carnage and culture

Wednesday, May 06, 2015

Race, Politics and Lies

Thomas Sowell | May 05, 2015

A protester in a sweatshirt that reads 'I Am Mike Brown' walks the memorial site for Michael Brown. (Photo: Tannen Maury, EPA)

Among the many painful ironies in the current racial turmoil is that communities scattered across the country were disrupted by riots and looting because of the demonstrable lie that Michael Brown was shot in the back by a white policeman in Missouri -- but there was not nearly as much turmoil created by the demonstrable fact that a fleeing black man was shot dead by a white policeman in South Carolina.

Totally ignored was the fact that a black policeman in Alabama fatally shot an unarmed white teenager, and was cleared of any charges, at about the same time that a white policeman was cleared of charges in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown.

In a world where the truth means so little, and headstrong preconceptions seem to be all that matter, what hope is there for rational words or rational behavior, much less mutual understanding across racial lines?

When the recorded fatal shooting of a fleeing man in South Carolina brought instant condemnation by whites and blacks alike, and by the most conservative as well as the most liberal commentators, that moment of mutual understanding was very fleeting, as if mutual understanding were something to be avoided, as a threat to a vision of "us against them" that was more popular.

That vision is nowhere more clearly expressed than in attempts to automatically depict whatever social problems exist in ghetto communities as being caused by the sins or negligence of whites, whether racism in general or a "legacy of slavery" in particular. Like most emotionally powerful visions, it is seldom, if ever, subjected to the test of evidence.

The "legacy of slavery" argument is not just an excuse for inexcusable behavior in the ghettos. In a larger sense, it is an evasion of responsibility for the disastrous consequences of the prevailing social vision of our times, and the political policies based on that vision, over the past half century.

Anyone who is serious about evidence need only compare black communities as they evolved in the first 100 years after slavery with black communities as they evolved in the first 50 years after the explosive growth of the welfare state, beginning in the 1960s.

You would be hard-pressed to find as many ghetto riots prior to the 1960s as we have seen just in the past year, much less in the 50 years since a wave of such riots swept across the country in 1965.

We are told that such riots are a result of black poverty and white racism. But in fact -- for those who still have some respect for facts -- black poverty was far worse, and white racism was far worse, prior to 1960. But violent crime within black ghettos was far less.

Murder rates among black males were going down -- repeat, DOWN -- during the much lamented 1950s, while it went up after the much celebrated 1960s, reaching levels more than double what they had been before. Most black children were raised in two-parent families prior to the 1960s. But today the great majority of black children are raised in one-parent families.

Such trends are not unique to blacks, nor even to the United States. The welfare state has led to remarkably similar trends among the white underclass in England over the same period. Just read "Life at the Bottom," by Theodore Dalrymple, a British physician who worked in a hospital in a white slum neighborhood.

You cannot take any people, of any color, and exempt them from the requirements of civilization -- including work, behavioral standards, personal responsibility and all the other basic things that the clever intelligentsia disdain -- without ruinous consequences to them and to society at large.

Non-judgmental subsidies of counterproductive lifestyles are treating people as if they were livestock, to be fed and tended by others in a welfare state -- and yet expecting them to develop as human beings have developed when facing the challenges of life themselves.

One key fact that keeps getting ignored is that the poverty rate among black married couples has been in single digits every year since 1994. Behavior matters and facts matter, more than the prevailing social visions or political empires built on those visions.

Tuesday, May 05, 2015

Today's Tune: Ben E. King and The Drifters - There Goes My Baby

Ben E. King: Drifter's Return

Inside the "Stand by Me" singer's supernatural comeback

By Jay Grossman May 1, 2015 | Updated May 8, 1975

http://www.rollingstone.com/

Daisy, a 17-year-old Soul Train veteran, was excited that her favorite group, the Dramatics, was about to tape a set for the show. But the identity of the guest artist, Ben E. King, had her confused. "I don't know him. What's he sing?" she asked. Duane, her 19-year-old friend, guessed at his identity: "He plays a guitar and sings blues, right?" And an usher, told that he'd written and sung "Stand by Me," announced that "you're thinking of John Lennon."

Backstage, King laughed over the confusion between himself, B.B. King and the former Beatle. "I told you last night they wouldn't know who I was," he said. "They wouldn't know unless their mommas told them this morning."

Ben E. King's last Top 40 song before "Supernatural Thing" was "I (Who Have Nothing)," recorded in the summer of 1963. The night before Soul Train, he relaxed in a Beverly Wilshire Hotel suite and talked about a dozen years of steady work playing clubs up and down the East Coast, performing at rock & roll revivals and making occasional trips to Europe. "This is the only livin' I've done since I started. I'm happy because it's something I like."

King, 36, a father of three who's been married to the same woman for 17 years, began performing in 1956 as the baritone singer of the Five Crowns, known peripherally for a passing success called "Kiss and Make Up." Two years later, the Five Crowns became the post-Clyde ("Lover Please") McPhatter Drifters. Doubts about the group disappeared when their first recording "There Goes My Baby," sold more copies than any of the McPhatter-led hits, but King grinned as he explained the story behind what was actually an unexpected success.

"That was a freak thing," he said describing how he came to do the lead vocal. "I was trying to show [lead singer] Charley Thomas how to sing it 'cause I was one of the writers and Jerry Wexler got a little angry at the way we were taking up the time. He said, 'Hey man, forget it. You go ahead and sing it and then we'll put Charley on later.' So I just sang the song, and I was stuck with lead from that point on."

King had never fronted a group before but the chemistry was right. "There Goes My Baby," perhaps the first rock song to incorporate violins, was followed by "Dance with Me," "This Magic Moment" and "Save the Last Dance for Me." But the next Drifters hit, "I Count the Tears," in 1960, was the last to feature him singing lead. According to King, management and money problems common to R&B groups in the early Sixties resulted in his leaving the group. "We was drawin' like maybe $75 to $100 a week each. That just wasn't enough. We had to pay rent, feed ourselves and keep our uniforms clean. At the end of the week I might wind up with maybe 30 to 40 bucks."

King became a solo artist — and soon hit the Top Ten. First came "Spanish Harlem," produced by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller and co-written by their then unknown assistant, Phil Spector. This was followed with "Stand by Me," a tune which King had written for the Drifters and which became a casualty of the management disputes until Leiber and Stoller recorded a rearranged version of it. King frowned as he recalled how he'd missed the perfect harmonies of the Drifters, and how he'd stood there "almost in tears, singing the song. It was like an artist paintin' a picture that's not there. I was doin' it and I knew it was wrong. But I guess that within that sadness I delivered something. The feelin' was just pouring out."

What he delivered was his sixth gold record, in the summer of 1961. But two years later, after his rich baritone and every violin that Atlantic Records could hire had made "I (Who Have Nothing)" into a dramatic, forceful ballad, the hits stopped coming. Maybe the material was poor, maybe his delivery was lacking, or maybe the public had tired of lushly arranged romantic ballads. Ben E. King found himself being billed as "an oldie but goodie, a blast from the past." Finally, in 1969 he made a difficult decision. Instead of a party to celebrate his tenth year with Atlantic, Ben E. asked to leave.

"Atlantic was doing things for me that I felt were being done because I was a friend and not because I was an artist," he explained. "I didn't want that to happen. I felt that I still had a voice. I said, 'Well, maybe you can look at things better if you get away from it!'"

But the disappointments continued. Albums on Maxwell and Mandala Records, one containing a rendition of Elton John's "Take Me to the Pilot," went nowhere, and a tour scheduled after a triumphant 1972 reunion with the Drifters on the stage of New York's Academy of Music eventually petered out. Then in late 1974, Atlantic president Ahmet Ertegun, who'd written a King hit called "Don't Play That Song" with Ben E.'s wife Betty, saw him in a small Miami club. Impressed by how he sang current tunes in a high voice and his own older songs in a baritone register, Ertegun brought Ben E. back to Atlantic. There Bert De Coteaux and Tony Silvester, who'd produced the Main Ingredient and Sister Sledge, made their position clear: "As far as we're concerned," they told him, "you're a new artist."

King's realization that "I had done to myself what others had done to me and locked myself into a sound" helped make it possible to record "Supernatural Thing" in a single session. But the final product proved surprising even in light of his new openness. "When I finished it, I thought it'd be dressed up with a lot of strings. The next time I heard the tune it was on the radio and I said, 'Wow, they left it like that.' I was stunned." But not negatively, he hastened to add. "God bless people like Bert who are willing to take a shot."

With "Supernatural Thing" moving on the Top Ten and an album, Supernatural, just released, Ben E. King has returned from obscurity. And in New York, one artist who recently cut "Stand by Me" added a footnote to the history of Ben E. King's music. "I used to do 'Stand by Me' in Liverpool when it first came out," John Lennon remembered. "It would be my big ballad. When I recorded it, I had forgotten the words, but I just closed my eyes and it all came back to me. It suited my voice and I loved Ben E. King's version."

From The Archives Issue 186: May 8, 1975

ISIS-Inspired Jihad Comes to Texas

Posted By Arnold Ahlert On May 5, 2015 @ 12:50 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | No Comments

http://www.frontpagemag.com/

150504-simpson-soofi-mugs-712p_c5b7223332af13ff5941483ad1826807

^[1]A former terror suspect previously known ^[2] to the FBI was one of the two men killed in the shootout at the Curtis Culwell Center in Garland, TX during the Mohammed Art Exhibit and Contest organized by the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI).

Elton Simpson of Arizona was an American Muslim convicted ^[3] five years ago of lying to federal agents about his plans to travel to Africa. Despite that conviction, U.S. District Judge Mary Murguia wrote that there was “insufficient evidence to support that the false statement ‘involved’ international terrorism.” Simpson got three years probation.

Police believe Simpson was the same man who sent out a series of tweets from a now suspended ^[4] “Shariah is Light” Twitter account. That account also contained ^[5] the image of Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical Islamist imam killed in Yemen in 2011 by an American drone strike. A screen grab from that account makes it clear Elton embraced radical Islam. “The bro with me and myself have given bay’ah to Amirul Mu’mineen. May Allah accept us as mujahideen,” it stated, above the hashtag #texasattack.

That last message was sent out approximately a half hour before the shooting. Prior to the attack, the Shariah is Light account also tweeted a command to follow “AbuHussainAlBritani,” another Twitter account that tweeted both before and after the attack. “The knives have been sharpened, soon we will come to your streets with death and slaughter!” was a message sent prior to the assault. After it, the account began tweeting praise for the gunmen, and linked their efforts to ISIS. “Allahu Akbar!!!!! 2 of our brothers just opened fire at the … art exhibition in texas!” one tweet stated. “Kill Those That Insult The Prophet.” The other tweet provided the linkage to ISIS. “They Thought They Was Safe In Texas From The Soldiers of The Islamic State,” it said. This account has also been suspended.

Al-Britani, born Junaid Hussain, is a computer hacker who joined ^[6] ISIS and helped fund their efforts via cyber attacks on British banks and celebrities. He is also one of three men suspected of being ISIS’s chief executioner, aka, Jihadi John, responsible for the murders of American journalists James Foley, Steven Sotloff, and Peter Kassig, as well as British aid workers David Cawthorne Haines and Alan Henning.

On Sunday night and early into Monday morning, FBI agents and a bomb squad descended on Simpson’s residence at an apartment complex in north Phoenix, reportedly using a robot to conduct the initial search, as agents feared the home might contain explosives. The second attacker was identified as Nadir Soofi, who shared an apartment will Elton.

Both attackers pulled up to the event armed with assault rifles and wearing body armor shortly before7 p.m. local time. Emerging from the vehicle they fired shots at 57-year-old Bruce Joiner, a security guard hired for the event. Joiner was hit in the ankle, taken to the hospital in stable condition, and subsequently released.

Seconds after the attackers fired, an as-yet-to-be-named Garland police officer returned fire, killing one of the men and then the other as he reached for his backpack that police had feared was filled with explosives. An investigation of the car they were driving ensued shortly thereafter. “It’s a very slow, tedious operation that’s going on,” Garland police spokesman Joe Harn said. “They may be even having to X-ray different things.” Later it was reported ^[7] no explosives were found in the car, only luggage and extra ammunition.

After the shooting, Geller expressed rage on her blog. “This is a war,” she wrote. “This is war on free speech. What are we going to do? Are we going to surrender to these monsters?”

Apparently some media outlets are willing to do just that—when they’re not busy reminding Americans, as the LA Times and Reuters did, that the radical leftist Southern Poverty Law Center classifies the ADFI as an anti-Muslim hate group. Or, as a headline at reality-challenged the New York Times framed ^[8] it, “Official Identifies One Suspect in Attack at Texas Anti-Islam Event.”

Moreover, as key event attendee Robert Spencer noted^[9] on his Jihad Watch website, the “vile Sharia-adherent cowards and trimmers” at Britain’s Daily Mail first reported the story with blacked-out images of the contest’s cartoons—before removing them entirely. “This only shows the jihadis that violent intimidation works,” Spencer writes. “Threats and murder work. To kowtow to that is the opposite of journalism and what journalism is supposed to be.”

Geller echoed those sentiments. “The media is self-enforcing a Shariah,” she said. “Under the Shariah you cannot criticize or offend Islam.” Dutch politician and the event’s keynote speaker Geert Wilders was even clearer. “Never surrender to terrorism!” he tweeted ^[10] following the attack.

The “Draw Mohammed” contest was precisely an effort to challenge the West’s continuing efforts at self-censorship. The Garland Independent School district cultural center was booked ^[2] for the event just over a week after Islamic terrorists massacred 12 people at French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. It was allowed to go forward despite concerns voiced by local residents, Muslim and non-Muslim, that it would put public safety as risk. The AFDI addressed those concerns by spending $10,000 on 40 additional security officers. Albanian-American cartoonist Bosch Fawstin won the contest and was awarded $12,500 grand prize for his cartoon^[11] depicting an angry Prophet Mohammed stating, “You can’t draw me,” even as it shows the hand of the artist and his response, “That’s why I draw you.” More than 200 people attending the event were inside the arena when the attack unfolded, and didn’t know about it until afterwards.

The attackers’ bodies remained on the scene well into Monday morning as the focus turned ^[12] to Geller, whom the BBC made sure to point out that her critics consider her a “bigot” because she has the temerity to stand against radical Islam. That stand began with her staunch online opposition to Park 51, the mosque and community center that upset many people who found the siting of it so close to where the World Trade Center once stood offensive. Her latest effort, a NYC anti-jihad ad campaign on city buses has roiled the delicate sensibilities of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) official, who refused to run the ads.

After Manhattan federal Judge John Koetl ruled ^[13] in April that the AFDI should be allowed to run the ads, based on the free speech rights enshrined in the First Amendment, the the MTA voted 9-2 last week to suspend^[14] all political advertising. Staten Island board member Allen P. Cappelli, who voted against the ban, was disgusted. “It is offensive to me as a citizen that the board would even be considering taking such a radical approach to deny the constitutional rights of New Yorkers,” he declared. AFDI will challenge the ban in court.

Geller was clear about why she organized the Garland event. “We draw Muhammad because we are free… We draw Muhammad because our unalienable rights are enshrined in the First Amendment,” she insisted. Regardless, Geller is labeled as an Islamophobe by leftist here and abroad apparently more than willing to embrace the Islamic concept of second-class existence known as “dhimmitude”—along with all the self-inflicted, impotent silence that accompanies it. Authorities are still reticent to label the incident a terrorist attack, but “obviously (the gunmen) were there to shoot people,” said ^[7] Harn during yesterday’s press conference. It is precisely that reticence that makes the efforts of Geller and the AFDI so vitally necessary.

Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here ^[15].

LIKE ^[16] Frontpagemag.com on Facebook and Subscribe ^[17] to Jamie Glazov Productions ^[17].

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

URL to article: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/arnold-ahlert/isis-inspired-jihad-comes-to-texas/

URLs in this post:

[1] Image: http://www.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/150504-simpson-soofi-mugs-712p_c5b7223332af13ff5941483ad1826807.jpg

[2] previously known: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3066779/Police-officer-suspect-said-injured-shooting-outside-art-anti-Muslim-exhibition-art-depicting-prophet-Muhammad.html

[3] convicted: http://abcnews.go.com/US/official-texas-shooting-suspects-ided/story?id=30782088

[4] now suspended: http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2015/05/alleged-shooter-elton-simpson-in-terror-attack-in-garland-texas-a-muslim-convert/

[5] contained: http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-texas-shooting-20150503-story.html#page=1

[6] joined: http://totalwar-ar.wikia.com/wiki/Abu_Hussain_al-Britani

[7] reported: http://www.fox4news.com/story/28965628/shooting-outside-garland-ctr-after-muhammad-art-exhibit

[8] framed: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/05/us/garland-texas-shooting-muhammad-cartoons.html?emc=edit_na_20150504&nlid=62431058&_r=0

[9] noted: http://www.jihadwatch.org/2015/05/cowardly-daily-mail-blacks-out-muhammad-cartoons-in-story-on-shooting

[10] tweeted: https://twitter.com/geertwilderspvv/status/595108813889351680

[11] cartoon: http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2015/05/winner-announced-in-texas-draw-mohammad-contest-after-terror-attack/

[12] turned: http://www.bbc.com/news/32582683

[13] ruled: http://nypost.com/2015/04/21/anti-jihad-bus-ads-cant-be-blocked-by-mta-judge/

[14] suspend: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/30/nyregion/mta-board-votes-to-ban-political-ads-on-subways-and-buses.html

[15] Click here: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=david+horowitz&rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&qid=1316459840&rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&sort=daterank

[16] LIKE: https://www.facebook.com/frontpagemag?fref=ts

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Monday, May 04, 2015

Eric Bogosian retells an 'amazing' Armenian tale

By Daniel Weizmann

April 21, 2015 | 12:41 p.m.

http://www.glendalenewspress.com/

"Whatever I thought being Armenian was, I didn't really know as much as I thought I knew," says Eric Bogosian, acclaimed actor, playwright and novelist. Next Wednesday, April 29, he'll speak at the Alex Theatre about his new novel, "Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot that Avenged the Armenian Genocide," a masterful, true-to-history thriller about the conspiracy to hunt down and kill the perpetrators of one of history's most brutal exterminations.

Writing the book has been an education for Bogosian himself. "Being Armenian was a very strong component of the way I grew up — my family's first language was Armenian, the food they ate, where they went to church, everything set us apart from whatever I thought an average American was supposed to be. But we weren't politically oriented. My birthday was April 24, and nobody thought that was an interesting date!"

In fact, this particular April 24 marks the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, and the commemoration is lining up with the book's release by sheer force of destiny.

"I started working on the book over seven years ago," Bogosian remembers. "I had heard the story of Soghomon Tehlirian years before, and at first I didn't even think it was true. But once I realized that he had indeed assassinated Talat Pasha and that he had been acquitted, I knew that this would make a great screenplay. I started to wonder — even beyond being Armenian — why doesn't everybody know this story? Anybody who knows about the Holocaust knows about Eichmann, and anybody who knows about the Armenian Genocide should know that a humble group of small businessmen in the New York-New England region got a bunch of ex-soldiers to go and hunt down these Turkish leaders and kill them in Europe."

Bogosian has always been an eclectic artist, doing everything from searing monologues ("Talk Radio") to straight-ahead TV drama ("Law and Order," "The Good Wife"), penning novels and plays, and lending his acting skills to everyone from Beavis and Butthead to Woody Allen and Alex Ross Perry. But the tackling of this particular story — complex, political, tragic — proved a challenge.

"At first," he admits, "I wasn't even really sure where Armenia was located! But I kept learning new things all the time, it was like a detective story. I learned so much about the history of the Armenians and the Turks, amazing histories that go back thousands of years. I had heard of sultans and harems but I didn't really know what any of this meant."

The more Bogosian explored, the deeper and more multifaceted the book became. "The Armenians are a disparate group, with many different faces," he says, "and yet… and yet… and yet… they all hearken back to an ancient civilization which peaked about the early Middle Ages. They all have this common religious aspect, the ancient church. The art and poetry and language makes this group very cohesive — Christians living in a Muslim empire.

"In some ways, the genocide acts upon the Armenian people like the Holocaust did on the Jews. There were many Jews in Germany who didn't think of themselves as Jews first and foremost, but they were forced to. If they had forgotten, they were being reminded. Many Armenians at the time prior to the genocide did not see their lives as that terrible."

Also challenging was breaking from his usual from-the-gut work style. "When I write fiction or a play I just make everything up. Why not? But here I was working very closely with historians, and I'd make a supposition and they'd say 'Did this actually happen?' and I'd go, 'Well, I'm not sure' and they'd go 'No, you can't do that.' It's either history or it isn't."

The Live Talks Los Angeles interview at the Alex Theatre will be conducted by screenwriter Alex Dinelaris, recent Oscar-winner for "Birdman." Dinelaris is himself part-Armenian and has written a well-received play about the genocide called "Red Dog Howls." Of course, Glendale — widely thought to be the center of Armenian-American life — seems like the natural place for this history-marking event.

As Ted Hapte-Gapr, who runs the Live Talks series says, "We've hosted several sold out shows at the Alex over the last couple years, and have a great partnership with Glendale Arts and the Alex Theatre, so when an opportunity to do an event with Eric Bogosian with his upcoming book on Operation Nemesis marking the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide came up, we naturally wanted to host it there."

For Bogosian, the moment is something of a surprise. "I can't say it's a happy accident that the book is landing this week, but things happen like that. I'll be turning 62 next week, and I'm at a point in my career where I know you can plan things, and they just won't work out the way you wanted, and there's other things that will swoop in and everything will change overnight. The thing I like the best about this project is that I could use all the skills that I brought to it. I don't think a younger Eric could have written this book. It required a level of focus that I didn't have 20 years ago."

But Bogosian's willingness to tackle such a difficult topic wasn't just about skills. "For a long time in my early career, I didn't want to be labeled as an ethnic actor," he explains. "I saw myself as a guy who should play any role and I always played any roles I wanted to play. On top of that, the nature of my writing wasn't topical. I never wrote about specific political things. The people I came up with in New York, mainly visual artists, like Cindy Sherman… this is the kind of work we all did. We were thinking about archetypes, not specifics — that was our aesthetic. At the same time, I knew there were threats to people who wrote about the genocide. When I was younger, maybe I thought my career or my children or my income was in jeopardy, but now I feel like — if not me, who? If not now, when? Let's do this."

DANIEL WEIZMANN is a regular contributor to Marquee.

HIGHEST RANKING COLD WAR DEFECTOR: THE KGB INVENTED ‘LIBERATION THEOLOGY’

In a startling new interview, a 3-star general and former head of Communist Romania’s secret police who defected to the United States in 1978, claims that the Theology of Liberation was the creation of the KGB, who exported it to Latin America as a way of introducing Marxism into the continent.

by THOMAS D. WILLIAMS, PH.D.2 May 2015

Ion Mihai Pacepa has been called “the Cold War’s most important defector,” and after his defection, the Romanian government under Nicolae Ceausescu placed two death sentences and a $2 million bounty on his head. During the more than ten years that Pacepa worked with the CIA, he made what the agency described as “an important and unique contribution to the United States.”

He is reported in fact to have given the CIA “the best intelligence ever obtained on communist intelligence networks and internal security services.”

“Liberation theology has been generally understood to be a marriage of Marxism and Christianity. What has not been understood is that it was not the product of Christians who pursued Communism, but of Communists who pursued Christians,” Pacepa said in a recent article. In his role as doctrinal watchdog, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger called liberation theology a “singular heresy” and a “fundamental threat” to the Church.

Pacepa says that he learned details of the KGB involvement with Liberation Theology from Soviet General Aleksandr Sakharovsky, Communist Romania’s chief foreign intelligence adviser, who later became head of the Soviet espionage service, the PGU.

In 1959, Sakharovsky went to Romania together with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, for what would become known as “Khrushchev’s six-day vacation.” According to Pacepa, Khrushchev “wanted to go down in history as the Soviet leader who had exported communism to Central and South America.” He chose Romania as his point of export, since it was the only Latin country in the Soviet bloc and provided a logical liaison to Latin America because of the similarity of language and culture.

Pacepa claims that the Theology of Liberation was not merely infiltrated by the KGB, it was actually the brainchild of Soviet intelligence services.

“The movement was born in the KGB, and it had a KGB-invented name: Liberation Theology,” Pacepa said.

According to the General, during those years, the KGB had a penchant for “liberation” movements, and a Theology of Liberation fit right in.

The National Liberation Army of Columbia (FARC), created by the KGB with help from Fidel Castro; the “National Liberation Army of Bolivia, created by the KGB with help from “Che” Guevara; and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), created by the KGB with help from Yasser Arafat are just a few additional “liberation” movements born at the Lubyanka — the headquarters of the KGB.

Pacepa said that Liberation Theology was born of a 1960s top-secret “Party-State Dezinformatsiya Program” approved by Aleksandr Shelepin, the chairman of the KGB, and by Politburo member Aleksey Kirichenko, who coordinated the Communist Party’s international policies.

The program mandated that “the KGB take secret control of the World Council of Churches (WCC), based in Geneva, Switzerland, and use it as cover for converting Liberation Theology into a South American revolutionary tool,” Pacepa said.

The Soviets were aware that the WCC was the largest international ecumenical organization after the Vatican, he said, representing some 550 million Christians of various denominations throughout 120 countries.

According to Pacepa the KGB followed a step-by-step procedure to bring Liberation Theology to Latin America, starting with the establishment of an intermediate international religious organization called the Christian Peace Conference (CPC), headquartered in Prague. Its main task “was to bring the KGB-created Liberation Theology into the real world,” he said.

“The new Christian Peace Conference was managed by the KGB and was subordinated to the venerable World Peace Council, another KGB creation, founded in 1949 and by then also headquartered in Prague,” he said.

In his work with the Soviet bloc intelligence community, Pacepa managed the Romanian operations of the World Peace Council (WPC).

“Most of the WPC’s employees were undercover Soviet bloc intelligence officers. The WPC’s two publications in French, Nouvelles perspectives and Courier de la paix, were also managed by undercover KGB – and Romanian DIE – intelligence officers,” he said.

Pacepa said that in 1968 “the KGB-created Christian Peace Conference, supported by the world-wide World Peace Council, was able to maneuver a group of leftist South American bishops into holding a Conference of Latin American Bishops at Medellin, Colombia.”

Though the Conference’s official task was to seek solutions to poverty, its “undeclared goal” was “to recognize a new religious movement encouraging the poor to rebel against the ‘institutionalized violence of poverty,’ and to recommend the new movement to the World Council of Churches for official approval,” he said.

“The Medellin Conference achieved both goals. It also bought the KGB-born name ‘Liberation Theology,’” he said.

Pacepa said that although he has good reason to suspect that there was an organic connection between the KGB and some of the leading promoters of Liberation Theology, he has no evidence to prove it.

“I recently glanced through Gutierrez’s book A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, Salvation (1971), and I had the feeling that it was written at the Lubyanka,” he said.

“No wonder he is now credited with being the founder of Liberation Theology,” he said.

Six years after Pacepa’s defection to the West, the Vatican issued its first of two scathing critiques of Liberation Theology, under the guidance of then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.

The stated purpose of the first “instruction” was to draw attention “to the deviations, and risks of deviation, damaging to the faith and to Christian living, that are brought about by certain forms of liberation theology which use, in an insufficiently critical manner, concepts borrowed from various currents of Marxist thought.”

The Vatican instruction also warned that the theologies of liberation generate “a disastrous confusion between the ‘poor’ of the Scripture and the ‘proletariat’ of Marx.” In so doing, it said, “they pervert the Christian meaning of the poor, and they transform the fight for the rights of the poor into a class fight within the ideological perspective of the class struggle.”

In Pacepa’s words, Liberation Theology was “deliberately designed to undermine the Church and destabilize the West by subordinating religion to an atheist political ideology for its geopolitical gain.”

Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter @tdwilliamsrome

Sunday, May 03, 2015

Hill and Bill can’t hide from shady deals exposed in ‘Clinton Cash’

By Kyle Smith
http://nypost.com/
May 3, 2015

Hilary and Bill open the Clinton Global Initiative’s annual meeting September 22nd in New York City.Photo: Getty Images

The Clintons have been playing the political press for idiots.

Revealing what they’ve been up to took a little bit of work. It wasn’t obvious. While Bill Clinton was giving a speech about fighting AIDS in Africa, or about educating girls in Asia, reporters simply regurgitated the press release. They didn’t ask: Who’s that shady guy standing next to Bill? What are his interests? How much money has he given to, or raised for, Bill, Hillary and their foundation? And what favorable treatment did the shady guy subsequently receive from Hillary?

When you’re a political reporter, complexity is boring. Curiosity takes work. Asking questions and looking up information can lead to dead ends.

It’s much easier to do gaffe patrol. Go to press conferences. Quote party hacks who call you every day with juicy little observations. Or, when all else fails, simply write down your opinions and call it “analysis” or attribute your thoughts to “critics.”

Thank goodness, then, for Peter Schweizer and his blockbuster expose “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich.” (Very rich: The pair have made at least $136.5 million since 2001).

The details of the Clinton operation vary, but the overall M.O. is fairly consistent, he writes.

One: Dodgy rich businessman, often a foreigner in the middle of a mega-deal in some corrupt country, possibly one run by a dictator, writes a check that buys him the status of friend of Bill Clinton (FOB). The check is payable to the Clinton Foundation or to Bill himself, as an honorarium for a meaningless idealistic speech that is essentially a homily at a whorehouse.

Two: When the cameras are turned off, Bill receives ultra-luxurious travel on someone else’s dime and attends a lavish party in his honor held by some dictator or shady businessman connected to the new FOB. Talks go on behind closed doors.

Three: Millions of dollars of donations start flowing into the Clinton Foundation from the FOB and associates.

Fourth: Potential roadblocks to the deal in the Senate or the State Department melt away. The business deal goes through. The new Clinton friend gets very, very rich.

Fifth: Hillary forgets to disclose these donations.

Six: The press doesn’t notice what just happened.

Friends of Bill

Schweizer’s book does the painstaking work of following the money to such characters as Canadian mining tycoon Frank Giustra, who in a period of a few months gave $31.3 million to the Clinton Foundation.

Giustra chauffeured Bill Clinton on his private jet to an improbable date with the dictator of Kazakhstan, whom Bill repeatedly praised and legitimized during an “election season” (the dictator received more than 90% of the vote).

Mukhtar Dzhakishev, the head of the Kazakhstan agency that oversees the country’s mining, said that Hillary Clinton pressured Kazakh officials to sell uranium assets to Giustra’s firm and that Bill Clinton adviser Tim Phillips said Hillary would not meet with him until Kazakh officials agreed to Giustra’s deal. Giustra’s firm, after a series of mergers, wound up controlling large amounts of uranium mining in the US and is now wholly owned by the Russian firm that built the Bushehr nuclear reactor in Iran.

Giustra’s business partner Ian Telfer directed some $2.35 million to the Clinton Foundation via his Fernwood Foundation. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a small group of high-ranking officials that included then-Secretary of State Clinton, approved the Russian takeover of US uranium mines.

The Clinton Foundation failed to disclose Fernwood’s donation.

Another FOB is mining tycoon Stephen Dattels, who in 2009 donated two million shares of stock in his company to the foundation. Two months later, the US Ambassador to Bangladesh requested that the country reauthorize a mining permit that benefitted Dattels’ company. The value of the stock Dattels had just given the Foundation increased.

Dattels’ donation was never disclosed by the Clinton Foundation.

Laureate Education, a for-profit education firm, of which President Clinton is a paid “honorary chancellor,” has some unusual practices. For instance, its students serve as telemarketers who pitch the school to prospective new students. It operates in at least three countries (Turkey, Mexico and Chile) where for-profit universities are illegal, Schweizer notes.

An FOB, Douglas Becker, runs the for-profit university, which engages Bill Clinton to give speeches several times a year. Based on Clinton’s fee scale, that works out to Bill getting perhaps $1 million a year from Laureate, Schweizer estimates. (On disclosure forms, Bill revealed only that he has been paid “more than $1,000” by Laureate.)

Becker also runs a related nonprofit, International Youth Foundation, which coincidentally found its federal grant money has “exploded” (according to Schweizer) since Hillary became secretary of state (in 2009) and Bill became honorary chancellor of Becker’s profit-seeking company. Many of its grants came from the federal agency USAID, over which Hillary took control by “dramatically reducing” its independence, Schweizer says.

(AP)

Secret deals

Given that the Clinton Foundation is a charity, though, does it really matter where the funding comes from? Let’s say Satan gives money to the Foundation, which then spends the money combating malaria. Well, that’s a nifty bit of jiujitsu then. Satan has been tricked into doing the Lord’s work.

Then why is it illegal for American companies to do this, to donate money to politically connected overseas charities?

Schering Plough, for instance, was charged with violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act when, in 2002, it gave money to a legitimate charity in Poland in order to curry favor with a Polish government official who was also on the board of the charity. The pharma company agreed to pay $500,000 to settle the claim. Hillary Clinton, by the way, is a hawk on the FCPA, “unequivocally opposed to weakening it,” as she once put it.

If Satan writes a check to the Clinton Foundation, it is not because Satan is too dumb to get something in return.

Moreover, as Sean Davis of The Federalist reported, for every $10 that the Clinton Foundation spends, only $1 is going out the door in the form of direct charitable grants. The rest goes to overhead — salaries, travel, office supplies, rent, IT expenses and “other”— a category that takes up more than a third of the budget.

The foundation claimed in a tweet this week that “More than 88 percent of our expenditures go directly to our life-changing work.”

Spending almost all of its money on itself is the foundation’s “life-changing work”?

The Clinton Foundation is run about as forthrightly as the KGB. The Better Business Bureau found in 2013 that it failed to meet minimum standards of accountability and transparency. Another watchdog, Charity Navigator, added Clinton Foundation to its watch list.

Large donors are rewarded with titles, like a medieval monarch bestowing baronetcies: “adviser to the Clinton Foundation” is much-coveted title many a donor proudly puts on his resume.

The foundation doesn’t pay the Clintons a salary. It doesn’t have to: It enables Bill to draw huge fees from outside groups to talk about the foundation. It is centrally a publicist for Bill and Hillary’s awesomeness. It also backs outside projects such as his 2007 book “Giving,” which earned him $6.3 million — returning publicity mojo to the Foundation.

Many Clinton cronies work for the foundation, and thanks to a startling change of rules, some of them (such as Huma Abedin, Anthony Weiner’s wife and Hillary’s current chief of staff) were on the payroll of the foundation and Hillary’s State Department at the same time. Abedin was also allowed to remain a consultant for the corporate consulting firm Teneo, which represents huge firms such as UBS and Coca-Cola.

(AP)

Not a defense

Clinton’s supporters argue that no quid pro quo has been proven.

We know that Bill and the Foundation received huge amounts of money from foreign entities seeking political favors. We know that those entities got those favors from Hillary. But we don’t have a video of Bill or Hillary saying, “Give us this, and we will give you that.”

So what?

Disgraced Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell and his wife are going to prison (both are free on appeal) for taking large gifts from donors seeking favors. No evidence exists that either McDonnell told the donors, “Give us this and we will give you that.”

Some 181 groups that gave money to the Clinton Foundation also lobbied the State Department, reported the left-wing site Vox.com, including such beloved institutions as Qatar, Goldman Sachs, Duke Energy Corp., Exxon Mobil, Dow Chemical, Monsanto, Chevron and Morgan Stanley.

Coca-Cola, which gave the foundation $5 million to $10 million, received help from State in lifting sanctions on Burma, where Coke just announced a $200 million investment.

Don’t all ex-presidents cash in? Yes, but none of them had a close family member who remained in high political office. (Jeb Bush’s term as Florida governor, by the way, ended before his brother left the White House.)

Mostly ex-presidents giving speeches trade on their glamour. That is a depreciating asset. Bill Clinton had something else to trade besides old stories: access to a family member who was secretary of state and perhaps a future president. That’s why his fees actually went up over time, not down. Eleven of the 13 highest-paid speeches he ever gave took place while his Hillary headed the State Department.

For instance, four days after The New York Times reported that Hillary would be Obama’s nominee to be the next secretary of state, the Canadian company TD Bank suddenly began taking an interest in the man who had been president eight years earlier. They began hiring him to give a series of speeches for which they paid him $1.8 million. TD Bank happened to be the largest shareholder in another Canadian company, the Keystone XL pipeline that was seeking federal approval.

Hillary apparently lobbied for the pipeline behind the scenes: a Freedom of Information Act request uncovered State Department emails from her Special Assistant Nora Toiv advising Keystone’s lobbyist on how to win regulatory approval (which President Obama has blocked).

The State Department issued an environmental-impact statement that was essentially a green light for Keystone, Hillary publicly answered a question about approving the pipeline, “We are inclined to do so” and Bill Clinton, at a green-energy summit (!) in Maryland in 2012, told the crowd they should “embrace” Keystone. Asked about this remark, Hillary replied, “He’s a very smart man.”

Five months after TD Bank’s well-compensated new friend’s wife departed the State Department, with Obama increasingly intransigent about his opposition, TD Bank gave up and announced it would begin selling off its $1.6 billion worth of Keystone stock.

The Clinton pattern

Should any of this surprise us?

The Clinton favor bank started doing business while President Clinton was still in the White House: a bankruptcy lawyer pledged $1 million to the Clinton Library in 1993 while he was being investigated by the Justice Department. The check was cashed, and three months later DOJ said “prosecution is not warranted.”

Anheuser-Busch gave the Clinton Library $1 million weeks after Clinton’s FTC dropped a plan to regulate any beer advertising that it determined to be aimed at minors. Marc and Denise Rich poured nearly $2 million into the library, Hillary’s Senate campaign and the Democratic Party before the president pardoned Rich, who had skipped bail and fled to Switzerland while facing trial for numerous financial crimes.

Revealing as it is, Schweizer’s book is necessarily incomplete. An outfit that is brazen enough to hide its emails from public scrutiny, then delete 30,000 of them, has many other safeguards to keep its favor-banking secret.

But virtually every chapter Schweizer wrote provides a tantalizing set of leads — curious characters to be interviewed, complex deals to be explored, connections to be untangled.

“Clinton Cash” is the blueprint to a tower of important questions about the ex-president and the president in waiting. The press is eager to go back on gaffe patrol — this book shouldn’t let them.