Then There's Obama, the Inspirer-in-Chief

The Detroit Free Press dedicated an entire Sunday section page to fawning about President Obama’s appearance commencement address to University of Michigan graduates today in Ann Arbor. The Freep’s jump headline indicates what the readers are in for. “U-M GRADUATES-TO-BE TELL PRESIDENT: EXCITE US, ENGAGE US -- AND TELL US THE TRUTH.”

Last year, when President Barack Obama's commencement addresses drew protests at the University of Notre Dame and Arizona State University, Rebekah Sharpe was spurred to action. She figured if Obama was invited to the 2010 commencement at the University of Michigan, the reception would be different., 'He will be welcomed with open arms,' " said Sharpe, who is graduating with a degree in communications. (“U-M grads want Obama to inspire -- and knock OSU”).

There’s no clue offered about exactly to what particular action Ms. Sharpe was spurred that will would guarantee Obama an even more unctuous welcome in Ann Arbor than he would already get. Maybe she’s the one who suggested to the Free Press sending him a full-page valentine signed by U-M grads.

Anyway, Ms. Sharpe, whom we note is graduating with a “degree in communications,” may have overlooked all those news reports about how Obama actually was welcomed at Notre Dame with open arms, which was exactly the reason for the protests.

Then Sheri Jankelovitz, a 22-year-old secondary education major from West Bloomfield, said that,

As a future educator, I am hoping Obama speaks about his plan to reform the education system in this country. He has spoken of recruiting new teachers and finding new ways to reward outstanding teachers and I wish to hear concrete plans as to how this will occur. Obama has also spoken of reforming No Child Left Behind, and actually attempting to support schools who need help, rather than shutting them down. Well, with Detroit now being one of the biggest cities hit by this issue, I hope that Obama will address this, using tangible ideas to map out how he plans to fix this growing problem. This is an issue that affects not just me as a future teacher, but all those in the graduating class who plan on sending their children to these schools in the future.

Now who says education degrees are a joke? As still only a future member of a teachers union, Ms. Jankelovitz has already made her very own every myth about why America’s public schools in general stink -- and Detroit’s school system stinks in particular -- as if she already had been a dues-paying public-school teacher for 30 years. She hasn’t even got her first teaching job yet and already she believes there aren’t enough teachers, there’s not enough money being spent on public education, that the President has been shutting down failing schools, and that all these red herrings explain the scandal of the Detroit Public School system.

Okay, it’s easy to pick on young people. When I was 22, it had been a year since I cast my first presidential vote for Jimmy Carter, and I still didn’t realize what I had done. I didn’t even have a liberal arts degree as an excuse.

My gripe is with the Free Press, not that I think we should expect better.

Obama the Imposer-in-Chief

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas called Saturday for a resumption of peace negotiations with Israel and said he had asked the United States more than once to unilaterally "impose" a solution in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (“Palestinian Mahmoud Abbas says he asked U.S. to 'impose' peace solution”)

And why not ask President Obama to impose a solution?

Didn’t Obama impose a health care law on all Americans that we didn’t want? Why wouldn’t watching world leaders draw a lesson from that?

Then Obama went out of his way to let the international community -- especially Israel’s enemies in the Middle East -- know beyond doubt that he shares the same anti-Israel views of the current Palestinian leaders. Won’t Fatah leaders and Israel’s other enemies in the neighborhood see Obama as a co-conspirator in their campaign to destroy Israel?

So Fatah knows that Obama supports the Palestinian cause, hates Israel, and sees himself as an agent of fundamentally transformative change. Why not recruit Obama’s help in fundamentally transforming a strong, thriving Israel into the kind of Israel Fatah, Hamas, Hezbollah, and 300 million neighboring Muslims mean by “a solution in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”: that is, an Israel that is no more?

'The First Thing We Do, Let's Kill All the Editors'

Apologies to Will Shakespeare.

The UK’s Guardian, rather an anti-Israel rag, ran this headline today:
Binyamin Netanyahu tells US: We won't stop east Jerusalem settlement building .

If I were using this headline in my Copy Editing 101 Class, it could be translated this way: Husband Admits to Asshole Reporter: ‘No, I Haven’t Stopped Beating My Wife’.

Netanyahu told AIPAC in a speech last month that “Jerusalem is not a settlement; it’s our capital.” Netanyahu doesn’t consider construction in Jerusalem for Israeli Jews “settlements.” So he didn’t say that he would stop building settlements in Jerusalem.

But The Guardian feels they can report that, “Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu has reportedly told the US administration that his government will not stop settlement construction in east Jerusalem, despite US pressure and long-running deadlock in peace talks.”

For you Europhiles out there, this is crap with a British accent.

'We Are All Eric Cartman'

The creepy thing is that this part of Sharia is already in place.

From HotAir:

Comedy Central Is Run By Terrifed Cowards

Last week, South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone revisited the controversy of Muhammed being an untouchable religious figure in the media. Years ago, they aired an episode called “Super Best Friends“, which starred religious figures like Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Moses, and yes, Muhammed. They drew him as he’s been historically depicted. He talked. He had the powers of fire for some reason. No riots. No censorship. Comedy Central apparently had no qualms with it.

Then, a few years later, came the episode “Cartoon Wars“. Combined with rather apt mockery of Family Guy, they spoofed the Western fear of depicting Muhammed in the wake of the Jyllands-Posten cartoon riots. Just to remind people, this is what caused the riots.

The big climax of the episode was going to be that Family Guy would insert Muhammed into a single one of their disjointed, senseless scenes. No actual jokes about Islam or Muhammed would be made, but his mere appearance drove the country into a panic, fearing violence from Muslims.

To punctuate the message of the episode, at the end, Al Qaeda supposedly got their revenge by showing a horrifically cheesy anti-Jesus cartoon, basically showing Jesus defecating on people, and them defecating on him. The moral? You can insult Jesus all you like, but don’t you dare even show a picture of the prophet of Islam. The mere showing of Muhammed proved too controversial for the cowardly punks at Comedy Central, however, and at the last minute, they forced the censoring of the image of Muhammed.


That sniveling bunch of media pansies ended up providing quite an ironic twist to Parker and Stone’s satire. Well, the duo wasn’t finished. For their 200th episode, they decided to revisit the controversy. Knowing they couldn’t even show Muhammed, they built around the idea of first putting him in a Ryder truck, and then transferring him to a bear mascot outfit.



I won’t give away too much of the plot in order to avoid spoiling the episode, but it turned out to be a two-parter, just like the Cartoon Wars episodes. I’m currently watching the second part…and guess what?

Comedy Central forced the bleeping of every use of the name “Muhammed”.

Despite last week’s episode using it numerous times. Despite having shown him in a previous episode. Despite being made to look like fools when they censored Muhammed last time. They bleep every mention of Muhammed’s name. It’s ludicrous trying to watch the episode. They say his name over and over, until the dialogue sounds like Morse Code. Don’t worry, though.

Comedy Central still had no problem with Buddha snorting coke or Jesus looking at porn in the same episode.

We have reached Irony Overload.

There are lots of cracks about the phrase “the terrorists have won”. Well, this is one of the clearest, truest signs that they have. It’s utterly abominable, and everyone responsible for this craven, pusillanimous decision is a worthless coward.

Pocket Politics

The thing about a modern reset button is that, in most cases, pushing it once only shuts the thing off. You have to push it again to get the power back on.

President Obama found pushing it once easy. Re-establishing American foreign policy -- on any basis, even the old one -- is eluding him.

From the New York Times:

Obama Backs Down on Sudan

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

JUBA, Sudan

Until he reached the White House, Barack Obama repeatedly insisted that the United States apply more pressure on Sudan so as to avoid a humanitarian catastrophe in Darfur and elsewhere.

Yet, as president, Mr. Obama and his aides have caved, leaving Sudan gloating at American weakness. Western monitors, Sudanese journalists and local civil society groups have all found this month’s Sudanese elections to be deeply flawed — yet Mr. Obama’s special envoy for Sudan, Maj. Gen. Scott Gration, pre-emptively defended the elections, saying they would be “as free and as fair as possible.” The White House showed only a hint more backbone with a hurried reference this week to “an essential step” with “serious irregularities.”

President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan — the man wanted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity in Darfur — has been celebrating. His regime calls itself the National Congress Party, or N.C.P., and he was quoted in Sudan as telling a rally in the Blue Nile region: “Even America is becoming an N.C.P. member. No one is against our will.”

Memo to Mr. Obama: When a man who has been charged with crimes against humanity tells the world that America is in his pocket, it’s time to review your policy.

'The Kids Are Alright'

Andrew C. McCarthy explains how Attorney General Eric Holder keeps the heat off his “kids” at the DOJ:

Holder cows Republican senators into silence on the Gitmo Bar and the CIA.

So now we know why the self-proclaimed “most transparent administration in American history” continues to stonewall rather than reveal the official responsibilities of Justice Department lawyers who volunteered their services to America’s enemies during wartime. Like any good Democrat, Eric Holder says he is doing it for the children.

The attorney general bristled during Senate testimony on Wednesday that he was “not going to allow these kids” to have their reputations dragged “through the mud.” The “kids” coddled in this touching paternal display include 45-year-old Tony West, who now supervises hundreds of lawyers as chief of DOJ’s Civil Division. It’s been 17 years since Tony the Kid first served as an influential official in the Clinton Justice Department. From there, he went on to nine-year stint as a hot-shot partner at a prestigious San Francisco law firm — in his spare time running both Barack Obama’s lavish presidential campaign in California and the defense of John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban” convicted on terrorism charges after making war on his country.

They grow up so quickly, don’t they? Kids like 40-year-old Neal Katyal, the current deputy solicitor general who, as Byron York observes, was a Georgetown law professor when he volunteered to represent Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s personal driver and bodyguard, who was apprehended transporting missiles in Afghanistan.

Then there’s precocious 38-year-old Jennifer Daskal. Over Holder’s dead body will anyone drag her reputation through the mud, insinuating that she spent her pre-DOJ years cheerleading for terrorists and running down her country when, in point of fact, Daskal spent her pre-DOJ years . . . cheerleading for terrorists and running down her country. When not campaigning on behalf of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (as if Bush had needed to torture him into confessing to atrocities he can’t stop bragging about) and Omar Khadr (accused of murdering an American serviceman), Daskal was pleading with the United Nations to designate the United States a rogue nation that systematically abuses prisoners, secretly imprisons suspects, applies the death penalty in a racially discriminatory manner, uses the “cloak of federalism” to conceal its serial violations of international law, invokes “the so-called ‘war on terror’” as a pretext for shredding the Bill of Rights, and, of course, harms our children — by subjecting juvenile criminals to life imprisonment when they commit murders.

Daskal also made time during her tenure at Human Rights Watch to expose a top-secret CIA program to detain high-level al-Qaeda operatives in overseas prisons. She and her HRW colleagues pooled intelligence from other fearless patriots who had volunteered to help terrorists bring lawsuits against the United States. As Tom Joscelyn and Debra Burlingame recount, that project had nothing to do with the lawful purpose of representing the terrorists — to challenge the validity of their detention as enemy combatants — but did involve extensive violation of court orders.

See the rest here.

One Man's Hard Line Is Another Man's Center

Remember the SWIFT program? It was a classified Bush-era program for tracking terrorist funding through foreign banks, blown wide open by leaked information published by the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post. In the case of the New York Times and the LA Times, the administration specficially asked the papers not to compromise the program, which would risk at least three counterterrorism investigations. (“SWIFT Deposits”).

There was never anything remotely unlawful about the program. But thanks to the self-righteous media’s self-induced hallucination that any Bush counterterror effort, by definition, had to be breaking some law, they ran the story anyway.

A couple months later that NYT’s ombudsman said he was sorry. Our bad. Then they dropped it. Meanwhile, we still all have to hear about Valerie Plame.

Now the Obama administration is trying to revive the SWIFT program, which it says is both a “key tool in tracking terrorist money,” and also one that “saves lives.” But the Europeans aren’t so sure they can trust us any more:

WASHINGTON — Attorney General Eric Holder is in Spain trying to revive a Bush-era counterterrorism program that the U.S. views as a key tool in tracking terrorist money transfers but European Union lawmakers reject because of civil liberties concerns.

The Obama administration argues that the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program has helped protect lives on both sides of the Atlantic and should continue with European cooperation. European governments are seeking wide changes and safeguards to protect civil liberties as they renegotiate a deal stopped in its tracks by a vote of the European Parliament in February.

The gap between the two sides shows the complicated contours of the Obama administration's efforts to set a centrist course on national security. Even as the administration struggles at home to remain vigilant against terrorism while separating its policies from the Bush White House's hard line, U.S. officials are committed to maintaining the data-sharing program abroad. (“US trying to woo EU back to terror finance program”)

The AP recap of the program’s history after it came into existence following 9/11 coyly glides over how “the existence of the U.S. anti-terror program was disclosed in 2006 — angering European legislators —.” No mention of the role of the three newspapers.

At the time, it was open season for the left on any and every classified antiterror operation of the Bush administration on general principles that anything that hurts terrorists must involve shredding the Constitution. What a crock about the current effort to revive the program being an effort to set a “centrist course” after Bush’s “hard-line.” It sounds as if Obama isn’t going for the center at all, he wants the Bush program, hard-line at all.

What If They Had a Hate Crime Surge an No One Reported It?

There’s been an unfortunate surge in violent robberies of Arab American store owners in Detroit, as reported Friday in the Detroit News. (“Crime surge worries Detroit Arab-American storeowners”).

According to the report, there have been at least three recent incidents of fatal shootings and pistol-whippings of Arab storeowners in the last couple weeks. Imad Hamad, regional director of the ADC, who I presume was in a meeting between storeowners and Detroit Police Chief Warren Evans, “said it doesn't appear the incidents were racially motivated.”

People mentioning race only to rule it out is usually an indication that the violence was racially motivated.

Anyone who has lived in this area for a while is aware that the black community and the Arab community don’t share great bonds of affection. Arab storeowners in Detroit tend to be disliked because their businesses are successful in parts of the city where there tend to be few businesses at all. Arabs generally don’t like blacks, whom they see as disproportionately involved in criminal activity.

The occurrences of pistol-whipping strikes me as the kind of gratuitous savagery that points to the criminals harboring genuine hatred for their victims, instead of just a greedy desire to steal their money and get away quick. Without having all the details about what happened in each case, I can only observe that, around here, that kind of thing usually comes down to racial hatred.

In my memory, crimes aggravated by racial hatred are only of interest to local media and politicians when the victims are minorities. Black-on-white crimes that contain an element of racism are treated as straightforward crimes, in automatic conformity with the narrative that minorities can never be guilty of racism, only victims of it.

A couple of years back a 90-something year old man was beaten almost to death in front of his wife by a black assailant at a gas station who had just robbed him. The victim hadn’t tried to resist, so the assault was purely gratuitous. The victim and his wife were also black, though the husband had light skin and freckles. During one of the defendant’s court appearances a witness heard the assailant tell his lawyer that the reason he beat the old man up that way was because he thought he was white. Hey, like you’ve never made a mistake.

Hamad and the ADC also have a heavy investment in the fable that the area has been undergoing an epidemic of hate crimes since 9/11, all of which supposedly are being directed against Muslims by white people. Black-on-Arab crime, even if it has an added element of racial hate, doesn’t gain for the Muslim community what the “Islamophobia” gambit was meant to get. There was a Dearborn gas-station held up not far from my house, caught on security camera, in which the armed robber, who already had the money from the till, reached over the counter where the cashier--a young Arab man -- was lying face down and harmless, and shot him to death for no apparent reason -- or at least none that was discussed in the media.

Blacks are one of the victim groups (the other is homosexuals) who’s more recent civil rights strategies Muslim leaders have appropriated for their own use. I’m talking about the recent strategies that could care less about achieving better conditions for their people than about silencing critics through intimidation and constant threats of being called a bigot.

Right now neither Hamad’s Muslim consituency, nor the black community -- which is currently twitching through a marionette revue supporting the Democratic Party’s race-baiting defense of Obama’s health-care law -- has any desire to confront any racial-hatred issues where the attackers aren’t Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck.

Then there’s DPD Chief Warren Evans. Evans is a political creature of Detroit’s Black Slate (“the political arm of Shrine of the Black Madonna”), which means he’s about as likely to beef up police patrols to help Detroit’s Arab business owners as Coleman Young was to beef them up to help Detroit’s white business owners.

Insults and Lies Must Be Walid's Cup of Tea

It’s telling to me how civil-rights humanitarian Dawud Walid, CAIR-MI’s (for now) executive director, stoops to using the debased expression “tea baggers” when referring to participants in the Tea Party Movement. (“Tea Baggers Coming to Town”).

In case you aren’t familiar with provenance of the phrase, you can read about it here.
(“Rise of an epithet”).

I wonder if one way to get rid of the term would be for straight people, when listening to one of the oft-enocuntered proudly open and vocal homosexual males talking about their favorite subject -- themselves -- were to ask, “Oh, you’re gay? Would you describe yourself as one of these tea baggers?” Since current civil-rights dogma provides that no one is allowed to call homosexuals degrading names except other homosexuals, it wouldn’t take long for the left-wing thought police to banish the phrase entirely.

Walid also resorts, hack-like, to repeating the slanderous and debunked myth of the Selma-like assault on helpless Congresspersons, when Tea Party protesters, lies Walid, were “calling two Black congressmen including Muslim-American congressman Andre’ Carson the N-word numerous times and spitting in a Black congressman’s face.”

At any rate, at least he’s providing some helpful information about Sunday’s Tea Party rally in Clinton Township, which you can look up here.

The Incredible Shrinking Investigation

I’ve noticed that local news stories on CAIR’s “independent investigation” of radical Imam Luqman Abdullah’s death are shrinking. Soon updates may just be a tiny graphic next to the daily weather forecasts. The upate logo could include a cartoon of Abdullah’s three-storey turban, surmounted by a looming ?

On Thursday, The Detroit News ran 200 words of nothing on CAIR’s release of five autopsy photos. (“Group: Photos belie feds in imam killing”). Hint: Don’t fall for the headline.

The IPT did an interesting piece contrasting the handling of the arrests of the Hutaree militia with that of the raid on Abdullah and his henchmen. (“CAIR's Great Responsibility Dodge”).

The Michigan-based separatist movement lured followers with an explosive mixture of radical religious interpretation and a deep hostility toward government, especially law enforcement.
It trained in the use of weapons and talked of killing police officers.

After building a criminal case, federal law enforcement officials prepared to move in. The suspects all were considered armed and dangerous. FBI agents lured them to a site away from their base of operations in hopes they could be arrested peacefully. The defendants could live to fight in court.

At this point, we could be describing the March arrests of nine members of the Hutaree, a Christian terrorist movement whose members are charged with seditious conspiracy, or the October case of Imam Luqman Abdullah and 11 followers on conspiracy and weapons charges.

The arrests have one significant and tragic difference. All the Hutaree suspects surrendered when agents came to arrest them, one after a lengthy standoff, and no one was hurt. But Abdullah was killed after refusing to surrender and firing his gun as FBI agents moved in. One of three shots fired from Abdullah's gun killed a police dog sent in to subdue him.

The IPT has the same point of view we do. “CAIR’s continuing attempt to deflect all responsibility away from Luqman Abdullah with its campaign of ‘questions’ in the absence of anything more than conjecture speaks volumes about its priorities.”

Amnesty International Endorse Defensive Jihad

From Steven Emerson's Investigative Project on Terrorism:

Amnesty International Boss Endorses "Jihad in self-defence"

Amnesty International (AI) Secretary-General Claudio Cordone has come under fire for defending jihad when it occurs in "self-defence" – a position many other human rights advocates believe "would gravely undermine the future of the human rights movement."
Cordone's comments came in response to a February 13 "Global Petition" to AI by human-rights and women's -rights advocates protesting the suspension of Gita Sahgal, a senior AI official in London.

Sahgal was suspended after the Sunday Times of London reported she believed Amnesty's collaboration with former Guantanamo Bay detainee Moazzem Begg "fundamentally damages" the group's reputation.

In a letter sent to senior AI officials, Sahgal charged that Amnesty has mistakenly aligned itself with Begg and his organization Cageprisoners, which calls itself a human-rights organization working to "raise awareness of the plight of prisoners" held in the war on terror.

According to the Sunday Times, the prisoners it championed have included "Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and Abu Qatada, a preacher described as Osama Bin Laden's 'European ambassador.' "

Begg and Cageprisoners are also reported to have developed a relationship with Anwar al-Awlaki, the Al Qaeda cleric who endorsed the failed Christmas Day plane bombing near Detroit and who became a confidant of Nidal Malik Hasan, charged with carrying out the Nov. 5 Fort Hood massacre. Read more here.

In the "Global Petition" sent to AI, the coalition of liberal human-rights advocates criticized what they called "U.S./NATO imperialism." But the bulk of the letter consisted of criticism of Sahgal's suspension and warnings about the pitfalls of negotiating with the Taliban and trying to advance human rights by working with "anti-democratic" groups.

On February 28, Cordone responded with a letter defending AI's work with Begg and Cageprisoners. Begg "speaks powerfully from personal experience" about the abuses at the U.S.-operated Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba, Cordone wrote, and advocates detainees' due process rights within "the same framework of universal human rights standards that we are promoting."

Cordone added that Begg and Cageprisoners' advocacy of "jihad in self defence" is not antithetical to human rights and that Begg is the victim of "many distortions, innuendoes and 'guilt by association' " charges.

In response, the initiators of the Global Petition expressed dismay about Amnesty's endorsement of a "defensive" jihad. They noted that such a call "is a thread running through many fundamentalist and specifically 'salafi-jihadi' texts. It is mentioned by Abdullah Azzam, mentor of Osama bin Laden, and founder of Lashkar e Tayyaba. It is the argument of 'defensive jihad' that the Taleban uses to legitimize its anti human rights actions such as the beheading of dissidents, including members of minority communities, and the public lashing of women."

Faking Hate Crimes

Comments by Mark Steyn I couldn’t improve on. I hope you’ll read the links, too:

The Democrats' Fake Hate Crime [Mark Steyn]

Jonah mentioned this the other day in his column, but the tireless Andrew Breitbart returns to the theme, to devastating effect.

On March 20th, something truly extraordinary happened. On the eve of the health care vote, a group of black Democrat Congressmen (eschewing the private tunnels they usually use to cross from their offices to the Capitol) chose to walk en masse through a crowd of protesters, confident that the knuckledragging Tea Party goons they and their media pals have reviled for a year now would respond with racial epithets.

And then, when the crowd didn't, the black Congressmen made it up anyway. Representative Andre Carson (Democrat , Indiana) insisted he heard the N-word 15 times. He's either suffering from the same condition as that Guam-flipper from Georgia, or he's a liar. At a scene packed not only with crews from the Dem poodle media but with a gazillion cellphone cameras, not one single N-word has been caught on audio. (By contrast, see my post yesterday for how easy it is to get it on tape when real epithets are flying.)

I disagree with John Lewis (Democrat, Georgia) politically but I have always respected him as a genuine civil rights warrior. And I feel slightly queasy at the thought that he would dishonor both the movement and his own part in it for the cheapest of partisan points - in the same way I would be disgusted by a Holocaust survivor painting a swastika on his own door and blaming it on his next-door neighbor over a boundary dispute.

But that's what the Democratic Party has been reduced to - faking hate crimes as pathetically as any lonely, mentally ill college student. Congressmen Carson, Lewis, Cleaver and the rest have turned themselves into the Congressional equivalent of the Duke University stripper. Except that they're not some penniless loser but a group of important, influential lifetime legislators enjoying all the privileges and perquisites of power, and in all probability acting at the behest of the Democrat leadership.

Isn't that what societies with functioning media used to call "a story"?

Apparently not. As they did at Duke, the brain-dead press went along with it - and so, predictably enough, did much of the Republican leadership.

Christian Jailed

A Sky News Online headline writer shows off some bias in an article last week about the sentencing of Scott Roeder, the man who shot George Tiller to death: “Christian Jailed For Murdering Abortionist”

As if it’s not enough to single out Roeder’s Christianity as his distinctive characteristic, (but how often in Western civilization has a Christian been jailed for a crime?), the subhead reinforces the main head.

“A born-again Christian who killed a doctor that provided late-term abortions has been jailed for life in the US.”

Not only did a Christian do this, but a born-again Christian, the most dangerous kind. If this guy were allowed any more headlines, we’d soon learn that Sarah Palin and the Tea Partiers were behind all this.

In the article, reporter Rob Cole quotes the Tiller family lawyer, Lee Thompson:

He said Tiller was all about women’s rights. "He was committed to it. He gave his life to the rights of women."

He did? Maybe after you exclude from those rights a woman’s right to be born.

'For the Good of the Public'

Andrew McCarthy keeps up the pressure on Eric Holder and his “Gitmo Bar” appointments to the Justice Department at NRO Online ( ‘Representing’ al-Qaeda):

Bravely entering the lion’s den — delivering a speech in praise of left-wing, “pro bono” lawyering to a group of left-wing, pro bono lawyers — Attorney General Eric Holder recently declared that “lawyers who provide counsel for the unpopular are, and should be, treated as what they are: patriots.”

Sure they are. After all, Holder explained, they “reaffirm our nation’s most essential and enduring values” — like the value we place on coming to the aid of our enemies in wartime. And let’s not forget the value we place on advocating for the release of those enemies who, as night follows day, then return to the business of killing Americans. Sure, the nation somehow missed these essential and enduring values in the two-plus centuries between the Revolutionary War and the War on Terror, but hey, who’s counting?

Oof.

Then McCarthy gets at the worst of it:

Thanks to dogged investigative work (here and here) by Debra Burlingame and Tom Joscelyn (of, respectively, Keep America Safe and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies), we now know a good deal about several of these volunteer lawyers. To take just a few examples, they provided al-Qaeda detainees with a brochure that instructed them on how to claim falsely that they had been tortured; fomented a detainee hunger strike that disrupted security and precipitated fabricated reports that prisoners had been tortured and force-fed; provided the detainees with other virulently anti-American propaganda (for example, informing them about the Abu Ghraib scandal, comparing U.S. military physicians to Josef Mengele, and labeling DOJ lawyers “desk torturers”); gave the enemy-combatant terrorists a hand-drawn map of Gitmo’s layout, including guard towers; helped the enemy combatants communicate messages to the outside world; informed the detainees of the identities of other detainees in U.S. custody; and posted photos of Guantanamo security badges on the Internet in a transparent effort to identify U.S. security personnel.

And that’s not the worst of it — not by a long shot. Bill Gertz of the Washington Times has uncovered the Gitmo Bar’s shocking effort to identify CIA interrogators. The lawyers — from the ACLU and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, perversely calling themselves “the John Adams Project” — actually had investigators stalk U.S. intelligence officers, surveilling them near their homes and photographing them with or near their loved ones. The photos were then smuggled into Gitmo and shown to top terrorists to determine whether they recognized which intelligence agents had questioned them.

Read all about it here.

Jihad Jane's Dearborn Connection

Dearborn attorney Majed Moughni, who led a rally denouncing Islamic terrorism in a gen-u-ine man-bites-dog story in January, (“Protest Organizer Wants To ‘Ignite a Movement’”), has been threatened by the same international plotters -- including “Jihad Jane” -- who were planning to murder a Swedish cartoonist for drawing Mohammed’s head on the body of a dog, (a “roundabout dog,” actually, a Swedish particularity).

As reported in the Detroit Free Press:

An Algerian man in Ireland charged with making death threats against a Dearborn attorney is also suspected of being part of an international plot to murder a Swedish cartoonist for his drawings of Islam's prophet, according to the attorney and Irish media reports.

Authorities have arrested the Algerian man in Ireland, Ali Charafe Damache, 44, for making death threats over the phone to Majed Moughni, the Dearborn attorney who led a rally against Islamic terrorism after the Christmas Day terror attempt over Detroit.

The arrested suspect is also reported to be part of an international plot by Muslims to murder a Swedish cartoonish who sparked protests in 2007 after drawing the head of Islam's prophet, Mohammed, on the body of a dog. (“Algerian charged with threatening Dearborn attorney also suspected of plot against Swedish cartoonist”).

Freep reporter Niraj Warikoo writes that after the rally Damache left a message on Moughni’s phone:

“I want to congratulate you for your place in hellfire, Inshallah,” the caller said, using an Arabic phrase that means, God willing. "If you’re in front of me, I will shoot you. I will put a bullet in your head. This is the consequence of a hypocrite.”