By George F. Will
The Wahington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com
August 18, 2012

Why doom has not materialized

By George F. Will, Published: August 17

Sometimes the news is that something was not newsworthy. The United Nations’ Rio+20 conference — 50,000 participants from 188 nations — occurred in June without consequences. A generation has passed since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, which begat other conferences and protocols (e.g., Kyoto). And, by now, apocalypse fatigue — boredom from being repeatedly told the end is nigh.
This began two generations ago, in 1972, when we were warned (by computer models developed at MIT) that we were doomed. We were supposed to be pretty much extinct by now, or at least miserable. We are neither. So, what went wrong?
That year begat “The Limits to Growth,” a book from the Club of Rome, which called itself “a project on the predicament of mankind.” It sold 12 million copies, staggered the New York Times (“one of the most important documents of our age”) and argued that economic growth was doomed by intractable scarcities. Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish academic and “skeptical environmentalist,” writing in Foreign Affairs, says it “helped send the world down a path of worrying obsessively about misguided remedies for minor problems while ignoring much greater concerns,” such as poverty, which only economic growth can ameliorate.
MIT’s models foresaw the collapse of civilization because of “nonrenewable resource depletion” and population growth. “In an age more innocent of and reverential toward computers,” Lomborg writes, “the reams of cool printouts gave the book’s argument an air of scientific authority and inevitability” that “seemed to banish any possibility of disagreement.” Then — as now, regarding climate change — respect for science was said to require reverential suspension of skepticism about scientific hypotheses. Time magazine’s story about “The Limits to Growth” exemplified the media’s frisson of hysteria:
“The furnaces of Pittsburgh are cold; the assembly lines of Detroit are still. In Los Angeles, a few gaunt survivors of a plague desperately till freeway center strips . . . Fantastic? No, only grim inevitability if society continues its present dedication to growth and ‘progress.’”
The modelers examined 19 commodities and said that 12 would be gone long before now — aluminum, copper, gold, lead, mercury, molybdenum, natural gas, oil, silver, tin, tungsten and zinc. Lomborg says:
Technological innovations have replaced mercury in batteries, dental fillings and thermometers; mercury consumption is down 98 percent, and its price was down 90 percent by 2000. Since 1970, when gold reserves were estimated at 10,980 tons, 81,410 tons have been mined, and estimated reserves are 51,000 tons. Since 1970, when known reserves of copper were 280 million tons, about 400 million tons have been produced globally, and reserves are estimated at almost 700 million tons. Aluminum consumption has increased 16-fold since 1950, the world has consumed four times the 1950 known reserves, and known reserves could sustain current consumption for 177 years. Potential U.S. gas resources have doubled in the past six years. And so on.
The modelers missed something — human ingenuity in discovering, extracting and innovating. Which did not just appear after 1972.
Aluminum, Lomborg writes, is one of earth’s most common metals. But until the 1886 invention of the Hall-Heroult process, it was so difficult and expensive to extract that “Napoleon III had bars of aluminum exhibited alongside the French crown jewels, and he gave his honored guests aluminum forks and spoons while lesser visitors had to make do with gold utensils.”
Forty years after “The Limits to Growth” imparted momentum to environmentalism, that impulse now is often reduced to children indoctrinated to “reduce, reuse, and recycle.” Lomborg calls recycling “a feel-good gesture that provides little environmental benefit at a significant cost.” He says that “we pay tribute to the pagan god of token environmentalism by spending countless hours sorting, storing and collecting used paper, which, when combined with government subsidies, yields slightly lower-quality paper in order to secure a resource” — forests — “that was never threatened in the first place.”
In 1980, economist Julian Simon made a wager in the form of a complex futures contract. He bet Paul Ehrlich (whose 1968 book “The Population Bomb” predicted that “hundreds of millions of people” would starve to death in the 1970s as population growth swamped agricultural production) that by 1990 the price of any five commodities Ehrlich and his advisers picked would be lower than in 1980.
Ehrlich’s group picked five metals. All were cheaper in 1990.
The bet cost Ehrlich $576.07. But that year he was awarded a $345,000 MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant and half of the $240,000 Crafoord Prize for ecological virtue. One of Ehrlich’s advisers, John Holdren, is Barack Obama’s science adviser.
georgewill@washpost.com

Egypt's Military and the Spring

By Andrew C. McCarthy
http://www.nationalreview.com
August 18, 2012

Earlier this week, I wrote about Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi. He is a Muslim Brotherhood adherent who rose to the rank of general in Egypt’s military — the armed forces he has just been tapped to command by Mohammed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood eminence who was elected president of Egypt a few weeks back. My column was prompted by the Wall Street Journal’s coverage of Sissi’s appointment, which strained to put a positive spin on an unfolding catastrophe.

The Journal has been all in on the “Arab Spring” fairy tale from the get-go, joining the bipartisan Beltway chorus in presenting the rise of Islamist totalitarianism as a spontaneous eruption of freedom fervor. Even so, it was jarring to find the paper burying General Sissi’s Brotherhood sympathies at the bottom of a lengthy profile. The thud came only after paragraph upon sunny paragraph of the conceit that Sissi’s decades of exposure to American military counterparts and his high standing in the eyes of Obama-administration officials boded well for future American-Egyptian relations and Israeli security.
The mainstream media, it seems, have their template: We’ve spent 30 years and about $45 billion cultivating the Egyptian military, so rest assured it is not going to stand by and let Egypt fall under the yoke of Islamist rule. Pretty soon, though, they’ll have to fire up Story Line B: Islamist rule is actually quite moderate and perfectly compatible with democracy . . .  On Friday, the New York Times reported on yet another key Islamist military appointment in the Brotherhood’s new Egypt: General Sedky Sobhi, who was just named army chief of staff.
Sobhi, it turns out, is the author of an academic paper that sharply rebukes American foreign policy as both insufficiently deferential to sharia (Islamic law) and too one-sided in favor of Israel. He’s on record calling for “the permanent withdrawal of United States military forces from the Middle East and the Gulf.”
Feel better now?
To its credit, the Times does not repeat theJournal’s sleight of hand. Rather than being obscured, General Sobhi’s sympathies are, for the most part, put up front. We quickly learn that he has forcefully argued against our military presence in the region, claiming that the U.S. has itself to blame for being (as theTimes phrases it) “mir[ed] . . . in an unwinnable global war with Islamist militants.”
Still, while one can guess why the general feels this way, the Times is elliptical about his Islamist convictions and rationalizations until we come to the end of the story. Only then do we hear of Sobhi’s complaint about (as theTimes puts it) U.S. “hostility toward the role of Islamic law” (if only!) and his objection to the American characterization of al-Qaeda and other Islamic militants as “irrational terrorist organizations” (Sobhi’s words).
Sobhi was no doubt correct about the latter charge, though not for the reason he offers. The general posited the vapid (albeit commonly voiced) Islamist talking point that America created global terrorism by adopting policies that inevitably resulted in “popular grievances,” which al-Qaeda and other militants “tapped into.”
Obviously, there has to be a reason U.S. national-security policies gave rise to “popular grievances” in the Muslim Middle East — that’s the elephant in the parlor that no one cares to notice. The pursuit of American interests and promotion of American principles are unpopular because they collide with classical sharia doctrine. Yes, as the general says, the jihadists are rational actors, not wanton killers — they are acting on the commands of a coherent doctrine. But that doctrine is also ardently anti-Western. Any policy we would adopt to further our ends is bound to be unpopular in an environment where the presence of a Western army is deemed to trigger a duty to expel that army by violent jihad. Any policy we would adopt to shore up Israel’s security is bound to be unpopular in an environment where the Jewish state’s destruction is unapologetically proclaimed to be an Islamic duty.
Withal, the Times report is very enlightening. As NR readers know, I’ve been arguing for the better part of a decade that the Islamic democracy project is a fool’s errand because Islamist ideology, far from being an outlier, is the mainstream Islam of the Middle East. I even wrote a book, The Grand Jihad, that both explains Islamic supremacism and illustrates that this ideology’s chief proponent — the Muslim Brotherhood, backed by deep Saudi pockets — rightly perceives itself as the avant-garde of a dynamic mass movement. Other than a few appearances on the bestseller list, which I’m sure must have pained the Gray Lady, the book was studiously ignored by theTimes. Elsewhere, it was pooh-poohed as Islamophobic tripe. Imagine my surprise, then, to find that my theory, virtually overnight, has gone from an object of ridicule to a truth so undeniable it warrants judicial notice.
Now, the Times tells us:

Samer Shehata, a professor of Arab politics at Georgetown University, said American policy makers would be naïve to think that the positions held by Mr. Morsi and the Brotherhood — including criticisms of the United States and strong support for the Palestinians — represented fringe thinking.
On those issues, “the Brotherhood is the Egyptian Kansas,” said Professor Shehata. Their positions on foreign policy “reflect rather than oppose what the Egyptian center is thinking,” he said.

Well, I’ll be darned. I thought it was hysterical “Islamophobia” to believe that such thinking represented “the Egyptian Kansas.”
Also remarkable is the paper’s matter-of-fact mention of the source of General Sobhi’s anti-American broadside. Turns out he wrote it seven years ago, when he was a student at the United States Army War College in Pennsylvania.
Think about that. As we’ve illustrated heretime and time again, it is delusional to assume the Egyptian military is pro-American and thus a reliable bulwark against the advance of Islamic supremacism. Cairo’s armed forces reflect the broader society, whose able-bodied men are required to serve — and, as even theTimes now concedes, the Egyptian mainstream is Islamist. Plus, the Egyptian army has always had Islamists (including violent jihadists) in its ranks. Its historical tendency, moreover, has not been to lead; it has been to follow the shifting political programs of whatever dictator happened to be running the show.
Nonetheless, you’ve spent nearly two years being told not to worry: Bet the farm on these generals we’ve been training and funding. Yet, now we see that not only is our government well aware of the Egyptian army’s Islamist streak (or shall we say swath?); Egyptian officers, who often study in the U.S., actually submit sharia-driven “get out of Dar al-Islam” term papers to their American military professors. And I’m betting Sobhi got an “A.”
Finally, the military promotions are not occurring in a vacuum. Things are going very badly in Egypt, and the reporting ought not be so vested in a rose-tinted narrative that it evades this unhappy bottom line. Contemporaneous with ousting the pro-American Mubarak remnants, President Morsi assumed dictatorial powers. He indicated that he would unilaterally oversee the drafting of a new constitution. There is not much mystery about what it will say: During the campaign, he vowed that Egyptian law would be “the sharia, then the sharia, and finally, the sharia.”
Meanwhile, dissenters and journalists are already being imprisoned and beaten — if not worse. (There are unconfirmed reports that crucifixion is making a comeback.) Terrorist leaders have been sprung from the prisons. The Sinai has become a jihadist haven. Women are attacked in the street if they fail to don the veil. A fatwa that prohibited eating during Ramadan was issued. Christians are fleeing in droves, their churches torched behind them. And the emirs of Hamas are warmly received as brotherly dignitaries.No amount of whistling can obscure the graveyard. Things are bad, and they are going to get worse.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Half-wit demagoguery, hard truths

By Mark Steyn
The Orange County Register
http://www.ocregister.com
August 17, 2012

Americans, according to a Winston Churchill quote of uncertain provenance, always do the right thing after they've exhausted all other possibilities. More verifiably, Sir Winston, upon being asked if he had any criticism of the United States, replied tersely: "Toilet paper too thin, newspapers too fat."

But that was then. Today, America is a land of two-ply toilet paper and one-ply newspapers. Being made of sterner stuff than Churchill's posterior, the eco-left want to ban two-ply bathroom tissue on environmental grounds, which would devastate the economy of Canada, whence comes most American bathroom tissue, at least until the Canadians, being the House of Saud of toilet paper, start shipping it to China, as they're now doing with their oil ever since Obama told them to go lay pipe somewhere else.

As for those once-fat newspapers, they're now so thin that they've only got room for the very mostest important news, like whether 30-year-old law-school coeds have sufficient access to federally mandated contraception and (breaking!) the dog Mitt Romney put on the roof of his car in the early Eighties. You have to be able to prioritize.

That's the genius of Romney's vice-presidential pick: It explicitly invites Americans to "do the right thing." Insofar as he's known to the electorate at all, Paul Ryan is the man with the plan – the guy who understands that multitrillion-dollar spendaholic government cannot continue. On that subject, Obama is the man with no plan, and no plans to get any plan. Yet the mere selection of Ryan has already improved the quality of the Obama campaign: Two weeks ago, they were denouncing Romney for killing a woman by cunningly giving her cancer five years after laying off her husband. Now they're denouncing Ryan for killing off Medicare. The former is the opening scene from the straight-to-video "Carcinogenic Zombie Mormon Venture Capitalist Apocalypse"; the latter has a very very teensy-weensy gossamer thread of connection to the issues facing the United States. So we should congratulate the Democrats on a modest re-acquaintance with reality. With Ryan on the ticket, the central question facing America can't be ducked.

As for the other half of that Churchill line – exhausting all the other possibilities – last week a man called Floyd Corkins shot another man called Leo Johnson, the security guard at the Family Research Council, a "conservative" group, according to the muted media coverage, or a "hate group," according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, who spray that term around like champagne on a NASCAR podium. Mr. Corkins, an "LGBT volunteer," told his victim, "I don't like your politics." In his backpack, he had one box of ammunition and 15 Chick-fil-A sandwiches. Had he had one Chick-fil-A sandwich and 15 boxes of ammunition, he might have done more damage. Or, then again, perhaps not, given that, as bloggers Kathy Shaidle and "the Phantom" pointed out, he reached his target and then started "monologuing," as they say in "The Incredibles."

Be that as it may, Mr. Corkins decided to shoot people because of a chicken sandwich chain owner's position on same-sex marriage. That's what Floyd Corkins thinks is the most pressing issue facing the United States. Perhaps he saw himself as the Gavrilo Princip of our time. Like Floyd Corkins, young Princip was not the sharpest knife in the transgender clinic – the cyanide pill he took after the assassination was past its sell-by date; to evade capture, his co-conspirator jumped into the River Miljacka, but it was only five inches deep, and a man standing up to his ankles in the middle of a river in a large city tends to attract attention. Nevertheless, Princip's assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand plunged Europe into war and brought down the Austrian, German, Russian and Turkish empires with consequences that plague us to this day (not least the post-Ottoman Middle East). History does not record whether Princip embarked on his mission with 15 pieces of Wienerschnitzel or Sachertorte in his backpack, but he changed the course of history. Perhaps Floyd Corkins had similar dreams: He would be the flamer that lit the fuse to liberate a continent from the oppressiveness of homophobic waffle fries.

I'm not blaming Floyd Corkins' actions on the bullying twerps at the Southern Poverty Law Center or those thug Democrat mayors who tried to run Chick-fil-A out of Boston and Chicago. But I do think he's the apotheosis of narcissistic leftist myopia. He symbolizes that exhaustion of the other possibilities – the dwindling down of latter-day liberalism to ever more self-indulgent distractions from the hard truths of a broke and ruined landscape. Our elites have sunk into a boutique decadence of moral preening entirely disconnected from reality: A nonhomophobic chicken in every pot, an abortifacient dispenser in every Catholic university, a high-speed rail corridor between every two bankrupt California municipalities.

No sane man could compete on this turf. Romney declined to come out for Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day, but the other week he did come out in favor of gay scoutmasters – whether just for scouts or for the rest of us, too, was unclear. But it doesn't matter. He could announce he was in favor of closing Gitmo and retraining every detainee as a gay scoutmaster, he could declare an amnesty for every undocumented gay scoutmaster north of the Rio Grande – and it still wouldn't be enough. He's still Mitt Romney, and he'll put your dog on the roof, your wife in the ground and your Negro houseboy in the cotton field out back – or, as the vice president of the United States told a mostly black crowd in Virginia the other day, "he gonna put y'all back in chains."

A few years ago, attempting to impose a "European constitution" upon the Continent, the Eurocrat elite took to warning their dull-witted peoples that if they were impertinent enough not to support their betters they'd be on a one-way ticket back to the concentration camps. "I've been in Auschwitz and Yad Vashem," the Dutch Prime Minister, Jan-Peter Balkenende, warned the Netherlands before the referendum. "The images haunt me every day. It is supremely important for us to avoid such things in Europe." The idea that it's a choice between an unreadable hyperstatist laundry list or the gas chambers seemed a wee bit overheated. But to their credit (not an expression I have occasion to use very often regarding the Europeans) the Dutch and even the French rejected this ludicrous rationale. And, to be fair, death camps and Nazi occupation are all well within living memory. Now the vice president is telling Americans it's a choice between Obama-Biden multitrillion-dollar shop-till-you-drop spend-till-you-end government ... or 19th century slavery. Swing low, sweet vice-presidential chariot.

For the record, Obama has already made $716 billion in Medicare cuts to pay for ObamaCare. That's three-quarters of a trillion. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, was in Ottawa last week, asking Her Majesty's Canadian Government to chip in for the Eurozone bailout. The Eurozone includes some of the richest nations in history, but it's still not enough. And the entire Eurozone bailout is $450 billion – or a little over half the cost of the first Obama stimulus. Under Obama's no-plan plan, there's not enough money on the planet.

Underneath the poseur narcissism, the half-wit demagoguery and the 13-figure innumeracy is bleak reality: a flat-line economy, underwater property, declining social mobility, half the population getting a check each month from the government and with minimum-wage service jobs as the only alternative to long-term dependency.

If you seriously think this election is about gay marriage or affordable contraception, you're about to do to America what Gavrilo Princip did to the Habsburg Empire.

©MARK STEYN

FOLLOW US @OCRegLetters

Huma Abedin's 'Muslim Minority Affairs': not just a journal

By Andrew C. McCarthy
PJ Media
August 17, 2012

“Assimilation is a crime against humanity.” So said Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Islamic supremacist who is both prime minister of Turkey and a close chum of President Obama.

The assertion ought to be infamous. But this is, after all, Islam we are talking about — meaning, we are not talking about it.

You won’t read it in the American media, nor will you hear it from our bipartisan Beltway profiles in courage. Both the Obama Left and the Republican establishment are deeply invested in the fantasy that Erdogan, like Islam itself, is our moderate ally — ironic, given that Erdogan himself is profoundly offended at the very suggestion that there is such a thing as “moderate Islam.” Yup, what you have been told is the plinth on which American Middle East policy rests, which is, according to Erdogan, not only a house-of-cards but:

 … an insult to our religion. There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam, and that’s it.

The prime minister is an excitable sort. Waxing metaphoric about his aggressive, ascendant ideology, he has also observed:

The mosques are our barracks, the minarets our bayonets, the cupolas our helmets, and the faithful our soldiers.

But he is inspired to new heights of fury by the admonition that Muslims living in Europe and North America should assimilate into Western societies. He first called that suggestion a “crime against humanity” in 2008, speaking to a throng of Turkish immigrants in Cologne. It was the obligation of Muslims, he elaborated, to cling to the tenets and culture of Islam. Yes, Muslims in places like Germany must integrate, in the sense of becoming politically active, of pressuring Western societies to give Islam a wide berth. But Muslims should never assimilate – they should use that wide berth to establish Islam’s authority.

Two years later, given an opportunity to recant during a joint press conference with Chancellor Angela Merkel, Erdogandoubled down:

Assimilation … [is] the permutation of the values of humans. … [It puts] pressure on individuals to leave aside their customs and traditions, and such a behavior happens to be a crime against humanity.

The message could not have been clearer: Muslims are in the West to change the West, not to be changed by it.

These sentiments of one of the world’s most influential Islamic leaders — one about whom Obama has said: “We find ourselves in frequent agreement upon a wide range of issues” — came to mind this week when Walid Shoebat dropped a new bombshell in the controversy over Huma Abedin’s ties to Islamic supremacism.

Ms. Abedin, of course, is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s deputy chief of staff. When concerns about her Muslim Brotherhood connections were first raised by five conservative House members, there was great gnashing of teeth from both Democrats and the Brotherhood’s growing squad of Republican cheerleaders. Soon, however, it wasdemonstrated beyond cavil that Abedin herself, like other members of her family, has a disturbingly close association with Abdullah Omar Naseef – a wealthy Saudi financier of al-Qaeda and Brotherhood eminence. At that point, most of the craven GOP emirate stuck its head back in the sand with hopes that the issue would just go away, while the Left reverted to its knee-jerk “McCarthyism” shrieks — along with the demeaning characterization of Abedin, who is actually a top policy adviser, as a flunky who merely helps Madame Secretary decide which “handbag” goes best with that day’s outfit.

Ms. Abedin’s Naseef connection centers on an entity the al-Qaeda backer established and recruited Abedin’s parents to run: the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs. Since its founding in the late seventies, the IMMA’s main purpose has been to publish the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs. Naseef remained closely involved in the JMMA for decades after its founding in the late 1970s — he was removed from the masthead in 2003, right around the time he was named as a defendant in the civil suit brought by victims of the 9/11 atrocities.

Abedin was assistant editor of the journal for a dozen years — from the time she started interning at the Clinton White House in 1996 until right before she joined the State Department in 2009. During seven of those years, she overlapped with Naseef, who was then on JMMA‘s advisory board.

Walid Shoebat’s latest report grapples with a central question that has been overlooked: Why “Muslim Minority Affairs”? What is the obsession with it? Why have Naseef and the Abedin family been immersed in this issue for so long? Indeed, Naseef not only established JMMA: he served for many years as secretary-general of the Muslim World League, a critical leadership post in the Brotherhood’s Saudi-funded effort to spread Islamic supremacist ideology globally. Quite apart from the terror-funding end of that enterprise, Naseef lavishly underwrote efforts to indoctrinate young Muslims at educational institutions.

Shoebat is a former jihadist who renounced Islamic supremacism and became a Christian nearly twenty years ago. He conducts exhaustive research in an effort to expose the ideology that fuels both terrorism and the broader threat to the West. The latter is what the Muslim Brotherhood calls its “grand jihad” or “civilization jihad” — “eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within,” as the Brotherhood’s American operatives put it in a 1991 internal memorandum.

In the course of researching the Abedin family’s ties to the Saudi Kingdom and the Brotherhood, Shoebat came across a document he has fittingly described as a “manifesto.” It is a book commissioned by King Abdullah’s predecessor, eponymously titled The Efforts of the Servant of the Two Holy Places, King Fahd bin Abdul Aziz, to Support the Muslim Minorities. (The king of Saudi Arabia is deemed custodian of Mecca and Medina, Islam’s “two holy places.”) The book explains that “Muslim Minority Affairs” is not merely an entity; it is shorthand for a long-term, high-priority policy to spread Islam until, finally, it comes to dominate the non-Islamic nations of the world.

Shoebat explains:

[The book] spoke of recruiting Muslims that live in non-Muslim lands and transforming them as a collective unit. It spoke of already established centers, educational programs, mosques and organizations in the United States like [the Islamic Society of North America] and [the Muslim Students Association], all geared towards hindering any Western plan for Muslim assimilation in a non-Muslim host nation. It mentioned “The Muslim Society of North America (ISNA) and the Muslim Students Association (MSA), established in the United States in 1962” (p. 65), as key agents to protect Muslims from assimilation.

It named the mosques and centers in major United States cities established to carry out the mission. Five decades of efforts were spent with billions to ensure that Muslims will be an unassimilated group which then can infuence the non-Muslim host nation and other nations, regardless of how small the numbers of Muslims, by shifting the demographic scale due to their population growth in favor of this Saudi agenda.

It explained how a gradual change would ensue by [Muslims'] becoming a major revolutionary powerhouse that will tilt the host nation in favor of Muslims due to their increase as a population …

In short, the plan echoed the Brotherhood’s 1991 memorandum.

Shoebat:

[It was designed] to transform a nation from within, where a Minority population can act as a fifth column, incubating in the host nation with the intent of gradually implementing the Wahhabist plans. …

Wahhabism is the fundamentalist Islam that is not merely the religion but the law and comprehensive social system of Saudi Arabia.

The building blocks of this plan included 29 scholarly works — including Muslim Minorities in the West, written by Huma Abedin’s father Dr. Zyed Abedin (whose name Shoebat transliterates as Sayed Zaynul Abedin). This explains why Ms. Abedin’s parents were entrusted with the pivotal task of overseeing JMMA, supported by the House of Saud and supervised by Naseef and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth — a lavishly bankrolled ideological and jihadist enterprise established by the Kingdom and the Brotherhood in 1972, with the global mission of – as a WAMY pamphlet puts it – “ … arm[ing] the Muslim youth with full confidence in the supremacy of the Islamic system over other systems.”

Under the supervision of current editor Dr. Saleha Mahmood Abedin (Huma’s mother and JMMA‘s editor since her husband’s death in 1993), JMMA abets the Muslim Minority Affairs mission to this day. In fact, the current edition features essays that champion what Andrew Bostom describes as:

The global hegemonic aspirations of major 20th Century Muslim Brotherhood jihadist ideologues … the more expansive application of Sharia within Muslim minority communities residing in the West, with the goal of replacing these non-Muslim governing systems …

As Shoebat summarizes:

“The Muslim Minority Affairs” program — according to the manifesto — can arrange “Muslim Minority activism” to advance the goal through the building of mosques, schools and Islamic centers where minorities exist (pp. 8-13, 17) in order to “establish a global Sharia in our modern times.” (p. 9-10) The measure also aims to “prevent the ‘hurdle’ Muslims encounter from ‘assimilation and melting’ in non-Muslim societies”. (p. 24)

The program surmounts this hurdle in two ways. One is the sharia jurisprudence (or fiqh) of Muslim Minority Affairs. This jurisprudence incorporates the concept of muruna, which permits Muslims living in non-Muslim lands to deviate from the dictates of classical sharia as long as, in so doing, they are advancing the ultimate mission of implementing and advancing sharia. Thus, for example, Muslims in the West might align with influential non-Muslims, which Islamic doctrine ordinarily forbids, if so doing helps them persuade governments and institutions to accommodate sharia strictures rather than pressure Muslims to assimilate.

The other method of staving off assimilation is the construction of an Islamist infrastructure in the West. This enables Muslims to create enclaves — in the physical community, on campus, and in major social institutions, including government — in which sharia is honored as basic law and Muslims are given safe haven to refrain from pressures to assimilate.

In the United States, the foundation of this infrastructure is the Muslim Students Association, which has hundreds of chapters on campuses across the United States and Canada.

Interestingly, in the late mid-to-late-nineties, while she was an intern at the Clinton White House and an assistant editor at JMMA, Ms. Abedin was a member of the executive board of the MSA at George Washington University, heading its “Social Committee.” That MSA chapter has an intriguing history. In 2001, its spiritual guide was … Anwar al-Awlaki, the al-Qaeda operative who was then ministering to some of the eventual 9/11 suicide-hijackers. Awlaki himself had led the MSA chapter at Colorado State University in the early nineties. As Patrick Poole has demonstrated, Awlaki is far from the only jihadist to hone his supremacist ideology in the MSA’s friendly confines. In the eighties, Wael Jalaidan ran the MSA at the University of Arizona. He would soon go on to help Osama bin Laden found al-Qaeda; he also partnered with the Abedins’ patron, Abdullah Omar Naseef, to establish the Rabita Trust — formally designated as a terrorist organization under U.S. law due to its funding of al-Qaeda.

The MSA gave birth to the Islamic Society of North America. The two organizations consider themselves as one, and ISNA is now the largest, most consequential Islamist organization in the United States — a go-to consultant for the Obama administration, despite its having been a key cog in the Brotherhood’s Hamas financing network, as the Justice Department proved in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism prosecution. ISNA’s business side is the North American Islamic Trust, another Holy Land Foundation co-conspirator and the vehicle by which the Saudis and the Brotherhood buy real estate and establish hundreds of mosques and Islamic centers throughout the U.S. These groups are fortified by the International Institute of Islamic Thought, a Brotherhood think-tank whose express mission is the “Islamization of knowledge” — developing an epistemological framework by which Muslims can fit current events and world history into an Islamic supremacist narrative. The infrastructure’s public face is organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), which combine public relations spin with sharia policy activism.

This is not a random proliferation of fraternities, the sort of cultural solidarity exhibition routinely seen throughout the American melting pot. The Saudi-constructed, Brotherhood-conducted Islamist infrastructure in the West is on a mission — the “Muslim Minority Affairs” mission. It seeks to grow an unassimilated, aggressive population of Islamic supremacists, who will gradually but dramatically alter the character of the West. Its goal is incrementally to infiltrate sharia principles in our law, our institutions, and our public policy. That means the mission takes direct aim at our liberties, particularly free expression, which enables examination and negative criticism of Islamist ideology. It takes aim at our alliance with Israel, because Jews are regarded as enemies and all of “Palestine” as Islamic territory. And it takes aim at our economic system, because sharia regards capitalism as a bane of human existence — there is a reason why the Brotherhood’s American operatives make common cause with the Left on everything from socialized medicine to finance regulation to gun control to surveillance law.

The media and the Obama Left will continue ridiculing the notion of Brotherhood influence on our government and attacking the five conservative House members who have raised concerns. The Republican establishment will lay cravenly low and pray that the controversy blows over — except for the stray useful idiot who calculates that there’s good press to be had in parroting the Democrats’ “McCarthyism” canard. Nevertheless, to perceive no correlation between the Islamists’ fervid anti-assimilation program and the United States government’s stunning accommodation of the Brotherhood and its agenda is to be willfully blind.

Paterno offered a complex challenge

By Joe Posnanski
USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com
August 17, 2012

On Nov. 4, 2011, Joe Paterno was a nominee for the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The main library at Penn State was named for him, and a statue of him stood in front of the football stadium. He was admired by American presidents — Republican and Democrat — and beloved by business leaders and clergy, football junkies and academics. There had been countless glowing stories written and told about him. 60 Minutes had done a piece on him so favorable that Paterno himself claimed to be embarrassed by it. Sports Illustrated had named him Sportsman of the Year. The Big Ten Conference named a trophy after him. Paterno had won more games than any big-time football coach ever and was on any short list of the greatest coaches ever. People called him Saint Joe, and only in recent years — as Paterno got older and crankier and less effective — had there even been much sarcasm in the title. That's how it was on Nov. 4.

On Nov. 5, a Pennsylvania grand jury presentment was released that charged Paterno's longtime assistant coach Jerry Sandusky with crimes against children so heinous that it hurt the eyes to even look at the words. The grand jury also charged two Penn State officials with failing to report those crimes and then lying about that failure under oath. We know now what has followed — a Penn State-funded investigation concluded that Paterno played a crucial role in the university's tragic failures, there has been a nationwide effort to scrub Paterno's name from the record — but even in the immediate aftermath, it was clear that Paterno had been told something about Sandusky showering with a young boy and he had not reported it to the police. Anyway, to everyone he was Penn State. And so, on Nov. 5, Joe Paterno became perhaps the most despised man in American sports.

And I was there in the middle of it all.

I had come to State College to write a book about Joe Paterno. It was a project years in the making. There was not just one thing that drew me — there never is just one thing with a project like a book — but if I could point to one thing it might have been one of the themes about sports that fascinate me, something about winning … and what that word really means. Paterno had always said — quite loudly and with perhaps too much righteousness in his voice — that winning football games wasn't what mattered. And yet, he won more games than anyone. He kept coaching into his 80s, long after even his most devoted fans thought proper. That riddle fascinated me. Why? What is this about? What is HE about? When I began the project, people constantly wondered if Paterno was too revered and virtuous to make for an interesting book, and the only question anyone seemed to ask about it was: "What's left to say about Joe Paterno?"

Obviously, nobody asked me that question after Nov. 5.

No, after Nov. 5 I found myself in the middle of something surreal. I was staying in a small apartment in State College, connected to my wife and daughters through the magic of Skype, and it felt like the ground was unstable. Every few minutes, it seemed, there were new details, rumors, accusations, defenses, truths, lies, so many it was hard to see straight. The media surrounded Joe Paterno's home. Facts emerged and retreated. No charge was dismissed; no allegation was too sinister for discussion. I had agreed to speak at a class at Penn State — a class I had spoken at the previous two or three years — and because of timing the class met just hours after Paterno had been fired and many students foolishly rioted in the wake. The discussion grew heated and spirited, and suddenly I found myself being quoted and misquoted in stories and being charged with mindlessly defending Joe Paterno against horrible villainy with which he had not yet been charged. All I had wanted to say was that we needed time to find out what was real and what wasn't.

With that in mind — "Justice," it says in The Ox Bow Incident, "has never been obtained in haste and strong feeling" — I went underground. I have made my living as a daily reporter, but this required something different. I could not allow myself to get caught up in the shifting winds of this story. In the last months of Joe Paterno's life, I met with him on several occasions and talked with him at length when he was perhaps the most sought after interview in America. I was granted access to his personal notes, and there were many. I talked to some of the people closest to him and also some of his harshest critics. I also talked with child sex abuse experts and legal experts to offer background and context. I read anything and everything that might give me some insight into who Joe Paterno really was. I reviewed inner-office e-mails (the same ones used in the Freeh Report), documents and timelines. I searched for what is real.

• MORE: Excerpts from the upcoming book 'Paterno'

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That was the point. Something real. Joe Paterno, throughout his life, has been infused with superhuman qualities and inhuman qualities. He was called perfect for so many years, and he was called omniscient and all powerful too. He was none of these things, though. The first words of the book came to me all at once:

"This is the story of a man named Joe Paterno, who in his long life was called moral and immoral, decent and scheming, omniscient and a figurehead, hero and fraud, Saint Joe and the devil. A life, of course, cannot be reduced to a single word, but …"

But … what? That was my book. There was the bloated superhero of Nov. 4, the savage villain of Nov. 5 … and I searched for the human being in the middle. I believe most of us live somewhere in the middle.

I suspect I will never have a more difficult task as a writer — I've been told by several authors that no biographer in American history has had a book change so drastically in the course of reporting. I suspect that's not right, but it is right that I was feeling my way through the dark. I was pushed and pulled, accused and derided, and that wasn't much fun. There were hundreds of questions, none of them with easy answers. But I had come to write a true book. That was what mattered. I have done my best to do that.

I think the richest and most significant stories defy easy answers. That's what draws me, both as a writer and as a consumer. The best movies, the best television shows, the best stories, the best novels and the best biographies are, I think, complicated. They stir many emotions, not all of them happy ones, not all of them angry ones. There are many people out there whose lives were enriched, altered and elevated by Joe Paterno. This is simply true. There are also many people out there who were victimized as children by the unspeakable evils of Jerry Sandusky, and no matter where you stand on the news it is at the very least true that Joe Paterno was one of the people who should have done more to stop him.

Nobody would argue — and certainly my book does not argue — that the good Joe Paterno did in his life should shield him from the horrors of his mistakes. Some would argue, especially in the white-hot emotion sparked by the latest revelations, that Paterno's role in the Jerry Sandusky crimes invalidates whatever good he might have done. My book does not argue that either. My book, I believe, lets the reader make up his or her own mind. When people ask me if Penn State was right in tearing down Joe Paterno's statue in light of the Freeh Report's conclusion, I ask a different question: "Should they have built a statue to him in the first place?" When people ask me if the NCAA was right in unleashing draconian penalties against Penn State, I ask a different question: "Should they have held up Joe Paterno as a paragon of purity and virtue for more than four decades?"

I realize some people have opinions about me and the book even before it comes out. This is one of the most emotional stories in memory. Children were damaged by a devious predator in a quiet little place that calls itself Happy Valley, and it is all but impossible to think of anything worse. Sandusky was not stopped — not by the police, not by child services, not by other authorities and child abuse professionals, not by the charity where he worked, not by the school where he had coached and, perhaps most striking to the rest of us, not by the football coach who had once been his boss, the head football coach who had professed all his life to stand for right. Emotions are raw. And how could they be anything else?

As a writer, I tried to take the measure of the man who was that head football coach. I believe I have written about his life with as much honesty as I have. I have reported as many of the facts of the Sandusky case as I could uncover (including some new ones). But I also objectively wrote about why so many people admired and idolized Joe Paterno in the first place. I wrote at length about his youthful idealism. I wrote at length about his unprecedented success as a coach. I wrote at length about the last 15 years of his life when he would not quit. I wrote at length about the end.

No, I don't feel about Joe Paterno the same way I did when I started writing the book. But I don't feel about him the way his most blistering critics feel. He was a human being, filled with ideals and flaws, honesty and hypocrisy, charity and selfishness, modesty and the refusal to abdicate his throne. There was little simple about him. I chased the complicated story of a man and his long life. I hope that is the story I wrote.

Joe Posnanski, the author of Paterno, is the senior columnist for sportsonearth.com, a joint venture between the USA TODAY Sports Media Group and MLB Advanced Media. The book goes on sale Aug. 21.

There is no California

By Victor Davis Hanson
http://www.nationalreview.com
August 16, 2012

Driving across California is like going from Mississippi to Massachusetts without ever crossing a state line.

Consider the disconnects: California’s combined income and sales taxes are among the nation’s highest, but the state’s annual deficit is still about $16 billion. It is estimated that more than 2,000 upper-income Californians are leaving per week to flee high taxes and costly regulations, yet the state government wants to raise taxes even higher. California’s business climate already ranks near the bottom in most surveys. Its teachers are among the highest paid, on average, in the nation, but its public-school students consistently test near the bottom of the nation in both math and science.

The state’s public employees enjoy some of the nation’s most generous pensions and benefits, but California’s retirement systems are underfunded by about $300 billion. The state’s gas taxes — at over 49 cents per gallon — are among the highest in the nation, but its once-unmatched freeways, like 101 and 99, for long stretches have degenerated into potholed, clogged nightmares unchanged since the early 1960s.

The state wishes to borrow billions of dollars to develop high-speed rail, beginning with a little-traveled link between Fresno and Corcoran — a corridor already served by money-losing Amtrak. Apparently, coastal residents like the idea of European-style high-speed rail — as long as the noisy and dirty construction does not begin in their backyards.

As gasoline prices soar, California chooses not to develop millions of barrels of untapped oil and even more natural gas off its shore and beneath its interior. Home to bankrupt green companies like Solyndra, California has mandated that a third of all the energy provided by state utilities soon must come from renewable energy sources – largely wind and solar, which currently provide about 11 percent of the state’s electricity and almost none of its transportation fuel.

How to explain the seemingly inexplicable? “California” is a misnomer. There is no such state. Instead there are two radically different cultures and landscapes with little in common, the two equally dysfunctional in quite different ways. Apart they are unworldly; together, a disaster.

A postmodern narrow coastal corridor runs from San Diego to Berkeley; there the weather is ideal, the gentrified affluent make good money, and values are green and left-wing. This Shangri-La is juxtaposed to a vast impoverished interior, from the southern desert to the northern Central Valley, where life is becoming premodern.

On the coast, blue-chip universities like Cal Tech, Berkeley, Stanford, and UCLA in pastoral landscapes train the world’s doctors, lawyers, engineers, and businesspeople. In the hot interior of blue-collar Sacramento, Turlock, Fresno, and Bakersfield, well over half the incoming freshmen in the California State University system must take remedial math and science classes.

In postmodern Palo Alto, a small cottage costs more than $1 million. Two hours away, in premodern and now-bankrupt Stockton, a bungalow the same size goes for less than $100,000.

In the interior, unemployment in many areas is over 15 percent. The theft of copper wire is reaching epidemic proportions. Thousands of the shrinking middle class have fled the interior for the coast or for nearby no-income-tax states. To fathom the nearly unbelievable statistics — as California’s population grew by 10 million from the mid-1980s to 2005, its number of Medicaid recipients increased by 7 million; one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients now reside in California — visit the state’s hinterlands.

But in the Never-Never Land of Apple, Facebook, Google, Hollywood, and the wine country, millions live in an idyllic paradise. Coastal Californians can afford to worry about trivia — and so their legislators seek to outlaw foie gras, shut down irrigation projects in order to save the three-inch-long Delta smelt, and allow children to have legally recognized multiple parents.

But in the less feel-good interior, crippling regulations curb timber, gas and oil, and farm production. For the most part, the rules are mandated by coastal utopians who have little idea where the fuel for their imported cars comes from, or how the redwood is cut for their decks, or who grows the ingredients for their Mediterranean lunches of arugula, olive oil, and pasta.

On the coast, it’s politically incorrect to talk of illegal immigration. In the interior, residents see first-hand the bankrupting effects on schools, courts, and health care when millions arrive illegally without English-language fluency or a high-school diploma — and send back billions of dollars in remittances to Mexico and other Latin American countries.

The drive from Fresno to Palo Alto takes three hours, but you might as well be rocketing from Earth to the moon.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, ofThe End of Sparta. You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com. © 2012Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Pesky deservedly is most beloved Red Sox great

By Peter Gammons
http://www.mlb.com
August 13, 2012

Gammons on Pesky's passing00:06:39

MLB Network analyst Peter Gammons talks about the passing of legendary Red Sox shortstop Johnny Pesky

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A visitor to Fenway Park last summer asked, "What are the numbers up there on the right-field roof?"

He was told that they were the retired numbers of Red Sox Hall of Famers Ted Williams, Bobby Doerr, Carlton Fisk, Joe Cronin, Carl Yastrzemski ...

"And No. 6 was Johnny Pesky."

"Is he in Cooperstown?"

"No. He was a good player ... .307 lifetime hitter ... 1,455 hits. But with the possible exception of Ted Williams, he is the most popular player in the 100-year history of the franchise. He is certainly the mostbeloved.

"Then why is his number retired?"

"Because of who he is, not what he was."

Johnny Pesky: 1919-2012 • Red Sox icon Pesky dies at 92 • Gammons: Pesky beloved by Nation • Past, present Sox saddened by loss • Red Sox family mourns loss of Pesky • Fans: Pesky was ambassador for game • Reactions to Pesky's passing • Commissioner's statement on Pesky • Posnanski on Pesky • MLBlog: Remembering Pesky • Donate to the Jimmy Fund • Pesky's career stats  Pesky passes away at 92  Gammons remembers Pesky  Red Sox players react  Eckersley on Pesky  Remy reflects on Pesky's career  MLB reflects on Pesky  Pesky raises championship banner  Randall discusses Pesky  Millar talks about Pesky  Looking back on Pesky's career  Career retrospective

I have never met a Red Sox fan who did not love Pesky. He always was nice to people because he was the essence of a good person. He went to rubber chicken banquets and Jimmy Fund events and loved his Red Sox as much as any fan out there. He played a year before going into World War II for three years, then when he came back played on those Red Sox teams that won one pennant in 1946 and probably should have won two more, losing the playoff to the Indians in 1948 and blowing a one-game lead with two to play to the Yankees in The Stadium in 1949.

He managed the Sox for two seasons in the '60s when the club was run like something out of "The Sound and the Fury," then returned as a broadcaster, a coach and the ambassador of everything Red Sox.

I always thought that one reason people liked him so much was that he never forgot from whence he came. Pesky didn't big league anyone. Yes, he played on some very good teams and was one of Ted Williams' best friends, but he never forgot that he started in baseball as a clubhouse kid in Portland, Ore. He shined Pacific Coast League shoes and washed uniforms and never forgot what that entailed, so if you worked the clubhouse or were an usher in the stands or were just somebody/anybody, he treated you with respect, enthusiasm and kindness.

Oh, there were times when he'd get a little piqued. Bernie Carbo once asked him if there were any pitchers "back in your time" who threw hard. Pesky shot back, "You couldn't have put a ball in play against Virgil Trucks or Dizzy Trout or Bob Feller."

And there was always the "Pesky held the ball" mark from the 1946 World Series. Enos Slaughter dashed around the bases from first base on a single and without television replays of today, the myth was that Pesky held the ball, allowing Slaughter to score.

What actually happened was that Dominic DiMaggio had been hurt and replaced in center by Leon Culberson, who was slow to the ball and getting the throw in.

"Lotta good that does me now," Pesky once said. "I was at an Oregon State football game, and some back for State fumbled a couple of times. Some loudmouth stood up and shouted, 'Give the ball to Pesky, he'll hold onto it."

He laughed. He told that story as a side dish at every rubber chicken event.

John and Ruth Pesky remained in Boston until each passed away, and were part of the landscape. Players loved having him in the clubhouse, and Jim Rice, who was exceptionally close to Pesky, told everyone that Johnny was the best hitting coach he ever had. He'd come to the clubhouse, dress at the locker right inside the door, and swap stories.

For many years covering the Red Sox for the Boston Globe, I'd go to road parks early, dress and work out. When players weren't hitting early, Pesky would work out what he called "Pesky's Silver Seven," comprised of broadcaster Ned Martin and three writers, Bob Finnigan, Chaz Scoggins and me. Oh, he loved to make us run after fly balls and play pepper so he could try to nail our ankles with line drives.

He always called me "My Captain of My Silver Seven." The last time I saw Johnny, this spring, he said "You're still my captain." Nice final words.

If you are out there across the country and do not understand why Pesky's funeral will be one of the largest of this century, first read David Halberstam's "The Teamates," the brilliant portrait of Williams, Dominic DiMaggio, Doerr and Pesky, who were first Red Sox teamates in 1942 and remained the closest of friends for the next 60 years, until Williams passed away in 2002.

"That doesn't happen in almost any walk of life," Pesky once told me, "especially our business of baseball. But Dominic, Ted and Bobby are three of the greatest men and greatest friends that ever walked the earth."

Seventy years ago, Pesky was a 22-year-old rookie with the Red Sox. Ted was 23, Doerr 24, DiMaggio 25. Hall of Famers Joe Cronin and Jimmie Foxx were on that team, in their mid-30's.

Sixty-three years later, when they held the Opening Day ceremony to hoist the World Series pennant above Fenway Park symbolizing the end of the 86-year drought, it wasn't David Ortiz or Pedro Martinez that pulled the rope to raise the flag, it was Pesky. On the day they celebrated their first World Series championship since World War I, it was a World War II hero who got the loudest ovation, who raised the symbolic end of the curse.

On the top steps of the visitors' dugout, Joe Torre, Derek Jeter, Don Zimmer and several Yankees stood and applauded Pesky.

"He's Johnny Pesky," Jeter said when asked about it in an ESPN pregame interview. "Of course you applaud, honor and respect Johnny Pesky. That's who he is to baseball."