Report: Jimmy Carter to Meet With Hamas Leader in Syria

Tuesday , April 08, 2008

By Joseph Abrams

 

NEW YORK CITY — 

Former President Jimmy Carter is reportedly preparing an unprecedented meeting with the leader of Hamas, an organization that the U.S. government considers one of the leading terrorist threats in the world.

 

The Arabic-language newspaper Al-Hayat reported Tuesday that Carter was planning a trip to Syria for mid-April, during which he would meet with Khaled Meshal, the exiled head of the Palestinian terror group Hamas, on April 18.

Deanna Congileo, Carter’s press secretary, confirmed in an e-mail to FOXNews.com that Carter will be in the Mideast in April. Pressed for comment, Congileo did not deny that the former president is considering visiting Meshal.

“President Carter is planning a trip to the Mideast next week; however, we are still confirming details of the trip and will issue a press release by the end of this week,” wrote Congileo. “I cannot confirm any specific meetings at this point in time.”

Meshal, who lives in Syria to avoid being arrested by the Israeli government, leads Hamas from his seat in Damascus, where he is a guest of Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

The State Department has designated Hamas a “foreign terrorist organization,” and some groups hold Meshal personally responsible for ordering the kidnapping of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack once said of the prospect of meeting with Meshal, “That’s not something that we could possibly conceive of.”

Some Carter critics called the latest reports typical of the ex-president.

“It’s about par for the course from President Carter, demonstrating a lack of judgment typical of what he does,” said John Bolton, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. “To go to Syria to visit Hamas at this point is just an ill-timed, ill-advised decision on his part.”

“I’m not surprised that Carter would do this, as he has been supporting Palestinian extremism for many years,” said Steve Emerson, director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, a watchdog group.

Carter would be the first Western leader of his stature to meet with the Hamas chief. Though Meshal met with Clinton officials in the 1990s, the Bush administration has sought to isolate Hamas, enforcing rigid sanctions on its government in Gaza and refusing to meet with its leaders unless it recognizes Israel and abandons terror.

“I think this [visit] undermines the U.S. policy of isolating Hamas,” said Emerson. “I think this encourages Europeans to further dilute their sanctions against the Hamas government.”

“When you put the prestige of a former president of the United States in a meeting with one of its terrorist leaders, you’re giving it a legitimacy and currency it never had,” said Bolton.

But Ibrahim Hooper, communications director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a non-profit advocacy group, said Carter’s efforts demonstrate he’s a true partner in peace.

“I think if true, this report would indicate that President Carter is willing to travel any road in search of peace,” he said. “I think President Carter would only undertake such a mission if he believed that something could be achieved in terms of peace and reconciliation in the region.”

Hooper added that because of Carter’s reputation among Palestinians he might be able to bring some pressure to bear.

“Obviously President Carter has a great amount of credibility in the region because of his past efforts seeking peace internationally,” Hooper said.

The Al-Hayat report stated that Carter would be traveling in his capacity as head of the Carter Center, and not in his capacity as a former president.

“That’s a distinction that’s absurd,” said Emerson.

“Maybe he’ll give up his pension, but he’s always a former president,” said Bolton.

Oprah’s church

The church of Oprah exposed

It seems like the ultimate human-made religion. Sounds like it started because Oprah saw fit to judge God and His revelation, and it all went downhill from there.

Amazing that millions are following blindly.

Don’t get confused, hers is not a Christian faith or church.

Video: Hussein – The Idiot Child Among Men

http://patdollard.com/2008/04/video-hussein-the-idiot-child-among-men/

Arabs must take a long, self-critical look in the mirror

By Emilio Karim Dabul

Monday, April 7th 2008, 4:00 AM

BE OUR GUEST

There was a time centuries ago in Arab countries when intellectual introspection was common and the culture produced searching, self-critical scholarship in various arenas.

That time is gone. Today, brave and questioning souls like Irshad Manji, who calls for an Islamic Reformation, receive death threats. Without the ability to look inward, Arab blame for problems is projected outward – meaning, at Israel and the U.S. That is very dangerous for the world.

As an Arab-American, recent events have reminded me in very stark terms why introspection needs to return to the Arab world in a big way, as quickly as possible, as a prerequisite for anything resembling peace, in the Middle East or elsewhere, to be a real possibility.

First, look at what Fatah just attempted to do regarding American victims of Palestinian terrorism. Because of the 1990 Anti-Terrorism Act, numerous lawsuits have been brought against Fatah and other Palestinian terrorist groups that have injured or killed Americans while in Israel. Recently, the State Department decided it might intervene in some of these judgments, which had found in favor of the defendants and held Fatah and other Palestinian groups liable for millions of dollars in damages, because Fatah had complained that these judgments would bankrupt them and that this in turn would hurt the peace process.

Yes, you heard right. Fatah complained that they were being held financially liable for injuring and killing Americans in Israel, acts for which they had previously claimed responsibility!

And our own State Department wanted to support them in this complaint, supposedly in the interest of peace, by having these judgments nullified. Joseph Heller, the author of “Catch 22,” couldn’t have come up with a more surreal scenario.

Fortunately, advocates like the Endowment for Middle East Truth, made noise, and as a result of that pressure, the State Department has backed down for now.

But where is the proper sense of shame that might stop a group like Fatah from lodging such a complaint to begin with?

The only explanation is that by having such a pathological, externally focused sense of blame, aimed exclusively at Americans and Jews, no such sense of reasoning or decency applies.

The recent massacre of the Yeshiva students in Jerusalem by a Palestinian Muslim fits the same pattern. Gaza celebrated – yes, celebrated – the cold-blooded and ethnically motivated murders of these religious students, most of whom were teenagers.

Why are we, as Arabs and Arab-Americans, not lining the streets in Ramallah and all the way to New York to decry this sort of barbarism?

Let me say unequivocally that I am ashamed. And I am angry. Nothing, nothing in the world justifies these sorts of actions. Tell me, when have you ever heard of Israelis celebrating the killing of Palestinians?

Yes, there are a few glimmers of progress. Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah has issued a call for interfaith dialogue between Christians, Jews and Muslims. And The New York Times actually called Hamas out on its murderous, anti-Semitic rhetoric.

But these are drops in the bucket, not a rising tide.

The centuries-old downward spiral of tyranny, poverty, fanaticism and finger-pointing is the rule, not the exception in most Arab countries.

At this point in Arab history, we must finally renounce these fatally flawed tendencies to blame everyone but ourselves. As Arab-Americans, we must lead the way, away from groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations – which consistently claims big, bad America is the oppressor and poor Arabs are almost always the hapless victims.

Let us begin anew the path toward our own glorious Renaissance abandoned long ago, and pursue the higher road that will be ours when we finally look more deeply and critically at ourselves.

Dabul is a novelist and commentator on Middle East issues.

McCain Speaks At Vets For Freedom Rally In DC – With Video

http://patdollard.com/2008/04/mccain-speaks-at-vets-for-freedom-rally-in-dc-with-video/

Obama Doesn’t Help Oprah

Ethel Fenig

What happens when the most influential and popular television star in the nation recommends a book on her highly rated television show? 

The book zooms to the top of the best seller lists.

What happens when that same television star endorses a political figure for office and then goes out on the campaign trail for him? 

Her popularity tanks.

Oprah’s popularity in America plummeted. An August 2007 CBS News poll showed only 61 percent of Americans were favorably disposed to her — a considerable drop of 13 percentage points from a similar survey conducted just seven months prior. An October 2007 Gallup/USA Today poll that showed Oprah with a slightly higher 66 percent favorability still reflected a drop.

The following month, with Clinton still dominating most national and statewide presidential primary polls, Oprah announced on Nov. 26, 2007, that she would go on the stump for Obama. To woo voters in crucial primaries, Oprah made appearances in Iowa, South Carolina and New Hampshire in early December 2007.

Oprah attracted overwhelming attention — and media coverage (mostly positive for Obama) — during her swing through these states. More than 66,000 people reportedly attended the Oprah rallies, and Obama campaign staff members claimed they signed up more than 10,000 supporters at the events and recruited 650 volunteers in New Hampshire alone.

But by the time Fox News/Opinion Dynamics asked Americans about their attitudes toward Oprah in a survey conducted about 10 days later, Dec. 18-19, Oprah’s favorability ratings had dropped even further — to 55 percent — the lowest level of favorability ever registered for Oprah in opinion surveys. Oprah’s negatives also spiked, with one in three respondents (33 percent) reporting unfavorable impressions of her.  

Proving once again that politics ain’t book selling.  Perhaps Oprah should continue doing what she does best,  thus maintaining her credibility for all her viewers. 

Posted at 09:04 AM | Email | Permalink

The slick trick behind global frauding

By James Lewis

In Stalin’s Russia any dissenter from the Party Line was guilty. Innocence had to be proved. It’s a standard tyrant’s trick. During the reign of Oliver Cromwell in England, witchhunters did not have to prove that their victims were guilty. The accused witches had to prove their innocence.

That’s what Al Gore has done to science: He and his friends have flipped innocence and guilt from normal science to Stalinist science.

 

In Al Gore’s America, any “global warming denier” is guilty until proven innocent. He or she must have been bought off by Big Oil.   Skeptics, no matter how well-qualified, must prove the negative about really silly alarmist hogwash. And whenever some prediction is falsified, the warm mongers have an explanation: it’s just a temporary glitch in the data. Oh, yes, we were wrong about 1998, but just wait till 2050! The excuses are endless.

 

Stalin twisted scientific biology over four decades in the Soviet Union. His favorite fake-scientist, Trofim Lysenko, used all the powers of the police state to enforce his batty belief that the bleeding disaster of Soviet agriculture could be fixed just by making plants grow bigger. It’s the old idea that giraffes have long necks because their ancestors stretched their necks out more and more, to nibble at higher leaves on the trees. It’s nonsense, as horse breeders have known for ages. You can’t make a great race horse just by making their ancestors run fast. You have to do selective breeding.

 

But breeding takes time, and Stalin was in a hurry. So he fell for the Lysenko fraud, and flipped the burden of proof: Any Soviet biologist who disagreed with Lysenko was shot. This went on for forty years, and caused endless suffering as one harvest after the next crashed. People died by the millions, in part because biological science was fundamentally corrupted.

 

Putting the burden of proof on the doubters is a perversion of normal, healthy science. It’s as if Jeremiah Wright demanded that all white folks must prove to him that they’re not blue-eyed devils.  If politically correct ideas are true by default, the Al Gores can prove anything.

 

In normal science the burden of proof is on the proposer. Albert Einstein had to prove in his historic 1905 paper that there was a fundamental flaw in classical physics.  The distinctive predictions of Relativity Theory had to be verified for decades afterwards. Some are still being tested today.  His predecessor Max Planck remarked that he encountered so much skepticism that he had to wait for the older generation of physicists to die off before his work was accepted. Darwin said the same thing.

 

A healthy scientific community is extremely skeptical. It needs to see more and more evidence, over and over and over again, before it adopts some wild-eyed new idea. It takes all the time it needs; good science is very patient. Einstein himself was a complete skeptic about quantum mechanics, and never accepted it over the last forty years of his life. He had a perfect right to question it, as long as he had rational arguments, and he did. (He was wrong on QM, but he was right on Relativity.)

 

“Catastrophic global warming,” caused by human beings, is a really wild-eyed idea, given the fact that animals have survived on earth for half a billion years, with thousands of massive volcanic explosions, giant meteors hitting the earth, drifting continents, and great biomass changes that would have perturbed the climate, if the hypothesis were true. Just imagine the amount of C0² that must have been released with the Cambrian explosion of animal life. If the earth really saw superfast global ups and downs in temperature, no animals could have survived those 500 million years. The Ice Ages drove animals and people south, but they were not superfast, global events, or you and I would not be here today. Animals and plants are able adapt to temperature changes. Polar bears grow layers of fat and long, dense fur. Camels can stay cool in the desert.

 

In biology, “catastrophism” has been treated with intense skepticism since Charles Darwin in the mid-19th century. Except today, when biological catastrophism is the in thing. Why would that be, do you suppose? 

 

How have Al Gore and the fraudsters pulled it off? It’s really simple. They just flipped the burden of proof and put it on the “deniers” — the skeptics, who don’t believe the computer models. With the Left in control of the media, you can do it.

 

So now it’s prove to me you’re not a witch! Because there is no decisive evidence. There are 21 computer models that “prove” global warming over the next century. By the time 2050 rolls around, most of the modelers will be dead.

 

To answer the biggest con trick in the history of science, you just have to address a single question to True Believers:  What’s your evidence for this barmy idea? (Not: Here’s my evidence against it. That’s not how it works).

 

And the answer is: There are no facts robust enough, consistent enough, and verified enough to support the mass  hysteria. The climate system is hypercomplex, nonlinear and poorly understood. The media spinners are immensely ignorant about real science, and just care about the next scare headline. There’s a lot of wild speculation and a mob of self-serving politicians, bureaucrats and media types who stand to gain a ton of power and money by suckering millions of taxpayers. Al Gore just started a 300 million dollar PR campaign to convince everybody.  When was the last time you saw 300 million bucks being spent to promote a scientific hypothesis that was already proven? We’re not spending millions to prove the existence of gravity. The uproar and money involved in this fraud is in direct proportion to the lack of solid facts.

 

The last ten years have seen global cooling, not warming.  

 

Temperatures over the last hundred years look like the stock market: ups and downs, a very slow rise of a fraction of a degree until the late 1990s, then a drop for the last ten years, with so much cooling in the last year as to cancel out a century of warming. Why? Nobody really knows, but Mr. Sun is the logical suspect.

 

Look it up. But don’t get caught in the trap of proving the negative. In normal, healthy science, the skeptics ask questions. It is the proponents who carry the burden of proof. 

 

Now can we talk about 9/11? That’s a fact. But Al Gore doesn’t think it’s a big deal, compared to his favorite science fiction story. Al Gore just wants power, fame, money, and the US Presidency. Well, three out of four ain’t bad.

 

Oliver Cromwell and his witchhunters would have understood  perfectly.

 

James Lewis blogs at dangeroustimes.wordpress.com

It’s a Bad World

It’s a Bad World

By Dennis Prager
FrontPageMagazine.com | 4/9/2008

Here are some news items from just this past week:

In Tibet, according to an Associated Press report, “police opened fire on hundreds of Buddhist monks and lay people who had marched on local government offices to demand the release of two monks detained for possessing photographs of the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled Buddhist leader.” At least eight died.

In Iraq, the mass murder of civilians continues while American and Iraqi government forces continue to battle murderous Shiite gangs known as militias. And a 40-year-old Assyrian Orthodox priest was killed in a drive-by shooting in Baghdad in the latest attack against Iraq’s Christian minority.

In Zimbabwe, one of the world’s longest-reigning tyrants, Robert Mugabe, began to violently annul the latest elections. He has virtually destroyed a once thriving country. Unemployment is 80 percent. Inflation is over 100,000 percent. The Zimbabwean dollar has been trading at a rate of 55 million for one U.S. dollar. And life expectancy has gone from 60 to 35.

In Woodbridge, Va., moronic officials at an elementary school called in police to arrest a 6-year-old boy for slapping a 6-year-old on her bottom. He has now been labeled a sex offender for life. And he is hardly alone among elementary school students. As reported in the Washington Post: “The Virginia Department of Education reported that 255 elementary students were suspended last year for offensive sexual touching, or ‘improper physical contact against a student.’ In Maryland, 166 elementary school children were suspended last year for sexual harassment, including three preschoolers, 16 kindergartners and 22 first-graders, according to the State Department of Education.”

In Pakistan, more than 25,000 people rallied against “Fitna,” an anti-Quran film made by Geert Wilders, a member of the Dutch Parliament. Speakers called on Muslims to kill themselves and others in defense of Islam’s honor.

Human Rights Watch released a report that the government of Sudan “is giving [Sudanese Arab gangs] a license to rape” black women and girls in Darfur.

In Sri Lanka, the Associated Press reported, “A suicide bomber killed 14 people at an opening ceremony for a Sri Lankan marathon. … More than 90 others were wounded.”

In Israel, Haaretz reported that an Arab woman has been shot in an attempted honor killing. She was to be the ninth female member of her family to be killed. “Eight women from this family were murdered in the past six years, all in connection with ‘family honor.'” Male relatives had murdered them all because they brought shame on their Muslim family by not marrying the men picked for them or otherwise disobeying family religious dictates.

These are only the news items of the last seven days. I purposely chose a period without dramatic headlines. And, of course, no news came out of North Korea, which continues to be the world’s largest concentration camp. Cubans continue to have no freedom. Iranians continue to be whipped and killed for sexual improprieties. Saudi women continue to be forced to be invisible in public and live a demeaned status.

The world is filled with evil. Always has been. The biggest difference today is that, thanks to communications, we are far more aware of much of it.

I am convinced that human evil is so great that most people choose either to ignore it or to focus their concerns elsewhere – like those who believe that human-created carbon dioxide emission, not human evil, poses the greatest threat to mankind. No one will ever get killed for fighting global warming. Fighting evil, on the other hand, is quite dangerous.

 

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Dennis Prager hosts a nationally syndicated radio talk show based in Los Angeles. He is the author of four books, most recently “Happiness is a Serious Problem” (HarperCollins). His website is www.dennisprager.com. To find out more about Dennis Prager, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.