This blog will examine most of the inequities involving the law, immigrations, education, employment, political, health care. It will showcase current news events concerning US and world economic, Middle-eastern revolt issues while trying to explain and resolve those issues.
The United States is projected to have a larger Muslim population by 2030 than any European countries with the exception of Russia and France, although other European countries may have higher percentages of Muslims.
As we watch the Egyptian government of Hosni Mubarak circle the drain and consider the protests already in progress in Jordan, we Americans might do well to ask if it can happen here.
Let’s be honest. The point of the Islamic arrow is pointed at “The Great Satan” – the United States.
"The Americans and (President Barack) Obama must be losing sleep over the popular revolt in Egypt," he said. "Now, Obama must understand that the people have woken up and are ready to unseat the tyrant leaders who remained in power because of U.S. backing. … "We tell the Americans 'enough is enough'," he continued.
Saeed is reported to have said that Arabs have grown disgruntled with U.S. domination of their oil wealth, military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, and its support for "totalitarian" leaders in the region.
It is really a shame that all this disruption in the Middle East had to break loose while we have Jimmy Carter II in the Oval Office!
Every conservative drawing breath today understands that a strong US with a strong Commander-in-Chief is the only thing standing between a semi-orderly world and world-wide chaos.
“Oh, but isn't There is the United Nations?” To that I would reply by holding my stomach and roaring a belly laugh -- running the risk, as we all know, of herniating myself.
As to the question of whether the Islamic rioting can happen here… yes, it can, and probably will. As the Islamic community grows in America so will its clout. Already, the calls for Sharia law are being whispered about.
See, this is a problem for America created by our very own constitution. Yes, I refer to the first amendment. In particular I refer to the right to practice one’s own religion. It is coming back to bite us in “the derriere.”
At this point in our history, there is simply no way to amend the constitution to outlaw the practice of certain religions in the United States. But, I will predict, that not too far into our future we will find it absolutely necessary to do just that and -- I am afraid – it will be too late.
What of America’s friend, Israel? She must seek new friends elsewhere. The Obama Administration has thrown Israel under the bus.
Having been reared as an evangelical Christian – I have a deep, ingrained, understanding of what this abandonment of Israel by Obama means for the US. It means God’s wrath will be turned against this country.
Of course, you are free to believe whatever you want. But, I am just expressing my own belief that an accounting will be required of America for her actions toward Israel.
Many in America believe we are already feeling the effects of “Divine Disgust” as our country teeters on the brink of economic disaster. Whether we like to admit it or not, America is eternally linked to Israel.
The so-called “cold peace” between Israel and Egypt is rapidly melting, right before our eyes. Should a Muslim theocratic regime wind up in power in Egypt, the southern threat to Israel will be renewed -- and remember, Israel no longer has the Sinai as a buffer.
Suez Canal
And there is the Suez Canal through which much of the world’s oil must travel. It is unsettling, to say the least, to consider the possible choke-hold Islamic fundamentalists could have on the world’s supply of oil.
Whether we want to admit it, or not, America and the free world are involved in a Third World War for dominance of the globe. There is no end in sight.
The plain truth is -- there is no way any nation, practicing any religion other than Islam, can exist in peace with the practioners of Islam.
The goal of the so-called religion of peace is to establish a worldwide caliphate (kingdom) ruled by Islamic law … period! It now appears they will accomplish their goal no matter how brutal the strategy and tactics required.
In answer to the question posed in the title to this commentary: Yes, it can happen here. In fact, it has already begun.
Five years ago when my organization BasicsProject.org partnered in producing the first national symposium series on the threat of radical Islam, the issue was not in the mainstream. In fact, our publication, NewMediaJournal.us was banned from Google News for what they called “hate speech,” simply because several of our writers dared to broach the subject of jihad and the violent tenets of Islamist fundamentalism. To be sure, we have come a very long way from those days. Today, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity both talk regularly about the issue with Mr. O’Reilly calling it “the Muslim problem.” This is a good thing, but it isn’t nearly enough.
As President Obama does everything in his power, using every resource and every propaganda ploy to diminish the “Muslim problem” that exists, not only in the United States, but around the world, the truth remains, fundamentalist Islam is a problem that is growing, not diminishing. Many on the Left and in the Progressive camp insist that the number of people within the Islamic religion who practice fundamentalist Islam – radical Islam; those who, when asked, champion the violent element within their religion, are but a scant ten percent.
But when we put that percentage in realistic terms, realizing that nearly one-fourth of the world’s population is Muslim (1.57 billion adherents) and that the number of those following the Islamic religion grows by 1.84% annually, we can divine that ten percent of the Muslim population; those who subscribe to fundamentalist Islam and violent jihad, that amounts to 157,000,000 (million) people and growing. That number, to equate it to something tangible, is over one-third of the population of the United States of America.
This, regardless of how you feel about the majority of pissed off Muslims in the world, should scare you to know end: a number of people equal to one-third of the population of the United States of America believes that Islam should be the preeminent religion in the world, dominant over all other religions and that the oppressive and brutal Sharia law should reign supreme, even over the Constitution of the United States, on our shores.
Brutal Shariah Law
I have been pointing these facts out for months, warning of a fundamentalist Islamist invasion of the European Continent and of “creeping Sharia” in the United States, only to be called a “hate-monger,” “a bigot” and “a racist”...and those are the printable descriptions. Today, as we watch events around the world with regard to the advance of Islam, we stand vindicated in our assessment, yet we take no solace in being correct.
A recent poll by Le Monde, the dominant newspaper in France, as reported by The London Daily Mail, revealed that “Islam is considered a ‘threat’ by millions of French and Germans to their national identity.” It ran the results under “a headline which brands efforts to get different religious communities to live side by side as a ‘failure.’”
According to the poll, 68 percent of the French and 75 percent of Germans believe Muslims are “not well integrated into society.” German chancellor Angela Merkel went as far as to say that the notion of “multiculturalism” in German society – given the issue of non-assimilation by foreigners – had “utterly failed.” Germany has one of the largest Muslim immigrant populations in Europe at 4.3 million. The Muslim immigrant population in France is 7 million and the British come in at 2.4 million. Experts say that almost 85% of the population growth in Europe, as a whole, was due to Muslim immigration and that the Muslim population alone will double by 2020.
The poll goes on to say that:
“...55 percent in France and 49 percent in Germany believe the ‘influence and visibility of Islam’ is ‘too large’, while 60 percent in both countries say the reason for the problem is Muslims’ own ‘refusal’ to integrate...Just as crucially, 42 percent of French and 40 percent of Germans consider the presence of Islamic communities ‘a threat’ to their national identities.
“An editorial in Le Monde adds: ‘As Islam becomes a permanent and increasingly conspicuous fixture of European societies, public opinion is clearly tensing up...’”
Again, given that experts have said that the percentage of the world’s Muslim population that follow fundamentalist Islam, which signs-on to the concept of the establishment of Sharia law and violent jihad, is ten percent, it is easy to see why the Germans and the French – and for that matter the whole of Europe – is ill-at-ease with the current situation. In Germany, France and Britain alone, using the experts’ ten percent figure, 1.7 million Muslims subscribe to fundamentalist Islam and the establishment of Sharia law.
To this point we have discussed the threats posed by fundamentalist Islam – violent jihadist Islam – as they pertain to a growing population, the lack of acceptable assimilation into the host country’s cultures and population growth by procreation. But there is another more disturbing trend emerging around the world: the violent extinguishment of other religions where fundamentalist Islam exists.
With each passing day we read a growing number of news items that describe how fundamentalist Islamists are attacking Christians and Jews, burning their houses of worship or otherwise violently attacking not only the places where they worship, but the non-Muslim worshipers themselves.
Osama bin Laden
Ayman al Zawahiri
▪ In Somalia, a location that both Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri directed Islamist jihadists in order to “regroup” after their ouster in Iraq by superior US and Coalition forces, a mother of fourhad her throat slit in front of her children by the radical Islamist group al Shabaab for having converted to Christianity.
▪ Christmas Eve bombings in Jos, Nigeria, perpetuated at the hands of radical Islamists and targeting Christian churches on one of Christianities most holy of days, killed 31 people and injured scores more. The governor's office in Jos had received letters purported to be from some Muslim organizations threatening attacks against Christians. The violence in Nigeria between Islamists and Christians has been in existence for decades.
▪ In Spain, the Hudson Institute reports that an initiative to build more mosques is coming into full swing, with the inclusion of a behemoth mega-mosque in Barcelona. The construction of new mosques comes at a time when municipalities linked to the Socialist Party have closed dozens of Christian churches across the nation.
▪ In Egypt,angry Copt Christians accosted the car carrying Egypt's top Muslim religious leaders in protest of the bombing of the All Saints Coptic Church in Alexandria on New Year’s Day, a bombing executed by radical Islamists. The blast killed 21 Coptic Christians.
▪ In the Philippines, al Qaeda-linked Abu Sayyef Islamistsbombed a Christian chapel on Christmas day injuring the priest and ten others.
▪ And United Nations Human Rights official, Navi Pillay, said attacks on religious minorities in places like Egypt,Nigeria and Pakistanshould serve as a wake-up call to authorities everywhere to combat rising fanaticism. Given that these locations are predominantly Muslim, the minority religions would be based in Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism, to name the more popular religions practiced in those regions.
The story is increasingly the same, from Pakistan and Afghanistan to the countries that formed the former Soviet Union, from Europe to Africa and the South Pacific, radical and violent Islamists are waging what can only be described as a “holy war” in a quest to expunge all other religions from their spheres of dominance...and this push is expanding day by day by day.
Religion Of Peace?
The inane Progressive tenet of political correctness has advanced the false notion that Islam is a religion of peace. Even former President George W. Bush made the mistake of allowing his influence to be co-opted by this fallacy. Truth be told, whether by immigration, procreation of violent jihad, fundamentalist Islam is advancing by whatever means works in any given location. If we are foolish enough to look the other way when the evidence to this fact is so incredibly overwhelming, we will soon be watching as the US Constitution gives way to Sharia law.
Free men and women everywhere, we are witnessing the third great Islamist quest for world dominance. We are in the midst of a holy war waged by fundamentalist Islamists against all other religions and their adherents. If we do not dispense with the lunacy of political correctness in an effort to be honest about our “Muslim problem,” it will most certainly be too late.
Forty-five radical Islamic enclaves are now operating with the borders of Canada and the United States. One of them has the audacity to call itself: Islamberg. Clear and simple, their intention is to destroy us. Nothing is being done about it.
In France, the growth of Radical Islam has spread to all four corners where enclaves have demanded, and basically received, the right to run their communities under Sharia Law. These are called “No-Go Zones” meaning, French police and government officials stay away unless invited, and let the enclaves govern themselves as they wish. Understand this: There are over seven hundred “No-Go Zones” in France. There were none thirty years ago. Imagine the next thirty years?
We have ‘No-Go Zones” as well, thirty-five in the U.S. and more in Canada. Here’s a report, check it out:
The United States is in (you guessed it) their crosshairs. We are the great Satan. Radical Islamists in the mideast have been known to say, “First Saturday, then Sunday,” which means, First Israel, then America.
For those who like to wear rose-colored glasses and refuse to acknowledge the obvious, it’s time to check reality. Truth cannot be denied. Radical Islam is here and growing, and in greater force than most people can imagine. Unfortunately, the only aspect of Radical Islam that the mainstream media focuses on, are threats or acts of terror, as if that’s all that matters. They, and our government representatives, do us no service by suppressing information that poses a danger to us and to our grandchildren in future generations. And the government, including the justice department, does us no service by ignoring it.
In a nutshell, their single purpose — no, their “Duty” — is the eventual Islamization of the west, whether it be through stealth infiltration, deceit, propaganda, population birth rates, immigration, conversions and if needed, violence.
Please take a breath before you stammer… “Oh, it’s just a religion” or “You’re a Xenophobe, Islamophobe” or “Right wing nut,” as some of my unaware friends so ineloquently have labeled me. I invite my critics to investigate, as I have investigated. Name-calling does not translate to knowledge and information. If anyone can refute me, I’m all ears. Try it.
Radical Islam is not just a religion. The Radical side of Islam is a clear ideology and form of government with its own set of laws (Sharia) that is not compatible with the U.S. Constitution. When strictly applied, the two cannot co-exist, for many reasons too numerous for a short article to explain.
What is the difference between “Radical” Islamand “Moderate” Islam? One word: Jihad. Those who actively engage in or support the overthrow of democracy in the west, by violence or any other means, are Jihadists engaged in a” holy struggle.” Their numbers are HUGE, into the multi-millions, not just a few al Qaeda twelve thousand miles away.
Remember the nameJamaat ul-Fuqra. He is the founder of these camps. There are a myriad of investigative reports disclosing his funding sources, where his charity funds are funneled, his training and information records, and so forth. The network is vast. Please check out this report by Jerry Gordon for the New English Review.
Many of these enclaves are occupied and run by former inmates of prisons in the U.S. which is part of the original plan. Four years ago, I researched and wrote in my book “Militant Islam In America,” how 40,000 to 60,000 inmates a year, mostly African American, are targeted for recruitment and conversion within prison walls. Saudi Arabia has been funding the dispatch of Korans by the thousands into prisons. It’s all paying off.
Young blacks, who already feel disenfranchised by the system, are prime for conversion, especially when they know they will be protected from other gangs. At first it’s a security blanket, then the indoctrination begins.
Meanwhile, we all sit by. People like me are called names. Government and media are skiddish over being names, so they turn a blind eye.
The only things we can do, is become better informed. Knowledge is power, and it is our duty to protect what is already here, our democracy, our way of life and our grandchildren’s children. Otherwise, we’re just a bunch of ignorant fools and the Jihadists would have been right all along.
Our unfunded-entitlement train is careening down the tracks about to tip over, but the conductor is lecturing us about staying in our seats until we come to a full stop. I hope that this example was a good metaphor for how our economy appears to both us and the rest of the world.
Rep. Paul Ryan
That, among other things, was one of the important problems with the president’s State of the Union speech. It was also what was wrong with the GOP response delivered by Rep. Paul Ryan. Neither party is telling the American people the truth about the coming entitlement crunch which threatens not only our fiscal solvency, but our national security, our economic vitality, and ultimately, our way of life. Every year we delay the bitter medicine we must take to get our fiscal house in order adds trillions in unfunded debt to the entitlement burden we already carry.
We expected President Obama to downplay the problem. He’s got a re-election campaign to win and the hugely unpopular entitlement cuts and tax increases that are going to be necessary to address the problem would be his doom if he proposed them. There were exactly two paragraphs in the president’s speech that dealt with this nations entitlement crisis – as if it should be treated as an afterthought rather than as the 3-alarm fire it is. What’s worse, the president made it seem as if fixing our entitlement problems will be a lot easier than it is surely going to be.
He claimed that Obamacare would “slow these rising costs” for Medicare – an extremely dubious claim unproven by the facts – while assuring seniors that we must “strengthen” Social Security without “putting at risk current retirees, the most vulnerable, or people with disabilities; without slashing benefits for future generations; and without subjecting Americans’ guaranteed retirement income to the whims of the stock market.”
In other words, some day in the future, a president is going to wave a magic wand and the trillions of dollars of Social Security unfunded liability is going to disappear. No one suffers. No one gets hurt. Presumably, the “rich” will take a hit, but then no one really cares about them.
Newsflash: All the easy fixes for our entitlement nightmare have already been tried several times. We’ve raised the retirement age, raised the eligibility age for Medicare, raised Social Security and Medicare taxes – doubling them over the last 30 years. We’ve fiddled, we’ve tweaked, we’ve performed all the dishonest accounting possible, hiding the truth from the American people for as long as we could, and yet – here we are at the gates of fiscal hell, the devil is opening the door and hells fire is the debt that is ever growing and there’s nowhere to run.
Meanwhile, the GOP is riding high at the moment and doesn’t want to sour the mood of the voters with blood curdling tales of $100 trillion plus in unfunded liabilities for Social Security and Medicare. But that’s the reality of our situation and someone, somewhere, somehow is going to have to take the bit in their mouth and lead us out of this house of horrors we’ve constructed for ourselves.
Protection For the Elderly
Rep. Ryan, who’s “Roadmap”at least offered an alternative to business as usual, was strangely quiescent about the entitlement mess. Not once in his response to the president’s speech did he mention Social Security or Medicare. Ryan at least had the courage to point out that we were in a major crisis headed for fiscal disaster, but the man who has offered a politically poisonous but realistic alternative stopped far short of endorsing what he so bravely put forth just a few months ago.
Cosmetic gambits like “spending freezes” and “doc fixes” can’t even begin to address the danger. This is political gamesmanship and it should anger us that the politicians know it but do it anyway. It’s not that the crisis is hidden, or has come upon us suddenly. We’ve known for decades where we were headed, but Washington chose the easy way: the politicians ignored the problem, kicking the can down the road, assuming they would be well into retirement — living off their extravagant congressional pensions — before history forced our hand.
The can has now been kicked into a cul de sac and there’s no way we can start kicking it back down the road. It may not be our fault, but we’re the ones who are going to have to pay for all of these promises so recklessly made by previous generations. One way or another, a solution will be found (or imposed) on us. Those are the only alternatives. Either the politicians will find the political courage (that they won’t get credit for) to start cutting and slashing at the monster or the monster will solve our problem for us by devouring us. To know this just look back through history, The Roman Empire, Ancient Eygipt, Great Britain. That's only three to give an idea as to the severity of this crisis, So, "Will we be the next to fall like Grease?
A few bare bones numbers are needed to prove that this is not hyperbole or political exaggeration. If we were to fulfill the promises made to every American from those born as I write this to the oldest citizen regarding Social Security and Medicare, it will cost us at least $130 trillion.Long before then, the entitlement crunch will have destroyed our economy. By 2016, 71% of the federal budget will be dedicated to paying entitlements of one form or another, the vast percentage of that being Social Security and Medicare.
There are 78 million baby boomers set to retire over the next 20 years, all expecting that monthly Social Security check for the rest of their lives. The significance of this is a matter of demographics. The number of workers paying into Social Security was 5.1 per retiree in 1960; this declined to 3.3 in 2007 and is projected to decline to 2.1 by 2035. We are currently in hock to the Social Security Trust Fund to the tune of $2.5 trillion. This number is expected to rise to $3.8 trillion by 2019. But by 2015, payments to Social Security beneficiaries will begin to exceed tax receipts. And by 2037, payments to recipients would start declining automatically – whether we wanted them to or not. The Trust Fund would be exhausted and Congress would be unable to tap any other revenue streams from the government to pay for it.
Medicare is in even worse shape. Bruce Bartlett read the last report from the Medicare trustees and noted that it would take an increase in personal income taxes of 81% to pay for the unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare:
• To summarize, we see that taxpayers are on the hook for Social Security and Medicare by these amounts: Social Security, 1.3% of GDP; Medicare part A, 2.8% of GDP; Medicare part B, 2.8% of GDP; and Medicare part D, 1.2% of GDP. This adds up to 8.1% of GDP. Thus federal income taxes for every taxpayer would have to rise by roughly 81% to pay all of the benefits promised by these programs under current law over and above the payroll tax.
Is it any wonder that President Obama or Rep. Ryan chose not to mention how serious the problem really is, and that addressing the crisis is going to be extraordinarily wrenching?
It took our politicians four score and five years to begin to address the evil of slavery. In truth, America deals with insoluble dilemmas by working around the edges of the problem, refusing to confront the roots of what ails us. The great compromises of 1820 and 1851 on slavery kept the nation from flying apart but did not address what was eating away at the body politic: that slavery was a wrong that needed to be righted.
We have spent a quarter of a century tinkering with Social Security and Medicare, stretching out the day of reckoning without addressing the fundamental math that underpins both programs: that someday, they would become unsustainable and drag us all to economic calamity.
That day has arrived. But you’d never know it listening to the president the other night with his new spending schemes and“things are getting better all the time” rhetoric. It hardly matters. One way or another, our fiscal crisis will be solved — either through bold and courageous actions that save us or our total collapse which will ruin us.
More and more, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have become one of the most powerful — and controversial — pressure blocs in the global arena. In recent weeks, Israel’s parliament established a commission of inquiry into NGO funding from Arab regimes such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and Algeria. Well-heeled NGO advocates have criticized the investigation for being heavy-handed, but in fact, an accurate understanding of the finances behind NGOs is desperately needed. Not only are these groups bankrolled by Israel’s enemies, but the funds are used for the express purpose of conducting “soft” warfare against the country from within. This nexus must be exposed.
Natan Sharansky
According to Natan Sharansky, a former Soviet dissident who was pivotal in the creation of the famous NGO Human Rights Watch, many of these organizations are currently being used by dictatorships to fight democracies. NGOs have become crucial in biased reports against Israel submitted at the United Nations, like the Goldstone Report on the Gaza War. Their “humanitarian” lamentations are often generously funded by the European Union, which supports many anti-Israel enterprises.
Irene Khan
NGOs fueled the legal battle to shut down Guantanamo Bay, which the former president of Amnesty International, Irene Khan, has shamefully called “the Gulag of our time.” The power of NGOs was discussed also in recently released WikiLeaks cables, with the revelation that Muslim “charities” are still playing a decisive role in financing terrorism.
Last year, a Turkish NGO called Insane Yardim Vakfi (IHH) sparked an unprecedented crisis in relations between Israel and Turkey. These organizations are also playing a role in the ongoing legal indictments against Israeli politicians and the country’s military. Israel has canceled “strategic dialogue” with London to protest a British law that allows judges to arrest members of the Israeli government for alleged “war crimes” if they set foot in the UK. Many Israelis cancelled UK trips out of fear of being arrested.
NGOs are promoting campaigns for boycotts, divestment and sanctions against the Jewish State. Some openly advocate “the abolition of Israel through the creation of a single state” in Palestine. The “soft war” against the Jews was born at the Durban UN Conference in 2001, at which 3,000 NGOs convinced the UN to condemn Israeli “racism.” Well-known NGOs such as Amnesty International and Save the Children attached their names to the conference. Israel was declared an “apartheid” and “criminal” state, and the Jews, inveterate racists.
Robert Mugabe
Jakaya Kikwete
NGOs at the conference supported the request of the Tanzanian minister of foreign affairs, Jakaya Kikwete, for immediate cash compensation to Africa for Western slavery. This fabricated colonial sense of guilt has become jet fuel for the humanitarian agenda. Encouraged by these NGOs, the genocidal Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe proclaimed that the Jews were responsible for all the ills of Africa. Some NGOs distributed leaflets with a portrait of Hitler and the inscription: “What if Hitler had won? There would be no Israel, and no Palestinian bloodshed.”
The mass of NGOs in the streets at the conference exalted Osama bin Laden, while the images of George Bush and Ariel Sharon were ornamented with swastikas and motifs of blood and death. Sadly, these NGOs will soon have another opportunity to showcase their Jew-hatred: the United Nations will celebrate “Durban III” in New York, just a few days after the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 atrocities.
Bush/Sharon effigie burning
Human Rights Watch used to be one of the most respectable NGOs. But the credibility of the organization, increasingly affluent after receiving million-dollar donations from the radical philanthropist George Soros, has faded after controversy erupted over a talk by the NGO’s spokesperson, Sarah Leah Whitson, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Ms. Whitson was not there to protest religious persecution or the brutal anti-Semitism of the Saudi clergy. Rather, Human Rights Watch was there to collect Saudi donations because, as Whitson later explained, her group must balance the power of “pro-Israel pressure groups in the United States.”
Marc Garlasco
Then came the affair of Marc Garlasco, the military organization expert for Human Rights Watch who enjoyed collecting Hitler memorabilia. Meanwhile, Amnesty International in its fifty years of activities has collected numerous humanitarian awards (including a Nobel Peace Prize in 1977), but it has also had many indictments — including for ignoring Pol Pot’s killing fields and the fate of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who has been held in captivity by Hamas since 2006.
Amnesty International used Moazzam Begg, a former Guantanamo prisoner and supporter of the Taliban and al Qaeda, to testify for them. The NGO even led Begg to Downing Street, the residence of British prime minister, to support the closure of the US detention camp for al Qaeda terrorists. The Italian secretary-general of Amnesty International Claudio Cordone, defended the organization by saying that the “defensive jihad” is not “diametrically opposed” to human rights. Recently, another Amnesty International official, Frank Johansson of Finland, called Israel “a scum state.”
Katyushas Rocket
We are still waiting for the moment when these NGOs will ride on Israeli buses to experience the truly unprovoked, homicidal nature of terrorist attacks. Perhaps, instead, they will demonstrate in the streets of Haifa and Sderot, destroyed by their allies’ Katyushas missiles and Qassams rockets.
Make no mistake, the NGO industry has betrayed the values embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It’s become an accomplice to evil. The new humanitarian industry is rooted in the equality of humankind to the exclusion of the Jew. This is why Western countries should reject Durban III.
President Obama fulfilled his constitutional duty and gave his report on the state of the union Tuesday night. Here is mine:
We're in deep trouble.
You know why. Our debt has passed $14 trillion, and yet our current spending plans will make that worse. The U.S. debt will reach Greek levels in just 10 years.
But do not despair. If we make reasonable cuts to what government spends, our economy can grow us out of our debt. Cutting doesn't just make economic sense; it is also the moral thing to do. Henry David Thoreau had it right when he "accepted the motto ... that government is best which governs least."
So what should we get rid of?
We start by closing the Department of Education, which saves $100 billion a year. Education ought to be in the free market. It's insane to take money from states only to launder it through Washington and then return it to states.
Next, we should close the Department of Housing and Urban Development: $41 billion. We had plenty of housing in America before a department was created. Let's get government out of that business.
Then we eliminate the Commerce Department: $9 billion. A government that can't count the votes accurately should not try to negotiate trade. Trade should be free. Free trade creates prosperity. And since trade should be free, we should eliminate all corporate welfare and all subsidies. That means: agriculture subsidies, green energy subsidies, ethanol subsidies and subsidies for public broadcasting. None of this bull is needed.
I propose selling Amtrak. Taxpayers will save money, and riders will get better service. Why is government in the transportation business? Let's have private companies compete to run the trains.
And we must finally stop one of the biggest assaults on freedom and our pocketbook, the war on drugs. The drug war is really a war on our own people. The ends do not justify the means.
Now for the biggest cuts, conservatives propose to cut discretionary nonmilitary spending. Good. But why stop there? That's only 15 percent of our budget. We must cut more. That means cutting Medicare, Social Security and conclusively bring the war in Afghanistan to a decisive end.
I know. Medicare and Social Security are popular, but they are unsustainable. We must privatize Social Security and slowly replace Medicare with vouchers.
And that brings me to Obamacare. The only way to cut costs and still have medical innovation is to free the market. So I propose that we repeal Obamacare immediately. Then we must do more: We must repeal all government interference in the medical and insurance industries, including licensing. All that impedes competition.
Now, military spending. Do you recall what candidate Obama said about the war in Iraq?
"I will bring this war to an end in 2009. So don't be confused."
But I am confused. We're two years past 2009, but we still have 48,000 troops in Iraq. We must shrink the military's mission to truly national defense. That means pulling our troops out of Germany, Japan, Italy and dozens of other countries. America cannot and should not try to police the entire world. We can't afford it, and it's not right. Democracy doesn’t work in all countries, so why force a system of government on nations where it is clear that it would be too expensive and would sooner fail?
Those cuts will put America on the road to solvency. But that's not enough. We also need economic growth.
Our growth has stalled because millions of pages of regulations make businesses too fearful to invest. Entrepreneurs don't know what the rules -- or taxes -- will be tomorrow. This discourages hiring.
All destructive laws must go. I again propose the Greer Rule: For every new law passed, we must repeal two old ones.
We need to progress to an America that cherishes individual freedom. That means a government limited by the Constitution, one that protects our shores and our persons but otherwise stays out of our way. We should take seriously the words of another president, Thomas Jefferson, and embrace "a wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned -- this is the sum of good government."
Over the past two years, President Obama has blamed big banks, Wall Street, corporate executives, trade deals, tax cuts and deregulation for all the nation's ills, while presiding over $4.9 trillion in additional debt. Now, after two years of a sluggish economy and unemployment still hovering between 9 and 10 percent, he's talking like a born-again free trader, calling for a new approach to job creation (and possibly a lower corporate tax rate), announcing a mission to root out bad regulations, and a plan to put business executives in the White House.
Gone is the far-left, inflammatory anti-business, anti-Wall Street rhetoric and class warfare attacks on "millionaires and billionaires" and, really, anyone making more than $250,000 a year.
William Daley
He has made William Daley, a J.P. Morgan bank executive, who championed the North American Free Trade Agreement under the Clinton administration, his chief of staff. He made one of Clinton's top economic advisers, Gene Sperling -- who backed a GOP-crafted capital gains tax cut that sent stocks soaring in the late '90s -- his top White House economic adviser. He brought in GE's chief executive Jeffery Immelt, a titan of industry, to advise him on how to get the economy growing again.
Jeffrey Immelt
Is this for real? Or this a case of survival politics pushing aside long-held liberal principles to boost the start of his bid for a second term -- knowing full well that he's not going to win re-election if the jobless rate remains above 9 percent?
After two years of the biggest government expansion in decades, the suddenness of Obama's flip-flop message shift suggests the latter.
For half his term, he has presided over a regulatory expansion of the economy that has turned the business community against him. Last week, in a rather transparent move, he ordered an official review to "root out regulations that conflict, that are not worth the cost, or are just plain dumb." Sure.
Last year he held an economic summit and did not invite the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the nation's largest business association. This week, he will go to their headquarters just two blocks away to address them.
For two years, he waged war against an extension of the Bush tax cuts, only to agree last month, after "The Shellacking" in the elections, to keep them through 2012, and claimed they would indeed be good for the economy and job creation. Even the Washington Post now calls them "the Obama tax cuts."
For two years, against the better judgment of his advisers, his principal focus was enacting sweeping, federally dictated health care reform, expanding the welfare state, boosting spending, establishing dozens of agencies, bureaus and other regulatory bureaucracies, and re-regulating the financial sector from top to bottom, while the economy languished.
In a video preview of last night's state of the union address, he said "My principal focus ... is going to be making sure that we are competitive, that we are growing and we are creating jobs."
After signing waste-ridden budget bills loaded with pork, and after his Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner asked Congress to raise the debt ceiling to unprecedented new levels, Obama now says he wants "to reform government so that it's leaner and smarter for the 21st century." Where was that message when he and his party went on a two-year spending binge?
It was reportedly said that Obama's Christmas vacation reading included a book about Ronald Reagan and that he was especially interested in how Reagan led the economy out of a deep, two-year recession with tax cut incentives to spur growth and investment that created hundreds of thousands of jobs per month and sent the U.S. economy soaring in the last half of his presidency. After his midterm election thrashing, Obama is clearly changing his tune to save his presidency.
Administration insiders say that Obama's focus will be on cutting the unemployment rate over the next two years by emphasizing trade expansion, passing pending free trade pacts that have been on the shelf since 2009, and reforming the tax code to bring down the 35 percent top corporate tax rate. That rate leaves U.S. companies at a competitive disadvantage in the global economy. Only Japan's rate is higher in the industrialized world.
"We have to be creative. For example, do we need to do something to our tax structure to make U.S. companies more competitive? That's a conversation the president has already had with Immelt," White House presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett told the Washington Post last week.
Immelt is in fact pushing new trade deals, as is Daley, to open up wider markets for U.S. manufacturers, and initiating corporate tax cuts among other growth incentives.
But exactly how much influence Immelt will have is in question. He, after all, will chair just an advisory panel, not a high-level post, but he has the president's ear and they've met frequently.
Then there is the liberal base of his party, which is still in rebellion over the Bush tax cuts extension and his newest business advisors.
Obama's got a political balancing act ahead of him that may not work out as well as it did for Clinton, a master negotiator. In the end, though, it will come down to the unemployment rate that shows little or no sign of falling below 8 to 9 percent by the 2012 election.
For decades, liberals have used "big business" as a bugaboo. Leftists say corporations are mean, heartless and cruel -- and what's more, they're inherently capitalist and conservative. When the economy tanks, liberals blame right-wing corporations; when the regulatory state fails, liberals claim that corporations have perverted the system.
In reality, corporations aren't conservative. They aren't capitalist. They're after the nearest buck. And when the nearest buck can be obtained simply by playing footsie with the federal government, big business becomes an emissary of the government. An image of "General Motors" should have just popped into your minds eye.
To achieve its ends, the federal government employs two methods: the carrot and the stick. The carrot is special regulation and legislation benefiting certain businesses; the stick is heavy regulation designed to threaten businesses into compliance with federal mandates.
This last week provided proof in spades that big business has become a tool of the state. On Jan. 18, the Federal Communications Commission OK'ed the merger of Comcast and NBC Universal. In order to obtain permission for that merger, however, the FCC required that Comcast fulfill certain conditions: NBC and Telemundo will need to add 1,000 hours of local news; Comcast must subsidize low-income Internet access to the tune of $10 per month for 2.5 million low-income households; and most egregiously, Comcast must increase Spanish-language programming.
Comcast, seeking to confirm the $30 billion deal, went along with the regulatory blackmail. And so Comcast became an active part of the liberal program to reach out to Hispanics, the poor, and a news media that desperately needs government interventionism in order to survive. In the same vein, Republican entrepreneur Donald Trump caved in to Democrats this week in an attempt to protect his business interests. While The Donald is no fan of President Obama -- he says that China is "laughing at our leadership" and that Obama is letting China "get away with murder" -- he willingly forked over a $50,000 check to Rahm Emanuel's Chicago mayoral campaign. No doubt Trump's Chicago real estate holdings had something to do with the contribution, not to mention that Rahm mysteriously re-appeared back on the Chicagos mayoral ballot.
Jeffrey Immelt
When the government isn't taking away, it's giving. This week, President Obama conferred knighthood on Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of General Electric, by appointing him to head his Economic Advisory Panel. In the recent past, Immelt has vacillated between criticism and praise of the Obama administration -- last July; he said that Obama was anti-business, while in December, Immelt praised Obama's outreach to business. Immelt's wild swings between antipathy and peonage to the Obama administration closely mirror the administration's treatment of GE: In general, when GE gets a handout, Immelt is a happy camper. This relationship has worked beautifully for the government. GE has utterly abandoned its capitalistic, entrepreneurial past. Instead, it has embraced the roller coaster ups-and-downs of government subsidization. Immelt doesn't believe that the main job of government is to keep the hell out of a company's way -- he believes instead that government should become a "partner" in crime. According to Washington Examiner columnist Timothy Carney, GE has spent $65.7 million on lobbying, outpacing its competition by leaps and bounds. GE and Comcast aren't alone in their desire to cozy up to the federal government. Google, once an entrepreneurial superstar, now links arms with the Obama administration by pushing "net neutrality," a scheme designed to run its competitors out of business via government regulation. Like GE, Google has one of its own inside the Obama administration -- Andrew McLaughlin, Google's former top policy executive, is currently deputy chief technology officer of the Obama administration. He has already been called on the carpet for asking Google to use its power to help out his new White House buddies.
Welcome to today's corporate America, where business takes a back seat to politics. The stock market now swings wildly based on Ben Bernanke's moods; the banking system teeters each time Barney Frank sneezes; titans of American industry scrape and bow for the scraps from Obama's dinner plate. Corporations are no longer capitalist but statist. Next time liberals cite the misdeeds of big business to complain about the ills of capitalism, inform them that big business is more a representative of government than it is of the free market.
Some Americans have strong, sometimes unyielding preferences for Mac computers, while most others have similarly strong preferences for PCs and wouldn't be caught dead using a Mac. Some Americans love classical music and hate rock and roll. Others have opposite preferences, loving rock and roll and consider classical music as hoity-toity junk. Then there are those among us who love football and Western movies, and find golf and cooking shows to be less than manly. Despite these, and many other strong preferences, there's little or no conflict. When's the last time you heard of rock and roll lovers in conflict with classical music lovers, or Mac lovers in conflict with PC lovers, or football lovers in conflict with golf lovers? It seldom if ever happens. When there's market allocation of resources and peaceable, voluntary exchange, people have their preferences satisfied and are able to live in peace with one another.
Think what might be the case if it were a political decision of whether there'd be football or golf watched on TV, whether we used Macs or PCs and whether we listened to classical music or rock and roll. Everyone had to comply with the politically made decision or suffer the pain of fines or imprisonment. Football lovers would be lined up against golf lovers, Mac lovers against PC lovers and rock and rollers against classical music lovers. People who previously lived in peace with one another would now be in conflict.
Why? If, for example, classical music lovers got what they wanted, rock and rollers wouldn't. Conflict would emerge solely because the decision was made in the political arena.
The lesson here is that the prime feature of political decision-making is that it's a zero-sum game. One person's gain is of necessity another person's loss. As such, political allocation of resources is conflict-enhancing, while market allocation is conflict-reducing. The greater the number of decisions made in the political arena, the greater the potential for conflict. It would not be unreasonable to predict that if Mac lovers won, and only Macs could be legally used, there would be considerable PC-lover hate toward Mac lovers.
Most of the issues that divide our nation, and give rise to conflict, are those best described as a zero-sum game where one person's or group's gain is of necessity another's loss. Examples are: racial preferences, school prayers, trade restrictions, welfare, Obamacare and a host of other government policies that benefit one American at the expense of another American. That's why political action committees, private donors and companies spend billions of dollars lobbying. Their goal is to get politicians and government officials to use the coercive power of their offices to take what belongs to one American and give it to another or create a favor or special privilege for one American that comes at the expense of some other American.
You might be tempted to think that the brutal domestic conflict seen in other countries can't happen here. That's nonsense. Americans are not super-humans; we possess the same frailties of other people. If there were a catastrophic economic calamity, I can imagine a political hustler exploiting those frailties, as have other tyrants, blaming it on the Jews, the blacks, the conservatives, the liberals, the Catholics or free trade.
The best thing the president and Congress can do to reduce the potential for conflict and violence is reduce the impact of government on our lives. Doing so will not only produce a less-divided country and greater economic efficiency, but bear greater faith and allegiance to the vision of America held by our founders -- a country of limited government. Our founders, in the words of Thomas Paine, recognized that, "Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one."
A running theme in most of my blogs has been the need to secure the safety of America by screening and limiting who enters. I think most Race Relations readers are already convinced that the admission of millions of Muslims into Europe was a catastrophe on the order of... well, what historical incident equals it? The final outcome remains to be seen, so let me lay out a range of possibilities.
If the influx is stopped in the next few years, and Western societies overcome the self-gelding political correctness and hysterical scrupulosity that drives them to hold their own societies to an inhuman standard of Kantian selflessness--while endlessly indulging the sins of newcomers--it's possible that we will keep our freedoms intact without a major violent confrontation. For that to happen, we'd need to slam shut our borders, cut welfare programs that allow recent immigrants to breed irresponsibly on the taxpayers' dime, rigorously enforce laws suppressing sedition, infiltrate and expose terror networks already in our midst, and push back hard against attempts to force an alien religion into our cultural mainstream.
If all that were to happen, there would be significant unrest among Muslim communities lasting several decades, but in general the level of violence would be low. We'd essentially have to reduce Islamic enclaves to the condition of the Basques--midsized, deeply disgruntled minorities treasuring claims against our territory, without the power to do much more than disrupt the peace, and occasionally murder some policemen. (Of course, the Basques have old, and in some ways legitimate grievances, since they really were here first--while the Muslims have none--but that's not really the issue.) If all those happy events were to come about, perhaps through the secret release of massive doses of testosterone into the water supply, then the decisions of obvious socialists like Francois Mitterand to flood their soveren nations with Saracens might be comparable to some mid-level historical blunder--like Napoleon's attack on Russia. What I'm saying here is; We've seen what they can do, and they never shut-up by exclaiming that they themselves are the victoms and exploiting every loop-hole in our constitution and laws to do so.
A less hopeful, but much more likely scenario is that the "awakening" of Westerners hemisphere will happen only fitfully, and the forces or intestinal fortitude opposing jihad arrives on the scene gradually, so that each nation, as it rallies itself, can be isolated and defeated by the others still sunk in denial. In other words, as countries reach the critical level of Muslim population, sharia activism, and jihad violence (these three, I maintain, are inherently inseparable) each at different times, and their native populations respond with varying degrees of firmness, the oligarchies that currently favor Islamic colonization will be able to crush each one in turn. In effect, any country like the Netherlands or Switzerland that woke up would suffer the fate (at best) of Austria after it elected the detestable Kurt Waldheim--and (at worst) that of Yugoslavia when it tried to hold onto its historical heartland, Kosovo. In this case, we would see a range of responses, from the EU and US sanctions against the offending" nation, to the use of NATO and U.S. troops to forcibly counteract the policies that nation was taking in its self-defense.
If the combination of sanctions and domestic rebellion could bring down a nation as tough, endangered, and morally tone-deaf as white-ruled South Africa, I wonder which European nation could make a tougher stand. (Please note that I hold no brief for the apartheid system, which white colonists imposed on black natives; indeed, I've written before that it is precisely such a system of religion, not race-based, oppression that Muslim colonists have in mind for the rest of us.) If this is the fruit of Muslim immigration, we will have to compare their arrival to something more like the Mongol invasion of Russia--which ushered in centuries of subjection by tough, highly organized alien rulers, who used local elites to cow the subject populations. Real dhimmitude, of the sort chronicled by Bat Ye'or, will come to the West comparatively peacefully; we will have committed suicide using a penknife.
But that's not even the worst conceivable outcome of the demographic treason committed by American leaders who admitted so many Muslims. From a humanitarian point of view, it might be even worse if some European countries woke up to the Muslim threat while others did not--and the governments of those countries on either side of the divide formed into regional blocs. The divide between dhimmi and anti-dhimmi countries would become every bit as sharp as that which sundered Europe during the Cold War. Imagine a "Silk Curtain" dividing an Islamicized France from a resurrected Germany, or a dhimmified Germany from a proud, resurgent Poland.
Within the Islamicized nations, the rights of Christians to free speech and worship would be quickly torn away, and millions of refugees would (if they were lucky) try to move to freer lands. Meanwhile, in anti-jihadist countries, peaceful Muslims living within them would no doubt be caught up in the net when those governments tried to "clean house" of jihadi subversives. Would we face a bloody "population transfer," like those that marked Greece and Turkey after the First World War? Would we face, on the soil of Europe, with nations that had 21st century military technology (and some of them nuclear weapons) a Third World War? And in such a war, would America take the right side? We might once again see massive assaults against the rights of unarmed civilians, such as what marked the First and the Second World Wars. It's hard to imagine the kind of civilization that would be left in the wake of such a conflict. Surely the transformation, and destruction, would be at least on the order of both those conflicts.
Does this make me sound like crazy alarmism? The reckless fantasies of someone who has spent too much time fighting the war on terrorism and read too many "Rightwing cables and blogs"? Let me ask you this: What would a sane, sober person in 1913--who lived in what was still the London of Sherlock Holmes--have thought if you told him that within six years 20 million Europeans would lie dead, four out of five of the major monarchies reigning in Europe would be deposed, and Communist revolutionary armies would be streaming from a Jacobin-ruled Russia into Poland, aiming to conquer all of Western Europe? If you'd told all this to Dr. Watson, he would have referred you to a "shrink," and gone back to Baker Street to chuckle with Holmes about the poor, self-appointed prophet he'd encountered in Hyde Park.
Situations that cannot continue...don't. The strings that knit together peaceful coexistence among communities are straining under the pressure of millions of resident aliens who should never have been admitted, who can only be tolerated when they are as sure as we that compared to us they are helpless. Islam is a religion of fear and force, and its adherents can only be at your feet or at your throat. We had better decide which posture we prefer. The time is short.
