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

FP: Joseph Yeager, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

What inspired you to write your book?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FP: What was the motive of your campaign?

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

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

Read it all.

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

FP: Pamela Geller, welcome to Frontpage  Interview.

Geller: Thank you, Jamie.

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

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

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

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

FP: What was the motive of your campaign?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FP: What’s the next step?

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

FP: Pamela Geller, thank you for joining us.

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

FP: Andy McCarthy, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Amnesty International supports individuals such as Former Gitmo detainee Moazzam Begg. Tell us what exactly is going on here.

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

People need to understand what Amnesty International is: a hard-left political organization. It is one of the bastions of what John Fonte calls transnational progressivism, and it’s agenda is a post-sovereign world theoretically governed by an abstraction AI calls “international humanitarian law” but, as a practical matter, ruled by the leftists who make up what this purported corpus of “law” means as they go along (just as they make up what “social justice” and other such abstractions mean to suit the exigencies of the moment).

This is not to say that AI is without authentic human rights activists. There are many people who are dawn to AI because of its admirable historic mission to pressure authoritarian governments that are serial human-rights violators. But as an institution, AI is a just another leftist hack, and the country it most chooses to pressure is the United States, for the American people’s great crimes of being free and self-determining and being uninterested in a post-sovereign order, and for pursuing our interests in the world, including our national security.

Moazzam Begg is a Taliban jihadist and former Gitmo detainee. The invaluable Tom Joscelyn (of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies) has done a great deal of work exposing him — such as in this Weekly Standard essay, which collects other Begg links. Much like CAIR, Begg has discovered that if you swaddle your Islamist activism in the rhetoric of human rights, and be sure to target the United States and Israel as the cause of the world’s problem, the hack leftist organizations will flock to you regardless of the atrocities you’re willing to commit or defend. Thus has AI made common cause with Begg and his British organization, “Cageprisoners.” That this should happen is not at all surprising to anyone who does a comparative study of leftist ideology and Islamist ideology — which is the subject of a book I’ve just finished, The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America, to be released by Encounter Books in late May.

Of course, the tie between AI and Begg is upsetting to individual, authentic human rights activists, both because it associates their cause with an ideology that rejects basic human freedoms (conscience, equality of the sexes, equality of Muslims and non-Muslims, sexual orientation, the ability to legislate irrespective of sharia dictates, etc.), and because it holds up the mirror to what AI really is (as opposed to the utopian vision of AI that caused them to gravitate to it in the first place).

FP: What happened to Gita Sahgal, head of AI’s “gender unit,” recently and what is the significance?

McCarthy: Gita Sahgal protested AI’s association with Begg, and AI responded by censuring and suspending her. That is, AI decided its alliance with an unabashed Islamist who has predictably become a darling of the left was more precious to it than the inconvenient fact that this alliance betrays everything that AI purports to stand for. Of course, any objective person looking at AI’s record could have told Ms. Sahgal that AI had long ago crossed that Rubicon. But the Begg connection and the way AI is clinging to it gives us one of those welcome “king has no clothes” moments.

FP: There was a petition against AI recently for all of this and AI Secretary-General Claudio Cordone responded by defending “defensive” jihad, right? What happened?

McCarthy: That’s right, Jamie. In response to the petition, Cordone has issued a letter in vigorous defense of AI’s collaboration with Begg and Cageprisoners. Steve Emerson’s Investigative Project on Terrorism has the story, here. In the letter, Cordone states AI’s position outright: advocacy of “jihad in self defence” is not antithetical to human rights. Of course, that is absurd. Islamists reserve unto themselves the right to determine when Islam is, as they put it, “under siege,” and when, therefore, forcible jihad is justified in “self-defense.” As we’ve seen too many times to count (including throughout the Taliban’s reign in Afghanistan), Islamists have a very low threshold for what constitutes an “attack” on Islam. The “self-defense” canard, as Robert Spencer has demonstrated repeatedly (see, e.g., here), is just camouflage for what is a very aggressive offensive jihad campaign, involving both force and stealth. All this is plainly of no concern to AI — again, for AI, only actions America’s self-defense are worthy of condemnation.

FP: What does all of this mean about AI?

McCarthy: Simply stated, I think it demonstrates that AI and its wider movement are fraudulent. Maybe it was once about human rights. But now it is just about the international left’s campaign against human freedom.

FP: Well, all of this has very much to do with, as you say, the romance between the radical leftist and radical Islam. You have done a comparative study of leftist ideology and Islamist ideology in your new book coming out in May, The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America. Can you tell us a bit of where leftist and Islamist ideology meet?

McCarthy: They meet in two very important ways, Jamie: One I’ll call ideological and the other tactical. On the ideological front, it seems to be conventional wisdom that Islam and the Left are antagonists. That’s a very shallow analysis, relying on a handful of issues on which the two are at odds: women’s rights, gay rights, abortion, and a few others. But in fact, Islamist ideology and Leftism have a great deal in common. They are totalitarian, revolutionary, corporatist systems in which the central authority seeks to control all aspects of the individual’s life. The individual is not seen as free and independent; he is just a cog in the wheel whose value lies in his usefulness to whole, as determined by the central authority.

The greatest obstacle to the aspirations of both ideologies is a system premised on individual liberty and rooted without apology in Western culture. That is to say, the greatest obstacle is America’s constitutional republic. And that gets us to the tactical aspect. Not only do Islam and the Left have structural similarities; they have the all important common enemy that has to be eliminated, or at least transformed into something radically different, if they are to thrive.

This is not to trivialize the differences between Islamism and what — as I detail in the book – our friend David Horowitz calls neocommunism (in his insightful book on this topic, Unholy Alliance). Marriages between the two have occurred frequently, especially in the last century. They endure only until the common enemy is eliminated, at which point the two are sure to turn on each other.

FP: Andy all of this appears so bizarre and depressing, and there is so much to be pessimistic about. The Left is in power, the Left has control of our culture in so many ways. It’s now even normal that the most known human rights organization in the world sides with Islamic jihad. The jihadists are winning on so many terrains. What concerns you the most? And what can and must average citizens do? And give us some grounds for hope and optimism. Where are we winning and where and how can we successfully protect ourselves and score a blow for liberty?

McCarthy: Jamie, the best things we have going for us in a period of ascendancy for Islamism and Leftism are … Islamism and Leftism. They are dead ends, roadmaps to a loss of liberty that liberty-loving people will not tolerate. We are seeing that in the Tea Party movement and the grassroots rejection of statism. The questions are whether the Unholy Alliance will do incurable damage before the people can wrest control from it, and whether new leadership will have the stomach (and it will take a strong one) to roll back the advances of statism and address its root cause: our wayward conception of why we have a central government and what its role should be. I’m not sure how we will answer these challenges because they are daunting. But I am encouraged by the appetite growing in the country — albeit not in the political class — to take them on in a serious way.

FP: Andy McCarthy, thank you for joining us.

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

FP: Dave Gaubatz, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

You were recently in the Los Angeles area conducting lectures and book signings. Fill us in a bit about what you learned about the Los Angeles County Sheriff (Sheriff Baca) and his ties to the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR).

Gaubatz: Thank you Jamie. I spent 5 days in the LA area and utilized every minute communicating with citizens and collecting counter-terrorism intelligence on Sheriff Baca. I visited four Islamic Centers to determine their association with CAIR and likewise his link to this terrorist supporting organization.

Unfortunately for the citizens of LA, Sheriff Baca supports Islamic groups who advocate violence against the very people he is supposed to be protecting. I informed the attendees of my lectures that there are only three primary reasons anyone supports CAIR and the violent ideology they spread and advocate.

FP: Why would someone support CAIR?

Gaubatz: The first is out of pure ignorance of what CAIR advocates behind the scenes. Second: job incompetence (lack of proper training in counter-terrorism and the Islamic ideology). Third and the most worrisome: like in the case of Sheriff Baca, certain people are in bed with the enemy for financial gain or political power.

FP: Expand on why you think this is the case with Sheriff Baca.

Gaubatz: I spoke with numerous people, reviewed materials from the Islamic Centers Sheriff Baca and CAIR both endorse, and talked with officers of Sheriff Baca’s Islamic Community Affairs program. At this stage of my research I would analyze Sheriff Baca as incompetent, and regardless of the innocent lives he is jeopardizing by supporting Islamic based terror groups, he is more concerned with the votes/funds CAIR can generate for his personal political goals.

I have advised several times to readers they should not become confused by the various acronyms used by Islamic based non-profit organizations. CAIR, ISNA, MSA, MAS, MANA and the host of others are Muslim Brotherhood (MB) and they encourage through their materials terrorist attacks against our troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, and even in America (Ft. Hood).

Readers may know I had over 23 years of U.S. Federal Service, was a Federal Agent, trained Arabic linguist, counter-terrorism specialist, visited numerous Middle east countries, was the 1st U.S. civilian Federal Agent in Iraq, had the highest U.S. government clearance, briefed into numerous ‘special government projects,’ personally conducted counter-terrorism research in over 200 Islamic Centers, obtained and reviewed thousands of documents/manuals from U.S. based Islamic Centers, and did what our federal government with vast financial and manpower resources could not do. I planned and executed an intensive (legal and professional) undercover research project placing 5 people (male and female) inside CAIR National (Top Branch of the Muslim Brotherhood operating in America) for a period of 6 months.

Based on my training and experiences, Sheriff Baca is aiding and abetting the Muslim Brotherhood. It will be our children who will suffer.  Sheriff Baca and any officer or politician who is supporting his actions should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and of course replaced with law enforcement officers who understand the violent aspects of the Islamic ideology and the Muslim Brotherhood.

If we want to save our country from Islamic terrorists, we as a country must be proactive and begin prosecuting anyone who seeks to hurt our children’s future. No longer do Americans want to see the Sheriff Bacas roll up in their decked out patrol cars, give a political speech about how effective his officers responded to a terrorist scene, and how brave everyone was.  This is no longer acceptable. Sheriff Baca needs to understand if he and his officers respond to an Islamic based terrorist scene, he has failed. Neither he nor any officer who ever supported his actions should be considered a ‘hero’ after our country has been attacked and lost innocent lives due to the ignorance, incompetence, and personal political goals of men like Sheriff Baca.

FP: You mentioned you visited several Islamic Centers in the LA, CA, and area. Can you describe the type of material you observed/obtained?

Gaubatz: Of course.  The four Islamic Centers I visited were Sunni/Salafist, (Wahhabi) ‘Pure Muslim’, backed by the Saudi government, CAIR (Muslim Brotherhood), and had material available for their worshippers that advocate violence against innocent people, treason and sedition.  I will mention one for the time being:

Omar Ibn Al-Khattab Foundation
1025 Exposition Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90007

A few weeks ago Sheriff Baca had visited this Islamic Center with CAIR executives and publicly endorsed CAIR and the teachings of this mosque.  I respectfully ask readers to review the following statements obtained in materials endorsed by CAIR and I observed/obtained in LA County and from people who support CAIR Executives:

“What should you do if you are arrested or framed by the racist, fascist, criminal police? Or the racist, fascist, criminal FBI?

Note by Gaubatz: This manual is distributed by CAIR supporters throughout the U.S.  It is an 81 page manual that clearly shows their support for terrorist organizations and not our U.S. Constitution or law enforcement.

“If we really want to produce such youth who should be prepared to lay down their lives for the sake of their country (Islamic Ummah) and also for the survival of the Islamic way of life, we should undertake to give them Islamic instruction of high standard along with sophisticated military training”.

Note by Gaubatz: This manual by Maududi (Jammet Islami founder) was obtained at an LA County Islamic center who instruct their children to fight (Jihad) for Islam, not America, and to train to the highest military standard in order to defeat their enemies (Christians, Jews, and non Sharia compliant Muslims).

I ask readers to closely review the following statements from materials endorsed by CAIR, published by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and provided to Islamic Centers, schools, and libraries across America. This manual was obtained at an LA County mosque:

“Islam does not acknowledge territorial boundaries, national or popular relations, and nationalities, as these lead to separation and differentiation among people. There is no nationality for Muslim except Islam”.

Note by Gaubatz; This statement alone by the Saudi government explaining the Islamic ideology should answer the question in people’s minds if Muslims can follow Islam and be American. The answer was no 1400 years ago and is no today.

“Apostasy from Islam is a grievous crime punishable by death. One who commits apostasy from Islam rejects truth after he known it, thus, he does not deserve life.”

Note by Gaubatz: Again this manual is distributed by the Saudi government and is in thousands of Islamic centers across America. Please keep in mind the above statement made by the Saudi government that ‘Islam does not acknowledge territorial boundaries.” This means if a young Muslim child (like 17 year old Rifka Bary) decides they want to leave Islam and convert to Christianity that the Saudi government and Islam fully support killing her and anyone who leaves Islam. This is regardless of the country they reside in. This statement alone is why ‘honor killings’ of innocent Muslims are committed every year across America by Sharia compliant worshippers and the media seldom reports on them. Why? Because a large part of our media worships at the altar of political correctness and is also financially supported by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

FP: Final thoughts?

Gaubatz: Jamie; I again thank you and your organization. Sheriff Baca is not the lone senior law enforcement officer or politician who is knowingly cooperating with those forces who are working to destroy our country. They are scattered across our great country and we are currently being attacked from within, and we are losing the ‘war on terrorism.”  There are few officers or employees of a politician who will not follow the orders of their ‘leader’. This equates to Sheriff Baca having the support of thousands of LA county Sheriffs who would back the Muslim Brotherhood before they would a hard working American family that prioritizes patriotism to our country above all.  Or would they? I will have more intelligence on CAIR, Sheriff Baca, and other terrorist supporters on our site muslimmafiainternational.com Thank you.

FP: Dave Gaubatz, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.

A couple of weeks or so ago a Colorado mom who had converted to Islam, and suddenly vanished, re-surfaced inside an Irish jail. Jamie Paulin-Ramirez was arrested for conspiring with the now-famous Jihad Jane and friends to commit an act of terrorism – specifically the murder of Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks, for publishing a caricature of Muhammad’s head on the body of a dog. The Irish police released Paulin-Ramirez from custody without charging any crimes.  Alas, she returned to the U.S.A. and has been re-arrested in Philadelphia, charged by U.S. authorities alongside her inter-net pal Jihad Jane with crimes that carry maximum penalties of $250,000.00 in fines and 15 years in prison.

Robert Spencer might sardonically label Paulin-Ramirez a “mis-understander of Islam”.  Perhaps former President George W. Bush would have bundled her with the few “extremists” he believed were not true practitioners of the Great Religion of Peace – rather they are practicing some far-out perversion of Islam.  Whichever way you look at it, watching the prosecution’s case unfold to see how much Muslim doctrine is presented as motive for the conspiracy will be very interesting.

Nicholas Riccardi’s L.A. Times report is here:

“Reporting from Denver – A Colorado mother whose family said she flew to Ireland last year to join a possibly violent Islamic group was charged Friday with working with a Pennsylvania woman to attend a terrorist training camp in Europe.

Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, 31, had been arrested in Ireland last month with six others on suspicion of planning to assassinate Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks, whose drawing of the prophet Muhammad with the body of a dog outraged many Muslims. Paulin-Ramirez, from Leadville, Colo, was later released by Irish authorities.

She returned voluntarily to the United States and was arrested Friday in Philadelphia, according to a statement from the Department of Justice…

… Federal prosecutors added Paulin-Ramirez to a case against Colleen R. LaRose, 46, who went by the online name “JihadJane” and was charged in a sealed indictment in October with recruiting people to kill Vilks…

…Paulin-Ramirez’s mother, Christine Mott, said Friday that she had not heard from her daughter since her arrest in Ireland and had not been aware she was back in the U.S. The two became estranged last year as Paulin-Ramirez, a nursing student, became obsessed with studying Islam online and began corresponding with people her mother viewed as extremists…”

Ah, yes, there’s that mysterious “extremist” word again.  Not claiming to be anyone other than a retired cop who is a wide-eyed reader of the works of Robert Spencer, Hugh Fitzgerald, Bat Ye’or and others who are recognized experts in the studies of Islam and Sharia (Muslim Law), I am continually astonished that the public news narrative continues about the hi-jacking of the Great Religion of Peace – without any examination of the doctrines that form its foundations and their acceptance in the world-wide Muslim mainstream.  According to Spencer’s website there have been no less than 15, 081 deadly acts of jihad following the 9/11/01 attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C.

So, Paulin-Ramirez’s prosecution will proceed however it proceeds.  My question is, and will be:  Why does an American-born nursing student, the mother of a six-year-old son, leave her home, her parents, her life, go to Europe, join a group of “isolated extremists” (President Obama’s term for jihadists such as  U.S. Army Major Nidal Hasan) and conspire to kill someone she has never met?  Where, oh, where can the answer be found?

I recently ended up in a long conversation with another mother at our children’s elementary school who told me about the ongoing conflict among the school’s board members about nutrition in the school. Apparently, the head of the committee wants all things sugar banned from the school — even lollipops for Valentine’s Day.

My friend — smart board woman she is –  realizes the absurdity of this goal and is trying to stop the other mother from making these unnecessary changes. “Childhood obesity cannot be resolved this way. It’s about what goes on outside school that matters,” she said.

Indeed. That’s why the new bill pushed through Congress Wednesday, The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, pays lip service to a huge problem in this country but will do little to solve it.

“This bill puts us on the path to addressing the epidemic of childhood obesity,” said Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.).

Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) concurs. The pending legislation will fight childhood obesity by “improving the health and livelihood of our children.”

This bill, by the way, will cost taxpayers an additional 4.5 billion — yes, that’s billion — over the next ten years. President Obama wanted the figure to be ten billion, but I guess the Senate couldn’t come up with the funds. (Gee, wonder why…) At present, nutrition programs cost 16.3 billion a year — which, apparently, is not enough to keep kids trim.

No surprise there.  Just as the alcoholic can’t get healthy by treating the symptom rather than the problem, so it is with childhood obesity. You can’t fight a social phenomenon as deeply rooted as this one with money. We must first name the problem if we’re going to solve it.

Childhood obesity has tripled over the past thirty years and we continue to blame the packaged food industry, as well as our sedentary lives. These things matter — but they wouldn’t matter nearly as much if parents were home to take control of their lives. We simply refuse to accept the correlation between fat kids and modern family life.

The truth is that kids became fat during the same period of time more and more mothers left their homes and went to work in mass droves. Put another way: No one’s in the kitchen anymore. Even Michelle Obama, who began the Let’s Move campaign which (presumably) resulted in this new bill, admits as much.

“Before coming to the White House, the president and I lived like most families: two working parents — too busy, not enough time, and I found myself unable to cook a good meal for my kids. Going to fast food more than I’d like, ordering pizza, and I started to see the effects on my family, particularly my kids.”

Americans need to wake up to the reason for childhood obesity. Yes, there’s too much packaged food; yes, businesses make it too easy to pick up fast food; yes, small portions have been replaced with gigantic food fests — but none of these things faze people who choose to move slower and take the time to eat right. Which means: It isn’t the existence of the food that matters; it’s the American lifestyle.

Progressives want you to believe the reason people are fat is because they don’t know any better. If we spend more money educating Americans, they will make better choices, we’re told. As Oprah’s favorite mantra goes: “When people know better, they do better.”

Hogwash. You can educate people until they’re blue in the face but in the end, people have to make up their own minds to be healthy.  Just last night on Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution — the guy who throws all the food people eat in their homes on a giant table to show them what they’re putting in their bodies — the interviewer asked the obese mother if she just “didn’t know any better” before Jamie came along to help her. To which she says, “Oh, I knew the food wasn’t good for me.”

Getting soda machines out of our schools is fine. Putting more carrots and fewer tator tots on the school plates is great. But until or unless parents make up their minds to get healthy themselves and then teach their children how to be healthy — all of which requires one parent being home long enough to plan the meals, do the shopping, and cook the food — we might as well flush the 4.5 billion dollars down the toilet.

Yes, I know: This is easier said than done in a nation in which 40% of mothers today are single and must work — and  when two full-time working parents have so little time, but that’s precisely my point. We’re barking up the wrong tree.

Suzanne Venker is an author, blogger, and former teacher. You can find out more about Suzanne at www.suzannevenker.com.

In the days after the 9/11 attacks, average Americans donated money and festooned American flags to vehicles in a show of unity and support.  Educators, in contrast, took advantage for further anti-American indoctrination and plastered school walls with “Understanding Islam” posters.  They did this at the University of Georgia where I was finishing up my Ph.D. program.

Since then, the Islamists have wormed their ways into our culture, reaching the most vulnerable: our children.

It is no surprise to me that blonde American women, like Jihad Jane and Jihad Jamie, would be converting to Islam and supporting jihad.  The most depraved murderers on death row attract the support of soft-hearted and weak-minded women.  They are aided by educators and the propagandists they invite into the classroom.

In fact, proselytizing occurs in high schools and colleges without a peep from principals or college presidents, who fret about such Christian symbols as Christmas trees on their campuses.

For example, for the second year, the Muslim Student Association is holding their Islamic Awareness Week at the Clarkston campus of Georgia Perimeter College in the Atlanta area.  MSA Advisor Shyam K. Sriram, who teaches American Government and Political Science, in an email encourages faculty members to allow their students “to obtain extra credit for attending these myriad of events” and adds that he is “happy to sign off on any extra credit sheets.”

Not only is Sriram sending this to all instructors on campus through the e-mail list, but his Islamic Awareness Week provides the theme for the college’s home page and posters about the events plaster bulletin boards on campus.  The student who wants to learn more about the event can click on a link and see the following list and the note, “Faculty are encouraged to give students extra credit for attending.”

These events for the week of March 16-19 include:

“Islam 101” with Brother Abu Addisalam.

“The Sweetness of Faith” with Imam Ishmael ibn Paul Teasley.

“Sorry, Mama, But I Love Her: A Talk on Love, Patience and Relationships” with Imam Tariq Khan.

“Hijab for a Day” “Information Session for WOMEN only.”

“Converts Panel featuring Former Rapper Loon.”

“Young Muslim Collegiate Panel.”

The title “Sorry, Mama, But I Love Her” reminded me of a workshop I attended at the National Council for the Social Studies conference called “Muslim Perspectives Through [sic] Film and Dialogue: Understanding, Empathy, Civic Discourse.”   There, Barbara Petzen (a blonde woman), an academic specializing in Middle East studies, and employed by the Middle East Policy Council, which has received multiple donations from Saudi Arabian royalty, offered sheep-like high school social studies teachers free films for use in the classroom.

One, which she showed, Allah Made Me Funny, about three young Muslim comedians—a Palestinian, an Indian, and an African-American convert–fits in with the lessons on “tolerance” teenagers receive from television and the classroom.

Its producer, Michael Wolfe, knows what will appeal to teenagers, for he himself is a convert and comes from what he calls a “mongrel” background of a mixed Jewish-Christian marriage.  What was especially disturbing in the film was the black convert, who bragged about his loss of attraction to white women since his conversion.  He had some tender-hearted bemusement for his poor, benighted old mother still stuck in the old Christian religion who was upset at his conversion.  He could see into her plot to get him back to her church, for an “intervention” on him.  (The camera panned to the wholesome Muslim audience of families in traditional and Western dress laughing good-naturedly.)

The talk by Imam Tariq Khan at Georgia Perimeter College (“Sorry, Mama, But I Love Her”) suggests a similar conflict between an adult child and parent. Converts are loving toward parents—although more enlightened.  In this age of tolerance and following your own path Islam is presented as just another alternative—and a better, more tolerant, and more hip alternative at that.

One wonders what would happen were the script reversed.  Would administrators allow a Methodist minister to put on a “Christian Awareness Week” at a community college?  Would Muslims tolerate a film being shown to Muslim students at a public school, titled Jesus Made Me Funny, that poked fun at their parents’ Muslim religion, that joked about seeing through a parent’s attempt to intervene?  Indeed, Muslim parents like those of Rifqa Bary, threaten and do kill children who convert to Christianity.

Of course, such facts never came up in the film or workshop.  Petzen said to teachers, “What I love about these guys is that they’re normal.”

When an inconvenient fact comes up—like the violence that Muslims have displayed—those like Petzen offer defenses through moral equivalency.  She gave lessons to social studies teachers to pass on to students about the rioting and murders after the publication of cartoons about Muhammad.  Well, Christians would get upset too, she offered.

Yes, they have, when their tax dollars go to support artwork that immerses a crucifix in urine.  But they don’t riot and murder over it.

Of course, educators are likely to present the Christians who opposed public funding of Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” artwork as close-minded and bigoted (as they have done in textbooks I’ve been required to use).  They are likely to invoke the First Amendment.

Petzen objected to my characterization of her “defense” in the report I wrote about the conference.  It was an “explanation,” she insisted.

Really?  Her moral equivalency insults the intelligence of the civilized world.  Everybody could understand being upset with the depictions in the cartoons.  What they could not understand was the barbarism of the response.  “Explanations” for violence, for behavior that defies every standard of Western civilization, makes every barbaric act more “normal.”  And, indeed, “normalization” of Islam is the goal of Petzen and Sriram, and every other proselytizer in the classroom.

In 1983, “A Nation at Risk,” stated famously, “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”

Some insist that “jihad” is misunderstood, that according to the Koran it involves moral cleansing and an intellectual effort. If so, we’ve got Jihad Janes in the classroom, proselytizing to already indoctrinated children and teenagers.  This is indeed a “war” on the hearts and minds of students.

For my full report on the National Council for the Social Studies go here.

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.

[This article is reprinted from the National Post]

In 1968, naive anti-establishment American and Canadian students considered themselves courageous for locking supine university presidents in their offices, throwing computers out of windows and even burning out-of-favour academics’ research work. They knew that in the free, indulgent West, their childish parody of a revolution would result in nothing more than a suspension from their studies.

In the same year truly courageous Moscow academic Yuri Glazov signed the famous “letter of the twelve,” protesting illegal arrests and trials of dissidents, knowing full well that this real act of revolution would result in a suspension of his human rights.

Glazov was predictably fired, meaning he was henceforth unemployable and deemed a “parasite” on the state. Warned by a friend, he narrowly avoided imprisonment on a trumped-up narcotics-dealing charge. Finally, through a stroke of luck, Glazov came with his family to the West, and in 1975 took up residence in Halifax as chair of the Russian Studies department at Dalhousie University, a position he held until shortly before his death in 1998.

[Yuri Glazov's family shortly before departure from Russia. From left to right: son Greg, Yuri, daughter Elena, wife Marina and son Jamie.]

An outstanding Canadian, Glazov deserves recognition, and so do many other brave dissidents for whom Canada has been a refuge. Nine million Canadians — that’s almost a third of us according to the 2006 census — came to these shores from communist-ruled countries. Many are now dead or very old. Their descendants deserve to see their sacrifices acknowledged and Canadians exposed to the full panoply of communist atrocities.

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

This memorial isn’t just a good idea, like an also-promised national Holocaust memorial, it is a necessary idea.

The exhaustively researched Holocaust is in no danger of being forgotten. The highest term of opprobrium in Western culture, whether from leftists or rightists (rightly or wrongly) is “Nazi,” not “communist.” That’s not because Nazis and communists have been compared and Nazis found to be worse. It’s because people don’t know how bad communism was and is.

In 2006 the Swedish Ministry of Education initiated programs teaching the crimes of communism because a poll had revealed only 10% of Swedish youth could identify the Gulag. Canadian youth would not fare better. All educated Canadians associate the word “Auschwitz” with “genocide.” The equally horrific “Holodomor” is more likely to draw a blank stare.

Why has communism escaped the moral condemnation Nazism attracts in such exuberant degree? In recent years several scholars have addressed the question and provided a litany of reasons, amongst them:

z  Stalin was a war ally and therefore escaped the postwar censure he deserved;

z  Only since the fall of the Berlin Wall has the most damaging data emerged; by then witnesses were aging and focused on economic priorities;

z  There was no Nuremburg, no Truth and Reconciliation moment for communism as there was for other genocidal regimes;

z  Communist propaganda machines are extremely efficient at positive branding (Trudeau bought in; his fawning patronage of Fidel Castro was beyond contemptible).

But all reasons pale beside the glaring failure of left-wing intellectuals to admit — and to teach — that communism isn’t simply an unfortunate contingency of socialist passion but an ideology as immoral and implacably ruthless and dramatically consequential as Nazism.

Actually it is more than intellectuals’ failure, which suggests passivity; it was, and is, active avoidance. Yuri Glazov was proud to become a Canadian citizen, but was shocked and chagrined at the ignorance and even denial of communism’s crimes he found amongst his fellow academics. As his son Jamie Glazov noted in his 2009 book, United in Hate: the Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror, “[W]hile we were cherishing our newfound freedom, we encountered … intellectuals in the universities who hated my parents for the story they had to tell …”

Left-wing intellectuals’ laundering of the truth about communism has translated into a vast lacuna in the teaching of 20th century history in our schools — one we can only hope the new memorial will help to fill.

The word “memorial” is somewhat misleading, though, suggesting that communism is a closed historical chapter. The fall of the Berlin Wall notwithstanding, communism in one guise or another still determines the fate of millions of hapless people around the globe. Victims in communist regimes are still starved, imprisoned, tortured and denied the most basic of human rights.

“Centre”? “Testament”? It is not too late to find a word to remind communism’s ongoing victims that right-thinking Canadians know the truth and will not abandon them.

To learn more about Yuri Glazov and the Yuri Glazov Memorial Award, click here.

Let me join David Swindle in saying that you owe it to yourself to read Jamie Glazov’s warm and gripping tribute to his father, Yuri Glazov, a scholar and dissident who stood up to the Soviet machine even as it moved to crush him.

David writes, “Jamie has finally written the kind of piece I’ve been bugging him to do for months…”

Here’s a sample of why:

On February 24, 1968, my father signed the Letter of Twelve, a letter written and signed by twelve Soviet dissidents to the Supreme Congress of Communist Parties in Budapest denouncing Soviet human rights abuses. He was immediately fired from his work for being “unprofessional” in his scholarly studies (even though he previously had received high praise for his academic studies).

…During this time, a friend of our family’s told my dad that, under vicious harassment by the KGB (they had discovered an affair she was having and threatened to tell her husband), she had agreed to be a witness for them in a trial against my father that would charge (and convict) him of selling foreign currency and drugs on the black market (which she would place in our apartment).

Consider this the official beginning of my lobbying effort to Jamie to turn this brave and compelling family saga into a book—a true and lasting memorial to his father.

In the meantime, you can help keep the legacy of this brave man alive.  Dr. Glazov taught for more than two decades at Canada’s Dalhousie University, and a memorial scholarship was established in his name.  However, as Jamie writes:

My father’s career at Dalhousie lasted twenty years – until his retirement in 1995. To honor his memory, a memorial award was established in his name. But funding for this award has been scarce and now the possibility has emerged that it will be shut down. This memorial fund is really the only marker in existence that publicly keeps alive who my dad was, what he did, and what he represented. It symbolizes the struggle of all dissidents for truth and for freedom. If some funds begin to materialize, the memorial award for my father can remain in existence. I would like to put a request to all of you who care and who can help, to kindly click on this site at Dalhousie to read about the Yuri Glazov Memorial Award and to contribute in any way you can – and even the smallest contribution will count a lot.

We all enjoy the freedom of the “new media” to get online and express our opinions, advocate for freedom, and rail against the prevailing academic culture which ignores the contributions of brave men like Yuri Glazov, while it celebrates those who would collaborate with evil like Ward Churchill and Howard Zinn.

So, here is your chance to actually do something about it.  How about it?  Let’s put our money where are keyboards are.

They have more in common than just the family resemblance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the whole thing at FrontPage.

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

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

FP: Pamela, welcome back to Frontpage Interview.

I would like to talk to you today about some troubling developments that occurred at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

Let’s begin by you telling us about your own event there.

Geller: Good to be here again Jamie, thank you.

Last Friday, Robert Spencer and I hosted a standing-room-only event at CPAC. It was standing room only, despite the fact that we were off to the side and were going against Gov. Tim Pawlenty, Congressman Steve King, Congressman Mike Pence, Grover Norquist and several other panels.

Our conference was designed to speak the truths that others will not speak. First to speak was Wafa Sultan, the ex-Muslim who shot to international fame after she stood up for human rights against Sharia on Al-Jazeera in a debate with an Islamic cleric on a famous viral video, and the author of A God Who Hates. She spoke of Islam’s war against the West. Then Steve Coughlin, the former Pentagon Islamic law specialist who was making his first public appearance after being fired from the Defense Department after pressure from those who didn’t like his truth-of-the-matter stance on jihad. He gave a bit of his controversial presentation to the Pentagon, showing how the Defense Department is ignoring the true nature of the jihad threat, to our great detriment – which is the title of his lengthy thesis on this problem.

Then in the second hour our speakers showed the next phases of the advance of jihad and Sharia. While Coughlin was fired for telling the truth about Islam and jihad, human rights activist Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff is being prosecuted for “hate speech” in Austria for the same truth telling. After her came Anders Gravers of Stop the Islamisation of Europe, who has been physically assaulted for standing up for freedom in Denmark. Then Simon Deng, a former slave in Sudan and a leading human rights activist against jihad and Islamic supremacism, showed what life is like for the subjugated, enslaved Christians of southern Sudan – the fourth phase of Sharia encroachment. Finally, the war hero and Congressional candidate Lt. Colonel Allen West gave a stirring speech calling us all to the defense of freedom.

FP: It’s a great sign that CPAC hosted an event like this, right?

Geller: Well Jamie, it’s not really what happened. The truth of the matter is that our event was at CPAC, but it was an independent event, not a CPAC event. And the truths that our speakers told were not aired at any other event at CPAC.

FP: Ok, just a second, let me get something straight: we are facing a deadly enemy in this current terror war, and that enemy is Islamic jihad — based on Islamic theology. CPAC had how many panels about it?

Geller: One.

And it was an exercise in misinformation.

FP: Are you kidding me?

Geller: Not at all. The single panel was:

“You’ve Been Lied To: Why Real Conservatives are Against the War on Terror Delaware Ballroom
Sponsored by Campaign for Liberty (60 minutes)
Speakers: Retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Karen Kwiatkowski and Jacob Hornberger, President of FFF
Open to All CPAC Attendees”

The message there was that “real conservatives” don’t support the war on terror because it is a creation of the “Israeli lobby” — which coalesces with the left-wing’s new anti-Semitism against neoconservatives. Karen Kwiatkowski is a darling of both the leftist Huffington Post and the anti-Semitic paleocon site Antiwar.com.

FP: Tell us some more about Kwiatkowski.

Geller: Well, let’s put it this way: in a 2006 article, she described John Bolton as “that blubbering bundle of self-righteousness.” She also wrote:

“Many in America oppose the U.S. knee-jerk, unquestioning support for Israel. Many more worry that the Israeli lobby is unusually influential in Washington, while remaining hidden and unaccountable to average Americans. Still others are alarmed that Israel’s constant war mentality has become our new American model, and that Iraq and our own borders have become our own occupied territories, teeming with terror and constituting a never-ending threat to our lives, prosperity and value system.”

Kwiatkowski is a retired military officer. Is this really the type of thinking prevalent in the military? Me thinks not. So why on earth was she given a platform at CPAC? Doing  can only undermine those who are now serving. Having different points of view presented is one thing, but by hosting this event, CPAC explicitly endorsed this fringe, anti-American thinking.

That panel was, of course, a reflection of Ron Paul’s perspective. There were no counter-jihadists, no Robert Spencer, no Ibn Warraq on any CPAC panel, but they had room for this well-funded “Campaign for Liberty” presentation. The same group also had a co-sponsor booth. No expense was spared — they were everywhere. At the event Jacob Hornberger said that there were four reasons why real conservatives should be against the war on terror: because it is too costly, because it makes us less safe (he said Americans were less secure because American troops kill children and mothers and people who are simply defending their country against invaders, and have even, he said, killed a bride at her wedding), because it violates Constitutional principles, and because it is a threat to liberty.

Nothing was said about the Islamic doctrine that shows that jihadists would be waging war against the U.S. even if we did end all actions in Afghanistan and Iraq. The panel agreed with Obama, that Muslims are angry with us because of our actions, and will stop being angry with us if we change our foreign policy. This view is naïve and reflects ignorance of Islamic doctrine. And consider this: if Ron Paul were as anti-Islam as he is anti-Israel, he would not have been in CPAC, and his perspective would not have been represented. Instead of coming together on our basic core values and circling the wagons on the fundamentals — national security, small government, low taxes, and the freedom of speech — the CPAC leadership had a circus of the fringe.

FP: This is mind-boggling. This is a conservative conference and one would think conservatives are interested in national security and protecting our liberties and American lives. Why do you think this happened?

Geller: I think CPAC’s agenda in 2010, as well as 2009 and before that, reflects the influence of Grover Norquist, the conservative powerhouse and kingmaker. He is a board member of the ACU, and from the looks of CPAC’s covered topics and omission of discussion of jihad, it looks as if he exerts enormous influence over David Keene, the ACU’s nominal leader. Norquist and his ally Suhail Khan seem to be in charge at CPAC — no CPAC event goes on that doesn’t reflect their perspective.

FP: Expand a bit on what perspective Norquist represents.

Geller: Jamie, Grover Norquist’s troubling ties to Islamic supremacists and jihadists have been known for years. He and his Palestinian wife, Samah Alrayyes, who was director of communications for his Islamic Free Market Institute until they married in 2005, are very active in “Muslim outreach.” Just six weeks after 9/11, The New Republic ran an expose explaining how Norquist arranged for George W. Bush to meet with fifteen Islamic supremacists at the White House on September 26, 2001 — to show how Muslims rejected terrorism. Wrote TNR author Franklin Foer:

Unfortunately, many of the leaders present hadn’t unambiguously rejected it. To the president’s left sat Dr. Yahya Basha, president of the American Muslim Council, an organization whose leaders have repeatedly called Hamas “freedom fighters.” Also in attendance was Salam Al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, who on the afternoon of September 11 told a Los Angeles public radio audience that “we should put the State of Israel on the suspect list.” And sitting right next to President Bush was Muzammil Siddiqi, president of the Islamic Society of North America, who last fall told a Washington crowd chanting pro-Hezbollah slogans, “America has to learn if you remain on the side of injustice, the wrath of God will come.”

It was Norquist who ushered these silver-tongued jihadists into the Oval Office after the worst attack ever on American soil. Don’t you think that the likes of Ibn Warraq, Bat Ye’or, and Wafa Sultan should have been advising the President instead of Hamas, Hizballah and the Muslim Brotherhood? But that wasn’t to be. So at that September 26 meeting Bush declared that “the teachings of Islam are teachings of peace and good.” It was a critically important, historic moment. What should have been the most important teaching moment of the long war became a propaganda tool for Islam. A singular historic opportunity was squandered, and the harm that has resulted is incalculable.

FP: Why did Bush do that?

Geller: Because he trusted Norquist, who vouched for these Muslim leaders. Yet “the record suggests,” wrote Foer, “that Norquist has spent quite a lot of time promoting people openly sympathetic to Islamist terrorists.” And this continued for years. In December 2003, David Horowitz wrote that Norquist:

“has formed alliances with prominent Islamic radicals who have ties to the Saudis and to Libya and to Palestine Islamic Jihad, and who are now under indictment by U.S. authorities. Equally troubling is that the arrests of these individuals and their exposure as agents of terrorism have not resulted in noticeable second thoughts on Grover’s part or any meaningful effort to dissociate himself from his unsavory friends.”

Horowitz wrote this in an introduction to a detailed expose by Frank Gaffney here in Frontpage showing how Norquist had given Muslims with jihad terror links access to the highest levels of the U.S. government.

Grover Norquist was on the jihad payroll before and after the carnage and death of September 11. Gaffney revealed Norquist’s close ties to Abdurahman Alamoudi, who is now serving twenty-three years in prison for financing jihad activity. In 2000, Alamoudi said at a rally, “I have been labeled by the media in New York to be a supporter of Hamas. Anybody support Hamas here?…Hear that, Bill Clinton? We are all supporters of Hamas. I wished they added that I am also a supporter of Hizballah.” Alamoudi was at that time head of the now defunct “moderate” group known as American Muslim Council (AMC), and was active in other Muslim groups in the U.S. that showed sympathy or support for jihadists. And Alamoudi, according to Gaffney, gave $50,000 to the lobbying group Janus-Merritt Strategies, which Norquist cofounded.

His money bought influence. Gaffney wrote back in 2003: “It seems unlikely that even in Alamoudi’s wildest dreams he could have imagined the extent of the access, influence and legitimacy the American Muslim Council and allied Islamist organizations would be able to secure in Republican circles, thanks to the investment they began in 1998 in a relationship with Norquist.”

Alamoudi also helped found Norquist’s Islamic Institute with a $10,000 loan and a gift of another $10,000. The founding director of the Islamic Institute was Khaled Saffuri, a Palestinian Muslim who had previously been active in Islamic groups in Bosnia, where Islamic jihadists from all over the world gathered “to establish,” says Gaffney, “a beachhead on the continent of Europe.” Gaffney adds that Saffuri “has acknowledged personally supporting the families of suicide bombers – even though, in public settings, he strenuously denies having done so.” Saffuri also denounced Bush’s shutdown of the Holy Land Foundation, which was funneling charitable contributions to Hamas.

Norquist has also carried water for Islamic supremacist efforts to weaken anti-terror efforts. Gaffney reveals that:

“Norquist was also a prime-mover behind efforts to secure one of the Islamists’ top pre-9/11 agenda items: the abolition of a section of the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act that permits authorities to use what critics call ‘secret evidence.’…Norquist was an honoree at an event held by Sami Al-Arian’s National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom in July 2001, two months before 9/11. The award was for being a ‘champion of the abolishment movement against secret evidence.’”

Al-Arian in 2006 pleaded guilty “conspiracy to make or receive contributions of funds to or for the benefit of Palestinian Islamic Jihad.” Palestinian Islamic Jihad is even worse than Hamas, celebrates the killing of Israeli civilians and calls repeatedly for the destruction of Israel.

Scott Johnson of the Powerline blog noted shortly after Gaffney’s article appeared that Norquist’s reponse to this exhaustively documented expose was:

“personal and evasive. He attacks Gaffney as racist and bigoted; not a trace of evidence in the public record supports these charges. I heard Norquist respond to Gaffney in this manner at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington this past January. He did not deign to respond to Gaffney’s remarks in substance.”

Norquist also introduced Nihad Awad, cofounder and executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, to President Bush. CAIR is one of the foremost Islamic supremacist hate sponsors in the U.S. Terror expert Steve Emerson wrote that “CAIR, which touts itself as America’s premier Muslim civil rights organization, was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Terror trial.” He noted that CAIR cofounders Nihad Awad and Omar Ahmad attended “a 1993 Philadelphia meeting where the HAMAS members and supporters discussed a strategy to kill the Oslo Peace Accords, which threatened to marginalize HAMAS. The group also discussed ways to improve HAMAS fundraising in America.”

Emerson also reveals that according to the testimony of an FBI agent, “CAIR was listed as a member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee.” The Palestine Committee is dedicated to jihad for the destruction of Israel. Emerson reveals that a 1992 memo seized from a jihadi’s home explains that “Palestine is the one for which Muslim Brotherhood prepared armies – made up from the children of Islam in the Arab and Islamic nations to liberate its land from the abomination and the defilement of the children of the Jews and they watered its pure soil with their honorable blood which sprouted into a jihad that is continuing until the Day of Resurrection and provided a zeal without relenting making the slogan of its children ‘it is a Jihad for victory or martyrdom.’” Omar Ahmad and Nihad Awad were also listed as members of the Palestine Committee.

Robert Spencer added this about CAIR:

“CAIR operatives have repeatedly refused to denounce Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist groups. Several former CAIR officials have been convicted of various crimes related to jihad terror. CAIR’s cofounder and longtime Board chairman (Omar Ahmad), as well as its chief spokesman (Honest Ibe Hooper), have made Islamic supremacist statements. CAIR has warred against free speech in the past.”

These are Grover Norquist’s bedfellows. Abusing his power and access, he introduced Islamic supremacists who advocate the overthrow of the government to those who have an oath to protect and defend the Constitution, and advocated for their cause. The enemy’s strategy for winning is by subverting our senior leaders. Norquist made that possible.

FP: Is Norquist still doing all of this?

Geller: Yes, Jamie. Grover Norquist has continued his activities on behalf of the jihad: in 2008 journalist Paul Sperry revealed Norquist’s sponsorship of Muslim candidates with shadowy ties to terrorists, and wrote that Norquist had a “wicked project to dress Islamists up as patriotic Republicans so they can infiltrate the government.” Norquist sponsored Kamal Nawash’s unsuccessful bid to become Republican party leader in Virginia; Nawash was Abdurahman Alamoudi’s attorney. Norquist also aided previous failed political runs by Nawash – including Nawash’s 2003 Virginia state senate bid, to which Saffuri gave money.

Norquist also aided Faisal Gill’s failed run for the Virginia state legislature in 2007. Gill, like Nawash, was an associate of Alamoudi. During his run he took $3,000 in contributions from the pro-jihad Safa group.

FP: Final words?

Geller: It is no surprise that CPAC 2010, like CPAC 2009, had nothing addressing the war we are actually engaged in. This is due to the influence of Norquist, Keene, and Suhail Khan, a CPAC board member. According to Gaffney, Khan “has repeatedly been a featured speaker at MSA, ISNA and CAIR events” – that is, Muslim Students Association, Islamic Society of North America, and Council on American-Islamic Relations, three groups linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, the international Islamic organization dedicated to establishing the rule of Islamic law and the subjugation of infidels worldwide.

Grover Norquist single-handedly ushered into America’s highest levels of government Islamic supremacist leaders, subversives, the Islamic fifth column. Grover gave them unparalleled access. Why didn’t Gaffney’s revelations, and those that preceded and followed his expose, end Norquist’s influence among conservatives? Why does he still have so much power?

Grover Norquist should be a pariah, not a kingmaker.

FP: Pamela Geller, thank you for joining us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and

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

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

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

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

Levin: Thanks Jamie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FP: Thank you Robert Spencer.

There is much more. Read it all.

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

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

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

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

and

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

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

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

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

Levin: Thanks Jamie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FP: Thank you Robert Spencer.

David Hornik what do you make of the comments by Kennth Levin and Robert Spencer?

I would also like you to comment on two points:

[1] Gerges makes much of the fact that Hamas participated in elections and was elected. Does this by necessity confer reasonableness and legitimacy on Hamas?

[2] Gerges’s alleged quotes showing Hamas officials’ moderation were said in English. Is there a chance that Hamas’s messages are a bit different in Arabic to their own people?

Hornik: Jamie, Kenneth Levin’s comments are right on the mark. I wanted to add something to his observation that “Gerges supports his stance by citing Hamas statements in the vein of being prepared to accept an Israeli retreat to the pre-1967 cease-fire lines.” Kenneth rightly points out that “Hamas has made clear that it views truces as vehicles to facilitate its strengthening its own forces until it is in a better position to pursue Israel ‘s annihilation.” It could also be added that, in regard to Gaza, Israel already has retreated, fully, to the pre-1967 cease-fire lines, in the 2005 disengagement. Hamas took power in Gaza in winter 2006 not long before the Olmert government–which ran on a platform of further withdrawals in the West Bank–came to office in Israel (indeed, Olmert eventually offered Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas essentially all of the West Bank).

Seemingly, if Hamas’s aim is–as Gerges claims–a genuine territorial compromise with Israel, it would have encouraged the then-Israeli trend of withdrawal by showing Israel what a peaceful, constructive neighbor it could be in Gaza. Instead, of course, it rained hundreds of rockets and mortars on Israel until even the highly reluctant Olmert government had to launch Israel’s Gaza campaign last year, while the Israeli public soured on the idea of further withdrawals and elected a more realistic government. Yet, if you search the word “rocket” in Gerges’s article, you’ll come up with nothing. “Siege” is a different matter–he refers to the Israeli “siege” of Gaza several times but never refers to “rocket,” which is like referring to fire-trucks while leaving out the issue of fire.

Robert Spencer, in stressing Hamas’s inevitable religious commitment as an Islamic organization to the liberation of any part of dar al-Islam that is ruled by non-Muslims–meaning in this case, of course, not only the West Bank but the pre-1967 state of Israel itself–goes to the ideological heart of the matter. It is difficult to believe that Fawad Gerges, professor of Middle Eastern politics and international relations at the London School of Economics, is not aware of this tenet of Islam and how inextricably Hamas is bound to it, and the fact that he professes to take at face value a few Hamas statements in English about a territorial deal with Israel casts doubt on the ingenuousness of his article.

As for Hamas’s having been democratically elected, on which Gerges (like all other Hamas apologists) also puts much emphasis, naturally it can be pointed out that another totalitarian movement committed to the annihilation of Jews, the National Socialists in Germany, were also democratically elected, had to deal with all the mundane details of governance, etc., and it hardly had a moderating effect on them. Gerges never gets around to asking what has become of democracy in Gaza since Hamas’s election; the answer, of course, is that Gaza has become a classic, one-party, totalitarian political entity with no political opposition allowed and certainly no further elections in sight. Hamas’s brief venture at joint rule with Fatah in 2007, even though Fatah was in a distinctly subordinate position, ended with Hamas’s bloody ouster of Fatah and total takeover in June of that year, with its erstwhile Fatah compatriots being thrown off tall buildings.

And as for your question, Jamie, about Hamas’s messages to its own people in Arabic, as distinct from the few quotes in English to Western journalists that Gerges cites, the answer is that the messages in Arabic remain steeped in genocidal anti-Semitism and hatred of Israel. Hamas’s Al-Aqsa TV recently broadcast a play staged at the Islamic University in Gaza City claiming that Jews, as part of their religious practice, drink the blood of Arabs and Muslims and wash their hands in it. In a recent sermon in a mosque in the Nuseirat refugee camp in Gaza, Hamas-affiliated preacher Ziyad Abu al-Hajj stated that “the time will come, if Allah so allows, when their property [of the Jews] will be destroyed and their children will be exterminated, until not one single Jew or Zionist remains on earth.” During Israel’s campaign in Gaza last year, a book called The Zionist Holocaust was seized; it was printed by Hamas in 2008 and is full of Holocaust denial and anti-Semitic hatred.

There is no murderous, anti-Western, totalitarian movement–whether Nazism, Soviet communism, Chinese communism, Hezbollah, Hamas etc.–that has not had its apologists in the West. Gerges’s article is part of that inglorious tradition.

FP: Thank you David Hornik.

Kenneth Levin, some thoughts on Robert Spencer’s and David Hornik’s comments and some final words?

Levin: The points made by Robert Spencer and David Hornik are all incisive, further demonstrating the intellectual dishonesty of Gerges’s arguments. Robert Spencer’s observations about Hamas’s commitment to Islamic orthodoxy, with its categorical rejection of accepting territorial control of any part of what is deemed dar al-Islam by unbelievers, itself gives the lie to Gerges’s thesis. The discussion of Islamic religious sanctioning of deception against unbelievers provides further, important elaboration on Gerges’s sham claims.

David Hornik’s discussion of what would have been Hamas’s behavior in the wake of Israel’s Gaza withdrawal had it genuinely been interested in an ultimate accommodation with Israel is another incisive rejoinder to Gerges. And David’s point about the absurdity of suggesting that electoral success somehow confers legitimacy on a genocidal regime is likewise on target. His additional examples of what, in fact, Hamas is currently telling its own people, with its anti-Jewish blood libels and its references to pursuing the annihilation of the Jews, further casts Gerges’s distortions in their proper perspective.

As David Hornik also notes, Gerges’s, and The Nation’s, apologetics for a genocidal regime is hardly something new but rather has a pedigree as hoary as it is ugly.

FP: Thank you Kevin Levin,

Robert Spencer, final comments?

I’d like you to touch on Gerges’s argument, which is a bizarre and ongoing theme and assumption in the media, that Palestinians have made all kinds of concessions and that Israel has made none. We know that in terms of the planet that we happen to be occupying, Israel has made eternal concessions, many of which are mentioned in this symposium. What concessions have the Palestinians ever made? I can’t even think of one. All that comes to mind is the violation of the Oslo accords, the preaching of hate in the Palestinian media, mosques and schools, and the constant terror being inflicted on Israelis.

What concession have the Palestinians ever made? (i.e. cracking down on the terrorist infrastructure, conceding that maybe Jews should not be exterminated from the face of the earth, etc.) Can you think of one real one?

Spencer: Jamie, in this context David Hornik’s observation is apposite, that “Hamas’s messages to its own people in Arabic, as distinct from the few quotes in English to Western journalists that Gerges cites, … remain steeped in genocidal anti-Semitism and hatred of Israel.” The closest thing that the Palestinians have ever come to an actual concession has been the appearance of concessions manufactured for the Western press, but contradicted in their Arabic statements.

Yasir Arafat, for example, agreed to the Oslo Accords, which angered many Palestinians with their apparent concessions to Israel, but Arafat explained in Arabic that he was following the model of the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah. This was a pivotal treaty that Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, agreed to with the pagan Arabs of the Quraysh tribe, who were at that time (although they were his own people) his principal enemies. Muhammad made significant concessions, to the consternation of his closest followers, but broke the treaty when he was in a stronger position vis-à-vis the Quraysh and no longer needed to make concessions to them in order to get what he wanted.

Sure enough, true to Arafat’s analogy, the Palestinians did indeed break the Oslo accords. And despite numerous entreaties from naïve Western leaders, they have never recognized Israel’s right to exist (although several Palestinian leaders, including even Khaled Meshaal of Hamas, have give the appearance of doing so on some occasions), nor have made any other concessions.

It’s noteworthy that last year when Obama met with Netanyahu, he pressed him for concessions on the “settlements,” but when he met with Mahmoud Abbas, he said nothing about the Palestinians needing to end the rocket attacks against Israeli civilians, the genocidal jihadist rhetoric on official Palestinian TV, or anything else. The Palestinians have never conceded an inch to the Israelis. And they never will. Fawaz Gerges must know that.

FP: Last word goes to you David Hornik.

Hornik: “The loathsome occupation in Palestine – its land and its holy places – by these new Mongols and what they are perpetrating upon this holy, blessed and pure     land – killing, assassination, destruction, confiscation, Judaization, harassment and splitting the homeland – are clear proof of…hostility, of incomparable racism,     and of Nazism of the 20th century. The Jews, the enemies of Allah and of His Messenger, the enemies of Allah and of His Messenger!…

“Oh Muslims! The Jews are the Jews. The Jews are the Jews. Even if donkeys would cease to bray, dogs cease to bark, wolves cease to howl and snakes to     bite, the Jews would not cease to harbor hatred towards Muslims. The Prophet said that if two Jews would be alone with a Muslim, they would think only of     killing him. Oh Muslims!… The Prophet says: ‘You shall fight the Jews and kill them….’ … this land will be liberated only by means of Jihad….”

These words did not issue from Hamas, but were part of a mosque sermon shown on Palestinian Authority TV on January 29, less than two weeks ago. In raising the inane issue of whether Hamas has “moderated,” articles such as Gerges’s further distort the picture by implying that, regarding Fatah–the organization embodied by the Palestinian Authority of the West Bank–moderation has already occurred. Of course, that is far from the case, as–among many other things–the murder of an Israeli soldier last week by a Palestinian Authority police offer testifies, along with the ongoing indoctrination of the West Bank population in genocidally anti-Jewish themes as the above extracts from the sermon exemplify. If this is what happens under Fatah rule–relatively secular compared to Hamas, which is not the same as secular–then discerning a moderating trend in emphatically religious Hamas is the height of inanity–at best.

As for Hamas, it has been disclosed in Israel that last December 12, five Hamas operatives were arrested while trying to infiltrate Israel from Egypt. They were supposed to carry out an attack that had been planned by Rahad Said, a senior Hamas commander in Gaza, involving mass murder and the kidnapping of another IDF soldier–in addition to Gilad Shalit, kidnapped in June 2006 and held ever since, in gross violation of international law, without so much as a visit by the Red Cross. Under interrogation, one of the five captured terrorists disclosed that still another Hamas terrorist was aiming to infiltrate Israel. Based on the information, this operative was captured on December 31 and has confessed to “planning to plant bombs in populated areas.” If Hamas is seeking compromise and peace with Israel, it somehow is not getting the message through. Fawad Gerges and The Nation, in claiming to hear such a message, are taking a side in the conflict between barbarism and civilization and it is not the right side.

FP: Kenneth Levin, David Hornik and Robert Spencer, thank you for joining Frontpage Symposium.

*

To get the whole story behind why the Left reaches out in solidarity to Islamic terrorist entities like Hamas, read Jamie Glazov’s new book, United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror.

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

FP: Pamela Geller, welcome back to Frontpage Interview.

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

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

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

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

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

FP: Provide some evidence.

Geller: That’s easy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FP: What can parents do about this?

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

FP: Pamela Geller, thank you for joining us.

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

FP: Dave Gaubatz, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

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

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

Gaubatz: Thank you Jamie.

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

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

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

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

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

FP: Talk a bit more about these videos.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FP: Final words?

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

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

Thank you Jamie.

FP: Dave Gaubatz, thank you for joining us.

To order Muslim Mafia, click here.

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

FP: Andy McCarthy, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

I would like to talk to you today about Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts and how it was the issue of national-security that put Brown over Coakley.

Can you talk a bit about that? The people seemed to have cared about terrorism and the treatment of enemy combatants, yes?

McCarthy: Jamie, great to be here as always.  And you’re right.  The Brown campaign’s internal polling told them something very interesting.  While it’s true that healthcare is what nationalized the election and riveted everyone’s attention to it, it was the national security issues that put real distance between the two candidates in the mind of the electorate—in blue Massachusetts of all places.  Sen.-elect Brown was able to speak forcefully and convincingly on issues like treating our jihadist enemies as combatants rather than mere defendants, about killing terrorists and preventing terrorism rather than contenting ourselves with prosecutions after Americans have been killed, about tough interrogation when necessary to save innocent lives.  Martha Coakley, by contrast, had to try to defend the indefensible, which is Obama-style counterterrorism.  It evidently made a huge difference to voters.

FP: What do you think of how Bush was treated on this whole issue?

McCarthy: As many of us predicted during the Bush years when the president was being hammered by the Left and the press, history is treating him much more kindly on the national security front.  His movement of the country to a war-footing rather than treating international terrorism as a criminal justice matter was common sense, but common sense cuts against the Washington grain so it took a strong president to do it.  Now, on issue after issue, he is being vindicated—he and Vice President Cheney, who has become the country’s leading voice on national security, after spending years being vilified.

FP: What role did McCain play?

McCarthy: Sen. McCain is, as ever, a mixed bag.  He’s recently been very good on the need to treat the enemy as an enemy, not as a defendant. So that was helpful to Brown. But it can’t be forgotten that McCain was the force behind the libel of Bush as a torture monger and the consequent ruination of our interrogation policy.  And it was the “McCain Amendment” that gave us, as a matter of law, the extension of Fifth Amendment rights to our enemies overseas, which has had awful ramifications even outside the issue of interrogation practices. McCain is responsible for a lot of the fodder that made Obama possible.

FP: What lessons should Republicans take from Brown’s success?

McCarthy: These national security positions resonate with voters.  Healthcare, TARP, and the economic issues in general are very important, but they’re complex and make people’s eyes glaze over sometimes.  The national defense issues, besides being the most important ones confronted by a political community, are comparatively easy to wrap your brain around.  And strong, unapologetic national defense in a time of terrorist threat is appealing to voters.  So we should be arguing these issues forcefully, and not worry about the fact that the left-wing legacy media will say nasty things about us.  Their instinctive America-bashing is why they are speaking to—or, better, speaking at—a steadily decreasing audience.

FP: The Left pretends that its positions in how to confront terror (or not to) are somehow founded on the Constitution. What’s the mindset here?

McCarthy: Yes, because they reject the foundational fact that the Constitution is a compact between the American people and the government they created.  They think every person on planet earth is an American waiting to happen, born with the full panoply of American constitutional rights that can be asserted against the American people.  And they think the courts, rather than being a peer branch of our government, stand over and above our government:  a forum where the rest of the world, including enemies of the United States, is invited to make its case against the United States.  That’s a warped understanding of the Constitution.

FP: What hope does Brown’s victory give? What do you think Obama, Holder and Napolitano are thinking – or not thinking?

McCarthy: Well, I think it’s Brown combined with what’s happened in New Jersey and Virginia, with Obama’s plunging numbers, the unpopularity of the Democrats’ healthcare, employment and national-security policies, and the disgusting wheeling-and-dealing the supposedly “transparent” Left is doing behind close doors (i.e., not on C-SPAN). All these things give hope that freedom is on the march, that people are broadly rejecting statism.  But I don’t think Obama is a normal politician and that his administration is a conventional “let’s modulate to remain viable” administration.

Enacting their agenda is more important to them than being reelected, and they are not to be underestimated.

FP: Why do you think that when I see or think about Janet Napolitano I am engulfed with a profound sense of doom and despair?

McCarthy: Well, if I have this right, she is an official who is in charge of securing the homeland but — after ballyhooed, years-long investigations, including by the 9/11 Commissions — she didn’t know how the 9/11 hijackers got here, thought they snuck in from Canada, and believes that what they did when they got here was a “man-caused disaster” that had nothing to do with jihadist ideology (indeed, she thinks that saying “jihadist” is problematic). She does see ideology as a problem, of course, but only if it is … conservative ideology.  That is, she thinks the real terror threat comes from people with radical ideas like limited government, the sanctity of life, and the Second Amendment — especially if they’re military vets who’ve served in George Bush’s wars of aggression. And she is in charge of enforcing the immigration laws but wasn’t aware that entering the country illegally is a criminal offense.

I can’t imagine why you’d have a problem with any of that, Jamie.

FP: Who needs horror movies or a tragic film to make you cry when you have things like this to think about?

Well, let’s move on:

What was this whole thing about Brown’s pick-up truck and Obama making fun of it? I thought Obama represented the common man?

McCarthy: This president has lived a very different kind of life from most Americans.  He lived his early, formative years in Indonesia, a majority-Muslim police state. After he returned to America at age ten or so, he dove into the fever-swamps of the Left and was steeped in the cynicism and nihilism of Saul Alinsky. For years, he’s surrounded himself with fawning sycophants who’ve told him he’s “The One.” And he’s extremely insulated from the real world of everyday Americans.  I don’t think the sudden burst of Obama-style populism is going to fly — and going after Brown’s pick-up is a good indication of why.  He thinks people who like their pick-up trucks are bitter-clingers.  Actually, they’re Americans.

FP: Brown vs. Obama, 2012?

McCarthy: I don’t think we should get ahead of ourselves.  Brown’s an impressive, talented guy, but he’s also someone no one outside of Massachusetts had heard of until a few short weeks ago.  But this does underscore something I’ve been saying for a long time.  As late as 1991, few people really knew who Bill and Hillary Clinton were, and yet they’ve towered over our politics from 1992 forward.  The world changed on a dime on 9/11.

A year ago today, with Pres. Obama just inaugurated and with the Democrats having wide margins in Congress, the Republican party seemed dead and even conservative intellectuals were telling us we had to abandon Reagan conservatism—the conservatism that’s leading us out of the woods.  This is all a long-winded way of saying:  We may not yet know, even today, who the leaders will be when 2012 rolls around.  We’ve got a ton on our plate right now, and the unknown tomorrow.  You know the old saw, “You want to make God laugh—tell Him about your plans.”  Right now, I’m worried about today, and content to figure 2012 will take care of itself.

FP: Well before we say goodbye for now, what is on your mind the most right now? What can you tell our readers that will give us all some hope that America, despite its current leadership, can prevail against the threats it faces?

McCarthy: After slumbering for too long, the public — the great swath of Americans that is basically conservative, patriotic, and thinks the country is the best the world has ever known, not in dire need of transformative “change” — has asserted itself.  But even if he’s held to one term, Obama will leave us in a deep hole.  The reckless borrowing and spending would take decades to dig out of even if we stopped it tomorrow. There is a lot of mischief a sprawling executive bureaucracy can do in four years, and Obama is likely to stock the federal courts with very left-wing judges who will try to impose transnational progressivism by fiat if the Republicans don’t have the gumption to stop the president from appointing them.  And that last point is what I think about most.

The challenge for Republicans is not to win the next elections.  The smart Democrats have already factored elections in.  Obama Leftists are not conventional politicians. They are true-believers. Of course they hope their friends at ACORN and similar outfits will soften the blow come November.  But if not, they are willing to endure electoral losses for what they see as the greater good of using this one-time opportunity they have to transform this country radically.

Republicans don’t so much need a plan to win elections — the Democrats’ statist policies and their irresponsible positions on national security will take care of that.  Stopping bad government is not enough. Republicans need a plan, after they win elections, to roll back what the Left has done and is doing.  That will require courage and skill.  I hope we have it, but I confess to worrying about whether we do.

FP: Andy McCarthy, thank you, and a pleasure and honor as always to speak with you.

Is my dear friend and colleague Jamie Glazov finally starting to get the recognition he deserves?

I certainly hope so. Jamie’s analysis of the psychology of Islamic terrorism is unique and compelling. After encountering his work — like his recent blockbuster article on Abdulmutallab — you’ll never think about Islamofascism the same way again.

Check out this column from Australian writer Miranda Devine who seems to agree:

As the youngest of 16 children and the son of his father’s No. 2 wife, he reportedly spent most of his childhood at an English boarding school in West Africa. The trajectory to extreme violence of this gentle, pious young man who wanted so much to be good and consequential, and yet was consumed with guilt about sex, fits with much of what is known about other Islamist suicide bombers.

Perhaps the best psychological explanation comes from United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror, the recent book by Jamie Glazov, the managing editor of FrontPage Magazine.

In a chapter entitled “To Hate a Woman”, he describes in chilling detail the oppression of women in parts of the Muslim world and the “theological justification” for violence against females “from the very moment of their birth”.

Islamist hatred of women has “fertilised the soil in which … terrorism and the new death cult have grown”.

He claims there is an “Islamist war on private love [which] derives most of its energy from a deep-seated misogyny. Women’s empowerment, independence and self-determination, especially the sexual variety, pose a threat to Islamism’s very existence.”

Islamist misogyny, he claims, comes from Islam itself. “The notion that women are by their very nature inferior to men is the underpinning of the entire structure and derives its legitimacy from numerous traditional teachings.”

It is no coincidence that the Arabic word “fitna” has two meanings – beautiful woman and social chaos.

Read the rest here at the Sydney Morning Herald.

Related posts:

1. Jamie Glazov Discusses "United In Hate"
2. Jamie Glazov Takes on Sean Penn at World Net Daily
3. French Blog Translates Jamie Glazov's Rebuttal to Naomi Wolf