What a disappointment – and yet nothing could have been less surprising. The first season of the Golden Globe-nominated, Showtime series Homeland came to a close last Sunday in a finale that drew mixed reactions from fans and set a record for the highest-rated finale for a freshman series in Showtime’s history. But more importantly, it confirmed that Hollywood is still not ready to take an unequivocal, pro-American stand against our jihadist enemy.

(Warning: MAJOR SPOILERS ahead)

For those who haven’t been following, the show centers on a Marine named Brody (actor Damian Lewis), missing and presumed dead in Iraq since 2003, who is discovered alive, rescued and brought home to suburban Washington D.C. to a lot of CIA self-congratulation and media fanfare. Not only does he become “a poster boy for the war,” as skeptical counterterrorism analyst Carrie (actress Claire Danes​) calls him, he’s even urged by the Vice President to run for political office. But Carrie has reason to believe that Brody has been “turned” traitor and is a sleeper agent involved in an imminent terrorist attack.

She suspects correctly. Although the series toyed briefly with the idea that Brody is nothing more than the victim of Carrie’s increasing bi-polar paranoia, he was indeed working with the terrorist mastermind Abu Nazir (Navid Negahban) to take down the Vice President and Secretary of Defense in a suicide bombing. But the shrapnel-packed suicide vest fails him in the final episode, which ends with Brody pitching the idea to Abu Nazir that perhaps he can best serve their cause not by killing the Vice President, who has announced his candidacy for the Presidency, but rather by influencing public policy through him.

I wrote about “Homeland” before on FrontPage Magazine, at the beginning of the show’s season, when I expressed skepticism about how the show would depict the ill-named “war on terror.” My doubts were based on interview snippets with the producers, who hinted at the usual Hollywood moral equivalence and aversion to patriotism. But I was encouraged that the show at least didn’t shy away from portraying Islamic terrorists as the bad guys, and after seeing the complexity and ambiguity of the first couple of episodes, I was just optimistic enough to conclude that it would be necessary to see how the season played out in order to judge the series fully.

Well, now that time has come, and the verdict is in. As gripping and well-acted as the series was on plenty of occasions, the finale laid bare its disheartening true colors when the real reason for Brody’s attempted terror attack became clear.

The motivation for Abu Nazir’s murderous plan? While Brody was still a prisoner of Nazir, our Vice President had ordered a covert drone strike on a school harboring Nazir, killing 82 children – among them, Nazir’s youngest son. The VP then ordered any trace of the operation wiped clean– except for a heavily redacted document that somehow slipped through the cracks and made its way to heroine Claire Danes’ mentor Saul (Mandy Patinkin.)  Then video surfaced of the VP ordering the strike despite being made aware of the presence of schoolchildren. Screw it, he says, we can’t be held responsible if the cowardly Abu Nazir chooses to shield himself among innocent children. So he, the CIA Director, and the Secretary of Defense determine that “the collateral damage count” of the attack is “within the acceptable matrix parameters” and the strike goes forward. Nazir vows vengeance against the principles involved, with Brody as his weapon.

Several weeks ago All-American Muslim debuted on TLC to a storm of publicity and high ratings, but the publicity has vanished and the ratings are dribbling away. The series had premiered to a 1.7 rating, but last Sunday’s episode had dropped to a 1.1 rating. The television ratings for this week aren’t in yet, but the news for TLC and the producers of All-American Muslim isn’t likely to be any better.

All-American Muslim had originally finished ahead of the terrorism drama Homeland which airs in the same timeslot, but last week Homeland finished ahead of it, and not because its ratings had improved. Homeland had lost viewers, but All-American Muslim had lost even more viewers making it by far the lowest rated show on TLC Sunday nights. Worse still its 18-49 demographic had been cut in half, which put it way at the bottom of the ratings pile and that made it a bad bargain for the advertisers who stuck it out with the controversial series only to be rewarded with a Halal turkey.

Despite being fictional Homeland is in some ways a truer depiction of the All-American Muslim and of the captive American audiences who yearn to identify with Muslims, much like Nicholas Brody, the enigmatic figure at the heart of Homeland whose loss of context and identity have seduced him to the other side. All-American Muslim gives Americans the Muslims that they would like to live next door to, but Homeland shows them the Muslims that they fear living next door to. Homeland confronts this ambiguity, but All-American Muslim pretends that it doesn’t exist.

Denial is the operating mode of All-American Muslim and it is caught between its guiding mission of normalization and the reality show mechanics that aim to create drama out of thin air. This week the focus is on the coach of the Fordson football team, Fouad Zaban. Zaban had already been featured in “Fordson: Faith – Fasting – Football,” a Muslim documentary dealing with the team. The documentary covered much of the same territory as the previous episode of All-American Muslim, and this episode, “A Muslim Goes to Washington,” feeds the same culture of entitlement that centered Fordson football around the Ramadan fast.

This week Zaban heads to the Iftar dinner at the White House to chat up Keith Ellison and Obama. While the reality show mechanics require Zaban to pretend that it’s difficult for him to decide between skipping practice and going off to the White House, it’s obvious all along what he will do. Zaban and the Fordson team have been the focus of more cameras than any normal high school team in America. All that has obviously disrupted practice already, but the Fordson team’s purpose is to be a showpiece for Muslims in America. And when Zaban, the coach of a high school football team, gets an invite to head to the White House, it isn’t because of how his team plays, but because he is a Muslim.

That unspoken entitlement is the whole premise of All-American Muslim, a show full of people who are there not because they’re interesting or because they do anything interesting, but because they are Muslims. All-American Muslim is a show built not on merit, but on religious identity. And that may help explain why All-American Muslim is tanking in the ratings.

It’s been almost a year and a half since the long-running Fox TV series 24 ended. The counterterrorism action show featured Kiefer Sutherland as the self-sacrificing super-patriot Jack Bauer, who took down terrorists by any means necessary, including torture – a tactic which created no end of controversy and earned the show scorn from the Left as “right-wing porn.” Now creative alumni from 24 have created a new show with a  compelling but decidedly more ambiguous take on what used to be called the “war on terror” (before the Obama administration changed it to “Overseas Contingency Operation” and then dropped a name for it altogether).

Homeland, which premiered two Sundays ago on Showtime, is based on Prisoners of War, an Israeli TV series about the reintegration of two soldiers held prisoner by the Syrians. It centers on a Marine named Brody (actor Damian Lewis) missing and presumed dead in Iraq since 2003, who is discovered alive and rescued during a CIA-driven operation. Brody is welcomed home to suburban Washington D.C. to a lot of CIA self-congratulation and media fanfare – “a poster boy for the war,” as skeptical counterterrorism analyst Carrie (actress Claire Danes) calls him. Unknown to her superiors, Carrie received a tip from a high-level informant that an American prisoner of war has been “turned” traitor; she suspects it is Brody, and that he is a sleeper agent involved in an imminent terrorist attack. (Warning: possible SPOILERS ahead)

Brody, tortured both physically and psychologically, struggles to re-acclimate himself to his family and freedom. Carrie herself suffers from what she dismisses as a mere “mood disorder,” but she’s barely holding herself together with the aid of clandestine medication, and has been treading on thin ice lately with the CIA brass, who want her to stop making waves. In her determination not to let another terror attack get past her, like the one that nearly derailed her career years before, Carrie decides to go with her instincts and run her own surveillance operation under the CIA’s radar. She wires Brody’s house with hidden cameras and microphones.  She sees a broken man engaging in bizarre behavior.  But is it just the residual effects of torture, or is she just paranoid after all?

Brody is all tightly-coiled anger and anxiety, and tight-lipped about the darker details of his horrific experience, suggesting hidden layers beneath his crisp uniform and impenetrable public face. Not to mention the fact that he is chanting in Arabic on a makeshift prayer rug in the privacy of his garage – but is that evidence that he has turned, or is it residual Stockholm Syndrome? Carrie believes she has caught him giving off subtle coded messages by twitching fingers to his partners-in-terror – or is it merely a nervous tic? Is he a traitor or an innocent target of her obsession with national security? The tension in these questions may be difficult to sustain over the course of an entire season, much less subsequent seasons, but so far – two episodes in – it is so successful that the viewer is left wanting more.

The exploration of this uncertainty seems to be the show’s point about a new era ten years after the 9/11 attacks. Howard Gordon, an executive producer of both 24 and Homeland, says that the former show reflected “an urgent, post-9/11 ethos,” but now?

Should we be afraid of the same things we were afraid of 10 years ago? The world is more complex, and our understanding of it is more nuanced. And there’s a gray space of not knowing who the good guys and bad guys are.

Such comments send up a giant red flag for anyone concerned that yet another Hollywood treatment of the Clash of Civilizations will be a disappointing exercise in moral equivalence. “Should we be afraid of the same things we were afraid of 10 years ago?” An odd question, considering that 1) the Islamic militants at war with us have not declared a cease-fire or surrender, 2) more terror attacks and plots have occurred or been thwarted on American soil during Obama’s presidency than in all the previous time since 2001, 3) we are still embroiled in two wars abroad, and 4) Iran is not only accelerating toward the acquisition of nuclear weapons, but also potentially planning to devastate America’s infrastructure with an EMP attack. Not a good time to relax our guard and pretend that the Islamic threat has subsided, as Gordon seems to be suggesting.

The Department of Homeland Security is trying to deport the son of a Hamas founder who told of his conversion to Christianity and decade of spying for Israel in a New York Times best-seller.

"Son of Hamas" author Mosab Hassan Yousef revealed on a blog hosted by his publisher he is scheduled to appear June 30 before Immigration Judge Rico J. Bartolomei at the DHS Immigration Court in San Diego.

Yousef said the DHS informed him Feb. 23, 2009, he was barred from asylum in the U.S. because there were reasonable grounds for believing he was "a danger to the security of the United States" and "engaged in terrorist activity."

An incredulous Yousef said the U.S. government's belief he is a terrorist is based on a complete misinterpretation of passages of his book in which he describes his work as a counterterrorism agent for the Israeli internal intelligence service Shin Bet.

Yousef said he's not so much worried about himself as he is "outraged" about "a security system that is so primitive and naive that it endangers the lives of countless Americans."

"If Homeland Security cannot tell the difference between a terrorist and a man who spent his life fighting terrorism, how can they protect their own people?" he asked in his blog post.

Yousef said whatever Judge Bartolomei decides will be appealed, "and this insane merry-go-round can go on like that for decades."...

Like the Fort Hood jihad massacre and virtually all such attacks and attempted attacks these days, the car bomb discovered in Times Square Saturday was initially dismissed as having nothing to do with terrorism. The New York Times reported: "A federal official said it was not considered a terrorist threat and that the New York Police Department had told the Department of Homeland Security to stand down."

Soon, however, the weight of evidence became too great for officials to sustain this wishful thinking. New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said: "I think the intent was to cause a significant ball of fire."' New York Governor David Paterson declared the incident an "act of terrorism." Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano revealed on Meet the Press that the car bomb was being treated as a "potential terrorist attack."

Napolitano offered no hint as to which terrorists might have done it: "It's too soon to tell who was responsible." New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg was just as puzzled: "We have no idea who did this or why."

Yet for all this official agnosticism, there were a number of clues - and even a group claiming credit. The explosives-laden car was found on 45th Street between 7th and 8th - not far from the offices of Viacom, which owns Comedy Central. Comedy Central, of course, presents South Park, the irreverent cartoon series that recently lampooned Islam's prophet Muhammad. After the show aired, the jihadist website RevolutionMuslim.com posted this threat against the creators of South Park, Matt Stone and Trey Parker: "We have to warn Matt and Trey that what they are doing is stupid and they will probably wind up like Theo Van Gogh for airing this show. This is not a threat, but a warning of the reality of what will likely happen to them."

Theo Van Gogh was brutally murdered by a Muslim on an Amsterdam street in the middle of the day in November 2004 after he made a film, Submission, about the oppression of Muslim women. Younus Abullah Muhammad of RevolutionMuslim.com told journalist Aaron Klein Sunday that the car bomb was "a retaliation for what your government is doing overseas. If you want to continue killing civilians, then you're going to get many incidents that resemble what happened yesterday." Not that RevolutionMuslim.com was claiming responsibility: "We do not condone nor condemn terrorism. There is no relation between our organization and these attacks." However, "there will be a lot more terror attacks in the United States."

Younus Abullah Muhammad's denial of responsibility notwithstanding, have authorities questioned the owners of RevolutionMuslim.com about this attempt to explode a car bomb outside Viacom's offices?...

Read it all.

ZIONISM is a national liberation movement, identical in most ways to other liberation movements that leftists and progressives the world over — and in virtually every case but this one — fervently support. This exceptionalism is also visible at the reverse end of the political spectrum: In every other instance, right-wingers like Patrick Buchanan oppose national liberation movements that are under the spell of Marxist delusions and committed to violent means. But they make an exception for the one that Palestinians have aimed at the Jews. The unique opposition to a Jewish homeland at both ends of the political spectrum identifies the problem that Zionism was created to solve.

The “Jewish problem” is just another name for the fact that Jews are the most universally hated and persecuted ethnic group in history. The Zionist founders believed that hatred of Jews was a direct consequence of their stateless condition. As long as Jews were aliens in every society they found themselves in, they would always be seen as interlopers, their loyalties would be suspect and persecution would follow. This was what happened to Captain Alfred Dreyfus, whom French anti-Semites falsely accused of spying and who was put on trial for treason by the French government in the 19^th Century. Theodore Herzl was an assimilated, westernized Jew, who witnessed the Dreyfus frame- up in Paris and went on to lead the Zionist movement.

Herzl and other Zionist founders believed that if Jews had a nation of their own, the very fact would “normalize” their condition in the community of nations. Jews had been without a state since the beginning of the diaspora, when the Romans expelled them from Judea on the west bank of the Jordan River, some 2,000 years before. Once the Jews obtained a homeland – Judea itself seemed a logical site — and were again like other peoples, the Zionists believed anti-Semitism would wither on its poisonous vine and the Jewish problem would disappear.

Here is what happened instead…

-- Why Israel is the Victim

–

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

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One of the most frequent questions I am asked about my transit from the political left to the right some thirty years ago is why I did not stop somewhere along the way, and in particular somewhere “in the middle,” by which the questioner usually means on the Democratic Party side of the political divide. In fact, I remember very clearly why I did not. At the time of my transition, just before the 1984 re-election, Ronald Reagan and the Republicans were trying to hold the line against a Communist offensive in Central America, while Democratic senators – Tom Harkin, John Kerry and Christopher Dodd among them – were conducting their own private diplomacy in Central America to cut deals with the Communists while the Democratic House was seeking to cut funds for the anti-Communist forces on the ground. I had turned my back on the left because of the support it gave to the Communists in Indo-China, which had enabled the slaughter of two-and-a-half million peasants when Democrats cut-off funding to the anti-Communist forces.

I was reminded of these events by a report that appeared recently on the Newsweek website:  “Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein and other prominent Senate Democrats have accused spies at the Homeland Security Department of basing official intelligence reports on dubious open-source material. Inquiries … indicate that at least some of the data that Feinstein and her colleagues deemed ‘questionable’ came from a website set up by outspoken conservative activist David Horowitz to catalogue negative information about the political left.”

This was a reference to DiscovertheNetworks.org, an encyclopedia of the left, which I launched in February 2005 and which has attracted over the last five years 22.4 million unique visitors, among them the producers of innumerable radio and TV talk shows. According to the Newsweek report, Senator Feinstein’s immediate concern was

“a profile of an unnamed but prominent American Islamic leader and was produced by Homeland Security’s intelligence office during the latter years of the Bush administration. The report was requested by the Department’s civil rights office, whose officials were preparing to meet with the Islamic leader. But instead of sending the civil rights office a quick bio of the individual in question, Homeland’s intelligence office issued a ‘finished’ intel report that was circulated to other intelligence agencies and, eventually, to Congressional oversight committees.”

In other words, Senator Feinstein and the Democrats were objecting to the scrutiny of a prominent Islamic leader scheduled to meet with the Bush Administration, even though leaders of prominent “mainstream” Islamic organizations such as CAIR have been convicted of terrorist activities, while others have been linked by the FBI to a formally organized network of the Muslim Brotherhood, the fountainhead of Islamic terrorism.

The letter from the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is the focus of the Newsweek article, complains that the Department of Homeland Security “used ‘certain questionable’ source material to glean ‘derogatory’ information about [a particular] Muslim leader, including information from an unidentified source ‘with obvious political motivation whose stated purpose is to “identif[y] the individuals and organizations that make up the left”.’  The senators added that the source also included information on “’numerous members of Congress and two former Presidents of the United States.’”

The source was censored from the Intelligence Committee letter, but Newsweek’s Mark Hosenball was able to identify it using a Google search as Discoverthenetworks.org: “The website is one of a number of anti-left and anti-Islamic websites operated by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a Los Angeles-based assortment of conservative political organizations founded and headed by David Horowitz, a 1960s-vintage far-left organizer who migrated sharply to the political right.”

When Hosenball interviewed me, I told him that I had no knowledge of the Homeland Security incident but hoped that intelligence officials were consulting DiscovertheNetworks regularly – for the sake of the country. The political left, I told him, “including some members of Congress – [the one I named was Barbara Lee, head of the Black Caucus] has a long history of … actively working with and collaborating with America’s enemies.” I also assured him that the material on his DiscovertheNetworks.org is “factual,” and not written in an inflammatory manner, which could be easily checked.

Of all the projects of the David Horowitz Freedom Center over its 22-year history, its university campaigns, the scores of books its principals and contributors have authored, the hundreds of lectures they have given and the thousands of articles its websites have published, I regard the creation of DiscovertheNetworks as its single most significant achievement with the most far reaching long-term impact on the future of this country. This is not because it is a “catalogue [of] negative political information about the political left,” as Newsweek claimed. It is no such thing, but rather a map describing the origins, activities, agendas, funding and interlocking networks of a political movement whose collective goal is the destruction of American capitalism and pluralism, and the framework its Founders created more than 200 years ago.

Ever since making my political conversion I have been aware that the American public is dangerously naïve about the nature and purposes of the American left (although mercifully it is an innocence that is rapidly coming to an end). The extent of this innocence is reflected in an incident twenty years past when I gave a speech to the Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation in St. Louis. Cardinal Mindszenty was a hero of the anti-Communist cause, and the Mindszenty Foundation was as conservative an organization was likely to host me.

In my days as a radical I would have described myself as a “Marxist revolutionary,” but when it came to my introduction, my host presented me as “a former peace activist and civil rights worker.” How familiar is this? Sworn enemies of American capitalism and American democracy such as Angela Davis and Michael Moore are universally described by mainstream media as “liberals” even though they are Marxists. The campaign to prevent America from toppling Saddam Hussein was portrayed in the mainstream media as a “peace movement” even though its leaders were self-described supporters of Korean dictator Kim Jong-il and other Communists, and they did not organize a single “peace” demonstration in front of the Iraqi embassy to demand that Saddam Hussein cease his defiance of 17 UN arms control resolutions and allow inspectors the required access to his weapons sites.

DiscoverTheNetworks strips the veil from thousands of radical groups who fly under false flags and attempt to slip beneath the radar by referring to themselves as peace movements and civil liberties organizations and campaigns for “social justice.” For the first time the left’s history, and agendas and commitments are displayed for a public that has not made the study of the left a lifetime occupation. This is a service to the country and the cause of freedom. For that reason, the most alarming aspect of the Newsweek report is the fact that the Bush Homeland Security Department had to refer to our research to warn the White House of the dangers a prospective visitor might pose and did not have this information in its own files.

This story at Newsweek made my day today. (How often do we say that at NewsReal Blog?) But as soon as you begin reading the post at the publication’s Declassified blog you’ll understand why:

Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein and other prominent Senate Democrats have accused spies at the Homeland Security Department of basing official intelligence reports on dubious open-source material. Inquiries by Declassified indicate that at least some of the data that Feinstein and her colleagues deemed “questionable” came from a website set up by outspoken conservative activist David Horowitz to catalogue negative information about the political left.

You can read the letter — much of it redacted — here in PDF format.

Gee, I wonder which site it was? “Catalogue negative information about the political left”? Whatever could that be?

In the age of Google it doesn’t matter if the name of the site was redacted:

The letter goes on to note that the Homeland report used “certain questionable” source material to glean “derogatory” information about the Muslim leader, including information from an unidentified source “with obvious political motivation whose stated purpose is to ‘identif[y] the individuals and organizations that make up the left’.”  The senators added that the source also included information on “numerous members of Congress and two former Presidents of the United States.” While details identifying the alleged dubious source have been censored out of the Senators’ letter, a Google search by Declassified for data sources purporting to identify “individuals and organizations that make up the left” led to a single website, Discoverthenetworks.org. The website is one of a number of anti-left and anti-Islamic websites operated by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a Los Angeles-based assortment of conservative political organizations founded and headed by David Horowitz, a 1960s-vintage far-left organizer who migrated sharply to the political right.

Glorious.

Our Editor-In-Chief had this to say:

Horowitz tells Declassified he has no knowledge of the Homeland Security paper the senators complained about. But he says he hopes intelligence officials are consulting his website. American left-wingers, including some members of Congress, have a “long history of … actively working with and collaborating with America’s enemies,” he warns. And he insists that the material on his Web site is “factual,” “not inflammatory” and that his group is “very careful about what it posts… All we do is connect the dots.” He adds that his Web site is regularly consulted by “a lot of TV talk-show producers.”

According to Democratic Senators Russ Feingold (Read his Discover The Networks Profile HERE, btw) and Jay Rockefeller the unknown material from DTN was “clearly inappropriate” and “derogatory.” But it does not matter to Feingold and Rockefeller that the report declared the Islamic leader in question was not an “extremist.” Senate Democrats just want to try and intimidate Homeland Security analysts to stay away from Horowitz and not ask uncomfortable questions about the Stealth Jihad perpetuated by many so-called “moderate Muslims.”

According to the letter, the Homeland report specifically went on to conclude that the Islamic leader in question was a “mainstream voice” and that information on him “points to politically controversial statements but not to extremism”  — conclusions that Rockefeller and Feingold declared to be “political assessments that are outside of the bounds of the authorities granted U.S. law enforcement and intelligence entities.”

This is how effective the Freedom Center’s publications have become. We’re being cited by Homeland Security, and leftist Democrats in the Senate cannot stand it.

If you appreciate the work we’re doing then please consider supporting us. And you can learn more about this bizarre practice of leftists running interference for Islamists in DTN’s companion book, Horowitz’s Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left.

Professor Karol Sikora, the London-based doctor who examined Megrahi and predicted he would be dead by last October, admitted this weekend that the fact the bomber is still alive might be “difficult” for the families of the 270 victims of the attack.

Read the whole thing.

It’s bad enough that John Brennan, President Obama’s national security deputy, thinks Gitmo jihadi recidivism is “not that bad.” But in his talk last week with Islamic law students at New York University, Brennan made even more reckless comments about our counterterrorism programs while pandering to one of the worst Muslim grievance-mongers and sharia peddlers in America.

During the question-and-answer session, Brennan welcomed a question from Omar Shahin. He identified himself as the head of the “North American Imams Federation.” What he didn’t mention was his role as the chief ringleader of the infamous flying imams. You remember them: They were the six Muslim clerics whose suspicious behavior — provocatively shouting “Allahu Akbar!” before boarding the plane, fanning out in the cabin before take-off, refusing to sit in their assigned seats, requesting seat-belt extenders, which they placed on the floor — led to their removal by a U.S. Airways crew in 2006.

In coordination with the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Shahin and his radical delegation attempted to shake down the airline with a discrimination lawsuit and bully the citizen “John Does” who flagged the imams’ security-undermining behavior. CAIR mouthpiece Ibrahim Hooper blasted “anti-Muslim hysteria” by those who saw something and said something about the imams’ in-flight shenanigans. Shahin ranted in a teleconference strategy session in 2007 that, indeed, he and his cohorts were spoiling for the incident and planning to engineer “many, many cases” to sabotage airline security efforts.

As head of the Islamic Center of Tucson in Arizona (home to past jihadi dry-run plotters), Shahin preached that his followers must put Islamic sharia law above Western laws. He told the Arizona Republic that he doubted Muslims were behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks, concluding: “All of these, they make it up.” Brennan didn’t appear to know who Shahin was. Somebody around him should have briefed him. Shahin’s involvement in Hamas-linked charities and radical Wahhabi “youth groups” has earned the Jordanian-born naturalized citizen increased FBI scrutiny over the years.

Instead, Brennan treated him as just another innocent Muslim with “reasonable” concerns about the government.

“We came to this country to enjoy freedom,” Shahin began with faux, flag-waving emotion.

“We feel that since September 11, we aren’t enjoying these values anymore. … Also, we feel that there’s a big lack of trust between Muslims’ community and our government. … My question: Is there anything being done by our government to rebuild this trust?”

Instead of countering the narrative, exposing Shahin’s true intentions and vigorously defending America’s homeland security apparatus, Brennan dutifully genuflected to the gods of political correctness. Obama, he told the militant 9/11 inside-job theorist and jihad white-washer, is “determined to put America on a strong course.”

No, not a “strong course” that includes national security profiling of Islamic radicals pretending they care about our country’s best interests. By “strong course,” Brennan assured Shahin, he meant a course toward assuaging the civil rights groups who have objected to every security program at airports, borders, train stations and visa offices for the past nine years.

Brennan told Shahin that the post-9/11 response of the Bush administration was a “reaction some people might say was over the top in some areas” (insert indignant grievance-monger nodding and mmm-hmming here), and that “in an overabundance of caution, (we) implemented a number of security measures and activities that upon reflection now we look back, after the heat of the battle has died down a bit, we say they were excessive, OK.”

It gets worse: Brennan then went on to decry the “ignorant feelings” of Americans outraged at the jihadi attacks on American soil. And then he told Shahin and the audience of Muslim students that he “was very concerned after the attack in Fort Hood as well as the December 25 attack that all of sudden there were people who went back into this fearful position that lashed out not thinking through what was reasonable and appropriate.”

The Fort Hood jihadist slaughtered 14 innocent soldiers and an unborn baby after an Army career of openly threatening the lives of our soldiers, and Brennan is wringing his hands about the rest of us “lashing out” over government incompetence. He believes our true sin is not in the systemic underreacting by the military, homeland security, intel and White House officials in charge, but in the “overreacting” of the American public.

With clueless capitulationists like Brennan in charge of our safety, who needs enemies?

The terrorist organization is deploying operatives to the United States to carry out new attacks from inside the country, including “clean” recruits with a negligible trail of terrorist contacts, CIA Director Leon Panetta said. Al Qaeda is also inspiring homegrown extremists to trigger violence on their own, Panetta added.

The annual assessment of the nation's terror threats provided no startling new terror trends, but amplified growing concerns since the Christmas Day airline attack in Detroit that militants are growing harder to detect and moving more quickly in their plots.

“The biggest threat is not so much that we face an attack like 9/11. It is that Al Qaeda is adapting its methods in ways that oftentimes make it difficult to detect,” Panetta told the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Al Qaeda is increasingly relying on new recruits with minimal training and simple devices to carry out attacks, the CIA chief said as part of the annual assessment of national threats provided to Congress by the top five U.S. intelligence officials.

Panetta also warned of the danger of extremists acting alone: “It's the lone-wolf strategy that I think we have to pay attention to as the main threat to this country,” he said.

The hearing comes just over a month since a failed attempt to bring down an airliner in Detroit by a Nigerian suspect. And the assessment follows only a few months since U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Hassan is accused of single-handedly attacking his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas, killing 13.

Director of National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair described Hassan as homegrown extremist. He also said that Al Qaeda can be expected to continue and try to attack the United States until Osama bin Laden and his No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahri, are dead.

The U.S. still does not know the intended targets of suspected terrorist Najibullah Zazi, who was arrested in September and charged with plotting to attack New York City with homemade bombs, Blair said.

Blair warned as well of a growing cyber threat, saying computer-related attacks have become dynamic and malicious.

Obama has promised to make cyber security a priority in his administration, but the president's new budget asks for a decrease in funds for the Homeland Security Department's cybersecurity division.

The government's first quadrennial homeland security review states high consequence and large-scale cyberattacks could massively disable or hurt international financial, commercial and physical infrastructure.

The report, obtained by The Associated Press, said these types of cyberattacks could cripple the movement of people and goods around the world and bring vital social and economic programs to a halt.

via FOXNews.com – Intelligence Officials Warn Attempted Al Qaeda Attack Months Away.

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama sent Congress a $3.83 trillion budget on Monday that would pour more money into the fight against high unemployment, boost taxes on the wealthy and freeze spending for a wide swath of government programs.

The deficit for this year would surge to a record-breaking $1.56 trillion, topping last year’s then unprecedented $1.41 trillion gap. The deficit would remain above $1 trillion in 2011 although the president proposed to institute a three-year budget freeze on a variety of programs outside of the military and homeland security as well as increasing taxes on energy producers and families making more than $250,000.

Echoing the pledge in his State of the Union address to make job creation his top priority, Obama put forward a budget that included a $100 billion jobs measure that would provide tax breaks to encourage businesses to boost hiring as well as increased government spending on infrastructure and energy projects. He called for fast congressional action to speed relief to millions left unemployed in the worst recession since the 1930s.

After a protracted battle on health care dominated his first year in office and led to a string of Democratic election defeats, the administration hopes its new budget will convince Americans the president is focused on fixing the economy.

via Obama unveils $3.83T budget with massive deficits – Yahoo! News.

[This article is reprinted from The Sydney Morning Herald.]

The 23-year-old Nigerian charged with trying to detonate a bomb on a Northwest Airlines flight over Detroit on Christmas Day was lonely and sexually repressed, according to messages left on an Islamic website.

As a US Senate Homeland Security committee continued to argue this week about how to handle Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the emotional anguish in his web posts provides an insight into fanatical Islam and what drives often hapless young men to become suicide bombers. Much as we would like them to be, they are not monsters.

Being the son of a wealthy banker, and living in London, Abdulmutallab had no real beef with Western life, did not complain about racism or express concern for downtrodden Muslim brothers.

But, like the September 11 bombers, who visited strip clubs before their date with destiny, when his devout religious beliefs conflicted with his corporeal desires, he found that blowing himself up along with a whole lot of infidels was preferable to being sexually frustrated.

As the New York Post put it: “The bomb wasn’t the only thing burning in his pants.”

On the Islamic Forum of the Gawaher website in 2005 and 2006 were more than 300 posts by Farouk1986 – Abdulmutallab’s middle name and birth year.

Under the heading: “I think I feel lonely,” Farouk1986 complains he has never found “a true Muslim friend”.

“As I get lonely, the natural sexual drive awakens and I struggle to control it, sometimes leading to minor sinful activities like not lowering the gaze.

“And this problem makes me want to get married to avoid getting aroused … but I am only 18.” In another post, he writes ”the hair of a woman can easily arouse a man”.

To continue reading this article, click here.

In Search of My Homeland: A Memoir of a Chinese Labor Camp
By Er Tai Gao
Harper Collins, $22.99, 260 pp.

“Socialism is Great!”: A Worker’s Memoir of the New China
By Lijia Zhang
Anchor, $15, 364 pp.

In a time when a White House Communications Director lists Red Chinese dictator Mao as a major influence in her life, it’s worth taking a look at the society that Mao established through mass murder and terror.

Two very different new memoirs by Chinese authors do just that. Anita Dunn, then President Obama’s director of communications, last fall held up Mao as an example of individualism. In reality, under Mao’s regime, the communist government was so intent on wiping out individuality that it even demanded ideological allegiance from those it had branded enemies of the state — as it was killing them.

Even in the time of “reform” after Mao’s death, during the great “liberalization” of the 1980s, Chinese female workers were required to report their menstrual cycles and sex lives to factory apparatchiks in charge of population control. Evidently, this is Anita Dunn’s idea of how the individual can make a difference in society.

In In Search of My Homeland, his eloquent and tragic memoir, artist Er Tai Goa records that as the Chinese government worked its prisoners to death, those in Mao’s gulags were continuously tested for ideological rigor. In fact, the inmates, much like the rest of the country, monitored each other through “mutual supervision,” complete with the infamous group criticism sessions and punishments. As Goa recounts, the prisoners were required to endure all this with a state-enforced smile on their faces, a strenuous effort that added another torment to their daily agony.

While prisoners were dropping like flies in the camps, life could still be made worse by the commandant. Even whole-heartedly embracing the process of personal “reforming through labor” and taking a vocal lead in ideological discussions — and “mutual supervision” — did not spare one from arbitrary punishment.

If this seems unbelievably Orwellian, consider this: During China’s Cultural Revolution in the ’60s, most of the people sent to their deaths in labor camps weren’t dissidents at all. In fact, most were as devoted to Mao as the people who denounced them and sent them away.

Er Tai Gao, however, did commit an ideological crime in the eyes of the regime, even though he had no political motive. As a young, naïve art teacher, Gao published an essay, “On Beauty,” in which he argued that beauty was subjective and dependent on context. Essentially, he wrote, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. To Western readers, the premise of Goa’s essay, which is included as an appendix, seems self-evident. But Lenin had held that beauty was objective and materialistic. So, in Mao’s eyes, Gao’s position was a crime against the Chinese State.

Gao published his essay in 1957, the time of “openness,” when Mao suckered his country’s intellectuals into expressing heresy openly so he could purge them in the Cultural Revolution. Gao was sent to the Jiabiangou “Farm” in the Gobi Desert, where the prisoners dug and filled in ditches through every kinds of brutal weather until they collapsed and died.

Goa, who survived more than two years in Jiabiangou, was released to a restrictive work environment, only to be denounced again and publically beaten; and was sent to another camp until he was released in 1962. He found a job after his release in China’s famed Mogoa Caves, a treasure trove of archeology and art, where he was able to lose himself in his work despite constant deprivation and threat.

In Search of My Homeland is a spare and beautifully written book. But it’s not necessarily a hopeful one. Gao says his survival was not due to any great inner strength of his own, or the kindness of strangers, but was entirely “capricious.”

He may give himself too little credit. This book is the result of a secret diary he kept hidden on his person as he kept himself sane by writing. The discovery of the document would probably have led to his death. However foolish the risk was, readers are the beneficiaries of his foolhardy courage in providing us this extraordinary document.

“Socialism is Great!”

While not a political dissident in any sense we would recognize, Gao at least was an intellectual of some consequence who expressed an opinion that clashed with state orthodoxy. But as Lijia Zhang recounts in her extremely engaging memoir, “Socialism is Great!,” her parents were basically anonymous workers, cogs in the machine of China’s vast labor force, who endured persecution during the Cultural Revolution.

For Zhang, however, neither Cultural Revolution nor Mao himself is the primary focus. Her story begins when her mother ends the school career of young Lijia and bequeaths the budding 16-year-old scholar a mind-numbing job in a Nanjing rocket factory — presumably a life sentence.

Lijia discovers an environment where the “workers” are anything but dedicated laborers and find innumerable ways to get through the day without effort. Production is secondary to ideological purity in the late 1970s, and the plant’s political instructor gathers them daily for what amounted to Communist chapel sermons:

“Wang loved to talk up the latest political movement: today, a campaign against burgeois liberalism symbolized by bell-bottoms, called ‘trumpet trousers’ in Chinese.

“‘Unable to distinguish between flagrant flowers and poisonous weeds, these young people pick up capitalist trash like “trumpet trousers and rotten music,’;’ Wang spat through a southern accent. ”‘We must resolutely defend the “four cardinal principles” of socialism and firmly oppose bourgeois liberalism!’”

But Lijia was a free spirit to a fault — and ambitious to boot. She first exercised rebellion by soaking up as much Western culture and literature as possible, such as secretly reading Jane Eyre and Great Expectations, and eventually through forbidden meetings with lovers (recounted in such frank detail that one hopes at least some were given pseudonyms).

While many in the West have heard of China’s one-child policy, which led to millions of cases of infanticide and forced abortions, it is rarely recounted just how thoroughly the Communist Party regulated the love life of average citizens.

China in the 1980s was a nation where married women could be forced to have an abortion at the same time a single woman could not legally obtain one. In a society nearly as sexually regulated as one under Islamic Sharia Law, an unmarried pregnant woman suffered not just social stigma but also civil sanctions—but so-called “pro-choice” and “feminist” groups on the American Left still lauded communist China’s “family planning” regime as a model for the Third World.

The limiting of offspring was not the only way in which married couples’ lives were regulated by the State. Lijia’s mother, for instance, lived as a virtual widow for most of her adult life for daring to marry a man from another city who was never given permission to permanently join her in Nanjing, giving them less than two weeks a year to be together.

In the rocket plant Lijia, and the other women are forced to submit to examinations by “the period police” in the factory hygiene office, a humiliation she recounts in chilling detail.

The book’s title comes from a hilariously stilted song the party gave the workers to boost morale. “Socialism is Great!” is filled with wry observations and a delicious sense of the ridiculous. While the totalitarian weight of the Chinese state is ever-present, Zhang tells her story with a sense of humor that is unique in dystopian memoirs.

The book ends on a serious note, however. Lijia, who organizes China’s largest pro-freedom rally outside of Tienanmen Square, is arrested for questioning even while her personal life takes a potentially disastrous and poignant turn.

In Search of My Homeland and “Socialism is Great” could not be more different books that examine the same society. Gao’s book may be more of a literary masterpiece, but Zhang’s effort fills the more needed gap in our understanding by covering a much more neglected period of Chinese political history.

Despite all the talk of progress, the more things changed, the more the underlying totalitarian nature of the Chinese Communist state has stayed the same.

[...] Another law-enforcement source tells me CAIR and other groups have been worse than useless: To this source's knowledge, US Muslims have played virtually no role in foiling local plots.

Indeed, in some places, imams have reportedly withheld useful info and threatened to oust congregants who aid law-enforcement. Officials say Ahmad Afzali, the Queens imam helping agents probe Najibullah Zazi (the coffee vendor charged in a New York terror plot), later double-crossed them and alerted Zazi.

"I know of no investigations" in which Muslims have been helpful, Rep. Peter King (R-LI), the ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, tells me. He says law-enforcement and counterterror officials invariably tell him Muslim cooperation doesn't exist. Sometimes agents say they're met with hostility.

For folks who "understand the nature of the threat" and watch officials from "CAIR and the Muslim Public Affairs Council on major [TV] networks, it's incredibly demoralizing," a former FBI special agent says.

A reluctance to even acknowledge pro-terrorist sympathies persists even beyond official Muslim groups. At universities, for example, Muslim students have blocked speeches by people like Nonie Darwish -- an anti-terror activist who calls herself a "former Muslim" and who speaks about the Islamic links to terror. In the last two months, scheduled Darwish talks at Princeton and Columbia were canceled at the last minute, after Muslim objections. At Boston University, someone lit a fire in a building where she was to speak.

Darwish says she and other former Muslims regularly face death threats. And though she's asked American Muslim groups to sign a pledge opposing fatwas that condemn former Muslims to death, "not one organization" has done so....

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Ralph Peters, a retired U.S. Army officer, a controversial strategist and world traveler, and the author of 25 books, including the recent bestselling thriller, The War After Armageddon, and the forthcoming Endless War (March, 2010), which examines the history–and future–of conflict between Islam and the West.  An opinion columnist for the New York Post and popular media commentator, he became Fox News Network’s first Strategic Analyst in 2009.

FP: Ralph Peters, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Peters: Great to reconnect with you, Jamie.

FP: What are your thoughts regarding the recent botched terrorist attack on Christmas Day on Flight 253?

Peters: Well, I have to separate my thoughts and my feelings.  First, the feelings: Outrage.  Not so much at the bomber, who was just fulfilling his duty to commit jihad against Christians on their most important holiday (with any dead Jews as a bonus), but at the stunning lack of interest or concern on the part of our partying president and his paladins.  Hey, why interrupt your holiday just because an Islamist terrorist (well, they don’t exist, right?) tried to kill 300 innocents and almost pulled it off?  And, of course, we were all instantly reassured when Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano (whose real interest seems to be harassing law-abiding citizens at airports, while preparing to push through citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants) told us that the system worked.  I mean, God help us, you and I don’t live in the same universe as our “leaders.”

On the thoughts side: President Obama, sooner or later, has to take responsibility for something.  His call for yet another review in the wake of the failed attack had the primary purpose of deflecting blame from the administration.  Well, the military maxim applies: A leader is responsible for everything his subordinates do, or fail to do.  All his adult life, Obama wanted to be president.  Now it’s time for him to actually be a president.  That means taking responsibility.

FP: How much confidence, exactly, do you have in this administration providing safety to Americans against our enemies?

Peters: Unfortunately, I have no faith–none–in the administration’s seriousness, when it comes to protecting Americans.  A president who insists, in the face of overwhelming evidence, that every next terrorist is just an “isolated extremist” with no connection to Islam isn’t interested in solving the problem.

FP: How about our intelligence system in this case?

Peters: It failed.  But, to be fair, many things that seem obvious in retrospect weren’t necessarily obvious in advance.  Our intelligence system has two pertinent problems (among many others): It’s dealing with a literally unmanageable volume of data, and (according to my friends still inside the system), the post 9-11 “reforms,” such as creating a Director of National Intelligence and the National Counter Terrorism Center, simply created additional layers of bureaucracy.  We’re fighting a lean, mean, fast, ruthless enemy.  Our response?  Bring more of yesterday’s senior officials out of retirement and hire more lawyers.  Maybe we should just sue al Qaeda and see how splendidly our civilian-justice approach to terror works.

FP: Your view of Janet Napolitano? Why is she still heading Homeland Security?

Peters: I’d rather not view Janet Napolitano at all.  This woman is so far out of her depth that it can’t be measured with Newtonian metrics.  She was a politically correct appointment, period.  On the positive side, word is that she’ll be gone in the next few months–Obama’s too vain to fire her right now, while the administration’s under fire over the Christmas terror attempt, but he realizes what a political liability she’s become.

There’s another, unfortunate, side to this.  When representing our country, especially on security matters, appearance and physical presence matter.  It would be great if that were not so, but facts are facts.  Even if Napolitano were a security genius, she doesn’t project a forceful, capable image to our deadly enemies (or to our allies).  Again, every one of Obama’s cabinet-level appointments has been about domestic politics, not about their effectiveness on the world stage.

Well, at least he can’t blame Bush for Napolitano.

FP: Your perspective on how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are going? What strategies that are in effect are wrong? What strategies would be more effective?

Peters: Strategy?  We still don’t have a strategy for Afghanistan-Pakistan.  We just have a collection of disjointed techniques we’re desperately trying to apply, hoping something, anything, will work.  A troop surge is a tool, not a strategy.  And you can’t nation-build where there’s no nation to build.  I’m disheartened.  American soldiers and Marines are dying and being maimed for fairy-tale counterinsurgency strategies that insist that digging wells for illiterate Afghans will deter al Qaeda’s Arab fanatics from killing Americans.  The only wise and effective thing we’re doing is applying UAVs (drones) and our special operations forces to the indispensable task of killing terrorists.

I’ve never been threatened by a dead terrorist.  And when a terrorist believes he’s on a mission from his god to kill you, killing him is the only plausible response.

As I’ve written recently, what little analysis of the Afghan problem we do obsesses on our continuing failures.  But the real question, which we refuse to ask, is “Why are the Taliban successful?”  And, of course, we go on pretending that Islam has nothing to do with anything.  Political correctness is killing our troops, defeating us, and facilitating terror around the world.

FP: Potential threats in 2010?  Where have we taken our eye off the ball?

Peters: Good Lord, where do you start?  The usual suspects will still be with us: Iran, al Qaeda, Chinese subversion of our economy (brought to you by WalMart, among others, thanks), piracy, Hugo Chavez’s apparent determination to precipitate a border war with Colombia, the Kirchner regime’s attempt to hobble democracy in Argentina, Islamist aggression in Nigeria (which is intensifying again), and, above all, Mexico–where the narco-insurgency constitutes the real number-one threat to the welfare of our citizen.  It bewilders me that we’re obsessed with “saving” Afghanistan, a worthless piece of dirt in the middle of nowhere, when the crucial struggle is right on (and crossing) our southern border.  Mexico is the most important country in the world to us–for better and worse–and we treat it as problem number 47.

Where have we taken our eye off the ball?  Please, tell me where the Obama administration has an eye on any foreign-policy or security balls.  This ultra-left administration isn’t concerned with security (except to the extent that it impacts on politics), but with a hard-left, destructive and divisive vision of “social justice.”  Which means, of course, punish productive citizens to reward the Lumpenproletariat.  We’re a greater threat to ourselves, in the long run, than al-Qaeda is to us.

FP: Ralph Peters thank you for joining us. It was an honor to speak with you.

I would like to announce to our readers that Mr. Peters will be speaking at the Freedom Center’s Wednesday Morning Club:

Tuesday, January 12, 2009.
Four Seasons
300 S. Doheny Dr.
Los Angeles, CA 90048
11:30 a.m. Reception
12:00 p.m. Luncheon
1:30 p.m. Book Signing
Registration: $75.00

To make reservations, please contact Stephanie Knudson at (818) 849-3470 ext. 209 or email at stephanie@horowitzfreedomcenter.org.

Islamist fascism has a problem.  It is that traditional Islam, and the Koran in particular, explicitly acknowledge that the Land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people.  The war of Islamofascism against Israel and its population thus directly contradicts the teachings about Jews and Israel found in the Koran itself.  The Islamofascists, however, have found a solution to this dilemma.  And they are being provided with this “solution” by a notorious Jewish anti-Semite.

Let me explain.

The Koran itself is extraordinarily clear about the status of the Land of Israel in Islam.   While in general criticizing Jews for their supposed sinfulness, something the Jewish Bible does quite a lot of also, the Koran relates in Sura 5:21, that Moses (a revered teacher in Islam) tells the Jews to “enter into the Holy Land which Allah has assigned to you.”   Moses adds to his people, according the Koran:

“O my people!  Remember the bounty of  God upon you  when  He bestowed  prophets upon you , and  made  you  kings and gave you that which  had not been given to  anyone before you amongst  the nations. O my people!  Enter the Holy Land which God has written for you, and do not turn tail, otherwise you will be losers.”

Elsewhere (Sura 17, 104) the Koran proclaims: “And thereafter We [Allah] said to the Children of Israel: ‘Dwell securely in the Promised Land. And when the last warning will come to pass, we will gather you together in a mingled crowd.’”   The founder of modern Zionism, Theodore Herzl, could not have said it better.

The legitimacy of Jewish claims to the Land of Israel is repeated in Sura 10:93-94:

“We settled the Children of Israel in a beautiful dwelling-place (Israel)…If thou wert in doubt as to what We have revealed unto thee, then ask those who have been reading the Book from before thee.”

The Koran also explicitly documents the existence of the Jewish Temples on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.  Sura 17:7 records the destruction of the First Jewish Temple by Babylon and the Second Temple by Rome, and Mohammed never contests the Bible’s claim that the Temples were in Jerusalem. Indeed, the return of the Jews to their homeland after centuries of exile can be seen as the fulfillment of Islamic prophecy. Sura 17:104 of the Koran says: “And we said to the Children of Israel afterwards,  ‘Go live into this land (Israel). When the final prophecy comes to pass, we will summon you all in one group.’”

As noted by Prof. Khaleel Mohammed, from the Department of Religious Studies at San Diego State University, the medieval exegetes of the Koran – roughly analogous to the Talmud for Judaism – recognize Israel as belonging to the Jews, as their birthright given to them by God.  Two of Islam’s most famous exegetes explained thus: ‘Ibn Kathir said: “That which God has written for you, i.e. that which God has promised to you by the words of your father Israel that it is the inheritance of those among you who believe.”  Muhammad al-Shawkani interprets Kataba to mean “that which God has allotted and predestined for you in His primordial knowledge, deeming it as a place of residence for you.”’

From the above, one would think that Islamofascism faces a theological quandary in its attempts at conscripting Islam for a genocidal jihad against Israel and the Jews.   But Islamofacsists have invented a solution.  They can jihad all they want against Israel and the Jews, Islamic theology notwithstanding, because they claim that the Jews … are not the Jews.  If modern Jews are really not Jews at all, then Israel is not a country of Jews, and so Israelis have no rights to sovereignty in their own homeland as promised in the Koran.

So just why are modern Jews not Jews, in the pseudo-theology of the jihadis?  Because the Islamofascists are recycling the old mythology about European Jews or “Ashkenazim” being nothing more than converted Khazars.  And the new guru of the “Jews-Not-Being-Jews” hoax is none other than Tel Aviv University history professor Shlomo Sand.

To explain this mind-numbing development, let’s take a few steps back.  Yes, there was indeed a Kingdom of Turkic peoples living north of the Black Sea in the Dark Ages called the Khazars, and – yes – its ruling family and part of its population did convert to Judaism.  The Khazar kingdom was largely destroyed by the expanding Russian kingdom in the tenth century, and anything remaining was destroyed in the Mongol invasions.  What actually became of the Jewish Khazars is unknown.  Some may have integrated themselves into other Jewish communities in the Middle East, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe.

Later a myth was created about the Khazars being an important component of European Jewry.  This myth was to a large extent the invention of the 1976 book, The Thirteenth Tribe by Arthur Koestler, a writer better known for his lifelong battles against totalitarianism in all its forms.  Koestler wrote his book largely in order to create interest and sympathy for Jews and Israel, believing the Khazar story would serve as a basis for respect and fascination with Jewish history.  In reality, there is very little evidence of any type, from genetic markers to family and place names, that there is any significant Khazar “blood” among Western or Ashkenazi Jews.

Meanwhile, Koestler’s public relations ploy backfired.  In recent years, the Khazar myth has been hijacked by Neo-Nazis and Islamofascists to invent a racialist argument against Jews being entitled to self-determination, independence, or a homeland in the Land of Israel.  If Jews are nothing more than converted Khazars, or so goes the argument of the anti-Semitic racialists, then they are foreign interlopers in the Levant and have no right to statehood there.

Now, as a matter of fact, even if the Khazar myth were true, and Ashkenazi Jews were descendent from converted Khazars (and – we repeat – the myth is NOT true!), it still would not make the slightest difference.  Jews never defined themselves in genetic or racial terms.  They always saw themselves as an ethnic group marked off by religion, tradition, and language.  Converts are just as Jewish as are those born to a Jewish mother and just as entitled to participate in Jewish self-determination.  And, to top it all off, most Israeli Jews are not even Ashkenazi Jews.

Meanwhile, the popularity of the Khazar myth among anti-Semites represents a return of modern anti-Jewish bigotry to the racialism of the 1930′s and earlier.

Nearly every anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi website denounces Zionists and Israelis as “Khazars.”  Web chat lists in which Jews defending Israel are dismissed as “Khazar usurpers” are too numerous to count.

The racialism once again in vogue holds that Jews would only have legitimate claims to the right of self-determination in their homeland if they were appropriately Semitic from a racial point of view.  Palestine is part of the Semitic racial lebensraum and those who do not possess the correct pure racial markings have no business being there.  Racial purity is suddenly the new basis for national rights.

If we take the racialist argument to its illogical conclusions, Palestinian Arabs have the right to exercise all claims to sovereignty in Israel due to their being true racial Jews, while Zionists are non-Jewish Khazars – racial imposters and usurpers.  But to make things even sillier, Arabs themselves are, of course, a mix of racial strains, with a particularly large Caucasian component thanks to Arab intermixing with Spanish and Italian Europeans, Caucasian Berbers, Vandals, Goths, and even some Vikings.

Lest the world dismiss “Khazar Zionist” nonsense as something as pathetic as the conspiracist “911-Truth” form of mental illness, along comes an anti-Semitic pseudo-academic from Tel Aviv University itself to lead the racialist charge against the Israeli “Khazars” and against Jewish self-determination.   Professor Shlomo Sand is a hard-core Stalinist and Jewish anti-Semite.  He was active for a while in the 1960s and 1970s in a tiny Israeli Maoist splinter named Matzpen.  From its ranks emerged an espionage ring of Israeli Jewish and Arab communists, who trained as terrorists in Syria and were jailed by Israel in the 1970s.  Writing mainly in French, Sand has built much of his “academic” career on churning out Marxist boilerplate diatribes.  He is a fanatic anti-Zionist and makes no attempt to hide his desire to see his own country obliterated.

Sand last year recruited himself to the aid of the Islamists seeking to annihilate Israel.  So the Koran says the Land of Israel belongs to the Jews?  In that case, Sand himself, a professor at Tel Aviv University, will recycle Neo-Nazi mythology about Israeli Jews being converted Khazar interlopers.  The result was Sand’s book, The Invention of the Jewish People, a pseudo-history published in English by Verso Books, a publishing house set up by “New Left Review,” specializing in communist and Bash-Israel “books.”

Sand’s book about Jews being a fraudulent “invention” is amazingly un-original.  If submitted as a student paper I suspect it would be rejected as plagiarism of the contents of anti-Jewish web sites.   Sand’s book has been hailed as ground-breaking scholarship by Neo-Nazis, jihadists, terrorist web sites, anti-Semites and communists of all stripes.  Serious historians have dismissed it as pseudo-academic poppycock, as fraud, and as little more than a comic book recycling of Neo-Nazi myths about Jews being Khazars.  Sand’s conclusions from the imaginary “evidence” about the Khazar roots of Israelis resemble those of his jihadi groupies, namely, that Israel has no right to exist and that Jews are not Jews at all, certainly not any sort of a people.  Tel Aviv University has won for itself the dubious honor of serving as home base for arguably the world’s worst “academic” anti-Semite, and has raised questions all over the globe about the academic standards it has obviously abandoned.

Meanwhile, we have grown accustomed in our 21^st century to the bizarre collaboration between Islamist fundamentalists and far-leftists.  Even so, one cannot help marvelling at the spectacle of an Israeli Stalinist professor devoting himself so passionately to prolierating the myths required by Islamofascist fundamentalists, and by so doing grant them the means for ignoring the Koran itself.

This country is on alert now in a way it has not been for almost nine years. Between the attempted Christmas Day terrorist attack, the bombing of the CIA headquarters in Yemen, and near-daily airport scares, we have been forcefully reminded that a real war against terror continues to be waged here at home and abroad.

And even as I applaud Americans for not letting recent events unduly disrupt their lives and thereby giving the terrorists a minor victory, I remain deeply concerned about the current state of our homeland security.

Shortly after the incident on Northwest Flight 253, Homeland Security Chief Janet Napolitano first insisted that “the system worked” regarding the Christmas Day attempt. This particularly blatant act of defensive self-protection was such an obvious falsehood that Counterterrorism Czar John Brennan has had to go from news show to news show offering a retraction. This bumbling effort is not exactly the type of first response that Americans should expect from those tasked with protecting our country.

Indeed, as the days progress, we are beginning to see just how great a retraction was needed. American authorities knew, before he ever boarded that plane, that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had extremist views and received training from Al Qaeda. In an act of tremendous courage, Abdulmutallab’s own father apparently had reported him as a person of concern to the U.S. embassy and CIA station chief. Abdulmutallab was on a government watch list. He had been spending time in a country with known terrorist activity.

With proper communication between security and counterterrorism agencies and proper scrutiny, this young man would have been put on a high-priority list. At the airport, he would have been flagged, he would have been searched, and he would have been caught. Instead, it is only through the grace of God and the courage of a passenger that the lives of over 200 were saved this Christmas.

In Afghanistan, we were not so fortunate, and seven American operatives were killed.

We do not have to live in fear in order to be smart about the dangers. We do not have to be an international bully to rightfully assert our position and interests around the world. The Obama administration, however, cannot seem to get a handle on the wide middle ground between “fear-mongering” and cowering in submission.

In many ways, this Christmas Day attempt is a great opportunity for the president. With no loss of life, systemic and human errors were revealed and can now be fixed. And they must be fixed.

We need to move forward with a comprehensive strategy to connect our intelligence dots. We can already see that tremendous strides have been made since the disastrous intelligence failure of 9/11, but we learned two weeks ago that we have not come far enough. Whatever motivation or resources are required, we need to improve our intelligence and make full use of it, rather than letting cases like Abdulmutallab’s fall through the cracks.

It would be all too easily to blame this on poor screening at airports here and overseas, and to reactively devote all our energies to bigger and better checkpoint technologies. To some measure, some of these recommended upgrades may be appropriate. But the greatest challenge will be for the president to take a step back and look at the entire system with all its moving parts and streamline the process. In doing, he must act with the conviction that the threat is imminent and real.

It’s time to step up to the plate, Mr. President. You signed up for this job, and we can’t afford any more of your on-the-job training.

[Editor's note: The following article is reprinted from the National Post.]

Top 10 Disasters of Flight 253:

[1] Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is on a terrorist watch list and banned from the U.K. His father has warned U.S. authorities about him. He has no passport, checks no luggage and pays for a one-way ticket in cash. He is allowed to board Northwest Airlines Flight 253.

[2] Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano goes on TV after the Christmas day terror attempt and announces that “the system worked” and that “everything happened that should have.”

[3] The next day, the Secretary goes back on TV to explain her words were taken “out of context” and admits that the “system did not work in this instance.”

[4] Napolitano is not fired.

[5] After staying silent for three days while playing golf in Hawaii , Obama makes his first statement: He declares, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the al-Qaeda trained Abdulmutallab is “an isolated extremist.” The President refers to him as a “suspect.”

[6] The “suspect” is charged, lawyered up and given the right to remain silent — instead of being treated as an enemy combatant, thrown into a dungeon, and interrogated about other plots, al-Qaeda in general and the whereabouts of his al-Qaeda handlers in particular.

[7] The administration fails to use the word “jihad” in dealing with this terror attack by al-Qaeda and to admit that the U.S. is at war with Islamic terrorists who are inspired by certain tenets of Islamic theology.

[8] A policy of profiling is not immediately instituted for airline security.

[9] Obama does not announce his decision to keep Guantanamo open and to stop sending its detainees back to Yemen .

[10] Obama remains in office.

*

To get the whole story on the Left’s Jihad Denial, read Jamie Glazov’s new book, United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror.

Heck of a job, Brownie.

via RealClearPolitics – Hollow Words on Terrorism.