This week’s primary races, in which grassroots conservative candidates had a strong showing, suggest that the political energy is on the Republican side. Yet it is too soon to predict that 2010 will be a replay of 1994, when a voter backlash helped Republicans recapture control of Congress for the first time in 40 years. Consider the May 18th showdown for John Murtha’s vacated congressional seat, which was disappointing for Republicans. In some polls, Tim Burns had been ahead of Mark Critz, and Critz’s 7 point win was bound to provoke a good deal of agonized post mortem analysis. But a crucial and sobering fact eluded everybody: PA12 showed that the decisive factor in the big GOP congressional gains of 1994 is missing this year, and will remain so until the party does something to remedy that.

Rush Limbaugh tried to cheer Republicans up by pointing to the 2 to 1 Democrat registration edge in the district, and assured them that they don’t need to win 2 to 1 districts to still win big in November. But John MCain beat Obama in that district in 2008—where shall Republicans be in the fall if they can’t hold what McCain held while Obama was winning the election? Another argument from Rush was that Critz had run like a Republican, but that one ought not to have appealed to a man who has been saying for years (correctly) that if people are given a choice between a quasi-Democrat (i.e., a liberal Republican) and a Democrat, they’ll naturally opt for the real thing. Burns was the real thing here, but that didn’t help him.

Dick Morris made a more plausible case when he said that in a low turnout election, Democrats came out in bigger numbers because they had been trying to get Arlen Specter out of his Senate seat for years, and now at last had the opportunity to finish him off. There is probably some truth in this, but unfortunately, it exposes a more important truth: Democrats were motivated to turn out but Republicans were not. The real question is why, and the answer casts a very long shadow over the fall elections. The factor which, according to Morris, successfully motivated Democrats was a trivial one: getting even with Specter. Compare this to what might have motivated Republicans: the next six months will be a dangerous time for the country. Democratic leaders know that their ability to implement their agenda may soon be gone, and so in the coming months they will try to ram through every destructive measure they can. Since they have the votes, only one thing will stop them: fear. Specifically, the fear on the part of scores of Democrats that their votes will end their careers. That fear has been stoked by the results of statewide elections in New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts, but statewide electorates are so large that they can never be skewed to one side as much as local congressional districts, which means that even in the era of Scott Brown’s win, large local party registration differences can still make a district feel safe. And so a Republican win in a heavily Democrat district would greatly increase fear, and that fear would make the GOP safer in the next six months.

Why didn’t this powerful motive for Republicans to go to the polls outweigh the trivial one that motivated Democrats? The ground should have been fertile: Obama’s approval numbers in the district were much lower than the national average. But Republican voters were not motivated by this powerful case because Republican leaders were not able to make it effectively. They lacked the energy and focus needed to inspire their side to vote, and so, squandered their advantage. That is a troubling lesson of the PA12 result.

There has been much discussion of the resemblance between this fall and 1994, when the GOP made large gains to take the House. The constant theme of the comparisons has been the similarity between HillaryCare and ObamaCare as sources of deep disillusion with the sitting President, and this similarity is widely assumed to be enough to make for a comparable Republican sweep this fall. But this thinking ignores a crucial factor that was present in 1994 and is not present this year: highly effective, focused and energetic leadership.

In 1994, Newt Gingrich wasn’t content to let people vote against the incumbent Democrats—he gave them something to vote for: the Contract with America. The Contract gave the campaign a clear focus, and it projected drive and energy. Newt was a compelling figure in front of the TV cameras: charismatic, full of ideas, exuding confidence and competence. What would the 1994 election have been like without dynamic, focused leadership pushing a clearly delineated positive agenda? It might well have been like PA12 this year, and that is why Republicans need to take that result seriously if they are to avoid the same outcome this fall.

In the House, energy, ideas, and strategic thought come from Paul Ryan (the Roadmap) and Eric Cantor, but not from the wooden, unimaginative John Boehner. In the Senate, waves are made by the likes of Jon Kyl and Jim DeMint, but not by the passive Mitch McConnell. Neither Boehner nor McConnell has the charisma or the focus needed to dominate a TV screen. Nor do they have strategic judgment–remember them on Scozzafava or amnesty? Where is this Republican leadership’s equivalent of a Contract with America for the fall election? In PA12, voters were asked to vote against the Pelosi-Reed agenda, but they were not given anything to vote for. Both Boehner and McConnell seem to think they can coast to victory on a wave of anti-Obama sentiment, but that’s not what produced 1994’s big win. I have seen this slogan for the fall elections: Boehner for Speaker. That’s a sure way to put GOP voters to sleep.

Spokesmen for liberal ideas are everywhere in the media, but Republicans are given few opportunities to make their case, and so must make sure that what chances they have are used to maximum effect. That’s why an ability to use TV to explain conservative ideas quickly and easily in crisp, forceful language is indispensable in GOP leaders. In 1994, the GOP seemed for once to understand that, and passed over more senior figures to anoint a natural leader in Newt Gingrich. But since then, it has gone back to its old ways, installing people with seniority but without ideas or energy, all but guaranteeing defeat with uncharismatic, lifeless figures like Denny Hastert and Bob Dole.

At the moment, tea party energy occasionally supplies some of what is missing in the leadership, but that can never be more than sporadic. Ordinary people can sustain their extraordinary efforts for only so long before the demands of their own lives reassert themselves. It’s not surprising that tea party energy suddenly disappeared in PA12. In any case, energy without the kind of focus provided by effective leadership can be dangerous, as the quirky Rand Paul’s nomination showed. Tea parties are a symptom of what is wrong with the GOP, not an antidote to it.

The real lesson of PA12 is this:  if Republicans were hoping for a repeat of 1994 this fall, then they had better prepare themselves for a disappointment—unless and until the GOP understands how it won in 1994, and accordingly moves to correct the disastrous leadership deficit that was on clear display in PA12. If the party persists in approaching its best opportunity in many years with its present passive, uninspired and uninspiring leadership, it will thoroughly deserve that old label: the stupid party.

Scanning news reports this week, I was surprised to learn that according to much of the press, Turkey had been Israel’s “staunchest ally in the Muslim world,” until the Gaza aid flotilla debacle. According to the Associated Press, the UK’s Daily Mail and other media, the Gaza aid flotilla crisis has irreparably damaged the “close” relationship between Israel and Turkey.

The fact is such reports are simply untrue and misleading. It was not the Gaza aid flotilla that irreparably damaged relations between Turkey and Israel. The relationship had already been under severe strain for the past seven years, since the now ultra-conservative Islamist AK Party led by Turkish Prime Minister Erodgan took power in 2002.

Indeed friendly relations between Turkey and Israel prior to the flotilla incident had already, for the most part, been over.

Turkey, the country that led the flotilla initiative, has shown absolutely no interest in continuing peaceful relations with Israel in the past year, resorting to hostile rhetoric and policies against the Jewish state. Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan barred Israel from annual military exercises on Turkey’s soil last year, while signing a military contract with Syria. At the World Economic Forum in Davos last year, the Turkish PM Erdogan verbally attacked Israeli president Shimon Peres about Gaza and stormed off the stage. In October 2009, Turkish national television aired a drama casting Israeli soldiers as sadists set to kill Palestinian children.

Not that Turkey’s human rights’ record is so squeaky clean. In 1974, Turkey invaded northern Cyprus, creating 160,000 Greek Cypriot refugees. Turkey still denies these refugees’ rights to return to their homes, as well as access and use of their property. Since the Turkish invasion, a large number of Turks have been brought to occupy the homes of the Greek Cypriot refugees, in violation of Article 49 of the Geneva Convention.

In 2009, the Orthodox Church of Cyprus launched legal action against Turkey for destroying 522 churches during the invasion. The Cyprus Church states that Turkey continues to destroy those remaining churches, converting them into “morgues, stables, night clubs, and chicken coops.”

But in addition to human rights abuses, it is those who Turkey counts as its friends, not its enemies, that should truly worry the West.

Turkey has announced that it would not join any sanctions aimed at preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and has warmly welcomed Iranian president Ahmadinejad to its capital city. But in May, Turkey went a step further and actually attempted to forestall UN economic sanctions against Iran much to the chagrin of the United States.

Back in February, the Turkish daily, Today’s Zaman wrote that the Turkish State Minister, Cedvet Yilmaz stated that his government was committed to working on improving relations with its neighbor Iran. The driving force behind this commitment, indicated Yilmaz, were the mutual gas transfer projects, which both Yilmaz and Iranian Foreign Minister, Manoucheher Mottaki agreed will bring both countries to a “historical era.”

Turkey and Iran have signed a number of deals to facilitate the flow of gas through Turkey to Europe, including agreements to allocate some Iran’s South Pars gas field to the Turkish Petroleum Corporation, where Iranian gas will be trasported across Turkey.

The Turkey-Iran pipeline transfers natural gas worth around $2 billion every year. “We believe that the projects for the tansfer of Iranian natural gas to Europe via Turkey will give a momentum to relations between the two largest economies in the world,” Yilmaz has stated. Another Turkish government official, Zafer Caglayan, stated that bilateral trade with Iran has grown to $10 billion in the past eight years.

But its not only economic ambitions or a record of human rights abuses that Turkey shares with Iran. Turkey’s government has grown more and more totalitarian in recent years, seeking not only to control economic and political matters but also attitudes, values and beliefs of its population. According to a recent article in Forbes, Melik Kaylan reports that the ruling pro-Islamic AK party has over 100,000 Turks wiretapped, thousands arrested and questioned, and over 200 reporters, intellectuals, academics and military officers jailed, all accused of a military coup.

“If you try to talk over the phone to people in Turkey about their current government, they will likely refuse to do so. The ruling pro-Islamic AK Party is now tapping phones so liberally that everyone is paranoid,” writes Kaylan.

A Washington Post blogger writes about similar observations of the Turkish government regime. Professor Susan Brook Thistelwaite reports that “far more Turkish women are wearing headscarves and religious dress than a decade ago. As one Turkish businessman observed about his university-age daughter, ‘They want to put a headscarf on her mind.’ He is thinking about sending his daughter to the United States to complete her education.”

“Erdogan’s administration has severely undermined the independence of the media, of the judiciary, of the banking system and has abolished long-standing rules prohibiting religious dress on university campuses. It is now moving on to re-write school textbooks to revise the country’s secular history,” writes Thistelwaite.

Indeed, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah presented the Turkish Prime Minister with one of the country’s most prestigious prizes, the King Faisal International Prize, also known as the ‘Arab Nobel Prize,’ in March.  The prize was given to Erdogan for “rendering outstanding service to Islam by defending the causes of the Islamic nation, particularly the Palestinian cause.” He received $200,000 in prize money.

The Palestinian cause has become a rallying banner for the Muslim world, serving as a means to distract the rest of the world from the human rights abuses that continue in countries like Turkey, Iran and Saudia Arabia, as well as from their growing economic power.

Indeed the humanitarian goods, among the weapons and arms, on the Gaza-bound flotilla should have gone to refugees elsewhere in the Middle East who have been displaced by Muslim powers. But then the incitement and hatred against Israel which unifies Muslims worldwide would have been lost.

Anav Silverman is a columnist and educator whose work has been published widely online and in print, both in Israel and internationally. She has appeared on Al Jazeera, BBC Radio, and CBS 2 and has contributed to BBC News, The Philadelphia Bulletin, Sderot Media Center, Front Page Magazine, Bangor Daily News, Maariv, The Jerusalem Post, Ynet News, and other publications.

When Barack Obama was originally pushing his ginormous stimulus bill, like many conservatives, I pointed out that it wasn’t going to work.

Among other things, I noted history has shown that stimulus bills of this sort don’t get the economy moving, I pointed out that there wasn’t even that much Keynesian stimulus in the bill  —  and it didn’t escape my notice that a significant portion of the spending was backloaded. In other words, we were going to spend as much money as “FDR’s New Deal AND the war in Vietnam combined” for a stimulus bill that wouldn’t actually stimulate the economy.

That was my position. Now for reasons that will soon become obvious, let’s look at some of the things that Robert Reich, Clinton’s Secretary of Labor, was saying about the same time. Of course, he supported it.

As the buyer of last resort, the federal government must respond if that cycle is to be reversed. In my judgment, this will require a stimulus of about 6 and a half percent of gross domestic product, or a total of some $900 billion, spread over two years. That’s my estimate for the shortfall in private demand. But the federal government should stand ready to spend larger sums if necessary to get the economy back on track toward full capacity. The danger is not that the government will do too much; the danger is that it will do too little, too late. Without such action, I estimate that another 3 million jobs will be lost in 2009, unemployment will rise to 10 percent of the workforce by the end of this year, and under-employment – including people working part-time who would rather be working full time, and those too discouraged even to look for work – will reach 15 percent. Without federal action, next year could be even worse.

As we now know, the unemployment rate hit 10.2% and underemployment was still at 19.1% in May of this year. In other words, things turned out even more poorly than Reich’s “worst case scenario” predicted it would get WITHOUT the stimulus.

Read the whole thing at Right Wing News.

How can we remember the cinema of the 1970s without the drug-induced rants from Dennis Hopper in both Easy Rider and Apocalypse Now? Unfortunately, last year it was revealed that Hopper was battling something just as serious as his previous drug addiction, prostate cancer. Hopper died this morning at the age of 74.

After battling drug addiction as well as playing addict characters, Hopper became one of Hollywood’s go-to guys for villainous roles. Among his memorable “bad guy” credits are films such as Blue Velvet, True Romance, Speed, Waterworld and the first season of the irreplaceable 24.

Hopper was also politically active for most of his life, Businessweek reports:

“Unusual for a countercultural figure, Hopper was a political conservative for much of his life and moved left in his later years. “I was the first person in my family to have been Republican,” he told reporters shortly before the 2008 U.S. presidential election. He said he had supported Republicans George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush but was planning to vote for Democrat Barack Obama.”

Regardless of a left political turn, he did play a role in the conservative film An American Carol in 2008. His characters have long been solidified in the memories of film audiences around the world. Many can agree that Hopper was an underappreciated treasure in Hollywood, he will certainly be missed.

"23-year-old convicted over car park killing," from The Local, May 28 (thanks to LazyBuddha):

A 23-year-old man has been found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to 22 months imprisonment in connection with the death of a 78-year-old woman who was assaulted during a parking lot dispute in southern Sweden in March.

Lund district court convicted the man of assaulting the woman outside a supermarket in Landskrona. The attack caused her to fall over and sustain injuries to the back of her head that led to her death in hospital two days later. The 23-year-old was also found guilty of assaulting the woman's 71-year-old husband.

The 23-year-old was also ordered by the court to pay 61,944 kronor ($8,000) in damages to the 78-year-old's husband and her estate.

The Lund court said the 23-year-old would have faced a slightly longer sentence of two years had he not suffered from psychological problems. An examination carried out by the National Board of Forensic Medicine (Rättsmedicinalverket) found the he had long suffered from a form of constant anxiety and related stomach complaints which made him less well-equipped for jail than the majority of prisoners.

The court found that the 23-year-old punched the 71-year-old man in the head and back in an unprovoked attack. He also punched the 78-year-old woman in the head when she intervened to help her husband.

The 23-year-old was fully aware that he was hitting an elderly woman, the court found.

The 23-year-old's credibility in the case was damaged by the fact that he left the car park immediately after the attack and did not make himself known before the police arrived at his home to place him under arrest. When questioned by police, he denied having been at the scene of the crime....

The 23-year-old comes from a family of immigrants and his arrest led to ethnic tensions in Landskrona. The right-wing extremist National Democrats called a public meeting in the town square to "protest against anti-Swedishness". Seeking to counter a rising tide of racial antagonism, organizations including the Church of Sweden and the local Islamic society held their own anti-violence demonstrations....

So a Swedish non-Muslim is victimized, and this becomes an occasion for the Swedish establishment and local Muslim groups to portray Muslims in Sweden as victims. Sounds like America.

With 10% unemployment, one would think that the government would consider lowering the number of green cards issued to foreign workers until Americans were back on their feet.  Amazingly, recently released data from the Department of Homeland Security shows that we have actually increased immigration.  Far from reflecting supply and demand, our legal immigration numbers continue to climb no matter the state of the national economy.

The latest figures come from fiscal year 2009.  The fiscal year began on October 1, 2008, which is when our economic collapse began and continued through September of 2009.  Over five million Americans lost their jobs over that period.

America issued 1,130,818 permanent green cards, 808,478 of which were given to immigrants of working age.  This is an increase over 2008 and 2007.  Excluding the extra green cards given after the 1986 amnesty, this was the second highest number of green cards issued since 1914.  From 2000 though 2009, we issued 10,299,430—the highest decade in American history.

In addition to the green cards, the government issued 881,840 temporary work visas and gave refugee or asylum status to 96,721 aliens.  The total increase to the American workforce was 1.75 million foreign workers. According to the Census Bureau, 1 out of every 6 workers is foreign born.

What are the possible justifications for this policy?  Are these immigrants taking jobs Americans won’t do?  With the unemployment rate at nearly 10%, no one can say this with a straight face.

Does this create diversity?  The pool of legal immigrants is rather un-diverse. Less than 10% of them come from Europe.

Does this decrease illegal immigration?  If that were the case, you would have expected the illegal immigration numbers to decline as legal immigration increased.  In fact, they have both skyrocketed.

Instead of talking about reducing these numbers, politicians are calling for raising the level of legal immigration.  Senators Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Robert Menendez (D-NJ), and Harry Reid (D-NV) recently released an outline for their ideas for “comprehensive immigration reform.” They call for adding an additional 3.4 million family visas and 550,000 work visas.

In the house, Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) and Solomon Ortiz’s (D-TX) introduced the Comprehensive Immigration Reform for America’s Security and Prosperity Act (H.R. 4321) which makes the same proposals for increasing family and work visas, but one ups them by adding a special new visa category of 100,000 permanent green cards a year to go specifically to Latin American countries.

There are two bills in Congress that will reduce legal immigration.  Rep. Phil Gingrey’s  (R-GA) Nuclear Family Priority Act (H.R.878) will limit family based immigration and reduce 111,800 green cards.  Rep. Bob Goodlatte’s (R-VA) SAFE for America Act (H.R.2305 ) will eliminate the Visa Lottery category that grants 50,000 visas a year.  Unfortunately, the Republican leadership is not backing these bills and they only have 30 and 57 co-sponsors, respectively.

These bills are a great start, but even if they passed we’d still issue nearly one million green cards a year. If we really want to put Americans back to work, we need a moratorium across nearly all categories of legal immigration.  A moratorium will free up jobs for American citizens, reduce the stress on social services, and allow the immigrants already here to assimilate.

The only people who will lose out from a moratorium are the ethnic interests who want new constituents and the business lobbies who want cheap labor.  Unfortunately, both political parties are more concerned with the well-being of these special interests than the well-being American citizens.

Virgil Goode represented Virginia’s 5^th Congressional District from 1997 to 2009.

A brand new study from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism offers  media buffs plenty to chew on. Entitled “How Blogs and Social Media Agendas Relate and Differ from the Traditional Press,” the study “gathered a year of data on the top news stories discussed and linked to on blogs and social media pages and seven months’ worth on Twitter. We also have analyzed a year of the most viewed news-related videos on YouTube.”

Here are some highlights:

Most broadly, the stories and issues that gain traction in social media differ substantially from those that lead in the mainstream press. But they also differ greatly from each other.  Of the 29 weeks that we tracked all three social platforms, blogs, Twitter and YouTube shared the same top story just once. That was the week of June 15-19, when the protests that followed the Iranian elections led on all three. (…)

And there is little evidence, at least at this point, of the traditional press then picking up on those stories in response. Across the entire year studied, just one particular story or event – the controversy over emails relating to global research that came to be known as “Climate-gate” –  became a major item in the blogosphere and then, a week later, gaining more traction in traditional media.   (…)

While social media players espouse a different agenda than the mainstream media, blogs still heavily rely on the traditional press – and primarily just a few outlets within that – for their information. More than 99% of the stories linked to in blogs came from legacy outlets such as newspapers and broadcast networks. And just four – the BBC, CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post accounted for fully 80% of all links.

Plus:

…the study found more political balance in blogs online than in talk radio.

“Partisanship is strong, but unlike talk radio, the conversation here tends to draw a fairly even mix of conservative and liberal voices,” the report said. “The Tea Party protests, Sarah Palin and Obama’s poll numbers, for example, all drew a wide mix of conservative and liberal commentary.”

Speaking of balanced and unbalanced: the broadcasting industry analysts at Holland Cooke Media are asking, “Now do you believe me?” So, what brought that on?

One reader canceled his subscription to my monthly newsletter — with flourish, by misquoting me on-air – when I became Talk Radio’s whistle-blower last September. I wrote an op-ed piece for The Daily Kos: “Will Talk Radio’s Dog Whistle Spark New Violence?” (…)

Now comes an FBI report that threats-against-members-of-Congress are up 300% this year. One Texas man arrested for threatening a United States Senator’s life was provoked by radio talkers’ tired rant against reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine which the FCC chairman and President Obama have both repeatedly said isn’t coming back.

Besides citing the actions of “one Texas man’s” alleged threats, Holland Cooke doesn’t offer links to any of this news. I found information about that FBI report at Politico. It reveals that these threats were aimed at both Democratic and Republican politicians; the “300% increase” figure comes from Senate Sergeant at Arms Terrance Gainer, not the FBI (I don’t doubt Gainer, but he’s not “the FBI”); we aren’t told about the number of cases as opposed to the percentage increase year over year. Were there 1,000 threats last year and 3,000 in 2010? Or 10 threats vs 30 threats?

It matters.

We get a hint from Gainer:

We have about 12 open cases at any given time, but most of those are relatively low threat, meaning there’s no specificity to them,” Gainer said. “But if there’s a serious threat, we’re going to have a pretty stern response.”

Holland Cooke and The Daily Kos might want to consider the wacky possibility that more Americans are angry at politicians, not (just) because boogeymen Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck are supposedly inviting them to “pass the time by playing a little solitaire” — but because politicians themselves are doing and saying things these Americans (left and right) feel are threatening their way of life.

Oh, and that stuff about the Fairness Doctrine “not coming back”? If you say so.

PS: that “dog whistle” thing? Old and tired.

In February of this year, New York Democrat Anthony Weiner said, from the House floor: “Make no mistake about it. Every single Republican I have ever met in my entire life is a wholly owned subsidiary of the insurance industry.” In March, Weiner launched an assault against “right-wing” media, accusing them of having disseminated “an enormous amount of disinformation” about the recently passed health-care legislation. Now he is accusing talk show host Glenn Beck of misleading his viewers into buying over-priced gold coins from a sponsor. This is the same Anthony Weiner who was once fined $47,000 for election-law violations.

To view the complete Anthony Weiner profile, click here.

Both Turkey and Brazil have grown much closer to Iran in recent years and have voiced their opposition to further sanctions. So it is not surprising that they have now come to the Islamic Republic’s rescue, handing it a lifeline on its nuclear program just as the Obama administration, after a year of failed diplomacy, had begun to contemplate the possibility of new sanctions.

Acting more as Iran’s advocates than neutral brokers, Turkey and Brazil worked out a deal whereby Iran would ship low-enriched uranium to Turkey in exchange for higher grade nuclear material. But the deal does little to stop Iran’s uranium enrichment activities, which are now approaching the 20 percent threshold that is considered the prelude to an operational nuclear weapon. A senior Israeli official has rightly called the deal “an Iranian trick,” as it will not end Iran’s own enrichment efforts and comes just as Secretary Clinton says the U.S., Russia and China have agreed on a draft resolution to impose sanctions.

The nuclear deal is just the latest sign of Turkey and Brazil’s newfound closeness with Iran. President Lula da Silva of Brazil reacted to the Ahmadinejad’s highly suspect “victory” in last year’s presidential elections by saying, “What right do I have, or any president, to question the election results in Iran. It would be overly arrogant for Brazil, 12,000 kilometers away, to pass judgment on Iran’s elections. Nor would I want them to judge ours.” A few months later, Ahmadinejad said that the ties between Iran and Brazil have “no limits.”

This deal comes just as Secretary of State Clinton announced that the U.S., U.K., France, Russia and China have finally agreed on the potential sanctions to be placed on Iran. The punishments include an arms embargo, freezing the assets of the Revolutionary Guards Corps, intercepting suspected WMD-related shipments, and other restrictions on dealing with the regime. This deal threatens to reset those negotiations.

China is reacting positively to the deal in the hopes of using it to justify the delay of further action. Iran provides China with 11.4 percent of its crude oil imports, and their overall trade has doubled since 2005. The Iranian refusal to budge made it difficult for China to stand by the Islamic Republic’s side in the United Nations, but this latest maneuver will give them the excuse to call for more diplomacy. Avoiding sanctions is clearly the goal of the Brazilian President, who boasted, “Diplomacy emerged victorious today.”

The Brazilian President is technically right. Diplomacy was indeed victorious—but it was a victory for Iran, and not for the U.S. or anyone threatened by Iranian nuclear weapons capabilities. Whereas Russia and China were in a tricky spot due to Iran’s blatant refusal to work with the international community, the role has been reversed and now the U.S. is the one in a tricky spot.

“But if he accepts it, many of the urgent issues he has said will have to be resolved with Iran in coming months—mostly over suspected weapons work—will be put on hold for a year or more.”

The New York Times perfectly frames America’s new position. “Mr. Obama now faces a vexing choice. If he walks away from this deal, it will look like he is rejecting an agreement similar to one he was willing to sign eight months ago,” the newspaper wrote.

Giving Iran another year will allow the regime to better prepare for the day when sanctions may finally be placed upon them. One of the regime’s key vulnerabilities is that it has to import petroleum-based products, including 30 percent of its gasoline. Iran is moving fast to expand ten of its current refineries and build seven more, allowing them to produce twice as much gasoline in 2012. The Iranians have struck a $6.5 billion deal with a Chinese company to help make this happen.

If Iran ships out a large part of its uranium to Turkey, it will not significantly delay its pursuit of the ability to create a nuclear arsenal. It is true that Iran will lose some of their uranium stock, which they are already short on. However, while international pressure is alleviated, Iran can work on other aspects of the weapons program such as the ability to mount a nuclear warhead on a ballistic missile. In the meantime, Iran can work to replenish its uranium stockpile from places like Zimbabwe, Venezuela, North Korea, possibly Burma, and through expanding production from its own uranium mine near Bandar Abbas, which they are still refusing to give the IAEA access to.

It is also important to remember that the deal does not stop Iran from enriching the uranium it keeps to 20 percent. David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security says that it would only take about six months to enrich the uranium from 20 percent to the bomb-grade level of 90 percent using 500 to 1,000 centrifuges. Iran currently has about 9,000 centrifuges, but only about 60 percent are said to be operating due to technical difficulties, probably courtesy of Western intelligence agencies.

This means that if this deal is enacted, Iran will still be enriching uranium to a level that will allow them to quickly create the fuel necessary for a nuclear bomb. The Iranians are openly expanding the number of their nuclear facilities, and likely have undeclared enrichment sites and stockpiles of uranium. The Syrians’ own nuclear program, which should be seen as an extension of Iran’s, and the planned opening of the Bushehr nuclear reactor in August further highlight the foolishness of relying upon this agreement to stop a nuclear-armed Iran from becoming a reality.

The Iranians’ best weapon in fighting the West has been the illusion that they can be dealt with diplomatically. Brazilian and Turkey have made this farce a reality. If the United Nations uses this latest deal as an excuse for inaction, the U.S. must immediately create a coalition that will place sanctions on Iran outside of the toothless organization’s framework.

The Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) cannot act quick enough to thumb its nose at punitive measures, claiming they are illegitimate and will be ineffective. Tuesday was no exception. Just as the U.S. finally convinced Russia and China to pass a fourth round of sanctions, the IRI promptly and audaciously dismissed the initiative, stating that it would not be approved by the rest of the United Nations Security Council and even if passed, it would not hinder the Iranian economy.

Maybe the IRI didn’t expect to be cornered this soon after making its tactful move Monday, agreeing to ship some of its uranium to Turkey to be enriched and returned as fuel for Iran’s nuclear energy plants. The operative word being ‘some,’ and the obvious motive being to show a glimmer of good faith before serious energy and gasoline sanctions are imposed.

The new proposal reiterates the demand that Iran halt its nuclear program and further prohibits any entity from selling to or aiding Iran in its nuclear weapons ambitions. It also imposes certain travel bans and requires that all Iranian cargo ships are searched before touching Iran’s shore.

Although most sanction proponents were hoping for a hard hit on Iran’s gasoline and energy industry, this fourth round of sanctions, according to the U.S., is meant to further isolate the IRI and to influence other nations to implement strict measures against Iran on their own.

While a step in the right direction, will these particular sanctions deter the IRI from going on with their proliferation? No. Does the U.S. believe it will? No. So why is the U.S. treading so lightly? Once again, we are brought back to the drawing board on sanctions. The longer we take to impose those that will genuinely cripple the Iranian regime, the more tricks the IRI will pull out of its hat to buy time and to reposition international forces.

Over the course of the last year, Iranian politicians, scholars and pundits have drastically evolved their opinions, mirroring a quickly changing and ever more urgent political backdrop.  Last June, when Iranians courageously took to the streets in the aftermath of a fraudulent election, they were filled with hope that change was within their grasp. More recently, as Iranians prepare for the one year anniversary of those demonstrations, they are going forward more cautiously and entirely cognizant that it will take more than large-scale protests to change their bitter fate under this regime.

The central topic at the time of the first demonstrations was the disenchantment of millions of Iranians whose rights were being trampled on by a rogue and hardline regime. Now at center stage, is the IRI’s nuclear weapons ambition and how quickly it will fulfill those objectives.

Likewise, talk of sanctions divided scholars, politicians, Iranians and Iranian Americans who feared the repercussion on innocent civilians. Slowly, those fears were replaced by an understanding that sanctions might be the only way to stop this relentless regime.

As the IRI further isolated itself from the international community with outlandish rhetoric and flippant demeanor, we found that a stronger and louder majority from the left, right and center began standing in support of powerful, yet targeted sanctions.

And the question, as always, was how the people of Iran will be affected. Why punish the citizens? Particularly in the case of Iran, we know the answer plain and simple. The people of Iran differ greatly with their government.  Yet by pushing for sanctions, are we allowing the Iranian people to bear the reprimands of their government; the same government many of them oppose.

The argument against sanctions on the people of Iran hinges on the premise that they will further strain an already suffering economy in a country where unemployment has been in the double digits for years. Many of those who can feed their families have to work a handful of menial jobs to do so.  The rule of thumb for many in the case of Iran has been to refrain from taking any action that would hurt the people, economically or otherwise.

It is dangerous, however, to make such a categorical statement given Iran’s precarious state. It then becomes necessary to carefully examine all the other avenues that the Iranian people have taken and are willing to take, having risked both their lives and livelihoods quite often.

Take, for example, the 2009 demonstrations. If we calculate the number of Iranians who were out on the streets throughout this year, missing work and cutting back on productivity for days at a time and then multiply this number by the number of man hours that were lost over the course of the year, it amounts to a huge economic loss for the Iranian economy. Yet, many opponents of sanctions, both in Iran and abroad, advocated protests and large-scale organized protests. It is interesting how economic loss was never an issue then.

Juxtapose this number with the irreplaceable and invaluable individuals who were killed, detained, beaten and tortured over the last 30 years. When one considers how the Iranians were willing to send their children out onto the streets the day after the well-known young woman Neda was shot and killed and hundreds of their friends and neighbors were secretly, yet brutally rounded up by the Revolutionary Guard and Basiji militia men, then the argument against sanctions for the protection of the Iranian people becomes entirely moot.

The debate among Iran scholars and political and social activists at this point should not focus on whether sanctions are appropriate to impose, but rather how they should be implemented, and what type of restrictions would best choke this regime while having the most nominal effect on Iranians.

The best recipe for sanctions requires five essential ingredients. First, they should be properly implemented. This means that they are targeted and meant to pinpoint the regime and its extensions only. Next, they should be clearly defined. As we are seeing in the case of Iran, a lack of boundaries and barriers leaves room for games and evading authority. Third, sanctions should be linked to a particular behavior change or resolution of specific issues.  Very clearly, sanctions should be tied to a particular action or behavior and made very clear to the regime. Next, it should be explained well to the Iranian people. What the United States has missed time and again in the case of Iran is a transparent and honest dialogue with the Iranian people. Where sanctions could be misconstrued as action against the people of Iran, the United States and all cosignatories should make it abundantly clear to the people of Iran that the sanctions are meant against its defiant government. Lastly, the sanctions should be lifted after conditions are met, meaning it needs to be a punishment that leaves room for repentance.

Another important point that is scarcely mentioned in talks about sanctions is that they are not meant solely to deter the Iranian regime from fulfilling its nuclear weapons ambitions. They can and should also be used in human rights cases to deter the regime from stoning, hanging and executing innocent civilians such as the five innocent Iranians arrested during the demonstrations and executed on Mother’s Day.

Over the past decade, targeted and action-specific sanctions have been successful in deterring the Islamic Republic. Two instances that come to mind are the freeing of the 13 Iranian Jews from the city of Shiraz in 1999 who were being tried for espionage. The campaign to halt the use of cranes for hangings was successful in stopping public executions for over three years.

Even if we were to give credence to the economic argument against sanctions, there are various ways in which they can be implemented to help the Iranian people without costing them anything. There can be sanctions on diplomats and their families. There can be a restriction on the regime’s communication worldwide, which would prevent them from making sanctimonious speeches at the United Nations every few months or so. The personal accounts of government officials and their families should be frozen. Which raises an interesting question: if these individuals want so badly to hold onto Iran’s government and care for its economic state, then why don’t they invest their money into the country?

Government officials should also feel pressure when they travel, when they invest abroad, and when they send their children abroad. Often, we see the children of the Iranian officials studying at top ranked American universities, while the regime is busy ruining the lives of their compatriots back home. Maybe if these officials felt the same pressures other Iranians did, their own children and families could pressure them to let up their chokehold on the country.

So, despite the IRI’s three-decade-long crusade to steer the country elsewhere, the argument should not be whether or not to impose sanctions. The Iranian people are hurting more in the interim with a hard-line regime which turns a blind eye to its citizens’ needs while duping the international community to cover its illicit nuclear weapons agenda. The argument should only focus on how we can hit hardest at the regime’s lifeline through crippling regulations on their energy and gasoline sectors, for the sake of the Iranians and everyone else.

There was an emotional ceremony at the White House on Monday when President Obama welcomed slain journalist Daniel Pearl’s surviving family members to witness the signing of the Daniel Pearl Freedom of the Press Act.

Pearl, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, was brutally murdered in Pakistan as he was following up some leads on al-Qaeda financing in early 2002. Four Pakistanis were convicted in Pearl’s murder in July of that year. The mastermind of the kidnapping and murder, however, may have been Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who confessed to the murder under interrogation by the CIA.

According to the New York Times, the Freedom of the Press Act “requires the State Department to expand its scrutiny of news media restrictions and intimidation as part of its annual review of human rights in each country. Among other considerations, the department will be required to determine whether foreign governments participate in or condone violations of press freedom.”

This is certainly good news. According to Freedom House’s annual surveyof press freedom in 196 countries, the indicators fell for the 8th straight year:

• Significant declines outnumbered gains by a 2-to-1 margin. Notable regional declines were registered in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, as well as the Middle East.
• Declines in important emerging democracies demonstrate the fragility of press freedom in such environments. Namibia and South Africa, two of the new democracies, dropped from Free to Partly Free. Worrying declines were also registered in Mexico, the Philippines, and Senegal.
• The only area to show overall improvement was the Asia-Pacific region, spurred by notable gains in South Asia that included status changes in Bangladesh and Bhutan from Not Free to Partly Free and a numerical score jump for the Maldives.
• Governments in China, Russia, Venezuela, and other countries have been systematically encroaching on the comparatively free environment of the internet and new media. Sophisticated techniques are being used to censor and block access to particular types of information, to flood the internet with antidemocratic, nationalistic views, and to provide broad surveillance of citizen activity.
• Journalists are increasingly the victims of assault and murder, a trend fueled by impunity for past crimes.

We give Egypt billions of dollars in aid every year and yet, President Mubarak and his security services have gotten into the very bad habit of arresting journalists and even bloggers who write on subjects that the state deems “dangerous.” It’s certainly dangerous to the journalists but beyond that, there doesn’t seem to be much rhyme nor reason to the practice except to clamp down on dissent.

Of course, you take your life in your hands if you write anything against the regime in Iran. Entire newspapers have been shut down by the mullahs since the disputed election last year and there is no sign that they are letting up in their campaign to silence critics.

Perhaps President Obama will want to do something about his friend Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela, who has shut down opposition TV stationsand engaged in media intimidation. Freedom House lists Venezuela as “Not Free,” ranking it a dismal 163 our of 196 nations. Just don’t let Sean Penn hear you call Hugo a “dictator,” though. He favors having journalists arrested who call Chavez the “D” word.

Mexico, South Africa, India, and Italy are all listed as “Partly Free.” Freedom House uses a broad range of criteria to determine it’s rankingsbased on a point system. The legal, political, and economic environment for the press in each country is given a numerical score of 0-40 in each. The totals reveal whether a country is “Free,” “Partly Free,” or “Not Free.” Only 69 countries are judged as having a “Free” press in their 2010 survey.

While a welcome addition to our criteria for giving aid and adjudging a level of support our State Department can offer a nation, one has to wonder how seriously the president and his appointees will actually take this new law. As Jennifer Rubin points out in a piece in Commentary’s Contentions blog, this administration has fallen down in its support for press freedom in countries where the weight of our words is desperately needed:

Has Obama done anything about the suppression of media critics in Egypt (other than prepare a lucrative financial package for the Egyptian government)? Has Obama made this a priority with any thugocracy? No. And when signing a bill in the name of someone who elevated and personified the freedom of expression, Obama at least could have departed from his campaign to delete the name of our enemies from the public lexicon.

Meanwhile, at the United Nations, it’s business as usual for the enemies of the free press. Anti-blasphemy measures are being pushed by the usual suspects in the Muslim world in a clear effort to stifling criticism of Islam.

In addition, the UN Human Rights Council has drafted rules designed to “protect” Islam from “political cartoonists and bigots.” This attitude seems widespread at the United Nations, who recently celebrated “World Press Freedom Day” on May 3rd. How devoted the UN is to press freedom is a matter open for debate. UNESCO, sponsor of World Press Freedom Day, defines “Fundamental Principles concerning the Contribution of the Mass Media” in what must be considered a novel manner:

2. Access by the public to information should be guaranteed by the diversity of the sources and means of information available to it, thus enabling each individual to check the accuracy of facts and to appraise events objectively. To this end, journalists must have freedom to report and the fullest possible access to information. Similarly, it is important that the mass media be responsive to concerns of peoples and individuals, thus promoting the participation of the public in the aggregation of information.

3. With a view to the strengthening of peace and international understanding, to promoting human rights and to countering racialism, apartheid and incitement to war, the mass media throughout the world, by reason of their role, contribute to promoting human rights, in particular by giving expression to oppressed peoples who struggle against colonialism, neo-colonialism, foreign occupation and all forms of racial discrimination and oppression and who are unable to make their voices heard within their own territories.

We Americans prefer the simple, “Congress shall make no law…” found in the First Amendment. It would appear that UNESCO has narrowed that definition considerably.

This is important because of the Obama administration’s clear preference for bending to the will of the United Nations on a variety of issues, most recently when Iran was given a seat on the UN Commission on Women’s Rights and President Obama remained silent. If we acquiesce on this, what other nonsense will the Obama administration put up with?

Despite its noble goals, it would seem to be a pipe dream to expect the State Department to do more than go through the motions when it comes to fulfilling the requirements of the Daniel Pearl Freedom of the Press Act. Given the large number of states who routinely violate that freedom, we should expect a business as usual attitude, especially from this president, whose outreach to thugs and tyrants around the world regardless their treatment of journalists – or their people – continues.

Julia Gorin has a translation of a Swedish article on this: "Sweden: Suspects in Vilks attack are two brothers," from Republican Riot, May 19:

The 21 and 19 year old arrested on for the attempted arson attack against Lars Vilks house are brothers, reports Sydsvenskan. The 21 year old man was arrested in his mother's apartment in Landskrona. He was arrested early Saturday morning - suspected for attempted arson....

The 21 year old moved from Kosovo to Sweden with his family in the early 1990s. He's a religious Muslim and regularly visits the mosque. But his sister says she has difficulty accepting that her brother is now a suspect in the attack against Lars Vilks.

"He's extremely kind. Certainly he's religious, but that doesn't mean that he would do such a thing," she says....

Of course not!

CNOOC Ltd., the Hong Kong-listed unit of China National Offshore Oil Corp. has partnered with the state-run Turkish Petroleum Corp. (TPAO) to win a contract with Iraq to develop the lucrative Missan oil-field in southern Iraq, marking CNOOC's first upstream access to Iraqi oil following its two major rivals, CNPC and Sinopec.

According to CNOOC, the 20-year contract includes an increase of Missan's production capacity to 450,000 barrels per day from the current 100,000 barrels a day within six years. CNOOC has agreed to price every additional barrel of oil produced after capacity rises by 10 percent at US$ 2.30.

CNOOC will be the operator and hold 63.75 percent of the interest. TPAO will have 11.25 percent interest while an Iraqi drilling company will hold the remaining 25 percent....

The other two major Chinese oil companies, CNPC and Sinopec, have also gained a foothold in the Iraqi oil industry. In November 2008, CNPC and China North Industries Corp. set up a joint venture and signed a 20-year development contract for Al-Ahdab Oilfield....

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.”

Anti-White La Raza Calls for Revolution Against White America

The media refuses to acknowledge racist violence in America – unless they can falsely accuse the Tea Party movement of it, that is. They have insinuated that tea party protesters are anti-black, Obama-hating racists, attempting to start violent revolutions.  These accusations are false. Tea parties are about preserving the Constitution, America’s founding and heritage, lowering taxes, government spending, and finding new leaders with Constitutional values to lead America.

On March 20, 2010, Salon.com’s Joan Walsh said of tea parties:

When the tea party movement began last year I saw it as right-wing reaction, but given the economic turmoil across the country…Maybe there was populism within the movement that the left needed to recognize.  I attended a local tea party last April 15, tax day, and while I didn’t find folks whose minds seemed mutable by liberal populism, at least it seemed possible to have a conversation…Of course I was in San Francisco, so it probably wasn’t representative of the tea party movement…A year later…The tea party movement is disturbingly racist and reactionary, from its roots to its highest branches…the movement’s origins in white resistance to the Civil Rights Movement was impossible to ignore.”

Media leftists promote left-wing ideology supporting violent revolutionaries in America. When it comes to real aggression against this great nation, the media covers it up. Would Miss Walsh view La Raza’s attempts at revolutionary violence, calling for Hispanics to rise up against whites, disturbingly racist? I fear not.

On May 6, 2010, Los Angeles high school teacher Ron Gochez told a La Raza rally to rise up revolutionary-style and fight America:

“We are revolutionary Mexican organization [La Raza] here.  We understand that this is not just about Mexico.  It’s about a global struggle against imperialism and capitalism… At the forefront of this revolutionary movement is La Raza.  We will no longer fall for these lies called borders.  We see America as a northern front of a revolutionary movement…Our enemy is capitalism and imperialism,” further calling the revolution a “global struggle.”

YouTube videos are the only footage showing Gochez riling up crowds with hate-filled anger toward America and whites, telling students of Mexican descent: “There’s 40 million potential revolutionaries north of the border, inside the belly of the beast,” Gochez’s reference America, whom he wants taken over by Hispanics.

Tea parties never call for whites fighting blacks, the only brutality was committed by leftist union groups beating up a black man supporting his local tea party: NewsReal’s Joesph Klein reported the media, as well as Al Sharpton, ignored the beating of a black tea partier by Service Employees International Union (SEIU) organizers, yet continue calling tea parties anti-black racists screaming the “N” word at politicians.

Of course videos proved the usage of the “N” word false. That did not, however, prevent media moron Keith Olbermann from claiming otherwise:

“I would like to thank whoever shouted at Mr. Lewis and Mr. Carson for proving my previous point.  If racism is not the whole of the Tea Party, it is in its heart, along with blind hatred, a total disinterest in the welfare of others, and a full- flowered, self-rationalizing refusal to accept the outcomes of elections, or the reality of democracy, or the narrowness of their minds and the equal narrowness of their public support.”

Unlike the Tea Party movement, Revolutionary Hispanic group La Raza isn’t calling for some innocent protests, but for an outright insurrection. Although they accuse tea partiers of racism whenever they dare disagree with Obama’s socialist policies, our left-wing media turn a blind eye to La Raza’s hatred towards whites. After all, to our progressive friends, violence or racism aren’t really the problem: capitalism and democracy are.

In 1992, Joel Rogers co-founded the New Party, a Marxist coalition that endorsed and helped elect left-wing political candidates; one of its most noteworthy members in the mid-1990s was Barack Obama. After the New Party closed its doors in 1997, it was reinvented the following year by Joel Rogers’ partner, Daniel Cantor, as the Working Families Party, which became a powerful front group for ACORN. Rogers has been lauded by Van Jones, President Obama’s disgraced “green czar” and now a member of the Center for American Progress. Jones has praised Rogers’ “extraordinary set of achievements,” including the creation of “an economic model” that is “now reflected in the White House”; a “new politics” — based upon the New Party and the Working Families Party — that represent “the basic framework for what just took over the White House [when Obama was elected]”; and “a new energy paradigm” as outlined by the Apollo Alliance, an organization Rogers helped create, and on whose board Van Jones sat.

To view the full Joel Rogers profile, click here.

A Catholic schoolgirl has been branded a 'truant' by her teachers after she refused to dress as a Muslim for a school field trip to a mosque.

Staff had ordered 14-year-old Amy Owen and her classmates to dress in headscarf, wear trousers or leggings and keep her arms covered for the compulsory visit to the mosque after it was arranged to promote 'community cohesion.'

Parents at the 1,100 pupil Ellesmere Port Catholic High School in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire were also told they were each required to make a £3 contribution towards the trip for all Year Nine students.

But when Amy refused to dress in Muslim attire for the visit to Al Rahma Mosque in Toxteth, Liverpool, staff warned her about rules and said refusal would mean non attendance which would then be marked down as an 'unauthorised absence.'

In a stern letter to her family with words in block capitals and underlined, the school's headmaster Peter Lee said the visit was 'as compulsory as a geography field trip.'

He added: 'There are two reasons for these visits. One is that the scheme of work in religious studies REQUIRES children to have knowledge and understanding of other world religions.

The one-way street of multiculturalist "tolerance":

'The second is that the school is REQUIRED to promote tolerance respect and understanding. This is known as community cohesion. A failure to do this could result in an unwelcome inspection judgement. None of us would relish that.

'Whilst I may not require you to pay for this I must require your child to participate.'

It is believed up to ten other families from Amy's Year 9 classes also refused to dress as Muslims and were marked down in the truanting register.

But Amy's mother Michelle Davies, 34, a home help said: 'It's like they're putting a gun to your head - either you go to a mosque, or you're marked down as an unauthorised absence on your record - that's it no two ways about it. [...]

'I also fail to see how a three-hour trip to a mosque is of any educational value to a Catholic when she can learn about the Muslim faith in the classroom.

'I can guarantee that if there were ten Muslim girls coming to our school it would adhere to what they wanted, because that's their faith, their religion, their dress code.'

The school claimed it had arranged the trip in accordance with diktats sent down by Oftsted and the Roman Catholic diocese and said it to abide by a 'strict dress code.'

Mrs Davies who has two other children said: 'No sooner had I objected to the dress code, I got a phone call from her head of year saying I don't see what the problem is, it teaches them respect. I said to her, is that not my job and your job as a school?...

]]> http://frontpagemag.com/2010/05/12/u-k-catholic-schoolchildren-told-to-dress-as-muslims-headscarves-included-for-mosque-visit-or-be-marked-as-truants/feed/ 0 http://frontpagemag.com/2010/05/12/times-square-denial/ http://frontpagemag.com/2010/05/12/times-square-denial/#comments Wed, 12 May 2010 04:01:35 +0000 Stephen Brown http://frontpagemag.com/?p=59959

Before any real investigation had been carried out into the attempted terrorist bombing on New York’s Times Square last week, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano had almost immediately dismissed it as a “one-off” thing. General David Petraeus, head of US Central Command, was also quick off the mark, saying the terrorist behind the plot, Faisal Shahzad, 30, who traded his Pakistani citizenship for American last year, was a “lone wolf.”

But last weekend the truth came out when Attorney-General Eric Holder was forced to admit what many suspected all along. It was another act of international Islamic jihad against the United States, and faceless murderers in Taliban/ al Qaeda terrorist organizations, based in Pakistan and motivated by their undying resolve to kill as many Americans, were the string-pullers.

“We’ve now developed evidence that shows that the Pakistan Taliban was behind the attack,” Holder said on the ABC program, This Week. “We know that they probably helped finance it. And that he (Shahzad) was working at their direction.”

With Holder’s admission, the question remains as to why a government that told people not to jump to conclusions concerning a connection between the Fort Hood massacre and Islamist terrorism was so quick to erroneously declare the Times Square bombing a solo, one-time operation? In the Fort Hood killings, Major Nidal Malik Hasan was also initially described as a lone gunman, whose motives were unclear, although he was shouting “Allahu Akbar” during his murderous rampage. President Obama himself cautioned against any premature judgement, even though his own intelligence agencies knew for months Hasan had been trying to make contact with al Qaeda-connected people.

“We don’t know all the answers yet,” Obama said at the time. “And I would caution against jumping to any conclusions until we have all the facts.”

But in the case of the failed Times Square bombing the facts were already in, some of them for a long time. The United States is in a worldwide war with radical Islam, a concept some still have difficulty with. As a result of this war, according to one analyst, America was the target of about a dozen terrorist attacks within its borders last year alone. Only the Fort Hood strike was successful, costing 13 lives while another 30 were wounded.

In one of the thwarted attacks, also potentially the most deadly, an Afghan residing legally in the United States, Najibullah Zazi, 25, was arrested last September along with two others for planning three suicide attacks on the New York subway. Zazi, like Shahzad, had also received weapons and explosives training at a terrorist training camp in Pakistan. Zazi pleaded guilty last February and will be sentenced in June.

However, it was the arrest of two men of Pakistani origin in Chicago last year on terrorism charges that indicated how deeply the al Qaeda/ Taliban terrorist network had spread in America. Rather than use the two Chicago residents, David Headley and Tahawwur Rana, the former an American and the latter a Canadian citizen, to carry out terrorist attacks in the United States where they lived, an easier proposition, the terrorist leaders sitting in Pakistan confidently used them to help carry out the most devastating terrorist attack of 2008: Mumbai.  Headley, using his American passport and Rana’s business as cover, traveled several times to India to scout out potential targets before the attack and to gather information. The two men’s sinister activities remained undetected in both India and America.

Headley would also travel to Pakistan where he would drop off his reports to Ilyas Kashmiri, the mastermind behind the Mumbai attack and allegedly the head of al Qaeda’s military operations. When arrested, Headley and Rana were carrying out reconnaissance in Denmark for another Kashmiri-planned terrorist attack, this time against the Danish newspaper, the Jyllands-Postens, which printed the Muhammad cartoons. Kashmiri was indicted at the trial that saw Headley plead guilty to terrorism charges last March.

When the investigation is complete concerning the failed Times Square bombing, it would not surprise if Ilyas Kashmiri’s name pops up once more. South Asian affairs analyst B. Raman describes Kashmiri as seeing himself as another Khalid Sheikh Mohammad who wants “to carry out a spectacular terrorist strike in a Western country.”

American intelligence indicated Kashmiri’s importance by subjecting him to three drone attacks in the past. Kashmiri, who also heads al Qaeda’s secretive 313 Brigade, granted a Pakistani journalist an interview last October after his death was reported in the third attack to prove he was still alive and planning further terrorist strikes in India, Europe and North America.

“They are right in their pursuit. They know their enemy well. They know what I am really up to,” he told the interviewer with pride.

The fact the Pakistani Taliban rather than al Qaeda at first took credit for helping Shahzad and then later retracted its claim is probably an attempt to deceive. Raman writes there is really no knowing what the relationship is between the Pakistani Taliban, Ilyas Kashmiri and his 313 Brigade. He further observes that the terrorist scene in Pakistan is “getting murkier and murkier” and not even Pakistan’s leaders know exactly what is going on.

The fact that so many terrorist plots in America and elsewhere have led back to Pakistan, why then would Napolitano and General Petraeus hastily conclude the Times Square bombing was a “one-off”, “lone wolf” deed?  What drives such speedy, and misleading, utterances and presidential warnings not to jump to conclusions is the White House’s fear of a backlash against Muslims living in America. Such a backlash, it is believed, would not only play into the Islamists’ hands and adversely affect the War on Terror, but would also jeopardise Obama’s stated desire to build bridges to the Islamic world.

But while such fear may be understandable, it only serves to hinder people from drawing the proper conclusion: Islamic terrorism is a very real danger to Americans and the threat is growing.  And that is something that can’t be denied.

]]> http://frontpagemag.com/2010/05/12/times-square-denial/feed/ 7 http://www.jihadwatch.org/2010/05/failed-times-square-bomber-the-latest-jihadist-inspired-by-yemeni-jihad-preacher-al-awlaki.html http://www.jihadwatch.org/2010/05/failed-times-square-bomber-the-latest-jihadist-inspired-by-yemeni-jihad-preacher-al-awlaki.html#comments Fri, 07 May 2010 08:06:00 +0000 Marisol Of course, Al-Awlaki did not invent the ideology he has become widely known for propagating. Nor did Osama bin Laden, nor did al-Qaeda. Authorities would have to dig into some highly politically-incorrect territory to get to the root of what motivated Shahzad to pursue violent jihad, especially since his case cannot be written off as the product of poverty or a lack of education. "A Newly Religious Immigrant Is Linked to a Militant Yemeni-American Cleric," by Scott Shane and Marc Mazzetti for the New York Times, May 6:

WASHINGTON -- The Pakistani-American man accused of trying to detonate a car bomb in Times Square has told investigators that he drew inspiration from Anwar al-Awlaki, a Yemeni-American cleric whose militant online lectures have been a catalyst for several recent attacks and plots, an American official said Thursday.

Curious NYT decorum:

The would-be bomber, Faisal Shahzad, said he was "inspired by" the violent rhetoric of Mr. Awlaki, said the official, who would speak of the investigation only on condition of anonymity.

"He listened to him, and he did it," the official said, referring to Saturday's attempted bombing on a busy street in Times Square.

Friends of Mr. Shahzad have said he became more religious and somber in the last year or so, and asked his father's permission in 2009 to join the fight in Afghanistan against American and NATO forces. Investigators believe he was trained by the Pakistani Taliban, a militant group that previously focused mainly on Pakistani government targets.

A senior military official said Thursday that Mr. Shahzad has told interrogators that he met with Pakistani Taliban operatives in North Waziristan in December and January. Later he received explosives training from the same operatives, said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the case.

Counterterrorism officials want to know how Mr. Shahzad, a naturalized American citizen who had earned an M.B.A., married and had children and worked in several corporate jobs, came to embrace violence.

It is no surprise to counterterrorism officials to find that an accused terrorist had been influenced by Mr. Awlaki, 39, now hiding in Yemen, who has emerged as perhaps the most prominent English-speaking advocate of violent jihad against the United States.

Earlier this year, the Obama administration took the extraordinary step of authorizing the killing of Mr. Awlaki, making him the first American citizen on the Central Intelligence Agency's hit list.

Mr. Awlaki's English-language online lectures and writings have turned up in more than a dozen terrorism investigations in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada, counterterrorism experts have said. And in two recent United States cases, Mr. Awlaki communicated directly with the accused perpetrator.

Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people at Fort Hood, Tex., in November, exchanged about 18 e-mail messages with Mr. Awlaki in the year before the shootings, asking among other things whether it would be permissible under Islam to kill American soldiers preparing to fight in Afghanistan. After the shootings, Mr. Awlaki praised Major Hasan as "a hero" on his Web site, which was taken offline by the Internet host company shortly after the posting.

In addition, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian man accused of trying to blow up a trans-Atlantic airliner on Christmas Day, is believed to have met Mr. Awlaki during his training by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

It is unclear whether Mr. Shahzad ever directly communicated with Mr. Awlaki.

A video broadcast on April 26 on Al Jazeera showed Mr. Awlaki speaking in Arabic and accusing the United States of participating with Yemeni forces in two air strikes in December, one of which was directed at a house where Mr. Awlaki was believed to be meeting with leaders of the Al Qaeda branch. The video carried the logo of the media arm of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

Mr. Awlakiwas questioned by the F.B.I. late in 2001 about contacts with three of the Sept. 11 hijackers who had attended his mosques in San Diego and Virginia. He denied any radical ties and denounced the 9/11 attacks in public statements.

He was imprisoned in Yemen in 2006 and 2007, and after his release he was more overtly approving of violence. Last year, he published a tract entitled "44 Ways of Supporting Jihad" that was widely circulated on the Internet.

There are 50 ways to leave your lover, but only 44 ways to support jihad. Now you know.

Mr. Awlaki's Web site became a favorite for English-speaking Muslims who were curious about jihad, and hundreds of people sent e-mail messages to his site. It is not known whether Mr. Shahzad was among them, and there is no evidence that Mr. Shahzad visited the cleric in Yemen where he was believed to be hiding in a harsh region of desert and mountains.

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