I am happy to say that Frank Gaffney devoted today's entire hour-long program to a conversation about American Betrayal, and the lessons that yesteryear's Communist infiltration and "secret assault on our nation's character" can teach about our struggle to protect liberty from Islam today.

Listen or download the show here.

When I was speaking about American Betrayal with Sandy Rios this morning on AFR Talk, she brought up a fascinating item at the American Spectator by Paul Kengor and Ion Mihai Pacepa (both of whom I quote in my book, as a matter of fact).

They write:

In watching President Obama speak on terrorism last week, we were taken aback to hear him say that America needs an anti-terrorism program that is both our sword and our shield. This was a striking choice of words by an American president. Remember the emblem of the KGB? Maybe you don’t, but we do. One of us (Pacepa) spent over two decades working for the KGB community as one of the highest ranking intelligence/military/political officials in the entire Soviet Bloc, and paid with two death sentences for his freedom. The emblem of the KGB was a sword and a shield symbolizing its duties: to put the country’s enemies to the sword, and to shield and protect the communist revolution.

...

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Ruth King, monthly columnist for Outpost and daily blogger-aggregator extraordinaire at Ruthfullly Yours, has a review of American Betrayal at Family Security Matters today followed by my first written Q & A. Even though we are a friends (as Ruth notes, full-disclosure style), I think I managed to shock her!

"A Review and Interview about American Betrayal"

by Ruth King

Were the Reagan years just a temporary feel good blip since what the late Jeane Kirkpatrick called "the blame America first crowd" still dominates our academies, the media and...

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DHS advisor Mohammed Elibiary: Reduce US policing of Muslims and let the imams control jihad!

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Neil Munro at The Daily Caller reports today on a very significant development in the Islamization of US security agencies.

Politically influential Muslim activists are pushing to reduce the FBI’s role in countering Islamic terrorism and are seeking greater federal reliance on hard-line orthodox Imams.

The White House’s “Countering Violent Extremism” program “did not produce the results a lot of us were hopeful … [and] kind of collapsed towards the end of last year,” complained Mohamed Elibiary, a Texas-based advocate who was appointed to the Homeland Security Advisory Council.

“I don’t know where it is today … [but] it presents us with the opportunity to look at the question of [whether] it is right to house it within the FBI,” he said at an May...

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A writer awaiting the official release (tomorrow!) of a book could do absolutely no better than to sit down and talk through the sure-to-be-controversial findings with The remarkable Ginni Thomas of The Daily Caller.



In her introductory comments, Ginni writes:

Dear reader, Diana West is a meticulous researcher who writes compellingly. She is also a new friend. Her new book, "American Betrayal," reads like a historical thriller as she weaves remarkable details from a variety of sources, including intelligence archives from the collapsed Soviet Union. In this week's interview, West explains the thesis of her book that she admits even shocked her: "Americans have been betrayed ... by our leaders...

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In a rousing letter to Fox colleagues regarding the Obama administration's outrageous investigation of James Rosen, Roger Ailes reveals either his accommodation of the Marxian narrative or his stunning ignorance of history:

The administration’s attempt to intimidate Fox News and its employees will not succeed and their excuses will stand neither the test of law, the test of decency, nor the test of time. We will not allow a climate of press intimidation, unseen since the McCarthy era, to frighten any of us away from the truth.

Could someone please ship Fox a ton of Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies by M. Stanton Evans and throw in a few American Betrayals on top? We are morally and intellectually sunk until we -- above all, conservatives -- reverse this gross inversion of both morality and reality that continues to demonize McCarthy and absolve America's ideological enemies of their treason.



...

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This week's syndicated column

Nearly 20 years after a Hasidic Jewish boy riding across the Brooklyn Bridge was killed by a Muslim fighting jihad, a British soldier was hacked to death and reportedly beheaded on the streets of London by Muslims fighting jihad.

Thanks to the happenstance of a passer-by with a video recorder, the world heard almost immediately from one of the two London suspects, Michael Adebolajo. His hands red with blood, Adebolajo confessed to the murder of Lee Rigby, 25, that he had just committed in Koranically correct terms of revenge, presumably for Britain’s efforts against jihad in Iraq and Afghanistan. We also know that cries of “Allahu Akbar” (“Allah is great”) punctuated the knifing and meat-cleavering of the victim.

But if “Allahu Akbar” is the historic cry of Muslims engaged in jihad, it is also the contemporary trigger for Western denial that jihad exists. “We will defeat violent extremism by standing together,” British Prime Minister David Cameron stated, gravely opaque. How? “Above all by challenging the poisonous narrative of extremism on which this violence feeds,” he said, definitely not referring to the verses of the Koran that inspire jihad.

...

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Over the years, I have received many wonderful letters from readers, and particularly from readers who were moved to write after reading my first book The Death of the Grown-Up.

Preceding the launch of American Betrayal next week, I am inaugurating a "Reader's Corner" where I will post letters from time to time. (The new button is in the blue navigation bar above.)

The book isn't out yet but the first one  is here, a quite fascinating memoir triggered by last weekend's conversation about the book on CSPAN Book TV's "Afterwords," which, by the way, replays on Sunday, May 26 at noon ET. 

Went on with the delightful Michael Coren on Sun TV in Canada last night to make my first attempt at sound-byting the 401 pages and 961 footnotes of American Betrayal. He said it "read like a novel," which made my day.

Click "Read More" to see video.

Via Vlad Tepes. 

...

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The inspirational team at TrentoVision mixes it up with American Betrayal.

The overwhelming presence in the Extortion 17 press conference last week, which I wrote about in last week's syndicated column, was the pain that filled every corner of the room. The shootdown of the Chinook CH-47 carrying 17 SEALS and 13 other American forces on August 6, 2011 may have faded like newsprint for most of us, but there on the top floor of the National Press Club, a stone's throw from the White House, the shock of it was still nightmare-vivid, particularly as the families described the holes in the military's investigation, and closed doors and runaround they gotten ever since. What  they want are answers to their natural questions, and accountability for the failures of the mission. For them, this is a grieving process without end untl they are treated with the decency and respect that their sacrifice merits and they receive answers they need and surely deserve.

One set of question that burns is why, on a SEAL Team 6 mission in August 2011, three months after the bin Laden...

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Great Britain is once again being rocked by revelations of the hell on earth little British girls are growing up in as sex slaves to gangs of Muslim, mainly Pakistani men -- and the craven impotence of British society which above all are supposed to be guardians of its own precious children.

The Telegraph's Alice Pearson writes:

Rochdale, Rotherham, Derby, Oxford. The towns change, but the pattern is always the same. Gangs of men, mainly of Pakistani Muslim heritage, lure white girls as young as 10 with gifts and displays of affection. Next, the girl is raped as a way of “breaking her in”. Once the child’s spirit is subdued, and her mind fogged with drugs, she is sold for sex to multiple men at £200 a time. If the girl tries to break away, a gang member might threaten to behead her or firebomb her home. Mohammed Karrar, who was found guilty in the Oxford sex-grooming case this week, took a scalding hairpin and branded one girl so she would know she was his property....

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A preface to my appearance on Afterwords this weekend, airing on C-SPAN2 on Saturday May 18 at 10pm, Sunday May 19 at 9pm, and Monday May 20 at midnight and 3am. It will re-air on C-SPAN2 next Sunday May 26 at noon.

Every author wants to go on C-SPAN Book TV's Afterwords, and why not? Book TV audiences actually tune in to hear about books they might like to read. I was elated to have my new book, American Betrayal, chosen for the Afterwords show and went to tape the program yesterday with high hopes.

It is a most civilized setting, produced by lovely people, and it provides an author, who has spent years alone in a hole, reading, writing, toiling, thinking, with the chance, faciliated by an informed interviewer, to tell the world what it's all about. Lay out the themes. Hit the highlights. Even defend the controversial bits and emit some sparks along the way just for fun. 

But no. That is, this was not exactly my experience as you'll see if you tune in. It was tough at times to get a word in edgeways (especially before the off-camera intervention took place midway through) so there are times when the interview is more like a battle for airtime-space -- more Senate filibuster meets Hunger Games than convivial let-the-author-cut-loose-and-talk-about-baby. (Watch for host's reading of verses from The Internationale.) Baby still made as much noise as possible, of course, but the birthday party didn't come off quite as expected.

...

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This week's syndicated column

Grief and politics don’t mix. When raw, aching grief and the dirtiest kind of politics meet, a hot volcano of pain and outrage erupts that is unstoppable. But it is necessary. It is the only way things might ever be clean again.

I am thinking of recent casket transfer ceremonies that have taken place at Dover Air Force Base, where senior administration officials have used the solemn occasions – Benghazi, the shoot-down of Extortion 17 – less to comfort grieving families than to lay blame, to establish a narrative, to lie.

Think of Sean Smith’s mother. Think of Tyrone Woods’ father. After the Obama administration’s hugs came the Obama administration’s stonewalling. They still don’t have answers about what happened in Benghazi on the night of Sept. 11, 2012.

We don’t either.

We still don’t know who in the U.S. government gave the order not to rescue Americans under fire for eight and a half hours, and how and why such an unconscionable...

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Maybe I missed it in the US press, but I never saw this heart-stopping shot of the Martin family and other innocent Americanss in the presence of pure evil, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (circled in red), who has just set his back-pack bomb packed with nails and ball bearings near the Boston Marathon finish line.

Young Richard, 9, circled in blue, was killed, his mother Denise suffered brain injuries and lost the sight in one eye, and little Jane, in the green jacket next to Richard, lost her left leg. Father Bill, who was finishing the race, is still recovering from a shrapnel wound and hopes to regain hearing he lost in the blast.

According to the London Daily Mail, which published the picture and update on the Martin family last week, Jane has now undergone her eleventh surgery to close the wound on her leg and to prepare it eventually to be fitted for a prosthesis. "She has battled infections in the hospital and faces more surgeries," the newspaper reports.

Tamarlan Tsarnaev lies at rest...

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A word about the Islamic burial of Tamarlan Tsarnaev in a cemetery in Virginia.

Virginia. Cradle of our Founders -- and resting place, too. George Washington. James Madison. Thomas Jefferson. ... Tamarlan Tsarnaev.

This is a defilement of the land. The killer waged jihad by destroying American lives as viciously as possible -- killing three, including young Richard Martin, consigning many Americans to life without limbs, skull and brain injuries, pain, trauma, shrapnel, nails, ball bearings...

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The Behennas write:

To all the thousands of Michael supporters, Just a quick update to let you know that the Government filed their Response to Michael's Petition before the Supreme Court.  Michael's lawyers now have ten days to file a Reply to the Government's Response. The Supreme Court will then set Michael's case for Conference (hopefully by June) and decide whether to grant Certiorari which means a review by the whole Supreme Court.  For the Supreme Court justices to grant Certiorari from the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces would be the first time a military petition has reached this stage - so prayers for discernment for these nine Justices are certainly welcomed. An encouraging tidbit was that Michael's case was selected by the Supreme Court Blog as the petition of the day for May 1st - http://www.scotusblog.com/2013/05/petition-of-the-day-446/ We ask that you spread this email and please continue...

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On the lighter side ...

An LA Mirror "Movieland Mystery Photo" in 2010 feature asked readers to identify the young man in a candid photo with a young Elizabeth Taylor.

A second photo (above) showed him in uniform in a still shot from a movie. The Mirror caption reads: "Here’s another photo of our mystery guest with a mystery companion. Aren’t her eyes haunting?"

His name is Jimmy Lydon. Her name is Barbara Belden -- my mother!

The movie is "When the Lights Go On Again," and it came out in 1944, when Barbara Belden was 15 years old.

This week's syndicated column:

“I want to ask a couple of questions about the February 17 Martyrs Brigade,” said Rep. Blake Farenthold.

The Texas Republican was addressing the three State Department “whistleblowers” who testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee about the attack in Benghazi that killed four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens. The three witnesses were Mark Thompson, acting deputy assistant secretary of state for counterterrorism; Greg Hicks, former deputy chief of mission in Libya; and Eric Nordstrom, former regional security officer in Libya.

When Farenthold introduced this crucial subject into the hearings, he also opened a window into Benghazi that shone light not only on disastrous Western support for “Arab Spring,” but also on the core crisis in U.S. foreign policy.

Farenthold: “Mr. Nordstrom, can you tell me the role of February 17 Martyrs Brigade in protecting the consulate in Benghazi?”

Nordstrom: “Certainly....

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This week's article for Dispatch International:

"US Religious Commission Won't Touch Sharia"

But is keen to revile Western countries trying to defend against Islamic law

WASHINGTON DC. Fifteen years ago, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom opened shop with a mandate from Congress to examine the state of religious freedom around the world, and issue an annual report to the President. The idea was to provide the information necessary for the U.S. government to make religious freedom a greater factor in foreign-policy-making by highlighting the world’s worst offenders. Such offenders run, as the commission’s 2013 religious freedom report tells us, from Saudi Arabia to China to Russia to Sudan to Iran to Western Europe.

Western Europe?

The 2013 report marks the first time that the region of Western Europe has made the commission’s official watch list. It doesn’t debut as a “tier-one”...

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The Washington Free Beacon reports (h/t John Rosenthal):

Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) called the idea that the U.S. could not arm the right rebels in Syria to fight Bashir al-Assad “damned foolishness” in an interview with Charlie Rose Tuesday. McCain has pushed for establishing a safe zone and supplying rebel forces with necessary weaponry. He was especially frustrated with Gen. James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, and Gen. Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, two administration officials who once favored arming rebels but said they were skeptical because of growing Islamist influence. “Well, doesn’t that mean it was a terrible tragic failure that we didn’t act then and get these weapons to the right people then?” McCain asked. “And of course it’s damned foolishness. Of course we can get the weapons to the right people. Of course if we set up a Benghazi in Syria, we can get them to the right people.”

The gulf, the chasm between John McCain and Reality must now be measured in light years.

...

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Some important stories are breaking all around this week.

Fox: "Hillary sought end-run around counterterrorism desk on night of Benghazi, whistleblower will say"

On the night of Sept. 11, as the Obama administration scrambled to respond to the Benghazi terror attacks, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a key aide effectively tried to cut the department's own counterterrorism bureau out of the chain of reporting and decision-making, according to a "whistle-blower" witness from that bureau who will soon testify to the charge before Congress, Fox News has learned.

That witness is Mark I. Thompson, a former Marine and now the deputy coordinator for operations in the agency’s counterterrorism bureau. Sources tell Fox News Thompson will level the allegation against Clinton during testimony on Wednesday before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa,...

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"Unbiased"? The  Muslim Brotherhood Channel? Are they kidding?

How does Qatar do it? How does Vogue let Qatar do it to it? "Playing it straight?" The Qatari Sharia Muslim Brotherhood Revolution? And who is this Lisa "Playing It straight into MB hands" Fletcher? To be sure, she got the glossy treatment in Vogue, swanning amid a Marc Jacobs' perfume ad (Daisy), breast cancer awareness, and Van Cleef & Arpels.

"Al Jazeera America" is thrilled to bits.

But what price Glossywood?

From an earlier post:

Qatar, after all, is a country Freedom House deems "not free" where, as reported in Freedom House's the 2012 Freedom of the Press Report, it is against the law for journalists to "criticize the Qatari government, the ruling family or Islam."

The country's seven newspapers are all owned by the ruling family or its business associates, while "the state...

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The see-no-Islam FBI: On the case against "violent extremism."

This week's syndicated column:

We have met the enemy and he is “self-radicalization.” No, wait: We have met the enemy and he is the Internet. We have met the enemy and he is broadband video?

“But this is hard stuff,” President Obama tried to explain in this week’s press conference. “Because of the pressure that we put on al-Qaida’s core, because of the pressure that we’ve put on these networks that are well-financed and more sophisticated and can engage in and project transnational threats against the United States, one of the dangers that we now face are self-radicalized individuals who are already here in the United States – in some cases, may not be part of any kind of network, but because of whatever warped, twisted ideas they may have, may decide to carry out an attack. And those are in some ways more difficult to prevent.”

...

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The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg 'fesses up to having witnessed a loathesome event last week:

a two-cheeked kiss, in public, between Qatar’s second-most powerful man, the prime minister (and foreign minister), Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani (photo above), and Haim Saban, the Israeli-American billionaire who funds, among other things, the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.

The kiss took place at a Brookings dinner last week in Washington that was convened to pay homage to Al Thani for his support -- because, yes, in addition to pledging $400 million to Hamas, Qatar also supports Brookings, one of Washington’s premier research groups.

... And as the kiss on Saban’s two cheeks suggests, Qatar sees nothing incongruous...

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I will never forget the unmitigated horror of watching as the United States openly switched sides in the 2011 "Arab Spring," abandoning allies in the war on terror (jihad) to support those same jihadist forces instead. There was precious little company in the press gallery on this one as US media, shouting slogans of "revolution" and "democracy," blindly failed to perceive or actually covered up the obvious truth: The US, with NATO, was now supporting the Other Side -- the same Other Side that had struck us in 9/11, killed and maimed our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and threatened Western liberty everywhere. It was in this crazy atmosphere, John Rosenthal's independent reporting from Europe provided essential information and context.

John's long-awaited book, The Jihadist Plot: The Untold Story of Al-Qaeda and the Libyan Rebellion, ...

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Love is a many $plendored thing ...

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Sickening.

From the New York Times (links from the original) and so what, no official will take responsible, honorable, grown-up action:

For more than a decade, wads of American dollars packed into suitcases, backpacks and, on occasion, plastic shopping bags have been dropped off every month or so at the offices of Afghanistan’s president — courtesy of the Central Intelligence Agency.

All told, tens of millions of dollars have flowed from the C.I.A. to the office of President Hamid Karzai, according to current and...

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Last week, I traveled to Florida to discuss American Betrayal:The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character in the Presidential Speakers Series sponsored by Embry Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona. The book, which, in fact, doesn't come out until May 28, couldn't have had a nicer debut with host Marc Bernier helming the interview. Bonus: We ended up discussing current Saudi events for the first 30 minutes, before tucking into exactly what American Betrayal is about. 

Seeing as the pub date is one month from today (and counting down), I am posting the interview.

Earlier this year, I wrote a series of posts (also here) on "The Fox Effect," which analyzed Fox coverage of Islamic stories through the Saudi scrim -- in other words, keeping in mind the part-ownership (7 percent) of News Corp. by ranking Saudi scion Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, and the part-ownership (nearly 20 percent) of Rotana (Alwaleed's media company) by Rupert Murdoch. (More coverage here.) The series culminated with a lengthy Q & A with Ryan Lauro here.

In this week's syndicated column, I note that Fox -- where Steve Emerson first broke the news that Saudi 3B-terrorist and ex-"person of interest" in the Boston bombing, Abdul Rahman Ali Alharbi, was slated for deportation on "national security grounds" -- appears to have "dropped" the story. That is too tepid a term. While Glenn Beck appeared on O'Reilly last night to present his team's ground-breaking work on the MSM-ignored story, Fox hasn't just dropped the story. The network is censoring it.

A search of the Fox...

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This week's syndicated column

Let’s pick up where last week’s column left off with that Saudi national in Boston – Abdul Rahman Ali Alharbi, the 20-year-old “student” who was acting suspiciously enough after the Boston bombing to be “detained” under guard at the hospital and named a person of interest in the April 15 attack.

That same day, law enforcement searched Alharbi’s Boston-area apartment for seven hours, leaving with bags of evidence at around 2 a.m. on Tuesday, April 16. On Tuesday afternoon, a sub-agency of the Department of Homeland Security created what is called an “event file” on Alharbi, calling for his visa to be revoked due to ties to terrorism. That same afternoon, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper would inform the Senate Intelligence Committee that Alharbi was now merely a “witness.”

This exonerating designation pulled the public eye off...

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The Western world gasses and sputters and anything else to avoid the obvious: Islam made them do it, You know who I mean, and you know what they did, and you know Islam made them do it, too. But such a concept, obvious as noses on faces, etc., is kept under wraps and strangled until it is not only unsayable but unthinkable, too.

We may not have rid ourselves of terrorism, but we've rid ourselves of Islam, sure as shooting (can I say that?). Soon, all Americans, not just the president, will be more likely to link "terrorism" to "tax day" than to that religion -- what was it called? Explosions, attacks, will, of course, "occur" -- as traffic accidents do -- but fear not: We will get better and better at cleaning blood from our streets, amassing heaps of teddy bears in bereaved neighbors' driveways, rehabbing legless athletes, raising money for the young and permanently disabled.

"Boston Strong," we cry out.

Maybe next time, it will be "Houston Strong." Then "Seattle, Atlanta or Schenectedy...

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A press release on the FBI website of Friday, April 19, 2013 tells us that "a foreign government" -- Russia -- alerted the FBI in "early 2011" that Tamarlan Tsarnaev was "a follower of radical Islam and a strong believer, and that he had changed drastically since 2010 as he prepared to leave the United States for travel to the country's region to join unspecified underground groups."

How you say "radical Islam" in Russian? Never mind. This is big and shocking news on several levels. The first concerns the government reflex to suppress speculation regarding Islamic terrorism, or even terrorism, period as when David Axelrod let fly that the president was thinking "tax day" might be what we used to obsess over as the so-called root cause. We might even look back on FBI's special agent in charge Richard DesLauriers' plea to the public on Thursday evening (April 18) as reinforcing the domestic confines of the suspect pool by omission. His carefully genericized statement failed to open the public mind to any suggestion that the suspects might not be homegrown locals.

...

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View of the Boston Common, circa 1750, stitched by Hannah Otis (1732-1801)

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The "ethno-masochists" are in mourning. They didn't get their man. Their white man. That bitter-clinger, church-going,Tea Party patriot of their dreams. This thwarted desire -- seething, pulsing, coursing through the flow of commentary all week -- was the ugly undercurrent to our national stress over another Islamic terrorist attack, this time in Boston, that has again torn at our civlizational fabric. But something else is tearing at that same fabric. And that is the fact that more than anything else, the Left wanted this terrorism to have been plotted and inflicted by one of our own.

We don't see such uniform deviance immediately on display after 9/11. Then, the Left and almost everyone else would be pre-occupied and distracted with the question, "Why do they hate us?"...

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Abdulrahman Ali Al-Harbi with Azzam with Saudi diplomat Azzam bin Abdel Karim in a Boston hospital

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Even as our focus remains on the manhunt for the second Chechen suspect, this Saudi story still simmers ....

This week's syndicated column

After the FBI rescheduled another postponed briefing on the Boston Marathon Massacre for 8 p.m. on Wednesday night – and then canceled that one, too – that was it. I was going to give the news circus a rest until morning.

Came the dawn I heard that terrorism expert Steven Emerson had dropped a bombshell Wednesday night on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program. Emerson reported that Abdulrahman Ali Alharbi, the Saudi national first identified as a “person of interest” and then downgraded, like a tropical storm, to “witness,” would be deported from the United States “on national security grounds.” This, Emerson added, “is very unusual.”

Yes. But also no. Amid similar conditions – a terrorist attack, an ongoing investigation and Saudi...

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Here is another photo of men with backpacks that has been making the Internet rounds. Anthony Gucciardi at InfoWars.com makes an interesting case that one of these men in wearing a ball cap with a SEAL-type logo. Judging by their gear, Gucciardi's guess is that the men may be employees of "the Blackwater-style private military/security firm Craft International." If so, why were they there? Taking in race day? Of course, maybe the guy just bought a hat with a SEAL-type logo.

UPDATE 12:30 pm: Nope.

The Boston Gobe reports:

Authorities have clear video images of two separate suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings carrying black bags at each explosion site and are planning to release the images today in an appeal for the public’s help in identifying the men, according to an official briefed on the case.

The official said that the two suspects were seen separately on videotape — one at each of the two bombing sites, which are located about a block apart.

The official, who spoke this morning on the condition of anonymity, said the best video has come from surveillance cameras on the same side of Boylston Street as the explosions. The official said the widely reported Lord and Taylor surveillance camera, and snapshots from individual cellphone camera users, have not provided the clearest...

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We still don't know what ideological-brand of terror-suspect we're looking at, but media are reporting that a suspect has been arrested -- OR NOT -- and CNN's John King is apologizing for his first bite of the scoop. 

From HuffPo:



CNN's John King caused some controversy on Wednesday when he said that a potential suspect in the Boston bombings was a "dark-skinned male."

King was the first to report that law enforcement officials had identified a suspect in Monday's bloody attacks.

"I want to be very careful about this, because people get very sensitive when you say these things," he said. "I was told by one of these sources who is a law enforcement official that this is a dark-skinned male."

He said that there had been a further description given, but he was refraining from sharing it with viewers.

...

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The Daily Mail has spectacular photos of today's funeral in London -- but not an Obama or Clinton or Bush in sight (not even a Biden).

From yesterday's press briefing (4/16/13):

QUESTION: Thank you, Patrick. This morning, there was supposed to be a photo opportunity with the Secretary and the Foreign Minister of Saudi Arabia. Could you tell us why it was canceled?

MR. VENTRELL: Well, first of all, let me provide a readout of the meeting for all of you.

Thank you, oh, Great Federal Flunky! Thank you!

The Secretary and the Foreign Minister from Saudi Arabia discussed a wide range of bilateral and regional issues, including Middle East peace efforts and the current situation in Syria. They met this morning. This is, again, him just coming back from – late last night from 10 days, and so the change in schedule is really just a matter of a very tight schedule. He is back for a couple of days of congressional testimony. He is, again, on the road, as you know, to Istanbul later this weekend. So this is really – I wouldn’t read...

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Hillary "What difference does it make" Clinton doesn't want Benghazi investigated further, either.

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Readers often email me asking what they can do besides feel outrage and helplessness. Here's something. Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) has introduced House Res. 36 to authorize the formation of a Select Committee to investigate what happened on September 11, 2012 and thereafter, including:

how the relevant agencies and the executive branch responded to it and whether appropriate congressional notifications were made; any improper conduct by officials relating to the attack; To date, HR 36 has 106 co-sponsors, all Republicans.

If you don't see your representative's name on the list, call up the House office and ask, Why not?

Speaker Boehner -- speaker for the O administration and GOP Establishment is more like it -- says investigating Benghazi is too expensive and time-consuming. (Bohner, obviously, is not a co-sponsor of HR 36.)

Idea: House members could cut down on their pasha-style travel -- first-class and military VIP travel, which cost taxpayers $1.45 million in 2012. The Washington Guardian today names names of profligate travelers including GOP Reps. Mike Turner (Ohio), Rob Bishop (Utah), Brett Guthrie (Kentucky), Tom Marino (Pa.), Darrell Issa (CA) and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (VA).

...

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Who did it? We still don't know. Our one "person of interest" has been downgraded, like a weakening storm, to "witness." End of Saudi story?

Today, former Muslim Brother turned "peace activist" Walid Shoebat provides familial, or, rather, clan context to explain why "person of interest"-turned-"witness" Abdul Rahman Ali Al-Harbi is at least such a potentially interesting witness.

The witness's clan, Al-Harbi, makes a prominent showing in the annals of Saudi jihad. Shoebat, co-author with Ben Barrack of The Case for Islamophobia,  also explains what  clannishness in Saudi Arabia means.

Many from Al-Harbi’s clan are steeped in terrorism and are members of Al-Qaeda. Out of a list of 85 terrorists listed...

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Paul Revere by John Singleton Copley

The Media Left speculates that persons motivated by the Tea Party, anti-tax, Right-Wing committed the Boston Marathon Atrocity. Alex Jones throws up the "false flag." The Right speculates that this was a jihad attack. Who is right? Details from the US government, which would prefer to tell us nothing (openly, ayway), are sparse, pried out by reporters with good law enforcement sources. Only the Right also cautions against jumping to conclusions, which is correct; however, It is only proper to note that investigators are certainly taking the Saudi trail seriously. We've been down that way before.

Still throbbing with rage over the blast, I am not assuaged by President Obama's loathesome promise: "We will find out why they did this." Why? His words suggest there could be a legitimate reason behind this pain-inflicting, civilization-crushing terrorism....

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There is something that Corey Jones, a first-base umpire working high school games in New Mexico, has in common with Ben Carson, conservative star, surgeon and head of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins.

They both violated the New Order in their respective commnunities, one being the high school baseball diamond, the other being academia. They are both being subjected to "re-education" in the public square.

What did they do? Carson, it is well known, declared his opposition to marriage for homosexuals. This violation of New Normal led Carson to withdraw as Johns Hopkins' commencement speaker. Like that poor canary-bird in the coal mine, Carson's experience provides solid evidence there is no "oxygen" in society at large for voicing the age-old convention that marriage is a heterosexual institution for one man and one woman, and no other pairings or groupings.

Corey Jones also gave voice to a convention that is no longer supported by society -- that educators, coaches, and other...

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This week's syndicated column

More than 5,000 words into the New York Times Magazine report on everything ex-Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., and his wife, Huma Abedin, want you to know about Weiner’s “sexting” scandal that led him to resign from Congress in 2011, reporter Jonathan Van Meter pauses the story.

Van Meter, a contributing editor at Vogue and New York Magazine, had worked diligently on this New York Times Sunday Magazine cover story – multiple interviews with Weiner and Abedin, both as a couple and separately. On some level, the prurient banality of what he was writing about must have gotten to him.

As he described listening to Weiner discuss the “original behavior” that culminated in the elected official, husband and father-to-be sending a photo of his own torso “wearing gray boxer briefs and an obvious erection” to 45,000 Twitter followers (rather than...

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I read this report and got that old feeling.

No, not that one -- I got that old, Libya-Redux feeling that the air was going out of the room. That's what happens whenever I see Uncle Sam stepping in to assist, support or enable the same forces of jihad that hit us right between the eyes on September 11, 2001. Only now we call it "Arab Spring."  When SecState John Kerry and British Foreign Minister Wm Hague meet with Ghassan Hitto, an American-citizen Muslim Brother and Hamas supporter now fronting the Syrian "opposition," we should call it what it is: submission as the new normal, submission to the forces spreading Islamic law. If you don't want to beat 'em, join 'em -- or at least send them big guns. Maybe they'll point them at Iran (could that possibly be the misbegotten "strategy"?).

So here we go again. Where we once fawned over Tunisia, Tahrir Square, and the Libya opposition, now we fawn over the Syria opposition, currently headed by Hitto. Why worry? After all, as a recent...

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Moving right along from soiled place setting (Libya...) to setting (Syria), the Western powers continue to muck up the Islamic world royally, powering the engine of Sunni jihad in a Grand Effort to isolate Iran and its ally Syria, or so it might appear.

It's easy to imagine NATO leaders patting themselves on the backs over their clever little wars on the "cheap" which require "only" Western arms and training and secret operations and money (but they can touch the Saudis and Qataris for much of the money, illegal/schmillegal), all of which, they maybe think, will ultimately vanquish Iran. When one setting is soiled, move on the next.

What they seem to miss -- unless, that is, they are al$o party to it -- is that they are leaving in their wake an equally if not far more dangerous monster: an oil-rich, strategic expanse of virulently metastisizing Sunni Shariadom.

Such a policy echoes...

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It is most impressive to scroll through the more than 20 pages of names of the 700 retired US special operations forces who have come forward as a group, Special Operations Speaks, to sign a letter in support of Rep. Frank Wolf's House Res. 36 to establish a House Select Committe to investigate Benghazi.

Breitbart has the story and the letter here.  

If readers wish to sign petitions in support of the effort, Center For Security Policy's petition is here; Special Operations Speaks' petition is here.



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