THOSE MIDDLE AMERICA RADICALS

GRABBING AN EXCERPT FROM Pat Buchanan's latest essay on the state of the 2008 presidential election:

Philosophically and culturally, we are a divided people. Across the spectrum there are us-versus-them folks who see politics as a zero-sum game between Middle America and a global elite. Below the upper-income brackets and along the center-right are the folks the late columnist Sam Francis, citing sociologist Donald Warren's 1976 study, called Middle American Radicals.

Richard Nixon brought the "MARs" to national attention when, as David Broder then wrote, the "breaking of the president" was underway in October 1969. Nixon went on television and called for the Great Silent Majority to stand with him against antiwar demonstrators and rioters in the streets, and for "peace with honor" in Vietnam.

When TV anchors trashed Nixon's speech, he unleashed Spiro Agnew on the establishment media. No White House had ever before attacked the networks or national press for ideological and political bias.

In a month, Nixon hit 68 percent approval, the apogee of his presidency, and Agnew was the third most admired man in America.

Ronald Reagan, by opposing the surrender of the Panama Canal to a leftist dictator, also rallied the MARs. He lost that battle, but his consolation prize was the GOP nomination and the presidency.

In recent years, we have seen the MARs rise again and again in roaring rebellion. But, invariably, when these rebellions occur, John McCain may be found inside the castle walls.

In 2007, McCain rushed to Washington to support George Bush, Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post in the drive to grant amnesty to 12 million to 20 million illegal aliens. A national firestorm killed the bill and almost killed McCain's campaign.

A year earlier, a MARs uprising killed the Dubai ports deal.

The power elite was stunned by the explosion of outrage over the leasing of six U.S. ports to Arab sheiks. Nationalism remains a more potent force than globalism, and not only in America.

In Clinton's first term, McCain stood with the establishment for NAFTA, GATT, the WTO and the Mexican bailout. Middle America opposed them all.

In the past decade, the MARs have opposed free-trade deals, and lost, but won virtually every referendum on gay marriage, affirmative action or welfare for illegal aliens. Invariably, the MARs are portrayed as bigots, nativists, xenophobes, protectionists and isolationists, and their leaders as demagogues. In McCain's words from 2000, they are "agents of intolerance."

This is fine if you wish to be beloved in this city, but it may be a fatal impediment if you want to be president.

McCain's problem is that, in 2008, when his old press idolaters have found a new favorite, these are the people who hold his key to the presidency. They are the Democrats who voted against Barack Obama by wide margins in Pennsylvania and Ohio and landslide margins in West Virginia and Kentucky.

These Democrats can still win this race for John McCain. Many admire his war record. But not only is he not one of them, he has taken pride and pleasure in having been their great antagonist.

Read it all.

Unfortunately, that's not the only news to cross my desk this morning. Read this Brigitte Gabriel interview on another rather critical issue facing the American republic today—the stealth Islamization of America.

TALES OF PURCHASING POWER

From the Washington Times article—The Camel in the Tent—by Rachel Ehrenfeld and Alyssa A. Lappen

Objections to Borse Dubai's proposed acquisition of 20 percent of Nasdaq last week prompted Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank to quip, "In the ports deal, the concern was smuggling something or someone dangerous... What are we talking about here—smuggling someone onto a stock exchange?"

It is not "who" Dubai will smuggle into the stock exchange we should worry about. It's the arrival of the world's first Islamic stock exchange exerting unprecedented Islamic influence in the heart of the U.S. and Western economies that should raise our alarm. Dubai's handsomely paid Washington lobbyists see nothing wrong with that. Rather, they claim the deal benefits U.S. financial markets, giving "Nasdaq access to rich Mideast pockets." Unfortunately, the deal also increases the appeal and influence of Islamic financing in the West.

What is "Islamic" finance? Islamic, or Shariah-based finance, is the 1920s invention of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna. He ordered the Muslim Brothers to create an independent Islamic financial system to supercede the Western economy, facilitating the spread of Islam worldwide. He set the theories and practices and his contemporaries and successors developed Shariah-based terminology for "Islamic economics," finance and banking. Attempts by Muslim Brotherhood members in the early 1930s to establish Islamic banking in India failed. Egyptian President Gamal Abdel-Nasser shut down the second attempt in 1964, after only one year, later arresting and expelling the Muslim Brothers for attempts to kill him. Saudi Arabia welcomed them and adopted their ideas.

In 1969, soon after a mentally deranged Australian Christian fundamentalist, Michael Dennis Rohan, tried to set fire to the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, the Saudis convened the Conference for the Islamic Organizations (OIC) to unify the "struggle for Islam," and have been its major sponsor ever since. The 56 OIC members include Iran, Sudan and Syria.

Based in Jeddah, "pending the liberation of Jerusalem," the OIC mandates and coordinates actions to "support the Palestinian people, assist them in recovering their rights and liberating their occupied territories." The OIC's first international undertaking was the 1975 establishment of the Islamic Development Bank "in accordance with the principles of the Shariah," marking the beginning of the fast-growing, petrodollar-based Islamic financing market. From 1975 to 2005, the bank approved more than $46 billion in funding to Muslim countries. Since 2000, it has transferred hundreds of millions of dollars raised especially to support the Palestinian intifada and suicide bombers' families -- and has channeled United Nations funds to Hamas. Yet the bank received U.N. observer status in 2007.

Overseeing Shariah finance are the 1991-Bahrain-registered and -based Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions (AAOIFI), which laid the groundwork for the global Islamic financial network and the "de facto Islamic Central Bank"—the Islamic Financial Services Board (IFSB), established in 2002 in Kuala Lumpur "to absorb the 11 September shock and reinforce the stability of Islamic finance." Chairing the meeting, then-Malaysian Prime Minister Mohamed Mahathir stated: "A universal Islamic banking system is a jihad worth pursuing to abolish this slavery [to the West]."

According to Saleh Kamel, president of the Saudi Dallah Al-Baraka Group and the Islamic Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ICCI), more than 400 Islamic financial institutions currently operate in 75 countries. They now hold more than $800 billion in assets—growing at a rate of 15 percent annually. All investments with Islamic financial institutions are subject to the minimum zakat (Islamic charitable wealth tax). On April 30, the OIC, the organization that initiated global Muslim riots after the Danish cartoon publications, established the clerical International Commission for Zakat, replacing more than 20,000 organizations that previously collected the money. Islamic clerics' "expert committee" in Malaysia now supervises and distributes those funds. The new committee will shortly distribute to Muslim charities roughly $2 billion collected during Ramadan.

But not all charities are equal. In 1999, Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Yousef al-Qaradawi decreed: "Declaring holy war [and] fighting for such purposes is the way of Allah for which zakat must be spent." If past zakat distribution is any indication, all Muslim jihadist-terror organizations (including Palestinian Hamas, the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, and the many al Qaeda offspring) will benefit.

Shortly after September 11, Osama bin Laden called upon Muslims "to concentrate on hitting the U.S. economy through all possible means. Look for the key pillars of the U.S. economy. Strike the key pillars of the enemy again and again and they will fall as one."

Most Arab and Muslim states publicly denounced bin Laden. But the impending Nasdaq acquisition, the purchases of over 52 percent of the London Stock Exchange and 47.6 percent of OMX (Nordic exchange) and the vigorous expansion of Shariah financing apparently follow the Muslim Brotherhood-bin Laden script.

President Bush on Sept. 25 at the United Nations called on all nations to open their markets. Surely, he did not mean opening the markets to domination by Shariah.
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Rachel Ehrenfeld is director of the American Center of Democracy and a board member at the Committee for the Present Danger. She is also a member of the American Congress for Truth Board of Advisors. Alyssa A. Lappen is a senior fellow at the American Center of Democracy.

FINANCIAL COLLAPSE IN THE WORKS?

Industrial freshness in oil rich Qatar

The ME state of Qatar has upped its share in the London Stock Exchange to nearly 24 per cent, giving the gulf state and its neighbour Dubai a controlling stake of nearly 52 per cent.

The Islamofanatics (sic!) are nothing if not superb Machiavellian practitioners of black intrigue. What better way to drop the equivalent of an electromagnetic pulse on an entire economy than with the weapon of stock exchange ownership? This is from the same playbook as the Dubai ports deal. Go after Western critical strategic non-military assets, control them and then put the economic squeeze on us. They did it with oil and they are using that as an example for further exploitation; but now they will use economic force to propagate Islam.

The bureaucrats in London, Washington, and New York should set aside their copies of Adam Smith and think about what is happening here. This litany of incidents were major direct attacks on our nations' financial systems in an area where we have no line of defense. Once economic control has shifted into "enemy" hands, Washington becomes irrelevant.

The Secretary of the Treasury and the Chief of Economic Advisors should be revolting against this stealth takeover of Western markets. They should forget about this globalism crap and throw out Queensbury rules, returning to WWII economic controls on enemy assets. The Islamofanatics only abiding rule of engagement is doing whatever it takes to win, to establish a world caliphate. They cannot win with a direct confrontation against a carrier group or an infantry division, but they can win with an economic ax threatening Wall Street which could easily slam into and paralyze the country's economic backbone. Only teeth-gnashing Marxists can cheer at this news. Make no mistake. They are cheering.

However, it is also true that Muslims owning a stock exchange is not the end of the system, not yet anyhow. What exchange ownership can control is which company to list or unlist. But even here there's a ball & chain of regulation to abide since all exchanges operate by local laws. I understand that a "Stock Exchange" is simply a trading space. Remember the Dick Grasso scandal? In fact, an exchange is a company by itself. If one falters or grows unstable or unfriendly there is always market space for another trading space company to spring into place, although by most accounts, the London Exchange is arguably the centerpiece of global trading.

Dubai has control of the Nasdaq also. The Saudi's are "playing" around with the US dollar. They have their tentacles in our media, they control the oil and now this. Now, where did I put all those "The End is Near" signs I rescued from a dumpster oh so many years ago?

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