Events This Week

This Monday the 30th I'll be introducing Charles Murray at the Freedom Center's Wednesday Morning Club luncheon at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills. Murray is the author of the new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.

Tuesday evening, May 1st, I'll be participating in a "Town Hall on Terror" in Sherman Oaks hosted by FrontPage Mag editor Jamie Glazov. The panel features ex-Muslim author Nonie Darwish, artist Bosch Fawstin, actor Dwight Schultz, and myself.

Then Wednesday evening I'll be speaking before the Hollywood Congress of Republicans in North Hollywood.

No They Can’t: Why Government Fails But Individuals Succeed

In his television specials and in books like Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity: Get Out the Shovel - Why Everything You Know is Wrong and Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media, reporter John Stossel has built an award-winning reputation as a tenacious debunker of commonly-held assumptions, and as a thorn in the side of business-as-usual bureaucrats. Now, as a welcome antidote to President Obama’s “Yes, we can!” big-government campaign mantra, comes Stossel’s latest book, No They Can’t: Why Government Fails But Individuals Succeed.

The libertarian Stossel hosts his own show and a series of specials on the Fox Business Network, and appears frequently on other Fox News shows. His consumer reporting has made him a nineteen-time Emmy winner and a five-time honoree for excellence by the National Press Club. Those familiar with Stossel’s laidback, plainspoken, eminently reasonable TV persona (and who isn’t?) will find it in full evidence here in No They Can’t as well.

The book’s thirteen chapters are devoted to a wide range of the biggest issues facing our government today, such as health care, the war on drugs, education, military spending, and the “budget insanity.” Stossel points out that our instinct is to believe that government can and should step in and resolve such problems. In a rhetorical device which he returns to frequently throughout the book, he posits “What Intuition Tempts Us to Believe: When there’s a problem, government should act.” He answers that with “What Reality Taught Me: Individuals should act, not government.”

Olbermann Versus Gore

Prior to falling off the radar of cultural relevance when he left MSNBC, political commentator Keith Olbermann featured a segment on his nightly Countdown with Keith Olbermann called “The Worst Person in the World.” This was a mean-spirited label he invariably awarded to targets on the right, such as his Fox News ratings nemesis Bill O’Reilly, with whom he had a longstanding feud, or such formidable political threats as Sarah Palin’s teenage daughter Bristol. Now his latest boss, Current TV’s Al Gore, may be considering applying the label to Olbermann himself.

Olbermann was once MSNBC’s point man for the spewing of progressive lies and hate speech. Even among that network’s stable of leftist attack dogs like Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell, the silver-haired Olbermann was notable for his angry, hyperbolic partisanship. Journalist and former Nightline host Ted Koppel called him “the most opinionated among MSNBC's left-leaning, Fox-baiting, money-generating hosts,” who “draws more than one million like-minded viewers to his program every night precisely because he is avowedly, unabashedly and monotonously partisan.”

That was then. Olbermann left MSNBC at the end of 2010 for reasons that have never been made clear. Less than 24 hours later, his friend Al Gore reached out to him, and the next February Olbermann brought his – at the time – star power to the Current TV network, run by founders Joel Hyatt and Gore, former U.S. Vice President and tireless promoter of his lucrative An Inconvenient Truth book and documentary. Current envisioned the new Countdown as a valuable primetime “tentpole” program. Olbermann was appointed chief news officer and given an equity stake in the progressive channel that was originally launched in 2005.

The Devil We Don’t Know, Part II

Bestselling writer and speaker Nonie Darwish is the author of the compelling autobiography Now They Call Me Infidel, about growing up in Egypt and her break from Islam, and Cruel and Usual Punishment, an exposé of the stark reality of sharia. Her new book, The Devil We Don’t Know: The Dark Side of Revolutions in the Middle East, explains what really lies behind the Arab Spring movement, and it exposes Islam as the belief system that will inevitably doom those revolutions.

Mark Tapson:         You write that “liberty and equality for women in the Middle East are closely linked to defeating sharia.” But you note that “Islamic feminism is a twisted kind of feminism that champions pride in Islamic bondage.” Can you elaborate on that?

Nonie Darwish:     It is a fact that there is hardly any Islamic feminist movement. How could it be that female citizens of the most oppressive anti-women system on Earth fail to take the opportunity of the Arab Spring to change their destiny and the destiny of their daughters and granddaughters? The answer to this question is very complex and part of the larger problem of Islam itself. Muslim women are at a much greater disadvantage if compared to Western feminists who did not have to overcome death penalties, humiliation, flogging and societal rejection and isolation if they violate religious laws.

Rachel Maddow and Michigan’s Poor Blacks

On her MSNBC show last week, progressive commentator Rachel Maddow once again aimed her snarky, facts-be-damned, rhetorical flamethrower at the ongoing controversy of emergency legislation designed to rescue the economically devastated town of Benton Harbor.

Michigan cities from tiny Benton Harbor to Flint to Pontiac all the way up to Detroit are in the death grip of a financial crisis in the wake of the housing crash and near collapse of the auto industry. In a desperate move to turn things around, Republican Governor Rick Snyder invoked Public Act 4, legislation that allows him to appoint city managers to take over cities in dire financial circumstances and enact drastic austerity measures. These managers are empowered to renegotiate union contracts, amend budgets, eliminate departments, even overrule or remove mayors and other elected officials if necessary.

The law's supporters say it allows for a more effective response to the state’s budget crisis. Even ABC acknowledged that these emergency measures are rescuing a growing number of cities from bankruptcy and thus preserving vital services for the citizens, including the same blacks that Maddow claims are being victimized by the procedure.

The Devil We Don’t Know: An Interview with Nonie Darwish, Part I

The “Arab Spring.” The mainstream media clung to this phrase last year in their giddy haste to promote what they saw as a flowering of freedom-loving, democratic uprisings across the Arab world, for which they were eager to credit President Obama’s famed Cairo speech as partial inspiration. Instead, it unfolded with freedom-hating Islamic fundamentalists seizing political dominance, and the Arab Spring came to look more like a Muslim Winter. What went wrong?

Bestselling writer and speaker Nonie Darwish is author of the compelling autobiography Now They Call Me Infidel, about growing up in Egypt and her break from Islam, and Cruel and Usual Punishment, an exposé of the stark reality of sharia. Her new book, The Devil We Don’t Know: The Dark Side of Revolutions in the Middle East, explains what really lies behind the Arab Spring movement, and it exposes Islam as the belief system that will inevitably doom those revolutions.

This is the first of a two-part interview. Part two will appear tomorrow on FrontPage Magazine.

Mark Tapson:         Nonie, you note in your introduction that you have written The Devil We Don’t Know not merely to criticize Islam but as a challenge, a plea to Muslims. What are you asking of them with this book?

Ayers Keeps the Dream Alive

To paraphrase the old saying: Old unrepentant terrorists never die, nor do they even fade away; they just pass the torch of their nihilistic, anti-American dream to the next generation.

President Obama’s former associate Bill Ayers and his partner-in-crime Bernardine Dohrn, ex-leaders of the Weather Underground terrorist group, addressed a small group of the ragtag Occupy Wall Street movement in New York City last week. They dispensed the usual shrill, tired old leftist laments about AmeriKKKa being the modern equivalent of the militaristic city-state Sparta. After declaring the United States to be “a declining economic and political power” but “a virulent and expanding military power,” Dohrn complained:

Yes, in many ways, national security… it’s all the United States seems to have to offer. It isn’t jobs or healthcare or public education or public parks or public libraries, it’s security, security, security. So, we don’t want that kind of a future. Occupy doesn’t want that kind of a future. We want a future for the 99%.

Well, if it’s insecurity they want, Ayers’ protégé Obama is certainly moving things in that direction. Dohrn has a valid point about our declining economic and political power, since Obama has steered us toward a post-American future of crushing debt and geopolitical impotence, as well as slashing the military budget. Insecurity indeed.

Tomorrow Belongs to Me

 

A few months ago I attended a private screening in Pasadena of the 1972 film Cabaret, which lost the Academy Award for Best Film to The Godfather, and yet still put an Oscar on the mantel of director Cabaret, not to mention ones for Liza Minelli, Joel Gray, and five others. The screening was hosted by film buff Alex Kozinski, whose day job is Chief Justice of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and whose parents are both Holocaust survivors. His friend, Cabaret producer Manny Wolf, was on hand to treat us with cinematic anecdotes and to answer questions afterward.

The first time I saw Cabaret I was too young to really appreciate the dark undercurrent of the story’s historical context. In the film, based on Christopher Isherwood’s book The Berlin Stories, the performers and patrons of a 1930s Berlin nightclub indulge in a raucous, desperately carefree decadence against the ominous backdrop of a growing National Socialist Party presence and increasing hostility directed at Jews.

In perhaps its most infamous scene, a fresh-faced young man captivates the patrons of a biergarten with a beautiful tenor rendition of “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.” The song is bursting with youthful idealism for a radiant future. But when the camera pans down to reveal the swastika armband on his Hitler Youth uniform, the scene’s tone suddenly turns chilling. The song gathers disturbing momentum as the Aryan patrons leap to their feet to sing along fervently:

One Feminist Condemns Another’s Military Empowerment

Radical feminist Naomi Wolf is calling for a boycott of pop superstar Katy Perry in the wake of the latter’s latest music video, in which she transforms herself a là “G.I. Jane” into a U.S. Marine.

In the storyline of the video for her power-pop single “Part of Me,” Perry is seen ditching an unfaithful boyfriend, then being inspired to enlist by a bumper sticker reading, “All women are created equal. Then some become Marines.” This is just the sort of female empowerment Perry’s emotionally wounded character needs. We follow her through hellish basic training: scaling rope ladders, hiking in full gear, jogging with a cadet on her shoulders, crawling through barbed wire in rainy darkness, linking arms with fellow cadets on the beach as the waves roll over them, and finally storming a beach. The video closes with her dancing and singing triumphantly in camouflaged fatigues under a starry, billowing canopy that seems to suggest a waving Stars-and-Stripes:

Throw your sticks and stones

Throw your bombs and your blows

But you're not gonna break my soul

This is the part of me that you're never gonna ever take away from me, no

Lets Get Small

The manmade global warming alarmists now suspect that all our efforts to reverse imminent planetary disaster may be inadequate and ultimately futile. Always thinking outside the box, they’re suggesting more radical sacrifices than simply upgrading light blubs and trading in gas-guzzlers for Priuses. Forget badgering people to be more energy-efficient, some global warming strategists are asking; why not genetically alter them to be so? “Let’s get small” doesn’t refer just to Steve Martin’s old comedy routine anymore; now it’s a call to bio-engineer smaller humans for a reduced carbon footprint.

In an online interview for The Atlantic, S. Matthew Liao, professor of philosophy and bioethics at New York University, expresses skepticism about the efficacy of our current attempts to mitigate climate change, and theorizes that “voluntary” human engineering is one possible solution. He is the principal author of the new paper “Human Engineering and Climate Change,” in the scholarly journal Ethics, Policy & Environment. In it, he and his co-authors propose possible bio-medical modifications to ensure that humans tread less heavily on Mother Gaia.

The Radical Left Unites with Iran in a March on Jerusalem

In the wake of the innocuous-sounding “Arab Spring” that has brought openly Jew-hating Islamists to power in the Middle East, Israel’s enemies everywhere smell blood. Twice last year her borders were breached by mobs seeking violent confrontation, which they achieved as the Israelis defended against the invasion. Recently a global program designed to demonize the tiny democracy, called Israeli Apartheid Week, revved up further anti-Israel sentiment. And now on March 30, an Iranian-backed protest march will attempt to storm Israel’s borders again in an effort to take Jerusalem – or at the very least to draw fire, enabling the marchers and the complicit media to denounce Israel’s “brutality” against “peaceful” protesters.

The Global March to Jerusalem (GMJ) is a well-organized, well-funded movement consisting of Israel-hating activists from around the world seeking to deny Jewish historical connections to Jerusalem and to claim the city for the Palestinians instead. In a clear case of psychological projection, the organizers’ strategy begins with falsely accusing Israel of racism and war crimes:

The march will confirm that the policies and practices of the racist Zionist state of Israel against Jerusalem and its people are a crime not only against Palestinians but against all humanity.

Subverting America’s Legal System

Scholar of Islam Andrew Bostom, interviewed recently about Islamic anti-Semitism here and here at FrontPage, has brought to our attention a revealing, 47-page Arabic-language document discovered by the Center for Security Policy and translated into English by his colleague at Translating Jihad. The paper was published by the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America (AMJA) in 2007, and presented at their 2008 careers conference in Houston. The document makes it clear that AMJA’s ultimate goal, as Bostom puts it, “is nothing less than the eventual subversion of the American legal system” to sharia law.

AMJA’s website explains that the group’s purpose is to service the growing Muslim population living in the non-Muslim Americas, giving them authoritative guidance as to what is allowable under the manmade laws of “infidel lands.” The organization also offers itself as “an authentic source of Islamic learning and thought for all peoples of the Americas.” All peoples who understand Arabic, that is. For those who do and who care to investigate, the organization reveals its subversive agenda.

Campus Hate Groups Target Jews & Israel

In the wake of Israeli Apartheid Week, the international campaign to delegitimize the state of Israel, campus hate groups have stepped up their aggressive pressure on Jewish students and speakers. The last week of February was marked by anti-Israel ugliness at two University of California events that left Jewish students feeling, as a letter to the UC President put it, “targeted, intimidated, harassed, and unsafe.”

On February 27 at University of California at Davis, Jewish student groups presented a talk entitled “Israeli Soldiers Speak Out” featuring Ran Bario Bar-Yoshafat, an Israeli reservist, and Ranya Fadel, a Druze woman whose father and brother fought in the Israeli Defense Force. The two had visited at least ten campuses across the United States in an effort to engage students of all political stripes in a dialogue about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and to dispel the biased media narrative about the Israeli military.

But members of the UC Davis branch of the national Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) had conspired on a strategy for suppressing the free speech of the scheduled speakers: pack the room with pro-Palestinian students, many of whom would walk out together during the event, leaving other members behind to disrupt the event relentlessly. Students for Justice in Palestine exists primarily for campus promotion of the anti-Israel boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaigns and others efforts to cripple the Jewish state.

United in Hate: The Left Dances on Breitbart’s Grave

When SEAL Team Six took out Osama bin Laden last year, there was widespread celebration across America. Many on the political left, however, affected a moral revulsion at the jubilation. Celebrating the death of any man is unseemly, immoral, even anti-American, they argued.

Any man except a political enemy, that is. As soon as the news spread of last week’s untimely death of conservative super-journalist Andrew Breitbart, many began dancing on their arch-enemy’s grave in gleeful, macabre celebration.

Breitbart, 43, was the relentless, charismatic warrior behind the conservative new media that was pounding the left with devastating exposés on ACORN, Pigford, and “Weinergate,” among others. Like other conservative political pugilists such as David Horowitz, Breitbart was a former leftist himself who understood well that politics is war, and that the left fights to win. He railed against the inability of conservatives to grasp this, and urged them to go on the offensive and destroy the left’s hateful false narrative. Also like Horowitz, Breitbart’s intimate understanding of the enemy earned him their most vicious hatred.

Pushing Back Against the BDS Bullies

Too often the media focus on – or even actively promote – the pro-Palestinian narrative that demonizes Israel. They report on the highly mobilized, relentless efforts to isolate and economically weaken the state of Israel. Much less often, if ever, do the media highlight stories of successful Israeli resistance to that onslaught.

Shanie Bar-Oz is the dynamic owner of a Vancouver bath-and-body boutique called Lavan Canada that sells unique Dead Sea-based products with natural scents. Prominently displayed both outside and inside the store are signs reading “Products Made in Israel.” Very enthusiastic about those Israeli-made products, Shanie, 33, unexpectedly came under fire from aggressive protesters from the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions bullies. Check out this video which depicts protesters chanting and carrying signs with ludicrous claims such as “Lavan Soap Whitewashes Israeli Occupation.”

Combating the Hate Groups on Campus

To counter the hate, disinformation and propaganda generated during Israeli Apartheid Week (what should more honestly be called Israeli Demonization Week) at universities across the United States, the David Horowitz Freedom Center (DHFC) is arming pro-Israel and pro-freedom student leaders on campus with the truth, in the form of its newspaper ads, pamphlets, film screenings, and speakers such as Nonie Darwish, Raymond Ibrahim, David Meir-Levi, and Horowitz himself.

A controversial DHFC ad appeared last week in the campus newspapers of Florida State University and the University of Arizona, and the Freedom Center has plans to place it in at least one hundred more. Entitled “Where Are They Now?,” it consists simply of a long list of nearly twenty former leaders and members of the Muslim Students Association (MSA) who have graduated to terrorist entities such as al-Qaeda, Hamas, the Taliban, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Among them are such standouts of Islamic terrorism as “bin Laden 2.0” Anwar al-Awlaki (former MSA President at Colorado State University); American al Qaeda spokesman Adam Gadahn (member of the MSA at the University of Southern California); the infamous Underwear Bomber (former head of the Muslim Association at the University College London); convicted terrorist supporter Abdul Rahman Alamoudi (former MSA National President); Ramy Zamzam, convicted of attempting to join the Taliban and kill U.S. troops (former president of Washington D.C.’s council of Muslim associations); Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas associate Jamal Barzini (co-founder of the MSA); Abu Mansoor al-Amriki (MSA President of the University of South Alabama), spokesman for al-Qaeda in Somalia; and more. The list speaks for itself as ample evidence that the MSA has less to do with serving student needs than recruiting for violent jihad.

Another Brick in the Wall

In the song “Another Brick in the Wall,” the British rock group Pink Floyd rails against the psychic isolation induced by rigidly doctrinaire schooling. “We don’t need no education,” the lyrics go, a line whose bad grammar ironically proves just how badly Pink Floyd does need one. It then continues with the still ungrammatical but much more valid protest, “We don’t need no thought control.”

As the Freedom Center’s David Horowitz has pointed out in several books about classroom indoctrination, higher education today is too often guilty of just that: controlling student minds rather than exercising and liberating them. Now the Student Union of the prestigious London School of Economics (LSESU) just laid another brick in that wall, with its recent resolution to stamp out the mythical threat of Islamophobia on the LSE campus.

A “Dictator” Mocks America’s Enemies

Overlooked among the nominees at the 84^th annual Oscars last weekend was a rather riveting drama called The Devil’s Double, starring Dominic Cooper in a brutal tale based on the true story of a man forced to serve as the body double for Saddam Hussein’s monstrous son Uday. It stood out among the normally politically correct entertainment industry fare as unique in its condemnation of the sadistic Arab dictator and his even more perverse son. But Dominic Cooper isn’t exactly a household name and the film didn’t exactly set the box office on fire.

Along comes Jewish comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, however, who is much more well-known thanks to his publicity antics and his 2006 prankster hit Borat, which raked in upwards of $260 million worldwide. Cohen has co-written and starred in the upcoming comedy The Dictator, Paramount’s “heroic story of a Middle Eastern dictator who risks his life to ensure that democracy never comes to the country he so lovingly oppressed.”

Cohen has clearly modeled The Dictator on a satirical amalgam of such evil icons as Saddam and recently deposed Libyan lunatic Muammar Qadhafi, right down to the latter’s female bodyguards. Not since the outrageous comedy Team America: World Police by the fearless South Park satirists has a film promised to boldly go where no one else in Hollywood dares – the usually taboo criticism of America’s totalitarian enemies.

The Freedom Center Counters Campus Jew-Hatred

The international program for the demonization of Israel known as Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) is on the march. It’s the spearhead of the campaign to delegitimize the state of Israel and soften it up for annihilation. And right there to counter their pernicious influence is the David Horowitz Freedom Center (DHFC), distributing its hard-hitting pamphlets and launching educational events on campuses all across the United States.

IAW is an annual series of events held in cities and on campuses across the globe. It aims “to educate people about the nature of Israel” – by which it means to spread disinformation and propaganda – “and to build Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns” in order to delegitimize it. They demand full equality for Arab citizens of Israel (who already have it), an end to what they falsely call the occupation and colonization of all Arab lands, dismantling of the security wall that protects Israelis from Palestinian terrorist attacks, and the Palestinian right of return, which would essentially mean the end of Jews in Israel. IAW’s speakers, conferences, rallies, workshops, panel discussions, film screenings, protests, even “flash mobs” will help hammer home their monstrous lies about Israel.

Hollywood’s Post-Racial Racism

In a 60 Minutes interview with Mike Wallace several years ago, black actor Morgan Freeman displayed unusual wisdom for Hollywood when he said that the way to end racism in America is to “stop talking about it.” Not long thereafter, (half-)black candidate Barack Obama’s ascension to the White House confirmed that race is no barrier to success in America (apparently neither is incompetence). But instead of ushering in a post-racial era as many hoped, Obama’s presidency has ramped up racial tensions and driven his black Hollywood supporters to talk about racism more than ever before –among them, sadly, Morgan Freeman.

Obama’s administration has been anything but post-racial. From Attorney General Eric Holder’s refusal to prosecute Black Panther thugs, to Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee’s charge that Tea Partiers are the new KKK, to the President’s own insult of the police officers who properly arrested his academic buddy Henry Louis Gates, Jr., it’s been payback time for those blacks who wear their racialism on their sleeve and yet hypocritically dismiss their critics as racist.

Berkeley Jew Hatred on Trial

The dismissed court case involving a Jewish student attacked by a Muslim student last year at the University of California at Berkeley is still alive. Jessica Felber, 21, was injured by Husam Zakharia, leader of the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), during a rally while holding a sign that said, “Israel Wants Peace.” Zakharia rammed her from behind with a shopping cart. The case was dismissed at the end of December when U.S. District Court Judge Richard Seeborg ruled, astonishingly, that the assault was “an act of protected free speech.”

In her suit, Felber alleges that UC Berkeley did not effectively deal with the harassment and intimidation of Jewish students by the SJP and Muslim Students Association [MSA], leading to “a dangerous and threatening environment.” The groups staged mock “checkpoints” on campus, where they waved imitation weapons around and demanded of passing students, “Are you Jewish?” Jewish students were allowed to pass (although some were verbally harassed) while Muslim or Arab students were “detained.” The checkpoints were meant to mimic the Israeli Defense Force's security measures against Palestinian terror attacks.

Matt Damon Brings Howard Zinn to Life

Fourteen years ago in his breakout performance as an arrogant young genius in the movie Good Will Hunting, actor Matt Damon’s character sneered at his Boston psychiatrist for “surrounding yourself with all the wrong f**kin’ books. You wanna read a real history book, read Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. That book’ll f**kin’ knock you on your ass.”

That was from a script Damon himself had written (with fellow actor Ben Affleck, with Oscar-winning rewrite assistance from famed screenwriter William Goldman). It reflected Damon’s own real-life admiration for self-proclaimed radical historian Howard Zinn, whom he is still actively promoting today, almost two years to the day after Zinn’s death.
Damon went on to co-produce a documentary entitled “The People Speak,” based on A People’s History and Voices of a People’s History of the United States, which Zinn co-edited with anti-war-on-terror socialist Anthony Arnove. Other Hollywood folk like Josh Brolin, Marisa Tomei, Morgan Freeman, Viggo Mortensen, Rosario Dawson, and Kerry Washington lent their star power to it for a History Channel premiere back in 2009.

Israeli Demonization Week

The title above may be a bit confusing, since the left and their media cohorts essentially treat every week as Israeli Demonization Week. So to be more precise: the official, organized, designated demonization of Israel known as Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) is gearing up to launch later this month.

IAW is an annual (2012 is the eighth) international series of events held in cities and on campuses across the globe. It aims “to educate people about the nature of Israel” – by which it means to spread disinformation and propaganda – “and to build Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns” in order to delegitimize it. They demand full equality for Arab citizens of Israel (who already have it), an end to what they falsely call the occupation and colonization of all Arab lands, dismantling of the security wall that protects Israelis from Palestinian terrorist attacks, and the Palestinian right of return, which would essentially mean the end of Jews in Israel.

The Occupy Movement Turns on its Religious Supporters

Having been anointed collectively as “Person of the Year” in 2011 by the desperate and irrelevant Time magazine, the unwashed masses of the Occupy movement seem to have let the dubious honor go to their collective head. Never known for their restrained, orderly behavior, the Occupiers have even begun turning against and repulsing their supporters among the religious left.

Initially, the Los Angeles Times pronounced the Occupy movement as “a predominantly secular undertaking,” although it did note that “some left-leaning religious groups see a golden opportunity in the Occupy movement, whose central message of greater economic equality resonates deeply among faith-based progressives.”

Sure enough, religious progressives did rush to anoint the movement as it began to swell. FrontPage contributor Mark Tooley noted that such religious left icons as Jim Wallis and Shane Claiborne rhapsodized about the Occupiers standing with Jesus in their defense of the poor, even resembling St. Francis of Assisi. “Whether or not the Wall Street Occupiers are ‘ordinary people,’” Tooley wrote, “much less resemble St. Francis, the Religious Left is bursting with pride over their naughty demands.” Wallis urged his followers to embrace the movement, literally:

Our faith communities and organizations should swing their doors wide and greet the Occupiers with open arms, offering them a feast to say “thank you” for having the courage to raise the very religious and biblical issue of growing inequality in our society.

Freedom Center Ads & Double Standards

The controversy is heating up over a David Horowitz Freedom Center advertisement published in an Ohio State University student newspaper.

Under the headline “Former Leaders of the Muslim Student Association (MSA): Where Are They Now?,” the ad in The Lantern simply lists, without comment, ten MSA co-founders and former presidents connected to terrorist entities such as al Qaeda, Hamas, the Taliban, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Not all have criminal convictions, but among them are such terrorist superstars as former Anwar al-Awlaki, the budding “bin Laden 2.0” taken out last year in a drone attack, and Abu Mansoor al-Amriki, spokesman for al Qaeda in Somalia. The ad closes by promoting a new pamphlet by Daniel Greenfield at the Freedom Center, Muslim Hate Groups on Campus, which documents the radical origins and violent objectives of the main Muslim student organizations on our nation’s campuses, such as the MSA and Students for Justice in Palestine, which are sponsors of hate-fests like “Israeli Apartheid Weeks” or “Palestine Awareness Weeks.”

The Muslims Next Door

Now celebrating its tenth anniversary, Silicon Valley Reads is a program that encourages everyone in northern California’s Santa Clara County “to read the same book, at the same time, and talk about it.” If you think this sounds like a program ripe for abuse by progressives in our educational system promoting groupthink about a social agenda, go to the head of the class.

The program is presented by the Santa Clara County Office of Education, Santa Clara County Library and the San Jose Public Library Foundation, with funding from foundations, nonprofits, corporations, and private donors. Each year it offers several dozen free public events at libraries, schools, and other community locations. Speakers and panels, a film festival, book discussion groups, essay contests, teen book groups and children’s story times are all part of a concerted effort to focus the community on a given theme. According to their website,

between 4,000-5,000 individuals attend these events and thousands more read the featured books on their own, for high school and college assignments, and with their book clubs…

James Rosen’s Strange Exoneration of Saul Alinsky

In a refreshing change of pace from Republican candidates taking potshots at each other on the campaign trail, Newt Gingrich put some perspective on the presidential race when he clarified the challenge for the eventual party nominee, and what is at stake. He told a large crowd in Coral Springs, Florida Wednesday that

We need somebody who is a conservative and who can stand up to [President Obama] and debate and who can clearly draw the contrast between the Declaration of Independence and the writings of Saul Alinsky… The centerpiece of this campaign, I believe, is American exceptionalism versus the radicalism of Saul Alinsky.

Gingrich’s attempts to tie Alinsky, the Chicago community organizer and author of the revolutionary handbook Rules for Radicals, to the Chicago community organizer in the White House prompted James Rosen to question this unusual strategy for Fox News online:

Why does Gingrich think it effective messaging for him to conjure a man who’s been dead forty years, and whose name is recognized, in all probability, by one in every 100,000 registered voters?

Understanding the Islam in Muslim Jew-Hatred: An Interview with Andrew Bostom, Part 2

Yesterday FrontPage Magazine ran the first part of this interview with scholar of Islam Andrew Bostom, on the roots of Islamic Jew-hatred. In this second and final part, Dr. Bostom details the facts about the often-misunderstood connection between Islam and Nazism, and describes his new upcoming book, Sharia versus Freedom – The Legacy of Islamic Totalitarianism (to be published by Sept 2012 with a foreword by the incomparable Andrew C. McCarthy).

Andrew Bostom, M.D., M.S., is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Rhode Island Hospital, the major teaching affiliate of Brown University Medical School. He is the author of two essential, extraordinary, and meticulously documented works of scholarship, The Legacy of Jihad and The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism. He has published articles and commentary on Islam here on FrontPage and in the Washington Times, National Review Online, Revue Politique, American Thinker, and elsewhere in print and online.

This Tuesday 1/24/12 in Los Angeles, Dr. Bostom will present “Understanding the Islam in Muslim Jew-Hatred.”

Mark Tapson:         Dr. Bostom, some say that modern Islamic anti-Semitism was shaped by the influence of Nazism – but isn’t it the other way around? Can you elaborate on their symbiotic relationship?

Understanding the Islam in Muslim Jew-Hatred: An Interview with Andrew Bostom, Part 1

In the wake of the farcically mislabeled “Arab Spring,” we are witnessing a swelling tide of Jew-hatred emanating from the triumphant Islamists throughout the Middle East who don’t even bother to conceal it. And why should they? Our own willfully blind and/or complicit media downplay it or ignore it altogether.

Some argue that what is mistaken for contemporary Islamic anti-Semitism is just a reaction to Israel’s “occupation” and “genocidal oppression” of the Palestinians. Or that it is not intrinsic to Islam but derives from the influence of Nazism. Or that it is a perversion of Islam on the part of a tiny minority of extremists. What are the true roots of Islamic Jew-hatred?

Andrew Bostom, M.D., M.S., has documented the answer. An Associate Professor of Medicine at Rhode Island Hospital, the major teaching affiliate of Brown University Medical School, he is the author of two essential, extraordinary, and meticulously documented works of scholarship, The Legacy of Jihad and The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, and of the upcoming Sharia versus Freedom (with a foreword by the incomparable Andrew C. McCarthy). He has published articles and commentary on Islam here on FrontPage and in the Washington Times, National Review Online, Revue Politique, American Thinker, and elsewhere in print and online.

This Tuesday 1/24/12 in Los Angeles, Mr. Bostom will present “Understanding the Islam in Muslim Jew-Hatred.”

Mark Tapson:         Dr. Bostom, what inspired you as a scholar to focus on Islam?