By DUFF WILSON
July 13, 2006
The New York Times
The former best friend and business partner of Barry Bonds has told federal investigators that Bonds was a heavy steroids user and flew into “roid rages,” his lawyer, Michael Cardoza, said yesterday.
The man, Steve K. Hoskins, 44, of Redwood City, Calif., also says Bonds gave him thousands of dollars to pass on to two of Bonds’s girlfriends, Cardoza said in telephone interviews.
Two lawyers for Bonds responded yesterday that Hoskins was lying to get back at Bonds for accusing him of financial misconduct in their memorabilia business. The lawyers acknowledged that Bonds and Hoskins had been best friends before a falling-out in mid-2003, when Bonds reported Hoskins to the F.B.I.
Bonds is widely expected to be indicted soon by a federal grand jury, which meets today and again next Thursday at the federal courthouse in San Francisco. After that, its 18-month term apparently expires, providing impetus to wrap up the case.
Witnesses who have testified say the grand jury is investigating whether Bonds engaged in income-tax evasion, and if he committed perjury in denying steroid usage. Other sports figures are also being investigated, but Bonds is the biggest target.
Bonds, 41, hit a record 73 home runs in 2001 and has 720 career homers, trailing only Hank Aaron’s 755.
On Dec. 4, 2003, Bonds told an earlier grand jury that he did not knowingly use steroids, despite drastic changes to his physique and documents with his name on them from 2001 to 2003 showing drug schedules, billing information and test results, The San Francisco Chronicle has reported.
The private dispute between Bonds and Hoskins went public this week when Michael L. Rains, Bonds’s defense lawyer, told The New York Times that the government was relying on Hoskins and Bonds’s former girlfriend Kimberly Bell for its case.
Hoskins is president of Kent Collectibles of San Carlos, Calif., and was widely known in the Giants’ clubhouse as Bonds’s right-hand man. The two were close: Hoskins was the best man at Bonds’s 1998 wedding, and Hoskins’s sister introduced Bonds to a woman who was his girlfriend from 1994 to 2003.
Laura J. Enos, Bonds’s lawyer for personal business matters since 1997, said in an interview yesterday that she and Bonds confronted Hoskins in June 2003 over the suspected forging of Bonds’s signature on contracts.
“He came and we met in a conference room,” Enos said. “He said: ‘I have three doors. If you don’t drop this memorabilia issue, I’m going to ruin Barry. Behind door No. 1 is an extramarital affair. Behind door No. 2 is failure to declare income tax. And behind door No. 3 is use of steroids. And I will go to the press and ruin Barry. His records will be ruined. He will never get into the Hall of Fame.’ ”
Enos said Bonds reported Hoskins anyway to the United States attorney and the F.B.I. in San Francisco in late June or early July 2003. Enos said Bonds was unaware at the time that the San Jose branch of the United States attorney’s office was already investigating whether Bonds used steroids.
LaRae Quy, a special agent and spokeswoman for the F.B.I. in Northern California, confirmed yesterday that the F.B.I. checked into the complaint by Bonds against Hoskins. Quy declined to comment further.
Enos and Rains said the F.B.I. dropped the case against Hoskins when he turned on Bonds. But Hoskins’s lawyer, Cardoza, said the F.B.I. cleared Hoskins when it found he had not forged the signatures and had kept meticulous records of cash transactions, including giving thousands of dollars to two girlfriends for Bonds. “We did not make a deal with the feds,” Cardoza said.
Cardoza said he had warned Enos that the steroids activity would come out if Bonds complained about Hoskins to federal authorities.
“Barry and Stevie were friends for years,” Cardoza said. “And Barry starts to get into steroids. And Barry has what’s called roid rages, which start to affect his relationship with Stevie. Stevie was very concerned as a friend with his steroid use. In fact, he involved Bobby Bonds, the dad, you know, saying, ‘You better get Barry off steroids because it’s going to kill him.’ ” (Bobby Bonds died in 2003.)
Cardoza said Barry Bonds’s steroid use and rages led to the end of Bonds’s close relationship with Hoskins.
“Stevie would nag Barry to get off the stuff,” Cardoza said. “Their relationship finally went in the toilet, business and personal. And with that, Barry is saying Stevie stole from me. It’s not true. He reports that to the feds. The feds do a full-blown investigation.”
Cardoza added: “So in your face, Barry. You’re lying.”
Asked whether Hoskins had firsthand knowledge of Bonds’s steroid use, Cardoza said: “Steve was his best friend. Steve had a relationship with him that nobody else did.”
Cardoza would not say whether Hoskins has testified before the grand jury, only that he had spoken with investigators.
Rains, Bonds’s defense lawyer, said he thought Hoskins was the source for much of the derogatory information about Bonds, including details of suspected steroid usage, in the book “Game of Shadows” by the reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams of The Chronicle. Hoskins was not mentioned by name in the 332-page book.
Rains and Cardoza said Hoskins’s sister had introduced Bonds to Bell in the early 1990’s and that Hoskins had known Bell for even longer.
“And now they’ve united in an effort to try to take down Barry,” Rains said. “And the government is dumb enough to try to use them to take down Barry.”
Bell is a graphic artist from San Jose, Calif., who says she dated Bonds from 1994 to May 2003. Bell has said Bonds told her he used steroids and gave her $80,000 cash.
Rains said Bell had tried to pressure Bonds to pay her money. Bell and her lawyer could not be reached for comment yesterday.
Enos said Hoskins and Bonds were childhood friends who became close as adults after Bonds returned to San Francisco from Pittsburgh in 1993. Hoskins was selling shoes at a Foot Locker when Bonds returned. Enos said Bonds helped Hoskins set up a business selling Bonds lithographs and memorabilia. .
Hoskins and Bell are now the key witnesses against Bonds, according to Rains. He said: “They won’t have any credibility once they get exposed. But I don’t know if the federal government bothered to tell the grand jury, once they heard their testimony, what liars they were.”
Rains said the only other witness the government was relying on was Greg Anderson. Anderson, Bonds’s trainer and a reputed steroid supplier, was sent to jail July 5 for refusing to testify to the grand jury.
Mark J. Geragos, a defense lawyer for Anderson, said he did not think that Bonds would be indicted in the next week or two because he did not think the government had a case. One of the elements of finding Anderson in contempt was that the government had to say it could not get the necessary evidence anywhere else, Geragos said.
Geragos said he anticipated that the government would try to keep Anderson in jail longer under a criminal contempt of court proceeding or by calling him in front of a new grand jury. Geragos said Anderson would never testify against Bonds.
Peter Keane, a law professor at Golden Gate University, said the government could empanel a new grand jury if it needed more time or wanted to pressure Anderson by keeping him in jail longer. Keane predicted that soon Bonds would be indicted “just as the night follows the day.”
The people known to have testified to the grand jury in the perjury investigation include Dr. Arthur Ting, Bonds’s orthopedic surgeon; Stan Conte, the San Francisco Giants’ head trainer; Dr. Larry Bowers of the United States Anti-Doping Agency; and Dr. Don Catlin, an antidoping expert at U.C.L.A.
Thursday, July 13, 2006
Plamegate: Mystery Solved
By Kenneth R. Timmerman
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
July 13, 2006
Finally some straight talk on the Valerie Plame case, thanks to Robert Novak, the conservative columnist who first revealed the identity of the not-so-covert CIA officer three years ago.
Novak’s July 14, 2003, column on the much-disputed trip to Niger by Plame’s husband, former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson, triggered an FBI investigation, a federal grand jury, and eventually the appointment of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who indicted top White House aid Scooter Libby for perjury along the way.
At issue was whether Saddam Hussein ever sent a buying team to Niger looking for uranium yellowcake in the 1999-2000 period. After tea and crumpets with former friends in the Nigerian government, Wilson concluded that it never happened. At least, that’s what he says today.
(The definitive Senate Select Intelligence Committee report on pre-war intelligence on Iraq, released in November 2004, asserts unequivocally that Wilson lied in public about the conclusions he sent to the CIA about his Niger trip).
Despite all the sturm und drang over the past three years, Novak kept silent about who said what regarding Wilson’s trip. The Left has imputed all kinds of scurrilous motives to Novak’s silence. They have accused him of cutting a special deal with the special prosecutor. They have accused him of fingering Libby and Rove. They have accused him of total disregard of the First Amendment, preferring to violate the “sanctity” of anonymous sources in favor of going to jail.
They have compared unfavorably to former New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who went to jail instead of revealing her sources in the same case.
But when the Left realized that Judy Miller had been close to Scooter Libby and actually reported on the facts of Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs, rather than the creampuff version being put out by the anti-Bush crowd at the CIA, they dropped her instantly. She was fired by the NY Times almost the minute she was released from jail.
Fitzgerald finally has closed the leak case in so far as Novak is concerned. “That frees me to reveal my role in the federal inquiry that, at the request of Fitzgerald, I have kept secret,” Novak wrote yesterday in an account he published in Human Events.
“Joe Wilson's wife's role in instituting her husband's mission was revealed to me in the middle of a long interview with an official who I have previously said was not a political gunslinger,” Novak revealed. “After the federal investigation was announced, he told me through a third party that the disclosure was inadvertent on his part.”
The official who was Novak’s primary source did not even know the name of Wilson’s wife. But it wasn’t a very close-held secret. “I learned Valerie Plame's name from Joe Wilson's entry in ‘Who's Who in America,’” Novak wrote.
I have asked a number of former CIA clandestine operators about Valerie Plame.
One former senior clandestine officer scoffed at the claim that Valerie Plame had ever been truly covert. “How can you be [covert] when you are married to an ex-U.S. ambassador and work for the State Department overseas?” Somebody looking at her from a hostile power (say, Iran) would have to have a brain the size of a pea to miss her connection to the U.S. government, he added.
And yet, former CIA officers who vigorously oppose this administration have signed public letters and gone on network television to protest the exposure of her identity as the greatest national security breach of the century.
Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer who became a deputy director of the State Department’s counter-terrorism bureau, has launched an internet witchhunt against Karl Rove for allegedly “outing” his former Camp Perry classmate, Valerie Plame. (Gee, Larry: Guess everybody must have known about Val’s Camp Perry date with you, so it’s okay to talk about that, right?)
Novak’s column takes the wind out of their sails. Not only was Karl Rove not Novak’s primary source, but Valerie Plame’s role at CIA was so well-known that a CIA spokesman, Bill Harlowe, was able to confirm to Novak that Plame had suggested Wilson for the Niger trip.
Like Novak and hundreds of others of reporters, I have had dealings with Harlowe over the years. Even if you had nailed down the identity of a covert CIA operator who had worked for the agency 20 years earlier, Harlowe would never confirm that person’s existence. The standard line was to neither confirm nor deny.
But if you asked if so-and-so who was posted overseas to a U.S. embassy, and was now working as an analyst, could give you a background briefing on their subject of expertise, he would at least get back to you with a yes or a no.
And that is exactly what he provided to Novak. The CIA public affairs office was his third source.
Larry Johnson and others had kvetched that Novak blew Valerie Plame’s cover at her “top secret” CIA proprietary, Brewster Jennings, in Boston.They allege that Plame was working undercover as an energy industry analyst to penetrate Iranian nuclear procurement networks.
But guess what? It wasn’t Bob Novak who revealed that Valerie Plame may have been working undercover (with an alleged tie to the alleged Brewster Jennings in Boston, which now hosts an Internet game similar to “Where in the World is Carmen SanDiego”?)
It was left-wing columnist David Corn, writing in The Nation, just two days after Novak’s first column.
It turns out that Corn is a close friend of the Wilson/Plame couple, and knew all about their various foreign outings. Unlike Robert Novak, he didn’t need to consult “Who’s Who in America” to learn Valerie Plame’s name.
If any security breach occurred with the disclosure of Valerie Plame’s name, look toward Joe Wilson, who posted his wife’s name to “Who’s Who,” and to their circle of political and professional friends.
My hunch: it was all part of a carefully orchestrated public relations scheme, that netted lying Joe Wilson prime time television appearances, a best-selling book, and a $2.5 million contract for the memoirs of Madame.
Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.
Kenneth R. Timmerman is the author of Countdown to Crisis: the Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran (Crown Forum, New York), and Executive Director of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran.
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
July 13, 2006
Finally some straight talk on the Valerie Plame case, thanks to Robert Novak, the conservative columnist who first revealed the identity of the not-so-covert CIA officer three years ago.
Novak’s July 14, 2003, column on the much-disputed trip to Niger by Plame’s husband, former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson, triggered an FBI investigation, a federal grand jury, and eventually the appointment of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who indicted top White House aid Scooter Libby for perjury along the way.
At issue was whether Saddam Hussein ever sent a buying team to Niger looking for uranium yellowcake in the 1999-2000 period. After tea and crumpets with former friends in the Nigerian government, Wilson concluded that it never happened. At least, that’s what he says today.
(The definitive Senate Select Intelligence Committee report on pre-war intelligence on Iraq, released in November 2004, asserts unequivocally that Wilson lied in public about the conclusions he sent to the CIA about his Niger trip).
Despite all the sturm und drang over the past three years, Novak kept silent about who said what regarding Wilson’s trip. The Left has imputed all kinds of scurrilous motives to Novak’s silence. They have accused him of cutting a special deal with the special prosecutor. They have accused him of fingering Libby and Rove. They have accused him of total disregard of the First Amendment, preferring to violate the “sanctity” of anonymous sources in favor of going to jail.
They have compared unfavorably to former New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who went to jail instead of revealing her sources in the same case.
But when the Left realized that Judy Miller had been close to Scooter Libby and actually reported on the facts of Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs, rather than the creampuff version being put out by the anti-Bush crowd at the CIA, they dropped her instantly. She was fired by the NY Times almost the minute she was released from jail.
Fitzgerald finally has closed the leak case in so far as Novak is concerned. “That frees me to reveal my role in the federal inquiry that, at the request of Fitzgerald, I have kept secret,” Novak wrote yesterday in an account he published in Human Events.
“Joe Wilson's wife's role in instituting her husband's mission was revealed to me in the middle of a long interview with an official who I have previously said was not a political gunslinger,” Novak revealed. “After the federal investigation was announced, he told me through a third party that the disclosure was inadvertent on his part.”
The official who was Novak’s primary source did not even know the name of Wilson’s wife. But it wasn’t a very close-held secret. “I learned Valerie Plame's name from Joe Wilson's entry in ‘Who's Who in America,’” Novak wrote.
I have asked a number of former CIA clandestine operators about Valerie Plame.
One former senior clandestine officer scoffed at the claim that Valerie Plame had ever been truly covert. “How can you be [covert] when you are married to an ex-U.S. ambassador and work for the State Department overseas?” Somebody looking at her from a hostile power (say, Iran) would have to have a brain the size of a pea to miss her connection to the U.S. government, he added.
And yet, former CIA officers who vigorously oppose this administration have signed public letters and gone on network television to protest the exposure of her identity as the greatest national security breach of the century.
Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer who became a deputy director of the State Department’s counter-terrorism bureau, has launched an internet witchhunt against Karl Rove for allegedly “outing” his former Camp Perry classmate, Valerie Plame. (Gee, Larry: Guess everybody must have known about Val’s Camp Perry date with you, so it’s okay to talk about that, right?)
Novak’s column takes the wind out of their sails. Not only was Karl Rove not Novak’s primary source, but Valerie Plame’s role at CIA was so well-known that a CIA spokesman, Bill Harlowe, was able to confirm to Novak that Plame had suggested Wilson for the Niger trip.
Like Novak and hundreds of others of reporters, I have had dealings with Harlowe over the years. Even if you had nailed down the identity of a covert CIA operator who had worked for the agency 20 years earlier, Harlowe would never confirm that person’s existence. The standard line was to neither confirm nor deny.
But if you asked if so-and-so who was posted overseas to a U.S. embassy, and was now working as an analyst, could give you a background briefing on their subject of expertise, he would at least get back to you with a yes or a no.
And that is exactly what he provided to Novak. The CIA public affairs office was his third source.
Larry Johnson and others had kvetched that Novak blew Valerie Plame’s cover at her “top secret” CIA proprietary, Brewster Jennings, in Boston.They allege that Plame was working undercover as an energy industry analyst to penetrate Iranian nuclear procurement networks.
But guess what? It wasn’t Bob Novak who revealed that Valerie Plame may have been working undercover (with an alleged tie to the alleged Brewster Jennings in Boston, which now hosts an Internet game similar to “Where in the World is Carmen SanDiego”?)
It was left-wing columnist David Corn, writing in The Nation, just two days after Novak’s first column.
It turns out that Corn is a close friend of the Wilson/Plame couple, and knew all about their various foreign outings. Unlike Robert Novak, he didn’t need to consult “Who’s Who in America” to learn Valerie Plame’s name.
If any security breach occurred with the disclosure of Valerie Plame’s name, look toward Joe Wilson, who posted his wife’s name to “Who’s Who,” and to their circle of political and professional friends.
My hunch: it was all part of a carefully orchestrated public relations scheme, that netted lying Joe Wilson prime time television appearances, a best-selling book, and a $2.5 million contract for the memoirs of Madame.
Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.
Kenneth R. Timmerman is the author of Countdown to Crisis: the Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran (Crown Forum, New York), and Executive Director of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran.
Friday, July 07, 2006
Film Review: 'Superman Returns'
Correction: In a June 28 Style review of "Superman Returns" (which was excerpted in the June 30 edition of Weekend), Superman's home state was incorrectly identified as Iowa. He is from Kansas.
Happy 'Returns'
Zen and Now: Latest Superman Honors Heroes Past
By Stephen Hunter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 28, 2006; C01
"Superman Returns" answers a question about the Man of Steel we boys have wondered about for decades.
Is Superman ga --
No, no, that's Batman .
The question is: What would happen if you shot Superman in the eye?
And the answer is: You'd have to get a new bullet. The one you fired would have pancaked flatter than a quarter and be spinning on the cement.
It happens in "Superman Returns," in a nifty little sequence where Our Hero has stood up to an electric Gatling gun hurling wads of copper-coated lead at him at a rate of about 3,000 a minute. They bounce off into the gloaming, trailing neon incandescence. So the bad guy marches up to him, pulls out a .45 and issues a coup de grace. Bad mistake, dude. You are toast.
The much ballyhooed movie, far from great and far from short (2 1/2 hours!), is still great fun. Best is its love for the traditions of the Big Guy: It reaches out to embrace all the previous iterations of the caped flyboy, even finding room for Jack Larson and Noel Neill to get giant close-ups and dramatic scenes of the sort they never got in previous TV cameos. Neill, the ur-Lois Lane, plays a dying octogenarian who is swindled out of billions on her deathbed by Lex Luthor; and Larson, the ur-Jimmy Olsen, is a bartender who in a moment of stress actually hugs Sam Huntington, this movie's Jimmy Olsen. It's too bad George Reeves, the original TV tall-building leaper, isn't around to bask in a little afterglow.
Even the late, great Marlon Brando is disinterred from the archives and called up to deliver a warning to his son, though it's actually Lex and his minions who've penetrated the Fortress of Solitude and learn the lesson from Stanley Kowalski gone slumming in Richard Donner's 1978 incarnation. And the movie uses as its overture John Williams's blast of triumph that accompanied the big '70s and '80s versions, with additional music by John Ottman.
But the truly beloved figure of this trip to Metropolis is the late Christopher Reeve; he and his late wife, Dana, are the dedicatees at movie's end. More to the point, the young actor Brandon Routh seems chosen for the part not because he embodies Superman but because he specifically embodies Reeve's Superman, with dark good looks, a modest, even ego-less screen presence, a curiously muted sexuality and a sense of well-brought-up preppie's politeness and diffidence. He's a Superman who'd always call you Sir.
Yet at the same time, it's not an impersonation, it's a performance. In certain ways the director, Bryan Singer (of "The Usual Suspects" and the first two "X-Men" movies), has found new stylings to enable his leading man to make the part his own.
Flying, for example; Reeve and even Reeves were coached to see flying as athletic, an expression of strength and speed. To get airborne they took off, building up a head of steam, then (oof!) bounding into the air with a diver's gymnastics as he launches off the high board. By contrast, Routh is a much less athletic, much less muscular flier. For him, flight almost seems Zen. He doesn't have to put any muscle into it and when he's flying, he's not penetrating the atmosphere (his hair hardly moves) but rather transcendentally meditating his way through it. His landings aren't controlled crashes softened by super-strong muscles and ligaments (oof! again) but a kind of delicate settling. He's a Supe who's made peace with the air. I kept expecting him to break into, "Look at me way up high, suddenly here am I, I'm flyyyyying!"
That same glee seems to run through the movie's first half, when, since the story hasn't really started, there seems plenty of time to experience the sheer joy of Superman's return. As the script -- cobbled out by Singer, Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris, among the millions who have toiled on it anonymously -- has it, Superman's been gone for five years seeking remnants of Krypton among the stars. Satisfied, if melancholy that the old home orb is forever gone, he returns to Earth to pick up where he left off, and discovers what Thomas Wolfe really meant by "You Can't Go Home Again."
Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth), for example, now has a child. She's even won a Pulitzer Prize for her essay: "Why the World Doesn't Need Superman." Her boyfriend has great teeth, Daily Planet Editor Perry White has morphed into lounge-lizard Frank Langella, and Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey) has just exited the slammer, copped billions from the old lady (played by Neill) and started a new shenanigan.
The lack of forward momentum makes room for a lot of pleasant lateral movement. We get to watch Supe rescue Lois in an elaborate sequence in which her plane, trailing flame and shreds of twisted metal, is headed for the dirt. He puts it gently down in Shea Stadium before the thousands of adoring Mets fans who commemorate the return. If only he had a good fastball!
It follows that Lois and Clark deal with buried feelings, and there's even world enough and time for Supe to remember his boyhood in Iowa, where the corn grew as high as an elephant's eye but he could leap as far as a thousand elephants, end on end or on top of each other. (Eva Marie Saint has a nice turn as his mom.)
These sequences, particularly the invocation of tender feelings between Clark and Lois, and Lois and Supe (she has to know, at some level), have a kind of puppy-love innocence to them. They're not sexual, but pre-sexual, full of the awkward romantic gropings of kids who don't really know what happens when the lights go down. Everything is idealized: Since Lois is now living with Perry White's nephew Richard, played by face-guy James Marsden, Clark/Supe is honor-bound to preserve the sanctity of the union and therefore can only pine in private. Lois, meanwhile, is in harsh denial, and we understand that her essay was really not addressed to the world but to her own heart. She has, she tells herself, Moved On, even if she doesn't believe it and we don't believe it.
What's missing? Oh, right, a caper. A plot. Hmm, the movie's an hour and a half old, and nobody's done anything yet.
Here's where I wish the team had done it better. First of all, as great an actor as Kevin Spacey is and as perfect for this part as he seems to be: Nobody could do it better than Gene Hackman.
True, it's probably easy to underrate Hackman's turns as Luthor, but they were great pieces of work. He was avuncular, self-parodying, narcissistic, self-amused and evil all at once. They gave such balance to Reeve's square virtue while at the same time providing a lot of comic mileage in interplay with sidekicks Ned Beatty and Valerie Perrine.
By contrast, Spacey lacks Hackman's charm, Parker Posey hardly registers as Lex's immorata and the hilarious Beatty has been replaced by three moogs of utter banality.
Worse, the plot seems not nonsensical or lacking in weight, just uninteresting. Having discovered Supe's lair and copped some magic crystals, Lex uses them to -- see if you can stay with me, and pray that I'm able to stay with me -- generate new continents, which, rupturing out of the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, seem fated to put half of North America underwater, while he claims sole ownership of the new land, which will be Luthorville or Luthorania or the United States of Lexatoria or some such. Never quite works, nor do the too many scenes of Lex and his pals playing pinochle in a wet cave that somehow is supposed to represent the Death of the West.
In fairness, the plot is just strutwork upon which to mount ever more elaborate set pieces, as Superman shunts faster than a speeding e-mail from crisis to crisis to undo the effects of Luthor's villainy. It would probably help if you brought a standard dead-tree World Mythological Concordance with you or watched with Treo 700p Smartphone in hand keyed to Wikipedia, for by the end of the film, Singer is looting world symbology for imagery. Atlas bent under the globe? Twice , even! The crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus? In jillions and jillions of bright pixels! How about Icarus falling from the rays of the sun, or is that the fall of man, the death of Odin, the last act of Wagner's "Gotterdammerung," the final chorus of Beowulf or the end of Richard Fleisher's "The Vikings"? Or even Will Kane limping out of town in "High Noon."
It's all of them, and many more I haven't thought of or don't know in the first place.
But the news is good. It's a myth, not a miss. The bottom line is that Superman has returned and again, you will believe that a man can fly, and that virtue is its own reward.
Superman Returns (154 minutes, at area theaters) is rated PG-13 for violence (parents should note that, at one point, the Man of Steel gets a tub-thumping beating).
Daniel Pipes: The Vatican Confronts Islam
Daniel Pipes
The Jerusalem Post
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
July 5, 2006
“Enough now with this turning the other cheek! It’s our duty to protect ourselves.” Thus spoke Monsignor Velasio De Paolis, secretary of the Vatican’s supreme court, referring to Muslims. Explaining his apparent rejection of Jesus’ admonition to his followers to “turn the other cheek,” De Paolis noted that “The West has had relations with the Arab countries for half a century…and has not been able to get the slightest concession on human rights.”
De Paolis is hardly alone in his thinking; indeed, the Catholic Church is undergoing a dramatic shift from a decades-old policy to protect Catholics living under Muslim rule. The old methods of quiet diplomacy and muted appeasement have clearly failed. The estimated 40 million Christians in Dar al-Islam, notes the Barnabas Fund’s Patrick Sookhdeo, increasingly find themselves an embattled minority facing economic decline, dwindling rights, and physical jeopardy. Most of them, he goes on, are despised and distrusted second-class citizens, facing discrimination in education, jobs, and the courts.
These harsh circumstances are causing Christians to flee their ancestral lands for the West’s more hospitable environment. Consequently, Christian populations of the Muslim world are in a free-fall. Two small but evocative instances of this pattern: for the first time in nearly two millennia, Nazareth and Bethlehem no longer have Christian majorities.
This reality of oppression and decline stands in dramatic contrast to the surging Muslim minority of the West. Although numbering fewer than 20 million and made up mostly of immigrants and their offspring, it is an increasingly established and vocal minority, granted extensive rights and protections even as it wins new legal, cultural, and political prerogatives.
This widening disparity has caught the attention of the Roman Catholic Church, which for the first time is pointing to radical Islam, rather than the actions of Israel, as the central problem facing Christians living with Muslims.
Rumblings of this could be heard already in John Paul II’s time. For example, Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, the Vatican equivalent of foreign minister, noted in late 2003 that “There are too many majority Muslim countries where non-Muslims are second-class citizens.” Tauran pushed for reciprocity: “Just as Muslims can build their houses of prayer anywhere in the world, the faithful of other religions should be able to do so as well.”
Catholic demands for reciprocity have grown, especially since the accession of Pope Benedict XVI in April 2005, for whom Islam is a central concern. In February, the pope emphasized the need to respect “the convictions and religious practices of others so that, in a reciprocal manner, the exercise of freely-chosen religion is truly assured to all.” In May, he again stressed the need for reciprocity: Christians must love immigrants and Muslims must treat well the Christians among them.
Lower-ranking clerics, as usual, are more outspoken. “Islam’s radicalization is the principal cause of the Christian exodus,” asserts Monsignor Philippe Brizard, director general of Oeuvre d’Orient, a French organization focused on Middle Eastern Christians. Bishop Rino Fisichella, rector of the Lateran University in Rome, advises the Church to drop its “diplomatic silence” and instead “put pressure on international organizations to make the societies and states in majority Muslim countries face up to their responsibilities.”
The Danish cartoons crisis offered a typical example of Catholic disillusionment. Church leaders initially criticized the publication of the Muhammad cartoons. But when Muslims responded by murdering Catholic priests in Turkey and Nigeria, not to speak of scores of Christians killed during five days of riots in Nigeria, the Church responded with warnings to Muslims. “If we tell our people they have no right to offend, we have to tell the others they have no right to destroy us, ” said Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican’s Secretary of State. “We must always stress our demand for reciprocity in political contacts with authorities in Islamic countries and, even more, in cultural contacts,” added Archbishop Giovanni Lajolo, its foreign minister.
Obtaining the same rights for Christians in Islamdom that Muslims enjoy in Christendom has become the key to the Vatican’s diplomacy toward Muslims. This balanced, serious approach marks a profound improvement in understanding that could have implications well beyond the Church, given how many lay politicians heed its leadership in interfaith matters. Should Western states also promote the principle of reciprocity, the results should indeed be interesting.
Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.
Mr. Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is director of the Middle East Forum and author of Miniatures (Transaction Publishers).
The Jerusalem Post
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
July 5, 2006
“Enough now with this turning the other cheek! It’s our duty to protect ourselves.” Thus spoke Monsignor Velasio De Paolis, secretary of the Vatican’s supreme court, referring to Muslims. Explaining his apparent rejection of Jesus’ admonition to his followers to “turn the other cheek,” De Paolis noted that “The West has had relations with the Arab countries for half a century…and has not been able to get the slightest concession on human rights.”
De Paolis is hardly alone in his thinking; indeed, the Catholic Church is undergoing a dramatic shift from a decades-old policy to protect Catholics living under Muslim rule. The old methods of quiet diplomacy and muted appeasement have clearly failed. The estimated 40 million Christians in Dar al-Islam, notes the Barnabas Fund’s Patrick Sookhdeo, increasingly find themselves an embattled minority facing economic decline, dwindling rights, and physical jeopardy. Most of them, he goes on, are despised and distrusted second-class citizens, facing discrimination in education, jobs, and the courts.
These harsh circumstances are causing Christians to flee their ancestral lands for the West’s more hospitable environment. Consequently, Christian populations of the Muslim world are in a free-fall. Two small but evocative instances of this pattern: for the first time in nearly two millennia, Nazareth and Bethlehem no longer have Christian majorities.
This reality of oppression and decline stands in dramatic contrast to the surging Muslim minority of the West. Although numbering fewer than 20 million and made up mostly of immigrants and their offspring, it is an increasingly established and vocal minority, granted extensive rights and protections even as it wins new legal, cultural, and political prerogatives.
This widening disparity has caught the attention of the Roman Catholic Church, which for the first time is pointing to radical Islam, rather than the actions of Israel, as the central problem facing Christians living with Muslims.
Rumblings of this could be heard already in John Paul II’s time. For example, Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, the Vatican equivalent of foreign minister, noted in late 2003 that “There are too many majority Muslim countries where non-Muslims are second-class citizens.” Tauran pushed for reciprocity: “Just as Muslims can build their houses of prayer anywhere in the world, the faithful of other religions should be able to do so as well.”
Catholic demands for reciprocity have grown, especially since the accession of Pope Benedict XVI in April 2005, for whom Islam is a central concern. In February, the pope emphasized the need to respect “the convictions and religious practices of others so that, in a reciprocal manner, the exercise of freely-chosen religion is truly assured to all.” In May, he again stressed the need for reciprocity: Christians must love immigrants and Muslims must treat well the Christians among them.
Lower-ranking clerics, as usual, are more outspoken. “Islam’s radicalization is the principal cause of the Christian exodus,” asserts Monsignor Philippe Brizard, director general of Oeuvre d’Orient, a French organization focused on Middle Eastern Christians. Bishop Rino Fisichella, rector of the Lateran University in Rome, advises the Church to drop its “diplomatic silence” and instead “put pressure on international organizations to make the societies and states in majority Muslim countries face up to their responsibilities.”
The Danish cartoons crisis offered a typical example of Catholic disillusionment. Church leaders initially criticized the publication of the Muhammad cartoons. But when Muslims responded by murdering Catholic priests in Turkey and Nigeria, not to speak of scores of Christians killed during five days of riots in Nigeria, the Church responded with warnings to Muslims. “If we tell our people they have no right to offend, we have to tell the others they have no right to destroy us, ” said Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican’s Secretary of State. “We must always stress our demand for reciprocity in political contacts with authorities in Islamic countries and, even more, in cultural contacts,” added Archbishop Giovanni Lajolo, its foreign minister.
Obtaining the same rights for Christians in Islamdom that Muslims enjoy in Christendom has become the key to the Vatican’s diplomacy toward Muslims. This balanced, serious approach marks a profound improvement in understanding that could have implications well beyond the Church, given how many lay politicians heed its leadership in interfaith matters. Should Western states also promote the principle of reciprocity, the results should indeed be interesting.
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Mr. Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is director of the Middle East Forum and author of Miniatures (Transaction Publishers).
The Saddam-Osama Connection: The Terrorist Testimony
Mark Eichenlaub
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
July 7, 2006
One of the pillars of the argument that there were “no links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda” is that the captured/defected members from both sides have denied any relationship existed. (The Left makes this claim even though most of the detainees’ interrogation logs remain classified and their contents remain on a need-to-know basis.) This “no connection” claim has been made a number of times, and those making it generally receive favorable media attention; they’re rarely if ever confronted with testimony that conflicts with their argument. I will not argue on behalf of the truthfulness of former Ba’athists and al-Qaeda members, but if their testimony is going to admitted, shouldn’t critics also hear the testimony of those in custody who tell a different story?
There are more than a few former Iraqi officials and captured al-Qaeda affiliates who have revealed examples of cooperation between Saddam’s Iraq and Osama’s terrorist assets.
· “Abu Mohammed,” a former colonel of Saddam Hussein’s Fedayeen fighters, told reporters long ago that Iraq was training terrorists, including al-Qaeda.
Gwynne Roberts, Sunday Times, July 14, 2002
· Iraqi soldiers, captured during the early phases of the war on Iraq in 2003, revealed that al-Qaeda terrorists were present inside Iraq fighting alongside Iraqi troops
Gethin Chamberlain, The Scotsman, 10-28-03
· Hamsiraji Sali, Commander of the al-Qaeda affiliate Abu Sayyaf, admitted receiving $20,000 dollars a year from Iraq.
Marc Lerner, Washington Times, 3-4-03
· Salah Suleiman, revealed that he was a former Iraqi Intelligence officer, captured on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border shuttling between Iraq and Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Janes Foreign Report, 9-19-01
· Jamal al-Qurairy, a former General in Iraq’s Mukhabarat, who defected years ago, said “that [is] ours” immediately after seeing 9/11 attacks.
David Rose, Vanity Fair, Feb. 2003, and David Rose, The Observer, 3-16-03
· Abbas al-Janabai, a personal assistant to Uday Hussein for 15 years, has repeatedly stated that there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden that included training terrorists at various camps in Iraq.
CNN, 7-23-2003
Gwynne Roberts, Sunday Times, July 14,2002
Richard Miniter, TechCentralStation, 9-25-03
· Two Moroccan associates of Osama bin Laden, arrested in Rabat in Nov 98, confirmed that Col Khairallah al-Tikriti, the brother of Iraq’s top Intelligence official (Mukhabarat), was the case officer in charge of operations with al-Qaeda in Kashmir and Manila
Jacquard, Roland, In the Name of Osama Bin Laden, Duke University Press, 2002, pg.112
· Wali Khan Amin Shah, an al-Qaeda operative in custody, told the FBI that Abu
Hajer al-Iraq had good contacts with Iraq Intelligence Services (reported to Senate Intelligence Committee)
Stephen Hayes, Thomas Joscelyn, Weekly Standard, 7-18-05
· Farouk Hijazi, former #3 in Saddam Hussein’s Mukhabarat, although he denies the well documented reports of his later meetings with bin Laden, Hijazi admits that he met with Osama bin Laden to discuss antiship mines and terror training camps in Iraq during the mid-90’s.
9-11 Commission, Staff Statement 15
· Abdul Rahman al-Shamari, who served in Saddam Hussein’s Mukhabarat from 1997-2002, says that he worked to link Saddam Hussein regime with Ansar al Islam and al-Qaeda.
Preston Mendenhall, MSNBC, "War Diary"
Jonathan Schanzer, Weekly Standard, 3-1-04
· Mohamed Gharib, Ansar al Islam’s Media chief, later admitted that the group took assistance from Saddam Hussein’s regime.
Scott Peterson, Christian Science Monitor, 10-16-03
· Mohamed Mansour Shahab, aka Muhammad Jawad, is a smuggler who claims to have been hired by Iraq to bring weapons to al-Qaeda in Afghanistan
Jeffrey Goldberg, New Yorker, 3-25-02
Scott Peterson, Christian Science Monitor, 4-03-02
Richard Miniter, TechCentralStation, 9-25-03
· Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi is a senior al-Qaeda operative. Although he has changed his story, he initially told his captors that his mission was to travel to Iraq to acquire poisons and gases from Iraqi Intelligence after impressing them with al-Qaeda’s attack on the USS Cole
Stephen Hayes, Weekly Standard, 11-24-03
· An “enemy combatant” being held at Guantanamo Bay, who was also a former Iraqi Army officer, admits that he served as a liaison between Osama bin Laden and Iraqi Intelligence. He was arrested in Pakistan before completing joint IIS/al-Qaeda mission to blow up U.S. and British embassies
Associated Press, 3-30-05
Stephen Hayes, Thomas Joscelyn. Weekly Standard. 7-18-05
· Abu Hajer al-Iraqi (aka Mahmdouh Mahmud Salim) told prosecutors that he was bin Laden’s best friend and in charge of trying and procure WMD materials from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review, 6-17-04
Stephen Hayes, Weekly Standard, 11-24-03
· A “Former Senior (Iraqi) Intelligence Officer” has told U.S. officials that a flurry of activity between Saddam Hussein’s regime and al-Qaeda took place in early and late 1998, the meeting point was Baghdad’s Intelligence station in Pakistan
Stephen Hayes, Weekly Standard, 11-24-03
· Wafiq al-Sammarrai, former head of Iraq’s Military Intelligence before defecting in 1994, stated that Saddam Hussein has agents “inside” al-Qaeda
Laurie Mylroie, “Study of Revenge”
· Khidir Hamza, Saddam Hussein’s former top WMD official, says that Saddam had connections to al-Qaeda
CNN, 10-15-01
PBS Frontline "Gunning For Saddam"
· Abu Zeinab al-Qurairy , a former high-ranking officer in Iraq’s Mukhabarat, told PBS Frontline and the New York Times that the September 11 attackers were trained in Salman Pak, as were other members of al-Qaeda
PBS Frontline "Gunning For Saddam"
· Sabah Khodada, a former Captain in Iraq’s Army, told PBS Frontline and the New York Times that the terrorist training camp at Salman Pak included the training of al-Qaeda members airplane hijacking
PBS Frontline "Gunning For Saddam"
· An “Iraqi Defector,” who spent 16 years working for Iraq’s Mukhabarat, told the Iraqi National Congress that Saddam Hussein’s illegal oil revenues helped fund al-Qaeda (story later corroborated by Claudia Rosett )
Radio Free Europe 9-29-2002
· Khalil Ibrahim Abdallah, a captured senior Iraqi official, said that IIS agents had met with bin Laden until the middle of 1999
Stephen Hayes, Weekly Standard, 11-24-03
· Qassem Hussein Mohamed, who served in Iraq’s Mukhabarat for 20 years, told reporters that Saddam Hussein has been secretly aiding, arming and funding Ansar al Islam and al-Qaeda for several years
Scott Peterson, Christian Science Monitor, 4-2-02
Jeffrey Goldberg, New Yorker, 3-25-02
· Dr. Mohammed al-Masri, a known al-Qaeda spokesman, told the Sunday Times that Saddam Hussein contacted the “Arab Afghans” (al-Qaeda) in 2001. Al-Masri also said that Saddam even went so far as to fund the movement of some al-Qaeda members into Iraq and then later supplied them with arms caches and money, later to be used in insurgent attacks. Abdel Bari Atwan, Sunday Times, 2-26-06 via Thomas Joscelyn, "Saddam, the Insurgency, and the Terrorists, 3-28-06
· Hudayfa Azzam, the son of bin Laden’s former mentor, told reporters in 2004, “Saddam Hussein's regime welcomed them with open arms and young al-Qaeda members entered Iraq in large numbers, setting up an organization to confront the occupation.” AFP, 8-30-04 Thomas Joscelyn, "What Else Did Hudayfa Azzam Have To Say About Al-Qaeda In Iraq?” 4-3-06
· Hudayfa Azzam, the son of bin Laden’s mentor Abdullah Azzam, has said Iraq’s government worked closely with al-Qaeda before the war and welcomed a number of members in after they left Afghanistan and armed and funded them Thomas Joscelyn citing AFP, 8-30-04
· Dr. Mohammed al-Masri, a known al-Qaeda spokesman, told the Sunday Times that Saddam Hussein contacted the “Arab Afghans” (al-Qaeda) in 2001. Abdel Bari Atwan, Sunday Times, 2-26-06 via Thomas Joscelyn, “Saddam, the Insurgency, and the Terrorists,” 3-28-06
· Haqi Ismail, a Mosul native with relatives at the top of Iraq’s Mukhabarat and spent time in al-Qaeda/al Ansar camps in Afghanistan and Northern Iraq before being caught by Kurdish security, indicated that he was working for Saddam Hussein’s Intelligence Service (Mukhabarat)
Jeffrey Goldberg, New Yorker, 3-25-02
· Moammar Ahmad Yussef, a captured deputy of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, told officials that Iraq provided money, weapons, fake passports, safe haven and training to al-Qaeda members
Dan Darling, Winds of Change, 11-21-03
· A “top Saddam Hussein official,” who was also a senior Intelligence official, says that Iraq made a secret pact with Ayman al-Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad and later al-Qaeda. Secret meetings between the two sides began in 1992.
Stephen Hayes, Weekly Standard, 11-24-03
· Abu Zubaydah, a high ranking al-Qaeda operative in U.S. custody, has said that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had good contacts with Iraqi Intelligence Services
Thomas Joscelyn, Weekly Standard, December 2, 2005
· Abu Iman al-Baghdadi, a 20-year veteran of Iraqi intelligence, told BBC news that Saddam Hussein is funding and arming Ansar al-Islam to fend off anti-Saddam Kurds
Jim Muir, BBC, July 24, 2002
Surely, much more detail is locked away in the classified interrogation logs of other captured al-Qaeda fighters and former Baathists in custody. (I have filed an FOIA request for a few.) Those who may have some answers would be the big name al-Qaeda fighters who were caught in Iraq and the captured Baathists in custody caught after the war terrorizing with Zarqawi and his affiliates. But what we know already should make us discount the “no connection” argument made by partisans denying reality.
Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.
Mark Eichenlaub runs the website Regime of Terror, "Documenting Saddam Hussein's State Sponsorship of Terrorism."
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
July 7, 2006
One of the pillars of the argument that there were “no links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda” is that the captured/defected members from both sides have denied any relationship existed. (The Left makes this claim even though most of the detainees’ interrogation logs remain classified and their contents remain on a need-to-know basis.) This “no connection” claim has been made a number of times, and those making it generally receive favorable media attention; they’re rarely if ever confronted with testimony that conflicts with their argument. I will not argue on behalf of the truthfulness of former Ba’athists and al-Qaeda members, but if their testimony is going to admitted, shouldn’t critics also hear the testimony of those in custody who tell a different story?
There are more than a few former Iraqi officials and captured al-Qaeda affiliates who have revealed examples of cooperation between Saddam’s Iraq and Osama’s terrorist assets.
· “Abu Mohammed,” a former colonel of Saddam Hussein’s Fedayeen fighters, told reporters long ago that Iraq was training terrorists, including al-Qaeda.
Gwynne Roberts, Sunday Times, July 14, 2002
· Iraqi soldiers, captured during the early phases of the war on Iraq in 2003, revealed that al-Qaeda terrorists were present inside Iraq fighting alongside Iraqi troops
Gethin Chamberlain, The Scotsman, 10-28-03
· Hamsiraji Sali, Commander of the al-Qaeda affiliate Abu Sayyaf, admitted receiving $20,000 dollars a year from Iraq.
Marc Lerner, Washington Times, 3-4-03
· Salah Suleiman, revealed that he was a former Iraqi Intelligence officer, captured on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border shuttling between Iraq and Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Janes Foreign Report, 9-19-01
· Jamal al-Qurairy, a former General in Iraq’s Mukhabarat, who defected years ago, said “that [is] ours” immediately after seeing 9/11 attacks.
David Rose, Vanity Fair, Feb. 2003, and David Rose, The Observer, 3-16-03
· Abbas al-Janabai, a personal assistant to Uday Hussein for 15 years, has repeatedly stated that there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden that included training terrorists at various camps in Iraq.
CNN, 7-23-2003
Gwynne Roberts, Sunday Times, July 14,2002
Richard Miniter, TechCentralStation, 9-25-03
· Two Moroccan associates of Osama bin Laden, arrested in Rabat in Nov 98, confirmed that Col Khairallah al-Tikriti, the brother of Iraq’s top Intelligence official (Mukhabarat), was the case officer in charge of operations with al-Qaeda in Kashmir and Manila
Jacquard, Roland, In the Name of Osama Bin Laden, Duke University Press, 2002, pg.112
· Wali Khan Amin Shah, an al-Qaeda operative in custody, told the FBI that Abu
Hajer al-Iraq had good contacts with Iraq Intelligence Services (reported to Senate Intelligence Committee)
Stephen Hayes, Thomas Joscelyn, Weekly Standard, 7-18-05
· Farouk Hijazi, former #3 in Saddam Hussein’s Mukhabarat, although he denies the well documented reports of his later meetings with bin Laden, Hijazi admits that he met with Osama bin Laden to discuss antiship mines and terror training camps in Iraq during the mid-90’s.
9-11 Commission, Staff Statement 15
· Abdul Rahman al-Shamari, who served in Saddam Hussein’s Mukhabarat from 1997-2002, says that he worked to link Saddam Hussein regime with Ansar al Islam and al-Qaeda.
Preston Mendenhall, MSNBC, "War Diary"
Jonathan Schanzer, Weekly Standard, 3-1-04
· Mohamed Gharib, Ansar al Islam’s Media chief, later admitted that the group took assistance from Saddam Hussein’s regime.
Scott Peterson, Christian Science Monitor, 10-16-03
· Mohamed Mansour Shahab, aka Muhammad Jawad, is a smuggler who claims to have been hired by Iraq to bring weapons to al-Qaeda in Afghanistan
Jeffrey Goldberg, New Yorker, 3-25-02
Scott Peterson, Christian Science Monitor, 4-03-02
Richard Miniter, TechCentralStation, 9-25-03
· Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi is a senior al-Qaeda operative. Although he has changed his story, he initially told his captors that his mission was to travel to Iraq to acquire poisons and gases from Iraqi Intelligence after impressing them with al-Qaeda’s attack on the USS Cole
Stephen Hayes, Weekly Standard, 11-24-03
· An “enemy combatant” being held at Guantanamo Bay, who was also a former Iraqi Army officer, admits that he served as a liaison between Osama bin Laden and Iraqi Intelligence. He was arrested in Pakistan before completing joint IIS/al-Qaeda mission to blow up U.S. and British embassies
Associated Press, 3-30-05
Stephen Hayes, Thomas Joscelyn. Weekly Standard. 7-18-05
· Abu Hajer al-Iraqi (aka Mahmdouh Mahmud Salim) told prosecutors that he was bin Laden’s best friend and in charge of trying and procure WMD materials from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review, 6-17-04
Stephen Hayes, Weekly Standard, 11-24-03
· A “Former Senior (Iraqi) Intelligence Officer” has told U.S. officials that a flurry of activity between Saddam Hussein’s regime and al-Qaeda took place in early and late 1998, the meeting point was Baghdad’s Intelligence station in Pakistan
Stephen Hayes, Weekly Standard, 11-24-03
· Wafiq al-Sammarrai, former head of Iraq’s Military Intelligence before defecting in 1994, stated that Saddam Hussein has agents “inside” al-Qaeda
Laurie Mylroie, “Study of Revenge”
· Khidir Hamza, Saddam Hussein’s former top WMD official, says that Saddam had connections to al-Qaeda
CNN, 10-15-01
PBS Frontline "Gunning For Saddam"
· Abu Zeinab al-Qurairy , a former high-ranking officer in Iraq’s Mukhabarat, told PBS Frontline and the New York Times that the September 11 attackers were trained in Salman Pak, as were other members of al-Qaeda
PBS Frontline "Gunning For Saddam"
· Sabah Khodada, a former Captain in Iraq’s Army, told PBS Frontline and the New York Times that the terrorist training camp at Salman Pak included the training of al-Qaeda members airplane hijacking
PBS Frontline "Gunning For Saddam"
· An “Iraqi Defector,” who spent 16 years working for Iraq’s Mukhabarat, told the Iraqi National Congress that Saddam Hussein’s illegal oil revenues helped fund al-Qaeda (story later corroborated by Claudia Rosett )
Radio Free Europe 9-29-2002
· Khalil Ibrahim Abdallah, a captured senior Iraqi official, said that IIS agents had met with bin Laden until the middle of 1999
Stephen Hayes, Weekly Standard, 11-24-03
· Qassem Hussein Mohamed, who served in Iraq’s Mukhabarat for 20 years, told reporters that Saddam Hussein has been secretly aiding, arming and funding Ansar al Islam and al-Qaeda for several years
Scott Peterson, Christian Science Monitor, 4-2-02
Jeffrey Goldberg, New Yorker, 3-25-02
· Dr. Mohammed al-Masri, a known al-Qaeda spokesman, told the Sunday Times that Saddam Hussein contacted the “Arab Afghans” (al-Qaeda) in 2001. Al-Masri also said that Saddam even went so far as to fund the movement of some al-Qaeda members into Iraq and then later supplied them with arms caches and money, later to be used in insurgent attacks. Abdel Bari Atwan, Sunday Times, 2-26-06 via Thomas Joscelyn, "Saddam, the Insurgency, and the Terrorists, 3-28-06
· Hudayfa Azzam, the son of bin Laden’s former mentor, told reporters in 2004, “Saddam Hussein's regime welcomed them with open arms and young al-Qaeda members entered Iraq in large numbers, setting up an organization to confront the occupation.” AFP, 8-30-04 Thomas Joscelyn, "What Else Did Hudayfa Azzam Have To Say About Al-Qaeda In Iraq?” 4-3-06
· Hudayfa Azzam, the son of bin Laden’s mentor Abdullah Azzam, has said Iraq’s government worked closely with al-Qaeda before the war and welcomed a number of members in after they left Afghanistan and armed and funded them Thomas Joscelyn citing AFP, 8-30-04
· Dr. Mohammed al-Masri, a known al-Qaeda spokesman, told the Sunday Times that Saddam Hussein contacted the “Arab Afghans” (al-Qaeda) in 2001. Abdel Bari Atwan, Sunday Times, 2-26-06 via Thomas Joscelyn, “Saddam, the Insurgency, and the Terrorists,” 3-28-06
· Haqi Ismail, a Mosul native with relatives at the top of Iraq’s Mukhabarat and spent time in al-Qaeda/al Ansar camps in Afghanistan and Northern Iraq before being caught by Kurdish security, indicated that he was working for Saddam Hussein’s Intelligence Service (Mukhabarat)
Jeffrey Goldberg, New Yorker, 3-25-02
· Moammar Ahmad Yussef, a captured deputy of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, told officials that Iraq provided money, weapons, fake passports, safe haven and training to al-Qaeda members
Dan Darling, Winds of Change, 11-21-03
· A “top Saddam Hussein official,” who was also a senior Intelligence official, says that Iraq made a secret pact with Ayman al-Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad and later al-Qaeda. Secret meetings between the two sides began in 1992.
Stephen Hayes, Weekly Standard, 11-24-03
· Abu Zubaydah, a high ranking al-Qaeda operative in U.S. custody, has said that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had good contacts with Iraqi Intelligence Services
Thomas Joscelyn, Weekly Standard, December 2, 2005
· Abu Iman al-Baghdadi, a 20-year veteran of Iraqi intelligence, told BBC news that Saddam Hussein is funding and arming Ansar al-Islam to fend off anti-Saddam Kurds
Jim Muir, BBC, July 24, 2002
Surely, much more detail is locked away in the classified interrogation logs of other captured al-Qaeda fighters and former Baathists in custody. (I have filed an FOIA request for a few.) Those who may have some answers would be the big name al-Qaeda fighters who were caught in Iraq and the captured Baathists in custody caught after the war terrorizing with Zarqawi and his affiliates. But what we know already should make us discount the “no connection” argument made by partisans denying reality.
Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.
Mark Eichenlaub runs the website Regime of Terror, "Documenting Saddam Hussein's State Sponsorship of Terrorism."
Thursday, July 06, 2006
Robert J. Samuelson: Global Warming's Real Inconvenient Truth
Robert J. Samuelson
The Washington Post
Wednesday, July 5, 2006; Page A13
"Global warming may or may not be the great environmental crisis of the next century, but -- regardless of whether it is or isn't -- we won't do much about it. We will (I am sure) argue ferociously over it and may even, as a nation, make some fairly solemn-sounding commitments to avoid it. But the more dramatic and meaningful these commitments seem, the less likely they are to be observed. Little will be done. . . . Global warming promises to become a gushing source of national hypocrisy.''
-- This column, July 1997
Well, so it has. In three decades of columns, I've never quoted myself at length, but here it's necessary. Al Gore calls global warming an "inconvenient truth," as if merely recognizing it could put us on a path to a solution. That's an illusion. The real truth is that we don't know enough to relieve global warming, and -- barring major technological breakthroughs -- we can't do much about it. This was obvious nine years ago; it's still obvious. Let me explain.
From 2003 to 2050, the world's population is projected to grow from 6.4 billion people to 9.1 billion, a 42 percent increase. If energy use per person and technology remain the same, total energy use and greenhouse gas emissions (mainly, carbon dioxide) will be 42 percent higher in 2050. But that's too low, because societies that grow richer use more energy. Unless we condemn the world's poor to their present poverty -- and freeze everyone else's living standards -- we need economic growth. With modest growth, energy use and greenhouse emissions more than double by 2050.
Just keeping annual greenhouse gas emissions constant means that the world must somehow offset these huge increases. There are two ways: Improve energy efficiency, or shift to energy sources with lower (or no) greenhouse emissions. Intuitively, you sense this is tough. China, for example, builds about one coal-fired power plant a week. Now a new report from the International Energy Agency in Paris shows all the difficulties (the population, economic growth and energy projections cited above come from the report).
The IEA report assumes that existing technologies are rapidly improved and deployed. Vehicle fuel efficiency increases by 40 percent. In electricity generation, the share for coal (the fuel with the most greenhouse gases) shrinks from about 40 percent to about 25 percent -- and much carbon dioxide is captured before going into the atmosphere. Little is captured today. Nuclear energy increases. So do "renewables" (wind, solar, biomass, geothermal); their share of global electricity output rises from 2 percent now to about 15 percent.
Some of these changes seem heroic. They would require tough government regulation, continued technological gains and public acceptance of higher fuel prices. Never mind. Having postulated a crash energy diet, the IEA simulates five scenarios with differing rates of technological change. In each, greenhouse emissions in 2050 are higher than today. The increases vary from 6 percent to 27 percent.
Since 1800 there's been modest global warming. I'm unqualified to judge between those scientists (the majority) who blame man-made greenhouse gases and those (a small minority) who finger natural variations in the global weather system. But if the majority are correct, the IEA report indicates we're now powerless. We can't end annual greenhouse emissions, and once in the atmosphere, the gases seem to linger for decades. So concentration levels rise. They're the villains; they presumably trap the world's heat. They're already about 36 percent higher than in 1800. Even with its program, the IEA says another 45 percent rise may be unavoidable. How much warming this might create is uncertain; so are the consequences.
I draw two conclusions -- one political, one practical.
No government will adopt the draconian restrictions on economic growth and personal freedom (limits on electricity usage, driving and travel) that might curb global warming. Still, politicians want to show they're "doing something." The result is grandstanding. Consider the Kyoto Protocol. It allowed countries that joined to castigate those that didn't. But it hasn't reduced carbon dioxide emissions (up about 25 percent since 1990), and many signatories didn't adopt tough enough policies to hit their 2008-2012 targets. By some estimates, Europe may overshoot by 15 percent and Japan by 25 percent.
Ambitious U.S. politicians also practice this self-serving hypocrisy. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has a global warming program. Gore counts 221 cities that have "ratified" Kyoto. Some pledge to curb their greenhouse emissions. None of these programs will reduce global warming. They're public relations exercises and -- if they impose costs -- are undesirable. (Note: on national security grounds, I favor taxing oil, but the global warming effect would be trivial.) The practical conclusion is that if global warming is a potential calamity, the only salvation is new technology. I once received an e-mail from an engineer. Thorium, he said. I had never heard of thorium. It is, he argued, a nuclear fuel that is more plentiful and safer than uranium without waste disposal problems. It's an exit from the global warming trap. After reading many articles, I gave up trying to decide whether he is correct. But his larger point is correct: Only an aggressive research and development program might find ways of breaking our dependence on fossil fuels or dealing with it. Perhaps some system could purge the atmosphere of surplus greenhouse gases?
The trouble with the global warming debate is that it has become a moral crusade when it's really an engineering problem. The inconvenient truth is that if we don't solve the engineering problem, we're helpless.
Thursday, June 29, 2006
Jeff Jacoby: A Press Storm Over Secrets
Jun 29, 2006
The Boston Globe
Jeff Jacoby ( bio archive contact )
T.F. Boggs is a 24-year-old sergeant in the Army Reserves serving his second tour of duty in Iraq, where he helps to provide security for a military base in Mosul. He is also an occasional blogger, venting his views at www.boredsoldier.blogspot.com. On Sunday, those views took the form of a letter to Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times. Two days earlier, the Times (along with The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times) had exposed the existence of a top-secret government effort to monitor the international movement of funds between Al Qaeda and its financial collaborators.
"Your recent decision to publish information about a classified program intended to track the banking transactions of possible terrorists is not only detrimental to America but also to its fighting men and women overseas," Boggs wrote. "Terrorism happens here every day because there are rich men out there willing to support the . . . terrorist who plants bombs and shoots soldiers. . . . Without money, terrorism in Iraq would die because there would no longer be supplies for IED's, no mortars . . . and no motivation for people to abandon regular work in hopes of striking it rich after killing a soldier. Thank you for continually contributing to the deaths of my fellow soldiers."
Boggs isn't the only angry soldier the Times has heard from. Lieutenant Thomas Cotton, a Harvard Law School graduate who practiced law in Washington before becoming an infantry officer, wrote from Baghdad (in a letter posted on the influential Powerline website) about the roadside explosion that recently "killed one soldier and severely injured another from my 130-man company." Cotton, too, underscored the fact that terrorism runs on money. The people trying to kill him and his men "require financing to obtain mortars and artillery shells, priming explosives, wiring and circuitry, not to mention for training and payments to locals willing to emplace bombs . . . You may think you have done a public service, but you have gravely endangered the lives of my soldiers and all other soldiers and innocent Iraqis here."
It obviously didn't come as news to the editor of the Times that money is crucial to terrorism, or that Al Qaeda will be a threat until its financial supply lines are choked off. The Times had made that point itself in a strong editorial less than two weeks after 9/11. "Washington and its allies must also disable the financial networks used by terrorists," the editorial said. "The Bush administration is preparing new laws to help track terrorists through their money-laundering activity. . . Much more is needed, including . . . greater cooperation with foreign banking authorities. There must also be closer coordination among America's law enforcement, national security, and financial regulatory agencies. . . . If America is going to wage a new kind of war against terrorism, it must act on all fronts, including the financial one."
It was just such reasoning that led the Treasury Department to develop the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program that last week's stories exposed. As even those stories made clear, the program was legal, disclosed to members of Congress, carefully limited to prevent abuse, and -- above all -- effective. Among other successes, administration officials told the Times, it led to the capture of the Indonesian terrorist who masterminded the horrific 2002 bombing of a Bali resort. For what reason would any responsible media outlet want to sabotage such a program? If not out of sheer political animus -- contempt for the Bush administration and opposition to the war -- then why?
Los Angeles Times editor Dean Baquet said yesterday that he "felt that the legitimate public interest in this program outweighed the potential cost to counterterrorism efforts." Keller, of The New York Times, said much the same thing last week. (The Times is owned by the New York Times Co., which also owns The Boston Globe.) But neither has explained just how the public interest is advanced by deliberately compromising a crucial counterterrorism tool. Once upon a time, mainstream journalists would have been aghast at the revelation of national security secrets in wartime. Apparently only some of us still feel that way.
The media may not be the most detested institution in America, but it is surely a contender for the title. A Harris poll in March found that only 14 percent of American adults express a "great deal" of confidence in the press, while 34 percent -- one American in three -- have "hardly any" confidence in it.
The nation's most trusted institution, by contrast, is the military. According to Harris, 47 percent of Americans have a "great deal" of confidence in the armed forces. Only 14 percent have "hardly any." No doubt it is just a coincidence that the small fraction of the public that disdains the military is equal to the small fraction that greatly admires the media. But at a time when prominent newspapers are running stories that are apt to get more soldiers killed, I'll bet Sergeant Boggs and Lieutenant Cotton don't think so.
Jeff Jacoby is an Op-Ed writer for the Boston Globe, a radio political commentator, and a contributing columnist for Townhall.com.
The Boston Globe
Jeff Jacoby ( bio archive contact )
T.F. Boggs is a 24-year-old sergeant in the Army Reserves serving his second tour of duty in Iraq, where he helps to provide security for a military base in Mosul. He is also an occasional blogger, venting his views at www.boredsoldier.blogspot.com. On Sunday, those views took the form of a letter to Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times. Two days earlier, the Times (along with The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times) had exposed the existence of a top-secret government effort to monitor the international movement of funds between Al Qaeda and its financial collaborators.
"Your recent decision to publish information about a classified program intended to track the banking transactions of possible terrorists is not only detrimental to America but also to its fighting men and women overseas," Boggs wrote. "Terrorism happens here every day because there are rich men out there willing to support the . . . terrorist who plants bombs and shoots soldiers. . . . Without money, terrorism in Iraq would die because there would no longer be supplies for IED's, no mortars . . . and no motivation for people to abandon regular work in hopes of striking it rich after killing a soldier. Thank you for continually contributing to the deaths of my fellow soldiers."
Boggs isn't the only angry soldier the Times has heard from. Lieutenant Thomas Cotton, a Harvard Law School graduate who practiced law in Washington before becoming an infantry officer, wrote from Baghdad (in a letter posted on the influential Powerline website) about the roadside explosion that recently "killed one soldier and severely injured another from my 130-man company." Cotton, too, underscored the fact that terrorism runs on money. The people trying to kill him and his men "require financing to obtain mortars and artillery shells, priming explosives, wiring and circuitry, not to mention for training and payments to locals willing to emplace bombs . . . You may think you have done a public service, but you have gravely endangered the lives of my soldiers and all other soldiers and innocent Iraqis here."
It obviously didn't come as news to the editor of the Times that money is crucial to terrorism, or that Al Qaeda will be a threat until its financial supply lines are choked off. The Times had made that point itself in a strong editorial less than two weeks after 9/11. "Washington and its allies must also disable the financial networks used by terrorists," the editorial said. "The Bush administration is preparing new laws to help track terrorists through their money-laundering activity. . . Much more is needed, including . . . greater cooperation with foreign banking authorities. There must also be closer coordination among America's law enforcement, national security, and financial regulatory agencies. . . . If America is going to wage a new kind of war against terrorism, it must act on all fronts, including the financial one."
It was just such reasoning that led the Treasury Department to develop the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program that last week's stories exposed. As even those stories made clear, the program was legal, disclosed to members of Congress, carefully limited to prevent abuse, and -- above all -- effective. Among other successes, administration officials told the Times, it led to the capture of the Indonesian terrorist who masterminded the horrific 2002 bombing of a Bali resort. For what reason would any responsible media outlet want to sabotage such a program? If not out of sheer political animus -- contempt for the Bush administration and opposition to the war -- then why?
Los Angeles Times editor Dean Baquet said yesterday that he "felt that the legitimate public interest in this program outweighed the potential cost to counterterrorism efforts." Keller, of The New York Times, said much the same thing last week. (The Times is owned by the New York Times Co., which also owns The Boston Globe.) But neither has explained just how the public interest is advanced by deliberately compromising a crucial counterterrorism tool. Once upon a time, mainstream journalists would have been aghast at the revelation of national security secrets in wartime. Apparently only some of us still feel that way.
The media may not be the most detested institution in America, but it is surely a contender for the title. A Harris poll in March found that only 14 percent of American adults express a "great deal" of confidence in the press, while 34 percent -- one American in three -- have "hardly any" confidence in it.
The nation's most trusted institution, by contrast, is the military. According to Harris, 47 percent of Americans have a "great deal" of confidence in the armed forces. Only 14 percent have "hardly any." No doubt it is just a coincidence that the small fraction of the public that disdains the military is equal to the small fraction that greatly admires the media. But at a time when prominent newspapers are running stories that are apt to get more soldiers killed, I'll bet Sergeant Boggs and Lieutenant Cotton don't think so.
Jeff Jacoby is an Op-Ed writer for the Boston Globe, a radio political commentator, and a contributing columnist for Townhall.com.
Michael Fumento: Killing the Passive Smoking Debate
Jun 29, 2006
Michael Fumento ( bio archive )
“Secondhand smoke debate ‘over.” That’s the message from the Surgeon General’s office, delivered by a sycophantic media. The claim is that the science has now overwhelmingly proved that smoke from others’ cigarettes can kill you. Actually, “debate over” simply means: “If you have your doubts, shut up!”
But you definitely should have doubts over the new Surgeon General’s report, a massive 727-page door stop. Like many massive reports on controversial issues, it’s probably designed that way so nobody (especially reporters on deadline) will want to or have time to read beyond the executive summary. That includes me; if I had that much time I’d reread "War and Peace". Twice. But the report admits it contains no new science so we can evaluate it based on research already available.
First consider the 1993 EPA study that began the passive smoking crusade. It declared such smoke a carcinogen based on a combined analysis (meta-analysis) of 11 mostly tiny studies. The media quickly fell into line, with headlines blaring: “Passive Smoking Kills Thousands” and editorials demanding: “Ban Hazardous Smoking; Report Shows It’s a Killer.”
But the EPA’s report had more holes than a spaghetti strainer. Its greatest weakness was the agency’s refusal to use the gold standard in epidemiology, the 95 percent confidence interval. This simply means there are only five chances in 100 that the conclusion came about just by chance, even if the study itself was done correctly.
Curiously, the EPA decided to use a 90 percent level, effectively doubling the likelihood of getting its result by sheer luck of the draw.
Why would it do such a strange thing? You guessed it. Its results weren't significant at the 95 percent level. Essentially, it moved the goal posts back because the football had fallen short. In scientific terminology this is known as “dishonesty.”
Two much larger meta-analyses have appeared since the EPA’s. One was conducted on behalf of the World Health Organization and covered seven countries over seven years. Published in 1998, it actually showed a statistically significant reduced risk for children of smokers, though we can assume that was a fluke. But it also showed no increase for spouses and co-workers of smokers.
The second meta-analysis, published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) in 2002, likewise found a statistical significance when 48 studies were combined. Looked at separately, though, only seven showed significant excesses of lung cancer. Thus 41 did not.
Meta-analysis, though, suffers from such problems as different studies having been conducted in different ways – the apples and oranges conundrum. What was really needed was one study involving a huge number of participants over a long period of time using the same evaluation.
We got that in the prestigious British Medical Journal in 2003. Research professor James Enstrom of UCLA and professor Geoffrey Kabat of the State University of New York, Stony Brook presented results of a 39-year study of 35,561 Californians, which dwarfed in size everything that came before. It found no “causal relationship between exposure to [passive smoke] and tobacco-related mortality,” adding, however “a small effect” can’t be ruled out.
The reason active tobacco smoking could be such a terrible killer while passive smoke may cause no deaths lies in the dictum "the dose makes the poison." We are constantly bombarded by carcinogens, but in tiny amounts the body usually easily fends them off.
A New England Journal of Medicine study found that even back in 1975 – when having smoke obnoxiously puffed into your face was ubiquitous in restaurants, cocktail lounges, and transportation lounges – the concentration was equal to merely 0.004 cigarettes an hour. That’s not quite the same as smoking two packs a day, is it?
But none of this has the least impact on the various federal, state, and city agencies and organizations like the American Lung Association for a very good reason. They already know they’re scientifically wrong. The purpose of the passive smoking campaign has never been to protect non-smokers, but rather to cow smokers into giving up the habit.
It’s easy to agree with the ultimate goal, but inventing scientific outcomes and shutting down scientific debate as a means is as intolerable as it was when Nazi Germany “proved” the validity of eugenics.
Michael Fumento is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., the author of BioEvolution.
Michael Fumento ( bio archive )
“Secondhand smoke debate ‘over.” That’s the message from the Surgeon General’s office, delivered by a sycophantic media. The claim is that the science has now overwhelmingly proved that smoke from others’ cigarettes can kill you. Actually, “debate over” simply means: “If you have your doubts, shut up!”
But you definitely should have doubts over the new Surgeon General’s report, a massive 727-page door stop. Like many massive reports on controversial issues, it’s probably designed that way so nobody (especially reporters on deadline) will want to or have time to read beyond the executive summary. That includes me; if I had that much time I’d reread "War and Peace". Twice. But the report admits it contains no new science so we can evaluate it based on research already available.First consider the 1993 EPA study that began the passive smoking crusade. It declared such smoke a carcinogen based on a combined analysis (meta-analysis) of 11 mostly tiny studies. The media quickly fell into line, with headlines blaring: “Passive Smoking Kills Thousands” and editorials demanding: “Ban Hazardous Smoking; Report Shows It’s a Killer.”
But the EPA’s report had more holes than a spaghetti strainer. Its greatest weakness was the agency’s refusal to use the gold standard in epidemiology, the 95 percent confidence interval. This simply means there are only five chances in 100 that the conclusion came about just by chance, even if the study itself was done correctly.
Curiously, the EPA decided to use a 90 percent level, effectively doubling the likelihood of getting its result by sheer luck of the draw.
Why would it do such a strange thing? You guessed it. Its results weren't significant at the 95 percent level. Essentially, it moved the goal posts back because the football had fallen short. In scientific terminology this is known as “dishonesty.”
Two much larger meta-analyses have appeared since the EPA’s. One was conducted on behalf of the World Health Organization and covered seven countries over seven years. Published in 1998, it actually showed a statistically significant reduced risk for children of smokers, though we can assume that was a fluke. But it also showed no increase for spouses and co-workers of smokers.
The second meta-analysis, published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) in 2002, likewise found a statistical significance when 48 studies were combined. Looked at separately, though, only seven showed significant excesses of lung cancer. Thus 41 did not.
Meta-analysis, though, suffers from such problems as different studies having been conducted in different ways – the apples and oranges conundrum. What was really needed was one study involving a huge number of participants over a long period of time using the same evaluation.
We got that in the prestigious British Medical Journal in 2003. Research professor James Enstrom of UCLA and professor Geoffrey Kabat of the State University of New York, Stony Brook presented results of a 39-year study of 35,561 Californians, which dwarfed in size everything that came before. It found no “causal relationship between exposure to [passive smoke] and tobacco-related mortality,” adding, however “a small effect” can’t be ruled out.
The reason active tobacco smoking could be such a terrible killer while passive smoke may cause no deaths lies in the dictum "the dose makes the poison." We are constantly bombarded by carcinogens, but in tiny amounts the body usually easily fends them off.
A New England Journal of Medicine study found that even back in 1975 – when having smoke obnoxiously puffed into your face was ubiquitous in restaurants, cocktail lounges, and transportation lounges – the concentration was equal to merely 0.004 cigarettes an hour. That’s not quite the same as smoking two packs a day, is it?
But none of this has the least impact on the various federal, state, and city agencies and organizations like the American Lung Association for a very good reason. They already know they’re scientifically wrong. The purpose of the passive smoking campaign has never been to protect non-smokers, but rather to cow smokers into giving up the habit.
It’s easy to agree with the ultimate goal, but inventing scientific outcomes and shutting down scientific debate as a means is as intolerable as it was when Nazi Germany “proved” the validity of eugenics.
Michael Fumento is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., the author of BioEvolution.
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
Michelle Malkin: The terrorist-tipping Times
Jun 28, 2006
http://www.townhall.com
Michelle Malkin ( bio archive contact )
The New York Times (proudly publishing all the secrets unfit to spill since 9/11) and their reckless anonymous sources (come out, come out, you cowards) tipped off terrorists to America's efforts to track their financial activities.
Guess what? It isn't the first time blabbermouth journalists have jeopardized terror-financing investigations since Sept. 11, according to the government.
I remind you of the case of the Treason Times, the Holy Land Foundation, and the Global Relief Foundation. As the New York Post reported last September, the Justice Department charged that "a veteran New York Times foreign correspondent warned an alleged terror-funding Islamic charity that the FBI was about to raid its office -- potentially endangering the lives of federal agents." Times reporter Philip Shenon was accused of blowing the cover on a Dec. 14, 2001, raid of the Global Relief Foundation.
"It has been conclusively established that Global Relief Foundation learned of the search from reporter Philip Shenon of The New York Times," U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald wrote in an Aug. 7, 2002, letter to the Times' legal department.
Shenon's phone tip to the Muslim charity (which occurred one day before the FBI searched the foundation's offices), Fitzgerald said, "seriously compromised the integrity of the investigation and potentially endangered the safety of federal law-enforcement personnel." The Global Relief Foundation (GRF) wasn't some beneficent neighborhood charity sending shoes and Muslim Barbie dolls to poor kids overseas. It was designated a terror-financing organization in October 2002 by the Treasury Department, which reported that GRF "has connections to, has provided support for, and has provided assistance to Usama Bin Ladin, the al Qaida Network, and other known terrorist groups."
The Muslim charity had "received funding from individuals associated with al Qaida. GRF officials have had extensive contacts with a close associate of Usama Bin Ladin, who has been convicted in a U.S. court for his role in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania." Moreover, the Treasury Department said, "GRF members have dealt with officials of the Taliban, while the Taliban was subject to international sanctions."
Shenon's then-colleague, Judith Miller, had placed a similar call to another Muslim terrorist-front financier, the Holy Land Foundation, a few weeks before Shenon's call to the GRF. She was supposedly asking for "comment" on an impending freeze of their assets. According to Fitzgerald in court papers, Miller allegedly also warned them that "government action was imminent." The FBI raided the Holy Land Foundation's offices the day after Miller's article was published in the Times.
The Times' reporters -- surprise, surprise -- refuse to cooperate with investigators trying to identify the leakers. The government is appealing a ruling protecting the loose-lipped reporters' phone records. Which side are they on? Actions speak louder than words.
Oh, and while they continue to sabotage terror-financing investigations, the blabbermouths of the Times should be reminded -- as the conservative bloggers Bill Keller despises so much are doing -- of their own call in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 for vigorous counterterrorism measures to stop the bankrolling of terror:
"The Bush administration is preparing new laws to help track terrorists through their money-laundering activity and is readying an executive order freezing the assets of known terrorists. Much more is needed, including stricter regulations, the recruitment of specialized investigators and greater cooperation with foreign banking authorities. There must also be closer coordination among America's law enforcement, national security and financial regulatory agencies."
"Much more is needed?" Right. And when the Bush administration came through, the Times stabbed them, and us, in the backs. The lesson is clear. When terror strikes, don't believe a word the know-it-all Times prints. They are opportunistic, hindsighted hypocrites who endanger us all.
Michelle Malkin is a syndicated columnist and maintains her weblog at michellemalkin.com. She has also authored books such as Unhinged and In Defense of Internment.
http://www.townhall.com
Michelle Malkin ( bio archive contact )
The New York Times (proudly publishing all the secrets unfit to spill since 9/11) and their reckless anonymous sources (come out, come out, you cowards) tipped off terrorists to America's efforts to track their financial activities.
Guess what? It isn't the first time blabbermouth journalists have jeopardized terror-financing investigations since Sept. 11, according to the government.
I remind you of the case of the Treason Times, the Holy Land Foundation, and the Global Relief Foundation. As the New York Post reported last September, the Justice Department charged that "a veteran New York Times foreign correspondent warned an alleged terror-funding Islamic charity that the FBI was about to raid its office -- potentially endangering the lives of federal agents." Times reporter Philip Shenon was accused of blowing the cover on a Dec. 14, 2001, raid of the Global Relief Foundation.
"It has been conclusively established that Global Relief Foundation learned of the search from reporter Philip Shenon of The New York Times," U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald wrote in an Aug. 7, 2002, letter to the Times' legal department.
Shenon's phone tip to the Muslim charity (which occurred one day before the FBI searched the foundation's offices), Fitzgerald said, "seriously compromised the integrity of the investigation and potentially endangered the safety of federal law-enforcement personnel." The Global Relief Foundation (GRF) wasn't some beneficent neighborhood charity sending shoes and Muslim Barbie dolls to poor kids overseas. It was designated a terror-financing organization in October 2002 by the Treasury Department, which reported that GRF "has connections to, has provided support for, and has provided assistance to Usama Bin Ladin, the al Qaida Network, and other known terrorist groups."
The Muslim charity had "received funding from individuals associated with al Qaida. GRF officials have had extensive contacts with a close associate of Usama Bin Ladin, who has been convicted in a U.S. court for his role in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania." Moreover, the Treasury Department said, "GRF members have dealt with officials of the Taliban, while the Taliban was subject to international sanctions."
Shenon's then-colleague, Judith Miller, had placed a similar call to another Muslim terrorist-front financier, the Holy Land Foundation, a few weeks before Shenon's call to the GRF. She was supposedly asking for "comment" on an impending freeze of their assets. According to Fitzgerald in court papers, Miller allegedly also warned them that "government action was imminent." The FBI raided the Holy Land Foundation's offices the day after Miller's article was published in the Times.
The Times' reporters -- surprise, surprise -- refuse to cooperate with investigators trying to identify the leakers. The government is appealing a ruling protecting the loose-lipped reporters' phone records. Which side are they on? Actions speak louder than words.
Oh, and while they continue to sabotage terror-financing investigations, the blabbermouths of the Times should be reminded -- as the conservative bloggers Bill Keller despises so much are doing -- of their own call in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 for vigorous counterterrorism measures to stop the bankrolling of terror:
"The Bush administration is preparing new laws to help track terrorists through their money-laundering activity and is readying an executive order freezing the assets of known terrorists. Much more is needed, including stricter regulations, the recruitment of specialized investigators and greater cooperation with foreign banking authorities. There must also be closer coordination among America's law enforcement, national security and financial regulatory agencies."
"Much more is needed?" Right. And when the Bush administration came through, the Times stabbed them, and us, in the backs. The lesson is clear. When terror strikes, don't believe a word the know-it-all Times prints. They are opportunistic, hindsighted hypocrites who endanger us all.
Michelle Malkin is a syndicated columnist and maintains her weblog at michellemalkin.com. She has also authored books such as Unhinged and In Defense of Internment.
Daniel Pipes: How Muslims Think
Daniel Pipes
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
June 28, 2006
How do Muslims worldwide think?
To find out, the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press carried out a large-scale attitudinal survey this spring. Titled “The Great Divide: How Westerners and Muslims View Each Other,” it interviewed Muslims in two batches of countries: six of them with long-standing, majority-Muslim populations (Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Nigeria, Pakistan, Turkey) and four of them in Western Europe with new, minority Muslim populations (France, Germany, Great Britain, Spain).
The survey, which also looks at Western views of Muslims, yielded some dismaying but not altogether surprising results. Its themes can be grouped under three rubrics.
A proclivity to conspiracy theories: In not one Muslim population polled does a majority believe that Arabs carried out the 9/11 attacks on the United States. The proportions range from a mere 15 percent in Pakistan holding Arabs responsible, to 48 percent among French Muslims.
Confirming recent negative trends in Turkey, the number of Turks who point the finger at Arabs has declined from 46 percent in 2002 to 16 percent today. In other words, in every one of these ten Muslim communities, a majority views 9/11 as a hoax perpetrated by the U.S. government, Israel, or some other agency.
Likewise, Muslims are widely prejudiced against Jews, ranging from 28 percent unfavorable ratings among French Muslims to 98 percent in Jordan (which, despite the monarchy’s moderation, has a majority Palestinian population). Further, Muslims in certain countries (especially Egypt and Jordan) see Jews conspiratorially, as being responsible for bad relations between Muslims and Westerners.
Conspiracy theories also pertain to larger topics. Asked, “What is most responsible for Muslim nations’ lack of prosperity?” between 14 percent (in Pakistan) and 43 percent (in Jordan) blame the policies of the U.S. and other Western states, as opposed to indigenous problems, such as a lack of democracy or education, or the presence of corruption or radical Islam.
This conspiracism points to a widespread unwillingness in the umma to deal with realities, preferring the safer bromides of plots, schemes, and intrigues. It also reveals major problems adjusting to modernity.
Support for terrorism: All the Muslim populations polled display a solid majority of support for Osama bin Laden. Asked whether they have confidence in him, Muslims replied positively, ranging between 8 percent (in Turkey) to 72 percent (in Nigeria). Likewise, suicide bombing is popular. Muslims who call it justified range from 13 percent (in Germany) to 69 percent (in Nigeria). These appalling numbers suggest that terrorism by Muslims has deep roots and will remain a danger for years to come.
British and Nigerian Muslims the most alienated: The United Kingdom stands out as a paradoxical country. Non-Muslims there have strikingly more favorable views of Islam and Muslims than elsewhere in the West; for example, only 32 percent of the British sample view Muslims as violent, significantly less their counterparts in France (41 percent), Germany (52 percent) or Spain (60 percent). In the Muhammad cartoon dispute, Britons showed more sympathy for the Muslim outlook than did other Europeans. More broadly, Britons blame Muslims less for the poor state of Western-Muslim relations.
But British Muslims return the favor with the most malign anti-Western attitudes found in Europe. Many more of them regard Westerners as violent, greedy, immoral, and arrogant than do their counterparts in France, Germany, and Spain. In addition, whether asked about their attitudes toward Jews, responsibility for 9/11, or the place of women in Western societies, their views are notably more extreme.
The situation in Britain reflects the “Londonistan” phenomenon, whereby Britons preemptively cringe and Muslims respond to this weakness with aggression.
Nigerian Muslims have generally the most belligerent views on such issues as the state of Western-Muslim relations, the supposed immorality and arrogance of Westerners, and support for bin Laden and suicide terrorism. This extremism results, no doubt, from the violent state of Christian-Muslim relations in Nigeria.
Ironically, most Muslim alienation is found in those countries where Muslims are either the most or the least accommodated, suggesting that a middle path is best – where Muslims do not win special privileges, as in the U.K., nor are they in an advanced state of hostility, as in Nigeria.
Overall, the Pew survey sends an undeniable message of crisis from one end to the other of the Muslim world.
Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.
Mr. Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is director of the Middle East Forum and author of Miniatures (Transaction Publishers).
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
June 28, 2006
How do Muslims worldwide think?
To find out, the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press carried out a large-scale attitudinal survey this spring. Titled “The Great Divide: How Westerners and Muslims View Each Other,” it interviewed Muslims in two batches of countries: six of them with long-standing, majority-Muslim populations (Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Nigeria, Pakistan, Turkey) and four of them in Western Europe with new, minority Muslim populations (France, Germany, Great Britain, Spain).
The survey, which also looks at Western views of Muslims, yielded some dismaying but not altogether surprising results. Its themes can be grouped under three rubrics.
A proclivity to conspiracy theories: In not one Muslim population polled does a majority believe that Arabs carried out the 9/11 attacks on the United States. The proportions range from a mere 15 percent in Pakistan holding Arabs responsible, to 48 percent among French Muslims.
Confirming recent negative trends in Turkey, the number of Turks who point the finger at Arabs has declined from 46 percent in 2002 to 16 percent today. In other words, in every one of these ten Muslim communities, a majority views 9/11 as a hoax perpetrated by the U.S. government, Israel, or some other agency.
Likewise, Muslims are widely prejudiced against Jews, ranging from 28 percent unfavorable ratings among French Muslims to 98 percent in Jordan (which, despite the monarchy’s moderation, has a majority Palestinian population). Further, Muslims in certain countries (especially Egypt and Jordan) see Jews conspiratorially, as being responsible for bad relations between Muslims and Westerners.
Conspiracy theories also pertain to larger topics. Asked, “What is most responsible for Muslim nations’ lack of prosperity?” between 14 percent (in Pakistan) and 43 percent (in Jordan) blame the policies of the U.S. and other Western states, as opposed to indigenous problems, such as a lack of democracy or education, or the presence of corruption or radical Islam.
This conspiracism points to a widespread unwillingness in the umma to deal with realities, preferring the safer bromides of plots, schemes, and intrigues. It also reveals major problems adjusting to modernity.
Support for terrorism: All the Muslim populations polled display a solid majority of support for Osama bin Laden. Asked whether they have confidence in him, Muslims replied positively, ranging between 8 percent (in Turkey) to 72 percent (in Nigeria). Likewise, suicide bombing is popular. Muslims who call it justified range from 13 percent (in Germany) to 69 percent (in Nigeria). These appalling numbers suggest that terrorism by Muslims has deep roots and will remain a danger for years to come.
British and Nigerian Muslims the most alienated: The United Kingdom stands out as a paradoxical country. Non-Muslims there have strikingly more favorable views of Islam and Muslims than elsewhere in the West; for example, only 32 percent of the British sample view Muslims as violent, significantly less their counterparts in France (41 percent), Germany (52 percent) or Spain (60 percent). In the Muhammad cartoon dispute, Britons showed more sympathy for the Muslim outlook than did other Europeans. More broadly, Britons blame Muslims less for the poor state of Western-Muslim relations.
But British Muslims return the favor with the most malign anti-Western attitudes found in Europe. Many more of them regard Westerners as violent, greedy, immoral, and arrogant than do their counterparts in France, Germany, and Spain. In addition, whether asked about their attitudes toward Jews, responsibility for 9/11, or the place of women in Western societies, their views are notably more extreme.
The situation in Britain reflects the “Londonistan” phenomenon, whereby Britons preemptively cringe and Muslims respond to this weakness with aggression.
Nigerian Muslims have generally the most belligerent views on such issues as the state of Western-Muslim relations, the supposed immorality and arrogance of Westerners, and support for bin Laden and suicide terrorism. This extremism results, no doubt, from the violent state of Christian-Muslim relations in Nigeria.
Ironically, most Muslim alienation is found in those countries where Muslims are either the most or the least accommodated, suggesting that a middle path is best – where Muslims do not win special privileges, as in the U.K., nor are they in an advanced state of hostility, as in Nigeria.
Overall, the Pew survey sends an undeniable message of crisis from one end to the other of the Muslim world.
Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.
Mr. Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is director of the Middle East Forum and author of Miniatures (Transaction Publishers).
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Concert Review: Bruce Springsteen in Holmdel, N.J.
Running on all cylinders
Springsteen, Seeger Sessions Band in top form at second PNC show
Posted by the Asbury Park Press on 06/27/06
BY MICHAEL RILEY
STAFF WRITER
In strange and dangerous times, under threatening skies, Bruce Springsteen brought his traveling medicine show and tent revival to the PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel on Sunday night.
The second of two homecoming shows (and the final shows of the tour for now) saw Springsteen and a full comport of the Seeger Sessions Band in top form, tighter than at the tour's Asbury Park rehearsal shows a few months back.
For much of his career, Springsteen's music and stage shows have been about the political and the personal, and the two are bound together, especially when informed by faith.
And that's still the case, and it's present even when the music isn't playing. Representatives from both the Community FoodBank of New Jersey and New Jerseyans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty were on hand, and Springsteen exhorted the audience to check them out.
But now, with this tour, Springsteen makes history a central part of the equation by reaching back over the last two centuries for folk tunes that speak to and for this day's troubles.
The show opened with a recent addition to the set list, "American Land," a song done by Pete Seeger and rewritten by Springsteen as a song about the immigrant experience.
The gothic shadows of "Long Black Veil" and the devastation of "My City of Ruins" both had their place, alongside a big band-style "Open All Night" and a salesman-rap "You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch)."
The endearing corny schtick that Springsteen uses as a replacement for flashpots and laser shows has been a mainstay of many Springsteen tours, and these non-E Streeters do their part to keep the tradition going, from horn player Richie La Bamba's wild leap off his riser to the stage floor to Springsteen's Jimmy Swaggart-like exhortation that "there is no free beer in heaven — You've got to earn it!" to the tuba player having to be pulled offstage at the end of "Pay Me My Money Down."
Both PNC Bank Arts Center shows were sold out, unlike a few on the U.S. leg of this tour, and Springsteen thanked the crowd for taking a chance on this genre-bending musical history tour. With the huge Seeger Sessions Band, the whole Phil Spector "wall of sound" thing has to take on new meaning.
And the one-two punch of the Depression-era "How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?" and "Jacob's Ladder," a question-and-answer pair of songs that still seem to form the emotional center of the show, seems to prove once again that song order matters in a Springsteen concert.
What fans who took a flier on this strange new direction got was a mature artist surrounded by darn fine musicians, playing music that matters to them and having a high old time doing it.
Kandra and Rob Vuono of Wall have seen Springsteen maybe a half-dozen times during the last decade or so in various incarnations. But this time was something different, something special.
"I think we had a good time because Bruce seemed to be having such a good time," said Kathy.
"Only Bruce Springsteen could get away with this," said Rob, "and make it so good."
Jeff Jacoby: In an Islamist America
Jun 26, 2006
The Boston Globe
Jeff Jacoby ( bio archive contact )
After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, it became a cliche that if we didn't do X, Y, or Z -- usually some normal peacetime activity -- then "the terrorists will have won." That was the claim of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which decided to proceed with the 2001 Academy Awards on the grounds that "if we give in to fear, if we aren't able to do these simple and ordinary things, the terrorists have won the war." Similarly, members of the Frank Scott Bunnell High School marching band in Stratford, Conn., insisted on accepting an invitation to the Rose Bowl Parade in Pasadena, despite the possible risks. "I understand why some parents are worried," one student told The New York Times, "but we can't let the terrorists win."
In truth, though, most Americans have never thought about what it would mean if the terrorists really did win -- if militant Islamists were to succeed in their quest for political control of the United States. It isn't something that elites in academia, government, or the media generally like to talk about, for fear of being branded racist or "Islamophobic." American Islamists themselves are usually careful not to speak too candidly about their supremacist goals, but as Daniel Pipes has documented, the mask sometimes slips. For example, Siraj Wahaj, imam of the Taqwa Mosque in Brooklyn and board member of the Islamic Society of North America, has said that if Muslims were better organized, they could replace the American government with a Islamic caliphate: "If we were united and strong, we'd elect our own emir and give allegiance to him. . . . [T]ake my word, if 6-8 million Muslims unite in America, the country will come to us."
Life in an Islamist United States would be largely unfree and intolerant, if the experience of countries where radical Muslims have achieved power -- Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sudan, and Afghanistan -- is any guide. But what would that mean in American terms? That's the question a remarkable new novel sets out to answer.
"Prayers for the Assassin", Robert Ferrigno's latest thriller, is set 35 years in the future, when most of the United States has been transformed into the Islamic Republic of America. Under the new regime, America is a country in which university professors can lose their jobs for being "insufficiently Islamic," cellphone cameras are illegal, and men can only dream of "loud music, cold beer, and coed beaches." There is still a Super Bowl, but the cheerleaders are all men. Mt. Rushmore still exists, but the presidential faces on it have been blown up.
Ferrigno has said he spent two years researching Islam, and it shows in the level of detail with which the Islamic Republic has been conceived. In one scene, for example, a cabbie tunes his radio to a popular call-in show called "What Should I Do, Imam?" As Ferrigno's heroine listens from the back seat, a caller asks whether there are any kinds of music that one can enjoy without running afoul of Muslim law.
"Good question, my daughter," the imam answers. "The Holy Qur'an is quite clear that music is forbidden. One of the messengers of Allah said, 'There will be a nation who will make music their lot, and one day, while enjoying their music and alcohol, they will awake with their faces transformed into swine.' In fact, this messenger said he was sent to destroy all musical instruments. . . . Instead of music, rather listen to the Holy Qur'an." Ferrigno invented the scene, but the severe Islamist reply has been taken almost verbatim from http://www.Ask-Imam.com, the online advice site of the South African Mufti Ebrahim Desai.
In a Muslim America, Christians are "dhimmi" -- tolerated, but only as second-class citizens, barred from the best jobs and housing. Others, especially Jews and homosexuals, are not tolerated at all; many flee for their lives along a new underground railroad into Canada.
Life is especially hard for women, who may not leave their homes without written permission from a male relative, and even then risk being whipped by the "Black Robes" -- the Sharia-enforcing religious police -- if a lock of hair slips out from beneath their head scarves, or they neglect to keep their ankles covered. Repression is at the heart of fundamentalist Islam, and Ferrigno's portrayal of that repression in American terms is a vivid reminder of what is really at stake in the war against the jihadists.
But "Prayers for the Assassin" is no screed. If its villains are Muslims, so are its heroes; Ferrigno is quite aware that moderate and liberal Muslims have the most to fear from an Islamofascist victory.
He is also quite aware of Islam's appeal. Many converts to Islam find comfort and reassurance in its moral certainty and firm standards, and Ferrigno underscores the point. "Don't tell me about the old days, girl, I lived through them," says one character, a top government official. "Drugs sold on street corners. Guns everywhere. God driven out of the schools and courthouses. Births without marriage, rich and poor, so many bastards you wouldn't believe me. A country without shame. Alcohol sold in supermarkets. Babies killed in the womb, tens of millions of them. . . . We are not perfect, not by any measure, but I would not go back to those days for anything."
The war we are in is a spiritual no less than a military one, a point too many of us are apt to ignore. "Prayers for the Assassin" -- in addition to being a great read -- is an admonition to stop ignoring it. Unless, that is, we want the terrorists to win.
Jeff Jacoby is an Op-Ed writer for the Boston Globe, a radio political commentator, and a contributing columnist for Townhall.com.
The Boston Globe
Jeff Jacoby ( bio archive contact )
After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, it became a cliche that if we didn't do X, Y, or Z -- usually some normal peacetime activity -- then "the terrorists will have won." That was the claim of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which decided to proceed with the 2001 Academy Awards on the grounds that "if we give in to fear, if we aren't able to do these simple and ordinary things, the terrorists have won the war." Similarly, members of the Frank Scott Bunnell High School marching band in Stratford, Conn., insisted on accepting an invitation to the Rose Bowl Parade in Pasadena, despite the possible risks. "I understand why some parents are worried," one student told The New York Times, "but we can't let the terrorists win."
In truth, though, most Americans have never thought about what it would mean if the terrorists really did win -- if militant Islamists were to succeed in their quest for political control of the United States. It isn't something that elites in academia, government, or the media generally like to talk about, for fear of being branded racist or "Islamophobic." American Islamists themselves are usually careful not to speak too candidly about their supremacist goals, but as Daniel Pipes has documented, the mask sometimes slips. For example, Siraj Wahaj, imam of the Taqwa Mosque in Brooklyn and board member of the Islamic Society of North America, has said that if Muslims were better organized, they could replace the American government with a Islamic caliphate: "If we were united and strong, we'd elect our own emir and give allegiance to him. . . . [T]ake my word, if 6-8 million Muslims unite in America, the country will come to us."
Life in an Islamist United States would be largely unfree and intolerant, if the experience of countries where radical Muslims have achieved power -- Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sudan, and Afghanistan -- is any guide. But what would that mean in American terms? That's the question a remarkable new novel sets out to answer.
"Prayers for the Assassin", Robert Ferrigno's latest thriller, is set 35 years in the future, when most of the United States has been transformed into the Islamic Republic of America. Under the new regime, America is a country in which university professors can lose their jobs for being "insufficiently Islamic," cellphone cameras are illegal, and men can only dream of "loud music, cold beer, and coed beaches." There is still a Super Bowl, but the cheerleaders are all men. Mt. Rushmore still exists, but the presidential faces on it have been blown up.
Ferrigno has said he spent two years researching Islam, and it shows in the level of detail with which the Islamic Republic has been conceived. In one scene, for example, a cabbie tunes his radio to a popular call-in show called "What Should I Do, Imam?" As Ferrigno's heroine listens from the back seat, a caller asks whether there are any kinds of music that one can enjoy without running afoul of Muslim law.
"Good question, my daughter," the imam answers. "The Holy Qur'an is quite clear that music is forbidden. One of the messengers of Allah said, 'There will be a nation who will make music their lot, and one day, while enjoying their music and alcohol, they will awake with their faces transformed into swine.' In fact, this messenger said he was sent to destroy all musical instruments. . . . Instead of music, rather listen to the Holy Qur'an." Ferrigno invented the scene, but the severe Islamist reply has been taken almost verbatim from http://www.Ask-Imam.com, the online advice site of the South African Mufti Ebrahim Desai.
In a Muslim America, Christians are "dhimmi" -- tolerated, but only as second-class citizens, barred from the best jobs and housing. Others, especially Jews and homosexuals, are not tolerated at all; many flee for their lives along a new underground railroad into Canada.
Life is especially hard for women, who may not leave their homes without written permission from a male relative, and even then risk being whipped by the "Black Robes" -- the Sharia-enforcing religious police -- if a lock of hair slips out from beneath their head scarves, or they neglect to keep their ankles covered. Repression is at the heart of fundamentalist Islam, and Ferrigno's portrayal of that repression in American terms is a vivid reminder of what is really at stake in the war against the jihadists.
But "Prayers for the Assassin" is no screed. If its villains are Muslims, so are its heroes; Ferrigno is quite aware that moderate and liberal Muslims have the most to fear from an Islamofascist victory.
He is also quite aware of Islam's appeal. Many converts to Islam find comfort and reassurance in its moral certainty and firm standards, and Ferrigno underscores the point. "Don't tell me about the old days, girl, I lived through them," says one character, a top government official. "Drugs sold on street corners. Guns everywhere. God driven out of the schools and courthouses. Births without marriage, rich and poor, so many bastards you wouldn't believe me. A country without shame. Alcohol sold in supermarkets. Babies killed in the womb, tens of millions of them. . . . We are not perfect, not by any measure, but I would not go back to those days for anything."
The war we are in is a spiritual no less than a military one, a point too many of us are apt to ignore. "Prayers for the Assassin" -- in addition to being a great read -- is an admonition to stop ignoring it. Unless, that is, we want the terrorists to win.
Jeff Jacoby is an Op-Ed writer for the Boston Globe, a radio political commentator, and a contributing columnist for Townhall.com.
Cam Edwards: Day One of the UN Gun Ban Summit
Jun 27, 2006
http://www.townhall.com
Cam Edwards ( bio archive contact )
They’ve gathered in New York City, the best and brightest minds in the global gun ban movement. Oh, they don’t want you to think for a second that they’re actually interested in your guns. Kofi Annan as much as said so yesterday, when he told the attendees of the Small Arms Review Conference, “This Review Conference is not negotiating a ‘global gun ban’, nor do we wish to deny law-abiding citizens their right to bear arms in accordance with their national laws.” Got it, gun owners? There’s nothing to fear from the UN when it comes to your guns.
It’s too bad for Kofi that many of the countries attending the summit didn’t get his memo. Yesterday’s speeches were full of calls for expanding the current agenda to include the civilian possession of firearms. Hans Winkler, speaking on behalf of the European Union, called the current Program of Action “the key starting point for further action on small arms”. The ambassador from Australia, Robert Hill, spoke glowingly of his country’s gun laws that “require the registration and licensing of all firearms owners, prohibit a range of automatic and semi-automatic long arms and handguns, and mandate minimum firearms safety training and storage requirements.”
The statement from Indonesia’s representative was perhaps the clearest example of what these countries are aiming for.
“We believe that no armed group outside of the State should be allowed to bear weapons. We also believe that regulating civilian possession of Small Arms/Light Weapons will enhance our efforts to prevent its misuse. In our view, the issue of ammunition should also be addressed in the context of the Program of Action because in the absence of ammunition, small arms and light weapons pose no danger.”
Not every country is as transparent as Indonesia. When looking at the statements of the various representatives, what isn’t said is just as important as the words we actually hear. Take, for example, the comments by Brazilian representative Ronaldo Mota Sardenberg. He told the summit, “this Review Conference should not limit ourselves to renewing our commitment to the full implementation of the Program of Action. It should rather be taken as an opportunity to address the Program’s shortcomings, by means of the adoption of substantive aimed at strengthening and complementing its mechanisms.” In other words, what we’ve got right now doesn’t go far enough. This comes from a country that tried to ban civilian ownership of firearms outright (the referendum failed last fall).
The anti-gun summit continues for the next two weeks, and you can get daily updates from http://www.NRAnews.com Executive Editor Ginny Simone every afternoon on “Cam and Company”, heard on the aforementioned NRAnews.com and Sirius Satellite Radio. Coming up on Tuesday, the United States issues its opening statement.
Cam Edwards is the host of “Cam and Company” on www.nranews.com and Sirius Satellite Radio. A veteran talk show host and political analyst, he blogs at www.camedwards.com in addition to his daily talk show. Cam lives in Northern Virginia with his wife and five children.
Copyright © 2006 Townhall.com
http://www.townhall.com
Cam Edwards ( bio archive contact )
They’ve gathered in New York City, the best and brightest minds in the global gun ban movement. Oh, they don’t want you to think for a second that they’re actually interested in your guns. Kofi Annan as much as said so yesterday, when he told the attendees of the Small Arms Review Conference, “This Review Conference is not negotiating a ‘global gun ban’, nor do we wish to deny law-abiding citizens their right to bear arms in accordance with their national laws.” Got it, gun owners? There’s nothing to fear from the UN when it comes to your guns.
It’s too bad for Kofi that many of the countries attending the summit didn’t get his memo. Yesterday’s speeches were full of calls for expanding the current agenda to include the civilian possession of firearms. Hans Winkler, speaking on behalf of the European Union, called the current Program of Action “the key starting point for further action on small arms”. The ambassador from Australia, Robert Hill, spoke glowingly of his country’s gun laws that “require the registration and licensing of all firearms owners, prohibit a range of automatic and semi-automatic long arms and handguns, and mandate minimum firearms safety training and storage requirements.”
The statement from Indonesia’s representative was perhaps the clearest example of what these countries are aiming for.
“We believe that no armed group outside of the State should be allowed to bear weapons. We also believe that regulating civilian possession of Small Arms/Light Weapons will enhance our efforts to prevent its misuse. In our view, the issue of ammunition should also be addressed in the context of the Program of Action because in the absence of ammunition, small arms and light weapons pose no danger.”
Not every country is as transparent as Indonesia. When looking at the statements of the various representatives, what isn’t said is just as important as the words we actually hear. Take, for example, the comments by Brazilian representative Ronaldo Mota Sardenberg. He told the summit, “this Review Conference should not limit ourselves to renewing our commitment to the full implementation of the Program of Action. It should rather be taken as an opportunity to address the Program’s shortcomings, by means of the adoption of substantive aimed at strengthening and complementing its mechanisms.” In other words, what we’ve got right now doesn’t go far enough. This comes from a country that tried to ban civilian ownership of firearms outright (the referendum failed last fall).
The anti-gun summit continues for the next two weeks, and you can get daily updates from http://www.NRAnews.com Executive Editor Ginny Simone every afternoon on “Cam and Company”, heard on the aforementioned NRAnews.com and Sirius Satellite Radio. Coming up on Tuesday, the United States issues its opening statement.
Cam Edwards is the host of “Cam and Company” on www.nranews.com and Sirius Satellite Radio. A veteran talk show host and political analyst, he blogs at www.camedwards.com in addition to his daily talk show. Cam lives in Northern Virginia with his wife and five children.
Copyright © 2006 Townhall.com
CAIR Fifth Columnists and Multiculturalists
By Joe Kaufman
FrontPageMagazine.com
June 27, 2006
In the realm of terrorism, the threat to America is not just concerning dirty bombs and terror cells. It’s not just about planes flying into buildings or suicide vests. No, the threat is a lot greater than that – a solid infrastructure finely cultivated into our society, paid for, at least in part, by Saudi royalty. It was created not to promote the values of our nation, but, instead, to impose Islamic law. A large part of that infrastructure is the Council on American-Islamic Relations or CAIR. On one fine spring day this month, two institutions that we as Americans rely on – one from each of America’s coasts – gave CAIR the things that it so ardently craves and needs to survive -- cover and legitimization.
The date was June 5, 2006. A South Florida Sun-Sentinel editorial that morning, entitled ‘Muslims: Group encourages volunteer work,’ began as follows: “To their great credit, many Muslim organizations in the United States have been working to counteract negative views of their religion resulting from the terrorism of Islamic extremists. One of the foremost of these groups is the Council on American-Islamic Relations…”
The piece was attributed to the Sun-Sentinel Editorial Board. The Board is made up of eleven individuals, the majority of which are accomplished writers with a vast amount of knowledge and experience in the widest range of subjects. That being the case, why would this distinguished group lavish praise on such an insidious organization as CAIR?
Was the Sun-Sentinel aware of the fact that CAIR, since its inception in 1994, had lost four of its officials, all linked to al-Qaeda and/or Hamas, all of which who’ve been either convicted or deported for their crimes? Or that one of its national advisory board members, Siraj Wahhaj, found his name placed on the list of potential co-conspirators to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center?
Did the newspaper know that, just prior to 9/11, CAIR had solicited funds for two terrorist charities related to Al-Qaeda and Hamas, the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development and the Global Relief Foundation, both shut down after 9/11?
Did the Sentinel recognize the fact that CAIR’s Executive Director, Nihad Awad, in March of 1994, had publicly stated his support for Hamas, saying that “after I researched the situation inside and outside Palestine, I am in support of the Hamas movement…”?
Did the paper realize that CAIR had criticized the prosecution of the spiritual leader of the ’93 bombing, Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, listing the trial as an “incident of anti-Muslim bias and violence”?
It seems none of this was taken into account, when the Board sat down to write its literary illusion. And anyway, it was only two weeks earlier that the Sentinel printed an op-ed written by the Executive Director of CAIR-Florida, Altaf Ali. Ali, exactly one month after 9/11, on a local radio show, derided this author for being Jewish and repeatedly refused to answer the question of whether he believed the people that perished during the World Trade Center attacks were innocent. Ali’s op-ed was about Daniel Wultz, the American boy that was murdered by a suicide bomber in Israel. The attacker was from Palestinian Islamic Jihad, one of the terrorist groups that CAIR has its roots in.
The same day the Editorial Board put out its puff piece, CAIR received another unwarranted stroke of good fortune, as a representative from the FBI showed up to take part in one of the group’s events.
On June 5th, the Los Angeles chapter of CAIR sponsored a community town hall meeting at the Islamic Center of Irvine (ICOI), a mosque that propagates venomously anti-Semitic and anti-Israel rhetoric. In a Khutbah (sermon) given at the ICOI last month, entitled ‘The Abuse of a Religion to sustain a Racist State,’ the ICOI’s Director of Religious Affairs, Sadullah Khan, stated, “Jews who came [to Israel] brought with them a Western arrogance…” In the sermon, which is found on the ICOI website, Khan liberally quoted alleged neo-Nazi William Baker and described Zionism as “racist,” “diabolical” and “sinister.”
Participating at the CAIR event was CAIR-LA Executive Director Hussam Ayloush. Ayloush’s appearance at ICOI makes sense, as he, himself, has been known to exhibit an extreme hatred towards the state of Israel. According to Dr. Daniel Pipes, whom Ayloush has likened to “a KKK person,” he (Ayloush) has repeatedly used the term “Zionazi,” when discussing Israelis. He has referred to Zionism as “a political ideology whose tentacles are rooted in racism,” and he has stated that the violent Intifada (Uprising) that was twice perpetrated by the Palestinians against the Israelis “really indicates standing up against injustice.”
Ayloush has complained of the United States’ treatment of the terrorist group Hamas, who recently had members voted into power in the “Palestinian territories.” During a Khutbah speech he gave at the Islamic Institute of Orange County (IIOC), last May, entitled “Don’t Be Pessimistic,” Ayloush stated: “Compare your situation to the situation of our brothers and sisters in Palestine… They were starved, they were pressured and threatened with embargo, if they don’t have democratic elections. And then, when they have the democratic elections, because we don’t like the results, now they are being starved again, embargoed and punished.”
In addition, Ayloush has jumped to defend the likes of Wagdy Ghoneim, a radical Egyptian imam from IIOC. Ghoneim, who was deported from the United States, had been videotaped calling for suicide bombings and had referred to Jews, at a 1998 CAIR co-sponsored Brooklyn rally, as “descendants of the apes.” Ayloush lauded Ghoneim as a “highly regarded religious scholar” and a “worldwide, well known scholar.”
Ayloush has also defended the terrorists held in Guantanamo Bay. On June 15, 2006, CAIR placed on its national website an “ISLAM-OPED” written by Ayloush, calling for the Guantanamo Bay prison’s closure, entitled ‘Shut Down the Gitmo Gulog.’ The next day, the article was published by the Al Jazeerah Peace Information Center, a website that acts as a propaganda machine for Hamas. In the piece, Ayloush suggests that at least some of the individuals being detained are “innocent.” However, according to a statement issued by the United States military just prior to the op-ed’s release, the inmates “are enemy combatants being detained because they have waged war against our nation and they continue to pose a threat.”
Accompanying Hussam Ayloush as a participant at the June 5th CAIR event was the Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI field office in Los Angeles, Stephen Tidwell. Tidwell, apparently, was there to quell concerns that the FBI was actively eavesdropping on local Muslims.
Like the Sun-Sentinel and its printing of Altaf Ali’s op-ed, the Los Angeles FBI had been down this road before. In fact, the L.A. FBI even created an entity, the Multi-Cultural Advisory Committee (MCAC), in which CAIR is one of the sitting members.
Did Assistant Director Tidwell, in joining the event, take into account that CAIR was created by a front for overseas terrorist organizations called the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), whose founders include the number two leader in Hamas today, Mousa Abu Marzook, and the former North American head of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Sami Al-Arian?
Did he understand that this front, the IAP, had been found liable for the murder of a young American boy, David Boim, whose life was taken during a Hamas terror operation in Israel?
Did Tidwell recognize that CAIR, itself, is currently the defendant in a lawsuit charging that the group played a role in the murder of former chief of the FBI’s counter-terrorism section, John O’Neill, on September 11th? One of his own. Or that Steven Pomerantz, former FBI assistant director and chief of the FBI's Counter-Terrorism Section, has stated, “CAIR, its leaders, and its activities effectively give aid to international terrorist groups”?
None of the above can be disputed, yet many have chosen to ignore it. Unfortunately, those ignoring the information are also responsible for supplying us with our daily take on the news and providing us with our safety and security here at home. June 5, 2006 was indeed a great day for CAIR; but for all those that worry about the future of the United States, it will be yet another day that will live on in infamy.
Nearly five years after 9/11, we still don’t get it.
Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.
Joe Kaufman is the Chairman of Americans Against Hate and the host of The Politics of Terrorism radio show.
FrontPageMagazine.com
June 27, 2006
In the realm of terrorism, the threat to America is not just concerning dirty bombs and terror cells. It’s not just about planes flying into buildings or suicide vests. No, the threat is a lot greater than that – a solid infrastructure finely cultivated into our society, paid for, at least in part, by Saudi royalty. It was created not to promote the values of our nation, but, instead, to impose Islamic law. A large part of that infrastructure is the Council on American-Islamic Relations or CAIR. On one fine spring day this month, two institutions that we as Americans rely on – one from each of America’s coasts – gave CAIR the things that it so ardently craves and needs to survive -- cover and legitimization.
The date was June 5, 2006. A South Florida Sun-Sentinel editorial that morning, entitled ‘Muslims: Group encourages volunteer work,’ began as follows: “To their great credit, many Muslim organizations in the United States have been working to counteract negative views of their religion resulting from the terrorism of Islamic extremists. One of the foremost of these groups is the Council on American-Islamic Relations…”
The piece was attributed to the Sun-Sentinel Editorial Board. The Board is made up of eleven individuals, the majority of which are accomplished writers with a vast amount of knowledge and experience in the widest range of subjects. That being the case, why would this distinguished group lavish praise on such an insidious organization as CAIR?
Was the Sun-Sentinel aware of the fact that CAIR, since its inception in 1994, had lost four of its officials, all linked to al-Qaeda and/or Hamas, all of which who’ve been either convicted or deported for their crimes? Or that one of its national advisory board members, Siraj Wahhaj, found his name placed on the list of potential co-conspirators to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center?
Did the newspaper know that, just prior to 9/11, CAIR had solicited funds for two terrorist charities related to Al-Qaeda and Hamas, the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development and the Global Relief Foundation, both shut down after 9/11?
Did the Sentinel recognize the fact that CAIR’s Executive Director, Nihad Awad, in March of 1994, had publicly stated his support for Hamas, saying that “after I researched the situation inside and outside Palestine, I am in support of the Hamas movement…”?
Did the paper realize that CAIR had criticized the prosecution of the spiritual leader of the ’93 bombing, Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, listing the trial as an “incident of anti-Muslim bias and violence”?
It seems none of this was taken into account, when the Board sat down to write its literary illusion. And anyway, it was only two weeks earlier that the Sentinel printed an op-ed written by the Executive Director of CAIR-Florida, Altaf Ali. Ali, exactly one month after 9/11, on a local radio show, derided this author for being Jewish and repeatedly refused to answer the question of whether he believed the people that perished during the World Trade Center attacks were innocent. Ali’s op-ed was about Daniel Wultz, the American boy that was murdered by a suicide bomber in Israel. The attacker was from Palestinian Islamic Jihad, one of the terrorist groups that CAIR has its roots in.
The same day the Editorial Board put out its puff piece, CAIR received another unwarranted stroke of good fortune, as a representative from the FBI showed up to take part in one of the group’s events.
On June 5th, the Los Angeles chapter of CAIR sponsored a community town hall meeting at the Islamic Center of Irvine (ICOI), a mosque that propagates venomously anti-Semitic and anti-Israel rhetoric. In a Khutbah (sermon) given at the ICOI last month, entitled ‘The Abuse of a Religion to sustain a Racist State,’ the ICOI’s Director of Religious Affairs, Sadullah Khan, stated, “Jews who came [to Israel] brought with them a Western arrogance…” In the sermon, which is found on the ICOI website, Khan liberally quoted alleged neo-Nazi William Baker and described Zionism as “racist,” “diabolical” and “sinister.”
Participating at the CAIR event was CAIR-LA Executive Director Hussam Ayloush. Ayloush’s appearance at ICOI makes sense, as he, himself, has been known to exhibit an extreme hatred towards the state of Israel. According to Dr. Daniel Pipes, whom Ayloush has likened to “a KKK person,” he (Ayloush) has repeatedly used the term “Zionazi,” when discussing Israelis. He has referred to Zionism as “a political ideology whose tentacles are rooted in racism,” and he has stated that the violent Intifada (Uprising) that was twice perpetrated by the Palestinians against the Israelis “really indicates standing up against injustice.”
Ayloush has complained of the United States’ treatment of the terrorist group Hamas, who recently had members voted into power in the “Palestinian territories.” During a Khutbah speech he gave at the Islamic Institute of Orange County (IIOC), last May, entitled “Don’t Be Pessimistic,” Ayloush stated: “Compare your situation to the situation of our brothers and sisters in Palestine… They were starved, they were pressured and threatened with embargo, if they don’t have democratic elections. And then, when they have the democratic elections, because we don’t like the results, now they are being starved again, embargoed and punished.”
In addition, Ayloush has jumped to defend the likes of Wagdy Ghoneim, a radical Egyptian imam from IIOC. Ghoneim, who was deported from the United States, had been videotaped calling for suicide bombings and had referred to Jews, at a 1998 CAIR co-sponsored Brooklyn rally, as “descendants of the apes.” Ayloush lauded Ghoneim as a “highly regarded religious scholar” and a “worldwide, well known scholar.”
Ayloush has also defended the terrorists held in Guantanamo Bay. On June 15, 2006, CAIR placed on its national website an “ISLAM-OPED” written by Ayloush, calling for the Guantanamo Bay prison’s closure, entitled ‘Shut Down the Gitmo Gulog.’ The next day, the article was published by the Al Jazeerah Peace Information Center, a website that acts as a propaganda machine for Hamas. In the piece, Ayloush suggests that at least some of the individuals being detained are “innocent.” However, according to a statement issued by the United States military just prior to the op-ed’s release, the inmates “are enemy combatants being detained because they have waged war against our nation and they continue to pose a threat.”
Accompanying Hussam Ayloush as a participant at the June 5th CAIR event was the Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI field office in Los Angeles, Stephen Tidwell. Tidwell, apparently, was there to quell concerns that the FBI was actively eavesdropping on local Muslims.
Like the Sun-Sentinel and its printing of Altaf Ali’s op-ed, the Los Angeles FBI had been down this road before. In fact, the L.A. FBI even created an entity, the Multi-Cultural Advisory Committee (MCAC), in which CAIR is one of the sitting members.
Did Assistant Director Tidwell, in joining the event, take into account that CAIR was created by a front for overseas terrorist organizations called the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), whose founders include the number two leader in Hamas today, Mousa Abu Marzook, and the former North American head of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Sami Al-Arian?
Did he understand that this front, the IAP, had been found liable for the murder of a young American boy, David Boim, whose life was taken during a Hamas terror operation in Israel?
Did Tidwell recognize that CAIR, itself, is currently the defendant in a lawsuit charging that the group played a role in the murder of former chief of the FBI’s counter-terrorism section, John O’Neill, on September 11th? One of his own. Or that Steven Pomerantz, former FBI assistant director and chief of the FBI's Counter-Terrorism Section, has stated, “CAIR, its leaders, and its activities effectively give aid to international terrorist groups”?
None of the above can be disputed, yet many have chosen to ignore it. Unfortunately, those ignoring the information are also responsible for supplying us with our daily take on the news and providing us with our safety and security here at home. June 5, 2006 was indeed a great day for CAIR; but for all those that worry about the future of the United States, it will be yet another day that will live on in infamy.
Nearly five years after 9/11, we still don’t get it.
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Joe Kaufman is the Chairman of Americans Against Hate and the host of The Politics of Terrorism radio show.
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