Between slimy, opportunistic politicians and the social parriahs in the LGBT lobby, ratings hungry day time talk show hosts and a slew of District Attorneys with nothing better to do then criminalize what is an unescapable aspect of growing up-- you would think bullying never existed or mattered until this past month.
Rather than focusing the obvious and prominent role that technology has played in the recent rash of teen suicides due to "bullying", "teasing" or kids just being mean to one another, everyone has tried to turn the tragic and untimely deaths of several young people into a victimization crusade. A few weeks ago talk show host Ellen Degeneres had her male doppleganger Anderson Cooper as a guest on her show for what was one of the most cringe inducing back and forths I have ever witnessed on television. Between Cooper lamenting over the unfortunate and horribly offensive practice of kids calling eachother "fags" in casual conversation (even if there is no intended malice to make light of ones sexual orientation)and Ellen suggesting that all children be forced to take mandatory sensitivity classes that should be graded in the same manner as Math or History, my jaw was twitching to run to my blog and go on an insensitive tirade against the entire spectacle. The sissifacation of America began long ago with the cancerous and pathetic PC movement, but this latest venture by the thought police is taking PC to levels that most rodents would find nauseating.
However, before I could write a single word on this mind numbing topic,I became preoccupied with other things and forgot about how pissed off I was.Thankfully, someone in today's Daily News echoed my sentiments precisely. Enjoy-->
Tyler Clementi, Rutgers freshman who committed suicide after gay bullying, could have fought back
By Elie Mystal
Thursday, October 21st 2010, 4:00 AM
In the wake of the suicide of Tyler Clementi (above) - the Rutgers student who jumped off the George Washington Bridge after his gay hookup was broadcast on the Web by his roommate - there's been a lot of talk about the proper punishment for bullies.
We need tougher laws against mean behavior, many people say. Some have gone so far as to argue that we should throw kids into jail for bullying each other, especially if the tormentors are making fun of a kid's sexual orientation.
If we don't soon have stricter punishment of bullies and more institutional control over mean schoolchildren, the argument goes, we'll see more hurt teenagers taking their own lives.
This argument is well meaning but ultimately dangerous. Victimization logic hobbles young people - gay or otherwise - and helps no one. Instead of telling our kids that they need to keep their heads held high and stand up for themselves, we're telling them to run to the justice system whenever somebody insults them with an "ouchy" word.
If they had set the "Karate Kid" remake in America, Mr. Miyagi would have been a trial lawyer who taught Daniel-san how to sue Cobra Kai into bankruptcy.
We need to teach kids effective coping mechanisms to deal with embarrassment and humiliation - perhaps even to, dare I say, fight back - instead of fostering a culture of hurt feelings and massive overreactions.
If anything, gay youths need these self-reliant coping mechanisms more than their friends. Because sadly, far too often, gay kids can't run home to their (homophobic, idiot) parents or their (overworked, desensitized) schoolteachers.
And those calling for tougher official punishment are missing another point. These suicides aren't the result of a few mean kids who just now decided it'd be fun to torment gay peers. They're the symptom of a complex youth culture obsessed with its own navel and how many friends "like" their latest Facebook status update. Throwing a few mean kids in jail isn't going to change that culture one bit.
What's going to change it are more and more vulnerable kids who start standing up to the jerks.
Because, news flash, kids are mean. Brutally mean. Have you ever actually sat and listened to one who hasn't been sanitized by the good people at Disney? Yes, they will make fun of the gay kid. Also on their "hit list": the effeminate kid, the dumb jock, the easy girl, the prudish girl, the fat kid, the thin kid, the smart kid, the developmentally disabled kid, the poor kid, the rich ponce, the kid who is so dark other black kids make fun of him, the kid who is so pale he gets sunburned if he comes out to play.
They'll make fun of me, they'll make fun of you - and then they'll get to our mothers.
Are we going to throw them all in jail? Or only the ones whose victims commit suicide?
In my neighborhood in Queens, if somebody made fun of you, you gave as good as you got. Or you punched the kid in the mouth. That's right, there was a time when standing up for yourself solved many schoolyard problems. And if you tell me that standing up for yourself is the exclusive province of "macho" straight males, I'll invite you over to hang out with some of my gay friends and my wife and her buddies so you can learn something about the world you live in.
I'm not saying poor Tyler Clementi isn't to be mourned. To the contrary, and the kids who mistreated him are miscreants. But we don't throw every miscreant in jail. If we want fewer young people to follow in Tyler's footsteps, we ought to spend much less time passing laws and incarcerating mean schoolkids and much more time teaching their targets how to deal with it.
If you are being bullied, laugh it off, ignore it or fight back. Just don't kill yourself. Whatever you are going through, it's entirely survivable.
Mystal is an editor at Above the Law, a legal blog.
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2010/10/21/2010-10-21_tyler_clementi_rutgers_freshman_who_committed_suicide_after_gay_bullying_could_h.html#ixzz13116SERv
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Monday, September 20, 2010
THE MAJORITY OF THE MUSLIM WORLD DOES NOT AGREE WITH THE GZ MOSQUE
Amazing how Rauf claimed that not building the Mosque would be a threat to national security--
Islam’s Encounters With America
A survey by Elaph, the most respected electronic daily in the Arab world, saw 58% object to the building of the WTC mosque.
OPINION SEPTEMBER 20, 2010
By FOUAD AJAMI
From his recent travels to the Persian Gulf—sponsored and paid for by the State Department—Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf returned with a none-too-subtle threat. His project, the Ground Zero Mosque, would have to go on. Its cancellation would risk putting “our soldiers, our troops, our embassies and citizens under attack in the Muslim world.”
Leave aside the attempt to make this project a matter of national security. The self-appointed bridge between America and the Arab-Islamic world is a false witness to the sentiments in Islamic lands.
The truth is that the trajectory of Islam in America (and Europe for that matter) is at variance with the play of things in Islam’s main habitat. A survey by Elaph, the most respected electronic daily in the Arab world, gave a decided edge to those who objected to the building of this mosque—58% saw it as a project of folly.
Elaph was at it again in the aftermath of Pastor Terry Jones’s threat to burn copies of the Quran: It queried its readers as to whether America was a “tolerant” or a “bigoted” society. The split was 63% to 37% in favor of those who accepted the good faith and pluralism of this country.
This is remarkable. The ground burned in the Arab-Islamic world over the last three decades. Sly preachers and their foot soldiers “weaponized” the faith and all but devoured what modernists had tried to build in the face of difficult odds. The fury has not burned out. Self-styled imams continue to issue fatwas that have made it all but impossible for Arabs and Muslims to partake of the modern world. But from this ruinous history, there has settled upon countless Muslims and Arabs the recognition that the wells are poisoned in their midst, that the faith has to be reined in or that the faith will kill, and that the economic and cultural prospects of modern Islam hang in the balance.
To this kind of sobriety, Muslim activists and preachers in the diaspora—in Patterson, N.J., and Minneapolis, in Copenhagen and Amsterdam—appear to be largely indifferent. They are forever on the look-out for the smallest slight.
Islam in America is of recent vintage. This country can’t be “Islamic.” Its foundations are deep in the Puritan religious tradition. The waves of immigrants who came to these shores understood the need for discretion, and for patience.
It wasn't belligerence that carried the Catholics and the Jews into the great American mainstream. It was the swarm of daily life—the grocery store, the assembly line, the garment industry, the public schools, and the big wars that knit the American communities together—and tore down the religious and ethnic barriers.
There is no gain to be had, no hearts and minds to be won, in Imam Rauf insisting that Ground Zero can't be hallowed ground because there is a strip joint and an off-track betting office nearby. This may be true, but it is irrelevant.
A terrible deed took place on that ground nine years ago. Nineteen young Arabs brought death and ruin onto American soil, and discretion has a place of pride in the way the aftermath is handled. "Islam" didn't commit these crimes, but young Arabs and Muslims did.
There is no use for the incantation that Islam is a religion of peace. The incantation is false; Islam, like other religions, is theologically a religion of war and a religion of peace. In our time, it is a religion in distress, fought over, hijacked at times, by a militant breed at war with the modern world.
Again, from Elaph, here are the thoughts of an Arab writer, Ahmed Abu Mattar, who sees through the militancy of the religious radicals. He dismisses outright the anger over the "foolish and deranged" Pastor Terry Jones who threatened to burn copies of the Quran. "Where is the anger in the face of dictatorships which dominate the lives of Arabs from the cradle to the grave? Would the Prophet Muhammad look with favor on the prisons in our midst which outnumber the universities and hospitals? Would he take comfort in the rate of illiteracy among the Arabs which exceeds 60%? Would he be satisfied with the backwardness that renders us a burden on other nations?"
The first Arabs who came to America arrived during the time of the Great Migration (1880-1920). Their story is told by Gregory Orfalea in his book, "The Arab Americans: A History" (2006). The pioneers were mostly Christians on the run from the hunger and the privations of a dying Ottoman empire. One such pioneer who fled Lebanon for America said he wanted to leave his homeland and "go to the land of justice." Ellis Island was fondly named bayt al-hurriya (the house of freedom). It was New York, in the larger neighborhood of Wall Street, that was the first home of the immigrants.
Restrictive quotas and the Great Depression reduced the migration to a trickle. This would change drastically in the 1950s and '60s. The time of Islam in America had begun.
It was in 1965, Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf tells us, that he made his way to America as a young man. He and a vast migration would be here as American identity would undergo a drastic metamorphosis.
The prudence of days past was now a distant memory. These activists who came in the 1990s—the time of multiculturalism and of what the late Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called the "disuniting of America"—would insist on a full-scale revision of the American creed. American liberalism had broken with American patriotism, and the self-styled activists would give themselves over to a militancy that would have shocked their forerunners. It is out of that larger history that this project at Ground Zero is born.
There is a great Arab and Islamic tale. It happened in the early years of Islam, but it speaks to this controversy. It took place in A.D. 638, the time of Islam's triumphs.
The second successor to the Prophet, the Caliph Omar—to orthodox Muslims the most revered of the four Guided Caliphs for the great conquests that took place during his reign—had come to Jerusalem to accept the city's surrender. Patriarch Sophronius, the city's chief magistrate, is by his side for the ceremony of surrender. Prayer time comes for Omar while the patriarch is showing him the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
The conqueror asks where he could spread out his prayer rug. Sophronius tells him that he could stay where he was. Omar refuses, because his followers, he said, might then claim for Islam the holy shrine of the Christians. Omar stepped outside for his prayer.
We don't always assert all the "rights" that we can get away with. The faith is honored when the faith bends to necessity and discretion.
Mr. Ajami is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Islam’s Encounters With America
A survey by Elaph, the most respected electronic daily in the Arab world, saw 58% object to the building of the WTC mosque.
OPINION SEPTEMBER 20, 2010
By FOUAD AJAMI
From his recent travels to the Persian Gulf—sponsored and paid for by the State Department—Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf returned with a none-too-subtle threat. His project, the Ground Zero Mosque, would have to go on. Its cancellation would risk putting “our soldiers, our troops, our embassies and citizens under attack in the Muslim world.”
Leave aside the attempt to make this project a matter of national security. The self-appointed bridge between America and the Arab-Islamic world is a false witness to the sentiments in Islamic lands.
The truth is that the trajectory of Islam in America (and Europe for that matter) is at variance with the play of things in Islam’s main habitat. A survey by Elaph, the most respected electronic daily in the Arab world, gave a decided edge to those who objected to the building of this mosque—58% saw it as a project of folly.
Elaph was at it again in the aftermath of Pastor Terry Jones’s threat to burn copies of the Quran: It queried its readers as to whether America was a “tolerant” or a “bigoted” society. The split was 63% to 37% in favor of those who accepted the good faith and pluralism of this country.
This is remarkable. The ground burned in the Arab-Islamic world over the last three decades. Sly preachers and their foot soldiers “weaponized” the faith and all but devoured what modernists had tried to build in the face of difficult odds. The fury has not burned out. Self-styled imams continue to issue fatwas that have made it all but impossible for Arabs and Muslims to partake of the modern world. But from this ruinous history, there has settled upon countless Muslims and Arabs the recognition that the wells are poisoned in their midst, that the faith has to be reined in or that the faith will kill, and that the economic and cultural prospects of modern Islam hang in the balance.
To this kind of sobriety, Muslim activists and preachers in the diaspora—in Patterson, N.J., and Minneapolis, in Copenhagen and Amsterdam—appear to be largely indifferent. They are forever on the look-out for the smallest slight.
Islam in America is of recent vintage. This country can’t be “Islamic.” Its foundations are deep in the Puritan religious tradition. The waves of immigrants who came to these shores understood the need for discretion, and for patience.
It wasn't belligerence that carried the Catholics and the Jews into the great American mainstream. It was the swarm of daily life—the grocery store, the assembly line, the garment industry, the public schools, and the big wars that knit the American communities together—and tore down the religious and ethnic barriers.
There is no gain to be had, no hearts and minds to be won, in Imam Rauf insisting that Ground Zero can't be hallowed ground because there is a strip joint and an off-track betting office nearby. This may be true, but it is irrelevant.
A terrible deed took place on that ground nine years ago. Nineteen young Arabs brought death and ruin onto American soil, and discretion has a place of pride in the way the aftermath is handled. "Islam" didn't commit these crimes, but young Arabs and Muslims did.
There is no use for the incantation that Islam is a religion of peace. The incantation is false; Islam, like other religions, is theologically a religion of war and a religion of peace. In our time, it is a religion in distress, fought over, hijacked at times, by a militant breed at war with the modern world.
Again, from Elaph, here are the thoughts of an Arab writer, Ahmed Abu Mattar, who sees through the militancy of the religious radicals. He dismisses outright the anger over the "foolish and deranged" Pastor Terry Jones who threatened to burn copies of the Quran. "Where is the anger in the face of dictatorships which dominate the lives of Arabs from the cradle to the grave? Would the Prophet Muhammad look with favor on the prisons in our midst which outnumber the universities and hospitals? Would he take comfort in the rate of illiteracy among the Arabs which exceeds 60%? Would he be satisfied with the backwardness that renders us a burden on other nations?"
The first Arabs who came to America arrived during the time of the Great Migration (1880-1920). Their story is told by Gregory Orfalea in his book, "The Arab Americans: A History" (2006). The pioneers were mostly Christians on the run from the hunger and the privations of a dying Ottoman empire. One such pioneer who fled Lebanon for America said he wanted to leave his homeland and "go to the land of justice." Ellis Island was fondly named bayt al-hurriya (the house of freedom). It was New York, in the larger neighborhood of Wall Street, that was the first home of the immigrants.
Restrictive quotas and the Great Depression reduced the migration to a trickle. This would change drastically in the 1950s and '60s. The time of Islam in America had begun.
It was in 1965, Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf tells us, that he made his way to America as a young man. He and a vast migration would be here as American identity would undergo a drastic metamorphosis.
The prudence of days past was now a distant memory. These activists who came in the 1990s—the time of multiculturalism and of what the late Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called the "disuniting of America"—would insist on a full-scale revision of the American creed. American liberalism had broken with American patriotism, and the self-styled activists would give themselves over to a militancy that would have shocked their forerunners. It is out of that larger history that this project at Ground Zero is born.
There is a great Arab and Islamic tale. It happened in the early years of Islam, but it speaks to this controversy. It took place in A.D. 638, the time of Islam's triumphs.
The second successor to the Prophet, the Caliph Omar—to orthodox Muslims the most revered of the four Guided Caliphs for the great conquests that took place during his reign—had come to Jerusalem to accept the city's surrender. Patriarch Sophronius, the city's chief magistrate, is by his side for the ceremony of surrender. Prayer time comes for Omar while the patriarch is showing him the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
The conqueror asks where he could spread out his prayer rug. Sophronius tells him that he could stay where he was. Omar refuses, because his followers, he said, might then claim for Islam the holy shrine of the Christians. Omar stepped outside for his prayer.
We don't always assert all the "rights" that we can get away with. The faith is honored when the faith bends to necessity and discretion.
Mr. Ajami is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Friday, September 10, 2010
My thoughts on the Koran Burning Saga
In the South Park episode that aired a couple of years ago entitled "Cartoon Wars", Eric Cartman comes up with a devious plan to have the television show Family Guy taken off the air. When the Fox network considers pulling a Family Guy episode that features an inoffensive and completely benign image of Mohammad, the normally racist, sexist, divisive and at times unapologetically evil Cartman suddenly develops an overwhelming sense of respect for Islam and launches a personal crusade to have the Family Guy episode pulled. In the name of religious tolerance, Cartman highlights the violence that might ensue should Fox decide to air the episode uncensored. All of a sudden, Cartman magically transforms from neanderthal to neo progressive without missing a beat. The other main characters, especially Cartmans nemesis Kyle, are opposed to Cartmans hypersensitive moral mission at first, but are eventually duped into believing that Cartmans sudden epiphany of religious reverence and concern for the safety of others is legitimate.
Toward the end of the first part of "Cartoon Wars" Cartman inadvertently reveals his true intentions to Kyle. He doesn't care about Muslims, or the safety of Americans, or offending people-- he just wants a television show that he hates to be taken off the air (no arguments there, family guy sucks). Cartman's rationale is that once an episode is pulled, the show will eventually be cancelled. Once a TV network can be coerced or threatened into censoring a single episode, Pandora's box is irrerversably opened and the network can be intimidated into pulling or censoring any or all future episodes for any reason imaginable. South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone have a knack for delivering the most sane and coherent points of view on all relevant social and political issues currently taking place in this country with the acute marksmanship of a sniper. In the end, Kyle thwarts Cartmans attempt to have the episode of Family Guy showing Mohammad taken off of the air and life goes on. Kyle reminds everyone that freedom of speech is a bedrock principle that America was founded on and that it is either something to be treasured, valued and exercised without fear of violence or reprisal-- or it should be eliminated completely. Giving into fear allows the terrorists to win, and at the end of the day if we give in once, we might as well give up America. In a truly free society, either everything is fair game or nothing is.
I bring up South Park as a prelude to the Koran burning controversy for two reasons. In the first place, Parker and Stone were recently the targets of ridicule in the Muslim world for attempting to release an episode showing an image of Mohammad. As in Cartoon Wars, the image was totally inoffensive. However, Comedy Central pulled the episode amid threats of violence. What I find comical about this recent development is actually two fold. First, this is a classic example of life imitating art and vice versa. Second, ONLY MUSLIMS ARE FORBIDDEN TO SHOW IMAGES OF MOHAMMAD. The Koran says nothing about non-Muslims creating images of Mohammad (not that anyone bothered to pay attention; they were too busy hiding in a pool of their own urine). Apparently, most Muslims are illiterate or have never read the Koran.
Secondly, there is a clear parallel at work here that I can't imagine only struck me as an incredible revelation. If you wanted to diminish any strong entity, albeit a television network, publicly traded corporation or in this case the most powerful country on earth-- what would be the easiest and smartest way to go about it? Would you directly confront the giant and attempt to match its might? Of course not. You bring down a giant by destroying its mystique and by causing the supremely confident giant to question itself and lose faith in the armor of infallibility. This is not done through direct confrontation. The much smarter and easier thing to do is to attack the IDEA of the giant. If you can call into question the giants very reason for being, you can destroy the giant with a little bit of persistence and minimal effort. The giant, comfortable and complacent, is not used to any real engagement anyway, because in recent history it has had so little to fight for. So, when faced with a challenge to its authority and autonomy that has nothing to do with the things it easily wields in its control like leaves on a tree- Money, brute force, power, influence—the giant begins to panic. If the enemy can’t be bought or merely crushed like a bug, what then? Now the giant begins to cower—it can’t lose face because once in a position of weakness, others will rise to take the giants place. So what does the giant do? It abandons the idea that it is a giant and appeases the challenger to its supremacy in order to maintain the illusion of safety. All the while, the giant pats itself on the back for thwarting a potential parade of horribles—The What If scenarios abound in a smug exercise of self congratulatory delusion. The giant reassures itself that it has risen above its illogical enemy and that it has proven as much through a sacrificial exercise of benevolent self restraint. Victory has been achieved because the giant avoided conflict. Like a champion prizefighter who retains his belt because he avoids the defense of his title, the giant convinces himself that the balance of power is left undisturbed.
But what of the challenger? The challenger now becomes emboldened. Seeing that the giant has no stomach to fight and no will to maintain his superiority beyond superficial displays that demonstrate a monumental lack of courage and conviction, the challenger follows the same formula again. Agitate, threaten, demand and escalate tensions while asking for sympathy and understanding at the same time. The idea always remains the same, but the issue of contention being used to attack the giants’ spirit will change. Sure enough, the same predictable outcome is reached. Little by little, bit by bit the giant can’t see what is happening. By fighting not to lose instead of fighting to win, the giant is too far removed to see his reflection below. Too vain and short sided to risk being viewed as unpopular; the giant’s very survival is now threatened. What started off as a harmless appeasement to avoid a prolonged struggle against an unworthy and undignified adversary has now mushroomed into an all consuming cloud of doubt, cowardice and at long last, instability.
Symbolism and imagery aside, my little foray into cartoons and ideological combat is meant to bring the Koran burning drama into proper perspective. I personally do not think that burning books is an effective way to bring attention to the world’s greatest threat against all of secular and civilized society. However, Terry Jones has the right to burn as many Korans as he can get his hands on. It is his RIGHT to do so under the Constitution of the United States. He is free to decide how to express himself politically, religiously or otherwise and his followers are free to do the same. Cross burning is protected speech. Flag burning is protected speech. Pornography is protected speech. He is a private citizen with a congregation of about 50 families in a sparsely populated area of Florida. Quite frankly, I don’t care what he does or how he does it. When I first heard about his plan to burn Koran’s on 911, I was against it—not because I care one iota about offending Muslims, but because it seemed like an immature way to highlight a serious problem and that inevitably, the main stream media would ignore the message and instead focus on the means of delivering that message. But now, after the whole world has taken notice of this crackpot Preacher with next to no followers, I adamantly support his publicity stunt. I am absolutely incensed that the Obama administration has spoken out against this man. Now, we are going to let what Islamic fanatics might do dictate whether or not we exercise our constitutional rights?! This is madness and insanity on levels that I didn’t think I would ever live to see in my country. The underlying message being promoted via the garbage coming out of the Obama administrations mouth is simple—give up your rights when violent barbarians on the other side of the world say so and when threatened with violence, cower and comply with the demands of the violent barbarians in the name of tolerance. In the end, what happens? THE TERRORISTS WIN. First it was cartoons, now private citizens can’t engage in freedom of speech, next time, what will these animals demand of us and how fast should we throw the constitution in the garbage to meet their demands?
The Islamist terror movement is doing exactly what Eric Cartman did in the South Park episode “Cartoon Wars”. At the outset of the episode, Kyle was behaving like most American liberals do—deluded and brainwashed into believing that Cartman and by extension the global Islamic fundamentalist (and their propaganda wing in the Council of American Islamic Relations) movement is genuinely concerned about the Koran burnings because they fear for the safety of American soldiers and citizens and that efforts should be made to prevent the exercise of free speech in the name of tolerance. I am hoping that this country finally wakes up and is struck by a lightning bolt of awareness in the same fashion that Kyle does toward the end of “Cartoon Wars”. All of the evidence is in plain view. Hopefully, this unpleasant realization will be made without the prerequisite of a nationally televised confession from the figure heads of the Islamist movement. Because unlike the confession Cartman makes to Kyle in “Cartoon Wars” that reveals the truth with plenty of time left in the episode for Kyle to save the day, real life is never as scripted or merciful.
The devious minds at work behind the violent struggle to falsely portray Islam as a peaceful religion and to elevate Islam beyond the reach of our Constitution are gaining ground right now, every day, right in front of our eyes. Every inch we give them plunges America deeper and deeper into the opiates of complacency, self delusion and willful blindness. The foundational principles that this country was built upon should never waiver, accommodate or falter under any circumstances, for any person or persons or for any reason. America is an idea, the end result of a dream conjured up by great minds that agreed certain aspects of our lives are beyond government control. To dilute or compromise the basic aspects of American life because of the potential consequences destroys everything that this country stands for and relegates America to the same status as the tyrant regimes that hundreds of thousands of American lives have been sacrificed to defeat.
My final thought involves how the Ground Zero Mosque ties in with the Koran Burning controversy. Does anyone else find it infuriating and hypocritical that Obama and his staff of spineless chumps want freedom of speech to take a backseat to the demands of Islamist extremism because America doesn’t want to offend Muslims, yet the Ground Zero Mosque which is 100 times more offensive, outrageous and incendiary to AMERICANS than burning some pieces of paper is defended tooth and nail? I suppose that we should pay close attention to our Islamic brethren. They have figured out how to make the giant bend to its will. Perhaps some violent protesting, the murder of innocent people and some other acts of destruction and brutality will prompt the United States government to be concerned with ( WAIT FOR IT)-----GASPPPPPPP---- THE DEMANDS OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.
Toward the end of the first part of "Cartoon Wars" Cartman inadvertently reveals his true intentions to Kyle. He doesn't care about Muslims, or the safety of Americans, or offending people-- he just wants a television show that he hates to be taken off the air (no arguments there, family guy sucks). Cartman's rationale is that once an episode is pulled, the show will eventually be cancelled. Once a TV network can be coerced or threatened into censoring a single episode, Pandora's box is irrerversably opened and the network can be intimidated into pulling or censoring any or all future episodes for any reason imaginable. South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone have a knack for delivering the most sane and coherent points of view on all relevant social and political issues currently taking place in this country with the acute marksmanship of a sniper. In the end, Kyle thwarts Cartmans attempt to have the episode of Family Guy showing Mohammad taken off of the air and life goes on. Kyle reminds everyone that freedom of speech is a bedrock principle that America was founded on and that it is either something to be treasured, valued and exercised without fear of violence or reprisal-- or it should be eliminated completely. Giving into fear allows the terrorists to win, and at the end of the day if we give in once, we might as well give up America. In a truly free society, either everything is fair game or nothing is.
I bring up South Park as a prelude to the Koran burning controversy for two reasons. In the first place, Parker and Stone were recently the targets of ridicule in the Muslim world for attempting to release an episode showing an image of Mohammad. As in Cartoon Wars, the image was totally inoffensive. However, Comedy Central pulled the episode amid threats of violence. What I find comical about this recent development is actually two fold. First, this is a classic example of life imitating art and vice versa. Second, ONLY MUSLIMS ARE FORBIDDEN TO SHOW IMAGES OF MOHAMMAD. The Koran says nothing about non-Muslims creating images of Mohammad (not that anyone bothered to pay attention; they were too busy hiding in a pool of their own urine). Apparently, most Muslims are illiterate or have never read the Koran.
Secondly, there is a clear parallel at work here that I can't imagine only struck me as an incredible revelation. If you wanted to diminish any strong entity, albeit a television network, publicly traded corporation or in this case the most powerful country on earth-- what would be the easiest and smartest way to go about it? Would you directly confront the giant and attempt to match its might? Of course not. You bring down a giant by destroying its mystique and by causing the supremely confident giant to question itself and lose faith in the armor of infallibility. This is not done through direct confrontation. The much smarter and easier thing to do is to attack the IDEA of the giant. If you can call into question the giants very reason for being, you can destroy the giant with a little bit of persistence and minimal effort. The giant, comfortable and complacent, is not used to any real engagement anyway, because in recent history it has had so little to fight for. So, when faced with a challenge to its authority and autonomy that has nothing to do with the things it easily wields in its control like leaves on a tree- Money, brute force, power, influence—the giant begins to panic. If the enemy can’t be bought or merely crushed like a bug, what then? Now the giant begins to cower—it can’t lose face because once in a position of weakness, others will rise to take the giants place. So what does the giant do? It abandons the idea that it is a giant and appeases the challenger to its supremacy in order to maintain the illusion of safety. All the while, the giant pats itself on the back for thwarting a potential parade of horribles—The What If scenarios abound in a smug exercise of self congratulatory delusion. The giant reassures itself that it has risen above its illogical enemy and that it has proven as much through a sacrificial exercise of benevolent self restraint. Victory has been achieved because the giant avoided conflict. Like a champion prizefighter who retains his belt because he avoids the defense of his title, the giant convinces himself that the balance of power is left undisturbed.
But what of the challenger? The challenger now becomes emboldened. Seeing that the giant has no stomach to fight and no will to maintain his superiority beyond superficial displays that demonstrate a monumental lack of courage and conviction, the challenger follows the same formula again. Agitate, threaten, demand and escalate tensions while asking for sympathy and understanding at the same time. The idea always remains the same, but the issue of contention being used to attack the giants’ spirit will change. Sure enough, the same predictable outcome is reached. Little by little, bit by bit the giant can’t see what is happening. By fighting not to lose instead of fighting to win, the giant is too far removed to see his reflection below. Too vain and short sided to risk being viewed as unpopular; the giant’s very survival is now threatened. What started off as a harmless appeasement to avoid a prolonged struggle against an unworthy and undignified adversary has now mushroomed into an all consuming cloud of doubt, cowardice and at long last, instability.
Symbolism and imagery aside, my little foray into cartoons and ideological combat is meant to bring the Koran burning drama into proper perspective. I personally do not think that burning books is an effective way to bring attention to the world’s greatest threat against all of secular and civilized society. However, Terry Jones has the right to burn as many Korans as he can get his hands on. It is his RIGHT to do so under the Constitution of the United States. He is free to decide how to express himself politically, religiously or otherwise and his followers are free to do the same. Cross burning is protected speech. Flag burning is protected speech. Pornography is protected speech. He is a private citizen with a congregation of about 50 families in a sparsely populated area of Florida. Quite frankly, I don’t care what he does or how he does it. When I first heard about his plan to burn Koran’s on 911, I was against it—not because I care one iota about offending Muslims, but because it seemed like an immature way to highlight a serious problem and that inevitably, the main stream media would ignore the message and instead focus on the means of delivering that message. But now, after the whole world has taken notice of this crackpot Preacher with next to no followers, I adamantly support his publicity stunt. I am absolutely incensed that the Obama administration has spoken out against this man. Now, we are going to let what Islamic fanatics might do dictate whether or not we exercise our constitutional rights?! This is madness and insanity on levels that I didn’t think I would ever live to see in my country. The underlying message being promoted via the garbage coming out of the Obama administrations mouth is simple—give up your rights when violent barbarians on the other side of the world say so and when threatened with violence, cower and comply with the demands of the violent barbarians in the name of tolerance. In the end, what happens? THE TERRORISTS WIN. First it was cartoons, now private citizens can’t engage in freedom of speech, next time, what will these animals demand of us and how fast should we throw the constitution in the garbage to meet their demands?
The Islamist terror movement is doing exactly what Eric Cartman did in the South Park episode “Cartoon Wars”. At the outset of the episode, Kyle was behaving like most American liberals do—deluded and brainwashed into believing that Cartman and by extension the global Islamic fundamentalist (and their propaganda wing in the Council of American Islamic Relations) movement is genuinely concerned about the Koran burnings because they fear for the safety of American soldiers and citizens and that efforts should be made to prevent the exercise of free speech in the name of tolerance. I am hoping that this country finally wakes up and is struck by a lightning bolt of awareness in the same fashion that Kyle does toward the end of “Cartoon Wars”. All of the evidence is in plain view. Hopefully, this unpleasant realization will be made without the prerequisite of a nationally televised confession from the figure heads of the Islamist movement. Because unlike the confession Cartman makes to Kyle in “Cartoon Wars” that reveals the truth with plenty of time left in the episode for Kyle to save the day, real life is never as scripted or merciful.
The devious minds at work behind the violent struggle to falsely portray Islam as a peaceful religion and to elevate Islam beyond the reach of our Constitution are gaining ground right now, every day, right in front of our eyes. Every inch we give them plunges America deeper and deeper into the opiates of complacency, self delusion and willful blindness. The foundational principles that this country was built upon should never waiver, accommodate or falter under any circumstances, for any person or persons or for any reason. America is an idea, the end result of a dream conjured up by great minds that agreed certain aspects of our lives are beyond government control. To dilute or compromise the basic aspects of American life because of the potential consequences destroys everything that this country stands for and relegates America to the same status as the tyrant regimes that hundreds of thousands of American lives have been sacrificed to defeat.
My final thought involves how the Ground Zero Mosque ties in with the Koran Burning controversy. Does anyone else find it infuriating and hypocritical that Obama and his staff of spineless chumps want freedom of speech to take a backseat to the demands of Islamist extremism because America doesn’t want to offend Muslims, yet the Ground Zero Mosque which is 100 times more offensive, outrageous and incendiary to AMERICANS than burning some pieces of paper is defended tooth and nail? I suppose that we should pay close attention to our Islamic brethren. They have figured out how to make the giant bend to its will. Perhaps some violent protesting, the murder of innocent people and some other acts of destruction and brutality will prompt the United States government to be concerned with ( WAIT FOR IT)-----GASPPPPPPP---- THE DEMANDS OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Another perfect article during the golden age of Conservative Op-ed's
Starting to say 'no'
Demanding truly moderate Islam
By ANDREW C. McCARTHY
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/starting_to_say_no_hUz9VY1Py5KvOgrU36plDL/0#ixzz0z45w6YFQ
A Tectonic shift is in motion: How fitting that its focal point is Ground Zero, the inevitable fault line between Islam and the West.
Only the blink of an eye ago, uttering the unpleasant truth that in terms of doctrine there is no such thing as "moderate Islam" resulted in one's banishment from what our opinion elites like to call the "mainstream," by which they mean the narrow-minded, viciously defended circle of their own pieties and fictions.
You could say it, but your skin had better have an extra coat or two of thick: You were in for a fusillade of rage, the likes of which our candor-phobic elites would never dream of unleashing at our Islamist enemies -- no matter how clearly those enemies announced their intention to destroy us.
The fusillade still comes, but now its blows only glance. The elites and their mainstream have been exposed as frauds: Being on the wrong side of enough 70-30 issues will do that to you.
It should never have gotten this far. Sponsors of the Ground Zero mosque neither own the property in question nor possess the means to build and operate the palatial Islamic center they envision. The more light that shines on their record of murky real-estate dealings and the dubious circumstances of their limited stake in the Ground Zero property, the more questions arise.
In a more sensible world, those questions would get answered before we plunged into a rancorous public debate. That hasn't happened, though. In spite of the implacable determination of the mayor (and the attorney general who would be governor) to look the other way, the issue has galvanized the public. What has long bubbled beneath the surface did not need much more heat to boil over.
For the better part of two decades, Americans have been murdered by Islamists and then lectured that they are to blame for what has befallen them. We have been instructed in the need for special sensitivity to the unceasing demands of Islamic culture and falsely accused of intolerance by the people who wrote the book on intolerance.
Americans have sacrificed blood and bottomless treasure for Islamic peoples who despise Americans -- and despise us even more as our sacrifices and gestures of self-loathing intensify. Americans have watched as apologists for terrorists and sha ria were made the face of an American Muslim community that we were simultaneously assured was the very picture of pro-American moderation.
Americans have had our fill. We are willing to live many lies. This one, though, strikes too close to home, arousing our heretofore dormant sense of decency. Americans have now heard President Obama's shtick enough times to know that when he talks about "our values," he's really talking about his values, which most of us don't share. And after 10 years of the Council on American-Islamic Relations's tired tirades, we're immune to Feisal Rauf, too.
We look around us and we see our country unrivaled by anything in the history of human tolerance. We see thousands of thriving mosques, permitted to operate freely even though we know for a fact that mosques have been used against us, repeatedly, to urge terrorism, recruit terrorists, raise money for terrorists, store and transfer firearms, and inflame Muslims against America and the West.
As Islamists rage against us, we see Islam celebrated in official Washington. As we reach out for the umpty-umpth time, we find Muslim leaders taking what we offer, but always with complaint and never with reciprocation.
We're weary, and we don't really care if that means that Timemagazine, Michael Bloomberg, Katie Couric, Fareed Zakaria and the rest think we're bad people -- they think we're bad people anyway. So finally we're asking: Where is this "moderate Islam" you've been telling us about?
Why would a self-proclaimed bridge-builder insist on something so patently provocative and divisive? How can we be sure that if imam Rauf builds his monument on our graveyard, it won't become what other purportedly "moderate" Islamic centers have become: a cauldron of anti-American vitriol?
It turns out that there are no satisfactory answers. When finally pressed on the taxonomy of moderate Islam, the best our elites can do -- besides shouting "Islamophobia!" -- is debate whether there ever was a "golden age" of Islamic tolerance. They have to confess that the Islamists -- whom they'd like us to see as a handful of "extremists" but who are in truth a mass movement -- are in the ascendancy.
It is embarrassingly obvious that while some of us have been working to defeat Islamism in our midst, our elites are of the incorrigibly progressive mindset that counsels accommodating them -- in the delusion that they will be appeased rather than encouraged to become more aggressive.
That is precisely the mindset that makes an Islamist think: Maybe now is the time for a $100 million mosque at Ground Zero.
"Moderate Islam" is a dream, not a reality. It is a dream with potential -- because there are millions of Muslims who are moderate people, and because there are dedicated Muslims working to transform their faith into something that is institutionally moderate.
But they work against great odds. They confront Islamists whose dedication to theocratic principles is deeply and undeniably rooted in Islamic scripture. And they confront American opinion elites who, wittingly or not, serve as the lifeline of the Islamists.
The reformers' slim chance at prevailing hinges on the American people's will to say "no" to our self-anointed betters. Ground Zero, once again the site of epic Islamist overreach, may be remembered as the place where we started to say "no."
Andrew C. McCarthy is a Na tional Review Institute senior fellow. His latest book is "The Grand Jihad." From nationalreview.com
Demanding truly moderate Islam
By ANDREW C. McCARTHY
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/starting_to_say_no_hUz9VY1Py5KvOgrU36plDL/0#ixzz0z45w6YFQ
A Tectonic shift is in motion: How fitting that its focal point is Ground Zero, the inevitable fault line between Islam and the West.
Only the blink of an eye ago, uttering the unpleasant truth that in terms of doctrine there is no such thing as "moderate Islam" resulted in one's banishment from what our opinion elites like to call the "mainstream," by which they mean the narrow-minded, viciously defended circle of their own pieties and fictions.
You could say it, but your skin had better have an extra coat or two of thick: You were in for a fusillade of rage, the likes of which our candor-phobic elites would never dream of unleashing at our Islamist enemies -- no matter how clearly those enemies announced their intention to destroy us.
The fusillade still comes, but now its blows only glance. The elites and their mainstream have been exposed as frauds: Being on the wrong side of enough 70-30 issues will do that to you.
It should never have gotten this far. Sponsors of the Ground Zero mosque neither own the property in question nor possess the means to build and operate the palatial Islamic center they envision. The more light that shines on their record of murky real-estate dealings and the dubious circumstances of their limited stake in the Ground Zero property, the more questions arise.
In a more sensible world, those questions would get answered before we plunged into a rancorous public debate. That hasn't happened, though. In spite of the implacable determination of the mayor (and the attorney general who would be governor) to look the other way, the issue has galvanized the public. What has long bubbled beneath the surface did not need much more heat to boil over.
For the better part of two decades, Americans have been murdered by Islamists and then lectured that they are to blame for what has befallen them. We have been instructed in the need for special sensitivity to the unceasing demands of Islamic culture and falsely accused of intolerance by the people who wrote the book on intolerance.
Americans have sacrificed blood and bottomless treasure for Islamic peoples who despise Americans -- and despise us even more as our sacrifices and gestures of self-loathing intensify. Americans have watched as apologists for terrorists and sha ria were made the face of an American Muslim community that we were simultaneously assured was the very picture of pro-American moderation.
Americans have had our fill. We are willing to live many lies. This one, though, strikes too close to home, arousing our heretofore dormant sense of decency. Americans have now heard President Obama's shtick enough times to know that when he talks about "our values," he's really talking about his values, which most of us don't share. And after 10 years of the Council on American-Islamic Relations's tired tirades, we're immune to Feisal Rauf, too.
We look around us and we see our country unrivaled by anything in the history of human tolerance. We see thousands of thriving mosques, permitted to operate freely even though we know for a fact that mosques have been used against us, repeatedly, to urge terrorism, recruit terrorists, raise money for terrorists, store and transfer firearms, and inflame Muslims against America and the West.
As Islamists rage against us, we see Islam celebrated in official Washington. As we reach out for the umpty-umpth time, we find Muslim leaders taking what we offer, but always with complaint and never with reciprocation.
We're weary, and we don't really care if that means that Timemagazine, Michael Bloomberg, Katie Couric, Fareed Zakaria and the rest think we're bad people -- they think we're bad people anyway. So finally we're asking: Where is this "moderate Islam" you've been telling us about?
Why would a self-proclaimed bridge-builder insist on something so patently provocative and divisive? How can we be sure that if imam Rauf builds his monument on our graveyard, it won't become what other purportedly "moderate" Islamic centers have become: a cauldron of anti-American vitriol?
It turns out that there are no satisfactory answers. When finally pressed on the taxonomy of moderate Islam, the best our elites can do -- besides shouting "Islamophobia!" -- is debate whether there ever was a "golden age" of Islamic tolerance. They have to confess that the Islamists -- whom they'd like us to see as a handful of "extremists" but who are in truth a mass movement -- are in the ascendancy.
It is embarrassingly obvious that while some of us have been working to defeat Islamism in our midst, our elites are of the incorrigibly progressive mindset that counsels accommodating them -- in the delusion that they will be appeased rather than encouraged to become more aggressive.
That is precisely the mindset that makes an Islamist think: Maybe now is the time for a $100 million mosque at Ground Zero.
"Moderate Islam" is a dream, not a reality. It is a dream with potential -- because there are millions of Muslims who are moderate people, and because there are dedicated Muslims working to transform their faith into something that is institutionally moderate.
But they work against great odds. They confront Islamists whose dedication to theocratic principles is deeply and undeniably rooted in Islamic scripture. And they confront American opinion elites who, wittingly or not, serve as the lifeline of the Islamists.
The reformers' slim chance at prevailing hinges on the American people's will to say "no" to our self-anointed betters. Ground Zero, once again the site of epic Islamist overreach, may be remembered as the place where we started to say "no."
Andrew C. McCarthy is a Na tional Review Institute senior fellow. His latest book is "The Grand Jihad." From nationalreview.com
Dinesh D'Souza makes a brutally shocking insight into the barking Commander and Chief
The best thing about the left falling apart is that there has been what I consider to be a rennisance by conservative columnists. D'Souza has always been a favorite of mine, but he has flown largely under the radar lately except on matters of religion. Here is a terrific article he penned recently about Barack Obama Sr. which may open some eyes and drop some jaws in the process.
Thank you to 33386 from getbig for posting this originally.
On The Cover/Top Stories
How Obama Thinks
Dinesh D'Souza, 09.7.10, 12:00 AM ET
www.forbes.com
________________________ _______________________
Barack Obama is the most antibusiness president in a generation, perhaps in American history. Thanks to him the era of big government is back. Obama runs up taxpayer debt not in the billions but in the trillions. He has expanded the federal government's control over home mortgages, investment banking, health care, autos and energy. The Weekly Standard summarizes Obama's approach as omnipotence at home, impotence abroad.
The President's actions are so bizarre that they mystify his critics and supporters alike. Consider this headline from the Aug. 18, 2009 issue of the Wall Street Journal: "Obama Underwrites Offshore Drilling." Did you read that correctly? You did. The Administration supports offshore drilling--but drilling off the shores of Brazil. With Obama's backing, the U.S. Export-Import Bank offered $2 billion in loans and guarantees to Brazil's state-owned oil company Petrobras to finance exploration in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro--not so the oil ends up in the U.S. He is funding Brazilian exploration so that the oil can stay in Brazil.
More strange behavior: Obama's June 15, 2010 speech in response to the Gulf oil spill focused not on cleanup strategies but rather on the fact that Americans "consume more than 20% of the world's oil but have less than 2% of the world's resources." Obama railed on about "America's century-long addiction to fossil fuels." What does any of this have to do with the oil spill? Would the calamity have been less of a problem if America consumed a mere 10% of the world's resources?
The oddities go on and on. Obama's Administration has declared that even banks that want to repay their bailout money may be refused permission to do so. Only after the Obama team cleared a bank through the Fed's "stress test" was it eligible to give taxpayers their money back. Even then, declared Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, the Administration might force banks to keep the money.
The President continues to push for stimulus even though hundreds of billions of dollars in such funds seem to have done little. The unemployment rate when Obama took office in January 2009 was 7.7%; now it is 9.5%. Yet he wants to spend even more and is determined to foist the entire bill on Americans making $250,000 a year or more. The rich, Obama insists, aren't paying their "fair share." This by itself seems odd given that the top 1% of Americans pay 40% of all federal income taxes; the next 9% of income earners pay another 30%. So the top 10% pays 70% of the taxes; the bottom 40% pays close to nothing. This does indeed seem unfair--to the rich.
Obama's foreign policy is no less strange. He supports a $100 million mosque scheduled to be built near the site where terrorists in the name of Islam brought down the World Trade Center. Obama's rationale, that "our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable," seems utterly irrelevant to the issue of why the proposed Cordoba House should be constructed at Ground Zero.
Recently the London Times reported that the Obama Administration supported the conditional release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber convicted in connection with the deaths of 270 people, mostly Americans. This was an eye-opener because when Scotland released Megrahi from prison and sent him home to Libya in August 2009, the Obama Administration publicly and appropriately complained. The Times, however, obtained a letter the Obama Administration sent to Scotland a week before the event in which it said that releasing Megrahi on "compassionate grounds" was acceptable as long as he was kept in Scotland and would be "far preferable" to sending him back to Libya. Scottish officials interpreted this to mean that U.S. objections to Megrahi's release were "half-hearted." They released him to his home country, where he lives today as a free man.
One more anomaly: A few months ago nasa Chief Charles Bolden announced that from now on the primary mission of America's space agency would be to improve relations with the Muslim world. Come again? Bolden said he got the word directly from the President. "He wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science and math and engineering." Bolden added that the International Space Station was a model for nasa's future, since it was not just a U.S. operation but included the Russians and the Chinese. Obama's redirection of the agency caused consternation among former astronauts like Neil Armstrong and John Glenn, and even among the President's supporters: Most people think of nasa's job as one of landing on the moon and Mars and exploring other faraway destinations. Sure, we are for Islamic self-esteem, but what on earth was Obama up to here?
Theories abound to explain the President's goals and actions. Critics in the business community--including some Obama voters who now have buyer's remorse--tend to focus on two main themes. The first is that Obama is clueless about business. The second is that Obama is a socialist--not an out-and-out Marxist, but something of a European-style socialist, with a penchant for leveling and government redistribution.
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These theories aren't wrong so much as they are inadequate. Even if they could account for Obama's domestic policy, they cannot explain his foreign policy. The real problem with Obama is worse--much worse. But we have been blinded to his real agenda because, across the political spectrum, we all seek to fit him into some version of American history. In the process, we ignore Obama's own history. Here is a man who spent his formative years--the first 17 years of his life--off the American mainland, in Hawaii, Indonesia and Pakistan, with multiple subsequent journeys to Africa.
A good way to discern what motivates Obama is to ask a simple question: What is his dream? Is it the American dream? Is it Martin Luther King's dream? Or something else?
It is certainly not the American dream as conceived by the founders. They believed the nation was a "new order for the ages." A half-century later Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of America as creating "a distinct species of mankind." This is known as American exceptionalism. But when asked at a 2009 press conference whether he believed in this ideal, Obama said no. America, he suggested, is no more unique or exceptional than Britain or Greece or any other country.
Perhaps, then, Obama shares Martin Luther King's dream of a color-blind society. The President has benefited from that dream; he campaigned as a nonracial candidate, and many Americans voted for him because he represents the color-blind ideal. Even so, King's dream is not Obama's: The President never champions the idea of color-blindness or race-neutrality. This inaction is not merely tactical; the race issue simply isn't what drives Obama.
What then is Obama's dream? We don't have to speculate because the President tells us himself in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father. According to Obama, his dream is his father's dream. Notice that his title is not Dreams of My Father but rather Dreams from My Father. Obama isn't writing about his father's dreams; he is writing about the dreams he received from his father.
So who was Barack Obama Sr.? He was a Luo tribesman who grew up in Kenya and studied at Harvard. He was a polygamist who had, over the course of his lifetime, four wives and eight children. One of his sons, Mark Obama, has accused him of abuse and wife-beating. He was also a regular drunk driver who got into numerous accidents, killing a man in one and causing his own legs to be amputated due to injury in another. In 1982 he got drunk at a bar in Nairobi and drove into a tree, killing himself.
An odd choice, certainly, as an inspirational hero. But to his son, the elder Obama represented a great and noble cause, the cause of anticolonialism. Obama Sr. grew up during Africa's struggle to be free of European rule, and he was one of the early generation of Africans chosen to study in America and then to shape his country's future.
I know a great deal about anticolonialism, because I am a native of Mumbai, India. I am part of the first Indian generation to be born after my country's independence from the British. Anticolonialism was the rallying cry of Third World politics for much of the second half of the 20th century. To most Americans, however, anticolonialism is an unfamiliar idea, so let me explain it.
Anticolonialism is the doctrine that rich countries of the West got rich by invading, occupying and looting poor countries of Asia, Africa and South America. As one of Obama's acknowledged intellectual influences, Frantz Fanon, wrote in The Wretched of the Earth, "The well-being and progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians and the yellow races."
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Anticolonialists hold that even when countries secure political independence they remain economically dependent on their former captors. This dependence is called neocolonialism, a term defined by the African statesman Kwame Nkrumah (1909--72) in his book Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. Nkrumah, Ghana's first president, writes that poor countries may be nominally free, but they continue to be manipulated from abroad by powerful corporate and plutocratic elites. These forces of neocolonialism oppress not only Third World people but also citizens in their own countries. Obviously the solution is to resist and overthrow the oppressors. This was the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. and many in his generation, including many of my own relatives in India.
Obama Sr. was an economist, and in 1965 he published an important article in the East Africa Journal called "Problems Facing Our Socialism." Obama Sr. wasn't a doctrinaire socialist; rather, he saw state appropriation of wealth as a necessary means to achieve the anticolonial objective of taking resources away from the foreign looters and restoring them to the people of Africa. For Obama Sr. this was an issue of national autonomy. "Is it the African who owns this country? If he does, then why should he not control the economic means of growth in this country?"
As he put it, "We need to eliminate power structures that have been built through excessive accumulation so that not only a few individuals shall control a vast magnitude of resources as is the case now." The senior Obama proposed that the state confiscate private land and raise taxes with no upper limit. In fact, he insisted that "theoretically there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100% of income so long as the people get benefits from the government commensurate with their income which is taxed."
Remarkably, President Obama, who knows his father's history very well, has never mentioned his father's article. Even more remarkably, there has been virtually no reporting on a document that seems directly relevant to what the junior Obama is doing in the White House.
While the senior Obama called for Africa to free itself from the neocolonial influence of Europe and specifically Britain, he knew when he came to America in 1959 that the global balance of power was shifting. Even then, he recognized what has become a new tenet of anticolonialist ideology: Today's neocolonial leader is not Europe but America. As the late Palestinian scholar Edward Said--who was one of Obama's teachers at Columbia University--wrote in Culture and Imperialism, "The United States has replaced the earlier great empires and is the dominant outside force."
From the anticolonial perspective, American imperialism is on a rampage. For a while, U.S. power was checked by the Soviet Union, but since the end of the Cold War, America has been the sole superpower. Moreover, 9/11 provided the occasion for America to invade and occupy two countries, Iraq and Afghanistan, and also to seek political and economic domination in the same way the French and the British empires once did. So in the anticolonial view, America is now the rogue elephant that subjugates and tramples the people of the world.
It may seem incredible to suggest that the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United States. That is what I am saying. From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America's military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father's position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America. In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America's power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe's resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet.
For Obama, the solutions are simple. He must work to wring the neocolonialism out of America and the West. And here is where our anticolonial understanding of Obama really takes off, because it provides a vital key to explaining not only his major policy actions but also the little details that no other theory can adequately account for.
Why support oil drilling off the coast of Brazil but not in America? Obama believes that the West uses a disproportionate share of the world's energy resources, so he wants neocolonial America to have less and the former colonized countries to have more. More broadly, his proposal for carbon taxes has little to do with whether the planet is getting warmer or colder; it is simply a way to penalize, and therefore reduce, America's carbon consumption. Both as a U.S. Senator and in his speech, as President, to the United Nations, Obama has proposed that the West massively subsidize energy production in the developing world.
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Rejecting the socialist formula, Obama has shown no intention to nationalize the investment banks or the health sector. Rather, he seeks to decolonize these institutions, and this means bringing them under the government's leash. That's why Obama retains the right to refuse bailout paybacks--so that he can maintain his control. For Obama, health insurance companies on their own are oppressive racketeers, but once they submitted to federal oversight he was happy to do business with them. He even promised them expanded business as a result of his law forcing every American to buy health insurance.
If Obama shares his father's anticolonial crusade, that would explain why he wants people who are already paying close to 50% of their income in overall taxes to pay even more. The anticolonialist believes that since the rich have prospered at the expense of others, their wealth doesn't really belong to them; therefore whatever can be extracted from them is automatically just. Recall what Obama Sr. said in his 1965 paper: There is no tax rate too high, and even a 100% rate is justified under certain circumstances.
Obama supports the Ground Zero mosque because to him 9/11 is the event that unleashed the American bogey and pushed us into Iraq and Afghanistan. He views some of the Muslims who are fighting against America abroad as resisters of U.S. imperialism. Certainly that is the way the Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi portrayed himself at his trial. Obama's perception of him as an anticolonial resister would explain why he gave tacit approval for this murderer of hundreds of Americans to be released from captivity.
Finally, nasa. No explanation other than anticolonialism makes sense of Obama's curious mandate to convert a space agency into a Muslim and international outreach. We can see how well our theory works by recalling the moon landing of Apollo 11 in 1969. "One small step for man," Neil Armstrong said. "One giant leap for mankind."
But that's not how the rest of the world saw it. I was 8 years old at the time and living in my native India. I remember my grandfather telling me about the great race between America and Russia to put a man on the moon. Clearly America had won, and this was one giant leap not for mankind but for the U.S. If Obama shares this view, it's no wonder he wants to blunt nasa's space program, to divert it from a symbol of American greatness into a more modest public relations program.
Clearly the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. goes a long way to explain the actions and policies of his son in the Oval Office. And we can be doubly sure about his father's influence because those who know Obama well testify to it. His "granny" Sarah Obama (not his real grandmother but one of his grandfather's other wives) told Newsweek, "I look at him and I see all the same things--he has taken everything from his father. The son is realizing everything the father wanted. The dreams of the father are still alive in the son."
In his own writings Obama stresses the centrality of his father not only to his beliefs and values but to his very identity. He calls his memoir "the record of a personal, interior journey--a boy's search for his father and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a black American." And again, "It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself." Even though his father was absent for virtually all his life, Obama writes, "My father's voice had nevertheless remained untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval. You do not work hard enough, Barry. You must help in your people's struggle. Wake up, black man!"
The climax of Obama's narrative is when he goes to Kenya and weeps at his father's grave. It is riveting: "When my tears were finally spent," he writes, "I felt a calmness wash over me. I felt the circle finally close. I realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America--the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I'd felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I'd witnessed in Chicago--all of it was connected with this small piece of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin. The pain that I felt was my father's pain."
In an eerie conclusion, Obama writes that "I sat at my father's grave and spoke to him through Africa's red soil." In a sense, through the earth itself, he communes with his father and receives his father's spirit. Obama takes on his father's struggle, not by recovering his body but by embracing his cause. He decides that where Obama Sr. failed, he will succeed. Obama Sr.'s hatred of the colonial system becomes Obama Jr.'s hatred; his botched attempt to set the world right defines his son's objective. Through a kind of sacramental rite at the family tomb, the father's struggle becomes the son's birthright.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Colonialism today is a dead issue. No one cares about it except the man in the White House. He is the last anticolonial. Emerging market economies such as China, India, Chile and Indonesia have solved the problem of backwardness; they are exploiting their labor advantage and growing much faster than the U.S. If America is going to remain on top, we have to compete in an increasingly tough environment.
But instead of readying us for the challenge, our President is trapped in his father's time machine. Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation's agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son. The son makes it happen, but he candidly admits he is only living out his father's dream. The invisible father provides the inspiration, and the son dutifully gets the job done. America today is governed by a ghost.
Dinesh D'Souza, the president of the King's College in New York City, is the author of the forthcoming book The Roots of Obama's Rage (Regnery Publishing).
Thank you to 33386 from getbig for posting this originally.
On The Cover/Top Stories
How Obama Thinks
Dinesh D'Souza, 09.7.10, 12:00 AM ET
www.forbes.com
________________________ _______________________
Barack Obama is the most antibusiness president in a generation, perhaps in American history. Thanks to him the era of big government is back. Obama runs up taxpayer debt not in the billions but in the trillions. He has expanded the federal government's control over home mortgages, investment banking, health care, autos and energy. The Weekly Standard summarizes Obama's approach as omnipotence at home, impotence abroad.
The President's actions are so bizarre that they mystify his critics and supporters alike. Consider this headline from the Aug. 18, 2009 issue of the Wall Street Journal: "Obama Underwrites Offshore Drilling." Did you read that correctly? You did. The Administration supports offshore drilling--but drilling off the shores of Brazil. With Obama's backing, the U.S. Export-Import Bank offered $2 billion in loans and guarantees to Brazil's state-owned oil company Petrobras to finance exploration in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro--not so the oil ends up in the U.S. He is funding Brazilian exploration so that the oil can stay in Brazil.
More strange behavior: Obama's June 15, 2010 speech in response to the Gulf oil spill focused not on cleanup strategies but rather on the fact that Americans "consume more than 20% of the world's oil but have less than 2% of the world's resources." Obama railed on about "America's century-long addiction to fossil fuels." What does any of this have to do with the oil spill? Would the calamity have been less of a problem if America consumed a mere 10% of the world's resources?
The oddities go on and on. Obama's Administration has declared that even banks that want to repay their bailout money may be refused permission to do so. Only after the Obama team cleared a bank through the Fed's "stress test" was it eligible to give taxpayers their money back. Even then, declared Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, the Administration might force banks to keep the money.
The President continues to push for stimulus even though hundreds of billions of dollars in such funds seem to have done little. The unemployment rate when Obama took office in January 2009 was 7.7%; now it is 9.5%. Yet he wants to spend even more and is determined to foist the entire bill on Americans making $250,000 a year or more. The rich, Obama insists, aren't paying their "fair share." This by itself seems odd given that the top 1% of Americans pay 40% of all federal income taxes; the next 9% of income earners pay another 30%. So the top 10% pays 70% of the taxes; the bottom 40% pays close to nothing. This does indeed seem unfair--to the rich.
Obama's foreign policy is no less strange. He supports a $100 million mosque scheduled to be built near the site where terrorists in the name of Islam brought down the World Trade Center. Obama's rationale, that "our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable," seems utterly irrelevant to the issue of why the proposed Cordoba House should be constructed at Ground Zero.
Recently the London Times reported that the Obama Administration supported the conditional release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber convicted in connection with the deaths of 270 people, mostly Americans. This was an eye-opener because when Scotland released Megrahi from prison and sent him home to Libya in August 2009, the Obama Administration publicly and appropriately complained. The Times, however, obtained a letter the Obama Administration sent to Scotland a week before the event in which it said that releasing Megrahi on "compassionate grounds" was acceptable as long as he was kept in Scotland and would be "far preferable" to sending him back to Libya. Scottish officials interpreted this to mean that U.S. objections to Megrahi's release were "half-hearted." They released him to his home country, where he lives today as a free man.
One more anomaly: A few months ago nasa Chief Charles Bolden announced that from now on the primary mission of America's space agency would be to improve relations with the Muslim world. Come again? Bolden said he got the word directly from the President. "He wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science and math and engineering." Bolden added that the International Space Station was a model for nasa's future, since it was not just a U.S. operation but included the Russians and the Chinese. Obama's redirection of the agency caused consternation among former astronauts like Neil Armstrong and John Glenn, and even among the President's supporters: Most people think of nasa's job as one of landing on the moon and Mars and exploring other faraway destinations. Sure, we are for Islamic self-esteem, but what on earth was Obama up to here?
Theories abound to explain the President's goals and actions. Critics in the business community--including some Obama voters who now have buyer's remorse--tend to focus on two main themes. The first is that Obama is clueless about business. The second is that Obama is a socialist--not an out-and-out Marxist, but something of a European-style socialist, with a penchant for leveling and government redistribution.
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These theories aren't wrong so much as they are inadequate. Even if they could account for Obama's domestic policy, they cannot explain his foreign policy. The real problem with Obama is worse--much worse. But we have been blinded to his real agenda because, across the political spectrum, we all seek to fit him into some version of American history. In the process, we ignore Obama's own history. Here is a man who spent his formative years--the first 17 years of his life--off the American mainland, in Hawaii, Indonesia and Pakistan, with multiple subsequent journeys to Africa.
A good way to discern what motivates Obama is to ask a simple question: What is his dream? Is it the American dream? Is it Martin Luther King's dream? Or something else?
It is certainly not the American dream as conceived by the founders. They believed the nation was a "new order for the ages." A half-century later Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of America as creating "a distinct species of mankind." This is known as American exceptionalism. But when asked at a 2009 press conference whether he believed in this ideal, Obama said no. America, he suggested, is no more unique or exceptional than Britain or Greece or any other country.
Perhaps, then, Obama shares Martin Luther King's dream of a color-blind society. The President has benefited from that dream; he campaigned as a nonracial candidate, and many Americans voted for him because he represents the color-blind ideal. Even so, King's dream is not Obama's: The President never champions the idea of color-blindness or race-neutrality. This inaction is not merely tactical; the race issue simply isn't what drives Obama.
What then is Obama's dream? We don't have to speculate because the President tells us himself in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father. According to Obama, his dream is his father's dream. Notice that his title is not Dreams of My Father but rather Dreams from My Father. Obama isn't writing about his father's dreams; he is writing about the dreams he received from his father.
So who was Barack Obama Sr.? He was a Luo tribesman who grew up in Kenya and studied at Harvard. He was a polygamist who had, over the course of his lifetime, four wives and eight children. One of his sons, Mark Obama, has accused him of abuse and wife-beating. He was also a regular drunk driver who got into numerous accidents, killing a man in one and causing his own legs to be amputated due to injury in another. In 1982 he got drunk at a bar in Nairobi and drove into a tree, killing himself.
An odd choice, certainly, as an inspirational hero. But to his son, the elder Obama represented a great and noble cause, the cause of anticolonialism. Obama Sr. grew up during Africa's struggle to be free of European rule, and he was one of the early generation of Africans chosen to study in America and then to shape his country's future.
I know a great deal about anticolonialism, because I am a native of Mumbai, India. I am part of the first Indian generation to be born after my country's independence from the British. Anticolonialism was the rallying cry of Third World politics for much of the second half of the 20th century. To most Americans, however, anticolonialism is an unfamiliar idea, so let me explain it.
Anticolonialism is the doctrine that rich countries of the West got rich by invading, occupying and looting poor countries of Asia, Africa and South America. As one of Obama's acknowledged intellectual influences, Frantz Fanon, wrote in The Wretched of the Earth, "The well-being and progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians and the yellow races."
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Anticolonialists hold that even when countries secure political independence they remain economically dependent on their former captors. This dependence is called neocolonialism, a term defined by the African statesman Kwame Nkrumah (1909--72) in his book Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. Nkrumah, Ghana's first president, writes that poor countries may be nominally free, but they continue to be manipulated from abroad by powerful corporate and plutocratic elites. These forces of neocolonialism oppress not only Third World people but also citizens in their own countries. Obviously the solution is to resist and overthrow the oppressors. This was the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. and many in his generation, including many of my own relatives in India.
Obama Sr. was an economist, and in 1965 he published an important article in the East Africa Journal called "Problems Facing Our Socialism." Obama Sr. wasn't a doctrinaire socialist; rather, he saw state appropriation of wealth as a necessary means to achieve the anticolonial objective of taking resources away from the foreign looters and restoring them to the people of Africa. For Obama Sr. this was an issue of national autonomy. "Is it the African who owns this country? If he does, then why should he not control the economic means of growth in this country?"
As he put it, "We need to eliminate power structures that have been built through excessive accumulation so that not only a few individuals shall control a vast magnitude of resources as is the case now." The senior Obama proposed that the state confiscate private land and raise taxes with no upper limit. In fact, he insisted that "theoretically there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100% of income so long as the people get benefits from the government commensurate with their income which is taxed."
Remarkably, President Obama, who knows his father's history very well, has never mentioned his father's article. Even more remarkably, there has been virtually no reporting on a document that seems directly relevant to what the junior Obama is doing in the White House.
While the senior Obama called for Africa to free itself from the neocolonial influence of Europe and specifically Britain, he knew when he came to America in 1959 that the global balance of power was shifting. Even then, he recognized what has become a new tenet of anticolonialist ideology: Today's neocolonial leader is not Europe but America. As the late Palestinian scholar Edward Said--who was one of Obama's teachers at Columbia University--wrote in Culture and Imperialism, "The United States has replaced the earlier great empires and is the dominant outside force."
From the anticolonial perspective, American imperialism is on a rampage. For a while, U.S. power was checked by the Soviet Union, but since the end of the Cold War, America has been the sole superpower. Moreover, 9/11 provided the occasion for America to invade and occupy two countries, Iraq and Afghanistan, and also to seek political and economic domination in the same way the French and the British empires once did. So in the anticolonial view, America is now the rogue elephant that subjugates and tramples the people of the world.
It may seem incredible to suggest that the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United States. That is what I am saying. From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America's military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father's position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America. In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America's power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe's resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet.
For Obama, the solutions are simple. He must work to wring the neocolonialism out of America and the West. And here is where our anticolonial understanding of Obama really takes off, because it provides a vital key to explaining not only his major policy actions but also the little details that no other theory can adequately account for.
Why support oil drilling off the coast of Brazil but not in America? Obama believes that the West uses a disproportionate share of the world's energy resources, so he wants neocolonial America to have less and the former colonized countries to have more. More broadly, his proposal for carbon taxes has little to do with whether the planet is getting warmer or colder; it is simply a way to penalize, and therefore reduce, America's carbon consumption. Both as a U.S. Senator and in his speech, as President, to the United Nations, Obama has proposed that the West massively subsidize energy production in the developing world.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rejecting the socialist formula, Obama has shown no intention to nationalize the investment banks or the health sector. Rather, he seeks to decolonize these institutions, and this means bringing them under the government's leash. That's why Obama retains the right to refuse bailout paybacks--so that he can maintain his control. For Obama, health insurance companies on their own are oppressive racketeers, but once they submitted to federal oversight he was happy to do business with them. He even promised them expanded business as a result of his law forcing every American to buy health insurance.
If Obama shares his father's anticolonial crusade, that would explain why he wants people who are already paying close to 50% of their income in overall taxes to pay even more. The anticolonialist believes that since the rich have prospered at the expense of others, their wealth doesn't really belong to them; therefore whatever can be extracted from them is automatically just. Recall what Obama Sr. said in his 1965 paper: There is no tax rate too high, and even a 100% rate is justified under certain circumstances.
Obama supports the Ground Zero mosque because to him 9/11 is the event that unleashed the American bogey and pushed us into Iraq and Afghanistan. He views some of the Muslims who are fighting against America abroad as resisters of U.S. imperialism. Certainly that is the way the Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi portrayed himself at his trial. Obama's perception of him as an anticolonial resister would explain why he gave tacit approval for this murderer of hundreds of Americans to be released from captivity.
Finally, nasa. No explanation other than anticolonialism makes sense of Obama's curious mandate to convert a space agency into a Muslim and international outreach. We can see how well our theory works by recalling the moon landing of Apollo 11 in 1969. "One small step for man," Neil Armstrong said. "One giant leap for mankind."
But that's not how the rest of the world saw it. I was 8 years old at the time and living in my native India. I remember my grandfather telling me about the great race between America and Russia to put a man on the moon. Clearly America had won, and this was one giant leap not for mankind but for the U.S. If Obama shares this view, it's no wonder he wants to blunt nasa's space program, to divert it from a symbol of American greatness into a more modest public relations program.
Clearly the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. goes a long way to explain the actions and policies of his son in the Oval Office. And we can be doubly sure about his father's influence because those who know Obama well testify to it. His "granny" Sarah Obama (not his real grandmother but one of his grandfather's other wives) told Newsweek, "I look at him and I see all the same things--he has taken everything from his father. The son is realizing everything the father wanted. The dreams of the father are still alive in the son."
In his own writings Obama stresses the centrality of his father not only to his beliefs and values but to his very identity. He calls his memoir "the record of a personal, interior journey--a boy's search for his father and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a black American." And again, "It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself." Even though his father was absent for virtually all his life, Obama writes, "My father's voice had nevertheless remained untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval. You do not work hard enough, Barry. You must help in your people's struggle. Wake up, black man!"
The climax of Obama's narrative is when he goes to Kenya and weeps at his father's grave. It is riveting: "When my tears were finally spent," he writes, "I felt a calmness wash over me. I felt the circle finally close. I realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America--the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I'd felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I'd witnessed in Chicago--all of it was connected with this small piece of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin. The pain that I felt was my father's pain."
In an eerie conclusion, Obama writes that "I sat at my father's grave and spoke to him through Africa's red soil." In a sense, through the earth itself, he communes with his father and receives his father's spirit. Obama takes on his father's struggle, not by recovering his body but by embracing his cause. He decides that where Obama Sr. failed, he will succeed. Obama Sr.'s hatred of the colonial system becomes Obama Jr.'s hatred; his botched attempt to set the world right defines his son's objective. Through a kind of sacramental rite at the family tomb, the father's struggle becomes the son's birthright.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Colonialism today is a dead issue. No one cares about it except the man in the White House. He is the last anticolonial. Emerging market economies such as China, India, Chile and Indonesia have solved the problem of backwardness; they are exploiting their labor advantage and growing much faster than the U.S. If America is going to remain on top, we have to compete in an increasingly tough environment.
But instead of readying us for the challenge, our President is trapped in his father's time machine. Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation's agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son. The son makes it happen, but he candidly admits he is only living out his father's dream. The invisible father provides the inspiration, and the son dutifully gets the job done. America today is governed by a ghost.
Dinesh D'Souza, the president of the King's College in New York City, is the author of the forthcoming book The Roots of Obama's Rage (Regnery Publishing).
Saturday, August 28, 2010
THE GREATEST OP-ED EVER WRITTEN
And, I'm not just saying that because I agree with my favorite columnist wholeheartedly. Charles Krauthammer is the best of the best because nobody on either side of the ideological spectrum can paint a more perfect and concise picture of reality than he can. Even George Will, who many consider to be the best Conservative columnist in America is not Krauthammer's equal when it comes to taking the pulse of the people on American politics.
Enjoy--
NY DAILY NEWS
Democrats play the bigotry card: The strategy will fail badly in November
Charles Krauthammer
Friday, August 27th 2010, 4:00 AM
Liberalism under siege is an ugly sight indeed. Just yesterday it was all hope and change and returning power to the people. But the people have proved so disappointing. Their recalcitrance has, in only 19 months, turned the predicted 40-year liberal ascendancy (James Carville) into a full retreat. Ah, the people, the little people, the small-town people, the "bitter" people, as Barack Obama in an unguarded moment once memorably called them, clinging "to guns or religion or" - this part is less remembered - "antipathy toward people who aren't like them."
That's a polite way of saying: Clinging to bigotry. And promiscuous charges of bigotry are precisely how our current rulers and their vast media auxiliary react to an obstreperous citizenry that insists on incorrect thinking.
-- Resistance to the vast expansion of government power, intrusiveness and debt, as represented by the Tea Party movement? Why, racist resentment toward a black President.
-- Disgust and alarm with the federal government's unwillingness to curb illegal immigration, as crystallized in the Arizona law? Nativism.
-- Opposition to the most radical redefinition of marriage in human history, as expressed in Proposition 8 in California? Homophobia.
-- Opposition to a 15-story Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero? Islamophobia.
Now we know why the country has become "ungovernable," last year's excuse for the Democrats' failure of governance: Who can possibly govern a nation of racist, nativist, homophobic Islamophobes?
Note what connects these issues. In every one, liberals have lost the argument in the court of public opinion. Majorities - often lopsided majorities - oppose President Obama's social-democratic agenda (e.g., the stimulus, Obamacare), support the Arizona law, oppose gay marriage and reject a Ground Zero mosque.
What's a liberal to do? Pull out the bigotry charge, the trump that preempts debate and gives no credit to the seriousness and substance of the contrary argument. The most venerable of these trumps is, of course, the race card. When the Tea Party arose, a spontaneous, leaderless and perfectly natural (and traditionally American) reaction to the vast expansion of government intrinsic to the President's proudly proclaimed transformational agenda, the liberal commentariat cast it as a mob of angry white yahoos disguising their antipathy to a black President by cleverly speaking in economic terms.
Then came Arizona and SB 1070. It seems impossible for the left to believe that people of good will could hold that: (a) illegal immigration should be illegal, (b) the federal government should not hold border enforcement hostage to comprehensive reform, i.e., amnesty, (c) every country has the right to determine the composition of its immigrant population.
As for Proposition 8, is it so hard to see why people might believe that a single judge overturning the will of 7 million voters is an affront to democracy? And that seeing merit in retaining the structure of the most ancient and fundamental of all social institutions is something other than an alleged hatred of gays - particularly since the opposite-gender requirement has characterized virtually every society in all the millennia until just a few years ago?
And now the Ground Zero mosque. The intelligentsia is near unanimous that the only possible grounds for opposition is bigotry toward Muslims. This smug attribution of bigotry to two-thirds of the population hinges on the insistence on a complete lack of connection between Islam and radical Islam, a proposition that dovetails perfectly with the Obama administration's pretense that we are at war with nothing more than "violent extremists" of inscrutable motive and indiscernible belief. Those who reject this as both ridiculous and politically correct (an admitted redundancy) are declared Islamophobes, the ad hominem du jour.
It is a measure of the corruption of liberal thought and the collapse of its self-confidence that, finding itself so widely repudiated, it resorts reflexively to the cheapest race-baiting (in a colorful variety of forms). Indeed, how can one reason with a nation of pitchfork-wielding mobs brimming with "antipathy toward people who aren't like them" - blacks, Hispanics, gays and Muslims - a nation that is, as Michelle Obama once put it succinctly, "just downright mean"?
The Democrats are going to get beaten badly in November. Not just because the economy is ailing. And not just because Obama overread his mandate in governing too far left. But because a comeuppance is due the arrogant elites whose undisguised contempt for the great unwashed prevents them from conceding a modicum of serious thought to those who dare oppose them.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/columnists/krauthammer/index.html?page=1#ixzz0xuEcu5s7
Enjoy--
NY DAILY NEWS
Democrats play the bigotry card: The strategy will fail badly in November
Charles Krauthammer
Friday, August 27th 2010, 4:00 AM
Liberalism under siege is an ugly sight indeed. Just yesterday it was all hope and change and returning power to the people. But the people have proved so disappointing. Their recalcitrance has, in only 19 months, turned the predicted 40-year liberal ascendancy (James Carville) into a full retreat. Ah, the people, the little people, the small-town people, the "bitter" people, as Barack Obama in an unguarded moment once memorably called them, clinging "to guns or religion or" - this part is less remembered - "antipathy toward people who aren't like them."
That's a polite way of saying: Clinging to bigotry. And promiscuous charges of bigotry are precisely how our current rulers and their vast media auxiliary react to an obstreperous citizenry that insists on incorrect thinking.
-- Resistance to the vast expansion of government power, intrusiveness and debt, as represented by the Tea Party movement? Why, racist resentment toward a black President.
-- Disgust and alarm with the federal government's unwillingness to curb illegal immigration, as crystallized in the Arizona law? Nativism.
-- Opposition to the most radical redefinition of marriage in human history, as expressed in Proposition 8 in California? Homophobia.
-- Opposition to a 15-story Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero? Islamophobia.
Now we know why the country has become "ungovernable," last year's excuse for the Democrats' failure of governance: Who can possibly govern a nation of racist, nativist, homophobic Islamophobes?
Note what connects these issues. In every one, liberals have lost the argument in the court of public opinion. Majorities - often lopsided majorities - oppose President Obama's social-democratic agenda (e.g., the stimulus, Obamacare), support the Arizona law, oppose gay marriage and reject a Ground Zero mosque.
What's a liberal to do? Pull out the bigotry charge, the trump that preempts debate and gives no credit to the seriousness and substance of the contrary argument. The most venerable of these trumps is, of course, the race card. When the Tea Party arose, a spontaneous, leaderless and perfectly natural (and traditionally American) reaction to the vast expansion of government intrinsic to the President's proudly proclaimed transformational agenda, the liberal commentariat cast it as a mob of angry white yahoos disguising their antipathy to a black President by cleverly speaking in economic terms.
Then came Arizona and SB 1070. It seems impossible for the left to believe that people of good will could hold that: (a) illegal immigration should be illegal, (b) the federal government should not hold border enforcement hostage to comprehensive reform, i.e., amnesty, (c) every country has the right to determine the composition of its immigrant population.
As for Proposition 8, is it so hard to see why people might believe that a single judge overturning the will of 7 million voters is an affront to democracy? And that seeing merit in retaining the structure of the most ancient and fundamental of all social institutions is something other than an alleged hatred of gays - particularly since the opposite-gender requirement has characterized virtually every society in all the millennia until just a few years ago?
And now the Ground Zero mosque. The intelligentsia is near unanimous that the only possible grounds for opposition is bigotry toward Muslims. This smug attribution of bigotry to two-thirds of the population hinges on the insistence on a complete lack of connection between Islam and radical Islam, a proposition that dovetails perfectly with the Obama administration's pretense that we are at war with nothing more than "violent extremists" of inscrutable motive and indiscernible belief. Those who reject this as both ridiculous and politically correct (an admitted redundancy) are declared Islamophobes, the ad hominem du jour.
It is a measure of the corruption of liberal thought and the collapse of its self-confidence that, finding itself so widely repudiated, it resorts reflexively to the cheapest race-baiting (in a colorful variety of forms). Indeed, how can one reason with a nation of pitchfork-wielding mobs brimming with "antipathy toward people who aren't like them" - blacks, Hispanics, gays and Muslims - a nation that is, as Michelle Obama once put it succinctly, "just downright mean"?
The Democrats are going to get beaten badly in November. Not just because the economy is ailing. And not just because Obama overread his mandate in governing too far left. But because a comeuppance is due the arrogant elites whose undisguised contempt for the great unwashed prevents them from conceding a modicum of serious thought to those who dare oppose them.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/columnists/krauthammer/index.html?page=1#ixzz0xuEcu5s7
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Mosque building and the fact track to terrorism
Source: Beach Bum from getbig.com
JUNE 30, 2003 11:20 A.M.
Wahhabism & Islam in The U.S.
Two-faced policy fosters danger.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the text of testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security on Thursday, June 26, 2003.
Chairman Kyl, other distinguished members of the subcommittee, thank you for your invitation to appear here today.
I come before this body to describe how adherents of Wahhabism, the most extreme, separatist, and violent form of Islam, and the official sect in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, have come to dominate Islam in the U.S.
Islam is a fairly new participant at the “big table” of American religions. The Muslim community only became a significant element in our country’s life in the 1980s. Most “born Muslims,” as opposed to those who “converted” — a term Muslims avoid, preferring “new Muslims” — had historically been immigrants from Pakistan and India who followed traditional, peaceful, mainstream Islam.
With the growth of the Islamic community in America, there was no “Islamic establishment” in the U.S. — in contrast with Britain, France, and Germany, the main Western countries with significant Islamic minorities. Historically, traditional scholars have been a buffer against extremism in Islam, and for various sociological and demographic reasons, American Islam lacked a stratum of such scholars. The Wahhabi ideological structure in Saudi Arabia perceived this as an opportunity to fill a gap — to gain dominance over an Islamic community in the West with immense potential for political and social influence.
But the goals of this operation, which was largely successful, were multiple.
First, to control a significant group of Muslim believers.
Second, to use the Muslim community in the U.S. to pressure U.S. government and media, in the formulation of policy and in perceptions about Islam. This has included liaison meetings, “sensitivity” sessions and other public activities with high-level administration officials, including the FBI director, that we have seen since September 11.
Third, to advance the overall Wahhabi agenda of “jihad against the world” — an extremist campaign to impose the Wahhabi dispensation on the global Islamic community, as well as to confront the other religions. This effort has included the establishment in the U.S. of a base for funding, recruitment, and strategic/tactical support of terror operations in the U.S. and abroad.
Wahhabi-Saudi policy has always been two-faced: that is, at the same time as the Wahhabis preach hostility and violence against non-Wahhabi Muslims, they maintain a policy of alliance with Western military powers — first Britain, then the U.S. and France — to assure their control over the Arabian Peninsula.
At the present time, Shia and other non-Wahhabi Muslim community leaders estimate that 80 percent of American mosques are under Wahhabi control. This does not mean 80 percent of American Muslims support Wahhabism, although the main Wahhabi ideological agency in America, the so-called Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) has claimed that some 70 percent of American Muslims want Wahhabi teaching in their mosques.1This is a claim we consider unfounded.
Rather, Wahhabi control over mosques means control of property, buildings, appointment of imams, training of imams, content of preaching — including faxing of Friday sermons from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia — and of literature distributed in mosques and mosque bookstores, notices on bulletin boards, and organizational solicitation. Similar influence extends to prison and military chaplaincies, Islamic elementary and secondary schools (academies), college campus activity, endowment of academic chairs and programs in Middle East studies, and most notoriously, charities ostensibly helping Muslims abroad, many of which have been linked to or designated as sponsors of terrorism.
The main organizations that have carried out this campaign are the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), which originated in the Muslim Students’ Association of the U.S. and Canada (MSA), and CAIR. Support activities have been provided by the American Muslim Council (AMC), the American Muslim Alliance (AMA), the Muslim American Society (MAS), the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences, its sister body the International Institute of Islamic Thought, and a number of related groups that I have called “the Wahhabi lobby.” ISNA operates at least 324 mosques in the U.S. through the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT). These groups operate as an interlocking directorate.
Both ISNA and CAIR, in particular, maintain open and close relations with the Saudi government — a unique situation, in that no other foreign government directly uses religion as a cover for its political activities in the U.S. For example, notwithstanding support by the American Jewish community for the state of Israel, the government of Israel does not intervene in synagogue life or the activities of rabbinical or related religious bodies in America.
According to saudiembassy.net, the official website of the Saudi government, CAIR received $250,000 from the Jeddah-based Islamic Development Bank, an official Saudi financial institution, in 1999, for the purchase of land in Washington, D.C., to construct a headquarters facility.2
In a particularly disturbing case, the Islamic Development Bank also granted US$295,000 to the Masjid Bilal Islamic Center, for the construction of the Bilal Islamic Primary and Secondary School in California, in 1999.3 Hassan Akbar, an American Muslim presently charged with a fatal attack on his fellow soldiers in Kuwait during the Iraq intervention, was affiliated with this institution.
In addition, the previously mentioned official website of the Saudi government reported a donation in 1995 of $4 million for the construction of a mosque complex in Los Angeles, named for Ibn Taymiyyah, a historic Islamic figure considered the forerunner of Wahhabism.4 (It should be noted that Ibn Taymiyyah is viewed as a marginal, extremist, ideological personality by many traditional Muslims. In the wake of the Riyadh bombings of 2003, the figure of Ibn Taymiyyah symbolized, in Saudi public discourse, the inner rot of the regime. An article in the reformist daily al-Watan was headlined, “Who is More Important? The Nation or Ibn Taymiyyah”? Soon after it appeared, Jamal Khashoggi, editor of al-Watan and former deputy editor of Arab News, was dismissed from his post.)
The same official Saudi website reported a donation of $6 million, also in 1995, for a mosque in Cincinnati, Ohio.5 The website further stated, in 2000, “In the United States, the Kingdom has contributed to the establishment of the Islamic Center in Washington DC; the Omer Bin Al-Khattab Mosque in western Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Islamic Center, and the Fresno Mosque in California; the Islamic Center in Denver, Colorado; the Islamic center in Harrison, New York City; and the Islamic Center in Northern Virginia.”6
How much money, in total, is involved in this effort? If we accept a low figure of control, i.e. NAIT ownership of 27 percent of 1,200 mosques, stated by CAIR and cited by Mary Jacoby and Graham Brink in the St. Petersburg Times,7 we have some 324 mosques.
If we assume a relatively low average of expenditures, e.g. $.5 million per mosque, we arrive at $162 million.
But given that Saudi official sources show $6 million in Cincinnati and $4 million in Los Angeles, we should probably raise the average to $1 million per mosque, resulting in $324 million as a minimum.
Our view is that the number of mosques under Wahhabi control actually totals at least 600 out of the official total of 1,200, while, as noted, Shia community leaders endorse the figure of 80 percent Wahhabi control. But we also offer a number of 4-6,000 mosques overall, including small and diverse congregations of many kinds.
A radical critic of Wahhabism stated some years ago that $25m had been spent on Islamic Centers in the U.S. by the Saudi authorities. This now seems a low figure. Another anti-extremist Islamic figure has estimated Saudi expenses in the U.S., over 30 years, and including schools and free books as well as mosques, near a billion dollars.
It should also be noted that Wahhabi mosques in the U.S. work in close coordination with the Muslim World League (MWL) and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), Saudi state entities identified as participants in the funding of al Qaeda.
Wahhabi ideological control within Saudi Arabia is based on the historic compact of intermarriage between the family of the sect’s originator, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, and the family of the founding ruler, Ibn Saud. To this day, these families divide governance of the kingdom, with the descendants of Ibn al-Wahhab, known as ahl al-Shaykh, responsible for religious life, and the Saudi royal family, or ahl al-Saud, running the state. The two families also continue to marry their descendants to one another. The supreme religious leader of Saudi Arabia is a member of the family of Ibn al-Wahhab. The state appoints a minister of religious affairs who controls such bodies as MWL and WAMY, and upon leaving his ministerial post he becomes head of MWL.
The official Saudi-embassy website reported exactly one year ago, on June 26, 2002, “The delegation of the Muslim World League (MWL) that is on a world tour promoting goodwill arrived in New York yesterday, and visited the Islamic Center there.” The same website later reported, on July 8, 2002, “During a visit on Friday evening to the headquarters of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) [Secretary-General of the MWL Dr. Abdullah bin Abdulmohsin Al-Turki] advocated coordination among Muslim organizations in the United States. Expressing MWL’s readiness to offer assistance in the promotion and coordination of Islamic works, he announced plans to set up a commission for this purpose. The MWL delegation also visited the Islamic Center in Washington DC and was briefed on its activities by its director Dr. Abdullah bin Mohammad Fowaj.”8
In a related matter, on June 22, 2003, in a letter to the New York Post, James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, a civic lobbying organization, stated that his attendance at a press conference of WAMY in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, had been organized by the U.S. embassy in the kingdom. If this is true, it is extremely alarming. The U.S. embassy should not act as a supporter of WAMY, which, as documented by FDD and the Saudi Institute,9 teaches that Shia Muslims, including even the followers of Ayatollah Khomeini, are Jewish agents.
This is comparable to Nazi claims that Jewish business owners were Communists, or Slobodan Miloševic’s charge, in the media of ex-Yugoslavia, that Tito was an agent of the Vatican. The aim is to derange people, to separate them from reality completely, in preparation for massacres. We fear that official Saudi anxiety their large and restive Shia minority, aggravated by Saudi resentment over the emergence of a protodemocratic regime in Iraq led by Shias, and consolidation of popular sovereignty in Shia Iran, may lead the Saudi regime to treat Shias as a convenient scapegoat, making them victims of a wholesale atrocity. The history of Wahhabism is filled with mass murder of Shia Muslims.
There is clearly a problem of Wahhabi/Saudi extremist influence in American Islam. The time is now to face the problem squarely and find ways to enable and support traditional, mainstream American Muslims in taking their community back from these extremists, while employing law enforcement to interdict the growth of Wahhabism and its financial support by the Saudis. If we fail to do this, Wahhabi extremism continues to endanger the whole world — Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
Some American Mosques Carry Extremist Tracts, Study Says
The print edition of the Wall Street Journal today carries on pg. B5 an advance report of a Freedom House study on Saudi mosques in the U.S.
WASHINGTON -- Mosques across the U.S. continue to carry books and pamphlets describing non-Muslims as "infidels" and promoting intolerance against Western society, according to a forthcoming study by Freedom House, a U.S. human-rights group.
Despite vows from American Islamic leaders after Sept. 11, 2001, to proselytize peacefully, New York based Freedom House researchers found 57 documents with incendiary material in more than a dozen mosques and Islamic centers in six states and Washington, D.C., visited over the past year.
The materials "demonstrate the ongoing indoctrination of Muslims in the United States in the hostility and belligerence of Saudi Arabia's hardline Wahhabi sect of Islam," says the report, an advance copy of which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
No one should be surprised by this. The Saudis can't stop teaching such things without compromising their core principles.
And here are findings from the Freedom House press release:
Various Saudi government publications gathered for this study, most of which are in Arabic, assert that it is a religious obligation for Muslims to hate Christians and Jews and warn against imitating, befriending, or helping them in any way, or taking part in their festivities and celebrations;
· The documents promote contempt for the United States because it is ruled by legislated civil law rather than by totalitarian Wahhabi-style Islamic law. They condemn democracy as un-Islamic;
· The documents stress that when Muslims are in the lands of the unbelievers, they must behave as if on a mission behind enemy lines. Either they are there to acquire new knowledge and make money to be later employed in the jihad against the infidels, or they are there to proselytize the infidels until at least some convert to Islam. Any other reason for lingering among the unbelievers in their lands is illegitimate, and unless a Muslim leaves as quickly as possible, he or she is not a true Muslim and so too must be condemned. For example, a document in the collection for the “Immigrant Muslim” bears the words “Greetings from the Cultural Attache in Washington, D.C.” of the Embassy of Saudi Arabia, and is published by the government of Saudi Arabia. In an authoritative religious voice, it gives detailed instructions on how to “hate” the Christian and Jew: Never greet them first. Never congratulate the infidel on his holiday. Never imitate the infidel. Do not become a naturalized citizen of the United States. Do not wear a graduation gown because this imitates the infidel;
· One insidious aspect of the Saudi propaganda examined is its aim to replace traditional and moderate interpretations of Islam with extremist Wahhabism, the officially-established religion of Saudi Arabia. In these documents, other Muslims, especially those who advocate tolerance, are condemned as infidels. The opening fatwa in one Saudi embassy-distributed book, published by the Saudi Air Force, responds to a question about a Muslim preacher in a European mosque who taught that it is not right to condemn Jews and Christians as infidels. The Saudi state cleric’s reply rebukes the Muslim cleric: “He who casts doubts about their infidelity leaves no doubt about his.” Since, under Saudi law, “apostates” from Islam can be sentenced to death, this is an implied death threat against the tolerant Muslim imam, as well as an incitement to vigilante violence;
· Sufi and Shiite Muslims are viciously condemned;
· For a Muslim who fails to uphold the Saudi Wahhabi sect’s sexual mores (i.e. through homosexual activity or heterosexual activity outside of marriage), the edicts published by the Saudi government’s Ministry of Islamic Affairs, and found in American mosques advise, “it would be lawful for Muslims to spill his blood and to take his money;”
· Regarding those who convert out of Islam, the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs explicitly asserts, they “should be killed;”
· Saudi textbooks and other publications in the collection, propagate a Nazi-like hatred for Jews, treat the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion as historical fact, and avow that the Muslim’s duty is to eliminate the state of Israel;
· Regarding women, the Saudi publications instruct that they should be veiled, segregated from men and barred from certain employment and roles;
The report states: “While the government of Saudi Arabia claims to be ‘updating’ or reforming its textbooks and study materials within the Kingdom, its publications propagating an ideology of hatred remain plentiful in some prominent American mosques and Islamic centers, and continue to be a principal resource available to students of Islam within the United States.”
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2005/01/some-american-mosques-carry-extremist-tracts-study-says.html
JUNE 30, 2003 11:20 A.M.
Wahhabism & Islam in The U.S.
Two-faced policy fosters danger.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the text of testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security on Thursday, June 26, 2003.
Chairman Kyl, other distinguished members of the subcommittee, thank you for your invitation to appear here today.
I come before this body to describe how adherents of Wahhabism, the most extreme, separatist, and violent form of Islam, and the official sect in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, have come to dominate Islam in the U.S.
Islam is a fairly new participant at the “big table” of American religions. The Muslim community only became a significant element in our country’s life in the 1980s. Most “born Muslims,” as opposed to those who “converted” — a term Muslims avoid, preferring “new Muslims” — had historically been immigrants from Pakistan and India who followed traditional, peaceful, mainstream Islam.
With the growth of the Islamic community in America, there was no “Islamic establishment” in the U.S. — in contrast with Britain, France, and Germany, the main Western countries with significant Islamic minorities. Historically, traditional scholars have been a buffer against extremism in Islam, and for various sociological and demographic reasons, American Islam lacked a stratum of such scholars. The Wahhabi ideological structure in Saudi Arabia perceived this as an opportunity to fill a gap — to gain dominance over an Islamic community in the West with immense potential for political and social influence.
But the goals of this operation, which was largely successful, were multiple.
First, to control a significant group of Muslim believers.
Second, to use the Muslim community in the U.S. to pressure U.S. government and media, in the formulation of policy and in perceptions about Islam. This has included liaison meetings, “sensitivity” sessions and other public activities with high-level administration officials, including the FBI director, that we have seen since September 11.
Third, to advance the overall Wahhabi agenda of “jihad against the world” — an extremist campaign to impose the Wahhabi dispensation on the global Islamic community, as well as to confront the other religions. This effort has included the establishment in the U.S. of a base for funding, recruitment, and strategic/tactical support of terror operations in the U.S. and abroad.
Wahhabi-Saudi policy has always been two-faced: that is, at the same time as the Wahhabis preach hostility and violence against non-Wahhabi Muslims, they maintain a policy of alliance with Western military powers — first Britain, then the U.S. and France — to assure their control over the Arabian Peninsula.
At the present time, Shia and other non-Wahhabi Muslim community leaders estimate that 80 percent of American mosques are under Wahhabi control. This does not mean 80 percent of American Muslims support Wahhabism, although the main Wahhabi ideological agency in America, the so-called Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) has claimed that some 70 percent of American Muslims want Wahhabi teaching in their mosques.1This is a claim we consider unfounded.
Rather, Wahhabi control over mosques means control of property, buildings, appointment of imams, training of imams, content of preaching — including faxing of Friday sermons from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia — and of literature distributed in mosques and mosque bookstores, notices on bulletin boards, and organizational solicitation. Similar influence extends to prison and military chaplaincies, Islamic elementary and secondary schools (academies), college campus activity, endowment of academic chairs and programs in Middle East studies, and most notoriously, charities ostensibly helping Muslims abroad, many of which have been linked to or designated as sponsors of terrorism.
The main organizations that have carried out this campaign are the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), which originated in the Muslim Students’ Association of the U.S. and Canada (MSA), and CAIR. Support activities have been provided by the American Muslim Council (AMC), the American Muslim Alliance (AMA), the Muslim American Society (MAS), the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences, its sister body the International Institute of Islamic Thought, and a number of related groups that I have called “the Wahhabi lobby.” ISNA operates at least 324 mosques in the U.S. through the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT). These groups operate as an interlocking directorate.
Both ISNA and CAIR, in particular, maintain open and close relations with the Saudi government — a unique situation, in that no other foreign government directly uses religion as a cover for its political activities in the U.S. For example, notwithstanding support by the American Jewish community for the state of Israel, the government of Israel does not intervene in synagogue life or the activities of rabbinical or related religious bodies in America.
According to saudiembassy.net, the official website of the Saudi government, CAIR received $250,000 from the Jeddah-based Islamic Development Bank, an official Saudi financial institution, in 1999, for the purchase of land in Washington, D.C., to construct a headquarters facility.2
In a particularly disturbing case, the Islamic Development Bank also granted US$295,000 to the Masjid Bilal Islamic Center, for the construction of the Bilal Islamic Primary and Secondary School in California, in 1999.3 Hassan Akbar, an American Muslim presently charged with a fatal attack on his fellow soldiers in Kuwait during the Iraq intervention, was affiliated with this institution.
In addition, the previously mentioned official website of the Saudi government reported a donation in 1995 of $4 million for the construction of a mosque complex in Los Angeles, named for Ibn Taymiyyah, a historic Islamic figure considered the forerunner of Wahhabism.4 (It should be noted that Ibn Taymiyyah is viewed as a marginal, extremist, ideological personality by many traditional Muslims. In the wake of the Riyadh bombings of 2003, the figure of Ibn Taymiyyah symbolized, in Saudi public discourse, the inner rot of the regime. An article in the reformist daily al-Watan was headlined, “Who is More Important? The Nation or Ibn Taymiyyah”? Soon after it appeared, Jamal Khashoggi, editor of al-Watan and former deputy editor of Arab News, was dismissed from his post.)
The same official Saudi website reported a donation of $6 million, also in 1995, for a mosque in Cincinnati, Ohio.5 The website further stated, in 2000, “In the United States, the Kingdom has contributed to the establishment of the Islamic Center in Washington DC; the Omer Bin Al-Khattab Mosque in western Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Islamic Center, and the Fresno Mosque in California; the Islamic Center in Denver, Colorado; the Islamic center in Harrison, New York City; and the Islamic Center in Northern Virginia.”6
How much money, in total, is involved in this effort? If we accept a low figure of control, i.e. NAIT ownership of 27 percent of 1,200 mosques, stated by CAIR and cited by Mary Jacoby and Graham Brink in the St. Petersburg Times,7 we have some 324 mosques.
If we assume a relatively low average of expenditures, e.g. $.5 million per mosque, we arrive at $162 million.
But given that Saudi official sources show $6 million in Cincinnati and $4 million in Los Angeles, we should probably raise the average to $1 million per mosque, resulting in $324 million as a minimum.
Our view is that the number of mosques under Wahhabi control actually totals at least 600 out of the official total of 1,200, while, as noted, Shia community leaders endorse the figure of 80 percent Wahhabi control. But we also offer a number of 4-6,000 mosques overall, including small and diverse congregations of many kinds.
A radical critic of Wahhabism stated some years ago that $25m had been spent on Islamic Centers in the U.S. by the Saudi authorities. This now seems a low figure. Another anti-extremist Islamic figure has estimated Saudi expenses in the U.S., over 30 years, and including schools and free books as well as mosques, near a billion dollars.
It should also be noted that Wahhabi mosques in the U.S. work in close coordination with the Muslim World League (MWL) and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), Saudi state entities identified as participants in the funding of al Qaeda.
Wahhabi ideological control within Saudi Arabia is based on the historic compact of intermarriage between the family of the sect’s originator, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, and the family of the founding ruler, Ibn Saud. To this day, these families divide governance of the kingdom, with the descendants of Ibn al-Wahhab, known as ahl al-Shaykh, responsible for religious life, and the Saudi royal family, or ahl al-Saud, running the state. The two families also continue to marry their descendants to one another. The supreme religious leader of Saudi Arabia is a member of the family of Ibn al-Wahhab. The state appoints a minister of religious affairs who controls such bodies as MWL and WAMY, and upon leaving his ministerial post he becomes head of MWL.
The official Saudi-embassy website reported exactly one year ago, on June 26, 2002, “The delegation of the Muslim World League (MWL) that is on a world tour promoting goodwill arrived in New York yesterday, and visited the Islamic Center there.” The same website later reported, on July 8, 2002, “During a visit on Friday evening to the headquarters of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) [Secretary-General of the MWL Dr. Abdullah bin Abdulmohsin Al-Turki] advocated coordination among Muslim organizations in the United States. Expressing MWL’s readiness to offer assistance in the promotion and coordination of Islamic works, he announced plans to set up a commission for this purpose. The MWL delegation also visited the Islamic Center in Washington DC and was briefed on its activities by its director Dr. Abdullah bin Mohammad Fowaj.”8
In a related matter, on June 22, 2003, in a letter to the New York Post, James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, a civic lobbying organization, stated that his attendance at a press conference of WAMY in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, had been organized by the U.S. embassy in the kingdom. If this is true, it is extremely alarming. The U.S. embassy should not act as a supporter of WAMY, which, as documented by FDD and the Saudi Institute,9 teaches that Shia Muslims, including even the followers of Ayatollah Khomeini, are Jewish agents.
This is comparable to Nazi claims that Jewish business owners were Communists, or Slobodan Miloševic’s charge, in the media of ex-Yugoslavia, that Tito was an agent of the Vatican. The aim is to derange people, to separate them from reality completely, in preparation for massacres. We fear that official Saudi anxiety their large and restive Shia minority, aggravated by Saudi resentment over the emergence of a protodemocratic regime in Iraq led by Shias, and consolidation of popular sovereignty in Shia Iran, may lead the Saudi regime to treat Shias as a convenient scapegoat, making them victims of a wholesale atrocity. The history of Wahhabism is filled with mass murder of Shia Muslims.
There is clearly a problem of Wahhabi/Saudi extremist influence in American Islam. The time is now to face the problem squarely and find ways to enable and support traditional, mainstream American Muslims in taking their community back from these extremists, while employing law enforcement to interdict the growth of Wahhabism and its financial support by the Saudis. If we fail to do this, Wahhabi extremism continues to endanger the whole world — Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
Some American Mosques Carry Extremist Tracts, Study Says
The print edition of the Wall Street Journal today carries on pg. B5 an advance report of a Freedom House study on Saudi mosques in the U.S.
WASHINGTON -- Mosques across the U.S. continue to carry books and pamphlets describing non-Muslims as "infidels" and promoting intolerance against Western society, according to a forthcoming study by Freedom House, a U.S. human-rights group.
Despite vows from American Islamic leaders after Sept. 11, 2001, to proselytize peacefully, New York based Freedom House researchers found 57 documents with incendiary material in more than a dozen mosques and Islamic centers in six states and Washington, D.C., visited over the past year.
The materials "demonstrate the ongoing indoctrination of Muslims in the United States in the hostility and belligerence of Saudi Arabia's hardline Wahhabi sect of Islam," says the report, an advance copy of which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
No one should be surprised by this. The Saudis can't stop teaching such things without compromising their core principles.
And here are findings from the Freedom House press release:
Various Saudi government publications gathered for this study, most of which are in Arabic, assert that it is a religious obligation for Muslims to hate Christians and Jews and warn against imitating, befriending, or helping them in any way, or taking part in their festivities and celebrations;
· The documents promote contempt for the United States because it is ruled by legislated civil law rather than by totalitarian Wahhabi-style Islamic law. They condemn democracy as un-Islamic;
· The documents stress that when Muslims are in the lands of the unbelievers, they must behave as if on a mission behind enemy lines. Either they are there to acquire new knowledge and make money to be later employed in the jihad against the infidels, or they are there to proselytize the infidels until at least some convert to Islam. Any other reason for lingering among the unbelievers in their lands is illegitimate, and unless a Muslim leaves as quickly as possible, he or she is not a true Muslim and so too must be condemned. For example, a document in the collection for the “Immigrant Muslim” bears the words “Greetings from the Cultural Attache in Washington, D.C.” of the Embassy of Saudi Arabia, and is published by the government of Saudi Arabia. In an authoritative religious voice, it gives detailed instructions on how to “hate” the Christian and Jew: Never greet them first. Never congratulate the infidel on his holiday. Never imitate the infidel. Do not become a naturalized citizen of the United States. Do not wear a graduation gown because this imitates the infidel;
· One insidious aspect of the Saudi propaganda examined is its aim to replace traditional and moderate interpretations of Islam with extremist Wahhabism, the officially-established religion of Saudi Arabia. In these documents, other Muslims, especially those who advocate tolerance, are condemned as infidels. The opening fatwa in one Saudi embassy-distributed book, published by the Saudi Air Force, responds to a question about a Muslim preacher in a European mosque who taught that it is not right to condemn Jews and Christians as infidels. The Saudi state cleric’s reply rebukes the Muslim cleric: “He who casts doubts about their infidelity leaves no doubt about his.” Since, under Saudi law, “apostates” from Islam can be sentenced to death, this is an implied death threat against the tolerant Muslim imam, as well as an incitement to vigilante violence;
· Sufi and Shiite Muslims are viciously condemned;
· For a Muslim who fails to uphold the Saudi Wahhabi sect’s sexual mores (i.e. through homosexual activity or heterosexual activity outside of marriage), the edicts published by the Saudi government’s Ministry of Islamic Affairs, and found in American mosques advise, “it would be lawful for Muslims to spill his blood and to take his money;”
· Regarding those who convert out of Islam, the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs explicitly asserts, they “should be killed;”
· Saudi textbooks and other publications in the collection, propagate a Nazi-like hatred for Jews, treat the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion as historical fact, and avow that the Muslim’s duty is to eliminate the state of Israel;
· Regarding women, the Saudi publications instruct that they should be veiled, segregated from men and barred from certain employment and roles;
The report states: “While the government of Saudi Arabia claims to be ‘updating’ or reforming its textbooks and study materials within the Kingdom, its publications propagating an ideology of hatred remain plentiful in some prominent American mosques and Islamic centers, and continue to be a principal resource available to students of Islam within the United States.”
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2005/01/some-american-mosques-carry-extremist-tracts-study-says.html
Friday, August 20, 2010
Charles Krauthammer proves again why he is the best in the business
Moral myopia at Ground Zero: Mosque supporters fail to understand the nature of the war we fight
Charles Krauthammer
It's hard to be an Obama sycophant these days. Your hero delivers a Ramadan speech roundly supporting the building of a mosque and Islamic center at Ground Zero in New York. Your heart swells and you're moved to declare this President Obama's finest hour, his act of greatest courage.Alas, the next day, at a remove of 800 miles, Obama explains that he was only talking about the legality of the thing and not the wisdom - upon which he does not make, and will not make, any judgment.
You're left looking like a fool because now Obama has said exactly nothing: No one disputes the right to build; the whole debate is about the propriety, the decency of doing so.
It takes no courage whatsoever to bask in the applause of a Muslim audience as you promise to stand stoutly for their right to build a mosque, giving the unmistakable impression that you endorse the idea. What takes courage is to then respectfully ask that audience to reflect upon the wisdom of the project, and to consider whether the imam's alleged goal of interfaith understanding might not be better achieved by accepting the New York governor's offer to help find another site.
Where the President flagged, however, the liberal intelligentsia stepped in with gusto, penning dozens of pro-mosque articles characterized by a frenzied unanimity, little resort to argument and a singular difficulty dealing with analogies.
The Atlantic's Michael Kinsley was typical in arguing that the only possible grounds for opposing the Ground Zero mosque are bigotry or demagoguery. Well then, what about Pope John Paul II's ordering the closing of the Carmelite convent at Auschwitz? Surely there can be no one more innocent of that crime than those devout nuns.
How does Kinsley explain this remarkable demonstration of sensitivity, this order to pray - but not there? He doesn't even feign analysis. He simply asserts that the decision is something "I confess that I never did understand."
That's his Q.E.D.? Is he stumped or is he inviting us to choose between his moral authority and that of one of the towering moral figures of the 20th century?
At least Richard Cohen of The Washington Post tries to grapple with the issue of sanctity and sensitivity. The results, however, are not pretty. He concedes that putting up a Japanese cultural center at Pearl Harbor would be offensive, but then dismisses the analogy to Ground Zero because 9/11 was merely "a rogue act, committed by 20 or so crazed samurai."
Obtuseness of this magnitude can only be deliberate. These weren't crazies. They were methodical, focused, steel-nerved operatives.
Nor were they freelance rogues. They were the leading, and most successful, edge of a worldwide movement of radical Islamists with cells in every continent, with worldwide financial and theological support, with a massive media and propaganda arm, and with an archipelago of local sympathizers, as in northwestern Pakistan, who protect and guard them.
Why is America fighting Predator wars in Pakistan and Yemen, surveilling thousands of conversations and financial transactions every day, and engaged in military operations against radical Muslims everywhere from the Philippines to Somalia - because of 19 crazies, all of whom died nine years ago?
Radical Islam is not, by any means, a majority of Islam. But with its financiers, clerics, propagandists, trainers, leaders, operatives and sympathizers - according to a conservative estimate, it commands the allegiance of 7% of Muslims, i.e., more than 80 million souls - it is a very powerful strain within Islam. It has changed the course of nations and affected the lives of millions. It is the reason every airport in the West is an armed camp and every land is on constant alert.
Ground Zero is the site of the most lethal attack of that worldwide movement, which consists entirely of Muslims, acts in the name of Islam and is deeply embedded within the Islamic world. These are regrettable facts, but facts they are. And that is why putting up a monument to Islam in this place is not just insensitive but provocative.
Just as the people of Japan today would not think of planting their flag at Pearl Harbor, despite the fact that no Japanese under the age of 85 has any possible responsibility for that infamy, representatives of contemporary Islam - the overwhelming majority of whose adherents are equally innocent of the infamy committed on 9/11 in their name - should exercise comparable respect for what even Obama calls hallowed ground.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com
- Nuff said.
Charles Krauthammer
It's hard to be an Obama sycophant these days. Your hero delivers a Ramadan speech roundly supporting the building of a mosque and Islamic center at Ground Zero in New York. Your heart swells and you're moved to declare this President Obama's finest hour, his act of greatest courage.Alas, the next day, at a remove of 800 miles, Obama explains that he was only talking about the legality of the thing and not the wisdom - upon which he does not make, and will not make, any judgment.
You're left looking like a fool because now Obama has said exactly nothing: No one disputes the right to build; the whole debate is about the propriety, the decency of doing so.
It takes no courage whatsoever to bask in the applause of a Muslim audience as you promise to stand stoutly for their right to build a mosque, giving the unmistakable impression that you endorse the idea. What takes courage is to then respectfully ask that audience to reflect upon the wisdom of the project, and to consider whether the imam's alleged goal of interfaith understanding might not be better achieved by accepting the New York governor's offer to help find another site.
Where the President flagged, however, the liberal intelligentsia stepped in with gusto, penning dozens of pro-mosque articles characterized by a frenzied unanimity, little resort to argument and a singular difficulty dealing with analogies.
The Atlantic's Michael Kinsley was typical in arguing that the only possible grounds for opposing the Ground Zero mosque are bigotry or demagoguery. Well then, what about Pope John Paul II's ordering the closing of the Carmelite convent at Auschwitz? Surely there can be no one more innocent of that crime than those devout nuns.
How does Kinsley explain this remarkable demonstration of sensitivity, this order to pray - but not there? He doesn't even feign analysis. He simply asserts that the decision is something "I confess that I never did understand."
That's his Q.E.D.? Is he stumped or is he inviting us to choose between his moral authority and that of one of the towering moral figures of the 20th century?
At least Richard Cohen of The Washington Post tries to grapple with the issue of sanctity and sensitivity. The results, however, are not pretty. He concedes that putting up a Japanese cultural center at Pearl Harbor would be offensive, but then dismisses the analogy to Ground Zero because 9/11 was merely "a rogue act, committed by 20 or so crazed samurai."
Obtuseness of this magnitude can only be deliberate. These weren't crazies. They were methodical, focused, steel-nerved operatives.
Nor were they freelance rogues. They were the leading, and most successful, edge of a worldwide movement of radical Islamists with cells in every continent, with worldwide financial and theological support, with a massive media and propaganda arm, and with an archipelago of local sympathizers, as in northwestern Pakistan, who protect and guard them.
Why is America fighting Predator wars in Pakistan and Yemen, surveilling thousands of conversations and financial transactions every day, and engaged in military operations against radical Muslims everywhere from the Philippines to Somalia - because of 19 crazies, all of whom died nine years ago?
Radical Islam is not, by any means, a majority of Islam. But with its financiers, clerics, propagandists, trainers, leaders, operatives and sympathizers - according to a conservative estimate, it commands the allegiance of 7% of Muslims, i.e., more than 80 million souls - it is a very powerful strain within Islam. It has changed the course of nations and affected the lives of millions. It is the reason every airport in the West is an armed camp and every land is on constant alert.
Ground Zero is the site of the most lethal attack of that worldwide movement, which consists entirely of Muslims, acts in the name of Islam and is deeply embedded within the Islamic world. These are regrettable facts, but facts they are. And that is why putting up a monument to Islam in this place is not just insensitive but provocative.
Just as the people of Japan today would not think of planting their flag at Pearl Harbor, despite the fact that no Japanese under the age of 85 has any possible responsibility for that infamy, representatives of contemporary Islam - the overwhelming majority of whose adherents are equally innocent of the infamy committed on 9/11 in their name - should exercise comparable respect for what even Obama calls hallowed ground.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com
- Nuff said.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Intolerable Tolerance
When the possibility of the KSM trial unfolding in lower Manhattan seemed like an inevitable reality, I remembered something that I had learned at a very young age when following politics. Ideology usually trumps principle and negative press usually trumps both. Of course, the unalienable truth of this statement was trumped by Obamacare, whose passage was the negative result of negative press, negative opinion polls, negative public sentiment, negative economic ramifications and untold negative consequences that will plague this country for years to come. In that single instance, ideology trumped all. But for the left, Universal Healthcare (or anything like it) is more akin to a true believers homage to a false prophet before drinking the cult Kool Aid in preparation for the alien invasion, rather than a coherent social or fiscal policy. Better to have passed the legislation and die politically, than squander the Congressional majority and lose the opportunity to attempt such a grand feat again.
But issues concerning national defense, terrorism, foreign policy and military matters (which are beyond the comprehension of most Democrats to begin with) are not ideological holy grails that liberal politicians are willing to throw themselves to the wolves over. Sure, they may support this asinine policy or that asinine policy, but if they value their political capital and their jobs, chances are that they will dance to the tune that the public sounds regardless of their own alleged beliefs.
The Ground Zero Mosque is, in my opinion, nothing more than a trophy for the sick, demented Islamic plague that is multiplying like a deadly virus under the Obama administrations watch. I don't want to hear any hogwash about the Constitution of the United States. This isn't a constitutional issue. I also don't want to hear a peep about religious tolerance, because I am sick and tired of being forced to tolerate the continued mockery of my country and everything that it stands for by twisted Muslim fanatics and their apologetic enablers. Finally, I ESPECIALLY do not want to hear a single syllable about the separation between church and state. Up until this point in time, the proponents of this mosque monstrosity have used the separation of church and state (along with the equal monstrosity of political correctness) like a blunt object to beat any traditional notions of God and the Judeo-Christian tradition out of American life with the ferocity that Leukemia uses to attack a White Blood Cell. No more nativity scenes in public places, can't say 'God' in the pledge of allegiance, can't invoke the name of "God" during a high school graduation ceremony, and on and on and on. Now all of a sudden, when a radical imam with ties to Islamic fundamentalist groups, who supports Sharia law, refuses to denounce Islamic terrorism, and blames America for the 911 attacks decides to build a 14 story Mosque at a site within a stone throw of Ground Zero, everyone should just shut up and be supportive in the name of tolerance?
In what grand American tradition should we show our support? Religious freedom-- the separation between church and state?---Ah, I nailed it! How about stupidity? This is outright madness. Not only has this unapologetic piece of Camel dreck thumbed his nose at the 911 victims families and said publicly that he is against interfaith dialogue ( the supposed purpose of building the mosque in the first place) but he has refused to reveal who is funding the Ground Zero project (as required by law). Undoubtedly, the funds will come from some anonymous Islamic charities with ties to Saudi Arabia and Iran. In a way this project makes perfect sense for the direction that America is headed. We can continue to help spread Islamic terrorism throughout the United States by green lighting the construction of more Mosques so radical clerics can continue the advancement of another bedrock American tradition -- suicide. With immigration, the economy, foreign policy and now, the building of domestic houses of worship-- let's stop messing around and really try to kill this country as quickly as possible.
In America today, the public is constantly told to keep a low profile about "sensitive issues" to avoid offending others. That is of course, unless we are talking about offending Judeo-Christian heterosexuals that live in America legally and have minds of their own. Then, tolerance means accepting every indignity and sickening display imaginable. However, I have a solution to this problem and I learned it from the brilliance of Islam. Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and the like should get together and organize interfaith terrorist organizations that exclude Islam and target world governments. Next, the interfaith terror groups should recruit Martyrs for the cause from North and South America and Africa, India, Russia and Israel. Once we have collected the necessary soldiers, we should send them to target any and everyone that doesn't bend to our will and most especially the Muslim community. Suicide bombings, rocket attacks, random shootings and targeted explosions should be used at all Muslim religious institutions, against politicians that take up the Muslim cause, newspapers that print things we find offensive, any and all military installations of countries that refuse to meet our demands, TV stations that broadcast programs we find offensive and writers that produce novels and short stories that we find incendiary.
Next, we should build as many interfaith religious buildings as possible to funnel money to our terrorist groups (the militant wing of our cause) and then denounce our opponents as bigoted.
If we can keep this up for a sustained period of time ( 5-10 years) people across the globe will fear us as much as they fear Muslims and we can get television programs pulled, books and music censored, houses of worship built on sites that we destroyed and our own special places to sit at ball games, airports and restaurants.
In short, I don't feel like highlighting my more muted objections to the Cordoba House project because I believe strongly that the 2 or 3 of you that read my blog have more intelligence than something I would step on that was scurrying around my apartment when I turned the lights on. Obviously, it's insensitive, unnecessary, offensive and is strongly opposed by the majority of 911 victims family's, Americans and New Yorkers. There are thousands of other places to put this terrorist house of worship besides next to Ground Zero. No one contests the legality to build the Ground Zero mosque, but that doesn't mean it should be built-- Just like the "Museum of Slavery" shouldn't be put next to NAACP headquarters and the PLO War Hero's Memorial shouldn't be put next to the Israeli Consulate.
For a much more eloquent and well written analysis of the Ground Zero Project-- Check out Jonah Goldberg in today's NY Post-- http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/the_anti_statesmen_3xiJbRmcOjUSrhJVzM7LmO
But issues concerning national defense, terrorism, foreign policy and military matters (which are beyond the comprehension of most Democrats to begin with) are not ideological holy grails that liberal politicians are willing to throw themselves to the wolves over. Sure, they may support this asinine policy or that asinine policy, but if they value their political capital and their jobs, chances are that they will dance to the tune that the public sounds regardless of their own alleged beliefs.
The Ground Zero Mosque is, in my opinion, nothing more than a trophy for the sick, demented Islamic plague that is multiplying like a deadly virus under the Obama administrations watch. I don't want to hear any hogwash about the Constitution of the United States. This isn't a constitutional issue. I also don't want to hear a peep about religious tolerance, because I am sick and tired of being forced to tolerate the continued mockery of my country and everything that it stands for by twisted Muslim fanatics and their apologetic enablers. Finally, I ESPECIALLY do not want to hear a single syllable about the separation between church and state. Up until this point in time, the proponents of this mosque monstrosity have used the separation of church and state (along with the equal monstrosity of political correctness) like a blunt object to beat any traditional notions of God and the Judeo-Christian tradition out of American life with the ferocity that Leukemia uses to attack a White Blood Cell. No more nativity scenes in public places, can't say 'God' in the pledge of allegiance, can't invoke the name of "God" during a high school graduation ceremony, and on and on and on. Now all of a sudden, when a radical imam with ties to Islamic fundamentalist groups, who supports Sharia law, refuses to denounce Islamic terrorism, and blames America for the 911 attacks decides to build a 14 story Mosque at a site within a stone throw of Ground Zero, everyone should just shut up and be supportive in the name of tolerance?
In what grand American tradition should we show our support? Religious freedom-- the separation between church and state?---Ah, I nailed it! How about stupidity? This is outright madness. Not only has this unapologetic piece of Camel dreck thumbed his nose at the 911 victims families and said publicly that he is against interfaith dialogue ( the supposed purpose of building the mosque in the first place) but he has refused to reveal who is funding the Ground Zero project (as required by law). Undoubtedly, the funds will come from some anonymous Islamic charities with ties to Saudi Arabia and Iran. In a way this project makes perfect sense for the direction that America is headed. We can continue to help spread Islamic terrorism throughout the United States by green lighting the construction of more Mosques so radical clerics can continue the advancement of another bedrock American tradition -- suicide. With immigration, the economy, foreign policy and now, the building of domestic houses of worship-- let's stop messing around and really try to kill this country as quickly as possible.
In America today, the public is constantly told to keep a low profile about "sensitive issues" to avoid offending others. That is of course, unless we are talking about offending Judeo-Christian heterosexuals that live in America legally and have minds of their own. Then, tolerance means accepting every indignity and sickening display imaginable. However, I have a solution to this problem and I learned it from the brilliance of Islam. Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and the like should get together and organize interfaith terrorist organizations that exclude Islam and target world governments. Next, the interfaith terror groups should recruit Martyrs for the cause from North and South America and Africa, India, Russia and Israel. Once we have collected the necessary soldiers, we should send them to target any and everyone that doesn't bend to our will and most especially the Muslim community. Suicide bombings, rocket attacks, random shootings and targeted explosions should be used at all Muslim religious institutions, against politicians that take up the Muslim cause, newspapers that print things we find offensive, any and all military installations of countries that refuse to meet our demands, TV stations that broadcast programs we find offensive and writers that produce novels and short stories that we find incendiary.
Next, we should build as many interfaith religious buildings as possible to funnel money to our terrorist groups (the militant wing of our cause) and then denounce our opponents as bigoted.
If we can keep this up for a sustained period of time ( 5-10 years) people across the globe will fear us as much as they fear Muslims and we can get television programs pulled, books and music censored, houses of worship built on sites that we destroyed and our own special places to sit at ball games, airports and restaurants.
In short, I don't feel like highlighting my more muted objections to the Cordoba House project because I believe strongly that the 2 or 3 of you that read my blog have more intelligence than something I would step on that was scurrying around my apartment when I turned the lights on. Obviously, it's insensitive, unnecessary, offensive and is strongly opposed by the majority of 911 victims family's, Americans and New Yorkers. There are thousands of other places to put this terrorist house of worship besides next to Ground Zero. No one contests the legality to build the Ground Zero mosque, but that doesn't mean it should be built-- Just like the "Museum of Slavery" shouldn't be put next to NAACP headquarters and the PLO War Hero's Memorial shouldn't be put next to the Israeli Consulate.
For a much more eloquent and well written analysis of the Ground Zero Project-- Check out Jonah Goldberg in today's NY Post-- http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/the_anti_statesmen_3xiJbRmcOjUSrhJVzM7LmO
Thursday, August 5, 2010
A Grim Prediction I made in February 2009
From a thread I started at getbig.com, February 12, 2009
So far, I take absolutely no pleasure in being correct.
Beyond this farce of a stimulus package and the depressing state of the job market, is anyone else starting to feel like our way of life is on the brink of collapse.
The bible says the meek shall inherit the earth. From my vantage point it appears the poor, lazy, stupid and slime masquerading as politicians shall inherit the earth.
This stimulus package is bad for numerous reasons which I'm not going to get into ad nauseum. However, what really scares me is that this Stimulus package is exactly like the AUMF that gave Bush the Congressional blank check to go into Iraq. Why do you ask? 9/11 was a national emergency- this economy is an emergency- Both Presidents used fear to get their mandates passed. Obama's pompous and laughable " just pass it, dont read it" mentality reminds me exactly of the uber patriotic morons that would jump down your throat if you didn't support going into Iraq without properly considering the consequences.
What was the result under Bush? A deeply divided country, resources squandered fighting a war against a country that didn't attack us instead of using it against the Taliban/ AlQueda, thousands of US soldiers dead and a military defense budget bloated to the point of absurdity.
Whats going to happen under Obama? copy and paste the above, except apply it to the economy. Economic protectionism, sky high taxes, shamelessly wasteful pork expenditures and a stranglehold on private capital and banks= Recipe for disaster. Forget about the fact that history has shown us that stimulus packages dont work-- Obama, in a stunning act of incompetence made the moronic assertion that if we dont pass the stimulus package, America will turn into the Japan of 10 years ago. Had he bothered to do any research into what caused Japan's "lost decade" he would realize it was a misguided and failed attempt of the Japanese government to revive the economy by passing legislation with almost equivalent aims to his stimulus package. But I digress-- As the CEO of GE put it a few days ago- This package is like giving someone who is on life support a new suit. I guess he didn't bother to prepare for that part of the press conference in light of those hardball queries he received about Alex Rodriguez using steroids, and about the "alleged" terrorists in Pakistan.
Whats the difference here? The republicans didn't sign on lock stock and barrel like the democrats did for the AUMF. Why? Because they aren't in control of Congress or the white-house anymore. They aren't running for re-election and more than half the American people dont like the stimulus package.
One scary thought someone I saw on TV had about the Obamanomics-- If 40% of the country pays 100% of the countries taxes, the party that is in power will never relinquish it because they'll always have the 60% majority.
So far, I take absolutely no pleasure in being correct.
Beyond this farce of a stimulus package and the depressing state of the job market, is anyone else starting to feel like our way of life is on the brink of collapse.
The bible says the meek shall inherit the earth. From my vantage point it appears the poor, lazy, stupid and slime masquerading as politicians shall inherit the earth.
This stimulus package is bad for numerous reasons which I'm not going to get into ad nauseum. However, what really scares me is that this Stimulus package is exactly like the AUMF that gave Bush the Congressional blank check to go into Iraq. Why do you ask? 9/11 was a national emergency- this economy is an emergency- Both Presidents used fear to get their mandates passed. Obama's pompous and laughable " just pass it, dont read it" mentality reminds me exactly of the uber patriotic morons that would jump down your throat if you didn't support going into Iraq without properly considering the consequences.
What was the result under Bush? A deeply divided country, resources squandered fighting a war against a country that didn't attack us instead of using it against the Taliban/ AlQueda, thousands of US soldiers dead and a military defense budget bloated to the point of absurdity.
Whats going to happen under Obama? copy and paste the above, except apply it to the economy. Economic protectionism, sky high taxes, shamelessly wasteful pork expenditures and a stranglehold on private capital and banks= Recipe for disaster. Forget about the fact that history has shown us that stimulus packages dont work-- Obama, in a stunning act of incompetence made the moronic assertion that if we dont pass the stimulus package, America will turn into the Japan of 10 years ago. Had he bothered to do any research into what caused Japan's "lost decade" he would realize it was a misguided and failed attempt of the Japanese government to revive the economy by passing legislation with almost equivalent aims to his stimulus package. But I digress-- As the CEO of GE put it a few days ago- This package is like giving someone who is on life support a new suit. I guess he didn't bother to prepare for that part of the press conference in light of those hardball queries he received about Alex Rodriguez using steroids, and about the "alleged" terrorists in Pakistan.
Whats the difference here? The republicans didn't sign on lock stock and barrel like the democrats did for the AUMF. Why? Because they aren't in control of Congress or the white-house anymore. They aren't running for re-election and more than half the American people dont like the stimulus package.
One scary thought someone I saw on TV had about the Obamanomics-- If 40% of the country pays 100% of the countries taxes, the party that is in power will never relinquish it because they'll always have the 60% majority.
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Long Long Long Layoff-- Quick rant about libs
To the 4 of you that pay attention to my blog, I apologize for the disappearing act.
Things have been unusually busy lately.
Inception: Best Sci Fi movie of all time (Blade Runner, Clockwork Orange and The Matrix series all get honorable mentions)
The Mets: Suck
The Democratic Party: On the verge of irrelevancy unless the GOP screws it up
The Mosque being built next to ground zero: An attrocity that should never be allowed to happen.
Fedor: Will come back stronger than before and dominate once again.
And now my latest rant-- I promise I will be posting again at least once a week for the forseeable future.
Well it's just courage without consequence.
Libs like to bitch and whine about religion becoming too intertwined with our secular society. They also take shots at the church every single opportunity they can. Finally, Libs also speak in outrageously inaccurate generalities and lump all religions into the same lot without regard for the realities of todays world. You see, for libs truth and reality are not readily definable attributes of the Universe, they are only details that should be harped upon when convenient for the talking points of their ideology. Why do they bow to Islam and demonize religions that have figured out (for quite sometime) how to live in harmony with the secular world? Because confronting evil requires the acceptance that there is evil in the world and that the existentialist mindset is nothing more than a diversion perpatrated by ivory tower academics that is used to brainwash impressionable college students into the belief that the world is whatever they imagine it to be.
It is much easier to take shots at the peaceful and complacent than it is to directly challenge the violent and deranged. Think of it as bullying the meek, silent type in the schoolyard while allowing the stupid, crazy kid who carries a switch blade in his book bag to run amok. It's easy to pretend your a champion of "freedom" and "expression" when the only real threat to freedom and expression is glossed over and directly ignored in plain view.
Things have been unusually busy lately.
Inception: Best Sci Fi movie of all time (Blade Runner, Clockwork Orange and The Matrix series all get honorable mentions)
The Mets: Suck
The Democratic Party: On the verge of irrelevancy unless the GOP screws it up
The Mosque being built next to ground zero: An attrocity that should never be allowed to happen.
Fedor: Will come back stronger than before and dominate once again.
And now my latest rant-- I promise I will be posting again at least once a week for the forseeable future.
Well it's just courage without consequence.
Libs like to bitch and whine about religion becoming too intertwined with our secular society. They also take shots at the church every single opportunity they can. Finally, Libs also speak in outrageously inaccurate generalities and lump all religions into the same lot without regard for the realities of todays world. You see, for libs truth and reality are not readily definable attributes of the Universe, they are only details that should be harped upon when convenient for the talking points of their ideology. Why do they bow to Islam and demonize religions that have figured out (for quite sometime) how to live in harmony with the secular world? Because confronting evil requires the acceptance that there is evil in the world and that the existentialist mindset is nothing more than a diversion perpatrated by ivory tower academics that is used to brainwash impressionable college students into the belief that the world is whatever they imagine it to be.
It is much easier to take shots at the peaceful and complacent than it is to directly challenge the violent and deranged. Think of it as bullying the meek, silent type in the schoolyard while allowing the stupid, crazy kid who carries a switch blade in his book bag to run amok. It's easy to pretend your a champion of "freedom" and "expression" when the only real threat to freedom and expression is glossed over and directly ignored in plain view.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
A rare but spectacular voice shatters the depravity of the death cult known as fundamentalist Islam
Very often I have nothing but horrible things to say about the Muslim religion. In my opinion it is the single biggest threat to civilized society on all four corners of the globe. It is in many respects a backward, barbaric and disgusting cult masquerading as a religion. In today's world Islam is a shining example of intolerance, stupidity and slavery.
While I am sure that a large number of peaceful, moderate Muslims who practice their religion without malice for infidel non-believers such as myself exist, their voices are virtually inaudible. Many do not speak out against the lunatics at the forefront of their faith because they fear for their safety and the safety of their families. Others are simply cowards and would rather make every single excuse under the sun ( right out of the American Liberal play book) as to why Islam breeds terror, hatred, the oppression of women and every other single atrocity imaginable. From India, to the Sudan, England, Spain, Russia, America, Denmark and beyond--- nobody is safe from the radical Islamic animals that span the world.
However-- today I have to take pause and give respect where it is due. One brave woman had the guts to go on television in front of the entire Muslim world and tell the truth. One housewife from Saudi Arabia demonstrated more testicular fortitude, reason and intelligence than the rest of the world's Muslim leaders combined ( and the parade of spineless jelly fish who enable the Muslim fanatics by kissing their rear ends in the name of political correctness). Her name is Hissa Hilal and of all places, she decided to make her feelings known on the Arabic version of American idol. Clad from head to toe in a Burqa, Hilal went on live television and openly criticized the violent and suppressive nature of Fundamentalist Islam and the clerics who issue Fatwas (Declarations by imams that incite violence-- ala Salman Rushdie, the Mohammad cartoon controversy in Denmark etc.)
The full story can be read here: Arabic idol finalist riles hard-liners in Middle East - NYPOST.com
In closing, I just wanted to once again shower this brave woman with as much praise as possible. She put her neck on the line to tell the truth and bring attention to a problem that affects every single one of us.
While I am sure that a large number of peaceful, moderate Muslims who practice their religion without malice for infidel non-believers such as myself exist, their voices are virtually inaudible. Many do not speak out against the lunatics at the forefront of their faith because they fear for their safety and the safety of their families. Others are simply cowards and would rather make every single excuse under the sun ( right out of the American Liberal play book) as to why Islam breeds terror, hatred, the oppression of women and every other single atrocity imaginable. From India, to the Sudan, England, Spain, Russia, America, Denmark and beyond--- nobody is safe from the radical Islamic animals that span the world.
However-- today I have to take pause and give respect where it is due. One brave woman had the guts to go on television in front of the entire Muslim world and tell the truth. One housewife from Saudi Arabia demonstrated more testicular fortitude, reason and intelligence than the rest of the world's Muslim leaders combined ( and the parade of spineless jelly fish who enable the Muslim fanatics by kissing their rear ends in the name of political correctness). Her name is Hissa Hilal and of all places, she decided to make her feelings known on the Arabic version of American idol. Clad from head to toe in a Burqa, Hilal went on live television and openly criticized the violent and suppressive nature of Fundamentalist Islam and the clerics who issue Fatwas (Declarations by imams that incite violence-- ala Salman Rushdie, the Mohammad cartoon controversy in Denmark etc.)
The full story can be read here: Arabic idol finalist riles hard-liners in Middle East - NYPOST.com
In closing, I just wanted to once again shower this brave woman with as much praise as possible. She put her neck on the line to tell the truth and bring attention to a problem that affects every single one of us.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Taking a break from politics to vent about Aqua Teen Hunger Force
Maybe I am just too "cool" to enjoy things for what they are. I'm the type of person who hates when songs that I like become popular. Once that occurs and the song is constantly on the radio or on television, the song is immediately deleted from Itunes and stricken from my memory. Once facebook and myspace took off, it was time for me to delete both. Now that everyone has blackberry messenger, I refuse to use it.
I have the same attitude toward television shows. For instance, I absolutely detest Family Guy. The first 4 seasons are hysterical. However, once FG started going into reruns on 8 different channels and Seth McFarland decided to use the show as a mindless platform for political commentary, gross out humor and hackneyed pop culture references,I decided to boycott the show.It was almost as if once the show reached legendary status, McFarland decided to make the show as predictable, stupid and unfunny as possible. Aqua Teen Hunger Force is or was rather, one of the funniest shows I had ever seen. The first four seasons were absolute perfection. Every single episode was funny and was worthy of watching in reruns over and over again.
Season 5 was not as good as the first four, but it was still pretty good and two thirds of the episodes were on par with the first 4 seasons.
Season 6 was ok-- So-so and for the first time the show went from hysterical without any gimmicks to lots of shock value bullshit and cartoonish violence to compensate for mediocre writing.
Season 7 is absolutely unwatchable. Not even remotely funny at all.
My question is WHY!?!?!
Is there some unwritten rule among the creators of TV shows that once the show is great, it's time to totally destroy it?
I would honestly prefer the show be taken off the air and forced into re-reuns than be dumbed down to the painfully unfunny bs it's putting out now.
Popularity seems to be the death knell for a lot of my favorite shows-- especially the ones on Adult Swim. The Venture Brothers, Sealab, Harvey Birdman and now ATHF have all gone in the toilet following the same formula once they became staples of the Adult Swim lineup.
The drop off between a relatively weak season 6 and a so far almost unwatchable season 7 is extremely pronounced. Season 6 was far from spectacular, but at least some episodes were pretty good and most episodes were decent. This season has been nothing short of painful. I was willing to give it a chance, but I think I am pulling the plug on my fandom with the show.
When I first starting watching ATHF, all my friends thought I had lost my mind. Now, all of my friends check it out when it's on and constantly quote funny lines from our favorite episodes. The show has been on for about eight years now. After almost 100 episodes and a full length movie (which was pretty damn good), I have to say I am impressed with the longevity of the series. I would venture to bet that when the show began the creators didn't think that they could churn out 100 episodes and a movie about a meatball, french fries, a milkshake and their fat neighbor in South Jersey. Maybe they just have run out of ideas.
So far this season, the show has had absolutely no entertainment value outside of an occasionally funny joke, idiotic guest appearances and mindless violence.
The biggest problem with season 7 in my opinion is Shake. I feel like they are over-writing and under thinking his lines on the show. If you compare Shake from the first few seasons to now, he isn't even the same character anymore. The creators have attempted to make him too human and have turned him from a hysterical sociopath into a complete douchebag that is simply not funny. His selfish antics, delusions of grandeur and constant abuse of Meatwad are what made him (next to Carl) the best character on the show. Now he's whiny, emotional, corny and last but not least hella unfunny. Dana Synders talent is being completely wasted in my opinion.
Are the equally unfunny tools from that god awful Tim and Eric show writing for ATHF now?
I have the same attitude toward television shows. For instance, I absolutely detest Family Guy. The first 4 seasons are hysterical. However, once FG started going into reruns on 8 different channels and Seth McFarland decided to use the show as a mindless platform for political commentary, gross out humor and hackneyed pop culture references,I decided to boycott the show.It was almost as if once the show reached legendary status, McFarland decided to make the show as predictable, stupid and unfunny as possible. Aqua Teen Hunger Force is or was rather, one of the funniest shows I had ever seen. The first four seasons were absolute perfection. Every single episode was funny and was worthy of watching in reruns over and over again.
Season 5 was not as good as the first four, but it was still pretty good and two thirds of the episodes were on par with the first 4 seasons.
Season 6 was ok-- So-so and for the first time the show went from hysterical without any gimmicks to lots of shock value bullshit and cartoonish violence to compensate for mediocre writing.
Season 7 is absolutely unwatchable. Not even remotely funny at all.
My question is WHY!?!?!
Is there some unwritten rule among the creators of TV shows that once the show is great, it's time to totally destroy it?
I would honestly prefer the show be taken off the air and forced into re-reuns than be dumbed down to the painfully unfunny bs it's putting out now.
Popularity seems to be the death knell for a lot of my favorite shows-- especially the ones on Adult Swim. The Venture Brothers, Sealab, Harvey Birdman and now ATHF have all gone in the toilet following the same formula once they became staples of the Adult Swim lineup.
The drop off between a relatively weak season 6 and a so far almost unwatchable season 7 is extremely pronounced. Season 6 was far from spectacular, but at least some episodes were pretty good and most episodes were decent. This season has been nothing short of painful. I was willing to give it a chance, but I think I am pulling the plug on my fandom with the show.
When I first starting watching ATHF, all my friends thought I had lost my mind. Now, all of my friends check it out when it's on and constantly quote funny lines from our favorite episodes. The show has been on for about eight years now. After almost 100 episodes and a full length movie (which was pretty damn good), I have to say I am impressed with the longevity of the series. I would venture to bet that when the show began the creators didn't think that they could churn out 100 episodes and a movie about a meatball, french fries, a milkshake and their fat neighbor in South Jersey. Maybe they just have run out of ideas.
So far this season, the show has had absolutely no entertainment value outside of an occasionally funny joke, idiotic guest appearances and mindless violence.
The biggest problem with season 7 in my opinion is Shake. I feel like they are over-writing and under thinking his lines on the show. If you compare Shake from the first few seasons to now, he isn't even the same character anymore. The creators have attempted to make him too human and have turned him from a hysterical sociopath into a complete douchebag that is simply not funny. His selfish antics, delusions of grandeur and constant abuse of Meatwad are what made him (next to Carl) the best character on the show. Now he's whiny, emotional, corny and last but not least hella unfunny. Dana Synders talent is being completely wasted in my opinion.
Are the equally unfunny tools from that god awful Tim and Eric show writing for ATHF now?
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Quick thought on Obamacare-- (much more to follow)
Convenient Morality
Over the last few days I have casually tuned in to watch the cable news talking heads. Most of them had a member of Congress or the Senate on their program to discuss Obamacare.
One thing I found fascinating was that there were actually some liberal politicians who went on TV and stated unequivocally that healthcare is a "moral" issue, and that being fiscally irresponsible in order to be morally responsible was warranted. These same politicians also made it pretty clear that they didn't care if voting for Obamacare meant they would be voted out of office.
What I find surreal about these statements is that liberals have fought tooth and nail for years to keep "morality" out of every single facet of American life. Hardcore pornography is art, laws regulating birth control and private conduct such as homosexuality are all unconstitutional and so on. Beyond the aforementioned, we should also bare in mind the rabid and often superfluous legal challenges issued by leftists over the separation of church and state. Morality: No! Science: Yes! --
I actually agree with this line of thinking to a large degree. The rule of law in this country has time and time again put forth the mantra that in America you cannot legislate morality.
However, the battle over healthcare seems to have thrown what has become an increasingly predictable philosophy on its head. All of a sudden, the continued proliferation of the biggest Ponzi scheme on the planet—(I.E. US Government Programs and Entitlements) is now an issue of moral concern and legislation should be implemented on a largely opposed public regardless of the cost. I wonder how these politicians that claim healthcare is a moral issue would react to a parallel argument being waged that espoused a similar view with respect to the United States fighting overseas or increasing taxes to inflate the military’s budget in the name of morality. Beyond the apparent contradiction at work here, My question is this—If states go bankrupt, individuals are subject to monetary penalties for not purchasing health insurance and an already anemic economy falls into further disrepair as a result of Obamacare, will the issue still be one of morality? With the state that this country is in today, aren't moral and fiscal responsibility one in the same?
Over the last few days I have casually tuned in to watch the cable news talking heads. Most of them had a member of Congress or the Senate on their program to discuss Obamacare.
One thing I found fascinating was that there were actually some liberal politicians who went on TV and stated unequivocally that healthcare is a "moral" issue, and that being fiscally irresponsible in order to be morally responsible was warranted. These same politicians also made it pretty clear that they didn't care if voting for Obamacare meant they would be voted out of office.
What I find surreal about these statements is that liberals have fought tooth and nail for years to keep "morality" out of every single facet of American life. Hardcore pornography is art, laws regulating birth control and private conduct such as homosexuality are all unconstitutional and so on. Beyond the aforementioned, we should also bare in mind the rabid and often superfluous legal challenges issued by leftists over the separation of church and state. Morality: No! Science: Yes! --
I actually agree with this line of thinking to a large degree. The rule of law in this country has time and time again put forth the mantra that in America you cannot legislate morality.
However, the battle over healthcare seems to have thrown what has become an increasingly predictable philosophy on its head. All of a sudden, the continued proliferation of the biggest Ponzi scheme on the planet—(I.E. US Government Programs and Entitlements) is now an issue of moral concern and legislation should be implemented on a largely opposed public regardless of the cost. I wonder how these politicians that claim healthcare is a moral issue would react to a parallel argument being waged that espoused a similar view with respect to the United States fighting overseas or increasing taxes to inflate the military’s budget in the name of morality. Beyond the apparent contradiction at work here, My question is this—If states go bankrupt, individuals are subject to monetary penalties for not purchasing health insurance and an already anemic economy falls into further disrepair as a result of Obamacare, will the issue still be one of morality? With the state that this country is in today, aren't moral and fiscal responsibility one in the same?
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