My latest article for Dispatch International sets out to explain to Europeans how it could be that the mayor of Philadelphia is investigating whether the First Amendment covers free speech about  Philadelphia -- specifically, the Philadelphia Magazine cover story, "Being White in Philly."

It's not easy.

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WASHINGTON, DC. In the summer of 2002, the Philadelphia Daily News published a cover story headlined, “Fugitives Among Us: Sometimes, Murder Suspects Hide in Plain Sight”. Forty-one mug shots of murder suspects illustrated the story, overflowing from the tabloid’s cover to the inside pages. The suspects were mainly black men, with a smattering of Hispanics and Asians. There were no white fugitives in the line-up.

Why? There were no white fugitives in Philadelphia at the time. This reality did nothing to ward off protests by activists who accused the newspaper of “racism” for publishing the facts. Soon, the newspaper issued an apology, and maybe Philadelphia civic...

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This week's column focuses on what David Petraeus could do, besides talk, about a small group of veterans whose punishments for "murder" and related charges on the COIN battlefield he ordered them onto are unjust, excessive or even corrupt. One of those veterans is Sgt. Derrick Miller (above with daughter Kaitlyn), who joined the " Leavenworth Ten" in 2011.

Below is an email exchange I had in July 2011 with Derrick's original defense lawyer Charles Gittens after Derrick was sentenced to life in prison.



Hello, Mr. Gittins,

Saw a brief story about Sgt. Miller's sentencing (first I'd heard of  the story). Can you send me any more information about his case? Best wishes, Diana West Charles Gittins replied:

...

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This week's syndicated column

Talk is cheap, Gen. Petraeus.

You may not agree. After all, your Washington, D.C., “super lawyer,” Bob Barnett, charges you something like $900 an hour for a kind of talk best described as “reputation reconfiguration” or “image management,” and that’s not cheap. Still, you probably consider it effective.

Judging by your recent coming-out party at a University of Southern California dinner to honor the military – your first public foray since you disappeared in a cloud of Paula Broadwell – whatever advice you’ve been buying seems to be working. You came, you apologized, you received a standing ovation. The media melted all over again into a puddle of admiration, further obscuring the real reasons you should be not apologizing before a gala crowd, but rather testifying before the American people: those national scandals you have so far successfully left in your dust.

I have previously addressed such scandals and will do so again: lying to the...

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The Death of the Grown-Up is now available as an e-book.

Kindle or Nook, take your pick.

CBS reports:

David Petraeus apologized Tuesday night to an audience of many veterans for the conduct that led to his resignation as head of the CIA following the disclosure of an extramarital affair.

"Needless to say, I join you keenly aware that I am regarded in a different light now than I was a year ago," Petraeus said. "I am also keenly aware that the reason for my recent journey was my own doing. So please allow me to begin my remarks this evening by reiterating how deeply I regret — and apologize for — the circumstances that led me to resign from the CIA and caused such pain for my family, friends and supporters."

It was clear at the time that the Broadwell affair was providing Petraeus with the perfect smokescreen to evade responsibility for lying to Congress twice...

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This week's syndicated column

Found myself in a group conversation that included one of the more instantly recognizable media figures -- someone who personifies the phrase "mainstream media." Since this isn't something that happens every day, why not make the best of it? Why not ask this VIMP (Very Important Media Person) a question or two on the topics that I frequently criticize the press for not covering?

The problem was how to do so without unduly alarming the poor thing. My favorite kinds of questions might be distressing to VIMPs who never ask them, or even seem to think of them. I didn't want to scare off her (or him) without eliciting an answer. I had to consider carefully while my VIMP remained at hand in a perpetual state of high-definition recognition.

There was no doubt about what was uppermost on my list: Had this journalistic personage ever had the curiosity to download and examine the online document posted at the White House website that purports to be President...

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CNN reports that David Petraeus will make his first public appearance since resigning in multi-varied if only partly limned states of disgrace, all overshadowed by L'Affaire Broadwell. He will deliver a speech this month at a dinner honoring the military.

The brief article cites two "persons" as sources.

Petraeus will attend a March 26 dinner at the University of Southern California, an annual event hosted by the president of the university to honor the military. He was asked a year ago to attend and accepted. He will deliver a speech at the dinner, according to one of the people who spoke with CNN.

That person said Petraeus is not yet ready to announce his future plans.

Person #2:

But the second person, who is equally close to the former Army general, said Petraeus is considering whether to be represented by a speakers bureau for future public...

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Is that what a police car in small town America should look like?

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Dear Mainstream Media,

Back in 2008, candidate Barack Obama went off his teleprompter and added a couple of sentences to the text of a speech about expanding the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps. Over rolling applause, the soon-to-be president of the United States said: “We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.”

At the time, Joseph Farah of WND.com wrote a column calling on you to help shine a light on what this shocking statement really meant. In a permanent state of vapors over Obama’s candidacy, you were of no use when it came to extracting anything but press releases from Team Obama.

Nearly five years later, it hardly matters that candidate...

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Heard about the chaplain from Ohio whom Uncle Sam has recognized with a Bronze Star for a PowerPoint presentation? Must have been some PowerPoint presentation -- and so it was.



A Bronze Star for this?

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The Dayton Daily News reports:

Trainer, who’s now in the running to be named Chaplain of the Year for the entire Air Guard, was in the third month of his voluntary deployment to Afghanistan last February when U.S. troops at Bagram Airfield mistakenly burned copies of the Muslim holy book.

The ensuing outrage claimed more than 30 lives, including two U.S. troops and two U.S. military advisers.

Within 48 hours, Trainer developed a PowerPoint presentation on the proper handling and disposal of Islamic...

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Andy McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor formidable and, bonus, great  friend of mine, has weighed in on the Rand Paul filibuster at NRO and finds it so much misguided theatrics. Further, he describes what I see as Paul's electric efforts to focus attention on executive overreach and obfuscation as a "crusade to have the Constitution ban a bogeyman of [Paul's] own making."

The "bogeyman" here is what Andy describes as the "killing of American citizens on American soil by America’s armed forces" -- which sounds pretty scary to me. This, he dryly notes, is "a scandal that clearly cries out for action, having occurred exactly zero times in the 20 years since jihadists commenced hostilities by bombing the World Trade Center."

Whether non-occurrence is reason for non-action -- or, in this case, public debate in the filibuster spotlight -- I leave to history's witness of Pearl Harbor, the 1972 Olympics, and the use on 9/11 of passenger jets as humanly guided...

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This week's syndicated column

Republican Rand Paul took to the floor of the U.S. Senate this week to filibuster John Brennan’s nomination to become head of the CIA. “I will speak as long as it takes,” the junior senator from Kentucky said, “until the alarm is sounded from coast to coast that our Constitution is important, that your rights to trial by jury are precious, that no American should be killed by a drone on American soil without first being charged with a crime, without first being found to be guilty by a court.”

I imagine many Americans following news of the filibuster, which lasted nearly 13 hours, were finding out for the first time that lawmakers such as Paul, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and a handful of others are gravely concerned about a possible threat from the executive branch against these unalienable rights. This makes the filibuster a success. As Paul said, sounding the alarm from “coast to coast” was exactly his aim.

Was this unusual event...

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Via Drudge, a Hollywood Reporter story on a $5 million lawsuit filed by a consultant who was cut out of a share of the Current TV/Al Jazeera deal. What is even more interesting is the key role David Blum, Sen. Dianne Feinstein's husband and a Current TV boardmember, played in presenting the deal to the rest of the board.

The plaintiff, media consultant John Terenzio, seems to specialize in handling propaganda-disseminating organs of state dictatorships (China, Qatar) for US markets.

Terenzio says that in June, he identified Current TV as a potential acquisition target for Al Jazeera given its vast distribution network and well-publicized financial woes.

At Terenzio's direction, Nanula is said to have approached Richard Blum, a member of Current's board of directors (and the husband of U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein), who was interested because "he and other Current investors were concerned about the prospect of losing their shirts in the financially troubled Current."

...

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The following exchange is from Hour 4:

SEN. CRUZ: After three times declining to answer a direct question -- would killing a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil with a drone strike, when that U.S. citizen did not present an imminent threat, would that be Constitutional -- after three times simply saying it would not be "appropriate," finally the fourth time, attorney general holder responded to vigorous questioning.

In particular, the course of the questioning, the point was made that Attorney General Holder is not an advice columnist giving advice on etiquette and appropriateness. The attorney general is the chief legal officer of the United States. And I will note that I observed it was more than a little astonishing that the chief legal officer of the United States could not give a simple one-word, one-syllable, two-letter answer to the question: Does the Constitution allow the federal government to kill with a drone strike a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil who is not posing an immediate threat? The proper...

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Yesterday, March 6, 2013, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), embarked on a filluster to block the nomination of John Brennan to director of the CIA pending confirmation from the Obama White House that it agrees the president is bound by the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees Americans' right to due process, and therefore will never use drones to kill American non-combatants on American soil.

To date, the White House answer is silence.

Here are Paul's opening remarks, which began at 11:47 am, excerpted from the uncorrected transcript to be found at Paul's official website. Paul's dramatic, public, and instructive defense of Constitutional rights against executive overreach is the best thing to have happened to America in a long time.

SEN. PAUL: I rise today to begin to filibuster John Brennan's nomination for the CIA I will speak until I can no longer speak. I will speak as long as it takes, until the alarm is sounded from coast to coast that our Constitution is important, that...

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Waste, fraud and US-taxpayer-abuse.

The final Special Inspector General's Iraq Report (SIGIR) is out this week. Curl up with it and find out where $60 billion taxpayer dollars went in Iraq (spoiler alert: down the drain). Boosters point to the relative success of Iraqi security forces in "keeping order" (trained at a cost of $20-plus billion) -- and Petraeus and Crocker, in their introduction to the report, still burble on, old Western-serial-style, about providing "new opportunity to the citizens of the Land of the Two Rivers" -- although somehow it seems relevant to note that Iraqi security forces under dictator Saddam Hussein also "kept order," sans such costly US training.

Out of Afghanistan, the waste, fraud and abuse story is even more grotesque. Afghanistan's Special Inspector General estimates that Americans have spent $100 billlion (and counting) on construction projects....

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The photo (above) is of a protest against Geert Wilders and his Freedom Party (PVV) in Arnhem, Holland in 2009. As a Leftist account of the vigil put it: "Many voices spoke out against the PVV party and the statements made by its leader, who is well-known for his `anti-immigration' and racist comments."

Wilders, of course, is the leading opponent of the Islamic wave bringing totalitarian supremacism to the West, which certainly includes the casually vicious anti-Semitism and pro-Hitler sentiments of Arhem's Turkish-Muslim youth as broadcast on Dutch television last month.

The response? Mainly silence -- and no candlelight vigils.

Watch this video (click on the title or "read more"), subtitled by my friend Ken Sikorski of Tundra Tabloids, as Turkish-Muslim "Dutch" boys freely express their visceral hatred of Jews, trading the 20th-century-tragedy of Anne Frank for a 21st-century-defense of HItler. Bonus: the hapless interviewer, a social worker in this city of Arnhem, who bets the boys 50 Euros that with sufficient "knowledge" that he will provide them, they will change their minds about Judaism (although not their animus toward Israel, which as *geopolitics, not Judaism,* he seems to agree with).

Hannah Arendt's famously articulated the "banality" of evil -- but sitting through even six minutes turns out also to be as excruciating as it is appalling.

Israel News reports on the reaction to the video, which aired on Dutch television last month, here:

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/165913#.UTdciRmhAeO

   

...

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Business Insider has the best account of Awaleed's announcement that he has "severed" his relationship with Forbes magazine's billionaire-ranking project, and will instead work with Bloomberg's Billionaire List.

Why?

Forbes isn't valuing Alwaleed's worth as highly as he does -- and, further, the Forbes' valuation process, the press release from Alwaleed's Kingdom Holding Company maintains, "seemed designed to disadvantage Middle Eastern investors and institutions." Forbes tells Business Insider, meanwhile, the huffy press release was Alwaleed's answer to some fact-checking questions.

The four examples KHC offers of Forbes "bias" will be as amusing to bilionaires and non-billionaires alike for revealing the factors behind the Saudi's pique. They are:

1) "A sudden refusal after six years to accept share values as listed by the Tadawul, Saudi Arabia's fully regulated, 21st-century, high-tech stock exchange ..."

We are not some Third World backwater ...

2) "A completely...

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March 3, 2013, "Prince Alwaleed Receives Lebanese Head of Mission to Discuss Economic Issues":

The meeting began as Mr. Anouti thanked Prince Alwaleed for giving him the opportunity to meet with him.

Same old, same old, right?

March 4, 2013, "Prince Alwaleed Receives Former US Secretary of State James Baker":

The meeting began with Prince Alwaleed greeting Mr. Baker, after which the two discussed issues of mutual interest pertaining to their respective countries.

Interesting!

The meeting was attended by Dr. Walid Arab Hashem,...

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Fox News reports that following Senate fury (when?) over a heavily redacted set of White House documents pertaining to the 9/11/12 attack on the US compound in Benghazi, a second set of documents "were delivered to Capitol Hill Thursday night which had only minimal redactions." 

... Senators have asked to see the documents as a part of their inquiry into the attack on Benghazi. Senators also wanted the documents before they were willing to vote on John Brennan to be Director of Central Intelligence.

A committee vote on Brennan’s nomination is set for Tuesday.

The documents reveal various email traffic about the “talking points” which were passed through a litany of Washington power centers: The White House, the FBI, the CIA, and the Justice Department. The source questions why it took the Obama administration months to deliver the information when all of these agencies had dealt with the email traffic.

Sources said the emails revealed heavy editing by then-CIA Director David Petraeus. The talking points evolved as they were passed around various intelligence and security hubs, and scrubbed of language referring to “al Qa’ida.” They also seemed to indicate an effort to paint the Sept. 11 attack as a demonstration and not a planned attack, the source said.

...

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James Murdoch and Alwaleed at the far end of the table, Savoy Hotel, February 5, 2013

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So what's Rupert Murdoch's Saudi Prince Moneybags up to lately?

March 13, 2013, "Prince Alwaleed Receives Lebanese Deputy Head of Mission to Discuss Economic Issues":

The meeting began as Mr. Anouti thanked Prince Alwaleed for giving him the opportunity to meet with him.

February 26, 2013, "Prince Alwaleed Receives Outgoing Head of European Commission":

The meeting began as Mr. Narbone thanked Prince Alwaleed for giving him the opportunity to meet him ...

February 24, 2013, "Prince Alwaleed Receives Former German Federal Chancellor":

The meeting began as Mr. Schröder thanked Prince Alwaleed for giving him and the delegation the opportunity to meet with him.

February 19, 2013, "Prince Alwaleed Receives NIgerian Ambassador to Saudi Arabia":

The meeting began as Mr. Bunu thanked Prince Alwaleed for giving him the opportunity to meet with him ...

...

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The Atlantic Wire notes the appearance of the above image in Inspire magazine, which may be described as Al Qaeda's English-language jihad glossy, a naseous-making and surreal propaganda product of global jihad.

Not surprisingly, the AQ magazine's Hollywood-style artwork is nauseous-making and surreal, too. Here we see Al Qaeda, adopting the cartoonish lexicon of George Bush, the Old West (Wanted, Dead or Alive), the Obama administration and Communist/labor/Left organizing ("Yes We Can") to remind its followers and, probably more important, the rest of us that it is targeting a list of law-abiding, peaceable people whose *crime* in the eyes of Islam is *blasphemy.*

Below is an analysis of the AtlanticWire's Daschiell Bennett's account, which I can assume took me longer to write than the hasty-seeming account. (As did, no doubt, this lengthy post on...

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This week's syndicated column

One last question about newly confirmed Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel.

Why?

Why for nearly two months (a Washington eternity) did this nominee above all others galvanize GOP Senate opposition?

I ask the question in genuine wonderment. After all, there was John Kerry with that giant bull’s-eye on his record for giving outrageous aid and comfort to America’s enemies by, among other things, entering into negotiations with the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong in 1971. How does a U.S. citizen tapped to lead the State Department not have to answer to U.S. senators for such treasonous behavior while a young but already noted public figure?

He was never asked the question, that’s how. Kerry sailed, or even windsurfed, through his confirmation hearing right into Foggy Bottom with only three little dissenting bumps (no votes from GOP Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz of Texas and James Inhofe of Oklahoma).

Then there’s John Brennan, President...

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The New York Times weighs in today (like a ton of bricks) on the attempted assassination of Lars Hedegaard, editor of Dispatch International.

"Danish Critic of Islam Attacked, and Muslims Defend His Right to Speak" (with links from the NYT original)

By Andrew Higgins (photo above):

COPENHAGEN — When a would-be assassin disguised as a postman shot at — and just missed — the head of Lars Hedegaard, an anti-Islam polemicist and former newspaper editor, this month, a cloud of suspicion immediately fell on Denmark’s Muslim minority.

This isn't a newspaper lede, it's a framework of Leftist attitude through which the pre-enlightened Timesreader is to view the event.

As such, it's worth a closer look. Note how the emotional seesaw touches down, first, at the head of...

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The hopefully named Radio Free Europe reports that up to $4 billion are coming Serbia's way from the UAE in the latest Western installment of doling for dollars.

Small wonder Belgrade has agreed to meet with Kosovo officials to discuss "normalization" with its erstwhile province, despite its declarations that "Kosovo is Serbia" forever.

The screws (continue to) turn.

Andrew C. McCarthy, who successfully prosecuted Abdel Rahman, the "blind sheikh" who masterminded the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, poignantly reflects on how it is that two decades of jihad have failed to prod the West into acknowledging and confronting the specifically Islamic brand of war, part-violence, part-subversion, that is leading to our demise as a civilization through the strangulating imposition, both de facto and de jure, of Islamic law in the West.

Andy draws a line between that long-ago demonic attempt to kill thousands in the heart of New York City on February 26, 1993 -- insistently, deceptively and self-deceptively protrayed as "wanton" violence devoid of doctrine -- with the near-assassation of Lars Hedegaard, a Danish newspaper editor, on a quiet street in Copenhagen three weeks ago. This recent event -- a strike at a man whose career...

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Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Saudi Arabia's Alwaleed bin Talal, shortly before Giuliani returned the prince's check for $10 million dollars in 2001, four years before Alwaleed became the largest stakeholder in News Corp outside the Murdoch family.

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On February 18, RadicalIslam featured a Q & A in which I discuss Saudi scion Alwaleed bin Talal, his politics, views and controversies, and what impact his 7 percent stake in News Corp. (and Rupert Murdoch's 18.97 percent stake in Alwaleed's Arabic media company) might have on the massive gaps in Fox's coverage of the post-9/11 world: for example, the total absence on Fox of reporting on Islamic law and its repressive, daily-documentable impact on liberty in the West, the totalitarian goals and diktats of the Saudi-based OIC (as enabled by former SecState Clinton), as well as the overall human-rights-disaster Saudi Arabia (among...

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Ed Smith, who lost his wife Monica (right) and un-born son in the 1993 terrorist attack, said after the 19th anniversary ceremony, "I miss my wife and my son every single day." Today is the 20th anniversary.

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Personally, my horizons at the time were defined by newborn twins so I recall the event impressionistically and in a surreal light.

But the event was surreal -- ghoulish, comic-book-crude evil -- and it set the standard for this age of jihad that the Western world resolutely refuses to face.

Tim Sumner of Freedom Radio writes:

At 12:17 PM, on February 26, 1993, Islamic terrorists detonated a 1,300-pound bomb in the parking garage beneath the World Trade Center. Their intent was to cause one Twin Tower to collapse into the other murdering the more than 25,000 people inside. Ed Smith joins us in remembrance of his wife Monica. She and their soon to be born first child, a son they planned to name Eddie, were killed that day. Former Special Agent Richard "Rick" Hahn...

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My latest Dispatch International article is an analysis of President Obama's State of the Union address of February 12, 2013. The title my European editors gave it is, "President Obama Proposes New Constitution." An eye-catching headline to be sure -- although maybe what the president was really telling us is that he has already ratified his own new constitution and is busy enacting it.

From Dispatch International:

“Checks and balances” to be replaced by “the greater good”

WASHINGTON, D.C. President Barack Obama opened his 2013 State of the Union (SOTU) address to Congress by quoting John F. Kennedy. Fifty-one years ago, JFK told assembled government leaders in the same ornate House chamber – the president’s cabinet, members of Congress, the twelve justices of the Supreme Court – that “the Constitution makes us not rivals for power but partners for progress”.

Such rhetoric, then and now, couldn’t be more at odds with the “checks and balances” that America’s founding fathers...

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Having refocused on the Obama identity fraud via the excellent essays by David Solway, it is also time to remind ourselves that the apparent fact that Obama is not actually eligible for the presidency, due to the fact that his father was a British subject, remains unaddressed by the courts and Congress.

Last June, the indomitable lawyer Mario Apuzzo set out to argue the "natural born" issue as well as to present evidence that the online birth certificate is a forgery in a New Jersey courtroom. The judge prevented him from doing either, and Obama's eligibility for the New Jersey presidential ballot was affirmed.

The syndicated column I wrote about the proceeding (reposted in full below) did not appear in either the Washington Examiner or Townhall.com, just to name two sigificant conservative sites that will not even permit coverage of the issue to sully their pages -- or appear before their readers.

From June 8, 2012:



Earlier this spring, President Obama’s attorney...

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On September 19, 2012, David Horowitz appeared on Fox News with Megyn Kelly to discuss the arrest of Nakoula Bassely Nakoula, the producer of "Innocence of Muslims," and, according to the leading members of the Obama administration, chief villain in the attack on the US compound in Benghazi on 9/11/12. Horowitz was in fine form, waxing outraged as the administration seemed to turn the screws on Nakoula and free speech itself -- a play, I would add, right out of the Muslim Brotherhood, OIC, Al Qaeda, CAIR, Muslim-"moderate" playbook to make the West conform to Islamic prohibitions against criticizing Islam.

Making the point that our ambassador had just been "murdered," Horowitz points out at around 2:30 of the video here (hat tip Andrew Bostom) that the Justice Department was nonetheless focusing on the filmmaker.

He continued:

David Horowitz: And you have to ask yourself: Isn’t not the fact that the chief advisor on Muslim affairs for Hillary Clinton, for our Secretary of  State, is a Muslim Brotherhood operative? And the Obama administration has turned over Egypt to the Muslim Brotherhood, which is a Nazi --...

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I've begun taking whacks at the fire-breathing dragon of "McCarthyism" lately (beginning with this piece that ran in Dispatch International last month) as a terrorizing, paralyzing figment of Communist-derived conditioning -- an overall phenomenon I examine at great length in the new book, American Betrayal. Similar forces are today trying to twist our understanding and thus defense against another totalitarian ideology, Islam. The remedy is in the moral: If we can't face facts, we can't face anything.

This week's syndicated...

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A message from the Behennas:

To the thousands of Michael supporters, With heavy hearts we must inform you that all our efforts to get clemency for Michael this year were for naught.  The Army Clemency and Parole Board listened to our family’s plea concerning the facts and circumstance’s surrounding Michael’s case and decided four years in prison was not enough.  The Clemency Board did not question us about Michael’s case, character, or whether he was a threat to society, so we are left to wait another year for an opportunity to petition for his freedom. We truly thought this year would be different; that this year we would finally get our son back where he belongs.  It is hard to convey the grief and despair we feel over this latest setback.  It is only the love and support of all of you and our deep abiding faith in a Higher Power that sustains us through...

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Pt. 2 of "The Conspiracy of Suppression," an original essay by David Solway

Pt. 1 is here.

A Man of Science Examines the President's Birth Certificate

by David Solway



A near-complete silence has attended the recent deposition by Lord Christopher Monckton regarding the numerous errors and discrepancies to be found in Barack Obama’s digital copy of his birth certificate. Exactly why a credible report by a trustworthy figure such as Monckton should be so studiously ignored presents an interesting case study in media self-censorship, liberal evasion and conservative pusillanimity. After all, Monckton’s international standing is impeccable. Specializing in investigating scientific frauds at the government level, he was for several years an advisor to British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in the appraisal of forged...

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Listen to the noble-voiced British Ambassador to Egypt proclaim, in so many words, England's compliance with sharia. If anything, his Olivier-style tones make his submission all the worse.

Via Vlad Tepes.

President Obama speaks to reporters about the online birth certificate White House officials uploaded on Wednesday, April 27, 2011.

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Below is an original essay by David Solway, but first an introduction.

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There are at least two basic ways to approach the signal, neutralizing event of American history.

Before I present examples of both by a singular guest-author, I realize I first have to specify what that signal event is. Our non-recognition is testament to many things, not least of which is the event's almost anti-climactic nature. We might think of the event as only the most visible manifestation, like a sore or lesion, of an underlying sickness in American society that more intangibly has rejected morality, bankrupted the law, and devalued the Constitution. Maybe the shame of it all is why we pretend this manifestation isn't there.

I refer to the president's all-but-certainly forged online birth certificate. How could a healthy society...

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From RadicalIslam.org:

In the following interview, RadicalIslam.org National Security Analyst Ryan Mauro speaks to Diana West, a nationally syndicated conservative American columnist and author, about the impact of the partial ownership of Fox news by Saudi Prince Alwaleed.





Ryan Mauro: You have devoted a lot of your time towards covering Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal. Can you tell us about him and why he warrants this attention?

Diana West: Prince Alwaleed bin Talal is usually described as a billionaire Saudi businessman, but he is also a senior member of the Saudi monarchy. He is the nephew...

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Behold The Mons Hall at Sandhurst, named to honor the thousands of men who died in the 1914 battle during  World War I. Soon its name will change to King Hamad Hall to honor the money of the dictator of Bahrain.

It's obscene.

From the Daily Mail:

The building will now be called King Hamad Hall and will reopen next month after being refurbished thanks to a £3 million donation from the king, who is the patron of the Sandhurst Foundation but is known for brutally repressing demonstrators at home.

Sandhurst has also accepted a  £15 million donation from the United Arab Emirates to build a new accommodation block, raising questions about the college’s links with authoritarian Gulf states accused of human rights abuses.

Wonder what will be named to honor that. How about changing Sandhurst to "Sandemirate"?





...

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Board meeting of Al Maktoun, a UAE charity. Are they writing checks for laptops for "needy" Americans? 

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Yesterday, I tweeted, and somehow contemptuously, that London's mayor was seeking money for a new airport from Qatar, Dubai and Kuwait.

Today, the Wash Post reports on the extensive charity the UAE is lavishing on "needy" American communities.

I feel ill. Emiratis are the people who were falconing with bin Laden in Afghanistan when the US didn't strike OBL pre-9/11; these are the people whom we successfully rejected over the UAE's proposed Dubai Port's purchase of US ports. Now, they just buy their way in all over America with laptops, soccer fields and hospital beds.

That's because no one has the Yankee pride to turn down the blood money and get along without it.  After all, UAE is not only a dictatorship where liberty doesn't exist, its many millionaires bankroll jihad violence...

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Image by the excellent "illustwriter" Bosch Fawstin

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Below is my write-up from Dispatch International of jaw-dropping Senate testimony from both SecDef Panetta and JCC Gen. Dempsey that, following an initial briefing at 5pm on 9/11/12, neither President Obama nor anyone from his White House staff ever once checked in with either Panetta or Dempsey during the night and early morning of 9/11/12 and 9/12/12 while US personnel and interests were under attack in Benghazi.

I have informally polled some experts and reporters (sometimes one and the same) as I have come across them since Panetta and Dempsey testified and they are roughly divided as to whether Panetta and Dempsey are telling the truth.

Senate testimony: Obama uninvolved as Americans were killed And...

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Minibar's "dragon's breath" course is a curried popcon ball dunked in liquid nitrogen.

Did the president eat it in one bite, as staff suggests, so vapor would stream from his nose?

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In case anyone is wondering what the Obamas' Valentine's Day dinner out at Minibar was like, here is a recent Barron's review of dinner for two, which came to $958.

From Barron's Penta Daily: Insights and advice for families with assets of $5 million or more [no wonder I never read it before]:

"A Bargain Dinner at $500 a Head"

At 6 p.m. on a rainy night this week, my guest and I sat down at the counter of Washington D.C.’s Minibar. Only six privileged guests at a time dine here on a 26-course meal handcrafted by Chef Jose Andres and his young staff.

One of the most acclaimed restaurants in the country, there is no shingle announcing Minibar on the corner of E and 9th streets, just an anonymous frosted-glass door of the type I’ve previously seen at private banks on the Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich. But behind the door stands a hostess with iPad. She took us from the white foyer to an adjacent waiting room, where more smart-looking staff brought us a cocktail, hot towel, and a wooden box filled with seaweed-dusted rice crackers.

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This week's syndicated column

We all know what happens when the fox guards the chicken coop – or do we?

This is not a rhetorical question. Do we Americans understand what happens when a wily predator is custodian of defenseless clucks? Our state of psychological disarmament makes us unable to recognize even such an obvious threat. I can’t think of another explanation for why the country hasn’t melted down the Capitol switchboard with phone calls to U.S. senators beseeching them not to confirm John Brennan as the next director of the CIA.

What’s so scary about Brennan, currently President Obama’s top adviser for counterterrorism?

More than any other Obama administration official, Brennan has openly cultivated groups in this country that I describe, with good reason, as being of the jihadist persuasion. Simultaneously, Brennan misinforms or dissembles about the nature of jihad itself. How can such a man helm America’s premier intelligence institution, which, at least ostensibly,...

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Larry Auster, author of the blog View from the Right, broke the very bad news to his readers almost in passing: given the discovery of "multiple metastatic lesions" in his brain, he is hoping to undergo treatment that, if successful, might give him "several more months of functional life before decline and death."

He writes:

It’s more cancer, appearing in a whole new front. Several doctors—including my own oncologist—said they had never heard of pancreatic cancer spreading to the brain. But now other doctors have said that because I have survived the pancreatic cancer so long it has had more time to do things and go places that is normally not the case. I was checked into the hospital yesterday and today was given me an MRI for a closer look at the brain. The hospital neurosurgeon speaks of “multiple metastatic lesions.” I’ve already been seen by the consultant neurosurgeon and the consultant oncologist today, who all came...

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Geert Wilders in 2009 in the LBJ Room of the US Capitol, where, hosted by Sen. Jon Kyl, he showed his movie Fitna. ((I'm to his left.)

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Below is the transcript of an Australian Broadcast Corp. Lateline interview with Geert Wilders.

Call it grace under fire as Wilders patiently fields a series of hostile questions from presenter Tony Jones. Worth noting is that this interview is more interrogation-style than conversation-style in that Jones ingnores Wilders' points and questions in rebuttal in favor or interupting him with more questions. TONY JONES, PRESENTER: Now to our guest. Geert Wilders is the Dutch anti-immigration and anti-Islam MP. He's the founder of the right wing Party For Freedom. Next week, Geert Wilders arrives in Australia for a visit that's been a long time in the making. He planned...

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This is a graphic from p. 66 of the new quarterly report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan (SIGAR). It shows the 12 largest donors to the giant sucking sound known as the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund (ARTF) for the last nine months of 2012, which are also defined in the SIGAR report as "SY 1391."

That's odd. What's "SY 1391"? In Iran and Afghanistan, it is the calendar year beginning from 622 when Mohammed is said to have made the "hijra," or migration, from (peaceful-ish) Mecca to (warlike) Medina. Medina, of course, is where Islam as it threatens us today really got started. Nice marker for a US government accounting of the waste of "infidel" taxpayer millions. I suppose we should be grateful SIGAR only rarely goes by "SY 1391," and mainly to explain why, as an accounting...

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WND reports today on the news former Marine platoon commander, FBI swat team leader, and counterterrorism & Muslim Brotherhood expert John Guandolo broke last week on Tom Trento's Trentovision show*: that John Brennan, President Obama's nominee to head the CIA, converted to Islam while CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia.

In John's analysis, Brennan's conversion represents the culmination of a campaign against Brennan by a foreign intelligence service. Giving Brennan the most charitable benefit of the doubt, this reveals Brennan's susceptibility to manipulation. By itself, the secret circumstances of this conversion to the religion that is also the basis for jihad war to entrench the totalitarian legal-political system of sharia should be troubling. But coupled...

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Despite media coverage of the Panetta-Dempsey Benghazi hearing best described as extra-terrestrial -- as in, what planet are these reporters on? -- several new pieces of information are now part of the record. They are not, however, part of the mainstream news feed.

Nonetheless, we now have testaments to the stunning detachment of President Obama and then-Secretary of State Clinton from the Pentagon during the 7 1/2-hour terrorist attack on Americans in Benghazi on September 11-12, 2012. According to both SecDef Panetta and Joint Chiefs Chairman Dempsey, neither Obama nor anyone else at the White House ever contacted Panetta or Dempsey directly...

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Geert Wilders in Bonn, February 2, 2013. Video via Vlad Tepes.

In this address, Geert reveals that a German publisher translated Geert's excellent Regenery book Marked for Death (2012) into German only to learn from the firm's lawyers that the publisher would face criminal prosecution for bringing Geert's book out in Germany as written.

Such is the repressive nature of German law under the influence of the twin totalitarianisms, Marx and Islam.

Geert rejected the proposed compromises with the facts and his beliefs. These, Geert said, included:

"For example, when in the English edition I criticize Islam and say truthfully `Islam,' the German edition can only read "Islamism," or "orthodox Islam," or "sharia-Islam," or whatever may be the case.

"Whenever I make the case that no more mosques should be built in Germany or Holland, I am only allowed to say: The construction of new mosques should be accompanied...

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This week's syndicated column

But first a Lars Update:

He is well, he is in an undisclosed location, he is back to work. Not bad for a 70-year-old man who was fired on "from less than a yard" away" while collecting a (phony) package delivered to his home. Far from stopping Lars, the gunfire triggered Lars's life-saving right hook to the gunman's face ... (see column below for details). I asked Lars yesterday if he knew more about his 25-year-old assailant. He wrote: "He is an immigrant from a Muslim country – Arabian or Pakistani. There is no doubt. You may quote me."

The gunman is also half a century younger than Lars. It suddenly struck me, as I reflected on the violence that Islam has brought into Western society: The heroes of the Danish counter-jihad are  elderly men -- old Vikings, it turns out, but "senior citizens" by any measure. Westergaard, Hedegaard, Sweden's Lars Vilks (b. 1946), too, an artist whose life is also imperiled by Muslims for his drawings and beliefs -- are all men of advanced years. They are also all men of the pen and paint set.

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Writing at Frontpagemag.com, Bruce Bawer discusses Scandanavian press coverage of yesterday's attempt on the life of Lars Hedegaard. A veteran Danish journalist and historian, Hedegaard is editor of the new weekly newspaper Dispatch International, for which I am DC correspondent. I invite readers to visit our English-language site where all content is free this week in view of the apparent jihadist attack (with a gun) on a lion of liberty (who uses a laptop). 

People should see exactly the kind of articles and opinon pieces that "causes" assassination attempts today in Europa Islamica -- Islamized Europe. I also invite you to subscribe to DI's English-language online edition, now more than ever, to support Lars, liberty and a free press (simply email Dispatch International and someone will contact you with subscription information: subscribe@d-intl.com). The media...

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