War on Free Speech -- and remember, the OIC and Co. are trying to bring it to the West. "After Facebook, Pakistan shuts down YouTube," by Kamran Haider for Reuters, May 20 (thanks to dsinc):

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistan has blocked the popular video sharing website YouTube indefinitely in a bid to contain "blasphemous" material, officials said on Thursday.

The blockade came hours after the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) directed Internet service providers to stop access to social network site Facebook indefinitely on Wednesday because of an online competition to draw the Prophet Mohammad.

Any representation of the Prophet Mohammad is deemed un-Islamic and blasphemous by Muslims.

Wahaj-us-Siraj, the CEO of Nayatel, an Internet service provider, said PTA issued an order late on Wednesday seeking an "immediate" block of YouTube.

"It was a serious instruction as they wanted us to do it quickly and let them know after that," he told Reuters.

YouTube was also blocked in the Muslim country in 2007 for about a year for what it called un-Islamic videos.

PTA spokesman, Khurram Ali Mehran, said the action was taken after the authority determined that content considered blasphemous by devout Muslims was being posted on the website.

"Before shutting down (YouTube), we did try just to block particular URLs or links, and access to 450 links on the Internet were stopped, but the blasphemous content kept appearing so we ordered a total shut down," he said.

He regretted that the administrators at the Facebook and YouTube had not taken the content off despite Pakistan's protests.

"Their attitude was in contravention to international resolutions and their own policies advertised on the Web for the general public," Mehran said.

The PTA issued a statement Thursday saying, "PTA would welcome the concerned authorities of Facebook and YouTube to contact the PTA for resolving the issue at the earliest which ensures religious harmony and respect."

The PTA decision to block all of Facebook also cut Pakistanis off from groups and pages dedicated to opposing the competition, which have thousands more supporters than the competition does.

Along with the ban, some popular websites, including Wikipedia and Flickr, have been inaccessible in Pakistan since Wednesday night. But the spokesman said it happened purely due to a technical reason and no orders were passed against them.

He said the authority was monitoring other websites as well....

[Editor's note: This is the final installment of a four-part series. To review earlier segments of "Pro-Palestinianism: A Movement of Hate," please click: Part I, Part II and Part III.]

Many pro-Palestinians seem to take genuine pleasure in abusively condemning Israel, which one critic described as a perverted, fevered hatred. It is their privilege to equate Jews with Nazis but dare anybody call them anti-Semites? Why would people behave in this abhorrent fashion, especially socialists who purport to be far more ethical than many of us? The Jew is a stranger whom others transform into what they fear. In the Christian era he was a devilish child and priest killer. In times of plague he was disease carrier or well poisoner. In Soviet Russia he was capitalist, while simultaneously in McCarthyite America he was communist. In the newer liberal/alternative political climate the Jew has become a 21st century version of the Western capitalist: the pro-war “neocon” of new anti-Semitism.

The Jew, as a microcosm of Israel, is seen as essentially white/Western, capitalist, wealthy, progressive, and somehow representative of authority and the establishment. The Palestinian is the polar opposite: primitive, feudal, radical, chaotic, anti-establishment, authentic, ethnic/non-white, and poor. Extreme pro-Palestinianism is acceptable even when overtly anti-Semitic since it presents an opposing face to the skin-head/jack booted anti-Semitism of old. It is politically correct, anti-American, anti-capitalist and alternative. No wonder hating Israel is a prerequisite for any right thinking leftist who can indulge his/her hatred for a much maligned race while appearing holier than thou.

Meanwhile, these people appear to be looking the other way while appalling abuses go on in the rest of the world. For example the extremely savage ethnic cleansing in Darfur, where a death toll numbers hundreds of thousands in a few years, is hardly mentioned. Why is it so few really care when Arab Muslims orchestrate a mass butchering campaign against black Muslims? The Arabs are a Caucasoid race, so this represents quite possibly the very worst episode of white on black racially motivated violence since the abolition of slavery. Yet President Obama, whose election would lead to a cure for all the woes of the world, seems to only be concerned in the international sphere with Jews building extensions to their homes. It is difficult to imagine a double standard starker than this.

The rise of the pro-Palestinian movement may be attributed to several developments in the West. Its origins may lie in moral relativism and cultural changes from the 1960s onwards. At the root of these developments is a hostility towards the West itself (in particular the US), including its values which are seen as oppressive, racist (white) etc. This led to a largely unthinking, emotive romanticisation of all that is alternative, non-western, and notably there is a broad acceptance of radicalism even if violent. Truth may be seen as something that ought to be overcome in the pursuit of an ideal. At its most extreme this has given rise to such things as inverted absurdist values in academia and political correctness. However, while this problem is usually much less obvious, such values are the motivation behind many viewpoints. Such positions had genuine merit at times but with so many blind assumptions at the core of these movements, all Western values, be they good or bad, have been corroded. At worst, it can be impossible to address controversial truths without severe censure. Thus, we see a vast number of apologists for Islam, permeating politics and the media. With Islam a protected religion in this alternative theology, any criticism is strictly verboten. Authorities refuse to use words like terrorist, while avoiding the overt association of terrorism and Islamic doctrine. Extremism is explained with leftist analysis: a symptom of economic hardship, US support for Israel etc. Societies are seriously debilitated if their members cannot frankly discuss all evidentially verifiable threats to their existence.

Previously, there was an understanding of the basic need for a Jewish state due to tragic past circumstance, and an appreciation of the hatred Israel faced. This began to change in the 70’s in part when the Arab-Islamic bloc, aided cynically by Soviet Russia, passed divisive UN resolutions. An antipathy, particularly amongst the left, continued to develop. The development of the unregulated Internet in the 1990’s and the ever increasing influence of Islamic culture in the West have brought problems such as the relegation of truth and rationality to a very critical point. The downgrading of academia and the dumbing-down of the media is having serious repercussions. With right-on bias so prevalent it is not considered problematic to target particular peoples or states with limited justification. Serious concerns have been raised about the partiality of Middle-Eastern faculties where lecturers who have expressed extreme anti-Israeli sentiments are often found. Middle-Eastern nations hostile to Israel have donated huge sums of money to some Western universities. Islamic societies are given free rein to invite extremist speakers and radicalise students, some going on to commit grave acts of terror. With the dominance of left-wing politics, very aggressive anti-Israeli campaigning and student union boycotts, it is little wonder that many university campuses have become intolerant, intimidating environments for Jewish students. If universities continue to be compromised to this extent it is inevitable the minds of the future Western leaders will take an even harsher approach to Israel than at present.

The United Nations, intended to be a source of good for the world, has become deeply anti-Semitic. There is ample proof of this fact. Through the last 60 years the UN has targeted Israel with more resolutions than all the other 191 countries combined. The military attack on the Tamil Tigers caused a far greater loss of civilian life than the 2009 conflict in Gaza but the responses of the UN could hardly be more different. They congratulated Sri Lanka for their co-operation while they kept hounding Israel. The UN Human Rights Council is comprised of gross human rights abusers and most are deeply hostile to Israel. The Goldstone Commission, bearing more than a passing resemblance to the Star Chamber, was essentially a politically motivated attack on Israel laying the ground for international prosecution. The criticism of Hamas was little more than an afterthought briefly alluded to in the Report as a ploy to appear balanced. Mr. Ahmadinejad, a man with similar ambitions to Hitler regarding the Jews, was the opening speaker for the Durban II UN conference on human rights, where predictably he spewed anti-Semitic sentiments – interestingly enough, numerous pro-Palestinians could be found on the internet defending many of his remarks. By reinstating the rejected “Zionism is racism” manifesto, Durban I (2001) was key in giving a renewed impetus to the pro-Palestinian movement. Truly the lofty aims for which the UN was envisaged have turned into a disturbing joke.

Perhaps the worst crime against the truth committed by the pro-Palestinian movement is the effective denial of the ancient links between Israel and the Jews. There is ample evidence people of Jewish origin lived in the region a lot longer than many purportedly indigenous peoples lived in their respective territories. The masses of archaeological evidence, the ancient records of the Roman Empire, not to mention histories of the region from disinterested (non-Jewish) sources new and old, proving beyond any doubt Jewish culture was predominant are quite simply denied or ignored. Such a denial of obvious truth could have implications as serious as the denial of the Holocaust for this act attempts to delegitimize the moral right of the Jewish people to return to their homeland and undermines the right for Israel to exist. Jews were gradually expelled or migrated out of necessity while under the dominion of pagans, Christians and latterly, Muslims. It is often claimed the Palestinians are indigenous while the Jews are not. However, the term indigenous literally means the place of origin and notably also includes displaced peoples. Thus the Jews are the indigenous people of that region, and were typically unable to remain in communities in other regions with lasting security. It is worth noting that Jews made up 10% of the Roman Empire by the 1^st Century AD. There were roughly seven million Jews in the Empire (including up to 2.5 million in Palestine) and a million in Babylonia (“A concise history of the Jewish people”, Naomi E. Pasachoff and Robert J. Littman, 2005, Page 67). Estimates vary but it is clear the Empire represented a quarter to a third of the World’s population. Comparing normal progressions in population growth, the Jewish people should amount to approximately 200 million (“Constantine’s Sword: The Church & the Jews,” James Carroll, 2002) to over a quarter of a billion people today. However, they only number a mere thirteen to fourteen million. While religious conversion would amount for a substantial reduction, such starkly contrasting figures indicate a continued destructive intent towards Jews in both the Islamic East and Christian West.

The logical conclusions to common pro-Palestinian arguments are very troubling. The result of many arguments is such that Israel should essentially facilitate the murder of its own civilians. For example, it should accept armament smuggling and tunnel building to aid enemies bent on its destruction. It should facilitate trade regardless of security issues, and supply the best utilities. Should there be any issues with Palestinian run infrastructure, why, then it is the fault of the Israelis as the 2009 Amnesty report on water utilities demonstrates. They excuse or fail to acknowledge the debased hate mongering of Israel and Jewish people generally (see Palestinian Media Watch). They ignore the use of human shields, the indoctrination of children (e.g. through the media), and the shocking dehumanized acts of terrorism, e.g. testimony of mothers martyring their young sons and daughters. It is critical to note that such views over this issue go far beyond normal differences of opinion. Clearly, these topsy-turvy views on the conflict require agile mental gymnastics and fabricated facts or heavily distorted truths for justification. They represent a triumph of hatred over reason and truth. Terrorist, UN, NGO and journalistic fabrications are channelled via an often collusive media to the consumer, allied to an unceasing pro-Palestinian propaganda machine. The consumer wants to believe, regardless of all rational absurdities or simply has to believe, having grown up with images of Palestinian suffering.

Clearly, the damage being done to Israel’s reputation is immense and it would be difficult to accept that the present conditions of extreme international hostility will not have very grave implications for the future of the state. I do not think it is melodramatic to suggest that the attempts of the increasingly powerful pro-Palestinian movement to delegitimize Israel represent an existential threat to the State in the long term. Propaganda is a very powerful weapon in times of conflict. I believe pro-Palestinian activity at its most concerted represents a serious propagandist non-military assault on Israel. This terminology is fair considering the spirit and intensity of such criticism. While many Westerners appear to think anti-Semitism of a genocidal variety magically evaporated after the Holocaust, I believe there is sufficient evidence to suggest an indirect genocidal intent motivates the extreme elements of the movement.

To conclude, the troubling behaviour of the pro-Palestinian movement reaffirms the need for the very thing it seeks to extinguish: the existence of an independent predominantly Jewish state. It’s time for those on the sidelines to join the very evident dots and question if something elemental is at play that doesn’t involve a concern for human rights.

Afghanistan's government is introducing new rules to ban internet users from accessing sites promoting pornography, alcohol and gambling or other activities that conflict with the country's Islamic culture, a senior official said on Wednesday.

The communications ministry is in discussions with internet service providers and telecommunications companies to introduce filtering systems to restrict access to certain sites and aims to start enforcing the ban next month.

"Areas like gambling, promoting alcohol or pornography - these are certainly areas which will be filtered because they are against our values," a senior official in the country's communications ministry told the Financial Times.

One major problem here is that, as we have seen in Indonesia, the excuse of fighting "pornography" easily becomes an elastic clause under Sharia for the suppression of legitimate religious and cultural expressions.

The official said a complete list of restricted sites and topics was being drawn up by the culture ministry and he did not yet have full details.

The official said the filtering system was being put in place in response to concerns expressed in parliament. Lawmakers have repeatedly objected to foreign media content they consider unsuitable for Afghan society, in particular movies made in India featuring scenes of men and women singing and dancing together.

The were at least 20 internet service providers active in Afghanistan, the official said.

A second government official confirmed that there was a joint effort underway by the ministry of communications and the ministry of culture to ban access to pornographic sites.

One internet provider wrote in a note to clients that it had been required to start filtering content relating to alcohol, dating sites, drugs, weapons, gambling and pornography from May 1.

Bill Clinton wants the GOP, conservatives, and especially the tea party people to cool their rhetoric against President Obama and the Democrats because, he believes, it could lead to violence.

“There can be real consequences when what you say animates people who do things you would never do,” Mr. Clinton told the New York Times. “Because of the Internet, there is this vast echo chamber and our advocacy reaches into corners that never would have been possible before,” he said. Mr. Clinton added that demonizing government and those who serve in it can have tragic consequences, as evidenced by the Oklahoma City bombing in 1993 where he insists the executed Timothy McVeigh was influenced by anti-government rhetoric.

Specifically, Clinton took Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann to task for using the phrase “gangster government” to describe the Obama administration. “They are not gangsters. They were elected. They are not doing anything they were not elected to do,” the former president said.

Mr. Clinton’s concern for the quality of our nation’s political discourse is touching, if not a little curious. Apparently, the avalanche of hate, violent rhetoric, and invective against President Bush for 8 years didn’t pose much of a danger in his mind. Otherwise, he would have said something, right?

During the Bush years, major figures on the left referred to the “Bush regime” as “fascist,” while insisting that the president was trying to set up a dictatorship. Mr. Bush was regularly hung in effigy at protest rallies, and something of an “assassination chic” arose where the killing of the president became a parlor game for some of the president’s more hip critics.

I don’t recall Mr. Clinton — or anyone else on the left for that matter — raising the specter of political violence as a result of that fantastically exaggerated, hateful rhetoric. Few, if any in the mainstream media raised an alarm that such unscrewed looniness would incite or enable some left wing kook to act out his violent impulses. Not even as the left en mass were screaming about Bush “destroying the country” did we hear a peep from the former president about “demonization” of Bush by his liberal allies.

The point being, Mr. Clinton is engaging in an effort to silence and delegitimize critics of President Obama by hinting at violence that hasn’t occurred yet. He is, in effect, setting the stage for a massive backlash against the right and tea partiers if, God forbid, some nutcase were to listen to the voices in his head telling him to kill people and act on those impulses. If this were to occur, we would once again be treated to the entire left playing amateur psychologist and trying to guess the insane person’s “motivations.” The fact that most crazed gunmen don’t need any outside stimuli to perpetrate their crimes is beside the point. Even the idea that the fringe right character plotting mayhem cares what some internet blogger has to say about Obama gains currency when the left engages in its politically motivated hunt for blame.

It is not the first time Bill Clinton has raised the specter of “hate speech” causing violence. He performed a similar fete of rhetorical legerdemain in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, hinting broadly that conservative talk radio was to blame for that horrific attack.

Byron York reminds us that there was method in Clinton’s madness; a cynical attempt to connect the GOP and Timothy McVeigh:

In addition to seeing a criminal act and human loss, Clinton and Morris saw opportunity. If the White House could tie Gingrich, congressional Republicans and conservative voices like Rush Limbaugh to the attack, then Clinton might gain the edge in the fight against the GOP.

[Dick]Morris began polling about Oklahoma City almost immediately after the bombing. On April 23, four days after the attack, Clinton appeared to point the finger straight at his political opponents during a speech in Minneapolis. “We hear so many loud and angry voices in America today whose sole goal seems to be to try to keep some people as paranoid as possible and the rest of us all torn up and upset with each other,” he said. “They spread hate. They leave the impression that, by their very words, that violence is acceptable.”

In his book Behind the Oval Office, Morris relates the strategy employed by President Clinton — an elegant, brilliant, subtle, and wholly dishonest plan to deliberately forge a false link from the bombing to the admittedly overheated rhetoric being used by talk radio hosts. Both then and now, Clinton is arguing that hyperbole and exaggeration borders on criminal incitement to violence — at least when conservatives are at fault.

The question he raises is not without precedent. When the Warren Commission was investigating the Kennedy Assassination, there was a debate over how much blame should be assessed the city of Dallas. William Manchester in his seminal work on the assassination Death of a President writes of the unhinged nature of right wing fanaticism that had been let loose in that city in the months leading up to JFK’s death. Open talk of killing the president, as well as a palpable atmosphere of hate in Dallas caused several Texans in the administration to warn Mr. Kennedy to avoid the city. Just weeks prior to Kennedy’s visit, Adlai Stevenson experienced a fright when he was physically assaulted after a speech.

The Commission’s problem; did all this right wing hate have an effect on Lee Harvey Oswald? Oswald, a self described Marxist, had a superficial understanding of the term, embracing it because it made the desperate loner stand out in a crowd. Might the white hot rhetoric employed by the Birchers, the Kluxers, the segregationists, and the southern revanchists have enabled Oswald in some way?

In the end, the Commission took the safe, politically expedient way out and barely mentioned the climate of hate and loathing for Kennedy in Dallas. But there is a world of difference between the kind of violent rhetoric employed by the right in Dallas prior to the assassination and the sometimes angry speech used by talk radio hosts and tea partiers directed at President Obama and the Democrats.

In fact, there is no comparison at all. Where a case can be made that the Dallas News placing a mug shot of the president on their front page the day of his visit with the caption, “Wanted for Treason” is beyond the pale of decency, referring to Obama as a “gangster” hardly rises to the level of incitement. It may by inaccurate and over the top, but the last I looked, nobody has gone off half cocked because a conservative compared the president to Al Capone.

The real wackos who might be galvanized into action and actually try to hurt someone or blow something up look upon the Limbaugh’s of the world and the tea partiers with contempt. They, like McVeigh, see them as weaklings without the courage of their convictions. The violent fringe on both sides have abandoned democratic norms and see those who protest as part of the problem. It does not seem rational to believe that anything the protestors say matters a whit to those who would perpetrate violent acts to make their statement against government. To do so ascribes rational thinking to irrational people.

The motivations of the far right fringe are not gleaned from mainstream sources. Timothy McVeigh received his inspiration from The Turner Diaries, and other far right, fringe literature. To posit the idea that right wing fanatical kooks scour the internet for motivation to commit violent acts, or even thinking that they might accidentally come across some unhinged rant by a right wing blogger that will set them off, is not supported by what we know of potential domestic terrorists. Thus, Bill Clinton’s warnings can be seen as nothing more than an attempt to silence critics, and to delegitimize their criticisms in the eyes of the public.

Certainly, using reason and logic in political discourse is always preferable to hyperbole and angry rhetoric. But to hint that passionate speech, even if it is irrational or over heated in its description of the opposition, will lead to violence is an insidious attempt to shut off debate and get people to shut up.

It didn’t work when Clinton tried it in 1994. And it won’t work now.

Rick Moran is Blog Editor of The American Thinker,and Chicago Editor for Pajamas Media. His personal blog is Right Wing Nuthouse.

“Access to this site has been denied in accordance with Navy policy to safeguard the security posture and/or to maintain the operational integrity of the NMCI.” 

This was the message encountered on Friday by Navy corpsmen when trying to access FoxNews.com via the Navy’s internet system. Other news sites during this time, including the New York Times, were also inaccessible through the Navy Marine Corps Internet (NMCI.) MSNBC and CNN, however, did not present the same problem.  

The Fox outage was not uniformly present throughout NMCI. Marines at the pentagon reported no disruption on Friday and no one is really sure why the site was temporarily prohibited. 

Fox News reports,

Lt. Justin Cole, a Navy spokesman, initially told FoxNews.com Friday morning that “there’s got to be some type of issue with NMCI.” But later he said he had been informed that it was not an NMCI issue…

The outage could have occurred automatically or manually, Cole said. But if it was manual, he said he was not sure who would have made that decision.

Access to Fox has since been restored to NMCI users, although the cause for the restriction is still unclear. Maj. Carl Redding, a Marine spokesman at the Pentagon suggested it was the “nature of the network” to unpredictably block even legitimate sites for technical and security reasons.

General Michael Vincent Hayden served as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency from May, 2006 until February, 2009. He is a retired United States Air Force four-star general and a former Director of the National Security Agency. Currently, Hayden is a principal at the Chertoff Group, a security consultancy, co-founded by former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. Hayden also serves as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at George Mason University School of Public Policy. NewsReal Blog interviewed General Hayden and found him to be engaging, witty, and insightful.

Click here for Part 1 of this interview.

NRB: What is the biggest threat to America today?

Hayden: Al Qaeda. If they could attack us in a massive way they would. If they can’t attack us in a massive way, they may choose to attack us in a way less threatening but more difficult to prevent.

NRB: Pakistan and the US captured the Taliban’s top military commander, Mullah Baradar, in a joint operation. Why weren’t we the ones to interrogate him?

Hayden: The Pakistanis are interrogating him. This has happened before. I doubt that they are following the Army Field Manual (AFM) either for interrogation or for the conditions of confinement. I am NOT claiming, however, that his treatment is cruel, inhuman or unlawful—just that it’s probably not governed by the AFM.

NRB: Do you agree with how quickly The Christmas Day Bomber was Mirandized?

Hayden: You don’t Mirandize in less than an hour. We don’t have many terrorists that we can talk to and gain information. Mirandizing is about prosecution whereas intelligence is about information. He is truly a military combatant. He is an Al Qaeda combatant, recruited by Al Qaeda, trained by Al Qaeda, motivated by Al Qaeda, and continuing the Al Qaeda plan to kill Americans. He made Detroit into a battlefield of the war. We should interrogate him with the strongest tools available and not offer him a lawyer where he has the option to remain silent.

NRB: With that logic, should Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) not be tried in a federal court?

Hayden: You have major figures like Attorney General Holder wanting to do it in this venue to showcase our justice system. Yet, they talk about guilt being evident. This is at the beginning of a process in which KSM is presumed innocent. Oh by the way, if he is declared innocent what are we doing to do with him? We have already made it clear we are never going to release him.

NRB: Do you fear that KSM’s trial will turn into a trial of the CIA?

Hayden: I fear when this process gets under way KSM’s defense counsel will try to make a centerpiece of the case; his treatment and detention by the CIA.

NRB: What is your opinion on the self-radicalized Americans such as Major Hassan, the Fort Hood murderer, and Jihad Jane to name a few?

Hayden: We have seen disturbing events over the past year. This looks like the new flavor of threat to the US. Al Qaeda is a thinking enemy. They say “OK they are looking for Middle Eastern men between the ages of 20 and 40.” If you over concentrate on that you will miss other people who are real threats. Al Qaeda is trying to recruit people who would not raise eyebrows at Dulles. Prudence requires a broad view.

NRB: For what type of attack are we most vulnerable?

Hayden: One of the fears I have is that Al Qaeda will go to school on the Mumbai attacks. In the past, they have only gone for the spectacular: blowing up the Pentagon, the World Trade Center. Mumbai was pretty low tech, just 12 guys with automatic weapons and cell phones; yet, it had great political impact. A low tech attack would be less devastating but harder to detect and prevent. My greatest fear is that Al Qaeda will back away from the spectacular and start working on these less difficult to mount attacks, but still with great political affect.

NRB: Do you think these types of attacks would freeze the country?

Hayden: Yes. First thing we would do is to react to the type of attack or its target and that would have an economic impact on the country.

NRB: It seems that a lot of those self radicalized Jihadists had contact with Al Qaeda through the internet. Is that correct?

Hayden: Al Qaeda has used the web to get their message out. They use it as an element of recruitment. At some point they establish human contact that guides and vets the recruit.

NRB: Should we put more restrictions on the internet?

Hayden: The whole question of the internet with regard to terrorism is a very complex issue. Even I, someone with a career in intelligence and security, understand the 1st Amendment’s importance, the internet being a vehicle for free speech. However, there is a difference between speech and doing something harmful.

NRB: Speaking of the spectacular do we have to worry about Al Qaeda obtaining a weapon of mass destruction (WMD)?

Hayden: The absolute consensus in the intelligence community is if Al Qaeda got their hands on it they will use it- that is the real danger.

NRB: What role does Iran play in the WMD roulette?

Hayden: Based on what I know the danger of Iran having a WMD is Iran having those weapons. It is hard for me to believe they would give it to Sunni extremists like Al Qaeda. My point is that it’s bad enough for the Iranians getting it without secondary scenarios.

NRB: Do you think Iran will obtain a WMD?

Hayden: The recently revealed secret facility in Qom leads me to believe that they intend to get a weapon. My personal view is that they are determined to have a weapon. If not a weapon, they intend to be in a permanent breakout state where they will have everything in place and will be able to create a weapon in a relatively short time.

NRB: Would being in permanent breakout capability be the best of all worlds for Iran?

Hayden: Yes, that may actually be their sweet spot. If they have this capability everyone in the region could go postal.

NRB: Is there any way to stop or deter the Iranians?

Hayden: The Iranian government’s decision making process has always been a mystery. I am not sure if it’s able to have a functional decision making process. How do you deter a state that may not act as a rational actor?

NRB: Did the National Intelligence Estimate of 2007(a report on Iran’s nuclear capability) get it wrong?

Hayden: Be very careful. What it said was that we have evidence that Iran stopped the development of a warhead in 2003 and we had moderate confidence they had not resumed it when we issued the NIE report in December, 2007.
You need to understand that three events needed to happen:
a. They needed fissile material which is currently on going
b. They needed a delivery system, missiles, which is currently on going
c. They had to work on the technology to put the material into something small and rugged enough to put on top of a missile, the war head which is what we discussed in the report.

NRB: American Jihadist Sharif Mobley worked in a nuclear power plant. My fear is that people like him will volunteer or be recruited by Al Qaeda; people able to infiltrate or gain access to radioactive materials. Can you comment?

Hayden: You stated the problem clearly. It requires vigilance and intelligence. What we did after 9/11 is not sit on the goal line and play defense but penetrate enemy cells. This disrupts Al Qaeda and makes us less dependent on catching every potential danger. We should be playing offense and disrupting them rather than just figuring out who they may be recruiting among us. The best counter terrorism tool is penetrating the other guy’s network.

NRB: Is there anything we can be optimistic about regarding Al Qaeda’s plots?

Hayden: Take for example the Christmas Day Bomber. Our intelligence as well as other tools has pushed them into this type of attack. They used a low probability weapon that usually doesn’t work with a guy that they hardly vetted and trained. If they held him any longer we would know who he was.

NRB: To use a metaphor, are we getting Al Qaeda to strike out?

Hayden: It’s not that they are planning to go low tech, they just can’t seem to put anything else together because we are attacking them. Let’s say they are not getting on base very much. I want to emphasize WE SHOULD NOT BE ARROGANT about this because they are still a dangerous enemy. However, the big lesson here is that the efforts of the last 8 years have made them much less capable of attacking us. This is not a bad outcome, the product of the last 8 years not just the last 8 months.

Last week two American Muslim women were arrested for their involvement in a plot to murder the Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks. One has since been released, but the cases of both women raise questions for Muslim groups in America and law enforcement officials - questions that are not being adequately answered.

Both "Jihad Jane" -- Colleen (or Fatima LaRose)-- who has been charged with recruiting suspects for "violent jihad" and conspiring to kill Vilks, and "Jihad Jamie," Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, who has since been released, are American women who became, out of despair, desperation, or the search for some great cause, converts to Islam.

Terror analysts have devoted a great deal of time to discussing how both were "radicalized" via the Internet. This calls for a new variation on an old truism. Just as guns don't kill people (people kill people), so also the Internet doesn't radicalize Muslims: Islamic jihadists radicalize Muslims.

And these bored suburbanites didn't have to go to the Internet to get "radicalized." As long ago as January 1999, the Naqshbandi Sufi leader Sheikh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani declared in a State Department Open Forum that Islamic supremacists controlled most mosques in America: "The most dangerous thing that is going on now in these mosques," he said, "that has been sent upon these mosques around the United States - like churches they were established by different organizations and that is ok - but the problem with our communities is the extremist ideology. Because they are very active they took over the mosques; and we can say that they took over more than 80% of the mosques that have been established in the US. And there are more than 3000 mosques in the US. So it means that the methodology or ideology of extremist has been spread to 80% of the Muslim population, but not all of them agree with it."

Terrorism expert Yehudit Barsky affirmed the same thing in 2005, saying that 80% of the mosques in this country "have been radicalized by Saudi money and influence." The Center for Religious Freedom found in 2005 a massive distribution of hateful jihadist and Islamic supremacist material in mosques in this country. And in June 2008 federal investigators found that the Islamic Saudi Academy in Virginia, despite promises to stop teaching such material, was still using books that advocated that apostates from Islam be executed and that it was permissible for Muslims to kill and seize the property of "polytheists."

This is the kind of teaching that Jihad Jane and Jihad Jamie imbibed. Jihad Jamie, despite her apparent non-involvement in the plot to murder Vilks, appears to be passing on this hatred to her six-year-old son, Christian (now Walid). Her mother, Christine Holcomb-Mott, recounted that the boy "said that Christians will burn in hellfire. That's what they are teaching this baby." Paulin-Ramirez's stepfather, George Mott, also a convert to Islam, said of young Walid: "He's in an Islamic school. They're teaching him hate."

According to Mott, the boy told him: "We are building pipes [pipe bombs], like the Fourth of July!" And he asked Paulin-Ramirez: "What are you going to do, strap a bomb on and blow up something?"

Her answer was direct: "If necessary, yes."

Direct, yes, and chilling, because nothing is being done about it. Law enforcement and government authorities assume, without any evidence to support their assumption, that the overwhelming majority of Muslims in the U.S. reject and abhor such perspectives. Yet despite their protestations of moderation, American Muslim advocacy groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) have done absolutely nothing to develop any response to the Islamic "radicalism" that converts to Islam encounter on the Internet - or in American mosques.

The one thing that can and should be done would be to call American Muslim groups to account, and demand that they institute in mosques and Islamic schools comprehensive, honest, verifiable programs teaching against the jihad doctrine and Islamic supremacism.

But officials will never do this. They would prefer to pretend that the jihad doctrine and Islamic supremacism do not exist. And so we will see many more desperate American housewives becoming Jihad Janes and Jihad Jamies.

A few hours before Glenn Beck brought the house down Saturday at the 2010 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC)*, conservative Internet entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart gave the clownish left-wing performance artist Max Blumenthal a much deserved dressing down in public.

Adding to David Swindle’s insightful observations, I witnessed the verbal sparring in person in the lobby of Washington, D.C.’s Marriott Wardman Park. It was entertaining, or rather, Breitbart was entertaining. Blumenthal mostly just took it and hurled unfunny one-liners, perhaps as a defense mechanism. Blumenthal’s no Einstein, as I pointed out previously. (He doesn’t understand what marriage entails.)

I saw Blumenthal, son of Clinton attack dog Sid “Vicious” Blumenthal, for the most recoil while Breitbart went on the offensive. Blumenthal hardly got a word in edgewise with Breitbart but that’s largely because he refused to own up to what he did. I am referring to Blumenthal’s now slapped down smear in which he called ACORN exposer James O’Keefe a racist.

What’s most interesting to me is the way Blumenthal is depicted in video footage from CPAC.

In his own video Blumenthal appears for the most part in control, self-confident, even cocky, as he repeatedly flashes his goofy, vacant grin:

Note how he tries to throw off other speakers with irrelevant observations such as that one person really likes the word rubric or that the other person is getting angry. It’s essentially an adult version of a schoolyard taunt and the kind of behavior that in a bar might cause an argument to easily escalate into a full-scale rumble.

Other video paints Blumenthal is a less favorable light:

Meanwhile, Blumenthal claims he was “mobbed” by angry conservatives but that might just be his narcissism speaking. In fact he was surrounded by CPAC attendees who were for the most part polite, though there were a few who were rude and disrespectful.

Blumenthal writes,

“I was prepared for some hostility after the crazed Andrew Breitbart declared jihad but I have to admit that by the end, I was pretty drained.”

Lying does that to a person. If you can’t handle the heat of being a left-wing character assassin, Max, maybe you should find a new, less stressful job.

* * * * *

*My favorite Beck line from Saturday was the one Media Matters hates the most:

“Progressivism is the cancer in America and it is eating our Constitution and it was designed to eat the Constitution, to progress past the Constitution.”

Last month, Editor David Swindle introduced NRB guests to the sagacious Douglas Rushkoff and his latest work, Digital Nation. Joining the author in his musings about the mental dribble and dung that accounts for much of what is consumed by the “Digital Nation,” Swindle posed the question:

“Is the Internet Destroying Our Lives or Enriching Them?”

Before we have the opportunity to assume a thoughtful pose, Rushkoff hastens to answer the question with a question loaded with the answer:

“I want the luxury of being able to push the pause button, you know, really ask whether we’re tinkering with some part of ourselves that’s a little bit deeper than we might realize at first. You know, how are we changing what it means to be a human being by using all this stuff?”

Along with PBS, Monsieurs Swindle and Rushkoff direct their concern to the effect that life in Blogdom may have upon our powers of concentration and the dearth of substance in what we, as a “Digital Nation,” find worthy of our time.

These past few months, what I have found worthy of my time has been the influence of anti-establishment Libertarianism on American conservatives. I will save some “fans” the trouble of pointing out that I appear to be obsessed with Dr. Ron Paul. Obsession is metaphysically impossible for a mother with five small children…unless it involves what to make for dinner.

In addition to more “proof” that Building Seven was destroyed by missiles, that Halliburton crews rigged the WTC for demolition, and that I am a Zionist pawn of Goldman-Sachs, I have also learned, and can submit for consideration to Mr. Swindle and his friend, Rushkoff, that the internet is transforming some of us into callous barbarians and intellectual clods.

Upon reading posts that call for mature reflection on ideas, offended supporters of the criticized icon set upon their keyboards with the chivalry of Mordor Orcs. Here are some examples taken from those opposed to my observations concerning Ron Paul:

“No truth here…sad sheeple…go to your pens.”

“The world is filled with malevolent control freaks, and the sooner we admit it, the sooner we can escape this sheeple pen. But I am resigned to the fact that the sheeple like it in their pen, guarded though it is with wolves. They’d rather be consumed than free.”

“Horowitz only cares about one thing! Getting the United States involved militarily in the Arab, Persian and Israel conflict. Thus he smears Ron Paul because he wants the Republican party to return to its traditional foreign policy.”

“If Horowitz feels so strong. Get your butt in the military but, no, you want to send others and others kids to the meat grinder. What a transparent argument this is. How pathetic.”

“Why should we listen to someone like David Horowitz, shill for Israel? You didn’t predict the banking burst, you didn’t tell us not to go into Iraq, you merely serve your Neocon/Zionist masters by trying to tie Ron Paul to extremists groups in order to keep him on the fringe. We see through your dirty tricks. Those protesters were probably plants too.”

The anonymity that favors erosion of common courtesy is at the root of a more serious byproduct, the over-simplification of ideas. Many Ron Paul supporters asserted that, because I question the Pauls’ foreign policy, I hate the Constitution, love war, and wish to live in a police state.

Here are some examples:

“If we’d be “much, much worse” off with federal government that abides by the Constitution as a previous post states, we should just call a constitutional convention and rewrite the damn thing. Run it through the shredder if the Left and Right know what’s better for us than our libertarian founders.”

“Ron Paul is attempting to stop the WICKED fraud – the Federal Reserve – perpetrated against the American people. Is this why Ron Paul is being attacked?”

“Keep that neo con war wagon running! More blood for Israel! More fake paper money for Israel!”

The detrimental effect of facile categorization of people or distillation of their ideas is that, instead of constructive intellectual exchange, commenting on posts descends to jousting with caricatures.

We might all do well to pretend we are in a coffee shop while on line. Personally informing a total stranger that they are a “blood-thirsty moron working to abolish the Constitution” is harder to do if you can actually see their face.

Perhaps, to answer Mr. Rushkoff’s question, we can still be enriched by the Internet after all, if we remember that the words on the screen were typed by a human being, a tapestry of convictions, capable of persuasion if we present our own ideas in a way that is balanced and coherent.

Visitors to the website of the main challenger in last June’s disputed presidential election were greeted by an image of the Iranian flag and an AK-47 assault rifle. “Stop being agents for those who are safely in the US and are using you,” they were told.

Another prominent opposition site was sabotaged, the internet was slowed down and threats were made to close Google’s Gmail system and set up Iran’s own national email service, a move that would allow government surveillance of the net.

A group calling itself the Iran Cyber Army has claimed responsibility for hacking into both opposition sites. This is the outfit that brought down Twitter for several hours last December when huge antigovernment protests were shaking the regime.

via Iran takes fight to opposition online – Times Online.

CNET was the first to report on prospective tracking of American citizens using cell phone technology, but this week Barack Obama becomes the Dark Knight himself, seizing the opportunity to spy on every American through unfettered access to their cell phone records, physical locations and internet use.

In the movie the Dark Knight, Batman uses cell phone technology to spy on the citizens of Gotham, following their every move in his quest to locate his nemesis. On Friday, the Obama administration will argue in federal court for the right, without a court-ordered warrant, to gain access to cellular provider records documenting the time and location American citizens place cell phone calls. I know you’re thinking, “But what about my Constitutional rights against search and seizure?” Those rights will no longer exist. The Obama administration is advocating that,

“Warrantless tracking is permitted because Americans enjoy no ‘reasonable expectation of privacy’ whereabouts. U.S. Department of Justice lawyers say that ‘a customer’s Fourth Amendment rights are not violated when the phone company reveals to the government its own records’ that show where a mobile device placed and received calls.

But cellular providers record more information than just when and where a call is placed. All cell phones “ping” the closest cell phone towers when not in use, alerting the tower it is within its transmission range, even when it’s turned off.  The only way to disconnect a cell phone’s ability to contact the towers is to remove its battery.

Despite the Obama administration’s assertion, I somehow doubt the signers of the Constitution would have agreed there is “no reasonable expectation of privacy.” The question then becomes, “Do customers have an expectation of privacy from cellular providers?” Because when the DOJ asks for ”records that show where a mobile device placed and received calls,” they receive all data collected by the towers, including your location when you walked down the street with your phone in your pocket.

With more than 89% of Americans using cellular phones and 82% with internet access, the court’s ruling has profound implications. Kevin Bankston, attorney for civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation, explains,

“This is a critical question for privacy in the 21st century. If the courts do side with the government, that means that everywhere we go, in the real world and online, will be an open book to the government unprotected by the Fourth Amendment.”

Imagine the possibilities if a targeted person possesses a cell phone. His movement can be tracked, logged and searched without the commission of a crime, and without knowledge by the courts. The screams of the Left roared for eight years about Patriot Act violation of citizen privacy and freedom, as they declared President Bush was,

“Seizing dictatorial control”

Why are they silent now when one of their own not only extends the Patriot Act, but directs his Department of Justice to seek legal authority to track citizen activities and their whereabouts through cell phone records?

The ability to observe or trace a citizen’s activities without consent or a court-ordered warrant violates their rights and limits their freedoms. According to Bankston a more ominous threat exists should the court rule in the Obama administration’s favor,

“The government is arguing that based on precedents from the 1970s, any record held by a third party about us, no matter how invasively collected, is not protected by the Fourth Amendment.”

Obama taught constitutional law and is well aware this is a fictitious interpretation of the Constitution. But like Batman in the Dark Knight, will he use cellular technology to track his nemeses? For an administration who labels conservatives as potential terrorists and systematically attacks their opponents, the potential for abuse abounds. And should the administration win, will they use this case as a precedent to dismantle our Constitutional freedoms and, eventually, our Republic?

Earlier today, our very own David Swindle alerted me to this documentary Douglas Rushkoff directed for PBS’s “Frontline.” The subject: how the Internet is changing us.

We used to do one thing at a time, drink a cup of coffee with our friends in our favorite bar and read a book at night. These days, we’re writing blog posts, checking our email, text messaging our friends and watching a movie; all at the same time and in the same place.

What do these new behavioral patterns – this constant multitasking – mean to us and especially the youth (to whom I belong as well)? Does it influence our brains? Has the Internet made our lives richer or poorer, or both?

Is the Internet a blessing or is it quickly becoming a curse? Rushkoff asks these questions and tries to answer them in Digital Nation.

As one would expect from Rushkoff, his latest film is absolutely fascinating – especially for those of us who recognize themselves in the “victims” of the Internet revolution.

Due to lack of time, I’m not going to write a long post on it – not now anyway – but the only problem I have with it is that it labels people too easily as victims. It does this for instance by talking about Internet “addictions” regularly and by blaming teenagers’ habits of playing computer ten hours a day instead of studying, to it. It might just be me, but it seems to me that not the Internet but these kids’ parents are to blame. If your 12-year old refuses to study because he likes to play World of War Craft all day long, well, then it’s your responsibility as a parent to force him to exit the game and write that English paper he is supposed to hand in tomorrow.

These days, we often use “addiction” for “bad behavioral habits.” This mix-up may sound innocent to some readers, but it’s not: the former term implies someone is a “victim” of something (or someone else), while the latter puts the responsibility for the destructive behavior squarely on the shoulders of the person himself.

In any case, if you have time to spare today – and even if you don’t – I highly recommend you watch Digital Nation. It’s intriguing, to say the least.

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

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

Take Vietnam, for example.

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

What was their crime?

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

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

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

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

Related posts:

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

The Huffington Post is an Internet webzine featuring mostly left-liberal participants. It was launched as a commercial venture on May 9, 2005, and takes its name from its creator Arianna Huffington, a “progressive independent” syndicated columnist, author, and media personality. The publication is the subject of an explosive new report titled, “Anti-Semitism and Israel-Hatred on Huffington Post.” To view this report, as well as a comprehensive profile of the Huffington Post, click here.

Twelve days, six days, and the best minds at Google, a pioneer and master of Internet technology, can't seem to figure out how to wire their search box so that it pops up suggestions for "Islam is" that are comparable to the suggestions you get for "Buddhism is" or "Hinduism is" or "Christianity is." Try it for yourself. Search for "Christianity is" at Google and a host of negative recommendations pop up:

It's the same thing for "Buddhism is," "Hinduism is," etc. But when you search for "Islam is," no negative recommendations come up -- indeed, no recommendations at all:

The same "bug" appears at Google's YouTube.

What a coincidence that Google's "bug" would crop up in a way that shelters the world's most thin-skinned religion from criticism! The one religion shielded from adverse judgment at Google is also the only religion that has is currently engaged in an organized campaign to stifle honest discussion about its texts and teachings that inspire violence. In 2008 the Secretary General of the 57-government Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), the largest voting bloc at the United Nations today, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, warned the West about "red lines that should not be crossed" regarding free speech about Islam and terrorism. For years now the OIC has spearheaded an effort at the UN to compel member states to criminalize what it calls "defamation of religions," but by which it clearly means any honest discussion of the texts and teachings of Islam that jihadists invoke to justify violence and supremacism. Interestingly enough, the OIC stepped up this campaign in the wake of the publication of cartoons of Muhammad in a Danish newspaper that touched off worldwide Muslim riots. Google, at the time those riots were raging, was dutifully removing from YouTube videos that depicted the cartoons.

Thus when the OIC has Google, it doesn't need international edicts muzzling free speech. Like many on the Left, Google seems all too willing to carry water for the Islamic bloc's war against free speech and to oblige the OIC's totalitarian and thuggish influences, by voluntarily refraining from doing anything that might offend Muslims. While its restriction of the automated search suggestions may seem insignificant, its overall willingness to conform to notoriously fragile Islamic sensibilities and deep-six criticism of Islam is anything but trivial.

"Polish Disc Jockey Threatened By Islamic Fundamentalists," from The Outlook, January 17 (thanks to John Doe):

Warsaw, Poland 17 January 2010 - Islamic fundamentalists posted death threats against a Polish disk jockey soon after he published a song that he says was supposed to be a tribute to the Muslim culture.

It started on Christmas Eve.

Jakub Rene Kosik, a 27-year-old DJ from Poland excused himself from the dinner table and checked his Facebook. Word of his newest composition, Mekka, was out. And it was ill-received.

"You messed with Islam," the first message read. "We'll never forgive what you did to our religion," read another. "You played with us, now we'll play with you." "We're everywhere. Forget your international career." By morning he had more than 300 such messages.

Fundamentalists reacted to the piece, placed on an internet music store website, because it included backing music of an Islamic prayer.

"I smiled stupidly and told my girlfriend "I think they want to kill me for this composition". In the first instant, she didn't react. Afterwards she was hysteric," Kosik said.

"I had mixed feelings. My first thought was, "great, publicity". Later I started thinking if I didn't in fact really hurt these people. But my composition was supposed to be a tribute to their culture.

"I'm atheist. But I was raised with respect to different religions and philosophical opinions."

The threats and negative comments, including one from an 8-year-old French boy - "Jakub Rene Kosik - die dog" - resulted in sleepless nights for the artist. He replied to the threats, each one individually, apologized and explained it was never his intention to offend anyone's religious sentiment. But it wasn't until he removed the piece from the sites that the taunts subsided.

Kosik denied accusations of a publicity stunts and said he doesn't feel any more popular and hasn't been invited to any more parties than usual.

"I am bitter that I was treated that way by fundamentalists. And I pity them that they aren't able to see things more liberally," Kosik said....

In its four years of existence,The Huffington Post (aka “HuffPost”) has grown from obscurity into the world’s most-visited blogsite, and one of America’s most popular news sites. It now has more monthly visitors than the Washington Post, and is supported by some of the largest advertisers in the world. Its representatives have been allowed to ask questions at presidential press conferences, and one was even given preferential treatment. It now enjoys access to, and influence over, the top levels of the U.S. government. Top members of the U.S. Senate are among HuffPost’s official bloggers, including John Kerry, Carl Levin, Chris Dodd, Barbara Boxer and others.

A significant reason for HuffPost’s success and “legitimization” are its claims that it is a nonpartisan “newspaper,” dedicated to “ferret(ing) out the truth,” and “debunking the left-right way of thinking.”

HuffPost also claims to be non-partisan in its moderation of user comments. Arianna Huffington, the site’s founder and Editor-In-Chief, claims HuffPost has “a zero tolerance policy” for hate speech, and that it acts vigilantly to keep its comment threads free of offensive content, 24-7.

Unfortunately, HuffPost consistently “frames” news stories in such a way that incites anti-Israel perceptions and hatred. Further, in violation of its own policies, it approves and tolerates user comments submitted in response to these stories that contain incendiary, hate-filled libels against Israelis and Jews, as well as links to anti-Semitic hate websites.

Given the fact that an estimated 135,000 of Huffington Post’s unique monthly visitors reside in Iran and Pakistan, there is great concern among informed observers that its incitement against Israel influences perceptions far outside the United States.

This report, the result of three years of observation, documents:

• Numerous examples of Huffington Post’s incitement of anti-Israel perceptions, and the defamatory user comments that have appeared on the site in response, with special focus on Israel’s recent Operation Cast Lead.

• The fact that many of the most egregious violators of Huffington Post’s stated policies, including some of its most prolific anti-Semitic propagandists, remain active users – some, with tens of thousands of comments in their archives.

• The fact that contrary to Huffington Post’s public statements, since at least March 2008, it has been pre-moderating all user comments, meaning that all of the hateful and defamatory comments that appear have been approved by its moderators.

All of the following anti-Semitic user comments were published after HuffPost announced, in March 2008, that the only comments that would appear on its site are those that a human moderator had reviewed, approved and made the decision to publish. Ms. Huffington confirmed this fact, several months later.

“Jews are evil. Israel runs the world. Lets kill ‘em all and give the land back to Islam; result-perpetual peace. Seig Heil.”
By “pedrothemigrant,” 5/23/08

“Funny how [Israelis] had NO problem with wiping the [Palestinians] off the face of the earth until they discovered they might actually be able to strike back in a meaningful way. proof that bullies like this are nothing but cowards.”
By “peacekitten,” 1/2/09

“There’s a reason they [Jews] have been the most problematic group for thousands of years.”
By “Amennyc,” 1/4/09

“[W]omen holding limp little bodies of children in their hands, crying, as an Israeli soldier aims an AK.-47 at her head. With each civilian casualty Israel gets closer to the regime in Germany that provided the impetus for the creation of Israel.”
By “SkepticHume,” 1/3/09

“Clowns to the left of me, Jokers to the right, Here I am, stuck in the middle with Jooooz [Jews]“
By “JamesR.,” 11/22/08

“They [Jews] all need to be rounded up and gassed.”
By “markoze,” 12/30/08

Perhaps more shockingly, all of these comments were posted by users whose accounts are still active (they have not been banned), some of whom HuffPost has allowed to post thousands of additional comments. This stands in stark contrast to the fact that HuffPost routinely bans other users who don’t violate its policies — some after as few as six comments — but dare to challenge or mock the radical leftists that the site attracts.

These comments are representative of thousands of others containing anti-Semitic and Israel-bashing libels, hate and propaganda that have been published on HuffPost in recent years. Columbia University professor Lincoln Mitchell recently claimed that on nearly every HuffPost news story concerning international affairs, regardless of the topic, he and his friends usually find that it takes no more than ten comments before its users are finding a way to blame Jews.

The most incendiary of these comments are usually submitted in response to “news” stories that HuffPost publishes regarding Israel, which it consistently “frames” in ways that incite inaccurate and unjustifiably negative perceptions of the Jewish state, and particularly its military. HuffPost does this primarily through the use of inflammatory, decontextualized headlines and headline imagery, and biased “news” sources. Examples of this incitement include:

• Its daily depiction of Israel’s incursion into Gaza in December 2008, in which it cast Israeli soldiers as thuggish villains, Palestinian civilians as their targets, and Hamas terrorists (often labeled as “security forces”) as victims. One example of this was its headline on 12/29/08 that featured a picture of a dead Muslim toddler, alongside text that claimed, “Israeli assault targets symbols of Hamas power.”

• Its headline story on 3/11/09 featured Charles Freeman’s claims that a Jewish conspiracy led him to withdraw his nomination to a national security post. HuffPost did not post any indication of the broad, bipartisan opposition to his nomination.

• It uncritically uses biased Arabic “news” sources – including the jihadist-celebrating al Jazeera (also a past HuffPost advertiser) – as single-sources for its headlines. One example was its 5/29/09 article that used a little-known Arabic “news” source’s account of what it described as an “activist” that was killed by the Israeli military. 24 hours earlier, the “activist” was identified by CNN as a suspect in several deadly terror attacks, and that the Israeli military had attempted to arrest him. Instead, he opened fire on them, and was killed. None of this was covered in HuffPost’s depiction of the incident.

• Its prominent positioning on 8/19/09 of a blood libel against Israel — that it murders Palestinians in order to harvest their organs — even though the “reporter” behind the story admitted in the article that he has “no idea… no clue” if the allegations are true or not. Soon thereafter, credible sources determined that these allegations were physically impossible, and further discredited the “reporter.” Yet HuffPost gave these stories little to no “play” (certainly nowhere near the prominence of the original blood libel).

Given the growing resurgence of anti-Semitism worldwide, HuffPost — like every other “legitimized,” advertiser-supported “newspaper” — is obliged to ensure that its “news” stories concerning Israel are fact-based and contextual. Further, HuffPost is obligated to enforce its nonpartisan comment moderation policy. In both of these regards, HuffPost is failing profoundly.

It is hoped that this detailed report will spur HuffPost to take corrective measures to ensure that it is living up to its self-proclaimed standards, particularly in regards to Israeli and Jewish affairs.

Click here to read the full report.

To NewsReal’s Readers,

As some of you might have realized NewsReal is under attack from a hacker. Our IT specialist has confirmed it. We’re currently working to fix the problem.

I apologize to anyone who was offended by the hacker’s profane messages.

This is how our opponents behave. They cannot defeat our arguments so they must sabotage us. We do not know yet who is responsible or what their motives are. Additional updates forthcoming.

-David

Related posts:

1. The Nation Compares Health Care Opponents to Racists
2. NewsReal Sunday: The Six Moral Arguments Against Socialized Medicine
3. Internet Terrorism: Iranians Hack Twitter

Failed suicide bomber Umar Abdulmutallab spelt out his nightmare vision of a world ruled by fanatical Islamic hardliners in a series of rambling internet rants.

In one, he said: "I won't go into too much details about my fantasy, but basically they are jihad fantasies.

"I imagine how the great jihad will take place, how the muslims will win (Allah willing) and rule the whole world and establish the greatest empire once again."...