Tuesday, April 29, 2008

THE 3 R's OF REVOLUTIONARY CANDOR (Part 1)



Summarizing history to a few words is not an easy task, but we would like to postulate something called the [Modern] 3 R's of Revolutionary Candor as defined here at the Scenewash Project and The Two-Fisted Quorum are Race, Religion, and Riches. This trinity must be greeted by first understanding the the origins of the first two world wars, and so that we can then recognize the third which is upon us. The tensions that led to World War I were exceedingly secular and nationalistic in nature, and PRIMARILY economic.

Below is a critical essay co-authored by three grad students in he late 1990s—Suzanne Karpilovsky, Maria Fogel, and Olivia Kobelt—detailing the causes of the First World War, and suffices brilliantly to fulfill our notion that the war which was launched with word of a royal assassination in Europe in 1914 at the height of the Industrial Revolution was primarily driven by RICHES.


Introduction
World War I was the result of leaders' aggression towards other countries which was supported by the rising nationalism of the European nations. Economic and imperial competition and fear of war prompted military alliances and an arms race, which further escalated the tension contributing to the outbreak of war.

Nationalism
At the settlement of the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the principle of nationalism was ignored in favor of preserving the peace. Germany and Italy were left as divided states, but strong nationalist movements and revolutions led to the unification of Italy in 1861 and that of Germany in 1871. Another result of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 was that France was left seething over the loss of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany, and Revanche was a major goal of the French. Nationalism posed a problem for Austria-Hungary and the Balkans, areas comprised of many conflicting national groups. The ardent Panslavism of Serbia and Russia's willingness to support its Slavic brother conflicted with Austria-Hungary's Pan-Germanism.

Imperialism
Another factor which contributed to the increase in rivalry in Europe was imperialism. Great Britain, Germany and France needed foreign markets after the increase in manufacturing caused by the Industrial Revolution. These countries competed for economic expansion in Africa. Although Britain and France resolved their differences in Africa, several crises foreshadowing the war involved the clash of Germany against Britain and France in North Africa. In the Middle East, the crumbling Ottoman Empire was alluring to Austria-Hungary, the Balkans and Russia.

Bismarck and Alliances
World War I was caused in part by the two opposing alliances developed by Bismarckian diplomacy after the Franco-Prussian War. In order to diplomatically isolate France, Bismarck formed the Three Emperor's League in 1872, an alliance between Germany, Russia and Austria-Hungary. When the French occupied Tunisia, Bismarck took advantage of Italian resentment towards France and created the Triple Alliance between Germany, Italy and Austria- Hungary in 1882. In exchange for Italy's agreement to stay neutral if war broke out between Austria-Hungary and Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary would protect Italy from France. Russia and Austria-Hungary grew suspicious of each other over conflicts in the Balkans in 1887, but Bismarck repaired the damage to his alliances with a Reinsurance Treaty with Russia, allowing both powers to stay neutral if the other was at war.

Collapse of Bismarckian Alliances
However, after Bismarck was fired by Kaiser William II in 1890, the traditional dislike of Slavs kept Bismarck's successors from renewing the understanding with Russia. France took advantage of this opportunity to get an ally, and the Franco- Russian Entente was formed in 1891, which became a formal alliance in 1894. The Kruger telegram William II sent to congratulate the leader of the Boers for defeating the British in 1896, his instructions to the German soldiers to behave like Huns in China during the Boxer Rebellion, and particularly the large- scale navy he was building all contributed to British distrust of Germany.

As a result, Britain and France overlooked all major imperialistic conflict between them and formed the Entente Cordiale in 1904. Russia formed an Entente with Britain in 1907 after they had reached an understanding with Britain's ally Japan and William II had further alienated Russia by supporting Austrian ambitions in the Balkans. The Triple Entente, an informal coalition between Great Britain, France and Russia, now countered the Triple Alliance. International tension was greatly increased by the division of Europe into two armed camps.

Arms Race
The menace of the hostile division led to an arms race, another cause of World War I. Acknowledging that Germany was the leader in military organization and efficiency, the great powers of Europe copied the universal conscription, large reserves and detailed planning of the Prussian system. Technological and organizational developments led to the formation of general staffs with precise plans for mobilization and attack that often could not be reversed once they were begun. The German von Schlieffen Plan to attack France before Russia in the event of war with Russia was one such complicated plan that drew more countries into war than necessary.

Armies and navies were greatly expanded. The standing armies of France and Germany doubled in size between 1870 and 1914. Naval expansion was also extremely competitive, particularly between Germany and Great Britain. By 1889, the British had established the principle that in order to maintain naval superiority in the event of war they would have to have a navy two and a half times as large as the second-largest navy. This motivated the British to launch the Dreadnought, invented by Admiral Sir John Fisher, in 1906. The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 had demonstrated how effective these battleships were. As Britain increased their output of battleships, Germany correspondingly stepped up their naval production, including the Dreadnought. Although efforts for worldwide disarmament were made at the Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907, international rivalry caused the arms race to continue to feed on itself.

Crises in Africa
The friction of an armed and divided Europe escalated into several crises in Morocco and the Balkans which nearly ended in war. In 1905, Germany announced its support of independence for Morocco, the African colony which Britain had given France in 1904. The British defended the French, and war was avoided by a international conference in Algeciras in 1906 which allowed France to make Morocco a French protectorate.

Bosnian Crisis of 1908
Another conflict was incited by the Austria-Hungarian annexation of the former Turkish province of Bosnia in 1908. The Greater Serbian movement had as an object the acquisition of Slavic Bosnia, so Serbia threatened war on Austria-Hungary. Russia had pledged their support to Serbia, so they began to mobilize, which caused Germany, allied with Austria-Hungary, to threaten war on Russia. The beginning of World War I was postponed when Russia backed down, but relations between Austria- Hungary and Serbia were greatly strained.

Morocco II
A second Moroccan crisis occurred in 1911 when Germany sent a warship to Agadir in protest of French supremacy in Morocco, claiming the French had violated the agreement at Algeciras. Britain again rose to France's defense and gave the Germans stern warnings. Germany agreed to allow France a free hand in Morocco in exchange for part of the French Congo. In the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, the Balkan States drove the Turks back to Constantinople and fought among themselves over territory. Tensions between Serbia and Austria-Hungary increased when Austria-Hungary forced Serbia to abandon some of its gains.

Assassination in Sarajevo
Europe had reached its breaking point when on June 28, 1914, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the Austria-Hungarian throne, was assassinated in Sarajevo, Bosnia, by a Serbian nationalist belonging to an organization known as the Black Hand (Narodna Obrana). Immediately following the assassination Germany pledged its full support (blank check) to Austria-Hungary, pressuring them to declare war on Serbia, while France strengthened its backing of Russia. Convinced that the Serbian government had conspired against them, Austria-Hungary issued Serbia an unacceptable ultimatum, to which Serbia consented almost entirely.

Falling Dominoes
Unsatisfied, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on July 28, 1914. On July 29, Russia ordered a partial mobilization only against Austria-Hungary in support of Serbia, which escalated into a general mobilization. The Germans threatened war on July 31 if the Russians did not demobilize. Upon being asked by Germany what it would do in the event of a Russo-German War, France responded that it would act in its own interests and mobilized. On August 1, Germany declared war on Russia, and two days later, on France. The German invasion of Belgium to attack France, which violated Belgium's official neutrality, prompted Britain to declare war on Germany. World War I had begun.

By: Suzanne Karpilovsky (IB Diploma 1996), Maria Fogel (IB Diploma 1996), Olivia Kobelt (Class of 1996)

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AN ETHICAL BASIS FOR WAR

An Ethical Basis for War Against Political Islam: Part 4

This newsletter is one of a series on the subject...

Jihad
The dualistic ethical system of the Islamic Trilogy prepares the foundation of jihad with one set of ethics for Muslims and another set of ethics for the kafirs. So, there are two ways to deal with the kafirs. One is to think of them as inferiors but act in a kindly way. The other is jihad.

Jihad is a unique word. Its actual meaning is struggle or effort. Islam speaks of two types-the lesser jihad and the greater jihad. The greater jihad is spiritual effort or internal struggle, to stop smoking, for example, or control one's greed. Only 3% of the Hadith Bukhari recorded about jihad refer to the greater jihad. The rest, 97%, of the Hadith about jihad are about war.

The Fundamentals of Jihad
The following hadith summarizes all the key elements of jihad. (Notice that only the fourth item, the Day of Resurrection, is purely religious in nature). It tells us that the whole world must submit to Islam; kafirs are the enemy simply by not being Muslims. To achieve this dominance, Islam may use terror and violence. It may use psychological warfare, fear, and theft. It may take the spoils of war from kafirs. Violence and terror are made sacred by the Koran. Peace comes only with submission to Islam.

Bukhari 1,7,331 Mohammed: "I have been given five things which were not given to any one else before me:
Allah made me victorious by awe, by His frightening my enemies for a distance of one month's journey.
The earth has been made for me and for my followers a place for praying and a place to perform rituals; therefore, anyone of my followers can pray wherever the time of a prayer is due.
The spoils of war has been made lawful for me yet it was not lawful for anyone else before me.
I have been given the right of intercession on the Day of Resurrection.
Every prophet used to be sent to his nation only but I have been sent to all mankind."

The story of the Trilogy culminates in the dominance of political Islam. The Trilogy teaches that Islam is the perfect political system and is destined to rule the entire world. The governments and constitutions of the world must all submit to political Islam. If the political systems of the kafirs do not submit, then force, jihad, may be used. All jihad is defensive, since refusing to submit to Islam is an offense against Allah. All Muslims must support the political action of jihad. This may take several forms-fighting, proselytizing or contributing money.

The Trilogy lays out the complete strategy, tactics, and vision of political Islam and jihad. Much of the Trilogy is about how Mohammed dealt with those people who disagreed with him. Violent political action with a religious motivation was taken against kafirs. Under Islam, their only political freedom was to submit. This legal inferiority is sacred, eternal and universal.

Duality of ethics was the basis for Mohammed's greatest single innovation-jihad. Jihad is dual ethics with sacred violence. The key religious element of the dual ethics is that Allah sanctifies violence for complete domination. The kafirs must submit to Islam.

In Mecca, Mohammed demonstrated the initial practice of jihad when Islam was weak: persuasion and conversion. When he moved to Medina, he demonstrated how jihad worked when Islam was strong: using immigration against inhabitants, creating political power by struggling against the host, dominating other religions, using violence, sowing division among the tribes, and establishing a government.

Jihad is civilizational war for two reasons. First, jihad uses every aspect of civilization as an element of war. Violence, education, fear, psychology, sociology, sex, population, immigration, public relations, corruption and religion are all used in jihad. Military force and terror are the smallest aspects of jihad. The second reason that jihad is civilizational war is that the purpose of jihad is to annihilate every aspect of the non-Islamic civilization. Art, history, law, dress, manners, names, education, customs, government, foreign policy, economics, and every other detail must become Islamic.

The greatest error in understanding jihad is to think of military force and terror. Jihad does not have to fit the Geneva Convention's rules. A jihadist is a civilian in the army of Allah and can move back and forth from soldier to citizen. Giving money to an Islamic "charity" is jihad. Writing a letter to the editor about how well Islam treats women is jihad. Having eight children is jihad.

The Koran could not be more clear-every Muslim is to be a jihadist. Jihad is laid out in all three of the Trilogy texts. There is no Islam without jihad.

Islam has been waging civilizational war for centuries. Before the Muslims arrived, Egypt and North Africa and the southern coast of the Mediterranean were Christian. There was a Buddhist monastery in Alexandria Egypt. Turkey was Buddhist and Christian. Persia-now Iran-was Zoroastrian. The Hindu culture covered an area of the world twice as large as it is now. Languages disappeared to be replace by Arabic.

When Napoleon invaded Egypt, he discovered that the Muslim population knew nothing about the pyramids or temples. The 5,000 year old culture of the Pharaohs had been annihilated. There is no longer a population of Buddhists in Afghanistan. Baghdad was once home to the oldest community of Jews in the world, brought there as Babylonian captives, today it is estimated that there are no more than a few dozen old, sick and infirm Jews left in Iraq. All cultures living within the borders of Islam are annihilated. [Whole] Peoples either leave, convert or die out. There are no exceptions.

Once jihad has conquered a civilization, there is never another revolution. Even if the form of government changes, it remains Muslim. The only time Islam has left an occupied territory has been because it was forced out by military might.

Rape as Warfare
Mohammed encouraged the rape of female captives after battles. This is reported in the Sira and Hadith and approved in the Koran. In jihad it is not considered rape to have forced sex with a woman as long as she is a kafir captive or slave. This is true even if she is married. In the Muslim world, the act is only rape when committed against a Muslim. Again, the dual ethics of Islam prevail.

Bukhari 3,34,431 One of the captives was a beautiful Jewess, Safiya. Dihya had her first, but she was given to Mohammed next.

4:24 Also forbidden to you are married women unless they are your slaves or captives.

Rape was one of Mohammed's tactics of conquest because it worked. Forced sex with women whose protectors had been killed was considered supreme domination. It was also a humiliation to the women's male relatives and husbands who had not been killed. If a woman is captured, raped and absorbed into the captor's environment, her helplessness renders her totally compliant and her submission is complete. To protect her children from slavery, many widows and rape victims readily agreed to conversion and their children were raised as Muslims.

Forced sex is far more than rape in political Islam. It is a method of war, a tactical strike which is not a crime because it is jihad. It is not a sin. It is practiced against the kafir and is sanctioned in the Trilogy of the Koran, the Sira, and the Hadith.

Bill Warner

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Friday, April 25, 2008

IS IT TIME AGAIN FOR NATIONAL RATIONING?

Well, I was not yet born, but I know my American history better than a good portion of those living in the nation today. And history speaks of the time when one just could not stroll into the market to buy certain items whenever one wished. There was a "no excuses" policy called food and gasoline rationing in place. Pearl Harbor changed the pace and purpose of every American. Almost overnight the economy shifted to war production. Consumer goods now took a back seat to military production as nationwide rationing began almost immediately.

The word on the street was, "There's a war on, you know."

Everyone understood, and most dealt with the new restrictions with patriotic fervor and civic pride.

The news today is grim. Food shortages worldwide, an obese population nationally. Spiraling gasoline prices. The falling dollar. An unstable stock market. Global warming. A public bored with consumer habits, itching for a defining spirit of purpose, a purpose greater than oneself, one favoring the nation (or as some might put it, the world) rather than the individual. Could it be that the Bush administration made his critical error in winning American hearts and minds in suggesting that "business as usual" was the tact to take while he conducted his war on terror.

There's no answer to that question, but rationing could again be on America's plate. China, Russia, Iran, Al-Qeada. All in the news, and seemingly wanted our national head on a platter. Our enemies are great and persistent. Perhaps we should all reacquire a sense of political humility. Perhaps, despite the initial pain and rebrokering of a system already teetering on the brink of collapse, our financial leadership should be seriously considering how a well-regulated regimen of product rationing would help steer this country back to the mindset that will prepare us for what is certainly in store.

Such a tactic would certainly put a heavy spray of starch into the britches of both the control-freaked Leftists and the grab-grubby Rightists. That would be fun to watch. Now what was I just writing about F.A Hayek?

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RUSH LIMBAUGH NAILS THIS ISSUE

by Rush Limba​ugh

I think​ the vast diffe​rence​s in compe​nsati​on betwe​en victi​ms of the Septe​mber 11 casua​lties and those​ who die servi​ng our count​ry in unifo​rm are profo​und.

No one is reall​y talki​ng about​ it eithe​r,​ becau​se you just don'​t criti​cize anyth​ing havin​g to do with Septe​mber 11.​ Well,​ I can'​t let the nu​mbers​ pass by becau​se it says somet​hing reall​y distu​rbing​ about​ the entit​lemen​t menta​lity of this count​ry.​ If you lost a famil​y membe​r in the Septe​mber 11 attac​k,​ you'​re going​ to get an avera​ge of $​1,​185,​000.​The range​ is a minim​um guara​ntee of $​250,​000 all the way up to $4.7 milli​on.​

if you are a survi​ving famil​y membe​r of an Ameri​can soldi​er kille​d in actio​n,​ the first​ check​ you get is a $​6,​000 direc​t death​ benef​it,​ half of which​ is taxable.

Next,​ you get $​1,​750 for buria​l costs​.​ If you are the survi​ving spous​e,​ you get $833 a month​ until​ you remar​ry.​ And there​'​s a payme​nt of $211 per month​ for each child​ under​ 18. When the child​ hits 18, those​ payme​nts come to a scree​ching​ halt.​

Keep in mind that some of the peopl​e who are getti​ng an avera​ge of $​1.​185 milli​on up to $4.7 milli​on are compl​ainin​g that it's not enoug​h.​Their​ death​s were tragi​c,​ but for most,​ they were simpl​y in the wrong​ place​ at the wrong​ time.​ Soldi​ers put themselves​ in harms​ way FOR ALL OF US, and they and their​ famil​ies know the dange​rs.​

We also learn​ed over the weeke​nd that some of the victi​ms from the Oklah​oma City bombi​ng have start​ed an organ​izati​on askin​g for the same deal that the Septe​mber 11 famil​ies are getti​ng.​ In addit​ion to that,​ some of the famil​ies of those​ bombe​d in the embas​sies are now askin​g for compe​nsati​on as well.​

You see where​ this is going​,​ don'​t you? Folks​,​ this is part and parce​l of over 50 years​ of entit​lemen​t polit​ics in this count​ry.​ It's just reall​y sad. Every​ time a pay raise​ comes​ up for the milit​ary,​ they usual​ly recei​ve next to nothi​ng of a raise​.​ Now the green​ machi​ne is in comba​t in the Middl​e East while​ their​ famil​ies have to survi​ve on food stamp​s and live in low-​rent housing.​ Make sense​?​

Howev​er,​ our own US Congr​ess voted​ thems​elves​ a raise​.​ Many of you don'​t know that they only have to be in Congr​ess one time to recei​ve a pensi​on that is more than $​15,​000 per month​.​ And most are now equal​ to being​ milli​onair​es plus.​ They do not recei​ve Socia​l Secur​ity on retir​ement​ becau​se they didn'​t have to pay into the syste​m.​ If some of the milit​ary peopl​e stay in for 20 years​ and get out as an E-7, they may recei​ve a pensi​on of $​1,​000 per month​,​ and the very peopl​e who place​d them in harm'​s way recei​ves a pensi​on of $15,​000 per month​.​

I would​ like to see our elect​ed offic​ials pick up a weapo​n and join ranks​ befor​e they start​ cutti​ng out benef​its and lower​ing pay for our sons and daugh​ters who are now fight​ing.​

Startling, isn't it? This has been one of my biggest gripes about war and how it gets to be that way—for decades. And to be perfectly frank, I was immediately against all those millions going to the 911 families because I had not glossed over the soldier's situation. Even to someone who finds these conspiracy theories repugnant and ludicrous, it seemed like George W. Bush was in much too big a hurry to pay off folks after the tragedy. Something fishy there. And Congress should be inconveniently ashamed of what it is doing to the front line soldier.

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TAKEOVER OF INDUSTRIAL SECTOR CONTINUES

STEUBENVILLE, WV—Reports today from news services in India say Essar Steel is making a bid to buy Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel Corp. from parent Esmark Inc., which completed its takeover of the local steelmaker in November.

The Economic Times of India is reporting Essar is in a bidding war for Wheeling-Pitt with Russia’s Severstal. The newspaper placed the value of Wheeling-Pitt at $1.5 billion.

The value of the company has been an issue of late as Esmark prepared federally required financial reports on year-end and first quarter data. Company officials have said there were several issues delaying the financial reports, including how to set values for some of the company’s assets, as well as accounting complexities relating to the completion of the Esmark takeover in the fourth quarter. The value of a deal for Wheeling-Pitt was not disclosed in the reports.

Esmark stock has been on the rise since March 28, when its adjusted closing price was $11.27. The stock hit a recent peak of $13.62 at the close on Wednesday and closed Thursday at $13.49. At the time of the Esmark deal in November, the stock was valued at $19.24.

Wheeling-Pitt officials did not immediately return calls for comment this morning. The Economic Times said Essar had no comment on the deal.

Severstal won the bidding war for ArcelorMittal’s Sparrows Point, Md., mill with an $810 million cash bid. Esmark had tried to buy the Maryland steel plant but a $1.35 billion financial package unraveled in December. ArcelorMittal had been ordered by the Justice Department to sell Sparrows Point to satisfy antitrust concerns regarding concentration of tin production in the eastern portion of North America.

According to the paper, Essar had been a bidder on Sparrows in the second round of bidding, losing out to Severstal.

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JOHN JAY CHAPMAN (1862-1933)

A Man Out of Season

ONE OF LIFE'S PLEASURES is discovering a provocative author worthy of attention who has fallen off the cultural map. Such is the case with John Jay Chapman. Although a prolific writer, having published numerous magazine articles and books criticizing late nineteenth and early twentieth century political, social, and moral values, Chapman is little known today. Adding to the mystery of his obscurity, is the extensive and powerful connections he had. John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court was his grandfather, Chapman counted William James as a friend, and he considered Theodore Roosevelt—Judas.

Chapman was a member of that segment of the northeastern intellectual elite alarmed at the cupidity, stupidity, and injustice the Gilded Age unleashed. Equally threatening to Chapman and his circle was the possibility of popular revolt ignited by the Age's toxic combination of laissez-faire capitalism and social darwinism. Chapman's disquiet prompted him to critique the moral, political, and social excesses of the day and the corruption which co-opted and silenced those who promoted radical reform.

His silence could not be bought. Chapman along with Ida B. Wells was among the first writers to chronicle and criticize lynching. In his essay, Coatesville, Chapman dissected the cultural pathology that permitted "upstanding" citizens to treat torture and lynching as acts delivering swift justice.

So why is John Jay Chapman lost from the pantheon of American letters? My hypothesis—academics and the public have difficulty categorizing him. Chapman wrote as a citizen about the issues he found interesting not as an expert specializing in a particular field. He exemplified that much praised individual—the Renaissance man. Americans, while ardently proclaiming the virtues of Da Vinci, are generally made uneasy by the Renaissance man's protean interests and accomplishments.

They harbor a deep seated mistrust of a mind that is immersed creatively in practical doings and fine art but also pertains to the highest human interests, from morals and religion to the political state and social rights, and thence to the study of the individual self in life and literature.

Americans mistrust the Renaissance quality of mind because they perceive it as characteristic of the amateur and not to be taken seriously.

Although the amateur is currently regarded with bemused indulgence that was not always the case. If one called Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson an amateur scientist, statesmen, or writer they would not take offense. Their understanding of the word was based on its original meaning: one who loves of is fond of; one who has a taste of anything.

Franklin and Jefferson were amateurs because learning was their love not their profession. Just as the lover seeks to discover all there is to know about the beloved, the amateur brings the same passion to experience.

By the time John Jay Chapman began writing the amateur's relationship to knowledge was beginning to be supplanted by the professional's. No longer was love of learning an adequate justification for seeking knowledge. The amateur became synonymous with the dabbler. In part, academics resented the amateur's quest for knowledge because it was not motivated by the need to make a living, therefore it could not be taken seriously.

By the end of the nineteenth century, a legitimate quest for knowledge increasingly demanded an academic imprimatur. Chapman, not interested in currying an academic position from which to advance his learning and air his views, cast his lot as a public intellectual, writing books, magazine articles, and lecturing to gain an audience.

Labels like public intellectual or critic do not capture the man's complexity. Chapman is a man of contradictions. A fierce defender of intellect and a person often dominated by his passions. A progressive reformer who writes about the consequences of wantonly jettisoning tradition. A citizen who was among the first to raise his voice against lynching and later wrote vitriolic anti-catholic attacks.

A man intimately acquainted with the dark night of the soul, but used humor to diagnose the pathologies of his day. The malcontent, as described by Randolph Bourne, best captures the twists and turns of Chapman's character. In his essay, Twilight of Idols, Bourne described this type.

"They (malcontents) are quite through with the professional critics and classicists who have let cultural values die through their own personal ineptitude. Yet these malcontents have no intention of being cultural vandals, only to slay. They are not barbarians, but seek the vital and sincere everywhere...

"They will be harsh and often bad-tempered, and they feel that the break-up of things is no time for mellowness. They will have a taste for spiritual adventure, and for sinister imaginative excursions. It will not be Puritanism so much as complacency that they will fight...

"Something more mocking, more irreverent, they will constantly want. They will take institutions very lightly, indeed will never fail to be surprised at the seriousness with which good radicals take the stated offices and systems. Their own contempt will be scarcely veiled, and they will be glad if they can tease, provoke, irritate thought on any subject...

"They will give offense to their elders who cannot see what all the concern is about, and they will hurt the more middle-aged sense of adventure upon which the better integrated minds of the younger generation will have compromised. Optimism is often compensatory, and the optimistic mood in American thought may mean merely that American life is too terrible to face. A more skeptical, malicious, desperate, ironical mood may actually be the sign of more vivid and more stirring life fermenting in America today.

"It may be a sign of hope. That thirst for more of the intellectual 'war and laughter' that we find Nietzsche calling us to may bring us satisfactions that optimism-haunted philosophies could never bring. Malcontentedness may be the beginning of promise."

Regarded as an amateur and a malcontent, Chapman has not taken his place in America's literary pantheon. It is our loss. The quality of Chapman's prose and thought make apparent the need to correct that oversight. To acquaint readers with Chapman's work I have provided links to his essays about education and will explore Chapman's essay, Learning, in depth.

Read it all.

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Thursday, April 24, 2008

MASSACHUSETTS POLICE GO BLACK

SPRINGFIELD, MA—Springfield's men in black are returning. The city's new police commissioner, William Fitchet, says members of the department's Street Crime Unit will again don black, military-style uniforms as part of his strategy to deal with youth violence. Fitchet's predecessor, Edward Flynn, had ditched the black attire as part of an effort to soften the image of the unit. Flynn left Springfield in January to become the police chief in Milwaukee.

Sgt. John Delaney told a city council hearing Wednesday that the stark uniforms send a message to criminals that officers are serious about making arrests, saying that a sense of "fear" has been missing for the past few years.

Okay, when those black uniforms stop bullets, we can all start wearing them, and I'd say we have something worth running up the flag pole.

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STOP NOW YE PLUNDERING CAPITALISTS

AND MAKE US PROUD AGAIN. There is a under-appreciated class of pro-capitalist anti-communist citizens workers who feel great pain at what America and the global economy have become. We want better choices to be made. We do not wish to destroy in order to have magically appear some unlikely new world because we believe we know at what price that new world would begin. We are the radical center. We want change, but we do not prefer left over right, or right over left. Here is an interesting article on how big business steals back our money after exploiting us in the first place which continues to proliferate the algorithm of the rich getting richer and the poor becoming more numerous, if not exactly poorer. Don't yawn quite yet, the article is solid, and worth a glance.

As someone who had suffered the early part of his life under a brutal regime, economic and political philosopher Friedrich Hayek's keen observation that capitalism works better than communism is proved mathematically. A thousand business owners each working in its own interest can react to the shifting aspects of supply and demand quicker and more efficiently than a centralized committee can even begin to recognize a problem. This mathematical insight solved the riddle once and for all for us here at the Two-Fisted Quorum, as to which is the preferred system, despite the problems with any system, by employing a metaphor akin to the historical scenario of the slow, bulky Spanish Armada warships who lost to the smaller, faster English fleet in rough weather.

We must turn the tide in this fight against an oligarchy of the rich. We must fight for freedom and renewed opportunity. This notion that things are not right does not make me a frothing leftist any more than wanting to own a gun to protect my family automatically makes me an avenging angel of the Right. Come now, let us reason together.

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Wednesday, April 23, 2008

HILLARY'S THE OBLITERATOR IN CHIEF

AS PENNSYLVANIA VOTERS go to the polls in a primary widely regarded as do-or-die for Sen. Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, the New York Democrat apparently is positioning herself to the right of some Republicans, vowing that if Iran attacks Israel with nuclear weapons, she would respond in kind against Tehran, with the ability to "totally obliterate them."

Would she, or won't she? Only her hairdresser knows for sure.

Clinton's remarks came during an interview airing tomorrow morning on the ABC News show, Good Morning America. ABC's Chris Cuomo asked Clinton what she would do if Iran attacked Israel with nuclear weapons, according to the network. "I want the Iranians to know that if I'm the president we will attack Iran," Clinton said. "In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them."

Aim big, but level a soft kick at the groin, just to get their attention. That's what many of us think about Hillary's commitment to defending Israel and America from this menace called Ahmadinejad's Mahdi. That poor fellow Ahmadinejad has been blustering for so long, his chin is dragging across his soup most of the time these days, but if he were to manage to finally go nuclear, there is little doubt he would immediately seek to create all that chaos that he believes his mysterious Mahdi requires for making that next appearance.

But somehow I believe her affinity for the button more than I believe Mister Obama in his earlier threatening words to Pakistan. Obama will opt for the jizya tactic. More bribery money to the troublemakers. That's his ticket. Bah, humbug. Stop all US payments to these crouching leopards, and while you are at it, why don't you show your toughness by being tough at home, and help police and eradicate the roving thugs already terrorizing our own urban and suburban neighborhoods throughout the nation...

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CONGRESSWOMAN MYRICK'S BOLD INITIATIVE

Myrick
U.S. Rep. Sue Myrick wants America to "wake up" and stop allowing terrorism to proliferate—and if that means revoking the passport of a former U.S. president or examining the preaching of prison chaplains, that's what she's prepared to do.

The Republican from Charlotte, N.C., on Friday released a list of 10 items she hopes will help peel back the layers on how radical elements of Islam might be infiltrating the military, school rooms and other elements of society. She also wants to stop the government from supporting terrorist organizations through financial investments, visa programs and military sales.

Earlier this week, she called for President Jimmy Carter's passport to be revoked because he met with Hamas, a Palestinian group that the U.S. government says supports terrorism.

"His actions reward terrorists, lend support and provide legitimacy to their belief that violence will eventually get them what they want," Myrick said. The co-founder of the House anti-terrorism caucus has spent an increasing amount of time trying to tackle what she views as threats posed at home by extremists, an issue that fuels her commitment to deporting illegal immigrants, which remains a priority.

We urge support for Representative Myrick's initiative.

1. Investigate all military chaplains endorsed by the convicted Islamic radical Abdurahman Alamoudi, who was imprisoned for funding a terrorist organization.
2. Investigate all prison chaplains endorsed by Alamoudi.
3. Investigate the selection process of Arabic translators working for the Pentagon and the FBI.
4. Examine the non-profit status of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
5. Make it an act of sedition or solicitation of treason to preach or publish materials that call for the deaths of Americans.
6. Audit sovereign wealth funds in the United States.
7. Cancel scholarship student visa program with Saudi Arabia until they reform their text books, which she claims preach hatred and violence against non-Muslims.
8. Restrict religious visas for imams who come from countries that don't allow reciprocal visits by non-Muslim clergy.
9. Cancel contracts to train Saudi police and security in U.S. counterterrorism tactics.
10. Block the sale of sensitive military munitions to Saudi Arabia.

Again, we here at the Two-Fisted Quorun call for full support of this "common sense" initiative, and suggest that all concerned citizens should contact their US representatives to urge them to support it also.

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Monday, April 21, 2008

IF EVERYONE JUST KNEW

Anybody remember this? Another gem from the sands of duplicitous Saudi Arabia and their thinly veiled plans of Islamic world domination.

"I summon my blue-eyed slaves anytime it pleases me. I command the Americans to send me their bravest soldiers to die for me. Anytime I clap my hands a stupid genie called the American ambassador appears to do my bidding. When the Americans die in my service their bodies are frozen in metal boxes by the US Embassy and American airplanes carry them away, as if they never existed. Truly, America is my favorite slave."

—King Fahd Bin Abdul-Aziz, Jeddeh, 1993

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JUST FOR THE RECORD

The Institute for American Values and the Georgia Family Council have just released a sobering study titled “The Taxpayer Cost of Divorce and Unwed Childbearing.” The study notes that while the debate on marriage usually focuses on its social, moral, and religious qualities, marriage is also an “economic institution.” It is a “powerful creator of human and social capital.”

Between 1970 and 2005, the percentage of children being raised in two-parent families dropped from 85 to 68 percent. The principal causes of this drop were the high divorce rate and the increase in the number of out-of-wedlock births. While the number of divorces has declined slightly in recent years, the percentage of children born to unmarried mothers has continued to grow.

“Divorce and unwed childbearing create substantial public costs, paid by taxpayers.”

How much? A minimum of $112 billion a year in “increased taxpayer expenditures for antipoverty, criminal justice . . . education programs,” and lost tax revenues.

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Saturday, April 19, 2008

CODE PINKERS ON ICE


Well, our Ladies In Pink are still on the beat...

THERE'S A LOT MORE to this article that you will want to read, and I will want to remember down the road, but here's a taste from Frontpage Magazine:

Code Pink may have become the best exponents of the policies of preemption and profiling in the War on Terror.

Last Tuesday, Sen. Joseph Biden ejected Code Pink protesters set to interrupt General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker's testimony on the state of Iraq. Biden instructed security to eject "the people making noise," and the Capitol police quickly responded, expelling the full Code Pink delegation. The latter stood out from the Hill staffers and military attachés listening respectfully to the hearings for a number of reasons: not least, they were wearing black robes, white skeleton or ghost masks, and gray grease paint. (You can see a video of the whole encouraging incident here.

The best part is when the police refuse to entertain their arguments and make them march back out to the street.) Apparently unfamiliar with the word hubris, Medea Benjamin complained, repeatedly and bitterly, that Sen. Biden called for order to be restored but "the police arbitrarily pulled out people." Her final words, as the police forced the pro-terrorists out of the hallway, were, "Why did I get pulled out?"

Arbitrarily? Why, whatever could have made the police think the professional protesters in Halloween costumes might be up to mischief? Unless the fifth column leftists had been called to testify about the Scream film series, their garb was inappropriate and suspect.

Read it all.

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Thursday, April 17, 2008

LIES, DAMN LIES, AND THE MEDIA

A CASE COULD BE MADE made that in the age of television, and especially since 1967, there has not been a news event of major transformative effect that has not been presented to the public without serious distortions. Some have been outright lies. The seriousness of the effects of these distortions cannot be understated. Here are a variety of examples as put forth by Yaacov ben Moshe over at his Breath of the Beast blog:

  • In 1967 the world was given the impression that the great victory in The Six Day War had solved the Middle East problem and secured Israel’s existence. This distorted view has set the stage for the Arabs, who still vastly outnumber the Israelis, are far richer and have an undiminished desire to utterly destroy Israel, to claim the mantel of “underdog” and even “victim” in the eyes of a majority of Europeans and very large numbers of Americans.

  • The defeat of the North Vietnamese Tet Offensive in 1968 was presented as proof that further support of freedom in Southeast Asia was futile. This perception turned allied victory into defeat and caused a substantial bloodbath in Viet Nam and contributed heavily to the cataclysm in neighboring Cambodia

  • In 1987 the video of the Rodney King incident was shown over and over to the public on the evening news without the first segment of it which showed King attacking one of the officers. The public then could not understand the verdict when the jury (who, in court, had seen King’s aggressive attack) acquitted the police officers. The reverberations of the riots, in which 48 people died, that followed are still poisoning the “conversation about race” in the US today.

  • The systematic demonization of the Serbs in the Balkans and the complete bestowal of “victim-hood” on the Moslems of Kosovo. Led to allied bombing of the Serbs and an overall tilt toward the Moslem side which gave prestige, courage and comfort to many foreign Islamist fighters who were active in the Balkans at the time. Many of those fighters, including Osama bin Laden himself, have gone on to terrorist activities against the west.

  • The al Durah blood libel poured fuel on the fires of Islamist Jihad and the resulting wave of “retaliatory” violence that reference al Durah included the Ramallah lynchings, the beheading of Daniel Pearl and 9/11. Even more damaging than the directly related violence, though, is that the wide acceptance of this particular fraud as truth has given credence to every other fraud, misrepresentation and slander since that time.

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  • OBAMA'S PATRIOTIC BOOMERANG



    Okay, okay. Don't look now, but I'm rather sure I see some chickens coming home to roost. These, of course, are Barack Obama chickens, seemingly of a bitter Pennsylvanian church-clutching, gun-blasting bloodline. We all recall the flap over his taking off his flap pin, and explaining it away as a false symbol of true patriotism. But now he's donned another flag pin just in time to cover his political ghost his recent remarks about jobless gun-toting church-huggers scattered throughout America, and specifically, Pennsylvania where he is now trying to overtake Hillary Clinton for votes by these very same voters. Here is the whole story from the American Thinker.

    The excerpt below is enough to clean a clock or two, but will it?


    I lost track of this very stupid story after the initial dust-up last October. Evidently a disabled vet handed it to him at this morning’s speech, thereby magically ridding it of the Iraq cooties that had rendered it unfit to grace the chest of the Messiah until today. Read this prescient column from the AJC a few weeks ago predicting that the pin would soon reemerge in the wake of Wright’s “chickens coming home to roost” clip entering near-permanent rotation on cable news. Conservatives naturally were blamed for making an issue of this last fall but in fact Obama’s the one who politicized it by investing the pin with such grandiose meaning that he simply had to stop wearing it in good conscience.

    No other prominent Democratic critic of the war that I can think of has felt the need to divest him- or herself of the sort of symbolism that those small town yokels whom Obama has such affection for seem to appreciate so much. If anything, the anti-war crowd has always been eager to reclaim the symbolism of the flag to make the point that no one has a monopoly on patriotism. Ah well; it’s all just a byproduct of false consciousness anyway.

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    Tuesday, April 15, 2008

    OPEN LETTER TO THE PETRAEUS PROTESTOR



    A familiar face and voice. And I thought you'd given up all this civil disobedience mascara, and were changing your tactics in stopping the war to something more likely to succeed. Ah, but it's in your blood, it's an addiction, it's the pure joy and panoply of carnival. Admit it. Glad to hear from you, though, as always, my friend. For a hip internationalist you even dazzle this tragically unhip radical centrist. You may or may not be a HD Thoreau in modern drag, and I am certainly no RW Emerson, but I nevertheless feel that your enormous energies and intellectual fervor could be put to better use than that which I witness here.

    Your response that you don't think that your public comment at a public hearing rose to the level of "civil disobedience", nor do you particularly care for carnival or spectacle, hardly seems a sincere analysis from over here in the cheap seats, especially after you voiced a frustration with living in a representative democracy rather than a participatory one, a comment which confirms that you comprehended the demarcation lines.

    Yet, we do very much live in a representative form of democracy, a republic. The founding fathers were very clear about both points. I have watched this video many times. While Senator Carl Levin did pause, or stumble in his questioning of the General for a very brief moment, thus allowing for what you called "an opening", the proceedings were inarguably disrupted by your outburst.

    And since you feel you were merely exercising your constitutional right of free speech, you must then also accept the judicial supposition that unless this "representational" aspect of our government is changed by constitutional amendment, you must surely accept the idea that any such public meeting, even the PTA, must operate under a rule of order.

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    BET FOUNDER ECHOES FERRARO ON OBAMA

    Johnson
    Billionaire businessman Bob Johnson said Monday that Sen. Barack Obama would not be the Democratic party's leading candidate if he were white. Those comments to the Charlotte Observer echoed those of former vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro, who stepped down as an adviser to Sen. Hillary Clinton last month after the firestorm that erupted after she was quoted saying Obama wouldn't be where he is if he were white.

    "What I believe Geraldine Ferraro meant is that if you take a freshman senator from Illinois called `Jerry Smith' and he says I'm going to run for president, would he start off with 90 percent of the black vote?" Johnson said. "And the answer is, probably not. But Geraldine Ferraro said it right. The problem is, Geraldine Ferraro is white. This campaign has such a hair-trigger on anything racial—it is almost impossible for anybody to say anything."

    Johnson disputed the notion that Obama has built a broad coalition. Most of his support, he said, comes from African Americans and white liberals but not white, working-class Democrats.

    Johnson, who made a fortune after founding Black Entertainment Television and now owns the Charlotte Bobcats, is a longtime friend of Clinton and her husband, the former president. Johnson said Obama is likely to win the nomination and has had the support of "the liberal media."

    "They sort of dislike Hillary for her vote on the war. They don't want to see Bill and Hillary in power again," he said. "So Obama comes in and runs a smart campaign. But that's not the Second Coming, in my opinion, of John F. Kennedy, FDR or the world's greatest leaders."

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    Monday, April 14, 2008

    MEASURING THE UMMAH

    LOOKING AT THE EXPANSIONIST and imperialistic attitude that is inherent in Islamic doctrine, in our own time and historically, we of sound mind can draw only one conclusion. There is only one Islamic agenda in a global context, and that is taking over the riches of other cultures. Not working on improving the world or bringing about reform in the ummah. Instead they prefer to wallow in their own nefarious filth and wait until the times are conducive in getting back to the task of conquering the world. The way I see it, we must not let it happen. I do not want to live in societies like the ummah where is constant sectarian violence, no human rights, no freedom of thought, speech or choice, and where human value and common dignity is out of the door. Only Muslim men will have status—non Muslims will be persecuted, women will be beaten, harassed and denigrated. Because their war manual tells them so.

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    Sunday, April 13, 2008

    FUNDING THE DEMOGRAPHIC WEAPON



    In 2005, NY-R Senator Charles E. Schumer questioned whether the Islamic Saudi Academy in Alexandria, Virginia, is another example of radical Islamic madrassas funded by and linked to terrorism here and abroad. It had recently been reported that a recent graduate, Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, of the Academy was indicted on charges of providing material support to terrorists and in conspiring to assassinate the President of the United States. Senator Schumer immediately called for an investigation into the funding of the Academy by the Justice Department, and is now urging the Saudi Arabian Ambassador, Prince Bandar, to further disclose the nature and funding of the school.

    “We need to know if the Islamic Saudi Academy is another example of the Saudi government turning a blind eye to terrorism. I hope that the ISA is not another madrassa in the United States,” Schumer then stated.

    Unflummoxed, Schumer said in his letter to Prince Bandar, “Because it is my understanding that the Islamic Saudi Academy receives a significant portion of its funding and curriculum guidance from your government, I ask for your assistance in fully disclosing the nature of this academy—what does it teach, from where does it receive funding, and to what extent it may be serving as a breeding ground for anti-American sentiment—and, possibly, even terrorist activities.”

    The letter addressed other instances where the ISA was linked with potential terrorist activities:

  • A former comptroller of the ISA, Ismael Selim Elbarasse, has been referred to by authorities as a high-ranking Hamas operative who was arrested in August while videotaping the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and has been implicated in efforts to channel financing to international terrorist activities.

  • In March of 2002, ISA graduate Mohammad Osman Idris was charged with lying to a U.S. grand jury investigating whether he and another ISA graduate planned to take part in acts of terror or violence against the State of Israel. The grand jury was investigating whether Idris was attempting to provide key support to Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

  • In August, the Free Muslim Coalition Against Terrorism called on the ISA to remove a textbook used to teach first-graders that stated that Judaism and Christianity are false religions.

    Schumer urged the Saudi government to investigate this matter and stated, “These incidents represent a repeated pattern of potential linkages between individuals associated with ISA and terrorism that is disturbing. I urge you to assist in the full disclosure of the means through which the school is funded as well as the tenets of its curriculum, and to take action to immediately remedy these concerns. Finally, I would also ask whether your government is funding any other schools within the United States that may be engaged in the type of intolerant teaching reported to take place at the ISA.”

    An excerpt from Hugh Fitzgerald on the nature of this beast, and how we must proceed to win the struggle of our time:

    The most horrifying statement in "Fitna" is not any particular menacing and bloodthirsty quote from the Qur'an. Those quotes, and hundreds more like them from Qur'an and Hadith, most visitors to this site already knew about.

    No, the most horrifying fact was this: that it 1960 there were 1,500 Muslims in the Netherlands. And in 2004 there were 800,000 (official figures), and today there are more than a million.

    It is demographic conquest from within. This means of conquering from within has happened before in Muslim history—after all, how did very small numbers of Arabs conquer large swathes of territory, and then proceed to both islamize and then arabize large areas of the Middle East and North Africa, if not by a combination of Da'wa (usually based on the desire of non-Muslims to join the winner, or to escape the humiliation, degradation, and physical insecurity of the dhimmi status), and demographic conquest?

    This demographic conquest has been discused for more than 30 years, quite openly in the Arab and Muslim world. In 1974 it was the ruler of Algeria, Boumedienne, at the U.N.—hardly the place to hide things—who spoke of how the Arabs and Muslims would conquer Europe "in the wombs" of the Muslim women having 10, 11, 12, 15 children apiece.

    But who could have foreseen that all over Europe Muslim immigrants would not only pour in, but take advantage, and then some, of every possible benefit that generous Infidels could and did provide, paid for by other Infidels, and meant to be received by fellow members of that Infidel nation-state who were part of that national community, and loyal to it, but have been taken over, and exploited to the fullest, by Muslim immigrants who, to the extent that they remain true to Islam, cannot conceivably offer loyalty to any Infidel nation-state, its people, or the legal and political institutions of that state which the Shari'a, in letter and in spirit, flatly contradicts.

    How much, do you think, are the British spending to monitor these Muslims?

    Will the cost rise? Of course it will. It wil go up as the number of Muslims steadily rises. You can pretend otherwise. You can prate all you want about "reform" but you still must explain how it is that the immutable and literal Word of God is to be "reformed," changed, edited, red-pencilled, and how, furthermore, more than a billion quite primitive people—made mentally primitive by the habit of mental submission that Islam encourages—will accept such changes to the Qur'an, or the Hadith (in their accepted rankings of autheniticity), or to the details of Muhammad's life recorded in the Sira, or even to the figure of Muhammad, as uswa hasana, al-insan al-kamil, the Perfect Man? How many Muslims would accept anything like the view of Muhammad that the words and acts attributed to him would cause any sane and well-informed non-Muslim to adopt?

    The "integration" of Muslims is a pipe dream. A few may fall away. A few may convert. These will, always and everywhere, be the morally and intellectually superior souls. But what of the rest, the rest having gigantic families, paid for by the Infidel-financed suicidal generosity? The idea that we buy their allegience when we buy their housing, their meals, their healthcare, their bombs has been proven false over and over again.

    The Western world has to halt all Muslim immigration, expel all Muslims who have not managed to acquire citizenship (those willing to jettison, publicly, Islam may—if they are carefully vetted, be allowed to apply to remain.), and then make life not easy but difficult for those remaining, so that many will leave voluntarily. Simply cutting off the malign source of funds for mosques and madrasas and propaganda—Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states—would do much to weaken support for Muslims, at least by ending the work of Western hirelings,and forcing Muslims in the West to pay for their own mosques and madrasas, rather than be supported, as they now are, with money from foreign Muslims, eager to help solidify and spread the presence of Islam in the Bilad al-kufr, the lands of the Infidels.

    Demography is destiny.

    So we ask in all earnestness, how much closer is the United States government to implementing the rigorous tools and mindset our nation requires for its own survival, than we were in 2005? Answer, not an inch. Why not? Because Saudi Arabia and China finance the largest chunk of our debt and therefore control our pursestrings. We, frankly, are being financially blackmailed, held hostage, and told to shut up and play ball. We must change our national tactics, the direction of our thrust, and the context of our understanding of global politics. We must know our enemies. We must recognize our own limits. Our enemies are playing for keeps. Historical tensions are worsening. So we must be ready to turn back the tide. We must not stumble, for now is the time to stand together as America faces the unrelenting global and national challenges ahead.

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  • Friday, April 11, 2008

    THE GLORIFICATION OF EMPIRICISM

    PERHAPS YOU TRUST THIS MAN, this writer named Mark LeVine, a writer who doesn’t want to know about all those scholars, doesn’t choose to discuss them at length, doesn’t admit the justice of their decades of scrupulous research. He knows better. He has been to the Middle East. He has talked to Hamas members and Muslim Brothers. They tell him things. What more does anyone need?

    Perhaps you agree as well with Mark LeVine’s guiding motto, that mental bumper-sticker which tells him always to “Question Authority.”

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    Thursday, April 10, 2008

    IT'S CALLED JIZYA, FOLKS...



    SITTING IN THE DOCTOR'S office for a routine visit, I looked across the waiting room, and there was political pundit Chris Matthews of the NBC news show Hardball dressed casually and in beat-up old white sneakers. After five minutes or so of trying to avoid staring at him, I sauntered over to the magazine table and grabbed up an old issue of Time Magazine. Of course, the first article I find has a sidebar comparing Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama's rather similar outlooks in their race to the presidency.

    The sidebar had caught my attention by stating in that Obama's big idea found articulation in his foreign policy, and could be summed up by one phrase: more foreign aid. In other words, Time Magazine believes along with Obama that terrorism is the result of poverty, a lack of education, and general non-sense like that, even though doctors and lawyers continue to get nailed in the act of jihad, from blowing up airports to funneling money to terrorist organizations.

    The Middle East—thanks to the oil beneath its sand—boasts some of the richest nations on earth, nations that are doing nothing to share their wealth with their own people, but instead spend billions in promoting its diabolical religion from a book which is nothing but a military manual dressed up in pseudo-religious language.

    There is nothing sublime or transcendent about Islam. Islam is an "in your face" no-holds barred problem.

    So I am confident that Barack Obama believes in jizya, that is to say, the subordination tax that is required by the supremists in sheep's clothing of all infidels. But then again, most leftists and Democrats believe in some sort of shifty financial shenanigans.

    Stop this madness! Reading this article was the last straw. I can no longer fathom a vote for this man from the southside of Chicago. I have traveled the gauntlet from being an enthusiastic supporter (I heard that 2004 speech, and called my wife in to hear this orator), to an indifferent bystander hoping for more (Ron Paul, where are you), to a staunch opponent of this man (anybody but Barack). In fact, it is my diligent position that we must stop ALL foreign aid to these enemies who do nothing but buy weapons and funnel funds to the jihadists with our blood monies. We are already in near terminal bankruptcy.

    The Saudis own us and they own billions of our petrodollars. The Chinese, Japanese and others are literally killing us with a calculated trade deficit, which continues to grow each passing year. We cannot afford to keeping throwing money on the fire. The housing collapse is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of how fragile our economy is when stacked against the deck of nations who are delighting in their current advantage, while America continues to waltz in with its pompous noblesse oblige throwing national treasure and human capital at those who would not only stab us in the back, they are already stabbing us in the face.

    And I haven't even mentioned Obama's declarations of initiating a fireside chat with Amadinejad. Because all he would get for his efforts there would be taqiyya, and that's a camel of an entirely different odor. Although this does beg the question, how much does Obama actually know about Islam? Besides the fact that his Kenyan kinfolk belong to the sect...

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    PETITION TO STOP FLIGHT 93 MEMORIAL



    Dear Fellow Americans:

    The planned Flight 93 Memorial contains extensive Islamic symbolism. It is an insult to my son Tom, and to the other murdered heroes of Flight 93 who stopped Islamic terrorists from destroying the White House or the Capitol that terrible September day.

    Please consider signing this online petition that I and some compatriots have put together. It calls for a new memorial design, and for investigation of the present design. If you want to do more, feel free to forward or post this appeal.

    For those who are not familiar, the original “Crescent of Embrace” design was laid out in the crescent and star configuration of an Islamic flag, is pictured above.

    Outrage over this overt Islamic symbolism forced the Memorial Project to disguise the original crescent with a few additional trees, but every particle of the original design remains completely intact in the so-called redesign. The giant crescent and star flag is still there!

    The Memorial Project assumes that any similarity to an Islamic crescent has to be unintentional. Even if it WERE unintentional it would still be intolerable, but how can anyone look at that crescent and star configuration and think that it CAN’T be intentional? That is like seeing an airliner fly into the World Trade Center and thinking that it CAN’T be intentional. Worst of all, the Memorial Project refuses to confront voluminous evidence that the Islamic symbolism IS intentional.

    It turns out that a person facing into the giant crescent will be facing Mecca. A crescent that Muslims face into to face Mecca is called a “mihrab” and is the central feature around which every mosque is built. The crescent memorial will be the world’s largest mosque!

    When TWO airplanes fly into the World Trade Center, even the most naïve person has start taking the possibility of intent seriously, but not the Memorial Project. The Islamic symbolism in Flight 93 Memorial goes on and on, but the Park Service refuses to be concerned.

    Architect Paul Murdoch says that the crescent shape comes from the hijacked airplane breaking the circle where it crosses the upper crescent tip. The flight path then continues down to between the crescent tips where Flight 93 crashed. (That’s right: the crash site is the star on the crescent and star flag.)

    Along the flight path are to be placed 44 translucent blocks, equaling the number of passengers, crew, AND terrorists:



    Left image: The Memorial Wall, traces flight path just above the point of impact. The white line at eye level is a set of 43 glass blocks, 40 to be inscribed with the names of my son and the other passengers and crew, and three (on the near side of the gap) to be inscribed with 9/11 date. Right image: At the upper crescent tip, at the end of the Entry Portal Walkway, sits a huge glass block, the 44th glass block on the flight path. It marks the spot where, in the architect’s description, the terrorists turned our humanitarian circle into a giant (Islamic shaped) crescent. Inscription: “A field of honor forever.”

    I don’t want to celebrate the terrorist’s circle-breaking crescent-creating feat, and I certainly don’t want my son’s name inscribed on that terrorist memorializing block count.

    We need to get the word out: the Flight 93 Memorial has been re-hijacked, and this time the whole nation is aboard. We have to get up out of our seats and stop this abomination!

    Sincerely,
    Tom Burnett Sr.
    Northfield Minnesota, March 2008

    P.S. Paper petitions are also available (with mailing instructions, and explanatory information on the back). Just open and print.

  • Online petition
  • Paper petitions and flyer-petition combinations
  • More information
  • Full exposé

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  • Tuesday, April 08, 2008

    SADDAM'S WEAPONS MOVED TO SYRIA



    HAVEN'T WE ALWAYS believed this to be true? An upcoming joint US-Israel report on the September 6 IAF strike on a Syrian facility will claim that former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein transferred weapons of mass destruction to the country, according to the Jerusalem Post.

    Now in addition to the interest this report will have for those who are still arguing over whether or not we should have gone into Iraq at all, if it is true this report means that these WMD's are most likely still in Syria, since the recent strike obviously didn't clear away

    As others have pointed out, Saddam was a major "Islamophobe" himself, equating Islam with violence and war, in regards to the Mother of All Battles Mosque, with its Scud-missile minarets, Kalashnikov ornamentation, and the Koran written in blood.

    On the other hand, George W. Bush clearly was determined to take Saddam down from the first day of his presidential campaign and on. I have grown weary of the debate as to whether that was a good thing or not. The worst thing about this acrimonious and highly public dispute is how people who wish Saddam & Sons were still in charge of Iraq have provided the rest of the world with all manner of grist for the America-hating mill.

    Here is how it probably happened, according to one source:

    "It happened during the 3-week hiatus in no-fly-zone overflights that Saddam worked out with Kofi Annan. More than 1,800 eighteen-wheelers were witnessed shooting across the border into Syria by the Mossad, which then squelched its own report. Interesting that Kofi suddenly termed the overflights "illegal" and then when the world confronted him about it Saddam recanted. This was on a Thursday. Saddam then gives the okay that on the following Tuesday overflights may be resumed. On Monday the last of the 18-wheelers crossed the border into Syria. And I'm standing in front of the TV for three weeks yelling, "They're moving the WMDs, you dopes!"

    Defectors to the US from Syria have told the government exactly where the three large underground vaults are that house these weapons.

    The case "against" would be that if they had 'em why hasn't Hizbollah used those weapons against Israel, or is it because Damascus knows it would be a smoking, radiating ruin in two hours if they did it.

    And another thing on Isreal's side is that jet stream moves west to east, and curves generally south to north a little in this area, and if there's a nuclear detonation in Israel, Damascus and Tehran will be contaminated with proximity one radiation in no more than 36 hours. But, did Saddam move that stuff? Yes. To Syria. And that includes the 47,000 gallons of VX nerve gas they claimed to have destroyed and then "couldn't find the paper work" on.

    Unfortunately, this report, even if proven to be 100% indisputably and incontrovertibly complete and true, will carry not one iota of weight with those who view America as the ultimate villain in this scene. If anything, it will further convince them of their inherently self-contradictory view of Bush as both evil genius and moron.

    The ever knowledgeable Morgaan Sinclair writes:

    Yeah, but if this gets out, the Saudis will drop oil prices to the USA by about $50/barrel, because what they REALLY fear is that the Shi'as will take Mecca and Medina. And one reason that the Syrians don't want the cat out of the bag is that it's just fine with them for the Saudis to be softening up the USA by bleeding it for every cent it can get at the tank, while they all set up shari'a banking to make sure the petrodollar usury profits stay in Islamic hands (if you think there's no "interest" in shari'a banking I've a bridge to sell you).

    Meanwhile, this is bad news for the Left and anybody that wants to get out of Iraq, because if the evidence is absolutely incontrovertible, no amount of screaming from the cheap seats is going to hack it here.

    The good news is that it becomes an INTERNATIONAL problem and splits the OIC down Sunni-Shi'a lines, and the dominant Sunnis then shift their weight (at least temporarily) to the West for protection.

    And—what a surprise—this only makes us more dependent on foreign oil, now cheap again, the tactic that Woolsey says the Saudis have used against us five times in the last 20 years—or, every time Americans get real interested in alternative energy or get scared about the global climate change bullet many think has already left the chamber.

    Could happen. I heard some pundit predict that gas would drop back to $2 per gallon by the end of the year. He didn't say why, but this report might very well be the clue. Funny also, how an Imam was just quoted the other day accusing Isarael of being the snarling watchdog for the United States. Interesting language becomes ever more precise now that more pieces of the puzzle are revealed. Damascus, anyone?

    One thing we need to remember before Johnny goes trotting off to war with Syria. These chemical weapons lose potency over time. It's been five years since Saddam transferred these diabolical vials. This is old news.

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    Monday, April 07, 2008

    LEAVING IRAQ TO ITS OIL AND IRAN



    EL PRESIDENTE George W. Bush and his merry band of Americans on both sides of the aisle have been played by the Iraqi ex-pats, pick-pocketing politicians, purple-fingered moms and pops, blood-thirsty tribal chieftans, scowling clerics, and let's not forget the optimistic Iraqi bloggers too. Yes, all those brave Iraqi bloggers and their words of Democracy and Freedom, who instead of joining the Iraqi Army and fighting por liberté et égalité, scooted off to graduate schools in the United States. Taqiyya writ large.

    The graft-burdened Americans have been played by the Turks, Saudis, Iranians, and Kurds. And the most maddening aspect of the unruly attempt at regime change and colonialization by another name is, if one were to ask the average Iraqi, as polls show, he and she would state the opposite—in their feverish anti-American, anti-Jewish fervor, they paint the events in Iraq as nothing more than an American Neocon-Zionist plot to attack Islam.

    And that being the case, do we fight for oil now, or do we allow Iran to consolidate power with Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon. That seems to be the destiny of the region. Leave Iraq now, or let's start really knocking heads over there, dammmit!

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    MUSLIM STUDENT UNION AT UC IRVINE



    by FrontPageMagazine

    WITH RESPECT TO THE ADVANCE of militant Islam, we are often asked “what can be done?” The first thing we in the West must do is to make a decision that “tolerance” does not mean we are obligated to be tolerant of Islamist intolerance. As Lee Harris notes in The Suicide of Reason, if we continue to be tolerant of such intolerance we are on a slow path to cultural suicide. We must decide to stand up and resist the militant intolerance of Islamofascism—'through educating others and, more importantly, through organized grassroots civic and political action. Western Europe and Great Britain are learning the hard way that which the tolerance of Islamist intolerance leads.

    Militant Muslims regularly, repeatedly, and falsely, attempt to portray themselves as the victims and “infidels” as the aggressors. We are not the aggressors; militant Muslims are the aggressors. We in the West are castigated as bigoted, narrow-minded, intolerant and Islamophobic. But it is the militant Muslims who are bigoted and intolerant. Only in an "Alice in Wonderland" world could people who call Jews apes and pigs be viewed as the tolerant ones in our midst.

    The article below provides just one more chilling example of how “peaceful” and “tolerant” militant Muslims are. Towards the end of the article you can read how these “tolerant” Muslims used intimidation to shut down a blog written by a Muslim who had left the faith. Small wonder so few moderate Muslims speak out against this militancy. You will also read how the Muslim student newspaper extolled terrorist attacks against civilians. All in the name of tolerance, of course.

    The Muslim Student Union (MSU) at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) was founded in 1992 by a group of Muslim students who said they wanted “to establish a presence on campus.” Today MSU seeks to “build an environment that enhances good, discourages bad, and provides networks of resources, knowledge, people, and companionship to its members.” [emphasis added].

    Toward these ends, MSU offers “daily congregational prayers, daily free iftars the evening meal for breaking the daily fast during Ramadan that serve over a hundred Muslims, over eight weekly classes, a quarterly magazine Alkalima, coalition building with other clubs on campus, and a gateway to the larger Muslim community …” MSU also provides career advice and a study/tutoring program to help Muslims at UCI.46

    Yet beneath this placid description of the group’s objectives is a seething hatred of Jews and Israel. At the organization’s on-campus events, its members commonly wear green armbands to signal their allegiance to the terrorist group Hamas. MSU also has displayed posters on the UCI campus that equate the Star of David with the Nazi Swastika.

    In February 2001, MSU hosted the radical cleric Imam Muhammad al-Asi, who told his UCI audience: “The Zionist-Israeli lobby is taking the United States government and the United States people to the abyss. We have a psychosis in the Jewish community that is unable to co-exist equally and brotherly with other human beings. You can take a Jew out of the ghetto, but you cannot take the ghetto out of the Jew.”

    On February 26, 2004, MSU brought another radical cleric, the black imam Abdel Malik-Ali to the UCI campus to deliver a speech titled “America under Siege: The Zionist Hidden Agenda.” According to UCI’s student newspaper, he “implied that Zionism is a mixture of ‘chosen people-ness and white supremacy’; that the Iraqi war is in the process of ‘Israelization’; that the Zionists had the ‘Congress, the media and the FBI in their back pocket’; that the downfall of former Democratic presidential front-runner Howard Dean was due to the Zionists; and that the Mossad Israel’s intelligence agency would have assassinated Al Gore if he was elected in 2000 just to bring Joe Lieberman (his Jewish vice-president) to power.”

    Later that spring, MSU and the Society of Arab Students (SAS) co-sponsored their fourth annual “Zionism Awareness Week,” during which members of both groups again wore green armbands to show their support for Hamas.

    In June 2004, MSU asked UCI’s graduating Muslim students to wear green sashes bearing the word “shahada,” the Arabic word for the “martyrdom” of a suicide bomber, to their graduation ceremony. Two dozen students appeared in this garb.

    In March 2006, MSU led 1,000 Muslim students to protest the public display of the “offensive” Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that had recently set off massive demonstrations and riots throughout the Muslim world. In front of several television camera crews, MSU members began the protest by rolling out green prayer mats and reciting a prayer in Arabic. Many of them wore their customary green, pro-Hamas armbands.

    When a crowd of counter-protesters stood behind an American and Israeli flag and sang “God Bless America,” the Muslim students responded by chanting: “Hey Republicans, Stop the Hate! All You Do Is Instigate,” and “Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho! The Prophet’s Cartoons Have Got to Go!”

    MSU organized a May 2006 “Holocaust in the Holy Land” event which consisted of four days of anti-Israel lectures and presentations portraying the Jewish State as the modern-day avatar of Nazi Germany.52 The keynote speaker for the event was the Holocaust-denier Norman Finkelstein, whose speech, titled “Obstacles to Peace: Israelis or Palestinians,” identified Israel as the world’s worst human rights violator. Adjacent to a mock Israeli “apartheid” wall which they had set up in the center of the UCI campus, MSU students wearing leather sandals and taqiyahs (skullcaps) distributed fliers bearing the title “Exploiting the Holocaust to Justify Genocide.”

    Abdel Malik-Ali was again the featured speaker at an October 5, 2006 MSU event, where he told a crowd of roughly 200 cheering students: “The Jews think they are superman, but we, the Muslims, are kryptonite. They Jews know that their days are numbered.”

    In May 2007, MSU held an “Israel: Apartheid Resurrected” week that featured twice-daily speeches and rallies condemning the State of Israel. On May 17, Abdel Malik-Ali delivered a lecture titled “UC Intifada: How you can help Palestine,” in which he informed UCI’s Muslim students (who again wore green armbands as well as T-shirts reading “UC Intifada” and “Freedom Fighter”) that a martyr’s death is the most honorable form of death. “Victory or martyrdom,” Malik-Ali asserted, are the only two viable options available to the Palestinians in their battle against Israel. Malik-Ali referred to Israel not by its name, but only as the “Zionist Apartheid State.”

    In 2007, a UC Irvine student identifying herself as “OC Apostate” (she had recently left the Muslim faith in which she was raised) was forced to shut down the blog in which she criticized Islam’s intolerance for fear that members of the campus MSU would harm her family in retribution for her apostasy. She explained:

    “I started a blog as way to express myself. Word finally got around that it was me who was writing it and my family got threats that if I didn’t shut up something might happen. I didn’t want them to suffer for something I had done. So I deleted everything. The other Muslim students saw me with my hair out of the hijab. They knew who I was. The reaction was a lot of gossip and speculation about my upbringing. Women who I didn’t know gave me dirty looks. I don’t underestimate them. The notion of a traitor in your own community is the worse thing that could possibly happen. There is no room for ex-Muslims in a Muslim society. The punishment for being an apostate is death.”

    MSU invited Yvonne Ridley, a reporter and activist for Iranian PRESS-TV, to speak at UC Irvine on November 12, 2007. Ridley, who also writes a column for the New York-based publication Daily Muslims, is a member of the Respect Party led by British Member of Parliament and former Saddam Hussein supporter George Galloway. She was formerly employed as a senior editor by Al Jazeera and helped launch that website’s English-language version in 2003.

    Ridley supports divestment from Israel, a nation she has described as “that disgusting little watchdog of America that is festering in the Middle East.” She says that her Respect Party “is a Zionist-free party,” adding that “if there was any Zionists in the Respect Party they would be hunted down and kicked out. We have no time for Zionists.”

    MSU’s ideology is expressed in journalism as well as radical actions on campus. The Muslim student newspaper, Alkalima, published a special report called “Zionism: The Forgotten Apartheid,” which glorified Hamas and Hezbollah as noble warriors fighting Israeli oppression.

    In 2006 Alkalima published For Justice We Fight, a pamphlet justifying terrorist attacks targeting innocent civilians. “The individual or community that participates in jihad finds itself between two blissful outcomes,” said the pamphlet, “either victory and the establishment of justice, or the reward of martyrdom and Paradise.”

    This propaganda machine of Islam must be countered with equal and greater force. A group of great value would consist of those apostates from Islam, some of whom have become Christians, others freethinkers. If those apostates have managed to jettison the Islam-prompted attitudes that sometimes survive belief in Islam, as Ibn Warraq, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ali Sina, Wafa Sultan, Simon Altaf, all clearly have, they would be the most valuable of all, in planning ways to demoralize Muslims, and offer campaigns of counter-Da'wa to diminish the appeal of Islam. For that appeal, to Infidels in the West, to the psychically and economically marginal, has to be diminished.

    Islam must be identified not with "family values" as the misguided conservative Dinesh d'Souza persists in theorizing by placing all the blame on the "liberals" in the west, but it must be identified with political, economic, social, moral, and intellectual failure. Those connections can easily be made, and have been made several times on this blog, and especially The Bellicose Augur among my own, as well as many other fine sites on the web, many noted on this page.

    An impartial observer must conclude that Western Civilization has outpaced Islam in all of these categories since the 7th Century. The only times Islam has flourished has been immediately after conquering thriving civilizations and then feasting off the ruins. When the survivors of those civilizations are converted, enslaved, killed or forced into dhimmitude, Islamic cultures retreats into its 7th Century model.

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    Saturday, April 05, 2008

    ENCOUNTER WITH A SHARIA APOLOGIST



    Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch reports on an encouraging email he received from an educated reader. It is as follows:

    I am writing to tell you about a small success story in the struggle against Sharia. I am a law student at the University of Cincinnati. Last Thursday our school hosted a Sharia apologist from Saudi Arabia, Dr. Abdulkareem Hamad A. Alsaiygh. He's Dean at the Center for Contemporary Islamic Studies and Dialogue among Civilizations, Imam Mohammed bin Saud Islamic University.

    The purported goal of his visit was to dispel myths that the West has about Islam and Sharia Law. Because of your written work and this website, a group of us were prepared to ask questions that cut through the typical obfuscating rhetoric of this Sharia apologist. Heading into the event, the vast majority of students in the audience were sympathetic and welcoming to the speaker and his ideas. By the end of the event, they were all rightly horrified.

    Among other things, our questions forced Dr. Alsaiygh to admit the following:

    1. That apostasy is rightly punishable by death under Islamic law and the law of Saudi Arabia.
    2. That there will never be a Christian church in Saudi Arabia.
    3. That a Christian church is considered a national security risk to Saudi Arabia and other Islamic states.
    4. That stoning is appropriate punishment for adultery.
    5. That most women raped in Saudi Arabia deserve some punishment for "putting themselves in that situation."
    6. That "interfaith dialogue" could never include polytheistic religions.
    7. That Christian evangelism in Saudi Arabia is a subversive act comparable to planning a terrorist attack in the US.
    8. And that all these were "moderate" Islamic positions.

    Of course, he attempted to take us on the obligatory guilt trip by blaming the West for radical Islam. But, by this point, he had lost the vast majority of the audience.

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    NEUTRALIZING THE GUN GRABBERS



    HERE IS WHAT LEADING gun rights advocates are saying about Alan Gottlieb's and Dave Workman's gripping new book—America Fights Back, Armed Self-Defense In A Violent Age.

  • “In America Fights Back, through vivid real-life stories of citizens forced to face the reality of violence, Gottlieb and Workman provide an accounting of America's crime problem largely ignored by mainstream media.”– Wayne LaPierre, Executive Vice President, National Rifle Association of America

  • “Americans love books in which the good guys win. Gottlieb and Workman are adding to that proud tradition with America Fights Back by documenting case after case in which gun-owning citizens who refuse to wear the label ‘victim' remain the winners.”– Jill “J.R.” Labbe, Deputy Editorial Page Editor, Fort Worth Star-Telegram

  • “How envious the anti-gunners must be of Dave Workman and Alan Gottlieb, for the authors of America Fights Back have the one thing gun-control nuts never will: the facts about firearms and self-defense in the 21st Century. Presented here in compelling fashion, those facts paint a vivid picture of how Second Amendment freedoms deter and prevent crimes. America Fights Back is a must-read for anyone considering carrying a firearm for personal protection.”– Brian Lovett, Editor, Gun Digest the Magazine

  • “Dave Workman and Alan Gottlieb are long-time heavy hitters in the gun owners' civil rights movement, and they keep their fingers on the pulses of what' s happening. This new collaboration of theirs is gripping for its deft combination of street action reports and legal/statistical correlation. It's a must-read for all those who argue for the right of the people to protect themselves and their loved ones.”– Author Massad Ayoob, founder, Lethal Force Institute

    We couldn't have said it any better ourselves. That's why the Second Amendment Foundation is urging you to buy this book today and help spread the word that gun ownership is important by getting this book into the hands of Americans, and thus making this book a bestseller.

    The "gun ban" lobby operating from the lunatic fringe does not want you to read this book. They know that this book is the ammunition that will shoot holes in all their twisted logic and emotional arguments.

    "Now people will finally listen to the gun rights side," say Alan Gottlieb and Dave Workman, authors of the soon to be bestseller—America Fights Back.

    The good news is Second Amendment Foundationhas sent a copy to every Senator and Representative in Congress—all 535 of them. And more copies to the White House and every State House. Why? The government's delusions about taking away your gun rights to fight crime are about to change forever—and soon.

    It could be the biggest Impact on gun rights this decade. Will it make a difference that they sent this book? We can only hope so, despite the fact that so many in this fight already have their minds made up, corrupted by influence peddlers on the move. But at the personal level, this book is a wakeup call—as well as a call to arms for every American.

    Just read this:

  • “During my years in the U.S. House of Representatives serving on the Judiciary Committee, I tired of listening to the arguments of one gun-control advocate after another endlessly repeat the same tired, baseless arguments in support of their efforts to disarm law-abiding American citizens. Now, in America Fights Back – Armed Self Defense in a Violent Age, we have a well-written defense of the Bill of Rights that provides both sound substantive arguments in support of the right to keep and bear arms, as well as true-life stories of how the Second Amendment works in practice not just in theory. This book ought to be required reading for every Member of the House and Senate; and every occupant of the White House”– Former Congressman Bob Barr

    America Fights Back contains gripping stories of armed self-defense by law-abiding American citizens, woven into analysis of gun control laws and a broken justice system, and how they have failed to protect us.

    A blockbuster book filled with the latest guns and self-defense true stories and research from two internationally famous authors, Alan Gottlieb and Dave Workman, it finally uncovers the whole secret story of the good side to guns and how and why America must stop the assault on our Second Amendment Rights. And more importantly, you can learn how you can protect yourself and your gun rights from this assault.

    Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation is recognized as a member of the working press, maintaining active membership in the Outdoor Writers Association of America. He is listed in Who s Who in America, Who s Who in the World and Who s Who in American Politics. Alan has appeared on over 3,500 TV and radio talk shows, including the Lehrer News Hour, ABC s 20/20, CNN Crossfire, Fox TV, NBC Today Show, Larry King Live and Good Morning America. Alan is also President of radio stations KBNP in Portland, KITZ in Seattle, KITZ in Olympia and KSBN in Spokane and former Chairman of the Board of Talk America Radio Network with more than 700 affiliates coast-to-coast.

    Dave Workman is a career journalist, freelance writer and author. Now senior editor for the Gun Week, he spent 21 years as a senior editor and writer at Outdoor Empire Publishing. Workman began his career running a small-town newspaper and "stringing" for the Associated Press. Over the years, his byline has appeared in several newspapers and publications. Both Gottlieb and Workman have written several books.

    The One Book for Gun Rights Protection

    Inside America Fights Back, you'll discover the specific things you need to know to protect yourself from those that want to disarm you and make you easy prey for violent criminals and power hungry politicians. Don't be caught off guard. America Fights Back shares the things you must do now to protect your gun rights.. (If this book is not already on your bookshelf...you need to get it there right away.) The only sure way to protect your rights is to understand the problem and take action. "America Fights Back" will help you do both.

    P.S. "America Fights Back" shows that the Second Amendment and the right to keep and bear arms is our most important right in our constitution.

    P.P.S. Will members of Congress read it? We would like to believe that most will. They might even agree with these readers who say...

  • “Who needs a gun? You do! And this book gives the reasons, complete with dozens of actual cases in which the man or woman with a firearm made the difference between life and death, health or injury in the face of violent criminal attack.”– John Snyder, Board Member, National Association of Chiefs of Police

  • America Fights Back offers a stunning insight into the other side of the equation — the one where the good guys win, using guns.”– Roy Huntington (retired police officer), Editor, American Handgunner Magazine

  • “In America Fights Back, Gottlieb and Workman draw you into the savage world of violent crime as confronted by ‘average Americans.' With gripping detail and a well-written page-turning style they weave together stories of how Americans turn to firearms to fight back against the worst, most violent and depraved predators that prowl our society. The story they tell in America Fights Back gives proof that…armed resistance to criminal predators works!”– Ted Deeds, Chief Operating Officer, Law Enforcement Alliance of America, Inc., (LEAA)

  • America Fights Back doesn't just break the myth of the gun free zone, it shatters it. This book is a serious exploration of the effects of violent crime, our liberal criminal justice system, and what we need to do to survive. A must read for every American.”– David Kenik, President of the Police Officers Safety Association, Inc. and author of Armed Response; A Comprehensive Guide to Using Firearms for Defense

  • “Wow! This is not a book full of statistics, but a book that gives you a punch in the stomach, a kick in the head. The authors wake you up to what kind of violence is truly out there and how men and women fight back and won't be victims. This is a must-read for all people who think the police will protect them.”–Paxton Quigley, author "Stayin' Alive: Armed & Female In An Unsafe World"

  • “Part textbook and part 'Dragnet,' America Fights Back is a terrific exploration of current trends in the gun control debate interwoven will compelling real-life stories.”–Peggy Tartaro, Editor Women & Guns Magazine

    Buy America Fights Back: Armed Self-Defense In A Violent Age.

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