SIGNS OF LIBERTY IN QUESTION

Why is the University of Mary Washington inhibiting free speech at today's Obama-Biden rally?

NOT ALL COUNTRIES guarantee their citizens the right to virtually unbridled freedom of speech. The United States does. Would someone please tell the campaign of Sen. Barack Obama? And the dozing guardians of liberty at the University of Mary Washington?

Mr. Obama, the Democratic nominee for president, is scheduled to speak at a rally at the university today. The public is invited to this forum, on property it, the public, owns. However, signs and banners will not be allowed, according to the organizers and compliant campus officials. Suddenly, UMW is a First Amendment-Free, or at least a First Amendment-Crippled, Zone, subject to the self-serving preferences of politicos.

Why does an Obama rally—or a McCain rally or a Nader rally—justify taking a little off the top of Americans' most fundamental rights?

A UMW spokeswoman says that the Obama campaign required the sign-and-banner ban. That campaign tells us that the ban is for "security" reasons. But a spokesman for the U.S. Secret Service, responsible for protecting presidential candidates, says that the service has no objection to signs at rallies, provided that no "part of the sign could be used as a weapon"—e.g., a heavy metal pole or a sharpened stick. Finally, the McCain campaign tells us, "We encourage people to make signs at our events."

Regarding today's event, one would expect better from a campaign bearing the name of a former professor of constitutional law. (See Ambrose Bierce's definition of a lawyer: "one skilled in circumventing the law.") And one would expect much better from a university that, in pursuit of a day of celebrity, a boost in prestige, and profits from its book store's planned commemorative Obama T-shirts (now scotched), shaves away an American liberty purchased by men who turned white snow red and dry dirt wet with their sacrificial blood. This is a lot to swap for a mess of pottage. Remarks the Rutherford Institute's John Whitehead, who has turpentined the Bush administration's civil-rights record, "The Secret Service has a better free-speech viewpoint than the college."

The First Amendment guarantees the freedoms of religion, speech, the press, peaceable assembly, petition of the government. Will one who aspires to the title Defender of the Constitution begin inhibiting these First Freedoms even before he is ushered into office—at a public university?

Read it all.

l was disgusted when l read last night that the Obama team are picking up buslaods of homeless in Ohio to register them, and at the same time vote! But don't tarry here, folks. There's much more to uncover in this startling and punitive grasp for absolute power by the Obama camp. Doesn't take a weatherman to know whivch way the wind blows. My prediction is that within one year of an Obama presidency, the same people who elected him will be howling for his impeachment.

The handwriting is on the wall, the internet is also under fire since it's just a little too free for some people. Here’s a frightening page that will interest. Its author accuses the Google’s Blogger folks of shutting down, or freezing anti-Obama blogs it hosts. Read with intelligence. Connect the damn dots. Wake up America!

Wife and I went to another DC event last night sponsored by one of the partners at her office. Several staunch Republicans I have known for years, senior citizens and a couple of thirty-somethings, have all either defected to Obama or declared that they will sit this one out. These people know government. They are Washington lobbyists, and those Republicans who now are voting for Obama claim to be protecting their jobs. I suspect the senior partners who have said they will vote for neither candidate, are doing so less because McCain is too liberal for them, but because they don’t want to go on the record. What in the cheesecake is happening to this country?

I feel like the Big Takeover is upon us. This is simply far too much change way too quickly. Something drastic, some Brave New World Order stealth maneuver seems to be happening…

Here's some friendly advice to our Obama-supporting friends—when your interests are aligned with those of Iran's President and Hitler-wannabe Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, it's time to consider a re-assessment of priorities.

Democrat activists this week gave Ahmadinejad a huge gift that keeps on giving in his circle of despots by sabotaging a major bipartisan anti-Iran rally. More important to these cracked activists than Iran, apparently, was the slick opportunity to marginalize popular Republican vice-presidential candidate Governor Sarah Palin.

To recap, the rally was organized by wide coalition of mostly Jewish organizations, including the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, the respected non-partisan umbrella group that seems to be the closest thing the American Jewish community has to single and unified voice. They assembled an impressive protest of the presence of Ahmadinejad at the United Nations, to sound the alarm over his nuclear weapons program, and to urge world leaders gathered this week in New York to act strongly—and soon—to prevent a nuclear Iran which seems to be in the sole business of threatening Israel, America, and the world.

The organizers secured a number of high-profile speakers, including Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, recent Democrat presidential candidate Senator Hillary Clinton and Vice-Presidential nominee Sarah Palin. It is not yet clear whether Clinton was coordinating with Democrat strategists, but when she found out Palin was also invited, she bailed out. Too bad-having America's two highest profile female politicians together on the same stage condemning the misogynistic (among its many attributes) Iranian regime would have been a powerful image.

Following Clinton's lead, two of the sponsoring organizations-led by left-wing Democrat activists-demanded that Palin be barred from speaking lest the rally be a "partisan" event. The organizers pleaded with both Joe Biden and Barack Obama to speak, but both declined. Although Congressman Robert Wexler, a prominent Obama surrogate, was available to speak, the Democrats (including members of Congress) relentlessly pushed to have the Palin invitation rescinded.

Their argument was part naked pretext and part veiled threat: that maintaining the invitation just might prompt the IRS to investigate all sponsoring organizations' non-partisan tax-exempt status-an interesting understanding of "partisan" considering the invitations to Clinton, Obama, Biden and Wexler. (Perhaps this gives a clue how an IRS run by Obama lieutenants might treat political opponents). In an effort to maintain an appearance of Jewish unity against the evil of Iran, the organizers were forced to cave; Palin was given the boot. Game over. The Democrats won.

And so did Ahmadinejad. This had the makings of rally with impact. Besides being a tremendous show of bipartisan unity opposing Iranian aggression, the massive media attention paid to Palin's appearances would have brought the Iranian danger to the forefront of American consciousness. The rally was also attended by Iranian dissidents, human rights activists, gays, Christians, Jews and Iraqis, all of whom suffer at the hands of the mullahs' regime. Their under-reported causes could have used the publicity boost. Deflating the event by removing its star power did all these groups a huge disservice. We're sure Ahmadinejad cannot believe his good fortune. Thank you, Democrats!

Don't the Democrats vainly claim to be the party of the powerless and the voice of the voiceless? Fighters for human rights and protectors of liberty? They shouldn't flatter themselves. How did they help those causes this week? By strong-arm tactics, stifling dissent and sacrificing their "principles" for some perceived marginal political gain? Aren't those the sorts of things they're supposed to be protesting against? Perhaps they should tell us which principles they won't trample in order to gain fleeting political advantage.

Read it all. And now because of his own draconian positions, wavering back and forth as he tends to do, Obama wants all NRA ads banned from the airwaves. The Obama camp has been threatening television and radio stations to keep them from airing anti-Obama ads. The latest target is the NRA and stations in Pennsylvania.

Earlier this week, the National Rifle Association's Political Victory Fund released a series of radio and television spots to educate gun owners and sportsmen about Barack Obama's longstanding anti-gun record. In response to the NRA-PVF ads, a clearly panicked Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) are doing everything they can to hide Obama's real record by mounting a coordinated assault on the First Amendment.

This camapign has gone to desperate and outrageous lengths to try to silence the NRA by bullying media outlets with threats of lawsuits if they run NRA-PVF's ads. Here is Obama's letter to station managers.

Obama cannot and should not be trusted. Let me remind you of what our Founding President had to say on this critical topic:

“If the Freedom of Speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”

—George Washington

MORE TRAITORS IN HIGH PLACES

Just when you thought that the Left in our university system were at the beginning stages of growing a pair thanks to Dr. Bollinger's crispy introduction of the Iranian president last fall, an academic delegation of Columbia University professors and deans of faculties announces its plans to visit Tehran to officially apologize to Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad. The delegation plans to express regret for the insulting remarks Columbia University President Lee Bollinger directed at the rather ridiculous Ahmadinejad on September 24 in his introductory speech, the Mehr News Agency correspondent in New York reported.

To refresh our memories of Mr. Bollinger's rather courageous anti-dhimmi remarks, courageous, given the tenor of our decadent times, he is recorded as having said to Ahmadinejad: "Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator, and so I ask you, why have women, members of the Bahá'í Faith, homosexuals and so many of our academic colleagues become targets of persecution in your country?"

"Why do you support well-documented terrorist organizations that continue to strike at peace and democracy in the Middle East, destroying lives and the civil society of the region? Frankly, and in all candor Mr. President, I doubt that you will have the intellectual courage to answer these questions, but your avoiding them will in itself be meaningful to us. I do expect you to exhibit the fanatical mind-set that characterizes what you say and do."

Since the incident, the deans and professors from the faculties of history, anthropology, Middle Eastern studies, philosophy, and Islamic studies have criticized Bollinger’s behavior toward Ahmadinejad.

A member of the delegation, who requested anonymity, said the main goal of the visit is to meet the Iranian president and officially apologize to him.

It is our opinion that these professors should be jailed, lose their passports, and be stripped of their teaching credentials. There is no gray area here.

THE MENDACITY OF ROOT CAUSES

In a surprise turnaround, given the usual dhimmitude exhibited by our liberal university power structure, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was repeatedly tested as he questioned the official version of the September 11 attacks and defended the right to cast doubt on the Holocaust in a tense appearance at Columbia University, whose president accused the hard-line leader of behaving like "a petty and cruel dictator."

Ahmadinejad smiled at first but appeared increasingly agitated, decrying the "insults" and "unfriendly treatment." Columbia President Lee Bollinger and audience members took him to task over Iran's human-rights record and foreign policy, as well as Ahmadinejad's statements denying the Holocaust and calling for the disappearance of Israel.

"Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator," Bollinger said, to loud applause. He said Ahmadinejad's denial of the Holocaust might fool the illiterate and ignorant.

"When you come to a place like this it makes you simply ridiculous," Bollinger said. "The truth is that the Holocaust is the most documented event in human history." Ahmadinejad rose, also to applause, and after a religious invocation, said Bollinger's opening was "an insult to information and the knowledge of the audience here."

"There were insults and claims that were incorrect, regretfully," Ahmadinejad said, accusing Bollinger of falling under the influence of the hostile U.S. press and politicians. "I should not begin by being affected by this unfriendly treatment."

During a question and answer session, Ahmadinejad appeared tense and unsmiling, in contrast to more relaxed interviews and appearances earlier in the day. And thus a banner day in American intellectual toughness has been witnessed. May this event at Columbia signal the end of the political correctness era, and the beginning of a true intellectual analysis on our campuses and in our think thanks. But don't count on it.There are still many who realize that the propaganda war is always a surgical composure. Columbia students did applaud this man. This clip will be used by our enemies.

And you can bet the tone of both the guest speaker Ahmadeinejad and his audience wiil be skewed in his favor today when the Iranian president speaks at the "Islamic" United Nations.

Moving along, here's another sweet plum from the mindful tree of Hugh Fitzgerald:

Qur'an, passim. Hadith, passim. Sira, passim. Take them seriously, take them to heart, do not ignore what they tell you, and the duty of Jihad becomes clear. Follow the logic of Jihad, and the instruments available to Muslims at this moment in history: qitaal as terrorism, the Money Weapon, campaigns of Da'wa, demographic conquest. Now choose one or more. Al Qaeda chose the first, but is also delighted with those who employ the second, and the third, and the fourth methods for spreading Islam, and removing all obstacles to Islam, whether this is accomplished by terrorizing, or buying off, or misleading, or simply outbreeding, the Infidel enemy.

That is the answer to "why did this happen." No one would have sought to find the "root causes" of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in anything other than Kodo, the blend of emperor-worship and extreme Japanese militarism that all through the 1920s began spreading throughout the ruling class, both military and civilian, in Japan. No one would think to find the "root causes" for Hitler's attack on Poland that led Britain and France to finally declare war, in anything other than the doctrine promulgated by Hitler that the "Aryans" of Germany needed, and were entitled to, Lebensraum by seizing lands belonging to all non-Aryan and therefore inferior peoples.

No one should seek to find the "root causes" of Muslim terrorism, carried out entirely by Muslims, for reasons clearly articulated by the most truthful terrorists (including Bin Laden and many of his aides), that constantly relate back to the doctrines of Islam, to passages to be found in Qur'an and Hadith, and in the details of Muhammad's life found in the Sira.

The "root cause" of Muslim terrorism at Ground Zero, as of Muslim terrorism directed at civilians in southern Thailand, or in India, or in Israel, or in the southern Sudan, or in Amsterdam, Madrid, London, and a thousand other places, is Islam. The "root cause" of Muslim terrorism is Islam.