A life in Intrigue: Frederick Forsyth talks exclusively to GL Magazine

By Corrie Bond-French
By GLmagazine  |  Posted: September 26, 2015

Pilot, journo, writer, spy. Four words, a line filched from Le Carre, and there you have it; a neat summation of nigh on eight decades of an extraordinary life and career, with an incendiary revelation fizzing away between the covers.

Except Frederick Forsyth, the novelist who lit thriller tinder when he first penned The Day of the Jackal back in the 1970s, doesn't consider his endeavours in subterfuge to be quite so dangerously revelatory anymore.

It is fascinating stuff, and the irony is not lost that he is visiting Cheltenham next Friday for an extremely rare foray into the Literature Festival landscape to talk about his memoirs in The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue, as GCHQ looms large in the background. "I don't do many," he tells me. "I'm notorious for it, but the reason for it is that I am naturally reclusive."

Frederick Forsyth needs little introduction. One of the world's best-known and best- selling writers, he has written some of the most instantly recognisable titles of recent times, and it's quite an oeuvre, including The Day of The Jackal, The Odessa File, Dogs of War and The Fourth Protocol for starters. Many have been made into hit films (Day of The Jackal launched Edward Fox's career and Michael Caine and other such acting luminaries have been happily available for roles). In short, Frederick's contribution to the world's bookshelves set the standard for meticulous research and plausible, realistic plot-lines.

His modus operandi is devastatingly effective: plots assembled with the precision of a Swiss pocket watch; characters and dialogue that linger convincingly long after the last page is turned and the cover dog-eared. It is possible to find oneself in Forsyth cold turkey. I have a cherished picture of my father and myself on holiday when I was 13. We are both in clover reading Forsyth. But he hadn't written that many books back then and we both read quickly. Cue the violins.

But the reason why his novels have endured in popularity for more than 45 years now, is because his cool, reportorial prose spins a convincing yarn; a yarn that unravels with unnerving authenticity. Frederick truly has been in the thick of it, with friends in high and low places and the occasional sleeping with the enemy thrown in for good measure.

Frederick's life story could trump any fictional tale, and lady luck has been a benevolent if not thoroughly indulgent mistress. If his life was a Bond film, she would slink up to him in the casino, kiss the dice and shake his cocktail (so to speak). As Frederick tells me, Bond is 'pure fantasy', but you get the picture. Lucky Frederick. Ergo lucky us.

And what a life he has had. Read on, and imagine you're in a bar, Frederick is beside you, taking a long drag on a Rothmans and regaling you with anecdote after anecdote: you'll have the book in a nutshell.

An academically gifted and, thanks to the prescience of his parents, multi-lingual only child, Frederick rejected the idea of a Cambridge education, opting instead to fulfil his dreams by becoming the youngest RAF fighter pilot at just 19.

He survived an horrific car crash at 20, his hand narrowly saved from amputation thanks to a fortuitously located retired surgeon, and his severed ear was reattached. His hearing was unaffected, but Frederick is no prize-winning golfer. And just as an aside, he also narrowly avoided being raped at knifepoint in Paris when he produced a larger knife, and he even had a stint as a trainee matador.

After earning his wings and completing the National Service he had chosen over that Cambridge degree, his desire to travel prompted his decision to train as a journalist. He earned his reporting chops on the Eastern Daily Press. Then luck struck again.

On what he thought a doomed attempt to get an interview in Fleet Street three years later, Frederick, disillusioned, sought solace in a bar, where a friendly chap struck up conversation. It transpired that he had trained at the same newspaper and knew Frederick's mentor well.

He immediately took young Frederick back to his place of work, which just so happened to be Reuters. Before the sun was over the yard arm they had sussed that Frederick was fluent in French, German and Spanish, and he found himself in Paris as Reuters' foreign correspondent at just 23 years old.

In Paris he covered the repeatedly unsuccessful assassination attempts on President Charles De Gaulle, and he found himself idly musing on the idea that perhaps a lone hitman would be a more successful option...

The following years were just as remarkable. His next move was to become Reuters man in East Berlin. At the height of the Cold War, Frederick was evading the Stasi past Checkpoint Charlie, whilst nearly triggering world war three, then occasionally sleeping with the enemy…

He went on to cover the Biafran War, falling out with the BBC and going freelance. He started writing to earn money, but when The Day of the Jackal hit the bookshelves, his fate as a writer was sealed. He now lives in Buckinghamshire with his wife Sandy, spending time with his two sons and grandchildren. Living, as he tells me, a simple and occasionally scruffy life.

"Basically it is. I spend most of my time around the house in canvas jeans and a farm work shirt, and sometimes I don't shave! Wow! No, I enjoy spending time here. Anyone thinking I've got to have caviar, nah! A ploughman's lunch at the Jolly Cricketers and I'm perfectly happy," said Frederick.

But, as revealing as this may be, it is remarkably only a couple of years since Frederick wrote The Kill List, when his unwavering perfectionism prompted a research trip to Mogadishu, Somalia. He was 75 at the time, and Sandy was not impressed. So did he miss the thrill and danger of it all?

"I didn't really miss it, that's too much. The last time I was, I suppose, in a dicey situation was writing The Kill List. I decided I had got to describe Mogadishu, Somalia and I read some stuff online but it was absolutely pathetic. It wasn't anything like what I knew what it must be, and I read some other writers who clearly hadn't been there. One could tell by just looking at what they had written about Mogadishu and Somalia generally, they just hadn't been there.

"So I said I'm going to have to go, and my wife Sandy said 'you're a damn fool, you're not the youth you used to be'. I said 'I'm 75, but on the other hand, I've got to go'. So I went. So that was that. There was a possibility of something happening there, but to say did I miss it? No, no. I've reached the stage now at 77 that I'm perfectly happy, to play with the grandchildren and take the Jack Russells for a walk. I don't really need to go into the weird situations anymore!" I venture that such a trip at 75 was still quite remarkable, and Frederick chuckles.

"She said if you ever do that again I'm going to sue you with Fiona Shackleton!"

Sandy can probably sleep more easily now, as Frederick has no plans to write another thriller.

"I said the last one would be my last novel. I still think it will be for a whole range of things. I haven't got any other stories that intrigue me, and also the complexity of technology nowadays in that world, the underworld, so to speak, is just baffling me. I can't even understand it. So the old days – and I almost said the good old days – when you had things like microfilm and you wrote things on paper, they're long gone. I think your spook today is just sitting there tapping things into a screen, which I can't find very dramatic!"

But there have been some baffling espionage-related cases in recent times that could be straight out of one of his books, such as the Litvinenko poisoning and the unexplained death of former GCHQ worker Gareth Williams, whose body was mysteriously found in a padlocked holdall in his bath five years ago. So was it foul play – reminiscent of a Forsyth-esque plot?

Frederick concedes: "It might have been, because obviously it was weird, and inexplicable, and I don't think we ever got to the bottom of it properly and we never will now. And occasionally murders, and it was clearly murder I think, but there are murders of course that are never ever solved and this may well be one."

So is his contacts book locked up safely in a vault now? Frederick laughs: "It's right in front of me – I'm staring at it!" Never say never, eh Frederick?

"I don't know about other writers, but I think we all have this in common: we need isolation to write. Some people are at their desk every day writing, then they re-write. I mean Jeffrey Archer does about 15 or 16 rewrites. I couldn't. That would drive me potty. I mean, to go all the way back to page one and start again? No! I just do one, meticulously careful, but just one copy and that goes to the editors. But I do prepare meticulously, I do the research over six months and then write over two. The only thing I don't have any more is deadlines.

"One of the things I like about it is that, unlike commerce for example where it's all about market share, you don't have to crush anybody else to be successful, it can be gentle. So if I see another young man having a blistering success I am delighted, because there's room."

And his admission in the book about his role as an asset for MI6 may well ruffle Whitehall feathers yet.

"Well, it's called asset or agent but really it's errand runner. I just ran a few errands, that's all," he tells me.

"A lot of people back then in the Cold War did, as I never cease to say, a lot of business men were approached. If you were going to a trade fair in a rather difficult to get at city, it was 'would you just do a little favour for us? If an envelope came under your hotel door would you put it in your attached case and bring it home?' And most said 'yeah, yeah'. It's why we had, or have, a brilliant intelligence service at a very cheap rate. The taxpayer is not being short-changed, believe me!"

Is he expecting any reprimand for his

contra-Official Secrets Act admission?

"I may be rebuked yet! It's the big word isn't it? S.P.Y. The media, and I know you are of the media and it's like shoving heroin to a junkie, but it wasn't so spectacular. James Bond was a fantasy, and always will be a fantasy. The stuff that was really pretty much accurate the way it was, was the George Smiley stuff. But that came from David Cornwall (aka John Le Carre) of course who was in it, and now admitted belatedly that he was. But he was on the staff you see, I was never on the staff. I was just serving as a volunteer and occasionally, now and again.

"And again the phrase 'over twenty years'. It was four or five things over that span, just errands, favours. And the only reason that I felt that I would be allowed was because I didn't ask. There might be someone miffed down there that I broke the code. But I just think it's so far back and we've had so many released secrets now; the 30-year rule cabinet documents, private and very secret memos exchanged between Prime Ministers which were all released under the 30-year rule, and I'm talking 45 years ago. And you know, East Germany has gone, the Stasis have gone, the USSR has gone. Communism has gone, except in the Labour party!" he laughs.

"It was a different world, and I don't see how anybody could be endangered by some Boys' Own paper anecdotes of 45 years ago. I don't know, the professionals might say 'I shouldn't have told anybody anything', but then I do remember far enough back to when we never officially told anyone we had an intelligence service."

Frederick is hard-pushed to say which of his thrillers was the most enjoyable to write.

"Oh Lord, I can't recall, I really can't. But the most traumatic was the stuff in Biafra. That was at the other end of the scale because that did scar me. I was there two years in a hell hole situation and I watched many, many children die of starvation… a black and white picture in the paper or even on TV is not the same as being there. So Biafra was revelatory and horrible and to this day I can't forget it."

But, the horrors of conflict aside, Frederick happily acknowledges that he has had more than his fair share of good fortune.

"I had a wonderful childhood. My father was in his way a great man. He was just a shopkeeper, but a kind, decent man.

"I have had amazing luck. I have some outbreaks of ill luck, like when I foolishly entrusted the guardianship of all my life savings to a man I thought was a friend, who turned out to be a conman and a swindler, and he embezzled all of my life savings going back to zero at the age of 50, and I had to start all over again... but most of my luck has been the other way, it's been good.

"I look back with great gratitude, but I don't quite know who to thank! I'm not a great believer but I will have to make my mind up soon; I may have to meet him!"

Frederick reads mostly non-fiction, and he finds the last 50 years the most interesting time to read about. He reckons more change occurred within the last 50 years than in the previous 200. It has been an interesting time to live through.

And he is still bemused that his creation of The Jackal has passed into common-parlance for hit men when the Venezuelan assassin Carlos the Jackal was exposed and later caught.

"I was asked 'why did you name him (The Jackal) after Carlos?' And I went pink 'I didn't! The press named Carlos after Jackal! I wrote Jackal in 1971 and he was exposed in public in '74!"

He is still very good friends with the film's Jackal, actor Edward Fox, they met for lunch at The Ivy just last week: "Edward's a great guy – we met just as I described in the book."

Frederick tells the tale in his book of the man who read his palm when he was in hospital. He was loath to do it, Frederick insisted, and his predictions have been remarkably accurate this far.

"Well, like all fortune tellers he was very vague, but he was pretty accurate on most of the things about the personal life: the sons, the wives, and writing, he seemed to foresee that. He said one day you will write creatively, and I said 'Oh really?" It wasn't what I had in mind. I was 20 years old and as far as I was concerned I was just dedicated to becoming a journalist. Is that writing? Well, yes it was, but it's not novels. But he did say that I would pop off one day, over 80 he said. I specifically remember that! Alone, and far away in a foreign land in the sun, which seems to indicate that it would be in the Caribbean somewhere, but I'm not going yet!"

Frederick has a picture on his study wall, of 'the old codger sitting in his spitfire', as he puts it. He finally got to fly the spitfire he had dreamed of since he was five years old last year. There are two pictures here. Look at them; the sheer joy on his face is the culmination of childhood dreams. Look again; that is a five year-old child.

So: Spitfire pilot, journo, writer, spy, husband, father, grandfather, friend and occasional political thorn in the side. Is there anything that he would change? It seems those boyhood dreams still count.

"For me it's very simple. I would have loved to fly with the few, just that, but I was 16 years too young

"I've had a lot of fun, I've had a great time and, well, I did the best I could."

Frederick will appear at Cheltenham literature festival on Friday at 2.15pm.

for tickets call 0844 880 8094

Frederick Forsyth: The Outsider is out now, priced £20.

http://www.gloucestershireecho.co.uk/life-Intrigue-Frederick-Forsyth-talks-exclusively/story-27868588-detail/story.html

Europe’s Migrant Crisis Is Simply Muslim History vs. Western Fantasy

Progressive Europe erased or rewrote its own history. Now they can't recognize an invasion by people to whom history is everything.

by Raymond Ibrahim

http://pjmedia.com/

September 29, 2015

Syrians fleeing the war rush through broken down border fences to enter Turkish territory illegally, near the Turkish border crossing at Akcakale in Sanliurfa province. (AFP/BULENT KILIC)

The world as understood by Islamic nations varies wildly from the Western nations’ understanding of the world. Whereas Muslims see the world through the lens of history, the West has jettisoned or rewritten history to suit its ideologies.

This dichotomy of Muslim and Western thinking is evident everywhere. When the Islamic State declared that it will “conquer Rome” and “break its crosses,” few in the West realized that those are the verbatim words and goals of Islam’s founder and his companions as recorded in Muslim sources — words and goals that prompted over a thousand years of jihad on Europe.

Most recently, the Islamic State released a map of the areas it plans on expanding into over the next five years. Not only are Mideast and Asian regions included, but the map includes European lands: Portugal, Spain, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Greece, parts of Russia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Romania, Armenia, Georgia, Crete, and Cyprus.

The reason for this is simple. According to Islamic law, once a country has been conquered (or “opened,” as the euphemistic Arabic words it), it becomes Islamic in perpetuity.

This, incidentally, is the real reason Muslims despise Israel. The motivation is not sympathy for the Palestinians — if it was, neighboring Arab nations would’ve absorbed them long ago, just as they would be absorbing all of today’s Muslim refugees. No, Israel is hated because the descendants of “apes and pigs” — according to the Koran — dare to rule land that was once “opened” by jihad and therefore must be returned to Islam. (Read more about Islam’s “How Dare You?” phenomenon to understand the source of Islamic rage.)

All of the aforementioned European nations are seen as being currently “occupied” by Christian “infidels” and in need of “liberation.” This is why jihadi organizations refer to terrorist attacks on such countries as “defensive jihads.” One rarely hears about Islamic designs on European nations because they are large and blocked together, altogether distant from the Muslim world. Conversely, tiny Israel is in the heart of the Islamic world, hence it has received most of the jihadi attention: it was a more realistic conquest. But now that the “caliphate” has been reborn and is expanding before a paralytic West, dreams of reconquering portions of Europe — if not through jihad, then through migration — are becoming more plausible, perhaps more so than conquering Israel.

Because of their historical experiences with Islam, some central and east European nations are aware of Muslim aspirations. Hungary’s prime minister even cited his nation’s unpleasant past under Islamic rule (in the guise of the Ottoman Empire) as a reason to disallow Muslim refugees from entering. But for more “enlightened” Western nations — that is, for idealistic nations that reject or rewrite history according to their subjective fantasies — Hungary’s reasoning is unjust, inhumane, and racist.

To be sure, most of Europe has experience with Islamic depredations. As late as the 17th century, even Iceland was being invaded by Muslim slave traders. Roughly 800 years earlier, in 846, Rome was sacked and the Vatican defiled by Muslim raiders.

Some of the Muslims migrating to Italy vow to do the same today, and Pope Francis acknowledges it — yet he still suggests that “you can take precautions, and put these people to work.”

We’ve seen this sort of thinking before: the U.S. State Department cited a lack of “job opportunities” as reason for the existence of the Islamic State.

Perhaps because the UK, Scandinavia, and North America were never conquered and occupied by the sword of Islam — unlike the southeast European nations that are rejecting Muslim refugees — they feel free to rewrite history according to their subjective ideals. Specifically, they stress that historic Christianity is bad and all other religions and people are good. Indeed, books and courses on the “sins” of Christian Europe from the Crusades to colonialism abound. (Most recently, a book traced the rise of Islamic supremacism in Egypt to the disciplining of a rude Muslim girl by a Christian nun.)

This “new history” – which claims that Muslims are the historic “victims” of “intolerant” Western Christians — has metastasized everywhere, from high school to college and from Hollywood to the news media, institutions which are becoming increasingly harder to distinguish from one another. When U.S. President Barack Obama condemned medieval Christians as a way to relativize Islamic State atrocities — or at best to claim that religion, any religion, is never the driving force of violence — he was merely being representative of the mainstream way history is taught in the West.

Even good, authoritative books of history contribute to this distorted thinking. While such works may mention “Ottoman expansion” into Europe, the Islamic element is omitted. Turks are portrayed as just another competitive people, out to carve a niche for themselves in Europe with motivations no different than, say, the Austrians, their rivals. That the “Ottomans” were operating under the distinctly Islamic banner of jihad, just like the Islamic State is today, is never made clear.

Generations of this false history have led the West to think that being suspicious or judgmental of Muslims is unacceptable, and that Muslims need to be accommodated. Perhaps then, they’ll like the West.

Such is progressive wisdom.

Meanwhile, in schools across much of the Muslim world, children are being indoctrinated into glorifying and reminiscing about the jihadi conquests of yore — conquests by the sword and in the name of Allah. While the progressive West demonizes European/Christian history — when I was in elementary school, Christopher Columbus was a hero, when I got into college, he became a villain — Mehmet the Conqueror, whose atrocities against Christian Europeans make the Islamic State look like boy scouts, is praised every year in “secular” Turkey on the anniversary of the savage sack of Constantinople.

The result of Western fantasies and Islamic history is that today Muslims are entering the West unfettered in the guise of refugees. They refuse to assimilate with the “infidels,” and form enclaves — in Islamic terminology, ribats – that serve as frontier posts to wage jihad against the infidel one way or another.

This in not conjecture. The Islamic State is intentionally driving the refugee phenomenon, and has promised to send half a million people — mostly Muslims — into Europe. It claims that 4,000 of these refugees are its own operatives:

Just wait. … It’s our dream that there should be a caliphate not only in Syria but in all the world, and we will have it soon, inshallah.

It is often said that those who ignore history are destined to repeat it. What happens to those who rewrite history in a way to demonize their ancestors while whitewashing the crimes of their ancestors’ enemies? The result is before us. History is not repeating itself; sword-waving Muslims are not militarily conquering Europe. Rather, they are being allowed to walk right in.

Raymond Ibrahim, a Middle East and Islam specialist, is author of Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians (2013) and The Al Qaeda Reader (2007). His writings have appeared in a variety of media, including the Los Angeles Times, Washington Times, Jane’s Islamic Affairs Analyst, Middle East Quarterly, World Almanac of Islamism, and Chronicle of Higher Education; he has appeared on MSNBC, Fox News, C-SPAN, PBS, Reuters, Al-Jazeera, NPR, Blaze TV, and CBN. Ibrahim regularly speaks publicly, briefs governmental agencies, provides expert testimony for Islam-related lawsuits, and testifies before Congress. He is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center; Judith Friedman Rosen Writing Fellow, Middle East Forum; and a Media Fellow at the Hoover Institution, 2013. Ibrahim’s dual-background -- born and raised in the U.S. by Coptic Egyptian parents born and raised in the Middle East -- has provided him with unique advantages, from equal fluency in English and Arabic, to an equal understanding of the Western and Middle Eastern mindsets, positioning him to explain the latter to the former.

Ludwig von Mises: Scholar of Free Markets and Prophet of Liberty

By Robert P. Murphy
http://www.americanthinker.com/
September 29, 2015

September 29 marks the 134th anniversary of the birth of Ludwig von Mises, the tallest giant of the “Austrian School” of economics. Although Mises is not a household name, Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek once referred to him as “the master of us all.” To this day, professional economists and laypeople alike learn from the writings of a man I consider to be the most important economist of the twentieth century.

One of Mises’s earliest achievements was to bridge the two fields we now call microeconomics and macroeconomics.Originally, the classical economists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had embraced variants of a labor theory of value in their teachings. Then, during the so-called Marginal Revolution of the 1870s, economists replaced the labor theory with the modern subjective theory of value, which sees all market prices as determined ultimately by the underlying preferences of consumers. It doesn’t matter how many labor-hours it takes to manufacture a product, according to subjectivism; if nobody really wants it, it will fetch a low price.

Economists gradually recognized the superiority of the new “subjective marginal utility” approach, but by the dawn of the twentieth century they still thought this worked only for “micro” explanations. The theory could explain, for example, how many bananas traded for how many apples, but economists still thought they needed an entirely different, “macro” framework to explain the money prices of goods.

Enter Ludwig von Mises. In his 1912 book, translated with the title The Theory of Money and Credit, he showed how to apply the theory of marginal utility to explain all market values -- even the value of money itself. In so doing, Mises put individual money prices, and the purchasing power of money, under the umbrella of a unified theory of value.

In the same book, Mises also unveiled what is nowadays called Austrian business cycle theory. Contrary even to some other free-market thinkers, he did not think that the typical boom-bust pattern in market economies was an intrinsic feature of capitalism. Instead, Mises argued that they originated in unsound banking practices, often instigated by a nation’s central bank. When banks expand credit in order to provide “cheap” loans, this artificially lowers interest rates to below their natural level, sending businesses and entrepreneurs a false signal that encourages unsustainable activity throughout the economy.

In particular, investment projects that are not justified by market fundamentals now appear profitable at the lower interest rates. The illusion created by the increased investment and spending can generate a period of apparent prosperity, but the economic boom rests on quicksand and eventually leads to a bust. According to Mises, rather than trying to restore the economy by engaging in deficit spending and monetary “stimulus,” the government should prevent the business cycle from getting started in the first place, by abstaining from central bank policies that make credit unnaturally cheap and induce the unsustainable boom.

In the 1930s, Mises’s theory was rapidly winning adherents among professional economists as the best explanation for the Great Depression. That is, until the charming John Maynard Keyes bamboozled almost everyone with the false promise that governments could deficit-spend the economy’s way back to health. To this day, most academics as well as the financial press adhere to the Keynesian notion that economic slumps are the result of consumer pessimism and inadequate spending.

But Mises’s most celebrated achievement by far was his critique of central economic planning. First in a 1920 academic paper and later in his 1922 treatise, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, Mises explained that the central planners in a socialist commonwealth faced an insurmountable hurdle, one even more fundamental than the problem of poor incentives.

Because a socialist state owns all of the “means of production,” Mises noted, there could be no market prices for farmland, factories, barrels of crude oil, and all of the other inputs used in a modern economy. But in the absence of market prices, he explained, there could be no rational way for the government’s central planners to compare the costs of their economic plans with the benefits they hoped their plans would yield.

Even after their production strategies were implemented, they would see only a list of specific quantities of outputs (so many houses, diapers, restaurant meals, nylon stockings, etc.) to compare to a list of specific quantities of inputs (so many cords of wood, tons of steel, man-hours of engineering labor, etc.). Any comparison they could make, however, would be meaningless. Without the profit-and-loss test that market prices make possible, the central planners would have no way to determine whether or not their production plans made any economic sense.

Clearly, Ludwig von Mises was not only a giant of the Austrian school of economics. He was also one of the greatest social scientists in world history. In addition to his profound contributions in technical economics, including in monetary theory, business cycle research, and comparative institutional analysis, he was an unyielding advocate of individual liberty who understood like no one before him the ideas and practices necessary to secure the fruits of Western civilization. Mises asked the average citizen to learn the basic principles of economic science and remember them while voting at the ballot box. He knew that the blessings of economic freedom are available only in societies in which the government doesn’t sabotage the market.

Robert P. Murphy is a Research Fellow with Independent Institute and Research Assistant Professor with the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University. His new book Choice: Cooperation, Enterprise, and Human Action crystallizes the key insights of Mises’s greatest treatise.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/09/ludwig_von_mises_scholar_of_free_markets_and_prophet_of_liberty.html#ixzz3n7qV2ETt
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Author Rick Bragg’s “Southern Journey” a hymn to food, people, memories

By SARAH SACHA DOLLACKER
http://www.artsatl.com/
September 23, 2015

Rick Bragg’s collection of essays My Southern Journey is a love song to the South. Collected from years of writing — some pieces appeared in Southern Living, Smithsonian, and Bon Appetit magazines – the articles portray and investigate the nuances of Bragg’s home region.

Born in the Appalachian foothills in northern Alabama, Bragg was reared on cracklins and stories. His love of food and memories from childhood fuel his writing. He won the James Beard Award for Distinguished Writing and the Pulitzer Prize for his work at The New York Times, but he is perhaps best known for All Over But the Shoutin’, a New York Times-bestselling memoir about his mother and his youth.

This focus on personal memory and life in the South permeate his latest collection, too. In these essays, Bragg, who will speak at the Jimmy Carter Library at 7 p.m. September 28, probes the South and his relationship to it, creating a tapestry of images and insights that illustrate the idiosyncrasies and vibrancy of a place he loves.

Divided into five sections – Home, Place, Table, Craft, Spirit — My Southern Journey is a contemplative and geographic adventure through the South. Bragg has lived all over the region, but the articles are primarily set in Louisiana, Florida and Alabama, where he now resides. The subjects of the essays are broad, too. Bragg is equally at home discussing oysters in New Orleans, explaining his mother’s preference for hand-me-down kitchen utensils, telling a story about the time he inadvertently glued his fingers to a wall or investigating the South’s obsession with football.

Whatever the subject, Bragg’s facility with language coupled with his ability to find the perfect example to illustrate his point create intimate and immediate essays, pieces that draw the reader in like compelling fiction.

This talent for description and capturing the exemplary moment to explore a deeper thought is best highlighted by his exquisite descriptions of food. A short essay eliding the enjoyment of deviled eggs with memories of his beloved grandmother, Ava, prove, as he says in “Honor Thy Matriarch,”  “things stand for things.” Much like Proust’s madeleine, Bragg’s deviled eggs transport him from the present to the past.

Nostalgia is a prevailing emotion in the articles, as Bragg remembers life before cell phones, community-destroying storms and oil spills in the Gulf. “Requiem for a Fish Sandwich” is an ode to the grouper sandwich of years gone by, but it also explores the diminishment of plenitude. The real grouper sandwiches have dwindled due to overfishing and oil pollution in the Gulf. Thus, Bragg’s meditation on a sandwich suggests a larger loss and the passage of time.

Despite this diminishment, Bragg’s essays portray an abundance of things that matter. There will always be neighbors offering aid after a storm and tables brimming with holiday dishes. The South’s focus on neighbors, food and family glues the place to its culture, Bragg suggests, because this is how it knows itself. The same stories are told, the same utensils used, the same family members remembered because this is the way Southern identity holds together.

My Southern Journey becomes more than a love song to the South, it becomes an examination of its soul and a memory book. These images and vignettes, so personal to Bragg, allow us to see the South through his eyes: a place imperfect and challenged, but a place to be loved.

- See more at: http://www.artsatl.com/2015/09/rick-bragg-my-southern-journey/#sthash.yGLmw2HU.dpuf

The Two Sides of Pope Francis

His speech to Congress was spiritual and not pointedly political, which came as a relief.

By Peggy Noonan

http://www.wsj.com/

September 25, 2015

Pope Francis addresses Congress, Sept. 24. PHOTO: JIM LO SCALZO/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY

The pope I love embraces the hideously deformed man. He sees the modern world for what it is, “a field hospital after battle.” We’re in triage: “The thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds.” This pope calls the woman who wrote him that her lover had left but she was having the baby. He tracked her down on her cellphone. “It’s Francis!” She said he told her he’d baptize the baby. This pope fills my eyes with tears. He loves the poor. He pays his own hotel bill. He had a return ticket home from the conclave because it wouldn’t be him. When he was elected he came out on the balcony and stood awkwardly, like Alec Guinness playing the part of a humble cardinal who, to his shock, had been chosen to lead the greatest institution in history. He stood there blank-faced, not equal to the moment, then saved the moment not by giving his prayer but by asking for prayers.

The pope I love tells comfortable cardinals that they are suffering from “spiritual Alzheimer’s.” Of those working within the church whose orientation is homosexual, he says: “Who am I to judge them if they’re seeking the Lord in good faith?” He instructs priests and bishops to give absolution through confession to the contrite and remorseful who have had abortions. Like most American Catholics I didn’t think he was saying anything new here. But he wanted to make it clear. Good, these things should be made clear.

The Francis I love is against materialism because he knows it is hollow and soul-crushing. He knows wealth and power are a moral hazard. He does not want man reduced to a commodity. He is for the little guy. He opposes the throwaway culture in which the old and the vulnerable are expendable. He wants you to be a saint, not a Scrooge.

Opinion Journal Video

Acton Institute Co-Founder Father Robert Sirico on Pope Francis’s speech to Congress and comments on immigration. Photo credit: Getty Images.

He wades into the great spiritual questions.

That pope has captured the imagination of the world.

Is what he does merely symbolic? Nothing at his level is merely symbolic. He is acting in a Christlike way: His actions are lessons, reminders, intimations. Inspirations.

The less lovable pope is—well, and I say this still with love, Uncle Frank in the attic. This is the one who endorses secular political agendas, who castigates capitalism in language that is both imprecise and heavily loaded. He doesn’t, actually, seem to know a lot about capitalism or markets, or even what economic freedom has given—and is giving—his own church.

For one small example, the other day Stephen Schwarzman of the Blackstone Groupgave $40 million to the Catholic schools of New York, meaning he is giving his personal wealth to pay for the education of children, many of whom are recent immigrants and some of whom sleep in cars. Last I looked Mr. Schwarzman was not a monk or a mystic but a businessman in private equity. This is not abusing, ignoring or dehumanizing the poor. This is lifting them up, helping them in a concrete way that will change their lives.

Political Francis seems not spiritual but strangely earthbound, like the pontiff of the Church of What’s Happening Now, a super-groovy pope acting on some antique ideological biases and assumptions.

On Thursday in the Capitol, as Francis made the first-ever speech by a pope to the U.S. Congress, the nature of the historic moment was sharpened by this question: Which Francis would show up—the one who makes me think of Heaven, or the earthbound one?

The speech was spiritual and not pointedly political, which came as a relief. He spoke of America with a certain reserved warmth, but a warmth nonetheless. As rhetoric it was high-class boilerplate, but its messages were useful. I wondered if the recent criticism of his secular political stands had led him to soften or refigure his speech. I wondered: Having just met America for the first time, and experienced all its variety and affection, how is he feeling about America now? I bet it has nothing to do with the cartoon, comic-book, dumbed-down Marxist stereotypes some of his friends and followers peddle.

Highlights of the speech:

The job of lawmakers “is to enable this country, by your legislative activity, to grow as a nation.” The “chief aim of all politics” is “the pursuit of the common good.” The four American lives that have most touched him, that most embody the nation’s “dreams,” are Abraham Lincoln, who stood for “liberty”; Martin Luther King, who stood for “liberty . . . and nonexclusion”; Dorothy Day, the activist, who stood for “social justice”; andThomas Merton, the monk and writer, who stood for “dialogue and openness to God.” These were four interesting choices, especially the last two, who don’t occupy a large place in the public imagination. But Day should be considered for sainthood, and one guesses that under Francis she may be. Merton wrote a spiritual masterpiece, “The Seven Storey Mountain,” that is important to many who experience Catholic conversions.

Democracy is “deeply rooted in the mind of the American people.” Politics is “an expression of our compelling need to live as one.” Americans should not be “fearful of foreigners,” because “most of us were once foreigners.” We must respond to immigrants in a way that is “humane, just and fraternal.” We must remember the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

He delightfully took a moment to nod to the creation of wealth: “Business is a noble vocation, directed to producing wealth and improving the world.” (That may have been his way of saying, “Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Schwarzman!”) “It can be a fruitful source of prosperity for the area in which it operates, especially if it sees the creation of jobs as an essential part of its service. . . . The fight against poverty and hunger must be fought constantly and on many fronts.”

You can believe there are two Francises and still feel an integrated affection and admiration for this man who stands for so much that is good, and tries to encourage the good. Who is in many ways great. Who has filled the world with more than his portion of sweetness, and who has drawn the affection and regard of non-Catholics around the world. He has even made left-wing American Catholics, a grumpy lot, happy. For at least 30 years they were frustrated and depressed by John Paul II and Benedict XVI. I guess it’s their turn.

They were sometimes graceless and grudging toward past popes. I don’t see what conservatives gain by playing that part now. When a much-loved pope comes to visit there’s a kind of moral imperative to good cheer.

I close with the words of a New York businessman, a capitalist and Catholic. I asked him Wednesday how he was feeling about Francis. “If he lives he’ll change the world,” he said.

For the better? “I think so, hopefully in an aspirational way. Don’t tax me to death helping the less fortunate. Urge me to do good. And I will. And many will. For him.”

OBAMA FREES 20TH 9/11 HIJACKER

Today it's Osama bin Laden's aide; tomorrow it could very well be the Blind Sheikh.

Matthew Vadum

http://www.frontpagemag.com/

September 28, 2015

Abdul Shalabi

The Obama administration quietly shipped Osama bin Laden's bodyguard back to the Wahhabist Kingdom of Saudi Arabia last week despite warnings that the Muslim terrorist remains a serious threat to the United States.

The newly released terrorist detainee is Abdul Shalabi, 39, who trained to be the 20th hijacker for the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Shalabi was set free even though military officials deemed him too dangerous to be unleashed on the world and too valuable as an intelligence asset to be released from U.S. custody.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said last week that the liberation of Shalabi, whom he referred to as a "dangerous detainee," is "another example of President Obama playing politics with national security and putting campaign promises ahead of U.S. national security interests." Shuttering the terrorist detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba has long been a goal of President Obama, going back at least to the campaign trail in 2008.

Shalabi's unshackling should have Americans wondering which bloodthirsty jihadist is next to be released by the soft-on-Islamism president of the United States. Could it be the "Blind Sheikh," a.k.a. Omar Abdel-Rahman, who orchestrated the deadly bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993? News reports that the Obama administration is working on releasing the deadly fatwa-issuing cleric linked to the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat go back years. The sheikh is a hero to his followers, including deposed Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, and a spiritual leader of al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood.

At home President Obama could win kudos from his allies in the increasingly violent Black Lives Matter cult by pardoning unrepentant cop-killers Mumia Abu-Jamal and Assata Shakur, a fugitive granted political asylum by Communist Cuba. Obama could boost the burgeoning anti-incarceration movement by making history with a sweeping prisoner amnesty, framing it as harmlessly setting free "all non-violent offenders" in federal custody.

Barack Hussein Obama knows he won't have to face the voters in another election so the sky's the limit.

The process by which Shalabi won his freedom offers disturbing insights into the system that determines if a terrorist detainee should be held indefinitely in wartime as allowed under the laws of war.

In May 2008 when George W. Bush was president, Rear Admiral David M. Thomas Jr., then the commander of the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo, recommended in a since-unclassified memo that Shalabi's detention be continued.

Spelling the word high in block capitals and boldfacing it for emphasis, Thomas warned that Shalabi was "[a] HIGHrisk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the U.S., its interests and allies[,]" "[a] HIGH threat from a detention perspective[,]" and "[o]f HIGH intelligence value."

Born Dec. 4, 1975 in the Muslim holy city of Medina, Saudi Arabia, Shalabi is a man of many aliases. He has also been known as Abdul Rahman Shalabi, Abdul Rahman, Abd al Rahman Shalbi Isa Uwaydah, Abdul Haq Rahman, Saqr al-Madani, and Mahmud Abd Aziz al-Mujahid.

Shalabi, who had been on a hunger strike for years at Guantanamo, is a member of al-Qaeda who began working as one of Osama bin Laden's bodyguards in 1999, the memo stated. Shalabi "received advanced training at multiple al-Qaida camps" and "received specialized close combat training for his role as a suicide operative in an aborted component of the 11 September 2001 al-Qaida attacks."

"Detainee attended an elite commando course run by al-Qaida operative Salah al-Din Abd al-Halim Zaydan aka (Sayf al-Adl) at the Mes Aynak Training Camp in 1999," Thomas wrote. "This course was offered to select trainees who had already received al-Qaida's basic training."

Shalabi was involved in "hostilities against U.S. and Coalition forces and was captured with a group referred to as the Dirty 30, which included UBL [Osama bin Laden] bodyguards and an assessed 20th 11 September 2001 hijacker." Shalabi, who has "familial ties" to bin Laden, "will likely reestablish ties to al-Qaida and other extremist elements if released."

Thomas argued that Shalabi was far from rehabilitated (assuming rehabilitation is even possible for a jihadist). His behavior while confined was atrocious. 

Thomas reported:

His overall behavior has been mostly noncompliant and hostile to the guard force and staff. He currently has 95 Reports of Disciplinary Infraction listed in DIMS with the most recent occurring on 27 February 2008, when he was reported spitting on the guard force. Detainee has 11 Reports of Disciplinary Infraction for assault with the most recent occurring on 27 February 2008, when he was reported spitting on the guard force. Other incidents for which he has been disciplined include inciting and participating in mass disturbances, failure to follow guard instructions and camp rules, inappropriate use of bodily fluids, unauthorized communications, damage to government property, attempted assaults, assaults, provoking words and gestures, and possession of food and nonweapon type contraband. On 7 August 2005, detainee was reported to be in possession of broken glass (shank).

"Does that sound like someone who is going to be rehabilitated in Saudi Arabia?" Investor's Business Dailyeditorialized. "Or someone who will be returning to the terrorist battlefield to wage jihad against America?"

Even if Shalabi does not return to terrorism, his release provides a morale boost for those who support the jihadist cause, the newspaper opined. "He was also on a partial hunger strike for nine years at Gitmo, and will undoubtedly be used in Islamist propaganda against U.S. detention policies once he returns to his home."

Some commentators accused the Obama administration of releasing Shalabi suddenly and without warning on Sept. 22 while the public and the media were distracted by the first-ever visit of Pope Francis to the United States. 

While the timing of Shalabi's deinstitutionalization may be suspect, the process that led to his repatriation began at least two years ago. 

Following the great American journalistic tradition of undermining U.S. national security to sell newspapers, theMiami Herald set in motion the events that led to Shalabi's low-key exfiltration from U.S.-held territory.

In June 2013, the U.S. Department of Defense released a list of detainees held at Guantanamo in response to a lawsuit filed by the newspaper. The media outlet then reported that Shalabi was one of 48 Guantanamo detainees "deemed too dangerous to release but ineligible for trial."

An unclassified transcript of an April 21 hearing of an Obama administration-controlled detention review board indicated its unnamed "presiding member" said Shalabi behaved badly in detention and "has refused to respond to substantive questions." That board, established under Executive Order 13567 (issued March 7, 2011 by President Obama), convened to hear evidence about whether Shalabi's continued detention at Guantanamo "remains necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States." The panel, according to the U.S. military, "consists of one senior official from the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Justice, and State; the Joint Staff, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence."

In a little-noticed development, the board determined June 15 that "continued law of war detention of the detainee is no longer necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States." The board recommended Shalabi be returned to his native Saudi Arabia.

At the April hearing, Shalabi's private counsel, Julia Tarver Mason-Wood, told the board that she had "represented Mr. Shalabi on a pro bono basis for almost a decade." She said her client "wants to make clear that he harbors no ill will to the United States, the American people, and non-Muslims."

The ethically challenged Mason-Wood told the board:

As he will explain to you, Mr. Shalabi is a teacher of Islam, which he believes is a religion of peace, not war. Mr. Shalabi will tell you that he does not support terrorism or the killing of innocent people; he steadfastly believes that such acts are contrary to the Quran and to the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed.  

Manhattan-based Mason-Wood is a partner in the Paul, Weiss law firm, which represents many Muslim terrorist detainees. She clerked for leftist U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor when the jurist sat on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Richard Pollock previously reported at PJ Media that Mason-Wood was banned from the Guantanamo facility by the base commander and the U.S. Department of Justice in 2006 "for secretly passing on anti-American propaganda and operational detention details to her 'client.'"

The detainee was Majeed Abdullah Al Joudi, a Saudi who belonged to the Taliban and al-Qaeda. In 2004 a status review tribunal heard that he was “was captured with al-Qaeda surveillance evasion reports and after-action reports.”

Pollock continued:

The anti-American propaganda Mason secretly passed on to Mr. Al Joudi was a slick, inflammatory 18-page color brochure — written entirely in Arabic — that slammed American detention policy as “that of anti-Arab, anti-Islamic, and other racist abuse.” It was filled with pictures of masked, bound, and kneeling prisoners, and according to the Wall Street Journal, “included pictures of what appeared to be detainee operations in Iraq.”

Mason-Wood had been surreptitiously forwarding "incendiary materials to her client through a system called 'legal mail,' which is supposed to be strictly legal correspondence between a lawyer and the enemy combatant." This appears to contravene "a 2004 protective order by federal Judge Joyce Hens Green [that] forbids the lawyers to give out any information on political news, current events, or the names of U.S. government personnel."

Mason-Wood brings to mind Lynne Stewart, the since-disbarred radical lawyer who was briefly imprisoned for providing material support for terrorism by illegally passing on a message from her client, Omar Abdel-Rahman. The communiqué was “the blessing of a return to violence from a terrorist leader,” prosecutor Anthony Barkow said during Stewart’s 2006 trial. In it, the sheikh urged disciples to abandon a ceasefire with the government of Egypt and resume terrorist operations.

According to Debra Burlingame and Thomas Joscelyn, Mason-Wood is one of several legal counsel to Guantanamo detainees who "went far beyond vigorous representation of their clients." (Burlingame, a former attorney, is the sister of the late Charles F. "Chic" Burlingame III, pilot of American Airlines flight 77, which was crashed at the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. Joscelyn is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.)

Mason-Wood, Burlingame and Joscelyn wrote in the Wall Street Journal,

inflamed tensions with the hunger strikers during a visit to Guantanamo in October 2005. She told one of the detainees, Yousef Al Sherhri, that the U.S. Government had no court authority to feed him using a nasal tube, according to Justice Department documents. As a result Al Sherhri pulled out his feeding tube, persuaded detainees in his cell block to do the same and exhorted them to physically resist. [Department of Justice] lawyers would later argue that Ms. Mason’s advocacy “resulted in a disruption of camp security and a potential threat to the health of eight hunger-striker detainees.”

After being banned from Guantanamo for breaking the rules, attorneys sued the government to regain access to detainees. The ban on Paul, Weiss lawyers that was enforced for part of 2006, was later rescinded "as part of a private settlement containing a variety of stipulations." 

Mason-Wood's client, Majeed Abdullah Al Joudi, was sent back to Saudi Arabia in February 2007. In 2009 the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency confirmed Joudi had “reengaged in terrorism.”

Freeing Omar Abdel-Rahman would be a logical enough choice for the Obama administration which has shown a willingness to release the worst of the worst among Muslim terrorists. 

Remember that Obama freed five Islamist generals in exchange for Taliban collaborator U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. 

Releasing the Blind Sheikh, whose list of U.S. targets overlapped with the targets Obama pal Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground Organization bombed or plotted to bomb in the 1970s, would delight the president's Islamist allies.

From the time since-overthrown Egyptian President Morsi took office, he promised to pressure the U.S. government to free the sheikh, the Washington Post reported in early 2013

In October 2012 al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri called on Egyptians to kidnap Americans to force the sheikh's release. Muslim terrorist Mokhtar Belmokhtar, who attacked U.S. and European oil workers in January 2013, put the sheikh's freedom on his list of political demands.

The sheikh "was the godfather of all Islamic movements," Zawahiri's younger brother, Mohamed al-Zawahiri has said. "Maybe if he was not going through such injustice, 9/11 would not have happened. [The sheikh's imprisonment] was one of the reasons that the people felt so strongly about the American offenses against the Islamic people."

The sheikh has long been a revered figure is Islamism but after Hosni Mubarak, who kept Egypt's Islamist problem under control, was ousted as the Arab republic's president, demands for the sheikh to be returned to Egypt have grown progressively louder.

In 2001 before the 9/11 attacks Osama bin Laden himself reportedly demanded the sheikh's release from U.S. custody. Author Peter Bergen described the sheikh as the "spiritual guide of 9/11" because he wrote an edict in prisons requiring Muslims to take up arms against their enemies and "kill them in the sea, on land and in the air."

The sheikh is reportedly very popular among Egyptian Salafists who view him as a legitimate religious and political leader railroaded by the U.S. justice system. Some call him the “Emir of Jihad."

Militants who attacked the In Amenas gas facility in southeastern Algeria offered to swap American hostages for the sheikh. Algerian authorities didn't pursue the offer and instead conducted a raid that left at least 29 terrorists and 37 captives dead.

A Libyan group known as the Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman Brigade took responsibility for  assaults on Western targets in Libya in 2012, including the Sept. 11 attack on U.S. facilities in Benghazi that left four Americans dead including Ambassador Chris Stevens. The sheikh's son, Abdallah, said the killers "were acting in the name of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman."

In a video message earlier this month, al-Qaeda's Zawahiri reminded his followers that the sheikh and his brethren remain in custody and, according to MEMRI, "urged all groups to include them in their deals when negotiating for the release of any of their hostages."

In recent years media outlets have reported that the U.S. Department of State “is actively considering negotiations with the Egyptian government for the transfer of custody of Omar Abdel-Rahman, also known as ‘the Blind Sheikh,’ for humanitarian and health reasons.” Obama administration officials deny that there have been any such negotiations but the administration isn't exactly known for its honesty.

The Arabic language newspaper al-Arabiya reported previously that the Obama administration offered to send Abdel-Rahman to Egypt as part a prisoner swap. Now well into his seventies, Abdel-Rahman was convicted of “seditious conspiracy” in 1995 in connection with the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

Abdel-Rahman’s terrorist organization, Jamaa Islamiya (Islamic Group), is a “radical offshoot” of the Muslim Brotherhood, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. Jamaa Islamiya also tried to assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in 1995. To try to force the release of Abdel-Rahman from the U.S., Jamaa Islamiya murdered 62 people in Luxor, Egypt, in 1997.

Shalabi's lawyer, Julia Tarver Mason-Wood, should be getting a telephone call from the Blind Sheikh's people any day now.

 Tags: 9/11, Gitmo, islamic jihad, osama bin laden, prison