Husham Al-Husainy met with lawyers to discuss his proposal for a statute criminalizing the desecration of holy books. “We want all of the religions to cooperate with us,” he declared, “to bring respect to the word of God, whether the Quran, Bible, or Torah.”</p>
<p>But <a href="http://www.arabamericannews.com/news/news/id_9053/Iraqi-American-man-arrested-while-burning-Quran-in-Dearborn.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">as it turned out</span></a>, the Qur’an barbecuer was none other than a Muslim named Ali Hassan Al-Assadi. Al-Husainy opined that al-Assadi was (surprise, surprise) “mentally unstable.” Crazy or not, the discovery that al-Assadi had burned the Qur’ans threw a large monkey wrench into al-Husainy’s plans to use the incident as the cornerstone of his campaign against the freedom of expression.</p>
<p><b>4. The Montclair State University attack.</b></p>
<p>Combine the relentless Muslim striving for victimhood with the cult of victimhood on college campuses these days, and even non-Muslims get into the faked hate act. Last April at Montclair State University in New Jersey, a student claimed that three white men in jeans and hoodies assaulted him. They called him an “Islamic terrorist.”</p>
<p>MSU police began an investigation, only to find that the whole incident was a hoax: a student named Navjoat Aulakh had filed a false report. Aulakh may not even be a Muslim. His full name is Navjoat Singh Aulakh; “Singh” is a name closely associated with Sikhs. The Aulakhs are a Jat clan from the Punjab area, and while many Jats are Muslims, the name Singh here suggests that this young man is himself a Sikh. <a href="https://www.facebook.com/navjoat.aulakh"><span style="color: #0433ff;">His Facebook page</span></a> gives no sign that he cares about much of anything but sports and babes, but apparently he does have some significant political concerns. If he is a Sikh, this would by no means be the first time that Sikhs have served as useful idiots for the Islamic supremacist victimhood posturing enterprise. Sikhs even stood with Hamas-linked CAIR to call for the allowance of hijabs on an amusement park go-kart ride that <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2014/04/2010-muslima-dies-as-hijab-caught-in-go-kart-axle-2014-cair-demands-hijabs-on-go-karts"><span style="color: #0433ff;">had already seen one Muslima killed as her hijab was caught in the axle</span></a>.</p>
<p>In this case, a Sikh apparently tried to aid the false Muslim victimhood narrative. And failed.</p>
<p><b>5. The Shaima Alawadi murder.</b></p>
<p>Last April in El Cajon, California, an Iraqi Muslim named Kassim Alhimidi was <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2014/04/www.10news.com/news/kassim-alhimidi-found-guilty-in-beating-death-of-wife-shaima-alawadi-041714"><span style="color: #0433ff;">found guilty</span></a> of murdering his wife, Shaima Alawadi, after she had told him that she wanted a divorce.</p>
<p>Before Alhimidi was arrested, this murder was widely reported as an “Islamophobic hate crime”: a note was found by Alawadi’s body that read, “Go back to your country, you terrorist.” Leftists and Islamic supremacists made a great deal of this, claiming that the murder was the work of an “Islamophobe” who hated Shaima Alawadi for wearing a hijab. They even staged a campaign, “One Million Hijabs for Shaima Alawadi.”</p>
<p>Reza Aslan, the celebrated author of <i>Zealot</i>, <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2014/04/california-muslim-guilty-of-killing-wife-whose-murder-was-blamed-on-islamophobia"><span style="color: #0433ff;">bashed out a sub-literate tweet</span></a> blaming Pamela Geller and me for the murder: “If a 32 year old veiled mother is a terrorist than [sic] so am I you Islamophobic fucks Gellar [sic] Spencer et. [sic] al. Come find me.” This tweet indicated how much mileage the “Islamophobia” propaganda machine thought it could get from the Alawadi murder in its efforts to intimidate people into thinking it wrong to oppose jihad terror.</p>
<p>Yet it was another fake hate crime. And since the mainstream media remains so uncritical about Muslim claims of having been victimized, there will be many more in 2015.</p>
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		<title>Steve Moore &amp; Michael Barone at Restoration Weekend</title>
		<link>http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/FrontpageMag/~3/TmUxh7n4jkI/</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/steve-moore-michael-barone-at-restoration-weekend/#respond</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 29 Dec 2014 05:50:07 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
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		<category><![CDATA[Economy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Election]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[electorate]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Immigration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Michael Barone]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Stephen Moore]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=248293</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Two top conservative minds give their take on America's political and the economic landscapes. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong style="color: #232323;">Below are the video and transcript to the panel discussion “Politics and the Economy,” which took place at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 20th Anniversary Restoration Weekend. The event was held Nov. 13th-16th at the Breakers Resort in Palm Beach, Florida. </strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/115323365" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong>When I was coming into this weekend I wasn&#8217;t even fully ready because I was like, wow, what an election we just had. Wow.  Then day three of Restoration Weekend and I&#8217;m like, wow, there is so much more to be done, and it&#8217;s so funny, this is the third year that I&#8217;ve been part of Restoration Weekend thanks to David and Michael Finch, and for years and years many of my friends who are here from Orange County, Marilyn, Cathy Grimmer, Paul and Sally Bender had said, &#8220;You&#8217;ve got to go to Restoration Weekend, no matter what the outcome of the election.  We go there and we leave feeling revived and ready to fight more.&#8221;  After this particular weekend I was thinking to myself, a weekend might not be long enough.  We should maybe start, David, Restoration Week. I don&#8217;t know.  Michael&#8217;s going to kill me for saying that.</p>
<p>We have a really great panel today.  We have two of the foremost minds of the conservative movement.  Their brains are so big that I&#8217;m intimidated to be on stage with them.  I&#8217;m going to introduce them both from left to right and they don&#8217;t need introductions, you all know them so I&#8217;ll make this quick.  Michael Barone, obviously a senior political analyst for the <i>Examiner</i>, Fox News contributor and the author of the <i>Almanac of American Politics</i>.</p>
<p><strong>Michael Barone: </strong>Co-author.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong>Co-author, foremost author, right?  Then second, Stephen Moore, long-time writer and editorial writer and columnist with <i>The Wall Street Journal</i>.  Now he&#8217;s the Chief Economist of the Heritage Foundation and I think his most impressive credential, because I&#8217;m biased, is that he&#8217;s also a columnist for the <i>Orange County Register</i> so, just saying.  We&#8217;re going to start our panel off with opening remarks.  We&#8217;ll start with Steve and then we&#8217;ll move to Michael with kind of their thoughts on what&#8217;s next on politics and the economy.  Then we&#8217;ll ask a couple of questions and then open it up for you all to get your questions answered as well.  Steven, let&#8217;s start with you.</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Moore: </strong>Okay, so let me give you my quick &#8212; Michael is obviously the Dean of Politics.  I&#8217;m going to give you just a quick seven or eight minute kind of sketch on what&#8217;s going on with the economy.  Some of you have seen these slides before, and I&#8217;m sorry if I&#8217;m a little bit repetitive of what I said last year, but I think this is such an important message.  Let me just start by saying this, I&#8217;m incredibly bullish on the U.S. economy.  I think we&#8217;re going to see an incredible, especially after this election, I think we&#8217;re going to see a big burst out of growth.  We&#8217;ve been stuck in this 2 percent rut on growth now for six years.  This has been an incredibly weak recovery but because of a lot of factors I talk about, I just think we&#8217;re really prepped for a big recovery.  As I said last year, but I&#8217;ll repeat this, the one industry that has really almost carried the rest of the economy on its back for the last six years has been this oil and gas boom.  It&#8217;s not a surprise to anybody in this room by now.  This is an incredible expansion we are living through.  Politics is so rich with irony.  The irony of Barack Obama&#8217;s Presidency is that he will have presided over the biggest oil and gas boom in American history and this is a president who hates the oil and gas industry.  If you look at this chart you can see what&#8217;s going on here.  The red line is all employment in every industry outside of oil and gas over the last six years, and you can see the big decline obviously in employment that happened during the great recession of 2008 and 2009 and you can see what a really flimsy recovery this has been, and it has taken us so long to get back to zero.  By the way, this goes through the end of 2013.  If it went through today, we&#8217;re right back about zero; so that is to say it took us six years but we finally recovery of every job that was lost during the recession.  That&#8217;s a pretty, pretty long and slow recovery process.</p>
<p>Now look at the blue line. That&#8217;s the oil and gas industry, and it&#8217;s interesting, I was giving a talk this summer to the Oklahoma and Texas Oil and Gas Drillers Association.  By the way, I think that may even be more conservative than this group here and so I started off my speech by saying, &#8220;Congratulations, you&#8217;re the people who reelected Barack Obama.&#8221;  They weren&#8217;t real happy but without this boom, there is no way that Barack Obama would have ever been reelected because the economy would have still been in a recession in 2012.  Now what&#8217;s interesting about this boom are a couple of things.  It is not &#8212; as you know, Michael, my mentor was the Great Julian Simon and Julian Simon taught us that natural resources don&#8217;t come from the ground or from the earth. they come from the human mind.  This boom in oil and gas is such a perfect example of what Julian talked about; that the ultimate resource is the human mind because this massive amount of energy we have in this country.  It&#8217;s not as if all of a sudden overnight God endowed America with all this oil and gas. It has been there for hundreds of thousands of years.  This is a testament.  This breakthrough is a testament to incredible technological prowess.  Wild cat or entrepreneurs, most of this energy was not found by Chevron and Exxon and so on, but smaller oil drillers just went out there and found this stuff, and it&#8217;s also a result of incredible technology.  We&#8217;re just seeing technologies that have changed this industry in such a massive, massive way.</p>
<p>Now what&#8217;s interesting about this story are a couple of things.  One is that if we get this right, and I said this last year &#8212; actually I misspoke last year.  Last year I said if we get this right within five years, the United States of America is going to be energy independent.  That is to say we are going to be selling more of this stuff than we buy and that&#8217;s true, I&#8217;m going to stick with that.  It&#8217;s quite plausible that by the Year 2020 if not before, the United States will be a net exporter of oil and gas, and as you know, that is a complete game changer with respect to our economy, and it&#8217;s a game changer, by the way, with respect to our National Security.  If we can actually sell this stuff rather than buy it; you know that you&#8217;ve been reading about this, ISIS gets about $5 million a day, $5 million a day from petro dollars.  We are funding the people that are trying to kill us so if we don&#8217;t have to buy this stuff, it changes the whole geopolitical situation, but I&#8217;ve changed my tune on this.  I would simply say this.  I kind of underestimated how big this is.  Before I said five years from now we&#8217;re going to be energy independent.  Five years from now we&#8217;re going to be energy independent.</p>
<p>My new line on this is five years from now the United States of America; this great, great, great country of ours is going to be the energy dominant country in the world, the energy dominant country in the world.  The thing that&#8217;s amazing about this, if you look at that incredible boom &#8212; just think about this ladies and gentlemen, think about how big this would be and could be if you actually had a president who liked this industry.  This has happened at a time when Barack Obama is doing everything possible behind the scenes to completely decapitate this industry.  For example, the pipeline issue is a big one and, by the  way, we don&#8217;t just need the Keystone Pipeline, obviously we do; we need pipelines all over this country to get the oil and gas that we have to every area of the country and around the world where we need it.  So that&#8217;s number one, Obama is not allowing virtually any new pipelines to be built.</p>
<p>Second of all as you know, if you look at this oil and gas boom on that chart, almost all of that, 98 percent of that boom is happening on private land.  Almost none of it is happening on federal.  In fact, I saw a statistic the other day that we&#8217;re actually drilling less today on public land than we were six or seven years ago.  If we were to open up federal lands &#8212; and I&#8217;m not talking about drilling on Yosemite or Yellowstone or the precious national parks that are environmentally sensitive; I&#8217;m just talking about drilling on forest land and so on that&#8217;s basically vacant.  If we were able to do that we could literally raise trillions of dollars of revenue of the next ten years to repay our national debt or to do other things to raise revenues.  We could practically eliminate the corporate income tax and replace that with money that we could get from drilling on federal land.</p>
<p>So that&#8217;s the second one, and the third one that&#8217;s so important and that we should all be paying attention to is these new EPA Regulations that President Obama is talking about, and this insane deal that President Obama supposedly signed with the Chinese.  Did you all follow this that the Chinese are now going to agree to reduce their carbon emissions by 25 percent by the year 2030?  That is the biggest bald-faced lie I have ever heard.  The Chinese are not going to reduce their carbon emissions.  They are laughing at us today in Beijing.  The Chinese are building a new coal burning fire plant every month in China so they are using fossil fuels. They&#8217;re going to burn this and they said to Obama, &#8220;Yeah, you go back to the United States and you cut your carbon emissions by 25 percent and we&#8217;ll do the same,&#8221; wink, wink, wink.  That isn&#8217;t going to happen.  This is just unilateral economic disarmament by the United States, and let me make another point about this because I think it is such an important issue.  I think a lot of you probably know this but can anybody in this room tell me what country of all the industrialized nations in the world, which country has reduced its carbon emissions the most over the last six years.  We have.  How many of you know that?  The United States. If you read the school books or read the newspapers you would know that.  We have reduced our carbon emissions more than any other country.  Wait a minute, how could that possibly have happened?  How could that possibly be true?  We didn&#8217;t do cap and trade.  We didn&#8217;t do, I don&#8217;t think we ever signed the Kyoto Treaty.  I don&#8217;t think we ratified it.  We didn&#8217;t have a carbon tax, all these things that all these sanctimonious Europeans said that they did.  We&#8217;ve cut our carbon emissions more than they have and I think you all know the reason why &#8212; because we&#8217;re converting electricity to natural gas.  Natural gas has become the number one source of electricity in the United States; it just surpassed coal.  Natural gas is a wonder fuel.  It is like this amazing wonder fuel.  Think about this; 1) It is abundant, we have hundreds of years&#8217; worth of natural gas in this country; 2) It is made in the USA; 3) It&#8217;s incredibly cheap; and 4) It&#8217;s a clean burning fuel.  Now why in the world would anybody be against natural gas?</p>
<p>But you know what&#8217;s amazing, the environmentalists have turned against natural gas; they&#8217;re against it even though it reduces greenhouse gasses.  Stunning, isn&#8217;t it?  I&#8217;ll make one last point about this.  If you look at electricity production today in America, because you all know this – the master resource is energy.  You can&#8217;t produce anything without energy and everything that we have, a major component of that is cheap and affordable energy.  Well if you look at our electricity today, where do we get our electricity today?  I just told you the number one source of electricity today is natural gas.  The number two source of electricity is coal.  So they don&#8217;t want natural gas, right, because they don&#8217;t want fracking.  The second source of electricity in the United States is coal.  They don&#8217;t want coal; they&#8217;re shutting down coal mines all over the country.  The third source is nuclear power.  They hate nuclear power.  The fourth source is an incredibly good, very affordable source of renewable energy, which is what?  What&#8217;s the number one source of renewable energy in American today?  I heard somebody say it. Hydropower.  Actually hydropower is a very good source of energy.  They hate hydropower too.  Why do they hate hydropower?  Because then don&#8217;t want dams, it&#8217;s going to kill the fish.  So any form of electricity production that actually works they&#8217;re against.  This leads me to an important point that I want to make.</p>
<p>You know, David, at this conference we&#8217;ve been talking a lot about the sinister elements in America today, the communists and the Jihadist and the &#8220;so-called progressives.&#8221;  I want to make a point to you that I think is really important.  I would make the argument to you that the most dangerous movement in the world today is not all of these other groups, and I&#8217;m not saying they&#8217;re not dangerous.  The most dangerous movement in the world today is the Radical Green Movement.  These people are absolutely crazy.</p>
<p>So I&#8217;m going to just kind of move on and make a couple of other quick points.  This is the crux of my argument about the economy, and this drives liberals crazy, so I want just two or three minutes to walk you through this.  If you look at this chart, the way I put it is the last 50 years there have been two great economic crises in America.  The first of course was the late-1970s and early-1980s when the United States went through what I call a mini depression.  We all remember that period.  You all remember 20 percent mortgage interest rates and 14 percent inflation and the fact that in the late-70s and early-80s America was truly deindustrializing, and if actually you read about what liberals and even a lot of conservatives were saying at that time, you remember this, Michael: America is an empire in decline, the Japanese are going to take over and actually the Soviet Model works better than ours does and so on.  That was the kind of environment that Ronald Reagan took over in and of course, in 2008 Barack Obama took office during an incredible economic crisis.  There&#8217;s no question about it.  We had lost six million jobs, the real estate bubble had burst, and half of the banks in America had collapsed.  So when Barack Obama walked into the White House, he walked into office in an incredible crisis, as he says ever speech that he gives.</p>
<p>Now here is what makes this experiment so interesting.  These two presidents used diametrically opposite approaches to dealing with the crisis, right?  So you all know the Reagan formula. It was to cut tax rates; it was to get government spending under control.  He worked with Paul Volker to slay inflation by cutting the money supply, and in a sense what Ronald Reagan did was he empowered workers and entrepreneurs and businesses to rebuild the American economy, the supply side recovery.  Barack Obama came in and did exactly the opposite, right?  Barack Obama used every single page out of the Keynesian playbook and, by the way, I&#8217;m not going to blame this just on Obama.  I would say the last year and a half or two years of the Bush Administration were a disaster too. So what did we do in response to the 2008 crisis?  Well, we bailed out big banks, insurance companies and auto companies.  We passed an $850 billion dollar so-called spending stimulus bill.  We had ObamaCare.  We had tax increases on the rich.  We borrowed $7 trillion, in six years we have borrowed $7 trillion.  This is a Keynesian&#8217;s dream, right?  We threw everything in the Keynesian playbook at that recession.  If you look at this chart, what I think is really interesting and I don&#8217;t think liberals have a good response to this.  What this chart is showing you is that the U.S. economy has grown by 2 percent under Barack Obama under his Keynesian formulation.  In fact, I think I wrote a piece on this for you guys are OCR.  You can see, so the economy has grown by 11½ percent over that period.</p>
<p>Now that&#8217;s decent but then you look at what happened under President Reagan.  Under Ronald Reagan the economy didn&#8217;t grow at 11½ percent over the recovery period; it grew at nearly 25 percent.  Now that&#8217;s a big, big difference ladies and gentlemen, that&#8217;s a huge difference.  That means, and what the number there you&#8217;re looking at, what that means, and if I updated that to today &#8212; because I don&#8217;t have the last two quarters on here. The underlying point of this chart is if the U.S. economy had grown as rapidly under Barack Obama&#8217;s recovery as it did under Ronald Reagan&#8217;s, the GDP national output and national income of this country would be $2 trillion larger today, $2 trillion.  That&#8217;s a massive number. If we were to give that $2 trillion to every single family &#8212; by the way, that&#8217;s year after year after year we&#8217;d be $2 trillion larger.  If we didn&#8217;t have that growth gap and we prorated that money to every family in America, the average family in America today would have $15,000.00 more income. $15,000.00 more income.  Now here is the amazing part about this.  The average family in America doesn&#8217;t have $15,000.00 more income in this recovery.  I think most of you know this.  The average median income family in the United States has $1,500.00 less income than when this recovery, so-called recovery, began.</p>
<p>Now why is that so important?  I think that single statistic may more than anything else explain why the Democrats had their heads handed to them a week and a half ago. Barack Obama was saying just ten days before the election, &#8220;Every single statistic shows improvement while I&#8217;ve been President.&#8221;  Well he left out the one that Americans care the most about.  What Ronald Reagan used to call &#8220;real take home pay&#8221; and &#8220;real take home pay&#8221; has been reduced and not increased over Barack Obama&#8217;s presidency, and that explains in my opinion, Michael, why 51 percent of Americans today say that the United States of America is still in a recession – because for half of the Americans it still is a recession.  When you&#8217;re losing income relative to inflation, you&#8217;re not feeling better about things; you&#8217;re feeling worse and that&#8217;s a point we have to hammer home over and over again.  One quick final point.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong>Okay, real quick though.</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Moore: </strong>Okay, just the states.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong>Michael wants to talk about something.</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Moore: </strong>No, I know. I agreed not to be too long, but this is so important.  No, I just got to do the Texas thing.  So this is just the last point.  If you really want to understand the superiority of our ideas versus their ideas, we&#8217;ve got such a great, great experiment here in the United States, and it turns out the four largest states in America, two red states, Texas and Florida are obviously red states.  The two biggest blue states are California and New York.  Correct me if I&#8217;m wrong about this Michael but I believe one out of three Americans lives in those four states.</p>
<p><strong>Michael Barone: </strong>That&#8217;s right.</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Moore: </strong>So those are the states that really matter and the basic bottom line here is that these red states, and this is what my book is about, the red states are incredibly outperforming the blue states.  You know this, migration pattern – there is a huge migration out of the Midwest and out of the Northeast into the South and to states like Phoenix and Utah and so on, and this is what liberals cannot, they cannot explain this because they kept saying, &#8220;Look, they want higher minimum wages, higher tax rates on the rich, don&#8217;t allow drilling, more regulation&#8221; and so on.  All of these things were supposed to create a worker&#8217;s paradise for the workers.  What they can&#8217;t explain is if that&#8217;s the case why are people leaving those states and what this chart is showing you is that over the last 15 years, for every job that was created in California and New York, three to four jobs were created in Texas and Florida.  Look, what&#8217;s the income tax rate today in Texas and Florida?  Zero.  How many in this room are Californians or New Yorkers?  Do you know what your highest income tax rate in California and New York is today?</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong>Don&#8217;t remind us.</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Moore: </strong>13.5%.  This stuff matters.  I debated Paul Krugman on this about a month ago, about the economy.  I showed him this chart and I said Paul, you&#8217;ve got the Nobel Prize in economics.  Please explain to me if your ideas are so much superior to ours, what explains this, and you&#8217;ll love this, Michael. He said, &#8220;Well there&#8217;s a very simple explanation.&#8221;  He said people are leaving because of the weather, because of the weather.  Now, actually, as with everything &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Michael Barone: </strong>The last year that Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex had something like 90 consecutive days of triple digit weather.</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Moore: </strong>Exactly, you took my &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Michael Barone: </strong>I&#8217;d like to have Paul Krugman mow some lawns in that weather.</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Moore: </strong>I said to Krugman, well, Paul, that&#8217;s an interesting theory, that you say you know people, and by the way, there is some truth to that. People want to live in warmer places, and I said if that&#8217;s the thing, if this is all driven by weather, Paul, you&#8217;ve got the Nobel Prize, please explain this to me, why are people leaving San Diego and going to Houston?  He had no answer.  I&#8217;m going to stop there.  Thank you very much.  It&#8217;s been a pleasure.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong>Thank you Steve, and all right, Michael, ready to give us the political scoop?</p>
<p><strong>Michael Barone: </strong>Well I&#8217;ll try to give you my view of a couple of important things, including some reflections on the dialogues that have been going on here at the Restoration Weekend.  I can&#8217;t resist beginning with some census data because I can&#8217;t think of anything more interesting to do than to plow through historical census data, make tables and things like that.  Steve&#8217;s economic tables are no match for this and the match is my home State of Michigan versus the State of Texas.  When I was growing up in Michigan everybody said well Texas is going to progress, inevitably. They will get big labor unions and so forth.  They&#8217;ll have business corporations that will cooperate with the unions.  They&#8217;ll get big government.  They&#8217;ll have an income tax, they&#8217;ll be like us in Michigan and so forth – census date.  In 1970, Michigan had nine million people.  In 2010, 40 years later, Michigan had ten million people.  A little bit of growth over 40 years, not spectacular.  In 1970 Texas had 11 million people.  Just a little bit bigger than Michigan.  In 2010 Texas had 25 million people.  Explain that Professor Krugman.  You got cold winters in Michigan, but you sure got hot summers in Texas and you actually have some cold winters there too.  Anybody that&#8217;s moving to Texas for the weather is deluded.  So let me just make three major points here that have been to some extent inspired or amplified by what I&#8217;ve been hearing, listening and talking to people with about at the Restoration Weekend.</p>
<p>The first is about the macro economy in which I do not consider myself to be an expert by any means.  I do know that there was a congressman from New York that said if you tax something you get less of it; if you subsidize something you get more of it.</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Moore: </strong>Would that be Jack Kemp?</p>
<p><strong>Michael Barone: </strong>Yeah and Jack had the right idea.  Obviously we want to get the macro economy growing again.  Some conservatives are saying okay we&#8217;ll just reduce rates on the high end like Reagan did and that will be fine.  I think we need something more than that.  For one thing, tax rates are not as high as when Reagan entered office.  There&#8217;s less to be cut, but I think we&#8217;ve got to do something else.  We&#8217;ve got to lower some tax rates.  We&#8217;ve got to get rid of some of the really hostile and anti-growth regulatory things and the crazed religion of the Radical Greens.  I think we also have to try to do something about family formation.  If we want to unleash human capital &#8212; and Steve has written about this recently.  I don&#8217;t know if his former colleagues at the <i>Wall Street Journal</i> editorial board are a little miffed at you, but one of the things that I think is holding us back to some extent, although it&#8217;s difficult to quantify, is family formation or the lack thereof.  All the sociological studies show that children raised in two-parent families do better by all sorts of metrics from crime to economic growth and productivity.  No, I don&#8217;t want to say anything negative about single parents and so forth.  But almost 50 years ago Pat Moynihan wrote his family report and he said that we&#8217;ve got a real crisis because 25 percent of black children are born out of wedlock.  The figure today is 70 percent.  The figure for all children is 40.  That is higher form of magnitude than what Moynihan was looking at justifiably, presciently, with alarm back in 1965, so what can we do.  The Tax Code doesn&#8217;t automatically shape behavior.  I think there are ways society can send signals.  When you look back in history people like us like to talk about declines of morals.  There are also increases in moral behavior that occur in various ways.  The United States in 1820 was a nation of drunks.  Basically alcohol consumption was cut by about two-thirds over the next 40 or 50 years.  That was an advance in human capital among other things.</p>
<p>We had senators like Mike Lee, Marco Rubio, others talking about child tax credit increase, other things to send money and signals to people to try to encourage family formation, to encourage two-parent families to give kids the advantage.  I think that there are a lot of other ways that we can think about this in terms of economics; but that&#8217;s one way to send a signal, that&#8217;s one way to give what Cass Sunstein calls a &#8220;nudge,&#8221; which in this case I think is useful.  So I think that we ought to be thinking about that and those of you who are active, and many of you are, in the voluntary sector, those of you who create organizations who work and organizations to try to foster better behavior, I think this is something many of you probably already are thinking about: how do we strengthen that kind of behavior because there&#8217;s a lot of human capital over the last generation that could have been created and wasn&#8217;t created.  That&#8217;s a problem.  We&#8217;d like to do better in the next generation, and how are we going to do this?</p>
<p>The second point I want to make is in another sense about the new generation and that&#8217;s taking a look at the election data, and this one was kind of fun to take a look at.  I was always a little dismayed at reading the number on President Romney, is to take a lot at two groups that we&#8217;ve been told are going to be a larger part of the electorate in years hence, and they are, and that we were told were going to be part of an inevitable during natural and permanent Democratic Party majority in America – the Hispanics and the Millennials.  If you made straight line extrapolations from the 2008 exit pole you might very well have thought that.  Both those groups, Hispanics, a term invented by a census bureaucrat circa 1970; Millennials, people born after 1980 or the 18 to 29 year-old-age group among voters, voted approximately two to one for Barack Obama in 2008.  They will be a larger part of the electorate.  My move to amend the Constitution to raise the voting age to 35 is barred &#8212; and permanently barring from the vote anyone born after 1980, our chances for that solution has been missed.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong>I wouldn&#8217;t be able to vote.</p>
<p><strong>Michael Barone: </strong>There you go, okay, sorry about that.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong>No it&#8217;s all right, it&#8217;s all right.</p>
<p><strong>Michael Barone: </strong>I&#8217;ll listen to your recommendation and start voting.  Those things having failed, those groups were going to go by, and you have writers like <i>National Journal&#8217;s </i>Ron Brownstein, who is a very talented guy, talking in addition about the non-white majority – divides electorate into whites and non-whites and says there will be a non-white majority.  Well let&#8217;s see how that&#8217;s working out.  Let&#8217;s start off with the Millennials.  In 2008 they voted 66/32 to Barack Obama.  Expressing that vote as a democratic margin as percentage of the total electorate.  Take the democratic popular vote margin among Millennials as a percentage of the total electorate. It&#8217;s 7 percent of the total electorate.  Barack Obama&#8217;s margin among the total electorate that year, 7 percent.  Essentially all of this popular vote margin came from them.  What has happened in years since.  Well the Millennials down there in their parents&#8217; basements have not been doing so well.  They were told that there was hope and change – that Obama was a with-it sort of person and he was cool and the other people weren&#8217;t and so forth.  In 2012 the Obama margin among Millennials goes down to 60 to 38.  That&#8217;s actually the biggest decline arithmetically among any age group so there is some decline.</p>
<p>It brings to mind the fact of the baby boomer, the fate of the baby boom generation politically, which I guess I&#8217;m part.  I&#8217;d like to say that the good news is that the baby boom generation is going to die out.  The bad news is I&#8217;m going to die about the same time.  The baby boom generation was 50/50 in the Nixon/McGovern race when the rest of the country was 63/36 for Nixon.  In 2012, 40 years later the baby boom generation voted for Mitt Romney, so people are affected by the changes and the things they see in their life as well as by some of the conservatizing forces perhaps of growing older, perhaps wiser, but in any case, the initial vote is not destiny.  Where were the Millennials in this election?  Take a look at the Exit Poll, the national vote for House of Representatives, it was 54/43 Democratic.  Express that as a percentage of the total electorate, Democratic margin as a percentage of the total electorate is 1.5 percent, 7 percent in 2008, 1.5 percent.  Millennial turnout will be higher in the general election than it was in the off-year election, so 1.5 percent translates to about 2 percent general election terms.  That&#8217;s a handicap for republicans.  They&#8217;ve got to carry their age groups by a larger margin in order to win, they did so, winning 52/45 House popular vote overall in this year in 2014 as well as 2010.</p>
<p>What&#8217;s happened to the Millennials in large part it&#8217;s a lot of human capital that&#8217;s not being achieved, that&#8217;s not finding an outlet.  I think one of the things I have felt is that there is a misfit between the Millennial generation and the way that they want to customize their own world.  Set up their own Facebook page and all this stuff, iPod list, that&#8217;s pretty antique now.  The tension between that and the centralized command and control policies of the Obama Administration. Those are policies that were initially crafted by people in an industrial age – 40,000 people worked at the Ford Rouge Plant.  You had a huge union local, it had 60,000 members.  You had a corporation that was one of the largest in the world.  The building was built in 1916 to 1918 at a cost of $1 billion which was actually a lot of money then.  I went around the Ford Rouge Plant in a car this summer – it&#8217;s 5.0 miles to drive around the perimeter of that place.  That is an artifact of the Industrial Age.  So individuals are small cogs in large machines, that&#8217;s what you do, big government, the centralized experts Jonathan Gruber will take care of you, you&#8217;re too stupid to take care of yourself, that&#8217;s the Industrial Age policies.  That&#8217;s a bad fit with this generation.  We&#8217;re not in an industrial age, we are in an information age.  The Ford Rouge Plant is a symbol of the Industrial Era, this is a symbol of the Information age.  It&#8217;s got more data in here than the Ford Rouge Plant ever processed and these policies aren&#8217;t working for them.  I think they&#8217;re waking up to that.  White Millennials are a significant Republican margin of this election.  The black under 30 voters.  Actually male blacks under 30 actually are moving towards Republicans more than their elders.  So I think that there&#8217;s some hope there. They are looking for something.</p>
<p>The Republicans have an opportunity, they sure don&#8217;t have a mandate. But they&#8217;ve got an opportunity for getting in touch with these people for policies that will enable them to find work, to earn success in ways that maximize their own special talents – their own individual interests.  The contribution that that individual uniquely can make to society.  The other side&#8217;s programs don&#8217;t give you any access to society.  The other side&#8217;s program don&#8217;t give you any access to that – you&#8217;re just a cog in a large machine.  These programs &#8212; I think conservatives can come up with a couple of programs that allow human capital to flourish in ways that are particular to the individual.  I think there&#8217;s an opportunity there.</p>
<p>Hispanics – Brownstein likes to lump together all &#8220;non-whites.&#8221;  I think this is misleading.  Hispanics and Asians, the people that fall into these categories, do not share the history experiences and heritages of Black Americans, which are, as many Black Americans will tell you, they are unique and they are absolutely correct in saying that.  They&#8217;re not behaving that way.  When Asians come to this country these days they don&#8217;t see separate drinking fountains marked off for them and they aren&#8217;t prevented from voting and in fact, what we&#8217;ve got is very different numbers.  If you look at the Hispanics, they go 67/31 Obama, 2008, 71/27 Obama, 2012.  They don&#8217;t like the self-deportation comment of Mitt Romney and so forth.  This election they&#8217;re moving in the other direction.  You look at the Exit Poll. It&#8217;s 62/36 for Democratic candidates for the House nationally.  But this aggregated by state.  One of the things you see, about 40 percent of Hispanics live in California, New York and New Jersey.  They were voting over 70 percent on average for the Democratic Party.  They are increasing Democratic margins that would exist if there were not a single Hispanic in any of those states.  If you are looking at the rest of the country, you&#8217;re seeing a different pattern.  In Rick Perry&#8217;s Texas, John Cornyn carried Hispanics 49/48, Greg Abbott got 44 percent here in Florida, Rick Scott got 38.  In Kansas and in Georgia, states with growing Hispanic percentages that some Democrats think are going to carry those states for them, Hispanics voted for the Republican, Nathan Deal, David Purdue, Pat Roberts.</p>
<p>My observation is that Hispanics are voting more like their white neighbors than their black neighbors and depending on the state they&#8217;re in.  I think that once again here are people that are looking for opportunity.  Here are people that are disproportionately in their younger years.  Here is human capital; potential human capital that is being under-utilized in this economy and these individuals are not being given an opening under this Administration&#8217;s policies so I think that once again there is significant opportunities and the idea that this is a totally non-white 90/10 democratic majority is simply factually wrong.  I could add that the Asian numbers show a flip from 73/26 Obama 2012 to 50/49 Republican.  I&#8217;m not sure that&#8217;s good data.  Sorry folks we&#8217;d love to believe it but I think that you&#8217;ve got small and potentially unrepresentative samples, but I think it&#8217;s an interesting mix and some of you are in situations like that.</p>
<p>Let me move on to my third topic that I want to talk about and that is one that I know evokes controversy or strong feelings in this room and that is immigration.  I think again there is a potential to unleash and enhance human capital in the United States, which we are in danger of missing, which people on the other side of the political fence are in danger of missing, and I think we have a set of immigration laws that have built on a system, that is built on a series of laws, 1924, passed 90 years ago, 1965, passed 49 years ago.  We inadvertently got a system that prefers extended family reunification of mostly low-skill people to admission of high skill people.  We&#8217;ve got a system now which we&#8217;ve got to lobby for declaring legalization of illegals, primarily low-skilled, and there&#8217;s an effective lobby for that.  There&#8217;s an effective lobby for increasing the number of H1BVs, as they tend to tie high-skilled people to a particular firm.  Microsoft wants you to work.  Apple wants you to work.</p>
<p>I think we should take this opportunity, the fact that it&#8217;s obvious that we need to change our immigration laws, to take a new approach and not just do patch work.  I&#8217;m not going to get into arguments here about what we do about seasonal farm workers, that&#8217;s a collateral issue.  I think that one of the things we&#8217;ve seen now, unlike 2006 and 2007, which is when the sort of design of the bill that passed the Senate in 2013 was formulated.  That&#8217;s a period when most of us thought we were going to have an unending surge of migration, especially low-skill migration from Latin America and some of us thought the best thing we can do is regularize it through some legalization.  We thought also that our high tech system was going on fine, we didn&#8217;t have any problems there and we thought that we had plenty of demand for low skill workers because the economy was growing.  Well, the surge in that migration from Mexico to the United States from 2007 to 2012 was zero, we don&#8217;t have that problem, and I think the argument is stronger today in my opinion than it was then, that says that legalization measures incentivize illegal immigration, which wouldn&#8217;t otherwise occur.  I think prior to 2007 it was going to occur anyway.  I think now we saw with the influx of Central Americans in the Rio Grande that there is an argument that undercuts the argument for legalization or at least suggests caution.</p>
<p>What I think is most important is to encourage high-skill immigration.  Steve and I disagree, I don&#8217;t think we need a lot of low-skill people right now, new people.  He thinks we always do.  I think we always need high skilled people in this country and I think if you want to maximize human capital in the United States or in the world, we want high-skilled people in this country, as many as we can get.  We&#8217;ve got a system where we admit a grudging amount of them, tied to particular firms.  I think we might do better if we let in high-skilled people, people who can demonstrate that they have high skills and abilities and let them see what they can do in something that we have here despite the effects of the current Administration, which is called the free enterprise system, a free economy and work their way up there.  I see as a model of the systems of our Anglosphere cousins Canada and Australia.  Canada and Australia have high-skill immigration.  They have point systems.  I had a chance to talk here with Senator Sessions and I said to him, let&#8217;s look at how Canada and Australia do this.  Can something like this be adapted to the United States?</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Moore: </strong>Canadians and Australians don&#8217;t want us to do this.</p>
<p><strong>Michael Barone: </strong>Well, a Canadian diplomat in Washington said to me please, please do not adopt our Canadian immigration system.  We want these high-skilled people in Vancouver and Calgary and Toronto and Montreal.  We don&#8217;t want them going to the United States.  We want them in Canada and Australia wants them in Australia.  I have a lot of affection for Canada or Australia but I say let&#8217;s give them a fight.  I think that we should try to restructure this so that instead of extended family reunification of low-skill people we move towards high skilled people that have demonstrated their abilities and so forth in this country.</p>
<p>As I look back over the three things I&#8217;m talking about, let&#8217;s liberate the economy from high taxes, but also incentivize family behavior that we&#8217;re not sure we can fully influence but at least move people towards behavior that tends to maximize human capital.  Present opportunities to growing groups of the electorate like Hispanics and Millennials so to maximize their human capital and to exchange our immigration system and not just tinker with band aids and stuff on the 90-year-old legislation and the 49-year-old legislation but actually reframe our immigration law.  Take this opportunity to proclaim that we are a land of the free, home of the brave and we have open arms to people who come here with high skills and want to contribute to the United States and the world through becoming Americans.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong>I think that, Michael, microphones are going to be going around in a second.  I&#8217;m going to ask a quick question.  Having just moved out from my parents&#8217; basement, thanks Ally and Paul, and being Hispanic and a Millennial, I&#8217;d like to talk kind of specifically about some of those policies the Republicans just took to Congress, both houses.  If you were in a room advising John Boehner and Mitch McConnell and the leadership in the Republican Party, what would you advise them they should do going out the gate in 2015 and what would you advise them not to do?</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Moore: </strong>Well the first thing, how many of you have been following this issue, this esoteric issue of corporate inversions of companies that are leaving and I say this is actually a real crisis in this country, and I don&#8217;t think a lot of the politicians quite understand what&#8217;s going on here.  If we don&#8217;t fix our corporate tax system &#8212; and most Americans have no idea about the corporate tax system and I don&#8217;t think Barack Obama understands this either.  Our corporate tax, as most of you in this room know, we have the highest statutory corporate tax in the world.  We&#8217;re at 40 percent and it&#8217;s interesting.  If you look over the last 25 years it used to be, Michael, if you go back to 1990 the rest of the world was at about 45 percent.  You know what&#8217;s happened over the last 25 years?  The rest of the world is adopting Reaganonics – Ireland, England, Canada, they are cutting their rates very sharply and so it used to be we were 5 percentage points below the world average.  Today we&#8217;re 15 to 20 percent above the world average.  That doesn&#8217;t work anymore.  I describe this as a Head Start program for every country that we compete with, right?  It&#8217;s true and I would even make the case it is unpatriotic to support a 40 percent corporate tax.  The people who are harmed by this tax are not big, rich Wall Street fat cats who own stock, although it does reduce returns to sharers, but there&#8217;s a lot of really good evidence by some of my friends at the American Enterprise Institute and some of my colleagues at Heritage, that the people that are hurt the most by this high corporate tax when companies leave is American workers.  This affects their wages and affects their job opportunities, so I would make the case by that and if I could do one thing overnight I would say, let&#8217;s just get rid of the corporate income tax, right?  Let&#8217;s just get rid of the corporate income tax and tax it to the shareholders when they earn it as capital gain.</p>
<p>But if we can&#8217;t do that there is a mandate in my opinion, there is a necessity we get that corporate tax rate down to 20 to 25 percent because if we do not do this and if we do not act quickly &#8212; you&#8217;ve seen what&#8217;s happened in the last nine months.  Think about the companies.  Burger King. Burger King is leaving the United States.  Walgreen&#8217;s wants to leave.  Pfizer wants to leave.  I could name four or five other major Fortune 100 companies that are essentially renouncing their United States citizenship and leaving the United States and as you said, going to Canada, going to Ireland.  In Ireland the highest corporate tax rate is 4½ percent.  That means you can change your location from, say, New York to Dublin, and you can cut your corporate income tax by two-thirds.  Companies have a charge to maximize their return to their shareholders so that would be the number one thing – get rid of the corporate income tax and then number two, let&#8217;s just blow up the whole income tax and start over with a flat tax.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong>I agree with both of those things and I think you know that, but how to Republicans send that credibly to Obama when he spent his entire Presidency demonizing corporations and saying they&#8217;re the Devil.</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Moore: </strong>Let me just make one quick comment about this.  I believe one of the biggest, one of the turning points in this election &#8212; and correct me if I&#8217;m wrong you guys because you know politics better than I do.  That imbecilic comment that Hillary Clinton made seven days before the next.</p>
<p><strong>Michael Barone: </strong>When she was giving her Elizabeth Warren imitation?</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Moore: </strong>Exactly.</p>
<p><strong>Michael Barone: </strong>No there is going to be a very spirited competition if those two run against each other because we don&#8217;t know who&#8217;s going to carry Salem.</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Moore: </strong>My only point in bringing that up is I do believe Brian that the big problem with the Democrats today, the Democrats today are anti-business, right?  They are anti-business.  My old boss Dick Army, you know Dick Army was the House Majority Leader, he used to say, and he said it so perfectly, liberals love jobs and they hate employers.  Liberals love jobs and they have employers.  You can&#8217;t have one without the other.  This is where I think it gets to your point about Millennials saying, wait a minute, the Democrats said they were going to create all these jobs.  When is the last time?  Just a thought I want to put in your head.  When is the last time this President in the last six years said anything good about business?  When has he said, he is the same President who said two years ago, &#8220;you didn&#8217;t build that,&#8221; so that anti-business sentiment is the ruination of the Democratic Party in my opinion.</p>
<p><strong>Michael Barone: </strong>Well, Steve starts off right with the populist to appeal and cut the corporate income tax.  You&#8217;re absolutely right on the arguments intellectually and I think there is a political avenue to do this and an openness to do this.  There is a lot of low-hanging fruit off there – the Keystone XL Pipeline, vote on a bunch of things where you&#8217;re going to get, by the way, a bunch of Democrats, 31 House Democrats voted for the Keystone Pipeline last week and so forth, that it&#8217;s a 70 percent issue.  You&#8217;ve got a bunch of 70 percent issues, but I guess I would just reiterate my thinking on the immigration thing.  I really think that we have an opportunity to change the trajectory of incoming immigration and so forth in the world in the years ahead.  I wrote this book, <i>Shaping Our Nation:  How Surges in Migration Transformed American Politics</i> and it&#8217;s about internal migrations and it&#8217;s about immigration migrations.  We&#8217;ve had these unexpected surges of migration.  Nobody in 1965 was predicting huge migration from Latin America.  We actually imposed a limit of something like 60,000 Mexicans a year in the &#8217;65 Act, did you know that?  It didn&#8217;t turn out to be very effective because of family reunification provisions and because of illegal immigration.  Migration from Mexico was ten times that approximately between 1982 and 2007 and then it stops and that&#8217;s a historic pattern too.  You get these surges that last one or two generations, they stop.  I want the next surges to be high-skilled people from around the world.</p>
<p>One of the statistics that I saw recently and perhaps appropriate of last night&#8217;s meeting was that the percentage of people in the United States &#8212; like some of President Reagan&#8217;s statistics this may be wrong, so I want to be fact checked on this.  The data was that of people born in Africa, that doesn&#8217;t include the President, people born in African in the United States today is something like 47 percent of them have college degrees and moving on to their accounting degree and getting that and we see that in Washington, DC.  Michelle Obama, that Minnesota gets the Somalians, we&#8217;ve got the Ethiopians and it&#8217;s better for our metro area.  But anyway, that&#8217;s an interesting data point.  Let&#8217;s get the high-skilled people across the world because it&#8217;s better for our country and a more prosperous, more creative America is better for the world.</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Moore: </strong>You know Michael I was in &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Michael Barone: </strong>It&#8217;s better for people all over the world because they in many ways have often been free riders on advances made in the United States and the people of the United States who make advances, who have economic success are also major supporters, not only through taxes and foreign aid but much more importantly through voluntary activities that have helped people around the world.</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Moore: </strong>I was just going to say, I got in a taxi in Washington, DC about two weeks ago and the driver was an Ethiopian and he kept staring at me, and he kept looking back at me, he had this big smile on his face, &#8220;You&#8217;re on Fox News, aren&#8217;t you.  I watch Fox News every day.&#8221;  I&#8217;m like these are our kind of people.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong>All right let&#8217;s go to some questions from the audience.  We have a microphone in the back.</p>
<p><strong>Rep. Michele Bachmann: </strong>Thanks.  You guys are so brilliant and I want to thank you and I just want to see me too to Steve.</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Moore: </strong>Michele you are irreplaceable in the United States Congress.  We love you.  You are awesome!  We need you to run against Mark Dayton for Governor of Minnesota.</p>
<p><strong><strong>Rep. Michele Bachmann</strong>: </strong>No I just want to say how much I love and underscore exactly what you said – in my former life I was a federal tax litigation attorney, before I came to the U.S. Congress and I think again this is a plus-up area where Republicans can go on offense in the next two years against Hillary Clinton or whoever the nominee is, because this is a job creations tax.  That&#8217;s what the Corporate Tax Code is, it&#8217;s a tax on job creation and we need to frame it in such a way so that people know that what we want to do is get rid of these job killing taxes and have job creation taxes and I&#8217;ll give you one perfect example based upon inversions.  Two weeks before the 2012 Election I sat down with all of the medical device industry in Minnesota from the baby startups all the way to the King Daddy which was Medtronic and all of them could be predictive.  They saw that this could very well go the way of Barack Obama and the way of the medical device tax and so they&#8217;d been out looking in Europe and other countries to see where they could move their industries, and they were very frank.  They said if we don&#8217;t take this election in 2012, we&#8217;re out of here because we&#8217;ve got better places to go for industry and so Medtronic is one of those companies that announced an inversion and then the Treasury Department came back and was basically going to cancel all those inversions but it&#8217;s human nature.  People go where they can make the income so I think this is a target rich environment for us to go on offense and I think we&#8217;ll get Millennials.  I think that we should compete for every bit of space for every voter because it&#8217;s about every voter, their job.</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Moore: </strong>Let me make a broader point because I think that what you said is so important.  Tell me if you think I&#8217;m wrong about this, Michele, but I think Republicans have an incredible opportunity right now with the old Reagan blue collar industrial union workers; because think about that.  Put it like this, Michael.  How can Tom Steyer coexist in a party with unionized blue collar workers? Tom Steyer is trying to deindustrialize America.  He wants to destroy the jobs of pipe fitters, welders, electricians – he wants to destroy the jobs of Teamsters.  Your and my party, Michele, you&#8217;re the person to do this.  We ought to be going into these union halls, I&#8217;m serious, and we should be saying, we&#8217;re the ones who are trying to save your jobs.  It&#8217;s these wacko Green Environmentalists who are trying to destroy your jobs, right?  That should be our message.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong>A question from Senator Sessions.</p>
<p><strong>Sen. Jeff Sessions: </strong>Thank you, just briefly.  I recall having met with a Canadian who runs their system of immigration.  They are very happy with it. They are very pleased.  At a hearing two years ago in the Judiciary Committee, the Microsoft representative and group pushing for high-tech visas praised the Canadian system.  I said, well, Mr. Microsoft, I&#8217;ll adopt the Canadian system today.  Do you agree to that?  What do you think his answer was?  He had this rueful smile, and the reason was they made a deal.  They got their deal on the big bill.  La Raza and the businesses who want lower-skill workers and the political groups that want family reunification.  They made a partnership so that the package itself was unacceptable, in my opinion, so I guess I would say if we can break this bunch from their unholy comprehensive alliance and focus on the Canadian-type system, which gives points if you &#8212; millions of people speak English in the world.  If you&#8217;ve got two people to apply to American, why not choose the one who already speaks English?  Have we got two young people in Honduras and one has two years of college and one is a high school dropout, why not let the scholar get in?</p>
<p>We&#8217;ve got data to show that people with two years of education who come to America almost always succeed.  Data shows that people who come to American without a high school degree, without language skills, almost always remain in poverty for generations.  So I guess, Michael, I think you&#8217;re on the right track.  I also am dubious about some of the things they say.  Microsoft just laid off 18,000.  Facebook, Mr. Zuckerberg, they only have 7,000 people.  This is not a big job industry.  If you travel the state like I do, and go in to business after business, it&#8217;s incredible the amount of robotics we&#8217;ve got.  We&#8217;re going to have more widgets made with fewer people every year for the next 30 years.  So we&#8217;ve got to think about how our people can be able to take the few jobs that exist out there, and we want to have their pay go up and not down.  So anyway, I&#8217;ve gone too long.</p>
<p><strong>Michael Barone: </strong>I think that this is a great example, Senator, that we are in an area where we need good policy instead of good lobbying.  There&#8217;s a lobby for H1Bs because they stay with my company and you got indentured servitude or something like it.  But high skill hasn&#8217;t got a lobby.  It has got to find one.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong>Why don&#8217;t we get a question over here and let&#8217;s walk to this side of the room too so there are a couple of questions over here.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>Yeah, one thing you haven&#8217;t mentioned and please address it, is the toll on human beings of the Green Agenda.  The world and our country came into fruition on oil, on energy.  Nothing works, no one gets a better life without the energy to propel it.  If you look at the Green Agenda, as a matter of fact I live in Austin.  We have a little tabloid that&#8217;s called <i>The Austin Chronical.</i>  Yeah you laugh, but it&#8217;s amazingly effective.  They had some smartly groomed black kids calling green the new black, displayed on the cover of last&#8217;s week&#8217;s <em>Chronical</em>.  This is a lie.  It&#8217;s all a lie.  If you take away the energy, Africa stops.  They have no chance of ever getting out from under the chains of and if you look at China, what has propelled them forward at break neck speed?  Energy, energy, energy and they take that all away and would you please address that because that&#8217;s one of the human tolls of the Green Agenda.</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Moore: </strong>So I just got back my, it&#8217;s a great point.  I just got back from Zimbabwe.  My niece is a Peace Corps volunteer in this little village really out in the middle of nowhere.  When you were talking I was thinking about this because this village, they are incredibly great people.  I just fell in love with these people but you know, they&#8217;re living almost literally like it&#8217;s the 16<sup>th</sup> Century and you know what they don&#8217;t have in this town?  Electricity, electricity. You can&#8217;t do anything if you don&#8217;t have electric power, and for our government, for Barack Obama to run around the world telling these countries they should use fossil fuels, use less fossil fuels, that&#8217;s immoral, right?  He&#8217;s basically saying he wants to keep these countries poor and that&#8217;s a message we need to get through to people.</p>
<p>Just one other quick little story: we lost our electricity last summer when we had a big storm in Northern Virginia and I wrote a piece in the <i>Wall Street Journal, </i>and it got a huge response, and I just said what happened when the Morris electricity went out.  I have three kids, two teenagers who I don&#8217;t like very much and then I have an 11 year old but my teenagers when the electricity went out, they thought the first few hours were really cool. We had a fire and we had candles and so on and I&#8217;ve got to tell you.  After the first day, because we were without electricity for 72 hours, my kids were like screaming how do people live without electricity, my God they didn&#8217;t have any screen, they didn&#8217;t have cell phones.  The point is if we let the Green Agenda go forward as these people want to do, we&#8217;re going to have rolling brownouts and blackouts in this country.  If you want to see the American people get angry, it&#8217;s going to be when that happens.  If you turn out the lights, people get pretty upset.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>Good morning, two quick points.  I find myself not surprised that once again I agree with Senator Sessions.  Good morning Senator.  Alan Greenspan testified before Chuck Shumer on April 30, 2009.  It&#8217;s just two sentences, I want to read this because I think we have too many high-tech workers from foreign countries competing with American high-tech workers which disincentivizes kids from going into those fields.  This is from Greenspan&#8217;s testimony.  &#8220;Greatly expanding our quotas for the highly skilled with lower wage premiums of the skilled over the lesser skilled.  Skill shortages in America exist because we are shielding our skilled labor force from world competition.  Quotas have been substituted for the wage pricing mechanism and in the process&#8221; &#8212; this word amazes me &#8212; &#8220;we have created a privileged elite whose incomes are being supported at non-competitively high levels by immigration quotas on skilled professionals.  Eliminating such restrictions would reduce at least some of our income and equality.&#8221;  We need to get more American kids into those high tech industries, item number one.  Item number two, if you go to the UN web site you will find that they predict the two fastest ways of increasing remittances flowing from the U.S. to the Third World, sustainability, green, and in that comprehensive reform. We need to understand that our laws were based on the concept of protecting American lives and American jobs, first and foremost.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong>Michael, what are your thoughts.</p>
<p><strong>Michael Barone: </strong>I&#8217;m not sure I&#8217;m so concerned about protecting high-skill people from competition.  I think high skills are not are zero sum game.  Andrew Carnegie did not suffer because John D. Rockefeller was successful in business.  You got one immigrant and the other is the son of a confidence man.  You can make an argument I think particularly at the stage of employment that we have now.  Steve would not agree with it, but that low-skill employment is the zero sum game for the people and you let in more low-skills from other countries you drive down wages of low skill people in this country.  I think there&#8217;s something at least marginally to that.  High skill people are going to create and do things that you central planners didn&#8217;t think up.  They&#8217;re going to actually figure out new things and Andrew Carnegie figured out new things, the poor boy from Scotland.  So I&#8217;m for letting a lot of competition bloom with high-skilled people and I don&#8217;t think they ever crowd each other out.</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Moore: </strong>Here&#8217;s why that&#8217;s completely wrong to say that our high-skilled workers or immigrants are taking jobs from American high-skilled workers.  There&#8217;s a very simple reason why that&#8217;s completely wrong.  It&#8217;s because 36 percent of the businesses in Silicon Valley that hire American high-tech workers were founded by immigrants.  So if the immigrants didn&#8217;t come here a lot of those businesses wouldn&#8217;t exist in the first place.</p>
<p><strong>Michael Barone: </strong>What we&#8217;ve seen with a lot of Hispanic voters &#8212; the one seriously contested Senate race was a state with above national average Hispanic percentage, was in Colorado and in Colorado the Democrats, partly through an effort of very rich people putting together a pretty smart political operation that&#8217;s won the major offices there, they imposed a gentry liberal, my friend Joe Cochran&#8217;s phrase, a gentry liberal program: gun control.  Hispanic voters recalled one of the state senators that voted for it in Pueblo County, 42 percent Hispanic county.  They were going to have an anti-fracking referendum.  They decided to take that off the ballot because it was polling so badly they were going to get licked 80/20 or something like that.  Abortion absolutism, Senator Mark Udall became known by the liberal media as Mark Uterus, ran half his ads, the NARAL pro-choice ad said that there would be no contraceptives available in Colorado if Cory Gardner was elected to the U.S. senate.  We now have a chance to fact check that prediction since Gardner was elected and we&#8217;ll see if there are any condoms available in Colorado.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong>Along with their marijuana.</p>
<p><strong>Michael Barone: </strong>Well I&#8217;m not going to go there.  They are rejecting that agenda.  The question is do Republicans have an agenda that can go forward and that can help them maximize their human capital.  Help them achieve their dreams.  Help them earn success.  I think we&#8217;ve been trying up in the platform, a lot of you in the audience are working at this sort of thing.  Can&#8217;t give you a fast formula but I think there are Republicans working on it.  I think that we&#8217;ve got to get going and the other low hanging fruit.  What Michele mentioned, the medical devices tax.  We have these wonderful industries that produce things like prosthetics that enable wounded veterans to live full lives in a way that wouldn&#8217;t have ever been possible before and what does this crowd do? They want to tax it.  I think that there are a lot of opportunities here.</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Moore: </strong>Well Michael let me just give you one, Hispanics are an obvious one but let me just put up one thought about black Americans.  Anybody in this room from Illinois?  A few.  What a great race, Bruce Rauner won one of the most important races in the country this year, and what&#8217;s interesting about Bruce Rauner, this is a near billionaire hedge fund manager.  They tried to run their own Mitt Romney campaign against him.  Here&#8217;s what interesting about Bruce Rauner.  I think every Republican in the country should take a page out of his book.  You know what he did?  Bruce Rauner spent a lot of his time going into black churches, black neighborhoods, black schools and he had a couple of messages.  One of the things he said, which every Republican should do when we&#8217;re talking to black audiences.  What have the Democrats done for you?  Really, what have the Democrats done for black American?  Nothing.</p>
<p><strong>Michael Barone: </strong>No, I&#8217;m from Detroit and I&#8217;ve seen what happens.</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Moore: </strong>Yeah, right, exactly.  That was his point and what Bruce Rauner said is you elect me Governor of this State – I&#8217;m going to clean up your neighborhoods, I&#8217;m going to give you school choice, I&#8217;m going to clean up your schools, I&#8217;m going to give you jobs and you know what?  Bruce Ronner got 20 percent of the black vote in Illinois, so we can win a bigger percentage of black Americans with a message of economic growth.</p>
<p><strong>Michael Barone: </strong>Well, and here&#8217;s an Hispanic message.  California and Texas, we&#8217;ve been looking at the number of jobs.  Both of those states in the 2010 census were about 36 percent Hispanic.  Texas Hispanics get better test scores than California Hispanics.  Texas is non-union, non-ed run schools do a better job than California&#8217;s Teacher Union runs schools, okay?  Texas Hispanics make more money than California Hispanics.  Texas Hispanics have lower unemployment than California Hispanics.  We have a test case on whose policies help Hispanic people in American and I think also there&#8217;s a spirit of, well there&#8217;s a spirit of enterprise.  There&#8217;s also a cultural spirit.  When you go to Texas the people in Texas look at somebody that&#8217;s got stereotypical Latino features, they say that&#8217;s a Texan.  When rich Californians see somebody with that figure they hand them the keys to the car because they assume it&#8217;s a valet parking attendant.</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Moore: </strong>So the message here, folks, is we have to make America look more like Texas and less like New York and California.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong>Except for the weather, except for the weather.  Thank you all very much for taking the time to listen to us and let&#8217;s give one more round of applause to our great panel.</p>
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		<title>Only Muslim Schoolchildren Lives Matter?</title>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 29 Dec 2014 05:45:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Raymond Ibrahim]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[attack]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Christian]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Terrorism]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[The world heard about the Peshawar school attack, but many attacks on Christian schools go unreported by MSM.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/4973928-3x2-700x467.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-248284" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/4973928-3x2-700x467-450x300.jpg" alt="4973928-3x2-700x467" width="321" height="214" /></a>Earlier we looked at “<a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/raymond-ibrahim/how-western-media-enable-islamic-terrorism/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">how Western mainstream media enable Islamic terrorism</span></a>,” specifically by employing an arsenal of semantic games, key phrases, convenient omissions, and moral relativism to portray such violence as a product of anything and everything—political and historical grievances, “Islamophobia,” individual insanity, poverty and ignorance, territorial disputes—not Islam.</p>
<p>Another strategy that recently came to the fore consists of highlighting Islamic terror attacks that target other Muslims.  The logic here is clear:  How “Islamic” can such Islamic groups be if they attack and kill fellow Muslims?  In other words, whatever the motivation, it surely cannot be Islam, since those being killed are themselves Muslims.  This suggests that the terrorists themselves cannot be true Muslims since Muslims are generally forbidden by Islam to kill other Muslims (caveats exist).</p>
<p>A recent example of this is the December 16 Taliban attack on an army public school in Peshawar, where 145 people were killed, the majority being schoolchildren age 18 and under.   This incident was reported all over the mainstream media, and rightfully so.</p>
<p>Yet this begs the question: why do similar attacks, when directed at non-Muslims—especially Christians—rarely if ever get the same sort of media coverage?</p>
<p>For example, in <a href="https://barnabasfund.org/US/News/Archives/47-youngsters-killed-at-Christian-school-in-Nigeria-while-Christians-in-Mubi-forced-to-flee-after-Boko-Haram-renames-it-City-of-Islam.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Nigeria</span></a> on November 10,</p>
<blockquote><p>A suicide bomb attack in a Christian secondary school in the town of Potiskum in Yobe state, north-eastern <a href="https://barnabasfund.org/US/Our-work/Our-current-projects/BF-Project-Countries/Nigeria.html?"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Nigeria</span></a>, has killed at least 47 people on Monday as the students gathered for morning assembly. Boko Haram is thought to be behind the blast, having carried out several attacks on schools giving a Western-style education. Translated from Hausa, Boko Haram means “Western education is forbidden” of which this latest school attack is a stark reminder.</p></blockquote>
<p>Earlier in the year in Nigeria “Boko Haram claimed the lives of <a href="http://www.romereports.com/pg155924-nearly-60-students-at-christian-school-killed-in-boko-haram-attack-in-nigeria-en"><span style="color: #0433ff;">59 students</span></a> at a Christian school &#8230;  Some 50 men ambushed the school, then beat and shot staff and students. Once finished, they set fire to the buildings, with many students still inside. It&#8217;s the fourth attack of its kind since May of last year.”</p>
<p>On October 1 in Syria, at least 41 Alawite children—all under 12—were <a href="https://docs.zoho.com/writer/ropen.do?rid=b6wwv3c5aa80706194262ab5ce81131ace25c#bookmark=http://www.fides.org/en/news/36468-ASIA_SYRIA_Massacre_of_children_in_Homs_three_Christians_kidnapped_in_the_province_of_Hassake"><span style="color: #0433ff;">killed</span></a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>The massacre was one of the most severe in terms of children who died since the beginning of the conflict in Syria. According to official Syrian sources, a car bomb and a suicide bomber caused two explosions when the children came out of school, in the suburb of Akrameh inhabited mainly by Alawites, with the targeted intention to cause the highest number possible of deaths among children of the same religious community to which the Assad family belong.</p></blockquote>
<p>Here is the testimony of an eyewitness to another Islamic attack on a Christian school in Syria, where 12 people—mostly children—were <a href="http://www.charismanews.com/world/43540-god-is-here-but-i-am-getting-so-tired-syrian-christian-mother-mourns-killing-of-children-from-bombings"><span style="color: #0433ff;">killed</span></a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>I want to tell you about Tuesday. It was a terrible day. We cried and prayed all day. Tuesday they were bombing Bab Touma, the old city of Damascus. A lot of Christians live there. There is also a Christian school—a private one. We know a lot of people in that school. Some children from our area also go to school there. When those kids went to school on Tuesday, gathered at the square like they always do, a mortar fell in their midst. Some friends passed by the school and saw that parents and teachers were carrying their wounded children out of the school, dripping with blood. They saw them running to the hospitals in panic. For me, as a mother and a teacher, I can hardly bear to imagine what these people must be going through right now.  Twelve people lost their lives in that school, most of them children from the elementary school. Many more of them have lost arms and legs or have other injuries.</p></blockquote>
<p>As for Islamic attacks on Christian schools that do not lead to casualties, these are quite common.  Thus, on November 5 in Bangladesh, hundreds of Muslims, some armed with knives and machetes, attacked a Christian school.  <a href="https://www.worldwatchmonitor.org/2014/11/article_3500298.html/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">They</span></a> torched its library, burned Bibles and hymnals, and committed other wanton acts of violence.  According to a source, “A wave of panic swept through the school and traumatized everyone. Many students became sick in the following days.”  The reason for this particular attack?  <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/islamists-project-islams-worst-traits-onto-christians/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Muslim projection</span></a>: a rumor started that the Christian school was converting Muslim students to Christianity.</p>
<p>How many of those Western people who could not help but hear about the Peshawar attack—considering its widespread coverage—also heard about these Islamic attacks on schools some of which also took large numbers of children lives?  Not very many, I would wager.</p>
<p>The reason, again, is obvious: reporting Muslims killing Muslims does not contradict the mainstream media’s narrative but ostensibly enforces it.  For—so the simple logic goes—Muslims who kill fellow Muslims cannot be “real” Muslims to start with, and must in fact be, as Western politicians habitually characterize them, mere “criminals.”</p>
<p>Thus, the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan issued a <a href="http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?adbid=545215646309416960&amp;adbpl=tw&amp;adbpr=66369181&amp;cid=social_20141217_37458137&amp;id=123838"><span style="color: #0433ff;">statement</span></a> condemning the Peshawar attack, adding, “The barbaric actions of the Taliban illustrate their lack of value for human life and lack of respect for the Islamic faith. These attacks only prove their selfish desire for power and willingness to murder to reach their self-serving goals.”</p>
<p>On the other hand, it is more difficult for the media to dissemble the motives of Muslims who intentionally target and kill “the other”—outnumbered and defenseless “infidel” minorities—simply because <i>they are</i> “the other.”</p>
<p>Whether small numbers or large—whether <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/islam-built-on-the-blood-of-christian-martyrs/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">four children decapitated for refusing to renounce Christ</span></a> or whether <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/largest-massacre-of-christians-in-syria-ignored/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">the largest massacre of Christians in Syria</span></a>—Muslim persecution of Christians will rarely if ever get MSM coverage, for it <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/why-christian-persecution-is-islams-achilles-heel/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">throws a wrench</span></a> in the media’s narrative that Islamic violence is a product of anything and everything but <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/the-ultimate-source-of-islamic-hate-for-infidels/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Islamic hate for non-Muslims</span></a>.</p>
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		<title>Russian Nativity Play: A Tale of Two Josephs</title>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 29 Dec 2014 05:40:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Oleg Atbashian]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[christmas play]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[What happens to a Christmas play when Joseph Stalin is more known than the biblical Joseph.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Joseph.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-248319" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Joseph-293x350.jpg" alt="Joseph" width="221" height="264" /></a>This &#8220;life imitates the People&#8217;s Cube&#8221; moment comes from St. Petersburg, Russia. What seems to be a spoof is a legitimate story via <a href="http://ria.ru/society/20141225/1040186712.html">RIA Novosti</a>, a Russian news agency. As a historical footnote, Nativity plays are a new concept in Russia, where Joseph Stalin is more known than the biblical Joseph, which occasionally causes Freudian slips like this one.</p>
<p>A St. Petersburg student mistakenly showed up dressed as Joseph Stalin to the Christmas play where he was supposed to play the biblical character of Joseph.</p>
<p>&#8220;Yesterday, my 12-year-old son participated in a school play. He told us ahead of time that he got the role of Joseph Stalin who is talking to some woman. It wasn&#8217;t a big surprise to us, as he has played parts in school plays before, and once he was even a watermelon,&#8221; wrote the student&#8217;s father Fyodor Gavrichenko on his <a href="https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10205116943470500&amp;set=a.1318879219340.47466.1451565715&amp;type=1&amp;fref=nf">Facebook page</a>.</p>
<p>Gavrichenko said the whole family worked on making the costume &#8211; especially the grandmother, who sewed trouser stripes to the pants, found some old army boots, made a generalissimo mustache and a red folder with a big star.</p>
<p>They didn&#8217;t realize the mistake until the last moment because the play was in German as part of the boy&#8217;s foreign language class, and no one understood what the son&#8217;s lines meant. Apparently, the boy hadn&#8217;t been paying attention in class either. Instead of bringing the costume to school before the play, he showed the teacher its picture on his cell phone. The teacher thought it was a joke and said that the costume &#8220;rocks.&#8221;</p>
<p>The family sensed trouble when they saw their son&#8217;s classmate dressed as Magi. &#8220;Who are you?&#8221; asked the Magi. &#8220;I&#8217;m Mary&#8217;s husband… Joseph Stalin,&#8221; said the boy. His confidence shaken, the classmate went to the teacher: &#8220;Our Joseph turns out to be Stalin… Is that a good thing?&#8221; &#8220;What?&#8221; asked the teacher, as he pulled the curtain revealing the Nativity scene with Joseph and Mary. It was too late to change.</p>
<p>The plot thickened before the drama began. According to the father, Stalin&#8217;s outfit was a smash. The boy&#8217;s lines were accompanied by fits of hysterical laughter through the tears from other parents, some of whom reportedly fell off their chairs.</p>
<p>Those who can read the original Facebook post in Russian will notice that the father knows as little about the Nativity story as his son, confusing characters and their roles in the story. This is rather a norm in Russia, where erstwhile official atheism is only now being replaced by the official Orthodox Church. This St. Petersburg father couldn&#8217;t tell the shepherds from angels even if his son&#8217;s play weren&#8217;t in German. But at least he&#8217;s trying.</p>
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		<title>Mahmoud Abbas: Failing the Palestinians and Peace</title>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 29 Dec 2014 05:35:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Puder]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=248290</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Palestinian president takes an even more drastic totalitarian turn. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Mahmoud-Abbas-AP.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-248291" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Mahmoud-Abbas-AP-450x324.jpg" alt="Mahmoud Abbas" width="296" height="213" /></a>Mahmoud Abbas, (aka Abu Mazen) has been a failure as the Palestinian “Rais.” He failed to lead the Palestinian Authority (PA) toward peace with Israel, and he mismanaged the alleged goal to achieve statehood for the Palestinians. Instead of facing the tough issues and making compromises required in negotiating peace and statehood with the Israelis, Abbas chose an alliance with the Gaza controlled terrorist group Hamas. Following Abbas’ pact with Hamas last April, Israel broke off peace negotiations with the Palestinians, just days before the talks brokered by Secretary of State John Kerry were scheduled to expire.</p>
<p>Abbas isn’t only confusing Israelis, Americans, and is his Europeans patrons, he is perplexing his own Palestinian consituents. Following last summer’s Gaza War between Hamas and Israel, Abbas threatened to join the International Criminal Court (ICC) and saught to indict Israel on war crimes. PA Foreign Minister Riad al-Maliki met with the Chief Prosecutor of the ICC last August to explore ways of joining the court by PA President Abbas signing the Rome Statute.  When, however, the U.S. Congress threatened to cut off all funding to Palestine if Abbas filed war crimes charges against Israel, Abbas backed off. At the same time though, Israel’s Prime Minister threatened to counter-sue, alleging that the rockets fired by Hamas terrorists into Israeli civilian areas constituted “<a href="http://www.thewire.com/global/2014/09/hamas-quietly-admits-it-fired-rockets-from-civilian-areas/380149/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">double war</span></a>” crimes.</p>
<p>The Israeli Law Center called Shurat-HaDin, led by Nitsana Darshan-Leitner submitted a complaint against Mahmoud Abbas in the ICC for “war crimes.” The complaint claims that Abbas may be tried for his responsibility in the missile attacks targeting Israeli cities, executed by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which Abbas heads. It charges that Fatah, also led by Abbas, was responsible for several missile attacks on Israeli cities. Darshn-Leitner pointed out that Fatah leader Abbas may be tried by the ICC. Abbas is a citizen of Jordan and Jordan is a member-state of the ICC. The ICC has jurisdiction over crimes committed by a citizen of a member state. Darshan-Leitner added, the organization “will not allow Fatah to carry out rocket attacks on Israeli population centers, while <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Arab-Israeli-Conflict/Shurat-Hadin-files-war-crimes-complaint-against-Abbas-with-ICC-381312"><span style="color: #0433ff;">hypocritically</span></a> advocating Palestinian membership in the ICC. Abbas falsely believes that alleged crimes against Arabs are the only ones that should be prosecuted.”</p>
<p>A week ago, Abbas threatened again. This time he fingered the security co-ordination with Israel following the death of Ziad Abu Ein, 55, PA Minister without Portfolio. He promptly backtracked. On November 29, 2014, Abbas declared  that if the United Nations Security Council rejects the Palestinian statehood resolution, he will seek membership in the ICC. He said, “We will seek Palestinian membership in international organizations, including the International Criminal Court in the Hague. We will also <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/.premium-1.629102"><span style="color: #0433ff;">reassess</span></a> our ties with Israel, including ending the security cooperation between us.”</p>
<p>Abbas’ latest gambit is a UN Security Council (UNSC) resolution that would force Israel to withdraw from Judea and Samaria (West Bank) within two-years. According to press reports, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry requested to postpone the Palestinian initiative at the UNSC until after the Israeli elections, (March 17, 2015) but the Palestinians refused. PA Foreign Minister Riad al-Maliki intimated to reporters that there was disagreement between the Americans and Palestinians on how the elections in Israel would or wouldn’t advance the PA UNSC resolution. Kerry believed that a UNSC vote before the elections would impact adversely on the winners. In other words, a vote before the elections would strengthen Netanyahu and the Right in Israel. Maliki argued that a vote before January, 2015 would be rather positive.</p>
<p>At a closed meeting last week with 28 EU ambassadors, John Kerry revealed that he was asked by former Israeli president Shimon Peres and Tzipi Livni to prevent the Palestinian initiative at the UNSC because it will help “<a href="http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/.premium-1.632816"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Netanyahu and Bennett</span></a> (Jewish Home Party chairman) in the upcoming elections.” Maliki posited that Kerry himself has not abided by his pledge not to intervene in the Israeli elections.</p>
<p>Also last week in London, Secretary of State Kerry met with Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, and according to a PA senior official, Kerry posed a number of U.S. principles that should be included in the Palestinian UNSC resolution. Kerry supposedly refused the two year time period demand by the PA for Israeli withdrawal. The resolution as Kerry suggested should include recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, as well as U.S. opposition to declare Jerusalem as a joint capital for Palestine and Israel. Erekat rejected the U.S. proposals. Kerry declared afterward that the U.S. does not accept the Jordanian (presenting the Palestinian resolution)  and French resolutions. He warned that if the Palestinians insist on presenting the resolutions, the U.S. would use its veto power. Erekat rejected Kerry’s ideas, and insisted that the resolutions would be submitted. As of December 25, 2014, Abbas rejected an Arab League request to delay the submission of the Palestinian statehood until January when five new members who support the Palestinian cause will join the Security Council.</p>
<p>Abbas’ gambits notwithstanding, the increased authoritarianism of Abu Mazen is reflected in a recent survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research. It indicates that 66% of Palestinians are afraid to criticise Abu Mazen and the PA, and 80% consider the PA institutions to be corrupt and infected with nepotism. Last summer, according to the survey, support for Abbas (Abu Mazen) declined to 35% from 50%. “There is no doubt about the fact that <a href="http://www.nrg.co.il/online/1/ART2/659/827.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">outlawing</span></a> freedoms and rights, especially of professional unions, is a factor in Abbas’ decline in popularity,” said Dr. Khalil Shikaki, one of the survey takers<span style="color: #323333;">. </span></p>
<p>PA security agents inspect what is written in the social media, and threaten those who criticize Abbas. Abu Mazen critics point out that after a decade in power he is controlling all systems of government to such an extent as to minimize all resistance. Perceived political rivals such as Mohammad Dahlan, who once served as Abu Mazen’s assistant, and Salam Fayyad, the former Prime Minister of the PA, are vilified by Abbas. Following the Palestinian Unity government formation, headed by Rami Hamdallah last May, elections were to follow. But, once again, internal squabbling prevented it, and added to it was Abbas’ fear of a Hamas victory.</p>
<p>Abu Mazen’s strategy for the establishment of a Palestinian state has reached a cul-de-sac.  None of his gambits proved successful. His rivalry with Hamas is bitter and ongoing, despite the alliance he forged at the expense of negotiations with Israel. And, like his predecessor Yasser Arafat, he balks at the idea of ‘ending the conflict’ with Israel. He knows full well that this might be a death sentence for him, targeting him for assassination. It is for this reason that Abbas and the PA are unlikely to forgo the “right of return” of Palestinian refugees to Israel. Israel for its part, cannot accept such a demographic suicide. This is why Abbas would rather avoid negotiations with Israel and bypass it by going to the UNSC. It is also the ostensible reason why peace with Israel cannot be achieved, and as a result, the Palestinian people continue to suffer political and economic deprivation. Abbas has not been the solution to the Palestinian problems; rather, he has been responsible for failing them.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.</b></p>
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		<title>Arab Israeli Politician Praises Terrorism</title>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 29 Dec 2014 05:30:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ronn Torossian]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Hanin Zoabi]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=248287</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Hamas representative in the Israeli Knesset.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #232323;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/w2-haneenzoabi-061614.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-248288" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/w2-haneenzoabi-061614.jpg" alt="w2-haneenzoabi-061614" width="346" height="280" /></a>In yet another story which the world&#8217;s mainstream media will ignore, an Israeli Arab Knesset member complained to the police about a right-wing Likud Knesset member, <span style="color: #1255cc;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nQWtVow1Lw">Danny Danon</a>,</span> making a video condemning her. <span style="color: #1255cc;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWKoFle57L8">Watch the video here</a></span></p>
<p style="color: #232323;"><span style="color: #1255cc;"><a href="http://www.truthrevolt.org/commentary/torossian-treason-israeli-knesset">The Arab MK, Hanin Zoabi</a>,</span> openly opposes the State of Israel, supports Hamas, and a few months ago published an article on Hamas&#8217;s website encouraging an Islamist uprising against the Jewish state, encouraging Arab countries to help stoke a &#8220;popular uprising&#8221; against Israel, halt security coordination with the Palestinian Authority (PA) police in Judea and Samaria, and lay siege to the region. She put the word &#8220;Israel&#8221; in quotation marks throughout the article, and said: [. . .] we must besiege &#8216;Israel&#8217; instead of negotiating with it.&#8221;  Zoabi has said Israel has “no right to a normal life” and Israel should &#8220;thank her&#8221; for allowing Jews to live in the Jewish State.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Recently, she defended the kidnapping of three Israeli teens, stating that the abduction was a &#8220;legitimate&#8221; way to &#8220;fight the occupation.&#8221; She has met Hamas officials, calls the Jewish State a racist notion, and has walked out of the Knesset during the singing of the national anthem.  This woman has made statements claiming that the <a href="http://www.truthrevolt.org/israel-revolt/torossian-pray-israel-defense-forces"><span style="color: #0066cc;">Israel Defense Forces</span></a> are a greater danger than the possibility of Iranian nuclear weapons, and denied that Palestinians kidnapping Israeli civilians are terrorists.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">However, she complained that Danon was committing incitement for releasing a video where he is depicted as a sheriff who locks her up for supporting terrorists.  Zoabi complains about incitement?  As Danon rightfully said in response, &#8220;A person who serves as the Hamas representative in the Israeli Knesset should be sitting in jail and not preaching on the subject of incitement and freedom of expression.&#8221;</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Imagine a member of Congress praising Al-Qaeda? Absurd.  Yet, worldwide Israel is spoken of terribly.  The emperor has no clothes.</p>
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		<title>Frontpage’s 2014 Person of the Year: The American Police Officer</title>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 26 Dec 2014 05:59:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=248229</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The soldier of civilization fighting to keep it alive.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/nypd2.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-248045" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/nypd2-450x300.jpg" alt="nypd2" width="306" height="204" /></a>As we sit here in our homes with our families and loved ones around us, tens of thousands of children wonder if their parents will come home tonight.</p>
<p>Their fathers and mothers aren’t stationed in Iraq or Afghanistan. They’re on duty in places like Englewood in Chicago where there are <a href="http://crime.chicagotribune.com/chicago/community/englewood">2 violent crimes for every 1,000</a> people in one month, Columbus Square in St. Louis or Bedford-Stuyvesant in New York City where two police officers were just murdered.</p>
<p>The men and women of law enforcement are on the front lines of the war at home. From the mugger on the block to the terrorist on the hijacked plane, they are the first ones there.</p>
<p>41 law enforcement officers were shot and killed in 2014. That’s in line with the number of Americans killed by hostile fire in Afghanistan. There’s a reason that Chicago has been nicknamed Chiraq. Some parts of the country are a war zone and after the latest shooting of two police officers in New York City, a statement circulating among cops states that the NYPD has become a “wartime police department.”</p>
<p>The war at home has been going on for a long time and by some accounts has claimed the lives of 20,000 law enforcement officers. Since 2001, more than 700 officers have been killed by gunfire. During the Gulf War, more officers were killed on the streets of American cities than in combat against Saddam.</p>
<p>Even as the murders of NYPD cops Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu fill the news, <a href="http://www.odmp.org/officer/22311-police-officer-charles-kondek">Officer Charlie Kondek has been shot</a> while pursuing a suspect in Tarpon Springs, Florida.</p>
<p>Officer Kondek had been a former member of the NYPD. He leaves behind five children. His killer, Marco Antonio Parilla Jr, had been repeatedly arrested for the possession and sale of cocaine before being released just this August. Officer Kondek and his children paid the ultimate price for his release.</p>
<p>All three police officers were casualties in the war against human evil that never ends. It’s an even dirtier and more unglamorous war than Iraq or Afghanistan. And police officers are hated in a way that it’s still socially unacceptable to hate soldiers. Ramos and Liu were the latest casualties of that hatred.</p>
<p>The police officer is the handyman of the welfare state. His job is to put his life on the line to plug the social leaks that the sociologists, consultants and social planners who made this mess had not foreseen. It’s his job to be there for a domestic violence complaint in a Florida motel at two in the morning or a failure of multiculturalism between two warring gangs in Oakland. He goes to places that the politicians don’t like to think about and deals with issues that the welfare state created and walked away from.</p>
<p>Progressives don’t believe in evil. It’s the beat cop who has to believe in it and clean it up.</p>
<p>The planners and politicians who allocate funds for new housing projects don’t have to patrol them at night. They don’t have to walk down a narrow concrete block hallway lined with dirty doors any of which can open at any minute with a gun behind it. The drug sentencing reformers have never had to carry a deranged screaming figure through the rusting doors of an emergency room. They have never had to get their soft shoes dirty walking through puddles of blood in an alleyway.</p>
<p>When liberalism fails, it’s the cop who gets the call. And when he does get the call, it’s the liberals who will be the first to call for his head.</p>
<p>It’s not enough that the cop has to clean up for the welfare state. He also has to be its scapegoat.</p>
<p>The chants of “Black lives matter” aren’t aimed at the gangs and drug dealers who rack up an astronomical number of black deaths; it’s aimed at the cops who put their lives on the line saving black lives. It’s the very people whose messes they clean up who hate them the most.</p>
<p>The police officer has come to embody America, abroad and at home, the nation that risks its lives to free peoples only to be despised for it, the nation that extends every benefit and privilege to its own criminals only to be shot and stabbed, raped and robbed for its endless generosity.</p>
<p>The American police officer was never supposed to be venturing into neighborhoods where no one speaks English and the locals see him as a member of an occupying army or patrolling in communities where gang members number in the thousands and could take down the entire local police force.</p>
<p>He was never supposed to be a social worker, a mediator, a medic and the commander of an invading army negotiating truces and treaties with the local tribes. And yet he is expected to be all these things and more. Every time he goes out he knows that he may face a choice between his life and his career.</p>
<p>If cops seem touchy, isolated or out of control it’s because they have been left hanging by a system that uses them to dam up the breakdown of a society without ever acknowledging that this is their job. Many urban police officers operate in environments where crime is not an aberration, but the norm. Like the American soldier, the police officer is better trained and more effective than ever before, but like the soldier he is also haunted by the sense that his work and his sacrifices are futile and unappreciated.</p>
<p>The police officer isn’t spending years in Iraq or Afghanistan; he’s spending decades in Chiraq. When his time ends, there will be no victory parades. Just the knowledge that he tried to make a difference and that unlike many brother officers, at least he made it to retirement.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.youcaring.com/memorial-fundraiser/remembering-daryl-pierson/228970">Officer Daryl Pierson was shot</a> and killed leaving behind a wife and two young children. Pierson had been an experienced officer. His killer, Thomas Johnson III, had been paroled after serving three years for an attempted armed robbery.</p>
<p>Officer Justin Winebrenner tried to get Kenan Ivery to leave a bar. Ivery drew a gun and shot and killed him. Officer Winebrenner was a second generation police officer. He left behind a 4-year-old daughter.</p>
<p>Officer Perry Renn responded to shots being fired and encountered Major Davis Jr. who was carrying a semi-automatic rifle. Davis Jr. had an extensive criminal record. He fired killing Officer Renn who had survived twenty-two years on the force.</p>
<p>Patrolman Jeffery Westerfield responded to a fight between Carl Le&#8217;Ellis Blount Jr. and his girlfriend. He never even got a chance to draw his gun or leave his squad car before Blount shot him in the head.</p>
<p>Deputy Sheriff Allen Bares was off duty when he saw a gold Lexus crash into a ditch. He approached the vehicle and was shot and killed. The two men inside, Quintylan Richard and Baylon Taylor, stole his truck and took off.</p>
<p>The police officers in all these cases were white. Their killers were black. But the police officers in many of these cases were trying to protect black people and black communities.</p>
<p>The killings all took place in a matter of months in 2014. And their numbers will only continue to grow.</p>
<p>While the wars abroad expand or contract, this is the war that will go on. Its soldiers will serve their tours of duty for decades on the streets of our own cities without having anywhere else to go home to. And when their time is up, they will never receive the thanks that they deserve because most of us will never understand the difference that they made.</p>
<p>When the left took over, it was the police officer who kept everything from going under in our major cities. It was not the politician or the planner, the sociologist or the social worker who kept the crime and chaos from sweeping everything away. It was the man in blue who did what had to be done.</p>
<p>Under Obama, when the criminal is king and the progressive planners are changing the country in ways unprecedented since the seventies, it’s still the lonely figure in the squad car that does his duty and holds the line in a thousand dark and dirty neighborhoods where gunshots and screams sound in the night. The American police officer has become the soldier of civilization fighting to keep it alive.</p>
<p>And somewhere a family wonders if their father or mother will come home tonight.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<title>The Cuban Archipelago</title>
		<link>http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/FrontpageMag/~3/6Axi1v9B5-8/</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jamie-glazov/the-cuban-archipelago/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 26 Dec 2014 05:17:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jamie Glazov]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=248186</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A reflection on the suffering of the Cuban people under a vicious communist tyranny.]]></description>
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</strong></p>
<p><em>Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any enemy that falls in my hands! My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. With the deaths of my enemies I prepare my being for the sacred fight and join the triumphant proletariat with a bestial howl.</em></p>
<p>—Che Guevara, <em>Motorcycle Diaries</em></p>
<p>President Obama’s <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obamas-bailout-for-communist-dictators/" target="_blank">recent move</a> to cozy up to Communist Cuba is a crucially  important moment not just diplomatically, but as a moral one in regards to human rights, dignity and justice. As we witness a Radical-in-Chief throwing <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obamas-bailout-for-communist-dictators/">an economic lifeline</a> to a barbaric tyranny, it is our duty and obligation to shine a light on the dark tragedy of the Cuban Gulag &#8212; and to reflect on the unspeakable suffering that Cubans have endured under Castro&#8217;s fascistic regime.</p>
<p>Until July 26, 2008, Fidel Castro had ruled Cuba with an iron grip for nearly five decades. On that July date in 2008, he stood to the side because of health problems and made his brother, Raul, de facto ruler. Raul officially replaced his brother as dictator on February 24, 2008; the regime has remained just as totalitarian as before and can, for obvious reasons, continue to be regarded and labelled as “Fidel Castro’s” regime.</p>
<p>Having seized power on January 1, 1959, Fidel Castro followed the tradition of Vladimir Lenin and immediately turned his country into a slave camp. Ever since, Cuba has distinguished itself as one of the most monstrous human-rights abusers in the world.</p>
<p>Half a million human beings have passed through Cuba’s Gulag. Since Cuba’s total population is only around eleven million, that gives Castro’s despotism the highest political incarceration rate per capita on earth. There have been more than fifteen thousand executions by firing squad. Torture has been institutionalized; myriad human-rights organizations have documented the regime’s use of electric shock, dark coffin-sized isolation cells, and beatings to punish “anti-socialist elements.” The Castro regime’s barbarity is best epitomized by the Camilo Cienfuegos plan, the program of horrors followed in the forced-labor camp on the Isle of Pines. Forced to work almost naked, prisoners were made to cut grass with their teeth and to sit in latrine trenches for long periods of time. Torture is routine.[i]</p>
<p>The horrifying experience of Armando Valladares, a Cuban poet who endured twenty-two years of torture and imprisonment for merely raising the issue of freedom, is a testament to the regime’s barbarity. Valladares’s memoir, <em>Against All Hope</em>, serves as Cuba’s version of Solzhenitsyn’s <em>Gulag Archipelago. </em>Valladares recounts how prisoners were beaten with bayonets, electric cables, and truncheons. He tells how he and other prisoners were forced to take “baths” in human feces and urine.[ii]</p>
<p>Typical of the horror in Castro’s Gulag was the experience of Roberto López Chávez, one of Valladares’s prison friends. When López went on a hunger strike to protest the abuses in the prison, the guards withheld water from him until he became delirious, twisting on the floor and begging for something to drink. The guards then urinated in his mouth. He died the next day.[iii]</p>
<p>Since Castro’s death cult, like other leftist ideologies, believes that human blood purifies the earth—and since manifestations of grief affirm the reality of <em>the individual</em>, and thus are anathema to the totality—mourning for the departed became taboo. Thus, just like Mao’s China and Pol Pot’s Cambodia,[iv] so too Castro’s Cuba warned family members of murdered dissidents not to cry at their funerals.[v]</p>
<p>The Castro regime also has a long, grotesque record of torturing and murdering Americans. During the Vietnam War, Castro sent some of his henchmen to run the “Cuban Program” at the Cu Loc POW camp in Hanoi, which became known as “the Zoo.” Its primary objective was to determine how much physical and psychological agony a human being could withstand. The Cubans selected American POWs as their guinea pigs. A Cuban nicknamed “Fidel,” the main torturer at the Zoo, initiated his own personal reign of terror.[vi]</p>
<p>The ordeal of Lt. Col. Earl Cobeil, an F-105 pilot, illustrates the Nazi-like nature of the experiment. Among Fidel’s torture techniques were beatings and whippings over every part of his victim’s body, without remission.[vii] Former POW John Hubbell describes the scene as Fidel forced Cobeil into the cell of fellow POW Col. Jack Bomar:</p>
<blockquote><p> The man [Cobeil] could barely walk; he shuffled slowly, painfully. His clothes were torn to shreds. He was bleeding everywhere, terribly swollen, and a dirty, yellowish black and purple from head to toe. The man’s head was down; he made no attempt to look at anyone. . . . He stood unmoving, his head down. Fidel smashed a fist into the man’s face, driving him against the wall. Then he was brought to the center of the room and made to get down onto his knees. Screaming in rage, Fidel took a length of black rubber hose from a guard and lashed it as hard as he could into the man’s face. The prisoner did not react; he did not cry out or even blink an eye. His failure to react seemed to fuel Fidel’s rage and again he whipped the rubber hose across the man’s face. . . . Again and again and again, a dozen times, Fidel smashed the man’s face with the hose. Not once did the fearsome abuse elicit the slightest response from the prisoner. . . . His body was ripped and torn everywhere; hell cuffs appeared almost to have severed the wrists, strap marks still wound around the arms all the way to the shoulders, slivers of bamboo were embedded in the bloodied shins and there were what appeared to be tread marks from the hose across the chest, back, and legs.[viii]</p></blockquote>
<p>Earl Cobeil died as a result of Fidel’s torture.</p>
<p>Maj. James Kasler was another of Fidel’s victims, although he survived the treatment:</p>
<blockquote><p> He [Fidel] deprived Kasler of water, wired his thumbs together, and flogged him until his “buttocks, lower back, and legs hung in shreds.” During one barbaric stretch he turned Cedric [another torturer] loose for three days with a rubber whip. . . . the PW [POW] was in a semi-coma and bleeding profusely with a ruptured eardrum, fractured rib, his face swollen and teeth broken so that he could not open his mouth, and his leg re-injured from attackers repeatedly kicking it.[ix]</p></blockquote>
<p>The reign of terror against American POWs in Vietnam was just a reflection of Castro’s treatment of his own people. In addition to physical hardships even for those who don’t wind up in prison or labor camp, Cuba&#8217;s police state has denied Cubans any freedom at all. Cubans do not have the right to travel out of their country. They do not have the right of free association or the right to form political parties, independent unions, or religious or cultural organizations. The regime has outlawed free expression; it has consistently censored publications, radio, television, and film. There is a Committee for the Defense of the Cuban Revolution (CDR) for every single city block and every agricultural production unit. The CDR’s purpose is to monitor the affairs of every family and to report anything suspicious. A Cuban’s entire life is spent under the surveillance of his CDR, which controls everything from his food rations to his employment to his use of free time. A vicious racism against blacks accompanies this repression. In pre-Castro Cuba, blacks enjoyed upward social mobility and served in many government positions. In Castro’s Cuba, the jail population is 80 percent black, while the government hierarchy is 100 percent white.[x]</p>
<p>Cuban Communism follows Lenin’s and Stalin’s idea of “equality,” wherein members of the <em>nomenklatura</em> live like millionaires while ordinary Cubans live in utter poverty. The shelves in the stores are empty, and food is tightly rationed for the average citizen. Teachers and doctors drive taxis or work as waiters to support their families. Under the system of tourist apartheid, ordinary Cubans are not allowed inside the hotels designated for tourists and party functionaries. There are, of course, police inside every such hotel to arrest any unauthorized Cuban citizen who dares to enter.</p>
<p>The $5-billion-a-year Soviet subsidy that just barely kept the Cuban economy afloat during the Cold War is long gone. And notwithstanding the $110 billion that the Soviets pumped in over the decades, Cuba has become one of the poorest nations in the world. Its sugar, tobacco, and cattle industries were all major sources of exports in the pre-Castro era. Castro destroyed them all.[xi] Because of his belief in “socialism or death,” Cuba is now a beggar nation. Even Haitian refugees avoid Cuba.</p>
<p>Denied the right to vote under Castro, Cubans have voted with their feet. Pre-Castro Cuba had the highest per-capita immigration rate in the Western hemisphere. Under Castro, approximately two million Cuban citizens (out of eleven million) have escaped their country. Many have done so by floating on rafts or inner tubes in shark-infested waters. An estimated fifty thousand to eighty-seven thousand have lost their lives.[xii]</p>
<p>Not content to trust the sharks, Castro has sent helicopters to drop sandbags onto the rafts of would-be escapees, or just to gun them all down. Epitomizing this barbarity was the Tugboat Massacre of July 13, 1994, in which Castro ordered Cuban patrol boats to kill forty-one unarmed Cuban civilians—ten of them children—who were using an old wooden tugboat in their attempt to flee Cuba.[xiii]</p>
<p>These are the heart-breaking stories, and only a few among many, of the Cuban people who have suffered excruciating pain and agony under an evil tyranny that now, as it stands on its last legs, is having <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obamas-bailout-for-communist-dictators/">its life extended</a> by an American president.</p>
<p>It is food for thought.</p>
<p><strong>Notes:</strong></p>
<p>[i] For one of the best accounts of the brutality of the Castro regime, see Pascal Fontaine, “Cuba: Interminable Totalitarianism in the Tropics,” in Courtois et al., <em>The Black Book of Communism</em>, pp. 647–665.</p>
<p>[ii] Armando Valladares, <em>Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro’s Gulag</em>, trans. Andrew Hurley (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2001), p. 137.</p>
<p>[iii] Ibid., p. 379.</p>
<p>[iv] For China’s case, see chapter 7 of my book, <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/United-Hate-Romance-Tyranny-Terror/dp/product-description/1935071602">United in Hate: The Left’s Romance With Tyranny and Terror</a></em>; for Cambodia’s, see John Perazzo, “Left-Wing Monster: Pol Pot,” <em>FrontPageMag.com</em>, August 8, 2005.</p>
<p>[v] Valladares, <em>Against All Hope</em>, p. 378.</p>
<p>[vi] Stuart I. Rochester and Frederick Kiley, chapter 19, “The Zoo, 1967–1969: The Cuban Program and Other Atrocities,” in <em>Honor Bound: American Prisoners of War in Southeast Asia 1961–1973</em> (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1999).</p>
<p>[vii] Humberto Fontova, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Fidel-Hollywoods-Favorite-Humberto-Fontova/dp/0895260433/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1419483023&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=humberto+fontova+fidel"><em>Fidel: Hollywood’s Favorite Tyrant</em></a>, (Regnery, 2005). pp. 141–142.</p>
<p>[viii] Rochester and Kiley, <em>Honor Bound</em>, p. 400.</p>
<p>[ix] Ibid., p. 404.</p>
<p>[x] Fontova, <em>Fidel</em>, p. 88.</p>
<p>[xi] Ibid., pp. 14–15 and 49.</p>
<p>[xii] Ibid., pp. 8 and 56–57.</p>
<p>[xiii] Ibid., pp. 157–163.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><strong>To get the whole story on why leftists venerate Castro&#8217;s tyranny, order Jamie Glazov&#8217;s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/United-Hate-Romance-Tyranny-Terror/dp/product-description/1935071602">United in Hate: The Left&#8217;s Romance With Tyranny and Terror</a>:</strong></p>
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		<title>Christians and Churches Attacked in the West</title>
		<link>http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/FrontpageMag/~3/W3JciPXtvGA/</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 26 Dec 2014 05:17:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Raymond Ibrahim]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Christians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Muslims]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[persecution]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=248121</guid>
		<description><![CDATA["You have a cross on…Do you know what we do to people like you?" ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/signs.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-248125" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/signs-450x281.jpg" alt="signs" width="283" height="177" /></a><strong>Reprinted from <a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/">GatestoneInstitute.org</a>.</strong></p>
<blockquote class="content_preface"><p>&#8220;You have a cross on… Do you know what we do to people like you?&#8221; — Muslim in Denmark.</p>
<p>Muslim Fulani gunmen forced their way into the church, cut [the pastor], his wife and a daughter with a machete, and then tied the hands and feet of the three of them before setting the building on fire&#8230; We only found the charred remains of the three of them in the morning. I heard them shouting at the top of their voices, saying they must obliterate any traces of Christianity in the town.&#8221; — Eyewitness account, Nigeria.</p>
<p>Each year, approximately 1,000 women in Pakistan are forced to convert to Islam and marry Muslim men. Whenever a case of this nature reaches the law courts, those women, under threat and blackmail, often declare that their conversion and marriage were decisions freely made, and the case is closed.</p></blockquote>
<p>The Muslim persecution of Christians in September started making prominent appearances not just in the Islamic world, but also in the West—in America, Australia and Europe.</p>
<p>In the United States, in Columbus, Indiana, three churches were vandalized on the same night. The words most frequently sprayed were &#8220;Infidels!&#8221; and &#8220;Koran 3:151.&#8221; The verse from the Koran states, &#8220;We will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve [or "infidels"] for what they have associated with Allah [reference to Christian Trinity] of which He had not sent down [any] authority. And their refuge will be the Fire, and wretched is the residence of the wrongdoers.&#8221;</p>
<p>Father Doug Marcotte of Saint Bartholomew&#8217;s Catholic Church, one of those vandalized, said, &#8220;There&#8217;s a lot of bad stuff being done in the name of Allah and so when people see this happening in Columbus, whether that was truly the person&#8217;s intent or there&#8217;s something else going on, it makes people nervous. It makes people upset. It makes them scared.&#8221;</p>
<p>Meanwhile, in Australia, AAP reported that &#8220;Church-goers in Sydney&#8217;s west have been left shaken after a stranger shouted death threats from a car bearing the Islamic State flag. The car drove past Our Lady of Lebanon Church at Harris Park on Tuesday and witnesses claim it had a flag similar to those brandished by Islamic State jihadists hanging out the window.&#8221; A church official said the people in the car threatened to &#8220;<a href="http://www.news.com.au/national/sydney-church-our-lady-of-lebanon-targeted-by-isis-threats/story-fncynjr2-1227062189328">kill the Christians&#8221; and slaughter their children</a>: &#8220;They were strong words and people were scared of what they saw.&#8221; Witnesses saw a flag outside the window with the words, &#8220;There is only one god and Muhammad is the prophet.&#8221; And as happens frequently in Muslim-majority nations, police security was later dispatched to patrol the Harris Park church while hundreds partook of the mass inside.</p>
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<p style="font-size: 82%; margin: 4px 6px;">People in a car bearing a jihadist flag verbally abused parishioners at the Our Lady of Lebanon Church in Sydney, Australia in September, threatening to &#8220;kill the Christians&#8221; and slaughter their children.</p>
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<p>In Denmark—2013&#8242;s &#8220;<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/22/denmark-happiest-country_n_4070761.html">happiest country in the world</a>&#8220;—Christians of Middle Eastern backgrounds continued to experience &#8220;harassment, verbal attacks and in some cases direct violence from Muslims,&#8221; reports TV2, especially in Muslim-majority areas, such as Nørrebro. One Christian, &#8220;Jojo,&#8221; born in Denmark of Lebanese parents, shared her experiences. Once when sitting in her parked car, several Muslims surrounded it, harassing her about her Western attire. When one of them noticed she was wearing a cross, he said &#8220;Well, you have a cross on—then <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2014/09/denmark-christians-flee-muslim-dominated-areas-they-tell-me-i-ought-to-be-stoned-to-death">you are also a Christian f***ing whore</a>. Do you know what we do to people like you? Do you know what we do to people like you? You get stoned [to death].&#8221;</p>
<p>Another Christian woman of Iranian background recounted how she and her son are harassed on the Muslim-majority block where they live—and where she stands out for not wearing a <i>hijab</i>, the Islamic veil: &#8220;My son is being called everything. I get called all sorts of things. Infidel. Filthy Christians. They tell me I ought to be stoned to death. My son was beaten at the bus stop. He was called pig, dirty potato (Muslim slang for Danes), and that &#8216;you and your mother should die.&#8221;&#8216;</p>
<p>Islamic dreams of conquering Europe were prevalent. A senior analyst in Spain warned that, because Islamists see the Iberian peninsula as being &#8220;under Spanish and Portuguese occupation,&#8221; <a href="http://www.ansamed.info/ansamed/en/news/sections/politics/2014/09/05/jihadists-want-al-andalus-back-spanish-terrorism-analyst_966e7c8a-6480-4a28-b4e1-7a63eabf2d51.html">greater risk of terrorism exists there</a> than in other Western areas. Because Iberia—or, in Arabic, Al-Andalus—was under Islamic domination for centuries, many Muslims consider it part of the Islamic world, or Dar al-Islam, which needs to be reconquered, no less than Israel, also seen as occupied Islamic territory.</p>
<p>More pointedly, in the Islamic State [IS], in a lengthy message partially addressed to the &#8220;crusaders&#8221;—a reference to the West—some members declared, &#8220;<a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2014/09/islamic-state-we-will-conquer-your-rome-break-your-crosses-and-enslave-your-women-by-the-permission-of-allah">We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women, by the permission of Allah</a>.&#8221; Members of the IS also invoked a statement attributed to Muhammad, that Constantinople would be conquered before Rome—and it was, in 1453. The implication was that the Eternal City of Rome would be next.</p>
<p>Around the same time, Rome responded by rejecting a motion to name a street after the late Oriana Fallaci, a veteran journalist who had once written that, &#8220;<a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2014/09/rome-nixes-naming-street-after-oriana-fallaci-because-she-wrote-that-the-muslim-world-is-attempting-to-conquer-the-west">the Muslim world is attempting to conquer the West in the name of Islam</a>.&#8221; In explaining their decision, local politicians described Fallaci&#8217;s writings as containing &#8220;religious hatred,&#8221; or &#8220;Islamophobia.&#8221;</p>
<p>In Canada, while 80 special Muslims went to the trouble of attending a Muslim rally on behalf of persecuted Christians, sadly, another rally, an extremist Al Quds Day Anti-Israel Hate Fest, drew approximately 6,000 participants.</p>
<p>The rest of September&#8217;s roundup of Muslim persecution of Christians around the world includes (but is not limited to) the following accounts, listed by theme and country alphabetical order, not necessarily according to severity.</p>
<p align="center"><b>Muslim Attacks on Churches</b></p>
<p><b>East Jerusalem</b>: <a href="http://morningstarnews.org/2014/09/attacks-on-church-in-east-jerusalem-grow-more-intense/">A Christian church was attacked numerous times</a>: On September 29, young Muslim men, with ties to a Palestinian militant group, wired shut the door of the Living Bread Church and sprayed a gaseous substance at those inside. An earlier gas attack had already occurred on September 17. Hours before the second attack, someone threw a rock through one of the windows of the church, and the day before that, Sunday, September 28, a Palestinian and others assaulted a church member as he was emptying trash into a dumpster outside the church.</p>
<p>On Sept. 21, a Palestinian militant, without warning, ran up behind a church leader, Karen Dunham, and knocked her to the pavement: &#8220;This guy charged me as fast as he could,&#8221; she said. &#8220;He came up behind me and just slammed into my back, and I fell and I hit the ground. My face is bruised. There&#8217;s bruises on the side of my cheek, on my face, on my head, on my knee, cuts on my head, and my wrist was fractured.&#8221;</p>
<p><b>Egypt</b>: A Christian priest in Egypt appealed to President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi to intervene on behalf of yet another church being threatened by &#8220;religious extremists.&#8221; So far, local authorities have done nothing. Four years ago, the Coptic Church of St. Abram in Shubra al-Khaima received a permit to build an additional building. During those same four years, seven &#8220;thugs&#8221;—in the <a href="http://www.copticsolidarity.org/cs-releases/2910-egypt-muslim-mob-prevents-coptic-church-building">words of the report</a>—have prevented it from being built. The &#8220;thugs&#8221; had mobilized local Muslims to threaten and demonstrate against the church. &#8220;The priest lamented that &#8216;after suffering many long years&#8217; they finally managed to acquire the permit to build, but then the next obstacle presented itself in the person of the aforementioned seven &#8216;thugs&#8217; who constantly harass, and incite Muslim mobs, against the church, whenever it tries to exercise its right to build the services building. Islamic law forbids the building of new churches or the renovation of existing churches.&#8221;</p>
<p><b>Iraq</b>: Islamic State militants &#8220;<a href="http://www.ansa.it/english/news/2014/09/25/isis-blow-up-tikrits-green-church_9ac1fb14-0ae6-417d-a4cc-b20cf9eddef2.html">completely destroyed</a>&#8221; the ancient Green Church in Tikrit. They packed the church with explosives and detonated them &#8212; <a href="http://www.aina.org/news/20140925012701.htm">completely destroying the ancient church</a>, which belonged to the Assyrian Church of the East. Almost from the time it was built in the seventh century, when Islam overran Iraq, the church had been attacked, ransacked, and destroyed by Muslim rulers and others, but was restored on the orders of Iraq&#8217;s late President Saddam Hussein in the 1990s.</p>
<p><b>Nigeria</b>: Many more churches and a Christian university, <a href="http://morningstarnews.org/2014/09/bible-college-churches-shut-down-as-boko-haram-claims-territory-in-ne-nigeria/">Kulp Bible College</a>, were forced to shut down as a result of the advances of the Islamic jihadi group, Boko Haram. In one instance, a pastor reported that &#8220;Boko Haram violence has been getting worse every day, and our members are fleeing the area by the thousands. Recent attacks in Borno and Adamawa states where our churches are located have seen Boko Haram take over the Army base. As a result, about 350 Christians have been killed.&#8221;</p>
<p>Separately, in Kaduna state, where &#8220;Muslim Fulani assailants seem driven to rid the area of Christianity and use the land to graze their cattle,&#8221; according to church leaders, 46 Christians, including two pastors, were slaughtered in raids. According to an eyewitness,</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;Suddenly we heard sounds of gunshots around our village. The pastor was still in the pastorate when the Muslim Fulani gunmen forced their way onto the church premises. They cut him, his wife and a daughter with a machete, and then tied the hands and feet of the three of them before setting the house on fire. The three of them were burned to ashes in the living room of the pastorate. We only found the charred remains of the three of them the following morning&#8230;. The gunmen then came onto the church premises and began shooting. I heard them shouting at the top of their voices, saying they must obliterate any trace of Christianity in the town.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>Although Muslim Fulani have historically had property disputes with Christian farmers, Christian leaders say attacks by the herdsmen constitute <a href="http://morningstarnews.org/2014/09/two-pastors-among-46-christians-killed-in-kaduna-state-nigeria/">a war &#8220;by Islam to eliminate Christianity&#8221; in Nigeria</a>.</p>
<p><b>Sudan</b>: In the latest incident of a nearly two-year wave of church demolitions, closures and confiscations, <a href="http://morningstarnews.org/2014/09/sudan-shutters-500-member-church-in-khartoum/">security agents padlocked a 500-member church building</a>, the Sudan Pentecostal Church [SPC] in Khartoum. The church also houses the Khartoum Christian Center (KCC). &#8220;The church is concerned that the building might be sold by the government, which renders more than 500 worshippers to have no place for worship,&#8221; a source told the <i>Morning Star News</i>. The Islamist government appears to be seeking any pretext for closing churches, sources said. In this instance, the space for the church was originally designated as &#8220;office space.&#8221; But, as one source asked, &#8220;How do you close a church building that has been in operation for 20 years in the name of the church being meant for offices?&#8221; The church has a deed showing that it owns the building and property &#8212; a situation that raises the question of the government&#8217;s right to sell it.</p>
<p>On June 30 bulldozers <a href="http://morningstarnews.org/2014/06/sudanese-authorities-demolish-another-church-building/">demolished</a> the Sudanese Church of Christ in the Thiba Al Hamyida area of North Khartoum as church members watched, while security personnel threatened to arrest them if they tried to block the bulldozers, church members said.</p>
<p><b>Syria</b>: The <a href="http://armenianweekly.com/2014/09/21/der-zor/">Islamic State destroyed the Armenian Genocide Memorial Church</a> in Der Zor, seen as the &#8220;Auschwitz&#8221; of the Armenian Genocide. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians perished in Der Zor and the surrounding desert during the genocide. In the summer of 1916 alone, more than 200,000 Armenians, mostly women and children, were massacred by Ottoman Turks. Armenia&#8217;s foreign minister issued a statement calling the church&#8217;s destruction a &#8220;horrible barbarity,&#8221; and referred to the Islamic State as a &#8220;disease&#8221; that &#8220;threatened civilized mankind.&#8221; The church was built in 1989-90 and consecrated a year later. A genocide memorial and a museum housing the remains of the victims of the genocide were also located in the church compound. Thousands of Armenians from Syria and neighboring countries gathered at the memorial every year on April 24 to commemorate the genocide.</p>
<p align="center"><b>Pakistani Rape and Dhimmitude</b></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.fides.org/en/news/36439-ASIA_PAKISTAN_Christian_girl_raped_the_perpetrators_film_the_violence#.VIXqaDHF9qU">Four young Muslims gang raped a 15-year-old Christian girl</a> and filmed it. The girl&#8217;s father, although he was threatened against filing a complaint, went to police, who confirmed the existence of a video that corroborates the violence. The video will apparently be introduced as evidence against the youths. A lawyer, Mushtaq Gill, issued a statement that, &#8220;Many Christian girls continue to be victims of sexual assault by young Muslims, who go unpunished&#8221; and that, &#8220;in this case there is also a video, flaunted as a trophy.&#8221;</li>
<li><a href="http://www.fides.org/en/news/36280-ASIA_PAKISTAN_Two_Christian_women_abducted_forced_to_convert_to_Islam_and_marry_Muslim_men#.VIXv9zHF9qU">Two Christian women were abducted, forced to convert to Islam and marry Muslim men</a>. Lawyer Mushtaq Gill said, &#8220;A Christian girl, Sairish, forced to marry a Muslim in 2009, in her heart never abandoned the faith and continued to pray to Jesus Christ even after her marriage. After a few years she found the courage to rebel against the situation and run away&#8230;. Her life is now in danger because if she declares herself Christian, Muslims may accuse her of apostasy and the punishment would be death.&#8221; Each year, approximately 1,000 women in Pakistan are forced to convert to Islam and marry Muslim men. Whenever a case of this nature reaches the law courts, those women, under threat and blackmail, often declare that their conversion and marriage were decisions freely made, and the case is closed.</li>
<li>Another Christian family fled their hometown, Lahore, <a href="http://www.fides.org/en/news/36318-ASIA_PAKISTAN_Christian_family_flees_to_save_their_daughters_from_forced_conversion_to_Islam#.VIXuVzHF9qU">to save their daughters from forced conversion to Islam</a>. According to the Justice and Peace Commission, the two sisters, aged 12 and 8, were studying in public schools, where learning to recite the Koran is mandatory. Apparently, because the girls recited the <i>shehada</i>, the Islamic declaration of faith, &#8220;an Islamic cleric, the father of a student stated that these girls had become Muslims and thus needed to be taken from their Christian parents and entrusted to adult Muslims.&#8221; The parents pulled their daughters out of school, but then the headmaster and other Muslim teachers &#8220;warned the parents to send them back to school, offering the family financial aid regarding the school fees.&#8221; The parents quit their jobs and fled the region.</li>
<li>Police arrested 15 Christians and booked 45 other members of the minority community under the blasphemy law <a href="http://www.dailypioneer.com/world/15-christians-held-in-pakistan-under-blasphemy-law.html">for allegedly desecrating Muslim graves</a> in a village in Punjab province. According to the AP, &#8220;The case was registered after a local cleric filed a complaint alleging that the Christians had desecrated over 400 Muslim graves to occupy the land in Chak village in Faisalabad, about 150 kilometres from Lahore.&#8221; Rights groups said it was a spurious charge meant to prevent the Christians from acquiring the land. In fact, the accusations were <a href="http://www.fides.org/en/news/36294-ASIA_PAKISTAN_False_accusations_of_blasphemy_later_withdrawn_against_31_Christians_in_a_Punjab_village#.VIXvWzHF9qU">later proven false</a>.</li>
</ul>
<h3 align="center">Dhimmitude: Islamic Discrimination Against Christianity</h3>
<p><b>Egypt:</b> Iman Sarofim, a 39-year-old Christian mother of five, returned home to her family <a href="http://www.fides.org/en/news/36441-AFRICA_EGYPT_The_Coptic_woman_who_had_disappeared_returns_home_she_did_not_convert_but_had_been_kidnapped#.VIXqsTHF9qU">after being kidnapped</a>. Initially it was believed that she had voluntarily converted to Islam and fled her family to be with a Muslim man. The woman contacted the family from Suez, where she had been brought by the kidnapper. The return of the woman was celebrated by neighbors and relatives in the city of Gabal al-Tir. Her disappearance had been the cause of clashes between Copts and police, who believed the narrative that she had voluntarily left. In retaliation, police officers entered the homes of dozens of Coptic families and violently arrested dozens of Christians. Separately, Ehab Karam, <a href="http://www.fides.org/en/news/36416-AFRICA_EGYPT_Kidnappings_continue_to_the_detriment_of_the_Copts_a_dentist_kidnapped_killed#.VIXrhzHF9qU">a Coptic dentist, was killed</a> after he was abducted by unknown persons, most likely for ransom. The kidnapping of Copts for ransom has evidently become a regular part of life in Egypt for Christians, particularly in Upper Egypt. Last February, for instance, police dismantled a crime network that for months had been organizing kidnappings, robberies and extortion against the local Coptic community. &#8220;Unfortunately,&#8221; said the Coptic Catholic Bishop of Assist, Kyrillos William, &#8220;the phenomenon continues and there are no signs of improvement. Police operations are episodic and ineffective, they are unable to solve the problem.&#8221;</p>
<p><b>Iraq:</b> The Islamic State decreed that <a href="http://www.fides.org/en/news/36336-ASIA_IRAQ_The_school_year_in_the_Islamic_Caliphate_the_teaching_of_Syriac_and_Christian_names_of_schools_have_been_abolished#.VIXuDTHF9qU">all schools in Mosul and the Nineveh Plain</a> which bore Christian names, some since the 1700s, must be changed. Also, the teaching of the Syriac language and culture and Christian religious education has been abolished. Reports indicate that the Islamic State took these moves &#8220;in order to erase all traces of cultural and religious pluralism in the conquered areas and turn schools into propaganda tools of jihadist ideology among the new generations.&#8221;</p>
<p><b>Saudi Arabia</b>: In the Eastern Province city of Khafji, &#8220;religious police,&#8221; or agents from the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, <a href="http://barnabasfund.org/US/News/Archives/Christians-detained-by-Saudi-religious-police-in-raid-on-private-home.html">raided a house where at least 27 Christians</a>, mostly expatriates from various Asian nationalities, were gathered. The Christians, including children, were accused of practicing Christianity in a house church, and were arrested and detained overnight. Authorities also confiscated musical instruments and copies of the Bible. The house had been placed under surveillance after a citizen reported that his Indian neighbor had converted his home into a Christian church. After witnessing a large number of individuals enter the home, officers raided the house. The only religion allowed to be practiced in public in Saudi Arabia is Islam. In the land of the prophet, no public places of worship for non-Muslims are permitted to exist.</p>
<p><b>Turkey:</b> According to the Armenian magazine,<i> Agos</i>, many of the primary and secondary education books being used for the current school year still <a href="http://www.fides.org/en/news/36339-ASIA_TURKEY_In_school_books_Christian_communities_portrayed_as_tools_of_foreign_powers_against_the_Ottoman_empire">describe the Armenians and other Christian communities as enemy forces</a> at the service of foreign powers, including Russia and England, after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. One eighth-grade history book tries to whitewash the Armenian genocide, which is portrayed as a &#8220;necessary deportation,&#8221; never as a massacre.</p>
<p><b>Uzbekistan</b>: Security forces reportedly raided the home of Pastor Stanislav Kim in Chirchik, 20 miles northeast of Tashkent, the capital. They detained 11 teenagers and three adults, who had gathered there for a volleyball game, and questioned them for more than four hours before releasing them. Officials also searched the pastor&#8217;s home and <a href="http://www.bosnewslife.com/33773-uzbekistan-prosecuting-pastor-son-for-unregistered-activity">confiscated a New Testament, a Bible, several other Christian books</a>, more than 100 slides of hymns, as well as some computer equipment. Voice of the Martyrs, which says there are at least 65 unregistered congregations scattered throughout Uzbekistan, said in a statement, &#8220;Please pray that this pastor and his son will not face fines, but will soon be acquitted of any perceived wrongdoing. Ask God to strengthen each believer who was present during this unwarranted raid so that they will not give in to governmental intimidation and pressure, but instead be emboldened to serve our Lord faithfully.&#8221;</p>
<p align="center"><b>About this Series</b></p>
<p>While not all, or even most, Muslims are involved, persecution of Christians is expanding. &#8220;Muslim Persecution of Christians&#8221; was developed to collate some—by no means all—of the instances of persecution that surface each month.</p>
<p>It documents what the mainstream media often fails to report.</p>
<p>It posits that such persecution is not random but systematic, and takes place in all languages, ethnicities and locations.</p>
<blockquote><p><a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/"><i>Raymond Ibrahim</i></a> <i>is author of</i> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1621570258/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=1621570258&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=uhurnetw-20">Crucified Again: Exposing Islam&#8217;s New War in Christians</a> <i>(published by Regnery in cooperation with Gatestone Institute, April 2013).</i></p></blockquote>
<p><b>Previous reports</b></p>
<ul type="square">
<li><a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4927/raping-beheading-faithful">August, 2014</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4846/muslim-persecution-christians-july">July, 2014</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4817/muslim-persecution-of-christians-june">June, 2014</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4763/muslim-persecution-christians-may-2014">May, 2014</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4666/raped-and-slaughtered-muslim-persecution">April, 2014</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4400/obama-muslim-persecutions">March, 2014</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4365/christians-most-persecuted">February, 2014</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4312/muslim-persecution-christians-january">January, 2014</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4252/slaughtering-christians">December, 2013</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4170/us-silent-muslim-persecution-christians">November, 2013</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4093/slaughter-in-muslim-lands">October, 2013</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4065/september-horror-christians-islam">September, 2013</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4050/christians-middle-east-august">August, 2013</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3967/christian-women-degradation-islam">June, 2013</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3904/nigeria-christians-murdered">May, 2013</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3875/christian-suffering-under-jihadi-extremism">April, 2013</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3760/muslim-persecution-of-christians-march-2013">March, 2013</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3673/muslim-persecution-of-christians-february-2013">February, 2013</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3641/muslim-persecution-of-christians-january-2013">January, 2013</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3577/muslim-persecution-of-christians-december-2012">December, 2012</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3566/muslim-persecution-of-christians-november-2012">November, 2012</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3485/muslim-persecution-of-christians-october-2012">October, 2012</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3421/muslim-persecution-of-christians-september-2012">September, 2012</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3318/muslim-persecution-of-christians-july-2012">August, 2012</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3318/muslim-persecution-of-christians-july-2012">July, 2012</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3203/muslim-persecution-of-christians-june-2012">June, 2012</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3135/muslim-persecution-of-christians-may-2012">May, 2012</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3065/muslim-persecution-of-christians-april-2012">April, 2012</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3033/muslim-persecution-of-christians-march-2012">March, 2012</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/2949/muslim-persecution-of-christians-february-2012">February, 2012</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/2834/muslim-persecution-of-christians-january-2012">January, 2012</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/2733/muslim-persecution-of-christians-december-2011">December, 2011</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/2676/muslim-persecution-of-christians-november-2011">November, 2011</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/2585/muslim-persecution-of-christians-october-2011">October, 2011</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/2491/muslim-persecution-of-christians-september">September, 2011</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/2401/muslim-persecution-of-christians-august-2011">August, 2011</a></li>
</ul>
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		<title>Sanction Relief Empowering the Mullahs, Not Citizens</title>
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		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/majid-rafizadeh/sanction-relief-empowering-the-mullahs-not-citizens/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 26 Dec 2014 05:10:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Majid Rafizadeh]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=248109</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A year later, the verdict is in on Obama's dirty deal with Iran. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/iran_2677161b.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-248111" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/iran_2677161b-450x350.jpg" alt="iran_2677161b" width="319" height="248" /></a>There has always been an argument claiming that economic sanctions normally do not yield any result due to the notion that economic sanctions do not target the ruling elite and governmental official, but the ordinary people. This argument is partially accurate.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, we need to remember that some targeted economic sanctions against the Islamic Republic (particularly the sanctions in oil and gas sectors and financial and bank institutions) did endanger the hold on power of the ruling cleric in Iran, particularly the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. That was the primary reason behind pushing the Iranian politicians to come to the negotiation table in nuclear talks.</p>
<p>On the other hand, the other side of the argument is that if economic sanctions are lifted, the major beneficiaries would be the ordinary people and the civilians. This argument would be accurate if the political and economic system of the given state is democratic, allows open opportunities for all, encourages the private sector, allows transparency, and holds those corrupt officials who commit illegal economic dealings accountable.</p>
<p>The Iranian political and economic system is devoid of the aforementioned standards. In fact, in states which the political system is mainly authoritarian or theocratic, and the economic system is monopolized by few people at top and is state controlled, any increase of wealth or flow of money will inevitably strengthening the ruling elite rather than the ordinary people.</p>
<p>To substantiate this argument, let us take a look on the ground in the Islamic Republic after the sanctions relief.</p>
<p>At the beginning, a majority of Iranian people were hoping that economic sanctions relief would alleviate their suffering, improve their standards of living, and push many families above the poverty line. Almost a year has passed since the Iranian government has been receiving sanctions relief.</p>
<p>After the interim nuclear deal and extension of the negotiations between the six world powers (known as the P5+1: China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) and the Islamic Republic, the Iranian government had received an estimated $7 billion.  Iran continues to receive approximately $700 million every month under the extension deal.</p>
<p>In addition, there has been some sanction suspension with respects to some of Iran’s major industries, including Iran’s auto sector, gold and precious metals, as well as Iran’s petrochemical exports. The Iranian currency, the rial, has appreciated due to the sanctions relief, Iran’s oil and non-oil exports have <a href="http://ameinfo.com/blog/finance-and-economy/irans-non-oil-exports-increase-28-per-cent/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">increased</span></a>, its economy is showing signs of stabilization, Tehran’s stock exchange has soared and Iran’s exports and business dealings with several countries have ratcheted up.</p>
<p>The suspension of sanctions has definitely given both psychological and financial support to the Iranian government.  But the real question is how this money is being spent and which institutions benefit primarily from this sanctions relief. Are ordinary people benefiting from these sanctions relief and flow of money?</p>
<p>Nevertheless, some Iranian civilians have begun to believe that even economic sanctions relief or even the lifting of the whole economic sanctions regime from the Iranian government are not going to assist civilians, their financial day-to-day activities, or bring concrete changes on the ground.</p>
<p>Four major institutions are benefiting mostly from the economic sanctions relief: Iran’s military-industrial complex, the Office of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a few top business figures who are connected with the government, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), through either legal and <a href="http://www.iranfocus.com/en/index.php?option=com_content&amp;view=article&amp;id=20355:irgcs-dominance-over-irans-politics-and-economy--part-1&amp;catid=29&amp;Itemid=121"><span style="color: #0433ff;">illegal</span></a> imports and exports.</p>
<p>For example, the IRGC controls and owns a considerable amount of shares in the aforementioned industries which have witnessed sanctions relief. In the petrochemical industry, The IRGC military-industrial complex <a href="http://www.iranfocus.com/en/index.php?option=com_content&amp;view=article&amp;id=20355:irgcs-dominance-over-irans-politics-and-economy--part-1&amp;catid=29&amp;Itemid=121"><span style="color: #0433ff;">owns</span></a> Zagros Petrochemicals; 40% of Pars Petrochemical Company, part of Arak Petrochemicals; 25% of Kermanshah Petrochemicals; as well as 19% of the shares of Maroun Petrochemicals.</p>
<p>This phenomenon of the monopolization of the economy applies in other sectors of Iran’s economy as well.  When it comes to Iran’s economic system, the Supreme Leader and IRGC do have a considerable amount of control and shares in almost all industries <a href="http://www.iranfocus.com/en/index.php?option=com_content&amp;view=article&amp;id=20355:irgcs-dominance-over-irans-politics-and-economy--part-1&amp;catid=29&amp;Itemid=121"><span style="color: #0433ff;">including</span></a> financial institutions and banks, the transportation industry, automobile manufacturing, mining, commerce, and oil and gas sectors.</p>
<p>As a result, these types of sanctions relief will mostly benefit the ruling elite, primarily the Supreme Leader and Iran’s military-industrial complex, IRGC. Iranian people will hardly observe any benefits from this economic sanctions relief or lifting of economic sanctions.</p>
<p>It appears that the easing of sanctions are strengthening the ruling elite without any sign of redistribution of wealth. This is predominantly due to the fact Iran’s economic system is a state and military controlled system, it lacks transparency, as well as the reality that it is crippled with <a href="http://www.rferl.org/content/article/1144661.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">widespread corruption</span></a> by the ruling elite and few on top.</p>
<p>If the intention of economic sanctions relief is to assist the Iranian people and alleviate their suffering, there ought to be more efficient approaches to develop some types of targeted sanctions relief (for example, being directed at Iran’s educational system, health care, etc.) which aim at empowering Iranian civilians and primarily the middle class.</p>
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		<title>Palestinians Attempt to Co-Opt Jewish History</title>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 26 Dec 2014 05:08:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ari Lieberman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[History]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=248061</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The desperate antics of an invented people. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div id="attachment_248203" style="width: 346px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/tel.jpg"><img class="wp-image-248203" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/tel-450x337.jpg" alt="tel" width="336" height="252" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">The Tel Dan Stele</p></div>
<p>In December 2011, former House Speaker and presidential candidate, Newt Gingrich made the <a href="http://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2011/12/13/yes_palestinians_are_an_invented_people_99796.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">following observation</span></a> regarding the Palestinians;</p>
<blockquote><p><i>Remember there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire. And I think that we&#8217;ve had an invented Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs, and were historically part of the Arab community…</i></p></blockquote>
<p>That comment set off a firestorm of debate and criticism but is in actuality, grounded in historical fact. As noted historian Benny Morris pointed out in his acclaimed book, <i>1948: The First Arab-Israeli War</i>, at the turn of the 20<sup>th</sup> century, most Arabs residing in the Land of Israel or “Palestine” considered themselves to be subjects of the Ottoman Empire. There were some Palestinian Arabs with vague nationalistic tendencies but even this minority considered itself to be part of Greater Syria. There simply was no reference to an independent Palestine for a distinct group of people calling themselves “Palestinians.”</p>
<p>Morris also perceptively notes that the residents of Palestinian villages routinely failed to come to the assistance of nearby villages that were under attack by Jewish forces thus reinforcing the view that Arab villagers felt little loyalty to all but clan and village. The notion of a “Palestinian people” was an alien concept to the common Palestinian villager who was not bound by any sense of duty to assist a neighboring village.</p>
<p>Occasionally, Palestinians themselves will acknowledge this fact. In a revealing 1977 interview with the Dutch newspaper Trouw, PLO executive committee member <a href="http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Zuheir_Mohsen"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Zahir Muhsein</span></a> stated,</p>
<blockquote><p><i>The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct &#8216;Palestinian people&#8217; to oppose Zionism.</i></p>
<p><i>For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa. While as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.</i></p></blockquote>
<p>It was a rare but astonishing moment of candor. A senior PLO member was openly acknowledging what few would readily admit. But his was not an isolated admission. In a March 2012 televised address, Hamas Minister of the Interior and of National Security <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAfENxzv2mc"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Fathi Hammad</span></a> essentially validated Gingrich’s assessment of the Palestinians. While pleading for Egyptian fuel, Hammad let loose with a series of embarrassing admissions that were certainly not intended for Western audiences.</p>
<p>“Every Palestinian…throughout Palestine can prove his Arab roots, whether from Saudi Arabia or Yemen or anywhere.” He went on to say that “personally, half my family is Egyptian, we are all like that.” And further buries himself deeper by stating, “Brothers, half the Palestinians are Egyptian and the other half are Saudis…Who are the Palestinians?” he asks rhetorically. “We have families called al-Masri whose roots are Egyptian, Egyptian! We are Egyptian! We are Arab! We are Muslim!” He concludes his rant with the obligatory Muslim battle cry, “Allahuakbar!” Curiously absent from his long diatribe is any recognition of an independent Palestinian identity and that’s precisely because there simply isn’t any.</p>
<p>Lacking their own independent history, culture and identity, Palestinians have adopted a strategy of <a href="http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=1468"><span style="color: #0433ff;">denying Jewish history</span></a>. Arafat, for example, flat out denied the fact that great Jewish Temples, built first by king Solomon and then by Herod, once stood where the Al-Aqsa Mosque currently stands. So ridiculous were his comments that they earned a swift rebuke from President Clinton. Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas taking cue from his boss also adopted this odious position. It should therefore come as no surprise that Abbas is also a <a href="http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/exposing-abbas-5335"><span style="color: #0433ff;">confirmed Holocaust denier</span></a>, despite his transparent efforts to <a href="http://tabletmag.com/scroll/170686/mahmoud-abbas-still-a-holocaust-denier"><span style="color: #0433ff;">rehabilitate his image</span></a> for his gullible Western audience.</p>
<p>Palestinian Arabs have also attempted to recruit Western “experts” and academics to their cause. In his insightful book <i>The Fight for Jerusalem:</i> <i>Radical Islam, the West, and the Future of the Holy City,</i> veteran Israeli diplomat Dore Gold chronicles the length to which Arab-Muslims and their Western lackeys will go to deny the Jewish nexus to the Land of Israel. They argued that much of ancient Jewish history was nothing but mythology including the Kingdoms of David and Solomon.</p>
<p>From the Arab perspective, the tactic was a sound one. Sever the ancient historical Jewish nexus with Israel and you severely undermine claims of indigenousness. But archeology does not lie and those very Western academics (at least the intellectually honest ones) were forced to retract their findings and conclusions after the dramatic 1993 discovery of a 9<sup>th</sup> century stele at Tel Dan in northern Israel that clearly referenced the “<a href="http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-artifacts/artifacts-and-the-bible/the-tel-dan-inscription-the-first-historical-evidence-of-the-king-david-bible-story/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">House of David</span></a>.” Additional discoveries since then, including finds in <a href="http://www.aish.com/h/9av/ht/48961251.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Jerusalem</span></a>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/09/international/middleeast/09alphabet.html?_r=0"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Tel Zayit</span></a> and at the <a href="http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/insideisrael/2013/June/Did-David-Solomon-Exist-Dig-Refutes-Naysayers/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Fortress of Elah</span></a> have further eroded claims by skeptics and naysayers.</p>
<p>Not content with denying Jewish history, Palestinian Arabs have actually attempted to co-opt it by absurdly claiming that Moses as well as King Saul were Palestinian Muslims who conquered and claimed “Palestine” for the benefit of Palestinians. These risible comments were spewed forth by “Dr.” <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqjwLKdg9ro"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Omar Ja’ara</span></a>, a lecturer at Al-Najah University in Nablus and broadcast on Palestinian Authority TV. He notes further that the actions of Moses and Saul represented “the first Palestinian liberation through armed struggle to liberate Palestine&#8230; this is our logic and this is our culture.”</p>
<p>Incidentally, Al-Najah University boasts on its <a href="http://www.najah.edu/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">website</span></a> that it is “the first Palestinian University to obtain the EFQM European Certificate of Excellence.” Something to bear in mind next time any parent contemplates sending their child off to Europe for higher education.</p>
<p>Of course it doesn’t matter that Saul lived approximately 1,700 years before Muhammad was zygote. Facts play absolutely no role in Palestinian academia. Empirical data and evidence is ignored. Precedence is given to upholding a false, pernicious and viscerally anti-Semitic narrative that either denies historical fact or co-opts it.</p>
<p>As PLO bigwig Zahir Muhsein candidly noted, the claim of a Palestinian identity is a myth whose aim is not designed to achieve liberation or advancement for any particular people but rather to subjugate and destroy another people. For those of you, who still remain unconvinced; consider the <a href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/al-aqsa-speaker-the-slaughter-of-the-jews-is-near/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">recent comments</span></a> made by a prominent sheikh during a religious sermon at the Al-Aqsa Mosque. During his tirade, which included the usual dose of anti-Semitic vitriol, the sheikh never once uttered a desire or longing for Palestinian statehood. Instead he expresses the desire to join with ISIS in its quest for an Islamic caliphate and asks the large crowd of acolytes surrounding him to, “pledge allegiance to the Muslim Caliph,” and they in turn respond with chants of “amen!”</p>
<p>Few in the West have faced up to this malevolent reality. They continue to adhere to the harmful, dogmatic formula of a two-state solution. What they willfully fail to realize is that such a solution poses an existential threat to the Mideast’s only democracy and will most certainly have grave negative consequences for the region at large.</p>
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		<title>Backlash Against de Blasio</title>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 25 Dec 2014 05:58:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
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		<category><![CDATA[Bill de Blasio]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Cop-basher surprised by police anger.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/mayor23n-1-web.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-248107" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/mayor23n-1-web-450x299.jpg" alt="mayor23n-1-web" width="379" height="252" /></a>Cop-bashing </span><span class="zw-portion">New York mayor Bill de Blasio seems genuinely surprised at the ferocious backlash against him in light of the </span><span class="zw-portion">execution-style weekend killing of two local cops.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">After spending the past year in office attacking police, the</span><span class="zw-portion"> mayor is now scrambling to put the pin back into the grenade he threw into the local body politic. His crusade against the police goes back at least to his election campaign last year when he caustically criticized then-mayor Michael Bloomberg&#8217;s stop-and-frisk policy.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">De Blasio is appealing for calm and for a temporary suspension of the ugly anti-police protests his incendiary rhetoric has spawned.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">Strangely, this far-left radical who, like his ally in the White House never puts politics aside for the benefit of the community, is now asking New Yorkers to do precisely that.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">So far the New York Police Department isn&#8217;t in a mood to forgive de Blasio who has teamed up with racial arsonist Al Sharpton to lay waste to what&#8217;s left of civil society in the Big Apple. Before the two murders Sharpton had been leading marches where the demonstrators chanted, </span><span class="zw-portion">&#8220;What do we want? Dead cops.&#8221; Taking cues from the Westboro Baptist Church, Sharpton followers showed up at one cop memorial service chanting and heckling the mourners.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">NYPD union leaders have asked de Blasio to skip police funerals and a</span><span class="zw-portion"> large gathering of cops turned their backs on the mayor as he showed up Saturday at the Brooklyn hospital where the lifeless bodies of officers Rafael Ramos, 40, and </span><span class="zw-portion">Wenjian Liu, 32, had been taken</span><span class="zw-portion"> after they were shot dead by an adherent of the Religion of Peace.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">The shooter,</span><span class="zw-portion"> Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley</span><span class="zw-portion">, </span><a style="color: blue;" title="" href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/robert-spencer/the-nypd-cop-killing-the-chickens-come-home-to-roost/" target="_blank" data-href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/robert-spencer/the-nypd-cop-killing-the-chickens-come-home-to-roost/" data-type="1"><span class="zw-portion link">was a Muslim</span></a><span class="zw-portion"> apparently upset at what he believed were the racist killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. and Eric Garner in Staten Island. He indicated he was planning to kill &#8220;pigs,&#8221; and as Robert Spencer notes,</span><span class="zw-portion"> </span><span class="zw-portion">&#8220;</span><span class="zw-portion">Brinsley</span><span class="zw-portion">’</span><span class="zw-portion">s Facebook page featured a photo of the Qur</span><span class="zw-portion">’</span><span class="zw-portion">an open to the eighth chapter, where Allah exhorts the believers to </span><span class="zw-portion">&#8216;</span><span class="zw-portion">strike terror into the hearts of the enemies of Allah</span><span class="zw-portion">&#8216;</span><span class="zw-portion"> (8:60).</span><span class="zw-portion">&#8220;</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">Since de Blasio was sworn in last New Year&#8217;s Day, New Yorkers have, in fits and starts, begun to realize that they elected a dangerously erratic Sandinista-loving radical as mayor. Although de Blasio&#8217;s reaction to the cop murders strikes many in the punditry as incompetent, they are being charitable. De Blasio&#8217;s behavior reflects his pathological,  hateful, profoundly anti-American ideology. He can&#8217;t conceal his contempt for those whose job it is to promote law and order.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">This is what happens when a small-c communist becomes mayor of the nation&#8217;s greatest metropolis. </span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who helped turn New York from a crime-infested urban jungle into the relatively crime-free city his successors inherited, </span><a style="color: blue;" title="" href="http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2014/12/22/giuliani-propaganda-from-politicians-to-separate-communities-from-police-is-shameful-n1934682?utm_source=thdailypm&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=nl_pm&amp;newsletterad=thpm1" target="_blank" data-href="http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2014/12/22/giuliani-propaganda-from-politicians-to-separate-communities-from-police-is-shameful-n1934682?utm_source=thdailypm&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=nl_pm&amp;newsletterad=thpm1" data-type="1"><span class="zw-portion link">said it was</span></a><span class="zw-portion"> &#8220;shameful&#8221; for politicians to drive a wedge between police and the communities they serve.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">&#8220;Police misconduct is a minor part of the problem. Community, serious violent crime is a much bigger part of the problem,&#8221; Giuliani said. </span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">&#8220;The people who are saving black lives in the city are [you] the New York City Police Department. I&#8217;m not doing it. President Obama&#8217;s not doing it. Mayor De Blasio&#8217;s not doing it. He&#8217;s not out at night walking down housing developments and trying to save children from being killed. Police officers are doing the most, right now, in these very very poor communities and sometime</span><span class="zw-portion">s</span><span class="zw-portion"> they&#8217;re white communities, but where there are black communities and police officers are doing the most to save the children that are at greatest risk. The politicians with this propaganda separating the community from the police, are doing something that&#8217;s shameful and they have to stop doing that. The vast majority of police want to help and the politicians&#8217; rhetoric should reflect the truth, not propaganda.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;">But de Blasio isn&#8217;t anything like Giuliani or even like Bloomberg, his immediate predecessor, a micromanaging Big Gulp-grabber who now seems like an exemplar of common sense compared to the current mayor.</p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">De Blasio is in many ways President Obama&#8217;s &#8220;mini me,&#8221; except unlike Obama, he has loud critics in the media who for the most part has not been giving him a free ride.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">But de Blasio hasn&#8217;t generated all of this racial hostility and antipathy toward cops on his own. He&#8217;s had a lot of help from </span><span class="zw-portion">President </span><span class="zw-portion">Obama who has been trying to kickstart a wave of </span><span class="zw-portion">civil unrest since even before he took office. The president&#8217;s</span><span class="zw-portion"> policy of trying to foment violent civil unrest is finally paying dividends.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">Attacking the police, as Obama has been doing for years, isn&#8217;t exactly a courageous act. The police are easy targets for leftist agitators. Riling up minorities over real and imagined abuses is child&#8217;s play. Even Al Sharpton can do it.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">On the 2008 campaign</span><span class="zw-portion"> </span><span class="zw-portion">trail</span><span class="zw-portion">, the president belittle</span><span class="zw-portion">d</span><span class="zw-portion"> small town </span><span class="zw-portion">Americans, implying they were racist, a time-honored leftist smear of conservatives. &#8220;</span><span class="zw-portion">And it&#8217;s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren&#8217;t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.</span><span class="zw-portion">&#8220;</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">Not too long after his inauguration in 2009</span><span class="zw-portion"> the new president </span><span class="zw-portion">mocked Cambridge, Mas</span><span class="zw-portion">s.</span><span class="zw-portion"> police by saying they </span><span class="zw-portion">“</span><span class="zw-portion">acted stupidly</span><span class="zw-portion">” </span><span class="zw-portion">by arresting Obama</span><span class="zw-portion">’</span><span class="zw-portion">s close personal friend,</span><span class="zw-portion"> black liberal academic </span><span class="zw-portion">Henry Louis Gates Jr. This led to the seemingly pointless public relations event known as the so-called beer summit between James Crowley (the arresting officer), Gates, and Obama. There was never any evidence that Gates&#8217;s arrest had anything to do with his skin color. Arrester and arrestee agreed to disagree yet Obama succeeded in scoring points with his radical base. </span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">Campaigning in 2010, Obama demonized non-Latinos.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">&#8220;If Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, &#8216;We&#8217;re gonna punish our enemies, and we&#8217;re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us&#8217; &#8212; if they don&#8217;t see that kind of upsurge in voting in this election &#8212; then I think it&#8217;s going to be harder. And that&#8217;s why I think it&#8217;s so important that people focus on voting on November 2nd.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">The </span><span class="zw-portion">same year he </span><span class="zw-portion">invoked </span><span class="zw-portion">Rosa Parks and segregation in order to </span><span class="zw-portion">ridicule </span><span class="zw-portion">Republicans. </span><span class="zw-portion">“</span><span class="zw-portion">We don</span><span class="zw-portion">’</span><span class="zw-portion">t mind the Republicans joining us,</span><span class="zw-portion">” </span><span class="zw-portion">Obama told the faithful. </span><span class="zw-portion">“</span><span class="zw-portion">They can come for the ride, but they gotta sit in back.</span><span class="zw-portion">”</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">In </span><span class="zw-portion">2012 </span><span class="zw-portion">Obama suggested if he failed to win reelection minorities would suffer. </span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">“</span><span class="zw-portion">The notion that we</span><span class="zw-portion">’</span><span class="zw-portion">re all in this together, that we look out for one another</span><span class="zw-portion">–</span><span class="zw-portion">that</span><span class="zw-portion">’</span><span class="zw-portion">s at stake in this election,</span><span class="zw-portion">” </span><span class="zw-portion">he </span><span class="zw-portion">said</span><span class="zw-portion">. </span><span class="zw-portion">“</span><span class="zw-portion">Don</span><span class="zw-portion">’</span><span class="zw-portion">t take my word for it. Watch some of these [Republican] debates that have been going on up in New Hampshire.</span><span class="zw-portion">”</span><span class="zw-portion"> Later that year he added </span><span class="zw-portion">Republicans</span><span class="zw-portion"> &#8220;</span><span class="zw-portion">want to take us back to the policies more suited to the 1950s than the 21st century.</span><span class="zw-portion">”</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">In 2012 he needlessly inserted race into the Trayvon Martin saga by saying, &#8220;</span><span class="zw-portion">if I had a son, he&#8217;d</span><span class="zw-portion"> </span><span class="zw-portion">look like Trayvon</span><span class="zw-portion">.</span><span class="zw-portion">&#8220;</span><span class="zw-portion"> </span><span class="zw-portion">Although the shooter who was eventually acquitted, so-called white Hispanic George Zimmerman, wasn&#8217;t a police officer, he was an authority figure of sorts as a neighborhood watch volunteer.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">Working with Sharpton, the Obama administration sicced the left-wing community organizers of the Justice Department&#8217;s Community Relations Service (CRS) on the unsuspecting people of Sanford, Fla. after the death of Martin. Evidence established that Martin attacked Zimmerman, who avoided legal liability because he acted in self-defense.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">Even after the </span><span class="zw-portion">acquittal Obama insisted on meddling. He said </span><span class="zw-portion">that </span><span class="zw-portion">“</span><span class="zw-portion">Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago,</span><span class="zw-portion">” </span><span class="zw-portion">and </span><span class="zw-portion">gave yet another </span><span class="zw-portion">lecture on race</span><span class="zw-portion">.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">Obama vigorously milked the August death of Michael Brown at the hands of white Ferguson, Mo. police officer Darren Wilson. </span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">Brown, an 18-year-old black male, was killed after he beat Wilson and tried to grab his handgun. Brown</span><span class="zw-portion">’</span><span class="zw-portion">s defenders characterize him as a gentle giant even though a few minutes earlier he was captured on video committing a strong-arm robbery at a convenience store, roughing up a much smaller clerk in the process. At autopsy Brown</span><span class="zw-portion">’</span><span class="zw-portion">s height was 6</span><span class="zw-portion">′ </span><span class="zw-portion">5</span><span class="zw-portion">″ </span><span class="zw-portion">and his weight was 289 lbs. </span><span class="zw-portion">The </span><span class="zw-portion">autopsy results were consistent with witness accounts that Brown reached for Wilson</span><span class="zw-portion">’</span><span class="zw-portion">s gun during their fateful altercation.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">Obama</span><span class="zw-portion"> dishonored his country by giving a speech at the United Nations citing Brown&#8217;s killing as something Americans should be ashamed of. After the grand jury refused to indict Wilson, Obama ramped up his rhetoric, claiming that racism is deeply rooted in American society.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">A major difference between de Blasio and Obama is that the mayor doesn&#8217;t have the president&#8217;s silver tongue. Serious calls for de Blasio&#8217;s ouster are now coming from civic leaders throughout New York.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">But don&#8217;t hold your breath waiting for de Blasio to resign. Radical leftists rarely give up power without a fight.</span></p>
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		<title>Brandeis Students Threaten Journalist for Reporting Anti-Cop Statements</title>
		<link>http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/FrontpageMag/~3/RcS_6ERqqdc/</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bradford-thomas/brandeis-students-threaten-journalist-for-reporting-anti-cop-statements/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 25 Dec 2014 05:56:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bradford Thomas]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Daniel Mael]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Khadijah Lynch]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[nypd]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Progressives]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Twitter]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=248164</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Campus Red Guards on the march.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class="field-body">
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/brandeis.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-248166" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/brandeis-450x253.jpg" alt="brandeis" width="297" height="167" /></a><strong>Reprinted from <a href="www.truthrevolt.org">TruthRevolt.org.</a></strong></p>
<p>Pro-Israel student activist and TruthRevolt contributor Daniel Mael has come under fire from campus progressives and fellow students for writing about a Brandeis student representative’s tweet declaring that she had “no sympathy” for the two NYPD officers murdered in Brooklyn Saturday. Since the story went viral, Mael has become the target of personal threats and a campaign to see him suspended or expelled from the school.</p>
<p>In his <a href="http://www.truthrevolt.org/news/student-leader-no-sympathy-executed-nypd-officers">piece</a> Saturday, Mael quoted multiple Twitter posts by Khadijah Lynch, at the time the Undergraduate Department Representative for Brandeis’ African and Afro-American Studies program, which expressed her lack of “sympathy” for the two police officers murdered earlier that day. &#8220;i have no sympathy for the nypd officers who were murdered today,&#8221; she wrote Saturday, followed by &#8220;lmao, all i just really dont have sympathy for the cops who were shot. i hate this racist fucking country.&#8221;</p>
<p>Mael followed the quotes with other inflammatory statements posted by Lynch, including posts asking “what the fuck even IS ‘non-violence’,” decrying “Zionism,” declaring “the fact that black people have not burned this country down is beyond me” and “I am in riot mode.”</p>
<p>TruthRevolt contacted Lynch for clarification about her statement about the NYPD officers; she responded by saying that any publication of her Twitter posts was “slander.” Mael reported that Lynch then returned to Twitter to say that she needed to “get my gun license. Asap.” and that “amerikkka needs an infitada” (a violent uprising).</p>
<p>This is the second time in recent weeks that TruthRevolt has been accused by left-wing activists of defamation for simply quoting them. The abortion activist and actress Lena Dunham went so far as to serve this publication with a <a href="http://www.truthrevolt.org/commentary/lena-dunham-threatens-sue-truth-revolt-quoting-her">cease and desist </a>for reporting statement made in her own book.</p>
<p>When Mael’s article went viral, Brandeis officials distanced the school from Lynch’s comments, calling them “<a class="external" href="https://twitter.com/DanielMael/status/547079015916642304" rel="nofollow">hurtful and disrespectful</a>,” and African and Afro-American Studies Department Chair Chad Williams issued a <a class="external" href="http://www.brandeis.edu/departments/afroamerstudies/docs/AAASstatementKhadijahLynch.pdf" rel="nofollow">statement</a> announcing Lynch’s resignation from her position as student representative for the program. Williams also denounced online criticism of Lynch, which he described as “horrifically racist, sexist, Islamophobic and threatening physical violence.”</p>
<p>Now Brandeis students supportive of Lynch are attempting to start a movement to have Mael either suspended or expelled.</p>
<p>The Daily Caller <a class="external" href="http://dailycaller.com/2014/12/23/brandeis-students-rally-around-peer-with-no-sympathy-for-dead-cops/" rel="nofollow">reports</a> that a member of the 2014-15 student conduct board sent an email Monday to the Brandeis president, senior administrators, professors, and students calling on them to &#8220;stand up for the principle of social justice&#8221; and hold Mael “accountable.” Entitled “VERY IMPORTANT: Holding Daniel Mael accountable, and other threats to student safety!” the email charges Mael with “expos[ing] Khadijah to the largely white supremacist following of the website” and claims that he has “potentially” violated student conduct policies. (Full text of email below.)</p>
<p>Due to the threatening nature of much of the pushback, Brandeis law enforcement officials have met with Mael to discuss his safety on campus. WFB <a class="external" href="http://freebeacon.com/issues/brandeis-pro-israel-leader-under-threat-by-progressive-activists/" rel="nofollow">reported</a> Tuesday that Brandeis officials told them that they were “in touch” with campus law enforcement who was working to address threats against those on campus but could provide no further details due to student privacy and security policies.</p>
<p>As of the time of publication, the administration at Brandeis has made no public statement in support of Mr. Mael&#8217;s first amendment rights or, as with the statement from Department Chair Chad Williams, denouncing the racist and sometimes violent statements being made by actual Brandeis students against him.</p>
<p>Text of email from Brandeis student conduct board member:</p>
<blockquote><p><strong><em>Subject:</em></strong><em> <strong>VERY IMPORTANT: Holding Daniel Mael accountable, and other threats to student safety!</strong></em></p>
<p><em>Hello to all,</em></p>
<p>This email is similar, but not identical, to one that had been sent out previously today. The first was to call attention to the issue, whereas this one is a request from many members of the Brandeis community that the student responsible for the incident be held accountable for his actions. We apologize for any redundancy.</p>
<p>As you may have been made aware, the safety of one member of the Brandeis community, Khadijah Lynch, has been compromised by the actions of another Brandeis student, Daniel Mael. Those of us within the Brandeis community who value the safety and integrity of all members of our community are requesting that action is taken to hold this student accountable for his actions, which have directly put Khadijah in danger and continue to do so.</p>
<p>Mael, a regular contributor on a website called &#8220;TruthRevolt&#8221;, a popular conservative-oriented political website designed, according to its mission statement, to &#8220;unmask leftists in the media for who they are, destroy their credibility with the American public, and devastate their funding bases,&#8221; wrote an article targeting Khadijah for a series of tweets she made on her own personal Twitter over the last month. In doing so, he posted a photo of her as well as information about her as a student as well as giving people access to her Twitter username. The article can be seen here:</p>
<p><a href="http://www.truthrevolt.org/news/student-leader-no-sympathy-executed-nypd-officers" target="_blank">http://www.truthrevolt.org/news/student-leader-no-sympathy-executed-nypd-officers</a></p>
<p>Whether one agrees or not with the very blunt comments Khadijah made on her Twitter account, the audience of these postings was originally those who frequented her Twitter. We do not propose to offer any opinion on the posts themselves, but it is important to note the sequence of events and intended audiences. After having posted the aforementioned article, Mael has exposed Khadijah to the largely white supremacist following of the website on which he posts, which has led to harassment, death threats, rape threats, and excessive hate speech directed to her personal Twitter (now private), Facebook (now deactivated), and Linkedin. People who frequent TruthRevolt have also gained access to Khadijah&#8217;s personal email address and her Brandeis mailbox number, and have threatened to contact her persistently. We have taken screenshots of some of these threatening comments and have attached them to this email, although more will likely be posted after this has been sent.</p>
<p>As can be seen in the article itself, Khadijah specifically requested that her personal comments be removed from the website and the article in question taken down, but her wishes were ignored and Mael continued to post updates to the article until Khadijah made her Twitter private.</p>
<p><strong><em>In doing so, he has potentially violated multiple parts of Section 2.10, particularly 2.10.f of Rights and Responsibilities, and we have screenshot and uploaded as an attachment the relevant portion. It is essential that this be taken into consideration. Other sections potentially violated are 3.2a (stalking), and attention may also be warranted about Section 17, 20, and 21.4. </em></strong></p>
<p><em>A Facebook page has also been made on which hate speech, directed toward Khadijah herself as well as a plethora of racist comments, have been made, and there has been word that professional hackers may have now stated plans to target specific members of the Brandeis community. The safety of the Brandeis community has been placed in jeopardy also by another student named Ben Vizlakh, who posted an article to this Facebook page telling its members that this email was going to be sent out, mentioning one student by name (a screenshot of his post has been attached here). <strong>Vizakh has potentialy violated 2.13 (retaliation) with regard to spreading the word of this email to people who pose a threat to the safety of Brandeis students. </strong>Here is the relevant Facebook link:</em></p>
<p><a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/340022509539521/?pnref=story" target="_blank">https://www.facebook.com/groups/340022509539521/?pnref=story</a></p>
<p><em>Upon Khadijah&#8217;s resignation as a UDR, Mael also posted the following, which did little more than to spur more negative comments about her (including another rape threat) as well as Brandeis University and its faculty:</em></p>
<p><a href="http://www.truthrevolt.org/news/student-leader-resigns-after-stating-she-has-no-sympathy-murdered-cops" target="_blank">http://www.truthrevolt.org/news/student-leader-resigns-after-stating-she-has-no-sympathy-murdered-cops</a></p>
<p><em>Additionally, if you go to Google and type &#8220;Khadijah Lynch Brandeis&#8221; this story has been reposted all over the Internet, with similar hateful comments and threats directed toward her. Not only does the posting of this article put Khadijah in danger, but also the Brandeis community at large, given the volume of hateful messages being posted about the school on social media by strangers.</em></p>
<p>The most pressing concern ought to be the safety of our students, and as such we request that action is taken to ensure Khadijah&#8217;s safety. A large part of this involves holding the student responsible who callously disregarded her safety. With the speed at which information is spread digitally these days and the fact that her personal information has been compromised and is in the hands of strangers, it is essential that action is taken. As students and community members who know Khadijah personally, we neither condone nor condemn the statements she had made, but we must understand the intent with which her posts and personal information were made accessible by a fellow Brandeis student to the general public, especially on a website frequented by white supremacists that seek to threaten and intimidate anyone with views that differ from their own. It is unfathomable to many within the Brandeis community that such an action could have been carried out with anything but malicious intent, as contributors to websites are perfectly aware of the following their websites receive. As a journalist, he must be aware of the impact that publishing such articles could have on other people&#8217;s safety, and it is important that he be held accountable for his actions.</p>
<p>Included in this email are students within the Brandeis community who stand in solidarity with Khadijah in this difficult time and who wish to see action taken to hold the student in question responsible and to protect her safety. As Chad Williams, Chair of the African and Afro-American Studies Department mentioned in his statement on this situation, &#8220;While it may be easy and convenient at this emotionally charged moment to condemn Ms. Lynch, we must also strive to understand why she would make these comments. This means openly and honestly recognizing the very real pain and frustration that many young people of color struggle with in trying to navigate their place in a society that all too often delegitimizes their existence.&#8221; While Khadijah has taken responsibility for her comments and has withdrawn from her position as a UDR, it is the responsibility of our community to condemn the threatening and hateful comments she has received and stand up for the principle of social justice on which Brandeis was founded.</p>
<p><em>Thank you so much for your time and we hope that you have a Happy Holiday!<br />
Best wishes,<br />
The Brandeis Community </em></p></blockquote>
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		<title>Trouble in Berkeley, Missouri</title>
		<link>http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/FrontpageMag/~3/3cGhh62eTUw/</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/trouble-in-berkeley-missouri/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 25 Dec 2014 05:27:38 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Berkeley]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ferguson]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Protests]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[shooting]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[surveillance camera]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=248132</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Protestors fight police after another shooting. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/berkeley12.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-248135" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/berkeley12-450x253.jpg" alt="berkeley12" width="244" height="137" /></a>Another seemingly justified police shooting near Ferguson, MO briefly followed a sadly predictable script. In nearby Berkeley, a white police officer, aged 34, fired three shots, killing black American Antonio Martin, aged 18. The officer was responding to a report of stealing at a Mobil on the Run gas station. Martin allegedly pulled a 9mm handgun on the six-year veteran, who stumbled backwards as he fired, striking Martin once. &#8220;He will carry the weight of this for the rest of his life, certainly for the rest of his career,&#8221; said St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar, referring to the unidentified officer. &#8220;There are no winners here.”</p>
<p>Unfortunately, there were plenty of losers. Despite the efforts of Mayor Theodore Hoskins, who <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/missouri-police-officer-shoots-dead-man-who-pulled-gun-1419412121?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTTopStories">explained</a> the shooting had been captured on a surveillance camera and a weapon was recovered on the scene, between 200 and 300 protesters <a href="http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/berkeley-officer-fatally-shoots-teenager/article_d45db16a-7422-5307-b81d-b45dbdc896ba.html">gathered</a> there and began fighting with police officers. One of three explosive devices (possible fireworks) tossed near gas pumps sent one officer to the hospital with injuries to his leg, while another sustained facial lacerations as a result of bricks thrown at the officers by the mob. Several police cars were also damaged by rocks protesters brought to the area. Four people were arrested for assault.</p>
<p>Belmar said he understood why a crowd would gather, but he noted that &#8220;to come there armed with explosive devices is certainly something that is not safe for our community, is not safe for our businesses and is certainly not safe for our officers.” He also addressed questions from the crowd as to why the officer couldn’t have used pepper spray or a Taser to subdue the victim. He characterized that response as “unreasonable.” &#8220;We had somebody who was pointing a gun at a police officer,” he explained. &#8220;With not a lot of time, I would imagine that most of us would feel like we were in imminent danger of losing our lives at that point. And I think the officer responded with what he thought was commensurate force at the time.”</p>
<p>&#8220;I understand the emotions and I understand these young people are looking for something, but I think we have to understand the context of what happens down there with these kinds of situations,” he added.</p>
<p>The incident occurred at approximately 11:15 p.m. Tuesday night.  The officer encountered two men at the parking lot in the 6800 block of North Hanley Road and began talking to them. Belmar said one of the men approached the drivers side of the police vehicle. According to the police officer&#8217;s attorney, Brian Millikan, the other man kept wandering away despite the officer’s commands to remain close by.</p>
<p>One of the two men &#8220;produced a pistol with his arm straight out, pointing it straight at the officer kind of from across the hood,&#8221; Belmar said, further noting the police officer had a flashlight in his left hand and was near his driver’s side door while the armed man stood near the headlights on the passenger side of the vehicle. The officer proceeded to get his handgun &#8220;and fired what we think is three shots,” Belmar said. One struck Martin, one struck a tire on the police car, and the third shot remains unaccounted for.</p>
<p>After the shooting the officer was placed on administrative leave. Belmar <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2014/12/24/protesters-near-ferguson-injure-cops-with-bricks-explosives-after-officer-kills-armed-18-yr-old/">revealed</a> the suspect’s “defaced” 9 mm gun “had five rounds in the chamber and one round in the magazine.” He further revealed Martin had a criminal record that included three assault charges, as well as charges for armed robbery, armed criminal action and  multiple unlawful uses of a weapon.</p>
<p>Millikan recounted further details provided to him by the officer hours after the shooting &#8220;The other guy was doing the talking, and as the cop starts talking, the suspect starts walking away again,&#8221; Millikan said. &#8220;At that point, the cop says, &#8216;Hey, come back here,&#8217; and he turns around, pulls a gun from his left pant pocket. He&#8217;s trying to process all of this, and the suspect raises it, points it at him. The cop pulls his weapon and starts backpedaling and fired three or four shots. It happened that quickly. He doesn&#8217;t understand why the suspect&#8217;s gun didn&#8217;t fire. I&#8217;m not sure if he tried to pull the trigger and it jammed,” he added.</p>
<p>Millikan who further characterized the behavior of the two suspects as “bizarre” speculated that his client might have been set up for an ambush because the suspects remained at the scene after store employees called 911. &#8220;Their behavior is certainly bizarre, and it wouldn&#8217;t surprise me at all, in the environment we are in, that&#8217;s for sure,” he contended.</p>
<p>Belmar noted the officer dropped his flashlight when he stumbled while backpedaling, with Mayor Hoskins characterizing that as a blessing in disguise that may have saved the officer’s life. The officer had been given a body camera at the beginning of his shift, but wasn’t wearing it. Belmar said the officer was doing something else when it was handed out and simply forgot to put it on. The police car’s dashboard camera was also inoperative at the time because the car&#8217;s emergency lights were not on, Belmar explained.</p>
<p>All three men were relieved the incident was captured by surveillance cameras. Only the part prior to the shooting has been released so far. &#8220;The video goes on; there’s no reason for the family of this young man to have to see the rest of the video,” Belmar said, adding the department would be distributing more video from the scene, including footage of the officer retreating, to provide transparency.</p>
<p>According to Belmar, the officer was involved in a similar incident in 2011 or 2012, during which he and a suspect struggled for the officer’s gun. To prevent the suspect from using it, the officer purposefully dropped the magazine out of the weapon and fired the chambered round into the floor.</p>
<p>Martin’s family, who couldn’t be located initially, finally emerged. And while his mother admitted he had problems, it &#8220;doesn&#8217;t make any sense for them to kill my son like this,&#8221; Toni Martin-Green <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/12/24/372903198/son-s-death-doesn-t-make-any-sense-say-antonio-martin-s-parents">contended</a>.</p>
<p>Belmar expressed condolence for both families. &#8220;These are nothing but tragedies,&#8221; he said. &#8220;This is a family right now that, regardless of the decisions that this individual made, are without a family member this Christmas season. This is also a tragedy for the police officer. He will carry the weight of this for the rest of his life, certainly for the rest of his career. This really underscores the task that our police officers across the nation have to deal with day in and day out as they answer these calls in our community,&#8221; he added.</p>
<p>Belmar also praised Berkeley Police Chief Frank McCall for helping to calm the protests that dissipated by 3 a.m., noting he had ordered his commanders to “let this emotion vent. Let this happen.” Hoskins was also adamant, &#8220;You can&#8217;t compare this to Ferguson or the Garner case in New York,” he said emphasizing the videotape showed Martin pointing a gun at the officer. Nonetheless, he promised an investigation would be conducted in addition to the one by the St. Louis County Police.</p>
<p>The Mayor also illuminated the racial breakdown of the department. Out of 31 officers, 17 or 18 are African-American, and approximately 75 percent of the command staff are black, along with the the mayor, police chief and other city officials. The community itself is just over 9,000 residents, 80 percent of whom are black American.</p>
<p>Hoskins made one stumble. &#8220;At this point, our review indicates that the police did not initiate this, like Ferguson,” he stated. Considering the Ferguson grand jury&#8217;s findings, that statement is disingenuous at best, and self-serving at worst. However, the Mayor did stand strong when his press conference was interrupted by black Baptist minister Jason Keith Coleman, who characterized the shooting as another act of aggression by “trigger happy” police officers. &#8220;Everybody don&#8217;t die the same,&#8221; Hoskins snapped back. &#8220;Some people die because they initiate it, and at this point, our review suggests police did not initiate it.”</p>
<p>Earlier that evening Belmar addressed equally spurious assertions, noting that he had &#8220;already seen through social media that this officer stopped (Martin), questioned him, frisked him and then killed him in cold blood — well, that&#8217;s not what you&#8217;re going to see when you see the video.”</p>
<p>Considering what has, and continues to transpire in New York and other hotspots around the nation, one might be forgiven for wondering whether it matters. Despite the successful efforts of local officials, a leftist agenda, replete with false narratives, continues to widen the divide between police and the communities they serve. It is driven by those for whom police officers will forever be “ trigger happy,” irrespective of evidence, because a divided America, along with the eternal victimization of black Americans, is the only thing that separates the racial arsonists from the irrelevance they so richly deserve. That includes our feckless president, who chooses to remain on the golf course in Hawaii while Vice President Joe Biden has been <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/joe-biden-attend-funeral-slain-nypd-officer-rafael-ramos-n274016">dispatched</a> to attend the one of the two funerals of the two <em>minority</em> officers slain in New York City.</p>
<p>President Obama could have sent a powerful message with his attendance. Instead, he sends an equally powerful message with his absence. There is no political mileage to be gained by standing with police officers, even as his ideological fellow travelers stand against them, all of their protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. Like his execrable Attorney General Eric Holder, Obama prefers the company of uber race-baiter Al Sharpton. It is this trio of men, along with New York’s equally feckless Mayor, Bill de Blasio, who have cultivated the &#8220;us against them”mentality they see as a vehicle for the &#8220;fundamental transformation&#8221; of America.</p>
<p>Ultimately, Berkeley, MO may prove that such a transformation is far from inevitable. We are a far better nation than the American left would have us believe, and the bet here is most Americans are finally beginning to realize it, one in their face, over the top, cop-bashing—and killing—moment after another.</p>
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		<title>To Kill a Kafir — on The Glazov Gang</title>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 25 Dec 2014 05:15:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Dr. Edward L. Dalcour takes us into the heart of Qur'anic darkness. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Isis-fighters.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-248130" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Isis-fighters-450x270.jpg" alt="Isis fighters" width="287" height="172" /></a><strong>[</strong><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><strong>Subscribe</strong></a><strong> to <em>The Glazov Gang</em> and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>LIKE</strong></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>Facebook.]</strong></a></p>
<p>This week&#8217;s <em>Glazov Gang</em> was guest-hosted by scholar of Islam <strong>Louis Lionheart</strong> and joined by author and lecturer <strong>Dr. Edward L. Dalcour.</strong></p>
<p>Dr. Dalcour came on the show to discuss <strong>To Kill a Kafir, </strong>explaining Islam&#8217;s true teachings on &#8220;freedom&#8221; of religion. The discussion occurred within the context of <strong>Sharia Law: Draconian Legal System</strong>, in which Dr. Dalcour unveiled the nightmare spawned by Islamic &#8220;theocracy.&#8221;</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/2l-HnpTFEBM" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p>Don&#8217;t miss this week&#8217;s second episode in which guest-host <strong>Louis Lionheart</strong> interviews <a href="http://www.markdurie.com/"><b>Dr. Mark Durie</b></a>, a theologian, human rights activist, pastor of an Anglican church, and an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum.</p>
<p>Dr. Durie came on the show to discuss <strong>Islamic Human Sex-Trafficking, </strong>explaining why ISIS&#8217;s new sex-slave pamphlet references Islamic texts.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/1Havjh7nMZw" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><strong>To watch previous <em>Glazov Gang</em> episodes, </strong><a href="http://jamieglazov.com/"><strong>Click Here</strong></a><strong>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Al-Qaeda’s Younger Brother in Florida</title>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 25 Dec 2014 05:14:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joe Kaufman]]></dc:creator>
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		<category><![CDATA[Nabil el-Shukri]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Is Nabil el-Shukri trying to fill the shoes of his extremist lineage?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Nabil.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-248049" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Nabil-450x330.jpg" alt="Nabil" width="262" height="192" /></a>Nabil el-Shukri’s terrorist family has been decimated. His father, who was the imam of what has been labeled one of the most dangerous mosques in America and the translator for the spiritual leader of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, has long been gone. And now his older brother, a top-ranking al-Qaeda Commander, has been killed by the Pakistani military. With his two biggest influences dead, will el-Shukri choose to lead a similar path? The extremism he has exhibited and is exhibiting today leads one to believe that it is a foregone conclusion.</p>
<p>Nabil el-Shukri is the administrator and the acting imam at the Alazhar School for children, PK – 8th Grade, located in the Fort Lauderdale suburb of Tamarac, Florida. He has been with the school, since it was incorporated in September 2008. While he is married with a child, today he no doubt feels quite lonely, as he has lost yet another piece of his radical Muslim family.</p>
<p>On a raid in the tribal district of South Waziristan, which began Friday, December 5<sup>th</sup> and ended the following day, <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/06/world/asia/pakistan-al-qaeda-death/">al-Qaeda Commander Adnan Gulshair el-Shukrijumah was killed</a> and confirmed dead by the Pakistani military. According to a resident from the area, he had been living there for two weeks, after having been forced out of North Waziristan during a military operation against militants <em>there</em>.</p>
<p>While with al-Qaeda, Adnan had quickly climbed ranks to reach the lofty position of head of external operations, a title once possessed by 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. In that capacity, he had been indicted by a federal grand jury for his role in the 2009 terrorist plot to blow up New York City&#8217;s subway system. At the time of his death, he was 39 years old, born in 1975 to a mother who was merely 16 years of age and a father who was 47.</p>
<p>Adnan had been on the radar of the intelligence community, since he abruptly left town in May 2001. Two years later, his father told the <em>Associated Press</em> that the reason Adnan had left was because he disliked the American lifestyle and was offended by women who wore skimpy clothing.</p>
<p>The father, Gulshair Muhammad el-Shukrijumah, had spent much of his life as a missionary for the Saudi Arabian government. In 1986, he was sent to Brooklyn, New York to head a mosque, Masjid Nur al-Islam. He also had involvement with another mosque that was located only blocks away, Masjid al-Farooq, the home for many of those involved in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.</p>
<p>Gulshair was a translator for the spiritual leader of the attack, the ‘Blind Sheikh’ Omar Abdel-Rahman. As well, during the federal trial concerning the attack, Gulshair was a chief/character witness for Clement Rodney Hampton-El, the individual who was believed to be the one who taught the terror cell how to build the bomb used in the attack. Hampton-El was one of the congregants at Gulshair’s mosque.</p>
<p>In a photo taken at Gulshair’s Brooklyn mosque, which was uploaded to the internet by his son Nabil, Gulshair is pictured reading with two young boys. Behind him, on the blackboard, it is written, “The human being is under the oppression of the kuffar [unbelievers, non-Muslims].”</p>
<p>In 1995, Gulshair moved himself and his family to Miramar in South Florida, where the Saudis once again set him up with a mosque to run. That mosque, Masjid al-Hijrah, has the dubious distinction of being named the No. 2 biggest “Sanctuary of Terror” by author Paul Sperry in his book <em>Infiltration</em>. At this mosque, Gulshair counseled the likes of convicted terrorist “Dirty Bomber” Jose Padilla, who also had dealings with Gulshair’s son, Adnan.</p>
<p>When the subject of his son’s terrorist activity became too hot, Gulshair was released from his duties as imam of al-Hijrah. He did not have to wait long to find a new job, though, as he was soon taken on as a director at the Shamsuddin Islamic Center, located in North Miami Beach. The mosque had recently moved across the street from its original location, at the same address as the American Muslim Association of North America (AMANA), a group run by Shukrijumah family friend Sofian Abdelaziz Zakkout, who was an advisor to the mosque.</p>
<p>Zakkout previously had been the Vice President of the Health Resource Center for Palestine (HRCP), a now defunct Hamas-related group run out of Deerfield Beach, Florida. Earlier this month, Zakkout posted on his Facebook page a photo of late PLO leader Yasser Arafat <a href="http://i1227.photobucket.com/albums/ee431/kaufmanforcongress/Sofian_Zakkout-Ahmed_Yassin_Yasser_Arafat.jpg">embracing late Hamas leader Ahmed Yassin</a>.</p>
<p>In June 2004, Gulshair el-Shukrijumah died at the age of 74, following a series of strokes claimed to have been brought on by news related to his oldest son, Adnan.</p>
<p>With both his older brother and father gone, Nabil el-Shukri has been left as the elder male figure in the radical Shukrijumah household. The question is will things be different with him than were with his two predecessors. The answer is probably no.</p>
<p>El-Shukri’s MySpace page is currently locked and restricted from public view. No longer can anyone go on it to see <a href="http://www.americansagainsthate.org/NabilShukrijumah_MySpace.htm">graphics of jihadis brandishing rifles</a> and al-Qaeda black flags or photos of killed U.S. troops. However, his Facebook and YouTube pages are entirely open for scrutiny, and what is found on them is also very disturbing.</p>
<p>On his Facebook site, el-Shukri posted different items associated with the Muslim American Society or MAS, including a <a href="http://i1227.photobucket.com/albums/ee431/kaufmanforcongress/Nabil_el-Shukri_MAS.jpg">MAS produced video, titled ‘Bassem is Trying.’</a></p>
<p>Last month, it was widely reported that MAS was named a terrorist organization by the UAE, on a list that included al-Qaeda, ISIS and Boko Haram. In the recent past, MAS has used its official websites to praise Hamas and to call for violence upon and/or denigrate Jews, Christians, homosexuals and women. The National Executive Director of MAS, Mazen Mokhtar, is a proponent of suicide bombings and has previously served as a web designer for what was then the main website raising funds and recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda and the Taliban, Qoqaz.net.</p>
<p>In January 2010, El-Shukri posted on his Facebook site a video, titled ‘The Arrivals pt.47 (The Free Human),’ which includes the following anti-Semitic rant from Islamic scholar Imran Hosein:</p>
<p>“What’s the new money that Israel will use to enslave mankind, the way the United States used the dollar? … It will be electronic money. And the strange thing – the dangerous thing – about electronic money is it is controlled by the banking system around the world, and the Jews control the banking system. That’s not an uncharitable statement… That’s the truth. We said that Israel is about to wage a big war. They prepared for this, when the Israeli Mossad and the CIA attacked America on September 11 and put the blame on us, us Muslims.”</p>
<p>In another video el-Shukri posted, titled ‘The Arrivals pt.26 (The Antichrist / Dajjal is Here),’ the same Imran Hosein describes a Satanic conspiracy between Britain, the United States and Israel. The video includes an image of the anti-Semitic fraud <em>Protocols of the Elders of Zion</em>, and states that “9/11 was an inside job.”</p>
<p>El-Shukri has not been shy about voicing his own fanatical views. He has a YouTube page, where he has uploaded a number of extreme speeches he has delivered in front of a mosque congregation. In one speech he posted in February 2010, titled ‘Al-Dajjal (Anti-Christ),’ he discusses his belief that, if Muslims try to become “moderate,” they are rejecting the Islamic religion and, instead, listening to the “Dajjal” or Devil.</p>
<p>He states: “We have to understand that we have to train ourselves – what is acceptable in this dunya [world]? Have we compromised our religion of Allah SWT? How much of our din [religion] has been compromised by this dunya? What is the definition of a moderate Muslim? &#8230; A moderate Muslim does not accept the Caliphate [Islamic rule]. A moderate Muslim wants to live under democracy – abolish the Caliphate. A moderate Muslim does not want the Sharia Law.”</p>
<p>Nabil’s radical views appear to be very much in line with that of his father and older brother. As well, his life seems to mimic Adnan’s. Both Nabil and Adnan had cell phone businesses. They both were involved in website design. They both attended classes at Broward College (Nabil is still attending classes there). And they both lectured in Islam, like their dad.</p>
<p>In December 2006, more than two years after the death of his father, Nabil el-Shukri wrote the following message on the MySpace page he created for Gulshair: “As Salaam Alaikum Dad, you’re still living among all of us, will see you later but not that much later.”</p>
<p>What does “not that much later” mean?</p>
<p>Given Nabil’s radical Islamic preoccupations and family history, these four words imply something very sinister which does not portend well for the future. His present, however, as administrator and acting imam of the Alazhar School is also cause for alarm, as he has been handed a forum to indoctrinate impressionable young minds with his toxic Islamist agenda and ideology.</p>
<p>In a June 2011 video interview with al-Hikmat, the media group run by the Darul Uloom mosque located near the home of the Shukrijumahs, where a number of al-Qaeda, including at least one of the 9/11 hijackers, had come to pray, el-Shukri called himself a “role model” for the Alazhar kids.</p>
<p>Question: What kind of parents would wish for their children to have a role model such as this? Those who keep their kids in this school are giving their tacit approval to the extremism that is represented by el-Shukri and his family’s lineage.</p>
<p><em>Beila Rabinowitz, Director of Militant Islam Monitor, contributed to this report.</em></p>
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		<title>Raymond Ibrahim on Western Myopia of the Jihad</title>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 25 Dec 2014 05:02:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[ISIS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jihad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Joe Biden]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Raymond Ibrahim]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=248027</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Shillman Journalism Fellow explains the "Hydra of Jihad" and Western blindness. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/hydra.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-248028" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/hydra.jpg" alt="hydra" width="301" height="226" /></a>Raymond Ibrahim, Shillman Fellow at the Freedom Center, was recently interviewed on Reel Talk with Audrey Russo.  Topics ranged from Joe Biden’s ISIS failures to the “Hydra of Jihad,” to Islam’s influences on non-Muslims throughout history.  <a href="http://www.audreyrusso.com/Raymond_Ibrahim_1114_intro.mp3"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Click here</span></a> to listen to the 25-minute interview.</p>
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		<title>The Sony Cyberattack: A Preview of Things to Come</title>
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		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-klein/the-sony-cyberattack-a-preview-of-things-to-come/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 24 Dec 2014 05:55:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Klein]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cyber war]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hacking]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Seth Rogen]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[the interview]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Why the North Korean hacking incident was no mere act of "vandalism." ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/rtr4h6b5.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-248059" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/rtr4h6b5-389x350.jpg" alt="rtr4h6b5" width="351" height="316" /></a>The FBI accused the North Korean government last week of perpetrating the devastating cyberattacks against Sony’s computer network for which a group calling itself the Guardians of Peace took responsibility. The North Korean government denied the charge and warned of serious consequences if the United States launched any counter-attack. President Obama ignored the threat, declaring that the U.S. would respond “proportionally” to what he characterized as cyberspace “vandalism.”</p>
<p>This Monday, North Korea experienced a total Internet outage for a bit less than ten hours. “I haven’t seen such a steady beat of routing instability and outages in KP before,” Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis at DYN Research, told North Korea Tech, referring to North Korea’s Internet country code top-level domain. “Usually there are isolated blips, not continuous connectivity problems. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are absorbing some sort of attack presently.”</p>
<p>North Korea’s Internet access, which it obtains through China-based facilities, has since been restored.</p>
<p>Some observers have attributed the temporary Internet outage to the fulfillment, in part or in whole, of Obama’s “proportional” response, which a White House National Security spokeswoman would neither confirm nor deny. Whether China may have played a role in the temporary outage is unknown, but doubtful.</p>
<p>The FBI said that its evidence of North Korean complicity in the Sony hacking was based in part on similarities between the malware found to be used in the Sony hacking and software used in previous cyberattacks carried out by North Korea — “similarities in specific lines of code, encryption algorithms, data deletion methods, and compromised networks.” While some cybersecurity experts have questioned the FBI’s findings, North Korea certainly has a self-declared motive for going after Sony and it has sophisticated cyberattack capabilities. Moreover, it would not be North Korea’s first time engaging in such tactics. Last spring, South Korea concluded that North Korea was responsible for the hacking of several South Korean banks and media outlets that, along with another attack last year, were estimated to have caused damages in the neighborhood of $800 million.</p>
<p>The cyberattacks against Sony were evidently in retaliation for a movie called <i>The Interview</i> Sony was planning to release that depicted a mission to assassinate North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. His regime demanded that the U.S. government ban the film, characterized it as an act of war in a letter to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon last June and threatened a “merciless and resolute” response. In addition to the cyberattacks which resulted in the release of sensitive and sometimes embarrassing confidential information and internal Sony communications, the attackers issued threats of terrorist attacks against theaters that dared to display the film. An e-mail of theirs warned: &#8220;The world will be full of fear. Remember the 11th of September 2001.&#8221;</p>
<p>Theater owners cowered in the face of these threats. Sony withdrew its planned Christmas Day release of the movie, although it now claims it will make the film available to the public after all.</p>
<p>It would be easy to dismiss this latest incident as yet another in a long series of spats between the United States and the North Korean regime, precipitated in this case by a movie studio’s decision to produce and release a tasteless farce offensive to the megalomaniac North Korean dictator. President Obama played into this trivialization by downplaying the cyberattack as a mere act of “vandalism.”  Instead, it should be seen as a preview of what is likely to come as rogue states such as North Korea and Iran, as well as technology savvy jihadists such as ISIS, focus on this alternative form of warfare and intimidation to censor speech they find offensive.</p>
<p>Rep. Patrick Meehan, chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security’s Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, warned the “attack on Sony is the latest high-profile example of the growing danger of the cyber threat, and it won’t be the last. American businesses, financial networks, government agencies and infrastructure systems like power grids are at continual risk. They’re targeted not just by lone hackers and criminal syndicates, but by well-funded nation-states like North Korea and Iran. A lack of consequences for when nation states carry out cyberattacks has only emboldened these adversaries to do more harm.”</p>
<p><i>Reuters</i> quoted a South Korean specialist in nuclear designs, South Korea University’s Su Kune-yull, as saying, following the recent hacking of computer systems at South Korea’s nuclear plant operator:</p>
<p>“This demonstrated that, if anyone is intent with malice to infiltrate the system, it would be impossible to say with confidence that such an effort would be blocked completely. And a compromise of nuclear reactors&#8217; safety pretty clearly means there is a gaping hole in national security.”</p>
<p>The control systems of the U.S. electric bulk power distribution system, the electrical grid, is particularly vulnerable to cyberattacks without adequate defenses, which are sorely lacking today. As Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., President of the Center for Security Policy, warned:</p>
<p>“The vulnerability of America’s electric grid is a ticking time-bomb…Many of our foes are aware both of the grid’s susceptibility to attack and the potentially catastrophic consequences for this country and its people should it happen.”</p>
<p>Cyberattack is one of the means available to our enemies to exploit the electric grid’s vulnerability and create a literal nightmare for the nation’s population so dependent on electricity for their day-to-day lives.</p>
<p>Congress passed earlier this month the Cybersecurity and Critical Infrastructure Protection Act, which President Obama is expected to sign. While the legislation is a step in the right direction of enlisting government and private enterprise resources to enhance the nation’s cyber defenses and awareness, it is not enough. It must be accompanied by forceful actions by the Commander-in-Chief to deter any future cyberattacks against sensitive systems and infrastructures. Our enemies are watching. As U.S. Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power told the UN Security Council during its open debate on December 22<sup>nd</sup> regarding North Korea’s abysmal human rights record, “Dictators who see threats are an effective tool for silencing the international community tend to be emboldened and not placated.”</p>
<p>Slaps on the wrist, like the type of temporary Internet outage that the Obama administration may or may not have caused to North Korea’s Internet access, are woefully insufficient. We cannot give even the appearance of being intimidated by thug regimes and terrorists who want to bully us into suppressing the fundamental right of free expression in our own country. In addition to restoring North Korea to the list of state sponsors of terrorism, further counter-measures should be seriously considered now.  These may include cutting off North Korea’s access to global finance as completely as possible and targeting critical pieces of North Korea’s military infrastructure control systems with viruses of the sort used to infiltrate and incapacitate some of Iran’s centrifuges. Another counter-measure worth pursuing is the launching of a massive propaganda counter-offensive, using the Internet and social media to which North Korean elites and military officers have access to sow further doubts they may already be harboring in Kim Jong-un’s leadership.</p>
<p>Less rhetoric and more action from President Obama is what is needed. As Teddy Roosevelt said: “Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.”</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.</b></p>
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		<title>Army Chaplain Punished for Mentioning Faith</title>
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		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/army-chaplain-punished-for-mentioning-faith/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 24 Dec 2014 05:52:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Chaplain]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[reprimand]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=248031</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Spreading holiday fear.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #232323;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Praying012807.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-248032" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Praying012807.jpg" alt="Praying012807" width="309" height="208" /></a>Apparently, the Obama administration’s ostensible determination to foster “diversity” in the military is a one-way street. Army Chaplain Joseph Lawhorn was <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2014/12/09/chaplain-punished-for-sharing-his-faith-in-suicide-prevention-class/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">disciplined</span></a> for mentioning his faith and the Bible as part of a November suicide prevention training seminar with the 5th Ranger Training Battalion. “You provided a two-sided handout that listed Army resources on one side and a biblical approach to handling depression on the other side,” wrote Col. David Fivecoat, commander of the Airborne and Ranger Training Brigade at Ft. Benning, Georgia, in an official Letter of Concern. “This made it impossible for those in attendance to receive the resource information without also receiving the biblical information.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Lawhorn received the letter following orders to appear in Col. Fivecoat’s office on Thanksgiving Day. The letter <a href="http://www.armytimes.com/story/military/2014/12/10/army-chaplain-joseph-lawhorn-ranger-training-complaint/20213399/?sf34573836=%5B%22%5B'1'%5D%22%5D"><span style="color: #1255cc;">continued</span></a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p style="color: #232323;">As the battalion chaplain, you are entrusted to care for the emotional wellbeing of all soldiers in the battalion. You, above all others, must be cognizant of the various beliefs held by diverse soldiers. During mandatory training briefings, it is imperative you are careful to avoid any perception you are advocating one system of beliefs over another.</p>
</blockquote>
<p style="color: #232323;">The sequence of events leading to the action taken against Lawhorn should sound familiar. The session took place Nov. 20 at the University of North Georgia. Lawhorn handed out the two-sided document, recited some scripture, and explained how he used the Bible to cope with his <i>own</i> bout of depression. A single soldier was “offended” by Lawhorn’s presentation and reported him to the <a href="http://militaryatheists.org/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers</span></a> (MAAF). Writing on behalf the MAAF, former Army Captain Jason Torpy characterized Lawhorn’s presentation as &#8220;an abuse of power and a violation of regulations.” He further accused Lawhorn of engaging in “conscience protection” which he defined as &#8220;an insidious legal tool designed to allow military chaplains to use their power and authority to evangelize vulnerable military populations.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;"><span style="color: #1255cc;"><a href="https://www.libertyinstitute.org/take-action/give?gclid=CO7q9t_G3MICFYtr7AodBBUAqw">The Liberty Institute</a></span> is defending Lawhorn. Attorney Michael Berry contends the soldier who filed the complaint “exploited” the chaplain’s “vulnerability.” “It took a great amount of courage for Chaplain Lawhorn to discuss his own personal battle with depression,” Berry explained. “At no time did he consider himself to be in a ‘preacher’ role.” Berry further insisted the Letter of Concern violated Lawhorn’s constitutional rights. “Not only is it lawful for a chaplain to talk about matters of faith and spirituality and religion in a suicide prevention training class &#8211; but the Army policy encourages discussion of matters of faith and spiritual wellness,” he told Fox News’s Todd Starnes. “The fact that one person in the class was offended changes nothing.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Berry appears to be on solid ground. The passage of the last two National Defense Authorization Acts (NDAA), included provisions expanding the rights of service members and chaplains to express their religious beliefs. Despite that effort, a congressional hearing on the matter taking place the same day Lawhorn was doing the seminar <a href="http://www.military.com/daily-news/2014/11/20/pentagons-religious-guidance-spurred-tsunami-of-confusion.html?ESRC=eb.nl"><span style="color: #1255cc;">revealed</span></a> that a &#8220;tsunami of confusion” has been engendered among military commanders, chaplains and personnel attempting to determined the difference between religious practice and proselytization.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">It was a hearing that didn’t sit well with former marine pilot Tom Carpenter. In a <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-carpenter/religious-accommodation-a_b_6207764.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">piece</span></a> for the Huffington Post, he characterized it as a “set up,” where the outcome is “preordained.” He further insisted the expansion of religious rights is &#8220;an attempt by the ultra conservative Christians in Congress to allow chaplains to witness for Christ to all service members AT ALL TIMES, [emphasis original] without fear of accountability,” and that &#8220;accommodation being considered by this committee is clearly a subterfuge to allow criticizing of LGB service members and proselytizing of all non-Christians.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Ron Crews, a retired <a href="http://www.military.com/Community/Home/0,14700,ARMY,00.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Army</span></a> chaplain and executive director of the Chaplain Alliance for Religious Liberty, testified at the hearing, citing what he believes was evidence of a double-standard. He noted that an article written by an Ohio Air National Guard member mentioning the importance of his faith and Jesus Christ was removed from an online newsletter, even as no action was taken against an airman writing a piece on atheism for a Moody Air Force Base newsletter.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Crews was quick to defend Lawhorn. “The chaplain did nothing wrong,” he explained. “At no time did he say his was the only or even the preferred way of dealing with depression. And at no time did he deny the validity of any other method. His story involves his faith journey. He was simply being a great Army chaplain &#8211; in ministering to his troops and providing first hand how he has dealt with depression in the past. That’s what chaplains do. They bare their souls for their soldiers in order to help them with crises they may be going through.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Adding weight to that assessment is the fact that Lawhorn is a chaplain who wears the Ranger Tab, meaning his personal stories were more than likely an effort to help his fellow Rangers identify similar tribulations in their own lives.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">In an interview with the Daily Signal, Lawhorn <a href="http://dailysignal.com/2014/12/18/punished-referencing-bible-military-chaplain-tells-side-story/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">expressed</span></a> that idea, further insisting he was only doing his job. &#8220;What I had tried to communicate with my audience is that depression can be conquered, depression can be overcome, and there are a myriad of ways of dealing with depression,” he explained. “In this particular case, I had struggled myself personally with the issue at hand I was teaching.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">He pushed back against the disciplinary action taken against him. “When I spoke about faith in particular, and in particular my Christian faith, it was clear that I was speaking from first-person account,” he maintained. “In my particular situation, it was my faith that helped me to persevere and remain resilient in the face of depression. And I was very clear to my audience that that was one way to handle depression and thoughts of suicide, but it certainly was not the only way.” Lawhorn further maintained that “any handout or any resource I provided soldiers who might need help was completely optional. It was up to them whether to take it or leave it.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Col. Fivecoat was unmoved. On Dec. 12 he sent Lawhorn followup missive, “Letter of Concern Filing Determination,” in which he maintained he had “carefully considered” Lawhorn’s rebuttal, but still decided to file the Letter of Concern in the chaplain’s local file. Col. Fivecoat determined that Lawhorn’s assertions “did not disprove nor dissuade me that your actions made it impossible for those in attendance to receive the necessary resource information without also receiving biblical information.” He further insisted the Letter of Concern was a “professional development matter&#8221; and “an administrative action,” as opposed to a “punishment.” Nonetheless the letter will remain in Lawhorn’s file “for one year or until you are reassigned outside the Ranger and Training Brigade, whichever is sooner.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Part of Lawhorn’s rebuttal included 33 letters of support from soldiers who attended the session, and those who know him personally. &#8220;They all almost universally say that he said, &#8216;I&#8217;m not telling you that using faith or religion or spirituality is the only way to deal with it. I&#8217;m not telling you it&#8217;s the correct way to deal with it. I&#8217;m just saying this was what worked for me,&#8217;&#8221; Berry explained. Berry also noted the complaining soldier didn’t give Lawhorn an opportunity to address his concerns. &#8220;Had Chaplain Lawhorn known of this, he would have happily sat down with this soldier and answered any questions or concerns he or she had,” Berry wrote to Col. Fivecoat. &#8220;Unfortunately, Chaplain Lawhorn was not given this opportunity&#8211;a professional courtesy&#8211;because the soldier in question alerted a civilian advocacy group, the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers, who apparently then alerted a media outlet, the Huffington Post.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA), whose district includes the area where the seminar took place, also sent a letter to the Colonel, taking him to task. “I find it counterintuitive to have someone lead a suicide prevention course but prohibit them from providing their personal testimony,” Collins wrote.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">His consternation was <a href="http://cnsnews.com/news/article/lauretta-brown/gen-boykin-army-violated-its-own-regulations-punishing-chaplain-using"><span style="color: #1255cc;">echoed</span></a> by retired Army Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin, chairman of the Restore Military Religious Freedom Coalition (RMRFC). He insisted Lawhorn’s First Amendment rights were violated and the Col. Fivecoat’s letter was in violation of Army regulation. “You cannot either force a chaplain to do something that violates their conscience or prohibit them from following their faith,” Boykin explained referencing Section 533 of the 2013 NDAA.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The RMRFC has pushed the matter up the chain of command, sending a letter to Secretary of the Army John McHugh. They want the Letter of Concern withdrawn, and Col. Fivecoat reprimanded. “I want somebody in the chain of command to sit him down and explain to him what the Constitution provides for in terms of freedom of religion as well as freedom of speech,” Boykin told CNS News.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Boykin is also vice president of the Family Research Council (FRC) that has created a <a href="https://www.frc.org/get.cfm?c=CHECKOUT&amp;dmy=7B14423A-FFB6-7971-6D293700BDA55783&amp;CFID=31113323&amp;CFTOKEN=7ad9faef490eb7d5-AE4A1494-DF8C-E938-F52FCE2FAD1CF48A">petition</a> requesting the same result. As of Dec. 18, it had 20,000 signatures. “We just simply cannot ignore this nor let it stand,” Boykin declared. “Even if there’s no long-term impact on the chaplain professionally, it can’t stand because commanders cannot abuse their power by abusing their subordinates over their conscience and their faith.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The ultimate outcome remains to be seen, but the larger picture remains rather one-sided. The American left’s determination to socially engineer the military is as steeped in orthodoxy as any religion, yet the tenets of so-called Secular Humanism remain completely above challenge or reproach, irrespective of their effects on cohesion, morale and/or military preparedness. Moreover the notion that a <i>chaplain </i>should be disciplined for employing religion as <i>part</i> of the mix in a suicide prevention seminar is preposterous. It is clear that while the American left purports itself to be tolerant and non-judgmental, nothing could be further from the truth.</p>
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		<title>Ronald Kessler on the Secrets of the Secret Service</title>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 24 Dec 2014 05:50:23 +0000</pubDate>
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		<description><![CDATA[Investigative reporter discusses his fascinating new book "The First Family Detail."]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em>Editor&#8217;s note: Below are the video and transcript to Ronald Kessler&#8217;s address at the Freedom Center&#8217;s Dec. 10, 2014, gathering of the Wednesday Morning Club. </em></p>
<p><strong><em>To order Ronald Kessler&#8217;s &#8220;The First Family Detail,&#8221; click <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-First-Family-Detail-Presidents/dp/0804139210">here</a>. </em></strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/114316988" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Ronald Kessler:</strong> Thank you so much for having me.  And it&#8217;s a real honor to be with such sophisticated people who understand everything, know everything.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And as you can tell from the titles of my books, I like to probe secret organizations, secret subjects.  And this sometimes gets me into trouble.</p>
<p>One of my books, called &#8220;Moscow Station,&#8221; revealed that a KGB archivist had defected from Russia to the FBI.  And I knew that he was safe, and revealing this would not jeopardize him.  But nevertheless, the FBI started a leak investigation.  And I heard about it from the inside.  I heard the agents were going to come out and try to interview me.</p>
<p>And I went through in my mind how I would greet them &#8212; I would offer them coffee, I would schmooze them.  And of course, I would try to develop them as sources.</p>
<p>And a few days later, I was in my house in Potomac, Maryland, which is a quiet suburb; very few people ring the bell.  And I had this idea &#8212; since I&#8217;ve written so many books about the FBI, and covered it for so long, and interviewed so many agents, that I have an idea of what FBI agents look like, which is pretty silly.</p>
<p>But nevertheless, the bell rang, I opened the door.  And there were these two very intense-looking young men with narrow ties, white shirts.  And I said &#8212; well, where have you guys been?  I&#8217;ve been expecting you, come on in.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And they looked at me a little &#8212; almost a little afraid, a little strangely.  And they held out these pamphlets, the &#8220;The Watchtower.&#8221;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>I like a challenge.  The fact that these are secret organizations, and also very important organizations that can engage in abuses that are so important to our national security &#8212; all that attracts me.  And in the case of the Secret Service, it is really the most secret of all the organizations, even more so than the CIA or the FBI, both of which I&#8217;ve written about.</p>
<p>And I began with a tip about mismanagement by the Secret Service.  And then, as I got into it, I found that was really the tip of the iceberg.  But at the same time, I got the cooperation of the Secret Service.  I think they felt that I would tell an honest story, which is what I try to do.</p>
<p>For example, with the FBI, when they do good, as they have since 9/11 &#8212; we have not had a successful foreign terrorist attack since 9/11, and it&#8217;s largely because of the FBI that I say that.  And that is unusual in journalism today, even though I&#8217;m actually much younger than Michael thinks.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>But on the other hand, when they engage in abuses, I reveal that.  In the case of the FBI, I revealed that William Sessions, the FBI director, had been engaging in abuses of all kinds, and I exposed that.  And that led to his dismissal by President Clinton.</p>
<p>In the case of the Secret Service books, I&#8217;ve now written two.  They both reveal the deficiencies in the agency and also what agents see behind the scenes.  I know this is too tawdry for all of you to hear, but there&#8217;s quite a bit that they see.</p>
<p>For example, actually before the first chapter, I began with a prologue which reveals that Bill Clinton has a mistress who has been unofficially codenamed by agents &#8220;Energizer.&#8221;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And Energizer was chosen because the first letter of every family&#8217;s codename is always the same.  So in the case of the Clintons, Bill is &#8220;Eagle,&#8221; and Hillary is &#8220;Evergreen.&#8221;  And so the mistress, busty blonde mistress, became &#8220;Energizer.&#8221;</p>
<p>And as soon as Hillary leaves the home in Chappaqua, Energizer shows up.  Unlike Hillary, who&#8217;s so nasty to agents that being assigned to her detail is considered a form of punishment &#8211;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>&#8211; the mistress is very nice to agents.  She&#8217;ll even bring them cookies sometimes.</p>
<p>One day, during the summer, she brought cookies, she drove up to the gate.  The agents are instructed not to ever ask for her ID or log her in, whereas even Clinton relatives have to be logged in.  And she held out this platter of cookies through the window of her vehicle to the agent.  And he noticed that she was wearing a low-cut tank top.  And he described in great detail her breasts, that they&#8217;re enhanced.  There was no question in his mind.  And so we have every single detail in this book, &#8220;The First Family Detail.&#8221;</p>
<p>In the case of Hillary, she&#8217;ll just make life miserable for agents.  She&#8217;ll blow up at them.  They can never do anything right.  She&#8217;ll even complain when the limousine goes over a bump in the road.  Being assigned is considered the worst assignment in the Secret Service to be assigned to Hillary&#8217;s detail.</p>
<p>And so yes, these stories are titillating; yes, they&#8217;re revealing.  But they also tell you something about our leaders and who we should be electing for President.  Should we elect someone who treats other people in such a shabby way, who at the same time claims to be compassionate, to care about the little people?  She&#8217;s going to be a champion of the middle class?  And yet, she cannot treat agents who are there to protect her, and even take a bullet to protect her, with decency.</p>
<p>And people just, you know, sort of ignore this.  They look at how well someone speaks, they look at what someone promises.  They&#8217;ll ignore the track record &#8212; for example, the fact that President Obama spent 20 years listening to the anti-white, anti-America, anti-Israel rantings of Reverend Wright.  People just &#8212; you know, they&#8217;re in denial.</p>
<p>My most liberal friends, my most liberal family members, say they would&#8217;ve walked out if they&#8217;d heard that, in any situation.  And yet, Obama exposed his kids to that, as well as, of course, Michelle, who was even more entranced by Reverend Wright.</p>
<p>Joe Biden &#8212; he goes back to his home in Wilmington several times a week on Air Force Two.  And that has cost our taxpayers $1 million since he took office.  And this is in the book.  I got it from the Air Force under the Freedom of Information Act.  And yet, nobody in the mainstream media has picked this up.</p>
<p>You know, it&#8217;s one thing to go back home a few times a year.  But he has a job in Washington, he has a home, paid for by taxpayers, in Washington, with five navy stewards who make pastries every night and cater to all of his wishes.  Both homes have pools.  He has no business going back and forth, sometimes even twice a day, on Air Force Two.  Sometimes, he&#8217;ll even go back to Wilmington, and then come back just for the day to play golf with Obama at Andrews Air Force Base, and then go back to Wilmington.</p>
<p>The fact that he has a pool is intriguing.  Because he has a habit of skinny dipping.  And this offends female Secret Service agents.  They signed up to take a bullet for the President, but not to see Joe Biden run around naked.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And on top of all that &#8212; and this is probably the worst of all &#8212; when he goes up to Wilmington, Biden instructs his agents to keep the military aide with the nuclear football for unleashing a nuclear counterstrike at least a mile behind in the motorcade.  Biden, like most politicians, is fixated on his image.  He wants to maintain the image of the regular Joe, working-class guy.  So he doesn&#8217;t want to have a long motorcade when he goes to Wilmington.</p>
<p>But the result is that if Obama were taken out, we would be defenseless against a nuclear attack.  Because, of course, there wouldn&#8217;t be time for the nuclear football to catch up with Biden.  Height of irresponsibility.  The worst judgment you can imagine.  And again, the mainstream media have ignored this revelation in the book.</p>
<p>The book is nonpartisan.  It says that Obama and his wife do treat agents with respect and consideration.  On the other hand, agents have been dismayed to overhear Michelle urge her husband to be more aggressive in attacking Republicans and in siding with blacks in racial controversies, which of course we see him do over and over again.</p>
<p>And I think that certainly has contributed to the violence and the rioting.  Because he&#8217;s essentially sanctioning the idea that we&#8217;re all racists.  And of course, that goes back to Reverend Wright.  That was exactly his mindset.  And we&#8217;re seeing it now with President Obama.</p>
<p>Going back to President Johnson &#8212; he was probably the most outrageous of all.  When he was Vice President, he was late for an appointment with JFK.  The agent was driving him along Pennsylvania Avenue &#8212; it was rush hour.  And he told his agent to drive up on the sidewalk to get there faster.  Well, the sidewalk was full of people coming out of office buildings.  The agent refused, of course, as he should&#8217;ve.  And Johnson took a newspaper and hit this agent on the head and said &#8212; you&#8217;re fired.  This is all on the record; at least half of the material in the book is on the record.</p>
<p>Johnson was having sex with five of his eight secretaries.  One time his wife, Ladybird, caught him having sex in the Oval Office with one of his secretaries.  And Johnson blew up at the Secret Service and said, you should&#8217;ve warned me, and insisted that they install a buzzer system to warn him in the future, if he was having sex and Ladybird was in the area.</p>
<p>He would also sit on the toilet and defecate as he&#8217;s being briefed by aids.  He would give press conferences in Texas and begin urinating in front of female reporters, as well as male reporters.  Of course, none of this was ever reported at the time.</p>
<p>The first time that the press began to report the sexual activities and other unpleasant activities of presidents and candidates was with Gary Hart, with the Donna Rice incident.  But actually, that was just the tip of the iceberg.  Agents who were protecting Donna Rice found that Hart&#8217;s buddy, Warren Beatty, would arrange to have these gorgeous starlets show up at Warren Beatty&#8217;s home in LA.  And Hart would go there, and they&#8217;d all jump in a hot tub.  Not with Warren Beatty, just the girls.  And Gary Hart &#8212; they&#8217;d jump in the hot tub, the girls would undress.  They&#8217;d stay overnight.  And the agents would go &#8212; there&#8217;s a 10, there&#8217;s a 9, there&#8217;s a 10, there&#8217;s a 9.  They were just totally overwrought by the gorgeous starlets.</p>
<p>Jimmy Carter, again, was this guy who pretended to be a jolly peanut farmer, a man of the people, a populist.  But behind the scenes, he was so nasty to agents that he would tell them he didn&#8217;t want them to say hello to him in the morning on the way to the Oval Office.  It was just too much bother to say hello back to another human being.  What kind of a person is that?</p>
<p>And he would pretend to carry his own luggage in front of the cameras, to try to show that he&#8217;s a man of the people.  But then, as soon as the cameras were gone, he would give the luggage to aides to carry, or the luggage was empty in the first place.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Carter would sometimes show up in the Oval Office at 5:00 in the morning and tell the Press Office to tell the press that he was in there working hard for the American people at 5:00 a.m.  But then he&#8217;d nod off to sleep on the couch in the Oval Office.</p>
<p>So, you know, again and again, we fall for these charades.  And the press just keeps focusing on the horserace.  They don&#8217;t look at character.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s something that we look at in our daily lives all the time.  We don&#8217;t choose a friend who would be nasty to other people, we don&#8217;t choose a new employee who would treat other people indecently.  And yet, here we have people who, you know, just cannot be trusted.  And it comes out eventually in their policies and in the way they interact with the country.  The other side is that the &#8212; in this book &#8212; the Secret Service has become so lax, and engages in so much corner-cutting, that everywhere you look, they&#8217;re really risking an assassination.</p>
<p>One thing in the book that hasn&#8217;t been picked up by the press is that on a regular basis, agents under pressure from either the Bush or the Obama White House or from campaign staffs will let people into events without magnetometer or metal detection screening.  It&#8217;s just like letting passengers into an airplane without doing that.  And if everybody did that, they would be fired and possibly prosecuted.</p>
<p>But the Secret Service management &#8212; it&#8217;s the management that&#8217;s at fault, not the agents, who really are brave and dedicated; they&#8217;ll take a bullet for the President &#8212; but the management has this arrogant culture that says &#8212; we&#8217;re the great Secret Service, we can take care of any problem.  We don&#8217;t have to even lock the front door of the White House.  And therefore, we can let people into events without magnetometer screening.</p>
<p>And when I confronted a high-ranking Secret Service official about this, he hemmed and hawed.  First he was saying &#8212; you know, now we have magnetometers, it&#8217;s much safer.  And I said &#8212; well, what about the times when you don&#8217;t use them, when you let people in under pressure?  Because there&#8217;s a line outside, and the staff says &#8212; let them in, let them in; and sure enough they let them in.</p>
<p>And then he started making excuses.  They&#8217;re wonderful at making excuses.  And he said &#8212; well, you know, if someone comes in without magnetometer screening, we keep those people further back.  Well, of course, in one second, you could have five terrorists come in with grenades and run from the back of an event and take out the President.  These are things that are just common sense.</p>
<p>And when you see what the Secret Service said after the penetration of the White House by Gonzales, which was &#8212; first of all, they lied about where he was apprehended &#8212; they said that he was stopped at the door; he actually penetrated the whole White House. They said he was not armed; that was a lie, he was armed with a knife.  And then they said &#8212; the Secret Service director, Julia Pierson, said that the agents exercised tremendous restraint in not killing him.  Well, is that what they&#8217;re there for, to exercise restraint?</p>
<p>I can tell you, FBI officials were horrified at that comment and laughing at it.  Because absolutely, he could&#8217;ve had explosives, he could&#8217;ve had WMD.  They wouldn&#8217;t know it until the White House was blown up.  And you have to use lethal force if everything else has failed.</p>
<p>And why did it fail?  Well, the guy who was supposed to release a canine unit, as they call them &#8212; and I did interview a canine unit when I was doing the book &#8212; they introduced me to one, and he went around and found explosives &#8212; that guy was on a personal cell phone call in his van.</p>
<p>But why would all this happen?  Why would you have agents hiring prostitutes?  Why would you have the uniform division letting the Salahis, the glamorous couple, into the White House; along with a third intruder, Carlos Allen, which is a story that I also broke &#8212; why would they be doing that?  Because you have this broken management culture.  And these agents say &#8212; well, management is breaking the rules.  They&#8217;re taking risks with assassinations; why should we do whatever we feel like doing?</p>
<p>This is just basic in any organization, that if you don&#8217;t maintain the right standards at the top, the whole place is going to crumble.  And that includes the infrastructure.  They don&#8217;t polygraph agents the way the FBI does, they don&#8217;t have the latest intrusion devices at the White House itself.</p>
<p>There&#8217;s this myth that somehow if you push the perimeter of the White House gate further back, somehow we&#8217;re not going to have access to the President.  Hey, nobody has access to the President, unless they have an appointment and have been cleared by the Secret Service.  And I don&#8217;t see that there&#8217;s anything to be lost by pushing that perimeter back.</p>
<p>You could have 30 ISIL terrorists come in with grenades from all directions.  And to keep the perimeter where it is now is simply asking for trouble.</p>
<p>The question often is asked of me &#8212; how do I get them to cooperate?  Usually, I water-board them, that works pretty well.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>But I think that, as I said before, I do tell an honest story.  They respect that.  I think it&#8217;s pretty unusual in journalism today, given all the slant that you see.  And also, I&#8217;m genuinely interested in what they do.  I love to hear about profiling.  Before it became a nasty word, I broke the first story about FBI profiling in 1985.  And I think they think I already have a lot of sources, I already know a lot.  And they figure they might as well cooperate.</p>
<p>In my previous book, the secrets of the FBI, Bob Mueller, the FBI director, personally approved giving me access to their most secret tool, which is how they break into homes and offices to plant bugging devices &#8212; all court-authorized, of course.  But it&#8217;s an incredible story.  And let&#8217;s say they want to break into an embassy or some other secure location, or a mafia home, they will essentially case the joint for about two weeks beforehand.  They&#8217;ll watch who goes in, who goes out.</p>
<p>And on the night of the break-in, they&#8217;ll have agents watch at the homes of those people to make sure they don&#8217;t go back to the premises.  And if they do, oh, there&#8217;ll be a little traffic accident, or there&#8217;ll be a little ticket written.  Because the agents might dress in police uniforms in order to delay anybody going back.</p>
<p>The agents will bring in their own dust, in case they disturb any dust on a coffee table or a desk.  They will take a photo of any dog on the premises, and show that photo to a veterinarian who&#8217;s on contract.  And he prescribes just the right amount of tranquilizer to shoot into the dog with a dart gun.  And at the end of the break-in, they wake up the dog, because they don&#8217;t want any sleepy dogs around to create suspicion.</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s say they want to put bugs in an office suite.  They&#8217;ll go in during the day and take control of one of the elevators; they go to elevator school.  And they&#8217;ll go up on the roof of the elevator in the middle of the night, get off, go in the suite, put the bugs in.  And they actually showed me a real bug, it&#8217;s about the size of a postage stamp.  And it will record for 20 hours, or transmit, as you wish.  And then, during the day, they&#8217;ll get back in the elevator, they&#8217;ll come back.  They&#8217;ll go out wearing business suits, and nobody&#8217;s the wiser.</p>
<p>And then, one other technique is &#8212; let&#8217;s say they want to put a bug in a home in the middle of the night.  They will take a photo of the front of the house.  They&#8217;ll blow that up into a huge tarp, drape that over the front of the house, so that any bystanders walking by will think that&#8217;s the front of the house.  But in fact, the agents are behind the tarp, defeating the alarms, defeating the lock systems; and they&#8217;ll put the bugs in.</p>
<p>And just one anecdote about this is they were to put bugs in a mafia hangout in Philadelphia.  It was an electronics store that was actually a front for the mafia.  And they couldn&#8217;t go &#8212; they didn&#8217;t want to go in the back door to put in bugs, because often that could be booby-trapped.  So they would have to go in the front.  But the front overlooked an all-night bar.</p>
<p>So how do they go in without being seen by the patrons?  They borrowed a city bus.  The agents got on the bus.  They rode in front of the premises.  They got out, they put the hood of the bus up to make it look as if it had broken down.  They went in, they defeated the locks and the alarm systems.  The bus then went around the block to pick them up.</p>
<p>And it went by a bus stop.  And there were two patrons in the bar waiting for the bus.  And the bus went whizzing by them, and they were furious.  And they went running for the bus.  And they got in as the agents were getting in, in front of the premises.  And the agents were all from different offices, including from this secret team called Tac-Ops that puts in bugs.  And they didn&#8217;t realize that these guys don&#8217;t belong with them.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>So then, a few of the agents, started taking off their weapons and their pit walkie-talkies, and these guys got scared, you know.  And they started ringing to get off &#8212; ding-ding-ding, let me off, let me off.  And the agent who was driving the bus said &#8212; hey, guys, stop bothering me, I&#8217;m having enough trouble driving this bus.</p>
<p>But then, another agent got up, and he had a shotgun over his shoulder.  And they started ringing again &#8212; ring, ding-ding-ding, let me off, let me off.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And finally, the agent who was driving figured out what was happening.  Let them out, they went running down the street, and nobody ever heard from them again.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>One other book that I did is mentioned in the New York Times today, and other publications, because the Senate Intelligence Committee&#8217;s report cites my interaction with the CIA when I did this book, &#8220;The CIA At War,&#8221; along with a New York Times reporter.  So it couldn&#8217;t be too bad if a New York Times reporter was involved.  And has the spin that somehow the CIA was leaking material about what they had done with the enhanced interrogation and how effective it was to me and to this New York Times reporter.</p>
<p>Well, the reality is I went to the CIA to get cooperation in the book.  They arranged a number of interviews on a lot of subjects.  Some of the interviews had to do with this.  It wasn&#8217;t as if I was being bamboozled by the CIA.  I corroborated what I used with the FBI.  But the implication is if the White House agrees to an interview, or the CIA or another institution agrees to an interview, somehow that means you&#8217;re already being propagandized and you shouldn&#8217;t listen to anything.</p>
<p>And that&#8217;s in fact what this Democratic staff did.  They refused to interview any of the CIA officials or officers involved in this whatsoever.  And in addition, they excluded the Republicans.</p>
<p>So the whole thing is a joke.  And what they have done is they&#8217;ve cherry-picked a few things, an email here, an email there.  That&#8217;s not the way you present how an investigation proceeded, you know.  If you think of gathering facts about any subject, it&#8217;s a very complex process.  You know, you may be impressed by one fact, you may hear about a fact and ignore it.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s the way the whole Watergate investigation proceeded.  I sat next to Carl Bernstein during Watergate at the Washington Post.  Woodward would come over every night, and they would write their stories together.  I would overhear what they were saying &#8211; they were knocking on doors until midnight.  And you see some critics on the right who are claiming that they embellished what they did, that they made up Deep Throat, that they didn&#8217;t really reveal the important stories.</p>
<p>That is B.S.  Because I was there, I saw what they did.  And they never claimed that Deep Throat gave them everything, but rather every now and then, he would give them a clue.  He would say &#8212; you&#8217;re on the right track.  And given the fact that the reporters and the Post were really, really scared of what might happen &#8211; they were being threatened by Mitchell &#8211; this reassurance and these clues every now and then helped their investigation.</p>
<p>And I actually was the first to present real information indicating who Deep Throat was before he came out.  I was doing another FBI book called &#8220;The Bureau.&#8221;  I went to interview Mark Felt, who turned out to be Deep Throat, in California.  And his daughter greeted me and said &#8212; you know, there&#8217;s this guy, Bob Woodward, who was out here about a year ago.  And he went to lunch with my father.  And you know what?  He came in a white limousine, but he had the limousine parked 10 blocks away, and then he walked to our house.  Well, that was a tipoff right away this is Deep Throat.  There&#8217;s no way Woodward would&#8217;ve done that otherwise.</p>
<p>And this daughter was sort of a flowerchild; she didn&#8217;t even recognize who Woodward was.  She knew he was a reporter, but didn&#8217;t know anything about Watergate and whatnot.</p>
<p>So, I&#8217;ve been into a lot of interesting subjects.  One other subject is in one of my books, just about the FBI&#8217;s counterintelligence program, the only book about how they catch spies.  I interviewed Karl Koecher and his wife, Hana, in Prague after they had been caught by the FBI and returned to Czechoslovakia.</p>
<p>Karl was a mole in the CIA, you don&#8217;t hear much about it.  But he was a very effective mole.  And one of his methods, besides being a very high-level translator, was that he and his gorgeous blonde wife, Hana, would go to orgies and sex parties with White House people, Defense Department people.  And of course, those people would feel compromised, because they were at these parties that they shouldn&#8217;t be attending.  Because they could be blackmailed.  And so they would get bits of information from them, as well as enjoying the parties.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Hana actually &#8212; Hana enjoyed the parties more than Karl.</p>
<p>The first part was where they refused to cooperate because of &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member:</strong> (Inaudible) was just gossip.</p>
<p><strong>Ronald Kessler:</strong> Oh, yeah.  Well, they are not supposed to talk about what they see behind the scenes.  And that&#8217;s just an understanding.  And after I revealed the prostitution scandal, they required agents to sign documents saying that they would not disclose anything.</p>
<p>And so, yeah, I would say the majority did not want to talk about that.  But others did.  And you know, it&#8217;s a legitimate point to say that maybe protectees would be a little more cautious about having agents near them if they think they&#8217;re going to reveal what they&#8217;re doing in their private lives.  But the other side is &#8212; A, we should know about the character of our leaders and prospective leaders; and B, if they&#8217;re engaging in something, some kind of subterfuge which they could be blackmailed for, they shouldn&#8217;t be running for office in the first place.</p>
<p>And in fact, when you&#8217;re talking about having sex, the agents are not there anyway.  For example, with Monica Lewinsky, she was in the Oval Office with Bill Clinton; the agents never saw what was actually happening.  So that&#8217;s my, you could call it, excuse for revealing these secrets.</p>
<p>And of course, the other side of exposing the shortcomings, the corner-cutting, is that they could change these practices overnight.  It&#8217;s not like when the AP revealed that the CIA had a source in Yemen who was telling them about prospective plots to blow up airplanes.  In that case, there was not news.  The CIA was doing its job.  There was no abuse.  There was no failure.  Just the opposite &#8212; it was a success.  And by compromising that source, we lost potential lives.  Because that source could no longer report on what was happening.  I thought that was outrageous.</p>
<p>But in the case of the Secret Service, they could change these practices overnight, they could stop the corner-cutting.  They could ask for more money, which I think is necessary.  Their budget is only $1.6 billion a year, which is the price of one stealth bomber.  And yet, they not only protect the President and others, the Vice President; but they also do counterfeit investigations and other financial investigations.</p>
<p>So there was an expose in the classic sense, where you hope for reform.  And I think it is contributing to the understanding of what&#8217;s wrong with the Secret Service.  It&#8217;s not just some error here and there; it&#8217;s a culture that has to be changed.  And I think the only way to do that is to bring in a director who was from the outside, such as a former high-ranking FBI official, who will shake things up, who will not be beholden to interests within the agency, who will understand that &#8212; yes, you have to polygraph agents, which is what the FBI does.  And that&#8217;s my purpose in writing these books.</p>
<p>Yes?</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member:</strong> Oh, hello?  Over here.</p>
<p><strong>Ronald Kessler:</strong> Oh, sorry.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member:</strong> That&#8217;s okay.</p>
<p>You talked about the Energizer for Bill. But what about Hillary?  What&#8217;s she up to?</p>
<p><strong>Ronald Kessler:</strong> Yeah.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p><strong>Ronald Kessler:</strong> Well, maybe she&#8217;s so nasty because she&#8217;s not up to anything, you know.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>She is not up to anything.  You know, there are rumors about her being a lesbian, and agents say that&#8217;s not true.  But I have a whole chapter in the book about Hillary&#8217;s nastiness.  It&#8217;s just unbelievable, including her chief of staff, who&#8217;s been in the news because her husband was &#8212; is Anthony Weiner.  Just as nasty, you know.  Do you know who I am, she would say to an agent when she doesn&#8217;t have proper ID.  Just high-handed arrogance.  Nasty, nasty people.  It&#8217;s unbelievable.</p>
<p>And you know, you wonder &#8212; there are so many millions of people in this country who have qualifications that are similar, who are lawyers, who are not people who are nasty to people, and who understand that companies actually do create jobs.  And she said companies don&#8217;t create jobs.  You understand that you should not respect your enemies.  She said we should respect our enemies.  What kind of a &#8212; who would vote for anybody like that, even for dogcatcher?</p>
<p>You know, that&#8217;s how broken our politics is.</p>
<p>Yes?</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member:</strong> Well, I have a question, just quickly &#8212; it sort of goes to Georgette&#8217;s question &#8212; and then my real question.  But does Hillary know about the Energizer?</p>
<p><strong>Ronald Kessler:</strong> Well, she does now.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>But, you know, agents feel that they have a political partnership, and it&#8217;s not a real marriage.  And that&#8217;s why they&#8217;re staying together.  That&#8217;s why she stays with Bill.  You know, she&#8217;s power-hungry.  That&#8217;s what she wants.  And she&#8217;ll overlook all of this in order to achieve power.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member:</strong> Okay.  My initial question is &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Ronald Kessler:</strong> Your real question.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member:</strong> &#8212; it became apparent after 9/11 that there wasn&#8217;t a lot of cooperation between the FBI and the CIA.</p>
<p><strong>Ronald Kessler:</strong> Right.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member:</strong> There was a lot of rivalry and competition.  So I&#8217;m wondering, has that changed?  What is the state at the relations between these two agencies?</p>
<p><strong>Ronald Kessler:</strong> That has totally changed.  And now, if you don&#8217;t cooperate, you&#8217;re in trouble.  Whereas before, it was the other way around.  Part of the problem was there was the so-called wall that said that you can&#8217;t &#8212; CIA can&#8217;t talk to the FBI and vice-versa, which is just something that a bureaucrat under Janet Reno came up with.  It was not based on any legal precedence whatsoever.  Previous cases had gone down to appeals without any problem.  But he just decided to write this, and then they all accepted it.  And so they stopped talking to each other, it was unbelievable.</p>
<p>But now, Bush established the Counterterrorism Center in McLean, Virginia, where CIA and FBI sit side-by-side, 24 hours a day, analyzing information.  So they&#8217;re talking to each other all day long now.  And there is very good cooperation.  And that&#8217;s one reason we have not had another attack.</p>
<p>Every few months, you see in the papers arrests by the FBI of terrorists.  And that&#8217;s the bottom line.  That&#8217;s why &#8212; that&#8217;s the result of this cooperation and the result of the FBI&#8217;s efforts and CIA&#8217;s efforts.  And yet, all we hear in the press is demonizing these people, who are working to protect us, who are not paid a whole lot compared with what they could get in the private sector.  And it&#8217;s just outrageous, in my opinion.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member:</strong> I would like your comments, please, on the First Ladies, the last several First Ladies, of what the agents think about them; as well as their spouses.</p>
<p><strong>Ronald Kessler:</strong> Right.  Well, the first First Lady that comes to mind is Pat Nixon.  She had a big alcohol problem.  It got worse when they left the White House.  One time, at San Clemente, an agent heard rustling in the bushes at night.  He cocked his shotgun.  And it turned out it was Pat Nixon, totally drunk, crawling on the ground, trying to find her house.</p>
<p>And she and Nixon never talked.  They would play golf together, but they wouldn&#8217;t say a word throughout the whole golf game.</p>
<p>Nixon was a very strange guy, as you might&#8217;ve surmised.  One day, he was watching TV at San Clemente.  An agent was watching through a window at the home.  And Nixon was feeding his dog dog biscuits.  And then he took one of the biscuits and put it in his mouth and ate it.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member:</strong> Oh, my God.</p>
<p><strong>Ronald Kessler:</strong> Another time &#8212; you know, he loved to have fireplaces going all through the summer.  And at one time, he forgot to open the damper.  And so the whole house filled with black smoke.  And there was something about &#8212; let&#8217;s see, how&#8217;s this go?  One of the agents said &#8212; where is the son of a bitch, referring to Nixon?  Didn&#8217;t know where Nixon had gone.  And Nixon overheard this, you know.  And Nixon said &#8212; son of a bitch is over here.</p>
<p>So, Nixon did have a sense of humor.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Betty Ford also had, as you know, both a drug and a drinking problem.  Sometimes she would be so inebriated when she was in the White House, they&#8217;d have to actually hold her as she went out of Air Force One.  Ford seemed to be oblivious to all this.</p>
<p>But to her credit, when she left the White House, she not only went to a rehab center, but she established the Betty Ford Clinic.  And agents admire that.  She&#8217;s spent a tremendous amount of time establishing that to help other people.  So unlike Pat, who never helped anybody with this problem, Betty Ford did.</p>
<p>Ford, of course, had this reputation of being clumsy.  The press beat up on him all the time.  And that was another myth.  He was a former high school football player.  He was a remarkable skier.  The Secret Service would assign their best skiers to go skiing with him in Colorado.  One of the agents would ski backwards to sort of taunt him.</p>
<p>But on the other hand, Ford &#8212; especially after he left the White House &#8212; turned out to be incredibly cheap.  He would tip caddies in California a dollar or two dollars.  He would have bellhops with carts full of luggage for both of them at the Plaza New York, and he would tip a dollar.  He would try to get gifts.  He would try to, you know, take golf sets from people in Japan who invited him for talks.  So that was the other side of Gerald Ford.</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s see, who else?  Well, Ronald Reagan and Nancy.  Ronald Reagan was just as genuine as he appeared to be on TV, just as gracious.  He would &#8212; whenever he went into Air Force One, he would greet the pilots and the copilots in the cockpit.  Jimmy Carter did that only once during his whole four-year term.</p>
<p>One day, Reagan was coming down &#8212; about to go into the elevator in the residence in the White House.  And an aide came up and told him about the Donna Rice affair with Gary Hart, and it was going to be in the paper the next day.  And Reagan said &#8212; well, boys will be boys.  And then he went up in the elevator with this agent.  And then he said to the agent &#8212; but boys will not be President.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Nancy could be cold and difficult.  Of course, she was very loyal to her husband.  She seemed to not like it when he would schmooze with agents.  And she would give him instructions &#8212; you know, you wear your gloves, you wear your hat.  And sometimes he would agree, and sometimes they would get in a fight over it.</p>
<p>And one time actually, at the ranch, they were about to go horseback riding, which Reagan loved to do, and she didn&#8217;t like it so much.  She liked to be with her friends in Beverly Hills.  And he would ring a bell for her to come out to go horseback riding.  She wasn&#8217;t coming out.  So he went inside.  And next thing agents knew was that the telephone reception at the house, at the ranch, had stopped.  And it turned out that Reagan had seen her talking to one of her friends in Beverly Hills on the phone, and just got enraged, and took the phone and threw it on the floor.  And so, that was the end of the telephone connection.</p>
<p>So, Reagan was human, like all of us.  I interviewed agents who were with him after he left office.  He would make it a point of going out to schmooze with them.  And then, of course, when he got Alzheimer&#8217;s, they started to notice the difference.  But that was only after he left office, not when he was in the White House.  He remembered the names of every agent and was, you know, the genuine article.  And I think that is reflected in the success of his presidency.  Because people do sense &#8212; you know, I think, even with Hillary, even without knowing what goes on behind the scenes &#8212; people do sense that she&#8217;s not a very nice person.</p>
<p>Any other First Ladies that you wanted to ask about?</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member:</strong> The Bushes.</p>
<p><strong>Ronald Kessler:</strong> Ah.  Well, Laura was just beloved by agents.  She would make it a point of going back to the ranch the day after Christmas Day, so that the agents could be with their families, and would ask about their families.  George Bush, very similar.</p>
<p>Of course, he loved to go running, and the agents would have to assign their fastest runners.  When his father, George H.W. Bush, was Vice President, he was in the Vice President&#8217;s residence at the Naval Observatory.  And during the day, the naval stewards, as I said, would make pastries and cookies.  And then they would hide them, because the agents would come out in the middle of the night and steal some of them.</p>
<p>So one morning, at 3:00 a.m., one of the agents was looking for the cookies in the kitchen.  And he heard this voice behind him &#8212; where are the cookies?  And he turned around, it was George Bush.  And so, together they went looking for the cookies.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>They had them together with milk.</p>
<p>And Barbara Bush &#8212; same.  Very decent.  She would even offer to do the laundry of agents when they were up at Kennebunkport.  She would make sure that agents wore hats.  If they didn&#8217;t have a hat, she would insist that her husband go and get his hat and give the hat to the agent.  Just very, very decent, admirable people.  And we need more of those in the White House.</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Speaker:</strong> Think we have time for one last question.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member:</strong> Hi.  I just would like to have your comments on what appears to me to be an increasingly governmentalized media, especially television, and how it seems to resemble Pravda more than the media I was used to.</p>
<p><strong>Ronald Kessler:</strong> Yeah.  You know, I&#8217;m just as perplexed as you are.  I can&#8217;t understand it.  It&#8217;s just a trend.  You could say it&#8217;s because of more pressure because of the Internet.  But that doesn&#8217;t excuse anything.</p>
<p>And I think the Washington Post, as Michael mentioned, has been doing a very fair job lately.  It&#8217;s really turned around.  And I think ultimately, that&#8217;s going to help its circulation and its pickup on the web.  Because people do want to be able to trust the information that they get.  New York Times, not so much.  Quite the opposite.</p>
<p>But you know, it perplexes me.  Why would Rolling Stone, for example, run the story without talking to the so-called assailants of this woman who claimed she was raped?  How could anybody in his right mind not do that?  You know, it&#8217;s beyond me.  Maybe they&#8217;re on marijuana, I don&#8217;t know.</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Speaker:</strong> Thank you.</p>
<p><strong>Ronald Kessler:</strong> Thank you.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
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