After a prolonged 33-hour siege on Merah’s apartment hideout, the police finally felled Merah with a bullet to the head. But that decisive resolution would have been highly unlikely had they deferred to the media consensus and gone after what reports in the French and foreign press emphatically suggested was a “right-wing assassin,” or “a marksman with far-right views,” perhaps one who had taken “inspiration from Anders Behring Breivik,” the Norwegian ultra-nationalist and mass murderer who killed 77 people.

In keeping with its ideologically preferred suspect, one popular press theory was that the Toulouse murderer was one of the neo-Nazi soldiers dismissed from the French army in 2008 after being photographed giving the Nazi salute behind a Swastika-emblazoned flag. “The French army has people in its ranks who may be tempted by extremism,” one French daily mused darkly. Before long, tabloids were blaring about a “hunt for Nazi soldiers.”

Even after French police had interrogated the soldiers and cleared them of suspicion, speculation persisted that the killer must have been a right-wing extremist rather than, as the evidence suggested, an Islamist. The French press in particular fanned that theory, suggesting that “Islamophobia” was driving the killer. After asking whether Islamophobia as well as anti-Semitism could have been a motive in the killings, Le Figaro answered its own question with a definitive “no doubt.”

The press even found a quick culprit in President Nicolas Sarkozy. Fingers were instantly pointed at Sarkozy’s comments earlier this month that France had too many foreigners and was not integrating them properly into society. Sarkozy’s statement touched off a firestorm, but it was by no means baseless. Destructive waves of riots by Muslim youth of North African origin in 2005 and again in 2010 revealed that France’s immigrant enclaves were hotbeds of extremism and separatism, where residents had little connection to and a violent resentment of French society at large.

Nonetheless, the press insisted that it was Sarkozy who was to blame for creating a so-called “climate of intolerance” toward Muslims. The barely concealed subtext was that Sarkozy himself might have contributed to the emergence of the murderer in Toulouse – a charge reminiscent of the left-wing smear that “violent rhetoric” from the Tea Party had inspired the deranged Arizona assassin Jared Lee Loughner.

It’s a measure of the media’s commitment to the “Islamophobia” narrative that it did not abandon it even after police revealed that their prime suspect was a Muslim. Even after revealing Merah’s Algerian identity – though not, pointedly, the fact that he was a Muslim – the New York Times lamented that French “Muslims complain widely of feeling vilified by some political elements, on the right in particular” and warned that “the anti-immigration far right has been gaining unprecedented popularity in recent months.” The police had their man, but the Times had its story, and it was sticking with it.

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Dr. Michael Widlanski, a specialist in Arab politics and communication whose doctorate dealt with the Palestinian broadcast media. He is a former reporter, correspondent, and editor, respectively, at The New York Times, The Cox Newspapers-Atlanta Constitution, and The Jerusalem Post. He has also served as a special advisor to Israeli delegations to peace talks in 1991-1992 and as Strategic Affairs Advisor to the Ministry of Public Security, editing secret PLO Archives captured in Jerusalem. He is the author of the new book, Battle for Our Minds: Western Elites and the Terror Threat.

FP: Dr. Michael Widlanski, welcome to Frontpage Interview. What inspired you to write this book?

Widlanski: Terror is the chosen weapon of war for the 21st century. And it is primarily a battle of the mind. Do the terrorists  gain control of our head, or do we get into theirs?

The average citizen does not have the time to master Arabic, Farsi, or Islamic culture. The average Joe and Jane must rely on the gatekeepers of our minds—our media, our academia and our government-intelligence agencies.  These public intellectuals should be our “best and our brightest,” but instead they became our worst and our dimmest. They sold us a politically correct and factually inaccurate ideology of idiocy, a doctrine of willful ignorance.

I have seen our supposedly best minds in academia, media and government “intel” actually aid terrorists by sins of omission and commission. And I felt it was time to call them out on it.

FP: What is the main argument of the book and who and what are its main targets?

Widlanski:  The book talks about general performance, but it also gets “close and personal.”  It examines the record of the leaders of our elites in media, academia and government—Columbia and Georgetown, The New York Times and CNN, the CIA, the FBI and the presidents. And also in other countries, too.

There are three elites that are responsible–the university community and its Middle East Studies programs that were hijacked by doctrines of political correctness and anti-American, anti-Western and anti-Israeli ideologies led by Edward Said, Noam Chomsky and John Esposito. These universities then produced generations of largely know-nothing media pundits and government intelligence officials who do not know the difference between Hamas and hummus.

We have to understand the methods and ideologies of the newest generations of terrorists, most of whom are Arab-Islamic terrorists. I have been an active student of the phenomenon inside several Arab countries and Israel as a reporter, soldier, Arab affairs expert, security official and now as a father of three soldiers.

FP: You say some pretty tough things about some important people and organizations. Please name them for our readers.

Widlanski: From Professor Edward Said of Columbia to John Esposito of Georgetown, from Eason Jordan, Christiane Amanpour, Robert Wiener and Peter Arnett of CNN to Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd of the Times, and from George Tenet to Michael Scheuer at CIA.  The list is of course much longer.  Many of them have minimized, ignored and even concealed the problem, and occasionally fronted for terrorists. This is intolerable. My book names names, but it also offers policy solutions.

Editor’s note: More information on the unholy alliance’s campaign to silence critics of the jihadi threat can be found in David Horowitz and Robert Spencer’s pamphlet, “Islamophobia: Thought Crime of the Totalitarian Future,” available in our bookstore.

For a person like me who learned English as a second language, the current trend of inventing new meanings for words is a disturbing phenomenon. Our vocabulary is transforming, particularly in politics, where the new interpretation of news and events is distorted to adversely affect reality.

It started with our government demanding that we stop using certain words and specifying alternates. “Overseas contingency operation.” “Man-caused disaster.” “Anti-Islamic activity.”  These are the terms currently required by our administration for the “global war on terror,” “terrorism,” and “Islamic terrorism.” At times, “freedom fighters” has been used for “terrorists.” The new expressions are vague to the point of meaninglessness and don’t convey the facts.

These phrases appear in internal government memos, as well as media articles, preventing the public from being properly informed. A new edition of the lexicon might also include euphemisms for serial killers and serial rapists as “man-caused afflictions” or “uninvited shoppers” for shoplifters.

An official memo from the National Counterterrorism Communication Center directs the replacement of “terrorists” with vague words like “extremists” or “totalitarians.” Officials are to “refrain from using so-called harsh words or Arabic words with Islamic consequence.” Instead they are to use generic terms without specific emphasis. Why? Terrorists attack us and we should not use harsh words? The word “jihad” is used by the radicals themselves, why can’t we use it? Going one step further, the government has drafted official guidelines in the publication “Terminology to Define the Terrorists: Recommendations from American Muslims, a guide for U.S. Government Officials.”

In addition, the government has required corporations, state, federal and various other agencies to hold “sensitivity training” for dealing with the Muslim community. We have never had such requirements. We seemed to get along with people of other faiths. Any opposition expressed to the Muslim community is considered an attack. What happened to free speech?

Is there a problem with truth and facts and, most importantly, with the appropriate use of the English language?  The government instructed us to use “undocumented immigrant” instead of “illegal alien.” They are not synonymous. The word “illegal” means against the law and punishable by law. Our obligation is to follow the law and promote lawful behavior. Using the new expressions confuses the facts. Why are we afraid to tell the truth? How can we correct something if we cannot describe it properly? Does “uninvited shopper” mean the same as “shoplifter”? Hardly.

Now we learn that the Defense Department has reclassified the Fort Hood massacre as “workplace  violence.”  The incident had nothing to do with Major Hasan’s work or the workplace. This mass murderer was shouting “Allahu Akbar” as he fired and killed thirteen innocent people. On his private business cards under his name was printed, “Soldier of Allah.”

Radical Islamists use our constitutional freedoms to sabotage our system of government from the inside. Sen. Susan Collins suggested on December 7, 2011 that the Defense Department classifying the Fort Hood massacre as workplace violence seems to place political correctness above the security of the nation’s armed forces at home.

On 9/11 we were attacked, yet people who are critical about Islam are called “Islamophobes.” The truth must be known — there is no such thing as Islamophobia. The definition of “phobia” is an irrational fear. However, our fear of Islam is very real as a result of 9/11, coupled with the constant barrage of anti-Western sentiments expressed by Muslim leaders. It is imperative that we listen to them and not ignore them.

Ever wonder where the term “Islamophobia” came from?

According to a FrontPage Magazine column posted by Robert Spencer on Dec. 30, 2011, it was deliberately invented by a Muslim Brotherhood front organization, the International Institute for Islamic Thought (IIIT), based in Northern Virginia.

Abhdur-Rahman Muhammad, a former member of the IIIT describes the strategy behind the word’s invention:

In an effort to silence critics of political Islam, advocates needed to come up with terminology that would enable them to portray themselves as victims. Muhammad said he was present years ago when his then allies, meeting at the offices of the IIIT… coined the term “Islamophobia.”

Consider the power of this word, how the media exploits it and how politicians fear it.

Editor’s note: Sign the Freedom Center’s petition, Purple Hearts for Fort Hood Heroes.

The Purple Heart, a United States military honor awarded for military merit, is specifically to be given, according to U.S. Army regulations, for “wounds received as a result of hostile action,” including fatal wounds. It can be awarded in peacetime “to military personnel wounded by terrorists or while members of a peacekeeping force.” Yet the twelve U.S. military personnel (plus one civilian) murdered by Islamic jihadist Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan at Fort Hood in Texas on November 5, 2009 have not been awarded the Purple Heart, and neither has Army Private William Long, who was murdered by Islamic jihadist Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad in Little Rock, Arkansas on June 1, 2009.

The reason for this is obvious: the Obama administration has not recognized either the Fort Hood or the Little Rock jihad attack as an act of terrorism. Thus the military personnel killed at Fort Hood and Private Long were not “wounded by terrorists”; hence no Purple Heart. Thus they become casualties not only of the global and domestic jihad, but of the politically correct refusal of official Washington to call that jihad what it is, and to recognize its full dimensions.

Of the facts of each case there is no question. Obama has ignored the Little Rock shooting, and, in one of the most egregious whitewashings of jihad in a field thick with competition, termed the Fort Hood shooting “workplace violence.” Any objective examination of either, however, leaves no doubt that Nidal Malik Hasan and Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad were Islamic terrorists performing a terrorist action in the name of Islam, and thus their victims were precisely “military personnel wounded by terrorists.”

In April 2011, Muhammad, an American convert to Islam, explained that he had killed Long in a “jihad operation.” He was not a soldier fighting against Americans on a battlefield, or even apparently an al-Qaeda operative acting on behalf of a recognized terror organization. He was a Muslim who was acting in accord with the teachings of his religion as he understood them – that is, as giving him a responsibility before Allah to wage war against and subjugate unbelievers. He was acting in imitation of his prophet, who said: “I have been made victorious through terror.” And in his terror operation, he killed Private Long.

Over the Christmas holiday, comedian Denis Leary – known for rapid-fire, politically incorrect standup rants – revived a several-years-old three-minute video from his production company by linking to it on the social network Twitter. The animated video, called “Merry F***ing Christmas,” is a parody of the long-running, annual Christmas special featuring Charlie Brown and his “Peanuts” gang.  In the course of it, Leary makes a couple of jokes at Christianity’s expense and even takes a potshot at Scientologist actor Tom Cruise’s well-known contempt for the psychiatric profession. But the primary target of Leary’s Christmas satire is, unusually, Islam.

The grim-visaged Ayatollah Khomeini once famously remarked that there is no humor in Islam. Many of his fundamentalist brethren have made that point abundantly clear by rioting, torching, and murdering – or at the very least threatening to do so – whenever Islam and/or its prophet Mohammed is the butt of a joke, as in the notorious Danish cartoons or the “Mohammed” episode of Comedy Central’s South Park in 2010. And the West has learned its lesson. We have acquired a finely-tuned sensitivity toward Muslim hair-trigger rage and censor ourselves accordingly now. After all, in the multiculturalist West, everyone’s religion, race, sexuality and culture are off-limits from ridicule, except for straight white Christians.

Entertainers are comfortable taking comic jabs at the latter because they know that Christians, renowned for turning the other cheek, are a safe and easy target, and because, inexplicably, that’s what passes for “edgy” among comedians. Witness, for example, HBO’s smug atheist Bill Maher and his recent, uncalled for crudity on openly Christian quarterback Tim Tebow (in all fairness, Maher has contempt for all religions, but he reserves a particular venom for Christianity). Rare is the prominent comedian who is willing to lay into Islam these days, not only because doing so wouldn’t sit well with his or her left-leaning show biz compatriots, but because the not-uncommon Muslim response to being satirized is not cheek-turning but bomb-hurling.

In Leary’s video, a depressed Charlie Brown (here called “Farley Towne”) confesses that he is losing faith in Christianity this holiday season. Trudging downcast through the snow, he happens upon piano prodigy Linus, who says he converted to Islam in prison and recommends that Farley convert as well. Linus shares with him a volume from the popular “Idiots” series of how-to books, this one entitled “Al Qaeda’s Terrorism for Idiots” – except “Terrorism” is scratched out and replaced with “Islam.” On the book’s cover is a bearded, turbaned version of Charlie Brown’s dog Snoopy saying, “Die infidels.”

“Farley” converts on the spot, changing his name to “Farley Ahmohammed al-Farouk al-Rashid.” When we next see him, he is bearded and kneeling on a prayer rug, but naturally, because he is the hapless Charlie Brown, he is incorrectly facing away from Mecca. Next, he interrupts the other kids’ preparations for a Christmas play with a bomb in hand. “With this bomb, you infidels will taste Allah’s infinite justice!” Again, because he’s Charlie Brown, the bomb fizzles out and the other kids have a loud laugh at his expense. A bearded Linus appears, but instead of delivering his expected, true-meaning-of-Christmas speech, he announces:

It is the duty of the jihadist to bring terror to the enemy and create one global, Islamic state where there is no music, no alcohol and no Western influences.

It’s a sad commentary on our unwillingness to confront global jihad that a comedian can bluntly and accurately state the goals of Islamic fundamentalists, and yet our own government has banished any mention of Islam from official discourse about national security.

Charlie Brown’s sister Sally responds to Linus’ speech by cooing, “Isn’t he the cutest radical Islamist you’ve ever seen?” Then Linus examines Charlie’s bomb and says, “It just needs a little hate.” The kids work together to beef it up into a nuclear weapon, and when it goes off accidentally, Charlie Brown and Linus wind up roasting in Hell. Charlie rubs his palms together eagerly and asks now for his 72 virgins, but when only 72 duplicates of nerdy, bespectacled Marcie appear, Charlie falls to his knees and asks, “Allah, why hast thou forsaken me?”

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

(Warning: MAJOR SPOILERS ahead)

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

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

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

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

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

A number of books have criticized multiculturalism, but even if you’ve already read a bunch of them, Salim Mansur’s Delectable Lie: A Liberal Repudiation of Multiculturalism is still very much worth your attention.  Mansur, a syndicated columnist who teaches political science at the University of Western Ontario and whose previous books include Islam’s Predicament: Perspectives of a Dissident Muslim, approaches multiculturalism from the distinctive viewpoint of a naturalized Canadian citizen who is also a secular Muslim born on the Indian subcontinent.  At once very knowledgeable about the history of multiculturalism and richly steeped in the long tradition of Western ideas about individual liberty (of which he rightly recognizes multiculturalism as a profound philosophical violation), Mansur is also a highly effective polemicist.  Although awash in learned references to thinkers ranging from Plato and Aristotle to Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek, Mansur’s book is eminently accessible, and should be of interest to any reader who is concerned about the threat that multiculturalism poses to the Western heritage of freedom.

It’s significant that Mansur is Canadian, because Canada, as he puts it, was “the first major democracy to experiment with designing a society on the basis of multiculturalism.”  He recounts the origins of this policy, which took shape largely as a response to growing pressure for Quebec’s independence (or, at the very least, for radical revision of its position in the Canadian confederation).  This pressure led to Prime Minister Lester Pearson’s 1963 establishment of a Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, which in turn eventuated in the formulation of an official multicultural policy in 1968 by the government of Pierre Trudeau.  Thus began Canada’s shift from a liberal democratic society that supported individual rights to a nation that placed the rights of the group above those of the individual – a process that reached its culmination under Brian Mulroney, during whose prime ministership, Mansur maintains, “Canada became the first western liberal democracy to adopt multiculturalism as the defining characteristic of the country.”

Multiculturalism, Mansur reminds us, was born in a time when the nature of immigration to North America had changed radically.  A century ago, relocating from the Old World to the New was an expensive proposition; people left the lands of their birth “with some certainty of never returning”; they put the past behind them and began a new life, grateful to receive opportunities not offered to them back home.  Yet all that changed, changed utterly – and a big reason for the change, as Mansur shrewdly points out, was “the arrival of wide-body aircraft,” which ended up “blurr[ing] the difference between immigrants and migrant workers.”  All too many of today’s so-called immigrants to the West, after all, are not truly immigrants in the traditional sense but are, rather, people “situated in two countries…only a few short hours removed from their native lands.”  They don’t break their ties to the old country, don’t undergo a dramatic psychological adjustment of the sort that was once a natural part of the immigrant experience.  Nor do the countries to which they “immigrate” expect of them what they used to expect of newcomers from abroad: today’s “immigrants” can become citizens of a Western country even if they utterly despise its core values and spend much of their time back in the places they “immigrated” from.

If Mansur is so exasperated at “immigrants” who fail to embrace their new Western homelands, it is because he himself has a profound – and often eloquently articulated – appreciation for the West.  Indeed this book is, among other things, a love letter to Western civilization, a civilization unique for its emancipation of the individual from the “collectivist hold of tribe, caste, church, nation, class and any ideology that made of him a mere cog in a wheel.”  Mansur – who (admirably) despises collectivism, and has no wish to be a cog in any wheel – reminds us that the idea of individualism is alien to every other civilization on the planet, and that it was “only through prolonged and sustained contact with the West” that the idea took root in non-Western societies.

If Delectable Lie is a love letter to the West, it is especially a love letter to Canada from a refugee who witnessed “terror and savage killings” back in his native country and will forever be thankful to the Great White North for providing him with a refuge and “the opportunity to begin a new life.”  His Canadian identity is so important to Mansur, indeed, that he eventually “came to feel uncomfortable with the notion of being a hyphenated Canadian.”  For if his Indian identity was something he had “inherited at birth without any effort on my part,” his Canadian identity was the product of “choice and conscious effort.”  Being Canadian meant “embrac[ing] the West and freely assimilat[ing] its distinctive culture”; it meant “recogniz[ing], as I did with a mixture of awe and gratitude, that the West represents the idea of a civilization nurtured by the values of the Enlightenment….its politics shaped by the democratic impulse of revolutions against hereditary rule, its philosophy influenced by the development of the scientific method of controlled experiments and tests, its culture open and embracing of new ideas.”

Moving sentiments; stirring words.  In Mansur’s view, it is a matter of deep moral urgency that a new immigrant to the West completely and sincerely embrace his new national identity.  Mansur meditates sensitively and at length on the importance of being a citizen, noting that “while other cultures have borrowed this idea, it is only in the West that citizenship is vested in a free individual with rights and responsibilities,” and lamenting that Western passports are now so freely handed out to “immigrants” who have little or no emotional attachment to their new countries and no real concept of the deeper meanings – and obligations – attached to the idea of citizenship.  In the Western world, as Mansur sees it, one’s identity as citizen is, or should be, paramount; and one of the deleterious aspects of multiculturalism is that it “works to weaken or dissolve citizenship identity by suggesting that the cultural identities which immigrants bring with them deserve to be recognized and treated with equal respect.”  This destructive tendency, he urges, must be countered as fervently as possible: “the principle of citizenship with its rights and responsibilities needs to be reaffirmed and protected.  People need to be reminded repeatedly what it means to be a citizen in a modern secular state.”

The European Union, that fount of forward-looking innovations, has another great idea: hiring a “pirate cultural advisor” to assist EU naval forces operating off the Horn of Africa “with pirate cultural and religious advice and in particular to advise on pirate trends and weaknesses.”

You can’t make this stuff up, but what’s most disheartening about the EU’s politically-correct answer to piracy is that it’s representative of the West’s overall response to piracy in recent years.

• According to a Reuters report, the EU’s counter-piracy effort entails confiscating the pirates’ weapons and the ladders they use to board ships “and leaving them with only enough petrol to get back to shore.”

• The United States and its allies have formed ad hoc counter-piracy flotillas like Combined Task Force 151 that focus largely on escorting merchant ships, deterring pirate activity through shows of force, creating safe corridors and apprehending pirates. But some 90 percent of captured pirates are caught and then released.

• The television documentary “U.S. Navy: Pirate Hunters” captures the futility of the anti-piracy coalition’s constrictive rules of engagement—and the frustration it causes U.S. forces. Sailors aboard the USS Gettysburg jokingly call their ship “Hotel Gettysburg” due to the generous hospitality they offer captured Somali pirates, who are usually released. Regrettably, assault teams returning from intercepting pirate skiffs and boats have been conditioned to say things like, “We’ve got enough to prosecute them.”

• Of course, even when they make it to trial, the pirates turn the proceedings into a farce. After using RPGs to attack a Dutch-flagged cargo ship in 2009, Somali pirates were captured by Danish marines, taken to the Netherlands to stand trial and promptly claimed that the Dutch cargo ship had attacked them. The Somalis were found guilty and sentenced to five years in prison, but EU officials now worry about convicted pirates seeking asylum after serving out their sentences.

• A more common outcome when allied naval forces encounter pirates is temporary detention and release. Since January 2010, the NATO-EU piracy taskforce has set 1,500 captured pirates free.

This catch-and-release approach is the very definition of self-defeating, and it’s a far cry from how our forebears dealt with pirates.

Now, as in the past, pirates are anything but the fun-loving adventurers romanticized by Hollywood. To the contrary, they are stateless, lawless, codeless thugs. Our forebears labeled them “enemies of the human race” for good reason.

Citing a study commissioned by the shipping industry, Reuters reported earlier this year that “4,185 seafarers had faced a direct attack by pirates with firearms in the Indian Ocean or Gulf of Aden. At least 1,432 seafarers had their ships boarded. While some escaped capture by hiding in secure cabins until the pirates left, at least 1,090 were taken hostage, often for months.” Pirate brutalities include “deprivation of food and water, beating (often with the butt of a gun), shooting at hostages with water cannons, locking hostages in the ship’s freezer, tying hostages up on deck exposed to scorching sun, and hanging hostages by their feet submerged in the sea.”

Beyond the human costs, financial costs include lost cargo, damaged ships, delivery delays, ransom payments and increased insurance rates. The Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports that insurers are charging extra premiums of up to $20,000 per trip through the Gulf of Aden. To avoid the pirates and the insurance costs, some cargo lines are choosing alternate routes, increasing total distance traveled by as much as 38 percent. Other shippers are sending goods by air, which costs up to 10 times as much as seaborne transport. Add it all up, and the cost of piracy may be as high as $16 billion annually. These “piracy surcharges” are passed on to consumers.

In addition, piracy poses a real, albeit indirect, threat to national security. For example, 11 percent of global oil supplies travel through the Gulf of Aden. In 2008, pirates hijacked a Kenya-bound freighter loaded with T-72 battle tanks. In 2010, they captured a tanker carrying poisonous chemicals. The worrisome reality is this: Men willing to commit piracy have no qualms about selling their plunder to the highest bidder.

Our ancestors recognized this. Untainted by moral relativism, they never entertained the pathetic postmodern notion that pirates need to be understood—or the companion notion that all violence is somehow the same. Instead, they realized that the use of deadly force to protect innocents, uphold the law and maintain the order necessary for commerce served a greater good. We could learn from their example.

All great powers have had to deal with piracy. Rameses III, for instance, eliminated the pirate threat to Egypt some 3,000 years ago. “The Athenian navy,” as Angus Konstam observes in his book Piracy: The Complete History, “devoted much time and effort to clearing pirates from the Aegean.” When Rome emerged as the primary Mediterranean power, Konstam details how Pompey the Great employed a massive military force of 500 ships, 120,000 troops and “the equivalent today of half the U.S. budget and armed forces” to fight piracy. Pompey sank 500 pirate ships, razed 120 coastal bases and killed 10,000 pirates.

It has been a long time coming, but the Obama Administration has now officially banned the truth. Deputy U.S. Attorney General James Cole declared Wednesday at a conference in Washington that he had “recently directed all components of the Department of Justice to re-evaluate their training efforts in a range of areas, from community outreach to national security.” This “reevaluation” will remove all references to Islam in connection with any examination of Islamic jihad terror activity. The Obama Administration has now placed off-limits any investigation of the beliefs, motives and goals of jihad terrorists.

Dwight C. Holton, former U.S. Attorney for the District of Oregon, emphasized that training materials for the FBI would be purged of everything politically incorrect: “I want to be perfectly clear about this: training materials that portray Islam as a religion of violence or with a tendency towards violence are wrong, they are offensive, and they are contrary to everything that this president, this attorney general and Department of Justice stands for. They will not be tolerated.”

Holton said that he had spoken with Attorney General Eric Holder about FBI training materials that Holton claimed were “egregiously false,” and that Holder “is firmly committed to making sure that this is over….we’re going to fix it.” Holton said that this “fix” was particularly urgent because the rejected training materials “pose a significant threat to national security, because they play into the false narrative propagated by terrorists that the United States is at war with Islam.”

Cole suggested that these training materials had done damage domestically as well: “One of the many, tragic legacies of 9/11 has been an increase in prejudice, discrimination and hatred directed against persons of the Muslim and Sikh faiths and those who are, or who are mistakenly perceived to be, of Arab or South Asian descent. Some have wrongly sought to blame the horror of 9/11 on Arab-American, Muslim American, Sikh-American and South Asian American communities. It has led to attacks against places of worship and other hate crimes, to job discrimination, and to the tragic harassment of children in our schools.”

After sketching out this horror tale, Cole declared: “We must never allow our sorrow and anger at the senseless attack of 9/11 to blind us to the great gift of our diversity.” And this, he said, must involve a rejection of the stereotyping of Muslims: “All of us must reject any suggestion that every Muslim is a terrorist or that every terrorist is a Muslim.  As we have seen time and again – from the Oklahoma City bombing to the recent attacks in Oslo, Norway – no religion or ethnicity has a monopoly on terror.” It was George Bush, he said, who after 9/11 “made clear to the nation that these terrorist acts were committed by individuals who distort the peaceful religion of Islam,” and now all government analysis of jihad terror would reflect that perspective.

Of course, the controversial training materials did not really claim that all Muslims are terrorists or that all terrorists are Muslims, and it is noteworthy that Cole had to resort to dismissive caricatures to make his point. For in taking this course, the Obama Administration is bowing to pressure from the Hamas-linked Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and other Islamic advocacy groups. In a Los Angeles Times op-ed that appeared on the same day as the conference in Washington, Salam al-Marayati of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) roundly criticized existing training materials about jihad terror and demanded that the FBI and the Justice Department “issue a clear and unequivocal apology to the Muslim American community; establish a thorough and transparent vetting process in selecting its trainers and materials; invite experts who have no animosity toward any religion to conduct training about any religious community to law enforcement.”

Al-Marayati complained that training materials reflected “bigoted and inflammatory views on Muslims, including claims that ‘devout’ Muslims are more prone toward violence, that Islam aims to ‘transform a country’s culture into 7th century Arabian ways,’ that Islamic charitable giving is a ‘funding mechanism for combat’ and that the prophet Muhammad was a ‘violent cult leader.’”

In this al-Marayati was simply repeating talking points from an “expose” of FBI training materials by hard-Left journalist Spencer Ackerman in Wired, who has been conducting a campaign for some time to get the bureau to purge its terrorism training seminars of any hint of the truth about the global jihad and Islamic supremacism. Yet like virtually all Leftist and Islamic supremacist critics of anti-jihad and anti-terror material, Ackerman and al-Marayati take for granted that such assertions are false, without bothering to explain how or why. Apparently they believe that their falsity is so self-evident as to require no demonstration; unfortunately, however, there is considerable evidence that they are true, and that in banning such materials, the Obama Administration has essentially banned the truth.

America is an island of free speech in an ocean of political correctness. American columnists have to worry about deadlines and the future of print media, not about being hauled into court over the sensibilities of some protected group. But conservative columnists in Canada, Europe, Israel and Australia have to write with one eye on the keyboard and the other on the door.

The strangest case of free speech suppressed by political correctness may have come out of Australia where Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt was dragged into court under the Racial Discrimination Act by a group of white aborigines who complained that he had questioned their authenticity.

The first rule of White Aborigine Club is that no one talks about it. Australia has a surplus of white aborigines who hold down university positions teaching aboriginal culture, pick up aboriginal scholarships and receive all sorts of preferential treatment. These white aborigines are not albinos, they are “Ward Churchills” — white men and women who claim to be aborigines because of some ancestor. And to question their authenticity all you need is a pair of working eyes.

Ward Churchill got away with claiming to be Native American by braiding his hair, wearing sunglasses and being so militant that no one questioned whether he was an American Indian or an American Imposter until he had tenure and a nationwide speaking tour denouncing the “white man’s crimes” against his people.

The white aborigine faces a more uphill battle against common sense as it’s rather hard not to notice what he is or rather what he isn’t. This forced the Australian left to play the old game of the emperor isn’t really naked if no one talks about it. Everyone knows that many of the beneficiaries of aboriginal affirmative action are white people with European names. And no one is supposed to notice that or comment on it.

Andrew Bolt did notice and wrote several columns, adding a few photos of the melanin-challenged tribesmen. It was a sore point for the Australian left which has made Aboriginal rights a centerpiece of its identity, and whose “Ward Churchills” benefit from the academic and cultural prizes granted to them by a guilty Australia.

It is still legal in the United States to point out that the emperor isn’t wearing any pants– but throughout much of the world it’s a federal case. In Australia that was literally so as several of the white aborigines took Bolt to Federal Court.

According to the court decision all the white aborigines had to do to win was prove that Bolt had “insulted, humiliated and offended” them and that it was done “because of the race, color or ethnic origin of fair-skinned Aboriginal people.” Or in this case the lack thereof. Since the whole point of the articles was that the white aborigines were not actual aborigines, it was a slam dunk decision against free speech and for criminalizing common sense.

The right to free speech and a free press was held to be less important than the self-esteem of a group of people who would merit howls of ridicule in any rational society. The Federal Court had not only ruled that you could not point out that a white man is not a black man, but it had also created an entirely new protected group—white men who claim to be black men.

“The members of the group referred to are fair skinned Aboriginal persons who, by a combination of descent, self-identification and communal recognition are, and are recognized as, Aboriginal persons.”

It seems another demographic group Democrats once took for granted is snapping out of Obama fever. At the Daily Beast, David Graham reports that American Muslims don’t think the president’s actions match his pro-Islam rhetoric. Aside from insisting that Islam is a religion of peace and appointing a few Muslims to important positions, Obama hasn’t met enough with American Muslim groups or “remade the political landscape for Muslims”:

“Just like the last time, we’re quite happy if any president offers positive rhetoric toward the Muslim world or Islam, but it really needs to be backed up with concrete policy initiatives,” says Ibrahim Hooper, communications director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a leading American Muslim group. “We’re still in Afghanistan, we’re still in Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian situation has gone south. We’re not there—we’re just continuing with the previous policies.”

It’s not just foreign policy. Across the board, Muslims are expressing disappointment with Obama’s progress on issues relevant to them in the domestic policy realm. What they express is not so much anger as disillusionment, a recognition that the president hasn’t remade the political landscape for Muslims. (American Muslim opinions mirror international opinions. A Pew survey released Tuesday finds that citizens in majority Muslim countries remain skeptical of Obama.)

[…]

Exhibit A is the Park51 project, the proposed mosque and Islamic center in Lower Manhattan that opponents dubbed the “ground zero mosque”. After delivering what appeared to be a full-throated defense of the project, he walked back his comments the next day, saying, “I was not commenting, and I will not comment, on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there.” It was a crucial litmus test for many American Muslims—and one that Obama failed. “He’s still missing the political courage to stand up for communities, and not just Muslim communities,” says Shireen Zaman, the executive director of the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, a think tank on Muslim issues.

As the Left always does when discussing different ethnic groups, it’s simply assumed at the outset that the positions cited are intrinsically anti-Muslim.

Whatever you think of the wisdom of starting or continuing the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, both conflicts were waged against specific governments the United States determined to be enemies, not against Muslims generally; indeed, both wars liberated their Muslim populations from nightmarish despots and gave them a genuine shot at liberty, so one could just as easily call a premature withdrawal from either theater anti-Muslim for enabling a descent back into totalitarianism.

Similarly, supporting the Ground Zero Mosque is only “pro-Muslim” to the extent that we associate that particular mosque with the radicalism of its organizers. Do Graham and Zaman mean to suggest that most American Muslims want sharia to be preached from a bloody site of Islamic conquest? The implication is far more Islamophobic than anything the average conservative has to say on the subject. And yes, that is the implication—considering that over 100 mosques have gone up in New York City without a peep from right-wing hatemongers, why make this particular mosque the litmus test for American tolerance?

Aside from CAIR-approved action on the preceding issues, just what are these groups looking for? What would a “remade political landscape for Muslims” look like? I submit that the United States doesn’t need to become more pro-Muslim. Polls indicate that the American people overwhelmingly distinguish between peaceful Muslims and jihad sympathizers, and a comprehensive study from the Center for Security Policy reveals that Muslims are targeted by hate crimes at comparable levels to Christians, and to a much lower degree than Jews. If anything, we go overboard in our fear of offending Muslims, as in the case of Ft. Hood shooter Major Nidal Hasan. We bend over backwards to avoid discussing the theological roots of our terrorist enemies.

For Obama, this is another demonstration that it takes a lot more than the sparkling personality of The One to satisfy people—responsible policymaking can’t help but offend somebody, and not every special-interest demand is susceptible to reason.

For the rest of the country, this should highlight the folly of leftist identity politics. Human beings are first and foremost individuals, and should evaluate political issues based on the facts and principles involved, not on superficial affinities for particular stances and groups that have been imposed by the Left.  The Founders warned us about such exploitation of factional impulses—it not only confuses and oversimplifies issues, all but guaranteeing worse policy, but it also conditions us to divide into insular cultural camps and practice the very us-vs-them thinking the Left claims to oppose.

Once upon a time, superheroes were a source of comfort and escape from the difficulties and ugliness of real life. While real-life recession and terrorism aren’t likely to meet any tidy resolutions soon, we can always count on Batman to solve the Riddler’s latest puzzle just in time, or Spider-Man to save the damsel in distress (well, usually).

Somewhere along the line, though, it was decided that our heroes had to grapple with real-world issues. When done sparingly and handled well, this can elevate the genre, such as Harry Osborn’s battle with drugs or 2008’s brilliant The Dark Knight. But more often than not, such efforts these days instead result in train wrecks of heavy-handed political proselytizing and moral confusion.

Such is the case with the latest development in DC Comics’ Action Comics #900, in which Superman decides he has to renounce his U.S. citizenship:

In it, Superman consults with the President’s national security advisor, who is incensed that Superman appeared in Tehran to non-violently support the protesters demonstrating against the Iranian regime, no doubt an analogue for the recent real-life protests in the Middle East. However, since Superman is viewed as an American icon in the DC Universe as well as our own, the Iranian government has construed his actions as the will of the American President, and indeed, an act of war.

Superman replies that it was foolish to think that his actions would not reflect politically on the American government, and that he therefore plans to renounce his American citizenship at the United Nations the next day — and to continue working as a superhero from a more global than national perspective. From a “realistic” standpoint it makes sense; it would indeed be impossible for a nigh-omnipotent being ideologically aligned with America to intercede against injustice beyond American borders without creating enormous political fallout for the U.S. government.

First, it’s interesting to note that the story’s starting dispute comes dangerously close to a damning indictment of Barack Obama for not taking a stronger stand on the Iranian protests of summer 2009, which is surprising coming from an iconic cultural mainstay and a major entertainment company. And while John Hawkins is right to note that there are certain practical difficulties with throwing someone as powerful as Superman into geopolitical situations, I can see definite story potential in exploring the tension between Superman’s no-nonsense moral clarity and the empty suits on Capitol Hill.

But renouncing his citizenship? That goes far beyond distancing himself from any particular policy or administration. As an alien raised on a Kansas farm who grows up to fight for truth, justice, and the American way both as a superhero and as a newspaper reporter, Superman’s American identity and values have always been central to the character. That’s not to say he should be a pawn of the government, or that he should never save the day overseas, but it does mean he can’t simply switch who he is at will.

At the heart of this concept seems to be a recurring leftist inability to distinguish a nation’s citizens from her government. Superman’s not a government agent; he doesn’t need to be a “global citizen” to act independently of Uncle Sam.

Gutting his patriotism isn’t the only way the Man of Steel has been badly mishandled in recent years; remember when 2006’s lukewarm Superman Returns had him impregnate Lois Lane, then leave the planet for years? It makes you wonder: who do we turn to when our heroes are the ones who need saving?

When is the left pleased with a character who’s known for fighting for “Truth, Justice & The American Way”? When that character has forsaken that fight.

There is now a trend of American comic book icons being de-Americanized in order to make them more palatable to a foreign — even anti-American — audience. In some foreign markets, Marvel studios is leaving the name “Captain America” off of the title of the upcoming film starring the patriotic superhero, and even the director of the film has made comments designed to placate non-American audiences.

The left was also pleased when Batman recruited a Muslim as his French counterpart, in a storyline that ignores the very reason we even began talking about Islam on a large scale, 9/11.

Superman was created and published by Americans. He crash-landed in America, was raised by Americans, lives in America, works in America, is married to an American. But D.C. Comics has just made him renounce his U.S. Citizenship. I keep reading about how Superman belongs to all of us. Well, my Superman would Never quit America. He might be critical of a particular policy of the American government, but he would never stop fighting for Truth, Justice & The American Way.

A Seattle public school has decided that Easter eggs are super offensive and not politically correct. They’ve renamed them Spring Spheres (even though eggs are not spheres. This is our public education system at work, people):

“At the end of the week I had an idea to fill little plastic eggs with treats and jelly beans and other candy, but I was kind of unsure how the teacher would feel about that,” Jessica said.

She was concerned how the teacher might react to the eggs after of a meeting earlier in the week where she learned about “their abstract behavior rules.”

“I went to the teacher to get her approval and she wanted to ask the administration to see if it was okay,” Jessica explained. “She said that I could do it as long as I called this treat ‘spring spheres.’ I couldn’t call them Easter eggs.”

Rather than question the decision, Jessica opted to “roll with it.” But the third graders had other ideas.

“When I took them out of the bag, the teacher said, ‘Oh look, spring spheres’ and all the kids were like ‘Wow, Easter eggs.’ So they knew,” Jessica said.

Of course they knew. Because they are Easter eggs.

Oh, it’s Seattle, one might say. Of course such things happen there. Hippies! Well, a similar thing occurred in my old hometown in New Jersey. The town Easter egg hunt was changed to “Spring Celebration. With Bunny.”

For reals.

They have since changed it again. One of the dreaded “E” words is no longer forbidden.  No, no… not “Easter.” That would be going too far!

The whole idea of having a mosque at Ground Zero is an abomination. It’s nothing less than an attempt by radical Muslims to celebrate the death of 3,000 Americans at the hands of Al-Qaeda while laughing at the stupidity of Americans who are willing to give them a pass in the name of political   correctness.

So, it’s natural that there  are  angry protests about this utterly despicable attempt to defile the dead. Yet and still, this IS NOT the way to do it:

At one point, a portion of the crowd menacingly surrounded two Egyptian men who were speaking Arabic and were thought to be Muslims.

“Go home,” several shouted from the crowd.

“Get out,” others shouted.

In fact, the two men – Joseph Nassralla and Karam El Masry — were not Muslims at all. They turned out to be Egyptian Coptic Christians who work for a California-based Christian satellite TV station called “The Way.” Both said they had come to protest the mosque.

“I’m a Christian,” Nassralla shouted to the crowd, his eyes bulging and beads of sweat rolling down his face.

But it was no use. The protesters had become so angry at what they thought were Muslims that New York City police officers had to rush in and pull Nassralla and El Masry to safety.

“I flew nine hours in an airplane to come here,” a frustrated Nassralla said afterward.

What unbelievable morons!

Read the rest at Right Wing News.

In an earlier article (“PC Casualities”), I examined the dire effects of more than a decade of political correctness at the CIA.  The most visible effect was the tragic death of seven CIA employees during a covert meeting on a forward operating base in Afghanistan.

The focus of the CIA is no longer on conducting effective intelligence operations against America’s enemies.  Their focus is now, like most US government entities, bureaucratic survival and establishing a “diverse” workforce.  Their affirmative action approach to selecting and promoting operations officers resulted in seven dead at Khost.

However, there are many more insidious effects that are unseen to the general public.  Those who care about the safety and security of our country, and the viability of our civilian national covert action and intelligence collection organization, must speak out against the destructive effects of PC in the CIA, and its debilitating effects on covert operations.

Speaking out is not enough.  As a successful counter-terrorism (CT) intelligence operative, a successful recruiter, and a successful instructional designer, I am compelled to share suggestions for change and improvement in our civilian CT and covert action efforts. My suggestions are based on a unique combination of experiences, education and training, which may provide valuable insights into future selection and training of operatives.  The current, broken bureaucracy will be replaced with a specialized Counter-Terrorism Corps of Collectors (CCC).

First, the CCC must conduct a needs assessment.  What are the desired outcomes?  What are the working conditions?  What are the skills/experience/education/background required for candidates to be successful American CT operators?

Head-to-head, toe-to-toe, sitting cross-legged on a rug on the sand, under a tent in the desert, camels hobbled nearby, sweet mint tea flowing, leaning on a cushion, fingering prayer beads, Mohammed Atta and his brethren only want to kill you.  They are only concerned about the quickest, most efficient, most deadly terrorist action to bring down “the Great Satan.”  This requires cross-cultural skills in our target cultures.

The job of a counter-terrorism operations officer is to recruit penetrations of these terrorists.  To get to know the Islamic extremists.  To get inside their heads, understand their innermost desires, needs, motivations, thoughts, and feelings.  And then to manipulate those motivations.

Terrorists are criminals.  They break the law every day—immigration fraud, credit card fraud, robbery, and other crimes.  Lying, cheating and stealing are as natural to them as breathing.  Hiding among your victims requires you to live a lie, at least until the moment that you act.  But up until that moment, a terrorist is like a thief in the dark—every action and deed, criminal and furtive.  Manipulating terrorists requires a deep understanding of the criminal mindset.

The working conditions in CCC operations are likely to be primitive and nomad-like.  Whether working in the field with foreigners who share the culture of our targets, or working in a war zone, regardless, the conditions are not up to American comfort standards.  Living rough requires experience in primitive conditions.

The requirements for this job can be summarized as in two areas, physical and mental.  Mentally:  to think like a criminal, to get in the mind of an Islamic extremist, to understand what motivates a determined homicidal terrorist, the ability to manipulate people for operational purposes.  Physically:  the skills to live in harsh environments.

With the conditions and required skills and experience identified, all that is left in our needs analysis is to identify a list of education/experiences that might lead a candidate’s possession of the required background.  In the analysis of this list of required traits, we ignore those things not required—including all the protected classes of traits—gender, religion, race, disability.  The only thing that matters in this most important of jobs is ability to get the job done—countering terrorists.

To develop the mindset of a criminal, one is most likely to have been involved in some type of criminal activity.  A candidate very likely can only truly understand the way of thinking of criminals by taking part in some kind of criminal activity.  A short-hand way of describing this skill-set is “street smarts.”  Someone who knows what it’s like to be both predator and prey on the street.  This requires intelligence, and experience on the streets.  Valuable experience includes being a victim of a crime, as well as thinking like a criminal.

To develop an understanding of Islamic extremists, a candidate needs to have lived among them, day to day, eating with them, and sharing their dreams and disappointments.  Either living among, with, or as one of them, a candidate should have had prior experience with Islamic extremists.

To manipulate and motivate our terrorist targets, a candidate must have experience in sales, teaching, training, coaching, or other related fields.  Street-savvy cunning is more applicable than a BA in communications.

Experience living in harsh environments could come from the military, scouting, or other high adventure activities.  Using this package of skills for American CT operations requires, maybe above all else, a love of the greatest country in the world.

We now have a good picture of our ideal candidate.  He (or she) will have:   spent time on the wrong side of the law; a well-developed street sense; a deep, cross-cultural understanding of Islamic extremists; experience in manipulating others for ulterior motives; ability to survive in harsh environments, and a desire to apply these skills to counter-terrorism operations for the protection and survival of the USA.

With this needs assessment-based candidate profile, we can now begin the search for CCC candidates.  The CCC profile is 180 degrees opposite from the current profile used to recruit ops officers at the CIA.  The current requirements include:  minimum of a bachelors degree with a superior GPA; the ability to write clearly and accurately; ability to work independently and as part of a team; and “international experience.”  This can include semesters abroad in Paris, Rome, or London.  The profile is an academic with some international interest or experience.

But our analysis of the skill-set required for the CCC shows that academic expertise has nothing to do with the actual work.  Street smarts are far more important than academics.  Cross-cultural experiences are more important than a high GPA.

The CCC candidate profile looks like the requirements for the operatives in the old movie, “The Dirty Dozen.”  They were recruited from a military prison.  We do not necessarily have to go to prisons, but we do need to open up the recruiting process.  We cannot just send retired secretaries to college job fairs.

After recruiting CCC candidates, we are faced with a dilemma.  These candidates are so far out of the mainstream of the CIA that they are fundamentally different.  We need to realize this, and from the outset, create a separate environment for them.  As the Army’s Special Forces train and deploy separate, but parallel to, the regular Army, so should the CCC be separate from the mainstream CIA.  It may eventually supplant the mainstream CIA altogether, but in the beginning, it should stand separate, in recruitment, training, and deployment.

Our street-smart CCC trainees will take quickly to the tradecraft training.  Since they are not required to write their own reports, however, the CCC training will include extensive exercises of providing oral reports to trained reports officers.

For terrorism ops, writing and academic knowledge pale in importance compared to street smarts.  Written communication about operations will be done by trained reports officers, working with our CCC officers.  Working as a team with the CCC ops officers, these traditional academically-oriented officers can craft beautiful ops cables after debriefing our CCC officers.

The CCC operators, like the movie Dirty Dozen, will require close and constant supervision.  Like Telly Savalas, managers will need to stay close to our CCC officers.  The managers must understand the special needs of the CCC.  This could be a very difficult job, much like managing a wild heavy-weight boxer.  The CIA is already top-heavy with middle-managers. With a little training, they should be able to handle the new counter-terror cadre.

This program is not to denigrate the need for other types of collectors.  The traditional collecter—genteel, caught up in the capital city whirl of social engagements, cocktail parties and 5-star restaurants will probably always be needed.  But for the war we are fighting now, the CIA must renew itself and create a specialized Counter-Terrorism Corps of Collectors.

Kent Clizbe (www.kentclizbe.com) served as a staff CIA case officer in the 1990s, and as an ops contractor after 9/11.  He worked in counter-terrorism against Islamic Extremism in Southeast Asia, Africa, Europe and the Middle East, and was awarded the Intelligence Community Seal Medallion in 2004.  He is also a successful recruiter and training designer.  Kent has appeared on VOA TV, PJTV, national and regional talk radio, and has written columns in FrontPageMag, Newsmax, WND, and Parcbench.

Obama’s dream team of top scientists, charged with solving the BP oil spill, has been found to have an undesirable amongst them. Washington University physics professor Jonathan Katz has been dismissed from the endeavor.

Why? You ask. Was it because his roommate was running a male prostitution ring out of their apartment? No. That wouldn’t do it.  Was it because he was having inappropriate relations with an intern? Of course not! That’s not a reflection of his job performance. Is it because he was a tax cheat?

It was because of Katz’s writing on his website. He dissed political correctness, diversity, and wrote in “defense” of homophobia. Ironically, his writings got him fired—and his firing proved the point in his writing.

Katz made this statement about diversity:

“The quest for diversity leads to another poisonous idea, that all decisions should be controlled by a central authority. No power is delegated, no subordinate individual or independent institution is given responsibility, or can act on its own authority, because it cannot be trusted to arrive at sufficiently “diverse” results. This is a fundamentally totalitarian idea, that power should be centralized rather than dispersed, and diversity is the rich manure in which this poisonous seed is growing.”

“The diversity movement is racist at its core. When dealing with people we should be concerned with intellect, talent, character and accomplishment. People aren’t dogs or cattle; race matters only to racists.” [Emphasis mine]

The former was written in 1999, this Postscript was later added:

“The February 13, 2004 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education contained an article by one of the prominent advocates of “diversity” (a man named Stanley Fish, an administrator and formerly an English professor—surprising, in view of his self-proclaimed limited vocabulary—see the article for details). He asserted that there is no place for intellectual diversity at a university. This Fascist idea, that only one kind of thought is acceptable, is unfortunately very influential in many universities today. Thus, as Orwell predicted, fascism comes calling itself anti-fascism. In contrast, I assert that intellectual diversity is the only kind of diversity that has any relevance to a university’s mission.

Obviously, neither is there any place for intellectual diversity when intelligent problem solving skills are needed by the current administration.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu, has stated he wasn’t aware of Katz “controversial” writings before selecting him. So, basically he was hired for his intellect, talent, character and accomplishment, and fired for his diversity.

And the Left celebrated.

Associated Press reports:

“A.J. Bockelman, director of PROMO, a St. Louis-bases advocacy group for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, applauded the decision to remove Katz.

“It’s disappointing at a time like this that when all Americans need to come together and focus on relief efforts and recovery efforts in the Gulf, someone divisive was placed in a position of power, Bockelman said.”

Don’t you find it odd, that the intelligence, talent and experience of someone top in their field is dismissed as divisive—because he holds a differing viewpoint on a totally unrelated subject than the crisis he was sent to resolve?

Multiculturalism, which is not so much about the appreciation of diverse human cultures, as it is about the theology of gender, race and class oppression, is the academic religion that sanctions these campus witch-hunts. Its imperatives are established in the “student orientation” sessions required of every entering freshman. “A central goal of these [orientation] programs,” as an authoritative study of these repressive practices sums them up, “is to uproot ‘internalized oppression,’ a crucial concept in the diversity education planning documents of most universities.”

At orientation, students are divided according to their membership by ethnicity and race into oppressed and oppressor groups. They are indoctrinated through training films with titles like “Blue Eyes” and “Skin Deep,” in which blue and white are symbols of the oppressor group, and brown eyes and skin that of the victims. “Programmatic differentiation by race is now typical in higher education. Half a century after the defeat of Nazism, our universities distinguish by blood and equate blood with culture. Sixty years after the Nuremberg Race Laws, we ask our students to check off their bloodlines and to act accordingly. The justification for this submergence of the individual into the tribe is the same as it was under fascism: The individual is a function – politically, morally, and historically of genetic and cultural collectivities. Campus life begins with the sorting out of students into oppressors and victims.” Once this orthodoxy is established, the mechanism of the witch-hunt follows directly. Every dissenter from the orthodoxy – every one who refuses to validate the theology of oppression — is doing the work of the devil, the oppressor.

These episodes are just the tip of an iceberg bigger than the Arctic. Why then are the last thirty-years not known as the era of progressive witch-hunts, especially since there have been many more victims of political correctness than there were of the McCarthy investigations, which have been employed to describe an earlier period? The obvious reason is that in this case the repressive orthodoxy is rooted in the academic culture. In contrast, McCarthy was hated, feared and demonized by the intellectual left because of its sympathies with McCarthy’s victims. These victims were indeed part of a conspiracy as McCarthy charged, though he certainly over-stepped the bounds of veracity and decency in pursuing his targets. The opening of the Soviet archives has shown that while McCarthy was an unscrupulous demagogue, the internal Communist threat in the 1950s was real, and there was – as McCarthy claimed — an organized “fifth column” of progressives ready to collaborate with the Soviet enemy. The left he opposed, on the other hand, survived to get its revenge by writing the history of the era.

– Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey 

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

1. “Horowitz Quote of the Day” in subject line.
2. A link to where the quote is from. (No need to include this if it’s from a book.)
3. Any remarks you’d like published explaining what value you take from it.
4. Your preferred name and a link to your blog or homepage (if you have one.)

The Left often pays lip service to, while actually doing nothing about, the  military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. Yet, in regards to radical Islam, that is exactly what the Left wants us to do. Don’t ask.  And, dear Allah, never tell!

Instead, they prefer to demagogue American citizens, while “bitterly clinging” to their insane politically correct worship of diversity and tolerance.  It’s funny how those who deride religion constantly are actually zealots in their own right. They worship at the altar of Better Than You ™ multiculturalism.

It has never been more apparent than it is now. In just the past couple of months alone, examples of this attitude have uncovered that what was once perhaps just dangerous naivety, is now the purposeful ignoring of what should be basic knowledge. All in order to appease, accommodate and appear culturally sensitive. The fact that the very people for whom they are apologists want to, you know, kill them is somehow lost on them.

They have yet to realize, or are choosing to ignore in their moral vacuum, the fact that political correctness is no longer just incredibly annoying. It’s now deadly. The politically correct culture has been hurl-worthy to me for years, but it has recently reached gastric lows. First, there was the absurd narrative being pushed about the Fort Hood terrorist. Oh, he was “bullied” and suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder—via osmosis, apparently, as he was never once deployed.

Flash forward to the attempted Times Square car bomb and the delusional narratives were even worse. Not only was the first thought of our alleged leaders and the mainstream media an attempt to demonize the new fall guy as “someone upset about health care”, but even after the attempted bomber’s name and history were known, they were more concerned with being “culturally sensitive” than the actual bomb attempt itself.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg says New York City “will not tolerate any bias” following the arrest of a U.S. citizen from Pakistan in the Times Square car bombing attempt.

Bloomberg said Tuesday that also applies to potential backlash against Muslim New Yorkers.

Like I said then, it’s rather telling that the only time the words Muslim or Islam ever appear is when the rest of us are being accused of being racist, bigoted half wits. Don’t ask! And don’t tell. That must explain the administration’s silence on two other recent developments. Firstly, Iran being appointed to the United Nation’s Commission on the Status of Women. I wrote the following when it was announced and, to my knowledge, they all still remain silent:

The United States Ambassador, Susan Rice, appointed by President Obama, was silent and did not even attend the vote. In fact, she wasn’t even in the building. Apparently, the administration believes that Iran will help shatter that glass ceiling with stray rocks, used as they stone women to death for being raped. A week later, and they remain mum. Not one word of denouncement from President Obama, who is too busy demonizing one of our own American states and and ignoring devastating floods. Too bad we can’t call ourselves “Los Women”. Maybe he’d give a hoot then. Ambassador Rice also refuses to comment, which is the status quo with her, evidently. The State Department, headed by Hillary Clinton, she of “not staying at home baking cookies” because that would be demeaning fame, is silent.

Not long after that affront to sane human beings everywhere, the American Academy of Pediatrics went one further in the “who can be the most vile in their attempts to appease” game. They decided that female genital mutilation should now just be called cutting (not as offensive sounding, you see) and that perhaps it would be okay to just allow doctors to perform a ritual “nicking.” What’s a little nicking and all? As long as we can all get along and everyone feels nice and appeased. Well, except for the girls you are sacrificing and who are being barbarically maimed.

What is worse is that the left doesn’t just look the other way; they have actually become apologists for barbaric behavior under the guise of tolerance. They explain away all wrongs perpetrated by others by trying to equate them in some way, usually invented out of whole cloth, with some delusionally perceived American wrong or Christian wrong.

Page 1 of 2   Continue reading —>

On Tuesday evening, May 11th, the crossroads of the world, better known as Times Square in Manhattan was the scene of a passionate display of fortitude as members of the Human Rights Coalition Against Radical Islam gathered for a rally to expose the existential perils that radical Islam represents to the Western world. Standing just a few blocks from the place where 30 year old Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani born and Taliban trained American citizen attempted to detonate his vehicle filled with deadly explosives, the leaders of this rainbow coalition of activists sounded a clarion call as onlookers watched and listened.

Comprised of Jews, Christians, Hindus, Sikhs and ex-Muslims, the HRCARI is a nascent organization that champions the rights of those who have been victimized and slaughtered by Muslim extremists. Having staged its very first rally in Times Square in May of 2009, their ranks have swelled over the last year with those who are deeply concerned about the cultural indifference to the burgeoning growth of Islamic radicalism.

Charles Jacobs, a board member of the HRCARI and a writer for The Jewish Advocate in Boston said, “Our purpose here today is two-fold. We are here to send a clear message to the press and politicians who have intentionally obfuscated the nature of this most recent terrorist attempt by not labeling the enemy as radical Islam and acquiescing to political correctness. We are also here to educate the public about the pernicious agenda of those radical Islamists who would love nothing more than to obliterate our cherished values of democracy, freedom and liberty.”

“The Western world is mired in self-doubt and self-guilt that has been imposed upon us by those post-modern forces on the left and in the sphere of academia who believe we are deserving of the animus of our enemies,” he ruefully observed.

Holding aloft signs and banners saying, “Elected Officials and Mass Media – Unveil The Truth: Radical Islam Attacks Humanity,” “Stop Billions of Saudi Oil Money that are Funding Worldwide Radical Islamic Intolerance and Terror,” “Reform Radical Islmamic Madrassas: Stop Teaching Hate” and displaying placards of those Christians, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, women and gays who have been summarily murdered by brutal Islamic regimes, the rally attendees graphically described the horrific consequences of being an “infidel” in the Muslim world.  Martin Rosenthal, a rally attendee from Queens held a homemade sign that said, “Queers Against Radical Islam” and spoke of the heinous atrocities committed against both gay men and women in such countries as Iran, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

Narain Kataria, the founder of the Indian American Intellectuals Forum said, “Since 9/11/2001, the followers of the so called “religion of peace” have carried out 15,101 deadly terrorist attacks and killed more than 75,000 people. It does not requite a rocket scientist to tell us that the aim of the Jihadist is to dominate the entire world, force all of us to surrender and to plant the Islamic flag in Washington, London, Jerusalem and New Delhi, not to mention New York City.” He also spoke of the mass slaughter of Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan. “Pakistan is the nursery of terrorism. Pakistan is the epicenter of Jihad. Pakistan is the most untrustworthy ally in the war on terror. Pakistan is fooling us. They use sophistry and subterfuge to hoodwink us,” he declared.

“What we need here in America and throughout the free world is intellectual clarity,” said Madeline Brooks, the Manhattan chapter head of Act For America, a national human rights organization that stridently opposes radical Islam and serves as a bulwark against the mendacity of multicultural relativists in the progressive camp. “We here in New York are faced with mortal danger each day. We are the prime terror target on this planet. We are in daner of being nuked and the government’s denial of this threat only leaves us in a much weaker state and undermines the confidence of the people who reside here. That is the reality of radical Islam and we do ourselves a grave injustice by not confronting it head on with the gravitas that it demands” she continued.

John Kenneth Press, a PhD in history and the author of  “Culturism: A Word, A Value, Our Future” (2007 – Social Books) said, “Culturism is a political philosophy, art and science based upon the understanding that cultural diversity is real and important. Western culture believes in free speech, feminism, and the separation of church and state. Islam, for example, does not. Western culture is based on individuals applying their intelligence towards progressive and productive ends. For 1400 years there has been a worldwide Jihad fueled by radical Islam whose objective is death and destruction of all infidels and the sooner that we give voice to this, the sooner that we demand that our government consider this threat as a moral and physical exigency, the sooner we can increase our chances of not falling prey to an Islamic caliphate.”

“21st century Nazism is now tantamount to radical Islam” said Andrew Upton, a board member of HRCARI. “There is someone here today holding a sign saying, “Queers Against Radical Islam.” We applaud this person for spotlighting the fact that gays and lesbians are considered worthy of death in Islamic countries as are women who are consistently victims of honor murders by male family members for attempting to divorce their husbands, for being raped, for not allowing themselves to be party to forced marriages and for purported violations of Sharia law,” he said.

At the conclusion of the rally, the participants took their signs and banners and staged a march throughout the Times Square area calling on all concerned citizens to lobby their elected officials and the press to “jettison the fraud of multicultural relativism and political correctness in the name of our survival.”