This may come as a shock to many of you, but when I was about 13 years old I became fascinated by Malcolm X.  I read every page of his autobiography that he wrote with Alex Haley.  I loved Spike Lee’s film with Denzel Washington’s stirring portrayal of the Nation of Islam leader.  I was ready to take some kind of action when I heard Malcolm’s speeches.  His favorite phrase, without a doubt, was “by any means necessary.”  It became the phrase of Black Power and the rest of the Left would later adopt it.

Actually the true King of “any means necessary” is Saul Alinksy.  Every effective leftist has devoted himself to Alinsky’s philosophy of doing whatever it takes to gain political power.  The media and so-called liberal blogosphere championed Alinskyite tactics to get Obama elected in 2008 and they are already getting started for reelection in 2012.

The Republicans are far from choosing their candidate to run against Obama for the presidency. But one of the consistent front runners in polling is former Governor Mike Huckabee.  Huckabee won Iowa in 2008 and was the last Republican primary contender to bow out before McCain took the party’s nomination. Huckabee has not only polled well among 2012 Republican Primary hopefuls, but he even ties or beats Obama in many recent polls.  That makes him a prime target of the Left.  He must be destroyed by any means necessary.

Leftist blogs exploded on Friday with reports of a recent Mike Huckabee speech where he supposedly promoted the idea that Americans should be indoctrinated at gun point.  One blog even went so far as to compare the former Arkansas governor to Pol Pot, the socialist Cambodian mass murderer.  Look at these shocking blog titles.

Firedoglake: “Your Republican Front Runner, Mike “Pol Pot” Huckabee”

Alternet: “Mike Huckabee Says He Wants Americans To Be Indoctrinated at Gunpoint”

Think Progress: “Mike Huckabee Wants Every American To Be ‘Forced At Gun Point’ To Learn From Radical Historian”

Huffington Post: “Huckabee: All Americans Should Be Forced at Gunpoint to Listen to David Barton”

What could Huckabee have said to garner such a widespread attack?  Well his real crime is polling well against Obama.  But the crime the Left wants to claim was a portion of a speech he gave this past week in Iowa at the Rediscover God in America conference.  Huckabee was introduced by David Barton, a man loved by Glenn Beck and others on the Right for introducing Americans to some of our nation’s Judeo-Christian roots.  Huckabee started his speech with a humorous compliment to Barton’s work.

“I just wish that every single young person in America would be able to be under his [Barton's] tutelage and understand something about who we really are as a nation. I almost wish that there would be like a simultaneous telecast and all Americans would be forced, forced — at gun point no less — to listen to every David Barton message. And I think our country would be better for it. I wish it’d happen.” – Huckabee

Now if you were a clueless individual and didn’t know an obvious joke when you hear it, that might be a scary statement.  However, anyone watching the video would know that Huckabee was making a joke.  He obviously does not want to hold anyone at gun point.  Yet lefty after lefty treated the statement like it was a declaration of future policy by Huckabee and a slam dunk on the man who could dethrone Obama.

“Did Mike Huckabee just flush his presidential aspirations down the proverbial toilet? Well, if American mainstream media has an ounce of journalistic gumption remaining the answer most certainly would be “yes”. Huckabee has just been caught on video, at a Christian supremacist conference, stating that Americans should be forcibly indoctrinated at gunpoint.” – Alternet

This attack on Huckabee is a warning shot to all Republican hopefuls (the Huffpo article threw Gingrich and Bachmann in with Huckabee in their attack).  If you come up against Obama, we will seek to destroy you by any means necessary.  We will turn your jokes into serious proclamations.  We will link conferences you speak at to supremacy groups without an ounce of proof.  We will even claim you are genocidal.

If the ends justifies the means there are no rules.  As 2012 approaches Americans need to be ready to do research.  You simply cannot depend on the mainstream media to report the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.  There is too much at stake for the Left to waste their time with honesty and factual reporting.

Fred Branfman, author, blogger and early contributor to the current California economic miracle under Governor Jerry Brown, has written a very long apologetic about Noam Chomsky, or more accurately a standard screed against US imperialism and capitalism using Chomsky as a prop. Presumably he thought that invoking the grand old man’s name would somehow spur the faithful to actually read through this door stopper, but I’m not sure the unearthed memoirs of Lenin could have done that. This is very much a “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” kind of piece and Branfman clearly hopes that if nothing sticks at least his readers will succumb to exhaustion and boredom before realizing it.

He needn’t have gone to so much trouble. The basic theme can be summarized in two sentences (spoiler alert for those of you actually thinking of navigating this tome):

• America is really, really bad.
• Communism will fix it.

In fairness, Branfman’s innovative variation is “I think America is very, very bad and Communism will fix it, and look Chomsky agrees with me!” but the basic approach remains the same. This is a patented two-step and Branfman pays close attention to the painted feet on the floor.

On the first point, demonizing America is reasonably straightforward as long as you remember to cherrypick the facts you don’t actually make up, and frame your questions with careful dishonesty. Branfman appears to have this down. Consider:

Which nation’s leaders since 1945 have murdered, maimed, made homeless, tortured, assassinated and impoverished the largest number of civilians who were not its own citizens?

I have asked this question of Americans in every walk of life since I discovered the bombing of Laos in 1969. It’s a simple matter of fact, not involving judgments of right and wrong, and I remain astonished at how most answer “the Russians,” “the Chinese,” or just have no idea that their leaders have killed more noncitizen civilians than the rest of the world’s leaders combined since 1945.

They have no idea because it isn’t true. Apart from the dearth of evidence to support such a claim the sophistry here is so obvious it’s like watching a third rate magician not quite able to get that red hanky into his sleeve. The qualifier “not its own citizens” conveniently excludes “the Russians” and “the Chinese” (proving conclusively that the Americans he talked to were smarter than he was), to say nothing of Pol Pot, Castro, Kim Jong Il and any other half-dozen dictators you could pull at random from the Communist Who’s Who. Among them, these “agrarian reformers” have killed more people on an off-day than the US would contemplate in a decade, but never mind; it’s just their own citizens.

By thus ignoring the Tiananmen Squares and killing fields of history, Branfman takes the apples and oranges fallacy one step further by denying the existence of the orange altogether.

Not that he understands the apples any better. Words like “murdered”, “maimed” and “tortured” are designed to evoke images of the Sopranos, not the unavoidable, if obviously tragic, consequences of war he is actually talking about. The US has, for all practical purposes, undertaken the defense of the free world since World War II.  It is therefore not surprising that it would inflict more civilian casualties in wars and police actions than, say, France—which like the rest of Europe reserves the right to be self-righteous about US military power while at the same time relying on it for protection.

Rendered of its fat, that’s all he’s got, which among any rational audience should provoke a vigorous “And so …?”

To which Branfman might then reply, “Wait guys, don’t go, you haven’t given me a chance to inflate the numbers yet!”

These would include the huge proportion of civilians among the 3.4 million Vietnamese that Robert McNamara estimated were killed in Vietnam (over 90 percent by U.S. firepower), Laotian and Cambodian civilians felled by the largest per capita and most indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets in history, the 1 million to 1.5 million Iraqis estimated by the U.N.‘s Denis Halliday to have died from Clinton’s sanctions “designed,” in Halliday’s words, “to kill civilians, particularly children,” and the hundreds of thousands killed as a result of the Bush invasion. The total number of civilians killed, wounded, made homeless and impoverished by U.S. leaders or local regimes owing their power to U.S. guns and aid—in not only Indochina and Iraq but Mexico, El Salvador, Israel/Palestine, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Egypt, Iran, South Africa, Chile, East Timor, Haiti, Argentina, Ecuador, Brazil, Bolivia, Venezuela, Cuba, Jamaica, the Philippines and Indonesia—is in the tens of millions.

Credible estimates put Vietnamese war dead at 3.8 million, over a span of 43 years (which for you history buffs includes the French and other combatants)—2.3 million if you exclude those who died by assassination, forced relocation, labor camps and various civil uprisings in that period. (For an example of someone who’s actually done his homework see R.J. Rummel: Statistics of Democide, Chapter 6.)

So I stand corrected, the French will occasionally shoot somebody if sufficiently provoked.

A greater canard is the Iraq number.

How Branfman’s can present Denis Halliday (anti-Israel flotilla activist and former head of the UN’s wildly successful Oil for Food program) as a credible source, without kicking the dirt and avoiding eye-contact, is a testament to his chutzpa. As Reason Magazine’s Matt Welch points out the sanctions were administered by the UN, not the US, and the civilian numbers were grossly exaggerated. What interest Halliday could possibly have had in ginning up the numbers–beyond providing poster children for his program and an exit strategy when he needed it—is anyone’s guess.

I don’t know about you, but even if we throw in Canada and the Virgin Islands (the only two countries he doesn’t seem to think we’ve decimated) I don’t know how he gets to “tens of millions.” But then again, he’s not expecting  anyone over at TruthDig to check. Just keep nodding and smiling boys.

Branfman then goes on—and on, and on—in this fashion, trying through sheer volume of prose to make the case that America is the source of all evil in the world.

His solution is a shocker.

Chomsky thus argues that human survival requires changing the system, not merely periodically replacing those running it.

[…]

The real choice, Chomsky makes clear, is not free enterprise versus statism, but state capitalism for (A) the few or (B) the many. The latter would include breaking up the banks, a focus on job creation and safety net expansion where needed, single-payer health insurance, higher taxes on the wealthy, far lower military spending, public members on corporate boards, greater employee workplace control and, above all, a new public-private partnership to see America become a leader in a clean energy economic revolution.

Got it. Apologies to Branfman and Chomsky for incorrectly believing they were dragging us down the road to serfdom once again. If it’s got the word “capitalism” in it, it must be good, right? Just like the word “democratic.” Since I know for a fact that Communists have never appropriated words to conceal their true intentions I know I’ll rest easy.

One wonders if Newsweek will soon come out with a “We’re All State Capitalists Now” issue.

Is the technological and digital revolution good for us? Astute cultural critic Neil Postman takes on such a complex question in Technopoly. Postman pushes the importance of history while showing us that some people appear to be treating technology as a deity. This is a great read for anyone who has an interest in the impact technology has on our culture.

[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

[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.

Back in the Soviet Union they had risked their lives to campaign for the millions who were being tortured and killed in the Gulag slave labour camps and psychiatric hospitals simply because of their political and religious beliefs. Yet in America they were being viciously attacked by an intelligentsia that loathed America while idolising communist barbarism.

It was a shock the young Glazov never really recovered from, and here he seeks to assess and understand this most bizarre feature of Western life. And with the onset of militant Islam, he sees the whole scenario again being played out before his eyes.

The first half of this important book covers the earlier cases of Western fascination with, and blindness to, totalitarian nightmare states. The Soviet Union, Castro’s Cuba and Mao’s China were all objects of wide-eyed leftist veneration and adoration.

Glazov reminds us of the words of the US ambassador to the Soviet Union, Joseph Davies, uttered during the height of Stalin’s murder of millions. He waxed eloquent in his love of Stalin with these words: Stalin’s “brown eye is exceedingly wise and gentle. A child would like to sit on his lap and a dog would sidle up to him.”

French writer Jean-Paul Sartre could say this about another murderous thug, Fidel Castro: “Castro is at the same time the island, the men, the cattle and the earth. He is the whole island.” And Father Daniel Berrigan, another longstanding apologist for tyrants, could say this of Hanoi’s prime minister Pham Van Dong: he is an individual “in whom complexity dwells: … a face of great intelligence, and yet also of great reserves of compassion …”

Or consider the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, who after capturing power in 1979 managed to carry out 8,000 political executions in the following three years. They made the nation a place of torture, repression and dictatorship. Yet plenty of Western leftists fell at their feet in worship.

German writer Günter Grass, who was shown a “prison” which the Sandinistas wanted political pilgrims to see — not the actual prisons where inmates were beaten, starved, tortured and killed — came back with euphoric exhilaration: “The humane way in which sentences are carried out!”, he gushed, along with other sentimental mush.

Of course, the Soviets had done just the same with the Gulag decades earlier, to fool gullible Westerners who came over for a look. Western left-wingers were just as ignorant and easily deceived in the 1930s or ’50s as they were in the ’80s.

And they still are. The second half of this book looks at Islamic terrorism, and its Western apologists. There are plenty of leftists in the West who are convinced that Islamic terrorism either does not exist, or is all America’s fault.

Again, Glazov offers plenty of examples. The September 11 atrocity provides plenty of quotes. Norman Mailer called the suicide-hijackers “brilliant.” He excused the attack by saying, “Everything wrong with America led to the point where the country built that tower of Babel which consequently had to be destroyed.”

Susan Sontag assured us that the terrorist attack was the result of “specific American alliances and actions.” Film-maker Oliver Stone affirmed that 9/11 was a “revolt” and said the ensuing Palestinian celebrations were comparable to those seen in the French and Russian revolutions.

Christian leader Tony Campolo could argue that 9/11 was a legitimate response to the medieval Crusades. German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen described the 9/11 attacks as “the greatest work of art for the whole cosmos.” On and on the apologists for terror and tyranny go. And then there is the inherent anti-Semitism in so much of this as well.

For many left-wingers, Israel is always the enemy, and the Muslim and Arab populations can do no wrong. Consider the remarks of Mike Wallace concerning Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called for the annihilation of Israel: “He’s an impressive fellow this guy. He really is. He’s obviously smart as hell. … You’ll find him an interesting man.”

These leftists offered more support for Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein than they did for George W. Bush. Film-maker Michael Moore denounced the US while extolling the terrorists: “The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not ‘insurgents’ or ‘terrorists’ or ‘The Enemy.’ They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow — and they will win.”

Glazov devotes a chapter to seeking to examine the psychological makeup of these leftists whose romance with tyranny and terror seems so hard to fathom. They are alienated from their own homelands, although seldom realise it. They espouse a secular religion, a secular utopian vision which speaks much of humanity but is happy to see individual humans crushed in the attempt to create their coercive utopia.

The West-hating Left seems to be a permanent feature of modern Western life. Now that the communist revolution has lost its momentum, other causes must be found. The Islamist cause nicely does the trick. The same enemies are there, such as America, freedom and affluence.

As this book reminds us, we really have two enemies to contend with: murderous totalitarian ideologies of every stripe, and their Western leftist support base. It is an insidious alliance of which we all must be aware. This book does a fine job of making that very clear indeed.

Bill Muehlenberg is a commentator on contemporary issues, and lectures on ethics and philosophy. His website, CultureWatch is at: www.billmuehlenberg.com.

To order a copy of United in Hate, click here.

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Olga Velikanova, an Assistant Professor of Russian History at the University of North Texas. She was among the first scholars to work with declassified Communist Party and secret police archives. Her research about everyday Stalinism, the cult of Lenin and Russian popular opinion has been broadcast by the BBC, Finnish and Russian radio and TV, as well as the History Channel in Canada. She is the author of Making of an Idol: On Uses of Lenin, The Public Perception of the Cult of Lenin Based on the Archival Materials and The Myth of the Besieged Fortress: Soviet Mass Perception in the 1920s-1930s. She is a recipient of many awards from different international research foundations.

FP: Olga Velikanova, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

I would like to talk to you today about the Commission to Counter Attempts to Falsify History to the Detriment of Russia’s Interests, which Russian president Dmitry Medvedev created a year ago, on May 19, 2009. What are the goals of this Commission exactly and what has it achieved?

Velikanova: Thank you, Jamie.

A year ago, as you say, on May 19, 2009, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev created the Commission to Counter Attempts to Falsify History to the Detriment of Russia’s Interests. This Commission puzzled many historians. Was it an offensive against freedom of thought and speech? Did it open a door for possible repression of historians who would “undermine” the national image of Russia by bringing up unpleasant things about Russia’s national identity and the cruel truth about the Soviet past?

Without a doubt, we see a Stalinist-like intervention of the state occurring right before our eyes. It is an intervention into the historical profession and an imposition of boundaries on historical study.

The idea of the Commission was initiated by the Russian Ministry of Foreign affairs to oppose attempts by the Western neighbors of Russia to return to a discussion about the beginning and the results of WWII, and the role of the USSR in the post-war settlement.  Primarily, this Commission was an instrument of struggle in foreign relations. It was a signal to Russian historians and media what positions they “should” take in their publications.

While Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have interpreted the occupation of their countries by the USSR in 1944-45 as enslavement, Soviet historiography has presented it as a liberation. As Baltic states argue, liberation from one dictatorial regime (Nazis) was followed by the onslaught and imposition of another dictatorial regime (Soviet). This account of two regimes was supported by the OSCE resolution on July 3, 2009, which stated equality of the role of Nazi Germany and the USSR in starting WWII. In response, the Russian media protested against any comparison of the two regimes of the 1930s.

Thus, the formation of the Commission should be read mostly in the context of foreign relations in the Baltic region (especially with Poland), rooted in the painful events of 1939-1945 and also in Russian-Ukrainian relations.

FP: Okay, so the Commission targets international relations rather than the public sphere inside Russia?

Velikanova: Well you have to keep in mind that, besides the international aspect, “prevention of falsification of history” obviously has domestic implications. Very logically, this premise leads to the reconsideration of the general character of Stalinism, not only in the European context, but also inside the Soviet Union. And it is exactly this problem – the definition of Stalin’s regime – that represents the most painful and controversial point of modern historical/political discourse inside Russia. Society itself has not yet come to terms with its traumatic past. There is no public consensus on the dilemma of Stalin’s legacy.

The Commission’s goal is to promote the state view on the Soviet past. The official turn towards “blind” compromise with the past became evident with Putin coming to power and is expressed in practices such as embellishing consequences, justification of human losses as inevitable, and silencing the crimes of Stalin’s regime. The superiority of the state over the human being and his life and rights is at the center of the Kremlin’s attitude toward Stalin’s politics. In parallel, not truth but national interests are prioritized by the Commission.

It’s obvious that Putin’s life-long affiliation with the most notorious institution of the Soviet state – security police OGPU-NKVD-KGB-FSB – played its role in turning the state and the public discussion towards toleration and a “not guilty” stance. Russian society, too, showed itself not mature enough to face unpleasant truths about its fathers and grandfathers. It’s especially painful in the context of the national identity crisis which followed the collapse of the Soviet Empire.

The justification of Stalin’s politics in the media and even in the school textbooks, where Stalin is called an “effective manager,” is opposed by a liberal minority in Russian society. The New Times in Russia represents historical views on Stalinism that do not always go in favor of the interests of Russia, as the Commission understands them. Thus, if “falsification of history” would be considered a state offense, as proposed by the Commission, then a publication like The New Times would become a target of harassment and persecution,

Debates about the Commission reflect the dichotomy: the Commission initially was created as a tool to protect Russian interests in the international arena (as the state and Ministry of Foreign affairs see them.) But it is obvious that the Commission is a threat to liberty of thought in modern Russia.

FP: Does the Commission target the historical truth about Russian-Ukrainian relations in the 1930s?

Velikanova: Yes, at the center of the Commission’s attention are not only problematic issues of history of relations with Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, but also relations with Ukraine. Over the last two decades, there has been discussion on the Famine of 1932-33. It is a part of a big controversy both in historical science and in relations between the two countries. It is very natural that the abused national feelings of the Ukrainians refer to the most tragic moment of their history.  In the domain of Ukraine history, they interpret famine in ethnic terms as intentional genocide by Moscow. In a broader context – in the domain of Soviet history (and Ukraine was a part of the Soviet Union) the famine, as most scholars agree now, was a result of inhuman social politics of Soviet central government directed against peasantry as a whole and afflicted not only Ukraine, but also Russian and Kazakh peasants (about 1 million victims in the last case).

The guilt of the Soviet central government is not under discussion here, however, since citizens of both countries are not ready to accept responsibility for the excesses of their Soviet past.

National Ukrainian Stalinists were, after all, also involved in fatal agricultural politics, and they therefore share responsibility with the Russian Stalinists. While Russia does not accept these charges, an important step was made in resolving these old issues on January 14, 2010, when Kiev’s Court of Appeals found Josef Stalin and other Bolshevik leaders guilty of genocide against the Ukrainians during the famine. Criminal proceedings against the Russian and Ukrainian leaders – Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, Postyshev, Kosior, Chubar and Khatayevich – were dropped “over the suspects’ deaths.” Former Ukrainian president V. Yushchenko in the last days of his tenure called for the organization of an International tribunal on the crimes of Communism following the model of the Nuremberg trials on Nazism.

FP: So with the organization of the Commission, does it mean that “falsification of history” will be a criminal offense?

Velikanova: The bill suggests that “falsification of history and rejection of the role of the USSR in the victory over Nazism” should be a criminal offense. It was introduced by the party United Russia. The government declined this bill on January 15, 2010. The party United Russia intends to work on a new formulation of this bill and resubmit it again.

FP: After one year of the Commission being set up, what has occurred?

Velikanova: If you mean to ask if there have been any purges – no, thank God. There are no mass purges among historians. There was just one episode when a professor of history at Arkhangelsk’s Pomorskiy university, Mikhail Suprun, who was collecting data on Germans imprisoned in Northern Gulag camps during WWII, was detained for a short period in October 2009 by the FSB. The Security service also seized his archive.  He has been charged with violating privacy laws.  The episode took place in December 2008 when the security service seized, for several months, the archives of the St. Petersburg public society “Memorial” which contains data on the victims of Stalinism.

FP: Your own personal experiences?

Velikanova: Immediately after the formation of the Commission, at the end of May, 2009, I arrived to Moscow and St. Petersburg to do my archival research.  I personally felt the new atmosphere in the historical institutions. In the summer of 2009 I met a much more secretive atmosphere in the archives than before. Reverse classification of Soviet documents has gradually progressed since 2000 with the establishing of Putin’s tenure as well as suspicious attitudes of the officials towards Americans.  Many foreign historians complained about more restrictions and denial of access to many documents.  Some archivists perceived signals from above (in our case – from the President who was an organizer of this Commission) as carte blanche to control the access to files. As a result, for example, I did not get permission to study the documents about the first wave of Stalin’s repressions in the summer of 1927.

The Commission has had two meetings by now. The first meeting of the Commission took place on August 28, 2009 at the Kremlin and was devoted to historical enlightenment. The Commission claimed to coordinate several publications undertaken on the eve of the 70^th anniversary of the beginning of WWII. In September 2009, a kind of confrontation took place in relations between Russia and Poland. Poland argues it was the Molotov-Ribbentrop deal that sparked the war when on September 1, Hitler and on September 16, 1939 Stalin, invaded Poland and divided it. While Putin struck a conciliatory note with Poland during his visit to a memorial ceremony, on September 1, the Russian Intelligence Service – Sluzhba Vneshnei Razvedki (Russian CIA) – presented the volume of the 60 declassified documents from the Soviet archives, “Sekrety Polskoi Razvedki, 1935-1945.” These are the documents of Polish Intelligence from 1935-1945, showing that Poland conducted undermining activities on the territory of the USSR and also reports of diplomats, etc.

The author/editor of the volume, Lev Sotskov (not a historian, but a general of intelligence) proves that Poland contributed significantly to the flaming of WWII. The presentation was shown on Russian TV and openly attached to the visit of Putin to Poland on that day.  So, the book contributed to the struggle on international relations. The chair of the Commission, S. E. Naryshkin, expressed satisfaction about such publications, which he called truthful in the last meeting of the Commission on January 19, 2010 at the Moscow Foreign Affairs Institute. On the eve of the 65th Anniversary of Victory in WWII, he called to oppose the attempts of unspecified historians and countries who claim the Soviet leadership was responsible for the excessive human cost of Soviet Victory (last historical estimates of Soviet losses is 26.6 million people) and thus, denigrate the celebration of victory in May 2010. The Commission coordinates publications of new studies and organization of conferences devoted to the history of WWII.

FP: This move by President Medvedev means that the image of him as a liberal is far from correct, right?

Velikanova: When Medvedev came to power, some liberal minded people hoped that he would soften Russian politics. After two years of his tenure, we can see only very timid attempts of independent movements. Vacillation of President Medvedev, who a few months after the creation of the Commission criticized the defenders of Stalin, reflects controversy in the Russian public sphere.

FP: So is the truth in Russian History attainable?

Velikanova: I do not believe the final, ultimate truth. Through different views and discussions, historians can endlessly approach the “reality.” But one thing is for sure: the state interventions (through the Commission) in discussions and imposing limits are not a productive tool in the search of historical truth. Retreat from this gendarme position of the state was seen in a recent online publication of the Katyn documents. We saw orders of Stalin and his cronies to shoot Polish captured officers. This publication is an important step forward in historical public debates in Russia and has implications on foreign relations with Poland.

The noisy campaign around the creation of the Commission, and its subsequent weak performance, reflects the contradictory nature of modern Russian politics. Medvedev and the government are sending inconsistent messages to the Russian public and the world.

FP: Olga Velikanova, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.

Bat Ye'or, whose groundbreaking historical research on dhimmitude opened my eyes, made sense of a great deal I was seeing in Islamic doctrine and history but which was not explained elsewhere, and inspired me to do the work I am doing now, speaks at the Vienna Forum in Austria.

Her talk was sponsored by the Hudson Institute, the Educational Initiative for Central and Eastern Europe, and Kairos Journal. The Forum topic was "The Future of Europe and the Challenge of Islam." Bat Ye'or spoke as part of a panel, "Historical Background and Thorny Issues," with Douglas Murray, Paul Marshall and me.

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Harvey Klehr, Andrew Mellon Professor of Politics and History at Emory University. He is the author of the new book, The Communist Experience in America: A Political and Social History.

FP: Harvey Klehr, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

So what inspired you to write this new book, what is it about and how is it different from other works?

Klehr: This book is actually a compilation of a number of articles that I have written over the past forty years.  Several years ago I was approached by Irving Louis Horowitz, publisher of Transaction Books, who asked me to consider collecting a number of the essays I had written on the issue of communism.  I tried to group them into several areas that illustrate both my own intellectual history and a coherent view of the communist phenomenon. And then I wrote an introductory essay about how I got interested in this topic and how an intellectual career can be shaped by a variety of factors, some of which flow logically from a topic and others which are based on serendipity.  Looking back on my career was fun, although once you reach the point where you are asked to collect a lot of what you have written, there’s also the sense that you are also a bit of a dinosaur.

FP: Can you talk to us a bit about your own intellectual history and journey?

Klehr: In graduate school in the late 1960s I was influenced by Marxism.  The first two published articles in the book explore the ways Marx and Lenin tried to understand America and how the USA might fit the Marxist paradigm for the development of capitalism.  I was really curious about why the Left had done so poorly in America – it’s the only advanced industrial country in which a left-wing movement explicitly committed to socialism never came to power or seriously competed for power.  My doctoral dissertation was on the theory of American exceptionalism.  It led me to an interesting episode in the history of American communism – the moment in 1929 when Joseph Stalin himself presided over a Moscow commission that expelled Jay Lovestone and his followers from the CPUSA for the crime of American exceptionalism.  Lovestone’s group, which included some fascinating people – Lovestone himself later became the fiercely anti-communist advisor on international affairs to George Meany, head of the AFL-CIO, Bert Wolfe became a noted historian of Russia, Will Herberg a prominent conservative theologian – had the support of 90% of the American party, but that meant nothing to Stalin.

That was what got me interested in the history of American communism.  I spent nearly twenty years studying the CPUSA and its relationship to Moscow.  After my first book, a sociological study of the leadership of the CPUSA appeared, Ted Draper, the dean of historians of American communism, approached me and asked me to finish his project on the CPUSA’s history.  That resulted in The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade.  By the early 1990s, I was sick of the topic and through a complicated set of circumstances, went to Moscow to get information for a biography – that I still intend to write – about a colorful character named David Karr.

I arrived in Moscow just a few months after Boris Yeltsin’s foiling of the coup and was fortunate enough to be the first American to get access to the Comintern archives, where I found stunning documentation of the role played by American communists in espionage operations of the USSR.  The archivists did not realize the material was in the files or its significance and I was able to take copies out of the country.  A few years later Yale University Press published The Secret World of American Communism, which I co-authored with John Haynes and Fred Firsov and I had launched myself on a new career as a writer on espionage.  John and I have written several other books, including Venona, Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, and most recently, Spies, The Rise and Fall of the KGB in American with Alexander Vassiliev.

The more I studied communism and the CPUSA, the more conservative I became.  It was fully as responsible as fascism for the most blood-soaked century in human history.  Individual communists were often motivated by the highest ideals and yet they helped to create and perpetuate many of the worst horrors in human history.  Writing about communists meant I also had to contend with many writers and intellectuals who apologized for or excused these atrocities – even as more and more information about them became available.  So, part of my responsibility, as I saw it, was to call them to account, something that Haynes and I did in In Denial and that is also on exhibit in many of the articles in this new book.

FP: Can you talk a bit about your experience in Moscow?

Klehr: My first trip in the spring of 1991 was a real adventure. The coup against Gorbachev had failed and Boris Yeltsin had seized Communist Party property, including the archive that held the records of the Communist International.Gorbachev had opened the archive, knowing that material in it would discredit the Communists. I was the first American, and one of the first Westerners, to use it. Going through the finding aids, I asked to see a variety of material that sounded interesting. I was a bit nervous; I had been writing about American communism for years without access to some of the most sensitive records of the Party and I couldn’t help but think that I would have to go back to the United States and admit that I had been wrong about the dominant role played by the USSR in the CPUSA’s affairs or other issues on which I had debated and argued with other scholars.  Luckily, that was not the case. While the archival materials deeply enriched what people like me had been saying about the CPUSA, they also confirmed virtually all of our arguments.

In many ways the more significant part of my trip was when I started coming across memos and notes signed by a man named Pavel Fitin, whom I had never heard of before.  Many of them were to or from Georgi Dimitrov, head of the Comintern, and asked for information, or provided information, about Americans.  And, they were marked “Top Secret.”  I recognized some of the names as people who had been named by Elizabeth Bentley as Soviet spies.  Since the memos were date in 1943 and 1944, they couldn’t have been in response to her naming them- she didn’t go to the FBI until late 1945.  When I found out that Fitin was the head of foreign espionage for the KGB, I knew that I had uncovered real gold.  I marked all this material – along with lots of other documents- for copying.  That was another adventure; there were no copying machines available to researchers in the archive- you marked what you wanted and when your research stay was over, the staff gave you a microfilm reel containing your material.  When I flew out of Moscow, I had two reels of documents, with many documents labeled top-secret.  It was a surreal experience going through customs with microfilm labeled top secret- a sign of how much the world had changed.

FP: As you state, the Left has a hard time being held accountable in your field. Many of my own colleagues who argued for years about the innocence of the Rosenbergs or Alger Hiss don’t receive the evidence like people who are too concerned about the truth or about the historical record. They end up justifying their guilt (after having argued their innocence) or further denying against all reality or just dismissing everything with deafening silence or scornful ridicule (i.e. historians who had defended Hiss laughed at me for chasing old ghosts. . . historians). There is obviously a deeper agenda at work. What is that agenda?

Klehr: I think that for some people, it’s simply a matter of religious faith.  No empirical evidence will ever persuade them.  For others, their loyalty to the USSR or to its narrative is so strong that they construct Rube Goldberg-like explanations to account for the evidence.  In many cases, where the individuals themselves are or were not communists, admitting what the new evidence shows, would require them to rethink their understanding of America and its history, most notably, the history of the McCarthy era.  To admit that Whittaker Chambers or Elizabeth Bentley told the truth, to admit that Richard Nixon was right about Hiss – they just can’t do it.

FP: How does it work that people motivated by the highest ideals help to create and perpetuate many of the worst horrors in human history?

Klehr: I think, unfortunately, it’s very easy. If your ideals are so wonderful and the only thing standing in the way of realizing them are ignorant and reactionary people, well, they just have to be eliminated –or even sacrificed for the greater good.  If you have persuaded yourself that you know how to end poverty or eliminate racism, why let a bunch of flawed human beings stand in the way?

FP: So what has been the communist experience in America?

Klehr: It’s been a story of brief period of success sandwiched between long eras of failure.  From its origins in 1919 until about 1935, the CPUSA was largely ineffectual.  It occasionally led dramatic strikes or recruited a prominent intellectual, but it remained small and widely despised, in large measure because of its ties to the USSR.

When Soviet foreign policy, reacting to Hitler’s consolidation of rule in Germany, started advocating a popular front against fascism, the CPUSA was able to make itself a significant factor in American life.  Its membership jumped to nearly 100,000 before 1939, its front groups enlisted millions of sympathizers for specific causes, it was a major presence in the CIO, and it achieved a certain respectability.  But all that ended with the Nazi-Soviet Pact.

The Party made recovery during WWII, when the USA and USSR were allies – although we now know that the Party leadership during that period was helping the KGB establish an extraordinarily large stable of spies throughout the American government.  As the Cold War heated up, the CPUSA’s unyielding defense of the interests of the Soviet Union made it a pariah in American society and revelations abut espionage helped to destroy it.  In the mid-1950s most of its remaining loyalists had enough when Khrushchev admitted Stalin’s crimes, the USSR crushed the Hungarian Revolution and revelations of anti-Semitism stunned many of the Party’s Jewish members.  It has been on the margins of American life ever since.

FP: What are you thinking about these days?

Klehr: This summer will be relaxing; for the first time in many years I don’t have a big project to finish.  I will be writing an article on David Karr in an effort to get back to his biography and see if I can start plugging some of the holes in his life that I will have to fill before that project would be feasible.

FP: Harvey Klehr, thank you, it was a pleasure to speak with you.

In his bestselling 1977 work, Hitler’s War, historian David Irving sought to present history “through Hitler’s eyes,” claiming that although Hitler was a “powerful and relentless military commander,” he was also a “lax and indecisive political leader.” Hitler’s War ultimately laid the basis for Irving’s lifelong claim that Hitler knew nothing of the Holocaust.

It was during the 1980s that Irving’s gradual journey toward Holocaust denial became complete. He began to give incendiary speeches around the world, calling the camps of Auschwitz a myth: “I don’t see any reason to be tasteful about Auschwitz. It’s baloney. It’s a legend. Once we admit the fact that it was a brutal slave labor camp and large numbers of people did die, as large numbers of innocent people died elsewhere in the war, why believe the rest of the baloney?”

To view the full David Irving profile, click here.

State Senator Leland Yee, a liberal San Francisco Democrat, wants to bar California from adopting any new material from curriculum changes in Texas, which he and other critics view as right-wing revisionism. Though much publicized, the charge fails to stand up, but some textbooks do need correction. Those would be California textbooks, and this is not a new problem.

“They’re all horrors, and there is no reason for them.” State Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig said that in 1988 about California’s watered-down texts. Honig, a liberal San Francisco Democrat, duly invited scholar Diane Ravitch to revise California’s history curriculum, which had been tasked to instill pride in accredited victim groups.

“Telling publishers that their books must instill pride only guarantees a phony version of feel-good history,” Ravitch wrote. “Publishers, as a result, bend over backward to be positive, whether writing about the genocidal reign of Mao Tse-tung (presumably to avoid offending his admirers) or the unequal treatment of women in Islamic societies (to avoid offending Muslims).”

Texts should be accurate, Ravitch wrote, “but to impose contemporary political requirements on how the events are portrayed only ensures that the history we teach our students is inaccurate and dishonest.”  In California, it certainly has been that.

The textbook An Age of Voyages: 1350-1600 showed Sikh founder Guru Nanak wearing a crown instead of a turban, and a beard that was trimmed instead of long, as alert Sikhs pointed out. At the time, the California Department of Education had no mechanism for ensuring that textbooks were “factually accurate.”  Little wonder that errors became commonplace.

“Studies have found hundreds of errors in California textbooks,” says the website of the Textbook Trust, a watchdog group. The mistakes include geography, such as the notion that California’s southern border is the Rio Grande. It isn’t, and that river ventures nowhere near the Golden State, whose textbooks also fail to get math right.

A second-grade math text used in 79 schools in California’s capital city of Sacramento contends that five times three equals five. The book, fully approved by the state, is part of a series published by MacMillan/McGraw-Hill and used through the sixth grade. In the nearby Folsom Cordova district teachers have students hunting for errors as part of a learning exercise. The eager fourth-grade students documented 90 errors in the math series, for which the district paid $1.9 million.

So the kids shape up as smarter than the publisher’s fact-checkers and anyone in what the Sacramento Bee calls the “labyrinthian process” of approving the books for the classroom. So do the teachers who are correcting the errors with red pen.  Many other state-approved California textbooks could be marked up.

Meanwhile, the “Texas Curriculum Massacre,” (Newsweek ) that so disturbed Sen. Yee and other liberals, is overblown. As David Upton, assistant professor of politics at the University of Dallas, noted, this may not be the best curriculum, but “no one has pointed to a particular significant error of fact.” And contrary to accusations, Upton writes, “the curriculum is replete with specific references to Jefferson, religious freedom, the civil rights movement, and the achievements and struggles of women and minorities.”

These will never be enough to assuage critics on the left, argues Amity Shlaes, of the Council on Foreign Relations and author of The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression.  “Whatever lines it inserts about church, state, hip-hop or the Alamo,” writes Shlaes, “the board will not restore true balance. It will merely manage to make the curriculum a little less skewed to the left.” In a more general way, she adds, “the left also hijacked American culture” so the Texas social studies issue makes sense as a “small check on a larger problem.”

Yet another problem lurks in the background, the government education system itself, an unreformable collective farm of ignorance and mediocrity. This system encourages mass purchase of textbooks, with large states like Texas and California setting the pace. The books may be politically correct, and instill pride in Maoists and Muslims, but that is not the same as accurate. That is why Guru Nanak gets a crown instead of a turban, the Rio Grande gets misplaced, and five times three equals five. Call it the stupidity inherent in the system.

The renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, dealing with the subject of possible extraterrestrial life, warns that contact with an alien civilization could spell disaster for the human race. “If aliens ever visit us,” he said, “I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the American Indians.” Pajamas Media editor Rick Moran concludes an article on this question with a  misplaced aspiration: “we can only hope that any intelligent life that becomes aware of us will share at least some of the values and morals our species holds dear.” Pace Moran, but I wonder about these “values and morals” in so intrinsically competitive and violent a species as ours and shudder to think that a highly evolved extraterrestrial race of beings may share them with us.

The situation of late, however, is somewhat different in the West, where a certain “transvaluation” has occurred. The “values and morals” increasingly prevalent among us are those of “moral equivalence,” pacifism, diffidence, “compassion,” self-abasement and pride masking as false humility. In the current context, such ostensible virtues turn out to be vices, which we would be foolish to expect a maniple of alien intruders to share with us. It would be more prudent to anticipate the opposite.

But prudence is not our strong point. The Active SETI (Active Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) movement and its offshoots, for example, believe that an alien civilization would be guided by the doctrine of universal altruism, a theory grounded in the assumption that advanced evolution leads inevitably to a “higher” ethical sensibility. Walter Sullivan in his admittedly fascinating book We Are Not Alone is convinced of the benefits that would flow via communion with evolutionary prodigies. “Most exciting of all the prospects,” he writes, “are the spiritual and philosophical enrichment to be gained by such exchanges.” Of course, there is no evidence that such would be the case, especially if we extrapolate from our own behavior. It’s a good bet our visitors from space won’t look or act anything like the diaphanous exotics in Encounters of the Third Kind or the sylvan Na’vi in Avatar. Astrobiology does not assure moral enlightenment.

But the prospect of alien hostility is not the only factor to be considered. There is the possibility of a fundamental misunderstanding between two species that have no common language with which to bridge the intergalactic gap that separates them and that would allow for differences in thought and intention to be worked out. Complicating this scenario is the potentially misguided conviction that, were our visitors aggressive by nature, overtures of peace and compatibility would be sufficient to bring about a harmonious resolution to the threat of conflict.

Consider the 1996 film Mars Attacks! which rather uncannily introduces a shot of the World Trade Center, traces a misguided official policy of appeasement and “cultural understanding,” dwells on the dove-releasing antics of the peace constituency which provoke immediate slaughter, and concludes in near-universal catastrophe. These cartoonish little aliens sliding down their saucer ramps proceed to take advantage of our deeply held belief in multicultural accommodation, responding favorably to our gestures of inclusion and shedding tears of sentimental fellow-feeling, only to insinuate themselves into our trust and play upon our fantasy of an ideal kinship. Before we know it things start blowing up and people are mowed down in the streets. Eventually, the president of the United States (played brilliantly by a smarmily innocuous Jack Nicholson), who adopts an agenda of reaching out to our enemies, is murdered in the White House by a gum-chewing Martian disguised as a hooker.

The allegory is unmistakable. The film—to some extent like the recent television remake of V about an interstellar civilization promising peace but harboring ominous designs—is a prescient cinematic transposition of what is now our nineleven world. Believing in the good intentions of our “otherworldly” visitors, permitting a belligerent minority to integrate into the structure of society and to establish organizations devoted to furthering their ulterior aims, and exonerating irruptions of culture-specific mayhem—suicide attacks, shootings, honor killings—as owing to other and even justifiable causes, we have embraced the Martians in our midst. That is, we have given carte blanche to the mustashhidin and their local variants—insurgents, “martyrs,” spokesmen for the Muslim Brotherhood, clever proselytizers, and advocates of Shari’a law—who would infiltrate and undermine the very institutions that guarantee our freedoms.

And they have powerful accomplices. The America-hating Left in the universities, the legacy media and even the current governing administration has become Islamofascism’s most valuable ally, a fifth column of de facto jihadists in everything but name as it prosecutes the war against Western civilization. Abetted by the profound naivety of a public ignorant of history and educated in the dogmas of postmodern relativity—all cultures are equal and must be understood on their own terms, one “truth” is as good as another, universal human rights are only an expression of Western particularism, etc—the Left, with open arms and closed minds, has welcomed the Martians who would destroy us. Only, these Martians are not harbingers of an advanced civilization blessed with sidereal intelligence but are rooted in the norms and usages of a pre-Medieval world view, which we regard as equally exotic.

How have we permitted this to happen? Have we absorbed our social and political conjectures at so impressionable and formative a stage in our cognitive development, as students in the revolutionary Sixties and Seventies, that we now act from rote behavior rather than critical reflection, bearing witness to the truth of Yogi Berra’s apothegm, “There are some people who, if they don’t know already, you can’t tell ‘em.” Is Victor Davis Hanson right when he declares that “our present generation is on the brink of moral insanity,” victims of lazy thinking, unable to distinguish between the terrorist and his quarry, and subject to the clichés “of postmodernism, cultural relativism, utopian pacifism, and moral equivalence”? Or are we merely hoping for clemency from an indebted foe who will, presumably, spare us for our collusion? Do we live in such a state of inward fear and paralysis that, to paraphrase poet Neil Powell, we are unable to let “panic subside to knowledge”?

But perhaps the fact is that years of cosseted, entitlement-friendly living, not to mention enrolment in the postmodern academy, have made us soft, prone to theoretical delusions, intellectually puerile, and unwilling to face the reality of struggle and conflict so many of us have been happily spared. We appear to suffer from a condition that Robert Wilson has called, in his book of that title, “the ignorance of blood,” which has blinded us to the baleful motives of our adversaries. Confronted with a dedicated enemy intent on conquest, we respond with platitudes like “social justice,” “equal status,” “sensitivity,” “diversity,” “peaceful coexistence” and all the rest of the ideological claptrap we have had dinned into us. Returning fire with ice cream scoops is no way to win a war. These notions would be fine if two criteria were satisfied, namely, that we were proud defenders of our own storied culture, and that the recipients of our generosity were willing to reciprocate. But when these two conditions are not met, then it is clear that we are not only inviting guests into our home. We are also inviting disaster.

The invaders we have to contend with, of course, are not lizards disguised as humans or megacephalic dwarves toting ray guns, contact with whom we might have preferred to avoid. They are, rather, a group of intraplanetary visitors who have emigrated to our shores with the purpose of social inversion and political subversion. Lest I be misunderstood, I am not referring to those who have come to make a better life for themselves and who are eager to join the cultural mainstream, learn the language, familiarize themselves with the history of the nation they have opted to become part of, enter the professions, and live as loyal and productive citizens.

On the contrary. I am referring to what is often called the “radical fringe,” which may not be as marginal as we would like to think. Radicals tend to multiply, radicalism to radiate outward. Indeed, we have sufficient evidence by now of sermons preaching sedition and violence, of homicidal rampages, of plots uncovered, and of the exploitation of our legal system and menaces publicly uttered with a view to suppressing informed dissent, principled objections, postings and publications. But instead of fighting back, belling our subversives and deporting their ringleaders, we cower and self-censor, like sanctimonious proctors silencing the unruly who oppose the drift toward supplication, and so enforcing the discipline of surrender. We have, in effect, been ghetto-ized inside our own trembling world, as if the country we live in could be renamed South Park, no longer the feisty and irreverent place it once was. So much for courage and independence.

Observed through the lens of history, this growing brigade of interlopers represents not merely a demographic trend but the forward cohort of an expeditionary force, taking cover beneath the mantle of its peaceable compatriots. “The vast majority of Muslim legal immigrants,” writes former congressman Virgil Goode, “do not support terrorism, but their large numbers allow terrorists to blend into the immigrant community.” Our refusal to act decisively against so insidious a threat to our way of life, by putting the brakes on excessive or undifferentiated immigration and by targeting extremists through the agencies at our disposal, is tantamount to gross capitulation.

Returning to the film, we note that the Martian invaders are ultimately routed. But they are not killed with kindness or disarmed by assimilation. It takes a blast of good old traditional American country music, which the aliens are unable to absorb and which reduces them to quivering heaps of head-exploding gelatin, to do the job. We recall, too, that the major theorist of the Muslim Brotherhood, Sayyid Qutb, as he recounts in Milestones, couldn’t tolerate the innocent waltz music or cheerful jitterbugging at American church dances, which pretty well drove him mad. The lesson the film teaches is obvious. It is not simply the heartland music as such that defeats the “aliens” but the attitudes, codes, mores, standards, originality and self-confidence which the music enshrines. It takes a belief in ourselves, our culture and our history, and a commitment to celebrate who we are (or were), to resist the sinister blandishments of the Martians among us.

Failing that, we will find ourselves soon enough facing a very different kind of music.

Don't know much about history;
Don't know much biology;
Don't know much about a science book;
Don't know much about the French I took;

But I do know that Allah hates you*;
And I know that if we blame the Jews,
What a halal world this would be.

*Sahih Bukhari 2.24.255: "Allah has hated you" for asking too many questions.

"Three schools blown up in Orakzai Agency," from Dawn, April 29:

PESHAWAR: Three schools were blown up by militants in the Mamozai area of upper Orakzai Agency on Thursday.

The attacks were the latest in a slew of militant violence. On Wednesday, suspected militants attacked a checkpoint in Beizot. Forces retaliated and killed five suspected militants and injured several others.

Five suspected militants were also arrested in Mishit-Mela and Ferozekhel.

It has been almost four weeks since the Orakzai operation was launched in the agency, in which troops claim to have killed over 400 militants so far.

Security forces also claim to have consolidated their positions in most parts of the lower Orakzai and now claim to be advancing towards the central part of the agency.

In the Khyber Agency at least five militants have been killed and 18 others have been arrested including two commanders of Lashkar-e-Islam in Bara Tehsil.

Many years ago, I was surprised to receive a letter from an old friend, saying that she had been told that I refused to see campus visitors from Africa.

At the time, I was so bogged down with work that I had agreed to see only one visitor to the Stanford campus— and it so happens that he was from Africa. He just happened to come along when I had a little breathing room from the work I was doing in my office.

I pointed out to my friend that whoever said what she heard might just as well have said that I refused to go sky-diving with blacks— which was true, because I refused to go sky-diving with anybody, whether black, white, Asian or whatever.

The kind of thinking that produced a passing misconception about me has, unfortunately, produced much bigger, much longer lasting, much more systematic and more poisonous distortions about the United States of America.

Slavery is a classic example. The history of slavery across the centuries and in many countries around the world is a painful history to read— not only in terms of how slaves have been treated, but because of what that says about the whole human species— because slaves and enslavers alike have been of every race, religion and nationality.

If the history of slavery ought to teach us anything, it is that human beings cannot be trusted with unbridled power over other human beings— no matter what color or creed any of them are. The history of ancient despotism and modern totalitarianism practically shouts that same message from the blood-stained pages of history.

But that is not the message that is being taught in our schools and colleges, or dramatized on television and in the movies. The message that is pounded home again and again is that white people enslaved black people.

It is true, just as it is true that I don’t go sky-diving with blacks. But it is also false in its implications for the same reason. Just as Europeans enslaved Africans, North Africans enslaved Europeans— more Europeans than there were Africans enslaved in the United States and in the 13 colonies from which it was formed.

The treatment of white galley slaves was even worse than the treatment of black slaves picking cotton.

But there are no movies or television dramas about it comparable to “Roots,” and our schools and colleges don’t pound it into the heads of students.

The inhumanity of human beings toward other human beings is not a new story, much less a local story. There is no need to hide it, because there are lessons we can learn from it. But there is also no need to distort it, so that sins of the whole human species around the world are presented as special defects of “our society” or the sins of a particular race.

If American society and Western civilization are different from other societies and civilization, it is that they eventually turned against slavery, and stamped it out, at a time when non-Western societies around the world were still maintaining slavery and resisting Western pressures to end slavery, including in some cases armed resistance.

Only the fact that the West had more firepower than others put an end to slavery in many non-Western societies during the age of Western imperialism. Yet today there are Americans who have gone to Africa to apologize for slavery— on a continent where slavery has still not been completely ended, to this very moment.

It is not just the history of slavery that gets distorted beyond recognition by the selective filtering of facts. Those who go back to mine history, in order to find everything they can to undermine American society or Western civilization, have very little interest in the Bataan death march, the atrocities of the Ottoman Empire or similar atrocities in other times and places.

Those who mine history for sins are not searching for truth but for opportunities to denigrate their own society, or for grievances that can be cashed in today, at the expense of people who were not even born when the sins of the past were committed.

An ancient adage says: “Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof.” But apparently that is not sufficient for many among our educators, the intelligentsia or the media. They are busy poisoning the present by the way they present the past.

The same was true of the coverage of the Communists, and especially of the forced starvation of the kulaks and others in the Ukraine. Walter Duranty was the Times' correspondent in the Soviet Union, and a sympathizer with the Communists, a man deeply impressed with Joseph Stalin. For his deeply misleading and in retrospect sickening reports, he won a Pulitzer Prize. He helped, by commission, to convey a false reality concerning the Soviet Union and its murderous policies, just as the owners of the Times helped, by deliberate omission and de-emphasizing, to convey a false reality concerning the Nazis and their murderous policies, and chief and earliest victims, the Jews of Germany and then of Eastern Europe.

Not content with that record, the New York Times over nearly the last decade has done nothing to enlighten its readers about the ideology of Islam. If you read the Times every day, faithfully, from 9/11/2001 on to today, you still would not know what the word "Hadith" means or what an "isnad-chain" is. You still would not be able to define the word "Sunnah." You still would not know that Muhammad is regarded as the Model of Conduct, uswa hasana, and the Perfect Man, al-insan al-kamil, or why it matters. You still would not know about little Aisha, and why Muhammad's "marriage" to her when she was nine years old had consequences in the Islamic Republic of Iran when Khomeini came to power, and still has permanent consequences for girls all over the Muslim-ruled lands.

You still would not know what the Muslim attitude toward negotiations and peace treaties with non-Muslims is, or what is the significance of the Treaty of Hudaibiyyah, made by Muhammad with the Meccans in 628 A.D., nor of the continuing significance of that Treaty in Muslim relations with non-Muslims - siyar - today. You still would not fully grasp what the Shari'a is, or what was and remains the legal status of non-Muslims in the Muslim state. You still would never have heard about Taqiyya, the doctrine of religiously-sanctioned dissimulation about the faith, or about the related doctrine of Kitman, which is a variant of Taqiyya that consists of "mental reservation." You still would not have heard of any of the great Western scholars of Islam - not a single mention, I suspect, in the New York Times, of C. Snouck Hurgronje, possibly the greatest of all of them, even when Aceh was much in the news, and Snouck Hurgronje had written extensively on the Acehinese. You would not have heard of Joseph Schacht, the great Western scholar of Islamic law. You would not have heard of Antoine Fattal, and his book (oh, it's in French, so Americans should not be expected to even have heard of it, even to learn of its existence), on the legal status of non-Muslims in Muslim lands. You still would not have had a single reference to, or any explanation of, the concepts of Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb. You still would never have heard more than a few gossipy stories, devoid of real content, devoted to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Wafa Sultan, Nonie Darwish, Ibn Warraq, Ali Sina, Magdi Allam, and many others. You still would not have heard in any detail about all the places where Islam is on the march, and how Islam is the main factor that explains the behavior of the Arab Muslims, not only in the forty-year slow genocide being carried out in southern Sudan, but also in the mass-murdering of black African Muslims in Darfur - because you would assume if Muslims kill Muslims, then "of course Islam can't have anything to do with it."

And you would think that because the New York Times would never publish a syllable about all the ways that Islam has been and always will be a vehicle for Arab supremacism. You would never have heard of Anwar Shaikh, and his book Islam: The Arab National Religion. You would never have heard of Taha Hussain, the great Egyptian writer and intellectual, and his attempt through what is called "Pharaonism" to remove Egypt, or at least to distance it, from the Islamic Middle East and to turn it toward the Greece of classical antiquity and toward Europe. You would never understand what Ba'athism really is, or why it took root only in Alawite-ruled Syria and Sunni-ruled Iraq, and what were the specific local reasons why the regimes in both countries found "Ba'athism" a useful camouflage for regimes that were Alawite and Sunni Arab despotisms, respectively.

You would not, if you dutifully read the preening and pridefully o'erweening New York Times every day since 9/11/2001, know what the word "dhimmi" really means. You would be unable to discuss in any detail what was required of "dhimmis" (that is, the subset of non-Muslims, or Infidels, who were allowed at least to live, and even practice their religion, under Muslim rule, in the lands conquered by Muslims, as long as a series of onerous duties, economic and social, were fulfilled). You would not know what the word "Jizyah" truly meant, and how different it was from merely being a "tax" given the deliberate conditions of humiliation with which it had ideally to be paid.

You would know nothing of how Islam spread in the East Indies, or in India. You would know nothing of the destruction of Buddhist steles and the artifacts of Greco-Bactrian civilization in Central Asia, know nothing about the tens of thousands of Hindu temple complexes destroyed in India, or how many tens of millions of Hindus were killed under Muslim rule, or what the British conquerors, in removing Muslim rulers, managed to do by way of allowing Hindus to rediscover their own past. You would have learned nothing of the massive destruction of Christian iconography all over Byzantium. Nor would you have a hint of how the vast riches of what once contained a hundred Ravennas were destroyed by Muslims, not wantonly but strictly according to the rules laid down by Muhammad as to what was prohibited and what commanded. You would know nothing about why in Islam dogs are so disliked, and why Muhammad is reported in a Hadith to have said that angels would not enter a home in which there were dogs or artworks depicting humans. You would, in short, in your understanding of Islam, had you relied only on the New York Times, still have roughly the same understanding of Islam that you had on 9/10/2001.

And The New York Times continues, in ways little and big, to ignore the reality of Islam. It is a case of individual folly and mediocrity - the egregious Tom Friedman comes immediately to mind, and so too does Nicholas Kristof. But then there are the reporters. There are those who report from Pakistan on various rapes and murders of Christians but are careful never to dwell on, and sometimes fail to mention altogether, the religious prompting of such atrocities by Muslims. See, for example, the report recently of Sabrina Tavernise on the young girl murdered by her Muslim employer, a leader of the Lahore bar, and how little she explained, and how much that was relevant she left out. See how other reporters, in Iraq, for example, have by ignoring Islam never asked the most obvious of questions: how is it that the goal, under Bush, or under Obama, of leaving Iraq unified and prosperous, will somehow contribute to our own defense, the Defense of the West, against the worldwide Jihad that is merely the sum of all the local Jihads? And the same question should be asked of Afghanistan. But while the editors of the New York Times so clearly did not support Bush, and are vaguely unhappy with the transfer of the "center of the war on terrorism" to Afghanistan by the Obama Administration, they lack the ability or willingness to discuss Islam, the ideology of Islam, and hence even to begin to think in terms of the threat to Western Europe through such instruments of Jihad as deployment of the Money Weapon, campaigns of Da'wa, and demographic conquest.

Thus the Times is worse than useless. It is not a guide to understanding the world, or the threat to the wellbeing of non-Muslims everywhere from those who take their Islam seriously, either now, or possibly, as a result of any number of promptings (some political and many personal) in the future. The Times has performed disgracefully, and after the disgraces of the 1930s, it's quite something to find it failing so badly, with such dangerous consequences, again.

Let us take, for example, something very small, something so small that it never appeared in the Times as a full-fledged article, but rather as a small paragraph under the rubric "World News." The Paper of Record took the story - The Times does this more and more - from the AP.

Here it is: "Muslims Try to Pray in Spanish Cathedral."

Where shall we begun? Let's begin with the title: "Muslims Try To Pray In Spanish Cathedral." Now the word "prayer" to non-Muslim readers will evoke an image of people perhaps silently clasping their hands together, leaning forward in a pew, and either silently, to themselves, or in a quiet tone, speaking heartfeltly to God. It seems innocuous, doesn't it? But we have to keep in mind what Muslim prayer is. It is a collective act. It is an act which requires the worshippers to get down on the floor, and to turn in a certain direction, and to simultaneously prostrate themselves, in serried ranks. It is, when carried out in the public spaces of the West - as on the Viale Jenner in Milan - a political statement. The Italian papers show these alarming photographs of hundreds or even thousands of Muslims taking over sidewalks, streets, the space before cathedrals, in a show not, as the Times report might make you think, of religious piety, but rather as a display of strength, a claim that is akin to that of planting the Flag of Islam. They were not merely praying. They were laying claim to territory. But if you do not know about Islam, if you have not thoroughly grasped and assimilated the texts, tenets, attitudes, and atmospherics of Islam, you would not know any of this.

And that is what was going on here, in Cordoba, at a cathedral. But was it, after all, a cathedral? Note that the very first sentence of the report attempts to undercut that claim: "A group of Muslims tried to pray inside a Roman Catholic cathedral that was originally a mosque and then scuffled with security guards and police who tried to stop them, a Spanish official said Friday."

Ah, you see. "A Roman Catholic cathedral" that was -- nota bene, reader - "originally a mosque." Oh, well then, those Muslims certainly have a claim, don't they? Would it help you to understand things better if you were also told that that mosque was last a mosque in the 13th century, when Muslims still ruled in Cordoba, just before the Reconquista finally reached the banks of the Guadalquivir, during a struggle to throw back the Muslim invaders that took 500 years to finally achieve its complete purpose? Would it matter to your understanding if, in addition to being told that the cathedral has been a cathedral since the 13th century, you also knew that the mosque itself had been built over a pre-existing Christian building, the Basilica of St. Vincent? What if the sentence had read thus: "A group of Muslims tried to pray inside a Roman Catholic cathedral that had once, in from the 8th to the 13th centuries, been a mosque, though built on top of what, before the Muslim conquest, had been the Basilica of St. Vincent...The Muslims 120 of them, refused to obey both security guards and police, and put up violent resistance that resulted in several serious injuries to those Spanish police, a Spanish official said Friday."

Would that change how you would view that event? Would your view change if you knew that the "group of Muslims" was not four or six or eight (you know, with Kodaks and postcards, just a group of tourists, who happened to enter the cathedral and, feeling inspired by the religious atmosphere, spontaneously started to pray, in their own way) but rather 120 Muslims "from Austria" ("Austrian Muslims")? They had come all this way perhaps to see "Islamic Spain" and to take part not in land reclamation of the kind the Jewish pioneers engaged in when they revivified the desolate deserts and reclaimed land from the Huleh Marshes in the 1920s and 1930s, but a different kind of land reclamation or re-claiming. How many Arab cities have an Al-Andalus street? How many times do the Arabs and other Muslims speak or write openly about re-claiming Spain, al-Andalus, which was once under Muslim rule and so, just like Israel, and just like Greece and the Balkan states, and Bulgaria, and Rumania, and much of Hungary, and much of Russia, and nearly all of India, are first on the To-Do List of Muslims? For Muslims, while aware that the whole world belongs to Allah, and to the Best of Peoples, his people, the Muslims, those places that were once under Muslim rule should ideally be recovered first, though in the end the order of conquest does not much matter as long as the whole world is ultimately a place where everywhere Islam dominates, and Muslims rule.

The second paragraph puts what happened as innocuously and unalarmingly as it can:

Two of the tourists were arrested after the incident Wednesday night in the southern city of Cordoba and a police officer and a cathedral security guard were slightly injured, National Police spokeswoman Rosa Ortiz told The Associated Press.

"Two of the tourists" were arrested but we still have no sense that there were 120 Muslims - quite a large number for the two or three security guards in the cathedral - there, behaving in a threatening way. And we don't know if those two were the only ones who had caused trouble or if they were the only ones that could be identified with certainty as having caused trouble. And what about the two Spaniards who were "slightly injured"? How were they "slightly injured"? And why do some accounts suggest, or state, that they weren't slightly injured but much more seriously injured? And why is it that there were police there at all? What was it that caused the police to be called in by the cathedral security guards, so that one of the two wounded turned out to be a police officer?

Well, the reporter, or AP editors, and no doubt the New York Times editors who reduced this version even further for the edition of the paper I saw, did not want to get into the details of the aggressive Muslim behavior, and the numbers involved, without first taking us on a little detour so that we would be psychologically soothed, mentally prepared to be on the side of the Muslims, before being told of the little unpleasantness.

Here are the three distracting paragraphs that might well have been omitted or changed, or come much further down in the story. For where they are placed, they interrupt the ordinary reportorial flow:

The Great Mosque of Cordoba was built after the Moorish invasion of Spain in the 8th century. Cordoba is known as the City of Three Cultures because Muslims, Jews and Christians lived there in harmony during medieval times.

The mosque was transformed into a cathedral in 1236 when King Ferdinand III captured the city from the Moors. Since then, except for rare exceptions, Muslim prayer rites have been forbidden inside.

All of a sudden, the Cathedral in Cordoba has become, in the telling, not "what was once the Great Mosque of Cordoba" or "built on the site of, and using much of the structure of, what was once the Great Mosque of Cordoba." No, it has already been transformed, in the report, into "the Great Mosque of Cordoba." And only now do we find out that this took place in the 8th century, "after the Moorish invasion of Spain" and we are quickly told that "Cordoba is known as the City of Three Cultures because Muslims, Jews and Christians lived there in harmony during medieval times."

Why are we told this? What does this have to do with 120 Muslims from Austria coming to Spain and defying orders to stop, continuing to aggressively prostrate themselves, all together, 120 of them, in what is, and what has been for nearly a thousand years, a Christian place of worship? Remember, this was an act not of religious piety - don't be fooled for a minute - but an act of calculated political muscle-flexing and aggression. They behaved in the spirit of the Muslims who from all over Europe came for the dedication of a mosque in Grenada a few years ago, and who, instead of expressing any gratitude to the Spanish government, spoke of Islam being on the march. They also said that Muslims in Europe should refuse to use the Infidel currency, and in other ways work to bring about the collapse of the societies within which those Muslims had been allowed to settle, to live and to receive every conceivable benefit from the generous welfare-states that Infidel taxpayers had set up, long ago, to take care of their own. Now those Infidels were finding that those benefits were being exploited, and then some, by Muslims who had arrived, who were not and could not be part of their societies, who did not and would not accept the legitimacy of non-Muslim legal and political institutions, but who were determined to take whatever advantage they could of Infidel naivety and endless generosity.

Why, the sentence about the Muslims, Jews and Christians living "in harmony" in Cordoba is a staple of Muslim and Arab propaganda. It is the theme of Maria Rosa Menocal's The Ornament of the World, with all of its clichés about Islamic Spain - clichés that owe their origin not to sober historians, but to writers of fiction, and not just any writers of fiction, but those who were part of what is called Romanticism. The three most responsible for the Romantic idealization of Islamic Spain were Sir Walter Scott (not for treating of Spain directly, but for his view of Saladin as a "chivalrous" man, practically someone who could give the Crusaders lessons in true Christian behavior), and Chateaubriand, in "Le Dernier des Abencerages" (you know, the last of Moorish kingdom in Grenada, the Moor's Last Sigh, that sort of thing) and, above all, Washington Irving with his romantic "Tales of the Alhambra."

But is it true? Was Cordoba, was Islamic Spain itself, a place where "Muslims, Christians, and Jews" all lived in splendid harmony? Apparently the Christians didn't feel so, because otherwise why would they have spent 500 years in attempting to throw back the Muslim invaders? And what about the Jews, who had no army? Well, consider the most famous of those Jews - there is a statute of him, by the way, in Cordoba, in the Juderia. What did Maimonides think of Cordoba, where he lived, as a place where under Muslim rule Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived in "harmony"? In his "Epistle to Yemen," Maimonides described his experience. In an excellent response to Amartya Sen's dreamy and utterly conventional view of Islamic Spain, Fouad Ajami took Sen to task for writing about things he knew little about -- it's the intellectual deformation that comes, for some, with winning the Nobel Prize. Like George Wald, like Linus Pauling, Amartya Sen has taken his Nobel to give him license not to observe the same exacting standards required for sensibly commenting on the world as he would observe, one assumes, in his own field of professional specialization.

In his introduction to Bostom's anthology The Legacy of Jihad, Ibn Warraq discusses the Myth of Maimonides thus:

Here is how Amartya Sen treats, for example, the Myth of Maimonides. Amartya Sen tells us twice in his book Identity and Violence that when "..the Jewish Philosopher Maimonides was forced to emigrate from an intolerant Europe in the twelfth century, he found a tolerant refuge in the Arab world." I do not know how to characterize this misinterpretation of history -- "willful," "grotesque," "dishonest" or "typical?" It is certainly an indication that in the present intellectual climate that one can denigrate Europe any way one wishes, to the point of distorting history, without, evidently, any one of the distinguished scholars who blurbed the book raising an eyebrow. Ironically, the one reviewer who did object to Sen's "potted history" which "is tailored for interfaith dialogues" was Fouad Ajami in The Washington Post. Ajami reminded Sen that...this will not do as history. Maimonides, born in 1135, did not flee "Europe" for the "Arab world": He fled his native Córdoba in Spain, which was then in the grip of religious-political terror, choking under the yoke of a Berber Muslim dynasty, the Almohads, that was to snuff out all that remained of the culture of conviviencia and made the life of Spain's Jews (and of the free spirits among its Muslims) utter hell. Maimonides and his family fled the fire of the Muslim city-states in the Iberian Peninsula to Morocco and then to Jerusalem. There was darkness and terror in Morocco as well, and Jerusalem was equally inhospitable in the time of the Crusader Kingdom. Deliverance came only in Cairo -- the exception, not the rule, its social peace maintained by the enlightened Saladin. Moses Maimonides [1135 -1204], Jewish rabbi, physician, and philosopher, was fleeing the Muslims, the intolerant Almohads who conquered Cordoba in 1148. The Almohads persecuted the Jews, and offered them the choice of conversion to Islam, death, or exile. Maimonides' family and other Jews chose exile. But this did not bring any peace to the Jews who had to be on the move constantly to avoid the all-conquering Almohads. After a brief sojourn in Morocco and the Holy Land, Maimonides settled in Fostat, Egypt, where he was physician to the Grand Vizier Alfadhil, and possibly Saladin, the Kurdish Sultan. Maimonides's The Epistle to the Jews of Yemen was written in about 1172 in reply to inquiries by Jacob ben Netan'el al-Fayyūmi, the then head of the Jewish community in Yemen. The Jews of Yemen were passing through a crisis, as they were being forced to convert to Islam, a campaign launched in about 1165 by 'Abd-al-Nabī ibn Mahdi. Maimonides provided them with guidance and with what encouragement he could. The Epistle to the Jews of Yemen gives a clear view of what Maimonides thought of Muhammad the Prophet, "the Madman" as he calls him, and of Islam generally. This is what Maimonides wrote:

You write that the rebel leader in Yemen decreed compulsory apostasy for the Jews by forcing the Jewish inhabitants of all the places he had subdued to desert the Jewish religion just as the Berbers had compelled them to do in Maghreb [i.e.Islamic West]. Verily, this news has broken our backs and has astounded and dumbfounded the whole of our community. And rightly so. For these are evil tidings, "and whosoever heareth of them, both his ears tingle (I Samuel 3:11)." Indeed our hearts are weakened, our minds are confused, and the powers of the body wasted because of the dire misfortunes which brought religious persecutions upon us from the two ends of the world, the East and the West, "so that the enemies were in the midst of Israel, some on this side, and some on that side." (Joshua 8:22).

But there is no hint of what Islamic Spain was really like in the admiring, if glancing, reference to that "harmony" in which all three faiths lived, so we are told by the Times in an authoritative, not-to-be-questioned tone -- as if the Reconquistas was some quite unnecessary reaction by some right-wing Christians, and as if any Jews who were unhappy with Islamic rule simply didn't realize how good they had it compared to what they would have had in Western Christendom. And so any testimony by Jews expressing discontent with Muslim rule should simply be discounted.

Now, just to make sure we remember that the building is, or was once, Muslim, there is this bit of architectural appreciation:

The building still retains exquisite red and white arches and gleaming marble columns from the original mosque. It was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1984, and is one of Spain's most popular tourist sites.

See? "Exquisite red and white arches" and "gleaming marble columns" from the "original mosque." And it's a World Heritage site to boot. That is all that matters about the place, even though for nearly 800 years the building has been a church, and even though before the Muslim invaders arrived and built on that spot, what was there before, and what no doubt had its stone quarried to help build, had been not a mosque but a church.

Now, toward the end of the story, after all those details about the beauty of the cathedral that owes it all to its having been a mosque (not a word about anything the Christians might have contributed), and after implanting in the readers' minds the notion of that "harmony" among the three faiths (the only thing missing was the word "abrahamic"), we finally learn that it wasn't such a small group of tourists:

Ortiz said a group of 120 Muslim tourists from Austria entered the mosque Wednesday evening and a handful of them -- six or seven, she said -- started to pray. Security guards told them to stop, but the small group insisted and argued with the guards, so National Police were summoned.

So there were 120 Muslims. Some of them - first described as a "handful" and then later in the sentence as a "small group" (see, not to worry) - apparently "insisted and argued with the guards," who told them to stop prostrating themselves in Muslim prayer in what is, and has been for 800 years, a Christian house of worship. At this point you can imagine what would have happened had, say, a group of 120 Christian pilgrims gone to the Great Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, the one built partly upon the prior-existing Church of St. John the Baptist, and had refused requests by the guards to stop praying, even if their prayers were not noisy and ostentatious, as Muslims prostrating themselves and uttering their phrases in loud unison tend to be, and no doubt were, that day in the cathedral in Cordoba.

And then the security guards called the police and the police came, but that was not enough:

Two of the people praying insisted even then, and got into a shoving match with officers, after which they were arrested for disobeying and threatening law enforcement officers, Ortiz said.

She declined to name them saying only they were men aged 23 and 19. The detainees were to appear before a judge in Cordoba on Friday. Ortiz said had never heard of an incident like this before.

And though just two people were arrested in the end, that was only because the others had stopped, and no doubt because the security guards and the police were outnumbered, and did not want a violent confrontation in the cathedral.

There appears to be a difference of opinion, at least in the Times story (taken from the AP), as to the involvement of the other 118 or 115 Muslims:

The bishop's office in Cordoba said the larger group had acted in a coordinated and aggressive fashion, but Ortiz downplayed that idea.

What does "downplay that idea" mean? Does it mean that what National Police spokeswoman Rosa Ortiz told The Associated Press is right, that the bishop is exaggerating? Or is it not more verisimilar to think that it is the National Police spokeswoman who has a stake in minimizing the incident? Certainly the Times-AP story would have you believe - by giving the last word to - that spokeswoman Rosa Ortiz.

And the last few paragraphs return to the subtle legitimizing of the Muslim claim, to take us away from the central fact: 120 Muslims from Austria entered a building that for 800 years has been a cathedral, and behaved as they would never have allowed any non-Muslims to behave, not for even one minute, in any mosque anywhere in the world. And some of them (how many is a matter of dispute) began to pray by prostrating themselves Mecca-wards and going up-and-down in loud, and quite disruptive unison - disruptive to all the non-Muslims who would have been there at this place, that is among the most visited World Heritage Sites in the world.

Here are the last five sentences, each a separate paragraph:

Mansur Escudero, a Spanish Muslim leader, said he has been pressing the Catholic church for years to let Muslims pray in the mosque, but to no end.

Over the past few decades exceptions were made, at the request of King Juan Carlos, and members of the Saudi royal family were allowed to pray in the mosque, Escudero, who is president of the Islamic Commission of Spain, told the newspaper El Mundo.

Spain has a Muslim community of about 1 million, out of a total population of 45 million.

The building's official title is the ''Mezquita Catedral de Cordoba'' -- the mosque cathedral. Escudero said the name should be changed to ex-mosque cathedral.

''Or just cathedral. If it is not a mosque, they should not call it a mosque,'' he was quoted as saying.

So there we have it. Manuel Escudero, a Muslim leader, had been "pressing the Catholic church for years to let Muslims pray in the mosque, but to no end."

Wait a minute. "Pray in the mosque"? It's a cathedral, remember. It has been a cathedral for 800 years. Why has it become, in this AP retelling, a "mosque"?

And only then he adds:

"Or just cathedral, If it not a mosque, they should not call it a mosque."

He is referring to the fact that the Spanish have kindly alluded to the pre-Christian past of this building, or part of it, by describing it as the "Mezquita Catedral," in order to give the Muslim period of the building's existence its due. But this has been turned on its head, and the fact that the Christians did this, in a spirit of historical understanding, was not received in the same spirit. Instead, it is taken to mean that it is, in some sense, now a mosque and therefore Muslims have a perfect right to enter, by the hundreds possibly, to orient themselves toward Mecca, and start in serried ranks to prostrate themselves and utter their loud exclamations which, if you have ever seen, are the kind of thing that give non-Muslims a shudder. For it is so much a group activity, so collectivist in spirit, so much akin to a fanatical rally of the kind that evokes memories of Nuremberg rather than, say, a town meeting in New England. And it is not only a religious but also an aggressively political statement: we are here, we belong, this is ours because this was once ours and shall be ours again.

All of this is missing from the New York Times account which, by the way, in the edition of the paper I received, had reduced even the story above to a single paragraph, as if the whole thing were not really worth being brought to the attention of readers. When, in the next few years, the full story begins to be told of what is going on in Europe with those many Muslims who have been allowed over just the past few decades - this is no long historical process, extending over centuries, but a recent and possibly fatal error - this kind of coverage in the Times will recall the darkest days of Duranty. Non-Muslims in Europe are beginning to rouse themselves and to become aware, just a little late, of what they have so unnecessarily done, through their lax and lackadaisical immigration policy, and inattention to what makes Muslim immigrants so uniquely threatening. After all, there are dozens of different non-Muslim immigrant groups whose members do, after a while, adapt, accept, and fully integrate into European life - but nowhere in Europe has this been true of all but a handful of the Muslim immigrants, and that handful are those who have taken Islam least to heart.

What did other papers report about the Muslims at the mosque in Cordoba? How did they report it? Did they convey something not conveyed by the report in The New York Times?

Here's a paragraph from the coverage of the incident in the French Le Figaro:

D'après l'évêché, l'événement était planifié. Les hommes auraient investi l'ancienne mosquée par des entrées différentes et se seraient retrouvé à un endroit et une heure précis grâce à des talkies-walkies. En pleine semaine sainte, l'acte est perçu comme une véritable provocation. Dans un communiqué, le porte-parole des Jeunesses musulmanes d'Autriche, qui organisaient le voyage, a toutefois tenu à assurer «que les jeunes n'avaient jamais eu l'intention de provoquer ou de blesser les sentiments des croyants catholiques». «Ils ont été si frappé par l'atmosphère spirituelle qui régnait dans la mosquée-cathédrale, ajoute-t-il, qu'ils se sont spontanément mis à prier, sans imaginer les conséquences que cela pourrait avoir.» Les autorités ecclésiastiques ont reconnu de leur côté être conscientes que «cet incident ponctuel ne représente en rien le comportement des musulmans puisque beaucoup d'entre eux sont ouverts au dialogue et considèrent avec respect l'Eglise Catholique».

In that paragraph we learn something that was completely absent from the New York Times article. We learn that, according to the Office of the Bishop, the whole event was carefully planned.

The [Muslim] men entered the former mosque by different entry-ways [presumably at different times] and gathered at the same time, at the same spot, thanks to their walkie-talkies. This act, in the middle of Holy Week itself, was naturally seen as a real provocation. In a communiqué, the spokesmen of Muslim Youth of Austria, that organized the trip, nonetheless insisted that the "young people did not have any intention of provoking or of injuring the sentiments of Catholic believers." "They were so moved by the spiritual atmosphere of the mosque-cathedral" [hence the walkie-talkies, hence the slow infiltration by different entries, and then the prearranged meeting at a certain time and place within the vast cathedral] he added, "that they spontaneously began to pray, without imagining the consequences that could have."

Oh, I won't bother to give you other accounts, as you can google them for yourself, and compare what was written in the European papers with what appeared in The New York Times (in most editions, I suspect only the single-paragraph abridgement of the AP story).

But I do have one question, one that The New York Times failed to answer. How were that cathedral security guard, how was that Spanish police officer, how did they both happen to be wounded? You see, there was a knife drawn by at least one of the Muslims. Shouldn't that have been part of the story?

You know, a story that were truthful would go something like this:

A deliberately-planned display of Muslim force took place in the cathedral of Cordoba on April 2, in the very middle of Holy Week, the holiest time of the year for Christians. Nearly 120 Muslims from Austria slowly filtered into the cathedral, so as not to attract the attention of guards and, using walkie-talkies, arranged to meet at a certain time, in one of the naves of the cathedral. There a number of them began, in the hush of the Christian services, to turn toward Mecca and prostrate themselves, and to loudly chant in unison. When asked by the security guards to please stop, they refused, and began to threaten the guards who, in turn, had to call for reinforcements from the Spanish police. When the Spanish police arrived, thus further disrupting the holy hush of ancient sacrifice, and the spiritual tranquility of the Christian worshippers, they found the Muslims unwilling to stop. At least one pulled out a knife, and at least two of the Spanish guards, one policeman and one from the cathedral detail, were wounded sufficiently to go to the hospital.

How's that for putting it truthfully?

And what about connecting this act of deliberate aggression with the other acts of Muslim aggression, all over Western Europe, designed to say, as Tariq Ramadan likes to repeat, "It's over. We're here. It's over"?

Is it? Is it "over"? Shall we like sheep sheepishly continue to endure, without complaint, what the New York Times tells us, or fails to tell us, about Islam?

At this point, kindly go back to the beginning of this article, and read all of the first part, that is, the entire list of things about Islam that you would not have learned, had you, over nearly the last decade, relied only on the New York Times, which really must get rid of that now-absurd motto about "All The News That's Fit To Print."

When the Times still manages, willfully, deliberately, after all of its many and severe lapses in the last unappetizing century, to fall down so badly, as it did with the Nazis and did with the Communists, in its coverage, and in its understanding, or failure to understand, Islam, one has to ask those associated with it how they can stand to look at themselves in the mirror. How do they do it? How do they wake up and read what they've produced, with all the resources in the world, and then look at themselves in the mirror and say "Well done, thou good and faithful servant"?

No, not good. Not well done. Not faithful to the truth which, come to think of it, is the first casualty not only of war, but of a certain kind of self-righteous worldview and parti-pris. Yes, the Times is very much parti-pris. And it has come a-cropper. A perfect failure, for Nazis, for Communists, and now in its treatment of the adherents, the ones who take the ideology most to heart, of Islam.

Someone, a complacent Punch, a self-satisfied Pinch, a someone, must be very proud of how the Times is covering -- i.e., not covering -- Islam.

But this can't go on forever.

For it's a Triumph -- a Trifecta, forsooth -- of irresponsibility and even idiocy.

Nobody's perfect, Billy Wilder has reminded us. But this is ridiculous.

With apologies to Sam Cooke and Kenneth C. Davis, when it comes to healthcare — and other issues — the Left’s new theme song should be: “Don’t know much about history!”

When Congress was debating Obamacare, the Left was much taken and smitten with history. Indeed, we kept hearing about how “historic” it would be to enact “comprehensive national healthcare reform.” And so it was.

“Obama signs historic healthcare reform into law,” announced the New York Times.

“We may not have chosen the time, but the time has chosen us,” declared a triumphant Nancy Pelosi.

“Tonight, we answered the call of history,” intoned President Obama.

Well, apparently, it seems that the only ones who can use and cite history are people on the Left: because when conservatives start citing history, the Left cries foul.

Actually, they don’t exactly cry foul. Instead, they pronounce — without any argument or evidence — that the historical reference points cited by conservatives are null and void or “over the top.”

How do I know this? Well, on Friday I published a piece in the American Spectator arguing that the real historical import of “comprehensive national healthcare reform” can be found not in Social Security or Medicare — the historical analogies favored by the Left — but rather in the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854.

Tony Blankley made the same argument that same day in the Washington Times. (What can I say? Great minds think alike!)

In any case, the historical analogy is, I think, compelling. The Kansas-Nebraska Act created a firestorm because it allowed for the expansion of slavery into new federal territories. “Comprehensive national healthcare reform,” likewise, is dangerous because it promises to extend the reach of government-controlled and -rationed healthcare.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act, of course, led to the Civil War. “Comprehensive national healthcare reform,” I argue, likely will lead to an economic and generational civil war. In my article, I note that this will not be a literal or violent civil war, but rather a figurative, non-violent civil or culture war and political struggle.

Moreover, I argue, unlike the 19th Century Civil War, this new conflict will not be tainted by racism or racial concerns. However, like the 19th Century Civil War, this new conflict will rupture America along irreconcilable lines. It will involve diametrically opposed conceptions of America that are at war with each other. And in the end, just as in the 19th Century, America will emerge as either all slave or all free.

We will be all slave or all free in this sense: We will have either a truly free-market healthcare system in which consumers, not employers or the government, make all healthcare decisions; or we will have a “single payer” healthcare system in which the state monopolizes the market and all real healthcare decision-making. There will no in-between. We will have to choose.

Yet, what has been the Left’s response to this legitimate and compelling historical argument? Nothing, or at least nothing serious-minded and substantive. They simply dismiss the historical analogy out of hand as absurd and ridiculous.

Thus Media Matters ran a “research” report that provides no real historical research. Instead, they breezily reference my article (and Blankley’s) under a banner headline that reads: (Right-wing) U.S. History 101: Health care reform just like Kansas-Nebraska Act.

Media Matters even blows up my March 21 Tweet in which I first referenced this historical analogy. Their clear implication is that my tweet is damning or incriminating evidence of some crackpot “right-wing” historical theory.

“This is such a preposterous [historical] analogy that I don’t even know where to start,” fumes one blogger. So he doesn’t. I mean he doesn’t start making an argument. Instead, he blithely asserts that any such historical analogy is obviously “idiotic.”

That won’t do. If the Left wants to invoke a glib and slanted version of history to push through its statist healthcare “reform” agenda, then it better be prepared to argue real history with historically informed and knowledgeable conservatives. Unfortunately, it seems that this may be asking too much of our political friends and adversaries on the Left.

—

John R. Guardiano is a writer and analyst in Arlington, Virginia. You can follow him on Twitter:@Guardian0

Somewhere in Washington D.C., probably at about one in the morning, a man closed a door against the noise and sat down on his bed. From the haggard, miserable look he had worn the entire evening, I doubt that he was smiling at the darkness. In fact, as the silence closed around, the heavy and unfamiliar sense of being alone, perhaps he got his first suspicion of what the rest of his life is going to be.

Only hours ago, the man was considered a veritable American hero. He was considered an honest representative of his people and a Defender of Life, rarities for his political party. He is now neither. Instead of being a true “Champion of the Unborn,” Bart Stupak traded his vote and those of the other “Pro-Life Democrats” he led, for a promise from a known liar. He will forever enjoy the dubious distinction of being the man who, in Congressman Mike Pence’s immortal words:

“You traded thirty years of law for a piece of paper from the most pro-Abortion President in History.”

I have a reputation for being a melodramatic writer. I am often unable to escape the double handicap of Irish hyperbole and over-exposure to the verbosity of “la Belle Langue.” But who will accuse me of exaggeration for saying that the man who fooled us all for months in his role as the hounded protector of the Innocent Unborn has accomplished more by his indefensible farce and groundless acceptance of “Presidential Assurances,” the acceptance of which was a criminal dereliction of logic, than all of NARAL and Planned Barrenhood put together? Who else has been able to obtain funding for abortion with taxpayer money?

History has taught us the fate of traitors, that what they expected would be a life of glory quickly becomes a lonely search for the comfort of shadowy oblivion. Those who slapped Benedict Stupak on the back last night have no more use for him and will punish him for having been so much trouble to them in the first place. No one of character will trust him, the Pro-Life friends who pinned their last hopes on him will only hold his memory in disgust and abhorrence.

I do not feel sorry for Bart Stupak, America’s Benedict Arnold. His name will be written, and deserves to be written, at the top of our first page as a Marxist nation. There are villains, the perpetrators, but History is not decided by perpetrators, it is written by bystanders, and it is written by those who know that what they do is wrong, but are too selfish or weak to stand up in the hour of the test, History is written by the traitors.

“And Judas said to them, ‘What will you give me if I betray?’” Stupak’s bag of silver, whatever it is, is not likely to replace the treasures of reputation and honor he sold tonight. None of our epic tales preserves the name of any traitor who found his coins to be a fair exchange for what he lost. A man or woman may be shunned for doing the right thing, but his or her peaceful conscience is good company in the dark, even when the guests leave and the doors are closed.

Of course, this is a human story and the most significant questions of forgiveness and redemption will play out away from the flashing cameras and national scrutiny. This is all his own private business. When we think of the innocent unborn babies whose deaths he will have facilitated instead of saved, and the free country that he turned over to Marxist Revolutionaries instead of defending Her to the death, we will always remember Bart Stupak as the man who sold our most precious treasures in the moment we needed a hero and found instead, a traitor.

The arrest of Chile’s counter-revolutionary general, Augusto Pinochet, and the approach of the 40th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution bring into focus two celebrated battles of the Cold War, in which members of my generation took passionate sides. As one who went into these battles on one side and came out on another, I have mixed but ultimately clear emotions about this history and the events that shaped it.Being in the left imbues one with a sense of having chosen the moral side in all such conflicts. Belonging to the camp of morality and progress becomes a kind of second nature, and compensates somewhat for the fact that most of these battles are necessarily lost. It used to be said among us that as revolutionaries we were destined to lose every battle but the last one. We did not join the progressive cause to support history’s winners, but to stand up for its losers: The powerless, the victimized, the oppressed. Our political commitment was about weighing in on the side of social justice. It is a good feeling.

For this reason, when it came time to relinquish those political commitments, it was far easier to identify what was wrong with the left and to draw back from it than it was to move in the direction of the right and plant my feet on new political terrain. As a matter of fact, I withdrew from all politics for nearly ten years before changing course.

As I was stepping back from the left, repelled by crimes that progressives had committed and catastrophes they had produced (it turned out that winning the “last” battle could be worse than losing), I had a nagging feeling about certain political events and historical figures associated with this past. One of the figures was Pinochet.

In our progressive version of this historical episode, we saw Chilean democracy as having produced a historical anomalya Marxist actually elected to power. This Marxist, Salvador Allende, had even been allowed by the ruling forces to form a government and to begin a program of social reform. We knew, of course, that this could not last. Ruling classes never gave up their power without a fight. Sooner or later, there would be a counter-revolution, probably a military coup. The only question was when. In making this calculation, we had our eye on Washington, the capital, in our eyes, of the world imperialist system. In political statements we issued, we invoked the cautionary memory of the Bay of Pigs, the failed CIA attempt to topple Fidel Castro in the second year of his revolutionary regime. This was the true face of American power, whose policies were orchestrated by multinational corporations with investment stakes in the third world. It was only a matter of time before their interests asserted themselves.

– Fidel, Pinochet, and Me

November 23, 1998
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Sunday marked the much-anticipated first episode of HBO’s The Pacific, the latest mini-series from the folks who brought you Band of Brothers. The production team includes, most notably, Hollywood icon Tom Hanks – and therein lies a still-simmering controversy that has cast a negative spotlight on the show just as it has begun its television run.

In a March 6 story at Time.com (subsequently corrected on March 11) Douglas Brinkley penned a gushing tribute to Hanks in anticipation of the debut of The Pacific, entitled “How Tom Hanks Became America’s Historian in Chief.” Sadly, Brinkley’s piece didn’t have much to do with history, much less with establishing Hanks as an expert on the subject.

For Brinkley, Hanks is not your typical left-coast progressive. Not only is Hanks supposedly knowledgeable about the events that shaped this nation, but the actor has put that journey of discovery to good use and, as a result, is really much more a moderate and a patriot than your usual run-of-the-mill Hollywood celebrity. Brinkley warmed to this theme early in his article:

“His view of American history is a mixture of idealism and realism, both of which have characterized all the work he has produced; he’s a Kennedy liberal with old-time values, the kind that embraces Main Street on the Fourth of July.”

But how to reconcile that view of Hanks with this utterance by the actor from the same article:

“Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as ‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs’ that believed in different gods. They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different. Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what’s going on today?”

That dual insult to everyone who served in the Pacific Theater during World War II and to everyone serving in Iraq and Afghanistan today is predictable when one considers where and how Hanks has filled his personal storehouse of historical knowledge. According to Brinkley:

“What differentiates Hanks from the academic past masters is his conviction that the historical experience should be a very personal one. He harbors a pugnacious indignation against history as data gathering, preferring the work of popular historians like McCullough, Ambrose, Barbara Tuchman and Doris Kearns Goodwin.”

And this:

“As Hanks’ star rose in the 1990s, he sought out new sources of what he calls ‘entertainable historical knowledge.’ Leon Uris’ fact-anchored novels — Mila 18, Armageddon and Exodus — taught Hanks to feel history in a way no high school teacher ever did, but the entertainment level had to be hyperkinetic to hold his attention. It was the same with most academic histories.”

Whatever “enteratainable historical knowledge” is supposed to be, it’s not history. It’s rather a fragment of history, taken out of context and placed against a dramatic backdrop that distorts the true picture. I love reading the late Stephen Ambrose as much as the next guy, but Ambrose told personal stories. He did not pen sweeping perspectives that document the forces and facts of history on the large scale. But, real history bores Hanks, so he’ll stick with the Saving Private Ryan formula when it comes to storytelling. And that’s great. Who doesn’t love Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers? Those works are invaluable tributes to the men who won World War II. When Hanks sticks to such personal stories, we are the richer for them. But when Brinkley’s new appointed “Historian in Chief” (perhaps “History Czar” is in Hanks’ future?) start commenting on historical, geo-political forces and social dynamics, he finds himself far out over his skis.

Even an armchair historian understands that the seeds of the Pacific war were planted when Japanese imperialistic aggression manifested itself in a brutal attack against China. America antagonized Japan because we applied diplomatic pressure to protect the Chinese from the Japanese. Our defense of China led directly to Pearl Harbor and everything that followed. The implication that race had anything to do with the war is nothing but nonsensical, unsupportable, neo-historical propaganda.

During World War II, Americans under Joe Stillwell fought alongside Chinese soldiers trying to drive the imperial armies of Japan from their land. Americans under Douglas MacArthur liberated the Philippines. Americans and Filipinos united under Lieutenant Colonel (self-appointed Brigadier General) Wendell Fertig, one of the unsung heroes of World War II, to conduct a heroic guerrilla war against Japanese rule on the Philippine island of Mindano. Our troops in the Pacific spent a great deal of their time and risked their lives to defend and liberate peoples whom Hanks calls “yellow, slant-eyed dogs.” A real “historian in chief” ought to be aware of that undeniable fact.

The same is true in Iraq and Afghanistan today. Anyone who has spent even a modicum of time talking with soldiers coming back from the front lines in those nations knows the truth. Our troops aren’t motivated by the need to kill alien “ragheads” (though that particular pejorative is regularly employed when it comes to jihadists); they are primarily motivated by two things: the desire to do right by their comrades-in-arms; and by the moral obligation to protect the peaceful, civilian populace in the nations they serve.

American soldiers have not and do not battle enemy combatants because they might have an alien appearance. American soldiers fight those enemies because they serve alien, tyrannical ideologies. If Tom Hanks intends to chronicle the stories of the brave men and women who have risked everything in the name of liberty, he would do well to remember the nobility of the causes they serve.

Have you heard of Phyllis Schlafly? Do you believe liberals are responsible for civil rights? Do you understand the consequences of Title IX? Are you aware that Germans and Italians were interned during World War II along with the Japanese? These are just some of the issues that have been debated for years in states where textbook standards are often determined. California and Texas lead the way due to their size, and this past Friday the Texas State Board of Education finally approved new standards for a social studies curriculum.

After three days of debate, the board gave preliminary approval for a new social studies curriculum that seeks to provide balance to a skewed view of American history. For years students (of all ages) have been taught a jaded view of history in the name of social engineering — which is just a fancy term for some people’s attempt to see things not as they are but as the way they would like them to be. Indeed, today’s textbooks are loaded with politically correct jargon, resulting in students being taught faux history and anti-American sentiment.

The reality is that our public institutions have become indoctrination centers – and, thankfully, several members of the Texas Board of Education are trying to do something about it. Unfortunately, their attempt to produce some semblance of balance has given them the label “conservative.” But this a red herring. It isn’t conservatism they’re after; it’s truth.

Liberal bias is not something everyone in America accepts as real — because not everyone understands what it is. Many people think liberal bias suggests that a bunch of left-wingers get together and plot how they’re going to undermine conservative thought, but it doesn’t work like this. Liberal bias, aka political correctness, is the belief that there is one right, one good, one moral way to view something — and that any thought that challenges the status quo is thus conservative.

But there’s nothing inherently conservative about covering the Judeo-Christian influences of the nation’s Founding Fathers, or pointing out the way in which separation of church and state have been exaggerated, or discussing the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and how Phyllis Schlafly was hugely instrumental in this process. It’s as if liberals fear that the mere mention of a traditional America will cause students to gravitate in that direction.

Yet students cannot get an accurate picture of America if there are major gaps in their learning — and this is what we’re dealing with in many public schools across the nation. Many kids would be surprised to learn, for example, that Republicans were instrumental in civil rights legislation. Many kids don’t have an accurate handle on what capitalism is — and how it leads to a strong nation. And the reason they don’t is because there are things you’re supposed to say in America, and things you’re not. That’s called political correctness — and that’s what the Texas Board of Education is trying to correct.

The idea that these folks are trying to force conservatism upon students is absurd; today’s kids are so steeped in progressive thought this isn’t even possible. I applaud the Texas Board of Education for putting this issue on the map. Let’s hope other states follow suit.

"Egyptian Cleric Ahmad 'Eid Mihna: The Jews Are Behind Misery, Hardship, Usury, and Whorehouses," from MEMRITV, January 10 (just posted):

The following are excerpts from an address delivered by Egyptian cleric Ahmad 'Eid Mihna, which aired on Al-Shabab TV (Egypt) on January 10, 2010

Ahmad 'Eid Mihna: The Jews are behind the misery, the hardship, the usury, the whorehouses, and any form of corruption that is spread in the land. In the battle of Al-Ahzab [627 CE], the [attackers] were seemingly Arab - the Quraysh and Ghatafan tribes.

However, the main planners of this raid were Jews. The main financers of this raid were Jews. The main ideologists behind this raid were Jews. One can see that hatred and jealousy of the Prophet Muhammad were manifest in the Jews from the day the Prophet was born, and did not begin with the Battle of Al-Ahzab.

Some people think that the enmity between Islam and Judaism began with the emigration of the Prophet Muhammad to Al-Madina. This is not true. The black history of the Jews proves that they are against any reform effort in the world. That's what the history of the Jews proves, and the Battle of Al-Ahzab fits the pattern.

The history of the Jews shows that they are against any reform movement in the world. Any reformer, Muslim or not, will be attacked by the Jews. The Jews are like that. They thrive only on civil strife, on the selling of arms, on usury, on whorehouses, and so on. [...]

When the Prophet Muhammad reached Al-Madina, all the Jews felt their control of the city was quaking. Why? Because they used to exploit the naivete of the Arabs. They would entice them with money - usury and all that -and with the selling of arms. Thus, the two brothers - the Aws and the Khazraj tribes - fought between themselves, to the benefit of the Jews who sold them arms and practiced usury.

Allah be praised. Jews will be Jews-everywhere and always. Their innate characteristics include lying, deceiving, the practice of usury, and the selling of arms. Even when it comes to our brothers in Hamas - may Allah grant them victory - their number one source of weapons is the Jews. They buy weapons from Jewish traitors.