Launched a month ago in Lower Manhattan, the “Occupy Wall Street” (OWS) movement has since spread to more than 140 cities nationwide while winning the hearts of leftists everywhere, most significantly in the Democratic Party‘s mainstream. By now, many Americans have seen some of the photos and film footage of OWS demonstrators spewing anti-Semitic diatribes; shutting down traffic in busy urban areas; engaging in public nudity, copulation, defecation, and illegal drug use; and defacing their environs with colossal mounds of trash that are utterly incongruous with the protesters’ professed concern for responsible environmental stewardship. But beyond their penchant for the bizarre and the odious, what exactly animates the OWSers in New York, Los Angeles, and everywhere in between?

While they have been widely described as a motley crew without a unifying agenda, the OWSers are in fact bound together by a strongly anti-capitalist worldview that characterizes America as a “ruthless,” materialistic society where the chief objective is to “always minimize costs and maximize profits”; where “lives are commodities to be bought and sold on the open market”; and where “the economic transaction has become the dominant way of relating to the culture and artifacts of human civilization.” The “deep spiritual sickness” that necessarily results from this repugnant philosophy of perpetual economic “growth for the sake of growth,” says OWS, has caused “vast deprivation, oppression and despoliation … to cover the world.” OWS’s prescribed remedy is to replace the foregoing arrangement “with a society of cooperation and community” – i.e., a socialist economy. Thus it is not at all surprising that the Communist Party USA, the International Socialist Organization, the Peace and Freedom Party, and the Democratic Socialists of America have all embraced OWS and its objectives.

OWSers, casting themselves as the victimized “99%” of the population who “will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the [wealthiest] 1%,” advocate the imposition of a “Robin Hood Tax” on most goods and services, with the aim of using its generated revenues (taken mostly from “the rich”) to fund social-welfare programs for “the poor.” Among those joining the “one-percenters” in denouncing America’s purportedly contemptible “millionaires and billionaires” are filmmaker Michael Moore, actress Susan Sarandon, actor Alec Baldwin, film star Jane Fonda, activist Yoko Ono, hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons, Marxist professor Cornel West, New York councilman Charles Barron, socialist radical Frances Fox Piven, TV personality Keith Olbermann, congressman John Lewis, congressman Charles Rangel, financier George Soros, labor leader Richard Trumka, former U.S. senator Russ Feingold, entertainer Roseanne Barr, left-wing preacher Jim Wallis, congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee director Robby Mook, and revolutionary communist Van Jones. Notably, most of these self-proclaimed champions-of-the-oppressed are themselves millionaires and billionaires. And yet another very wealthy man – President Obama – has likewise praised the OWS protesters for “giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works.”

It is impossible to understand the world around us, or to cultivate a coherent set of core principles, if our use of language is fraught with sloppiness and imprecision. Nowhere is this truer than in the realm of politics, where emotionally charged terms are routinely bandied about with scarcely any conception of what they actually mean. “Liberal” and “conservative” are perhaps the most significant of these.

Many people who describe themselves as “liberal” typically use the term as a synonym for all things noble and morally pure. The late newsman Walter Cronkite, for instance, equated liberalism with a “broad-minded,” “unprejudiced,” and “beneficent” mindset. Author and radio personality Garrison Keillor – who views “conservatives” as people of “ugly and rancid” political beliefs  – proudly declares: “I am a liberal, and liberalism is the politics of kindness … 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.”And the revered “Liberal Lion” of the U.S. Senate, the late Ted Kennedy, defined a liberal as “someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions” and “someone who cares about the welfare of the people.”

But if one merely equates liberalism with what is “good,” and conservatism with what is “bad” – or vice versa, for that matter – he or she cannot lay claim to any authentic understanding of either term. Thus we need an operational definition for each term, just as we need definitions for any other words we employ in our daily lives. Regardless of how we feel about “liberalism” or “conservatism,” we need to know specifically what qualities give each of them their respective identities.

When the term “liberalism” (from the Latin word liberalis, meaning “pertaining to a free man”) first emerged in the early 1800s, it was founded on an unwavering belief in individual rights, the rule of law, limited government, private property, and laissez faireeconomics. These would remain the defining characteristics of liberalism throughout the liberal epoch, generally identified as the period from 1815-1914.

But many who call themselves “liberals” today are in fact leftists – i.e., the very antithesis of liberals. The modern Left – which traces its roots back to a faction of early-19th-century French liberals who proclaimed that capitalism and private property were agents of inevitable moral decay – is animated by a desire to topple the existing capitalist order and to replace it with a socialist regime where the utopian ideal of perfect equality will reign. Disingenuously portraying itself as an agent of enlightened commitment to “liberal” causes, today’s Left in fact rejects each of the liberal ideals enumerated in the preceding paragraph. We can readily observe for instance, that the modern Left is the stalwart champion of:

• group rights and collective identity, rather than of individual rights and responsibilities (e.g., racial preferences, notions of collective guilt and innocence, and a devotion to identity politics generally);
• the circumvention of law rather than the rule of law (as exemplified by the flouting of immigration laws and nondiscrimination laws, and by a preference for judicial activism whereby judges co-opt the powers that rightfully belong to legislators);
• the expansion of government rather than its diminution (favoring ever-escalating taxes to fund a bloated welfare state and a government that oversees — and intervenes in — virtually every aspect of human life); and
• the redistribution of wealth (through punitive taxes and, again, a mushrooming welfare state), rather than its creation through free markets based on private property.

By calling themselves “liberals,” leftists have entirely redefined the terms of debate. The media and the general 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.” Indeed the terms are generally used interchangeably by people at every point along the political spectrum. Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, for one, calls Barack Obama “the most liberal president ever.” Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly similarly calls Obama ”the most liberal president I’ve seen in my lifetime,” and then, in the next breath, says Obama “may well be the most left-wing chief executive in American history.” As a consequence of such imprecision, we witness the travesty of the “liberal” label being widely attached to leftists like Obama, Michael Moore, George Soros, Noam Chomsky, Al Sharpton, Jane Fonda, Ted Kennedy, and Hillary Clinton. In the process, the noble values and ideals that are genuinely “liberal” in the true sense of the word — and that are in fact wholly consistent with what is nowadays called “conservatism” — are wrongly conflated in the public mind with the socialist, revolutionary, and anti-American agendas of the foregoing leftists. As a result, the definition of “liberalism” continues to drift inexorably leftward.

The David Horowitz Freedom Center has created a website, DiscoverTheNetworks.org, to help explain exactly what, and who, the Left is – and how it utterly rejects every major principle that can legitimately be classified as “liberal.” This NewsReal blog post will be followed in the coming days and weeks by a long series of posts taking you on a guided tour of DiscoverTheNetworks and its multitudes of special sections and features. We invite you to come along for the ride. If you do, you will understand the Left, its agendas, its tactics, and its key players in a profound and illuminating way. And you will see clearly how the Left has fraudulently draped itself in the vestments of a once-noble tradition — liberalism — thereby giving the false appearance that its own socialist objectives are somehow consistent with that tradition. They are not.

For today, why not visit DiscoverTheNetworks’ section titled “Defining and Understanding the Left”? It’s a great starting point if you’re not yet familiar with this vast and informative website.

Seventy-year-old Democrat James Clyburn has been the U.S. Representative for South Carolina’s 6th congressional district since 1993. He also has served as House Majority Whip since 2007, making him the third-ranking Democrat in the House behind Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer. When the new Congress convenes in January 2011, Clyburn will retain a #3 leadership position – “Assistant Minority Leader” – among the now-minority Democrats. As one of the most influential political figures in the country, he merits the closest scrutiny of the American people – particularly in light of the fact that his politics are those of Democratic Party orthodoxy writ large.

A member of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), Clyburn, in the longstanding tradition of the CBC and the political Left, has cultivated an uncanny ability to spot white racists lurking menacingly around virtually every corner. For instance, when former President Bill Clinton likened Barack Obama‘s 2008 Democratic primary victory in South Carolina to then-candidate Jesse Jackson‘s primary victory there twenty years earlier, Clyburn concluded that Clinton’s remarks were embedded with a racist intent to diminish Obama’s achievement. “When he [Clinton] was going through his impeachment problems, it was the black community that bellied up to the bar,” said Clyburn. “I think black folks feel strongly that that this is a strange way for President Clinton to show his appreciation.”

When South Carolina’s Republican governor Mark Sanford formally rejected federal earmarks for his state early last year, Clyburn alleged that Sanford was a racially insensitive elitist: “He [Sanford] happens to be a millionaire. He may not need help for the plantation his family owns, but the people whose grandparents and great-grandparents worked those plantations need the help.”

In February 2009, Clyburn offered this assessment of why Sanford and three other southern white governors were opposing President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package: “The governor of Louisiana expressed opposition. [Louisiana] has the highest African-American population in the country. Governor of Mississippi expressed opposition. The governor of Texas, and the governor of South Carolina. These four governors represent states that are in the black belt. I was insulted by that. All of this was a slap in the face of African-Americans.”

In March 2009, when Governor Sanford compared Obama’s massive stimulus spending to the disastrous fiscal policies of Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe, Clyburn characterized the governor’s remarks as “beyond the pale.” When reporters subsequently asked Clyburn if his use of that phrase was intended to imply that Sanford’s comments had racial overtones, the congressman replied: “I’m sure he would not say that, but how did he get to Zimbabwe? What took the man to Zimbabwe? Someone should ask him if that’s really the best comparison.… How can he compare this country’s situation to Zimbabwe?”

After Rep. Joe Wilson infamously shouted “You lie!” during President Obama’s September 9, 2009 address outlining his healthcare-reform proposal to a joint session of Congress, Clyburn again sniffed the pungent stench of racism. Claiming that he had always tried to “look past” Wilson’s “membership in some groups that call into question his feelings about his whole notion of white supremacy,” Clyburn said: “Joe Wilson has worked very hard to cultivate a sort of choir-boy image, but I think that most people realize that there’s something else going on with him.”

In Clyburn’s calculus, even a refusal to dutifully swallow the fantasy of manmade global warming qualifies as evidence of racism because, as the congressman explains, “African-Americans are disproportionately impacted by the effects of climate change economically, socially and through our health and well-being.”

Clyburn’s unwavering leftism manifests itself not only in such reflexive charges of racism, but also in the congressman’s voting record on a wide range of vital issues. A devoted fan of the bloated welfare state, Clyburn, early in his legislative career, voted against a 1995 bill designed to move people off the welfare rolls and into paying jobs. In addition to limiting welfare aid to five years per family, this bill barred states from giving cash assistance to children of unmarried teenagers; to families that had given birth to additional children while on public assistance; to any person who had fraudulently sought to obtain benefits in more than one state; and to fugitive felons, parole and probation violators, alcoholics, and drug addicts. But alas, Rep. Clyburn thought all these stipulations were bad ideas. The following year, he voted against the landmark Welfare Reform Act of 1996, which caused welfare rolls nationwide to shrink by more than 50 percent, as millions of formerly dependent people were moved successfully into jobs where they were able to earn their own way instead of being the wards of American taxpayers.

Clyburn also thought it was a bad idea in 2003 to place even minimal new conditions on welfare eligibility. Thus he voted against a proposal to raise the work requirements, from 30 hours per week to 40, for individuals receiving public assistance. By contrast, boondoggles requiring absolutely nothing of their beneficiaries are just dandy in Clyburn’s eyes. In 2006 he voted Yes on a $70 million amendment to fund 10,000 Section-8 housing vouchers. Two years after that, he voted in favor of yet another spending bill to revitalize public housing – despite the fact that the U.S. already had more than 80 federal housing programs operating on an annual budget exceeding $30 billion.

Just as Clyburn is willing to funnel billions of other people’s dollars toward redistributive welfare and public-housing initiatives, so is he ever-eager to pour rivers of cash into a public-education system that has scarcely proven to be worth its weight in dirt. In 2007 he voted in favor of a bill – stuffed with more than 2,200 earmarks totaling nearly $1 billion, and funding nearly five-dozen programs that were duplicative or had proven ineffective – allocating an additional $10.2 billion to federal education and HHS projects. Two years later, he voted Yes on a proposal to spend $40 billion for the modernization, renovation, and repair of “green public schools.” Every year since 2005, Clyburn has received a perfect rating from the National Education Association, the largest American labor union, the leading engine of leftist indoctrination in the public schools, and a major funder of Democratic candidates and causes.

By Clyburn’s reckoning, only the enlightened Washington elite are qualified to determine how American children ought to be educated. Thus in 1997 the congressman voted against permitting certain federal education funds to finance vouchers that would enable low-income families to send their children to private schools rather than to dismal, failing public schools. The following year, Clyburn again voted against federally funded vouchers for impoverished children in Washington, DC, a city whose schools are the very embodiment of fiscal waste and academic incompetence.

The extreme left-wing bias of American academia is well documented. Thus, it is not at all surprising that our nation’s university presses – nonprofit publishing houses that are ideological extensions of their parent institutions – invariably serve as platforms for the dissemination of far-left dogma. Each year, they produce hundreds of tracts extolling the virtues of pacifism, radical environmentalism, open borders, and socialism, while delivering an endless stream of literary assaults on capitalism, American culture, and Western civilization generally. Because these books carry the implied intellectual legitimacy of the colleges and universities with which their publishers are associated, their influence on policymakers, opinion leaders, and even the general public can be considerable – even though the sales of such books are, by industry standards, typically meager.

Whereas commercial publishers focus on producing books that will have broad popular appeal and generate profits, university presses deal mainly, though not exclusively, in scholarly works (monographs) that are geared toward a small audience of specialists in certain concentrated fields of research. A large percentage of these books are sold in hardcover editions to libraries. The American Association of University Presses (AAUP), under whose umbrella these academic publishing houses are counted, currently includes 125 members, of which 95 are affiliated with public and private research universities in 40 separate U.S. States and Canada. The remaining 30 are situated variously in Belgium, China, Egypt, Ireland, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, and the Netherlands.

In 2005, the most recent year for which a complete set of statistics is available, AAUP members collectively published 10,159 new book titles, an average of 81 titles per publisher. That same year, AAUP members reported $267 million in total book sales, an average of $2.1 million per publisher and $26,370 per title. At an average per-copy sale price of $41, the typical university-press title sells approximately 643 copies. All told, book and journal sales account for about 85 percent of AAUP member revenues. Another 10 percent comes from the publishers’ respective parent institutions (which, in the case of public universities, means taxpayers), and the remaining 5 percent derives from government and foundation grants.

A survey of the books that university presses across the U.S. are currently featuring in their catalogs and on their websites, reveals a host of titles promoting doctrinaire leftism in a variety of disciplines:

Environmentalism

A particularly hot topic for university presses nowadays is global warming. In Worst Case Scenarios, published by Harvard University Press, author Cass Sunstein – President Obama‘s regulatory “czar” –  discusses how Americans ought to prepare for the looming disaster called “climate change.” Another newly released Harvard production is an update of Spencer Weart’s The Discovery of Global Warming, “revised throughout to reflect the latest science and with a new conclusion that shows how the scientific consensus caught fire among the general world public.” That description, in light of the devastating “Climategate” revelations about the global-warming crowd’s deliberate falsification and concealment of inconvenient evidence, is nothing short of delusional.

Approaching environmentalism from a different angle is Images of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a University of Alaska Press book that presents an “emotionally evocative and beautifully fierce” collection of “lyrical essays and stunning panoramic photographs” paying “homage to a vast and remote land that remains untamed by technology and undisturbed by human development.” The book’s purpose is to argue against U.S. oil drilling in Alaska’s ANWR region by tugging on readers’ heartstrings rather than by engaging their brains.

Baylor University Press, meanwhile, has blended environmentalism with religion in The Bible and Ecology:
Rediscovering the Community of Creation. Here, author Richard Bauckham takes issue with the biblical “mandate of human dominion given in Genesis 1,” which, he writes, “has too often been used as a justification for domination and exploitation of the earth’s resources.” Taking up a similar theme is Baylor Press’s Greening Paul:
Rereading the Apostle in a Time of Ecological Crisis. This book aims “to read the Pauline literature from an ecological perspective,” challenging the Bible’s “anthropocentric worldview that gives humanity license to exploit the earth for our benefit.”

Islam

While university presses may be distressed by the dangers of climate change, they are apparently unconcerned about any threat from radical Islam. Indeed, the University of Chicago Press has published The Fear of Barbarians: Beyond the Clash of Civilizations, wherein author Tzvetan Todorov “argues that the West must overcome its fear of Islam if it is to avoid betraying the values it claims to protect.”

Meanwhile, the Canada-based University of Alberta Press has published The Contemporary Arab Reader on Political Islam, billing it as “the perfect starting point for students and academics looking to understand ‘Political Islam’ in contemporary Arab and Muslim societies.” The book’s editor, Ibrahim Abu-Rabi’, is an anti-Semitic demagogue who says that “the Nazi Holocaust has been “exploited fully” by “the Israeli Zionist state since 1948”; that Jews seek to frighten the Palestinians with the implied threat of a “mini holocaust” which may be carried out against the latter; that “militarism” has “defined the nature of the Israli state from 1948 until the present time”; and that “Israel has exploited Judaism in a very negative and violent way” in order to advance its own “project of hegemony and project of dispossession of the Palestinian people.” Abu-Rabi’s book features the work of such luminaries as: (a) Abdullah Azzam, the late Muslim scholar who was an influential figure in the Muslim Brotherhood, a leader of Hamas, and a mentor to both Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri; (b) Sayyid Muhammad Hussain Fadlallah, a Shiite spiritual leader of Hezbollah; and (c) Ahmad Bin Yousuf, a political advisor to Akram Haniyya, who served as an advisor to the late terrorist Yasser Arafat.

Immigration

Regarding issues on the home front, immigration occupies the thoughts of many in the scholarly community. The University of Arizona Press, for example, has recently published several books on the topic. One of these, Dead in Their Tracks, focuses on what it terms “America’s killing field” – that portion of the Arizona desert where many Mexicans, in the process of trying to sneak across the U.S. border in pursuit of “a better life,” have died of heat and sun exposure, making the region “the deadliest immigrant trail in America today.” Crossing with the Virgin elaborates on this theme, urging readers to “see past political positions to view migrants as human beings,” and lamenting that “over the past ten years, more than 4,000 people have died while crossing the Arizona desert to find jobs, join families, or start new lives.” Similarly, Between The Lines – a “collection of letters between undocumented immigrants in California and their families back home” – seeks to put “a human face” on illegal immigration, a topic which too often “has been presented as a monolithic abstraction” rooted in “political rhetoric and fear.”

Capitalism

In contrast to the presumably benign trend of illegal immigration, capitalism, according to the scholar-authors of America’s university presses, poses a grave threat not only to our nation but to the planet at large. From Predators to Icons, a new release by Cornell University Press, contends that ruthless “predation” traditionally has been the key to economic success in United Stated States. Another Cornell title – an updated edition of Jennifer Clapp’s Toxic Exports – asserts that as a result of “investment relations in the context of a highly unequal world,” business firms in “rich industrialized countries” routinely ship “toxic waste and hazardous technologies” to “poor countries” that are “ill equipped to manage the materials safely.” In a glowing review of the book, UC Santa Cruz professor  Ronnie Lipschutz lauds Clapp for having exposed the ugly truth about the “hazardous wastes generated by contemporary industrialism and capitalism.”

The old maxim about a picture being “worth a thousand words” would serve as a fitting epilogue for the work of Paul Conrad, who spent 43 years as an editorial cartoonist famous for his withering attacks on political figures – especially conservatives. Indeed Conrad, who died September 4^th at the age of 86, actually believed that the best cartoons were those that let the pictures do all the talking and contained no words at all – only images to depict what Conrad called the “political, social and moral injustices” of our time.

Conrad came of age as a cartoonist after the Second World War. His first professional job was with the Denver Post, where he spent 14 years until the Los Angeles Times eventually hired him in 1964. The Times, where Conrad would stay until his retirement 29 years later, gave the cartoonist an extraordinarily high-profile platform from which to disseminate his leftist view of the world. Vowing that he would never stoop so low as to vote for any Republican political candidate, Conrad was outspoken and forthright about his leftism. “Don’t ever accuse me of being objective,” he often said.

When it came to commenting on American culture, Conrad, as leftists are wont to do, focused almost exclusively on the negative. During his first several years at the Times, he directed much of his attention on the civil rights movement’s effort to disinfect what he viewed as a society that was morally contaminated to its core. In a cartoon that appeared shortly after the 1965 Watts riots in California, for instance, Conrad drew a group of white men gathered around a black man who was seated on a therapist’s couch, saying to him: “You’ve mentioned unemployment, housing, education, police brutality and despair … but, what was the reason for the riot?”

While his cartoons commonly touched upon broad themes such as civil rights, Conrad gained his greatest renown for the way he skewered particular key individuals. Indeed, his indignant passions reached their apogee when he made Richard Nixon the object of his wrath. So searing were Conrad’s depictions of the 37^th president, that they earned the cartoonist a spot on Nixon’s infamous “enemies list” in 1973 – a distinction Conrad welcomed as a sure sign of his own effectiveness. In one particularly famous cartoon, Conrad portrayed an agitated Nixon sitting, with pen in hand, at a large desk covered by long, serpentine scrolls of names – titled “Enemies List.” The caption of the cartoon read, “His Own Worst Enemy.” As James Rainey of the L.A. Times recently observed, Conrad’s renderings of Nixon invariably showed the president with “brow furrowed, eyes ringed with dark shadows, head slumped into rounded shoulders – helping to cement the image of a desperate, paranoid chief executive.”

After Nixon’s precipitous fall from grace in the Watergate affair, Conrad’s attacks on him became still more relentless. The day after the illegal break-in at the DNC headquarters in Washington, the cartoonist drew Nixon disguised as a telephone-company worker boring a hole in the DNC’s office wall. In another famous cartoon of the period, Conrad, emphasizing that Nixon’s troubles were mostly self-inflicted, depicted the president nailing himself to a cross. As a variation on that theme, Conrad drew a hangman’s noose fashioned from long strips of unraveled audiotape from Nixon’s secret Oval Office recordings. On yet another occasion, Conrad drew Nixon as a modern-day Gulliver, bound and rendered helpless by multiple reels of those same tapes. Many times, Conrad emphasized Nixon’s allegedly imperial mindset as one who believed himself to be above the law, and thus likened the beleaguered president to such historical figures as Napoleon Bonaparte, Richard III, and Julius Caesar. So deep was Conrad’s contempt for Nixon, that there seemed to be no bounds to what he would imply about the president. Indeed, at least a year and a half before the Watergate scandal would erupt, Conrad drew the satanic murderer Charles Manson wearing a wicked grin on his face and a “Nixon’s the One” campaign button on his shirt. (Notably, L.A. Times editor Tony Day determined that this particular cartoon was, even by Conrad’s standards, beyond the pale, and thus prevented it from being published.)

Striking a powerful blow in defense of Martin Luther King’s memory, Reverend Al Sharpton accused Glenn Beck – who held his “Restoring Honor” event in DC last Saturday, on the 47th anniversary of King’s immortal “I Have a Dream” speech – of engaging in “a blatant attempt to hijack” the civil rights movement “that changed America.” As one of the leading stewards of that movement over the past quarter-century, Sharpton is of course eminently qualified to determine who should – and who should not – be permitted to enter the fraternity of those who nobly defend the cause of civil rights.

Indeed, who could forget the unrivaled dignity with which Sharpton himself first took up the mantle of Dr. King’s legacy and became a renowned civil-rights gladiator in his own right? The year was 1987. Sharpton, demonstrating his unwavering commitment to stamping out racism, promoted — for the ultimate good of society, no doubt — the fiction that a black teenager named Tawana Brawley had been repeatedly raped and sodomized by six white kidnappers in upstate New York. A Sharpton aide named Perry McKinnon later revealed that Sharpton had privately acknowledged “early on” that he knew the Brawley allegations were obviously “bull—t,” but that he had chosen to pursue the matter anyway because he was “building a movement” around this “perfect issue” of “whites on blacks” – a key component of which would be to convince “all the deprived people … that all white people are bad.” Moreover, said McKinnon, Sharpton had predicted that the publicity surrounding the case would make him and his fellow defenders of Brawley “the biggest ni–ers in New York.” Was it at that point, pray tell, that the torch of civil rights leadership which Dr. King had once held, was officially passed into Reverend Sharpton’s capable hands?

If not, then perhaps it was in 1991 — when Sharpton really showed his mettle as a civil rights champion in the aftermath of a Brooklyn, New York car accident in which a Hasidic Jew accidentally killed a seven-year-old black child. At the boy’s funeral, Sharpton declared that this death was due not merely to a car accident, but rather to “the social accident of apartheid.” Thereafter he organized a series of massive demonstrations to protest the racial undertones of the killing. He even challenged local Jews—“diamond merchants,” he affectionately called them—to “pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house” to settle the score if they disagreed with his portrayal of the incident. Stirred in part by Sharpton’s soaring, inspirational oratory, hundreds of Crown Heights freedom-fighters took to the streets, pelting Jewish homes with rocks, setting vehicles on fire, and shouting “Jew! Jew!” As the riots continued for three days and nights, Sharpton, with his characteristic level-headedness, put everything in perspective: “We must not reprimand our children for outrage, when it is the outrage that was put in them by an oppressive system.”

In 1995, the great civil rights champion led his National Action Network in a noble boycott against Freddy’s Fashion Mart, a Jewish-owned business in Harlem, New York. The boycott started when Freddy’s owners had the temerity to announce that because they wanted to expand their own business, they would no longer sublet part of their store to a black-owned record shop. The street leader of the boycott, Morris Powell, was the head of Sharpton’s “Buy Black” Committee. He repeatedly referred to the Jewish proprietors of Freddy’s as “crackers” and “greedy Jew bastards.” All of this occurred under the watchful, approving eye of Sharpton, who vowed not to allow “some white interloper” to “expand his business” in Harlem, and who exhorted blacks to join “the struggle brother Powell and I are engaged in.” The subsequent picketing became increasingly violent in tone, until one of the protesters eventually shot four whites inside the store and then set the building on fire—killing seven employees. 
But as everyone knows, of course, any great crusade is bound to be marred by a few unintended casualties.

That same year, Sharpton again demonstrated that the reins of the civil rights movement were in the firm grasp of the most expert hands when he eloquently informed an audience at New Jersey’s Kean College: “White folks was in the caves while we [blacks] was building empires … We built pyramids before Donald Trump ever knew what architecture was … we taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it.” One can only speculate as to how many of those in attendance may have wondered whether Sharpton had excerpted those electrifying passages from Dr. King’s “I Have A Dream” speech. In response to a few squeamish critics who later suggested that Sharpton’s reference to homosexuals may have bordered on the insensitive, the good Reverend condescended to inform the nervous ninnies that, lo and behold, the word “homos” was “not a homophobic term.”

Sharpton’s Kean College speech also featured his uplifting assertion that America’s founders consisted of “the worst criminals, the rejects they sent from Europe … to the colonies.” “So [if] some cracker,” Sharpton continued with his characteristic elocution, “come and tell you, ‘Well my mother and father blood go back to the Mayflower,’ you better hold you pocket. That ain’t nothing to be proud of, that means their forefathers was crooks.” As for those few jittery souls who recoiled at Sharpton’s use of the term “cracker,” the good Reverend was more than prepared to educate them: “Cracker,” Sharpton said instructively, was merely a “colloquial term used to describe a certain kind of bigot, who hates both blacks and Jews. It’s certainly not a racist term and certainly not an anti-Semitic term, because a cracker hates Jews and blacks.” Because such etymological subtleties generally escape the understanding of the average American imbecile, we evidently ought to be grateful that the civil rights movement is currently guided by an intellectual and moral giant like the Reverend Sharpton. How tragic it would be if a Johnny-come-lately like Glenn Beck – or any other “white interloper,” to borrow a term from the holy man’s lexicon – should be so brazen as to try to steer the movement off its current path of interminable racial grievance.

Beck devoted his DC gathering Saturday to the themes of Honor, Character, Faith, Hope, and Charity. How utterly presumptuous of him, or anyone else, to think that they could teach anything about those lofty traits to a civil rights leader as great as Al Sharpton. Lead on, gracious Reverend. Lead on.

Thomas Perez, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division (CRD) in the Department of Justice (DOJ), is the quintessential Obama appointee – capable of feeling the proverbial pea of discrimination under a thousand mattresses. A self-styled redeemer, Perez aims to save the weak and the exploited from the ravages of America’s purportedly intractable bigotry. His passion for this mission recently prompted him to tell an American Constitution Society (ACS) gathering, to enthusiastic applause: “I love this job.” Elaborating on that theme, Perez cited the deep satisfaction he had derived from successfully prosecuting a pair of white racists who had attacked a black man in a South Carolina restaurant. Why, in a nation where black-on-white crimes far outnumber their white-on-black counterparts, did Perez elect to focus on an instance of the latter? Just remember that Perez views the U.S. as a veritable snake pit teeming with racist white vipers, and the question answers itself.

Perez comes to the Obama administration with a wealth of experience as a protector of white racism’s many alleged victims. Indeed, he served as a prosecutor with the Civil Rights Division of Bill Clinton‘s DOJ in the early 1990s, and as that same Division’s Deputy Assistant Attorney General from 1998 to 1999. Also in the Nineties, Perez volunteered for – and later became a board member of – Casa de Maryland – a George Soros-funded advocacy group for illegal aliens. As Michelle Malkin has pointed out, this organization opposes the enforcement of deportation orders for illegals; has condemned the post-9/11 coordination of local, state, and national criminal databases; has published a “know your rights” pamphlet for illegal aliens; supports the granting of driver’s licenses to illegals; favors in-state tuition discounts for illegal-alien students; and laments “the history of domination” that has always afflicted nonwhites in the United States. According to Perez, Americans who call for the strict enforcement of immigration laws are … you guessed it: racists and “xenophobes.”

As a devoted advocate for illegal aliens and the dissolution of America’s borders, Perez found a natural ally in the late Senator Ted Kennedy, a man who never met an immigration scheme he didn’t love – provided, of course, that it was structured to import a massive, permanent Democratic voting bloc and economic underclass into the U.S.  Thus, from 1995 to 1998, Perez served as Special Counsel to Kennedy, advising him on civil rights, criminal justice and constitutional issues.

In 1996, Perez was instrumental in facilitating the passage of the Church Arson Prevention Act, a bill founded on the premise that southern black churches were being targeted with disproportionate frequency by (presumably white) arsonists. That premise, it turned out, was 100-percent false. But crusaders like Perez are impressively immune to facts that, were they to be acknowledged, would inconveniently interrupt the self-satisfied, public exhibitions of moral preening that are their stock-in-trade.

Illegal Mexican immigrants and southern black church congregations are only two of the many victim groups to which Perez solemnly pledged his advocacy when he joined the Obama administration. As Byron York reports, Perez has articulated his view that the Civil Rights Division’s role is to help people who are “living in the shadows” – a reference not only to illegal aliens, but also to “our Muslim-American brothers and sisters subject to post-9/11 backlash”; “communities of color disproportionately affected by the subprime meltdown”; “LGBT brothers and sisters … forced to confront discrimination”; and “all too many children lacking quality education.” Such is life, as Perez sees it, in the Good-Ol’ jingoistic, Islamophobic, racist, homophobic, child-hating U.S. of A.

From the moment he first joined the Obama team, Perez pledged to greatly expand the DOJ’s prosecution of alleged hate crimes. Perez also made it clear, as Byron York again informs us, that he would view “disparate impact” as prima facie evidence of discrimination. In other words, if a company makes its hiring or promotion decisions based on the results of employee-aptitude tests on which whites as a group score higher than blacks, or if a particular bank rejects black loan applicants at a higher rate than white applicants, those racial disparities are proof of injustice – period, end of story.

WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, previously famous for leaking a video of an American helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed several people (with a scene showing one of them carrying a rocket-propelled grenade edited out), is making headlines again — this time for his data dump of classified material about the war in Afghanistan. His supporters like to think of him as “an Internet freedom fighter.” Assange himself has collaborated with this image by making pious assertions about the value of “transparency” — of the sort WikiLeaks has produced — for reducing international corruption and creating better government. But Assange’s own profile, far from that of a conscientious moral critic bent on revealing unethical behavior, shows the evolution of an information vandal sublimely indifferent to those who might be put at risk by his behavior.

Born in Australia in 1971, Assange grew up in an unanchored family which had moved 37 times by the time he was 14. His cheap teenage thrills involved invading the secure worlds that others created. By 1987, Assange had established a reputation as a sophisticated computer programmer who could break into even the most well-protected networks. But he indicated his real intentions by joining with two fellow hackers to form a group that became known as the International Subversives. They broke into computer systems from Europe to North America, including, most notably, networks belonging to the U.S. Defense Department and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. In a book to which he contributed – Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier – Assange tried to create an aura of morality around this activity, defining what he called the Golden Rules of the hacker subculture: “Don’t damage computer systems you break into (including crashing them); don’t change the information in those systems (except for altering logs to cover your tracks); and share information.”

Hacking remained an obsession for Assange throughout his late teens; the excitement he derived from it was only amplified by his knowledge that federal authorities were doggedly trying to catch him and his fellow “Subversives.” This self-dramatization continues today, as Assange constantly moves from place to place, maintaining no real home, because he fears that international governmental agencies, particularly those in the U.S., may have targeted him for reprisal for the leaks he has orchestrated.

In September 1991, Assange hacked into the master terminal that the Canadian telecom company Nortel maintained in Melbourne. Soon thereafter, he was caught by federal investigators and was charged with 31 counts of hacking and related offenses. Facing a potential sentence of a decade behind bars, Assange pled guilty to 25 charges and 6 were dropped. At his final sentencing, the judge went easy on him: “There is just no evidence that there was anything other than sort of intelligent inquisitiveness and the pleasure of being able to—what’s the expression—surf through these various computers.” Thus Assange escaped with the lightest of penalties — the payment of a small fine.

After the hacking trial, Assange lived below the radar in Melbourne for a number of years, working variously as a computer programmer and software developer, among other pursuits. He also studied physics and math at the University of Melbourne. Then, in 2006, he began the process of creating WikiLeaks, a website that would publish confidential government documents and images. His inspiration for this brainstorm was the infamous Daniel Ellsberg, who in 1971 — the year of Assange’s birth — had published the Pentagon Papers.

Shortly after getting WikiLeaks off the ground, Assange flew to Kenya to attend the World Social Forum — a yearly symposium dedicated to the redistribution of wealth and the eradication of capitalism — where he delivered a presentation about his new website.

Every now and then, a smug, gloating know-it-all unexpectedly comes face-to-face with painful reality, causing his or her seemingly permanent smirk to be wiped away in a mere instant. For the self-proclaimed “radical human rights attorney” Lynne Stewart, such a day came last Thursday, when she learned, to her astonishment, that the length of the prison sentence she already has been serving will be more than quadrupled.

The roots of Stewart’s imprisonment date back at least to the year 2000, when she illegally smuggled messages from her incarcerated client, the Muslim terrorist sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, to his violent devotees in his native Egypt. In 2005, the now-disbarred Stewart was convicted of those transgressions. Given the serious nature of her crimes, prosecutors at the time asked the court to impose a 30-year prison sentence. But instead, judge John G. Koeltl of Federal District Court in Manhattan sentenced her to a mere 28 months. Koetl explained that while Stewart’s actions did indeed constitute “extraordinarily severe criminal conduct” – as well as “dishonesty and breach of trust” with “potentially lethal consequences” – during her long legal career she had “performed a public service, not only to her clients, but to the nation.”

Because her prison term was so short, a gloating Stewart instantly depicted herself as the victor in the case. Soon after her sentence had been handed down, she told a crowd of supporters: “He [the judge] gave me time off for good behavior, and he gave it to me in advance of the sentence … he said that my extraordinary work meant that I could not get a sentence that the government wanted.” Stewart then told the press not only that she could serve such a brief period “standing on my head,” but also that, if ever the opportunity were to present itself, she would once again do the very things for which she had just been convicted. After numerous delays, the 70-year-old Stewart finally began serving her 28 months in November 2009. Then, last Thursday, Judge Koeltl increased that sentence to ten years.

Stewart herself sowed the seeds of this bitter harvest by gloating without restraint after the original sentence had been handed down. Soon thereafter, prosecutors filed an appeal of the sentence, arguing that a more appropriate prison term would be in the range of 15 to 30 years. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit – after considering how egregiously Stewart had abused her position as an attorney in her dealings with Rahman, and how Stewart had subsequently committed perjury when testifying at her trial – overturned the original sentence and sent the case back to Judge Koetl, asking him to consider lengthening Stewart’s jail time. Koetl concluded that Stewart’s self-congratulatory statements and jovial demeanor in the aftermath of her first sentencing indicated “a lack of remorse” on her part, and suggested that “the original sentence was not sufficient.” Thus he imposed the ten-year sentence.

To provide context, a quick review of the precise nature of Stewart’s crimes, and the crimes of her client, are in order. The client, Omar Abdel Rahman, is the longtime “spiritual leader” of the Egypt-based Islamic Group, which was was originally an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood and is closely linked to Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network. From its inception, the Islamic Group’s objective was to overthrow Egypt’s existing government and replace it with a fundamentalist Islamic regime. Eschewing diplomatic compromise entirely, the Islamic Group viewed violent jihad as the only acceptable means of advancing its power. In addition, the organization advocated the spread of violence and mayhem to “infidel” countries like the United States and its allies, and openly called for the destruction of Israel. In 1981 Rahman issued a religious edict condemning Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to death for the role he had played in negotiating peace with Israel; soon thereafter, Muslim fundamentalists assassinated Sadat.

In October 1995 a federal court in New York – in a case where Lynne Stewart served as the head of a legal defense team that also included Ramsey Clark and Abdeen Jabara – convicted Rahman and nine co-defendants of seditious conspiracy for planning to wage a “war of urban terrorism” against the United States. This war, which Rahman never managed to launch successfully, was slated to feature the near-simultaneous bombings of the United Nations Building, the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, the George Washington Bridge, and the main Federal office building in Manhattan. According to prosecutors, the February 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, which killed six people, was also part of Rahman’s overall conspiracy, though the latter was never accused of helping to carry out that particular attack. In addition, Rahman was found guilty of plotting to assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in 1993. In January 1996, three months after his convictions, Rahman was sentenced to life in prison. Fifteen months later, the U.S. government, in an effort to terminate Rahman’s connections to active terrorists, blocked him from communicating with anyone in the outside world.

During her Senate hearings this week, Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan confirmed, beyond any doubt, that she is indeed the leftist which most objective observers have always known her to be. In one of her more remarkable assertions of the week, Kagan denied that the late Thurgood Marshall, whom she identifies as one of her heroes, could properly be described as an “activist” judge. Yet this was the same Thurgood Marshall who advised judges to “do what’s right and let the law catch up”; who said that the U.S. Constitution, “as originally drafted and conceived,” was “defective” and thus in need of fundamental change; and who, in a defense of affirmative-action policies, once told William O. Douglas, “You [white] guys have been practicing discrimination for years. Now it’s our [blacks'] turn.” For whatever merits Marshall may have had as a civil-rights crusader and a jurist, he was clearly an activist on the bench.

It is noteworthy that Kagan, on other occasions, has approvingly cited Justice Marshall’s assertion that the Supreme Court must “show a special solicitude for the despised and the disadvantaged.” That perspective is entirely consistent with President Obama’s view that a Justice, first and foremost, should have “the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old.” Such a mindset dovetails seamlessly with judicial activism, where courts – unfazed by the letter of the law – dole out preferential treatment to the “have-nots” and impose retributive justice on the “haves.” It was precisely this type of activism that Obama countenanced when he called the Constitution “not a static but rather a living document [that] must be read in the context of an ever-changing world.”

During her Senate hearings, Kagan candidly echoed Obama’s notion that the Constitution cannot be interpreted strictly by the “original intent” of its framers. “The constitutional law that we live under does develop over time,” Kagan said. “In [some] cases, the original intent is unlikely to solve the question, and that might be … because we live in a world that’s very different from the world in which the framers lived.” Rejecting the strict-constructionist philosophy of such sitting justices as Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, Kagan also criticized Chief Justice John Roberts’ contention that a Supreme Court Justice’s job is “to call balls and strikes” like an umpire, rather than to try to dictate the course and outcome of the proverbial game.

In a 6 to 3 decision last week, the Supreme Court upheld a federal law that makes it a crime for Americans to provide “material support” of any kind – be it in the form of cash, weaponry, training, personnel, services, or “expert advice or assistance” – to a foreign terrorist organization, even if that support is for ostensibly peaceful purposes. At issue in the case, known as Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, was the question of whether this restriction violates Americans’ First Amendment rights of free speech and association. Writing the majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts said that “even seemingly benign support” for such an entity “bolsters the terrorist activities of that organization”; “frees up other resources within the organization that may be put to violent ends”; “helps lend legitimacy to foreign terrorist groups”; and strains “the United States’ relationships with its allies.” As to the specific issue of free speech, Roberts pointed out that people “may say anything they wish on any topic”; that they “may speak and write freely about” any organization of their choice; and that they are even free to become members of whatever group they wish to join. Roberts was backed in his decision by Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy, and the soon-to-be-retiring John Paul Stevens. Dissenting from the majority decision were Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Sonia Sotomayor, who saw the “material support” restriction as a violation of the First Amendment.

A lead plaintiff in the case was the longtime civil-rights attorney Ralph Fertig, whose professed desire is to help the Turkey-based Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) find peaceful ways of advancing its goal: the creation of an independent Kurdish state in southeast Turkey, northern Iraq, and parts of Iran and Syria. Because PKK’s history is replete with bombings, kidnappings, and a violent insurgency responsible for some 22,000 deaths, the U.S. government has designated it as a terrorist organization. Notwithstanding this bloody track record, Fertig and his fellow plaintiffs maintained that with a proper blend of persuasion and education, PKK could be convinced to renounce its violent tactics and to work, instead, within the framework of “various representative bodies such as the United Nations for relief.” By Fertig’s reckoning, the ban against giving aid to PKK and other terrorist groups is “more dangerous than McCarthyism” ever was. After the Court announced its decision last week, a dejected Fertig said: “This is a very dark day in the history of the human rights struggle to assist groups overseas that are being oppressed.”

A look at Fertig’s background and affiliations will help place his disappointment in proper perspective. First and foremost, Fertig is president of the Humanitarian Law Project (HLP), an organization created by Los Angeles real estate magnate Aris Anagnos, who since the early 1970s has bankrolled Marxist causes around the globe — including the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, the Marxist rebels in Chiapas, and the regime of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. Over the years, HLP has consistently sided with America’s Marxist adversaries in international disputes; has accused the U.S. of committing “atrocities” in both Iraq wars; has called for the United States to be prosecuted for its alleged war crimes by the World Court; and has identified American disarmament as a chief prerequisite for peace around the world.

Fertig also serves as a supporting member of the Campaign Against Criminalizing Communities (CACC), which complains that the war on terror was concocted by warmongering conservatives to “promot[e] a racist culture of suspicion towards migrant and Muslim communities”; to “generat[e] and manipulat[e] public fears [that will] justify a perpetual state of war”; to plac[e] entire communities under suspicion of associating with such ‘terrorism’”; to “us[e] ‘intelligence’ obtained by torturing detainees abroad”; and to “wag[e] psychological warfare through disinformation and mass-media scares about ‘al Qaeda cells.’” (All scare quotes were in CACC’s original literature.)

Fertig also endorsed World Can’t Wait (WCW), a project of the Revolutionary Communist Party – a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist group calling for the overthrow of the U.S. government and its replacement with a Communist dictatorship. WCW sought to “halt” the Bush administration’s alleged pursuit of “endless wars,” its routine use of “torture,” its indifference to the victims of Hurricane Katrina, and its quest to transform the United States into a Christian “theocracy.”

The Foundation for Human Rights and Freedom and Humanitarian Relief (better known by its Turkish acronym, IHH) is the group that organized the six-ship flotilla which recently tried, without success, to sail all the way to Gaza. Established in Turkey in 1992, the Foundation sends aid to distressed areas throughout the Middle East – in the form of food, medicine, vocational education, and building supplies. A prime destination for this aid is Gaza, where – according to IHH – Palestinians are being oppressed by an unjustified Israeli naval blockade. (For the record, that blockade was put in place to prevent Hamas, which controls Gaza politically and has fired thousands of rockets into southern Israeli towns in recent years, from importing additional weaponry from Iran and other allies abroad.)

For several days last week, as the flotilla approached Gaza, Israel issued warnings that the ships would not be permitted to reach their destination without first submitting to an inspection of their cargoes – to ensure that no weaponry was being transported. But when the respective crews of the vessels refused to comply, Israeli commandos took action and intercepted the flotilla in the early morning hours of May 31. The IHH-affiliated activists responded with violence, instantly attacking the commandos with knives and clubs, and throwing one of them overboard. In the melee that ensued, ten activists were killed and seven Israeli soldiers were wounded. How could this be? How can we be expected to believe that a well-meaning “humanitarian relief” group would ever behave in a manner that might provoke violent reprisals from Israeli troops? A more thorough examination of IHH’s history and affiliations explains everything.

While IHH is indeed involved in the aforementioned humanitarian endeavors, its overall objectives are much broader. Belying the dove of peace whose image appears on its logo, IHH overtly supports Hamas, is sympathetic to al Qaeda, and maintained regular contact with al Qaeda cells and the Sunni insurgency during the bloodiest stretches of the Iraq War. Moreover, IHH has supported jihadist terror networks not only in Iraq, but also in Bosnia, Syria, Afghanistan, and Chechnya. According to Carnegie Endowment analyst Henri Barkey, IHH is “an Islamist organization” that “has been deeply involved with Hamas for some time.” A 2006 report by the Danish Institute for International Studies characterized IHH as one of many “charitable front groups that provide support to Al-Qaida” and the global jihad.

Is the IHH beginning to sound less and less like a “humanitarian relief” group? Let’s look a little deeper still.

According to a French intelligence report, in the mid-1990s IHH leader Bülent Yildirim was directly involved in recruiting “veteran soldiers” to organize jihad activities, and in dispatching IHH operatives to war zones in Islamic countries to gain combat experience. The report also stated that IHH had transferred money as well as “caches of firearms, knives and pre-fabricated explosives” to Muslim fighters in those countries. Given this track record, can Israel’s concern about the contents of the IHH flotilla cargoes really be considered excessive or unwarranted?

In 1996, IHH continued to burnish its credentials as a “humanitarian relief” organization when an examination of its telephone records showed that repeated calls had been made to an al Qaeda guest house in Milan and to Algerian terrorists operating in Europe. That same year, the U.S. government formally identified IHH as having connections to extremist groups in Iran and Algeria.

In December 1997, Turkish authorities, acting on a tip from sources claiming that IHH leaders had purchased automatic weapons from other regional Islamic militant groups, initiated a domestic criminal investigation of IHH. A thorough search of the organization’s Istanbul bureau uncovered a large assortment of firearms, explosives, bomb-making instructions, and a “jihad flag.” In addition, Turkish authorities seized a host of IHH documents whose contents ultimately led investigators to conclude that the group’s members “were going to fight in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Chechnya.”

Near the end of 2000, IHH organized protests against proposals to overthrow that humanitarian icon, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein; American and Israeli flags were burned at these rallies.

During the April 2001 trial of would-be “millennium bomber” Ahmed Ressam, it was revealed that IHH had played an “important role” in the plot to blow up Los Angeles International Airport on December 31, 1999. Some reasonable observers might contend that to classify such a pursuit under the heading of “humanitarian relief” would require an unduly broad definition of that term.

In 2002, investigators found correspondences from IHH in the offices of the Success Foundation, a Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated organization whose Secretary was Abdul Rahman Alamoudi. For the record: The Brotherhood was the ideological forebear of Hamas and al Qaeda; it supports jihad; and it seeks to impose shari’a law on the entire civilized world. Mr. Alamoudi, for his part, is currently serving a prison term of nearly a quarter-century for his role as a funder of international terrorism. He is best known for having proudly declared himself to be a passionate supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah. The connections to “humanitarian relief” seem rather tenuous here.

According to a report issued by a website close to Israeli military intelligence: “[S]ince Hamas took over the Gaza Strip, IHH has supported Hamas’ propaganda campaigns by organizing public support conferences in Turkey.” The report also states that IHH continues to operate widely throughout Gaza and to funnel large sums of money to support the Hamas infrastructure.

In January 2008, an IHH delegation met with Ahmed Bahar, chairman of Hamas’ council in the Gaza Strip. At the meeting, the delegation not only boasted about the large amount of financial support it had given Hamas during the preceding year, but also declared its intent to double that sum in the future. Once again, we are left to wonder how any of this falls under the rubric of “humanitarian relief.”

In 2008 Israel banned IHH from the country because of the organization’s membership in the “Union of Good” (UOG), a Hamas-founded umbrella coalition comprised of more than 50 Islamic charities (most of which are associated with the global Muslim Brotherhood) that channel money and goods to Hamas-affiliated institutions. In December 2008, the U.S. government designated UOG as a terrorist entity that was guilty of “diverting” donations that were intended for “social welfare and other charitable services,” and using those funds “to strengthen Hamas’ political and military position.”

In January 2009, IHH head Bülent Yildirim met with Khaled Mash’al, chairman of Hamas’ political bureau in Damascus, and Mash’al thanked Yildirim for the support of his organization.

In November 2009 IHH activist Izzat Shahin transferred tens of thousands of American dollars from IHH to the Islamic Charitable Society (in Hebron) and Al-Tadhamun (in Nablus), two of Hamas’ most important front groups posing as “charitable societies.”

This, then, is the IHH: a pack of anti-Semitic supporters of terrorism, cloaking themselves in the vestments of victimhood, and bleating to the world about how unfairly they have been treated by the very nation whose extermination they have worked long and hard to bring about. It’s actually a story that has become quite familiar.

Ever since she affirmed, with clarity and conviction, that she supports Hezbollah‘s candid desire to herd all the world’s Jews into Israel so as to ultimately make their mass extermination easier to carry out, Muslim Students Association member Jumanah Imad Albahri has quickly devolved into what can only be described as a pathetic figure.

While the UC San Diego student now whimpers that she is a victim of “alienation” and “marginalization” – note how well-versed she is in the lexicon of victimology – it has become increasingly obvious that her chief affliction is a profound lack of common sense. This deficiency is made plain by the fact that after Albahri gave her recent thumbs-up to genocide, she did not deem it prudent to keep a low profile for awhile – in order to give the foul stench of her bigotry a bit of time to dissipate. Instead, she has persisted in publicly spouting further stupidities, the latest of which brands David Horowitz, who first exposed her unmistakable Jew-hatred at an “Israel Apartheid Week” event earlier this month, as a racist. To “prove” the veracity of her smear, Albahri cites Horowitz’s supposedly objectionable 1999 article titled “Guns Don’t Kill Black People, Other Blacks Do.” So offensive was that piece, claims Albahri, that Horowitz “needs to apologize” for having written it. Really?

Horowitz’s article centered around an NAACP plan to file a class action lawsuit against firearm manufacturers because gun violence was snuffing out the lives of young black men in grossly disproportionate numbers. “Firearm homicide has been the leading cause of death among young African-American males for nearly 30 years,” an NAACP press release lamented at the time. Ostensibly to help remedy this problem, the lawsuit aimed to “force” gun makers “to distribute their product” more “responsibly.” The implication was that if only the gun industry would be more concerned about the rivers of blood flowing through black communities, and less preoccupied with the rivers of cash pouring into its coffers, this crisis would either diminish substantially or disappear entirely.

Horowitz rightly pointed out that the NAACP, by focusing on the alleged transgressions of gun manufacturers, was misdiagnosing the cause of the violence that was decimating the black community. He pointed out, for instance, that 90 percent of all gun-related killings of African Americans were perpetrated by other blacks, and that blacks (who constituted 12 percent of the U.S. population) committed 54 percent of all homicides. Was Horowitz, as Albahri implies in her denunciation of the article, simply engaged in an effort to demean blacks by citing these very sobering facts? No. His point was to bring attention on the real cause of the violent epidemic that was afflicting young blacks; without such an honest appraisal, any prescribed “solutions” – such as suing gun manufacturers – would inevitably be misguided and ineffective, perhaps even counterproductive.

Thus, to shed light on the key issue, Horowitz pointed out that seven of every ten black babies in the United States were being born into homes where there were no fathers – a fact that condemned them, statistically, to alarmingly high probabilities of living in poverty and eventually spending time in prison. Harvard Professor Stephan Thernstrom, for instance, reports that the poverty rate for black children living in single-parent homes is nearly five times greater than for those living in married-couple families. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the median income of fatherless black families is scarcely one-third as high as for two-parent black families. Unwed mothers, regardless of their race, are four times more likely to live in poverty than the average American. And 85 percent of all black children in poverty live in single-parent, mother-child homes.

The more we study the numbers, the more they boggle the mind. Regardless of race, children raised without fathers comprise an astonishing 70 percent of our nation’s long-term prison inmates, 70 percent of all young people in state reform institutions, 60 percent of rapists, and 72 percent of adolescent murderers. Regardless of race, each year a boy spends without a father increases his likelihood of future incarceration by about 5 percent. And regardless of race, children from fatherless homes are characterized by much higher-than-average rates of academic failure, placement in special-education classes, behavioral disorders, drug abuse, and such psychiatric problems as depression and anxiety. In other words, growing up without a father is a far better forecaster of a boy’s future criminality than either race or poverty.

Even if all the gun makers in America were unrepentant, bloodthirsty bigots intent on disseminating weapons of death throughout every street and alley of every black neighborhood in the country, they could not harm African Americans nearly as much as the demise of two-parent families has devastated them already. David Horowitz, in his article, was simply pointing out this vital truth – and noting that the NAACP’s energies and resources would have been better spent addressing that issue, rather than on demonizing gun manufacturers for a crisis they did not create. If Miss Albahri is unable to understand this, that’s too bad.  Mr. Horowitz communicated the message quite clearly. It’s not his job to comprehend it for her.

At first blush, the suggestion that a Nobel Peace Prize winner would have anything in common with a pack of unabashed, poison-tongued Jew-haters seems preposterous. But Desmond Tutu, the former archbishop of Cape Town, South Africa, who in 1984 won the coveted Nobel award for his campaign against apartheid in that country, is today one of the most celebrated supporters of the “Divest from Israel” movement. Particularly widespread on university campuses across America, this movement routinely offers a high-visibility propaganda forum for some of the most rabid, combative anti-Semites of our time.

At its heart, the campus divestment movement aims to cripple Israel’s economy by compelling universities to withdraw whatever funds they may have invested in Israeli-based or -affiliated corporations. These efforts are founded on the premise that Israel is guilty of practicing apartheid and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian people. According to the divestment movement’s leaders, the human rights violations perpetrated by Israel are on par with those of the former apartheid regime in Desmond Tutu’s South Africa; many critics go so far as to liken modern Israel to Nazi Germany. When the Associated Students of UC Berkeley recently expressed their wish to have the university divest its money from Israel, Tutu praised their “principled stand” against the “injustice of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and violation of Palestinian human rights.” “[I]t is always an inspiration when young people lead the way and speak truth to power,” said Tutu.

The philosophy underlying the divestment movement has been displayed in stark relief recently at a number of University of California campuses, where Muslim student groups sponsored events under the banner of “Israeli Apartheid Week: A Call to Boycott, Divest, and Sanction Israel.” At a Muslim Students Association (MSA) event at UC San Diego, for instance, one MSA member explicitly affirmed that she supported Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah‘s assertion that “if Jews all gather in Israel, it will save us [jihadists] the trouble of going after them worldwide.” Meanwhile, UC Irvine’s Muslim Student Union promoted its own “Israeli Apartheid Week” festivities by featuring, as guest speakers, such luminaries as Norman Finkelstein (who asserts  that the Holocaust has been exaggerated and exploited by Jews to justify Israeli human-rights violations and crimes against humanity); Hedy Epstein (who contends that the only “lesson” Jews “learned from the Holocaust” was how to “become the persecutors” of vulnerable people like the Palestinians); Hatem Bazian (who, at an American Muslim Alliance conference promoting the creation of an Islamic State of Palestine, approvingly quoted a hadith calling on Muslims to “come and kill” the Jews); Alison Weir (who characterizes the Israeli-Arab conflict as nothing more complex than a battle between “the brutalizer and the brutalized”); and Amir Abdel Malik-Ali (an open supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah who has warned that he and his fellow Muslims “will fight” the Jews “until we are either martyred or until we are victorious”).

Such are the worldviews and sentiments of the leading lights in today’s “Divest from Israel” movement. By no means, however, is it surprising that Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu would support such bellicose rhetoric, given his own long history of condemning and smearing Israel and the Jews. Noting that divestment campaigns helped bring about the end of apartheid in South Africa, a development he calls “one of the crowning accomplishments of the past century,” Tutu is delighted that a “similar movement” now aims to put “an end to the Israeli occupation” in the Middle East. Notably, Tutu makes no call for divestment from any other Middle Eastern nation – though the political oppression, human rights abuses, and barbaric atrocities characterizing life throughout much of that region dwarf anything that the Palestinians have ever suffered in Israel, to which Tutu refers as America’s “client state.”

Tutu informs us that his heart breaks whenever he sees “the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks,” and he explains that their evident “suffering” evokes memories of what South African blacks once experienced “when young white police officers prevented us from moving about.” Asserting that “Israel is like Hitler and apartheid,” Tutu has urged Americans to oppose Israeli “injustices” as fervently as they once opposed Nazism and South Africa’s system of racial separation. Putting his contempt for the Jewish state in still fuller context, he once said: “The [South African] apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosevic, and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust.”

In an October 2007 op-ed piece, Tutu lamented that because of unnecessarily restrictive Israeli policies, the Palestinian people “cannot move freely from one place to another”; that “a wall separates them from their families and from their incomes”; and that “they are arbitrarily demeaned at checkpoints and unnecessarily beleaguered by capricious applications of bureaucratic red tape.” These things, said Tutu, were reminiscent of “the yoke of oppression that was once our burden in South Africa.” Absent from his lamentations was any recognition that Israel’s checkpoints and security barrier had been established in direct response to the Palestinians’ relentless campaign of genocidal terrorism. Instead, Tutu reminded his readers that “God’s dream begins with this mutual recognition – we are not strangers, we are kin.” But there again, he had nothing to say about the wholesale rejection of so-called “kinship” by Hamas, the terrorist group whose founding charter explicitly calls jihad “an individual duty [that is] binding on every Muslim man and woman,” while it condemns “the Nazism of the Jews” and calls for their extermination.

Tutu’s morally inverted worldview is not confined solely to matters involving Israel. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, for instance, he described America’s retaliatory military campaign (against the Taliban and al-Qaeda) as an “utterly reprehensible” exercise in “vengeance” rather than justice. He explained that the hijackers had been “willing to pilot a plane and go to their deaths” because they were making a desperate plea for relief from the “poverty, hunger, and disease” that plagued the people of their homelands. Condemning America’s greed and self-absorption, Tutu suggested that “a minute fraction of [U.S.] defense budgets would ensure that God’s children everywhere would have clean water, enough to eat, a decent home, a proper education, and accessible and affordable health care.” The terrorists, in other words, were trying to strike a blow for charity and social justice, not Islamic jihad.

While Tutu has been relentless in ridiculing Israel and the United States, he has been far more forgiving of Winnie Mandela, South Africa’s so-called “Mother of the Nation,” whom the former archbishop professes to love “very deeply.” Prominent in the Soviet-sponsored African National Congress (ANC), which was closely aligned with the South African Communist Party, Mrs. Mandela used her notorious bodyguards in a protracted reign of terror, torture, and murder during the 1980s. The ANC committed innumerable atrocities in the name of liberation, prompting a 1988 Pentagon Report to list it as one of the world’s “more notorious terrorist groups.” Many ANC victims were physically pummeled and brutalized to death – some of them on the direct orders of Mrs. Mandela. Among the ANC’s preferred methods of torturing suspected political opponents was “necklacing” – a barbaric practice where automobile tires were tied around the necks of victims, filled with gasoline and lit on fire. It is estimated that some 1,000 people were set ablaze in this manner. “With tires and matches we will liberate this country,” crowed the celebrated “Mother” of Tutu’s nation.

To recap: Desmond Tutu “loves” Winnie Mandela “deeply”; he blames the United States for provoking the 9/11 attacks; and he supports worldwide divestment from a purportedly “Nazi”-like nation that gives its Arab citizens more rights and freedoms than they would be able to enjoy anywhere in the Arab world. These views prove conclusively that honorific titles and prestigious awards do not necessarily correlate with sound moral judgment in their recipients.

When John Paul Stevens announced that he would be stepping down from the Supreme Court after three-and-a-half decades on the bench, Barack Obama lauded the outgoing Justice as a “brilliant, non-ideological, pragmatic” man, “committed above all to justice, integrity, and the rule of law.” The President pledged to seek, for Stevens’ successor, someone “with similar qualities” – an individual who understands that “in a democracy, powerful interests must not be allowed to drown out the voices of ordinary citizens.” Monday morning Obama announced that choice: Elena Kagan.

This not the first time the President has named Kagan to a prominent post in government. During his first week in office, Obama, who has known Kagan since the two were colleagues on the University of Chicago Law School faculty during the 1990s, named her for the post of U.S. Solicitor General, the nation’s second-most-influential legal authority. It bears mention that Kagan, at the time of that appointment, had never argued a case in any court and had published only three major articles along with a handful of minor pieces. Sensing the special connection that existed between Obama and the new Solicitor General, Center for Security Policy CEO Frank Gaffney presciently depicted Kagan’s assignment as “a stepping-stone for her appointment to the Supreme Court.” To understand why Obama holds Kagan in such high regard, we must take a closer look at the political and legal positions she has embraced over the course of her adult life, and see how they dovetail with those of the President.

A week after Ronald Reagan’s presidential victory in November 1980, a twenty-year-old Elena Kagan, who was then a student at Princeton University, contributed a piece to the Daily Princetonian, wherein she gave voice to her angst over the apparent demise of the left. She wrote that her immediate “gut response” to Reagan’s election had been to conclude “that the world had gone mad, that liberalism was dead, and that there was no longer any place for the ideals we held or the beliefs we espoused.” After having taken some time to calm down, Kagan predicted, with a hopeful spirit, that “the next few years will be marked by American disillusionment with conservative programs and solutions, and that a new, revitalized, perhaps more leftist left will once again come to the fore.”

The following year, Kagan penned her senior thesis—titled “To the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900-1933”—wherein she specifically thanked her brother Marc, “whose involvement in radical causes led me to explore the history of American radicalism in the hope of clarifying my own political ideas.” In the body of that work, Kagan lamented that “a coherent socialist movement is nowhere to be found in the United States”; that “Americans are more likely to speak of … capitalism’s glories than of socialism’s greatness”; that “the desire to conserve has overwhelmed the urge to alter”; that “in a society by no means perfect,” no “radical party” had yet “attained the status of a major political force”; that “the socialist movement [had] never become an alternative to the nation’s established parties”; and that the Socialist Party had “exhausted itself forever and further reduced labor radicalism in New York to the position of marginality and insignificance.” Kagan called these developments “sad” and “chastening” for “those who, more than half a century after socialism’s decline, still wish to change America.”

After graduating from Princeton, Kagan went on to earn a Master of Philosophy degree from Worcester College at Oxford University in 1983, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1986. She then took a job as a law clerk for Judge Abner Mikva, a leftist member of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Later, she clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, whom she now identifies as her hero. In 1988 Kagan worked on the presidential campaign of Democrat Michael Dukakis. And three years later she became an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Law School, where, as noted above, she first met Barack Obama.

From 1995 to 1999, Kagan served under Bill Clinton in various roles: Associate White House Counsel, Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, and Deputy Director of the Domestic Policy Council. In June 1999, Clinton nominated Kagan to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. But because the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Republican chairman, Orrin Hatch, subsequently elected not to schedule a hearing on Kagan, her nomination was never confirmed.

In 2003, Harvard University president Lawrence Summers appointed Kagan to be the dean of Harvard Law School. It was in this role that Kagan expressed her most infamous criticisms of the U.S. military. In Kagan’s view, the armed forces ought to welcome open homosexuals to their ranks without the slightest reservation; any policy to the contrary, she views as bigotry of the lowest order. In an e-mail that she disseminated to the entire Harvard Law School community in October 2003, Kagan wrote: “I abhor the military’s discriminatory [don't ask,don't tell] recruitment policy” – characterizing it as “a profound wrong, a moral injustice of the first order … a wrong that tears at the fabric of our own community.”

Kagan has long opposed the so-called Solomon Amendment, a law that denies federal funding to any university that “has a policy or practice … that either prohibits, or in effect prevents” military personnel “from gaining access to campuses, or access to students … on campuses, for purposes of military recruiting.” This Amendment was enacted in 1996, in response to a trend where many law schools, as gestures of protest against a federal law barring open homosexuals from military service, were discouraging and/or prohibiting military recruitment on their campuses. When a federal appeals court struck down the Solomon Amendment, Harvard Law, under Kagan’s stewardship, became the first major law school in the United States to ban official recruiting on campus. Ed Whelan of the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center has written: “I doubt that the American public will be impressed that Kagan kicked the military off campus in wartime but welcomed law firms that were donating their services to terrorists.”

Kagan also filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to declare the Solomon Amendment unconstitutional. The Court, however, unanimously rejected Kagan’s position. Frank Gaffney observed that Kagan’s passionate opposition to the Solomon Amendment reflected “her hostility toward the U.S. military.” But that very hostility has proven to be to Kagan’s political advantage, because it is ideologically compatible with that of President Obama, who, in a moment of unguarded candor during the presidential campaign, suggested that U.S. troops in Afghanistan were doing a disservice to their mission by “just air raiding villages and killing civilians.” When Kagan was confirmed as Solicitor General last year, Gaffney noted that the “likely consequence” would be that “the Justice Department will play an adversarial, rather than supportive, role for our armed forces in an age when they are increasingly subjected to ‘lawfare’—the use of legal proceedings to interfere with and, where possible, defeat their missions.”

It is noteworthy that Kagan’s understanding of the Supreme Court’s role mirrors that of her “hero,” Thurgood Marshall. In one of her legal writings, Kagan cited Marshall’s assertion that the Constitution, “as originally drafted and conceived,” was “defective.” This view fits hand-in-glove with Obama’s celebrated contention that the Constitution “is not a static but rather a living document and must be read in the context of an ever-changing world.”

Kagan has also quoted Justice Marshall saying that the Supreme Court’s mission is to “show a special solicitude for the despised and the disadvantaged.” In those words, we can hear the echoes of Obama saying that in many legal cases, “the critical ingredient” is neither what the law nor the Constitution say, but rather “what is in the judge’s heart”; that a judge must prove that he or she is not “dismissive of concerns that it is harder to make it in this world … when you are a woman rather than a man”; that a judge ought not “sid[e] on behalf of the powerful against the powerless”; and that a judge should be “somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old.” In essence, these are calls for a jurisprudence of the heart rather than of the law; a jurisprudence aimed at settling old scores on behalf of aggrieved “victim” groups, rather than meting out equal justice to individuals regardless of their demographics.

Ideologically, Elena Kagan is a kindred spirit of Barack Obama. As such, she will keep Justice Stevens’ Supreme Court seat firmly situated on the political left. By no means is this the least bit surprising. Elections have consequences, sometimes very predictable ones.

In a recent speech to the Young Democratic Socialists, an arm of the Democratic Socialists of America, longtime ACORN luminary Bertha Lewis publicly embraced her socialist ideology, declaring: “First of all let me just say any group that says, ‘I’m young, I’m democratic, and I’m a socialist,’ is alright with me.” She also suggested that conservatives planned to reinstitute segregation and set up internment camps in the United States:

“Right now we are living in a time which is going to dwarf the McCarthy era … It is going to dwarf the internments during World War II. We are right now in a time that is going to dwarf the era of Jim Crow and segregation.”

Lewis especially condemned the Tea Party Movement, calling it a “bowel movement” filled with “racism.”

To view Bertha Lewis’ full profile, click here.

Called the “People’s Pastor” for his long activist career, Herbert Daughtry in 1953 was convicted of armed robbery and assault charges. In prison, he had a religious conversion to Pentecostalism which led him to become a pastor in Brooklyn, New York.

In 1980 Daughtry helped establish the National Black United Front, which helped organize the national campaign for reparations and has worked alongside the New Black Panthers. In 1982 he founded the African People’s Organization, which teaches the black origins of Christianity. In 1984 Daughtry became a special assistant to Jesse Jackson during the latter’s presidential campaign. He has also helped organize a number of initiatives with Al Sharpton, particularly the 2006-2008 demonstrations protesting a police shooting of a young black man in New York City.

A fervent proponent of Black Liberation Theology, Daughtry has served in a number of prominent positions with the World Council of Churches. He also has been one of the principal leaders of the reparations-for-slavery movement in America. His church in Brooklyn is adorned with a banner for slavery reparations, proclaiming, “They Owe Us.”

To view the full Herbert Daughtry profile, click here.

On July 9, 2004, the Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees (UNITE) merged with the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE) to form the politically progressive UNITE HERE. This union has given millions of dollars in “hard” and “soft” money contributions to political candidates; the vast majority of these funds have gone to Democrats. In 2008, UNITE HERE supported Barack Obama during the Democratic presidential primaries, running attack ads against Hillary Clinton that injected racial politics into the election. The union is also a part of the pro-amnesty lobby on immigration reform and helped to organize major “immigrant-rights” rallies in 2006 and 2010.

To view the full UNITE HERE profile, click here.