Obamonopoly

http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2008/09/obamonpoly.html

Murdoch: Obama’s economic policies are ‘naive’

http://www.thrfeed.com/2008/09/murdoch-obamas.html

The Surge To Find Bin Laden And Destroy Al Qaeda Has Begun McCain says he wants to shoot Osama

http://patdollard.com/2008/09/the-surge-to-find-bin-laden-and-destroy-al-qaeda-has-begun/

ROCHESTER, N.H. — Republican presidential candidate John McCain told workers of small weapons factory that he not only wants to catch Osama Bin Laden if elected, but said he “will shoot him with your products”.

“I will follow Osama Bin Laden to the gates of hell and I will shoot him with your products,” McCain said.

McCain told reporters afterward he was joking when he made the comment at Thompson Center Arms in Rochester.

“I certainly didn’t mean I would actually shoot him. I am certainly angry at him, but I was only speaking in a way that was trying to emphasize my point,” McCain said. “I would not shoot him myself.”

Prayer, God And War

http://patdollard.com/2008/09/prayer-god-and-war/

Obama and Raines: then and now

Clarice Feldman
In 2008* the Washington Post reported  (and its principal source was clearly Franklin Raines) that Raines was offering financial advice to Obama:

In the four years since he stepped down as Fannie Mae’s chief executive under the shadow of a $6.3 billion accounting scandal, Franklin D. Raines has been quietly constructing a new life for himself. He has shaved eight points off his golf handicap, taken a corner office in Steve Case’s D.C. conglomeration of finance, entertainment and health-care companies and more recently, taken calls from Barack Obama’s presidential campaign seeking his advice on mortgage and housing policy matters.

 

Now that John McCain has come out with a video attacking Obama’s judgment for, among other things, relying on the advice of Raines, Raines denies that connection:

Raines said in the statement through the campaign, “I am not an advisor to Barack Obama, nor have I provided his campaign with advice on housing or economic matters.”

 

Through a spokesman so did Obama:

 

This is another flat-out lie from a dishonorable campaign that is increasingly incapable of telling the truth. Frank Raines has never advised Senator Obama about anything — ever. And by the way, someone whose campaign manager and top advisor worked and lobbied for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac shouldn’t be throwing stones from his seven glass houses.

 

Who to believe — and when?

* thanks to readers who notified us of an earlier typo here.

Posted at 09:54 AM | Email | Permalink

‘Blacks Against Obama’ Interrupt Campaign Rally – With Video

http://patdollard.com/2008/09/blacks-against-obama-interrupt-campaign-rally-with-video/

We Are Losing Europe to Islam

Thursday, September 18, 2008

We Are Losing Europe to Islam

by Diana West

 

 

With Wall Street convulsing, and the White House race intensifying, the question “Who lost Europe” is on no one’s lips, let alone minds. Indeed, the question begs another: “Is Europe lost?”

The answer to the second question is, “No, not yet.” And losing Europe, I would add, is by no means inevitable. But that doesn’t mean the continent isn’t currently hell-bent to accommodate the dictates of Islamic law, bit by increasingly larger bit. Such a course of accommodation, barring reversal, will only hasten Bernard Lewis’ famous prediction that Europe will be Islamic by century’s end.

And what do I mean by “accommodation“? Well, to take one tiny example, one snowflake in a blizzard of such examples, there are schools in Belgium that not only serve halal food to Muslim and non-Muslim alike (old news), but, according to a recent French magazine report, no longer teach authors deemed offensive to Muslims, including Voltaire and Diderot; the same is increasingly true of Darwin. (Don’t even ask about the Holocaust.)

For a more substantial, indeed, keystone example of accommodation, we can look to England, where, it pains me to write, Sharia courts are now officially part of the British legal system. According to press reports this week, the British government has quietly, cravenly elevated five Sharia courts to the level of tribunal hearings, thus making their rulings legally binding.

It may be difficult to quantify the impact of a Voltaire vacuum on the continent, but we can instantly see the inequities of British Sharia (I can’t believe I’m writing that phrase). Among the first official verdicts were those upholding the Islamic belief in male supremacy. These included an inheritance decision in which male heirs received twice as much as female; and several cases of domestic violence in which husbands were acquitted and wives’ charges were dropped.

In a decidedly minuscule minority, I say we ignore the spread of Islamic law across Europe, from the schoolroom to the courtroom, at our peril, particularly given that in so doing, we also ignore the vital political parties that have arisen in reaction to this threat to Western civilization. Why at our peril? Because the same type of liberty-shrinking, Sharia-driven accommodation is happening here.

Of the parties dedicated to resisting Islamization that I examined in Europe last summer, the most promising range from the sizeable Vlaams Belang in Belgium to the tiny Sweden Democrats, and include the Lega Nord in Italy, the Party for Freedom of Geert Wilders in Holland, the Danish People’s Party, the Swiss People’s Party and the Austrian Freedom Party. Such parties are unknown here, or ignored. Worse, they are shunned. Why? I believe it’s because their respective political opponents — the leftist media and governing establishments that are increasingly dependent on Islamic support, by the way — have successfully slandered these parties as “extremists,” “racists,” “fascists” and “Nazis.”

Is advocating freedom of speech “extreme” or “fascist”? Is opposing Islam’s law, which knows no race, “racist”? Is supporting Israel (which these parties do far more than other European parties) “Nazi”? The outrageously empty epithets of the Islamo-socialist left seem calculated to stop thought cold and trigger a massive rejection reflex. In this way, resistance becomes anathema, and Islamic law, unchecked, spreads across Europe.

Does that sound “Islamophobic”? You bet. How can anyone who values freedom of conscience, equality before the law and other such Western jewels not have a healthy fear of Islamic law, which values none of these things? Incredibly, this is an emotion that is supposed to be suppressed — and, in Europe, on pain of prosecution. Indeed, because Filip Dewinter admitted to such “Islamophobia” in an interview, his party, the Vlaams Belang, has been taken to court in Belgium on charges of racism, and, if convicted, will be effectively shut down through defunding by the government.

That hasn’t stopped Dewinter, who, in accepting an award at a memorial event dedicated to Oriana Fallaci in Florence, last week, said: “Islamophobia is not merely a phenomenon of unparalleled fear, but it is the duty of every one who wants to safeguard Europe’s future. Europe means Rome, Greece, Enlightenment and Judeo-Christian roots. Europe is a continent of castles and cathedrals, not of mosques and minarets.”

Of course, even as Dewinter admits to fearing the Islamization of Europe, he and his colleagues act with exceptional political — and physical — bravery in rallying voters against it. This coming weekend, he joins several other politicians on the Sharia-fighting right in Europe — among them two other men I interviewed, Mario Borghezio of Lega Nord, which is part of Italy’s ruling coalition, and Heinz-Christian Strache of Austria’s Freedom Party, which is expected to become part of Austria’s ruling coalition after elections this month — in Cologne, Germany. In that ancient cathedral city, where the city council recently approved the construction of a long-controversial mega-mosque, these men will address a rally against European Islamization. (Contrary to initial reports, Jean-Marie Le Pen will not be at the demonstration.) The Sharia-fighters expect 1,500 demonstrators. Police expect 40,000 counter-demonstrators.

These are frightening odds — a metaphor, perhaps, for Europe’s chances of staving off Islamic law. Who lost Europe? If it does happen, we certainly won’t be able to say we weren’t warned.

Saudi Inroads in U.S. Schools

by Hillel Fendel

 

Sarah Stern, who heads EMET, the Washington, D.C.-based Endowment for Middle East Truth think-tank, says the Saudi Arabians are using their petrodollars to make major inroads into the American educational system, from elementary school and up.  

Speaking with Eve Harow on Israel National Radio, Stern said the Saudis are making use of a clause in the little-known Higher Education Law called Title VI to train teachers from kindergarten through 12th grade with an anti-American, anti-Israel bent.

To hear and/or download the entire interview, click here.

Title-6 ‘outreach’ allows biased academics to bring in off-campus activists, and pay them lecture fees to propagandize teachers and the general public. All at the taxpayers’ expense.Stern explained that Title VI was legislated in 1958, “in the midst of the Cold War, when it was felt that American youngsters did not know enough to deal with the Communist threat or to be succesful in the global market. So they set aside a pot of money, which has now grown to something like $120 million of taxpayers’ money, to fund college campus programs for regional studies, such as African studies, Asian studies, Middle Eastern studies, etc. That was fine, but in 1978, Edward Said of Columbia University wrote his simplistic and lies-filled book Orientialism, which stated that only people from a given region can talk or write about that region. And that became the prevailing dominant trend of thought in academic circles. So that if you go into a Middle Eastern studies program as a Jew or Zionist, it is almost impossible to go through it without being constantly pounded with anti-Israel rhetoric.”

The problem was succinctly summed up by Martin Kramer, a colleague of Stern, who wrote, “Title VI ‘outreach’ allows biased academics to bring in off-campus activists, and pay them lecture fees to propagandize teachers and the general public. All at the taxpayers’ expense.”

But there’s even more, Stern says: “The law says you have to have teacher training seminars on campuses, and these have a radical anti-American bent. There is a place in New Mexico called Dar el Islam, a giant 1,300-acre complex that has a mosque, a medrassah [Islamic theological school], a summer camp, a teacher training workshop, and a publishing house that publishes some of the most virulent translations of the Quran, as well as the materials for their teacher-training that are used all over the country – and all stamped with the fancy blue-green-white star emblem of ARAMCO, the state-owned national oil company of Saudi Arabia. They are very very stealth – I call this the ‘soft jihad’ against America.”

 

“So we are raising generations of Americans who feel that Israel is a liability to US,” Stern said, “though it’s not only anti-Israel, but also anti-American… The first question on their teacher-training guide is, Why was America attacked on 9/11? And the answer is because of American support for Israel. So the Saudis, with their millions and millions of dollars, have been penetrating into think tanks, and into the penal system where very Wahabi imams come in and teach and get them to convert to extreme-Wahabi Islam. And they are hiding behind the American constitutional rights to be able to do this in America.”

 

Asked what is being done and what can be done to stop this, Stern said, “I see my primary mission as informing and educating. Although, we were successful in making some small changes in Title VI – myself together with Martin Kramer, who wrote the seminal book on this called Ivory Towers on Sand about the failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America, and with Stanley Kurtz – we were able to make some small incremental changes, such as having the universities answer how many of the participants went on to serve in positions of national security interests as a result of these programs, which was the original purpose of the Title VI.”

 

First the Saturday People, Then the Sunday People
Stern says her EMET think-tank is “the first one that is unabashedly pro-Israel. There are others that are allegedly pro-Israel, but they basically follow the State Department line of land-for-peace, even though this has been proven to be a colossal failure. We talk about Israel’s security as the key to US security. We’re saying that patriotic Americans should support Israel, for America’s sake; after all, we’re fighting the same war. The radical Islamists say clearly, first the Saturday people and then the Sunday people.”

Fannie Mae CEO Calls Obama And Dems ‘Family’

http://patdollard.com/2008/09/fannie-mae-ceo-calls-obama-and-dems-family/

Dem Party Collapses As 18 Point Lead It Held For Year Vanishes In 3 Weeks – GOP Now Tops

http://patdollard.com/2008/09/dem-party-collapses-as-18-point-lead-it-held-for-year-vanishes-in-3-weeks-gop-now-tops/