New York Rally Protests Holder's Decision on KSM Trial

Americans Rally in Thousands to Protest Eric Holder’s Terror Trial Decision

NEW YORK, DECEMBER 5, 2009 — Several thousand protesters gathered at Foley Square in New York City to rally against Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and 4 other 9/11 co-conspirators as civilians in federal court. Despite bitter cold, strong winds and heavy rain the crowd stayed through the 2-hour rally. The event was organized by the 9/11 Coalition to Never Forget and featured speakers representing 9/11 family members, first responders and our troops.

The following statement, written by Judea and Ruth Pearl, the parents of Daniel Pearl, the journalist slaughtered by Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, was read by actor Brian Dennehy at the rally in New York City:

December 5 2009
Friends,On behalf of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, we wish to join you today in a call to reverse Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to try America’s new-type of enemies in New York Federal court.

We wish to add to your rally the perspective of our own personal tragedy which, in many ways, has come to symbolize the depth of inhumanity that has swept our planet in the 21st century, and the sense of urgency with which this planet is currently watching your rally, in New York City, a rally that may very well hold the key to the future of open society.

We, who witnessed the darkest side of hell, and have since spent every moment of our lives studying the anatomy of terror, we refuse to accept the strategy of normalization that Holder’s decision represents. Terror is a crime against society, and should not be tried in the same court as crimes against individuals or against a particular country.

Let us make it perfectly clear. We are not concerned about the safety issues that this trial poses to New York City — we trust our law enforcement officers. Nor are we concerned about the anguish of our children who will be seeing the memories and values of their loved ones mocked and ridiculed in the court room — they have known greater pains before. We are concerned about the millions of angry youngsters, among them potential terrorists, who will be watching this trial unfold on Al Jazeera TV and come to the realization that America has caved in to Al Qaeda’s demands for publicity. The atrocity of 9/11 and the brutal murder of Daniel Pearl are vivid reminders of terrorists’ craving to dramatize their perceived grievances against the West.

Today, America has given them an even lauder mega-phone — in the best theater in town — and thus signaled to thousands of would-be terrorists that joining Al Qaeda or other terror organizations is one way to obtain that craved-for mega-phone.

We who have studied the anatomy of terrorism cannot accept the logic that terror has no country therefore it cannot be defined, named and fought with the same determination and creativity that civilized society has fought other existential threats since the invention of gun powder. These include high-seas piracy, the introduction of poison gas and the threat of nuclear weapons; all were contained by creative changes in international law and the establishment of new legal categories. The invention of the suicide belt is of no lesser threat.

Terror is an ideology that elevates one’s grievances above the norms of civilized society and, like any epidemic of global dimension it must be fought by attending to the distinct mechanisms that transmit and propagate the disease.

In 2002, the international community has given America a moral mandate to fight the new epidemic with all the necessary instruments, including a new court system and new legal regimes. The decision to try the arch-symbols of terror in ordinary criminal court, using traditional legal instruments, constitutes a betrayal of that mandate.

Mr. Attorney General, our children and grand-children are imploring you today: Please reclaim America’s mandate to secure a brighter future for our troubled world!
Judea and Ruth Pearl
Los Angeles, California

Another Dearborn Heights Saturday Night

I can’t improve on this story.

Manager-mother IDs alleged robber with gun as her son

Saturday, December 5, 2009
By Sean Delaney, Press & Guide Newspapers

DEARBORN HEIGHTS -- A 27-year-old Lincoln Park man and his 22-year-old girlfriend will undergo a preliminary examination Dec. 9 after allegedly robbing the Wendy’s on Telegraph and Van Born Road, where the man’s mother worked as a manager.

Authorities say 27-year-old Jason Zacchi walked up to the restaurant’s drive-thru window about 9:30 p.m. Nov. 28 with a blue bandana around his face and a sawed off shotgun in his hand.“He threatened one employee, and reached in and started hitting the screens to open up the register,” said Dearborn Heights Police Detective Sgt. Stephen Gurka.

During the commotion, the restaurant manager came out to see what was going on and recognized her son’s face above the bandana.

“She proceeded to walk over and shouted, ‘What the hell are you doing?’” Gurka said.

She told investigators she attempted to take the drawer from her son, who fled with $150 cash in an unidentified vehicle allegedly driven by his 22-year-old girlfriend, Amanda Lee Yost of Lincoln Park.

Yost, a former Wendy’s employee, allegedly gave Zacchi her grandmother’s shotgun prior to the robbery. The couple was arrested at the home they share with Zacchi’s mother and the $150 was recovered by police.

Both were arraigned Monday in 20th District Court on armed robbery charges and are being house in Wayne County jail — Zacchi on a $100,000 cash bond and Yost on $50,000.

The couple has three young children — 18-month-old twins and a 2-year-old.
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Obama the War Hawk

Clarence Page is taking Bill Ayer’s recent denunciations of President Obama’s Afghan war plans as proof that Ayers and Obama are not brothers in radical ideology. Of Ayers’s fairly tame complaints, Page writes, “The 1960s Weather Underground radical-turned-University-of-Illinois professor sounds as steamed up against Obama as he used to feel about President Richard Nixon.” (“Bill Ayers dumps Obama”).

This proves to Page that all those crazy right-wingers were wrong that Ayers and Obama “were joined at the hip.”

“Meanwhile,” Page continues, “what are the Glenn Becks, Sean Hannitys and Sarah Palins of the world going to talk about now that Ayers says Obama's a conservative war hawk? Hint: I'm sure they'll find something.”

I’m sure they will, too. They’ll probably go for something obvious like the fact that both Obama and Ayers are disciples of Saul Alinksy. (“Revolution you can believe in”). I know I would. As Alinskyites, both Obama and Ayers are free to claim support or opposition for any position necessary to achieving their ultimate aim, as Andrew McCarthy describes:

. . . Alinskyites are . . . sophisticated, patient, and practical. They bore in, hollowing out the system from within, appropriating the appearance and argot of mainstream society. Their single, animating ambition is to overthrow the capitalist social order, which they claim to see as racist, corrupt, exploitative, imperialist, etc. Apart from that goal, everything else — from the public option to Afghanistan — is negotiable: They reserve the right to take any position on any matter, to say anything at any time, based on the ebb and flow of popular opinion. That keeps them politically viable while they radically transform society. Transform it into what, they haven’t worked out in great detail — except that it will be perfect, communal, equal, and just. (“Alinsky Does Afghanistan”).

As another prominent Alinskyite, Hillary Clinton, wrote in her Wellesley College senior thesis, “There is only the fight”, that is, the radical fight to remake society.

Leftists needn’t fear that Afghanistan has become Obama’s fight. This changes nothing.

Swiss Ban on Minarets

“Minarets are our bayonets.”
--Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyib Erdogan

Al Jazeera’s response to the Swiss referendum banning the construction of minarets includes this opinion:

Imagine the furor that would certainly ensue should a country with an overwhelmingly Muslim population be asked to vote on whether its small Christian community should be allowed to build their churches according to a particular design or method, or whether they would rather do without the church bells sounding from time to time. (“Minarets and Europe's crisis”).

Writer Anas Altikriti's invitation to “imagine” a Muslim population making it tough for religious minorities glides over the glaring history of that very thing. Take away the element of putting the proposal to a vote, (since Caliphs used to make the decisions) and what Altikriti's imagining is the very dhimmi status Islam subjected Islamized Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa to for centuries. And still does, in far too many places.

Bat Ye’or in her The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam, described the limits placed on dhimmi Christians and Jews (Christians actually were the majority population), in the conquered lands of eastern Christendom:

In theory the laws concerning places of worship depended on the circumstances of the conquest and the terms of the treaties. Construction of new churches, convents, and synagogues was forbidden, but restoration of pre-Islamic places of worship was permitted, subject to certain restrictions and on condition that they were neither enlarged nor altered. (83)

According to Islamic tradition, the rule restricting ritual and forbidding the ringing of bells and the display of a cross, banners, icons, and other ritual objects date from the beginning of the conquest. (87)

Altikriti acknowledges that critics regularly decry Islam's record of religious freedom, engaging it only to warn that religious minorities' freedom in Muslim lands hangs by a slender thread.

One wonders where this leaves the throng of Western commentators who persistently remind their audiences that Christians are disallowed from practising their faith freely or building churches in certain Muslim countries. In fact one wonders whether the ramifications of the Swiss vote on Christians and other minorities living freely among Muslim societies were ever considered.

One doesn’t need to wonder. I’m certain threats of anti-Western, anti-Christian outbreaks in the Muslim world were promised to voters by Swiss authorities trying to dampen popular support for the ban. The threats didn't work.

The Swiss initiative doesn't impose reverse dhimmi status on Muslims in Switzerland. The ban doesn’t interfere with the building of new mosques, nor the practice of Islam. Nor does it impose personal restrictions of Muslims, least of all requiring them to wear humiliating clothing or armbands. It prohibits nothing but the construction of minarets, clearly seeing them as symbolic of Islamic domination that is not welcome to the majority of Swiss voters. One commentator I heard said the Swiss were trying to send a message to deaf political leadership: Stop ignoring our concerns about the immigration of unassimilated Muslims.

The Swiss are a prickly, not particularly welcoming nation. I spent a few weeks there one summer in the mountains high above Lake Geneva. Almost daily I could hear automatic fire from the incessant training of the military reservists in the valley down below. Swiss neutrality is not the product of pacifist indifference nor national timidity: it’s ferociously guarded with a willingness to make war to defend it. Swiss border roads and bridges have been mined since 1938. Invasion plans by The Third Reich were a constant concern for the Swiss, even though popular history of the war always implies Swiss neutrality was an absolute respected by all belligerents. Even allied airmen who landed crippled planes in Switzerland faced a tough time in Swiss internee camps.

Nor is Swiss defense-mindedness limited to universal marksmanship and military vigilance. Swiss resistance to subversion by malevolent outsiders is a centuries-old national trait. The Swiss were well aware of the designs on Switzerland Hitler described in Mein Kampf. When Hitler became German Chancellor in 1933, “the Swiss Federal Council prohibited the wearing of Hitlerite uniforms and insignia, and subjected violators to imprisonment or deportation. . . . On 18th February 1936, the Federal council ordered the immediate suppression of all Nazi organisations in Switzerland. In 1937, the Communist Party and all other parties affiliated with foreign organisations were outlawed.”

This situation seems basic enough. The Swiss are a border-loving people, faced with an influx of immigrants whose religion predicates a borderless Ummah, and preaches all infidel nations are doomed to be flattened into floor tiles in the grand, global mosque of the Prophet. The kind of obstinate disinterest in assimilation Muslim immigrants display in every European nation was bound to lead to friction in Switzerland. Considering this history, the ban on minarets seems mild.

But sure enough, and as Altikriti warned us, Al Jazeera reported yesterday that “Iran's foreign minister warned of unspecified ‘consequences’ if the ban were enforced.” (“IRAN: Outrage, and a warning, over Swiss vote to ban minarets”).

Well, then, it must be serious if Muslims are outraged, and threatening retaliation against “Western targets” (Christians in Muslim countries). When does that ever happen?

The Koran says, We can step on you, but you can’t step on us.

But the Swiss have that persistent national stubbornness going for them. And they’ve proved before this they’ll back it up.

Islamic, Islamist, Baloney

Three Islamic academics, Hayri Abaza, Soner Çağaptay, and Kayvan Chinichian, have written an article for a Turkish newspaper beseeching nonMuslims to “Please, Call us Islamic.”

“Substituting the term Islamic for Islamist incorrectly brands all Muslims as Islamists. In the name of political sanity, we ask you, please call us Islamic because Islamism is an ideology we do not share.”

It works this way: If we all stop referring to Islamists as Muslims, we will contribute to “separating Islam from Islamism so as to diminish the power of the latter.”

I might consider this, if I believed at all that what empowers jihadism and terror attacks has a single thing to do with what Western commentators say about Islam. (I note this exception: when we drop our guard and reassure one another that Islam is safe and peaceful, jihadist attacks increase). I believe the evidence shows jihadism is being driven by the mosques, by the imams, by the radical preachers and the spiritual advisers in the Muslim community, here and abroad. There is also a lot of evidence jihadism is being driven by the Koran and the nature of the Islamic religion itself. What we nonMuslims say has nothing to do with it.

I can appreciate that adherents of a religion don’t like being defined wrongly, or misnamed by outsiders. Especially by outsiders who have somewhat of a bone to pick with the insiders’ religion. But the approach of these writers leaves too much unaccounted for.

For instance, take that simple formula they offer that “Islam is a religion and Islamism is an ideology.”

This means, if we hew strictly to its stripped-down terms, that Islam and Islamism can and must be separated as two unlike things, even two unrelated things. The distinction requires us to stop referring to Islamists as Muslims.

But the statement, “Islamism is an ideology” leaves far too much unexplained. Most of the notroious ideologies of our age have been secular--communism, fascism, nationalism, environmentalism. There have been no religions associated with them, with the exception of environmentalism, which is reviving what it imagines to be ancient pantheism.

But Islamism is a religious ideology. It is dedicated to the imposition, by force, of a particular religion, Islam, on the entire world. Even the writers of this article admit that Islamism is “a modern anti-Western political ideology rooted in Islam.” The concept of Islam to Islamists is as necessary to its ideological fabric as the concept of the nation is to nationalists, or the concept of communal misery is to communists. And because Islamism is rooted in Islam, it's not such an easy matter to “separate” Islam from Islamism. The difficulty the Muslim community in Europe and North America has explaining the distinction to the rest of us is a major factor in nonMuslim mistrust toward global Islam.

But as Abaza, Çağaptay, and Chinichian see it, if we won’t sequester Islamists from Muslims by distinguishing “Islamic” from “Islamist,” then what we’re really saying is “that only Islamists are authentic Muslims and that non-Islamist Muslims cannot be real Muslims.”

No, really, we’re not saying either of those two other things. And they do not follow, either lby logic or syntax, that we are saying them, no matter how often this non sequitur is repeated.

(I don’t know why it is that, when it comes to Muslims as a set, people simply forget the meaning of human language. Wasn’t there a time in this country when someone could say, “the car that caused that accident was a Ford,” without having someone cluck their tongue and lecture us that not all Fords cause accidents, or that not all accidents are caused by Fords?)

While I recognize some value in defining the term, “Islamist,” calling a terrorist or terror groups “Islamic” is a valid description that’s either correct or not. The statement that a given attacker was Islamic says no more about who else is or isn’t a real Muslim than my calling Nancy Pelosi “Catholic” means only morally-compromised, pro-abortion political harpies are authentic Catholics. The acknowledgement that Pelosi’s a Catholic means only that, for good or ill, even if she’s a bad Catholic, she's got the credentials and the rest of the Catholics are stuck with her. And it follows that the deranged religious sensibilities of the likes of Pelosi and Kennedy and Kerry and Granholm and Cuomo, require that other better-grounded Catholics, like Bishop Tobin, have to work harder to explain to outsiders what the Church really stands for. That can't be helped. But that’s a job for Catholics to do, not outsiders.

Just so, Muslims are stuck with Nidal Hasan, Ahmadinejad, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Whatever else these guys are, no one’s ever going to buy it that they’re not Muslim. And it shouldn’t be put up to we infidels to sort out if they’re authentic, inauthentic, or “real Muslims.” That’s for Muslims to do, if they can.

And Muslims haven’t been willing to do it. Not really do it.

Frankly, I don’t have an opinion about who is or isn’t an authentic Muslim, or what authentic Islam is. Our job here isn’t to declare who’s a genuine Muslim, or to define what is or isn’t authentic Islam. Our job is to call attention to a threat we’re facing from a large, and very aggressive global army of enemies who define themselves as soldiers of Allah, embarked on a jihad to spread Islam over the whole world, including over my street and yours. If these self-described Muslims die in the act of telling us their bloodthirsty acts are done to punctuate the greatness of Allah, who am I to say they’re not authentic Muslims? They think they are, and they aim to kill me because I'm not. Close enough.

In my view, the problem isn’t too many nonMuslims unwittingly ascribing “the ideology and crimes of Islamists to all Muslims.” The problem is too few Muslims making a persuasive case that they really do despise Islamists as hijackers of their great and peaceful religion. In spite of a dearth of evidence of widespread Muslim contempt for jihadists, it's still too easy for Abaza, Çağaptay, and Chinichian here to say that, “A majority of Muslims are not Islamists and the violent crimes of Islamists would be enough for them to be considered un-Islamic.”

Why would be? If being considered un-Islamic by a majority of Muslims were enough, wouldn’t Islamism soon die out--in Saudi Arabia, in Pakistan, in Iran, in Turkey, Egypt, Somalia, Sudan, in Syria, in Gaza, in Hezbollah strongholds in southern Lebanon, in the caves of Kandahar, in the mosques of Londonistan, and in the no-go Muslim enclaves of Sweden, and on and on, and on?

The unwitting pundits that Abaza, Çağaptay, and Chinichian are complaining about are not ascribing the ideology and crimes of Islamists to all Muslims. What they/we are doing is ascribing the ideology and crimes of Islamists to Islam. If Islamism truly is not Islamic, then the case has yet to be made by the only people who can make it--Muslims. Please don’t ask us to make it for you.

'The War for 21st-Century Freedom'

Barbara Lerner has written a lengthy, hard-hitting overview for National Review Online about how “the Islamists are fighting for control of the world,” and “We need a president who knows it.” (“The War for 21st-Century Freedom”).

Here’s an excerpt, but you’ll probably want to read the rest:

Are you worried — like so many Americans after the Fort Hood massacre — about the growing threat of Islamist subversion and terror here at home? Worried, beyond that, about what we’re doing — or not doing — militarily in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq? Worried about the growing reach and power of Islamist movements in Europe and South America, as well as Asia, the Middle East, and Turkey? Worried about the military alliances Islamist governments are forging with their secular mirror images: socialist-god governments in places like North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela?

Then focus like a laser on Iran, now, because Islamists will score major victories in all those places and more if we fail to prevent the ruling mullahs from openly, triumphantly making Iran the world’s first Islamist nuclear power. The danger isn’t only Iran’s own catastrophic recklessness, once she gets the bomb, or the fact that all her Arab neighbors will respond by scrambling to go nuclear too. It’s also that Islamists everywhere — joined by growing masses of previously undecided Muslims — will see Iran’s success in achieving nuclear status the way Iran’s mullahs see it: as a historic defeat for the West, blasting open the gate to a 21st-century world where Islam rules and Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists are subservient or worse. Islamist ranks will swell, everywhere, as confidence grows that the Islamist side is the winning side, and victory is near.

THE WAR WE MUST WIN
Most Americans can scarcely imagine an Islamist-ruled world. Most Muslims can, and they respond in one of three ways. Moderate Muslims wholeheartedly reject the Islamist vision and the support for jihad that is inseparable from it; Muslim extremists embrace it, many with growing fervor; and a third group sits on the fence, waiting and watching. Constant politically correct reassurances that only a minority of the world’s Muslims support violence against us are based on the fantasy that only “Islamist extremists” do that; “moderate Islamists” don’t. In fact, there is no such thing as a “moderate Islamist.” All Islamists are extremists. It’s an extreme creed. Moderate Muslims do exist, millions of them, many bravely fighting against the rising Islamist tide, but they aren’t “moderate Islamists.” Moderate Muslims are anti-Islamist Muslims, who oppose the imposition of Sharia and all the oppressive baggage that comes with it. They are on our side — freedom’s side — and we should be on theirs. Instead, we mostly ignore them and fail to heed their warnings, reaching out to “moderate Islamists” instead, welcoming them into our critical institutions — as our military, aided by the FBI, welcomed Major Hasan.

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Lost Child

Interesting comment from NRO:

Unanimous Supreme Court Recognizes Unborn Human Being to Be a “Child” [Ed Whelan]

On Monday, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous per curiam opinion in Porter v. McCollum in favor of the habeas petition filed by a death-row inmate. Specifically, the Court ruled that the inmate was deprived of his Sixth Amendment right to counsel when his counsel failed to discover significant mitigating evidence and to present that evidence at the sentencing phase of his trial.

By e-mail, Walter Weber of the American Center for Law and Justice highlights an interesting phrase in the Court’s opinion:

In the course of relating the criminal convict’s troubled childhood, the unanimous Court states, “Porter routinely witnessed his father beat his mother, one time so severely that she had to go to the hospital and lost a child.” Slip op. at 4. The unmistakable reference is to a miscarriage. The stage of gestation is not mentioned.

Outside the abortion context, every Justice knows that a pregnant woman carries “a child.”

(I’ve added the italics.)

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Elves Brace for Backlash

'Elf' jailed over dynamite hoax on Ga. mall Santa

(AP)
MORROW, Ga. — A man in an elf suit is jailed after police in Georgia say he told a mall Santa that he was carrying dynamite.

Police say Southlake Mall in suburban Atlanta was evacuated but no explosives were found.

Morrow police arrested 45-year-old William C. Caldwell III, who was being held without bond Thursday in the Clayton County jail. He was not part of the mall's Christmas staff.

Police say Caldwell got in line Wednesday evening to have his picture taken with Santa Claus. Police say when Caldwell reached the front of the line, he told Santa he had dynamite in his bag. Santa called mall security and Caldwell was arrested.

Caldwell faces several charges, including having hoax devices and making terroristic threats.
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Dress up like an elf and tell a mall Santa you’ve got dynamite in your bag and that’s clearly a terroristic threat. Shoot 13 soldiers to death and wound 32, and they’re still trying to decide.

'Take This Religion to New York!'

Damn those hijackers! From yesterday’s Time Magazine report on the absence of a backlash against Dearborn’s Muslims:

A week and a day after the massacre at Fort Hood, Texas, there's a palpable sense of unease among the 400 men and women gathered for Friday prayers at the American Muslim Center in Dearborn, Mich., 1,350 miles away. In his sermon, lay preacher Hani Ayyad is careful not to mention Major Nidal Malik Hasan by name but repeatedly inveighs against "those who try to hijack our deen [faith], who distort, tarnish and darken it." Worshippers know exactly who he means. (“Postcard from Dearborn”).

Maybe worshippers do know exactly who he means. It’s the rest of us who don’t know exactly who he means.

Does he mean Imam Luqman Abdullah? Does he mean Anwar al-Alakwi? Does he mean al Zawahiri? Does he mean Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood? Does he mean Yusuf al-Qaradawi? For all that, does he even really mean Major Nidal Malik Hasan?

The writer doesn’t explain why Ayyad felt the need to be careful not to mention Hasan by name while inveighing against "hijackers" of the faith. If what Hasan did was so incontrovertibly outside of acceptable Islamic belief and practice, then why not say so? Is it because there are members of the community who wouldn’t agree?

This is exactly where the statements of Muslim leaders purporting to condemn terrorism fall short. They condemn terrorism generically without managing to condemn terrorists by name. Hasan is the exception that proves the rule. And because, as far as we know, he was a lone wolf unconnected to any bona fide international jihadist organization, imams can rip on him without fear of alienating supporters of international groups linked to terrorism.

For years CAIR, the puppet organization of the Muslim Brotherhood that openly supports both Hamas and Hezbollah, has been pretending to condemn terrorism while never exactly condemning terrorists, terror activities, or terrorist groups. CAIR’s leaders, like the Dearborn preacher, are also careful not to mention names, trusting that listeners will know exactly what they mean--or what they don’t mean.

Like CAIR's Ibrahim Hooper last year, when he was asked specifically by an NBC interviewer to answer whether or not CAIR supported Hamas and Hezbollah. “Hooper asserted that CAIR has always condemned acts of terrorism, but then ‘would not answer whether CAIR condemns those designated terrorist groups themselves.’” Then he cut the interviewer off. (“CAIR’s True Colors”).

Then there was this exchange on Fox News last year with CAIR national legislative affairs director Corey Saylor, refusing to say that CAIR condemns Hamas and Hezbollah:

Reporter David Lee Miller:

"Can you sit here now and in just one sentence tell me- CAIR condemns Hamas and CAIR condemns Hezbollah?"

Corey Saylor:

"I'm telling you in a very clear fashion – CAIR condemns terrorist acts, whoever commits them, wherever they commit them, whenever they commit them."

David Lee Miller:

"That's not the same thing as saying you condemn Hamas and you condemn Hezbollah."

Corey Saylor:

"Well I recognize that you don't like my answer to the question, but that's the answer to the question."

David Lee Miller:

"It's not no, it's not whether I like it or dislike it. I was asking whether or not you can sit here now and say- CAIR condemns Hamas or Hezbollah. If you don't want to, just say that. If that is a position your group doesn't take, I certainly accept that. I just want to understand what your answer is." [emphasis added]

Corey Saylor:

"The position that my group takes is that we condemn terrorism on a consistent, persistent basis, wherever it happens, whenever it happens."

That’s clear enough.

When the archbutcher George Tiller was, himself, murdered in Kansas, every pro-life group in America condemned it, specifically, as an act of arbitrary killing that can’t be reconciled with a belief in the sanctity of life.

In spite of the best efforts of the Left and the pro-abortion lobby to use Tiller’s murder to place pro-lifers in a false light as homicidal, theocratic extremists, it didn’t catch on.

That’s because the pro-life movement, for decades, has always presented a consistent witness to the value of life. Rather than part of a pattern, the murder of Tiller was an extremely rare example of an abortion opponent resorting to violence during America’s long, sad era of unlimited abortion.

I endorsed the pro-lifers’ position that taking the law into one’s own hands is wrong, although I stopped well short of joining some of these groups’ expressions of regret or sorrow for the end of Tiller’s genocidal life. But regardless of my reaction to it, the condemnation by the pro-life leaders, consistent as it was with the movement’s actions all these years, dispelled any confusion about whether or not pro-life leaders were truly unsympathetic with Tiller’s murderer.

Muslims in America are facing a nearly opposite problem. And by the "opposite problem" I'm not saying, though folks like me are constantly being accused of saying it, that all Muslims are terrorists. (I've never said that.) The problem is that Hasan’s jihadist massacre was not a rare, uncharacteristic outburst that critics will try to use to uncover the “hypocrisy” of Islam’s peaceful, benevolent message.

Americans are exposed to daily reports from around the world of Islam-inspired violence, threats of violence, and threats of armed conflict against a variety of bitterly hated enemies: against Jews, against Israel, against the United States, against the West, against the Kuffirs, against “crusaders.” Half-hearted declarations follow the most shocking attacks, claiming that they were the work of “hijackers” of one of the world’s greatest religions. But the declarations invariably shatter against the evidence of the attackers’ methodical pre-attack documentation of their jihadist motives, their religious devotion, and their confident self-image as Koran-loving, houri-lovin’ warriors of Allah. Now, who are we going to believe? Ibrahim Hooper, or that dead-jihadi-walking in the video with no reason to lie?

Since 9/11 the Muslim community has failed to present a clear, consistent, principled position towards Islamic terrorism, one by which an outsider can judge the community’s sincerity in responding to actions that shock and dismay the average American. Islam’s nonMuslim defenders aren’t helping, either. It isn’t just the way their obsequious public comments convince the rest of us just how deeply immersed in sand their own heads are on the subject of Islamic terrorism. It’s that the more reflexively insincere they sound while lecturing us how the likes of Hasan is really the exact opposite of a devout Muslim, the more they sound like Jon Lovitz.

A Nightmare Deferred

Does this mean we scooped Time Magazine?

As your intrepid DU blog never ceases to repeat, the fabled American backlash against Muslims is a worthy of Stephen King, or at least the Climate Research Center's Phil Jones.

Time writer Bobby Ghosh is now reporting on how Dearborn's Muslim advocates were stood up by the the post-Ft. Hood backlash that never showed up.

Mohamed Mardini, imam at the American Muslim Center on Outer Drive, had to admit to Ghosh “that there have been no reports of heinous attacks on Muslims anywhere in the U.S. ‘Our worst nightmare has not come true,’ he says.” (“Postcard from Dearborn”).

Ghosh still gives credence to explanations that this forestalled nightmare was thanks only to a frenzied response by local Muslim leaders, in coordination with CAIR and ISNA, to “condemn the massacre with no reservations, and offer support for the victims and their families.”

In view of the fact that in the hours and days after the massacre, every Army spokesman, politician, media commentator, expert, and local weatherman on television was condemning the massacre and offering support to the victims, it’s seems a stretch to say the only thing that pacified Dearborn’s mobs of pitchfork-wielding Islamophobes were rumors that local CAIR wasn’t saying the exact opposite.

There's a far more plausible theory that gets no credit. There are no mobs of pitchfork-wielding Islamophobes. And never were.

Nor is it accurate to say that Muslim leaders condemned Hasan’s actions “with no reservations.” Imam Elahi had plenty of reservations. Among them, he tried to lay off Hasan’s jihadist explosion as explainable by “Nidal's Palestinian background . . .[and] Israeli crimes in the occupied territories,” or as “side effects of these wars begun by a previous administration.” (i.e., the Bush-made-him-do-it reservation). CAIR’s Ibrahim Hooper said that to call what Hasan did “an act of terror is to jump to conclusions, to rush to judgment.”

And while all this alleged inveighing was going on against “those who try to hijack . . . distort, tarnish and darken” Islam, the local Muslim community had a parallel frenzy throwing together the Imam Luqman Abdullah Martyr’s Appreciation Day in honor of the area’s own violent, self-proclaimed “Soldier of Allah.” Abdullah is the violent radical mosque leader killed mid-felony in an FBI shootout. Although Abdullah’s plans for jihadist murders never got past the promises, promises stage, his stated goals were at least as bloody as Hasan’s were. And Abdullah’s jihadist principles even featured a preference for military targets.

Ghosh never explores whether or not there were any moderate local imams who inveighed against Abdullah as a faith-tarnishing hijacker. Maybe that's because the community’s official spokesmen already granted Abdullah holy martyr status weeks ago. Ghosh repeats instead local Muslim explanations that “the killing of a controversial Detroit imam during an FBI raid of his mosque [sic] last month,” is only proof that local law enforcement is not on their side.

Not on their side? Ghosh managed to overlook credible reports that local imams have to buy special lip balm-removing toilet paper to use after monthly BRIDGE meetings.

In spite of Ghosh’s thematic references to the Muslim community’s “palpable sense of unease,” and Muslim fears of how Hasan's attack increased “what they say is widespread hostility toward their community,” he shows no curiosity at all for whether or not those fears ever had any basis in any actual, documented backlash. This most recent backlash no-show is all the more hard to explain, as many are calling the Ft. Hood attack the worst domestic terrorist act since 9/11-- and yet the imams “worst nightmare” still has not come true—again. Just like it didn’t come true after 9/11.

Fear not. This will not be the end of regular forecasts of the coming backlash. In Dearborn we're used to the idea that just because there's no smoke, doesn't mean there's no fire.

Cheney for President

I would vote for Dick Cheney in a second:

Should Dick Cheney run in 2012?

Rick Moran

Short answer; no. His well known heart problems would kill any chances of success. I seriously doubt questions about his health could ever be put to rest no matter how many doctors swore he was fit. Beyond that, there is no doubt that Cheney would make a great president. He would be the "Anti-Obama," possessing qualities exactly the opposite of our current president while outshining him in wisdom and fortitude.Leaving the health issue aside, could he win the nomination? Jon Meacham of Newsweek takes a serious look at why Cheney would be a good candidate:

Why? Because Cheney is a man of conviction, has a record on which he can be judged, and whatever the result, there could be no ambiguity about the will of the people. The best way to settle arguments is by having what we used to call full and frank exchanges about the issues, and then voting.

A contest between Dick Cheney and Barack Obama would offer us a bracing referendum on competing visions. One of the problems with governance since the election of Bill Clinton has been the resolute refusal of the opposition party (the GOP from 1993 to 2001, the Democrats from 2001 to 2009, and now the GOP again in the Obama years) to concede that the president, by virtue of his victory, has a mandate to take the country in a given direction. A Cheney victory would mean that America preferred a vigorous unilateralism to President Obama's unapologetic multilateralism, and vice versa.

Three years out, the GOP field does not offer a putative nominee. When Gallup polled on the Republican race for 2012, it asked about Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Tim Pawlenty, and Haley Barbour (Huckabee won, with Romney and Palin tying for second among Republicans who were asked whom they would consider voting for). Cheney covers all the ground these folks do, and then some. (After Liz Cheney's remark on Fox News, a flood of subsequent e-mails asked her, "Where do I sign up?")

Meacham doesn't mention the health issue, and he makes some backhanded points about why Cheney should run. But there is little doubt that a Cheney trial balloon would set the GOP to talking and serious people would consider contributing time and money to his campaign.I don't think it likely at all. But who knows what condition the country will be in come 2012 and what kind of a president the American people will be looking for?You just never know in politics.
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Where's There's Smoke, There's No Warming?

“This is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud.”
-- The great climate change science scandal

From today's American Thinker:

Climategate: 'The stones cry out'

Joseph Finlay

The extraordinary revelation of Climategate through the alternative media the world over raises provocative questions about the health of Western notions of truth, science, and intellectual freedom . Jonathan Leake, writing in the UK's Times Online, offers a balanced overview of the scandal and this fascinating point regarding the chronology of the "breaking" of the story:

It was a powerful and controversial mix - far too powerful for some. Real Climate is a website designed for scientists who share Jones's belief in man-made climate change.

Within hours the file had been stripped from the site.Several hours later, however, it reappeared - this time on an obscure Russian server. Soon it had been copied to a host of other servers, first in Saudi Arabia and Turkey and then Europe and America.

What's more, the anonymous poster was determined not to be stymied again. He or she posted comments on climate-sceptic blogs, detailing a dozen of the best emails and offering web links to the rest. Jones's statistical tricks were now public property.

Note carefully the fact that this modern shot heard round the world first found a point of entry through Russia, then Saudi Arabia, and then Turkey - next Europe, and lastly the United States. In other words, the traditionally supposed intellectual freedom and free speech climate of the West was "stoney ground" in comparison to the accessibility of outlets under the more repressive regimes of Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.

Perhaps the greater story is the truth itself - and its indomitable will to reveal itself through even the most unlikely of conduits and efforts of even one individual arrayed against a worldwide apparatus of dishonesty. Jesus, in Luke 19:40, when admonished to silence the truth, made a startling claim about the geological record that collided with accepted scientific notions in His day:

And he answered and said unto them, I tell you that, if these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out.

It would appear that the repression of truth in the scientic community and the MSM in the west has indeed caused "the stones to cry out."

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A Perfect Storm of Idiocy

Sure it’s just a coincidence.

Last August a report was issued by the Southern Policy Law Center, “Return of the Militias,” warning of an alarming resurgence of the militia groups of the 1990s. “All it's lacking is a spark,” reported one law enforcement agency. “I think it's only a matter of time before you see threats and violence.”

Back in August the SPLC supplemented its report with an article calling right-wing militias the number-one domestic threat. According to the SPLC, the militia movement “is steeped in paranoia and infused with a boiling rage against President Obama”:

“The Department of Homeland Security has recently warned that right-wing extremists such as these militias currently pose the No. 1 threat of domestic terrorism.” (“Right-Wing Militias Currently the #1 Domestic Terror Threat”).

Except there haven’t been any threats and violence from militia groups that I’ve heard, or nothing that’s big enough to surface to national attention. (Nothing, say, comparable to Fort Hood, or even comparable to the shootout with Imam Abdullah).

And Janet Napolitano ended up having to apologize to military veterans for the unfortunate wording in her Homeland Security report that the SPLC relied so much on.

Then last summer the media tried, tried hard, to portray millions of tea-party goers as unhinged homicidal mobs, except all that video of chipper church groups picking up their own litter kept clashing with the Jaws soundtrack.

And yet here it is late November and the AP is tossing the militia story out there again, with no additional material to explain what makes it news again. (“Militia movements rise up nationwide”).

Today's AP story repeats that, since Obama's election, there’s been a resurgence of militia activity by white guys who can’t process having a black man in charge.

At least 50 new right-wing militia groups have been identified by the Montgomery, Ala.-based Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit civil rights organization.

There is a violent edge to this movement. Lone wolves and small groups who are "embracing violent right-wing extremist ideology are the most dangerous domestic terrorism threat," according to the Southern Poverty Law Center report.

And you know what shocking details we end up with to illustrate this? A where-is-he-now story about an over-the-hill Norm Olson, the former Michigan Militia guy who's now moved to Alaska, He doesn't come across sounding like the center of any "Perfect Storm" of militia violence. He gets along with his new neighbors. His property isn't a "compound." Olson says he's 63 and too old for grunting through the woods. "I'm a flag waver. That's really all I am today."

Is Olson supposed to scare us? If I lived in his town I'd call him up and see if he minded bringing in our mail while we're away.

I ask you: Is this story really being re-launched now, with all the recycled, discredited exaggerations abouting boiling-hot racist right-wing extremist gun nuts, just to divert readers from the real threat of domestic Islamic terrorism?

Do they think we're that stupid? Really?

When Terrorists Get Acquitted, Do We Still Win?

This morning’s Detroit Free Press features this the headline over Brian Dickerson’s column, “When terrorists get equal justice, we win”.

This captures perfectly the failure to tell any difference between jihadist terrorism as a war against us, or terrorism as a criminal act, like mortgage fraud or burglary or assault.

His headline is wrong. We don’t win when terrorists get equal justice--we win when they die, or give up. (And these guys don’t give up). We win when they lose. That’s how wars work.

Dickerson thinks Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is entitled to Bill of Rights protections for criminal defendants just for being one of God’s children.

Except he isn’t entitled. KSM isn’t an American, for one thing, nor was he arrested on U.S. soil. And until a week ago Friday he was generally recognized as a foreign enemy combatant captured making war on us in violation of the laws of war. As far as the laws of war are concerned, we can detain him indefinitely until the war is over.

But Dickerson’s fighting the good fight, along with Obama and Holder, protecting our civil liberties from us, from the “masses,” especially from “critics, mostly on the right,” who would probably vote against the Bill of Rights if anyone was dumb enough to give us the chance.

Why is KSM coming to New York? For your own good.

Thus, Dickerson:

Take, for instance, the notion that any person, no matter how heinous the crime he or she is accused of, should enjoy certain fundamental legal protections, such as the right to a public trial by a jury of ordinary Americans, or the right to cross-examine hostile witnesses.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and his boss, President Barack Obama, are currently under attack for defending this very proposition.

Is that why they’re under attack, for defending the proposition that “any person” is entitled to a public jury trial? And here I thought most of us were upset because Holder and Obama are trying to fight a war as if it's a criminal investigation.

As to those “fundamental legal protections,” I don't get why Dickerson isn’t defending that proposition on behalf of the other detainees, the ones who aren’t getting civil trials, but instead are being sent, by Holder, to military commissions, the same ones Dickerson sneers at as “secret military tribunals.” Don’t these terrorists qualify as “any person,” too?

Aren’t the bombers of the U.S.S. Cole entitled to their “fundamental legal protections,” too?

Didn’t Washington and his men freeze at Valley Forge to ensure all of our most deadly enemies get all of their rights, too?

Holder told the Senate hearing Wednesday that “those who attacked a civilian target on U.S. soil were being sent to a civilian federal court and those who attacked or plotted against military targets abroad were going before tribunals.”

Good luck making sense of that. Regardless, the fact of Holder and his boss endorsing the military tribunals for anyone ought to shut down for good the argument that, compared with criminal courtrooms, they’re little better than legal “black holes.” Dickerson recognizes only the false choice between KSM getting a jury trial in a civilian court, or being denied his Constitutional rights while America abandons her highest principles. The simple solution that he could stay, (or better yet, could have been allowed to complete his plea of guilty and gone off to execution), is never credited to us. Liberals prefer false choices. That way, if you don't support KSM’s “I’ll Take Manhattan” trial, you’re as good as saying you don’t want justice done at all.

Why can’t Dickerson recognize the contradicition of the other detainees going to military courts?

Because he doesn’t know there’s a war. In his mind KSM is a criminal. What has the armed forces got to do with it? Those military tribunals are just something Bush thought up to deprive criminal defendants of their rights.

Dickerson has no clue.

Dickerson is a smart guy who’s commented well on legal issues in the past. I almost never agree with him, but I used to be able to see his point. Lately, he’s drifted over the horizon. I wonder if this isn’t how “cognitive dissonance” affects your thinking after a while?