Crazy

A DU correspondent has provided a script we’ve been unable to confirm is the alternative version of the ad the Obama administration released in Pakistan apologizing for the “Innocence of Muslims” video. Unfortunately,  the ad, which features a song set to the tune of a classic Brenda Lee hit, was outside the range of the Secretary of State’s voice.  The result is the current ad. 

Here’s the alternative if you’re interested.

“We’re Sorry” (with apologies to Brenda Lee)

(Fervently, with eyes cast down)

We’re sorry, so sorry                                                                                     That Copt was such a fool                                                                              You gotta know                                                                                                   We all agree: “That’s not cool”!                                                                   Oh, oh, oh, oh, uh-oh, oh, yes!

They tell us,  free speech                                                                                     Is amendment number one!                                                                           But that don’t mean                                                                                             A guy’s free to make fun                                                                                 Oh, oh, oh, oh, uh-oh, oh, no!

Spoken:
(We’re sorry) We’re sorry                                                                              (So sorry) So sorry                                                                                            We endorse your point of view!
You’re just  burnin’                                                                                            To make sure that we learn  Shariah!                                                       Oh, oh, oh, oh Uh, oh Oh, yes

We’re sorry, so sorry                                                                                        Crossed the line while talkin’ free                                                                 But now we see                                                                                              That’s not how to be dhimmi                                                                            

(Sorry)

(Sorry)

(Sorry)

From Our ‘They Think We’re Idiots’ Department

Friday’s “Rally Against Hate” in front of  the Islamic Center of America is being portrayed in the media as a peaceful protest of the “Innocence of Muslims,” and an example of the unity, peace, and mutual sweetness that is and has always existed amongst the great religions of the world.

Right. 

But the real purpose of the rally is to inveigh against free speech, or specifically, against speech that criticizes Islam.  For instance:

“’We need to draw the line between freedoms of expression and hate speech,’ said Sayed Hassan al-Qazwini, imam of the Islamic Center on the border of Detroit and Dearborn.” (“250 rally at Dearborn mosque against worldwide violence”).

Last week Qazwini “urged the U.S. to do more to stop the people behind the video and those who are promoting it.” He believes the “U.S. response should be much more stronger [sic] than verbal condemnation." (“Dearborn imam: Violence not what Islam preaches”).

Stronger than verbal condemnation?  The government’s verbal condemnation was a positive disgrace.   

Government responses to speech that are stronger than verbal condemnation would have to mean civil or criminal sanctions, including anything from levying fines to capital punishment – absolutely none of which could be promulgated without violating the Bill of Rights (unless . Qazwini would be familiar with strong sanctions, because, before he came here to “be a part of the Islamic frontier in this country,” he experienced Saddam’s persecutions of his father, who had to flee with his family, first into Kuwait, and then to Iran. He certainly knows the meaning of government displeasure in forms “stronger than verbal condemnation.” What he clearly had no concept of, nor interest in, is freedom of speech.

Also featured at the rally was Reverend Edwin Rowe, of Central United Methodist in Detroit, who told the crowd:

that the blame of the escalating violence should be placed on those individuals who were responsible for creating the movie first and foremost. "Blood is on their hands. There is absolutely no way we can call this anything close to free speech. In fact, if you know the action that you are going to create is going to result in violence and death, then you are responsible for the blood that it causes and I pray that these folks will be brought to justice.” (“Interfaith leaders condemn hate speech at ICA rally”).

Whenever a Christian leader mentions praying for justice without also praying for mercy, it’s reasonable to question his religious seriousness. (On the other hand, Reverend Rowe’s credentials as a social gospeller and curator of Sixties leftism are absolutely solid!). Reports don’t tell us if Reverend Rowe was equally vociferous in praying for justice on any of the – by now – hundreds, if not thousands of Islamist community organizers who, unlike the movie creators, have explicitly called for violence in more than twenty nations, and many of whom also have blood on their hands -- literally.

Dawud Walid was on hand, naturally, director of the Michigan branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and, as CAIR is only its front, as representative of the Muslim Brotherhood (Motto: "Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Qur'an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope."). Walid “said that violent Muslim protesters are actually acting against Islam.

"We can't take the law into our hands," Walid said. "The prophet Muhammad never returned insults with injury."

We never know when Walid is being serious, so we assume he never is. For an example of one of the better-known instances of Mohammed’s response to an offense, consider the slaughter of the Jews of Banu Qurayza. 

The Brotherhood had a second representative at the rally, Imam Mustapha Elturk, of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). As we have written elsewhere:

ISNA was explicitly named as a Muslim Brotherhood front group in the “Explanatory Memorandum On the General Strategic Goal for the Group In North America” introduced as evidence during the 2007 Holy Land Foundation Hamas-financing trial. The kernel of that strategic goal is anchored on this blog right below DU’s masthead, where you can read about the Brotherhood’s “Grand Jihad” in “destroying Western civilization from within.” (“FBI’s Mueller to Brotherhood’s ISNA: ‘I’m Your Puppet’”)

Elturk said on Friday that, "We urge all Muslims to peacefully oppose any provocative or aggressive acts against their faiths."

Elturk we know is lying when he calls for peaceful opposition to “aggressive acts.” The rules of war laid out in the Quran forbid aggression, but provide an absolute right to self-defense against “those who attack you.” Calling any action that offends a Muslim an “aggression” or “attack”  automatically makes it a justifiable act of self-defense to attack the source of the offense – through jihad. The Quran specifically command Muslims to “Fight for the sake of God those that fight against you, but do not attack them first. . . [Otherwise] slay them wherever you find them . . . if they attack you put them to the sword. Thus shall the unbelievers be rewarded”. Surah 2.  All the violence – all of it – that we’ve seen acted out in the Middle East since the 11th can be traced back directly to this doctrine.   And of course Walid and Elturk know it perfectly well.

When Pakistani Prime Minister Raja Pervaiz Ashraf  “demanded the international community to declare blasphemy a punishable crime on the global level” on Friday, he deliberately called the video an “attack”: “an attack on the Holy Prophet (pbuh) was an attack on the core belief of 1.5 billion Muslims, and was unacceptable.”

He regretted the violence of his people so much that he gave them the day off so they’d have more time to do it.

Which is why we can’t believe a word of what these people say.

###

Coming Soon to the Islamic Multiplex

Tuesday’s LA Times ran an op-ed laying out the case for limiting free speech in cases such as the one now raised by the imbecilic video fragment, “Innocence of Muslims.” Specifically, writer Sarah Chayes, a former special assistant to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, proposes placing restrictions on speech, including “punishing it after it has in fact caused violence.” (“Does 'Innocence of Muslims' meet the free-speech test?”).

The “Innocence of Muslims” isn’t free speech protected under the First Amendment because, Ms. Chayes believes, it was likely to incite imminent violence.

Every attempt to limit speech critical of Islam, and Ms. Chayes’s op-ed is no exception, cites Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s highly unhelpful dictum on free speech in a 1919 Supreme Court opinion (Schenck vs. U.S.), where he wrote “[t]he most stringent protection would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing panic.”

My reasons for saying Holmes’s remark is unhelpful include that the particular facts before the court in Schenck weren’t remotely similar to those of a man who falsely shouting fire in a theater. Rather, the court was reviewing the conviction of a man for distributing circulars opposing the draft during World War I, and unanimously adopted Holmes’s faulty reasoning to uphold the conviction. Further, Holmes’s theater rule has never been adopted as an actual legal standard for determining the limits of free speech.  And the standard that was adopted in Schenck -- that free speech protections don’t extend to words that “create a clear and present danger” -- had a disfavored history most of its life before being completely tossed out in favor of a stricter standard by the Supreme Court in 1969 .

Ms. Chayes is well aware of this history, and even attempts to show how the “Innocence of Muslims” still should be excluded from First-Amendment protection under the stricter standard. But arguing for the stricter standard as she does,  she still manages to cite the “shouting fire” metaphor not once, but twice, once in her opening, and once in her closing paragraphs.

It’s not hard to see why: if you needed to capture in just a few scant words the now-familiar reaction in the Muslim world to perceived insult, what niftier shorthand is there than the image of human beings massed into a mindless stampede of hate?

Ms. Chayes explains the prevailing legal standard adopted in 1969, in a case called Brandenburg vs. Ohio,  to provide that “only speech that has the intent and the likelihood of inciting imminent violence or lawbreaking can be limited.”

Except she’s fudging the language of the holding: Brandenburg doesn’t exclude speech with the likelihood of inciting violence, but advocacy of such violence -- a gigantic distinction. Brandenburg even distinguishes “the mere abstract teaching . . . of the moral propriety or even moral necessity for a resort to force and violence,” from “preparing a group for violent action and steeling it to such action.” No one’s accused the producer of the video of advocating Islamic violence – only of creating an insulting portrayal of Mohammed that, allegedly, incited Islamic violence. Certainly no one can credit Nakoula with preparing the Cairo mobs to invade the consulate or with steeling the Benghazi paramilitary for their multi-pronged attack on Ambassador Stevens – that was the doing of the Muslim Brotherhood, the al Qaeda operatives, and the imams.

Ms. Chayes spent ten years in Afghanistan, and even her own description of conditions there make clear just who exactly deserves the blame for stirring up violence:

In Afghanistan, and in all of the Arab nations in transition, an extremist fringe is brawling for power with a more pluralistic majority. Radicals pounce on any pretext to play on religious feeling. I could pick out the signs of manipulation in Afghanistan — riots that started on university campuses where radicalized Pakistani students abound, simultaneous outbreaks in far-flung places, the sudden appearance of weapons. By providing extremists in Libya and elsewhere such an opportunity, the makers of “Innocence of Muslims” were playing into their hands.

Which raises the question, how can Nakoula be both the mastermind of the violent outbreaks, at the same time as he’s a dupe playing into the hands of the extremists? If it’s radicals who are pouncing on pretexts, playing on religious feelings, and supplying weapons for planned outbreaks, then why is it fair that Nakoula be punished? The worst thing he can be accused of is providing a pretext to opportunistic extremists by insulting the religion of Islam.   Yet isn’t the whole meaning of “pretext” that it’s false explanation for bad actions?

According to Ms. Chayes’s summary of free-speech rulings, “U.S. law makes a distinction between speech that is simply offensive and speech that is deliberately tailored to put lives and property at immediate risk.”  Maybe.  But “simply offensive” is about the best that can be said for Nakoula’s video – and that’s just speaking to its production values.  Still, Ms. Chayes seems to know for certain that Nakoula intentionally designed it to put lives at risk, because it “was deliberately publicized just before the sensitive date of Sept. 11, and could be expected to spark violence on that anniversary.”

How can she possibly conclude that from the facts? What Nakoula may have expected is hardly the cause of what followed. She may as well say that a Christmas card she sent last year was the cause of a national outbreak of gift-giving and decoration-hanging.

And since when is there anything sensitive about September 11 for Muslims? Muslims weren’t attacked on September 11, we were. The only thing sensitive about 9/11 in that part of the world is that, like Fridays after mosque, jihadists see it as an extra-special time to launch attacks on infidels and symbols of Western decadence. Trailer or no trailer, anyone paying attention already expected violence on that anniversary. That’s why the Obama administration’s failure to add security to our foreign missions in advance of 9/11 is now the object of a huge White House whitewashing.

The only real difference between ordinary “simply offensive” speech on any other subject and “simply offensive” speech on Islam is that any and every instance imaginable of the latter has the potential for putting lives at risk, because that’s how Muslims choose to respond to offense. Islam has no threshold of tolerance beneath which an insult to the Prophet might fail to justify violent reaction. “Especially in the heightened volatility of today's Middle East,” writes Ms. Chayes of the YouTube video, “such provocation is certainly irresponsible.” Stated another way, if we know that statements considered blasphemous to Muslims will lead to trouble, the only responsible thing to do is never make such statements.

Ergo, the only protected speech is that favorable about Islam.

And that sets Ms. Chayes up for her second, closing appeal to that much-maligned man shouting “fire!” in a theater. People wanting to criminalize speech against Islam love Holmes’s metaphor for aptly bringing to mind what we’ve all now seen for ourselves about the Islamic world: hundreds of millions of people in a confined society, with little chance for escape, easily tricked into mayhem and murder by an unfounded appeal to their basest instincts.

The thing is, that metaphor completely fails in the other part about the shouting man, for the reason that there isn’t now, nor ever has been, any Westerner in a like fashion shouting “fire!” at Islam. (For that matter, I couldn’t find any historical figure in American criminal history who was ever charged for shouting “fire!” in a crowded theater).  Terry Jones burning a Quran wasn’t shouting “fire!”; Nakoula’s trailer portraying Mohammed as a buffoon isn’t shouting “fire!”; and Salman Rushdie wasn’t shouting “fire!” when he wrote The Satanic Verses. Insulting someone’s religion is not the equivalent of falsely instigating a panicked stampede in a crowded building.

My response to Ms. Chayes’s argument is simply this: the Ummah doesn’t need us to start their stampedes.

And as if to underline the point, reports say that, among other acts of destruction by Pakistani rioters given the day off today by the government for that very purpose, two Peshawar cinemas actually were set afire.  

We don’t know if they were occupied at the time.  But if they were, we can only hope that some heroic loudmouth had the courage to shout, “Fire! Fire! Fire!”

###

Free Speech Impediment

From the New York Post:

Nice Constitution ya got there

Yesterday was Constitution Day, the 225th anniversary of America’s fundamental document — an irony no doubt lost on Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, whose anti-Islam video is being cast by the Obama administration as the sole cause of anti-US violence across the Muslim world.

Nakoula was rousted from his home in the middle of the night Saturday by a squad of sheriff’s deputies and hauled away to “discuss” a possible federal probation violation.

Coming on the heels of a White House demand — rightly rejected — that YouTube “review” (i.e., pull) his tawdry video, Nakoula’s perp walk transmitted an unmistakable message: The Obama administration has scant respect for the First Amendment.

Yesterday, Nakoula was freed from custody — and immediately went into hiding.

Who can blame him, when Team Obama continues to hold firmly to the fiction that his film is the sole reason the Muslim world is on fire?

UN Ambassador Susan Rice went on the Sunday talk shows to deny that the attacks — including the one that resulted in the savage murders of the US ambassador to Libya and three companions — were anything other than spontaneous reaction to the video.

But that view is flatly contradicted by Libyan officials, who said elements of al Qaeda were behind the attack, and that it was timed for the 11th anniversary of 9/11.

And that Nakoula’s film, though adding fuel to the mobs’ fire, was little more than a pretext.

Certainly the heavy weapons used in the Benghazi attack — mortars, machine-guns and rocket-propelled grenades — fortify the Libyans’ claim.

All the more reason, then, for Washington not to admit as much: That would mean conceding a mammoth failure of US intelligence and consular security.

Indeed, Rice, an accomplished dissembler, suggested the fact that two of the dead in Libya were security guards proves there was no lack of security.

It proves no such thing. The State Department maintains a muscular security service of its own — in addition to the usual Marine Corps detachments — and neither were present in Benghazi last week.

No wonder the administration seeks to scapegoat Nakoula’s film — and to infringe grievously on his First Amendment rights.

All presidents take an oath to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution — though, clearly, some presidents take that oath more seriously than others.

The image of Nakoula being hustled away in the night should give pause to all Americans — not just those who have a dog in this fight.

It’s a cliché to say that the reaction among the media and left-leaning public-policy types would have been explosive had George W. Bush been president.

Fact is, though, it would have been.

Fact is, when the First Amendment is successfully trashed to achieve political goals, unscrupulous politicians everywhere take note.

Nakoula Basseley Nakoula and his insipid video aren’t likely to be the end of it.

###

Cairo Wins

As we noted here the other day, the early cynical remarks by the Muslim Brotherhood over the embassy riots they organized in Cairo was to challenge the Obama administration that “the United States should do a better job of protecting Islam.”

Accordingly, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the man who is believed to have made “Innocence of Muslims,” was arrested by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department after most of the media had knocked off for the night.

It’s a reasonable inference that President Obama, who reportedly read Egyptian President Morsi the riot act Wednesday night over Egypt’s refusal to protect the American embassy, had Nakoula arrested as a quid pro quo.  On Thursday Morsi made a pretense to Egyptians that he did not support the attacks.  But in his Thursday statements he also said that “he had spoken with US President Barack Obama and told him that it was necessary to put in place ‘legal measures which will discourage those seeking to damage relations... between the Egyptian and American people.’” 

The United States enforcing Shariah was exactly what Morsi and the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) wanted all along.  They want to see the USA “criminalize” criticism of Islam.  On Thursday, Muslim Brotherhood Deputy President Khairat El-Shater said in a letter to the New York Times that “we do not hold the American government or its citizens responsible for acts of the few that abuse the laws protecting freedom of expression.”  If that language sounds familiar, that’s because it matches almost perfectly the Cairo Embassy’s statement Tuesday that “to hurt the religious beliefs of others” is “to abuse the universal right of free speech.”  Translation: Free speech aside, blasphemy of Islam is a crime.

Now the Brotherhood has a photo they can flash around to their illiterate supporters showing the Coptic infidel being hustled off to who knows where.

Mission accomplished.

###

'Court Eunuchs’

The Obama administration is now asking its supporters to suspend all disbelief in the matter of the Cairo-Benghazi attacks on 9/11. In lockstep the vanguard of those supporters, otherwise known as the American media, obeys. The official story is going to be that the attacks on the Egyptian and Libyan missions were nothing more nor less than a spontaneous eruption of Muslims who’d had their feelings hurt by a preposterous video that ran on the Internet weeks ago.

Mark Steyn captures only some of this present insanity at NRO:

But Hillary Clinton and General Martin Dempsey are guilty of something worse, in the secretary of state’s weirdly obsessive remarks about an obscure film supposedly disrespectful of Mohammed and the chairman of the joint chiefs’ telephone call to a private citizen asking him if he could please ease up on the old Islamophobia.

Forget the free-speech arguments. In this case, as Secretary Clinton and General Dempsey well know, the film has even less to do with anything than did the Danish cartoons or the schoolteacher’s teddy bear or any of the other innumerable grievances of Islam. The 400-strong assault force in Benghazi showed up with RPGs and mortars: That’s not a spontaneous movie protest; that’s an act of war, and better planned and executed than the dying superpower’s response to it. Secretary Clinton and General Dempsey are, to put it mildly, misleading the American people when they suggest otherwise.

One can understand why they might do this, given the fiasco in Libya. The men who organized this attack knew the ambassador would be at the consulate in Benghazi rather than at the embassy in Tripoli. How did that happen? They knew when he had been moved from the consulate to a “safe house,” and switched their attentions accordingly. How did that happen? The United States government lost track of its ambassador for ten hours. How did that happen? Perhaps, when they’ve investigated Mitt Romney’s press release for another three or four weeks, the court eunuchs of the American media might like to look into some of these fascinating questions, instead of leaving the only interesting reporting on an American story to the foreign press.

Read the rest at (“Disgrace in Benghazi”).

I use the term “court eunuchs” for the American media because their curiosity doesn’t seem to function. In a week of dramatic and consequential news, nothing seems to arouse them (other than Romney press releases).

For example, the Egyptian president demands the arrest of an obscure American who made an unseen film. And whaddayaknow? Next thing that happens, back in the land of the free, a large posse of heavily armed officers descends on his apartment at midnight so that he can be “voluntarily” taken into custody for alleged “probation violations” – because, as everyone knows, in civilized societies breach-of-probation orders are always served at midnight on a weekend when the dark is so much more conducive to persuading householders to “volunteer”.

Read the rest at (“Re: If Only Mitt Would Stop Preventing Us From Doing Our Jobs (The Sequel”).

###

‘Do A Better Job Protecting Islam’

Earlier Tuesday, the U.S. Embassy in Egypt had condemned insults to religion, saying in a statement that “we firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others.”

A spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Morsi is a member, said that the United States should do a better job of protecting Islam.

“It isn’t a matter of freedom of speech,” Muslim Brotherhood spokesman Mahmoud Gozlan said. “It’s a matter of a holy Islamic symbol.” (“U.S. ambassador to Libya, 3 other Americans killed in Benghazi”).

Like the ancient Latin expression, “Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi,” (“the law of praying is the law of believing”), the law of diplomatic pronouncements is the law of a nation’s true beliefs in foreign relations.

That is what makes the first statement issued by the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, in the wake of an invasion by Islamists, so disgraceful.

By early Wednesday morning the Obama administration had issued a curative statement that will more than likely undo most of the political damage that the president so richly deserves from this. I’m afraid the events came too quickly for the significant facts to make any impression on the stiff wax encasing the brains of America’s Undecided Voters. It remains to be seen if the Romney campaign will exploit this effectively from here on out.

Make no mistake that Romney was absolutely within his rights to criticize President Obama over this. For God’s sake, the whole country is within its rights to expect him to do so: who else is better placed at this moment to take on the incumbent president; this entire set of events directly reflects Obama’s dangerous incompetence in foreign policy. The Cairo Embassy’s groveling denunciations of Americans who dare “to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims” is only the latest in a long line of similar statements from this administration, starting with Obama’s Apology-Tour Kickoff speech to Islam in Cairo in 2009. It was there that Obama redefined his Constitutional role “as President of the United States” to include fighting “against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.”

Coming when it did, this had to be sweet music to the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), which has been pushing an anti-blasphemy resolution since 1999:

The OIC’s anti-defamation effort was inspired by Ayatollah Khomeini’s infamous 1989 fatwa, directing “all zealous Muslims to execute quickly” the British author Salman Rushdie and others involved with his book TheSatanic Verses. While not explicitly embracing vigilantism, the Saudi Arabia–based OIC, an organization of 56 member states, quickly endorsed Khomeini’s novel principle: that Western law should be subject to Muslim measures against apostasy and blasphemy. (“An Anti-Blasphemy Measure Laid to Rest”).

Tuesday, when a spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (which controls the government of Egypt) commented on these events, he dismissed the silly infidel notion that “freedom of speech” is playing any role in the controversy: “’It isn’t a matter of freedom of speech,’” Muslim Brotherhood spokesman Mahmoud Gozlan said. “It’s a matter of a holy Islamic symbol.’”

That’s why the Morsi government can lecture us “that the United States should do a better job of protecting Islam.” And, you may ask, where does Morsi get the gall to tell America it’s got a job to do protecting Islam?

Just remember that Obama traveled to Cairo in 2009 expressly to announce to the Ummah: “I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.”

Our Islamist enemies would dearly love to manipulate American foreign policy to include a ban on criticism of Islam. According to one source, Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, in commenting on Tuesday’s attack on the U.S. Embassy, “said that he had spoken with US President Barack Obama and told him that it was necessary to put in place ‘legal measures which will discourage those seeking to damage relations... between the Egyptian and American people.’”

If you want to know what Morsi, Egypt’s Brotherhood head of state, means by “those seeking to damage relations,” here’s how it’s explained in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood companion statement on Thursday. “[Because] hurting the feelings of one and a half billion Muslims cannot be tolerated, and the people’s anger and fury for their Faith is invariably predictable, often unstoppable,” all assaults on “the sanctities of all heavenly religions” must be “criminalized”:

Otherwise, such acts will continue to cause devout Muslims across the world to suspect and even loathe the West, especially the USA, for allowing their citizens to violate the sanctity of what they hold dear and holy. Hence, we demand that all those involved in such crimes be urgently brought to trial.

In other words, this was our fault for allowing some of our citizens to produce a film insulting to Islam.

From the Brotherhood’s point of view, subjection of Western people to Shariah is a given. It’s only a matter of explaining it to us. And their job is made that much easier when so many non-Muslim Americans have volunteered to make explaining it to the rest of us their mission.  Take, for instance, how the U.S. Embassy in Cairo explained to us yesterday that “to hurt the religious beliefs of others” is “to abuse the universal right of free speech.”

Even though the OIC anti-blasphemy resolution failed last year, the Ikhwan is as determined as ever to achieve the same end by other means. And the enthusiasm the Obama administration has shown for this initiative in the past is all the more reason for the Ikhwan to think America is only a few shoves away from adopting the same kinds of hate-speech laws as those already gagging Westerners in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.

The apology of the Embassy to a mob of invaders reveals the hollow and misguided “lex credendi” of President Barack Obama. As Mitt Romney correctly pointed out, “the Obama Administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.”

The response from the Obama campaign and the media launched against Romney for “jumping the gun” means nothing outside the arena of domestic election politics. But you can be certain that the Islamist puppeteers in the Middle East have gotten a good look at Romney, and they aren’t going to think he’ll be so easy to push around.

###

Something Rotten in Farmington Hills

Thomas More Law Center sends this update on the corrupt sale of the Farmington Hills Eagle Elementary School to the Islamic Cultural Association:

New Evidence of Corruption Involving Sale of Michigan Public School Property to the Islamic Cultural Association

ANN ARBOR, MI – A stunning new development has come to light surrounding allegations of public corruption over the sale of Farmington Public Schools (FPS) property to the Islamic Cultural Association (ICA). On Wednesday, August 8^th, Reverend Bruce D. Burwell, Senior Pastor of Light of the World Christian Center in West Bloomfield, read aloud a prepared statement on how the person in charge of FPS properties told him the property was not for sale when he expressed an interest in purchasing it for his church. FPS subsequently sold the vacant Eagle Elementary school property to the Islamic Cultural Association.

Pastor Burwell’s statement at Wednesday event

Pastor Burwell told the audience “how odd it was that in these bad economic times that the Farmington Hills School District would not be jumping at the chance to sell one of their buildings to an interested buyer” and “how odd it was that if they were seriously trying to sell the building, why did they not have a for sale sign up.” He concluded his remarks by saying that “there is no doubt in my mind that something is going on.”

Pastor Burwell’s prepared statement has been forwarded to Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette to consider as part of the request by the Thomas More Law Center that he empanel a citizens grand jury to investigate the allegations of corruption.

Pastor Burwell’s revelations are the latest in a series of allegations that FPS engaged in a NO-BID, secret backroom transaction with the Islamic Cultural Association while at the same time it was telling interested buyers that the vacant property was not for sale. Pastor Burwell’s statement was delivered to a packed community briefing last night to discuss the basis for the allegations of corruption and the legal issues surrounding a civil lawsuit already filed against the school district.

In June 2012, the Thomas More Law Center (TMLC), an Ann-Arbor based national public interest law firm, submitted a 22-page Statement of Allegations against the suburban school district to the Attorney General requesting that a citizens grand jury be convened to pierce “the fog of corruption”’ that has descended upon FPS surrounding this highly irregular and controversial sale.

Click here to read the 22-page Summary of Allegations

Records submitted to the Attorney General’s office included more than 400 pages of documentation supporting the TMLC allegations that FPS disregarded the recommendations of its own legal council, a specially convened internal committee and district residents in steamrolling through the secretly negotiated no-bid, below-market sale of valuable public property.

TMLC became involved in the case when it learned that according to the real estate broker who represented ICA in the purchase of Eagle Elementary, ICA owns and operates the HUDA, an Islamic school in the Village of Franklin, Michigan. The Council of Islamic Organizations of Michigan, reports that ICA shares direct ties to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the North American Islamic Trust, Inc. (NAIT), both of which were named as unindicted co-conspirators/joint venturers in U.S. v. Holy Land Found. For Relief & Dev. (HLF), the largest terrorism funding trial in U.S. history. Federal prosecutors proved that HLF worked closely with the U.S. designated terrorist organization Hamas to fund terrorist activities.

Among allegations of corruption, the TMLC filing details the district’s representations to several parties that Eagle Elementary School was not for sale and was slated for demolition. All the while, records show, the district had discriminatorily granted exclusive consideration to and protected the bid of the ICA, with whom it was negotiating for months behind closed doors.

All citizens who value public transparency and accountability should welcome an independent grand jury investigation into this public school system scandal that has cost the students and taxpayers so dearly. At a press conference yesterday, Attorney General Schuette reminded all: “Public service is not a game.” We couldn’t agree more. And nowhere is it more important to assure integrity than in our public school systems.

###

What Media Bias?

Detroit Free Press columnist Ron Dzwonkowski now has scientific proof that “debunks [the] notion of liberal media bias.” Just in time for the last lap of the presidential campaign, we’re being told that Obama’s most powerful surrogate, the media, aren’t bending things his way after all. Writes Dzwonkowski:

Thirty-five major print publications, 13 TV broadcasts across five networks (basically Sunday and nightly shows) and National Public Radio. You won't believe this.

There's no liberal bias in the news media coverage of this year's presidential campaign.

Unbelievable, right? Because, as everybody knows, the media lean left and that's why we have the likes of Fox News, to keep things "fair and balanced."

And yet, from May 1 to July 15, Republicans were quoted in news reports 44% more often than Democrats, and negative coverage of President Barack Obama was 17% higher than such coverage for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

That's not from me or from either side but from a new project called 4th Estate that runs news reports from 35 publications, including the Free Press, 13 TV broadcasts across five networks and NPR through software that sorts the content in, well, all sorts of ways in search of bias. The project, an offshoot of a news media analysis company called GNI, is an apolitical effort to test conventional wisdom about news coverage. (“Ron Dzwonkowski: New venture debunks notion of liberal media bias”).

But doesn’t this contradict what every serious news consumer can see for himself?  Naw. Science proves all of that’s just an optical illusion.  

"Media bias is certainly the perception," said Michael Howe, chief technology officer for 4th Estate, "but it's based on a lot of anecdotal evidence and people talking about 'What I think ...' We hope to change the nature of the debate."

Here’s the infographic that proves it:

Dzwonkowski explains the 4th Estate methodology to Freep readers as best he can. For one thing, the news from these various outlets is put “through software that sorts the content in, well, all sorts of ways in search of bias.” That’s informative. And we know the software hasn’t been written by biased software writers because neither Howe nor any of “his fellow software developers . . . have ever worked in the political arena.”

At Dzwonkowski’s suggestion I went to the 4^th Estate’s website to find out more about their method, but it doesn’t tell much:

The 4th Estate collects data from a sampling of news stories from US national print outlets, TV broadcast and radio transcripts covering the 2012 election. These stories are contextually analyzed and broken down by influence, topic, sentiment and newsmaker. The data for this graphic includes quotes and statements from newsmakers who provide subjective insight.

Check out the hyperlink about how the stories are broken down the way I did and see if it’s still dead.

Elsewhere Howe compares their analysis of news to the way we  analyze our food to find out exactly what’s in it. Says Howe: "Now we consume all this information from so many sources; what's in it? We're using software and algorithms to see what's in it."

Should it bother me that Howe (who “has a degree in philosophy,” gushes Dzwonkowski!) attempts an analogy between the highly precise empirical analysis of the chemistry of food ingredients to the necessarily less precise analysis of news, opinion, and the sorts of coded language employed by politicos and broadcasters? Have they really come up with an algorithm that measures how much bias went into the decision by ABC, NBC, and CBS to ignore the nasty “Romney killed my wife” ad, with the same precision used to measure the amount of Polysorbate 60 in a Hostess Twinkie?

At least one liberal isn’t buying it, either.

David A. Graham, an associate editor at The Atlantic, says he’s “sceptical” of these findings, citing 3 reasons:

1. Obama has a track record as president to discuss. There's no apples-to-apples comparison between Romney, a former governor running for president, and Obama, with four years of deeds to critique. Given the state of the economy, et al, it's natural that there would be negative coverage.
2. By the same token, Obama needs less oxygen in the media. He's got the famed bully pulpit; many of the conservative pundits who appear on the air are there to respond to things the president has done or said. If the president were Republican, the ratio would likely be different. I'm sure Obama would much rather have the presidential podium than a seat at the table for a surrogate.
3. . . . . Always remember to read the fine print, kids! It's been pointed out to me that the data runs from May to July. Compared to Obama, voters are still just getting to know Romney, but the effect is much less. (“Infographic of the Day: Do the Mainstream Media Have a Conservative Bias?”).

Dzwonkowski’s in such a hot rush to debunk the “slobbering love affair” the media has with Obama that he abandons journalistic scepticism and lets himself be dazzled by twinkling computer lights and the “algorithms” that filter the news for bias “in all sorts of ways”.

He also makes it clear he’s got a serious case of nostalgia for the good old days of the media. That’s back before Rush and Fox News, when media gatekeepers like Cronkite and Brokaw protected Americans from the ill effects of the wrong kinds of facts:

The problem created by the abundance of information today is that it actually closes more minds than it opens. People used to seek information from trusted sources to make up their minds about issues. Now they turn to sources they trust to reinforce what they already believe.

What we’ve all thought was media bias has been nothing more than the objective liberal media trying to save us from too much information – or the wrong kind of information. If we just open our minds and listen, then we would learn that Romney is a wimp, that opposition to same-sex marriage is bigotry, and that all criticism of Obama is racist.

Who needs “fair and balanced”?

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You’re Mitt Romney, and It’s About F-ing Time

 

Left Rushes To Defend Huma Abedin, (or At Least TO Attack Her Critics)

After watching the sophomoric behavior of several journalists during the Q&A following Andrew McCarthy’s presentation at the National Press Club on Wednesday, I’m not surprised that the media is trying to neutralize him today.  Andrew Bostom responds to one of the hits, by Dana Milbank on the Washington Post’s blog. Here’s an excerpt from Bostom:

Yesterday, my colleague Andrew McCarthy gave a riveting presentation at The National Press Club about Muslim Brotherhood influence peddling, and national security. (The full text of Andy's prepared remarks are available here; the video of the entire press conference can be viewed at C-SPAN 3 here)

Impenetrable by fact, The Washington Post's Dana Milbank has written a predictably dishonest and uninformed attack on McCarthy's briefing. Consistent with his crude pun on McCarthy's name in the title, Milbank's vicious blog just sprays defamatory charges of conspiracism at McCarthy. While Milbank's essential sin is a crude, willful omission of the voluminous evidence McCarthy adduced, the Washington Post columnist also disingenuously (and /or out of distressingly lazy ignorance) misrepresents the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs (and its journal) -- a defining enterprise of Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin's family .

Here is Milbank's reductio ad absurdum assessment, complete with his own sneer quotes:

Abedin's mother, brother and late father, all academics, were active in the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs, which McCarthy alleges was created by Abdullah Omar Naseef, "a major Muslim Brotherhood figure involved in the financing of al-Qaeda." To that, he adds the charge that "Abedin is directly connected" to Naseef because her mother, the editor of the institute's quarterly journal, listed her as an "assistant editor" between 1996 (when she was 20) and 2008. Abedin worked for the Clinton White House, Hillary Clinton's Senate office and the Clinton campaign during that time, so it's unlikely that she was doing much editing. It's also difficult to see how affiliation with the journal -- which publishes articles such as "The North African Heritage of the Hui Chinese" and "Muslim Mudejar Women in Thirteenth-Century Spain" -- gives Abedin conflicted loyalties.

Dana Milbank needs to read more than the table of contents when he evaluates a scholarly journal.

Please read the entire article at American Thinker:(“Educating Dana Milbank About the Abedin Family Journal”).

In his blog post Milbank also claims McCarthy “had difficulty when Mother Jones reporter Adam Serwer challenged him to explain how Obama was advancing sharia at the same time he was supporting same-sex marriage.”   McCarthy did have some difficulty with that “challenge,” as it was a total non sequitur bearing no relation to the subject-matter of McCarthy’s talk.   There isn’t always a logical response when one is confronted with an adolescent diversion.  McCarthy had no trouble at all explaining the decades-old (and well-documented) working relationship leftists and Islamists share based on their common enmity to American freedom.  

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McCarthy on Huma Abedin

Andrew McCarthy gave the following remarks about the Obama Administration's alleged ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's aide Huma Abedin at National Press Club on August 8, 2012.

McCarthy on Muslim Brotherhood

From Our ‘Judges Aren’t All the Same’ Department

If you’re any kind of court watcher there’s something to be learned from last week’s Michigan Supreme Court ruling that ordered a petition for the November ballot to repeal the emergency-manager law be certified (“Stand Up for Democracy vs. Board of State Canvassers, et al.”). The opinion shows the clear distinction between the reasoning of conservative judges who adhere to the rule of law on the one hand, and activist judges on the other who reduce their judicial duties to further a political ideology. The ruling also contradicts the media myth that the Supreme Court’s conservative justices are little more than tools of the Republican Party and the powerful corporate interests.

This is the way Karen Bouffard at the Detroit News, who is sold out to the myth, explains the opinion:

In a ruling that surprised many on both sides of the issue, [Michigan Supreme Court Justice Mary Beth] Kelly sided with the panel's three Democrats in voting to place petitions on the ballot to repeal a law that was passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature at the bidding of Republican Gov. Rick Snyder. (“Republican-backed justice decided emergency manager case”).

Two things: First, Kelly did not side with the three Democrats. They sided with her on one of the opinion’s two holdings; as can be seen from their concurring opinion, they couldn’t have cared less what Kelly’s reasoning was, as they were just happy that the ruling gave a victory to their side in the dispute.  Second, Bouffard shares the one-dimensional view of all liberals that all three branches of government are strictly political.  In her version, a Republican governor got a Republican legislature to pass the EM law, and so naturally it was unexpected when a “Republican” justice ruled partly in favor of the plaintiff in the case.  It’s more accurate that it would only have been surprising to Democrats who can’t imagine a judge sworn to uphold the rule of law who might actually apply that rule in spite of some perceived political disadvantage to his party.

The media’s cartoon version of this case is that the petition to place the repeal of the emergency-manager law on the November ballot was rejected by the Board of Canvassers on the phony “technicality” that it failed to comply with the statutory requirement that the all petitions shall have a “heading . . . ‘printed in capital letters in 14-point boldfaced type . . . .’”  Supporters of repeal yelped that thwarting the will of “the people” (i.e., the people who signed the petition) over a few stupid fractions of an inch was, pure and simple,a direct attack on democracy and on “the people’s right to vote.”

Notably, on the standard of “substantial compliance,” which Kelly and the conservative majority reversed, the court’s three Democrats, Michael Cavanagh, Marilyn Kelly, and Diane Hathaway, didn’t side with Kelly at all.

Observe the contrast in the opening sentences of Justice Kelly’s opinion for the majority, and the overheated squawk of Justices Cavanagh, (Marilyn) Kelly, and Hathaway’s partial dissent. Justice Kelly:

Although we colloquially call ourselves a “democracy,” we are not. We are a constitutional republic in which we, as Michigan citizens, elect our representatives to local and state legislative bodies to enact our laws. This republican form of government is guaranteed to us in the United States Constitution.

In Michigan, we have enacted into our State Constitution an exception: The right of the people by initiative or referendum directly to enact laws or to repeal those validly enacted by our Legislature. Thus, as plaintiff seeks here, it is possible for a small minority of citizens to suspend a validly enacted law and require that that law be voted on in a general election. This case well demonstrates that tension between constitutional interests: the right to a republican form of government versus a constitutional process that allows a small minority to suspend the enactments of that government.

In the very constitutional provision creating this right of petition by initiative and referendum, the Legislature is required to prescribe the rules by which such petitions may validly be made. It has done so, and one such provision is the mandatory 14-point boldfaced-type requirement that is challenged here.

It would be hard to improve on that with any comment I might make.  But now see if you can find all the clichés and buzzwords in Cavanagh, Kelly, and Hathaway’s partial dissent:

[The majority’s] decision to depart from 30 years of precedent by abandoning the substantial-compliance doctrine throws Michigan’s electoral process into chaos and disenfranchises citizens from one of the most basic rights of democracy: the right to vote.

The holding of these justices that a mere clerical technicality—which has not and cannot be shown to create any harm whatsoever—could have prevented a referendum vote from taking place, in the face of more than 200,000 citizens who signed the petition to place the referendum on the ballot, is unprecedented and highly disturbing.

The majority opinion is rooted in the Constitution and the rule of law. Even if you don’t agree with Kelly on how type size should be measured, there’s no doubt she’s working quite hard to do her job and come up with the right decision. Even the partial dissents of fellow conservatives Robert Young, Brian Zahra, and Steven Markman are notable for their probity and logic.  Can anything like that be said for Cavanagh’s partial dissent, which shows the lazy bias of jurists who bring nothing to each case but a stubborn purpose to force the law to comply with their ideology?

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We’re Here, We’re Queer, and . . . Saaay! Doesn’t Anyone Care?

Friday’s threatened subversion of Chick-fil-A restaurants by homosexual activists flopped so bad it broke the Great Commandment of Gay: don’t be boring. Even committed progressive editors holding precious space open for Friday’s event – hoping to counteract the unexpected success of Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day -- had to face the fact that images of boys kissing boys hasn’t been newsworthy to Americans since, oh, maybe 1990?

It’s their own fault. For the past 20 years Hollywood’s been donating hours of weekly airtime to make gay celebrities and gay TV characters ubiquitous: audiences were meant to become desensitized to the point that they’re just as comfortable with another queen in the cast as with George Costanza or Brian Seacrest. It’s worked. Americans are no longer shocked by the behavior of flames: or at least not by the  narrow stereotype of innocuous behaviors the gay lobby chooses to reveal to the straight world.  But that still doesn’t mean Americans embrace homosexuality as equal to healthy sexuality, no matter how much we fib to pollsters or leave unchallenged outspoken guests at parties for the sake of peace. It takes more to get us riled than the sight of two funny boys smooching on cue.

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Wished Into the Cornfield, Chick-fil-A Stays Put *UPDATED*

The “purposeful”-feeling Adam Smith, whose namesake explained the invisible hand of the marketplace, has been visibly bitch-slapped himself by the hand of his now-former employer for making himself feel superior at the expense of a captive Chick-fil-A employee.

Adam Smith, who posted an online video of himself going through a Chick-fil-A drive-thru and ordering only the free water, was canned from his gig as chief financial officer of Vante, a Tucson medical manufacturing company, after the video made the rounds.  (“Viral video of man picking on Chick-fil-A worker gets him fired”).

Smith is obviously a bully. Only a bully would confront a restaurant employee, who is clearly in no position to defend herself, with the kind of self-righteous twaddle Smith unleashed on this young lady, and then brag about how much holier the whole experience has made him. For that matter, Mayors Rahm Emanuel, Thomas Menino, and Edwin Lee are bullies, too, as are the myriad homosexual alliances that threaten same-sex “kiss-ins” at Chick-fil-A restaurants. Sally Quinn, the Washington Post’s religion columnist, advises homosexuals to

Make the restaurants the gay hangouts of the community. Gay partners and Married gays could begin taking their children there. They could start having birthday parties for their kids. They could have Gay pride events there. (They have an events manager – just call) They could even have gay weddings there.

In other words, apply the same bullying tactics Marlon Brando and his fellow biker used to take over the cafe in The Wild One. 
Face it: America is weak on homosexuality these days. That’s the result of 300 million people being intimidated into silence by a few thousand homosexual activists who’ve usurped the moral high ground with their threats to slander all opponents with horrible labels like “bigot” and “homophobe.” The truth is that most Americans still don’t view homosexual relationships as normal – and never will. Most Americans, even liberals in their few unguarded moments, view the homosexual life as tragic at worst, and at best, humorous – but not normal. It isn’t possible to make it normal, and one doesn’t need to be a Bible student to see that.
The steady drumbeat in the media, the arts, and in leftist politics that there is a growing national consensus in favor of homosexual normalcy and queer marriage is only a reflection of how effectively the silence of opposing voices is being enforced. It’s true Americans express increasing support for gay marriage. But that support has the stiff and forced quality of those terrified townsfolk forced to look favorably on every mean trick Billy Mumy could come up with in the Twilight Zone’s “It’s a Good Life,” out of fear at being wished away into the cornfield.

“Dan Cathy, You’re a very bad man!”

Fortunately, Americans still dislike bullies, which explains the success of “Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day” on Wednesday. Some commentators said it wasn’t about opposition to gay marriage, it was about free speech, or freedom of religion, or some such. I don’t think that’s quite it, either. It was about Americans being sick and tired of a handful of vocal homosexuals and their Democrat enablers daring to lay down the law for the rest of the nation about what we are and aren’t allowed to think.
As for Adam Smith, he should take Quinn’s advice and apply for work at Chick-fil-A.

AUGUST 5, 2012 UPDATE: A video has surfaced depicting a mob of homosexual bullies at Friday’s Love and Tolerance Kiss-In at a Chicago Chick-fil-A, harassing a black man reading his Bible .   The hero in the plaid shirt admits he hates God.  Now if he'll just admit he hates his father, too.

   
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Qaradawi: Now This Is a Guy With Chicago Values!

Reported July 28 in the Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Report:

EXCLUSIVE: Obama OIC Envoy Meets With Qaradawi Associate In Mauritania; Abdallah Bin Bayyah Part Of Antisemitic Religious Body

The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) has announced that Rashad Hussain, President Obama’s Special Envoy to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, has attended a meeting in Mauritania that was hosted by Abdallah bin Bayyah, an associate of Global Muslim Brotherhood leader Youssef Qaradawi. According to the ISNA report, the subject of the meeting was “challenges faced by religious minorities in Muslim-majority communities” and participants included:

The meeting last week was hosted by Shaykh Abdallah bin Bayyah, Vice Chair of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, in his new Global Centre for Renewal and Guidance in Nouakchott, Mauritania. Participants included Dr. Nourredine al-Khademi, Tunisian Minister of Religious Affairs; Dr. Ahmed Toufiq, Moroccan Minister of Islamic Affairs and Endowment; Mr. Rashad Hussain, President Obama’s Special Envoy to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation; Dr. Ahmed Ould Neini, Mauritanian Minister of Islamic Affairs; Dr. Abderrazak Juessoum, President of the Algerian Muslim Scholars Association; and other prominent scholars. The scholars also met with President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz of Mauritania to brief him on the purpose of their visit to Mauritania and the goal of their project. The President was very supportive and offered the scholars his assistance facilitating the development of solutions to this enormous challenge.”

Abdallah Bin Bayyah, last known to be living in Saudia Arabia, is a well known global Muslim Brotherhood figure also from Mauritania. According to an on-line biography, Sheikh Bin Bayyah was born in Eastern Mauritania and was the son of “one of the greatest scholars of his time.” According to this source, Sheikh Bin Bayyah was taught Islamic subjects by his father and in his early 20’s, was sent by the Mauritanian government to Tunis to study Islamic jurisprudence. Upon his return to Mauritania, he became a judge in the Ministry of Justice. He was also chosen to be the head of the Shariah section of the court of appeals and later to “High Authority for Religious Affairs.” Sheikh Bin Bayyah held numerous government posts including Vice-President, Prime Minister, and Permanent Secretary of the People’s Party of Mauritania. Sheikh Bin Bayyah is a member of the European Council for Fatwa and Research, the theological body headed by Global Muslim Brotherhood leader Youssef Qaradawi and affiliated with the Federation of Islamic Organizations in Europe, essentially comprising the European Muslim Brotherhood.

The ECFR meets annually and a Wall Street Journal reporter who attended a 2004 meeting described the extremism and antisemitism that took place:

“…members, speaking in Arabic, explained how European Muslim family life was under attack. ‘Extremist fundamentalist powers based on aggression on the part of the Crusader and Zionist alliance in the West are now preparing their cultural strategy according to a new wave of secular tendencies,’ said Ahmed Ali Al- Imam, a Sudanese religious figure who advocates the implementation of sharia in his religiously divided country. Other papers accepted traditional norms that directly contradict Western law and society, especially regarding women and marriage. Women should only cut their hair with their husbands’ permission, and “any woman who would marry without a male guardian’s consent, her wedding is invalid,” declared Muhammad Hawari, a Germany-based member of the group. Sometimes the group’s advice seems aimed at Muslims from another era. ‘Children should eat clean food and use clean water. They should not urinate in water wells,’ Mr. Hawari wrote in a paper. Adoption, he added, was forbidden, because a woman might be seen in a state of undress by a child other than her biological offspring. And if a child is adopted, Mr. Hawari said they should not be given equal rights to biological children.”

The same reporter also wrote that a Council member cited “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a notorious anti-Semitic forgery written in czarist Russia, in a position paper on how Muslim families are under threat in Europe. “The Protocols, the speaker said, was evidence of a Jewish plot to undermine Muslim moral values through sexual permissiveness.” Qaradawi himself is a virulent anti-Semite is often referred to here as the most important leader of the global Muslim Brotherhood, an acknowledgement of his role as the de facto spiritual leader of the movement.

For a short time, Rashad Hussain was embroiled in controversy after the GMBDR reported both his associations with the US Muslim Brotherhood and remarks that he had made in 2004 about the prosecution of convicted terrorist Sami Al-Arian that were later deleted from the publication that reported them. Mr. Hussain at first denied remembering that he had made the remarks calling the prosecution “politically motivated persecution” but later, after an audio tape surfaced documenting the remarks, he acknowledged the comments but said that they had been “ill advised.” Mr. Hussain also admitted that he had complained to the publication about being misrepresented after the remarks were first reported but that the publication had deleted them on their own volition. The remarks did not appear to have been deleted until after Mr. Hussain had been appointed White House Counsel. (for an analysis of these events, go here). Since that time, Mr. Hussain has appeared at numerous events sponsored by the US Muslim Brotherhood including those held by the Center for the Study of Islamic and Democracy (CSID), the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago, the Council for the Advancement of Muslim Professionals (CAMP), and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). A Hudson Institute report identifies both the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) as elements of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood. Previous posts have discussed the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood ties of the other organizations.

In May, a post reported that ISNA held a symposium together with the Georgetown University’s Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU) which featured prominent members of the global Brotherhood including Abdallah Bin Bayyah and U.S. Muslim Brotherhood leader Jamal Badawi.

A report by the Hudson Institute has identified ISNA as a major part of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood. The organization has a long history of fundamentalism, anti-semitism, and support for terrorism and during the recent Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing trial, ISNA was named as an unindicted co-conspirator. Although recently ISNA has issued condemnations of terrorism which for the first time identify Hamas and Hezbollah by name, there is no indication that the organization has ever addressed or acknowledged its history.

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How I’m Spending My Summer Vacation

The pressures of a difficult year got worse in early July when the medicos told me I was overdue for another coronary bypass surgery, (my second).  I’m still not quite all back from that yet, but I’m getting there. I stay home from work, take walks when the temperature is below 80, take a lot of naps with the dog, and feel guilty about how little blogging I do these days.

Meanwhile our long national nightmare has still not ended, and threatens to repeat itself – but this time even worse -- in November.