carnage and culture: 2013

Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Terror Wave in Russia

Posted By Robert Spencer On December 31, 2013 @ 12:40 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 4 Comments

http://www.frontpagemag.com

For the second consecutive day a terrorist a terrorist bombing has struck the city of Volgograd, this time killing 14 people aboard a bus. (Reuters)

There have now been three major jihad terror attacks in Russia in four days. The attacks are a grim reminder of how vulnerable crowded public places are worldwide to jihad mass murder — and an indication of what the United States could look like sooner or later.

The latest round of jihad mass murder began last Friday, when jihadists murdered three people with a car bomb in Pyatigorsk in southern Russia. Then on Sunday, a jihad/martyrdom suicide bomber murdered sixteen people at the train station in Volgograd – the city that, as Stalingrad, was the bloody site of the turning point of World War II. Then on Monday, a jihadist murdered fourteen more people on a trolley bus in the same city.

These were by no means the first jihad strikes in Russia in recent years. In September 2004, Islamic jihadists under the command of Chechen jihad leader Shamil Basayev took 1,300 hostages at a school in Beslan, a town in the Russian Republic of North Ossetia; ultimately the jihadists murdered well over 300 people.

Then in August 2009, jihadists claimed to have murdered over 24 people with a bomb at Siberia’s Sayno-Shushenskata hydro-electric plant in Siberia, although the Russian government claimed that there was no bomb at all, and that the explosion was an accident. On November 27, 2009, jihadists murdered 27 people with a bomb planted under the Nevsky Express train between Moscow and Saint Petersburg. Then in March 2010, Islamic jihad/martyrdom suicide bombers murdered 39 people on the Moscow subway. In February 2011, another jihad/martyrdom suicide bomber murdered 36 people at Domodedovo International Airport in Moscow.

Another Chechen jihadist, Doku Umarov, the leader of a group that calls itself the Caucasus Emirate (Umarov styles himself the “Emir of the Caucasus”), told Russians in 2010: “I promise you that war will come to your streets and you will feel it in your lives, feel it on your own skin.” He later threatened that “more special operations” would soon follow, for “among us there are hundreds of brothers who are prepared to sacrifice themselves….We can at any time carry out operations where we want.”

He warned the Russians again last July, exhorting Muslims to wage jihad warfare against the Russians for daring to host the Winter Olympics in Sochi on the Black Sea coast. Umarov said that Muslims should “use maximum force on the path of Allah to disrupt this Satanic dancing” – by which Patrick Swayze-evoking locution he referred to the Games. The Russians, he said, “plan to hold the Olympics on the bones of our ancestors, on the bones of many, many dead Muslims buried on the territory of our land on the Black Sea, and we Mujahedeen are obliged not to permit that — using any methods allowed us by the almighty Allah.”

The Caucasus Emirate has not claimed responsibility for the jihad attacks this week, but given the threats Umarov has made against the Games, which are scheduled to begin February 6, it is understandable that suspicion has focused on this group. Vladimir Putin has tightened security, but Russian officials know that there is little he can do to prevent still more jihad terror. Alexei Filatov, whom Reuters describes as the “deputy head of the veterans’ association of the elite Alfa anti-terrorism unit,” observes: “We can expect more such attacks. The threat is greatest now because it is when terrorists can make the biggest impression. The security measures were beefed up long ago around Sochi, so terrorists will strike instead in these nearby cities like Volgograd.”

There is little doubt that Filatov is right: the area that requires protection is simply too vast, and the possible targets too many, to ensure that there will not be more jihad attacks in Volgograd or elsewhere. The situation is the same in the United States: while law enforcement agents so far have been able to stop most jihad plots from ever coming to murderous fruition, their luck is unlikely to hold – particularly since the Obama Administration has forbidden agencies to study Islam and jihad in connection with terrorism, thereby depriving them of the ability to understand the motives and goals of those who have vowed to destroy Western societies.

It is well within the realm of possibility, then, that sometime in the not-so-distant future, the United States could be the country that is reeling from three jihad attacks in four days, with an untold number of casualties. What is glaringly deficient, if not altogether absent, in both the Russian and American response to this reality is any serious attempt to prevent such attacks from being plotted in the first place. No one is challenging Muslim groups in the U.S. or Russia to reinterpret the Islamic texts and teachings that jihadists use to justify violence and supremacism, and to teach actively against the understanding of Islam that gives rise to such attacks.

To be sure, government and law enforcement officials in the U.S. work with Muslims they deem “moderate” against those they regard as “extremist”; however, since they lack a clear understanding (and are forbidden to gain one – to do so would be “Islamophobic”) of the roots of jihad violence in Islamic teaching, they tend to take disingenuous claims to “moderation” at naïve face value. Their delineation between the “extremist” and “moderate” is often superficial and leads them into self-defeating blind alleys.

One notorious example of this is how government and law-enforcement agencies continued to work with the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) for several years after the Justice Department designated it an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case, and its Hamas ties were abundantly established. I myself several years ago gave a four-hour-long presentation to a roomful of FBI and intelligence agents that included, among many other things, evidence of CAIR’s ties to Hamas. Yet during the question-and-answer period an agent complained that some of his best contacts in the Muslim community were CAIR officials, and I was wrong to “stigmatize” them.

Of course, it was not I, but the Justice Department, that had done the “stigmatizing,” and one would think that this surpassingly naïve agent would have thought that forewarned was forearmed regarding how much he could trust his friends at CAIR, but he wouldn’t hear it: he knew they were friendly and “moderate,” and that was good enough for him.

This politically correct naïvete practically amounts to an invitation to Islamic jihadists to mount more jihad attacks. And so they will, in the U.S. as well as Russia – but this agent’s friends at CAIR will issue another pro-forma condemnation, and so all will be well.

Three jihad strikes in four days in Russia. They were warned. We have been warned as well. But we aren’t paying attention to those warnings. To heed them would be “Islamophobic.”

Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.

Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://www.frontpagemag.com

URL to article: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/robert-spencer/terror-wave-in-russia/

Monday, December 30, 2013

Review: 'High Hopes' by Bruce Springsteen

Bruce Springsteen's new album, High Hopes, is a collection of revamped and re-recorded lost songs – but it doesn't quite fit together

By Neil McCormick

28 December 2013

http://www.telegraph.co.uk

As one of rock’s great storytellers, Bruce Springsteen usually makes albums with a strong narrative thrust binding the songs together. So what are we supposed to make of a new CD that opens with a rocky cover of a folk song about finding hope in a hopeless world, ends with an atmospheric take on the romantic Dream Baby Dream (originally by synth band Suicide) and, in between, roams across topics including institutional racism, Vietnam, 9/11 and the everlasting triumph of our Lord Jesus Christ?

Although substantially re-recorded and presented as a new collection, these 12 tracks are odds and ends, “leftovers” from other sessions and new versions of songs that have taken different forms on the road. Springsteen has always written a lot of material which he shapes and filters, with some songs – ones that many fans consider classics – discarded from his sets as he goes. Previously, these sorts of rejects have surfaced on compilations, notably the excellent Tracks box set from 1998.

WATCH: Bruce Springsteen and I: fans tell their stories of The Boss

This time, he has revamped and re-recorded lost songs to bring them up to date. You can hear the old, meaty saxophone of Clarence Clemons (who died in 2011) and the rangy piano playing of Danny Federici (who died in 2008), but they’re combined with the new, slashing art-attack guitar of Rage Against The Machine’s Tom Morello, who was brought in to expand the E Street Band line up in 2012.

Morello is the album’s guiding spirit. But while his agit-pop sensibility is a good fit with Springsteen’s socio-political conscience, his effects-laden guitar playing operates at odd angles to the deep roots sensibility of the E Street sound. He slashes and burns through American Skin (41 Shots), a raging, angry anthem inspired by the 1999 police shooting of immigrant Amadou Diallo, giving Springsteen the contemporary edge he has been looking for.

But Morello tips a revamped Ghost Of Tom Joad completely over the top, taking the quiet dignity of the acoustic 1995 original and turning it into a zany prog rock wig-out. The pieces of the song don’t quite fit together, and the same might be said of the whole album.

REVIEW: Bruce Springsteen live at Hard Rock Calling

Particularly ill-fitting are songs of unambiguous Christian faith, presumably plucked from a gospel album Springsteen scrapped before 2012’s triumphant Wrecking Ball. There is a stiff didacticism in their Biblical language that sits poorly with Springsteen’s questioning humanism elsewhere.

Releasing this album at 64, Springsteen seems busier than ever. In a recent Rolling Stone interview he said, “It’s that old story, the light from the oncoming train focuses the mind”. Unfortunately, it hasn’t focused this record. Perhaps the real story of High Hopes is that Springsteen is only trying to keep busy. There’s a lot of great stuff on here, but it doesn’t hold together and doesn’t come close to being one of Springsteen’s great albums.

New York Times Ignores Evidence of Al Qaeda Link to Benghazi

Contradicts previous reporting from the New York TImes.

Stephen F. Hayes

http://www.weeklystandard.com

December 29, 2013 4:01 PM

Let’s start by giving David Kirkpatrick credit. Kirkpatrick, the Cairo bureau chief of the New York Times and author of this weekend’s much-discussed piece on Benghazi, provides many new on-the-ground, minute-by-minute details of the attacks and the weeks and months leading up to them. Some of the reporting is incredible. Kirkpatrick describes the vase in the living room of the home belonging to the mother of Abu Khattala, a main suspect in those attacks. He reports on how the fighting in the consulate paused when Abu Khattala entered the compound, a revealing fact. Citing security camera video footage, the author describes how one of the attackers paused amidst the bedlam in the consulate to pour some Hershey’s chocolate syrup down his throat. Kirkpatrick obviously spent considerable time on the ground in Benghazi and interviewed several anti-Western Islamists, including some involved in the attacks. There’s little doubt he took considerable risks as he reported his piece.

While much of Kirkpatrick’s reporting is admirable and while these details add to our knowledge of certain aspects of the attack, they do not tell the whole story. And that’s where the piece ultimately fails.

The piece makes two main claims that challenge much of the previous reporting about Benghazi: 1) The Times asserts that there is “no evidence that al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault;” and, 2) that the attack “was fueled in large part by anger at an American-made video denigrating Islam.”

We'll focus on the first one.

There is, in fact, evidence that terrorists linked to al Qaeda had a role in the Benghazi attacks. Indeed, there’s a fair amount of that kind of evidence. As Representative Adam Schiff, a California Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence put it on Sunday when asked about the Times report: “The intelligence indicates that al Qaeda was involved, but there were also plenty of people and militias that were unaffiliated with al Qaeda involved.” Schiff who has defended the Obama administration on Benghazi and praised the Times piece as adding “valuable insights,” nonetheless pronounced it incomplete and hinted that signals intelligence contradicted the claims in the piece. The Times report, Schiff continued, was “deficient in they didn’t have the same access to people who were not aware they were being listened to. They were heavily reliant obviously on people that they interviewed who had a reason to provide the story that they did.” He concluded: “So I think it does add some insights but I don’t think it’s complete.”

In addition to the signals intelligence Schiff mentions, there is abundant open-source reporting that contradicts Kirkpatrick’s sweeping claim about “no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault.” And most problematic for this revisionist account, some of that evidence comes from the Times itself in a story the paper published on October 29, 2012.

That story, like this latest one, was a major front-page investigative piece. It reported that “American officials” said the Benghazi attacks “included participants from Ansar al Shariah, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and the Muhammad Jamal network, a militant group in Egypt.” So according to previous reporting in the Times, the Benghazi attacks included participants from the main al Qaeda affiliate in Libya and a terrorist network in Egypt, and, contrary to Kirkpatrick’s assertion, evidence that both al Qaeda and other international terrorist groups played some role in the assault. Kirkpatrick was presumably aware of that earlier report, since he was credited with contributing reporting from Benghazi.

There’s more. As my colleague Tom Joscelyn reports, the namesake of that Egyptian jihadist network, Muhammad Jamal, is not mentioned in the Times’s latest piece. Why not? The Times had previously reported the involvement of his network. When Mohammad Jamal was arrested in Egypt in December of 2012, two months after the Times article that mentioned him, the Wall Street Journal reported on his extensive ties to al Qaeda and its senior leadership, as well as his alleged involvement in the Benghazi attacks.

Have U.S. officials since concluded that his network wasn’t involved, as the Times and many others had reported? And if that were the case, wouldn’t Kirkpatrick have reported that? A U.S. official familiar with the intelligence on Benghazi tells THE WEEKLY STANDARD that there has been no change. U.S. intelligence officials continue to believe Jamal’s network was involved.

Why was Jamal left out of this latest Times piece? That’s unclear. But we do know that including him would have undermined one of the piece’s central claims – that there was no evidence of any Benghazi role for either al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups.

As Joscelyn writes:

Jamal was trained by al Qaeda in the late 1980s, and has been loyal to Ayman al Zawahiri since at least the 1990s. He served as a commander in the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ), a terrorist group headed by Zawahiri that merged with bin Laden’s enterprise. Jamal left prison in 2011 and quickly got back to work.

The Egyptian press has published some of Jamal’s letters to Zawahiri. In the letters, which were written in 2011 and 2012, Jamal is extremely deferential to Zawahiri. Jamal heaps praise on Zawahiri, seeking the al Qaeda master’s guidance and additional support. Jamal even mentions that he attempted to visit Zawahiri in person, but failed to do so because of restrictions on his travel. So, Jamal writes, he sent an emissary instead.

Jamal’s letters read like status reports. He writes that he has received financing from al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), but requires additional funds to purchase more weaponry. Jamal also explains that he had formed “groups for us inside Sinai” and had established “an advanced base outside Egypt in Libya to take advantage of the conditions in Libya after the revolution.”

Jamal’s operations inside the Sinai and Libya included training camps. Some of the trainees from those camps took part in the Benghazi attack.

Since the New York Times and other press outlets first reported on the Jamal network’s involvement, both the U.S. State Department and the United Nations have designated Jamal and his subordinates as terrorists. Both the U.S. and UN designations tie Jamal’s network directly to al Qaeda.

The State Department, for instance, notes that Jamal “has developed connections with al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), AQ senior leadership, and al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) leadership.” Jamal not only received funds from AQAP, but has also “used the AQAP network to smuggle fighters into training camps.”

While the State Department’s designation does not mention the Jamal network’s participation in the Benghazi attack, the UN’s designation does. The UN noted that both Jamal and members of his network are “[r]eported to be involved in the attack on the United States Mission in Benghazi, Libya, on 11 Sep. 2012.”

When Jamal was detained in Egypt, a U.S. intelligence official involved in the Benghazi investigation described his capture as “a big deal,” and investigators would later express frustration at their inability to interrogate Jamal to better understand the role his network played in the attacks.

U.S. officials also suspected other al Qaeda-affiliated groups. CNN reported that intelligence officials also believed jihadists from al Qaeda in Iraq also participated in the Benghazi assault.

And, as Joscelyn notes, U.S. intelligence officials told THE WEEKLY STANDARD last fall that Faraj al-Shibli, a Libyan who once served as a bodyguard to Osama bin Laden, participated in the Benghazi attacks and, in the days that followed, delivered to senior al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan intelligence taken from the U.S. compound after the attacks.

Are the officials who spoke to THE WEEKLY STANDARD about al Qaeda's involvement in the Benghazi attacks wrong? And those who talked to CNN, the Wall Street Journal, and others? What about the Democratic congressman on the House Intelligence Committeewho declared that "the intelligence indicates that al Qaeda was involved?"

And what about that previous major investigative piece in the New York Times, the one that reported the involvement of a key al Qaeda affiliate and international terrorist groups? Was it wrong? Should we expect a correction?

Sunday, December 29, 2013

Benghazi: The New York Times vs. the Truth

Posted By Roger Kimball On December 29, 2013 @ 6:02 am In Uncategorized | 6 Comments

http://pjmedia.com/

President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton greeting the remains of the four Americans — including U.S. Amb. Christopher Stephens — who died in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. (Pete Souza/White House)

They never give up at the New York Times. If at first they don’t succeed in twisting the truth to fit the Newspeak fit to print, it’s try, try again. Their latest exercise in mendacity is “A Deadly Mix in Benghazi ^[1],” an elaborate essay that substitutes a plethora of irrelevant details and animated graphics for historical truth. The long essay takes up an event which, in a rational world, would have led the to resignation of former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and the impeachment of President Barack Obama. I mean the terrorist attack on our consular facility at Benghazi, Libya.

You remember Benghazi: a U.S. ambassador and his security detail were ambushed by Islamic radicals and, after an hours’ long firefight, Ambassador Chris Stevens, Foreign Service Officer Sean Smith, and former Navy SEALs Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty were brutally murdered. By Islamic radicals.

The cataract of misinformation that gushed out of the Obama administration about that event, a mephitic current of lies and half truths streaming from the cloaca maxima in Washington, D.C., was stunning even by the low standards of “the most transparent administration in history.” I wrote about the events here several times ^[2], as did several of my PJM colleagues.

The administration’s line was that the savage ambush that left four Americans dead was part of a “spontaneous uprising” by adherents of the Religion of Peace, goaded to murderous fury because of a hitherto obscure internet video ^[3] that portrays Mohammed as a corrupt sexual predator. It’s a silly film. But, however silly, however offensive to Muslim sensibilities it may be, is it grounds for mayhem and murder? And, more to the point, did it in fact have anything at all to do with the events in Benghazi of September 11, 2012?

The short answer is: No. The internet video had nothing to do with that terrorist attack. The date, however, — September 11 — probably had a lot to do with the timing of the attack.

According to the New York Times, the perpetrators of the attack were not elements of al-Qaeda and kindred radical groups but disaffected members of the Arab street who were distraught by Innocence of Muslims, the sophomoric internet video on which President Obama and Hilary Clinton blamed the attack. My own view is that if a group of people is so criminally puerile that they can can be roused to murder by a video, then they deserve to be treated as mental incompetents. But in this case, the question doesn’t really arise because the Times offers no evidence that the video had anything to do with the murderous attack.

As a House Intelligence Committee report concluded ^[4], pace the Times, the Benghazi attack was “an al Qaeda led event.” The culprit was “not a video,” Rep. Mike Rogers observed — “that whole part was debunked time and time again.” It was not a “spontaneous uprising,” as was put about by the administration at the time and is now reprised by the New York Times, but rather a “pre-planned, organized terrorist event,” orchestrated by al-Qaeda.

How are we to understand the Times’s latest entry into the contest to rewrite history for ideological fun and profit? My own sense is that it has less to do with salvaging President Obama’s tattered reputation — he is well on his way to winning the prize for the least competent and most destructive president in the history of the republic. No, Barack Obama is yesterday’s news, and unless and until he is impeached and removed from office he will be pretty much forgotten by purveyors of all the Newspeak fit to print. They have their eyes on another player in the Benghazi scandal, namely Hilary Clinton. If anyone emerged from that shameful episode more discredited than Barack Obama, it was Ms. Clinton. But time is passing fast, and there is a lot of remedial work to do if Hilary Clinton is to be suitably repackaged as the Democratic candidate for president. That ambition, I believe, stands behind this elaborate, breathtaking exercise in journalistic mendacity.

Article printed from Roger’s Rules: http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2013/12/29/benghazi-the-new-york-times-vs-the-truth/

URLs in this post:

[1] A Deadly Mix in Benghazi: http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2013/benghazi/?hp#/?chapt=0

[2] several times: http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2012/09/16/spontaneous-uprising-or-premeditated-murder/

[3] internet video: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innocence_of_Muslims

[4] House Intelligence Committee report concluded: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/12/29/house-intelligence-chair-benghazi-attack-al-qaeda-led-event/

Camille Paglia: A Feminist Defense of Masculine Virtues

The cultural critic on why ignoring the biological differences between men and women risks undermining Western civilization

By
CONNECT

Updated Dec. 28, 2013 10:46 p.m. ET

http://online.wsj.com

Philadelphia

'What you're seeing is how a civilization commits suicide," says Camille Paglia. This self-described "notorious Amazon feminist" isn't telling anyone to Lean In or asking Why Women Still Can't Have It All. No, her indictment may be as surprising as it is wide-ranging: The military is out of fashion, Americans undervalue manual labor, schools neuter male students, opinion makers deny the biological differences between men and women, and sexiness is dead. And that's just 20 minutes of our three-hour conversation.

When Ms. Paglia, now 66, burst onto the national stage in 1990 with the publishing of "Sexual Personae," she immediately established herself as a feminist who was the scourge of the movement's establishment, a heretic to its orthodoxy. Pick up the 700-page tome, subtitled "Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, " and it's easy to see why. "If civilization had been left in female hands," she wrote, "we would still be living in grass huts."

The fact that the acclaimed book—the first of six; her latest, "Glittering Images," is a survey of Western art—was rejected by seven publishers and five agents before being printed by Yale University Press only added to Ms. Paglia's sense of herself as a provocateur in a class with Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern. But unlike those radio jocks, Ms. Paglia has scholarly chops: Her dissertation adviser at Yale was Harold Bloom, and she is as likely to discuss Freud, Oscar Wilde or early Native American art as to talk about Miley Cyrus.

Ms. Paglia relishes her outsider persona, having previously described herself as an egomaniac and "abrasive, strident and obnoxious." Talking to her is like a mental CrossFit workout. One moment she's praising pop star Rihanna ("a true artist"), then blasting ObamaCare ("a monstrosity," though she voted for the president), global warming ("a religious dogma"), and the idea that all gay people are born gay ("the biggest canard," yet she herself is a lesbian).

Enlarge Image

Neil Davies

But no subject gets her going more than when I ask if she really sees a connection between society's attempts to paper over the biological distinction between men and women and the collapse of Western civilization.

She starts by pointing to the diminished status of military service. "The entire elite class now, in finance, in politics and so on, none of them have military service—hardly anyone, there are a few. But there is no prestige attached to it anymore. That is a recipe for disaster," she says. "These people don't think in military ways, so there's this illusion out there that people are basically nice, people are basically kind, if we're just nice and benevolent to everyone they'll be nice too. They literally don't have any sense of evil or criminality."

The results, she says, can be seen in everything from the dysfunction in Washington (where politicians "lack practical skills of analysis and construction") to what women wear. "So many women don't realize how vulnerable they are by what they're doing on the street," she says, referring to women who wear sexy clothes.

When she has made this point in the past, Ms. Paglia—who dresses in androgynous jackets and slacks—has been told that she believes "women are at fault for their own victimization." Nonsense, she says. "I believe that every person, male and female, needs to be in a protective mode at all times of alertness to potential danger. The world is full of potential attacks, potential disasters." She calls it "street-smart feminism."

Ms. Paglia argues that the softening of modern American society begins as early as kindergarten. "Primary-school education is a crock, basically. It's oppressive to anyone with physical energy, especially guys," she says, pointing to the most obvious example: the way many schools have cut recess. "They're making a toxic environment for boys. Primary education does everything in its power to turn boys into neuters."

She is not the first to make this argument, as Ms. Paglia readily notes. Fellow feminist Christina Hoff Sommers has written about the "war against boys" for more than a decade. The notion was once met with derision, but now data back it up: Almost one in five high-school-age boys has been diagnosed with ADHD, boys get worse grades than girls and are less likely to go to college.

Ms. Paglia observes this phenomenon up close with her 11-year-old son, Lucien, whom she is raising with her ex-partner, Alison Maddex, an artist and public-school teacher who lives 2 miles away. She sees the tacit elevation of "female values"—such as sensitivity, socialization and cooperation—as the main aim of teachers, rather than fostering creative energy and teaching hard geographical and historical facts.

By her lights, things only get worse in higher education. "This PC gender politics thing—the way gender is being taught in the universities—in a very anti-male way, it's all about neutralization of maleness." The result: Upper-middle-class men who are "intimidated" and "can't say anything. . . . They understand the agenda." In other words: They avoid goring certain sacred cows by "never telling the truth to women" about sex, and by keeping "raunchy" thoughts and sexual fantasies to themselves and their laptops.

Politically correct, inadequate education, along with the decline of America's brawny industrial base, leaves many men with "no models of manhood," she says. "Masculinity is just becoming something that is imitated from the movies. There's nothing left. There's no room for anything manly right now." The only place you can hear what men really feel these days, she claims, is on sports radio. No surprise, she is an avid listener. The energy and enthusiasm "inspires me as a writer," she says, adding: "If we had to go to war," the callers "are the men that would save the nation."

And men aren't the only ones suffering from the decline of men. Women, particularly elite upper-middle-class women, have become "clones" condemned to "Pilates for the next 30 years," Ms. Paglia says. "Our culture doesn't allow women to know how to be womanly," adding that online pornography is increasingly the only place where men and women in our sexless culture tap into "primal energy" in a way they can't in real life.

A key part of the remedy, she believes, is a "revalorization" of traditional male trades—the ones that allow women's studies professors to drive to work (roads), take the elevator to their office (construction), read in the library (electricity), and go to gender-neutral restrooms (plumbing).

" Michelle Obama's going on: 'Everybody must have college.' Why? Why? What is the reason why everyone has to go to college? Especially when college is so utterly meaningless right now, it has no core curriculum" and "people end up saddled with huge debts," says Ms. Paglia. What's driving the push toward universal college is "social snobbery on the part of a lot of upper-middle-class families who want the sticker in the window."

Ms. Paglia, who has been a professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia since 1984, sees her own students as examples. "I have woodworking students who, even while they're in class, are already earning money making furniture and so on," she says. "My career has been in art schools cause I don't get along with normal academics."

To hear her tell it, getting along has never been Ms. Paglia's strong suit. As a child, she felt stifled by the expectations of girlhood in the 1950s. She fantasized about being a knight, not a princess. Discovering pioneering female figures as a teenager, most notably Amelia Earhart, transformed Ms. Paglia's understanding of what her future might hold.

These iconoclastic women of the 1930s, like Earhart and Katharine Hepburn, remain her ideal feminist role models: independent, brave, enterprising, capable of competing with men without bashing them. But since at least the late 1960s, she says, fellow feminists in the academy stopped sharing her vision of "equal-opportunity feminism" that demands a level playing field without demanding special quotas or protections for women.

She proudly recounts her battle, while a graduate student at Yale in the late 1960s and early '70s, with the New Haven Women's Liberation Rock Band over the Rolling Stones: Ms. Paglia loved "Under My Thumb," a song the others regarded as chauvinist. Then there was the time she "barely got through the dinner" with a group of women's studies professors at Bennington College, where she had her first teaching job, who insisted that there is no hormonal difference between men and women. "I left before dessert."

In her view, these ideological excesses bear much of the blame for the current cultural decline. She calls out activists like Gloria Steinem, Naomi Wolf and Susan Faludi for pushing a version of feminism that says gender is nothing more than a social construct, and groups like the National Organization for Women for making abortion the singular women's issue.

By denying the role of nature in women's lives, she argues, leading feminists created a "denatured, antiseptic" movement that "protected their bourgeois lifestyle" and falsely promised that women could "have it all." And by impugning women who chose to forgo careers to stay at home with children, feminists turned off many who might have happily joined their ranks.

But Ms. Paglia's criticism shouldn't be mistaken for nostalgia for the socially prescribed roles for men and women before the 1960s. Quite the contrary. "I personally have disobeyed every single item of the gender code," says Ms. Paglia. But men, and especially women, need to be honest about the role biology plays and clear-eyed about the choices they are making.

Sex education, she says, simply focuses on mechanics without conveying the real "facts of life," especially for girls: "I want every 14-year-old girl . . . to be told: You better start thinking what do you want in life. If you just want a career and no children you don't have much to worry about. If, however, you are thinking you'd like to have children some day you should start thinking about when do you want to have them. Early or late? To have them early means you are going to make a career sacrifice, but you're going to have more energy and less risks. Both the pros and the cons should be presented."

For all of Ms. Paglia's barbs about the women's movement, it seems clear that feminism—at least of the equal-opportunity variety—has triumphed in its basic goals. There is surely a lack of women in the C-Suite and Congress, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a man who would admit that he believes women are less capable. To save feminism as a political movement from irrelevance, Ms. Paglia says, the women's movement should return to its roots. That means abandoning the "nanny state" mentality that led to politically correct speech codes and college disciplinary committees that have come to replace courts. The movement can win converts, she says, but it needs to become a big tent, one "open to stay-at-home moms" and "not just the career woman."

More important, Ms. Paglia says, if the women's movement wants to be taken seriously again, it should tackle serious matters, like rape in India and honor killings in the Muslim world, that are "more of an outrage than some woman going on a date on the Brown University campus."

Ms. Weiss is an associate editorial features editor at the Journal.

Saturday, December 28, 2013

Coercing Conformity

A government that creates the climate for bullying is the worst of the bullies.

By Andrew C. McCarthy

http://www.nationalreview.com/

December 28, 2013

Hillary Clinton

In “protecting the rights of all people to worship the way they choose,” then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton vowed “to use some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people don’t feel that they have the support to do what we abhor.”

Mrs. Clinton required translation into the language of truth, as she generally does when her lips are moving. By the “rights” of “all people” to “worship” as “they choose,” she meant the sharia-based desire of Muslim supremacists to foreclose critical examination of Islam. Madame Secretary, you see, was speechifying before her friends at the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) — the bloc of 56 Muslim countries plus the Palestinian territories.

At that very moment in July 2011, Christians were under siege in Egypt, Syria, Sudan, Iraq, and Iran — being gradually purged from those Islamic countries just as they’d been purged from Turkey, which hosted Mrs. Clinton’s speech. As Christians from the Middle East to West Monroe, La., can tell you, the Left and its Obama vanguard are not remotely interested in their “rights . . . to worship the way they choose.”

What they choose, after all, is to honor Christian tenets about sexuality, freedom of conscience, and the sanctity of life. Those tenets, just like honest criticism of Islam, are consigned to the category Clinton calls “what we abhor.” And if progressives abhor something, it somehow always becomes everyone’s duty to make certain that those who embrace that something “don’t feel that they have . . . support.”

Of course, they do have support . . . at least on paper. The First Amendment protects all of us against government suppression of speech. But the amendment is just a parchment promise if the government against which it is a safeguard actively undermines it. That is today’s United States government: rendering free expression an illusory right by inciting the mob, by extortionate lawfare tactics that exhaust the resources and energy of the citizen.

That brings us to the most compelling of all the points Mark Steyn made this week in his trenchant defense of free expression: When it comes to stifling speech, and thus suppressing thought, it is increasingly frivolous to distinguish between “state coercion” and “cultural coercion.”

Yes, it is textbook true that the First Amendment applies only against the government — indeed, only against the federal government as originally understood. The constitutional free-speech guarantee is literally irrelevant against private actors, including bullies like GLAAD, the gay-rights agitators who intimidated A&E into suspending Phil Robertson from a show about his family — which, I suppose, is the absurd reality when you’re producing a “reality” program (Duck Dynasty) about a family business.

But as long as we’re talking about reality, what if the “private” actors are really the deadly point of a coercive government’s spear? Mrs. Clinton proclaimed that the Obama administration would unleash “old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming” to squelch speech it disapproved of. We call these “techniques”extortion and intimidation when they are used by mafia families and other like-minded racketeering enterprises.

A corrupt government has some direct ways of undermining our rights. It can bring vexatious lawsuits, knowingly enact unconstitutional laws, or sign international agreements transparently intended to erode constitutional liberties. Theoretically, we can fight these tactics in the courts and by lobbying our lethargic lawmakers; as a practical matter, though, it takes years of anxiety at prohibitive expense. Few will be up to the task.

Secretary Clinton’s collaboration with the OIC is a good example: They jointly came up with a resolution that would make it unlawful to engage in speech that incites “discrimination” and “hostility” toward “religion.” More translation: “Religion” here does not mean religion; it means Islam. The Obama administration, itself no stranger to incitements against traditional Christianity, is not worried about that kind of hostility.

But put aside the hypocrisy of bashing Christians for merely holding beliefs while turning a blind eye to Muslims who kill over theirs. The point here is: It is pluperfectly palpable that the resolution negotiated by the Obama State Department and the OIC violates the First Amendment.

Free speech cannot work if the government it is designed to restrain does not respect it. A lawful American government — one that takes seriously its sworn obligation to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution — would not only enforce the First Amendment; it would refrain from engaging in unconstitutional schemes in the first place.

When it instead leads the pack in assaulting the Constitution — when, to take another example, the government repeatedly, publicly, and mendaciously blames a jihadist mass murder in Benghazi on an obscure movie; when, under the guise of a “supervised release” violation, it then trumps up a prosecution against the filmmaker precisely to sell the “Muslim world” on its commitment to imposing anti-constitutional sharia blasphemy standards — it is implicitly endorsing and obviously encouraging mob suppression of speech.

That is how this government indirectly assaults the First Amendment, in tandem with its “private”-actor allies. The GLAADs and CAIRs of the world are the government’s partners in “peer pressure and shaming,” the cultural coercion that is every bit as insidious as the administration’s official lawlessness. A government that creates the climate for bullying is one of the bullies — the most culpable one.

The radical shock troops seeking to “fundamentally transform the United States of America,” as their pied piper puts it, make up a distinct minority of the country. To advance their transformative program, they need the mob — and a president who knows how to use the mob’s “peer pressure,” who knows that telling a room full of jittery bankers that “my administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks” is akin to Don Corleone making them an offer they can’t refuse.

Consequently, we are not in ordinary times — times when speech competes with speech in Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “marketplace of ideas,” and when we are simply trying to arrive at the best policies within an agreed-upon constitutional framework. We are in an us-versus-them time when the radicals are out to annihilate traditional culture and constitutional principles.

There are no Marquess of Queensbury Rules for confronting such a threat, since a fair fight is not what the mob has in mind. The threat and the aggressors making it need to be exposed, debated, mocked, and otherwise discredited whenever the opportunities present themselves. Nothing else will do, for the mob is immune to peer pressure and it has no shame.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute. He is the author, most recently, of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy.

Sharia's Protector

By Mark Steyn

National Review's Happy Warrior
December 27, 2013

http://www.steynonline.com/

Rohullah Qarizada is one of those Afghans you used to see a lot on American TV in the immediate aftermath of the Taliban's fall. Trimly bearded, dapper in Western suit and tie, he heads the Afghan Independent Bar Association in Kabul. Did you know Kabul had a bar association? A few years back, I ran into one of the U.S. prosecutors who helped set it up, with a grant from the Swedish foreign ministry. Mr. Qarizada currently sits on a committee charged with making revisions to the Afghan legal code. What kind of revisions? Well, for example: "Men and women who commit adultery shall be punished based on the circumstances by one of the following punishments: lashing, stoning."

As in stoning to death. That's the proposed improvement to Article 21. Article 23 specifies that said punishment shall be performed in public. Mr. Qarizada gave an interview to Reuters, explaining that the reintroduction of stoning was really no big deal: You'd have to have witnesses, and they'd better be consistent. "The judge asks each witness many questions," he said, "and if one answer differs from other witnesses then the court will reject the claim." So that's all right then.

Stoning is making something of a comeback in the world's legal codes — in October the Sultan of Brunei announced plans to put it on his books. Nevertheless, Kabul has the unique distinction of proposing to introduce the practice on America's watch. Afghanistan is an American protectorate; its kleptocrat president is an American client, kept alive these last twelve years only by American arms. The Afghan campaign is this nation's longest war — and our longest un-won war: That's to say, nowadays we can't even lose in under a decade. I used to say that, 24 hours after the last Western soldier leaves Afghanistan, it will be as if we were never there. But it's already as if we were never there: The last Christian church in the country was razed to the ground in 2010.

At this point, Americans sigh wearily and shrug, "Afghanistan, the graveyard of empire," or sneer, "If they want to live in a seventh-century s***hole, f*** 'em." But neither assertion is true. Do five minutes' googling, and you'll find images from the Sixties and early Seventies of women in skirts above the knee listening to the latest Beatles releases in Kabul record stores. True, a stone's throw (so to speak) from the capital, King Zahir's relatively benign reign was not always in evidence. But, even so, if it's too much to undo the barbarism of centuries, why could the supposed superpower not even return the country to the fitful civilization of the disco era? The American imperium has lasted over twice as long as the Taliban's rule — and yet, unlike them, we left no trace.

Seven years ago, in my book America Alone, I quoted a riposte to the natives by a British administrator, and it proved such a hit with readers that for the next couple of years at live stage appearances, from Vancouver to Vienna, Madrid to Melbourne, I would be asked to reprise it — like the imperialist version of a Beatles cover band. The chap in question was Sir Charles Napier, out in India and faced with the practice of suttee — the Hindu tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. General Napier's response was impeccably multicultural: "You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours."

India is better off without suttee, just as Afghanistan would be better off without child marriage, honor killing, death for apostasy, and stoning for adultery. What my readers liked about my little bit of Napier karaoke at live appearances was its cultural cool. It wasn't an argument for more war, more bombs, more killing, but for more cultural confidence. In the long run, that's more effective than a drone. For the least worst two-thirds of a century in its history, the vast fractious tribal dump of Sudan was run by about 200 British civil servants. These days, I doubt the smallest Obamacare branch office makes do with fewer than 200 "navigators." Yet, alert to the obsolescence of the mid-20th-century social programs, the Right remains largely blind to the similarly too-big-to-fail model of the American way of war. No serious person can argue that we're not spending enough money. The problem is we waste so much of it — to the point where in Afghanistan the Western occupation accounts for 97 percent of GDP, and all we have built is another squalid sharia state.

The American way of war is to win the war in nothing flat, and then spend the next decade losing the peace. The American people have digested that to the point where they assume that, no matter how "unbelievably small" (as Kerry promised of Syria) the next intervention is, it's a fool's errand. The rest of the world grasps it, too. If Hamid Karzai treats Washington with contempt and gets away with it, why expect the Iranians to behave any differently? A nation responsible for almost half the planet's military spending goes into battle with the sentimental multiculti fantasist twaddle of Greg Mortensen's Three Cups of Tea as its strategy manual — and then wonders why it can't beat goatherds with fertilizer.

Incidentally, I'd be interested to know which particular fellow at the Pentagon ordered that a copy of Three Cups of Tea be included in every Kandahar-bound kitbag. He should be fired. Come to think of it, he should be stoned.

Friday, December 27, 2013

American Muslim Children Taught to Hate

The astonishing and disturbing findings of an undercover reporter inside America's mosques.

By Dave Gaubatz

http://m.clarionproject.org

Mon, January 23, 2012

In the last five years I have personally visited over 250 Islamic Centers, mosques, and Islamic Schools throughout America. The goal of my research has been to determine what Islamic leaders are teaching the young and innocent Muslim children. The findings are abhorrent, sad, unbelievable and frightening. Most disturbing is the fact our government is keeping this dangerous fact from the American people.

Muslim children attending mosques and Islamic schools are being taught to hate America, our government, our military personnel and its non Muslim population. In this article I will identify three significant mosques in America that are leading the way in teaching Muslim children to hate and influencing them to commit violent acts inside our country.

In America we have been programmed by the media and political leaders to believe violent teachings of Islam are only being taught to children in Palestine. We have watched the Muslim Palestinian children spew their taught hatred of the Israelis. What Americans are not being shown (due to political correctness) are that Muslim children throughout the world and specifically inside America are also being taught violence and hatred.

Children as young as seven years old are being taught that to assimilate with America is to disrespect and dishonor Islam. They are being taught that our military personnel are the enemies of Islam, and that it is justifiable to kill anyone who dishonors or oppresses the Islamic ideology.

During my research I have identified numerous mosques that are teaching young Muslim children to hate America and are leading them to commit future violent acts against our country and innocent people. I would like to focus on three such mosques.

Anwar al-Awlaki

Dar al Hijrah, Falls Church, Virginia

My researchers and I spent several weeks at the Dar Al Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Virginia. Almost immediately we were informed to obtain our study material from the Halaco Bookstore which is located nearby the mosque. It was very apparent upon entering the store and reviewing the materials that the bookstore provides materials for the Sunni (Wahhabi) Muslim population across the U.S. and specifically for Dar Al Hijrah.

Anwar al-Awlaki was an imam at the Dar al Hijrah Mosque from January
2001 until 2002. Three of the 9/11 hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar, Nawaf
al-Hazmi and Hani Hanjour, attended some of Awlaki’s sermons at this
mosque. I was able to spend many hours talking with store personnel and was invited to the home of one employee to discuss Islamic issues.

There is a large section in the store dedicated to the education of the Muslim children. I discovered materials that are being sent to Islamic schools across America. Much of the material deals with Sharia (Islamic law) and jihad.

One of the DVD’s and books I obtained was by an Islamic scholar Ahmad Sakr. Sakr travels the U.S. visiting Islamic schools and educates them in Sharia law. I have watched one of his videos in which he tells the young children our government is evil and not to follow the laws of our country and Americas government leaders will all go to hell.

The material provided by Dar Al Hijrah and their selected Islamic bookstore also was filled with violent jihad. There were manuals informing the readers how to destroy America, and how to kill anyone who oppresses Islam. They are told how to obtain weapons, including weapons of mass destruction. Although all of the above is very disturbing and should (and actually is) against the law, the Muslim leaders of Falls Church are allowed by our government to indoctrinate the Muslim children into future violence against our country.

Al Farooq, Nashville, Tennessee

The Al Farooq mosque in Nashville, Tennessee is even more disturbing. My research team and I spent two weeks at the Al Farooq mosque. The mosque was Sunni and had the typical violent books and DVD’s/videos pertaining to the overthrow of any government system that oppresses Islam. They also had numerous teachings from current Islamic leaders operating in America who are teaching the Muslim population to hate our country and its people.

Although this should frighten all concerned citizens, there was even sadder and disturbing intelligence collected at this mosque. Lately, we have all read about the child brides and forced marriages in Afghanistan and in Saudi Arabia. What most Americans do not realize is that child marriages are occurring throughout our country and specifically in Nashville, Tennessee.

One young 7 year old Muslim girl at Al Farooq talked to our researcher about being beaten by her Islamic leaders and being married to a Muslim man. I reported the matter to the Nashville authorities, but almost from the beginning they were reluctant to intercede because this was a religious institution and more importantly to them it was Islamic.

Senior law enforcement authorities of the Nashville police department informed me they were afraid of being sued by Islamic organizations such as CAIR (Council on American Islamic Relations) if they got involved, and it would be a political nightmare to get anything done at the mosque.

What bothered me most of all is the fact I contacted an Islamic organizations to help this innocent Muslim child and they also balked. This reinforced to me that Islamic law (Sharia) is alive and very active inside our country, to include child marriages.

Siraj Wahhaj

Taqwa, Brooklyn, New York

The next mosque I investigated is led by an Islamic scholar who is not only a major fundraiser for CAIR but travels throughout the U.S. teaching his violent ideology of Islam. He is Imam Siraj Wahhaj. For those who have never visited the Islamic district of Brooklyn it would come to a surprise to many that the area around At Taqwa is similar to the Wahhabi land of Saudi Arabia. I have previously described Wahhaj as the most dangerous man in America. I have reviewed hundreds of his Friday (Juma) mosque lectures.

In one speech he tells his followers that around the world Muslims will wake up and say,“I don’t want to follow the way of the colonial masters any more. I want the Sharia. I want Islam. We want to be ruled by Islam. And all we have to do is go back to that golden generation.”

He routinely called America an evil country and is a strong leader in developing Sharia law inside America. His violent lectures are available to the adult and child Muslims throughout America.

"Those who struggle for Allah, it doesn't matter what kind of weapons, I'm telling you it doesn't matter! You don't need nuclear weapons or even guns! If you have faith in Allah and a knife!! If Allah wants you to win, you will win! Because Allah is the only one who fights. And when his hand is over your hand. whoever is at war against my friends, I declare war on them." (From a video of a sermon from Sept. 28, 1991 by Sirah Wahhaj called "The Afghanistan Jihad," given in Toronto, Canada.)

“If we go to war, brothers and sisters – and one day we will, believe me – that’s why you’re commanded [to fight in] jihad. When Allah demands us to fight, we’re not stopping and nobody’s stopping us.” (Sermon by Siraj Wahhaj entitled “Stand Up to Justice,” delivered on May 8, 1992 and distributed as a video.)Islamic teachings such as this are what led Major Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood Murderer, to commit his acts.

Although I have only focused on three mosques that lead the way in introducing Muslim children to violence and hatred, there are hundreds scattered across the U.S. Few states are immune from this growing threat. The violence spewed by these Islamic leaders will ultimately lead to more violence in the name of Islam. I have witnessed firsthand the violence being taught. There are numerous such Islamic centers in North Carolina, Florida, Virginia, New York and California.

Unless Muslim parents decry the violent teachings of Islam to their children, there will continue to be more and more Siraj Wahhaj-type Islamic leaders in America. The ultimate result will be the suffering of America as we now see in France, Britain and Canada.

Dave Gaubatz spent 20 years as an active duty USAF (Special Agent/OSI), 3.5 years as a civilian 1811 Federal Agent trained by the U.S. State Department in Arabic, and was the first U.S. Federal Agent to enter Iraq in 2003. He is also a counterterrorism counterintelligence officer. He is co-author of the book Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America. He can be reached at davegaubatz@gmail.com.