Category: Articles

The Evils of Islamic Political Ideology

Part III: Islamic Oppression of non-Muslims

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By Alyssa A. Lappen
Right Side News | Jun. 1, 2009

According to a central tenet of Islam, any lands that Muslims ever conquered or controlled belong to Islam for eternity. Muslims believe themselves “the best of peoples, evolved for mankind” (Qur’an 3:110)—and appointed to hold all lands in trust for Allah. Both Sunni and Shi’ite followers of Mohamed’s 7th century ideology also envision an end-time Islamic Apocalypse forcibly gathering all non-Muslims within their faith—eliminating all known beliefs except Islam—and rendering the whole planet earth an Islamic trust.

On these shari’a (i.e., Islamic law) concepts rest the Muslim contention that the United Nations’ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is inadequate: The UDHR neither appoints Muslims guardians of humanity, nor restricts the rights of non-Muslims and women. Therefore, 56 Muslim nations in the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) consider the Universal Declaration of Human Rights obsolete and irrelevant. They want “an independent permanent body to promote human rights” among U.N. member states “in accordance with” the Cairo Declaration and its foundational shari’a legal code—denying all essential human rights to non-Muslims and women.

The OIC ultimately hopes to replace universal human rights with universal shari’a law, granting superiority to the Muslim ummah (“nation”) while imposing dhimmitude, — i.e., intense, institutionalized subservience, probably best described as human rights apartheid — upon all others. Indeed, the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam (CDHRI), rooted in shari’a law and adopted in August 1990 at the 19th Islamic Conference of Foreign Ministers, like the Qur’an presupposes that mankind is already obliged to follow all commandments of Islamic law:

“[N]o one as a matter of principle has the right to suspend in whole or in part or violate or ignore [fundamental rights and universal freedoms for Muslims] in as much as they are binding divine commandments, which are contained in the Revealed Books of God and were sent through the last of His Prophets to complete the preceding divine messages thereby making their observance an act of worship and their neglect or violation an abominable sin, and accordingly every person is individually responsible … for their safeguard. (emphasis added)

The OIC has been building pressure for years. In December 2005, Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal revealed his “Mecca Declaration” to a Jeddah “preparatory meeting of OIC ministers“—a 10-year “plan of action to confront the challenges of the 21st century” to counter a “harsh offensive on Islam from enemies abroad and some of its own children with deviant ideologies.” Turkish OIC secretary general Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu praised the plan as a “roadmap for Islamic common action.”

Indeed, the OIC has always adulated tyranny and oppression, conforming to the classical Islamic ideology of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna—and his contemporary Hajj Amin al-Husseini. Upon his 1929 appointment as Jerusalem mufti, al-Husseini circulated faked postcards of Al Aqsa mosque flying a “Zionist” flag atop the Temple Mount to inflame Muslim hatred and violence against Jerusalem’s Jewish majority. [1] The Muslim Brotherhood mimicked this very “defense” of Islam by establishing the OIC after a lone lunatic man set fire to Al Aqsa in 1969. The MB in this way conveniently wall-papered its hope of eliminating the “Zionist occupation”—that is, of entirely purging Jews and Judaism from the ancient Jewish capitol, just as Mohamed had purged Jews from Mecca and Arabia.

In March 1970, “pending the liberation of Jerusalem,” the First Islamic Conference of Ministers of Foreign Affairs established its Jeddah General Secretariat. (No surprise that the OIC now wants to wrest sovereignty over the Temple Mount from Israel.) In 1973, the OIC planned to discriminate further by creating the Islamic Development Bank (IDB) “in accordance with the principles of the Shari’a.”

For decades afterwards, longtime World Union of Progressive Judaism (WUPJ) representative, historian David G. Littman, warned of a concerted effort at the U.N. to supplant universal human rights with the shari’a-based discriminatory system of dhimmitude. He was correct.

In May 2007, 36th Islamic Conference of Foreign Ministers (ICFM) in Islamabad resolved to impose human rights apartheid through a new Islamic Charter on Human Rights, a Convention on Women’s Rights in Islam and an Islamic Covenant Against Racial Discrimination. The ICFM also seeks U.N. “observer status” for various “interested non-governmental organizations (NGOs),” undoubtedly including many Islamic “charities.”

Naturally, Muslim leaders deny their discriminatory intentions. At the 6th Session of the Human Rights Council on Dec. 10, 2007, for example, Pakistan Ambassador to the U.N. Masood Khan falsely contended on OIC behalf that its 56 Muslim member nations had “made substantial contributions to the development of the Universal Declaration and the two International Covenants,” concerning matters of “religious freedom, social justice, the indivisibility of human rights and the right to self-determination.”

Yet Islamic and African countries that regularly violate human rights dominate the HRC, which favors Islamic blasphemy laws making it a capital offense to quote Qur’anic passages or shari’a law, much less to criticize Mohammed in any forum at the U.N. This shari’a-based mindset takes Islam as inviolable—and all that that implies.

Thus in 2008 the Geneva office of the 47-member U.N. Human Rights Council—where historian Littman is an NGO—began implementing shari’a principles even as it made the very word verboten. On March 26, 2009, followed the 23-nation HRC “simple majority” passage of a Pakistani resolution to protect “against acts of hatred, discrimination, intimidation and coercion resulting from defamation of religions and incitement to religious hatred in general.”

As Islamic scholar Ann Elizabeth Mayer notes in Islam and Human Rights: Tradition and Politics,

[N]o theory in international law … supports the notion that fundamental human rights may be curtailed — much less permanently curtailed — by reference to the requirements of any particular religion. Under international law, non-Muslims cannot be legally deprived of their rights by the use of Islamic standards. There is also no warrant under international law for Muslims being deprived of their rights due to governmental application of restrictions taken from Islamic law.” (Mayer, Westview Press, 2nd edition, p. 64)

Leading Muslim figures frequently claim to support universal human rights—a point often discussed at Right Side News. Yet the OIC hopes to eliminate freedom of speech. Increasing implementation of human rights and religious apartheid, however the OIC veils it, will surely follow if the OIC succeeds.

Mohamed established his ideology’s central shrine at the Kabba in Mecca. There, pre-Islamic Arabians worshiped a pantheon of gods, including idols, stones and “heavenly bodies” such as the sun, moon and stars, according to Sir William Muir‘s 19th century Life of Mahomet. Atop this pre-Islamic prayer site, Mohamed built thinking and a 1400 year history espousing suppression and oppression of others. It steals and suppress other peoples’ sacred books, prophets, holy sites—and above all, their very human rights—with a hope for end-game Muslim supremacy over all others.

Among those fiercely opposing such religious and human rights apartheid, has been the incomparable AtlasShrugs publisher, Pamela Geller. In this third interview in an exclusive Right Side News series, investigative journalist Alyssa A. Lappen continues her discussion with Geller—this time on Islamic oppression of non-Muslims. [Read Part One here; read Part Two here]


Alyssa A. Lappen: We’ve already discussed Islamic suppression of free speech and Muslim abuse of women. Today, let’s turn to the seemingly central Islamic theology encouraging the oppression of others, that is, non-Muslims. What turned your attention to this phenomenon?

Atlas: 9/11 took me down this road—when our great nation was attacked by Islamic jihadis. At that time, I did not know anything about the enemy or who attacked us, or why.

The more I studied and researched, the more difficult it became to plow through layers upon layers of deception and propaganda. I almost had to make it a life’s project.

AAL: So, what have you learned, in general, about the oppressive nature of this belief system?

Atlas: Now, understand me. This is not a new enemy. It’s centuries old. Islam has taken all the tenets of religion and turned them into a new evil.

In Judaism, a basic tenet of Judaism, is not to convert others, and not to proselytize. In order to convert, a person not born as a Jew really has to want it. He or she must really be in love with someone, or in love with the ideas of goodness. But by and large, Judaism frowns upon outreach to or conversion of others.

Christians did not subscribe to the Jewish system. They do support and seek conversion of others. [While historically Christians forcibly converted others, this was a religious interpretation, not a dictate.] Christianity sent missionaries to the most dangerous places in the world, always in this [relatively] peaceful way. They offered, food, clothing, education, and God’s love. Not violence.

Then you had Islam. This took the conversion idea, and made it into a violent act. It was “Convert or die.” Should anyone have a change of heart, it becomes a death sentence. Even today, apostates [from Islam] have death sentences hanging over their heads. If non-Muslim subjects within Islamic lands accepted dhimmitude, they also accepted daily humiliation. They’d pay a jizya [onerous head tax] to live, and were demeaned by believers. I dislike scholars like [Bernard] Lewis, who present dhimmitude inside an Islamic empire in a Hollywood, glorified kind of way. We have to tell the truth about Islam. And those of us who tell the truth are labeled racists and bigots and Islamophobes.

AAL: Does oppression of others under Islam vary or is it more or less universal?

Atlas: The oppression of non-believers exists in every Islamic country. Shari’a law is oppressive. All those terrible acts committed in the name of Islam—honor killings, clitorectomies, death for apostasy, death to hypocrites—all happen under shari’a law. This is not under in any way, shape or form compatible with Democratic law. There’s no such thing as a little shari’a law. It’s like being a little bit pregnant. Shari’a taints the law. You cannot introduce this bad blood into good law and end up with good law.

It is like the [1958 classic horror movie] “The Blob.” The more the blob consumes, the bigger it gets, the more it eats, the more it morphs into something bigger and bigger. Society is then completely overwhelmed. And we see it in America. We see the introduction of shari’a in America. When workers in Greeley [Colorado] or Emporia [Kansas] insist on prayer time in the work place, this is a form of Islamic supremacism. So are foot baths in public places like airports or universities, or Muslim-only prayer rooms in universities. They are special rights for special classes. So are special prayer rights for a special class, in this case Muslims in public schools, that is, giving Muslims special prayer times or closing schools on Muslim holidays. Some places like Seattle, Washington have also introduced special swim time for Muslims in public pools, often paid by taxpayers’ public, government funds.

In and of itself, it seems innocent. So, the boy needs to pray. It’s no big deal. Give him a special place and time for prayer. But this is what Muslims do. It is part of the [Islamization] movement. This needs to be seen in the context of an overall assault on a society. Muslims who have left their countries to escape this oppression should be speaking out the loudest but they are not.

AAL: Aren’t there are some ex-Muslims and a handful of Muslims speaking out about the assault on Western Democratic values?

Atlas: Wafa Sultan is the only American in decades whom threats have forced to live in hiding. She should be hidden in White House. The media’s lack of coverage of her case is criminal. Hers should be a cause célèbre. Her situation is among the most damaging to freedom of speech.

AAL: What’s the prognosis for positive change?

Atlas: If the hate crime laws pass under a very Islamic-sympathizing president, then voices and websites like mine will be shut down. It will be over. The line in the sand rests on freedom of speech. That is the basis of this country.

Even ugly speech. We see and saw this in “death to the Jews” rallies. We saw it the last generation, in 1970s Nazis rallies Skokie, Illinois. That is freedom of speech. The media demonizes the Tea Parties [protesting Obama’s profligate spending.] This is not an Islamic issue. But it is part of the leftist Islamic issue. You see the demonizing of free speech. This is the most dangerous development. The demonization of Geert Wilders is very dangerous.

AAL: Don’t you think that U.S. citizens are starting to yell “basta,” enough?

Atlas: The April headlines in the New Haven paper were the exception, not the rule. Tea Parties, nationwide, are more routinely painted as a sinister Republican movement, organized by right wing extremists and clowns. In New York, the media used that description even though an estimated 13,000 people attended the Tea Party there.

These people never went to a rally before. They feel the heat. They feel the hot breath of government on their necks. They feel a fascist reality taking hold. They see enslavement in their workplaces, and the encroaching government controls. People came who voted for Obama. They said they made a mistake. There were business owners. People spoke about the oppressive taxation and the nationalization of banks, auto companies, and the impending bailouts of media.

Once we have a bailout of media, it is over. Who will insult the leader, when he is signing the paycheck?

AAL: What are you talking about. Bailing out the media, the networks?

Atlas: Yes, there is talk of bailing out local newspapers, on the East and West coasts, bankrupt metropolitan newspapers, as well as MSNBC and NBC. Yes. There is talk of reclassifying newspapers as nonprofit organizations. There are all kinds of ways to skin a cat. One includes subsidies to go to the NBC parent company, General Electric, through Obama’s much-touted “cap and trade,” his purported energy renewal program. Obama does not call this nationalization. But we have an Orwellian president who never calls things by their real names. The government has banned the term “war on terror.” He calls war a “contingent operation.” The word “terrorism” has been replaced by “man made disaster.” Obama has removed the enemy from all public discussions.

AAL: How is this related to Islamic oppression of non-Muslims.

Atlas: If you look at history, this is how Muslims have conducted Islamic jihad. And in the modern world, Orwellian language has entered the Islamic sphere, too. Obama does not want us to say the word “jihadi.” These men are not conducting “jihad.” They are suffering from “mental illness.” So according to Obama, every jihadi is just mentally ill.

Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department has set all kinds of new immigration quotas from countries that are the worst state sponsors of terrorism. They are terrorist nations. The State Department does not call them that. But Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt are terrorist nations. And from these countries, the U.S. Is now importing the largest invasion of enemy combatants in the history of man. We are experiencing an invasion of a foreign enemy, of a very large proportion.

AAL: So, while freedom of speech is itself a huge issue, we are no longer discussing freedom of speech alone. We’re talking about freedom, period. Just plain freedom.

Atlas: Yes. We are literally abdicating American sovereignty. The Obama administration, along with the Muslim globalists, paint everything as a global problem. And for global problems, there can only be global solutions. So we see the rise of a transnational movement, which advocates abdicating U.S. sovereignty to the U.N. And the U.N. is driven by the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC). And they are, as you have reported before, the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood. OIC objectives are clear. It is a sinister machination. It is made up of 56 nations, plus “Palestine.” They unwaveringly vote together as a single bloc. No one ever goes off the Islamic reservation. Their issue is Islamic supremacy. That is the definition of Islam. They impose Islam. They pass UN resolutions against “defamation of Islam.” That is code for freedom of speech. They never discuss the defamation of Judaism or Jews or Christianity. That is the OIC currency. So yes, the worldwide global conspiracy, the fact of Islamic jihad is tied into all things. It is embedded in schools and universities. The Saudis give millions and millions of dollars to affect their curricula with mendacious teachings and textbooks, whose distribution they fund through various “non-profit” organizations, by overwhelming local communities and also in co-ordination with U.S. textbook companies themselves.

They orchestrated textbook chapters devoted to Mohamed. In small towns and cities across America, like Nashville, they impose Islam—in schools, by shuttering conferences featuring Geert Wilders, or by women refusing to remove their veils for drivers’ license photos. They create law by creating precedents, they build a bigger empire, step by step. And they could never do it all without help from the left. I did not become aware of this until I started blogging about anti-war rallies, and anti-Israel rallies. Muslims at these rallies are anything but peaceful. Without fail, they are supported by the most notorious left wing groups like A.N.S.W.E.R., CODEPINK, various communist and socialist organizations.

AAL: How does Obama’s presidency affect matters?

Atlas: The White House radical couldn’t have arrived there without aid from leftists. They tackled the Vietnam War with propaganda and have poisoned America for so long, that instead of thinking critically and believing their eyes, people believe leftist and Islamic lies. The White House apologist supports nefarious movements and actions. He says, “these are things with which we may not agree, but we have to respect.”

No, I don’t respect honor killings. No. I don’t see Adolph Hitler in 1940s American news reels, giving his side. We can’t pretend nothing is happening. Look at Obama’s cultural psyops [psychological operations]. Our “dear leader” is on TV everyday with Orwellian speeches. If Obama wants to be a movie star, let him move to Hollywood. The media fawns and swoons and talks about how cool he is. You’re against him? You’re not cool. You’re against Janeane [Garofalo]? She demonizes rational people and logical men. If the truth is extreme, I’m an extremist.

AAL: How does this relate to Islamic supremacism?

Atlas: We’re faced with subversion of the U.S. Constitution through international law. Our forefathers did not fight and die for OIC-made international law. Who are the OIC? Expect no resistance from England. France? Jihad conquered them. England and France refused to withdraw from the U.N.’s Jew-hating Durban II conference. England lets Muslims have multiple wives and get social benefits for multiple families. Radicals can emigrate. Geert Wilders heads the leading Dutch political [Party for Freedom, PVV]. Holland’s Supreme Court will let the government try him for “hate speech,” for quoting the Qur’an. The OIC-dominated European Union subverts Dutch laws.

For the first time in Israel’s history, it doesn’t have a friend in the White House. Obama has met Hugo Chavez. He agreed to meet every other low-life violent pig, including Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, despite his anti-Semitic Durban II tirade tirade and endless promises to annihilate Israel. [Israeli] Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu must join hands in tight new alliances with China and India. China’s only future is current revenue. But every free nation, including Israel, must preserve its national self interest.

The free world—Japan, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, everyone formerly under the U.S. umbrella, who didn’t go nuclear, knowing that America had its back—must now scramble for new cover and allies. The U.S. no longer protects its friends. They’re not friends any more. New U.S. friends are [Raul] Castro, Ahmadinjehad, Chavez—all this in only four months.

Obama will be the longest 4-year president in history.

AAL: What do you envision at the Congressional mid-term election, in 18 months?

Atlas: There’s a good chance for reversal. Obama is giving tax relief to buy the 2010 election. The grass roots Tea Parties counter him. CNBS trading-floor commentator Rick Santelli started this amazing phenomenon. It caught on like wildfire.

AAL: Do the Tea Parties understand the Islamic component?

Atlas: No. It’s hidden from them. American print media are firmly entrenched in dhimmitude and they follow Obama’s blue print, spelled out in his April 2009 Doha compact at the OIC Alliance of Civilizations’ 2nd Forum in Istanbul. The Doha compact repudiates U.S. Democratic ideas and self-defense, subsuming U.S. national interests to please the Muslim world. Tea Party organizers don’t know; U.S. newspapers didn’t report it. But the enemy doesn’t intend to get along. In what Muslim nation would U.S. citizens want to live? If the U.S. takes on Islamic values, why would America be different? Islam hangs all Brittanies [Spears] wearing no underwear—and all National Enquirer celebrity subjects.

AAL: Would you say critics of Islam are racist?

Atlas: The media consider anyone who speaks against Obama a racist. They play into the OIC line. Americans would rather be called anything—anything other than racists. That word is equivalent to being accused of all seven deadly sins at once. It’s not funny. We’ve been clubbed with the racist thing. But the U.S. wasn’t, and isn’t racist. We’re not a perfect country. But in the 70s, racism was already history. The Civil War and civil rights wars were fought. It was over when I was growing up in the 1970s. In the early 19th century, women had had their suffragettes. It was all fixed. Over. Of course, we are not a racist nation. Otherwise, Obama couldn’t have been elected.

Only real racists love Obama for his race. He has served racism like Thanksgiving dinner—and he drives the race issue every day. He is creating new racism. This is wrong.

AAL: Is Obama hostile to Israel? Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told Jews not to build homes in Jerusalem. Israeli Press Director Daniel Seaman replied that he admires “Iroquois territory” residents who assume “they have a right to determine where Jews should live…”

Atlas: Obama says Israelis want two states. The Jewish people do not want a Jew-hating jihad state up their ass. If Netanyahu can stand up against a tsunami of threats, and intimidation, he’ll be the new leader of the free world.

It will be very hard, as always. Any Jew who questions this should watch a Nazi SS interview at Treblinka. They talked in stunning detail on machinations of systematic extermination—how to handle bodies, about the cesspool of flesh below that surfaced outside the Nazi mess hall. On the trains, mothers from the time’s most advanced society, who’d thought themselves accepted, slashed their daughters’ wrists. It’s the same thing, all over. We have no choice.

AAL: At this series’ outset, you were optimistic. Are you still optimistic?

Atlas: Yes, I believe in God. I believe in good triumphing over evil. Islam will not win in the long run. The short term looks to be very devastating. We’re not experiencing a violent jihad alone. It’s a social, national, legal and economic jihad. We see whole continents moving to Islam. The Middle East was once Christian. Africa will go next. Muslims have no sense of time. To say they have not conquered anything in the last five minutes amounts to stunning stupidity. America is ripe for infiltration. We need basic principals as part of our epistemology, and moral compass.

However, I’m part of the Human Rights Coalition—Jews, Coptic Christians, Hindus. We’re not one people, one nation alone. All freedom loving people must join together, whatever their stripe to fight.

AAL: Let’s suppose moment the unimaginable—that we lose. What would the U.S. be like, living with dhimmitude?

Atlas: There are historical examples. In Morocco, before plumbing, each week the Muslims carted all of their excrement, literally, carted it all to the Jewish quarter and dumped it on Saturday. Then the Jews would have to wait until sundown [the end of Sabbath] to clean up the Muslims’ weekly crap. [In Iran], Jews weren’t allowed to go out in the rain. Jews could be killed for that. [They were najas, dirty.] Water might splash off a non-believer onto a Muslim and dirty them. It’s an “otherness.” Jews lived with sub human status. Each Muslim country would manifest the penalties upon dhimmis differently. Islamic history is rife with aggression. Years ago, I met a Turkish Jewish family. One said it was fine—but was always aware of being a Jew, despite Turkey having been at a supposed peak of secular Muslim democracy. Turkey is now an Islamic country; They elected [PKK Prime Minister Recep Tayyip] Erdogon. His Islamic party controls the government.

AAL: So can you please repeat, why are you optimistic?

Atlas: We can fight. If we fight there is hope. We can fight each fight, and fight each battle the same way Muslims fight each battle. They want Muslim prayer in schools. We have to say no. The Saudi academy wants to expand. We have to show up at every municipal hearing and say, “No.” There was a hearing on public access TV and many great Americans showed up. The audience was teaming with radical Muslims. It took a lot of balls to stand up before 600 belligerent Muslims. But people did stand up. And each battle must be waged like this. Each attempt at Islamic supremacism must be beaten back. We can, and we have to, respond more aggressively. They have achieved a great many goals without violence. In Europe they use violence. But in America, in real America, we are not cowards. Muslims want to make it an intellectual argument and appeal to liberal guilt. But once people understand the enemy, we can win this intellectual war.

AAL: How important is AtlasShrugs in this effort?

Atlas: Every day I get more and more readers. AtlasShrugs gets roughly 700,000 page views a month. People want to know. The more folks learn, the quicker we can take back this country and the sooner we can beat back the enemies within. The blogs would assume leadership a lot faster if the government were not involved in bailing out media. News media are failing for a reason. But we can win this intellectual war. Islam will not suppress America.

[1] Samuel Katz, Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine, 1985 edition, p. 77.


All Articles, Poems & Commentaries Copyright © 1971-2021 Alyssa A. Lappen
All Rights Reserved.
Printing is allowed for personal use only | Commercial usage (For Profit) is a copyright violation and written permission must be granted first.

The Budget Boondoggle

By Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine | Mar. 23, 2009

On March 3, days after President Barack Obama grandly unveiled a $3.6 trillion 2010 budget overview, Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director Peter Orszag testified to the House Budget Committee that this budget is “fiscally responsible,” and doesn’t constitute “big spending.” The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) disagrees. On March 20, it predicted that the Obama budget would generate some $9.3 trillion in new red ink by 2019—and unsustainable, significantly greater annual deficits than the Obama plan projected. The U.S. House Budget Committee had not yet responded.

Moreover, the 2010 budget process has only begun. The budget could still end up harboring billions in earmarks—those pet projects Congressmen slip to buddies who miraculously avoid competitive bidding or oversight. The White House and OMB “blueprint” introduced February 26 isn’t a true, line-by-line 2010 budget, explains Taxpayers for Common Sense (TCS) vice president Steve Ellis. Incumbent presidents unveil budgets in February. Until April, Obama benefits from the traditional “pass” Congress gives new administrations. Only then will his full budget appear. In May, Congress will start writing the bills that will fund the budget, Ellis says. This spring and summer, thousands of new earmarks will very likely bloom.

Indeed, the outline makes it seem that the 2010 budget will provide fertile ground for earmarks as Congressmen and Senators grapple over which cities and states will land the funds. The $4.5 billion Community Development Block Grant, for example, is supposed to rely on a new program formula “to better target economically distressed communities.” It doesn’t specify who will write the formula or decide who gets the money. The Budget likewise proposes new Department of Housing and Urban Development funding to preserve “1.3 million affordable rental units” in multifamily properties.

And such housing grants have been massively abused in the past (along with many other department budgets), TCS’ Ellis notes. Obama should know. As both a State and U.S. Senator, he blessed state and federal legislative aid for several developers who then received more than $700 million in grants, loans and tax credits for their projects. His Chicago law partner Allison Davis, Syrian developer Antoin “Tony” Rezko (now incarcerated on 16 political corruption charges) and Chicago slumlord Cecil Butler, for example, all profited greatly from federal funds to provide thousands of Chicago low-income apartment units—all of which were condemned or foreclosed within 10 years. Obama’s 2010 budget overview offers nor regulatory or oversight measures to prevent such situations.

Obama campaigned heavily against Washington’s heavy use of earmarks. Yet the $410 billion Omnibus law he signed on March 11 offers substantial evidence that billions of dollars in budgetary abuse could follow in 2010. The new law reportedly contained “only” 7,991 earmarks, to cost at least $5.5 billion. In fact, it includes more than 9,282 earmarks, TCS reports. The Senate had March 3 defeated Senator John McCain’s proposal to strip over 8,500 original earmarks and $32 billion from the bill. Consequently, the law added 8% to fiscal 2009 spending, increases that bought less transparency than before. Congress publicly disclosed $500 million fewer juicy earmarks than last year, according to TCS. The visible earmarks are not comforting. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, for example, carved out $100 million in earmarks for Nevada, including $951,000 for Las Vegas “sustainability” (whatever that means) and $1.7 million for Las Vegas and Reno “dropout prevention.” By comparison, only three other cities got “dropout prevention” grants—Riverside, Ca. ($476,000); Scottsdale, Az. ($143,000); and Jackson, Ms. ($95,000). It’s strange—unless Nevada’s cities unaccountably cornered the U.S. market for high school dropouts.

TCS provides extensive lists of earmarks appropriated through U.S. departments overseeing agriculture, commerce, justice, science, defense, energy, water, financial services, homeland security, interior, U.S. legislature, military construction, Veteran’s affairs, foreign affairs, and transportation. Hundreds of millions of earmarks for the Labor, Health and Human Services and Education departments alone take 211 pages to list. Thus we find that Nevada’s $100 million in earmarks included $6 million from the Department of Education, for example, $143,000 for Reno to develop a comprehensive online encyclopedia—although many comprehensive online encyclopedias already exist—and $143,000 for a natural history museum in Las Vegas, whose horizon is neon.

Obama grandly promises to keep the 2010 budget transparent, “pay-as-you-go,” and return the U.S. “to honest budgeting.” But every federal budget is ripe for earmarks, says TCS V.P. Ellis. “People think budgets are about numbers, but they are about priorities. Where you put money shows where the priorities are. All program funding provides an opportunity for abuse.” This proposal, moreover, also has problematical “robust growth in spending” 10 years out, and increasingly enormous deficits, Ellis says.

It also suggests a reliance on nonprofit organizations. The $1.3 billion in loans and grants “to increase broadband capacity and improve telecommunication,” education and health services in rural areas—a laudable goal—could end up a nonprofit boondoggle. So could a “Social Innovation Fund” proposed to back “innovative non-profits” addressing serious national problems. Unfortunately, the 2010 budget outline offers no oversight on who decides “what works” or how Obama will control nonprofit spending.

Obama’s February overview proposes new oversight mechanisms for financial institutions and markets, for-profit corporations and government agencies. Yet nonprofits clearly also need strict oversight—which this proposal does not provide. The Washington Post this week exposed a $250 million in earmarks to Electro-Optics Center—a supposedly innovative defense research non-profit, founded 10 years ago by Democratic Rep. John Murtha at the Pennsylvania State University to create new industry and jobs in Western Pennsylvania. Instead, Electro-Optics spent much of that funding at companies supporting Murtha. Likewise, the Omnibus law allocates $190,000 to a new New Orleans community center to be constructed by a nonprofit. Founded by Sen. Mary Landrieu’s brother, that nonprofit organization no longer exists.

Unfortunately, Obama’s $3.6 trillion plan also includes no strategy to limit the very haphazard way Congress “throws money at infrastructure, agriculture, energy, health care” and so on. In fact, the plan may well encourage more haphazard spending, which goes hand in hand with earmarks. So, don’t expect earmarks to disappear soon.


All Articles, Poems & Commentaries Copyright © 1971-2021 Alyssa A. Lappen
All Rights Reserved.
Printing is allowed for personal use only | Commercial usage (For Profit) is a copyright violation and written permission must be granted first.

America’s Excessive Debt Disease

Will Obama’s proposed budget kill the patient?

By Alyssa A. Lappen
Right Side News | March 19, 2009

President Barack Obama wants Americans to see his $3.6 trillion 2010 federal budget as a long term bail out for the sick U.S. economy. Yet it focuses on key budgetary and economic issues only at the margins—through an ancillary hit list designed to overhaul health care, education and energy policies, and abate a purported global climate crisis that evidence totally debunks, according to over 31,000 scientists.
No, the economic turmoil originated in two decades of “irrational exuberance,” as former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan correctly termed excessive market optimism in December 1996. Social spending can’t resolve the mess, no matter how hard Obama wishes.

“In just 50 days, Congress has voted to spend about $1.2 trillion” on the $787 billion so-called stimulus and $410 billion omnibus spending bills, noted Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. “[T]hat’s about $24 billion a day, or … $1 billion an hour — most of it borrowed.” Those astronomical sums, moreover, followed a host of 2008 spending and relief programs that cost the government $2.3 trillion—including the February $168 billion Economic Stimulus Act and October Trouble Asset Relief Program to buy $700 billion in distressed securities. Since late September, U.S. debt has risen to nearly $11 trillion. In January, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected that the U.S. deficit would rise to more than 8% of the gross domestic product (GDP) later this year.

The new budget, however, proposes to add more to the national debt “than all previous presidents—from George Washington to George W. Bush,” according to Stanford University economics professor Michael Boskin. Obama promised that 95% of Americans will see no tax increase. Yet his budget proposes to raise earnings taxes over the current payroll cap of $106,800, the top marginal rates to nearly 40% and capital gains and dividends taxes to 20%. That means, as Boskin notes, Obama is cutting average Americans’ work and savings incentives—most heavily impacting the middle class, not the super-rich.

Undoubtedly, Obama’s economic maneuvers will worsen matters, something reflected in Obama’s speedily declining popularity. Obama’s support already undercuts that of President George W. Bush at an equivalent moment in 2001, reports the Wall Street Journal. Roughly 83% of Americans worry that Obama’s financial measures will fail, and things will get worse. Two thirds wanted Obama to spend less. And most Americans expect to pay higher taxes, despite assurances to the contrary. Obama has lost much Independent, and virtually all Republican support, and has lower approval than any elected 20th century president at comparable points. Finally, while slightly more Americans have overall faith in Obama, 45% have no confidence in him, an increase since his January inauguration.

Americans especially disapprove of Obama’s costly proposal to generate at least $646 billion in “climate revenues” through 2019—from a “cap and trade” tax for every ton of carbon emitted. These expenses would be dispersed throughout the economy, falling on every consumer large and small. Within ten years they would make “climate revenues” the 6th largest federal revenue stream after individual and corporate income taxes, Social Security and Medicare payroll, and excise taxes. Of that, Obama proposes redistributing $15 billion annually to subsidize alternative fuel and $65 billion to subsidize workers who frequently pay no income taxes.

Worst of all, this proposed “climate tax” wealth redistribution mechanism results from a bogus global warming theory completely debunked scientifically. Human activity generates only 4% of atmospheric carbon, which totals only 2% of the vast global oceanic carbon sink, according to Resource and Environmental Geology Professor Tom Segalstad at University of Oslo. Moreover, atmospheric carbon emissions linger only five to six years—before the calcium-rich oceans absorb them, he says.

Nor will Treasury Secretary Thomas Geithner’s proposed new financial regulations—including new capital requirements for the largest 10 banks, increased Federal Reserve Board economic risk monitors, tightened bank regulatory oversight and stricter control over inter-bank money flow—outweigh the mass of negative budgetary factors. The U.S. stock and bond markets last week booed Obama with several consecutive days of decline. Even Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is now on the defensive: In a CBS 60 Minutes interview aired Sunday March 15, Bernanke claimed the economy will recover, albeit not until the financial markets and banks stabilize. That gave small comfort to Americans who have lost roughly 50% of their wealth since November 2007.

Yet the vast majority of world leaders at the January World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland were stuck in what Harvard economics professor Niall Ferguson labels a “Great Repression,” that is, deeply anxious yet “fundamentally in denial about the nature and magnitude of the problem.” They reflexively reach for “dog-eared copies of John Maynard Keynes’ [1936] General Theory,” an economic theory prescribing heavy government spending to offset market instability in periods of high unemployment. And they almost universally prescribed issuing more debt to cure a global economic crisis caused by—an overabundance of easy credit and debt.

This fundamentally delusional mindset trusts that “a crisis of debt can be solved by creating more debt.” Yet, the West’s harsh repressed reality, Ferguson observes, is its current “crisis of excessive indebtedness”—-overly leveraged households, corporations and governments, alike. Average U.S. household debt is now 141% of disposable income (that is, income after taxes); in the U.K. it’s 177%. Some of the best known U.S. and European banks have overextended balance sheet debt to “forty, sixty or even a hundred times the size of their capital.” In short, they’re largely under water. Meanwhile, the U.S. federal budget deficit could easily hit 10% of GDP in 2009, Ferguson believes, and the CBO grossly underestimates the ultimate impact of that U.S. national debt explosion.

The only obvious solution, Ferguson correctly opines, is less debt, not more. Two methods ostensibly exist to reduce that debt—artificially inflating the U.S. dollar or renegotiating the debt. The first option is not currently feasible. While most economists eye inflationary pressure, deflation has already significantly eroded prices—and with them, opportunity to print enough money to escape a crisis this big. In the last quarter of 2008, deflation cut the consumer price index by a seasonally adjusted 12.7% per annum. The only remaining solution is restructuring. Bank shareholders must face their losses; bondholders must exchange debt for stock—at a negotiated discount—and governments must re-capitalize financial institutions after writing down their assets.

In the 19th century, Ferguson concludes, governments repeatedly exchanged higher-yielding bonds for lower-yielding securities. Bonds yielding 5% were swapped for 3% bonds, for example, without a whiff of default. Thus, homes could be refinanced, banks recapitalized and privatized, and the U.S. economy reset.

But time is wasting. Obama should quickly take Ferguson’s dark warning seriously to heart: “If we are still waiting for Keynes to save us when Davos roles around next year, it may well be too late.” Otherwise, his popularity is sure to plummet to unheard of lows.
———————————————————————–
Alyssa A. Lappen, a freelance investigative journalist, is a former senior fellow of the American Center for Democracy, former senior editor of Institutional Investor, Working Woman and Corporate Finance and former associate editor of Forbes. Her work has also appeared in FrontPage Magazine, the Washington Examiner, Washington Times, Pajamas Media, American Thinker, Human Events, Right Side News, Midstream and Revue Politique. Her website is https://www.alyssaalappen.org/


All Articles, Poems & Commentaries Copyright © 1971-2021 Alyssa A. Lappen
All Rights Reserved.
Printing is allowed for personal use only | Commercial usage (For Profit) is a copyright violation and written permission must be granted first.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant

by Alyssa A. Lappen
Right Side News | March 10, 2009

unitedinhateReview: United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror (WND Books, 2009), 239 pages.

In 2000, I noted a near-total mainstream news blackout on hateful Islamic ideological drivers of violence and jihad. I then began migrating from financial journalism to covering Islam and the Middle East. At first I believed colleagues were ignorant of services translating statements and articles from Arab, Urdu, Pashtan and Turkish clerics and media. A bevy of rude, angry replies to my letters, however, disabused me of that naiveté. Rather they suffered from an almost universal animus to facts—and to educating the public on underlying factors.

I simply could not understand.

Jamie Glazov’s United in Hate provides the first genuine insight I’ve yet found into this phenomenon. This brilliant historian and Ph.D. in U.S., Russian and Canadian foreign policy identifies a sort of psychotic dementia opposed to liberal humanism and the Socratic method. The diseased worship various Utopian ideologies, and are adamantly determined to reconstruct them on earth, regardless the costs in human life. Taking a page from everyman philosopher Eric Hoffer, Glazov labels them “believers.” These political theory ultra-advocates all possess one psychological characteristic—parallel to a genus, or DNA strand, and rooted in denial—a virulent, apparently communicable hatred for human imperfection, and therefore everything and everyone of the real world.

Neither believers nor their secular faiths are all identical. Yet deadly, duplicate attributes afflict all forms of Communism—engendered by Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Fidel Castro, Pham Van Dong, Mao Zedong, and Daniel Ortega—and political Islam. Believers all suffer acute alienation from society, total blindness to it—and the inability “to rise to the challenges of secular modernity,” establish real, “lasting interpersonal relationships or [internalize] any values that help him find meaning in life.” (p. 6)

Even nearly two decades after the Soviet Union’s defeat, Glazov finds that believers continue to threaten Western civilization. Now, they have married their animus for humankind to Islam’s longstanding, toxic war against individual freedoms and its renewed, current-day jihad against the West.

After defining their ailment, Glazov reviews believers’ shocking prominence—and intense commitment to the communist death cult. Wooden-legged drug user, “satanic sexual orgies” aficionado and U.S. outcast, New York Times reporter Walter Duranty, witnessed Ukrainian mass starvation in 1933, for example. Yet he reported the situation to be “not famine but abundance.” Peasants appeared “healthier and more cheerful” than anticipated. Their markets overflowed with “eggs, fruit, poultry, vegetables, milk and butter.”

Journalist Anna Louise Strong covered Washington state’s 1916 Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies) riots, became a World War I pacifist and in 1921 traveled to Poland and Russia, and metamorphosed into a Stalinist, immune to 1930s arrests and murders of her friends. In the 1950s, Strong migrated to China, where she died in 1970—still defending Mao’s bloody cultural revolution.

Playwright George Bernard Shaw, likewise “revered Stalin.” In 1931 his Soviet minders’ introduction of two train station waitresses “intimately acquainted” with his plays convinced him that Russians were more literate than Britons. Visiting Potemkin village prisons built to fool idiots like him similarly persuaded Shaw that ordinary English delinquents exited prison as “criminal types,” while Russia made such people ordinary men.

Few Kurt Weill fans may realize that Three Penny Opera collaborator Bertolt Brecht doubled as a dedicated Marxist, opposed to free expression. Art was meant “not to serve beauty or any other aesthetic value; [but] to destroy the old order and thereby enable the birth of the communist utopia.” Intellectuals were all scum, “parasites, professional criminals, informers….” The more innocent, the more they deserved to be shot. Brecht even said there “must have been enough evidence” to arrest his lover Carola Neher, who was never seen again.

These famous believers were followed by a long line of deniers—including Noam Chomsky, Norman Mailer, Simone de Beauvoir, Susan Sontag, Jean Paul Sartre, Abbie Hoffman, Shirley McLaine, Mary McCarthy, newsman Dan Rather, author Gunther Grass, producers Oliver Stone and Steven Spielberg, actors Ed Asner and Michael Douglas and many famous others. None ever knew “real economic hardship” or lacked material comfort, educational opportunity or social advancement. Yet these “new left” devotees—like Students for a Democratic Society terrorist William Ayers, President Barack Obama’s political mentor since circa 1995—all longed to redistribute wealth from evil capitalists to sainted “have-nots,” with typical sangfroid for the deadly consequences.

Longing for submersion into a communal whole, indeed their own deaths, believers flocked throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s to adulate mass murderers in Havana, Hanoi, Beijing and finally Managua. They denied victims of Castro’s vicious racism and homophobia—80% of them black, and Cuba’s 18%, post-1959 population decline; horrors and mass murders at Hanoi’s Cu Loc (nicknamed the “Zoo” and “Cuban program”) and North Vietnamese villages; mass starvation and murder in China; and malnutrition, begging and mass abuse in 145 Nicaraguan settlements, outside of which, Ortega ordered soldiers to ask no questions and shoot everyone on sight.

With the fall of communism, the believers migrated to yet another death cult—-jihad as exemplified in virtually every Islamic terrorist organization under the sun. In Islam, Algerian radical Ali Benhadj notes, “If faith… is not watered and irrigated by blood, it does not grow. It does not live. Principles are reinforced by sacrifices, suicide operations and martyrdom for Allah.”

Islam commands Muslims to commit violent jihad. “Myriad Koranic verses emphasize the importance of fighting unbelievers,” Glazov notes. For example, the “famous Verse of the Sword,” (Chapter 9: Verse 5) nullifies all non-violent passages and instructs Muslims to seek and obtain global “hegemony.”

Unfortunately, Glazov reaches this discussion, in Part III of his book, only after seeming to suggest that the current jihad arose from Nazism and Communism. He also subsequently suggests that Islamic hatred of Jews is partly an outgrowth of European anti-Semitism. In both instances, Glazov mistakes. Mohammed himself initiated Islam’s virulent hatred of Jews and Judaism, as becomes eminently clear in Dr. Andrew Bostom’s brilliant Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism. Moreover, Islamic affinity for Nazism was an outgrowth of Islamic ideas, not the other way around: Hitler himself identified with Muslim thinking and numerous Nazis later converted. But these objections are slight.

Glazov correctly notes that Islam, as always practiced and taught today, is rooted in jihad ideology. He also recognizes that Western Marxist believers identify strongly with Islamic adoration for “purification through mass death,” although they don’t actually understand Islam at all. Just as Marxists denied every horror perpetrated by the Marxist regimes and heroes they worshiped in previous eras (which Glazov describes in detail). No, their rigid secular view of everything today prevents them from comprehending that Islamic violence “has absolutely nothing to do with economic inequality, class oppression, or Western exploitation.” They demonstrate “an obvious and profound racism,” Glazov observes: They consider Muslims and Arabs inadequate “to understand their own circumstances.” Muslims frequently explain jihad as the natural result of Koranic directives to make Islam a global empire. Yet, believers always reject their explanations—as if one cannot seriously expect Muslims to understand their own theocratic, imperialist ideology.

Perhaps Islam can be reformed, as Glazov posits—and a dedicated few do hope to turn Muslim minds away from hatred and violence. “Human rights is not negotiable, even for God,” says one moderate Muslim I was recently privileged to meet. “Otherwise, Islam is a only a cult.” But that would be news to stubborn mainstream media, who (considering Glazov’s reflections) look married to the same Marxist belief and denials that drove Walter Duranty and Anna Louise Strong.

Those few cannot change what is hidden, unrecognized, unknown—and largely denied by their potential Western allies, however. The success of a handful of Muslims fighting impossible odds to promote secular Islam and reform their co-religionists’ thinking requires gargantuan efforts.
Glazov’s book is therefore critical to everyone who cares about the survival of Western civilization. As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis noted, “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.” Clearly, only public pressure can force the news media to pull up their window shades and shine the necessary light on Arab and Muslim ideological hatred of everyone not like them. And this book could help raise the pressure.
————————————-
Alyssa A. Lappen, a freelance investigative journalist, is a former senior fellow of the American Center for Democracy, former senior editor of Institutional Investor, Working Woman and Corporate Finance and former associate editor of Forbes. Her work has also appeared in FrontPage Magazine, the Washington Examiner, Washington Times, Pajamas Media, American Thinker, Human Events, Midstream and Revue Politique. Her website is https://www.alyssaalappen.org/.


All Articles, Poems & Commentaries Copyright © 1971-2021 Alyssa A. Lappen
All Rights Reserved.
Printing is allowed for personal use only | Commercial usage (For Profit) is a copyright violation and written permission must be granted first.

Should the U.S. nationalize banks?

citi
There may be a simpler solution to the credit crunch.

By Alyssa A. Lappen
Front Page Magazine | March 2, 2009

Well, it’s official.

Last Friday, the U.S. came within a hair of nationalizing a sick major bank. The government will receive up to 36% of Citigroup common shares—what financial markets would call control—for up to $25 billion in preferred stock bought in a failed October attempt to shore up the bank’s ailing capitalization.

For U.S. taxpayers, this could be a lose-lose proposition: As President Barack Obama’s newly named National Economic Council director Lawrence Summers observed last July, government sponsored enterprises (GSEs) tend to privatize profits and socialize losses. But the outcome will depend on Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s next step, which he has not yet specified.

Yet pumping new capital into sick banks hasn’t worked. Hundreds of billions in taxpayer funds barely dented the problem. At least Uncle Sam won’t commit ad infinitum to back Citi’s liabilities without control, dramatic policy changes and a total dividend moratorium. Common shareholders stand to see their 100% Citigroup stake tumble to 26%, but have little choice. The alternative could be total loss. Perhaps $27.5 billion in preferred and special stock may also be converted in the potential $52.5 billion deal if owners like Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, Singapore’s Government Investment Corp., Capital Research Global Investors and Capital World Investors and Abu Dhabi Investment Authority agree.

“This does something critical for the common good,” says Albert Romano, a former money center bank senior manager and trader, adding banks are but one industry affected by multiple converging crises. “We face widespread systemic risk. The overarching challenge goes beyond political views and philosophical differences.”

Even some die hard capitalists believe circumstances so grave that the U.S. must nationalize its banking system. Besides $1.2 trillion in subprime mortgages, New York University economics professors Matthew Richardson and Nouriel Roubini contend, $7 trillion in commercial real estate loans, consumer credit card debt, high-yield bonds and other loans could lose much of its value. The International Monetary Fund and Goldman Sachs predict bank loan write downs, now above $1 trillion, could exceed $2 trillion. Combined U.S. bank loan and portfolio losses could reach $3.6 trillion, with banks absorbing $1.8 trillion, the professors project. Banking industry capital, after U.S. government assistance, was only $1.4 trillion last fall—“about $400 billion in the hole.” Based largely on Sweden’s 1992 example, they argue, only nationalization, system-wide “receivership,” would stop “the death spiral,” resolve “toxic assets in an orderly fashion” and finally let lending resume.

Others disagree.

Sweden‘s emergency bank authority resembled the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, writes former Stockholm School of Economics professor Anders Aslund, a senior fellow at Peterson Institute for International Economics. “It is sheer waste to try to recapitalize a damaged bank,” as the U.S. did with Citibank and others. Like “a worm in an apple,” toxic debts left alone “will devour the whole apple.” Sweden categorized banks as obviously bankrupt, under-capitalized but salvageable, or private but in “rude health.” It reviled private-public partnerships like the “telling and repulsive” Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp. (Freddie Mac). Only Sweden’s bankrupt Gota Bank was nationalized and merged into the government’s own bankrupt Nordbanken, which was reconstituted as Nordea, revitalized and privatized. Private banks created private bad banks, through which they discounted or sold non-performing loans.

Already under government control, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac remain prone to privatize gains and socialize losses. Respectively founded in 1938 and 1970 to fill mortgage lending gaps, both benefit from U.S. government debt guarantees. In the early 1980s they “fed off the carcasses of the thrift industry,” enabling troubled savings and loans “to liquidate mortgage portfolios without recognizing losses.” Later, their easy lending policies fueled the current crisis: In 2003, they together held over half America’s outstanding mortgage debt. The Bush administration last year nationalized both bankrupt agencies. Yet they remain guarantors of the American dream—making home ownership universally available—a goal the Obama administration hasn’t relinquished.

Of most immediate concern is the banking industry’s terrible capitalization. Bank regulators require at least 6% of overall bank capitalization to be Tier 1—i.e. “intangible” preferred and special securities that ordinarily measure an institution’s health. For huge “money center” banks like Citi, U.S. economic cornerstones, regulators expect much higher Tier 1 capital ratios. But markets currently hate Tier 1 capital still more than bank common stock.

Thus the U.S. devised the new Citigroup rescue plan largely to sooth markets by creating up to $81 billion in tangible capital. Taxpayers lose out: The U.S. has collected only a quarter of $2.25 billion in annual dividends originally expected on $25 billion in preferred stock since October, although besides the control block, the U.S. would retain $27 billion in two other preferred “rescue” issues to convert into “separate trust preferred securities” paying 8% annually.

Unfortunately, markets disapprove. Citigroup shares fell 39% Friday, and further in after hours trading. Other banks were also pummeled. “The dose of intervention and its intended objectives will ultimately determine the validity of this temporary model,” says Romano. But as to whether political animus or President Obama’s social agenda will prevent an orderly resolution of the mess, the jury remains out.

Disgraced Merrill Lynch managing director Henry Blodget calls Geithner a “weird reverse Robin Hood,” shoveling money from regular guys “into banks that vaporize it.” The U.S. should force Citi to write down its assets and convert the company’s debt to common stock. Blodget understands balance sheet toxic assets have to go.

Unfortunately, “mark-to-market” accounting rules, intended to forestall managers from doctoring true asset values to disadvantage shareholders, are self-defeating in the current market. Panic has virtually eliminated normal markets, slashing bank balance sheet values for some of the most troubled assets to far less than the “near expected rate” cash flows that they currently produce.

Thus the obvious, best and simplest solution, also possibly closest to Sweden’s successful model, might be removing “bad” assets from bank balance sheets at “net realizable value,” argues American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Peter J. Wallison. Translation: paying a normal market price, if there were a normal market to realistically assess. Normal prices generally approximate current cash flows “discounted by expected credit losses over time.” Bank balance sheet losses are temporary “liquidity losses,” not indicative of whether banks are sufficiently financed to continue “until liquidity returns to the asset-backed market.” Banks aren’t insolvent, and “nationalization would be a huge mistake.” The U.S. could and should simply buy assets at independently-verified net realizable values, thus significantly improving bank industry capitalization—and U.S. economic health. Ultimately, taxpayers would lose little, since the government could sell the “toxic” assets for their true value, like Sweden’s private banks eventually did.

In any case, delaying puts the U.S. at risk of tumbling into something akin to Japan’s 1990s, decade-long banking crisis, Swedish economist Aslund warns. The Obama administration must “act fast” to identify, write off, and remove bad debts from normal banks—especially since assets at those banks equal at least $1 trillion, or 7 percent of America’s gross domestic product (GDP).


All Articles, Poems & Commentaries Copyright © 1971-2021 Alyssa A. Lappen
All Rights Reserved.
Printing is allowed for personal use only | Commercial usage (For Profit) is a copyright violation and written permission must be granted first.

The Evils of Islamic Political Ideology

Part Two: How Muslim Theory Suppresses Women

rightsidenews_301

By Alyssa A. Lappen
Right Side News | Feb. 26, 2009
RightSideNews Copyright © 2009

U.S. women received universal suffrage in 1920 with passage of the 19th Constitutional Amendment, avowing that neither the federal government nor any state could deny or abridge the right of U.S. citizens “to vote … on account of sex.” Article II granted Congress the right to enforce the amendment legislatively.

Long before the U.S. declared itself a nation, however, America gave women at large great respect. The Uxbridge, Mass. town fathers in 1756 granted the young widow Lydia Taft the right to vote in local matters, for example. America again showed its respect for women in 1789 when the states ratified the U.S. Constitution, inferring rights to women amongst “We the people of the United States,” when early 19th century suffragette Abby Kelley Foster first sought votes for women, and in 1869 when Susan B. Anthony’s formed the National Woman Suffrage Association.

Voting rights would never have accrued to American women, moreover, without their basic and universal right to free speech and their right “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances,” as guaranteed in the First Amendment, drafted and ratified in 1791.

Nowhere in the world, by contrast, does Islam grant such rights to women, either political or religious. Far from it. Current Islamic teaching more or less parallels that of the 7th century original. In October 2006, for example, former Australian Mufti Sheikh Taj Aldin al-Hilali described women as “uncovered meat” in a sermon at Sydney’s Lakemba mosque. Similarly, Muslim Brotherhood spiritual chief Yusuf Qaradawi, widely recognized as Islam’s “greatest” living scholar, in the Status of Women in Islam derides any woman having “free rein to assert herself, promote her personality, enjoy her life and her femininity… mix with men freely, experience them closely where they would be together and alone, travel with them, go to cinemas or dance till midnight together.”

Moreover that theme—of women as not only chattel, but actually meat—is embedded in Islamic tradition, as stated by Second Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab (634-644). Umar stated, “innamaa al-nisaa’ laHm `alaa waDam illaa maa dhubba `anhu” (Women are only meat on the butcher’s block, except for any parts that have dried up), according to a medieval Arabic text cited in 1937 by the great Islamic scholar, Georges Vajda. [1]

This might be unbelievable but for the fact that Islamic law, as cited in the Hadith (traditions of Mohammed) ascribes to women’s testimony just half the value given to that of men. Muslims consider the accounts of Sahih al-Bukhari unassailable. And according to Sahih al-Bukhari (3:48:826), Mohammed said, “This is because of the deficiency of the women’s mind.” Presumably for the same reason, Islamic law historically accepts accusations of rape only when there are four witnesses (not including the victim), an intentionally impossible benchmark. Three quarters of women imprisoned under Pakistan’s hudud laws, not surprisingly, are reported to be rape victims.

The global Muslim war on free speech is best exemplified by verbal and legal attacks on Dutch freedom fighter and Member of Parliament Geert Wilders, who has for years required non-stop personal security protection, now faces trial at home for his truthful statements quoting the Qur’an, and was recently barred entry to the U.K. This is all the work of advocates for global shari’a rule.

As we’ve previously noted at Right Side News, several large North American Muslim organizations also advocate global imposition of Islamic law, which prohibits “defamation” of Islam and Mohammed. For Muslims who leave the faith or “blaspheme” against Islam or Mohammed, the punishment is death, a statute on the books in several Muslim states, and widely enforced by mob rule in others. Non-Muslims may not criticize Islam or Mohammed, either. Pakistan’s hudud code enforces shari’a laws on everyone, Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Iran, Saudi Arabia and Sudan also enforce hudud laws. According to Islamic scholars, these statutes apply to all of mankind.

“Shari’a is barbaric, hateful, imperialistic, and unjust,” says ex-Muslim Abul Kasem, who no doubt voices the thoughts of tens of thousands of former Muslims. But the situation in which shari’a places women, both in Islamic countries and the West, is by far one of most intolerable created by the code. In Women in Islam: an Exegesis Kasem, a contributor to Leaving Islam, Ibn Warraq’s superb collection of essays by many former Muslims, challenges readers to imagine their mothers and sisters imprisoned under such shari’a.

“Men are in charge of women,” asserts the Qur’an in Chapter 4, verse 34. Other edicts concerning women are also especially harsh, and they are all based on the Qur’an, as well as other traditional Islamic sources. Kasem also asks readers to find a single Western law as misogynist as the following two Haditha, which equate a woman with a rib, and therefore crookedness.

From Bukhari Volume 7, Book 62, Number 113, as narrated by Abu Huraira:

“Allah’s Apostle said, ‘The woman is like a rib; if you try to straighten her, she will break. So if you want to get benefit from her, do so while she still has some crookedness’.”

From Shahih Muslim, also narrated by Abu Huraira Volume 8, Number 3467,
“Women were created crooked; if you try to straighten her you will break her and breaking her is divorcing her….”

One of the foremost U.S. advocates of equal rights for Muslim women, in North America and worldwide, is AtlasShrugs.com editor and publisher Pamela Geller.

Here, in the second installment of an exclusive four-part Right Side News series on the Evils of Islamic Political Ideology, investigative journalist Alyssa A. Lappen focuses the discussion on the plight of Muslim women worldwide.

AAL: Why do you consider the situation of women so important within the Muslim war upon Western freedoms?

Atlas: This war is for women, and about women, and the ownership of women. You can judge the health of any society by how they treat women. And obviously in Islam, women are chattel.

I grew up in the Golden Age. I grew up in post World War II America. I was a post-boomer, what they called the generation Joneses. I grew up watching Andy Griffiths and I Love Lucy — mindless, carefree, free. Freedoms were like the air I breathe. It was not until those freedoms were threatened that I realized how privileged I was and am and how I must do everything in my power to save it. No one stomps on my neck because I wear high heal shoes and low necked sweaters.

And now, the key to our freedom, believe it or not, is the freedom of women in the Muslim world.

AAL: Changing the situation for them seems like a very tall order, almost an impossibility.

Atlas: Women in the Muslim world have to be part of the effort, although they know nothing else and they live under fear and oppression. They have no one fighting for freedom. They’re people who’ve had Stockholm Syndrome for 1,400 years.

If you throw a frog in boiling water, he will jump out. But if you put a frog into warm water and turn up the heat until it gets hotter and hotter, that frog will be toast. That is what has happened to Muslim women, and it’s why we have to work for them. We have to stop that, because it is already happening here.

People are auto-censoring themselves. There is double speak. People say what seems correct because they are afraid of the truth. Where you are not free to speak we are all in trouble. And the battle line in North America, first and foremost, is for Muslim women.

AAL: How can we show skeptics how difficult things have already grown in the West.

Atlas: Look, all you have to to is going onto YouTube to see videos on how to beat your wife without leaving marks, what tools to use, like they would beat a dog. There are Islamic clerics who teach men to beat their wives “gently.”

The long and short of it is, in Islamic countries, women are slaves. And there is still slavery in these countries. They have human trafficking. It is not part of our culture, it is not part of our rules. Of course, there is illegal human trafficking here, but it is not systemic. It is against the law. Slavery was abolished with the emancipation proclamation. Slavery is still very much a part of Islamic societies.

They consider it perfectly normal.

But we currently have a United Nations that has paid no attention to the millions of people murdered in the southern Sudan and Darfur genocides. These atrocities are of no consequence to them. So women’s rights are certainly not even on the playing field.

AAL: How much of this happens in the West. Do we now have an epidemic in North America, too?

Atlas: So many people ask me how many women in the West are murdered in honor killings. I can’t give them an answer. Part of the problem is that even when there’s unquestionably been an honor killing, officials do not want to label it. This was the case when Yaser Abdel Said murdered his daughters Amina Said, 18, and Sarah Said, 17 on New Year’s Day in 2008. They were gorgeous, vibrant, quintessential girls. But they were too Western and they were dating non-Muslims. They spoke to a teacher at school. They called social services. They totally invested themselves in the West. They took honors and advanced placement classes. None of that mattered. No one helped them. Finally they ran away. The West could not save them. Their mother Patricia and brother, Islam, lured them back to Texas, to be murdered on New Year’s Day. Their father Yaser fled the country, probably to Egypt and the FBI issued a wanted poster. Their great aunt, Gail Gartrell, lobbied officials to designate the crimes honor killings, which they were.

Their mother, father and brother are still at large. And it took the FBI 10 months to add the words “honor killing” to the wanted poster. I called it a pig-flying moment, when the FBI finally acted, it was so rare. They called a spade a spade. But within days, the FBI caved in to pressure from the Muslim Brotherhood and revised the wanted poster, to exclude the truth.

AAL: That’s horrible. But this is anecdotal. To play the devil’s advocate, how do we know the problem is so huge, even in the U.S.

Atlas: For one thing, there is a fear of labeling. It took the FBI 10 months to call those murders honor killings. After 10 months, the wanted poster finally said:

“CAUTION
Yaser Abdel Said is wanted for murder. On January 1, 2008, Said took his two teen-aged daughters for a ride in his taxi cab, under the guise of taking them to get something to eat. He drove them to a secluded park in Irving, Texas, where he allegedly shot both girls to death. They died of multiple gunshot wounds. The 17- and 18-year-old girls were dating American boys, which was contrary to their father’s rules of not dating non-Muslim boys. Reportedly, the girls were murdered due to an “Honor Killing.” Said may have fled to New York or Egypt.”

But the FBI redacted that language very quickly. I called them on it. I called the agent and the man in charge. And he said, look we do not want to get involved in labeling. So there is real fear. It’s fear, or dhimmitude.

AAL: How can people grasp the severity of the problem?

Atlas: I am documenting as much as I can, but I cannot cover everything. This is one giant thing. I keep a running list of cases, and I am adding to it all the time, unfortunately. Look at these gorgeous girls. Look at Amina and Sarah. Beautiful. But there was also a “deer-in-the-headlights” quality to them.

In Canada, Aqsa Parvez was 16. Her father and brother killed her because she refused to wear a hijab. She’s in an unmarked grave. I said, “This is nuts.” I established a fund and let me tell you. People responded, with little amounts. But they did.

I called Aqsa’s family and asked what they would like. They said “we don’t speak English.” I went through the cemetery. We were willing to accept any changes the family wanted. But they never looked at the artwork we sent by email or snail mail. The family would not sign off on anything. They will not allow a marker. I raised money from readers for a simple plaque. The family does not want that. She was too Western. She dishonored them. The cemetery also refused to let me buy a plot near her.

I worked with readers to find another location, an arboretum at the University of Guelph in Mississauga, where she lived. We were all set to have a memorial garden. But the University of Guelph canceled at the last minute. They told the school newspaper they didn’t want to appear to support my “politically charged views.” They’re liars. They are afraid of Islamic reaction to a plaque for a victim of an honor killing. We wanted trees and a little plaque to read “Aqsa Parvez — Beloved, Remembered Free.” That’s it. It would not have been controversial. But no. The arboretum sent an email saying, “We will not let you do it. This is a peaceful place.” I will not burn, sue, deface, harass, intimidate—I will be civilized. How could the University consider this political?

The case of Aqsa Parvez is one story. But it is a microcosm of everything. It is a travesty that this beautiful girl, who lived a tortured life, who was subjugated, beaten and finally murdered, cannot have a freaking headstone. It’s insane. People refuse to change, and refuse to help. They say Islam is peaceful. But what does “peace” mean in Islam, except submission. Aqsa Parvez had no freedom of any kind, certainly not freedom of speech. That’s why I am doing this. It is insane.

AAL: And there were many others as well.

Atlas: Yes. Now there was a “moderate” beheading in Buffalo, New York. Muzzammil Hassan, a Muslim Brotherhood big whig, murdered his wife Aasiya Hassan, 37, at the Bridges TV Islamic station they founded in 2004 to show Muslims in a good light. She’d filed for divorce, and had gotten a protection order against him. But that did not save her.

Muslims in the local community all knew Aasiya was suffering severe abuse. The Northeast Intelligence Network had investigated Hassan’s TV station for its relationship with Hezbollah’s al Manar TV. That’s a terrorist group. It’s illegal in the U.S. Okay, but this guy is charged with second degree murder for beheading his wife. And like Robert Spencer has reported, the media obfuscates about honor killing. It has to stop.

In India, in another case, Mohammed Suhaib Ilyasi, “a famous journalist who started the TV Show ‘India’s Most Wanted’…married Anju Singh. This non-Muslim converted and lost all her property, cash and jewelry to him. He was connected to the Islamic mafia and slit his wife’s throat. The police caught him, but his father was important in the All India Islamic Cleric Association and Ilyasi got away.

Let’s ask why it’s okay to throw out our women like so much chattel. Where is the wall-to-wall television coverage like that given to Natalee Holloway, Callee Anthony, Jesse Davis? The media has already submitted to Islam and Muslim women who experience the worst from shari’a law are trampled like so much garbage, in the name of multi-culturalism. What about Muslim women.

This week a German Muslim was jailed for life for murdering his 16-year-old sister last year. She “turned away” from Islam. There have been at least 50 honor killings in Germany in the last decade. Again, those are just the ones recognized officially.

In Basra, Iraq, 133 women were killed last year. At least 47 of them were honor killings. Abdel-Qader Ali stomped, suffocated and carved up his 17-year-old daughter Rand to cleanse his honor. She fell in love with a British soldier, Paul, and dreamed of a future with him. Ali went free and then beat his wife Leila Hussein, 41. He broke her arm for reporting the murder. Leila finally roused enough courage to leave him, go into hiding and plan to go to Amman. Before leaving Basra, she was targeted and gunned down.

Why didn’t the Americans protect her? Why didn’t U.S. troops arrest him? Did we free Iraq to institute shari’a? And the dhimmi media loves telling us she was still a virgin. What difference does it make? If she wasn’t a virgin, would her father have had a right to kill her? Of course not. This was a life.

I’ve written at least 81 blog entries on Islamic misogyny and honor killings. I get their photos. Every one of these women was a life. A beautiful life wasted, for what? Look at them all.

The point is that there is an ever growing number of these things that we know about. I have a list of cases that I keep adding to. And for every one we know about there are probably at least five that are never reported as such. The point is these are girls. They are young girls and young women. They just want to be free. And they are all individual people. Their lives are snuffed out. And the number is large and trending up.

AAL: Well obviously you care a lot about these women.

Atlas: Yes, I identify with these girls. [The random brutality of] every story is remarkably the same. Aqsa was getting a bus to go see her friends and her mother saw her and socked her in the head.

When Amina was a sophomore she came to school with huge red bruises on her arms and back. She told a friend that her father kicked her in the face after finding notes from her boyfriend. Her lips got intertwined with her braces and the family refused to take her to a doctor.

Amina was willful. She was the one who wanted to get away. He had to kill her immediately. Sarah was quiet and subservient. She figured if she went along, she’d stay out of her father’s line of fire. I read the autopsy and shared it with a friend who is a prosecutor. Sarah, the subservient one, he tortured her. He put the gun to her arm and shot. She had 9 bullets when she called 911. He tortured that girl.

AAL: Assuming you cannot scientifically prove your theory of rising honor killings, or even if you could, what can we in the West realistically do about this?

Atlas: There has to be a place for people to go. America was always that place. I believe in individual responsibility. So women, if they want to get out, have to find a way.

But there are also Muslim victims here in the West. Europe is no longer safe for women. And U.S. society has to wise up. Do you remember that journalist who went around wearing a burka to find out what it was like to be a Muslim woman? Afterwards, she said everyone was so solicitous to her. The only ones hostile to her were Muslim women. They know what it is. They don’t want us to be trapped like them. They want us to free them.

Now in some ways, you have to hold Muslim women responsible. In Iran, I have a problem with that. If you do not like your country, fight or get out. Do something.

The U.S., though, is a country Muslim women can run to, where Muslim fathers should not get away with murder and their sins should not be covered when they commit honor killings. This is what has to be done. We have to expose them. But the question remains, are we setting an example for the rest of the world. Are we setting a good example of what it means to be free. President Bush did that, and he got his ass handed to him.

AAL: Do you have any hope that Obama could help?

Atlas: He will not benefit the rights of Muslim women in any way. He’s giving the Muslim world a blank check to do and act as they wish. I don’t know anyone who left Islam with a happy face. I don’t know anyone. And I don’t think Obama is naïve or ignorant about that. He was raised on Islam. He lived in an Islamic nation and went to an Islamic school. He memorized Qur’an. It’s where his sympathies rest. And think about his church. I do not consider Rev. Wright a Christian. He founded a black nationalist organization, and was very close to the nation of Islam before he started that church.

It bodes ill for all of us, but especially for women.

AAL: So what’s the answer?

Atlas: As I said, the key is the women in the Muslim world. They have to be part of the effort.

We’ll get nothing from Western feminists here. It’s an abomination that no feminist group has researched these numbers or taken bold action. Meanwhile, Muslim men commit these heinous crimes.

But we must not give them an imprimatur of legitimacy. We cannot let them get up and spout evil incitement. This did not have to be handled militarily.

At the turn in last century, one in ten Americans were part of the Klu Klux Klan. Now, the KKK is completely marginalized. They are not accepted. We have to marginalize honor killing and Muslim abuse of women to the point where it is simply not accepted.

That is what should have been done with Islamic jihad. But it was not done. This was a critical mistake. In any compromise between good and evil, evil profits. We are still suffering from this poisonous fruit.

At the birth of this nation, there were people for slavery and people against it. The founding fathers allowed slavery. That was a mistake. It was rectified by the bloodiest war in our history. Deals with the devil are much more injurious when you do not nip them in the bud.

So as bad as things are, and as bad as they will get, we should put these people in padded rooms, like heroin addicts who need to get clean. That is what the country needs.

AAL: Why it is that Islamic culture has this problem with women? Why is that.

Atlas: This problem also exists in other cultures. It does. Muslims are not the only ones to commit honor killings. The shame-honor culture is also specific to other tribal societies.

But Islam brings several things to the picture so that Islamic men are more likely to kill women. Women are but little possessions in Islam. There’s a devaluation of women in the Qur’an, making them but little possessions. Also, the Qur’an gives no clear prohibition against murder. Mohammed personally killed people and ordered people to be killed.

We like to think that religions provide the ethics and morals to control impulses, to stop humans from acting like animals. Good religion stops those base instincts. Bad religion amplifies them. And unfortunately, the West is becoming increasingly Islamic in nature.

You tell me. What instincts did the father of those gorgeous girls, Amina and Sarah, have?

This is what we have to do. We have to make it safe for girls who want to escape Islam. Any Muslim girls who want to escape Islam, contact me. I will put them in touch with people who will make them safe.

Islam needs a Vatican II. Islam really needs a reformation. But until such time as Islam reforms, we have to save those we can save.

As I said before, in any society and any political system, you look at how they treat their women. It says everything. That’s why, ultimately, this is why a war about women and over women, over control and dominance. The West doesn’t want to recognize that. But it is plain as the nose on your face.

Notes:

[1] Georges Vajda, “Juifs et Musulmans Selon Le Hadit” [“Jews and Muslims According to the Hadith”] Journal Asiatique 1937, Vol. 229, pp. 57-127, included in Andrew Bostom, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: from Sacred Texts to Solemm History (2008, Prometheus).


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