Tuesday, August 05, 2014
Gaslight Anthem go off the rails and Get Hurt
Bernard Zuel
July 27, 2014
Ready to rock: Brian Fallon, second from left, and the band.
To some, Brian Fallon - the centre but certainly not the whole of Gaslight Anthem - is a New Jersey bloke who looks like he probably works construction and sees bands on a Friday night, so there’s something on while he downs another beer.
That he writes intensely passionate songs and sings them with even more intensity, in a band that has the push of the Clash and the earthiness of the Replacements, is one thing that surprises people. Another surprise for those folks is just how good Gaslight Anthem – Fallon, Alex Rosamilia, Alex Levine and Benny Horowitz – are.
A band with soul and power and yet a good portion of subtlety, lyrically and musically, they announced themselves in 2008 with the Springsteen-meets-Clash force of their second album, The 59 Sound. Then two albums later, with 2012’s Handwritten (which took some of its cues from another iconic band, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers), they finally forced their way into the mainstream while still sounding like they could play that Friday night bar.
This would be the point, then, when commercial sense would have you work that furrow a bit longer, extend the “Gaslight brand” with a repeat dose of Handwritten. But after two years (and one excellent solo project for Fallon), the coming album is striking out into new territory. Not wholly new, not abandoning everything, but expanding the palette with more grooves, more riffs, different instruments and a sense of adventure.
"We didn't want to lose ourselves when we changed," Fallon says. "A lot of bands say: we hate our old records or that's not us any more blah blah blah. I don't feel that way at all. I feel very passionate about all those records that we've done."
The “but” unspoken in that answer, comes in something he told Fairfax Media 18 months ago: "I think if you don't go out and challenge yourself, put yourself in awkward situations, you can forget really easily and ... you kind of check out and become Eric Clapton in the white suit.”
This new album is probably exactly what happens when they say that to themselves.
"A lot of people ask us: you had a lot of success on your last record, why would you change it now? And I was like: I don't think there's anything else to do,” he says. “Unless you're the Ramones and you invented a style, completely unique to yourselves, then you can’t not change forever.”
And the reason, at least in part, is who has come before them. “We are the Tom Petty and the Bruce Springsteen and the Bob Dylan kids, and also the Clash and the Replacements kids,” Fallon says. “When you look at those bands, they have always changed and we are the product of that environment. We had the sense that maybe now is the time because we had gotten to a place where we were comfortable and being comfortable is really a killer, like a shark in the water.”
They’ve avoided the shark with a surprising injection of the kind of swaggering riffs some classic rock bands would have enjoyed having and some classic punk bands would have enjoyed mocking.
"Some of it’s like [Led] Zeppelin, you know," he chuckles. "I'd never really listened to that kind of music before and I started to pick up other records like that and I noticed a lot of my favourite songs had riffs in them, even Nirvana. I was like, ‘we don't have any riffs, we need riffs’, so I was trying to write riffs inside of [what are] essentially folk songs.”
He pauses and then, with a big laugh, adds a final note for those who pigeonhole him or his band. “I would have probably used an orchestra if I didn't feel it was going too far. The next record I probably won't be so afraid to use it."
Clinton Admits He Passed on Killing Bin Laden
Posted By Mark Tapson On August 5, 2014 @ 12:54 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 2 Comments
In a memorably explosive 2006 interview with Chris Wallace, former President Bill Clinton went off on a finger-wagging “tear,” as Wallace put it, when questioned about whether he had done enough during his terms in office to get Osama bin Laden. “I got closer to killing him than anybody has gotten since,” growled a furious Clinton. Now a recently-released audiotape confirms that Clinton did indeed have at least one clear opportunity to kill the world’s most wanted man in 1998 – and passed on it, allowing bin Laden to live to mastermind the 9/11 attacks.
Last week Australian Michael Kroger, the former head of the Liberal Party in the state of Victoria, unveiled on Australia’s Sky News a never-before-released audio of Clinton speaking to a group of businessmen in Melbourne on September 10, 2001, recorded a mere ten hours before the first plane hit the World Trade Center. In that recording, made with the former president’s knowledge according to Kroger, Clinton responded thusly in response to a question about international terrorism:
And I’m just saying, you know, if I were Osama bin Laden — he’s a very smart guy, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about him — and I nearly got him once. I nearly got him. And I could have killed him, but I would have to destroy a little town called Kandahar in Afghanistan and kill 300 innocent women and children, and then I would have been no better than him. And so I didn’t do it.Questioned by Fox News about the Clinton recording, Michael Scheuer, chief of the bin Laden unit from 1995 to 1999, replied that Clinton was a “disgrace” and a “monumental liar” for claiming that he didn’t kill bin Laden because of the collateral damage. He asserted that only Taliban and bin Laden and his crew would’ve died if Clinton had given the go-ahead for a missile strike on the region in December of 1998. But Clinton didn’t act, said Scheuer, because he’s a “coward morally” and because he’s “more concerned, like Obama, with what the world thinks about him.”
In the 2006 Wallace interview, Clinton referenced a wildly controversial ABC miniseries called The Path to 9/11*, which had aired a mere two weeks earlier and which Clinton angrily called part of a right-wing “disinformation” campaign against him. That docudrama, based in part on The 9/11 Commission Report, dramatized the historical thread connecting the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, Islamic attacks on American interests throughout the Clinton era, the failure to connect the dots under Bush, and the attacks of that September morning in 2001.
Prior to its premiere, a false accusation of “conservative bias” on the part of the filmmakers quickly spun into leftist hysteria that the $30+ million miniseries was a “well-honed propaganda operation” on the part of a stealth cabal of conservatives. Clinton and his supporters, fearing the miniseries would tarnish his political legacy, claimed it was full of lies and pulled out all the stops to suppress it, including threats by the Senate Democratic leadership, led by Harry Reid, to pull ABC’s license if the miniseries aired. With a few very minor edits, the miniseries squeaked by and went on to high ratings; but it has not aired since and ABC-Disney refuses to release a DVD [check out John Ziegler’s riveting documentary Blocking the Path to 9/11 for the whole outrageous story].
The miniseries featured one particular scene vetted, as every scene was, by a battery of ABC lawyers, in which a CIA team and its Afghan allies have bin Laden in its sights, call the White House for approval to make the hit, and are denied the green light. Clinton and his people attacked this scene as an outrageous fabrication.
But in May 2012, CBS’ 60 Minutes broadcast a startling segment featuring former CIA officer Hank Crumpton, Deputy Director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, who discussed with interviewer Lara Logan his participation in operations to capture and/or kill bin Laden well before 9/11.
Crumpton complained about “the lack of response on the part of the administration” and described one incident in which his team sighted bin Laden. It sounds very similar to the dramatized scene from Path to 9/11:
Crumpton: Our human sources took us to a village uh, far, not far from Kandahar –
Logan: And what did you see there?
Crumpton: We saw a security detail, a convoy, and we saw bin Laden exit the vehicle.
Logan: Clearly.
Crumpton: Clearly. And we had – the optics were spot on, beaming back to us, CIA headquarters. We immediately alerted the White House, and the Clinton administration’s response was, “Well, it will take several hours for the TLAMs, the cruise missiles launched from submarines, to reach that objective. So you need to tell us where bin Laden will be five or six hours from now.” The frustration was enormous.
Logan: So at that moment you wanted to kill him.
Crumpton: Yes.
Logan: But you couldn’t get permission.
Crumpton: Correct.Logan then narrates that Crumpton “couldn’t get permission to do anything, including allowing the CIA’s Afghan agents on the ground to attack bin Laden’s compound.”
Now the Clinton admission serves as further vindication for the Path to 9/11’s veracity; in fact, Scheuer also stated, as he has on numerous previous occasions, that the Clinton administration passed on as many as tenopportunities to nail bin Laden.
Imagine how different the world would be if President Clinton had pulled the trigger on bin Laden in 1998. There would have been no 9/11, says Michael Scheuer, and probably no Iraq war. “I worked hard to try to kill him,” Clinton insisted in the Wallace interview. “I authorized a finding for the CIA to kill him. We contracted with people to kill him. I got closer to killing him than anybody has gotten since.” But when he could have, he didn’t. Even if it truly was out of concern for Kandahari civilians, this question posed rhetorically by Scheuer cuts to the heart of the matter: “Who was he elected to protect, Kandaharis or Americans?”
* Full disclosure: The Path to 9/11 was written and produced by my friend Cyrus Nowrasteh, whom I assisted on the project.
Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.
Subscribe to Frontpage’s TV show, The Glazov Gang, and LIKE it on Facebook.
Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://www.frontpagemag.com
Monday, August 04, 2014
Israel’s endgame in Gaza
By CAROLINE B. GLICK
http://www.jpost.com/
July 31, 2014
IDF soldiers of the Paratroopers Brigade guarding and neutralizing tunnels that were dug by the Hamas organization and leading into Israel, Khan Younis, Gaza, July 30, 2014.Ziv Koren—Polaris
The fighting is still raging in Gaza. Each day the IDF destroys more and more tunnels and other terrorist infrastructure. Each day, we discover new facets of Hamas’s depravity.
The three soldiers from the Maglan commando unit who were killed on Tuesday in the southern Gaza Strip, were buried in the rubble of a UN clinic. They entered the building to seal a terror tunnel whose entry shaft was located inside the clinic.
A Hamas terrorist was inside the tunnel waiting for them. He detonated the building. Works out that Hamas had booby-trapped the structure, hiding 12 barrels with 80 kg. of explosives each, in a wall.
In a press briefing following the bombing, the commander of the Gaza Division reported that to date Hamas has used more than a thousand improvised explosive devices. Its bombs have destroyed thousands of buildings in the Gaza Strip.
OC Southern Command Maj.-Gen. Sami Turgeman told reporters that with the amount of concrete Hamas used in its tunnels it could have built 100 kindergartens, two hospitals, 20 schools and 20 clinics.
Clearly Hamas’s priorities do not include economic or social development projects for the residents of the area. Dual use materials will always be used first for terrorist purposes. Concern for the welfare of Gaza’s citizenry is at best a distant second.
Indeed, the terror group’s practice of using clinics, kindergartens, schools, hospitals and mosques as weapons storage areas, missile launching sites and command centers makes clear that the welfare of Gaza residents doesn’t even rank in Hamas’s list of organizational goals. As a consequence, the concept of providing “humanitarian aid” to Gaza with Hamas in power is laughable. Every smidgen of aid it receives will go to Hamas’s war machine.
And this brings us to the heart of the matter.
Even in the midst of the fighting it is apparent that we are moving toward the endgame.
The question is, what is the desired end-state? How will we know if we have won? Certainly following America’s lead is not an option. Indeed, the Obama administration is the greatest constraint Israel faces today on its road to victory.
From the actions and words of senior administration officials, it is easy to ascertain where President Barack Obama wants this conflict to end.
First, the administration wants Hamas to remain armed and in control of Gaza. This point was made clear by Lt.-Gen. Michael Flynn, who heads the US Defense Intelligence Agency. In congressional testimony Flynn told US lawmakers, “If Hamas were destroyed and gone, we would probably end up with something much worse.”
This of course is absurd. Hamas wants to kill every Jew in the world. As a practical matter then, it is impossible for any successor regime to be worse. But from Israel’s perspective, more important than discovering that the head of the DIA is an idiot, is Flynn’s revelation that the US wishes to save Hamas from Israel.
The administration’s other positions have all been aligned with this strategic goal of maintaining Hamas in power. Both the US draft cease-fire agreement that Israel rejected, and the White House readout of President Obama’s telephone conversation with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Sunday night made clear that the US wants Hamas to be able to prosper.
Secretary of State John Kerry’s cease-fire proposal was explicit on this issue.
A permanent cease-fire deal, it read, must include “arrangements to secure the opening of the crossings, allow the entry of goods and people and… transfer funds to Gaza for the payment of salaries for public employees… ” The last component of the administration’s desired end-state of the war is to use it as a means to force Israel to concede land to the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria, or at least use Israel’s refusal to do so as a means for blaming Israel for continued Palestinian aggression.
Obama made this clear in his conversation with Netanyahu. As the White House’s summary of the conversation reported, “The president stressed the US view that, ultimately, any lasting solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must ensure the disarmament of terrorist groups and the demilitarization of Gaza.”
In other words, the Palestinians will keep shooting until Israel coughs up Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, and Obama is okay with that.
To summarize, the Obama administration wishes to end the war with Hamas armed and in charge of Gaza, enjoying open borders to the world, and rolling in the dough of international donor dollars and euros, and so in a position to replenish its arsenals and rebuild its tunnels.
The US seeks as well to use this end-state as a means of reinstating its pressure on Israel to surrender land in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem to the Palestinians.
Israel’s end-state is of course entirely different. Indeed, if the US gets what it wants, then Israel will have lost the war.
The question is, given that this is the US’s position, what can Israel do to win? As the scandalous Federal Aviation Administration flight ban last week made clear, the administration has effectively limitless means to harm Israel. The ban served to instill massive uncertainty into Israel’s export- and tourism-based economy. As Israeli leaders noted, it was the greatest gift to terrorists the US had ever given. Moreover, it was unwarranted and prejudicial.
Whereas the FAA claimed that it acted out of an abundance of caution after a Hamas missile landed a mile from Ben-Gurion Airport, the fact is that such caution exists nowhere else. There is no FAA flight ban on Pakistan, where a civilian aircraft was shot down last month, or in Ukraine. There is no FAA flight ban in Afghanistan or Yemen. Clearly a double standard was used against Israel.
And predictably, when US Sen. Ted Cruz stood up to the administration and demanded an explanation of the FAA’s action and its use of a double standard against Israel, the State Department accused him of lack of concern for US air carriers and passengers.
It was a testament to Cruz’s moral courage that he was willing to risk being wrongly accused of reckless indifference to the safety of US airline passengers in order to decry the administration’s prejudicial treatment of Israel.
And while Sen. Cruz played a central role in revoking the flight ban after 36 hours, the act itself showed how easy it is for the US to hurt Israel without openly attacking it. Other punitive actions have already been undertaken.
While the administration acts in accordance with congressional will and resupplies the IDF and increases the US investment in Iron Dome, it has stopped providing visa services to Israelis interested in traveling to the US. According to I24 News, the US Embassy in Tel Aviv is not issuing travel visas except in emergency circumstances, due to staff reductions during the war.
In light of the constraints Israel faces from the administration, certain operational goals that might otherwise have been achievable must be ruled out. Other actions that might have been reasonable, make no sense, under the circumstances.
The government has determined that the ground operation will go on until the tunnels are destroyed. Whether the operation takes days or weeks or longer, Netanyahu has made it clear that Israel will continue to operate on the ground – even in the framework of a cease-fire – to destroy Hamas’s tunnels.
If we assume that Netanyahu and his ministers will continue to withstand US pressure and continue the operation until it has been completed, the question becomes, what happens then? To neutralize Hamas as a military threat in the future, Israel only needs to secure one goal: In any cease-fire arrangement, Gaza’s borders must remain sealed.
Egypt must continue to prevent smuggling from Sinai to Gaza.
Israel must maintain its naval blockade.
Gaza must remain cut off from the international banking system.
Hamas is fighting to open these borders. And if it makes any gains in this area, Hamas will win. Assuming Israel destroys all or most of Hamas’s offensive capabilities before the fighting ends, the only way to keep Hamas from fighting again is to prevent it from resupplying.
To achieve its goal of keeping Gaza’s borders shut, Israel needs to do two things. First, it needs to complete its operations on the ground as quickly as possible. The faster the IDF removes our ground forces from Gaza the more difficult it will be for Obama to demand that Israel end its maritime blockade of the Gaza coast.
Second, Israel must avoid any cease-fire agreement that involves any international supervision or presence in Gaza. The best option for Israel would be a cease-fire in the form of a letter from Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas setting out broad conditions of a cease-fire arrangement.
Any cease-fire that involves US guarantees or supervision or international guarantees or supervision will be an invitation for renewed pressure on Israel and Egypt to open the borders of Gaza and allow Hamas to rebuild its machinery of murder.
The same is the case for international peacekeepers.
Any agreement that involves the deployment of foreign forces to Gaza for any purpose is an agreement that imports human shields to Gaza. As has been Hezbollah’s practice with UN forces in south Lebanon for the past four decades, foreign forces will not interfere with any Hamas operations, but through their very presence in on the ground, they will impede the IDF’s capacity to fight Hamas in the event that such operations becomes necessary.
Netanyahu has stated that Israel’s seeks the demilitarization of Gaza. There are only two ways to achieve that goal – through the reinstitution of Israeli military control over Gaza, and through attrition.
In light of the Obama administration’s support for Hamas’s war goals and actions it has already undertaken to undermine Israel’s war effort, it is fairly clear that it would be unwise for Israel to reconquer Gaza at this time. The price Obama would extract for such a move would in all likelihood outweigh the benefits Israel would gain from physically damaging Hamas directly.
The other option – demilitarization through attrition – is consequently Israel’s strongest option for a victorious endgame today. And attrition can only be secured if Gaza’s borders remain sealed.
War is an ugly thing. War with terrorist murderers who lack a shred of human decency is a very ugly thing.
There are no guarantees that Israel will not have to fight again. And if Obama gets even some of what he is demanding, Israel will have to fight again, and soon.
Under these circumstances, Israel’s best bet is to destroy the tunnels quickly and secure cease-fire terms that keep Gaza isolated to reduce to a minimum Hamas’s ability to fight again.
‘The Strain’ reclaims vampires from teen girls
There are no sparkly, hunky bloodsuckers in Guillermo del Toro’s tale of terror.
By Scott D. Pierce
http://www.sltrib.com/
August 1, 2014
Corey Stoll in a scene from FX's new vampire drama, 'The Strain.' Michael Gibson/FX
By Scott D. Pierce
http://www.sltrib.com/
August 1, 2014
Corey Stoll in a scene from FX's new vampire drama, 'The Strain.' Michael Gibson/FX
Thanks to "The Strain," vampires aren’t just for teenage girls anymore.
After years of bloodsuckers-as-romantic leads in TV shows like "The Vampire Diaries," "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "True Blood," "The Strain" takes things in an entirely different direction. In this FX series, you won’t see any of the sparkly vampires who populate "Twilight."
In "The Strain," horrifying monsters feed on humans and infect some of them — turning them into inhuman monsters, too.
"You need to see the first feeding," said executive producer Guillermo del Toro. "And you need to see the vampire drink the person like you would drink a little box of Capri Sun. And then discard it with equal abandon.
"Like, what do you do with a Capri Sun? You drink it, and you don’t go, ‘Now, I’ll give you my love.’ No, you just crush it and throw it away."
Yeah, no vampires sparkle in "The Strain."
The series is based on a series of books by del Toro and executive producer Chuck Hogan. "The Strain" was originally envisioned as a series, but del Toro turned to publishing when he couldn’t sell it to TV in 2006. The show he pitched to Fox was what’s airing on FX now — it began with a jet filled with dead passengers. Just four survivors. Epidemiologists investigated and, eventually, discovered a horrible creature bent on destroying mankind.
The 2006 pitch meeting did not go well because Fox executives were seeing "a romantic conception of vampires — sort of GQ version of vampires," del Toro said. "And I get in with this pitch about vampires being a truly revolting spiritually and physically revolting parasites. … They said, ‘Could you turn it into a comedy?’ And I said, ‘No.’ "
He and Hogan wrote the books; eventually, FX won a bidding war to make the series. And make no mistake — "The Strain" is scary.
"I didn’t want to go into my basement after watching the pilot," said Mia Maestro, who stars as epidemiologist Nora Martinez.
This is not Dracula crawling out of his coffin and killing a few dozen people. The monster in "The Strain" does come out of a big box filled with dirt, but he carries an infection that could wipe out the human race.
"We deal with great specificity with the biology of these vampires — how they work, how they came into being," said executive producer Carlton Cuse ("Lost," "Bates Motel"). "And then as the story evolves, we kind of come to understand that there’s sort of a spiritual origin to this story."
According to del Toro, he set out to capitalize on fear "that the world may end tomorrow. We feel very exposed to plagues, viral pandemics, terrorism, cyber hacking."
It’s about a viral pandemic taking the form of a vampire. And "The Strain" was terrifying from the get-go.
"These guys are not going to take you to dinner. The greatest tragedy in their life is not their bleaching session got canceled," del Toro said. "These are really brutal creatures. … These are not tortured romantics.
The IRS’s God Complex
The tax agency signs a secret pact with atheists, promising it will investigate 99 churches.
Is the Internal Revenue Service a threat to religious liberty?
As the IRS continues to come under well-aimed fire for harassing conservative groups, on Friday it secured a final court order formalizing what amounts to a secret agreement to monitor the pulpits of ill-favored churches. The serious danger, as former Justice Department attorney J. Christian Adams told Fox News, is that the IRS will start treating “theology as politics,” and regulate it accordingly.
Lovers of liberty should be very concerned.
According to a June 27 IRS letter to the Justice Department, 99 churches merit “high priority examination” for allegedly illegal electioneering activities. The letter was sent in reference to a now-dismissed lawsuit filed by the atheist group known as the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF). The suit originally was a rather broad one, demanding not only that the IRS enforce prohibitions against churches’ endorsing candidates specifically, but also that churches should be “required to file” what it described as “detailed annual information” that would force them (if they are like other nonprofits) to “expend substantial time and resources.”
With the end of the suit, those filings presumably will not be required (though a second suit, on just that subject, remains open). But IRS’s monitoring of alleged electioneering activities could still be quite onerous.
Traditionally, churches have been free to do just about anything short of outright candidate endorsements. Conservatives have suggested that not even that prohibition is enforced against traditionally liberal churches in black communities and that FFRF isn’t much concerned with such groups. But at least for conservative-leaning churches, FFRF has a much more restrictive agenda in mind.
In a 2012 letter to the IRS, for example, FFRF complained that Bishop Robert Morlino of the Madison, Wis., diocese, had dared send out an election-season letter stressing the Catholic Church’s opposition to abortion and homosexual marriage. The letter said that “no Catholic, in good conscience,” may vote for candidates who are “pro-choice,” who support same-sex marriage, or “who would promote laws that would infringe upon our religious liberties and freedom of conscience.”
To FFRF, it didn’t matter that the bishop did not mention a single candidate by name, instead leaving it up to voters to apply this generic, well-established teaching of the Catholic Church. “The Diocese of Madison appears to have inappropriately intervened in a political campaign,” wrote the group’s staff attorney, Rebecca Markert. How? “Those issues are generally what distinguish Republican and Democratic social platforms,” Markert explained. “Likewise, the paragraph about ‘religious freedom and freedom of conscience’ is a clear reference to the current HHS mandate of the incumbent candidate for president, Barack Obama. Though he does not explicitly state, ‘Vote for Romney’ or any other specific candidate, it is clear to the reader that Morlino is urging members of his diocese to vote against President Obama and other Democratic candidates.” The letter concluded with a plea for the IRS to “commence an immediate investigation of the Diocese of Madison.”
Likewise, FFRF asked the IRS to sanction Billy Graham’s ministry for newspaper ads urging voters to consider the same three issues, so “that we will turn our hearts back to God.” (Oh, the horror!)
These FFRC letters are chilling. Indeed, if the IRS actually enforced FFRF’s suggested standards, it would be downright frightening. It would mean that not only that pastors could be forbidden from candidate endorsements but also that they could not even inform their congregants about the real-world tenets of their faith. The traditional bright line between explicit electioneering and the sorts of things FFRF’s letter wants stopped exists for good reason: Freedom of conscience, and of faith practices, is the founding freedom of this nation. If government dares to forbid preachers from mere religious instruction — while the preachers still leave it up to their flocks to apply that instruction according to their understanding and their consciences — then there is nothing to stop government from infringing on other pulpit pronouncements with ever-more-intrusive regulatory strictures.
The standard suggested by FFRF would be far more than a gentle slippery slope toward trammeled religious freedom; it would be an avalanche that buries and then asphyxiates liberty.
Worse, by prohibiting clergy from making pleas for protecting religious liberty at the ballot box, FFRF would make churches the only institutions in America denied free-speech rights on their own behalf. Anybody, from any platform, including a pulpit, should be able to argue for generic support of candidates who support the freedom the speaker is utilizing. But FFRF would trample that — dare I say it — God-given right, by forbidding the church and its personnel from advocating for religious liberty.
So, with all that as background, what exactly did the IRS finalize last week? The atheist group withdrew its suit, so one would ordinarily think that it lost — right?
Not even close: FFRF has been crowing loudly about its “victory.” It asked for its suit to be dismissed “without prejudice” because the IRS was able to assure FFRF, in private discussions, that the agency would indeed take an active role in monitoring churches. That’s what the IRS’s June 27 letter to the DOJ, which specified that 99 churches warrant “high priority examination,” explained.
In fact, the IRS on July 22 filed a motion with the court specifically to deny the request of another church, which had become a party to the suit, for documents pertaining to the “agreement” between IRS and FFRF. In other words, shockingly, the IRS was now taking the side of the atheist group that had nominally sued it. One week later, FFRF filed a motion making clear, as its co-president Annie Laurie Gaylor put it, that the dismissal of its suit applies only if “our agreement has teeth.”
So even though the IRS will now put “teeth” into its monitoring of churches, the general public will not be allowed to find out exactly what those teeth can bite into (according to the IRS’s July 22 motion against release of documents, which the judge granted August 1).
Considering the IRS’s well-publicized penchant for burying or erasing evidence (even from Congress) of its bias against conservative political groups, this secrecy about enforcement teeth in the church-electioneering case should raise concerns from every traditionalist church and faith group.
It has been well documented that the Obama administration and its bureaucratic minions think little of traditional notions of religious freedom. Its recent executive order barring federal contractors — including faith-based groups — from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation is one more example of this authoritarian impulse.
Congress thus should investigate this IRS-FFRF agreement, to ensure that, in actual practice, it results in nothing nefarious.
— Quin Hillyer is a contributing editor for National Review Online. Follow him on Twitter: @QuinHillyer.
Sunday, August 03, 2014
Film Review: 'A Most Wanted Man'
BY DAVID DENBY
July 28, 2014 issue
"A Most Wanted Man,” in which Philip Seymour Hoffman gives his last major performance, is set in Hamburg, the city where Mohamed Atta and some of his co-conspirators lived prior to the 9/11 attacks. A few years later, German and American intelligence officers, anguished by earlier lapses, are scrambling to disrupt any further terrorist operations there. The movie is based on John le Carré’s 2008 novel, and it’s driven by his contempt for the crudity of American intelligence methods in the Bush-Cheney era. In this telling, the Americans have corrupted the German intelligence services except for one brilliant and eccentric man, a high-functioning wreck named Günther Bachmann (Hoffman). Gut-heavy, relentless, sleepless, womanless, Bachmann is both subtle and brutal. Like George Smiley, le Carré’s earlier creation, he plays the long game. His special unit cultivates contacts in Hamburg’s refugee community who might know something; Bachmann finds a quarry, turns him, and moves up the ladder of culpability until he can force someone to betray the players who finance terrorist operations. Le Carré wrote a mordant, morally complicated book. The movie, which was written by Andrew Bovell and directed by Anton Corbijn, is much condensed and a little tepid; Bachmann’s knowing and cynical tirades about the nature of anti-terrorist work have been cut back. Still, it’s le Carré’s material; it was shot in dark, lurid, vital Hamburg; Hoffman is the star; and I was completely held.
Bachmann’s immediate concern is a strange young man, with a thick black beard and frightened eyes, named Issa Karpov (Grigoriy Dobrygin), a half-Russian, half-Chechen Muslim who washes up in Hamburg after being tortured by the Russians. The handsome Dobrygin, a well-known Russian actor, gives an affecting performance as a traumatized man holding on to his austere religion in a rich, sinful Western city. In the book, Karpov delivers speeches with a manic eloquence tinged with irony. In the movie, he’s tentative, withdrawn, and fascinating in his brooding silence. An idealistic young German human-rights lawyer (Rachel McAdams), who may be falling in love with Karpov, assists him in a remarkable claim: it seems that Karpov’s father, a vicious Russian criminal who is now dead, had deposited millions of dollars in a Hamburg bank for him, and he has come to the city to collect the money.
Is Karpov a jihadist or just a pious and very wealthy refugee? Bachmann persuades the bank to pay out the money, which, he reasons, might attract Dr. Faisal Abdullah (Homayoun Ershadi), a Muslim scholar and humanitarian in Hamburg, whose charity work Bachmann suspects is a front for bankrolling extremists. Bachmann manipulates everyone to lay a trap for Abdullah, but the regular intelligence forces, German and American, close in on Karpov. They’re sure that he’s a terrorist, and they want him off the streets and “interrogated.” Both the movie and the book are haunted by le Carré’s profound bitterness over the way that intelligence services—even the “good” ones—inevitably chew up ordinary people. We live in the fallen le Carré world, where deceit and betrayal lurk beneath every assertion. Only the naïve tell the truth.
The movie, as if in homage to Smiley’s Cold War days, returns to the old-fashioned trappings of espionage: cigarette-pack drop-offs of intelligence, planted bugs and surveillance cameras, meetings in forlorn dives. Corbijn’s previous film, “The American,” which starred George Clooney as a hired assassin, was unconvincing and absurdly chic, but the director has sobered up. He stages several conversations between Bachmann and Martha Sullivan (Robin Wright), a charming C.I.A. official who understands Bachmann’s needs but may be playing him, and Corbijn and the actors skillfully bring out the sinister undertones in these exchanges. They’re the best thing in the movie, but a familiar problem arises: le Carré’s complicated plot and his thrillingly cryptic dialogue can’t be adequately conveyed in two hours. The finest dramatization of le Carré remains the BBC’s 1979 seven-part adaptation of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” directed by John Irvin, in which the elaborate mock-politeness of élite English manners garlands the arcane conspiracies at glorious length.
Bachmann’s nature seems to reflect Hoffman’s unsettled state in his final days. Bachmann smokes constantly and pours himself whiskey neat. Hoffman, his shirt hanging out, tears through rooms, growling at everyone in German-accented English. He almost never smiles, almost never looks at people until he turns threateningly toward them with a bulldog frown. The film gives le Carré’s bitterly intelligent man some streaks of tenderness, which bring him closer to a conventional movie hero. Yet the heroic quality in Hoffman doesn’t need softening. A great actor, he carried his despair and his outsized sense of responsibility with him to the end.
5 Ways Muslims Have Contributed to ‘Building the Very Fabric of Our Nation’
Posted By Robert Spencer On August 2, 2014 @ 12:04 am In Uncategorized | 83 Comments
[1]
Last Sunday, in his message congratulating Muslims on Eid al-Fitr, the holiday marking the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, Barack Obama wrote: “Eid also reminds us of the many achievements and contributions of Muslim Americans to building the very fabric of our nation and strengthening the core of our democracy.” That’s right: he said “many achievements and contributions.” I could only think of five. Maybe you will be able to think of some more.
5. Getting us here in the first place
This one predates the United States as a nation, but without it, the United States would not exist. Every schoolchild knows, or used to know, that in 1492 Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue and discovered America while searching for a new, westward sea route to Asia. But why was he searching for a new route to Asia? Because the fall of Constantinople to the Muslims in 1453 closed the trade routes to the East. This was devastating for European tradesmen, who had until then traveled to Asia for spices and other goods by land. Columbus’s voyage was trying to ease the plight of these merchants by bypassing the Muslims altogether and making it possible for Europeans to reach India by sea.
So the bellicosity and intransigence of Islam ultimately opened the Americas for Europe – and made the United States possible.
[2]4. Slavery
Slavery is condoned in the Qur’an as well as the Bible, and has been taken for granted throughout Islamic history, as it was in the West until the advent of the great abolitionist movements in the U.S. and Britain. The opening of the transatlantic slave trade provided Muslim slave dealers in Africa with a lucrative new market – one that they cheerfully and energetically exploited.
One consequence of this has been claims by the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and other Islamic advocacy groups in the U.S. that the first Muslims in the U.S. were slaves imported from Africa. This, of course, feeds the sense of victimhood that CAIR so assiduously cultivates for the political power that it offers, but it cuts in the other direction as well: not only the slaves, but the slave traders who sold them to Europeans and Americans who brought them to the New World were Muslims, operating in accord with the sanction of slavery given by Muhammad and the Qur’an.
Arguably, then, if it weren’t for the Islamic slave industry on the African continent, there would have been no slavery in the New World, and none of the attendant national traumas that reverberate down to this day. This means, of course, that one way that Muslims have contributed to building the very fabric of our nation is by setting in motion the chain of events that led to ongoing racial tensions in the U.S., and ultimately to the election to the presidency of Barack Obama.
[3]3. The Marines
“From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli…” The line from the Marines’ hymn commemorates the Marines’ actions during the First Barbary War (1801-1805), the first war the United States fought against Islamic jihadists. The war came about because President Thomas Jefferson refused to accede to the Barbary states’ demands for tribute payments – demands made in accord with the Qur’an’s dictum that the “People of the Book” must be made to “pay the jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued” (9:29). The Barbary pirates, also acting in accord with Islamic law regarding the kidnapping, enslaving and ransoming of non-Muslims, were seizing American ships and enslaving the crews, demanding exorbitant ransoms for their release.
The Marines put a stop to all that, and the line from the Marines’ hymn shows how pivotal their actions on the Barbary coast were to forming the Marine ethos. So for the Marines, too, we have Muslims to thank.
[4]2. A drastically weakened economy
Osama bin Laden explained that he mounted the 9/11 jihad terror attacks in order to weaken the American economy. In October 2004 he exulted: “Al-Qaeda spent $500,000 on the event, while America, in the incident and its aftermath, lost — according to the lowest estimate — more than $500 billion, meaning that every dollar of al-Qaeda defeated a million dollars.” Then there are the further billions lost since 2004, and the billions wasted on the nation-building misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan – such that if he were alive today, bin Laden could look with satisfaction on an America with a severely weakened economy, high unemployment, and no imminent prospects for genuine recovery.
We experience the effects of this every day in a thousand ways, large and small – in an America that is poorer, uglier, meaner, more dangerous, less productive and less efficient than it was on September 10, 2001. A veritable contribution to the fabric of our nation indeed.
[5]1. The TSA
Once romantic and even glamorous, air travel today is an uncomfortable, uncertain, unpleasant, inhospitable, cramped affair involving intrusive and inefficient security procedures that annoy and humiliate travelers. At least everyone is humiliated equally. Passengers are poked, prodded, threatened, herded like cattle, beleaguered with delays, and treated as if they were criminals in a politically correct attempt to avoid focusing on the true source of the problem.
Meanwhile, the TSA and the Department of Homeland Security are two new bloated and ever-growing bureaucracies, further draining the already depleted American taxpayer.
And that, surely, is the crowning contribution that Muslims have made to “building the very fabric of our nation” as it stands today.
*****
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch [6] and author of the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) [7] and The Truth About Muhammad [8]. His latest book is Arab Winter Comes to America: The Truth About the War We’re In [9]. Follow him on Twitter here [10]. Like him on Facebook here [11].
image via shutterstock / Zoran Karapancev [12]
Article printed from PJ Media: http://pjmedia.com
URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/blog/5-ways-muslims-have-contributed-to-building-the-very-fabric-of-our-nation/
URLs in this post:
[1] Image: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=My8Vd-NZ8Qo
[2] Image: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfV5PIAqkSQ
[3] Image: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ui8OCiZsWGw
[4] Image: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKNRPnp4lfc
[5] Image: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMQOy8S-xC4
[6] Jihad Watch: http://www.jihadwatch.org/
[7] The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades): http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0895260131/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=pjmedia-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0895260131
[8] The Truth About Muhammad: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1596985283/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=pjmedia-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1596985283
[9] Arab Winter Comes to America: The Truth About the War We’re In: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1621572048
[10] here: https://twitter.com/jihadwatchRS
[12] Zoran Karapancev: http://www.shutterstock.com/gallery-88208p1.html
Friday, August 01, 2014
An Ancient Tomb Meets a Modern Horror
The rampage by ISIS extremists in Mosul included destroying Jonah's last resting place.
By Benjamin Blech
July 31, 2014
Mosque of the Prophet Younis
The ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh, once the most powerful capital of the ancient world, has special importance for anyone familiar with the Bible. It was the setting for the book of Jonah, a place to which God sent the prophet to warn its inhabitants of impending destruction unless they repented of their evil ways.
Today it is known as Mosul, the second-largest city in Iraq. And last week, almost unnoticed amid the horrific stream of news about violence in the Mideast, a fresh casualty of Islamic extremism was the towering structure that contained the tomb of Jonah. Militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham who blew up the prophet's tomb either didn't know or didn't care that it was Muhammad himself who, in the Quran, described Jonah as "a righteous preacher of the message of God."
It is remarkable that Jonah achieved significant importance in the religious traditions of all three major monotheistic faiths. His biblical book is short, all of four chapters, totaling 48 sentences. In the Christian Bible, it is found in the section called "The Minor Prophets." In the Jewish version, Jonah is lumped in with 11 others in the work known as "The Twelve."
People walk amid the rubble of the destroyed Mosque of The Prophet Younis, or Jonah, in Mosul, Iraq, on July 24. Associated Press
And yet, of all the prophets chosen to be emphasized by Michelangelo in his magnificent frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, the largest and most imposing figure is Jonah. First-time visitors to the chapel often gasp at the sight: Jonah seems to be actually dangling his legs out of the wall and over the altar, while his shoulders and head seem to be leaning back through the roof of the Sistine into the open sky beyond.
Michelangelo was not alone in singling out Jonah for prominence. Jewish tradition echoes the same choice. Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, concludes a 10-day period of penitence that begins with Rosh Hashanah. These 10 days are also known as the Days of Awe, each one bringing closer the moment when, without repentance, there is no longer any escape possible from God's heavenly verdict for every individual. As that moment draws near, Jewish tradition requires a recitation of the four chapters of Jonah, which serve as the concluding biblical message of the day and are read in every synagogue around the world.
To understand the reason for the choice of Jonah by Jews is to grasp what must have motivated Michelangelo as well. The Talmudic rabbis felt that the book of Jonah captures the quintessential message for Yom Kippur because it is a story that reminds us that God judges the whole world—not only Jews but also the people of Nineveh as well as the rest of all mankind.
Jonah was the only Jewish prophet sent to preach to the Gentiles. He emphasized the truth that those who follow God have an obligation to help the wicked turn from their evil ways, and that no one can flee from this obligation without suffering the consequences of divine wrath.
That message is at the heart of the most famous element in Jonah's story: When he was called upon by the Almighty to go to the wicked city of Nineveh and to prophesy to its corrupt inhabitants, Jonah first tried to escape from his calling by boarding a ship going in another direction. But he was pursued by God and ended up being swallowed by a giant fish for three days.
From this we learn that no one can hide from God no matter where he or she goes. And yet we may never give up hope that the wicked, no matter how far gone, can be moved to change their behavior. Repentance is always possible. And, most important, repentance is always accepted by God, even at the very last moment before imminent destruction.
Michelangelo surely identified with Jonah because the artist saw himself as also forced into a mission—leaving Florence to paint at the Vatican—that he wanted at all costs to avoid. Jonah cried and prayed to heaven for the liberation of Nineveh's denizens "out of the depths." Michelangelo, who hoped to steer the church from its hedonistic excesses, identified with the prophet whose task seemed impossible and yet prevailed. For Jonah's message was taken to heart by those who heard him—and he thereby saved the people of Nineveh.
How tragic, then, to note that in modern-day Nineveh Jonah's tomb fell victim to people claiming a commitment to the teachings of Islam, yet it was the Prophet Muhammad who once warned, in the collection of Imam Bukhari, that "One should not say that I am better than Jonah."
The desecration of Jonah's final resting place is a blow not only to his memory but more tragically to his message of universal concern for those of all faiths, the message that still remains the only hope for civilized mankind.
Rabbi Blech, a Talmud professor at Yeshiva University in New York, is the co-author, with Roy Doliner, of "The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican" (HarperCollins, 2008).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)