Category Archives: Islam

Follow the money

Remember last summer when we had the whole hoopla about the poor children flooding into America from Central America and everyone from President Obama to Glenn Beck proclaimed we needed to help these poor children, but also found excuses for why they’re pouring in- terrible gang violence.   With the wave of a rhetorical flourish, they were no longer illegal immigrants, no they were now refugees, fleeing from violent gangs (as if we don’t have that problem here too).   It’s orchestrated to some degree (maybe a lot) and definitely abetted is my opinion, but during that hoopla it came to my attention that there are Christian charities involved with the federal government, receiving large sums of money to provide food and shelter for these illegal immigrant children (and the many adults with them).  I wrote about this here  here, and then here I wrote a post titled, “More border disorder” where I said:

“Pretending these illegal immigrants are going to assimilate and embrace American values seems a dangerous delusion and potentially a threat to our national security, as this mess escalates.   Of course, it’s easier to do the feel-good, “I care about the downtrodden” sound bites and not be accused of being a “hater”.”

So, fast forward and there have been recent reports about ISIS in Mexico near the TX border, which got poo-pooed as more Islamophobia, to quote Snopes, that oh so unbiased fact-checker (sarcasm intended), who fact-checked this in October 2014:

“None of them have found any evidence, credible or otherwise, that Isis is in Juárez.”
Read more at http://www.snopes.com/politics/immigration/isismexico.asp#t0mFWhJBFM0XLtrF.99

Then there was the Garland, TX cartoon-drawing contest terrorist attack, which was foiled by a fast-acting lawman and the media started deflecting attention from the radical Muslim connection, by attacking the contest organizer for “inciting” the attack.  She’s a brassy, New York Jewish lady, so thankfully,  she isn’t backing down to intimidation!  So, our trusty , diligent reporters spend a week attacking Pamela Geller and reporting crap like this, which is a CNN story :

“(CNN) — Whatever spurred Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi to drive across two states to shoot up a Prophet Mohammed cartoon contest is lost on their families, their neighbors and the place they had worshipped.

One was a described as “gentle person,” albeit one who had been convicted of a terror-related charge and supported an ISIS propagandist. (my emphasis not CNN’s)

The other was a father who had “put his son above everything” — until the day he and his roommate opened fire at the event in Garland, Texas, wounding a security guard before police shot and killed the gunmen.”

The article lists connections to terrorism, then includes this nonsense:

“He had ‘a good demeanor’

That’s according to the president of the Islamic Community Center of Phoenix, where both Simpson and Soofi worshiped.

Usama Shami said Simpson came regularly until around 2010 or 2011, about the time the FBI arrested him on the false statement charges. Soofi came less frequently.

Simpson “was a gentle person,” Shami said. “He always had a good attitude, a good demeanor.”

Like others at the mosque, Shami said he was stunned to hear about the attack Sunday night.

“They didn’t show any signs of radicalization or any signs of even thinking about those things in that manner,” he said. “So when that happens, it just shocks you. ‘How good did you know these people?’ That’s the question that people ask themselves.””

No, no, he was a gentle person, yada, yada, yada.  Now, here’s some information on the Islamic Community Center of Phoenix: “The Texas terrorists’ mosque in Phoenix is reportedly controlled by a Muslim Brotherhood front group.” from the Gateway Pundit.  For more information on Muslim Brotherhood front groups Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, has written scores of articles on this topic and several books too – he has meticulously researched and investigated this topic.  Here is a Clarion Project article to enlighten the President of the Islamic Community Center of Phoenix: “Muslim Brotherhood Funded 50% of the Mosques in the West”  Oh my, how could that be?  Yeah, really, quite a mystery for the mainstream media to research and find the facts…

Between the hordes of  illegal immigrants, hordes of legal immigrants pouring in from Muslim countries, that are hotbeds of radical Islam, under the refugee guise, a porous border, and now this new addition to these terrorist attacks inside America committed by Americans, the government and the media go to great lengths to pretend none of these issues are connected in any way somehow seems peculiar to me.

In the most recent attack in Garland, TX the two terrorists were Americans who the press and government assure us they haven’t found any direct link between these two terrorists and ISIS.  We’ve been presented this “lone wolf” misdirection for years now and been told everything ranging from it’s recruitment from social media or in the largest terrorist attack on a US military installation in the United States, at Fort Hood, TX in 2009, our Homeland Security Director told us it was just “workplace violence”.  I have often wondered how closely our authorities have looked into searching, not just  for direct internet communication between these “lone wolf” terrorists and foreign terrorists, but have they looked at homegrown radical Islamist connections right here in America- both in mosques and in that unspoken large, dangerous radical Islamist element within black America.  No one wants to mention that.

In light of the racial tensions, our federal government and the media pretend all these race riots aren’t being fueled, in large part, by Marxist radicals, stalwart race hustlers like Al Sharpton, and MUSLIM black gangs and thugs – like the Nation of Islam, the New Black Panthers, Black Guerrilla nation and many more.   The media, by and large, tiptoes around acknowledging that radical black Muslim gangs serve as a home-grown terrorist training ground.

Malik Shabazz, formerly in the Nation of Islam, former  head of the New Black Panthers, a Muslim black supremacist, virulent anti-Semite and now the head of some nicer sounding National President of Black Lawyers for Justice, became a champion of the black people against the police in Baltimore and here’s the connection of the black Muslim gangs banding together for “justice”.  Really, the attempt to cover-up the Islamic connection among American academia, the Obama White House, and even the Southern Poverty Law Center is astounding.  You can check out the New Black Panthers at the SPLC website and no where in the first pargraph describing the group is the radical Islamic connection mentioned (way down the page you can find his connection to Nation of Islam):

“The New Black Panther Party is a virulently racist and anti-Semitic organization whose leaders have encouraged violence against whites, Jews and law enforcement officers. Founded in Dallas, the group today is especially active on the East Coast, from Boston to Jacksonville, Fla. The group portrays itself as a militant, modern-day expression of the black power movement (it frequently engages in armed protests of alleged police brutality and the like), but principals of the original Black Panther Party of the 1960s and 1970s— a militant, but non-racist, left-wing organization — have rejected the new Panthers as a “black racist hate group” and contested their hijacking of the Panther name and symbol.”

Here is a UK Daily Mail story “The rival gang members who stood against violence in Baltimore: Crips, Bloods, Black Guerrilla Family and Nation of Islam ‘united as black men’ to stand between police and rioters“, with a jolly good first sentence like this:

“In an extraordinary show of unity in Baltimore, rival gang members of the Bloods, Crips and Black Guerrilla Family, appeared to come together to ask protesters to stop the violence and help rebuild communities.”

Hint to the Daily Mail – these groups are CRIMINALS and ANARCISTS.  They incited the riot in Baltimore and then gave this stand down order to their gang members to set the stage for this political sideshow.  Wake up, America!  They’re the ones who caused the destruction and now they’re are going to unite against violence and help rebuild???  Many of these gangs are conduits to drug trafficking for Islamist terrorist entities abroad.

So, there’s a black Muslim radical connection, that most of us have no idea just how radical or how closely aligned with jihadist ideology these groups are, then there’s the insidious influence of the Muslim Brotherhood, which has connections at the very highest levels of our government, for instance Hillary Clinton’s long-time aide, Huma Abedin.  Abedin and her parents are closely connected with the Muslim Brotherhood.

Here’s an excerpt from 2005 Frontline piece, “The Salafist Movement”, by Bruce Livesey, which might help you understand that the Muslim Brotherhood is not some benign group to help Muslims in America avoid persecution from a cartoon-drawing contest or to fight Islamophobia:

“When Gilles Kepel was researching a book about the origins of the global jihad movement back in the 1980s, he recalls rarely coming across Muslim fundamentalists known as “Salafists” living in Europe. “The ones who were prevalent … were totally apolitical and they didn’t deliver theoretically or in terms of doctrine,” he says.

Salafism is an ideology that posits that Islam has strayed from its origins. The word “salaf” is Arabic for “ancient one” and refers to the companions of the Prophet Mohammed. Arguing that the faith has become decadent over the centuries, Salafists call for the restoration of authentic Islam as expressed by an adherence to its original teachings and texts. “Salafists originally are supposedly not violent,” Kepel explains. “They are not advocating the revolt against one who holds power, against the powers that be. They are calling for re-Islamization at the daily level.”

By the mid-’90s, Kepel saw an alarming change among Europe’s Muslims. Increasingly he was coming across Salafists who had embraced jihad — in other words, who felt violence and terrorism were justified to realize their political objectives. Kepel explains that when Salafists, who tend to be alienated from mainstream European society, meet and mingle with jihadists, it fuses into a volatile mixture. “When you’re in the state of such alienation you become easy prey to the jihadi guys who will feed you more savory propaganda than the old propaganda of the Salafists who tell you to pray, fast and who are not taking action,” he says. “And this is why the [Islamist terrorists] who had been arrested were often good Salafists in the beginning.”

Kepel labeled these Muslim fundamentalists “Salafist jihadists”, a term that he extends to include the followers of Al Qaeda. Salafist jihadists are now a burgeoning presence in Europe, having attempted more than 30 terrorist attacks among E.U. countries since 2001.

While European counterterrorism experts recognize that Salafist jihadism is an ideological movement with deep religious and historical roots, they feel that their counterparts at the FBI and American intelligence agencies don’t share this understanding. “I began using the word Salafi and Salafists in 1997 in meetings in Washington and nobody raised the word and asked what does it mean,” says says Xavier Raufer, a Paris-based expert on Islamic terrorism who has close ties to France’s intelligence community.

continuing on:

“The origins of Salafi jihadism can be traced to the Muslim Brotherhood, the seminal organization for Islamic terrorism. Founded in 1928 in Egypt with the goal of establishing an Islamic state, the Brotherhood had as its slogan “The Quran is our constitution.” The Brotherhood’s political agenda combined with its rigid version of Islam proved to be an explosive formula. “The Muslim Brotherhood is the mother of all these movements, ideologically,” says Dr. Mamoun Fandy, an Egyptian-born professor of politics and senior fellow at the James A. Baker III Institute of Public Policy. “Salafist jihadism and the activation of the views of the world of the house of Islam and the house of war are the ideas that emerged from the writings and the teachings of the Muslim Brotherhood.””

Al Qaeda is an off-shoot of THE SALAFIST MOVEMENT!

Then we come to Arab money going to aid poor minority students rumors (haven’t found any proof), but this link was given to me on another blog when I asked about this Muslim/black America connection.  The article has footnotes at the bottom and it includes a syndicated 1979 column by none other than Vernon Jarrett, Valerie Jarrett’s former father-in-law.  Oh, the title of that  1979 Jarrett article, “Will Arabs Back Ties To Blacks With Cash?”  Here’s an intriguing excerpt from the Frank Miele article, “Does 1979 newspaper column shed light on 2008 campaign story?”:

“So far as I know, this 1979 column has not previously been brought to light, but it certainly should be because it broke some very interesting news about the “rumored billions of dollars the oil-rich Arab nations are supposed to unload on American black leaders and minority institutions.” The columnist quoted a black San Francisco lawyer who said, “It’s not just a rumor. Aid will come from some of the Arab states.”

Well, if anyone would know, it would have been this lawyer — Donald Warden, who had helped defend OPEC in an antitrust suit that year and had developed significant ties with the Saudi royal family since becoming a Muslim and taking the name Khalid Abdullah Tariq al-Mansour.

Al-Mansour told Jarrett that he had presented the “proposed special aid program to OPEC Secretary-General Rene Ortiz” in September 1979, and that “the first indications of Arab help to American blacks may be announced in December.” Maybe so, but I looked high and wide in newspapers in 1979 and 1980 for any other stories about this aid package funded by OPEC and never found it verified.

You would think that a program to spend “$20 million per year for 10 years to aid 10,000 minority students each year, including blacks, Arabs, Hispanics, Asians and native Americans” would be referred to somewhere other than one obscure 1979 column, but I haven’t found any other word of it.

Maybe the funding materialized, maybe it didn’t, but what’s particularly noteworthy is that this black Islamic lawyer who “for several years [had] urged the rich Arab kingdoms to cultivate stronger ties to America’s blacks by supporting black businesses and black colleges and giving financial help to disadvantaged students” was also the same lawyer who allegedly helped arrange for the entrance of Barack Obama into Harvard Law School in 1988.”

Yes, I know my inquiring mind is in overdrive today, but I will reblog a post from  Musings from a Middle Aged Man, after this post, but for those of who don’t know, that blog is written by an old (retired) New York cop and he comes up with some interesting pieces of information. So we have illegal immigrants pouring in, possibly Arab money being used to convert poor blacks, we’ve got “lone wolf” terrorists traveling by two in this Garland, TX case, yet the FBI is scouring the internet looking for a direct link to ISIS in Syria/Iraq, but no luck, even though both attended a local mosque in Phoenix, which would seem to be the place to start looking right here at home.

Oh, so who is ISIL,ISIS,IS?  Well if you listen to the media, they’re some evil Islamic genie, who popped out of some lamp straight from hell.  If you listen to the President, they’re the JV team.  Well, here’s who they are SALAFIST TERRORISTS, whose leader was head of Al Qaeda in Iraq.  There is radical Islamist recruiting going on, not only on social media and in mosques, but in poor black communities and in our prisons and it’s in academia being funded by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Now, the Musings from a Middle-Aged Man blog posted a link that explains the assimilation dilemma and how we are being duped by our own government and many Christian charities about the threat from hordes of illegal immigrants and even legal immigration efforts to resettle large Muslim populations from radical Islamist hotbed countries. It’s the Refugee Resettlement Program and perhaps some of you can shed more light on this program.  The video and link on Musings blog states how the program is run and the connections between the UN, our federal government, the Islamic Supremacist groups, and even Christian charities, who receive millions of dollars from the federal government to provide social services to refugees.  So, when a Christian charity organization is receiving millions in federal tax dollars, there might be a willingness to sell the government propaganda about this immigration nightmare or perhaps just a willingness not to mention it. The Bible has so many warnings about money, I don’t know where to begin…   Maybe someone can shed more light on the Islamic Hijra, this video states is being promoted to spread Islam into other countries and promote Sharia law.  Is this true?  I don’t have the answer to that yet.

It’s hard to find honest reporting and facts that aren’t tainted.  I came across this January 2015 article: “Are All Terrorists Muslim?  It’s Not Even Close” at The Daily Beast and this article uses a Think Progress (yes, George Soros again) piece of research to conclude that less than 2% is Muslim terrorists.  Of course, when even a glaring case of a jihadist terrorist attack on our largest US Army post gets dubbed mere workplace violence by our own government and there is a concerted effort to deceive the public from all sorts of leftist groups and and our mainstream media can’t seem to do more than regurgitate White House narratives, shouldn’t we demand the truth?

Those who dare to question or challenge the lies are doubters, wild conspiracy theorists, Islamophobics, haters, and in the case of Pamela Geller, who is trying to tell America there’s an orchestrated totalitarian ideology spreading in America and those spreading it are determined to stamp out our FREEDOM and impose Sharia compliance in America, she is a pyromaniac, according to Juan Williams, and she should just shut-up and not say mean things that might offend SAVAGES (like the ones who share those lovely decapitation videos online) or the vast, SILENT, majority of MODERATE Muslims, whom a cartoon of their prophet might offend. I’m offended that in over a decade, they haven’t spoken up en masse to denounce the SAVAGES, but instead want to deflect blame and find excuses! The jihadist movement and these black radical groups, in collusion, are trying to create anarchy in predominantly black urban areas – the Van Jones plan. There’s still a lot of money trails along this jihadi magic carpet ride that need to be investigated.

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Huma Abedin’s Muslim Minority Affairs: Not Just a Journal

Huma Abedin’s Muslim Minority Affairs: Not Just a Journal.

This is a 2012 article by Andrew McCarthy worth reading as a sort of refresher course on the Muslim Brotherhood.

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Cliff Kincaid: “Liberal Media Work With Jihadists”

Cliff Kincaid wrote an excellent article exposing the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), whose website states they are : “fighting hate, teaching tolerance, seeking justice”, as the distributor of a list, which is little more than the leftist version of Joe McCarthy’s infamous communist list.  Kincaid documents that the media portrays the SPLC as a champion of civil rights, but in reality, they champion only left-wing partisans and show little regard for facts.  He points out that the SPLC circulates a list of so-called “right-wing extremists” or “haters”.  Kincaid states:

“The SPLC exercises what journalist James Simpson calls “partisan tolerance,” which means conservatives and Christians must be demonized and destroyed. On the other hand, anyone on the left is acceptable. That’s why the SPLC hailed the “educational” work of Weather Underground terrorist bomber Bill Ayers.

As the leading spear-carrier in the cultural Marxist war on America, the SPLC is one of the most despicable groups on the political scene these days, and yet it is accepted by the media as somehow authoritative and respectable”

Read more: Family Security Matters http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/liberal-media-work-with-jihadists#ixzz3Zf4HciuT
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

This SPLC list of right-wing extremists and haters was news to me.  Pamela Geller, the target of a foiled terrorist attack, is on the SPLC list.  Her crime is she speaks out against the radical Islamist threat to the West and the insidious way they and their many aiders and abettors in America try to silence critics. Kincaid’s article is a must read!

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From The American Thinker: Embracing dhimmihood

According to Muslim law (sharia) a non Muslim who refuses to convert to Islam but is still tolerated in Muslim society is considered a dhimmi, a lower being.  Accepting their diminished outcast status, dhimmis are not to mock their superiors–th….

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Breaking: FBI KNEW Terrorist Was Heading to Garland, TX – DID NOT Notify Organizers (VIDEO)

Breaking: FBI KNEW Terrorist Was Heading to Garland, TX – DID NOT Notify Organizers (VIDEO).

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Free thinking: the key to defeating radical Islam

Since 2001 it’s safe to say the vast majority of Americans are aware of Muslims, who scream various incantations of “Death to infidels”.  Some subset of this group actually follow the threats with action.  The American response to the 9/11/01 attack in NYC was to embark on a muddled decades plus long effort to cite the number of peaceful, moderate Muslims in the world, twist ourselves into pretzels to avoid offending these peaceful, moderate Muslims, and then engaging in tortured parsing and prevaricating to pretend that this violent subset isn’t really practicing what the highest levels of our government dubbed “a religion of Peace”, but instead were some fringe outlier beliefs.  Well, I am not an Islamic scholar, but “Peace”, tolerance of other faiths, and any desire to get along with people of different faiths and views doesn’t appear to be part of the practice of the Islamic faith and the supposed vast moderate Muslim majority seems a fact to be taken on faith, despite the deafening silence from them for over 14 years.  Where is the moderate Muslim majority – either here or in the Muslim world?

We have big name pundits arguing about how the cartoon-drawing event was “incitement” and wrong and here’s an excerpt of Bill O’Reilly’s take on the matter from Breitbart News:

“He continued that the “Christian point of view” is that “you don’t demean other people unnecessarily. Jesus would not have sponsored that event.” And “the goal of every decent person in the world should be to defeat the jihad. And in order to do that, you have to rally the world to the side of good, our side. Emotional displays like insulting the prophet Mohammed make it more difficult to rally law-abiding Muslims, for example. Including nations like Jordan and Egypt, who are actually the fanatical Islamists. In any war, you have to win hearts and minds, and the situation in Garland, TX goes against that. Again, the freedom of speech issue is bogus. No one is saying the exposition was illegal. The point is winning, defeating the jihad.””

The recent terrorist incident in Garland, TX whereby two adherents of  the religion of Peace planned and tried to execute an attack on a private cartoon-drawing event, if nothing else has incited a firestorm over free speech, civility and even defeating jihad.

Let me attempt to disassemble Mr. O’Reilly’s argument and then point out where I disagree.  He states: “He continued that the “Christian point of view” is that “you don’t demean other people unnecessarily. Jesus would not have sponsored that event.”   America is a secular nation and luckily for all of us, one where that “Christian point of view” helped create our secular Republic, so that tolerance and respect for all people serve as keystone values.  Mr. O’Reilly wants us to rally the world to the side of good.  Yay, we’re all in for trying to “win the hearts and minds”.

Pam Geller is speaking the truth about the religion of Peace.  She’s speaking the truth about the radical Islamists, whose views are more mainstream in the Muslim world than we care to acknowledge.   You may not like her approach to making you confront the reality, but the fact is she held a private event in America where they drew cartoons.  Two adherents to the more radical branch of the religion of Peace planned to attack the event, ostensibly out of anger over the cartoons,  and drove from AZ to TX  to do so.  We are supposed to accept that if Pam Geller hadn’t incited them or had instead tried to win their hearts and minds, they would have had no reason to plan this attack….  Now, a contrarian like me  might argue they were looking for targets to make a point that their views will be obeyed or there will be hell to pay.  Then again I see radical Islam not as a religion, but as a totalitarian political movement hiding behind the shield of a religion.  Americans value freedom of religion, so we bend over backwards to allow free establishment and practice of religion, this Islamist movement exploits that American value.

Now,we’ve got Islamists screaming for her head, we’ve got Americans condemning her as the problem for inciting a response (Juan Williams is quite vocal on this point) and many others offering some variation of O’Reilly’s point, “Emotional displays like insulting the prophet Mohammed make it more difficult to rally law-abiding Muslims, for example. Including nations like Jordan and Egypt, who are actually fighting the fanatical Islamists.”   Let me take a stab at deflating this “higher-purpose” Hindenburg, descending in flames as Americans watch the ME burn, Al Qaeda stabbed in the heart by Obama, now rising from the ashes and morphing into the JV ISIS team and the “law-abiding Muslims” (moderates, we’re assured), remain silent.

Here’s how I see it from what I, as JK used the word,  glean from the last 14 plus years:  from oh, extensive reading, observing news reporting and following the news daily.  O’Reilly’s “law-abiding Muslims'” argument is ludicrous.  Here in the West, where Muslims are living in a free society, they already know free speech is reverently upheld and the most vile radical Islamists living in the West use that freedom to spread their abhorrent ideology, but on the other hand, they also scream, trying to rally others to silence Pam Geller and those who oppose their ideology.  Many Muslim groups and sympathizers in America and the West aid and abet the imposition of Sharia compliant behavior under the guise of  “we shouldn’t offend Muslims” and somehow by bowing down in fear of inciting them or creating more of them, we will  “defeat them”.  All we are doing is trying to censor free speech out of fear.  This is the the lunch room bully extorting your lunch money every day, so you just cower and pay up, but beg Mom and Dad for extra money or go hungry.  Bowing down makes you a spineless victim and it emboldens the bully.

The idea that private American citizens need to conform their beliefs, speech or setting up a private event to aid our dismal foreign policy  “to rally law-abiding Muslims, for example. Including nations like Jordan and Egypt, who are actually fighting the fanatical Islamists.” ” is one of the stupidest things I have heard lately.  There has been no mass rallying among moderate Muslims (at least I haven’t seen any reported, although there have been a few brave Muslims who have spoken out against radical Islamists).  I have seen many reports over the years of Muslims cheering attacks against Americans though. Egypt is run by a military cabal, who threw out the radical Islamist regime and umm,, I believe they outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood and aren’t putting up with radical Islamists.  In Jordan, they’ve got a king – he’s got a British mother, is western educated and he will work with the West against radical Islamists regardless whether Pam Geller hosts a Mohammed cartoon-drawing contest every week.  To pretend private citizens behavior will impact whether leaders of other countries will work with the American government is ridiculous.

What O’Reilly and our leaders are pandering to is the power of propaganda in the Muslim world, because here’s a newsflash Bill O’Reilly, the news most Muslims in the Muslim world receive isn’t “fair and balanced” – it’s CENSORED.  Those who CENSOR that news look for small things like Pam Geller’s cartoon-drawing contest to sensationalize and INCITE anti-American sentiments.  You will never win “hearts and minds” of people who can not hear opposing views and be FREE to think for themselves.  The issue to argue about is not Geller “inciting”, the issue to argue about and the goal of our policy should be to enlighten Muslims on the power of FREEDOM and that starts by showcasing our values.  Sure, I’m all for civility and I would not attend a Mohammed cartoon-drawing contest, but then again I would not pay money to watch a play mocking Mormons, or sit through a stand-up comic bashing Jews.  And, I sure as hell wouldn’t ever consider trying to ban their free speech or drive hundreds of miles to murder them.  Until we can find ways to promote free thinking in the Muslim world, any hope of “winning their hearts and minds” is doomed!

I’ve believed for a long time that the way to open the doors to freedom in the Muslim world is through finding ways to reach women and help them learn to be free-thinkers and agents of change in the Muslim world.  Even here in America the most powerful cultural movements were championed and propelled by large numbers of women. If we can reach the women in the Muslim world and help them understand FREEDOM, more than half the battle is won.  Living as little more than chattel at best, slaves at worst, women in the Muslim world might be the key to actually “winning their hearts and minds”.  Yes, conservative ol’ me champions women too, but more than that, I champion the cause of FREEDOM!

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Hibernian Anti-Semitism

Ireland is no stranger to religious or racial hatred. Part of the trouble is geography. Nurtured by religion and isolation, island monocultures often breed narrow minds and asocial practice. Clerical pedophilia and chronic alcoholism might be two Iri….

Here’s a fascinating GMD piece, replete with many historical angles to consider in understanding anti-Semitism in Ireland, in today’s The American Thinker.

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ISIS Camp a Few Miles from Texas, Mexican Authorities Confirm

ISIS Camp a Few Miles from Texas, Mexican Authorities Confirm.

Note: This story is from Judicial Watch and I have no way to check the veracity, but it’s one of those open source reports that surfaces and then the situation in TX last night happens, which makes you think this deserves some deeper investigation. I heard some terrorist expert on CNN today  mention the two gunmen killed as “wanna-be terrorists”, trying to downplay the possible ISIS connection. Now, one could argue that embarking on actually committing a terrorist act makes one, yep, an actual terrorist.

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LB Revisits a Christmas past….

Amazing admissions by Mike Morrell in the Washington Post: “Former CIA official cites agency’s failure to see al-Qaeda’s rebound”

So ridiculous to blame the Arab Spring and rapidly changing events – I’m too disgusted with these way too late admissions to comment a great deal. Any analyst with a brain should have seen the Arab Spring, as a huge destabilization of several governments in rapid succession, with collapsing governments,  through time immemorial creates “POWER VACUUMS” and those who are organized and willing to use force rise to fill them. The American democracy experiment, where thoughtful men met in the aftermath of a revolution to discuss and reach a peaceful consensus on the new government and worried about the rights of individuals, is the exception in history, not the rule. There were some of us who predicted this was the biggest boon to Islamists, who were prepared to seize this opportunity. There was no viable democracy movement in these countries to produce the miracle the Obama administration, the media and starry-eyed analysts waxed on about.

Time for a LB repost from a Christmas past:

December 25, 2012 · 8:12 pm | Edit
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Thoughts on the Arab Spring

Yes, I know it’s Christmas and I’ve already got my Christmas dinner started, so between dashes back to the kitchen to keep dinner moving along I’m going to jot down a few thoughts on why just about everyone in punditry, left, right and in between, gets it wrong on the Arab Spring. The first mistake many people make is what I’ll call cultural relativism, a natural off-shoot of our moral relativism, where we try to replace moral absolutes (i.e. right or wrong) with some ever-shifting sliding scale of excuse-making and finger-pointing of causes.. Once we muddy the water on defining behavior as right or wrong, we quickly get sucked down by underwater currents , akin to swimming in water-filled old quarry holes that abounded where I grew up in rural PA. As years of this muddled thinking spread by that contagion, I’ll refer to as the loons of academia, well, now many people hesitate to take a moral stance on just about any behavior, or they try to rationalize away individual responsibility for bad behavior. That same type of brainwashing on evaluating cultures spread like kudzu took root here in the American South, leading to our present strategic failures. If we start with all cultures are of equal merit and no culture has a superior value system, to better the life of its citizenry, then we end up quickly drowning in this swimming hole of cultural relativism. If we survive, we end up flailing about looking for some sound underpinnings to our understanding of what is going on in the world, what the likely outcomes of unfolding events will be and what these events mean to American interests.

The petals of optimism about the Arab Spring faded quickly, spreading seeds of discontent, disillusion and disconnected reasoning blowing across the strategic plain. Americans like everything fast, not just their cars and food, no, we like fast solutions, even when dealing with conflicts and cultures, dating back two millennia. I’ve read so much about the Arab Spring written by supposed experts on the Middle East, yet sadly most of these pages would serve a more useful purpose lining the bottom of a birdcage to catch the droppings. I’m quickly going to run through a few common fallacies that weave an uneven magic carpet of Arab pipe-dreams. My Christmas ham is happily baking so lets start with Islam (okay, I apologize that wasn’t culturally sensitive). Islam does not mean peace, it means submission to the will of God and obedience to his law. So, in Islam, God’s law is defined by the prophet, Mohammad and every aspect of Islamic culture is defined by this. The concept of separation of church and state falls as an anathema to Islamic teachings. Holding “democratic” elections does not a free, democratic, pluralistic society make. Cultures still steeped in tribal forms can’t jump the arc of historical enlightenment and instantaneously fall at the end, finding Jeffersonian democratic pots of gold. . And a last point is Islam lends itself more easily to autocratic forms of government, because the overwhelming consensus in these countries is that they want sharia law, which sets the stage for a theocracy (hint, that can never be a free, pluralistic society). Even the Puritans who fled persecution in England initially set-up a theocratic form of government and while lots of historians tend to miss this fact, cherry-picking only American themes they like (like how they tried communal living and it failed – strike one against communism in America) , the truth is they weren’t a pluralistic, welcoming group initially. There’s an excellent five-volume set of “The Life of George Washington” written by John Marshall and Volume 1 deals with a very detailed history of America’s founding from the very beginning (long before Washington’s birth). Marshall explains how other Protestants were run out of some Puritan towns, because they didn’t allow free exercise of religion, except for their own. This changed over time, but Catholics faced persecution in other colonies, as did various Protestant sects. So, our religious tolerance wasn’t at the high-water mark at America’s founding. The Marshall series is available for free at amazon.com (here) or volume 1 is at gutenberg.org (here).

So, then we reach the conundrum of why do some countries make successful democratic breakthroughs and others don’t and why are there so few successful democratic breakthroughs. There’s no exact recipe for democratic success, but having the basic mix of vital ingredients (free enterprise, democratic institutions within the society, property rights to list a few) helps increase the odds for success. The Mid-East, except for Israel, has none of the ingredients on hand. Trying to wing it with rhetorical substitutions and pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking won’t produce the desired results. I kept noticing this entrenched belief system when that clamor arose about the Palestinians and all the Jimmy Carteresque blather about holding elections, which led not to joyous democracy, instead it led to the posthaste election of Hamas. Even western-style image makeovers can’t turn a sow’s ear (like Arafat) into a silk purse and we end up with the same old dictators and tyrants. Here’s the best analysis of why the road to free, pluralistic, democratic governance has more potholes and road construction signs than highways in PA. It’s a book (sorry the kindle version isn’t free and the formatting is lacking) titled, “America’s Inadvertent Empire” by the late GEN William Odom and Robert Dujarric. GEN Odom’s wisdom will be sadly missed and I greatly admired him, in fact, I long for generals of his stature (alas, we’ve sunk to the GEN Casey/Petraeus/ Clapper politico types) . As a starting point in getting back on rational strategic terrain, this book maps out an excellent route toward understanding the landmarks to look for along the difficult road toward democracy. These are a few of my thoughts on what’s wrong with our American foreign policy in the Arab world. I’m not an expert on much of anything except needlework and homemaking, so I welcome opinions and comments. Time for Christmas dinner. Merry Christmas everyone!

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