University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee officials said Friday that they will investigate whether student conduct rules were violated when Muslim and Jewish students clashed during a protest of a Jewish-sponsored event on campus Thursday.

One Jewish student was reported injured and a Muslim student was arrested by campus police in the incident on Spaights Plaza outside the UWM Union during an event meant to mark the 62nd anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel.

The event erupted into shouting and then violence after members of the Muslim Student Association confronted the Jewish students over Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, and a Jewish student attempted to throw a Palestinian flag in the trash.

Jewish students said Friday that they felt threatened and were seeking a meeting with university officials to ensure a safe environment for future events. And a small group of Jewish and Muslim students met on the plaza Friday to quietly discuss the conflict and how they might move beyond it.

"It was very difficult, but it was good to do," said Diana Azimov, president of the Jewish Student Association who planned the Israel anniversary party and was offended by the protest - particularly a swastika that was scrawled along with other anti-Israel rhetoric on the plaza the night before the event.

"I think it says something about these groups that we could clash one day and the next day come together to share our feelings," she said.

Yamin Masalkhi, who is president of the Muslim Student Association and participated in the protest, said that he apologized to the organizers, but that many members in his organization are of Palestinian descent and have strong feelings about Israel's treatment of the Palestinians.

"We didn't go there intending to cause trouble, we just wanted to have a conversation," said Masalkhi, who stressed their actions were personal and not affiliated with the Muslim Student Association. "Things unwound so quickly," he said.

At one point during the confrontation, Masalkhi said, "some of the hotheads in our group" scaled a climbing wall the Jewish students rented for the event and unfurled a Palestinian flag atop it.

The flag was confiscated, and when one of the Jewish students attempted to throw it in the trash, a Muslim student struck him - though witnesses differ on how hard.

The Muslim students and members of Students for a Democratic Society - which is under investigation by the university for its role in a March protest on campus that turned violent - said they wrote anti-Israel political statements in chalk on the plaza pavement Wednesday night, but denied drawing the swastika.

"We saw a lot of things the next day that weren't there the night before - the swastika, obscene remarks that don't further anybody's interests," said Masalkhi....

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee officials said Friday that they will investigate whether student conduct rules were violated when Muslim and Jewish students clashed during a protest of a Jewish-sponsored event on campus Thursday.

One Jewish student was reported injured and a Muslim student was arrested by campus police in the incident on Spaights Plaza outside the UWM Union during an event meant to mark the 62nd anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel.

The event erupted into shouting and then violence after members of the Muslim Student Association confronted the Jewish students over Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, and a Jewish student attempted to throw a Palestinian flag in the trash.

Jewish students said Friday that they felt threatened and were seeking a meeting with university officials to ensure a safe environment for future events. And a small group of Jewish and Muslim students met on the plaza Friday to quietly discuss the conflict and how they might move beyond it.

"It was very difficult, but it was good to do," said Diana Azimov, president of the Jewish Student Association who planned the Israel anniversary party and was offended by the protest - particularly a swastika that was scrawled along with other anti-Israel rhetoric on the plaza the night before the event.

"I think it says something about these groups that we could clash one day and the next day come together to share our feelings," she said.

Yamin Masalkhi, who is president of the Muslim Student Association and participated in the protest, said that he apologized to the organizers, but that many members in his organization are of Palestinian descent and have strong feelings about Israel's treatment of the Palestinians.

"We didn't go there intending to cause trouble, we just wanted to have a conversation," said Masalkhi, who stressed their actions were personal and not affiliated with the Muslim Student Association. "Things unwound so quickly," he said.

At one point during the confrontation, Masalkhi said, "some of the hotheads in our group" scaled a climbing wall the Jewish students rented for the event and unfurled a Palestinian flag atop it.

The flag was confiscated, and when one of the Jewish students attempted to throw it in the trash, a Muslim student struck him - though witnesses differ on how hard.

The Muslim students and members of Students for a Democratic Society - which is under investigation by the university for its role in a March protest on campus that turned violent - said they wrote anti-Israel political statements in chalk on the plaza pavement Wednesday night, but denied drawing the swastika.

"We saw a lot of things the next day that weren't there the night before - the swastika, obscene remarks that don't further anybody's interests," said Masalkhi....

The South Florida chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-SFL) today announced that Miami-Dade Transit is dropping bus advertisements sponsored by an anti-Islam hate group.

Let's see. CAIR is an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case -- so named by the Justice Department. 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, and that CAIR's cofounder and longtime Board chairman (Omar Ahmad), as well as its chief spokesman (Honest Ibe Hooper), have made Islamic supremacist statements.

Meanwhile, SIOA is dedicated to defending the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, the legal equality of all people, and the Constitutional principle of non-establishment of religion as the only secure foundation for a society in which people of good faith differ in conscience.

Which one is the hate group again?

CAIR-SFL asked that the ads, produced by the hate group Stop the Islamization of America, be dropped because they promote bigotry and may fuel discrimination against ordinary Florida Muslims.

So it does look as if Miami-Dade Transit bowed to the will of these duplicitous Hamas-linked Islamic supremacist thugs. We're suing Miami-Dade Transit for infringement of our First Amendment rights and breach of contract.

"We believe Miami-Dade Transit did the right thing in dropping this campaign of hatred and intolerance," said CAIR-SFL Executive Director Muhammed Malik. "The advertisement's reference to apostasy is merely a smoke-screen for the promotion of anti-Islam bigotry and the attempted marginalization of American Muslims."

No, CAIR's actions are merely a smokescreen for the Islamic supremacist suppression of the freedom of speech and the introduction into the U.S. of Sharia provision requiring dhimmis to refrain from speaking in unacceptable ways about Allah or Muhammad, on pain of death.

He said Stop the Islamization of America's leaders, Pam Geller and Robert Spencer, are considered by many Muslims to be among the nation's most vicious Islamophobes.

CAIR would have you believe that telling the truth about the global jihad and Islamic supremacism is "Islamophobia." I think the term Islamorealism is more accurate.

Then CAIR defames Pamela Geller, who ably answers here. Unfortunately for the gentle stomach-stapled beekeeper Honest Ibe Hooper and his merry band of liars at CAIR, on the same day that CAIR claimed that Geller was "seemingly supportive of the slain South African apartheid leader Eugene Terre'blanche," she wrote about Terreblanche at the American Thinker that he was the "leader of the noxious and hateful neo-Nazi Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB)." Whoops!

And so it goes. Virtually all of what CAIR says about Pamela Geller is unsupported smear, some of it taken from the by now hopelessly discredited libelblogger Charles Johnson, whom CAIR doesn't even name in this press release. This is a departure from earlier smearfests from CAIR, and shows that even Honest Ibe Hooper and his fellow libel artists know that Johnson is so thoroughly discredited that to name him as the source of the "fascist" smears would be to show them to be hollow on their face.

Then CAIR turns to me:

Robert Spencer has also been criticized for the extremism exhibited on his personal anti-Muslim web site "Jihad Watch," which recently compared Muslims to Nazis. Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald wrote: "When I see thousands of people in a mosque, I am put in mind not of a gathering at St. Peter's, but rather, of a Nuremberg Rally, a horizontal collective affair, rather than vertical, with the prostration itself performing, or signifying, blind obedience of the kind that, at the real Nuremberg, is signified by the heil-hitlering salute of thousands, yelling in unison, and saluting, and re-saluting." [Spencer refused to repudiate those statements.]

Why should I?

...One then right-wing critic wrote of Spencer's blog: "His website has descended into a true hate site at this point, dominated by extreme, bigoted commenters who regularly advocate genocide and mass murder of Muslims." [That writer has since broken with the far-right, in part because of pervasive anti-Islam bigotry its proponents often exhibit.]

That is all, of course, referring to the execrable libelblogger Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs, who today has won a new distinction: he is now the tool so debased, so universally distrusted and despised that even Hamas-linked CAIR won't name him.

In 2007, Spencer spoke at a so-called "Counterjihad Brussels" conference in Belgium attended by those with links to far-right parties such as Filip Dewinter of Vlaams Belang (Belgium) and Ted Ekeroth of Sverigedemokraterna (Sweden). Both parties have been accused of either having a racist platform, a neo-Nazi past or having links to neo-Nazis and other racists.

They have been "accused." An accusation is not the same thing as a fact. The libelblogger Johnson has spread a great deal of second-hand misinformation and disinformation about these groups, but in any case the fundamental question is this: the Counterjihad Summit featured speakers such as Israeli Knesset member Aryeh Eldad; the great historian Bat Ye'or; the great scholar of jihad Patrick Sookhdeo and others. There was nothing remotely racist or neo-Nazi about it. Even if these parties are all that Johnson claims they are (and given his record of lies and distortions I'm more inclined to believe that the opposite of anything he says is true), that in no way obliges me to answer for them or makes me responsible for them in any way. I've spoken at a lot of events, with a lot of other speakers, and I am no more responsible for the totality of their views as they are for mine. I once spoke at the same event as Hillary Clinton; does that make her an "Islamophobe"?

"The bus ads are part of a growing 'Islamophobia machine' nationwide that must be challenged by Americans of all faiths," said CAIR National Executive Director Nihad Awad.

This one really made me laugh. CAIR is a well-heeled money machine with funding from the Saudis. Pamela Geller and I are two American citizens with no major donors, no rich backers -- nothing but the truth on our side. And that's why CAIR is so afraid of us.

He noted that CAIR has long held that religious decisions should be matters of personal choice, not a cause for state intervention. According to CAIR's position statement on Islam and apostasy: "Faith imposed by force is not true belief, but coercion. Islam has no need to compel belief in its divine truth."

Great. Then CAIR should support our campaign, which is by no means dead. Nihad Awad and Honest Ibe Hooper can donate to our religious liberty bus ad campaign by clicking on the Contribute to Jihad Watch link on the upper right-hand sidebar.

“They fought like tigers,” writes the CIA officer who helped train the Cubans who splashed ashore at the Bay of Pigs 49 years ago this week. “But their fight was doomed before the first man hit the beach.”

That CIA man, Grayston Lynch, knows something about fighting – and about long odds. He carries scars from Omaha Beach, The Battle of the Bulge and Korea’s Heartbreak Ridge. But in those battles, Lynch and his band of brothers could count on the support of their own chief executive. At the Bay of Pigs, Grayston Lynch (an American) and his band of brothers (Cubans) learned — first in speechless shock and finally in burning rage — that their most powerful enemies were not Castro’s Soviet-armed soldiers massing in Santa Clara, Cuba, but the Ivy League’s best and brightest dithering in Washington.

Grayston Lynch put it on the line for the U.S. Constitution unlike many living today. I’d say he’s earned the right to indulge in a little “freedom of speech.”

So when he wrote, “Never have I been so ashamed of my country” about the bloody and shameful events 49 years ago this month at the Bay of Pigs, I’d say we owe him a respectful audience.

In his own words, Lynch helped train, “brave boys, most of whom had never before fired a shot in anger” — college students, farmers, doctors, common laborers, whites, blacks, mulattoes. The Brigada included men from every social strata and race in Cuba — from sugar cane planters to sugar cane cutters, from aristocrats to their chauffeurs. But mostly, this included the folks in between as befits a nation with a larger middle class than most of Europe.

They were known as La Brigada 2506. An almost precise cross-section of Cuban society of the time. Short on battle experience, yes, but bursting with what Bonaparte and George Patton valued most in a soldier — morale. No navel-gazing about “why they hate us.” They’d seen the face of Castro/communism point-blank. And that’s all it takes.

They set their jaws and resolved to smash the murderous barbarism that was ravaging their homeland.  They went at it with a vengeance. These “brave boys” fought till the last round, without food or water, and inflicted losses of almost 30-to-1 against their Soviet-led and arm-lavished enemy.

Castro defectors, some the very doctors who attended the casualties, say the invading freedom-fighters inflicted over 3,500 casualties on their Stalinist enemy. Castro and Che were jittery for a while, urging caution in the counterattack. From the lethal fury of the attack and the horrendous casualties their troops and militia were taking, the Stalinist leaders assumed they faced at least “20,000 invading mercenaries,” as they called them.

Yet, it was a band of mostly civilian volunteers they outnumbered 20-to-1, led by the heroic Erneido Oliva. (A black Cuban, by the way, Congressional Black Caucus.) A high percentage of these men had wives and children. But to hear Castro’s echo chamber (the mainstream and academia) Fidel was the plucky David and the invaders the bumbling Goliath!

The invaders themselves suffered 100 dead. Four were American pilot “advisers” who defied direct orders to abandon the men they’d trained and befriended. “Nuts!” they barked — but at their own commander in chief. These U.S. volunteers — Pete Ray, Riley Shamburger, Leo Barker, and Wade Grey — suited up, gunned the engines, and joined the fight. These were Southern boys, not pampered Ivy Leaguers, so there was no navel-gazing. They had archaic notions of right and wrong, of honor and loyalty, of whom America’s enemies really are. Their Cuban brothers were being slaughtered on that heroic beachhead. Knowing their lumbering B-26s were sitting ducks for Castro’s unmolested jets and Sea Furies, all four Alabama air guard volunteers flew over the doomed beachhead to lend support to their betrayed brothers in arms.

All four Americans were shot down. All four have their names in a place of honor next to their Cuban comrades on The Bay of Pigs Memorial, plus streets named after them in Miami’s Little Havana and their crosses at Miami’s Cuban Memorial cemetery.

When Doug MacArthur waded ashore on Leyte, he grabbed a radio: “People of the Philippines: I have returned. By the grace of Almighty God our forces stand again on Philippine soil — soil consecrated in the blood of our two peoples.”

Cuban soil was similarly consecrated.

To quote author Haynes Johnson, “The Bay of Pigs was a battle where heroes were made.” And how! We call them “men,” but Brigadista Felipe Rondon was 16 years old when he grabbed his 57 mm cannon and ran to face one of Castro’s Stalin tanks point blank. At 10 yards he fired at the clanking, lumbering beast and it exploded, but the momentum kept it going and it rolled over little Felipe. Gilberto Hernandez was 17 when a round from a Czech burp gun put out his eye. Castro’s troops were swarming in but he held his ground, firing furiously with his recoilless rifle for another hour, until the Reds finally surrounded him and killed him with a shower of grenades.

By then the invaders sensed they’d been abandoned. Ammo was almost gone. Two days shooting and reloading without sleep, food, or water was taking its toll. Many were hallucinating. That’s when Castro opened up four batteries’ worth 122 mm Soviet howitzers. They pounded 2,000 rounds into the invaders’ ranks over a four-hour period. “It sounded like the end of the world,” one said later.

“Rommel’s crack Afrika Corps broke and ran under a similar bombardment,” wrote Haynes Johnson. By now the invaders were dazed and delirious with fatigue, thirst and hunger; too deafened by the bombardment to even hear orders. So their commander had to scream.

“No retreat, Carajo!” Oliva stood and bellowed to his dazed and horribly outnumbered men. “We stand and fight!” And so they did, and wrote as glorious a chapter in military history and the annals of freedom as any you’d care to read.

Right after the deadly shower of Soviet shells, more Stalin tanks rumbled up. Another boy named Barberito rushed up to the first one and blasted it repeatedly with his recoil-less rifle. It barely dented it, but so rattled the occupants that they opened the hatch and surrendered. In fact, they insisted on shaking hands with their pubescent captor who, an hour later, was felled by a machine-gun burst to his valiant little heart.

On another front, Lynch, from his command post offshore, was talking with Cmdr. Pepe San Roman. Lynch had just learned how the Knights of Camelot (for dread of name-calling by the Latin-American “Street” as “yankee-bullies!”) had canceled the vital air strikes to knock out Castro’s Air-force, and figured the men were doomed. “If things are really rough,” he told Pepe, “we can come in and evacuate you.”

“We will not be evacuated!” Pepe barked back. “We came here to fight! This ends here!” The communists had almost 50,000 men around the beachhead now. But Oliva had one tank manned by Jorge Alvarez, and two rounds. Jorge aimed — Blam! Reloaded — Blam! — and quickly knocked out two of Castro’s Stalins. But more Stalins and T-34′s kept coming. So Alvarez — outgunned, outnumbered and out of ammo — finally had no choice: He gunned his tank to a horrendous clattering whine and charged! He rammed into another Stalin tank. Its driver was stunned, frantic. He couldn’t get a half-second to aim his gun. So Alvarez rammed him again. And again. And again, finally splitting the Stalin’s barrel and forcing its surrender.

The Brigada’s spent ammo inevitably forced a retreat. Castro’s jets were roaming overhead at will. They long ago had sunk the ammo ships; now they concentrated on strafing the helpless men.

“Can’t continue …” Lynch’s radio crackled – it was San Roman again. “Have nothing left to fight with … destroying my equipment …” The radio went dead.

“Tears flooded my eyes,” wrote Grayston Lynch. “For the first time in my 37 years I was ashamed of my country.”

The battle was over in three days, but the heroism was not.

Now came almost two years in Castro’s dungeons for the captured Brigada, complete with the physical and psychological torture that always comes with communist incarceration. On a visit to Miami during his presidential campaign, John McCain learned that he had shared torturers with his Cuban-American freedom-fighter hosts (Castro had sent several of his regime’s most promising sadists to North Vietnamese prison camps to instruct the Vietnamese reds in finer points of their profession.)

During almost two years in Castro’s dungeons, Oliva and his men lived under a daily death sentence.  Escaping that sentence would have been easy: simply sign the little paper confessing they were “mercenaries of the Yankee imperialists” or go on camera and on record denouncing the U.S. Given these freedom-fighters betrayal, you might think the Castroites had a cakewalk here.

Hah! Neither Oliva nor any of his men signed the document. The freedom-fighters stood tall, proud, defiant, and solidly with their commander, even sparring with Castro himself during their televised Stalinist show trials. “We will die with dignity!” snapped Oliva at the furious Castroites again, and again, and again. To a Castroite, such an attitude not only enrages but also baffles.

“Wimps,” sneers Michael Moore in his book “Downsize This,” referring to Bay of Pigs veterans  “really just a bunch of wimps. That’s right, wimps– and crybabies too….ex-Cubans with a yellow stripe down their backs.” Knowing that anti-yankee confessions would save them from Che Guevara’s firing squads and torture chambers, these freedom-fighters refused any association with the type of slogans Michael Moore shouts weekly for free publicity.

"Loan caters to Minneapolis Muslim business owners: The Alternative Finance Program respects Islamic law by offering fixed-rate loans," by Katherine Lymn for the Minnesota Daily, March 24 (thanks to Arafat):

An Islamic law enacted centuries ago was an obstacle for modern Minneapolis businesses until Minneapolis partnered with an African business resource group to allow Muslim business owners a way to both comply with their beliefs and invest in their businesses.

Since April 2007, the city of Minneapolis, in partnership with the African Development Center, has given out 38 loans in a way that is compliant to Islamic law by using a fixed rate in place of a variable interest rate.

Through the system, called the Alternative Finance Program, businesses pay a set rate of return, which corresponds with Islamic practices. The program is a slightly altered version of the common "Two-Percent" loans also offered by the city's Department of Community Planning and Economic Development.

"It really amounts to the same thing," Bob Lind, CPED director of business finance, said. "But it's ... just a different way of looking at it."

Recipients of the loan operate businesses that lie mainly in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood and along Lake Street, "typical strongholds for the Somali community," Lind said.

That is, the Somali community that has seen so many of its members return to Somalia to wage jihad in recent years.

Five of the loans went to businesses that are part of a Somali marketplace in the Cedar-Riverside area.

Said Karie, who works at Hijaz Clothing in the marketplace, explained that "everything that has [an] interest rate is actually a sin" for Muslims.

"It's been that way for years and years," Karie said.

The rule extends beyond just loans, as Muslims who follow the religion strictly will go as far as returning interest gained on savings to the bank or a charity, said Abdirahman Omar, general manager of Mustaqbal Computer Center.

"Personally, I wouldn't take it [interest] even if I needed it," Omar said....

The loan program is a response to the wave of Middle Eastern and East African immigrants in recent years, Lind said.

"We're just trying to work with those new immigrant populations to try to provide assistance and financing just like we would for anybody with the last name 'Smith' or 'Johnson,' " he said.

Partnering with the Minneapolis-based African Development Center, CPED has distributed almost $1.5 million to the businesses, with loans ranging from $10,000 to $150,000. Most fall between $10,000 and $20,000, Lind said.

He added that loan recipients have been good clients of the city; "[they] tend to borrow as short a term as possible [and] pay it back as quick as possible," Lind said.

Before the program, businesses were unable to get loans because of these religious beliefs, and they would turn to raising money internally, Lind said.

The program is a pathway for business owners to "achieve the American dream of creating wealth," Lind said.

He added that Minneapolis is the first city, to his knowledge, to adopt a Shariah-friendly loan program. He sees the city's version as becoming a model for others in the future.

I am sure it will be.

The books that David Horowitz has written as a conservative fall into three general categories.

The first is analytical. It focuses on the radicalism of the Left, its effects and how to oppose the Left’s agendas. In this category are The Politics of Bad Faith, Left Illusions, and Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left, and several co-authored books, including Destructive Generation (with Peter Collier), Deconstructing the Left (with Peter Collier), The Shadow Party (with Richard Poe) and Party of Defeat (with Ben Johnson). Also in this analytical category are four compilations of articles: Sex, Lies and Vast Conspiracies, Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes, The Art of Political War and Other Radical Pursuits and How to Beat the Democrats and Other Subversive Ideas.

The second category is also analytical, but its subject is a very specific dominion of the Left: American universities. There are five books in this category, which represent a comprehensive critique of the radicalized academic campus and its curriculum: Uncivil Wars, The Professors, Indoctrination U., One-Party Classroom (with Jacob Laksin) and the forthcoming Reforming Our Universities: The Campaign for an Academic Bill of Rights, which will be published by Regnery in fall 2010.

The third category is biographical and philosophical. These are Horowitz’s most lyrical writings: Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey (1997), The End of Time (2005) and A Cracking of the Heart (2009).

Party of Defeat, co-written with Ben Johnson and published in 2008, is tightly argued, carefully focused, and precisely documented. It is 164 pages of argumentation with more than 20 pages in footnotes. Party of Defeat makes its case in two parts each divided into two chapters.

Part 1 is titled “The War Against America and the West.” The first chapter describes the Path to 9/11. The disastrous Jimmy Carter presidency, Ted Kennedy’s attempts to undermine Ronald Reagan’s successful Cold War strategy, and Bill Clinton’s head-in-the-sand syndrome are all examined. The second chapter focuses on 9/11 itself and the Left’s response. We see a distinction here between the radical, anti-American Left of Tom Hayden and Michael Moore and the more sane liberal Left of mainstream Democrats in congress and the Senate. One group rabidly opposed the Afghanistan war; the other did not. It would not be long before this distinction vaporized.

Part 2 examines Operation Iraqi Freedom specifically. Chapter 3 lays out the justifications for the mission. This is a particularly important segment because Horowitz and Johnson explain the difference between the actual justifications for removing Saddam Hussein and the political task of selling the war to the American public. Understanding this distinction is critical and is something leftists and Democrats completely miss even today in their tunnel vision of WMDs. Chapter 4, the heart of the book, then shows how the Left and the Democrats sought to sabotage that task once America began it. Horowitz and Johnson hit all the bases: Ambassador Joe Wilson, yellowcake uranium, Valerie Plame, the influential slander of “Zionist neo-cons” “distorting” intelligence, Democrats claiming they were misled, Al Gore’s The Assault on Reason, the New York Times printing classified information, “Mother” Cindy Sheehan, and finally MoveOn.Org’s disgusting General “Betray-Us.”

Party of Defeat thus serves as a conclusive defense of the legitimacy of the Bush administration’s push to implement regime change in Iraq — a policy initially proposed by a Democratic president. Further, Horowitz and Johnson meticulously establish that not long after initially supporting the war the Democratic Party adopted the positions of the anti-American Left — while America’s troops were in harm’s way. Considered in the context of the historical information from the first chapter, it’s clear that this shift to the Left is not an aberration but a consistent march that’s proceeded over the last 35 years. (See The Shadow Party by Horowitz and Richard Poe for more on this.)

And how can the Left and Democratic Party apologists respond?

The book itself is only the first part of the Party of Defeat intellectual experience. After Party of Defeat was published Horowitz and Johnson set up the $500 FrontPage Challenge. Noted foreign policy analysts and journalists could debate Horowitz and Johnson’s thesis at FrontPage. These debates are in many ways as enlightening as the book itself. The Left’s attempt to defend itself from the charges is at times stunning, predictable, and ultimately sad. Read all of these debates here:

To read Ethan Porter’s exchange with the authors, click here.
To read Lawrence Korb’s exchange with the authors, click here.
To read Andrew Grotto’s exchange with the authors, click here.
To read Jordan Smith’s exchange with the authors, click here.
To read Robert Farley’s exchange with the authors, click here.
To read Michael Isikoff’s exchange with the authors, click here.
To read Ben Johnson’s exchange with William Blum, click here.
See also Nick Cohen’s, Jeffrey Herf’s and Bruce Thornton’s critiques of the book.

Last week, Keith Olbermann infamously broke into MSNBC’s coverage of Scott Brown’s acceptance speech with the exclamation “My God, he’s still talking!”

Brown dared to talk for about 20 minutes to gathered supporters who had helped him pull off a historic victory, which changed the landscape of the nation politically.  To a large extent, we can probably blame Scott Brown for the extreme length of Barack Obama’s first State of the Union address, which was undeniably shaped by the shellacking the President took last week—not to mention last Fall.

Despite the fact that it seemed to drag on like one of Castro’s birthday speeches, or Khadafi’s  deranged appearance at the U.N., the Washington Post reveals today that Barack Obama’s SOTU address was only the 5^th longest State of the Union speech in modern history.

Here is the breakdown published in the Post today:

At 71 minutes, President Obama’s State of the Union address Wednesday ranks among the longest such speeches in the past 45 years. These are the longest State of the Union addresses:

2000 (Clinton): 89 minutes

1995 (Clinton): 85 minutes

1998 (Clinton): 78 minutes

1998 (Clinton): 76 minutes

1967 (Johnson): 71 minutes

2010 (Obama): 71 minutes

Source: The American Presidency Project, University of California at Santa Barbara

Of course, the MSNBC “anchor team” of Matthews, Maddow and Olbermann had no trouble with that aspect of the speech—and NBC had no problem with the most ideological crew on TV hosting a major news event.

Fox, by contrast, used Bret Baier and Shephard Smith as its anchors for the SOTU.  Imagine the outcry if the network Keith Olbermann calls, “Fox Noise,” and “Fixed News,” has used O’Reilly, Hannity and Beck as the night’s anchors.

Every network had its panels of clearly identified partisan and ideological commentators last night, including Fox.  And while we spend a lot of time on this blog identifying the bias of some of the so-called “straight news” people, only MSNBC chose to host the evening with open ideologues.

More on the details of what that meant to MSNBC’s coverage last night, later.  For now, it’s worth noting that while there were benign references to the length of the speech, we had no “Merciful heavens will he please shut up” moments from Keith and company last night.

Related posts:

1. “My God, He’s Still Talking!” Meltdown with Keith Olbermann Part 27
2. A Bridge Too Far? Meltdown with Keith Olbermann Part 28
3. Rather Clueless: Meltdown with Keith Olbermann Part 12

Lahore (AsiaNews/Agencies) - A 12-year-old Christian girl died on Friday as a result of physical violence inflicted by her employer, a rich and powerful Muslim lawyer in Lahore. The case has led to protests by the Christian community, which demonstrated before the provincial assembly of Punjab in Lahore. The authorities are trying to appease people and have pledged that justice shall be done. Pakistani President Zardari has also promised to pay compensation to the family.

A Protestant NGO, Sharing Life Ministry Life (SLMP), reported the case of Shazia Bashir, 12, who was employed for the past eight months as a domestic worker in the household of Chaudhry Muhammad Naeem, a lawyer and former president of the Lahore Bar Association.

Local Christians say that during that period the girl was the victim of constant harassment, and that she was raped and tortured before she was killed.

SLMP chief coordinator Sohail Johnson said the girl worked under constant stress and experienced emotional and psychological trauma. She was also denied the agreed salary (Rs 1,000 or about US$ 12 per month).

Shazia "would get insults whenever she raised the subject of payment," the Christian activist said.

Three days before her death, her employer tortured her, he noted. Afterwards, he tried to have her treated at his home without informing the parents of her health situation. In the end, the medical care she did get proved inadequate and she had to go to Lahore's Meo Hospital.

"Shazia's parents were not allowed to meet her. They did not know what she was going through," said Razia Bibi, the girl's 44-year-old uncle.

Shazia died last Friday from her injuries.

Sohail Johnson said that her body showed signs of torture with at least 12 marks of injury. "Shazia was admitted to the hospital with a broken jaw," he said.

Initially, Chaudhry Muhammad Naeem's family tried to pay off Shazia's parents with Rs 20,000 (US$ 250) to stop them from filing a case against them. Eventually they fled, but were arrested yesterday under pressure from the federal government.

On Saturday, Christians demonstrated in front of the Punjab Provincial Assembly.

The Lahore Bar Association has instead sided with the powerful Muslim lawyer.

Local Christians have expressed scepticism about the impartiality and efficacy of the police investigation; however, Punjab Law Minister Rana Sanaullah said that outside interference would not be tolerated and that justice would be done.

Sohail Johnson said that 99 per cent of Christian girls from poor families are hired by wealthy Muslims, and are often physically, psychologically and sexually abused.

"In some cases, their employers marry them off to Muslim servants, and forcibly convert them to Islam," he said.

"These vulnerable Christian girls do not have any state protection. We urge the government to ensure protection of these disadvantaged girls," the SLMP coordinator said.

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari has promised Rs 500,000 (US$ 6,000) in compensation to the girl's family and urged the Punjab government to provide financial help as well. The money is expected to cover the cost of Shazia Bashir's funeral, which is scheduled for today in Lahore.

Charles Johnson brands me with the ‘R’ word. And it isn’t ripped, even though I totally am.

Y’know, I’m really glad that Charles Johnson of LittleGreenFootballs.com let me know I was a racist, because if I don’t fix that soon, it’s going to cause me major social problems.

On January 2, BloggingHeadsTV.com posted a webcam interview with Charles Johnson about his post titled, “Why I Parted Ways with the Right.” Watch the full interview below:

At 45 minutes in, Mr. Johnson mentions an article I wrote at Pajamas Media while discussing his anger over the right-wing’s support for fascism. In my piece, I criticize the Conservative Political Action Conference for bringing the John Birch Society on as a co-sponsor.

Johnson states that my criticism,

“wasn’t based on the fact that John Birch Society was an illegitimate group, or a racist group, which they are. The criticism was based on allowing them to attend was politically not very smart. So it wasn’t based on principle, it was based on politics.”

Yes, in my attempt to persuade CPAC to drop JBS, I pointed out that it hurt them and their agenda, but let’s look at what else I said.

I described JBS as having an “oh-my-god-look-a-conspiracy-attitude,” and spend the rest of the article ridiculing their theories about the involvement of the American government in the anti-freedom conspiracy to bring about a one-world government in partnership with the Communists. In other words, I am attacking the legitimacy of the group, just as Johnson said I should have.

But am I being indifferent to racism as Johnson implies? Absolutely not. JBS’ current material, at least what I’ve seen, is not racist in any way. None of my interactions with its members have exposed me to racism and although it’s possible Johnson can pull up an offensive quote from a past leader, it would be highly irresponsible for me to paint the organization as racist when their agenda has nothing to do with the subject. And if I did use such a label, which apparently one must do to pass Mr. Johnson’s racism litmus test, would only make me look like the type of person who immediately embraces accusations and negative labels against their political adversaries.

Mr. Johnson, you should be ashamed of himself for implying I was indifferent or somehow supportive of racism. And next time you’re doing an Internet show, don’t wear a shirt that looks like one of those giant lollipops I used to try to win at the fair.

—

Ryan Mauro is the founder of WorldThreats.com and a regular contributor to FrontPage Magazine.

Related posts:

1. Jimmy Carter the Racist in Black and White
2. Olbermann Says Glenn Beck and others brought Van Jones down because they are racist.
3. CNN Joins the NFL Players' Association in Calling Rush a Racist

The notion that crime is an understandable reaction to poverty and racism took hold in the early 1960s. Sociologists Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin argued that juvenile delinquency was essentially a form of social criticism. Poor minority youth come to understand that the American promise of upward mobility is a sham, after a bigoted society denies them the opportunity to advance. These disillusioned teens then turn to crime out of thwarted expectations.

The theories put forward by Cloward, who spent his career at Columbia University, and Ohlin, who served presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Carter, provided an intellectual foundation for many Great Society-era programs. From the Mobilization for Youth on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1963 through the federal Office of Economic Opportunity and a host of welfare, counseling and job initiatives, their ideas were turned into policy.

If crime was a rational response to income inequality, the thinking went, government can best fight it through social services and wealth redistribution, not through arrests and incarceration. Even law enforcement officials came to embrace the root causes theory, which let them off the hook for rising lawlessness. Through the late 1980s, the FBI’s annual national crime report included the disclaimer that “criminal homicide is largely a societal problem which is beyond the control of the police.” Policing, it was understood, can only respond to crime after the fact; preventing it is the domain of government welfare programs.

via Heather Mac Donald: A Crime Theory Demolished – WSJ.com.

fifty years ago this spring, Jackie Robinson broke the color bar in baseball. The events that followed provide a lesson for Black History Month — which ends this week — that many civil rights leaders seem to have forgotten. Following Robinson’s historic breakthrough, as everybody knows, other black athletes followed his example and professional basketball and football also became multiracial sports. Over the years, however, there were many doubters that these gains were possible or that the revolution would continue. The doubters said whites would never accept more than a few black players. There would always be quotas to limit the number of blacks. Whites, they said, would never allow blacks to become managers or quarterbacks or the owners of clubs. They said that if blacks became the majority of the players in professional basketball, for example, whites wouldn’t go to see the games.

But history has shown that on all counts the doubters were wrong. Blacks did become quarterbacks and managers and general managers. Superstars like Isiah Thomas and Magic Johnson even became owners. So thoroughly did blacks come to dominate sports that were once the exclusive province of whites that in basketball today almost 90 percent of the starting players are black. When the NBA All-Star Game was played last year, it was televised to 170 countries worldwide, and nine out of the 10 starting players were black multimillionaires, some with contracts totaling $50 million, $80 million and even $100 million. But despite this overwhelming tide of color in the sport, 80 percent of the paying customers are still white.

The most telling point in the history just summarized is the following neglected fact: This was all accomplished without government intervention and without affirmative action. There were no government policies or official guidelines laid down for owners of athletic teams, no EEOC investigators hovering around stadiums or summoning owners to court. No lawsuits were filed by NAACP lawyers, no consent decrees ordered by federal judges, no heavy government hand compelling owners to redress “past injustice.” Only two things were required to achieve this momentous change in America’s race relations: a single businessman with a vision, and a public to support him.

– Salon

–

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Related posts:

1. From the Pen of David Horowitz: December 9, 2009
2. From the Pen of David Horowitz: December 16, 2009
3. From the Pen of David Horowitz: December 18, 2009

The United Nations-sponsored global change conference in Copenhagen is turning into a shake-down of the West by developing countries. It is also a typical display of hysteria manufactured by UN bureaucrats to justify their sinecures.

“Decades of effort will come down to this one critical week,” UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told reporters assembled for a press briefing on December 14^th just before his departure for Copenhagen. “Seldom in history has a choice been so clear. We can move toward a future of sustainable green growth, or we can continue down the road to ruin.”

To show how seriously the United Nations establishment is taking this conference, its leadership has arranged a huge field trip for its bureaucrats to Copenhagen. The spokesperson for the Secretary General said there are 477 staffers from UN Secretariat units and 309 more from 19 specialized agencies and related organizations in Copenhagen. It may be no exaggeration to say that the transportation and feeding of nearly 800 UN bureaucrats – not to mention all the UN member state representatives, academics and hangers-on attending the two-week conference – is causing more carbon gas emissions than some countries experience in a year.

One leading theme of the Copenhagen conference is to obtain major funding commitments from developed countries to help the developing countries deal with climate change. “Looking ahead, we need greater clarity on a robust finance package for the middle and longer-term”, said Ban Ki-moon. “It is essential that we leave Copenhagen with a clear understanding of how we will meet the financing challenge through 2020.”

Some $10 billion in funds annually, up to 2020, is already on the table, but the Secretary General is looking for way more. So is China, the largest emitter of carbon gasses and an economic powerhouse in its own right. China has made clear during the conference that it still regards itself as a developing country and demands a free pass for its actions, even as it insists on severe restrictions on Western economies and trolls for hand-outs from what may turn out to be the most massive wealth transfer scheme in history.

We are not just talking about providing energy-efficient technology and technical assistance to truly poor economies, or financial aid to low-lying island and seacoast countries or agriculture-based economies, to enable them to adapt to the impacts of climate change. Those can be constructive measures. What some developing countries (and China) are demanding amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars of reparations for the alleged sins of economically prosperous countries. A commitment to solving their own pollution problems is not on the agenda. Nor is accountability for the monies they will receive.

Saudi Arabia has taken the shake-down to a new level, complaining that its economy will suffer very serious harm from any global pact that curbs demand for its oil. Therefore, it is demanding access to UN funds that are supposed to help countries adapt to climate changes from global warming, such as the rise in sea levels and extreme weather. “I’m surprised to see that developed countries expect they can get away with the things they want without giving equal treatment to what we want,” said Saudi Arabia’s lead climate negotiator earlier this year in the lead-up to Copenhagen.

Lest anyone question the agenda of the Copenhagen conference, a generous dose of hysteria is on offer as a distraction. The conference started off with a video setting the stage for urgency to deal with a problem that its sponsors have been hyping as a looming catastrophe. The video recalled the 1964 Lyndon Johnson-Barry Goldwater presidential campaign of the Johnson ad featuring a little girl picking flowers just before a nuclear bomb explosion. This time, the video featured a little girl running from the surging waters supposedly unleashed by man-made global warming and trying to climb a tree as her only temporary safe refuge. Hysterical appeals to emotion have replaced discussion of objective facts and reasoned expert opinions presented by all sides of the climate change issue.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was supposed to bring together the world’s best scientists with expertise in climate change who would follow the evidence, wherever that may lead.  But the environmental panel had an ideological agenda. It produced a report with the participation of 2,500 scientists from 130 countries that was meant to “shock people, governments into taking more serious action,” in the words of the panel’s chairman.

As it turned out, the panel’s report was contaminated with fraudulent scientific research. As we now know from leaked e-mails exchanged by scientists who already had their minds made up without first dispassionately assessing all of the evidence, the data underlying the report was deliberately manipulated. The opinions of scientists dissenting against the conventional wisdom, which held that man-made global warming was an imminent existential danger, were suppressed. In spite of all the doubts raised by these revelations, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon still insists that “the science is clear and settled” and that those who continue to question the conventional wisdom are “wrong.”

To enforce the conventional wisdom, armed UN security officers were deployed to make sure that no dissenting voices were heard in the inner sanctums of the Copenhagen conference.  In one outrageous instance, they intervened to stop aggressive questioning of Stanford University Professor Stephen Schneider, a senior member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change who was promoting his book during a press conference. The questions had to do with Climategate.

Apparently, this global warming alarmist found the questions too hot to handle. Professor Schneider refused to comment on the leaked e-mails. When he ran out of his talking points in response to questions from a skeptical film maker named Phelim McAleer who was pressing for some honest answers, the professor called for armed guards to intervene. The guards obliged by threatening the film maker, ordering him to stop filming and to stop asking any more questions.

“These questions should be answered,” said McAleer. “The attempts by UN officials and Professor Schneider’s assistant to remove my microphone were ham-fisted but events took a more sinister turn when they called an armed UN security officer to silence a journalist. This is a blatant attempt to stop journalists doing journalism and asking hard questions. It is not the job of armed UN security officers to stop legitimate journalists asking legitimate questions of senior members of the UN’s IPCC.”

This is not the first time that the UN blueshirts have been called in to muzzle dissent. Last month, the United Nations security department in New York detained a leading UN critic, Anne Bayefsky, and then escorted her out of the building after stripping her of her accreditation pass.

In dismissing the global warming skeptics, Ban Ki-moon said that “climate change is real, we are the primary cause, and it is up to us – here and now – to deal with it. Nature does not negotiate.”

Climategate is proving one law of nature: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The truth is pushing back against the forces of the climate change “consensus.”

The perspective that informs the nearly seven hundred pages of A People’s History is a plodding Marxism supplemented by the preposterous idea that nation-states are merely a fiction, and only economic classes are “real” social actors:

Class interest has always been obscured behind an all-encompassing veil called “the national interest.” My own war experience [in World War II], and the history of all those military interventions in which the United States was engaged, made me skeptical when I heard people in high political office invoke “the national interest” or “national security” to justify their policies. It was with such justifications that Truman initiated a “police action” in Korea that killed several million people, that Johnson and Nixon carried out a war in Indochina in which perhaps 3 million died, that Reagan invaded Grenada, Bush attacked Panama and then Iraq, and Clinton bombed Iraq again and again.

This passage illustrates the continuity of leftwing myths in shaping the consciousness of radical generations. A Stalinist in his youth, Zinn retains into his seventies the same ideological blinders he wore as a young man. America’s defense of South Korea against a Communist invasion from the North was not initiated by the United States as the Communist propaganda machine maintained at the time. It was a response to the Communist aggression, which was initiated by Stalin himself according to most recent historical accounts. The war and subsequent American support for the South Koreans resulted in their liberation from both poverty and dictatorship. South Korea was, in 1950, one of the poorest third world countries with a per capita income of $250, on a level with Cuba and South Vietnam. Fifty years of American protection, trade and investment has made South Korea a First World industrial nation with a reasonably stable democracy. By contrast North Korea, which was the industrial heart of the Korean peninsula and which the American armies failed to liberate – thanks to Zinn’s political allies at the time – is an impoverished totalitarian state that has starved more than a million of its inhabitants in the last decade, while its Communist dictator hordes scarce funds to build an arsenal of nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles. The rest of Zinn’s examples are equally tendentious and amount to little more than communist propaganda.

Not surprisingly, Zinn describes the founding of the American Republic — the world’s most successful democratic experiment as an exercise in tyrannical control of the many by the few for greed and profit. “The American Revolution…was a work of genius, and the Founding Fathers deserve the awed tribute they have received over the centuries. They created the most effective system of national control devised in modern times, and showed future generations of leaders the advantages of combining paternalism with command.” In Zinn’s reckoning, the Declaration of Independence was not so much a revolutionary statement of rights as a cynical means of manipulating popular groups into overthrowing the King to benefit the rich. The rights it appeared to guarantee were “limited to life, liberty and happiness for white males” – and actually for wealthy white males — because they excluded black slaves and “ignored the existing inequalities in property” (in other words, they were not socialist). This is an absurd view of the Declaration and of the history of the Republic to which it gave birth, but it is the entrenched belief of the political left for whom Zinn is an icon and his tract canonical.

The attack on the American Founding is crucial to the outlook shared by Zinn, Chomsky, and the entire spectrum of the left that has declared its separate war on America. It is central to understanding the left’s animus and the fact that no particular event – least of all a foreign policy event like the war in Iraq — is required to generate the kind of self-hatred evidenced during the Iraq protests. There is nothing original in Zinn’s book, nor has he engaged in any serious research other than to fill in the dots of Communist clichés.

A People’s History of the United States reflects a leftwing culture that despises America in its very roots. As a result of the left’s colonization of the academic social sciences, this anti-American culture is now part of the educational curriculum of America’s emerging elites, and as much an element of the cultural mainstream as any other historical tradition. Indeed, it is a dominant element. In 2004, the Organization of American Historians devoted an evening at its annual convention to honor Zinn and his work.

Todd Gitlin, former SDS leader and now Professor of Sociology and Journalism at Columbia University, summed up this academic triumph in these words: “My generation of the New Left – a generation that grew as the [Vietnam] war went on – relinquished any title to patriotism without much sense of loss … The nation congealed into an empire, whose logic was unwarranted power. All that was left to the Left was to unearth righteous traditions and cultivate them in universities. The much-mocked ‘political correctness’ of the next academic generations was a consolation prize. We lost – we squandered – the politics, “but won the textbooks.”

– Unholy Alliance

NewsReal will be critiquing “The People Speak” after it airs on Sunday on the History Channel.

If you have a favorite Horowitz quote you want to highlight for others then please email it to DavidSwindle {@} Gmail.com. Please include:

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Related posts:

1. From the Pen of David Horowitz: December 10, 2009
2. From the Pen of David Horowitz: December 2, 2009
3. From the Pen of David Horowitz: December 9, 2009

President Lyndon Johnson and advisor Joseph Califano Jr.

Last week, one of our hottest discussions on NewsReal involved the controversy over Bishop Thomas Tobin recommending that Congressman Patrick Kennedy not partake of communion as long as he is a proponent of abortion.

Former Johnson Administration official, Joseph Califano Jr. had a rather chilling op-ed in response to this principled action by the Bishop in Saturday’s Washington Post.

Califano shockingly revealed that the Johnson Administration was willing to starve people in India in order to get them to adopt a “family planning” regime, but no one was denied communion over this.  This, to him, was an example of the good old days when Catholic Bishops apparently knew their place.  Califano writes:

“In the 1960s, LBJ became the first president to aggressively promote family planning abroad and at home. Abroad, he refused to send grain to India during a famine until Indira Gandhi committed to a family planning program.”

One of Stalin’s most famous atrocities, is the famine he created in the Ukraine by exterminating  the Kulak farmers and collectivizing the farms (which was covered up by the New York Times’s Walter Duranty).  This isn’t in that league; but to hear that a President of the United States would withhold food during a famine for political purposes other than, say, stopping international aggression, is stunning.

But it’s cool with Califano.

That’s right.  This wasn’t a mea culpa, it was casual and callous and made to prove his point.  “Oh, hey, your mom told you about the starving children in India?  Well, we allowed for there to be a few more, so that ultimately there would be a few less.”

But nobody chanted, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”   Not over this, anyway.

Califano’s op-ed details a history of the Bishops’ negotiating policy with various White Houses, all to give a context to say that Tobin is out of line.  Here is a more full context for the killer quote above:

American bishops didn’t used to do this. Even when they disagreed sharply with policies pursued by Catholic officeholders, they were willing to sit down and discuss alternatives. I know. I saw this when I served as chief domestic adviser for President Lyndon Johnson and as secretary of health, education and welfare for President Jimmy Carter.

In the 1960s, LBJ became the first president to aggressively promote family planning abroad and at home. Abroad, he refused to send grain to India during a famine until Indira Gandhi committed to a family planning program. At home, he ordered federal agencies to make contraceptives available to the poor. I was the (Catholic) White House aide responsible for enforcing those policies.

Johnson’s actions prompted a stinging attack from Catholic bishops, who charged that he was coercing the poor to practice birth control. The president told me to “work something out” with the bishops, who were our needed allies in battling poverty and racial discrimination. At meetings with Father Francis Hurley, the bishops’ top Washington staffer, and Detroit Archbishop John Dearden, leader of the American bishops, I assured them that we were offering an option to the poor, not coercing acceptance. We ultimately agreed that if the president phrased his policy in terms of “population control” (which allowed for more food and the church-approved rhythm method of family planning as well as contraception), the bishops would cool their rhetoric. LBJ kept his word, and when he later signed a U.N. declaration supporting population control, the bishops were silent.

Blah blah blah.  It’s kind of hard to focus on the surrounding blather after Califano’s confession.

Bishop Tobin doesn’t seem like the kind of guy whose conscience will be seared upon hearing that someone who thinks it was admirable public policy to starve people into submission, disapproves of how he is handling his duties.

During a weekend in which commentators were holding up the hurt feelings act by the White House gate-crashers as a sign that we are becoming a shame-less society; Joseph Califano illustrated that is true–  but in a truly horrifying manner.

Related posts:

1. Chris Gone Wild: Matthews Berates Catholic Bishop as Having “Transgressed,” Says He Has No Authority to Advocate Against Abortion in Health Care Bill
2. Yes, Virginia, There Is a Religious Left
3. MSNBC’s O’Donnell Calls Catholic Bishop a “Political Hack”

And now it is beginning: he has in a recent post approvingly quoted Elizabeth May, a venomous Israel-hater who spoke in August 2006 at an anti-Israel rally full of supporters of the jihad terrorist group Hizballah.

Thus using the very same fractured logic that Johnson has used to defame me and many others as racists, fascists, supporters of genocide, etc., the conclusion is clear: libelblogger Charles Johnson now supports Hizballah.

Hoist by his own petard.

And fractured logic aside, watch for Johnson's abandonment of Israel -- his new Leftist masters will demand it. He has already banned several longtime commenters, including Carl In Jerusalem, as "Kahanists." And Elizabeth May is someone the old Johnson never would have quoted in any context except as an opponent. Those who thought that Israel would never go under the Lizardoid bus should be watching the wheels in the coming weeks and months.

UPDATE: Johnson, brazening it out, denies that May spoke at an anti-Israel, pro-Hizballah rally. Uh, Charles, there's photographic evidence. Whoops! And Pamela has even more. The sleazy lizard keeps digging his hole deeper.

You can find it here -- the adolescent libelblogger has blocked direct links from this site, but you can paste this in to your address bar:

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/35243_Why_I_Parted_Ways_With_The_Right

The thuggish libelblogger incites his sycophants and whips them into a frenzy of hate with three lies about me and Pamela Geller:

9. Anti-Islamic bigotry that goes far beyond simply criticizing radical Islam, into support for fascism, violence, and genocide (see: Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, etc.)

Of course, he does not, and cannot, produce a shred of evidence to support any of these libelous claims, but that is par for the course at this point for this man, who has long since kissed goodbye to the last shreds of his integrity.

One can only wonder what sickness of soul would lead this man to devote so much time and effort to lying about other people and trying to destroy them.

UPDATE: It is interesting that Johnson's hate list appeared just hours after I spoke at length with a New York Times reporter -- excited by his move leftward, they're doing a big story on Johnson. Coincidence? Of course!

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Lucy Mashua, the Global Ambassador for fighting FGM (Female Genital Mutilation) and standing up for Women’s Rights.

FP: Lucy Mashua, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.

Tell us about your background and your own personal story.

Mashua: I was born 30 years ago in a small village in southern Kenya in Rift valley province. I come from the Maasai tribe, which is known for its cultural wearing of beads, red ochre and wraps. We are nomadic people and move with our animals from one place to another in search of pastures, as it’s a semi arid area. We have three major groups in Africa: Bantu, Cushites and Nilots.

My tribe falls into the Nilots group and the tribe from which Obama’s father comes from, Luo. We migrated from Egypt in 16 AD, named after the river Nile and most of us are black Jews, but practicing Christianity. I am a Christian.

I love my tribe so much that I want them to treat women and children right by ending FGM and early child marriage. Women and girls are not men’s properties. It is our God- given right not to be mutilated and married off at a tender age. I am the first born of a family of six and underwent FGM at the age of 9 one early morning with a group of other girls. Vaginal genocide was committed on us.

And now here I am living to tell and be a voice for the voiceless.

FP: Why does your tribe practise FGM? What is its philosophy? And why does it also engage in child marriage?

Mashua: My tribe practices FGM because they are ignorant and brainwashed since the days of Pharaoh in Egypt as they migrated to East Africa with this tradition. The philosophy is that women will be more tame and controllable. When a woman is made to feel like she is an object and not 100% human, she will fall for it. They become puppets and not valued, but it didn’t work with me.

They also engage in early childhood marriage to control and tame women because if you are married off at 12, by the time you are 18 you are just worn out and you will never see the need to explore life. The younger the girls are, the easier it is to control and manipulate them. It’s also about wealth. The more wives and cattle you have, the wealthier you are and you have more property.

FP: I am sorry to ask, but can you kindly share with us the horrible experience you suffered of FGM? Who did this to you? What were the consequences? How did you cope with it?

Mashua: One chilly morning in a group of 29 girls, we were mutilated. I was tied with a rope because I was screaming and begging them to stop. Some girls were considered brave for not crying aloud. But I know their heart cried out loud. I could hear their cry and still do.

It is so hard for me to talk about this. It’s so fresh. I am still so traumatized. They used the same knife on us, not caring about any infections. These are tradition mutilators and midwives that perform this savagery. My mom could not watch this. Up to now, I am scared of any human blood. I scream when I accidentally cut myself. A few days ago I passed out when I cut my finger and I hurt my back as I live by myself. No one could help me.

I have nightmares. I have never coped. I have very painful PMS. I have extra glands growing so I need surgery. I have scar tissues. That’s why my vagina muscles hurt. I will live with this for the rest of my life. I will never cope but one thing for sure I will never stop voicing out against FGM.

One day I will reach the World Court and criminalize globally FGM. I swear I am going to reach there. I am now building a very big network of very committed people. I aspire even to be a human rights movie documentary producer. I am going to get words out there and catch the attention of all kinds of good people. I will kick FGM ass out of this planet. And that makes me smile.

FP: I am sorry that I asked you to talk about this horrible monstrosity that was committed against you. Thank you for sharing it with us. I speak on behalf of Fronpagemag.com to say that our heart is with you and all the victims. We feel your pain and stand beside you in this battle to stop this violence against little girls and women.

You have suffered some persecution and terrible ordeals because of your fight against FGM while you were in Africa. Tell us what happened to you.

Mashua: First I was rejected by my own society, relatives and friends because of my strong uncompromised belief that women are human too and that no one should take a razor, knife or sharp glass to cut off our clitoris.

No man owns a woman and no one has the right to beat or hit a woman. I have watched my mom suffer at the hands of men and I had enough and began my rebellion by not obeying what men wanted from me and I knew then I have begun a war.

As young as 6 years old I would open my mouth and shout to the top of my voice in a gathering to speak my mind out. Of course I would get beatings but I grew immune. I could not cry anymore from the beatings but I cry out when my friends and relatives undergo FGM.

My fight against FGM has landed me in jail as a protester. I have suffered beatings, rejection, sexual abuse, separation from my babies. I have been tortured physically, sexually and emotionally. I have physical scars all over my body. Up to this time there are times my mind goes back and it’s like a horror movie. I suffered a great deal but I thank God almighty for America.

FP: What efforts are you now making to stop FGM? What resistance are you confronting?

Mashua: Since the day I stepped foot in the United States, I have been leading a fight against FGM. I have received help from my attorneys Roy Petty and Daniel Stewart, Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson and many organizations, such as the Center for Survivors of Torture and Human rights Initiatives.

Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson held my hand and stood by me. Annually I am a guest speaker to her World of Peace Women Conference. She even introduced me to President Obama back in 2007. He recognized my efforts on human rights issues and said he was proud of me in a letter he wrote to me.

The Congresswoman is a great friend. She helps me in many big ways that you cannot imagine and they are very personal. She went ahead and introduced me to my adopted brother J. Kendel Johnson, who has always been there for me, even in my hospital bed during my reconstructive surgery. He is an angel.

Parkland hospital surgeons saved my life and reduced my pain and body struggle by 60%. Many individuals groups supported me and still support me with my campaign here in the United States.

I began my campaign officially in 1999 in Kenya by holding demonstrations, speaking in seminars, radio and television programmes and in other East and Central Africans countries. I have currently launched a world wide campaign to stop FGM in Europe.  It’s not always been easy. First, resistance from my own people, then resistance from traditional mutilators who say that I am trying to destroy their only means of income.

FP: How about the Left? They pretend they are for human rights?

Mashua: Leftists pay lip service to women’s rights, but they are full of empty words. They derive fame and recognition from the pain and suffering of women. They only talk and travel just to show off; they do nothing to help or join in the fight against FGM.

FP: Expand for us on why leftist feminists and the Left in general abandons the girls who are the victims of FGM, especially those under Islam? They simply cannot bring themselves to criticize adversarial cultures and religions right?

Mashua: It’s simple: they don’t care about the harmful cultures. All they care about is opening their mouth or scribbling some words online or on paper to act as if they care and so far they have scooped several Grammies for best actors.

They bow down and worship the women haters to achieve favors and recognition. It’s high time we smoke these hypocrites out. I cannot stand them anymore I even don’t want their money to support my campaign because it’s blood money and evil-haunted money.

I would rather crawl and beg in the streets to sustain my campaign instead of working with such people.

The leading member of the Women Development Organization in Kenya, the vice chair, said this about FGM: “Unlike other gender issues, such as access to education, FGM is viewed as cultural practice, which, if threatened, endangers the cohesion of an entire community.” Her name is Rukia Subow and she is a supporter of the mutilators and of mutilation. She is the vice chair of Maendeleo ya Wanawake Organization–or MYWO–a leading Kenyan women’s rights group based in Nairobi. She writes: “FGM is considered most significant rite of passage to adulthood, enhancing tribal cohesion, providing girls with important recognition from peers.”

This is an organisation that is funded and works with the leftists in the West. I went to court to sue this organisation and its leadership with other 10 women and we lost and ended up in jail. We were beaten up and threatened just because we wanted them to womanup.

Another example is Ricken Patel of AVAAZ who grew up in Kenya. He told me that FGM is not an important issue and cannot beat climate change and his organisation will not help us to protect girls from FGM. Believe me, religion is a playing card here because this pretender doesn’t want to step on the toes of religion leaders and haters of women. Then a few days later he put a cause on Facebook that he cares about sex slavery. I told him these girls run away from their home to escape the crude culture of mutilation and child brides and end up in the streets where they are captured by educated heartless people for sex slavery and it’s so painful because it happened to someone very dear to me. She disappeared for years. She was only 11

In the Washington Post, Secretary Clinton wrote a column “Fighting Modern Slavery” lamenting worldwide sex trafficking. The root causes of sex trafficking are poverty, illiteracy, and powerlessness. Gender inequality is the basis for all three. I am hoping to represent the Department of State in a two week conference next year in Sierra Leone.

FP: You come from a tribe that is made of up Christians, and yet there was FGM. This is strange as Christianity would be completely against this kind of thing. It is in Islam where this is most occurring and Islamic theology sanctions it. Tell us also about your experience with Islam and Muslims in terms of FGM today.

Mashua: Yes my tribe is Christian and also full of traditional believers. I don’t know why they practice it because there is no single Bible verse that says to mutilate women. As I said earlier, it’s a way of controlling women. It has nothing to do with Christianity and they do not point to Christianity. They carried this tradition from Egypt in 16 AD (days of Pharoh). As Nilots, we immigrated to East Africa.

My experience with Islam on FGM is very sad. As you correctly point out, a majority of people who practice FGM on women are of the Islamic faith and in the Muslim countries that I have visited their women and children have encountered the worst form of it, and many reconstructive surgeons can testify to this. It is a form of control and manipulation in the name of religion.

The good news is that there many Muslims who are rising to end any form of torture against women.

FP: That is great but the problem is that Muslims point to traditional Islamic teachings that sanction FGM. This is the way they keep it in placed. That is why when Egypt, for example, banned FGM in 1996, an Egyptian court overturned the ban in July 1997 after Islamic clerics went on a rampage to bring it back, pointing to Islamic teachings and ideology. Islamic tradition, for instance, records the Prophet Muhammad emphasizing that circumcising girls is “a preservation of honor for women.” A legal manual endorsed by Al-Azhar University of Cairo, which is the oldest and most prestigious university in the Islamic world, states that circumcision is obligatory for both boys and girls.

The sexual mutilation of girls is in the interests of those who control the structure of Islamic gender apartheid. Keeping FGM legitimized and institutionalized is one of the most effective means that Islamic gender apartheid keeps women subjugated and caged.

Yes, let’s hope that Muslim reformers can be empowered to fight FGM, but in order to do so they have to confront the misogyny and demonization of female sexuality that is embedded in Islamic theology.

So where does your battle stand now as we speak?

Mashua: We all read the harmful Muslim remarks on Beyonce after she said she was going to perform in Egypt:

“Beyonce, queen of the crusader whores and puppet of the Zionist entertainment complex, plans to bring her filthy sex act to the heart of the Muslim world with a concert in Cairo. Not since al-Malik al-Adil Nur ad-Din Abu al-Qasim Mahmud Ibn ‘Imad ad-Din Zangi fought the crusaders in Damascus has the Muslim world faced such a threat.”

“If Beyonce is allowed to go ahead with her insolent sex party, all of our daughters risk growing up whores. Soon, they will dare to show their ankles in a public setting, or sit in a room with a grown man who is not an immediate family member.”

“If Beyonce insists on traveling to Egypt, she must be met with fierce resistance. She should be arrested and made to have a female circumcision in order to correct her wicked urges. If she objects, she must be stoned to death. Only then can our daughters be safe from Western vice and debauchery.”

Wow, tell me what kind of religion it is that hates women so much to the core? It’s simple: women are not allowed to enjoy sex or laughter or just the gift of life because of these Islamic attitudes and teachings. Look what happened at the Fort Hood shooting. The authorities knew about Nidal Hasan’s jihadist views but they were afraid to report him because of political correctness. And the fear of not taking action cost us our blood and lives. Believe me there are so many of the major Hasans out there. It’s high time we call a spade a spade.

Five hundred thousand women are still dying in childbirth every year and the promise of universal access to reproductive health and family planning made at the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, Egypt in 1994 has been more honored in the breach than in the implementation. A.majority of women’s deaths in these cases are caused by early women rights violations (i.e. FGM, child brides, etc.)

On Common Ground must expand the discussion to the entire planet. What we do here in this country has an effect on the entire world’s view of women, on their status, on their role in human affairs. America, we are the hope of the world. Let’s stand together and lets not be scared of the haters and leftists.

FP: Thank you Lucy Mashua. Final words?

Mashua: When the world takes care of women, women take care of the world. What does taking care of women mean? It means that people rejoice equally at the birth of a girl or a boy. Every single human being ever born has come from the womb of a woman. Women risk their very lives to ensure the propagation of the species.  If women lack health and education and choices in their lives, humanity suffers. If women disappear, humanity disappears. It is really that simple. So take care of women.

FP: Lucy Mashua, you are an inspiration to us all. We encourage all of our readers to help join the fight against FGM.

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[To get the whole story on why the Left won't lift a finger against Female Genital Mutilation and Islamic Gender Apartheid, read Jamie Glazov’s new book, United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror.]