Tag Archives: War of Ideas

How conservatives lose elections

It would seem that in recent years conservative candidates in both Israel and the U.S. have forgotten how to win an election.
To win an election, a political party must identify and satisfy its political base. It must also identify and attract potential swing voters. To accomplish the latter task, a party has to identify the strengths and weaknesses of their opponents and co-opt their strengths while highlighting their weaknesses.
One of the most difficult challenges of running a campaign is figuring out how to attract undecided voters without alienating or demoralizing a party’s base. On the face of it, doing so should be easier for conservatives than for liberals in the U.S. and Israel because a majority of voters in both countries define themselves as right-leaning.
As Karl Rove noted recently in The Wall Street Journal, in spite of the Democrats election victory, the U.S. remains a center-right country. According to pre-election and post-election surveys of American voters last month, 34% consider themselves conservatives, 45% say they are moderate, and only 21% call themselves liberal.
In Israel, consistent polling shows that more than 60% of Israelis reject making territorial concessions on Jerusalem and the Golan Heights and do not believe it is possible to reach a credible peace accord with the Palestinians. Moreover, the vast majority of Israeli Jews are socially conservative; 80% of Israelis, for example, classify themselves as religiously observant or traditional.
These numbers go a long way in explaining why liberal candidates in both the U.S. and Israel seek to portray themselves as conservative hawks during electoral campaigns. In the U.S., Democratic presidential candidates from Jimmy Carter to Barack Obama have run as moderates with conservative tendencies. In Israel, leftist politicians from Yitzhak Rabin to Shimon Peres to Ehud Barak to Tzipi Livni, have all portrayed themselves as security hawks ahead of elections.
As candidates, these politicians (and their supporters) understood that to win, it was necessary for them to go to the right – where the voters are. Once elected, of course, they have governed as liberals — that is, until they began considering their reelection prospects.
While it makes sense for left-leaning liberals to move to the right in elections, it makes little sense for their opponents to move to the left. After all, the voters are on the right. Yet for some reason, moving to where the voters aren’t is becoming common practice in both the U.S. and Israel.
As we saw in the U.S. presidential election and in the current Israeli Knesset campaign, by moving to the left, right-leaning candidates demoralize their base. And far from convincing swing voters to support them, they make swing voters feel comfortable supporting their opponents.
During the presidential campaign, Republican nominee Senator John McCain believed that to win, he needed to convince voters he was the "anti-Republican" Republican. McCain believed President Bush’s low approval ratings meant the public had rejected the Republican Party.
But McCain’s analysis was wrong. Americans had rejected Bush and his policies, not his party as a whole. Had McCain campaigned as the anti-Bush candidate by attacking Bush’s passivity on issues like illegal immigration and the Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs, and had he attacked Bush’s big government policies, he would have successfully distanced himself from an unpopular president and rallied his base.
Moreover, he would have been able to attack Obama for pushing immigration, foreign policy and economic policies identical to or even more extreme than Bush’s failed policies.

By incorrectly identifying the object of both Republican dissatisfaction and swing-voter concerns, McCain demoralized his base and convinced undecided voters it was okay to support Obama. Indeed, it was McCain’s anti-Republican campaign more than Obama’s change campaign that brought a majority of voters to Obama. As polling data indicates, Obama did not move many Republican voters to his side.

What enabled Obama to win the election was not a massive voter shift from right to left. Rather, Obama owes his victory in large part to the fact that McCain’s anti-Republican campaign convinced a lot of Republicans that they had no one to vote for and so 4.1 million Republican voters stayed home on Election Day.

As Rove reported, Obama’s crucial victory in Ohio came despite the fact that he won 32,000 fewer votes in the state than John Kerry did in 2004. It wasn’t that Obama was loved. He won because McCain’s base hated McCain. In Ohio, McCain’s anti-Republican campaign caused him to win 360,000 fewer votes in the state than Bush won in 2004.

In Israel, Likud under Benjamin Netanyahu today has the advantage of running against Kadima, whose strategic and diplomatic programs have been largely rejected by voters. On the other hand, Netanyahu is running against Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni who is quite reasonably playing down her radical and failed policies and basing her campaign on her undeserved reputation for competence and her dubious public persona as a clean politician.
To win, Netanyahu and Likud should be doing two things. They should be continuously pointing out Kadima’s record of failure in office and they should be attacking Livni. They should be emphasizing Livni’s personal failures in office and focus the public’s attention on the fact that she owes her political rise to her association with corrupt politicians like Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert.
Instead, Netanyahu is pointing his guns at his own party. For three precious weeks, he staged an ugly campaign against his intra-Likud adversary Moshe Feiglin. And in so doing, he angered a significant portion of his political base.
Then too, rather than emphasizing the policy distictions between likud and Kadima, Netanyahu has sought to blur those distinctions by promising to form a unity coalition with Kadima after the elections and pledging to continue the government’s negotiations with the Fatah terror movement toward an Israeli withdrawal from Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem. As well, Netanyahu has opted not to highlight his own oft-stated refusal to withdraw from any part of Jerusalem or the Golan Heights.
As to political integrity, rather than highlight Livni’s ties to crooked pols, Netanyahu has tried to "out-integrity" her by bringing a political enemy, former justice minister and dovish Kadima supporter Dan Meridor, back into Likud.
Far from harming Livni’s prospects, Netanyahu’s actions have increased the public’s appreciation for her supposed attributes and so made fence sitters feel comfortable supporting Kadima.
On the other hand, his actions have angered Likud’s core supporters. Many are now willing to consider other options for voting. Some are moving to other rightist parties. Some are moving to Kadima. And some are declaring their intention not to vote. This is the reason that over the past two weeks, Likud has lost its 10-15 seat lead in the polls and is currently in a dead heat with Kadima.
Both McCain’s failed campaign for the presidency and Netanyahu’s current campaign in Israel may be partly attributable to the profound leftist bias of the media in both countries. It is possible that due to the media’s overwhelming support for left-leaning candidates, right-leaning candidates have drawn the incorrect conclusion that their societies and their potential voters lean left.
Whatever has caused the state of affairs in which conservative candidates feel compelled to turn to their political opponents for support that will never come rather than rely on their voters who comprise the majority of their electorates, it can only be hoped that both in Israel today and the U.S. in the future, conservative politicians will reverse course.
It does no one any good when voters elect politicians who do not share their views because politicians who do share their views insult and anger them.
Originally published in The Jewish Press.

Where does the fight go from here?

As President-elect Barack Obama and his administration begin the transition process from the Bush administration, anti-Islamists cannot help but be concerned. Those of us dedicated to stimulating and facilitating long overdue reform within the Muslim consciousness against the growing threat of political Islam cannot help but feel more adrift now than ever before with little legitimate "hope for change" in our policy against Islamists then we have ever had.

The long and arduous two year campaign negligently spent little to no time laying out what the policy of the Obama administration would be toward Islamists, both foreign and domestic. While the Bush administration understood the basic need to promote liberty as an alternative to oppression in Muslim lands, they were unable to translate that into an effective policy with a critical engagement of Islamists. They did not seize the opportunities they had to counter political Islam by fostering grassroots movements for freedom against Islamists. If the Obama campaign is any sign of what is in store, we seem to be headed even further back into a retreat from any perceptible contest of ideas against the ideology of Islamism.

The Obama Campaign and Islamists

While the dominance of economic issues during the final months of the campaign can certainly be understood, one major attack by radical Islamists is all that would be necessary to precipitate what could ultimately be a most devastating and crippling blow to our economy. We cannot afford to overlook this possibility. To do so leaves little room for comfort in the hearts of concerned anti-Islamists today.

In fact, looking at the Obama campaign’s inclination to appoint individuals like Mazen Asbahi to "Muslim outreach" may portend a naïve facilitative role with regards to Islamists and the ideology of Islamism. Looking at the converse, in what appears to be significant domestic and foreign support for President-elect Obama by Islamists, also portends an upcoming weaker stance – if not outright appeasement – from Washington against the ideology of Islamists. In fact, the messages from the Obama campaign (or lack thereof) concerning political Islam, were interpreted favorably by American Islamist organizations. The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), and their umbrella lobbying organization the American Muslim Task Force (AMT) all quickly rushed to congratulate President-elect Obama. Interestingly, the AMT pushed out an election eve endorsement on November 3, 2008, deceptively trying to "have its cake and eat it too." They stated to the Massachusetts Telegram and Gazette , "by making an ‘indirect endorsement’ but keeping it low profile, Mr. Ali said, the organization avoided two pitfalls: ‘creating problems for the Obama campaign (and) accepting exclusion from the American mainstream." In other words, the Islamists carefully avoided any possibility of having the Obama campaign account for their stance by having to accept or reject the endorsement of every American Islamist organization. Thus the twelve Islamist organizations which are represented by AMT were able to claim public and open support of Obama on November 5, 2008 while avoiding any real contest of ideas and reckoning about their own facilitation and promulgation of political Islam.

[More]Post-election day, AMT quickly rushed out a press release of the results of a poll (conducted by "Genesis Research Associates") of American Muslims, which was uncritically regurgitated by the mainstream media claiming that 89% of American Muslims voted for Obama. It also claimed a 95% Muslim voter turnout. I am inclined, for a number of reasons, to believe that these numbers are a bit inflated. This reminds us of the dire need for anti-Islamist Muslims to contract well-established polling firms in the study of the American Muslim population from an anti-Islamist perspective rather than what can be a self-fulfilling prophecy completed by Islamists.

Regardless, the general "collectivist-liberal" trend with regards to Muslim voting numbers presents an even deeper challenge to any effective effort to counter the equally collectivist ideology of Islamism – the theocratic ideology of Muslim collectivism inherent in  political Islam. By the way, it should not escape informed readers that Islamists are "hardly liberal" and are in fact "reactionary," if not medieval in their views, when it comes to their beliefs on women’s rights, minority rights, free speech laws (i.e. blasphemy laws), and corporal punishment for crimes, to name just a few areas of conflict between current day "established sharia law" and the rule of law in Western secular liberal democracies. Islamists are still very easily able to escape this whole discussion, short of being pushed into a "contest of ideas," since they are a minority in the U.S. and never have to actually account for the laws they would endorse in places where they are a majority. And if Muslim leaders claim agreement with Western secular law, one cannot help but ask where all the movements for modernization of sharia law against the current salafist interpretations are?

Identity Politics, the Left, and the Ideology of Islamism

The Obama mantra of "change" gives anti-Islamists little comfort arising out of a campaign which was negligently short on substance on the issue of radical Islamism and the threat of Islamist-inspired terrorism. One would be hard-pressed to find candidate Obama or any of his surrogates on the record once about the "contest of ideas" and what his vision, or that of his advisors, is of how that contest would play out in his administration. Sadly, when the issue of Islam and Muslims was addressed it focused far too narrowly and naïvely on identity politics and religious freedom for Muslims in America, rather than the threat of political Islam or the absence of religious freedom in "Muslim" nations. Political correctness once again prevailed against a backdrop of an ideology promoted by Islamists which still threatens our national security.

A good example was Gen. Colin Powell’s comments on October 18, 2008 on NBC’s Meet the Press. Unfortunately, Gen. Powell missed the point of the entire struggle  at the eye of the storm in the global contest of ideas. His overriding comments on Muslims, in general, were certainly laudable and long overdue in the public place in as far as they spoke to the irrelevance of a candidate’s personal faith practice. Powell’s comments asking, " Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no, that’s not America" did resonate with me from a perspective of religious freedom and liberty for all Americans certainly including American Muslims in the pluralism which is America.

Gen. Powell’s touching story about an American Muslim soldier who gave the ultimate sacrifice in Iraq also resonated with me as a former U.S. Navy officer. Powell related, "…and his name was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, and he was an American. He was born in New Jersey.  He was 14 years old at the time of 9/11, and he waited until he can go serve his country, and he gave his life " These comments are all well and good and may warm the cockles of the hearts of Muslims including me, but at the end of the day we are losing the meaning of why this courageous American soldier gave his life and who and what he was fighting. The fact is that we are still left with a real and existential threat of political Islam that feeds radical Islamist networks that only Muslims can defeat. As long as our political leaders demagogue identity faith politics (of Muslims) and give American Muslim leaders and their organizations more and more room to deflect their own responsibility to counter the threat of political Islam, we will not win the contest of ideas. A contest of ideas not waged cannot be won. To dismiss American Muslims and their global brethren as mere victims or bystanders in a conflict which is at its core only theirs to wage and to win against political Islam is to leave our security perilously at risk. 

Regardless of how much American Islamists reject terrorism as an act, the fact remains that all radical Islamists come out of the mindset of political Islam. Real counterterrorism can only come out of real anti-Islamism. Collectivizing Muslims in elections, as the Left is want to do, is reckless and feeds into the ideology, means, and mission of savvy Islamists who know exactly how to manipulate this. We will never defeat such an ideology which thrives upon the political collectivization of all Muslims if we continue to feed into the mindset which demagogues Muslims as a homogenous collective unit. It may be very comfortable and certainly true from a First Amendment perspective to couch commentary about personal Muslim faith practice as Gen. Powell did in the warmth of religious liberty and American ideals. God knows, my family has certainly realized this and it was one of the primary driving forces of my own service in the U.S. Navy. But Gen. Powell forgets that the same Islamist organizations which so widely disseminated his remarks have done very little to encourage military service of Muslims in the U.S. military and to the contrary take every opportunity to disseminate incidents like the Abu Ghraib story as  the representative example of American action in Iraq.

Gen. Powell’s comments are misused by Islamists because he did not make them concomitantly with comments denouncing the political ideology of Islamism and Muslim political collectivism. When the Muslim community is looked upon as a collective and as a victim with no emphasis upon responsibility in defeating Islamism, it ends up propping up Islamists substantially. In order to know understand how reckless such comments can be, one need look no further than how far and wide Gen. Powell’s comments were disseminated by global transnational Islamist movements. Leaders like Gen. Powell need to both advocate for American religious freedom domestically which includes Muslims and all faiths while also positioning such advocacy within a concurrent Muslim anti-Islamist movement. Avoiding this positioning leaves Islamists empowered and overly comfortable. One cannot help but see that the Obama campaign and its surrogates have done just that- empower transnational Islamist movements.

We need cautious and thoughtful politicians who understand the "contest of ideas" within the Muslim consciousness. We need leaders who are willing to ask Muslims and all of their organizations the tough questions – not just the easy ones about condemning terrorism which any human being should do; but rather to ask Muslims to condemn the ideology of political Islam which is always an undercurrent of radical Islamist movements.
One can only guess that President-elect Obama seems to come from the school of thought that terrorism is simply a crime problem and radical Islamists are simply a crime syndicate. Such a line of thinking is not only wrong-headed but leaves us perilously and continuously exposed to a deep existential threat. Islamist terrorism is just that- Islamist. It is fueled by an undercurrent of political Islam which is running rampant in the Muslim world and yet remains basically unopposed by western ideas.

We have had over 30 planned attacks upon our citizens that, thankfully, were prevented since 9/11. They will continue to recur unless we begin a movement from within the Muslim consciousness to counter the politico-religious ideology (Islamism) which feeds it. The Bush administration proved not to have the stomach to deal with the real ideological threat of Islamism. Instead they have often appeased Islamists domestically (MB surrogates) and globally (i.e. the MB). If we do not realistically and critically counter the ideas of political Islam we stand against a growing threat that we will ultimately be unable to counter.

Unanwered Questions: Beyond the war of ideas

Regardless of whether the Obama administration addresses the war of ideas or not, the conflict will not go away. In fact, it is set only to increase. As an aside, one cannot help but wonder what life must have been like living in the "war of ideas" of the Cold War of the 1960s against communism as the left controlled the executive branch.

Does the Obama administration on deck really feel that the threat of Islamist terror will disappear if we withdraw from Iraq? Will Obama’s transition team acknowledge that terror is merely a tactic and its threat preceded the Iraq war and runs across the deep abyss which separates political Islam from Western secular democracies?

The nonpartisan Committee on the Present Danger which includes bipartisan involvement has gathered its resources again in the wake of 9/11 to educate America to the threat of Islamism and its fuel for terror against our homeland. Is President-elect Obama ready to acknowledge this threat? If so, are we going to withdraw all substantive influence from the Muslim world and allow Islamists to make dangerous political gains? If not America, then who is going to help defend Muslim liberty movements in each nation where Islamists should meet Muslim and non-Muslim resistance alike? Is America going to live up to our own ideologies of liberty, freedom, and secular democracy by advocating for such ideas abroad? What will happen to our thus far ineffectual Public Diplomacy program? How will our Public Diplomacy program engage in the Contest of ideas? Will his administration finally have the stomach to confront the ideology of Wahhabism under the Saudi regime? Will we continue the often hypocritical and short-sighted policy in the Muslim world of making our "enemy’s enemy" into our friend? Do we understand how that perception undermines our credibility with real reformist movements? What will be the Obama strategy for countering the dangerous ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood abroad and domestically?

As goes the foreign verbiage and engagement so goes the domestic engagement of Muslim organizations. As a relatively new immigrant population, the connections of the domestic Muslim community to the Muslim community abroad are deep, daily, and continuous, fed by a robust exposure to Arabic and Indo-Pakistani satellite news media which is most often Islamist. How will the Obama administration counter and engage that media including such outlets as Al Jazeera, MBC, Al-Arabiya, or GeoTV to name a few. 

How about a bold new mantra of "change" directed at the Islamists changing their ideas toward real religious freedom and liberty for all? But that would demand that the mantra actually have substance and be backed up by a clear strategy. So far, if the campaign season is any sign, the Obama administration policy toward Islamists and Islamism appears to be long on platitudes and bromides and short on substance and a clear strategy.


This article appeared originally at FamilySecurityMatters.org

Contributing Editor M. Zuhdi Jasser is the founder and Chairman of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy based in Phoenix Arizona. He is a former U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander, a physician in private practice, and a community activist.

 

A marriage of convenience

As we enter the home stretch of the 2008 presidential election, new revelations about Barack Obama’s harshly critical views of the U.S. Constitution for not providing for wealth distribution have again raised concerns as to whether the American people may be about to elect the first radical Leftist if not outright socialist president in the republic’s history. This hugely troubling possibility, were it to happen, would mark yet another historical watershed that’s mentioned less often – the de facto alliance between the Left and radical Islam in American politics.
The discussion of Islam, to the extent that is mentioned at all in the campaign, has mostly been limited to a rather inconclusive debate in the blogosphere as to whether Obama is a Muslim or not, and a more substantive, if suppressed by the mainstream media, discussion of Senator Obama’s questionable ties to radical Islamists and anti-Semites. The latter has provided more than enough empirical evidence to at least give a pause to a dispassionate observer as to Obama’s pious assertions of his dedication to the struggle against Islamic extremism and friendship for Israel. Without going into too much detail, these connections include well-documented close ties with Black Panther mentor-turned-radical Muslim and Wahhabi stooge, Khalid al-Mansour (nee Don Warden); Nation of Islam hate-spewing, anti-white racist, Louis Farakhan; Columbia professor and apologist of Palestinian terrorism, Rashid Khalidi;  and last, but not least, Salam Ibrahim, an alleged Taliban sympathizer and chairman of the defunct Chicago Shariah-finance company Sunrise Equities, who appears to have absconded with $80 million of his clients’ funds.
What all of these unsavory men have in common, apart from friendship with and admiration for Barack Obama, is their passionate dislike for the United States and their virulent anti-Semitism. This may not prove that Obama himself is an Islamist, an anti-Semite or an anti-American, it but it does show that, throughout his career, he has willingly associated with, and been mentored by, people who are.
As much as this should be an issue of serious concern, the growing nexus between radical Islam and the Left is ultimately of much greater systemic consequence and one that goes far beyond current election considerations to present a palpable threat to the future of this country and Western civilization itself.
[More]To understand that, we must first look at what the two parties to this unholy alliance represent. Should Senator Obama be elected as the next president of the United States, he will come to office as the leader of a party that has changed so dramatically from its historical traditions that, today, it has little in common with the Democrat Party of old. It is a party in which the worldview of the 1960s hard, anti-American Left reigns triumphant and in which yesterday’s democratic icons such as Truman, JFK, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey and Scoop Jackson would feel completely out of place.  
It is thus not a huge surprise that a radical Leftist like Barack Obama would find an enthusiastic reception in a party that itself has become socialist in everything but name. And like its fellow-socialist confreres in Europe and elsewhere, it is a party that implicitly rejects individual rights, the free market system and the Judeo-Christian moral order on which they are based in favor of socialist collectivism, multiculturalism and robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul redistributionism. More than anything else, it rejects the imperative to defend those sacrosanct American principles against enemies foreign and domestic, as enshrined in our Constitution, in favor of political correctness, utopian pacifism and appeasement of evil.
It is these ideological propensities of the new American Left that radical Islam finds made to order for its purposes, and eager to cultivate and exploit. This is indeed a tactical alliance, a marriage-of-convenience for the Islamists, whose ultimate objective is the destruction of Western civilization, including its socialist infidels. It is, nonetheless, a critically important alliance in the meantime that serves Islamism by legitimating it within Western society, allowing it to infiltrate its political establishment and government and weakening resistance to Islamist efforts to subvert it from within. In the American context, this has led to numerous successful initiatives by the Muslim Brotherhood/Wahhabi fifth column that dominates the Islamic establishment to make a common cause with the Left on efforts to stop anti-terrorism measures such as "Secret Evidence" and the Patriot Act, and various anti-Iraq war and pro-illegal immigration campaigns, among others.
None of this is particularly surprising and the imperative for Islamists to ally with the Left has long been part of the official Muslim Brotherhood strategic doctrine of waging war on the West. Less well-known is the fact that even prominent ideologues of violent jihad against the West, such as the leading theoretician Abu Musab al-Suri in his seminal work "Global Islamic Resistance Call," lists Leftist parties with "anti-American and anti-imperialist ideology" as key potential allies for the jihadists.
A more pertinent question is what in radical Islam appeals to the Left. A messianic, totalitarian doctrine in religious garb that preaches violence against all non-Muslims and espouses the establishment of the medieval barbarism of shar’iah law as its political program, Islamism is, at first sight, as incompatible as could be with the lofty humanitarian pretenses of the Left. The more so because key constituencies of the Left, such as gays and lesbians, feminists, animal rights fanatics, atheists and Jews are among the first marked for destruction, should Shariah ever triumph.
The answer is to be sought in the common denominator and obsession of the radical Left around the world – a bottomless hatred for bourgeois capitalism and America as the country that epitomizes it. A hatred as pathological as that of the Communists for the class enemy and the Nazis for the Jews.  That and the documented mass appeal and murderous vitality of radical Islam made the dispirited Leftists after the fall of Communism believe that here finally was a mighty ally that could help defeat the hated capitalist system and bring down America.
It is this transcendent obsession that made a flamboyant homosexual like French post-modernist philosopher Michel Foucalt, who knew full well what Khomeini does to gays, lionize the reactionary ayatollah as the new hope of the proletariat; British politician George Galloway claim that "progressives" like him and the Muslims had the same enemies; American greens to dream of an alliance with the Islamists to "destroy capitalism"; and assorted radicals and Communist leftovers from the 1960s to march against "Islamophobia" with terrorism accomplices from the American Ikhwan (Muslim Brotherhood) networks. It is, of course, a pernicious illusion but a very costly one for a free society.
It has already led to electoral alliances between socialist parties and the Islamists in Europe, facilitated the introduction of shariah law, sanctioned appeasement of violent Islamist norms and turned a blind eye to the spread of vituperative anti-Semitism not seen since the 1930s. Should the Democrats win the White House, it will not be long before the same trends appear on American soil.
In a recent speech, Senator Obama admirably promised to go to the gates of hell if necessary to get Osama bin-Laden. He would have been more persuasive if before traveling that far he had bothered to check some of his campaign’s dubious connections and come clean on them and his own with the American public. He would have found out, for instance, that a former Muslim outreach coordinator of his campaign, one Mazen Asbahi, was a key leader of the Muslim Student Association, a radical Islamist organization on campus, which had this to say about Osama bin-Laden in an official publication: "When we hear someone refer to the great Mujahid Osama bin Laden as ‘terrorist’, we should defend our brother and refer to him as a freedom fighter, someone who has forsaken wealth and power to fight in Allah’s cause and speak out against oppressors." This same virulently anti-American organization now advertises a "get out the vote" campaign on its website.
Barack Obama’s deafening silence on his own and his campaign’s troubling connections with Islamists does little to discourage one from believing that the loudest cheers for his eventual victory next Tuesday will be those of the sworn Islamist enemies of our civilization.
Originally published at FamilySecurityMatters.org
 
Alex Alexiev is a contributing editor to familysecuritymatters.org and vice-president for research at the Center for Security Policy in Wash. D.C. He is the author of a forthcoming book on shariah finance titled Jihad on Wall Street: Shariah Finance in the War Against America.
 
** The article above does not necessarily reflect the views of the Center for Security Policy; the author’s views are his own.**

Obama, cop-killers and the cops

Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn aren’t Barack Obama’s only terrorism problem.

A group of lawyers suing the United States to extend constitutional rights to enemy combatants detained in Guantanamo has endorsed Obama. Even more, the signatories say they “have been working closely with Senator Obama.”

As if that isn’t bad enough, one of the signatories who claims to have worked with Obama is head of a notorious legal activist group that has spent decades defending convicted terrorists and cop-killers.

I wonder what the National Association of Police Organizations (NAPO) has to say about that since its September endorsement of Obama. NAPO says it represents “more than 2,000 police unions and associations” and “241,000 sworn law enforcement officers.”

But the lawyers for the enemy combatants, terrorists and cop-killers endorsed Obama first. On January 28, 2008, “Habeas Lawyers for Obama,” a group that describes itself as “deeply involved in the Guantanamo litigation” on behalf of enemy combatants, wrote a letter advocating Obama’s candidacy. “We have worked closely with Senator Obama,” the group said, calling habeas corpus under threat because of the treatment of the enemy combatants our troops captured in the war on terrorism.

Obama bought the line and acted. “Some politicians are all talk and no action,” the group said. “But we know from first-hand experience that Senator Obama has demonstrated extraordinary leadership on this critical and controversial issue. When others stood back, Senator Obama helped lead the fight in the Senate against the Administration’s efforts in the Fall of 2006 to strip the courts of jurisdiction,” according to the lawyers. Not only that, but Obama made his taxpayer-funded office available for their use: “When we were walking the halls of the Capitol trying to win over enough Senators to beat back the Administration’s bill, Senator Obama made his key staffers and even his offices available to help us.”

Obama made the enemy combatants’ defense his personal cause, the lawyers said: “Senator Obama worked with us to count the votes, and he personally lobbied colleagues who worried about the political ramifications of voting to preserve habeas corpus for the men held at Guantanamo.”

“Senator Obama demonstrated real leadership then and since, continuing to raise Guantanamo and habeas corpus in his speeches and in the debates,” they said.

One of the signatories was the lawyer who successfully argued the Supreme Court case giving constitutional protections to the enemy combatants. That lawyer, Michael Ratner, heads a legal activist group called the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), which masquerades as a human rights organization. The CCR has publicly supported or otherwise defended the murderers of American law enforcement officers, including FBI Special Agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams; Fulton County, Georgia, Deputy Sheriff Ricky Kinchen; New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster; Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner and NYPD Officer John Scarangella.

The CCR has been supporting terrorists, almost nonstop, since the late extremist legal activist William Kunstler founded the group when Obama was about eight years old.

Kunstler vowed to keep the revolutionaries in the streets by using the legal system as a weapon against American society. The CCR defended the Weather Underground of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn back then. Subsequently it supported the terrorists who planted more than 100 bombs across Chicago and New York, as well as the terrorist group that blew up the historic Fraunces Tavern, killing four and wounding 54, and the bomber of a New York synagogue. Later, under Ratner’s leadership, it extended its support to Islamist extremists, including the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and enemy combatants held by the U.S. military at Guantanamo.

While working with Obama, Ratner and his group teamed with a lawyer for an identified Al Qaeda front in a separate legal case.

Ratner says his work, part of decades of legal maneuvers to undermine the nation’s protection against terrorists, is really a fight to save habeas corpus and the U.S. Constitution. Assisting the enemy combatants – today, not when Obama was eight – is what brought Ratner publicly to support the Illinois senator for president.

It looks like NAPO didn’t do its detective work. “NAPO believes that Senators Obama and [Joseph] Biden will make giving our nation’s law enforcement officers every protection they need a top priority of their administration,” said association President Tom Nee in NAPO’s September endorsement.

Had NAPO done some basic gumshoe work, it might have pressured Obama, in exchange for its coveted endorsement, to disclaim his support from Ratner and other defenders of terrorism.

But it didn’t. And so far, nobody has held Obama accountable. The questions now are, how can Obama claim to be a friend of the police while he collaborates with lawyers who aid terrorists and cop-killers? What was the extent of his involvement with them? And why has he not renounced their support?

J. Michael Waller is Vice President for Information Operations at the Center for Security Policy.

 

Terrorism as career option

Among the greatest underrated factors energizing the tides of history is boredom.  Boredom and peer pressure and the love of personal power and wealth, and all the other mundane and often ugly personal drives that have a force that can exceed the most profound political or religious beliefs — and for that reason have often built or broken empires. 

It was partly boredom that urged young men onto ships to explore the New World and later prompted them to join wagon trains to settle the West.  In the early days of the Civil War, peer pressure worked on state legislatures to prod many former Union stalwarts to embrace the Confederacy.  And in our own time, in the 1960s, rioting in the ghettos and among students was often motivated by nothing more than a testosterone-fueled sense of power and a desire to loot and destroy. 

In the Middle East today, it is often boredom and peer pressure, and — among the leaders especially — the desire for sheer power and wealth, that entices young men into radical politics.  Many of the top Palestinian "militants," for example, may cloak these motivations in politics or religion, but ultimately they are little more than gangsters whose venality conveniently coincides with the prevailing public orthodoxies.

Pssst!  Wanna job?  You’re in the occupied West Bank or Gaza; there’s massive, entrenched unemployment; you’re young and not particularly educated.  What do you do?

How about a "job" that may after a few years yield a substantial bank account and serious power; in fact, the power of life or death.  Joining a terrorist outfit is not only somewhat expected, but you can take care of your family and cousins and friends, and have women swooning in their nijabs and men shaking in their Nikes.

[More]One of the largely unremarked facts of life in the Palestinian territories is that the life of a "militant" often isn’t such a bad deal, and there’s reason to believe that some of the ongoing troubles in that benighted place are due to the simple fact that for the sociopathic personality being a militant can be a great job opportunity.

A number of the terrorist leaders are men in their 40s without skills or the prospects of decent employment.  What’s the appeal of a clerk’s job in the local equivalent of a 7-11 when you can have money and power and be in service to a nationalist political cause that makes you the toast of the Arab world and left wing salons from Paris to London to, yes, even New York.

Great job being a freedom fighter, if you can get it — and keep it.  This is often true for the leaders, of course, but it can also be true for mid-level operatives.  There is no doubt that for some there is a real belief in the cause, but for many it is merely a job.

The same way of thinking that allows one to eschew democracy, lord it over one’s fellows or simply to kill political opponents, is the same mentality that allows a former "idealist" simply to begin killing and stealing — and prevents him from embracing peace.  

Money.  Power.  Fame or popularity.  These are the rewards that go to those who keep the pot boiling.  Keep it boiling or agree to a settlement that will yield peace and increased prosperity for your people but to the now-aging militants might only mean the drudgery of performing the mundane duties of a real politician in a poor backwater.

Just follow the money.  The billions of Dollars, Pounds, Marks and now Euros handed over to the various Palestinian groups are never fully accounted for.  Yasser Arafat is widely considered to have stashed away hundreds of millions of dollars in Europe, maybe even billions.  And top followers acquired villas, fancy cars and their own plump bank accounts.  Other funds, amounting to billions, continue to be disbursed by Fatah’s followers as living expenses — or as a "salary" for one meaningless "job" or another — but amount only to payment for loyalty to the leaders. 

And now there are now reports that Hamas — which won at the polls at least partly in reaction to Fatah’s corruption — is joining their erstwhile rivals in stealing from their compatriots.

What precisely does this recommend as to how to fight and overcome these "liberation movement" mafias? 

Perhaps most important, they should be exposed for what they are.  Making clear the gangster nature of many of these "liberation movements" should communicate to their allies among the left intelligentsia in the West, or their enablers among their less ideological and bloodthirsty countrymen, that these people are not committed to the best interests of their people.  They do not deserve support or understanding.

At very least, disbursements of cash should be severely restricted or cut off to the various Palestinian NGOs, Fatah and the Palestinian government.  No more blank checks.  Any aid should be in-kind and only provided under the most strict oversight by the nations providing it, not by the UN or Palestinian NGOs.  And the aid should consist of little more than the basics of food and fuel — and that only in the extraordinarily unlikely circumstances that ordinary Palestinians were facing a true crisis.

Finally, their economy should be forced to stand on its own two feet.  Perhaps second only to the Lebanese in the Middle East, the Palestinians have a history of success in business and trade, and even if the territories never become Switzerland, they are capable of supporting themselves and of providing jobs to many more of their young men than they do today.

Some among the Palestinian leaders and their followers have an interest in the betterment of their compatriots.  The only hope for peace will come when the gangsters who thrive in war are gone and replaced by those who have a moral horizon that extends beyond the mundane and ugly personal drives that have so twisted a culture and betrayed a people.

If and only if these figures are allowed to come to the fore in the Middle East, the tides of history may yet be moved by our better natures, and the Palestinians may finally find accommodation with Israel and the larger world.

From The American Thinker

Douglas Stone is a Senior Fellow with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C

 

Characters count

Suddenly, the presidential campaigns are addressing an issue that should have been at the forefront of this year’s election long ago.  Call it "characters count."  We know people – especially public figures – by the company they keep.  And we need to know much more about, to put it charitably, the characters that have figured prominently for years in Barack Obama’s life.

Over the weekend, Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin brought the issue to the fore by observing caustically that the Democrats’ would-be commander-in-chief has "palled around with terrorists."  The Obama campaign immediately deployed talking points and a television ad conjuring up Charles Keating, a one-time friend and supporter of John McCain who was a driving force behind the 1980s-era savings and loan debacle. 

The problem for Barack Obama is that convicted – and unrepentant – terrorist William Ayers is not the only person with a profound animosity towards this country with whom he has "palled around" since his youth.  It is not, as the Democratic candidate maintains, a distraction or a sign of desperation on the part of his opponents that serious questions are finally being asked about the nature and the implications of the judgment he has exhibited in the past – and may exhibit in the future – as evidenced by his myriad and profoundly troubling personal ties. That is especially the case since so little is known about the junior Senator from Illinois and what he really means by "change."

Take for example, the formative influence in Barack Obama’s youth that he calls in his memoirs simply "Frank."  As it happens, the Frank in question was Frank Marshall Davis, a well-known Stalinist Communist in Hawaii whose attachment to the Soviet Union and hatred for an America he loathed as racist and imperialistic caused the FBI to keep him under surveillance for at least 19 years.  Evidently, young Obama and his father spent hours in the company of this mentor, presumably soaking in not only his alcohol but his virulent hostility towards America.

[More]We now know that a similar view was espoused routinely from the pulpit of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ. Sen. Obama maintains that somehow he had not heard any of Wright’s loathing of this country – epitomized by the latter’s notorious plea, "God damn America."  When confronted with evidence of it, he could not bring himself to disassociate from his pastor of twenty years until that tie properly threatened to scupper his candidacy during the Democratic primaries.  

Thanks to the intrepid Stanley Kurtz, we also have learned of Sen. Obama’s longstanding ties to another fixture of the radical left, one emblematic of its enmity towards an America seen as oppressive and racist: the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (better known as ACORN). Obama trained ACORN personnel, worked with its activists on the group’s (often problematic) voter-registration efforts and consulted with its most aggressive operatives.  Preeminent among the latter has been one Madeline Talbott.

Obama also secured, through his position on the Woods Fund and Chicago Annenberg Challenge boards (he served on the former with Bill Ayers), funding for ACORN’s intimidation campaigns against banks that failed to make sub-prime style loans to otherwise ineligible would-be homeowners. As Kurtz put it in the New York Post, "It would be tough to find an ‘on the ground’ community organizer more closely tied to the subprime-mortgage fiasco than Madeline Talbott.  And no one has been more supportive of Madeline Talbott than Barack Obama."

To the extent that the economic effects of the sub-prime meltdown makes Charles Keating’s S&L raid on the Treasury look like a church social, Obama should be careful about casting stones in that direction. 

Even more worrisome from a national security perspective are some of Obama’s ties to prominent figures in the world of radical Islam.  These include another racist black nationalist, Don Warden, who converted to Islam and changed his name to Khalid al-Mansour.  According to Kenneth Timmerman in Newsmax, al-Mansour has worked closely to advance the influence operations in America of one of Saudi Arabia’s most insidious royal billionaires, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal.  The latter has appreciated for some time the help America’s higher education institutions could give his Islamist "soft jihad" – the effort to legitimate and insinuate Islamic law (Shariah) into this country.  Toward that end, he has bought leading Middle East studies programs, notably at Georgetown and Harvard University, and reportedly helped advance Obama’s candidacy to the latter’s law school. 

Then, there is the case of Rashid Khalidi, a former colleague of Obama’s at the University of Chicago and now a professor at Columbia.  Khalidi is an enthusiastic supporter of the Palestinians, fervent critic of Israel (which he calls a destructive "racist" state), an admirer of suicide bombers and a driving force behind the Arab American Action Network (AAAN). This so-called pro-Palestinian "community organization" in Chicago is another beneficiary of the largesse of the Obama-Ayers team at the Woods Fund and promotes an agenda that would horrify many of Obama’s Jewish supporters. 

Tonight’s town-hall style debate between Barack Obama and John McCain offers the public an opportunity to explore a basic question:  Have these and similar influences on Sen. Obama’s life in fact been influential – and, if so, will they translate into personnel, policies and practices that are inimical to our country, its people and security if he is elected?

We have a need to know.  Characters count.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy and a columnist for the Washington Times.

Vote early and often– at the box office

It’s election season, so it is appropriate that an important vote will be cast this weekend. No, I am not talking about early balloting in Ohio or Oregon for the November presidential race. Rather, this vote is a national one— and it will be taking place at a theater near you.

This weekend, the returns will be tallied on box-office sales of the opening weekend of An American Carol — a marvelously politically incorrect take-off on the timeless Dickensian morality tale. Set around the Fourth of July in contemporary America rather than a Victorian Yuletide, it has been created and directed by my friend, the zany and wildly successful David Zucker.

This Carol’s Scrooge character, played by Kevin Farley, is a dead-ringer for radical leftist filmmaker Michael Moore. The ghosts who visit him — including John F. Kennedy, George S. Patton, and George Washington — labor to teach their subject about the greatness of this country, the absurdity of the "Blame-America-First" Left’s toxic hatred for it and the opening the latter provides for Islamists bent on our destruction. Punctuated by trademark Zucker slapstick humor (his other credits include Airplane!, The Naked Gun, Scary Movie 3, and assorted sequels), the movie makes a deadly serious point: Everything is on the line in this War for the Free World and those of us who prize our freedoms will lose them if we fail to protect them against enemies foreign and domestic.

In a sense the pilgrimage Zucker chronicles is an autobiographical one. He had his own epiphany after 9/11, prompting him to break with Hollywood’s dominant left-wing politics and reflexive contempt for our government, military, and people (even, amazingly, the movie-going ones). With the passion of a convert, he uses his skills to poke fun at his industry, academia, political and media elites and such mainstays of the radical Left as the ACLU, MoveOn.org, Rosie O’Donnell and, of course, Michael Moore.

Zucker and Farley are joined in this apostasy by other accomplished stars, including Jon Voight, Kelsey Grammar, James Woods, and Robert Davi. Their courage in goring so many of Hollywood’s sacred cows is palpable given that community’s notorious practice of ensuring that those who are shunned never "eat lunch" (read, work) in that town again.

Amidst the sight-gags, the slapstick (often literally), the absurd moments and hilarious quips, there is a scene that is transcendently important and deeply affecting. After the protagonist has proven infuriatingly resistant to mentoring from JFK and Patton, he is given a tour of St. Paul’s Chapel near Wall Street by its most famous parishioner, President Washington. Jon Voight does not act this part; he channels the father of our country. Moore-as-Scrooge comes face to face with the carnage of 9/11 and confronts at last the necessity of taking responsibility for his own destructive actions. It is one of the most powerful pieces of cinematic artistry I have ever seen.

An American Carol is more than a wonderfully entertaining film. It is more even than a forceful political statement on behalf of the values and institutions that have made America, as the bumper sticker has it, thanks to the brave, the land of the free.

David Zucker’s new film is also an opportunity — a chance to show Hollywood in the only way it understands that the people of this country admire those prepared unashamedly to stand up for us and the country we hold dear.

For the film industry, opening weekend box office returns determine whether a film is deemed to be a success or not. A big turn-out demonstrates an appeal that will result in more movie theaters showing the film and for longer runs than will otherwise be the case.

Consequently, we have a chance to do something more than properly reward David Zucker and his gutsy team by turning out this weekend to see their movie. In the process, we can demonstrate in a most tangible and impactful way to others in their industry that there is a market not only for this film but for others who revere this country, rather than demean it.

In short, I urge you to take not just your family and friends to see An American Carol. Ask everyone you know to do the same. If possible, do it this weekend and thereby vote in a contest that may prove to be nearly as far-reaching as that whose balloting will take place a month later.

Originally published in National Review

Let Palin be Palin

At critical moments before and during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, his admirers would urge that he be allowed to be himself – rather than the far-less-authentic and -appealing facsimile served up by his handlers.  "Let Reagan be Reagan," they would urge, confident that the man himself would fare well if left to his own talents and judgment.  Time and time again, that proved to be the case as his common-man qualities, native intelligence and utter decency allowed him to connect with and secure the support of the American people.

This lesson is worth recalling now, on the eve of a possibly make-or-break vice presidential debate between Republican Sarah Palin and her Democratic rival, Senator Joseph Biden.  The outcome – and the fate of the GOP ticket – may turn on whether her handlers "Let Palin be Palin."

To be sure, there are powerful factors arguing for doing otherwise.  While the Governor of Alaska has more executive experience than Barack Obama and Joe Biden combined, she is a relative newcomer to many national and certainly international issues. While her state’s geography, energy resources and role in the national defense give her a grounding – by osmosis, if nothing else – in some of the most important foreign and security policy issues of the day, she has not been dabbling in and debating them for over three decades, as has the senior Senator from Delaware.

Understandably then, Sen. McCain’s campaign has sought to give his running mate a crash course in the sorts of issues likely to feature in the Palin-Biden debate on Thursday night.  They have largely kept her away from the press, with the notable exception of interviews with ABC’s Charlie Gibson and CBS’s Katie Couric which demonstrated the perils of trying to give her an overnight public policy make-over, one that threatens to serve her, her party and the country poorly. 

Of particular concern is the prospect that her head is being filled with the nostrums of one inveterate handler, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.  The risks of channeling the man Ronald Reagan ran against in 1976 as much as he did Gerald Ford was on display during Friday night’s presidential debate between John McCain and Barack Obama. 

As McCain was properly taking his rival to task for the latter’s stated willingness to meet without preconditions with the leader of Iran, Obama retorted that one of the Republican candidate’s own senior advisors, Dr. Kissinger, had recommended such engagement.  The debate corkscrewed into a "no he didn’t," "yes he did" stand-off whose upshot was that Kissinger apparently doesn’t think the next U.S. president should meet with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but does believe that his administration should hold meetings with other representatives that genocidal maniac’s regime. 

That’s pretty much what Messrs. Obama and Biden are saying now.  Heaven help the nation – and the Republican ticket – if the choice between McCain and Obama turns out to be which of the minions of our time’s Hitler we seek to appease, Himmler or Goebbels?

Unfortunately, Iran policy is not the only place where the common sense and moral clarity that Sarah Palin seems fully capable of bringing to bear – the sort of clarity that was the very essence of Ronald Reagan’s personal approach to security policy – would be imperiled by her eminent mentor.  On two other issues, Dr. Kissinger has staked out positions in recent years that are not only indefensible.  They are much more similar to the stances embraced by the Democratic ticket than those of Gov. Palin’s running mate. 

Take for example, Russia.  Kissinger – whose consulting firm has long had commercially lucrative relationships in Moscow – has for years urged accommodation with Putin and his kleptocracy, even as it systematically stifled democracy at home and increasingly threatened it abroad.  (In an earlier era, Kissinger justified appeasing the Kremlin with détente because he was convinced the Soviets were going to win the Cold War.)  The Bush administration, to its shame and now regret, followed the advice proffered in innumerable séances with the former Secretary of State.  It would be disastrous for Gov. Palin to endorse it, especially since her running mate has taken so much more robust a stance towards the Kremlin, both before and after its invasion of Georgia.

Then there is Dr. Kissinger’s endorsement of the idea of U.S. denuclearization.  He has lent his name and prestige to an initiative that would, as a practical matter, make the world a much more dangerous place since our enemies will surely not follow our example if we get rid of our nuclear arsenal.  Here again, as with Iran and Russia, the Kissinger position is closer to Barack Obama’s than to John McCain’s.  It is certainly not consistent with the national interest.

From here on out, and most especially Thursday night, Gov. Palin should be herself.  She doesn’t have to know everything and shouldn’t pretend she does.  What she needs to communicate is that – like Ronald Reagan and, for that matter, like Harry Truman – she will bring to the job her native American common sense instead of some establishment pedigree and lousy judgment. (See Andy McCarthy’s devastating critique of how lousy Joe Biden’s is in National Review.)

Governor Palin, use your platform on Thursday to embrace American exceptionalism, defend our sovereignty and promise to build our national power and to employ it wisely in defense of both.  The public – if not the policy establishment and the media elite – will embrace you, as they did the Gipper.  Just let Palin be Palin.

 

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy and a columnist for the Washington Times.

 

A world without America

Q. What do Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Barack Obama have in common?  

A. The president of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Democratic candidate for president of the United States of America have both chosen to spend much of their lives in the company of people who are virulently hostile to this country.   At least some of them seek to bring about, as Ahmadinejad puts it, a "world without America."

 
 

As it happens, Ahmadinejad will be given Tuesday a platform for his anti-American invective by the United Nations.  That organization increasingly not only shares a generalized transnational ambition to transform a sovereign, powerful United States in favor of one-world government.  Worse yet, thanks to the growing petro-wealth and aggressiveness of the leaders of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), the UN is actually starting to accommodate itself to that bloc’s ambition to have the new world order be arranged according to the totalitarian program the Iranian and other Islamists’ call Shariah.

In the early days of the Iranian revolution, Ahmadinejad was a street thug (and, according to some Americans taken hostage in the U.S. embassy in Tehran, one of their tormentors) in the service of the radical Shiite Islamist, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.   Ever since, he has been rewarded for his loyalty to the most intolerant strains of Islam and for his hostility to the "Great Satan."  

Today, that service continues as the front-man for the current ruling theocracy, led by another radical cleric, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.   The Iranian regime is not content with having Mahmoud Ahmadinejad touting repeatedly its determination to bring about a world without America – and, by the way, without Israel, either.   It is acting to acquire the capability to fulfill these genocidal threats with the development and deployment of the means of launching unimaginably destructive nuclear attacks against these nations.  

Is that possible?   Unfortunately, given Israel’s small size and concentrated population, a single weapon could effectively achieve Ahmadinejad’s stated goal of "wiping Israel off the map."   Less well understood is the fact that, according to a congressional commission, a single nuclear weapon used to unleash a devastating electro-magnetic pulse via a nuclear detonation in space, could cause "catastrophic" damage to this country, too.   By some estimates, were the electrical grid to be taken down for a very long time, nine out of ten Americans would be unable to survive.   A world without America, indeed.

Thankfully, the friends of Barack Obama who have exhibited their own, rabid hostility toward this country have had more modest ambitions towards "changing" this country – or at least not been in a position to act on Iranian-style apocalyptic visions.   It is now common knowledge, however, that his pastor for twenty-years, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, called on God to "damn America" and that one of Obama’s early political allies, convicted terrorist William Ayers, expressed regret that he was unable to "do enough" when it came to "setting bombs."  

[More]Before Messrs. Wright and Ayers, though, there was "Frank," the name Obama gives in his memoirs to a man he describes as a formative influence during his early years in Hawaii. It turns out this Frank was none other than Frank Marshall Davis, a Stalinist black Communist whom the inestimably valuable Cliff Kincaid has identified as a "high-level operative in a Soviet-sponsored network in Hawaii," which "the communists had targeted…largely because of its strategic location and importance to the U.S. defense effort." Kincaid describes Davis as a "propagandist, racial agitator and recruiter for the Communist Party of the USA." He reports that, during the 19 years Davis was under FBI surveillance, Obama’s mentor "spent much of his time" photographing Hawaii’s shorelines and beachfronts – presumably not for their scenic value.    

Last, but not least, there is increasing evidence of Obama’s long-standing ties to two others with records of hostility towards this country. According to investigative reporter Kenneth Timmerman, the first is Khalid al-Mansour (a.k.a. Don Warden), once a prominent advocate for racist black nationalism.  Since his conversion to Islam, al-Mansour has worked closely with a Saudi billionaire anxious to "exert influence in the United States," Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. 

It will be recalled that the latter was the Wahhabi whose largesse then-New York Mayor Rudy Guiliani famously spurned after 9/11 upon learning the Saudi royal had blamed American policies for that day’s horrific attack.   Obama reportedly benefited from these Islamists’ help in securing a position at Harvard Law School – a university that now has a $20 million center named for the prince that helps legitimate the seditious practice of Shariah in America.

We know that Barack Obama has, in the past, declared his willingness to meet with the leaders of Iran without precondition.   While he has subsequently qualified that commitment, it seems fair to conclude that, given what they have in common, the Democratic candidate would feel unencumbered by a reluctance to dignify – to say nothing of encourage – so vociferous a proponent of anti-Americanism as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  

It is clear what kind of "change" the Iranian president believes in and that which has animated several of Barack Obama’s long-time friends.   This week’s presidential debate may afford an opportunity to determine to what extent change inimical to America is also what the Democratic candidate believes in.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy and a columnist for the Washington Times.

 

Sarah Palin’s experience

Listening to her critics, one might think that John McCain’s chosen running-mate is a complete ignoramus when it comes to matters of national security.  In fact, Sarah Palin’s background in Alaska, including most recently her service as that state’s governor, suggests that the judgment of the Republicans’ candidate for Vice President with respect to this portfolio is likely to be substantially better than that of either Barak Obama or Joe Biden.

Consider the following factors:

Gov. Palin has spent much of her adult life dealing with matters long central to the Alaskan experience and now of surpassing importance to the nation as a whole – namely, energy security and how we can provide for it.  Having managed her state’s department responsible for oil and gas exploration and exploitation, having negotiated a long-delayed natural gas pipeline through Canada to the Lower 48 and having been married for nearly two decades to a blue-collar worker in Alaska’s North Slope oil fields, she knows more about the subject than all three of the others on the two parties’ tickets put together.

If Gov. Palin can bring to bear her insights into the need for expanded, yet environmentally sensitive drilling, including in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR) – together with an appreciation of the need to introduce fuel-choice in our transportation sector, the object of the bipartisan Open Fuel Standard Act introduced in both the House and Senate shortly before the August recess – she will demonstrate unsurpassed leadership in what is, arguably, the single most important national security challenge of our time.

Napoleon is said to have declared that "Geography is destiny."  That certainly is true of Gov. Palin.  Her state is adjacent to Russia, a nation that has in recent years demonstrated a rising aggressiveness towards its neighbors.  The targets are not just the relatively weak and formerly enslaved countries on its littoral like Georgia – the scene of a bloody invasion last month aimed at toppling the elected government there.  Moscow has also conducted simulated strategic bombing runs with Soviet-era long-range, nuclear-capable aircraft.  These offensive missions are designed to penetrate U.S. northern air defenses in a manner reminiscent of the most provocative of Kremlin behavior during the Cold War.

As it happens, the best of those defenses – including a squadron of America’s state-of-the-art interceptors, the F-22 Raptor – are stationed at Elmendorf Air Force Base near Anchorage.  Governor Palin would not only be intimately familiar with that facilities’ vital role in protecting U.S. territory.  She would also appreciate its importance in the projection of American power in Asia and beyond as much of the nation’s long-range transport aircraft supplying our military operations around the world transit through Elmendorf. Every Commander-in-Chief should have such insights.

Speaking of geography, Alaskan territory is also along the trajectory of ballistic missiles launched eastward out of Stalinist North Korea.  For that reason, among others, Alaska’s Fort Greely was selected as the site for the principal U.S. ground-based defense against such missiles. 

As that state’s governor, Sarah Palin would know more by osmosis – if nothing else – about the necessity for U.S. anti-missile systems than either Messrs. Obama or Biden.  In fact, the Democrats have reflexively opposed such defenses and promise to starve them of funds if elected.  Opinion polls suggest that the support missile defense enjoys among Gov. Palin’s Alaskans is shared by strong majorities of their countrymen elsewhere.  Her judgment versus Sen. Biden’s on the question of whether America should be protected against present and growing missile-delivered threats will be one of the highlights of the vice presidential nominees’ debate.

At present, one can only infer Sarah Palin’s grasp of the danger posed by today’s principal enemy: adherents to the brutally repressive and seditious program the Islamists call Shariah, a program they seek to impose worldwide through violent means and "soft jihad" (including, Shariah-Compliant Finance, influence operations, subversive proselytizing and recruitment in our mosques, prisons and military, etc.)  A tangible indicator of her views, however, is the enlistment of her eldest son, Track, on the anniversary of 9/11 last year and his imminent deployment to Iraq.  His mother – like the loved ones of millions of other servicemen and women – has had to confront directly and personally the prospect of making the ultimate sacrifice for their country in the face of such evil.

In short, America is only beginning to get to know Sarah Palin.  As we do, she will have plenty of opportunities to illuminate her views on national security.  One thing is already clear, though:  By virtue of her home state and its unique role in America’s energy, defense and power-projection and thanks to her own public sector service and that of her offspring in the U.S. Army, it is not only wrong but foolish to portray her as totally unprepared to contend with the epochal foreign and defense policy issues we are confronting. 

If anything, Gov. Palin’s personal story and qualities that are clearly resonating with millions of Americans across the political spectrum – her intelligence, scrappiness, integrity, common sense and deep-seated faith – when combined with her real-world experience in Alaska, suggest that she will prove to be better equipped than her rivals to deal with the dynamic and increasingly ominous national security challenges of our times.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy and a columnist for the Washington Times.