Apparently millions of American voters believe the federal government should be required by law to provide things for the folks – education, healthcare, good jobs, financial security in old age, on and on.
That belief runs counter to how America was established in the late 18th century when our first-elected officials put their game plan into effect.
Basically their vision was a limited one. Citizens would have basic freedoms to worship, vote, speak openly without being punished, assemble without interference, and pursue happiness within the framework of the law.
It was entirely up to the folks how they would use those freedoms. No one was forced to go to the voting booth as they are in Australia, no one was forced to believe in God as they were in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Today the question of individual choice -- the quest to succeed or fail on your own -- has almost been obliterated by politicians and judges who don't respect the concept of competition and the struggle to prosper.
In short, they are evolving away from how this country was established.
In addition, they are deceiving the American people into believing that their success and well-being will be almost assured by a giant federal nanny state, which is absolutely impossible in a nation of nearly 320 million people.
Politicians deceive because it is an easy way to seduce voters unhappy with their circumstance in life.
When Bernie Sanders tells Americans that the economic system is rigged against them, he destroys incentive.
Why work hard if the big banks will harm you no matter what? If I am failing, it's not my fault -- the phantom billionaires are hurting me.
Sanders is correct that the feds need to stop fraud in the marketplace, but his message of wall-to-wall capitalist corruption is false and pernicious.
When a guy like Rand Paul tells Americans that they should be able to intoxicate themselves at will and public safety be dammed, he gives license to behavior that has destroyed untold billions of people the world over. Not to mention the message that legalized drugs sends to children.
We don't live in a vacuum here. The condition of others can directly affect us, just look at the drunk-driving stats.
When Al Sharpton and his grievance lobby assert that black Americans are oppressed by a racist system bent on hurting them, he provides an excuse for a litany of apathetic and destructive behaviors.
The kid struggling in a bad school with parents who don't care needs all the encouragement leadership can give him or her, not a list of historical atrocities that can cause even more bitterness.
The cold fact is very few powerful people are willing to address vexing problems by telling the truth to the folks.
Here's what the government owes us:
Protection from foreign concerns who would harm us.
Protection from criminals who would harm us.
A secure border system whereby our immigration laws are enforced and respected.
An infrastructure of mass transportation that is safe and efficient. What the U.S. airlines are doing to their passengers is a scandal and the fact that we don't have a high-speed rail system is flat out irresponsible.
The government also has an obligation to protect our constitutional rights and to protect private property.
Seizing assets after an American dies is abhorrent. Many Americans work hard all their lives to give their children a better situation than they had.
Finally, it is the duty of those in power to foster a system that allows every single American a truly fair shot at material and emotional success.
That means schools with strong educational and disciplinary standards; subsidized benefits for the poor and infirmed that are delivered responsibly with clear guidelines; also, protections in the workplace against companies that would violate labor laws and exploit powerless employees.
That's the heart of what the government owes us and social engineering is not part of it, nor is free education, nor free health care, nor a free income if you choose to lay about.
Workers pay taxes to support the government, as well as for personal social security in old age, which the feds have mismanaged in the extreme.
We deserve honesty and responsible spending, not wasteful programs designed to secure votes.
Last week I spoke with Donald Trump about his promise to return jobs from overseas.
Mr. Trump, Senator Sanders and Secretary Clinton all say they will punish American companies who move jobs abroad.
A president could certainly make life very difficult for corporations that ship jobs out, but the truth is that many of the lost jobs pay little and even if they do come back it's a marginal play.
The big problem is that millions of Americans are so poorly educated and personally irresponsible they simply cannot compete in the free marketplace.
So what are the power-seekers going to do about that?
Blank stares.
Now the race hustlers, who apparently have not walked the streets of poor neighborhoods lately, immediately accused me of racism.
And that is why the acute problem of cultural deprivation among underclass children of all colors is never addressed. The smear merchants hammer anyone who does so.
It is beyond disgraceful that powerful people look away from the real problem.
Mr. Trump is noble in his intent to create jobs and train Americans to do them.
But that will require much more than trade deals and rhetoric.
It will require a cultural change in many working class and poor precincts. If you reject the conventional road to success -- education and hard work -- you will fail in our capitalistic system … no matter what kind of outlandish promises Bernie Sanders makes.
It is all about personal responsibility and motivation, and who is preaching that message?
Who?
The truth is that individual motivation is being destroyed by phony politicians seeking power by promising an endless series of entitlements to a population that is moving away from achievement and into the gimme zone … gimme, gimme, gimme.
Until that deep cultural flaw is exposed, until the phonies, race hustlers and corporate greed heads are called out, we will continue to see big lies spouted by deceivers and enabled by a gutless media.
God help America.
And that's the memo.
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Showing posts with label the solution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the solution. Show all posts
2016-04-18
The Big Lie of the Presidential Campaign
2015-08-29
Restore American Exceptionalism — Before It's Too Late
Born of the revolutionary ideal that we are “endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights,” we were, first, an example to the world of freedom’s possibilities. During World War II, we became freedom’s defender, at the end of the Cold War, the world’s sole superpower. We did not seek the position. It is ours because of our ideals and our power, and the power of our ideals. As British historian Andrew Roberts has observed, “In the debate over whether America was born great, achieved greatness or had greatness thrust upon her, the only possible conclusion must be: all three.”
No other nation, international body or “community of nations” can do what we do. It isn’t just our involvement in world events that has been essential for the triumph of freedom. It is our leadership. For the better part of a century, security and freedom for millions of people around the globe have depended on America’s military, economic, political and diplomatic might. For the most part, until the administration of Barack Obama, we delivered.
Since Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed us the “Arsenal of Democracy” in 1940, Republican and Democratic presidents alike have understood the indispensable nature of American power. Presidents from Truman to Nixon, from Kennedy to Reagan, knew that America’s strength had to be safeguarded, her supremacy maintained. In the 1940s American leadership was essential to victory in World War II, and the liberation of millions from the grip of fascism. In the Cold War American leadership guaranteed the survival of freedom, the liberation of Eastern Europe and the defeat of Soviet totalitarianism. In this century it will be essential for the defeat of militant Islam.
Yet despite the explosive spread of terrorist ideology and organizations, the establishment of an Islamic State caliphate in the heart of the Middle East, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and increasing threats from Iran, China, North Korea and Russia, President Obama has departed from this 75-year, largely bipartisan tradition of ensuring America’s pre-eminence and strength.
He has abandoned Iraq, leaving a vacuum that is being tragically and ominously filled by our enemies. He is on course to forsake Afghanistan as well.
He has made dangerous cuts to America’s military. Combined with the sequestration mandated in the Budget Control Act of 2011, these cuts have, according to former Army Chief of Staff Ray Odierno, left the Army as unready as it has been at any other time in its history. Chief of Naval Operations Jonathan Greenert has testified that “naval readiness is at its lowest point in many years.” According to Air Force Chief of Staff Mark Welsh, the current aircraft fleet is “now the smallest and oldest in the history of our service.”
For seven decades, both Republican and Democratic presidents have understood the importance of ensuring the supremacy of America’s nuclear arsenal. President Obama seems not to. He has advocated cutting our nuclear force in the naïve hope that this will persuade rogue regimes to do the same. He has imposed limits on our ability to modernize and maintain nuclear weapons. He has reduced the nation’s missile-defense capabilities.
He says that he is committed to preventing nuclear proliferation. For more than 45 years, presidents of both parties have recognized that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is vital in this effort. Signed by 190 countries, including Iran, the NPT has been arguably the single most effective multilateral arms-control agreement in history. President Obama stands ready to gut it. Among the many dangerous deficiencies in his nuclear deal with Iran is the irreversible damage it will do to the international nonproliferation regime contained in the NPT.
Allowing the Iranians to continue to enrich uranium and agreeing to the removal of all restraints on their nuclear program in a few short years virtually guarantees that they will become a nuclear-weapons state, thus undermining the fundamental agreement at the heart of the NPT. President Obama is unraveling this international structure as part of an agreement that provides a pathway for the world’s worst state-sponsor of terror to acquire nuclear weapons.
Nearly everything the president has told us about his Iranian agreement is false. He has said it will prevent the Iranians from acquiring nuclear weapons, but it will actually facilitate and legitimize an Iranian nuclear arsenal. He has said this deal will stop nuclear proliferation, but it will actually accelerate it, as nations across the Middle East work to acquire their own weapons in response to America’s unwillingness to stop the Iranian nuclear program.
President Obama told us he would never accept a deal based on trust. Members of his administration, including his secretary of energy and deputy national-security adviser, said the nuclear deal would be verifiable with “anywhere, anytime” inspections. Instead, the Obama deal provides the Iranians with months to delay inspections and fails to address past clandestine work at military sites. Inspections at these sites are covered in secret deals, which is historic, though not in the way the president claims. Under the reported provisions of the secret deals, the Iranians get to inspect themselves for these past infractions. Inevitably these provisions will be cited by the Iranians as a precedent when they are caught cheating in the future.
The president has tried to sell this bad deal by claiming that there is no alternative, save war. In fact, this agreement makes war more, not less, likely. In addition to accelerating the spread of nuclear weapons across the Middle East, it will provide the Iranians with hundreds of billions of dollars in sanctions relief, which even the Obama administration admits likely will be used to fund terror. The deal also removes restrictions on Iran’s ballistic missile program; lifts the ban on conventional weapons sales; and lifts sanctions on Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps, on the Quds Force, and on Quds Force Commander Qassem Soleimani. Under Mr. Soleimani’s leadership, the Quds Force sows violence and supports terror across the Middle East and has been responsible for the deaths of American service members in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A vote for the Obama nuclear deal is not a vote for peace or security. It is a vote for an agreement that facilitates Tehran’s deadly objectives with potentially catastrophic consequences for the United States and our allies.
The Obama nuclear agreement with Iran is tragically reminiscent of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s Munich agreement in 1938. Each was negotiated from a position of weakness by a leader willing to concede nearly everything to appease an ideological dictator. Hitler got Czechoslovakia. The mullahs in Tehran get billions of dollars and a pathway to a nuclear arsenal. Munich led to World War II. The Obama agreement will lead to a nuclear-armed Iran, a nuclear-arms race in the Middle East and, more than likely, the first use of a nuclear weapon since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The U.S. Congress should reject this deal and reimpose the sanctions that brought Iran to the table in the first place. It is possible to prevent Iran from attaining a nuclear weapon, but only if the U.S. negotiates from a position of strength, refuses to concede fundamental points and recognizes that the use of military force will be required if diplomacy fails to convince Iran to abandon its quest for nuclear weapons.
As America faces a world of rising security threats, we must resolve to take action and shouldn’t lose hope. Just as one president has left a path of destruction in his wake, one president can rescue us. The right person in the Oval Office can restore America’s strength and alliances, defeat our enemies, and keep us safe. It won’t be easy. There is a path forward, but there are difficult decisions to be made and very little time.
We are living in what columnist Charles Krauthammer has called “a hinge point of history.” It will take a president equal to this moment to lead us through. America needs a president who recognizes that everything the nation must do requires having a U.S. military with capabilities that are second to none—on land, in the air, at sea, in space and in cyberspace. The peace and security of the world and the survival of our freedom depend on it. We must choose wisely.
As citizens, we have another obligation. We have a duty to protect our ideals and our freedoms by safeguarding our history. We must ensure that our children know the truth about who we are, what we’ve done, and why it is uniquely America’s duty to be freedom’s defender.
They should know about the boys of Pointe du Hoc and Doolittle’s Raiders, the battles of Midway and Iwo Jima. They should learn about the courage of the young Americans who fought the Nazis at the Battle of the Bulge and the Japanese on Okinawa. They should learn why America was right to end the war by dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and about the fundamental decency of a nation that established the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. They need to know about the horror of the Holocaust, and what it means to promise “never again.”
They should know that once there was an empire so evil and bereft of truth it had to build a wall to keep its citizens in, and that the free world, led by America, defeated it. They need to know about the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11, the courage of the first responders and the heroism of the passengers on Flight 93. They should understand what kind of world militant Islam will create if we don’t defeat it.
They should learn about great men like George C. Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower and Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan. We must teach them what it took to prevail over evil in the 20th century and what it will take in the 21st. We must make sure they understand that it is the brave men and women of the U.S. armed forces who defend our freedom and secure it for millions of others as well.
Our children need to know that they are citizens of the most powerful, good and honorable nation in the history of mankind—the exceptional nation. They must know that they are the inheritors of a great legacy and a great duty. Ordinary Americans have done heroic things to guarantee freedom’s survival. Now, it is up to us. Speaking at Omaha Beach on the 40th anniversary of the D-Day landings, President Reagan put it this way, “We will always remember. We will always be proud. We will always be prepared, so we may always be free.”
Mr. Cheney, former vice president of the United States, and Ms. Cheney are the authors of “Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America,” from which this article was adapted; the book is being published Sept. 1 by Simon & Schuster’s Threshold Editions.
2015-02-22
Race Relations and Law Enforcement
Race Relations and Law Enforcement
Jason L. Riley
2015 January
Editorial Board Member, Wall Street Journal
Jason L. Riley is an editorial board member and a senior editorial page writer at the Wall Street Journal, where he writes on politics, economics, education, immigration, and race. He is also a FOX News contributor and appears regularly on Special Report with Bret Baier. Previously, he worked for USA Today and the Buffalo News. He earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is the author of Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed.
Thomas Sowell once said that some books you write for pleasure, and others you write out of a sense of duty, because there are things to be said—and other people have better sense than to say them. My new book, Please Stop Helping Us, falls into that latter category. When I started out as a journalist 20 years ago, I had no expectation of focusing on race-related topics. People like Sowell and Shelby Steele and Walter Williams and a few other independent black thinkers, to my mind at least, had already said what needed to be said, had been saying it for decades, and had been saying it more eloquently than I ever could. But over the years, and with some prodding from those guys, it occurred to me that not enough younger blacks were following in their footsteps. It also occurred to me that many public policies aimed at the black underclass were just as wrongheaded as ever. The fight wasn’t over. A new generation of black thinkers needed to explain what’s working and what isn’t, and why, to a new generation of readers. And the result is this book, which I hope will help to bring more light than heat to the discussion of race.
The book is not an autobiography or a memoir, but I do tell a few stories about growing up black and male in the inner city. And one of the stories involves a trip back home to Buffalo, New York, where I was born and raised. I was visiting my older sister shortly after I had begun working at the Wall Street Journal, and I was chatting with her daughter, my niece, who was maybe in the second grade at the time. I was asking her about school, her favorite subjects, that sort of thing, when she stopped me and said, “Uncle Jason, why you talk white?” Then she turned to her little friend who was there and said, “Don’t my uncle sound white? Why he tryin’ to sound so smart?”
She was just teasing, of course. I smiled and they enjoyed a little chuckle at my expense. But what she said stayed with me. I couldn’t help thinking: Here were two young black girls, seven or eight years old, already linking speech patterns to race and intelligence. They already had a rather sophisticated awareness that, as blacks, white-sounding speech was not only to be avoided in their own speech but mocked in the speech of others.
I shouldn’t have been too surprised by this, and I wasn’t. My siblings, along with countless other black friends and relatives, teased me the same way when I was growing up. And other black professionals have told similar stories. What I had forgotten is just how early these attitudes take hold—how soon this counterproductive thinking and behavior begins.
New York City has the largest school system in America. Eighty percent of black kids in New York public schools are performing below grade level. And a big part of the problem is a black subculture that rejects attitudes and behaviors that are conducive to academic success. Black kids read half as many books and watch twice as much television as their white counterparts, for example. In other words, a big part of the problem is a culture that produces little black girls and boys who are already worried about acting and sounding white by the time they are in second grade.
Another big part of the problem is a reluctance to speak honestly about these cultural shortcomings. Many whites fear being called racists. And many black leaders have a vested interest in blaming black problems primarily on white racism, so that is the narrative they push regardless of the reality. Racism has become an all-purpose explanation for bad black outcomes, be they social or economic. If you disagree and are white, you’re a bigot. If you disagree and are black, you’re a sell-out.
The shooting death of a young black man by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, last year touched off a national discussion about everything except the aberrant behavior of so many young black men that results in such frequent encounters with police. We talked about racial prejudice, poverty, unemployment, profiling, the tensions between law enforcement and poor black communities, and so forth. Rarely did we hear any discussion of black crime rates.
Homicide is the leading cause of death for young black men in the U.S., and around 90 percent of the perpetrators are also black. Yet for months we’ve had protesters nationwide pretending that our morgues are full of young black men because cops are shooting them. Around 98 percent of black shooting deaths do not involve police. In fact, a cop is six times more likely to be shot by someone black than the opposite. The protestors are pushing a false anti-cop narrative, and everyone from the president on down has played along.
Any candid debate on race and criminal justice in this country would have to start with the fact that blacks commit an astoundingly disproportionate number of crimes. Blacks constitute about 13 percent of the population, yet between 1976 and 2005 they committed more than half of all murders in the U.S. The black arrest rate for most offenses—including robbery, aggravated assault, and property crimes—is typically two to three times their representation in the population. So long as blacks are committing such an outsized amount of crime, young black men will be viewed suspiciously and tensions between police and crime-ridden communities will persist. The U.S. criminal justice system, currently headed by a black attorney general who reports to a black president, is a reflection of this reality, not its cause. If we want to change negative perceptions of young black men, we must change the behavior that is driving those perceptions. But pointing this out has become almost taboo. How can we even begin to address problems if we won’t discuss them honestly?
“High rates of black violence in the late twentieth century are a matter of historical fact, not bigoted imagination,” wrote the late Harvard Law professor William Stuntz. “The trends reached their peak not in the land of Jim Crow but in the more civilized North, and not in the age of segregation but in the decades that saw the rise of civil rights for African Americans—and of African American control of city governments.”
The Left wants to blame these outcomes on racial animus and poverty, but back in the 1940s and ’50s, when racial discrimination was legal and black poverty was much higher than today, the black crime rate was lower. The Left wants to blame these outcomes on “the system,” but blacks have long been part of running that system. Black crime and incarceration rates spiked in the 1970s and ’80s in cities such as Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, and Philadelphia under black mayors and black police chiefs. Some of the most violent cities in the U.S. today are run by blacks.
Some insist that our jails and prisons are teeming with young black men due primarily to racist drug laws, but the reality is that the drug laws are neither racist nor driving the black incarceration rate. It’s worth remembering that the harsher penalties for crack cocaine offenses that were passed in the 1980s were supported by most of the Congressional Black Caucus, including Rep. Charles Rangel of Harlem, who at the time headed the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control. Crack was destroying black communities and many black political leaders wanted dealers to face longer sentences. In other words, black legislators in Washington led the effort to impose tougher drug laws, a fact often forgotten by critics today.
When these laws passed, even their opponents didn’t claim that they were racist. Those charges came later, as the racially disparate impact of the laws became apparent. What’s been lost in the discussion is whether these laws leave law-abiding blacks better off. Do you make life in the ghetto harder or easier by sending thugs home sooner rather than later? Liberal elites would have us deny what black ghetto residents know to be the truth. These communities aren’t dangerous because of racist cops or judges or sentencing guidelines. They’re dangerous mainly due to black criminals preying on black victims.
Nor is the racial disparity in prison inmates explained by the enforcement of drug laws. Blacks are about 37.5 percent of the population in state prisons, which house nearly 90 percent of the nation’s inmates. Remove drug offenders from that population and the percentage of black prisoners only drops to 37 percent. What drives black incarceration rates are violent offenses, not drug offenses. Blacks commit violent crimes at seven to ten times the rate that whites do. The fact that their victims tend to be of the same race suggests that young black men in the ghetto live in danger of being shot by each other, not cops. Nor is this a function of blacks being picked on by cops who are “over-policing” certain neighborhoods. Research has long shown that the rate at which blacks are arrested is nearly identical to the rate at which crime victims identify blacks as their assailants. The police are in these communities because that’s where the 911 calls originate.
If liberals want to help reverse these crime trends, they would do better to focus less on supposed racial animus and more on ghetto attitudes towards school, work, marriage, and child-rearing. As recently as the early 1960s, two out of three black children were raised in two-parent households. Today, more than 70 percent are not, and the number can reach as high as 80 or 90 percent in our inner cities. For decades, studies have shown that the likelihood of teen pregnancy, drug abuse, dropping out of school and other bad social outcomes increases dramatically when fathers aren’t around. One of the most comprehensive studies ever undertaken in this regard concluded that black boys without a father are 68 percent more likely to be incarcerated than those with a father—that overall, the most critical factor affecting the prospect of young males encountering the criminal justice system is the presence of a father in the home. All other factors, including family income, are much less important.
As political scientist James Q. Wilson said, if crime is to a significant degree caused by weak character, if weak character is more likely among children of unmarried mothers, if there are no fathers who will help raise their children, acquire jobs, and protect their neighborhoods, if boys become young men with no preparation for work, if school achievement is regarded as a sign of having sold out—if all these things are true, then the chances of reducing the crime rate among low income blacks anytime soon is slim.
Many on the Left sincerely want to help the black underclass. The problem is that liberals believe bigger government is the best way to help. But having looked at the track record of government policies aimed at helping the black underclass, I’m skeptical.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson’s commencement speech at Howard University. Johnson had signed the Civil Rights Act a year earlier and would sign the Voting Rights Act two months later. And he used the speech to talk about what the government should do next on behalf of blacks. These two laws marked merely the end of the beginning, he said:
But what if Johnson was mistaken? What if there are limits to what government can do beyond removing barriers to freedom? What if the best that we can hope for from our elected officials are policies that promote equal opportunity? What if public policy makers risk creating more problems and barriers to progress when the goal is equal outcomes?
The civil rights struggles of the mid-20th century exemplified liberalism at its best. The 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act outlawed racial discrimination in employment and education and ensured the ability of blacks to register and vote. All Americans can be proud of these accomplishments. But what about the social policy and thinking that arose from the ruins of Jim Crow? Good intentions aside, which efforts have facilitated black advancement, and which efforts have impeded it?
In 1988, right around the 25th anniversary of the Great Society, Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer published a book called the The Limits of Social Policy. Glazer analyzed Great Society programs from the perspective of someone who believed that government action was the best way to improve the lot of blacks. But his assessment humbled him. He concluded that in many ways, the Great Society programs were causing just as many problems as they were solving—that good intentions aren’t enough.
Unlike Nathan Glazer, many policy makers today are still riding high on good intentions. They don’t seem particularly interested in reconsidering what has been tried, even though 50 years into the war on poverty the result isn’t pretty. While gains have been made, significant racial disparities remain in some areas and black retrogression has occurred in others. The black-white poverty gap has widened over the past decade and the black poverty rate is no longer falling. The black-white disparity in incarceration rates today is larger than it was in 1960. And the black unemployment rate has, on average, been double the white rate for five decades.
Confronted with these statistics, liberals continue to push for more of the same solutions. Last year, President Obama announced yet another federal initiative aimed at helping blacks—an increase in preschool education, even though studies (including those released by his own administration) have shown no significant impacts in education from such programs. He said that he wants to increase reading proficiency and graduation rates for minority students, yet he opposes school voucher programs that are doing both. He continues to call for job-training programs of the sort that study after study has shown to be ineffective.
Fred Siegel, an expert on urban public policy, has written extensively about the liberal flight from evidence and empiricism that began in the 1960s. The Left, wracked by guilt over America’s diabolical treatment of blacks, decided to hold them to different standards of behavior. Blacks, Siegel writes, were invited to enter the larger society on their own terms. Schools, which had helped poor whites, ceased incorporating poor blacks from the South into the mainstream culture. Discipline as a prerequisite for adult success was displaced by the authentic self-expression of the ill-educated. Blacks were not culturally deprived but simply differently-abled—more spontaneous and expressive and so forth. Liberals tried to improve conditions for blacks without passing judgment on antisocial black culture. And this sort of thinking continues to this day. Walter Williams once wrote that he’s glad he grew up in the 1940s and ’50s, before it became fashionable for white people to like black people. He received a more honest assessment of his strengths and weaknesses, he says, than black kids today are likely to receive from white teachers and employers who are more interested in being politically correct.
After George Zimmerman was acquitted in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, President Obama explained the black response to the verdict this way. Blacks understand, he said, that some of the violence that takes place in poor black neighborhoods is born out of a very violent past in this country, and that the poverty and dysfunction that we see in those communities can be traced to that history. In other words, Obama was doing exactly what the Left has been conditioning blacks to do since the 1960s, which is to blame black pathology on the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.
This is a dodge. That legacy is not holding down blacks half as much as the legacy of efforts to help. Underprivileged blacks have become playthings for intellectuals and politicians who care more about revelling in their good intentions or winning votes than advocating behaviors and attitudes that have allowed other groups to get ahead. Meanwhile, the civil rights movement has become an industry that does little more than monetize white guilt. Martin Luther King and his contemporaries demanded black self-improvement despite the abundant and overt racism of their day. King’s self-styled successors, living in an era when public policy bends over backwards to accommodate blacks, insist that blacks cannot be held responsible for their plight so long as someone, somewhere in white America, is still prejudiced.
The more fundamental problem with these well-meaning liberal efforts is that they have succeeded, tragically, in convincing blacks to see themselves first and foremost as victims. Today there is no greater impediment to black advancement than the self-pitying mindset that permeates black culture. White liberals think they are helping blacks by romanticizing bad behavior. And black liberals are all too happy to hustle guilty whites.
Blacks ultimately must help themselves. They must develop the same attitudes and behaviors and habits that other groups had to develop to rise in America. And to the extent that a social policy, however well-intentioned, interferes with this self-development, it does more harm than good.
This concept of self-help and self-development is something that black leaders once understood quite well, and at a time when blacks faced infinitely more obstacles than they face today. Asked by whites in 1865 what to do for freed blacks, Frederick Douglass responded: “I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! . . . If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength . . . let them fall! . . . And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs!” Douglass was essentially saying, give blacks equal opportunity and then leave them alone.
Booker T. Washington, another late 19th century black leader who had been born a slave, once said that it is important and right that all privileges of the law be granted to blacks, but it is vastly more important that they be prepared for the exercise of these privileges.
Douglass and Washington didn’t play down the need for the government to secure equal rights for blacks, and both were optimistic that blacks would get equal rights eventually, although neither man lived to see that day. But both men also understood the limits of government benevolence. Blacks would have to ready themselves to meet the challenge of being in a position to take advantage of opportunities once equal rights had been secured. The history of 1960s liberal social policies is largely a history of ignoring this wisdom.
Jason L. Riley
2015 January
Editorial Board Member, Wall Street Journal
Jason L. Riley is an editorial board member and a senior editorial page writer at the Wall Street Journal, where he writes on politics, economics, education, immigration, and race. He is also a FOX News contributor and appears regularly on Special Report with Bret Baier. Previously, he worked for USA Today and the Buffalo News. He earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is the author of Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed.
Thomas Sowell once said that some books you write for pleasure, and others you write out of a sense of duty, because there are things to be said—and other people have better sense than to say them. My new book, Please Stop Helping Us, falls into that latter category. When I started out as a journalist 20 years ago, I had no expectation of focusing on race-related topics. People like Sowell and Shelby Steele and Walter Williams and a few other independent black thinkers, to my mind at least, had already said what needed to be said, had been saying it for decades, and had been saying it more eloquently than I ever could. But over the years, and with some prodding from those guys, it occurred to me that not enough younger blacks were following in their footsteps. It also occurred to me that many public policies aimed at the black underclass were just as wrongheaded as ever. The fight wasn’t over. A new generation of black thinkers needed to explain what’s working and what isn’t, and why, to a new generation of readers. And the result is this book, which I hope will help to bring more light than heat to the discussion of race.
The book is not an autobiography or a memoir, but I do tell a few stories about growing up black and male in the inner city. And one of the stories involves a trip back home to Buffalo, New York, where I was born and raised. I was visiting my older sister shortly after I had begun working at the Wall Street Journal, and I was chatting with her daughter, my niece, who was maybe in the second grade at the time. I was asking her about school, her favorite subjects, that sort of thing, when she stopped me and said, “Uncle Jason, why you talk white?” Then she turned to her little friend who was there and said, “Don’t my uncle sound white? Why he tryin’ to sound so smart?”
She was just teasing, of course. I smiled and they enjoyed a little chuckle at my expense. But what she said stayed with me. I couldn’t help thinking: Here were two young black girls, seven or eight years old, already linking speech patterns to race and intelligence. They already had a rather sophisticated awareness that, as blacks, white-sounding speech was not only to be avoided in their own speech but mocked in the speech of others.
I shouldn’t have been too surprised by this, and I wasn’t. My siblings, along with countless other black friends and relatives, teased me the same way when I was growing up. And other black professionals have told similar stories. What I had forgotten is just how early these attitudes take hold—how soon this counterproductive thinking and behavior begins.
New York City has the largest school system in America. Eighty percent of black kids in New York public schools are performing below grade level. And a big part of the problem is a black subculture that rejects attitudes and behaviors that are conducive to academic success. Black kids read half as many books and watch twice as much television as their white counterparts, for example. In other words, a big part of the problem is a culture that produces little black girls and boys who are already worried about acting and sounding white by the time they are in second grade.
Another big part of the problem is a reluctance to speak honestly about these cultural shortcomings. Many whites fear being called racists. And many black leaders have a vested interest in blaming black problems primarily on white racism, so that is the narrative they push regardless of the reality. Racism has become an all-purpose explanation for bad black outcomes, be they social or economic. If you disagree and are white, you’re a bigot. If you disagree and are black, you’re a sell-out.
The shooting death of a young black man by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, last year touched off a national discussion about everything except the aberrant behavior of so many young black men that results in such frequent encounters with police. We talked about racial prejudice, poverty, unemployment, profiling, the tensions between law enforcement and poor black communities, and so forth. Rarely did we hear any discussion of black crime rates.
Homicide is the leading cause of death for young black men in the U.S., and around 90 percent of the perpetrators are also black. Yet for months we’ve had protesters nationwide pretending that our morgues are full of young black men because cops are shooting them. Around 98 percent of black shooting deaths do not involve police. In fact, a cop is six times more likely to be shot by someone black than the opposite. The protestors are pushing a false anti-cop narrative, and everyone from the president on down has played along.
Any candid debate on race and criminal justice in this country would have to start with the fact that blacks commit an astoundingly disproportionate number of crimes. Blacks constitute about 13 percent of the population, yet between 1976 and 2005 they committed more than half of all murders in the U.S. The black arrest rate for most offenses—including robbery, aggravated assault, and property crimes—is typically two to three times their representation in the population. So long as blacks are committing such an outsized amount of crime, young black men will be viewed suspiciously and tensions between police and crime-ridden communities will persist. The U.S. criminal justice system, currently headed by a black attorney general who reports to a black president, is a reflection of this reality, not its cause. If we want to change negative perceptions of young black men, we must change the behavior that is driving those perceptions. But pointing this out has become almost taboo. How can we even begin to address problems if we won’t discuss them honestly?
“High rates of black violence in the late twentieth century are a matter of historical fact, not bigoted imagination,” wrote the late Harvard Law professor William Stuntz. “The trends reached their peak not in the land of Jim Crow but in the more civilized North, and not in the age of segregation but in the decades that saw the rise of civil rights for African Americans—and of African American control of city governments.”
The Left wants to blame these outcomes on racial animus and poverty, but back in the 1940s and ’50s, when racial discrimination was legal and black poverty was much higher than today, the black crime rate was lower. The Left wants to blame these outcomes on “the system,” but blacks have long been part of running that system. Black crime and incarceration rates spiked in the 1970s and ’80s in cities such as Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, and Philadelphia under black mayors and black police chiefs. Some of the most violent cities in the U.S. today are run by blacks.
Some insist that our jails and prisons are teeming with young black men due primarily to racist drug laws, but the reality is that the drug laws are neither racist nor driving the black incarceration rate. It’s worth remembering that the harsher penalties for crack cocaine offenses that were passed in the 1980s were supported by most of the Congressional Black Caucus, including Rep. Charles Rangel of Harlem, who at the time headed the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control. Crack was destroying black communities and many black political leaders wanted dealers to face longer sentences. In other words, black legislators in Washington led the effort to impose tougher drug laws, a fact often forgotten by critics today.
When these laws passed, even their opponents didn’t claim that they were racist. Those charges came later, as the racially disparate impact of the laws became apparent. What’s been lost in the discussion is whether these laws leave law-abiding blacks better off. Do you make life in the ghetto harder or easier by sending thugs home sooner rather than later? Liberal elites would have us deny what black ghetto residents know to be the truth. These communities aren’t dangerous because of racist cops or judges or sentencing guidelines. They’re dangerous mainly due to black criminals preying on black victims.
Nor is the racial disparity in prison inmates explained by the enforcement of drug laws. Blacks are about 37.5 percent of the population in state prisons, which house nearly 90 percent of the nation’s inmates. Remove drug offenders from that population and the percentage of black prisoners only drops to 37 percent. What drives black incarceration rates are violent offenses, not drug offenses. Blacks commit violent crimes at seven to ten times the rate that whites do. The fact that their victims tend to be of the same race suggests that young black men in the ghetto live in danger of being shot by each other, not cops. Nor is this a function of blacks being picked on by cops who are “over-policing” certain neighborhoods. Research has long shown that the rate at which blacks are arrested is nearly identical to the rate at which crime victims identify blacks as their assailants. The police are in these communities because that’s where the 911 calls originate.
If liberals want to help reverse these crime trends, they would do better to focus less on supposed racial animus and more on ghetto attitudes towards school, work, marriage, and child-rearing. As recently as the early 1960s, two out of three black children were raised in two-parent households. Today, more than 70 percent are not, and the number can reach as high as 80 or 90 percent in our inner cities. For decades, studies have shown that the likelihood of teen pregnancy, drug abuse, dropping out of school and other bad social outcomes increases dramatically when fathers aren’t around. One of the most comprehensive studies ever undertaken in this regard concluded that black boys without a father are 68 percent more likely to be incarcerated than those with a father—that overall, the most critical factor affecting the prospect of young males encountering the criminal justice system is the presence of a father in the home. All other factors, including family income, are much less important.
As political scientist James Q. Wilson said, if crime is to a significant degree caused by weak character, if weak character is more likely among children of unmarried mothers, if there are no fathers who will help raise their children, acquire jobs, and protect their neighborhoods, if boys become young men with no preparation for work, if school achievement is regarded as a sign of having sold out—if all these things are true, then the chances of reducing the crime rate among low income blacks anytime soon is slim.
Many on the Left sincerely want to help the black underclass. The problem is that liberals believe bigger government is the best way to help. But having looked at the track record of government policies aimed at helping the black underclass, I’m skeptical.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson’s commencement speech at Howard University. Johnson had signed the Civil Rights Act a year earlier and would sign the Voting Rights Act two months later. And he used the speech to talk about what the government should do next on behalf of blacks. These two laws marked merely the end of the beginning, he said:
That beginning is freedom; and the barriers to that freedom are tumbling down. Freedom is the right to share, share fully and equally, in American society—to vote, to hold a job, to enter a public place, to go to school. . . . But freedom is not enough. . . . You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. . . . The next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights [is] . . . not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.
But what if Johnson was mistaken? What if there are limits to what government can do beyond removing barriers to freedom? What if the best that we can hope for from our elected officials are policies that promote equal opportunity? What if public policy makers risk creating more problems and barriers to progress when the goal is equal outcomes?
The civil rights struggles of the mid-20th century exemplified liberalism at its best. The 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act outlawed racial discrimination in employment and education and ensured the ability of blacks to register and vote. All Americans can be proud of these accomplishments. But what about the social policy and thinking that arose from the ruins of Jim Crow? Good intentions aside, which efforts have facilitated black advancement, and which efforts have impeded it?
In 1988, right around the 25th anniversary of the Great Society, Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer published a book called the The Limits of Social Policy. Glazer analyzed Great Society programs from the perspective of someone who believed that government action was the best way to improve the lot of blacks. But his assessment humbled him. He concluded that in many ways, the Great Society programs were causing just as many problems as they were solving—that good intentions aren’t enough.
Unlike Nathan Glazer, many policy makers today are still riding high on good intentions. They don’t seem particularly interested in reconsidering what has been tried, even though 50 years into the war on poverty the result isn’t pretty. While gains have been made, significant racial disparities remain in some areas and black retrogression has occurred in others. The black-white poverty gap has widened over the past decade and the black poverty rate is no longer falling. The black-white disparity in incarceration rates today is larger than it was in 1960. And the black unemployment rate has, on average, been double the white rate for five decades.
Confronted with these statistics, liberals continue to push for more of the same solutions. Last year, President Obama announced yet another federal initiative aimed at helping blacks—an increase in preschool education, even though studies (including those released by his own administration) have shown no significant impacts in education from such programs. He said that he wants to increase reading proficiency and graduation rates for minority students, yet he opposes school voucher programs that are doing both. He continues to call for job-training programs of the sort that study after study has shown to be ineffective.
Fred Siegel, an expert on urban public policy, has written extensively about the liberal flight from evidence and empiricism that began in the 1960s. The Left, wracked by guilt over America’s diabolical treatment of blacks, decided to hold them to different standards of behavior. Blacks, Siegel writes, were invited to enter the larger society on their own terms. Schools, which had helped poor whites, ceased incorporating poor blacks from the South into the mainstream culture. Discipline as a prerequisite for adult success was displaced by the authentic self-expression of the ill-educated. Blacks were not culturally deprived but simply differently-abled—more spontaneous and expressive and so forth. Liberals tried to improve conditions for blacks without passing judgment on antisocial black culture. And this sort of thinking continues to this day. Walter Williams once wrote that he’s glad he grew up in the 1940s and ’50s, before it became fashionable for white people to like black people. He received a more honest assessment of his strengths and weaknesses, he says, than black kids today are likely to receive from white teachers and employers who are more interested in being politically correct.
After George Zimmerman was acquitted in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, President Obama explained the black response to the verdict this way. Blacks understand, he said, that some of the violence that takes place in poor black neighborhoods is born out of a very violent past in this country, and that the poverty and dysfunction that we see in those communities can be traced to that history. In other words, Obama was doing exactly what the Left has been conditioning blacks to do since the 1960s, which is to blame black pathology on the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.
This is a dodge. That legacy is not holding down blacks half as much as the legacy of efforts to help. Underprivileged blacks have become playthings for intellectuals and politicians who care more about revelling in their good intentions or winning votes than advocating behaviors and attitudes that have allowed other groups to get ahead. Meanwhile, the civil rights movement has become an industry that does little more than monetize white guilt. Martin Luther King and his contemporaries demanded black self-improvement despite the abundant and overt racism of their day. King’s self-styled successors, living in an era when public policy bends over backwards to accommodate blacks, insist that blacks cannot be held responsible for their plight so long as someone, somewhere in white America, is still prejudiced.
The more fundamental problem with these well-meaning liberal efforts is that they have succeeded, tragically, in convincing blacks to see themselves first and foremost as victims. Today there is no greater impediment to black advancement than the self-pitying mindset that permeates black culture. White liberals think they are helping blacks by romanticizing bad behavior. And black liberals are all too happy to hustle guilty whites.
Blacks ultimately must help themselves. They must develop the same attitudes and behaviors and habits that other groups had to develop to rise in America. And to the extent that a social policy, however well-intentioned, interferes with this self-development, it does more harm than good.
This concept of self-help and self-development is something that black leaders once understood quite well, and at a time when blacks faced infinitely more obstacles than they face today. Asked by whites in 1865 what to do for freed blacks, Frederick Douglass responded: “I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! . . . If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength . . . let them fall! . . . And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs!” Douglass was essentially saying, give blacks equal opportunity and then leave them alone.
Booker T. Washington, another late 19th century black leader who had been born a slave, once said that it is important and right that all privileges of the law be granted to blacks, but it is vastly more important that they be prepared for the exercise of these privileges.
Douglass and Washington didn’t play down the need for the government to secure equal rights for blacks, and both were optimistic that blacks would get equal rights eventually, although neither man lived to see that day. But both men also understood the limits of government benevolence. Blacks would have to ready themselves to meet the challenge of being in a position to take advantage of opportunities once equal rights had been secured. The history of 1960s liberal social policies is largely a history of ignoring this wisdom.
2015-02-09
A New and Improved U.S. Foreign Policy
Nothing says sincerity like a Carrier Strike Group and a U.S. Marine Air-Ground Task Force.
2015-01-27
Absence of White House Strategy Makes ISIS, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan Wars Unwinnable
Victory in military campaigns against the Islamic State group, the Taliban, the Haqqanis and others means nothing without concrete plans, retired top commanders say.
by Paul D. Shinkman
U.S. News & World Report
2015 January 27
An absence of clear policies from the White House makes it impossible for the U.S. to achieve any sort of victory in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and elsewhere in the region, according to three former top military officers who oversaw recent wars there.
“[We need to] come out from our reactive crouch and take a firm, strategic stance in defense of our values,” retired Marine Gen. Jim Mattis said to Congress Tuesday morning.
“America needs a refreshed national security strategy,” he added, saying that it must look beyond the string of crisis “currently consuming the executive branch.”
The notoriously blunt combat commander and former head of U.S. Central Command was testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee alongside retired Navy Adm. William Fallon, also a former CentCom chief, and former Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. John Keane.
They spoke to new members of the Senate, which for the first time includes veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, such as Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, who was on the dais at Tuesday’s hearing.
The three former commanders highlighted what they see as a common problem among top conflicts sucking in U.S. forces deployed abroad, and threats to the American people at home.
The U.S. has been in a “strategy-free” stance in Iraq for some time, and it didn’t begin with the Obama administration, Mattis said. He applauded President Barack Obama for visiting Saudi Arabia this week to reinforce ties with the longtime Middle Eastern ally, and for using U.S. influence to help oust Nouri al-Maliki, the polarizing former Iraqi prime minister.
But many countries in the region, including the Saudis, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan, remain confused about what America hopes to achieve there while stating its goal remains to pivot to the Pacific.
“We’ve disappointed a lot of friends out there, from Abu Dabi to Riyadh, from Tel Aviv to Cairo,” Mattis said.
Keane, a Vietnam veteran, helped oversee the initial invasion of Iraq and became one of the most vocal advocates following his 2003 retirement for increasing the number of troops deployed to the war there. Keane, along with Mattis and Fallon, criticized Obama’s preference for ending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on a preconceived deadline, instead of weighing progress on the ground, he says.
The U.S. fight against Islamic extremism should resemble something closer to U.S. efforts to contain communist ideology wrought by the Soviet Union during the Cold War, he said Tuesday.
A “policy of disengagement in the Middle East” has contributed to the rise of such extremism, he said, conceding that the appeal of groups like the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria, or al-Qaida in Pakistan or Yemen, would still exist were it not for U.S. intervention in the region.
The U.S. must focus on gathering allies who share similar values and political beliefs to confront his threat, he said, or it remains doomed to face the same problems again. This is particularly important ahead of the reported massive offensive against the Islamic State group in the key Iraqi city of Mosul and in Anbar province this spring.
“Will there be something after ISIS to deal with?” he said, using a common alternative name for the Islamic State group. “You bet, if we don’t take a comprehensive approach to deal with it.”
Mattis offered a similar example in Syria, saying it remains unclear what the administration hopes to achieve politically in that country.
A civil war between the regime of President Bashar Assad and an opposition movement flared up in early 2011 amid the so-called “Arab Spring.” Extremists from al-Qaida in Iraq crossed the border into the active war zone, where they found safe haven, giving them time to arm, train and supply before launching a new offensive back into Iraq as the Islamic State group.
The Obama administration kept the civil war at arms length, refusing on multiple occasions to openly fund and arm the opposition movement, or to conduct unilateral airstrikes. That changed last summer when the U.S. began a continuing air campaign targeting only the Islamic State group fighters.
“We have to get a very detailed level of understanding. What is the political objective we’re out to accomplish? Frankly, I don’t know what that is right now,” Mattis said. “The clarity and commitment of the U.S. can draw in the full commitment of others.”
Tentative or halfhearted commitment only drives potential allies further away, he said.
In Afghanistan and elsewhere, Fallon stressed the importance of differentiating between Sunni militants who believe in the cause of extremist groups, and the disaffected local populations who are coerced into joining such networks because they have no other alternative.
Fallon stepped down from his position in 2008 following remarks published in an Esquire article criticizing what he perceived as President George W. Bush administration’s march to war with Iran.
The U.S. should remain in Afghanistan beyond the 2016 deadline imposed by the Obama administration when all U.S. troops will withdraw, he said. Troops could remain in largely a training role, with special operations forces helping the government with the tasks its own military cannot yet perform.
"The Haqqanis have safe havens in the east, embedded there," Keane said, referring to the notoriously brutal Islamic extremist network that was largely able to hide in Pakistan from U.S. strikes during the war. "The Afghan National Security Force does not have the capability to deal with that harsh reality."
But all of these threats represent a lower priority than one originating from within the U.S. government. Across-the-board spending caps known as sequestration remain law in Congress, which has yet to pass a budget deal that would repeal the automatic cuts.
Sequestration is greater than any foreign threat, and without budget predictability, no strategy can be implemented, Mattis said.
by Paul D. Shinkman
U.S. News & World Report
2015 January 27
An absence of clear policies from the White House makes it impossible for the U.S. to achieve any sort of victory in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and elsewhere in the region, according to three former top military officers who oversaw recent wars there.
“[We need to] come out from our reactive crouch and take a firm, strategic stance in defense of our values,” retired Marine Gen. Jim Mattis said to Congress Tuesday morning.
“America needs a refreshed national security strategy,” he added, saying that it must look beyond the string of crisis “currently consuming the executive branch.”
The notoriously blunt combat commander and former head of U.S. Central Command was testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee alongside retired Navy Adm. William Fallon, also a former CentCom chief, and former Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. John Keane.
They spoke to new members of the Senate, which for the first time includes veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, such as Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, who was on the dais at Tuesday’s hearing.
The three former commanders highlighted what they see as a common problem among top conflicts sucking in U.S. forces deployed abroad, and threats to the American people at home.
The U.S. has been in a “strategy-free” stance in Iraq for some time, and it didn’t begin with the Obama administration, Mattis said. He applauded President Barack Obama for visiting Saudi Arabia this week to reinforce ties with the longtime Middle Eastern ally, and for using U.S. influence to help oust Nouri al-Maliki, the polarizing former Iraqi prime minister.
But many countries in the region, including the Saudis, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan, remain confused about what America hopes to achieve there while stating its goal remains to pivot to the Pacific.
“We’ve disappointed a lot of friends out there, from Abu Dabi to Riyadh, from Tel Aviv to Cairo,” Mattis said.
Keane, a Vietnam veteran, helped oversee the initial invasion of Iraq and became one of the most vocal advocates following his 2003 retirement for increasing the number of troops deployed to the war there. Keane, along with Mattis and Fallon, criticized Obama’s preference for ending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on a preconceived deadline, instead of weighing progress on the ground, he says.
The U.S. fight against Islamic extremism should resemble something closer to U.S. efforts to contain communist ideology wrought by the Soviet Union during the Cold War, he said Tuesday.
A “policy of disengagement in the Middle East” has contributed to the rise of such extremism, he said, conceding that the appeal of groups like the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria, or al-Qaida in Pakistan or Yemen, would still exist were it not for U.S. intervention in the region.
The U.S. must focus on gathering allies who share similar values and political beliefs to confront his threat, he said, or it remains doomed to face the same problems again. This is particularly important ahead of the reported massive offensive against the Islamic State group in the key Iraqi city of Mosul and in Anbar province this spring.
“Will there be something after ISIS to deal with?” he said, using a common alternative name for the Islamic State group. “You bet, if we don’t take a comprehensive approach to deal with it.”
Mattis offered a similar example in Syria, saying it remains unclear what the administration hopes to achieve politically in that country.
A civil war between the regime of President Bashar Assad and an opposition movement flared up in early 2011 amid the so-called “Arab Spring.” Extremists from al-Qaida in Iraq crossed the border into the active war zone, where they found safe haven, giving them time to arm, train and supply before launching a new offensive back into Iraq as the Islamic State group.
The Obama administration kept the civil war at arms length, refusing on multiple occasions to openly fund and arm the opposition movement, or to conduct unilateral airstrikes. That changed last summer when the U.S. began a continuing air campaign targeting only the Islamic State group fighters.
“We have to get a very detailed level of understanding. What is the political objective we’re out to accomplish? Frankly, I don’t know what that is right now,” Mattis said. “The clarity and commitment of the U.S. can draw in the full commitment of others.”
Tentative or halfhearted commitment only drives potential allies further away, he said.
In Afghanistan and elsewhere, Fallon stressed the importance of differentiating between Sunni militants who believe in the cause of extremist groups, and the disaffected local populations who are coerced into joining such networks because they have no other alternative.
Fallon stepped down from his position in 2008 following remarks published in an Esquire article criticizing what he perceived as President George W. Bush administration’s march to war with Iran.
The U.S. should remain in Afghanistan beyond the 2016 deadline imposed by the Obama administration when all U.S. troops will withdraw, he said. Troops could remain in largely a training role, with special operations forces helping the government with the tasks its own military cannot yet perform.
"The Haqqanis have safe havens in the east, embedded there," Keane said, referring to the notoriously brutal Islamic extremist network that was largely able to hide in Pakistan from U.S. strikes during the war. "The Afghan National Security Force does not have the capability to deal with that harsh reality."
But all of these threats represent a lower priority than one originating from within the U.S. government. Across-the-board spending caps known as sequestration remain law in Congress, which has yet to pass a budget deal that would repeal the automatic cuts.
Sequestration is greater than any foreign threat, and without budget predictability, no strategy can be implemented, Mattis said.
2015-01-24
How to Deal With U.S. Citizens Who Become Radical Islamic Terrorists
It is inscrutable to all rational thinkers that our elected officials are pathologically incapable of addressing the chronic issue of U.S. citizens traveling to the Middle East, fighting with radical Islamic terrorists against the U.S. and then returning to this country to perpetrate death and destruction across the Nation. The solution is painfully simple — and effective — and applies equally to local self-radicalized Islamic terrorists who spread death and terror across this country.
The United States Code at 18 U.S.C. § 23 states "whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death." This is precisely the sort of issue that firing squads are so perfectly designed to deal with and in a fashion that dramatically reduces recidivism. How difficult can it be!
POSTSCRIPT: Nidal Malik Hasan murdered 13 people and injured more than 30 others at Fort Hood, Texas, on November 5, 2009. Today Hasan is alive and well and living off the U.S. taxpayer. On August 28, 2014, his attorney announced that Hasan had written a letter to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi — head of the notorious Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which has proclaimed a caliphate in Iraq and Syria and has been designated a terrorist organization by the US, UN, and many Western countries. In the letter, Hasan requests to be made a citizen of the Islamic State and included his signature and the abbreviation SoA (Soldier of Allah). And this is justice in the U.S. today?
The United States Code at 18 U.S.C. § 23 states "whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death." This is precisely the sort of issue that firing squads are so perfectly designed to deal with and in a fashion that dramatically reduces recidivism. How difficult can it be!
POSTSCRIPT: Nidal Malik Hasan murdered 13 people and injured more than 30 others at Fort Hood, Texas, on November 5, 2009. Today Hasan is alive and well and living off the U.S. taxpayer. On August 28, 2014, his attorney announced that Hasan had written a letter to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi — head of the notorious Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which has proclaimed a caliphate in Iraq and Syria and has been designated a terrorist organization by the US, UN, and many Western countries. In the letter, Hasan requests to be made a citizen of the Islamic State and included his signature and the abbreviation SoA (Soldier of Allah). And this is justice in the U.S. today?
2014-12-02
Can The U.S. Congress Black Caucus Possibly Be More Benighted?
Congressional Black Caucus denounces Ferguson grand jury
By KENDALL BREITMAN 11/24/14 10:22 PM EST
“The Ferguson grand jury’s decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson in the death of Michael Brown is a miscarriage of justice,” CBC Chair Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio) said in a statement released after the decision was announced late Monday evening in Missouri. “It is a slap in the face to Americans nationwide who continue to hope and believe that justice will prevail.”
“This is a frightening narrative for every parent and guardian of Black and brown children, and another setback for race relations in America.”
After months of deliberation, St. Louis County prosecuting attorney Robert McCulloch announced that a grand jury had reached a decision not to indict Wilson on criminal charges. Wilson shot and killed the unarmed teenager Aug. 9 in a confrontation on the streets of Ferguson.
The American Civil Liberties Union issued a statement on Monday night saying that it will “continue to fight for racial justice.”
“We must end the prevailing policing paradigm where police departments are more like occupying forces, imposing their will to control communities,” the statement read. Once the decision not to indict was announced, Ferguson again became engulfed in unrest. The Associated Press reports dozens of businesses were set ablaze and authorities said they heard hundreds of gunshots. Dozens of people were arrested. Rep. John Lewis, known for his role in the civil rights movement, took to Twitter shortly after McCulloch finished his statement.
“I know this [is] hard. I know this is difficult. Do not succumb to the temptations of violence. There is a more powerful way,” the Georgia Democrat tweeted.
Another of his tweets read, “Only love can overcome hate. Only nonviolence can overcome violence.”
Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) also likened the events in Ferguson to the civil rights movement, urging protesters in a statement to march peacefully “just as we did” during the ’50s and ’60s.
Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) was quick to put out a statement and said he is “disappointed” in the decision, but that he is looking to the Department of Justice to continue to investigate the case.
“While I understand the emotions that have brought protestors into the streets, our goal now should be preventing cases like this one from ever happening again by encouraging dialogue with the police forces sworn to protect our communities and transforming the practices and culture that led to the shooting,” Cummings said in a statement.
Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) echoed Cummings’ disappointment, tweeting she is also “disappointed in the lack of #Justice4MikeBrown. We must demand change & work to end racial & structural bias in a peaceful manner.”
Prominent political figures in Missouri also weighed in.
Gov. Jay Nixon said: “I urge all those voicing their opinions regarding the grand jury’s decision to do so peacefully. I also urge everyone to continue working to make positive changes that will yield long-term social, economic and spiritual benefits for all our communities.”
Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) said in a statement that she expects people to be disappointed, but that she hopes the DOJ will “continue working together for solutions to systematic issues highlighted by this tragedy.”
Over a series of 11 tweets sent after the decision was announced, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) told protesters, “We hear you.”
“We have not merely witnessed the effects of a warped sense of law & order, enforced with unbridled & unpredictable power. We wear the scars,” one tweet read.
EDITOR'S NOTE: With the above-level of thought, reflection, and reason in the U.S. Congress, is there any question today why we have the current, bad-faith, bad-blood race relations in this county today? This portion of the U.S. Congress is clearly a major part of the problem and has no notion of the solution. None. Sad.
2014-09-28
Should Muslim Mosques Be Band In The U.S.A.?
The Case Against Muslim Mosques in the U.S.A.
By Martel Sobieskey
The die was cast in 632 AD when Mohammed built the first mosque in Medina. It became an inviolable and enduring precedent. Using the mosque as a base of infiltration and invasion, he methodically proceeded to destroy and obliterate all religions and governments throughout the Arabian Peninsula. It was as if some ghoulish monster had risen from the parched desert sands and could only slake its thirst by feeding on blood. It born a toxic formula carried thru to present time – first build mosques then conquer.
Now the monster of Islamofascism has risen in America with nearly 2000 mosques jeering at us, 80% of them financed by Saudi Arabia, an inimical foreign government, illicitly given trespass upon sovereign soil by our feckless and corrupt leadership besotted by Islamic oil money. The influence of Islamic oil money on America’s leadership is enormous to the extent that we have been “bought and paid for”.
Steven Emerson of the “Investigative Project on Terrorism” (IPT) elucidates: “the enemy is advancing, fueled by unparalleled amounts of money, helping the Islamists garner unprecedented support from politicians, government officials, journalists, commentators, academics, and more.” Steven Emerson has compiled a mountain of evidence proving his case.
Each of these mosques is currently conducting various types of jihadist attacks such as: propaganda jihad, immigration jihad, education jihad, media jihad, marriage jihad, lawsuit jihad, moderate Islam jihad, sharia jihad, bribery jihad, stealth jihad and all varieties of nefarious and clandestine means to sabotage and undermine our nation as required by the Koran. All this has been enabled under the guise of “moderate Islam”, the most effective psychological warfare infiltration ruse in history.
In their booklet “The Mosque Exposed” S. Solomon and E. Almaqdisi remark: “The mosque is the command and control center of Islam.” They further warn that by allowing mosques to be built in America we are helping build the enemies command and control center in the USA. They explain that Islam is at perpetual war with all non-Muslims and the mosque its center of operations. S. Solomon’s opinion is brilliantly qualified having been a former Islamic Sharia jurist.
In his article, “The Muslim Mosque: A State Within A State” , Vijay Kumar former Tennessee congressional candidate explains what a mosque does. “A mosque in the United States is a command and control center of a foreign political and military state that seeks the overthrow of our government, and an Imam in a mosque is a political and military representative of a foreign state that calls for the overthrow of the United States.” A native of India and longtime American citizen Vijay Kumar readily understands the atrocities perpetuated by the mosque community which have wreaked bloody havoc upon his country of birth for over 1000 years as required by the Koran.
Fellow Americans it is bad news if you have a mosque in your neighborhood, while putting on a smiling face it stealthily plots to emulate Mohammed in Medina – first build a mosque and next take over your neighborhood. The most important thing any American can do is steadfastly lobby for the shutting down of the mosque in their area.
Truth be told, Islam is not an authentic religion, rather it is an ideology of predation and the mosque is clearly the egg from which it hatches. The book, “Muslim Mafia”, by David Gaubatz and Paul Sperry reveals Islam to be a criminal gang bent upon worldwide conquest by hook or by crook. Please note, it is the death penalty for leaving Islam and the death penalty for criticizing Islam. Is not the death penalty the sine qua non of all criminal gangs? Genuine religions do not require the death penalty for apostates or detractors.
Undoubtedly the world’s most profoundly informed and stalwart expert telling the unabashed and candid facts about Islam and its mosques is former Muslim, Mr. Ali Sina. He states:
“The truth about Islam is ugly. It is so ugly that no one wants to look at it. We did. It is vile, disgusting and crude. We revealed that truth with brutal honesty, and challenged anyone to prove us wrong.”
Ali Sina offers $50,000 to anyone who can overturn the truth he tells about Islam and challenges everyone to debate. After 10 years of public debate he has easily defeated all opponents making him the paradigm of wisdom regarding all things Islamic. The truth will set us free and unless we adopt the sagacious consul of Ali Sina, Islam using the mosque as its base, will turn America into a living hell.
The “about me” section on Ali Sina’s website provides an insightful summary into the cruel realities of Islam. Ali Sina deserves a Noble Peace Prize for his efforts to educate our weak minded leadership and nation. If you think him wrong debate him, and you will discover your ignorance and perhaps your lack of intellectual honesty about the abject tyranny inherent in Islam. Ali Sina’s book “Understanding Mohammed and Muslims” is without comparison in the veracity of its content.
Habitually denying the obvious fact that mosques have never been benign places of worship will destroy any nation including ours. To the contrary, mosques are the beach heads, forward bases of invasion and infiltration encampments established for the usurping and destruction of their host country. Make no mistake about it, “moderate” mosques are the indispensable incubators nourishing the homegrown Islamic invasion of America. Here is a succinct and reliable depiction:
“Moderate” mosques are the harbingers of America’s demise. They are like cancer cells whose primary function is to metastasize and destroy all things non-Islamic worldwide. This is not a personal opinion, rather it is the absolute mandate bellicosely commanded by Allah in the Koran. It is further ordered in Mohammed’s 800 page biography. It is required again by the Hadith reports, and dictated yet again by Sharia, the barbaric Islamic legal code that obligates under penalty of death, all mosques carry out the Islamic conquest of the entire world.
Any ideology that calls for the overthrow of the American government is obviously illegal and must be outlawed. The slam dunk evidence against mosques is the Koran and its supporting literatures. Please note, that’s four smoking guns, making mosques the most blatantly villainous institutions in the history of the USA. “Moderate” mosques clearly do not belong in the USA because they are mandated by the Koran to destroy us. For this reason, it is imperative that all mosques in America be immediately shut down, boarded up, shuttered, put out of business, and ceased from further operations.
“American Mosques: Jihad’s Incubators” was written by Frank Gaffney president of the Center for Security Policy. Gaffney cites research data that approximately 80% of American mosques advocate or otherwise promote violence. What the research omits is that 100% of mosques seek the downfall of our government. This is because the so called “moderate” mosques that do not openly advocate violence conduct a wily and surreptitious jihad causing much greater harm.
All mosques conduct two general types of jihad: bloody jihad and scam (propaganda) jihad also known as stealth jihad, a term coined by Robert Spencer in his excellent book “Stealth Jihad”. Scam jihad and bloody jihad work together “hand in glove” in all “moderate” mosques with the same goal of conquering America. If any American believes that the “moderate” mosque in their neighborhood is peaceful and does not want to overthrow the USA then they have been scammed and are a victim of propaganda jihad.
Tragically, the large majority of America’s leadership are dunces who have swallowed the verbiage of the propaganda jihad, and our entire national security apparatus has adopted the scam by touting the phrase “moderate” Islam. The mosques built in America have been allowed by cloaking themselves in the scam called — “moderate” Islam, making the label “moderate Islam” the most efficacious psyop in world history.
Here is a truism that will prove reliable: Any person who claims there is a “moderate mosque” that does not want to overthrow the USA is an incompetent fool, a laughing stock or corruptocrat committing sedition in broad daylight. Nowhere has this been better explained then by Christopher Logan at Logan’s Warning he sarcastically states, “The moderate Muslims are not coming to the rescue.”
Christopher Logan is 100% correct because the so called “moderate” Muslims and mosques are 100% in support of the Islamic conquest of America and the entire world as required by the Koran.
In his book “Islam: The Enemy” Richard Crandall explains: “Despite what the mainstream media reports, Islamic extremists or terrorists have not “hijacked” Islam: Islam itself is extreme and dangerous as shown by its core teachings, its prophet Mohammed’s words and actions, and its fourteen hundred year history.”
Richard Crandall tells the truth desperately needed during our national malaise of abject denial where crooked hacks and timid quacks contemptuously claim Islam to be a religion of peace. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Please see my article “At War with Islam” supporting his excellent work.
Shutting down the mosques now is a very compassionate and wise thing to do because it will prevent enormous social upheaval, economic upheaval and bloodshed in the years to come. It’s just like having small weeds in the garden, pluck them early or they will take over the garden. Enormous misery can be avoided by closing the mosques and preventing this barbaric ideology of predation called Islam from harming our nation further.
To reiterate, the sole purpose of every mosque is to promote and implement the dictates of the Koran, and the Koran is a manual of war and hatred against all non-Muslims everywhere. The Koran is the beating heart and life blood of every so called “moderate” mosque in America. The heartfelt wish of each mosque is to emulate Mohammed making every mosque an edifice of warfare and hatred “lying in wait.”
America has been succor punched, played for an infantile ignoramus and remains blinded by the term “moderate” Islam which has let an enemy invader establish its beach heads in our homeland. The situation is an emergency crisis and our house is on fire.
During its current infiltration stage “moderate” Islam puts on a smiling face playing us for gullible fools, telling us whatever we want to hear, while it shrewdly looks for ways to diminish and destroy us from within. There is no better way to harm us then to build another mosque. On the other hand there is no better way to stop Islamofascism then to shut down all mosques immediately. Take your pick. Either you aid an enemy in the conquest of your own nation or you immediately shut down the “moderate” mosques stopping the Islamic assault in its tracks. If you are a masochist, which the majority of Americans seem to be, then let the mosques thrive and they will bring the torture you so much relish. But if you are a patriot then demand that all mosques be shut today and you will have done your duty to protect our homeland.
“Mosque of Conquest” is an article by journalist William Federer. It gives a brief “bird’s eye view” of Islamic conquest and mosques though out the ages. Related to this is his book, “What Every American Needs to Know about the Koran”. It reveals the malice being taught at “moderate” mosques. Please note, a mosque may label itself as “moderate” but the Koran it cherishes is hardcore hate mongering and warfare. We must not be fooled by the façade; rather, our survival depends upon looking deeper into the malevolent message of the Koran. It cannot be over emphasized that the building of mosques is the first step of Islamic invasion. Perhaps this is why William Federer has titled his article “Mosque of Conquest”. He may well agree with the theme of this article: first build mosques, and then conquer.
Since 9/11 nearly 800 new mosques have been built in the USA according to Dr. Ihsan professor of Islamic studies at the University of Kentucky. The required and competent security measure was to shut down every Mosque on 9/12. There has never been a greater failure in our national security then categorizing mosques as religious edifices rather than enemy encampments of infiltration and subversion.
A competent American President will immediately shut down all mosques by executive order. Both Bush and Obama are guilty of extreme negligence and dereliction of duty for failing to do so and the scam of “moderate” Islam is laughing at our supine leadership. The Koran tells Muslims that we are inferior to them and they will rule over us. What better proofs have they than this proliferation of mosques after 9/11?
Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan concisely portrays the inherently warlike agenda of mosques by quoting a renowned Islamic poet: “The minarets are our bayonets, the domes our helmets, the mosques our barracks, and the faithful our army.”
Martel Sobieskey: has approximately 40 years research experience in the field of religious conditioning and its relationship to warfare. He is greatly alarmed that America’s politicians, military brass, educators, journalists, intelligence analysts, security and police personnel, have failed to comprehend the deeply entrenched jihadist conditioning inherent in all of Islam – “moderates” included.
By Martel Sobieskey
The die was cast in 632 AD when Mohammed built the first mosque in Medina. It became an inviolable and enduring precedent. Using the mosque as a base of infiltration and invasion, he methodically proceeded to destroy and obliterate all religions and governments throughout the Arabian Peninsula. It was as if some ghoulish monster had risen from the parched desert sands and could only slake its thirst by feeding on blood. It born a toxic formula carried thru to present time – first build mosques then conquer.
Now the monster of Islamofascism has risen in America with nearly 2000 mosques jeering at us, 80% of them financed by Saudi Arabia, an inimical foreign government, illicitly given trespass upon sovereign soil by our feckless and corrupt leadership besotted by Islamic oil money. The influence of Islamic oil money on America’s leadership is enormous to the extent that we have been “bought and paid for”.
Steven Emerson of the “Investigative Project on Terrorism” (IPT) elucidates: “the enemy is advancing, fueled by unparalleled amounts of money, helping the Islamists garner unprecedented support from politicians, government officials, journalists, commentators, academics, and more.” Steven Emerson has compiled a mountain of evidence proving his case.
Each of these mosques is currently conducting various types of jihadist attacks such as: propaganda jihad, immigration jihad, education jihad, media jihad, marriage jihad, lawsuit jihad, moderate Islam jihad, sharia jihad, bribery jihad, stealth jihad and all varieties of nefarious and clandestine means to sabotage and undermine our nation as required by the Koran. All this has been enabled under the guise of “moderate Islam”, the most effective psychological warfare infiltration ruse in history.
In their booklet “The Mosque Exposed” S. Solomon and E. Almaqdisi remark: “The mosque is the command and control center of Islam.” They further warn that by allowing mosques to be built in America we are helping build the enemies command and control center in the USA. They explain that Islam is at perpetual war with all non-Muslims and the mosque its center of operations. S. Solomon’s opinion is brilliantly qualified having been a former Islamic Sharia jurist.
In his article, “The Muslim Mosque: A State Within A State” , Vijay Kumar former Tennessee congressional candidate explains what a mosque does. “A mosque in the United States is a command and control center of a foreign political and military state that seeks the overthrow of our government, and an Imam in a mosque is a political and military representative of a foreign state that calls for the overthrow of the United States.” A native of India and longtime American citizen Vijay Kumar readily understands the atrocities perpetuated by the mosque community which have wreaked bloody havoc upon his country of birth for over 1000 years as required by the Koran.
Fellow Americans it is bad news if you have a mosque in your neighborhood, while putting on a smiling face it stealthily plots to emulate Mohammed in Medina – first build a mosque and next take over your neighborhood. The most important thing any American can do is steadfastly lobby for the shutting down of the mosque in their area.
Truth be told, Islam is not an authentic religion, rather it is an ideology of predation and the mosque is clearly the egg from which it hatches. The book, “Muslim Mafia”, by David Gaubatz and Paul Sperry reveals Islam to be a criminal gang bent upon worldwide conquest by hook or by crook. Please note, it is the death penalty for leaving Islam and the death penalty for criticizing Islam. Is not the death penalty the sine qua non of all criminal gangs? Genuine religions do not require the death penalty for apostates or detractors.
Undoubtedly the world’s most profoundly informed and stalwart expert telling the unabashed and candid facts about Islam and its mosques is former Muslim, Mr. Ali Sina. He states:
“The truth about Islam is ugly. It is so ugly that no one wants to look at it. We did. It is vile, disgusting and crude. We revealed that truth with brutal honesty, and challenged anyone to prove us wrong.”
Ali Sina offers $50,000 to anyone who can overturn the truth he tells about Islam and challenges everyone to debate. After 10 years of public debate he has easily defeated all opponents making him the paradigm of wisdom regarding all things Islamic. The truth will set us free and unless we adopt the sagacious consul of Ali Sina, Islam using the mosque as its base, will turn America into a living hell.
The “about me” section on Ali Sina’s website provides an insightful summary into the cruel realities of Islam. Ali Sina deserves a Noble Peace Prize for his efforts to educate our weak minded leadership and nation. If you think him wrong debate him, and you will discover your ignorance and perhaps your lack of intellectual honesty about the abject tyranny inherent in Islam. Ali Sina’s book “Understanding Mohammed and Muslims” is without comparison in the veracity of its content.
Habitually denying the obvious fact that mosques have never been benign places of worship will destroy any nation including ours. To the contrary, mosques are the beach heads, forward bases of invasion and infiltration encampments established for the usurping and destruction of their host country. Make no mistake about it, “moderate” mosques are the indispensable incubators nourishing the homegrown Islamic invasion of America. Here is a succinct and reliable depiction:
“Moderate” mosques are the harbingers of America’s demise. They are like cancer cells whose primary function is to metastasize and destroy all things non-Islamic worldwide. This is not a personal opinion, rather it is the absolute mandate bellicosely commanded by Allah in the Koran. It is further ordered in Mohammed’s 800 page biography. It is required again by the Hadith reports, and dictated yet again by Sharia, the barbaric Islamic legal code that obligates under penalty of death, all mosques carry out the Islamic conquest of the entire world.
Any ideology that calls for the overthrow of the American government is obviously illegal and must be outlawed. The slam dunk evidence against mosques is the Koran and its supporting literatures. Please note, that’s four smoking guns, making mosques the most blatantly villainous institutions in the history of the USA. “Moderate” mosques clearly do not belong in the USA because they are mandated by the Koran to destroy us. For this reason, it is imperative that all mosques in America be immediately shut down, boarded up, shuttered, put out of business, and ceased from further operations.
“American Mosques: Jihad’s Incubators” was written by Frank Gaffney president of the Center for Security Policy. Gaffney cites research data that approximately 80% of American mosques advocate or otherwise promote violence. What the research omits is that 100% of mosques seek the downfall of our government. This is because the so called “moderate” mosques that do not openly advocate violence conduct a wily and surreptitious jihad causing much greater harm.
All mosques conduct two general types of jihad: bloody jihad and scam (propaganda) jihad also known as stealth jihad, a term coined by Robert Spencer in his excellent book “Stealth Jihad”. Scam jihad and bloody jihad work together “hand in glove” in all “moderate” mosques with the same goal of conquering America. If any American believes that the “moderate” mosque in their neighborhood is peaceful and does not want to overthrow the USA then they have been scammed and are a victim of propaganda jihad.
Tragically, the large majority of America’s leadership are dunces who have swallowed the verbiage of the propaganda jihad, and our entire national security apparatus has adopted the scam by touting the phrase “moderate” Islam. The mosques built in America have been allowed by cloaking themselves in the scam called — “moderate” Islam, making the label “moderate Islam” the most efficacious psyop in world history.
Here is a truism that will prove reliable: Any person who claims there is a “moderate mosque” that does not want to overthrow the USA is an incompetent fool, a laughing stock or corruptocrat committing sedition in broad daylight. Nowhere has this been better explained then by Christopher Logan at Logan’s Warning he sarcastically states, “The moderate Muslims are not coming to the rescue.”
Christopher Logan is 100% correct because the so called “moderate” Muslims and mosques are 100% in support of the Islamic conquest of America and the entire world as required by the Koran.
In his book “Islam: The Enemy” Richard Crandall explains: “Despite what the mainstream media reports, Islamic extremists or terrorists have not “hijacked” Islam: Islam itself is extreme and dangerous as shown by its core teachings, its prophet Mohammed’s words and actions, and its fourteen hundred year history.”
Richard Crandall tells the truth desperately needed during our national malaise of abject denial where crooked hacks and timid quacks contemptuously claim Islam to be a religion of peace. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Please see my article “At War with Islam” supporting his excellent work.
Shutting down the mosques now is a very compassionate and wise thing to do because it will prevent enormous social upheaval, economic upheaval and bloodshed in the years to come. It’s just like having small weeds in the garden, pluck them early or they will take over the garden. Enormous misery can be avoided by closing the mosques and preventing this barbaric ideology of predation called Islam from harming our nation further.
To reiterate, the sole purpose of every mosque is to promote and implement the dictates of the Koran, and the Koran is a manual of war and hatred against all non-Muslims everywhere. The Koran is the beating heart and life blood of every so called “moderate” mosque in America. The heartfelt wish of each mosque is to emulate Mohammed making every mosque an edifice of warfare and hatred “lying in wait.”
America has been succor punched, played for an infantile ignoramus and remains blinded by the term “moderate” Islam which has let an enemy invader establish its beach heads in our homeland. The situation is an emergency crisis and our house is on fire.
During its current infiltration stage “moderate” Islam puts on a smiling face playing us for gullible fools, telling us whatever we want to hear, while it shrewdly looks for ways to diminish and destroy us from within. There is no better way to harm us then to build another mosque. On the other hand there is no better way to stop Islamofascism then to shut down all mosques immediately. Take your pick. Either you aid an enemy in the conquest of your own nation or you immediately shut down the “moderate” mosques stopping the Islamic assault in its tracks. If you are a masochist, which the majority of Americans seem to be, then let the mosques thrive and they will bring the torture you so much relish. But if you are a patriot then demand that all mosques be shut today and you will have done your duty to protect our homeland.
“Mosque of Conquest” is an article by journalist William Federer. It gives a brief “bird’s eye view” of Islamic conquest and mosques though out the ages. Related to this is his book, “What Every American Needs to Know about the Koran”. It reveals the malice being taught at “moderate” mosques. Please note, a mosque may label itself as “moderate” but the Koran it cherishes is hardcore hate mongering and warfare. We must not be fooled by the façade; rather, our survival depends upon looking deeper into the malevolent message of the Koran. It cannot be over emphasized that the building of mosques is the first step of Islamic invasion. Perhaps this is why William Federer has titled his article “Mosque of Conquest”. He may well agree with the theme of this article: first build mosques, and then conquer.
Since 9/11 nearly 800 new mosques have been built in the USA according to Dr. Ihsan professor of Islamic studies at the University of Kentucky. The required and competent security measure was to shut down every Mosque on 9/12. There has never been a greater failure in our national security then categorizing mosques as religious edifices rather than enemy encampments of infiltration and subversion.
A competent American President will immediately shut down all mosques by executive order. Both Bush and Obama are guilty of extreme negligence and dereliction of duty for failing to do so and the scam of “moderate” Islam is laughing at our supine leadership. The Koran tells Muslims that we are inferior to them and they will rule over us. What better proofs have they than this proliferation of mosques after 9/11?
Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan concisely portrays the inherently warlike agenda of mosques by quoting a renowned Islamic poet: “The minarets are our bayonets, the domes our helmets, the mosques our barracks, and the faithful our army.”
Martel Sobieskey: has approximately 40 years research experience in the field of religious conditioning and its relationship to warfare. He is greatly alarmed that America’s politicians, military brass, educators, journalists, intelligence analysts, security and police personnel, have failed to comprehend the deeply entrenched jihadist conditioning inherent in all of Islam – “moderates” included.
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