October 7, 2008
Exclusive: William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn – Friends of Barack ObamaJohn Howard
I am a child of the ‘60s. I grew up with the radical twaddle of people like Tom Hayden (the Ted Baxter of the radical Left), and Romper Room Revolutionaries William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, the Mao and Jiang Qing of adolescent radicalism. It was an overheated time made worse by nursery school traitors. It was a time during which the most pampered generation in the history of mankind went into an extended tantrum, punctuated only by the indulgent sighs of their misguided and clueless parents who still apparently thought the destructive impulses of their little darlings were somehow cute. Bill Ayers’ father, the late Thomas G. Ayers, Commonwealth Edison Chairman, Chicago grandee and symbol of muscular capitalism comes to mind. (Does anyone really believe that Ayers and Dohrn, wanted by the FBI, lived without family help and contact for 11 years “underground” in Chicago, the town his prominent father and powerful friends helped run and which has been described as having the distinction of being the only completely corrupt city in the nation? Please.)
But Ayers and Dohrn demonstrated that low grade, child radicals, too, could be dangerous. Their simple minded nihilism was exceeded only by their almost complete ineptitude. But it is important to recall who they were and to know who they are because not only do they still exist and spread their poison, their very relationship to a national candidate for President should chill every thinking citizen.
An outgrowth of an earlier Leftist organization, the Students for a Democratic Society, was established in 1960 with a manifesto that represented a break with the traditional non-Communist Left. With Tom Hayden at its helm, it is unsurprising that it started as a shallow, self-dramatizing collection of students fresh from panty raids and looking for something more interesting to do. As the turmoil of the ‘60s continued to ferment, it became more and more strident, inflexible and radical in its project.
After an internecine war in 1969, it split into different groups, among which was the Weathermen, a would-be domestic terrorist organization with little apparent purpose except to engage in violent acts in service of the national tantrum and of a badly articulated, simplistic ideology with little grounding in anything other than the romantic fantasy that they were somehow aiding “the Revolution.” The preening self-regard of its leaders was breathtaking.
Its primary activity was the issuance of dramatic “communiqués” from the underground in a grotesque imitation of stilted Soviet-speak, like a bad ‘50s movie, threatening violent action in instant mayhem. Its first act was a riot called “Days of Rage,” not surprisingly in Chicago. With its usual flair, the Weathermen announced that its protest would be the largest ever, but with its usual ineptitude, only a few hundred showed up. They blew up a statue honoring policemen who had been killed or injured in earlier riots. (They blew it up again when it was rebuilt several years later.) They burned cars, shattered windows and attacked policemen, injuring 28.
Bernardine Dohrn, in an astonishing display of hubris, demonstrated her simple-mindedness and limited forensic gifts in her attempt to define their purpose: “We are building a communist organization to be part of the forces which build a revolutionary communist party to lead the working class to seize power and build socialism… We must further the study of Marxism-Leninism within the Weather Underground Organization. The struggle for Marxism-Leninism is the most significant development in our recent history. We discovered thru [sic] our own experiences what revolutionaries all over the world have found — that Marxism-Leninism is the science of revolution, the revolutionary ideology of the working class, our guide to the struggle.”
History has now shown us the merit of that project as even those who knew it best and preserved it longest have rejected the moronic and evil ideology that was Marxism-Leninism – but not Ms. Dohrn and Mr. Ayers.
Shortly after the Days of Rage riot, the Weathermen risibly “declared war” on the United States. The sheer pretentiousness of these junior Bolsheviks was vaguely laughable. But they were deadly serious. Dohrn constructed and planted an anti-personnel bomb containing heavy metal staples and metal projectiles on the window ledge of a police facility, killing one officer, Bryan V. McDonnell, and severely wounding and permanently blinding another, Robert Fogarty. Their families never recovered. Ayers laughingly and emphatically admitted his participation and Dohrn’s skill in placing the fatal bomb.
In 1970, the Weatherman attacked New York City policemen with bombs and firebombed the home of a New York judge presiding over the criminal trial of black thugs who had wrapped themselves in the mantle of radicalism; a favorite ruse of the time. They went on to plant bombs at the United States Capital, the New York City Police Department and the Pentagon, all the time issuing taunting communiqués suggesting more attacks were on the way. Had it not all been so lethal, it would have had all the earmarks of children playing war in the back yard. It is a shame it was not so benign.
Despite their later, self-serving statements that they really intended to harm only property, the evidence is clearly otherwise. In 1970, an explosion rocked Greenwich Village, destroying a beautiful, privately owned townhouse. The townhouse had been converted to a bomb factory and, demonstrating the ineptitude for which the Weathermen had become almost as legendary as their infantile communiqués, three of them blew themselves up while making bombs. It was a fitting end to the meaningless lives of Diana Oughton, Ted Gold and Terry Robbins, whose deaths stunned their colleagues but left the world a little cleaner. The fragmentation bombs they were making were intended for the murder of American soldiers at a dance at Fort Dix and for the destruction of a library at Columbia University.
Who were these people? Children of privilege whose nihilistic, radical project was intended to destroy this nation. They were, and are, at root, evil. Commenting on the Charles Manson murders, Ms. Dohrn told her “collective:” "Dig it! First they killed those pigs and then they put a fork in their bellies. Wild!" “Dig it”, indeed. The “belly” she was referring to contained Sharon Tate’s unborn child. What kind of perverted monster could find pleasure in the thought that a woman eight and one half months pregnant, on the eve of delivery, was killed and mutilated with a fork left sticking out of the unborn infant inher abdomen? That is the measure of Bernardine Dohrn and her consort, Bill Ayers, who attempted to suggest she was “kidding” when she made the statement. It is hard to imagine any context in which the “joke” would be comprehensible to anyone who is not unhinged by radical ideology. No, she wasn’t kidding. Anyone who could wantonly murder police officers with a bomb that shredded them like lettuce has no soul and could not be moved by the Manson Family’s savagery.
And so it goes to this day. Dohrn’s latest ravings are of a piece with those of her past. In the July/August 2003 issue of the Monthly Review, she descended, yet again, into the pit of radicalism from which she never really emerged ranting about “American imperialism.” Fulminating about law enforcement and the reasonable effort by our government to keep its citizens, even those as unworthy and unthinkable as Bernardine Dohrn, safe. Gibbering about American “oppression.” Biting, yet again, the hand that protects her.
Some things are not forgivable. There are some things for which one cannot atone. Treason is one. Betrayal of one’s country is another. Wanton murder, still another. But apparently there is forgiveness in Chicago. No one has ever accused the present Mayor Daley of an overabundance of grey matter. But he told the New York Times that he finds value in Ayers and Dohrn. He says Ayers “has done a lot of good in this city and nationally.” “People make mistakes. You judge a person by his whole life.” Mistakes? Deliberate, cold blooded murder is a “mistake?” Conspiracy to murder soldiers is a “mistake?” Mocking the murder and mutilation of an expectant mother on the verge of giving birth is a “mistake?”
When Dohrn emerged from the miasma, she was offered a job at Sidley Austin, one of Chicago’s most prestigious law firms, even though she was denied a law license by the State of Illinois. The managing partner, Howard Trienans, a friend of Mr. Ayers’ father, thought she would make a fine addition to the firm. In the sort of dismissive sarcasm so favored by those who are not used to being contradicted, he said “She didn’t get her law license because she is stubborn. She wouldn’t say she was sorry.” She didn’t say she was sorry, Mr. Trienans, because she isn’t. What more need be said? One wonders how understanding he might have been had one of her targets been Sidley Austin for representing the monopolistic AT&T, his most lucrative client.
Her fatuous narcissism continues to this day in her writings and defiant view that this nation that has brought freedom to the greatest number; this nation that is a beacon of hope to people throughout the world; this nation that nurtured the idea of liberty when there were none other to protect it from those to whom Ayers and Dohrn paid their fealty, is the major source of evil on the globe.
It would be easy to dismiss Ayers and Dohrn as toothless relics of a forgotten age; witless simpletons reduced to legal clinics and the academy. But they are not sorry. And they still spread their poison. And they still have influence.
Obama’s views on foreign policy did not happen in a vacuum. His disdain for the idea of American exceptionalism comes from the dangerous world view of the milieu from which he so recently emerged. His view of the military, America’s history and his opposition to war come from the environment in which he has immersed himself for these past 20 years; an environment sharply defined by Ayers, Dohrn and their allies and protectors. The New York Times would have us believe Obama and the Ayers hardly knew each other. Yet the exalted Mayor Daley knows them well in the hothouse of Chicago politics, and says so. Is it even remotely likely that an obscure state senator who lived three blocks from Dohrn and Ayers and was first introduced politically at their home does not? It hardly matters, though. They are cut from the same cloth.
Knowing who Ayers and Dohrn were and are, we must ask ourselves: what sort of people would embrace them? What kind of people would excuse their acts and, more importantly, why? What decent person would welcome them into civil society? What does it say for a public official that he does not condemn them outright? What does it say of a public official that he would accept any help they might offer? That he is ignorant of history? That he is young? That he is naïve? Or is it because, when linked to others of his associations, he may sympathize with their twisted radicalism?
Family Security Matters Contributing Editor John W. Howard is a lawyer, specializing in corporate and business litigation who also founded a non-profit, public interest law firm specializing in First, Second and Tenth Amendment issues. Feedback: editorialdirector@familysecuritymatters.org.
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Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Did Obama Commit a Felony by Violating the Logan Act?
Exclusive: Did Obama Commit a Felony by Violating the Logan Act?
Pam Meister
The Logan Act (est. 1799): a single federal statute making it a crime for a citizen to confer with foreign governments against the interests of the United States. Specifically, it prohibits citizens from negotiating with other nations on behalf of the United States without authorization.
This week, New York Post columnist Amir Taheri made the claim that while in Iraq this summer, Barack Obama privately tried to convince Iraqi leaders to wait until a new administration is in place before beginning a draw-down of American troops.
According to Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, Obama made his demand for delay a key theme of his discussions with Iraqi leaders in Baghdad in July.
"He asked why we were not prepared to delay an agreement until after the US elections and the formation of a new administration in Washington," Zebari said in an interview.
Obama insisted that Congress should be involved in negotiations on the status of US troops - and that it was in the interests of both sides not to have an agreement negotiated by the Bush administration in its "state of weakness and political confusion."
The Obama campaign issued a denial:
...Obama's national security spokeswoman Wendy Morigi said Taheri's article bore "as much resemblance to the truth as a McCain campaign commercial."
In fact, Obama had told the Iraqis that they should not rush through a "Strategic Framework Agreement" governing the future of US forces until after President George W. Bush leaves office, she said.
Let's compare two key sentences from the articles linked above:
"He asked why we were not prepared to delay an agreement until after the US elections and the formation of a new administration in Washington."
In fact, Obama had told the Iraqis that they should not rush through a "Strategic Framework Agreement" governing the future of US forces until after President George W. Bush leaves office, she said.
It seems to me that the Obama campaign essentially confirmed what Taheri's public source said. Let's look at the Constitution.
Article Two, Section Two:
The President shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States; he may require the opinion, in writing, of the principal officer in each of the executive departments, upon any subject relating to the duties of their respective offices, and he shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.
He shall have power, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, judges of the Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United States, whose appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by law: but the Congress may by law vest the appointment of such inferior officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the courts of law, or in the heads of departments.
The President shall have power to fill up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate, by granting commissions which shall expire at the end of their next session.
Article Two, Section Three:
Section 3. He shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in case of disagreement between them, with respect to the time of adjournment, he may adjourn them to such time as he shall think proper; he shall receive ambassadors and other public ministers; he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed, and shall commission all the officers of the United States.
Nothing in Article One, which covers the duties of Congress (both House and Senate), says anything about senators engaging foreign policy unbidden by the president - even those running for president. And somehow I doubt President Bush called him up and asked him to take over Condoleezza Rice's job for a day.
But my plebian education may be impeding my interpretation of both Obama's denial and the Constitution. See, I didn't go to Columbia or Harvard - like Sarah Palin, I graduated from a state university, so I may not be educated enough to figure it out. I do still have all my teeth, however, so that's one thing going for me.
Last year, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi traveled to Israel and then to Syria, where she told Syrian President Bashar Assad that Israel was ready for peace talks with that nation. It came as a huge surprise to Israel's prime minister, whose office said that "what was discussed with the House speaker did not include any change in Israel's policy, as it has been presented to international parties involved in the matter."
At the time, critics suggested that Pelosi had violated the tenets of the Logan Act, which is a felony. But the mainstream media avoided the topic like a hot potato and nothing was ever done about it - President Bush being too nice a guy as usual?
The cynic in me can't help but believe that Obama wanted the Iraqis to hold off on sending American troops home until - presumably - he is in the Oval Office next January and can take credit for "bringing the troops home" as per his campaign platform. It's nice to know he's thinking of keeping one of his many campaign promises, but a little disconcerting to think that he'd try to undermine the current president in the process.
Charlie Gibson asked Sarah Palin if she'd ever met any foreign heads of state, to which she answered no. Will he ask Barack Obama what he talked about with the foreign heads of state he's met? Or is he satisfied with questions like whether Obama will debate with McCain at a town hall?
Not only should the media be making more of a fuss about this, but so should the Bush administration. Seals and fancy planes aside, Barack Obama is not yet President of the United States. And if this is how he thinks foreign policy should be conducted - on the sly - is he really the man we want officially directing such policy for the next four to eight years?
Pam Meister is the editor of FamilySecurityMatters.org
Pam Meister
The Logan Act (est. 1799): a single federal statute making it a crime for a citizen to confer with foreign governments against the interests of the United States. Specifically, it prohibits citizens from negotiating with other nations on behalf of the United States without authorization.
This week, New York Post columnist Amir Taheri made the claim that while in Iraq this summer, Barack Obama privately tried to convince Iraqi leaders to wait until a new administration is in place before beginning a draw-down of American troops.
According to Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, Obama made his demand for delay a key theme of his discussions with Iraqi leaders in Baghdad in July.
"He asked why we were not prepared to delay an agreement until after the US elections and the formation of a new administration in Washington," Zebari said in an interview.
Obama insisted that Congress should be involved in negotiations on the status of US troops - and that it was in the interests of both sides not to have an agreement negotiated by the Bush administration in its "state of weakness and political confusion."
The Obama campaign issued a denial:
...Obama's national security spokeswoman Wendy Morigi said Taheri's article bore "as much resemblance to the truth as a McCain campaign commercial."
In fact, Obama had told the Iraqis that they should not rush through a "Strategic Framework Agreement" governing the future of US forces until after President George W. Bush leaves office, she said.
Let's compare two key sentences from the articles linked above:
"He asked why we were not prepared to delay an agreement until after the US elections and the formation of a new administration in Washington."
In fact, Obama had told the Iraqis that they should not rush through a "Strategic Framework Agreement" governing the future of US forces until after President George W. Bush leaves office, she said.
It seems to me that the Obama campaign essentially confirmed what Taheri's public source said. Let's look at the Constitution.
Article Two, Section Two:
The President shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States; he may require the opinion, in writing, of the principal officer in each of the executive departments, upon any subject relating to the duties of their respective offices, and he shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.
He shall have power, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, judges of the Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United States, whose appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by law: but the Congress may by law vest the appointment of such inferior officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the courts of law, or in the heads of departments.
The President shall have power to fill up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate, by granting commissions which shall expire at the end of their next session.
Article Two, Section Three:
Section 3. He shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in case of disagreement between them, with respect to the time of adjournment, he may adjourn them to such time as he shall think proper; he shall receive ambassadors and other public ministers; he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed, and shall commission all the officers of the United States.
Nothing in Article One, which covers the duties of Congress (both House and Senate), says anything about senators engaging foreign policy unbidden by the president - even those running for president. And somehow I doubt President Bush called him up and asked him to take over Condoleezza Rice's job for a day.
But my plebian education may be impeding my interpretation of both Obama's denial and the Constitution. See, I didn't go to Columbia or Harvard - like Sarah Palin, I graduated from a state university, so I may not be educated enough to figure it out. I do still have all my teeth, however, so that's one thing going for me.
Last year, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi traveled to Israel and then to Syria, where she told Syrian President Bashar Assad that Israel was ready for peace talks with that nation. It came as a huge surprise to Israel's prime minister, whose office said that "what was discussed with the House speaker did not include any change in Israel's policy, as it has been presented to international parties involved in the matter."
At the time, critics suggested that Pelosi had violated the tenets of the Logan Act, which is a felony. But the mainstream media avoided the topic like a hot potato and nothing was ever done about it - President Bush being too nice a guy as usual?
The cynic in me can't help but believe that Obama wanted the Iraqis to hold off on sending American troops home until - presumably - he is in the Oval Office next January and can take credit for "bringing the troops home" as per his campaign platform. It's nice to know he's thinking of keeping one of his many campaign promises, but a little disconcerting to think that he'd try to undermine the current president in the process.
Charlie Gibson asked Sarah Palin if she'd ever met any foreign heads of state, to which she answered no. Will he ask Barack Obama what he talked about with the foreign heads of state he's met? Or is he satisfied with questions like whether Obama will debate with McCain at a town hall?
Not only should the media be making more of a fuss about this, but so should the Bush administration. Seals and fancy planes aside, Barack Obama is not yet President of the United States. And if this is how he thinks foreign policy should be conducted - on the sly - is he really the man we want officially directing such policy for the next four to eight years?
Pam Meister is the editor of FamilySecurityMatters.org
Monday, September 15, 2008
Obama’s Disrespectful Behavior at Ground Zero
Exclusive: Obama’s Disrespectful Behavior at Ground Zero
Ben Shapiro
It is difficult to screw up an appearance at Ground Zero on September 11th. You have to be either completely oblivious or completely indifferent. It is a signal feat of idiocy.
And yet Barack Obama accomplished it.
John McCain and Obama visited Ground Zero together. Obama and McCain entered the site. But while McCain took the time to shake hands with uniformed firefighters and a construction worker with an American flag helmet, Obama ignored them and stood around.
But he wasn’t done yet. Both McCain and Obama brought roses to place on the makeshift 9/11 memorial. Obama casually tossed his rose on the memorial, looking somewhat like Don Barzini tossing a rose on Don Corleone’s grave near the end of Godfather I. McCain and his wife, by contrast, approached the memorial gingerly, then placed the roses with care on the memorial. In case you were wondering, Michelle Obama was back in Chicago tending to the children – she somehow has time to accompany Barack to the DNC, but not to Ground Zero on September 11th.
Small gestures matter in large campaigns. That’s why Obama reversed himself on wearing an American flag pin. That’s why John McCain takes care with how he hugs Sarah Palin. In a campaign, everything is analyzed, re-analyzed, and over-analyzed.
And that’s why Obama’s flower-tossing exhibition matters. It demonstrates a lack of concentration, a lack of respect. Most of all, it displays no reverence. Perhaps Obama feels reverence. But his behavior at Ground Zero didn’t show that. Instead, it showed a man so concerned with himself that he wasn’t willing to take the time to shake hands with the “little people” or bend down to lay a rose on a monument.
That self-concern is at the center of Obama’s polling free fall. He has ranged far afield, away from policy and toward personal combat. He has done that because he cannot stand being personally affronted.
Sarah Palin attacked Obama’s community organizing. Obama responded by sending out his minions to talk about how Jesus was a community organizer and Pontius Pilate a governor. Meanwhile, he blundered into the “lipstick on a pig” controversy.
Obama attacked McCain on education. McCain responded with an ad accusing Obama of supporting comprehensive sex education for kindergarteners in Illinois. Obama came back with an ad talking about how McCain is old and doesn’t use e-mail.
The common thread is this: when attacked substantively, Obama counters personally. He gets angry, and he gets mean. He has read his own press clippings, and he believes them. He is The One. No one is allowed to attack him.
There are only two problems with such hubris. One is that Americans don’t like it. Arrogance bugs us. Ask John Edwards and Hillary Clinton.
The other problem is that when you believe yourself to be a messianic figure, you have to live up to that image – and you are bound to fail. Presidential politics is a game of attacks and counter-attacks, feints and bluffs, insults and retorts. It cannot be won up in the clouds – it has to be won in the mud. Even if your image demands that you remain the clouds, you will be brought down into the mud.
And so we see the new Barack Obama. The new Obama is no longer the “united we stand,” rhetoric-blowing giant. He is now the street-smart Chicago politician willing to unsheathe the knife on occasion. Only he’s not that street-smart, and it shows. Obama vowed to bring a gun to a knife-fight. Americans are beginning to realize that Obama’s gun is filled with water.
Obama’s behavior at the 9/11 memorial, then, represented two impulses. First, there was the anger of walking down to the memorial with the man who was sinking his highfalutin’ aspiration’. Second, there was the inability to bend down, even for a memorial.
And that betrays a disturbing lack of self-knowledge and self-restraint.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Ben Shapiro, 24, is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School. He is also the author of the recently published Project President: Bad Hair and Botox on the Road to the White House, as well as national bestsellers Porn Generation: How Social Liberalism Is Corrupting Our Future and Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America’s Youth. Feedback: editorialdirector@familysecuritymatters.org.
Ben Shapiro
It is difficult to screw up an appearance at Ground Zero on September 11th. You have to be either completely oblivious or completely indifferent. It is a signal feat of idiocy.
And yet Barack Obama accomplished it.
John McCain and Obama visited Ground Zero together. Obama and McCain entered the site. But while McCain took the time to shake hands with uniformed firefighters and a construction worker with an American flag helmet, Obama ignored them and stood around.
But he wasn’t done yet. Both McCain and Obama brought roses to place on the makeshift 9/11 memorial. Obama casually tossed his rose on the memorial, looking somewhat like Don Barzini tossing a rose on Don Corleone’s grave near the end of Godfather I. McCain and his wife, by contrast, approached the memorial gingerly, then placed the roses with care on the memorial. In case you were wondering, Michelle Obama was back in Chicago tending to the children – she somehow has time to accompany Barack to the DNC, but not to Ground Zero on September 11th.
Small gestures matter in large campaigns. That’s why Obama reversed himself on wearing an American flag pin. That’s why John McCain takes care with how he hugs Sarah Palin. In a campaign, everything is analyzed, re-analyzed, and over-analyzed.
And that’s why Obama’s flower-tossing exhibition matters. It demonstrates a lack of concentration, a lack of respect. Most of all, it displays no reverence. Perhaps Obama feels reverence. But his behavior at Ground Zero didn’t show that. Instead, it showed a man so concerned with himself that he wasn’t willing to take the time to shake hands with the “little people” or bend down to lay a rose on a monument.
That self-concern is at the center of Obama’s polling free fall. He has ranged far afield, away from policy and toward personal combat. He has done that because he cannot stand being personally affronted.
Sarah Palin attacked Obama’s community organizing. Obama responded by sending out his minions to talk about how Jesus was a community organizer and Pontius Pilate a governor. Meanwhile, he blundered into the “lipstick on a pig” controversy.
Obama attacked McCain on education. McCain responded with an ad accusing Obama of supporting comprehensive sex education for kindergarteners in Illinois. Obama came back with an ad talking about how McCain is old and doesn’t use e-mail.
The common thread is this: when attacked substantively, Obama counters personally. He gets angry, and he gets mean. He has read his own press clippings, and he believes them. He is The One. No one is allowed to attack him.
There are only two problems with such hubris. One is that Americans don’t like it. Arrogance bugs us. Ask John Edwards and Hillary Clinton.
The other problem is that when you believe yourself to be a messianic figure, you have to live up to that image – and you are bound to fail. Presidential politics is a game of attacks and counter-attacks, feints and bluffs, insults and retorts. It cannot be won up in the clouds – it has to be won in the mud. Even if your image demands that you remain the clouds, you will be brought down into the mud.
And so we see the new Barack Obama. The new Obama is no longer the “united we stand,” rhetoric-blowing giant. He is now the street-smart Chicago politician willing to unsheathe the knife on occasion. Only he’s not that street-smart, and it shows. Obama vowed to bring a gun to a knife-fight. Americans are beginning to realize that Obama’s gun is filled with water.
Obama’s behavior at the 9/11 memorial, then, represented two impulses. First, there was the anger of walking down to the memorial with the man who was sinking his highfalutin’ aspiration’. Second, there was the inability to bend down, even for a memorial.
And that betrays a disturbing lack of self-knowledge and self-restraint.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Ben Shapiro, 24, is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School. He is also the author of the recently published Project President: Bad Hair and Botox on the Road to the White House, as well as national bestsellers Porn Generation: How Social Liberalism Is Corrupting Our Future and Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America’s Youth. Feedback: editorialdirector@familysecuritymatters.org.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Barack Hussein Obama – Magna Cum Saudi?
Barack Obama – Magna Cum Saudi?
September 9, 2008
Barack Obama – Magna Cum Saudi?Print This
Investor’s Business Daily
www.ibdeditorials.com
Election '08: Does Barack Obama owe his meteoric rise to an Israeli-hating adviser to a Saudi billionaire? Why did a race-baiting mentor to the Black Panthers favor this yet unknown community organizer?
In her stunning national political debut as the Republican candidate for vice president, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin described Obama as a man who had written two memoirs but no significant laws or reforms. So how did this unaccomplished community organizer rise to fame and fortune? He had some interesting help.
We know he's a Harvard graduate and was editor of the Harvard Law Review. Less known is the story of how he got into the prestigious Ivy League university. As Newsmax's Kenneth Timmerman reports, he was helped by a letter written by Percy Sutton, former Manhattan borough president and a credible candidate for mayor of New York in 1977.
In an interview earlier this year on New York's all-news cable channel NY1, the 88-year-old Sutton made some interesting revelations about his relationship with the young Obama. He told NY1 reporter Dominic Carter on "Inside City Hall" that he was introduced to Obama by a friend raising money for him. The friend asked Sutton to write a letter in support of Obama's application to Harvard law school.
"The friend's name is Dr. Khalid al-Mansour, from Texas," Sutton said. "He is the principal adviser to one of the world's richest men. He told me about Obama."
Sutton recalled that al-Mansour said, "There is a young man that has applied to Harvard. I know that you have a few friends up there because you used to go up there to speak. Would you please write a letter in support of him?" Sutton did.
According to Timmerman, "At the time Percy Sutton, a former lawyer for Malcolm X and a former business partner of al-Mansour, says he (al-Mansour) was raising money for Obama's graduate school education (and) al-Mansour was representing top members of the Saudi Royal family seeking to do business and exert influence in the United States."
One of those Saudi royals was Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, a nephew of Saudi King Abdullah. He was the Saudi prince who offered to donate $10 million to help New York rebuild after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. After the prince publicly suggested (as Obama's pastor, Jeremiah Wright, did recently) that U.S. policies brought on the attacks, then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani told Prince Alwaleed where he could deposit his check.
Dr. Khalid Abdullah Tariq al-Mansour, born Donald Warden, is another interesting fellow from Obama's past. He himself is a graduate of Harvard and has been a guest lecturer there. His writings and statements reveal him to be an ideological clone of the Rev. Wright, who married Barack and Michelle and baptized their children.
In his 1995 book, The Lost Books of Africa Rediscovered, al-Monsour alleged that America was plotting genocide against black Americans. The first "genocide against the black man began 300 years ago," he said at a book-signing in Harlem, while a second "genocide" was on the way "to remove 15 million black people, considered disposable, of no relevance, value or benefit to the American society."
Al-Mansour told an audience in South Africa that "the Palestinians are treated like savages," something our worst ex-president, Jimmy Carter, as well as Wright might agree with. He has accused Israeli Jews of "stealing the land the same way the Christians stole the land from the Indians in America."
When he was known as Donald Warden, according to the Social Activism Project at the University of California at Berkeley, al-Monsour was the mentor of Black Panther Party founder Huey Newton and his associate, Bobby Seale.
California Congresswoman Barbara Lee entered an official statement of appreciation of Warden and his Black Panther colleagues for their role in founding a radical group known as the African-American Association into the Congressional Record of April 23, 2007.
What did this radical extremist see in young Barack Obama that he would seek to sponsor and perhaps finance Obama's education? Obama says he paid his way solely through student loans. How did they meet? Where did the money he raised come from? Now that we know who the father of Bristol Palin's baby is, maybe the mainstream media will have time to find out.
2008 Investor’s Business Daily. Used with permission.
September 9, 2008
Barack Obama – Magna Cum Saudi?Print This
Investor’s Business Daily
www.ibdeditorials.com
Election '08: Does Barack Obama owe his meteoric rise to an Israeli-hating adviser to a Saudi billionaire? Why did a race-baiting mentor to the Black Panthers favor this yet unknown community organizer?
In her stunning national political debut as the Republican candidate for vice president, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin described Obama as a man who had written two memoirs but no significant laws or reforms. So how did this unaccomplished community organizer rise to fame and fortune? He had some interesting help.
We know he's a Harvard graduate and was editor of the Harvard Law Review. Less known is the story of how he got into the prestigious Ivy League university. As Newsmax's Kenneth Timmerman reports, he was helped by a letter written by Percy Sutton, former Manhattan borough president and a credible candidate for mayor of New York in 1977.
In an interview earlier this year on New York's all-news cable channel NY1, the 88-year-old Sutton made some interesting revelations about his relationship with the young Obama. He told NY1 reporter Dominic Carter on "Inside City Hall" that he was introduced to Obama by a friend raising money for him. The friend asked Sutton to write a letter in support of Obama's application to Harvard law school.
"The friend's name is Dr. Khalid al-Mansour, from Texas," Sutton said. "He is the principal adviser to one of the world's richest men. He told me about Obama."
Sutton recalled that al-Mansour said, "There is a young man that has applied to Harvard. I know that you have a few friends up there because you used to go up there to speak. Would you please write a letter in support of him?" Sutton did.
According to Timmerman, "At the time Percy Sutton, a former lawyer for Malcolm X and a former business partner of al-Mansour, says he (al-Mansour) was raising money for Obama's graduate school education (and) al-Mansour was representing top members of the Saudi Royal family seeking to do business and exert influence in the United States."
One of those Saudi royals was Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, a nephew of Saudi King Abdullah. He was the Saudi prince who offered to donate $10 million to help New York rebuild after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. After the prince publicly suggested (as Obama's pastor, Jeremiah Wright, did recently) that U.S. policies brought on the attacks, then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani told Prince Alwaleed where he could deposit his check.
Dr. Khalid Abdullah Tariq al-Mansour, born Donald Warden, is another interesting fellow from Obama's past. He himself is a graduate of Harvard and has been a guest lecturer there. His writings and statements reveal him to be an ideological clone of the Rev. Wright, who married Barack and Michelle and baptized their children.
In his 1995 book, The Lost Books of Africa Rediscovered, al-Monsour alleged that America was plotting genocide against black Americans. The first "genocide against the black man began 300 years ago," he said at a book-signing in Harlem, while a second "genocide" was on the way "to remove 15 million black people, considered disposable, of no relevance, value or benefit to the American society."
Al-Mansour told an audience in South Africa that "the Palestinians are treated like savages," something our worst ex-president, Jimmy Carter, as well as Wright might agree with. He has accused Israeli Jews of "stealing the land the same way the Christians stole the land from the Indians in America."
When he was known as Donald Warden, according to the Social Activism Project at the University of California at Berkeley, al-Monsour was the mentor of Black Panther Party founder Huey Newton and his associate, Bobby Seale.
California Congresswoman Barbara Lee entered an official statement of appreciation of Warden and his Black Panther colleagues for their role in founding a radical group known as the African-American Association into the Congressional Record of April 23, 2007.
What did this radical extremist see in young Barack Obama that he would seek to sponsor and perhaps finance Obama's education? Obama says he paid his way solely through student loans. How did they meet? Where did the money he raised come from? Now that we know who the father of Bristol Palin's baby is, maybe the mainstream media will have time to find out.
2008 Investor’s Business Daily. Used with permission.
Barack Hussein Obamas Campaign, Palin Smears Intensify.......
Analysis:
Monday, September 8, 2008 11:14 PM
By: Newsmax Staff Article Font Size
After selecting Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate, Sen. John McCain has soared in the polls -- taking a 10-point lead over Sen. Barack Obama in the Gallup daily tracking poll among likely voters.
The development has shaken many in the major media who are strongly backing Obama, a Democrat. His allies have now launched an all-out offensive against the first GOP female vice presidential candidate.
Worrisome for the Obama camp is the momentous effect Palin has had on women. Before her selection, Obama led McCain among white women, 55 percent to 37 percent.
The most recent poll data out last week shows 53 percent to 41 percent in favor of McCain. ABC News called it "one of the single biggest post-convention changes in voter preference.''
"She's not part of the Washington, D.C., cocktail circuit," Steve Schmidt, a McCain adviser, told Time magazine.
"Elite opinion looks down with contempt at people who are not part of their world," he said.
Palin has become a juggernaut. The Obama campaign wants her stopped, and the media -- which has given Obama almost a free pass in vetting him -- is giving Palin a vigorous examination.
On Monday, the Obama campaign released a new TV ad directly attacking Palin.
The ad states:
“They call themselves mavericks. Whoa. Truth is, they're anything but. John McCain is hardly a maverick, when seven of his top campaign advisers are Washington lobbyists. He's no maverick when he votes with Bush 90 percent of the time. And Sarah Palin's no maverick either. She was for the Bridge to Nowhere before she was against it. Politicians lying about their records? You don't call that maverick. You call it more of the same.”
Such political attacks have been backed up by vicious personal smears.
Comedian Bill Maher cracked a tasteless “joke” involving Palin’s Down syndrome child -- and referred to her as a “stewardess.” In the monologue of a recent HBO show, Maher noted that Palin has five children, including an infant “that has Down syndrome. She had it when she was 43 years old. And it looks a lot like John Edwards.”
Also notable was US Weekly magazine, whose cover story featured Palin and the headline “Babies, Lies & Scandal.”
Asked by Fox News Megyn Kelly to identify any “lies” Palin had uttered, US Weekly Senior Editor Bradley Jacobs could not offer any.
Just months ago, the same weekly had published Barack and Michelle Obama on the cover with the headline “Why Barack Loves Her.”
Meanwhile, the media has been elevating minor controversies in Palin’s home state of Alaska to national “scandals.” For example, the firing of a state trooper who allegedly Tasered his own 10-year-old son has been elevated to an international human-rights case.
The latest line of attack on Palin is focused on her strong Christian beliefs. She has been labeled a wacko fundamentalist who doesn’t believe in evolution. (Interestingly, several polls show most Americans don’t believe in it, either. A 2006 CBS poll found that just 13 percent of Americans believe in scientific evolution, and most Americans believe life was created and guided by God.)
A recent Associated Press investigative report was headlined: “Pentecostalism Obscured in Palin Biography.”
Her crime, according to the AP?
Here’s what AP wrote: “Sarah Palin often identifies herself simply as Christian. Yet John McCain's running mate has deep roots in Pentecostalism, a spirit-filled Christian tradition that is one of the fastest growing in the world. It's often derided by outsiders and Bible-believers alike.”
CNN on Monday was out with a similar “expose,” citing her former Alaskan pastor as saying Palin wanted to hide her Pentecostal roots.
Why? CNN claims she may be embarrassed that Pentecostals “speak in tongues.”
Though Palin has clearly demonstrated that her faith does not mix with her public service, it’s a major problem for the media.
It should be remembered that this is the same media that ignored Obama’s involvement with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. until video clips of his pastor condemning the United States made it onto YouTube. The media continues to largely ignore the fact Obama won’t admit he was raised a Muslim and later converted to Christianity.
The bias against Palin has become so apparent that even some in the major media are taking notice.
During the Republican National Convention last Wednesday, Palin mentioned how the media was covering her, and angry Republicans began screaming “NBC, NBC, NBC.”
NBC News, once considered the gold standard of broadcast news, has become so closely associated with the Obama campaign that it even replaced veteran news anchors for the two conventions with Democratic pundits Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews.
The network’s slanted coverage of the GOP became such an embarrassment that the network this past Sunday removed both Olbermann and Matthews as its election news anchors.
The pro-Obama bias has not only affected Palin and the GOP. During one Democrat debate earlier this year, Sen. Hillary Clinton referenced a “Saturday Night Live” sketch that showed CNN moderators bending over backwards to help Obama.
Hillary may have the last laugh as the Republicans, with Palin leading the charge, are stealing the women vote – a bloc Hillary solidly owned and one she could have brought home to the Democratic Party on Election Day.
© 2008 Newsmax. All rights reserved
Monday, September 8, 2008 11:14 PM
By: Newsmax Staff Article Font Size
After selecting Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate, Sen. John McCain has soared in the polls -- taking a 10-point lead over Sen. Barack Obama in the Gallup daily tracking poll among likely voters.
The development has shaken many in the major media who are strongly backing Obama, a Democrat. His allies have now launched an all-out offensive against the first GOP female vice presidential candidate.
Worrisome for the Obama camp is the momentous effect Palin has had on women. Before her selection, Obama led McCain among white women, 55 percent to 37 percent.
The most recent poll data out last week shows 53 percent to 41 percent in favor of McCain. ABC News called it "one of the single biggest post-convention changes in voter preference.''
"She's not part of the Washington, D.C., cocktail circuit," Steve Schmidt, a McCain adviser, told Time magazine.
"Elite opinion looks down with contempt at people who are not part of their world," he said.
Palin has become a juggernaut. The Obama campaign wants her stopped, and the media -- which has given Obama almost a free pass in vetting him -- is giving Palin a vigorous examination.
On Monday, the Obama campaign released a new TV ad directly attacking Palin.
The ad states:
“They call themselves mavericks. Whoa. Truth is, they're anything but. John McCain is hardly a maverick, when seven of his top campaign advisers are Washington lobbyists. He's no maverick when he votes with Bush 90 percent of the time. And Sarah Palin's no maverick either. She was for the Bridge to Nowhere before she was against it. Politicians lying about their records? You don't call that maverick. You call it more of the same.”
Such political attacks have been backed up by vicious personal smears.
Comedian Bill Maher cracked a tasteless “joke” involving Palin’s Down syndrome child -- and referred to her as a “stewardess.” In the monologue of a recent HBO show, Maher noted that Palin has five children, including an infant “that has Down syndrome. She had it when she was 43 years old. And it looks a lot like John Edwards.”
Also notable was US Weekly magazine, whose cover story featured Palin and the headline “Babies, Lies & Scandal.”
Asked by Fox News Megyn Kelly to identify any “lies” Palin had uttered, US Weekly Senior Editor Bradley Jacobs could not offer any.
Just months ago, the same weekly had published Barack and Michelle Obama on the cover with the headline “Why Barack Loves Her.”
Meanwhile, the media has been elevating minor controversies in Palin’s home state of Alaska to national “scandals.” For example, the firing of a state trooper who allegedly Tasered his own 10-year-old son has been elevated to an international human-rights case.
The latest line of attack on Palin is focused on her strong Christian beliefs. She has been labeled a wacko fundamentalist who doesn’t believe in evolution. (Interestingly, several polls show most Americans don’t believe in it, either. A 2006 CBS poll found that just 13 percent of Americans believe in scientific evolution, and most Americans believe life was created and guided by God.)
A recent Associated Press investigative report was headlined: “Pentecostalism Obscured in Palin Biography.”
Her crime, according to the AP?
Here’s what AP wrote: “Sarah Palin often identifies herself simply as Christian. Yet John McCain's running mate has deep roots in Pentecostalism, a spirit-filled Christian tradition that is one of the fastest growing in the world. It's often derided by outsiders and Bible-believers alike.”
CNN on Monday was out with a similar “expose,” citing her former Alaskan pastor as saying Palin wanted to hide her Pentecostal roots.
Why? CNN claims she may be embarrassed that Pentecostals “speak in tongues.”
Though Palin has clearly demonstrated that her faith does not mix with her public service, it’s a major problem for the media.
It should be remembered that this is the same media that ignored Obama’s involvement with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. until video clips of his pastor condemning the United States made it onto YouTube. The media continues to largely ignore the fact Obama won’t admit he was raised a Muslim and later converted to Christianity.
The bias against Palin has become so apparent that even some in the major media are taking notice.
During the Republican National Convention last Wednesday, Palin mentioned how the media was covering her, and angry Republicans began screaming “NBC, NBC, NBC.”
NBC News, once considered the gold standard of broadcast news, has become so closely associated with the Obama campaign that it even replaced veteran news anchors for the two conventions with Democratic pundits Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews.
The network’s slanted coverage of the GOP became such an embarrassment that the network this past Sunday removed both Olbermann and Matthews as its election news anchors.
The pro-Obama bias has not only affected Palin and the GOP. During one Democrat debate earlier this year, Sen. Hillary Clinton referenced a “Saturday Night Live” sketch that showed CNN moderators bending over backwards to help Obama.
Hillary may have the last laugh as the Republicans, with Palin leading the charge, are stealing the women vote – a bloc Hillary solidly owned and one she could have brought home to the Democratic Party on Election Day.
© 2008 Newsmax. All rights reserved
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Quote of the Day........
My friends, we live in the greatest nation in the history of the world. I hope you'll join with me as we try to change it.' -- Barack Obama
When It Comes to Islamism, the DNC Still Doesn’t Get It
September 1, 2008
Exclusive: When It Comes to Islamism, the DNC Still Doesn’t Get It
M. Zuhdi Jasser
Last week’s opening festivities at the Democrat National Convention in Denver began with an interfaith prayer. As the Democrat Party searches for its newfound interest in faith, it quickly called upon one of the lowest hanging fruit in the American Muslim community - the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). Ingrid Mattson, the President of ISNA gave a speech along with Adbur-Rahim Ali of the Northeast Denver Islamic Center. Some may dismiss the selection of nine speakers of faith at the political shindig as irrelevant and simply part of the pomp and circumstance of the DNC Convention.
But propping up ISNA in today’s environment is akin to propping up the Legal Guild (a ‘60s Communist front group) to address the convention during the Cold War. Our civil servants will verify that they have prevented over 30 attacks by militant Islamists upon our nation and our citizens since 9/11. The only ideology that unites the groups set upon our destruction is not violence. It is political Islam - their Islamism. Unless we identify both violent and non-violent political Islam as a root cause of terrorism we will never win this conflict. Militant Islamists, much as non-militant Islamists, seek some form of a transnational Muslim, political movement. They both seek various forms of the ascendancy of Islam with respect to other religions culminating in the establishment of Islamic states.
It is not enough to condemn terrorism for politically active Muslims to be “friends of American security interests” or pillars of the representation of ‘spiritual’ Islam. If Muslim organizations are to be lifted up as ‘friends of government,’ they, at the minimum, need to share a common vision of ideal governance - that of a secular liberal democracy. It is against American interests and certainly an obstacle in the work of all anti-Islamist Muslims for the American establishment to lift up Islamists, manifestations of political Islam, as representatives of Muslims and especially as representatives of “non-political” Islam. ISNA is without question patently political. I would defy anyone to find evidence of its rejection of the ideology of Islamism and similarly its defense of the ideology of the secular liberal democracy in the writings and public work of any of its leaders. To do this ISNA would have to sponsor and distribute intellectual work against the foundations of the Muslim Brotherhood, Sayyid Qutb, Sayyid Al-Mawdudi, and Yusuf Al-Qaradawi. Not only do they not do this, the vast majority of the other imams, books, and tapes they promote all derive their ideology from the same Salafist political mindset.
If anyone had done their homework at the DNC they would have realized that the primary origin of political Islam in the early twentieth century is the Muslim Brotherhood - arguably the central nervous system of political Islam globally. Its imams and spiritual leaders over the past century from Sayyid Qutb, Hassan al-Banna, to the current Godfather, Yusuf Al-Qaradawi are ultimately the seeds of thought which have sprouted the vast majority of Islamist movements in the world whether militant or not. The means employed by Islamists may vary from nation to nation but in the end their goals of establishing an Islamic state are almost universally the same.
ISNA has demonstrated repeatedly that its goals in the United States are no different from the Muslim Brotherhood’s goals in Jordan, Egypt, Syria, or England for that matter. Its leadership is generally either an outgrowth of the MB salafist ideology in the Middle East or an outgrowth of the similar Deobandi ideology of the Indo-Pakistani region.
As others have also noted, the Department of Justice did not coincidentally list ISNA as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the federal Holy Land Foundation trial in Dallas. All of the associated documentation and links to the MB’s Project in the west and the implicated individuals who share the ideology of political Islam should cause great concern.
Ingrid Mattson, an articulate Canadian convert to Islam, comes across superficially as a benign figure for the purposes of a DNC prayer gathering. But if her years of presidency of ISNA thus far have demonstrated anything, it has shown publicly that her role is nothing more than window dressing for a political organization whose mission of political Islam remains quite unchanged. Note ISNA’s continued participation in the intensely political American Muslim Political Coordination Committee. If she is as “modernized” and apolitical a Muslim leader as her public pronouncements and packaging would purport, I would have expected to see major work from this Hartford Seminary professor marginalizing political Islam and the transnational goal of Islamists. If ISNA is truly not Islamist or the same ISNA as the Wahhabis who formed it out of the MSA in the ‘60s and ‘70s, its ideology against Islamism would be at the forefront - it is not. As the first woman and first convert of an organization with deep Wahhabi and salafist origins, I would have expected Dr. Mattson to have provided major testimony to the necessary reform and the long overdue sea change against salafism necessary in her organization. Without this and with all the evidence linking them to the Muslim Brotherhood, ISNA clearly remains wedded to the Islamist and Wahhabi origins of its founders and its directors. As many have already done, a review of her public commentary demonstrates no such sea change. In fact a review of her public pronouncements seems to basically verify that she tows the Islamist line.
From Mattson there has been no condemnation of the Islamic state or central tenets of Islamism. No public defense of women’s rights against the medieval laws enacted by Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia or taught by many of the texts distributed by her own ISNA (i.e. of Mawdudi or Qaradawi) and its affiliated bookstores and bizarres. No condemnation of the OIC and its promotion of blasphemy laws and its blind promotion of authoritarian regimes including any criticism of the 57 so-called Muslim nations nearly all of which are some form of despotic dictatorships and monarchies which oppress their minorities. Her commentaries have repeatedly rather been apologetics wrapped in victimology and false moral equivalency between terrorism and American security efforts.
If you don’t believe this commentary here, just check into the ISNA convention this past weekend in Columbus, Ohio. Their bazaars, attended by thousands, will be full of political Islamist literature. Rest assured, anti-Islamist literature against the formation of the Islamic state or public implementation of sharia will be nonexistent.
The DNC and so many in the media continue to sadly miss how Mattson is simply window dressing to an organization whose mission remains at serious odds with the core values of liberty and our secular liberal democracy which are classically American.
My own experience with ISNA solidified in my mind long ago that it was a political and an Islamist organization which covered itself in the spiritual language of Islam for the political promotion of its leadership. For example, in 1994 when I was on leave from the U.S. Navy, I naively attended an Islamic Medical Association (IMA) event with a U.S. Navy professor and mentor in order to present some research. We happened to attend the first day of the ISNA meeting which ran in succession with the IMA that September of 1994. The keynote address to open the ISNA meeting was given by none other than, Siraj Wahhaj, a long time ISNA and CAIR leader until today. Wahhaj most recently gained notoriety for his subway advertisements about Islam in New York City and was himself an unindicted coconspirator in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center who provided testimony in court defending the character of the blind sheikh- Omar Abdel-Rahman.
During his speech that year in ISNA, Siraj Wahhaj held up a Koran and stated clearly that it is his goal as it should be for every Muslim to replace the Constitution with the Koran and bring Islamic governance to the West. During question and answer I stood up and reminded the entire audience of thousands of Muslims of the seditious nature of his comments and admonished all military members to dissociate from ISNA immediately as I did. Until this day there is no ideological evidence whatsoever that ISNA does not remain on track with that mission vis-à-vis the Islamic state and a “soft Jihad.”
Groups like the DNC can choose all they want to ignore the political mission of ISNA and all of its associated Islamist organizations. But at the end of the day ISNA is not simply a ‘faith-based’ organization. It is an obvious manifestation of Islamism - political Islam.
Make no mistake. ISNA has a large membership and is linked to the funding of over half of the mosques in the United States through their North American Islamic Trust (NAIT). Their annual convention this weekend in Columbus will bring in tens of thousands of Muslims. Many Muslim members of these organizations get swept in by various publications, meetings, verbiage, and tribal techniques which take on a very Islamic and seemingly spiritual tone. But in reality, the core mission beneath the false veneer is political. This false veneer changes only based upon the particular setting. Mattson serves her purpose well for the Salafists running the organization as long as their core Islamist ideologies remain unwavering and her public projection gives the image of women’s rights and modernity when in fact virtually no work is being done by ISNA to promote such needed changes toward modernity in the Muslim community. Attendees at ISNA’s national convention last September noted that the panels on women’s rights and domestic abuse were poorly attended while the panels on Islamophobia and victimization were standing room only. Look at Mattson’s writings - slim pickings on anti-Islamist reform and strong suggestions of Islamism. Again, more window dressing with no real leadership.
Is it enough for the American establishment to engage Muslims who simply condemn the act of terror? Not only is the answer a resounding, “no,” but it is actually dangerous and gives a false sense of security against the ideologies we are countering. The elevation of ISNA by the DNC is a clear demonstration that they really have no idea whatsoever about the political ideology which that organization represents.
It’s time to afford leaders of the Muslim community the same scrutiny we give any other political organization in the United States. Look at Dr. Mattson’s own words and that of ISNA’s and make an assessment for yourself about where she falls in the continuum between Islamism and liberty. What did Dr. Mattson for example mean when she said, “People of faith have a certain kind of solidarity with others of their faith community that transcends the basic rights and duties of citizenship.” Sounds like a central tenet of political Islam to me.
As our nation faces a continued threat of radical Islamists, where is the wisdom in the elevation of Islamist organizations? In a written statement Fox News reported that the DNCC said,
“She (Mattson) is part of an organization that has met with leaders like Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and key Bush Administration adviser Karen Hughes. Under her tenure, ISNA has worked to build understanding and has been supported by the National Council of Churches and the Union for Reform Judaism which hosted Mattson at its biennial conference last year.”
One can begin to see how ISNA gains its legitimacy not from any review of its core ideologies which remain wholly unchecked, but rather from the misguided associations of other parts of the American governmental, religious, and media establishment. One endorsement leads to another, leads to another and they all become mutually dependent on the endorsement of the other with no one doing any homework on ISNA’s real core ideologies.
It may be the easiest short cut to placate the loudest arm of Islamism in the United States, but it does our efforts against the dangerous ideology of political Islam and the stranglehold of Islamists over the Muslim community no good whatsoever. Our own leading politicians are unable to clearly articulate and understand the central ideologies at stake in this global battle of ideas between political Islam and the West. So, it should not be a surprise when Islamist organizations continue to gain influence and legitimacy.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor M. Zuhdi Jasser is the founder and Chairman of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy based in Phoenix Arizona. He is a former U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander, a physician in private practice, and a community activist. He can be reached at Zuhdi@aifdemocracy.org.
Exclusive: When It Comes to Islamism, the DNC Still Doesn’t Get It
M. Zuhdi Jasser
Last week’s opening festivities at the Democrat National Convention in Denver began with an interfaith prayer. As the Democrat Party searches for its newfound interest in faith, it quickly called upon one of the lowest hanging fruit in the American Muslim community - the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). Ingrid Mattson, the President of ISNA gave a speech along with Adbur-Rahim Ali of the Northeast Denver Islamic Center. Some may dismiss the selection of nine speakers of faith at the political shindig as irrelevant and simply part of the pomp and circumstance of the DNC Convention.
But propping up ISNA in today’s environment is akin to propping up the Legal Guild (a ‘60s Communist front group) to address the convention during the Cold War. Our civil servants will verify that they have prevented over 30 attacks by militant Islamists upon our nation and our citizens since 9/11. The only ideology that unites the groups set upon our destruction is not violence. It is political Islam - their Islamism. Unless we identify both violent and non-violent political Islam as a root cause of terrorism we will never win this conflict. Militant Islamists, much as non-militant Islamists, seek some form of a transnational Muslim, political movement. They both seek various forms of the ascendancy of Islam with respect to other religions culminating in the establishment of Islamic states.
It is not enough to condemn terrorism for politically active Muslims to be “friends of American security interests” or pillars of the representation of ‘spiritual’ Islam. If Muslim organizations are to be lifted up as ‘friends of government,’ they, at the minimum, need to share a common vision of ideal governance - that of a secular liberal democracy. It is against American interests and certainly an obstacle in the work of all anti-Islamist Muslims for the American establishment to lift up Islamists, manifestations of political Islam, as representatives of Muslims and especially as representatives of “non-political” Islam. ISNA is without question patently political. I would defy anyone to find evidence of its rejection of the ideology of Islamism and similarly its defense of the ideology of the secular liberal democracy in the writings and public work of any of its leaders. To do this ISNA would have to sponsor and distribute intellectual work against the foundations of the Muslim Brotherhood, Sayyid Qutb, Sayyid Al-Mawdudi, and Yusuf Al-Qaradawi. Not only do they not do this, the vast majority of the other imams, books, and tapes they promote all derive their ideology from the same Salafist political mindset.
If anyone had done their homework at the DNC they would have realized that the primary origin of political Islam in the early twentieth century is the Muslim Brotherhood - arguably the central nervous system of political Islam globally. Its imams and spiritual leaders over the past century from Sayyid Qutb, Hassan al-Banna, to the current Godfather, Yusuf Al-Qaradawi are ultimately the seeds of thought which have sprouted the vast majority of Islamist movements in the world whether militant or not. The means employed by Islamists may vary from nation to nation but in the end their goals of establishing an Islamic state are almost universally the same.
ISNA has demonstrated repeatedly that its goals in the United States are no different from the Muslim Brotherhood’s goals in Jordan, Egypt, Syria, or England for that matter. Its leadership is generally either an outgrowth of the MB salafist ideology in the Middle East or an outgrowth of the similar Deobandi ideology of the Indo-Pakistani region.
As others have also noted, the Department of Justice did not coincidentally list ISNA as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the federal Holy Land Foundation trial in Dallas. All of the associated documentation and links to the MB’s Project in the west and the implicated individuals who share the ideology of political Islam should cause great concern.
Ingrid Mattson, an articulate Canadian convert to Islam, comes across superficially as a benign figure for the purposes of a DNC prayer gathering. But if her years of presidency of ISNA thus far have demonstrated anything, it has shown publicly that her role is nothing more than window dressing for a political organization whose mission of political Islam remains quite unchanged. Note ISNA’s continued participation in the intensely political American Muslim Political Coordination Committee. If she is as “modernized” and apolitical a Muslim leader as her public pronouncements and packaging would purport, I would have expected to see major work from this Hartford Seminary professor marginalizing political Islam and the transnational goal of Islamists. If ISNA is truly not Islamist or the same ISNA as the Wahhabis who formed it out of the MSA in the ‘60s and ‘70s, its ideology against Islamism would be at the forefront - it is not. As the first woman and first convert of an organization with deep Wahhabi and salafist origins, I would have expected Dr. Mattson to have provided major testimony to the necessary reform and the long overdue sea change against salafism necessary in her organization. Without this and with all the evidence linking them to the Muslim Brotherhood, ISNA clearly remains wedded to the Islamist and Wahhabi origins of its founders and its directors. As many have already done, a review of her public commentary demonstrates no such sea change. In fact a review of her public pronouncements seems to basically verify that she tows the Islamist line.
From Mattson there has been no condemnation of the Islamic state or central tenets of Islamism. No public defense of women’s rights against the medieval laws enacted by Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia or taught by many of the texts distributed by her own ISNA (i.e. of Mawdudi or Qaradawi) and its affiliated bookstores and bizarres. No condemnation of the OIC and its promotion of blasphemy laws and its blind promotion of authoritarian regimes including any criticism of the 57 so-called Muslim nations nearly all of which are some form of despotic dictatorships and monarchies which oppress their minorities. Her commentaries have repeatedly rather been apologetics wrapped in victimology and false moral equivalency between terrorism and American security efforts.
If you don’t believe this commentary here, just check into the ISNA convention this past weekend in Columbus, Ohio. Their bazaars, attended by thousands, will be full of political Islamist literature. Rest assured, anti-Islamist literature against the formation of the Islamic state or public implementation of sharia will be nonexistent.
The DNC and so many in the media continue to sadly miss how Mattson is simply window dressing to an organization whose mission remains at serious odds with the core values of liberty and our secular liberal democracy which are classically American.
My own experience with ISNA solidified in my mind long ago that it was a political and an Islamist organization which covered itself in the spiritual language of Islam for the political promotion of its leadership. For example, in 1994 when I was on leave from the U.S. Navy, I naively attended an Islamic Medical Association (IMA) event with a U.S. Navy professor and mentor in order to present some research. We happened to attend the first day of the ISNA meeting which ran in succession with the IMA that September of 1994. The keynote address to open the ISNA meeting was given by none other than, Siraj Wahhaj, a long time ISNA and CAIR leader until today. Wahhaj most recently gained notoriety for his subway advertisements about Islam in New York City and was himself an unindicted coconspirator in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center who provided testimony in court defending the character of the blind sheikh- Omar Abdel-Rahman.
During his speech that year in ISNA, Siraj Wahhaj held up a Koran and stated clearly that it is his goal as it should be for every Muslim to replace the Constitution with the Koran and bring Islamic governance to the West. During question and answer I stood up and reminded the entire audience of thousands of Muslims of the seditious nature of his comments and admonished all military members to dissociate from ISNA immediately as I did. Until this day there is no ideological evidence whatsoever that ISNA does not remain on track with that mission vis-à-vis the Islamic state and a “soft Jihad.”
Groups like the DNC can choose all they want to ignore the political mission of ISNA and all of its associated Islamist organizations. But at the end of the day ISNA is not simply a ‘faith-based’ organization. It is an obvious manifestation of Islamism - political Islam.
Make no mistake. ISNA has a large membership and is linked to the funding of over half of the mosques in the United States through their North American Islamic Trust (NAIT). Their annual convention this weekend in Columbus will bring in tens of thousands of Muslims. Many Muslim members of these organizations get swept in by various publications, meetings, verbiage, and tribal techniques which take on a very Islamic and seemingly spiritual tone. But in reality, the core mission beneath the false veneer is political. This false veneer changes only based upon the particular setting. Mattson serves her purpose well for the Salafists running the organization as long as their core Islamist ideologies remain unwavering and her public projection gives the image of women’s rights and modernity when in fact virtually no work is being done by ISNA to promote such needed changes toward modernity in the Muslim community. Attendees at ISNA’s national convention last September noted that the panels on women’s rights and domestic abuse were poorly attended while the panels on Islamophobia and victimization were standing room only. Look at Mattson’s writings - slim pickings on anti-Islamist reform and strong suggestions of Islamism. Again, more window dressing with no real leadership.
Is it enough for the American establishment to engage Muslims who simply condemn the act of terror? Not only is the answer a resounding, “no,” but it is actually dangerous and gives a false sense of security against the ideologies we are countering. The elevation of ISNA by the DNC is a clear demonstration that they really have no idea whatsoever about the political ideology which that organization represents.
It’s time to afford leaders of the Muslim community the same scrutiny we give any other political organization in the United States. Look at Dr. Mattson’s own words and that of ISNA’s and make an assessment for yourself about where she falls in the continuum between Islamism and liberty. What did Dr. Mattson for example mean when she said, “People of faith have a certain kind of solidarity with others of their faith community that transcends the basic rights and duties of citizenship.” Sounds like a central tenet of political Islam to me.
As our nation faces a continued threat of radical Islamists, where is the wisdom in the elevation of Islamist organizations? In a written statement Fox News reported that the DNCC said,
“She (Mattson) is part of an organization that has met with leaders like Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and key Bush Administration adviser Karen Hughes. Under her tenure, ISNA has worked to build understanding and has been supported by the National Council of Churches and the Union for Reform Judaism which hosted Mattson at its biennial conference last year.”
One can begin to see how ISNA gains its legitimacy not from any review of its core ideologies which remain wholly unchecked, but rather from the misguided associations of other parts of the American governmental, religious, and media establishment. One endorsement leads to another, leads to another and they all become mutually dependent on the endorsement of the other with no one doing any homework on ISNA’s real core ideologies.
It may be the easiest short cut to placate the loudest arm of Islamism in the United States, but it does our efforts against the dangerous ideology of political Islam and the stranglehold of Islamists over the Muslim community no good whatsoever. Our own leading politicians are unable to clearly articulate and understand the central ideologies at stake in this global battle of ideas between political Islam and the West. So, it should not be a surprise when Islamist organizations continue to gain influence and legitimacy.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor M. Zuhdi Jasser is the founder and Chairman of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy based in Phoenix Arizona. He is a former U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander, a physician in private practice, and a community activist. He can be reached at Zuhdi@aifdemocracy.org.
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