Friday, April 13, 2012

Al Sharpton Equates Trayvon Martin Case With Jesus' Crucifixion

Talk about being dumber than rocks.

 

B

 

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/al-sharpton-equates-trayvon-martin-case-jesus-crucifixion

 

Al Sharpton Equates Trayvon Martin Case With Jesus’ Crucifixion

By Elizabeth Harrington

April 13, 2012

Subscribe to Elizabeth Harrington's posts

The Rev. Al Sharpton (AP Photo)

(CNSNews.com) – “Inequities” in the criminal justice system go back to the time of Jesus, and protests stemming from the Trayvon Martin case – some of them led by the Rev. Al Sharpton -- were intended to right some of those wrongs, Sharpton said.

“We believe in Jesus, they crucified him and never had a charge,” the Rev. Sharpton told a gathering of his National Action Network in Washington, D.C., on Thursday. “They never charged, there wasn’t no crime on his indictment. So we’ve got to deal with the inequities of the criminal justice system. The fact that we (black people) are overly-incarcerated, the fact that we go to court and are treated differently, and the fact that when we’re victimized there is not the same response. That’s what Trayvon was about.”

Image003

Sharpton and his National Action Network have led a number of protest rallies in recent weeks, demanding the arrest of neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman, who told police he shot 17-year-old Trayvon in self-defense.

Sharpton, who hosts both a radio and TV show on MSNBC, said Martin’s attorney Benjamin Crump called him last month, requesting publicity about Trayvon’s death:

“The reason they called us was to try and make it a big case,” Sharpton said. “I put Crump on the radio show that day and on the television show that night, and we began building.

“Then everybody say, ‘Well they ain’t gonna get nothing done no how.’ And it kept going and rallying and people got involved -- culminating, as you know, yesterday (when Zimmerman was charged with second-degree murder).

“Now they are going to attack those of us involved, ‘cause that’s what they always do. Part of the job of activists is, you want them to attack you and not the victim and the family. You want to absolve it to you. So I’m ready for all of that.”

As for criticism that his tactics are racially polarizing, Sharpton said, “If nobody is upset with you, you are not doing much of anything.”

Sharpton said he doesn’t know what happened on Feb. 26, the night Zimmerman shot Martin. All he knows is that Trayvon was “an unarmed young man that committed no crime,” while Zimmerman was “an armed man that was not even a law enforcement officer or a registered watchman.”

“He should have been arrested and have to stand trial. That’s all we say,” Sharpton added.

Sharpton said he will continue to fight Florida’s Stand Your Ground law, the self-defense statute that could be used in Zimmerman’s defense.

“The reason this (Zimmerman) case is serious is the ramifications of this will determine Stand Your Ground in 21 states,” Sharpton explained. He said most of the cases the National Action Network takes have “broad” civil rights implications.

 


Remembering scum Mike Wallace

Remembering Mike Wallace

Posted By Bruce Bawer On April 13, 2012

Channel surfing the other night, I ran across All the President’s Men for what felt like the thousandth time. I came in about twenty minutes before the end, and – not for the first time – I felt compelled to watch it to the end. What a splendidly written, brilliantly directed, terrifically acted movie! What a stirring story! What a beautiful piece of filmmaking, from the cinematography to the lighting design! And what a crock!

All the President’s Men converted a generation of innocent, impressionable, pre-Internet Americans – myself included – into unthinking fans of the mainstream news media. Some people in the government might be out to screw us over, and certainly every last man and woman in corporate America was up to no good, but the knights in shining armor at the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the network news divisions were there to come to our rescue – to save our freedoms and preserve our Constitution, wielding the truth like a shining sword.

As I watched Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, in the last shot of the film, taking down Richard M. Nixon one typewriter keystroke at a time, my thoughts naturally turned to Mike Wallace, who since his death the other day at the age of 285 – sorry, 93 – has been celebrated by many commentators as the quintessential embodiment of the crusading, principled, virtuous mainstream news media in its now-bygone, widely lamented heyday. His death, indeed, has provided his colleagues in the traditional media with a magnificent opportunity – which many of them, of course, have seized upon – to try to resurrect the heroic myth perpetrated by All the President’s Men and many other films. (Remember, for example, another Redford film from 1976, Three Days of the Condor, in which he’s betrayed and hunted down by the CIA and ends up, incriminating evidence finally in hand, at the entrance to the New York Times building, the logo of that newspaper symbolizing his, and justice’s, salvation?) A typical posthumous tribute to Wallace in the Washington Post began as follows: “Mike Wallace had a glorious career at CBS, racking up 21 Emmy awards and an endless reel of great interviewing moments. And to think that this fantastic career….” Check, please!

Admittedly, Wallace was a gifted showman. Every cheesy TV show that has ever made use of ambush interviews owes him a huge debt of gratitude. But too often his antics left a vaguely – or not so vaguely – bad taste in one’s mouth. Yes, the used-car salesman in Cowpie, Oklahoma, who turned back odometers deserved to get nabbed for it – but did he deserve to be nabbed in front a nationwide audience? Did this pathetic petty swindler deserve to be cast as this week’s dastardly villain opposite the golden champion of American fair play and hero of the common man – portrayed, as always, by Wallace, this moneyed member of the Manhattan media elite?

What was especially unpalatable about Wallace’s work on 60 Minutes is that one week he’d self-righteously bring down some small-time crook in some shabby little office in flyover America – killing a fly with a cannon – and the next week he’d turn out an unctuous, nauseating puff piece on some insufferable celebrity or other. I’ll never forget the image of him laughing it up with real-estate magnates Harry and Leona Helmsley on the roof of one of their New York hotels. One had the impression (and perhaps he even said something to this effect; I don’t remember) that he and the Helmsleys were chums, or at least went to some of the same parties or had mutual friends among the bicoastal glitterati. The Helmsleys – both of whom, not very long afterwards, would end up behind bars – were ripe for exposé treatment, but their profile by Mike Wallace, investigative journalist extraordinaire, was framed as a portrait of a husband and wife of a certain age who, t hough high-powered and successful businesspeople, were, far more importantly, still just as deeply in love with each other as ever.

The tributes have made it clear that we’re supposed to remember Wallace as a man of conviction – a dedicated newsman whose tough interviewing technique was rooted in a determination to ferret out the truth and entrap the guilty. It may be salutary to recall that before he became a tough, no-holds-barred investigative reporter, he was a game-show host. To watch some of the interviews from his pre-60 Minutes show The Mike Wallace Interview, moreover – a number of which are available online at the University of Texas website – is to wonder whether the interrogation business was all just schtick, just showbiz. In one episode, he actually interrogates the Broadway lyricist, librettist, and producer Oscar Hammerstein II as if the guy just turned back a whole parking lot full of odometers. The charge: excessive sentimentality! Exhibit A: the lyrics of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” and “I Whistle a Happy Tune.” Watch it – Wallace’s faux aggressiveness, combined with Hammerstein’s bemused tolerance (which proves him to be every bit as good-natured as his lyrics, and as much of a gentleman as Wallace was not) actually makes for quite hilarious viewing.

In another interview from that period, Steve Allen mentions having just done a parody of Wallace’s show on his, Allen’s, own show. (I wish that were online.) Wallace doesn’t seem to have been terribly amused by Allen’s mockery. Nor was he at all amused, many years later, when Andy Rooney thought it might be a funny idea, for his own lightweight segment at the end of 60 Minutes, to take a camera crew down the hall to Wallace’s office and ambush him. That bit, tellingly, never aired. In short: Wallace could dish it out, but he considered himself above having to take it, and certainly had no sense of humor about himself. In that regard, he was indeed the very model of the pre-Internet news-media elite.

(Note, incidentally, that Wallace begins the Hammerstein show by singing the praises of Parliament cigarettes, and begins the Allen show by waxing equally enthusiastic about Benson and Hedges. As he gives these sponsors their due, he sounds no more or less earnest than he does in his interrogations of Hammerstein and Allen. Not that there’s nothing wrong with being a TV commercial pitchman: just don’t confuse that with being a bold crusader for the truth.)

Then there’s the small matter of Wallace’s reporting about Israel and about his fellow Jews. After his death, the Jewish Daily Forward ran an admiring article headlined “Remembering Mike Wallace, A Jew Unafraid of the Truth.” On the contrary, when it came to Jews, Israel, and related subjects, Wallace did indeed seem to be afraid – afraid, that is, of bucking the received opinions of the mainstream news media and the cultural elite. . After Wallace retired in 2006, CAMERA (the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America) ran a right-on-target piece by Kate Naseef entitled “Mike Wallace’s Middle East Problem.” Among Naseef’s observations:

The aggressive questioner in Wallace was not in evidence when he interviewed Yasir Arafat in 1989….Wallace accepted Arafat’s responses largely without question. He asked if Arafat had renounced “military operations” inside Israel. Arafat’s response was, “Any people who are facing occupation or oppression have the right to use all methods.” Wallace did not probe with a follow-up question….The late David Bar-Illan, then editorials editor at The Jerusalem Post, suggested that Wallace “acted like a public-relations agent for Arafat” in the 1989 interview….

In a 1987 story on Soviet Jews, including refuseniks, invited to immigrate to Israel, Wallace concluded that “one and a half million Soviets identified as Jews apparently live more or less satisfying lives.” Wallace acknowledged that Russia had a history of harboring antisemitism, but then said that anti-Jewish activities were against the law, without mentioning that the law was frequently broken — often by the government….

In late 1990, Wallace reported on Arab riots on the Temple Mount, in which several thousand people stoned Jewish worshipers at the Western Wall before beleaguered Israeli police shot some rioters in regaining control. He based his report almost exclusively on Palestinian sources [and] reversed the order of events, making it appear that the stone-throwing riot followed the police shooting rather than led to it….

In 1975 and 1984, Wallace filed reports on Syria that minimized the oppression of Syrian Jews and obscured the dictatorial nature of Hafez al-Assad’s regime.

And there’s more where that came from.

Finally, some of us still remember the notorious 1987 panel discussion on PBS during which Wallace and Peter Jennings, in the presence of several members of the military, were presented with a hypothetical question: if they were reporting from behind enemy lines in a war and learned that the enemy was preparing to ambush and kill American soldiers, would they tip off the Americans or just stand by and report? When Jennings said, hesitantly, that he’d warn the Americans, a thoroughly unhesitant Wallace upbraided him, saying: “You don’t have a higher duty….You’re a reporter!” Whereupon an embarrassed Jennings awkwardly and apologetically reversed himself.

James Fallows recounted Wallace’s entire rant – in all its smugness, self-assurance, and self-satisfaction – in a 1996 Atlantic article appropriately entitled “Why Americans Hate the Media.” Not to speak overly ill of the dead, but – well, just watch the video of that repulsive exchange and try to think of Mike Wallace as anything other than a prime example of why, now that we have other sources of reportage and commentary, the traditional news media are, indeed, dying off as fast as the dudes on 60 Minutes.

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URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/04/13/remembering-mike-wallace/

2 muslims terrorists arrested for hacking UK anti-terror hotline

Two arrested after hackers attacked anti-terror hotline

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/9201621/Two-arrested-after-hackers-attacked-anti-terror-hotline.html

Two boys aged 16 and 17 have been arrested as part of an investigation into

recordings made of conversations on Scotland Yard's anti-terror hotline,

which were posted on the internet.

An investigation is underway after hackers targeted Scotland Yard's

anti-terror hotline and leaked conversations between officials on the

internet.

The recordings were later posted online in what will be regarded as a major

embarrassment of the security services Photo: Alamy

Christopher Williams and Hannah Furness

11:59PM BST 12 Apr 2012

The teenagers were being held in the West Midlands by officers from the

Police Central e-Crime Unit on suspicion of offences under the Malicious

Communications Act and the Computer Misuse Act.

Yesterday, an organisation called Team Poison claimed to have carried out a

cyber-attack in response to the alleged detention of innocent people on

terrorism charges and the recent ruling to deport a number of terror

suspects to the United States

The Daily Telegraph also understands that the group was angry at Government

plans to introduce so-called snooping laws, allowing the authorities greater

access to personal communications.

The group, which claims to have carried out a string of similar assaults on

other organisations including Nato, launched a two day "phone bombing"

exercise against the anti-terror hotline, jamming the network and preventing

genuine callers from getting through.

It is understood Team Poison used readily available software to bombard the

Scotland Yard phone line, but routed the activity through a computer server

based in Malaysia in order to cover their tracks.

Related Articles

The hackers then claim to have exploited a "weakness" in the Scotland Yard's

phone system to eavesdrop and record a conversation between officials

discussing the incident.

Recordings of the conversations were later posted on internet, suggesting an

embarrassing lapse of security within Scotland Yard's counter-terrorism

unit.

Last night the Metropolitan Police insisted that their phone security had

not been breached the integrity of the confidential anti-terror hotline

remained intact.

In one recording, an alleged hacker, who has an American accent, is heard

goading one of the hotline operatives about the phone-bombing exercise.

The caller, who claimed to be called Robert West, told the official:

"I got some terrorism for you here .. our philosophy is pretty simple, it's

knowledge is power."

More worryingly for the security services however is the question of how

hackers apparently managed to record a conversation between two officials

within Scotland Yard discussing the incident.

One operative is heard telling another that the anti-terror hotline had been

inundated with hundreds of calls from the hacking group.

In a recording posted on the internet he is heard to say: "We have been

subjected to a barrage of calls from a group called Team Poison.

We have had about 700 calls over the last couple of nights. One of the

conversations I had last night was leaked on YouTube.

"Everyone else calling was effectively shut out and could not through at

all."

It is not clear how the group managed to listen in to the conversation, but

one theory is that the receiving handset was compromised during the

phone-bombing exercise.

One member of Team Poison allegedly claimed to have used a well established

system of phone hacking known as Phreaking.

He said: "It was very easy, they were using an old phone system which was

vulnerable to a private phreaking method that we discovered.

He added: "The guys at the Counter Terrorist Command are clowns, whilst

listening in on them, all they do is socialise and joke around with other

employees. But to be honest, they are the real terrorists, imprisoning

innocent people without evidence and invading countries for their own

benefit."

Explaining what had motivated the attack, the alleged hacker claimed it was

in response to Britain's treatment of terror suspects.

He said: "We done it due to the recent events where the counter terrorist

command and the UK court system have allowed the extradition of Babar Ahmad,

Adel Abdel Bary (sic) and a few others - we also done it to due the new

"snooping" laws where the GCHQ can "spy" on anyone and everyone."

He added: "Our members come from all over the world, we have no religion, no

race, we are not affiliated with any other groups, we believe in equality

for all & were anarchists."

It is the second time in a matter of months that hackers have gained access

to private telephone conversations involving Scotland Yard personnel.

In February hackers from the group known as Anonymous released a recording

of a conference call between the FBI and UK police in which they were

discussing efforts to catch hackers.

Last night, Ailsa Beaton, Director of Information for the Metropolitan

Police said: "We are confident the MPS communication systems have not been

breached and remain, as they always have been, secure.

"We are satisfied that any recording would have been made via the receiving

handset only and not from an attack on internal systems.

The public can remain confident in the ability to communicate in confidence

and that the integrity of the Anti-Terrorist Hotline remains in place."

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Nazi Gunter Grass, Red Flags and European socialists

Gunter Grass, Red Flags and Anti-Semitism

Posted By Daniel Greenfield On April 13, 2012

A few days after September 11, I saw a quote from Gunter Grass on a Manhattan lamppost. In those dark days, the lampposts and walls that weren’t covered in missing persons posters were decorated with the hysterical pamphleteering of the left urging us to blame ourselves for the attacks. The quote has long since been lost to memory, buried under smoke and ash, a green parrot perched on an empty staircase and crowds thronging on foot across the bridge.

The quote itself, like the latest Grassian screed, does not matter. Grass, like Gandhi and King, was one of the favorite go-to guys for the left’s sticky sheets of paper. When you want to write a suicide note, then you reach for a line from Sylvia Plath or Emily Dickinson, but when you want to write a national or civilizational suicide note, there’s always Gunter Grass.

As a writer, Gunter Grass is a blacksmith, hammering together graceless and shapeless lumps that aren’t good for much except hitting people over the head. Take his latest masterpiece which has for a brief shining moment gotten people outside Germany and Sweden to mention his name in conversation. You don’t have to know German to recognize that, “Es ist das behauptete Recht auf den Erstschlag der das von einem Maulhelden unterjochte” is not exactly Die Lorelei. In a fitting irony the author of the Tin Drum has a tin ear.

Like Die Lorelei’s protagonist, Gunter Grass writes about being filled with unnamable emotions, but instead of seeing water nymphs combing their hair while ship captains ram their boats into the rocks, Grass is attempting to impress audiences with his bold struggle against Jewish accusations of bigotry to forewarn us about the threat of the Jewish state.

Grass, like so much of the German left, sees Nazis everywhere but in the mirror. The only lesson that he and his comrades have drawn is that they were wrong to march right, when they should have marched left. It does not occur to them that they should not have been marching at all and that the marching under red banners was the whole problem to begin with.

On the thirty-first anniversary of Kristallnacht, the progressives of the German terrorist left plotted to bomb a Berlin synagogue where a Kristallnacht commemoration was taking place. They didn’t succeed, but their colleagues on Air France Flight 139 did, staging their own Aktzion, separating the Israelis from the non-Israelis and deciding who would go left or right.

Bose, the leader of the German Entebbe hijackers, who had told the hostages that he was not a Nazi, just an idealist, had proposed assassinating Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. That plot, like bombing a synagogue’s Kristallnacht commemoration, seemed more like it might be up a Nazi’s alley. Another symptom of how the German left could not help goosestepping right.

The answer to the unspoken thing that Gunter Grass dares not speak of may lie in a letter from the leader of another German leftist terrorist cell, Dieter Kunzelmann, who while sipping coffee with Muslim terrorists in Jordan, wrote home that, “The German left must overcome its Judenknacks” or hangups about Jews. By this little Dieter did not mean that the German left should stop hating Jews, he meant that it should learn to feel good about hating Jews.

Bombing the synagogue on Kristallnacht would help Germany get rid of its “Vorherrschaft des Judenkomplexes“, he wrote, which means something like the Supremacy of the Jewish Neurosis, Bombing a synagogue would help Germans break through their feelings of guilt and emancipate the German left from feeling any hesitation about killing Jews. The provocateurs of the left who had dedicated themselves to the war against bourgeois hangups about orgies and communal property would help break one more wrongheaded bourgeois taboo. Much like an icon of the German left confessing to having served in the SS and writing a poem that features him working out his own “Judenknacks” right on the page.

Gunter Grass is more of a moderate than Dieter Kunzelmann. Rather than tackling the Judenknacks head on by bombing a synagogue on Kristallnacht or shooting Simon Wiesenthal in the head, he takes the hack’s route by treading the well worn ground of spinning the wheel of history until the Jews become the new Nazis. They have uniforms don’t they, and an army and bombs. Such an observation wouldn’t have been all that novel in the seventies, for Grass to pretend that his whispered take on it is something daring and shocking brands him as a true hack.You do not come away from “Was Gesagt Werden Muss” having learned anything more about Israel or Iran than you did going in, but you learn something about what a fine fellow that Gunter Grass is, why he dares to say what no one else dares to say as he reclines on his own therapist’s couch and achieves a breakthrough in tackling the Vorherrschaft des Judenkomplexes that plagues the left.

Mein Kampf wasn’t about the Jews or England and France, it was about what a great man that Adolf is and why you should consider him for dictator for life. The European left’s Anti-American and Anti-Semitic hiccups have little to do with the red, white and blue or the blue and white. They have to do with how impressive all the speakers are in taking on the Great Satan and the Little Satan. Down with General Electric, down with the A-Bomb, down with the Synagogue. Up with whoever is shouting through a megaphone about boycotting Israeli walnuts or American rockets.

The current shouter through the megaphone isn’t just Grass, it’s Sigmar Gabriel, the head of Germany’ Social Democratic Party, a party that Grass has more than a passing affinity for. The elections scheduled for next year will determine a great deal and the attacks on the sale of submarines to Israel are aimed at Chancellor Merkel. Attacking Merkel for pandering to the Jews is a bit of 1930′s politics, but that’s just part of getting over the Judenknacks.

It’s not about the left being Anti-Semitic, it’s about it being socially acceptable for the left to be Anti-Semitic. And it’s about the “courage” of leftists who dare to take on the bourgeois post-Holocaust hangups and switch them around so that the Jews become the Nazis, the Nazis become the Jews and the Mullahs become the Uberjews. The Jews are irrelevant except as a means for the left to rid itself of all rules and morals on the path to total revolutionary commitment.

“Raise high the red flags,” the Battle Hymn of National Socialism went, “For German labor we will clear the path to freedom.” Those red flags have not changed much since. The Blutfahne, the blood flag covered supposedly in the vital fluids of dead Nazis killed during the Beer Hall Putsch under which Nazis swore in new recruits. Or the red flag of Soviet Union memorializing the blood of the martyrs of revolution. Or the red tulips of the Iranian flag which represent the blood of martyrs.

They are cheering Gunter in Berlin, in Moscow and Tehran, not to mention London, Paris and Boston. Not because he has said anything terribly daring, but because he has thrown a stone at a window. And it isn’t the size of the stone, it’s the breaking of taboos. And when enough taboos have been broken, then the red flags will freely wave again.

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

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/04/13/gunter-grass-red-flags-and-anti-semitism/

Israeli Shin Bet questions Israeli terror-supporters

Israeli Shin Bet (secret services) questions Israeli activists (of the AAtW)

linked to upcoming 'fly-in' protest

http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20120412101808131

By Amira Hass

Several Israelis have been questioned at length by the security service in

recent weeks regarding Sunday's planned 'fly-in'; activists' lawyer says

Shin Bet is attempting to deter people from taking part in legal activities.

The Shin Bet security service has interrogated four left-wing Israelis

involved in preparations for Sunday's "fly-in." The activists, members of

Anarchists Against the Wall, said they have been questioned over the past

two to three weeks.

Two of the activists said they were questioned at Ben-Gurion International

Airport upon returning from a trip abroad. Two others received a written

summons to the police station on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv.

The four were questioned by a man who called himself "Shavit" and said he

was chief of the Shin Bet's department in charge of the extreme right and

extreme left.

The activists said they refused to speak to him or answer his questions,

which prompted him to tell them they were under close surveillance. He told

them the Shin Bet knew many details about their private lives, not only

about their activities (which they report about in full on social media).

They said Shavit stressed the meeting was not an interrogation but a

conversation. But when some of them asked if that meant they could leave, he

said no.

Two other activists received summonses by telephone and another received a

written one too late for the scheduled meeting. All seven are also members

of the Anarchists Against The Wall group. Some have been summoned to

interviews with the Shin Bet before.

The activists' attorney, Gaby Lasky, said "the summons is illegal and

outside the Shin Bet's authority. Under the guise of a 'friendly

conversation' the Shin Bet is trying to deter people from taking part in

legal activity with Palestinians."

The Shin Bet said the decision to call in the seven "was made by the power

invested in the service and the duties imposed on it by law, in order to

convey messages designed to thwart illegal activity."

The first activist to be questioned was Lihi Rothschild, 27, a translator,

on her return from London three weeks ago. She said that at the airport in

London she was physically examined and told to undress. Her clothes were

screened and all her possessions inspected, she said.

At Ben-Gurion airport, Rothschild was interrogated for more than three hours

by Shavit, a man who said his name was Reshef and a woman they called Karin,

who kept silent the whole time.

About a week later, on April 2, Kobi Barkan, 35, a mathematics teacher, was

interrogated. He told Haaretz that Shavit "made sure to remind me of the

report Lihi had posted about her interrogation on the leftist website +972."

Shavit mentioned the sexual harassment issue Rothschild had written about.

She wrote "Reshef said I didn't look like an anarchist, while checking my

clothes and commenting on each garment. Shavit warned him it was sexual

harassment. They tried to persuade me to meet for a friendly conversation

over coffee. I continued to remain silent."

Barkan said Shavit mentioned the issue as a way of bringing up the issue of

sexual harrassment in the territories and, in some cases, among the peace

activists. He said that at the end of the 20-minute meeting, Shavit said he

could write about the conversation "anything you like."

Rothschild, in contrast, had been advised to keep the interrogation a

secret, she wrote on +972, saying "that's one motive to publish the story."

Shavit told Rothschild that while her activity was legal, Palestinians whom

she was in touch with could use her to transfer terrorists or bombs to

Israel. He said she must understand the risk and be careful, she said.

He said investigators wanted to understand what drove her to become an

activist and asked if she was active in the "flytilla," flotilla or the

march to Jerusalem, and what happens at the meetings of Anarchists Against

The Wall.

She said they offered her help in obtaining permits for demonstrations or in

passing messages to soldiers in the West Bank about their treatment of the

demonstrators.

Shavit said the Shin Bet sees Rothschild as a leader who could be deemed

responsible for illegal acts other people would commit. The responsibility

issue was brought up in the other activists' interviews as well.

One activist, a 23-year-old student and animation editor, said Shavit told

her "I know you're very active and you should know many new activists see

you as a an example. You [all] are upstage, very dominant and people look at

you and are influenced by you. Be careful."

Shavit telephoned the activist for two weeks, telling her to come in for

questioning, but she refused to go without a written summons.

"He told me he heard about the sexual harassment in the left and said 'it

troubles us very much,'" said the animation editor.

He said the Shin Bet was also troubled by boycotts against Israel and asked

her if she did not think she was endangering herself at the demonstrations.

He warned her of being exploited by people she thought she knew but really

didn't.

Barkan said Shavit kept mentioning names of people he had interrogated

before him. He also mentioned the name of a Palestinian friend who attended

a meeting in Tel Aviv (the meeting was reported on Facebook, with

photographs ). He said the security forces had broken into the Palestinian's

house at night and confiscated his computer and telephone.

He also mentioned the names of French activists organizing the "fly-in." "He

said helping them was borderline legal," Barkan told Haaretz. "Although

these are people who instead of lying are telling the border police the

truth - that they want to visit the West Bank."

Shavit questioned another activist after midnight at the airport, after he

returned from a trip to Paris. The activist, a student, 28, said Shavit

tried to get him to talk for three and a half hours.

From

http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/shin-bet-questions-israeli-act

ivists-linked-to-upcoming-fly-in-protest-1.423871

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(F)AIR USE NOTICE: All original content and/or articles and graphics in this

message are copyrighted, unless specifically noted otherwise. All rights to

these copyrighted items are reserved. Articles and graphics have been placed

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Karl Marx Preached "Fairness" Too

Karl Marx Preached "Fairness" Too

Thursday, 12 April 2012 17:06 Alan Caruba

My father was a Certified Public Accountant and dinner time throughout my youth was filled with horror stories about the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) as he struggled to keep up with a tax code that just kept growing.

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According to Nina Olsen, the National Taxpayer Advocate for the IRS who heads a staff of 2,000, the American tax system is “a huge convoluted mess.” Despite efforts to determine its length, it is variously estimated to be between 65,000 and 70,000 pages. “We looked at how many changes in the tax law (that) had occurred in the last year alone,” said Olsen, “it was something like 579 changes.” No one can keep up with that volume of changes, not even Ms. Olsen’s office.

As this is being written, President Obama is dominating the news cycle with his message of tax “fairness”, attacking men like Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican candidate, for being wealthy and citing men like Warren Buffett and other millionaires and multi-millionaires who say they should pay more. It is a longtime populist, progressive message and it is a false message.

Chris Edwards who studies tax policy at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, says, “What happens when you raise taxes for higher-income people; they reduce their productive activities—like working and investing and starting businesses—and they increase their unproductive activities—like tax avoidance and tax evasion. So governments really shoot themselves in the food if they raise rates too much.”

If it were not for “taxation without representation” Americans might still be “subjects” of the British Empire because, as any school child can tell you, the Revolution was fought over this issue and was kicked off in earnest by the Boston Tea Party when a tax on tea enraged the citizens of that time. There were, in fact, some ten other tea parties in the colonies.

The United States has the dubious honor of having the highest tax rate on corporations in the world. And some people still cannot understand why U.S. corporations are shipping jobs overseas and foreign corporations are reluctant to set up U.S. headquarters here.

In a recent opinion in The Wall Street Journal, Amity Shales, a former WSJ reporter and now the director of a George W. Bush Institute project on national economic growth, wrote that “The trouble is that lawmakers (especially at the federal level) insist on discussing fax reform in terms of fairness. Tax competition earns a mention from time to time, but only a mention.” She pointed out, as have others, that “states with no income tax grow faster than those with high income taxes.”

By framing the tax debate in terms of fairness and attacking Mitt Romney’s wealth, President Obama is pandering to his greatest constituency—the stupid among us. He was elected on the basis of a lot of gauzy, vague promises of hope and change, and with the adoring support of the mainstream media.

Obama’s problem is not about fairness or taxes. His problem is 13.9 million unemployed Americans, not counting those who are not looking for work or those working part-time jobs just to make ends meet. As a recent commentary on EconomicCollapse.com pointed out, “The number of unemployed Americans is larger than the entire population of Greece.”

The onerous, insane growth of the regulation industry at all levels of government is crushing the economy. “The U.S. national debt has increased by more than four trillion dollars since Barack Obama took office” and, with the aid of a Democrat-controlled Congress for the first two years of his term, he increased the national debt more than all the presidents combined from Washington to Clinton.

Believing that taxing rich people will close the gap is unbelievably stupid. As a Wall Street Journal editorial pointed out on April 10th, “The Obama Treasury’s own numbers confirm that the tax (on the wealthy) would raise at most $5 billion a year—or less than 0.5% of the $1.2 trillion fiscal 2012 budget deficit and over the next decade a mere 0.1% of the $45-43 trillion the federal government will spend.”

There is an alternative. It’s called the “Fair Tax” and you can learn more about it by visiting the website of the National Taxpayers Union.

By bleeding jobs through an insane tax system, a federal tax code filled with loopholes that even the IRS cannot keep up with, the highest corporate tax in the world, an idiotic immigration policy toward illegal aliens, and a burden on the fortunate few that still have jobs the United States is digging itself into financial collapse.

The federal government is broke. The states are broke. And with the advent of $4 and $5 gas pump prices—thanks to Obama’s anti-energy policies—the rest of us are getting more broke.

President Obama’s blather about “fairness” is straight out of Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital” and the Communist Manifesto with their emphasis the redistribution of wealth and the end of private property

Thursday, April 12, 2012

Dare we actually listen to the Islamists?

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0412/may041212.php3?printer_friendly

By Clifford D. May







West must not be complicit in our own deception about 'Arab Spring'


JewishWorldReview.com | The term “Arab Spring” was born of optimism, not analysis. When a downtrodden fruit monger in Tunisia self-immolated, setting off a series of regional upheavals, many journalists, diplomats, and academics thought they heard an echo of the Prague Spring of 1968. That was when Czechoslovakia boldly initiated democratic reforms — an experiment quickly extinguished by a Soviet invasion.

Americans do not like to see people living under the jackboots of dictators. We instinctively root for the revolutionaries hoping there are George Washingtons and Thomas Jeffersons among them. But the American Revolution was an historical anomaly. The French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Iranian Revolution — in these and other instances, one form of despotism simply replaced another.

Are there freedom fighters in the Muslim world? Yes, without question. But not many. And most are Western-educated intellectuals, no match for disciplined Islamic militants operating from an international network of mosques and non-governmental organizations, drawing from a bottomless well of oil money, and more than willing to use violence — or to stand aside as others use it — to achieve their objectives.

Islamists are calling this stormy new season the Nahda, Arabic for renaissance, which is French for rebirth — in this case, they believe, a rebirth of global Islamic power. Khairat Al-Shater, the deputy guide of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and its recently announced presidential candidate, phrased it (in a speech he made a year ago and which was recently translated by the Hudson Institute) this way:

The mission is clear: restoring Islam in its all-encompassing conception; Subjugating people to G0d; instituting the religion of God; the Islamization of life, empowering of God’s religion; establishing the Nahda of the Ummah [Muslim nation] on the basis of Islam.

Last week, a delegation of Islamists from Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan, and Libya paid a visit to Washington. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace held a one-day conference: “Islamists in Power: Views from Within.” Jessica Mathews, Carnegie’s president, opened the discussion by noting that the “rise of Islamist parties is a political reality,” one which “has sparked a great deal of uncertainty, even trepidation” while “Islamist parties remain poorly understood.” No doubt about any of that.

The panelists ranged from dour to congenial. They used words the audience was eager to hear: “democracy,” “freedom,” “pluralism.” More than one said their goal is a “civil society, not a theocratic state.” They emphasized the desire of their peoples for “justice,” “dignity,” and “Islamic values,” but made little effort to define those terms.

Though they vowed “respect for the rights of minorities,” no one specified what rights minorities are entitled to as subjects of the “Islamic states” they envision. There was not a word about the escalating attacks on Egypt’s Coptic Christians; the Saudi Grand Mufti’s fatwa that more churches be demolished; Sudan’s mass murders of both Christians and the black Muslims of Darfur; the unspeakable atrocities committed by the Taliban; the Iranian regime’s continuing repression at home and support for terrorism abroad; the mounting death toll in Syria; Hezbollah’s power grab in Lebanon; Hamas’ commitment to the extermination of Israel; or al-Qaeda.

That is not to say these Islamists marched in lockstep. Mustapha Elkhalfi, minister of communications for Morocco — where a centuries-old monarchy has so far weathered the storms — said the priority should be to adopt policies that can reduce “poverty, illiteracy, and unemployment.”

By contrast, Abdul Mawgoud Rageh Dardery, a member of parliament from Egypt’s Freedom and Justice Party, said, “Many Egyptians tell me: We would like to live free even if we become hungry.” He did not say whether he thought it would make Egyptians feel less free to have Westerners in Cairo supporting fledgling civil-society groups, or businessmen and tourists sipping cocktails in hotel bars, or to restrain terrorists from firing missiles at Israel from Egyptian territory.

Nabil Alkofhai, of Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic Action Front Party, struck a chord with me when he said that Arab peoples do not want “to remain on the margins of human civilizations.” But a few moments later he insulted the audience’s intelligence by asserting that “the Islamic world . . . did not witness anything in its history [of] over 1,400 years that is called religious oppression.”

Similarly, I thought Dardery had a point when he said that sharia simply means law — and that Islamic law can be variously interpreted. But then he said that jihad means “exerting an effort” and so “I am doing jihad sitting here.” Studying hard, he added, is jihad; not eating too much — that, too, is jihad. I waited for him to add something about jihad as defined by Osama bin Laden, who said it “means fighting only, fighting with the sword,” or Ayatollah Khomeini, leader of Iran’s 1979 revolution, who said:

Those who study jihad will understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world. . . . Islam says: Kill all the unbelievers just as they would kill you all! . . . Islam says: Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword! People cannot be made obedient except with the sword! The sword is the key to paradise, which can be opened only for holy warriors!

The Arab Spring was a mirage. The Nahda is a reality. By all means, let’s talk to the Islamists. But let’s listen carefully to what they say. Let’s not be complicit in our own deception. Let’s watch what they do. Let’s not confuse gradualism with moderation. Journalists, diplomats, and academics might understand all this if they were relying less on optimism and more on analysis.


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Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism. A veteran news reporter, foreign correspondent and editor (at The New York Times and other publications), he has covered stories in more than two dozen countries, including Iran, Pakistan, Sudan, Ethiopia, China, Uzbekistan, Northern Ireland and Russia. He is a frequent guest on national and international television and radio news programs, providing analysis and participating in debates on national security issues.