Muslim Convert to Catholicism Tells Pope Islam is Not Inherently Good

Journalist Magdi Allam (L), who was a non-practicing Muslim, was baptized by Pope Benedict XVI

during Easter Vigil mass in Saint Peter's Basilica March 22, 2008, in Vatican City.

From Catholic New Service

By Cindy Wooden

The Muslim-born journalist baptized by Pope Benedict XVI at Easter asked the pope to tell his top aide for relations with Muslims that Islam is not an intrinsically good religion and that Islamic terrorism is not the result of a minority gone astray.

As the Vatican was preparing to host the first meeting of the Catholic-Muslim Forum Nov. 4-6, Magdi Allam, a longtime critic of the Muslim faith of his parents, issued an open letter to Pope Benedict that included criticism of Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, president of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue.

In the letter, posted on his Web site Oct. 20, Allam said he wanted to tell the pope of his concern for "the serious religious and ethical straying that has infiltrated and spread within the heart of the church."

He told the pope that it "is vital for the common good of the Catholic Church, the general interest of Christianity and of Western civilization itself" that the pope make a pronouncement in "a clear and binding way" on the question of whether Islam is a valid religion.

The Catholic Church's dialogue with Islam is based on the Second Vatican Council's Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions ("Nostra Aetate"), which urged esteem for Muslims because "they adore the one God," strive to follow his will, recognize Jesus as a prophet, honor his mother, Mary, "value the moral life and worship God especially through prayer, almsgiving and fasting."

The council called on Catholics and Muslims "to work sincerely for mutual understanding" and for social justice, moral values, peace and freedom.

Allam told Pope Benedict he specifically objected to Cardinal Tauran telling a conference in August that Islam itself promotes peace but that "'some believers' have 'betrayed their faith,'" using it as a pretext for violence.

"The objective reality, I tell you with all sincerity and animated by a constructive intent, is exactly the opposite of what Cardinal Tauran imagines," Allam told the pope. "Islamic extremism and terrorism are the mature fruit" of following "the sayings of the Quran and the thought and action of Mohammed."

Allam said he was writing with the "deference of a sincere believer" in Christianity and as a "strenuous protagonist, witness and builder of Christian civilization."

After Pope Benedict baptized Allam March 22 during the Easter Vigil and Allam used his newspaper column and interviews to condemn Islam, the Vatican spokesman, Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, said that when the Catholic Church welcomes a new member it does not mean it accepts his opinions on every subject.

Baptism is a recognition that the person entering the church "has freely and sincerely accepted the Christian faith in its fundamental articles" as expressed in the creed, Father Lombardi had said.

"Of course, believers are free to maintain their own ideas on a vast range of questions and problems on which legitimate pluralism exists among Christians," he said.

Bishop Compares Election To Battle of Lepanto

From Catholic World News

Bishop Robert W. Finn of Kansas City-St. Joseph compared the upcoming presidential election to the Battle of Lepanto, in which Christian forces against overwhelming odds defeated Ottoman Turkish invaders bent on the conquest of Europe. ‘Together with the other Bishops of Missouri I am calling on all the faithful to make this last week before the election a week of prayer for our nation-- a week of prayer for the protection of Human Life,’ Bishop Finn wrote in an October 24 diocesan newspaper column. ‘Join me in calling upon Mary in this month of the rosary. In In 1571, in the midst of the Battle of Lepanto, when the future of Christian Europe was in the balance and the odds against them were overwhelming, prayer to Our Lady of the Rosary brought the decisive victory. We ask her now to watch over our country and bring us the victory of life.’

‘Our Catholic moral principles teach that a candidate’s promise of economic prosperity is insufficient to justify their constant support of abortion laws, including partial-birth abortion, and infanticide for born-alive infants,’ Bishop Finn noted. ‘Promotion of the Freedom of Choice Act is a pledge to eliminate every single limit on abortions achieved over the last thirty-five years … I ask you to join me in invoking the Guardian Angels of 47 million babies lost through abortion in our country in the last thirty-five years. This horrendous loss of life remains one of the greatest threats to human civilization we have ever faced.’

Source(s): these links will take you to other sites, in a new window.

• Bishop Finn: Week of Prayer for Our Country (Catholic Key)

A Marriage of Convenience: Obama, the Left and Radical Islam

From Family Security Matters

By Alex Alexiev

As we enter the home stretch of the 2008 presidential election, new revelations about Barack Obama’s harshly critical views of the U.S. Constitution for not providing for wealth distribution have again raised concerns as to whether the American people may be about to elect the first radical Leftist if not outright socialist president in the republic’s history. This hugely troubling possibility, were it to happen, would mark yet another historical watershed that’s mentioned less often – the de facto alliance between the Left and radical Islam in American politics.

The discussion of Islam, to the extent that is mentioned at all in the campaign, has mostly been limited to a rather inconclusive debate in the blogosphere as to whether Obama is a Muslim or not, and a more substantive, if suppressed by the mainstream media, discussion of Senator Obama’s questionable ties to radical Islamists and anti-Semites. The latter has provided more than enough empirical evidence to at least give a pause to a dispassionate observer as to Obama’s pious assertions of his dedication to the struggle against Islamic extremism and friendship for Israel. Without going into too much detail, these connections include well-documented close ties with Black Panther mentor-turned-radical Muslim and Wahhabi stooge, Khalid al-Mansour (nee Don Warden); Nation of Islam hate-spewing, anti-white racist, Louis Farakhan; Columbia professor and apologist of Palestinian terrorism, Rashid Khalidi; and last, but not least, Salam Ibrahim, an alleged Taliban sympathizer and chairman of the defunct Chicago Shariah-finance company Sunrise Equities, who appears to have absconded with $80 million of his clients’ funds.

What all of these unsavory men have in common, apart from friendship with and admiration for Barack Obama, is their passionate dislike for the United States and their virulent anti-Semitism. This may not prove that Obama himself is an Islamist, an anti-Semite or an anti-American, it but it does show that, throughout his career, he has willingly associated with, and been mentored by, people who are.

As much as this should be an issue of serious concern, the growing nexus between radical Islam and the Left is ultimately of much greater systemic consequence and one that goes far beyond current election considerations to present a palpable threat to the future of this country and Western civilization itself.

To understand that, we must first look at what the two parties to this unholy alliance represent. Should Senator Obama be elected as the next president of the United States, he will come to office as the leader of a party that has changed so dramatically from its historical traditions that, today, it has little in common with the Democrat Party of old. It is a party in which the worldview of the 1960s hard, anti-American Left reigns triumphant and in which yesterday’s democratic icons such as Truman, JFK, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey and Scoop Jackson would feel completely out of place.

It is thus not a huge surprise that a radical Leftist like Barack Obama would find an enthusiastic reception in a party that itself has become socialist in everything but name. And like its fellow-socialist confreres in Europe and elsewhere, it is a party that implicitly rejects individual rights, the free market system and the Judeo-Christian moral order on which they are based in favor of socialist collectivism, multiculturalism and robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul redistributionism. More than anything else, it rejects the imperative to defend those sacrosanct American principles against enemies foreign and domestic, as enshrined in our Constitution, in favor of political correctness, utopian pacifism and appeasement of evil.

It is these ideological propensities of the new American Left that radical Islam finds made to order for its purposes, and eager to cultivate and exploit. This is indeed a tactical alliance, a marriage-of-convenience for the Islamists, whose ultimate objective is the destruction of Western civilization, including its socialist infidels. It is, nonetheless, a critically important alliance in the meantime that serves Islamism by legitimating it within Western society, allowing it to infiltrate its political establishment and government and weakening resistance to Islamist efforts to subvert it from within. In the American context, this has led to numerous successful initiatives by the Muslim Brotherhood/Wahhabi fifth column that dominates the Islamic establishment to make a common cause with the Left on efforts to stop anti-terrorism measures such as “Secret Evidence” and the Patriot Act, and various anti-Iraq war and pro-illegal immigration campaigns, among others.

None of this is particularly surprising and the imperative for Islamists to ally with the Left has long been part of the official Muslim Brotherhood strategic doctrine of waging war on the West. Less well-known is the fact that even prominent ideologues of violent jihad against the West, such as the leading theoretician Abu Musab al-Suri in his seminal work “Global Islamic Resistance Call,” lists Leftist parties with “anti-American and anti-imperialist ideology” as key potential allies for the jihadists.

A more pertinent question is what in radical Islam appeals to the Left. A messianic, totalitarian doctrine in religious garb that preaches violence against all non-Muslims and espouses the establishment of the medieval barbarism of shar’iah law as its political program, Islamism is, at first sight, as incompatible as could be with the lofty humanitarian pretenses of the Left. The more so because key constituencies of the Left, such as gays and lesbians, feminists, animal rights fanatics, atheists and Jews are among the first marked for destruction, should Shariah ever triumph.

The answer is to be sought in the common denominator and obsession of the radical Left around the world – a bottomless hatred for capitalism and America as the country that epitomizes it. A hatred as pathological as that of the Communists for the class enemy and the Nazis for the Jews. That and the documented mass appeal and murderous vitality of radical Islam made the dispirited Leftists after the fall of Communism believe that here finally was a mighty ally that could help defeat the hated capitalist system and bring down America.

It is this transcendent obsession that made a flamboyant homosexual like French post-modernist philosopher Michel Foucalt, who knew full well what Khomeini does to his kind, lionize the reactionary ayatollah as the new hope of the proletariat; British politician George Galloway claim that “progressives” like him and the Muslims had the same enemies; American greens to dream of an alliance with the Islamists to “destroy capitalism”; and assorted radicals and Communist leftovers from the 1960s to march against “Islamophobia” with terrorism accomplices from the American Ikhwan (Muslim Brotherhood) networks. It is, of course, a pernicious illusion but a very costly one for a free society.

It has already led to electoral alliances between socialist parties and the Islamists in Europe, facilitated the introduction of shar’iah law, sanctioned appeasement of violent Islamist norms and turned a blind eye to the spread of vituperative anti-Semitism not seen since the 1930s. Should the Democrats win the White House, it will not be long before the same trends appear on American soil.

In a recent speech, Senator Obama admirably promised to go to the gates of hell if necessary to get Osama bin-Laden. He would have been more persuasive if before traveling that far he had bothered to check some of his campaign’s dubious connections and come clean on them and his own with the American public. He would have found out, for instance, that a former Muslim outreach coordinator of his campaign, one Mazen Asbahi, was a key leader of the Muslim Student Association, a radical Islamist organization on campus, which had this to say about Osama bin-Laden in an official publication: “When we hear someone refer to the great Mujahid Osama bin Laden as ‘terrorist’, we should defend our brother and refer to him as a freedom fighter, someone who has forsaken wealth and power to fight in Allah’s cause and speak out against oppressors.” This same virulently anti-American organization now advertises a “get out the vote” campaign on its website.

Barack Obama’s deafening silence on his own and his campaign’s troubling connections with Islamists does little to discourage one from believing that the loudest cheers for his eventual victory next Tuesday will be those of the sworn Islamist enemies of our civilization.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Alex Alexiev is a contributing editor to familysecuritymatters.org and vice-president for research at the Center for Security Policy in Wash. D.C. He is the author of a forthcoming book on shariah finance titled Jihad on Wall Street: Shariah Finance in the War Against America.

An Examination of Obama’s Use of Hidden Hypnosis Techniques in His Speeches

Hat Tip to the Right Truth blog for the following very interesting explanation of how a radical, Marxist thug who collaborates with terrorists and racists, and who stands for policies that most Americans reject, can be a viable candidate for the Presidency of the United States.

An Examination of Obama’s Use of Hidden Hypnosis Techniques in His Speeches (pdf) (thanks to Right Truth reader Junichi)

THE EVIDENCE IS HERE: This document contains over 60 pages of evidence and analysis proving Barack Obama’s use of a little-known and highly deceptive and manipulative form of “hack” hypnosis on millions of unaware Americans, and reveals what only a few psychologists and hypnosis/NLP experts know.

Barack Obama’s speeches contain the hypnosis techniques of Dr. Milton Erickson, M.D. who developed a form of “conversational” hypnosis that could be hidden in seemingly normal speech and used on patients without their knowledge for therapy purposes. Obama’s speeches intentionally contain:

- Trance Inductions
- Hypnotic Anchoring
- Pacing and Leading
- Pacing, Distraction and Utilization
- Critical Factor Bypass
- Stacking Language Patterns
- Pre-programed Response Adaptation
- Linking Statements/ Causality Bridges
- Secondary Hidden Meanings/Imbedded Suggestions
- Emotion Transfer
- Non-Dominant Hemisphere Programming

Obama’s techniques are the height of deception and psychological manipulation, remaining hidden because one must understand the science behind the language patterns in order to spot them. This document examines Obama’s speeches word by word, hand gesture by hand gesture, tone, pauses, body language, and proves his use of covert hypnosis intended only for licensed therapists on consenting patients. Obama’s mesmerized, cult-like, grade-school-crush-like worship by millions is not because “Obama is the greatest leader of a generation” who simply hasn’t accomplished anything, who magically “inspires” by giving speeches. Obama is committing perhaps the biggest fraud and deception in American history.

Obama is not just using subliminal messages, but textbook covert hypnosis and neuro-linguistic programming techniques on audiences that are intentionally designed to sideline rational judgment and implant subconscious commands to think he is wonderful and elect him President. Obama is eloquent. However, Obama’s subconscious techniques are shown to elicit powerful emotion from his audience and then transfer those emotions onto him, to sideline rational judgment, and implant hypnotic commands that we are unaware of and can’t even consciously question. The polls are misleading because some of Obama’s commands are designed to be triggered only in the voting booth on November 4th. Obama is immune to logical arguments like Wright, Ayers, shifting every position, character, and inexperience, because hypnosis affects us on an unconscious and emotional level. To many people who see this unaccomplished man’s unnatural and irrational rise to the highest office in the world as suspicious and frightening and to those who welcome it, this document uncovers, explains, and proves the deceptive tactics behind true “Obama Phenomenon” including why younger people are more easily affected.

EXPOSING OBAMA’S DECEPTION MAY BE THE ONLY WAY TO PROTECT DEMOCRACY

The full article in pdf, pages, is located here and I suggest you read it all.

I found the following of great interest:

Specific examples of Obama using 14 separate hypnotic pacing statements in his Denver 2008 Convention speech Elementary pacing examples from Obama include, “now is the time”, and “as I stand here before you.” These statements are undeniably true in the simplest terms and commonly used parts of his pacing techniques, because of course now is the time, and if he is there speaking, of course he is standing before us.

These are things the hypnotist says that are verifiably true, and used to lower our critical factor defenses to allow implantation of subconscious messages. Looking at “pacing” statements alone, Obama’s 2008 Democratic National Convention Speech in Denver48 uses them throughout. Yet, nobody suspects these language patterns to be anything other than an innocent part of his powerful speech.

Three of Obama’s favorite hypnotic paces are “that’s why I stand here tonight”, “now is the time”, and “this moment.” Just these three pacing statements are used by Obama a total of fourteen (14) times throughout this single speech.

I suppose anybody can win the White House if you use hypnosis and illegal foreign campaign donations.

Obama Campaign Attempts $3 Million Bribe to Suppress Michelle Obama Tape

From African Press International

Six hours after the release of information by API on the planned broadcast by Fox News Network of the Michelle Obama tape, in accordance with an agreement that has been reached between API and Fox News Network, API was contacted by Obama’s Campaign Manager.

Those who are close to the democratic presidential candidate must be desperate to win the elections no matter what, otherwise they would not have taken such bold step to contact API with an offer of a bribe in order to stop the airing of the tape.

Obama’s campaign manager contacted API by telephone and email offering 3 million US dollars followed with a request to API to cancel the deal with Fox News Network.

Ten days ago API received the first request to accept 2 million US dollars by Mr Ed Hale, President of Plains Radio, Texas - USA, in an effort to suppress the information from reaching the public before the coming US Presidential elections.

API has now taken a decision to contact the American Embassy in Oslo, Norway as soon as possible in order to report the matter and hand over the evidence for investigative purposes.

API’s Canadian lawyer is expected to fly to Oslo shortly in order to assist in the legal matters that arise from the bribery attempt.

API’s Chief editor is expected to travel to New York, together with the Canadian lawyer, where he will appear live in one of the shows that will air the Michelle Obama tape.

By His Friends, You Shall Know Him

"Audacity" is the word that comes to mind when one thinks of Obama. But it's not the audacity of hope. It's the audacity to think he can gloss over his lifelong network of radical Marxist thugs, racists and terrorists. Here is the Prince of Darkness in a 1995 interview describing Reverend Jeremiah Wright as "the best of what the black church has to offer."

He's running out of room under that bus.

Barack Obama's Career Path Toward an American Presidency

From Investigating Obama

A narrative of facts many have not heard, documented with Web links

Barack Obama, by his own book, plus the testimony of relatives and friends, was raised in quite a family. While in high school, his mother developed an affinity with a Marxist teacher and become an agnostic or atheist. She met Barack Obama Sr. in a college Russian language class. Yes, a Russian language class, circa 1960.

With no father in his home in Hawaii, he was mentored throughout his teens by Frank Marshall Davis, a man famous in communist circles, with numerous FBI files. Davis also wrote an autobiography, "Sex Rebel," which demonstrates numerous of his perversions, including pedophilia. Nothing new there, "sexual revolution" was a part of the Russia’s Marxist revolution: sex is divorced from reproduction, marriage, and child rearing; abortion becomes sublime. Sexual involvement is "liberated" into mutual use.

According to a former intelligence officer who had read the FBI files, Davis laid out a generic communist plan “to take over America from within, by installing educators at all levels of our educational system, gaining control of the media, getting Liberal judges appointed, recruiting, training and backing people to be elected to public office.”

From Hawaii, Barack was on to New York and Columbia University (Bill Ayers was a neighbor there, too) then Chicago (where Ayers returned). Obama writes of attending socialist conferences and reading Marxist books around this time. He was trained in and taught the insurgent methods of "Rules for Radicals" drafted by cynical, "transformational Marxist," Saul Alinsky. Thesis: lie, cheat, steal, etc., while making those with American principles live up to impossibly high standards of institutional altruism, so that we and our liberal government fail in ridicule. Preach "change" and gradually build an activist army of the proletariat, motivated by (short sighted) self interest, for a crescendoing revolt. All, to pave the way for the "egalitarian state." And funny thing, Alinsky's book tosses an acknowledgment to Lucifer, "the very first radical," a refreshing lapse into candor.

In Chicago, Obama met his wife Michelle at the Sidley & Austin law firm, where terrorist Ayers' terrorist wife, Bernardine Dohrn worked, too. And in Chicago, they joined Jeremiah Wright's church, investing two decades and significant indoctrination of their daughters there. That is, until Wright turned his criticism from merely "God damn America," toward the one, Obama. This congregation espouses Black Liberation Theology, an institutionalization of ethnocentric bitterness and a variant of Liberation Theology, which had been conceived in South America as an attempt to sell Marxism to Christians through the clergy, misapplying portions of the Bible. Concurrently, Obama has repeatedly exhorted, "our individual salvation depends on collective salvation." While that would have been less than Good News to Christ's Apostles, Marx may have found it catchy.

Obama also shared an office for apparently three years with Ayers and fellow SDS member Michael Klonsky (a self-described Maoist communist) while taking Annenberg millions and devoting much of it to ACORN and other insurgent "community organizations." The goal? "Raise political consciousness," chiefly among black school kids. (Historically, an SDS and Weathermen objective has been to piggyback on any black revolt in America, for their Marxist ends.) What "political consciousness?" One attractive to Ayers, a self-proclaimed anarchistic Marxist. Ayers secured the purse, thus presumably played a responsible role in setting up young Mr. Obama as chairman. They apparently formed a small circle of Chicago’s education radicals.

In an overlapping circle, Obama became a member of the Marxist “New Party“ in the 1990’s while maintaining membership in the Democratic Party. Soviet apologist, Alice Palmer hand picked Obama to succeed her as Illinois State Senator. He also gained an odd circle of radical Muslim, anti-Israel friends, including Khalid al Mansour, Rasheid Khalidi, and Ali Abunimah. He has connected with the radical Muslim Brotherhood, and Louis Farrakhan credits Obama with a key role in organizing his 1995 “Million Man March.”

And what has Obama been doing as Senator besides running for President? Well, he donated $1M to, and in 2006 visited Kenya to campaign for, Raila Odinga, a Kenyan out of prison for communist insurgency, who allied himself with radical Islamists and their establishment of brutally oppressive Sharia law in that nation. Odinga lost and led the kind of protest that killed 1,500 Kenyans, mostly Christians, mostly by Muslims. Rape, too. Churches were burned. The thuggery worked and Obama's man was named Prime Minister. "Change."

Many Americans are hearing about Obama's redistributionist tax and welfare/workfare plans, but do not know he is committed in the direction of conscription, apparently into a “civilian national security force.” And, he has pledged to plan his presidential agenda in meetings with ACORN. He is also committed to the "Freedom of Choice Act," which would nullify all laws against partial birth abortion and those for parental notification, and any other restriction of abortion. So much for "Life, Liberty, and Property." This is one page’s worth of the many elements in the visibly Marxist career development of the one poised to become, of all things, United States President.

http://investigatingobama.blogspot.com/2008/10/baracks-career-path-toward-american.html - by Arlen Williams

The People Behind Those "Great Public Schools"

Marcia Neal, a retired high school teacher, is seeking a seat on the Colorado State Board of Education. Her diagnosis of Colorado's education system:

"The top half of the students are well-educated, the bottom half receive extra help, but the middle half we are leaving out."

Time for Biden Justice

Now that Biden has "punished" and banned a second TV station from future interviews for asking a few obvious and pointed questions, perhaps its time his bishop followed his example and declared this Catholic-in-name-only excommunicated and anathema.

Joe Biden's Bishop: He's Wrong on Catholic Church and Abortion Teaching

By Steven Ertelt

Joe Biden's own bishop has had to correct the pro-abortion vice-presidential candidate again on his misstating the pro-life teachings of the Catholic Church. In an interview last week, Biden claimed Catholics can support abortion and he understated the far-reaching effects of the Roe v. Wade decision.

In the interview with the Delaware News Journal, Biden continued to misrepresent the position of the Catholic Church on abortion in a way that has gotten him in trouble recently.

"But throughout the church's history, we've argued between whether or not it is wrong in every circumstance and the degree of wrong. Catholics have this notion, it's almost a gradation," Biden claimed.

Not so says Rev. W. Francis Malooly, the bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Wilmington.

He writes in a new letter to the editor that Biden "presents a seriously erroneous picture of Catholic teaching on abortion."

"This is simply incorrect," he says of Biden's interpretation. "The teaching of the Church is clear and not open to debate. Abortion is a grave sin because it is the wrongful taking of an innocent human life."

"The Church received the tradition opposing abortion from Judaism. In the Greco-Roman world, early Christians were identifiable by their rejection of the common practices of abortion and infanticide," Malooly goes on to say.

"The Didache, probably the earliest Christian writing apart from the New Testament, explicitly condemns abortion without exceptions," he continues. "This has been the consistent teaching of the Church ever since."

Malooly said there was some uncertainty in previous centuries about the beginning of human life but science has confirmed that human life begins at conception and the Catholic Church has never wavered in supporting that view and that human life deserves protection from that point.

"Of course, we now know that a fetus is a living human being from the very start. Thus, abortions take innocent human lives no matter when they occur," he says.

Malooly also condemns the trimester framework Biden uses to justify his support for Roe, which allows virtually unlimited abortions throughout pregnancy.

"Since there is no gradation in the Church’s teaching on abortion, there is no way the medically obsolete division of pregnancy into three trimesters by Roe v. Wade can have any bearing on the rightness or wrongness of abortion," the bishop explains. "Taking an innocent life in the womb is wrong at any stage of pregnancy."

Malooly calls on Biden to change his views on abortion and to conform to the pro-life teachings of the church.

He said all "statesmen and politicians" should be courageous and effective in their defense and promotion of the sanctity of human life."

"We hope Sen. Biden will carefully listen to the Church’s 2,000 years of testimony on abortion and that he will join in the defense and promotion of the sanctity of life," he concluded.

2008 and the Return of the Nation-State

From Stratfor
By George Friedman

In 1989, the global system pivoted when the Soviet Union retreated from Eastern Europe and began the process of disintegration that culminated in its collapse. In 2001, the system pivoted again when al Qaeda attacked targets in the United States on Sept. 11, triggering a conflict that defined the international system until the summer of 2008. The pivot of 2008 turned on two dates, Aug. 7 and Oct. 11.

On Aug. 7, Georgian troops attacked the country’s breakaway region of South Ossetia. On Aug. 8, Russian troops responded by invading Georgia. The Western response was primarily rhetorical. On the weekend of Oct. 11, the G-7 met in Washington to plan a joint response to the global financial crisis. Rather than defining a joint plan, the decision — by default — was that each nation would act to save its own financial system with a series of broadly agreed upon guidelines.

The Aug. 7 and Oct. 11 events are connected only in their consequences. Each showed the weakness of international institutions and confirmed the primacy of the nation-state, or more precisely, the nation and the state. (A nation is a collection of people who share an ethnicity. A state is the entity that rules a piece of land. A nation-state — the foundation of the modern international order — is what is formed when the nation and state overlap.) Together, the two events posed challenges that overwhelmed the global significance of the Iraqi and Afghan wars.

The Conflict in Georgia

In and of itself, Russia’s attack on Georgia was not globally significant. Georgia is a small country in the Caucasus, and its fate ultimately does not affect the world. But Georgia was aligned with the United States and with Europe, and it had been seen by some as a candidate for membership in NATO. Thus, what was important about the Russian attack was that it occurred at all, and that the West did not respond to it beyond rhetoric.

Part of the problem was that the countries that could have intervened on Georgia’s behalf lacked the ability to do so. The Americans were bogged down in the Islamic world, and the Europeans had let their military forces atrophy. But even if military force had been available, it is clear that NATO, as the military expression of the Western alliance, was incapable of any unified action. There was no unified understanding of NATO’s obligation and, more importantly, no collective understanding of what a unified strategy might be.

The tension was not only between the United States and Europe, but also among the European countries. This was particularly pronounced in the different view of the situation Germany took compared to that of the United States and many other countries. Very soon after the Russo-Georgian war had ended, the Germans made clear that they opposed the expansion of NATO to Georgia and Ukraine. A major reason for this is Germany’s heavy dependence on Russian natural gas, which means Berlin cannot afford to alienate Moscow. But there was a deeper reason: Germany had been in the front line of the first Cold War and had no desire to participate in a second.

The range of European responses to Russia was fascinating. The British were livid. The French were livid but wanted to mediate. The Germans were cautious, and Chancellor Angela Merkel traveled to St. Petersburg to hold a joint press conference with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, aligning Germany with Russia — for all practical purposes — on the Georgian and Ukrainian issues.

The single most important effect of Russia’s attack on Georgia was that it showed clearly how deeply divided — and for that matter, how weak — NATO is in general and the Europeans are in particular. Had they been united, they would not have been able to do much. But they avoided that challenge by being utterly fragmented. NATO can only work when there is a consensus, and the war revealed how far from consensus NATO was. It can’t be said that NATO collapsed after Georgia. It is still there, and NATO officials hold meetings and press conferences. But the alliance is devoid of both common purpose and resources, except in very specific and limited areas. Some Europeans are working through NATO in Afghanistan, for example, but not most, and not in a decisive fashion.

The Russo-Georgian war raised profound questions about the future of the multinational military alliance. Each member consulted its own national interest and conducted its own foreign policy. At this point, splits between the Europeans and Americans are taken for granted, but the splits among the Europeans are profound. If it was no longer possible to say that NATO functioned, it was also unclear after Aug. 8 in what sense the Europeans existed, except as individual nation-states.

The Global Financial Crisis

What was demonstrated in politico-military terms in Georgia was then demonstrated in economic terms in the financial crisis. All of the multinational systems created after World War II failed during the crisis — or more precisely, the crisis went well beyond their briefs and resources. None of the systems could cope, and many broke down. On Oct. 11, it became clear that the G-7 could cooperate, but not through unified action. On Oct. 12, when the Europeans held their eurozone summit, it became clear that they would only act as individual nations.

As with the aftermath of the Georgian war, the most significant developments after Oct. 11 happened in Europe. The European Union is first and foremost an arrangement for managing Europe’s economy. Its bureaucracy in Brussels has increased its authority and effectiveness throughout the last decade. The problem with the European Union is that it was an institution designed to manage prosperity. When it confronted serious adversity, however, it froze, devolving power to the component states.

Consider the European Central Bank (ECB), an institution created for managing the euro. Its primary charge — and only real authority — is to work to limit inflation. But limiting inflation is a problem that needs to be addressed when economies are otherwise functioning well. The financial crisis is a case where the European system is malfunctioning. The ECB was not created to deal with that. It has managed, with the agreement of member governments, to expand its function beyond inflation control, but it ultimately lacks the staff or the mindset to do all the things that other central banks were doing. To be more precise, it is a central bank without a single finance ministry to work with. Unlike other central banks, whose authority coincides with the nations they serve, the ECB serves multiple nations with multiple interests and finance ministries. By its nature, its power is limited.

In the end, power did not reside with Europe, but rather with its individual countries. It wasn’t Brussels that was implementing decisions made in Strasbourg; the centers of power were in Paris, London, Rome, Berlin and the other capitals of Europe and the world. Power devolved back to the states that governed nations. Or, to be more precise, the twin crises revealed that power had never left there.

Between the events in Georgia and the financial crisis, what we saw was the breakdown of multinational entities. This was particularly marked in Europe, in large part because the Europeans were the most invested in multilateralism and because they were in the crosshairs of both crises. The Russian resurgence affected them the most, and the fallout of the U.S. financial crisis hit them the hardest. They had to improvise the most, being multilateral but imperfectly developed, to say the least. In a sense, the Europeans were the laboratory of multilateralism and its intersection with crisis.

But it was not a European problem in the end. What we saw was a global phenomenon in which individual nations struggled to cope with the effects of the financial crisis and of Russia. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, there has been a tendency to view the world in terms of global institutions, from the United Nations to the World Trade Organization. In the summer of 2008, none of these functioned. The only things that did function effectively were national institutions.

Since 2001, the assumption has been that subnational groups like al Qaeda would define the politico-military environment. In U.S. Defense Department jargon, the assumption was that peer-to-peer conflict was no longer an issue and that it was all about small terrorist groups. The summer of 2008 demonstrated that while terrorism by subnational groups is not insignificant by any means, the dynamics of nation-states have hardly become archaic.

The Importance of the State

Clearly, the world has pivoted toward the nation-state as the prime actor and away from transnational and subnational groups. The financial crisis could be solved by monetizing the net assets of societies to correct financial imbalances. The only institution that could do that was the state, which could use its sovereign power and credibility, based on its ability to tax the economy, to underwrite the financial system.

Around the world, states did just that. They did it in very national ways. Many European states did it primarily by guaranteeing interbank loans, thereby essentially nationalizing the heart of the financial system. If states guarantee loans, the risk declines to near zero. In that case, the rationing of money through market mechanisms collapses. The state must take over rationing. This massively increases the power of the state — and raises questions about how the Europeans back out of this position.

The Americans took a different approach, less focused on interbank guarantees than on reshaping the balance sheets of financial institutions by investing in them. It was a more indirect approach and less efficient in the short run, but the Americans were more interested than the Europeans in trying to create mechanisms that would allow the state to back out of control of the financial system.

But what is most important is to see the manner in which state power surged in the summer and fall of 2008. The balance of power between business and the state, always dynamic, underwent a profound change, with the power of the state surging and the power of business contracting. Power was not in the hands of Lehman Brothers or Barclays. It was in the hands of Washington and London. At the same time, the power of the nation surged as the importance of multilateral organizations and subnational groups declined. The nation-state roared back to life after it had seemed to be drifting into irrelevance.

The year 1989 did not quite end the Cold War, but it created a world that bypassed it. The year 2001 did not end the post-Cold War world, but it overlaid it with an additional and overwhelming dynamic: that of the U.S.-jihadist war. The year 2008 did not end the U.S.-jihadist war, but it overlaid it with far more immediate and urgent issues. The financial crisis, of course, was one. The future of Russian power was another. We should point out that the importance of Russian power is this: As soon as Russia dominates the center of the Eurasian land mass, its force intrudes on Europe. Russia united with the rest of Europe is an overwhelming global force. Europe resisting Russia defines the global system. Russia fragmented opens the door for other geopolitical issues. Russia united and powerful usurps the global stage.

The year 2008 has therefore seen two things. First, and probably most important, it resurrected the nation-state and shifted the global balance between the state and business. Second, it redefined the global geopolitical system, opening the door to a resurgence of Russian power and revealing the underlying fragmentation of Europe and weaknesses of NATO.

The most important manifestation of this is Europe. In the face of Russian power, there is no united European position. In the face of the financial crisis, the Europeans coordinate, but they do not act as one. After the summer of 2008, it is no longer fair to talk about Europe as a single entity, about NATO as a fully functioning alliance, or about a world in which the nation-state is obsolete. The nation-state was the only institution that worked.

This is far more important than either of the immediate issues. The fate of Georgia is of minor consequence to the world. The financial crisis will pass into history, joining Brady bonds, the Resolution Trust Corp. and the bailout of New York City as a historical oddity. What will remain is a new international system in which the Russian question — followed by the German question — is once again at the center of things, and in which states act with confidence in shaping the economic and business environment for better or worse.

The world is a very different place from what it was in the spring of 2008. Or, to be more precise, it is a much more traditional place than many thought. It is a world of nations pursuing their own interests and collaborating where they choose. Those interests are economic, political and military, and they are part of a single fabric. The illusion of multilateralism was not put to rest — it will never die — but it was certainly put to bed. It is a world we can readily recognize from history.

"Coming Out Day" for 5 year olds?

Parents at a K-8 charter school in Hayward (California) were shocked to learn this week the extent to which their school is promoting gay and lesbian ideals to their daughter in kindergarten.

The parents were shocked to see a poster announcing that "Coming Out Day" will be celebrated at the school today. The school, Faith Ringgold School of Art and Science, chose not to tell parents ahead of time, but it is in the midst of celebrating "Ally Week," a pro-homosexual push typically aimed at high school students. When one mother asked her daughter earlier this week what she was learning in kindergarten at the school, the 5-year-old replied, "We're learning to be allies." The mother also learned that her daughter's kindergarten classroom is regularly used during lunchtime for meetings of a Gay Straight Alliance club.

Later this week, the school is slated to talk about families. The parents have noticed several posters promoting families, all of which depict only homosexual families. More controversial discussions can be expected through next week, as the elementary school continues to celebrate Gay and Lesbian History Month. On Nov. 20, the school will host TransAction Gender-Bender Read-Aloud, where students will hear adapted tales such as "Jane and the Beanstalk."

These parents are being advised by attorneys from Pacific Justice Institute. Brad Dacus, president of Pacific Justice Institute, commented, "Do we need any further proof that gay activists will target children as early as possible? Opponents of traditional marriage keep telling us that Prop. 8 has nothing to do with education. In reality, they want to push the gay lifestyle on kindergartners, and we can only imagine how much worse it will be if Prop. 8 is defeated. This is not a scenario most Californians want replayed in their elementary schools."

Any other parents whose elementary-age children have been subjected to pro-homosexual propaganda should contact Pacific Justice Institute for counsel and possible representation: Phone:(916) 857-6900, Fax:(916) 857-6902.

An Amazing Story! -- "The Bridge"

America's First Far-Left Radical President?

By Melanie Phillips

With all eyes glued to the collapse of global capitalism as we know it, attention has been somewhat distracted from the race to lead what still remains the most powerful nation on earth — the United States. We ignore it at our peril.

From the shockingly partisan presentation by the pro-Obama media on both sides of the Atlantic, you’d think this was a contest between twin pillars of rectitude and inspirational high seriousness on the Democratic side, and a joke Republican ticket consisting of an erratic old man and a brainless, wacko, gun-toting beauty queen, who in a fit of madness John McCain picked as his vice-presidential candidate.

Unfortunately for the Democrats, the beauty queen in question, Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska, has struck an enormous chord with Middle America. As a result, Barack Obama’s media supporters are making a huge effort to destroy her.

Now the Left thinks it has shot its moose. It has been crowing that an inquiry by Alaska’s legislature has found Palin abused her office by firing Alaska’s Commissioner of Public Safety for refusing to fire in turn Palin’s former brother-in-law, Trooper Michael Wooten.

This really is a case of half-baked Alaska. First, the inquiry’s conclusions were ambiguous. It found that Palin had violated public trust through using official action for personal interest; but it also said the firing was a proper and lawful exercise of her authority, and that personal interest had only been a contributory factor in the Commissioner’s firing.

And just what was that personal interest? Palin wanted a state Trooper fired because he had assaulted his 11-year-old stepson with a stun gun, been caught drinking alcohol in his patrol car, and the Palins say was threatening to kill a member of their family.

Certainly, there was a conflict of interest because Wooten was the Governor’s sister’s ex-husband. But shouldn’t the real question be why such a man was not fired?

What is really astounding, however, is the hue and cry over this non-event in Alaska while a raft of disturbing evidence about Senator Obama’s connections is being either glossed over or not reported at all.

This may come as a shock to most people, but Obama is at the centre of a network of radical associations which he has tried to conceal.

Take for example his relationship with William Ayers, founder of the terrorist Weather Underground which bombed federal buildings in the 1960s and who has consistently maintained his radical views ever since.

Obama’s own political career was actually launched in Ayers’s Chicago house at a fundraising-event in 1995 which fired the starting gun for his run at the Illinois Senate.

Not only that, Obama and Ayers both sat on the boards of two organisations, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and the Woods Fund. These organisations put into practice Ayers’s revolutionary ideology by channelling money supposed to fund regular educational projects into extreme radical groups instead.

Obama now says he didn’t know of Ayers’s terrorist past and never endorsed his views, simply working with him on an educational project. But it defies belief he didn’t know about Ayers, who was notorious in Chicago. In 2001, indeed, Ayers told a magazine: ‘I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.’

The crucial point was that this educational project was itself a vehicle for subversion; in the view of Ayers, its driving force, education was ‘the motor-force of revolution’. Moreover, Obama wrote a rave review about Ayers’ book on criminal justice, which compared America to South Africa under apartheid.

Through the Woods Fund, Obama also funnelled millions of dollars to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). Described by an academic sympathiser as ‘a uniquely militant organisation’, ACORN played a significant role in the sub-prime scandal - which detonated America’s financial crisis — by physically intimidating banks into lowering credit standards for poor and minority customers.

The Obama campaign has paid an ACORN subsidiary $800,000 to register new voters. But now, numerous states are launching investigations into massive voter fraud being carried out by ACORN activists who are being caught falsifying voter registration cards, registering fictitious individuals and hounding voters to register multiple times.

But Obama’s connections with ACORN go even deeper. Even though his campaign has denied this, for several years running he trained its activists and in 1992 even ran one of its voter registration projects.

Such radical links fit with other highly dubious associations Obama has made. We all know that, under pressure, he distanced himself from his longstanding mentor Pastor Wright, who infamously coined the phrase ‘God damn America!’

But Obama never distanced himself from the anti-white teachings of his church, which was heavily influenced by the philosophy of the black racist James Cone who claimed that ‘whiteness is the symbol of the antichrist’.

And after the controversy over Wright, Obama has become close to another preacher, Jim Wallis, who spews out the same anti-American message — once calling the U.S. ‘the great power, the great seducer, the great captor and destroyer of human life’.

That’s not all. ACORN is heavily involved with a Marxist group called the Chicago New Party, whose strategy is to force the Democratic Party to the far Left by infiltrating it and ‘ burrowing from within’. In 1996, the New Party exulted that one of its members who had just been successful in the political primary season was — Barack Obama.

Whenever any of this surfaces, the Left tries to suppress it by screaming ‘guilt by association’. Not so. This is guilt by participation.

The left cries ’smear’ and ‘racism’. On the contrary — if Obama wasn’t a black Democrat, with this history his candidacy would have been toast before it got started.

Just consider if the boot had been on the other foot and McCain’s political career had been launched by an abortion clinic bomber, his mentor for 20 years had been a Ku Klux Klansman, and he had paid nearly a million dollars to far-right militias who strong-armed voters into fraudulent registrations.

Of course, there is no suggestion that Obama supports terrorism or intimidation. But the question is whether through expediency or ideological sympathy or a combination of the two, he has allowed himself to be associated with thinking that threatens the basic values of America and Western society.

This may sound too incredible for words. But what’s really incredible is that, with dozens of reporters feverishly combing Alaska for any evidence to tarnish Sarah Palin, the mainstream media has largely refused to investigate any of this.

What’s really incredible is that a man with such a background in anti-Western thinking can now stand on the verge of becoming the leader of the free world.

Please don’t get me wrong. I am not a particular fan of John McCain. I think he is indeed erratic, and has run a lousy campaign. And the exhausted Republicans deserve to lose. But the prospect of Obama in the White House as America’s first far-Left radical president is deeply worrying.

It would be a crowning triumph for the anti-Western ideology which has wrought such havoc on both sides of the Atlantic.

The reason Sarah Palin has struck such a chord is that Middle America sees her as the first candidate in its lifetime who stands against that destructive nihilism. That’s why she is the key target for Western radicals who are now poised to gain the biggest prize of all.

Melanie Phillips is a columnist for the Daily Mail in London and author of Londonistan.

Pastor Becomes IRS Target

From OneNewsNow.com

A group that supports the false philosophy of separation of church and state has filed action against another pastor for having his say about politics.

Bishop Robert E. Smith is senior pastor at Word of Outreach and Christian Academy in Little Rock, Arkansas. Americans United for Separation of Church and State has lodged a complaint against him for endorsing John McCain for president from the pulpit on October 12.

"Bishop Smith knowingly and flagrantly violated the law and has even dared the IRS to investigate him for it," says Americans United leader Barry Lynn in a press release. "I hope the federal tax agency promptly takes him up on that."

But Smith contends the law upon which the complaint was filed with the Internal Revenue Service is unconstitutional.

"Congress cannot make any law that prohibits the free exercise of my faith," the pastor explains. "So a part of my faith as a minister is not only to deal with issues, but to deal with the people who are making the laws that affect the issues -- because I preach a two-sided gospel: the gospel of Christ for salvation, and the gospel of the kingdom for the political stability of its people. So that gets into politics."

The Arkansas pastor remembers a time when pastors could speak freely from the pulpit -- and did. "Well, that's the way it has been," he laments, "but since it's coming out in the form as it is now, a lot of the pastors are getting cold feet and they're backing up."

Smith is one of 33 pastors around the country who have spoken from the pulpit on political candidates and issues as part of Alliance Defense Fund's project to challenge the law and generate a lawsuit to take the issue to the U.S. Supreme Court. Complaints have been filed with the IRS against seven churches so far.

Polish Nightingales - "Pie Jesu"

A soloist of the Polish Nightingales (Polskie Slowiki) performs "Pie Jesu" from Gabriel Fauré's Requiem. The gala concert, marking the choir's 50th anniversary in 1994, took place at The Royal Castle in Warsaw.

Barbara West Questions Biden: What Real Journalism Looks Like

Younger voters may think that Katie Couric asking Barack Obama when he last cried is what journalism is about, but the following offers a glimpse of real journalism as it was once practiced in America:

Bishop Rene Gracida Releases Radio Ad Stating "No Catholic Can Vote for Barack Obama in Good Conscience"

Bishop Rene H. Gracida, the retired Bishop of the Diocese of Corpus Christi, Texas, has released a stunning radio ad concerning Catholics voting for Barack Obama. His ad, recorded in English and Spanish states:

"This is Bishop Rene H. Gracida, reminding all Catholics that they must vote in this election with an informed conscience. A Catholic cannot be said to have voted in this election with a good conscience if they have voted for a pro-abortion candidate. Barack Hussein Obama is a pro-abortion candidate."

The Bishop's message can be heard here.

The commercial has been released by pro-life activist Randall Terry who offers the radio spot without charge for all who want to use it. All faithful Catholics are invited to download the mp3 file, and place this ad on their local radio station(s).

They must simply contact their local radio station(s), and pay for the ad as an "independent expenditure." The station can download the audio file to play on the radio. The mp3 file is also available at www.randallterry.com.

Moreover, permission is granted for the ad to be downloaded, sent as a file, or posted on any web site in America.

If this ad receives the airplay it deserves, it could sink Obama's campaign by jolting Catholic voters back to their senses and moorings. Over 50% of Catholic voters have been seduced into ethical quicksand by errant Catholics who are partisan supporters of Obama and have betrayed the lives of innocent unborn children.

Terry is also in the process of organizing nationwide protests against Obama's pro-abortion agenda under the theme “No Catholic Can in Good Conscience Vote for Obama.”

At 12 Noon, Thursday, October 30, Catholics will hold a one hour demonstration, accompanied by a press conference, echoing Bishop Gracida’s words: "No Catholic can in good conscience vote for Obama, because of his radical support of child-killing."

Right now, cities include:

Cincinnati, Ohio
Columbus, Ohio
Indianapolis, Indiana
Denver, Colorado
Colorado Springs, Colorado
Jacksonville, FL
St. Augustine, FL
Miami, FL
Charlotte, NC
Arlington, VA
Richmond, VA
St. Louis, MO
Kansas City, MO
Joplin, MO

Terry states:

"Our message to the press will be simple: 'As Catholic voters – who put innocent life ahead or partisan politics – we reject the Obama/Biden ticket, and urge our fellow Catholics to abandon their plans to betray their faith.'

Our beloved late Holy Father, John Paul II, clearly stated: “In the case of an intrinsically unjust law, such as a law permitting abortion or euthanasia, it is therefore never licit to obey it, or to ‘take part in a propaganda campaign in favour of such a law, or vote for it.” 73, Gospel of Life”

With our federal system of government, we do not vote for laws; we vote for lawmakers who make laws in our stead. Given the history and intention of Obama to continue the legalized killing of the unborn, to vote for him is to knowingly participate in his evil acts and intentions, and in a real way to vote for abortion itself.

Randall Terry can be reached at: (904) 687-9804.

French Accuse the English of War Crimes

On what was historically St. Crispin's Day, 593 years ago today, 150,000 French were defeated by 6,000 English at Agincourt, France. The great battle was commemorated in Shakespeare's immortal history play, Henry V.

But if you can't win a war, you can always revise the history. So nearly 600 years after the battle, revisionist historians from all over France will gather at the historic battlefield for a conference that will:

"suggest that the extent of the feat of arms was massively exaggerated, with claims that the English were hugely outnumbered a lie. More controversially still, they will say that the foreign invaders used numerous underhand tactics against an honourable enemy."

The Telegraph has the story of today's conference of revisionist French historians.

Too bad we'll miss the conference in 2538 that explains France's glorious role in the liberation of Europe from Nazi tyranny.

Ayers' Weathermen Planned "Re-Education" and Genocide

Larry Grathwohl was an undercover government agent who infiltrated the Weather Underground of unrepentant terrorist and Obama friend of twenty years, Bill Ayers. In this 1982 interview he reveals their plans to establish "reeducation" centers in the Southwest and to murder approximately 25 million Americans.

Senator Graham's Words Come Back To Haunt Him: Conley Endorsed by ALIPAC

Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, one of the leading national grassroots organizations fighting against Amnesty and for more immigration enforcement, has endorsed South Carolina's Bob Conley for US Senate and intends to launch TV and Radio commercials that highlight Senator Lindsey Graham's offensive comments made in a speech to the National Council of La Raza (NCLR).

"Lindsey Graham has been the Republican with the worst stance on immigration issues in the US Senate," said William Gheen. "Any American who is concerned about illegal immigration should vote against Graham and be offended by his comments. Our TV and radio commercials will allow South Carolinians to hear the speech Graham would rather conceal from them."

In March of 2007, Senator Lindsey Graham made a speech before the National Council of 'La Raza' (English Translation: The Race), where he was receiving an award for his support for Comprehensive Immigration Reform AMNESTY for illegal aliens. In his speech, he called Americans who opposed his legislation "Bigots" and announced that American citizens had no right to govern immigration laws as mandated to their elected representatives in Congress by the US Constitution. Lindsey Graham also praises his leader on immigration issues... Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA).

The TV and radio ads ALIPAC intends to launch next week will contain the following quotes from Senator Graham, while encouraging voters to visit www.alipac.us to review the entire clip.

"An American is an idea. No group owns being an American. Nobody owns this.... I don't do this much but I want to thank Ted Kennedy (laughter)... We are not going to run people down, we are not going to scapegoat people, we are going to tell the bigots to shut up..."

Bob Conley is being endorsed by ALIPAC because he has promised to oppose Amnesty in any form for illegal aliens and to support more immigration enforcement and border security. Senator Graham has received a deplorable grade of 'D' at betterimmigration.com

"We have a case in South Carolina, where Bob Conley better represents the over 80% of voters who prefer enforcement over amnesty," said Gheen. "Lindsey Graham supports Amnesty over enforcement of our existing immigration laws and his own words are about to come back to haunt him."

ALIPAC is a multi-ethnic national organization, founded on 9/11/2004, with over 25,000 supporters representing all 50 states. The organization appears regularly on FOX, CNN, MSNBC, and CBC and is supported by many LEGAL immigrants who favor the reversal of illegal immigration in America through the humane and non racist enforcement of our existing immigration laws. For more information, please visit www.alipac.us

Lindsey Graham's ENTIRE sellout speech to La Raza follows:

Africa and the Unstoppable Rise of English

French Funded Rwandan Genocide

From The Japan Times

By Gwynne Dyer

Just over half of Africa's 52 countries speak French, but the number is dropping. This month Rwanda defected, announcing that henceforward only English will be taught in the schools. It would not be overstating the case to say that this caused alarm and despondency in France.

You couldn't help feeling, either, that Rwanda's trade and industry minister, Vincent Karega, was deliberately rubbing salt in the wound when he explained why French was being scrapped. "French is spoken only in France, some parts of west Africa, and parts of Canada and Switzerland," he said. (In parts of Belgium, too, actually, not to mention Haiti, but you get the point.) "English has emerged as a backbone for growth and development not only in the region but around the globe."

Getting very close to the regimes in African countries that have French as an official language, even sending troops to protect them from their domestic enemies, has always been part of Paris' strategy for preserving the status of French as a world language. In Rwanda's case, that put France in bed with the extremist Hutu-dominated regime that ruled the densely populated country before the genocide, to such an extent that Paris largely paid for the tripling in size of the Rwandan army in 1990-91.

When the Hutu regime began murdering the minority Tutsis in industrial quantities in 1994, France did not abandon it. The French president at the time, Francois Mitterrand, is alleged to have remarked that "in such countries, genocide is not too important . . ." And a principal reason that France overlooked its Rwandan ally's ghastly behavior was that the Tutsi-led opposition in exile mostly spoke English, because its members had found refuge in English-speaking Uganda.

An estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered in 1994, but the Uganda-based Rwanda Patriotic Front put an end to the genocide by invading the country and overthrowing the regime. Even a direct French military intervention in Rwanda (thinly disguised as a humanitarian operation) could not save the Hutu "genocidiaires," as they are universally known. So it was not to be expected that the new, mainly English-speaking government in Rwanda would have warm feelings toward France.

Fourteen years later, more than 95 percent of Rwanda's secondary schools still teach mainly in French, although an alternative English instructional program or intensive English language courses are usually available. Knowledge of both English and French is required for university entrance (and for most government jobs), but the government's own statistics say that only 3 percent of the population are fluent in English. Nevertheless, the new decision ends the teaching of French in Rwandan schools.

The government defends it as a purely business decision, driven by Rwanda's membership in the largely English-speaking East African Community (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi), but resentment of France also plays a role. This is a country that has already expelled the French ambassador and closed down the French cultural center, international school and radio station.

But can an African country just switch from one European language to another like that? It can if, like Rwanda, it only uses one language domestically. Almost all Rwandans, whether Hutu or Tutsi, speak Kinyarwanda, so they have no need for a lingua franca to communicate among themselves. Only those going into higher education or working with foreigners need any other language at all — which is why only 8 percent of Rwandans speak fluent French after all this time.

This is far from typical of African countries, most of which have many different ethnic groups, each with its own language. Such countries use the language of the former colonial power as a neutral "national" language, and have such a large investment in teaching it by now that switching is out of the question. The Congo will always use French; Nigeria will always use English; Mozambique will always use Portuguese.

So Francophones can relax: Their language is not about to be vanish from the African continent. On the other hand, French will always lose out to English in situations like Rwanda, where there is a single national language and the main reason for learning a foreign language is communication with the rest of the world.

Vietnam, an ex-French colony, has long taught English as the main foreign language in its schools, and Madagascar, also formerly ruled by France, made English a national language last year.

English-speakers often assume that this world role for their language owes something to its huge vocabulary and wonderful literature, or at least to the fact that Hollywood speaks English. Nothing of the sort. The sole reason is that the world's dominant power for the past two centuries has been English-speaking: Britain in the 19th century, and the United States in the 20th. Timing is everything, and English just happened to be the leading candidate when globalization created the need for an agreed global second language.


Gwynne Dyer is a London-based journalist.

Video Released of POW John McCain

"There is only one man in this election who has ever really fought for you in places where winning means survival and defeat means death - and that man is John McCain."

Marie Freeman Profiled By Winston-Salem Journal

Photo By Marie Freeman

So many people have remarked on the beautiful photographs that have been the masthead of this blog since its beginning.

I can take no credit. They are all the work of Marie Freeman, an extremely gifted photo-blogger from Valle Crucis, North Carolina, who very graciously allowed me to feature them. Marie's exceptional talent and her superb Blue Ridge Blog were recently profiled in the Winston-Salem Journal. If you haven't visited the Blue Ridge Blog, do yourself a favor; it is a delight. Like me, you will probably want to move to the mountains of north-western North Carolina.

Ignoble Lies, or Socrates Was Not Black

From The Dartmouth Review

A Book Review by A. S. Erikson

History Lesson: A Race Odyssey

Mary Lefkowitz

Yale University Press, 2008

I recently heard in passing that Aristotle stole all of his philosophical teachings from the library in Alexandria. Being not completely ignorant in matters of antiquity—and something of a contrarian by nature—I was intrigued partly by this claim, but even more by the fact that I had never heard this view of history before. I was so intrigued that I googled ‘Aristotle’, ‘stolen’, and ‘Alexandria’ in the hopes of finding out more. This led me to find Mary Lefkowitz’s newly published book History Lesson: A Race Odyssey.

Lefkowitz is an Emerita Professor of Classics at Wellesley College. The book recounts the 1990s face-off between herself and a member of the Africana movement: Tony Martin, a professor in the Africana Studies department at Wellesley. The Africana movement was in the business, beginning in the late eighties and continuing through the nineties, of advancing not only the Aristotle fallacy but of claiming that Western Civilization itself came from Africa. The argument advanced was one of cultural, not biological, history. The Greeks had stolen all of their ideas of note from Africa.

For proponents of the Africana movement, Aristotle is a fraud and Socrates was a black man. Lefkowitz, upon learning of “The Stolen Legacy” theory, was, in turns, dumbfounded and appalled. In 1992, she penned a review of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena for The New Republic entitled “Not out of Africa: The Origins of Greece and the Illusions of Afrocentrists.” The event marked the beginning of Lefkowitz’s Long Road. History Lesson is the story of her ugly confrontation with Martin and his movement; yet, it is also about—paradoxically—the future of history.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. What exactly was the Africana movement, and what was the agenda they were pushing? The movement was concerned with revising history. The confrontation described in the book is primarily concerned with the proper way to study history. On the one hand, Lefkowitz maintained that history must be backed up with relevant facts, but her opponents saw history as an area perfect for the sowing of the ‘noble lie.’ This is the sort of lie that would make whole races feel better about their own history. The movement was composed of pseudo-intellectuals and academics (e.g. Bernal was tenured at Cornell University).

This movement was not interested in scrutinizing past scholarship, like how past scholarship downplayed Greek sexism or xenophobia. No, unlike modern scholars who try to “set the record straight,” the Africana movement was creating its own past; they were attempting to causally project themselves back into the past. The project was not merely about propping up their own insecurities, though: “In the introduction to Volume 1 of Black Athena, Bernal admitted that his project had a political purpose, which was, ‘of course, to lessen European cultural arrogance.’”

The writers of the Africana movement stand in stark contrast to Lefkowitz, who is consistently—and perhaps a bit frustratingly—non-confrontational in her writing. In the New Republic review that started it all she objected to Bernal’s view of history, putting forth her own: “All these civilizations . . . like everything else in the past, belong equally to all of us.” Instead of rebuffing the Africana movement’s claim outright, she welcomed them to the fold, claiming no one had a special claim to ancient Greek civilization.

Nonetheless, Lefkowitz was concerned with the claims being advanced by Bernal and others:

As I saw it, Bernal’s book presented a serious challenge, both to the basic narrative of ancient history and to the whole purpose of studying the past. If I read him correctly, he was saying that one shouldn’t study history to learn what had happened—because—it was impossible to discover all the facts, especially in the case of the remote past—rather, the best one could do was to offer a “plausible” account. The role of the historian
was to assess the various “competitive plausibilities” and pick the one that was most persuasive.

But how to decide which was the most plausible? Bernal seemed to be saying that the most persuasive narrative was the one with the most desirable result. In effect, he was preaching a kind of affirmative action program for the rewriting of history, a project to revamp the past in order to bring about social change in the present. To Bernal, the Egyptian pharaohs could “usefully” be called black, because, presumably, today a lot of people wanted them to be black.

With her characteristic understated way of putting her concerns, she continues:

I was uncomfortable about Bernal’s competitive plausibility method, because it
was fundamentally subjective. If Bernal or I could simply rewrite history to
bring about the social changes we desired (and I felt sure that I hated the
racism in American society just as much as he did), then what was to stop the Ku
Klux Klan from rewriting the history to suit their nefarious purposes?

At Wellesley the movement’s representative was Tony Martin, whose class “Africans in Greece and Rome” was the beachhead at the college for Bernal’s and others’ writings. When some classics majors were upset by the lies being spread by Martin, they took their complaints to the President Nan Keohane, who “advised them to consider Tony Martin’s feelings. “He was on his own,” Lefkowitz said, while Lefkowitz herself had the support of tradition and the classics profession. The events are completely surreal; the college President tells students to beware a faculty member’s feelings because he practiced poor scholarship. Lefkowitz wryly writes, “I couldn’t help wondering why we were talking about feelings instead of historical values.” Martin was repeatedly coddled by the college’s administration.

As Keohane demonstrated by her fear of confrontation, one of interest-group-intellectualism’s unintended consequences is the utter stifling of intellectual debate and the installment of a constant fear: fear of what one says, fear of what one writes, even fear of what one thinks. It is the fear that anyone—even a liberal professor—can be branded as a racist reactionary.

All of this sounds a bit odd maybe—hardly innocent—but, after all, it’s a debate about ancient history. Yet, there was an even darker side to the movement, a side steeped in and stained by anti-Semitism.

The attacks from the Africana studies establishment were appalling to read about. At a debate Lefkowitz participated in at the University of San Diego, her counterpart, Dr. Khallid Muhammad, called her “Dikeda Left-o-witch.” She was a “homosexual . . . imposter man . . . imposter Jew” and a “hook-nosed, lox-eating, bagel-eating . . . something . . . something . . . so called Jew.”

Another disturbing element to emerge in Lefkowitz’s narrative is the students’ (and others’ as well) inability to tell a work of scholarship from a thinly veiled polemic. At first I chuckled aloud when she recounted how a student pointed to the number of footnotes as proof that The Secret Relationship Between the Blacks and Jews was not anti-Semitic. This is a book claiming that Jews dominated the slave trade and were the predominant slaveholders in the American South, all of this and more at a time when they were mostly confined to ghettoes in Europe. The laughter subsided as this tactic was used again and again to defend the above work—anonymously authored and published by the Nation of Islam—and others.

The Africana movement was perhaps the logical endpoint after several decades of multiculturalism occupying the apex of university chic. The establishment can tell everyone how special their culture is for only so long before people start reflecting on the fact for themselves. All cultures were not created equal, and to claim so downplays the incredible achievements of ancient Greece or Arabia during the Middle Ages.

Lefkowitz recounts all of these events from her past deftly and clearly. The tone throughout is neither one of sentimentality nor one of outrage, but one of bafflement. Her narrative easily keeps the reader’s attention, but the book is about more than Lefkowitz’s encounter with the Africana movement. This book is about two issues: first, the balance between political correctness and intellectual inquiry, i.e. how to keep campus debates both intellectual and civil; second, the extent to which the long-time virtues of history (clear argument, evidence, and attempting to recount reality rather than fantasy) are under attack in the academy.

Obama & DNC Admit All Allegations of Federal Court Lawsuit - Obama’s “Not” Qualified to be President

Obama Should Immediately Withdraw his Candidacy for President

For Immediate Release: - 10/21/08 - Complete contact details and pdfs of this press release and motions filed by plaintiff Berg today are at the end of this article

(Lafayette Hill, Pennsylvania – 10/21/08) - Philip J. Berg, Esquire, the Attorney who filed suit against Barack H. Obama challenging Senator Obama’s lack of “qualifications” to serve as President of the United States, announced today that Obama and tbe DNC “ADMITTED”, by way of failure to timely respond to Requests for Admissions, all of the numerous specific requests in the Federal lawsuit. Obama is “NOT QUALIFIED” to be President and therefore Obama must immediately withdraw his candidacy for President and the DNC shall substitute a qualified candidate. The case is Berg v. Obama, No. 08-cv-04083.

Berg stated that he filed Requests for Admissions on September 15, 2008 with a response by way of answer or objection had to be served within thirty [30] days. No response to the Requests for Admissions was served by way of response or objection. Thus, all of the Admissions directed to Obama and the DNC are deemed “ADMITTED.” Therefore, Obama must immediately withdraw his candidacy for President.

OBAMA - Admitted:

1. I was born in Kenya.

2. I am a Kenya “natural born” citizen. 3. My foreign birth was registered in the State of Hawaii.

4. My father, Barrack Hussein Obama, Sr. admitted Paternity of me. 5. My mother gave birth to me in Mombosa, Kenya.

6. My mother’s maiden name is Stanley Ann Dunham a/k/a Ann Dunham. 7. The COLB [Certification of Live Birth] posted on the website “Fightthesmears.com” is a forgery.

8. I was adopted by a Foreign Citizen. 9. I was adopted by Lolo Soetoro, M.A. a citizen of Indonesia.

10. I was not born in Hawaii. 11. I was not born at the Queens Medical Center in Hawaii.

12. I was not born at Kapi’olani Medical Center for Women and Children in Hawaii. 13. I was not born in a Hospital in Hawaii.

14. I am a citizen of Indonesia. 15. I never took the “Oath of Allegiance” to regain my U.S. Citizenship status.

16. I am not a “natural born” United States citizen. 17. My date of birth is August 4, 1961.

18. I traveled to Pakistan in 1981 with my Pakistan friends. 19. In 1981, I went to Indonesia on my way to Pakistan.

20. Pakistan was a no travel zone in 1981 for American Citizens. 21. In 1981, Pakistan was not allowing American Citizens to enter their country.

22. I traveled on my Indonesian Passport to Pakistan. 23. I renewed my Indonesian Passport on my way to Pakistan.

24. My senior campaign staff is aware I am not a “natural born” United States Citizen. 25. I am proud of my Kenya Heritage.

26. My relatives have requested changes to the portion of my birth certificate that identifies my first name. 27. My relatives have requested changes to the portion of my birth certificate that identifies my last name.

28. My relatives have requested changes to the portion of my birth certificate that identifies my place of birth. 29. I requested changes to the portion of my birth certificate that identifies my first name.

30. I requested changes to the portion of my birth certificate that identifies my last name. 31. I requested changes to the portion of my birth certificate that identifies my place of birth.

32. The document identified as my Indonesian School record from Fransiskus Assisi School in Jakarta, Indonesia is genuine. 33. I went to a Judge in Hawaii to have my name changed.

34. I went to a Senator and/or Congressman or other public official in Hawaii to have my name changed. 35. I had a passport issued to me from the Government of Indonesia.

36. The United States Constitution does not allow for a Person to hold the office of President of the United States unless that person is a “natural born” United States citizen. 37. I am ineligible pursuant to the United States Constitution to serve as President and/or Vice President of the United States.

38. I never renounced my citizenship as it relates to my citizenship to the country of Indonesia.39. I never renounced my citizenship as it relates to my citizenship to the country of Kenya.

40. I am an Attorney who specializes in Constitutional Law. 41. Kenya was a part of the British Colonies at the time of my birth.

42. Kenya did not become its own Republic until 1963.43. I am not a “Naturalized” United States Citizen.

44. I obtained $200 Million dollars in campaign funds by fraudulent means. 45. I cannot produce a “vault” (original) long version of a birth certificate showing my birth in Hawaii.

46. My “vault” (original) long version birth certificate shows my birth in Kenya.47. The only times I was to a Hospital in Hawaii was for check-ups or medical treatments for illnesses.

48. Queens Medical Center in Honolulu, Hawaii does not have any record of my mother, Stanley Ann Dunham (Obama) giving birth to me.49. Kapi’olani Medical Center for Women and Children in Honolulu, Hawaii does not have any record of my mother, Stanley Ann Dunham (Obama) giving birth to me.

50. I was born in the Coast Province Hospital in Mombasa, Kenya. 51. I represented on my State Bar application in Illinois that I never used any other name other than Barack Hussein Obama.

52. I went by the name Barry Soetoro in Indonesia. 53. My Indonesian school records are under the name of Barry Soetoro.

54. I took an Oath to uphold the United States Constitution when admitted to the State Bar of Illinois to practice Law. 55. I took an Oath to uphold the United States Constitution when I was Sworn into my United States Senate Office.

56. I hold dual citizenship with at least one other Country besides the United States of America.

DNC - Admitted:

1. The DNC nominated Barrack Hussein Obama as the Democratic Nominee for President.

2. The DNC has not vetted Barrack Hussein Obama. 3. The DNC did not have a background check performed on Barrack Hussein Obama.

4.The DNC did not verify Barrack Hussein Obama’s eligibility to serve as President of the United States. 5. The DNC admits Barrack Hussein Obama was born in Kenya.

6. The DNC admits Barrack Hussein Obama is not a “natural born” United States citizen.7. The DNC admits Barrack Hussein Obama was not born in Hawaii.

8.The DNC admits they have not inquired into Barrack Hussein Obama’s citizenship status.
9. The DNC admits they have a duty to properly vette the Democratic Nominee for President.

10.The DNC admits Lolo Soetoro, M.A., an Indonesian citizen adopted Barrack Hussein Obama.
11. The DNC admits the Credentials Committee has been aware of this lawsuit since August 22, 2008 as the lawsuit was faxed to our Washington D.C. Office on August 22, 2008.

12. The DNC admits their Credentials Committee failed to verify and/or inquire into the credentials of Barack Hussein Obama to serve as the President of the United States. 13. The DNC admits their Credential Committee’s Report failed to address the issues of Barack Hussein Obama’s ineligibility to serve as President of the United States.

14.The DNC admits Howard Dean, Chair Person has and had knowledge Barack Hussein Obama was born in Kenya and ineligible to serve as the President of the United States. 15. The DNC admits Plaintiff and all Democratic citizens of the United States have been personally injured as a result of not having a qualified Democratic Presidential Nominee to cast their votes upon.

16. The DNC admits Plaintiff and all citizens of the United States have a Constitutional Right to vote for the President of the United States and to have two (2) qualified candidates of which to choose from. 17. The DNC admits Plaintiff and all citizens of the United States have a Constitutional right to have a properly vetted Democratic Presidential Nominee of which to cast their vote.

18. The DNC admits an FBI background check is not performed on the Presidential or Vice Presidential Candidates. 19. The DNC admits the United States Constitution does not allow for a Person to hold the office of President of the United States unless that person is a “natural born” United States citizen.

20. The DNC admits they collected donations on behalf of Barack Hussein Obama for his Presidential campaign.21. The DNC admits Plaintiff and Democratic citizens donated money based on false representations that Barack Hussein Obama was qualified to serve as the President of the United States.

22. The DNC admits if Barack Hussein Obama is elected as President and allowed to serve as President of the United States in violation of our Constitution, it will create a Constitutional crisis.23. The DNC admits Barack Hussein Obama took an Oath to uphold the United States Constitution.

24. The DNC admits allowing a person who is not a “natural born” citizen to serve as President of the United States violates Plaintiff’s rights to due process of law in violation of the United States Constitution.25. The DNC admits allowing a person who is not a “natural born” citizen to serve as President of the United States violates Plaintiff’s rights to Equal Protection of the laws in violation of the United States Constitution.

26. The DNC admits the function of the DNC is to secure a Democratic Presidential Candidate who will protect Democratic citizen’s interests, fight for their equal opportunities and fight for justice for all Americans. 27. The DNC admits the Democratic National Committee has been promoting Barack Hussein Obama’s Presidential election knowing he was ineligible to serve as President of the United States.

Our website obamacrimes.com now has 50.7 + million hits. We are urging all to spread the word of our website – and forward to your local newspapers, radio and TV stations. Berg again stressed his position regarding the urgency of this case as, “we” the people, are heading to a “Constitutional Crisis” if this case is not resolved forthwith.

Philip J. Berg, Esquire
555 Andorra Glen Court, Suite 12
Lafayette Hill, PA 19444-2531
Cell (610) 662-3005
(610) 825-3134
(800) 993-PHIL [7445]
Fax (610) 834-7659

KGB Involved In Murder of Solidarity Priest

In describing this blog's focus as faith, freedom, defense of the West and renewal of the culture, I have wanted to highlight great champions of those causes because they inspire and remind us all of the role we each must play in the defense of free, Judeo-Christian civilization. In this regard, I can think of no greater, bolder, more courageous and self-giving champion than the spiritual advisor to Poland's Solidarity Movement, Father Jerzy Popieluszko, who I profiled a year ago on October 19, the anniversary of his martyrdom.

Now, new details of Father Popieluszko's death are coming to light that directly link the Soviet Union to this holy priest's murder in 1984.

From The Telegraph
By Matthew Day

KGB agents, desperate to curb the influence of Poland's Catholic Church, may have had a hand in the murder of a Polish priest at the forefront of opposition to communist rule, investigators in Warsaw have claimed.

Historians from Poland's Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), the body charged with investigating communist crimes, have found documents that suggest that the Soviet Union was involved in the kidnap, torture and murder of Father Jerzy Popieluszko in 1984.

The IPN says new evidence indicated that Father Popieluszko, an unflinching and brazen critic of communist rule in Poland, may have been held at a Soviet military base near Kazun, 30 miles to the north of Warsaw, and murdered a number of days after his abduction.

Professor Jan Zaryn, a historian at the IPN, said that the order to kill the priest may well have come from a Kremlin worried by the growing anti-communist influence of Poland's Catholic Church and its Polish head, Pope John Paul II. By murdering the priest, Moscow may well have wanted to deliver a blunt message to the Church as a way of forcing it to stay out of politics.

The new evidence undermines the official version of events surrounding the death of Father Popieluszko, who had become a leading protagonist of the suppressed Solidarity movement and major thorn in the flesh of the country's socialist regime at the time of his death.

According to the conventional line, Father Popieluszko was abducted on the night of October 19, 1984 by three men from Poland's internal security service, the SB, and, operating under their own initiative, they beat him to death.

Eleven days later the priest's body was pulled from a reservoir to the north-west of Warsaw. An estimated 250,000 Poles, appalled by the murder, attended his funeral in Warsaw a few days later.

Despite suspicions that the order came from high up in the communist hierarchy, until now there has been little evidence to suggest anything other than the official line that the SB agents, who were convicted of the murder in 1985, were responsible for the killing.

But a report in the Polish newspaper Polska, based on the IPN documents, said that the injuries sustained by the priest's body were so severe that they could not have been committed by the SB agents alone.

Professor Zaryn has also alleged that the trial of the agents was an exercise in damage limitation, designed to keep the possible involvement of high ranking politicians, including that of Poland's then leader, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, secret.

14,000+ Hillary Volunteers Working for McCain

A Cuban-American Writes to the Richmond Times-Dispatch

Visitor Number 50,000

Sunlit Uplands was very pleased to welcome its fifty-thousandth visitor this afternoon; someone from Deer Park, Texas.

Over the past year the number of visitors each month has grown incredibly. About 75% of all visitors are from the United States and 25% come from Canada, the United Kingdom and scores of other nations. Most gratifying is the sizable number of you who visit regularly. I hope you will take advantage of the new Frappr feature in the sidebar, introduce yourself, perhaps share a photo, and leave a comment. Your visits are warmly welcomed and your comments, suggestions, article ideas are always appreciated.

Cead Mille Failte!

Colin Powell: General Paper Mache'

Colin Powell's entire career owes everything to the good will and generosity of four Republican presidents. He may say that his endorsement of Barack Hussein Obama is not about race, but his rise through the ranks to the most senior of administration positions clearly was.

He suggests that his endorsement of Obama is motivated by a concern over Supreme Court nominations and the inexperience of Governor Sarah Palin. We all knew that the General is a Rockefeller Republican and a consummate Washington insider, but his knock against Governor Palin is inappropriate, ungentlemanly, and coming from one whose service will be remembered for lying to the world community, grossly hypocritical. Unlike Governor Palin, General Powell spent his entire career hanging from his sources of power. His rise and the positions he held were entirely dependent on the good will of those above him.

Governor Palin stands on her base of power. She was willing to do something Powell, for whatever reasons, has been unwilling to do -- subject herself to the American electorate. As both a Mayor and a Governor, she has been handily elected, and her 80%+ approval rating is based on a "take no prisoners" record of accomplishment.

Despite all the helping hands General Powell has received along the way, today he reverted to the role in which he is apparently most comfortable -- political hack. And since he claims that he won't bother to campaign for Obama, he even lacks the courage of his convictions. He is truly a paper mache' general.

Libera - "When A Knight Won His Spurs"

Obama: Spreading the Wealth Around

"It is this world, a world where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where white folks’ greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere… That’s the world! On which hope sits!"

-- From "Audacity of Hope" by Barack Hussein Obama

Those socialists lecturing plumbers on the need to spread their wealth around know how to set an example. Barack Hussein Obama's brother may be living in a shack in Africa on less than $1 a month, but look at how the Obama's are spreading their campaign donors' wealth around at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York.

Here they are, selflessly spreading that wealth around over lobster appetizers, two whole steamed lobsters, Iranian caviar, and champagne, served by the Waldorf's room service.

Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis

From American Thinker

By James Simpson

America waits with bated breath while Washington struggles to bring the U.S. economy back from the brink of disaster. But many of those same politicians caused the crisis, and if left to their own devices will do so again.

Despite the mass media news blackout, a series of books, talk radio and the blogosphere have managed to expose Barack Obama's connections to his radical mentors -- Weather Underground bombers William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis and others. David Horowitz and his Discover the Networks.org have also contributed a wealth of information and have noted Obama's radical connections since the beginning.

Yet, no one to my knowledge has yet connected all the dots between Barack Obama and the Radical Left. When seen together, the influences on Obama's life comprise a who's who of the radical leftist movement, and it becomes painfully apparent that not only is Obama a willing participant in that movement, he has spent most of his adult life deeply immersed in it.

But even this doesn't fully describe the extreme nature of this candidate. He can be tied directly to a malevolent overarching strategy that has motivated many, if not all, of the most destructive radical leftist organizations in the United States since the 1960s.

The Cloward-Piven Strategy of Orchestrated Crisis

In an earlier post, I noted the liberal record of unmitigated legislative disasters, the latest of which is now being played out in the financial markets before our eyes. Before the 1994 Republican takeover, Democrats had sixty years of virtually unbroken power in Congress - with substantial majorities most of the time. Can a group of smart people, studying issue after issue for years on end, with virtually unlimited resources at their command, not come up with a single policy that works? Why are they chronically incapable?

Why?

One of two things must be true. Either the Democrats are unfathomable idiots, who ignorantly pursue ever more destructive policies despite decades of contrary evidence, or they understand the consequences of their actions and relentlessly carry on anyway because they somehow benefit.

I submit to you they understand the consequences. For many it is simply a practical matter of eliciting votes from a targeted constituency at taxpayer expense; we lose a little, they gain a lot, and the politician keeps his job. But for others, the goal is more malevolent - the failure is deliberate. Don't laugh. This method not only has its proponents, it has a name: the Cloward-Piven Strategy. It describes their agenda, tactics, and long-term strategy.

The Strategy was first elucidated in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation magazine by a pair of radical socialist Columbia University professors, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. David Horowitz summarizes it as:

The strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis. The "Cloward-Piven Strategy" seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.

Cloward and Piven were inspired by radical organizer [and Hillary Clinton mentor] Saul Alinsky:

"Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules," Alinsky wrote in his 1989 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system's failure to "live up" to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist "rule book" with a socialist one. (Courtesy Discover the Networks.org)

Newsmax rounds out the picture:

Their strategy to create political, financial, and social chaos that would result in revolution blended Alinsky concepts with their more aggressive efforts at bringing about a change in U.S. government. To achieve their revolutionary change, Cloward and Piven sought to use a cadre of aggressive organizers assisted by friendly news media to force a re-distribution of the nation's wealth.

In their Nation article, Cloward and Piven were specific about the kind of "crisis" they were trying to create:

By crisis, we mean a publicly visible disruption in some institutional sphere. Crisis can occur spontaneously (e.g., riots) or as the intended result of tactics of demonstration and protest which either generate institutional disruption or bring unrecognized disruption to public attention.

No matter where the strategy is implemented, it shares the following features:

1. The offensive organizes previously unorganized groups eligible for government benefits but not currently receiving all they can.
2. The offensive seeks to identify new beneficiaries and/or create new benefits.
3. The overarching aim is always to impose new stresses on target systems, with the ultimate goal of forcing their collapse.
   

Capitalizing on the racial unrest of the 1960s, Cloward and Piven saw the welfare system as their first target. They enlisted radical black activist George Wiley, who created the National Welfare Reform Organization (NWRO) to implement the strategy. Wiley hired militant foot soldiers to storm welfare offices around the country, violently demanding their "rights." According to a City Journal article by Sol Stern, welfare rolls increased from 4.3 million to 10.8 million by the mid-1970s as a result, and in New York City, where the strategy had been particularly successful, "one person was on the welfare rolls... for every two working in the city's private economy."

According to another City Journal article titled "Compassion Gone Mad":

The movement's impact on New York City was jolting: welfare caseloads, already climbing 12 percent a year in the early sixties, rose by 50 percent during Lindsay's first two years; spending doubled... The city had 150,000 welfare cases in 1960; a decade later it had 1.5 million.

The vast expansion of welfare in New York City that came of the NWRO's Cloward-Piven tactics sent the city into bankruptcy in 1975. Rudy Giuliani cited Cloward and Piven by name as being responsible for "an effort at economic sabotage." He also credited Cloward-Piven with changing the cultural attitude toward welfare from that of a temporary expedient to a lifetime entitlement, an attitude which in-and-of-itself has caused perhaps the greatest damage of all.

Cloward and Piven looked at this strategy as a gold mine of opportunity. Within the newly organized groups, each offensive would find an ample pool of foot soldier recruits willing to advance its radical agenda at little or no pay, and expand its base of reliable voters, legal or otherwise. The radicals' threatening tactics also would accrue an intimidating reputation, providing a wealth of opportunities for extorting monetary and other concessions from the target organizations. In the meantime, successful offensives would create an ever increasing drag on society. As they gleefully observed:

Moreover, this kind of mass influence is cumulative because benefits are continuous. Once eligibility for basic food and rent grants is established, the drain on local resources persists indefinitely.

The next time you drive through one of the many blighted neighborhoods in our cities, or read of the astronomical crime, drug addiction, and out-of-wedlock birth rates, or consider the failed schools, strapped police and fire resources of every major city, remember Cloward and Piven's thrill that "...the drain on local resources persists indefinitely."

ACORN, the new tip of the Cloward-Piven spear

In 1970, one of George Wiley's protégés, Wade Rathke -- like Bill Ayers, a member of the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) -- was sent to found the Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now. While NWRO had made a good start, it alone couldn't accomplish the Cloward-Piven goals. Rathke's group broadened the offensive to include a wide array of low income "rights." Shortly thereafter they changed "Arkansas" to "Association of" and ACORN went nationwide.

Today ACORN is involved in a wide array of activities, including housing, voting rights, illegal immigration and other issues. According to ACORN's website: "ACORN is the nation's largest grassroots community organization of low-and moderate-income people with over 400,000 member families organized into more than 1,200 neighborhood chapters in 110 cities across the country," It is perhaps the largest radical group in the U.S. and has been cited for widespread criminal activity on many fronts.

Voting

On voting rights, ACORN and its voter mobilization subsidiary, Project Vote, have been involved nationwide in efforts to grant felons the vote and lobbied heavily for the Motor Voter Act of 1993, a law allowing people to register at motor vehicle departments, schools, libraries and other public places. That law had been sought by Cloward and Piven since the early1980s and they were present, standing behind President Clinton at the signing ceremony.

ACORN's voter rights tactics follow the Cloward-Piven Strategy:

• 1. Register as many Democrat voters as possible, legal or otherwise and help them vote, multiple times if possible.
• 2. Overwhelm the system with fraudulent registrations using multiple entries of the same name, names of deceased, random names from the phone book, even contrived names.
• 3. Make the system difficult to police by lobbying for minimal identification standards.

In this effort, ACORN sets up registration sites all over the country and has been frequently cited for turning in fraudulent registrations, as well as destroying republican applications. In the 2004-2006 election cycles alone, ACORN was accused of widespread voter fraud in 12 states. It may have swung the election for one state governor.

ACORN's website brags: "Since 2004, ACORN has helped more than 1.7 million low- and moderate-income and minority citizens apply to register to vote." Project vote boasts 4 million. I wonder how many of them are dead? For the 2008 cycle, ACORN and Project Vote have pulled out all the stops. Given their furious nationwide effort, it is not inconceivable that this presidential race could be decided by fraudulent votes alone.

Barack Obama ran ACORN's Project Vote in Chicago and his highly successful voter registration drive was credited with getting the disgraced former Senator Carol Moseley-Braun elected. Newsmax reiterates Cloward and Piven's aspirations for ACORN's voter registration efforts:

By advocating massive, no-holds-barred voter registration campaigns, they [Cloward & Piven] sought a Democratic administration in Washington, D.C. that would re-distribute the nation's wealth and lead to a totalitarian socialist state.

Illegal Immigration

As I have written elsewhere, the Radical Left's offensive to promote illegal immigration is "Cloward-Piven on steroids." ACORN is at the forefront of this movement as well, and was a leading organization among a broad coalition of radical groups, including Soros' Open Society Institute, the Service Employees International Union (ACORN founder Wade Rathke also runs a SEIU chapter), and others, that became the Coalition for Comprehensive Immigration Reform. CCIR fortunately failed to gain passage for the 2007 illegal immigrant amnesty bill, but its goals have not changed.

The burden of illegal immigration on our already overstressed welfare system has been widely documented. Some towns in California have even been taken over by illegal immigrant drug cartels. The disease, crime and overcrowding brought by illegal immigrants places a heavy burden on every segment of society and every level of government, threatening to split this country apart at the seams. In the meantime, radical leftist efforts to grant illegal immigrants citizenship guarantee a huge pool of new democrat voters. With little border control, terrorists can also filter in.

Obama aided ACORN as their lead attorney in a successful suit he brought against the Illinois state government to implement the Motor Voter law there. The law had been resisted by Republican Governor Jim Edgars, who feared the law was an opening to widespread vote fraud.

His fears were warranted as the Motor Voter law has since been cited as a major opportunity for vote fraud, especially for illegal immigrants, even terrorists. According to the Wall Street Journal: "After 9/11, the Justice Department found that eight of the 19 hijackers were registered to vote..."

ACORN's dual offensives on voting and illegal immigration are handy complements. Both swell the voter rolls with reliable democrats while assaulting the country ACORN seeks to destroy with overwhelming new problems.

Mortgage Crisis

And now we have the mortgage crisis, which has sent a shock wave through Wall Street and panicked world financial markets like no other since the stock market crash of 1929. But this is a problem created in Washington long ago. It originated with the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), signed into law in 1977 by President Jimmy Carter. The CRA was Carter's answer to a grassroots activist movement started in Chicago, and forced banks to make loans to low income, high risk customers. PhD economist and former Texas Senator Phil Gramm has called it: "a vast extortion scheme against the nation's banks."

ACORN aggressively sought to expand loans to low income groups using the CRA as a whip. Economist Stan Leibowitz wrote in the New York Post:

In the 1980s, groups such as the activists at ACORN began pushing charges of "redlining"-claims that banks discriminated against minorities in mortgage lending. In 1989, sympathetic members of Congress got the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act amended to force banks to collect racial data on mortgage applicants; this allowed various studies to be ginned up that seemed to validate the original accusation.

In fact, minority mortgage applications were rejected more frequently than other applications-but the overwhelming reason wasn't racial discrimination, but simply that minorities tend to have weaker finances.

ACORN showed its colors again in 1991, by taking over the House Banking Committee room for two days to protest efforts to scale back the CRA. Obama represented ACORN in the Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank Fed. Sav. Bank, 1994 suit against redlining. Most significant of all, ACORN was the driving force behind a 1995 regulatory revision pushed through by the Clinton Administration that greatly expanded the CRA and laid the groundwork for the Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac borne financial crisis we now confront. Barack Obama was the attorney representing ACORN in this effort. With this new authority, ACORN used its subsidiary, ACORN Housing, to promote subprime loans more aggressively.

As a New York Post article describes it:

A 1995 strengthening of the Community Reinvestment Act required banks to find ways to provide mortgages to their poorer communities. It also let community activists intervene at yearly bank reviews, shaking the banks down for large pots of money.

Banks that got poor reviews were punished; some saw their merger plans frustrated; others faced direct legal challenges by the Justice Department.

Flexible lending programs expanded even though they had higher default rates than loans with traditional standards. On the Web, you can still find CRA loans available via ACORN with "100 percent financing . . . no credit scores . . . undocumented income . . . even if you don't report it on your tax returns." Credit counseling is required, of course.

Ironically, an enthusiastic Fannie Mae Foundation report singled out one paragon of nondiscriminatory lending, which worked with community activists and followed "the most flexible underwriting criteria permitted." That lender's $1 billion commitment to low-income loans in 1992 had grown to $80 billion by 1999 and $600 billion by early 2003.

The lender they were speaking of was Countrywide, which specialized in subprime lending and had a working relationship with ACORN.

Investor's Business Daily added:

The revisions also allowed for the first time the securitization of CRA-regulated loans containing subprime mortgages. The changes came as radical "housing rights" groups led by ACORN lobbied for such loans. ACORN at the time was represented by a young public-interest lawyer in Chicago by the name of Barack Obama. (Emphasis, mine.)

Since these loans were to be underwritten by the government sponsored Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the implicit government guarantee of those loans absolved lenders, mortgage bundlers and investors of any concern over the obvious risk. As Bloomberg reported: "It is a classic case of socializing the risk while privatizing the profit."

And if you think Washington policy makers cared about ACORN's negative influence, think again. Before this whole mess came down, a Democrat-sponsored bill on the table would have created an "Affordable Housing Trust Fund," granting ACORN access to approximately $500 million in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac revenues with little or no oversight.

Even now, unbelievably -- on the brink of national disaster -- Democrats have insisted ACORN benefit from bailout negotiations! Senator Lindsay Graham reported last night (9/25/08) in an interview with Greta Van Susteren of On the Record that Democrats want 20 percent of the bailout money to go to ACORN!

This entire fiasco represents perhaps the pinnacle of ACORN's efforts to advance the Cloward-Piven Strategy and is a stark demonstration of the power they wield in Washington.

Enter Barack Obama

In attempting to capture the significance of Barack Obama's Radical Left connections and his relation to the Cloward Piven strategy, I constructed following flow chart. It is by no means complete. There are simply too many radical individuals and organizations to include them all here. But these are perhaps the most significant.

The chart puts Barack Obama at the epicenter of an incestuous stew of American radical leftism. Not only are his connections significant, they practically define who he is. Taken together, they constitute a who's who of the American radical left, and guiding all is the Cloward-Piven strategy.

Conspicuous in their absence are any connections at all with any other group, moderate, or even mildly leftist. They are all radicals, firmly bedded in the anti-American, communist, socialist, radical leftist mesh.

Saul Alinsky

Most people are unaware that Barack Obama received his training in "community organizing" from Saul Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation. But he did. In and of itself that marks his heritage and training as that of a radical activist. One really needs go no further. But we have.

Bill Ayers

Obama objects to being associated with SDS bomber Bill Ayers, claiming he is being smeared with "guilt by association." But they worked together at the Woods Fund. The Wall Street Journal added substantially to our knowledge by describing in great detail Obama's work over five years with SDS bomber Bill Ayers on the board of a non-profit, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, to push a radical agenda on public school children. As Stanley Kurtz states:

"...the issue here isn't guilt by association; it's guilt by participation. As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle. That is a story even if Mr. Ayers had never planted a single bomb 40 years ago."

Also included in the mix is Theresa Heinz Kerry's favorite charity, the Tides Foundation. A partial list of Tides grants tells you all you need to know: ACLU, ACORN, Center for American Progress, Center for Constitutional Rights (a communist front,) CAIR, Earth Justice, Institute for Policy Studies (KGB spy nest), National Lawyers Guild (oldest communist front in U.S.), People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), and practically every other radical group there is. ACORN's Wade Rathke runs a Tides subsidiary, the Tides Center.

Carl Davidson and the New Party

We have heard about Bomber Bill, but we hear little about fellow SDS member Carl Davidson. According to Discover the Networks, Davidson was an early supporter of Barack Obama and a prominent member of Chicago's New Party, a synthesis of CPUSA members, Socialists, ACORN veterans and other radicals. Obama sought and received the New Party's endorsement, and they assisted with his campaign. The New Party also developed a strong relationship with ACORN. As an excellent article on the New Party observes: "Barack Obama knew what he was getting into and remains an ideal New Party candidate."

George Soros

The chart also suggests the reason for George Soros' fervent support of Obama. The President of his Open Society Institute is Aryeh Neier, founder of the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). As mentioned above, three other former SDS members had extensive contact with Obama: Bill Ayers, Carl Davidson and Wade Rathke. Surely Aryeh Neier would have heard from his former colleagues of the promising new politician. More to the point, Neier is firmly committed to supporting the hugely successful radical organization, ACORN, and would be certain back their favored candidate, Barack Obama.

ACORN

Obama has spent a large portion of his professional life working for ACORN or its subsidiaries, representing ACORN as a lawyer on some of its most critical issues, and training ACORN leaders. Stanley Kurtz's excellent National Review article, "Inside Obama's Acorn." also describes Obama's ACORN connection in detail. But I can't improve on Obama's own words:

I've been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career (emphasis added). Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work. - Barack Obama, Speech to ACORN, November 2007 (Courtesy Newsmax.)

In another excellent article on Obama's ACORN connections, Newsmax asks a nagging question:

It would be telling to know if Obama, during his years at Columbia, had occasion to meet Cloward and study the Cloward-Piven Strategy.

I ask you, is it possible ACORN would train Obama to take leadership positions within ACORN without telling him what he was training for? Is it possible ACORN would put Obama in leadership positions without clueing him into what his purpose was?? Is it possible that this most radical of organizations would put someone in charge of training its trainers, without him knowing what it was he was training them for?

As a community activist for ACORN; as a leadership trainer for ACORN; as a lead organizer for ACORN's Project Vote; as an attorney representing ACORN's successful efforts to impose Motor Voter regulations in Illinois; as ACORN's representative in lobbying for the expansion of high risk housing loans through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that led to the current crisis; as a recipient of their assistance in his political campaigns -- both with money and campaign workers; it is doubtful that he was unaware of ACORN's true goals. It is doubtful he was unaware of the Cloward-Piven Strategy.

Fast-forward to 2005 when an obsequious, servile and scraping Daniel Mudd, CEO of Fannie Mae spoke at the Congressional Black Caucus swearing in ceremony for newly-elected Illinois Senator, Barack Obama. Mudd called, the Congressional Black Caucus "our family" and "the conscience of Fannie Mae."

In 2005, Republicans sought to rein in Fannie and Freddie. Senator John McCain was at the forefront of that effort. But it failed due to an intense lobbying effort put forward by Fannie and Freddie.

In his few years as a U.S. senator, Obama has received campaign contributions of $126,349, from Fannie and Freddie, second only to the $165,400 received by Senator Chris Dodd, who has been getting donations from them since 1988. What makes Obama so special?

His closest advisers are a dirty laundry list of individuals at the heart of the financial crisis: former Fannie Mae CEO Jim Johnson; Former Fannie Mae CEO and former Clinton Budget Director Frank Raines; and billionaire failed Superior Bank of Chicago Board Chair Penny Pritzker.

Johnson had to step down as adviser on Obama's V.P. search after this gem came out:

An Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) report^[1] from September 2004 found that, during Johnson's tenure as CEO, Fannie Mae had improperly deferred $200 million in expenses. This enabled top executives, including Johnson and his successor, Franklin Raines, to receive substantial bonuses in 1998.^[2] A 2006 OFHEO report^[3] found that Fannie Mae had substantially under-reported Johnson's compensation. Originally reported as $6-7 million, Johnson actually received approximately $21 million.

Obama denies ties to Raines but the Washington Post calls him a member of "Obama's political circle." Raines and Johnson were fined $3 million by the Office of Federal Housing Oversight for their manipulation of Fannie books. The fine is small change however, compared to the $50 million Raines was able to obtain in improper bonuses as a result of juggling the books.

Most significantly, Penny Pritzker, the current Finance Chairperson of Obama's presidential campaign helped develop the complicated investment bundling of subprime securities at the heart of the meltdown. She did so in her position as shareholder and board chair of Superior Bank. The Bank failed in 2001, one of the largest in recent history, wiping out $50 million in uninsured life savings of approximately 1,400 customers. She was named in a RICO class action law suit but doesn't seem to have come out of it too badly.

As a young attorney in the 1990s, Barack Obama represented ACORN in Washington in their successful efforts to expand Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) authority. In addition to making it easier for ACORN groups to force banks into making risky loans, this also paved the way for banks like Superior to package mortgages as investments, and for the Government Sponsored Enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to underwrite them. These changes created the conditions that ultimately lead to the current financial crisis.

Did they not know this would occur? Were these smart people, led by a Harvard graduate, unaware of the Econ 101 concept of moral hazard that would result from the government making implicit guarantees to underwrite private sector financial risk? They should have known that freeing the high-risk mortgage market of risk, calamity was sure to ensue. I think they did.

Barack Obama, the Cloward-Piven candidate, no matter how he describes himself, has been a radical activist for most of his political career. That activism has been in support of organizations and initiatives that at their heart seek to tear the pillars of this nation asunder in order to replace them with their demented socialist vision. Their influence has spread so far and so wide that despite their blatant culpability in the current financial crisis, they are able to manipulate Capital Hill politicians to cut them into $140 billion of the bailout pie!

God grant those few responsible yet remaining in Washington, DC the strength to prevent this massive fraud from occurring. God grant them the courage to stand up in the face of this Marxist tidal wave.


Jim Simpson is a former White House staff economist and budget analyst. His writings have been published in American Thinker, Washington Times, FrontPage Magazine, DefenseWatch, Soldier of Fortune and others. His blog is Truth and Consequences..

McCain Owns the Evening at Al Smith Dinner

David Horowitz on Islamo Fascism Week

Islamo Fascism Awareness Week III is Happening

Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week III has begun on over 75 campuses across the country and so have the attempts to suppress it. I’m going to speak on several campuses. Other speakers who’ll be on campus for the Freedom Center these next three weeks include Dick Morris, Daniel Pipes, author and scholar Dr. Andrew Bostom, former Muslim Nonie Darwish, and Middle East reporter Deborah Weiss.

As in the two Islamo-Fascism Awareness Weeks that preceded this one, our effort focuses on the global threat posed by the radical Islamic extremism that fuels the international jihad. But over the past year, as we have attempted to make students aware of the goals of Islamo Fascism, we have become more aware of the “stealth” jihad taking place in our own country under the protection of our constitutional freedoms and civil liberties. This movement is especially strong on our nation’s campuses, therefore, we have made the target of Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week III: Stop the Jihad on Campus in general and the Muslim Students Association (MSA) in particular.

Hiding under the cover of the campus romance with “multiculturalism,” the MSA falsely presents itself as a religious/cultural organization representing all Muslims when in fact it is a hardcore radical political organization representing Muslims who support the jihad against the West and the destruction of the Jewish state. The MSA receives student funding under false pretenses and should be compelled to make its agendas clear or renounce the jihad and terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah and Hamas.

Aside from its imposture as a non-political organization, the MSA is also an opponent of free speech and is part of a nation-wide Islamo-fascist campaign to suppress the film Obsession. This campaign is spear-headed by organizations associated with the terrorist party Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and includes the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim American Society (MAS) in addition to the Muslim Students Association.

Here is a story from the North Carolina Daily Tar Heel about our protest on that campus. The story swallows the jihadist line that we are opposed to the MSA's funding because of its "radical ideas." This is a lie the jihadists have learned to tell from the American left whose strategy is to destroy its opponents by labeling them Islamophobic, racist and McCarthyite. The ideas of the MSA are reprehensible and morally disgusting. But this is a free country and they have a right to say what they want. But lying to student activities boards to get student funds is not a right. Presenting themselves as a religious group when they are political arm of the Islamo-fascist jihad against the West is a form of deception. Allowing them to get away with this endangers the lives and security of moderate Muslims who do not support the jihad, not to speak of the Christians, Jews and Atheists who are infidels and therefore in their path.

-- David Horowitz


Stifling Debate at Eastern Tennessee State

When East Tennessee State University (ETSU) grad student Sean Rife tried to bring author Robert Spencer to campus for Islamo Fascism Week III, he wasn’t looking to start a fight. As the president of ETSU’s Society for Intellectual Diversity (SID), a non-partisan student group that champions free debate and academic freedom, Rife was just looking to stir discussion about a subject, Islamic terrorism, which increasingly has come to dominate Americans’ concerns. But a fight – and a lesson in politically correct bullying – is exactly what he got.

It began when Rife presented his request to the school’s Student Government Association. Like any other student, Rifled filled out the required paperwork, and submitted a funding request to a student government committee. Then, on Monday, he went before the committee to discuss his request – and that’s when the trouble started.

First off, Rife was required by a student representative to defend the request. He pointed out that the idea was not to cause offense but to have a reasoned debate. As the author of several well regarded books on the subject of Islam, moreover, Spencer was more than qualified to lead a discussion under the title “Is Islam a religion of peace?” Rife further noted that his organization’s faculty sponsor, Paul Kamolnick, an associate professor in the department of sociology and anthropology, had written a letter to Taneem Aziz, the leader of an Islamic community center in neighboring Johnson City, Tennessee, inviting him to attend Spencer’s talk and present his own views. So far from ostracizing Muslims, the idea was to include them in the discussion.

None of this made a difference to the student government committee. Rife’s request to host Spencer was officially rejected. But he was taken a back at the reason for the rejection: “due to the controversial issues that [David] Horowitz’s society condones is degrading Muslims.” Spencer’s name was hardly even mentioned, nor was there any evidence given of Horowitz allegedly anti-Muslim views.

Rife’s knows politics were at play. While East Tennessee is not ruled by the sort of far left political culture that characterizes schools like UC Berkeley, it does share something in common with such bastions of political correctness: the speakers invited to the school are almost without exception from the political Left. In the past several years, the school has hosted such far-Left activists as actors Felix Justice and Danny Glover, the latter an outspoken supporter of Cuba’s dictatorial regime; radical education activist Jonathan Kozol; and black-power filmmaker Spike Lee. Just last week, the school hosted self-described “sex and relationship educators” Marshall Miller and Dorian Solot, who delivered an instructional lecture titled “I Heart Female Orgasm.”

Rife doesn’t want East Tennessee students to lose the opportunity to hear about the dangers of Islamo Fascism. He intends to bypass the student government and file a formal appeal with the administration to have Robert Spencer’s speech approved. But he knows the odds he faces. “As long as I’ve been here there has been no major discussion related to Islamic terrorism,” he says. If the student government’s censors have their way, that won’t change anytime soon.

See It Again: Third Presidential Debate (Full Video)

The "New McCain" is a Big Improvement

Who was that man and what has he done with John McCain?

Tonight's debate was unquestionably John McCain's finest performance. He put away the hackneyed "reaching across the aisle" rhetoric and replaced it with a vigorous defense of principle. At long last we heard "straight talk" -- truth -- about the character and judgment of his opponent. It was the kind of offense for which McCain-Palin crowds have been literally begging, and it was refreshing.

He was on top of the issues -- his health care plan and that of his opponent. He showed passion when speaking about the life issues and education. And the Freudian slip, when he called Obama "Senator Government," was the most memorable line and the icing on the cake.

Whether it was too little-too late remains to be seen, but my guess is that McCain will get a bounce from tonight's debate.

This, finally, was a McCain that Republican conservatives can enthusiastically support. Let's see and hear much more of this "new McCain."

Obama Uses Secret Service to Intimidate Voter

Here is the kind of political intimidation we should expect were Obama to become President.

From LifeNews.com

A pro-life woman who received an unsolicited phone call from the Barack Obama campaign complained about his pro-abortion position. The call earned her a visit from the Secret Service, who were apparently given erroneous information from the campaign volunteer that she made a death threat.

Jessica Hughes of Texas says she received a phone call last Wednesday from a woman with the Obama Volunteers of Texarkana.

She told the Lufkin Daily News: "She asked if I was an Obama supporter, to which I replied, 'No, I don't support him. Your guy is a socialist who voted four times in the state Senate to let little babies die in hospital closets; I think you should find something better to do with your time.' (And then) I hung up."

Hughes was referring to bills in the Illinois legislature that Obama opposed that would have required medical personnel to provide appropriate medical care for babies who survive failed abortions. A Chicago nurse had exposed how some of the babies were left to die.

Her comment about abortion was apparently changed by the Obama volunteer and reported to the Secret Service, who are protecting both presidential candidates.

Two federal agents showed up at Hughes' home on Thursday and asked her if she has said, "I will never support Obama and he will wind up dead on a hospital floor."

Hughes told the Lufkin newspaper she is upset the Obama campaign would allege she had made a death threat and is considering filing a complaint."She has made a charge that will follow me the rest of my life," she said. "I find that repugnant and violating — that some person got her undies in a bundle because she didn't like what I had to say."

Hughes went further than her comments to the newspaper in an email about the incident and indicated the Secret Service threatened her.

She indicated the agents asked her why the Obama campaign volunteer would make up the quote about her wanting Obama to die.

"I replied that I supposed she wasn’t happy about what I said about her candidate and the Agent said 'That’s right, you were rude.' The last time I checked being rude wasn’t a crime in America," she said.

"Luckily the big file they had gathered on me didn't indicate mental instability or a past life of stalking/crime, however they did want to know how I felt about Obama," she said. "That was my limit. I told the Agent in no uncertain terms that my thoughts were not pertinent to their investigation, that this was America and the last time I checked I was allowed to think whatever I wanted without being questioned by the Secret Service."

She said the agents admitted there was no tape of the call and threatened that she could wind up in court or they would talk to neighbors and associates if she didn't cooperate.

"I recognized this as a veiled threat. I told them I would happily go to court since I did nothing wrong and at least then my accuser would have to face me rather than sending the thought police to my house," Huhghes said.

Hughes said she asked the agents for their badge numbers and they refused to supply them to her.

Ultimately, Hughes said she worries what will happen to pro-life advocates and other dissidents if Obama is elected.

"Someone high in the ranks of a campaign working for a man who may be the next President of the United States of America felt comfortable bringing the force of the Federal Government to bear on a private citizen on nothing but the word of a partisan volunteer," she concluded.

O Canada!

It took Canada a mere 37 days to do the right thing. How is it possible that after two, long years, so many Americans fail to grasp that Barack Hussein Obama is a radical Marxist thug, having spent his whole life being mentored by and consorting with Communists and domestic terrorists, and who is committed to overturn, through any means possible, the basic institutions of the United States?

Ohio Will Not Allow Election To Be Stolen

Ohio, the state where one man registered to vote 73 times, has decided they will not allow this election to be stolen. The AP reports:

Associated Press

CINCINNATI -- A federal appeals court has ordered Ohio's top elections official to set up a system by Friday to verify new voters' eligibility.

The full 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati has upheld an earlier ruling that Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner has to use other government records to check the thousands of new voters for registration fraud. A three-judge panel of the 6th Circuit had disagreed last week, but the full court's ruling trumps the panel's decision.

Ohio Republicans sued Brunner, a Democrat.

Ohio GOP Chairman Bob Bennett calls the ruling a victory for the election's integrity.
A spokesman for Brunner could not immediately be reached for comment. Brunner previously said there was no way to set up the system with such speed.

Obama: The Post Turtle

While suturing a cut on the hand of a 75 year old rancher, whose hand was caught in the gate while working cattle, the doctor struck up a conversation with the old man. Eventually the topic got around to Obama and his bid to be our president.

The old rancher said, 'Well, ya know, Obama is a 'Post Turtle''.


Not being familiar with the term, the doctor asked him what a 'post turtle' was.

The old rancher said, 'When your driving down a country road an you come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that's a 'post turtle'.

The old rancher saw the puzzled look on the doctor's face so he continued to explain. 'You know he didn't get up there by himself, he doesn't belong up there, and he doesn't know what to do while he's up there, and you just wonder what kind of dumb ass put him up there to begin with'.

Buckeye Institute Files State Rico Action Against ACORN

If the election of Barack Hussein Obama is such a certainty, why are fascist thugs among his supporters working so hard to steal an election through massive fraud? The Buckeye Institute has done a great service in bringing this state RICO action.

The Buckeye Institute, a Columbus-based think tank, today filed a state RICO action against the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) on behalf of two Warren County voters. The action filed in Warren County Court of Common Pleas alleges ACORN has engaged in a pattern of corrupt activity that amounts to organized crime. It seeks ACORN's dissolution as a legal entity, the revocation of any licenses in Ohio, and an injunction against fraudulent voter registration and other illegal activities.

Plaintiffs Jennifer Miller of Mason, Ohio and Kimberly Grant of Loveland, allege that ACORN's actions deprive them of the right to participate in an honest and effective elections process. They allege fraudulent voter registrations submitted by ACORN dilute the votes of legally registered voters.

"The right to cast a vote that is not diluted by fraudulent votes is a fundamental individual right," Buckeye Institute President David Hansen said.

"ACORN appears to be recklessly disregarding Ohio laws and adding thousands of fraudulent voters to the state's roles in the process," Maurice Thompson, Director of the Buckeye Institute's 1851 Center for Constitutional Law said. "Such voter fraud erodes the value of legally cast votes," he added.

In the complaint, Thompson cites an accumulation of evidence showing numerous instances of admitted fraud by ACORN employees, as well as individuals solicited by ACORN.

"In light of its hiring, training and compensation practices, ACORN should have known its conduct would cause fraud," Thompson said. "It also should know that its conduct will cause fraud in the future."

In addition, the complaint cites conduct by ACORN in Colorado, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin.

A full copy of the complaint is available online at http://www.buckeyeinstitute.org/acorn.pdf.

The Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions, together with its 1851 Center for Constitutional Law, is a nonpartisan research and educational institute devoted to individual liberty, economic freedom, personal responsibility and limited government in Ohio.

ACORN: Community Organizers, Phony Voters and Your Tax Dollars

From the National Center for Policy Analysis

Acorn -- the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now -- has been around since 1970 and boasts 350,000 members. Acorn is now getting more attention as John McCain's campaign makes an issue of the fraud reports and Acorn's ties to Barack Obama. It's about time someone exposed this shady outfit that uses government dollars to lobby for larger government, says the Wall Street Journal.

Acorn is spending $16 million this year to register new Democrats and is already boasting it has put 1.3 million new voters on the rolls. The big question is how many of these registrations are real?

• The Michigan Secretary of State told the press in September that Acorn had submitted "a sizeable number of duplicate and fraudulent applications."


• Earlier this month, Nevada's Democratic Secretary of State Ross Miller requested a raid on Acorn's offices, following complaints of false names and fictional addresses (including the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys).


• Nevada's Clark County Registrar of Voters Larry Lomax said he saw rampant fraud in 2,000 to 3,000 applications Acorn submitted weekly.


• Officials in Ohio are investigating voter fraud connected with Acorn, and Florida's Seminole County is withholding Acorn registrations that appear fraudulent.


• New Mexico, North Carolina and Missouri are looking into hundreds of dubious Acorn registrations.

Also:

• Wisconsin is investigating Acorn employees for, according to an election official, "making people up or registering people that were still in prison."


• Then there's Lake County, Indiana, which has already found more than 2,100 bogus applications among the 5,000 Acorn dumped right before the deadline; "All the signatures looked exactly the same," said Ruthann Hoagland, of the county election board.


• Bridgeport, Connecticut estimates about 20 percent of Acorn's registrations were faulty. o As of July, the city of Houston had rejected or put on hold about 40 percent of the 27,000 registration cards submitted by Acorn.


• o As of July, the city of Houston had rejected or put on hold about 40 percent of the 27,000 registration cards submitted by Acorn.

The Justice Department needs to treat these fraud reports as something larger than a few local violators. The question is whether Acorn is systematically subverting U.S. election law -- on the taxpayer's dime, says the Journal.

Source: Editorial, "Obama and Acorn; Community organizers, phony voters, and your tax dollars," October 14, 2008.

For text: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122394051071230749.html

Catholics, Protestants Mull Joint Orissa Aid

In the face of unrelenting persecution of Christians and with 6000 families in relief camps, Christian leaders are working together to provide needed relief to over 20,000 victims.


From UCANEWS.COM

Catholic, Protestant and Evangelical leaders came together in New Delhi to explore ways of getting relief and rehabilitation aid to victims of anti-Christian violence in Orissa.

About 75 leaders from various Churches and denominations met on Oct. 7 under the banner of National United Christian Forum, a joint body comprising the Catholic Bishops' Conference of India (CBCI), National Council of Churches in India (NCCI) and Evangelical Fellowship of India.

NCCI president Bishop Taranath Sagar told UCA News the violence against Christians threatens the future of India as a secular nation. The Churches' took this new initiative, the Protestant prelate added, "not only to save Christians but also the secular fabric of our nation."

Bishop Sagar said their meeting discussed various ways to bring aid to an estimated 20,000 victims now living in government-run relief camps. Thousands of homeless people are also reported to be hiding in forests.

The sustained violence, now running into its seventh week, has killed at least 52 people. Hindu extremists have also burned down 4,500 houses, 100 churches and 20 convents, as well as presbyteries and other Church institutions. About 50,000 people have been rendered homeless.

The violence began on Aug. 24, the day after a Hindu leader who opposed conversions to Christianity and four of his associates were killed. Even though a Maoist group claimed responsibility for the killings, Hindu radical groups blamed the murder on Christians.

"We doubt Christians can live without fear in India," Bishop Sagar said, adding that the situation demands the government restrict Hindu fanatical organizations from "spreading poison of hatred."

The meeting discussed joint efforts to get help to the victims. It also discussed improving Christian media and networking, engaging civil society and the preparedness of the Churches to face such events in future.

Reverend Raj Bharat Patta, who heads NCCI's office for dalit and tribal people, told UCA News the meeting agreed to "deal with the situation in a united way." Dalit is a Sanskrit term used to refer to people of former untouchable classes.

Participants resolved to spread awareness of people's rights and join hands with other social organizations to denounce the atrocities against economically and socially poor people, he said.

In another meeting on Oct. 8, representatives of national Christian social-service organizations framed long-term and short-term relief and rehabilitation plans.

Bishop Sagar said the relief agencies including the Evangelical Fellowship of India Commission on Relief (EFICOR), Caritas India, Catholic Relief Services and Church's Auxiliary for Social Action, a Protestant agency, will work jointly to mobilize resources for relief and rehabilitation of the victims.

Caritas India director Father Varghese Mattamana, who attended the meeting, told UCA News the Christian volunteer organizations decided to jointly prepare plans for rehabilitation and relief work.

The Catholic priest said the Orissa state government has given permission for them to provide medical services in three relief camps. The priest added they are awaiting further permission to provide non-food materials such as blankets, mats, toiletries and utensils in the camps.

The Church groups, Father Mattamana said, plan to help some 6,000 families in the relief camps, providing each family with materials worth 2,000 rupees (US$41). Caritas' office in Bhubaneswar will be the hub for the relief effort. "The work will start as soon as we get permission," he added. The state capital city is some 1,745 kilometers southeast of New Delhi.

Father Mattamana said they also plan to provide "a kit" to each family that wants to leave the relief camps and go back to their village. The kit would have materials like kitchen utensils and cloth for immediate needs.

Sanjeev Bhanja, EFICOR's director of programs, told UCA News the six major Christian NGOs will work through the government. Their main area of operation will be Kandhamal district, some 350 kilometers west of Bhubaneswar, where the violence has been concentrated.

Change? You Have No Idea

United States of America will be radically transformed beyond all recognition

From Canada Free Press
By Jim O'Neill

If Obama is elected President the United States of America will be radically transformed beyond all recognition. Obama, with a Democratic Congress rubber-stamping his agenda, will so quickly and radically steer the country to the extreme left that we’ll all have whip-lash.

In my last article I discussed the racial bigot, reverend “God Damn America” Wright, and homegrown terrorist Bill Ayers—both guilty of traitorous behavior and speech. Both of them close friends of Obama. (Yes, I know that Obama acts like Wright’s racist anti-American rhetoric is a huge surprise to him, and he claims to barely know Ayers. I don’t believe Obama—simple as that).

Like some devious fifth column infiltrator, Obama has left little in the way of a paper trail, but let me briefly discuss a few more of Obama’s associates. You would do well to look up more information on each of these individuals.

Frank Davis—Obama’s uncle; Communist Party member, and self-proclaimed child molester.

Dr. Khalid al-Mansour—Allegedly, helped get Obama into Harvard; wrote such books as “The Destruction of Western Civilization as Seen Through Islam,” and “The Challenges of Spreading Islam in America.”

Obonga (Ray) Obama—Obama’s half-brother and an Islamic radical.

Raila Amollo Odinga—Obama’s cousin, radical Muslim, and current Prime Minister of Kenya. Some of Odinga’s Islamic supporters burned down a Christian church –with fifty Christians locked inside it. Obama’s support for Odinga is well documented.

Saul Alinsky—Obama and his wife often quote him. In his book, “Rules for Radicals,” Alinsky wrote “Lest we forget [to acknowledge] the very first radical: ...the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he...won his own kingdom—Lucifer.”

Unbelievable.

Given his questionable background and associations with radicals and extremists of various kinds, Obama would not qualify for a U.S. security clearance. But he can run for President.

Is there something in the water? What are people thinking, or more to the point, why are they not thinking?

A sheriff in Florida is under investigation for using Obama’s full name—Barrack Hussein Obama. You can’t talk about Obama’s Islamic heritage and connections; you can’t talk about his ties to black racists; you can’t speak his full name. All this before Obama’s elected President.

Change? You have no idea.

Born in June of 1951 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Jim O’Neill proudly served in the U.S. Navy from 1970-1974 in both UDT-21 (Underwater Demolition Team) and SEAL Team Two. A member of MENSA, he worked as a commercial diver in the waters off Scotland, India, and the United States. In 1998 while attending the University of South Florida as a journalism student, O’Neill won “First Place” in the “Carol Burnett/University of Hawaii AEJMC Research in Journalism Ethics Award. The annual contest was set up by Carol Burnett with the money she won from successfully suing the National Enquirer for libel.

Did Biden Betray Soviet Jews?

From Catholics Against Joe Biden

In 1979, while Pope John Paul II was travelling to Poland, preaching a message of human rights and inherent human dignity, thereby giving hope to his oppressed people and spelling the beginning of the end of the scourge of Soviet communism, Sen. Joe Biden may have been, according to Soviet-era documents, busy undermining those efforts. Ed Morrissey reports:

According to internal Soviet Union documents from the SALT-2 negotiations in 1979, Joe Biden effectively told Soviet negotiators not to worry about American rhetoric about human-rights concerns. In fact, Biden also told the Soviets that the Senate didn’t really care about European security, but only in giving the appearance of caring about it. Vladimir Bukovsky and Pavel Stroilov parse the dispatch from the deputy head of the International Department of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union for Front Page Magazine ...

***
... Biden and Lugar may have wanted to clear the talks from all other considerations, which might make sense, except for the rhetoric of Biden and Carter on human rights and their criticism of previous administrations for ignoring the issue in past negotiations. Biden and other Democrats would make that same criticism through the Reagan administration, right up to the collapse of the USSR.

If Biden sold out the refuseniks while he and his party screeched about their plight, then he has already demonstrated a lack of resolve and character for higher office. Biden needs to explain himself.

[More]

"Liberal" Outrage: A Pro-McCain March In Manhattan

A Pro-McCain march on the Upper West Side in Manhattan on Sunday, September 21, 2008. A group of McCain-Palin supporters dare to march through the Upper West Side - infidels in the "liberal" Mecca. Local "progressives" boo, jeer, and flip fingers at them with a rage they never display even to this country's enemies.

See for yourself the Obama supporters' liberal-minded tolerance, the attitudes that academe has implanted about each finding one's own truth, their openness, and consideration of other points of view.

Would New Yorkers greet a parade of Islamist terrorists this way? Imagine what America would become were these "liberal" fascists to control the levers of government. Perhaps this is what their leader, "the Anointed One," meant when he commanded his followers to "get in their faces."

Perhaps some of the lefty bloggers can explain this; there seem to be some wanna-be Gauleiters among them.

The Navy Hymn - "Eternal Father, Strong To Save"

With thanks to Piddingworth, and warm good wishes to
all our Canadian friends on their Thanksgiving Day.

Morality and Columbus Day: Another View

From LewRockwell.com

By Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

When the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ discovery of America was observed in 1892, the atmosphere was one of celebration. Columbus was rightly portrayed as a brave and skilled navigator who had brought two worlds together and changed history forever. The Knights of Columbus even put his name forward for canonization.

A century later, the prevailing mood was far more somber. Now Columbus was being accused of all kinds of terrible crimes, ranging from environmental devastation to cruelties that culminated in genocide. Author Kirkpatrick Sale described the events of 1492 as the "conquest of paradise," as peaceful, environmentally friendly peoples were violently displaced by avaricious European conquerors. At the very least, the emphasis was now on European mistreatment of native populations, and particularly on the employment of natives as forced laborers.

The debate over the significance of the original encounters between Europe and the New World, and whether the consequences of this meeting of cultures has on net been positive or negative, has remained contentious ever since. Those who would defend the Europeans in general and Columbus in particular have replied to the likes of Kirkpatrick Sale by suggesting that European crimes have been exaggerated, that the greatest toll on native lives came from disease (a non-volitional and therefore morally neutral source) rather than from exploitation or military force, that native populations were neither as peaceful nor as solicitous of environmental welfare as their modern-day admirers have suggested, and so on. Still others have pointed to Columbus’ profoundly spiritual motivations and his deep commitment to the Catholic faith, a fact that can scarcely be denied. Even Father Bartolomé de Las Casas, perhaps the most vocal critic of Spanish policy in the New World, spoke well of Columbus and directed his criticism primarily at those administrators who had come after him.

Such arguments are certainly not without merit, and deserve to be made. Here, however, I should like to consider the question from a different angle, and one that is frequently overlooked. Reports of Spanish mistreatment of the natives of the New World prompted a severe crisis of conscience among significant sectors of the Spanish population in the sixteenth century, not least among her philosophers and theologians. The issue provoked substantial discussion and debate within the Spanish intellectual community. This fact alone indicates that we are witnessing something historically unusual: nothing in the historical record suggests that Attila the Hun had any moral qualms about his conquests, and the large-scale human sacrifice that was so fundamental to Aztec civilization appears to have elicited no outpouring of self-criticism and philosophical reflection among that native people comparable to what European misbehavior provoked among Catholic theologians in sixteenth-century Spain.

It was in the course of that philosophical reflection that Spanish theologians achieved something rather substantial: the beginnings of modern international law. Thus the controversy surrounding the natives of America provided the occasion for the elucidation of general principles that states were morally bound to observe in their interactions with each other.

It was not that no one had ever before supposed that somewhere within the moral order there must exist laws to govern the interaction of states. But they had remained vague, and had never been articulated in any clear way. It was the circumstances that arose from the discovery of the New World that gave new impetus to the study and delineation of those laws. Naturally enough, students of international law have often looked to the sixteenth century, when theologians applied themselves to a serious reckoning with these issues, to find the origins of their discipline.

Father Francisco de Vitoria: Father of International Law

In the course of his own critique of Spanish policy, Father Francisco de Vitoria laid the groundwork for modern international law theory, and for that reason is sometimes called (with Hugo Grotius) "the father of international law" – a man who (in the words of historian Marcelo Sánchez-Sorondo) "proposed for the first time international law in modern terms." In support of his arguments Vitoria drew from arguments based on Scripture as well as from arguments based on reason. In so doing he "furnished the world of his day with its first masterpiece on the law of nations in peace as well as in war," writes James Brown Scott in The Spanish Origin of International Law (1928).

Who was Francisco de Vitoria? Born around 1483, he entered the Dominican order in 1504. He made his way to the University of Paris, where he completed his studies in the liberal arts and went on to the study of theology. He lectured at Paris until his departure in 1523, when he continued his theological lectures at Valladolid at the College of San Gregorio. Three years later he was elected to the Prime Chair of Theology at the University of Salamanca, where so much profound thought in so many areas would take place over the course of the sixteenth century. In 1532 he delivered a famous series of lectures that were later published as Relección de los Indios, usually rendered as Readings on the Indians and on the Law of War, which set forth important principles of international law in the context of a defense of the rights of the Indians. When this great thinker was invited to attend the Council of Trent, he indicated that he would more likely go to the other world, which he did in 1546.

But he was best known for his commentaries on Spanish colonialism in the New World. Vitoria and other Spanish theologians were concerned to examine the morality of Spanish behavior. Did the Spanish possess just title to lands in the Americas that had been claimed on behalf of the Crown? What were their obligations toward the natives in their interaction with them? Such issues inevitably prompted more general and universal questions. What behavior were states obligated to observe in their interactions with one another? Under what circumstances may a state justly go to war? These questions are obviously fundamental to modern international law theory.

With the space at my disposal here it is not possible to provide a systematic overview of Vitoria’s arguments (which I do provide in a book I am currently writing). But I can at least suggest some basic themes in Vitoria’s thought, followed by some brief considerations regarding why these ideas were of such historic importance.

It was and is a commonplace among Christian thinkers that man enjoys a unique position within God’s creation. Having been created in God’s image and endowed with a rational nature, he possesses a dignity – a word that has been much abused in recent years but which is certainly apropos here – that all other creatures lack. It was on this basis that Vitoria continued the development of the idea that by virtue of his position within the Creation he was entitled to a degree of treatment from his fellow human beings that no other creature could claim.

Vitoria borrowed two important principles from St. Thomas Aquinas: (1) the divine law, which proceeds from grace, does not annul human law, which proceeds from natural reason; and (2) those things that are natural to man neither are to be taken from nor are to be given to him on account of sin. For example, no Catholic would argue that it is a less serious crime to murder a non-baptized person than a baptized one. This is what Vitoria meant: the treatment to which all human beings were entitled – e.g., not to be killed, expropriated, etc. – derives from their status as men rather than as members of the faithful in the state of grace. Father Domingo de Soto, Vitoria’s colleague at the University of Salamanca, stated the matter plainly: "Those who are in the grace of God are not a whit better off than the sinner or the pagan in what concerns natural rights."

It was by means of these principles adopted from St. Thomas that Vitoria argued that man was not deprived of civil dominion by mortal sin, and that the right to appropriate the things of nature for one’s own use (i.e., the institution of private property) belonged to all men regardless of their paganism or whatever barbarian vices they might possess. The Indians of the New World, by virtue of being men, were therefore equal to the Spaniards in matters pertaining to natural rights. They owned their lands by the same principles that the Spaniards owned theirs. As Vitoria wrote, "The upshot of all the preceding is, then, that the aborigines undoubtedly had true dominion in both public and private matters, just like Christians, and that neither their princes nor private persons could be despoiled of their property on the ground of their not being true owners."

Vitoria also argued, as did fellow scholastics Domingo de Soto and Luis de Molina, that pagan princes ruled legitimately. He pointed out that the well-known scriptural admonitions to be subject to the secular powers had all been made in the context of pagan rule. If a pagan king has committed no other crime, says Vitoria, he may not be deposed simply because he is a pagan. It was with this principle in mind that Christian Europe was to interact with the polities of the New World. "In the conception of the well-informed and well-balanced professor of Salamanca," writes a twentieth-century admirer, "States, irrespective of their size, their forms of government, their religion as well as that of their subjects, citizens, and inhabitants, their civilization, advanced or incipient, are equal in that system of law which he [Vitoria] professes." Each state has the same rights as any other, and is under an obligation to respect the rights of others.

Vitoria did believe that the peoples of the New World had an obligation to permit Catholic missionaries to preach the Gospel in their lands. But he absolutely insisted that rejection of the Gospel did not constitute grounds for a just war. Himself a Thomist, Vitoria recalled the argument of St. Thomas Aquinas whereby coercion was not to be applied in the conversion of pagans to the Faith, since (in St. Thomas’ words) "to believe depends upon the will," and therefore must involve a free act. Thus the Fourth Council of Toledo (633) had condemned the practice of compelling Jews to receive baptism.

Vitoria and his allies also believed that natural law existed not just among Christians but among all peoples. This did not mean that no society could pervert that law, or fail in its application of one of its precepts, or indeed simply be ignorant of its implications in a given area – for one thing, not every precept of the natural law was equally self-evident. Such difficulties aside, these Spanish theologians believed with St. Paul that the natural law was written on the human heart, and they therefore possessed a basis on which to establish international rules of conduct that could morally bind even those who had never heard (or had actually rejected) the Gospel. Such peoples were still thought to possess the basic sense of right and wrong, summed up in the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule – both of which some theologians all but identified with the natural law itself – from which international obligations could be derived.

International Law and Its Enforcement: A Digression

The difficulty of enforcing international law is a separate matter, but one regarding which a brief word may be necessary. The resolution of this problem is left more or less open in the work of the Spanish theologians. Vitoria’s answer appears to have been connected to the idea of the just war – that is, if a state had violated the norms of international law in its interaction with another state, the latter state may have grounds for waging a just war against it.

What we should not do is carelessly assume that the Spanish theologians would have supported an institution akin to the United Nations. Recall the original problem that a system of international law aims to solve. According to the seventeenth-century British philosopher Thomas Hobbes, in the absence of a government capable of functioning as an umpire over all men, human society is condemned to a state of chaos and civil war. The creation of a sovereign office whose primary function is to keep order and enforce obedience to the law is, in Hobbes’ view, the only mechanism by which we may escape the chronic insecurity and disorder of the so-called state of nature. In the same vein, it is sometimes said that in the absence of some kind of world government, the nations of the world are in the same situation vis-à-vis each other as are the individuals of a single nation before the creation of a government over them. Without the establishment of a sovereign to rule over the nations, Hobbesian analysis tells us that we can expect the same kind of conflict and disorder between nations as would exist, in the absence of civil government, between individual citizens.

The Hobbesian diagnosis is seriously flawed for a great many reasons, but for our purposes it shall suffice to consider only one. The establishment of government does not solve the problem that Hobbes describes; it merely shifts that problem to another level. To be sure, the people are no longer in a state of nature vis-à-vis each other, in that they now have a common umpire to rule over them. Theoretically, that single authority – namely, government – can enforce peace and prevent injustice among the people it rules. But the people are now in a state of nature vis-à-vis government itself, since there is no common umpire that stands above both government and people. If the government possesses the sovereign authority that Hobbes recommends, it must have the last word on the extent of its own powers, on right and wrong, and even on the adjudication of disputes between individual citizens and itself. Even if Hobbes believed in democracy, mere voting can hardly be expected to restrain such an institution. If a power above both government and people were established in order to ensure that government did not abuse its powers, it would only push the problem to yet another level, for there would now be no umpire above this new power.

This is just one problem with the idea of an international institution with coercive powers to enforce international law. Proponents of such an idea contend that such an authority would liberate the nations of the world from the Hobbesian state of nature in which they find themselves. But with the creation of such an authority, the problem of insecurity still exists: the nations of the world would now be in a state of nature vis-à-vis this new authority, whose behavior they would be unable to restrain.

The enforcement of international law, therefore, is no simple matter, and the establishment of a global institution for the purpose only shifts the Hobbesian problem rather than solving it. Yet other options remain. After all, the advanced nations managed to observe the rules of so-called civilized warfare for two centuries following the Thirty Years War (1618–48). The threat of ostracism of an offending nation can have very real deterrent effects.

Whatever the practical difficulties of its enforcement, however, the idea of international law, which emerged in inchoate form as a result of the philosophical discussion prompted by the discovery of America, is supremely important. It suggests that each nation is not a moral universe unto itself, but is morally bound in its behavior by basic principles on which civilized peoples can agree. The state, in other words, is not morally autonomous.

In the early sixteenth century, Nicolò Machiavelli had presaged the arrival of the modern state with his short book The Prince (1513). For Machiavelli, the state was indeed a morally autonomous institution, whose behavior on behalf of its own preservation could be judged against no external standard, whether the decrees of a Pope or any code of moral principle. No wonder the Church ultimately placed The Prince on the Index of Prohibited Books: it was precisely this view that the great Catholic theologians of Spain so emphatically denied. The state, according to them, could indeed be judged according to principles external to itself, and could not act on the basis of mere expedience or narrow advantage if moral principles were trampled in the process.

Catholics Did What the Indians Could Not

Let us, finally, return to the main line of our investigation. In sum, Spanish theologians of the sixteenth century held the behavior of their own civilization up to critical scrutiny and found it wanting. They proposed that in matters of natural right the other peoples of the world were their equals, and that the commonwealths of pagan peoples were entitled to the same treatment that the nations of Christian Europe accorded to one another. (It is for this reason that Lewis Hanke could title his book on the subject The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America.) If we consider the Age of Discovery in the light of sound historical judgment, we must conclude that the Spaniards’ ability to look objectively at these foreign peoples and recognize their common humanity was no small accomplishment, particularly when measured against the parochialism that has so often colored one people’s conception of another.

Such impartiality could not have been expected to develop out of American Indian cultures. "The Indians of the same region or language group did not even have a common name for themselves," explains Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison. "Each tribe called itself something like ‘We, the People,’ and referred to its neighbors by a word that meant ‘the Barbarians,’ ‘Sons of She-Dog,’ or something equally insulting." The conception of an international order of states large and small, of varying levels of civilization and refinement, operating on a principle of equality one toward the other, could not have found fertile soil amid such narrow chauvinism. The Catholic conception of the fundamental unity of the human race, on the other hand, informed the deliberations of the great sixteenth-century Spanish theologians who insisted on universal principles that must govern the interaction of states. If we criticize Spanish excesses in the New World, therefore, it is only with the moral tools provided by the Catholic theologians of Spain itself that we are able to do so.

That injustices were committed in the conquest of the New World no serious person will deny, and holy priests at the time chronicled and condemned them. But it is natural that we should wish to find some silver lining, some mitigating factor, amid the demographic tragedy that struck the peoples of the New World during the Age of Discovery.

The encounters between these peoples provided an especially opportune moment for moralists to discuss and develop the fundamental principles that must govern the interaction of peoples. This task was carried out by the painstaking moral analysis of Catholic theologians teaching in Spanish universities. As Professor Hanke rightly concludes, "The ideals which some Spaniards sought to put into practice as they opened up the New World will never lose their shining brightness as long as men believe that other peoples have a right to live, that just methods may be found for the conduct of relations between peoples, and that essentially all the peoples of the world are men."

Professor Thomas E. Woods, Jr. [send him mail] holds an AB from Harvard and a PhD from Columbia. He teaches history, is associate editor of The Latin Mass Magazine, and is co-author of The Great Façade: Vatican II and the Regime of Novelty in the Roman Catholic Church (2002). His next book, The Church Confronts Modernity: Catholic Intellectuals and the Progressive Era, will be published next year by Columbia University Press. A longer version of this article appeared in The Remnant.

Barack Obama Is Not Natural Born Citizen -- Not Eligible for the Presidency

Barack Hussein Obama has teams of attorneys fighting a simple court order -- produce a birth certificate establishing that you are a natural-born citizen, and thus eligible to serve as President of the United States. Why does he not comply? Because he does not have a U.S. birth certificate.

In "October Surprise", Molotov Mitchell interviews the plaintiff in a stunning federal case against Barack Obama. The case is nothing short of electrifying, but the mainstream media is doing its best to keep Americans in the dark. Avoid the worst constitutional crisis this country has ever known and share this shocking video with everyone you know.

Red Alert: The G-7 -- Geopolitics, Politics and the Financial Crisis

From Stratfor

The finance ministers of the G-7 countries are meeting in Washington. The first announcements on the meetings will come this weekend. It is not too extreme to say that the outcome of these meetings could redefine how the financial markets work, certainly for months and perhaps for a generation. The Americans are arguing that the regime of intervention and bailouts be allowed to continue. Others, like the British, are arguing for what in effect would be the nationalization of financial markets on a global scale. It is not clear what will be decided, but it is clear that this meeting matters.

The meetings will extend through the weekend to include members of the G-20 countries, which together account for about 90 percent of the global economy. This meeting was called because previous steps have not freed up lending between financial institutions, and the financial problem has increasingly become an economic one, affecting production and consumption in the global economy. The political leadership of these countries is under extreme pressure from the public to do something to solve — or at least alleviate — the problem.

Underlying this political pressure is a sense that the financial class, people who run global financial institutions, have failed to behave responsibly and effectively, and have therefore lost their legitimacy. The expectation, reasonable or not, is that the political system will now supplant these managers and impose at least a temporary solution. The finance ministers therefore have a political mandate, almost global in scope, to act decisively. The question is what they will do?

That question then divides further into two parts. The first is whether they will try to craft a single, global, integrated solution. The second is the degree to which they will take control of the financial system — and inter-financial institution lending in particular. (A primary reason for the credit crunch is that banks are currently afraid to lend — even to each other.) Thus far, attempts at solutions on the whole have been national rather than international. In addition, they have been built around incentivizing certain action and increasing the available money in the system.

So far, this hasn’t worked. The first problem is that financial institutions have not increased interbank lending significantly because they are concerned about the unknowns in the borrower’s balance sheet, and about the borrowers’ ability to repay the loans. With even large institutions failing, the fear is that other institutions will fail, but since the identity of the ones that will fail is unknown, lending on any terms — with or without government money — is imprudent. There is more lending to non-financial corporations than to financial ones because fewer unknowns are involved. Therefore, in the United States, infusions and promises of infusion of funds have not solved the basic problem: the uncertain solvency of the borrower.

The second problem is the international character of the crisis. An example from the Icelandic meltdown is relevant. The government of Iceland promised to repay Icelandic depositors in the island country’s failed banks. They did not extend the guarantee to non-Icelandic depositors. Partly they simply didn’t have the cash, but partly the view has been that taking care of one’s own takes priority. Countries do not want to bail out foreigners, and different governments do not want to assume the liabilities of other nations. The nature of political solutions is always that politicians respond to their own constituencies, not to people who can’t vote for them.

This weekend some basic decisions have to be made. The first is whether to give the bailouts time to work, to increase the packages or to accept that they have failed and move to the next step. The next step is for governments and central banks to take over decision making from financial institutions, and cause them to lend. This can be done in one of two ways. The first is to guarantee the loans made between financial institutions so that solvency is not an issue and risk is eliminated. The second is to directly take over the lending process, with the state dictating how much is lent to whom. In a real sense, the distinction between the two is not as significant as it appears. The market is abolished and wealth is distributed through mechanisms created by the state, with risk eliminated from the system, or more precisely, transferred from the lender to the taxing authority of the state.

The more complex issue is how to manage this on an international scale. For example, American banks lend to European banks. If the United States comes up with a plan which guarantees loans to U.S. banks but not European banks, and Europeans lend to Europe and not the United States, the integration of the global economy will very quickly shatter, leading to significant limitations on international trade, currency convertibility and so on. You will nationalize economies that can’t stand being purely national.

At the same time, there is no global mechanism for managing radical solutions. In taking over lending or guarantees, the administrative structure is everything. Managing the interbank-lending of the global economy is something for which there is no institution. And even with coordination, finance ministries and central banks would find it difficult to bear the burden — not to mention managing the system’s Herculean size and labyrinthine complexity. But if the G-7 in effect nationalize global financial systems and do it without international understandings and coordination, the consequences will be immediate and serious.

The G-7 is looking hard for a solution that will not require this level of intrusion, both because they don’t want to abolish markets even temporarily, and more important, because they have no idea how to manage this on a global scale. They very much want to have the problem solved with liquidity injections and bailouts. Their inclination is to give the current regime some more time. The problem is that the global equity markets are destroying value at extremely high rates and declines are approaching historic levels.

In other words, a crisis in the financial system is becoming an economic problem — and that means public pressure will surge, not decline. Therefore, it is plausible that they might choose to ask for what FDR did in 1933, a bank holiday, which in this case would be the suspension of trading on equity markets globally for several days while administrative solutions are reached. We have no information whatsoever that they are thinking of this, but in starting to grapple with a problem of this magnitude — and searching for solutions on this scale — it is totally understandable that they might like to buy some time.

It is not clear what they will decide. Fundamental issues to watch for are whether they move from manipulating markets through government intrusions that leave the markets fundamentally free, or do they abandon free markets at least temporarily.

Another such issue is whether they can find a way to do this globally or whether it will be done nationally. If they do go international and suspending markets, the question is how they will unwind this situation. It will be easier to start this than to end it and state-controlled markets are usually not very attractive in the long run. But then again, neither is where we are now.

UK's Largest Teachers' Union Lobbies to Legalize Sex with Students

How long do you think it will be before the NEA is pushing this?

By Hilary White

LONDON, October 9, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The largest UK teachers' union wants the government to decriminalize sex with students who are over the legal age of consent. Chris Keates, the general secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT), said that teachers who have sex with pupils over the age of consent should not be placed on the sex offenders register. Keates called prosecution for statutory rape "a real anomaly in the law that we are concerned about."

NASUWT complained that media reports had misrepresented their position. "To describe the NASUWT's comments on this as 'teachers want the right to bed pupils' as one report has done, simply for pointing out an anomaly which criminalises a teacher but would leave any other adult free from prosecution for the same type of relationship, is a travesty."

Gregory Carlin, however, a child protection activist and head of the Irish Anti-Trafficking Coalition, said that such ideas were another sign of the erosion of legal protections for young people against exploitation.

"If the NASUWT philosophy has its day," he said, "exploiting a 16 year old in a brothel would carry no extra penalty." Under the same logic, he said, "Jail guards would be able to take their pick from their charges and foster parents would be spared prosecution for having sex with foster children."

In an official statement dated October 6th, Keates said, "From the time the Sexual Offences legislation was first drafted in 2001 the NASUWT consistently raised the significant anomaly within its provisions. A teacher having a consensual relationship with a pupil over the age of 16 on the roll of the school in which they teach is liable under the Act to prosecution and being placed on the sex offenders register.

"However, if the same teacher has a consensual relationship with a young person of the same age who attends another school they would not be prosecuted or classed as sex offenders."

Carlin told LifeSiteNews.com that Keates "knows what she was asking for," which is simply to "legalise sex crimes."

List 99 is a secret register of men and women who are barred from working with children by the Department of Education and Skills. Carlin said, "Thousands of teachers are referred to List 99 each year, most of them from the NASUWT. In fact, the referrals doubled between 2003 and 2005."

Louis Farrakhan Declares Barack Obama The Messiah

Five Million Illegals Have Illegal Mortgages in U.S.A.!

From NewsBusters.org
By Warner Todd Huston

A single report by KFYI radio [1] of Phoenix, Arizona highlights a shocking claim made by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). HUD says that five million illegal aliens hold illegal mortgages. This is just one more example of the lax lending laws put into place by Democrats like Barney Frank that have contributed to this economic crisis. One would think this would be big news. But, so far we have only this one report to cover it.

There have been earlier stories of home flipping schemes that made liberal use of illegal aliens as straw buyers and the FBI has followed numerous cases [2] to prosecution and conviction. But the Old Media have not done much with this story.

KFYI reports that these fraudulent straw purchases of mortgages by illegal aliens has affected every state in the union.

One illegal alien was arrested this year in Tucson after allegedly using a stolen social security number to buy two homes and rack up over $780,000 in bad debt.

Some five million fraudulent home mortgages are in the hands of illegal aliens, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

It's not known how many of those have contributed to the subprime housing mortgage meltdown, but it has affected every state, including Arizona.

The problem began years ago when banks were forced to give mortgages without confirming social security numbers or borrower identification. As a result, illegal immigrants were able to obtain home mortgages which they could not afford.

Lax immigration laws have also helped make this crime easy to perpetrate.

In 1965 a Democrat Controlled Congress under President Lyndon Johnson passed the concept of "chain" immigration into law. A later commission named the Hesburgh Commission [3] convened during Ronald Reagan's first term, found that this concept statistically allowed each single immigrant to bring into this country 84 of his family members. Of course, all these people have to live somewhere making such fraudulent mortgages quite attractive.

What illegal struggling to survive is going to pass up a free house that he can move into without having to present any identification, proof of employment, financial history or even a down payment?

This story should be in every paper and on every TV news cast. Yet it isn't. I'll leave the guessing as to why with you, gentle reader.


Notice: the link to the story above is a Google cached page link because KFYI has pulled down their report.

Bob Conley to Debate Grahamnesty on Saturday

Bob Conley, who is "charging hard and closing in" on victory in his U.S. Senate race, will be debating John McCain's "personal valet and bag boy" on Saturday at 8 P.M. on C-Span. Bob Conley offers South Carolina the opportunity to have two representatives in the United States Senate, rather than subsidizing the third Senator from Massachusetts.

Bob is committed to:

• Outlaw lobbying in Washington by banking and finance firms
• Stop market-distorting bailouts
• Put strict leverage limits on all financial institutions
• Revise “mark to market” accounting rules
• Limit the size of financial firms so they can never be “too big to fail”
• Reinstate the separation of banking, insurance and brokerage
• Mandate transparency among banks to remove trust barriers
• Roll back government policies that encourage mortgages for those who can’t afford them
• Prohibit congressional earmarks, wasteful spending, and no-bid contracts
• Correct massive trade imbalances

Here he joins Jerry Hughes on ARN's Straight Talk to discuss his campaign, his conservatism, and his concerns about the future of South Carolina. Bob is a movement conservative who will work with Senator Jim DeMint, rather than canceling out his vote.

Please check out Bob Conley's website and help this good man become South Carolina's next United States Senator.

Obama’s Henchmen and the Rise of Commufascism

From Canada Free Press

By Shawn D. Akers

The secret to selling bad ideas is to make sure they are the only ones available. This is how totalitarian regimes take power. Whether it was Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany or Vladimir Lenin in Communist Russia, the pattern is largely the same – totalitarian dictators come to power by enshrining themselves as cults of personality and then creating political monopolies through often less than delicate campaigns of indoctrination and censorship – especially censorship enshrouded in the intimidating aura of state power.

Ironically, these cloven-tongued leaders often rise to dominance by preaching power to those they will dominate, provision to those they will impoverish, and liberty to those they will force into state labor. Whether they claim to be left or right, revolutionary or reactionary, communist or fascist, the result is always the same – tyranny.

The great discomfort for many Americans as they watch the current presidential contest is that the scent of such totalitarianism hangs heavy in the air; the pattern so familiar in European dictatorships seems eerily present in Barak Obama’s presidential campaign. Senator Obama, obviously intelligent and gifted with enviable powers of communication, has for all of his eloquence, done very little in the real world other than campaign for office. His supporters can not tell you what he has done that qualifies him to run the most powerful nation the world has ever known, but they know he was born for the job – they were there at the convention; they heard the speech; they felt the magic; chills ran up their legs, and they cried their eyelashes off as Mr. Obama stood tall between the ivory columns of a Greek temple to accept his party’s nomination for President of the United States.

If there was any remaining question of his revolutionary greatness, scattered around the nation are tri-color campaign posters of Mr. Obama, bearing a striking resemblance to the larger than life representations of Lenin, Marx, and Engels used by soviet propagandists in the glory days of Mother Russia. These communist styled knock-offs featuring Mr. Obama staring nobly – if melodramatically – into the distance and emblazoned with one-word utopian mantras such as “Change,” “Progress,” or “Hope,” were designed by Shepard Fairey whose obsession with communist propaganda overflows in his “OBEY” brand website which brandishes a Cyrillic-styled banner that reads “Propaganda Engineering” and boasts the company motto “Manufacturing Quality Dissent Since 1989.”

The nod to Chomsky notwithstanding, Fairey, like any good propagandist, denies the obvious message of the Obama campaign posters. He claims the art is “patriotic” and prefers to let it speak for itself as it joins his growing portfolio of romanticized communist plagiarisms of such other “patriotic” works as Demitry Moor’s famous 1920 Soviet Red Army recruitment poster Have You Volunteered?, Vladimir Kozlinsky’s 1919 poster Meeting, and the 1968 Chinese Proletarian Cultural Revolution poster Political Power Comes from the Barrel of a Gun. Least the fascists feel slighted, Fairey also produced an exact copy of the Nazi Gestapo “death’s head” logo which he placed on t-shirts and rebranded as a part of his OBEY clothing line.

Whatever else may be said, Mr. Obama’s personality cult campaign has been an unmitigated success, creating, almost ex nihilo, a “beloved leader” out of a largely inexperienced and unknown man, void of business, executive, and foreign policy credentials. This fact alone is cause for substantial concern, but, unfortunately for the American people, what has been true of the form of the Obama campaign is now materializing in its function as individuals cloaked in the appearance of state authority seek to silence dissent and indoctrinate the masses.

The largest portion of the media has progressed in its leftist agenda so overtly in the current presidential race that we are hardly surprised when television news “anchors” swoon at the very mention of Barak Obama while taking every opportunity to belittle Governor Sara Palin, feigning objectivity and savoring superiority all the while. Such private sector propaganda is so common it is almost passé. What is far more troubling is when individuals holding powerful and intimidating public posts – police officers and prosecutors, individuals who, by the very power of their offices, can strip citizens of their liberty – use their positions to intimidate anyone who dares speak against Mr. Obama. When Missouri prosecutor Bob McCulloch takes to the air waives, placing the public on notice that he is a member of Mr. Obama’s “truth squad” and that he and other Missouri prosecutors and law enforcement officials plan to “respond immediately” to any critical speech concerning Mr. Obama that “might violate Missouri ethics laws,” the message, with all of its implications, is crystal clear – “speak out against our beloved leader and all the fury of the state will fall on you.” Mr. McCulloch has since claimed that he was speaking only in his personal capacity – a strange assertion considering that he has no personal capacity to “respond . . .[to] violat[ions] of Missouri ethics laws.” Perhaps Mr. McCulloch and the other members of Mr. Obama’s political police could have clarified their role by exchanging their very official looking lawyer’s suits for a selection of Fairey’s Gestapo t-shirts.

The shocking willingness of the Obama campaign to begin using state power, or at least the appearance of state power, to censor dissent even before Mr. Obama holds the actual power he seeks is doubly troubling when combined with actions of other individuals who use their taxpayer funded positions of power to indoctrinate “the masses” in favor of Mr. Obama and against anyone who opposes him. Only weeks ago, Janna Barber had the courage to expose what is apparently all too common in public universities – professors who are paid with taxpayer funds, using their positions of considerable power and influence to force feed pro-Obama political dogma to their students. Professor Andrew Hallam of Metropolitan State College of Denver, did for the classroom what Shepard Fairey did for political posters. In true Nazi-Reichsführer-school-meets-Communist-Reeducation-Camp style, Hallam brought rabid party fanaticism and inexcusable psychological abuse to bear on his class, demanding that his English students write a searing anti-Palin position paper, requiring the Republican students to self-identify, and then allowing if not encouraging the enlightened, open-minded, diverse, accepting, and politically correct Democratic students to verbally berate and abuse the handful of Republicans with language that would have made Stalin blush.

Whether it is Kent Higgins, a Chaplin at the University of Massachusetts, attempting to use official University action to directly build Obama’s workforce by providing college credit for Obama campaigners, or PBS ensuring that an open ardent Obama supporter whose own success as an author is dependent on Obama’s victory, moderates the Vice Presidential debates, or Virginia public school teachers coordinating an “Obama Blue [shirt] Day” campaign to indoctrinate the young children they have so much influence over with the conviction that Barak Obama is every authority figure’s leader of choice (Obama Jugend?), or Obama’s throngs of attorneys threatening with litigation broadcasters that air unapproved messages, the actions taken together amount to a “forced coordination” – what the Nazis referred to as Gleichschaltung.

If this is the result of an Obama presidential campaign, one can only shudder to think of the impact of an Obama administration. These are not the ways of a free people. They are the ways of those who do by brute force what they can not do by the force of their ideas. Attempts at tyranny have historically struck a sour note in the collective soul of Americans. There is something written on our hearts that says it is wrong to take property that does not belong to you even if you take it for a “good cause;” it is wrong to kill the innocent even if their existence is inconvenient for you; it is wrong to win a contest by intimidating the judges; and it is the honor of the strong to secure justice for the weak. This may be the most important election in recent American history, and we owe it to ourselves and our children to choose leaders who will not tolerate tyranny much less partake in it.


Shawn D. Akers is the Director of Academic Support and an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Law at Liberty University School of Law. Mr. Akers can be contacted via email at akerslaw@aim.com. (This information is provided for identification purposes only.)

Catholics and Abortion (Again!)

From Faithful Catholic Citizens
By Cal Thomas

In recent elections when a high-profile Roman Catholic Democrat seeks high, or higher office, the issue of abortion surfaces. As the pro-choice, non-Catholic Barack Obama makes a play for evangelical voters, conservative Catholics are asking their fellow believers to take seriously the church's teaching on abortion and not cast their vote for Obama and Catholic Joe Biden.

The split in Democratic ranks is along political as well as theological lines. Liberal Catholics claim that government programs advocated by Democrats more accurately reflect the teachings of Jesus about the poor and the weak. More "observant" Catholics, some of whom support anti-poverty government programs, point out that no program can help someone who is not given the right to live. Liberals want Catholics to look beyond abortion. Would they have been comfortable 50 years ago with appeals for Catholics to look beyond the racism of Southern Democratic senators? Probably not.

A group calling itself Faithful Catholic Citizens" (FCC) has produced two powerful television commercials, which are running in Iowa and soon, it hopes, in heavily Catholic Pennsylvania. Both spots begin with a confrontational question: "Are you truly Catholic" and follow with a sound bite from "Meet the Press" in which Speaker Nancy Pelosi asserts that Catholic teaching on abortion has been inconsistent. "Utterly incredible," Cardinal Edward Egan is then quoted as saying about Pelosi's statement, which is followed by one from the late Pope John Paul II, who called abortion "(the) deliberate killing of an innocent human being." And then comes a reference to Sen. Barack Obama on the abortion issue from Rick Warren's forum in August at which Obama said that knowing when life begins is "above my pay grade."

"Don't be misled," continue the ads, "Know the church. Know the truth." (View both ads below)

Is abortion "intrinsically evil" and "a non-negotiable issue for Catholics," as FCC President Heidi Stirrup asserts? If one is a Catholic and subscribes to the belief that the interpretation of Scripture and moral truth is the responsibility of the pope and the apostolic bishops, then one would have to say, "yes;" and when faith and politics conflict, a politician should be required to choose one or the other.

Some Catholic politicians have tried to have it both ways. They have even tried to gain favor among their fellow Catholics by noting their strong opposition to capital punishment, which puts them in an oddly inconsistent position. Such Catholic politicians favor preserving the lives of convicted murderers, but choose to do nothing when they have the power to stop, or at least curtail, the killing of the innocent unborn.

While I am not a Catholic, it seems more than inconsistent to take such a position. One chooses one's denomination, just as one chooses one's political affiliation. No one forces another to become a Catholic and no one requires one to become a Democrat, or Republican. Judicial nominees have been denied confirmation based on their membership in clubs that excluded blacks and Jews. But now we may be about to elevate two men to our highest offices who would deny civil rights to African American babies (who are aborted disproportionately to other races), one of whom seeks the votes of his fellow Catholics.

Two years ago, Pope Benedict XVI reiterated the church's "non-negotiable" issues: "Protection of life at all stages, from the moment of conception until natural death; recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family as a union between a man and a woman based on marriage; the protection of the rights of parents to educate their children."

Obama and Biden oppose at least two of these (they claim to be against same-sex "marriage," but for "civil unions"). Whether the TV ads change any minds may be problematic. Catholics who are enamored with "change" and the belief that government is the primary instrument of God, rather than the church, in carrying out His will — and who have ignored church teaching on profound moral issues — are unlikely to be swayed by further appeals to become "truly Catholic." But if only a few see where an Obama-Biden administration would take the country on moral issues, in a close election that might be enough.

Barack Obama and Raila Odinga

Counter-Cultural Education in a One-Room School

John DeJak, teaching Latin at the Chesterton Academy, a new high
school in St. Louis Park that aims to start an education revolution.

From the Star Tribune

By Katherine Kersten

Remember the old one-room schoolhouse? We've moved far beyond it with our multimillion-dollar school facilities and our high-tech computer labs, right?

If so, why are John DeJak and Dale Ahlquist back in a one-room school, aiming to start an education revolution in St. Louis Park with 11 students?

DeJak, of Richfield, puts it simply: "We realized that our kids are being robbed."

So began Chesterton Academy -- a school that may point the way to an educational renaissance to match the Renaissance man whose name it bears.

The academy, which opened in September, is a private high school that will expand from ninth and 10th to 12th grade in the next two years. It is named after G.K. Chesterton, an English social commentator, theologian and man of letters who was one of the 20th century's greatest minds and most prolific authors.

Chesterton Academy's "countercultural" identity doesn't spring from theories found in the latest education journals. Nor is the school breaking new ground in Chinese immersion pedagogy or robotics.

Instead, this place exemplifies the real avant-garde.

The bright room in Eliot Community Center is hung with icons and medieval art, and lined with such books as Cicero's "Orations" and Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales." Students sit around a table, engrossed in Latin verbs. One wall displays calligraphy exercises, which include this revealing Chesterton quote: "A dead thing goes with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it."

In future years, the kids will study calculus and chemistry, and immerse themselves in great thinkers from Homer to T.S. Eliot. They will also explore once-celebrated arts such as oil painting and Gregorian chant, which few pursue today.

The educational "robbery" that Chesterton Academy is striving to halt has two components, says DeJak, the school's headmaster.

First, schools are depriving students by failing to pass on the 3,000-year-old body of knowledge -- literature, philosophy, theology, history, art, music, drama -- that is their greatest heritage as human beings, he says. The greatest flaw of modern education is that it is based on a succession of fads, he adds.

As a result, our young people may be "eco-aware" or have great self-esteem, but they often can't explain the passions that sparked the Civil War or why "David Copperfield" is a great novel.

At Chesterton Academy, "We start with the premise that -- in Chesterton's words -- 'the oldest things ought to be taught to the youngest people,'" says Ahlquist, one of the academy's founders, who is also president of the Bloomington-based American Chesterton Society.

Do you want evidence that our kids can't think clearly? he asks. Just listen to them talk.

A typical ninth-grader's response to just about anything runs like this: "So I'm like, wow, that's, like, awesome."

"Kids today can't speak in complete sentences because they can't think in complete sentences," Ahlquist explains.

He's not kidding. At Chesterton Academy, there's a rule against saying "like."

Contemporary education robs young people in a second way, observes DeJak. Our schools teach moral relativism -- the notion that there is no truth, and that we all must choose our own "values," our own right and wrong. No wonder our kids' favorite word is, like, "whatever."

"We believe that there is a larger truth, which every other truth relates to -- and that is God," says DeJak. "For us, education is not just about job training, but about seeking the truth and training the soul."

Chesterton Academy teaches the Catholic faith, but is careful not to call itself Catholic until the Archbishop of St. Paul and Minneapolis approves that designation, as the church's law requires.

In line with its revival of lost arts, Chesterton Academy will place special emphasis on public speaking -- once the crowning glory of a high school education. Not long ago, every ninth-grader could recite the Gettysburg Address.

At the moment, students at the school are learning how to introduce themselves, and working on posture, articulation and presentation. Later, they will deliver two-minute speeches -- "you learn how long two minutes really is," jokes DeJak -- and will then move on to poetry recitation and debate.

Chesterton Academy's ambitions extend beyond academics, as you'd expect from a school that seeks to "train the soul."

"We'll work on getting rid of unfortunate cultural habits," says DeJak, such as the sense of entitlement so common among young people.

In November, for example, the boys from the school will travel to the University of Notre Dame to see a football game. "The guys have to pay $65 each for their tickets," explains DeJak. "I told them, 'Don't run to Mom for the money. You'll enjoy it more if you work for it.' So they're having bake sales and raking leaves."

How are the kids at Chesterton Academy responding? "The first week was the toughest of their lives," says DeJak. "But now it's beginning to gel."

When I ask, the students acknowledge that they will miss the football games and proms that bigger schools offer. But they are enthusiastic about their new school's small size, and about teachers who "bring the people of other times alive for us."

As 10th-grader Paul Cummings begins to answer my question, a renegade "like" intrudes in his first sentence. Shaking his head, he starts again.

As I said, this is the real counterculture.

Felons Voting In Ohio

Mayor Richard M. Daley with protege Barack Hussein Obama

Here's a change you can believe in, the corrupt machine politics of Chicago is going national.

From the New York Post

CLEVELAND - Volunteers supporting Barack Obama picked up hundreds of people at homeless shelters, soup kitchens and drug-rehab centers and drove them to a polling place yesterday on the last day that Ohioans could register and vote on the same day, almost no questions asked.

The huge effort by a pro-Obama group, Vote Today Ohio, takes advantage of a quirk in the state's elections laws that allows people to register and cast ballots at the same time without having to prove residency.

Republicans have argued that the window could lead to widespread voter fraud because officials wouldn't have an opportunity to verify registration information before ballots were cast.

Among the volunteers were Yori Stadlin and Vivian Lehrer of the Upper West Side, who got married last week and decided to spend their honeymoon shepherding voters to the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections.

Early today, Stadlin's van picked up William Woods, 59, at the soup kitchen of the Bishop Cosgrove Center.

"I never voted before," Woods said, because of a felony conviction that previously barred him from the polls. "Without this service, I would have had no way to get here."

Obama Youth: Troops of a New Social Order?

A teacher has been suspended after filming an "Obama Youth" group marching and chanting slogans while dressed in military uniforms.

From The Telegraph

Authorities at the Urban Community Leadership Academy in Kansas City, Missouri took action after a video of the pupils, who are thought to be aged 14 and 15, emerged on YouTube.

The video, which was titled "Obama Youth – Junior Fraternity Regiment", has since been removed, but copies have been re-posted.

It shows 10 teenage boys marching into a classroom, making gestures with their arms and reciting "alpha, omega".

After coming to a halt, each in turn shouts a personal mantra associating their personal goals with Mr Obama.

The first says: "Because of Obama, I aspire to be the next doctor"; the next, "Because of Obama, I aspire to be the next lawyer".

Each then shouts Mr Obama's campaign slogan: "Yes we can", before carrying out a drill combining the recital of slogans and aggressive physical gestures. The boys then each recite a different benefit of Mr Obama's healthcare plan.

Joyce McGautha, the school's superintendent, told US media that the school did not approve of the video. She said that the teacher, who has not been named in anticipation of legal action, was suspended, and that further drill activities were stopped.

YouTube viewers were quick to criticise Mr Obama's campaign for the video's content, and to compare it to 20th century political youth movements.

One wrote: "This should scare the hell out of any freedom loving American. The Democrats, their accomplices in the media and the schools, are producing the next generation of Hitler Youth. Welcome to the People's Socialist Republic of America."

The video's emergence comes soon after that of Sing for Change, a clip in which 22 children between 5 and 12 were seen singing a song praising the Democratic presidential candidate. Critics said it was improper to make children support politicians.

Geert Wilders: "The Lights May Go Out In Europe"

In 1946 Winston Churchill delivered the historic "Iron Curtain Speech" at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. It was a defining event and the historic moment when Western democracies were summoned to a new, epic struggle for the freedom of man.

On September 25, at a forum in New York sponsored by the Hudson Institute, the Dutch Member of Parliament, Geert Wilders, gave a speech which was no less important, and may in time be seen as the great clarion call in the growing worldwide struggle with Islam.

At great personal risk, Wilders has been the foremost opponent of a totalitarian ideology conceived in the pit of hell. All who care about freedom, Christian civilization and national survival need to read this great speech.

Dear friends,

Thank you very much for inviting me. Great to be at the Four Seasons. I come from a country that has one season only: a rainy season that starts January 1st and ends December 31st. When we have three sunny days in a row, the government declares a national emergency. So Four Seasons, that’s new to me.

It’s great to be in New York. When I see the skyscrapers and office buildings, I think of what Ayn Rand said: “The sky over New York and the will of man made visible.” Of course. Without the Dutch you would have been nowhere, still figuring out how to buy this island from the Indians. But we are glad we did it for you. And, frankly, you did a far better job than we possibly could have done.

I come to America with a mission. All is not well in the old world. There is a tremendous danger looming, and it is very difficult to be optimistic. We might be in the final stages of the Islamization of Europe. This not only is a clear and present danger to the future of Europe itself, it is a threat to America and the sheer survival of the West. The danger I see looming is the scenario of America as the last man standing. The United States as the last bastion of Western civilization, facing an Islamic Europe. In a generation or two, the US will ask itself: who lost Europe? Patriots from around Europe risk their lives every day to prevent precisely this scenario form becoming a reality.

My short lecture consists of 4 parts.

First I will describe the situation on the ground in Europe. Then, I will say a few things about Islam. Thirdly, if you are still here, I will talk a little bit about the movie you just saw. To close I will tell you about a meeting in Jerusalem.

The Europe you know is changing. You have probably seen the landmarks. The Eiffel Tower and Trafalgar Square and Rome’s ancient buildings and maybe the canals of Amsterdam. They are still there. And they still look very much the same as they did a hundred years ago.

But in all of these cities, sometimes a few blocks away from your tourist destination, there is another world, a world very few visitors see – and one that does not appear in your tourist guidebook. It is the world of the parallel society created by Muslim mass-migration. All throughout Europe a new reality is rising: entire Muslim neighbourhoods where very few indigenous people reside or are even seen. And if they are, they might regret it. This goes for the police as well. It’s the world of head scarves, where women walk around in figureless tents, with baby strollers and a group of children. Their husbands, or slaveholders if you prefer, walk three steps ahead. With mosques on many street corner. The shops have signs you and I cannot read. You will be hard-pressed to find any economic activity. These are Muslim ghettos controlled by religious fanatics. These are Muslim neighbourhoods, and they are mushrooming in every city across Europe. These are the building-blocks for territorial control of increasingly larger portions of Europe, street by street, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, city by city.

There are now thousands of mosques throughout Europe. With larger congregations than there are in churches. And in every European city there are plans to build super-mosques that will dwarf every church in the region. Clearly, the signal is: we rule.

Many European cities are already one-quarter Muslim: just take Amsterdam, Marseille and Malmo in Sweden. In many cities the majority of the under-18 population is Muslim. Paris is now surrounded by a ring of Muslim neighbourhoods. Mohammed is the most popular name among boys in many cities. In some elementary schools in Amsterdam the farm can no longer be mentioned, because that would also mean mentioning the pig, and that would be an insult to Muslims. Many state schools in Belgium and Denmark only serve halal food to all pupils. In once-tolerant Amsterdam gays are beaten up almost exclusively by Muslims. Non-Muslim women routinely hear “whore, whore”. Satellite dishes are not pointed to local TV stations, but to stations in the country of origin. In France school teachers are advised to avoid authors deemed offensive to Muslims, including Voltaire and Diderot; the same is increasingly true of Darwin. The history of the Holocaust can in many cases no longer be taught because of Muslim sensitivity. In England sharia courts are now officially part of the British legal system. Many neighbourhoods in France are no-go areas for women without head scarves. Last week a man almost died after being beaten up by Muslims in Brussels, because he was drinking during the Ramadan. Jews are fleeing France in record numbers, on the run for the worst wave of anti-Semitism since World War II. French is now commonly spoken on the streets of Tel Aviv and Netanya, Israel. I could go on forever with stories like this. Stories about Islamization.

A total of fifty-four million Muslims now live in Europe. San Diego University recently calculated that a staggering 25 percent of the population in Europe will be Muslim just 12 years from now. Bernhard Lewis has predicted a Muslim majority by the end of this century.

Now these are just numbers. And the numbers would not be threatening if the Muslim-immigrants had a strong desire to assimilate. But there are few signs of that. The Pew Research Center reported that half of French Muslims see their loyalty to Islam as greater than their loyalty to France. One-third of French Muslims do not object to suicide attacks. The British Centre for Social Cohesion reported that one-third of British Muslim students are in favour of a worldwide caliphate. A Dutch study reported that half of Dutch Muslims admit they “understand” the 9/11 attacks.

Muslims demand what they call ‘respect’. And this is how we give them respect. Our elites are willing to give in. To give up. In my own country we have gone from calls by one cabinet member to turn Muslim holidays into official state holidays, to statements by another cabinet member, that Islam is part of Dutch culture, to an affirmation by the Christian-Democratic attorney general that he is willing to accept sharia in the Netherlands if there is a Muslim majority. We have cabinet members with passports from Morocco and Turkey.

Muslim demands are supported by unlawful behaviour, ranging from petty crimes and random violence, for example against ambulance workers and bus drivers, to small-scale riots. Paris has seen its uprising in the low-income suburbs, the banlieus. Some prefer to see these as isolated incidents, but I call it a Muslim intifada. I call the perpetrators “settlers”. Because that is what they are. They do not come to integrate into our societies, they come to integrate our society into their Dar-al-Islam. Therefore, they are settlers.

Much of this street violence I mentioned is directed exclusively against non-Muslims, forcing many native people to leave their neighbourhoods, their cities, their countries.

Politicians shy away from taking a stand against this creeping sharia. They believe in the equality of all cultures. Moreover, on a mundane level, Muslims are now a swing vote not to be ignored.

Our many problems with Islam cannot be explained by poverty, repression or the European colonial past, as the Left claims. Nor does it have anything to do with Palestinians or American troops in Iraq. The problem is Islam itself.

Allow me to give you a brief Islam 101. The first thing you need to know about Islam is the importance of the book of the Quran. The Quran is Allah’s personal word, revealed by an angel to Mohammed, the prophet. This is where the trouble starts. Every word in the Quran is Allah’s word and therefore not open to discussion or interpretation. It is valid for every Muslim and for all times. Therefore, there is no such a thing as moderate Islam. Sure, there are a lot of moderate Muslims. But a moderate Islam is non-existent.

The Quran calls for hatred, violence, submission, murder, and terrorism. The Quran calls for Muslims to kill non-Muslims, to terrorize non-Muslims and to fulfil their duty to wage war: violent jihad. Jihad is a duty for every Muslim, Islam is to rule the world – by the sword. The Quran is clearly anti-Semitic, describing Jews as monkeys and pigs.

The second thing you need to know is the importance of Mohammed the prophet. His behaviour is an example to all Muslims and cannot be criticized. Now, if Mohammed had been a man of peace, let us say like Ghandi and Mother Theresa wrapped in one, there would be no problem. But Mohammed was a warlord, a mass murderer, a pedophile, and had several marriages – at the same time. Islamic tradition tells us how he fought in battles, how he had his enemies murdered and even had prisoners of war executed. Mohammed himself slaughtered the Jewish tribe of Banu Qurayza. He advised on matters of slavery, but never advised to liberate slaves. Islam has no other morality than the advancement of Islam. If it is good for Islam, it is good. If it is bad for Islam, it is bad. There is no gray area or other side.

Quran as Allah’s own word and Mohammed as the perfect man are the two most important facets of Islam. Let no one fool you about Islam being a religion. Sure, it has a god, and a here-after, and 72 virgins. But in its essence Islam is a political ideology. It is a system that lays down detailed rules for society and the life of every person. Islam wants to dictate every aspect of life. Islam means ‘submission’. Islam is not compatible with freedom and democracy, because what it strives for is sharia. If you want to compare Islam to anything, compare it to communism or national-socialism, these are all totalitarian ideologies.

This is what you need to know about Islam, in order to understand what is going on in Europe. For millions of Muslims the Quran and the live of Mohammed are not 14 centuries old, but are an everyday reality, an ideal, that guide every aspect of their lives. Now you know why Winston Churchill called Islam “the most retrograde force in the world”, and why he compared Mein Kampf to the Quran.

Which brings me to my movie, Fitna.

I am a lawmaker, and not a movie maker. But I felt I had the moral duty to educate about Islam. The duty to make clear that the Quran stands at the heart of what some people call terrorism but is in reality jihad. I wanted to show that the problems of Islam are at the core of Islam, and do not belong to its fringes.

Now, from the day the plan for my movie was made public, it caused quite a stir, in the Netherlands and throughout Europe. First, there was a political storm, with government leaders, across the continent in sheer panic. The Netherlands was put under a heightened terror alert, because of possible attacks or a revolt by our Muslim population. The Dutch branch of the Islamic organisation Hizb ut-Tahrir declared that the Netherlands was due for an attack. Internationally, there was a series of incidents. The Taliban threatened to organize additional attacks against Dutch troops in Afghanistan, and a website linked to Al Qaeda published the message that I ought to be killed, while various muftis in the Middle East stated that I would be responsible for all the bloodshed after the screening of the movie. In Afghanistan and Pakistan the Dutch flag was burned on several occasions. Dolls representing me were also burned. The Indonesian President announced that I will never be admitted into Indonesia again, while the UN Secretary General and the European Union issued cowardly statements in the same vein as those made by the Dutch Government. I could go on and on. It was an absolute disgrace, a sell-out.

A plethora of legal troubles also followed, and have not ended yet. Currently the state of Jordan is litigating against me. Only last week there were renewed security agency reports about a heightened terror alert for the Netherlands because of Fitna.

Now, I would like to say a few things about Israel. Because, very soon, we will get together in its capitol. The best way for a politician in Europe to loose votes is to say something positive about Israel. The public has wholeheartedly accepted the Palestinian narrative, and sees Israel as the aggressor. I, however, will continue to speak up for Israel. I see defending Israel as a matter of principle. I have lived in this country and visited it dozens of times. I support Israel. First, because it is the Jewish homeland after two thousand years of exile up to and including Auschwitz, second because it is a democracy, and third because Israel is our first line of defense.

Samuel Huntington writes it so aptly: “Islam has bloody borders”. Israel is located precisely on that border. This tiny country is situated on the fault line of jihad, frustrating Islam’s territorial advance. Israel is facing the front lines of jihad, like Kashmir, Kosovo, the Philippines, Southern Thailand, Darfur in Sudan, Lebanon, and Aceh in Indonesia. Israel is simply in the way. The same way West-Berlin was during the Cold War.

The war against Israel is not a war against Israel. It is a war against the West. It is jihad. Israel is simply receiving the blows that are meant for all of us. If there would have been no Israel, Islamic imperialism would have found other venues to release its energy and its desire for conquest. Thanks to Israeli parents who send their children to the army and lay awake at night, parents in Europe and America can sleep well and dream, unaware of the dangers looming.

Many in Europe argue in favor of abandoning Israel in order to address the grievances of our Muslim minorities. But if Israel were, God forbid, to go down, it would not bring any solace to the West. It would not mean our Muslim minorities would all of a sudden change their behavior, and accept our values. On the contrary, the end of Israel would give enormous encouragement to the forces of Islam. They would, and rightly so, see the demise of Israel as proof that the West is weak, and doomed. The end of Israel would not mean the end of our problems with Islam, but only the beginning. It would mean the start of the final battle for world domination. If they can get Israel, they can get everything. Therefore, it is not that the West has a stake in Israel. It is Israel.

It is very difficult to be an optimist in the face of the growing Islamization of Europe. All the tides are against us. On all fronts we are losing. Demographically the momentum is with Islam. Muslim immigration is even a source of pride within ruling liberal parties. Academia, the arts, the media, trade unions, the churches, the business world, the entire political establishment have all converted to the suicidal theory of multiculturalism. So-called journalists volunteer to label any and all critics of Islamization as a ‘right-wing extremists’ or ‘racists’. The entire establishment has sided with our enemy. Leftists, liberals and Christian-Democrats are now all in bed with Islam.

This is the most painful thing to see: the betrayal by our elites. At this moment in Europe’s history, our elites are supposed to lead us. To stand up for centuries of civilization. To defend our heritage. To honour our eternal Judeo-Christian values that made Europe what it is today. But there are very few signs of hope to be seen at the governmental level. Sarkozy, Merkel, Brown, Berlusconi; in private, they probably know how grave the situation is. But when the little red light goes on, they stare into the camera and tell us that Islam is a religion of peace, and we should all try to get along nicely and sing Kumbaya. They willingly participate in, what President Reagan so aptly called: “the betrayal of our past, the squandering of our freedom.”

If there is hope in Europe, it comes from the people, not from the elites. Change can only come from a grass-roots level. It has to come from the citizens themselves. Yet these patriots will have to take on the entire political, legal and media establishment.

Over the past years there have been some small, but encouraging, signs of a rebirth of the original European spirit. Maybe the elites turn their backs on freedom, the public does not. In my country, the Netherlands, 60 percent of the population now sees the mass immigration of Muslims as the number one policy mistake since World War II. And another 60 percent sees Islam as the biggest threat to our national identity. I don’t think the public opinion in Holland is very different from other European countries.

Patriotic parties that oppose jihad are growing, against all odds. My own party debuted two years ago, with five percent of the vote. Now it stands at ten percent in the polls. The same is true of all smililary-minded parties in Europe. They are fighting the liberal establishment, and are gaining footholds on the political arena, one voter at the time.

Now, for the first time, these patriotic parties will come together and exchange experiences. It may be the start of something big. Something that might change the map of Europe for decades to come. It might also be Europe’s last chance.

This December a conference will take place in Jerusalem. Thanks to Professor Aryeh Eldad, a member of Knesset, we will be able to watch Fitna in the Knesset building and discuss the jihad. We are organizing this event in Israel to emphasize the fact that we are all in the same boat together, and that Israel is part of our common heritage. Those attending will be a select audience. No racist organizations will be allowed. And we will only admit parties that are solidly democratic.

This conference will be the start of an Alliance of European patriots. This Alliance will serve as the backbone for all organizations and political parties that oppose jihad and Islamization. For this Alliance I seek your support.

This endeavor may be crucial to America and to the West. America may hold fast to the dream that, thanks tot its location, it is safe from jihad and shaira. But seven years ago to the day, there was still smoke rising from ground zero, following the attacks that forever shattered that dream. Yet there is a danger even greater danger than terrorist attacks, the scenario of America as the last man standing. The lights may go out in Europe faster than you can imagine. An Islamic Europe means a Europe without freedom and democracy, an economic wasteland, an intellectual nightmare, and a loss of military might for America - as its allies will turn into enemies, enemies with atomic bombs. With an Islamic Europe, it would be up to America alone to preserve the heritage of Rome, Athens and Jerusalem.

Dear friends, liberty is the most precious of gifts. My generation never had to fight for this freedom, it was offered to us on a silver platter, by people who fought for it with their lives. All throughout Europe American cemeteries remind us of the young boys who never made it home, and whose memory we cherish. My generation does not own this freedom; we are merely its custodians. We can only hand over this hard won liberty to Europe’s children in the same state in which it was offered to us. We cannot strike a deal with mullahs and imams. Future generations would never forgive us. We cannot squander our liberties. We simply do not have the right to do so.

This is not the first time our civilization is under threat. We have seen dangers before. We have been betrayed by our elites before. They have sided with our enemies before. And yet, then, freedom prevailed.

These are not times in which to take lessons from appeasement, capitulation, giving away, giving up or giving in. These are not times in which to draw lessons from Mr. Chamberlain. These are times calling us to draw lessons from Mr. Churchill and the words he spoke in 1942:

“Never give in, never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy”.

East German Spy Service Aided Assassination Attempt on John Paul II

From Catholic World News

The notorious East German secret-police force, the Stasi, cooperated with Bulgarian colleagues in the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II, according to a report published in Der Spiegel. The Stasi reportedly launched “one of the largest campaigns of misinformation in its history” in order to deflect suspicion from the Bulgarian masterminds.

Source(s): these links will take you to other sites, in a new window.

• German weekly highlights role of the Stasi in attempt on John Paul II’s life (CNA)

Libera -- "There Is A Green Hill"

The Obama Depression: All In The Family

Rush Limbaugh nailed it when he said that if any Republican fingerprints were on the financial crisis, that person would be known throughout America and would be subpoenaed to appear before Congressional committees.

It is clear that the group most responsible for requiring lending institutions to make loans to unqualified borrowers is the Congressional Black Caucus and their liberal allies.

They had an incestuous relationship with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and did all they could to protect the taxpayer-funded, cash cow for the benefit of all in the family. Among the Congressional Black Caucus, no member received more protection money from Fannie Mae than did Barack Obama. With a Hat Tip to Savage Politics who made this video, here they are, in their own words, defending the family "enterprise:"

FBI Raids Obama Friend's Office

Sen. Barack Obama hugs Will County executive Larry Walsh in a hotel in Springfield, Ill., in February 2008. (Associated Press)

From The Washington Times

The FBI on Wednesday raided the county offices of a former Illinois state senator who is a poker-playing buddy of Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama.

According to Chicago authorities, the FBI visited the offices in Joliet, Ill., of Will County executive Larry Walsh, a longtime friend of Mr. Obama's, and his chief of s