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.

“Good old Joe,” as Obama calls him. If only Joe Biden’s veracity matched his charming smile. But it doesn’t. Biden has a lengthy history of outright falsehoods as well as careless gaffes.

Biden warned earlier this month that more people would likely be raped and murdered if President Obama’s jobs bill wasn’t passed. The Weekly Standard quoted Biden as saying at a campaign event: “In 2008, when Flint (Michigan) had 265 sworn officers on their police force, there were 35 murders and 91 rapes in this city. In 2010 when Flint had only 144 police officers, the murder rate climbed to 65, and rapes…climbed to 229. In 2011, you now have only 125 shields. God knows what the numbers will be if we don’t rectify it” (by passing the president’s phony jobs bill, which includes $35 billion to supposedly avert police layoffs).

Biden repeated the dire warnings at a later Philadelphia event.

But according to Fact Check, Joe’s figures were way off base. They don’t “square with FBI data.” And since then he has said rapes in Flint have tripled and even “quadrupled.” But FBI data show that rapes, instead, have gone down 11 percent from 103 in 2008 to 92 in 2010.

As for the claim that the city’s murder rate has “tripled,” the city says there were a record high 66 murders that year, double, not triple the 32 murders that occurred in 2008.

Violent crime is “bad in Flint, no doubt, but Biden makes it out to be worse than it is.” A Fact Check update Oct. 23 found that the rape figures reported by Flint to the Michigan State Police confirm that rapes declined in the city from 2008 to 2010. “We also found that the broader category of criminal sexual conduct also was down.”

State police figures show a 10 percent reduction in total criminal sexual conduct reports between 2008 and 2010. Also murder, rape and robbery are declining this year in spite of police layoffs in Flint, according to the most recent official report by the State Police.

Biden was wrong when he said the murder rate has tripled.

Fact Check explained:

In 2008, there were 32 murders in a city of 113,462 people for a murder rate of .28 murders per 1,000 residents. In 2010, there were 66 murders and a population of 109,245 for a rate of .60 murders per 1,000. That’s an increase of 115 percent, more than double but not quite triple.

Could it be that Old Joe is confusing crime with the deficit and debt which has tripled and quadrupled since Obama and Old Joe took office?

Is a shortage of police a new phenomenon? Hardly. Back in 2003, for instance, the Hartford, Conn. police union griped that budget cuts plaguing the state had forced the city to hold off filling department vacancies. The union said there “are not enough officers to fill beats and not enough to back each other up.”

Hartford was not alone. “Other cities, including Bridgeport and New Haven are also down officers,” said a July 27, 2003 report in The New York Times.

In 2004, USA TODAY reported Cleveland’s mayor reported staffing problems in police and fire departments.

America is an island of free speech in an ocean of political correctness. American columnists have to worry about deadlines and the future of print media, not about being hauled into court over the sensibilities of some protected group. But conservative columnists in Canada, Europe, Israel and Australia have to write with one eye on the keyboard and the other on the door.

The strangest case of free speech suppressed by political correctness may have come out of Australia where Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt was dragged into court under the Racial Discrimination Act by a group of white aborigines who complained that he had questioned their authenticity.

The first rule of White Aborigine Club is that no one talks about it. Australia has a surplus of white aborigines who hold down university positions teaching aboriginal culture, pick up aboriginal scholarships and receive all sorts of preferential treatment. These white aborigines are not albinos, they are “Ward Churchills” — white men and women who claim to be aborigines because of some ancestor. And to question their authenticity all you need is a pair of working eyes.

Ward Churchill got away with claiming to be Native American by braiding his hair, wearing sunglasses and being so militant that no one questioned whether he was an American Indian or an American Imposter until he had tenure and a nationwide speaking tour denouncing the “white man’s crimes” against his people.

The white aborigine faces a more uphill battle against common sense as it’s rather hard not to notice what he is or rather what he isn’t. This forced the Australian left to play the old game of the emperor isn’t really naked if no one talks about it. Everyone knows that many of the beneficiaries of aboriginal affirmative action are white people with European names. And no one is supposed to notice that or comment on it.

Andrew Bolt did notice and wrote several columns, adding a few photos of the melanin-challenged tribesmen. It was a sore point for the Australian left which has made Aboriginal rights a centerpiece of its identity, and whose “Ward Churchills” benefit from the academic and cultural prizes granted to them by a guilty Australia.

It is still legal in the United States to point out that the emperor isn’t wearing any pants– but throughout much of the world it’s a federal case. In Australia that was literally so as several of the white aborigines took Bolt to Federal Court.

According to the court decision all the white aborigines had to do to win was prove that Bolt had “insulted, humiliated and offended” them and that it was done “because of the race, color or ethnic origin of fair-skinned Aboriginal people.” Or in this case the lack thereof. Since the whole point of the articles was that the white aborigines were not actual aborigines, it was a slam dunk decision against free speech and for criminalizing common sense.

The right to free speech and a free press was held to be less important than the self-esteem of a group of people who would merit howls of ridicule in any rational society. The Federal Court had not only ruled that you could not point out that a white man is not a black man, but it had also created an entirely new protected group—white men who claim to be black men.

“The members of the group referred to are fair skinned Aboriginal persons who, by a combination of descent, self-identification and communal recognition are, and are recognized as, Aboriginal persons.”

On December 14th, 2000, as the holiday season was getting into full swing in Wichita Kansas, five young men and women, all professionals with bright careers in front of them were taken hostage in a townhouse. Two criminal brothers held them at gunpoint, raped the women and made the men have sex with each other, then took them out and shot each of them in the head. One young woman miraculously survived. Bleeding and naked, she staggered a mile through the snow to safety. During her torment in the townhouse, one of the criminals had stolen a diamond ring he found in a desk drawer and unwittingly revealed that her boyfriend now dead intended to propose to her.

Despite the story’s horror, despite its drama, despite its “human interest” dimension, no national news media reported the case. Not one. The reason was that the monsters who committed this horror happened to be black while their victims were white. The story failed to attract attention because it did not fit the national melodrama of black victimhood and white oppression. The reason was that the national media is infected with a politically correct, anti-white racism that everybody is aware of, but no one will discuss.

The same prejudice affects local governments and law enforcement authorities. In the local District Attorney’s office, as in the editorial rooms of the Wichita Eagle, the official position on the killings in Kansas is that the December 14th hate crime was not a hate crime. Why? Because the victims were robbed and – in the eyes of the District Attorney and the editors of the Wichita Eagle — this made the motive of the crime robbery, not race.

Matthew Shepherd, the nation’s most famous hate crime victim, was robbed.

– The Art of Political War

If you have a favorite Horowitz quote you want to highlight for others then please submit it here. Please include:

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Tikkun Magazine, which I have long criticized for spewing hatred against Israel, is now trying to silence me by employing old fashioned McCarthyism tactics. They are blaming me for inciting a group of protestors who apparently glued some political signs to the house of Michael Lerner, who runs Tikkun. Of course I don’t know any of these protestors, nor was I aware of their actions until I read about them in the newspapers. Lastly, it goes without saying that I do not approve of people pasting posters on someone else’s property.

Although Lerner regards this as a hate crime, the local authorities have apparently explained to him that he cannot achieve the martyrdom status bestowed on victims of hate crimes because his Jewish attackers were not attacking him for his religion, but for his politics. On a scale of one to ten, having a few posters glued to your house ranks at about a one for seriousness. Lerner went to the press and is trying to use it to bully me into silence.

Tikkun blames the posters on an article I wrote criticizing Lerner for claiming that the Israeli government made a decision to kill as many Palestinian civilians as possible, without any military purpose, during Operation Cast Lead. This of course is entirely untrue, and the Goldstone report, which originally made this claim, produced absolutely no evidence to back it up. The reality is, as Colonel Richard Kemp, the former British Army Colonel, said,

“I don’t think there has ever been a time in the history of warfare when an army has made more efforts to reduce civilian casualties and deaths of innocent people than the IDF is doing today in Gaza.”

My criticism of Lerner was entirely valid, and it must have struck a painful chord in this rabbi who pitifully claims that he is pro-Israel; a curious statement to make for one who is essentially accusing the Israeli government and military of a blood libel. Lerner has been trying to silence me for years. In reviewing one of my books, he accused me, in the pages of Tikkun Magazine, of having the blood of OJ Simpson’s victims “on my hands,” because I was a member of the legal team that defended him.

This time, the anti-Israel guru and his followers have resorted to a different technique. They claim that I incited those who glued the posters to his house. The managing editor of Tikkun, David Belden, tried to link my article to an increase in hate mail and ultimately to the great gluing gambit. “It’s undoubtedly due to Dershowitz,” he said. What he failed to consider is that the hate mail may be a reaction to Lerner’s own hate mongering.

Another of Lerner’s followers, Richard Silverstein, has gone ever further, accusing me in effect, of trying to kill Lerner. Here’s what he has said,

“In effect, Dershowitz words here are the equivalent of ‘will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?’ Of course there are those willing to act on Dershowitz’s rhetoric. He, of course, is too slick to be caught anywhere near a real act of violence. He would rather use rhetorical violence to impugn the morals of his enemies and gin up real violence by others.”

This is by one who supports the rabbi who has impugned the morals of his own enemies, namely the leaders of Israel, by falsely accusing them of setting out to kill as many civilians as possible. Lerner, Belden and Silverstein know that I oppose violence as strongly as I favor the open marketplace of ideas. I have long argued that the best answer to falsehood of the kind promoted by Tikkun is the truth, and that the answer to bad speech is good speech. Tikkun Magazine has incited hatred against me and others who support Israel. I have been threatened with real violence, not a couple of posters on my house. I have needed armed bodyguards, policemen with bulletproof vests and other forms of protection from those incited by Lerner and his crew. Yet I would never try to shut down Tikkun nor silence Lerner. Nor should he try to silence me.

In any event, his efforts to frighten me into silence will not work. I am tempted to make a deal with him, of the sort that Adlai Stevenson offered one of his political opponents:

“If you promise to stop lying about me, I will promise to stop telling the truth about you.”

I will not make that promise because I will continue to tell the truth about Michael Lerner, as long as he continues to lie about Israel. Let him whine to the press about a little glue on his house. If he can’t stand the heat, he should get out of the kitchen.

If you’ve been following the news from Arizona in recent days, you’ve probably heard that the state’s Republican governor, Jan Brewer, has just signed into law a “racist” bill that will punish Hispanics, stamp out civil rights, create a police state – and trample on the Constitution for good measure. You also may have heard that the Arizona law will “undermine basic notions of fairness,” at least according to President Obama, who has called the law “misguided” and ordered the Justice Department to find some way to challenge its standing.

Apocalyptic rhetoric notwithstanding, the Arizona law is not at all controversial in substance. All it does is deputize state police to determine whether people are in the country legally and to question them if there is reasonable suspicion that they’re not. Of course, that function should properly be handled by the federal government. But because the government has made so little effort to enforce immigration laws, border states that bear the brunt of illegal immigration – an estimated 460,000 illegal immigrants call Arizona home – have been forced to take action on their own terms.

The concept behind the immigration law is straightforward: If you enforce laws against illegal immigration, you will have less of it. That was also the idea behind Arizona’s Legal Arizona Workers Act, which required the state’s employers to verify the immigration status of new hires using the federal government’s E-Verify program. Businesses eager to avoid the burdens of verification and pro-illegal immigration groups also opposed that measure, filing suit to prevent its passage, but emerging evidence seems to suggest that it had the desired effect: Since being implemented in January 2008, the LAWA has resulted in a substantial decrease of illegal immigration.

The new law seeks to continue that progress. It does so mostly by making state crimes what are already federal crimes. For instance, the Arizona law makes it a crime to be in the country illegally – in other words, it enforces the national law. The Arizona law also requires police to question people about their immigration status if they have reasonable cause to suspect that they’re illegal immigrants. To prevent abuse or racial discrimination, the law also includes provisions banning racial profiling, and the measure itself has nothing to do with race or ethnicity, as the bill’s foes claim. Still, given that the majority of the state’s illegal immigrants are from neighboring Mexico, it is inevitable that the majority of those targeted by the law will be Hispanic. That says more about the demographics of illegal immigration than the allegedly discriminatory agenda of Arizona authorities.

Concerns about the abuse of civil liberties are similarly overblown. The Arizona law will require anyone arrested for a crime to have their immigration status established before their release. In theory, this should already be the law of the land; but so-called “sanctuary city” laws enacted by cities and municipalities across the country have prevented police from enforcing immigration laws. Such laws certainly benefit felons who escape deportation. How they profit the country at large is less apparent. The Arizona law also requires residents to carry ID or immigration registration documents at all times. That too is reasonable. A valid ID is already required to qualify for government and public assistance programs available to citizens and requiring one form of valid ID – whether a drivers license a government-issue ID — hardly marks the onset of Nazi Germany. Indeed, no less than President Obama has previously expressed support for a national ID card.

While some have criticized Arizona for taking the initiative against illegal immigration, it’s hard to find fault with the state’s sense of urgency. Last month’s murder of Arizona cattle rancher Rob Krentz was just example of the crime problem that unchecked illegal immigration has helped create and the problems its poses for American justice. Although Kentz was known for providing illegals with food and water, police found tracks at the murder scene leading to the Mexican border. They made no arrests in the case. In that climate of lawlessness, the state cannot be blamed for passing a law that may help offer a solution. Moreover, with the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats threatening to take up immigration reform – that is, amnesty for the 11-million plus illegal immigrants in this country unmatched by serious enforcement measures going forward – states like Arizona are left with a choice of doing something to combat the problem or leaving it to the federal government to make it worse.

If there is an ugly side revealed by the Arizona law, it is in the extremism of pro-illegal immigration groups. On Monday, opponents of the Arizona law used refried beans to smear swastikas on the Arizona state Capitol. Another champion of illegal immigration, Mexican President Felipe Calderon, made the not-so-veiled threat that Mexican trade and political relations with Arizona would suffer if it cracked down on illegals.

Defying these opponents and braving slander in much of the press coverage, Arizona has taken the lead in enforcing the country’s immigration laws and protecting the rights and interests of its citizens. For the Left, the new law makes Arizona a model of an “American-style police state.” For those serious about border security and law enforcement, it makes it a model worth emulating.

From "CAIR's Hate Crimes Nonsense" by Daniel Pipes and Sharon Chadha:

CAIR cites the July 9, 2004 case of apparent arson at a Muslim-owned grocery store in Everett, Washington. But investigators quickly determined that Mirza Akram, the store's operator, staged the arson to avoid meeting his scheduled payments and to collect on an insurance policy. Although Akram's antics were long ago exposed as a fraud, CAIR continues to list this case as an anti-Muslim hate crime.

CAIR also states that "a Muslim-owned market was burned down in Texas" on August 6, 2004. But already a month later, the owner was arrested for having set fire to his own business. Why does CAIR include this incident in its report?

CAIR lists the March 2005 lawsuit filed by the Salmi family for the firebombing of their family van as one example of a hate crime report it received in 2004. However, the crime named in the lawsuit occurred in March 2003, was already reported by CAIR in 2003, and should not have been tabulated again in the 2004 report.

CAIR reports that "a home-made bomb exploded outside of the Champions Mosque in the Houston suburb of Spring, Texas," staking its claim on eyewitness reports that on July 4, 2004, "two white males" were seen placing the bomb. We inquired about the incident and found that Spring's sheriff department could not locate any police files about an explosion. Further inquiries to the mosque and an e-mail to CAIR both went unanswered. There is scant evidence that any crime even occurred.

CAIR notes that "investigators in Massachusetts are still investigating a potential hate-motivated arson against the Al-Baqi Islamic Center in Springfield." However the case was long ago ruled a simple robbery, news that even CAIR's own website has posted. The Associated Press reported on January 21, 2005, that prosecutors determined the fire was set by teen-age boys "who broke into the Al-Baqi mosque to steal money and candy, then set the fire to cover their tracks." The boys, they clarified, "weren't motivated by hatred toward Muslims."

CAIR describes what happened to a Muslim family in Tucson, Arizona: "bullet shots pierced their home as they ate dinner in October 2004" and two months later their truck was smashed and vandalized. But the only evidence that either incident was motivated by hate of Muslims is the Dehdashti family itself, not the police. Detective Frank Rovi of Pima County Sheriff's Department, who handled the shooting investigation, said that according to the neighbors, the desert area by the Dehdashti house was often used for target practice. Neither incident was classified as a hate crime and both cases were closed by February 2005, long before the CAIR report went to press.

Of twenty "anti-Muslim hate crimes" in 2004 that CAIR describes, at least six are invalid – and further research could likely find problems with the other fourteen instances.

Should a group with a track record like this really be given a pass by AP and Minnesota education authorities?

"Muslim Group: Hate Incidents On Rise In MN Schools," from AP, March 24 (thanks to Wheeler):

ST. PAUL (AP) ― A Muslim civil rights group is calling on the Department of Education to investigate reports of racial and religious tensions in Minnesota public schools.

The Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations asked for the department's help Wednesday, following reports of anti-Muslim incidents around the state.

Muslim students have allegedly been called names and faced harassment by students and teachers. In one case, CAIR says, two students shoved pork bacon in the faces of Muslim high school girls. Muslims do not eat pork.

In another case, CAIR says, a bus driver went past Muslim students waiting at a bus stop. And CAIR says a teacher told students to spray air freshener when Muslim students entered a room....

It’s a good thing we have post-modern, post-moral professors, or else some might get the crazy notion that looting is a bad thing. From a weekend piece in the Times, apropos the looting that followed last week’s earthquake in Chile, we get these two nuanced views on the morality of – let us dispense with the niceties – collective theft:

Tricia Wachtendorf, associate director of the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center, objects to even the use of the words “looting” or “crime” to describe taking essential goods, noting that nobody objected to firemen taking water from stores near Ground Zero to rinse the World Trade Center’s smoke from their eyes.

The ethics depend on the facts of each case, said James M. Glass, a politics professor at the University of Maryland. “You can argue that hungry men stealing from stores is O.K., but hungry men attacking a woman with a bag of groceries for her kids is a moral quagmire. It’s not a situation where anybody comes out in a good way.”

A few thoughts. First, New York firemen rinsing their eyes in the course of saving civilians from a smoldering inferno is hardly the same as a few opportunists taking advantage of a natural disaster to rampage for a new flat screen. As for Professor Glass’s scenario: In what bizarro world does a woman carrying food for her children – presumably also hungry – come off as morally compromised as the attackers who steal her groceries? Simply mind-boggling.

Look, few if anyone would deny that stealing bare necessities in order to survive amidst a humanitarian crisis may sometimes be justified. And yes, the profiteers who try to capitalize on disaster by selling those necessities as hideously inflated prices are despicable in their own way. But neither of these truisms is inconsistent with pointing out that there is a phenomenon called looting, that it is a crime, and that those engaged in it, with a few exceptions, should be strongly condemned. That may be too bold for some of our enlightened faculty, but alas that’s true for so much of what is known as common sense outside the purview of academia. At any rate, I’m heartened to see that most Chileans – 85 percent of whom want the looters prosecuted – have no sympathy for the professorial view.

Three Hayward men are scheduled to be arraigned on assault and hate crime charges in San Francisco next week for allegedly shooting a man they thought was gay with a BB gun.

The Feb. 26 incident took place at about 10 p.m. outside a Mission District bar at 16th and Guerrero streets, according to police.

The 27-year-old San Francisco man had just come out of the bar when he was shot once in the cheek by suspects in a nearby car, which then drove off, police spokesman Officer Samson Chan said.

The man was not seriously injured and called police, and while officers were interviewing him outside the bar, he spotted the same vehicle again driving by, Chan said.

Police pulled the car over and found three men inside with a "rifle-style" BB gun and a video camera, which investigators later discovered had recorded the shooting, according to Chan.

The three men, Shafiq Hashemi, 21, Sayed Bassam, 21, and Mohammad Habibzada, 24, the driver, were arrested.

According to Chan, they allegedly admitted to the crime.

"The suspects did make a confession, basically stating that they came to San Francisco to target gay people," he said....

While the country and the Congress have their eyes on today’s dog-and-pony show on socialized medicine, House Democrats last night stashed a new provision in the intelligence bill which is to be voted on today. It is an attack on the CIA: the enactment of a criminal statute that would ban “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.” (See here, scoll to p. 32.)

The provision is impossibly vague – who knows what “degrading” means? Proponents will say that they have itemized conduct that would trigger the statute (I’ll get to that in a second), but it is not true. The proposal says the conduct reached by the statute “includes but is not limited to” the itemized conduct. (My italics.) That means any interrogation tactic that a prosecutor subjectively believes is “degrading” (e.g., subjecting a Muslim detainee to interrogation by a female CIA officer) could be the basis for indicting a CIA interrogator.

The act goes on to make it a crime to use tactics that have been shown to be effective in obtaining life saving information and that are far removed from torture.

“Waterboarding” is specified. In one sense, I’m glad they’ve done this because it proves a point I’ve been making all along. Waterboarding, as it was practiced by the CIA, is not torture and was never illegal under U.S. law. The reason the Democrats are reduced to doing this is: what they’ve been saying is not true — waterboarding was not a crime and it was fully supported by congressional leaders of both parties, who were told about it while it was being done. On that score, it is interesting to note that while Democrats secretly tucked this provision into an important bill, hoping no one would notice until it was too late, they failed to include in the bill a proposed Republican amendment that would have required full and complete disclosure of records describing the briefings members of Congress received about the Bush CIA’s enhanced interrogation program. Those briefings, of course, would establish that Speaker Pelosi and others knew all about the program and lodged no objections. Naturally, members of Congress are not targeted by this criminal statute — only the CIA.

via While You Are Distracted by the Summit, Obama Democrats Are Targeting the CIA – Andy McCarthy – The Corner on National Review Online.

“I’m so relieved to be an elite” –tweet from Roger Ebert

Most public figures have done or said something they wish they could take back. When it comes to public intellectuals and film critics specifically, they generally pride themselves on their ability to analyze what they see. Therefore, their responses to culture should be very measured and reasonable.

This was the case with Roger Ebert (usually) until last year when he began to fall off the ledge of grounded thought. For the last few months I’ve been trying to give Ebert the benefit of the doubt with his political ramblings. At this point, it’s getting harder and harder to do and now I’m afraid that his highly respected legacy is coming into question very fast. This thought pains me as I look across the room at a copy of his book The Great Movies.

It isn’t because he is a lefty. That doesn’t bother me. It is that his comments have become unhinged and it pains me to see a critic I have long respected go down this road that is reserved for corrupt and insensitive political types. My concerns began when Ebert unfairly criticized Bill O’Reilly and David Swindle and I co-authored a response.

Ebert went off the deep end for good once he was introduced to twitter and I responded to his numerous tweets joking about Rush Limbaugh’s recent health scare which felt unwarranted seeing that Ebert has major health issues of his own. While both Limbaugh and O’Reilly regularly deserve some criticism, I always expect useful thougts from someone as astute as Ebert. NewsReal Blog’s own David Forsmark has also expressed concern.

As long as I have been serious about film I’ve been reading Ebert’s work. I would be lying if I didn’t say he had a large impact on how I see film. He helped set a standard for film criticism that he is quickly destroying. For quite some time he has been going after the tea party movement by using ridiculous and disgusting phrases like “tea baggers.” Big Hollywood’s Editor-in-chief John Nolte called Ebert out and asked him to just say what he really means:

“We’re not as enamored as he is with the man currently occupying the Oval Office. Disagree, argue, that’s all fine. But he’s calling us “teabaggers,” and he knows full well what that means. And he’s calling us “teabaggers”  because he doesn’t have the guts to come right out and call us “c***suckers.”

Ebert has responded to some of Nolte’s writing, again on twitter. Big Hollywood has begun to ask Ebert to retract some of his words via their new retraction vehicle (read this and this) with minimal success. It is clear that Ebert no longer cares what people think of him, which is sad when it concerns someone who has been highly respected for so long.

Today in Esquire there is a wonderful yet sad piece by Chris Jones about Ebert’s disintegrating health over the last few years. It talks about the troubles Ebert has in doing every day things like eating, speaking, or even sitting up straight for a long duration. The pictures featured in the article as well as the images described are hard to place with the larger-than-life voice Ebert has had for decades. One good thing remains, Ebert has not lost his ability to enjoy watching movies and writing about them. That is a blessing I hope he is awarded as long as he lives.

Ebert knows he is dying, Jones writes:

There has been no death-row conversion. He has not found God. He has been beaten in some ways. But his other senses have picked up since he lost his sense of taste. He has tuned better into life. Some things aren’t as important as they once were; some things are more important than ever. He has built for himself a new kind of universe.

Ebert now only speaks through writing and a state of the art voice machine through which he told Jones:

I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this, and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.

I take Ebert at his word. I believe he is a good person and means well. His impressive body of work will live on long after he is gone. Reading a lengthy article about Ebert’s struggles makes me feel for the man regardless of his outrageous political ramblings. I know he has much greater things to offer and has made a career doing just that. When living is difficult such as the case with Ebert, I can’t imagine why he would waste his time tweeting about how stupid the readers of Big Hollywood are.

The Esquire article mentioned that Ebert has a new book coming out, The Great Movies III. I deeply enjoy his Great Movies books as they are truly Ebert at his best. He is a man who loves film from the depths of his heart as many of us do and it shines through brilliantly in these books. This is what I want to remember Ebert for. I would hate for his “last words” to be a series of stupid remarks about Sarah Palin or tea partiers.

In Turkey just recently, a father and grandfather repeatedly beat Medine Memi, a sixteen-year-old girl, for the crime of talking (allegedly) to boys. The police weren’t interested. The beatings were eventually deemed insufficient punishment for Medine for the temerity of having her own human agency, so the father and grandfather killed her by burying her while she was “alive and fully conscious.”

My dear friend and courageous freedom fighter Phyllis Chesler has written about this barbaric murder and described it as a “savage, heartless, primitive act” that “is the ultimate, logical consequence of burying women alive—shrouding them–while they still roam the earth. One becomes claustrophobic under the burqa, until one gets used to being seen as a ghost, invisible, non-human, dead.”

Medine’s father is incredulous about why he has been arrested, explaining, matter-of-factly in his statements to the police, that his daughter had male friends and that the family was unhappy about it. This serves as a reminder of Muslim rapists casually testifying that their victims deserved their fate since they were either not veiled or weren’t Muslims. It also brings to mind when the Spanish Muslim cleric Mohamed Kamal Mustafa, to his great surprise, was prosecuted and sentenced to fifteen months in jail by a Spanish court for giving Muslim men specific instructions in a book on how to beat their wives. In court, he defended himself by arguing — correctly — that he was only repeating and interpreting passages from the Koran (i.e. Sura 4:34).

I can’t help from wondering: when are all the brave Western leftist feminists going to protest with vehement anger about the fate of Medine Memi and about the Islamic ideology that spawned her barbaric murder?

I wonder if we’ll be hearing from Naomi Wolf? She really cares about women’s rights, doesn’t she? Well, she thinks the burqa is “sexy,” we know that.

So the question must be asked: Does Naomi think throwing Medine Memi into a hole in the ground and burying her alive is sexy too? If she doesn’t think it’s sexy, where are her expressions of moral outrage at this vicious crime committed against a young Muslim girl, a crime that represents the horrible oppression of women under Islamic gender apartheid?

Could it just be that we won’t be hearing from Naomi Wolf — or from any of her like-minded “feminists” — because, when it comes down to it, she really doesn’t care about Medine Memi and other victims of Islamic gender apartheid? Could it be that she fully knows that if she speaks out on behalf of Medine, then she might have to speak out against the Islamic theology that engendered her murder? Could it be that Naomi Wolf fully knows this is a step she cannot take because doing so will destroy the entire foundation of her anti-American worldview and her conception of her own personal identity?

Well, we’re waiting for your howls of moral indignation about what happened to Medine Memi in any case, Ms. Wolf.

We know they will never come, neither from you, nor from the ranks of the feminist and progressive Left that you supposedly lead.

The question lingers: Do you have any sense of shame, at last?

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The tortures included laying a man naked on a freezing cement floor, forcing his legs apart, and then an interrogator stepping on his testicles, applying increasing pressure until the confession surfaced. Imagine the consequences of no surfacing confession. Indeed, many people refused to confess to a crime they did not commit.

Daughters and sons were raped in front of their fathers and mothers — for the sake of extracting “confessions.”

These are just some of the delicacies that the Stalinist machinery inflicted on its citizenry in the hope of bringing socialism into earthly incarnation. Alexander Solzhenitsyn has shared much of this horror with us in his Gulag Archipelago — a work, mystifyingly enough, that I had never heard mentioned, except with a few exceptions, by one professor in a lecture or seminar in my entire eleven years studying Cold War history in academia. It was a work that I never saw, again with a few exceptions, on any academic syllabus — and many of my courses concerned Soviet history and American foreign policy toward the Soviet Union.

Both of my grandfathers were exterminated by Stalinist terror. Both of my parents, Yuri and Marina Glazov, were dissidents in the former Soviet Union. They risked their lives for freedom; they stood up against Soviet totalitarianism. They barely escaped the gulag, a fortune many of our friends and relatives did not share. I come from a system where a myriad of the closest people to my family simply disappeared, where relatives and family friends died under interrogation and torture for their beliefs — or for simply nothing at all.

To continue reading this article, click here.

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The tortures included laying a man naked on a freezing cement floor, forcing his legs apart, and then an interrogator stepping on his testicles, applying increasing pressure until the confession surfaced. Imagine the consequences of no surfacing confession. Indeed, many people refused to confess to a crime they did not commit.

Daughters and sons were raped in front of their fathers and mothers — for the sake of extracting “confessions.”

These are just some of the delicacies that the Stalinist machinery inflicted on its citizenry in the hope of bringing socialism into earthly incarnation. Alexander Solzhenitsyn has shared much of this horror with us in his Gulag Archipelago — a work, mystifyingly enough, that I had never heard mentioned, except with a few exceptions, by one professor in a lecture or seminar in my entire eleven years studying Cold War history in academia. It was a work that I never saw, again with a few exceptions, on any academic syllabus — and many of my courses concerned Soviet history and American foreign policy toward the Soviet Union.

Both of my grandfathers were exterminated by Stalinist terror. Both of my parents, Yuri and Marina Glazov, were dissidents in the former Soviet Union. They risked their lives for freedom; they stood up against Soviet totalitarianism. They barely escaped the gulag, a fortune many of our friends and relatives did not share. I come from a system where a myriad of the closest people to my family simply disappeared, where relatives and family friends died under interrogation and torture for their beliefs — or for simply nothing at all.

To continue reading this article, click here.

Visit Pajamas

The tortures included laying a man naked on a freezing cement floor, forcing his legs apart, and then an interrogator stepping on his testicles, applying increasing pressure until the confession surfaced. Imagine the consequences of no surfacing confession. Indeed, many people refused to confess to a crime they did not commit.

Daughters and sons were raped in front of their fathers and mothers — for the sake of extracting “confessions.”

These are just some of the delicacies that the Stalinist machinery inflicted on its citizenry in the hope of bringing socialism into earthly incarnation. Alexander Solzhenitsyn has shared much of this horror with us in his Gulag Archipelago — a work, mystifyingly enough, that I had never heard mentioned, except with a few exceptions, by one professor in a lecture or seminar in my entire eleven years studying Cold War history in academia. It was a work that I never saw, again with a few exceptions, on any academic syllabus — and many of my courses concerned Soviet history and American foreign policy toward the Soviet Union.

Both of my grandfathers were exterminated by Stalinist terror. Both of my parents, Yuri and Marina Glazov, were dissidents in the former Soviet Union. They risked their lives for freedom; they stood up against Soviet totalitarianism. They barely escaped the gulag, a fortune many of our friends and relatives did not share. I come from a system where a myriad of the closest people to my family simply disappeared, where relatives and family friends died under interrogation and torture for their beliefs — or for simply nothing at all.

Now try to imagine me sitting in the company of left-wing “intellectuals” in the West who think they are oppressed. This is my lifelong experience. I remember one radical feminist, whom I sat next to in a graduate student lounge, lecturing me sternly about how women in the West are oppressed because they wear bikinis on beaches; with a reprimanding tone, she explained to me that this represented the way capitalism objectifies women, marginalizes them from spheres of power, and metaphorically decapitates them as human beings. I remember asking her what she thought of female genital mutilation and honor killings in the Muslim world. To this I received a stone-cold silence and a frightening hateful stare, a stare with which I have become accustomed: I would be confined to a gulag or a psychiatric hospital if this particular individual had the power to place me there. This would be done for the good of society of course. My question was heresy: she could not, naturally, admit that evil adversarial cultures and ideologies existed — under which women truly suffer real oppression — for if she did, then she would have to sacrifice her entire worldview and personal identity.

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The doctrine that only whites can be racist is, in fact, itself an instigation to hate crimes. It is a doctrine that has already spread to the secondary schools. The week after the Shepard killing, a Seattle father called a national radio talk show on which I was a guest, and told the audience that his son’s class in junior high school had been discussing the hate crime concept because of the killing. During the discussion, the teacher informed the class that only heterosexual whites could be racists. The caller’s son was unconvinced and brought up the savage beating of Reginald Denny during the Los Angeles riots by a group of black gang members. Surely, he suggested, this was a hate-crime. But his teacher corrected him. Even though Denny was pulled from his truck solely because he was white, and then beaten within an inch of his life, he could not be the victim of racial attitudes. The attempted murder of Reginald Denny was actually an act of rebellion by people who were themselves the victims of a white racist system, and the act they committed, therefore, could not be considered a hate crime. This is the perspective of academics who teach “whiteness studies,” of law professors who teach “critical race studies,” and no doubt of education professors busily transmitting the progressive world view to the next generation of high school instructors.

– Hating Whitey

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.)

[Editor's note: The article below is a rebuttal to Joe Kaufman's Frontpage article “The Terror and Crime of the American Task Force on Palestine,” which ran on January 29, 2010.]

“The Terror and Crime of the American Task Force on Palestine” posted by Joe Kaufman on January 29 was very wide of the mark.  Kaufman takes to task various government officials for participation in ATFP’s annual banquet.  I regretted having to turn down an invitation to that self-same affair because I was out of town.

Why my regret?  Because the ATFP is a breath of fresh air in the Arab-American community.  I think it is exactly what I and others in the pro-Israel community have been hoping for: an Arab or Palestinian advocacy group that offers no apologias for terrorists and genuinely wants to meet us half-way.

Kaufman makes much of the name Rashid Khalidi, and I share Kaufman’s distaste for the man.  But Khalidi’s name cannot be found on the ATFP web site.  (Whether he was involved in the past I do not know.)  I do know Ziad Asali, the president, and Hussein Ibish and Gheith al-Omari, the two staff members of ATFP.  I have had long conversations with each.  More important, I have been on Arabic satellite network talk shows multiple times with each of them—so I have heard what they had to say to Arab audiences.  They were always unequivocal about a two-state solution, and always with rhetorical “body language” that made it abundantly clear that they respected Israel’s right to exist and its legitimate security concerns.

Of course, various Arabs and other Palestinians over the years have mouthed the word “peace” quite disingenuously, most importantly and famously, Yassir Arafat.  Some Arab-American and Muslim-American groups have decried terrorism but defined the term or hedged it about in such ways as to fill me with skepticism about what they really meant.  (Just as the Organization of the Islamic Conference always resorts to a juvenile game of semantics, saying that it opposes “terrorism” but that, of course, blowing up babies and moms in pizzerias is not terrorism if done in the name of “resistance to occupation.”)

This disgusting double-talk is not what ATFP does.  When they say they oppose terrorism, when they say they want peace, they really mean it, which is apparent if you talk to them long and hard.  Of course, they are not Zionists.  They are a Palestinian group.  They are not on our side, but they sincerely want to make peace with us. If only there were more of their kind!  I wish we could help them, but of the embrace from our side would likely not help them build support in their community.  We can, however, do the minimum which is not to attack them falsely.

President of the Islamic Council of Jamaica, Mustafa Muhammad, says he agrees with the Sharia law which prescribes death for people who openly flaunt homosexual behaviour.

Muhammad did not mince words as he lashed out against what he described as an unclean, unnatural lifestyle.

"It is illegal and in the Sharia law the punishment is death. If you follow Christianity it is a crime in the sight of God. He destroyed a whole city because of this thing. It is an ungodly practice and I apologise to no one for this," Muhammad said. [...]

Muhammad made sure to state that he was against the killing of gays in Jamaica.

"This can only be done in a country that is being run by Islam," he said.

And which system of laws would he like to see in Jamaica?

Roman Polanski’s wife wants you to know the truth about her husband.  You’ll find that “truth” printed in thousands of articles, a handful with unfortunate headlines like these:

Roman Polanski’s Wife Talks About Sex Case

Wife Understands Women’s Shock at Polanski Sex Case but Says Today Is Not Permissive 1970s

The phrase “sex case” has been used in the American media to describe everything from child rape to Senator John Ensign’s extramarital affair.  In the headlines cited above, it’s an attempt to obfuscate and even minimize the barbarous nature of Polanski’s crime.

But let’s not forget: Roman Polanski raped a child. He continued to rape her after she begged him to stop.  Would it really be so gauche, so unsophisticated to call Polanski’s crime a sexual assault, unlawful sex, or heaven forfend, rape?  Polanski’s wife certainly thinks so.

“My personal truth is that Roman is a marvelous husband and man,” said actress Emmanuelle Seigner, 43. “He is an impeccable man and I have nothing to reproach him for.”

“Personal truth.” I think I need a rape apologist to English translation. Is that the truth, or the truth-truth?

The director’s wife said the 1970s were a “crazy time.”

Ah, yes, the 1970s, when California was a lawless free-for-all.  That “crazy time” when drugging 13-year-old girls into dazed compliance was plain vanilla foreplay. It wasn’t rape, it was just run-of-the-mill seventies sex.

“The relationship to drugs wasn’t the same, the relationship to sexual liberty and permissiveness neither,” she said. “Today, public opinion has considerably evolved on the subjects.”

Really? Did the 1970s climate of sexual liberty and permissiveness grant Hollywood directors an all-you-can-rape card that magically turned every “no” into an enthusiastic “yes”?

Of course not. If any of Emmanuelle Seigner’s delusions about her husband were true, we wouldn’t be discussing the Roman Polanski rape case today.  Charges of rape by use of drugs, sodomy, and child molestation would not have been filed in the mythical 1977 Seigner imagines.  And Roman Polanski could have spent the last three decades in America, flitting from teenager to teenager without fear of repercussions.

Instead, Polanski hopped a flight to Europe and proceeded to live a charmed life, fawned over by rape apologists in Hollywood, the media, and his family, and insulated from those of us who won’t pretend that a child rapist is beyond reproach.

—–

Follow Jenn Q. Public on Twitter and read more of her work at JennQPublic.com.

Related posts:

1. Polanski Petition Doesn't Address Rape Charges
2. PJTV's Poliwood Confronts the Hollywood Left's "Free Polanski" Movement
3. Is Hollywood Really Backing Polanski?

Tran Huynh Duy Thuc, left, and Le Cong Dinh were sentenced to long prison terms in Vietnam

Tonight, Glen Beck will air his must-see special on communism, which should artfully recount the historical development of that inherently evil, political ideology. While Beck’s narrative will focus on the past, we must not lose sight of the fact that communism has not gone away, and its continued existence in much of the world still brings misery, oppression and death to those unfortunate enough to be living under its yoke.

Take Vietnam, for example.

This week, the communists ruling that country took, according to a European Union spokesman, a “major and regrettable step backwards,” by sentencing four people to stiff periods of incarceration (remember, in communist societies that usually means hard labor in a “re-education camp). After a speedy, one-day trial in typical communist fashion (behind closed doors), Tran Huynh Duy Thuc received a 16-year sentence. Nguyen Tien Trung got 7 years. Le Cong Dinh and Le Thang Long each received 5 years.

What was their crime?

They had the audacity to post writings on the Internet advocating freedom of expression and a multi-party system for Vietnam. You see, by definition, communism cannot have a political rival—and even discussing such a thing in a communist state can land you in jail, or worse.

A communist judge convicted the men of “a well-organized campaign in collusion with overseas exile reactionary organizations, aimed at overturning the government with the help of the Internet.” The men were immediately taken away to begin serving their sentences.

Actually, Vietnam has been very busy putting people away lately for having similar views. In the last three months, 10 other democracy activists have been sentenced to long prison terms, and 6 students in the city of Haiphong received sentences of between two and six years for hanging up a pro-democracy banner. The irony here is that the Vietnamese government crackdown on dissent comes before elections to be held next year, where certain members of the Communist Party will try to gain coveted seats in the Party congress.

As harsh as these sentences are, these dissidents really are rather fortunate, as the authorities did show an uncharacteristic level of leniency. In Vietnam (and in nearly every other communist state, past and present), the normal punishment for the crime of dissent is death.

Related posts:

1. The Nation Celebrates the Fall of Communism by … Celebrating Communism!
2. Feel the Need to Express Your Political Views? In China, that Will Get You Serious Jail Time.
3. Like Obama, the Secret Service Speaks No Evil, Sees No Evil, Hears No Evil