Friday, July 18, 2008

FAIRNESS DOCTRINE? Not So Fast, Pelosi...


'Fairness Doctrine' an apparent no-go

Jim Brown - OneNewsNow - 7/17/2008

The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission is making it clear that he has no desire to reinstate the "Fairness Doctrine," a controversial regulation that once required TV and radio stations to give equal airtime to opposing viewpoints on controversial subjects.

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman Kevin Martin has sent House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) a letter assuring him that he has "always been, and remain[s] strongly, opposed to the Fairness Doctrine." Martin also pointed out he has backed legislation that would have prohibited the FCC from reinstating the policy. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) recently told reporters that she supported bringing back the Doctrine.

Penny Nance, a special adviser at the FCC, says it is important to remember that the Fairness Doctrine was in place when there were only three networks. "Chairman Martin strongly believes that, in this day and age when you have literally hundreds of channels with all varying viewpoints available, that that is an old, archaic, outdated policy that serves no purpose in today's market," she explains.

Chairman Martin, according to Nance, is supportive of legislation sponsored by Congressman Mike Pence (R-Indiana) that would permanently outlaw the use of the Fairness Doctrine. Nance contends the current five-member Commission lacks the votes necessary to reinstate the Doctrine.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I guess Nancy Pelosi will have to find some other way (that doesn't include suppressing free speech) to garner support for her un-American activities.

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

America’s Socialist Oriented Bureaucrats


America’s Socialist Oriented Bureaucrats

by John Ross (7/12/08)

Using the same template European Union (EU) and the former Soviet Union counterparts follow, or followed, America’s socialist oriented bureaucrats (SOBs) gravitate to positions of policy influence. Recognizing that a well-placed like-minded socialist confidant, as with activist judicial appointments, can impose or quietly override the will of the electorate majority, America’s SOBs are very devious. Following the lead staked out by the mainstream media, press, many in Hollywood, too many educators and most public bureaucrats, America’s SOBs have acquired undue influence over our lives.

Today’s socialism is an artificial, or contrived human exploitive device intended solely to acquire control of personal and corporate assets, or resources of others. The term gravitate was used earlier, in lieu of ascend, as gravity pulls everything to earth Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Hugo Chavez, Putin and all the other socialist ideologues and their minions lined their pockets and were the only winners when handed power, or it was seized. As imperfect as it may be, reasonable democratic capitalism has and will advance the lives of more people with less associated violence and social dislocation than the contrivances and propensity for brutalism socialism ultimately gravitates to.

Succumbing to the patently false ‘qualitative’ lure espoused by SOBs and their minions, socialism imposes a restrictive self-serving insatiable veneer that devours individualism and all other economic resources. When presented with a level playing field free of most political, religious and organized corruption and crime, democracy based politically moderate capitalism will always out perform the subjective vagaries of socialism and communism. Relying on old fashion emotion based pandering, lying and brute force, socialists and their typically brutal communist brethren will seize power only to abdicate after they have destroyed its’ economic and social fabric.

Placing B. Hussein Obama, a professed Democrat that has voted for most all socialist (98%) programs into the role of literally leading the world as President of The United States is akin to giving the job to Madonna, another so-called rock-star. Other than gender, the only difference between the two is Madonna has strong convictions, albeit that many of them are socially reprehensible, and does not appear to waffle like B. Hussein Obama on national issues. Trotting B. Hussein Obama, or for that matter Gary Coleman in front of mainstream media cameras or “groomed” liberal audiences generates entertaining hype. Critical analysis of the B. Hussein Obama “rock-star” hype suggests that he is pandering to fuzzy emotions that is a further reflection of the shallowness the candidate offers.

The American people and the world cannot for financial, political and security reasons afford to have another “mystic” like Jimmy Carter in The White House that will say and do anything to acquire the power of The Presidency. Honestly earning the title of being the most liberal, socialist, senator in the U.S. Senate, B. Hussein Obama can also point to a firm foundation in communist anti-Americanism. Answers about his, Obama’s, and his “handlers” position on terrorism, expanded entitlement programs, national defense, George Soros and Saddam Hussein’s Nadhmi Auchi need to be answered, to ascertain his allegiances and core values.

As it stands today, B. Hussein Obama, who are you and can you intelligently talk to the American people without a teleprompter?

John Ross

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Victims Of The Left

DiscoverTheNetworks.Org

Victims of the Left

June 2008

Summary:


This section of DiscoverTheNetworks examines how the campaigns of the socialist left, under the noble-sounding banners of “social justice” and “equality,” have inflicted catastrophe in many forms—poverty, moral decline, criminality, violence, illness, and death—upon countless millions of people over the course of the past half-century. The programs and policies that led to these disastrous outcomes were unfailingly promoted by the left—under the false flag of “liberalism”—as expressions of a high-minded idealism that promised to spawn an era of unprecedented societal harmony, and to literally create the world anew.

The leftist paradigm holds that non-socialist societies are composed exclusively of dominators and the dominated, oppressors and the oppressed. The alleged cause of this social arrangement is the economic system of free-market capitalism, which the left considers the root of all manner of social ills and vices—racism, sexism, alienation, homophobia, imperialism. In the calculus of the left, capitalism is the agent of tyranny and exploitation that presses its iron boot upon the proverbial necks of a wide array of victim groups—blacks and other minorities, women, homosexuals, immigrants, and the poor, to name but a few. That is why according to the left, the United States (the standard-bearer of all capitalist economies) can only do wrong. The ill-fated leftist policies discussed in this section of DiscoverTheNetworks were intended to rectify those purported wrongs.

To eliminate America’s inherent injustices, the left seeks to return to a status society where the power hierarchy is inverted, where the groups now said to be oppressed become the privileged races, classes and gender of the new social order. The left’s quest to transform the “dominated” into dominators, and vice versa, draws its inspiration from the Communist Manifesto, which asserts that “[t]he history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.

The struggle identified by the Manifesto was that of the proletarians and their intellectual vanguard who, armed with the radical utopian vision of socialism, were expected to launch a series of civil wars in their respective countries—battles that would topple the “ruling classes” and the illegitimate societies they had established. According to Marxist theory, these conflicts would rip each targeted society apart and create a new revolutionary world from its ruins.

And if the success of such revolutions was contingent upon immense suffering, so be it. No purgative campaign—whether entirely nonviolent, or the very embodiment of unrestrained savagery—would be too dear a price to pay for the vaporization of the old order and the creation of a “progressive” future.

Toward the realization of such a future, the contemporary left has formed a broad alliance, or united front, composed of radicals representing a host of demographic groups that are allegedly victimized by American capitalism and its related injustices. Each constituent of this alliance—minorities, homosexuals, women, immigrants, the poor—contributes its voice to the chorus that aims to discredit the United States as an irredeemable abuser of the vulnerable. Nor is the left’s list of victim groups limited only to human beings; even certain species of shrubs, trees, insects, and rodents qualify as victims in the worldview of leftwing environmentalists and animal rights activists.

The destructive leftist campaigns identified in this section of DiscoverTheNetworks were invariably launched in the name of rescuing such victims from the ravages of an allegedly oppressive status quo. Calling themselves “liberals,” today’s leftists claim the moral high ground as self-anointed avatars of compassion and enlightenment—counterweights to the supposedly “reactionary” conservatives they depict as heartless monsters.

In his book Homegrown Democrat, author and radio personality Garrison Keillor gives voice to this perspective. He writes: “I am a liberal, and liberalism is the politics of kindness. Liberals stand for tolerance, magnanimity, community spirit, the defense of the weak against the powerful, love of learning, freedom of belief, art and poetry, city life, the very things that make America worth dying for.” Keillor classifies conservative Republicans as people who seek to create a “new privatized low-tax minimal-services society” where “politics will be so ugly and rancid that decent people will avoid expressing an opinion for fear of being screeched at and hectored and spat on”; who feel no sense of “Christian obligation toward the poor”; who have “too much money and too little character”; who have no “honesty” and no “idea of serving the public good”; and to whom “human misery is all a fiction, something out of novels, stories of matchstick people.”

Keillor’s remarks typify the manner in which contemporary leftists characterize themselves and, in stark contrast, their conservative ideological foes. But the term “liberal” as Keillor intends it bears no substantive resemblance to the classical liberalism that originally grew out of the dramatic intellectual strides that Western culture made during the 17th-century Age of Reason and the 18th-century Enlightenment. When the term “liberalism” (from the Latin word liberalis, meaning “pertaining to a free man”) first emerged in the early 1800s, it was guided by a four-pronged value system that embraced individual rights, the rule of law, limited government, and free markets based on private property. These would remain the defining characteristics of liberalism throughout the liberal epoch (generally identified as the period of 1815-1914). “Until August 1914,” wrote British historian A. J. P. Taylor, “a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state.” As Barry Loberfeld puts it,

“The government did not control how [a man] lived, where he lived, where he traveled, what he purchased, whom he traded with, or whether he should enlist in the military.”

Yet the modern left, which portrays itself as the agent of enlightened commitment to “liberal” or “progressive” causes, in fact stands for the antithesis of each of the foregoing liberal ideals. Contrary to its self-definition, the left is neither “liberal” nor “progressive,” but rather a reactionary force that seeks to resurrect the traditions that characterized the epoch which preceded the rise of classical liberalism.

Consider these easily verifiable truths: The modern left is the stalwart champion of group rights rather than individual rights (as exemplified by its support for collective preferences—affirmative action—based on such categories as race, ethnicity, gender, or national origin); the circumvention of law rather than the rule of law (as exemplified by support for the edicts of activist judges and the non-enforcement of laws pertaining to immigration and nondiscrimination); the expansion of government rather than its diminution (by means of ever-escalating taxes to fund a bloated welfare state, and government control over virtually every aspect of human life—education, health care, day care, etc.); and the redistribution of wealth (through punitive taxes and mushrooming welfare programs), rather than its creation through free-market capitalism.

By calling themselves “liberals” or “progressives,” leftists have entirely redefined the terms of debate. And as noted earlier, the media and the public have largely gone along with this fraudulent self-identification, as evidenced by the fact that few people nowadays draw any distinction between liberalism in its original and authentic sense, and leftism—or socialism posing as “liberalism.”

Thus we witness the travesty of the “liberal” label being widely attached to far leftists like Michael Moore, George Soros, Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Jesse Jackson, Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden, Angela Davis, Cindy Sheehan, Lynne Stewart, and Ted Kennedy. Yet the ideals of each of these individuals are utterly antithetical to the tenets of classical liberalism as outlined above.

The socialist left’s redefinition of liberalism has taken place subtly and incrementally. The left has long understood the effectiveness of an incremental approach to social revolution, where the shadow of government regulation over every aspect of life—such as college admissions, hiring practices, and promotion policies—lengthens so slowly as to be scarcely noticed by the society whose structure and traditions it quietly, inexorably obscures. As the perennial Socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas once said:

“The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism. But under the name of ‘liberalism,’ they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.”

In the name of liberalism, the left has inflicted immense suffering upon the very groups on whose behalf it justifies its own campaigns and crusades. That suffering is the subject of this section of

DiscoverTheNetworks.

Copyright 2003-2006 : DiscoverTheNetwork.org

Monday, July 14, 2008

The Supreme Obstacle


from Howard Was Right.com

The Supreme Obstacle


Judicial Activism by Bruce Walker


Friday, July 11, 2008

The recent spate of Supreme Court decisions, some good and some bad, focus attention on the critical role which the federal judiciary has come to play in public policy. Civics students have been spoon fed the notion that our Founding Fathers constructed the Constitution upon principles of “separation of powers” and “checks and balances” with three co-equal branches of government.

The Supreme Court is the only court mentioned in the Constitution and it is the highest federal court of appeal, with original jurisdiction also in a few types of cases. The idea that the Supreme Court should be co-equal and that it should be checking the legislative and executive branches of government would have struck the Founding Fathers as macabre. Congress is clearly the predominant branch of the federal government, which is why in early American history the Speaker of the House was as important as the President.

Congress was intended to have much power. The President was intended to have some power. The Supreme Court was intended to have very little power. How little power? Consider what Congress has the power under the Constitution to do to the Supreme Court:

(1) Congress has the power to create all lower federal courts. Congress can abolish, change , or expand those courts as it wishes. If Congress wished to abolish the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal or all federal circuit courts of appeal, it could do so by a single statute. This is not a phantom power: Congress has completely reorganized the federal judiciary, including abolishing federal courts.

(2) Congress may limit the very jurisdiction of federal courts, including the Supreme Court, to hear cases. There are only a few instances in which the Supreme Court has explicit constitutional jurisdiction to hear cases, and the Constitution says nothing about the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court to interpret the Constitution or even interpret federal laws. Congress could, for example, deny the Supreme Court the power to rule on any issue related to abortion.

(3) Congress may increase or decrease the size of the Supreme Court. It has done both in the past. The nine justices we have associated with the Supreme Court have been as many as ten or as few as six. If Congress wished to double the size of the Supreme Court, it could. This is exactly how the United Kingdom has controlled its House of Lords: When that upper house of Parliament has defied what the voters want, enough peers are created to give a majority to the government’s view.

(4) The House of Representatives may impeach and the Senate may convict and remove any federal judge or justice who Congress feels has committed impeachable offenses. Historians have written that high crimes and misdemeanors are required to remove a federal judge, but Congress has complete independence in determining whether that is the standard and what that standard would mean if used. A majority of the House and two thirds of the Senate can remove any justice or judge of the federal judiciary, no matter what.

The false idea that Congress has no power to control the federal judiciary is simply a myth which allows Congress to pretend to be helpless when the Supreme Court keeps prayer out of school or allows eminent domain to be used by local government to seize private property when it wishes. Congress has plenty of ways to reverse bad judicial decisions, if it really wants to do so, but Congress pretends that the Founding Fathers, somehow, intended for the Supreme Court to protect individual rights under the Constitution.

The Constitution does not give the Supreme Court that power or role at all, but it does create two balances against an overly bossy Congress. The President had the power to veto any bill of Congress, and that veto could only be overridden by two thirds of both houses. The veto has come to be seen as a tool of the President to affect the substance of legislation, but our first president, George Washington, felt that the presidential veto should only be used when Congress passed a bill which was unconstitutional. The Father of Our Nation, who was also the President of the Constitutional Convention, believed that the check upon unconstitutional legislation by Congress was the presidential veto, not the Supreme Court.

The other great check on Congress was the power of the state governments, and particularly state legislatures – the part of our federal system closest to the people. When Congress did pass clearly unconstitutional legislation, like the Alien and Sedition Acts (under which a sitting congressman was put in jail), the Supreme Court did absolutely nothing – but the legislatures of Virginia and Kentucky ruled that Congress exceeded its power, and the resolutions of those legislatures worked.

How did American defenders of constitutional rights view the Supreme Court? Thomas Jefferson, the greatest defender of individual rights in our history, wrote:

“The great object of my fear is the Federal Judiciary. That body, like gravity, ever acting with noiseless foot, and unalarming advance, gaining ground step by step, and holding what it gains, is ingulfling (sic) insidiously [our freedoms.]”

Jefferson was brilliantly prescient. The federal judiciary, quietly and slowly, has increased its power from almost nothing, when the Constitution was adopted, to almost everything today. It should interest us that the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth amendments in the Bill of Rights all are intended to limit judicial power and that the last two amendments, the “forgotten Ninth” and the Tenth, intended to limit federal power in general.

The first amendment after the Bill of Rights was passed in reaction to a case in which the Supreme Court extended its jurisdiction over the State of Georgia, Chisholm v. Georgia. This Eleventh Amendment was intended to curtail the power of the Supreme Court by limiting its power by prohibiting it from hearing cases by citizens of one state against another state or by foreign nationals against states.

Our early citizens thought that the Supreme Court was unnecessary to protect our constitutional rights and even dangerous to our constitutional rights. Were they right? What has the Supreme Court done to protect the average citizen from government oppression? What has it done to harm those rights?

The ghastly Supreme Court decision of Dred Scott removed from Congress the power to effectively end slavery in America, and even rendered the power of individual states to abolish slavery ineffective. The Supreme Court insured civil war which would end and a century of state discrimination and interstate bitterness. The Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson and similar decisions kept Congress from granting blacks equal right in the racist South.

Congress tried to provide for “one man, one vote” in congressional districts as well as end gerrymandering by white people or political parties to frustrate the will of the voters. The Supreme Court during the 1930s “interpreted” congressional legislation to allow gerrymandering in Mississippi which kept congressional districts unequal in population and also effectively disenfranchised blacks. Congress tried to protect black voting rights and the Supreme Court overruled that effort.

During the Second World War, the Supreme Court in two separate decisions upheld the internment of Japanese-Americans without due process. Today, the Supreme Court grants rights to our murderous enemies to sue in federal courts, but the Supreme Court denied the right of perfectly innocent Japanese citizens of America to get out of interment camps.

The Supreme Court invented from whole cloth the concept of “de facto” segregation and then approved the busing of young children for hours across large cities to unfamiliar, often dangerous, schools – all in the name of ending racial discrimination (it has not seemed to work, has it?)

The Supreme Court granted an absurd panoply of new legal rights to guilty criminals (the rights granted by the Warren Court, which excluded evidence of guilt, only protected the guilty and not the innocent.) The consequence, predicted by prosecutors in the 1960s, was a virtual explosion in the rate of violent crime, consider the changes in the rate of violent crime before and after the Warren Court’s grotesque decisions:

1960 .16%

1970 .36%

1980 .59%

1990 .73%

2000 .50%

The rate of violent crime is down from its high in the 1990s, but the chances are still four times greater today than in 1960 that you or your loved ones will be beaten, raped or murdered, and that is largely because of surreally bad Supreme Court decisions under the Warren Court.

What about abortion? Was the Supreme Court needed to prevent back room abortions? No: Abortions in most states were illegal, but that was because the people, through their state legislators, wanted abortions illegal. In fact, writers in the 1940s were complaining about perfectly legal abortion mills running in Rochester, New York. All Roe v. Wade did was to remove the power of state legislators or voters to make any decisions about abortion. If the Supreme Court next year ruled that a fetus was a human life, then abortion would be murder everywhere, and no legislature, state or national, could regulate abortion to protect the life of the mother or in case of rape or incest.

The history of the Supreme Court in American government and politics has been the story of the governed and their elected representatives losing power by federal judicial decisions which erode individual rights and replace those rights with the personal whims of judges. We have reached the tragic point where the most compelling issue in our presidential election may be who each candidate will appoint to the Supreme Court. If we want again a republic deriving “its just powers from the consent of the governed,” then we must begin by reducing the Supreme Court to its proper, minor role.

Posted by Bruce Walker on 07/11

And Joseph Farrah weighs in...













It's the Constitution, stupid!


Posted: July 09, 2008

Americans need to ask themselves the following question: Do I want the courts to decide cases on the basis of good public policy, or do I want them to decide them on the basis of what the Constitution says?

Nearly every ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court, including the recent overturn of the Washington, D.C., gun ban confronts us with this dilemma.

Naturally, most Americans want their own opinions to prevail in court cases, just as they would like their opinions to prevail in legislative debates or in elections.

However, the courts were never established for this purpose. Courts were established to uphold the existing laws, and, in the case of the U.S. Supreme Court, to uphold the U.S. Constitution.

While I'm gratified that the Constitution was upheld in the D.C. case, I am alarmed it came in a 5-4 ruling. That means we are just one Supreme Court justice away from a ruling that proclaims the Constitution unconstitutional!

Of course, it wouldn't be the first time it has happened in American history. And it usually occurs when a decision of the court is popular because it seems to uphold justice and is in line with popular opinion.

Such was the case in one of the most celebrated Supreme Court rulings of the 20th century – Brown v Board of Education.

I know what you're thinking: "Please, Farah, tell me you are not going to say this widely acclaimed 1954 ruling banning racial segregation of schools was wrong?"

As the new book, "Who Killed the Constitution?" by Thomas E. Woods Jr. and Kevin R.C. Gutzman shows, I am absolutely persuaded Brown v Board of Education was wrongly decided. In fact, I would say the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court was unconstitutional on its face.

I know this puts me in dangerous company. I know there are those out there who will call me a racist for saying it. I know it's yesterday's battle, and there is little good that can come from opening up this old can or worms.

However, it is bad precedent law that is subverting the Constitution day by day, year by year, piece by piece in ways that has brought us to the point in which politicians and judges can do pretty much whatever they want without a thought as to the shackles the founding document placed on them with the intent of preserving liberty for the people.

As Woods and Gutzman state it: "To make exceptions for government actions that seem 'right' but aren't consistent with the Constitution is to make arbitrary, and quite dangerous distinctions. Doing so breaks 'the chains of the Constitution' that in [Thomas] Jefferson's memorable phrase, are needed to 'bind down' politicians. Once we allow the government to go outside the bounds of the Constitution, we have created a precedent for other extra-constitutional actions later."

The authors build a persuasive case that the court could not arrive at its conclusion on the basis of precedent law, legislation by Congress, nor the Constitution. Brown was clearly a case of a group of justices determining which policy outcome they preferred and ruling accordingly – in spite of precedent, in spite of the will of Congress and in spite of the Constitution.

Of course, it wasn't the first time it happened – though it may be one of the most shameless displays of justices assuming the role of legislators.

Interestingly, the outcome the justices hoped to achieve – namely desegregated schools – failed to materialize. If you say to yourself: "Well, it might have been a bad decision, but at least some good emerged from it," I urge you to think again.

Far from it. If you think segregated schools are a thing of the past, I urge you to visit a few institutions of public education in the Washington, D.C., system – even a few blocks from the Supreme Court building.

Which leads me to believe, following the Constitution is not only the right thing to do as a matter of principle, it is the right thing to do as a matter of policy.

Sunday, July 13, 2008

Killing One's Own Children For "Family Honor"

This is a really ugly, sick psychotic Muslim practice, which keeps happening right here in America. Authorities seem at a loss as to how to deal with it. I have some ideas how to deal with families who kill their own, and probably my ideas who probably be labeled as cruel and unusual punishment. A father who could murder his own daughter for disobedience, believing that his act will somehow "restore" his family's honor, deserves cruel and unusual punishment. But a Muslim father's decision to take his own daughter's life in cold blood also implicates his own family and the religion of death, Islam.

The Leftists will no doubt mumble nonsense about "cultural relativism", if they comment at all.

Today I'm running two accounts of this outrage. The first account deals with the radical feminists's lack of response to the plight of these young women, and has to be dragged out into the light. The second account, by Robert Spenser, deals with the wider cultural climate in which these murders take place.

Feminists Truly Hate Women

July 10, 2008

-By Warner Todd Huston

Last Sunday in Jonesboro, Georgia, an immigrant Muslim father strangled his daughter to death in a so-called “honor killing” because she protested being forced by her family to marry a man she did not know. No feminist uttered a word about the murder of twenty-five-year-old Sandeela Kanwal. On the following Wednesday officials in the city government of Atlanta, Georgia bowed to the pressure from one feminist nut to stop posting “men at work” signs in the city because they are “sexist.”

The contrast is stark as well as revealing, if not entirely disgusting. It reveals an American feminism that is a hypocritical, unserious, sham that deserves nothing but derision. A movement that indulges in oblivious, frivolity while real pain surrounds them.

The western world is in the midst of a clash of cultures that is killing thousands of people every week. The west is seeing a religio-political system calling itself Islam perpetrating some of the most oppressive actions against women in modern history.

Women are daily and by the millions beaten, raped, mutilated, and oppressed in uncountable ways by adherents of a so-called religion. This is not only happening in far away lands, either. Imigrants are importing these barbarous, uncivilized ways into the west and right into our midst.

Girls of Muslim heritage throughout the west are being forced into marriages against their will, sold into sexual slavery, their genitals are being mangled in a faux religious ceremony and they are being treated as second class citizens by their parents and relatives, immigrants of Muslim background.

And as these very real crimes against women occur what do the feminists of Atlanta, Georgia get all exercised about? The elimination of signs that say “men at work.”

Feminists in America and other western nations have a possible crusade just aching for their care and development, yet these same feminists who pretend that women’s rights are their priority consistently ignore real oppression. These oppressed Muslim women suffer unimaginable horrors at the hands of their uncivilized religion and imported, backwards culture all the while western feminists sit on their hands and concerns themselves with pointless issues like city signage.

As Sandeela Kanwal was agonizing over her forced marriage in Jonesboro and later as her murdered body lay on the floor of her Father’s home, the last bit of precious life fading, a childish, foolhardy “feminist” named Cynthia Good was congratulating herself on somehow striking a blow against oppression by making Atlanta get rid of a few paper signs.

While millions of young girls cower and allow themselves into forced marriages all across the west, magazine editor Cynthia Good trumpeted her success and called for the rest of the country to join her earthshattering, important efforts. “We’re calling on the rest of the nation to follow suit and make a statement that we will not accept these subtle forms of discrimination,” chortled the facile Good to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

This is the result of liberal moral equivalence. The western liberal’s self-destructive insistence that each culture is just as good as the next, yet at the same time the assumption that our own is somehow worse for its “oppression” and “discrimination,” courses throughout the veins of pernicious feminism. The delusional insistence that we, the west, are the bane of civilization as poor young girls like Sandeela Kanwal lead pitiful existences often meeting a violent end right under the noses of these same “feminists” who claim moral superiority is an outrage. The belief that a paper sign alerting passersby that people are working in the area is worse than the murder of Sandeela Kanwal and others like her is a travesty.

Feminists are execrable yet are given the benefit of government money in our universities and places of high esteem. Today, feminists are as bad a holocaust deniers, as bad as Soviet apologists, for their willful ignorance of the oppression of women that goes on around them every day.

The Soviets used to call westerners who gave them cover for their crimes against humanity “useful idiots.” Muslims call westerners who turn a blind eye to their oppressions “dhimmis,” folks who have a lesser stance in Islam but follow along dutifully ignoring the crimes around them. Cynthia Good is a dhim idiot. She make fools of every person everywhere truly concerned with eliminating oppression.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Honor Killing in Georgia

By Robert Spencer

FrontPageMagazine.com | Thursday, July 10, 2008

Last Sunday Chaudhry Rashid, a Pakistani immigrant living in Clayton County, Georgia, strangled his daughter to death. According to police, Rashid explained to them that he had killed his daughter, Sandeela Kanwal, in order to restore his family’s honor, which she had sullied by planning to divorce the husband to whom she had been given in an arranged marriage. Clayton County Police spokesman Tim Owens explained: “Apparently she and the father had argued over the marriage and the fact that it was arranged, and at some point during the altercation he did end up killing his daughter.”

The family appears to have adhered to traditional Islamic mores. A neighbor noted: “I would see the young lady outside every once in a while dressed in the traditional Muslim gear.” Added another: “The father, he would pray at certain times of the mornings and evenings.” And indeed, honor killing most commonly occurs among Muslims. While there is no direct sanction given in the Qur’an or Islamic law for it, the practice is encouraged by the shame/honor culture that Islam has created. A transgression of the moral law is not seen only as a sin to be somehow expiated by the individual who committed it, but as a blot upon the honor and purity of the family of the victim – and that blot inheres in the sullied purity of the victim, not the perpetrator.

“Honor killings” are distressingly common throughout the Muslim world. Phyllis Chesler reports that “in 1997, in Cairo Egypt, twenty-five-year-old Nora Marzouk Ahmed’s honeymoon ended when her father chopped off her head and carried it down the street. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘the family has regained its honor.’ Nora’s crime? She had eloped.” And “in 2002, in Tehran, an Iranian man cut off his seven-year-old daughter’s head after suspecting she had been raped by her uncle. ‘The motive behind the killing was to defend my honor, fame, and dignity.’ Some people called for this man’s death under Islamic law, but ironically, only the father of the victim can demand the death sentence.”

Chesler recounts many such killings. “In 1999, in Lahore, Pakistan, Samia Imran was shot dead in her feminist lawyer’s office by a man whom her parents had hired to kill her. Her crime? Seeking a divorce….In 2001, in Gujar Khan, Pakistan, Zahida Perveen’s husband attacked her, gouged out both her eyes, her nose, and her ears. He wrongly suspected her of adultery. He was arrested, but male relatives shook his hand and men decided she ‘must have deserved it’ and that a ‘husband has to do what a man has to do.’…In 2005, in Gaza, five masked members of Hamas…shot Yusra Azzumi, a twenty-year-old Palestinian woman, to death, brutalized her corpse, and savagely beat both her brother, Rami, and her fiancé, Ziad Zaranda, whom she was to marry within days. This self-appointed Morality Squad wrongly suspected Yusra (herself a Hamas member) of “immoral behavior.”

Islamic clerics are partially responsible for the strong association of this practice with Islam. One notorious example of this association came in the relatively moderate Muslim country of Jordan in 2003, when the Jordanian Parliament voted down a provision designed to stiffen penalties for honor killings. Al-Jazeera reported with unintentional irony that increasing penalties for honor killings would destroy families: “Islamists and conservatives said the laws violated religious traditions and would destroy families and values.”

Ignoring the clear and close link between of honor killing and Islamic culture, however, the mainstream media searched for explanations elsewhere. CNN consulted Ajay Nair, associate dean of multicultural affairs at Columbia University, to see if honor killing was a “South Asian” problem. Certainly not, explained Nair: “My immediate reaction was that this is an anomaly in the South Asian community. This isn’t a rampant problem within South Asian communities. What is a problem, I think, is domestic violence, and that cuts across all communities.”

Also ignoring the incidence of honor killings in Jordan, Egypt, Iran, Gaza and elsewhere (including among Muslim immigrants in Germany, Britain, Canada, and Texas), the Chicago Tribune attributed it to the cultural rigidity of Pakistani and Indian immigrants, and even dragged in the crowned heads of Europe: “Such cultural unions serve as social contracts among South Asians and other communities, where a marriage agreement is more about families joining forces than about two people finding love—akin to the arranged marriages of European royalty…”

To this Warner Todd Huston of NewsBusters trenchantly responded: “Last I checked my history books common Europeans didn’t go around killing their daughters for marrying ‘wrong’ and neither did their ages old Monarchs.”

In line with the widespread acceptance of this practice in Islamic culture, when he appeared before a judge, Chaudhry Rashid insisted: “I have done nothing wrong.” Speaking to the judge, he demanded prison food prepared according to Islamic requirements, and declared that he would refuse pork in any form. It was a clear indication of the strength of his commitment to Islam, even as the mainstream media remained determined not to notice any such commitment.

The price of this politically correct refusal to confront the ugly realities of the Islamic link to honor killing will be, quite simply, more honor killings. No one will call upon Islamic groups to do something about this practice. No special scrutiny will be focused upon Muslims in the United States, or any studies undertaken about how honor killings can be prevented. No one will examine the question of unrestricted Muslim immigration in light of this problem. While learned analysts search for clues in South Asian cultural habits and the practices of European royalty, more young women will be murdered by their Muslim fathers, husbands, and brothers to cleanse their family’s honor. These young women are the ultimate victims of political correctness.

Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of seven books, eight monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including the New York Times Bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His next book, Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs, is coming this November from Regnery Publishing.

Copyright©2008 FrontPageMagazine.com

Saturday, July 12, 2008

All Evil Is On The Left

All Evil Is On The Left

from
enterstageright.com


The Ku Klux Klan was the terrorist wing of the Democrat Party

By Bruce Walker
June 23, 2008

When men like Senator McCain, who I give the benefit of doubt in his moral seriousness, seeks a moderate position, when anyone seeks the "middle ground" in political debate, it is clear that the old bogeyman of evil on the "Far Right" and evil on the "Far Left" has enthralled them. Let us be clear at the outset: there is no "Far Right" at all.

Those handful of nutty and dangerous separatist groups have no connection with what are called conservatives at all. They resemble, in fact, much more the very real Far Left. Recall that Jim Jones, the suicide-murderer minister, was a radical Leftist who supported "social justice" and Democrat politics before he convinced his Jonestown thralls to drink poison Kool-Aid.

In politics, there is some goodness on what we call the Left; there is some goodness on what we call the Right; but there is no evil on the Right: all evil is on the Left. Before delving into the historical basis for this position, consider today what the Right and Left are supposed to represent. The Right is accused, essentially, of doing little or nothing about our social and economic problems.

Those on the mythical Right are not accused of trying to impose enslavement on others – Leftism, and Marxism, simply assume that in the absence of government such enslavement will occur in free markets. The position of the mythical Right represents the first rule of medicine: First, do no harm.

It is very hard to characterize that as evil. Marx himself refrained from defining that as evil, adopting, instead, an objective and scientific approach (much like Barack Obama appears to be doing in his elitist campaign.) In fact, the only way the "Right" can be characterized as evil is by taking the path of Jeremiah Wright and his compatriots: America is a vast conspiracy; America invented AIDS; America deliberately hooked black youths on cocaine; America planned 9-11 to enrich Dick Cheney; and so on.

This is one reason why the Left is so invested in a so-called "ideological spectrum" that stretches from the Far Right (which doesn't exist) to the Far Left (which does exist.) Because the Far Left does plan and hope for very real evil – simply reading what their blogs say about Nancy Reagan and Charlton Heston should leave no doubt about the evil that the Far Left represents – it must create a Far Right that also harbors great evil.

In fact, those evils which historically in America have been connected with the mythical "Far Right" were the Far Left. Consider, for example, the anti-Semitic priest, Father Coughlin, who held captive millions of Americans during the 1930s with his radio broadcasts. Certainly Coughlin supported bad things, but was he on the "Far Right"? It would have astounded him to be considered so. Repeatedly Coughlin denounced "conservatives" of every sort and embraced "progressives." His radio addresses, when actually studied, show contempt for the rich and an insistence upon socialism. Coughlin had supported Roosevelt, not Hoover, in 1936. He abandoned Roosevelt, not because he was too far to the Left, but because he was too timid in confronting Wall Street and capitalist overlords. Yet Coughlin is routinely trotted out as an example of the "Far Right" in America. Ironically, Coughlin was also attacked by another group reflexively considered on the "Far Right," the Ku Klux Klan.

Was the Ku Klux Klan on the "Far Right"? Well, it was overtly racist. But is racism a quality of this mythical "Far Right"? Marx was profoundly racist and nationalistic. The Soviet Union was profoundly racist during its seventy years or so of existence (ask the Armenians or Uzbeks or Lithuanians or Ukrainians.) Communist China, today, is racist (ask the Tibetans or several other captive peoples.) Is there a society, a government or a nation that has not been xenophobic or racist?

The deliberate rejection of racism, politically, in the foundational document of the American polity, the Declaration of Independence, which proclaimed to the world that all men are created equal and endowed by God with certain absolute rights. This is the heart of what is called the "Right" in American. The moral rejection of racism came first in Judaism and then, more emphatically, in Christianity, which proclaimed that we are neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. Yet what is most consistently considered by the Left as the most dangerous "Rightists"? - American Christians or Americans who celebrate the Judeo-Christian moral heritage.

Racism was opposed in America by the "capitalist" North, relying almost exclusively upon very devout Christians, and was opposed in America by the anti-capitalist South, which relied upon Darwinism rather than Christianity and which was opposed, in the South, only by very brave Christians. Racism was opposed in America by the Republican Party, which was expressly founded upon the rights of blacks not only to freedom but to equality.

Who, then, supported racism in America? The Ku Klux Klan was the terrorist wing of the Democrat Party in the post-bellum South.

Their outrages were not committed so much against blacks as against Republicans, both black and white. The Klan continued to support Democrats. Edward D. White was appointed to the Supreme Court by Grover Cleveland, the only Democrat president between the Civil War and 1912. White had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

William Jennings Byran, three time nominee of the Democrat Party, was not only bigoted against blacks but also against Jews. His "Cross of Gold" speech was in condemnation of "English and Jewish Bankers." William McKinley, his Republican opponent in two of those three presidential races, as governor of Ohio had supported equal rights for blacks, opposed lynching and appointed blacks to state government positions.

Woodrow Wilson Woodrow Wilson, the first true Leftist president, was enthusiastically supported by the Klan, whose members campaigned at the Democrat Convention in 1924 to get his son-in-law, William McAdoo, nominated for the presidency. McAdoo himself had insisted in 1912 that Wilson remain on the ballot, which he did, ultimately winning the nomination. Small wonder that the Leftist bigot Woodrow Wilson got a paltry seven percent of the black vote, the rest going to conservative Republicans who consistently support equal rights for blacks.

The racism of that first pure Leftist American, Woodrow Wilson, was not limited to blacks. He rejected the policies of Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, which had been to treat Japan as a modern, civilized nation and Wilson opposed the Japanese proposal that the League of Nations charter endorse racial equality. He looked down as well on Italians, who were coming to America in huge numbers (to our great fortune) during his presidency.

Later the Klan would enthusiastically support Franklin Roosevelt, and FDR responded by appointing another member of the Klan, Hugo Black, to the Supreme Court, and appointing another member of the Klan, Tom Clark, to be Attorney General (Tom Clark, the father of Ramsey Clark, would also wind up on the Supreme Court.) Paul Robeson accused FDR, the vision of American Leftism for many years, of engaging in "a gratuitous and outrageous insult to my people" by appointing the Klansman Clark to be Attorney General and Roy Wilkins of the NAACP damned FDR with "moral cowardice" – the Left in America was saturated with racial bigotry.

Harry Truman also signed up to join the Klan, making him the third icon of the American Left who directly connected himself with the most racist and malignant organization in American politics. The ideology of the Klan was profoundly anti-capitalist, and those men sympathetic to the Klan, like Tom Watson, were among the first to applaud the Bolshevik Revolution – Watson, as a senator from Georgia, was among the first to push for recognition of the new Bolshevik regime, thus neatly tying together a hatred of blacks and Jews with an enthusiastic support for the first Marxist government on the planet.

This connection between racism and anti-Semitism (twin moral maladies) and the Left in America has never disappeared. Jeremiah Wright, the mentor of Barack Obama, has displayed a bigotry toward people of color (pink) and a disdain for Jews worthy of an Imperial Wizard. There is another connection between Jeremiah Wright, Tom Watson, Ramsey Clark, Woodrow Wilson, Hugo Black, Nathan Bedford Forrest (founder of the KKK) and Franklin Roosevelt: all were Democrats. All considered themselves on the political Left.

What is true about American politics is just as true about world politics. If the Far Right did not exist, if liberty was not extremism at all, if a private commitment to genuine Judeo-Christian moral traditions is the best choice a morally serious person can make, then all evil would reside on the Far Left. The mythical Far Right would be the rhetorical equivalent of Kulaks in Stalinist Russia or Jews in Hitlerite Germany – an innocent scapegoat; an illusionary enemy of the people; a needed sham.

This is why when I write articles about the Leftism of Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy, the Left reacts so passionately. We all do and all should hate everything that Nazism and Fascism stood for, but we should also draw our own conclusions about where these two movements would have fallen on the invented ideological spectrum of the Far Left. Consider, for the moment, what sort of political argument could be made for the Left if Hitler and Mussolini, as well as their movements, were on the Far Left and not on the Far Right?

There would, essentially, be no argument at all for the Far Left and no fear at all of the Far Right. This is precisely why the myth of the Far Right is so important. Yet this myth is also so transparent that it collapses at any objective inspection. The predecessor of Fidel Castro, Fulgenio Batista, for example, is often cited as a man of the "Far Right." Yet Batista was supported by the Cuban Communist Party; he legalized the party and brought its members into his cabinet; he supported the same leveling policies as the communists. The Cuban Communist Party, in fact, supported Batista against Castro until Castro won. Yet history has consigned Batista to the "Far Right."

The same is true of Juan and Evita Peron, both of whom adored both Fascism and National Socialism, and yet both of whom condemned the rich, disliked America, opposed Christianity, and harbored overt anti-Semitic sentiments (defining characteristics of the Left.) Communists did not know what to do with the Perons, and when Evita visited France, L'Humanite could think of nothing more creative to say about this competing Leftist than to describe her as a "Left Fascist."

Oswald Mosley
Europeans, from Jacques Doriot (the leader of French Communists who ended up supporting the Nazis) to Oswald Mosley (the leader of the British Union of Fascists who moved during his life from being a member of the Conservative Party to a Labour Party cabinet minister to something more Leftist), all display the same politics of the Left: Abolish the phony idea of a "Far Right" and they are all on the "Far Left."

Even that generic term of imprecision, Fascist, is full of contradiction unless we see it as a movement of the Left. Fascism, as a sibling Leftist movement and thus a bitter rival of National Socialism, was long the antithesis of what we consider it today. Not only was Mussolini not anti-Semitic, but many of the leading Fascists were Jewish and Fascist Italy strongly opposed anti-Semitism when it appeared, for example, in Hungary after Bela Kun. The principal mistress and official biographer of Mussolini was Jewish (Sarfatti was also a feminist.) The Nazis opined that Mussolini was "probably a Jew" and that Fascism was a "Jewish movement." Fascists, almost alone, halted the advance of Nazism in the early 1930s.

Both movements were malign; both movements oppressed freedom, religion and democracy; both movements exalted violence and action; both movements championed those causes of the common man which always are used to justify oppression; both movements – as all Leftist movements always do – connived against each other for power; and both movements inevitably descended into hatred of serious Jews and Christians, whose God would not allow men to behave like gods.

Everything about Fascism and National Socialism looked and smelled like Bolshevism. Mussolini was known, as a Fascist leader, as "the Lenin of Italy." Hitler advanced policies much farther to the Left than Hillary or Obama have ever proposed. The Nazis never called themselves a movement of the "Far Right." They were called "Rightists" that by their enemies. The Fascists, like the Nazis, rather portrayed themselves as parties of the middle or, better still, something different from the "Left" or the "Right." Yet the policies of the National Socialists as well as the Fascists reflected some incarnation of socialism and redistribution of wealth. Indeed, the Nazis claimed to be the only true socialists. In Hitler's 1943 New Year's message, he said:

"The alliance of the arch-capitalist state of the West, or even more so of America, with the mendacious mock-socialist regime of bolshevism is conceivable only because leadership in both cases lies in the hands of international Jewry."
We know, sadly too well, why the Nazi tyrant was spouting venous and absurd calumnies upon Jews, but why was Hitler accusing the western allies, America and Britain, of being "arch-capitalists" and accusing the Soviet Union of being "mock-socialism"?

Because Hitler believed that the German socialism his party propounded should triumphant. Is this Marxism? Consider that after the Prussian victory over France in 1871, Marx himself exulted "Now it will be German socialism that will triumph in Europe." The connection between Marx and Hitler was noted by writers long ago. Ernest Hambloch, writing in 1939 before the Second World War, suggests Marx may have been right, because the "Mohammed of the Allah of ‘Scientific Socialism' was Hitler, not Stalin" and that Marx deserved a place of honor not only in Bolshevik, but Nazi hagiography.

All evil is on the Left. Nazis, Bolsheviks, American "progressives," and Fascists have all held the same positions. They have suspicion or contempt for Jews, Christians and the Judeo-Christian moral traditions. They seek to collect as many material or psychological dependents as possible and to "represent" the interests of these individuals as if they were not individuals at all, but rather members of some hive. They seek violence and propaganda (violence against truth) as the primary instruments of their power. And they perpetuate the idea that they are different from each other, much as Obama and Hillary pretend to have real differences, because as soon as we see that all evil is on the Left, the political debate ends and the principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence – principles which, essentially, end the role of ideology in government – lives again. ESR

Bruce Walker has been a published author in print and in electronic media since 1990. He is a contributing editor to Enter Stage Right and a regular contributor to Conservative Truth, American Daily, Intellectual Conservative, Web Commentary, NewsByUs and Men's News Daily. His first book, Sinisterism: Secular Religion of the Lie by Outskirts Press was published in January 2006.

His latest book, The Swastika against the Cross: The Nazi War on Christianity, has just been published, and can be viewed here: outskirtspress.com.

Friday, July 11, 2008

Global Warming As Mass Neurosis

WSJ

GLOBAL VIEW
By BRET STEPHENS

Global Warming as Mass Neurosis

July 1, 2008

Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the mass hysteria phenomenon known as global warming. Much of the science has since been discredited. Now it's time for political scientists, theologians and psychiatrists to weigh in.

What, discredited? Thousands of scientists insist otherwise, none more noisily than NASA's Jim Hansen, who first banged the gong with his June 23, 1988, congressional testimony (delivered with all the modesty of "99% confidence").

The New True Believers

But mother nature has opinions of her own. NASA now begrudgingly confirms that the hottest year on record in the continental 48 was not 1998, as previously believed, but 1934, and that six of the 10 hottest years since 1880 antedate 1954. Data from 3,000 scientific robots in the world's oceans show there has been slight cooling in the past five years, never mind that "80% to 90% of global warming involves heating up ocean waters," according to a report by NPR's Richard Harris.

The Arctic ice cap may be thinning, but the extent of Antarctic sea ice has been expanding for years. At least as of February, last winter was the Northern Hemisphere's coldest in decades. In May, German climate modelers reported in the journal Nature that global warming is due for a decade-long vacation. But be not not-afraid, added the modelers: The inexorable march to apocalypse resumes in 2020.

This last item is, of course, a forecast, not an empirical observation. But it raises a useful question: If even slight global cooling remains evidence of global warming, what isn't evidence of global warming? What we have here is a nonfalsifiable hypothesis, logically indistinguishable from claims for the existence of God. This doesn't mean God doesn't exist, or that global warming isn't happening. It does mean it isn't science.

So let's stop fussing about the interpretation of ice core samples from the South Pole and temperature readings in the troposphere.

The real place where discussions of global warming belong is in the realm of belief, and particularly the motives for belief. I see three mutually compatible explanations.

The first is as a vehicle of ideological convenience. Socialism may have failed as an economic theory, but global warming alarmism, with its dire warnings about the consequences of industry and consumerism, is equally a rebuke to capitalism. Take just about any other discredited leftist nostrum of yore – population control, higher taxes, a vast new regulatory regime, global economic redistribution, an enhanced role for the United Nations – and global warming provides a justification.

One wonders what the left would make of a scientific "consensus" warning that some looming environmental crisis could only be averted if every college-educated woman bore six children: Thumbs to "patriarchal" science; curtains to the species.

A second explanation is theological. Surely it is no accident that the principal catastrophe predicted by global warming alarmists is diluvian in nature. Surely it is not a coincidence that modern-day environmentalists are awfully biblical in their critique of the depredations of modern society: "And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart."

That's Genesis, but it sounds like Jim Hansen.

And surely it is in keeping with this essentially religious outlook that the "solutions" chiefly offered to global warming involve radical changes to personal behavior, all of them with an ascetic, virtue-centric bent: drive less, buy less, walk lightly upon the earth and so on. A light carbon footprint has become the 21st-century equivalent of sexual abstinence.

Finally, there is a psychological explanation. Listen carefully to the global warming alarmists, and the main theme that emerges is that what the developed world needs is a large dose of penance. What's remarkable is the extent to which penance sells among a mostly secular audience. What is there to be penitent about?

As it turns out, a lot, at least if you're inclined to believe that our successes are undeserved and that prosperity is morally suspect.

In this view, global warming is nature's great comeuppance, affirming as nothing else our guilty conscience for our worldly success.

In "The Varieties of Religious Experience," William James distinguishes between healthy, life-affirming religion and the monastically inclined, "morbid-minded" religion of the sick-souled. Global warming is sick-souled religion. [emp. added]

Thursday, July 10, 2008

"Karachi Kids" Documentary Trailer



"Karachi Kids” Documentary Spurs Action


Two American Children Escorted from Taliban Madrassa by American Consulate for Flight to NYC

Canada Free Press (CFP)

By Online Thursday, July 10, 2008

Two American children were escorted by the American consulate officers in Karachi, Pakistan Tuesday night Pakistan time and boarded a flight to Dubai, UAE and then boarded a direct flight to NYC, Noor Elahi Khan and Mahboob Elahi Khan are expected to arrive in Atlanta on a Delta flight this afternoon at 4:30 PM.

The two brothers have been in a Pakistani madrassa for four years and are the focus of a newly released documentary entitled “The Karachi Kids”.

"I have been working for months to secure their exit from the Madrassa and from Pakistan,” said Imran Raza, writer, director and executive producer of the Karachi Kids documentary. “This is great news, but we need to get the other American children out of there, now. There are nearly 80 other Americans currently at this Jamia Binoria madrassa—that teaches Deobandism—the religion of the Taliban. Our government, and the Pakistani government, has more work to do to get the other American children out of there.”

Raza discovered the two children from Atlanta while filming a documentary about madrassas. He returned to the madrassa three times in four years to film their transformation in the hands of the radical mullahs. Children in the documentary film ”The Karachi Kids” describe beatings and human rights violations for those who reject the radical teachings of their Taliban masters. Children from California and Georgia are interviewed in the film from inside the madrassa and discuss coming back to the United States to spread extremism within our borders.

The headmaster of the Binoria madrassa personally recruits American children to his institution during Ramadan, and says on camera that: “We work on altering the mindset of the students we are training, so when they return to their home countries, their mindset is such that they will work on altering the minds of others. That is why I’m appealing to you that at least 1000 to 2000 boys come to us so we can train them and they will go back to their home countries and do the work and make people understand.” The headmaster of the Binoria madrassa also states that he has already graduated 100 American children from his madrassa.

Listen to Tom Fredrickson's Old Glory Radio Network interview with Imran Raza, the maker of the Karachi Kids Documentary:



More on this distressing situation at World Net Daily.

Saturday, July 05, 2008

Your First Amendment Needs YOU



Now that SCOTUS has affirmed that the RKBA is an individual right, we need to get ready for the upcoming attack on our First Amendment rights: our freedom of speech.

From INSIGHT Magazine

Liberal Democrats are attempting to muzzle conservative talk radio: they are assaulting free speech. Like the communists in the former Soviet Union, America's liberals seek to crush dissent by consolidating control over the media-especially talk radio, which has emerged as the dominant medium for conservative opinion.

Allies close to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are promoting legislation, which if passed, will take off the air prominent conservative radio hosts such as Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly-along with thousands of smaller conservative broadcasters.

The bill, entitled the "Media Ownership Reform Act," is sponsored by Rep. Maurice Hinchey, a leftist Democrat from New York. The legislation aims to revive the so-called "Fairness Doctrine" of the 1940's: "all views" are to be given equal time on radio. In particular, the Federal Communications Commission would have the power to oversee and change radio and television content. The goal is to tilt the ideological balance of power away from the right on the nation's air waves.

The real force behind the effort to censor conservative talk radio is the progressive-philanthropist, George Soros. The radical leftist billionaire has made no secret of his hatred for conservatives. He says President Bush has transformed America into a militaristic, "fascist" empire. Moreover, Soros champions many of liberalism's chic causes: abortion on demand, legalization of drugs, homosexual marriage, euthanasia, unlimited Third World immigration, open borders, and one-world government anchored in the United Nations. He advocates all the issues that are anathema to popular radio talk-show hosts like Savage, Limbaugh and Hannity. Hence, he wants these commentators to be exiled to the political wilderness.

The answer to the Media Ownership Reform Act is the Broadcast Freedom Act. It is currently stuck in committee, and needs 218 votes to discharge it for a full floor vote. With U.S. Rep. Timothy V. Johnson's vote, the petition now has 196 votes. Write your Congressman/woman and let them know exactly where you stand on this issue.

The following editorial makes it abundantly clear why we must not lose this First Amendment battle with the extreme Leftists...

The Dallas Morning News

Editorial: All hail the First Amendment

Friday, July 4, 2008

On the Fourth of July, the day we celebrate America's liberty and independence, it's worth contemplating how much more free America is than most other nations in the West.

Why? The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. How very much depends on these 45 words:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

"The First Amendment really does distinguish the U.S., not just from Canada but from the rest of the Western world," says writer Mark Steyn, who's learning it the hard way. Mr. Steyn and Maclean's, the top-selling Canadian magazine, have faced human rights charges in British Columbia. Their alleged offense? Maclean's published a Steyn essay critical of Islam, which prompted Muslim activists to file formal charges accusing the writer and the magazine of violating Canada's hate-speech laws.

Last Friday, the national Human Rights Commission dismissed the charges, but they're still pending in front of a provincial panel. The victory is less than what it appears. For one thing, defending against the charges cost the magazine hundreds of thousands of dollars. For another, it is frightening to think that a human rights panel has the right to decide what can and cannot be published in a free country.

It's not just Canadian critics of Muslims whose speech is under attack. The Alberta Human Rights Commission ruled that the Rev. Stephen Boissoin had broken the country's hate-speech laws by criticizing homosexuals. Last month, the panel ordered the minister to pay damages, apologize and desist from criticizing homosexuality for the rest of his life.

Similarly, the Ontario Human Rights Commission recently ordered a large Christian social service ministry to abandon its statement of faith as discriminatory against gays and to send its employees to diversity training.

Free speech also is in trouble in Europe. Last month, a French court fined actress and animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot $23,000 for violating hate-speech laws. Complaining about Islamic sheep-slaughtering customs, Ms. Bardot had said Muslims were "destroying" France. In May, British police arrested a teenager for calling Scientology a "cult" at a peaceful demonstration.

Also that month, police in The Netherlands arrested Dutch cartoonist Gregorius Nekschot on suspicion of incitement to hatred and discrimination for cartoons alleged to be anti-Muslim. The Dutch police, who have established a branch to investigate cartoons, recently brought in proprietors of a Website critical of multiculturalism to explain comments left on the site.

None of this could have happened in the United States, where the right to say what's on your mind, no matter whose feelings it may hurt, is considered vital to the self-government of a free people. The First Amendment means that in our liberal democracy, we have to tolerate speech many of us find obnoxious or offensive. But it affirms that enduring hateful or distasteful oratory is far less dangerous than giving taboos on controversial speech the force of law.

It is not too much to say that all of our freedoms depend on the First Amendment, for if we cannot speak and worship freely, we are on the road to tyranny. On Independence Day, and every day, we must be grateful for the foresight of the Founders, who understood as no others in their position had before or have since, how sacred freedom of speech is.

When Thomas Jefferson famously said that he would rather have newspapers without a government than government without newspapers, he meant that freely and widely expressed opinions are the true foundation for a successful government of the people, by the people and for the people.

In an observation that cannot be improved upon, the Colonial-era Freeman's Journal editorialized: "As long as the liberty of the press continues unviolated, and the people have the right of expressing and publishing their sentiments upon every public measure, it is next to impossible to enslave a free nation."

God bless America – and God bless the First Amendment, which protects and serves rich and poor, liberals and conservatives, secularists and believers, and all those privileged to call themselves Americans.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

For an exhaustive analysis of the "Liberal" Left's claims of "unfairness in the media", see:

Unmasking the Myths Behind the Fairness Doctrine

Full Report

by Brian Fitzpatrick, Senior Editor, Culture and Media Institute

HINT: Nancy Pelosi and Company were pissed-off when they got their ass kicked on the illegal immigration reform bill in 2007.

Tuesday, July 01, 2008

NYC Gun Grabbing Elitist Mayor, Mike Bloomberg, Overheard Muttering: "Shit In A Hat!"

The New York Sun

Heller's Kitchen

By DAVID KOPEL
June 30, 2008

When the case of District of Columbia v. Heller was before the Supreme Court, Mayor Bloomberg filed a brief in support of the District's handgun ban, arguing that a militia-only interpretation of the Second Amendment was necessary to keep New York City's gun laws intact.

On Thursday, when the Supreme Court ruled against Mr. Bloomberg's position, the mayor claimed that the ruling was a "benefit" and would not affect any New York City laws. His claim was half-right. It is a benefit, but it's unlikely that it will not affect any New York City laws.

In most of America, Heller will have little effect on state and local laws, because the vast majority of states already have an individual right to arms in their state constitutions.

Illinois and California are two of the states that don't have a right to handguns; suits have already been filed challenging the handgun ban in Chicago and the S.F. ban on firearms possession by public housing residents. Those cases will help decide whether the Second Amendment is enforceable against state and local governments or only against the federal government

New York's state Constitution has no right to arms, but the Civil Rights Law does. The Civil Rights Law begins with a Bill of Rights.

Article 4 declares: "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms cannot be infringed." It is identical to the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution, except that New York follows modern standards for capitalization and punctuation, and says "cannot" instead of "shall not."

As a Monroe County court accurately observed in the 1994 case Citizens for a Safer Community v. City of Rochester, "The Courts of this State have concluded that the language of federal law interpreting the Second Amendment (which is identical in its language to Article 2, section 4 of the Civil Rights Law) should be used in interpreting the provisions of this state law."

Some New York courts have interpreted the New York right to arms restrictively, but these decisions were explicitly based on misunderstanding of the same language in the Second Amendment. The cases treating the Civil Rights Law as almost meaningless are of dubious validity now that Heller has made is clear that "the right of the people to keep and bear arms" is a broad and important individual right.

Read the rest...