Backgrounder: Revolution Muslim

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Permalink Reply by michaelriker on April 21, 2009 at 9:58pm

This was from the ADL.org . The Anti-Defamation League, founded in 1913, is the world's leading organization fighting anti-Semitism through programs and services that counteract hatred, prejudice and bigotry.

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Permalink Reply by HOMELAND TV NETWORK on May 4, 2009 at 1:21pm

First, allow me to thank you, on behalf of Homeland TV, for your vigilance in following matters such as this. Your leadership at ICTOA is a vital resource for those of us who are members.

This public relations campaigns of organizations such as Revolution Muslim are in full swing. The recruitment efforts are moving ahead at an even greater pace. As Americans who value our relationship with Israel, and our Jewish Americans here, we must remain on constant guard against the threats which exist again them. The above push by this Muslim campaign is a dangerous effort that must be monitored and, at every turn, face the response of those who know that the Radical Islamic p.r. effort is a design against our country and our jewish brothers and sisters.

--Will Griffith
Homeland TV Network

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Permalink Reply by James Williams on May 4, 2009 at 2:33pm

Amen Brothers ! I want to thank you for being beacons of light in world of darkness & hate . May God Bless your continued efforts to bring the world & the American people the truth instead of deception which we all have unfortunately become accustomed to in the mainstream media! Again God Bless!

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Permalink Reply by James Williams on September 2, 2009 at 1:11pm

The Twin Myths of Eurabia
From the desk of Fjordman on Sun, 2006-07-23 20:27

Bat Ye’or is the most informed contemporary scholar of the unique Islamic institution of dhimmitude, the repressive and humiliating apartheid system imposed upon those non-Muslims (i.e., dhimmis) subjugated by Jihad. Sir Jadunath Sarkar, the pre-eminent historian of Mughal India, wrote the following in 1920 regarding the impact of centuries of Jihad and dhimmitude on the indigenous Hindus of the Indian subcontinent:

“The conversion of the entire population to Islam and the extinction of every form of dissent is the ideal of the Muslim State. If any infidel is suffered to exist in the community, it is as a necessary evil, and for a transitional period only. Political and social disabilities must be imposed on him, and bribes offered to him from the public funds, to hasten the day of his spiritual enlightenment and the addition of his name to the roll of true believers.” “A non-Muslim therefore cannot be a citizen of the State; he is a member of a depressed class; his status is a modified form of slavery. He lives under a contract (zimma, or ‘dhimma’) with the State: for the life and property grudgingly spared to him by the commander of the faithful he must undergo political and social disabilities, and pay a commutation money. In short, his continued existence in the State after the conquest of his country by the Muslims is conditional upon his person and property made subservient to the cause of Islam.”

According to Bat Ye’or, Eurabia is essentially a political project for a demographic and cultural symbiosis between Europe and the Arab Muslim world, a new extended Mediterranean “continent” made possible by EU authorities through deliberately favoring Muslim immigration, promoting Multiculturalism and the dissemination of Arab and Islamic culture in Europe. In the essay Andalusian Myth, Eurabian Reality, co-authored with Andrew G. Bostom, editor of the comprehensive book The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims, Bat Ye’or dispels one of the founding myths of Eurabia: that of the alleged “tolerance” of medieval Spain under Islamic rule.

During the completion of the new Granada Mosque, which was marked by celebratory announcements July 10, 2003 of a “return of Islam to Spain,” disconcerting statements were made by European Muslim leaders. Specifically, the keynote speaker at this conference, Umar Ibrahim Vadillo, a Spanish Muslim leader, encouraged Muslims to cause an economic collapse of Western economies (by ceasing to use Western currencies, and switching to gold dinars), while the German Muslim leader Abu Bakr Rieger told Muslim attendees to avoid adapting their Islamic religious practices to accommodate European (i.e., Western Enlightenment?) values.

Bat Ye’or and Andrew Bostom state that: “We believe that reiterating these ahistorical, roseate claims about Muslim Spain abets the contemporary Islamist agenda, and retards the evolution of a liberal, reformed ‘Euro-Islam’ fully compatible with post-Enlightenment Western values.” “Iberia [Spain] was conquered in 710-716 AD by Arab tribes originating from northern, central and southern Arabia. Massive Berber and Arab immigration, and the colonization of the Iberian peninsula, followed the conquest. Most churches were converted into mosques. Although the conquest had been planned and conducted jointly with a strong faction of royal Iberian Christian dissidents, including a bishop, it proceeded as a classical jihad with massive pillages, enslavement, deportations and killings.”

“In the regions under stable Islamic control, Jews and Christians were tolerated as dhimmis – like elsewhere in other Islamic lands – and could not build new churches or synagogues nor restore the old ones. Segregated in special quarters, they had to wear discriminatory clothing. Subjected to heavy taxes, the Christian peasantry formed a servile class attached to the Arab domains; many abandoned their land and fled to the towns. Harsh reprisals with mutilations and crucifixions would sanction the Mozarab (Christian dhimmis) calls for help from the Christian kings.”

The humiliating status imposed on the dhimmis and the confiscation of their land provoked many revolts, punished by massacres, as in Toledo (761, 784-86, 797), Saragossa from 781 to 881, Cordova (805), Merida (805-813, 828), and yet again in Toledo (811-819). The insurgents were crucified, as prescribed in the Koran 5:33.

According to Bat Ye’or and Bostom, “Feuding was endemic in the Andalusian cities between the different sectors of the population: Arab and Berber colonizers, Iberian Muslim converts (Muwalladun) and Christian dhimmis (Mozarabs). There were rarely periods of peace in the Amirate of Cordova (756-912), nor later.” “Al-Andalus represented the land of jihad par excellence. Every year, sometimes twice a year, raiding expeditions were sent to ravage the Christian Spanish kingdoms to the north, the Basque regions, or France and the Rhone valley, bringing back booty and slaves. Andalusian corsairs attacked and invaded along the Sicilian and Italian coasts, even as far as the Aegean Islands, looting and burning as they went. Thousands of people were deported to slavery in Andalusia, where the caliph kept a militia of tens of thousand of Christian slaves brought from all parts of Christian Europe (the Saqaliba), and a harem filled with captured Christian women. Society was sharply divided along ethnic and religious lines, with the Arab tribes at the top of the hierarchy, followed by the Berbers who were never recognized as equals, despite their Islamization; lower in the scale came the mullawadun converts and, at the very bottom, the dhimmi Christians and Jews.”

Richard Fletcher observed in Moorish Spain that “Moorish Spain was not a tolerant and enlightened society even in its most cultivated epoch.” A prominent Andalusian jurist, Ibn Hazm of Cordoba (d. 1064), wrote that Allah has established the infidels’ ownership of their property merely to provide booty for Muslims. Ibn Abdun forbade the selling of scientific books to dhimmis, under the pretext that they translated them and attributed them to their co-religionists and bishops.

Bat Ye’or and Bostom state that: “The Muslim Berber Almohads in Spain and North Africa (1130-1232) wreaked enormous destruction on both the Jewish and Christian populations. This devastation – massacre, captivity, and forced conversion – was described by the Jewish chronicler Abraham Ibn Daud, and the poet Abraham Ibn Ezra. Suspicious of the sincerity of the Jewish converts to Islam, Muslim ‘inquisitors’ (i.e., antedating their Christian Spanish counterparts by three centuries) removed the children from such families, placing them in the care of Muslim educators.”

“The socio-political history of Andalusia was characterized by a particularly oppressive dhimmitude that is completely incompatible with modern notions of equality between individuals, regardless of religious faith. At the dawn of the 21st century, we must insist that Muslims in the West adopt post-Enlightenment societal standards of equality, not ‘tolerance,’ abandoning forever their hagiography of the brutal, discriminatory standards practiced by the classical Maliki jurists of ‘enlightened’ Andalusia.”

Some modern Spaniards, however, seem to have forgotten the painful lessons inflicted by an Islamic occupation that ended as late as 1492. Every year, in a tradition that goes back to the 16th century, Spanish villages still celebrate the Reconquista, the liberation from the Moors (as the Muslims were locally called) during “Moros y Cristianos” festivals in which effigies of the prophet Muhammad – the so-called “la Mahoma” – are mocked, thrown out of windows, and burned. After the 2004 Madrid train bombings which killed 192 people, the village of Bocairent near Valencia decided to discontinue the century old tradition of mocking and burning effigies of Muhammad. Bocairent did not want to risk becoming the target of suicide bombers.

The Socialist government of PM Zapatero gained power after the bombings. Mr Zapatero’s first act after winning the general election was to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq. He then turned on the Church, which he viewed as part of the “old Spain.” The government drew up plans to finance the teaching of Islam in state-run schools and to give funds to mosques on the grounds that it would create greater understanding of the country's one million Muslims. Spain’s leading archbishop, Cardinal Antonio María Rouco, denounced the Socialist government, saying its policies were taking the country back to medieval times, when Muslim invaders swept across the Straits of Gibraltar. “Some people wish to place us in the year 711,” Cardinal Rouco said. “It seems as if we are meant to wipe ourselves out of history.”

These days, we also hear claims that we in the West owe so much to Muslims because Muslim Spain preserved and passed on Greek knowledge to the West, without which there would have been no Renaissance. The funny thing is, nobody seems to ask the Greeks about how good Muslims have been at preserving their cultural heritage. They might disagree.

The classical and Greek heritage did not die when the Western Roman Empire collapsed, it continued in the Eastern Roman Empire, later known as the Byzantine Empire, as it was more Greek than Roman. It lived on there uninterruptedly until the 15th century when it was finally destroyed by, well, Turkish Muslims. The Byzantine Empire upheld the unbroken succession of Roman emperors for a thousand years after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The Byzantines played a crucial part in the transmitting the classical and Greco-Roman heritage to Renaissance Italy, especially after the Ottoman Muslim conquest and the many Greek scholars fleeing to the West.

The Greeks bore the brunt of the Jihad for more than a thousand years. Muslims wiped out Greek communities all over the Eastern Mediterranean for centuries, a process that continued in countries such as “Turkey,” the formerly Greek-dominated region of Anatolia, and Egypt even after WW2. If this is how Muslims “preserve Greek heritage,” I hope they will never be in a position to “preserve” mine.

Robert Spencer describes how on Tuesday, May 29, 1453, the armies of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II entered Constantinople, breaking through the defenses of a vastly outnumbered and indomitably courageous Byzantine force. Historian Steven Runciman notes what happened next: The Muslim soldiers “slew everyone that they met in the streets, men, women, and children without discrimination. The blood ran in rivers down the steep streets from the heights of Petra toward the Golden Horn. But soon the lust for slaughter was assuaged. The soldiers realized that captives and precious objects would bring them greater profit.” It has come to be known as Black Tuesday, the Last Day of the World.

The jihadists also entered the Hagia Sophia, which for nearly a thousand years had been the grandest church in Christendom. Muslim men then killed the elderly and weak and led the rest off into slavery. Once the Muslims had thoroughly subdued Constantinople, they set out to Islamize it. According to the Muslim chronicler Hoca Sa’deddin, “churches which were within the city were emptied of their vile idols and cleansed from the filthy and idolatrous impurities and by the defacement of their images and the erection of Islamic prayer niches and pulpits many monasteries and chapels became the envy of the gardens of Paradise.”

One of the worst burdens on the dhimmi population in the Ottoman Empire was devshirmeh, the forced collection of young boys from Christian Greeks, Croats, Bulgarians, Serbs and Albanians to build a slave army of Janissaries. Vasiliki Papoulia highlights the continuous desperate, often violent struggle of the Christian populations against this brutally imposed Ottoman levy:

“It is obvious that the population strongly resented […] this measure [and the levy] could be carried out only by force. Those who refused to surrender their sons – the healthiest, the handsomest and the most intelligent – were on the spot put to death by hanging. Nevertheless we have examples of armed resistance. Since there was no possibility of escaping [the levy] the population resorted to several subterfuges. Some left their villages and fled to certain cities which enjoyed exemption from the child levy or migrated to Venetian-held territories. The result was a depopulation of the countryside.”

Andrew Bostom describes how John Quincy Adams, diplomat and 19th century President of the United States, understood Jihad well, and had lots of sympathy with the Greeks, who, along with the Serbs, were the first to revolt against Turkish Muslim rule:

“If ever insurrection was holy in the eyes of God, such was that of the Greeks against their Mahometan oppressors. Yet for six long years, they were suffered to be overwhelmed by the whole mass of the Ottoman power; cheered only by the sympathies of all the civilized world, but without a finger raised to sustain or relieve them by the Christian governments of Europe; while the sword of extermination, instinct with the spirit of the Koran, was passing in merciless horror over the classical regions of Greece, the birth-place of philosophy, of poetry, of eloquence, of all the arts that embellish, and all the sciences that dignify the human character. The monarchs of Austria, of France, and England, inflexibly persisted in seeing in the Greeks, only revolted subjects against a lawful sovereign. The ferocious Turk eagerly seized upon this absurd concession, and while sweeping with his besom of destruction over the Grecian provinces, answered every insinuation of interest in behalf of that suffering people, by assertions of the unqualified rights of sovereignty, and by triumphantly retorting upon the legitimates of Europe, the consequences naturally flowing from their own perverted maxims.”

The gradual loss of supremacy over their non-Muslim subjects and the Islamic anger this sparked culminated in the outright Jihadist genocide of the Christian Armenians in the early 20th century, a crime Turks are greatly reluctant to acknowledge even today. Serious riots broke out in Istanbul on the night of September 6, 1955, which led to looting in Greek neighborhoods and the destruction of many of the city’s churches and synagogues. More than 5,000 shops belonging to the Greek minority were looted by an emotional crowd of several thousand people. The Turkish Pogrom resulted not only from “fervid chauvinism, or even [from] the economic resentment of many impoverished rioters, but [from] the profound religious fanaticism in many segments of Turkish society.”

Ultranationalist Turks in 2005 attacked an exhibit in Istanbul of rare photographs of the violent anti-Greek incidents that occurred 50 years earlier, ripping photos off the walls, shouting “Turkey is Turkish and will stay that way.” “I’m merely defending my country,” one militant said. Turkey is officially 99 percent Muslim. 4,000 Greek Orthodox faithful live primarily in Istanbul. Known as Constantinople under Greece’s last great empire, Istanbul remains the seat of the Eastern Orthodox patriarchate, the highest authority in the Orthodox world.

We often hear that “Islamic culture” was superior to Western culture in the Middle Ages, and that Westerners owe much of our technological progress to Muslims. If we say that the “Middle East” and the Eastern Mediterranean were culturally and economically superior to Europe in the Middle Ages, then this is true. However, this had been the case for thousands of years before Islam entered into history. The oldest civilizations know to mankind originated in a belt stretching from today's Egypt via Syria, Lebanon, Iran and Iraq to Pakistan. It is not a coincidence that the first European civilizations began in countries that were geographically close to the Middle East: The island of Crete, later mainland Greece and the Balkans, then Rome. Even in the Roman Empire, the Eastern part of the empire was stronger and more urbanized than its Northern and Western regions, which is one of the reasons why the Eastern half proved much more durable while the Western half collapsed in the 5th century.

When the Arab Muslims, a collection of backward, nomadic warrior tribes who did not even have a fully developed script, conquered Egypt, Syria and Iran, they took control over some of the world’s largest centres of accumulated knowledge. To say that “Muslims” or “Islamic culture” created the civilizations of the Middle East can be compared to an illiterate person storming into the planet’s largest library, killing all the librarians and then claiming to have written all the books there. The cultural superiority of the Middle East in relations to Europe did not begin with Islam’s entry into the area. In fact, it ended with it. One of the great riddles of history is how this once-dynamic region could become the world’s number one problem spot. It so happens that this decline coincides with the region’s Islamization, although some would claim that it had already started before this. Islam’s much-vaunted “Golden Age” was in reality just the twilight of the conquered pre-Islamic cultures, an echo of times passed.

It is true that no civilization exists in a vacuum. Modern Western civilization owes much to Egyptians, Persians, Sumerians, Byzantines, Assyrians, Jews, Indians and Chinese. We owe little, if anything to Islam.

The esteemed F.A. Hayek, in his classic The Road to Serfdom, can have fresh lessons for us even today. According to him, “The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those which they, or at least the best among them, have always held, but which were not properly understood or recognised before.” “The most efficient technique to this end is to use the old words but change their meaning. Few traits of totalitarian regimes are at the same time so confusing to the superficial observer and yet so characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as the complete perversion of language, the change of the meaning of words by which he ideals of the new regimes are expressed.” “Gradually, as this process continues, the whole language becomes despoiled, words become empty shells deprived of any definite meaning, as capable of denoting one thing as its opposite and used solely for the emotional associations which still adhere to them.” “With all the fatalistic belief of every pseudo-historian since Hegel and Marx this development is represented as inevitable: ‘We know the direction in which the world is moving, and we must bow to it or perish.’”

Isn’t this exactly what is happening in the West now, with Multiculturalism and Muslim immigration? A massive rewriting of our history, and a perversion of language?

The European Commission proposed the controversial idea of a Eurovision-style singing event in all member states to celebrate the European Union’s 50th “birthday,” the 50th anniversary of the 1957 Treaty of Rome. Commissioner Margot Wallstrom was lobbying for big-style birthday celebrations to “highlight the benefits that European integration has brought to its citizens.” Diplomats said the idea had sparked feelings of disgust among new member states, which were reminded of “Stalinist times” when people were forced to sing. Brussels also intended to spend around €300,000 on the appointment of 50 citizen “ambassadors,” dubbed the “Faces of Europe,” who were supposed to “tell their story” throughout the year on what the EU means to them in their daily life. Germany will in any case go ahead with its own idea to let thousands of its bakeries bake 50 sorts of cakes with recipes from all 25 member states.

Tariq Ramadan, the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, the most important Islamist movement of the 20th century, is a resident of Geneva, Switzerland. He is the author of a dozen books, among them To Be a European Muslim, translated into 14 languages. The EU Parliament consults him as an expert voice of “moderate Islam.”

Mr Ramadan says decadent Europe will give way to an Islamized Europe. The 21st century, he says, will see a second role reversal between Islam and the West: “The West will begin its new decline, and the Arab-Islamic world its renewal” and ascent to seven centuries of world domination after seven centuries of decline. “Only Islam can achieve the synthesis between Christianity and humanism, and fill the spiritual void that afflicts the West.” All good people are implicitly Muslims, he maintains, “because true humanism is founded in Koranic revelations.”

Muslim identity is the only true source of universality, proclaims Tariq Ramadan. “It will fill the spiritual void that afflicts the West.” In a clash with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somalian-born Dutch MP and critic of Islam, Ramadan said it was wrong to suggest that Muslims were in Europe to proselytize, and wrong to say that Europe had a Judeo-Christian past. “Islam is a European religion. The Muslims came here after the first and second world wars to rebuild Europe, not to colonise.” Again, according to F.A. Hayek, “The Nazi leader who described the National-Socialist revolution as a counter-Renaissance spoke more truly than he probably knew. It was the decisive step in the destruction of that civilisation which modern man had built up from the age of the Renaissance and which was above all an individualist civilisation. Individualism has a bad name today and the term has come to be connected with egotism and selfishness. But the individualism of which we speak in contrast to socialism and all other forms of collectivism has no necessary connection with these.”

“The essential features of that individualism which, from elements provided by Christianity and the philosophy of classical antiquity, was first fully developed during the Renaissance and has since grown and spread into what we know as Western European civilisation – the respect for the individual man qua man, that is the recognition of his own views and tastes.” “From the commercial cities of Northern Italy the new view of life spread with commerce to the west and north, through France and the south-west of Germany to the Low Countries and the British Isles, taking firm root wherever there was no despotic political power to stifle it.”

In sharp contrast to the Islamic world, “During the whole of this modern period of European history the general direction of social development was one of freeing the individual from the ties which had bound him to the customary or prescribed ways in the pursuit of his ordinary activities.” “Perhaps the greatest result of the unchaining of individual energies was the marvellous growth of science which followed the march of individual liberty from Italy to England and beyond.” “Only since industrial freedom opened the path to the free use of new knowledge, only since everything could be tried – if somebody could be found to back it at his own risk – and, it should be added, as often as not from outside the authorities officially entrusted with the cultivation of learning, has science made the great strides which in the last hundred and fifty years have changed the face of the world.”

If this was all caused by the introduction of “Islamic science,” how come none of it took place in Islamic lands? It is patently absurd to claim that Islam, perhaps the most anti-individualistic creed on earth, was somehow responsible for triggering the individual brilliance of Renaissance men such as Leonardo da Vinci, not to mention the grossly un-Islamic, figurative art of Michelangelo. So why is this assertion repeated, again and again?

The roots of Western civilization are primarily Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman. If you want to create a new entity, Eurabia, encompassing Europe, Turkey and the Arab world, you need first to establish that this cultural entity isn’t “new” at all, but has always existed. The way to do this is to establish that Islam is a natural and integral part of Western civilization. You need to imprint in the minds of the people that yes, Muslims and Christians can indeed live peacefully together, as we did in the glorious days of Andalusia. Not only can we live with Muslims, we actually owe Muslims gratitude for helping us create the scientific achievements of the modern West. Thus we have the twin foundational myths of Eurabia. This is why French President Jacques Chirac can claim that “Islam has contributed just as much to Western civilization as Christianity,” thus echoing Tariq Ramadan. Muslims believe that all people are born as Muslims. Jews and Christians share the same message as Muslims. If they disagree on something, this is because Jews or Christians have “misinterpreted” or “perverted” the true, Islamic message. All good things are essentially Islamic, as Mr Ramadan points out. It is thus an illusion to claim that there is such as thing as a separate, “Judeo-Christian” civilization. All Western achievements are Islamic, as they are the result of a civilization Muslims gave to us. Muslims should thus feel no gratitude for enjoying the benefits of the West, they are merely enjoying the legitimate benefits of their own civilization. In fact, Westerners should feel gratitude towards Muslims.

It is a time-tested Islamic tradition: If you cannot show significant historical achievements of your own, you can always steal somebody else’s.

The EU elites see themselves as Julius Caesar or Octavian, but end up being Brutus, stabbing their own peoples in the back. They want to recreate the Roman Empire on both sides of the Mediterranean, bound together by some vague references to a “shared Greek heritage.” Instead, they are creating a civilizational breakdown across much of Western Europe as the barbarians are overrunning the continent. The EU wants to recreate the Roman Empire and ends up creating the second fall of Rome.

It has been said that those who do not have a history also do not have a future. If so, maybe the reverse is true as well. Westerners have lost sense of much of our own cultural heritage. We have forgotten who we once were. Perhaps if we start reclaiming our past, we will discover that we have also gained a future, as an added bonus.

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Permalink Reply by James Williams on September 6, 2009 at 11:26am

Is anybody grasping whats happening here????????

Obama Bans National Day of Prayer, But Applauds Islam Ramadan Print
The Post Chronicle
September 4, 2009

by J. Grant Swank, Jr.

The Republic is taking a drastic change away from its biblical tradition in favor of Islam when Obama celebrates Ramadan, but will not touch the National Day of Prayer?

Per Top of the Ticket / Los Angeles Times: "For years, it's been a staple of the White House calendar. President Obama opted not to have a service in the White House this year."

It's that simply maneuvered a move. Doesn't take much, does it, to wipe out the Christian heritage of this nation when seated as a Muslim in the Oval Office? "President Truman signed the first National Prayer Day proclamation, and President Reagan made it a permanent occasion. Under Bush, the day was a political event, confirming a conviction that religion was a core tenet of Republican politics.

"Naturally, prominent evangelicals, including National Day of Prayer Task Force Chairman Shirley Dobson, and her husband, Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, expressed disappointment in Obama's decision.

"'At this time in our country's history, we would hope our president would recognize more fully the importance of prayer,' Shirley Dobson said in a statement."

Obama has made it clear that he sides up gladly to atheists. Atheists do not like the National Day of Prayer. Therefore, while atheists had nothing to do with the establishing of our Christian heritage as a Republic, Obama is the first President to give them acclaimed status.

It is intolerable that unbelievers are put on the same level as biblical believers. The atheists can find refuge politically in nations that esteem no deity; but they certainly are not to be given praise in America.

Obama stated in his inaugural address that atheists and Muslims are to be honored as well as Christians. Why that sentence was written into that address is beyond reason. Obama is quickly ridding our nation of its biblical ethics and Christian backdrop. This is exactly what the knowledgeable citizens stated throughout the presidential campaign.

However, even evangelicals were swayed by the underhanded deceiver as he held gospel concerts in the Bible Belt, mounted evangelical church platforms to take full advantage of his mesmerizing techniques, and quoted Scripture when convenient - even when his exegesis was incorrect.

I heard one evangelical woman say in a gathering that the inauguration was "an historic event." I was so shocked at hearing her say this that I had no retort. I simply concluded that the stupid would live with the destruction of this nation - along with those of us who know the truth.

"I want to welcome all the American Muslims from many walks of life who are here. This is just one part of our effort to celebrate Ramadan, and continues a long tradition of hosting iftars here at the White House.

"For well over a billion Muslims, Ramadan is a time of intense devotion and reflection. It's a time of service and support for those in need. And it is also a time for family and friends to come together in a celebration of their faith, their communities, and the common humanity that all of us share. It is in that spirit that I welcome each and every one of you to the White House."

Is there any doubt that Marxist Muslim Barrack Hussein Obama is ready to open wide the Republic to Islam?
Note his remarks this year at the annual Ramadan dinner:

"Tonight's iftar is a ritual that is also being carried out this Ramadan at kitchen tables and mosques in all 50 states. Islam, as we know, is part of America. And like the broader American citizenry, the American Muslim community is one of extraordinary dynamism and diversity -- with families that stretch back generations and more recent immigrants; with Muslims of countless races and ethnicities, and with roots in every corner of the world.

"Indeed, the contribution of Muslims to the United States are too long to catalog because Muslims are so interwoven into the fabric of our communities and our country. American Muslims are successful in business and entertainment; in the arts and athletics; in science and in medicine. Above all, they are successful parents, good neighbors and active citizens.

"So on this occasion, we celebrate the Holy Month of Ramadan, and we also celebrate how much Muslims have enriched America and its culture -- in ways both large and small. And with us here tonight, we see just a small sample of those contributions."

I have not been aware that the "contributions of Muslims to the Untied States are too long to catalog because Muslims are so interwoven into the fabric of our communities and our country."

Someone get hold of that praise sentence, please, to yank it from every printed copy of this Muslim speech.

Obama continues: "So tonight, we celebrate a great religion and its commitment to justice and progress. We honor the contributions of America's Muslims, and the positive example that so many of them set through their own lives. And we rededicate ourselves to the work of building a better and more hopeful world."

Invited dinner guests included:

Cabinet: Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr., and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

Deputy Cabinet secretaries: Commerce Deputy Secretary Dennis Hightower and Education Deputy Secretary Adam Miller.

Congress: Reps. Andre Carson (D-Ind.), John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.) and Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.).

Diplomats: Ambassador Prince Zeid Ra'ad Zeid Al Hussein of Jordan; Ambassador Adel A.M. Al Jubeir of Saudi Arabia; Ambassador Husain Haqqani of Pakistan; Ambassador Erlan A. Idrissov of Kazakhstan; Ambassador His Excellency Said, Tayeb Jawad of Afghanistan; Ambassador Aziz Mekouar of Morocco; Ambassador Peter N.R.O. Ogego of Kenya

J. Grant Swank, Jr. is an independent columnist

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Permalink Reply by James Williams on September 7, 2009 at 12:08pm

More Muslim Appeasement On the Way?
The Minority Report
September 7, 2009

[Excerpt: "The continued stroking of Islamic terrorists only makes us appear weak and easy targets unclear about the rules of the game. We should remember the words of Thomas Jefferson who said, “Too long, for the honor of nations, have those Barbarians been suffered (permitted) to trample on the sacred faith of treaties, on the rights and laws of human nature!” ]

by Glen Spicer

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says that “there is too much emphasis on telling the U.S. story and not enough on building trust and credibility”. Since Obama became president, some feel that the image of the U.S. has improved in many parts of the world. However, the troubling news is that this is not true in the Arab and Muslim world, particularly Turkey, Pakistan and Palestinian territories, where animosity toward the U.S. continues “to run deep and unabated” in spite of Obama “Apologetics Tour” of the region where he railed against America’s intolerance of Islam and its arrogance. I am sure this troubles Obama as he has tried to convince these people, at the expense of America, that we are not to be feared but should be seen as one offering an olive branch for mutual understanding. Having mutual understanding with an enemy, and yes I did say “enemy” contrary to what the president wishes were true, is impossible when hatred for us, simply because we are not like them in our culture and religion, persists. And how long will this hatred persist? It will persist until we are governed by Sharia Law and Allah is our only God. These requirements are non-negotiable and set in the stony regions of the heart of Islam.

So the continued apologies coming from this administration, and now from the Joint Chief s of Staff, are both a waste of energy and a delay in addressing the real problem. With all due respect Mr. President, contrary to what you so boldly profess, we ARE at war with Islam and we have been for over 200 years. The non-believing world has been at war with Islam for over 14 centuries. Facts are facts, period, politically correct or not.

Our desire to appease Muslims goes all the way back to the battle fought against piracy and Islamic terrorist during the turn of the 19th century at Tripoli,” a Muslim stronghold that was used as a base of operations for Barbary pirates. Muslim nations were hostile to what they perceived as “Christian nations” habitually preying on their ships and enslaving their seamen. This war against Islamic terrorists is nothing new and the desire to appease them as a means to ward off trouble and battle is nothing new also.

But just as it did not do anything more than embolden them in 1805, it does nothing less in 2009. When we refuse to learn what history has shown us, we learn the lesson all over again, only this time the losses and the death toll will far surpass the historical lesson. The Treaty of 1797 was supposed to appease the Muslims and yet it did not. We promised that we would not try and convert the Muslim people. Words such as “Islam is a great religion” and “a religion of Peace” that came from President George W. Bush did not make them back off. President Barack Obama’s words that “America is one of the largest Muslim nations in the world” and that “America is no longer a Christian nation” did not either.

The continued stroking of Islamic terrorists only makes us appear weak and easy targets unclear about the rules of the game. We should remember the words of Thomas Jefferson who said, “Too long, for the honor of nations, have those Barbarians been suffered (permitted) to trample on the sacred faith of treaties, on the rights and laws of human nature!” That being understood, how can mere words calm the turbulent waters that span the gulf between Islam and any nation who rejects Islam? They cannot. The basic tenants of Islam haven’t changed so it is still submission, becoming a second class citizen and paying for the privilege with a special tax, or death are the only options given to unbelievers and my prayer is that America will always be listed among the infidels and not one who submits.

The sentiment of the Ambassador Abdrahaman, Tripoli’s Ambassador to Great Britain during that time, still pervades Islamic attitudes today. He said, “A non-aggressing nation is still at war with Islam, as long as it hasn’t embraced Islam”. Understand fully what he is saying. “A non-aggressive nation” meaning one that is not engaged in fighting back, is still at war. It is much like two kids on the schoolyard with one determined to punch the face of the other and the second one being content to allow it and not fight back. There is still a battle going on with the one doing the most damage being the one who does not refrain from throwing the punches. Even if America is determined to remain passive and not fight back, Islam still sees us as the enemy as long as we refuse to “embrace Islam” and will gladly continue to throw its punches.
Jefferson argued that the United States was not at war with Tripoli and Islam (sound familiar?) but that did not make any difference. The reason was explained to him this way: “it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman [Muslim] who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise”. It was requested of America that they pay a fee to keep the peace amounting to a total of $1.3 million a year, with, of course, no guarantee that the Muslims would honor the treaty as they had not honored the Treaty of 1797. Nothing has changed for Islam and the demand they make of infidels.

Fast forward to 2009 and ask how could this be made clearer? And why does our weak, appeasement-bent President still think they don’t mean it? How can he believe that they will not continue to take aim at us even if we “play nice”? Their stern warnings have been ignored at the peril of all Americans. America IS at war with Islam Fundamentalists. As long as they see us as their enemy they are ours and must be treated as such. To do less is to proceed in folly at the risk of American lives here and abroad.

And how does President Obama seek to handle the treat here at home? Quietly, and unknown to most, he and Department of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano have appointed Arif Alikhan, a devout Muslim, as Assistant Secretary of Policy Development at the Department of Homeland Security. Alikhan was instrumental in the halting of “Muslim Mapping” programs in the Los Angeles Police Department back in 2007, a program that was believed needed to identify hotbeds of extremism in the area.

But surely the new Assistant Secretary of Policy Development won’t let a silly thing like aggressively pursuing Muslim extremists get in the way of defending the country against another attack, would he? Or is a fox now guarding the henhouse?

To add icing to the “Insanity cake”, they also swore in Kareem Shora, a Syrian born Muslim as the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee National Executive Director as a part of Homeland Security. So now we have a Muslim who will be instrumental in setting policy concerning the American position concerning Muslims and another Muslim in charge of making sure no one discriminates against Muslims.
Perhaps they will be great at their job, but with all that is happening in Washington these days, I am having trouble discerning just what Obama’s appointees are considering their job.

With countless czars, some professed Communists, radicals and convicted criminals, what do you suppose is their main goal? Keeping America safe or continuing their efforts to undermine the society they deplore might not be one of their goals. And it seems that their previous actions have been rewarded by Obama’s confidence and we all know what rewarding someone for their efforts gets us – more of the same. America cannot afford more of the same. Obama’s efforts to stamp out “business as usual in Washington” has caused him to turn America on its head. Business as usual in Washington needed some attention and revision certainly, but even that form of corruption is preferable to what we are being subjected to now.

Speaking boldly and with that ever familiar raised nose and arrogant stance, Obama promised if elected he would “fundamentally change America” and he is determined to do it too. The fundamentals of America do not need to be changed. The fundamentals of free speech, freedom of religion, the right to keep and bear arms, and all the rights granted to us in our Constitution, right down to LIMITED federal government not ever-expanding federal government, are the fundamentals that made this country. Even with all her faults, America is still the brightest hope for the future of the planet but changing it into a third-world country where we are no better than the rest, cheats us and cheats the world.

Leave our fundamentals alone. Leave our rights alone. Leave our liberties alone. Leave our Constitution alone. Leave America better than you found it, not in rubble. America is still the “shining city on the hill” and she’ll remain so if we can stop this Administration from turning out the lights.

Found in: http://theminorityreportblog.com/blog_entry/glen_spicer/2009/08/30/...

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Permalink Reply by James Williams on September 29, 2009 at 11:53am

It is time for all Americans to wake up & smell the stench that is creeping into our society Shariah !

A virus called 'Shariah'

Center for Security Policy | Sep 28, 2009
By Frank Gaffney, Jr.
A Denver airport shuttle driver from Afghanistan who plotted to blow up subway trains in New York City. A Jordanian who tried to destroy one of Dallas' tallest skyscrapers. An American who thought he was detonating a truck bomb aimed at a federal courthouse in Springfield, Illinois.

Law enforcement authorities who successfully stymied these alleged attacks have been at pains to emphasize that there are no connections between the three.

Of course there are.

Maybe it will prove to be the case that the three men at the heart of these interrupted plots - Najibullah Zazi, Hosam Maher Husein Smadi and Michael Finton (also known as Talib Islam) - had no connection in a tactical or operational sense.

Still, it is absurd, and extremely dangerous, to insist that they are not connected in at least one way: What apparently animated all three of these suspects (and perhaps a number of others believed to have been involved in the New York plot who are still at large) is the seditious, supremacist theo-political-legal program authoritative Islam calls "Shariah."

Shariah requires its adherents to engage in jihad - the struggle to bring about the triumph of Islam worldwide through whatever means are available. Shariah explicitly calls for the use of violent techniques designed to instill terror in those who stand in the way of a global Muslim theocracy.

Lethal truck-bombs, pellet-laced explosive vests and backpacks and bombs or hijackers aboard aircraft have already been used for this purpose. It is a matter of time before vastly more destructive weapons of mass destruction (chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear) become available to jihadists who believe that, pursuant to Shariah, they are fulfilling Allah's will when they kill "infidels" or otherwise force them to submit to Islam.

Even more insidious, though, is what Robert Spencer calls "Stealth Jihad." This practice involves using myriad non-violent measures to insinuate Shariah into non-Muslim societies. Adherents demand such concessions as special treatment for them and their faith in public spaces, private corporations, schools, communities and government at every level.

The prime-mover behind these demands is the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization that shares the violent jihadists' commitment to advance Shariah's end-state of a global caliphate, but seek (for the moment, at least) to do so non-violently. The successful prosecution last year of one Brotherhood front, the Holy Land Foundation, established that the organization's mission is "to destroy Western civilization from within...by its own miserable hand." (In the course of the trial, the government also identified virtually every prominent Muslim-American group as Brotherhood affiliates or "friendly" to its purposes.)

What happens as tolerant democratic societies try to accommodate themselves to the stealthy form of jihad, backed by the persistent threat of the violent form - if not its actual occurrence, can be seen in much of Western Europe. For example, France now has 751 zones urbaines sensibles - Muslim-only areas that amount to "no-go" zones for French authorities. In these zones, Shariah rules instead of the laws of the host government, at the expense most notably of women's rights, due process and public order (especially for Jews, Christians and other non-Muslims).

To be sure, accommodations to date to Shariah have not metastasized in the United States to nearly this extent. There are, however, numerous worrisome examples of concessions that have been made here, too. To cite a few: taxpayer-financed footbaths for Muslims installed at state universities; corporations providing Muslim-only prayer rooms and time off for prayers; government-sanctioned discrimination by taxi drivers against passengers deemed "impure" (haram) because they have alcohol or dogs; unhygenic practices in food plants to accommodate the preferences of Muslim workers; government-offered Shariah-compliant mortgages; Islamic proselytizing in public school curricula; etc.

The failure by U.S. and other governments' officials to recognize the connection between Shariah and jihad (of either the violent or stealthy kind) is like refusing to acknowledge that there is a common virus causing an outbreak of swine flu. How could the medical community hope to identify appropriate prophylactic measures (for instance: Keep kids in school or shut the schools down? Take antibiotics or not?) if it were not permitted to understand the nature of the virus. There would certainly be little chance of developing effective vaccines under those circumstances.

We face approximately the same problem if we require our law enforcement, intelligence, homeland security and military personnel to behave as though there is no toxic virus - think of it as the "anti-swine flu," since pork is the ultimate in haram under Shariah - animating those seeking to destroy us, our government and our freedom-loving way of life. At best, we will be able to stop some of the attacks the jihadists are plotting against us. We certainly will not be able to defeat the disease and thereby protect Western civilization from its potential for truly pandemic virulence.

Our natural allies in taking such a stance against Shariah are the many millions of Muslims around the world whose practice of their faith does not involve adherence to this medieval, barbaric and totalitarian program. Indeed, most Muslim immigrants in America came here to get away from Shariah in their native lands. Only by differentiating such Muslims from the carriers of this lethal virus can we hope to inoculate them against the spread of the disease - and enlist their help in protecting the rest of us by keeping American Shariah-free.



Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy, a columnist for the Washington Times and host of the nationally syndicated program, Secure Freedom Radio.
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Frank Gaffney

Mr. Gaffney is President and founder of the Center for Security Policy. He formerly acted as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy during the Reagan Administration, following four years of service as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Forces and Arms Control Policy. Previously, he was a professional staff member on the Senate Armed Services Committee under the chairmanship of the late Senator John Tower, and a national security legislative aide to the late Senator Henry M. Jackson


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Permalink Reply by James Williams on October 1, 2009 at 11:39am

Schoolhouse Shariah

Multiculturalism: California's educrats have put out new rules for teaching Islamic studies to seventh-graders in public schools, and they are as biased as ever. They'll also likely spread eastward.

The lesson guidelines adopted by the bellwether state whitewash the violence and oppression of women codified in Islamic law, or Shariah. And they're loaded with revisionist history about the faith.

For example, the suggested framework glorifies Shariah as a liberal reform movement that "rejected" the mistreatment of women that existed in Arabia before Muhammad and his successors conquered the region, according to Accuracy in Academia. The guidelines claim that Islamic law established for the first time that men and women were entitled to equal "respect."

Not so, says Islamic scholar and author Nonie Darwish, who grew up Muslim in Egypt.

"I am shocked that that is what they teach," she said. "Women had more rights in Arabia before Shariah."

In fact, "wife beating is allowed under Shariah" today, she added. "It allows a woman seen without a headdress to be flogged, punishes rape victims, and calls for beheading for adultery."

California's course on world religions also omits Islam's long history of jihadist violence, while portraying Christianity as an intolerant and bloodthirsty faith.

Christianity isn't given equal time, either. It's covered in just two days — as opposed to up to two weeks for Islam — and doesn't involve kids in any role-playing activities like the Islam unit.

Students do get a healthy dose of skepticism about the Christian faith, including a biting history of its persecution of other people.

Islam, in contrast, gets a pass from critical review. Even jihad is presented as an "internal personal struggle to do one's best to resist temptation," not waging holy war.

"California schools are pushing an unbalanced religious agenda that favors Islam and minimizes Christianity and Judaism," Accuracy in Academia warns in its latest Campus Report.

Who helped build the California Education Department's framework for Islamic studies? Islamist "scholars" with the Council on Islamic Education, or CIE, a Saudi-tied activist group.

The consultancy changed its name after former IBD Washington bureau chief Paul Sperry, author of "Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington," exposed that its chief researcher and textbook consultant for years taught social studies at a Saudi madrassa just outside Washington.

The Islamic Saudi Academy is a breeding ground for terrorists, including the valedictorian-turned-al-Qaida agent recently sentenced to life for plotting to assassinate President Bush.

Recently, Fox News reported that the head of CIE — now known as the Institute on Religion and Civic Values — misled California education authorities about his academic credentials. For one, Shabbir Mansuri never received a USC degree in chemical engineering as he has claimed, Fox says.

The group's Web site no longer includes the claim. These are the folks who are teaching your children about Islam in public schools. Parents have protested, even sued, but to no avail.

For example, parents of seventh-graders in the San Francisco area, who after 9/11 were taught pro-Islamic lessons as part of California's world history curriculum, sued under the First Amendment ban on religious establishment.

They argued, reasonably, that the government was promoting Islam by mandating that their kids participate in Muslim role-playing exercises such as designing prayer rugs, taking an Arabic name and essentially "becoming a Muslim" for two full weeks.

Children also were told to recite aloud Muslim prayers that begin with "In the name of Allah, most gracious, most merciful," and memorize the Muslim profession of faith: "Allah is the only true God, and Muhammad is his messenger."

But a federal judge appointed by President Clinton told parents in so many words to get over it, that the state was merely teaching kids about another "culture."

California's 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the decision, ruling that it was OK to put public-school kids through Muslim role-playing exercises.

The decision was a major victory for the multiculturalists and Islamic apologists in California and across the country who've never met a culture or religion they didn't like — with the exception of Western civilization and Christianity.

You can't teach the Ten Commandments in public schools. But teaching the five pillars of Islam is A-OK.


© 2009 Investor's Business Daily, Inc. All rights reserved.


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Permalink Reply by James Williams on October 14, 2009 at 11:21am

Barack Obama adviser says Sharia Law is misunderstood

By Andrew Gilligan and Alex Spillius in Washington
Published: 8:00PM BST 08 Oct 2009

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/barackob...
6274387/Obama-adviser-says-Sharia-Law-is-misunderstood.html

President Barack Obama's adviser on Muslim affairs, Dalia Mogahed, has provoked controversy by appearing on a British television show hosted by a member of an extremist group to talk about Sharia Law.

Miss Mogahed, appointed to the President's Council on Faith-Based and Neighbourhood Partnerships, said the Western view of Sharia was "oversimplified" and the majority of women around the world associate it with "gender justice".

The White House adviser made the remarks on a London-based TV discussion programme hosted by Ibtihal Bsis, a member of the extremist Hizb ut Tahrir party.

The group believes in the non-violent destruction of Western democracy and the creation of an Islamic state under Sharia Law across the world.

Miss Mogahed appeared alongside Hizb ut Tahrir's national women's officer, Nazreen Nawaz.

During the 45-minute discussion, on the Islam Channel programme Muslimah Dilemma earlier this week, the two members of the group made repeated attacks on secular "man-made law" and the West's "lethal cocktail of liberty and capitalism".

They called for Sharia Law to be "the source of legislation" and said that women should not be "permitted to hold a position of leadership in government".

Miss Mogahed made no challenge to these demands and said that "promiscuity" and the "breakdown of traditional values" were what Muslims admired least about the West.

She said: "I think the reason so many women support Sharia is because they have a very different understanding of sharia than the common perception in Western media.

"The majority of women around the world associate gender justice, or justice for women, with sharia compliance.

"The portrayal of Sharia has been oversimplified in many cases."

Sharia in its broadest sense is a religious code for living, which decrees such matters as fasting and dressing modestly. However, it has also been interpreted as requiring the separation of men and women.

It also includes the controversial "Hadd offences", crimes with specific penalties set by the Koran and the sayings of the prophet Mohammed. These include death by stoning for adultery and homosexuality and the removal of a hand for theft.

Miss Mogahed admitted that even many Muslims associated Sharia with "maximum criminal punishments" and "laws that... to many people seem unequal to women," but added: "Part of the reason that there is this perception of Sharia is because Sharia is not well understood and Islam as a faith is not well understood."

The video of the broadcast has now been prominently posted on the front page of Hizb ut Tahrir's website.

Miss Mogahed, who was born in Egypt and moved to America at the age of five, is the first veiled Muslim woman to serve in the White House. Her appointment was seen as a sign of the Obama administration's determination to reach out to the Muslim world.

She is also the executive director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, a project which aims to scientifically sample public opinion in the Muslim world.

During this week's broadcast, she described her White House role as "to convey... to the President and other public officials what it is Muslims want."

Wendy Wright, president of Concerned Women for America, said Miss Mogahed was “downplaying” Sharia Law.

“There is a reason sharia has got a bad name and it is how it has been exercised. Regrettably in the US there have been acts of injustice perpetrated against women that are driven by the Sharia-type mindset that women are objects not human beings,” she said.

She cited the example of Muzzammil Hassan, a Buffalo man who ran a cable channel aimed at countering Muslim stereotypes and was charged earlier this year with beheading his wife after she filed for divorce.

“Americans understand by example, it’s not as if we are an ignorant mass of people. Just as we don’t broad brush all Muslims, so should Dalia not downplay the serious nature of sharia law.”

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Permalink Reply by James Williams on October 19, 2009 at 11:40am

Free Speech Under Foreign Assault – by Robert Spencer

Posted By Robert Spencer On October 9, 2009 @ 12:06 am In FrontPage

Does the United States Constitution protect the freedom of speech of American citizens, or does it not? In this era of globalization, the answer is becoming increasingly muddled. Thursday, an American citizen, Paul Williams, went on trial in Canada. He is charged with violating Canadian libel laws in charges he made in his book The Dunces of Doomsday about a jihad terror cell at McMaster University in Ontario. Likewise in Brazil, an American business writer, Joseph Sharkey, is on trial for what he wrote about Brazilian air-traffic controllers after he survived an airplane crash in Brazil.

Williams and Sharkey both live in the United States, which guarantees that its citizens’ freedom of speech not be infringed. Should Canadian and Brazilian libel laws apply to them? Williams has already had to pay enormous amounts of money for his defense, and Sharkey is likely to be found guilty and given a $500,000 fine. McMaster University wants a cool two million dollars from Williams.

Shouldn’t the United States government protect American citizens from such bullying by foreign powers?

If nothing is done, the problem is certain to get worse — for Williams and Sharkey are not the first American victims of the tactic that has come to be known as “libel tourism.” The late Saudi billionaire Khalid Salim bin Mahfouz sued Rachel Ehrenfeld, founder and director of the American Center for Democracy, several years ago. Bin Mahfouz was upset about Ehrenfeld’s book, Funding Evil, in which she wrote that he was involved in funding Hamas and al Qaeda – a charge for which there was abundant evidence from Western intelligence agencies. Nevertheless, taking advantage of British libel laws that place the burden of proof on the defendant, rather than the plaintiff, bin Mahfouz sued not in the United States, where Ehrenfeld lives and published her book, but in Britain, where neither he nor Ehrenfeld lived and where his entire case depended upon a handful of copies sold in that country mostly through special orders from Amazon.com, and the appearance of one chapter of the book on the Internet, where could have been read by British readers. A British court awarded bin Mahfouz $250,000, and Ehrenfeld had to devote the bulk of her time for years to fighting this judgment.

Now Senator Arlen Specter (D-PA) has introduced the Free Speech Protection Act of 2009, which would shelter American writers from libel judgments by courts in countries that do not value the freedom of speech the way America does. But this bill faces an uphill battle – it seems unlikely that Barack Obama will give it his support after he just last week had the United States co-sponsor an anti-free speech resolution at the United Nations. Approved by the U.N. Human Rights Council, the resolution, cosponsored by the U.S. and Egypt, calls on states to condemn and criminalize “any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence.”

“Hatred” and “incitement” are, of course, in the eye of the beholder — or more precisely, in the eye of those who make such determinations. The powerful can decide to silence the powerless by classifying their views as “hate speech.” The ability to dissent, publicly and without fear of imprisonment or other reprisal, is a cornerstone of any genuinely free society. Yet no less distinguished a personage than the President of the United States has now given his imprimatur to the quashing of such dissent.

But we still have the First Amendment, right? Legal expert Eugene Volokh explains that it isn’t that easy: “If the U.S. backs a resolution that urges the suppression of some speech, presumably we are taking the view that all countries — including the U.S. — should adhere to this resolution. If we are constitutionally barred from adhering to it by our domestic constitution, then we’re implicitly criticizing that constitution, and committing ourselves to do what we can to change it.”

Is that the change that Americans were hoping for when they voted for Barack Obama in such large numbers in 2008? Specter and the other Democrats who have introduced and support the Free Speech Protection Act should recognize how inconsistent it is with their own party leader’s actions as President of the United States, and call upon him to end all support for any legal measure anywhere that restricts free speech.

Our survival as a free people could depend upon it.

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Permalink Reply by James Williams on October 20, 2009 at 12:39pm

Rep. Sue Myrick op-ed:

Last week, I held a press conference on Capitol Hill attended by three of my colleagues in the House of Representatives to call for a federal investigation (s) into a non-profit group called the Council on American Islamic Relations (C.A.I.R.)

Here are the facts:

1. CAIR has documented ties to the terrorist organization HAMAS. This is stated fact by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

In an April 28, 2009 letter to US Senator Jon Kyl, the FBI wrote the following:
“As you know, CAIR was named as an unindicted co-conspirator of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development in the United States v. Holy Land Foundation et al. (Cr. No. 3:04-240-P (N.D.TX.). During that trial, evidence was introduced that demonstrated a relationship among CAIR, individual CAIR founders (including its current President Emeritus and its Executive Director) and the Palestinian Committee. Evidence was also introduced that demonstrated a relationship between the Palestinian Committee and HAMAS, which was designated a terrorist organization in 1995. In light of that evidence, the FBI suspended all formal contacts between CAIR and the FBI.”

In case you are not familiar with the Holy Land trial referenced above, it was a Dallas, Texas trial that ended with guilty verdicts on 108 counts of funneling money ($12 million) to HAMAS.

2. The purpose of our press conference was to make public an internal CAIR memo that documented CAIR's stated goal of placing CAIR interns in the offices of members of Congress, especially the members who serve on the Homeland Security, Judiciary and Intelligence Committees. Let me be clear here, CAIR, a group whom the FBI says is affiliated with the terrorist group HAMAS, is trying to place their interns in the offices of those members who serve on the three committees that handle national security related issues. National Security is the first responsibility of the federal government.

3. Following our press conference, CAIR, immediately labeled we four members as bigots and started their public relations campaign to discredit us by claiming that we were against Muslims working on Capitol Hill. We never said that. At no time during our press conference did we even insinuate that we were investigating Muslims being interns on Capitol Hill. Go to http://www.youtube.com/suemyricknc09 and watch the press conference yourself.

Our focus was and is on CAIR and CAIR alone, not Muslims.

Likewise CAIR tried to make this a Republican vs. Democrat thing, because the four members at the press conference happened to be Republican.

How then does CAIR explain Democrat Senator Charles Schumer’s call earlier this year for a government-wide ban on CAIR in the federal government due to their ties to HAMAS? Democrat Senator Barbara Boxer has likewise made public her opinions of CAIR and any Google search will find her remarks.

4. CAIR is spending time, money and energy to position themselves as the spokespeople for the moderate Muslim community. Problem is CAIR is not a moderate Muslim organization. It is a radical front group for HAMAS. So who is CAIR competing with for this designation? The real moderate Muslim groups/individuals in America. Groups and individuals like the following who are committed to countering Islamist extremism:

Dr. Hedieh Mirahmadi – President World Organization for Resource Development and Education (WORDE)
Zeyno Baran – Director for the Center for Eurasian Policy at the Hudson Institute
Farid Ghadry – President of the Reform Party of Syria
Manda Zand Ervin – Founder and director of the Alliance of Iranian Women
Omran Salman – Arab Reformists Project, 'Aafaq (Arabic for “horizons”).
Dr. Zuhdi Jasser – American Islamic Forum for Democracy
Karim Bromund – Director of Inter-Religious Affairs for the Islamic Supreme Council of America

I SUPPORT the Muslim individuals and groups mentioned above. These groups renounce terrorists and their radical ideology. They are trying their hardest to be heard and recognized in America, but are being overshadowed and out-funded by CAIR. Today, when something happens that impacts the Muslim community, the media calls CAIR (an unindicted co-conspirator to terrorism and a HAMAS front group) for comment on behalf of American Muslims. What an insult the media is performing on the Muslim community. Instead they should be calling Muslim groups/individuals like those named above. This is part of the reason we are focusing our attention on CAIR and exposing them for who they are. For one they pose a threat to our national security, and two, they deny the ability of legitimate Muslim groups to gain credibility.

5. In July of this year I held a summit on Capitol Hill where I introduced the leaders of eight moderate Muslim organizations to the heads of several US Agencies, Members of Congress and congressional staff. For example, they met with representatives from the State Department, USAID, Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense. How can I be against Muslims working on Capitol Hill and hold such an event? Go to http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.3881/pub_detai... and read for yourself about this summit.

See through the lies and realize what is really going on here.

We are trying to expose a HAMAS Front Group (CAIR) for who they are, and they are crying we are anti-Muslim hoping that media outlets will ignore the terrorist claim and instead pick it up as a race/religion story. When those claims don’t work, they claim it’s a Republican political thing.

Americans, on this subject we need to stop the Republican vs. Democrat, Conservative vs. Liberal, Christian vs. Muslim division and unite on one simple point…. CAIR is a front group for HAMAS. It was named as an un-indicted co-conspirator in a terrorism case that lead to 108 convictions of funneling $12 million to HAMAS. Because of the evidence produced in that case, the FBI severed all ties with them. This same CAIR, by their own admission, is trying to place people inside the offices of members of Congress who deal with national security issues (judiciary, homeland security and intelligence committees). I serve on one of those committees, Intelligence, am the co-chairwoman of the House Anti-Terrorism Caucus, and have spent the better part of the last four years working every day on terrorism related issues.

If we Americans fail to set aside our political, religious and ideological differences and unite when we encounter the enemy in such stark and plain terms, then God help us.

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Permalink Reply by James Williams on November 4, 2009 at 2:44pm

Israeli naval force intercepts Iranian weapon ship
4 Nov 2009
A special Israel Navy force intercepted and boarded a ship 100 miles off the coast of Israel. The ship, carrying the flag of Antigua, was carrying weapons under civilian disguise.




Weapon carrying ship intercepted by naval force in Ashdod port (Photo: Reuters)



On Tuesday (November 3, 2009) a special naval force detained and boarded a merchant ship carrying the flag of Antigua about 100 miles west of the coast of Israel.

Following an initial inspection, which determined that it was carrying a significant amount of weapons disguised as civilian cargo, the weapons-loaded ship was directed to an Israeli port so as to enable further searches on board and a detailed inspection of the cargo.

The IDF Spokesperson said that after the ship was boarded and checked, it was taken into Israel to conduct a detailed inspection of the cargo.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak praised the IDF for their outstanding effort in combating weapon smuggling. "This is another success in the struggle against attempts to smuggle weapons by terrorist organizations who threaten the security of Israel" he said.

It should be emphasized that IDF forces and the Israel Navy conduct routine intensive operations for security purposes, in order to combat terror and to prevent arms smuggling on various fronts, and the seizure of the ship was carried out as part of this ongoing routine activity.

The largest ship intercepted by Navy forces was the Karine A vessel in 2002. The vessel carried tons of weapons from Iran intended to reach the Gaza Strip.

Since the conclusion of the Second Lebanon War, Iran has intensified efforts to establish itself as the leader of the radical axis. These efforts are manifested in ongoing, wide-scale weapon transfers to Syria, Hizbullah and Hamas, as well as financial assistance, training and more. By providing hostile factions with these weapons, Iran substantially enhances their capabilities, improving their arsenals both qualitatively and quantitatively.

The Quds Force, which is affiliated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, is responsible for Iran's international operations. The force, which answers directly to the Iranian leader, has developed numerous methods of transferring weapons and supplies, relying on aerial, naval and ground channels.

* * *

President Peres stated: "The IDF today successfully intercepted a ship that was apparently en route from Iran to Syria and Hizbullah. Although all the parties deny it, the entire world is today witness to the wide gap between what Syria and Iran say and what they in fact do. The actions of Iran and Syria contradict all international law. Both Iran and Syria are continuously arming the terrorist organizations, first and foremost Hizbullah and Hamas, and are clearly working to undermine peace in the Middle East. The interception of the arms ship is of the highest importance in military terms, but also has political importance. No one can argue with facts. This is an important achievement for the army and for the entire State of Israel."


Background:

1. Events in which Iranian attempts to smuggle arms have been uncovered

December 2001 - The Karine A vessel, loaded with weapons in Iran, bound for the Gaza Strip, sailed in the direction of Egypt with the intention of unloading its cargo in Egypt. Small fishing boats were meant to pick up the cargo and deliver it to the Gaza Strip. The ship, loaded with rockets, anti-tank rockets, and light arms, was seized on January 3, 2002 by Israeli naval commandos.


Weapons taken from the Karin A vessel (Photo: IDF Spokesman)

December 2003 - January 2004 - The Iranian Revolutionary Guard directed an aerial convoy to transfer weapons and supplies to Hizbullah via Syria. The aerial convoys were disguised as humanitarian aid intended for those injured in an earthquake in Bam, a city in southern Iran. The Iranians took advantage of the open airspace by trying to smuggle weapons to Hizbullah while humanitarian aid flights were landing in Iran from all over the world.

May 2007 - An Iranian train carrying arms (mortar shells, light arms, rocket launchers and ammunition) was uncovered in Turkey. The arms were destined for Hizbullah. The Iranians attempted to conceal and disguise the arms in order to avoid suspicion by the Turkish authorities.

January 2009 - An arms shipment sent by Iran was intercepted and seized in Cyprus after it was found on the Cypriot vessel Monchegorsk which had been leased by the Iranian Irisl shipping company. The cargo was found to include tank, artillery and mortar shells as well as materials to be used for producing rockets.


Cypriot vessel Monchegorsk (Photo: IDF Spokesman)

October 2009 -The Hansa India, which sailed from Iran flying a German flag was due to unload a cargo of eight containers in Egypt. Following warnings from the German authorities the vessel was not unloaded and continued to Malta where it was seized and found to be carrying bullets and industrial material intended for the production of weapons, seemingly bound for Syria.


The Hansa India-seized in Malta (Photo: IDF Spokesperson)



2. UN Resolutions limiting Iranian export and arms trade

Excerpts from original text

UN Security Council Resolution 1737 (December 23, 2006):
"Decides that Iran shall not export any of the items in documents S/2006/814 and S/2006/815 and that all Member States shall prohibit the procurement of such items from Iran by their nationals, or using their flag vessels or aircraft, and whether or not originating in the territory of Iran."

UN Security Council Resolution 1747 (March 24, 2007):
"Decides that Iran shall not supply, sell or transfer directly or indirectly from its territory or by its nationals or using its flag vessels or aircraft any arms or related material, and that all States shall prohibit the procurement of such items from Iran by their nationals, or using their flag vessels or aircraft, and whether or not originating in the territory of Iran."

UN Security Council Resolution 1803 (March 24, 2008)
"Calls upon all States, in accordance with their national legal authorities and legislation and consistent with international law, in particular the law of the sea and relevant international civil aviation agreements, to inspect the cargoes to and from Iran of aircraft and vessels, at their airports and seaports, owned or operated by Iran Air Cargo and Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines, provided there are reasonable grounds to believe that the aircraft or vessel is transporting goods prohibited under this resolution or resolution 1737 (2006) or resolutions 1747 (2007);"

UN Security Council Resolution 1835 (September 27, 2008)
"Reaffirms the statement of its President, S/PRST/2006/15, of 29 March, and its resolution 1696 (2006) of 31 July 2006, its resolution 1737 (2006) of 23 December 2006, its resolution 1747 (2007) of 24 March 2007, and its resolution 1803 (2008) of 3 March 2008…"

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