ACT FOR AMERICA

Dear Gabriel,

When we speak to groups around the country, it's not uncommon for us to hear people say "surely the things you're warning us about couldn't happen here in America!"

For instance, surely in "the land of the free and the home of the brave," where our right to free speech is enshrined in the very first amendment to the Constitution, the successful muzzling of criticism of radical Islam in Europe and Great Britain couldn't happen here.

Surely an event in America that featured Dutch Member of Parliament Geert Wilders would not be shut down, as was the case in Great Britain earlier this year.

The Newsmax.com article below should be one more nail in the coffin of "surely it can't happen here" wishful thinking. It IS happening.

This illustrates better than any alarm bell we can ring why the growth of ACT! for America into a formidable, organized grassroots voice of resistance to radical Islam is essential. No such force existed in Europe or Great Britain 25 years ago, and the result has been a highly successful advance of cultural jihad in those nations.

The clock is ticking and Islamists are advancing. You can help us continue to build our citizen action network and our organized resistance by forwarding this email to everyone you know and asking them to sign up for our emails at ACT FOR AMERICA.

You can also help us with your financial support by clicking here.

ACT! for America now has nearly 60,000 members and 300 local chapters. With your support we will continue to grow, organize, and successfully resist the rising threat of radical Islam to our security and our freedoms.

ACT for America
P.O. Box 12765
Pensacola, FL 32591
www.actforamerica.org

ACT for America is an issues advocacy organization dedicated to effectively organizing and mobilizing the most powerful grassroots citizen action network in America, a grassroots network committed to informed and coordinated civic action that will lead to public policies that promote America's national security and the defense of American democratic values against the assault of radical Islam.

We are only as strong as our supporters, and your volunteer and financial support is essential to our success. Thank you for helping us make America safer and more secure.

REFUSING TO LIVE WITH RADICAL ISLAM

From the Creeping Sharia front:

FAREED ZAKARIAH IS AT IT AGAIN. Remember him? The Muslim editor of Newsweek who wrote a book entitled the Post American World. The same book Barack Obama was reading during the U.S. presidential election, which has a chapter entitled “A Non-Western World”, and mentions Obama on page 255. The same Fareed Zakaria who declared the USA #2 in a separate Newsweek story.

We surmised Obama might be modeling some of his foreign policy strategies on Zakaria’s writings, particularly his approach to Iran—see our previous post Obama planning post American world to compare Zakaria’s words on Iran to Obama’s. With the closing of Gitmo, the failure to address the kidnapping of a U.S. U.N. worker in Pakistan, and the chumminess towards soon-to-be nuclear power Iran, and Hamas may bear that out.

In Fareed Zakaria’s latest, Learning to Live With Radical Islam, he subtitles his article: “We don’t have to accept the stoning of criminals. But it’s time to stop treating all Islamists as potential terrorists.”

If Zakaria means that all Muslims are Islamists, he should first prove that all Islamists (i.e., Muslims) are treated as potential terrorists, then we can talk. If he means that all “radical” Muslims are Islamists, then why wouldn’t “we” treat all “Islamists” as potential terrorists? Furthermore, if Zakaria could conclusively define radical Islam that would be extremely helpful. Is radical Islam based on a different version of the Quran or other Islamic texts? A different Mohammid? A different Allah? A different jihad than Mohammad waged?

Any article detailing how “we” should learn to live with radical Islam, rather than defeat it, that begins with an opening paragraph describing how a region of Pakistan is quiet once again because the Taliban took over and implemented sharia law simply doesn’t bode well for anyone. He fails to mention that the Taliban waged a war for the Swat valley and “beheaded opponents, torched girls schools and terrorized the police to gain control of much of the one-time tourist haven”.

Keep in mind however that Fareed Zakaria routinely minimizes the Islamic terrorism threat, al-Qaeda, the odds of being a victim of terrorism, and he does it here again claiming that the Taliban aren’t so bad after all because Fareed says most “Taliban want Islamic rule locally, not violent jihad globally.” Got that? “Not all these Islamists advocate global jihad, host terrorists or launch operations against the outside world—in fact, most do not.” See world, nothing to worry about here, just a tiny minority of Islamists want to kill us.

Fareed overlooks many a significant point in his article. One, even if it is true that only a small group of Muslims have global jihadist ambitions like al Qaeda, that’s all it takes. Just one group. Just one nuke. Look what 19 Muslims did on 9/11. Maybe Muslims should learn to live with the fact that as long as ANY Islamists (defined any way you want) have global jihadist ambitions that there will be significant consequences. Two, Fareed, given the resources and the opportunity, how quickly would the local jihadis that behead folks, burn girls schools, and adhere to the strictest of sharia law, take their local jihad global? Three, wasn’t Muhammid’s ambition to create a global khillafah or caliphate? Isn’t that the ultimate goal of Islam? For all to submit to Allah’s will?

There are interesting points made in the article but most are glossy at best. He writes about Iraq and claims that General Petraeus’ squelching of a massive insurgency is an example of accepting Islamism. What he fails to mention is the presence, and increase in, U.S. troops that executed the counter-insurgency strategy and made it work.

Zakaria does state that “Recognizing the reality of radical Islam is entirely different from accepting its ideas.” If that’s all he meant, why the cover story in Arabic and the statement ‘how to live with it’? Later in the same paragraph Zakaria takes it on his own to wildly distort reality, reminiscent of Obama’s air raiding villages comment, he states dumping resources (i.e., cash) on the problem rather than, “simply bombing, killing and capturing—might change the atmosphere surrounding the U.S. involvement in this struggle.” He also fails to mention that it was Islamism that brought the struggle to the U.S., not the other way around.

He concludes:

We can better pursue our values if we recognize the local and cultural context, and appreciate that people want to find their own balance between freedom and order, liberty and license. Radical Islam will follow the same path. Wherever it is tried…people weary of its charms very quickly. The truth is that all Islamists, violent or not, lack answers to the problems of the modern world. They do not have a world view that can satisfy the aspirations of modern men and women. We do. That’s the most powerful weapon of all.

Fair enough. Yet once people are enslaved to sharia law, weary or not, they are not permitted to “find their own balance between freedom and order, liberty and license.” Hence, we should not be giving Islamists hope and proposing how we should learn to live with their “radical Islam”, rather we should be proposing how to end it and prevent it from infiltrating our institutions and way of life.

We did not choose to live with Nazism, communism, or fascism, nor should we surrender to and live with Islamism.

Read it all at Newsweek.

THE MELTING POT STIRRED

Bob Dylan in 1976

"Oh where have you been my darling young one?"

I HAVE BEEN HOPING I would never have to write this article. I hoped it would never get to this point, which would force me to openly speak out against the first African American to seriously have a chance to be elected President of the United States.

But after reviewing all the Stanley Kurtz material on Barack Obama/Bill Ayers relationship, I've come to the conclusion Barack Obama is definitely under the influence of a radical ideology that is so dangerous, it could literally pose a danger to the very existence of the United States, especially when we have an economy already in crises, and a war in progress against one of the greatest threats we have ever faced, in Islamic terrorism. (Photo to the right is William Ayers mug shot taken upon arrest by Chicago police in 1968—just before Ayers began his campaign in the early 70's—bombing campaign that is, not political)

I know Barack Obama. No I haven't met Barack Obama personally, but I know many African Americans like him. African Americans who were born in the 1950s and early 1960s who are now in their 40s and 50s in age. I am of that generation.

Our generation grew up personally witnessing the turmoil of the 1960's and 70's, which shaped our viewpoint of America. During the great civil rights movement of this era a very young radical element evolved and came into being in the Northern black communities of major cities of America.

This element I refer to did not embrace the nonviolent civil disobedience philosophy of Martin Luther King. In fact we ridiculed King's non-violent movement going on in the South. We wanted to meet violence with violence, and so organizations like the Black Panther Party, Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) (which later renounced non-violence) and The Nation of Islam came into being in cities like NY, Chicago, Boston, and LA. Those times and organizations produced leaders like Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Huey Newton, the dis-Honorable Elijah Muhammad, Bobby Seale, and others.

Read it all. There is understandably quite a firestorm sweeping through the comments section of Jazzman's blog. And then check out Urban Cure which is the brain trust of Star Parker, the founder and president of CURE, the Coalition on Urban Renewal & Education, a 501c3 non-profit think tank that provides a national voice of reason on issues of race and poverty in the media, inner city neighborhoods, and public policy.

Prior to her involvement in social activism, Parker was a single welfare mother in Los Angeles, California. After embracing Christianity, she returned to college, received a BS degree in marketing and launched an urban Christian magazine. The 1992 Los Angeles riots destroyed her business, yet served as a springboard for her focus on faith and market-based alternatives to empower the lives of the poor.

And if you are still unimpressed with the twisted logic this presidential campaign has presented the "average" American voter, take a listen to this short clip put together by the unflappable Howard Stern Show.

Now for something completely predictable on so many levels—starting with the redoubtable Obama himself—while he begins to deny his association with ACORN, here is what Obama proclaimed to ACORN in a November, 2007 speech, according to Newsmax:

“I’ve been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career. Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work.”

MASTER OF CHANGE AND HIS DISCIPLES

The following excerpt of an essay by John Perazzo published at Front Page Mag is a splendid starting point for educating oneself concerning the unsavory tactics of revolutionaries, radicals, and enforcers rising up from both the Left and the Right. Read it all. The link to the full essay, which is rather long and comprehensive, is at the end of this excerpt.

AMERICANS ARE WELL-ACQUAINTED with presidential candidate Barack Obama’s legendary pledges to bring “change” to America’s political and social landscape. (For example, see here and here and here.) Indeed, “Change We Can Believe In” is the slogan that adorns the homepage of his campaign website and so many of the placards displayed by the supporters who attend his speaking engagements.

His Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, is also well practiced at issuing calls for change. Her “Change and Experience” ad campaign was but an outgrowth of her 1993 declaration, as First Lady, that “remolding society is one of the great challenges facing all of us in the West.” Most Americans are unaware, however, that when Obama and Clinton speak of “change,” they mean change in the sense that a profoundly significant, though not widely known, individual—Saul Alinsky —outlined in his writings two generations ago.

Alinsky helped to establish the confrontational political tactics, which he termed “organizing,” that characterized the 1960s and have remained central to all subsequent revolutionary movements in the United States. Both Obama and Clinton are committed disciples of Alinsky’s very specific strategies for “social change.”

...

Alinsky stressed that organizers and their followers needed to take care, when first unveiling their particular crusade for “change,” not to alienate the middle class with any type of crude language, defiant demeanor, or menacing appearance that suggested radicalism or a disrespect for middle class mores and traditions. For this very reason, he disliked the hippies and counterculture activists of the 1960s. As Richard Poe puts it: “Alinsky scolded the Sixties Left for scaring off potential converts in Middle America. True revolutionaries do not flaunt their radicalism, Alinsky taught. They cut their hair, put on suits and infiltrate the system from within.”

While his ultimate goal was nothing less than the “radicalization of the middle class,” Alinsky stressed the importance of “learning to talk the language of those with whom one is trying to converse.”[63] “Tactics must begin with the experience of the middle class,” he said, “accepting their aversion to rudeness, vulgarity, and conflict. Start them easy, don’t scare them off.”[64]

To appeal to the middle class, Alinsky continued, “goals must be phrased in general terms like ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’; ‘Of the Common Welfare’; ‘Pursuit of happiness’; or ‘Bread and Peace.’”[65] He suggested, for instance, that an effective organizer “discovers what their [the middle class’] definition of the police is, and their language— [and] he discards the rhetoric that always says ‘pig’ [in reference to police]. Instead of hostile rejection he is seeking bridges of communication and unity over the gaps. He will view with strategic sensitivity the nature of middle-class behavior with its hang-ups over rudeness or aggressive, insulting, profane actions. All this and more must be grasped and used to radicalize parts of the middle class.”[66]

A related principle taught by Alinsky was that radical organizers must not only speak the language of the middle class, but that they also must dress their crusades in the vestments of morality. “Moral rationalization,” he said, “is indispensable to all kinds of action, whether to justify the selection or the use of ends or means.”[67] “All great leaders,” he added, “invoked ‘moral principles’ to cover naked self-interest in the clothing of ‘freedom,’ ‘equality of mankind,’ ‘a law higher than man-made law,’ and so on.” In short: “All effective actions require the passport of morality.”[68]

This tactic of framing one’s objectives in the rhetoric of morality precisely paralleled a communist device for deception known as “Aesopian language,” which J. Edgar Hoover described as follows:

“Nearly everyone is familiar with the fables of Aesop…. Often the point of the story is not directly stated but must be inferred by the reader. This is a ‘roundabout’ presentation. Lenin and his associates before 1917, while living in exile, made frequent use of ‘Aesopianism.’ Much of their propaganda was written in a ‘roundabout’ and elusive style to pass severe Czarist censorship. They desired revolution but could not say so. They had to resort to hints, theoretical discussions, even substituting words, which, through fooling the censor, were understood by the ‘initiated,’ that is, individuals trained in [Communist] Party terminology….

“The word ‘democracy’ is one of the communists’ favorite Aesopian terms. They say they favor democracy, that communism will bring the fullest democracy in the history of mankind. But, to the communists, democracy does not mean free speech, free elections, or the right of minorities to exist. Democracy means the domination of the communist state, the complete supremacy of the Party. The greater the communist control, the more ‘democracy.’ ‘Full democracy,’ to the communist, will come only when all noncommunist opposition is liquidated.

“Such expressions as ‘democracy,’ ‘equality,’ ‘freedom,’ and ‘justice’ are merely the Party’s Aesopian devices to impress noncommunists. Communists clothe themselves with everything good, noble, and inspiring to exploit those ideals to their own advantage.”[69]

But Alinsky understood that there was a flip side to his strategy of speaking the palatable language of the middle class and the reassuring parlance of morality. Specifically, he said that organizers must be entirely unpredictable and unmistakably willing -—for the sake of the moral principles in whose name they claim to act—to watch society descend into utter chaos and anarchy. He stated that they must be prepared, if necessary, to “go into a state of complete confusion and draw [their] opponent into the vortex of the same confusion.”[70]

One way in which organizers and their disciples can broadcast their preparedness for this possibility is by staging loud, defiant, massive protest rallies expressing deep rage and discontent over one particular injustice or another. Such demonstrations can give onlookers the impression that a mass movement is preparing to shift into high gear, and that its present (already formidable) size is but a fraction of what it eventually will become. “A mass impression,” said Alinsky, “can be lasting and intimidating. Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.”[71]

“The threat,” he added, “is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.”[72] “If your organization is small in numbers,” said Alinsky, “conceal the members in the dark but raise a din and clamor that will make the listener believe that your organization numbers many more than it does.”[73]

“Wherever possible,” Alinsky counseled, “go outside the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.”[74] Marching mobs of chanting demonstrators accomplishes this objective. The average observer’s reaction to such a display is of a dual nature: First he is afraid. But he also recalls the organizer’s initial articulation of middle-class ideals and morals. Thus he convinces himself that the People’s Organization is surely composed of reasonable people who actually hold values similar to his own, and who seek resolutions that will be beneficial to both sides. This thought process causes him to proffer—in hopes of appeasing the angry mobs—concessions and admissions of guilt, which the organizer in turn exploits to gain still greater moral leverage and to extort further concessions.

In Alinsky’s view, action was more often the catalyst for revolutionary fervor than vice versa. He deemed it essential for the organizer to get people to act first (e.g., participate in a demonstration) and rationalize their actions later. “Get them to move in the right direction first,” said Alinsky. “They’ll explain to themselves later why they moved in that direction.”[75]

Among the most vital tenets of Alinsky’s method were the following:

“Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more live up to their own rules than the Christian Church can live up to Christianity.”[76]

“No organization, including organized religion, can live up to the letter of its own book. You can club them to death with their ‘book’ of rules and regulations.”[77]

“Practically all people live in a world of contradictions. They espouse a morality which they do not practice.… This dilemma can and should be fully utilized by the organizer in getting individuals and groups involved in a People’s Organization. It is a very definite Achilles’ heel even in the most materialistic person. Caught in the trap of his own contradictions, that person will find it difficult to show satisfactory cause to both the organizer and himself as to why he should not join and participate in the organization. He will be driven either to participation or else to a public and private admission of his own lack of faith in democracy and man.”[78]

We have seen this phenomenon played out many times in recent years. For instance, a case of police brutality against black New Yorker Abner Louima in 1997 was cited repeatedly by critics of the police as emblematic of a widespread pattern of abuse aimed at nonwhite minorities. Similarly, the misconduct of a handful of American soldiers at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in 2004 was portrayed as part of a much larger pattern that had been approved by the highest levels of the U.S. government.

And on the battlefields of the Middle East, any American military initiative that has inadvertently killed innocent civilians has been cited by opponents of the war as evidence that U.S. troops are maniacal, bloodthirsty killers. In each of the foregoing examples, the allegedly hypocritical American authorities were accused of having violated their own “book of rules” (rules that are supposed to govern the conduct of the police or the military).

Alinsky taught that in order to most effectively cast themselves as defenders of moral principals and human decency, organizers must react with “shock, horror, and moral outrage” whenever their targeted enemy in any way misspeaks or fails to live up to his “book of rules.”[79]

Moreover, said Alinsky, whenever possible the organizer must deride his enemy and dismiss him as someone unworthy of being taken seriously because he is either intellectually deficient or morally bankrupt. “The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength,” said Alinsky.[80] He advised organizers to “laugh at the enemy” in an effort to provoke “an irrational anger.”[81] “Ridicule,” said Alinsky, “is man’s most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.”[82]

According to Alinsky, it was vital that organizers focus on multiple crusades and multiple approaches. “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag,” he wrote. “Man can sustain militant interest in any issue for only a limited time. New issues and crises are always developing.”[83] “Keep the pressure on,” he continued, “with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.”[84]

Toward this end, Alinksy advised organizers to be sure that they always kept more than one “fight in the bank.” In other words, organizers should keep a stockpile of comparatively small crusades which they are already prepared to conduct, and to which they can instantly turn their attention after having won a major victory of some type. These “fights in the bank” serve the dual purpose of keeping the organization’s momentum going, while not allowing its major crusade to get “stale” from excessive public exposure.[85]

Read it all.

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.

HINTS ON INTELLECTUAL HONESTY

(Originally published on the SWORG SWILL LISTSERV on June 21, 1999)

Crash writes: I'm glad that you are so clear on your political position.

Kube writes: This was a joke right? Here are a few clearer generalisations.
1. that everyone is and should be out for themselves (individualism)
2. that everyone is mutually interdependent and only equity (of opportunity to develop what you are) can ultimately deliver what anyone needs (communism, self-interest). That is, the nurturing of the parts is the nurturing of the whole.
3. that such an interdependent and complex system can only work on the basis of control by the people (anarchism, efficiency.)
4. that the task is immense and cannot be perfected overnight (revolution, pragmatism) (also see my position on violence)
5. that human relations are inseparable from material conditions (sociology, biology)
6. that all that is springs from material conditions (materialism, religion)
7. there are loads more, but the above will do to fill in most of the traditional boxes.

Crash writes...
Because I'm still working on my position and feel that I'm constantly evolving, I'm not willing to throw my hat into the standard groups (situs, anarchists, marxists, whatever).

Kube writes...
Well I've been TRYING to throw in my lot with some kind of standard group or other for longer than I can remember, for the simple reason that I felt it necessary to organize and coordinate in order to have a benign effect upon a hostile social order. But the trouble with all these groups is simply that they're all fucking wrong.

And writes...
This is not to say that I disagree with Situationism (I want to live in situations!), Anarchism (I want to be free!) or Marxism (we must work together!), but as doctrines they fail to ensure the enlightenment of their own members let alone society at large, and “therefore” one must induct that as worldviews they are not necessarily wrong, but they are certainly lacking. My opinion is that they all lack much the same thing—a sufficient comprehension of relationship and its role in the creative process (that is, in its creation of the future).

And writes...
Anarchists simply refuse to acknowledge the dynamic expansive essence of human nature—they fall back onto small fragmented self-contained worlds (two hippies in a tent on an allotment); the Situationists fell into the pomo Sargasso of 'going with the flow', everything is permissible and utopia will build itself out of nothing at all; the Marxists developed dialectics—but only to the size of a blastocyst, then stopped. All those libraries of paper, all those pyramids of ponderings on what should be done in Somalia, Timbuktu, Peking when the truth is that their members couldn’t collectively make a chicken casserole out of a casserole and a chicken.

And writes...
Inevitably therefore, the basis of action, or of any cultural or political system which is its objective, must be individualism. In order for other people to be what you want them to be (whether you imagine this to be "sharing", "obedient", "enlightened", "beautiful" or whatever) you must create the conditions for them to make this of themselves. A world held in the shape you want it to be only by your own expenditure of energy is a world in which you suffer eternal hunger, toil, conflict, frustration and boredom. In other words, it's a paradox.

And writes...
This is the world we live in (reality on the ground, as Gabriel puts it).

And writes...
Even the desire to control others "for their own good" leads to a contempt for others which does not desire "their own good" any longer—THEY must instead be punished for being the projected object of YOUR own dissatisfaction.