Thanks to 3 Senators, China Entrenched in Iraqi Oil for 20 Years
BigGovernment.com ^ | May 19 2010 | Steve Schippert
This story might slip right past you. It’s understandable, considering most Americans have no idea of the context or how it happened that the state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) is now set for 20 years in Iraq, thanks to a deal just inked between the Iraqi government and Communist China. The Iraqis originally selected America’s Exxon-Mobil. I’ll wager you probably didn’t know that. You’ll want to read on. But brace yourself.
It’s the classic American political tale of self-loathing crafted by the usual suspects. With its government firm and its security at its post-surge best, the Iraqi government needed to quickly bring its oilfields online. It desperately needed the revenues. The summer of 2008 saw oil prices above $100 per barrel and Americans were paying $4 per gallon at the pump.
The best in the business – the best in the world – is Exxon-Mobil. And the government of Iraq turned to America’s Exxon-Mobil to bring undeveloped and underdeveloped fields online to rejuvenate its own revenue sources and ween itself and its people off of American aid.
But three American Senators would have none of it. Senators John Kerry (D-MA), Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Claire McCaskill (D-MO) sent a public letter to the Bush administration’s Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, imploring her to derail the Iraqi deal.
(See: ‘In China We Trust’: Senators Closed Door to US Oil Investment In Iraq.)
As the Senate troika stated, “It is our fear that this action by the Iraqi government could further deepen political tensions in Iraq and put our service members in even great danger.”
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Sunday, May 9, 2010
WHAT IS YOUR MOST IMPORTANT DAY?
Five Hanged in Secret, Twenty Seven others Facing Hangman’s Noose
(9 May 2010) The sudden execution of five Iranian political prisoners today appears to signal a government policy of relying on politically-motivated executions to strengthen its position vis-à-vis its opposition through terror and intimidation, the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran said.
The Campaign condemned the execution of five political prisoners, including Farzad Kamangar, a 34-year-old teacher and social worker, who was charged with Moharebeh (taking up arms against God), convicted and sentenced to death in February 2008, after a seven-minute long trial in which “zero evidence” was presented. Four others also executed included Shirin Alam Holi, Ali Heidarian, Farhad Vakili and Mehdi Eslamian.
“Kamangar was arbitrarily arrested and set up to be killed in a staged trial, with no opportunity to present a defense,” stated Aaron Rhodes, a spokesperson for the Campaign.
“These secret executions are, in reality, nothing more than state-sanctioned murders, and provide more evidence of the Islamic Republic’s brazen contempt for international human rights standards,” he said.
Kamangar’s lawyer, Khalil Bahrmian, told the Campaign that he was in shock because judicial authorities had reassured him and Kamanger that the charges against his client have been found to be baseless and he was no longer in danger of execution.
“I keep thinking this is a bad nightmare and I am going to wake up from it and Farzad is alive. It just doesn’t make sense,” he said. Kamangar’s family have also told the media that they had received similar assurances and no one had informed them of the execution, either before or after it had taken place.
Shirin Alam Holi, a 28- year- old Kurdish women was also executed today. In several letters recently written from Evin prison she denied charges of terrorism against her and said she had been tortured to make such false confessions in front of television cameras, which she had refused.
At least sixteen Kurdish political prisoners and eleven post-election protestors are in danger of similar unannounced and sudden executions.
The Campaign and other human rights, teachers and labor rights organizations have fought strenuously for Kamangar’s life. In a letter of 31 July 2008, the Campaign appealed to the then Head of Iran’s Judiciary, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, to commute his sentence and investigate a series of major legal irregularities, breaches of due process and grave human rights violations, which occurred in the course of his arrest, incarceration, and trial.
Kamangar was held incommunicado for seven months after his arrest in July 2006. There is strong evidence that Kamangar was tortured.
His lawyer has stated that no evidence could be found in his interrogation records, file, or in presentations by prosecutors or the judge’s decision to support the charge of Mohareb.
Kamagar’s trial lasted no more than seven (7) minutes, three (3) of which were consumed by reading the indictment against him. Neither Kamangar nor his lawyer was permitted to speak at the trial.
The sixteen other Kurdish prisoners in danger of execution are: Zeinab Jalilian, Habibollah Latifi, Shirkoo Moarefi, Hussein Khazri, Rostam Arkia, Mostafa Salimi, Anvar Rostami, Rashid Akhkandi, Mohammad Amin Agooshi, Ahmad Pooladkhani, Seyed Sami Husseini, Seyed Jamal Mohammadi, Hasan Talei, Iraj Mohammadi, Mohammad Amin Abdollahi and Ghader Mohammadzadeh.
The nine post-election protestors facing execution include: Mohammad-Amin Valian, Jafar Kazemi, Mohammad Ali Aghaee, Abdolreza Ghanberi, Motahareh Bahrami, Mohsen Daneshpour, Ahmad Daneshpour, Rayhaneh Haj Ebrahim, Hadi Ghaemi (not related to the Campaign’s director of the same name).
Iran's Nobel Prize winner - Shirin Ebadi sued the government newspaper Kayhan for libelresulting in the editor Sharyatmadari being summoned to court. The trial also lasted a mere SEVEN minutes during which only HE was allowed to speak, wherr he repeated what he had sritten in a slanderous tirade at the end of which the court session ended and no witness nor the Ebadi lawyer was allowed to particpate.
Note: in a general repression in advance of the coming protests on the anniversary of the "selection" of the President "Usurper" (Ahmadi-Nejad not Obama), Tehran police arrested some 80 people in night raids for attending a clandestine music concert and immoral clothing.
They are promising more raids to arrest people at parks (usually gays and people with pets, which are now forbidden in public, while gays are supposed to be extinct in Iran) and to crack down (pun intended) on drug addicts, who live mostly on the streets and accost people like our San Francisco panhandlers (smile).
Unlike the pandhandlers many of those arrested for any reason will not live through the event. And women will usually wish they were dead after the sadistic sexual abuse they endure.
Sadly, our Marxist-Islamist Oba-Hussein Administration which receives funds and support from the Mullahs and are a bunch of Chicago street thugs, feel closer to the Mullah regime thuggery than to the pain of the people.
The same attitude appears increasingly in their dealing with our American populace, where we have their wishes thrust down our throats with a disregard similar to the Mullahs.
To raise awareness regarding political executions in Iran, the Campaign has released this short video below.
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
AMONG CRIMINAL MOSLEMS
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Nicolai Sennels, a Danish psychologist who worked for several years with young criminal Muslims in a Copenhagen prison. He is the author of Among Criminal Muslims. A Psychologist’s Experience from the Copenhagen Municipality. The book will be out in English later this year. He can be contacted at: nicolaisennels@gmail.com.
FP: Nicolai Sennels, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
I would like to talk to you today about your experience working with young criminal Muslims in a Copenhagen prison. Let’s begin by talking about how you got into your line of work.
Sennels: Thank Jamie.
Well., many people think that I took the prison job because I wanted to get a closer look at Muslim mentality, failed integration and Islam. But I did not. I was just looking for a job and having worked as a social worker taking care of teenagers for several years part time while studying at Copenhagen University to become a psychologist, it was natural for me to apply for a job involving juvenile offenders. I had no idea that seven out of ten teenagers in the average Danish youth prisons have a Muslim background. Since I was the first psychologist at the institution I was very free to develop my position as psychologist.
The main job was to find out the young peoples’ pedagogical and therapeutic needs and develop therapeutic methods fitted for those needs. And this I did and this is what my book is about. The unusual thing about my work is that I found out that my Muslim clients had certain psychological characteristics that my non-Muslim – mostly Danish – clients did not have. They were all between 15 and 17 years old, most of them showed antisocial behaviour and a big part of both groups came from homes with a certain lack of emotional support. I guess nine out of ten were boys and though the main part came from less well functioning homes I also had many Muslim and Danish clients who’s parents and elder siblings were well educated, had normal jobs and so on.
I worked in the prison for a bit less than three years and had around 150 Muslim clients and 100 Danish clients. I conducted group therapies and individual therapies and with such a large amount of both Muslim and non-Muslim clients I had a relatively large background material for understanding and comparing their psychological development and the underlying conditions influencing this development. Normal “real” research projects of this kind – consisting of long and several qualitative interviews – most often only have 20-30 subjects as background material.
FP: Ok, so some of your conclusions?
Sennels: Well, one significant conclusion was that having been raised in a Muslim environment – with Muslim parents and traditions – includes the risk of developing certain antisocial patterns.
About two thirds of all teenagers accused for criminal actions in Copenhagen have a Muslim background. For years the explanation for this phenomenon has been that Muslims are discriminated against by Danish employers and are thus unable to find a job. The consequence is that Muslims are poor – and this poverty then gets the blame for the high crime rate among young Muslim men.
As a humanist and psychologist I have to expose and oppose this faulty explanation. Explaining psychological development and complicated human mental and behavioural patterns by pointing on the amount of kroner, Euros or dollars rolling in to a person’s bank account every first bank day of the month is a very materialistic and two-dimensional view on the human being. What is first of all deciding our actions is our own free will and motivation – which are first of all influenced by the emotional, cultural and in some cases religious frame that we grew up in.
It is easy to establish a statistical connection between poverty and criminal behaviour – but what comes first? I saw a lot of young teenagers sowing the seeds for their own future unemployment by not going to school, staining their criminal records and developing unattractive social habits such as aggressiveness, insecurity and lack of respect for authorities.
FP: Did you find any real differences between Muslims coming from different parts of the Muslim world?
Sennels: My experience from working with Muslims is that the culture developed under Islamic influence supports the development of certain psychological characteristics. I had Muslim clients from most of the Muslim world: most of the Middle East, Muslim countries in Africa, Pakistan and ex-Yugoslavia. I did not register any major differences between the mentalities between these countries. The only real importance deciding the impact of Muslim mentality was whether the client himself identified himself strongly as belonging to the Muslim society or not. There was a quantitative difference from the often less Islamic Muslims from e.g. ex-Yugoslavia and the clients from the Middle East who mostly identified themselves strongly as being Muslims.
By far the most of my 150 Muslim clients expressed strong loyalty to their God, Allah, and their prophet but less than half was actively practising Islam by doing their prayers, Quran studies etc. But there did not seem to be any difference between the actively practising group and the group that could be called loyal but passive believers. Seen from the therapy room, the mentality stemming from Islamic influence on the societies where it is the dominating value system is so strongly rooted in the culture that Muslims are influenced by its dogmas and values no matter if they pray five times a day and can recite the Quran or not.
FP: Draw for us a psychological profile of Muslim culture. How does it shape a human being’s mind and behaviour to grow up in such a culture?
Sennels: The most important characteristics that I found concerns aggression, self-confidence, individual responsibility and identity.
Concerning anger, it quickly becomes clear that Muslims in general have a different view on aggression, anger and threatening behaviour than Danes and probably most of our Western world.
For most Westerners, it is an embarrassing sign of weakness if people become angry. This view on anger is probably consolidated already in early childhood. I have been working as a school psychologist for several years and bullying is a continuous problem at the schools that I work in. The interesting thing is that the children who are most likely to be the target of being bullied are the children that get angry the easiest. If people get angry we have a tendency to lose respect for them and in many cases we try to tease them to provoke them even more – with the pedagogical aim of helping the person to realize the childishness of his or her behaviour. Trying to get one’s will by acting aggressively or using threats is seen as immature and our reaction is often to ridicule or simply ignore them. Thus, the shortest way to lose face in our Western culture is to show anger.
It is completely opposite in the Muslim culture. While most of my Danish clients who had problems with anger felt embarrassed about it, none of my Muslim clients ever seemed to understand our view on anger. I spent countless hours doing Anger Management therapy with both Danish and Muslim clients and hence I had very good opportunities to experience the cultural differences concerning this specific emotion, ways of handling it and reacting to it.
In Muslim culture, it is expected that one should show anger and threatening behaviour if one is criticized or teased. If a Muslim does not react aggressively when criticized he is seen as weak, not worth trusting and he thus loses social status immediately.
This cocktail of cultural differences has sparked the ongoing debate on free speech all over the world. The free world’s criticism and jokes about Islam is met with anger and threats of terror. When a Danish cartoonist shows the Muslims’ prophet with a bomb in his turban to illustrate the fact that Mohammed conducted dozens of massacres and called for global violent jihad against non-Muslims, the reaction of Muslim leaders and their followers was exactly to confirm Westergaard’s drawing: They responded with jihad on all possible levels – threats of genocide, terror, economical boycott, lawsuits and using democratic systems in our countries, EU and the UN to challenge and destroy our laws on free speech.
The wisdom and bravery of any child in any school yard to people using aggression to hide their own insecurity because of a simple drawing would lead to more jokes and logic as a mean to pedagogically point out obvious human weaknesses. Unfortunately most of our politicians are not as wise and brave as the average school child.
FP: Expand a bit on the differences between Muslim and Western cultures in terms of self-confidence.
Sennels: The concept of honor in the Muslim culture is – just like in the case with anger – opposite of our Western view. It is common in the Muslim culture to be exceedingly aware of one’s status in the group, other peoples’ view of oneself and any signs of any kind of criticism. The aggressive response to anything that can make one insecure is seen as an expression of honorable behaviour. But what is honorable about that? What kind of honor needs to be defended by all means necessary – including the abolishment of women’s human rights, such as the right to pick their own sexual partners, clothes, husband and life style? What is honorable about anger and the lack of ability to ignore provocations and handle criticism constructively?
After listening to more than a hundred Muslim teenagers telling their stories about their feelings, thoughts, reactions, families, religion, culture, the life in their Muslim ghettos and their home countries, it became clear to me that to a Muslim such behavior is the very core of keeping one’s honor. But seen through the eyes of Western psychology, it is all an expression of a lack of self-confidence. According to our view, the base of being authentic and honorable is to know one’s strengths and weakness – and accepting them. The ability to think “your opinion about me, not mine – and mine counts to me” when provoked and being mature enough to handle criticism constructively is a source of social status in the Western world.
Unfortunately, the Muslim concept of honor transforms especially their men into fragile glass-like personalities that need to protect themselves by scaring their surroundings with their aggressive attitude. The show of so-called narcissistic rage is very common among Muslims. The fear of criticism is in many cases not far from paranoia. It is not without reason that self-irony and self-criticism is completely absent in the Muslim societies. Seen from a psychological perspective – whose aim is to produce self-confident, happy, free, loving and productive individuals; and not to please a hateful God or culture traditions – Muslim culture is in many ways psychologically unhealthy to grow up in.
FP: Nicolai Sennels, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
I would like to talk to you today about your experience working with young criminal Muslims in a Copenhagen prison. Let’s begin by talking about how you got into your line of work.
Sennels: Thank Jamie.
Well., many people think that I took the prison job because I wanted to get a closer look at Muslim mentality, failed integration and Islam. But I did not. I was just looking for a job and having worked as a social worker taking care of teenagers for several years part time while studying at Copenhagen University to become a psychologist, it was natural for me to apply for a job involving juvenile offenders. I had no idea that seven out of ten teenagers in the average Danish youth prisons have a Muslim background. Since I was the first psychologist at the institution I was very free to develop my position as psychologist.
The main job was to find out the young peoples’ pedagogical and therapeutic needs and develop therapeutic methods fitted for those needs. And this I did and this is what my book is about. The unusual thing about my work is that I found out that my Muslim clients had certain psychological characteristics that my non-Muslim – mostly Danish – clients did not have. They were all between 15 and 17 years old, most of them showed antisocial behaviour and a big part of both groups came from homes with a certain lack of emotional support. I guess nine out of ten were boys and though the main part came from less well functioning homes I also had many Muslim and Danish clients who’s parents and elder siblings were well educated, had normal jobs and so on.
I worked in the prison for a bit less than three years and had around 150 Muslim clients and 100 Danish clients. I conducted group therapies and individual therapies and with such a large amount of both Muslim and non-Muslim clients I had a relatively large background material for understanding and comparing their psychological development and the underlying conditions influencing this development. Normal “real” research projects of this kind – consisting of long and several qualitative interviews – most often only have 20-30 subjects as background material.
FP: Ok, so some of your conclusions?
Sennels: Well, one significant conclusion was that having been raised in a Muslim environment – with Muslim parents and traditions – includes the risk of developing certain antisocial patterns.
About two thirds of all teenagers accused for criminal actions in Copenhagen have a Muslim background. For years the explanation for this phenomenon has been that Muslims are discriminated against by Danish employers and are thus unable to find a job. The consequence is that Muslims are poor – and this poverty then gets the blame for the high crime rate among young Muslim men.
As a humanist and psychologist I have to expose and oppose this faulty explanation. Explaining psychological development and complicated human mental and behavioural patterns by pointing on the amount of kroner, Euros or dollars rolling in to a person’s bank account every first bank day of the month is a very materialistic and two-dimensional view on the human being. What is first of all deciding our actions is our own free will and motivation – which are first of all influenced by the emotional, cultural and in some cases religious frame that we grew up in.
It is easy to establish a statistical connection between poverty and criminal behaviour – but what comes first? I saw a lot of young teenagers sowing the seeds for their own future unemployment by not going to school, staining their criminal records and developing unattractive social habits such as aggressiveness, insecurity and lack of respect for authorities.
FP: Did you find any real differences between Muslims coming from different parts of the Muslim world?
Sennels: My experience from working with Muslims is that the culture developed under Islamic influence supports the development of certain psychological characteristics. I had Muslim clients from most of the Muslim world: most of the Middle East, Muslim countries in Africa, Pakistan and ex-Yugoslavia. I did not register any major differences between the mentalities between these countries. The only real importance deciding the impact of Muslim mentality was whether the client himself identified himself strongly as belonging to the Muslim society or not. There was a quantitative difference from the often less Islamic Muslims from e.g. ex-Yugoslavia and the clients from the Middle East who mostly identified themselves strongly as being Muslims.
By far the most of my 150 Muslim clients expressed strong loyalty to their God, Allah, and their prophet but less than half was actively practising Islam by doing their prayers, Quran studies etc. But there did not seem to be any difference between the actively practising group and the group that could be called loyal but passive believers. Seen from the therapy room, the mentality stemming from Islamic influence on the societies where it is the dominating value system is so strongly rooted in the culture that Muslims are influenced by its dogmas and values no matter if they pray five times a day and can recite the Quran or not.
FP: Draw for us a psychological profile of Muslim culture. How does it shape a human being’s mind and behaviour to grow up in such a culture?
Sennels: The most important characteristics that I found concerns aggression, self-confidence, individual responsibility and identity.
Concerning anger, it quickly becomes clear that Muslims in general have a different view on aggression, anger and threatening behaviour than Danes and probably most of our Western world.
For most Westerners, it is an embarrassing sign of weakness if people become angry. This view on anger is probably consolidated already in early childhood. I have been working as a school psychologist for several years and bullying is a continuous problem at the schools that I work in. The interesting thing is that the children who are most likely to be the target of being bullied are the children that get angry the easiest. If people get angry we have a tendency to lose respect for them and in many cases we try to tease them to provoke them even more – with the pedagogical aim of helping the person to realize the childishness of his or her behaviour. Trying to get one’s will by acting aggressively or using threats is seen as immature and our reaction is often to ridicule or simply ignore them. Thus, the shortest way to lose face in our Western culture is to show anger.
It is completely opposite in the Muslim culture. While most of my Danish clients who had problems with anger felt embarrassed about it, none of my Muslim clients ever seemed to understand our view on anger. I spent countless hours doing Anger Management therapy with both Danish and Muslim clients and hence I had very good opportunities to experience the cultural differences concerning this specific emotion, ways of handling it and reacting to it.
In Muslim culture, it is expected that one should show anger and threatening behaviour if one is criticized or teased. If a Muslim does not react aggressively when criticized he is seen as weak, not worth trusting and he thus loses social status immediately.
This cocktail of cultural differences has sparked the ongoing debate on free speech all over the world. The free world’s criticism and jokes about Islam is met with anger and threats of terror. When a Danish cartoonist shows the Muslims’ prophet with a bomb in his turban to illustrate the fact that Mohammed conducted dozens of massacres and called for global violent jihad against non-Muslims, the reaction of Muslim leaders and their followers was exactly to confirm Westergaard’s drawing: They responded with jihad on all possible levels – threats of genocide, terror, economical boycott, lawsuits and using democratic systems in our countries, EU and the UN to challenge and destroy our laws on free speech.
The wisdom and bravery of any child in any school yard to people using aggression to hide their own insecurity because of a simple drawing would lead to more jokes and logic as a mean to pedagogically point out obvious human weaknesses. Unfortunately most of our politicians are not as wise and brave as the average school child.
FP: Expand a bit on the differences between Muslim and Western cultures in terms of self-confidence.
Sennels: The concept of honor in the Muslim culture is – just like in the case with anger – opposite of our Western view. It is common in the Muslim culture to be exceedingly aware of one’s status in the group, other peoples’ view of oneself and any signs of any kind of criticism. The aggressive response to anything that can make one insecure is seen as an expression of honorable behaviour. But what is honorable about that? What kind of honor needs to be defended by all means necessary – including the abolishment of women’s human rights, such as the right to pick their own sexual partners, clothes, husband and life style? What is honorable about anger and the lack of ability to ignore provocations and handle criticism constructively?
After listening to more than a hundred Muslim teenagers telling their stories about their feelings, thoughts, reactions, families, religion, culture, the life in their Muslim ghettos and their home countries, it became clear to me that to a Muslim such behavior is the very core of keeping one’s honor. But seen through the eyes of Western psychology, it is all an expression of a lack of self-confidence. According to our view, the base of being authentic and honorable is to know one’s strengths and weakness – and accepting them. The ability to think “your opinion about me, not mine – and mine counts to me” when provoked and being mature enough to handle criticism constructively is a source of social status in the Western world.
Unfortunately, the Muslim concept of honor transforms especially their men into fragile glass-like personalities that need to protect themselves by scaring their surroundings with their aggressive attitude. The show of so-called narcissistic rage is very common among Muslims. The fear of criticism is in many cases not far from paranoia. It is not without reason that self-irony and self-criticism is completely absent in the Muslim societies. Seen from a psychological perspective – whose aim is to produce self-confident, happy, free, loving and productive individuals; and not to please a hateful God or culture traditions – Muslim culture is in many ways psychologically unhealthy to grow up in.
Sunday, April 25, 2010
SECURITY THREAT GROUPS IN TEXAS
Security Threat Groups and Other Major Street Gangs in Texas
This booklet is published by the Texas Department of Public Safety, Criminal
Intelligence Service, with the cooperation of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice-Security Threat Group Management Office. It is being provided as a resource to assist law enforcement agencies and correctional staff in identifying possible members of Security Threat Groups (STGs).
This booklet contains historical synopses of all STGs recognized by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ), as well as recognized tattoos and other related indicators most often used by STGs and various street gang members.
Gang members may change or modify the tattoos as corrections officials and law enforcement identify them as gang-related. The dynamics of these groups are also subject to change.
TEXAS SECURITY THREAT GROUPS
Aryan Brotherhood of Texas (ABT)
Aryan Circle (AC)
Barrio Azteca (BA)
Bloods (BLD)
Crips (CRP)
Hermandad de Pistoleros Latinos (HPL)
Mexikanemi/Texas Mexican Mafia (EME)
Partido Revolucionario Mexicano (PRM)
Raza Unida (RU)
Texas Chicano Brotherhood (TXCB)
Texas Mafia (TM)
Texas Syndicate/Syndicato Tejano (ESE TE; TS)
TANGOS/TANGO BLAST GROUPS
Austin Tangos (ATX; Capirucha)
Corpus Christi Tangos (Corpitos; Charco)
Dallas Tangos (D-Town)
El Paso Tangos (EPT)
Fort Worth Tangos (Foritos; Foros)
Houston Tangos (Houstone; H-Town)
Rio Grande Valley Tangos (Valluco)
San Antonio Tangos (San Anto; Orejones)
West Texas Tangos (WTX)
MAJOR STREET GANGS AND CLIQUES
18th Street Gang
Black Gangster Disciples (BGD)
Latin Kings (LK)
Mandingo Warriors (MW)
Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13)
Mexicles
Surenos
Tri-City Bombers (TRICB)
White Knights (WK)
If you have any questions or comments, or require additional information, please contact the Criminal Intelligence Service at (512) 424-2200 or the TDCJ-Security
Threat Group Management Office at (936) 437-8445.
This booklet is published by the Texas Department of Public Safety, Criminal
Intelligence Service, with the cooperation of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice-Security Threat Group Management Office. It is being provided as a resource to assist law enforcement agencies and correctional staff in identifying possible members of Security Threat Groups (STGs).
This booklet contains historical synopses of all STGs recognized by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ), as well as recognized tattoos and other related indicators most often used by STGs and various street gang members.
Gang members may change or modify the tattoos as corrections officials and law enforcement identify them as gang-related. The dynamics of these groups are also subject to change.
TEXAS SECURITY THREAT GROUPS
Aryan Brotherhood of Texas (ABT)
Aryan Circle (AC)
Barrio Azteca (BA)
Bloods (BLD)
Crips (CRP)
Hermandad de Pistoleros Latinos (HPL)
Mexikanemi/Texas Mexican Mafia (EME)
Partido Revolucionario Mexicano (PRM)
Raza Unida (RU)
Texas Chicano Brotherhood (TXCB)
Texas Mafia (TM)
Texas Syndicate/Syndicato Tejano (ESE TE; TS)
TANGOS/TANGO BLAST GROUPS
Austin Tangos (ATX; Capirucha)
Corpus Christi Tangos (Corpitos; Charco)
Dallas Tangos (D-Town)
El Paso Tangos (EPT)
Fort Worth Tangos (Foritos; Foros)
Houston Tangos (Houstone; H-Town)
Rio Grande Valley Tangos (Valluco)
San Antonio Tangos (San Anto; Orejones)
West Texas Tangos (WTX)
MAJOR STREET GANGS AND CLIQUES
18th Street Gang
Black Gangster Disciples (BGD)
Latin Kings (LK)
Mandingo Warriors (MW)
Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13)
Mexicles
Surenos
Tri-City Bombers (TRICB)
White Knights (WK)
If you have any questions or comments, or require additional information, please contact the Criminal Intelligence Service at (512) 424-2200 or the TDCJ-Security
Threat Group Management Office at (936) 437-8445.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
REAL AND PERCEIVED OBAMA HEAVEN
A man and his dog were walking along a road. The man was enjoying the scenery, when it suddenly occurred to him that he was dead.
He remembered dying, and that the dog walking beside him had been dead for years. He wondered where the road was leading them.
After a while, they came to a high, white stone wall along one side of the road. It looked like fine marble. At the top of a long hill, it was broken by a tall arch that glowed in the sunlight.
When he was standing before it he saw a magnificent gate in the arch that looked like mother-of-pearl, and the street that led to the gate looked like pure gold. He and the dog walked toward the gate, and as he got closer, he saw a man at a desk to one side.
When he was close enough, he called out, 'Excuse me, where are we?'
'This is Heaven, sir,' the man answered. 'Wow! Would you happen to have some water?' the man asked.
Of course, sir. Come right in, and I'll have some ice water brought right up.'The man gestured, and the gate began to open.
'Can my friend,' gesturing toward his dog, 'come in, too?' the traveler asked.
'I'm sorry, sir, but we don't accept pets.'
The man thought a moment and then turned back toward the road and continued the way he had been going with his dog.
After another long walk, and at the top of another long hill, he came to a dirt road leading through a farm gate that looked as if it had never been closed. There was no fence.
As he approached the gate, he saw a man inside, leaning against a tree and reading a book.
'Excuse me!' he called to the man. 'Do you have any water?'
'Yeah, sure, there's a pump over there, come on in.'
'How about my friend here?' the traveler gestured to the dog.
'There should be a bowl by the pump.'
They went through the gate, and sure enough, there was an old-fashioned hand pump with a bowl beside it.
The traveler filled the water bowl and took a long drink himself, then he gave some to the dog.
When they were full, he and the dog walked back toward the man who was standing by the tree.
'What do you call this place?' the traveler asked.
'This is Heaven,' he answered.
'Well, that's confusing,' the traveler said. 'The man down the road said that was Heaven, too.'
'Oh, you mean the place with the gold street and pearly gates? Nope. That's hell.'
'Doesn't it make you mad for them to use your name like that?'
'No, we're just happy that they screen out the folks who would BETRAY AND DESTROY AMERICA (leave their best friend behind)
Soooo...
Sometimes, we wonder why friends keep forwarding jokes to us without writing a word.
Maybe this will explain.
When you are very busy, but still want to keep in touch, guess what you do? You forward jokes.
When you have nothing to say, but still want to keep contact, you forward jokes.
When you have something to say, but don't know what, and don't know how, you forward jokes.
Also to let you know that you are still remembered, you are still important, you are still loved, you are still cared for, guess what you get?
A forwarded joke
So, next time if you get a joke, don't think that you've been sent just another forwarded joke, but that you've been thought of today and your friend on the other end of your computer wanted to send you a smile.
You are all welcome at my water bowl anytime!
GOD SAVE AMERICA AND DESTROY HER ENEMIES!
Sunday, March 28, 2010
POLITICAL CORRECTNESS GOING 20 LEAGUES UNDER
Friday, March 26, 2010
FARADY: Impractical folly of coed submarines
Michael Farady
Unless Congress intercedes, the U.S. Navy plans to station women on submarines. The change in policy was announced with no fanfare and has stirred almost no debate. Won't some wizened old salt please speak out? No? OK, then I'll take the plunge.
The only sure benefit of stationing women on subs is establishing equality of opportunity. Essential to realizing this ideal is the professionalism of military personnel. Never mind allegations that sexual harassment is rampant.
The practical concern the new policy aims to address has to do with smarts. Sub duty requires personnel of above-average IQ. Intelligence is everywhere in short supply, so the Navy is always in a pinch to staff the sub fleet. Adding women to the candidate pool might help. But there is a catch.
The military fervently woos women, but with little success. Just 15 percent of Navy personnel are women. As a rule, women are more difficult to entice into the military, harder to keep and generally less available for duty (e.g., because of pregnancy) than men are. I don't see how the Navy's difficulty in staffing subs would be affected much by adding women to the mix - there simply aren't many to begin with.
At least some of the few women who are suitable for sub duty will opt out. Submariners must endure a weird and claustrophobic environment. "The total living area for more than 130 people is equivalent to a medium-size house," states a report prepared for the Navy. And, while at sea for months, one can't leave the house to go for a walk or visit family. Not everyone can put up with this.
In general, women tend to avoid high-stress jobs, particularly those that involve travel. Psychologists suggest that women are especially vulnerable to social stress. So how will they adapt to the forced camaraderie of life on a sub combined with the isolation that comes from being trapped at the office for months at a time, 20,000 leagues under the sea, with a boatload of men?
Apparently, cost is no barrier to conducting this experiment. The only estimate I've come across (from 10 years ago in a newspaper column) is that reconfiguring subs for coed service would cost in the neighborhood of $4.5 million per ship. Reuters news agency reports that the Navy has 71 subs, but it doesn't say how many are scheduled to be retrofitted. So the final cost, which appears to be prohibitive, is a mystery.
Well, I don't suppose we have a choice, given the sorry performance record of the sub fleet.
What's that you say? The fleet is performing adequately if not splendidly? Hmm. The handyman code instructs, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." So why are we doing this?
The reason the Navy is going down this ill-advised path is political correctness. Officers know that speaking out against PC nonsense is career suicide. So only a few (usually disgruntled malcontents with one foot out the door) even contemplate raising the appropriate questions.
Political correctness has a way of putting certain values on a pedestal while making other concerns vanish. When considering whether to put women on subs, gender equity is in the first category, practicality is in the second.
Touching base with reality, one might wonder: Can we afford this? Does it make sense even to attempt what heretofore has been considered imprudent if not foolish?
Luckily, the military has a policy that can be adapted to quell these concerns: Don't ask, don't tell. (Not for long)
Michael Farady served as a Navy clinical psychologist and now conducts independent research on sex and gender. His article on the girl-crisis movement appears in the March issue of Review of General Psychology.
FARADY: Impractical folly of coed submarines
Michael Farady
Unless Congress intercedes, the U.S. Navy plans to station women on submarines. The change in policy was announced with no fanfare and has stirred almost no debate. Won't some wizened old salt please speak out? No? OK, then I'll take the plunge.
The only sure benefit of stationing women on subs is establishing equality of opportunity. Essential to realizing this ideal is the professionalism of military personnel. Never mind allegations that sexual harassment is rampant.
The practical concern the new policy aims to address has to do with smarts. Sub duty requires personnel of above-average IQ. Intelligence is everywhere in short supply, so the Navy is always in a pinch to staff the sub fleet. Adding women to the candidate pool might help. But there is a catch.
The military fervently woos women, but with little success. Just 15 percent of Navy personnel are women. As a rule, women are more difficult to entice into the military, harder to keep and generally less available for duty (e.g., because of pregnancy) than men are. I don't see how the Navy's difficulty in staffing subs would be affected much by adding women to the mix - there simply aren't many to begin with.
At least some of the few women who are suitable for sub duty will opt out. Submariners must endure a weird and claustrophobic environment. "The total living area for more than 130 people is equivalent to a medium-size house," states a report prepared for the Navy. And, while at sea for months, one can't leave the house to go for a walk or visit family. Not everyone can put up with this.
In general, women tend to avoid high-stress jobs, particularly those that involve travel. Psychologists suggest that women are especially vulnerable to social stress. So how will they adapt to the forced camaraderie of life on a sub combined with the isolation that comes from being trapped at the office for months at a time, 20,000 leagues under the sea, with a boatload of men?
Apparently, cost is no barrier to conducting this experiment. The only estimate I've come across (from 10 years ago in a newspaper column) is that reconfiguring subs for coed service would cost in the neighborhood of $4.5 million per ship. Reuters news agency reports that the Navy has 71 subs, but it doesn't say how many are scheduled to be retrofitted. So the final cost, which appears to be prohibitive, is a mystery.
Well, I don't suppose we have a choice, given the sorry performance record of the sub fleet.
What's that you say? The fleet is performing adequately if not splendidly? Hmm. The handyman code instructs, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." So why are we doing this?
The reason the Navy is going down this ill-advised path is political correctness. Officers know that speaking out against PC nonsense is career suicide. So only a few (usually disgruntled malcontents with one foot out the door) even contemplate raising the appropriate questions.
Political correctness has a way of putting certain values on a pedestal while making other concerns vanish. When considering whether to put women on subs, gender equity is in the first category, practicality is in the second.
Touching base with reality, one might wonder: Can we afford this? Does it make sense even to attempt what heretofore has been considered imprudent if not foolish?
Luckily, the military has a policy that can be adapted to quell these concerns: Don't ask, don't tell. (Not for long)
Michael Farady served as a Navy clinical psychologist and now conducts independent research on sex and gender. His article on the girl-crisis movement appears in the March issue of Review of General Psychology.
Saturday, March 20, 2010
IRAN NEWS BRIEFS
Call To Release Iran's 'Blogfather' For Norouz
The mother of a controversial, well-known blogger, Hossein Derakhshan, who is often described as Iran's "blogfather" because he helped popularize blogging in Iran, has called on the head of Iran's judiciary to release her son for the Iranian New Year, or Norouz, marked on March 21. More
A Turkish Role Model For Iran?
As Ankara has worked to improve relations with Iran, person-to-person bilateral contacts have blossomed in recent years. The experience, Abbas Djavadi writes, has been good for both sides. More
Iran Reformist Among Those Out On Bail
Iranian authorities have reportedly released on bail a top reformist who has been jailed since last June, along with a filmmaker and a reformist journalist. More
Iranian Politician Says Reformist Party's Ban 'Totally Illegal'
Former Iranian parliament deputy Fatemeh Haghighatjou has harshly criticized the decision by Iran's judiciary to ban activities by the major reformist Islamic Iran Participation Front. More
A Year On, Blogger's Death In Detention Remains Unexplained
Tomorrow marks one year since the death in Tehran's Evin prison of Iranian blogger Omidreza Mirsayafi. Many questions remain. More
Flight Of Iran's Critical Voices Shows Joke Isn't Funny Anymore
As many Iranian journalists and bloggers have been arrested in a government crackdown on dissent that began after the presidential election, dozens more have been driven into self-imposed exile abroad. One is Alireza Rezaei, a well-known blogger whose humorous take on even the worst aspects of the postelection protests gained him a wide following. More
Defiant Iranians Celebrate Festival Of Fire Despite Ban
Iranians last night openly challenged Supreme leader Ali Khamenei by taking to the streets for the traditional Festival of Fire, which Khamenei had said has no religious basis and should not be celebrated. More
Year Of 'Patience And Perseverance'
Iranian opposition leader Mir Hossein Musavi has said that the coming new year in Iran will be the year of "patience and perseverance" for the opposition movement. More
Quote Of The Day
"Slowly [the authorities] will ask us not to breath, because they will say antirevolutionary air might get into your lungs." This is a quote from one of our listeners with whom I have been exchanging e-mails for the past several months. She is a young Iranian woman in the capital. More
International News Group Condemns Detention Of Iranian Journalists
The World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) has condemned the continuing imprisonment of Iranian journalist Emad Baghi and what it calls the "repressive measures employed by the state to silence critical publications." More
Iranian-American Scholar Kian Tajbakhsh Reportedly Released On Bail
Iranian opposition websites are reporting that prominent Iranian-American scholar Kian Tajbakhsh has been released from jail on $500,000 bail. More
The Picture That Was Removed
Iranian blogs and websites are reporting that this picture -- reportedly taken during President Mahmud Ahmadinejad’s trip last week to Hormozgan Province -- was removed by the ISNA news agency shortly after being posted. More
Why Is Iran Releasing Some Postelection Detainees?
Several prominent detainees arrested in the wake of Iran's postelection unrest have been freed from prison. But Iranian authorities' motivation in freeing the prisoners remains unclear. More
Who Is Waging War Against God In Iran?
How did Mohammad Amin Valian, a 20-year-old student from Damghan, land in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' (IRGC) infamous Special Detention Center No. 209 of Tehran’s Evin Prison? More
UN Torture Envoy Says Concerned About Iran
In the wake of the UN Human Rights Council's recent session on Iran, Manfred Nowak, the UN's special rapporteur on torture, talked about his attempts to visit Tehran and his efforts to make governments around the world take better care of their detainees. More
Afghans, Iranian Honored As 'Women Of Courage'
Ten extraordinary women have been recognized by the U.S. State Department in a ceremony in Washington. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appeared in person alongside first lady Michelle Obama to praise the group of women that she and her staff have chosen as this year's International Women of Courage. More
Prague's One World Festival Puts Focus On Iran
The One World International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival, which will show over 100 films from 30 countries in Prague from March 10-18, has a special focus on Iran this year. More
Filmmaker Calls For Release Of Jailed Panahi
One of Iran's most prominent filmmakers, Abbas Kiarostami, has called for the release of Jafar Panahi and Mahmoud Rasoulof, two directors recently detained by the Iranian authorities. More
Iranian Women’s Rights Advocate Dedicates Her Prize To Jailed Activist
Iranian human rights lawyer and women’s rights advocate Shadi Sadr has dedicated her “Women of Courage Award,” given by the U.S. State Department, to jailed human rights activist Shiva Nazar Ahari. More
http://www.rferl.org/section/Iran/156.html
The mother of a controversial, well-known blogger, Hossein Derakhshan, who is often described as Iran's "blogfather" because he helped popularize blogging in Iran, has called on the head of Iran's judiciary to release her son for the Iranian New Year, or Norouz, marked on March 21. More
A Turkish Role Model For Iran?
As Ankara has worked to improve relations with Iran, person-to-person bilateral contacts have blossomed in recent years. The experience, Abbas Djavadi writes, has been good for both sides. More
Iran Reformist Among Those Out On Bail
Iranian authorities have reportedly released on bail a top reformist who has been jailed since last June, along with a filmmaker and a reformist journalist. More
Iranian Politician Says Reformist Party's Ban 'Totally Illegal'
Former Iranian parliament deputy Fatemeh Haghighatjou has harshly criticized the decision by Iran's judiciary to ban activities by the major reformist Islamic Iran Participation Front. More
A Year On, Blogger's Death In Detention Remains Unexplained
Tomorrow marks one year since the death in Tehran's Evin prison of Iranian blogger Omidreza Mirsayafi. Many questions remain. More
Flight Of Iran's Critical Voices Shows Joke Isn't Funny Anymore
As many Iranian journalists and bloggers have been arrested in a government crackdown on dissent that began after the presidential election, dozens more have been driven into self-imposed exile abroad. One is Alireza Rezaei, a well-known blogger whose humorous take on even the worst aspects of the postelection protests gained him a wide following. More
Defiant Iranians Celebrate Festival Of Fire Despite Ban
Iranians last night openly challenged Supreme leader Ali Khamenei by taking to the streets for the traditional Festival of Fire, which Khamenei had said has no religious basis and should not be celebrated. More
Year Of 'Patience And Perseverance'
Iranian opposition leader Mir Hossein Musavi has said that the coming new year in Iran will be the year of "patience and perseverance" for the opposition movement. More
Quote Of The Day
"Slowly [the authorities] will ask us not to breath, because they will say antirevolutionary air might get into your lungs." This is a quote from one of our listeners with whom I have been exchanging e-mails for the past several months. She is a young Iranian woman in the capital. More
International News Group Condemns Detention Of Iranian Journalists
The World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) has condemned the continuing imprisonment of Iranian journalist Emad Baghi and what it calls the "repressive measures employed by the state to silence critical publications." More
Iranian-American Scholar Kian Tajbakhsh Reportedly Released On Bail
Iranian opposition websites are reporting that prominent Iranian-American scholar Kian Tajbakhsh has been released from jail on $500,000 bail. More
The Picture That Was Removed
Iranian blogs and websites are reporting that this picture -- reportedly taken during President Mahmud Ahmadinejad’s trip last week to Hormozgan Province -- was removed by the ISNA news agency shortly after being posted. More
Why Is Iran Releasing Some Postelection Detainees?
Several prominent detainees arrested in the wake of Iran's postelection unrest have been freed from prison. But Iranian authorities' motivation in freeing the prisoners remains unclear. More
Who Is Waging War Against God In Iran?
How did Mohammad Amin Valian, a 20-year-old student from Damghan, land in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' (IRGC) infamous Special Detention Center No. 209 of Tehran’s Evin Prison? More
UN Torture Envoy Says Concerned About Iran
In the wake of the UN Human Rights Council's recent session on Iran, Manfred Nowak, the UN's special rapporteur on torture, talked about his attempts to visit Tehran and his efforts to make governments around the world take better care of their detainees. More
Afghans, Iranian Honored As 'Women Of Courage'
Ten extraordinary women have been recognized by the U.S. State Department in a ceremony in Washington. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appeared in person alongside first lady Michelle Obama to praise the group of women that she and her staff have chosen as this year's International Women of Courage. More
Prague's One World Festival Puts Focus On Iran
The One World International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival, which will show over 100 films from 30 countries in Prague from March 10-18, has a special focus on Iran this year. More
Filmmaker Calls For Release Of Jailed Panahi
One of Iran's most prominent filmmakers, Abbas Kiarostami, has called for the release of Jafar Panahi and Mahmoud Rasoulof, two directors recently detained by the Iranian authorities. More
Iranian Women’s Rights Advocate Dedicates Her Prize To Jailed Activist
Iranian human rights lawyer and women’s rights advocate Shadi Sadr has dedicated her “Women of Courage Award,” given by the U.S. State Department, to jailed human rights activist Shiva Nazar Ahari. More
http://www.rferl.org/section/Iran/156.html
Sunday, February 28, 2010
OBAMA PURIM INTERVIEW WITH ISRAELI NEWS
Obama: 'I'm Really a Space Cadet when it Comes to the Mideast'
by Gil Ronen
Follow Israel news on and .
(IsraelNN.com) United States President Barack Obama admitted, in a special Purim interview for Arutz Sheva, that he “frankly does not have a clue” regarding the psychology of the Middle East and that “a three year old child with some experience in nursery-school power politics could probably understand the Middle East better than [he does].”
"I really am a space cadet when it comes to Middle East," he said.
His mood swung from low to high and back again as he sipped occasionally from the Purim wine that the Arutz Sheva team had brought him. To our surprise, Obama chugged away at the bottle, finishing it before the interview was halfway through and asking for seconds. His mood from that point onward could best be described as “drunkenly sober” – until the end of the interview, when matters took a surprising turn.
ARUTZ SHEVA: Mr. President, as the Jewish people celebrate Purim, we remember our struggle with an evil Persian official named Haman, and look with foreboding at a new Iranian regime that threatens us with destruction too. Can you promise us that the US intends to apply biting sanctions against Iran before it is too late?
PRESIDENT BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA: First of all let me say that I am very much in favor of sanctions that bite. As a matter of fact, I think all sanctions bite. They really do. Sanctions are out! Any form of punitive action against a Muslim country is really counterproductive because Islam is a religion of peace and the US is after all a colonialist power. I was just talking to some old madarassah buddies of mine from Indonesia about this on Facebook.
Suddenly beaming, Obama waves at the camera and exclaims: “Hi Bilal and Japoor! Hope you are watching!” He fondles his wine glass pensively and continues.
BHO: Having said that – we have no intention of abandoning Israel to the wolves, so to speak. I have said before and I will say it again: the United States will not stand idly by as Israel is turned into a radioactive parking lot. If and when Iran uses nuclear weapons against Israel, and if we see that there is serious fallout and hundreds of thousands of people die horrible deaths – we will apply sanctions against the Revolutionary Guards.
AS: What kind of sanctions?
BHO: We have already drawn up a plan for barring the families of Iranian Revolutionary Guardsmen from Disney World and Disney Land. We will not let them in, clear and simple.
AS: What if they cry?
PO: That depends on whether it is a fake cry or a real sobbing, chest-heaving cry. We are not heartless. But we will not allow our ally to be attacked without responding swiftly.
AS: What about EuroDisney? Will they be allowed there?
BHO: Well, we need the European Union for that and we believe that they, too, will be on board. However, EuroDisney isn't that cool anyways. The main thing is Disney World.
AS: And that's it? Hundreds of thousands may die in a nuclear holocaust and the only sanctions will involve theme park access?
BHO: Let me be very clear on this: If Iran uses nuclear weapons on Israel, I personally intend to make a round of appearances on network talk shows, including David Letterman who I remind you is a Jew, and mock out Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. You know how charismatic I can be. I will also tell ACORN volunteers nationwide to 'get in the faces' of Iranian diplomats if they encounter them. This will get ugly.
AS: Well yes, but by then Israel will already be, as you put it, a parking lot.
BHO: Now, you see, a parking lot is actually not a bad thing for the Middle East to have. Everyone needs parking. My problem is not with the parking lot but with the vehicles that park in it. I'm talking about all the SUVs that are so popular in the Gulf states. I would expect cooperation from our allies the Saudis and Emirate sheikhs in making sure that if the Jewish state does become a parking lot, the cars that park there conform to the strictest regulations regarding emissions.
AS: What happened to all your plans for Mideast peace?
BHO: Well let me be frank with you. It turns out I do not have a clue regarding the psychology of the players in the Middle East. The dynamic between Jews and Arabs there turns out to be totally different from Chicago. Recently I have reached the conclusion that a three year old child with some experience in nursery-school power politics could probably understand the Middle East better than me.
With his elbows digging into the Oval Office desk, his ears touching the tips of his scrunched-up shoulders and his face registering a puzzled look, Obama said: “I really am a space cadet when it comes to Middle East.”
AS: So what caused you to be so wrong?
BHO: Well, I knew, based on my experience in Chicago, that Jews are Democrats. So all those years, when I heard that Israel was a democratic country, I figured they meant Israelis were Democrats! Lately I have discovered, however, that there are a lot of Jewish Republicans in Israel as well. This I did not expect. It's weird! And they are so bitter! They just sit there on their ancient land and cling to their Bibles and guns!
AS: Finally sir, do you have a message to convey to the Nation of Israel on Purim?
BHO: Well of course I do. You must always remember that the US is your ally in times of need, and that we will not let you down... wait, I am getting some information on the earphones... what? I am being told that a youth on a hilltop in Judea has just built a dog shed for his puppy. Jim, send me that satellite photo to my PDA, will you? Hi-res! These things make me angry, Arutz Sheva, you know that? I am so upset I could swat a fly on live television. Rahm? Get me this Bibi clown on the phone right now, I am going to give him a piece of my mind. And you guys – Arutz Sheva, Shmeva, get out of my office, now! Shalom!
The President got abusive and incoherent, and the sounds of pointed shoes soles colliding with antique furniture could be heard as the Arutz Sheva team was escorted gruffly out of the Oval Office.
Purim is a holiday on which Jews are expected to get tipsy, wear costumes and do silly things – including posting completely imaginary and false interviews with the President of the United States on news websites that are perfectly serious on all the other days of the year.
by Gil Ronen
Follow Israel news on and .
(IsraelNN.com) United States President Barack Obama admitted, in a special Purim interview for Arutz Sheva, that he “frankly does not have a clue” regarding the psychology of the Middle East and that “a three year old child with some experience in nursery-school power politics could probably understand the Middle East better than [he does].”
"I really am a space cadet when it comes to Middle East," he said.
His mood swung from low to high and back again as he sipped occasionally from the Purim wine that the Arutz Sheva team had brought him. To our surprise, Obama chugged away at the bottle, finishing it before the interview was halfway through and asking for seconds. His mood from that point onward could best be described as “drunkenly sober” – until the end of the interview, when matters took a surprising turn.
ARUTZ SHEVA: Mr. President, as the Jewish people celebrate Purim, we remember our struggle with an evil Persian official named Haman, and look with foreboding at a new Iranian regime that threatens us with destruction too. Can you promise us that the US intends to apply biting sanctions against Iran before it is too late?
PRESIDENT BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA: First of all let me say that I am very much in favor of sanctions that bite. As a matter of fact, I think all sanctions bite. They really do. Sanctions are out! Any form of punitive action against a Muslim country is really counterproductive because Islam is a religion of peace and the US is after all a colonialist power. I was just talking to some old madarassah buddies of mine from Indonesia about this on Facebook.
Suddenly beaming, Obama waves at the camera and exclaims: “Hi Bilal and Japoor! Hope you are watching!” He fondles his wine glass pensively and continues.
BHO: Having said that – we have no intention of abandoning Israel to the wolves, so to speak. I have said before and I will say it again: the United States will not stand idly by as Israel is turned into a radioactive parking lot. If and when Iran uses nuclear weapons against Israel, and if we see that there is serious fallout and hundreds of thousands of people die horrible deaths – we will apply sanctions against the Revolutionary Guards.
AS: What kind of sanctions?
BHO: We have already drawn up a plan for barring the families of Iranian Revolutionary Guardsmen from Disney World and Disney Land. We will not let them in, clear and simple.
AS: What if they cry?
PO: That depends on whether it is a fake cry or a real sobbing, chest-heaving cry. We are not heartless. But we will not allow our ally to be attacked without responding swiftly.
AS: What about EuroDisney? Will they be allowed there?
BHO: Well, we need the European Union for that and we believe that they, too, will be on board. However, EuroDisney isn't that cool anyways. The main thing is Disney World.
AS: And that's it? Hundreds of thousands may die in a nuclear holocaust and the only sanctions will involve theme park access?
BHO: Let me be very clear on this: If Iran uses nuclear weapons on Israel, I personally intend to make a round of appearances on network talk shows, including David Letterman who I remind you is a Jew, and mock out Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. You know how charismatic I can be. I will also tell ACORN volunteers nationwide to 'get in the faces' of Iranian diplomats if they encounter them. This will get ugly.
AS: Well yes, but by then Israel will already be, as you put it, a parking lot.
BHO: Now, you see, a parking lot is actually not a bad thing for the Middle East to have. Everyone needs parking. My problem is not with the parking lot but with the vehicles that park in it. I'm talking about all the SUVs that are so popular in the Gulf states. I would expect cooperation from our allies the Saudis and Emirate sheikhs in making sure that if the Jewish state does become a parking lot, the cars that park there conform to the strictest regulations regarding emissions.
AS: What happened to all your plans for Mideast peace?
BHO: Well let me be frank with you. It turns out I do not have a clue regarding the psychology of the players in the Middle East. The dynamic between Jews and Arabs there turns out to be totally different from Chicago. Recently I have reached the conclusion that a three year old child with some experience in nursery-school power politics could probably understand the Middle East better than me.
With his elbows digging into the Oval Office desk, his ears touching the tips of his scrunched-up shoulders and his face registering a puzzled look, Obama said: “I really am a space cadet when it comes to Middle East.”
AS: So what caused you to be so wrong?
BHO: Well, I knew, based on my experience in Chicago, that Jews are Democrats. So all those years, when I heard that Israel was a democratic country, I figured they meant Israelis were Democrats! Lately I have discovered, however, that there are a lot of Jewish Republicans in Israel as well. This I did not expect. It's weird! And they are so bitter! They just sit there on their ancient land and cling to their Bibles and guns!
AS: Finally sir, do you have a message to convey to the Nation of Israel on Purim?
BHO: Well of course I do. You must always remember that the US is your ally in times of need, and that we will not let you down... wait, I am getting some information on the earphones... what? I am being told that a youth on a hilltop in Judea has just built a dog shed for his puppy. Jim, send me that satellite photo to my PDA, will you? Hi-res! These things make me angry, Arutz Sheva, you know that? I am so upset I could swat a fly on live television. Rahm? Get me this Bibi clown on the phone right now, I am going to give him a piece of my mind. And you guys – Arutz Sheva, Shmeva, get out of my office, now! Shalom!
The President got abusive and incoherent, and the sounds of pointed shoes soles colliding with antique furniture could be heard as the Arutz Sheva team was escorted gruffly out of the Oval Office.
Purim is a holiday on which Jews are expected to get tipsy, wear costumes and do silly things – including posting completely imaginary and false interviews with the President of the United States on news websites that are perfectly serious on all the other days of the year.
Monday, February 15, 2010
JOURNALISTS UNDER ATTACK BY SHARIA LAW
Another request from another source to stand behind the Dallas Morning News. If you didn't send a note yesterday, you've got another chance today! :). ---Dorrie
From: "ACT-Arizona"
Subject: Support Journalists Under attack by Muslim Brotherhood ISNA
Date: Sat, 13 Feb 2010 10:05:42 -0700
Please write in support of Brooks Egerton. Islamic supremacism is trying to silence anyone who exposes who and what they are. Un-indicted co-conspirator and front for the Muslim Brotherhood (as evidenced and proven in the Holy Land Trial) ISNA is demanding an apology. These hate sponsors live under our law, not Islamic law. Tell Maud Beelman, the DMN News Editor Mbeelman@dallasnews.com 214-977-8456, Mbeelman@dallasnews.com and Brooks Egerton, begerton@dallasnews.com staff writer begerton@dallasnews.com 214-977-7622 that no apology is necessary. Thank them for doing their job investigating the jihadi who spoke at Fort Hood after the attack.
Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil. Thomas Mann
*******************************************************************
Friday, February 12, 2010
Atlas Action Alert: Support Journalists Under attack by Muslim Brotherhood ISNA
ISNA is trying to stop the First Amendment – imposing Shariah Blasphemy laws. No surprise – the Fiqh Council that is opposing full body scanners is an ISNA creation as well.
BTW, the Louay Safi article in the Dallas Morning News (it’s below with link - about the Fort Hood teaching gig Safi had there) didn’t even go into his approval of execution for apostates, as detailed in his book Peace and the Limits of War. They don’t realize how bad this guy actually is. Andy McCarthy wrote:
the Defense Department has brought Louay Safi to Fort Hood as an instructor, and that he has been lecturing on Islam to our troops in Fort Hood who are about to deploy to Afghanistan. Safi is a top official of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), and served as research director at the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT).
Worse, last evening, Safi was apparently permitted to present a check (evidently on behalf of ISNA) to the families of the victims of last month's Fort Hood massacre. [...]
ISNA was identified by the Justice Department at the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing conspiracy trial as an unindicted co-conspirator. The defendants at that trial were convicted of funding Hamas to the tune of millions of dollars. This should have come as no surprise. ISNA is the Muslim Brotherhood's umbrella entity for Islamist organizations in the United States. It was established in 1981 to enable Muslims in North America "to adopt Islam as a complete way of life" — i.e., to further the Brotherhood's strategy of establishing enclaves in the West that are governed by sharia. As I detailed in an essay for the April 20 edition of NR, the Brotherhood's rally-cry remains, to this day, "Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Koran is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” The Brotherhood's spiritual guide, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who issued a fatwa in 2004 calling for attacks on American forces in Afghanistan, openly declares that Islam will "conquer America" and "conquer Europe."
Please write in support of Brooks Egerton. Islamic supremacism is trying to silence anyone who exposes who and what they are. Un-indicted co-conspirator and front for the Muslim Brotherhood (as evidenced and proven in the Holy Land Trial) ISNA is demanding an apology. These hate sponsors live under our law, not Islamic law. Tell Maud Beelman, the DMN News Editor Mbeelman@dallasnews.com 214-977-8456 and Brooks Egerton, staff writer begerton@dallasnews.com 214-977-7622 that no apology is necessary. Thank them for doing their job investigating the jihadi who spoke at Fort Hood after the attack.
Please contact the Dallas News politely and kindly. We must show support. Every basic American freedom is under attack by these Islamic groups intimidating good people to shut up as they further advance their Islamic goals.
Sent to Atlas by a correspondent following the topic:
Subject: ISNA puts pressure on Dallas Morning News
Hi, y'all - ISNA is putting pressure on the Dallas Morning News, flooding the editor with emails against reporter Brooks Egerton. Would you send out an action item to generate email support for Egerton and his story? I will write it up if you want.
Here's a cut-and-paste from the ISNA website:
Action Requested!
The negative article by Brooks Egerton was published on the front page of the Sunday edition of the Dallas Morning News. Musim Brotherhood front, ISNA, is appealing to members of the Muslim community in general, and the Texas Muslim community in particular, to let the newspaper know about their feelings regarding this negative presentation. Please make sure that you speak respectfully but firmly on this issue.
Please contact Ms. Maud Beelman, the DMN News Editor, and Brooks Egerton, the article writer, at the Dallas Morning News and request that the newspaper issue a retraction and allow ISNA to publish rebuttal on the DMN op-ed page.
Maud Beelman, The DMN News Editor Mbeelman@dallasnews.com 214-977-8456
Brooks Egerton, staff writer begerton@dallasnews.com 214-977-7622
Backgrounder on ISNA (Dallas article follows below):
www.isna.net
From the ISNA website:
The government conceded, through exchange with ACLU lawyers, that it had absolutely no evidence proving that either ISNA, or its service organizations, had engaged in a criminal conspiracy. Response:
- On the face of it, this comment is untrue. The government never conceded that "no evidence" existed to prove a criminal conspiracy. Secondly, in a memorandum to the Federal Court, in response to ISNA's request to have its name removed from the unindicted co-conspirator list from the Holy Land Foundation trial - the largest terrorism financing trial in US history - the prosecution stated "ISNA and NAIT, in fact, shared more than just a parent organization. They were intimately connected with the HLF and its assigned task of providing financial support to HAMAS." Again, this quote is from a memorandum to the Federal Court which heard the HLF case and refused to remove ISNA's name from the unindicted co-conspirator's list because of the VAST amount of evidence it was a Muslim Brotherhood organizations financially supporting HAMAS - a designated terrorist organization.
- ISNA was used to funnel hundreds of thousands of dollars to Hamas. This was demonstrated with evidence in the Holy Land Foundation Trial - the largest terrorism financing trial in US history.
- Numerous copies of checks, money orders, and other financial documents were entered into evidence at HLF trial directly from ISNA to Hamas and Hamas entities.
- ISNA was created to be the "nucleus of the Islamic Movement" in North America by the Muslim Brotherhood. The historical document stating this was written by Zaid Noman, senior Muslim Brother in the US, and was also entered into evidence at HLF - unopposed by the defense.
- The Muslim Brotherhood's stated doctrine is to destroy American civilization from within via a "civilization jihadist rocess." ISNA is the MB in North America.
From the ISNA website:
The insinuation that ISNA is an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood has been promoted by Muslim bashers. Now DMN decided to echo their methods and amplify their lies. The DMN report’s assertion that ISNA is a member of a foreign organization with plans to “overtake the United States” is based on a document in Arabic dated May 19, 1991, and signed by an obscure author.
Response:
- The Muslim Brotherhood's strategic document for conquering North America entitled "An Explanatory Memorandum" lists ISNA at the top (number one) on the list of "our organizations and the organizations of our friends." This document was entered into evidence unopposed by defense counsel at the Holy Land Foundation Trial in Dallas, TX (Convictions Nov 2008). As a matter of legal fact, ISNA is an entity of the Muslim Brotherhood.
- The Explanatory Memorandum was not written by an obscure author. It was written by Mohammed Akram. Another piece of evidence admitted at HLF, also unopposed by the defense counsel (meaning it is legally what it proports to be), was the list of the Board of Directors of the Muslim Brotherhood in North America. Mohammed Akram is a member of the Board of Directors for the MB in North America and a member of the Palestinian Section in the US (documented and entered into evidence at Holy Land unopposed) meaning Akram is Hamas. So not only was the author NOT obscure, he was a leading Muslim Brother and a member of HAMAS.
- Since ISNA was created by the Muslim Brotherhood to be the "nucleus" for the Islamic Movement in North America, and since the MB's stated objective is to destroy Western civilization from within by waging a civilization jihadist process in North America, and since the Muslim Brotherhood is an international organization whose creed includes "martyrdom for the sake of Allah is our highest aspiration," and whose only objectives are to re-establish the global caliphate and implement global Islamic Law, it stands to reason since these are known facts, legally recognized facts, that ISNA is, in fact, a foreign entity which seeks to destroy America from within. Therefore, ISNA should be considered hostile, and should be treated as such - legally.
Dallas Morning news covered the Louay Safi presentation at here:
U.S. torn over whether some Islamists offer insight or pose threat
12:00 AM CST on Sunday, February 7, 2010
By BROOKS EGERTON / The Dallas Morning News
begerton@dallasnews.com
After the worst military base massacre in U.S. history, officials acknowledged that they failed to "connect the dots" – the shooter had been corresponding with an imam tied to al-Qaeda and had condemned the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as a war against Islam.
But Fort Hood gunman Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan wasn't the only one working on a Texas Army base the day of the shooting who had links to radical Islamists.
At Fort Bliss, an experienced military trainer was teaching soldiers about his Muslim faith. He, too, had denounced government counterterrorism efforts, and public records show he and some of his closest associates had ties to terrorism suspects.
But when The Dallas Morning News first inquired about the instructor, Louay Safi, military officials praised him. Only later did they say that Safi had been suspended from working on military bases pending a continuing criminal inquiry.
The Safi affair reveals the deep divisions within the U.S. government over how to combat terrorism and over what constitutes moderate Islam.
Some believe insight into Islamist thinking can be gained only by engaging a wide range of people in North America's close-knit Muslim community, where leaders may well have ties to extremists – ties that do not necessarily signal alliances or support. Others argue that engagement should be limited or shunned to avoid legitimizing radicals or embarrassing the government.
Safi is a senior official of the Islamic Society of North America, the country's largest Muslim organization. ISNA has been consulted for years by Washington and is described as a partner in the fight against terrorism. In addition to serving as ISNA's communications director, Safi runs its program certifying Muslim chaplains for work in the U.S. military and prison system. He publicly denounces terrorism and advocates peace.
Safi was also named by government prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator in one terrorism case in 2005. His last two employers were implicated in other government terrorism investigations while he worked for them. He was never charged, nor included among the targets of those investigations.
But Safi has called the widespread raids on Muslim organizations after 9/11 "a campaign against Islam" – a term that 9/11 Commission director Philip Zelikow says is part of "the jihadi narrative."
Safi has also complained that Muslims are treated differently from Christians and Jews when they do wrong. They are unfairly identified by and questioned about their religion, he says, treatment that can lead to isolation and aggression.
"The extremist ideology responsible for violent outbursts is often rooted in the systematic demonization of marginalized groups," Safi said in an Internet posting after the Fort Hood shooting.
Some view Safi's rhetoric as incendiary.
Zuhdi Jasser is a Navy veteran who founded the American Islamic Forum for Democracy and has spoken publicly about the dangers of politicizing Islam. He said Safi's "separatist mindset of the world against Muslims" is the "mindset that created Hasan."
Safi would not answer most questions from The News. But in a brief interview, he said the legal assaults on him and his associates even as Washington sought their advice represented the government's divided approach to Islam.
"There are those who are prejudiced and would like to deny Muslims their rightful place in this country," Safi said, "and there are people who are more open-minded. It's as simple as that."
Safi's case, however, is anything but simple. It illustrates not only the divisions in dealing with Islam but also the difficulty in knowing which dots to connect.
"You have a schizophrenic government and a schizophrenic institution," Zelikow said, referring to ISNA. "The schizophrenia cuts right into how the government views the whole Fort Hood affair. We don't know whether to treat him [Hasan] as part of an international conspiracy or as a lone wolf who happened to have gotten solace from a radical imam."
Lectures suspended
Safi, a 54-year-old native of Syria, is a military subcontractor who has lectured on Islam for the Army since 2005. His relationship with the Pentagon began a year earlier, when he became ISNA's leadership development director, providing Muslim chaplains the religious endorsement they need to work in the military and prison system.
He is one of seven lecturers in the Army's Islamic education program, overseen by the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. Much of the work is contracted out to Huntsville, Ala.-based Camber Corp., the privately held firm that hired Safi.
The training on Islam is part of a broader military educational program for which Camber is paid about $17.7 million annually, Navy Commander Brenda Malone said. Camber spokeswoman Rivka Tadjer declined to comment, citing instruction from the military.
One lecturer not affiliated with Camber who has worked alongside Safi is Michael Rubin, resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and a staunch ally of Israel.
Safi's presentations stick to religious theory and do little to prepare deploying soldiers for how extremists exploit Islam, said Rubin, an Iran expert who also lectures at the naval school. "There's an element of excusing rather than explaining," Rubin told The News.
Military officials would not identify the five other trainers. They said federal privacy law forbids naming the subcontractors without their consent, which they did not give.
One trainer who has previously identified himself publicly is Yahya Hendi, a chaplain at the National Naval Medical Center near Washington. He serves with Safi on ISNA's chaplaincy board and sits on the ISNA-affiliated Fiqh Council of North America, which issues Islamic legal decrees. He did not respond to repeated requests for an interview.
Investigators came across Safi at least 15 years ago during a government investigation into terrorism financing. Later, after he began working at ISNA, the group was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the prosecution of Richardson-based Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. It was the government's largest terrorism financing case and ended in 2008 with convictions against senior Holy Land leaders.
Yet U.S. military leaders seemed unconcerned when first questioned about Safi.
"He has not been the subject of any indictment," Fort Hood spokesman Tyler Broadway told The News in a Dec. 9 e-mail. "His presentations have always [met] the high standards expected."
In January, military officials told the newspaper that Safi was under investigation and that his lectures had been suspended. The investigation, begun by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, was recently referred to the Army, said Ed Buice, an NCIS spokesman. He would not elaborate, but other military officials said the inquiry began after a Dec. 3 complaint about ISNA. The complaint came in as Safi concluded three days of lectures at Fort Hood, which is still traumatized by the Nov. 5 massacre.
Thirteen members of Congress, all conservative Republicans, wrote to Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Dec. 17 asking him to halt military base lectures by anyone affiliated with ISNA. Gates did not respond, said Rep. Sue Myrick of North Carolina.
Myrick, who founded the congressional Anti-Terrorism Caucus, co-signed a similar letter during the Bush administration, asking the Justice Department not to co-sponsor an ISNA event. There was no response then, either.
"We never get an explanation for the strategy," she said. "They just ignore us."
Even counterterrorism experts differ on what the government's strategy should be and how much nuance is necessary for success.
Paul Pillar, a retired CIA expert on terrorism and the Middle East, said The News' findings illustrate "how hard it is to come up with some person or organization that is Muslim in North America that does not have some kind of associations or links that when we looked into them we'd say, 'Oops, that gives us pause.' "
Not everyone with such associations is "unsavory," Pillar stressed. He said he was unfamiliar with Safi and ISNA.
Christopher Hamilton, a former FBI counterterrorism expert who oversaw intelligence-gathering on Palestinian and state-sponsored terrorism matters, advocates limited engagement.
"You can't not have contact with them," he said of ISNA, but "keep them at arm's length." Do not involve them in military and law-enforcement training, he added.
The Pentagon has acknowledged that not enough attention was paid to the warning signs evidenced by Hasan's rhetoric and connections before the shooting. Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, is accused of murdering 13 people and is awaiting a military trial.
"It is clear that as a department we have not done enough to adapt to the evolving internal security threat," the defense secretary said Jan. 15 in presenting an investigative report on the Fort Hood violence.
The report did not examine policies concerning contractors, but its authors said, "We strongly recommend that they be addressed in a future review." They also warned that military standards for those who certify chaplains may be too lax and allow "improper influence by individuals with a propensity toward violence."
Defense officials would not say whether the recommendation and warning related to Safi and ISNA. They were not named in the "Lessons from Fort Hood" report.
The raids
Safi came to law enforcement's attention in 1995 when he telephoned Sami al-Arian, a terrorism suspect who was teaching computer science at the University of South Florida. At the time, Safi was a political science professor at an Islamic university in Malaysia, according to his resume.
Federal agents listened in as the two men mocked a broad terrorist-financing ban that President Bill Clinton had just announced. A partially redacted transcript of their wiretapped phone conversation, included in court records, also shows them agreeing that Jews controlled the U.S. government.
"My brother, it is a war, a war waged by the Zionists," al-Arian said, according to the transcript. "They are controlling the White House and the State Department."
Clinton "just wants to please them," Safi responded. "Nobody understands these things in America."
In 2003, the Justice Department formally accused al-Arian, a Kuwait-born Palestinian, of financially supporting a Palestinian terrorist group. Two years later, jurors acquitted him on eight charges but couldn't reach a verdict on nine others. In a subsequent deal with prosecutors, al-Arian pleaded guilty to one charge of conspiring to support a terrorist group and was sentenced to nearly five years in prison.
Safi was named an unindicted co-conspirator during al-Arian's trial. Nothing in the public record beyond the intercepted call links him to the al-Arian case.
Prosecutors use the unindicted co-conspirator designation for several reasons, including cases in which there is insufficient evidence to convict. The label also allows prosecutors to introduce evidence that would otherwise be blocked by rules against hearsay. Those rules don't apply to statements made by co-conspirators.
Civil libertarians complain that the practice is abusive because the named person isn't allowed a defense.
Safi agreed, in a recent Internet posting that protested ISNA's designation as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land case.
"The 'unindicted coconspirator' designation has been exploited by Muslim bashers," Safi wrote, "with the hope that this cheap and abusive tactic would frighten the public."
Safi left Malaysia and moved in the late 1990s to the Washington area, where he became research director at the International Institute of Islamic Thought. It, like his previous employer, says it seeks to achieve the "Islamization of knowledge."
In early 2002, federal agents investigating terrorism-financing allegations raided the institute and dozens of related businesses, tax-exempt groups and individuals' homes in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington. A former ISNA leader targeted in the raids was later convicted on a terrorism-related charge and imprisoned.
Court records show that the institute had funded alleged front groups formed by al-Arian, and that a man who had run one of those groups worked with Safi at the institute. Al-Arian has since been released from prison but still faces criminal contempt charges for refusing to testify about the institute before a grand jury.
About a month after the raids, the head imam of one of the most prominent mosques in the United States quit. Anwar al-Awlaki had been repeatedly questioned by the FBI about his ties to some of the 9/11 hijackers, who had attended his Dar al-Hijrah mosque in northern Virginia. The mosque is owned by an ISNA-related trust, and ISNA leaders have served on its board of directors. But the U.S.-born imam was never charged with a crime and later moved to his parents' native Yemen.
In late 2008, a top U.S. official called al-Awlaki an "example of al-Qaeda reach" into the United States. Two months later, the Fort Hood gunman began corresponding with the imam. The FBI intercepted their e-mails but decided they were harmless.
Al-Awlaki and other al-Qaeda operatives were targeted by Yemeni airstrikes on Dec. 24, and he is suspected of aiding the Dec. 25 airline-bombing attempt near Detroit.
Zelikow, the 9/11 Commission director, told The News that al-Awlaki was one of the "biggest loose threads" of the 9/11 investigation.
'Grand Jihad'
ISNA, which Safi joined in 2004, is based in the Indianapolis suburb of Plainfield. It grew out of a Muslim student organization that formed in Illinois nearly half a century ago.
Over the years, it has affiliated with several other groups. ISNA's Web site lists the North American Islamic Trust, which claims to hold title to about 300 mosques and schools, as a "constituent organization."
Court records show ISNA sent large sums of money to the Holy Land Foundation, which supported the Palestinian militant group Hamas. The transactions occurred in the late 1980s and were legal – it wasn't until 1995 that the U.S. designated Hamas a terrorist organization for its sponsorship of suicide bombings against Israel.
Holy Land continued to aid Hamas, leading prosecutors to file terrorism-related charges against foundation officials. Prosecutors put ISNA on a long list of unindicted co-conspirators, contending it was among groups that "are and/or were members of the US Muslim Brotherhood."
The Brotherhood aimed to take over the United States, according to a document from the group used as evidence in the Holy Land trial.
Brotherhood members "must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within," and they "must possess a mastery of the art of 'coalitions,' the art of 'absorption' and the principles of 'cooperation,' " the 1991 document said.
Hamilton, the former FBI counterterrorism expert, said that document reflects ISNA's current thinking. "They're trying to portray themselves as moderate in the West when they are not," Hamilton said, referring to ISNA and several other large Muslim groups. "Too often we're finding people connected to them doing bad things."
"You can't prove they're bad guys," he added. "Morally they are culpable."
It's unclear whether the brotherhood is active today in the United States, but it remains a potent force in Muslim-majority countries. Its leaders, based in Egypt, describe themselves as nonviolent, pro-democracy moderates.
ISNA has fought in court, unsuccessfully, to have its name removed from the unindicted co-conspirators list, arguing that the designation violates its constitutional rights.
Kathy Colvin, a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney's office in Dallas, would not say whether the government believed ISNA was still active in the brotherhood. Nor would she answer any other questions about the co-conspirators list.
Safi has described the 1991 document as a "fantasy" that his organization does not share.
"ISNA is not now nor has it ever been subject to the control of any other domestic or international organizations including the Muslim Brotherhood," says a 2007 statement posted on the organization's Web site. "ISNA was founded by Muslims in North America for the purpose of establishing an open, pluralistic platform for presenting Islam, supporting Muslim communities, developing educational, social and outreach programs and fostering good relations with other religious communities, civic and service organizations and all levels of government."
Close contacts
For years, ISNA has enjoyed a mostly close relationship with the federal government, including the departments of Justice, State, Defense and Homeland Security.
In 2005, ISNA helped the U.S. Embassy in Belgium organize a meeting between Muslims there and in America. Tom Korologos, then U.S. ambassador to Belgium, said some government officials balked at dealing with ISNA but failed to show him concrete reasons why the collaboration should not occur.
"Somebody's got to talk to them," he told The News, citing the organization's size and prominence. "I'd do it again."
Korologos, testifying before a Senate panel in 2006, acknowledged that "some of the organizations whose members participated in the conference have been accused of being extremist." He said they were chosen based on their "stated policies and specific actions" regarding Muslim integration into Western societies.
ISNA's 2006 national convention featured an address by Gordon England, then the Pentagon's No. 2 official, who called terrorism "the fundamental challenge of our time." He urged organization members "to be even more active in reaching out to others and sharing your values, beliefs and experiences," adding, "America wants you to be more involved."
The Justice Department, shortly after making the Holy Land co-conspirators list public in 2007, organized an event that was to feature Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and an ISNA board member. The event was canceled for reasons that remain unclear.
Also in 2007, an expert on Islamist ideology working on contract for the Pentagon repeatedly warned that the U.S. risked undermining its anti-extremist efforts by working with ISNA and similar organizations. "Despite a track record of self-serving denials with regard to extremism, ISNA continues to function as an important component of the Saudi/Muslim Brotherhood global network," analyst Stephen Coughlin wrote.
He named Safi as one example of the "numerous" connections between ISNA and the International Institute of Islamic Thought, the Virginia group raided in 2002, and he alleged that the institute was also a Muslim Brotherhood entity.
Coughlin's warnings created controversy in the Defense Department, and the analyst now works at a Washington think tank. He did not respond to requests for an interview.
High-level contacts with ISNA have continued under President Barack Obama. ISNA president Ingrid Mattson spoke at his inaugural prayer service in January. Valerie Jarrett, a senior Obama adviser, was a featured speaker in July at the group's national convention in Washington, which thousands attended.
"We share common values," Jarrett told the audience, and "we also share common dreams – for security, progress and opportunity."
One convention panelist was Warith-Deen Umar, a former prison chaplain with a history of extremist rhetoric. He advocated "more jihad," blamed Jews for the Holocaust and said Israelis "have control of the world."
Safi responded in a news release that condemned anti-Semitism, said nothing about the "jihad" remark and did not apologize for ISNA's invitation to Umar.
The speaker's proposal "described a completely different content than what reportedly transpired," Safi wrote. "The title of the speaker's presentation was 'Jews for Salaam [Peace],' and the presentation was described as a '... blue print for world peace. Christians, Jews and Muslims have common roots; focuses on the unique position Jewish people are in to move the world toward peace.' "
Umar's title is the same one he used for a 2008 book in which he traced Jews' problems to their failure to convert when Islam emerged in Arabia more than 1,400 years ago.
Rabbi Marc Schneier, president of the New York-based Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, also spoke at the convention. He said it should be remembered for its extensive outreach to Jews, not Umar's "repulsive" remarks.
"I've only had the most positive experience with ISNA," Schneier said.
He did not know Safi, Schneier said, nor was he familiar with his and ISNA's past ties to terrorism suspects. "That's not the ISNA I see today," the rabbi said. "Institutions evolve."
Victim fundraiser
Three days after the Fort Hood massacre, Safi announced that ISNA was launching the Fort Hood Family Fund. "Mosques throughout the country are expected to join fellow Americans in contributing to help the families of the victims," his news release said.
A fund Web site said the initial goal was "to raise $100,000 for immediate relief," with further amounts invested in a mutual fund. ISNA promised "to maintain full transparency to ensure that your donated dollar gets to its intended destination."
About $55,000 had been collected by early December, Safi told The News.
When he went to Fort Hood at the beginning of that month to train officers, Safi took a $10,000 check to the Association of the U.S. Army. Ron Taylor, president of the military-support charity's regional chapter, said he was grateful for the donation.
Safi called him about a week later and promised $100,000 more after learning that The News was asking questions about the money, Taylor added. He said recently that the pledge had not materialized.
Taylor admitted to wondering what was going on. And he recalled how Safi described Hasan to him – not as a religiously motivated extremist who planned to kill soldiers but as "someone who just lost it that particular day and did some bad things."
Staff writer Jason Trahan contributed to this report.
From: "ACT-Arizona"
Subject: Support Journalists Under attack by Muslim Brotherhood ISNA
Date: Sat, 13 Feb 2010 10:05:42 -0700
Please write in support of Brooks Egerton. Islamic supremacism is trying to silence anyone who exposes who and what they are. Un-indicted co-conspirator and front for the Muslim Brotherhood (as evidenced and proven in the Holy Land Trial) ISNA is demanding an apology. These hate sponsors live under our law, not Islamic law. Tell Maud Beelman, the DMN News Editor Mbeelman@dallasnews.com 214-977-8456, Mbeelman@dallasnews.com and Brooks Egerton, begerton@dallasnews.com staff writer begerton@dallasnews.com 214-977-7622 that no apology is necessary. Thank them for doing their job investigating the jihadi who spoke at Fort Hood after the attack.
Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil. Thomas Mann
*******************************************************************
Friday, February 12, 2010
Atlas Action Alert: Support Journalists Under attack by Muslim Brotherhood ISNA
ISNA is trying to stop the First Amendment – imposing Shariah Blasphemy laws. No surprise – the Fiqh Council that is opposing full body scanners is an ISNA creation as well.
BTW, the Louay Safi article in the Dallas Morning News (it’s below with link - about the Fort Hood teaching gig Safi had there) didn’t even go into his approval of execution for apostates, as detailed in his book Peace and the Limits of War. They don’t realize how bad this guy actually is. Andy McCarthy wrote:
the Defense Department has brought Louay Safi to Fort Hood as an instructor, and that he has been lecturing on Islam to our troops in Fort Hood who are about to deploy to Afghanistan. Safi is a top official of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), and served as research director at the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT).
Worse, last evening, Safi was apparently permitted to present a check (evidently on behalf of ISNA) to the families of the victims of last month's Fort Hood massacre. [...]
ISNA was identified by the Justice Department at the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing conspiracy trial as an unindicted co-conspirator. The defendants at that trial were convicted of funding Hamas to the tune of millions of dollars. This should have come as no surprise. ISNA is the Muslim Brotherhood's umbrella entity for Islamist organizations in the United States. It was established in 1981 to enable Muslims in North America "to adopt Islam as a complete way of life" — i.e., to further the Brotherhood's strategy of establishing enclaves in the West that are governed by sharia. As I detailed in an essay for the April 20 edition of NR, the Brotherhood's rally-cry remains, to this day, "Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Koran is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” The Brotherhood's spiritual guide, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who issued a fatwa in 2004 calling for attacks on American forces in Afghanistan, openly declares that Islam will "conquer America" and "conquer Europe."
Please write in support of Brooks Egerton. Islamic supremacism is trying to silence anyone who exposes who and what they are. Un-indicted co-conspirator and front for the Muslim Brotherhood (as evidenced and proven in the Holy Land Trial) ISNA is demanding an apology. These hate sponsors live under our law, not Islamic law. Tell Maud Beelman, the DMN News Editor Mbeelman@dallasnews.com 214-977-8456 and Brooks Egerton, staff writer begerton@dallasnews.com 214-977-7622 that no apology is necessary. Thank them for doing their job investigating the jihadi who spoke at Fort Hood after the attack.
Please contact the Dallas News politely and kindly. We must show support. Every basic American freedom is under attack by these Islamic groups intimidating good people to shut up as they further advance their Islamic goals.
Sent to Atlas by a correspondent following the topic:
Subject: ISNA puts pressure on Dallas Morning News
Hi, y'all - ISNA is putting pressure on the Dallas Morning News, flooding the editor with emails against reporter Brooks Egerton. Would you send out an action item to generate email support for Egerton and his story? I will write it up if you want.
Here's a cut-and-paste from the ISNA website:
Action Requested!
The negative article by Brooks Egerton was published on the front page of the Sunday edition of the Dallas Morning News. Musim Brotherhood front, ISNA, is appealing to members of the Muslim community in general, and the Texas Muslim community in particular, to let the newspaper know about their feelings regarding this negative presentation. Please make sure that you speak respectfully but firmly on this issue.
Please contact Ms. Maud Beelman, the DMN News Editor, and Brooks Egerton, the article writer, at the Dallas Morning News and request that the newspaper issue a retraction and allow ISNA to publish rebuttal on the DMN op-ed page.
Maud Beelman, The DMN News Editor Mbeelman@dallasnews.com 214-977-8456
Brooks Egerton, staff writer begerton@dallasnews.com 214-977-7622
Backgrounder on ISNA (Dallas article follows below):
www.isna.net
From the ISNA website:
The government conceded, through exchange with ACLU lawyers, that it had absolutely no evidence proving that either ISNA, or its service organizations, had engaged in a criminal conspiracy. Response:
- On the face of it, this comment is untrue. The government never conceded that "no evidence" existed to prove a criminal conspiracy. Secondly, in a memorandum to the Federal Court, in response to ISNA's request to have its name removed from the unindicted co-conspirator list from the Holy Land Foundation trial - the largest terrorism financing trial in US history - the prosecution stated "ISNA and NAIT, in fact, shared more than just a parent organization. They were intimately connected with the HLF and its assigned task of providing financial support to HAMAS." Again, this quote is from a memorandum to the Federal Court which heard the HLF case and refused to remove ISNA's name from the unindicted co-conspirator's list because of the VAST amount of evidence it was a Muslim Brotherhood organizations financially supporting HAMAS - a designated terrorist organization.
- ISNA was used to funnel hundreds of thousands of dollars to Hamas. This was demonstrated with evidence in the Holy Land Foundation Trial - the largest terrorism financing trial in US history.
- Numerous copies of checks, money orders, and other financial documents were entered into evidence at HLF trial directly from ISNA to Hamas and Hamas entities.
- ISNA was created to be the "nucleus of the Islamic Movement" in North America by the Muslim Brotherhood. The historical document stating this was written by Zaid Noman, senior Muslim Brother in the US, and was also entered into evidence at HLF - unopposed by the defense.
- The Muslim Brotherhood's stated doctrine is to destroy American civilization from within via a "civilization jihadist rocess." ISNA is the MB in North America.
From the ISNA website:
The insinuation that ISNA is an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood has been promoted by Muslim bashers. Now DMN decided to echo their methods and amplify their lies. The DMN report’s assertion that ISNA is a member of a foreign organization with plans to “overtake the United States” is based on a document in Arabic dated May 19, 1991, and signed by an obscure author.
Response:
- The Muslim Brotherhood's strategic document for conquering North America entitled "An Explanatory Memorandum" lists ISNA at the top (number one) on the list of "our organizations and the organizations of our friends." This document was entered into evidence unopposed by defense counsel at the Holy Land Foundation Trial in Dallas, TX (Convictions Nov 2008). As a matter of legal fact, ISNA is an entity of the Muslim Brotherhood.
- The Explanatory Memorandum was not written by an obscure author. It was written by Mohammed Akram. Another piece of evidence admitted at HLF, also unopposed by the defense counsel (meaning it is legally what it proports to be), was the list of the Board of Directors of the Muslim Brotherhood in North America. Mohammed Akram is a member of the Board of Directors for the MB in North America and a member of the Palestinian Section in the US (documented and entered into evidence at Holy Land unopposed) meaning Akram is Hamas. So not only was the author NOT obscure, he was a leading Muslim Brother and a member of HAMAS.
- Since ISNA was created by the Muslim Brotherhood to be the "nucleus" for the Islamic Movement in North America, and since the MB's stated objective is to destroy Western civilization from within by waging a civilization jihadist process in North America, and since the Muslim Brotherhood is an international organization whose creed includes "martyrdom for the sake of Allah is our highest aspiration," and whose only objectives are to re-establish the global caliphate and implement global Islamic Law, it stands to reason since these are known facts, legally recognized facts, that ISNA is, in fact, a foreign entity which seeks to destroy America from within. Therefore, ISNA should be considered hostile, and should be treated as such - legally.
Dallas Morning news covered the Louay Safi presentation at here:
U.S. torn over whether some Islamists offer insight or pose threat
12:00 AM CST on Sunday, February 7, 2010
By BROOKS EGERTON / The Dallas Morning News
begerton@dallasnews.com
After the worst military base massacre in U.S. history, officials acknowledged that they failed to "connect the dots" – the shooter had been corresponding with an imam tied to al-Qaeda and had condemned the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as a war against Islam.
But Fort Hood gunman Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan wasn't the only one working on a Texas Army base the day of the shooting who had links to radical Islamists.
At Fort Bliss, an experienced military trainer was teaching soldiers about his Muslim faith. He, too, had denounced government counterterrorism efforts, and public records show he and some of his closest associates had ties to terrorism suspects.
But when The Dallas Morning News first inquired about the instructor, Louay Safi, military officials praised him. Only later did they say that Safi had been suspended from working on military bases pending a continuing criminal inquiry.
The Safi affair reveals the deep divisions within the U.S. government over how to combat terrorism and over what constitutes moderate Islam.
Some believe insight into Islamist thinking can be gained only by engaging a wide range of people in North America's close-knit Muslim community, where leaders may well have ties to extremists – ties that do not necessarily signal alliances or support. Others argue that engagement should be limited or shunned to avoid legitimizing radicals or embarrassing the government.
Safi is a senior official of the Islamic Society of North America, the country's largest Muslim organization. ISNA has been consulted for years by Washington and is described as a partner in the fight against terrorism. In addition to serving as ISNA's communications director, Safi runs its program certifying Muslim chaplains for work in the U.S. military and prison system. He publicly denounces terrorism and advocates peace.
Safi was also named by government prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator in one terrorism case in 2005. His last two employers were implicated in other government terrorism investigations while he worked for them. He was never charged, nor included among the targets of those investigations.
But Safi has called the widespread raids on Muslim organizations after 9/11 "a campaign against Islam" – a term that 9/11 Commission director Philip Zelikow says is part of "the jihadi narrative."
Safi has also complained that Muslims are treated differently from Christians and Jews when they do wrong. They are unfairly identified by and questioned about their religion, he says, treatment that can lead to isolation and aggression.
"The extremist ideology responsible for violent outbursts is often rooted in the systematic demonization of marginalized groups," Safi said in an Internet posting after the Fort Hood shooting.
Some view Safi's rhetoric as incendiary.
Zuhdi Jasser is a Navy veteran who founded the American Islamic Forum for Democracy and has spoken publicly about the dangers of politicizing Islam. He said Safi's "separatist mindset of the world against Muslims" is the "mindset that created Hasan."
Safi would not answer most questions from The News. But in a brief interview, he said the legal assaults on him and his associates even as Washington sought their advice represented the government's divided approach to Islam.
"There are those who are prejudiced and would like to deny Muslims their rightful place in this country," Safi said, "and there are people who are more open-minded. It's as simple as that."
Safi's case, however, is anything but simple. It illustrates not only the divisions in dealing with Islam but also the difficulty in knowing which dots to connect.
"You have a schizophrenic government and a schizophrenic institution," Zelikow said, referring to ISNA. "The schizophrenia cuts right into how the government views the whole Fort Hood affair. We don't know whether to treat him [Hasan] as part of an international conspiracy or as a lone wolf who happened to have gotten solace from a radical imam."
Lectures suspended
Safi, a 54-year-old native of Syria, is a military subcontractor who has lectured on Islam for the Army since 2005. His relationship with the Pentagon began a year earlier, when he became ISNA's leadership development director, providing Muslim chaplains the religious endorsement they need to work in the military and prison system.
He is one of seven lecturers in the Army's Islamic education program, overseen by the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. Much of the work is contracted out to Huntsville, Ala.-based Camber Corp., the privately held firm that hired Safi.
The training on Islam is part of a broader military educational program for which Camber is paid about $17.7 million annually, Navy Commander Brenda Malone said. Camber spokeswoman Rivka Tadjer declined to comment, citing instruction from the military.
One lecturer not affiliated with Camber who has worked alongside Safi is Michael Rubin, resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and a staunch ally of Israel.
Safi's presentations stick to religious theory and do little to prepare deploying soldiers for how extremists exploit Islam, said Rubin, an Iran expert who also lectures at the naval school. "There's an element of excusing rather than explaining," Rubin told The News.
Military officials would not identify the five other trainers. They said federal privacy law forbids naming the subcontractors without their consent, which they did not give.
One trainer who has previously identified himself publicly is Yahya Hendi, a chaplain at the National Naval Medical Center near Washington. He serves with Safi on ISNA's chaplaincy board and sits on the ISNA-affiliated Fiqh Council of North America, which issues Islamic legal decrees. He did not respond to repeated requests for an interview.
Investigators came across Safi at least 15 years ago during a government investigation into terrorism financing. Later, after he began working at ISNA, the group was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the prosecution of Richardson-based Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. It was the government's largest terrorism financing case and ended in 2008 with convictions against senior Holy Land leaders.
Yet U.S. military leaders seemed unconcerned when first questioned about Safi.
"He has not been the subject of any indictment," Fort Hood spokesman Tyler Broadway told The News in a Dec. 9 e-mail. "His presentations have always [met] the high standards expected."
In January, military officials told the newspaper that Safi was under investigation and that his lectures had been suspended. The investigation, begun by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, was recently referred to the Army, said Ed Buice, an NCIS spokesman. He would not elaborate, but other military officials said the inquiry began after a Dec. 3 complaint about ISNA. The complaint came in as Safi concluded three days of lectures at Fort Hood, which is still traumatized by the Nov. 5 massacre.
Thirteen members of Congress, all conservative Republicans, wrote to Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Dec. 17 asking him to halt military base lectures by anyone affiliated with ISNA. Gates did not respond, said Rep. Sue Myrick of North Carolina.
Myrick, who founded the congressional Anti-Terrorism Caucus, co-signed a similar letter during the Bush administration, asking the Justice Department not to co-sponsor an ISNA event. There was no response then, either.
"We never get an explanation for the strategy," she said. "They just ignore us."
Even counterterrorism experts differ on what the government's strategy should be and how much nuance is necessary for success.
Paul Pillar, a retired CIA expert on terrorism and the Middle East, said The News' findings illustrate "how hard it is to come up with some person or organization that is Muslim in North America that does not have some kind of associations or links that when we looked into them we'd say, 'Oops, that gives us pause.' "
Not everyone with such associations is "unsavory," Pillar stressed. He said he was unfamiliar with Safi and ISNA.
Christopher Hamilton, a former FBI counterterrorism expert who oversaw intelligence-gathering on Palestinian and state-sponsored terrorism matters, advocates limited engagement.
"You can't not have contact with them," he said of ISNA, but "keep them at arm's length." Do not involve them in military and law-enforcement training, he added.
The Pentagon has acknowledged that not enough attention was paid to the warning signs evidenced by Hasan's rhetoric and connections before the shooting. Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, is accused of murdering 13 people and is awaiting a military trial.
"It is clear that as a department we have not done enough to adapt to the evolving internal security threat," the defense secretary said Jan. 15 in presenting an investigative report on the Fort Hood violence.
The report did not examine policies concerning contractors, but its authors said, "We strongly recommend that they be addressed in a future review." They also warned that military standards for those who certify chaplains may be too lax and allow "improper influence by individuals with a propensity toward violence."
Defense officials would not say whether the recommendation and warning related to Safi and ISNA. They were not named in the "Lessons from Fort Hood" report.
The raids
Safi came to law enforcement's attention in 1995 when he telephoned Sami al-Arian, a terrorism suspect who was teaching computer science at the University of South Florida. At the time, Safi was a political science professor at an Islamic university in Malaysia, according to his resume.
Federal agents listened in as the two men mocked a broad terrorist-financing ban that President Bill Clinton had just announced. A partially redacted transcript of their wiretapped phone conversation, included in court records, also shows them agreeing that Jews controlled the U.S. government.
"My brother, it is a war, a war waged by the Zionists," al-Arian said, according to the transcript. "They are controlling the White House and the State Department."
Clinton "just wants to please them," Safi responded. "Nobody understands these things in America."
In 2003, the Justice Department formally accused al-Arian, a Kuwait-born Palestinian, of financially supporting a Palestinian terrorist group. Two years later, jurors acquitted him on eight charges but couldn't reach a verdict on nine others. In a subsequent deal with prosecutors, al-Arian pleaded guilty to one charge of conspiring to support a terrorist group and was sentenced to nearly five years in prison.
Safi was named an unindicted co-conspirator during al-Arian's trial. Nothing in the public record beyond the intercepted call links him to the al-Arian case.
Prosecutors use the unindicted co-conspirator designation for several reasons, including cases in which there is insufficient evidence to convict. The label also allows prosecutors to introduce evidence that would otherwise be blocked by rules against hearsay. Those rules don't apply to statements made by co-conspirators.
Civil libertarians complain that the practice is abusive because the named person isn't allowed a defense.
Safi agreed, in a recent Internet posting that protested ISNA's designation as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land case.
"The 'unindicted coconspirator' designation has been exploited by Muslim bashers," Safi wrote, "with the hope that this cheap and abusive tactic would frighten the public."
Safi left Malaysia and moved in the late 1990s to the Washington area, where he became research director at the International Institute of Islamic Thought. It, like his previous employer, says it seeks to achieve the "Islamization of knowledge."
In early 2002, federal agents investigating terrorism-financing allegations raided the institute and dozens of related businesses, tax-exempt groups and individuals' homes in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington. A former ISNA leader targeted in the raids was later convicted on a terrorism-related charge and imprisoned.
Court records show that the institute had funded alleged front groups formed by al-Arian, and that a man who had run one of those groups worked with Safi at the institute. Al-Arian has since been released from prison but still faces criminal contempt charges for refusing to testify about the institute before a grand jury.
About a month after the raids, the head imam of one of the most prominent mosques in the United States quit. Anwar al-Awlaki had been repeatedly questioned by the FBI about his ties to some of the 9/11 hijackers, who had attended his Dar al-Hijrah mosque in northern Virginia. The mosque is owned by an ISNA-related trust, and ISNA leaders have served on its board of directors. But the U.S.-born imam was never charged with a crime and later moved to his parents' native Yemen.
In late 2008, a top U.S. official called al-Awlaki an "example of al-Qaeda reach" into the United States. Two months later, the Fort Hood gunman began corresponding with the imam. The FBI intercepted their e-mails but decided they were harmless.
Al-Awlaki and other al-Qaeda operatives were targeted by Yemeni airstrikes on Dec. 24, and he is suspected of aiding the Dec. 25 airline-bombing attempt near Detroit.
Zelikow, the 9/11 Commission director, told The News that al-Awlaki was one of the "biggest loose threads" of the 9/11 investigation.
'Grand Jihad'
ISNA, which Safi joined in 2004, is based in the Indianapolis suburb of Plainfield. It grew out of a Muslim student organization that formed in Illinois nearly half a century ago.
Over the years, it has affiliated with several other groups. ISNA's Web site lists the North American Islamic Trust, which claims to hold title to about 300 mosques and schools, as a "constituent organization."
Court records show ISNA sent large sums of money to the Holy Land Foundation, which supported the Palestinian militant group Hamas. The transactions occurred in the late 1980s and were legal – it wasn't until 1995 that the U.S. designated Hamas a terrorist organization for its sponsorship of suicide bombings against Israel.
Holy Land continued to aid Hamas, leading prosecutors to file terrorism-related charges against foundation officials. Prosecutors put ISNA on a long list of unindicted co-conspirators, contending it was among groups that "are and/or were members of the US Muslim Brotherhood."
The Brotherhood aimed to take over the United States, according to a document from the group used as evidence in the Holy Land trial.
Brotherhood members "must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within," and they "must possess a mastery of the art of 'coalitions,' the art of 'absorption' and the principles of 'cooperation,' " the 1991 document said.
Hamilton, the former FBI counterterrorism expert, said that document reflects ISNA's current thinking. "They're trying to portray themselves as moderate in the West when they are not," Hamilton said, referring to ISNA and several other large Muslim groups. "Too often we're finding people connected to them doing bad things."
"You can't prove they're bad guys," he added. "Morally they are culpable."
It's unclear whether the brotherhood is active today in the United States, but it remains a potent force in Muslim-majority countries. Its leaders, based in Egypt, describe themselves as nonviolent, pro-democracy moderates.
ISNA has fought in court, unsuccessfully, to have its name removed from the unindicted co-conspirators list, arguing that the designation violates its constitutional rights.
Kathy Colvin, a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney's office in Dallas, would not say whether the government believed ISNA was still active in the brotherhood. Nor would she answer any other questions about the co-conspirators list.
Safi has described the 1991 document as a "fantasy" that his organization does not share.
"ISNA is not now nor has it ever been subject to the control of any other domestic or international organizations including the Muslim Brotherhood," says a 2007 statement posted on the organization's Web site. "ISNA was founded by Muslims in North America for the purpose of establishing an open, pluralistic platform for presenting Islam, supporting Muslim communities, developing educational, social and outreach programs and fostering good relations with other religious communities, civic and service organizations and all levels of government."
Close contacts
For years, ISNA has enjoyed a mostly close relationship with the federal government, including the departments of Justice, State, Defense and Homeland Security.
In 2005, ISNA helped the U.S. Embassy in Belgium organize a meeting between Muslims there and in America. Tom Korologos, then U.S. ambassador to Belgium, said some government officials balked at dealing with ISNA but failed to show him concrete reasons why the collaboration should not occur.
"Somebody's got to talk to them," he told The News, citing the organization's size and prominence. "I'd do it again."
Korologos, testifying before a Senate panel in 2006, acknowledged that "some of the organizations whose members participated in the conference have been accused of being extremist." He said they were chosen based on their "stated policies and specific actions" regarding Muslim integration into Western societies.
ISNA's 2006 national convention featured an address by Gordon England, then the Pentagon's No. 2 official, who called terrorism "the fundamental challenge of our time." He urged organization members "to be even more active in reaching out to others and sharing your values, beliefs and experiences," adding, "America wants you to be more involved."
The Justice Department, shortly after making the Holy Land co-conspirators list public in 2007, organized an event that was to feature Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and an ISNA board member. The event was canceled for reasons that remain unclear.
Also in 2007, an expert on Islamist ideology working on contract for the Pentagon repeatedly warned that the U.S. risked undermining its anti-extremist efforts by working with ISNA and similar organizations. "Despite a track record of self-serving denials with regard to extremism, ISNA continues to function as an important component of the Saudi/Muslim Brotherhood global network," analyst Stephen Coughlin wrote.
He named Safi as one example of the "numerous" connections between ISNA and the International Institute of Islamic Thought, the Virginia group raided in 2002, and he alleged that the institute was also a Muslim Brotherhood entity.
Coughlin's warnings created controversy in the Defense Department, and the analyst now works at a Washington think tank. He did not respond to requests for an interview.
High-level contacts with ISNA have continued under President Barack Obama. ISNA president Ingrid Mattson spoke at his inaugural prayer service in January. Valerie Jarrett, a senior Obama adviser, was a featured speaker in July at the group's national convention in Washington, which thousands attended.
"We share common values," Jarrett told the audience, and "we also share common dreams – for security, progress and opportunity."
One convention panelist was Warith-Deen Umar, a former prison chaplain with a history of extremist rhetoric. He advocated "more jihad," blamed Jews for the Holocaust and said Israelis "have control of the world."
Safi responded in a news release that condemned anti-Semitism, said nothing about the "jihad" remark and did not apologize for ISNA's invitation to Umar.
The speaker's proposal "described a completely different content than what reportedly transpired," Safi wrote. "The title of the speaker's presentation was 'Jews for Salaam [Peace],' and the presentation was described as a '... blue print for world peace. Christians, Jews and Muslims have common roots; focuses on the unique position Jewish people are in to move the world toward peace.' "
Umar's title is the same one he used for a 2008 book in which he traced Jews' problems to their failure to convert when Islam emerged in Arabia more than 1,400 years ago.
Rabbi Marc Schneier, president of the New York-based Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, also spoke at the convention. He said it should be remembered for its extensive outreach to Jews, not Umar's "repulsive" remarks.
"I've only had the most positive experience with ISNA," Schneier said.
He did not know Safi, Schneier said, nor was he familiar with his and ISNA's past ties to terrorism suspects. "That's not the ISNA I see today," the rabbi said. "Institutions evolve."
Victim fundraiser
Three days after the Fort Hood massacre, Safi announced that ISNA was launching the Fort Hood Family Fund. "Mosques throughout the country are expected to join fellow Americans in contributing to help the families of the victims," his news release said.
A fund Web site said the initial goal was "to raise $100,000 for immediate relief," with further amounts invested in a mutual fund. ISNA promised "to maintain full transparency to ensure that your donated dollar gets to its intended destination."
About $55,000 had been collected by early December, Safi told The News.
When he went to Fort Hood at the beginning of that month to train officers, Safi took a $10,000 check to the Association of the U.S. Army. Ron Taylor, president of the military-support charity's regional chapter, said he was grateful for the donation.
Safi called him about a week later and promised $100,000 more after learning that The News was asking questions about the money, Taylor added. He said recently that the pledge had not materialized.
Taylor admitted to wondering what was going on. And he recalled how Safi described Hasan to him – not as a religiously motivated extremist who planned to kill soldiers but as "someone who just lost it that particular day and did some bad things."
Staff writer Jason Trahan contributed to this report.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
MURPHY'S REAL LAWS
Murphy's Real Laws, Part I
1. Everyone has a photographic memory. Some don't have film.
2. He who laughs last thinks slowest.
3. A day without sunshine is like, well, night.
4. Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.
5. Back up my hard drive? How do I put it in reverse?
6. I just got lost in thought. It was unfamiliar territory.
7. When the chips are down, the buffalo is empty.
8. Seen it all, done it all. Can't remember most of it.
9. Those that live by the sword get shot by those who don't.
10. I feel like I'm diagonally parked in a parallel universe.
11. He's not dead. He's electroencephalographically challenged.
12. She's always late. In fact, her ancestors arrived on the "Juneflower."
13. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say will be misquoted and used against you.
14. I wonder how much deeper the ocean would be without sponges.
15. Honk if you love peace and quiet.
16. Pardon my driving, I'm reloading.
17. Despite the cost of living, have you noticed how it remains so popular?
Murphy's Real Laws, Part II
18. Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool.
19. It is hard to understand how a cemetery can raise its burial costs and blame it on the higher cost of living.
20. Just remember if it wasn't for gravity, we'd all fall off.
21. The 50-50-90 rule: Anytime you have a 50-50 chance of getting something right, there's a 90% probability you'll get it wrong.
22. It is said that if you line up all the cars in the world end to end, someone would be stupid enough to try and pass them.
23. You can't have everything. Where would you put it?
24. Latest survey shows that 3 out of 4 people make up 75% of the world population.
25. If the shoe fits, get another one just like it.
26. The things that come to those that wait may be the things left by those who got there first.
27. Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will sit in a boat all day drinking.
28. Flashlight: A case for holding dead batteries.
29. The shin bone is a device for finding furniture.
30. A fine is a tax for doing wrong. A tax is a fine for doing well.
31. It was recently discovered that research causes cancer in rats.
32. Everybody lies, but it doesn't matter since nobody listens.
33. I wished the buck stopped here, as I could use a few.
34. I started out with nothing, and I still have most of it.
35. When you go into court, you are putting yourself in the hands of 12 people who weren't smart enough to get out of jury duty.
36. Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.
1. Everyone has a photographic memory. Some don't have film.
2. He who laughs last thinks slowest.
3. A day without sunshine is like, well, night.
4. Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.
5. Back up my hard drive? How do I put it in reverse?
6. I just got lost in thought. It was unfamiliar territory.
7. When the chips are down, the buffalo is empty.
8. Seen it all, done it all. Can't remember most of it.
9. Those that live by the sword get shot by those who don't.
10. I feel like I'm diagonally parked in a parallel universe.
11. He's not dead. He's electroencephalographically challenged.
12. She's always late. In fact, her ancestors arrived on the "Juneflower."
13. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say will be misquoted and used against you.
14. I wonder how much deeper the ocean would be without sponges.
15. Honk if you love peace and quiet.
16. Pardon my driving, I'm reloading.
17. Despite the cost of living, have you noticed how it remains so popular?
Murphy's Real Laws, Part II
18. Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool.
19. It is hard to understand how a cemetery can raise its burial costs and blame it on the higher cost of living.
20. Just remember if it wasn't for gravity, we'd all fall off.
21. The 50-50-90 rule: Anytime you have a 50-50 chance of getting something right, there's a 90% probability you'll get it wrong.
22. It is said that if you line up all the cars in the world end to end, someone would be stupid enough to try and pass them.
23. You can't have everything. Where would you put it?
24. Latest survey shows that 3 out of 4 people make up 75% of the world population.
25. If the shoe fits, get another one just like it.
26. The things that come to those that wait may be the things left by those who got there first.
27. Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will sit in a boat all day drinking.
28. Flashlight: A case for holding dead batteries.
29. The shin bone is a device for finding furniture.
30. A fine is a tax for doing wrong. A tax is a fine for doing well.
31. It was recently discovered that research causes cancer in rats.
32. Everybody lies, but it doesn't matter since nobody listens.
33. I wished the buck stopped here, as I could use a few.
34. I started out with nothing, and I still have most of it.
35. When you go into court, you are putting yourself in the hands of 12 people who weren't smart enough to get out of jury duty.
36. Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
DR. MANNING - OBAMA NEVER WENT TO COLUMBIA (VIDEO)
Meanwhile more details of Obama hoax perpetrated on America
“As far as can be seen at this time, the roots of the Obama candidacy go back to a project begun by Zbigniew Brzezinski and his National Security Council subordinate, Professor Samuel Huntington of Harvard, in the early 1980s.”
http://www.rense.com/general80/s0pa.htm
Read the following article. It explains a lot about Obama and his relationship to Zbigniew Brzezinski, professor at Columbia University in New York while Obama attended there (1981-1983) while Brzezinski was also serving as Pres. Carter’s former National Security Advisor, and was the head of the Institute on Communist Affairs, where he was located from 1960 to 1989.
Brzezinski is currently Obama’s foreign policy advisor.
Behind The Copied Speeches -
Governor Deval Patrick Is Brzezinski’s Spare Obama
By Webster G. Tarpley
2-19-08
http://www.rense.com/general80/s0pa.htm
The recent discovery by various functionaries of the Clinton campaign that Obama habitually lifts entire passages from the speeches of Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick points far beyond the issue of alleged plagiarism and gets us close to the central issue about Obama: the Illinois Senator is a synthetic Manchurian candidate who has been concocted over a period of two decades or more by a political intelligence faction associated with the Zbigniew Brzezinski clan, and Zbig’s friends of the “color revolutions” faction at the National Endowment for Democracy and the Soros milieu.
The striking fact revealed by the discovery that Obama and Patrick parrot the same type of utopian and messianic platitudes is not just that these two mellifluous demagogues habitually swap chunks of their speeches. It is rather that both of them are the product of the same process of programming, training, and indoctrination one might well say brainwashing on the part of the Brzezinski faction. They are both from the same stable, so to speak.
The reason that there are two of them is that each is a backup for the other within the framework of the same overall intelligence community project, which is to bring the techniques of postmodern coup, otherwise known as the CIA color revolution or people power putsch, into this country in order to seize power in a postmodern coup d’état. Both Obama and Patrick can be viewed as the dummies through which the ventriloquist Brzezinski speaks.
It is of course ironic that Obama, the professional word-monger, deals in words he has filched elsewhere. With no achievements, no record, no commitments, no promises, no loyalties, and no track record, Obama’s stock in trade is oratory.
How revealing that his only capability, his words, have been purloined.
Here is an example, widely quoted on the Internet, of parallel passages spouted by Obama and by Patrick:
Obama: “Don’t tell me words don’t matter. ‘I have a dream’ just words? ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’ just words? ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself’ just words? Just speeches?”
Patrick: “’We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’ just words? ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself’ just words? ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.’ Just words? ‘I have a dream’ just words?”
The passages are interesting since they amount to a pre-packaged defense against the most obvious objection to the two politicians in question: they are short on concrete policy proposals, and long on vapid rhetoric. Since it would appear that Patrick made his remarks first, there is little doubt that Obama is indeed a mimic of Patrick. This discovery, however, is not new. Over the past year, the New York Times Magazine, the Boston Globe, and the Boston Phoenix have all published articles pointing to the fact that the babblings of these two politicians are astonishingly similar, to the point of being practically identical.
The Boston Phoenix article is included below. What these passages reveal is that both Obama and Patrick are indeed Manchurian candidates, and that both are reciting from the same intelligence community print out. They have memorized their lines from the same prompter. This points to the fact that both of these candidates come out of a laboratory, the same laboratory, and not out of any normal political process is the average person would understand that. Their rhetorical style and repertoire of themes are coherent with the same covert operation, in which they are both cogs.
As far as can be seen at this time, the roots of the Obama candidacy go back to a project begun by Zbigniew Brzezinski and his National Security Council subordinate, Professor Samuel Huntington of Harvard, in the early 1980s. This was the immediate aftermath of the catastrophic Carter administration, which Zbigniew Brzezinski had helped to wreck with the help of his fellow Trilateral Commission member Paul Adolph Volcker, whom Carter had appointed as head of the Federal Reserve System. For Brzezinski and the Trilateralists, the Carter administration had been a great success, one destined to be repeated.
Saturday, January 16, 2010
LEARN FROM HISTORY - COMPARE AUSTRIAN DOWNFALL AND OURS HAPPENING IN THE USA
DIFFERENT PLAYERS - BUT EXACTLY SAME STORY AND DISASTER REPEATING ITSELF IN AMERICA
Subject: 1938 Austria -- Land of "The Sound of Music" Story
A BIT LONG, BUT VERY ENLIGHTENING!
America Truly is the Greatest Country in the World. Don't Let Freedom Slip Away
By: Kitty Werthmann
What I am about to tell you is something you've probably never heard or will ever read in history books.
I believe that I am an eyewitness to history. I cannot tell you that Hitler took Austria by tanks and guns; it would distort history. We elected him by a landslide - 98% of the vote. I've never read that in any American publications. Everyone thinks that Hitler just rolled in with his tanks and took Austria by force.
In 1938, Austria was in deep Depression. Nearly one-third of our workforce was unemployed. We had 25% inflation and 25% bank loan interest rates.
Farmers and business people were declaring bankruptcy daily. Young people were going from house to house begging for food. Not that they didn't want to work; there simply weren't any jobs. My mother was a Christian woman and believed in helping people in need. Every day we cooked a big kettle of soup and baked bread to feed those poor, hungry people - about 30 daily.
The Communist Party and the National Socialist Party were fighting each other. Blocks and blocks of cities like Vienna , Linz , and Graz were destroyed.. The people became desperate and petitioned the government to let them decide what kind of government they wanted.
We looked to our neighbor on the north, Germany , where Hitler had been in power since 1933. We had been told that they didn't have unemployment or crime, and they had a high standard of living. Nothing was ever said about persecution of any group -- Jewish or otherwise. We were led to believe that everyone was happy. We wanted the same way of life in Austria . We were promised that a vote for Hitler would mean the end of unemployment and help for the family. Hitler also said that businesses would be assisted, and farmers would get their farms back. Ninety-eight percent of the population voted to annex Austria to Germany and have Hitler for our ruler.
We were overjoyed, and for three days we danced in the streets and had candlelight parades. The new government opened up big field kitchens and everyone was fed.
After the election, German officials were appointed, and like a miracle, we suddenly had law and order. Three or four weeks later, everyone was employed. The government made sure that a lot of work was created through the Public Work Service.
Hitler decided we should have equal rights for women. Before this, it was a custom that married Austrian women did not work outside the home. An able-bodied husband would be looked down on if he couldn't support his family. Many women in the teaching profession were elated that they could retain the jobs they previously had been required to give up for marriage.
Hitler Targets Education - Eliminates Religious Instruction for Children:
Our education was nationalized. I attended a very good public school. The population was predominantly Catholic, so we had religion in our schools. The day we elected Hitler (March 13, 1938), I walked into my schoolroom to find the crucifix replaced by Hitler's picture hanging next to a Nazi flag. Our teacher, a very devout woman, stood up and told the class we wouldn't pray or have religion anymore. Instead, we sang "Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber Alles," and had physical education.
Sunday became National Youth Day with compulsory attendance. Parents were not pleased about the sudden change in curriculum. They were told that if they did not send us, they would receive a stiff letter of warning the first time. The second time they would be fined the equivalent of $300, and the third time they would be subject to jail. The first two hours consisted of political indoctrination. The rest of the day we had sports. As time went along, we loved it. Oh, we had so much fun and got our sports equipment free. We would go home and gleefully tell our parents about the wonderful time we had.
My mother was very unhappy. When the next term started, she took me out of public school and put me in a convent. I told her she couldn't do that and she told me that someday when I grew up, I would be grateful. There was a very good curriculum, but hardly any fun - no sports, and no political indoctrination. I hated it at first but felt I could tolerate it. Every once in a while, on holidays, I went home. I would go back to my old friends and ask what was going on and what they were doing.. Their loose lifestyle was very alarming to me. They lived without religion. By that time unwed mothers were glorified for having a baby for Hitler. It seemed strange to me that our society changed so suddenly. As time went along, I realized what a great deed my mother did so that I wasn't exposed to that kind of humanistic philosophy.
Equal Rights Hits Home:
In 1939, the war started and a food bank was established. All food was rationed and could only be purchased using food stamps. At the same time, a full-employment law was passed which meant if you didn't work, you didn't get a ration card, and if you didn't have a card, you starved to death. Women who stayed home to raise their families didn't have any marketable skills and often had to take jobs more suited for men.
Soon after this, the draft was implemented. It was compulsory for young people, male and female, to give one year to the labor corps. During the day, the girls worked on the farms, and at night they returned to their barracks for military training just like the boys. They were trained to be anti-aircraft gunners and participated in the signal corps.. After the labor corps, they were not discharged but were used in the front lines. When I go back to Austria to visit my family and friends, most of these women are emotional cripples because they just were not equipped to handle the horrors of combat. Three months before I turned 18, I was severely injured in an air raid attack. I nearly had a leg amputated, so I was spared having to go into the labor corps and into military service.
Hitler Restructured the Family Through Daycare:
When the mothers had to go out into the work force, the government immediately established child care centers. You could take your children ages 4 weeks to school age and leave them there around-the-clock, 7 days a week, under the total care of the government. The state raised a whole generation of children. There were no motherly women to take care of the children, just people highly trained in child psychology. By this time, no one talked about equal rights. We knew we had been had.
Health Care and Small Business Suffer Under Government Controls:
Before Hitler, we had very good medical care.. Many American doctors trained at the University of Vienna .. After Hitler, health care was socialized, free for everyone. Doctors were salaried by the government. The problem was, since it was free, the people were going to the doctors for everything. When the good doctor arrived at his office at 8 a.m., 40 people were already waiting and, at the same time, the hospitals were full. If you needed elective surgery, you had to wait a year or two for your turn. There was no money for research as it was poured into socialized medicine. Research at the medical schools literally stopped, so the best doctors left Austria and emigrated to other countries.
As for healthcare, our tax rates went up to 80% of our income. Newlyweds immediately received a $1,000 loan from the government to establish a household. We had big programs for families. All day care and education were free. High schools were taken over by the government and college tuition was subsidized. Everyone was entitled to free handouts, such as food stamps, clothing, and housing.
We had another agency designed to monitor business. My brother-in-law owned a restaurant that had square tables. Government officials told him he had to replace them with round tables because people might bump themselves on the corners. Then they said he had to have additional bathroom facilities. It was just a small dairy business with a snack bar.. He couldn't meet all the demands. Soon, he went out of business. If the government owned the large businesses and not many small ones existed, it could be in control.
We had consumer protection. We were told how to shop and what to buy. Free enterprise was essentially abolished. We had a planning agency specially designed for farmers. The agents would go to the farms, count the live-stock, then tell the farmers what to produce, and how to produce it.
"Mercy Killing" Redefined:
In 1944, I was a student teacher in a small village in the Alps . The villagers were surrounded by mountain passes which, in the winter, were closed off with snow, causing people to be isolated. So people intermarried and offspring were sometimes retarded. When I arrived, I was told there were 15 mentally retarded adults, but they were all useful and did good manual work. I knew one, named Vincent, very well. He was a janitor of the school. One day I looked out the window and saw Vincent and others getting into a van. I asked my superior where they were going. She said to an institution where the State Health Department would teach them a trade, and to read and write. The families were required to sign papers with a little clause that they could not visit for 6 months. They were told visits would interfere with the program and might cause homesickness.
As time passed, letters started to dribble back saying these people died a natural, merciful death. The villagers were not fooled. We suspected what was happening. Those people left in excellent physical health and all died within 6 months. We called this euthanasia.
The Final Steps - Gun Laws:
Next came gun registration. People were getting injured by guns. Hitler said that the real way to catch criminals (we still had a few) was by matching serial numbers on guns. Most citizens were law abiding and dutifully marched to the police station to register their firearms. Not long after-wards, the police said that it was best for everyone to turn in their guns. The authorities already knew who had them, so it was futile not to comply voluntarily.
No more freedom of speech. Anyone who said something against the government was taken away. We knew many people who were arrested, not only Jews, but also priests and ministers who spoke up.
Totalitarianism didn't come quickly, it took 5 years from 1938 until 1943, to realize full dictatorship in Austria . Had it happened overnight, my countrymen would have fought to the last breath. Instead, we had creeping gradualism. Now, our only weapons were broom handles. The whole idea sounds almost unbelievable that the state, little by little eroded our freedom.
After World War II, Russian troops occupied Austria . Women were raped, preteen to elderly. The press never wrote about this either. When the Soviets left in 1955, they took everything that they could, dismantling whole factories in the process. They sawed down whole orchards of fruit, and what they couldn't destroy, they burned. We called it The Burned Earth. Most of the population barricaded themselves in their houses. Women hid in their cellars for 6 weeks as the troops mobilized. Those who couldn't, paid the price. There is a monument in Vienna today, dedicated to those women who were massacred by the Russians. This is an eye witness account.
"It's true..those of us who sailed past the Statue of Liberty came to a country of unbelievable freedom and opportunity.
America Truly is the Greatest Country in the World. Don't Let Freedom Slip Away
"After America , There is No Place to Go"
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