CAIR Representing Flying Imams against Airline and Passengers
by Sher Zieve
In a first of its kind lawsuit, CAIR (Council on America-Islamic Relations) attorneys are representing the so-called “Flying Imams” in suing both US Airways and passengers. The suit stems from an incident that occurred on a US Airways’ flight in November 2006, from Minneapolis to Arizona, on which six Islamic Imams were reported to have stood up on the plane and prayed loudly, took seats that were not assigned to them (reminiscent of the 9/11 hijackers’ locations) and requested seatbelt extensions (which can be used as weapons) when they were neither required nor justified. They are also reported to have made anti-American and pro-Saddam Hussein and Osama bin-Laden comments. The actions of the Imams were not only overtly menacing but, seemed designed to instill fear amongst their fellow passengers. Several passengers, including at least one who speaks and understands the Arabic language, reported the Imams’ behaviors to flight attendants. The Imams were, subsequently, removed from the flight.
On Monday, CAIR attorneys filed a “Civil Rights Complaint for Declaratory, Injunctive and Monetary Relief” lawsuit in federal court against US Airways, Inc., John Does (the passengers who reported the Imams behaviors) and the Metropolitan Airports Commission. The suit also alleges “Defendants had no legitimate non-discriminatory reason to justify their treatment of Plaintiffs; rather, Defendants based their actions on Plaintiffs’ race, religion, color, ethnicity, alienage, ancestry, and/or national origin.” Note: CAIR and the Flying Imams appear to be asserting that Muslims, in general, have the right (above all others) to do anything and everything they wish on any and all airline flights. Might that also include the rights to wear ski masks, carry weapons and actually hijack planes? Not yet but, the future is unknown. The verbiage in the suit filed by CAIR strongly suggests that Muslims should not only be allowed to exhibit threatening behaviors to others but, that passengers should be prohibited from reporting any of these behaviors—to anyone. If they do, they will be sued by CAIR or some other Islamic organization. In other words, if Muslims stand up on planes shouting their prayers, make threatening comments against the US and voice their support of Islamic terrorists, the other passengers must remain silent and airline employees may not stop them. Is CAIR advising us that we must make (or already have made) preparations to die if Muslims are on our flights? Are Muslims now to be granted “rights” not granted to non-Muslims? One has to wonder how long it will be until the ACLU (CAIR’s partner on multiple other lawsuits) enters this fray and demands that terrorist activities be allowed—as they are actually free speech. Then again, maybe it’s already working on it.
No doubt CAIR is already shopping for a US judge who is friendly to Islam. Some Clinton or Carter appointee, perhaps? Included with the other inanities in the filed lawsuit is: “Defendants, with the intent to cause harm to plaintiffs’ reputation, maliciously, recklessly and without regard to their privacy and integrity, defamed and made false reports against Plaintiffs to justify their illegal action.” In a post-9/11 world (with due consideration given to all of the other worldwide Islamic bombings and terrorist attacks in myriad other countries), it is neither malicious nor reckless to take notice of and stop threatening behaviors aboard an airline flight. And suffice it to say, the reports made about the Imams were not false. If the Imams truly wanted to preserve their “privacy and integrity” they should not have infringed upon the same privacy and integrity of the other passengers. But, that is precisely what they are reported to have done.
This latest CAIR lawsuit is merely another attempt to place Islam above the law and to bully non-Muslims and the “politically correct” crowd into acquiescing to their demands. If any US court agrees to this bogus and frivolous suit, it will be another huge step in the Islamization of America and another nail in the coffin for the USA. And it certainly seems that this “discrimination” lawsuit was carefully strategized from well before the first Flying Imam set foot on that now famous US Airways’ flight.
by Bill Levinson
As reported yesterday, Michael Moore’s Minutemen crossed the chemical/biological/nuclear threshold by using a weapon of mass destruction against a primarily-civilian target in Iraq. (See the link for a picture of a female Iraqi civilian who was injured by the insurgents’ chemical weapon.)
Official U.S. policy is that chemical = biological = nuclear. A chemical or biological attack on our Armed Forces, and presumably our civilian population, or that of an ally, is equivalent to a nuclear attack on the United States. This requires retaliation in kind and, as the United States has disarmed itself of all chemical and biological weapons, the nature of the retaliation should be obvious. Policies and words deter only when backed by action. Failure to retaliate with nuclear weapons, or so many conventional explosives and incendiaries as to equal nuclear weapons in their effects, undermines the credibility of the United States and tells other terrorists and rogue nations that they are in fact free to use weapons of mass destruction while violating the Hague Convention’s prohibition on the use of chemical weapons.
Not with Impunity: Assessing US Policy for Retaliating to a Chemical or Biological Attack
Lt Col Harry W. Conley, USAF
Sen. Jesse Helms: Suppose somebody used chemical weapons or poison gas on people in the United States. . . . Would they damn well regret it?
Secretary of Defense William Perry: Yes.
Helms: I want to know what the response will be if one of these rogue nations uses poison gas or chemical weaponry against either us or our allies. . . . What is the response of this country going to be?
Perry: Our response would be devastating.
Helms: Devastating- to them?
Perry: To them, yes. . . . And I believe they would know that it would be devastating to them.
Helms: Let the message go out.
We also want to know what our country’s response is going to be, as does every two-bit dictator and terrorist on earth. The manner of our response to this latest atrocity by Michael Moore’s Minutemen will show them whether they can expect to get away with, for example, blowing up a rail car full of liquified chlorine upwind from a major American city, or releasing something like Ebola or anthrax in our streets. Here is our recommended response, assuming that a suitable target can be found for it.
The light damage radius of a 1-kiloton weapon is about a mile, and the blast radius is proportional to the cube root of the explosive force. Therefore, if the W54 or a similar weapon was set for a 0.01 kiloton explosion, the light damage radius would be around 120 meters, or slightly longer than a football field. (The blast might break windows and cause other relatively minor harm further away.) Serious damage and heavy casualties would take place within 60 or so meters. It must be added, of course, that an air burst must be used to avoid contaminating everything downwind with radioactive fallout. If property or personnel belonging to the perpetrators of the gas attack is no closer than, for example, half a mile to anything we don’t want to damage or destroy, the use of a small nuclear weapon to set an example and show that U.S. deterrent policies mean exactly what thay say would be a reasonable and appropriate response.
Teaching Law-Breaking at UC-Berkeley
By Lee Kaplan
FrontPageMagazine.com | March 19, 2007
The purpose of a law school is to teach law, not to provide a forum for political propaganda and illegal activity. That would likely come as news to the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley. While the school is touted as one of the premier educational institutions in the country, it is affiliated with a law student association on the UC campus, Law Students for Justice in Palestine (LSJP), whose anti-Israel campaign actually advocates lawbreaking. It is a measure of its prominence on campus that LSJP boasts its own website within the university’s official Boalt Hall website. The site states that the group was founded in 2001 with university approval for the purposes of promoting the Palestinian cause. Specifically, LSJP seeks to “infuse the current discourse with a legal analysis of the Palestinian struggle for liberation and the illegality of the state of Israel and its policies in their current form” and to “provide legal support to her sister organization on the main UC Berkeley campus, Students for Justice in Palestine, which has been participating in an ongoing campaign to demand that the UC system divest from Israel since February 6, 2001.”
This platform reflects poorly on the group’s commitment to jurisprudence. In the first place, the state of Israel was legally created by the United Nations in 1948, and the Jews who settled the state purchased their land in accordance with the law. Israeli law, moreover, has always required equal civil rights for all citizens of Israel, be they Muslims, Christians, Jews or others. So the pointed purpose of the LSJP is to ignore the legal justifications for the Jewish state by having aspiring lawyers declare the Jewish state “illegal.”
More troubling is the other reason given for the existence of the LSJP: providing support for Students for Justice (SJP) in Palestine at UC Berkeley and its divestment campaign against Israel. SJP is one of the founding organizations of the anti-Israel propaganda group known as the International Solidarity Movement. The SJP website outlines the group’s demand for “the full decolonization of all illegally held Palestinian lands.” It also calls for the “end of the Israeli occupation of the Gaza, Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.”
A closer examination of these positions shows how extreme they really are. Currently, U.S. foreign policy envisions two democratic states, side by side and living in peace. However, since the SJP calls for an end to any Israeli influence in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the first paragraph clearly implies that all of the land of Israel is a “colony” and “illegally” held. In other words, the SJP seems to deny Israel’s right to exist within secure borders—anywhere in the Middle East.
Reinforcing this suspicion is the fact the SJP calls for an unconditional “right of return.” If implemented, this would give any Arab who claims to have had a dead ancestor who resided within Israel’s borders in 1948 the right to live in Israel. As many critics have noted, this leaves open the door for five million Arabs to flood Israel, outnumber her Jewish residents, and create another Arab-Muslim state. There is no legal precedent for succeeding generations of refugees after a war to claim refugee status, but that seems not to deter the legal eagles at UC Berkeley.
Nor are they put off by the fact that the SJP expressly endorses lawbreaking in the service of its anti-Israel agenda. On its website, the SJP clearly states that it encourages “civil disobedience” and divestment from the state of Israel, both of which are illegal acts. It should come as no surprise, then, that in 2002 radicals from SJP unlawfully stormed a building on campus where Jewish students were memorializing the Holocaust. SJP’s divestment campaign is likewise of dubious legality. Divesting from Israel is actually part of the Arab League boycott of Israel and, it might be argued, is a violation of the Logan Act. One might think that a respectable law school would be keen to distance itself from student groups more committed to radical political agendas than to legal precedent. UC Berkley’s continued association with Law Students for Justice in Palestine speaks volumes about its inverted priorities.
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Intelligence War in Iran
By Kenneth R. Timmerman
FrontPageMagazine.com | March 19, 2007
As the debate between the Democrats and themselves over the war in Iraq becomes increasingly absurd, inside Iran another debate of momentous proportions is underway. It involves Iran’s involvement with Iraq, and who is to blame for recent Iranian failures that have led to the capture of high-ranking Iranian intelligence officials by multinational forces in Iraq and the defection of two senior Revolutionary Guards intelligence officers, probably to the U.S. The Revolutionary Guards Corps and the Ministry of Information and Security (MOIS, aka VEVAK) are hurling stink bombs at each other in the corridors of power in Tehran. Each is accusing the other of having screwed up in Iraq and allowing Iran’s intelligence and terrorist-support networks to get rolled up over the past three months. More importantly, my sources in Tehran tell me: each organization also suspects the other of secret ties to U.S., British, and/or Israeli intelligence. True or not, this is terrific news for the United States. Mutual suspicion is the first stage of a crippling sick think that has ruined more than one world-class intelligence organization. MOIS is the civilian branch of Iran’s intelligence. It tracks the Iranian opposition, handles internal security and counterespionage work. It also does Secret Service-style protection of the leadership. The Rev. Guards Intelligence Department is tasked with penetrating foreign military organizations, acquiring defense technology, and liaising with armed terrorist organizations overseas, such as Hezbollah. Both support Iranian government-ordered terrorist operations, from sending hit squads to assassinate dissidents, to blowing up U.S. and Israeli embassies. And both are deeply involved in Iraq. In public, Iranian officials gloat over the coming American “defeat” in Iraq. In private, however, they fear the Bush administration will stand firm. The one thing giving them hope is the Democrats in Washington and their talk of an Iraq pullout. Shortly after U.S. troops raided an Iranian intelligence headquarters in northern Iraq on the night of Jan. 10, the encourage of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei began referring to America as the Cobra standing on its tail. Ayatollah Khamenei hastily convened a national security damage control committee to devise new strategies for reducing Iran’s footprint in Iraq. It was staffed almost exclusively with top Rev. Guards officers, including the head of IRGC intelligence, Maj. Gen. Morteza Rezai, and former deputy IRGC commander, Brig. Gen. Mohammad Baqr Zolqadr, now a deputy interior minister. They accused MOIS of leaking information on rival IRGC networks in Iraq to the British, who passed the information to the Americans. That led to the capture over Christmas of a top IRGC operative, Brig. Gen. Amir Mohsen Shirazi. As the U.S. raids on Iranian networks in Iraq intensified, the IRGC leaders urged Khamenei to order Ahmadinejad and MOIS to terminate their operations in Iraq, because they were “unprofessional.” They also issued the Supreme Leader a dire warning: if MOIS continued to leak operational details of IRGC networks in Iraq to the British and the Americans, they would be compelled to strike back hard at the Americans. And that, in turn, could lead Iran into an open shooting war with the U.S. military. Many Iranians believe this is just what Ahmadinejad wants, since his chiliastic vision of the End Times calls for an orgy of bloodshed on a planetary scale to usher in the return the 12th imam, the Imam Mahdi. Even as this infighting continues, the Revolutionary Guards Qods Force is inserting fresh operatives into Iraq, according to my sources. More than one hundred fresh operatives have entered Iraq in recent weeks, even as militiamen loyal to Iranian stooge Muqtada al-Sadr have laid low. The Iranian intelligence war and the rear guard effort by the IRGC to re-establish its operational networks in Iraq aren’t the only signs that the U.S. is starting to win in Iraq. Last Friday, Maj. Gen. Benjamin Mixon, commander of Multinational Division-North and the 25th Infantry Brigade in Iraq, told reporters that his troops have seized another cache of Iranian-made weapons and have “got momentum” in the fight against the insurgents. Speaking from Baghdad via live video-conference to reporters at the Pentagon, Mixon said he has beefed up his forces in the Diyala province northeast of Baghdad in recent months and is now asking for more units to take counter-insurgency operations beyond the provincial capital, Baquba. “I’ve got momentum and want to press forward,” Mixon said. “I know what I would do with more troops.” The full transcript of Mixon’s remarks is here. So with these first encouraging signs of a turning tide in Iraq, wouldn’t you think that Congress would get behind the war effort, to send a strong message to the insurgents and to their primary backer, Iran? You would be wrong. On Thursday, the House Appropriations Committee conducted a marathon hearing on the President’s supplemental budget request to fund the war in Iraq. For anyone who caught part of the hearing on C-SPAN, there were comic moments to this underlying tragedy. At one point, Rep. Bill Young of Florida introduced an amendment to prohibit the use of any funds in the supplemental from being used for combat operations in Iraq, other than what was strictly necessary to protect U.S. lives and cover the withdrawal of U.S. forces. Rep. Young made clear he didn’t support his own amendment. However, because the appropriations bill was binding legislation – as opposed to the non-binding resolution calling for a U.S. withdrawal that passed a few weeks ago – he thought it was the proper moment to get committee members on the record on the war. In the voice vote, more than a half-dozen of the committee’s 66 members voted “Yes” to the resolution. But when Rep. Young called for a recorded vote, not a single weasel stood by their vote. The vote was 66 to nothing and the amendment was “narrowly defeated,” Chairman David Obey (D, WI) quipped. Rep. Obey was filmed last week telling left-wing supporters that a vote for the supplemental was not a vote to prolong the war. They were wrong to protest his efforts to pass the president’s bill, because the Democrats had laid secret traps in the language that would actually end the war. “We’re trying to use the supplemental to end the war. But you can’t end the war if you vote against the supplemental. It’s time these idiot liberals understand that,” Obey said. In case the “idiot liberals” didn’t get it, Obey got even more specific. “The language we have in the resolution ends the authority for the war. It makes it illegal to proceed with the war. You don’t have to defund something if the war doesn’t exist. That’s the problem. The liberal groups … don’t understand what the hell is in the bill.”Thank-you, Congressman Obey. Just when the bad guys were beginning to lose hope, you are coming to their rescue.
The New York Times Proves Bush Right on Iraq
By Ben Johnson
FrontPageMagazine.com | March 19, 2007
When a fact becomes self-evident enough, even the New York Times can’t lie about it. The premium al-Qaeda places on driving America out of Iraq has now entered those ranks.
NYT reporter Michael R. Gordon wrote that initially military officials thought Shi’ite violence would pose the greatest threat to American soldiers taking part in the president’s surge, but:
[D]uring the early weeks of the operation, deadly bombings by Sunni Arab militants have emerged as a greater danger. In particular, the threat posed by the Sunni group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia was underscored when American troops seized a laptop computer from a senior operative in the group who was killed in late December.
Information from captured materials indicates that the group’s leadership sees “the sectarian war for Baghdad as the necessary main focus of its operations,” according to an intelligence report that was described by American officials. (Emphasis added.)
The gold standard of journalistic liberalism has authenticated President Bush. For years, President Bush has stated Iraq is “the central front in the War on Terror,” while his opponents – including all the leading Democratic presidential candidates (and all the dark horse candidates, for that matter) – denounced the war they once authorized as a “distraction” and “diversion” from the real enemy: al-Qaeda. That lie has been put to rest.
The Times also notes the terrorists, invigorated by previous triumphs in Beirut, Afghanistan (over the Soviets), and Somalia, plot feverishly to pull off another victory over a superpower in the Arab world. In two paragraphs, the mainstream media have proven:
1. Al-Qaeda is America’s most pressing enemy in Iraq;
2. Al-Qaeda is channeling its energy into defeating the United States in Iraq; and
3. Thanks to the Iraq war, Zawahiri’s footsoldiers are focusing on Baghdad and not New York, Washington, or rural Pennsylvania.
Naturally, the “newspaper of record” conveniently hid all this verification under the bland headline, “Sunni Militants Disrupt Plan to Calm Baghdad.”
Some leftists have portrayed “Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia” (nee “Al-Qaeda in Iraq”) as an indigenous, “anti-imperialist” force. However, Gordon notes, “some senior commanders are foreigners, including Abu Ayyub al-Masri, an Egyptian who became the leader of the organization last year after the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist who founded the organization.” Not to mention that Ayman al-Zawahiri fellow who keeps dispatching missives to Iraq from an undisclosed location.
Gordon relays what students of war and human nature have long known: implacable foes respond only to the threat of force. That was the genius in President Bush’s much-maligned “surge” strategy – and it’s already reaping benefits. Writes Gordon, “When faced with American combat power, the Sunni militants tend to disperse, hoping to fight another day, American commanders say.”
Meanwhile, the Shi’ite majority, until so recently the focus of anti-American activity, have begun cooperating with the United States. Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, who oversees events on the ground in Iraq, says simply, “The Shia have gone to ground for the most part.” Indeed, anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr is believed to have fled into Iran, and his Mahdi Army is collaborating with U.S. forces – on his orders:
“[O]ur leader has ordered us to keep quiet,” explained Ayad al-Khaby, a local official in Sadr’s organization. “This is in order for the security plan to succeed.”
Publicly, Sadr has criticized the U.S. presence inside his stronghold. He is a fierce nationalist who has long demanded a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, and his authority derives in large part from his opposition to the occupation. But privately, he has ordered his militiamen to lie low no matter how much they are provoked by U.S. forces, according to interviews with Sadr representatives and fighters.
The commander in charge of Baghdad, Maj. Gen. Joseph F. Fil, said al-Sadr’s assistance “certainly has been a factor in the way we’ve been able to go into Sadr City, this early, this quickly.” The day after this public outing, Al-Sadr denied any cooperation but, critically, he called for no militia violence against the United States.
And the reduction in violence – both sectarian and anti-American – is the greatest success of the surge thus far. Within two weeks of the initial phase of the troop deployment, civilian deaths in Iraq hit their lowest point in four months. Maj. Gen. William Caldwell reports in the one month since the surge began, “there has been an over 50 percent reduction in murders and executions,” and the number of civilian deaths declined from 1,440 to 265. The surge has resulted in a dramatic reduction of Shi’ite death squads, the arrest of 700 Sadr-aligned guerrilla leaders, and the detention of more than a thousand more.
As if to anticipate the positive press this would generate, The Washington Post ran a front-page story on Bush’s alleged history of lying with numbers: “Iraq War’s Statistics Prove Fleeting.”
The combined weight of the Times revelations – the role and goal of al-Qaeda, the success of the military strategy the Left has virulently opposed – will have precious little effect on modern leftists. They are capable of claiming al-Qaeda is not even present in Iraq in one sentence, then snapping, “President Bush brought al-Qaeda into Iraq!” in the next, without an apparent sense of irony.
In that vein, this weekend also featured a mass political rally against the U.S. surge – a demonstration at which ideological comrades called for a “peaceful uprising” and “demanded a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops,” a rally at which its featured speaker challenged the angry crowd never to cease “standing and demonstrating that way.” He intoned, “Raise your voices, all of you, loving your brothers and united against your enemy, saying as your leader taught you, ‘No America, no Israel, no, no Satan.’”
The speaker, of course, was Muqtada al-Sadr. However, as the media have reported, he currently more cooperative with U.S. military objectives in Iraq than the political Left.
