Obama took a leading role in causing the subprime housing crisis which triggered the recession, but he blames it on the financial institutions which he forced to provide the bad loans.

This is an editorial from Investor’s Business Daily:

Obama pushed thousands of credit-poor blacks into homes they couldn’t afford. As a civil-rights attorney, he sued banks to rubberstamp mortgages for urban residents.

Many are now in foreclosure. …

Obama focused on “housing rights” when he worked as a lawyer-activist and community organizer in South Side Chicago. His mentor — the man who placed him in his first job there — wasthe father of the anti-redlining movement: John McKnight. He coined the term “redlining” to describe the mapping off of minority neighborhoods from home loans.

McKnight wrote a letter for Obama that helped him get into Harvard. After he graduated, [Obama] worked for a Chicago civil-rights law firm that worked closely with McKnight’s radical Gamaliel Foundation and National People’s Action, as well as Acorn, to solicit lending-discrimination cases.

At the time, NPA and Acorn were lobbying the Clinton administration to tighten enforcement of anti-redlining laws.

They also dispatched bus loads of goons trained by Obama to the doorsteps of bankers to demand more home loans for minorities. Acorn even crashed the lobby of Citibank’s headquarters in New York and accused it of discriminating against blacks.

The pressure worked. In 1994, Clinton’s top bank regulators signed a landmark anti-redlining policy that declared traditional mortgage underwriting standards racist and mandated banks apply easier lending rules for minorities.

Also that year, Attorney General Janet Reno and her aide Eric Holder filed a mortgage discrimination case against a Washington-area bank that forced it to target minority neighborhoods for subprime loans. Reno and Holder also encouraged civil-rights lawyers like Obama to file local lending-bias cases against banks.

The next year, Obama led a class-action suit against Citibank on behalf of several Chicago minorities who claimed they were rejected for home loans because of the color of their skin. …

Which was untrue. Would-be borrowers, whatever their race, who can provide no deposit and have no job are  – obviously, you may think – not eligible for loans.

But Citibank eventually settled, despite the weak case. Under the 1998 settlement, Citibank vowed to pay the alleged victims $1.4 million and launch a program to boost home lending to poor blacks in the metro area. …

Citibank underwrote thousands of shaky subprime mortgages to satisfy the court in Obama’s case. Defaults were common. When home prices collapsed, most of the loans went bust.

By putting them on the hook for loans they couldn’t pay, Obama did them no favors. Blacks have been hit hardest by foreclosures. But what does Obama care …  he pocketed at least $23,000 from the Citibank case.

Today, he blames the devastating wealth drain in black communities on [the very] subprime mortgages [he insisted upon]. He says “greedy,” “predatory” lenders tricked poor minorities into paying higher fees and interest rates. …

His closest economic advisers also promoted subprime lending. … [His] Chicago pal Austan Goolsbee, who later became his top economist, sang the praises of subprime loans in a New York Times column. He argued they allowed poor blacks “access to mortgages.”

One of Obama’s top bank regulators, Gary Gensler, once bragged that thanks to subprime mortgages, banks made home loans to minorities at “twice the rate” they made to other borrowers … “A subprime loan is a good option when the alternative is no access to credit,” he said years before the crisis.

Obama hasn’t learned from his mistakes.

Far from it … The mammoth credit watchdog agency he created (with input from NPA radicals) will dust off Clinton’s 1994 minority lending guidelines to crack down on stingy lenders. And he’s ordered Holder, now acting as his attorney general, to prosecute banks that don’t open branches in blighted urban areas.

Not only has Obama scapegoated banks for the crisis he helped cause, he’s exploited minority suffering to continue reckless policies that hurt those he claims to champion.

But the bankers do have a share in the blame. Only it is their weakness, not their economic might, that should be held against them.

Now, against their better judgment and common sense, they are letting themselves be forced by Obama into yet another money-squandering scheme. While he has learnt nothing from the subprime disaster, they have failed to acquire a spine.

His new demand is that the banks throw masses of moola down the gullet of Gaia, the Goddess of the Green religion.

And again, though it couldn’t be more obvious that Obama’s demands are a recipe for bankruptcy, they meekly comply!

Obama’s goal is to wreck the capitalist system. Can the bankers not see this? Or have they decided it’s a jolly good idea?

This also comes from from IBD:

First the affordable housing crowd shook down banks for mortgage payola for the poor. Now the environmental lobby is shaking them down for cash to underwrite President Obama’s risky green agenda.

Risky? More like a dead cert loser.

In a strange announcement, Bank of America this week pledged an eye-popping $50 billion in loans for “renewable energy” projects — windmills, solar panels and hybrids — over the next 10 years.

The Charlotte, N.C.-based bank joins a number of other large banks making green commitments amid complaints from environmental groups that they finance coal extraction, the new bugaboo of the left.

Wells Fargo has already committed $30 billion in green payola. JPMorgan Chase has pumped nearly $7 billion into renewable energy projects.

Just as they bowed to bullying by Obama-supported NPA and ACORN into giving loans to borrowers who could not possibly repay them, they are now bowing to the same tactics used by greenies.

BofA upped the ante just one month after five radical greenies climbed Bank of America stadium in Charlotte, N.C., and unfurled a 70-foot-wide banner rebranding the stadium the “Bank of Coal.”

A group called Rainforest Action Network took credit for the stunt. A San Francisco-based green version of ACORN, founded by an anti-capitalist Obama donor [who no doubt became rich enough to be a donor through capitalist enterprise], RAN wanted to highlight BofA’s funding of coal plants, which it claims cause global warming. …

RAN sent its goons to BofA’s annual meeting. They demanded the bank stop funding coal mining — specifically mountaintop clearing — and “expand investments in renewable energy.”

BofA … agreed to stop funding mountaintop mining and start funding windmills, even though coal is a more cost-efficient energy source — and far more profitable than alternatives. …

What mysterious perversion of their minds drives the beneficiaries of capitalism to wreck it?

Why would the nation’s largest bank let tree huggers dictate its investments? The same reason it agreed to underwrite billions in risky mortgages in response to threats from ACORN and other housing shakedown groups: to protect its corporate brand.

Is that why? How is its corporate brand protected by its heading for bankruptcy?

Just like banks didn’t want to be labeled “racists” then, they don’t want to be branded “polluters” now.

And extortionists like RAN, who play dirty, attacking bankers on vacation and at graduation speeches, prey on that fear. Their subversive tactics work. They know CEOs will pay them off if they apply enough pressure.

Only, BofA, Wells Fargo, Citibank and other banking giants already paid off housing-rights groups literally trillions of dollars in mortgage commitments in the run-up to the housing crisis. Yet, they’re all being sued now for lending discrimination.

Now they’re falling into the next trap. Obama and his pals are using the banking system to finance their illusory Green Economy. …

Put plainly, these are socialists trying to destroy our free enterprise system.

These Giants of Finance are not evil as Obama and the “Occupy” revolutionaries like to pretend, they are merely fools and cowards. But if many of those who have their hands on the levers of power are foolish and cowardly, they can ruin a nation.

The IBD advises them to “unapologetically defend your business and the capitalist system, make it clear your obligation is to customers and shareholders — not radical activists.”

We doubt they’ll take such sensible advice.

President Barack Obama’s deputies are holding “hundreds” of closed-door meetings with a jihad-linked lobbying group that is widely derided by critics as a U.S. arm of the theocratic Muslim Brotherhood.

So The Daily Caller reports.

The admission of meetings with the Council on American-Islamic Relations came from George Selim, the White House’s new director for community partnerships, which was formed in January to ensure cooperation by law enforcement and social service agencies with Muslim identity groups in the United States.

“There is [sic] hundreds of examples of departments and agencies that meet with CAIR on a range of issues,” he told The Daily Caller …

CAIR is especially controversial because of its many links to the theocratic Muslim Brotherhood, whose political wing is set to dominate Egyptian politics since the 2011 departure of Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak.

In 2009, a judge confirmed the Justice Department’s decision to name CAIR as an unindicted conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation conspiracy to smuggle funds to HAMAS, which is a jihadi affiliate of the Egypt-based brotherhood. Five men in the smuggling ring were sentenced to jail in 2009, including two who were given 65-year sentences.

We often ask, why does CAIR remain forever “unindicted” if it is known to be a conspirator in felonious activities? But answer comes there none.

The House of Representatives last month prodded the Department of Justice to end all contacts with CAIR. “The [appropriations] committee understands that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has an existing policy prohibiting its employees from engaging in any formal non-investigative cooperation with CAIR [and] the committee encourages the attorney general to adopt a similar policy for all department officials,” said the committee report accompanying the 2013 Commerce, Justice, Science Appropriations bill, passed in mid-May by the House..

Janet Levy writes at Family Security Matters:

The Muslim Brotherhood is well entrenched throughout the government and government agencies at the federal, state and local levels. They have taken hold of the FBI, the DHS, the military, the State Department, and other government organizations. The Muslim Brotherhood determines U.S. counterterrorism policy and its operatives meet regularly with Janet Napolitano as well as the Department of Justice staff.

Recently, the DoJ joined the Muslim Brotherhood in an investigation of NYPD counterterrorism interventions that have protected Americans from jihadist attacks.

Ask yourself why Major Hasan’s trial has been delayed and why he hasn’t received the death penalty almost three years after he committed the Fort Hood massacre?

Also, why has Hasan’s murderous rampage been officially designated as “workplace violence” and “nothing to do with Islam”?

What about the order to destroy the cell phone videos taken by Pfc. Lance Aviles showing Hasan shouting “Allahu Akbar” and Hasan’s private business cards that identified him as a “Soldier of Allah, Glory to God” … ?

Why were two Al Qaeda fundraisers – Al Munia and Muntasser – just set free? How was the federal judge in this case able to rule that references to Osama bin Laden were off-limits during their criminal trial?

Last month, one of the MB subsidiaries – CAIR – successfully eliminated 900 pages of close to 400 FBI training presentations that they deemed “offensive to Islam.” FBI agents will no longer learn anything about the enemy except that they are followers of “the religion of peace.”

In 2009, all references to “jihad,” “Islam” and the “Muslim Brotherhood” were expunged from the FBI lexicon and the National Intelligence Strategy of the U.S. Contrast this with the 9-11 Commission report issued in 2004 which mentioned “Islam” 322 times and “jihad” 126 times.

Recently, the U.S. State Department removed an entire section of a human rights report that dealt with the persecution of Christians throughout the Muslim world.

For over a decade, the State Department has been actively facilitating higher levels of Muslim immigration to the U.S.

Our military has been busy learning to respect Islam and our troops are well schooled in the proper handling of Islamic religious materials. They also know not to urinate or spit in the direction of Mecca. At a once prominent military academy deemed the “West Point of the South” – VMI – cadets now celebrate the 771 A.D. Muslim conquest of Spain.

All because America has elected a lover of Islam as its president. Americans learnt on 9/11 (if they did not know it sooner) that Islam is America’s enemy. But no one whose duty it was – media reporters, politicians – found out and published, in the election year of 2008, the fact that candidate Obama loves Islam.

Now it is known, can the information be widely enough spread to keep the voters from re-electing him?

This is from Family Security Matters, by Clare M. Lopez:

Quietly, behind the scenes, the Muslim Brotherhood is enforcing censorship of all U.S. government training about Islam and the forces of Islamic jihad. Under the co-opted direction of National Security Council official, Quintan Wiktorowicz, key Cabinet Departments, including Defense, Homeland Security, Justice and State are purging their curriculum materials of any references about Islam that their Muslim Brotherhood advisors find objectionable.

In effect, the national security policy of the U.S. government is being brought into compliance with Islamic law on slander.

Under Islamic law (sharia), “slander” means “to mention anything concerning a person [a Muslim] that he would dislike.” Telling the whole truth about Islamic doctrine, law and scriptures – especially the Muslim obligation to conduct warfare against non-Muslims, subjugate them and force them to live under Islamic law – would reveal the very essence of sharia Islam. For obvious reasons, it’s not the part of Islam that its Brotherhood vanguard wants Americans to know about.

There is a campaign against imaginary “Islamophobia,” which is, Clare Lopez writes, “designed and promoted by the Muslim Brotherhood to silence those who would speak truth about Islam.”

She goes on:

Farah Pandith is the Special Representative to Muslim Communities for the U.S. Department of State. … She repeatedly has associated with groups and individuals that are known affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood and its equally jihadist off-shoot, HAMAS. In an interview with the Gulf Times at the conclusion of the May 2012 9th U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Qatar, Pandith confirmed that it has been the policy of the Obama administration since its inception “to put the priority of engaging with one fourth of humanity [Islam] front and centre.” …

There’s never before been an American president who so unashamedly and deliberately has sought to empower those who’ve openly and repeatedly declared themselves the sworn enemies of this country. … Muhammad Badi, the Muslim Brotherhood Supreme Guide, effectively declared war on the U.S. in October 2010, about nine months before the Obama administration granted formal diplomatic recognition to the jihadist group. …

With the Obama presidency that the deep Brotherhood penetration of U.S. national security leadership is moving unafraid into the open, at last confident of its acceptance and backing. …

On October 19, 2011, an op-ed piece, written by Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) President Salam al-Marayati, was published in the Los Angeles Times and threatened the FBI that the Muslim community would withhold cooperation against terrorism if the Justice Department (DoJ) didn’t purge its training materials “immediately.”

“Co-operation against terrorism”? By the MPAC? Who would have guessed it was happening? Who will believe it that it ever did or ever will?

Justice must have gotten the message very quickly, immediately in fact, because that very afternoon, Thomas E. Perez, the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, represented the Department at a George Washington University summit in Washington, D.C. to confirm its capitulation to the Muslim Brotherhood.

In attendance to accept the surrender was Mohamed Magid, president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) …  [The] DoJ earlier named ISNA an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2008 Holy Land Foundation HAMAS terror funding trial.

Another criminal organization remaining “unindicted”.

In fact, FBI Director Robert Mueller appeared to anticipate the al-Marayati blackmail piece when he appeared before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence earlier on October 6, 2011, to offer his mea culpa for FBI training material that … taught accurately that “Jihad is motivated by the strategic themes and drivers in Islam.”

By February 15, 2012, the FBI was announcing that it would be taking its curriculum purge and revision advice from a panel that apparently includes Muslim Brotherhood associates ISNA and MPAC (although the FBI refuses to say for sure). Under the watchful eyes of its jihadist mentors, the FBI subsequently pulled over 700 documents and 300 presentations from its training materials.

Also in October 2011, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) published its Training Guidance & Best Practices for Countering Violent Extremism (CVE), a term that deliberately erases any hint that Islamic terrorism derives its motivation from the doctrine, law and scriptures of Islam.

It’s no surprise that DHS Secretary Napolitano’s CVE Working Group includes the Obama administration’s favorite Imam, Mohamed Magid (of ISNA and Muslim Brotherhood association), plus Dalia Mogahed, who sports her own jihadist leanings, and one of the Muslim Brotherhood’s all-time favorite law enforcement officials, the LAPD’s Deputy Chief, Michael Downing. …

The final bastion of America’s defense against Islamic jihad and sharia, the Pentagon, fell to the enemy in April 2012, with the issuance of a letter from General Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, re-issuing his earlier order that all Department of Defense (DoD) course content be scrubbed to ensure no lingering remnant of disrespect to Islam.

All U.S. military Combatant Commands, Services, the National Guard Bureau and Joint Staff are under Dempsey’s Muslim Brotherhood-dictated orders to ensure that henceforth no U.S. military course will ever again teach truth about Islam that the jihadist enemy finds offensive (or just too informative). To all intents and purposes, DoD Secretary Leon E. Panetta likewise has acquiesced to a Muslim Brotherhood takeover of U.S. military education.

One cannot help wondering: if Muslims  find it “offensive” for the cruelties of Islamic law and practice to be revealed, why do they continue to uphold them and practice them? If they’re proud of amputating limbs, stoning women to death, killing apostates and homosexuals, beating women and treating them as slaves, waging  jihad against the rest of the world, why not trumpet those ideals of justice throughout every land? Hushing them up does suggest they’re ashamed of them. Why can’t they see this? Why can’t the administration see it?

The Great Purge represents a huge victory for the jihadist enemy, who told us in the Muslim Brotherhood’s Explanatory Memorandum more than 20 years ago of its plan for “eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house …  ”

Without the willing assistance of America’s most senior leadership figures – at DHS, DoD, DoJ, the State Department and White House – this enemy triumph could never have happened. Reversing the disastrous effects of the Great Purge before the Republic slips further under the censorship of the Muslim Brotherhood is the critical task before us now.

The UN must be destroyed because (to put it very mildly, coolly, and objectively):

• It does no good to anyone
• It does much harm to many
• It is unreformable
• It was a colossal mistake of wishful thinking from its beginning
• It is kept going only because it is a gravy train for its bureaucrats and diplomats at enormous expense to tax-payers, especially Americans

A documentary film made recently by Ami Horowitz and Matt Groff, UN Me, exposes the worst incidences of its uselessness and corruption, violent and cruel actions, and refusals to do what it purportedly came into existence to do.

The following extracts are from an excellent article on the film by Bruce Bawer at Front Page. (It is well worth reading in full.)

UN Me begins by according us a few brief glimpses of the sheer sloth that characterizes the whole shebang. Old UN hands describe the short working days, long lunches, and frequent midday naps that characterize the everyday life of many of its functionaries. Wandering the halls of UN headquarters in New York shortly after 5 PM on a weekday, Horowitz … encounters a virtual ghost town: almost everybody has long since cleared out for the day. This institutional torpor is, he makes clear, emblematic of the whole worldwide enterprise. …

Horowitz reminds us that countries like Libya, Sudan, Zimbabwe, and China have sat on the UN Human Rights Commission – and, later, on the Human Rights Council that was meant to be an improvement on that comically corrupt agency.

In 2010, Iran was elected to the UN Commission on the Status of Women.

At one point in the film, Horowitz asks Navi Pillay, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and director of the UN’s 2009 anti-racism conference in Geneva, why Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, of all people, was named keynote speaker at that event. That question, she replies in a small voice, is “not for me to answer.” (No, you don’t get far at the UN by providing honest answers to reasonable questions like that one.)

Horowitz informs us that Article 6 of the UN Charter actually “calls for the expulsion of any nation that consistently violates the principles of the charter.” Yet no member country has ever been expelled under Article 6. Shashi Tharoor, UN information chief, cheerfully explains that it’s best to have everybody “under the same tent.” …

The  film covers some of the more egregious scandals involving UN peacekeeping …  anecdotes about peacekeepers in various countries who, in their interactions with the people they were there to protect, acted like thugs, got rich trafficking drugs, spent their time whoring, and sexually abused minors. Peacekeepers in the Congo committed literally thousands of rapes. At least one ran a pedophilia ring.

We’re shown video of UN bureaucrats solemnly vowing that errant peacekeepers will be caught and punished. But in fact almost no UN peacekeeper has ever been held accountable for anything.

In Côte d’Ivoire, peacekeepers actually fired on peaceful, unarmed protestors.

They were standing together, men women and children, singing happily when UN sharp shooters fired on them. One of the few times the “peacekeepers”  have actually used their arms.

But was anyone punished? No; that’s just not the UN way. When Horowitz, in a sit-down interview with Abou Moussa, head of the UN mission in Côte d’Ivoire, asks about the episode, Moussa gets up and leaves.

The film moves on to the absurdity that is the International Atomic Energy Agency – which, tasked with preventing nuclear-arms proliferation, has actually helped North Korea, Iran, India, and Pakistan to acquire nuclear technology, purportedly for peaceful purposes. Since, as the film notes, the IAEA can only perform inspections in countries that invite it to do so, it spends more than 80% of its $380 million annual budget inspecting facilities in – believe it or not – Germany, Japan, and Canada. …

Iran carries on towards making nuclear weapons. The UN and its agencies can do nothing about it, nor would if they could. Iran’s President Ahmadinejad is one of the most honored, ecstatically applauded gasbags in the UN General Assembly, he who has homosexuals hanged and women stoned to death. Ahmadinejad is the perfect personification of the spirit of the United Nations Organization.  

Then there’s terrorism. After 9/11, the UN passed Resolution 1373, which was supposedly designed to fight terrorism. It would appear to be as toothless a measure as was ever ratified by a deliberative body. Horowitz interviews Javier Ruperez, whose title is – get this – Executive Director of the Counter-Terrorism Executive Directorate of the Counter-Terrorism Committee of the Security Council. Asked what the committee actually does to fight terrorism, Ruperez speaks blandly of the production of reports. Member countries, you see, are asked to file reports indicating whether or not they’re aiding terrorists. The directorate, or committee, or whatever it is also sends inspectors for, oh, a week or so to various countries to find out whether anything fishy is going on there. None of this, of course, actually accomplishes anything. Asked whether the UN has official lists of terrorist groups and of countries that support terror, Ruperez says no: “This is not the practice of the UN.” …

Another question: how does the UN define terrorism? This, Ruperez declares, is still a “pending matter.” …

The UN will not define terrorism because the General Assembly is dominated by terrorism-sponsoring states.

Next up: the Oil for Food scandal – which, as Claudia Rosett, the top-notch UN expert and eloquent UN critic, tells Horowitz, was absolutely “designed to produce corruption.” Allegedly, the objective of the program was to provide food, medical supplies, and so forth to the Iraqi people in exchange for oil; in reality, a bunch of UN big shots, up to and including Security Council representatives … lined their pockets with kickbacks. But, again, the UN did nothing – it was, as Rosett says, “the biggest scam in the history of human relief,” but nobody was fired or jailed. As always, the UN proved that nothing could be more alien to its institutional culture than the idea of accountability.

The Rwanda genocide gets its own sad chapter in UN Me. The head of the UN peacekeepers in that country, General Romeo Dallaire, actually wanted to do the right thing. But when he asked Kofi Annan, then in charge of all UN peacekeeping forces, for authority to take relatively modest action to prevent a looming genocide, Annan said no. Why? Because it was more important to protect the UN’s “image of impartiality” than to protect people from genocide. UN forces were even ordered to withdraw from a school where they were the only thing standing between Tutsi refugees – many of them children and old people – and Hutus with machetes. Result: a brutal massacre for which – yet again – no UN personnel were punished.

Live footage of what happened there is one of the most heart-rending scenes in the film.

While this nightmare was unfolding in Rwanda, Boutros-Boutros Ghali, then secretary-general of the UN, was on a European tour, which he refused to cancel in order to deal with Rwanda.

He had urgently to attend a string of universities bestowing honorary degrees on him for being such a benefactor of mankind.

When he did return to New York, he denied that Tutsi were being exterminated. …  Horowitz and Groff even got Jean-Marie Guéhenno, former Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, on camera smoothly asserting that in the wake of the Rwanda genocide, it’s best not to “allocate the blame to one actor or the other.”

Horowitz also interviews Jody Williams, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who was invited by the UN to examine the situation in Darfur and who ended up livid at the UN’s palpable discomfort with her undiplomatic conclusions and its failure to act on her urgent recommendations. …

At film’s end, Horowitz and Graff pose a simple question: what, given all these unpleasant facts, does the UN stand for? The answer, alas, is clear. It stands for itself – period. Like many other pointless bureaucracies, it is about perpetuating its own existence and enhancing its own image – and about seeking to squelch the truth about its fecklessness, incompetence, and absolute lack of a moral compass. It’s also … about providing hack politicians from around the world with yet another career steppingstone, once they’ve risen to the top of the ladder in their own crummy little countries and finished emptying their own citizens’ pockets.

Please watch the film!

Would you like a long vacation on a sunny Caribbean island, costing you not a cent for accommodation, good food, leisure, sports with luxury facilities including a super new soccer field, TV and DVD movies, newspapers in a well-stocked library, and “enriching your life” classes with instruction in painting, writing a resume and how to handle personal finances?

All you have to do to qualify is commit an act of terrorism against the United States – outside US territory –  in the name of Islam.

This is from Commentary Contentions, quoted by Alana Goodman:

Among the recent improvements to the facility commonly known as “Gitmo”: a heavily guarded soccer field for detainees known as “Super Rec,” which cost nearly $750,000 and opened this week; cable television in a communal living quarters and “enriching your life” classes for detainees, which include instruction on learning to paint, writing a resume — even handling personal finances. …

Many of the improvements have been made at the most modern facility in the detention center, known as Camp VI, a communal living compound that houses about 80 percent of the 169 detainees currently held at Gitmo. There, detainees who are deemed to be compliant with the rules and therefore eligible for more privileges are able to watch 21 Cable TV channels, DVD movies, read newspapers and borrow books from a library.

Alana Goodman comments:

You’ve got to be kidding. Only 21 cable channels available? It would have been so much more humane to simply drop a drone on their heads and get it over with.

Notice that Democrats pretty much stopped complaining about the detention facility after gaining control of the executive branch. Most of their concerns about civil liberties at Guantanamo Bay seemed to evaporate shortly after Obama’s election. The issue just never comes up anymore — and even the media lost interest in stories about alleged “mistreatment” at the facility. Also note that Democrats are pretty nonchalant about Obama’s “kill list,” and his increase in drone strikes. They were appalled with the idea of detaining terrorists and attempting to collect intelligence from them, but they support killing them in the desert with hellfire missiles.

For the record, I’m in favor of both. But how can you support the latter and not the former, and claim it’s for humanitarian reasons?

We too are in favor of both.

We’d consider it merciful treatment for the Allahu Akhbar Murderers if they were fed on pork, cooped up in narrow dark cells, humiliated, forced to give information to relentless interrogators, tried briskly soon after capture by military tribunals, and shot.

Call us soft if you will.

UNRWA, The United Nations Relief and Works Agency, is an organization that exists solely to keep millions of Palestinians as stateless dependents, or as cossetted beggars to put it more bluntly. This cruel policy was decided upon by Arab leaders way back in the late 1940s, in order to bludgeon Israel and the West with their own sense of compassion – the Arabs themselves having no such bothersome thing –  and the Western powers have gone along with it ever since. How many more generations must be condemned to this fate?

Mark Kirk, the Republican US Senator from Illinois, recently decided it was time for questions to be asked about the ever-growing numbers of Palestinian “refugees”.

Cliff May wrote on May 31, 2012, at the National Review:

Last week the Senate Appropriations Committee, on a unanimous and bipartisan basis, approved legislation requiring the State Department to tell Congress how many of the five million Palestinians currently receiving assistance from UNRWA were among the approximately 750,000 individuals displaced during the war against Israel, and how many are their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

A statement from Kirk’s office explained that, “With U.S. taxpayers providing more than $4 billion to UNRWA since 1950, the watershed reporting requirement will help taxpayers better understand whether UNRWA truly remains a refugee assistance organization or has become a welfare agency for low-income residents of the Levant.”

Kirk’s legislation was strenuously opposed not just by UNRWA but also by the State Department.

– And by Patrick Leahy, Democratic Senator from Vermont.

Daniel Greenfield writes at Canada Free Press:

“I always look at what is in the United States’ interest first and foremost, and this would hurt the United States’ interests,” Senator Leahy stated firmly.

It is of course difficult to find as compelling a national interest as the UNRWA, a refugee agency created exclusively for the benefit of five million Arabs, approximately 30,000 of whom are actual refugees, but all of whom hate the United States.

Senator Leahy, who could not discover a national interest in the Balanced Budget Amendment, drilling for oil in ANWR or detaining Muslim terrorists, all of which he voted against,  finally discovered a binding national interest 5,500 miles away in Jordan, where “refugee camps” like Baqa’a (pop. 80,000), which are virtually indistinguishable from local towns and cities, complete with block after block of residential homes, stores and markets, multi-story office buildings, schools, hospitals and assorted infrastructure, must not be looked at too closely.

In Jordan, Palestinians from West of the River do actually have citizenship and are not, like the other “refugees”, stateless.  (Some two-thirds or maybe even three-quarters of the population of Jordan is native to the region of Palestine as defined under the post World War One British mandate. Jordan is, in fact, the Arab state of Palestine.)

As a city which will soon celebrate its 50 year anniversary, Baqa’a is older than many modern Israeli cities and is as much a refugee camp as any of them. … [But in] Baqa’a no one does anything for themselves because they are all eternal refugees with an entire UN agency dedicated to wiping their bottoms for them. A unique and singular honor in a world full of authentic refugees who have been driven out by rape squads and genocide, without getting their own minders in blue.

Senator Mark Kirk’s heretical proposal to begin reforming the UNRWA by distinguishing between people who could have some claim on being refugees from the vast majority who cannot, met with Leahy’s declaration that … “it would hurt the United States’ interests.”

It is no doubt in the best interests of the denizens of Baqa’a and their Jordanian rulers, who need to spend that much less money taking care of their people, but ignorance certainly doesn’t do the United States and its interests any good. A refusal to seriously examine the books does, however, benefit the UNRWA and politicians like Leahy who continue to support this boondoggle. …

Where exactly is the compelling national interest in standing behind the UNRWA’s 1.23 billion dollar biennial budget, and not just the budget, but a refusal to reform the methodology for accounting where all that money is going to? Before Washington D.C. cuts another quarter-of-a-billion dollar check to one of the biggest wastes of money in an organization that excels at wasting money, even more than D.C., it’s entirely sensible to ask whom the money is going to and how long we will be making out these checks?

There are currently five million people living off the UNRWA dole. Sooner or later there will be fifty million. Jordan’s government has done everything possible to inflate the UNRWA welfare rolls and keep cities like Baqa’a and their people on the Western dole. …

Thomas R. Nides, the Deputy Secretary of State, took a position against the amendment, calling the number of refugees a “Final Status Issue” that can only be resolved when Israel and the PLO militias complete their negotiations, at some unknown date. Diplomats have developed a bad habit of insisting on a dysfunctional status quo tilted toward the Muslim side, until the messiah of final status finally comes. There can be no Jewish housing in Jerusalem, because it’s a final status issue, we can’t count the refugees because it’s a final status issue, and we can’t question the final status, because that too is a final status issue.

After twenty years of negotiations, that have led to nothing except a rump terrorist state that is one big Baqa’a inside Israel, it’s ridiculously clear that there will never be any final status negotiations …

Final status, for all intents and purposes, means forever. It’s an excuse for maintaining Baqa’a and the United Nations budget, and nothing else. But suppose that we might one day look forward to final status negotiations, there is no reason why an objective like what makes one a refugee, cannot be addressed by the nation funding the refugees. Final status agreements cannot defer the dictionary or common sense. And unless we are expected to keep on funding Baqa’a on its 100 year anniversary or its 200 year anniversary, sooner or later the numbers have to be added up, and people whose only claim to the bottomless aid bucket is that their great-grandfather was on the losing side of a war of conquest, started by their side, will have to get a job. …

What conceivable national interest has there ever been in picking up Soviet leftovers like the PLO, and pouring billions of dollars into a sewer, which only spits up more terrorism, hate and chaos? When Senators and Deputy Secretaries talk about national interests, what they really mean is the interest of Muslim monarchies in the Gulf … 

The UNRWA, Baqa’a and the PLO aren’t an American interest — they’re a Muslim interest. What Leahy and Nides really mean is that it’s in America’s national interest to cater to Muslim interests. Nides comes closest to saying that, when he writes that cutting UNRWA aid would place a heavy burden on our allies in the region, who despite their billions in oil wealth and their passionate feelings on the subject, somehow can’t be bothered to cover the cost of feeding, teaching and caring for Baqa’a.

The King of Jordan found 1.5 billion dollars to build the Red Sea Astrarium, a local version of Disneyland, but the Hashemite monarchy, like the House of Saud, the Al-Thanis, the House of Sabah, and every other bunch of burnoosed tyrants with palaces and investments across the world, can’t be asked to care for their own people in their 50 year old refugee camps, who are kept that way because it’s an easy way to sock the gullible West for another few billion dollars to fund their terrorist training bases.

Even if there were a valid reason for the United States to champion Muslim interests by carving up Israel in order to create yet another Sunni Muslim state, it would not be a national interest, it would be appeasement. … A foreign policy of feeding other people to the beast, in the hopes that he won’t feed on us, is not a national interest — it’s craven cowardice that has no hope of succeeding. …

The future of the United States will not be secured by turning Washington D.C. into the front office for a bunch of medieval tyrannies that have no future. …

To return to Cliff May’s article, he reports and comments:

There are 1.8 million Palestinians who hold Jordanian citizenship and yet are counted as refugees, despite the fact that under international law — specifically, the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (Article 1C, the “Cessation” Clause) — a person stops being a “refugee” once he “has acquired a new nationality, and enjoys the protection of the country of his new nationality.”

Would anyone suggest that a Pakistani citizen, the descendant of a Muslim who left India following the post–World War II partition of the subcontinent into two states, should be classified as a refugee?

It should be obvious that UNRWA’s beneficiaries are being used as cannon fodder.

– To be kept as beggars forever if the Arab leaders continue to have their way.

Incredible as it must seem to the logical Western mind, the Arab plan is to keep the Palestinian refugees as refugees dependent on hand-outs from the charitable democracies even if they attain a Palestinian state. 

They have been told by their own leaders that they will be denied Palestinian citizenship even in a future Palestinian state. “They are Palestinians, that’s their identity,” Abdullah Abdullah, the Palestinian ambassador to Lebanon, stated last year, “but … they are not automatically citizens. … Even Palestinian refugees who are living in [refugee camps] inside the [area of a projected Palestinian] state, they are still refugees. They will not be considered citizens.”

Why not? Because statelessness makes them more lethal weapons of war. Ambassador Abdullah explained: “When we have a state accepted as a member of the United Nations, this is not the end of the conflict. This is not a solution to the conflict. This is only a new framework that will change the rules of the game.”

The end of the “game” being the liquidation of the State of Israel – the goal of the Arabs to which the State Department closes its ears and mind, because to acknowledge it would be to confess that the  whole notion of a “peace process” is nothing but a game, a farce, a protracted stupidity. As a policy, the State Department’s obstinate stance helps neither the refugees nor Israel. It prolongs the misery of  the one and the insecurity of  the other. How it serves the real long-term interests of the United States is impossible to see.

That great injustice has been done by a court in Pakistan cannot come as a surprise, but it must be angrily deplored. A brave man, Dr. Shakil Afridi, who should receive honor and reward for carrying out an act beneficial to the whole world, including his own country, is instead to be punished for it, by imprisonment for 33 years.

AP reports:

A Pakistani doctor who helped the U.S. track down Osama bin Laden was convicted of high treason Wednesday [today] and sentenced to 33 years in prison, officials said, a verdict that is likely to further strain the country’s relationship with Washington.

Could any strain be great enough to persuade the Obama administration that Pakistan is not an ally of the US?

[Dr. Shakil] Afridi was also ordered to pay a fine of about $3,500 and will spend an additional three and half years in prison if he does not …

Afridi was tried under the Frontier Crimes Regulations, or FCR, the set of laws that govern Pakistan’s semiautonomous tribal region. Human rights organizations have criticized the FCR for not providing suspects due process of law. There is no right to legal representation, to present material evidence or cross-examine witnesses. Verdicts are normally handed down by a Khyber government official in consultation with a council of government elders.

Dr Shakil Afridi, at personal risk, helped to identify bin Laden.

Shakil Afridi ran a vaccination program for the CIA to collect DNA and verify bin Laden’s presence at the compound in the town of Abbottabad where U.S. commandos killed the al-Qaida chief last May.

The operation outraged Pakistani officials because they were not told about it beforehand.

Considering that bin Laden was sheltering under the wing of the Pakistani government, and that their secret services are buddies of the Taliban, it was not only sensible but essential to keep them ignorant of the plan.

Indeed the verdict, which treats Dr. Afridi’s courageous act as treasonous, proves that the Pakistani authorities are on the side of al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

What is the US government going to do to help the man who, at his own peril, did such vitally important work for it?

Senior U.S. officials have called for Afridi to be released, saying his work served Pakistani and American interests. His conviction comes at a sensitive time because the U.S. is already frustrated by Pakistan’s refusal to reopen NATO supply routes to Afghanistan. The supply routes were closed six months ago in retaliation for American airstrikes [with helicopters]  that [mistakenly] killed 24 Pakistani soldiers.

It is morally imperative that the US government bring all the pressure it can to bear on the Pakistani authorities to reverse the conviction of Dr. Shakil Afridi. But will the Obama administration do any such thing? To judge by its past form, the Obama administration is more likely to increase the aid it gives to Pakistan than to threaten it with punitive action.

(Hat-tip to reader and commenter Frank)

There are millions of people in the Western world, hundreds of thousands of them in the universities, the media, the “Occupy” movement, in comfortable houses and apartments in the great cities, and at  least a few hundred in the present US administration, who “think” that Communism is really really good. The best. The ideal. The golden future that good people must work to establish.

Yeah, yeah – Paradise on earth.

They may know how the Russians suffered under Stalin, the Chinese under Mao Zedong, the Cambodians under Pol Pot. But they won’t allow such right-wing narratives to change their minds. No siree! “Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer,” they declare bravely to each other over their well-loaded dining tables, “we’ll keep the Red Flag flying in our faithful hearts and hopes and dreams.” Besides, they say, that wasn’t true Communism, what Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot did.

You know the names of some of them: Anita Dunne, Van Jones, Bill Ayers, Bernadine  Dohrn, Saul Alinksy, Richard Cloward, Frances Fox Piven, Noam Chomsky …

They love humanity and Che Guevara. They feel sorry for the poor and downtrodden and are willing, eager, to kill policemen. They wish heroically to overthrow the rich, capitalism, bankers, the military-industrial complex, dead white men, Bush, Sarah Palin, and … and … you know …

Here’s an extract from an article by Jeff Jacoby at Townhall. It provides more information about life under Communism for them to brush aside:

SHIN DONG-HYUK grew up in North Korea’s Camp 14, one of the monstrous slave-labor prison complexes in which the world’s most tyrannical regime has crushed hundreds of thousands of its citizens, working them to death in conditions of excruciating brutality and degradation. Though the North Korean concentration camps have lasted far longer than their Soviet or Nazi counterparts did, Shin is the first person born and raised in one of them to have successfully escaped abroad. His story is told in journalist Blaine Harden’s Escape from Camp 14, a heart-crushing reminder that man’s inhumanity to man has no limit.

It is a book filled with harrowing passages. At the age of six, Shin was forced to watch as one of his classmates — a short, slight, pretty girl — was beaten to death by their teacher when he discovered five kernels of corn in her pocket. When Shin accidentally dropped a sewing machine while working at the camp’s garment factory, half of his middle finger was chopped off as punishment. Time and again he sees other inmates maimed or killed when they are forced to work under appallingly dangerous conditions. And time and again he joins in collective punishment, unhesitatingly obeying when ordered to slap and beat a classmate or some other prisoner singled out for abuse and discipline.

When Shin was 14, he witnessed the execution of his mother and brother for attempting to escape. His dominant emotion as he watched them die was not sorrow, but anger: He was furious at what they had caused him to be put through. Because of their infraction, he had been savagely tortured, suspended in mid-air over a charcoal fire as interrogators demanded information about where his mother and brother were planning to flee after their escape.

“Shin, crazed with pain, smelling his burning flesh, twisted away from the heat,” Harden writes. “One of the guards grabbed a gaff hook from the wall and pierced the boy in the lower abdomen, holding him over the fire until he lost consciousness.”

North Korea’s slave-labor gulag would be horrific even if its inmates were guilty of actual crimes. But most prisoners are guilty of nothing except being related to the wrong family.

Under a demented doctrine laid down by Kim Il Sung, the communist tyrant who founded North Korea, “enemies of class … must be eliminated through three generations.” The regime therefore fills these unspeakable camps not only with “enemies” who dared to practice Christianity or failed to keep a picture of Kim properly dusted, but with their entire families, often including grandparents and grandchildren. Shin’s father ended up in Camp 14 because two of his brothers had fled south during the Korean War. He and Shin’s mother were assigned to each other by camp guards years later as prizes in a “reward” marriage. They were allowed to sleep together just five nights a year. Shin was thus conceived — and spent the first 23 years of his life — behind the electrified barbed wire of Kim’s ghastly hellhole. …

There is no cruelty so depraved that people cannot be induced to do it, or to look the other way while it is being done.

Or deny that it is being done. Or will assure you that even if it is, it’s better than … than … being exploited in “employment” by people whose only aim in life is to make a profit. Yucks!

This video is an overview of an excellent course in 10 parts. It teaches how the Muslim Brotherhood is pursuing its agenda in the US, which is to infiltrate the institutions of American democracy and penetrate the highest echelons of government, in order to spread totalitarian sharia law, and advance towards the establishment of a caliphate as a dominating global power.

It shows that even the Republican Party is being subverted by Muslim Brotherhood agents, most notably Grover Norquist, whose tax-cutting ideas are good, but whose affiliation to America’s worst enemy is evil and needs to be exposed.

It shows how “useful idiots” in the military and security services are helping the Muslim Brotherhood achieve its aims.

Learn more about it, or take the whole course free of charge, here.

Bill Whittle recalls some of the reasons why he and many of us are angry with the gang in power –