In February, capitalizing (pardon the expression) on the union instigated Wisconsin “crisis,” Van Jones announced his American Dream movement. Just a few short months later, it was announced that he would join the Pachamama Alliance in the fight for rights for Mother Earth. Although seemingly unrelated, it all appears to be part of the same South American dream of a Marxist utopia.
In keeping with the dream, we recently heard from Bolivia. As a member nation of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA), leading the way with Ecuador, Ambassador Pablo Solón recently declared the following in a speech to the United Nations, on the Occasion of the General Assembly Interactive Dialogue on Harmony with Nature:
Is there no contradiction in recognizing only the rights of the human part of this system while all the rest of the system is reduced to a source of resources and raw materials – in other words, a business opportunity?
It is incredible that it is easier to imagine the destruction of nature than to dream about overthrowing capitalism.
The propaganda, anti-Israeli and anti-American filth, coming out of Gaza and the West Bank daily, hourly, year after year, is beyond belief both in quantity but also in quality.
For example, the very gifted Palestinian cartoonist, Omayya Joha, the widow of one Hamas bomb engineer and of another Hamas operative, has remained continually obsessed with the Palestinian “right of return.” The symbol for this obsession is a key (to the house left behind). Five generations later, the descendants of those whose grandparents and great-grandparents fled to Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, or Syria, because the Arab League boasted that five great Arab armies were massed against the infidel Jewish state and would shortly vanquish it. However, thereafter, no Arab state (with the exception of Jordan, which has since revoked the citizenship of many “Palestinians”) was ever willing to allow “Palestinians,” i.e. Arabs who fled the land that Israel conquered in a war of self-defense, to become citizens in their Arab, Muslim countries.
But how do I suddenly know all this? read more…
Trying to capitalize on the bump in the polls he received from the successful Bin Laden Navy Seal commando operation, President Obama went to the border in El Paso Texas yesterday and blasted Republicans for blocking what amounts to amnesty for illegal aliens.
It’s bad enough that Obama chose to politicize a sensitive issue in order to work up his Latino base. He also lied about his record on border security, maintaining that his administration had “gone above and beyond” what Republicans had demanded to protect the border.
Obama ridiculed those who say that he fallen far short of what is needed:
Maybe they’ll need a moat. Maybe they’ll want alligators in the moat. read more…
In Cairo on Saturday, May 7 Muslim protesters attacked two Coptic Christian churches. The rioters set one of the churches on fire. Twelve have been killed and over 200 injured in the violence.
Simon Caldwell of the Catholic News Service (CNS) reported on May 10 that:
Bishop Antonios Aziz Mina of Giza said Egypt would descend into anarchy if such outbreaks of violence were allowed to go unpunished.”The police need to say clearly to those who have done this: ‘You cannot do this. It is not allowed,’” he said in a May 9 telephone interview with the British branch of Aid to the Church in Need, a Catholic charity helping persecuted Christians. ”Without action from the police and the army, it will be chaos, complete anarchy,” the bishop said. ”The army will not stand up against the people who do this sort of thing,” he said. “They want to stay neutral. The police appear, but very slowly. They are frightened. They have not been strong enough.”
One did not have to be clairvoyant to know that 2011 was not going to be a good year to be a Coptic Christian in Egypt. On January 1, 2011 23 Copts were murdered in a church bombing in Alexandria. Over 90 were injured. The U.S. mainstream media was too willing to try and downplay the Islamic terrorism and failed to report it as a harbinger of anti-Christian violence yet to come. So far in May, Muslim rioters have set two Cairo churches on fire. Twelve have been killed and over 200 injured in the violence.
This report appeared originally at American Power. See, “Noam Chomsky Attacks Israel’s ‘Expansion Over Security’ at UCLA Lecture on ‘Palestine in Crisis’.”
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I experimented with video blogging, and this clip captures more of Chomsky’s comments on U.S. policy than his remarks on Israeli expansionism. Here he argues that from Washington’s perspective democracy and freedom in the Middle East are antithetical to American interests. The U.S. and Israel allegedly fear the Arab Spring because the revolutions threaten American hegemony in the region. Chomsky spouts a lot of disinformation, which is his trademark. He says at 40 seconds that “about 90 percent of Egyptians view the United States as the main enemy” and that “about 80 percent in the region wanted to be sure Iran had nuclear weapons”:
Actually, public opinion in Egypt is much more complicated than that, and while there’s obviously variation across individual polls and over time, there’s no support for Chomky’s claim of “80 percent” across the region supporting Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. In fact, according to a Pew Global Attitudes survey in April 2010, “a majority of respondents in Turkey, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon as well as Israel said the spread of nuclear weapons was a major threat” (the number was 41 percent in Egypt).
But these are only quick examples of the kind of propaganda one hears at a Noam Chomsky lecture. Indeed, what’s even more fascinating than hearing Chomsky’s America-bashing is observing the rock star status he’s afforded by the huge crowd of collegiate wannabe bohemians, diehard pro-terror communists, and the campus Islamist jihadis who thronged the event. I’ll post pictures later. Chomsky was swarmed by extremist acolytes upon entering the lecture hall. Upon speaking, it was as if his attacks on “American imperialism” and “corporate dominance” were like throwing bags of candy to children. I arrived at UCLA at 5:00pm, and the event was scheduled from 6:00 to 8:00pm. There was a long line out in front of the lecture hall, and while I was dressed casual with my baggy shorts and Famous Stars and Straps shirt and cap, I nevertheless hid the cover of Peter Collier and David Horowitz’s, Anti Chomsky Reader with my copy Chomsky and Ilan Pappé’s Gaza in Crisis. No need to get these thugs riled. That said, I haven’t shaved in weeks, and the beard’s getting a little scruffy, frankly, and thus I imagine that grizzled look went over well among the hordes. Honestly, some Muslim women simply do not smell good, and that’s to say nothing of the countercultural radicals who look like they just awoke from a night’s sleep out on the sidewalks of Westwood. Hey, I guess it’s a good thing that the Muslim dude I saw in building of the Samueli School of Engineering, where I stopped off to take a leak before heading back out to the parking garage, was performing his ablutions right there at the bathroom sink!
In any case, listening to Chomsky drone on lethargically, I was reminded of this passage from David Horowitz’s essay at the reader, “Noam Chomsky’s Anti-American Obsession”:
It would be easy to demonstrate how on every page of every book and in every statement that Chomsky has written the facts are twisted, the political context is distorted (and often inverted) and the historical record is systematically traduced. Every piece of evidence and every analysis is subordinated to the overweening purpose of Chomsky’s lifework, which is to justify an idée fixe — his pathological hatred of his own country.
The point was evident at the moment Chomsky commenced. The talk was on “Palestine and Israel in Crisis,” but Chomsky was emphatic in stressing the everything Israel does “is at the direction of the United States.” That claim sets the tone, of course, for Chomsky’s attacks on America’s imperial ambitions in the region. But despite the monotonous delivery, Chomsky was sharp intellectually and stayed on point in discussing the Middle East “crisis.” And note that nothing, not a single fact surrounding the cycles of violence and bloodshed in the region, is the fault of the Palestinians. He made a big point, a number of times, to stress that the U.S. and Israel face a “crisis of legitimation” in world opinion. He argued, by that token, that this was in fact an increasing “crisis of delegitimation” that’s bringing about a “tsunami” of condemnation against the United States, which Chomsky eagerly claimed to be a declining power, but which will nevertheless will remain influential of global affairs for some time to come. (Which begs the question of course of whether or not the U.S. really is the “hegemon” that’s the basis for Chomsky’s decades-long excoriation of his own country.)
When reading through issue #1 of Bosch Fawstin’s long-awaited graphic novel The Infidel I try and take myself back to when I first encountered the artist’s work.
Bosch and I first connected in February of 2009. He got in touch with me to give me a pat on the back for a freelance article I’d written for FrontPage about comic book heroes called “Superhero Conservatism.” He told me about his own anti-Jihad superhero he’d created, a tough character named Pig Man. A few months later I sold another article to FrontPage, an interview with Bosch about his life, art, and philosophy. read more…
Barack Obama’s entire presidency has been characterized by bumbling and amateurishness. This is an inexperienced President who doesn’t know how to govern and either doesn’t have advisers capable of explaining how things work to him or he doesn’t listen to those advisers.
This has been particularly noticeable in foreign affairs where his bowing and bungling have created issues in Britain, Russia, Israel, Poland, and Honduras among other places.
The place where Obama’s inexperience and arrogance has the potential to create the most dangerous problem, however, is in Pakistan. read more…
When I first described the City University of New York as the Communist University of New York, I had no idea how right I was.
It seems that Dr. Michael Meeropol, the son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, is one of two professors at John Jay College who nominated Tony Kushner for this honorary degree. Meeropol is a professor of economics.
Cross-posted from Yid with Lid.
Every day there are more stories in the media and Arab protests about Israel trying to “Judaicise” the area around what they call the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. I have even read with curiosity how European Foreign Ministers and press reporters with Christian backgrounds describe the site as “what the Jewish people SAY was the location of the Holy Temples.” When those folks go to church on Sunday do they argue with their Priests and Ministers to change the gospels because the man that they believe was the Son of God went to that Temple Mount 3x a year. read more…
From Accuracy in Media‘s Don Irvine:
There was more to the story of the passenger who disturbed an American Airlines flight on Sunday than was reported by most of the media.
While these and most other media reports did state that Almurisi had a Yemeni passport and California identification card, they somehow managed to miss reporting on what he said on the plane that startled passengers as well. read more…
Noam Chomsky doesn’t like corporations, but the only one He doesn’t seem interested in exposing is al Qaeda. Since its inception, al Qaeda and its recently expired figurehead, Osama bin Laden, have essentially operated as a multinational importer-exporter of murder, fear, hatred, nihilism, and racism. They’ve had a hand in some of the most significant acts of degradation since the end of the Cold War, and have done so via a byzantine financial network of front companies, false charities, and squandered inheritance (see, for instance, the fine research of Rohan Gunaratna on this). But to read Chomsky these days, one is forced to overlook all this capitalist malfeasance and conclude the following:
1. There was little or no evidence that Osama bin Laden was involved in 9/11 when we first invaded Afghanistan; moreover, there’s still little or no evidence.
2. Morally, George W. Bush is worse than Osama bin Laden (or, presumably, whoever was actually responsible for 9/11).
3. Since we killed Osama bin Laden, we must admit that it would be OK for someone to kill Bush or President Obama.
4. The United States is racist and imperialist.
These are the main points of Chomsky’s Official Reaction to the recent raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, which took out bin Laden. It wasn’t enough for Chomsky to criticize the U.S. for not giving him a “fair trial.” No, to lodge that complaint only would be to consent to the moral parameters of the argument as put forward by Washington—that bin Laden was responsible for 9/11 and deserved some form of retribution. The extremist impulse to destroy and rebuild another world is evident in the way Chomsky wants the entire perspective redefined. Whereas before He might have been content to criticize bin Laden as the product of American foreign policy, now He apparently feels even doing that might be an indulgence of the imperialist narrative. read more…
From Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, by Matthew Vadum (WND Books):
For ACORN, anything goes, from rude protests to crude intimidation and violence. The bigger, the louder, the more obnoxious, the more destructive, the better. ACORN founder Wade Rathke summed up ACORN’s approach to doing business in a single sentence: “One can almost taste the adrenaline when people take a crowbar to a door and pop it open to begin squatting.” ACORN leadership doesn’t care if people get hurt or property is damaged: as long as the action advances the cause, it’s fair game. read more…
