“The High Price of Telling the Truth About Islam”

How Making a Documentary Defending the Rights of Muslims
Turned my Worldview Upside Down

By Eric Allen Bell

A strange thing happened to me today when I was driving past the Federal Building in Los Angeles. There were a crowd of people assembled there with signs which said that Israel is an aggressive force in the Middle East and that Iran is being picked on. As I stopped at a red light I heard a man with a mega phone lead the protesters in a chant charging Obama with genocide. I saw many young people and several Muslim women with their heads covered. It was an anti-war demonstration that probably a year ago I would have supported. But although I am not in favor of military action, I know that Iran is not another Iraq, and that in fact there is more going on here than the overly-simplified picture that the protestors were painting, as cars drove by honking in support. As the light turned green another sign caught my eye – a picture of the Twin Towers burning which read “911 Was an Inside Job”. As I looked at a sea of Palestinian flags and college kids banging on drums I felt a certain frustration – frustration based on a series of events that have changed my world view.

In the Summer of 2010, having recently escaped Hollywood, CA to take a much needed break from my profession as a film maker, I was driving in my car listening to a story on NPR. It seems the people in my new home of Murfreesboro, TN were up in arms over the proposed construction of a 53,000 square foot mega mosque, to be built in their small town in the middle of the American Bible Belt.

I listened carefully, to the sound bytes, of those who had shown up to a town hall meeting to voice their opposition and, as someone who was rather new to the South, I was surprised by what I was hearing. “America is a Christian nation and there is only one God and his name is not Allah and his son is Jesus Christ” and “America is a Christian Nation” and “These Muslims do not share my values and I don’t want them in my backyard”. Growing up in Southern California, I had never heard anything like this before in my life. And I started to follow the story with great interest.

On the outer edge of town, off a small country road, there was a large parcel of land, right next door to a Baptist church, with a big sign that read, “Future Home of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro”. Over the past 6 months that sign had been defaced twice. Once it was broken in half and another time the words “Not Welcome” were spray painted over it.

Rutherford County, which includes Murfreesboro, only has a little over 100,000 residents and yet the area boasts nearly 200 Christian churches. Having not been much of a fan of Islam or Christianity or religion in general (and that’s putting it mildly) I saw this as something of a David vs. Goliath story – with fanatical Evangelicals bullying a peaceful Muslim population, which had been in the community for over 30 years without there ever being any trouble. And, after learning that in July there was to be a big parade down Main Street to the town square, protesting the construction of this new mosque, I decided someone really needed to make a documentary about this. And even though I had gone to Murfreesboro to escape the film world for a while, it seemed pretty clear that if I did not document this in a movie, no one else would. I wanted to show the world what I was seeing. So I put together a small film crew and began production on a documentary I would title, “Not Welcome”.

I had never seen more American flags assembled together in one place than I had on that hot July morning as the anti-mosque crowd gathered at the base camp to prepare for the parade. Many of the marchers showed up wearing red, white and blue. I had 4 cameras covering the event with one crew embedded with the Liberal activists who were going to counter-demonstrate and the rest of the cameras with me, embedded with those who were to march against the mosque. I conducted several interviews in the school parking lot where locals and those who had driven for hours gathered, prepared to march against what they perceived to be not only a threat to their way of life, but also something of an insult given the events of September 11, 2001. Two Congressional candidates, both promising to “stop the Islamic training camp” showed up and used this opportunity to campaign, one of whom even gave a speech through a mega phone reminding folks to vote for him if they wanted to stop Sharia Law from coming to Murfreesboro. The pastor of Baptist church gathered everyone together in prayer, and the parade took off down Main Street with signs that read “Google the Koran” and “Stop Homegrown Terrorism” and someone in the crowd handed out hundreds of small Israeli flags as several hundred Southerners marched against the mosque.

About six months later I had accumulated over 300 hours of footage, interviewing the parade organizer, both Congressional candidates, the Mayor, the Imam at the mosque and several of its board members, numerous concerned residents on both sides of the issue, Muslim residents, city council members, a Christian Zionist lobbyist who was organizing the opposition to the mosque – and I had even filmed weeks of court proceedings, as a local group had filed suit against the County to stop them from issuing any construction permits to the Islamic Center. The court proceedings were truly a circus as a country lawyer in loud suit with a bow tie argued that Islam is not a religion and that he was prepared to take this matter to the Supreme Court if necessary. That legal action had failed and failed miserably. And although many of the townspeople did in fact have a number of very valid concerns, I felt that those whom they had chosen to represent them were not their best foot forward. In many ways, for the people of Murfreesboro, TN this turned out to be an international embarrassment – given the level of interest from the press.

Also, someone tried to set fire to some construction equipment at the site of the new mosque and the student activist group, calling themselves “Middle Tennesseans for Religious Freedom” put together a candle light vigil where hundreds of townspeople showed up in support of tolerance. A few young men showed up in a pickup truck and honked their horn repeatedly throughout the vigil. Their clothes seemed to indicate they had spent the work day hanging drywall. And when they put up a huge sign in the back of their truck which read “No Mosque” while misspelling the word mosque, I did not hesitate to film them but to also sort of taunt them, in order to provoke a good response on camera. And I got it. One of them said we should suspend the Constitution and went on to say that “All them Mooslums should be shipped home” even the ones who were born here.

Adding more fuel to that fire was an incident that took place when I attempted to interview Kevin Fisher at a Tea Party event on the town square. It was my opinion that in order to avoid accusations of being bigoted, the money interests (a Christian Zionist organization called Proclaiming Justice to the Nations) chose the only person of color, already involved in this issue, to lead the parade and to be a plaintiff in the lawsuit. Kevin Fisher was an African American college dropout, who worked as a prison guard and became a passionate opponent of the new mosque, after his wife divorced him and became, you guessed it, a Muslim convert. When I approached him on the square with a crew that included 4 cameras, saying only “Hi, Kevin” he dialed his cell phone and called 9-1-1 saying that he was being “racially harassed”. This not only made the headlines of the local paper but the incident, including audio from the 9-1-1 call was played over and over that night on the local evening news. This became something of a running joke, when I was recognized at the grocery store in Murfreesboro for instance, people would often point at me and say, “Hey, stop racially harassing me” and then we would all have a big laugh. And Islamic blogs such as Loonwatch.com were only too happy to run an article about how an opponent of the mosque was “playing the race card” against a filmmaker who was just trying to ask questions.

CNN breezed through town and produced a quick hit piece painting all of the mosque opponents as uneducated rednecks and the Islamic community as everyday people who were being wrongly persecuted. Soledad O’Brien’s producer offered to buy some of my footage from me with the explicit promise that their piece was going to be called “Islam: In America” and would not focus more than a few minutes on Murfreesboro. After an inside tip that this producer was lying to me, I confronted him and got some rather vague answers. So I declined to license him any of my material. And sure enough, the CNN documentary did in fact focus exclusively on Murfreesboro and was called “Unwelcome: The Muslims Next Door”. Somehow Hollywood, with its usual backstabbing tricks, had managed to find me hiding out in Tennessee.

I had accumulated a lot of good quality footage. That, combined with the increasing number of physical threats to me personally while filming in large crowds, and death threats that had arrived via email (causing me to look over my shoulder everywhere I went and making it necessary to spend a small fortune on private security) told me it was time. The writing was on the wall. It was time for me to leave Murfreesboro, hire a professional Editor and get to work on assembling my footage to create a feature length documentary for theatrical distribution.

Before I go any further, I should mention that, while all of this was happening, I had become involved in the story itself. I took sides. I sided with the Islamic community in their legal right to build a house of worship and when I was interviewed by the local papers (it’s not every day that a small town like this has someone shooting a documentary there) when I was asked where I stood on the issue I never hesitated to give my point of view. And after a time my point of view was sought out by larger newspapers and several local and syndicated radio programs – mostly Conservative and mostly taking issue with my stance. And I was also invited to write several pieces for Michael Moore’s blog as well.

Although I had left town to edit, there continued to be letters to the editor on a few of the local papers saying that I should leave TN and go back to where I came from. I could not believe the cartoonish way in which those who opposed the mosque were making their case. I felt like I was on the right side of this thing – absolutely certain. But in fact, I was wrong.

Everything I have told you up until now – this version of my story – is exactly how I was seeing things up until something changed. I went home to Los Angeles, showed my 25 minute short version of the documentary to some distributors and backers, and did the usual dog and pony show that had worked so well to raise funds, for other motion picture projects I had been involved with in the past. And sure enough someone said they would back the completion of the movie. It was decided that the focus would be on “the enemy at home” that being what we were calling “Apocalyptic Christianity” (as there was concern about using the word “Zionism” in “Christian Zionism”). The Murfreesboro issue was to be used as something of a jumping off point to take a look at the expanding influence of the End Times Evangelical lobby in the United States and how they use their influence to manufacture consent for the bombing of oil rich Islamic countries and to influence policy on social issues. The theme would focus on the problems we have in America, with our own religious lunatic fringe, rather than on a peaceful group of non-Christians who just wanted to build a place of worship.

After writing a few articles for Michael Moore, I also wrote for a liberal blog called Common Dreams and I wrote over a hundred articles for the Daily Kos, a liberal blog so popular that they receive over one million visitors a day. I felt I was protecting the underdog, going after the bullies. I really believed that I was on the right side of this thing.

But something kept nagging at me on a gut level. Something about all of this didn’t quite feel right. The Arab Spring, which I supported, started to degenerate into the Islamist Winter, and I grew more and more concerned. I flew back to Nashville to shoot a conference on whether or not Islam was conducive with Democratic Values and on the way to my hotel room I learned that my cab driver was from Egypt. I asked him how he felt about the fall of Mubarak, a dictator worth over $70 billion dollars while so much of his country was living in poverty and he told me he was concerned. Concerned? Wasn’t this good news? The cab driver was a Coptic Christian and he told me that he feared for his family back home. “If the Muslims take control, and they will, it will be very dangerous for my parents and my sisters. I’m scared for them right now”. After that conversation, I started to pay more attention to the news coming from the Islamic world in the Middle East.

Over the coming months I watched as the Muslim Brotherhood gained political power in Egypt. I saw that cab driver’s worst fears come true as Coptic Christians were attacked by Islamic mobs. I saw Tunisia institute Sharia, the brutal Islamic Law. After Libya fell, the Transitional Council also instituted Islamic Law. The nuclear armed Islamic government of Pakistan arrested and punished those who cooperated with the United States in killing Osama Bin Laden. A woman under the Islamic government of Afghanistan faced execution for the crime of being raped. Similar news stories emerged from Iran. A man who typed “there is no god” as his Facebook status in Indonesia, the largest Islamic country in the world, was arrested for blasphemy. Several Muslim men in England were arrested for handing out leaflets to Londoners demanding that homosexuals be executed by hanging for violating Islamic Law with their lifestyle.

And it struck me. Even though these angry townspeople in Mufreesboro, TN had not articulated their concerns very well, they were only half wrong. I remember meeting Frank Gaffney and interviewing him in front of the courthouse and asking him if he really thought that the peaceful Muslims here actually presented a real threat to America and he said no. That caught me off guard so I asked if he really thought it was a credible threat that a community that makes up about one percent of the United States population was just going to suddenly rise up one day and try to take over the country and force Sharia Law onto all of us. Again he said no. Then he told me I was asking the wrong questions. He suggested that I was only looking for answers that would support the conclusions I had already arrived at. He said he had, after much research, arrived at a different set of conclusions and he challenged me to look a little deeper. He gave me a report to look at and many, many months later I did look at his report.

It was at this time that I went to my backers and told them that we were not making an honest documentary. I felt that everything I had put into the 25 minute short version (the one I used to raise the completion funds) was true, but only half true. It was critical that we also show the very real threats that exist within Islam. We needed to show that what is happening to these small communities of peaceful Muslims in America were the exception to the rule. I wanted to show what happens to countries when they gain a Muslim majority, how women are treated, that homosexuals were executed, that free speech did not exist, that the forced Islamic Law was not consistent with Democratic Values – anything and everything I could think of that ought to strike a chord with the Liberal mindset. And the response I received was, “Eric you are starting to sound like an Islamophobe. We don’t want to make a movie that promotes fear. Let’s just stick with the existing plan, okay?”

I fought and I fought. I showed them a book called “The Truth About Mohammed” but was struck down since the author was a man named Robert Spencer and my backers pointed out that the Southern Poverty Law Center named his “Jihad Watch” site as part of a hate group. I asked them to watch a documentary called “Islam: What the West Needs to Know” and pointed out that I had researched independently and verified the truth of what was being presented there, but they would not even watch this documentary as they were sure in advance that it was “hate speech” and “propaganda designed to spread fear”. It probably goes without saying that by now I was very frustrated. I showed my new backers several verses from the Koran that call for the killing of infidels and was told that these verses were probably being taken out of context. I showed them a video clip from MEMRI TV of a young Egyptian child reciting a Hadith that calls for the killing of Jews and was told that “you can’t trust MEMRI because they have an agenda”.

I mentioned the popular Islamophobia watchdog site “Loonwatch” and how I had noticed a pattern of deflecting all criticisms of radical and violent Islam by calling anyone who publicly raises these concerns a “Loon” and how I felt this was an intentional effort to provide a smoke screen for the terrorists. I also noted that everything Loonwatch said was in lockstep with the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and how CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation – the largest Islamic charity at one time, which was found to be funneling monies to Islamic terrorist organizations. I also noted that CAIR had ties to both Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and that Al Qeada had come out of the Muslim Brotherhood. I expressed my concerns that the Egyptian Imam of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro might have ties to the MB, something I had failed to properly investigate. But since CAIR had the support of Glenn Greenwald and Amy Goodman’s show, Democracy Now, I was told that I had my facts all wrong. It was also pointed out to me that if CAIR was allegedly some kind of terrorist front then why do they still have a special tax status and why are they still around? When I said I do not know but it was possible that the government might prefer to watch them out in the open rather than risk them going underground I was told that my judgment was sounding less and less clear and that maybe I needed to take a step back from the project for a while.

As a last attempt I showed them footage of the Imam in Murfreesboro condoning stoning, admitting that Mohammed had stoned someone to death, saying that women cannot be trusted with money because they are irrational. Then I pointed out that a board member of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro was investigated after pictures from his MySpace page had surfaced indicating his strong sympathies for Hamas. I was reminded that Hamas was also a political party which was voted in Democratically and that I needed to make a choice – either stick with the original blueprint or else give the money back and go find myself another backer. So I did. I walked. If I can’t make an honest documentary then I’m in the wrong business. I didn’t want to add to more of the noise that’s out there – I wanted to make something that told the truth, even if that truth is hard to swallow.

It’s funny because I run a website called Global One TV, which has had about 23 million visitors so far, and the theme of this blog is that “Inward Revolution Creates Outward Revolution”. And here I was, having to take my own medicine. My own inward revolution – the questioning of one’s conclusions in search of a deeper truth – had lead me to a very strange place. I thought of the famous Nietzsche quote that says “When you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you”. And with nothing left to lose, I used my position at Daily Kos to go about telling the truth.

In January of 2012 I wrote 3 consecutive articles for the Daily Kos. The first was entitled “Loonwatch.com and Radical Islam”. Here I pointed out the how Loonwatch only deflects criticism of radical Islam. I was also critical of Islamic theology while noting over and over that most Muslims were peaceful. The comments section of Daily Kos made me feel like I was attending my own funeral. It was like a public stoning. There wasn’t much in the way of responding to any of the points laid out in my article but hundreds of comments accusing me of being “right wing” a “bigot” and an “lslamophobe”. This was disappointing.

The next day I received an email from Loonwatch.com with an article showing my name and a photograph of my face, going out to much of the Islamic world, calling me the “Loon at Large”. This article was picked up by IslamophobiaToday.com and TheAmericanMuslim.org – later being repurposed by numerous Islamic blogs around the world, including in places where we all know what happens to anyone who is perceived to be the enemy of Allah or who dares to “insult” Islam.

My next article sought to further substantiate my point with regard to these wolves in sheep’s clothing calling themselves “Islamophobia Watchdog sites” and their first line of defense, that being a blogosphere of liberal lemming infidels who are pre-programmed to blurt out the word “Islamophobe” on cue. That article was called “How and Why Loonwatch is a Terrorist Spin Control Network”. And as you might have guessed, this piece was met with the same mob mentality of those who, rather than read the article and criticize it on its merits, instead shot the messenger with charges of “Islamophobia”. There were also 2 Daily Kos articles written in response attacking me personally, another Loonwatch article where someone suggested I must be from TN and have no education, etc. And once again, my name was put out on the street through a network of Islamic Blogs, including the landing page for CAIR, using a form of Islamic double speak which translated to any serious Jihadist means “enemy of Allah” and “insulting Islam”.

Given the incredible density of the popular Liberal mind, how the readers of my articles were unable to see how their beliefs of Islam were in direct conflict with human rights, gay rights, women’s rights and basic Democratic Values, I wrote a final piece called, “Are You In Favor of Human Rights?” and that one of course got me banned from Daily Kos. It should be noted that in one of the Loonwatch.com articles the author, a person simply calling himself “Danios” demanded that DKOS silence me and provided a link for its readers to email the editors of the Daily Kos, demanding that this “Islamophobe” be censored. And it worked – once again proving the oil and water relationship between Islam and tolerance for free speech.

Things got even stranger from there. Robert Spencer himself wrote me an email and we had a rather interesting dialogue. It became apparent almost immediately that there was nothing about this man that was even remotely hateful. So when Robert Spencer asked if I minded if he reprint my email in response to his on Jihad Watch, I said “sure, why not?” Once that surfaced, the friend count on my Facebook fan page dropped suddenly. Friends and acquaintances told me I had become a hatemonger, a fear monger and an Islamophobe. I pointed out that an Islamophobe is someone with an irrational fear of Islam but there was no reasoning with anyone so deeply indoctrinated into the tyranny of political correctness.

And almost right on cue the news story broke about the NYPD using as a training video a documentary narrated by a devout Muslim who opposes terrorism and jihad, someone who has advised law enforcement and served in the military and as a physician to highly placed members of the United States government. That documentary was called “The Third Jihad” and the story surfaced that CAIR was calling this film “Islamophobic” and demanding that the NYPD pull it right away, which of course they did. CAIR demanded the removal of the head of the NYPD and the liberal blogosphere sang backup – most notably with articles on Huffington Post calling “The Third Jihad” propaganda, hate speech and of course more “Islamophobia”. When I posted a link to this documentary on my Facebook page I was met with more charges of being an Islamophobe by people who had only recently told me how much they had been inspired and influenced by my writings.

After Jamie Glasov of FrontPage Mag – part of the David Horowitz Freedom Center – reached out to me to ask me to be on his radio show (which I agreed to) I surfed the web a bit trying to get a better sense of who exactly David Hororwitz was. It became clear almost immediately that we do not share the same political views, but one thing Horowitz did say that came through with stunning clarity was an assertion that there was an unholy alliance between the Left and Islam, with radical Islam using the Liberal media to create a smoke screen for it – a place where radical can appear moderate and receive Liberal support. He also went on to say that in many Universities across America that students were being radicalized, indoctrinated into the far Left. And I remembered something. Nearly all of the organizers for the college aged activist group who demonstrated in favor of the new mosque in Murfreesboro were either Socialists or Communists. These were kids and they all seemed to share one Professor in particular who was something of a mentor to them, a Socialist who always seemed to be hanging around their college parties, infiltrating into their social scene, taking the smarter and more articulate ones under his wing as their campus group called simply “Solidarity” grew in numbers – in fact recruiting quite a few students while organizing in favor of the mosque. Yikes.

So here we are today, as news that Kuwait goes Islamist and the NYPD answers to CAIR, an arm of a terrorist organization, out of concern for political correctness. Have I become a Conservative out of all of this? Not really. I still oppose the invasion of Iraq. I still feel that all wars should be avoided unless absolutely necessary. I still think that George W. Bush was one of the worst things to happen to America in my lifetime. I still support marriage equality. But I’m also still pro-life. Do you see a trend here? I support human rights and oppose anything which I perceive to be in violation of human rights.

Where do I stand on Islam? Let’s look at its founder – a man who raped a 9 year old girl, a slave owner, a leader who ordered people to be tortured, for adulterers to be stoned, for countless nonbelievers to be beheaded, a killer, a warmonger who spread his “religion of peace” by the sword, a man who suffered from hallucinations of voices telling him to do violent things, a tyrant, a homicidal maniac perhaps the equivalent of 100,000 Osama Bin Ladens. And this sadistic lunatic is considered to be the “ideal man” in Islam. What more needs to be said about Islam than that?

So in this climate where innocent people are killed when Korans are burned, when there are riots and bomb threats and killings over cartoons that offend Muslims, when a novelist such as Salman Rushdie is advised by Indian intelligence authorities that it is unsafe for him to enter the country to attend the world’s largest literary festival, when Muslims outside the festival threaten violence such that the festival organizers decide to cancel even patching in a video of Rushdie for the conference, in a world where a man, Theo Van Gough, was shot a couple dozen times in broad daylight, then stabbed, then had a sword rammed into his heart on the sidewalk of a European street simply for making a 10 minute film about the mistreatment of Muslim women – in such a world that is constantly terrorized by Islamic militants whose insanity is co-opted by an army of Liberal bloggers who make excuses for them – who tell us that 911 was probably our fault – what will become of my documentary when I finish it?

How will “Not Welcome” be received? Will movie theaters refuse to show it, just like those many bookstores who removed the Danish cartoons from their shelves? Will film festivals be afraid to screen it? Will my life be in danger? Will some lunatic Islamic cleric issue a Fatwa ordering my death? Will CAIR gain even more political influence and work within the system to get it banned as “hate speech”? Will critics fear for their lives and thus refuse to review it?

Is the Liberal view that Stealth Jihad is just some whacky conspiracy theory really true? Who will win – free speech of the savagery of a growing mob hell bent on Jihad? I can only tell you this. I will not back down. I will not be bullied, threatened, coerced or terrorized by the “religion of peace”.

We each have a responsibility to the other people on this planet, and especially to those whom we will leave this planet to after we are gone. And this sometimes means taking an unpopular stand in order to protect the rights of innocent people. Loonwatch, CAIR and the other numerous terrorist spin control networks – you’ve not seen the end of me. Not by a long shot. As the saying goes, “You have a right to swing your fists, but that right ends when your fist connects with my nose”.

And by the way, I still believe that unless they break the law, the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro has a legal right to build their house of worship. We don’t have to like it, but then again the First Amendment was designed not to protect popular ideas – as they don’t need protecting – but to protect unpopular ideas as well. This is something you won’t find in any Islamic country and it is also something worth protecting – even when the so-called “religion of peace” tries to shut you down.

Peace,

Eric Allen Bell

READ MORE: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/02/07/the-high-price-of-telling-the-tr…

You’ll probably not believe what you’ll hear…until she pulls out the documents:

Anti-Shariah conference at Madison church

Click here to view the embedded video.

Uploaded by YEAR2012INFO on Nov 14, 2011
The U.S. Constitution is under attack…
Please copy this video TODAY and send it to every person and Church in the USA and Canada.

More from Brigitte Gabriel, founder of Act! For America:

Brigitte Gabriel on Obama

Click here to view the embedded video.

Uploaded by megawolf7 on Jul 21, 2009
Brigitte Gabriel, author of the book, They Must Be Stopped, on the Bill Cunningham Show, June 7, 2009

Islamic infiltration of the universities (h/t: Eric Allen Bell):

MSA student supports rounding up Jews to Israel to kill them

Click here to view the embedded video.

Uploaded by Dendoi on May 16, 2010

Nazi-like MSA student states that she supports Hassan Nasrallah’s call to round up Jews to Israel so he won’t hunt them down worldwide. This video was put up by the David Horowitz Freedom Center [DHFC]. I just put it up here for educational purposes; so people can see a sample of how bad Islamic anti-Semitism is.

Jay Sekulow on Fox News discussing Presidential Primary in Virginia

Click here to view the embedded video.

Uploaded by OfficialACLJ on Jan 2, 2012

Several candidates failed to meet Virginia’s legal requirements to be on the ballot in the state’s Presidential primary. Is such a high bar to be placed on the ballot for president constitutional?

“Free” Elections?

Oh, I can still remember those public school teachers telling us about “Communist elections.” They used to tell us that, in Communist countries, “You can vote for Joe or you can vote for Stalin.” We were supposed to quiver and think of that Joe Stalin fellow, the Mr. Wonderful who helped us win World War II and who later became Mr. Evil, our first enemy in the Cold War. But they always told us how “free” our elections were. They would tell us how we could “vote for anyone we want.”

Well, that was not a complete lie, in that some voters like to write in ‘Mickey Mouse’, just to push it to its illogical extreme. However, it is a significant enough lie. The United States has pretty much been locked into a two-party system since the ratification of the Twelfth Amendment. I.e., since there is no “second prize” in our national elections, presidential and vice-presidential candidates run on the same ticket, with absolutely no fear that the third most popular viewpoint can capture the second prize. Hence, the best a candidate who is not running as a Democrat or Republican can hope for is to play the role of a spoiler.

So, the Democratic and Republican parties act as great gatekeepers in the same way the Communist Party did back in the days of the USSR. Of course, in the USSR, everyone knew they had only one party and little choice. In the USA, we have the feeling we have some choice–and that is often the case.

What choices do voters actually have?

That said, the elements of dictatorship remain part of the picture on election day. For example, I’d like to ask our Democrat readers: Who will be challenging Obama for the nomination this time? Hmmm? No one? Well, I guess y’all are so happy with this dude that nobody would think of such a thing. OK, back in 2004, who was challenging George W. Bush for the nomination? Doesn’t anyone ever challenge a sitting president in his own party? Well, at least Ted Kennedy challenged Jimmy Carter. That was just back in . . . 1976. Like over a third of a century ago!

So, unless a President is retiring, we have a primary election choice in only one party–that is only half of the field, as it is pretty rare to see a partisan challenge of a sitting President. Now let’s look at what choices are available to voters in the party that is currently out of power.

Few would want to grant ballot access to anybody and everybody who signs a few papers and offers to be President. Elections are expensive to run, and ballots with hundreds of names on them would be too unwieldy and time-consuming for each voter and for the election officials. Ballot access should require some indication of a significant amount of support for the candidate. And, generally speaking, each State’s government and that State’s political party should be allowed to create REASONABLE means to determine whether a candidate has a significant enough following to allow the party faithful of its state to consider that individual for their support.

Virginia was the first colony. It was first in freedom. It produced the first President and lead the US in many ways. Leaving the US in 1861, it was first in freedom in the Confederacy, until captured by the Yankee dictatorship. General Robert E. Lee’s home became the great Yankee cemetery. Controlling and Yankeefying Virginians has been the mission of the American dictatorship ever since.

Et tu, Sekulow?

Jay Sekulow is supposed to be one of the good guys. He is a lawyer who fights abortion and homosexual extremism; he defends the rights of Christians and Jews, and seems the type of guy who makes us feel a little guilty when we tell lawyer jokes. So, when the ONLY two candidates who happen to make the GOP ballot in the Commonwealth of Virginia are Mr. Establishment, RINO (Republican In Name Only) from the quintessential all-Democrat-all-the-time-please-disregard-all-party-labels State, and an open and notorious Libertarian, you would think it might raise a red flag in Sekulow’s mind.

Of course, we have had Bachmann, Cain, Perry, Gingrich, and most recently, Santorum garnering major support in the polls. It is hard to say that any of them can be left off the ballot by any REASONABLE method. Of course, the fact that no other State has managed to winnow the field down to two candidates this year also argues pretty loudly that Virginia’s system is not very REASONABLE. In fact, it would probably be more reasonable for Virginia’s Republican leaders to decide who will be the State’s uncommitted delegates in some “smoke-filled room” and send them to the Convention. Heck, if I were a Virginia Republican voter, I would see the “smoke-filled room” as a much fairer system. If I don’t like what the leaders of my local party did, I could take it up with them, in person and/or at the next local election.

But Mr. Sekulow is out there screaming that rules are rules! He says that most years, they have plenty of candidates on the ballot in Virginia. (Irrelevant, because the ballot access law was recently changed.) He says that you Republicans can choose between a Democrat in Republican clothing and a Libertarian who has been nice enough to serve as a “Republican Congressman” for many years.

If the Sekulow the-law-is-the-law argument were absolute, we would have to apologize to the Nazis tried at Nuremberg. Every one of us who has gone to law school knows that we look not ONLY to the law as written, but the interest that the law was written to protect. Every Christian knows there is a difference between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law.

Jay, if you are shilling for Mitt Romney because you feel he is “the most electable”, I can respect that, though I think you are deeply mistaken. If you are shilling for Ron Paul because you believe that the good he does by promoting libertarianism and limited government outweighs the harm that will be done by the libertines who are promoting him, I would agree that you have a point.

Of course, if you are getting paid for this, all lawyers can understand that. We all heard it during our first year in law school: “If someone is paying you X dollars per hour, you could make an argument for . . . .” So, if a wealthy client is paying you for this, Godspeed, Jay!

However, please spare us your the-law-is-the-law mechanical reaction to this injustice. The Republican voters of Virginia should have an actual Republican on the ballot. In the 2012 Primary, Republican voters in Virginia will be completely disenfranchised and Jay Sekulow is amongst the disenfranchisors.

UPDATE: Fox News: Virginia Attorney General Backs Off Call to Change Ballot Rules Before Primary

I say he is WRONG. When the law was intended to subvert our Constitutional rights, respecting the “rule of law” is simply fatuous. This law was put into place to help the GOP establishment, i.e., Romney, who has vastly more money than anybody else. Though that was not the intention, it also helped Ron Paul, who has all the Paulbots to do whatever needs to be done.

The way that the law was interpreted is also very questionable.

If Virginians were made of the same stuff they were made of in 1776, every lamppost would have its politician. Instead, it’s a mere suburb of Mordor on the Potomac. For shame.

Fox News has the story:

Virginia AG Intervenes in GOP Ballot Dispute as Blocked Candidates Join Suit

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is intervening in his state’s presidential primary dispute and plans to file emergency legislation to address the inability of most Republican presidential candidates to get their name on the ballot, Fox News has learned.

Meanwhile, four GOP candidates on Saturday joined fellow candidate Rick Perry’s lawsuit against the state, urging the Board of Elections to either allow them on the ballot or at least refrain from taking any action until a Jan. 13 court hearing.

Only Mitt Romney and Ron Paul qualified for the Virginia primary, a contest with 49 delegates up for grabs. Perry and the four candidates joining the lawsuit — Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum and Jon Huntsman — did not.

The failure of other candidates to qualify led to complaints that the 10,000-signature requirement is too stringent.

Cuccinelli, who is a Republican, shared the concerns and plans to take them to the legislature while the candidates work through the courts.

“Recent events have underscored that our system is deficient,” he said in a statement Saturday. “Virginia owes her citizens a better process. We can do it in time for the March primary if we resolve to do so quickly.”

Cuccinelli’s proposal is expected to state that if the Virginia Board of Elections certifies that a candidate is receiving federal matching funds, or has qualified to receive them, that candidate will upon request be automatically added to the ballot.

Two former Democratic attorneys general are backing the move, along with a former Democratic state party chairman and a former Republican state party chairman.

Former state Attorney General Tony Troy called the Virginia process a “legal and constitutional embarrassment.” Fellow former top Virginia prosecutor Steve Rosenthal said: “This is not a Democratic or Republican issue. If it takes emergency legislation, then we need to do it.”
[...]
More here.

Here’s my earlier take on the Virginia GOP ballot debacle.

First, please read this article at Ashby Law Firm:
Why It’s Time to Change Virginia’s Unreasonable Ballot Access Law

(h/t: GOV)

I left a message on the Ashby site; here is that message in its entirety:

Evidently, the Virginia GOP are either controlled by, or are themselves, Washington insiders who are rigging the game to keep out any candidate who both:

(1) has a chance of winning (unlike Ron Paul);
and
(2) is a genuine conservative who excites real people in flyover country, and who provides a legitimate alternative to RINOs, Washington insiders, and other subhuman parasites on the body politic (unlike Mitt Romney and Ron Paul).

A large part of your Commonwealth is, in fact, a suburb of Mordor on the Potomac. The Constitution makes it difficult to partition any Commonwealth or State, so you’re stuck with them. I don’t envy you.

Unfortunately, this electoral wrongdoing in Virginia – and wrongdoing it is – has a deleterious effect on the rights of the rest of the citizenry of these United States, who don’t want an evil or crazy pair of presidential candidates foisted on us by having primaries stolen by one method or another, in one State after another.

Both parties, and the government at all levels, are rapidly losing the already tattered fig leaf of the consent of the governed. When that happens, the result may be a preference cascade. If you don’t know what that is, Google is your friend. We hope to have emigrated by that time.

Bare Naked Islam has the story.

WXIA-Atlanta has the story:

WACO, Ga. — A west Georgia business owner is stirring up controversy with signs he posted on his company’s trucks, for all to see as the trucks roll up and down roads, highways and interstates:

“New Company Policy: We are not hiring until Obama is gone.”

“Can’t afford it,” explained the employer, Bill Looman, Tuesday evening. “I’ve got people that I want to hire now, but I just can’t afford it. And I don’t foresee that I’ll be able to afford it unless some things change in D.C.”

Looman’s company is U.S. Cranes, LLC. He said he put up the signs, and first posted pictures of the signs on his personal Facebook page, six months ago, and he said he received mostly positive reaction from people, “about 20-to-one positive.”

But for some reason, one of the photos went viral on the Internet on Monday.

And the reaction has been so intense, pro and con, he’s had to have his phones disconnected because of the non-stop calls, and he’s had to temporarily shut down his company’s website because of all the traffic crashing the system.

Looman made it clear, talking with 11Alive’s Jon Shirek, that he is not refusing to hire to make some political point; it’s that he doesn’t believe he can hire anyone, because of the economy. And he blames the Obama administration.

“The way the economy’s running, and the way my business has been hampered by the economy, and the policies of the people in power, I felt that it was necessary to voice my opinion, and predict that I wouldn’t be able to do any hiring,” he said.

Looman did receive some unexpected attention not long after he put up his signs and Facebook photos. He said someone, and he thinks he knows who it was, reported him to the FBI as a threat to national security. He said the accusation filtered its way through the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and finally the Secret Service. Agents interviewed him.

“The Secret Service left here, they were in a good mood and laughing,” Looman said. “I got the feeling they thought it was kind of ridiculous, and a waste of their time.”

So Bill Looman is keeping the signs up, and the photos up — stirring up a lot of debate.

“I just spent 10 years in the Marine Corps protecting the rights of people… the First Amendment, and the Second Amendment and the [rest of the] Bill of Rights,” he said. “Lord knows they’re calling me at 2 in the morning, all night long, and voicing their opinion. And I respect their right to do that. I’m getting a reaction, a lot of it’s negative, now. But a lot of people are waking up.”

“Until Obama is gone?”

Not everyone can afford to wait that long!

Telegraph (UK): America Ignores Long-Term Unemployment At Its Peril

It wasn’t great, good or, depending on whether your glass is always half full or empty, even that encouraging. But there was nothing in the latest US jobs report that has had anyone borrowing the doom-laden language that Europe has had a recent monopoly on.

80,000 jobs were created in October, and the tally for August and September was revised upwards by a total of 102,000. According to the Bureau of Labor, people have been hired at a rate of 125,000 a month for the last year. There was a decline, too, in the long-term unemployed – a group you belong to in the US if you’ve been without work for more than six months. That figure fell 366,000 to 5.9m.

But don’t expect Americans to be celebrating. That’s not only because October’s figures don’t immediately change an extremely difficult jobs market. 13.9m people are still unemployed and a further 8.9m are having to settle for part-time work. It runs deeper.
[…]
A report published this week by the Pew Trust, a bipartisan research group, underlines what a new problem it is. Before spiking to its current level of 42.2pc of the total number of unemployed, the highest it reached since the 1960s was just under 15pc following the recession of the early 1980s.

In its analysis of long-term unemployment in the third quarter of this year – July to September – The Pew Trust report found that older workers were hit particularly hard. 43pc of those without work over the age of 55 had been for more than six months. A university degree did not offer that much protection – 34pc of the unemployed with a degree were long-term casualties, while almost every industry had 20pc long-term unemployment. [emphasis added]
[…]
The consensus among economists is that the majority of unemployment is what they describe as cyclical. In other words, as the economy recovers companies will hire more aggressively and those without work will find it. But at an otherwise dull press conference on Wednesday, Bernanke remarked that: “cyclical unemployment left untreated can, so to speak, become structural.”

The implication is worrying: a period out of work can turn a previously employable worker into one that will find it much harder to get a job. Skills atrophy, confidence plummets and the needs of companies move on. [emphasis added]
[…]
Read it all.

Human Events: Rise of the Unemployables

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce released a grim quarterly report this week that found “the small business outlook on the U.S. economy continues to decline.” The percentage of small businesses planning to add a few employees declined from 18% to 16% in the second quarter, while those with plans to add “many” employees remained stuck at 1%.

This isn’t primarily due to flat sales. That was actually the #3 reason for holding off on making new hires… and it was virtually tied with dread of ObamaCare. The number of businesses citing ObamaCare as their top concern continued to grow.
[…]
Small businesses are the primary engine of job creation, as everyone right up to President Obama agrees. Their reluctance to hire anyone is a troubling sign of the long unemployment wasteland stretching ahead. Making things worse is the growing trend toward long-term unemployment. A rising number of people have become, in a word, unemployable.

The Economist has some terrible statistics:

Over 6 million Americans, more than 40% of all those unemployed, have now been out of work for more than six months. Most of these, 4.5 million, haven’t worked for a year or more. This crisis of long-term joblessness is unprecedented in the post-war period.

[…] Workers are escaping unemployment more slowly than at any time since 1948. The long-term unemployed are struggling most; in the year to June, the newly jobless were three times more likely to find new work in a given month than the long-term unemployed. Many of the latter have given up hope. For the first time in decades, jobless workers are more likely to drop out of the labor force (and cease to be counted as unemployed) than to get a job.

(Emphasis mine.) This latter point is important to keep in mind when considering unemployment news, because the widely reported U-3 measurement from the Bureau of Labor Statistics deliberately excludes those who have dropped out of the workforce entirely. For September, the “official” U-3 figure held steady at 9.1%, and made headlines. The real unemployment number, the U-6 measurement that includes discouraged workers, rose from 16.2% to 16.5%.

Peterson Institute​ visiting fellow Howard Rosen, quoted in a Politico article that notes the percentage of people unemployed for six months or longer hasn’t risen above 26% during the past fifty years, sees the U.S. work force contracting as the population increases:

“We have an immediate problem, which is that people are dropping out of the labor force,” said Howard Rosen, a visiting fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “It drains the potential of our economy to grow.”

The working-age population increased by 3.8 million over the past two years, but the net size of the labor force has declined by 768,000, he noted.

[…]
America doesn’t just need more “jobs,” it needs more careers. It needs more new careers.

Obama’s [recently-defeated] bill included an even stranger provision that would have allowed the long-term unemployed to sue businesses that refuse to hire them, if they could demonstrate the length of their unemployment was a factor in the decision. The resulting flood of frivolous lawsuits would have only made the publication of a want ad even more terrifying for business owners.

What we’ve got is a collapsing workforce, cherry-picked for recently unemployed, highly skilled workers by large corporations. Small businesses that might be willing to take a chance on younger workers, or those with less sterling credentials, are afraid to hire anyone. [emphasis added]

Obama’s solutions were foolish attempts to distort the price of labor without altering its value. The value of discouraged workers doesn’t change when little tax-credit carrots are dangled before prospective employers. As the overall demand for employees falls, it’s not surprising to find resumes ever more carefully fished out of corporate in-boxes. A smaller group of people gets hired and re-hired for all the good jobs, while the ranks of the unemployable swell. [emphasis added]

The only real answer is to increase the demand for labor, and provide more opportunities for those discouraged workers to re-enter the workforce. The value of their labor only changes when demand increases, to the point where employers who formally considered only the thickest and juiciest resumes are offering on-the-job training to get people in the door. History has shown that sort of improvement comes only with increases in our national gross domestic product: more companies selling more goods and services to a growing base of hungry consumers. Why would anyone expect to find opportunities for marginal workers anywhere except the margins of energetic growth?

Expanding markets, and creating job opportunities, is always a matter of risk taken in the pursuit of reward.  What happens when arbitrary government power increases the risks and diminishes the rewards?  The answer is written on millions of unemployment checks.  The Chamber of Commerce small business survey had it exactly right.  The best thing the Obama Administration could do for the unemployables is the one thing it will never do: get out of the way.
Read it all.

Also see:

• Website: US Crane LLC
• The Blaze: Majority of unemployed have now been out of work so long they no longer get benefits
• UNDERemployment and the Greater Depression of 2010
• Why Employers Avoid Hiring the Long-Term Unemployed

You heard as a child in your government propaganda camp . . . Oh dear, I am having a Rick Perry moment. Most people don’t call those places “government propaganda camps.” What are the words? Oh, yes, most people call them “American public schools.”

At any rate, they told you that the Pilgrims in Massachusetts had the “first Thanksgiving” back in the 1600s. Well, actually, the those strange-dressing, “witch”-hanging, Yankee forerunners were actually pretty late to the party. About a half century too late to the party, to be exact.

The first Thanksgiving was celebrated September 8, 1565, in St. Augustine, Florida. Oh, you are one of those English-only people who think that you can find fault with this post? Well, think again. The first recorded Thanksgiving amongst English settlers was on December 4, 1619 in Virginia. Read all about it here.

Want to experience a real Old South Thanksgiving? Visit the Olde South Thanksgiving and Harvest Festival website to see what it’s all about. If you plan to be in the Abbeville, South Carolina area, it is this coming weekend. If not, wait until next year.

How to get there? Click here for Abbeville, SC on Google Maps.

PJM: Two More Terrorists Traced Back to ‘Jihad U.’

Samir Khan and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab are both AlMaghrib Institute members.

October 19, 2011 – 12:00 am – by Patrick Poole

Last week, underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab pleaded guilty for trying to murder 289 innocent civilians on Christmas Day 2009: he claimed he is guilty under U.S. law, but innocent under Islamic law. Earlier this month, North Carolina resident and al-Qaeda English-language propagandist Samir Khan met his end in a drone strike targeting al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) leader Anwar al-Awlaki, former imam at the Dar al-Hijrah terrorist factory in Falls Church, Virginia.

Both Abdulmutallab and Khan had connections to Awlaki, but they also had one additional tie: they were both former members of the extremist AlMaghrib Institute. (I first wrote about AlMaghrib’s extremist teaching back in February 2007.) With Khan’s death and Abdulmutallab’s guilty plea, the pair join a long line of terrorist operatives who have graduated from “Jihad U.”

Samir Khan’s connection to AlMaghrib goes back to at least October 2004, when his profile on AlMaghrib’s online forums was established (his profile is still online).

According to CNN, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab flew to Houston and attended a 16-day AlMaghrib seminar featuring hate sheikh Yasir Qadhi and dedicated to teaching young Muslims “the nuts and bolts of Islam.” A Houston TV station reported that sermon audio sets by Anwar al-Awlaki were on sale during the conference. Abdulmutallab also attended two additional AlMaghrib events held in the UK.
[…]
Considering AlMaghrib’s abject failure in deradicalizing their own students, it is all the more amazing that the National Counterterrorism Center has enlisted AlMaghrib dean Yasir Qadhi as an expert in deradicalization — notwithstanding his complaints at a meeting attended by a top Department of Homeland Security official that he was on the terror watch list. [emphasis added]

There is no such thing as deradicalization.

One has to wonder if deradicalization is actually a goal of the AlMaghrib Institute, considering the river of hate that streams from its instructors and staff. I’ve previously reported here at Pajamas Media on Yasir Qadhi’s “Hoax of the Holocaust” rhetoric and his promotion of the cause of his teacher, terror ringleader Ali al-Timimi.

Qadhi is joined by other AlMaghrib faculty members, including: Saeed Rageah, who has publicly called for Allah to “destroy” the enemies of Islam and to “damn” the “infidels”;  AlMaghrib head of Islamic history Sheikh Abdullah Hakim Quick, who says that gays should be killed and pronounces Jews and other non-Muslims as “filth”; AlMaghrib Vice President Waleed Basyouni, who has spied Jewish plots and claimed that only Muslims can really know God (and who is described by Dateline NBC as “an outspoken critic of extremism”); and AlMaghrib founder and President Muhammad Alshareef, who has expounded on such interfaith themes as “Why the Jews Were Cursed.”
[…]
Much more here.

Jihad U

By: Patrick Poole
FrontPageMagazine.com | Wednesday, February 14, 2007

From the East Coast through the American Heartland to the West Coast, a rapidly growing and extremely popular Islamic studies program is bringing Wahhabi extremism and Muslim Brotherhood activism into mosques and Muslim student groups throughout North America. The Al-Maghrib Institute features motivational-style speakers, aggressive marketing, savvy use of the Internet and slick multi-media presentations as part of their for-college-credit courses leading to an Islamic Studies degree offered at mosques in at least thirteen cities:

College Park, Maryland
Fairfax, Virginia
Houston, Texas
New Brunswick, New Jersey
San Francisco Bay area, California
Seattle, Washington
Memphis, Tennessee
Sacramento, California
Detroit, Michigan/Windsor, Ontario, Canada
Chicago, Illinois
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Toronto, Quebec, Canada

Al-Maghrib also ran onsite seminars in Columbus, Ohio during 2006. In addition to the courses they offer, the Institute sponsors a site selling Al-Maghrib audio and video course lectures, EmanRush Audio, and Khutbah.com, which provides texts of sermons and articles delivered by Al-Maghrib instructors and staff.

The staple of Al-Maghrib’s course offerings are the double weekend seminars held at their permanent sites. Locations of upcoming seminars, including one held this past weekend in Atlanta, are provided on the Al-Maghrib website. In addition, the Al-Maghrib instructors are in high demand as motivational speakers at Muslim organization events all over the world. The Institute is also active amongst the 150 chapters of the Muslim Student Association (MSA) located at universities all over the US and Canada. The MSA is one of the front groups operated by the international Muslim Brotherhood. Al-Maghrib staff are also regular fixtures on several Islamic satellite television networks.

The organization’s Wahhabi-influenced extremism, rabid anti-Semitism and Holocaust denials, and militaristic preaching of jihad even have other Muslims expressing concern about the radicalizing effect of Al-Maghrib’s preaching and programs.

Al-Maghrib’s educational courses are accredited by the American Open University, which in turn is accredited by Al-Ahzar University in Cairo – the headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood, the oldest and largest radical Islamic organization in the world. The courses offered by Al-Mahgrib count only as course credit for the AOU’s Bachelors in Islamic Studies degree, the only English language program offered by AOU.
[…]
Much more here.

The Difference between the First Black President and My First Black President

Posted by Julia Gorin September 05th 2011 03:30:18 AM

Herman Cain: “I would attack Iran to protect Israel.”
Barack Obama: I would attack Israel to protect Iran.

Cain: I would attack Iran to protect Israel (July 18)

Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain said Monday he would attack Iran to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons or to respond to aggression against Israel.

Asked if he agreed with former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton’s contention that the “only realistic alternative … is to use force preemptively against Iran’s nuclear weapons program” since diplomacy has failed, Mr. Cain said he did, with one caveat.

“There would be some other pieces of information I would need before I gave that order, but I’m saying that would be Option B,” Mr. Cain said during an interview with editors and reporters at The Washington Times.

“Option A is, ‘Folks, we are not going to allow you to attack Israel‘ … If they call my bluff, they already know — they will know — what Option B is.”

Mr. Cain said that, as commander-in-chief, he would “make it crystal clear [that] if you mess with Israel, you’re messing with the United States of America,” but stressed that his “Cain Doctrine” would not be a “blank check” for Israeli military action.

“There will be a set of conditions and circumstances that I will work with Israel on for them to understand that they cannot abuse that doctrine,” said Mr. Cain, a former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza.
However, if Israel is ever attacked first by Iran, he said he is “not going to sit back and get a vote from the United Nations as to what we ought to do.”

“If they [Iran] start lobbing rockets and stuff over at Israel, then we’re going to shoot back with Israel,” he said.

Mr. Cain dismissed the notion that an attack on Iran is unrealistic: “First of all, we have the most capable military power in the world,” he said. “Air, ground — although we won’t have to use ground for this — submarines, ships, that would be strategically placed in that part of the world.”

Mr. Cain has questioned President Obama’s commitment to the Jewish state, saying during his candidacy announcement that Mr. Obama had thrown “Israel under the bus” by calling for negotiations with the Palestinians to be based on Israel’s borders before the 1967 war.

“The problem we have today is that, I believe, that [Iran] would test this president’s intention to help protect Israel,” he said.

Cain’s position would be a first for any United States president, and certainly the first time that this stance would be official policy. Which would of course go against the position of the State Dept., the CIA, and parts of the U.S. military which are Arabist. Cain would give truth to the lie that America is a friend of Israel. So far, it’s been such in a purely Kavorkian sense of the term.

But below is what really made me fall for the man, from Jihad Watch:

Herman Cain: U.S. communities have right to ban mosques

“Herman Cain Says U.S. Communities ‘Have the Right’ to Ban Mosques,” from FoxNews.com, July 17 (thanks to Rand):

Presidential candidate Herman Cain on Sunday defended his opposition to a new mosque in Tennessee, expressing concern about Shariah law and declaring Americans “have the right” to ban mosques in their communities.

Cain, who stirred controversy this year by saying he would be uncomfortable appointing a Muslim to his Cabinet if elected, first expressed concern Thursday about the controversial mosque in Murfreesboro, Tenn. That mosque has been the subject of demonstrations and legal challenges in the wake of the controversy over the so-called “Ground Zero mosque” in New York City.

Speaking on “Fox News Sunday,” Cain said he came out against the Tennessee mosque after talking to members of that community. He said the site is “hallowed ground” to Murfreesboro residents and that they’re concerned about “the intentions of trying to get Shariah law” — the code governing conduct in Islamic societies.

“It’s not just a mosque for religious purposes. This is what the people are objecting to,” he said.

Asked whether any community should be able to prohibit a mosque, Cain said they should.

“They have the right to do that. That’s not discriminating … against that particular religion. That is an aspect of them building that mosque that doesn’t get talked about,” he said.

Cain again argued that residents were objecting to “the fact that Islam is both a religion and a set of laws, Shariah law. That’s the difference between any one of our other traditional religions.”

But while Cain said he expects the case to come before the Supreme Court, a local judge has allowed the project to go forward.

Cain is taking heat for his comments about Muslims. The [Hamas-linked] Council on American-Islamic Relations, which accused him of using “bigoted” language with his Cabinet comments, said Sunday that he should “apologize” for his latest remarks. […]

Election 2012? I think Cain is able.

The Tennessean: Davidson sheriff’s booking policy eases rules on religious headwear

A Muslim woman told to remove the veil covering her face to pose for a jail mugshot has prompted the Davidson County Sheriff’s Office to revise its policy regarding religious headwear.

Beginning Friday, a person wearing face-covering religious headwear who is being booked into the jail will have two mugshots — one with the coverings on; the other will be taken with the headwear removed from the person’s face.

The second shot will be taken in the presence only of a same-sex guard, be kept in a confidential file, and opened only through judicial order, said Karla Weikal, sheriff’s office spokeswoman.

The same rule applies at security checkpoints at Justice A.A. Birch Criminal Justice Building, Historic Metro-Nashville Courthouse and Davidson County Juvenile Justice Center. If someone wearing a type of religious headwear sets off a metal detector at the entrance, the person will be taken to a private room by a guard of the same sex. There, the person will remove the headdressing and be screened.

While local civil rights and religious leaders Tuesday applauded the revisions, some Middle Tennessee law enforcement officials said the sheriff’s office might be taking things a bit too far.

“…taking things a bit too far”?

Gee, ya think?

“We respect religious rights, but sometimes common sense has to play in here a little bit,” said Wilson County Sheriff Terry Ashe. “I don’t care if it’s Bubba with a cowboy hat or if it’s a religious situation, for everyone’s safety, we’re going to take a mugshot, and when it comes to booking photos, I’m going to have to see who you are.”

The Muslim woman who was told to remove her veils for her booking photo in Davidson County contacted the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee, which started in April negotiating with the sheriff’s office about changes to its religious accommodation policy. That policy took effect in 1998 but is modified each year…

Read it all.

This is perfectly ridiculous.

Nobody in the US has any business wearing facial disguise in public to begin with, much less committing a crime with it on.

In the US or any other non-Muslim nation, facial disguise (the burqa, or the hijab and niqab, or anything else) violates our own social mores. As a way of verifying identity and establishing the level of trust that allows our society to function, we expect that persons of both sexes and all ages go about in public with their faces and heads exposed. Not only the face itself, but also the neck, ears, head shape, and hair, form part of the visual cues that we use to recognize and identify one another.

When we see someone whose face is concealed, other than during a masquerade event or in exceedingly cold weather (uncommon in Tennessee), we wonder whether that person is getting ready to loot a store, rob a bank, throw a bomb, join a lynch mob, or commit other violent crimes. Considering the facial disguises worn by many of the recent rioters in the UK, our mistrust is well founded.

Not About Modesty

Burqa-wearers claim that their “modesty” is offended by any attempts to get them to doff their facial disguise. That’s hogwash! In our part of the world, modesty is all about not attracting undue attention to oneself. Going around with a bag over one’s head and body is the antithesis of modesty. It is all about confrontation; it is a test to see whether we will back down. One reason why Muslimas wear the burqa in Tennessee is because it puts pressure on non-Muslims. Even the hijab alone, by which I mean just the head/neck scarf, without the niqab (i.e., the face veil), serves as an “in your face” confrontation. The hijab is a visual sign of the wearer’s rejection of the customs and the community ties of native-born Americans and even of the sensibilities of those immigrants who came to the US because they approve of what we stand for (or of what the US once stood for). It is an implied statement that normal American women who do not cover their heads are somehow “immodest.”

If you cannot cope with the idea of your face being exposed in public, then you do not belong in this part of the world. Just go home immediately, take your friends and family with you, and never come back. Or don’t come here in the first place!

Security Risk

The burqa is an unacceptable security risk, even in Muslim countries! There is no way to know who (male, female, criminal, terrorist) or what (contraband, including BOMBS) might be under that burqa. By the time the authorities apprehend the suspect and remove the disguise, it may be too late to prevent a massacre or other major disaster. This is why the burqa is banned in some countries and cities.

“Religious headgear”?

Calling the burqa “religious headgear” is a whitewash in and of itself. What kind of “religion” expects teenage girls and adult women go around with bags over their heads? I contend that Islam is not a religion at all, but rather, an enemy, totalitarian, expansionist political ideology that seeks to rid the world of everything but itself. There is no reason why we need to give any totalitarian ideology the First Amendment protection that belongs to the free exercise of religion. In fact, according to the Qur’an, the stated goal of Islam is to encroach upon and destroy our own freedom to reject Islam!

Why is Davidson County so important?

Davidson County’s policy on shari’a law is important because Davidson County exercises jurisdiction over a populous metropolitan area that is also the capital of Tennessee.

According to Wikipedia:

Davidson County is a county located in the U.S. state of Tennessee. As of 2010, the population was 626,681. Its county seat is Nashville.[1]

In 1963, the City of Nashville and the Davidson County government merged, so the county government is now known as the “Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County,” or “Metro Nashville” for short.

Nashville is also the capital of Tennessee. The upshot is that decisions that are made in Davidson County will not only affect “Metro Nashville” but also exert influence upon the entire State.

Blog admins 1389 and CzechRebel have been to Nashville. We both vehemently oppose the ongoing Muslim attempts to infiltrate the Southern US and to impose a parallel system of shari’a law upon it. We are far from alone in this. The South continues to be a bastion of Judaeo-Christian civilization, which is why the tranzi-progressive/pro-jihadi axis constantly bashes Southerners as “rednecks,” “hillbillies,” “bigots,” and so forth. It is all because the “common folks” of the “Red States” in the South keep getting in the way of their evil agenda.

No mosques in Dixie, and no burqas either!

From Gates of Vienna:

This press conference announcement arrived in our mailbox a little while ago. It is a push-back against a Sharia Republican primary candidate for the Virginia State Assembly.

You’ll notice the date for the meeting is today, in Leesburg, Virginia. For any of our readers in the 87th District, please follow this carefully.

Press Conference

Government Center

1 Harrison Street S.E., Leesburg Virginia

August 10, 2011

5:30 p.m.

The background, relationships and beliefs of Imad Afif “David” Ramadan, a candidate seeking the Republican nomination for the Virginia House of Delegates seat in the new 87th district in Loudon County, have lately become a matter of increasing controversy. To explore what is known — and as yet unknown — about Mr. Ramadan’s character and caliber, a group of local and national figures will hold a press conference at the Government Center in Leesburg, Virginia at 5:30 on Wednesday, August 10.

Among those participating in the press conference will be:

• Frank Gaffney is the President of the Center for Security Policy, a Washington Times columnist and host of the nationally syndicated talk-radio program, Secure Freedom Radio (heard locally on the Salem Radio Network’s WRC 1260 AM at 9:00 p.m.) Mr. Gaffney was the publisher and co-author of the Amazon best-seller, Sharia: The Threat to America.

• Kent Clizbe was a covert Central Intelligence Agency officer specializing in counter-terrorism operations in Southeast Asia, Africa, Europe and the Middle East in the 1990s. Following the attacks on 9/11, Mr. Clizbe returned to work for the Agency as counter-terrorism operations officer, for which service he was awarded the Intelligence Community Seal Medallion, its highest decoration for contractors. He is a Muslim convert who formerly served on the Loudoun County Republican Committee. He is also the author of Willing Accomplices: How KGB Covert Influence Agents Created Political Correctness, and a recent article at BigPeace.com about his interview with, and research on, David Ramadan.
• Kerry Patton is a former intelligence officer who has specialized on network-centric warfare and served in South America, Africa, Middle East, Asia and Europe. He is an internationally recognized expert on security, terrorism and intelligence-related issues and is a national security commentator for Fox News. Mr. Patton has advised domestic government agencies and international organizations on these issues. He is author of Sociocultural Intelligence: The New Discipline of Intelligence Studies.
• Nagi N. Najjar is a Lebanese Orthodox Christian born in Beirut. He was an officer in the Lebanese Armed Forces specializing in intelligence. He has advised the U.S. government on issues regarding Islamic terrorism in Lebanon and the Middle East. And, since 2000, Mr. Najjar has been the Executive Director of the Government of Free Lebanon in Exile. He is also the publisher of From Israel to Damascus and Cobra.
• James Lafferty is the founder and chairman of the Virginia Anti-Shariah Task Force and a member of the board of Stop the Islamization of America. He operates a political and public relations consulting firm with offices in Washington, DC and New York.

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Immediately following the press conference, “Friends of David Ramadan” are hosting a fundraiser headlined by former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese at Tuscarora Mill, a restaurant adjacent to the Government Center complex. Curiously, a spokesman for Mr. Meese has said he is not endorsing Mr. Ramadan. Unless and until questions are fully and accurately addressed about who Imad Afif Ramadan is, no one else should either.

For those who follow Virginia politics, this is a crucial moment in our battle against the incursions of sharia law. In fact, it is vital not just to Virginians, but to all Americans who are concerned about people like Ramadan, and even more so, the cluelessness of the Republican Party…

Mr. Ramadan is taking advantage of the redistricting chaos which always follows a Census-based district re-alignment. This process confuses most people and they resort to going online to find out what their new district may be. That is, if they even notice there will be a primary vote in their district.

Mr. Ramadan’s opponent in this Republican primary is Jo-Ann Chase. I’ve looked at a few leftist Virginia blogs and she’s being demonized as a — gasp — Tea Party “extremist”. In Leftist terms that means she supports small government and the Second Amendment. You can see her endorsements on that page, above.

Her Republican primary opponent, Mr. Ramadan, is endorsed by Senator John McCain and our Democrat Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. He also has the blessing of al-Jazeera, as you can see at this essay.

Grover Norquist endorses him, as he does any Muslim Brotherhood candidate. You can read about Grover’s sharia ties here. As that essay states (a point I have often considered myself) calling Norquist out in this political climate is much akin to what the witness/martyrs like Whittaker Chambers had to endure when the leftists and closet Communists were exposing Alger Hiss’ perfidy.

Mr. Gaffney’s courage in being willing to name Norquist and point credibly to his terrorist ties is quite remarkable, especially given Norquist’s position as the ultimate influential insider in Washington, D.C. Republican politics.

Thus, the RINOs like McCain line up when told to do so. Let’s see if Mr. Meese comes to his senses.

From Rep. Allen West’s weekly email update:

Upcoming Week
…
- Protecting Jobs from Government – The House is scheduled to consider H.R. 2587, the Protecting Jobs from Government Interference Act. The bill would prohibit the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) from ordering an employer to restore or reinstate any work or employee, or from requiring investment in a particular plant or facility. The bill is in response to a complaint filed in April of this year by the NLRB against the Boeing Company for its decision to locate a production facility in South Carolina, a “right-to-work” state. The NLRB is seeking to force the company to keep its production in Washington, where the workforce is unionized. Regarding the bill, House Education and Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline (R-MN) said “Republicans refuse to allow federal bureaucrats to reverse the business decisions of employers. The Protecting Jobs from Government Interference Act takes a critical step to provide employers with the certainty they need to put Americans back to work, right here at home.”

Click HERE to sign up for Allen West’s email.

Why are huge megamosque complexes invading the American South? Who is funding them? And why are they often being built next to churches?

Human Events: Southern-Fried Jihadists?

by Jason Mattera

05/05/2011

Homegrown Islamic terrorists are consciously moving to the South to take their Jihad to the heart of “infidel America,” says Erick Stackelbeck, investigative reporter and author of the new book, The Terrorist Next Door.

When we sat down, Stackelbeck argued that monster mosques are popping up everywhere below the Mason-Dixon Line because Jihadists want to “challenge American Christendom.” These multi-million dollar facilities, Stackelback suspects, are almost completely funded with Saudi Arabian and United Arab Emirates money. As you’ll see in our interview, Stackelback highlights a massive mosque in the Nashville area that had to get gobs of financial assistance for construction from elsewhere than the local Muslim community, as there are only 200 Muslim families in the area.

Oh, and these mosques are generally built near churches on purpose with the “minaret” towering over the “steeple,” and that’s not by accident. I’ll let Stackelbeck explain:

YouTube: Southern-Fried Jihadists?

View article and read comments here.

The federal government settles Somali Muslim “refugees” in small towns such as Shelbyville, Tennessee, where they not only disrupt and endanger the lives of law-abiding locals, but also form a permanent security risk to the US:

Atlas Shrugs: PBS in Tandem with the State Department Smears Shelbyville to Advance Al Hijra (Muslim Immigration)

For years I have been writing about the refugee resettlement program here: Refugee Resettlement: The quiet Jihad tsunami that is wreaking havoc on "gateway cities" like Lewiston, Maine; Shelbyville, Tennessee; St. Cloud, Minnesota; Clarkston, Georgia; and Jamestown, North Dakota. (here)

More deeply disturbing is the UN decides who gets refugee status. I have recounted the subsequent sometimes violent repercussions of these "religious" communities attempting to advance Islamic supremacism by targeting gays and hurling stones at them, trying to impose Muslim prayer on the public schools, imposing sharia law on these workplaces in America (go here and here and here and here and here and here)….

More on al hijra here.

Brian Mosely, staff writer for the Shelbyville Times Gazette, contacted me on the topic of Somali immigration in that small Tennessee community. He has written a number of articles over the past three years dealing with the strains and culture clashes that have occurred as a result of that.

In his email, Mosely describes the Islamic supremacist propaganda war being advanced by the notoriously left PBS (your taxpayer dollars at work) and the Arabist State department:

One of these stories took the national stage in 2008 when the Times-Gazette reported that a new union contract at the Shelbyville Tyson Foods facility replaced Labor Day as a paid holiday with the Muslim festival of Eid al-Fitr.

Following that, a documentary crew came here and shot  "Welcome to Shelbyville," which will air nationwide, May 24 on PBS..

The film received financing and support from progressive migration advocates, with the hand of George Soros thrown into the mix, and has also been sponsored by the state department as overseas propaganda. The "propaganda" label comes from no less an authority than the New York Times

I am in the film and after seeing it in October, found it a completely biased distortion of what has happened, one that depicts myself and Shelbyville as "unwelcoming." In short, they came to town with a prearranged agenda to link the community with the Jim Crow past and the KKK and then proceeded to stage events with the Soros supported Welcoming Tennessee activist group, but completely edited out important issues like the communality's reaction and resistance to the demands of the Muslims during the Eid al Fitr controversy. The event is not mentioned at all.

Writing about this topic has so far resulted in my appearance in this left wing movie, as well as a right-wing book. I learned last week that I am in Chapter 4 of Erick Stakelbeck's The Terrorist Next Door, which examines Somali immigration and is partly based on my work from 2007-2008. Erick came down an shot a segment for the 700 Club with me in 2009 about our situation.

It even got so nuts for this country-boy scribe in 2008 that no less an authority than Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy flew down here to meet with me personally in order to pick my brain about creeping Shariah.

This morning, our paper published an editorial calling into question the motives of the filmmakers, and my publisher has allowed me to take them to task for the way I am portrayed in my blog. I detail my experiences with the director, who was only focused on arriving a prearranged story, no matter what the facts were.

Times Gazette wrote of the film here.

There is quite a bit of money and media support for this effort by the filmmakers and the state department, but I feel that the other side of the story is not being told. I am just a small town journalist with only one voice, and now I learn that the state department is throwing their weight behind this slanted film:

Read it all.

In an effort to keep the voters from figuring out that accepting any Muslim refugees is a bad idea, liberal media operatives backed by George Soros produce a movie, shown on PBS, that smears the town as raaaaacist:

About “Welcome to Shelbyville”

(h/t: Atlas Shrugs)

By Brian Mosely

As many of our readers are aware, in late 2007, I wrote a five part series about the impact that the introduction of Somali refugees were having on Bedford County. The stories focused on how the refugees got here, their traditions and beliefs, and took an honest look at the many cultural clashes that were taking place between the locals and the newcomers.

The series provoked a huge controversy, along with much discussion and debate from members of our community.

Then, in August 2008, the Times-Gazette reported that a new union contract at the Shelbyville Tyson Foods facility replaced Labor Day as a paid holiday with the Muslim festival of Eid al-Fitr.

That story put Shelbyville on the national stage, with the topic touching off coverage from the national news media, as well as massive attention on the issue from talk radio hosts, websites and blogs, some of which continues to this very day.

The controversy the stories created led a documentary crew to Shelbyville in late 2008 to shoot “Welcome to Shelbyville,” which will air nationwide, May 24 on PBS at 9 p.m.. The film received financing from progressive migration advocates, and has been sponsored by the state department as overseas propaganda. The “propaganda” label comes from no less an authority than the New York Times.

I viewed the film twice in October of last year during its local premiere, and found the filmmaker’s depiction of myself and the stories published by the T-G to be a monstrous distortion, with an incredible series of blatant omissions and dishonest misrepresentations that was obviously designed only to advance the political agenda of the filmmakers and the progressive organizations that funded and supported its production.

While the filmmakers certainly have a right to express their views, in the process, I feel they have engaged in a completely unfair character assassination of both myself, the Times-Gazette, not to mention how the entire city of Shelbyville is depicted.

They have told their story. Now, I shall tell mine.

The first time I met the director of Welcome to Shelbyville, Kim Snyder, was on the public square in the fall of 2008 and it was obvious from the start that the filmmakers was planning on telling the story of our situation to promote their own agenda. She was with Catalina Nino, who did public relations for the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition (TIRRC) at the time, and another woman whose name escapes me, but who was heavily involved in the production of the film.

We spoke about the situation here regarding the Somalis and they asked if I would appear in the film. I knew I had no choice but to take part in this, otherwise, they would tell whatever story they pleased without my participation.

Apparently, they intended to do that whether I was in the movie or not.

Then the discussion turned to what I was doing at that time, which was covering the new prosecution of Edward McGee, who raped and murdered two little girls in 1966. I explained the sad case and why it was still a topic of conversation over 40 years afterwards.

But the director’s friend only had one question: “Was he black?”

She said this in such excited tones that I felt like I was disappointing her by informing them that everyone involved in the horrific murder case was white.

It was obvious to me, however, that the filmmakers already had a narrative in place for their project and appeared to be let down that there would be no “To Kill a Mockingbird” parallels to work with in Shelbyville.

But, despite my misgivings about their motives, I asked the editor at the time, John Philio, for permission to be interviewed for the film and it was granted.

So, one month later, I sat down with Snyder and her crew to tell the story of what had been going on in Shelbyville with the refugees and the series of stories we ran, and the impact. I went into extreme detail about the history of the Tyson indictment from 2001, and how the community felt about the issue of immigration, as well as going into great detail the more recent Labor Day/Eid al Fitr flap, which brought us national media attention and angered many in Shelbyville and across the country.

None of these important topics made it into the film. Not even a mention.

Instead, the filmmakers decided to use a clip of dialog in which I described some of the derogatory comments made by our readers on the T-G website that mentioned the alleged hygiene of the Somalis. I clearly stated that the T-G never published these stories and statements ourselves, and that they were made by our readers but for some reason, out of the three hours of footage they shot of me, this clip is featured at the start of the film and prominently on the Internet via YouTube.

Much more here.

Why are we harboring “refugees” who are known to be terrorists? Just askin’.

Kentucky: Federal indictment: Two Bowling Green residents involved in a conspiracy to provide support, weapons to al-Qaida in Iraq (ISI)

Pictured: Flag of the “Islamic State of Iraq” (aka al-Qaida in Iraq)

BGDailyNews[Emphasis mine..ed}

LOUISVILLE — Two Iraqi refugees living in Bowling Green were arraigned today on federal terrorism charges - including accusations of attempting to kill U.S. troops with explosive devices in Iraq.

Waad Ramadan Alwan, 30, and Mohanad Shareef Hammadi, 23, are charged in a 23-count indictment returned by a federal grand jury in Bowling Green on May 26. The men made their initial federal court appearance today in Louisville.

Alwan is accused of conspiring to kill U.S. nationals overseas, conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction against U.S. nationals overseas, distributing information on how to manufacture and use improvised explosive devices, attempting to provide material support to terrorists and to al-Qaida in Iraq and conspiring to transfer, possess and export Stinger missiles.

Hammadi is charged with attempting to provide material support to terrorists and to al-Qaida in Iraq, as well as conspiracy to transfer, possess and export Stinger missiles.

The men were arrested Wednesday in Bowling Green. The FBI set up a mobile command center behind the Bowling Green Police Department headquarters last week, where FBI agents in camouflage, body armor and suits could be seen moving between the mobile command center and the BGPD.

In September 2009, the FBI began investigating Alwan, according to a news release from the Department of Justice. The FBI later began using a confidential source to meet with and record conversations with Alwan in August and with Hammadi in January. In meetings with the confidential source, Alwan allegedly discussed his previous activities as an insurgent in Iraq from 2003 until his capture by Iraqi authorities in May 2006 - including apparent use of IEDs and sniper rifles to target U.S. forces, according to the release. [More including links to PDF's related to case]

Hmmm, will they rat out others? May be a good idea to stock up on popcorn, this could get very interesting…

Read the rest.

Gates of Vienna: The Farce Continues

Reprinted with permission.

Geert Wilders took a bit of a vacation earlier this month, visiting Canada and Tennessee. Now everything has returned to normal, and he’s back in the dock in the Netherlands.

The Amsterdam court that is trying Mr. Wilders is engaged in a surgical operation for political purposes under the mandate of the Dutch ruling class. Its task is to excise the PVV leader from the Dutch body politic and restore the multicultural state to its previous dominance.

If there were ever any doubt that this is a kangaroo court, and that the verdict was determined well in advance, the following brief article would lay it to rest. Many thanks to our Dutch correspondent H. Numan for this translation from De Telegraaf:

Court: Wilders trial continues

AMSTERDAM – the court of Amsterdam decided on Monday the trial against PVV leader Geert Wilders will continue. At the beginning of this month, Wilders’ lawyer Bram Moszkowicz stated his client isn’t getting a fair trial and the case must be declared inadmissible by the prosecution.

The unfair trial was caused by amongst others Tom Schalken, councillor of the court, and in that position responsible for issuing the order for the prosecution to continue the trial against Wilders. The politician is on trial for sowing hatred and discrimination and insulting a group.

The order to continue the trial is according to Moszkowicz a conviction. Also, Schalken had tried to influence the expert-witness Hans Jansen, Arabist. Other influential magistrates had influenced the trial, by publicly voicing their own personal opinions.

The court rejected the arguments of the lawyer.

Comments at GoV: Does any nation deserve admiration?

The comments on this article are well worth reading. One in particular, from Sagunto in Amsterdam, caught my attention:

Sagunto said…

John in Cheshire -

wrote:

"I used to think the Dutch were a nation to be admired. Not any more."

Why admire any nation at all, one would think. One might – as an outsider – take a shot at understanding a foreign nation, but anyway..

Considering your judgement of nations is obviously based on the behaviour of its political and cultural elites, is there any nation left in the West today, that is worthy of your admiration?

Kind regs from Amsterdam,

Sag.

My take on American Exceptionalism

I comment fairly often at GoV, and attempted to post a reply to Sagunto’s comment. Unfortunately, Google Blogger seems to be having technical issues with their comment function again, so my comment could not be posted at that time. Here is what I would have liked to say:

As an Orthodox Christian, I believe and understand that we live in a fallen world, and that no country and no government deserves uncritical admiration. A quick glance at any newspaper, newscast, or news website, anywhere in the world, suffices to confirm that. The refusal to accept this as a basic principle is at the root of the errors of modern-day liberals.

It is up to each of us to rein in evil and to mitigate suffering and injustice wherever we can. We can never rely on governments to rein in evil and do justice on our behalf unless we hold their feet to the fire at every turn. Geert Wilders was free to speak his mind in Tennessee, and his audience, both in person and on the Internet, has the freedom to watch and listen. The question is, how long will we preserve our First Amendment rights for freedom of speech, assembly, and the press in an age of “political correctness”?

Whenever I hear the phrase “American exceptionalism,” I remind people that American exceptionalism is all about our Judaeo-Christian heritage and adherence to the US Constitution. Lose those, and it’s all over.