Al Armendariz: Authoritarian, and Ignorant of History
Winfield Myers • April 27, 2012 9:47am • Uncategorized
When Obama administration EPA administrator Al Armendariz used an historical analogy to brag about how he and his buddies at EPA “crucify” oil and gas companies, he compared his actions to those of Roman soldiers, of whom he said:
They’d go into a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw, and they would crucify them.
Thuggish, as one would expect from this administration. And ignorant–as one would expect from such people, too.
During the classical period, when Roman rule was extended throughout the Mediterranean basin, the ancestors of the Turks who hundreds of years later (during the eleventh century) invaded Anatolia and conquered formerly Roman towns one by one were still in Central Asia. The Romans didn’t conquer Turkish villages; the Turks conquered Roman (Byzantine) towns, including Constantinople in 1453.
What’s this country coming to when our ruler’s apparatchiks don’t even know the facts about historical thugs they seek to emulate?
Romney’s New Campaign Slogan, Post-Dog
Winfield Myers • April 18, 2012 18:04pm • Uncategorized
UCLA Honors Sharia Apologist Khaled Abou El Fadl
Winfield Myers • April 3, 2012 14:25pm • Uncategorized
Today at FrontPage Magazine, my Middle East Forum colleague Cinnamon Stillwell, along with Judith Greblya, report on UCLA’s most recent effort to whitewash Sharia and one of its most prominent proponents, law professor Khaled Abou El Fadl. The article in full is below.
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Academic self-congratulation reached new heights at the University of California, Los Angeles on March 21, 2012, with “An Event Honoring Professor Khaled Abou El Fadl.” Abou El Fadl—Omar and Azmeralda Alfi Distinguished Professor in Islamic Law and chair of the Islamic Studies Interdepartmental Program at UCLA—was feted by the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies, the UCLA School of Law Journal of Near Eastern and Islamic Law, the UCLA School of Law Muslim Law Students Association, and the UCLA School of Law Critical Race Studies Program. Eighty students, professors, and community members gathered to commemorate “the world’s leading authority on Islamic law and Islam, and the prominent scholar in the field of human rights,” according to the event description. In reality, Fadl is an apologist for radical Islam who routinely denies valid concerns over the human rights abuses inherent to Sharia (Islamic) law while charging its critics with “Islamophobia.”
Cheryl Harris, Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Professor of Civil Liberties and Civil Rights at UCLA, opened the event by hailing Abou El Fadl as a hero in “the struggle against Islamophobia in America.” Persecuted for the “sins he has committed . . . from the sin of being a scholar to standing up against the egregious vilification of Muslims in the West,” Abou El Fadl—in Harris’s fevered imagination—is a victim of slander from both liberals and conservatives. Ratcheting up the melodrama even further, she then declared that “the Korematsu trope has been recycled in the post-9/11 world against Muslims,” referring to the 1944 United States Supreme Court case deciding the constitutionality of the order to intern Japanese-Americans during WWII. This ludicrous comparison has been made on more than one such occasion; it never seems to lose its appeal to academic peddlers of victimhood.
Continuing this theme, George Bisharat, a law professor at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, reveled in sinister—albeit imaginary—campaigns to stifle academic freedom. He focused on a March 2011 Hastings conference that he organized titled, “Litigating Palestine: Can Courts Secure Palestinian Rights?” The conference featured a roster of anti-Israel speakers advocating the delegitimization of Israel through U.S. courts—otherwise known as lawfare. Because of the radical, one-sided nature of the conference, local Jewish leaders expressed their reservations to Hastings dean Frank Wu, who subsequently canceled his welcoming address and the law school’s official co-sponsorship. Bisharat objected to Wu’s actions, telling the San Francisco Chronicle that “opponents had wrongly accused the conference of ‘Israeli-bashing.” Yet journalist Stephen Schwartz, who attended the conference and reported on it for Campus Watch, wrote:
In fact, that’s exactly what took place at the conference. The anti-Israeli rhetoric of the participants was notably extreme, and even bizarre. . . . Hastings officials were correct in withdrawing their sponsorship and canceling the participation of their dean in this effort.
Bisharat’s bitterness lingers, for he again chastised Hastings officials for withdrawing their sponsorship and, in the process, revealed his anti-Semitic conspiracy mongering. Claiming he initially believed that opposition came from “a few alumni who were troubled by the one-sided group of speakers,” he added:
[B]ut when I dug deeper and spoke with the dean, it was clear to me that it was the Jews. The Jews were behind a united attempt to silence academic freedom.
So anti-Semitism had no place at the conference—if only those conniving Jews who attempted to silence it had known that!
Sherman Jackson, who now occupies the Saudi-funded (and grandiosely titled) King Faisal Chair of Islamic Thought and Culture and Professor of Religion and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, followed, explaining that it was a “matter of duty to come and speak here today.” Adding to the chorus of voices lauding Abou El Fadl’s heroism against the supposed onslaught of American Islamophobia, Jackson—also known as Abdal Hakim Jackson—then noted:
I am an African-American convert to Islam. I live in a so-called democratic country. America has been a ‘democratic’ country for two-hundred years, and yet has a past of deep racial issues. . . . Fadl’s struggle is our struggle as a nation. What happens to Khaled happens to us.
Having stated at a December 2009 convention that “his primary commitment was to Allah, not to America,” Jackson’s contempt for American democracy is no surprise.
Jackson congratulated the students in attendance for having the “courage to stand up against Islamophobia” by celebrating Abou El Fadl’s storied career and concluded his talk with an Arabic adage: “Those who are silent in the face of injustice are dumb mutes.” As an advocate for implementing the barbarism of Sharia law in the U.S., Jackson clearly does not apply the same standard to himself. Moreover, it takes no “courage” to participate in an event characterized by intellectual and political uniformity.
Echoing the previous speakers, Susan Slymovics, UCLA anthropology professor and director of its Center for Near Eastern Studies, concluded the evening with another fawning tribute to Abou El Fadl, whose “brave research,” she claimed, “has raised awareness about racism and Islamophobia both domestically and abroad.” If “raising awareness” about a phenomenon that does not exist—Muslims in America and throughout the West continue to thrive and enjoy the same rights and privileges as everyone else—and that is designed to silence legitimate criticism while avoiding much-needed reform is a mark of courage, then Abou El Fadl is the bravest of men.
Using the occasion as an opportunity to claim widespread Islamophobia and to bash Israel, the U.S., and the West—all the while demonstrating a comical capacity for self-regard—these four speakers provided a fitting tribute to Abou El Fadl, who has made a career out of doing exactly the same thing. He should feel honored, indeed.
Judith Greblya co-wrote this article with Cinnamon Stillwell, the West Coast Representative for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum, which commissioned this work. Send email to jgreblya@aol.com and stillwell@meforum.org.
UCLA Chancellor Gene Block may reached at:
Phone: 310-825-2151
Fax: 310-206-6030
U.S. mail
UCLA Chancellor’s Office
Box 951405, 2147 Murphy Hall
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1405
Omid Safi’s Exquisite Art of Moral Equivalency
Winfield Myers • March 25, 2012 13:43pm • Uncategorized
Today at American Thinker, I critique the latest attempt by a professor of Middle East studies to obfuscate the danger posed by jihadi terrorists in the West:
[Ed. note: this essay appears at American Thinker as, "No, Hasan and Bales Are Not Equivalent."]
Last week, Omid Safi, a professor of Islamic studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, used his blog “What Would Muhammad Do” at the Religion News Service to claim a moral equivalency between Ft. Hood jihadist Major Nidal Malik Hasan and U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales. “When Americans Kill vs. When Muslims Kill” is a morally repugnant attempt to claim a double standard in the way Americans react to mass murder. In this, Safi echoes the party line of the Middle East studies establishment, which blames the West for the region’s political and technological backwardness while largely ignoring its systemic social problems, from the subservient roles of women to the glorification of terrorism.
Rather than proving his claim, however, Safi highlights what he attempts to deny — that the double standard in Americans’ treatment of Muslims leads Americans to turn a blind eye toward Islamic radicals while condemning non-Muslims harshly. Willful blindness, not bigotry, is the hallmark of the contemporary West’s treatment of Islamic radicalism.
He writes:
When Americans kill, it is portrayed as an aberration, an act of a tormented and troubled individual. When Muslims kill, it is covered as a signal of a communal, global genocidal tendency.
And:
In short, the assumption that [sic] when we Americans kill, it is an aberration from our good nature. Even if the act is abominable, it is said to be purely an individual act totally disconnected from any larger institutional or political context. However, when Muslims kill, it is a sign of a world-wide, evil ideology of jihad and terrorism.
Hasan, a psychiatrist who slaughtered thirteen fellow soldiers while shouting “Allahu Akbar” (“God is great”), psychologically abused his patients — weary, sometimes mentally fragile Iraq War veterans seeking medical treatment. He condemned their service to their country, attempted to convert some to Islam, and told an Army captain that she was an infidel who would be “ripped to shreds” and would “burn in hell” because she was not a Muslim. His file reveals years of unprofessional, highly aggressive behavior toward Army personnel driven by his desire to carry out jihad — holy war — against Americans. Private business cards found in his apartment after his arrest stated that he was an “SoA (SWT),” an acronym found on jihadist websites that stands for “soldier of Allah” and “Subhanahu Wa Ta’ala,” or “Glory to God.”
Yet, in spite of a mountain of evidence against Hasan, official government reactions to his murderous rampage and to other actions by radical Islamists reveal anything but bigotry against Muslims:
- The official Department of Defense report on the murder of the thirteen servicemen at Fort Hood does not mention Hasan by name, nor does it mention the words “jihad” or “Muslim,” while “Islam” occurs only in a reference footnote.
- U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder refused to state that radical Islam played any role in the Fort Hood shooting or the attempted bombing of Times Square in New York City in 2009.
- Federal officials regularly resort to euphemisms, including “overseas contingency operation,” “a campaign against extremists who wish to do us harm,” and “countering violent extremism” to describe America’s wars against radical Islamists and terror-sponsoring nations.
That Hasan got away with his actions without being expelled from the Army, if not prosecuted, is testimony to the West’s pusillanimity in the face of radical Islam and its apologists, not its bigotry against them.
Hasan is entirely representative of jihadists who infiltrate Western institutions and kill in the name of Islam. Bales, who gunned down sixteen innocent Afghan civilians, is undeniably unrepresentative of U.S. military personnel, whether in Afghanistan or elsewhere. Countless Americans have given their lives to protect Muslims from those same Muslims’ brethren, including Americans lost through the implementation of military tactics that place U.S. personnel in increased danger of death in order to spare civilians from casualties.
Safi’s analogy fails also because Hasan was in fact in contact with radical Islamists and jihadist websites around the world (although Safi claims he acted as a “lone person”), including the late Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni cleric with whom Hasan exchanged ten to twenty e-mails and at whose mosque he worshipped in Virginia. In the wake of Hasan’s actions, al-Awlaki called him a “hero” and wrote:
The fact that fighting against the U.S. army is an Islamic duty today cannot be disputed. Nidal has killed soldiers who were about to be deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan in order to kill Muslims.
There is utterly no evidence that Bales acted from any religious motivation, or that he was part of a larger network. Moreover, where is any praise of Bales, from anyone? Both President Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta called Afghan president Karzai to apologize for Bales’s act. Bales is under arrest, held in solitary confinement, and faces charges that could lead to the death penalty. Safi, desperate to link two disparate killers, is grasping at straws.
Safi has a long history of defending radical Islamists and smearing his critics, all while posing as a progressive Muslim fighting for justice. From classroom assignments in which scholars with whom he disagrees are labeled “Islamophobes” to charging falsely that Robert Spencer threatened to kill him, Safi lashes out at those who would expose his efforts to shill for Islamists. In his latest apologia for terrorists, he insults the professionalism of the American military, the decency of the American people, and the truth.
Winfield Myers is director of academic affairs at the Middle East Forum. This essay was written for Campus Watch, a project of the Forum.
Contact information for the chancellor of UNC-Chapel Hill:
Holden Thorpe
Phone: 919-962-1365
Fax: 919-962-1647
holden_thorpe@unc.edu
Letter to UCI on Rejection of Wallenberg Statue
Phil Orenstein • March 5, 2012 23:34pm • Uncategorized
Dear Dean Lewis, President Yudof, and Chancellor Drake,
As a former college lecturer and current member of the National Conference on Jewish Affairs, I find it appalling and perplexing that University of California, Irvine would summarily reject, without explanation, the proposal for the erection of a commemorative Wallenberg statue on the University of California, Irvine campus (1). This would have served as an exemplary educational tool to teach the majority of the student body vastly unfamiliar with the heroic deeds of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who risked his life to save 100,000 Hungarian Jews from Nazi death camps (2).
Peter Lancz, son of Hungarian master sculptor, Paul Lancz who was saved by Wallenberg himself, had originally proposed to University of California president Mark Yudof that the statue be erected on the UC Irvine campus, which has in recent years become notorious for rampant anti-Semitic hate speech and obstruction of pro-Israel speakers. This stellar opportunity, funded through outside donors, has now been discarded, further tarnishing the reputation of UC Irvine.
During this centennial celebration year of Wallenberg’s birth, Peter Lancz is spearheading a nationwide effort to raise awareness and keep the memory of this true hero and savior alive, fulfilling his father’s dream of fighting bigotry and anti-Semitism on campus, which in his own words is “the cancer of the human soul.” The proposal was forwarded to UC Irvine Chancellor Michael Drake, and finally sent on to the Claire Trevor School of the Arts to be considered by the Public Art Program Council.
How ironic that a few days after the rejection letter, the Claire Trevor School of the Arts hosted a conference of rabid anti-Israel artists and filmmakers entitled “…and Europe will be stunned: The Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland,” envisioning the return of over three million Jews to Poland (3). This is not an actual political movement, but an artistic project to demonize Israel by deconstructing Zionism as the malicious product of European propaganda, “at the price of bringing a disaster upon the people already inhabiting that land” in the words of one of the speakers. Now anti-Semitic hate speech is considered rational discourse and even merits an arts conference espousing, under the umbrella of institutionalized “academic freedom” the proposition that Israel has no right to exist.
But the Wallenberg rejection further exposes “the cancer of the human soul” long entrenched at UC Irvine. The arts conference was bland compared to the epidemic of virulent hate speech and anti-Semitic attacks on the UC Irvine campus, that Judea Pearl, father of Daniel Pearl, journalist murdered by Islamic terrorists, called the “proving grounds for a nationally orchestrated Israel-defamation campaign.” Throughout the school year and especially during “Israel Apartheid Week” extremist speakers call for terrorist attacks on Israel and jihad against the United States. Imam Amir-Abdel Malik-Ali, a notorious supporter of Hamas, Hezbollah and al-Qaeda, has spoken at UCI numerous times, calling for the destruction of the “apartheid state of Israel,” comparing Jews to Nazis, and going on long anti-Semitic tirades about the “disproportionate numbers of Jews, Zionist Jews, in the media, in finance and foreign policy.” He preached suicide bombing of Israel to a campus audience saying: “That ain’t suicide, that’s martyrdom.” This is pure incitement to violence against Jews and it has precipitated hostile attacks, rock throwing and desecration of a Holocaust memorial on campus (4).
While such virulent hate speech and incitement gets prominent billing on campus, the UCI chapter of the Muslim Student Association (MSA), the Muslim Student Union (MSU) has wantonly shut down pro-Israel speakers and events, including disruption of speeches by Daniel Pipes and Israeli ambassador Michael Oren. But the MSA chapter of UCI freely hosted unobstructed events with former MSA president Amir Mertaban, an admitted supporter of the Taliban in the 1980’s, who proselytized the students in defense of Osama bin Ladin, jihad, polygamy and, and in praise of Hamas’ “freedom fighting missions.”(5)
MSA is the campus division of the Muslim Brotherhood, the movement founded in Egypt in 1928 that seeks to re-establish the imperial Islamic state, transforming the world to Islam by infiltrating democratic institutions (6). MSA leaders have made statements condemning the Unites States and calling for the killing of all Jews (7). Recently the MSA has been in the news as the campus incubator of radicalization and recruitment of some of the most dangerous homegrown jihadists and global terrorists, such as al-Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, NYC subway bomber Adis Medunjanin, convicted terrorists Aafia Siddiqui, Zachary Chesser, Jesse Morton, Ramy Zamzam, and Washeed Zaman, convicted of plotting to blow up transatlantic flights, and many others (8).It is a disgrace and peril to us all that campuses are allowed to host these terrorist breeding grounds. UCI is culpable as well of providing a stately academic platform to legitimize the nefarious agenda of this dangerous campus organization and the poisonous radical speakers they present.
The rejection of the Wallenberg statue proposal for the UCI campus, which would serve as a model of courage and true heroism for students to discover, was a regrettable decision which betrays a long-standing pattern of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel discrimination. However, the Wallenberg rejection and obstruction of pro-Israel speakers reveals the deeper issue of the moral bankruptcy of a campus administration that would unreservedly prop up terrorism-supporting speakers and dangerous organizations at the expense of academic freedom and student safety. This is not only a disgrace to the academic traditions of scholarship and the free and open exchange of ideas but a serious threat to our national security that requires immediate attention and investigation.
Sincerely,
Phil Orenstein
National Conference on Jewish Affairs
(1) http://garyfouse.blogspot.com/2012/02/uc-irvine-school-of-fine-arts-rejects.html
(2) http://cifwatch.com/2010/10/03/a-fathers-dream-a-sons-mission-and-the-memory-of-a-righteous-martyr/
(3) http://studioart.arts.uci.edu/gallery/eflierCAC.html
(4) http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/23/muslim-hate-groups/
(5) http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11499/pub_detail.asp
(6) Shariah: The Threat to America, Center for Security Policy Press, 2010, p. 109
(7) Ibid, p. 136
(8) http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11499/pub_detail.asp
Requiescat in Bellum, Andrew Breitbart
Laurie Morrow • March 1, 2012 11:14am • Uncategorized
America has lost a fine and fearless defender of freedom, with the death of Andrew Breitbart. He understood, as very few conservatives do, the necessity and power of popular culture to spread conservative ideas. I met him only once, at Restoration Weekend, in 2006. He invited me to join his group of friends for a drink and was warm and gracious to me, an older woman with neither wealth nor power – an excellent test of a man’s character. I’d say “Requiescat in pace,” but this Happy Warrior wouldn’t enjoy that. And so, Andrew, Requiescat in bellum: may you continue eternally a joyous champion of freedom.
Giving Up Liberty for Lent? Obama’s Statist Religion
Winfield Myers • February 28, 2012 18:15pm • Uncategorized
According to modern liberalism’s creed, to oppose the state’s intrusion into civil society is, perversely, to impose one’s own beliefs on others. Thus, one who opposes forcing institutions connected to the Catholic Church to pay for medical insurance that includes practices the Church considers immoral and sinful–contraception, abortifacients, sterilization–imposes his private beliefs on others.
The origins of such illogic is clear: the state, not the individual, and not Burke’s “little platoons” that make up civil society, controls everything and, by its benevolence, allows individuals, civil, and religious organizations–all those layers that buffer the individual’s relationship with the state and limit the state’s authority over the individual and the organizations to which he may belong–to exercise whatever degree of self-governance it deems proper.
Therefore, when one opposes the state-sanctioned order, one imposes one’s beliefs on one’s fellow subjects (for surely “citizen” is a misnomer here) simply by the act of defying state decrees that seek to control and, eventually, eviscerate civil society. Acting in accord with one’s conscience on matters of religion, or on moral and ethical questions of any kind, ceases to be an exercise of rights guaranteed by the Constitution, which itself declares such rights to be God-given and not man-made, and becomes a violation of the state-imposed uber-conscience. Hegel lives.
Francis Cardinal George, archbishop of Chicago, describes this unconstitutional power-grab by the Obama administration in his February 26 column in Catholic New World, the newspaper of the archdiocese; here is a small excerpt:
Freedom of worship was guaranteed in the Constitution of the former Soviet Union. You could go to church, if you could find one. The church, however, could do nothing except conduct religious rites in places of worship-no schools, religious publications, health care institutions, organized charity, ministry for justice and the works of mercy that flow naturally from a living faith. All of these were co-opted by the government. We fought a long cold war to defeat that vision of society.
The strangest accusation in this manipulated public discussion has the bishops not respecting the separation between church and state. The bishops would love to have the separation between church and state we thought we enjoyed just a few months ago, when we were free to run Catholic institutions in conformity with the demands of the Catholic faith, when the government couldn’t tell us which of our ministries are Catholic and which not, when the law protected rather than crushed conscience. The state is making itself into a church. The bishops didn’t begin this dismaying conflict nor choose its timing. We would love to have it ended as quickly as possible. It’s up to the government to stop the attack.
Obama’s Endless Apologies to Radical Muslims
Winfield Myers • February 27, 2012 19:40pm • Uncategorized
When you’re upset with someone, especially in matters concerning religion and politics, I’m sure you do what hordes of Afghans did in the wake of the burning of a Qur’an by U.S. forces: riot, pillage, murder. Hey, it’s the way things get done, right? And if you’re a weak U.S. president, you apologize for this act abjectly while ignoring the many atrocities committed against American troops by the people they’re trying to protect–and while simultaneously attempting to weaken the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious liberty significantly.
This cartoon, by Tony Branco, sums it up:
Gingrich: Obama ‘Most Dangerous President in U.S. History’
Candace de Russy • February 21, 2012 16:26pm • Uncategorized
Defeating him in November, argues the presidential candidate searingly, is crucial to our national security.
Symposium on Putin
Jay Bergman • February 17, 2012 16:24pm • Uncategorized
The text of a symposium that appeared online today in Frontpage Magazine on the current prime minister of Russia, Vladimir Putin, in which I was among the participants, can be accessed at:
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/02/17/symposium-putin-forever/print/
