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.
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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/

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Sunlight is the best disinfectant

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

Review: 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 naivetÃ©. 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.
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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/.

Should the U.S. nationalize banks?

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).

The Evils of Islamic Political Ideology

Part Two: How Muslim Theory Suppresses Women

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.â€

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 naÃ¯ve 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).

Genocide on Trial

Pol Pot’s henchmen may finally face “justice” — in 2010.

by Alyssa A. Lappen
Front Page Magazine | Feb. 23, 2009

“I have waited 30 years for this trial,” said painter Vann Nath, 63, on the eve of Feb. 17 pre-trial proceedings in Phnom Penh’s international Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). So have an estimated 3 million other survivors of Pol Pot’s five-year Cambodian reign of terror.

On April 17, 1975—“Year Zero,” as the communist tyrant named that date—Pol Pot’s communist forces began driving people from Cambodian cities with the fanatical goal of recreating a perfect, clean, peasant-controlled, communist agrarian society. The cadres of “brother number one,” as Pol Pot was known, starved, beat and murdered up to 2 million Cambodians, more than a fifth of the population in 1975. With backing from China, Pol Pot destroyed virtually all Cambodia’s doctors, attorneys, intellectuals, artists and musicians in the nation’s rural areas, which quickly became killing fields. Even today, Cambodia’s countryside is littered with human bones and indiscriminately placed land mines.

Bringing the perpetrators of Cambodia’s genocide to justice has been a story almost as sad as the horrific atrocities themselves. Vietnamese communist forces liberated Cambodia over 30 years ago, in January 1979. However, Chinese-backed Khmer Rouge forces remained at large in Cambodia’s jungles until well after Vietnamese rule ended in 1991. Cambodia at long last achieved independence and self-rule in 1993, but Khmer renegades controlled some rural areas until March 1998, when the final Khmer cadres surrendered.

Meanwhile, there were virtually no efforts to obtain justice, apart from the absurd July 1997 show trial Pol Pot received from his comrades in Anlong Veng, and his sentence of house arrest for life. Pol Pot remained under house arrest he died in 1998. His military leader, Ta Mok, likewise died in July 2006, without ever facing justice.

These “punishments” reflected the enormous conflict of interest of Cambodia’s government. While self-ruled since 1993, the young polity actually had counter-incentives against seeking genocide trials. Co-Prime Minister Hun Sen, himself a former Khmer official, had served Vietnam’s People’s Republic of Kampuchea as a foreign minister from 1979 through 1990. Even in the relative calm of 1993 to 1998, when Hun shared the Prime Minister’s post with Cambodian Prince Norodom Ranariddh, the government rebuffed a 1994 coup, regional upheaval and pockets of Khmer Rouge unrest. Hun feared indictments against many of his regime’s other former Khmer appartchiks. Moreover, he feared public scrutiny and backlash over his continued close ties with Chinese leaders, who actively backed the Khmer Rouge, from 1975 until Vietnamese rule ended in 1991. “I do not understand why some people want to remove Pol Pot,” Chinese vice premier Deng Xiaoping said in 1984. “It is true that he made some mistakes in the past but now he is leading the fight against the Vietnamese aggressors.”

In June 1997, 18 years after the Khmer reign of terror, Hun and Prince Norodom pretended to request genocide trials, asking the U.N. General Assembly to establish a tribunal like those for the Rwanda and former Yugoslavia genocides. But Cambodian conflicts of interest remained. Thus, on ascending as sole Prime Minister—following the final Khmer rebels’ surrender—Hun granted criminal immunity to Noun Chea, Pol Pot’s “brother number two,” and advised Cambodians to “dig a hole and bury the past” to reconcile. In 1999, Hun rejected the U.N. proposal to seat international judges on Cambodia’s genocide tribunal.

Cambodian delays and U.N. Secretary General grandstanding prevented the General Assembly from reaching any agreement until March 2003. Only in 2007 did Hun Sen accept participation by foreign justices on the “hybrid” ECCC.

Still, years of wrangling seemed to remain. “This just goes on and on and I’ve almost lost hope there’ll ever be justice,” Vann Nath said in February 2007, a decade after the Cambodian government asked the U.N. to help convene a tribunal. Indeed, three other survivors of Phnom Penh’s most notorious prison since then literally died waiting for justice.

Yet, Hun continued to delay and let corruption run amok. From 2007 to early 2009, agencies including the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP), European Commission and U.N. Office of Internal Oversight Services (UNOIOS), alleged that Cambodian officials had demanded kick backs from local justices and court staff appointed to the ECCC. Deputy prime minister (and Khmer Rouge trials Task Force chair) Sok An repeatedly promised to investigate—but did nothing. In mid-2008, “payroll embezzlement” charges lead the UNOIOS to freeze Cambodia’s portion of ECCC funding. He so abused the U.N. human rights envoy, that Yash Ghai last year quit. There were also the cost overruns endemic to such international tribunals. Originally estimated at $19 million, the ECCC budget is now expected to exceed $170 million, reports the Economist, similar to astronomical increases in 2003 Sierra Leone court mandate and the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda tribunals, which together consumed over $2 billion.

But worst of all is the lack of justice. In 2007, officials finally arrested Khmer Rouge ideological chief Nuon Chea, 82; former head of state Khieu Samphan, 76; former foreign minister Ieng Sary, 82; and fellow Central Committee member and Ieng’s wife, Thirith, 75. In 1999, the government also arrested Toul Sleng prison chief Kaing Guek Eav, 66, a former math teacher known as Duch (pronounced doik), who ordered the deaths of more than 14,000 prisoners in the Phnom Penh high school turned slaughter house. Now an avowed Christian, Duch admitted committing atrocities on his arrest, but claims he would have been murdered himself had he not followed orders.

In 12 years, Cambodia has detained just five perpetrators. “A lot of people ask: ‘Why only five? Why only five? Why only five’?” notes Cambodian humanist Kek Galabru, adding these five are “the minimum of the minimum.” It is certainly not for lack of evidence: In 2005, Yale University’s Cambodian Genocide Project handed Cambodia voluminous documents it had amassed since 1994.

Duch will be tried first. After waiting three decades to be heard about the catastrophic crimes they witnessed, only four of Duch’s victims remain alive, among them painter Vann Nath, 63; Chum Mey, 77; and sole child survivor Norng Chan Phal, now 38.They watched the February 2009 ECCC pre-trial proceedings with anxious relief. “I could not sleep last night. I was waiting for sunrise so I could see Duch in the dock,” Vann said.

But it remains to be seen whether the other Khmer Rouge masterminds, old and ailing, will survive long enough to go to trial, which will not be scheduled until 2010, if ever. In sum, the international community has disappointed Cambodia as much as its own government. The “limited scope and poor design” of the international and Cambodian “hybrid” ECCC will call few surviving Democratic Kampuchea (DK) perpetrators “to account for their crimes,” sadly concludes Cambodian scholar Sopheada Phy. Once again, Khmer Rouge planners, supporters and participants may get away with mass murder.

The Evils of Islamic Political Ideology

The U.S. Constitution, ratified on March 4, 1789, forbade treason against the young republic. Article III, section 3 reads: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.” The founding fathers apparently were more concerned with treason than individual rights—since the first ten amendments, establishing individual rights, were neither drafted nor ratified until 1791.

American patriots, whether of Christian or Jewish religious conviction, suffered brutal oppression at the hands of the British and their allies. Their homes were invaded, their property stolen, and their very lives forfeit. Therefore, they naturally cemented life and liberty “for all” into the Constitution’s very foundation. Moreover, to maintain that standard the founders realized that all citizens must support equal rights to life and equal liberty for all, without exception.

To put it another way, America’s fathers and the Constitution’s ratifying states—in both historical sequence and principal—held above everything else, loyalty to the supposition of life and liberty for all. Before all else, the nation’s founding idea was that citizens’ Constitutionally guaranteed rights were and are not exclusive to some, but deniable to others.

The very first clause of the opening item on the Bill of Rights (the initial ten Constitutional amendments) sets into U.S. law the principal of a federal government free from legislation “respecting an establishment of religion.” Americans generally understand that phrase to establish each individual’s right to freedom of faith, yet the precise wording mentions no individual rights at all. Rather, it pointedly prohibits U.S. federal laws or regulations that require or in any way institutionalize religious practices.

Now, President Barack Obama advocates a so-called civil rights agenda—to “expand hate crime” statues like the Matthew Shepard Act, named for a student tortured and murdered in 1998 for his sexual orientation.

Yet this insidious legislative turn would would raise motive above the importance of criminal acts themselves, and attempt to legislatively control thinking—something time and again proven impossible, always with murderous consequences.

Even “New York Times bestselling” uber-thought cop Glenn Greenwald recognizes the danger. In defense of free speech, Greenwald decries Obama’s new policy, albeit from inside a little glass house, while casting obnoxious epithets at journalists with whom he disagrees (totally without basis in fact). One needs only imagine hate-crime “proceedings directed at opinions and groups that one likes,” Greenwald correctly observes. “If Muslim groups can trigger government investigations due to commentary they find offensive, so, too, can…” Now, replace Greenwald’s stone-throwing and name-calling with whatever you like.

Here’s the rub: In the 21st century, some claiming themselves pious consider their right not to be offended—however they perceive that—more valuable and sacrosanct than all rights of all other Americans. Thwarting every criticism of that faction would simultaneously gut Constitutional rights to life and liberty for all, without exception.

Muslims constitute the “political faction” advocating loudest for “hate crime” statutes. Their intent is to “restrict and punish speech” they dislike, i.e. criticism of Islam and Mohammed, to benefit their global war on free speech. To consolidate gains against free speech in Europe and the United Nations, the Islamic faction is heavily campaigning against North American free speech too.

Most large North American Muslim organizations hope to globally impose shari’a law, which prohibits “defamation” of Islam and Mohammed. Muslims who leave the faith or “blaspheme” against Islam or Mohammed earn the classical punishment, death—a statute on the books in several Muslim states, and elsewhere, widely enforced by mob rule. Non-Muslims daring to criticize Islam or Mohammed often receive the same punishment, whether in Islamic states or not.

Pakistan’s hudud code for example enforces shari’a on all citizens and residents—Muslims and non-Muslims. Iran, Saudi Arabia and Sudan also execute hudud laws—and not on modern whims. Under 7th century Islamic law, these statutes apply to all mankind.

The widespread Muslim hope to prosecute shari’a laws globally stems partly from the basic Islamic belief that “all people are Muslims at birth,” enshrined for example in Morocco‘s legal code and Malaysia‘s constitution, despite the latter’s ostensibly secular nature and 40% non-Muslim population. Indeed, everyday Muslims often advocate for global shari’a laws. A Malaysian blogger addresses such a message to “all Non Muslims reading this.”

“You must know about the Hudud Laws of Islam as you are also a creation of Allah, no matter that you are today a Kaffir @ an Unbeliever in Allah because you have been born as such

“It is up to you, as a free human being to choose to learn and study about these True Laws of Allah, as a source of knowledge and information about what they truly are and not be misled anymore about them based on what you have read or been fed by those who have an agenda to keep you in the dark about the Truth of Islam as revealed to us by our Lord and Creator.” (emphasis in original)

Fortunately, the West has individually sponsored websites too—like Right Side News.

Also fortunately, America has stalwart patriots such as Pamela Geller, editor and publisher of AtlasShrugs.com. Geller considers America’s current situation extremely dire. The U.S., she thinks, stands on the edge of a precipice. Like revolutionary-era journalist Thomas Paine, however, Atlas speaks common sense to, and for, common Americans. She too considers America “ultimately unconquerable.” And most importantly, unlike Paine, Atlas will never retreat to Europe or anywhere else.

Herewith we begin an interview with Atlas Shrugs founder Pamela Geller, on the evils of Islamic ideology. Right Side News opens this exclusive interview four-part series by investigative journalist Alyssa A. Lappen with a discussion on the worldwide Islamic assault on free speech, now intensifying in North America. Please check Right Side News in coming weeks for the second through fourth parts, covering other important aspects of the Islamic ideological threat.

AAL: What induced you to start a blog, and when?

Atlas: The blog was born on February 11, 2005. We just had our fourth birthday. I started it because I’m an individualist. I grew up in a post-historical world, as it were. I assumed my freedom. It was a given. After World War II, the good guys won. It was over.

I noted world events. But apart from being Jewish and supporting Israel because it is a beacon of democracy in modern civilization, I was not involved in politics. I was very ambitions and had a good career. I was the associate publisher at the New York Observer.

Then 9/11 clubbed me. On that day, I lost everything at the very foundation of what I believed. At that moment, I realized that nothing is forever, not even America. I felt very guilty that I did not know anything about who had invaded this country. So what could I do? One reacts to the political scene. But I was politically inactive, and I had a lot to learn.

Then I went to hear [Islamic scholar] Bat Ye’or speak at Columbia University. After her lecture, I asked for advice. She told me to learn everything. I started reading, and read all her books. I read everything I could about Islam. The media was not giving us information. And I read the internet—websites, news and blogs on subjects the media wasn’t reporting. I began to see that many people were saying what I was thinking.

In a way, I was raised to do this. My mother and father had a very good marriage. They worked hard. My father was a tough guy. He made $60 a day. He was a workaholic. My mother really respected him. Once, we were driving, and he said, “Nothing is for ever.” My mother objected, “America is.” My father said, “No, not even America.” On 9/11, I realized my father was right.

Initially, I did not do the blog. I went to protests. If there was an anti-Ahmadinejad protest, I was there. If there was a Hamas rally and counter-protest against them, I was there. I covered protests, I took videos and recorded them. Now the same rallies are against Jews, in America. Finally, a really smart commentator—I have a lot of respect for him—said, “Start a blog.” He said, “Do it,” and I did.

I am exactly the same now. I blog exactly the same as when I had 10 readers, and when I had 20,000 readers. My focus is just bigger and broader. It is hard when I go to my computer. There are always another 300 emails. It’s not terribly lucrative. But the responses are worth it. Today, I got an email from a woman. Listen to this. She writes, “I found your site by accident. I never realized what a mess we are in. Thank you. My eyes are open. I am passing this on.”

AAL: What took so long?

Atlas: I had never thought of blogging. And anyway, I had to learn before I could say anything. I spent about four years. You need to know what you’re talking about. It’s not like World War II. How many people are clued in to the doctrine in the Qur’an? They can expound on it all day long, but have never read it, and still call anyone a racist who cites what’s in there. This is not about al Qaeda, or Hamas, or Islamic Jihad, or any of those organizations. They are just changing their underwear. It’s all about jihad.

AAL: Why did you name the blog Atlas Shrugs?

Atlas: I loved the metaphor [Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged]. That was exactly what people were doing. Atlas Shrugging.

There are so many misconceptions about Ayn Rand. She is individualist. Her party is the party of individual rights, the smallest minority in the world. In this story, the world’s producers and entrepreneurs, people who make things happen, are so put upon by regulation and government. It is like what’s happening now. And the characters give nice names to things, like now, calling it a “Stimulus package” when it’s really a socialist package

In the novel, all the producers go on strike. The book is a stunning indictment of statism. It speaks for capitalism. It says, “I will not ask another man to live for my sake.”

Ayn Rand was an uncompromising person. In any compromise between good and evil, she understood that evil profits. The bad never comes over to our side. Evil has to be crushed. People do not like to hear that. But it does. Science advances and technology advances. Human nature stays the same.

AAL: Why do you think mainstream newspapers and broadcast media do not cover the the influence of the Qur’an, Islamic jurisprudence and theological edicts on Islam’s basically totalitarian goals?

Atlas: It is auto censorship and fear. Also, everyone is worried all about insulting Islam. Reporting even the smallest factoid earns an onslaught of charges of bigotry and racism. The net result is that you cannot even call an honor killing an honor killing and not get that kind of charge.

You can have a whole article on how a father, brothers and husband in a Muslim family are going to kill their sister or mother or niece. Yet the reporter will not even call the deed an honor killing. That line [of reporting leads] to the door. [Reporters get fired for it.] That is the problem. We saw that tendency with the [Kurt Westergaard Mohammed] cartoons. And that was [in September 2005] before Muslims were really on the march here. But even back then, in late 2005, I went to a panel discussion about the cartoons at New York University. They were going to show the cartoons so we could talk about them. But then the hosts decided at the last minute not to show the cartoons. I got there and the easels were black. That was March 2006. That is the level that we’re at now. At the one college where a school newspaper printed the cartoons, the university fired or suspended the student publisher. A couple of publishers were courageous enough to admit, “Look, we do not want to be targeted.” But that is now standard operating procedure.

AAL: A more current example is the failure to report Obama’s executive order giving $20 million and refugee status to “resettle” people from Gaza, in other words, Hamas.

Atlas: They haven’t reported that, no. The Arab narrative has taken over. The reporting in December and January said that Israel was targeting innocent civilians. But the only evidence was to the contrary. In fact, we have proof that Hamas shoots its own people in their homes. They literally shoot people in the streets, to punish them, or make it look like Israel targeted homes. Israel was hit from inside mosques and by mortars from a UN school and foreign press offices. Hamas hijacks ambulances to transport terrorists.

But U.S. newspapers don’t report it. This is auto-censorship. It is enormous. It shows where the sympathy lies. I see it as Islamic apologism. To their [Muslims’] credit, on even the smallest insult, their push-back is huge. They are winning. Mohammed said, “War is deceit,” and they are doing an awfully good job so that very few in America even recognize the risk.

If you report what they say, if you report their hate speech, you are considered a hate speaker. Truth has become hate speech. That is what we are talking about. So people are really clueless. They need blogs. Someone like me will be labeled a racist. This is what they do. They smear the good name of people and immediately associate you with the worst of humanity. If you say “ka ka”—or speak badly of Obama— your career is destroyed.

U.S. newspapers tell people not to believe their eyes. I tell people to believe their eyes and I am excoriated for it. The most highly visible example of that is Geert Wilders, [whom Holland is prosecuting for hate speech, for producing Fitna, and Great Britain denied entry last week to speak in the House of Lords]. Here is a man who cites Qur’anic verse, and they want him in jail.

But meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people can march and call for the death of Jews and it’s not hate, from London, to Paris, to Amsterdam, to Fort Lauderdale, and New York. Those death marches should have been on the front page of every newspaper and the lead story of every cable news and net. And it is almost unthinkable that the police would escort the jihadists to the Israeli embassy and at the same time be harassed and have shoes thrown at them. This is the apex of civilization. And where are the Muslims counter protesting not in our name? Where are they? I want them. Where are all those moderate Muslims.

AAL: This kind of thing goes on in government, too, doesn’t it.

Atlas: On February 2, I was on a conference call with [former U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy (2001 â€“ 2005)] Douglas Feith. I asked, when the Bush administration was planning the invasion into Iraq, if they took into account the jihadist ideology. His response was very revealing. In the beginning, he said [former Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld and [Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard B.] Myers emphasized the importance of the ideology. They wanted a strategic method to counter it. The rest of the government was doing nothing. Rumsfeld and Myers created the Office of Strategic Influence at the Pentagon. But the Pentagon public affairs people were very unhappy with the creation of that office. And it was infiltrated almost from the beginning. Someone leaked its existence. The New York Times inaccurately reported that the Office of Strategic Influence intended to lie to foreign journalists. It never occurred to them that their sources, not the government, were lying to hurt the U.S. Feith said that U.S. government strategy has not recovered from that to this day.

AAL: So honestly, don’t you think we are going to lose?

Atlas: No. I have faith in the individual, and in the indomitable American spirit. The picture you get from the media is very misleading. I don’t think that the silent majority has a clue to who and what we elected and the pickle that we were in even before B. Hussein took [the president’s] office.

But America is already waking up. Look at [Diane McDaniels] the mother whose son [Seaman James Roderick McDaniels] died [with 16 other servicemen] in the attack on the U.S.S. Cole. She voted for Hussein. Now she says she made a mistake. Her son was killed on the Cole, but Obama plans to release the [alleged] Cole perpetrator [Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri]. She was invited to go the White House with other Cole and September 11 families, and she refused to go.

And look at what this man did in his first two weeks of his office. The first foreign leader he calls is [Holocaust denier Mahmoud] Abbas, he is selling airplane parts to Syria, which is a state sponsor of terror [since December 1979]. He does not play hail to the chief. He ordered the U.S. Marine Band to play Sting’s “Desert Rose,” by an Arabic signer Cheb Mami, [rather than John Phillip Souza’s “Hail to the Chief”]. And he gives his first television address to apologize to the Muslim world. Apologize for what? For liberating Iraq from Saddam Hussein? For paving the way to an Islamic state in the heart of Europe? And he alludes to the U.S. as being a colonial power. America was never a colonial power.

Well freedom of speech is for me. That is how I define what I do.

All is not lost. Look at Churchill. They were bombing London when he was Prime Minister. Londoners were running for the shelter in the underground. It will get much darker here. But we live in a free country. We have a moral imperative. And I know that what we see on the TV does not speak for the American culture, or America’s ethics. Freedom of speech will win in the end.
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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/.