CAIR at ORD: Vampires Inside the Bloodbank

by Srdja Trifkovic
5 September 2006
http://www.ChroniclesMagazine.org

We’ve learned with two months’ delay that on June 21 the U.S. Department of Homeland Security took officials of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) on a behind-the-screens tour of U.S. airport security measures at O’Hare International in Chicago. During the tour Customs and Border Patrol agents outlined their high-risk passenger lookout system to the guests. The decision to take Muslim activists to point-of-entry and Customs stations, secondary screening and interview rooms at America’s busiest airport was made in response to CAIR’s complaints that Muslims were being unfairly targeted for scrutiny on arrival in the United States. This is not the first time CAIR was able to intimidate American institutions into compliance with its dictates, but it is by far the most alarming such incident to date.

Brian Humphrey, Director of Field Operations at O’Hare, assured his guests that agents do not target Muslim passengers for special screening and explained that U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents are obliged to complete an interactive cultural sensitivity course. The course, which teaches agents, inter alia, that Muslims believe jihad is an inner struggle against one’s sinful desires, was developed by Margaret Nydell, professor of Arabic at Georgetown University and the author of Understanding Arabs, a notable piece of Islamophile apologia. Professor Nydell’s are of special interest and expertise is Saudi Arabia. Perhaps it should be added that Georgetown’s Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy is lavishly funded by Saudi money and that its head is one of the world’s leading apologists of jihad, Dr. John Esposito.

Nydell’s instruction and CBP’s companion training manual and video, were described as “politically correct drivel” by a Customs and Border Protection supervisor: “It’s all about how Islam means peace and tolerance,” he told WorldNetDaily. “We’re told how to deal with Arabs and Muslims, that they are loving people and not terrorists. That jihad is struggle with sin and has nothing to do with violence.” Customs agents involved in the CAIR tour at O’Hare told the same source that they were outraged that sensitive counterterrorism procedures were revealed to an organization tainted with terrorist links.

CAIR claims to be “just another civil-rights group,” devoted to protecting the rights of Muslims and promoting a better understanding of Islam in America, but there is more, much more, than meets the eye:

—Ihsan Bagby, a founding Board member of CAIR, maintained that Muslims “can never be full citizens of this country [the U.S.] . . . because there is no way we can be fully committed to the institutions and ideologies of this country.”

—Shortly after it was founded with foreign Arab money in 1994, CAIR called the guilty verdict in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing case “a travesty of justice” and a proof of the all-pervasive “Islamophobia” in the American society.

—In 1995 CAIR condemned the conviction of Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheikh, for conspiring to blow up New York City landmarks, as a “hate crime.”

—CAIR advisory-board member Siraj Wahhaj was named in 1995 as one of the unindicted co-conspirators in the scheme to blow up New York City sites in 1993.

—In July 1998 CAIR’s chairman of the board, Omar Ahmad, declared that the Kuran should be America’s highest authority and that Islam is not in America to be equal to any other religion, but to be dominant.

—In August 1998 CAIR condemned the targeting of terrorist training camps in Afghanistan in the aftermath of the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa.

—In October 1998 CAIR demanded the removal of a Los Angeles billboard describing Osama as “the sworn enemy.”

—That same year CAIR denied bin Laden’s responsibility for the twin East African embassy bombings.

—In November 1999, at a Muslim youth rally in Chicago, Omar Ahmad praised suicide bombers: “Fighting for freedom, fighting for Islam—that is not suicide.”

—After 9-11 CAIR called for donations: under a picture of the flaming Towers the hyperlink took donors to the website of the Holy Land Foundation, an Islamic charity whose assets were frozen soon thereafter by the Treasury Department. On July 27, 2004, a federal grand jury in Dallas, Texas, returned a 42 count indictment against the HLF that included conspiracy, material support to a foreign terrorist organization, and money laundering.

—A week later CAIR called on people to donate to the Global Relief Foundation, another Islamic charity from Illinois, whose assets were also frozen in December 2001, and which has provided assistance to known Islamic terrorist groups.

—In December 2002 CAIR called the closure of the Holy Land Foundation “unjust” and “disturbing.”

—CAIR claimed the closure of the Global Relief Foundation was due to the racial profiling of a group that “had established a track record of effective relief work.”

—In 2002 CAIR embarked on a campaign to place a package of pro-Islamic books and CDs in thousands of American libraries. It claimed the program was not subsidized from abroad, but kept quiet about $1/2m donation from Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz al Saud

—which gave a Wahabi seal of approval on the materials.

—In 2003 CAIR complained about the FBI surveillance of mosques, but remained mute when it was revealed that the Al-Farooq mosque in New York was complicit in collecting funds for al-Qaeda. Undeterred, it has continued to demand amendments to the USA Patriot Act to protect the Muslims from eavesdropping.

—In September 2003 Bassem Khafagi, CAIR’s community relations director, pleaded guilty to lying on his visa application and was deported.

—After the March 11, 2004, bombings in Madrid, Ibrahim Hooper said a Muslim convert in Florida who allegedly had her hijab pulled by Spanish tourists “is also victim of terrorism.” Adolf [sic] Ali, head of CAIR Florida, insisted that Florida should reinstate the electric chair for “kuffars [infidel] accused of causing offense to Muslims.”

—In April 2005, the founder of the Texas chapter of CAIR, Ghassan Elashi was found guilty of supporting terrorism. He was the third CAIR-connected figure to be convicted on federal terrorism charges since 9-11.

—Also in April 2005, CAIR orchestrated a nation-wide campaign to have my book The Sword of the Prophet banned from the National Review Online bookstore.

—in August 2005 when WMAL, a Washington, D.C. talk radio station, succumbed to CAIR’s pressure and fired presenter Michael Graham for his comments on the link between Islam and terrorism.

—In April 2006 a federal appeals court upheld the dismissal of a $2 million defamation lawsuit by CAIR against former U.S. Rep. Cass Ballenger. The suit was filed in response to an October 2003 interview in which Ballenger said CAIR raised funds for terrorists and did so “with actual malice, wrongful and willful intent to injure and with reckless disregard for its truth or falsity.”

This is only a partial list, and it is likely to be enriched in the months and years to come. And yet, in the immediate aftermath of 9-11, CAIR’s lading PR duet—Palestinian-born Nihad Awad and American-born Ibrahim Hooper

—were invited to the White House. When receiving them President Bush may have been unaware that CAIR’s condemnation of the attacks was delayed, and only came in December of that year. Until that time it had referred to the “alleged attackers,” implying that someone other than the named 19 were the real culprits.

CAIR’s medium-term agenda became apparent in May 2004, when it issued a report claiming that anti-Muslim incidents in the United States had increased by almost 70 percent in 2003. The study “outlined”—euphemism for superficial or fraudulent research—over a thousand “incidents and experiences of anti-Muslim violence, discrimination and harassment.” (The word “experience” denotes an entirely subjective view of a situation or event that could not be pumped up into an “incident.”) Claiming that “hate crimes” alone had jumped by 121 percent, CAIR demanded a public inquiry into post-9/11 policies impacting the Muslim community, legislative actions to curb the use of profiling by law enforcement agencies, strengthening of hate crime prosecutions, and “modifications” to the Patriot Act to end “abuses” of the Muslim community.

With that “report” and the associated demands, reflected in the campaign to censor books and media outlets uncomfortable to jihad, the true agenda of CAIR is finally clear. It is a radical political group that does not merely want to change the nature of discourse on Islam in America, it wants to Islamize America. It wants to transform America into a barren wasteland of mind-numbing uniformity of thought, on par with Saudi Arabia and Mauritania. Messrs. Awad and Hooper are not Islamic community activists seeking to better the lot of their co-religionists, they are political visionaries who want the U.S. government to be Islamic “sometime in the future.”

Emboldened by the lack of moral fiber in the host-society that they despise, with each victory CAIR activists become ever more cocky. Arsalan Iftikhar, national legal director for CAIR, thus promised in September 2005 that it was time for everyday Muslims to “defend the image and reputation of the community and Islam in general”: “I am here to teach you how the American Muslim community can legally empower itself to protect itself in the American courts.”

It is high time to turn the tables and use the courts against CAIR. It has been playing its pernicious game far too long, and needs a healthy dose of the law itself—and the law is clear:

Whoever provides material support or resources or conceals or disguises the nature, location, source, or ownership of material support or resources, knowing or intending that they are to be used in preparation for, or in carrying out [terrorist acts] . . . shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 15 years, or both, and, if the death of any person results, shall be imprisoned for any term of years or for life.

There is a clear link between CAIR and persons and institutions with terrorist connections, and it defies belief that such an organization is still allowed to operate—let alone to be given VIP tours of America’s border defenses by the Department of Homeland Security.

/Islam/CAIR print permanent link writebacks (2)

Clarence Page: Give Parents a Chance to Choose Schools

September 07, 2006
The Chicago Tribune
Clarence Page

WASHINGTON--What if you took junior high school-aged boys, rated as "high risk" in their low-income, high-crime urban neighborhood, and plopped them down in a low-enrollment high-quality school in rural Africa?

That's the premise behind the Baraka School, a project put together in Kenya, East Africa, by American volunteers and foundations for early-teen boys from Baltimore, Md. Why Kenya? Besides being less expensive than a lot of places, it is a place where "boys can live the lives of boys," spokesmen say. The kids can swim in natural streams, terrify each other with pet reptiles and watch real elephants parade through real forests instead of vegetating in front of video games.

A year in the lives of one group from Baltimore is chronicled in "The Boys of Baraka," a critically-acclaimed documentary by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady that played briefly in theaters last year. Its broadcast debut is scheduled for Tuesday night, Sept. 12, as part of the "P.O.V." independent film series on PBS (check local listings).

What happened to them? Mostly they thrived. As portrayed in the movie, they arrive at the mostly white-run school jet-lagged, homesick and shocked by the prospect of an academic year without Game Boys, let alone reliable electricity.

But they adjust. Their tough, defensive street attitude slowly melts. They take on a new excitement about learning, teamwork and the vast dimensions of true manhood in a world beyond the 'hood back home.

"This school is very strict!," says Richard, an aspiring preacher. "You fail one class, you're going back. . You know what, I'm going to keep on trying until I can't try no more. Some people give up, but this is the only chance I got!"

Another boy's mother is arrested while he is in Kenya. His grandparents keep the news from him. He arrived street-hard, but eventually is so transformed that, back home, he earns the highest score in all of Maryland on a state math test and gains admission to Baltimore's most competitive high school.

But the school ends sadly. Terrorist uprisings in Kenya force Baraka to close in the summer of 2003 before the boys featured in the film can begin their second year. Their parents are distraught and outraged. Their sons' performance has blossomed from mediocre to outstanding. Now, as one mom says, "If you send them to Baltimore, you're sending them to jail."

"It's a war zone here," one father argues with a Baraka representative. "They're more likely to be killed over here than over there."

During its seven years of operation, the program served about 95 boys. Most arrived at the school three to four grade levels behind. So far, a Baltimore Sun follow-up found in March, their graduation rate exceeds than that of their non-Baraka peers. Of those who could be located, eight alumni went to college; two joined the Navy, one joined the Army; one spent time in prison.

The Baraka project teaches something critical about the impact of environment on learning and behavior. No kid should have to leave his home, family and country to get an education free of shots fired in the night and police helicopters overhead. But, as this film shows, the change could do a lot of kids a lot of good.

And there's another, more controversial lesson the Baraka story offers: a powerful argument for more school choice, even if that means vouchers for private schools.

The earnest parents in this movie, mostly moms and grandparents, fighting hard to get their kids a better chance at life, illustrate why polls show growing support for private school vouchers among African-American parents, as long as they do not take money from the public schools.

Housing vouchers have offered similar help to a fortunate few. One now-famous example emerged out of a class-action racial discrimination lawsuit filed 40 years ago by Dorothy Gautreaux and three other Chicago public housing residents. Thanks to a Supreme Court ruling in their favor, more than 6,000 poor, black Chicago families have moved out of densely concentrated black neighborhoods and integrated into mostly white suburban neighborhoods with the help of Section 8 federal housing vouchers.

The result mostly has been a win-win all around. Studies by the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University found, in the program's first two decades, that at least children's attitudes toward school improved in their new neighborhoods. Their grades did not suffer, and they were more likely than their city counterparts to graduate from high school, get good jobs and enroll in four-year colleges.

Environment matters. Responsible parents often do a better job than government agencies of deciding what schools and neighborhoods are best for their kids. They deserve a chance to show it.

Page is a Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist specializing in urban issues. He is based in Washington, D.C. E-mail: cptime@aol.com

Froma Harrop: Islamic Terror's Endless 'Root Causes'

September 07, 2006
Froma Harrop

In Oliver Stone's movie "World Trade Center," the people who know least about the Sept. 11 horror are the two Port Authority cops closest to it. Asian peasants follow the awful events on television, but the men buried under smashed iron and concrete don't know the "who" or the "why" or even that the towers had collapsed.

Through their own courage and that of their rescuers (this is a true story), the officers live to learn what happened. But five years later, neither they, nor anyone else, fully understand "why."

That Islamic terrorists hate the United States is an all-purpose explanation. Dig deeper into the reasons for that hatred, though, and the confident answers of "expert opinion" don't quite satisfy.

Since that gruesome blue-sky day, Islamic radicals have staged more attacks and have been foiled in others. But try to find a connecting theme, other than psychosis. There's only a pile of shifting motives.

Denmark just arrested nine Muslim men preparing explosives for some new outrage. Why, no one knows for sure. Could be the Danish cartoons of Muhammad. Could be because Denmark has troops in Iraq. Could be something else.

When German authorities caught two Lebanese men planting bombs on trains, they assumed the motive was the war in Lebanon. Turns out it was the cartoons. The suspects did tack Lebanon onto their grievance list, but actually, the attack had been planned before the war began.

The 2004 bombing of commuter trains in Madrid took place in the days preceding a Spanish election. Its goal, the thinking went, was to scare voters into replacing a government that had sent troops to Iraq. They did, but three weeks later, a bomb similar to the ones used in the March massacre was found on a track near Madrid.

Why did Islamic terrorists bomb nightclubs in Bali? Were they aiming at Bali itself, a Hindu island in mostly Muslim Indonesia? Was the target Australia because it sent troops to Iraq -- or Australia because it helped liberate East Timor from Indonesia? (Nearly half the people killed were Australian tourists.) Was it an objection to bikinis?

The attacks on Mumbai commuter trains have been linked to Pakistani anger at India's control over much of (Muslim) Kashmir. The bombings on London subways were traced to sons of Pakistani immigrants supposedly unhappy over how they're treated in Britain. Intelligence officials say at least one had trained with al-Qaida in Pakistan, where the terrorist group was also prepping suicide bombers to blow up 10 airliners flying from London to the United States.

Terrorists vowed massive attacks against France over its ban on Islamic headscarves in public schools. And a Muslim gang murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in the streets of Amsterdam over a movie he made.

Given this Wal-Martian selection of motives, one must smile at the five-years-after editorial in The Economist, which states the number of jihadis has multiplied since Sept. 11, "partly as a result of the way America responded." By that, the British magazine means the war in Iraq.

We can agree that the war was based on trumped-up evidence, that it was poorly planned and that it is going badly. But Islamic terrorists are attacking people on nearly every continent -- many who have little or nothing to do with U.S. foreign policy. Multicultural, huggy-bear, we're-not-in-Iraq Canada has uncovered a plot by 17 Muslims to invade its Parliament and chop off the prime minister's head.

Perhaps terrorists see countries that make sensitive analyses of their complaints as easy marks. If so, then the eagerness to prettify mass murder with "root causes" could itself be a root cause.

fharrop@projo.com

Ann Coulter- Joe Wilson: The End of an Error

Ann Coulter
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
September 7, 2006

As National Public Radio described the story behind Joe Wilson's amusingly titled book, The Politics of Truth (available on the $1 table in fine bookstores everywhere), in May 2004:

"Last July Wilson wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times saying that this particular intelligence regarding Iraq was false. A week later, columnist Robert Novak revealed that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA operative."

This is like saying: "John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan; Reagan later died." Every word of that is true, but what it implies – that Hinckley killed Reagan – is false.

In the exact same way, the grand White House conspiracy promoted by Wilson and the mainstream media cites chronological events to prove causation.

The media's conspiracy theory is:

1. Wilson said Bush's famed "16 words" in his 2003 State of the Union address – "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa" – were a lie.

2. Wilson's wife was then revealed to be an "undercover" spy at the CIA, exposing Wilson and his family to danger.

3. Therefore, she was "outed" by the White House as retaliation against Wilson for calling Bush a liar.

Point 1 of leftists' conspiracy theory has been proved false since Britain's Butler Commission reviewed its government's pre-war intelligence on Iraq and concluded that "the British government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium."

It was again proved false when our own Senate Intelligence Committee also concluded, in July 2004, that Saddam Hussein had sought uranium from Niger.

So there went the White House's motive for muddying up Wilson: Government fact-finding commissions, here and in the United Kingdom, were muddying up Wilson on their own simply by finding facts.

Point 2, that Wilson's wife was an undercover agent, has been proved false even to the willfully blind since Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald announced the conclusion to his pointless investigation last year, saying that Plame's employment with the CIA was not undercover, but merely "classified."

Everything is "classified" at the CIA. They have no idea when 19 terrorists are about to hijack commercial aircraft and slaughter 3,000 Americans, but the CIA is very good at play-acting James Bond spy games.

How covert was Valerie Plame at the CIA? Her top-secret code name was "Valerie Plame."

All this should have been enough to end conspiracy theories of White House skullduggery. But the nation's newsrooms simply continued asserting that someone in the Bush White House had "outed" Valerie Plame, despite the fact that revealing her employment with the CIA was not illegal.

Thus, as recently as January of this year, a New York Times editorial said the issue of the "leak" about Wilson's wife, whom the Times called "a covert CIA operative whose identity was leaked" (two strikes already), concerned "whether the White House was using this information in an attempt to silence Mrs. Wilson's husband, a critic of the Iraq invasion."

Wilson was more precise about the White House "leaker," variously naming Karl Rove, Lewis Libby and Dick Cheney as the source. He even described "a meeting in the suite of offices that the vice president occupies, chaired by either the vice president or Mr. Libby," where, Wilson said, the decision was made to destroy him.

(If the secret plan hatched in the vice president's office was to send evil spirits to enter Wilson's body and make him act like a fool, the plan worked brilliantly.)

Now it turns out, even Point 3 of leftists' conspiracy theory was false: The original "leaker" of Plame's name to columnist Bob Novak – not a crime – was not in the White House at all. It was Richard Armitage, a State Department official and opponent of the Iraq war.

The information that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA had nothing to do with harming Wilson. It did not come from the White House. It did not even come from someone who supported the war in Iraq.

The rest of the world found out Armitage was Novak's source last week, something Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald knew from the first week of his investigation. So what was Fitzgerald investigating?

Even people who think the president should not be subject to civil suits in office do not deny that Bill Clinton had an affair with Monica Lewinsky and lied about it in a civil suit brought by Paula Jones. However irritating it is to leftists that lying about sex under oath is a crime, there was a crime that Ken Starr was investigating.

What was Fitzgerald investigating? Not only was there no underlying crime, there was not even – as the Times put it – "an attempt to silence Mrs. Wilson's husband" (or an attempt "to respond to people calling you a liar in the New York Times," as normal people put it).

Fitzgerald's entire investigation was nothing but a perjury trap from beginning to end for anyone who misremembered anything about who told whom what about a low-level nobody at the CIA who happened to be married to a Walter Mitty fantasist.

Ann Coulter is a bestselling author and syndicated columnist. Her most recent book is Godless: The Church of Liberalism.

Joe Kaufman: CAIR's Extremist Makeover

Joe Kaufman
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
September 7, 2006

“The change at CAIR starts with a brand new identity that reflects our core values of being.” These are the words found in the new flash presentation on the website of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). The presentation introduces a new look for CAIR. Gone is the boring blue logo, replaced by an equally boring emblem that now includes an Islamic pattern combining four crescents and stars. Regrettably, while the logo did receive a facelift, the organization is still the same CAIR – the same radical Islamist group that it was when it began more than twelve years ago.

Tomorrow night, September 8th, CAIR will be sponsoring an event featuring the former President of Iran, Mohammad Khatami. Khatami, during the recent fighting in Lebanon, described Hezbollah as “a shining sun that illuminates and warms the hearts of all Muslims and supporters of freedom in the world.” Indeed, no matter what CAIR says, the core is still well intact.

Part of CAIR’s core is its co-founder and Executive Director, Nihad Awad. Awad started the group, along with two fellow representatives from the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), in June of 2004, just three months after Awad publicly proclaimed his support for Hamas.

Another part of CAIR’s core is its National Spokesman, Ibrahim “Dougie” Hooper. In April of 1993, Hooper told the Minneapolis Star Tribune, “I wouldn’t want to create the impression that I wouldn’t like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future.” These quotations from CAIR’s two main leaders represent an ideology that has driven the group to the front of the American Islamist community.

The fact that four of CAIR’s former officials have been convicted in and/or deported from the United States, all found to have had ties with Hamas or al-Qaeda, is indicative of the “core values” that CAIR’s flash presentation speaks of, and it is the reasoning behind the speaking invite of someone such as Mohammad Khatami.

Seyed Mohammed Khatami served as Iran’s fifth President, from August of 1997 through August of 2005. Once thought of as a reformer, Khatami has embraced extremism on a number of occasions, most notably with respect to his views on the terrorist organization Hezbollah. Less than a month before leaving office, in July of 2005, he stated on Al-Arabiya TV (Dubai), “It is not in Lebanon's best interest to stop the resistance. We always support this idea. We believe that Hezbollah has an authentic Lebanese identity. We love Hezbollah… Hezbullah will remain and will keep its weapons.” And as reported in the New York Times, during the recent fighting that took place in Lebanon, Khatami likened Hezbollah to “a shining sun that illuminates and warms the hearts of all Muslims and supporters of freedom in the world.” Also according to the article, Khatami sent a hate-filled letter to Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, which stated, “Zionists’ shocking atrocities in Palestine and Lebanon are a sign of their violent nature.”

Khatami’s visit to the U.S. has drawn the ire of many, including that of the Governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney. Concerning Khatami’s invitation to speak at Harvard University on the eve of 9/11 (following the CAIR speech), Romney stated, “State taxpayers should not be providing special treatment to an individual who supports violent jihad and the destruction of Israel.”

It is obvious that this is not of concern to CAIR, as the group is throwing out the red carpet for the so-called “reformist.” According to CAIR’s website, in addition to the speech, there will be “a private reception with President Khatami, including a photo opportunity.”

The event is being held at the Marriott Crystal Gateway in Arlington, Virginia. This is the same venue that hosted CAIR’s 11th Annual Banquet, in December of 2005. That affair featured Siraj Wahhaj, a former National Board member of CAIR, whose name appears on the U.S. Attorney’s list of potential co-conspirators to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

By bringing Mohammad Khatami, an extremist that supports terrorists, to speak at its event, CAIR has shown that its new image is nothing but a farce, and its new logo is little more than ‘window dressing’ to that farce. CAIR is no more of a reformer than its Iranian guest.

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Joe Kaufman is the Chairman of Americans Against Hate and the host of The Politics of Terrorism radio show.

Daniel Pipes: Improvising After 9/11

Daniel Pipes
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
September 6, 2006

The five years since 9/11, in retrospect, have been like a perpetual workshop in which Americans argue about the nature of their enemy and how to defeat him.

Along the way, they have made plenty of mistakes, ranging from former secretary of state Colin Powell's claiming that 9/11 "should not be seen as something done by Arabs or Islamics," to not allowing an Arab to board an airplane because he wore a t-shirt bearing Arabic script. What impresses me, however, is how Americans have constantly, if slowly, improved their understanding of the enemy, as can be seen in everything from presidential rhetoric to airplane security. Much of this evolution has been improvised – using existing tools in new ways, preserving old laws but applying them in new circumstances.

Here's one such example: Hamid Hayat, a 23-year-old cherry packer from Lodi, California, was convicted in April 2006 of providing material support to terrorists by attending a paramilitary training camp in Pakistan during 2003-04. In the course of a police interrogation, when asked who else had gone to the terror camps, Hayat fingered his 18-year-old American-born cousin, Jaber Ismail, saying he "went, like, two years ago." Did Jaber attend the same camp as him? "I'm not sure, but I'll say he went to a camp." Hayat later modified his story, saying that Ismail and another relative "didn't talk to me about going to camps or anything. But you know I'm sure they went to the camp...'cause they memorize the Holy Koran."

Jaber Ismail had, in fact, lived in Pakistan for four years, along with his father Muhammad, a 45-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen born in Pakistan; his mother; and his two siblings. Predictably, Jaber explains his Pakistan years benignly: "I was memorizing the Koran because it was important to my mom." Jaber and Muhammad were so close to Hayat, they listed him as an emergency contact in their passports.

On returning from Pakistan to Lodi on April 21, 2006, the Ismail family changed planes in Hong Kong. Three family members got permission to go on, but Jaber and his father were stopped, so they returned to Pakistan. On trying again two weeks later, they learned that, though not charged with a crime, they were on the U.S. government's terrorism watch-list, and that they could only enter the United States after getting "clearance" from the embassy in Pakistan. That meant submitting to an FBI interrogation and to lie detector tests, which they refused to do.

On Aug. 9, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) claiming the Ismails have been denied their civil rights. The ACLU lawyer, Julia Harumi Mass, states that "They want to come home and have an absolute right to come home. They can't be compelled to waive their constitutional rights under threat of banishment." Michael Barr, director of the aviation safety and security program at the University of Southern California deems it "very unprecedented" for U.S. citizens to be rendered stateless in this fashion. Usama Ismail, 20, complains that his brother and father are being treated "like foreigners or something."

Is the Ismails' exclusion legal?

To get a reading on the feds' legal basis, I turned to William West, former chief of the National Security Section for the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Miami, Florida. "It is a rare decision, but within the legal pale," he explained to me.

"Section 215 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, 8 USC 1185 allows for the ‘travel control' of the entry and departure of citizens. U.S. citizens use their passports only within the rules, regulations, and proscriptions as issued and decided by the president. Travel restrictions on U.S. citizens are seldom utilized (and usually to keep criminal or national-security suspects from fleeing). The law, however, does also allow for entry control."

West expects that the Ismails "ultimately will be allowed back into the country. But in the short term, DHS has a legal basis for excluding them."

The DHS not only applied the law to scrutinize possibly dangerous Islamists but its actions suggest a possible conceptual breakthrough, signaling that the U.S. government sees the "nationality" of radical Islam to be incompatible with American citizenship. Thus do Americans improvise and make gradual progress in their War on Terror.

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Mr. Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is director of the Middle East Forum and author of Miniatures (Transaction Publishers).

Book Review- 'Creators' by Paul Johnson

God’s Gift to Man

by ROGER KIMBALL
http://www.nationalreview.com


In 1988, the British historian Paul Johnson published a slim volume called Intellectuals. What is an intellectual? Johnson defined the beast as “someone who thinks ideas are more important than people,” and proceeded to take readers on an entertaining, though decidedly unedifying, tour of typical intellectuals from Shelley and Karl Marx to Bertrand Russell and D. H. Lawrence. My, what an unlovely tribe! Self-absorbed, hypocritical louts, most of them, infatuated above all with the thought of their own higher virtue.

Johnson is a consummate storyteller, and Intellectuals became an instant bestseller, gobbled up eagerly by nearly everyone except those whose follies it anatomized, intellectuals themselves. What really rankled, especially among academic intellectuals whose audience generally numbers in the low three figures, was the book’s popular success. Among other things, Intellectuals illustrated a principle enunciated with all possible clarity by the English music critic Ernest Newman: “Journalist,” said Newman (himself a fixture for decades at the London Times), is a term of contempt employed by writers who are not read to refer to writers who are.

What especially infuriated critics was Johnson’s systematic unwillingness to take intellectuals at their own self-estimation. These people, most of them, were bad hats, and Johnson did not forbear to point out their brutality; their cavalier disregard of friends, family, and supporters; and their often comical inflation of their own importance. Most readers found the book hugely entertaining, but some complained that it was “mean-spirited,” concentrating on the failures and foibles of human ambition, not its aspirational yearnings. Creators is in part a response to that criticism.

The book, Johnson tells us in his opening pages, forms the second part of a trilogy that began with Intellectuals and will end with Heroes, which will dilate on those “who have enriched history by careers or acts of conspicuous courage and leadership.”

There are a few surprises in Creators. I for one was dismayed to find that Johnson’s list of the five architects of outstanding accomplishment in the English-speaking world did not include Stanford White. (Had I to choose, I’d substitute White for Johnson’s candidate Frank Lloyd Wright.) But this is a quibble.

Creators is a riveting collage of a book. Its ambitious scope is adumbrated by its subtitle: “From Chaucer and Dürer to Picasso and Disney.” Shakespeare, Bach, Jane Austen, Turner, and T. S. Eliot are here; so are Wagner, Tiffany, Victor Hugo, and the dress designer Cristóbal Balenciaga. (The chapter on Balenciaga and Christian Dior is a special delight.) Along the way Johnson glances at figures as disparate as Imhotep, vizier or chief minister to a succession of Egyptian pharaohs circa 2600 B.C., and Thomas Telford, the great Scottish bridge-builder and engineer.

Johnson has prepared the widest possible canvas upon which to paint his tableau. Creativity, he points out, is a fundamental God-given grace of human life, inherent in all of us, as much in the humorist whose creative gift issues in the transient if utterly absorbing phenomenon of laughter as in the architect, painter, musician, or writer, whose creativity issues in more lasting monuments.

One of the reasons that Intellectuals garnered the criticisms it did was that it was misread as an exercise in intellectual history. Johnson was not endeavoring to explain the ideas of (say) Karl Marx or Jean-Paul Sartre. That has been done a hundred times over. Instead, he endeavored to provide a sort of moral archeology of the figures he discussed. His aim was to understand their work, their ambition, in the context of their lives. He is up to something similar in this book. Creators is full of fascinating aperçus and asides. I especially liked Johnson’s recollection of his meeting with T.S. Eliot at a party in 1953. The sole comment the poet addressed to him was, “There is nothing in this world quite so stimulating as a strong dry martini cocktail.”

Still, Creators is not a book “about” Chaucer, or Shakespeare, or any of the other characters who populate its pages. Instead it canvasses the pains and pleasure of creativity, offering an inventory of some of the most significant ways in which the urge to create has incarnated itself in human history. Johnson aims to provide a Baedeker for high-level creativity as it has manifested itself in (mostly) Western art and culture. It is worth noting that the expression of creativity, even creativity at a high level, does not require genius.

Johnson devotes a chapter to Jane Austen (along with some other women novelists), and though he greatly admires Austen’s novels — what sane person does not? — he is probably right that she “was not a genius.” This is not to diminish Austen’s achievement but rather to suggest that genius may not be the essential concomitant of superlative artistic, intellectual, or cultural achievement. There are after all plenty of geniuses about. Often, their productions are more curious than substantial. Think only of Hegel: a man, as Kierkegaard said, who built an intellectual palace but lived in the guard house. As the English essayist Walter Bagehot observed in another context, “In the faculty of writing nonsense, stupidity is no match for genius.” The allotropes of creativity are as various as the individuals who embody the creative spirit. Nonetheless one can discern leitmotifs of the creative spirit.

For example, most visual artists of superlative accomplishment begin young — three is the age Johnson mentions — and follow their careers with an all-absorbing passion. Dürer was typical: “As soon as he could hold a pen,” Johnson tells us, “he was drawing.” It was the same with Turner and his Japanese equivalent Hokusai, the 19th-century painter who “in effect created Japanese landscape painting from nothing.” Turner had his first watercolor accepted by the Royal Academy when he was 16, his first oil four years later. He became a full Royal Academician at the unusually young age of 27. Hokusai, who lived to his late 80s, began young and pursued his art with astonishing single-mindedness. At 83, he sent an autobiographical fragment, as touching as it is whimsical, to his publisher:

From the age of six I could draw forms and objects. By 50 I had turned out an infinite number of drawings. But I am not happy about anything I did before 70. Only at 73 did I begin to understand the true form and nature of birds, fish and plants. By 80 I had made a lot of progress. At 90 I will begin to get to the root of it all. By 100 I will have reached a Superior State in art, undefinable, and by 110, every dot and line will be living.

It is clear that Johnson — himself an amateur watercolorist of impressive accomplishment — greatly admires the creative spirit in action. But it is also clear that he is under no illusions about the moral claims of creative spirits. Writing in passing about the dissolute poet Dylan Thomas, Johnson notes that no one who studies creators will find them “a particularly amiable or grateful tribe.” Indeed, many of the creators he discusses — Wagner, Victor Hugo — were prodigies of egoism and worse. To what extent they go together — the egoism and the creativity — is a question Johnson touches on but does not settle.

The biggest offender in Johnson’s menagerie is undoubtedly Picasso, one of the most curious cultural figures of the 20th century. Long before his death in 1973, Picasso had emerged in the public imagination as perhaps the creative artistic genius of the period. For many, Picasso was to art as Einstein was to science. Of course, not everyone was susceptible. Few perhaps went as far as Evelyn Waugh, who for a period ended his letters with the valediction “Death to Picasso.” But there were many who contemplated Picasso’s deliberate assault upon nature and the human figure with horror, not admiration.

What seems clear from our vantage point thirty-odd years after Picasso’s death is that his reputation owed as much to the public intoxication as to his achievement. Picasso may have been, as Johnson observes, “the most restless, experimental, and productive artist who ever lived,” but he was also an artist whose primary endowment was the ability to sense “exactly how much the vanguard of the art world would take.” The two words that best describe Picasso’s activities as an artist — as a man, too — are “cunning” and “rage.”

From an early age, Picasso knew (in Gertrude Stein’s phrase) exactly how far to go in going too far. The astonishingly protean quality of Picasso’s work — from the sentimentalities of the Blue Period to the depredations of his cubist and post-cubist “portraits” — bespeaks not only an abundance of creative élan but also a fundamental vacuum at the center of his art. “Obviously,” Picasso said in an aside that speaks volumes about his attitude toward his art, “Nature exists so that we can rape it.” Johnson describes Picasso as “essentially a fashion designer,” catering with perfect pitch to the fickle vicissitudes of avant-garde taste. It is worth noting, I think, how much smaller Picasso’s achievement seems now than it did even a decade ago. In time, I predict, he will be seen primarily as a gifted caricaturist who also happened to be a thoroughly repulsive man.

It was of course naughty of Paul Johnson to pair Picasso with Walt Disney, the inventor of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. Naughty, but also instructive. Where Picasso made war on nature, Disney always endeavored to follow it. He and his team of animators spent countless hours observing the movements of the animals they brought to life in their cartoons. Picasso’s attitude toward nature was consonant with his attitude toward women: They were, as one of his mistresses bitterly recalled, either “goddesses or doormats,” and Picasso’s chief ambition was to transform the former into the latter. Picasso wanted to get nature. Disney and his team wanted to get it right.

How shocking to compare, and compare favorably, a mere cartoonist to an avant-garde artistic icon. Oh, how the academics will hate that! But Johnson is on to something important, and this wise and entertaining book will delight and instruct the serious reading public as much as it will irritate the clerks for whom genius provides a blanket indemnity from all moral scruple.

Mr. Kimball is publisher of Encounter Books and co-editor and co-publisher of The New Criterion.

Book Review- Johnny U: The Life and Times of John Unitas

'Johnny U: The Life and Times of John Unitas' by Tom Callahan

How quarterback went from Steelers reject to NFL legend

Sunday, September 03, 2006
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
By Allen Barra

The late Johnny Unitas was the National Football League's first household name, the first pro football player to be recognized on a level with Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays.

Modern pro football is practically dated from his first championship season in 1958. Amazingly, half a century after Unitas began his professional career, this biography by Tom Callahan, a sports columnist with the Washington Post, is the first book to tell us how and why Unitas kick-started a legend.

Callahan's writing is appropriate to his subject, lean and unpretentious, and to the point. Like Johnny U, he rises to the occasion in the big games. Those who were never fortunate enough to watch Unitas play will feel as if they have to clean grass stains off their pants after reading this book.

John Constantine Unitas was born in Pittsburgh in 1933 and raised by his Lithuanian immigrant mother on Mount Washington after his father died when he was 5.

He was born -- and stayed -- working class. At the height of his fame, gossip columnist Louella Parsons, who made a living from champagne-fueled conversation with Cary Grant and Clark Gable, sought an interview.

"Sure, Louella," he told her, inviting her to plop down and have a beer with him. Parsons fled.

Like most great stars of his generation, Unitas used football as a ticket out of a life of factory labor. He developed such mental tenacity that, according to one of his All-Pro receivers, John Mackey, "Playing with Johnny Unitas was like being in the huddle with God."

But not right away. After failing to gain a scholarship from Notre Dame and the University of Pittsburgh, he had an up-and-down college career with the disorganized Louisville program.

Upon graduation, no one wanted him; he was finally drafted in the ninth round by the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1955, then cut after training camp. He worked construction jobs and earned $15 a game playing for the semipro Bloomfield Rams. It earned him a shot the next year with the Baltimore Colts, and he made the most of it.

Unitas came of age when the passing game was capturing the imagination of television viewers, when quarterbacks called their own plays and players' styles weren't subordinate to a brain trust of coaches.

The quarterback famous for his crew cut and high-top black shoes was the idol of another boy from a Pennsylvania steel town who became famous for long hair and white shoes.

"On Sixth Street in Beaver Falls," said Joe Namath, "I wasn't Joe Namath. I was Joey U."
From the late 1950s to the pro football merger in 1970, the game was played by men whose names now sound mythical, men who were paid not much better than Wal-Mart employees today.

"The time," as Callahan writes, "was different. The players lived next door to the fans, literally. There wasn't a financial gulf, a cultural gulf, or any other kind of gulf between them."
Unitas, with his laser-like passing skill and riverboat gambler's flair, helped change all that by ushering football into the big-money TV era.

The game changed, becoming glitzier and more sophisticated, but Unitas stayed the same. He never felt the need to unburden himself to the public.

When a sportswriter dryly inquired if he had written his own autobiography, he replied that "I didn't even read it."

When the Pro Football Hall of Fame asked him for his memorabilia, he gave them everything but his shoes. "They're great for cutting the grass," he explained. Unitas died in 2002.
That grass didn't grow in Indianapolis. When Colts owner Robert Irsay sneaked the franchise out of Baltimore in the middle of the night in 1984, Unitas requested that his statistics be removed from the Indianapolis record book. His explanation was simple: "I never played there."
One hesitates to call it a curse, but the Colts haven't won a championship since they left Baltimore.

(Allen Barra is a sports columnist and author of "Clearing the Bases." )

John Harper: It's time for Jeter to get his MVP due

The New York Daily News
2 September 2006

He says he doesn't even think about it, but you know that can't be true. After all these years, there is plenty of evidence that Derek Jeter is genuine about putting winning above all individual pursuits, but that doesn't mean he isn't human.

That doesn't mean he didn't get a kick out of putting on a little show for Joe Mauer, the man he's chasing for what would be his first batting title.

It's not only that he went 3-for-5 last night, raising his average to .342 to inch a little closer the Twins' catcher. But he did it in classic Jeter style, killing the Twins not just with singles, but with a perfectly executed hit-and-run single that ignited the big fifth inning that put away an 8-1 victory last night.

It was another example of why maybe you need to watch Jeter play every day to understand how he can be a legitimate MVP candidate with just 12 home runs. Around the country, you still hear that Jeter is the beneficiary of New York hype, that he would just be another good player if he was playing in, say, Minnesota.

But it has never been further from the truth than in this season. For one thing, he is hitting .389 with runners in scoring position, second in the AL to Mauer. And he does have 83 RBI, which is no Punch-and-Judy season.

Perhaps most important, his clutch hitting was crucial in keeping the Yankees from sagging under the weight of the all their injuries in May, June and July.

Surely people who watch baseball are ready to embrace Jeter's day-to-day brilliance. We're supposed to be out of the steroids era, after all, and impact doesn't have to be about hitting home runs.

For all of his flaws, Alex Rodriguez will always get more oohs and aahs than Jeter when he suddenly finds his stroke again and hits two home runs, as he did last night. The first one was a laser to left field that gave the Yankees a 1-0 lead and also gave the suddenly caring Stadium fans another chance to embrace A-Rod with a huge ovation, as they now seem to be on a mission to nurse him back to health.

But the point is, neither of the home runs was the most important hit of the night. That came off Jeter's bat, and it was a jam shot that barely crawled through the right side of the infield.

The thing was, it wasn't lucky. Johnny Damon was running on the pitch, and with second baseman Nick Punto moving to cover second, Jeter fought off an inside fastball from Carlos Silva with an inside-out swing from the hit-and-run manual that squeaked through the spot that Punto had vacated.

"Derek's the best in the game at that," said Damon. "That was huge. Give us first and third with the big guys coming up, we'll take that any day."

The first "big guy" to bat was Bobby Abreu. Before the game, Twins manager Ron Gardenhire was talking about Abreu, and how he has made the Yankee lineup, with its work-the-count philosophy, even more of a nightmare for pitchers, particularly young ones like he has.
"That's the Yankee way," Gardenhire said. "It seems like every Yankee at-bat takes five minutes."

Then Gardenhire sighed the sigh of a small-market manager.

"It's hard to believe you can go out and get Abreu," he said. "Not too many teams can. Abreu is like the rest of them. He's a very professional hitter.

"That's why we talk to our pitchers about pitching to contact, working ahead in the count. If you get behind against these guys, they'll eat you alive. You've gotta attack their hitters, and if they hit it, they hit it."

With runners at first and third, Silva didn't have any choice. And the Yankees made him pay. Abreu singled to center to drive in Damon, and before the inning was over, A-Rod and Robinson Cano had added RBI singles as well, to turn the game into a 6-0 rout.

But it was Jeter's ability to handle the bat that set up the entire inning. It wasn't his only contribution, either. In the third inning, he singled and stole second, setting up the Yankees' second run of the game as Abreu singled him home.

It was all the more noticeable because Mauer was at the ballpark. Mauer, who was 1-for-2 last night and remains at .350, has gradually come down from the .380 he was hitting during the first half of the season, and since even young catchers feel the wear and tear of a season in September, you have to like Jeter's chances of catching him.

Jeter has never won a batting title, and you believe him when he says that all he wants is another ring. But he's too competitive not to want the individual accolade, and what's wrong with that, anyway?

Perhaps most significant, the batting title might make people who don't see him every day take notice, and make them realize he doesn't have to hit home runs to deserve an MVP.

Originally published on September 2, 2006

Kathleen Parker: The Religion of Peace -- at Gunpoint

September 01, 2006
The Orlando Sentinel
Kathleen Parker


"... disbelievers will be cast into an eternal fire. But Allah is also ever merciful, and the West can change its ways and turn to the purifying power of Islam ..."-- Kidnapped Fox reporter Steve "Khaled'' Centanni, channeling his captors.

We don't often get to watch our media people convert to Islam, so the footage of Fox News' Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig has been riveting.

Some people can't get enough of watching planes fly into the World Trade Center towers; I can't get enough of Centanni and Wiig pledging allegiance to Muhammad, Peace Be Upon Him.

The common thread between the two is disbelief. I keep rerunning the tapes, now posted on the Web, trying to read the kidnapped men's body language and translate the meaning of deep breaths and eye movements.

Trying, alas, to imagine being in their place.

As everyone knows, reporter Centanni and cameraman Wiig were released several days ago after being seized in Gaza City by masked gunmen and held hostage for 13 days.

It's not clear exactly who their kidnappers were, whether part of the Holy Jihad Brigades, as claimed, or whether they had ties to Hamas or the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an offshoot of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah.

You need a scorecard to keep up with all the region's disaffected. Apparently, when three or more angry Muslims gather in a garage, a new jihadist group is born.

What's perfectly clear is that video is the new weapon of mass destruction. A billion people manipulated into religious frenzy is a formidable force. It is also clear that the West's continued existence -- at least from the perspective of Islamist militants -- depends upon our willingness to bow to Islam.

Those two conclusions are made possible by the images of Centanni and Wiig holding up an index finger and proclaiming allegiance to the Prophet Muhammad.

Says Centanni: "My name is Steve. I'm an American. After I entered Islam, I changed my name to Khaled. I have embraced Islam and say the word Allah, and my leader is the Prophet Muhammad, Peace Be Upon Him.''

Wiig -- new name "Ya'aqob'' -- repeats the liturgy.

Then the two men proceed to read a script outlining all the reasons why the West is wrong -- from invading Afghanistan and Iraq to the tortures of Abu Ghraib. They also ask that all prisoners be released from Guantanamo and that President Bush cease referring to Islamic fascists as "Islamic fascists.''

It's not nice, and it makes the kidnappers mad.

"Yeah, they were very angry about that,'' said Wiig in an interview after his release.

In his role as Khaled, Centanni said he hoped to help Westerners see the light of Islam, which "helps people to love mercy, brotherhood, equality and justice.'' Especially -- we can't help filling in for him -- when a gun is pointed at one's head. Or a knife poised at one's throat.

One of Wiig's interrogators, a dark figure framed by two AK-47s and with a bayonet at his feet, provided a grim reminder that death is always an option for uncooperative infidels. Thus, the journalists did what they thought necessary to survive.

Obviously, none of us can imagine what we'd do under similar circumstances. Yet despite our empathy and relief at the men's release, there is nevertheless something about that video -- of seeing those two decent, open-hearted Western men surrendering to these lowlife fanatics -- that makes me want to take a shower.

How dare those thugs lecture Westerners about the loveliness of Islam while forcing religious conversion at gunpoint?

Their objective was clear from the beginning, according to Centanni and Wiig. They wanted a video. The two Fox journalists were far more valuable shown as cowardly Westerners converting to Islam than as severed heads on the tip of a dull knife.

Let me be clear: I don't think they were cowards. But those who are willing to strap explosives to their bodies -- or enlist their children to become suicide bombers -- surely see them, and us, that way. It is easy to imagine that rancorous Muslims are as attuned to the video as we are, watching replay after replay in the smug satisfaction that they have scored another victory against the infidel and the Great Satan.

Those few minutes of choreographed horror affirm for the Islamic world that Westerners are weak, while they reiterate the jihadist's message to the West:

Convert to Islam -- or die.

kparker@orlandosentinel.com

Daniel Pipes: CAIR's Twisted Stand on Academic Freedom

Daniel Pipes
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
September 1, 2006

Hark the ringing prose about academic freedom by Rima Kapitan, the volunteer attorney in CAIR’s Chicago office.

Another casualty in the war against civil liberties in this country since September 2001 is the right to academic freedom. Professors and students who diverge too much from the current political and economic orthodoxy are being silenced around the country. Among the most vulnerable have been adjunct professors, foreign professors and students, and professors and students who support Palestinian national rights or who oppose U.S. foreign policy decisions. …

CAIR-Chicago is joining other organizations and individuals in an effort to defend academic freedom. … CAIR-Chicago has also initiated the creation of an academic freedom coalition called the Free Campus Coalition, which will defend the academic freedom rights of students and professors as violations occur. The coalition will comprise of civil liberties organizations, professors and students.

Freedom on universities is especially important because of the formative role that universities play in the lives of students, and because of the essential role they play in their communities. Students should be exposed to a wide range of ideas, and learn to argue against ideas with which they do not agree.

The immediate beneficiary of this high-blown rhetoric, dated August 14, 2006, is one Douglas Giles of Roosevelt University, who lost his job supposedly for just mentioning Zionism in his “World Religions” class and for allowing students to speak about Zionism. According to Giles, a student in his course asked a question about Zionism, which he answered. Then, presto, he was fired by his department chair, Susan Weininger. The disagreement is scheduled for arbitration in September. Whatever the facts in this incident, CAIR’s Chicago office stands fully behind Giles.

But in Chicago’s other high-profile academic-freedom case concerning the Arab-Israeli conflict, and there, CAIR is exactly on the other side, seeking to have the instructor fired.

That would be the case of Thomas Klocek, a part-time adjunct professor since 1991 at DePaul University, the largest Catholic school in the United States. At a campus fair, Klocek expressed pro-Israel views, got into an altercation with two anti-Israel groups (Students for Justice in Palestine and United Muslims Moving Ahead), and, after they registered complaints against him, was suspended by the university. CAIR not only endorsed his suspension but, as articulated by Christina Abraham, CAIR-Chicago's civil rights coordinator (and a DePaul University law student), wanted him more severely punished.

Abraham gave a video interview in June 2006 concerning Klocek’s suspension, as revealed by John Ruberry, in the course of which she, speaking on behalf of CAIR explained the organization’s position on Klocek. About 1/8th of the way into the video, she says: “We were very concerned with the situation and we did request that he [Klocek] be terminated.” She confirmed this, later saying (about 1/6th of the way in) that CAIR-Chicago suggested to DePaul that “if the investigation were to have shown that he did make these statements that and he did act this way towards the students, yes, we did suggest that they should terminate him.”

Comments: (1) CAIR’s position on Klocek hardly fits the description of a group taking part in the Free Campus Coalition to defend “the academic freedom rights of students and professors as violations occur.”

(2) As Ruberry points out, CAIR fancies itself a civil rights organization, but is it the normal work of a civil rights organization to recommend that a private institution fire an employee, thereby depriving him of his livelihood (not to speak of the health insurance required for his serious kidney condition)? Some might conclude that CAIR is no civil rights organization; that would certainly fit with my own perception since 1999.

(3) The inconsistency documented here is par for the CAIR course; it routinely takes ostensibly principled positions that in fact adjust to its politics. (CAIR, for example, has jointly sponsored programs with United Muslims Moving Ahead.) For other examples of this pattern, see

· “CAIR’s Inconsistent Advice on Law Enforcement.” DanielPipes.org, 4 July 2004. CAIR’s advice: Help the police to protect you, but stiff them when they seek your help with counterterrorism.

· “Look Now Who’s Profiling – CAIR’s Staff Is.” DanielPipes.org, 1 August 2003. CAIR hates profiling, except when it does so itself.

· “Radical Islam’s Hypocrisy[: The Ehrgott & Okashah Cases].” The New York Sun, 18 January 2005. CAIR comes down hard on the foes of radical Islam but pleads for an understanding of Muslims in similar circumstances.

(4) More broadly, such behavior points to the unreliable quality of CAIR’s work, a theme that the reader can more fully explore at “Bibliography - My Writings on Not Trusting CAIR.”

Mr. Pipes (http://www.danielpipes.org/) is director of the Middle East Forum and author of Miniatures (Transaction Publishers).

Obituary: Glenn Ford

Actor Glenn Ford, Known for 'Blackboard Jungle' and 'Teahouse of the August Moon' Dies at 90

From a Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
August 31, 2006

Glenn Ford, the rangy, laconic actor who in a long and prolific career in films and television portrayed characters from gallant leading men to saddle tramps, died Wednesday. He was 90.

Ford, a top box-office draw in the 1950s whose career spanned more than five decades and more than 100 films, was found dead at his Beverly Hills home by Fire Department paramedics just before 4 p.m.

Largely out of the public eye since the early 1990s, Ford was saluted by American Cinematheque at Hollywood's Egyptian Theatre in May on his 90th birthday. Ford, who had suffered several strokes, had been expected to attend but ultimately missed the event because of fragile health.

In his prime, Ford posted a string of memorable credits that included "Gilda," "The Big Heat," "The Blackboard Jungle," "3:10 to Yuma," "The Teahouse of the August Moon," "Don't Go Near the Water," "The Courtship of Eddie's Father," "Pocketful of Miracles" and "The Rounders."

He could play an ambitious, crooked gambler with a soul-saving sense of honor ("Gilda") or an idealistic yet tough-minded teacher ("Blackboard Jungle"). As a youth, Ford portrayed a Depression-era store clerk who hitchhiked west in "Heaven With a Barbed Wire Fence," his first feature picture in 1939. As a middle-aged character actor, he was the surrogate father of "Superman" (1978) in the first feature-length film treatment of the comic book character. And although he was never nominated for an Oscar, he was a longtime Hollywood favorite.

Ford, who was under contract to Columbia Pictures for many years, got along well with studio chief Harry Cohn, who was famous for his parsimonious purse strings and flaming temper.

Ford recalled in a 1981 interview that Cohn had sent for him when he left Columbia after his contract had expired and that the studio boss shook his hand fondly and said: "You know why we always got along together, Glenn? Because you never were afraid of me."

In the 1970s, Ford began concentrating on television, portraying Sheriff Sam Cade in "Cade's County"; the narrator of the children's series "Friends of Man"; and the Rev. Tom Holvak, a poverty-stricken preacher, in "The Family Holvak."

The last character, in the 1975-77 series, was based, Ford told The Times in 1975, on his grandfather, Thomas Ford, a rural minister in Quebec, Canada, the actor's native land.

He was born Gwyllyn Samuel Newton Ford on May 1, 1916, the son of a railroad executive and mill owner and nephew of Sir John MacDonald, a former prime minister of Canada and a descendant of Martin Van Buren, eighth president of the United States.

Ford spent his earliest years in Glenford, site of the family's paper mill, from which Ford took his professional name. By the time his family moved to California when he was 7, he had already developed a taste for performing. At Santa Monica High School, he ran track, played lacrosse and excelled in English and drama.

Ford worked with numerous little theater groups and California touring companies as an actor and stage manager before joining the Broadway-bound play "Soliloquy," starring film actor John Beal, in 1938.

But when the play reached Broadway, it closed after only two performances. Ford returned to Los Angeles, and 20th Century Fox hired him for a fourth-billed role in the low-budget "Heaven With a Barbed Wire Fence."

It was not the most auspicious of debuts.

In a 1985 interview with The Times, Ford recalled that the film's director, Ricardo Cortez, told him he would never make it as a movie actor. But soon after, Ford was signed by Columbia. Roles in a string of B pictures followed, until World War II service intervened.

Ford enlisted in the Marine Corps in December 1942, after having been a member of the Coast Guard Auxiliary for a year. After his discharge in 1945, he returned to the screen the next year in three notable pictures: "Gilda"; "A Stolen Life," in which he played opposite Bette Davis; and "Gallant Journey," a film biography of 19th century flight pioneer John Montgomery.

In "Gilda," where Rita Hayworth performs one of the steamiest dances in movie history, Ford was praised by Variety as "a far better actor than the tale permits."

In 1953, Ford had his Columbia contract rewritten so he could work for other studios. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer featured him as the doctor-husband in "Interrupted Melody," the story of opera star Marjorie Lawrence, a polio victim. That picture and others, such as "Ransom" and "Don't Go Near the Water," brought him rave notices about his "recent mature and thoughtful performances" and his "sly and adept" comedy.

Off-screen, Ford played polo — he had learned to ride while taking care of Will Rogers' polo ponies as a teenager in the 1930s — and was lifelong friends with William Holden and Hayworth. He also worked with Actors and Others for Animals, an animal-rights group.

He was married four times. The first marriage, to dancer Eleanor Powell in 1943, ended in divorce in 1959. They had a son, Peter. Ford married actress Kathryn Hays in 1966, but the marriage lasted only a year. In 1977, he wed actress Cynthia Hayward, a union that ended in divorce in 1984. In 1993, he married Jeanne Baus.

As a commander in the Naval Reserve, Ford spent a month in South Vietnam in 1967. Accompanied by a Marine Corps camera crew, he filmed combat locations for "Global Marine," a documentary training movie for recruits.

"People who come out here for a visit and go back with pat opinions about how the war is going to be won are fools," Ford told The Times at the end of his trip to the war zone. "This is a vicious war, a unique war, with no simple answer, but I think the complicated problem we face here cannot be appraised and judged by anyone who has not been here."

In the mid-to-late 1960s, Ford created three quality film roles that enriched his reputation: the footloose cowboy in "The Rounders," the good cop gone bad in "The Money Trap" and the frontiersman trying to recapture his family from Indians in "Day of the Evil Gun." If Ford gravitated toward a single genre in his later years, it was the western, where the simple plot lines and sparse dialogue suited him. "You don't have to speak English to understand what's going on," he once told The Times. "I've always said the talking pictures talk too much anyway." Besides, he added, "I'm out of place doing sophistication. I'm so uncomfortable in a tuxedo."

Information about survivors and funeral plans was unavailable late Wednesday.

Paul Sperry: The Terrorist Next Door

Paul Sperry
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
August 31, 2006

The recent terror case of a "gentle" third-grade teacher from the D.C. suburbs shows the danger is at once closer and harder to ID than you think. The enemy is hiding not in the shadows, but in plain sight, and may even wear a smile.

Hundreds of Muslims last week flocked to a federal courtroom to show their support for the affable and soft-spoken Ali Asad Chandia of Maryland as he was sentenced to 15 years in prison for supporting terrorists. Friends say anti-Muslim prosecutors railroaded a "law-abiding" and "peaceful" brother.

"He is a dedicated teacher," said one. "A great family man," said another. Another told the judge Chandia's so gentle he wouldn't hurt a tree branch in his yard. "I said to Ali that I may need to cut the branch (but) he asked that I not hurt the tree," the friend, a landscaper, said in a letter. "I was touched by Ali's insistence that the tree not be harmed in any way."

But prosecutors tell a different story.

They showed evidence that Chandia, 29, trained at a jihad camp in Lahore, Pakistan, run by the terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba, an al-Qaida subcontractor that also trained some of the London bombers. He helped Lashkar ship 50,000 paintball pellets, unmanned aerial vehicles, night-vision gear and wireless video cameras from the U.S. to Pakistan for paramilitary training. He even chauffeured a Lashkar lieutenant around Washington on trips the officer made here after 9-11. Within months of the attacks, Chandia joined the so-called Virginia jihad network dedicated to preparing for holy war against U.S. troops deployed to Afghanistan. The gang's ringleader was the civil-rights coordinator for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, a Washington-based nonprofit leading the charge against airport and subway terror profiling.

Chandia, who graduated from the University of Maryland and once worked at Costco, also worked as a former personal assistant to the jihad gang's spiritual leader -- imam Ali al-Timimi, a native Washingtonian convicted last year for soliciting the Muslim men to levy war against the U.S. Al-Timimi praised the hijackers who carried out the 9-11 attacks and even cheered the crash of the space shuttle Columbia. Chandia helped al-Timimi schedule his sermons.

In Chandia's car, not surprisingly, federal investigators found a CD-ROM containing videos that glorified Osama bin Laden and the 19 hijackers.

All this took place in the shadow of the U.S. capital. And yet members of the large Muslim community there, many of whom work for the government, were unfazed by the evidence aligned against Chandia. After his conviction, some 350 Muslims including Islamic scholars, activists and other leaders, as well as government employees and contractors, donated generously to his defense fund.

"We ask Allah to reward everyone who supported this cause," gushed the head of the Ali Asad Support Committee. "We ask Allah to raise their ranks and to grant them goodness in this world and in the hereafter."

The local Muslim luminaries also wrote letters to the judge complaining of a U.S. witch hunt against "Brother Ali" and other "principled" Muslims who support "mujahideen" groups. And they mobbed the federal courtroom in Alexandria, Va., hoping for a lenient punishment.

But the judge wasn't buying it, and he imposed a fairly stiff sentence. Chandia, for his part, was unrepentant to the end. Upon his sentencing, Chandia lashed out at prosecutors, warning "their judgment is on the way."

U.S. marshals then led away a terrorist -- not a mild-mannered teacher or loving father -- but a terrorist.

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Paul Sperry is a Hoover Institution media fellow and author of "Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington." He can be conacted at Sperry@SperryFiles.com.

Daniel Pipes- Muslim Radicals: Piggybacking on Terrorism

Daniel Pipes
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
August 30, 2006

Two days after August 10 – when British authorities broke up an alleged plot to blow up multiple aircraft over the Atlantic Ocean – the "moderate" Muslim establishment in Britain published an aggressive open letter to Prime Minister Tony Blair.

It suggested that Blair could better fight terrorism if he recognized that current British government policy, especially with regard to "the debacle of Iraq," provides "ammunition to extremists." The letter writers demanded he change his foreign policy to "make us all safer." One prominent signatory, Labour MP Sadiq Khan, added that Blair's reluctance to criticize Israel increased the pool of people from which terrorists can recruit.

In other words, Islamists working within the system exploited the thwarted Islamist terror plot to pressure the British government to implement their joint wishes and reverse British policy in the Middle East. Lawful Islamists shamelessly leveraged the near-death of thousands to forward their agenda.

Despite its reported fears of Muslim street unrest, the Blair government heatedly rejected the letter. Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett called it "the gravest possible error." Foreign Office minister Kim Howells dismissed it as "facile." Home Secretary John Reid deemed it a "dreadful misjudgment [to think that the] foreign policy of this country should be shaped in part, or in whole, under the threat of terrorism activity." Transport Secretary Douglas Alexander rejected the letter as "dangerous and foolish."

Undaunted, the "moderate" Muslim establishment pushed even harder on the domestic front. In an August 14 meeting with high government representatives, including the deputy prime minister, it made two further demands: that a pair of Islamic religious festivals become official holidays and that Islamic laws pertaining to marriage and family life be applied in the United Kingdom. A Muslim present at the meeting later warned the government against any plans to profile airport passengers, lest this step further radicalize Muslim youths.

Why these ultimata and why at this time? The leader of the August 14 Muslim delegation, Syed Aziz Pasha, explained his group's logic: "We told [the politicians] if you give us religious rights, we will be in a better position to convince young people that they are being treated equally along with other citizens." More ominously, Pasha threatened the government leaders. "We are willing to co-operate but there should be a partnership. They should understand our problems, then we will understand their problems."

The press reacted furiously to these demands. The Guardian's Polly Toynbee condemned the open letter as "perilously close to suggesting the government had it coming." The Daily Mirror's Sue Carroll portrayed Pasha's position as "perilously close to blackmail."

This was not the first such attempt by "moderate" British Muslim leaders at political ju-jitsu, to translate Islamist violence into political clout. The same happened, if less aggressively, in the aftermath of the July 2005 London bombings, when they piggybacked on the death of 52 innocents to demand British forces out of Iraq.

That pressure did succeed, and in two main ways. First, the Home Office subsequently issued a report produced by "moderate" Muslims, "Preventing Extremism Together," that formally accepted this appeasing approach. As Dean Godson of Policy Exchange summarizes the document, Islamist terror "provided a wonderful, unexpected opportunity for these moderates to demand more power and money from the State."

Piggybacking on terror worked, second, in that a recent poll shows 72 percent of British subjects now accepting the Islamist view that Blair's "backing for action in Iraq and Afghanistan" has made Britain more of a target for terrorists, while a negligible 1 percent say the policies have improved the country's safety. The public solidly backs the Islamists, not the prime minister.

I have argued that terrorism generally obstructs the progress of radical Islam in the West by stimulating hostility to Muslims and bringing Islamic organizations under unwanted scrutiny. I must admit, however, that the evidence from Britain – where the 7/7 terrorism inspired more self-recrimination than it did fury against jihad – suggests that violence can also strengthen lawful Islamism.

And here's another reconsideration: while I maintain that the future of Europe – whether continuing in its historic Christian identity or becoming an adjunct of Muslim North Africa – is still an open question, the behavior of the British public, that weakest link in the Western chain, suggests that it, at least, may be too confused to resist its Londonistan destiny.

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Mr. Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is director of the Middle East Forum and author of Miniatures (Transaction Publishers).

Robert Spencer: Fox News and Forced Conversions

Robert Spencer
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
August 30, 2006

The most bizarre element of the two weeks of captivity suffered by Fox News reporter Steve Centanni and photographer Olaf Wiig at the hands of Gaza’s Holy Jihad Brigade was the video that surfaced depicting their conversion to Islam. Even before the journalists revealed that their conversions had been coerced, there were disturbing indications that they were not acting freely. While reading a statement he himself had ostensibly written, Centanni stumbled over words, appeared to puzzle over the handwriting, and seemed to grimace after pronouncing the words “peace be upon him” after the name of the Islamic prophet Muhammad.

Their messages as new converts to Islam were predictable denunciations of the United States and Israel, combined with emphasis on Islam’s universal call as the solution to the world’s problems. But most jarring was the video editor’s invocation of the favorite Qur’an verse of Western analysts of Islam and terrorism, “There is no compulsion in religion” (2:256). The irony of featuring this verse in a video depicting two forced conversions has been widely noted. In fact, however, the juxtaposition of this verse with the video of Centanni and Wiig was probably not simply transparent deception, as strange as that may seem, and has far-reaching implications.

Islamic law forbids forced conversion, but as Andrew Bostom documented in a FrontPage article yesterday, this is a law that throughout Islamic history has all too often been honored in the breach. Nor is this yet another case of a “twisting” or “hijacking” of Islam; in fact, Islamic law regarding the presentation of Islam to non-Muslims manifests a quite different understanding of what constitutes freedom from coercion and freedom of conscience from that which prevails among non-Muslims.

Muhammad instructed his followers to call people to Islam before waging war against them – the warfare would follow from their refusal to accept Islam or to enter the Islamic social order as inferiors, required to pay a special tax:

Fight in the name of Allah and in the way of Allah. Fight against those who disbelieve in Allah. Make a holy war…When you meet your enemies who are polytheists, invite them to three courses of action. If they respond to any one of these, you also accept it and withhold yourself from doing them any harm. Invite them to (accept) Islam; if they respond to you, accept it from them and desist from fighting against them….If they refuse to accept Islam, demand from them the Jizya [the tax on non-Muslims specified in Qur’an 9:29]. If they agree to pay, accept it from them and hold off your hands. If they refuse to pay the tax, seek Allah’s help and fight them. (Sahih Muslim 4294)

There is therefore an inescapable threat in this “invitation” to accept Islam. Would one who converted to Islam under the threat of war be considered to have converted under duress? By non-Muslim standards, yes, but not according to the view of this Islamic tradition. From the standpoint of the traditional schools of Islamic jurisprudence such a conversion would have resulted from “no compulsion.”

Muhammad reinforced these instructions on many occasions during his prophetic career. Late in his career, he wrote to Heraclius, the Eastern Roman Emperor in Constantinople:

Now then, I invite you to Islam (i.e., surrender to Allah), embrace Islam and you will be safe; embrace Islam and Allah will bestow on you a double reward. But if you reject this invitation of Islam, you shall be responsible for misguiding the peasants (i.e., your nation). (Bukhari, 4.52.191).

Heraclius did not accept Islam, and soon the Byzantines would know well that the warriors of jihad indeed granted no safety to those who rejected their “invitation.”

Muhammad did not get a satisfactory answer either from Chosroes, ruler of the Persians. After reading the letter of the Prophet of Islam, Chosroes contemptuously tore it to pieces. When news of this reached Muhammad, he called upon Allah to tear the Persian emperor and his followers to pieces (Bukhari, 5.59.708). He told the Muslims that they would conquer both empires: “When Khosrau [Chosroes] perishes, there will be no (more) Khosrau after him, and when Caesar perishes, there will be no more Caesar after him. By Him in Whose hands Muhammad’s life is, you will spend the treasures of both of them in Allah’s Cause” (Bukhari 4.53.349).

Muhammad did not limit his veiled threat only to rulers. Another hadith records that on one occasion he emerged from a mosque and told his men, “Let us go to the Jews.” Upon arriving at a nearby Arabian Jewish community, Muhammad told them: “If you embrace Islam, you will be safe. You should know that the earth belongs to Allah and His Apostle, and I want to expel you from this land. So, if anyone amongst you owns some property, he is permitted to sell it, otherwise you should know that the Earth belongs to Allah and His Apostle” (Bukhari, 4.53.392). In other words, if you accept Islam, you may keep your land and property, but if not, Muhammad and the Muslims would confiscate it.

Bostom notes: “Orders for conversion were decreed under all the early Islamic dynasties—Umayyads, Abbasids, Fatimids, and Mamluks. Additional extensive examples of forced conversion were recorded under both Seljuk and Ottoman Turkish rule (the latter until its collapse in the 20th century), the Shi’ite Safavid and Qajar dynasties of Persia/Iran, and during the jihad ravages on the Indian subcontinent, beginning with the early 11th century campaigns of Mahmud of Ghazni, and recurring under the Delhi Sultanate, and Moghul dynasty until the collapse of Muslim suzerainty in the 18th century following the British conquest of India.” Since these Muslim rulers and armies all revered Muhammad as an “excellent example of conduct” (Qur’an 33:21), this is not surprising.

After being freed, Centanni said: “We were forced to convert to Islam at gunpoint. Don’t get me wrong here. I have the highest respect for Islam, and I learned a lot of good things about it, but it was something we felt we had to do because they had the guns, and we didn’t know what … was going on.”

Indeed, few in the West know what’s going on regarding the example of Muhammad and the stance of traditional Islam on conversion. The human rights should have the courage to recognize and denounce this conversion-or-else directive, and to recognize the plight of those who even today suffer from its scourge. Moreover, with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad operating according to Muhammad’s instructions, this now has geopolitical implications. In his letter to President Bush, Ahmadinejad invited him to accept Islam, and then echoed the Prophet of Islam in delivering a threat to Bush through Mike Wallace: “We are all free to choose. But please give him this message, sir: Those who refuse to accept an invitation will not have a good ending or fate.”

Ahmadinejad’s threat, as well as the ordeal of Centanni and Wiig, epitomizes the threat that the global jihad represents to the freedom of conscience. Analysts are increasingly beginning to note that the conflict has ideological dimensions, but these dimensions are still imperfectly understood in the public sphere. Were Western leaders courageous enough to speak forthrightly about the threat we face as an Islamic jihad, they could use the “conversions” of Centanni and Wiig to illustrate one of the elements of Western civilization that is being challenged and that we are resolved to defend. Unfortunately, mired as they are in denial about the nature of the “terror” threat itself, they have made as yet no such resolution.

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Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of six books, seven monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest Growing Faith and the New York Times Bestseller The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades). His latest book, The Truth About Muhammad, is coming October 9 from Regnery Publishing.

Arnaud de Borchgrave: Gathering Nuclear Storm

The Washington Times
August 29, 2006

Just days before the United Nations Security Council deadline for Iran to cease and desist enriching uranium, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gave the West the Iranian bird. By inaugurating a "heavy-water" reactor, Iran instantly doubled its chances of acquiring nuclear weapons. Adding insult to injury, the military mullahs test-fired a new long-range missile -- the Thaqeb, or Saturn, a submarine-to-surface weapon.

The new reactor runs on natural uranium mined by Iran and skips the difficult enrichment phase to produce plutonium, which gives nukes the power to obliterate entire cities. Of course, all these efforts, says Iran's president, is to treat and diagnose AIDS and cancer patients. And -- we almost forgot -- to generate more power to improve agriculture. The fact Iran has sufficient oil reserves to generate electric power for generations to come is conveniently overlooked.

Iran is now confident neither Russia nor China will go along with meaningful economic sanctions. Moscow says sanctions have never worked, ignoring those that collapsed South Africa's apartheid regime. The handwriting on the geopolitical landscape has convinced Israel and its core support in the U.S., from the neoconservatives to the Christian Right, that a military solution is inescapable.

Leading conservatives have said World War III -- the ultimate clash of civilizations -- has been under way since September 11, 2001. Some neocons say it started when the mullahs forced the shah into exile and seized power in Iran in early 1979 -- and that President Bush and Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair are treading water among the appeasers. They remind Mr. Bush he vowed not to leave office without first ensuring that "the worst weapons will not fall into the worst hands" and thus Iran cannot become a nuclear power. Their ideological guide Richard Perle goes so far as to accuse Mr. Bush, who knows Iran has pursued a secret nuclear weapons program for the last 19 years, of opting for "ignominious retreat."

Overlooked in this calculus is Mr. Bush's burden of two wars, Afghanistan and Iraq, and a much-diminished U.S. military. A third front against Iran, an ancient civilization of 70 million with global retaliatory capabilities (e.g., Hezbollah), is a frightening prospect that conjures up the nightmare of a return to the draft.

Mr. Bush believes deeply that Iran poses an existential threat to close ally Israel. Congress recently voted a resolution that said an attack on Israel is an attack on the United States. Mr. Bush also believes Iran is determined to sabotage American hopes of establishing a new democratic Middle East.

In Iraq, clandestine Iranian aid, from sophisticated "Improvised Explosive Devices" to funds and weapons to the two main Shi'ite militias, may be designed to maneuver the U.S. into a humiliating, Vietnamlike withdrawal from Iraq.

Given Mr. Bush's overarching dedication to "winning the Global War on Terrorism," said one former senior intelligence analyst, the neutralization of Iran has become a sine qua non, "equal if not higher on his list of priorities than 'victory' in Iraq, another impossibility that he is unwilling to recognize, even privately, much less acknowledge publicly."

Mr. Bush's national security advisers have also pointed out that an escalating danger of U.S.-Iran military confrontation automatically intensifies internal and regional opposition to U.S. objectives in Iraq. The president keeps reminding private interlocutors to think of how history will judge this critical period 15 to 20 years hence. He sees personal and national humiliation if he were to leave office having acquiesced to an embryonic Iranian nuclear arsenal.

So odds makers bet sometime before the end of his second term President Bush will order a massive air attack on a wide range of carefully selected targets in Iran, in partnership with Israel, and against the advice of many of his advisers. Mr. Bush is convinced a nuclear Iran would pose an intolerable threat to U.S. national security and, as one former intelligence topsider put it, "he is firm in his faith that God agrees with him on that point, and certain that history will eventually recognize and properly appreciate his courageous and visionary leadership."

This raises the question of congressional approval. As George Will said to CBS' George Stephanopoulos two Sundays ago, when was the last time this president ever worried about getting approval in advance from the Congress or the public?

In any event, Israel is not taking any chances. Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres said last week Israel would not be the first to attack Iran. Other Israeli voices say Israel will have to do just that. Israel recently added a new command to the IDF -- the "Iran Command." Its new commander is Maj. Gen. Elyezer Shkedy, Israel's Air Force chief. He is responsible for all conflicts with countries "not bordering Israel." The Jewish state's strategic thinkers and military planners take the diminutive Mr. Ahmadinejad at his word when he says Israel must be "wiped off the map."

Most worrisome for Israel is Hezbollah's recent military performance against the Israeli Defense Force in Lebanon. The perception is this Iranian surrogate resisted and repelled a mighty foe. The reality is Iran's new-mown conviction Israel can be defeated. So Israel will now have to prove, yet again, that it cannot.

Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor at large of The Washington Times and of United Press International.

Star Parker: Katrina, lies and videotape

Monday, August 28, 2006
http://www.townhall.com
Send an email to Star Parker

Spike Lee took his cameras and crew to New Orleans to film a documentary about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. The four-hour production, which aired on HBO, is, unfortunately, about as destructive as was the disaster it depicts.

At a time when we need light and understanding, Lee has delivered darkness, anger and hatred. Those who will be hurt the most by the distorted and untruthful picture that Lee has concocted are the poor blacks he purports to want to help.

It's clear that Lee did not go to Louisiana in search of truth. He went to Louisiana to carefully construct a documentary that would support the conclusion he had already reached. That conclusion: poor blacks suffered and died as result of the indifference of a detached and racist Bush administration in general and President Bush in particular.

The film commits egregious journalistic sins of commission and omission, carefully selecting and editing footage to indict Bush, including only commentators who support the conclusions that Lee had already reached, and selectively omitting reams of information relevant to the complex truth of what actually happened.

Since Lee already knew the truth, he didn't have much need to examine material such as "A Failure of Initiative," Congress' investigation into Katrina, which shows failure and breakdown at all levels of government _ local, state and federal. It also was of little interest to Lee that primary responsibility for disaster preparation and management is at the level of local and state government, not federal.

But New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin comes off in the production as just one cool dude. He shows up at regular intervals over the four-hour production, talking New Orleans jive and being one straightforward sincere guy who was trying to do his job.

No mention is made of the hurricane simulations and emergency evacuation plans that he totally ignored. No reference is made to the famous picture of the parking lot filled with flooded school buses that Nagin chose not to use to evacuate residents in poor areas.

Central to the Katrina story is the failure of the levees. Indeed, Lee's film is called "When the Levees Broke."

But who is responsible for ignoring the warnings over the years that the levees protecting New Orleans were inadequate? Bush? Of course not.

It was Louisiana's congressional delegation that was responsible to ensure that their constituents' interests were being represented and that funds were being appropriated to fix sub-standard levees. But not a single Louisiana senator or congressman is ever mentioned or appears in "When the Levees Broke."

William Jefferson, New Orleans' congressman for the last 16 years, has been under FBI investigation over the last year under bribery charges. However, Jefferson is a Democrat and a member of the Congressional Black Caucus. To shine a light on his possible, and likely, neglect of representing his constituents' interests would have distracted from the single message that Bush was the evil genius behind this tragedy.

Of course, no mention is made of Jefferson's trip home, when he commandeered a National Guard truck in the middle of rescue efforts to take him to his house to retrieve personal property.

Given what Lee leaves out, it's particularly cheap and sick that he felt it relevant to include footage of Condoleezza Rice supposedly shopping for designer shoes at the time the disaster was sweeping New Orleans. As we know, Condi is our secretary of state, who has no responsibility for any of these matters.

After showing what appears to be a disengaged Bush, assuring that help is on the way, Lee pans, in contrast, to Harry Belafonte, who talks about the generous offers of help that came from President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.

I have written previously of the love of affair of the black left, particularly the Rev. Jesse Jackson, with Third World dictators. There is virtually no freedom of the press and speech in Venezuela. If Lee were a citizen of Venezuela and made a similar film attacking Chavez, he would disappear forever after the first showing.

Perhaps most sad is that in four hours Lee has nothing positive to say about America and Americans. No mention is made of the $700 million from private citizens and churches that were committed in the first few days of the tragedy. No mention is made of the thousands of homes across the nation that welcomed evacuees. No mention is made of the tens of thousands who have successfully rebuilt their lives.

Spike Lee clearly has little affection for the country that gives him free expression and has made him wealthy. He has produced a self-indulgent, deceitful and exploitive film about a tragedy. His message will give poor blacks more reasons to feel powerless, to feel lost, to feel that others bear responsibility for their lives, to hate, and to stay poor.