Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Lisa Daftari, a journalist specializing in Iranian affairs.  She is a guest contributor on Fox News and has been published in Frontpage Magazine, Washington Post, CBS.com, NBC, Voice of America, and PBS.

FP: Lisa Daftari, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

I would like to talk to you today about the future of Iran’s freedom movement.

I think the best way for us to start is for you to update our readers on the current status of Iran’s Green Movement. Tell us about its beginnings two years ago and how it has diminished. What has been the role of the reformist leaders in slowing down or progressing the movement over the last two years?

Daftari: Thank you Jamie, it is my pleasure to speak with you.

Well, I think I should start by differentiating between the understandings of what the Green Movement actually is. To a lot of people, the Green Movement simply refers to the uprising that occurred in Iran following the election of 2009 where many Iranians felt the election was fraudulent and rushed into the streets. This is the biggest uprising that Iran had seen in 30 years since the Islamic Theocracy has been in power. In actuality, the Green Movement is not a pro-democracy movement. It is a pro-reform movement, which means that Iran would still function under the Islamic Republic, but it would be led by one of the other candidates who would have won the Presidency. The two candidates were Karoubi and Mousavi, who are both veteran politicians within the Islamic regime.

Both were hoping to have a chance at the Presidency. Now when a lot of these young people came out into the streets, there was a fusion of sorts. They were asking to get back their votes, “Give me back my vote,” was the slogan of the uprising, but slowly people began to regret even walking into the polls, because when you vote, you actually acknowledge the government. They then turned this “Green Movement” into an anti-regime movement, saying, for the most part, we don’t even want these reformist candidates, we want the entire regime to be done away with. So there are different understandings of what the Green Movement actually signifies, what it actually represents.

Green is a very important color in Islam. We can see today in Libya, it is Qadaffi’s go-to color as well. So this Green Movement for some people just represents a freedom movement for the people of Iran, who actually want regime change. It also represents a young movement, especially because the world recognized for the first time in 30 years that the Iranian people are 70 million, many under the age of 30 and 35 years old. They are educated. They have a high energy. They know about the Western world and they want their freedoms. This basically got intertwined with the movement that these reformist candidates wanted to push forward. Also, a lot of people have problems with these reformist candidates because they have the blood of many innocent Iranians on their hands. They don’t exactly have clean records.

For example, the number of executions under Mousavi’s time, or watch, outnumber the number of executions done under Ahmadinejad’s watch, and I don’t know if a lot of people know that, or the fact that he is related to Khamenei, the clerical head of the country. So there are a lot of misunderstandings as to what is going on or what the people want. Obviously there is a lack of organization on the part of the Iranian opposition that leads to a lot of these misunderstandings and leads to a lot of confusion, both for the people and for the outside world trying to understand what is going on in Iran over the last two years.

FP: Can you please explain why the movement was successful in spreading to other parts of the world, but could not make significant changes in Iran before fading out?

Daftari: Right now we are watching the last moments of the Arab Spring unfold in the Middle East, and a lot of people give credit to Tunisia and Egypt for starting the movement, when in fact Iran was first in the region in 2009 to have full scale uprisings against their regime.  For Iran, it was the most significant anti-government display they had seen in the last 30 years, despite the fact that there had always been smaller protests throughout. In 1999 they had the”Hejdayeh Teer” or the 18^th of the month of Teer, the uprisings at Tehran University, but that was quickly quashed. That had been the most significant uprising until 2009.  It was only in 2009 when the people came out into the streets and said enough is enough, deciding that they would do whatever they could to let their voices be heard. But, unlike Egypt and Tunisia,  there was less brutality and violence against the people as there was in Iran. In Iran, they actually imported Basiji Militia men to be in the streets to stop demonstrators. They rounded people up. They came into people’s homes. So the regime is quite masterful at stopping these movements and keeping their stronghold on the government, not allowing these demonstrations to spread beyond the point they had already spread.

So unfortunately the movement slowed down. A lot of people were arrested. A lot of the consequences were too great for people, for their families, for professionals, for journalists, and photojournalists. I speak to people all the time who wanted to give everything they had, but unfortunately when the stakes are so high, the consequences become unbearable and people have to go home or leave the country in order to live another day. That being said, the Iranian people were extremely successful directly following the announcement of the election results in June of 2009 and months following, to go out into the streets, to have their stories heard, to use the Internet and social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter to tell their stories.

Where journalists were not allowed, the people went in, they told their stories, and were very much successful in turning the attention of the world to their plight and the gross human rights violations within their country. They brought attention to the fact that the only problem that the world has with the Iranian regime is not just their ongoing nuclear agenda, but also in spreading this terrorist and extremist ideology that they use against their own people.

FP: We see the mainstream media giving heavy coverage to Egypt, Libya and Syria, but Iran is virtually ignored. How come?

Daftari: The easy answer would be to say that journalists are not allowed in Iran.  Firstly, very few foreign journalists are allowed to be inside the country and secondly, even the Iranian journalists who are inside the country and want to express themselves and send out pictures are forced to face the consequences. A young man I interviewed took the cover shot that was used on Time Magazine’s cover of the 2009 post election uprisings. He was searched for. There was a warrant out for his arrest and he had to escape the country. On the one hand, getting your photo on the cover of Time Magazine is such a huge accomplishment, for anyone, particularly someone living in Iran. And to have his “reward” then be that he has to escape the country, leave his family, leave his friends, because of such a huge accomplishment…The obstacles are great; whether it be the fact that journalists are not allowed in the country or the fact that Iranian journalists are very fearful to contribute, to put their stories out, to do a blog, to actually be interviewed. I have a hard time getting interviews that are not “anonymous.” Nobody wants to speak. Nobody wants to be responsible. Nobody wants to put things up on Facebook, on Twitter. There are crackdowns and people are really scared to voice their opinions.

FP: What do you see as the future of the Green Movement or the results of the uprisings? Do you think the authority of leaders like Khamenei and Ahmadinejad will grow or do you think there is a chance that this regime will collapse?

Daftari: It’s going to be hard to tell what will happen. Obviously the people of Iran have understood that what happened in 2009 in the aftermath of the election will not be the solution, or will not result in the toppling of the regime, but that there has to be something more forceful, more organized. They definitely lack a viable leader, and I don’t think that the Green Movement, and the way I’m defining it, have real leaders in Karoubi and Mousavi. They will not be the leaders going forward because the Iranian people realized that in order to get the freedoms that they want, in order to have freedom of press, freedom of religion, women’s rights, gay rights, you name it, they will have to do away with this regime and this ideology.

I think that if the Iranian people were to come out into the streets again, risking their lives again, this time around they would go for it all; they would go for something that would actually make a significant change in their lives. We have elections coming up again in 2013 and as we get closer, hopefully the Iranian people will have a better chance at getting or at least expressing their views on what they want in a government. This time around I think they are looking more heavily to the international community to help and support them just as the allies have supported Libya, Tunisia and Egypt. Iranians believe they deserve the same chance.

FP: Thank you Lisa Daftari for joining us.

I Support Justice, Not Jihad
By Mustafa Akyol

Recently Robert Spencer argued on Frontpage that I, once a "moderate Muslim," have joined the jihad against "infidels" and especially the state of Israel.

Well, not really. If I ever join an armed struggle one day, I will tell you. What I actually did was to condemn a particular action of the Israeli government: their bloody raid on the Free Gaza flotilla, an international group of NGOs that tried to bring in humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, defying Israel's blockade.

The incident has become a global issue, as nine Turkish activists on the flotilla were killed by Israeli commandos. The two sides, as you can expect, have their own versions of the events. Mr. Spencer seems to accept and defend the Israeli narrative, and that is just fine. I, for my part, don't accept the Israeli narrative, and hope that a "credible, independent international investigation," as a recent New York Times editorial suggested, will show us what really happened.

Meanwhile, I don't think that the fact that some of the activists on board were "Hamas sympathizers" justifies Israel's attack. In Turkey we have a few million "PKK sympathizers," and although I regard the PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party) as a terrorist organization, I don't regard those people as terrorists and thus legitimate targets. I understand that they just see the world quite differently.

I also don't accept that Israel has a right to put a blockade on the Gaza Strip -- a collective punishment on 1.5 million people -- for the terrorist actions of the radicals in that destitute part of the world. I actually think that the radicalism on the Palestinian side is only exacerbated by such brutal and humiliating policies of Israel, which include the occupation of Palestinian lands since 1967 and the building of illegal settlements on them. The latter recently infuriated even Joe Biden, who does not shy away from describing himself as "a Zionist."

I, on the other hand, am not a Zionist, but I certainly accept Israel's right to exist, in its internationally acknowledged pre-1967 borders. I also strongly support a two-state solution which will, hopefully, give peace and security to both the Jewish and the Palestinian peoples.

The bottom line, I guess, is that I am not "pro-Israel," as I believe Mr. Spencer is. I am rather trying to be pro-justice, and equally respect the rights of the both sides of the Middle Eastern conflict.

As for being a "moderate Muslim," I never recall calling myself as such. The only political-sounding term I prefer to use is "liberal," in the classical sense of the word. In other words, I do define myself as a "liberal Muslim," for I uphold individual liberty, and criticize some elements within the Islamic tradition that contradict this value -- things such as the ban on apostasy, the bans on "sinful" things, or the enforcement of certain religious practices.

I probably am "moderate," too, for I always prefer dialogue to confrontation and diplomacy to armed conflict. But if being a "moderate Muslim" means being uncritical of Israel, or any other government, in order to enjoy flattery by them and their supporters, then let me kindly return the badge.

Spencer responds:

Mustafa Akyol, oddly enough, seems in his note to equate “jihad” with “armed struggle,” and to ignore the jihad of the tongue, the jihad of the hand, the jihad of the heart, and the jihad against the lower self, all of which are abundantly represented in Islamic tradition. But for the record, I do not believe and did not intend to imply that Mustafa Akyol was going to blow himself up in a crowded restaurant in Tel Aviv, or hide explosives in his underwear and attempt to set them off on an airplane, or drive a bomb-rigged car into Times Square, or shoot soldiers on a U.S. Army base. I do not believe that he is ever going to take up arms in order to further the hegemony of Islamic law over the world — but that doesn’t mean that in endorsing the Jihad Flotilla, and accepting the Islamic supremacist Turkish government’s fantastic version of events, that he is not siding with the jihad against Israel, and hence with the larger global jihad of which the jihad against Israel is just one of many fronts, albeit the foremost.

For the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians is indeed a jihad — if it weren’t, Mr. Akyol would have had his two-state solution in 1948, when the Arabs rejected a Palestinian state and went to war with Israel instead, motivated by the jihadist intransigence that demands all the land of Israel as an Islamic waqf. That line of thinking is also why the Camp David Accords, the Oslo Accords, the Road Map, and all other attempts to “solve” the Israeli/Palestinian conflict have failed, and why all future such initiatives will fail unless they involve the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state and its incorporation into an Islamic Sharia state. That is the stated goal of the Hamas movement that runs the Gaza strip that was to be the recipient of this “humanitarian aid.”

The “radicals,” as Mr. Akyol calls Hamas and its ideological kin, are supported by the overwhelming majority of Gazans, who voted them into power by a large margin. The society they envision is not in any sense “pro-justice” except in the eyes of Sharia supporters and sympathizers, and given that Mr. Akyol acknowledges that “some of the activists on board were ‘Hamas sympathizers,’” it reflects poorly on the moral sense of the other “activists” that they made the trip at all in the company of such people.

Meanwhile, Mr. Akyol conveniently ignores the fact that what he characterizes as the “Israeli narrative,” to which he generously grants me permission to subscribe, is abundantly established by video footage showing that the “activists” attacked the Israeli soldiers first, and by the photographs showing that the weapons they used were anything but the harmless “kitchen utensils” he earlier characterized them as being. But it has already been abundantly established that the world will not accept Israeli evidence no matter how compelling, while swallowing Palestinian propaganda (which they are very skillful in packaging for the mainstream media) with eager credulity.

So I do not, by any means, expect Mr. Akyol to break ranks with the dominant mainstream, the overall objectives of which he accepts anyway. I do wonder, however, what would happen to this self-professed “liberal Muslim” if he himself were to visit Gaza and proclaim publicly his opposition to the Islamic death penalty for apostasy. He might in that event not find too many of the oppressed, starving, but inexplicably obese (indeed, one of the most obese populations in the world) people of Gaza not quite as “pro-justice” as he might have hoped.

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Lisa Daftari, a journalist specializing in Iranian affairs.  She is a guest contributor on Fox News and has been published in Frontpage Magazine, Washington Post, CBS.com, NBC, Voice of America, and PBS.  She communicates with individuals living in Iran and tells their stories.  In 2006, she was invited to show her documentary on bringing regime change to Iran to a subcommittee of Congress.

FP: Lisa Daftari, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Tell us about your work in regards to Iran and what inspires you to engage in it.

Daftari: As a journalist, I am drawn to human stories, particularly ones that demonstrate the effects that society and politics have on ordinary peoples’ lives. In the case of Iran, these stories are quite numerous and revealing. Whether it is a story about a young girl who was arrested for her voicing her political views or a father of two who is forced to work four jobs just to put food on the table, I think these stories are the best ways to understand the struggles of the Iran people right now.  It is a well-known fact that the Islamic Republic is a radical, fundamentalist and unjust government, but through talking to the Iranian people and understanding their lives can we better grasp how this regime plays a role in daily routine of the people.

FP: What has drawn you to Iran?

Daftari: Obviously my background, as an Iranian-American, has played a significant role in fostering my passion and interest in the area. Every time I had a research assignment or paper in school, I would find some way to do my project on Iran.  Growing up, I was incredibly cognizant of the Iranian Revolution of 1979, or the Enghelab, the word for revolution in Farsi. I knew that it had changed the fate of my family significantly and that is how we found ourselves living in this country.  My family, like many other Iranian families, shared these conversations and anecdotes at the dinner table. My siblings and I felt a deep nostalgia for a time period we did not live through and yearned to understand and experience that time for ourselves. Later when I became a journalist, I wanted to tell human stories in the backdrop of larger social, political and cultural issues. Clearly, starting with my own people felt most natural, particularly when the Iranian people experienced their most crucial historic moment only 30 years ago.

FP: Tell us a bit about the radical, fundamentalist and unjust government that rules over Iranians.

Daftari: The Iranian people see their government as an imported entity; a group of fundamentalists whose beliefs in radical Islam are stronger than their nationalistic ties to the country.  This clashes strongly against a large population of Iranians who consider themselves extremely patriotic. We also have to remember that Iran is made up of a rich cross section of various religions, cultures and dialects. Obviously there is no government that can represent them all, yet they share and celebrate the Iranian culture and old heritage they have in common.

Above all, this regime, cloaked in religious fundamentalism, angers the people with its hypocritical actions. They deny the people so many of their basic rights, yet we have extensive evidence of their own indulgent lifestyles. We know of their lavish vacations around the world, their lucrative real estate portfolios, their international bank accounts storing millions of dollars, and their access to some of the world’s best universities for their children.  The people of Iran are savvy and resent the double standards.

FP: You have researched the Iranian American community and its evolvement over the last 30 years. Can you enlighten us a bit on your findings and observations?

Daftari: The Iranian American community has developed an extremely unique dual identity. Over the last thirty years, many of these Iranians had lost hope in ever going back to their homeland, and likewise in ever seeing this government change. The result has been an Iranian American community that has emerged quite successfully. They are represented in all types of occupations and areas of business.  They have excelled in politics, music, film, fashion, real estate and technology.  They have raised their American born children to share an unwavering allegiance to the United States. In June however, it was remarkable to see how invested even American born Iranians were in the fate of their inherited homeland.  In large cities across the U.S., Iranians and Iranian Americans gathered by the thousands to stand in solidarity with the protestors in Iran.  They felt a real glimmer of hope with this political impetus that really moved the community.  They had been waiting for such a moment for a long time.

FP: We know of course that Iranians are still bravely protesting and being tortured every day. The fascists who rule the country are cracked down on the protests and continue to crack down viciously and sadistically. Your thoughts? What’s coming up?

Daftari: Many describe the Iranian people at the time of the protests as a pot that boiled over. The impetus, or better yet, the excuse, was frustration over a fraudulent election, but the reality was that the Iranian people, both in Iran and abroad, had been waiting three decades for such a moment. With every breach of justice, with every hanging, with every whip that slashed down on an innocent woman’s arm, for every stone that was violently hurled at a young Iranian’s head, the grievances had amassed.

Since last June, Iranians came out in protest during holidays and other commemorative days, particularly those momentous to the regime. They came out on these days to show that their grievances are directly against the regime.  By protesting on Islamic holidays and on days special to the Islamic Republic, they made a stand against the government and what it stands for. The people of Iran are incredibly nationalistic. They are patriotic and their Iranian heritage runs deeper and stronger than anything else.

We are coming up on the one-year anniversary of those protests, and Iranians are organizing for smaller demonstrations.  We are seeing an evolving Iranian force, partly as a result of the threats that the regime has made against those who come out and partly because the Iranians realize that to be shot at, beaten and rounded up and taken to prison is not going to be the avenue to freedom. The main issue for the protestors is and has been a lack of leadership and strategy.

FP: Why is it, in your perspective, important to talk about Iran in the context of its people and their experiences and disenchantment?

Daftari: In the case of Iran, it is imperative to get to know the people, their struggles, their experiences and what they really want going forward. The Iranian people are multi-faceted. Iran is such a vast country that has varying religions, dialects and sub-cultures that create a rich cross-section of Iranian culture. In the past, many would erroneously group together the Iranian people together with their regime, but since the elections, I think it has become quite clear that that is not the case.  The people of Iran have a 30-year-old story to tell. Everyone in Iran is and has been dramatically affected by the political landscape in the country; just as the lives of Iranian Americans and Iranians living anywhere else in the world have been remarkably shaped by the political on-goings of the last three decades.

FP: What are the chances that the Iranian people can overthrow the despots who have them imprisoned? How can we best help the Iranian people to do so?

Daftari: If we were to look at the Iranian dilemma as a social one in addition to a political one, it has become obvious that the people of Iran have and will continue to further out-grow their government. Although this regime has only been around for 30 years, as a result of the Ayatollah Khomeini-backed baby boom following the Iran Iraq War, almost 70% of Iran’s population was born under this regime. That is a very significant statistic. It means that an overwhelming majority of the country is young, modern, and under the age of 30. Even though living under the confines of a theocracy is the only life they know, many of these young people are overtly disenchanted with their government.  Overthrowing, or maybe better stated, shaking this government is inevitable. Their grievances are specific and prevent them from living a normal life on a daily basis.  They just want to live normal lives and be free to blog, to sign onto Yahoo or Google, to walk down the street with their boyfriends and girlfriends, to go to college despite not having any connections to the clergy, etc.

There is a lot of pressure on the youth of Iran, and that is what is propelling them to go out to the streets in demonstration. They want better, and they know it is out there. The Iranian people are smart, savvy, intellectual people who refuse to be represented by fundamentalist, tyrannical leaders who are holding them back. Whether it is through demonstrations or any other way they can voice their frustrations, they will continue to do so until change is brought about.  There’s a lot of hopelessness, and that’s what this struggle is about.

The question that is frequently asked of the Iranian people is: What can the rest of the world do to support them in this struggle? I think the answer has always been to unconditionally support them. It would mean to educate oneself about what is going on in the region, to ask for Iran stories when the subject suddenly escapes the media, to ask questions of elected government officials, and as taxpayers, to interrogate the United Nations on not taking a serious stance on Iran and its nuclear agenda.

FP: Lisa Daftari, thank you for joining us.

The crisis with North Korea is escalating and will continue to escalate for as long as the regime is in power. Kim Jong-Il made a calculated decision that he needed a dramatic confrontation in order to appear strong, set the stage for his youngest son to take over, and to create a pretext with which to stop Western influence from reaching the country’s increasingly knowledgeable population. Until the regime collapses under the weight of its failures, it will need to periodically up the ante with a series of increasingly frightening provocations.

There was a much bigger purpose behind the North’s sinking of the Cheonan and that was to stir up the biggest clash since the Korean War. Shortly after the attack, the South Korean army was accused by the North of crossing into the Demilitarized Zone and opening fire. Five properties at the jointly-operated Mt. Kumgang resort were seized, and two North Korean agents were arrested in South Korea as they plotted to assassinate the highest-level defector living there. This was a campaign to make certain that a crisis was sparked.

Since South Korea has formally accused the Kim Jong-Il regime of sinking their ship, the U.S. and South Korea have planned joint military exercises, the South Koreans have pledged to bring the case to the United Nations and they have cut off almost all trade with North Korea. The South’s sea lanes are also being closed to North Korean ships and they are re-labeling the North as their “principal enemy.”

The North Korean government believes it has to retaliate and appear strong in the face of this retaliation. They have reacted by cutting off economic and political ties, and promising to close the Kaesong factory complex where South Korean businesses were allowed to invest, and South Koreans are now beginning to be kicked out from the site. The military is on alert, and the telephone line between the two countries used to avert naval clashes has been cut off. The “puppet authorities” of the South will not be allowed to travel to the North, and none of the South’s air or naval vessels can enter their territory.

Four of North Korea’s submarines have left their base and their location is unknown. It is possible they have been deployed for an attack. Colonel Gordon Cucullu, author of Separated at Birth: How North Korea Became the Evil Twin, told FrontPage that it is also possible that the submarines are hidden in caves along the coast as a security measure. This movement may be because of the North Korean military’s “war footing,” but it is hard to know for sure given how erratic their behavior has been.

Another startling development is that the South has arrested a spy who transmitted classified information about their subway system to the Kim Jong-Il regime. This is a strong indication that North Korea is still preparing for potential sabotage operations. The North has the world’s largest number of special forces, which they have been training to carry out guerilla-type attacks. It is also known that the North has commandos willing to go on suicide missions. Should the North Korean government view the upcoming military exercises as something they must respond aggressively to in order to maintain credibility, the use of such saboteurs cannot be ruled out.

The biggest reason North Korea has started and continued the crisis is to maintain a hold on its population. It provides an excuse for dramatic security measures and a reason to crack down on things like joint ventures with the South that expose the people to Western influence. This has become an increasing problem for Kim Jong-Il, as over half of the population now accesses foreign news, polls of refugees show increasing anger towards the government for their economic catastrophe, and public expressions of dissent when the government issued a new currency and banned old bank notes and foreign currency.

Suzanne Scholte, the leader of the North Korea Freedom Coalition, told FrontPage that now is the time to aggressively “reach out to the North Korean people through all means possible” and to focus on the human rights situation under Kim Jong-Il, which she described as a “holocaust.” She provided FrontPage with the text of a speech she gave in April, outlining the weaknesses of the regime.

Two of the most important methods the regime uses to stay in power have collapsed. The system to distribute food and goods has collapsed, and so private markets have arisen that are decreasing the population’s reliance upon the government for survival.

The second major method was isolating the population from outside influence, which is also failing.

“One could argue that capitalism is alive and well and thriving in North Korea as the people cope the best they can by trading and selling the markets,” she said in her speech.

“In fact, the film Titanic became so widely watched in North Korea that the regime felt compelled to inform the people that the movie was a depiction of the failure of capitalism,” she said.

The fear of the Kim Jong-Il regime became evident when it said it will destroy any loudspeakers set up by the South to broadcast into the North. That is a line that he cannot allow to be crossed. The North Koreans have vowed to begin “merciless counteractions” against the South’s “psychological warfare against the North.” The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has made new 300-strong police units in each province to stamp out opposition and to try to prevent the flow of information into the country.

The West faces a dilemma. The North Korean government feels it needs a crisis in order to survive, and therefore, ignoring them will only result in greater provocations. At the same time, Kim Jong-Il must react to the retaliation by appearing stronger than his enemies by heating things up further. The result is an inevitable series of increasing crises with unforeseen consequences. The solution is to hasten the day when the regime falls, but the weaker the regime becomes, the more likely it is to lash out as it has this year. The unfortunate conclusion is that further clashes are unavoidable.

There are multiple ways that the West can weaken the regime’s grip. Colonel Cucullu said that the North expects to “be rewarded by Western nations once again.” This behavior cannot be encouraged through appeasement. He also raised the point that Japan is also fearful and will not rely on the U.S. for its safety. The possibility of chaos on the Korean Peninsula and the potential for Japan to rapidly rearm can be used to pressure China into reigning in its partner.

Joshua Stanton makes a wise suggestion that cell phones be smuggled into North Korea’s markets and towers erected in the South so they have reception. Scholte said that there are 17,000 North Koreans who left their country for the South that can be used to send information into their original homeland. Refugees can be mobilized for similar efforts.

The U.S. should place North Korea back on the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism, and push for sanctions in the United Nations. International measures to freeze the assets of North Korean officials and institutions involved in criminal activity and human rights abuses should also be taken.

There will be those who oppose such measures out of a fear of provoking North Korea. The sad truth is that the current government will set out to instigate major confrontations as a matter of survival. The West has two options: Ignore the misery of the North Korean people and hope that this pattern will not spiral down into armed conflict, or actively welcome the day that Korea can be united and free.

[This article is reprinted from the National Observer.]

One of the great unresolved questions of recent history is why so many members of the Western left have become so besotted with, and apologetic for, ruthless totalitarian regimes. There have always been Western leftists who have idolised brutal regimes — be it the Soviet Union, communist Cuba or Islamist Iran —and preferred them to their own countries in the free and prosperous West.

Others have documented this phenomenon, such as Paul Hollander in various classic works, including Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China and Cuba, 1928-78 (1981) and Anti-Americanism (1995).

Here, in his recent book United in Hate, Jamie Glazov makes an attempt at exploring and explaining the Left’s love affair with terror and tyranny.

Glazov is very well qualified to do so, and not only because he has a PhD in history, specialising in US and Russian foreign policy. His personal story contributes much to this book. His parents were Soviet dissidents who fought against communist tyranny and oppression.

They managed to escape to the US in 1972. Their initial taste of glorious freedom was soon soured when they learned that there were Western academics and intellectuals who actually hated them and the message they had to share. These Western apologists for Soviet murder and genocide wanted nothing to do with the Glazovs, and sought to denounce and demonise them in the strongest terms.

Read the rest at FPM

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Joseph Yeager, the author of the new book, Intellectual Assault: Academic Anti-Americanism and the Distortion of 9/11. He holds a Ph.D. in medieval Russian history from the University of Missouri. He is a member of the National Association of Scholars’ Argus Project, a watchdog group which keeps an eye on excesses and abuses in academia.

FP: Joseph Yeager, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

What inspired you to write your book?

Yeager: I was inspired by curiosity, Jamie, and a certain knowing suspicion.

Soon after 9/11 the professors and academic administrators began making their presence felt among the commentariat. Their sudden ubiquity was due partially to the media which understandably solicited opinions from experts about the tragedy, but it was also due to the egomania of a people who believe they are smarter than everybody else and thus deserve to be heard.

And what I heard was frankly quite disgusting. I’m sure your remember it well: America was to blame for 9/11; the terrorists and the society from which they sprang were actually righteous victims of American aggression; America is actually a terrorist state, so by what right may we punish the Taliban and al-Qaeda, ad nauseum.

These outrageous statements from the academics filled me with a desire to see if such views were outliers which received an airing precisely because they were so odious, or if they were the coin of the academic realm. As I suspected, and as my book makes clear, the academic anti-Americanism we witnessed after 9/11 is closer to being the rule than the exception on America’s campuses.

FP: So what is the prevalence of anti-Americanism in academia?

Yeager: For my book I did in-depth research on every single college and university website in American academia. I printed literally thousands of documents containing opinions about 9/11 from the faculty and administration. And while I did encounter a handful of academics who expressed sensible views about 9/11, and a fair share of others whose views might be characterized as cautiously critical of the terrorists and the Islamo-Arab world, the undoubted preponderance of opinion was that the United States was at fault and that the people of the Islamo-Arab world were victims meriting sympathy. The contours of this anti-Americanism are far more multifaceted than that statement suggests, but it does get to the heart of the matter. And based upon my research I suspect that perhaps two thirds of the academics, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, are basically anti-American.

FP: Does academic anti-Americanism vary significantly from state to state, region to region?

Yeager: Very little, Jamie. As I point out in my book, academia should be thought of as an anti-American archipelago. College and university campuses are essentially islands of Leftist radicalism in a great ocean of moderation and common sense. Moreover, these islands are closely linked to one another by a shared culture that is transmitted to future professors and administrators during their undergraduate and especially graduate years. Newly minted Ph.D.s go thither to California and Maine, Florida and Washington, Missouri and Wyoming, and they reinforce and replicate the anti-Americanism and Leftism they’ve swallowed throughout their years as students. Consequently, a tenured professor at Princeton will have far more in common with an instructor at Northern Arizona than he will with a pizza maker in Trenton; the Vice Provost at South Alabama will share more with the President of Stanford than he will with a physician in Birmingham. The surrounding political culture really has very little effect on the mental world of the university.

FP: How is 9/11 a lens through which we can understand academic anti-Americanism?

Yeager: The 9/11 attacks are so important for understanding academia precisely because they put the professors on the defensive for a change. Hence, the terrorists were constituents of academia. They were non-white, they were not Christians or Jews, they were from Third World nations and they were from parts of the globe that are comparatively impoverished, even if the actual terrorists themselves were anything but poor.

And these constituents of academia managed to unite American citizens, at least temporarily, in a conviction that the terrorists were evil and that they and their supporters had to be destroyed by military force. The academics were of course, aghast. How could Americans be so filled with hate? How could they rebel against pet academic nostrums such as “conflict resolution” and out-and-out pacifism? Did they not learn anything from the Vietnam War?

But most interestingly I believe the academics felt that the very notion of “diversity” was under siege. The terrorists were in no uncertain terms exemplars of diversity. And suddenly Americans were turning a gimlet eye on Islam and the Islamo-Arab world. They were also questioning the wisdom of easily acquired student visas, and open-door immigration policies.

This was too much for academia to stand. Believing their diversity ox was being gored, the professors and administrators sallied forth to defend the bearers of diversity and to attack Americans as rubes and racists. They even constructed a totally fallacious backlash by common Americans against Muslims and Arab-Americans where none existed. Rather than mass pogroms against these minorities, there were very isolated hate crimes which quickly petered out. My book deals with these issues in some depth.

FP: What is the biggest problem in US higher education?

Yeager: Believe it or not, Leftist propagandizing in the classroom, and even overt discrimination against conservatives on campus are not the biggest problems. Far more significant is the relatively subtle but ceaseless skewing of virtually every field in the social sciences and humanities to the left.

Because these fields are so ideologically unbalanced, so lacking in views emanating from anywhere on the political spectrum other than the far left, there is an inevitable drift of scholarship leftward. Liberal and Leftist assumptions about scholarly issues and problems, liberal and Leftist points of departure and ways of looking at the world are never even questioned. Indeed, the research questions which serve as the basis of scholarly projects almost inevitably stem from a liberal/Left foundation.

And how could they not? There are simply not enough centrists and conservatives in academia to even illuminate the liberal/Left bias, let alone to raise a din that would inspire greater self awareness among the majority scholars.

What results is a lifeless intellectual universe where poor scholarship is produced and indeed, the distinction between scholarship and propaganda is blurred. American students are thus getting a pathetic excuse for an education, and are paying ever more for this woeful product.

FP: So what can be done about all of this?

Yeager: As long as Americans are essentially apathetic about what goes on in academia the problem will only worsen. American citizens must recognize the seriousness of this situation and they must do something about it. And make no mistake, they have the power to make a difference.

Money, as always and everywhere, is the lifeblood of academia. Cut off the money supply and the academic power brokers will take notice and make changes. Concerned citizens should write their state representatives demanding accountability in academia on pain of voting for challengers should the incumbents not apply the heat. Alumni should cease donating money to their alma maters and make clear why they are no longer giving. Small businesses and corporations could help the cause as well by no longer requiring college degrees for work that can be done by high school graduates. The use of bachelor’s degrees as a winnowing device simply funnels a steady supply of students (and money) to the very people who would like to see this country crash and burn. The professors and administrators don’t much care for Americans; why should we continue to provision their sumptuous gravy train, with no strings attached?

FP: Joseph Yeager, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Pamela Geller, founder, editor and publisher of the popular and award-winning weblog AtlasShrugs.com. She has won acclaim for her interviews with internationally renowned figures, including John Bolton, Geert Wilders, Bat Ye’or, Natan Sharansky, and many others, and has broken numerous important stories — notably the questionable sources of some of the financing of the Obama campaign.. Her op-eds have been published in The Washington Times, The American Thinker, Israel National News, Frontpage Magazine, World Net Daily, and New Media Journal, among other publications. She is the co-author (with Robert Spencer) of the soon to be released, The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America (forward by Ambassador John Bolton).

FP: Pamela Geller, welcome to Frontpage  Interview.

Geller: Thank you, Jamie.

FP: Tell us about the “Leaving Islam” bus ads and what’s going on.

Geller: Last Tuesday (April 13), Stop Islamization Of America and the Freedom Defense Initiative, the new organization I have begun with bestselling author and Jihad Watch director Robert Spencer, rolled out our “Leaving Islam” ad campaign on Miami buses. But on Friday (April 30), in an outrageous denial of our free speech rights, Miami-Dade Transit pulled our ads – because they might be “offensive to Islam.”

At the behest of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an un-indicted co-conspirator in a Hamas funding case, Miami-Dade Transit took our SIOA ads off the buses in South Florida because they offended Muslims.

Miami-Dade Transit was bowing to Sharia, Islamic law, which forbids non-Muslims to insult Islam. But ultimately free speech won out: after we threatened a lawsuit, Miami-Dade Transit agreed to restore our ads and add them to twenty new buses at the cost merely of printing the new posters. Our lawyer, David Yerushalmi, did a superb job, with the aid of the Thomas More Law Center’s Robert Muise.

FP: What was the motive of your campaign?

Geller: Jamie, this campaign was and is in defense of religious freedom. Our ad asks, “Fatwa on your head? Is your family or community threatening you? Leaving Islam? Got questions? Get answers! RefugefromIslam.com.” This is the first time anyone offered public help to people threatened under Islam’s death penalty for apostasy. America is the land of the free, and apostates must know they are free here. Safe here. Government and law enforcement should be on this. But they aren’t. So we are. It is time for free citizens to stand for freedom — or lose it.

Miami-Dade Transit’s kowtowing to CAIR, even though it ultimately reversed itself, shows how close we are to losing it.

FP: Didn’t CAIR run a bus ad campaign of its own?

Geller: Yes, Jamie. CAIR and other Muslim Brotherhood-linked groups ran campaigns on buses across the country last year, including Miami, inviting people to convert to Islam and claiming that Abraham, Moses and Jesus were Muslim prophets. It was important to counterbalance this offensive appropriation of the founding figures of Judaism and Christianity and outright deception with a healthy message.

FP: It’s amazing that defending freedom of religion would be controversial.

Geller: That’s right, Jamie. Freedom of religion is an unalienable right. Sharia law should hold no weight or legitimacy here. Apostates should be free in America to leave Islam without fear, and be who and whatever that they want to be.

But Miami-Dade Transit thought otherwise, and it took the threat of a lawsuit to keep them from submitting to Sharia. While they allowed the CAIR bus ads despite how offensive they were to Jews and Christians, they initially disallowed the SIOA ads. In December 2008, the Miami Herald ran a glowing piece on the CAIR bus ad campaign, which ran in Miami-Dade and Broward counties for eight weeks. No one took offense, despite the Islamic supremacist nature of the ads. No one breathed a word of protest.

So Muslims can run bus ads all across America inviting the clueless to convert to Islam, but we cannot make information available to Muslims who want to leave Islam. Still think this is a free country? Still think we enjoy the protection of the First Amendment on speech that offends the powerful? Think again: it didn’t start with Miami. At least three of the bus companies that ran CAIR’s dawah (invitation to Islam) bus ads turned down our ad.

FP: How did CAIR react when your ads were pulled?

Geller: As Miami-Dade Transit bowed and scraped, CAIR lied. CAIR-South Florida director Muhammed Malik claimed: “Islam guarantees freedom to and freedom from religion. . . . [We] reject as un-Islamic any extremist interpretation that sanctions the killing of any individual because she decided to ‘leave Islam.”

If what Malik said were so, the ads would run. But what about the thousands of dead apostates in Muslim countries? Al Azhar University, the leading Islamic university in the world, recently issued a fatwa that constitutes a death warrant on apostates from Islam. Ruling on the question of a Muslim who had converted to Christianity, the fatwa said: “Since he left the Islam, he will be invited to express his regret. If he does not regret, he will be killed pertaining to rights and obligations of the Islamic law.”

Will Muhammad Malik denounce Al-Azhar University? Will he denounce Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi of Al-Jazeera, who said that all the major schools of Islamic law “agree that apostates must be executed”?

FP: What’s the next step?

Geller: Jamie, I am proud to announce that Robert Spencer and I are taking our “Leaving Islam” campaign nationwide. Miami was a key test case. Now we are trying to raise money for ads – and lawyers – all over the country. Free speech and religious liberty must be defended in the United States. Public institutions like Miami-Dade Transit must not give way to Islamic rules governing speech. The stakes couldn’t be higher.

FP: Pamela Geller, thank you for joining us.

Ryan Mauro is a foreign policy analyst who contributes regularly to both FrontPage Magazine and Pajamas Media. He also blogs here at NRB about The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Brigitte Gabriel, founder of the nonprofit organization ACT! for America, and one of the leading terrorism experts in the world. Her expertise is sought after by world and business leaders. She has addressed the Australian Prime Minister, members of The British Parliament/House of Commons, members of the United States Congress, The Pentagon, The Joint Forces Staff College, The US Special Operations Command, The US Asymmetric Warfare group, the FBI, and many others. She is the New York Times best selling author of Because They Hate and They Must Be Stopped: Why We Must Defeat Radical Islam and How We Can Do It.

FP: Brigitte Gabriel, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

I would like to talk to you today about CAIR’s personal attack on you. Tell us about it.

Gabriel: CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, sent out a press release on March 17^th, using its standard propaganda techniques such as name calling, which I won’t dignify by repeating here.  This is not the first time that CAIR has attacked me.  But in this case, CAIR’s attack could best be described as “throwing the kitchen sink” at me.  It was a litany of accusations and references to statements I have allegedly made, or statements that were taken out of context, pieced together to create a distorted caricature of what I believe and how I define the threat of radical Islam.

FP: Why do you think CAIR did this?

Gabriel: It seems clear to me that CAIR is becoming increasingly desperate in its efforts to try to stop the truth about radical Islam from reaching the American people.  It’s almost like they’re flailing, like a drowning man desperately trying to stay afloat.  They have lost every court battle thus far in their fight against the authors of the blockbuster exposé Muslim Mafia. The Department of Justice has reaffirmed its finding that CAIR is tied to the terrorist organization Hamas, and a grand jury subpoena for CAIR records issued last November indicates a new government investigation of CAIR is ongoing.

Desperate organizations, like desperate people, are prone to do desperate things.  CAIR is desperately trying to divert attention from its own problems, and they are many, by slinging mud at others – and not just me.

FP: I noticed that one of the sources CAIR quotes is the Australian Jewish News. Could you tell us about that particular interview?

Gabriel: This is one of the areas CAIR honed in on. Back in 2007 I was in Australia to speak at a major event honoring Prime Minister John Howard. While there I met with a Jewish journalist who brought along a friend, and we had coffee. The “friend” turned out to be an apologist for anything Islamic, including the Palestinians against Israel. He was so ignorant of the issues of terrorism that he didn’t even know what Hamas was. He was so uninformed that the journalist sitting next to me told him, “You are an embarrassment to journalism.” The man who invited him apologized to me in the car for his friend’s behavior and told me that he will never invite him again to a press conference. This person was a regular at the Islamic Mosque and was very close friends with the Imam and members of the mosque. He ended up writing a blog that badly distorted things I said in the conversation.

CAIR has since been quoting this blog to falsely allege things that I don’t believe. For instance, I don’t believe that there are no moderate Muslims. Of course there are.

FP: You have made statements about “practicing Muslims.” Tell us precisely what you mean in these statements.

Gabriel: When I have made statements about “practicing Muslims,” here is what I’m saying:

In any religious faith, and that includes Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, there are people who are very orthodox and very devout, and then there are others who are less so.  There are Christians who read their Bibles, attend church regularly and pray every day, and there are those who don’t.  The same dynamic is true in Judaism.

And the same is true in Islam. There are many, many Muslims who have never read the Koran in their own language, who don’t even know many of its teachings or closely adhere to its teachings and those of the Hadith, and who don’t pray five times a day.   These are the Muslims who are often described as “moderate,” or less devout, or even “secular.”

Then there are those Muslims who take the Koran and Hadith very seriously.  They follow the Islamic shariah law and they subscribe to the supremacist political ideology embedded within the Islamic holy books.  They aspire to emulate Mohammed, who any honest historian will tell you spread Islam by terror and the sword.  They agree with the doctrine of jihad. They believe that Islamic shariah law should reign supreme over all and that man-made laws are invalid.  They agree with the Islamic command that their allegiance is to the “ummah”, the Islamic nation, rather than to any country.

It is these Muslims, who are typically referred to as practicing “radical Islam,” that I refer to when I say such Muslims cannot be trusted to be a loyal citizen to our country – or any country for that matter – and who do not acknowledge that here in America we recognize the Constitution as the “supreme law of the land.”  It is these Muslims I have referred to as “practicing.”

Just look at what Imam Al-Awlaki, the American Al-Qaida leader in the Arabian Peninsula, said just last week: ”I eventually came to the conclusion that jihad against America is binding upon myself just as it is binding on every other Muslim.”

As you can see, this explanation does not lend itself well to a 20 second sound bite.  So it’s easy for Islamists and their apologists to lift one sentence out of context to lead people to conclude something that I’m not saying. And they don’t do it just to me – they do it to anyone who they perceive as a threat to their ideological agenda.

FP: For real.

Even more interesting: isn’t it true that CAIR leaders have made public statements that actually confirm what it is you’re saying?

Gabriel: That’s the delicious irony of all of this.  CAIR’s press release criticized me for my statements about how radical Muslims cannot be trusted to be loyal citizens.  Yet public statements by some of their own leaders confirm what I’m saying.

For instance, Omar Ahmad, the founder of CAIR, made this statement in 1998: “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Qur’an should be the highest authority in America.”  This was reported in the San Ramon Valley Herald on July 4, 1998.  Look what Ahmad is saying – he wants an Islamic theocracy in America. How is this any different from my position that says there are those Muslims who believe that Islamic shariah law should reign supreme and that man-made laws are invalid?

Then there’s Ibrahim Hooper, CAIR’s Communications Director, who said in a 1993 Minneapolis Star Tribune interview, “I wouldn’t want to create the impression that I wouldn’t like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future…”

If that sounds to you like he wants an Islamic theocracy in America where Islamic shariah law reigns supreme, you’re right.

Which begs this question: Can Omar Ahmad and Ibrahim Hooper be counted on to be loyal citizens of the United States and to the Constitution, our law of the land?

FP: This is the question that many people are afraid to answer.

So what do we conclude from all of this?

Gabriel: Everywhere I go I make the point of saying just what I said earlier, that there are many, many Muslims worldwide who either don’t know, don’t understand, or don’t subscribe to the ideology of political Islam, the doctrine of jihad, and the supremacy of Islamic shariah law.  Of course, we have no idea how many people make up this group.

But ultimately, that’s not the issue.  The issue is the radical, passionate Islamists worldwide who are driving the militant Islamic agenda in the world.  Read the words of the revered and respected Muslim clerics worldwide.  They are committed to supremacy, jihad, and Islamic shariah law.  This is what drives the terrorists and those devoted to “stealth jihad.”  It doesn’t matter if even most Muslims don’t think this way, because as history teaches us, the “moderate” element within a movement don’t drive the agenda.  Most Germans during World War II weren’t committed Nazis, but that didn’t prevent Nazism from leading to the deaths of 60 million people.  The same can be said for the Communists in the Soviet Union and the followers of Mao in China.

FP: Words of wisdom.

So before we go, a final thought?

Gabriel: Thanks Jamie.

A final thought?

Well, let’s face the truth of the dire situation we are facing: Islamists are intent on doing us harm, either through violent jihad or stealth and cultural jihad. They are driven by their commitment to the ideology of political Islam, the doctrine of jihad, the supremacy of Islamic shariah law over all other law, and their allegiance to the ummah rather than any one country.  They see this as a state of war between Islam and the “infidel” world, and the practice of everything from deception (taqiyya) to violence is acceptable for their use in fighting this war.  That includes the propaganda techniques employed by organizations like CAIR.  Understanding all of this is essential to understanding how our enemies think and why they do what they do – and what we must do to defeat them.

FP: Brigitte Gabriel, as always it was an honor and privilege to speak to you. Thank you for your courage and nobility. Thank you for your fearless fight for liberty and the truth. The world doesn’t make many people like you.

Today, FrontPage Magazine published a must read article written by Barbara Kay.

The subject of the piece is FPM’s managing editor Jamie Glazov’s father, Yuri. Yuri Glazov was an outspoken critic of the Soviet regime. After signing the infamous “letter of the twelve,” the regime had enough and declared war on him. They trumped up some drugs related charges and prepared to send him to the Gulag.

Realizing his life was on the line, he told his family to pack their bags. They fled to Canada. Here, Yuri continued to and expose and fight communism and its many evils.

Living in the West and working for one of Canada’s major universities, Yuri quickly discovered that most Westerners had no idea what was happening. He dedicated his life to changing that.

Without him, most of his fellow academics (most of whom were leftists, of course), would have continued doing what they had been doing for decades: wipe the crimes committed by the Soviets under the rug. If it were not for the Yuri Glazovs of this world, there would not have been Westerners today with knowledge and understanding of the truly evil nature of communism.

Having said that, there’s still much work to do in this regard. Kay notes that:

Prospects for educating Canadians about the human toll exacted by communism through their stories will brighten when a long-sought Ottawa Memorial to the Victims of Totalitarian Communism is completed, a project singled out for endorsement in the recent Throne Speech.

This memorial is needed because Westerners need to understand just how dangerous communism is. We all know that Nazism was evil, but most of us have no idea that communism isn’t much, if any, better.

In related news, the Yuri Glazov Memorial Award is in danger of being shut down. This award is meant to reward those who fight for freedom (and democracy). It goes without saying that we should do everything in our power to make sure that this will not happen. If you can, please donate.

They have more in common than just the family resemblance.

My always-supportive friend and mentor Dr. Jamie Glazov has a must-read article today at FrontPage.

Usually when I introduce one of Jamie’s articles it’s time to brace yourself for a horrific expose of Islamofascism or misogyny. Today’s a bit different, though. Jamie has finally written the kind of piece I’ve been bugging him to do for months: the story of his family. Here’s the beginning of it:

One day, when I was nine years old, my father and I were on our way to Church. As we neared the entrance, I spat on the ground. Reflexively, my dad’s arm shot out across my chest like a railway barrier, blocking my motion forward. We stood there, frozen in time, for some three seconds until my father uttered, in a very serious but patient way: “It is ok to spit outside of KGB headquarters, but never in front of a place such as this.” I registered the message and indicated my understanding — and we proceeded on our way.

That was my dad’s moral clarity and sharp, quick-witted way with words; and the sacred values that spawned those words made a profound impression on me from the moment of my birth. I was born into a family of Russian dissidents — a father and a mother, Yuri and Marina Glazov, who put their clenched fists up and went toe-to-toe with the Evil Empire.

Throughout my youth, my dad shared many stories with me, which included how he had always been aware, even in his youth, that he existed in a slave camp masquerading as a country and that he perpetually dreamed of escaping it. He spent his young years studying maps, trying to decipher which body of water he could swim across to escape the communist paradise he languished in. But his life ended up going a different way: he confronted the slave masters, rather than escaping the prison they had built.

My father was a scholar at the Soviet Academy of Sciences and a professor at Moscow State University. His main field of study concerned Oriental languages and cultures, with a specialty in the Chinese, Sanskrit and Tamil areas. Despite his rewarding career, my dad put everything on the line and began to attend human rights demonstrations in Moscow on behalf of political prisoners. He also started to sign letters of protest against the political repressions that were heightening in the country in the 1960s, connected as they were to the re-Stalinization of the Soviet Union after the Khrushchev thaw. The activities my dad engaged in could land a Soviet citizen in the gulag or a psychiatric hospital for decades.

Read the whole thing at FrontPage.

See how Jamie has carried on his father’s legacy of fighting totalitarianism by reading his book, United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror

The first American to be charged with treason since World War II was back in the news Sunday, both for a new videotape he released and for reports of his capture that turned out to be false. In the videotape, al-Qaeda operative Adam Gadahn, an American convert to Islam, praised the Fort Hood jihad murderer and called upon Muslims to carry out jihad attacks in the United States. The reports that Gadahn had been captured caused widespread excitement until the arrestee turned out to be a different American convert to Islam, Abu Yahya Mujahdeen Al-Adam, who like Gadahn is an al-Qaeda leader. The videotape and the arrest of the other American-born Muslim demonstrate yet again the cognitive dissonance that prevails at the highest levels regarding the nature of the jihad threat.

In the videotape, Gadahn called Nidal Hasan, who murdered thirteen people in the name of jihad and Islam at Fort Hood in November 2009, "Brother Nidal" and held him up as "the ideal role-model for every repentant Muslim in the armies of the unbelievers and apostate regimes." And not just military personnel: Gadahn added that "Nidal Hasan is a pioneer, a trailblazer and a role-model who has opened a door, lit a path and shown the way forward for every Muslim who finds himself among the unbelievers."

Gadahn advised his fellow jihad warriors: "You shouldn't make the mistake of thinking that military bases are the only high-value targets in America and the West. On the contrary, there are countless other strategic places, institutions and installations which, by striking, the Muslim can do major damage." He implored jihadis to think out of the box: "As the blessed operations of September 11th showed, a little imagination and planning and a limited budget can turn almost anything into a deadly, effective and convenient weapon."...

Read it all.

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and a columnist for National Review. His book Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books, 2008), has just been released in paperback with a new preface. Check out a description from Encounter Books.

FP: Andy McCarthy, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.

The Obama administration has now named a CAIR-trained supporter of convicted terrorist Sami al-Arian to be its envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference. What gives here?

McCarthy: Jamie, as always it’s a great pleasure to be here.

It’s not such a great pleasure, however, to talk about what is happening to our country.  What we are seeing is the domestic version of the Obama administration’s dangerously loopy “engagement” strategy.  Basically, if you’re a friend of the United States, say Israel or Poland, prepare to be screwed; if you despise America as, say, Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood do, prepare to be wooed. What’s happening here is wrong on so many levels it’s hard to unwind.

The OIC is an insidious organization dedicated to the imposition of Sharia (i.e., the evisceration of liberty) and the destruction of Israel. Yet, as Claudia Rosett’s recent brilliant column in Forbes observes, we are subsidizing its activities and giving it a propaganda victory every time we repeat its claim to be a “57-nation bloc” (one of those “nations” is the Palestinian territories, which do not constitute a nation). We shouldn’t have an envoy for it at all. We can thank the Bush administration’s pandering for that, but the Obama administration takes every Bush misstep and increases it geometrically. So now we will have an envoy whose credibility with the OIC will lie in the fact that he shares its disdain for the American government’s national defense measures against Islamic terrorists.

FP: What’s with Homeland Security Secretary, Janet Napolitano and her cozy relationship with Muslim Brotherhood’s U.S. affiliates?

McCarthy: This is a continuation of what President Obama started in Cairo, when the Muslim Brotherhood was invited to attend his ballyhooed speech. There are many people on the Left who have argued for years that we should be engaging the Brotherhood — that they are the “good” Islamists who are willing to work through a political process rather than resort to terror.  Putting aside that they actually do support terrorism (against U.S. forces in Muslim countries and against Israel, at the least), shouldn’t we be concerned about what these “moderates” want to achieve through the political process?  They are dedicated to the installation of Sharia law, the necessary precondition, in Islamist ideology, to the Islamization of society.

Many of the groups for which Napolitiano has rolled out the red carpet — the Islamic Society of North America, the Muslim American Society, for instances, are Muslim Brotherhood tentacles.  Like CAIR, they were shown in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism finance trial to be part of what the Brotherhood described as ”grand jihad” to “sabotage” America from within. When you know that, the idea would be to keep them out.  We’re inviting them in.  I strongly recommend that people check out Richard Pollock’s report at Pajamas Media about Napolitano’s meeting with these groups.

FP: Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan has come out with some curious comments on the recidivism rates of released Gitmo detainees. Tell us about those comments and other aspects of this story that need more attention.

McCarthy: Well, the recidivism comment is just staggering.  First of all, to say the rate at which former Gitmo detainees recidivate (i.e., go back to the jihad) is ”20 percent,” as Brennan said, is preposterous.  We don’t know if someone is a recidivist unless we either encounter him on the battlefield or get reliable intelligence that he has rejoined the terrorist groups.  That is, we can’t account for people we haven’t encountered on the battlefield or otherwise gotten good intelligence about.

This is not a criminal trial such that you have to suspend common sense and give those unaccounted for jihadists the benefit of the doubt. The only safe assumption is that the real recidivism rate is higher — no doubt much higher — than 20 percent. Moreover, even if it were lower, we are talking about people who go back to mass-murder, not shop-lifting. For Brennan to say 20 percent is fine because it compares favorably to the recidivism rate for ordinary criminals utterly misconstrues the difference between a national security challenge (which must be defeated) and a mere criminal justice problem (which has to be managed by good policing but can never really be eliminated).  That would be a stupid remark for a cop or an analyst to make; for a high national security official to make it is inexcusable.

Beyond that, why is Brennan going to NYU to pander to Islamist activists like Omar Shahin?  Michelle Malkin has an excellent piece on this unnoticed aspect of Brennan’s performance. Shahin was the ring-leader of the Flying Imams. He was also the leader at one of the most notorious Islamist mosques in the United States, the Islamic Center of Tucson. His predecessor there was Wael Hamza Julaidan, an al Qaeda founder designated by the Treasury Department as an international terrorist. Shahin gave fiery anti-Semitic “sermons” while at the mosque, the worshippers at which included 9/11 suicide bomber Hani Hanjour, bin Laden’s secretary Wadi el-Hage (since convicted in the embassy bombing case), and two young Saudis (Hamdan al-Shalawi and Muhammad al-Qudhaieen) who just happen to have been implicated in a 1999 “dry run” for the 9/11 attacks — engaging in the same sort of antics Shahin and the other Flying Imams engaged in. Shahin was the Arizona coordinator for the Holy Land Foundation (a charity later shuttered for supporting Hamas) and later became a representative of “Kind Hearts,” another Hamas charitable front. Yet, here is a top presidential adviser not only giving this guy the time of day but seemingly agreeing with him that our post-9/11 counterterrorism has been too aggressive.  It’s shameful.

FP: What is happening in all of these developments and what threat does it pose?

McCarthy: The Muslim Brotherhood’s “grand jihad” — as it describes the plan in a 1991 memo — is to “sabotage” the United States from within.  These developments show we’re not only failing to defend ourselves.  We’re helping them along.

In a recent article in The Nation, titled "The Transformation of Hamas," Prof. Fawaz A. Gerges argues that Hamas is ready to accept Israel and to become a moderate and democratic force if it is engaged properly by the U.S. and the West.

What reality is there to this proposition? Today Frontpage Symposium has assembled a distinguished panel to discuss the supposed "transformation" of Hamas. Our guests are:

Kenneth Levin, a clinical instructor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, a Princeton-trained historian, and a commentator on Israeli politics. He is the author of The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege.

P. David Hornik, a freelance writer and translator living in Beersheva, Israel, and a frequent contributor to Frontpagemag.com and Pajamas Media.

and

Robert Spencer, a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. His latest book is The Complete Infidel's Guide to the Koran. He is coauthor (with Pamela Geller) of the forthcoming book, The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War on America.

[Editorial note: I emailed Prof. Fawaz A. Gerges several times to invite him to join this discussion, but my invitations went unanswered.]

FP: Kenneth Levin, David Hornik and Robert Spencer, welcome to Frontpage Symposium.

Kenneth Levin, tell us your thoughts on Prof. Fawaz A. Gerges's article. Is Hamas truly ready to embrace Israelis? This means they are ready to abolish Article 11 of their Charter, which is the sole purpose for their existence. This is a bit confusing. What’s your angle?

Levin: Thanks Jamie.

Gerges’s article is simply pro-Hamas propaganda; it is shilling for a murderous organization dedicated to an explicitly genocidal agenda. Unfortunately, this has become standard fare for pieces touching on Israel in the pages of The Nation.

The Hamas charter that you mention not only calls for Israel’s annihilation but asserts the killing of all Jews to be a religious duty, and Hamas leaders continually reiterate their eternal fealty to the charter’s declarations. Just recently, senior Hamas figure Osama Abu Khaled shot down claims of any moderating of the organization’s goals and asserted that its objective remains Israel’s destruction. In addition, Hamas-controlled schools and children’s television continue to indoctrinate their young audience in the virtues of devoting themselves to the murder of Jews.

Gerges supports his stance by citing Hamas statements in the vein of being prepared to accept an Israeli retreat to the pre-1967 cease-fire lines. But Hamas leaders have repeatedly explained that they view any such “acceptance” as an interim step on the path to eliminating Israel. The same is true with regard to Hamas’s willingness to enter into truces. While Gerges asserts that this too is evidence of the organization’s “moderating,” Hamas has made clear that it views truces as vehicles to facilitate its strengthening its own forces until it is in a better position to pursue Israel’s annihilation.

In expounding his thesis, Gerges makes much of other indirect “evidence” as well, “evidence” as meaningless as the examples cited.

Among his other claims, Gerges asserts that the task of governing Gaza and satisfying the needs of its people is one of the factors pushing Hamas to moderation. This has for almost a century been a recurrent – and empty – line of argument proffered by apologists for despotic, murderous regimes. Many were the voices in 1933 that declared Hitler’s rise to the position of chancellor in Germany and his need to govern the nation would inevitably push him to moderate his murderous objectives.

In a similar vein, Gerges cites Hamas’s violent confrontations with other Islamist groups in Gaza as additional evidence of its moderation. Of course, these confrontations are no more than struggles for dominance among competing parties.

After the 1934 “Night of the Long Knives,” when Hitler, apparently fearing a potentially competing power base, had Ernst Roehm and other leaders of the Nazi Sturm Abteilung, the SA, murdered, numerous voices in the West chose to interpret the move as Hitler’s eliminating Nazi extremists and as evidence of his own moderating.

Having established, to his apparent satisfaction, Hamas’s “political evolution and deepening moderation,” Gerges then gets to his predictable conclusion: The real problem is not Hamas and its genocidal agenda but Israel – which, Gerges suggests, is the true “hardline” and “extremist” party in the conflict. The key obstacle to peace is Israel and its refusal to make the concessions that would free Hamas to go public with its new moderation and allow it to follow its heart and abandon more explicitly its goal of killing all Jews.

This is what passes for serious discourse on the Israeli-Arab conflict in The Nation and likeminded anti-Israel outlets.

FP: Robert Spencer, what do you make of Gerges’s article and Kenneth Levin's comments? And I would like you to expand on this idea that Hamas would or could somehow stray from Islamic orthodoxy regarding Jews and territories that are considered to belong to the House of Islam.

Spencer: Jamie, Kenneth Levin is entirely correct, and his observations are important. Gerges's article is indeed, as Levin says, "simply pro-Hamas propaganda...shilling for a murderous organization dedicated to an explicitly genocidal agenda." And it is crucial to bear in mind that "the Hamas charter that you mention not only calls for Israel's annihilation but asserts the killing of all Jews to be a religious duty, and Hamas leaders continually reiterate their eternal fealty to the charter's declarations."

Of course, in contrast to this, Gerges insists that "there are unmistakable signs that the religiously based radical movement has subtly changed its uncompromising posture on Israel." But not even Gerges could bring himself to assert that there have been any signs at all, subtle or not, that Hamas has changed its uncompromising posture on Islam, and that makes all the difference. For as long as Hamas remains a group committed to what it regards as Islamic purity, it also remains committed to the Islamic principle that land that is considered to have once belonged to the dar al-Islam belongs by right to the dar al-Islam forever. It remains committed to the idea that, as the twentieth-century Pakistani jihad theorist Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi put it, non-Muslims have "absolutely no right to seize the reins of power in any part of God's earth nor to direct the collective affairs of human beings according to their own misconceived doctrines." If they do, "the believers would be under an obligation to do their utmost to dislodge them from political power and to make them live in subservience to the Islamic way of life."

This means that if Hamas remains an Islamic group, it remains committed to the destruction of Israel. The strategy that Hamas may pursue in order to attain this goal may change enough to deceive Fawaz Gerges or, if he is in on the joke, then the readers of The Nation, but the goal remains the same.

It is also important to note in light of Gerges' article that Hamas also, insofar as it continues to be an Islamic religious party, also believes in the acceptability of deceiving unbelievers, particularly in wartime. This is based on a hadith in which Muhammad says that lying is permissible in war, and others in which he says "war is deceit." Also, Qur'an 3:28 warns Muslims not to take unbelievers as "friends or helpers" (َأَوْلِيَا -- a word that means more than casual friendship, but something like alliance), "unless (it be) that ye but guard yourselves against them." This is a foundation of the idea that believers may legitimately deceive unbelievers when under pressure. The word used for "guard" in the Arabic is tuqātan (تُقَاةً), the verbal noun from taqiyyatan -- hence the increasingly familiar term taqiyya. Ibn Kathir says that the phrase given above as "unless (it be) that ye but guard yourselves against them" means that "believers who in some areas or times fear for their safety from the disbelievers" may "show friendship to the disbelievers outwardly, but never inwardly. For instance, Al-Bukhari recorded that Abu Ad-Darda' said, 'We smile in the face of some people although our hearts curse them.' Al-Bukhari said that Al-Hasan said, 'The Tuqyah [taqiyya] is allowed until the Day of Resurrection.'"

While many Muslim spokesmen today maintain that taqiyya is solely a Shi'ite doctrine, shunned by Sunnis, the great Islamic scholar Ignaz Goldziher points out that while it was formulated by Shi'ites, "it is accepted as legitimate by other Muslims as well, on the authority of Qur'an 3:28." The Sunnis of Al-Qaeda practice it today.

It is much more likely that Hamas is practicing taqiyya in appearing to accept the existence of Israel and being willing to negotiate, than that they have actually abandoned Islamic doctrine on these matters.

FP: Thank you Robert Spencer.

There is much more. Read it all.

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Pamela Geller, founder, editor and publisher of the popular and award-winning weblog AtlasShrugs.com.. She has won acclaim for her interviews with internationally renowned figures, including John Bolton, Geert Wilders, Bat Ye’or, Natan Sharansky, and many others, and has broken numerous important stories — notably the questionable sources of some of the financing of the Obama campaign. Her op-eds have been published in The Washington Times, The American Thinker, Israel National News, Frontpage Magazine, World Net Daily, and New Media Journal, among other publications. She is the co-author (with Robert Spencer) of the soon to be released, The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America (forward by Ambassador John Bolton).

FP: Pamela Geller, welcome back to Frontpage Interview.

I would like to talk to you today about Organizing for America (OFA), formerly Obama for America, and what it is doing in public schools. Tell us about it.

Geller: Jamie, a reader of my website AtlasShrugs.com, Chuck, has a daughter in the eleventh grade in a public high school, Perry Local in Massillon, Ohio. The teacher in her government class passed out a propaganda recruiting paper – headed with Obama’s distinctive “O” logo — asking students to sign up as interns for Organizing for America. You can see the entire intern recruiting form at AtlasShrugs.com.

The form indicates yet again that Barack Obama is using our public school system to recruit for his Alinsky-inspired private army. Organizing for America is recruiting in our high schools to “build on the movement that elected President Obama by empowering students across the country to help us bring about our agenda” – that is, his agenda of socialism for the United States of America.

FP: So what would you say to the argument that this is just an internship program and that there’s nothing wrong with it?

Geller: Yes, Jamie, it is just an internship program, but what will these “interns” be force-fed? The mother’s milk of the left — anti-war agitation, anti-capitalism, Marx, Lenin, Ayers, LGBT agenda promotion, global warming, soft-on-jihad, and illegal immigration. For starters. Maybe “Ellie Light,” who has in the last few weeks published the same Letter to the Editor supporting and defending Obama in over a dozen newspapers across the country, can give lessons in astroturfing.

FP: Provide some evidence.

Geller: That’s easy.

The evidence for this is that the very form in question carries a recommended reading list, including Rules for Radicals by the notorious hard left community organizer and Obama mentor Saul Alinsky; two Huffington Post articles by Zack Exley, “The New Organizers” and “Obama Field Organizers Plot a Miracle.” The first of those, published in October 2008, enthuses about “an insurgent generation of organizers” inside the Obama campaign that has, “almost without anyone noticing … built the Progressive movement a brand new and potentially durable people’s organization, in a dozen states, rooted at the neighborhood level.”

During the 2000 presidential campaign, Exley operated the website www.gwbush.com, which was filled with lies about George W. Bush that were designed to kill his chance to become President. The site’s headline was “Just Say ‘No’ to a Former Cocaine User for President.”

Also included on the OFA internship recommended reading list are Stir It Up: Lessons from Community Organizing and Advocacy by the leftist activist Rinku Sen, and sections of Obama’s book Dreams from My Father dealing with his days as a community organizer in Chicago.

FP: What do you think the point is of all this “community” organizing?

Geller: To elect more Democrats, of course. This internship program is geared towards the 2010 elections, using our kids as the Democrats’ goons. The internship form begins with a nakedly partisan and propagandistic appeal: “Organizing for America, the successor organization to Obama for America, is building on the movement that elected President Obama by empowering students across the country to help us bring about our agenda of change. OFA is launching a national internship program connecting students all over the country with our organization on the ground – working to make the change we fought so hard for in 2008 a reality in 2010 and beyond.”

Jamie, can you imagine if the Republicans attempted such a stunt? Obama is using the public school system to help ensure Democratic victories in 2010, 2012, and thereafter.

This is incredible. And it’s profoundly wrong, to say the least. And it is no accident. Obama is poisoning our public school system. He acts as if it’s his own private recruiting farm.

FP: The Obama camp has done questionable things in public schools before, hasn’t it?

Geller: Yes, Jamie. In September 2009, all public school students were forced to listen to his creepy speech about working hard in school. During the campaign the Obama camp had “Kids for Obama Parades.” And public school teachers more than once were caught indoctrinating children into the Obama cult.. Remember the uniformed children chanting about how Obama had motivated them to succeed? P.J. Gladnick wrote about that video at Newsbusters in October 2008 that it was “reminiscent of North Korean kids chanting out their praises for the ‘Dear Leader.’” And don’t forget those many videos of public school kids singing brainwashed tunes of Obama praise.

Long before he was President, Obama’s camp had targeted children and started building a cult of adulation around their hero. The children’s book Barack Obama: Son of Promise, Child of Hope by Nikki Grimes sets Obama up as a demigod: “Ever since Barack Obama was young, Hope has lived inside him. From the beaches of Hawaii to the streets of Chicago, from the jungles of Indonesia to the plains of Kenya, he has held on to Hope. Even as a boy, Barack knew he wasn’t quite like anybody else, but through his journeys he found the ability to listen to Hope and become what he was meant to be: a bridge to bring people together.”

And now once again our perverse public school system abandons academic standards and achievement, replacing them with radical leftist activism from leftwing Alinsky indoctrinators.

FP: What can parents do about this?

Geller: Be aware and proactive. Children must be advised to expose this propaganda. Children must tell their parents how they are being used and manipulated. Parents, warn your kids. Don’t let Barack Obama recruit his drones from your family.

FP: Pamela Geller, thank you for joining us.

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Dave Gaubatz, the first U.S. civilian (1811) Federal Agent deployed to Iraq in 2003. He is the owner of DG Counter-terrorism Publishing. He is currently conducting a 50 State Counter-terrorism Research Tour (CTRT). He is the co-author (with Paul Sperry) of the new book, Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld that’s Conspiring to Islamize America. He can be contacted at davegaubatz@gmail.com and his site is MuslimMafiaInternational.com.

FP: Dave Gaubatz, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

I would like to talk to you today about jihadi torture videos that have come into your possession and also about Islam’s child martyrs in America.

But first, give us some updates on your new research in terms of counter-terrorism.

Gaubatz: Thank you Jamie.

I just returned from DC, MD, PA, WV, VA, and NJ conducting various counter-terrorism (CT) research.  I would like to say that while various realms of our government are doing an outstanding job in protecting our families from future Islamic based terrorist attacks, we have several serious problems. One of them is that our President doesn’t even officially have any type of plans on a “War on Terrorism.” Sadly, we are being overtaken by these groups. I meet Americans and other concerned citizens from Canada and the UK, and they know America and their countries are slowly/patiently being overtaken from within, while their leaders are ignoring the national threats.

FP: Give us some specifics on what you have recently discovered.

Gaubatz: I am beginning to see more and more violent material published and distributed to young Muslim children advocating killing Jews and Christians, and how to conduct treason/sedition inside America and to ultimately take our country down as we know it.

CAIR (Muslim Brotherhood) strongly informs its followers to not assist our law enforcement agencies and to not conduct slander and backbiting against Islamic leaders. Within Sharia law there are severe penalties for undermining the efforts of the ‘Islamic Ummah’ (Nation) and their specific target of a worldwide Ummah under Sharia law.

I have been provided hundreds of DVD’s originally videotaped by Islamic terrorist groups while they conducted torture and killings of people (even Muslims) who have helped their enemies (Israel, America, UK, Canada, etc…) to further (in their opinion) oppress the Muslim Ummah.

FP: Talk a bit more about these videos.

Gaubatz: This part of my work is very depressing because I have to review the most extreme animal actions by terrorist groups on innocent people, to include young children. I reviewed hundreds of videos the American people and law enforcement do not get to see, and our government does not want the American people to see. Why? I will explain later.  I witnessed innocent people being slaughtered like animals. The Islamic terrorist groups had children cut and behead a fellow Muslim. In addition several young Muslim men had to stand in line and wait their turn to have their tongues removed by an al-Qaeda member with a razor blade. Several men had to put their arm on a board and a terrorist used a baseball to break his arm. Then he had to put his other arm out for the same treatment.

These are the type of people CAIR supports and even our government supports. The IRS grants CAIR and other such organizations non-profit organizational status and tax free benefits, while you and I are forced to pay taxes to support the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood. Something doesn’t seem right and politicians who protect these groups will lose in the end. The American people will not allow our children to suffer at the hands of terrorist groups.

FP: Share with us how Muslim children are being taught to kill “oppressors” of Islam, even inside America.

Gaubatz: For many years I have tracked the materials coming into America from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan specifically.  Based on my research, these two countries are responsible for distributing jihadi materials, not just to adults, but to Muslim youth right here in America.

The message is clear: “Islam is a religion of Jihad, in peace and in war. Jihad is one of the noblest principles of Islam.” The manual where this message is found is titled, “A Guide for The Young Muslim.” The manual further describes Jihad as being physical fighting against their enemies and oppressors. It is admired to be a “martyr.” This book was found in northern VA, and a CAIR pamphlet was beside it.

“Martyrdom means transfusion of blood into a society, especially a society from anemia. It is the martyr who infuses fresh blood into the veins of the society.” The manual in which this teaching was contained was found in VA (again alongside a CAIR brochure). It is titled “The Martyr” and was originally printed in Houston, TX.

I would like to explain how the above statement is applicable here in America and reaches Muslim children.  When Maj. Hasan murdered the innocent people at Fort Hood, he was trying to revitalize the Muslim people to not lose hope, to continue pursuing the agenda of al-Qaeda and others, and most importantly to let them know there are “martyrs” working inside America who are ready to die for Islam.  He is 100% correct. Sleeper cells are alive and well not only in America, but Canada, the UK, and most countries worldwide.

The terrorist sleeper cell is not waiting for a “green light” from an al-Qaeda leader who may already be dead (Osama bin Laden); the green light was already given to the Jihadists many years ago.  The word is being kept alive through the manuals, DVDs, and books being sent into our country by the leadership of Pakistan and Saudi, with the help of many of our own elected officials.  How many people know that Hamas and Saudi Arabia sponsored former President Jimmy Carter’s books and paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to get them into the hands of young children so they will support the cause of Palestine/Hamas?  Our research team uncovered this several months ago and more documents pertaining to this issue will soon be released to the public.

FP: Ok, we will be talking to you right when you release this information.

Give us an update on the CAIR lawsuit against you and your son, Chris.

Gaubatz: First I would like to thank the many people supporting Chris and I in this frivolous lawsuit (per the words of CAIR Executives). Our attorneys Daniel Horowitz, Bernard Grimm, and Martin Garbus, to name a few are people, I will always respect because they know CAIR is just not targeting Chris and I, but the whole American infrastructure.  They are trying to make an example of Chris and me so others will never try and expose them.

But CAIR made one fatal error:  They did not realize I have some of the same attributes of the Muslim Brotherhood: I have patience and persistence. I have no fear of terrorist groups or what they can and have tried to do to me in regards to physical attacks. I have no love for material goods such as cars and houses, and most importantly I love my country as much as they love their desire to control our world under Sharia law (an Islamic Nation worldwide).

Behind the scenes during our undercover research, CAIR Executives told our researchers and my own son certain things that amount as a threat to me. I am ready to testify about all of this with hardcore evidence to back me up.

FP: Final words?

Gaubatz: Thank you Jamie. I again want to thank all of my supporters. It will not be me that legally defeats the Muslim Brotherhood, it will be the people behind the scenes who care for our country and who support the work my team and I do each day to protect our country.

In addition to the time, locations, and dates, Islamic based terrorist acts are committed with much more thought than many of our “authorities” would like you to believe. There is actually a day set aside to celebrate “martyrs” who have given their life to murder innocent Jews, Christians, and non-Muslims not adhering to the strict laws of Sharia. It is called the “The Day of Ashura” (10th Muharram). Readers who are interested should research on their own how many terrorist attacks have been finalized on the 10^th of a month, and carried out on the 11^th.

Thank you Jamie.

FP: Dave Gaubatz, thank you for joining us.

To order Muslim Mafia, click here.

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Nonie Darwish, the co-founder of FormerMuslimsUnited.com and the author of Cruel and Usual Punishment.

FP: Nonie Darwish, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Today I would like to discuss with you the photos we are exhibiting below of Cairo University graduates over the course of this era. There are the 1959 and 1978 photos compared to the 1995 and 2004 photos.

These pictures tell quite a story. Radical Islam has taken over even the minds of educated women in the Muslim world.

Since you’re from Egypt, I would like to get your take on this phenomenon. What’s going on here? One would think that people yearn for freedom rather than enslavement, but I guess life experience and human history tells us otherwise – when it comes to certain cultures. Being from Russia, I’m not too surprised with many Russians’ adoration of a thug despot like Putin and even their pining for Joseph Stalin.

Let’s first show these pics and then you share your thoughts on them.

1959:

1978:

1995:

2004:

Darwish: These photos represent the gradual but steady Islamic radicalization invading the Middle East and the rest of the world in the last three decades. I lived in Egypt until the year 1978 and have never wore a head cover, neither did my mother or grandmother. And this is thanks to a feminist movement that started in Cairo in 1919 under the leadership of the famous Egyptian feminist Hoda Shaarawi.

Shaarawi had attended women’s conferences in Europe and Turkey, which was undergoing major reforms by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk who wanted to be more like Europe and less like Muslim Arabia. Upon her return from a trip to Rome in 1923, Shaarawi performed a bold act that became the central symbol of her life: with the support of several upper class Egyptian women, she removed her veil in public, at the crowded Cairo train station.  If such an act of defiance had happened today in Iran or even Egypt, she would be executed by the Iranian government and, as to Egypt, she could be killed by an Islamist on the street for defying or insulting Islam.

FP: What were the circumstances at that time that allowed Hoda Shaarawi to engage in this act of freedom of conscience?

Darwish: The reason she was not killed then but actually protected, and was able to start a reform movement in Egypt, was due to many reasons. First and most important was the existence of the British in the area. They helped protected the peace, minorities and equal rights. Second, the Egyptian king was moderate and wanted to bring modernity to Egypt.  Third, this was the pre-petrodollar era of wealth in Saudi Arabia which was still weak and poor. Fourth, the Muslim Brotherhood was not yet in existence.

FP: How and why have things changed?

Darwish: Things started drastically changing after the Egyptian 1952 coup which ousted King Farouk and the British. Even though that coup appeared secular, none of the rebel ‘free officers’ were Christian Egyptians and almost all were members of the Muslim Brotherhood. However, the impact of the Muslim Brotherhood was delayed for a decade after the revolution when they attempted to assassinate Nasser who killed and imprisoned many members of its members. After Nasser died, the Muslim Brotherhood was empowered and with it the status of women. That coincided with Saudi petrodollars and the Iranian revolution, both of which brought power of Islamists to the whole area.

FP: Talk about these photos.

Darwish: The first 1959 photo reflects the influence of the Sharaawi feminist movement which existed until the death of Nasser. However, I must stress that the Egyptian feminist movement which started in 1919 and ended in the late 70’s, and which freed Egyptian women from the hijab, was more cosmetic than true Western-style liberation. Women still had to abide by Sharia law when it came to marriage and family matters and the culture still practiced segregation of the sexes and honor killing.

FP: So why did many of Egypt’s women, and educated women, become more radicalized and turn to the veil?

Darwish: As we see in the photos, the change was gradual, from 1959 of no head covers at all, to 2004 where almost all women, even some young girls, are wearing head covers. It must be noted that the Egyptian government, unlike Iran, does not force the head cover on women.  Religious and social pressure on Egyptian women was the cause for the change. Feminists such as Shaarawi are now threatened and accused of apostasy, forcing the Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi to leave the country. And now we see that some of the harshest critics of Muslim women reformists and human rights activists are none other than Muslim women.

The Muslim woman’s attire is the first thing noticeable in any Muslim country and is dictated by Islamic law. Some devout Muslim women chose to carry the torch of Islam by wearing the burqa on their own and exhibit their piety and devotion to their faith. Those were the ones who were rewarded and respected by society. The rest were left in a quagmire, either choose to be viewed as devout Muslims or as outcast rebel apostates. The majority chose the former since perception and image is extremely important in Muslim society where the uncovered head can be regarded as a defiant image of rebelliousness. After some acts of violence on the street against uncovered women, even some Christian girls found it safer to cover their heads so they were not noticed. How can feminism be practiced openly let alone survive under such conditions?

FP: What does the future hold?

Darwish: Muslim women in the Middle East have never developed a relationship of solidarity and support for their rights and freedoms. To the contrary, they often have hostile relationships where women often report other women when they violate social and religious taboos. Most have developed a holier than thou attitude towards other women. In such an atmosphere many found that if they want respect and even financial rewards, then they must be as radical, if not more radical then men. Some women do not even talk or communicate with women who are uncovered. This happened to me personally when I visited Egypt in 2001 and was wearing a conservative one piece bathing suit on the beach and a couple of covered up women in a group I was with would not talk to me.

In the beginning of our interview you asked why educated Egyptian women choose going back to the old days of the repression of the Burqa. The reasons are many and complex. Muslim women were left with two choices; to be in a constant struggle against Islamization and merciless rejection by society or if you can’t beat them, then join them. Another reason is nationalism, Arab pride and rejection of Western influence. Arab nationalism and pride came at the same time with the sudden wealth from petro-dollars which empowered radial Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia.

Muslim countries have an obsession against free democracies that are prosperous and give women equal rights. Muslim leaders are having a hard time convincing their citizens that the Muslim system is better than Western democracies and thus the media and preaching is consumed with hate propaganda against the West, telling the West we reject your culture, the way you dress etc. I actually remember mosque sermons telling us how Western civilization is corrupt, satanic and we should not befriend them or imitate them in any way shape or form.

The return of the Burqa movement has also migrated to the West. When I moved to the US in 1978 I visited some Muslim girlfriends at UCLA and none of them wore the head cover. Many Muslims who moved to the States in the same year with me never wore the head cover back in Egypt. However, I have seen some of these immigrants a decade later with full Islamic attire. Even on US college campuses the movement is the same, Muslim students are proud to wear their Islamic outfit and refuse to assimilate. The trend is everywhere, just like in the Egyptian photos.

FP: So then what is the future of true women’s rights under Islam?

Darwish: Many believe that Islam’s treatment of women is on its way to being reformed and that it is just a matter of time until Muslim women will wise up, figure what must be done, stand together in unity and march for their equality and human rights. That happened to women in the West, so why not to Muslim women in the Middle East?

There is a major difference: in the West, Christianity did not come with thousands of pages of Jesus’s laws regulating every detail in a Christian’s life to control every Christian. Jesus did not call women deficient in intelligence and lacking in religion or that they are toys, slaves in a marriage. Very simply Western feminists were not confronted with the many dead ends that the Muslim feminist is confronting.

Many also believe that the reformation of Sharia and Islam itself will come from its most oppressed group: women. I disagree with that view, partially because the woman is largely the object of extreme regulation in Sharia (Allah’s law).

Expecting Muslim women to be behind the reformation of Islam and Sharia, is like asking slaves to end their own slavery without their masters’ approval or asking prisoners to get out of prison without the guards opening the doors. That is the reason Muslim Feminism has not succeeded in getting the majority of Muslim women on board. A Muslim woman’s inferior status in Muslim society has gone too deep and has become institutionalized. Muslim societies, cultures and institutions are dependent on it. For Muslim women to simply revolt against Islamic gender apartheid will be regarded as anti-man, anti-family, anti-religion, anti-government and worst of all, anti-Allah himself.

FP: Nonie Darwish, thank you for joining us. And again, thank you for being the brave freedom fighter that you are.

And I encourage all our readers to get their hands on Nonie Darwish’s book Cruel and Usual Punishment.

Visit Newsreal

At JihadWatch Robert Spencer has a great post taking apart a new self-published book attacking him, David Horowitz, and other anti-Jihad activists.

Why was the jacket photograph of Horowitz from A Cracking of the Heart distorted and a yarmulke inserted? Horowitz is not religious and does not wear yarmulkes. I think I know why.

*

Editor’s note: Below we reprint Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch takedown of Edip Yuksel’s book:

The Enemy of Peace!
by Robert Spencer

Several people sent me information about this book recently, but I hadn’t intended to say anything about it, despite the honor Edip Yuksel does me by including me in his subtitle, and despite the slyly antisemitic caricature of David Horowitz on the cover. After all, I have had fun with Edip Yuksel’s book before. And Edip Yuksel was so thoroughly beaten in his two debates with me, Bill Warner and others on FrontPage that I thought he would have preferred that these debates be forgotten forever. Yet not only does he seem not to realize how soundly he was defeated and completely he was exposed, but he actually thinks he did well enough to publish his humiliation in a book. That self-delusion and/or ridiculous chutzpah seemed to me to be punishment enough, and so I thought I’d pass over his ludicrous book in silence.

But then Bill Warner of the excellent Political Islam site kindly sent me this thought-provoking piece, and it is amply worth reading:

Imagine my surprise when I opened an email ad from Amazon.com and found that a Muslim, who is a leading reformer, had written a book, Peacemaker’s Guide to Warmongers: Exposing Robert Spencer, David Horowitz, and other Enemies of Peace by Edip Yuksel. He made my day. Bill Warner was included in the product description as an enemy of peace. I am flattered.Why does Mr. Yuksel call me an enemy of peace and a warmonger? It’s simple. Partnered with Robert Spencer, I debated him in Frontpage Magazine Symposium and beat him like a drum using the doctrine and history of political Islam. As a result, I have gone from being an opponent in a debate to an enemy of peace.

Am I an enemy of peace? Am I a warmonger? Yes, on an everyday basis and I want you to be an enemy of peace and a warmonger as well.

The question must be asked: what peace are we talking about? Islamic peace. How does Islamic peace come about? Islamic peace comes after jihad and the victory of Islam. Peace is one of those words that everyone considers to be universally good, but peace is what losers (kafirs) get, while winners (Muslims) get victory. Islamic peace is all about the victory over the kafirs. Islamic peace changes a free man into a slave of Allah.

We should examine the meaning of all words Muslims use, since Islam does not share a common ground of civilization with us. Islam twists all of the kafir words. To find out what “peacemaker” means we have to go to Mohammed. Mohammed was an Islamic peacemaker. In the last 9 years of his life, he was involved in an event of violence on the average of every 6 weeks.

Every single neighbor of Mohammed experienced his peacemaking. Take the Jews of Khaybar, for instance. They were going about their lives when the army of Mohammed showed up. It took the murder, rape, theft, torture and becoming semi-slaves before the Jews experienced the peace of Mohammed. Once they submitted to Islam as dhimmis and agreed to live under Sharia law and give him half of what they earned, the jizyah (the dhimmi tax), they were left to live in peace. This is the peace of Islam.

As long as Mohammed merely preached the religion of Islam in Mecca, he was a failure. Very few people were interested in the religion of Islam. It was only in Medina where he became a warlord that Islam succeeded, and he became a peacemaker.

The natural state of Islam in relation to kafirs is jihad, not peace. If we want to discover peace in Sharia law, we must look under the general heading of jihad to find the subject of “truce”. We learn that Muslims are not to call for a truce as long as they are winning. When Islam offers peace, it means that they are losing and need to gain time to prepare for the next jihad.

I am a warmonger because I use the doctrine of Islam to refute the deceptions of Muslims like Edip Yuksel. Last night in Nashville, TN, a Muslim stood in front of a college crowd and said that jihad was inner struggle. Working hard to get an A is jihad. Jihad is not holy war. He is right. When you examine the hadiths about jihad in Bukhari, about 2% of them can be construed as jihad is an inner struggle. However, the other 98% of the jihad hadiths are about killing kafirs until the rest submit to Islam.

Warmongering consists of asking questions to confront Islamic propaganda in this ideological war. Being a warmonger means showing up to support the Coptic Christians at a street demonstration about the jihad killing of Copts in Egypt. Warmongering means going to an interfaith bridge building and confronting the ministers and rabbis with their ignorance about Islam. Warmongering means speaking truth to the lies of Official Islam.

It works like this. Unless we have enough enemies of the Islamic peacemakers, one day our civilization will experience the peace of Islam, and we will be like the historical majority Greek Christian culture of Asia Minor. Today Greek Christians are 0.3% of Turkey. They’ve experienced the peace of Islam–annihilation.

By the way, at this writing Yuksel’s book is ranked #260,119 in Amazon.com’s sale ranking. If it goes up, Edip, I expect a thank-you note! (Yuksel’s book is doing so well that his already-published book ranks just a little bit ahead of my as-yet unpublished one — which will be out in July and promises a much more rewarding reading experience!)

[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.

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Pamela Geller, founder, editor and publisher of the popular and award-winning weblog AtlasShrugs.com. She has won acclaim for her interviews with internationally renowned figures, including John Bolton, Geert Wilders, Bat Ye’or, Natan Sharansky, and many others, and has broken numerous important stories — notably the questionable sources of some of the financing of the Obama campaign.. Her op-eds have been published in The Washington Times, The American Thinker, Israel National News, Frontpage Magazine, World Net Daily, and New Media Journal, among other publications. She is the co-author (with Robert Spencer) of the soon to be released, The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America (forward by Ambassador John Bolton).

FP: Pamela Geller, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

I would like to talk to you today about Facebook’s Fatwa’s on Rifqa.

What exactly is going on?

Geller: Thank you Jamie.

Facebook is full of death threats and other vicious material about Rifqa Bary, the teenage convert from Islam to Christianity who is in a fight for her life in juvenile court on Franklin County, Ohio. She left Islam and converted to Christianity, and she has been persecuted for it ever since.

Rifqa’s life is now on the line. Back in September I reported at my website AtlasShrugs.com on the first Rifqa Bary Facebook Fatwa: a Facebook group that said openly, “we need to kill her,” and was full of Muslim members. Now add this to the list of fatwas and death threats against Rifqa Bary: a Facebook group, again with numerous Muslim members, proclaiming, “Don’t save Rifqa Bary, let them kill her.” Although I have called attention to that group, it is still on Facebook. It has 64 members, all of them apparently Muslims. Not a Moishe in the mix.

Imagine, these are just the ones we catch. Only G-d knows how many hit squads are out for this young woman.

Another Facebook group screams, “F*** RIFQA BARY !!! SHAME FOR ISLAM !!!!” It has 57 members – once again, all Muslims. This one openly admits what CAIR and other front groups in America lie about: “In Islam, yes, apostasy is the death penalty.”

And yet another Rifqa-hating Facebook group asks if she is the Dajjal, an evil figure from Islamic eschatology. Robert Spencer says: “The Dajjal will at the end of days lead people astray. Muhammad said: ‘The Dajjal is one-eyed and will bring with him what will resemble Hell and Paradise, and what he will call Paradise will be actually Hell; so I warn you (against him) as Noah warned his nation against him.’” The Facebook group says: “Scriptures reveal Dajjal will have one eye. Rifqa Bary has one eye. You be the judge.” It also quotes a dhimmi Christian, Rev. Tim Ahrens, praising the extremist Noor mosque that Rifqa’s parents attend and saying, “I have only ever found graciousness and kindness in my dealings with Muslims.”

They are screaming it on social networks, but in the case of Rifqa Bary, justice is not blind, it is deaf and dumb. Is Judge Elizabeth Gill and Rifqa’s crack legal defense team going to continue to ignore the death penalty for apostasy under Sharia law for those who leave Islam? Are the CAIR militants going to act like thugs, and intimidate and pervert the American justice system to enforce Islamic law?

FP: What are other developments since the Rifqa Bary case returned to Ohio?

Geller: There have been many, especially in recent weeks. Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas front CAIR has found out where Rifqa is living. Omar Tarazi knows the address of Rifqa Bary’s foster home. How? What Islamist enemy leaked her location to CAIR? She must be moved at once. Who put Rifqa’s life at risk? I would demand a change of venue. The courtroom has been infiltrated, her best interests subverted.

Rifqa’s foster parents have her on lockdown. Rifqa’s limited phone and computer were completely cut off after the hearing of the 22nd. Complete crackdown. All communication to Rifqa was cut off. It was decided that a counselor would determine if she could have contact with friends. The counselor said she could, but nothing has happened. She is literally being treated like a prisoner.

FP: Sounds like Sharia Law on America soil.

Geller: That is what is happening Jamie. This is the punishment for female apostasy. House arrest until the apostate recants. This isolation is a form of psychological torture. I thought Obama said no torture for jihadists. So why is a girl in America, guilty only of freedom of religion, allowed to be psychologically tortured? This is mental abuse, and the fact that the parents are behind it with a terror organization as their hatchet man speaks volumes as to what would happen to Rifqa if they ever dared to send her home.

Apparently Rifqa met with and was begging the counselor assigned to her for some contact, any contact, with the people she loves. She told the counselor she was completely isolated. Alone and sad. The counselor agreed and said OK. But nothing has been done. Rifqa’s John Stemberger-appointed lawyers have agreed to this house arrest. She is surrounded on all sides.

Her legal team, still led by her former Florida attorney John Stemberger, is fiercely raising money — for what? I thought his work was pro bono. And he bungled the case so badly in Florida that I cannot imagine why he is still driving the “strategy”.

FP: Why has Rifqa’s legal team agreed to or imposed this crackdown in concert with the foster family?

Geller: I don’t know. Perhaps because those who loved Rifqa would advise her to get new legal help that specialized in apostasy cases. But no one can get to her. A new lawyer could ask for a continuance to prepare for the brutal trial against the Islamic machine. She needs a continuance.

She has no one now. No one. It has never been this bad for her. And her legal team has not been preparing for trial. They seem to think they can still make a deal with CAIR (Muslim Brotherhood). The Barys will never make a deal. This is jihad. A deal is never going to happen. Rifqa’s lawyers have barely begun taking depositions for Rifqa. They haven’t interviewed any of Rifqa’s witnesses in the trial to prove dependency. And Rifqa’s parents are fighting dependency with every dishonest crooked tool in the Islamist toolbox (taqiya, lies, deception). But the Stemberger-led legal team is still in the earliest stages of preparations.

FP: What is it exactly that Rifqa’s parents are up to?

Geller: Rifqa’s parents are fighting dependency by saying there was no conflict in the home. They are saying there is no conflict for apostasy in Islam. Every teaching from the Quran (Allah’s word) says it is the most egregious crime, punishable by death. The devout Barys said “she could practice her Christianity in the home”. Nothing could be farther removed from objective reality. She lived in fear and in secret for years. The beatings, the death threats can all be substantiated by her friends. The nature of the conflict is Islam, yet Rifqa’s lawyers will not present any religious evidence. Ex-Muslims such as Wafa Sultan, Nonie Darwish, and the world’s leading scholar on Islam, Ibn Warraq, would testify. None are being called.

The parents and their CAIR-appointed attorney Omar Tarazi are determining who can speak to Rifqa. They are the only ones who can determine who is on the non-existent visitors list.  And now, still, there is no visitors list. The two closest friends of Rifqa are no longer able to contact her.

In the courtroom on December 22nd, the magistrate told the attorneys she doesn’t want any surprises before they go into any of the hearings, so they meet in chambers first. She wants to know everything that is going to be filed. Every motion, any move…and no Islam. You can not introduce Islam. And yet Islam has been introduced already. Just look at the Facebook threats.

I have said from the very first that Rifqa Bary is the highest value target in America. Apostasy is the most egregious crime against Islam. Her crime is not just against the family. It is against Islam.

I know Ohio law enforcement and Florida law enforcement found no threat to Rifqa, but perhaps they can put down the kool aid for five minutes and do their jobs.

With sites on Facebook threatening Rifqa with death, everyone should stop the PC Religion-Of-Peace nonsense and get serious. Is law enforcement going to stop playing games and protect this young girl or what? Salman Rushdie did far less.

FP: What can the average citizen do to help Rifqa? And who can we contact on Facebook to ask why it allows jihad and death threats on its site?

Geller: Jamie, the average citizen can write to Ohio authorities, including the governor, to protest how they are allowing Rifqa to be railroaded.

Franklin County children services can be reached here.

Eric Fenner’s fax number is 614-275-2755 and his e-mail address is edfenner@fccs.co.franklin.oh.us

The Ohio governor’s office can be reached here.

Also, Governor Strickland is up for re-election. Here is John Kasich’s contact information.

Be vigilant. And pray for her.

As for Facebook, they seem deliberately to make it difficult to contact them. There are contact forms within Facebook itself for members, but it is not easy to know which is the right one that will get to the right person. Readers can and should try abuse@facebook.com, but there is no assurance that anyone with any authority in Facebook will see the message.

FP: Pamela Geller, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.