Three distinguished guests recently joined The Glazov Gang, Frontpage’s television program, to shed light on The High Price of Telling the Truth about Islam — the title of Eric Allen Bell’s recent Frontpage article. Our guests were Eric Allen Bell, a writer and filmmaker who was recently fired from the “Daily Kos” for telling the truth about Islam, Nonie Darwish, author of the new book, The Devil We Don’t Know: The Dark Side of Revolutions in the Middle East, and Mark Tapson, Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Below is Part I of a three part series. We will run Part II in tomorrow’s issue.

To get the whole story on why the Left suppresses the truth about Islam, read Jamie Glazov’s book, United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror.

Fourteen years ago in his breakout performance as an arrogant young genius in the movie Good Will Hunting, actor Matt Damon’s character sneered at his Boston psychiatrist for “surrounding yourself with all the wrong f**kin’ books. You wanna read a real history book, read Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. That book’ll f**kin’ knock you on your ass.”

That was from a script Damon himself had written (with fellow actor Ben Affleck, with Oscar-winning rewrite assistance from famed screenwriter William Goldman). It reflected Damon’s own real-life admiration for self-proclaimed radical historian Howard Zinn, whom he is still actively promoting today, almost two years to the day after Zinn’s death.

Damon went on to co-produce a documentary entitled “The People Speak,” based on A People’s History and Voices of a People’s History of the United States, which Zinn co-edited with anti-war-on-terror socialist Anthony Arnove. Other Hollywood folk like Josh Brolin, Marisa Tomei, Morgan Freeman, Viggo Mortensen, Rosario Dawson, and Kerry Washington lent their star power to it for a History Channel premiere back in 2009.

On January 31^st, actor/activist Damon lent his name and voice to a live performance in Chicago called “The People Speak, Live!” Composed of songs and dramatic readings based on the actual words of, as the organizers put it, “rebels, dissenters, and visionaries from America’s past,” the show was part of an ongoing program to promote Zinn’s subversive work.

Zinn was arguably the most popular proponent of the “history from below” school of historiography, which explores past events from the perspective of everyday people as opposed to the “Great Men” theory, which actor Brolin, another Zinn devotee, calls mere “propaganda.” Zinn’s 1980 book A People’s History of the United States, one of the best-selling history books of all time thanks partly to the influence of pop culture powerhouses like Damon, Brolin, and the rock group Pearl Jam, is a litany of oppression and exploitation on the part of America’s white ruling class, a “raggedly conceived Marxist caricature” of American history, as David Horowitz calls it in his Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left.

Zinn’s book is as ubiquitous in high school and university classrooms as sexual tension. His website proudly asserts that “no other radical historian has reached so many hearts and minds.” Well certainly, no other has darkened as many young hearts toward America and clouded as many young minds with utter disdain for facts and objectivity. Like his fellow academic cult figure Noam Chomsky and President Obama’s former associate and likely ghostwriter, unrepentant-terrorist-turned-radical-educator William Ayers, Zinn’s world view is powered by a relentless and hateful leftist fantasy: that the American government is and always has been racist, oppressive, warmongering, and ruthlessly exploitative, and that it must be subverted. And that subversion begins in classrooms all across America.

Editor’s note: To get David Horowitz’s perspective on the OWS movement, see his recent lead feature, Communism Reborn. For the whole story behind Occupy Wall Street and how this movement marks a new phase in the rebirth of the communist Left, read the new broadside by David Horowitz and John Perazzo, Occupy Wall Street: The Communist Movement Reborn. This essential pamphlet exposes the roots, leaders and hidden agendas of the radical movement and its war on capitalism and free societies.

Having been anointed collectively as “Person of the Year” in 2011 by the desperate and irrelevant Time magazine, the unwashed masses of the Occupy movement seem to have let the dubious honor go to their collective head. Never known for their restrained, orderly behavior, the Occupiers have even begun turning against and repulsing their supporters among the religious left.

Initially, the Los Angeles Times pronounced the Occupy movement as “a predominantly secular undertaking,” although it did note that “some left-leaning religious groups see a golden opportunity in the Occupy movement, whose central message of greater economic equality resonates deeply among faith-based progressives.”

Sure enough, religious progressives did rush to anoint the movement as it began to swell. FrontPage contributor Mark Tooley noted that such religious left icons as Jim Wallis and Shane Claiborne rhapsodized about the Occupiers standing with Jesus in their defense of the poor, even resembling St. Francis of Assisi. “Whether or not the Wall Street Occupiers are ‘ordinary people,’” Tooley wrote, “much less resemble St. Francis, the Religious Left is bursting with pride over their naughty demands.” Wallis urged his followers to embrace the movement, literally:

Our faith communities and organizations should swing their doors wide and greet the Occupiers with open arms, offering them a feast to say “thank you” for having the courage to raise the very religious and biblical issue of growing inequality in our society.

By the beginning of December The Huffington Post asserted that “more than 1,400 faith leaders from around the country [had] signed a pledge of solidarity with Occupy protesters.” They conducted services and provided counseling, and their churches hosted Occupy meetings. Religious communities of all stripes rushed to offer the Occupiers shelter and solidarity:

In addition to spiritual ministry and space to assemble and sleep, religious communities have provided the Occupy movement with material support such as food, clothing, tents, blankets and heaters.

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams wrote that Jesus would be among the Occupiers of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and that the movement had prompted people to examine themselves and ask, “What would Jesus do?”

But the behavior of the Occupiers themselves belied all this spiritual praise. If the Occupiers did ask themselves “What would Jesus do?” then they apparently came to the conclusion that Jesus would expose himself, rape, urinate and defecate in public, endanger children, steal, trespass, trash public and private property, harass and denounce Jews, assault non-protesters and police, block traffic, take drugs, hurl Molotov cocktails and blood and vinegar, and more. Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government website has posted a jaw-dropping, ongoing “rap sheet” of the Occupy movement’s reprehensible if not actually criminal behavior that numbers well over 400 incidents. But that list hasn’t been updated for a month. To date, arrests at Occupy events number over 6,000, including over 400 in Oakland alone last weekend. By contrast, the Tea Party movement doesn’t even litter.

Now celebrating its tenth anniversary, Silicon Valley Reads is a program that encourages everyone in northern California’s Santa Clara County “to read the same book, at the same time, and talk about it.” If you think this sounds like a program ripe for abuse by progressives in our educational system promoting groupthink about a social agenda, go to the head of the class.

The program is presented by the Santa Clara County Office of Education, Santa Clara County Library and the San Jose Public Library Foundation, with funding from foundations, nonprofits, corporations, and private donors. Each year it offers several dozen free public events at libraries, schools, and other community locations. Speakers and panels, a film festival, book discussion groups, essay contests, teen book groups and children’s story times are all part of a concerted effort to focus the community on a given theme. According to their website,

between 4,000-5,000 individuals attend these events and thousands more read the featured books on their own, for high school and college assignments, and with their book clubs…

And of course, no progressive indoctrination is complete unless it targets children:

Silicon Valley Reads has also recommended companion books for children with themes similar to the featured book for adults. This allows families to read together and to discuss contemporary issues and themes.

The themes of past book selections have included illegal immigration, WWII Japanese internment, racism, and censorship. Now we come to the theme for 2012, kicking off on January 25: “Muslim and American – Two Perspectives.” If you suspect that the program will consist of the usual disinformation about Islam and whitewashing of its darker aspects, then you get a gold star.

One of the program’s two book selections is The Muslim Next Door, sporting the cutesy subtitle The Qur’an, the Media, and That Veil Thing and a disarming cover photo of author Sumbul Ali-Karamali smiling warmly. As she writes on the program’s website,

I hope this is only one step in many that will serve to erase misconceptions and build intercultural understanding.

In the ten-year span since 9/11, more non-Muslims than ever before have undertaken to learn about the Religion of Peace and are alarmed and disgusted by the totalitarianism, misogyny, violence, supremacism, and Jew-hatred that are evident in the foundational texts of Islam, in the pronouncements of its most respected imams, and in the behavior of its fundamentalist adherents around the world. And yet Muslims still insist that we’re laboring under ignorance and misconceptions; that our irrational fear, racism and cultural myopia are the problem; that if we just unquestioningly accept the vapidity of interfaith dialogue and the soothing reassurances of such non-threatening, Westernized apologists as the ones featured in Silicon Valley Reads, we’ll finally understand that worldwide jihad and all-encompassing sharia are nothing to fear.

The other book selection is The Butterfly Mosque: A Young American Woman’s Journey to Love and Islam by G. Willow Wilson, a Muslim convert who struggled to come to grips with “that veil thing” and ended by proclaiming that a woman in the Middle East “is far less free than a woman in the West, but far more appreciated.” The book comes with a front cover blurb by the rock star of academic apologists for Islamic supremacism, Reza Aslan. Ms. Wilson writes on the Silicon Valley Reads site that

the topic of Islam is loaded with emotional and political baggage, and only through open and honest communication can Muslims and non-Muslims come to a better understanding of one another.

I couldn’t agree more. Indeed Islam is loaded with emotional and political baggage, and I hope that, in the spirit of that “open and honest communication,” she will openly and honestly acknowledge the reasons why.

The 2012 Silicon Valley Reads program also features a panel discussion called “Paranoid Politics – Islamophobia, McCarthyism and the Yellow Peril,” described thusly:

Muslims are not the first group in America to be targeted by paranoid people who are afraid and looking for someone to blame. This will cover three periods in U.S. history when groups who are “different” – Muslims since 9/11, Jews during the McCarthy Communist witch hunts, and Asians during World War II – were persecuted in politics and the media.

Of course, American Muslims are not being targeted, and non-Muslims outraged about sharia and jihad are not “paranoid people looking for someone to blame.” Any reasonable person who follows the news is justifiably concerned about Islam not because Muslims are “different” but because Muslim fundamentalists have openly declared war on Western civilization and are waging global jihad, including on our own soil. Real-world Islamic terrorism and creeping sharia are the issues, not the phantom red herring “Islamophobia.”

In the warm summer of 2011, a twenty-something Israeli named Daphne Leef set up a Facebook protest page agitating against the high cost of housing in Tel Aviv. She pitched a tent and helped touch off a social protest movement that received national and international attention.

While the protests were billed as grassroots, there was nothing grassroots about them. The protests had been organized and funded by the New Israel Fund. Daphne Leef worked as a video editor for the New Israel Fund.

In the winter of that same year, as the protests had died down, a woman named Tanya Rosenblit boarded a bus which runs through religiously hyper-conservative neighborhoods and staged an incident with the passengers. Rosenblit was dubbed an Israeli Rosa Parks and her stunt helped generate waves of articles about major social problems in Israel.

Rosenblit was associated with One Voice, an organization funded by the New Israel Fund, whose board included Alon Liel, the husband of New Israel Fund director Rachel Liel. Hardly had the NIF gotten through manufacturing one phony social protest movement than it was hard at work on another.

The pattern in both social protests was traditional divide and conquer methodology that pitted the segments of society against each with the goal of creating maximum disruption and mobilizing warm bodies to call for political change.

The New Israel Fund is the local Israeli version of Soros’ Shadow Party and it receives money from Soros. The Liels are the ultimate insiders. Rachel Liel worked as the Deputy Director of Rehabilitation Services in the Ministry of Labor and Alon Liel was the Director General of two ministries and a foreign affairs advisor to former Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Their real program is to bring the left to power.

As the mothership organization of the Israeli left, the New Israel Fund seeds funding to smaller NGOs, which go out and do their community organizing best to carry off the same sort of social conflicts on a communal level, mobilizing protests, manufacturing outrage and recruiting local activists to embed their agenda into a communal identity.

This program is a vital one for the Israeli left which has no voting base left to cling to. The Labor Party, once the dominant establishment, has become a shadow of its former self, forced into a coalition with the ruling conservative Likud Party. To understand their plight, imagine if the Democratic Party lost almost all its seats in Congress.

The Labor Party had alienated Israeli immigrant groups and the country’s religious population. The only minorities willing to vote for it were Arab Muslims, which wasn’t enough to keep it in power. The fringe left-wing parties meanwhile attracted the local version of the Berkeley vote but couldn’t get past their small number of parliamentary seats.

Most plans to revitalize the Israeli left as a political force beyond the ministries and organizations still controlled by its bureaucracy hinge on giving it a political base in Israeli society. While the Western left’s parties have become successfully identified with immigrants and identity politics, the two primary immigrant groups in Israel tend to skew conservative.

The current center-right consensus in Israel is reflective of Israeli society. Disrupting that consensus to create a mandate for change is the agenda of the New Israel Fund. Class warfare was the obvious opening shot.

Editor’s note: The world is at this moment witnessing a horrific phenomenon: Islamists coming to power throughout the Middle East under the guise of a supposed “Arab Spring” – while the President of the United States is facilitating the entire process. Indeed, President Obama is reaching his hand out in solidarity to Islamists and enabling their solidification of power throughout the region. While displaying a disastrous weakness with Iran and allowing the Mullahs to move ahead aggressively with their nuclear weapon program, the Obama administration is helping the Muslim Brotherhood take over Egypt and the Taliban regain power in Afghanistan.

In these tragic and disturbing circumstances, the editors of Frontpage felt it timely and relevant to rerun the video of Frontpage editor Jamie Glazov’s interview with Erick Stakelbeck on CBN News in May 2009, in which he discussed his book “United in Hate,” which crystallizes why the Left is in league with our deadly jihadi enemies. The interview explains precisely why a leftist like Obama is pursuing a disastrous foreign policy that is helping Islamists gain and consolidate power throughout the Middle East. Below is the second part of the two-part interview. We ran the first part in our next previous issue. 

Part II:

Editors’ note: The world is at this moment witnessing a horrific phenomenon: Islamists coming to power throughout the Middle East under the guise of a supposed “Arab Spring” – while the President of the United States is facilitating the entire process. Indeed, President Obama is reaching his hand out in solidarity to Islamists and enabling their solidification of power throughout the region. While displaying a disastrous weakness with Iran and allowing the Mullahs to move ahead aggressively with their nuclear weapon program, the Obama administration is helping the Muslim Brotherhood take over Egypt and the Taliban regain power in Afghanistan.

In these tragic and disturbing circumstances, the editors of Frontpage felt it timely and relevant to rerun the video of Frontpage editor Jamie Glazov’s interview with Erick Stakelbeck on CBN News in May 2009, in which he discussed his book “United in Hate,” which crystallizes why the Left is in league with our deadly jihadi enemies. The interview explains precisely why a leftist like Obama is pursuing a disastrous foreign policy that is helping Islamists gain and consolidate power throughout the Middle East. Below is the first part of the two part interview. We will run the second part in our next issue. 

Part I:

In Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy, James Fallows cites Homer Bigart, the doyen of the Vietnam War press corps, who “used to tell younger reporters that their first task was to drop the assumption that they understood a story before they reported it”—sage advice that has gone largely unheeded. Indeed, today the media game has changed dramatically. Reporters and news writers not only assume that they understand a story before it unfolds, they approach events with a cookie-cutter mentality, a prefabricated plot line. They come equipped with an entrenched political perspective that enables them to shape the news according to prior specification, a practice that has come to be known as “agenda journalism.”

For example, former head of India’s counter-terrorism agency Bahukutumbi Raman, writing for the South East Asia Analysis group, refers to “agenda and motivated journalism.” Jonathan Tobin writing in Commentary deplores the “agenda journalism” at The New York Times, which has “graduated into agitprop style distortions of the truth,” and Simon Plosker at Honest Reporting skewers the “Guardian’s agenda journalism.” More recently, Tom Blumer at PJ Media takes issue with the Associated Press’ promotion of something called “The New Distinctiveness” or “Journalism with Voice” which, as Blumer shows, quoting several salient examples, “has nothing to do with facts and everything to do with spin.” In short, “Journalism with Voice” is merely a fancy term for “agenda journalism.”

Blumer renames the Associated Press as the Administration’s Press since its chief purpose appears not to report the news fairly and accurately but to re-elect the Obama administration. But AP is only one division in the president’s army. It is no secret that Barack Obama rode to electoral victory in the armor-plated limousine provided by the mainstream media. The propaganda vehicle successfully deflected every salient criticism along with the hail of biographical data that would have put his campaign in serious jeopardy.

Similarly, the controversy over the now-defunct Journolist group does not cloud the fact that a number of its members were clearly playing partisan politics, attacking Republicans and suppressing unsavory facts about Obama. Jonathan Chait in The New Republic considered the rumpus exaggerated, but Mark Fitzgibbons writing in American Thinker and Roger Simon at Politico reveal the “malice” (Fitzgibbon’s word) and discernibly left-wing bias that governed the listserve’s procedures. One recalls, too, the forced resignations of CBS anchor Dan Rather and CNN executive vice president Eason Jordan, implicated in their respective scandals. And who can forget Newsweek’s mutilation of the truth in its Koran-flushing perjury? (The editors were obviously unfamiliar with H.J. Simson’s classic 1937 study, British Rule, and Rebellion, where he discusses the Koran-shredding ploy used by the Arabs to incriminate British officers during the Palestinian rebellion of 1936—though Newsweek was plainly, so to speak, on the same Palestinian page.) None of this should surprise us. In today’s media consortium in the West—the European media are guilty of the same kind of yellow journalism—it is obvious that a basic trust has been broken. The Fourth Estate has become the Fifth Column.

Naturally, journalism was always to some extent agenda driven. Every shade of the political spectrum boasted its particular newspaper, patronized by its targeted readership. The agenda was pretty well explicit. The difference today is threefold: the mantle of principled objectivity in which our journalists conspicuously garb themselves; the fact that the agenda is often undeclared, allowing the media to sail under false colors; and the expansion of global coverage into the visual, electronic and digital dimensions which purport to be mere aggregate news gatherers transposing the world directly and without deviation to the airwaves and the screen. In this way, the media is able to caramelize its product and, as a result, the underlying cookery generally goes undetected.

Robert Kaplan has justly written in Policy Review for December 2004 that “the ongoing centralization of major media outlets, the magnification of the media’s influence through various electronic means and satellite printing…has created new realms of authority akin to the emergence of a superpower with similarly profound geopolitical consequences.” This “superpower” has, for the most part, invaded the public mind with an army of reporters, columnists, think-tankers and editors engaged in the diffusion of fables and distortions. For what we used to call “journalistic integrity” is a rara avis and news reporting has come increasingly to reflect editorial policy—even the headline will often flaunt a compressed editorial opinion—making it difficult for the interested reader or viewer to arrive at a reasonable approximation of the truth, so far as it can be reliably determined.

As I mused in The Big Lie, when even so sedate a commentator as William Watson refers in passing in a National Post column to that “demonic moron” George W. Bush, we know we are no longer in the world of accountable journalism, a world shrinking at a vertiginous rate. Another example of such a betrayal of responsibility is Charles Brooker’s now-infamous column in The Guardian for October 23, 2004 in which he called for the assassination of President Bush: “John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr.—where are you now that we need you.” Such jaundiced sentiment masking as informed opinion shows how corrupt our press has become and explains how Aidan White, general secretary of the International Association of Journalists, can describe Hezbollah’s propaganda tool, the Al-Manar television network, as a “free press.” Like to like.

Foreign correspondence features the same decadent symptoms as the national brand of specious advocacy and cultivated ignorance. The Western media today is terminally infected by the lazy incompetence of journalists who are generally unfamiliar with the areas and issues they report upon, have little or no knowledge of the languages of the regions to which they have been posted, rely on “fixers” and second-hand or biased sources of information, arrive on the job with their own set of prejudices, and are, for the most part, profoundly uneducated in politics and history. The general modus operandi is simple: jump to premature conclusions, accept orchestrated events as veridical and interpretation as fact, ignore confuting or problematic data, and suppress or damp down countervailing intel when the truth eventually emerges. There is now little that may serve to distinguish our notable news organs from, let us say, the Palestinian daily Al-Hayat al-Jadida or the Arabic television channel Al Jazeera.

January 10, 2012 was a big day for terrorist Anders Breivik, the diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic (but now being reevaluated), who on July 22, 2011, bombed the Norwegian Prime Minister’s office and, soon after on that same day, gunned down seventy-seven Norwegian teenagers at a political camp near Oslo.  The Norwegian justice system will now permit him to receive visitors, ending almost six months of isolation.  This will allow Breivik to give interviews to the media to expound his wild theories justifying his murderous actions, and even entertain adoring supporters.  Undoubtedly, the resulting attention, stories and interviews will create outrage among the still grieving Norwegian population. And undoubtedly, the leftist, politically correct Norwegian elite will use this public outrage to continue their campaign to restrict, or even shut down, all speech they perceive as “Islamophobic.”

Brevik’s horrendous mass murder has already been used by Norway’s liberal elite for political gains.   Shortly after the attack, the Prime Minister’s Labor Party used it to smear the party’s main political opposition – the Norwegian Progress Party – as a bunch of hate-filled, Breivik sympathizers.  The Progress Party’s only real connections to Breivik were: 1) that he used to be a member of their party before ditching them for their unwillingness to resort to physical violence; and 2) that they, like Breivik, oppose multiculturalism and unrestricted immigration.  In the Norwegian local elections on September 10, the elite’s strategy was shown to be hugely successful, as the Labor Party received a large sympathy vote over the Progress Party.  Simply put, Norwegians were shamed into voting against the party that had been “linked” to the mass murderer.

The political ramifications of the Brevik attack are not unique to Norway.  In nation after nation in the West, the elites have used Breivik’s attack as a way to restrict debates regarding Islam-related issues (i.e., topics including Islam, radical Islam, terrorism, and terrorist funding).  They have done so in one of three ways: 1) as previously illustrated, as an electoral club against anti-immigrant, anti-Islamist, “right wing” political parties; 2) as a call to push new legislation to restrict free speech concerning Islam-related topics; or 3) as an attempt to shame certain leading commentators and scholars from speaking about Islam-related topics.  Unfortunately for proponents of universal free speech rights, these leftist elites have had increasing success by all of these methods.  Several European nations besides Norway have used this smear in political campaigns – see Finland; see Sweden; see Denmark; see Germany; and see – of course – the Netherlands.  Some others, such as Austria, have used it to justify the strengthening of their “hate speech” codes; where in October of 2011 the Austrian Parliament passed the Terrorism Prevention Law.

In the United States, the cultural liberal apologists have used the Brevik attack to both shame and silence those commentators and scholars who work on Islam-related issues.  There are essentially two arguments that the PC elite media have advanced here.  First, they have claimed that the criticisms of Islamism (or of Islam) made by the counter jihad movement actually “fostered” Breivik’s terrorist actions.  Second, the elite media has made the argument that since their foes have acted irresponsibly with their own language and have some of the same positions as Breivik on Islam-related issues, they must also be somehow at fault.  A frequently used tool to connect Breivik and a specific counterjihadi is the “cite and numbers game” in Breivik’s manifesto e.g., “Breivik, in his manifesto, cited scholar X 12 times, which must mean that scholar X fostered, or is associated with, the terrorist attack.”  Since Breivik’s manifesto is over 1500 pages long, it has been relatively easy for members of the press to find connections in it to a number of prominent bloggers, among them: Mark Steyn, Fjordman, Robert Spencer, Daniel Pipes, and Bruce Bawer.  Finally, after making the connections, the elite media then demand that the counterjihadi activists need to be shamed into reining in their criticism of Islam-related topics to prevent future terrorist attacks.

British Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks visited with Pope Benedict XVI last month in Rome and defended Europe’s Judeo-Christian heritage, including the “religious roots of the market economy and of democratic capitalism.”   In a speech there, he urged that Jews and Christians to work together to “help Europe recover its soul.”

Separately, in a speech to the British House of Lords, Sacks denounced increasing persecution of Christians by radical Islam, warning that the “fate of Christians in the Middle East today is the litmus test of the Arab Spring.”  In Rome and in London, he was more outspoken than are many of Europe’s often muted church officials, who typically fear to defend their faith, their culture, or their persecuted brethren.

“If Europe loses the Judeo-Christian heritage that gave it its historic identity and its greatest achievements in literature, art, music, education, politics, and economics, it will lose its identity and its greatness,” Sacks warned during his Rome speech.  “When a civilization loses its faith, it loses its future. When it recovers its faith, it recovers its future. For the sake of our children … we – Jews and Christians, side-by-side – must renew our faith and its prophetic voice.”

Sacks admired and was encouraged by the warm response the Pope received during his 2010 visit to mostly non-religious Britain, when “everyone was amazed that the interest was so acute and so widespread.” The Chief Rabbi’s visit to Rome clearly was an attempt to strengthen Jewish and Christian voices in defense of historic Western cultural, political and economic principles.

Unlike left-leaning church officials in the West who simplistically equate free markets with sterile materialism, Sacks offered a more balanced perspective.  He critiqued Europe’s secularism and materialism while pointing out that biblical religion created the foundations of prosperous market economies.  “When Europe recovers its soul, it will recover its wealth-creating energies,” he said.  “But first it must remember: humanity was not created to serve markets. Markets were created to serve humankind.”   In contrast, the Religious Left, both in Europe and America, prefers to believe that markets are innately wicked and must be usurped by coercive national and international regulation.

Of course, much of the Religious Left is itself deeply materialist, preoccupied by the redistribution of wealth but unconcerned about the transcendence and timeless principles that facilitate justice and prosperity.  But appropriately for a spiritual leader, Sacks pointed to the primacy of the “soul” of Europe.

“We are very concerned obviously with the soul of Europe, I mean Europe was built on Judeo-Christian foundations, even the market was built on Judeo-Christian foundations,” Sacks told Vatican Radio.  In his Rome speech, he described the West’s democracy and prosperity relying on biblical understandings of “dignity of the human individual,” respect for property rights and labor, job creation over charity, and creation of wealth so as to become “partners with God in the work of creation.”   He noted that ancient rabbis “favored markets and competition because they generate wealth, lower prices, increase choice, reduced absolute levels of poverty, and extend humanity’s control over the environment, narrowing the extent to which we are the passive victims of circumstance and fate.”

We made three fundamental mistakes in our dealings with Islam. First, we assumed that the only politically acceptable answer was also the right answer. This is the most common mistake that politicians make.

Second, we established a construct of a moderate and extreme Islam that reflected how we saw it from the outside. This construct had no theological relationship to any actual belief or movement within Islam. Had we made the division into modern and fundamentalist, we would at least have been using words that meant something. Instead we used moderate and extreme in a military sense to mean hostile and friendly or neutral. But as a Vietnam era president and military command should have known, in a guerrilla war not everyone who isn’t shooting at you is friendly or even neutral.

Our construct was black and white with few shades of gray. But the Muslim world is all shades of gray. The absolute choice we wanted them to make, “you’re either with us or with the terrorists”, was foreign to their culture and their way of life. Multiple layers of contradictory relationships and alliances are the norm in the region. You expect to betray and be betrayed, much as you expect to cheat and be cheated while bartering for a carpet at the souk. In a region where coalitions of Fascists, Communists and Islamists are doable, contradictions don’t exist, all alliances are expedient and built on an expected betrayal. The rise of Islam itself was built on broken peace treaties. So it is no wonder then that in response to Bush’s call, they chose both us and the terrorists. Appeasing America and the Islamists at the same time was their version of the politically safe middle ground, the path of least resistance and the only acceptable option.

And the more we prattled about the peacefulness of Islam, the more we looked like we could be easily appeased with a few gestures. And so it was the Islamists who were more threatening, who got the benefit of of their appeasement. We had asked Muslim countries for an alliance with no mixed allegiances, in a region where only kin could ask or count on such an arrangement. And we are not their kin, neither by blood and certainly not by religion. While we insisted that all people were the same, this was a statement of our belief, not theirs. And they did not believe that we believed it either.

Rather than learning what the Muslim world was, we had already decided what we wanted it to be. But our perspective was a foreign one. They might pander to it, but they would never dictate their own beliefs by it. We might talk of a moderate or extreme Islam, but that is our idea, not theirs. There is more than one form of Islam, they are not defined by their extremism or moderation. Nor by their approach toward violence. No more than we are.

Muslim theology is violent, because violence has always been a tool of its expansion. When we ask Muslims to disassociate themselves from violence, we are really asking them to disassociate themselves from Islam. And this they will not do. They will contextually condemn some acts of terror, depending on the identity of the perpetrators and the targets, and the impact of the acts on the nation and ideology of the Muslim or Muslims in question. But they will dub other acts of terrorist as valid resistance. The differences are not moral, but contextual.

The Muslim world is a gray zone full of alliances written on sand where every principle can be bent at need, but is dominated by a religion that pretends to be morally absolute. This is an inherent contradiction. And like most moral conflicts it is resolved through self-deception. Our absolute standards have no meaning when applied to the Muslim world. They have moral force, but little practical relevance.

Islamic moderation is not theology, but pragmatism. Its fanatics are the most trustworthy, and its pragmatists the least trustworthy. We have put our faith in the moderation of the pragmatists, but confusing pragmatism with moderate beliefs, morals or friendship is no better than lapping at the sand of a mirage and calling it water.

Our third and final mistake was to believe that we held all or most of the cards, and were free to give away as many of them as we wanted to. But the more we thought we were calling the shots, the more we were shot at. Because we were not in control. The political, religious and armed conflicts we were engaged in were being fought on their terms, not ours. They began the war. They decided when to initiate the violence or call a halt to it. Their violence set the tone, we tried to defuse it. Our attempts to promote moderation in the Muslim world were reactive. It is the bomber who has the initiative once he chooses to act. And so we tried to teach the bombers not to bomb, while the bombers taught us to appease them.

When a psychiatrist rewards rats for finishing a maze, is it the psychiatrist who is training the rats to finish mazes, or the rats who are training him to give them cheese. The answer to that question hinges on who controls the experiment. While we thought that we were experimenting on the Muslim world to make them more moderate, they were actually experimenting on us to teach us to appease them.

While we were trying to force the Muslim world into our maze with two openings, one labeled ‘extreme’ and one labeled ‘moderate’, they were really moving us into their meta-maze with two openings, ‘death’ or ‘appeasement’. Our plan was to keep forcing them to choose the moderate openings in order to moderate them and break them of any attachment to terrorism. But our chief method for moving them there was appeasement. Once we got bogged down in Iraq, appeasement became our only method. While we thought that we were leading them to the moderate opening in our maze by appeasing them, they were leading us to the appeasement opening in their maze.

The rats turned out to be training the psychiatrist and they have done an excellent job of it. The Muslim world is more Anti-American than it was 10 years ago, while we are more pro-Muslim. Each time they finish the moderate maze and assure us how peaceful Islam is, we gift them with the cheese of appeasement. Rather than teaching them to be moderate using the reward of our appeasement, they have taught us to appease them using the reward of their faked moderation. Like tourists at the souk, we have been cheated badly by laying out good money for a fake rug. But worse than that we have been turned into rats in their maze, rushing to appease them in the hopes that they will reward us by being moderate.

Pavlov demonstrated that once you teach dogs to associate a ringing bell with a meal, they will salivate when you ring the bell even when there is no food. So too rats will keep running the maze even when there is no cheese. So too governments continue appeasing Islam, even when the promised cheese of moderation fails to yield any significant changes on the ground. A plot broken up here or there. Or even a mosque that opens its doors to the FBI or Scotland Yard is enough for them. But is it the FBI that is teaching Muslims to be more cooperative, or Muslims who are teaching the FBI to be more accommodating. Who is the psychiatrist and who is the rat?

Conventional wisdom, or at least the cliché, is that history goes in cycles, or is akin to a pendulum that only swings so far this way until, as if by a force of nature, it swings back in the other direction.

It is easy to forget – or simply never to have thought about at all – but the human condition was pretty much the same from the dawn of time until what I call the Modern Liberal Era (post World War II through today.)  The “five thousand year leap” that was borne of Western Civilization in general and America’s founding in particular, was joined both by geopolitical realities and technological marvels over the past six-plus decades, to create a world vastly different than anything human beings had ever before known.

With it came questions that other civilizations rarely contemplated, and then only as science fiction.  These futuristic mullings are now our world’s realistic possibilities for both good and ill.  Never before, for example, did people have to give serious consideration as to how to sustain a civilization where aging can be slowed to a near-standstill, where average life expectancy will soon easily exceed a hundred years and where talk can seriously be engaged in about never dying at all.

How are these things to be paid for?  At what age does someone who never dies begin to collect Social Security?  Who’s to pay – and how — the medical bills of those who, with just another and then another implant or surgery can live forever?

Now that human life can be manufactured in a test tube and new species manufactured in a lab, is human life still the domain only of God and, if so, how does one control the genie now that it’s out of the bottle?  Should we control it?  Are we prepared to deal with the unintended – or in some cases, intended — consequences?

Further realties of our time – and no one else’s in human history – is the ease with which rogue regimes and evil despots can wreak havoc and even doom.  How will the “Arab Spring” shake out?  Will the world be faced with Jihad of the sort almost won by the Muslims the first time around only now with nuclear arms and hellacious toxins at their easy disposal?

These are no small questions nor idle and fanciful chatter.  They are the realistic possibilities – and in some cases, already the reality – of our brave new world.  How this plays out, history can offer little guidance.  But for us to be going into this yawning and daunting unknown with our books out of balance, our resources left untapped and our military eviscerated is beyond irresponsible, it is insane.

[This review was originally posted on LiveLeak.com.]

Jamie Glazov connects the dots between the totalitarian massacres of the 20th century, murder in the name of Islam and the mutual attraction between the radical Left and radical Islamists.

Both the radical and the reactionary hate the present. Intellectuals and celebrities venerated monsters like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, & Ho Chi Minh. The New Left of the 1960s didn’t have a change of heart, just a change of icons from Stalin to third world tyrants. The homicidal and sadistic Che Guevara is still held up as a hero.

After the communist victory and resultant slaughter in Vietnam, few of Hanoi’s western supporters expressed shock or regret. These true believers do not care about the victims who are merely eggs to be broken in order to create the perfect utopian omelet.

The last communist hope in Nicaragua was shattered by Ronald Reagan. After that, the collapse of the Soviet Empire left the Left aimless.

To order United in Hate, click here.

The ideological offspring of the ‘progressives’ that were hoping the West would lose the Cold War became the nihilist leftovers of today.Hatred of the United States is one great attractor. Jihadists share a desire for cathartic violence with radical leftists; that’s why the latter could not conceal their glee in the wake of 9/11.

In the 1930s, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj al-Amin al-Husseini, became a supporter of Hitler, eventually settling in Berlin where he encouraged the annihilation of European
Jews, hoping to become the leader of the Arab world in expectation of an Axis victory.

The Mufti promoted Nazism amongst the Arabs, blending National Socialism with fundamentalist Islam. After the war, he fled to Cairo where he accommodated fleeing Nazis and planned the destruction of Israel. Al-Husseini did not only target Jews but also moderate Arabs and the democratic West in general. Nazism was the spiritual and physical bridge bringing ideological extremism to the Arab world. When the Soviet Union
became the champion of the Arab cause, hatred of Israel started migrating to the Left. Arab leaders like Gamal Abdel Nasser, Saddam Hussein and Yasser Arafat were all influenced by the Mufti’s ideas.

The Left’s latest idol is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his proxies Hamas and Hezbollah.

I have often wondered with both genuine puzzlement and rage, why the radical Left seems to have vigorously supported every murderous tyranny on the face of the earth, providing it is anti-Western.

It has always been galling and sickening how left wing radicals have had no humanity towards anyone who was a victim of the totalitarian regimes or bloodthirsty terrorist movements that they have supported over the last century. The shameful death cult odyssey has led left wing radicals of the intellectual elite, academics, lawyers, writers, entertainers and others to always identify with the most evil and monstrous regimes and leaders on this planet and to turn a blind eye to the death and destruction they have sowed (while in reality enjoying it).

Watch Jamie Glazov explain the Left’s romance with terror in the CBN video interview below:

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For those wondering where the permutations of progressives’ infatuation with government-enforced moral relativism lead, Greece is a bellwether. Despite teetering on the brink of national insolvency, Greece’s Labor Ministry has decided to expand its list of state-recognized disability categories. The latest additions? Exhibitionism, kleptomania–and pedophilia.

“What’s happened is incomprehensible. I think there is some big mistake. The ministry should have a different policy on disability,” said Yiannis Vardakastanis, leader of Greece’s National Confederation of Disabled People (NCDP). ”The list contains major changes to disability quotients, which could effectively remove many people from access to benefits.” The NDCP itself called the ruling “incomprehensible” and noted that pedophiles will now be awarded a greater level of disability payments than some people who receive organ transplants. ”It’s really not serious to grant Peeping Toms a 20-30 percent disability rate, and 10 percent to diabetics, who have insulin shots four or five times a day,” fumed Vardakastanis.

The Labor Ministry claimed that the new categories on the list–which also includes pyromaniacs, compulsive gamblers, fetishists and sadomasochists–were determined by a panel of medical experts, but that they did not necessarily signify benefit entitlements. ”No insured citizen has received any benefit under the new rates,” a statement released by the Ministry on Tuesday explained.

Yet the NCDP remains alarmed. They are in talks with Labour Minister Giorgos Koutroumanis to get the new code changed before it goes before the Greek parliament and is voted into law. Their primary concerns are two-fold: the new code could be used to undermine state benefits to current disability groups, many of whom rallied in December demanding job and benefit protection; and the new disability scale would work cumulatively “so a person gets 20 per cent for one thing, then more for something else–and when they reach 67%, they are entitled to benefits,” noted Vardakastanis, who is blind.

A blind and unemployed person in Greece is currently entitled to $896 per month, while an employed blind person gets $461. “Disability is if society doesn’t give you what you need to be like others,” said Vardakastanis. “We want the Greek government to really protect vulnerable groups from getting deeper into poverty, exclusion and discrimination.”

At this point in time, that is a tall order. Greece has accumulated more than $445 billion of national debt, and must cut state spending to the bone in order to get the next installment of $165 billion in bailout money coming from the European Union (EU) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The IMF’s largest contributor is the United States, which funds 17 percent of its budget. And while bills to defund our $100 billion contribution are working their way through both houses of Congress, it is more likely that onlyadditional funding in 2012 will be prevented. Thus, American taxpayers might someday be underwriting Greek pedophiles.

The outrage over this story has sparked a re-iteration by the Labor Ministry that the new list ”solely concerns medical evaluation, not the provision of social benefits.” Yet there is no denying that they remain government-recognized disabilities. In other words, the proverbial camel’s nose is under the tent. Those familiar with the incrementalist approach employed by progressives with regard to controversial issues know where this is leading. As they have with so many other issues, progressives will wage a campaign aimed at wearing down public antipathy–by any means necessary–in order to get what they want.

And lest Americans think such incrementalism regarding pedophilia is confined to Greece, it should be noted that American progressives are endeavoring to emulate Greece’s morally relative ways. At an August 17, 2011 conference in Baltimore, a group of American mental health professionals and sympathetic activists known as B4U-ACT advocated the removal of pedophilia from the American Psychiatric Association’s list of mental defects in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

The Greek government does not cease to beg the EU and international institutions for spare change in order to help the country dig itself out of its debt debacle. But, as it turns out, the Greek government evidently really has too much spare budgetary funds, money it is desperate to find a way to waste.

Indeed that is the only plausible explanation for the decision by the government of Greece a few days ago to start funding pedophiles. No, that is not a spoof and not a misprint.  According to the Associated Press, the Greek government has just recognized pedophiles as a population of the “disabled,” entitled under law to governmental disability compensation and added to the country’s welfare roll.  The children who are the victims of those pedophiles evidently are not.

Pedophiles are not the only folks being added to the growing lists of those who may enjoy free handouts and disability income from the Greek government. (Notice I did not say benefits “paid for by the Greek taxpayer,” since so much of the Greek national budget is not covered by them these days.)  Exhibitionists and kleptomaniacs were also just added to the welfare roll list that already includes pyromaniacs, compulsive gamblers, fetishists and sadomasochists.  Under the new Greek “disability” rules and categories, pedophiles will get larger welfare checks than people who have undergone organ transplants. Peeping Toms will enjoy a higher level of support than diabetics.

The additions to the welfare roll were denounced by the Greek National Confederation of Disabled People and its leader Yiannis Vardakastanis, who is blind. They are concerned that all the additions will lead to the reduction in support levels for people with real disabilities. Now almost the only people in Greece who will not be recognized as “disabled” are those who abide by the law. Under the circumstances, those law abiders should really be the first group to be acknowledged as disabled, because they are clearly insane.

What is one to make of all this?

The first conclusion is that this new set of insane “disability” policies serves as a perfect demonstration of what led Greece to the debtors dog house in the first place. For many years the Greek governments of both the leading parties have handled their finances like the cartoon king in the Wizard of Id, handing out massive wide-scale exemptions from payment of taxes while ladling out populist largess with a soup spoon so large that it could quench the thirst of mythological Greek gods.

The second conclusion is that what we observe in Greece is political correctness on crack and steroids.  Here is the ultimate and natural culmination of the attempts to subject society to the idiocies of political correctness.  When “approval” becomes a universal entitlement, when all condemnation of all forms of behavior is a reactionary manifestation of intolerance and bigotry, why should not pedophilia and kleptomania be added to the lists of behavior about which one must never ever be judgmental?

But perhaps the most important lesson from the Greek policies is that there seem to be no limits to the “medicalization” of misbehavior.   For decades now, growing numbers of evil, destructive, anti-social, and deviant behavior have been “medicalized,” converted into medical conditions.  Once they are classified as medical conditions, those who engage in such behavior get an automatic “pass” from society.  They often also get money.  While not quite as insane as the Greek policies, the United States has digested a huge bowl of similar idiocy within the framework of the Americans with Disabilities Act, first passed in 1990.

Definitions of disabilities are getting sillier and sillier in many parts of the world.  In the United States, the current version of the Americans with Disabilities Act defines the term “disability” with respect to an individual as: (A) a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities of such individual; (B) a record of such an impairment; or (C) being regarded as having such an impairment.

From the start, public safety was not considered valid grounds for “discriminating” against people with “disabilities.” So a group of near-sighted people sued when they were denied jobs as airline pilots. People with serious psychiatric problems have sued when denied various jobs and positions in which the public could be placed in harm’s way as a result of their employment. People with contagious diseases like hepatitis cannot be denied jobs in which they may infect others, since that would be discrimination against the disabled.  It is even more difficult to deny positions to those with AIDS or HIV.

Editors’ note: The world is at this moment witnessing a horrific phenomenon: Islamists coming to power throughout the Middle East under the guise of a supposed “Arab Spring” – while the President of the United States is facilitating the entire process. Indeed, President Obama is reaching his hand out in solidarity to Islamists and enabling their solidification of power throughout the region. While displaying a disastrous weakness with Iran and allowing the Mullahs to move ahead aggressively with their nuclear weapon program, the Obama administration is helping the Muslim Brotherhood take over Egypt and the Taliban regain power in Afghanistan.

In these tragic and disturbing circumstances, the editors of Frontpage felt it timely and relevant to run the video of Frontpage editor Jamie Glazov’s speech in May 2009, in which he discussed his book “United in Hate,” which crystallizes why the Left is in league with our deadly jihadi enemies. The speech explains precisely why a leftist like Obama is pursuing a disastrous foreign policy that is helping Islamists gain and consolidate power throughout the Middle East. Below are the final two parts of the 4-part speech. We ran the first two parts in yesterday’s issue.

Part III:

Part IV:

Editors’ note: The world is at this moment witnessing a horrific phenomenon: Islamists are coming to power throughout the Middle East under the guise of a supposed “Arab Spring” – while the President of the United States is facilitating the entire process. Indeed, President Obama is reaching his hand out in solidarity to Islamists and enabling their solidification of power throughout the region. While displaying a disastrous weakness with Iran and allowing the Mullahs to move ahead aggressively with their nuclear weapon program, the Obama administration is helping the Muslim Brotherhood take over Egypt and the Taliban regain power in Afghanistan.

In these tragic and disturbing circumstances, the editors of Frontpage felt it timely and relevant to run the video of Frontpage editor Jamie Glazov’s speech in Los Angeles in May 2009, in which he discussed his book “United in Hate,” which crystallizes why the Left is in league with our deadly jihadi enemies. The speech explains precisely why a leftist like Obama is pursuing a disastrous foreign policy that is helping Islamists gain and consolidate power throughout the Middle East. Below are the first two parts of the 4-part speech. We will run the last two parts in our next issue:

Part I:

Part II:

Once one gets beyond the self-serving sloganeering of the Democratic Party — the notion that they and only they are “compassionate” or that they and only they “like air and water” — and addresses the actual policies and values of the different parties, it becomes clear that there is absolutely nothing Jewish about the Democrat Party.  In fact, the Democratic Party is antithetical to Jewish moral beliefs.

Jewish values reside in the Republican Party, which is the reason that the more Jewish a person is by belief and practice, the less likely he is to support the Democrats.  Secular Jews are overwhelmingly likely, Reform Jews somewhat less likely, Conservative Jews less likely than that and Orthodox Jews not at all likely to put their faith in the party of faithlessness.

So why, then, do any Jews vote for a party that stands in total opposition to Jewish values?  The answer can be found, at least in part, in the writings of Rabbi Joshua Hammerman:

Emboldened faithful can do insane things, like burning mosques, bashing gays and indiscriminately banishing immigrants.

Many Jews – I’ll call them the “Hammerman Jews” — have made a Faustian bargain.  Fearful of what “emboldened” faithful might do, they have betrayed their own faith in exchange for the temporary safety they believe can be found in the arms of the faithless.

The attraction the Hammerman Jew has for the Democratic Party is found in its entirety in a rather shallow, objectively false and logically fallacious conviction that those with no religion are closer to Jewish belief than are those from a different religion. The idea is that Christians are, by being people of a faith not Jewish, more of a threat to Judaism than are those antipathetic to any and all faith equally.  It’s as illogical and self-destructive as it sounds.

But the Hammerman Jew has signed onto the non-Jewish, wholly liberal conceit that it is not what someone believes but the existence of any beliefs that is the threat to world peace in general and the safety of the Jews in particular.  Only those who have beliefs, the argument goes, can become so emboldened in those beliefs as to be willing to burn down a mosque or bash a gay or, by extension, start a pogrom or support a holocaust.

The way to prevent the next holocaust, then, isn’t to stand up for good and rightful values, it is to join with those with no values, allied with them in their war against belief.

How frightened of the faithful are these Hammerman Jews?  Consider the impetus for Hammerman having raised the alarm with his piece in the first place.  What had set Hammerman off to become fearful enough to warn the world was not a gathering of the Ku Klux Klan or a meeting of the Neo-Nazis, it was the possibility that Tim Tebow might lead his team to the Super Bowl.  I kid you not:

If Tebow wins the Super Bowl, against all odds, it will buoy his faithful, and emboldened faithful can do insane things, like burning mosques, bashing gays and indiscriminately banishing immigrants…

When a man is so terrified of people of faith that he’s convinced the next holocaust is always just a field goal away, you can understand why he might chuck all of his values and blindly sign on with the enemy.

Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.  

To get the whole story on why leftist Jews side with those who plan to do them harm, read Jamie Glazov’s book, United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror.

A video interview with spokeswoman Rysle Dyre:

If Barack Obama wins in 2012, he can bestow his gratitude largely  on his news media worshipers.

Appearing on Dec. 25 Meet the Press, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, full of his usual arrogance and ferver, said he was deeply worried about Obama’s prospects for re-election: “I really, really worry about him. Republicans are starved for a candidate … they think is as smart and mellifluous as the president.”

During the 2008 campaign, the network morning shows were cheerleaders for the Democratic field. In 2012, they are sure to be providing far more hostile coverage of various Republicans who are running, while treating Obama’s re-election campaign to the same personality-driven coverage that was so helpful to the then-Illinois Senator four years ago.

For instance, NBC News, Dec. 28 hyped Gallop Poll numbers indicating a slim improvement in Obama’s approval/disapproval numbers after House Republicans agreed to the payroll tax cut extension compromise, although recently following numbers indicated his approval was sliding backward.

On NBC Nightly News, reporter Kristen Welker first enthusiastically touted the out-dated and more positive number. She failed to inform viewers that Obama’s disapproval rating had increased more than the approval rating had fallen.

Excerpts from Barbara Walters’ ABC interview with Barack and Michele Obama in the White House, released Dec. 23, was defended by left-wing Media Matters publication as a conservative attack by such publications as the National Journal and the Daily Caller. Why? Because they reported the President had said:

“[D]eep, underneath all the work I do, I think there’s a laziness in me.”

The portion of the interview released by ABC news did not include the part in which Obama also says, “I’m saying to myself. You know what, you could be doing better, push harder…”

Politico’s correspondent Ben Smith fearfully is called this the “next anti-Obama talking point” for Republicans.

The Hill newspaper recently held a poll conducted by Pulse Opinion Research about media bias. The results indicated 46 percent of likely voters felt that the news media favored Democrats. “This figure outstripped by more than two to one the share of the electorate (22 percent) that believed Republicans” were beneficiaries of media bias.

As Robert Lichter, director of the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University, told The Hill: “You never lost a vote in a Republican primary by attacking the media” Lichter has studied media bias for a generation.

Over on ABC, World News correspondent Jim Avila spun the fight as one between unpopular Republicans and a resurgent Barack Obama.

According to Avila, the country’s anger is “reflected in today’s ABC News/Washington Post poll, showing a job approval rating of just 20 percent for Republicans in Congress who have blocked the payroll tax cut while President Obama’s approval rating jumped to 49 percent.”

NBC and ABC on following days knocked House Republicans for potentially “messing up” an extension of the payroll tax cut. NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell derided this as “holiday cheer gone sour.”

The previous night, O’Donnell portrayed Boehner as “feeling the heat” and unable to control his own members. She gossiped, “And there is political fallout too, there are some questions about Speaker Boehner’s leadership, his ability to deliver votes…”

Officials from the policy-neutral National Payroll Reporting Consortium, Inc. (NPRC) have expressed concern to members of Congress that the two-month payroll tax holiday passed by the Senate and supported by President Obama cannot be implemented properly.

ABC’s Good Morning America mostly ignored the subject, providing only two news briefs on the payroll extension. CBS’s Early Show (as well as the network’s Evening News from Monday) provided more restrained coverage.