FBI Expert: Obama's Nominee for CIA Chief John Brennan Converted to Islam

Who would have thought this possible?

Muslim born and bred, Muslim-Brotherhood-friendly, enabler of Al Qaeda in Northern Africa Barack Hussein Obama chooses a Muslim as Central Intelligence Agency's chief.

John Guandolo, one of the FBI’s former top experts on Islam, has announced that President Obama’s choice to head the CIA, John Brennan, who in the above video indulges in a few-minutes long praise of Islam, converted to Islam years ago in Saudi Arabia.

Michele Bachmann is vindicated.

Guandolo has long warned that the federal government is being infiltrated by members of the radical Muslim Brotherhood. But he now warns that by appointing Brennan to CIA director, Obama has not only picked a man “naïve” to these infiltrations, but also chose someone who is himself a Muslim.

“Mr. Brennan did convert to Islam when he served in an official capacity on the behalf of the United States in Saudi Arabia,” Guandolo told interviewer and radio host Tom Trento.

“That fact alone is not what is most disturbing,” Guandolo continued. “His conversion to Islam was the culmination of a counterintelligence operation against him to recruit him. The fact that foreign intelligence service operatives recruited Mr. Brennan when he was in a very sensitive and senior U.S. government position in a foreign country means that he either a traitor … [or] he has the inability to discern and understand how to walk in those kinds of environments, which makes him completely unfit to the be the director of Central Intelligence.”

Brennan did indeed serve as CIA station chief in Riyadh in the 1990s and today holds the official title of Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism. On Jan. 7, Obama nominated Brennan as the next director of the CIA, though he has yet to be confirmed.

“Are you kidding me?” Trento balked at Guandolo’s allegations. “The head of the CIA is a Muslim? For real? … Are you sure?”

“Yes I am,” Guandolo asserted. “The facts of the matter are confirmed by U.S. government officials who were also in Saudi Arabia at the time that John Brennan was serving there and have direct knowledge. These are men who work in very trusted positions, they were direct witnesses to his growing relationship with the individuals who worked for the Saudi government and others and they witnessed his conversion to Islam.”

A former Marine and combat veteran, Guandolo worked for eight years in the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division as a “subject matter expert” in the Muslim Brotherhood and the global spread of Islamism. Guandolo boasts he created the Bureau’s first counterterrorism training/education program and twice received United States Attorney’s Awards for investigative intelligence.

Guandolo is also one of the authors of the Center for Security Policy’s Team B II report, “Shariah: The Threat to America.”...

“My contention is that [Brennan] is wholly unfit for government service in any national security capacity, and that would specifically make him unfit to be the director of Central Intelligence,” Guandolo told Trento.

Guandolo then broke down a three-part argument against Brennan’s confirmation.

“The first is he has interwoven his life professionally and personally with individuals that we know are terrorists,” Guandolo asserted. “He has overseen and approved and encouraged others to bring known leaders of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood into the government in positions to advise the U.S. government on counterterrorism strategy as well as the overall ‘war on terror.’”

Second, Guandolo asserted, Brennan has “proven through his own comments publicly that he is clueless and grossly ignorant of Al-Qaida’s strategy.

“Third and finally, which some would say is most disturbing, is Mr. Brennan did convert to Islam,” Guandolo said, but stressed, “I think the [larger] news is that that conversion is the culmination of the work of people in Saudi Arabia who worked for the Saudi Government – and that makes John Brennan just naïve, foolish, dangerously ignorant and totally unfit for this position.

“That in and of itself, again, shouldn’t be shocking to people,” Guandolo continued. “Mr. Brennan, they have the clip where he specifically says during a public address … he said during that speech that he has learned and gets his understanding and his ‘worldview’ in large part from Islam. It shouldn’t be a large leap to imagine he’s converted to Islam.”

Alex Jones Confronts Piers Morgan Backstage on Gun Control - Video

Video of radio host Alex Jones confronting Piers Morgan a few days ago in a protest against gun control last night, before Morgan broadcast his show from Texas, in a repetition of the explosive debate between the two on television last month.

The CNN host's decision to record his show live from a gun store in Katy, Texas, was seen as a provocation and an assault on the second amendment by Jones, who asked Morgan if he would have him back on the show for another debate, to which Morgan replied: “Well I don’t want to promote you that much, Alex.”

At that point CNN directors ordered Jones and his cameraman to leave the shooting range area while they were taping. “I understand, this is like Obama shooting the shotgun, now you’re going to make everybody think you’re pro-gun – you’re scared to have me back on”, said Jones.

The radio host then led a pro-second amendment protest outside the building, leading Morgan to tweet: “Rather large protest growing outside this Houston gun store now. Feels slightly tyrannical, ironically”.

Albanian Bogus Asylum Seeker in the UK Was Given a Cop Job

Albanian bogus asylum seeker in the UK Elidon Habilaj told a pack of lies to get a British passport and a job with the Serious Organised Crime Agency.

Fact stranger than fiction.

He has now jumped bail and fled the country, while English Defence League's Tommy Robinson is languishing in jail without bail:

But he was unmasked after being spotted checking his TRUE details on a computer at work.

Prosecutor Christian Moll said: “IWF is a database used by SOCA to track the actions and movements of people who are of interest to the Agency.”

Habilaj’s immediate boss spotted what was on the computer screen, he said.

Mr Moll told London’s Snaresbrook Crown Court: “He could clearly see the defendant was mentioned on the IWF, and this was confirmed when Mr Habilaj double-clicked on the screen and a photo of himself came up.”

Checks were made and 35-year-old Habilaj’s sham story exposed. He had claimed to be Farid Ademi, a refugee from war-torn Kosovo, when he arrived in Britain on “the back of a lorry” in September 1998.

He claimed his brother had been tortured to death and his father was killed in the fighting.

Habilaj was granted asylum and later got British citizenship and a passport — which he used to get a job at SOCA, as an intelligence officer at its headquarters in Vauxhall, South London.

After being rumbled last January, Habilaj was charged with entering the UK by deception, which he denied. But he jumped bail and FLED the country the next month — and is being tried in his absence.

The Obama Depression Is like the Great Depression

Mortimer Zuckerman on How We Can End Our Modern-Day Depression in US News: "We must increase investment in education and infrastructure, and enact tax reform":

If you went out this morning and saw hundreds of people lining up at soup kitchens, you'd think you were in a time machine, transported back to the Great Depression of the '30s, or the victim of a hallucination incubated by powerful images of those times. In fact, it is the absence of such images that is the illusion. We believe we live in more normal times—and we do not. Millions of people today are experiencing exactly the same struggle as the millions did in the Great Depression. They can't find work. They depend on government and philanthropy. They live on hope denied.

The big difference: Today millions are assisted by checks from Social Security and by food stamps. Food-stamp enrollment has been rising at the rate of 400,000 per month. More than 47 million Americans now depend on that program, an almost incredible record, for it is 15 percent of the population compared with the 7.9 percent who received food stamps from 1970 to 2000. Meanwhile, nearly 11 million Americans are now collecting federal disability checks from Social Security, and half have signed on since President Obama came to office. In 1992, there was one person on disability for every 35 workers. Today it is one for every 16. Such an increase simply cannot have been caused by direct disability experienced during employment. This is in effect another unemployment program, one without end. Many of the people on disability would normally be considered unemployed.

The reality is, we are experiencing a modern-day Depression. It is harder to find work than it has been in any previous economic recovery period. Typically, it takes 25 months to close the employment gap from the employment peak near the start of a downturn. But this time around, five years after employment peaked in January 2008, non-farm employment is still roughly 4 million below where it started. Never before has the job level not been at a record high during the fourth year into a business cycle.

In fact, 4.5 million fewer Americans are working today than when the recession started, and fewer are working today than in the year 2000, despite the fact that our population has grown by 31 million and our labor force by 11.4 million. Though the White House forecast four years ago that, with its stimulus policies, the jobless rate would be down to 5.2 percent by now, the real unemployment rate is 14.4 percent.

The Pew Research Center reports that for the first time in the post-World War II era, middle-class families finished the decade significantly poorer in terms of household net worth—which is down almost 40 percent since 2007—and with lower incomes than a decade earlier. This has hit the middle class harder than any other group. According to Pew, one third of Americans now identify themselves as lower class or lower middle class, a deterioration since 2008 when one quarter identified themselves that way.

The outlook is no better. Job seekers are only one third as likely to find a job now as they were in 2006. A record number of households have at least one member looking for a job. Some 40 percent of the people who are unemployed have been out of work for 27 weeks or more, which means we've got 4.8 million who are described as "long-term" unemployed. Employers are shortening the work week or asking employees to take unpaid leave in unprecedented numbers. Those taking unpaid leave are not included in the unemployment count.

Indeed, the recession has shown employers that they can make do with fewer workers. Now over 20 percent of companies say that employment in their firms will not return to pre-recession levels.

Older Americans, whose net worth has taken a huge hit (75 percent of it due to a decline in their home equity), can't afford to quit. Since the recession began, employment in that age group of 55 and older is up by over 3 million, in contrast to total employment, which is down by 5 million. The baby boomers are quite simply postponing their exit from the workforce. This has created a huge bottleneck for the nation's youth, who now face double-digit unemployment.

Now Is the Time for the GOP to Destroy Obama

The American are media coming out, revealing their bias.

CBS News' Political Director John Dickerson had this advice for Obama's second inaugural address on the leftist online magazine Slate in January:

The president who came into office speaking in lofty terms about bipartisanship and cooperation can only cement his legacy if he destroys the GOP. If he wants to transform American politics, he must go for the throat...

Obama’s only remaining option is to pulverize. Whether he succeeds in passing legislation or not, given his ambitions, his goal should be to delegitimize his opponents. Through a series of clarifying fights over controversial issues, he can force Republicans to either side with their coalition’s most extreme elements or cause a rift in the party that will leave it, at least temporarily, in disarray.

Obama, he said, must declare war on the Republican Party.

Breitbart commented on that:

What is worthy of note, though, is that a CBS News' political director is now comfortable openly calling for the destruction of the Republican Party. He obviously fears no admonitions from his colleagues or his employer...

You lump all of this with CNN chief Jeff Zucker applauding Piers Morgan's shameless feasting off the dead children of Sandy Hook for ratings and attention, and what you have is a media that's finally … coming out.

And yet, even as they do, even as they openly celebrate their left-wing biases out of one side of their mouth, out the other, they will claim they remain objective and unbiased.

And now the blog Flopping Aces has turned the threat upside down:

We are in a depression. The Obama depression...

But it IS a list of accomplishments he [Obama] is after. He pushed through a stimulus, a health care abomination and wants to push through amnesty and suffocate us with “climate change” legislation without any of them needing to be successful. The economy should be Job One, but it still sucks and shows no inclination to improve.

Enough. The GOP should destroy Obama and they can absolutely do it. The tools are in their hands right now.

Obama wants a deal- he wants to raise taxes and put the sequester cuts off until….well, sometime....

John Boehner should just say no. McConnell should say no.

There are a couple of possible outcomes. The economy suffers a little initially and then improves because of debt reduction. The second is that the economy does not improve. Then again, it is not improving now. Obama is treading water and he knows it. That’s why he is asking gently for a deal instead of demanding one.

This is the time to destroy him. Deny him the opportunity to put off responsibility. Deny him the chance to kick the can down the road again.

Michael Coren and Diana West on Lars Hedigaard's Attempted Assassination

Michael Coren here in superb form, commenting on yesterday's attempted assassination of Lars Hedigaard, a well-known Danish historian, defender of free speech and Islam critic by a likely "religious Muslim".

The mainstream media tend to be silent about this kind of news, but this is the new world we live in. Freedom of speech is a thing of the past in the West as well now, our political leaders do nothing to protect it from Muslims wanting to impose sharia law.

These are the new enemies, not the ones we believed in the past to be enemies. I've woken up to the new realities, and I hope that you will too.

The brilliant author of Why Catholics Are Right and TV presenter Michael Coren says on Canada's Sun News (above video) about the mainstream's media scant coverage of this assassination attempt: "Imagine if some critic of abortion had gone to the door of an abortionist and tried to shoot them dead? That would be on the front page of every newspaper. That seems to be a bit of a double standard".

Gavin Boby of Mosquebusters with Brian Lilley of Sun News

The British Gavin Boby, who specializes in planning law and is successfully stopping mosque construction in the UK by demonstrating to local councils that the building of a mosque or an Islamic center is actually in violation of British law, with Brian Lilley of Sun News.

Muslim Illegal Immigrant Arrested for Raping Dog in Italy

Another case of a Muslim raping animals.

In Spain a few months ago a Muslim had killed a horse by anally raping him, and now in Italy an illegal immigrant, an unemployed Moroccan has been arrested for repeatedly raping a dog on a farm in Sicily.

The 32-year-old-man was caught in the act by CCTV cameras.

He had previously spread panic in the countryside near the town of Ragusa by committing two arsons, the second of which on Boxing Day, causing damage for tens of thousands of euros to two local farms, by the use of a lighter.

But that's not enough. He was responsible for the theft of electrical appliances, farm equipment, clothes and food.

In Muslim countries the practice of having sex with and raping animals is much more common than we think.

In Pakistan, a donkey was honour killed after being raped, a treatment ususally reserved to Muslim women. From Wikipedia:

Karo-kari is part of cultural tradition in Pakistan and is a compound word literally meaning “black male” (Karo) and “black female (Kari), in metaphoric terms for adulterer and adulteress. Once labeled as a Kari, male family members get the self-authorized justification to kill her and the co-accused Karo to restore family honor, although in the majority of cases the victim is female, while the murderers are male.

Sorry, Gays, Equality Is a Different Thing

The TV news channel Russia Today's CrossTalk programme for once had a debate (in the above video) I am glad to report on.

"Unimarriage?", on the subject of gay marriage, was a discussion among the UK's prominent gay rights activist Peter Tatchell, UK Independence Party's Member of the European Parliament Godfrey Bloom and Thomas Peters of the USA's National Organization for Marriage who works in Washington DC.

It was introduced thus:

Should same-sex marriages be accepted? What's driving the change in the institution of marriage? Are equal marriage rights democratic? Why aren't civil unions enough for gay couples? And if marriage is about love and the emotional needs of adults, then what about their children?

The programme was also exceptional in that the supposedly "moderator" Peter Lavelle did not intervene with opinions of his own.

One of the recurring claims of the conversation was Peter Tatchell's insistence that the right to marry is one of the human rights recognized by the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights and to deny it to homosexuals violates a principle of equality for all individuals.

But is it true that opposing gay marriage means discriminating and denying equal rights to homosexuals?

Tatchell confuses equal rights with equal treatment. Equality for individuals who are different results in different treatment.

Peter Singer, a moral and political philosopher much respected by the Left and certainly one of the thinkers of our time who will be included in future history of philosophy books, begins his classic work Animal Liberation with a comparison between the objections usually raised against the case for moral equality of animals to humans and the derisive attacks that greeted the publication of early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in the late 18th-century.

One of the most frequent of those criticisms was to highlight the factual differences between men and women (analogous to the possible use of the differences between human and nonhuman animals to counter Singer's argument).

Singer responds to both in the same way: equal consideration of interests (the utilitarian Singer does not use the terminology of "rights") does not require equal treatment. The treatment for different sentient beings, the moral objects, will be different if their interests are given equal consideration (if they have equal rights).

The Australian philosopher says that equality does not entail that dogs have the right to vote because humans do and men have the right to abortion on demand if women do.

The incongruity of the idea that equality requires non-differential treatment in all cases can be seen if we think of, for instance, children not being allowed to drive a car or vote, even if they wanted to: developing the logic of Tatchell's argument to its full consequences would require giving children all the rights that adults have, including, for instance, driving and voting.

In the specific case of marriage, children, close blood relatives, threesomes are not allowed to marry, even if they so wished: are all those persons discriminated against? Most reasonable people would not think so.

This is probably why the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights that Thatchell invokes in his support does not include sexual orientation among the characteristics that should not limit the right to marry. It says:

Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family.

Virtually nothing of what Peter Tatchell said throughout the debate had a leg to stand on.

His assertion that polls show that a majority favours same-sex marriage was dismantled with ease by Thomas Peters of the National Organization for Marriage. He explained that in 30 out of the 34 times when people were given the possibility to vote on this they voted against gay marriage. Polls on this subject are not reliable because people tend to say they are favourable to it even when they are not, since they think it makes them look good.

In these Orwellian times when accusation of "homophobia" are thrown so liberally (pun half-intended) it seems a highly plausible explanation.

In addition, "polls claiming a majority support redefining marriage offer those they poll a false binary choice between redefining marriage and no legal recognition whatsoever".

In the UK, Prime Minister David Cameron has been accused by the polling company ComRes to misrepresent its polling data in order to claim popular support for redefining marriage:

Andrew Hawkins, Chairman of the polling company, wrote to David Cameron to “put the record straight” about the number of people who are in favour of the Government’s plans to redefine marriage.

The Prime Minister had responded to a letter from MP Cheryl Gillan, in which she criticised the proposals. He said that more Tory-leaning voters were in favour of same-sex marriage than were put off by it.

Support

But Andrew Hawkins said his polling showed that redefining marriage was unlikely to win back support from disillusioned voters.

He also said it was “simply not the case” that all the published polls show more voters are in favour of same-sex marriage, something the Prime Minister asserted as fact in his letter.

Mr Hawkins said the level of agreement that marriage should stay as it is, varies between 55% and over 70%.

Ignore

He said that taking the polling as a whole, it is hard for David Cameron to ignore the fact there is less support for gay marriage than he makes out.

He said “the policy is likely to make it harder to retrieve many former Conservative supporters” and the issue is having a “detrimental effect on local Associations.”

Andrew Hawkins referred to a recent ComRes poll which showed that six out of ten Conservative Party chairmen believed the policy would lose the party more votes than it would gain.

Election

Earlier this week, Chancellor George Osborne said that gay marriage would win the party the next election, a claim quickly refuted by the Coalition for Marriage.

C4M Director Colin Hart said: “Yet again the Government’s spin doctors are trying to claim that redefining marriage is a vote winner. Quite the opposite is true.”

More than 610,000 people have signed the Coalition for Marriage petition to keep marriage as it is.

Tatchell's presentation of his battle for gay rights as a lonely one could have been realistic a few decades ago, but these days everybody knows that it cannot be delivered with a straight face. Peters pointed out that the three main associations for same-sex marriage in Washington receive many times the money his small organization gets, not to mention Obama's support and the Decmocratic Party's inclusion of legalization of gay marriage in its manifesto. Peters also said he receives death threats.

UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom argued that the gay claims, with which he used to agree, have now gone too far, and threaten other people's liberty, as in the case of Peter and Hazelmary Bull, the Christian husband and wife B&B owners who were successfully sued by a gay couple for offering them two rooms rather than one.

Peters summed up some of the reasons to keep marriage between a man and a woman:

There's an awful lot of civil society -- churches, communities, government -- that is all built to support marriage because marriage isn't easy. It's not easy to get men and women to commit to raising the children they make with their bodies. But that's what civil society has been doing and a healthy society does that. It is difficult and gay marriage makes it difficult for all of civil society to enshrine that value that children deserve a mom and a dad, and that men and women should stick around and love and raise the children they make with their bodies, and the distraction of gay marriage has made it impossible for things like the Catholic Church, for things like political/civil government to give that message and so when you say "gay marriage won't hurt anyone" it already has because now when I try to say "a child deserves both mom and a dad" you jump in and say "that's against equality!" and so you can actually see already that the more gay marriage becomes accepted and enshrined in law the more difficult it will become for the rest of us to communicate this life-saving propagating message for the next generation.

We must also not forget how the redefinition of marriage could pave the way to allowing for Islamic polygamy to become acceptable:

Muslim polygamy has been a much more easily accepted practice, with authorities and police in Western countries turning a blind eye to it, than it would have been the case in the past, when people knew what the word 'family' meant, before the time of constant redefinitions of the term to include homosexuals, threesomes, incestuous couples and all the ever-expanding circle of relationships that the concepts of marriage and family must now apply to.

Post-Election Obama Administration's Iran and Israel Policies

Moshe Phillips, member of the executive committee of the Philadelphia Chapter of Americans for a Safe Israel / AFSI, writing for Voice of the Copts says that Democratic Senator John Kerry as the next Secretary of State is a much bigger problem for Israel than Republican former Senator Chuck Hagel as the next Secretary of Defense, despite the American Jewish establishment's vehement protesting the latter but not the former.

The role of the Secretary of State, much more than the Secretary of Defense, is "a position to effect policy as it impacts Israel, set an overall tone for US in the Middle East and be a key player in future negotations".

Kerry thinks that the settlements are the main problem, adopted the Arab view that Jerusalem is one of “the big three issues" and believes that Israel and the Palestinian Arabs equally share blame for the continuation of a decades old conflict.

Kerry’s words show that he will be hostile to the very existence of Israeli towns in the suburbs of Jerusalem. Democrats consider these “settlements” to be part of the “Occupied West Bank”and he will label them as such.

John Kerry’s leadership at State will be the beginning of a new effort by the Obama Administration to pressure Israel to surrender territory to the Palestinian Authority, deny Israel’s sovereignty in Jerusalem, negotiate with Hamas and accept a hostile Palestinian State along its vulnerable borders.

Israel and its American supporters are in for a very tough time with Kerry and they seem to have no idea.

Hagel is not spared either. In another article in Voice of the Copts by Heritage Foundation senior fellow and former deputy assistant Secretary of Defense Peter Brookes, Hagel is criticized for his soft stance on Iran ("Hagel has pushed for direct talks, while pushing against economic sanctions and force"), his comments in favour of cutting the Defense budget, and his underestimation of North Korea. Brookes concludes:

The concern, of course, is that Hagel — like Kerry — will push US foreign and defense policy violently Left, more in line with Obama’s real sentiments.

I end with a quotation from a third article from the same high-quality publication, about Obama's policy of appeasement towards Iran, poorly camouflaged as Iranian Nuclear Containment. The article is by Mark Langfan, who has created an original educational 3d Topographic Map System of Israel to facilitate clear understanding of the dangers facing Israel and its water supply, which has been studied by US lawmakers:

And just like a nuclear-armed Hitler and/ or Togo would have found a "rational" use of a nuclear bomb in World War II, had he owned one, the Iranians will figure out a "rational" use of a nuclear bomb which will destroy the United States in the coming World War III.

Whether it is an Iranian EMP attack on Saudi Arabia, thereby gaining Iran sole control of 60 percent of the world's oil supply, or an Iranian untraceable nuclear suicide terror attack against Manhattan, it doesn't matter. The Iranian Islamic Regime is a talented, resourceful, and driven cabal of very rational people who are determined to rule the world, and impose their Shia Islam on every human on the planet.

The only person who is not "rational" in this drama is US President Obama, and neither is his merry band of sycophantic echo-chamber yes-men, who irrationally believe Israeli settlements are a greater threat to world peace than Iranian nuclear weapons.

Yes, elections have consequences, sometimes, irreparably catastrophic consequences. And, the horrific irreparable consequence of a 51 percent to 49 percent 2012 US Election is that the United States elected a President who has been, who is, and who will continue to be an Appeaser-in-Chief of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Had the world allowed Hitler or Togo's Japan to gain a nuclear bomb before World War II, there wouldn't be a free-world today. Unfortunately, Obama's containment policy will enable Iran to gain a nuclear weapons' arsenal which will bring the entire world into a dark ages from which the free-world will never return.

What Happens in the USA? Houston Resident: "I felt in a War Zone"

Residents of Miami, Florida, and Houston, Texas, were terrified by the sight of military helicopters in their skies and the sound of military gun fire. A Houston resident said: "I felt I was in a war zone". It turns out it was just a multi-agency training a drill.

Similar urban military exercises took place in Los Angeles and, since April 2012, in St. Louis, MO; Minneapolis, MN.; Long Branch, NJ; Laredo, TX; Boston, MA; and Chicago, IL, and Atlas Shrugs says in Harrisburg, Pennslyvania.

Atlas Shrugs also says:

What kind of military exercise requires black hawk helicopters and machine gun fire in a city? What is Obama expecting to happen?

Why such drills in civilian areas? These usually take place out of public view. Why weren't local police and fire/rescue alerted prior? There is certainly an intimidation factor at work here.

And The Examiner (h/t Augusto Pozuelos):

Of course, a little over a week ago, renowned author and humanitarian Dr. Jim Garrow made the shocking claim that President Obama will only keep military leaders who "will fire on U.S. citizens."

Read this columnist's report on the shocking claim...

It should be noted that the Obama administration has yet to deny the allegation.

On January 20, the Washington Free Beacon reported the head of Central Command, Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis is being dismissed by Obama and will leave his post in March.

Since 2010, Commander of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal (USA), Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Gen. David Petraeus (USA) and Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. James Cartwright (USMC) have all been forced into retirement.

In light of the Obama administration's push for gun-grabbing legislation (being sponsored by Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA)), a flurry of "multi-agency training drills" and the dismissal of several well-respected military leaders...one need not be a conspiracy theorist to be genuinely concerned about the imminent threat to our freedoms.

As the ancient Chinese curse portends...these are truly "interesting times."

Italian Priest Offers Reward for Weddings

In the small village of Volania, in Northern Italy, home to about 300 families and 1,000 people, the local priest Father Giancarlo Pirini has decided to offer a "bounty" of 500 euros, in cash, of his own money to every couple who will get married.

The Father is worried about the crisis of marriage.

"Some time ago, leafing through the marriage register of the parish - says Fr Pirini - I noticed that it was still at the first volume, which began in 1955." Scanning it, the parish priest ended in despair: in 1960 only 17 weddings were celebrated, in 2006 and 2012 none.

Europeans, if the current rates of marriage and reproduction continue, are going to die out.

New Facebook Page: Save the West

I have started just 3 days ago a new Page on Facebook, called Save the West.

Save the West from what threatens to destroy it from without, Islam, and from within, cultural Marxism, what we kindly call "political correctness".

Come and have a look and, if you like it, Like it.

The Marxist-Leninist Roots of the European Union. Interview with Vladimir Bukovsky

Below is my translation of an interview I found very interesting with former Soviet dissident and political prisoner Vladimir Bukovsky by Alessandra Nucci, published in the December 2012 issue of the Italian periodical Radici Cristiane. What he says provides a very useful background to understand what lies behind the European Union project and its similarities with the Soviet Union, a subject on which Bukovsky has written a book.

---

Vladimir Bukovsky, 70, is one of the most famous ex-political prisoners of the former Soviet Union. In total he spent twelve years of internment, including prisons, labour camps and psychiatric hospitals, before being ejected and swapped for the Chilean prisoner Luis Corvalan in 1976. Since then he has lived in Cambridge and took British citizenship.

In 2007 he co-authored with Pavel Stroilov EUSSR: The Soviet Roots of European Integration in which he reconstructs, on the basis of documents copied from the Soviet archives in 1992, plans to transform the European Union into a Union of Socialist Republics in all identical to the former Soviet Union.

Radici Cristiane has asked his opinion on current developments.

Mr. Bukovsky, at least since 2000 you have been saying that the European Union is the exact copy of the Soviet Union. Aspects in common you highlighted include the new Europe’s structure itself: a union of republics with a socialist structure, run by a handful of unelected people who make typically Bolshevik promises - equality, fairness and justice - and do not recognize nations but only citizens of a new people, with "European" instead of "Soviet". In common, in addition, the two unions have the typical corruption of a socialist republic, a corruption organized from the top, aggressiveness towards the outside and even gulags inside. Many years later, are the events proving you right?

You forgot the similarity in the way they started. How was the USSR created? Of course, by military force, but also by forcing the republics to join with the financial threat, making them economically fearful. So there we are.

But we are still at the beginning, at the first stage. The ultimate goal of all unions that have been built so far does not end with the submission to the control of Brussels, but it goes further. The target is the building of a single state, under one world government, with a single law, a single pension....

The financial crises serve to push in this direction.

The general impoverishment would then be wanted?

It is the very concept of "union" that removes flexibility from the economy. A single economy makes the constant adjustments necessary to facilitate trade impossible.

Don’t let's forget that the Soviet Union went bankrupt. Of course, we were far ahead on the road to integration towards a single state: not just a single currency, but also one people. And the Soviet Union, in contrast to Europe, had enormous resources, so, every time it was on the verge of bankruptcy, it would discover new resources: oil, diamonds, gold... That's what made ​​them carry on. Otherwise they would not have failed in the eighties but by the end of the thirties.

You said that the crisis was the first stage. What about the second?

Over time there is a development of distrust that can lead to hostility. That is the next stage. Examples abound, just think of Yugoslavia, the USSR… Countries forced to live under the same roof. I myself grew up under a federal flag. But it is a pressure cooker that sooner or later blows up.

Is this why they are gradually unifying the military?

It still has to do with the construction of a single state. One government, one president, one policy. The economic difficulties help to reduce the sovereignty, because people are more willing to accept and obey. In Italy not coincidentally you have an unelected Prime Minister.

Are they using the economy to crush the nation state? It seems to me that they use it to crush people. They manipulate people to prevent them from opposing the new policy, which must, on the contrary, appear to them as the only hope.

Are they therefore all socialists in Brussels?

The project is socialist. I do not know these people personally, but most of them are on the Left, more or less extreme. That means that they favour statist solutions and the regulation of everything. And they all talk like in Lenin's book The State and Revolution, which explains how the nation state will die. His words are that it will "fade until it disappears."

For their part, the Conservatives hold the curious idea that the project can change from within. The EPP does not resist, and trying to influence it from within becomes a good excuse for doing nothing.

Is then in Lenin the matrix of what we are experiencing?

The dream of socialists, the Maximum Programme, has always been to eliminate the private property, the family and the nation state. With the private property they have not succeeded, but they continue on the path of destruction of the family and the nation.

The plan that failed in the East has been transferred to the West; Europeans and Moscow have worked together to implement the "convergence" of the "Common European Home". Prior to 1985, the Left was opposed to the European Community because it was saying that it helped the owners, industrialists, capitalists, and let down the workers. Then they made a U-turn.

“Socialist” for us is a term very different from “communist”. You seem to apply it to the Soviet paradigm as a synonym for “communist”.

No, socialism is the gradual and less violent form of communism, and socialist is the project of the European Union, which was born in Maastricht in 1992. The intent was to save socialism in Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the predictable bankruptcy of the welfare state in the West as well. Welfare costs were growing and there was no way to counter them or stop them.

You can give benefits to people but cannot take them away without alienating a huge part of the population, because you do not get re-elected. So when leftist leaders realized that they were going into the red and that their socialist innovations in Europe would go belly up, they decided to create this administration of unelected people, who could not be sent home.

An administration that however already existed!

Before Maastricht there was no European Union. There was a common market, created to facilitate trade, movement of capital. That's why no one has had anything to object for so long. But in the mid-eighties, rather than an economic community they decided to set up a state. Before Maastricht they never said “union”, they were saying “community”. And they were not talking about it publicly.

Among your predictions for the EU-USSR there was also the gulag. Do you confirm it?

Unfortunately, yes. The EU is creating them slowly. The politically correct is imposed not by persuasion but by repression. In Britain just last month they jailed for hate speech a nineteen-year-old who had written something offensive on Twitter about a football player with black skin. He was sentenced to a month and a half in prison.

As nobody protests, they will gradually widen the net and eventually we will get the gulag. And remember that the European police force is granted immunity, something that was not granted even to the KGB!

Is Barack Obama not part of all this?

For now, Americans do not perceive the European Union, do not see where it is going. But America has a parallel special project, the American Union.

If the process includes the United States of America, what hope is there to stop this global government? It will fail, because it is too big to handle. It is impossible to govern such a huge entity. And notice that the most common resistance is not open, but passive: sabotage.

On the other side is Putin. I know that you have an entirely negative opinion of him, but times change and its strong ties with the Orthodox Church have meant that a few weeks ago Russia joined the majority of other nations in opposition to the United States and the countries of Western Europe on the subject of abortion. Thus Russia is, and has been for a while, a reference point for the Orthodox churches and also for the Catholic Church.

For that matter the same applies to Muslims, who on these issues make a common front at the UN with the Church, but in obedience to their own religion. This does not make them "good", because outside of this topic they are opposed to us as their enemies. It is one of the paradoxes of this world.

Minority German Children Bullied by Muslims in Their Own Schools

Just published on YouTube is a shocking video of discrimination against German and Christian children in German schools. They are severely bullied by Muslim kids in a school where immigrant children are an astonishing 96 percent. Hardly anybody speaks to them, they become introvert. They are outcasts, not integrated into the schools of their own land.

The reporter investigating this shameful situation interviews a boy who tells her how he was chased and attacked for saying that he does not believe in God, and a girl who says she is regularly insulted for being a Christian and called "You shit Christian".

The problem is not addressed by the school staff or the education authorities. The teachers even refuse to talk to the journalist in the video.

Indigenous and Christian children then become fearful even of reporting that they have been bullied to the teachers, not knowing how they will react (maybe they'll be called "racist"?).

The school councillor interviewed in the video admits that this causes real problems in children, like academic failure and refusal to return to school, and yet teachers are afraid to discuss it openly and reproach the Muslim bullies, lest they come "under immediate general suspicion of being against foreigners": and that's obviously anathema to them.

Cultural Marxists and liberals prefer to let their children grow up shy and socially inept than to risk fomenting "xenophobia" by openly discussing this scandal. They seem to be prepared to throw even their kids under the bus.

Some families move away closer to a different school. Do native Europeans have to leave their homes and cities to make way for Muslim immigrants? Many British people choose to go and live abroad and not just for the climate. Is this the future of Europe, or lack thereof?

The last kid interviewed in the video describes his plans for the future thus: "Move away from here to where there are Germans living and where one is left in peace".

Germany's Family Minister Kristina Schröder aknowledged the existence of this issue of children being bullied in schools just for being German as part of "a growing tendency to violence stemming from a 'macho culture' among young Muslim men".

The problem was highlighted in 2010 in the city of Essen by the German TV channel Das Erste:

"They're not threatened with a knife every day. but the children of immigration background clearly have their way here," says the school principal. The female teachers have to deal with students saying "don't speak to her, she's just a German slut."

"When it's Ramadan, there's a state of emergency. The last time it went so far, that they spit in our food," says the home-economics teacher. "People always say that foreigners are discriminated, but here it's precisely the other way around." A Lebanese Arabic teacher says that the German way of living is very clearly being rejected by his students, the attitude is almost chic.

The German children respond with aggression or by over-adapting their behavior. In the playground you find them in the corners. Sebastian, an ethnic German 16 year old, feels bullied by the Muslim students, and is often involved in fights. Juli is a friend of the devout Saleh from Palestine. She calls herself a Muslims, which means: no parties, no alcohol, no sex.

The teachers try to respond t the situation with clarity and by upholding German laws and regulations, but also by mother-tongue classes and understanding for the Lebanese.

Every 5 Minutes a Christian is Killed for His Faith

Every 5 minutes a Christian is killed for his or her religion somewhere in the world.

Yet, leftists, dhimmi media and assorted "intellectuals" say that the main problem is "Islamophobia".

From Zenit, Sociologist: Every 5 Minutes a Christian Is Martyred. Speaks of Emergency in Religious Discrimination:

ROME, JUNE 3, 2011 (Zenit.org).- A sociologist representing a European security organization says that the number of Christians killed each year for their faith is so high that it calculates to one martyr's life being taken every five minutes.

Massimo Introvigne of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) reported this data at a conference on Christian-Jewish-Muslim interfaith dialogue, which concluded today in Hungary. The conference was sponsored by the Hungarian presidency of the Council of the European Union, and included a variety of high-level representatives from the three monotheistic religions, as well as political and social leaders.

Introvigne reported that Christians killed every year for their faith number 105,000, and that number includes only those put to death simply because they are Christians. It does not count the victims of civil or international wars.

"If these numbers are not cried out to the world, if this slaughter is not stopped, if it is not acknowledged that the persecution of Christians is the first worldwide emergency in the matter of violence and religious discrimination, the dialogue between religions will only produce beautiful conferences but no concrete results," he stated.

Egyptian diplomat Aly Mahmoud said that in his country laws have been passed that will protect Christian minorities, for example, prosecuting those who give speeches that incite hatred and banning hostile crowds outside churches.

"However, the danger is that many Christian communities in the Middle East will die from emigration, because all Christians, feeling threatened, will flee," he said.

The diplomat suggested Europe prepare for "a new wave of emigration, this time from Christians fleeing the persecutions."

For his part, Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, chairman for the Russian Orthodox patriarchate's Department of External Church Relations, reminded that "at least 1 million" Christian victims of persecutions are children.

Sharia Police already a Reality in London

Five people so far have been arrested by the police in connection with the offences committed by the self-proclaiming "Muslim vigilantes" last weekend, including causing grievous bodily harm and public order offences.

The video above shows ordinary people on the streets of East London being confronted by Muslim vigilantes telling them that it is a "Muslim area" and "this is a Muslim patrol". They say: "No alcohol is allowed", "The Muslims patroling this area forbid evil, and alcohol is evil", forcing people to relinquish cans and bottles.

Other utterances are: "We don't care if you believe it or not", "We need to control this area and we need to forbid these people to dress like this and exposing themselves outside the mosque", followed by telling aggressively to a normally-dressed (i.e. without hijab) woman and man: "Remove yourself away from the mosque now, and don't come back. Do you understand?".

To another woman who retorted that she was appalled they shouted: "We don't care if you are appalled at all" and "Vigilantes implementing Islam upon your necks".

Despite "progressive" reporters and commentators' lame attempts to insinuate that this could have been a far-right's plot to inflame and divide public opinion on the issue of Islam, investigative journalist Ted Jeory has done his job and found out that Anjem Choudary, spokesman for the now proscribed Islamist association Islam4UK, knew the Muslim vigilantes group.

The Bishop of Rochester's warning in January 2008 that Islamism had turned "already separate communities into 'no-go' areas" is turning out to be true.

This should not surprise anyone who has even sporadically followed the news.

The group Muslims Against the Crusades (MAC) has long designated Tower Hamlets, an East London borough, as one of three areas - the other two are Bradford and Dewsbury, in Yorkshire, Northern England - where to establish three independent states or autonomous territories within the UK, medieval 'emirates' operating entirely outside British law, as testbeds for blanket sharia rule.

Those areas have been chosen because they are heavily populated by Muslims. MAC has been banned, but its ideas are flourishing in Tower Hamlets.

MAC said on its site, now removed:

We suggest it is time that areas with large Muslim populations declare an emirate delineating that Muslims trying to live within this area are trying to live by the sharia as much as possible with their own courts and community watch and schools and even self sufficient trade...

In time we can envisage that the whole of the sharia might one day be implemented starting with these enclaves.

Tower Hamlets Council, the area's local authority, is notorious for having been exposed as infiltrated by Muslim extremists, as has the Labour Party itself, which runs the council.

Tower Hamlets elected as its first directly-elected mayor Lutfur Rahman, an Islamist with ties to the fundamentalist Islamic Forum of Europe, which controls the East London Mosque. This fact also should give an idea of the political propensities of the Muslim population that dominates this part of London.

In another twist of this shameful connivance between Labour and Islamism, last Spring the defeated London mayor candidate for the Labour Party, Ken Livingstone, gave an infamous speech promising to turn London into a “beacon” for the words of the Prophet Mohammed and pledging to “educate the mass of Londoners” in Islam. Andrew Gilligan, London editor of the Telegraph, reports:

[Livingstone said]: “That will help to cement our city as a beacon that demonstrates the meaning of the words of the Prophet.” Mr Livingstone described Mohammed’s words in his last sermon as “an agenda for all humanity.”

He praised the Prophet’s last sermon, telling his audience: “I want to spend the next four years making sure that every non-Muslim in London knows and understands its words and message.” He also promised to “make your life a bit easier financially. [or, to call things by their name, jizya in the form of welfare]”

Thank God he lost.

Hope Is a Theological Virtue

Theodore Dalrymple, in his excellent book Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) , wrote in the year 2000 that the liberal elites at the BBC and other UK media were denying the reality of the British working class's degeneration in the previous few decades.

He describes what he saw in the downmarket seaside resort of Blackpool, in Northern England, which he had visited for the purpose fo writing an article commissioned to him "to describe the conduct of the people who go there for a weekend":

This sophisticated innocence has departed. Without the institution of marriage, mother-in-law and divorce jokes are pointless and passé. Fun now means public drunkenness on a mass scale, screaming in the streets, and the frequent exposure of naked buttocks to passersby. Within moments of arriving on the street along the beach, which was ankle-deep in discarded fast-food wrappings (the smell of stale fat obliterates completely the salt smell of the sea), I saw a woman who had pulled down her slacks and tied a pair of plastic breasts to her bare buttocks, while a man crawled after her on the sidewalk, licking them. At midnight along this street—with the sound of rock music pounding insistently out of every club door, and each door presided over by a pair of steroid-inflated bouncers, among men vomiting into the gutters, and with untold numbers of empty bags of marijuana on the pavement—I saw children as young as six, unattended by adults, waiting for their parents to emerge from their nocturnal recreations.

He recounts how, after the article's publication, he was accused by the mainstream media's intellectual elites of being a snob, and letters sent to these media outlets accused him of not understanding the working class "culture".

But other, unpublished, letters sent by the public were supportive of his position:

The liberal assumption, in this as in most things, is that to understand is to approve (or at least to pardon), and therefore my disapproval indicated a lack of understanding. But strangely enough, the letters that the BBC and the newspaper that published the original article forwarded to me—those they hadn't broadcast or published—wholly endorsed my comments. They were from Blackpool residents and from working-class people elsewhere who passionately denied that working-class culture had always consisted of nothing but mindless obscenity. Several writers spoke very movingly of enduring real poverty in childhood while maintaining self-respect and a striving for mental distinction. The deliberate exclusion of these voices from public expression provided a fine example of how the British intelligentsia goes about its self-appointed task of cultural destruction.

Since the time when Dalrymple wrote about his difficulty in breaking through the media wall on the subject of descent from self-respecting working class to underclass, the press and TV networks have repeatedly published images of events similar to the ones he described occurring at weekends in many other cities and towns across the country, and indeed even abroad, in places like Spain or wherever British holidaymakers can be found.

A single man armed with a pen, determined to expose a problem and indicate a solution, has had a lasting influence in showing a path that other mass means of communication followed.

It is just one of the numerous examples of how change can be easier than we sometimes think.

When I was a teenager in the 60s and 70s, the radical ideas of the Left seemed unrealistic and their goals unattainable. Now for them it's almost mission accomplished.

Things can turn around the other way just as easily as they did this way.

Gates of Vienna Moved. Please Change Link

Due to Google-owned Blogger's decision to take it down twice within a single week, Gates of Vienna, one of the Counterjihad most historical and well-known blogs, has moved to this new address:

http://gatesofvienna.net/

The problem in a move like this, without possibility of redirecting, is that Gates of Vienna might lose its high Google rank of 6, with consequent loss of traffic. So, they are asking to change your links to the new one in order to minimize that negative effect.

Mental Illness and Violence

Reading Ann Coulter's article Guns don’t kill people, the mentally ill do I felt a lot of sympathy for her position.

I attended University in Italy in the late '70s, and I studied psychiatry as part of my Philosophy course.

The anti-psychiatry movement started by British psychiatrist Ronald Laing, which denied the existence of mentall illness, claiming that the whole family of the patient is ill and the psychiatric patient is only the scapegoat of the family's disease, was then very influential.

Italy's democratic psychiatry school of Franco Basaglia of Gorizia's Psychiatric Hospital was very popular. The political slant in Basaglia's approach was that the mentally ill is simply someone who chooses not to conform and integrate, a victim of society or, more specifically, of the political powers who need to emarginate dissenters (and he wasn't talking just about the Soviet Union but of Western democracies too).

I remember even attending, with other university students, a meeting with the patients of Arezzo Psychiatric Hospital, run by another psychiatrist of Basaglia's school, Pirella. Meetings between the hospital patients and the general public were regularly organized. And in these hospitals, the patients were free to go in and out.

The whole idea then was that psychiatric patients had been oppressed and terribly mistreated, that they should not be locked up and that the chance of their being dangerous was risible.

What these movements achieved, as well as influencing the way people look at mental illness, was a profound reform of psychiatric institutions, with the release into "the territory" (the Italian term) or "the community" (the English jargon) of many people previously admitted into mental hospitals.

We are all now familiar with many cases in which some people with psychosis have become a very difficult burden for their families, who can't cope with them and repeatedly asked for them to be re-admitted to a hospital and treated. In some cases such mentally ill people have committed suicide or murders.

This could be the reason why a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, in which respondents were asked to apportion responsibility for the shootings that have taken place in Tucson, Ariz.; Aurora, Colo.; and Newtown, Conn. to various posssible choices of causes, reveals that

The second choice, selected by 82 percent as “a great deal” or “a good amount,” was “the lack of effective treatment for mental illness.”

The first choice was “parents not paying enough attention to what is going on in their children’s lives”, of which 83 percent said that was “a great deal” or a “good amount” responsible. Only 4 percent said “none at all.”

Guns only came in fifth, somehow vindicating Coulter's position, although the percentages were still high:

Tied for fifth place at 59 percent each was “assault and military-style firearms being legal to purchase,” and “the availability of high capacity ammunition clips.”

But the point is: is this scientifically founded?

Here I believe that, as much as the new psychiatric policies may have been failures, to find the right balance is extremely difficult.

There is a statistical fallacy which commonly confounds the issue here. The proportion of prison inmates who are mentally ill is rather high - some sources say almost 1 in 5 in the United States -, and according to a systematic review people with schizophrenia are about twice more likely to be violent than other people, but the proportion of psychotic people who commit violent crimes is extremely low: an Oxford Journals meta-analysis of 7 studies in different countries resulted in an estimate of 1 murder of a person unknown to the mentally ill individual per 14.3 million people per year.

The report concludes:

Stranger homicide in psychosis is extremely rare and is even rarer for a patient who has received treatment with antipsychotic medication. A lack of distinguishing characteristics of stranger homicide offenders and an extremely low base rate of stranger-homicide suggests that risk assessment of patients known to have a psychotic illness will be of little assistance in the prevention of stranger homicides.

We know that hindsight is easy, but prediction is a much harder business.

Psychotic killing of strangers is extremely rare, and rare events are difficult to handle statistically. Ben Goldacre explains it in his book Bad Science:

Let's think about violence. The best predictive tool for psychiatric violence has a ‘sensitivity' [accuracy in predicting correctly] of 0.75, and a ‘specificity' [accuracy in not over-predicting] of 0.75. It's tougher to be accurate when predicting an event in humans, with human minds and changing human lives. Let's say 5 per cent of patients seen by a community mental health team will be involved in a violent event in a year. Using the same maths as we did for the HIV tests, your ‘0.75' predictive tool would be wrong eighty-six times out of a hundred. For serious violence, occurring at 1 per cent a year, with our best ‘0.75' tool, you inaccurately finger your potential perpetrator ninety-seven times out of a hundred. Will you preventively detain ninety-seven people to prevent three violent events? And will you apply that rule to alcoholics and assorted nasty antisocial types as well?

For murder, the extremely rare crime in question in this report, for which more action was demanded, occurring at one in 10,000 a year among patients with psychosis, the false positive rate is so high that the best predictive test is entirely useless.

This is not a counsel of despair. There are things that can be done, and you can always try to reduce the number of actual stark cock-ups, although it's difficult to know what proportion of the ‘one murder a week' represents a clear failure of a system, since when you look back in history, through the retrospecto-scope, anything that happens will look as if it was inexorably leading up to your one bad event. I'm just giving you the maths on rare events. What you do with it is a matter for you.

Associated Press Bans the Use of "Islamophobia", "Homophobia" and Other Words

The major news agency Associated Press (AP) has recently decided to put an end to the use of "Islamophobia", "homophobia", "ethnic cleansing" and other politically charged words in its highly influential The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law, generally called the AP Stylebook.

The book, annually updated, is a guide for style, usage, grammar, punctuation and reporting principles and practices used by reporters, editors and others in the US newspapers, news industry, magazines, broadcasters, public relations firms and so on.

Although not all publications use it, the AP Stylebook is regarded as a newspaper industry standard.

Therefore, the decision of making these changes, which will appear in the next printed edition that usually comes out in June, has particular importance.

The online Style Book now says that "-phobia," "an irrational, uncontrollable fear, often a form of mental illness" should not be used "in political or social contexts," including "homophobia" and "Islamophobia." It also calls "ethnic cleansing" a "euphemism," and says the AP "does not use 'ethnic cleansing' on its own. It must be enclosed in quotes, attributed and explained."

"Ethnic cleansing is a euphemism for pretty violent activities, a phobia is a psychiatric or medical term for a severe mental disorder. Those terms have been used quite a bit in the past, and we don't feel that's quite accurate," AP Deputy Standards Editor Dave Minthorn told POLITICO.

"When you break down 'ethnic cleansing,' it's a cover for terrible violent activities. It's a term we certainly don't want to propgate," Minthorn continued. "Homophobia especially -- it's just off the mark. It's ascribing a mental disability to someone, and suggests a knowledge that we don't have. It seems inaccurate. Instead, we would use something more neutral: anti-gay, or some such, if we had reason to believe that was the case."

"We want to be precise and accurate and neutral in our phrasing," he said.

This is an obvious improvement, since"homophobia" and "Islamophobia" are terms coined with the sole purpose of denigrating an opponent in a debate, as ad hominem attacks, and are devoid of any real meaning: they say more about the people who use them than about those they refer to.

Regarding "Islamophobia", David Horowitz and Robert Spencer have written a pamphlet on the word's origins that can be ordered or read for free online, entitled "Islamophobia: Thought Crime of the Totalitarian Future":

The U.S. is slowly but certainly accommodating the view that free speech, when it comes to religious (i.e. Muslim) matters, is suspect. We have come to this point, in large part, because of the growing success of the idea that any criticism of Islam is actually a pathology, rather than a legitimate exercise of free speech. It is, in other words, “Islamophobia.”

In their pamphlet, Islamophobia: Thought Crime of the Totalitarian Future, David Horowitz and Robert Spencer document how the origin of the word “Islamophobia” is a coinage of the Muslim Brotherhood. They show how the Brotherhood launched a campaign, by ginning up “Islamophobia” as a hate crime, to stigmatize mention of such issues as radical Islam’s violence against women and murder of homosexuals, and the constant incitement of many imams to terrorism. The authors make the case that “Islamophobia” is a dagger aimed at the heart of free speech and also at the heart of our national security.

Regarding the political use of the suffix -phobia generally, it is interesting to note, as Peter LaBarbera does, how unequally and uni-directionally it is employed; *-phobes never belong to the dominant orthodoxy, but always to the class of those who dissent from it:

We at Americans For Truth, like our peers in the pro-family, conservative movement who stand in principled and faith-based opposition to the LGBT political and cultural agenda, do not “fear” homosexuals. We simply disagree profoundly with the normalization of homosexual behavior and the elevation of homosexuality and “gay” identity to “civil rights” status.

Of course, there are people who do fear homosexuals, but there are also people who fear conservative Christians. So isn’t it odd that “homophobia” (and “Islamophobia”) became mainstreamed in America’s media-driven lexicon, while “Christian-phobia” did not? (And now transgender activists, piggybacking off the semantic success of their homosexual allies, are pushing the equally dubious “transphobia” to advance their agenda.)

You could easily fill ten large books with examples of abuses of the tendentious term “homophobia” and its derivative, “homophobe,” in the same-sex debate. Advocates of homosexuality and foes of biblical sexual morality would never allow themselves to be categorized and caricatured as “phobes” — our friend John Biver posits the Secular Left as “morality-phobia” HERE — yet they pretend that somehow “homophobia” objectively describes opposition to homosexuality. That’s because to far too many homosexual advocates, the end justifies the means, and the “gay” cause advances when its critics are cynically and falsely cast as hateful and fearful creeps.

We will have more on this story. For now, it is gratifying to see AP make a move toward neutrality, objectivity and fairness in its coverage of homosexuality.

It's extremely telling that Associated Press decided to drop both "Islamophobia" and "homophobia" simultaneously, because their origin and usage as denigratory terms, free-speech attacks and thought-policing instruments are remarkably similar.

It is really good news that someone in a position of influence in the media has started taking notice. And it is not the first time:

First the Associated Press announced that it would continue using “Illegal Alien” instead of “Undocumented American”, “Accidental Border Crosser” or “Beautiful Dreamer” on the grounds that it was well… technically accurate.

...The Associated Press is not taking a conservative position here, but we have reached such a point of cultural decay that fact-based positions that derive their grounds from reason and proof are already innately conservative. Or as George Orwell put it, “We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”

The left’s counterattack on behalf of homophobia is already irrational, even from the standpoint of their own interests, because it communicates mental problems when the goal is to communicate bigotry.

Slate argues that homophobia is just like arachnophobia. The argument is wrong on a number of levels. The most simple level where it’s wrong is that the subject under discussion is not even fear. It’s dislike. The Guardian and several other media outlets have churned out pieces arguing that dislike of homosexuality is primarily motivated by fear. But that’s an opinion and the very argument testifies to a news media that is hardly able to distinguish fact-based reporting from opinion-mongering.

Finally there is something Orwellian about describing political or religious views in terms usually employed for mental illness. It skips past discussing what people believe or do to claiming intimate knowledge of their motives and passing judgement on their sanity. It’s reasonable for the AP to opt out of such heavily politicized and inaccurate language that claims to report on the state of mental health, rather than the state of events.

France to Hire Imams for Prisons to Fight Spread of Jihad Ideology

The government of Hollande in France is planning to hire dozens of full-time imams for French prisons.

The rationale behind it is to promote "integration" and freedom of worship, and for that goal the Imams will teach Islam classes to the inmates.

60 prisons in France already have their own imam, and 60 more will get that in the next two years, according to The Two Cities, the journal of the French Department of Prison Administration.

“We have to make sure that religion and worship take place, but that these also respect the values and laws of the Republic,” Justice Minister Christine Taubira explained.

How the teaching of Islam can help the prison population or anybody else "respect the values and laws of the Republic" is anyone's guess. It looks to me like the French government, if its intention really is to curb Jihadist ideology, is scoring an own goal, probably due to the unfounded, almost incredibly naive belief that "true Islam" is peaceful. Naivety that could be easily cured, given that Qu'ran copies are easy to find and buy, so people can find out what Islam is from the horse's mouth. Unless Taubira thinks that the Imams she employs are going to ignore Islam's holy book in their classes.

Here is a taste:

“… Fight the unbelievers until no other religion except Islam is left.” — Quran 2:193/189

"As to those who reject faith, I will punish them with terrible agony in this world and in the Hereafter, nor will they have anyone to help." - Quran 3:56

The predictions of people who truly know Islam, in this as in all other cases have yet again proved right.

In the highly informative post "Muslim Demographics And Effect", adapted from Dr. Peter Hammond’s book Slavery, Terrorism & Islam: Historical Roots and Contemporary Threat (Amazon USA), (Amazon UK) , The Muslim Issue offers this:

"Islam’s Effect On Society At 2%-5%

"At 2% to 5%, they begin to proselytize from other ethnic minorities and disaffected groups, often with major recruiting from the jails and among street gangs."

As predicted, with Muslims now making up 10% of the French population (at 6-7 million people the most numerous minority), the Jihadist ideology is dangerously spreading among prison inmates.

The French police recently arrested a young man who was preparing attacks on synagogues in Paris and had become a militant Muslim in his prison cell.

Grandma Scares Away Store Robber with a Gun

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What happened in a convenience store in Milwaukee confirms the view of those who want the Second Amendment upheld, that guns, yes, can be used to commit crimes but they can also be essential to prevent and stop them.

I'm on the fence on this, I can see the merits of both positions. And I can see that to let the state (and the criminals) be the only ones in possession of weapons requires an enormous amount of trust in that state.

Ernestine Aldana, a 48-year-old grandmother working in the shop, being threatened with a knife by a robber, responded by pulling out a gun and pointing it at him. He got scared and ran away.

Media Double Standard for Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party

The New York Post on Monday reported on an alleged link between Occupy Wall Street and a New York City couple arrested for being found in possession of an array of weapons, a bombmaking explosive, instructions to make bombs and 'The Terrorist Encyclopedia' in their Greenwich Village apartment.

http://m.nypost.com/p/news/local/manhattan/bombmaking_in_the_village_LoRDqNzP02SDZyfC1pLVXN

The couple are Morgan Gliedman, daughter of a prominent doctor, and Harvard graduate and alleged Occupy Wall Street activist Aaron Greene. Sources told the paper that people who know him say he has 'extreme' political views.

Occupy Wal Street has denied the purported association, which the NYPD told The Daily Mail they are still investigating.

http://press.nycga.net/2012/12/31/nypd-media-reports-attempt-to-link-ows-to-crime-again/

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2255609/Morgan-Gliedman-Aaron-Greene-junkies-terrorists-police-say.html?ITO=socialnet-twitter-mailonline&ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=socialnet-twitter-mailonline

The couple's apartment in which the police found weapons and explosives is near the flat where two rich young men accidentally blew themselves up in 1970 while making a bomb for the far-left group Weather Underground.

Bloggers have expressed concern that, in view of the left-wing bias in the mainstream media, this story will not be given the extensive and balanced coverage it deserves.

http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2013/01/01/bomb-arrest-a-test-for-the-media/

The ABC network did not even mention the alleged link of the arrested with Occupy Wall Street, although it had last July wrongly accused a member of the Tea Party of a mass killing, for which it later apologized.

http://m.newsbusters.org/blogs/scott-whitlock/2013/01/02/abc-skips-occupy-connection-terror-case-falsely-smeared-tea-partier-

The connection between Greene and OWS is still under investigation, not an entirely unreasonable assumption, given the violent propensities of some of the movement's elements.

The Tea Party, on the other hand, despite media's strenuous efforts, were never found guilty of any violent act.

As Human Events puts it:

'But the founding principles of OWS, the concept of illegal 'occupation' to compel attention to its agenda, inevitably corrupted the enterprise, and attracted people with even more vigorous plans for compelling the attention of the public.

'It's not just a minor stylistic difference that the Tea Party crew was law-abiding and tidy - it goes to the heart of who they are, what they want, and how they regard the rest of the American public. That's why the media's fervent search for Tea Party violence never turned up the kind of story they resolutely ignore when it emanates from their once-beloved, now-forgotten Occupy crew.'

http://www.humanevents.com/2012/12/31/occupy-wall-street-organizer-busted-for-possession-of-mostly-peaceful-bomb-components/

From Atheist to Agnostic

I was an atheist for almost my entire life. I could not believe that God existed, so that's how I described myself.

I believed in Christianity as an ethical system, so I would call myself, as the great Oriana Fallaci, a 'Christian atheist', expression which has simarities to 'secular Jew'.

I have recently realized things that cast serious doubts on my previous way of thinking.

The moral validity of Christianity was in no question before and is in no question now. But it is the issue of the existence of God which is not so simple as I mistakenly believed.

Science in itself is too limited to provide evidence to prove or disprove it, as I've always known, although Newton himself, for example, made God part of his theory as absolute time.

But, paradoxically, it is not the content of science, namely what is inside it, that gives us an indication here, but rather its limits, what is outside it.

Science's laws of nature can explain many of its phenomena and have the potential to make us understand even more.

But there are three moments which require an enormous leap of faith in the NON-existence of God to believe that science can ever explain them.

These three moments are: the origin of matter, life and consciousness.

Science can understand pretty well what happens after those key moments, but it cannot explain them.

In successive posts I'll deal with these further, but for the moment I want to report how Melanie Phillips, in her book The Book Turned Upside Down, describes her conversation with Richard Dawkins in 2008 following a public debate between him and John Lennox.

'I asked Dawkins whether he believed that the origin of all matter was most likely to have been an entirely spontaneous event. He agreed that he did think so. I put it to him that he seemed therefore to be arguing that something could be created out of nothing - which surely runs counter to the scientific principles of verifiable evidence that he tells us should govern all our thinking'.

Think about it: people who do not believe in God usually adduce as reason how we have never experienced anything with God's attributes.

But the alternative theory, that matter, ie something, arose from nothing, also describes an event that we have never experienced.

Atheism activists and scientific triumphalists, of whom Dawkins is the most famous, misleadingly portray this conflict about the existence of God as one between the rational believers in evidence-based theories (as they, the atheists, modestly consider themselves) and the irrational, superstition-bound theists.

But the reality is entirely different. The question of whether the universe had a Creator or emerged from nothing is one which can be answered, either way, ONLY with reference to, and belief in, an entity or event of which we have absolutely no experience.

Both our senses and evidence here do not help at all.

It is a work in progress but for the moment, not being able to choose one or the other explanation, I call myself agnostic.

Obama's Fiscal Cliff Is Permanent

America will be on a fiscal cliff no matter what agreements are reached between Democrats and Republicans.

The damage done by the Obama administration to the economy is too deep to be saved by last-minute deals.

Tax increases on the rich have virtually no impact on the reduction of the US national deficit, and are imposed for ideological, not practical, reasons.

The type of measures that could be most effective, reducing public spending, are exactly what Obama does not want to do. He did not pursue that policy in his first term and is unlikely to do it now, after being re-elected.

The Democrats, as they have done many times before (http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/51958#When:22:20:54Z), make promises that they will not maintain, in order to deceive Republicans and lead them to make concessions.

Harvard professor and chairman of the Economics Department at Harvard University Greg Mankiw explains why this policy of tax increases on the rich will not solve the debt problem and will only lead to more, never-ending tax hikes:

http://gregmankiw.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/the-neverending-quest-for-more.html?m=1

He also explains why taxing 'the rich', which is already done anyway since one third of their income is taken in tax - despite the media's generous coverage of unenlightening anecdotes about unrepresentative cases of tax avoidance -, cannot mathematically solve the problem of the government's overspending on entitlements. So the choice can only be between drastically reducing the welfare system expenditure or increasing taxes on the middle class (Mankiw obiously does not consider the possibility of robbing the rich of all or most of their money, although Obama and his comrades might):

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/30/business/on-middle-class-tax-rates-too-much-wishful-thinking.html?smid=pl-share&_r=0

The current policy is lunacy and Obama has dragged American economy into a vicious, self-perpetuating circle of ever-increasing poverty and on a road to communism not through revolution but by stealth, piecemeal, a bit of redistributive tax hike at a time.

Africa Energy Consumption Growing Fastest in the World

The continent of Africa, home to 15 percent of the globe's population, has the fastest-growing energy consumption in the world.

http://m.csmonitor.com/World/Africa/2013/0101/Africa-s-energy-consumption-growing-fastest-in-world

This is part of the explanations of why attempts to reduce carbon emissions are irrational and destructive.

If you exclude Third World countries from restrictions in their use of fossil fuels, as the Kyoto Protocol does, even by the calculation of those who believe in anthropogenic global warming you have no impact whatsoever on the reduction of warming.

If, on the other hand, you impose those restrictions on developing countries as well, the effect on global warming is minimal, merely delaying it by something like 5 years, while there is no question that you deliver a blow to the world's poorest nations' possibilities of economic development.