W8 C2 Notes

I'll post up both the next essay topic and an article for summary/response on Saturday.

I see that some of you were confused by the fourth clip, the tv series which supposedly shows Jews conspiring with Hitler to murder their own people. No, it never happened. It is pure propaganda. This is from Arabic television and is designed to convince viewers that Jews are such disgusting traitors they would even betray millions of their own people if it helped them to achieve their ultimate goal: taking over Palestine.

On a related topic, the assumption that the Jews stole the Palestinian land is by no means an established fact. Unfortunately, the msm and the education system rarely attempt to teach the history of the middle east, particularly that regarding modern Israel. Here's an interesting 'politically incorrect' interpretation of that history, one which you'll never see in college or via the msm:

http://www.terrorismawareness.org/what-really-happened/


We'll watch the last bit of the film today and talk about it. In addition to the summary, please give your impressions of the film. Next week, we continue with the academic world. The following week, we'll take up Chapter 7, the contents of which relates directly to the discussion of race in "Indoctrinate U"

W8 C2 My o my, what have we here?

Question from audience: You mentioned a little bit ago, ‘Why did it take a bunch of Arabs to do what you all should have done a long time ago,’ that’s my question.

And as a white man standing here in your midst from a fairly liberal/conservative/middle of the road background—and I tell people I’m so far left I’m coming up on the rigt—and I’d like you to respond to, why shouldn’t we do something and how could we move so they don’t see us coming?

Churchill: I’m gonna repeat that, tell me if I got that right: Why shouldn’t we do something and how do you you move so they don’t see you coming.

As to the first part, not a reason in the world that I could see. I can’t find a single reason that you shouldn’t in a principled way—there may be some practical considerations, such as do you know how (laughter from audience)—you know, often these things are processes. It’s not just an impulse. And certainly it’s not just an event.

And the simple answer, although it probably should be more complicated, but I’m not being flip and giving the simple answer, is: You carry the weapon. That’s how they don’t see it coming.

You’re the one…They talk about ‘color blind or blind to your color.’ You said it yourself.

You don’t send the Black Liberation Army into Wall Street to conduct an action.

You don’t send the American Indian Movement into downtown Seattle to conduct an action.

Who do you send? You. Your beard shaved, your hair cut close, and wearing a banker’s suit.

There’s probably a whole lot more to it, you know that. But there’s where you start.


Thoughts?

Teaching jihad in America: 1992

Stephen Emerson

September 11, 2001, will live in infamy, but February 26, 1993, should also cause Americans to shudder. On that day 15 years ago, Islamic militants tried to topple the World Trade Center; six people in the building were killed, over a thousand injured. It was the first time the world network of Islamic terrorists had struck on American soil. Most Americans missed the message.

Andrew McCarthy's Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad is a comprehensive, meticulous, and impassioned reminder of that message. As lead prosecutor in one of the most notorious terrorism cases in U.S. history, no one is better equipped than McCarthy to recount the details of the ensuing trial that condemned Islamist kingpin Omar Abdel Rahman to a lifetime in a supermax prison.

McCarthy recalls a 1998 speech by Osama bin Laden's mentor Abdullah Azzam, delivered not in Pakistan, but in Oklahoma City, where a crowd of American-based Muslims was instructed that "the jihad, the fighting, is obligatory on you whenever you can perform it. And just as when you are in America you must fast...so, too, must you wage jihad. The word jihad means fighting only, fighting with the sword."

It was a conference in the same city, on Christmas Day, 1992, sponsored by the Muslim American Youth Association (MAYA), that sparked my own interest in tracking radical Islam. The conclave featured speakers like Khaled Meshaal, Hamas's supreme leader. Speeches were punctuated by frenzied shouts of "kill the Jews" and "destroy the West." Books like How to Kill the Infidel were sold.


These events exposed a violent domestic strain of Islam whose menace was completely underestimated by federal authorities at the time-and, unfortunately, all too often still.

W8 C1 Read this before you do homework

Let's return to the concept of political correctness and develop it a bit more. The better you understand this, the more you'll comprehend the academic world today. The following is taken from Wikipedia:

Some critics, primarily on the Right, claim that political correctness is a Marxist-inspired effort aimed at undermining Western values.

Lind and Buchanan have characterized PC as a technique originated by the Frankfurt School. According to Lind and Buchanan, the work of the Frankfurt School aimed at undermining Western values by influencing popular culture through Cultural Marxism.[28][29]

Buchanan says in his book The Death of the West:

"Political Correctness is Cultural Marxism, a regime to punish dissent and to stigmatize social heresy as the Inquisition punished religious heresy. Its trademark is intolerance."(p. 89).

Critics argue that political correctness is censorship and endangers free speech by limiting what is considered acceptable public discourse, especially in university and the political forums. University of Pennsylvania professor Alan Charles Kors and lawyer Harvey A. Silverglate, connect political correctness to Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse.

They view "Marcusean logic" as the base of speech codes formulated in American universities.[30]

Kors and Silverglate went on to create the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which campaigns against such speech codes.

W8 C1 Homework 2: Respond to this article

My Second Marxist Indoctrination
By Tatiana Menaker
FrontPageMagazine.com December 3, 2003

After arriving in the United States with a diploma from Leningrad University (a university with such alumni as Vladimir Lenin, Ayn Rand and President Vladimir Putin), I realized that I had the extremely unmarketable skills of a Marxist-Leninist philosophy professor. Moreover, English was not my strong suit. So I became a staff writer for a Russian newspaper in San Francisco and free-lanced for émigré publications in New York and Los Angeles. Eventually, I decided “To bring my English to the level of my Russian" (as the Russian-born American novelist Vladimir Nabokov quipped) and enrolled at San Francisco State University. I majored in creative writing.

I couldn’t believe what I found.

Imagine the utter amazement of a refugee from a Communist country, where Marxism was forced on all students, now having to sink in a puddle of socialist propaganda again -- but this time in the middle of an American university!

Imagine the astonishment of a person who, after fighting the KGB and being a refusenik, finally comes so close to her dream of receiving a real education instead of indoctrination, only to find herself, once again, in the middle of a socialist brainwashing machine -- but this time in San Francisco.

Unfortunately, at San Francisco State University, meeting with members of the monolithic left-wing faculty, who are still soaked in the delirium of the Marxist-Socialist utopia, is an everyday necessity for the average student.

Very few SFSU faculty members separate their political platforms from the professor's podium. When a professor in the Philosophy department teaches Marxism with the zealotry of a new convert, it is totally understandable; but when a Linguistics professor pushes socialist ideas instead of explaining sentence structure, or a Geography professor slaps slogans of the extreme left-wing organization International ANSWER on her office door (paid for by taxpayers with differing political views), it becomes another matter altogether.

Obviously, being busy with teaching and promoting world change, these professors have overlooked the well-known fact that Marxist ideology failed the test in every country where it was applied. Completely unchastened by the failure of socialism, these individuals still harbor the dream of a Union of American Socialist Republics. It is not my duty to enlighten them about the events of modern history or to correct their outdated '60s-era radical political views. But unfortunately, their obsession affects their job performance and ruins education systems all across the county.

These academics assume that all the students have the same anti-American and anti-Bush opinions they uniformly hold. So instead of the material listed in the syllabus, they present soliloquies about American imperialism.

Last summer, one of my professors started every class with Orwellian "Five-Minute Hate" condemnations of President Bush. The instructor did not understand how ridiculous he looked: a 50-year-old guy in sandals and a worn-out jacket with hanging threads, who didn't make it to an Ivy League university, giving hysterical speeches calling President Bush "a moron" and "a good for nothing idiot."

This confused me. Was the professor referring to the George W. Bush who was elected governor of Texas and then the president of the richest and most powerful country in the world? Was he referring to the George W. Bush who graduated with a B.A. from Yale and an M.B.A. from Harvard, who made $14 million in the baseball business, who was a military pilot and acted with courage and nobility as a leader during one of the worst moments of American history on September 11?

"What is this?" I asked myself.

At least this professor can be credited for giving me my well-deserved grade of C. Another professor, who hated President Bush because he, like Bush, also graduated from Yale, gave me an F with a note saying that I would never overcome the language barrier.

I couldn’t help reflecting that, at the same age as Bush, this professor had achieved little more than a few divorces and five children spread all over the country -- information that he poured on us before even learning our names, which, by the way, he never managed to do.

Considering how irritated he was by my essay, which ridiculed his leftist views, this professor was not conducting himself in a fair and unbiased manner. Obviously, I was not the only student who complained about my grade. As a result, the English department quickly changed my grade of F to "no credit." The following semester, I repeated the same class with a famously tough teacher, receiving a B+ and many compliments on my writing. It seems that I had overcome my allegedly insurmountable “language barrier” after all.

I noticed a recurring pattern in SFSU's anti-American professors: the degree to which a professor condemned American “imperialism” was usually in direct proportion to his lack of personal hygiene and steady decline in personal appearance.

I was especially fascinated by one middle-aged guy who had alcoholism written all over his face, in bathhouse flip-flops revealing dirty overgrown toenails, and with his belongings stuffed in a plastic grocery bag. If I hadn't seen him behind the teacher's desk, I would have mistaken him for one of San Francisco's deranged homeless, lost on the campus having wandered from the neighboring shower program. Instead of his subject, African Studies, he was teaching that America was rich only because it dishonestly made money on rebuilding Europe after WWII. If not for that lucky strike, he argued, this country would be even more terrible than it is now. He never had notes or a clear structure for his lectures; he just improvised on his well-worn, beloved topic of anti-Americanism.

Over time I found the inverse proportion worked as well: the more well-kept and professional the teacher was, and the harder he worked, the less inclined he was to get himself into the mess of quasi-political discussions instead of the work he was paid to do: teach.

One female instructor, who had no idea how to fill the three hours of class, used to spend 40 minutes taking attendance and often started her lectures with the sentence, "In this country. . . ." Instead of discussing literature, she would consistently praise socialism and what she considered to be the Soviet workers’ paradise. Only my cobra-like gaze and "rude" remarks made her choke on her words. For this offence, I received a D, even though my essays were so good that she told me she didn't believe I was the one who wrote them.

Immediately before the war in Iraq, I watched two different kinds of professors at SFSU: both of them, naturally, antiwar. Some of them did their work with professional integrity even though their hearts were on the antiwar side, trusting students to make their own political decisions. Some others not only served as ideologues to the anti-American mob organized under their patronage, but also agitated and incited students to leave classes for antiwar demonstrations.

This pointed out the major difference between my education in the Soviet Union and my education at SFSU. When I wanted to transfer credits from my Leningrad University degree to SFSU, I was told by the International Admissions Office that it couldn't be done, because as a professor of Marxist-Leninist philosophy, I had only gone through "indoctrination." I find this fascinating, because the difference between Leningrad University and SFSU is that my professors in Leningrad were forced to teach socialist propaganda for fear of brutal punishment; here a bunch of aged hippies, who put students through forced indoctrination instead of academic work, were materially rewarded for their radical activism.

Not only am I as amazed as Alice in the Socialist Wonderland of San Francisco State University, but I feel as though I need to attend a third university to receive a real education.

At SFSU, I've merely had my second Marxist indoctrination.


Respond to three specific points/experiences discussed in the article.

W8 C1 Homework 1: Indoctrinate U

What are your impressions of the movie and our class discussion?

W8 C1 Notes: Essay 2 - bias in the universities

I'm developing a collection of articles from which you'll choose three to write the next essay.

The articles below are just a brief introduction to the prevailing situation on university campuses, both in Canada and the US.

As with the msm itself, there are those who argue that no significant problem exists in terms of bias and/or indoctrination in the university in general.

If someone were to say, "There's no problem of leftwing bias in universities", what evidence would you refer to in three of the given articles to challenge that point of view? Someone might argue that "there might be a few cases in a few universities, but it's hardly worth worrying about." How would you reply, based on the evidence? If you were a journalist, is academic bias a topic that should be reported on? Is there a probable connection between academic and media bias?

As usual, summarize, briefly but accurately, the articles. You may wish to respond one article at a time, or you might respond in the second half of the essay. Your response should refer specifically to evidence in the articles.

Essay should be 1,000 words. Due on Tuesday, November 11, Week 10. Double spaced. Hardcopy and email. You must use at least 3 direct quotes.

Mob Rule on College Campuses

Cinnamon Stillwell
Wednesday, November 29, 2006

America's college campuses, once thought to be bastions of free speech, have become increasingly intolerant toward the practice. Visiting speakers whose views do not conform to the prevailing left-leaning political mind-set on most campuses are at particular risk of having their free speech rights infringed upon.

While academia has its own crimes to atone for, it's the students who have become the bullies as of late. A disturbing number seem to feel that theirs is an inviolate world to which no one of differing opinion need apply. As a result, everything from pie throwing to disrupting speeches to attacks on speakers has become commonplace.

Conservative speakers have long been the targets of such illiberal treatment. The violent reception given to Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minuteman Project, an anti-illegal immigration group, at Columbia University in October is a recent example. Gilchrist had been invited to speak by the Columbia University College Republicans, but was prevented from doing so by an unruly mob of students. What could have been mere heckling descended into yelling, screaming, kicking and punching, culminating in the rushing of the stage and Gilchrist being shuttled off by security.

The fact that the rioting students could be heard yelling, "He has no right to speak!" was telling. Apparently, in their minds, neither Gilchrist nor anyone else with whom they disagree has a right to express their viewpoints. In any other setting this would be called exactly what it is -- totalitarianism. But in the untouchable Ivy League world of Columbia, it was chalked up to student activism gone awry. While condemning the incident, Columbia University President Lee Bollinger has yet to apologize to Gilchrist or to conclude the supposed investigation into the affair. In other words, mob rule won the day.

Bay Area Politically Correct Intolerance

Such behavior is certainly not limited to East Coast universities. Last February at San Francisco State University, former liberal activist-author turned conservative activist-author David Horowitz had his entire speech shouted down by a group of protesters. Composed primarily of students and other members of the Spartacus Youth Club, a Trotskyist organization, the group stood in the back of the room shouting slogans and comments at every turn.

Even this was not enough to warrant their removal, so Horowitz and his audience, which included me, simply had to suffer through the experience. Horowitz, whose speech centered on his Academic Bill of Rights, took on his critics and attempted to engage them in dialogue, with varying degrees of success. But those who actually came to hear him speak, whether out of sympathy for his views or out of a desire to tackle them intellectually, were unable to do so fully because of the actions of a few bullies.

It is not only conservative speakers who are at risk of having their free speech rights trampled upon on American college campuses. Those who dare criticize radical Islam in any way, shape or form tend to suffer the same fate.

In 2004, UC Berkeley became the locus for bullying behavior during a speech by Islam scholar Daniel Pipes. I was witness to the spectacle, one I'll never forget. Members of the Muslim Student Association and other protesters formed a disruptive group in the audience, shouting, jeering and chanting continually. They booed loudly throughout and called Pipes everything from "racist" and "Zionist" (which in their minds is an insult) to "racist Jew" -- all because Pipes had the audacity to propose that moderate Muslims distance themselves from extremist elements in their midst; that in tackling terrorism authorities take into account the preponderance of Muslim perpetrators and that Israel has a right to exist peacefully among its neighbors.

This was hardly the first time that UC Berkeley students had espoused hostility toward speakers with "unpopular" views or those hailing from "unpopular" countries such as Israel. Nonetheless, it was a wake-up call for many in the audience who had not yet experienced first-hand the intimidation of the mob.

Arab Reformers Silenced

Recently, reformers from within the Arab world itself have been on the receiving end of such treatment. Whether it be the work of student groups or faculty, insurmountable security restrictions and last-minute cancellations have a strange way of arising whenever such figures are invited to speak on college campuses.

Arab American activist and author Nonie Darwish was to speak at Brown University earlier this month, when the event was canceled because her views were deemed "too controversial" by members of the Muslim Students' Association. Given that Darwish is the author of the recently released book, "Now They Call Me Infidel: Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel and the War on Terror," such claims are hardly unpredictable. Like most Arab reformers, Darwish must overcome the resistance within her own community, aided and abetted by misguided liberal sympathizers, in order to get her message across.

Darwish was born and raised a Muslim in Egypt and later lived in Gaza. It was during this time that she had several experiences that led her to reject the anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism with which she was indoctrinated as a child. She eventually converted to Christianity and emigrated to the United States. She has since dedicated her life to exposing the ways that hatred and intolerance are crippling the Muslim world and leading to violence against non-Muslims.

Her pro-Israel views led to an invitation from the campus Jewish group Hillel to speak at Brown University. Unfortunately, the very same organization later backed out, fearing that their relationship with the Muslim Students' Association would be harmed by the experience. But if such a relationship is based on mutually assured censorship, then it's hardly worth preserving. In the end, all of Brown's students missed out on what would undoubtedly have been a thought-provoking experience. Word has it that Brown University has re-invited Darwish to speak, no doubt in response to the furor, so perhaps students will have that opportunity after all.

Terrorists Recant

Walid Shoebat, a former PLO terrorist turned Christian convert and outspoken anti-jihadist, fared slightly better at Columbia University in October. Shoebat is the author of "Why I Left Jihad: The Root of Terrorism and the Return of Radical Islam." He was invited to speak by the Columbia College Republicans, along with former Lebanese terrorist Zachariah Anani and former Nazi Hitler Youth member and German soldier, Hilmar von Campe. All three have renounced their former anti-Semitic views and dedicated themselves to exposing radical Islam in a no-holds-barred fashion.

They managed to give their presentation, but the turnout was greatly impacted by last-minute changes to security policies implemented in the wake of the Jim Gilchrist debacle. As a result, 75 to 120 people who had RSVP'd for the event were turned away at the door because only Columbia students and 20 guests were allowed to attend. An e-mail sent out 3 hours before the event was the only forewarning, and as one would expect, most of those planning to attend didn't receive it in time. The event had been widely advertised in the blogosphere, and those denied entry were not only greatly inconvenienced but also greatly disappointed.

Members of student groups who had boycotted the event were much cheerier at the prospect of a low turnout. A post at the blog for the Blue and White, Columbia's undergraduate magazine, expressed eagerness for "pretty pictures of empty chairs." Unfortunately, they got their wish, to the detriment of open discourse at Columbia.

Illiberal Mob Rule

It's a sad state of affairs indeed when the figures of moderation and reform that many who call themselves liberal or progressive should in theory support are instead shunned in the name of political correctness. For how can one expect to promote progress while helping to stifle the voices at its heart?

People such as Shoebat and Darwish, who literally risk their lives to call attention to a grave threat to all our rights, are the true freedom fighters of our day. But far too many accord that label to those who choose to effect political change by blowing themselves up in a crowd of civilians or by randomly lobbing rockets into homes and schools or by promoting hatred of other religions. By excusing such behavior and simultaneously helping to suppress reformers, liberal student groups are in fact aiding the very totalitarian forces they claim to oppose. They have in effect become part of the problem, not part of the solution.

It would be nice if we could look to our colleges and universities as the bearers of progress, but at this rate it seems an unlikely prospect. If we are to truly promote an atmosphere of intellectual openness, respectful political debate and the free flow of ideas on campus, then we must stem the tide of thuggery, bullying and intolerance that threatens to subsume future generations.

Otherwise, we cede the day to mob rule.


Cinnamon Stillwell is a San Francisco writer. She can be reached at cinnamonstillwell@yahoo.com.
Read her blog at cinnamonstillwell.blogspot.com/.

What in the world's going on in universities?

http://NoIndoctrination.org

Archives

College Credit for Political Campaigning? [2008]
Metro State: Politics in the Classroom? [2008]
Survey of Georgia's public colleges [2008]
David Clemens' book review of Robert O'Neil's academic freedom book [2008]
Fish Interview re: Save the World on Your Own Time [2008]
Science and Political Agendas [2008]
Alan Kor's quote re: higher education [2008]
"Dartmouth's 'Hostile' Environment" [2008]
LA Times Academic Freedom Debate [2008]
Marshall College's DOC - UCSD [2008]
Double Standard at Harvard? [2008]
College Res-Life Programs [2008]
Facts and Fallacies with Thomas Sowell [2008]
More re: Duke University [2008]
Columbia University [2008]
School of Social Work at Rhode Island College [2008]
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"Save the World on Your Own Time" [2008]
Bruce Thornton quote [2007]
Teacher Education Accreditation Drops Social Justice [2007]
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Academic McCarthyism at Duke [2007]
Professor experiences effects of political correctness [2007]
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Zogby Poll re: political bias in academia [2007]
Georgia Tech Admin soliciting Obama volunteers [2007]
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2007 Sheldon Award [2007]
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Quote from June 17 Wall Street Journal [2007]
Review of Howard Zinn's "Young People's History of the United States" [2007]
Baccalaureate Address Quotes: Middlebury College [2007]
Inside Higher Ed article re UCSD's Dimensions of Culture Program [2007]
Minneapolis Community and Technical College [2007]
Shame of Higher Education [2007]
Hypocrisy at Yale? [2007]
A stinging indictment of Missouri State University's Social Work Program [2007]
Quote from Cary Nelson (President, American Association of University Professors) [2007]
"Pernicious Politicization in Academe" by Luan Wright [2007]
"The Impact of Academic Bias" [2007]
"Indoctrinate U" [2007]
Teacher Education - "Thought Police" [2007]
Interview with Luann Wright [2007]
ACTA's Missouri Public Universities Survey [2007]
CUNY Approves Steps for Dealing With Complaints About Professors' Conduct [2007]
ASU's "Sensitivity Exercises" for dorm RAs [2007]
Quote from "Duke's Curtis Crisis" [2007]
Job Fair Canceled at UC Santa Cruz [2007]
Stanley Fish Quotes [2007]
Columbia University Pres Lee Bollinger's Letter [2006]
"Mob Rule on College Campuses" - SF Chronicle [2006]
Read "The left has been infected by the disease of intolerance" [2006]
Read "Balancing Views on Campus" [2006]
Schools of Social Work [2006]
Missouri State - School of Social Work [2006]
Columbia University's Lack of Free Speech [2006]
Liberal Bias Rules UNM Law School [2006]
"UC-Santa Cruz and the Loss of Public Trust" [2006]
"Sounding Taps: Why military history is being retired" [2006]
A Stanley Fish quote in The New York Times [2006]
Education Schools [2006]
"A tale of two professors -- Standards high and low at CCRI" [2006]
Quote from "From Ideology to Inquiry" [2006]
"Ethnic Studies 198: The Prop 209 Project": [2006]
The 2006 Sheldon Award [2006]
ACTA Report [2006]
Conference at USC - April 22, 2006 [2006]
Update Re: Prof. Clemens' Univ of Calif posting [2006]
Quotes from article by Professors Lee and Garrett [2005]
A Quote from Author & Teacher Daphne Patai [2005]
A Quote from Stanley Fish, Dean Emeritus at UIC [2005]
ACE on Academic Rights and Responsibilities [2005]
A Quote from a Recent Poster [2005]
NoIndoctrination.org testifies again at CA Senate hearing [2005]
NoIndoctrination.org responds to University of Wisconsin-Whitewater Professor [2005]
Gaucho Free Press (UCSB) - Interview with Luann Wright [2005]
A Quote from the President of Columbia University [2005]
A Victory for Racial Equity at Penn State [2005]
UC Backs Down - A Victory for Gender Equity at the University of California [2005]
A quote from a recent poster [2004]
A Survey on Politics in the Classroom [2004]
A graduate student's essay "On Indoctrination at the University" [2004]
"Academic Freedom in the Classroom: When 'Freedom' Becomes 'License'" by Luann Wright [2004]
NoIndoctrination.org's letter to Indiana University's Board of Trustees [2004]
A letter from one of our student posters [2004]
Watch the film Brainwashing 101 [2004]
June/July correspondences between NoIndoctrination.org and the California State University system [2004]
George Washington University President's Quote [2004]
NoIndoctrination.org testifies at CA Senate hearing [2004]
NoIndoctrination.org's letter to Historian group [2004]
A Student Exposé of Campus Speaker Selection at Univ of Tennessee, Knoxville [2003]
The University of California's Academic Freedom Statement Revision [2003]
How Academic Freedom Could Become Academic Secrecy in New York [2003]

The Hazards of Speaking on a College Campus

By David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com 10/20/2008

For a conservative, the hazards of speaking on a college campus are more extensive than you might think. Once the security guards are in place – as they inevitably must be – the risk of getting pied or physically attacked or having one’s speech shut down by raucous protesters is actually a lesser problem than others one regularly encounters at these events.

Far greater is the problem presented by the generally hostile environment a conservative normally encounters on any campus. This includes destruction of flyers advertising one’s event, failure of the campus newspaper to publicize it and failure of professors to recommend or even require student attendance as they regularly do for radical speakers.

Equally troublesome for a visiting conservative is the pervasive leftist mindset of a community that is constantly brow-beaten by leftist propaganda and is the subject of relentless intimidation by leftist bigots who will call anyone who disagrees with them a racist or a sexist or an Islamophobe at the drop of a hat. This creates a conventional wisdom which institutionalizes falsehoods such as "Israel is occupying stolen Arab lands or is an apartheid state" or “the Jews control American policy.”

The same oppressive atmosphere makes lunatic positions such as the claim that the American government or the Israeli Mossad blew up the world trade center seem reasonable. When I spoke at Central Michigan University last week, for example, my speech was competing with another event, organized by Michigan faculty which featured a once deported Muslim professor – now re-admitted on visa – who argued that 9/11 was an Israeli plot.

At same time, reasonable statements a visiting conservative is likely to make - that the Arabs are guilty of a sixty-year war of aggression whose goal is to destroy the Jewish state - seem one-sided, hard-to-believe and therefore “extreme.” This means that any statement made by such a visitor taken out of context can seem ludicrous and absurd to a campus audience which is likely never to have been confronted by conservative arguments and facts – perhaps never to have heard them presented by an adult member of the academic community.

In this fertile ground, the campus press becomes the most hazardous land mine for a visiting conservative. As a result of changes made twenty and thirty years ago, campus newspapers are independently owned while still drawing on institutional support from universities who give them exclusive distribution rights, and bearing the names of traditional campus newspapers which associates them with the university community. This arrangement allows university administrators to wash their hands of responsibility for the journalistic contents of the papers while providing them with a captive campus audience.

On my campus visits, I have occasionally had really fine student reporters cover my events, and I have had honest but incompetent student reporters garble my remarks. But I have also had ideologically hostile campus reporters who garbled my remarks with political intent. The resulting caricatures have provided useful fodder for the many leftist websites gunning for me on the web. The fact that this ammunition comes with the apparent imprimatur of venerable institutions increases its power to produce collateral damage. It is this hazard to one’s reputation as a public intellectual that presents the most troublesome risk to a conservative who is imprudent enough to accept an invitation to come to a university to speak.

A case in point is the recent visit I made Brown University during Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week – which was “reported” in the Brown Daily Herald. I have a long history with the Brown Daily Herald. In 2001, its liberal editors published an ad I wrote called “10 Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery Is a Bad Idea and Racist Too.” The editors then stood up courageously when they were attacked by the campus left which stole an entire edition of the paper in retaliation and destroyed the copies.

The leftists then threatened to repeat the vandalism every day until the editors paid them money, gave them a free full-page ad and agreed to have their representatives form a committee that would oversee the editorial content of the paper from then on. When Brown's president gently reminded these youthful totalitarians that a free press was a pillar of American democracy, 60 Brown professors signed an open letter condemning the president for her remarks and defending the vandals.

This history is a necessary background to the paper's report on my speech at Brown last week. The assault began with the story’s headline “Horowitz Lambastes Islam in Near Empty MacMillan (Hall).” These seven words consist of one damaging lie and one misleading half-truth.

The half-truth is the statement regarding the poor attendance at my speech. As I have already pointed out, there is not a level playing field for conservatives at Brown or any university. Brown has one notable conservative faculty member in its entire liberal arts program, and thus only one professor who might encourage his students to come to this event or spring to my defense when the event is attacked. But this professor did not attend. Nor did I expect him to attend. It would be, to put it bluntly, dangerous from a career point of view for him to be associated with me in any way, a fact we both understand. Consequently, we have never met, although I have spoken at Brown twice.

Since this is a normal situation on univerity campuses, my usual speaking audience is a couple of hundred students. I were a leftist with my level of notability, there would be double that number or more.

My last talk at Brown was an exception to this rule – some 600 students attended. It was my first visit to Brown after the reparations controversy which tore up the campus. I had to wait three years to be invited because the heads of the college Democrats and the International Socialists Organization had threatened violence if I came, which caused the College Republicans to rescind their original invitation. Because of this history, the president of Brown, Ruth Simmons, was in attendance at my speech along with the diversity provost and the dean of students who introduced me (but asked if he could omit “the laudatory” items in my bio). In other words, this -- despite the fact that I was an unwanted conservative -- approached the status of a true “campus event” – the kind that leftist speakers take for granted.


Although I normally speak to hundreds of students despite these handicaps, there were only about 50 in MacMillan Hall that night. This was the half-truth. The reason for the poor attendance was that the event had been scheduled on the night of the 6th game of the playoffs between the Boston Red Sox (the “home team” for New England) and the Tampa Bay Rays. The schedule for my speech had been in place before Boston unexpectedly beat Anaheim in the semi-finals. The omission of this not insignificant fact from both the article and the headline was hardly accidental – particularly since the reporter had a “Go Red Sox” sticker on his laptop cover.

So much for the half-truth. The lie in the article headline is that I attacked Islam as a religion. I did say that Islam had some problematic elements, in particular the genocidal saying or hadith attributed to its Prophet which says: “The Day of Judgment will only come when Muslims fight Jews and kill them, when the Jews hide behind the rocks and the trees and the rocks and the trees cry out ‘Oh Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him!’”

This hadith was a focus of our Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week this fall and therefore an inevitable subject of my talk. However, throughout my talk and in my discussion of this hadith in particular, I went out of my way to say I was not condemning or attacking or “lambasting” Islam as such. “There are both good Muslims and bad Muslims,” I said repeatedly, “just as there are good Christians and bad Christians and good Jews and bad Jews.”

I went further. I pointed out that at a speech I gave at the University of Virginia the night before (attended by about 200 students) there were 30 or so Muslim students in the audience, who so identified themselves when I asked for a show of hands. I asked for the show of hands after a Muslim student questioned whether the Prophet had ever said such a thing. When I asked, the student said she had never heard of this famous hadith. I then asked for the Muslim show of hands and whether any of them had heard of this hadith. None of them had.

This genocidal hadith is not incidental to the Islamo-fascist jihad which was the subject of my talk. It is written into the Hamas charter and is obviously a motivating force behind the genocidal agendas of Hizbollah, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Iranian regime. I used the classroom “teaching moment” provided by the Muslim students present to illustrate the fact that there were Muslims who were innocent of these agendas. I repeated for the Brown students my belief that probably the overwhelming majority of Muslims was innocent of those agendas, and not part of the Islamic jihad.

Yet the Daily Herald article accuses me of attacking Islam and provides “evidence” of same which will be used on numerous Islamist and leftist websites where I am being maligned as one of the nation’s top “Islamophobes.”

The article begins with an introductory joke I told when I said that I hoped the students had checked their pies at the door. This was a reference to a recent incident in which New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman had so assaulted at Brown.

The Herald article then pointedly described me as “a Jewish writer and activist who holds adamantly pro-Israel views,” and opened its account of my remarks with the following sentence: “‘You have one of the worst faculties in the United States,’ [Horowitz] said, ‘These people are communists – they are totalitarians.’” This was the last point in the article that any Brown reader would still be interested in anything I said or would regard me as anything but a foaming-at-the-mouth ideologue.
The alleged quotation, of course,was a travesty, a gross distortion of the statement I actually made.

I did not and would never say that the entire faculty of any school north of Havana was made up of communists and totalitarians (and I wouldn’t even make such a blanket statement about Castro’s school, which might have many silent dissenters in its ranks). But mangling my statement was only part of the problem.

The reporter also deliberately left out the context of my remark. As is my custom if I have been to a school before, I generally reference a previous visit. In this case, since my relationship to Brown has a greater significance than is the case with most schools, I went over the details of incident with my reparations ad and the trashing of the Herald by student leftists, and the support for this attack on a free press by the 60 Brown faculty members who signed the letter defending the destruction of the newspaper. I then said that these professors had the mentality of communists and totalitarians. Since there were sixty of them supporting the attack on a free press I did say that I thought Brown had the worst faculty – the most overtly political and anti-democratic – in the country.


There is little point in reviewing the other distortions in the Herald story, which included misquoting the genocidal hadith to make it look as though I were exaggerating its implications, and claiming that I said “the Koran left little room for interpretation when compared to the Hebrew and Christian bibles.” In fact, I said that Islam was a fundamentalist religion whose traditions historically did not allow for an interpretive distance from its texts – a point made by many scholars of Islam.

My speech at Brown is over, but I am now left to deal with the caricature in the Brown Daily Herald, which will resurface in innumerable attacks on me by equally unscrupulous leftists on the web. I cannot repair the damage to my relationship with Brown or my reputation with untold Brown alumni and other friends of the Brown community who will read the Herald account.

When I ask myself why the Herald which, despite its liberal bent, has been pretty respectful of my views in the past, would send such a dishonest and hostile reporter to cover my event, the answer I come up with is this: He probably was the only one willing to volunteer for the job while the others went to watch the Red Sox.

The director of "Obsession - radical Islam's war with the west"

FP: What motivated you to direct Obsession?

Kopping: The producer and co-writer of Obsession, Raphael Shore, is really the visionary behind the project. He was the one that first exposed me to the vicious hate speech and propaganda coming out of the Arab world. I remember thinking to myself, "the world has got to see this". This lead us to make a film called, "Relentless" [RelentlessTheMovie.com ] which was about the Arab-Israeli struggle.

Obsession is a sequel of sorts that takes a much broader look at the issue of Radical Islamic terrorism, and the threat it poses to practically every country in the world.
We felt compelled to make the film because the threat is so grossly misunderstood. We made the film so that people could hear from the Radical Islamic leaders in their own words, on their own Islamic TV networks how they see the struggle.

People often tell us that once they've seen Obsession, they walk away with a clarity about the true nature of the conflict that they never had before - and that's why we wanted to make the film.

FP: Why do you think the threat we face is so grossly misunderstood in the West?

Kopping: I think it's because we have a hard time wrapping our heads around the notion that there are people out there that really, really hate us. We can't wrap our heads around a culture that, as we speak, is teaching its men, women and children that the greatest honor and reward a Muslim can earn is by killing the infidel [non-Muslims] - and dying in the act as a martyr. This is part of what we expose in Obsession.

We have an impossible time understanding these things because we, in the West, don't see the world that way. So, what we do, is we say to ourselves that if there are those that hate us, and that are literally raising a next-generation of suicide bombers, it must be for a good reason.

Therefore, we believe that it has to be that we, in the West, have committed some heinous crime in order to invoke such hatred. And so we navel gaze and try to find something, anything, everything that we have done to raise the ire of the Islamic world.

This plays directly into the hands of the Radicals, who point to Iraq, for instance, and say to the West, "Look what you've done! The Sunni and the Shiites are murdering each other on a daily basis! Their blood is on your hands!"

What people fail to realize is that the Sunni's and Shiite have been violently at odds with one another for centuries.

I'm not saying US foreign policy has nothing to do with the current crisis, but the US is not the root cause of the conflict. And that is a critical point that we fail to understand -- that Radicals understand how we see the world, and they prey on our willingness to blame ourselves for the misdeeds of others.

People also fail to realize that the Radical Muslims see this conflict with the West as part of a centuries-long, historic struggle with the non-believers. In many ways, it's as if they see themselves as still fighting the Crusades. The Radicals believe it is their religious duty to cleanse the Muslim lands of the infidels, and to bring the world under the aegis of Islam.

We, in the West, grossly underestimate how religion almost entirely forms the Radical's world-view. In the majority of Islamic countries, there is no separation between “church and state”. In Iran, for instance, there are so-called 'Religious Police" that closely watch the population and regulate their dress- codes, limit interaction between the sexes and the like. In Saudi-Arabia, for instance, it is haram, forbidden for women to drive a car - let alone vote.

The point here is that we are living in a very different worlds to the majority of the Islamic population.

And until we begin to understand how the Radical Muslims see the world, we are not going to fully understand the nature of the threat we are facing.

FP: How would you define the enemy we face?

Kopping: Radical Muslims present themselves as defending the lands and honor of Islam against the "Great Satan" [ie, the West, and America, in particular]. Radical Muslims have cast themselves in the role of the victim because they know that it is the surest way to galvanize their entire population to rise up against the onslaught of this "Satan".

Add to that, they believe that they have a religious imperative commanded by Allah Himself to fight the kuffar (infidel, non-Muslim) no matter where they happen to live. Therefore, they believe it is incumbent of every believing man, woman and child to play an active role in this Jihad, the highest of honor of which is to die as a martyr. These factors make for an intensely volatile situation.

W7 C2 Should we restrict freedom of speech?

In the film, a Danish Imam said, "The only way you can stop us is to stop our freedom of speech. But then, we win. You have to contradict your own values. Like we say, "Democracy equals hypocrisy".

In Canada, the Islamist literature and propaganda is being spread in mosques, often against the wishes of local Imams, and over the internet.

Do you think in Canada we should have a strict crackdown against Islamist ideas? Can you think of other topics where Canada is quite strict in regulating speech?

W7 C2 Summary: "Politically correct death threats at Georgia Tech"

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=2fec320f-6785-477d-b6ff-70145cc7a880

Think about 'political correctness'

Same as with Bias -- one paragraph summary, one paragraph response

Due Monday, Oct. 21

One summary, one response paragraph.

W7 C2 Notes

Grades are posted on Blackboard. The breakdown is 1 mark for in-class posts, 3 (not 2) for homework, and 5 for summaries. Please email me at kevin.topalian@senecac.on.ca if you want to talk about your grades. Occasionally, there's a mistake, so don't panic if you are missing a mark for something.

We'll watch the last part of the film today, again focussing on the struggle of moderates within the Muslim community. It's produced by the same people as did "Islam versus the Islamists".

I'm still working on the second essay topic, and will post it in the next few days.

In anticipation of the next topic, "What's school got to do with it?", I've posted an article for summary/response. I'll give you until Monday midnight to post.

W7 C1 Notes: assignments and schedule changes

My apologies. I will give back your assigments and post your grades next class. I didn't get enough work done on the weekend.

Today, we'll watch another film. Let me know if you want to spend more time on the war on terror. If a majority do, we'll take one more week after the break.

The second short assignment is posted under "Links". It's due Oct. 28th. I'll have the 2nd essay topic and the next summary/response posted by next class. You'll have plenty of time to do the next essay.

After the break, we'll look at the topic "What's school got to do with it?" which was scheduled for week 11. Then, we'll go back to ch's 7, 9, and 11. The sooner you read and make notes on these, the better. I'll give you readings for the school topic.

W7 C1 Homework: ours is a religious war against the Jews

A. UAE Professor Mustafa Muslim Claims Allah Has Gathered the Jews in Israel to Make It Easier for Muslims to Fight Them on Judgment Day

The following are excerpts from an interview with Al-Shariqa University Professor Mustafa Muslim, which aired June 19, 2005 on Al-Majd TVMuslim:

[The Israelites] have spread all over the world. Now Allah gathers them in this land. He brings them in groups from all countries of the world, in order fulfill Allah's universal law:

Judgment Day will come when Muslims fight the Jews, and the stone and the tree say: "Oh, Muslim, Oh, servant of Allah, there's a Jew behind me, come and kill him."

If the Jews were scattered throughout the world, how could we find them in order to fight them?

The war between us and the Jews is a religious war. This is not a war over a path, a land or anything like that. The part of the Koran that was given at Mecca, before the Muslim even met the Jews, each chapter reveals who the Jews really are, their perversity and the danger they present.

Our war with them is a religious war, and we must arm the nation with the weapon of faith.

B. Hamas is the official government of the Palestinian people. They were elected by about 70% of the people approximately 3 years ago. They are listed internationally as a terrorist organization. Here are a few of their basic principles, taken from the Hamas Charter:

1. "Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it."

2. "The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic land consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up. "

3. "There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors."

Question:

Some of you have commented that you don't think the Islamists' hatred is grounded in religion because God wouldn't command such hatred. You're missing the point: across the Muslim world, the Islamists are claiming that this genocide of the Jews is exactly what God commands.

Do you understand that political arguments about who owns the land are totally unimportant to these people?

Saudis recruit American black jihad fighters in US prisons

http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=0F03A69D-2986-4CE8-9158-C986849424D5

Jews as apes and pigs: Koran and Hadith

Defining the Jews as "the descendants of apes and pigs" is widespread today in religious, educational and public discourse in the Arab world. In his weekly sermon (April 2002) the Sheikh of Al-Azhar, Muhammad Sayyid Al-Tantawi, the most senior authority in the Sunni Muslim world, described the Jews as "the enemies of Allah, sons of pigs and apes."(1)Viewing Jews as the "descendants of apes and pigs" is grounded in the most important Islamic religious sources, both in divine revelation in the Koran,(2) in the Hadiths (traditions about the Prophet Muhammad), and in the most reliable compilations of traditions collected by the leading ninth-century sages Al-Bukhari and Muslim [both mention transformation into mice and lizards as well]. The notion of transforming Jews into animals appears also in ancient Arabic literature.(3)

http://www.spme.net/cgi-bin/facultyforum.cgi?ID=865

W6 C2 Jews are the descendants of apes and pigs

http://www.memritv.org/subject/en/364.htm

The idea that Jews are less than human is a religiously based concept.

Your thoughts?

W6 C2 Homework: Extremists, Saudis, and Sharia - Toronto

First read the article below, "Sharia law in the United States?" Now, read what follows and answer the question that follows.

Three years ago, the Ontario government was about to allow Shariah law in Ontario. At the last minute, some Muslim and non-Muslim groups persuaded the government to outlaw the practice. The first excerpt below quotes Ali Hindy, the Toronto Imam who, in the film, claims that publicly stoning people to death is "not my opinion, it's in the Quran...it's the religion".

http://www.dd-rd.ca/english/commdoc/publications/women/arbifaith.htm

Enforcing religiously based decisions will solidify the power of imams like Ali Hindy, head of Toronto’s Salaheddin Islamic Centre, who has said,

“The Qur’an says a man is limited to four wives. Canadian Law doesn’t allow it—God does, so I marry them myself.… If your wife doesn’t like sex, you can take another wife. If she can’t give you children, you can take another wife.”

The second excerpt relates to the Boyd Report, which recommended to the Ontario government that Sharia law be allowed because it was a 'voluntary' process.

http://secularalliance.ca/files/Press_Release_Sharia.pdf

While the Boyd Report states that all parties have a choice in using arbitration, uneducated and second class women and children are not even made aware of this right and are told in Sharia Court brochures that they will no longer be considered Muslims if they refuse the faith-based courts.

“Do you want to govern yourself by the personal law of your own religion, or do you prefer governance by secular Canadian family law? If you choose the latter, then you cannot claim that you believe in Islam as a religion,” says Mumtaz Ali, who had led the push for Sharia Courts. You can see how 'voluntary' Sharia would have been from the words of Mumtaz Ali.

The concept of choice has no meaning for young children and infants, who, as the most vulnerable element of society, must be protected by secular family law in secular courts.

The Canadian Council of Muslim Women is reaching out, speaking of intimidation into using Sharia Courts that favour men in cases of inheritance, alimony, property division and custody, and asking that we intervene and protect their individual rights.

Following is what has actually happened to some Muslim girls and women in Toronto:

In Canada, there are battered Muslim women claiming their husbands are invoking their God and Sharia-given rights to hit them. In a Toronto-based case, the Sharia was used to force a 15-year-old girl to leave school and marry an older man. She then separated after being abused and impregnated at 16. While in Canadian secular court underage marriage and abuse results in criminal charges and the involvement of Children’s Aid, Sharia tribunals see no crime, allowing public criminal law to be dealt with as private family law.

In countries from Sudan to Egypt to Malaysia to Pakistan, the introduction of Sharia Law has worsened the conditions of women and minority groups. “If you are thinking that these atrocities apply to other countries but could never happen in Canada, ask yourself what makes Canada different,” says Trottier. “Is it not those universal human rights that protect each and every one of us, and are they not then worth defending at all costs for every single citizen?”
In the west, abandoning such values can be disastrous.

You've just read about what is happening in Britain.

In light of the above, what do you think? Do you understand the link between Islamist extremists, Saudi funding, and Sharia?

W6 C2 Homework: Sharia law in the United States? -- it's already in Britain

In an aptly titled piece on Feldman’s scholarship, “Shilling for Sharia at Harvard,” Hillel Stavis warns that “it can only be a matter of time before the professor, having asserted that Sharia law is desirable, will assure us that its introduction in the United States is inevitable.”

Considering recent developments in Britain, the inevitability of Sharia law may not just be an abstraction. As reported last week by The Times Online:

Islamic law has been officially adopted in Britain, with sharia courts given powers to rule on Muslim civil cases.

The government has quietly sanctioned the powers for sharia judges to rule on cases ranging from divorce and financial disputes to those involving domestic violence.

Rulings issued by a network of five sharia courts are enforceable with the full power of the judicial system, through the county courts or High Court.

Melanie Phillips, writing for National Review Online, notes the role of Saudi funding and Middle East studies in furthering this process:

"Even thought itself is being Islamized, with academic objectivity in the teaching of Islam and Middle East studies set aside in favour of indoctrination and propaganda. An as-yet-unpublished report by Prof. Anthony Glees says that extremist ideas are being spread by Islamic study centers linked to British universities and backed by multi-million-pound donations from Saudi Arabia and Muslim organizations.

Professor Glees says, ‘Britain’s universities will have to generate two national cultures: one non-Muslim and largely secular, the other Muslim. We will have two identities, two sets of allegiance and two legal and political systems.

Britain can serve as a cautionary tale for the West. Scholars who downplay the threats to democratic societies posed by the encroachments of Sharia law, and push a sanitized, idealized version thereof, may one day help usher in our worst nightmare.

From: Sharia law: coming soon to a country near you.

Does the Msm lie for Obama?

October 8th, 2008
Why the press hides Obama’s lies

Ever since the first sound bites of the execrable Reverend Wright hit the airwaves, it has been obvious that Barack Obama is a less than candid human being. It was impossible to believe that a man who had spent twenty years in Wright’s pews did not have a pretty good idea of the minister’s vile views. You would have had to have been deaf and dumb not to. And Wright was the inspiration of Obama’s books!

Yet when the candidate was confronted by the press about this, he denied knowing about Wright’s excesses and made a speech that was hailed by the media as a monument in race relations equal, some said, to Dr. King.

It was at that precise moment I knew we were living in a media-constructed lunatic asylum. That didn’t take a rocket scientist, I can assure you, only someone with a modicum of common sense.

But it only got worse. When Wright predictably “acted out” and let loose with one of his racist screeds of the very type Obama pretended never to have heard, the candidate blithely pushed the minister under the bus with barely a peep from the compliant press.

About that time I learned of his putative relationship with William Ayers, the unrepentant Weatherman. I was assured by the New York Times and others that this was of no consequence, that Ayers was, in Obama’s words, just “some guy in the neighborhood.”

Another lie.

The more we learn of Obama’s ties to Ayers the more complex and disturbing they become. It is unlikely that we will ever know the extent of them, certainly not before the election. Most of what we do know does not come from the Times or the Washington Post of vaunted Woodward & Bernstein fame, but from Stanley Kurtz of the National Review, who has been following this story of the Ayers-Obama whitewash for months. Under orders or not, the normally voluble Mr. Ayers himself has kept his yap shut.

And now we learn of yet another strange obfuscation or omission. In 1996, Obama was apparently a member of the Chicago “New Party,” a now defunct socialist political party of some stripe or other.

There’s nothing wrong with being a socialist. I called myself one for the better part of twenty years. Millions of people have and many still do.

But there is something very wrong with hiding who you are or who you were from the electorate—especially if you want to be President of the United States. Yet that seems to be a habit of Mr. Obama’s, with the collusion of the press.

To my knowledge, no one in the mainstream media has begun to inquire into the details of Obama’s curiously unreported years at Columbia and Harvard, although much could be relatively easily ascertained. Obama himself has not been remotely forthcoming about them.

The inescapable conclusion is that Barack Obama is a highly deceptive, often dishonest individual. Again, many would say this is standard operating procedure for politicians in our culture (and most others too). But Obama presents himself as something different, a new kind of post-modern politician above the conventional dirty dealings of backroom politics.

Of course, by now that is something of a joke—yet the press is loath to admit it or to do much to balance the investigative reporting equation. They don’t even begin. What is the explanation for this? The most obvious reasons are bias and the desire to defeat the opposing candidate.

But beneath these obvious explanations, I sense something more complex and pathological. Deeper fears are perhaps at play - the loss of self-image and personality disintegration, also a desperate need to conform to a fragile peer group. And in these times more than ever, a yet more potent terror – job loss.

UPDATE: Two related articles of note have appeared this morning. In the New York Post, Ron Radosh explores Ayers’ educational theories as they relate to Obama . In the American Thinker, Jack Cashill makes the rather extraordinary allegation, using various linguistic study methods, that Ayers may have ghost written Obama’s first book. As a memoirist myself, I found this jaw-dropping.

MORE from neo-neocon: Ayers and Obama in synch on education

Obama's terrorist connection: video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppQszYT3djE

McCain ad goes hard after Obama/Ayers connection

http://thepage.time.com/video-halperin-chats-with-gibbs-in-nashville/

Mr. Gibbs, a senior Obama advisor, 'answers' questions about Billy Ayers in the video.

What do you think?

Iran: death penalty for Muslims who leave their religion

Iranian parliament approves law on apostasy calling for death penalty




[ 25 Sep 2008 11:48 ]

Tehran – APA. Iranian parliament approved the law calling for a mandatory death sentence for apostates, or those who leave Islam.



APA reports that members of the parliament citing sharia (Islamic law) made decision on death sentence for men leaving Islam and life sentence for women. According to other points of the new law, extrasensory individuals, fortune-tellers, and homosexuals will also be sentenced to death.

This grave punishment is applied to men and women abjuring Islam. 196 parliamentarians voted for the law, 7 against, 2 abstained. European missionary organizations condemned the decision of Iranian parliament.

Two men converted to Christianity were arrested in Shiraz in May this year. Islamic Revolutionary Court of Iran demands death sentence for them.

By the way, these laws are extra territorial, meaning that Muslims living in countries like Canada who turn away from Islam will be under sentence of death. I'm not sure, but I believe it is even possible that extremists will be told it is their religious duty to carry out the execution of individuals in other countries -- victims will be subject to 'fatwahs' -- religious rulings -- like the French journalist, Sefouie, whose murder was commanded by British Imam, Abu Khatada.


Iran introduces law that imposes death penalty on converts
Friday, 8th February 2008.
George Conger.

LEGISLATION has been brought by the government of President Mahmoud Amadinejad before the Iranian Majlis that would mandate the death penalty for apostates from Islam. The law’s reach would be worldwide, the legislation says.

Article 112 would give the law an extraterritorial jurisdiction, extending its mandate to cover those who renounce Islam both inside and outside Iran.

The proposed laws were “a legislative tool to consolidate power around the regime and extend its religious tyranny globally," Mr Grieboski said, and should be condemned by the international community.

In December 2004, the Prince of Wales convened a meeting of Muslim and Christian leaders at Clarence House to address the death penalty for converts. Prince Charles’ efforts proved unsuccessful however as the Muslim delegation said non-Muslims should not speak publicly about apostasy laws.

Who is a moderate Muslim?

Robert Spencer, a scholar of Islam, proposes that a moderate Muslim is one who would:

1. Acknowledge the existence of and repudiate the traditional Islamic imperative, taught by all the schools of Islamic jurisprudence that Muslims recognize as orthodox, to impose Islamic law upon non-Muslims, whether by force or by stealth.

2. Renounce any intention, now or in the future, to replace the U.S. Constitution with Islamic law.

3. Clarify, and call upon other Muslims in America to clarify, what is meant by the words “terrorism” and innocent” in Muslim condemnations of terrorism, so that it is clear that what is being condemned is the murder of American and other non-combatants by Muslims acting in the name of Islamic jihad.

4. Repudiate the idea that Muslims have a divine mandate to force, when possible, Jews, Christians, and other “People of the Book” to pay a special religion-based tax from which Muslims are exempt (Qur’an 9:29).

5. Call upon Muslims in America to institute comprehensive, honest, and transparent programs in mosques and Islamic schools, teaching the virtues of the non-establishment of religion, and teaching directly against Islamic supremacism and the idea that Muslims must fight against Jews and Christians until they “feel themselves subdued” (Qur’an 9:29).

6. Call upon Muslims in America to institute comprehensive, honest, and transparent programs in mosques and Islamic schools, teaching against honor killing, and against the idea -- which is enshrined in Islamic law -- that a parent faces no penalty for killing his or her own child (see ‘Umdat al-Salik o1.1-2).

7. Call upon Muslims worldwide, including in Saudi Arabia, to end all institutionalized discrimination against and harassment of non-Muslims, and to allow churches and other houses of worship to be built in majority-Muslim countries with an ease comparable to that with which mosques are currently built in Western countries.

8. Repudiate the idea that a Muslim who renounces Islam and adopts any other faith or no faith at all should be killed -- as is the teaching of Muhammad and all the schools of Islamic jurisprudence -- and call upon Muslim groups in America to teach the freedom of conscience as a God-given right in American mosques and Islamic schools.

9. Call upon Muslims in America and worldwide to drop the traditional and authoritative Islamic prohibition of marriage between non-Muslim men and Muslim women, and to repudiate and teach against the idea of divinely sanctioned wife-beating (Qur’an 4:34).

10. Condemn Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist organizations, and the Islamic Republic of Iran for its continuing the barbaric practice of stoning people to death. Call upon Muslim groups to teach against stoning as a punishment for adultery or anything else in American mosques and Islamic schools.