As John Perazzo and I write in our new broadside about Occupy Wall Street, this movement marks a new phase in the rebirth of the communist left. I wrote about this phenomenon previously in my book Unholy Alliance, where I included a lengthy analysis called “The Mind of the Left” tracing its development from the Stalinism of the Thirties through its reincarnation in the final degenerated stages of the New Left (William Ayers comes to mind) and then in the post-Communist resurgence of the international left first in the anti-globalization riots (which were not against  globalization but against capitalism) and then in the movement to defend the Iraqi mass murderer Saddam Hussein. Only a movement so swept up in its hatred of America as a symbol of capitalism could have committed a moral atrocity like this. In the book I also noted and analyzed the “unholy alliance” that had been formed globally between the forces of Islamic totalitarianism and the radical secular left. Hence the title of the book.

At the time I wrote the book — which was 2004 — the main organization of the international left was the Soros-funded World Social Forum which brought together narco-terrorists, Islamic jihadists and Western radicals such as Noam Chomsky. The World Social Forum has now emerged as the brain center of the Occupy movement — which is more accurately the neo-Communist international — and its plans for global anti-capitalist riots in June.

I’m going to dissent from the majority and from our Frontpage article on Obama’s State of the Union address. I think most taxation these days is theft, in that it goes for services we don’t need and I don’t want, like paying government union workers exorbitant pensions, and funding school systems that don’t teach, and providing people who don’t want to work incentives to have children out of wedlock and to create large families condemned to live in poverty, which produce an outsize share of criminals who prey mainly on the working poor. I am against the progressive income tax, because it is basically unfair and provides an incentive to the 50% who don’t pay taxes to support government waste and encourage destructive government policies, like the current system of welfare programs.

However, Obama’s proposal to plug what is essentially a loophole — low tax rates for carried interest income — in the present tax set up is a good idea. Mitt Romney earns $21 million a year but pays at a 15% rate because of this loophole. This is not income he earns as an active investor. He’s a politician and has been for a long time. There are so many people who are multimillionaires and billionaires that taxing them an additional 15% would amount to a significant boost in revenues at time when the country needs them and would hardly be as punitive as a 35% tax rate on someone making $100,000 — which is what unionized dispatchers make as longshoremen.

The New York Times, which played a key role in getting convicted and unrepentant murderer Kathy Boudin a parole, has now published a similar massive plea posing as a news story for her accomplice, Judy Clark. The piece is maliciously titled “The Radical Transformation of Judy Clark” as though Clark, understanding the heinous nature of her crime which left 9 children fatherless, is prepared to renounce the life that led to it. Nothing could be further from the truth. Of course Clark is in her sixties now and regrets her separation from the infant she abandoned to commit the crime (her last crime not her only crime). Her daughter  is now 31 and she would obviously like to be able to share the kind of life with her that her victims cannot share with their dead fathers. And, of course, being old and gray, she no longer thinks Amerikkka is on the brink of a violent revolution and liberation. Unlike Boudin, moreover, she does seem to have given some thought to the enormity  of what she did to those nine fatherless children. But that said, there is no indication that her parole plea is anything but self-serving, or that she has turned her back on the progressive terrorists — Boudin, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn among them — who were her comrades-in-arms through the twelve years of armed warfare she conducted against her country and its citizens, which left more than a handful of people dead.

To begin with, Clark and her mouthpiece at the Times, present the culprit as an absent-minded accomplice to the one crime for which she was convicted, the Brinks robbery in Nyack NY in 1981. According to Clark,  her participation  was an “obligation” — the fulfillment of a promise she had made to participate as a getaway driver in a robbery she thought would never take place. This is baloney. Clark was part of a group that called itself “The Family,” which  was a working alliance between the Black Liberation Army and the May 19th Communist Movement (so-named in part to commemorate the day the BLA murdered a black and white police team in New York for no reason other than that they were a black and white officer working together).

The May 19 gang was mainly women (among them Boudin, Clark and Susan Rosenberg) who served as the getaway team for the BLA in a string of bank robberies in which people were killed. One attempted assassination of  a New York judge was unsuccessful. All these crimes were committed in the name of the revolution, which in the perverse eyes of progressives like Judy Clark, justified them. The Family had also sprung a cold-blooded killer — Assata Shakur — from federal prison. Clark’s role in the May 19th organization was not the beginning of her criminal career but its fulfillment. Previously she had spent 7 years as one of the most fanatical members of the Weather Underground, helping to conduct many bombings and kill at least three people, and probably also two police officers whose deaths are still under investigation.

A guilty person who understands their guilt and has genuine remorse begins by accepting responsibility for what they did and for all they did — and not pretending (as Clark does in this article) that they became a violent radical only after they were arrested as a result of guilt for not having been revolutionary enough. Or that their participation in the one crime they were apprehended for was actually the result of inattention or some other excusable offense.

Far more important, a truly remorseful terrorist will feel obligated to turn his back on his fellow terrorists and their supporters and do the innocent a service by revealing what they know, and who their networks are, and what they actually did — not just what they got caught doing. This kind of truth-telling is an authentic form of atonement and would protect others — and particularly young radicals just starting out who may become involved in criminal ventures just as Clark did when she was young and the tragedies she caused were still in front of her.

Update: Ron Radosh has a different take at Pajamas Media.

I did my mourning for Christopher when he was given his death sentence last July and appeared in public as a punished shell of his former self. For those of us who knew him, it was hard to watch and painful to think about. Christopher was a great entertainer and everyone will miss him for that. He was also an outspoken if inconsistent moralist, and a fearless champion of the right to think and speak one’s mind, and he will be remembered gratefully for that.

Christopher had a dark, mean side, which was not so likeable, and whose bile was directed at religious people and select conservatives like Ronald Reagan, and for some reason celebrities like Lady Di. But his wit and verbal bravura were irresistible and helped many to forgive him his transgressions. When he was struck with cancer, thousands of his targets directed prayers for him to heaven in the face of his ridicule.

He was a man of the Left to the end, and that is where he went to die. In his last decade he had held his comrades to account for their malicious support for the tyrant in Iraq and their equally disgraceful attacks on their country for its support for freedom. It was his remarkable achievement to retain his standing in a movement committed to those ends. He was able to do so in part because of his final campaign against God, which occupied the main part of his dying days. I understand why Christopher did this, even though its ordeals took precious time and attention from his family and friends and from himself. He was when all was said and done a romantic, who sacrificed his life in this world to the fantasy of a future he imagined – first without capitalism and then without faith.

I have missed Christopher since the day he was given his death sentence. I have reflected more than once on the times I saw him early in the day with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other and the look of a man who had been freshly mugged, and thought my friend is killing himself, knowing that there was nothing I could say or do to stop him. After his diagnosis, Christopher defended his reckless self-destruction saying it helped to make his life give off “a more lovely light.” I think it did for him, and am glad for that, though those of us who enjoyed its pleasures will wish he had found some other way to shine.

The Father of Palestinian “Nationalism” and His Hero

Some conservatives, most notably Elliot Abrams, have criticized Newt Gingrich’s observation that the Palestinians are an invented people by saying that even if they are — (and there is no real question but that they are) — they’ve been around long enough (50 years, or since the creation of the PLO in 1964) so that we need to deal with that fact — not. What makes anyone think this is a people even today? Last spring I spoke at Brooklyn College. My speech was attended and then obstructed by a sizeable contingent from the Brooklyn College “Palestinian Club” — at least fifty people, all ethnic Arabs claiming to be Palestinians. During my talk I referred to the Palestinian death cult, its admiration for Hitler, its determination to wipe the Jewish state from the face of the earth, its eagerness to kill any Jew and to blow up its own children in the process. I said it was a “sick, sick culture.” But when the members of the so-called Palestinian Club erupted at me, what they said was “Why do you want to lynch all Muslims?” (This is on video available on YouTube or on our site — under “Videos” — for anyone who wants to check. It comes in the Q&A period.) This does not sound like a nationalist movement.

But the evidence is that Palestinians are a political fiction for a movement whose organizing desire is the destruction of the Jewish state and expulsion of the Jews is far stronger than this small incident. In 1948, 80% of the so-called “Palestine Mandate” had been given to the Hashemite minority in control of Jordan. The Jews were given half of the remaining 20% and the Arabs the other half. A nationalist movement would surely have accepted the partition and then laid claim to the 80% controlled by the Hashemites in Jordan. No such thing happened. Instead the Arab states including Jordan attacked the Jewish state with the intention of destroying it.

The upshot of that war was a Jewish victory in 1949. Whereupon Egypt annexed Gaza and Jordan annexed the West Bank — all the territory that had been offered to the so-called Palestinians and rejected by them.  There was not a peep out of the Arab world — or out of the so-called Palestinians — over this rejection. Why? Because a Palestinian state was never their agenda. Their agenda was and is the destruction of the Jewish state and the expulsion of the Jews from the Middle East — or failing that, their absolute subjection as a hated minority without access to state power.

Hamas is not a national movement. It is a fanatical religious cult which seeks a Muslim Empire throughout the Middle East and — in so many words — the extermination of the Jews. That’s in their charter. Is there an objection to this Nazi agenda from Abbas and the “moderate” terrorists of the West Bank? Not at all. The PLO has declared it will not recognize a Jewish state, has said that Palestine will be Jew free, and has formed an alliance with the Hamas Nazis.

The agenda of the Arabs in the Middle East is not nationalist — that went out with the vile dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser. The agenda is Islam — an Islam whose prophet calls for the extermination of the Jews and whose leaders call on their Arab brethren to finish the job that Hitler started.

In an interview on Saturday, Newt Gingrich put some reality into the surreal discussion of the Middle East conflict and (as he put it) the delusional nature of the current “peace process.” The Palestinians are indeed an “invented people” — invented by the Nasser dictatorship and KGB by the way — and the Hitlerian lie that Israel occupies one square inch of “Arab” let alone “Palestinian” land needs to be buried for any clarity on what the conflict is about, let alone progress towards peace.

Of course there is no peace in the Middle East and there can be no peace so long as the Muslim Arabs want to kill the Jews and destroy the Jewish state. That is the explicit goal of the enemies of Israel in the terrorist entities of Gaza and the West Bank, and also of Israel’s principal enemy the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Newt Gingrich’s gutsy statements — if he will hold to them — could change the nature of the debate not only about how to deal with the Islamic terrorists of the Middle East but with the Islamic jihad itself. For the campaign to destroy Israel is at bottom a campaign to restore the Muslim (not Arab) ummah — as it was under the Turkish empire and the caliphate.

According to CNN, a Palestinian spokesman called Gingrich’s observation that the Palestinians are “an invented people” quote “the most racist I’ve ever seen.” This just shows what brazen liars Palestinian spokesmen are. Everything that Gingrich said was obvious fact. For nearly 2,000 years “Palestine” referred to region not a people — just as “New England” refers to a region not a people. In 1948 the Arabs of the Palestine region were not talking about a Palestinian state and were not referring to themselves as Palestinians. That came in 1964 with the creation of the PLO, engineered by the KGB and the Jew-hating dictator of Egypt, Gamel Abdel Nasser. Even then the PLO charter (which is still available on the web) did not call for the liberation of the West Bank or Gaza (annexed by Jordan and Egypt respectively) but for the destruction of the Jewish state. Jew hatred is what has driven the conflict in the Middle East which is more precisely described as a genocidal war against the Jews.

The Father of Palestinian “Nationalism” and His Hero

Some conservatives, most notably Elliot Abrams, have criticized Newt Gingrich’s observation that the Palestinians are an invented people by saying that even if they are — (and there is no real question but that they are) — they’ve been around long enough (50 years, or since the creation of the PLO in 1964) so that we need to deal with that fact — not. What makes anyone think this is a people even today? Last spring I spoke at Brooklyn College. My speech was attended and then obstructed by a sizeable contingent from the Brooklyn College “Palestinian Club” — at least fifty people, all ethnic Arabs claiming to be Palestinians. During my talk I referred to the Palestinian death cult, its admiration for Hitler, its determination to wipe the Jewish state from the face of the earth, its eagerness to kill any Jew and to blow up its own children in the process. I said it was a “sick, sick culture.” But when the members of the so-called Palestinian Club erupted at me, what they said was “Why do you want to lynch all Muslims?” (This is on video available on YouTube or on our site — under “Videos” — for anyone who wants to check. It comes in the Q&A period.) This does not sound like a nationalist movement.

But the evidence is that Palestinians are a political fiction for a movement whose organizing desire is the destruction of the Jewish state and expulsion of the Jews is far stronger than this small incident. In 1948, 80% of the so-called “Palestine Mandate” had been given to the Hashemite minority in control of Jordan. The Jews were given half of the remaining 20% and the Arabs the other half. A nationalist movement would surely have accepted the partition and then laid claim to the 80% controlled by the Hashemites in Jordan. No such thing happened. Instead the Arab states including Jordan attacked the Jewish state with the intention of destroying it.

The upshot of that war was a Jewish victory in 1949. Whereupon Egypt annexed Gaza and Jordan annexed the West Bank — all the territory that had been offered to the so-called Palestinians and rejected by them.  There was not a peep out of the Arab world — or out of the so-called Palestinians — over this rejection. Why? Because a Palestinian state was never their agenda. Their agenda was and is the destruction of the Jewish state and the expulsion of the Jews from the Middle East — or failing that, their absolute subjection as a hated minority without access to state power.

Hamas is not a national movement. It is a fanatical religious cult which seeks a Muslim Empire throughout the Middle East and — in so many words — the extermination of the Jews. That’s in their charter. Is there an objection to this Nazi agenda from Abbas and the “moderate” terrorists of the West Bank? Not at all. The PLO has declared it will not recognize a Jewish state, has said that Palestine will be Jew free, and has formed an alliance with the Hamas Nazis.

The agenda of the Arabs in the Middle East is not nationalist — that went out with the vile dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser. The agenda is Islam — an Islam whose prophet calls for the extermination of the Jews and whose leaders call on their Arab brethren to finish the job that Hitler started.

In an interview yesterday, Newt Gingrich put some reality into the surreal discussion of the Middle East conflict and (as he put it) the delusional nature of the current “peace process.” The Palestinians are indeed an “invented people” — invented by the Nasser dictatorship and KGB by the way — and the Hitlerian lie that Israel occupies one square inch of “Arab” let alone “Palestinian” land needs to be buried for any clarity on what the conflict is about, let alone progress towards peace. Of course there is no peace in the Middle East and can be no peace so long as the Muslim Arabs want to kill the Jews and destroy the Jewish state. That is the explicit goal of the enemies of Israel in the terrorist entities of Gaza and the West Bank, and also of Israel’s principal enemy the Islamic Republic of Iran. Newt Gingrich’s gutsy statements — if will hold to them — could change the nature of the debate not only about how to deal with the Islamic terrorists of the Middle East but with the Islamic jihad itself. For the campaign to destroy Israel is at bottom a campaign to restore the Muslim (not Arab) ummah — as it was under the Turkish empire and the caliphate.

According to CNN, a Palestinian spokesman called Gingrich’s observation that the Palestinians are “an invented people” quote “the most racist I’ve ever seen.” This just shows what brazen liars Palestinian spokesmen are. Everything that Gingrich said was obvious fact. For nearly 2,000 years “Palestine” referred to region not a people — just as “New England” refers to a region not a people. In 1948 the Arabs of the Palestine region were not talking about a Palestinian state and were not referring to themselves as Palestinians. That came in 1964 with the creation of the PLO, engineered by the KGB and the Jew-hating dictator of Egypt, Gamel Abdel Nasser. Even then the PLO charter (which is still available on the web) did not call for the liberation of the West Bank or Gaza (annexed by Jordan and Egypt respectively) but for the destruction of the Jewish state. Jew hatred is what has driven the conflict in the Middle East which is more precisely described as a genocidal war against the Jews.

A bunch of students who think they’re revolutionaries formed a mob at UC Davis the other day, blocked a public walkway and refused to move when campus police requested them to do so. As participants in the Occupy Wall Streets on American neighborhoods and now campuses, these are people who support violence against a democratically elected government at home and terrorism abroad. They are friends and comrades of Jew-haters both domestic and foreign. You will notice the Keffiyehs in the video — but the record of the Occupiers is quite clear — on the matter of Jews, on the matter of violence and on the matter of hatred for their own country.

To be a “revolutionary” in a democratic country is to be a self-conceived and self-declared outlaw. That’s who these students are. Of course they may not realize who they are since the adults around them have conspired not to hold them accountable for their actions. But that’s who they are. I have long been of the opinion that the Sixties might have been avoided if administrators had responded to the illegal occupations of college campuses by expelling the culprits responsible. I see the same mistake being made now by the administrators at UC Davis who in the midst of what is — for them — a public relations nightmare, are groveling before these enemies of civility, decency, public order and the fundamental principles which sustain our Republic.

These demonstrators, these haters of our civic order, have forfeited the right to be subsidized by California taxpayers and to occupy privileged spots at our public universities. They need to be taught a lesson as much as our society needs to learn a lesson.Treating adults as children is bad policy; treating the enemies of American democracy as children and “idealists” can be  suicidal. If we don’t defend ourselves, there is no one else who will.

To be a “revolutionary” in a democratic country is to be a self-conceived and self-declared outlaw. That’s who these students are. Of course they may not realize who they are since the adults around them have conspired not to hold them accountable for their actions. But that’s who they are. I have long been of the opinion that the Sixties might have been avoided if administrators had responded to the illegal occupations of college campuses by expelling the culprits responsible. I see the same mistake being made now by the administrators at UC Davis who in the midst of what is — for them — a public relations nightmare, are groveling before these enemies of civility, decency, public order and the fundamental principles which sustain our Republic.

These demonstrators, these haters of our civic order, have forfeited the right to be subsidized by California taxpayers and to occupy privileged spots at our public universities. They need to be taught a lesson as much as our society needs to learn a lesson.Treating adults as children is bad policy; treating the enemies of American democracy as children and “idealists” can be  suicidal. If we don’t defend ourselves, there is no one else who will.

A friend of mine sagely observed that the difference between conservatives and leftists is that we are creators and they are destroyers. You couldn’t have a better picture of that than the contrast between the peaceful Tea Party demonstrators and the mobs defacing cities and causing millions of dollars in damage all over America and now the world. That’s because the Tea Partiers love their country and respect their communities, even those they disagree with. Whereas the destroyers respect nothing and are driven by their primary emotions which are envy, resentment and hate.

Make no mistake about who these people are. This is the same global communist movement that attacked the World Trade Organization and “evil corporations” in 2001, and that took to the streets to defend Saddam Hussein and call Bush Hitler in 2002. The forces behind this movement are identical: Soros, the Shadow Party, gangster socialist unions and a “progressive” intelligentsia whose hatred of the capitalist West has caused it to lose its collective mind.

The fascist face of Occupy Wall Street