The Obama administration’s position on Syria is clear. Administration officials have said that Bashar Assad’s days are numbered and affirmed that the goal is a “democratic transition” that would see Assad deposed from power. President Obama has added moral urgency to the situation, condemning Assad’s brutal 11-month crackdown on dissent and vowing that “cruelty must be confronted for the sake of justice and human dignity.” For all the forcefulness of its intentions, though, the administration has yet to spell out a concrete course for ousting Assad and ending the violence.

Diplomacy seems to be the administration’s preferred strategy for regime change, at least judging from the desperate way in which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tried to win Russian support for a UN Security Council resolution backing Assad’s exit. But as Russia and China’s obdurate refusal to part ways with Assad shows, there will be no such unanimity at the UN. Neither country seems to have been moved by Syria’s humanitarian crisis, as UN ambassador Susan Rice’s admonition that both countries “will have any future blood spilled on their hands” plainly has fallen on deaf ears.

Russia and China’s backing isn’t necessary to tighten sanctions or to seize the regime’s finances abroad, but these measures may have reached diminishing returns. Switzerland and the EU have already frozen Assad and his lieutenants’ assets and it’s not clear how much more can be done on this front. Powerful economic sanctions have already been pushed through by the European Union, Turkey, and the Arab League, meanwhile, and while their impact will certainly be felt in Damascus it’s unlikely to be decisive. As international sanctions expert Daniel Drezner points out, sanctions alone rarely collapse regimes as determined to hold on to power as Assad’s.

The administration’s least-preferred option – the use of force – is also unlikely. Although the Department of Defense has said that it is reviewing all options for Syria, the administration has been at pains to stress that it has not been considering a Libya-style military intervention. Speaking with NBC’s Matt Lauer last Sunday, President Obama stressed that it is “very important for us to try to resolve this without recourse to outside military intervention.” Obama added that he thought that was “possible.”

This reluctance may seems strange coming from the Obama administration, particularly considering its willingness to use force in Libya, where Moammar Qadaffi only threatened the kind of collective punishment and humanitarian disaster that Assad has already inflicted on Syrians. But according to national security reporter Laura Rozen, the administration considers Syria a different case for several reasons.

First, Syria’s location matters more than Libya’s. Syria’s neighbors – Iraq, Israel, Turkey – make the threat of regional instability arising from military intervention far more worrying. There is also the matter of Syria’s internal sectarian divisions and its fractured political opposition. Not only are there long-running tensions between the majority Sunnis and the Alawaite sect of Assad, but there is feuding even among the two leading opposition groups, the Syrian National Council and the National Coordination Body, who fell out most recently after disagreeing about the use of foreign force against Assad.

[Editor's note: The radical Left in America is once again mobilizing in our communities and on our campuses. Get the whole story behind Occupy Wall Street and the new phase in the rebirth of the communist Left by reading the new broadside by David Horowitz and John Perazzo, Occupy Wall Street: The Communist Movement Reborn. This essential pamphlet exposes the roots, leaders and hidden agendas of the radical movement and its war on capitalism and free societies.]

The latest attempt by the radical Left to capitalize on the neo-communist movement known as OWS is emanating from an old source. The “new” Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which derives its name, inspiration, and mission from the original SDS of the ’60s, is calling for a “Day of Action” scheduled for March 1st. The rhetoric is tiresomely familiar. “We believe that education is a right, not an economic privilege for the advantaged,” says their website. ”We demand and fight for a university that is for everyone! … We want student, worker and faculty control over our universities; we should be in control of our own futures and lives.”

Hoping to channel the mob-rage made so fashionable by the broader Occupy movement, it is no surprise who these students blame for their woes. “We refuse to pay for the crisis created by the 1%. We refuse to accept the dismantling of our schools and universities, while the banks and corporations make record profits. We refuse to accept educational re-segregation, massive tuition increases, outrageous student debt, and increasing privatization and corporatization. They got bailed out and we got sold out. But through nationally coordinated mass action we can and will turn back the tide of austerity.”

But don’t count on the campus Left acknowledging government culpability in the crisis it bemoans. It was government, after all, that threatened banks with fines and other restrictions if they refused to lower their lending standards to accommodate mortgage applicants who had no business owning a home. Likewise, government has also facilitated the enormous increases in college tuition. The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education discovered college tuition and fees increased 439 percent from 1982 to 2007, while median family income rose 147 percent. Why? Because taxpayers are guaranteeing student loans (to the tune of $1 trillion currently)–all of which were taken over by the government in 2010 as part of Obamacare. Thus, colleges have no incentive whatsoever to lower their costs.

Furthermore, one of the critical funding sources for colleges is endowment funds. Even in the down economy of 2009, such funding totaled more than $300 billion. Who endows universities? Those with enough wealth to give large sums of money away, aka the very “1 percent” those currently attending college love to vilify.

Ironically, the same SDS that calls for “chops from the top,” meaning to overpaid administrators, is the one that is calling for even more of the cost-increasing academic inanity we’ve seen rising for decades: “Ethnic, Women’s, Queer, and African/a studies departments,” along with “reparations [i.e., affirmative action] for bias in admissions owing to [longstanding] systems of oppression.” What they don’t know is that they’ve succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. “For the last three decades, colleges have added more and more tuition-busting bureaucratic fat; since 2006, full-time administrators have outnumbered faculty nationally,” writes Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald.

What kind of administrators? Those who facilitate the SDS wish list. Here’s a partial roster of administrators at UC Berkeley: Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion; Director of Faculty Relations and Development in Academic Personnel; Director of the UC Davis Cross-Cultural Center; Director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Resource Center; Academic Enrichment Coordinator; Diversity Program Coordinator; Early Resolution Discrimination Coordinator; and Associate Executive Vice Chancellor for Campus Community Relations.

Racism is about many things but it isn’t about race. To understand the uses of race in American liberalism requires understanding its place in the political culture. When American liberals speak of race they aren’t speaking in the genetic sense. What they are doing is clumsily piggybacking class onto race and adding one dubious construct to another.

The placement of racial politics at the center of liberal advocacy coincided with a growing national prosperity that seemed to be on the way to making class warfare of the old kind irrelevant. Previous liberal civil rights activity had been a subset of class, but class now became a subset of race. And both were a means of liberal self-definition as the people concerned with the plight of the downtrodden.

Class warfare was not really about the poor. It was about using a permanent social problem as a means of recreating the social order and gaining permanent political power. Race is just class dressed up in the same old class warfare clothes so that there is nearly no distinction between the two. Reformers gain power by attacking the failures of the system and positioning a social problem as an open sore that must be healed. But it isn’t healing that they have in mind.

When your power is a product of social problems, then the failure to locate social problems that are an open sore on society, a cry of conscience and a grievous crime that must be faced, leaves you powerless and irrelevant. Once you start running out of legitimate social problems to tackle, then you have no choice but to start creating them or exaggerating them. Whether the problems you are dealing with are real or unreal, your challenge is to find ways to make them worse in order to retain your power and the social relevance of your movement.

Race has very little to do with racial politics, which rely on the older methodologies of radicalizing slums and using subsidies to elevate community leaders who will support the reformers, all tactics that date back centuries and long predate the politicization of race.

When the Democratic Party had its change of heart on race all it did was take the same methods it used on German, Irish, Jewish and Italian immigrants and shift them to urban African-Americans who had come north and were living in the same neighborhoods formerly occupied by the immigrants. And so the party that during the Civil War orchestrated urban anti-draft riots by white immigrants targeting African-Americans was using the same methods to orchestrate African-American riots aimed at the second and third generation of working class immigrants that it had once fostered. What most people thought of as racial politics was just the Democratic Party doing what it had been doing all along.

Race hasn’t simply been politicized. The practical meaning of the word has been so thoroughly transformed that it does not refer to what most people think that it does. In the liberal lexicon race, like class, is an outcast term. It is a catchall term meaning those who are oppressed by the powerful majority. It is why the left will use accusations of racism in completely inappropriate ways that make no sense in relation to the dictionary definition.

Muslims are not a race, but they have been classified as an oppressed group. Socialism is not a race, but they are the official representatives of all oppressed peoples. To insult either one is to be “racist” because racism refers to majority oppression and nothing else. To be a racist is to oppose or denigrate the moral worldview of the reformers without reference to the skin color of any of the parties. Therefore African-American opponents of President Clinton were racists because the terminology of race had nothing to do with the preexisting racial construct. The idea of race as it had existed in the United States no longer applied. Words like racism were part of the Newspeak grammar which insisted on appropriating the moral force of the old meanings, but without actually employing those meanings.

This liberal lexicon is the Newspeak that is all around us. It relies on the moral power of words while first subtly and then grossly changing their definitions until they no longer have anything to do with the old meaning. The process begins with politicized terminology and ends when the core terminology of a free country like “rights,” “freedom” and “democracy”  no longer have anything in common with their formal definitions. Their new definitions are those that serve the purposes of the ideology that commands them.

Regardless of what they are supposed to mean, progressivism, racial tolerance and social justice all mean the same thing. And so in the inverse, racism, conservatism and small government also add up to variations of the same idea in the liberal lexicon. Which might not be so much of a problem if it were not also the lexicon being used by the media, academics, politicians, judges and the entertainment industry to name a few groups who are invested in the altered meanings because they are also invested in the ideology that those meanings support.

Ideologies define a worldview where for compelling moral reasons the ideologues are the only ones who can be safely allowed to rule. Imposing this worldview on the people as often as possible and through every possible venue from news reporting to novels and from music to the educational system allows for the perpetual power of the ideologues. So long as the cause is just then no possible overreach of power or abuse can ever justify removing the ideologues from their petty thrones.

Not long ago, I used this space to ask if the Arab Spring was like 2009 (the failed Twitter Revolution in Iran), 1989 (the democratic revolutions in Eastern Europe) or 1979 (the Islamist revolution in Iran). Like others, I believed the end of Mubarak’s autocratic rule was something to celebrate, but I worried that what ultimately replaces Mubarak may not be worth celebrating. And sadly, a year later, elements of the Arab Spring are starting to resemble 1979, as evidenced by the brewing hostage crisis in Egypt.

Nineteen American citizens working for well-known and well-established nonprofit groups are being held on trumped-up charges that they tried to destabilize Egypt. Their offices were raided in late December, some are holed up in the U.S. embassy and all of them have been barred from flying out of Egypt. As Time magazine notes, December is significant. December is when Congress passed a number of conditions for aid to the Egyptian military, including proving a “commitment to Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel, progress toward democratic reforms, and the protection of free expression, association and religion.” Not only are the last two of those conditions not being met by Egypt, but Time adds that Cairo’s case against the Americans is “propagated by the military-led regime.”

That’s also an important part of the story. To its credit, the Egyptian military played a key role in persuading Mubarak to cede power, and in preventing Egypt from careening into chaos. The Egyptian military is now trying to serve as something of a referee/power broker/king-maker. Up until this crisis, Washington recognized that while having the Egyptian military in charge is not ideal, it may be necessary to hold the political pieces together in Egypt. But if this is how the “responsible” parties in post-Mubarak Egypt are going to treat Americans, then it’s time to reevaluate everything about this interests-based relationship. Hopefully, Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey is conveying that very message in his talks in Cairo.

The clear, unambiguous and indeed private message should be threefold:

• The U.S. aid spigot—an average of $2 billion per year since 1979—will be shut off if these hostages aren’t freed and if post-Mubarak Egypt continues to resemble post-Shah Iran. As Time puts it, “if Egypt’s generals get away with the NGO crackdown and the political humiliation of its biggest foreign benefactor, it’s going to set a dangerous precedent for other regimes testing the waters of democracy.”

• The United States is prepared to radically rethink its security posture and force structure in the region. There are many other countries in the region that will take U.S. aid dollars and assist the U.S. in protecting its strategic interests.

• U.S. force will be employed if American interests or citizens are again threatened. Washington cannot allow another far-off revolution to hold America hostage.

Heretofore, debt-defaulting Greece has operated on Raiders of the Lost Ark-logic: “You throw me the idol; I’ll throw you the whip.” Its European Union and International Monetary Fund sugar daddies have tired of sending cash without budget reforms in return. On Thursday, they rejected Greece’s newest amorphous pledge of budget cuts later for billions now. Burned before by big promises with no fulfillment, the Eurogroup sent a clear message to the Greeks through its chair Jean-Claude Juncker: “no disbursement before implementation.”

But with Greece already forcing creditors to take a haircut, and refusing to make good on its pledged reforms, why would European nations agree to throw more good money after bad?

A coalition of Greek political leaders came to an agreement on Thursday to narrow the chasm between revenues and receipts in hopes of paving the way for $172 billion in new loans from the European Union. But EU finance ministers balked at the proposal that contained very little in specified cuts for non-defense-related government expenditures. The European finance ministers demanded from the troubled nation $325 billion in new cuts and parliament’s preapproval of the plan before it will agree to a further bailout. Greece, which is already de facto in default since other nations are paying its creditors, stands to legally default on March 20 if it doesn’t receive a cash infusion.

The refusal to implement promised budgetary and economic structural reforms is a tacit admission that Greek politicians believe the debt crisis just isn’t their fault. This is a popular sentiment within Greece, muted only when going abroad with hat in hand. Foreign bankers, EU bureaucrats, and American capitalists are favorite scapegoats according to internal Greek rhetoric. If outsiders are to blame for the crisis, why should Greeks reform their economic system? It’s everyone else who has the problem, after all, not Greece.

Recently the Partij voor Moslim Nederland (Party for Muslim Netherlands), which already enjoys a significant presence in various municipal governments in that country, announced that it intended to run candidates for the Dutch Parliament.  An article in Forbes listed the party’s major principles, which included limits on “offensive” speech about religion; the criminalization of blasphemy and of the destruction of religious texts; immediate admission of Turkey to the EU; an end to support for Israel; and the free and unimpeded importation of Muslim brides from abroad.

Whether to work within existing parties, or to concentrate on forming and building up separate Muslim parties, has always been a key strategic question for the soft jihadists of Europe.  Though there are Muslims in Norway who are prominent members of several large traditional parties, the country now has a Muslim party too.  Founded in 2009 as the Independent Labour Party, it was obliged later that year to change its name to the Samtidspartiet (Contemporary Party) because of official concerns that it might be confused with the Norwegian Labor Party.  When outlining the party’s goals, its founder, Norwegian-Pakistani Ghuffor Butt, focused on a desire for lower taxes, gas prices, and the like – making it sound like rather a libertarian party for Muslims.  Formerly a cinema director, producer, and political journalist in Pakistan, as well as an actor in some twenty Pakistani movies, Butt ran – and, as far as I know, still runs – a successful store in Grønland, a largely Muslim district in Oslo, that sells Bollywood films.

Yet lest these credentials suggest he was a “liberal” and “modern” Muslim, Butt made it clear, in answer to a Dagbladet journalist’s questions, that his party’s other objectives included lifting the ban on hijab in the police force, establishing exclusively Muslim schools and hospitals, instructing immigrant-group children in their parents’ native tongue rather than in Norwegian, easing residence-visa rules, using taxpayer money to fund the building of mosques and pay the salaries of imams, punishing those who had reprinted the Danish Muhammed cartoons, withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, and prohibiting homosexuality.  (Later, presumably loath to offend some of his allies on the left, Butt made a phone call to Dagbladet to walk back the bit about gays: while homosexual conduct is forbidden by Islam, he said, the party did not intend to change Norwegian law on the subject.  Yeah, right.)

“If Norwegians didn’t drink alcohol, have premarital sex, and eat pork,” Butt told Dagbladet, “they’d be the world’s best Muslims.”  He also suggested that Mossad was responsible for 9/11 and echoed the popular myth that Jews hadn’t shown up for work at the World Trade Center that day.

It is interesting to note that the official launch of this putatively Norwegian political party took place in Pakistan – yet another apparent indication of the way in which many Norwegian-Pakistanis view their relationships to their old and new homelands.  As Butt explained, it was easier to reach Norwegian Pakistani voters in Norway this way because they didn’t watch Norwegian TV: thanks to satellite dishes, their sets are tuned to the Pakistani channels on which he was planning to do interviews.  “In three years, Oslo’s mayor will be a Norwegian-Pakistani,” he predicted (wrong so far), and expressed the hope that within fifteen years a “second-generation immigrant” would be Norway’s prime minister.

[Editor's note: The article below is written by Eric Allen Bell, a filmmaker who was recently banned from blogging at  the “Daily Kos” because he wrote three articles that ran afoul of the mindset there, specifically naming “Loonwatch.com” as a “terrorist spin control network.” This article first appeared in our Feb 7 issue and we have decided to rerun it due to the massive interest and reaction it received. Don't miss Eric Bell on Frontpage's television program, The Glazov Gang, which we will air in our Monday, Feb. 13 edition.]

A strange thing happened to me the other day when I was driving past the Federal Building in Los Angeles.  There were a crowd of people assembled there with signs which said that Israel is an aggressive force in the Middle East and that Iran is being picked on.  As I stopped at a red light I heard a man with a mega phone lead the protesters in a chant charging Obama with genocide.  I saw many young people and several Muslim women with their heads covered.  It was an anti-war demonstration that probably a year ago I would have supported.  But although I am not in favor of military action, I know that Iran is not another Iraq, and that in fact there is more going on here than the overly-simplified picture that the protestors were painting, as cars drove by honking in support.  As the light turned green another sign caught my eye – a picture of the Twin Towers burning which read “911 Was an Inside Job”.  As I looked at a sea of Palestinian flags and college kids banging on drums I felt a certain frustration – frustration based on a series of events that have changed my world view.

In the Summer of 2010, having recently escaped Hollywood, CA to take a much needed break from my profession as a film maker, I was driving in my car listening to a story on NPR.  It seems the people in my new home of Murfreesboro, TN were up in arms over the proposed construction of a 53,000 square foot mega mosque, to be built in their small town in the middle of the American Bible Belt.

I listened carefully, to the sound bytes, of those who had shown up to a town hall meeting to voice their opposition and, as someone who was rather new to the South, I was surprised by what I was hearing.   “America is a Christian nation and there is only one God and his name is not Allah and his son is Jesus Christ” and “America is a Christian Nation” and “These Muslims do not share my values and I don’t want them in my backyard”.  Growing up in Southern California, I had never heard anything like this before in my life.  And I started to follow the story with great interest.

On the outer edge of town, off a small country road, there was a large parcel of land, right next door to a Baptist church, with a big sign that read, “Future Home of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro”.  Over the past 6 months that sign had been defaced twice.  Once it was broken in half and another time the words “Not Welcome” were spray painted over it.

Rutherford County, which includes Murfreesboro, only has a little over 100,000 residents and yet the area boasts nearly 200 Christian churches.  Having not been much of a fan of Islam or Christianity or religion in general (and that’s putting it mildly) I saw this as something of a David vs. Goliath story – with fanatical Evangelicals bullying a peaceful Muslim population, which had been in the community for over 30 years without there ever being any trouble.  And, after learning that in July there was to be a big parade down Main Street to the town square, protesting the construction of this new mosque, I decided someone really needed to make a documentary about this.  And even though I had gone to Murfreesboro to escape the film world for a while, it seemed pretty clear that if I did not document this in a movie, no one else would.  I wanted to show the world what I was seeing.  So I put together a small film crew and began production on a documentary I would title, “Not Welcome”.

I had never seen more American flags assembled together in one place than I had on that hot July morning as the anti-mosque crowd gathered at the base camp to prepare for the parade.  Many of the marchers showed up wearing red, white and blue.  I had 4 cameras covering the event with one crew embedded with the Liberal activists who were going to counter-demonstrate and the rest of the cameras with me, embedded with those who were to march against the mosque.  I conducted several interviews in the school parking lot where locals and those who had driven for hours gathered, prepared to march against what they perceived to be not only a threat to their way of life, but also something of an insult given the events of September 11, 2001.  Two Congressional candidates, both promising to “stop the Islamic training camp” showed up and used this opportunity to campaign, one of whom even gave a speech through a mega phone reminding folks to vote for him if they wanted to stop Sharia Law from coming to Murfreesboro.  The pastor of Baptist church gathered everyone together in prayer, and the parade took off down Main Street with signs that read “Google the Koran” and “Stop Homegrown Terrorism” and someone in the crowd handed out hundreds of small Israeli flags as several hundred Southerners marched against the mosque.

About six months later I had accumulated over 300 hours of footage, interviewing the parade organizer, both Congressional candidates, the Mayor, the Imam at the mosque and several of its board members, numerous concerned residents on both sides of the issue, Muslim residents, city council members, a Christian Zionist lobbyist who was organizing the opposition to the mosque – and I had even filmed weeks of court proceedings, as a local group had filed suit against the County to stop them from issuing any construction permits to the Islamic Center.  The court proceedings were truly a circus with a country lawyer in loud suit with a bow tie argued that Islam is not a religion and that he was prepared to take this matter to the Supreme Court if necessary.  That legal action had failed and failed miserably.  And although many of the townspeople did in fact have a number of very valid concerns, I felt that those whom they had chosen to represent them were not their best foot forward.  In many ways, for the people of Murfreesboro, TN this turned out to be an international embarrassment – given the level of interest from the press.

Also, someone tried to set fire to some construction equipment at the site of the new mosque and the student activist group, calling themselves “Middle Tennesseans for Religious Freedom” put together a candle light vigil where hundreds of townspeople showed up in support of tolerance.  A few young men showed up in a pickup truck and honked their horn repeatedly throughout the vigil.  Their clothes seemed to indicate they had spent the work day hanging drywall.  And when they put up a huge sign in the back of their truck which read “No Mosque” while misspelling the word mosque, I did not hesitate to film them but to also sort of taunt them, in order to provoke a good response on camera.  And I got it.  One of them said we should suspend the Constitution and went on to say that “All them Mooslums should be shipped home” even the ones who were born here.

Adding more fuel to that fire was an incident that took place when I attempted to interview Kevin Fisher at a Tea Party event on the town square.  It was my opinion that in order to avoid accusations of being bigoted, the money interests (a Christian Zionist organization called Proclaiming Justice to the Nations) chose the only person of color, already involved in this issue, to lead the parade and to be a plaintiff in the lawsuit.  Kevin Fisher was an African American college dropout, who worked as a prison guard and became a passionate opponent of the new mosque, after his wife divorced him and became, you guessed it, a Muslim convert.  When I approached him on the square with a crew that included 4 cameras, saying only “Hi, Kevin” he dialed his cell phone and called 9-1-1 saying that he was being “racially harassed”.  This not only made the headlines of the local paper but the incident, including audio from the 9-1-1 call was played over and over that night on the local evening news.  This became something of a running joke, when I was recognized at the grocery store in Murfreesboro for instance, people would often point at me and say, “Hey, stop racially harassing me” and then we would all have a big laugh.  And Islamic blogs such as Loonwatch.com were only too happy to run an article about how an opponent of the mosque was “playing the race card” against a filmmaker who was just trying to ask questions.

CNN breezed through town and produced a quick hit piece painting all of the mosque opponents as uneducated rednecks and the Islamic community as everyday people who were being wrongly persecuted.  Soledad O’Brien’s producer offered to buy some of my footage from me with the explicit promise that their piece was going to be called “Islam: In America” and would not focus more than a few minutes on Murfreesboro.  After an inside tip that this producer was lying to me, I confronted him and got some rather vague answers.  So I declined to license him any of my material.  And sure enough, the CNN documentary did in fact focus exclusively on Mufreesboro and was called “Unwelcome: The Muslims Next Door”.  Somehow Hollywood, with its usual backstabbing tricks, had managed to find me hiding out in Tennessee.

I had accumulated a lot of good quality footage.  That, combined with the increasing number of physical threats to me personally while filming in large crowds, and death threats that had arrived via email (causing me to look over my shoulder everywhere I went and making it necessary to spend a small fortune on private security) told me it was time.  The writing was on the wall.  It was time for me to leave Murfreesboro, hire a professional Editor and get to work on assembling my footage to create a feature length documentary for theatrical distribution.

Before I go any further, I should mention that, while all of this was happening, I had become involved in the story itself.  I took sides.  I sided with the Islamic community in their legal right to build a house of worship and when I was interviewed by the local papers (it’s not every day that a small town like this has someone shooting a documentary there) when I was asked where I stood on the issue I never hesitated to give my point of view.  And after a time my point of view was sought out by larger newspapers and several local and syndicated radio programs – mostly Conservative and mostly taking issue with my stance.  And I was also invited to write several pieces for Michael Moore’s blog as well.

Although I had left town to edit, there continued to be letters to the editor on a few of the local papers saying that I should leave TN and go back to where I came from.  I could not believe the cartoonish way in which those who opposed the mosque were making their case.  I felt like I was on the right side of this thing – absolutely certain.  But in fact, I was wrong.

Everything I have told you up until now – this version of my story – is exactly how I was seeing things up until something changed.  I went home to Los Angeles, showed my 25 minute short version of the documentary to some distributors and backers, and did the usual dog and pony show that had worked so well to raise funds, for other motion picture projects I had been involved with in the past.  And sure enough someone said they would back the completion of the movie.  It was decided that the focus would be on “the enemy at home” that being what we were calling “Apocalyptic Christianity” (as there was concern about using the word “Zionism” in “Christian Zionism”).  The Murfreesboro issue was to be used as something of a jumping off point to take a look at the expanding influence of the End Times Evangelical lobby in the United States and how they use their influence to manufacture consent for the bombing of oil rich Islamic countries and to influence policy on social issues.  The theme would focus on the problems we have in America, with our own religious lunatic fringe, rather than on a peaceful group of non-Christians who just wanted to build a place of worship.

After writing a few articles for Michael Moore, I also wrote for a liberal blog called Common Dreams and I wrote over a hundred articles for the Daily Kos, a liberal blog so popular that they receive over one million visitors a day.  I felt I was protecting the underdog, going after the bullies.  I really believed that I was on the right side of this thing.

But something kept nagging at me on a gut level.  Something about all of this didn’t quite feel right.  The Arab Spring, which I supported, started to degenerate into the Islamist Winter, and I grew more and more concerned.  I flew back to Nashville to shoot a conference on whether or not Islam was conducive with Democratic Values and on the way to my hotel room I learned that my cab driver was from Egypt.  I asked him how he felt about the fall of Mubarak, a dictator worth over $70 billion dollars while so much of his country was living in poverty and he told me he was concerned.  Concerned?  Wasn’t this good news?  The cab driver was a Coptic Christian and he told me that he feared for his family back home.  “If the Muslims take control, and they will, it will be very dangerous for my parents and my sisters.  I’m scared for them right now”.  After that conversation, I started to pay more attention to the news coming from the Islamic world in the Middle East.

Over the coming months I watched as the Muslim Brotherhood gained political power in Egypt.  I saw that cab driver’s worst fears come true as Coptic Christians were attacked by Islamic mobs.  I saw Tunisia institute Sharia, the brutal Islamic Law.  After Libya fell, the Transitional Council also instituted Islamic Law.  The nuclear armed Islamic government of Pakistan arrested and punished those who cooperated with the United States in killing Osama Bin Laden.  A woman under the Islamic government of Afghanistan faced execution for the crime of being raped.  Similar news stories emerged from Iran.  A man who typed “there is no god” as his Facebook status in Indonesia, the largest Islamic country in the world, was arrested for blasphemy.

Several Muslim men in England were arrested for handing out leaflets to Londoners demanding that homosexuals be executed by hanging for violating Islamic Law with their lifestyle.

And it struck me.  Even though these angry townspeople in Mufreesboro, TN had not articulated their concerns very well, they were only half wrong.  I remember meeting Frank Gaffney and interviewing him in front of the courthouse and asking him if he really thought that the peaceful Muslims here actually presented a real threat to America and he said no.  That caught me off guard so I asked if he really thought it was a credible threat that a community that makes up about one percent of the United States population was just going to suddenly rise up one day and try to take over the country and force Sharia Law onto all of us.  Again he said no.  Then he told me I was asking the wrong questions.  He suggested that I was only looking for answers that would support the conclusions I had already arrived at.  He said he had, after much research, arrived at a different set of conclusions and he challenged me to look a little deeper.  He gave me a report to look at and many, many months later I did look at his report.

It was at this time that I went to my backers and told them that we were not making an honest documentary.  I felt that everything I had put into the 25 minute short version (the one I used to raise the completion funds) was true, but only half true.  It was critical that we also show the very real threats that exist within Islam.  We needed to show that what is happening to these small communities of peaceful Muslims in America are the exception to the rule.  I wanted to show what happens to countries when they gain a Muslim majority, how women are treated, that homosexuals were executed, that free speech did not exist, that the forced Islamic Law was not consistent with Democratic Values – anything and everything I could think of that ought to strike a chord with the Liberal mindset.  And the response I received was, “Eric you are starting to sound like an Islamophobe.  We don’t want to make a movie that promotes fear.  Let’s just stick with the existing plan, okay?”

I fought and I fought.  I showed them a book called “The Truth About Mohammed” but was struck down since the author was a man named Robert Spencer and my backers pointed out that the Southern Poverty Law Center named his “Jihad Watch” site as part of a hate group.  I asked them to watch a documentary called “Islam: What the West Needs to Know” and pointed out that I had researched independently and verified the truth of what was being presented there, but they would not even watch this documentary as they were sure in advance that it was “hate speech” and “propaganda designed to spread fear”.  It probably goes without saying that by now I was very frustrated.  I showed my new backers several verses from the Koran that call for the killing of infidels and was told that these verses were probably being taken out of context.  I showed them a video clip from MEMRI TV of a young Egyptian child reciting a Hadith that calls for the killing of Jews and was told that “you can’t trust MEMRI because they have an agenda”.

I mentioned the popular Islamophobia watchdog site “Loonwatch” and how I had noticed a pattern of deflection all criticisms of radical and violent Islam by calling anyone who publicly raises these concerns a “Loon” and how I felt this was an intentional effort to provide a smoke screen for the terrorists.  I also noted that everything Loonwatch said was in lockstep with the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and now CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation – the largest Islamic charity at one time, which was found to be funneling monies to Islamic terrorist organizations.  I also noted that CAIR had ties to both Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and that Al Qeada had come out of the Muslim Brotherhood.  I expressed my concerns that the Egyptian Imam of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro might have ties to the MB, something I had failed to properly investigate.  But since CAIR had the support of Glenn Greenwald and Amy Goodman’s show, Democracy Now, I was told that I had my facts all wrong.  It was also pointed out to me that if CAIR was allegedly some kind of terrorist front then why do they still have a special tax status and why are they still around?  When I said I do not know but it was possible that the government might prefer to watch them out in the open rather than risk them going underground I was told that my judgment was sounding less and less clear and that maybe I needed to take a step back from the project for a while.

In dealing with the threat of a nuclear Iran, Obama has not merely kicked the proverbial can down the proverbial road; he has actually aided and abetted Iran in its quest for military nuclear capabilities.

Such a grim assessment of Obama’s Iran policy is unavoidable in light of his inaction against Iran for its capture of the RQ-170 stealth drone in December of last year; his silence over Iran’s initiation of 20% uranium enrichment at the underground Fordo facility near Qom; his reluctance to send U.S. aircraft carriers into the Persian Gulf through the Straits of Hormuz;  his hesitation in approving immediate sanctions on Iran’s central bank and energy sector; his silence as Hugo Chavez allies with Iran to develop terrorist and missile bases in Venezuela; his secret attempt to influence Congress to soften US sanctions; and his secret letter of appeasement to Iran.   These inactions are incomprehensible and unforgivable because they have allowed Iran to reach the threshold of becoming a nuclear threat to the entire world.

What can now be done?  All the options are bad. Sanctions have slowed Iran’s progress but not stopped it.  Bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities would certainly inflict crippling pain and would set back Iran’s WMD quest by a year or so; but this course of action brings with it risks of regional upheaval and war, global economic disruption, and Iran-sponsored terror attacks on US and Israeli targets anywhere in the world.  On the other hand, not stopping Iran from bringing the world to the brink of nuclear holocaust has obvious consequences of an even more dire and perilous nature.

How can any country, any national or international leader, dissolve this Gordian knot of similarly evil alternatives?  Israel may have the answer, without an airstrike.

Since 2005 various parts of the Iranian nuclear project have been hit by a series of disasters, which Iran blames on the West, and especially Israel.¹

In April 2006, two transformers blew up and 50 centrifuges were ruined during Iran’s first attempt to enrich uranium at Natantz. A spokesman for the Iranian Atomic Energy Council stated that the raw materials had been “tampered with.”

Between January 2006 and July 2007, three airplanes belonging to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards crashed under mysterious circumstances. Some reports said the planes had simply “stopped working.”

“Stopped working” was also the Iranian explanation for two lethal computer viruses that penetrated the nuclear project’s computer system in 2007, knocking out a large number of centrifuges.

In January 2007, several insulation units in the connecting fixtures of the centrifuges, which were purchased on the black market from suppliers in Eastern Europe, turned out to be flawed and unusable. Iran concluded that some of these suppliers were actually straw companies that were set up by Iran’s enemies to outfit the Iranian nuclear effort with faulty parts.

In January 2007, Dr. Ardeshir Husseinpour, a 44-year-old nuclear scientist, died under mysterious circumstances. The official announcement said he died in a “work accident,” but Iranian intelligence blames Israel.

Massoud Ali Mohammadi, a particle physicist, was killed in January 2010, when a booby-trapped motorcycle parked nearby exploded as he was getting into his car. Some analysts harbor the suspicion that Mohammadi was killed by Iranian agents because of his support for the Iranian opposition leader Mir Hussein Moussavi, but Iran blames Israel.

In June 2010, reports surfaced that the computer system operating the uranium enrichment site of Natanz had been infected with a new and more powerful cyber-weapon, a deadly virus known as “Stuxnet.”  A highly sophisticated, incredibly invasive, but surgically refined virus, Stuxnet infected 59% of Iran’s computers but targeted only those using the Siemens SCADA software used by Iranian nuclear facilities.  Contrary to Iranian denials, analysts confirmed that this cyber-attack delayed Iran’s WMD progress by at least several years and forced 984 centrifuges off-line.

This article was first published by the Stonegate Institute.

The beginning of the New Year saw only an increase in the oppression of Christians under Islam, from Nigeria, where an all-out jihad has been declared in an effort to eradicate the Muslim north of all Christians, to Europe, where Muslim converts to Christianity are still hounded and attacked as apostates.  According to the Chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, “The flight of Christians out of the region is unprecedented and it’s increasing year by year”; in our life time alone, he predicts “Christians might disappear altogether from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Egypt.”

An international report found that Muslim nations make up nine out of the top ten countries where Christians face the “most severe” persecution.  In response to these findings, a Vatican spokesman said that “Among the most serious concerns, the increase in Islamic extremism merits special attention.  Persons and organizations dedicated to extremist Islamic ideology perpetrate terrible acts of violence in many places throughout the world: the Boko Haram sect in Nigeria is but one example. Then there is the climate of insecurity that unfortunately in some countries accompanies the so-called “Arab spring”—a climate that drives many Christians to flee and even to emigrate.”

Categorized by theme, January’s batch of Muslim persecution of Christians around the world includes (but is not limited to) the following accounts, listed in alphabetical order by country, not severity of anecdote.

APOSTASY

Iran: A Christian convert who was arrested in her home has been sentenced to two years in prison. Previously she endured five months of uncertainty detained in the notorious Evin prison, where the government hoped she would come to her senses and renounce Christianity. She was convicted of “broad anti-Islamic propaganda, deceiving citizens by formation of what is called a house church, insulting sacred figures and action against national security.” Likewise, Iranian Pastor Yousef Nadarkhani continues to suffer in prison.  Most recently, he rejected an offer to be released if he publicly acknowledged Islam’s prophet Muhammad as “a messenger sent by God,” which would amount to rejecting Christianity, as Muhammad/Koran reject it.

Kenya: Muslim apostates seeking refuge in Kenya are being tracked and attacked by Muslims from their countries of origin: An Ethiopian who, upon converting to Christianity, was shot by his father, kidnapped and almost killed, is now receiving threatening text messages. Likewise, a Ugandan convert to Christianity is in hiding, his movements severely restricted since “the Muslims are looking to kill me. I need protection and help.”

Kuwait: A royal prince who openly declared that he has converted to Christianity, confirmed the reality that he now might be targeted for killing as an apostate.

Norway: While out for a walk, two Iranian converts to Christianity were stabbed with knives by masked men shouting “infidels!” One of the men stabbed had converted in Iran, was threatened there, and immigrated to Norway, thinking he could escape persecution there.

Somalia: A female convert to Christianity was paraded before a cheering crowd and publicly flogged as punishment for embracing a “foreign religion.” Imprisoned since November, “the public whipping was meant to mark her release.” She received 40 lashes as hundreds of Muslim spectators jeered. An eyewitness said: “I saw her faint. I thought she had died, but soon she regained consciousness and her family took her away.” Likewise, “Somali Islamists arrested a Muslim father after two of his children converted to Christianity” and fled.  He is accused of “failing to raise his sons as good Muslims,” because “good Muslims cannot convert to Christianity.”

Zanzibar: After being robbed, a Muslim convert to Christianity called police to his house; they discovered a Bible during their inspection. The course of inquiry immediately changed from searching for the thieves to asking why he “was practicing a forbidden faith.” He was imprisoned for eight months without trial, and, since being released, has been rejected by his family and is now homeless and diseased.

CHURCH ATTACKS

Azerbaijan: A pastor has been threatened with criminal proceedings following a raid on his church during Sunday service. Earlier, he was told that “a criminal case had been launched over religious literature arousing incitement over other faiths,” and was pressured by authorities to leave the area, which he did, traveling great distances each week to lead church services.

Egypt: Before a bishop was going to inaugurate the incomplete Abu Makka church and celebrate the Epiphany mass, a large number of Salafis and Muslim Brotherhood members entered the building, asserting that the church had no license and so no one should pray in it. One Muslim remarked that the building would be suitable for a mosque and a hospital.

Indonesia: A sticker on the back of the car of a member of the beleaguered Yasmin church saying “We need a friendly Islam, not an angry Islam,” distributed by the family of the late Muslim president, prompted another Islamic attack on the church: scores of Muslims “terrorized the congregation and attacked several church members.” Since 2008, the congregation has been forced to hold Sunday services on the sidewalk outside the church and then later in the home of parishioners. Not satisfied, hundreds of Muslims later searched and found the private home where members were congregating and holding service and prevented them from worshiping there as well: “It crosses the line now. The protesters now come to the residential area, which is not a public place.” A new report notes that anti-Christian attacks have nearly doubled in the last year.

Nigeria: Soon after jihadis issued an ultimatum giving Christians three days to evacuate the region or die, armed Muslims stormed a church and “opened fire on worshippers as their eyes were closed in prayer,” killing six, including the pastor’s wife. Then, as friends and relatives gathered to mourn the deaths of those slain, “Allahu Akbar” screaming Muslims appeared and opened fire again, killing another 20 Christians. Several other churches were bombed, and seven more killed.