In Defense of Warren

By Peter Wehner - 12.22.2008 - 11:47 AM

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/

Barney Frank is deeply offended by Rick Warren, and he wants to the world to know it. On CNN’s Late Edition yesterday, Representative Frank criticized President-elect Obama for inviting Warren to deliver the invocation at his inauguration. According to Frank,

Mr. Warren compared same-sex couples to incest. I found that deeply offensive and unfair. If [Obama] was inviting the Reverend Warren to participate in a forum and to make a speech, that would be a good thing. But being singled out to give the prayer at the inauguration is a high honor. It has traditionally been given as a mark of great respect. And, yes, I think it was wrong to single him out for this mark of respect.

Barack Obama and Rick Warren

What has Frank and other gay rights advocates riled up is that Warren backed a California ballot initiative banning same-sex marriage (the measure was approved by voters last month). In the course of defending his stand, Warren has made the point that there are lots of arrangements one could envision consenting adults wanting–from polygamy to incest–that we would not want to label “marriage.” In making that comparison, gay rights advocates have decided to try to turn the Reverend Warren into a reviled figure. Let’s therefore try to examine the argument Warren is making.

The core of this case, which is articulated in William Bennett’s 2001 book The Broken Hearth: Reversing the Moral Collapse of the American Family (full disclosure: I assisted Bennett in writing the book), is that marriage is not an arbitrary social arrangement; it is, rather, based on teleology and the different, complementary nature of men and women. It is also an institution that cannot be understood apart from its cultural, biological, and religious underpinnings. It cannot be redefined by fiat.

Suppose, for example, that a man and three women, all adults, wanted to marry. They insist they love one another and that marriage would strengthen their bond. As consenting adults, they should be allowed to enter any arrangement they desire. Or assume that a man and his 22-year-old daughter decide that they, too, love one another and want to spend the rest of their lives together. They, too, insist that they love each other and that allowing them to marry would represent the best of America: tolerant, respectful of the desires of individuals, and part of the expansion of individual rights that we witnessed during the Civil Rights era. Now ask advocates of same-sex marriage to make an argument against these arrangements.

They will say that marriage isn’t about marrying as many people as you love; it’s about marrying one other person you love. It should therefore be restricted to two people. But why is this? Who are gay-rights advocates to insist that we limit the number of people in marriage to two? Polygamy, after all, has been much more prevalent in history than gay marriage, a movement that was essentially unheard of until a few years ago. But homosexuality is “morally and psychologically” superior to polygamy, others insist. And how do they know? As Charles Krauthammer has pointed out, many Americans believe heterosexuality to be “morally and psychologically” superior to homosexuality, which is why they deny the validity of homosexual marriage.

Same-sex marriage advocates, in dismissing the time-honored definition of marriage and de-linking it from its cultural, religious, and traditional understanding, have lost the ability to draw boundaries against a slew of other arrangements. Once people decide that their own human longings give them license to lay claim to marriage, the definition of the institution is arguably up for grabs. Everyone who wants to redefine marriage will invoke the arguments made by same-sex marriage advocates–from insisting that society should not set up roadblocks to their happiness and their desire to enter into loving, faithful relationships; to arguing that their lives would be incomplete without marriage; to claiming that government is wrong to deny them equal protection.

In the words of Mr. Bennett:

Having just rewritten the central rule of the marriage bond, proponents of same-sex marriage are hardly qualified to dictate to others what constitutes its central meaning, or why it can be felt only between two human beings, and not more than two. What arguments would they invoke? Tradition? Religion? The time-honored definition of the family? These are the very pillars they have already destroyed. No, once marriage has been detached from the natural, complementary teleology of the sexes, it becomes nothing more than what each of us makes of it.

That, I think, is what Rick Warren was getting at, rather than comparing homosexual behavior to incest. Now one may disagree with Warren’s position and believe that gay marriage is simply part of the centuries-long evolution of marriage that has occurred and that it would not harm, and may even marginally help, the institution of marriage. I disagree, but I understand such a case can be made–and, in fact, that case has been made by intelligent and sober advocates for same-sex marriage (like Jonathan Rauch). But to say that the arguments put forth by Warren are “deeply offensive and unfair” is itself, I think, unfair. And the effort to portray Warren as a bigoted and benighted figure is both unfair and wrong.

By all accounts, Rick Warren is a man of enormous integrity who oversees a wonderful, life-saving ministry. He also gives voice to the views of millions and millions of Americans–including presumably Barack Obama, who also opposes same-sex marriage–and Warren does so in a civil manner. Beyond defending the traditional view of heterosexual marriage, Warren has done several other things, including broadening the vision of evangelical social ethics to issues such as AIDS and helping the continent of Africa. He has also shown a generosity of spirit by having Obama speak at his church (and has been criticized from the right for doing so).

President-elect Obama deserves credit for asking Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his inauguration. It is a symbolic gesture for sure–but symbolism matters, and this reciprocal generosity of spirit is good for the country. It is Barney Frank and his allies who are determined to turn the Obama inauguration into yet one more battlefield in America’s “culture war.”

The outrage directed at Warren is an effort by some to intimidate those who oppose same-sex marriage into silence and de-legitimize their arguments rather than answer them. This effort needs to be resisted, especially by those who claim to care so much about “tolerance” and the free and open exchange of ideas. It would be nice if, from time to time, those who claim to represent modern liberalism would reacquaint themselves with the classical version.

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Today's Tune: Bach - Christmas Oratorio: Schlafe, mein Liebster

(Clcik on title to play video)

War Against Christmas 2008: Christopher Hitchens’ War Against Christmas

By Tom Piatak
http://www.vdare.com/
December 23, 2008

Those claiming to doubt the existence of the War against Christmas need only read the annual anti-Christmas rants of Christopher Hitchens, which are prominently featured at Slate. Indeed, this year Slate linked Hitchens’ column with the title "My War on Christmas" and accompanied it with an illustration of the dyspeptic Briton kicking Santa Claus.

Hitchens is open about his intention: "My own wish is more ambitious: to write an anti-Christmas column that becomes fiercer every year while remaining, in essence, the same." ['Tis the Season To Be Incredulous, December 15, 2008] And Hitchens’ open disdain for Christmas, and the religion that gave it birth, neither harms Hitchens with leftist editors nor with his many admirers in the "mainstream right." The brief biographical tagline at the end of Hitchens’ column identifies him both as a "columnist for Vanity Fair" and as "the Roger S. Mertz media fellow at the Hoover Institution." For most "mainstream conservatives", Hitchens’ full-throated support for the Iraq War is apparently enough to excuse his War against Christmas and against Christianity.

Hitchens’ complaint is that Christmas is "a moral and aesthetic nightmare," and that at Christmas "the United States . . . turns itself into the cultural and commercial equivalent of a one-party state," where "the image and the music of the Dear Leader are everywhere."

Leaving aside the fact that the public celebration of Christmas has diminished during Hitchens’ time in America (he's lived here since Reagan's first term) as a result of the War Against Christmas Hitchens’ comparison of Christ to Kim Jong Il is offensive, and the rest of his argument is simply stupid. [Watch Hitchens on YouTube reciting Tom Lehrer's parody, A Christmas Carol.]

One-party states are notorious for their violent suppression of Christmas, including the one-party state of Lenin and Trotsky Hitchens continues to applaud. More importantly, the public celebration of Christmas in America is the result of private activity, not public coercion. In fact, government action in the United States generally results in the suppression of Christmas, as crèches disappear from town squares and carols go unsung in school concerts under the threat of lawsuits.

If Hitchens is serious about wanting to avoid Christmas, maybe he should make his next home the birthplace of the "Dear Leader," North Korea.
Hitchens’ claim that Christmas represents a "moral and aesthetic nightmare" is equally obtuse; in fact, it is the inverse of the truth. Christianity is the moral basis of Western civilization, and Christmas especially is marked by countless acts of Christian charity, and numerous donations that help all manner of charities to continue their work throughout the year.

Does Hitchens really hate the Salvation Army bell ringers who enable that organization to do its exemplary and cost-efficient work? And the spirit of charity that characterizes Christmas has been embraced and even furthered by non-Christians. Charles Dickens was not an orthodox Christian, but in the English-speaking world Christmas inevitably brings to mind his great and justly loved tale of the moral redemption of Ebenezer Scrooge, a tale that has helped further the outpouring of generosity that continues to mark Christmas.

As Fred tells Scrooge at the beginning of Dickens’ novel, in words that have become familiar to most of us,

"I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything can be apart from that—as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys."

And far from being an "aesthetic nightmare," Christmas was instrumental in creating the Western artistic tradition. I noted in my article "How to Win the War Against Christmas" in the December issue of Chronicles that Christmas is a celebration of the birth of Christ and the mystery of the Incarnation. But it is also the celebration that most helped shape the West.
As Thomas Cahill explains in his Mysteries of the Middle Ages,

"Roman Christians found their attention drawn to the most down-to-earth aspect of the Trinitarian doctrine: the Infleshing, the Incarnation, the Making of the God-Man. What, they asked themselves, are the practical consequences—to human beings—of the Word becoming Flesh? From this question will flow, with some notable divagations, the main course of what was to become Western Christianity."

Although Roman Christians "agreed in principle" with their Greek coreligionists that Easter was the "supreme Christian feast," "in practice they came to prefer Christmas." And this preference for Christmas had profound consequences.

Cahill tells the story of how Saint Francis of Assisi created the first crèche at Midnight Mass in Greccio. In the words of Saint Bonaventure, Francis "made ready a manger, and bade hay, together with an ox and an ass, be brought unto the place."

Cahill focuses on why Francis did this: "I wish to make a memorial of that child who was born in Bethlehem and, as far as possible, behold with bodily eyes the hardships of his infant state, lying on hay in a manger with the ox and the ass standing by." By trying to recreate "as far as possible" what had happened in Bethlehem, Francis had, according to Cahill, asked a "wholly new question," a question that was "historical, emotional, particular, and human: what would it have been like to be there?"

This emphasis on realism, so different from the Christian iconography that characterized Eastern religious art, meant that "In the town of Greccio on Christmas night in 1223 were born the arts as we still know them."

A generation later, Giotto, "throughout his adult life a Franciscan tertiary," painted that scene in Greccio in fresco in the magnificent basilica built to commemorate Francis in Assisi, and the first Christmas is part of his equally famous frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. Giotto’s

"eucharistic Catholicism, informed by a Franciscan spirit, pushed him toward a nearly scientific quest to reproduce more exactingly in art the very things his eyes could see, his hands could touch, his heart could love—and preeminently among these lovable things was the human body itself."

And this realism, grounded in the incarnational theology of the Western Church, had a profound impact:

"[Giotto’s] work is done. His influence on generations to come, whether direct or indirect, on sculptors as well as painters, on Renaissance and modern artists as well as late-medieval ones—on Pisano, Ghiberti, Donatello, the Della Robbias, Fra Angelico, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, and Mantegna, on the inevitable trio of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael, and perhaps especially on that most inspired supernaturalist Caravaggio—will be immeasurable. . . . And that is how life became art."

Thus, it is no exaggeration to state that the Western artistic tradition is inextricably linked to the celebration of Christmas.

We are reminded of this great tradition whenever we buy one of the Postal Service’s Christmas stamps, which each year feature a painting of the Madonna and Child by one of the masters of the Western artistic tradition. (This year, the stamp features a portion of Botticelli’s Virgin and Child with the Young John the Baptist, found in the Cleveland Museum of Art; sadly, the Museum described the stamp as a "holiday stamp" in its December Members Magazine, even though the Postal Service blazons "Christmas" on the stamp). [Contact the Cleveland Museum of Art]

To be sure, there are some tacky Christmas songs and displays, but only someone completely lacking in imagination will let those obscure the profound beauty that has always marked Christmas and that can still be found by those willing to look.

Almost everyone enjoys seeing Christmas trees and Christmas lights, and there is enough variety in the great treasury of Christmas music—from high art such as Handel’s Messiah and Bach’s Christmas Oratorio to great, heartfelt carols such as Silent Night, The First Noel, and Angels We Have Heard On High, to outstanding examples of American songwriting such as The Christmas Song and Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas—to please almost every musical taste.

That Hitchens is incapable of enjoying any of this is sad enough. That he and the rest of those waging War Against Christmas want to prevent the rest of us from doing so is inexcusable.

(Email Christopher Hitchens).

Tom Piatak (email him) writes from Cleveland, Ohio.

On the Death of Deep Throat

By Patrick J. Buchanan

http://www.vdare.com/

December 22, 2008

"De mortuis nil nisi bonum."

Of the dead, nothing but good.

So said Dean Acheson of Sen. Joe McCarthy on his death in 1957. "Tailgunner Joe" had bedeviled the secretary of state for his lassitude toward communist penetration of State in President Truman's time.

Mark Felt

But the passing of Mark Felt, associate director of the FBI in the later Nixon years, lately exposed as "Deep Throat," the source for the Woodward-Bernstein stories, calls forth some rebuttal to the tributes lavished upon Felt as the honest lawman who saved our republic.

When the Watergate break-in was traced to the Committee to Reelect the President, Felt was put in charge of the FBI investigation. Almost immediately, he began to leak to Woodward.

Felt, it is said, was justified, as the White House was interfering with his investigation. False.

This is a moral cloak belatedly cast over more base motives.

The truth: Felt was a bitter man. Having risen through the ranks under J. Edgar Hoover, whose black-bag jobs he had overseen, Felt expected to be rewarded by being named director on Hoover's death. Nixon had passed him over for an outsider, L. Patrick Gray.

By secretly colluding with the Washington Post, Felt was ingratiating himself with an establishment that loathed Nixon, even as he exacted revenge for having being denied by Nixon the post he had coveted.

Had Nixon or aides restricted Felt, the Post would have had an explosive story. But the Post never charged the White House with interfering with the FBI investigation that summer or fall, because it was not interfering.

What Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein ran with were such shockers as that Nixon's men had hired a trickster to ape the Democrats' Dick Tuck, and said trickster had sent dozens of pizzas to a Muskie rally.

The FBI had ferreted out the Artful Dodger, and the Post led with the atrocity. "FBI Finds Nixon Aides Sabotaged Democrats," screamed the four-column headline at the top of page one.

Indeed, if what Felt did was honorable, why did he lie and deny it repeatedly when asked if he was leaking to the Post? Why did he lie in his memoir in 1979, when, well into retirement, he emphatically denied he was Deep Throat? Was Felt so noble he could save our republic, yet refuse, to the point of lying in his memoirs, to take any credit?

Answer: Felt knew what he did was dishonorable, corrupt—and unnecessary. For honest FBI agents were steadily making progress toward proving that higher-ups at CREEP were involved in aiding those caught in the Watergate break-in.

Felt had another reason for lying about his role as snitch for the Post.

Former colleagues would be disgusted, for his was not only a breach of law, but of faith and trust, a dishonoring of his oath as an FBI agent.

One wonders what went through the mind of Felt, when, on trial in Manhattan in 1980 for those FBI black-bag jobs against the Weather Underground that had bombed the Pentagon and Capitol, ex-President Nixon walked into the courtroom to testify in Felt's defense?

When Felt was convicted, Ronald Reagan pardoned him, declaring that if the Carter amnesty was proper for those who had defected to Canada rather than serve in Vietnam, it was right to pardon those who risked their careers to protect the nation.

After exposure as Deep Throat, Felt wrote in a 2006 memoir, "The bottom line is that we did get the whole truth out, but isn't that what the FBI is supposed to do?"

No, Mr. Felt, that is not what the FBI is supposed to do.

Do we really want, here in America, our premier investigative and police agency to get the truth out that it decides to get out?

Would it have been right for Hoover to get the "whole truth out" on JFK's liaisons with suspected German spies, Mafia molls and Marilyn Monroe, and destroy his presidency? Would it have been right for the FBI to get the "whole truth out" of Hoover's secret files, and ruin all the public careers the FBI could have destroyed?

Isn't that what the old KGB did to its enemies?

In the early '60s, Robert Kennedy authorized Hoover to bug and tap Dr. Martin Luther King. When the FBI turned up film of King with loose women, LBJ's White House moved the photos to the Washington press.

Felt knew of this. The Post knew of this. The Washington press corps knew of this. Why didn't Felt and the Post blow the whistle on this squalid deed?

Was it not so egregious as sending pizzas to Muskie's rally?

In that Scoundrel Time, the liberal establishment—the press, the politicians and the police bureaucrats—colluded to destroy Nixon, even as they covered for JFK and LBJ.

Nixon, you see, was not one of them. Is it not always thus?

COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

- Patrick J. Buchanan needs no introduction to VDARE.COM readers; his book State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, can be ordered from Amazon.com. His latest book is Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, reviewed here by Paul Craig Roberts.

It's Cold Outside, But Global Warming Industry Still Hard At Work

by Christopher C. Horner (more by this author)
Posted 12/23/2008 ET

The most expensive secret you’re not supposed to know is that George W. Bush leaves office with the planet cooler than when he entered. This dangerous trend threatens the multi-billion dollar “global warming” industry, adding new urgency to the ritual shriek of “we must act now!” in the scramble to impose a costly regime of mandates and energy taxes.

The global warming industry’s tactics already range from comical to reprehensible. As a result of a cooling atmosphere -- which thanks to the “global cooling” panic we began measuring in 1979 -- you are distracted with irrelevant surface temperatures. This is possibly because more than 90% of our surface thermometer network is in violation of rules for locating the instruments. For example, why are so many now on asphalt parking lots, black tar roofs, airport tarmacs, and even hanging directly above barbeque grills?


Al Gore

Such childishness is only the tip of the iceberg of outrages employed to advance an ideological agenda. Our schools torment those whom they are charged with protecting from abuse, with night terrors among the less egregious outcomes. Their brainwashing includes hate mail campaigns to skeptics, reporting on their parents’ willingness to adopt an agenda, and even emotional breakdown requiring institutionalization.

High government officials around the world abuse their powers to expand government’s powers. The media moved from pushing catastrophism in order to sell copy, to expressly abandoning journalistic principles and declaring that, regarding global warming, “balance is bias.”

Last year, after Kevin Rudd was elected Australia’s Prime Minister, he addressed a gathering of that nation’s “best and brightest” pondering how to achieve their policy dreams. One idea floated was to strip Aussies of their citizenship if they expressed doubts about man-made climate catastrophe. So as to not be extremist, however, this allowed for the prospect of restoring one’s standing upon -- you guessed it -- reeducation.

The mostly taxpayer-funded science community is repeatedly caught fudging their numbers to exaggerate and even manufacture warming. Peer-review journals place hurdles in the “skeptic” path to publication while publishing demonstrable falsehoods without bothering to check the claims’ viability.

Gang Green smears any who dare speak out as unqualified or shills corrupted by “Big Oil” money. Media and lawmakers repeat the claims, yet show no curiosity about the staggering $300 million given to Al Gore. Who is it so covetous of frightening you into accepting costly policies in the name of a “climate crisis” as to underwrite this aggressive lobbying and re-branding blitz? Gore won’t tell us, but you can bet they stand to profit at your expense.

The establishment furiously engages to shout down, censor and shut down dissent. They now have the active participation of the National Academy of Sciences thanks to a back door created to elect “environmentalists” who otherwise would not attain this status and who then exercise a veto over others who do not share their worldview. Forget the policy implications, and consider how this threatens the various institutions of science once the entire enterprise is inevitably exposed.

It is now mainstream in the campaign to suppress speech to call for criminalization of skepticism (that is, of science) and imprisonment of its practitioners. British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett publicly demands that media outlets refuse to grant “skeptics” space, on the grounds that they are just like Islamic terrorists.

Who, then, is surprised that scientists receive professional and even death threats for their heresy, and one in Norway had the wheels fall off of his car -- twice -- after speaking out, once when his young daughter was a passenger? His mechanic said the lugs had been loosened. Apparently dissent is not patriotic to the global warming industry.

One prominent former CEO now pushing alarmism says that continued opposition to “climate” policies, specifically a supranational organization to which we cede the necessary authority, will be “paralyzing” and “suffocating”. Officials and opinion leaders similarly argue that the global warming issue is simply too important to be left to democracy and that we must suspend certain such arcane notions, if just for this one issue.

This is madness. It has to stop.

The first step in our recovery is to have a public discussion about why proponents of the global warming agenda must stoop to these tactics.

Mr. Horner is author of "Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed."

Shilling for the Ft. Dix Six

By Robert Spencer
http://www.frontpagemag.com/
Tuesday, December 23, 2008

The Fort Dix jihad plotters are guilty, and Muslim spokesmen in America are outraged – not at the plotters who have ostensibly "hijacked" their religion, but at the officials who secured the convictions.

They wanted to burst into Fort Dix and murder as many American soldiers as they could, but it was all a joke, you see: so said Mohamed Younes, president of the American Muslim Union. "I don’t think they actually mean to do anything," he asserted. "I think they were acting stupid, like they thought the whole thing was a joke. They don’t look like the type of people to do something like this."

Unfortunately, Associated Press reporter Wayne Parry doesn’t seem to have followed this up by asking Younes exactly what "the type of people to do something like this" actually do look like. It might have been interesting to see a Muslim leader in the United States engage in what could be regarded as "racial profiling," but it would, of course, have been far too politically incorrect for AP to print.

In any case, when one of the Fort Dix jihadists, Mohamad Shnewer, was in a particularly joking mood back in 2006, he showed a fellow plotter who turned out to be a government informant some DVD files: some featured Osama bin Laden calling Muslims to wage jihad warfare, and others contained the last will and testaments of some of the 9/11 hijackers. Oh, Shnewer, you kidder! Shnewer was ready to lay them in the aisles but good, saying of American soldiers at Fort Dix, "They are the ones, we are going to put bullets in their heads, Allah willing." Riotous!

One of the other plotters, Serdar Tatar, displayed a sense of comic timing that rivaled the side-splitting Shnewer’s when he told an FBI informant that he was ready to commit mass murder at Fort Dix: "I’m gonna do it….It doesn’t matter to me, whether I get locked up, arrested, or get taken away, it doesn’t matter. Or I die, doesn’t matter, I’m doing it in the name of Allah."

Muslim leaders others who were present at the trial were not pleased on Monday that these happy-go-lucky jokesters now face life in prison. Faten Shnewer, Mohamad Shnewer’s mother, said of the verdict: "It’s not right, it’s not justice." It was entrapment: the government "sent somebody to push him to say something; that’s it." Entrapment seemed to be the line of choice: Jim Sues of the New Jersey chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), echoed Faten Shnewer’s lament: "Many people in the Muslim community will see this as a case of entrapment. From what I saw, there was a significant role played by the government informant." (Given CAIR’s taste for attempting to silence its critics by means of legal intimidation, Sues is aptly named, and faces a bright future in the organization.)

A former Muslim chaplain for the U.S. military and Obama delegate to the Democratic National Convention, James Yee, expressed sorrow over the verdicts as well – not because of the potential loss of life at Fort Dix, but because the convictions would ruffle American Muslim feathers: "All of this doesn’t help build trust with the American Muslim community," he complained, "and that is vital if our law enforcement is going to fight terrorism. If anyone can improve security, it’s our community, but we need to be seen as trusted partners, not potential suspects." Yee knows what it’s like to be a suspect: in 2004 he was investigated for mishandling classified material at Guantanamo. The charges were dismissed in March 2004, but Yee was not exactly cleared: AP reported that "in dismissing the charges, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, commander of Joint Task Force Guantanamo, which operates the detention center, cited ‘national security concerns that would arise from the release of the evidence’ if the case proceeded." Not exactly a resounding affirmation of Yee’s clean hands.

In any case, it is useful to pause and consider how Muslim leaders could be reacting to the verdicts. Instead of hurling reckless charges of "entrapment," they could be taking the hard steps necessary to clean their own house. All these years now after 9/11, most Americans still have no idea that they need do any such housecleaning – even outgoing Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff recently told USA Today that "what we’re confronting is an ideological conflict with an extremist world view that I don’t think is an accurate representative of Islam, but uses the language or hijacks Islam for an extremist agenda." Yet while Muslim and non-Muslim spokesmen have spilled oceans of ink since 9/11 asserting that Islam condemns "terrorism" and the killing of "innocents," without defining what is meant by either term, no one has ever produced any examples of authoritative and orthodox Islamic religious scholars rejecting, on Islamic grounds, jihad violence against non-Muslims; rejecting the idea that Sharia law should be instituted in the Muslim and non-Muslim world; and teaching the idea that non-Muslims and Muslims should live together indefinitely as equals.

Thus the Fort Dix verdicts give American Muslim groups who claim moderation to demonstrate the genuineness of the claim, or to be further exposed in the eyes of the public. Now is the time for law enforcement and government officials to call upon the Muslim community to institute comprehensive and inspectable programs teaching against the jihad ideology and Islamic supremacism. If they don’t – and they won’t – one thing is certain: there will be more jihad plots like this one in America.

- Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of seven books, eight monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including the New York Times Bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His next book, Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs, is has just been released by Regnery Publishing.

Volleyball gods make mark at NCAA finals

By Gordon Brunskill
Centre Daily Times
http://www.centredaily.com/
December 23, 2008


Penn State's Christa Harmotto hits the ball during Saturday's championship match of the 2008 Division I Women's Volleyball Championships in Omaha, Nebraska. Penn State faced Stanford in a repeat of last year's championship match. (For the CDT/Steve Manuel)


They are the volleyball gods, and whether or not you have faith in anything else, you still heed the wishes of the volleyball gods.

They will, in the end, put right the wrong.

If you are playing a match somewhere, just a friendly game with no officials watching over play, and no one is sure if the ball landed in or out, simply replay the point and the volleyball gods will decide.

If you get the point, the ball must have been in before. That is the rule.

The volleyball gods were watching over the Penn State women Saturday night.

If you watched the NCAA championship match against Stanford, won in a sweep by the Nittany Lions to clinch their third national title and second in as many years, you probably already know the scenario.

The score was 21-19 in the second set, and the funny thing was that everyone in the building knew the deal except for three people — the official scorer and the two referees. Even the head coaches, Penn State’s Russ Rose and Stanford’s John Dunning, knew the situation.

The referees had an excuse, since they usually do not know what the actual score is at any one time. It is not their job. ...

In case you do not remember, here is a brief recap: Penn State’s Blair Brown had just pounded down a spike to apparently put the Nittany Lions up 21-19, except the Qwest Center scoreboard read “20-20.” The down referee checked with the official scorer, then huddled with the coaches, then huddled with the up referee, then started the process over again as the entire building watched in disbelief as the national championship was being screwed up by someone not paying attention.

Also during he lengthy delay, Stanford’s Cynthia Barboza walked to the net and motioned to the Penn State players the debate should be decided by “rock-paper-scissors.”

Eventually, for some strange reason, the score was settled at 20-19 Penn State and play resumed. A few points later, the score took another inexplicable jump from 22-21 to 23-22 in the Nittany Lions’ favor. There was a brief discussion over this, and then play resumed again.

After this display, does Omaha still deserve to be getting premium consideration for hosting volleyball championships?

The NCAA showed off its infinite intelligence over the matter once again, just like it does over football, by not consulting with anyone who might be able to help. ESPN2, which was carrying the match live, had the score right (I know, I just watched the set again to check my scoring). Across the court, Nebraska’s scorekeepers, who were keeping the computer scoring and have a running play-by-play to easily clear up any discrepancies, had it right. Neither was asked for help.

Then, compounding the idiotic mess, after the match every member of the media was instructed not to ask about the situation, even in a hypothetical, because no one will be allowed to answer. Big Brother says so.

They also issued a brief explanation, which explained nothing:

“Error by scorekeeper, correction made by officials then when error was found on the scoresheet the adjustment was made on the scoreboard.”

The good news? Penn State still ended up winning the set and the match. In reality the final score of the set was 26-23, not 26-24 as the scoreboard showed, but that will soon fade from memory.

What should be remembered is the volleyball gods were watching over Omaha, making sure all was just and fair.

That is what they do, and that is why we trust them.

Traditions continue

Some things go with the Nittany Lions even if they are not in Rec Hall. Just like she has done throughout the first four rounds of the tournament at home, when introduced before the semifinal and final matches, senior Nicole Fawcett ran behind each of her other teammates and slapped them all on their backsides. For the championship match, her slaps were extra hard.

It was a tradition starter last season by former player Kara Callahan.

“Kara did it last year and I thought it needed to still carry on,” Fawcett said. “That was, if anything, to keep everyone loose and having fun. I decided I had to do it.”

Another much longer-standing tradition also continued: When the team ran onto the floor to begin their pre-match warm-up routine for both matches, Fawcett and Christa Harmotto stood by the net and gave sophomore Cathy Quilico a lift up above the net to start jumping drills.

“I love it,” Quilico said. “I feel like I’m tall — one of the big girls.”

That tradition from pretty much every match in the past several years predates Harmotto and Fawcett. Tabitha Eshleman, whose last season was in 2004, was the first to be hoisted toward the sky. Since then a census is taken every preseason to find the smallest player, and at 5-foot-1 and maybe a feather over 100 pounds, Quilico more than fits the bill.

“I’m assuming I’ll be the smallest girl the next two years also,” Quilico said. “I’m glad I get to do that.”

Gordon Brunskill is a sports writer for the Centre Daily Times. He can be reached at 231-4608 or gbrunski@centredaily.com.

PSU relieves pressure with title

NCAA VOLLEYBALL REVIEW

By Gordon Brunskill- gbrunski@centredaily.com
Centre Daily Times
December 22, 2008

OMAHA, Neb. — So, was this one really the best volleyball team in NCAA history?

The debate raged all week in Omaha, and with the American Volleyball Coaches Convention in town along with the final four, there were plenty of experts on hand who could pass judgment.


Members of the Lady Lion volleyball team, from left, Kelsey Ream, Blair Brown, Alyssa D'Errico, Christa Harmotto and Nicole Fawcett display the 2008 NCAA Division 1 Championship trophy while they are honored during a timeout during the Nittany Lions' basketball game against Lafayette on Sunday, Dec. 21, 2008

The coaches who were on the court for the national championship match, Penn State’s Russ Rose and Stanford’s John Dunning, were a little less opinionated Saturday night after the Nittany Lions’ three-set sweep at the Qwest Center, giving them back-to-back titles and three in the last 10 seasons.

“I guess time will tell,” Dunning said. “They have a record that continues, it’s an amazing season that continues. I don’t like to compare teams, personally, as I don’t like to compare players because I don’t think it’s right or fair.”

The Nittany Lions were pestered by the same questions all season long: How good were they really? Could they win every match? Could they win every set? Could they repeat as champions?

Needless to say, they were getting pretty tired of hearing those questions and were finally happy to prove their worth with Saturday’s victory.

“Looking back now, it’s extremely hard,” said senior Nicole Fawcett, who had 10 kills in the final and was honored the night before as the AVCA national Player of the Year. “The amount of pressure — it was there but I don’t think we ever let that affect us. The pressure we put on ourselves was more important. We really demanded the best of each other and I think that’s why we got to where we are and became the team that we are right now.”

What was a major key to the team staying in contention all year, to set all those records and dominate the way they did? They stayed healthy.

Other than one weekend when libero Roberta Holehouse was absent due to a death in the family, and one weekend in which key defensive specialist Alyssa D’Errico was lost to a concussion, every key player was on the court for every single match.

That was in contrast to 2005, when Penn State looked to be a strong title contender but then-freshman middle hitter Christa Harmotto was lost to a torn ACL late in the regular season.

“I remember freshman year with Christa’s injury, then sophomore year half our team was injured,” Holehouse said. “It really helps us to play the top, the volleyball we want to play. Everyone’s healthy, everyone’s able to get off the ground quick, everyone can take big swings. It really does help us.”

What else got them to the glorious ending? Defense. It was not just blocking, even if they had 11.5 terminal rejections against Stanford, and a ton more that the Cardinal kept alive, but it was also the back-line people D’Errico and Holehouse.

“Even though the offense gets all the attention, there were a lot of people who had to improve their game,” said Rose, the AVCA Coach of the Year. “Roberta flew under the radar screen for most of the season and a good bit of her career. It’s going to be difficult to replace the things that she did.”

When you are leading the nation in hitting and blocking, digging numbers do tend to get overlooked. It may jump out that, statistically speaking, Penn State was awful in digging. The Nittany Lions were 11th — dead last — in the Big Ten in digs. Yet in their matches, they were only out-dug by an opponent once all year, and they had 14 more than Nebraska in the semifinals and 10 more than Stanford in the finals.

Why the disparity? When you are cranking up big hitting numbers and blocking numbers, the opponents are not sending too many balls to the back-row people.

“People tend to overlook the things we do because we have so many All-Americans on the floor that are big hitters,” Holehouse said. “The past two matches are an indication that we’re not just a big team, we’re an all-around team.”

That is how you end up with a national championship.

Hurting Holehouse

If you were at the match or watching on television, you may have noticed a couple of delays while Holehouse was tended to by the team trainer. She actually had to deal with three separate injuries Saturday.

She cut one of her fingers while opening a soup can Friday and the cut reopened Saturday night. She also scraped the back of her hand on the plastic sport court during the match.

Then there was the pre-match injury: While standing in the stadium tunnel before running onto the court, under a temporary awning, Holehouse was dancing in excited anticipation and was accidently pushed by a teammate into the metal frame of the awning, gashing her thigh.

Loose ends

Cleaning up some odds and ends from the now-completed season:

•Penn State finished with a .390 hitting percentage, breaking the NCAA rally-scoring record of .369 by Florida A&M in 2004. The Nittany Lions just missed the all-time record of .406 by Hofstra in 1983.

•Harmotto finished with a .433 career hitting percentage, which would have broken the old NCAA record of .423 by Virag Domokos of George Mason, except Stanford’s Foluke Akinradewo passed them both with a career mark of .447.

•Fawcett finished her career second on the school’s all-time kills list with 1,943, while Harmotto is 16th with 1,244. Harmotto also is fourth all-time in blocks with 682 and Holehouse is fifth in career digs with 1,306, passing current assistant coach Salima Rock-well on the list. Their impact will be missed by their teammates.

“I can’t talk about that yet,” said redshirt sophomore Blair Brown, one of the team’s six All-Americans. “I’m not ready for that. Not only are they incredible in the program, they’re some of my best friends. State College will be so different without them. They’re my neighbors, I live with them, It will be so different. They are Penn State volleyball.”

By the way, two-time NCAA Championship Most Outstanding Player Megan Hodge is fifth on the all-time Penn State kills list with 1,582.

•Rose now has 963 career wins, third in NCAA Division I history.

•One NCAA record held by Penn State is about to be broken: Nebraska has won 87 straight home matches (in Lincoln, not including the Qwest Center where they lost for the first time Thursday). That ties the Nittany Lions’ streak set in the 1990s. Penn State could be poised to take back the record should the Cornhuskers ever lose, since they have won their last 57 at Rec Hall.

•For more on the scoring fiasco during the second set, pick up a copy of Tuesday’s CDT.

Sarah Palin: Conservative of the Year

by Ann Coulter
http://www.humanevents.com/
12/22/2008

Sarah Palin wins HUMAN EVENTS’ prestigious “Conservative of the Year” Award for 2008 for her genius at annoying all the right people. The last woman to get liberals this hot under the collar would have been … let's see now … oh, yeah: Me!

The entire presidential election year was kind of a downer for conservatives. Once the “maverick” John McCain won the nomination, the rest of the year was like watching a slow motion car crash. Except at least a slow-motion car crash is occasionally entertaining. So it was going to be a long year.

Until Palin.

When McCain chose our beauteous Sarah as his running mate, the maverick was finally acting like a real maverick -- as opposed to the media’s definition of a “maverick” which is: “agreeing with the editorial positions of the New York Times.”

Pre-Palin it had been one race -- boring old “You kids get off my lawn!” John McCain versus the exciting, new politician Barack Obama, who threw caution to the wind and bravely ran as the Pro-Hope candidate. And then our heroic Sarah bounded out of the Alaska tundra and it became a completely different race. This left the press completely discombobulated and upset. They didn't know whether to attack Sarah for not having an abortion or go after her husband for not being a sissy.

I assume Palin was chosen because McCain had heard that she was a real conservative and he had always wanted to meet one -- no, actually because he needed a conservative on the ticket, but that he had no idea that picking her would send the left into a tailspin of wanton despair.

But if anyone on the McCain campaign chose Palin because she would drive liberals crazy, my hat is off to him!

True, Palin made some embarrassing gaffes.

She complained that we didn’t have enough “Arabic translators” in Afghanistan -- not realizing the natives don’t speak Arabic in Afghanistan, but rather a variety of regional dialects, the most common of which is Pashtun.

Speaking to military veterans one time, Palin said, “Our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes -- and I see many of them in the audience here today.”

She bragged about passing a law regulating the nuclear industry that it turned out never became a law at all.

Some days Palin said Venezuela's dictator Hugo Chavez should suffer "regional isolation" -- but then on others she’d say she supported the president’s meeting with Chavez.

She told one audience about recent tornados in Kansas that had killed 10,000 people. In fact, a dozen people were killed in the tornados.

She referred to the “57 states” that make up the U.S.

Speaking of her eldest daughter’s pregnancy, she said Bristol was being “punished” with a baby.

As you probably know -- or guessed by now -- none of these gaffes were uttered by Palin. They are all Obama gaffes. Luckily, he made them to a star-struck press that managed not to ask him a difficult question for two years.

It seemed like the media would introduce an all-new double standard each day throughout the two glorious months of Palin’s candidacy.

I don’t remember, for example, zealous inquiries into the supposedly peculiar religious practices of any candidates in past elections. No one in the press touched on Sen. Joe Lieberman’s religious beliefs when he was Kerry’s running mate. (Nor, while we’re on the subject, was the media particularly interested in the beliefs of the religion that inspired the 9/11 attacks on America.)

But the press snapped right back into their anti-religious hysteria for a candidate who was a Pentecostal! The same media that couldn’t be bothered to investigate Obama’s ties to former Weathermen or Syrian Nationalist Tony Rezko was soon hot on the trail of a rumor that Palin’s church had a speaker 30 years ago who spoke in tongues!

Let me think now: Were there ever any unusual or otherwise noteworthy speeches or sermons given in churches where Obama worshipped? Hmmm … it's on the tip of my tongue.

Liberals also suddenly decided that a woman with children could not handle the stress of higher office. Until Palin reared her beautiful head, this is precisely the sort of thinking liberals would have denounced as the Neanderthal, backwards, good old boy network attitude that had created a “glass ceiling.”

Let’s consider the facts: Palin’s oldest son was about to be under the tender care of Gen. David Petraeus after being shipped off to Iraq. Her next oldest child was about to be married and probably would prefer that her parents butt out. That left three children under the age of 15, which was almost the same as Obama had.

So Palin had one more child -- and a lot more executive experience -- than the guy at the top of the Democrats’ ticket. (I suspect what liberals were really mad about was that if Palin became Vice President, she probably would have hired a nanny who was a U.S. citizen.)

Having indignantly rejected experience as a presidential qualification in the case of Obama, liberals had to raise questions about Palin’s experience gingerly. But, in short order, they threw caution to the wind and began energetically criticizing Palin for her lack of experience. I call that two … two … two standards in one!

Like most Democrats, both Obama and Biden boasted of their humble beginnings, while having fully adopted the attitudes, pomposity and style of the elites.

Meanwhile, Palin is the sort of genuine American that brings out the worst, most egregious pomposity of liberals. For weeks, Carl Bernstein was showing up on TV to announce: “We still don’t have the date of first issuance of her passport.” Members of the establishment would be astonished to learn that more Americans have guns than passports.


Palin blows a kiss to fans during a rally in Kissimmee, Fla., on October 26. (Burbank/Orlando Sentinel/MCT)

Liberals were angry at Palin because they thought she should look and act like Kay Bailey Hutchinson: Upper crust, prissy and stiff.

Palin had a husband in the Steelworkers Union, a sister and brother-in-law who owned a gas station, and five attractive children -- one headed for Iraq, one a Down’s syndrome baby and one the cutest little girl anyone had ever seen.

In a nutshell, Palin was everything Democrats are always pretending to be, but never are.

She didn’t have to conjure up implausible images of herself duck hunting as Hillary Clinton did. Nor was Palin the typical Democratic elected female official who went straight from college into politics, like Nita Lowey.

Despite their phony championing of “women’s issues” (i.e. abortion) there was not one Democrat woman who could win a head-to-head contest with Palin. Especially not if we got to see their faces. Democrats may have a fleet of women politicians, but they don’t have a deep bench of attractive ones. You don’t even think of most Democratic woman as women: Rosa Delauro, Nita Lowey, Patty Murray, Janet Napolitano -- and the list goes on. Oh, sure, there are the odd female Democrat sex kittens -- your Janet Renos, your Donna Shalalas -- but they're the exception to the rule.

After Palin gave her barnburner of a speech at the Republican National Convention, a friend of mine in a liberal industry told me his friends were aggressively confronting him demanding to know if Palin was raised by a secret cult of Christians that taught children nothing but Creationism and public speaking.

Oh, how I wish he had said “yes.” Imagine the aneurisms! I think what liberals were to say was: Gosh, she’s an exceptionally attractive mother of five!

The Obama campaign was so alarmed by Palin’s speech, it loudly dismissed the speech saying she didn’t write it. At least that’s what a press release written by an Obama campaign staffer said.

Indeed, the first words out of every Palin critic's mouth were: "Good speech, but she didn't write it." So I guess all liberals were reading the same talking points written for them by the Obama campaign. At least Palin pays her speechwriters. Neil Kinnock is still waiting for his check.

Speaking of Joe Biden, he said that Palin’s speech had a lot of style but little substance. Inasmuch as Biden was Obama's running mate, I think that meant he liked it!

A newspaper in Boston responded to Palin’s speech by interviewing hairdressers who criticized Sarah's hairstyle. (Where were these people after Joe Biden's speech?)

Trendy dinner party opinion soon demanded that all liberals take up the cry that Palin must let the press have a whack at her. Almost immediately after she was introduced to the nation, the cry went up: “When are we going to be allowed to ask Palin questions?”

Palin’s refusal to meet with the press for one week after being chosen as McCain’s running mate was evidently more maddening than Obama's refusal to appear on Fox News for almost the entirety of his campaign.

Everyone acted as if Obama’s feat of running for President for two years constituted a complete and thorough vetting.

It might have been, except that the entire media had apparently agreed: “OK, none of us will ask Obama about Tony Rezko, William Ayers, and Jeremiah Wright.”

Hillary was hissed by the audience for mentioning Rezko at a Democratic debate and George Stephanopoulos nearly lost his career for asking Obama one William Ayers question at another.

Osama bin Laden was more upset about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright than liberals were -- especially after "Jeremiah Wright videos" passed "al Qaeda videos" for most total viewings on Youtube. (He was kicking himself for not coming up with that “God Damn America” line first!)

Who cares if Palin was qualified to be President? She was running with John McCain! There was no chance that ticket was going to place her anywhere near the presidency. In fact, I can’t think of a better place to put someone you wanted to keep away from the White House than on a ticket with McCain.

Palin was a kick in the pants, she energized conservatives, and she made liberal heads explode. Other than his brave military service, introducing Sarah Palin to Americans is the greatest thing John McCain ever did for his country.

But unless Palin is going to be the perpetual running mate of “moderate” Republicans who need conservative bona fides, she will need to become wiser and better read. Even Reagan didn’t run for President in his 40s. (True Obama is in his 40s, but we are not Democrats.)

Perhaps Palin’s year is 2012, but I would recommend that she take a little more time to become older and wiser. She ought to spend the next decade being a good governor, tending to her children so none of them turn out like Ron Reagan Jr., and reading everything Phyllis Schlafly, Thomas Sowell, Ronald Reagan and “Publius” have ever written. (She also might keep in mind that HUMAN EVENTS was Ronald Reagan’s favorite newspaper!)

In time, HUMAN EVENTS’ 2008 Conservative of the Year will be ready to be our President and someday can sweep into office and dismantle all the heinous government programs Obama and the Democrats are about to foist on the nation. Who knows? She might even be able to run as the candidate of "hope" and "change."


Read HUMAN EVENTS' exclusive interview with Gov. Sarah Palin.

Ann Coulter is Legal Affairs Correspondent for HUMAN EVENTS and author of "High Crimes and Misdemeanors," "Slander," ""How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must)," "Godless," and most recently, "If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans."

Today's Tune: Chuck Berry - Run Rudolph Run

(Click on title to play video)

Who Was Behind the Jihad by the Shoe – and Why?

By Dr. Walid Phares
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/
December 20, 2008

As I observed the immediate aftermath of the shoe throwing incident in Baghdad, I noted that the most striking effect occurred among the Western public, and particularly within the United States. Commentators and regular citizens were asking themselves again, seven years later, “why do they hate us?” missing one more time the fact that this particular violent expression, far from being a unique emotional reaction by one individual, is part of a war of ideas; it is a continuous organized confrontation over the future of the region. In short, this was another form of Jihadism, one I am coining now as a Jihad by the Shoe (Jihad bil Hizaa). Here is why.

Western Awe of So-Called Arab Reaction

The main question on anchors’ minds and lips reflected the shock and awe felt by many Americans. It wasn’t really about the Iraqi journalist … targeting President Bush with his two leather “missiles”… for in liberal democracies, the scene of flying eggs, pies or liquid in the direction of politicians, legislators, Prime Ministers or Presidents is part of the political culture. Even obscene gestures and words are frequently uttered against leaders; this behavior comes with the package of democratic freedoms. It ends up usually with a sensational picture on the front page, as a joke on TV’s late night shows, and/or it can come with some minor legal consequences.

But the shoe bombing of President Bush stunned Western commentators for another reason: the seemingly vast outpouring of support the thrower received in the region. In the absence of sound expert analysis as to the meaning of the colorful reporting on Arab channels, and as many Western media went overboard in their guilt-ridden commentaries, the public was left alone to figure this out. Obviously their conclusion was that “whatever we do for them, they will continue to hate us.”

That’s exactly the gist of almost every question I was asked by the media: “After all we’ve done for them, freed them from Saddam, lost three thousand American men and women and spent billions of dollars, they made a hero of a shoe thrower against our President.” While the unease in America and in many Western countries is legitimate, the cause of their frustration, not the shoe thrower, should be blamed: as before, the public was very poorly served by its media and academia. The public simply wasn’t told – with accuracy - what actually unfolded in that incident, which was another battle in the ongoing War of Ideas, aimed at defeating the will of the free world. Here is how:

The Shoe Thrower

According to Arab commentators, Iraqi journalist Muntazar al Zaidi, who launched his two shoes against U.S. President George Bush while calling him “dog”, is a controversial militant. Dr. Abdel Khaliq Hussein, writing in Elaph accused al Zaidi of being a “friend of the terrorists.” Furthermore, along with other analysts, Hussein said the “shoe thrower” used to know about the “terrorist attacks before they took place and managed to be at the location beforehand.” These are serious accusations against a person who was made into an icon of “Arab pride” by the Jihadi media machine. Furthermore, Hussein wrote that al Zaidi fabricated his abduction story last year to get “maximum publicity.” One can see a pattern here. Maybe President Bush’s instincts were right.

In the daily al Shaq al Awsat, another observer wrote that al Zaidi is a Sadrist. Others disagree and describe him as radical opportunist. Nidal Neaissi, also writing in Elaph, reminded his readers of an historical precedent in Bedouin history: a well known greedy man, Abi Qassem al Tamburi was always trying to get rid of his shoe by throwing it against well known people, attracting the support (and more) of their enemies. Too many comments about the so-called “shoe hero” have appeared in the Arab media - unread in the West - leaving us with one conclusion. The man had a plan for his shoe: a major show. And it worked.

The Force behind the Shoe Thrower

It gets better when you investigate the organization paying his salary and expenses. Al Baghdadiya TV, based in Cairo, is owned by another controversial figure in the murky world of Middle Eastern media: Abdel Hussein Shaaban, an Iraqi Shia from Najaf and ex-Communist. According to Iraqi opposition sources based in London, Shaaban was an operative for Saddam, tasked with discrediting the Baathist leader’s critics around the world. Obviously it comes with payroll, according to the same sources.

But more recent accusations leveled by media experts in the region claim that al Baghdadiya TV, like dozens of other recipients, are getting significant funding from the Iranian regime. Military expert W. Thomas Smith, Jr., writing in World Defense Review has described the huge propaganda operation unleashed by Tehran directly, and via its network in Beirut, to “influence” Arab and Western media and to direct them against the regime’s foes.

Blasting George Bush, and more importantly his project of “spreading Democracy”, is high on Iran’s list but also on many other regimes’ agendas. An article by Ali Al Gharash titled “Shoes Terrify Regimes Now” shows that a consensus exists within the region’s establishment to demolish the image of the man who dared (despite the failure of U.S. bureaucracy) to “do it,” that is to tear down their wall of radical ideologies. The shoe thrower was clearly on a mission to do just that by striking at the “head” of the enemy with his pair of shoes.

The Making of a Jihadi Hero

Minutes after the incident took place and was captured by the media feed and aired worldwide, a snowball flurry of releases, special shows with commentators - gathered too fast for the circumstance - were on the airwaves. Interestingly al Baghdadiya TV issued – faster than the speed of light - a long press release calling for struggle. Minutes after, a vast magma of satellite channel sympathizers of Jihadism, and of sites virulently anti-democracy, exploded with incitement and calls for mobilization - and some were even as provocative as characterizing the ballistic exercise by al Zaidi as an “act of Jihad.”


A protester displays a shoe and a picture of U.S. President George W. Bush during a protest in Amman December 20, 2008. Protesters on Saturday showed their support for detained Iraqi journalist Muntazer al-Zaidi, who hurled his shoes at U.S. President George W. Bush during a recent news conference in Iraq.
REUTERS/Muhammad Hamed (JORDAN)

Within six hours, the airwaves in the region were invaded by the “shoe Jihad.” Within 12 hours, friendly voices beaming from Western networks joined the orchestra in aggrandizing the matter. “A shoe in the Arab culture is the worst epithet one can use, it expresses so deep an anger,” blasted one of the oldest international media out of Europe. More seasoning was added on this side of the Atlantic. “Analysts” for mainstream networks - most of whom can’t speak the language - began lecturing the stunned public on the “lessons to be learned and on the pain felt in those lands at the sight of President Bush.” And the framing continued on. By the second day, both the Arab satellite cohorts and the “specialists” on “how to understand the region” were breaking to the world the grandiose news: a new hero was born in the Muslim world, the shoe thrower. Give it a few weeks and Hollywood will buy the story and make a movie out of it. Give it a year and it will be taught as a course by our academic cinema.

The West is Dragged to Confusion

Within Western democracies, informational confusion reigns: this is “Bushophobia” claim the most sophisticated. It is impossible, after all the Coalition has done to free Iraqis from Saddam, that demonstrators are chanting for the shoe thrower. Others, less confident in the ability of the region’s peoples to accept democracy and to be thankful to the liberators, began a psychological withdrawal: let them live under dictatorships for they don’t deserve better, said many talk show hosts.

When a Western response like this happens, connoisseurs of Jihadi tactics know that the “shoe Jihad” worked impeccably. It spread doubts in the heads of Westerners, particularly among Americans, so that few will support a U.S. President in the future if he asks for sacrifices to “bring change” to the region. The combined propaganda machine of the Baathists, Salafists, Khomeinists and other authoritarians scored a major coup in a job lasting only 48 hours: they forced a confused West to believe that the region is utterly opposed to liberal democracy. Consequently, the next White House and other chanceries across the Atlantic need to learn from the shoe attack: do not intervene in Darfur; do not pressure the Iranian regime; do not help Lebanon against Hezbollah and let go of democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Pro-Democracy Voices Lash Out

But the critics of the “Shoe Jihad”were as fast as the petro-dollar machine in reacting. Indeed, and unlike what most Westerners were swift to conclude, pro-democracy voices were loud and clear: from Kuwait, Lebanon, Jordan, Morocco and across the Arab world, and particularly from Iraq, journalists, bloggers, talk show hosts, teachers and artists blasted the Jihadi comedy and rejected the “unholy shoeing.” For each email on al Jazeera supportive of the insult, another email landed on liberal web sites and editorial rooms. How the incident was reported in the Middle East depended on who stood behind which medium. Sadly, if the funders were petro-regimes, the “Shoe Jihad” won. The other side’s volume was too low to be broadcast throughout the world. International media, incorporating the West’s global apology syndrome, obviously showcased the “partisans of the shoe” rather than those who were embarrassed by it.

A War of Ideas

The West was left to see only what it was allowed to watch: a repeat of previous cycles in the War of Ideas. Viewers in New York and Paris can see the angry protesters of the Danish Cartoons and Guantanamo and the insulting of a U.S. President; but they cannot see the men and women who wish to shoe bomb their own dictators and oppressors. Sometimes the public has a mere glimpse of the other side: when Saddam’s statue was toppled and beaten with shoes for few hours, and when a million people demanded the Assad regime to take their boots off of Lebanon’s soil.

Meanwhile, the battle for minds and hearts rages relentlessly - a confrontation so far won by those who wage Jihad by all means, as they say. This time, it was by the shoe.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Dr. Walid Phares is the Director of the Future Terrorism Project at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the author of "The Confrontation: Winning the War against Future Jihad."

A Lesson for Britain From Honest Abe

By Mary Ellen Synon
http://synonblog.dailymail.co.uk/
16 December 2008 1:36 PM

At the moment, Barack Obama is trying to pose as the new Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Early in his campaign, however, he was trying to pose as the new Abraham Lincoln, the straight, simple man who went to Washington from Illinois. Last year Obama even went to the the steps of the Old State Capitol Building, in which Lincoln had once served in the Illinois legislature, to make his announcement that he would run for the Democratic nomination.

But he has gone quiet on that one lately. Hardly surprising. These days a connection with Illinois means a connection with the facts of corruption not the myth of Lincoln.

But in Illinois, they just can't keep Lincoln out of the picture. Even the US Attorney who is prosecuting the present governor, Rod Blagojevich, with 76-pages of allegations of corruption, says that all he has found out about the level of corruption in 'the Land of Lincoln' now 'Would make Lincoln roll over in his grave.'

High-level corruption in the Land of Lincoln, and this US Attorney thinks we should be surprised at that -- and Lincoln would be shocked. Oh, sure. As Captain Renault was shocked to find there was gambling going on at Rick's Café.

I am not surprised to see yet more evidence that corruption is endemic in the Land of Lincoln. I'd call it highly appropriate. But then, I've known enough about Lincoln all my life to know that the sobriquet 'Honest Abe' was originally meant as irony. Lincoln was venal and greedy, and long before he was elected president in 1860, the people of Illinois knew it.

You no doubt think Lincoln was some kind of country lawyer who went into politics for noble reasons. Wrong on both counts. Before he was president, Lincoln was the highest-paid trial lawyer in Illinois. His clients included the Illinois Central Railroad, which at the time was the biggest corporation in the world.

As Prof Thomas J. DiLorenzo, author of The Real Lincoln, has found in his research, Lincoln was essentially a lobbyist for the Northern plutocracy and its anti-populist, mercantilist policies.

As for Lincoln's supposed commitment to racial equality, he was as morally corrupt on that one as he was financially greedy on the other: 'Lincoln states over and over again that he was opposed to political or social equality of the races; he was not an abolitionist but denigrated them...his primary means of dealing with racial problems was to attempt to colonize all American blacks in Africa, Haiti, Central America -- anywhere but in the United States.'

The fact is that from the moment in 1832 when Lincoln announced he was going to run for the state legislature in Illinois, his agenda was almost solely economic -- for example, demanding protectionist tariffs and taxpayer subsidies for his old friends in the railroads and other corporations. Lincoln the Lawyer even had personal use of a private railway carriage, the Gulfstream jet of its day.

Like most Northerners, Lincoln was what today would be called a racist. He had no interest in liberating slaves, not until years into the war which he had started for mercantilist reasons. Even then, Lincoln only made the Emancipation Proclamation for political reasons; more, he excluded from emancipation the slaves owned in the four slave states which stayed on the Union side and did not join the Confederacy.

What drove him to launch a war against the South was the fact that 80 percent of the foreign earnings of the United States came from the agricultural exports of the Southern states. Lincoln decided to open the floodgates on a sea of blood rather than let the Southern states secede, as was their undoubted right. A South in control of its own foreign earnings could have threatened the fortunes of his rich friends in the industrial North.

Lincoln's moral corruption went far beyond greed and slavery, though. The late historian, Webb Garrison of Emory University, wrote that when Lincoln was informed how the federal army had pillaged, plundered, burned and raped its way through the defenceless Shenandoah Valley in 1864, Lincoln only conveyed 'the thanks of a nation' to General Sheridan, the chief plunderer.

Lincoln's wartime villainy brings us back to present day Illinois villainy. One of the crimes of Lincoln was his unconstitutional suspension of the writ of Habeas Corpus. He ordered the army to arrest thousands of Northern civilians and imprison them without trial. Among them were hundreds of editors, journalists and newspaper owners who were opposed to the war.

Back in Chicago today, we see that one of the corrupt deals in which Governor Rod Blagojevich was apparently involved was a financial squeeze on the Chicago Tribune to try to force them to fire journalists who criticized him.

But Blago couldn't pull off the deal, couldn't put the screws on even one paper. As Aaron Wolf says in Chronicles Magazine, 'Threatening newspapermen for writing things critical of the chief executive? Rod, you have a lot to learn from Honest Abe.'

As Britain has a lot to learn from the history of the South, and what happened when it tried to withdraw in peace from what was in law only a federal union of sovereign states...

December 16, 2008 Permalink Comments (11)

Mark Steyn: Flaming Youth

Sunday, December 21, 2008
Flaming youth [Mark Steyn]
http://corner.nationalreview.com/

People stand near a burning barricades on the main road in the immigrant-dominated suburb of Rosengard in Malmo in southern Sweden December 18, 2008. REUTERS/Drago Prvulovic/Scanpix (SWEDEN)

John Hinderaker notes the return of youths of no other discernible characteristics in this BBC headline:

Swedish City Hit By Youth Riots

Let's take a wild guess here. Would the "Swedish city" happen to be "Malmo"? Why, amazingly, yes:

Dozens of youths have rioted in the southern Swedish city of Malmo for a second consecutive night, setting cars on fire and clashing with police.

While we're on a roll, would it happen to be the part of Malmo known as "Rosengard"? Why, right again!

People stand near a burning barricades on the main road in the immigrant-dominated suburb of Rosengard...

"Immigrant-dominated", eh? Is that a way of saying it's the most heavily Muslim neighborhood of Sweden's most Muslim city? Ah, well, let's not go that far. All the BBC is prepared to say is that the otherwise non-specific youths' riotous activities were "linked to the closure of an Islamic centre".

Down under, I got into a little spat with a rather dour lady leftie on Australian radio who disputed my characterization of Malmo, and in particular my claim that ambulances would no longer respond to emergency calls in certain youthful neighborhoods with a police escort. I offered to buy her lunch in Rosengard and show her the town so she could judge for herself, but she declined to take me up on the offer. Still, perhaps she'll reflect on this detail in a Reuters photo caption:

Police extinguish burning barricades on the main road in the immigrant-dominated suburb of Rosengard in Malmo in southern Sweden, early December 19, 2008. The fire department considered the area to be too risky to enter with their personnel.

In my "free speech" crusade up in Canada, I'm frequently lectured by lazy cliche-recyclers that there's no freedom to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theatre. But in a burning city feel free to shout "Nothing to see here!" for another decade or three.
12/21 08:18 AM

SIMPLY THE BEST

By Gordon Brunskill
Centre Daily Times
http://www.centredaily.com/
Sunday, Dec. 21, 2008


The Penn State Lady Lion volleyball team poses with the national championship trophy after sweeping Stanford University for its second consecutive National Championship Saturday in the 2008 Division I Women's Volleyball Championships in Omaha, Nebraska. (For the CDT/Steve Manuel)


OMAHA, Neb. — Now you can crown them.

After months of brushing off talk about being the best women’s volleyball team of all time, Penn State’s players can finally lay claim to the title.

With one t h u n d e r ous swing after another, the Nittany Lions brought down Stanford and danced off the floor of Omaha’s Qwest Center with their second straight national championship.

Led by a huge final set from tournament Most Outstanding Player Megan Hodge, who had nine kills in the frame and a match-high 16, Penn State knocked down the Cardinal 25-20, 26-24, 25-23 Saturday night, wrapping up the fourth undefeated season in NCAA Division I history.

“It’s an honor to fulfill those expectations,” said senior libero Roberta Holehouse, who had a match-high 18 digs. “We got to show that it wasn’t just a label and it was something that we took pride in and something we believed.”

With the final swing was senior leader and the national Player of the Year Nicole Fawcett, who instead of rocketing the ball through the Stanford defense gave a soft swipe at the ball, nipping a blocker’s hand and putting the ball on the floor for the team’s 64th consecutive victory, extending their NCAA record.

“It hasn’t sunk in yet, it hasn’t from last year yet and I don’t think it’s ever going to,” said Blair Brown, who provided key change-up opportunities while putting down nine kills to go with five blocks. “It’s a big goal. It’s a great thing for our team to accomplish together.”

The Nittany Lions (38-0) may have been denied a complete perfect season, not giving up a set for 111 straight frames until Nebraska took two in the semifinals on Thursday, but with a record six All-Americans in the starting lineup and back-to-back championships for the seventh time in NCAA history, Penn State put its stamp on history.


The Penn State Lady Lion volleyball team celebrates after sweeping Stanford University for its second consecutive National Championship Saturday in the 2008 Division I Women's Volleyball Championships in Omaha, Nebraska. (For the CDT/Steve Manuel)

“People are going to say what they want to say and there are a lot of words being spoken about our team,” said Hodge, who also had 14 digs and was the Most Outstanding Player of last year’s final. “At the end of the day we play for each other, we play for Penn State, we play for Coach (Russ) Rose and all the coaching staff and that’s what it comes down to. It’s not about any labeling.”

“This group had the potential to do certain things and they kept working hard,” said Rose, the national Coach of the Year. “They kept having to hear me talk about what their potential was and why we had to keep working. Other people can talk about those things, they can talk about records.”

Luckily, unlike that battle against Nebraska, there was no such drama on this night in front of 14,299 enthusiastic but hardly partisan fans. The teams traded the lead often, but in the final few points, they demonstrated why they were so feared all season.

Also, unlike two nights earlier when a 2-0 lead disappeared after intermission, Penn State started flexing its muscles right from the set’s outset behind one impressive swing after another from Hodge, who usually punctuated those kills with a roar.

“Thursday night and even last year in this same match we kind of let off a little bit in the third game and it turned into a more competitive match going five,” Hodge said. “I think we all got it in our heads that we have to go out there and play hard.”

With Penn State up 23-18 and just two points away from grabbing the trophy, the Cardinal (31-4) rallied with three big kills from Alix Klineman to get within 23-22. Hodge ended the run with her final blast of the night cross-court, and after another Klineman kill, Penn State scrambled with Christa Harmotto setting her fellow senior Fawcett for that final point.

The players waited anxiously for what seemed an eternity before the referee signaled the point, and the match belonged to the Nittany Lions and then everyone swarmed the floor in celebration. A woman tried repeatedly to hand off the trophy before Kelsey Ream finally turned around to see her and hoisted the prize high in the air.

“Going through my head was, ‘They better call the touch,” said Fawcett, who had 10 kills and 11 digs Saturday. “At that time it did seem like an eternity but Megan was already celebrating so I figured we already got the point. It was good to see everyone rushing the floor.”

Penn State did have its hands full with Stanford, which held the nation’s top hitting team to a season-low .177 hitting night ---just the fifth time all year they were held under .300.


Penn State's Christa Harmotto (3) takes a shot over Stanford's Alix Klineman (10) in the second set of their NCAA chamionship volleyball match on Saturday, Dec 20, 2008, in Omaha, Neb.(AP)

Another key statistic: The Nittany Lions ripped in five service aces to none from the West Coast power.

“I think the difference in the (second) game, if I remember after looking at it, was serving,” said Stanford coach John Dunning, whose team has lost three straight finals. “They had some aces and we had a couple errors. It’s a two-point difference.”

Penn State also won the digging battle 64-54, and got the ball to setter Alisha Glass in good spots so she could get people like Brown and Harmotto (8 kills, 6 blocks) involved to keep the Cardinal honest defensively.

“Our defense did a really nice job tonight,” said Alisha Glass, who gave out 40 assists. “We started out a little bit slow, but once we were getting touches on the block we were able to get digs and convert for points.”

“Penn State is a great team,” said Foluke Akinradewo, who posted eight kills and six blocks. “They have a really big block and a great defense behind it, so it is hard to get kills on them.”

Klineman led the Cardinal with 15 kills while Cynthia Barboza added 11 in a .023 hitting night thanks to 10 errors. Cassidy Lichtman handed out 36 assists, Gabi Ailes had 16 digs and Barboza posted 15.

Now, the pressure is finally off and the Nittany Lions can settle into their holiday break, and for the seniors the looming real world, reveling in what they have accomplished.

“It was worth it,” said Hodge, whose right shoulder was heavily encased in ice and hobbled around after the match like an elderly woman. “I’m not going to lie, Thursday was exhausting. If I never get put in that position again I’ll be a happy person but I really think it showed that our team is battle-tested and we can handle anything.”


Six Penn State players were named All-Americans Friday in Omaha, the site of the 2008 NCAA Women's Volleyball Championships. They include (L to R) Christa Harmotto, Arielle Wilson, Blair Brown, Alisha Glass, Nicole Fawcett, and Megan Hodge. Senior Nicole Fawcett was also named the 2008 AVCA Division I Player of the Year. Russ Rose won his second straight AVCA Division 1 Coach of the Year award and Megan Hodge was selected as the tournament's Most Outstanding Player for the second year in a row.(For the CDT/Steve Manuel)