* The administration claims Abdulmutallab is now cooperating. That’s either dishonest or idiotic — or both.

If he is cooperating, jeez, you don’t tell the terrorists. Why on earth leak it that the guy’s blabbing, thus warning the enemy? Could the administration — just possibly — be playing politics?

* Even if he’s talking now, Abdulmutallab won’t provide actionable intelligence. It’s too late: His contacts had time to vacate the premises and alter their modes of operation.

The best information that a low-level operative like the Jockey-shorts jerk possesses is highly perishable — the captive isn’t privy to long-term plans, just the immediate details of his mission and a few basic contacts.

via Miranda wrongs – NYPOST.com.

From a comment on Jeanette Pryor’s post yesterday about Sarah Palin and Rand Paul:

i am guessing that you are and/either/or of the following ….a neo-con, a jew, a zionist……….right?

and you support sustained foreign military action primarily on behalf of israel, right?

well those viewpoints do not serve the best interests of the united states of america and people are finally starting to wake up.

From one of our headline board posts (this one is really bad):

Or we could send the Jews back to the European ghettos they crawled out of before they came and defiled the sacred land of Palestine; the Heart of the Middle East

That comment also linked to a disgusting anti-Semitic site — until I deleted the link.

Read the original story at NewsReal Blog » Feature.

But they also take this stance because they believe it. The idea that all critics of jihad and Islamic supremacism are evil people driven by hatred is also simply a Qur'anic principle -- which is a chief reason why Islamic spokesmen in the West so consistently take this line. The Qur'an assumes that anyone who opposes or rejects Islam is evil, malicious, and motivated by greed or envy or both. There is no notion of the dignity of the human person as regards the unbeliever, or any idea of the free conscience operating in good faith in rejecting Islam.

And so the problem with this court decision in India is that Muslims will use it to characterize any and all criticism of Islam as malicious, and to get it censored as a result.

"Islam Can be Criticised, But Not Maliciously: HC," from OutlookIndia, January 6 (thanks to Natassia):

Islam or any other religion can be criticised, but a malicious criticism aimed at promoting communal hatred and painting the whole community as villainous is not permissible, Bombay High Court held today.

Refusing to interpret Quranic verses, Court however advised that verses must be "correlated", and historical background must be kept in mind when interpreting.

I am all for that. The unfortunate truth of this, however, is that contrary to what this court clearly believes, and contrary to popular belief, the "historical background" of the various Qur'anic teachings on jihad don't mitigate, but rather reinforce, Islamic doctrines involving violence against and the subjugation of unbelievers.

A full bench of the High Court upheld the ban on 'Islam - A concept of Political World Invasion By Muslims', written by advocate R V Bhasin. Bhasin had challenged the ban, saying that it violated right to freedom of speech.

The book was banned in state government in 2007, on the ground that it contained derogatory remarks about Islam and prophet Mohammad and insulted Muslim sentiments....

All right, but you'll notice that this article at least doesn't say anything about the book being banned because it contained false information about Islam or Muhammad. Islamic advocacy groups like CAIR have not hesitated to protest in the U.S. against material about Islam that was perfectly true, but which contained material they didn't like. See, for example, here.

Read the original story at Jihad Watch.

"Christian teacher 'forced out' after complaining Muslim pupils praised 9/11 hijackers 'as heroes,'" by Lucy Ballinger for the Daily Mail, February 8:

A Christian teacher told today how he lost his job after complaining that Muslim pupils as young as eight hailed the September 11 hijackers as 'heroes'.

Nicholas Kafouris said he was forced from his £30,000-a-year post because he would not tolerate the 'racist' and 'anti-Semitic' behaviour of children.

He said the predominantly Muslim youngsters openly praised Islamic extremists in class, and hailed the terrorists of the 2001 atrocities as 'martyrs'.

Mr Kafouris, 40, told how one pupil said to him, 'Don't touch me, you're a Christian', when the teacher accidentally brushed against him with his arm.

Others said, 'We want to be Islamic bombers when we grow up', and 'the Christians and Jews are our enemies, you too because you're a Christian', he added.

Mr Kafouris, who had taught at Bigland Green Primary School, in Tower Hamlets, East London, for 12 years, said there was a change in attitude of pupils at the school - where the majority of pupils are Muslim - after the World Trade Center attacks....

Mr Kafouris, a Greek Cypriot, said pupils told him, 'We hate the Christians' and, 'We hate the Jews', despite his attempts to stop them....

He had filled out a 'Racist Incident Reporting Sheet' but claimed the headteacher Jill Hankey dismissed his concerns....

'Some children were expressing delight at the death and killing of people of other cultures and religions: In the last week of November 2006 a child was talking about stabbing another child and I told him this was dangerous talk and that a lawyer had recently been stabbed by teenagers; his reply was:, "I'm glad that man died", 'Why?' I asked. "Because he's a Christian and English and we're Muslim".'

During a religious education lesson about Jonah and the whale, he claims one of the pupils asked if Jonah was a Jew, before shouting: 'I hate the Jews, they're our enemies.'

Mr Kafouris said he again tried to speak to the headteacher about it.

He said: 'The head's response was hostile and offensive again. The very first thing she said to me was: "Oh you again! You're the only teacher that reports these things! Nobody else does!".

'Four times she repeated: "It's because of your lack of discipline that they're saying these things".'...

Now there's a new one: lack of class discipline creates Islamic jihad doctrine, Islamic supremacism, and Islamic antisemitism. Expect a brand new white paper from the Nixon Center forthwith!

Read the original story at Jihad Watch.

I’ve been reading — and worse — listening to leftwing pundits dump on the Conservative Awakening and dismiss it as a “media event.” When 10,000 let alone 100,000 let alone a reported million conservatives — people who are allergic to collective action and despise demonstrations — march on Washington as they did on 9/12 something very serious is going on; I would say a conservative equivalent to the 1960s.

I just came from an event in St. Louis at which Glenn Beck spoke in a sports arena to 11,000 Tea Partiers who paid $20 a head to hear him give a sermon in the Church of American Patriotism, specifically a church whose sacred texts were the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, the objects of the evening’s worship. The event was organized by a tiny organization of religious conservatives closely associated with Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum. The woman who organized the evening had never organized anything on this scale in her life, or even close. She did not know the thousands who came to hear Beck speak, but collected their addresses with the idea of educating them for the struggle for their country that lay ahead. The atmosphere of the evening was that of political rally, with the roof coming down every time Beck rang the patriotic bell. The speech he gave — really the performance — was an astounding paean to America and the sounding of an alarm against the progressive attack on its foundations.

I continue to be amazed by the refusal of the Obama Administration, the Democratic Party, and their retainers in the media at Newsweek, Slate, etc. to understand that the reckless arrogance of the Obama left and the reckless leftism of the Obama regime have triggered a political earthquake in the metaphorical American heartland which stretches from Massachusetts to the Pacific Coast, portending an electoral tsunami to follow. This revolt began last May with California voters’ rejecting five initiatives to raise taxes by 60% majorities and passing a sxith initiative to punish legislators who failed to balance the budget by a 70% margin. These margins held in San Francisco as throughout this liberal state. When liberals reject more taxes and deficits and Obama spills 2 trillion dollars in red ink in an in-your-face defiance of the popular will, you know we are at a historic turning.

Personally I am happy that liberals are so thick-headed and self-righteous — none more so than their incompetent and over-rated chief — because it means they probably won’t wake up in time to correct course and stem this conservative tide.

Reminder: David Horowitz will be on Glenn Beck today at 5:00 PM EST.

Read the original story at NewsReal Blog » Feature.

Of all the commercials I saw during Sunday’s Super Bowl, the creepiest by far was Audi’s “Green Police” ad which was supposed to laugh at the poor, beknighted fools being hauled away to goodness knows where by a new environmental police force while the cool Audi drivers got to speed away from the Stasi…I’m sorry, Green Police’s, disapproval.

Michelle Malkin has done most of the heavy lifting as to why the commercial’s real message of “fascism is fun!” isn’t quite so funny when you consider that the enviro-cops have already set up shop, albeit sans catchy Cheap Trick knock-off soundtrack. I won’t cover the ground she’s already covered very well, but I will highlight one big fat lie on Audi’s “Green Police” web site.

Here, according to Audi, is why their commercial is really just an innocent bag of yuks.

Now consumers have help, from the Green Police.

As part of the lead up to their third consecutive Super Bowl ad, Audi has created a fictional Green Police unit that are caricatures of today’s “green movement”. The Green Police are a humorous group of individuals that have joined forces in an effort to collectively help guide consumers to make the right decision when it comes to the environment. They’re not here to judge, merely to guide these decisions.

So they’re “not here to judge” and only want to “guide” us, eh? Well, let’s just take a look at that commercial for a quick second uick and see what this not-judging and laughalicious guiding really looks like.

Wow, it didn’t take long for our non-judgmental Green Police guide to slam a guy’s head onto a checkout counter and frog-march…err, “guide”…him out of a grocery store, did it? Then there was the “humorous” warrantless search of every garbage can in the neighborhood leading to a bum rush of a private residence where the “caricatures” will no doubt “help” the resident right into a court date. And how about that guy carefully “guided” into a police car after being “arrested”? I bet he didn’t feel judged at all, especially by the big spotlight from the helicopter and the news vans parked in front of his house. And how about the guy dragged out of the pool who is almost cuffed before he takes off, with the Green Guides in hot pursuit? It sure seemed he had all kinds of Green Shirt…oops “Police”…help, didn’t he?

I’ve seen guiding and, friends, that’s not it. It takes a certain amount of gumption (I use that word because the more accurate word is NSFW) to say that a uniformed force dragging people out of grocery stores and hot tubs is “humorous” and “not here to judge”. Audi is, to use a polite phrase, full of beans and its commercial is only a solid minute of innocent fun if you had never read a history book, or George Orwell, for that matter. But if you’re one of the people who’ll end up doing Green Time for your sins if the environmental movement gets its way, it’s probably not all that funny.

Read the original story at NewsReal Blog » Feature.

A democracy at war is faced with problems dictatorships find avoidable. Its citizens have a responsibility—as the Left never tires of repeating—not to abandon the freedoms they are defending, in order to defend them. The imperative can be abused, however, as the Left’s actions constantly remind us. Justice Robert H. Jackson warned Americans, following the Second World War, that they should be careful not to “convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.” Even in peacetime, the right to other freedoms must be weighed against the primary right to life itself.

Criticism of every war, including the one in Iraq, is warranted and necessary. The military surge that began in 2007 was a belated admission that the war had been launched without sufficient forces. Equally crucial, there had been no planning for the ethnic infighting that plagued the reconstruction effort after the toppling of the Saddam regime. Four years after the initial invasion, Bush acknowledged to journalist Robert Draper that defusing Sunni-Shi’ite tensions was “something we didn’t spend a lot of time planning for.” He had thought that Saddam had been stoking these resentments and that, once he was apprehended, they would resolve themselves. As Vice President Cheney observed privately in November 2003, the Pentagon believed that it was in a “mopping-up phase,” which was an unwarranted assumption. “They fail to see that we’re in a major battle against terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere,” Cheney commented. More
precisely, they failed to see that we were in a war with Islamists who were terrorists, a failure contributed to by the Bush administration’s  reluctance to recognize the religious nature of the enemy we face.

– Party of Defeat

If you have a favorite Horowitz quote you want to highlight for others then click here to submit. Please include: “Horowitz Quote of the Day” in subject line. A link to where the quote is from. (No need to include this if it’s from a book.) Any remarks you’d like published explaining what value you take from it. Your preferred name and a link to your blog or homepage (if you have one.)

Read the original story at NewsReal Blog » Feature.

In the lead story in FrontPage this morning I discuss how Geert Wilders is being denied a fair trial -- although of course the very fact that he is on trial at all indicates that it is not a fair trial.

The Stalinist-show-trial aspect of the Geert Wilders "hate speech" trial in the Netherlands was thrown into sharp relief last week when the Amsterdam District Court refused to allow Wilders to call fifteen of the eighteen witnesses he had hoped to bring forward in his defense. Wilders in response was characteristically direct: "This Court is not interested in the truth. This Court doesn't want me to have a fair trial. I can't have any respect for this. This Court would not be out of place in a dictatorship."

The three witnesses the court allowed Wilders are the Dutch Islamic scholars Hans Jansen and Simon Admiraal, along with the Wafa Sultan. Hans Jansen's work on Islam is superb and groundbreaking, and he will be an excellent witness, as will Admiraal and the exemplary freedom fighter Wafa Sultan.

Nonetheless, this decision indicates the hollowness of Dutch justice and the court's bias against Wilders. For some who would have been Wilders's most effective witnesses were disallowed. He had wanted to call Mohammed Bouyeri, the murderer of Theo Van Gogh.

Why Bouyeri? Wilders, in the bizarre inquisition that has replaced justice in the Dutch courts, is accused of offending Muslims by pointing out that Muslims invoke the Qur'an and Muhammad's example to justify violence. However, Bouyeri quoted the Qur'an in the note threatening Wilders and others that he stabbed into Van Gogh's body, and invoked the Qur'an repeatedly during his trial as well. "Kill them, and Allah will help you and guide your hand," he said. "There's no room there for doubt or interpretation there."...

Read it all.

Read the original story at Jihad Watch.

Being a college student in the early ’70s, The Who was right up there on our “must see” concert list. I have often thought of them in the last few years, as their famous lyrics “won’t get fooled again” continued to pop up in my mind (usually on a daily basis.) For me, that one line resonates more than any other.

Seeing them on the Superbowl half time stage commanded my full attention and arose me from my football-and-queso-dip coma. They were playing my song! I knew what it meant to me, but I have often wondered what Townshend had intended when he wrote it. I decided to Google it this morning. 

Apparently, John J. Miller had discussed this very song back in 2006 for National Review. At the time, he said:

The conservative movement is full of disillusioned revolutionaries; this could be their theme song, an oath that swears off naïve idealism once and for all.

Townshend heard about it, and this was his response, from an interview in the Pennsylvania Times Leader:

National Review magazine called “Won’t Get Fooled Again” the greatest conservative rock song of all time. Townshend says that’s “on the money.” The self-described “working musician” who sees his job as “helping the audience to forget themselves,” says he never really bought into “all that hippie (expletive) I so despise.”

And, Townshend says, “when people say ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ is not about rebellion, it’s the exact opposite of that, I say they’re right.”

I love the great observation made by Thomas Ryan from American Hit Radio:

Some were offended by his inability to lay back and accept the hippie agenda at face value, but time may have proven Townshend to be the wiser. Once the smokescreen of rhetoric and posturing dissipated, the politics of youth were revealed to be as one-dimensional and muddled as the values they were rallying against. In 1967, the dream was fresh and new, but by 1970 it had become little more than a deceitful memory.

Reading over the complete lyrics of the song, you can take a lot from it. For me, as I keep plugging along, trying to keep from getting disillusioned with the daily influx of insanity coming from this radical administration and the progressives now in office, I’ll try to bring the song up in my mind, the new anthem to keep me going.

Then I’ll get on my knees and pray

We don’t get fooled again

—

Michelle is a small business owner in south Texas.

Read the original story at NewsReal Blog » Feature.

UPDATE (6:00 AM ET)
Dutch Omroep Brabant now reports that police say no bomb has been found. A man was arrested, but he it’s likely he’s an insane loser with too much time on his hands and not a terrorist. Good news, if true of course.

Having said that, I do hope that this man will suffer the consequences of pulling such a “prank.” The entire train station was evacuated, people couldn’t get to their work, all because of one attention craving idiot. End Update

National newspapers and news channels report today that a bomb was found in a train at the train station of the city of Den Bosch, in the South of the Netherlands. Experts are supposedly trying to dismantle the explosive device at this moment.

Dutch news channel the NOS says that the bomb was found after passengers alerted railroad personnel that a suspicious man was moving in and around the train. When personnel tried to talk to the men he said he had planted a bomb in the train.

One witness said: “First, he suddenly asked for a cigarette. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘I’d like to have a cigarette.’ After that he disappeared for a short while, but returned within a matter of minutes. He shouted ‘God is great’ [not sure whether he shouted God is great in Dutch or in Arabic - Allahu Akbar - and Dutch media simply translated it into Dutch themselves] and ‘I have a bomb!’”

A bomb squad moved in and found the explosives, the national railroad company (NS) says. Police haven’t confirmed the report yet.

If the report is accurate, it seems pretty safe to conclude that the would-be bomber is yet another extremist trying to murder innocent people – men, women and children – in the name of Islam. Let it serve as a reminder that the enemy is living among us and that we underestimate his ruthlessness and barbarism at our own peril.

4:38 AM ET UPDATE

Post updated to reflect the fact that while the NS says the bomb has been found, police haven’t confirmed it yet. There is some uncertainty about the question of whether the explosives were found or not. Reports coming from the Netherlands are a bit chaotic, at the moment.

Please stand by for further updates.

Read the original story at NewsReal Blog » Feature.