WAR MACHINE AIMS TO CURTAIL FREE SPEECH

No silly. I'm not referencing the Bush administration. All bellicose references to Nazi-like affectations directed at Bush and company, despite its monumental failures of judgement, are ridiculous cacricatures at best, filthy projections of a distorted and mismanaged mind, in numbers too strained to recant, in their worst form. Thanks, but no thanks. Rather, on this fine March day, I am referring once again to the war machinery of soiled thugs husting over hill and dale at the IOC.

Jihad Watch is vigilant, as Robert Spencer reports:

CAIR BULLIES ARE THWARTED

Well, it looks like the tide is turning, and CAIR may be on the first wave back out to the sea from which it came. This is good news for America. This is good news for truly peaceful Muslims. This is good news for you, those enemies in waiting on the Left, who act as apologists for these interlopers, these invaders who are using our system to gain footing, only to have already voiced their agenda to replace the US Constitution with sharia law. How many times do they have to tell us these things. Yes, this is good news for you doubters and appeaser. You just don't know it yet.

Read it all. Check out the three links. Check out the parties in play. Do your homework people. Before it's too late.


PHILADELPHIA - The Legal Project of the Middle East Forum announces its support of Robert Spencer and the Young America's Foundation (YAF), the latest victims of what appears to be a targeted intimidation and defamation campaign by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) designed to silence critics of its organization.

Spencer, a well-respected author and the director of Jihad Watch, spoke today for YAF on "The Truth about CAIR" on the campus of George Washington University. As a consequence of this invitation, YAF's president Ron Robinson received a threatening and possibly defamatory letter written by CAIR's acting attorney, Joseph E. Sandler, of the law firm Sandler, Reiff & Young, P.C.

Sandler's letter (available in pdf format here) accuses Mr. Spencer, without offering any factual support, of being a "well-known purveyor of hatred and bigotry against Muslims," with "a history of false and defamatory statements." Sandler goes on to "demand that YAF cancel the subject session or else take steps to ensure that false and defamatory statements are not disseminated," and states an intention to pursue a "legal remedy" against YAF, should CAIR deem statements made by Spencer at the session "false and defamatory."

CAIR's letter appears to be aimed at maliciously harming Spencer's reputation, interfering in his lawful employment, and aimed to discourage both Spencer and YAF from exercising their fundamental rights to free speech and assembly. Furthermore, the letter wrongfully implies that YAF has an independent duty to censor Spencer, and that it may be subject to suit for allowing Spencer to speak on private property. It is our opinion that CAIR's pre-emptive accusations are without merit, without any legal basis, and that CAIR has yet to prove any of its statements as true.

Therefore, the Legal Project hereby gives CAIR and its attorneys notice that it, too, will pursue "every available and appropriate legal remedy to redress any false or defamatory statements that are made" or have been made by CAIR and its attorneys against Spencer. We advise CAIR's staff to govern themselves accordingly.

The Legal Project, established by the Middle East Forum in June 2007, is dedicated to safeguarding the democratic liberties afforded by the Constitution to U.S. citizens, namely the rights to free speech and free assembly. The Legal Project protects researchers and analysts working on the topics of terrorism, terrorist funding, Islam, and Islamism against those who seek to silence them through intimidation, defamation, and predatory lawsuits.

Immediate release

For more information: John Matthies, (215) 546-5406, ext. 16, or Matthies@MEForum.org

MEMORIAL DAY 2007

Today, as I drove around southern Maryland from Annapolis to Scotland Island and back to Washington with my wife in our Jeep Liberty Renegade, driving past so many American flags on display, some fresh and in full wave, others ragged and woefully ripe for its "dignified burning" which is in the officially proscribed act of retiring it, I realized once again that in my limited lifetime of fifty-one years, I have never personally known someone who has sacrificed his or her life in service to our nation, specifically in a military uniform.

I have never suffered the loss that so many in our nation and others have suffered in losing to an untimely death a dear relative or a close friend while performing active military service, partially because of an accident of birth, a time spanning from the Vietnam War, where I and my immediate generation and the one immediately preceding mine, were excepted by age or gender. While decendent from a family whose military tradition has waned since the American Civil War, the few family members and friends I have known who have indeed fought for American forces on foreign soil such as Iraq and Afghanistan have survived with honor. I am very proud of these men regardless of whether I appove or disappove of certain foreign policy choices of any administration. I feel inadequate to express my own gratitude to these living heroes and to those who did not make it back to their families intact, but I must. War is a wicked endeavor. But war often requires war to extinguish itself, just fire is often turned back with more fire.

To this end, I must repost the following essay by Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch:

Today is Memorial Day, and while Hugh grills the Jihad Watch burgers I thought I'd note that one of the reasons why the popular culture does not honor our fighting forces today or in general is that the politically correct mindset assumes that we have moved beyond all that. Conflicts don't ever need to be solved with wars, you see. All we need to do is understand each other a little better, show the opposition that we are really good fellows after all, win over a few hearts and minds, teach the children not to hate, and voila, all will be well, and all manner of thing will be well.

Unfortunately, in the real world, sometimes one may know someone else quite well, and see that he is a good fellow, and despite all the hand-holding and Kumbaya singing, still want to kill or subjugate for reasons of one's own, that don't proceed from the Kumbaya-singer's actions at all.

This is a point that all too many in Washington, at the highest levels, stubbornly refuse to grasp. It is axiomatic in the State Department, and in Europe, and at the UN, that all conflicts can be solved through negotiated concessions. This is so much a part of the air they all breathe that it would be unthinkable even to question it. No one would even think to ask, "What if we implement state-of-the-art hearts-and-minds initiatives, and conform to all their foreign policy and cultural demands, and they still hate us?" This cannot be. The non-Western man is just a reactor, not an actor. He has no imperatives of his own that might set him against us. He is, ultimately, at our mercy, and it is up to us and us alone to pacify him.

The unconscious paternalism of this is ironic, coming as it does from the most besotted of relativist multiculturalists, but in any case, the fact of Memorial Day, and the reality of those who died in this nation's conflicts, shows it all to be false. Sometimes there are disputes between peoples that can't be smoothed over by any amount of making nice. And then, if a nation does not have within it those who will fight and will die to defend it, it will perish.

Today those who believe we have moved beyond wars, beyond fighting, rule the day. Unfortunately, we face a foe who believes war and fighting is his religious duty. He will not be pacified. Our fight is not just military, although it has a military dimension, and a huge adjustment in our current foreign entanglements is needed to defend ourselves most effectively from this scourge. It is a matter of will. Of remembering that there is in Judeo-Christian civilization, and in all civilizations that are threatened by the jihadist imperative of Islamic supremacism, something worth fighting and dying for. Remembering that we are only here to fight this battle today because others fought and died throughout history for our nations, our people, and the principles for which we stand. Let us not just honor them today, but, each in our way, seek to emulate them.

LIVING IN THE AGE OF QUARREL

The more I read the posts at Jihad Watch and those of Robert Spencer, the more I am convinced that only a fact-truth confrontational approach will prevail in this ongoing conflict with passive-aggressive Islam. That naive handmaiden of so-called "moderation" will not do the job. Th evidence has spoken, loudly and clearly.

The current crisis with Islam appears to have two immediate sources: 1) the oil revenues that fund the spread of the belief-system and Jihad and 2) the collapse of the USSR which had delayed a lurking jihad that for 70 years lay dormant after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire. But now unbelievers, or kafir, face a resumed war with Islam and its sleeping dogs that has been in process for 1300 years.

During the 70s and 80s there were many who sought to appeal to "moderates" within the Soviet Empire, who urged no confrontation in word and deed with the obvious aggressive and totalitarian nature of the Soviet belief-system. They were in Western "peace movements" that were often funded by the USSR. The people who advised caution and moderation in confronting the Soviets did so for many reasons, but it all boiled down to "don't make them mad", "don't offend them" "they only have different "values".

Yet folks like Solzhenitsyn advised a confrontation that would make the Soviets angry, and noted that in their anger, in their rage, the Soviets would reveal themselves and the nature of their belief-system. Thus the exile of Solzhenitsyn, the attempt to kill Pope John Paul, the attempt to crush Solidarity, the shooting down of the Korean passenger plane by the Soviets in 1983, and other ugly manifestations of Soviet rage, did much to bring down the regime. All of the items you mention are necessary to contain this insane Soviet-like belief system, including factual in-your-face-confrontation with the sick violence and intolerance of Muhammad and his belief-system.

Pope Rage, Cartoon Rage, Apostate Rage, and other rages are just what the doctor ordered to cure this belief-system disease. Confrontation and resulting rage are good. Solzhenitsyn was right about confrontation re the USSR. In-your-face-factual-truthful-confrontation-is the answer with Islam, too.

Moderates and apologists within Islam try to claim differently, by disassociation techniques, but with every invocation of the takirphrase "Allahu akbar" in the warzones of Iraq to the streets of Paris suburbs, the implication that the culprits think God will approve of their action or that their action does something to glorify God, the message is burned into the minds and hearts of the world that Islam is the root cause of these reveries. However, without looking into their minds, it's impossible to know if they deliberately meant that or if they were using a common phrase in their culture without thinking about what it meant. But in their own words, to a Muslim, their religion is everything, including their God-given right to use force in subjugating infidels to the ends of the earth.

These apologists usually point to so-called Christian atrocities in Serbia or in the distant past to validate their points. Yet, it is quite evident that Western secular progressive cultures have done everything possible to distance themselves from their historical roots in Judaic and Christian thought and symbolism, and even this distancing is used by the jihadists to prove their notions of superior religiosity, and they certainly have no qualms in desecrating the traditions and icons of those religions, while screaming bloody murder at anyone who dares raise an eyebrow at theirs.

But let's be clear here, I am not defending Christianity's "hollow" symbols. From a fundamentalist biblical perspective, almost all of the so-called holy days are fabrications taken from traceable pagan sources, and would be quite foreign to the players of biblical times.

But it seems that leftist America is stealthly embracing Islamic appearances while throwing off the yoke of Christianity. This is a ridiculous and dangerous operation. It needs to be stopped before it is too late.