JohnKJR's Blog

The staggering arrogance Democrats have displayed by spending hundreds of $billions we can't afford on counterproductive pork during a recession goes beyond showering cash on abortion mills. They are also using the loot to ensure they stay in power by injecting massive amounts of cash into ACORN, the radical left activist group best known for conducting systematic voter fraud on behalf of Dems across the country.

From the office of House Minority Leader John Boehner:

The House Democrats' trillion dollar spending bill, approved on January 21 by the Appropriations Committee and headed to the House floor next week for a vote, could open billions of taxpayer dollars to left-wing groups like the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). ACORN has been accused of perpetrating voter registration fraud numerous times in the last several elections; is reportedly under federal investigation; and played a key role in the irresponsible schemes that caused a financial meltdown that has cost American taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars since last fall.

A more pernicious organization than ACORN would be difficult to imagine. As noted above, it helped cause the financial meltdown by using the deranged Community Reinvestment Act to extort banks into making bad loans to privileged minority groups — with the assistance of slimy lawyers like Barack Obama. The chances of any money flushed down ACORN improving our economy are obviously nil.

Only with the media completely in the tank for the Moonbat Messiah could Dems even temporarily get away with passing off their gargantuan handouts as "stimulus."

The good news is, we won't have to pay for all of it — because the scale of Democrat waste and corruption is so vast, we don't have enough money. The next generation will pay, and the one after that. The Anointed One has promised "trillion-dollar deficits for years to come."

Hat tip: Michelle Malkin. On tips from J and V the K. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

In the shiny happy unintelligent land of Hopenchange, we have no need for these antiquated measures of “security:” Bush’s ‘War’ On Terror Comes to a Sudden End.

Key components of the secret structure developed under Bush are being swept away: The military’s Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, facility, where the rights of habeas corpus and due process had been denied detainees, will close, and the CIA is now prohibited from maintaining its own overseas prisons. And in a broad swipe at the Bush administration’s lawyers, Obama nullified every legal order and opinion on interrogations issued by any lawyer in the executive branch after Sept. 11, 2001.

According to some estimates, at least 10 percent of the Al Qaeda terrorists released from Guantanamo Bay immediately return to the jihad, and here’s the latest example: Report: Ex-Gitmo detainee joins al-Qaida in Yemen.

CAIRO, Egypt – A Saudi man released from Guantanamo after spending nearly six years inside the U.S. prison camp is now the No. 2 of Yemen’s al-Qaida branch, according to a purported Internet statement from the terror network.

The announcement, made this week on a Web site commonly used by militants, came as President Barack Obama ordered the detention facility closed within a year. Many of the remaining detainees are from Yemen, which has long posed a vexing terrorism problem for the U.S.

The terror group’s Yemen branch — known as “al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula” — said the man, identified as Said Ali al-Shihri, returned to his home in Saudi Arabia after his release from Guantanamo about a year ago and from there went to Yemen, which is Osama bin Laden’s ancestral home.

Say thank you to President Bush for keeping the United States safe, at Mission 1 Accomplished.

The folks who built the site are planning to present the comments and logs to George W. Bush’s Presidential Library on September 11, 2011.

Al Arabiya reporter Hannan al-Masri is live on the air in Gaza when she is told that Hamas has just fired rockets from inside the Al Arabiya studio building, news which apparently strikes her as quite humorous.

(Turn on closed captions for English subtitles.)

 

 

I urge everyone who has an American Flag to fly The Flag upside down during this Innauguration and for the next four years to show the distress this once great nation is currently in with a Non American Marxist holding the office of President.

Hamas Inauguration   By Robert Spencer
FrontPageMagazine.com | Monday, January 19, 2009

 

Barack Obama isn’t wasting any time making an impression: he has selected the leader of a group that has been named an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case to present a prayer during his inauguration festivities. Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), will offer a prayer at the National Cathedral Tuesday.

 

Superficially, Obama’s choice is understandable: Ingrid Mattson is a Canadian convert to Islam who has carefully cultivated the image of a moderate spokesperson. Yet her organization’s record is not entirely clean. Federal prosecutors last summer rejected claims that ISNA was unfairly named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terror funding case. And ISNA has even admitted ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, complaining only that the government’s evidence for those ties came from old documents, but offering no proof that the organization had reversed course. In a memorandum on the Muslim Brotherhood’s strategy in the United States, a Muslim Brotherhood operative named ISNA as an allied organization in what it called “a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

What’s more, in a CNN chat room on October 18, 2001, Mattson offered a subtle defense of Osama bin Laden. She avowed that “only a small number of Muslims throughout the world would support Osama bin Laden’s tactics.” (Emphasis added.) Tactics alone? Is that the only problem with Osama? Does she, then, hold to his goals? Mattson even suggested that “a larger number” of Muslims share bin Laden’s grievances, and that he was popular because the leaders of Islamic countries had failed their people: Muslims, she said, “turned to Osama bin Laden as a spokesperson…because they feel that no one else, including their own leaders, has spoken for them.” This disquietingly echoes the jihadist critique of secular regimes in Muslim countries such as Egypt and Pakistan: jihadists label such regimes illegitimate and apostate because they do not implement Islamic law in its fullness.

In 2002 she even asserted that in countries that were not functioning democracies, “‘extremism’ might seem to be the only rational choice, because extreme actions are the only actions that seem to have an effect.” This again gives the impression that bin Laden’s goals were laudable, and that he was driven by desperation to illegitimate actions in pursuit of a legitimate goal.

Mattson explained during the CNN chat that “Islam allows force to be used by legitimate authorities, to protect people, and to protect Muslim states, just as all nation states in the world permit themselves to use force to protect their security and interests. Again, the problem of individual Muslims taking up arms, becoming vigilantes, in a way, is related to their frustration with the lack of leadership on the part of their own government.” This implies that if the governments of Muslim countries had been waging jihad to protect Muslim states, Osama bin Laden wouldn’t have had to do so. Here again she implies that bin Laden’s goals are sound, only his means are questionable.

Mattson again reinforced the impression that she endorsed al-Qaeda’s goals, if not its means, when she referred (also in the CNN chat) to the “overthrowing of the caliphate” in the 1920s as “a plan of European powers for many years,” and claimed that “this deprived the Muslim world of a stable and centralized authority, and much of the chaos that we’re living in today is the result of that.” This does appear to be an endorsement of the jihadist goal of reestablishing the caliphate and uniting Muslims under its authority in a supranational state which could then, according to Islamic law, legitimately wage offensive jihad warfare against non-Muslim states.

Mattson also excused the virulent and violent Wahhabi movement in Islam, terming it “a reform movement that began 200 years ago to rid Islamic societies of cultural practices and rigid interpretation that had acquired over the centuries.” Mattson thus suggests that Wahhabism was a legitimate reform within Islam, asserting that “it really was analogous to the European Protestant Reformation” and noting that “the Saudi scholars who are Wahhabi have denounced terrorism and denounced in particular the acts of September 11” – but never mentioning the abundant evidence that high-placed Saudis have continued to support and finance global jihad terrorism.

Yet while curiously silent about the excesses and violence of Wahhabism, Mattson blamed the decline of the Islamic world on the West: “Well, the decline began with the colonization of the Muslim world by European powers. One of the first things the colonialists did was to dismantle the institutions of what we could call civil society. The Muslim world has until now not recovered from that dismemberment of its society.”

In reality, the colonial period did not begin until the 18th and 19th centuries, and would not have been able to begin at all had the Islamic world not already been in a period of steep cultural and military decline. Historian Philip K. Hitti describes the decline of Islamic thought as beginning far earlier than the era of European colonialism, saying that “the whole Arab world had by the beginning of the thirteenth century lost the intellectual hegemony it had maintained since the eighth.”

Mattson has also tried to set Jews and Christians against once another. Speaking at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in March 2007, Mattson said: “Right-wing Christians are very risky allies for American Jews, because they [the Christians] are really anti-Semitic. They do not like Jews.” Yet Mattson would be hard-pressed to produce any anti-Semitic statement from Christians who support Israel – any statement, in other words, comparable to an article posted at IslamOnline, “Jews as Depicted In the Qur’an,” which concludes:

After this clear explanation, we would like to note that these are but some of the most famous traits of the Jews as described in the Qur’an. They have revolted against the Divine ordinances, distorted what has been revealed to them and invented new teachings which, they claimed, were much more better than what has been recorded in the Torah. It was for these traits that they found no warm reception in all countries where they tried to reside. Rather, they would either be driven out or live in isolation. It was Almighty Allah who placed on them His Wrath and made them den of humiliation due to their transgression. Almighty Allah told us that He’d send to them people who’d pour on them rain of severe punishment that would last till the Day of Resurrection. All this gives us glad tidings of the coming victory of Muslims over them once Muslims stick to strong faith and belief in Allah and adopt the modern means of technology.

What is Mattson doing to combat these attitudes within the Islamic community? She never addresses them.

If Ingrid Mattson truly intends to be a voice for reform and moderation within the Islamic community in North America, and to reassure those who are justifiably alarmed by Obama’s invitation to her, she should explain her troublesome statements – especially those that apparently portray Osama bin Laden in a favorable light. She should also explain ISNA’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, and confront honestly the elements of Islamic teaching that jihadists use to justify violence and make recruits among peaceful Muslims. Unless and until she does these things and others that would conclusively demonstrate her moderation, non-Muslims are justified in being appalled at Obama’s choice.

---

Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of seven books, eight monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including the New York Times Bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His new book is Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs.

 

More pro-Hamas videos are appearing on YouTube; this one was posted by VoiceOfJihaD and it shows very clearly how Hamas uses children as human shields. At about 1:20, the terrorists appear to be shooting at a helicopter overhead—and they send children into the streets, in the open, to point out where the helicopter is, while they stay hidden under trees and next to walls.

They do this because they know the IAF tries not to launch airstrikes against children. But they also know that if any of them are killed, their useful little spotters can easily be turned into propaganda tools with the willing assistance of Western media.

They don’t waste any part of the child.

 

 

Video: Hamas In Their Own Voices

Video | Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 3:21:32 pm PST

Here’s a new presentation from MEMRI TV: Hamas in Their Own Voices.

In case anyone had any doubt what Hamas wants and stands for.

 

 

 

Media | Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 8:05:22 pm PST

Leading Hamas terrorist Mousa Abu Marzook, deported from the United States in 1997, gets back into the US via a column in the Los Angeles Times: Hamas speaks.

Vile. Evil. Disgusting. Foul. Take your pick. There is something deeply wrong with our mainstream media.

Contact the Los Angeles Times and tell them what you think about giving a voice to genocidal mass murderers.

And then we have this also:

Hamas Steals Humanitarian Supplies, Then Sells Them for Profit

Middle East | Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 5:45:39 pm PST

Report: Hamas stealing aid supplies to sell to residents.

A number of reports from the Strip paint a picture of very difficult humanitarian conditions, not least because of Hamas itself. The suspicion is that the group’s operatives have seized control of any supplies passing through the crossings – including those sent by Israel and international organizations.

Reports say Hamas takes a cut out of all aid that arrives, including flour and medicine. Supplies intended to be distributed without gain among the population are seized by the group and sold to the residents, at a profit to the Hamas government.

One such incident was recorded Monday, when a convoy of trucks carrying supplies through the Kerem Shalom crossing was opened fire upon and seized by Hamas gunmen. Similar incidents occurred with trucks carrying fuel.

We should not forget that every television image and every news photograph coming out of Gaza right now is filtered through Hamas. The photographers filing pictures for Reuters, Associated Press, and Agence France Presse are all Palestinians, and all propagandists for Hamas—or they wouldn’t be allowed to take pictures in Gaza.

With that in mind, here’s yet another example of news photographs staged for propaganda purposes by terrorists and their allies: CAMERA Snapshots: Green Helmet’s Successor?

UPDATE at 1/5/09 11:06:16 am:

Israellycool has another example: the same injured child being paraded around by two different men.

Here are the two images at Daylife.com:

A Palestinian father carries his wounded baby daughter into a hospital in Gaza City...

A Palestinian carries a child into the Shifa hospital in Gaza City...

Hamas brags about using innocents as human shields:

Hamas - Fathi Hamad
by bivouac-id

"For the Palestinian people, death has become an industry

In which excel the women and all the people of this land:

The older people excel, the jihadists excel

And the children excel

Consequently, [the Palestinians] created a human shield of women, children

Older people and jihadists

Against the Zionist bombing machine

That is telling the Zionist enemy

We want death just as much as you desire life."

"We love death as much as you love life" is an ancient Islamic boast.

And a deeply evil one.

It makes you wonder how exactly Islamists distinguish themselves in their own minds from followers of the devil himself.

If someone deliberately set out to fill the world with the purest evil he could find, wouldn't the effort prominently feature minions who take delight in bringing about the deaths of innocent men, women and children -- including their own?  Wouldn't some of the proudest moments of these soldiers of hell include incidents like "Beslan" and "9/11" and "Mumbai" and "Nicholas Berg" and "heads found in fruit boxes all over Baghdad" and "suicide bomb detonated in pizza parlor" and "Lockerbie," just to name a few of the many?

If Islamists indeed love death as much as humans with common decency love life, I'm thinking we should be able to find some common ground.

All those who desire death can proceed directly to their premature, violent self-destruction.  The rest of us can go with the "life" thing, crazy as that seems.

What Islamists need, of course, is to find redemption. They need a religion of love, not hate. They need a religion of joy and true peace. They literally have no idea of what they are missing.

But where do you even begin, with a culture that firmly believes that a day spent slaughtering innocents is a good day's work?

Cross-posted at GINA COBB

Victimology - Or How The Left Uses "Science" For Its Ideological Agenda

Barack Obama promises that science will no longer be "twisted" to fit an ideology. But of course using "science" to advance their political agenda has been a tool of the left for years. A perfect example can be found with the issue of obesity. Andrew Ferguson provides the anatomy of how a personal failing becomes a disease and those who don't have the self-discipline to resist over-eating become "victims" - all with the aid of "science".

First comes the misappropriation of the language of epidemiology. The terms are liberated from their scientific meaning and then attached to a widely shared activity or condition. The condition, in this case obesity, is renamed a "disease," suggesting that some kind of contagion is making the rounds. Then the disease inflates into an "epidemic," suggesting an urgency that only the foolhardy would ignore. "We find ourselves," says Paterson, "in the midst of a new public health epidemic, childhood obesity." Any libertarian qualms are quickly overridden, since not even the most hollow-eyed anarcho-capitalist would deny that government is obliged to guard against runaway disease.

To intensify the urgency, Paterson deploys neutral statistics from sources that are already on his side. The statistics are always improbably exact. Unnamed public health researchers at Harvard have discovered that obesity is "associated" with 112,000 deaths in the United States every year; not 113,000, and not 111,000. Each can of soda pop "increases the risk" of making a child fat by 60 percent. Not 59 percent. Not 61 percent. An increase of $1.25 in tobacco taxes saves more than 37,000 lives and $5 billion in health care costs. And Paterson's 18 percent tax on sugary soft drinks will reduce consumption by 5 percent. Not four.

From here the rest of the argument tumbles like dominoes, clack clack clack. Fat people are not merely drawn to eating unhealthy food; they are "addicted." As addicts, they are rendered helpless by their addiction. Helpless, they deserve the status of victims. Like all victims, they must be victimized by something. By unhealthy food? No: Not food merely, for food and commercial marketing combine to create the TFE--the "Toxic Food Environment." The TFE is everywhere in today's America; it is today's America. It emanates from the seductive advertising of food, from the media's quasi-pornographic obsession with food, from the scandalously low price of food, from the ubiquitous sale of food in such unlikely places as gas-station minimarts. (In simpler times, Americans got gas when they ate food; now they eat food when they get gas.) Created by cynical corporations, the TFE is the ghastly miasma in which we live and move and have our being, swelling with every Frito.

Thus a private failing becomes a public menace.

 

If you don't believe that's what is happening, consider this statement by NY's governor, David Patterson:

"What smoking was to my parents' generation," Paterson says, "obesity is to my children's generation."

And we all know, given the tobacco outcome, that the target won't be the "victims". You see, they're excused:

"Weight bias exists," they explained, because weightist bigots believe that "the only reason people fail to lose weight is because of [they're not teaching grammar at Yale these days] poor self-discipline or a lack of willpower." This wrongheaded notion "blames the victim rather than addressing environmental conditions that cause obesity."

You pretty much know how the rest of this will go now. Patterson, of course, is proposing a "fat tax" on sugared soft drinks, all bolstered by the "science" above.

[Crossposted at QandO]

A classic picture of numb-skulled hatred from the pro-Palestinian demonstration in Manhattan yesterday. (Larger image here.) I personally wish the IDF well in all of it's efforts against Hamas. A true terrorist organization duly elected by the Peace-Loving Palestinian Squatters.

Yesterday on Christmas people seemed to really enjoy reading about the differences of Conservatives and Liberals. So today; I thought it might be a good idea to point out 10 more issues about which conservatives are right and liberals are wrong.

10) Conservatives believe that the United Nations is a corrupt, anti-American, anti-Semitic talking shop that is largely hostile to American interests and is too incompetent to be much of use in areas where it's not. Liberals are internationalists who still have confidence in the UN. Moreover, they don't seem to be overly concerned about signing our country on to international schemes that are slanted against us, or about the fact that nations that are largely hostile to our interests like China, France, and Russia have a veto over any significant action that the UN can take.

9) Conservatives believe that marriage is one of the most crucial building blocks of a healthy society, and that anything that weakens the institution has the potential to do enormous harm to our country over the long haul. That's why we believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman. Liberals support gay marriage, and appear completely unconcerned about the long-term damage that glibly toying with something as important as marriage could do to our country.

8) Conservatives believe that companies should be taxed and regulated, but that the government has to be very cautious about adding new burdens on business. Businesses provide jobs, health care for many Americans, and enormous amounts of tax revenue, all of which could be jeopardized if we go overboard with taxes and regulations, thereby killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. Liberals, on the other hand, being socialists at heart, have seldom seen a tax, new regulation, or expense that they would hesitate to impose on businesses, despite the potential for damaging our economy.

7) Conservatives have kept an open mind about global warming, but we have seen little hard proof that mankind is responsible for the small, roughly 1 degree global temperature increase over the last century. Saying that it is "scientific consensus" that mankind is causing global warming means little when more than 17,100 American scientists disagree. Liberals want to impose massive regulatory schemes that would increase taxes, cost millions of jobs, and cause fuel prices to skyrocket even though most environmentalists acknowledge that Kyoto and the carbon credit trading schemes that have been put forth wouldn't make a huge dent in the amount of greenhouse gasses produced by mankind.

6) Conservatives believe that encouraging poor people to be dependent on the government is counterproductive. Instead, we believe that by keeping taxes low, the economy strong, and by supporting churches and charities, we can create an environment that allows the poor to help themselves. Liberals believe in keeping poor people as dependent on the government as possible because people who are reliant on the government for their sustenance tend to vote for the political party that will give them the biggest handout.

5) Conservatives may not be happy with how the war in Iraq has gone so far, but we believe that pulling out before the Iraqi government can defend itself from attack would lead to a nightmare scenario that has the potential to produce millions of dead Iraqis, a massive spike in worldwide oil costs, and an increase in terrorism after Al-Qaeda declares victory over the United States. Liberals understand the consequences for pulling out of Iraq too quickly just as well as conservatives, but they would prefer to see America lose the war in Iraq, despite the horrible consequences, because they believe it would benefit them politically.

4) Conservatives believe that the more distant the government gets from the constituents it serves, the worse it performs. That's why, if it's absolutely necessary that government become involved in an issue, it's usually better for state and local governments to become involved instead of the Federal Government.

3) Conservatives believe in keeping taxes low because when taxes get high, they stifle economic growth and expansion; because it's hard to justify giving the government more money when it wastes so much now, and because people should get to keep as much of their hard earned money as possible. Liberals prefer high taxes because it gives them more money that they can fritter away on big government programs and social engineering projects.

2) Conservatives believe that the market can better allocate resources than the government and that usually, when you see problems with the market -- for example gas shortages or the exploding cost of health care -- government interference with the workings of the market is at the root of it. Liberals have never seen a part of the economy that they wouldn't prefer to socialize and put under government control, despite the fact that anything run by the government tends to be far slower, more inefficient, and more expensive than anything run by private industry.

1) Conservatives believe that America has been and continues to be the greatest force for good in the world today. As a nation, we do more to promote freedom, help those who need it, and stand up for what's right than any other dozen nations combined. Liberals, on the other hand, always find a way to blame America first. Nobody, no enemy past, present, or future, will ever top American liberals when it comes to generating anti-American propaganda.