Italian Hostages Released

In Iraq, seven kidnapped hostages including two Italian women abducted three weeks ago have now been released. In the case of the Italian women Italy’s President Berlusconi won’t say whether there was a ransom or some other quid pro quo. Is there any question in your mind? There isn’t in mine.

Another recently released hostage, a Canadian, is reporting something very ominous.

Scott Taylor

Canadian Journalist Scott Taylor spent five days as a kidnapped hostage in Iraq. He was “tortured and beaten” and “also told I was going to die. They were going to behead me on Friday.” He said he can barely walk because of the beatings he endured.

Scott Taylor, Canadian Journalist and Former Hostage in Iraq tells his story:
“They pronounced that I would be executed the following morning and I was handcuffed and chained to the bed and I laid there for about 6 or 7 hours just anticipating my own death. “

But what’s most chilling about Taylor’s story is what he’d already learned by then. From the moment of his capture as he and a Turkish journalist approached an Iraqi police checkpoint outside the city of Talafar.

TAYLOR: “We were instructed to get into a car with four masked gunmen, this is by the Iraqi police, and the masked gunmen were sitting next to the checkpoint.”

The Iraqi police, mind you, are the ones we’re counting on to provide security for the January elections. BY then it’s hoped there’ll be 145 thousand of them. But as his kidnappers were driving their hostages to Mosul, they encountered MORE Iraqi police. And guess what?

TAYLOR: “They actually welcomed these guys like you would welcome home the local baseball team after a game. These were obviously about 30 heavily armed mujahideen coming in dusty cars across the desert with captives, evident captives, myself and the Turkish journalist, inside the car. They were giving them cigarettes, giving them water.”

Taylor says this wasn’t just garden variety police corruption.

TAYLOR: “This wasn’t something where these guys were just paying protection and turning a blind eye. They were actually willingly encouraging the mujahideen in their fight against the American occupiers: And they were LAUGHING.” says Taylor.

TAYLOR: “They were laughing about this because it meant that in fact the munitions they were purchasing for the resistance were in fact being bought with American money that was intended for the salaries of the Iraqi police and army that were supposed to be combating the resistance, so they found this rather ironic.”

Don’t YOU find that troubling? I do.

From The Founding Fathers & the Classics.

by Dr. Joe Wolverton II

As the Founders read the histories of the rise and fall of the Greek and Roman republics recorded by Herodotus, Livy, Tacitus, Sallust, Plutarch, Polybius and others, they learned that the liberties enjoyed by the citizens of those commonwealths were quite often targeted by conspiracies of men determined to enslave the people an establish themselves as tyrants. The Founders recognizes that the conspiratorial view of history was not a theory–it was a fact.

Ancient historians were straightforward in their eports of the secret plots. Surveying the library of British monarchial abuses, our Founders rightly perceived that the shrouded hand of evil conspiracy was at work in America and England. Just as it had been in the Roman republic they so admired. Famed patriot Charles Carroll of Carrollton invoked the record of Roman historian Tacitus when he wrote that the conspiracy of this own time had led America and England to “that degree of liberty and servitude which Galba ascribes to the Roman people in the speech to Piso; those same Romans, a few years after that period, deified the horse of Caligula.”

The equally eminent and historically minded John Adams also applied analogies from the Roman republic to the increasingly open threat to the foundations of English liberty by corrupt legislators. The government of England, he said, “quoting Roman historian Sallust), had descended to the level where “the Roman republic was when Jugurtha left it, and pronounced it a ‘venal city, ripe for destruction if it can only find a purchaser.’” SSallust was a valuable and oft-cited source of warnings in the consquences of government corruption and intrigue.

Our Founders heeded these warnings about power elites who used corruption, intrigue, and personal immorality to neutralize public concern and dampen zeal for the protection of liberty. From the 18th to the 21st century, ti would seem, times have changed very little.

James Madison insightfully noted that most of the tyrants of history masqueraded as democrats, and over time, revealed themselves to be power hungry dictators and shameless demagogues. Alexander Hamilton, an astute student of classical history, devoted his first contribution to the Federalist Papers to a writing against tyrants of “men who have over-turned the liberties of republics, commencing as demagoguges and ending as tyrants.”

From such statements, it is evidence that Adams, Madison, Hamilton and other Founders understood that, throughout the history of the Greek and Roman republics, tyrants were more likely than not to begin their political careers as populists and democrats and end them as despots. Such demagogues were men of prominence who used their popular support to force their will upon an unsuspecting and trusting populace. As greek historian Thucydides remarked, “You may rule over anyone whom you can dominate.”

Madison’s study of the ancient Greek confederacies revealed to him that almost every one of these republics came to an end as a result of conspiracy among domestic demagogues and foreign allies. Hamilton called these insiduous cabals the “Grecian Horse to a republic.” Both men worried that the same scheme would eventually destroy the American union. This fear, coupled with a thorough understanding of history, made the Founders vigilant guardians against the rise of such combinations in their own nascent republic.

Madison, James Wilson and others, who systematically studied the ancient republics and confederacies, noted that conspiracies were rampant among them. Those who were successful in carrying out such evil designs would expose and vehemently rail against similar acts on the part of others, thus painting themselves as guardians of liberty. The source of all this evil was an unquenchable thirst for power. Power was the end, and conspiracy was the means commonly used to satisfy the rapeicious appetitie for domination.

From Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, Jefferson, Adams, Dickinson, Madison, Hamilton and other diligent patriot-scholars, learned of a particularly permicious deception practiced by tyrannically minded conspirators. These instigators would place their fellow cinspirators in leadership positions on both sides of a controversy, constantly inciting the “opposing” factions against one another until the innocent citizens didn’t know what to believe. Our American republic in the 21st century is little different, as Democrats and Republicans adamantly “oppose” on another, while between their rival policies lurks not a dime’s worth of difference.

A companion of evil to the conspiracies that contaminated and eventually annihilated the ancident commonwealths was the gradual erosion of liberty by seemingly harmless and legal acts. In Demosthenes’ writings, the Founders read of how Philip of Macedon–by slow and nearly imperceptible means–dismantled Athenian freedom. Philip was an enemy even to those who fancied themselves his allies. He used “legal” means to subvert the constitution and rob Athens of her liberty. His favorite tactic was to create frivolous diversions and provide luxuries to lull the Athenians into a false sense of security and distract them from noticing Philip’s usurpations.

Unfortunatley, Philip succeeded in gaining control of Athens and in making her formerly freedom-loving citizens slaves to his will. Jefferson described such gradual and planned usurpations this way:

“Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of the day, but a series of oppressions, began at a distinguished period and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate and systematical plan of reducing us to slavery.”

Will we prove wiser and more zealous protectors of our sacred liberties?

One of the best ways of demonstrating our respect for our Founding Fathers, and our dedication to the principles of liberty they bequeathed to us, is to study the books they studied. By doing so, we will come to appreciate, as they did, that republics are as fragile as they are glorious. We will also more fully recognize that unassailable personal virtue and vigilant loyalty to constitutional principles are the only hope for perpetuation of the freedom that our forebears bought with their blood. May we learn from successes and failures of the ancients and not allow the “lamp of experience” to be extinguished in our lives.

Liberals like Hillary and the dangerous politics of the left are poison to the souls of patriotic Americans.

Patriotic Americans don’t blame the deaths of our soldiers on our government–they blame them on the enemy who pulled the trigger or ignited the truck bomb. Patriotic Americans don’t criticize the government for “losing the peace” when we are, in fact, winning the war. In the War on Terror, we’re not at peace, and we’re not losing.

Patriotic Americans don’t take a noble cause such as defending your country and liberating the oppressed and turn it into a set of talking points aimed solely at the political destruction of a rival. Patriotic Americans chose their country, first. The politics come later.

Former VP Al Gore, with all the motion he could muster, Dean-screamed, “This nation has never in our two centuries made a worse foreign policy mistake than what George W. Bush made in putting our troops into that quagmire in Iraq. It was a horrible misjudgment.”

Would-be Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean claims that Saudi Arabia tipped off President Bush about the September 11, 2001, attacks and he failed to act, and claimed America is no safer with Saddam Hussein behind bars.

Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy, speaking to the Center for American Progress, attacked the Bush Administration, saying that it had “broken faith with the American people, aided by a congressional majority willing to pursue ideology at any price, even the price of the truth….” Earlier, Kennedy had called the awar in Iraq a fraud “made up in Texas.” “There was no immminent danger,” he continued, “and we should never have gone to war.”

General Wesley Clark, the “Perfumed Prince”, campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, referred to the war in Iraq as “not patriotic. Not smart, I don’t think it was a patriotic war. I think it was a mistake, a strategic mistake.” Clark also called for an impeachment probe of President Bush. “I think the Congress needs to investigate precisely (how the US wound up in a war with Iraq) that was connected to the threat of Al-Qaeda.” Clark said, “This was an elective war, “He complained. He also charged that Bush “never intended” to capture Osama bin Laden. Let’s just watch for the coming October surprise.

A clear indication of the extremes the former general was willing to go to for votes was demonstrated with his machismo pose on the cover of the Advocate magazine (a national gay and lesbian news source) sporting an open shirt over a v-neck t-shirt for the gay readers.

George Soros, the radical billionaire philanthropist and friend of Bill Clinton who funds groups supporting abortion, atheism, gay marriage, euthanasia, drug legalization, sex education and other liberal causes…vowed to do whatever necessary to bring the President down.

Soros’ brain trust for the effort is Morton Halperin, a former Clinton Administration official and liberal mastermind who organized the highly damaging campaign of the ’70’s to strip the intelligence gathering capabilities of the FBI and CIA; and John Podesta, former Clinton White House chief of staff.

It would serve well for the Clintons…Gore, Kenney..and Clark (who seems to have lost whatever military sense he had when he became Democratic presidential candidate and tried to get to the left of Howard Dean) to remember this: America’s servicemen and women are engaged in combat.

Click here for The Faces Of John Kerry’s Democratic Party

Responding to the controversy over ads run by the Swiftees, Bush urged that all campaign ads by independent groups be halted. The television ads by the Swiftees prompted media scrutiny of all “527″ groups–independent organizations created to run attack ads against political candidates.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reports on August 25 that Mr. Bush planned to file a lawsuit to squelch compaign ads by 527 groups. If court action doesn’t work, the president would be willing to pursue legislation action with senator McCain on that.

Under the campaign finance reform law signed by Mr. Bush in 2002, 527 groups who run advocacy ads must avoid “coordination” with any political campaign.

Criticism of the Swiftees by liberal partisans (as pro-Republican ads) prompted retaliatory criticism of pro-Democrat 527s such as MoveOn.org and other similar groups bankrolled by billionaire leftist investor George Soros.

The Kerry campaign extended the logic of stifling free speech by further demanding that the Swiftees book “Unfit for Command” be pulled from store shelves. That demand provoked this reply from Republican Joan Goldberg, editor at large for National Review Online: “Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 is surely as dishonest as anything the Swift Vets can be alleged to have made up. Why not try to ban Moore from making his movies?”

In fact, as noted earlier, the GOP front group Citizens United actually filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission calling Moore’s film “a political weapon against President Bush” and demanding action to suppress advertising for the film. The group also sent harassing letters to broadcast outlets running ads for the film, warning them of possible FEC action against them. So the Kerry campaign was merely planting in furrows that had already been dug by Bush supporters.

As liberal Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson observed in an August 25 essay:

“The presidential campaign has confirmed that, under the guise of “campaign finance reform,” Congress and the Supreme Court have repealed large parts of the First Amendment. They have simply discarded what were once considered constitutional rights of free speech and political association. It is not that these rights have vanished. But they are no longer constitutional guarantees…We have entered an era of constitutional censorship. Hardly anyone wants to admit this….the legalized demolition of the First Amendment would seem shocking–and so hardly anyone does.”

From The Founding Fathers & the Classics.

by Dr. Joe Wolverton II

Ancient history provided the Founders with examples of behavior and circumstances that they could apply to their own circumstances. Their heroes were Roman and Greek republicans and defenders of liberty. All of the Founders’ Roman heroes lived at a time when the Roman republic was being threatened by power-hungry demagogues, bloodsthirsty dictators and shadowy conspirators. The Founders’ principal Greco-Roman heroes were Roman statemen: Cato the Younger, Brutus, Cassius and Cicero–all of whom sacrificed their lives in unsuccessful attempts to save the republic–as well as the celebrated Greek lawgivers Lycurgus and Solon.

Cato the Younger was a Roman of sterling reputation who lived from approximately 95 BC ro 46 BC. He is described as being “unmoved by passion and firm in everything,” even from his youth. He was renowned for finishing whatever he started and for hating flattery. He embraced every Roman virtue, and he was especially appreciatef for his sense of justice and his even temperment. As a senator, Cato was always in attendance when the Senate was in session. A no-nonsense legislator, Cato was hated by Pompey and Caesar for his integrity and for his refusal to aid them in their corrupt plans to usurp power. Although they imprisoned him, the public clamored for his release and Caesar reluctantly complied.

Unable to squelch Cato’s attacks on their corrupt policies, Caesar and Pompey sent him to Cyprus. Finally, Cato aligned himself with Brutus against Caesar, a decision that would eventually cost him his life. George Washington admired Cato so greatly that he had Joseph Addison’s play about Cato performed in Valley Forge to boost the troops’ morale.

Roman heroes very dear to the hearts of the Founders also included Brutus and Cassius. Brutus was admired by his contemporaries for his pleasant disposition and virtuous temper. Even those who opposed his attack on Caesar believed that Brutus was motivated by a genuine concern for the republic and not by personal animosity toward Caesar.

Marc Antony himself said that Brutus was “the only man that conspired against Caesar out of a sense of the glory and justice of his action; but all the rest rose up against the man, and not the tyrant….” America;’s Founders looked to Brutus and Cassius as role models because their only aim to overthrowing Caesar was to restore the constitutional Roman government and republican liberties.

The most popular Roman hero of the Founding Fathers was Cicero, the silver-tongued Roman orator. Cicero lived from approximately 106 BC to 43 BC. John Adams, in his Defense of the Constitution, said of Cicero: “All of the ages of the world have not produced a greater statesman and philosopher united than Cicero….” First as a lawyer, then as a consul and senator, Cicero boldly defended the republic against the rise of dictators. Cicero delivered his greatest speeches in defense of the republic against the Catilarian Conspiracy.

The Catilarian Conspiracy was a plot to overthrow the republic, hatched by aristrocrat Lucius Sergius Catiline with the help of a cabal of aristocrats and disaffected veterans. In 63 BC, Cicero exposed and thwarted the plot, and Catiline was forced to flee from Rome. For his service in saving Rome, Cicero was given the title “Father of his Country” by his countrymen. Like Brutus and Cassius, Cicero’s courageous defense of republican liberty in the face of designing conspirators made him a logical model for emulation by our Founding Fathers.

Regarding the Greek classics, the American Founding Fthers greatly admired lycurgus, the lawgiver of Sparta, Lycurgus lived in the 9th century BC and reformed the centire Spartan commonwealth. His most important reform was the establishment of a senate equal in authority with the monarchy in matters of great importance. Prior to Lycugrus’ innovation, the Spartan government swayed between monarchy and democracy, depending on whether the king or the people had the upper hand. The senate served as a check on the excesses of both king and subjects. The biographer Plutarch called Lycurgus’ institutions “one of the greatest blessings which heaven can send down.”

Another Greek famed for his reform of the law was Solon, born in Athens about 638 BC. Solon achieved glory as one of the “Seven sages of Greece”. Around 390 BC he was given the task of reforming the Athenian constitution. Solon’s improvements included the right of trial by jury and the division of society lines into several bodies that would balance and check each other in governing Athens. After finishing his constitutional reform, Solon left Athens for 10 years. While he was away, Pisistratus, his former friend, usurped control of the government and fastened tyrannical controls on Athens. Both Lycurgus and Solon appreciated the need for incorporating checks and balances into government, a need that the American founders understood just as acutely.

From The Founding Fathers & the Classics.

by Dr. Joe Wolverton II

“I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past.”
~Patrick Henry, March 23, 1775

Patrick Henry’s view of the value of history was not unique. The men who framed our constitutional republic agreed with French author Charles Pinot Duclos, who observed:

“We see on the theater of the world a certain number of scenes which succeed each other in endless repetition: where we see the same faults followed regularly by the same misfortunes, we may reasonably think that if we could have known the first, we might have avoided the others. The past should enlighten us on the future: knowledge of history is no more than an anticipated experience.”

All of the founding fathers believed that history was a precursor of the future. In the annals of history, particularly that of the Roman and Greek republics of antiquity, they believed they could find the key to inoculating America against the diseases that infected and destroyed past societies. Indeed, it has been said that the Founders were coroners examining the lifeless bodies of the republics and democracies of the past, in order to avoid sccumbing to the maladies that shortened their lives.

The Founders learned very early in life to venerate the illuminating stories of ancient Greece and Rome. They learned these stories, not from secondary sources, but from the classics themselves. And from these stories they drew knowledge and inspiration that helped them found a republic far greater than anything created in antiquity.

Classical training usually began at age eight, whether in a school or at home under the guidance of a private tutor. One remarkable teacher who inculcated his studients with a love of the classics was Scotsman Donald Robertson. Many future luminaries were enrolled in his school: James Madison, John Taylor of Caroline, John Tyler and George Rogers Clark, among others. Robertson and teachers like him nourished their charges with a healthy diet of Greek and Latin, and required that they learn to master Virgil, Horace, Justinian, Tacitus, Herodotus, Lucretius and Thucydides. Further along in their education, students were required to translate Cicero’s Orations and Virgil’s Aeneid. They were expected to translate Latin and Greek passages aloud, write out the translations in English, and then re-translate the passages back into the original language, using a different tense.

The standards were no less rigorous for those taught at home. George Wythe, the renowned Viriginian who would come to be known as the “Teacher of Liberty”, was himself taught to appreciate the writings of the ancients at home by his mother. Tragically, Wythe’s mother died when he was very young, but she lived long enough to anchor her son’s education on very firm moorings. Before she died, she taught Wythe to read and translate both the fundamental languages of antiquity, Greek and Latin. According to one early biographer, Wythe “had a perfect knowledge of the Greek language taught to him by his mother in the backwoods.”

Whether at home or in a schoolhouse, the goal of education in the early days of our nation was to instill virtue in the students. The Founders were taught that free societies were sustained by a virtuous populace, and that, if a society were to abandon a study of the classics, that same society would eventually abandon the virtues championed by the classical authors.

There was a more pragmatic side to the Founders’ classical education as well. Twenty-seven signers of the Declaration of Independence were college-educated. Moreover, of the 53 delegates who attended the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1987, 30 were college graduates. That is an impressive feat, given the challenging entrance requirements of the 18th-century universities. Fortunately for the young Founding Fathers, the teachers of the day exercised their students in Greek and Latin, so that their pupils could meet the rigorous entrance requirements of colonial colleges. Those colleges stipulated that entering freshmen be able to read, translate and expoud the Greco-Roman classical works.

Such requirements were nearly universal in America and remained unchanged for generations. Teachers concentrated their lessons on the works of those classical authors on which students would be tested prior to admission to college. A brief survey of the entrance requirements for colonial colleges will testify to the enlightenment of our Founding Fathers–as well as the astounding decline in the educational standards of today.

In 1750, Harvard demanded that applicants be able to extemporaneously “read, construe, and parse Tully (Cicero), Virgil, or such like classical authors and to write Latin in prose, and to be skilled in making Latin verse, or at least know the rules of Prosodia, and to read, construe, and parse ordinary Greek as in the New Testatement of the Bible, Isocrates, or such like and decline the paradigms of Greek nouns and verbs. Of note is the fact that John Tumbull, the illustrious artist, passed Harvard’s exacting entrance exam at only 12 years of age.

Alexander Hamilton’s alma mater, King’s College (now Columbia), had similarly stringent prerequisites for prospective students. Applicants were required to “give a rational account of the Greek and Latin grammars, read three orations of Cicero and three books of Virgil’s Aeneid, and translate the first 10 chapters of John from Greek into Latin.”

James Madison had it no easier when he applied for entrance to the College of New Jersey (now Princeton) in 1769. Madison and his fellow applicants were obliged to demonstrate “the ability to write Latin prose, translate Virgil, Cicero, and the Greek gospels and a commensurate knowledge of Latin and Greek grammar.”

College lessons were as demanding as the entrance exams. American colonial curricula was based on the Latin “trivium” of rhetoric, logic and grammar, as well as the “quadrivium” of arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. Unlike modern universities, where elective courses are innumerable and often inane, the colleges attended by our Founding Fathers offered very few elective courses and coursework focused chiefly on the study of classical works. And those works were in the languages in which they were written!

Students were taught lessons in virtue and liberty from the works of Herodotus, Xenophon, Plutarch, Livy, Sallust, Tacitus and Polybius. Thomas Jefferson’s classmates recall that he studied at least 15 hours a day and carried his Greek grammar book with him wherever he went.

Even the commencement ceremonies were dedicated to classical learning. They featured contests of Greek and Latin translation or extemporaneous debates in those languages.

Because of this formidable classical curricula at colonial colleges, the classics became a well from which the Founders drank deeply. In the classics, the Founding Fathers found their heroes and villains, and they also detected warning signs along the road of statecraft on which they would tread.

NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only.

http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=25997

A lawsuit was filed in 2003 by several Christian students and their parents to stop the Byron Union Public School District in California from teaching Islam to their children.

Seventh- graders were required to pretend they’re Muslims, wear Islamic garb, assume Islamic names, recite prayers in class, memorize and recite verses from the Quran, simulate Ramadan fasting by going without eating for a day, pray to Allah, and even play “jihad games”.

According to a recent WorldNetDaily article [Judge Rules Islamic Education OK in California Schools] US District Judge Phyllis Hamilton ruled in her 22-page disclosure that Excelsior Elementary Public School in Byron, California “…is not indoctrinating students about Islam when it requires them to adopt Muslim names and pray to Allah as part of a history and geography class, but rather is just teaching them about the Muslim religion.”

Is this just teaching the children about the Muslim religion, or is it indoctrination? By the way, this curriculum is being taught to all seventh-graders in California. What will you and your pastor do when it comes to your school? Will you have the love and courage to remove your children and homeschool them?

The black-robed judges have ruled that it’s OK to remove the Bible, praying, displaying the Ten Commandments and even mentioning the word “God” from our public schools. Aren’t they educational as well? Yet, it’s OK to replace the above with the Quran, praying to Allah, and other Islamic symbols because it is all only for “educational purposes”. It appears the idea of “separation of church and state” applies only to Christianity.

We are a Christian nation and logic dictates that our tax-funded public schools should be teaching our children about our Judeo-Christian heritage. In fact, during the 1800’s the Bible was used in our public schools to teach children to read. So much for freedom of choice and equal rights.

Today, if you bring the Bible to public school you could get sued, reprimanded and expelled. Where are the so-called God-fearing pastors when God, His Son, the Bible and the 10 Commandments are trashed? Hiding behind the pulpit with the collection plate in hand, I presume.

What will the pastors do for a living once Christianity is outlawed and replaced with a One World Religion like Environmentalism? Will they compromise to keep their jobs?

Try removing Allah from Muslim schools and see the sparks fly. Not so with Christians.

In Mobile, Alabama The Christmas Parade was renamed The Jolly Holiday Parade in order not to offend anyone. During the hearings there were lots of pastors present, not one spoke publicly against it, not one. They were all concerned about looking politically correct.

Imagine that, The Christmas Parade is not politically correct, but The Gay Pride Parade is.

Did Jesus teach us to be sheep or did He teach us to stand up and be counted? Are the lukewarm Pastors part of the problem?

Atheists and homosexuals are hard at work destroying the Judeo-Christian foundation that America was built on, while Christians and most of the pastors do nothing.

Do we get the government and pastors we deserve?

This is how evil took control of this nation.

Throughout history, there has always been a battle between good and evil. First, evil demands ‘equal rights’. Once the people are duped into accepting ‘equal rights’ with wrong, then it begins its true agenda to dominate and control, until the moral fiber of a nation is totally destroyed, and they’re in control. Once in control, the trend will never be reversed.

Evil has to destroy the contrast between itself and good. It must ‘put out the light of the world’ so that it can never be challenged again. Because evil doesn’t do consensus.

What will you tell your grandchildren when they ask you “Why did you allow this to happen?”

Some solutions:

1 Stop giving your lukewarm pastors money. Tell him when he finds his backbone you’ll reconsider. In the meantime find another church with a courageous pastor.
2 Take your children out of the public school system. Don’t tell me you can’t, where there is a will there is always a way. Ask with a sincere heart and a way will be shown to you.
3 Get involved in your local community. Stand by your convictions and DO NOT COMPROMISE!
4 Write letters-to-the-editor in your local paper about important events that you read on reputable online news sources.
5 Tell everyone you meet about NewsWithViews.com and other reputable news sources.
6 Print out informative articles. Then go to the printer and have a few hundred copies made and pass them out in front of the post office or other places. Make sure you get the owners permission first.
7 Take criticism gracefully and do not resent or argue with people who disagree with you, they have a right to disagree. Remember, we all have free choices. We can accept a lie and reject the truth, or we can accept the truth and reject a lie. One must be free to CHOOSE.
8 Run for local office, such as county commissioner, school board, or the city council.
9 If your local paper is biased, organize and start a weekly picket.
10 Support organizations or groups that are actively involved with finances or volunteer labor. Caution: Thoroughly check out any organization(s) to make sure they’re on the up and up before donating money or labor.

Remember; Doing something is better than doing nothing.

Help Us Wake Up America.

Judge’s Ruling-It’s OK To Teach Islam In Byron School

NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only.

http://www.illinoisleader.com/content/img/f19558/WCT-Obama1.pdf

The Windy City Times (gay publication) Obama ad…open your mouth a little more, baby….

• Opposes Constitutional Amendment To Ban Gay Marriage
• Supports repeal of Defense of Marriage Act
• Chief Co-Sponsor of Human Rights Bill in Springfield
• 100% Pro Choice Voting Record
• The only candidate with a legislative record
• Supports expansion of hate crimes legislation
• Supports repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” military policy

Personally, I don’t see any reason why we should accept gay marriage as a new institution. Let them have their civil unions….Marriage is for procreation. Gays can’t do that. Sodomy is wrong; it’s against biblical principles.

If Obama gets his way, the hate crimes legislation that he refers to would prevent conservatives or preachers from talking about the Bible, biblical principles, or that sodomy is wrong.

This guy’s prochoice voting record is the most extreme pro choice stand I’ve ever seen. Picture a nurse holding a baby as it’s dying, asking someone to please let her help it live. The answer? Lay it down and let it die!!! This is a baby who lived in spited of its mother trying to kill it. So I call that infanticide. It’s murder. And it’s wrong.

Will we shortly lose our right to talk about this stuff?

I’m going to talk shortly on the “Separation of Church and State” since people say it so much. Nowhere in our founding documents is that phrase found. And there once was a time when a person was a Christian in public and private life. I fear we’re losing our right to do that, and it’s absolutely not what the Founders had in mind.

Kerry: I Love My Communist Chinese AK-47

Two weeks John Kerry blasted Bush for failing to push for an extension of the assault weapons ban, saying he’s never met anyone who wanted to use an AK-47 to shoot a deer.

But that was before Kerry admitted in a magazine interview that he owns a Chinese assault rifle. Read: Open mouth, insert foot.

“My favorite gun is the M-16 that saved my life and that of my crew in Vietnam,” Kerry tells Outdoor Life in its October issue. “I don’t own one of those now, but one of my reminders of my service is a Communist Chinese assault rifle.”

(By the way that particular gun is illegal to own in Massachusetts or Washington D.C. It’s probably a ChiCom AK-47 ‘war trophy’ he brought back from Vietnam. Very illegal to do so and just as illegal to own where he lives and works. )

The Kerry campaign stonewalled questions on their candidate’s illegal gun stash, with spokesman Michael Meehan telling the New York Times only that his boss was a registered gun owner in Massachusetts.

Meehan said that Kerry had been unable to respond to questions about his banned weapon because his voice was too hoarse. (awww pobrecito) The Kerry aide refused to return follow-up calls.

“It’s O.K. for John Kerry to own these kinds of firearms, but it’s not O.K. for John Q. Public?” complained National Rifle Association spokesman Andrew Arulanandam, in an interview with the Times. “He certainly owes people an explanation as to why there’s a double standard,” Arulanandam added, noting that if the top Democrat brought his illegal assault rifle home from the war as a souvenir he could be subject to court-martial.

Moral Conscience-Keyes and Douglas

The candidate who will win, Dr. Alan Keyes, our U.S. Senate hopeful in Illinois, called on a crowd to return the country to its moral values and “conscience,” speaking where Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas debated for a Senate seat. Isn’t this picture just a kick?

About 250 people converged on Lincoln-Douglas Square Downtown Alton for the midday, 90-minute rally featuring Republican candidate Alan Keyes, who is facing Democrat Barack Obama in the November election.

Before touting reasons that Illinoisans should vote for him, Keyes pushed for the re-election of President Bush.”There is more at stake than there ever has been,” said Keyes, 54, of the Nov. 2 election as he stood on the platform between brass statues of Lincoln and Douglas. “It is life and death for our country and life and death for moral principles and for the heart and soul for our people. We will make decisions that will influence the fate of our freedom and of our public.”

The difference between Bush and challenger John Kerry, he said, “is one has proved he will defend our lives and someone who doesn’t understand they are at stake.”

Keyes holds a doctorate in government from Harvard University. He repeatedly stressed his “pro-family, pro one-man-one-woman marriage, pro-Second Amendment and pro-life” stances in a quick, booming voice.”We do not have the right to take the life of a human being based on its stage of development,” he said regarding abortion. He accused Obama of “talking out of both sides of his mouth” regarding gay marriage — depending on the audience — and for voting for anti-business bills in the Illinois Senate that kill jobs and the state’s tax base.

He referred to Obama as “left wing” and himself as “mainstream.”"If you elect Barack Obama, Sen. Dick Durbin will be your conservative senator,” he said, referring to the generally liberal Durbin.Keyes localized his speech to rail against the medical malpractice climate in Madison County and said the election of Republicans to the Illinois legislature would send a mandate for tort reform.

His platform also includes caps for medical malpractice awards; elimination of the inheritance tax; school choice, including charter and magnet schools and vouchers; replacing the federal income tax with a sales tax; low taxes for businesses; and reversing trade policies.In response to criticism that he doesn’t live in Illinois but is running for office to represent the state in Washington, D.C., Keyes said he has a national power base that would benefit his constituents.

“They will pay me more attention than someone who has no constituency in their state,” he said of other senators. “There are senators who know they are in the (U.S.) Senate because I worked to get them there. Barack Obama can talk until the cows come home, but he can’t have that influence for 1,000 years that I have today.”

He also said it is to the advantage of Illinoisans to have a senator who is not part of a “small Chicago neighborhood clique.”

“We have the opportunity to end the reign of self-serving politicians,” he said.At the event was a truck bearing Texas license plates pulling a trailer with two, 6-foot-tall gray-painted, foam “tablets” with the Ten Commandments and a large replica of the Liberty Bell.

Someone rang the bell during portions of the rally, including to announce Keyes’ speech.Rebecca Stewart of Brighton said the rally was her first and called it “exciting.”

“I think he was honest and straightforward, and he represents how I feel as a resident of Illinois,” Stewart said.

James McAfee drove from Belleville to hear Keyes. “He was good, pretty much what I expected since I’ve been following him closely.”

He said he shares Keyes’ viewpoints on abortion, “pro-family and one-man-one-woman for marriage.” Gay marriages, he said, “are a threat to our whole culture and society.”

Madison County Republicans also spoke in behalf of, among others, Madison County Board member Eugene Frizzo, who is running for County Board chairman; and for Judge Lloyd Karmeier, running for Illinois Supreme Court.

Dear Senator Kerry,

Since it has become clear that you will probably be the Democratic nominee for President, I have spent a great deal of time researching your war record and your record as a professional politician. The reason is simple, you aspire to be the Commander in Chief who would lead my sons and their fellow soldiers in time of war. I simply wanted to know if you possess the necessary qualifications to be trusted in that regard.

You see, I belong to a family of proud U.S. veterans. I was a Captain in the Army Reserve, my father was a decorated Lieutenant in World War II; and I have four sons who have either served, or are currently serving in the military.

The oldest is an Army Lieutenant still on active duty in Afghanistan, after already being honored for his service in Iraq.

The youngest is an E-4 with the military police. His National Guard unit just finished their second tour of active duty, including six months in Guantanamo Bay. My two other sons have served in the national guard and the Navy.

In looking at your record I found myself comparing it not only to that of my father and my sons, but to the people they served with. My father served with the 87th Chemical Mortar Battalion in Europe. They landed on Utah Beach and fought for 317 straight days, including the Cherbourg Peninsula, Aachen, the Hurtgen Forest, and the Battle of the Bulge.

You earned a Silver Star in Vietnam for chasing down and finishing off a wounded and retreating enemy soldier. (A violation of the Geneva Convention)

My father won a Bronze Star for single handedly charging and knocking out a German machine gun nest that had his men pinned down.

You received three purple hearts for what appears to be three minor scratches. In fact, you only missed a combined total of two days of duty for these wounds.

The men of my father’s unit, the 87th, had to be admonished by their commanding officer because it had been brought to his attention that some men were covering up wounds and refusing medical attention for fear of being evacuated and permanently separated from their organization…

It was also a common occurrence for seriously wounded soldiers to go AWOL from hospitals in order to rejoin their units.

You, however, used your three purple hearts to leave Vietnam early.

My oldest boy came home from Iraq with numerous commendations and then proceeded to volunteer to go to Afghanistan, and from there back to Iraq again. My sons and father have never had anything but the highest regard and respect for their fellow soldiers.

Yet, you came home to publicly charge your fellow fighting men with being war criminals and to urge their defeat by the enemy. You even wrote a book that had a cover which mocked the heroism of the U.S. Marines who raised the flag on Iwo Jima.

Our current crop of soldiers has a philosophy that no one gets left behind; and they have practiced that from Somalia to the battlefields of the Middle East.

Yet, as chairman of a Senate committee looking into allegations that many of your fellow servicemen had been left behind as prisoners in Vietnam, you chose to defend the brutal Vietnamese regime.

You even went so far as to refer to the families of the POWs and MIAs as Professional malcontents, conspiracy mongers, con artists, and dime-store Rambos.

As a Senator you voted against the 1991 Gulf War, and have repeatedly voted against funds to supply our troops with the best equipment, and against money to improve our intelligence capability.

I find this particularly ironic since as a Presidential candidate you are highly critical of our pre-war intelligence in Iraq. However, you did vote to authorize the President to go to war, but have since proceeded to do everything you can to undermine the efforts of our government and our troops to win. Is this what our fighting men and women can expect of you if you are their Commander in Chief? Will you gladly send them to war, only to then aid the enemy byundermining the morale of our troops and cutting off the weapons they need to win?

Our country is at war Senator, and as has been the case in every war since the American Revolution, a member of my family is serving their country during the war. Now you want me to trust you to lead my sons in this fight.

Sorry, Senator, but when I compare your record to those who have fought and died for this nation, and are currently fighting and dying, the answer is not just no, but Hell No!

Sincerely,
Michael Connelly
Dallas, Texas

In January 2004, President Bush delivered his annual State of the Union address. He reviewed the victories of the past two years in Afghanistan and Iraq, and assessed the war tasks ahead. Homeland security was prominent on the president’s agenda and its cornerstone was the Patriot Act, which Congress had passed in 2001 just after the World Trade Center attack. When the president came to the point in his address where he intended to ask legislators to renew the Act, there was an unscripted moment in the proceedings. “Key provisions of the Patriot Act are set to expire next year,” he said. The Democrat side of the chamber broke out in applause. The president paused to look in the direction of its opponents, and then, with emphasis on each word that followed, he said: “The terrorist threat will not expire on that schedule.” Now the Republican side applauded. “Our law enforcement needs this vital legislation to protect our citizens. You need to renew the Patriot Act.”

Just six days after the president’s speech, a federal judge in Los Angeles struck down one of the Patriot Act’s key provisions “aimed at blocking support for foreign terrorist groups.”[1] The provision prohibited citizens from providing material support to foreign terrorist organizations by giving them “expert advice or assistance.” This provision had been incorporated from the “Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act,” signed into law by President Clinton in 1996 after the bombing of the Oklahoma federal building.

It was a Clinton appointee who decided in favor of the plaintiffs in the Los Angeles case, agreeing with their lawyers that the Patriot Act provision—which prohibited technical and personnel assistance to designated terrorist organizations—would violate the First Amendment. The governments’ lawyers defended the provision arguing that the law “made clear that Americans are threatened as much by the person who teaches a terrorist to build a bomb as by the one who pushes the button.”[2] The judge’s rejection of this argument was summarized by a Wall Street Journal reporter as “a setback for government anti-terrorism policies.”[3]

The Los Angeles lawsuit—Humanitarian Law Project et al v. Reno et al—was brought by the radical Center for Constitutional Rights, which had been challenging the law on behalf of the same defendants—the Kurdish Workers Party of Turkey and the Tamil Tigers[4] of Sri Lanka—since 1996.[5] The Center was one of a group of legal organizations—the fraternally related National Lawyers Guild was another—with a long history of legal campaigns against federal internal security measures and an equally long history of political agitation on behalf of radical and terrorist groups accused of violating them. Both organizations were core constituents of the “legal left” and its protest movements against American national security policies and against American policy generally.[6]

The Center for Constitutional Rights was founded in 1966 by William Kunstler, Arthur Kinoy, and Morton Stavis, attorneys who were either members of the Communist Party or politically allied with the radical agendas of the “new left.”[7] Michael Ratner, long time president of the Center has also been president of the National Lawyers Guild,[8] which began as a Soviet front and has continued to embrace the Communist political heritage. The Center and the Guild are integral parts of the radical left and see themselves as the legal arm of a movement against American “imperialism.” Each has a long history of obstructing the American government’s efforts against Communism in the Cold War with Russia and in Vietnam and other fields of conflict.

Since the attorneys themselves are activists in these movements, they see themselves as supporters of radicals who are declared enemies of the capitalist system and are there to help them when they get themselves into trouble. In an interview with George Packer for the New York Times, Kunstler law partner Ron Kuby, a member of both groups was candidly introspective in talking about a colleague who had been indicted for aiding and abetting a terrorist: “Lawyers are cowards, Kuby told me, … They live vicariously through their clients. ‘Movement’ lawyers, especially, identify with the people they represent. … In the best of cases we identify with their determination, with their courage, and we see the people that maybe we could have been had we the courage to do what they did. And as a result, if you’re a good lawyer, you spend a lot of time doing gut checks. And because it’s a profession that is so cowardly, enjoying the aura of being those people without ever taking the risks of being those people, it’s easy to say: this is the right thing to do, I’m not hurting anyone, this is morally justified.”[9]

While embracing the agendas of their clients, the radical legal groups assumed deceptive names like the Center for Constitutional Rights and passed themselves off as “civil liberties” organizations. Their terrorist clients, on the other hand, frequently presented themselves as “humanitarian groups.” This was the case with the plaintiffs in Los Angeles. The Court obligingly accepted their self-description at face value and referred to them as such, a practice adopted by the news media covering their legal proceedings.[10] In the Los Angeles case, the plaintiffs bore names like the “Tamil Human Rights and Welfare Committee,” although this was in a fact a front group for a Marxist terrorist organization, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

There were actually two terrorist organizations involved in the Patriot case—the Kurdish Workers Party was the other—and they were among the largest in the world, responsible for hundreds of suicide bombings and more than 100,000 deaths between them. Both had been officially designated terrorist groups by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright during the Clinton Administration.[11] In arguing their case, the lawyers for the Center for Constitutional Rights contended that the designation of groups as “terrorist” was itself unconstitutional—a position maintained by the legal left generally. But in Los Angeles, Judge Audrey Collins ruled against the plaintiffs, affirming that such governmental designations were valid.

The lead plaintiff in the case was an American organization, the “Humanitarian Law Project.” This was a radical organization with a record of years of service providing legal counsel and promotional help to the Kurdish Workers Party, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the Zapatistas, a Marxist guerrilla group in Mexico. The Humanitarian Law Project is part of a network of radical organizations funded by the Anagnos Peace Foundation and housed rent-free in the Anagnos Peace Center that includes the National Lawyers Guild and the Coalition for World Peace, an equally radical group. One of the member organizations in the Coalition is the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, a Communist Party faction co-chaired by Leslie Cagan, head of United for Peace and Justice. The directors of the Humanitarian Law Project are well-known leftists and veterans of the solidarity campaigns in behalf of the Communist movements in Central America in the 1980s.[12]

In making its case, the Humanitarian Law Project claimed that the “expert advice” it provided to the terrorists was in the area of “international law and the art of peace-making and negotiation,” and that its free speech in these areas would be infringed by the Patriot Act. The government’s lawyer countered that advice in these areas “was not even arguably expert.”[13]

Acting as lead counsel for the plaintiffs and the Center for Constitutional Rights was Georgetown Law Professor David Cole, himself a radical and one of the advisory board members of the anti-war organization and Maoist front group, Not In Our Name. In court, Cole maintained that the provisions of the anti-terrorism law that designated “material support” for terrorists a criminal act were unconstitutional. His argument was that they “do not require proof that an individual intended to further terrorist activity, and that the law, therefore, imposes guilt by association, rather than on the basis of one’s acts.”[14]

The same argument was being used at the time by Palestinian non-governmental organizations who were refusing to accept US foreign AID “rather than sign a pledge promising that the money would not be used to support terrorism.” James Zogby, head of the radical Arab-American Institute, defended the Palestinian organizations saying that their refusal to sign the pledge, “should not be seen as support for terrorism,” and that the very “idea of providing non ‘material’ support’ is such a broad brush stroke, it compromises the ability of the humanitarian organizations to function.”[15]

Both Zogby’s and Cole’s legal arguments ignored the fact that “accessory to a crime” and “conspiracy to commit murder” are features of established law.[16] Their argument would make Saddam Hussein innocent of complicity in suicide bombings in Israel if the $25,000 donations he made to the families of “martyrs” were paid through a charitable organization. But as terrorism expert Michael Radu has observed, “In a globalized world of mass communications, travel and instant financial transactions [terrorist organizations like] the Kurdish Workers Party and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam cannot survive without international help. The same can be said of al Qaeda, Hamas, the Philippines’s New People’s Army, the Basque ETA and many other violent groups. As Clausewitz put it, war is the continuation of politics by other means. Giving ‘political and humanitarian’ aid to terrorists is paying for murder.”[17]

The “material support” provision of the Patriot Act had become an important instrument in the battle against terrorism because terrorist organizations depended so heavily on political and charitable fronts for financial and legal help and to recruit members and advance their agendas. This was as true of the Irish Republican Army, whose political arm was Sinn Fein, as it was of Islamic terrorist groups like Hizbollah, Hamas and al Qaeda. Millions of dollars had been raised through charitable fronts in the United States to fund global Islamic terror.[18]

Charitable and political non-profits were not incidental to the terrorist threat but central. A prime counter-terrorism effort of the federal government, for example, was to pressure the Saudis not to fund madrassas or religious schools which were the principal recruiting centers for al Qaeda. As terrorism expert Steven Emerson summed up, “By far the most important tactic utilized by terrorist groups in America has been to use non-profit organizations to establish a zone of legitimacy within which fund-raising, recruitment, and even outright planning can occur.”[19]

An under-appreciated fact about the war on terror is that America itself is a primary base of Islamic terrorist operations. America has functioned as a prime organizing site for international terrorism because the liberties provided by the American legal system allow terrorists to travel freely, raise money, propagandize, recruit, and move men and money across international borders. Terrorist organizers, including the leaders of al Qaeda, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood have all traveled extensively in the United States, raised funds, recruited soldiers and sent emissaries back and forth across America’s borders. This makes control of borders and other immigration issues a crucial front in the anti-terrorist war.

Not surprisingly, the National Lawyers Guild, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and associated legal experts like David Cole are also fierce opponents of border control and immigration security. They are leaders of the movement to open America’s borders and to establish rights for illegal immigrants that would blur the distinction between citizens and non-citizens and extend the protections of the Constitution to the latter. Since 9/11, this movement, which includes dozens of radical organizations, has targeted every effort by the Homeland Security Department under the Patriot Act to strengthen America’s borders.[20]

The principal financier of the open borders movement is the Ford Foundation. Its $11 billion in assets makes it the largest dispenser of “philanthropic” dollars in the world. On the second anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the Ford Foundation published a newsletter interview with David Cole about his new book (also Ford funded) Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism. The Ford grant to underwrite Cole’s book was intended to “safeguard human rights and civil liberties of non-U.S. citizens and to inform policy makers and the public about these issues.” The Ford newsletter warned that, “Cole’s fight has taken on new urgency, as the government has detained thousands of Arab-American and Muslim men, held hundreds of ‘enemy combatants’ without trial, charges or access to legal representation, and endorsed racial profiling in terrorism cases.”

In the interview Cole denounced “the criminalization of what the government calls material support for terrorist organizations (emphasis added). This is a practice that was introduced, again through the immigration law, against foreign nationals, but has now become part of the criminal law, and applies to both U.S. citizens and foreign nationals. It criminalizes any support of any blacklisted terrorist organization without regard to whether one’s support actually had any connection whatsoever to terrorist activity that the group undertakes.”[21] As noted, however, making a member or supporter of a criminal group accountable for its crimes is an established legal concept. Funding a suicide bomber or the organization that supports suicide bombers obviously makes the crimes themselves possible.

The reforms introduced by the “Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act” of 1996 and the Patriot Act of 2001 were inspired by the fact that the existing framework of legal protections had made America a primary organizing base for global terrorism, and in particular for terrorism directed against the United States. Before embarking on their fatal mission on 9/11, all of the terrorists had lived and operated and trained within the United States. The terrorist organizations Hamas and Palestine Islamic Jihad had actually been created in the United States and were able to coordinate their worldwide terror with the aid of existing American laws.[22]

Among the architects of the terrorist jihad who had taken advantage of the situation existing prior to the enactment of the anti-terrorism legislation was the Palestinian radical, Abdullah Azzam, the mentor of Osama bin Laden himself. A university professor and member of the Muslim Brotherhood, Azzam founded the Alkhifa Center in Peshawar in the early 1980s, where he had gone following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Starting with only a storefront, he revived the concept of armed jihad among Muslims with the best selling tract, Defending the Land of the Muslims is Each Man’s Most Important Duty. In 1985, Azzam recruited a young Osama bin Laden to be the financier of the holy war he had launched against Israel and the United States.[23]

As Steven Emerson reports, “It was in the United States that Azzam was able to raise much of his money, enlist new fighters, and—most important—enjoy the political freedom to coordinate with other radical Islamic movements. From 1985 to 1989, Azzam and his top aide, Palestinian Sheikh Tamim al-Adnani, visited dozens of American cities, exhorting new recruits to pick up the sword against the enemies of Islam. They raised tens of thousands of dollars and enlisted hundreds and hundreds of fighters and believers.” Thus, the First Conference of Jihad was held by Azzam not in Peshawar or Riyadh or Damascus, but in Brooklyn, at the Al-Farook Mosque on Atlantic Avenue. There, in 1988, Azzam exhorted the nearly two hundred Islamic militants who attended the conference with the following words:

Every Muslim on earth should unsheathe his sword and fight to liberate Palestine. The jihad is not limited to Afghanistan. … You must fight in any place you can get. … Whenever jihad is mentioned in the Holy Book, it means the obligation to fight. It does not mean to fight with the pen or to write books or articles in the press or to fight by holding lectures.[24]

The terrorist centers created by Azzam were embedded in mosques and Islamic community centers across the United States. He opened branches of Alkhifa in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Brooklyn, Jersey City, Pittsburgh, Tucson and thirty other American cities as well as in Europe and the Middle East. He published a magazine called Al-Jihad with inflammatory articles directed against the United States, Christians and Jews, exposing their alleged crimes against Islam. “Al-Jihad called for Muslims to pick up the gun and wage jihad to kill the infidels and ‘all enemies of Islam.’”[25]

According to Emerson, these Alkifah centers shipped bombs, timers and explosives to Hamas in Gaza, counterfeited money to purchase weapons, forged passports to enable Islamic militants to visit the United States and the jihad battle fronts. Azzam’s Tucson Alkifah Center was a base for Wadih el-Hage, Osama bin Laden’s personal secretary who was convicted of the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Africa. When Azzam was assassinated in Pakistan in 1989, a power struggle ensued to control his organization. The center of this struggle was not in Pakistan, but in the Brooklyn Alkhifa Center.

The victor in this struggle (his rival was also assassinated) was the blind sheik Omar Abdel Rachman, leader of a terrorist organization called the Islamic Group, and of the terrorist cell that bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 in an attempt to kill 250,000 people.[26] (The group also intended to blow up the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels filled with rush-hour traffic, but the plots were thwarted.) When he was arrested for the Trade Center bombing, the blind sheik was represented by Lynne Stewart, a Center for Constitutional Rights attorney and a member of the National Lawyers Guild. In direct defiance of a Justice Department order, Stewart used her role as the sheik’s counsel to enable him to communicate with his terrorist followers in Egypt, specifically to break a truce between violent factions. The Justice Department promptly indicted Stewart for providing material support to terrorist organizations.

Stewart’s attitude towards her terrorist client (and he was not the first) was described by her Center for Constitutional Law colleague Ron Kuby this way: “When the lawyer is as loving and committed as Stewart, [Kuby] said, and the client as charismatic as Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the identification becomes passionate.”[27] Stewart described her own view of “Muslim fundamentalists” to the radical magazine Monthly Review: “They are basically forces of national liberation. And I think that we, as persons who are committed to the liberation of oppressed people, should fasten on the need for self-determination. … My own sense is that, were the Islamists to be empowered, there would be movements within their own countries … to liberate.”[28]

When asked about her attitude towards terror by the New York Times, “Ms. Stewart suggested that violence and revolution were sometimes necessary to right the economic and racial wrongs of America’s capitalist system.” Stewart elaborated: “I don’t believe in anarchistic violence, but in directed violence. That would be violence directed at the institutions which perpetuate capitalism, racism, and sexism, and the people who are the appointed guardians of those institutions, and accompanied by popular support.”[29] This was a solid basis for what Kuby described as the “passionate … identification” between radical attorneys like Stewart and their terrorist clients.

Stewart’s comradely attitude towards Islamic terrorists was hardly unique in the American left. One of the most sophisticated terrorist leaders based in America was able to insert himself into the very heart of this left and become one of its best-known Muslim figures. Osama (Sami) al-Arian was a Palestinian professor of engineering who operated out of the University of South Florida. Al-Arian created two non-profit organizations, a think-tank associated with the University called the World Islamic Studies Enterprise (WISE) and the Islamic Committee for Palestine, which raised funds and recruited soldiers for Islamic jihad. Al-Arian’s Islamic Committee had featured the blind sheik, Omar Abdul Rachman, as a guest speaker while Tarik Hamdi, a board member of WISE was known by authorities to have personally delivered a satellite telephone and battery pack to Osama bin laden in Afghanistan in May 1998.[30]

Sami al-Arian was, in fact, the North American head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, one of the principal terrorist organizations in the Middle East, responsible for suicide bombings that took the lives of more than a hundred people including two Americans, aged 16 and 20, before he was arrested in February 2003. An FBI surveillance video of al-Arian’s fund-raising tour of American mosques shows al-Arian being introduced as “the president of the Islamic Committee for Palestine. … the active arm of the Islamic Jihad Movement.” While others in the video praise the killing of Jews and Christians, al-Arian states, “Let us damn America … Let us damn [her] allies until death.” In another speech al-Arian said, “We assemble today to pay respects to the march of the martyrs and to the river of blood that gushes forth and does not extinguish, from butchery to butchery, and from martyrdom to martyrdom, from jihad to jihad.” [31]

In 1997, Al-Arian created another organization, the National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom. He appointed Kit Gage a member of the National Lawyers Guild and a veteran of the anti-Vietnam left to be its executive director. The specific purpose of the National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom was to oppose the “Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act”—the predecessor to the Patriot Act—which had been passed in 1996 following the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, a terrorist atrocity which killed 175 innocent people. Pursuant to the Act, Palestinian Islamic Jihad was declared a terrorist organization. The Act made “material support” for terrorist organizations illegal and authorized the use of secret evidence in terrorist cases. Sami al-Arian’s brother-in-law Mazen al-Najjar was arrested under its terms, held for three and a half years and eventually deported after 9/11. His attorney was David Cole, the Center for Constitutional Rights counsel in the Los Angeles Patriot Act case and the Ford Foundation’s legal scholar and advocate against post-9/11 immigration controls.

Among the organizations supporting al-Arian’s “civil liberties” crusade against the terrorist legislation were the National Lawyers Guild, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the ACLU, the American Muslim Council and the Council on Arab-Islamic Relations (CAIR), two radical Islamic groups which also pretended to be civil liberties organizations. CAIR is an offshoot of the Hamas-created Islamic Association for Palestine and several of its leaders have been arrested as terrorists. The American Muslim Council is the “founder, corporate parent and supporter of several militant Islamic groups, while its leaders have openly championed Hamas terrorists, defended Middle Eastern terrorist regimes, [and] issued anti-Semitic and anti-American statements.”[32]

The 120-page indictment of Al-Arian issued by the Ashcroft Justice Department was based on a seven-year investigation including extensive wire-taps of al-Arian’s conversations with Hamas terrorists in Syria and the Middle East. Among the 200 specific acts connecting al-Arian to the terrorist organization listed in the indictment were a fax sent “to Saudi Arabia, [that] inquired about obtaining palletized urea fertilizer [a chemical compound used in explosives] in fifty kilogram bags suitable for ocean transportation,”[33] and telephone calls arranging payments to the families of suicide bombers, which was one of al-Arian’s responsibilities as financial head of the terrorist organization.[34]

Sami al-Arian was arrested for his terrorist activities in February 2003. He had been under investigation by the FBI since 1996 and had long been publicly identified as a terrorist by close observers of the Islamic jihad movement like Steven Emerson. The basis for their suspicion was fairly transparent. For example, one board member of al-Arian’s think-tank (WISE), a Palestinian academic named Khalil Shiqaqi, was the brother Fathi Shiqaqi the well-known founder of Palestinian Islamic Jihad. When Fathi Shiqaqi was assassinated, he was replaced as head of the terrorist organization by Ramadan Abdallah Shallah who was the director of al-Arian’s think-tank and a board member of WISE himself. At the same time, Al-Arian’s non-profit—the Islamic Committee for Palestine—was involved in raising money and recruiting at public events across America to “sponsor” Palestinian martyrs and featuring appeals by fundraisers “who begged for $500 to kill a Jew.”[35]

When Emerson began warning the public about al-Arian’s terrorist recruitment efforts and his connections to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, he was ferociously attacked for “Muslim-bashing” and “McCarthyism” by prominent figures in the political left, among whom al-Arian was by now a familiar colleague. On September 26, 2001 al-Arian made the mistake of appearing on the FoxNews Channel’s O’Reilly Factor. The host confronted al-Arian with his public calls for “Death to Israel” and declared, “If I was the CIA, I’d follow you wherever you went.” The ensuing public uproar produced enough embarrassment to University of South Florida officials that they finally suspended al-Arian from his professorship, albeit with pay.

Al-Arian immediately adopted the posture of the victim: “I’m a minority,” he said. “I’m an Arab. I’m a Palestinian. I’m a Muslim. That’s not a popular thing to be these days. Do I have rights, or don’t I have rights?”[36] The American left sprang to al-Arian’s defense. Their efforts included articles in The Nation and Salon.com, whose reporter Eric Boehlert called it, “The Prime Time Smearing of Sami al-Arian” and explained, “By pandering to anti-Arab hysteria, NBC, Fox News, Media General and Clear Channel radio disgraced themselves—and ruined an innocent professor’s life.”[37] Others who joined the al-Arian defense chorus included the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the University of South Florida faculty union, and the American Association of University Professors.[38] The leftist head of Georgetown’s Middle East studies program, John Esposito, expressed concern that al-Arian not be a “victim of … anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigotry,” and Ellen Schrecker, the foremost academic expert on the McCarthy era (who regards American Communists as well-meaning social reformers and innocent victims of government persecution) called al-Arian’s suspension “political repression.”[39]

After the O’Reilly show and just before al-Arian’s indictment, Duke University held a symposium on “National Security and Civil Liberties.” Al-Arian was the featured (and university-sponsored) speaker. After his arrest, a report on his appearance at Duke was posted on the leftist website CommonDreams.org. It was written by Sarah Shields, a professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of North Carolina: “Professor Sami al-Arian made an impassioned plea for free speech. An immigrant, a professor, a leader of his Muslim community, al-Arian had campaigned against the use of secret evidence in court, embracing the democratic guarantees of a constitution designed to protect the innocent. Professor al-Arian had seen first hand the triumph of our most valued principles. At a time when Americans needed the information about the growing number of Muslims in this country, he helped found a think-tank [WISE] devoted to the study of Islam in this country. … Sami al-Arian has spent the past decade arguing passionately for the freedom of conscience, for the protections against arbitrary imprisonment that form the very foundations of our civilization. Now he is locked up, unable to appear in court in his own defense, awaiting trial under conditions uncommon for even the worst convicted criminals. … When I was in preschool, I heard fairy tales about all-powerful kings who arbitrarily threw people into dungeons. When I was in Hebrew school, I learned how Jews were rounded up by rulers during times of instability. … And today I wonder: was there a warning in those fairy tales, those stories about bad kings, evil advisors, and their dungeons?”[40]

Sami al-Arian was arrested five months after the O’Reilly episode. The arrest took place seven years after the FBI investigation began, and was made possible only by provisions adopted in the Patriot Act. The reason for the long delay was the existence of a government rule that created a wall between criminal and intelligence investigations, and barred agents of the FBI and intelligence agencies from communicating with each other. It was this rule that had prevented FBI agents in Minneapolis from breaking into the computer of Zacarias Moussaoui—the so-called “20th hijacker”—a month before 9/11. Had the FBI agents been given permission to search Moussaoui’s computer, two of the 9/11 hijackers would have been identified along with the Hamburg cell that planned the attack, and it is possible that the 9/11 tragedy would have been averted.[41]

ENDNOTES:
[1] Jess Bravin, “Judge Deals Blow to the Patriot Act,” Wall Street Journal, January 27, 2004;
[2] Eric Lichtblau, “Citing Free Speech, Judge Voids Part of Antiterror Act, New York Times, January 27, 2004
[3] Op. cit.
[4] Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.
[5] U.S. Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, Humanitarian Law Project et al v. Reno et al http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/ca9/newopinions.nsf/044DE357BD726D7288256DF10063BDE4/$file/0255082.pdf?openelement
[6] A dossier of cases can be found in Jules Lobel, Lost Causes, NY 2004. Lobel is vice-president of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
[7] In the early seventies Arthur Kinoy met with the author who was then editor of the radical magazine Ramparts and handed him a 35 page manifesto written by Kinoy and Kunstler calling for the formation of a “new Communist Party.”
[8] Jules Lobel, Lost Causes, op. cit., p. 186.
[9] George Packer, “Terrorist Lawyer,” New York Times, September 23, 2002
[10] Eric Lichtblau, who covered the case for the New York Times, explained in a phone interview with the author that this was the Times’ standard practice.
[11] Michael Radu, “Terrorism Is Free Speech,” http://www.frontpagemag.com/, February 3, 2004. Radu is a terrorism expert at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
[12] Jean Pearce, “Humanitarian Law Project,” http://www.frontpagemag.com/, April 14, 2004. Aris Anagnos, the funder of the Anagnos Peace Center is a pro-Castro real estate magnate who funded the Christic Institute’s RICO suit against the CIA for alleged drug-trafficking and support of assassinations in Nicaragua. The suit was thrown out when most of the “witnesses” turned out not to be real people. Ralph Fertig, the principal director of The Human Law Project is a lawyer for (what has become) the far left Americans for Democratic Action and a board member of the Pacifica Foundation a radical public radio network whose board Cagan chaired. Lydia Brazon, the number two executive at The Humanitarian Law Project is also on the Pacifica Board and like Fertig a radical anti-war activist.
[13] Times, op. cit.
[14] http://www.ombwatch.org/. Tim Visser and Kay Guinane, “Patriot games: The USA Patriot Act and Its Impact on Nonprofit Organizations. This article covers the cases from a left-wing perspective.
[15] Washington Times, January 8, 2004
[16] Radu, op. cit.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Timmerman, op. cit. pp. 276 et seq.
[19] Steven Emerson, American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us, NY 2002, p. 37
[20] William R. Hawkins and Erin Anderson, The Open Borders Lobby and National Security After 9/11, Los Angeles 2004, a Center for the Study of Popular Culture book. The original article is available at http://www.frontpagemag.com/
[21] Ibid.
[22] Emerson, op. cit., p.84 and p.2
[23] Emerson, op. cit., pp. 128 et seq. Cf. also, Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, op. cit., pp. 144 et seq
[24] Emerson, op. cit., p. 130
[25] Emerson, op. cit., p. 131
[26] Emerson, op. cit., p. 134.
[27] Packer, “Terrorist Lawyer,” New York Times, op. cit.
[28]Monthly Review, November 25, 2002. Reprinted in www.frontagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=4764
[29] New York Times, DATE 1995
[30] Emerson, op. cit. pp. 122, 121
[31] Cited in State of Michigan, Washtenaw County Circuit Court, Case 02-1150-CZ, Richard Dorfman and Adi Neuman v. The University of Michigan
[32] Emerson, op. cit. pp. 197 et seq; pp. 203 et seq;
[33] David Tell, “Al-Arian Nation,” The Weekly Standard, February 3, 2003
[34] http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/flm/pr/022003indict.pdf
[35] Emerson, op. cit., pp., 109 et seq;
[36] Robert Spencer, “Al-Arian: Terrorist Professor and His Campus Allies,” http://www.frontpagemag.com/, February 26, 2003
[37] Salon.com January 19, 2002. http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/01/19/bubba/
[38] The AAUP’s position is analyzed in Nathan Giller, “American Association of University Professors: Lobby for the Left,” http://www.frontpagemag.com/, June 4, 2003
[39] Ken Timmerman, Preachers of Hate, p. 273; Ron Radosh, “The Case of Sami Al-Arian, http://www.frontpagemag.com/, February 8, 2002; Jonathan Schanzer, “Professors for Terrorist Al-Arian,” http://www.frontpagemag.com/, February 24, 2003
[40] Sarah Shields, “Sami al-Arian and the Dungeon: A Fable for our Time,” www.CommonDreams.org, November 16, 2003
[41] Heather MacDonald, “Why The FBI Didn’t Stop 9/11,” City Journal, Autumn 2002

NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only.

New Vietnamese Money

The rule erecting a barrier between intelligence and criminal investigations had been put in place by Attorney General Janet Reno in July 1995.[42] Referred to as “the wall,” it caused a breakdown in the collaboration between investigators that national security officials had long realized was a danger to public safety. In the words of Mary Jo White, a Clinton-appointed U.S. Attorney who was the most seasoned al Qaeda prosecutor before 9/11: “The walls are the single greatest danger we have blocking our ability to obtain and act on [terrorist] information.”[43] One of the important innovations of the Patriot Act was to eliminate these walls. This made possible the collaboration between intelligence agencies and the FBI and led directly to the arrest of Sami al-Arian and his associates.

Another post-9/11 security reform was removing the so-called “Levi” guidelines implemented by the Ford Administration, which barred the FBI from surveilling radical organizations unless they could be shown to have committed (or be planning to commit) specific criminal acts. Under these guidelines, a terrorist organization—such as Abudallah Azzam’s Alkhifa or Sami al-Arian’s Islamic Crusade for Palestine—could recruit soldiers and funds for a holy war against the United States and be insulated from FBI scrutiny unless they could be tied to an actual criminal act. In the new age of terror, this could mean an act as destructive as 9/11 itself.

Yet it was precisely these provisions of the Patriot Act to which the left objected and against which it mounted a ferocious national campaign. For more than half a century the left had defended revolutionaries and agents of revolutionary states who had broken American laws. Radical legal organizations like the National Lawyers Guild and the Center for Constitutional Rights, as well as Sami al-Arian’s National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom, had been created for the express purpose of doing so. They supplied the lead counsels for violent radicals and terrorist suspects both before and after 9/11 and were themselves vocal antagonists of America’s wars and its national security defenses.

It was the idea of terrorism itself that radicals found problematic. In a lengthy statement of its position, the Center for Constitutional Rights complained, “the [Patriot] Act creates a new category of crime, domestic terrorism, which blurs the line between speech and criminal activity. Section 802 of the Act defines domestic terrorism as, ‘acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of criminal laws [that] appear to be intended to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion.’ This definition is so vague that acts of civil disobedience may be construed to violate the law. … Thus, a spontaneous demonstration that blocks the path of an ambulance might invite charges of domestic terrorism under the new law.”[44]

In fact, exactly this kind of civil disobedience that served terrorist agendas was close to what American radicals had actually planned for the opening stages of the War in Iraq. As the left-wing magazine Salon.com reported, “If bombs start falling on Iraq, peace activists say, expect insurgency at home.”[45] On the eve of America’s engagement, Salon explained, a radical group called the Military Globalization Project announced plans to march on the Vandenberg military base in the state of Washington, which was coordinating military operations in Iraq via satellite. The radicals identified the base as “the electronic nerve center of the global-surveillance-targeting, weapons-guidance and military-command satellites that will largely direct the war.” Their express purpose was to disrupt the war effort. Fortunately, this particular plan for “civil disobedience” was discouraged when the base commander warned that trespassers would be shot on sight.[46] American radicals were not ready yet to actually die for Saddam Hussein.

Other radical groups, however, did stage civil disobedience demonstrations that were calculated to block busy downtown hubs in major cities across the nation, and timed for the outbreak of hostilities. In Los Angeles, one tenth of the entire police force—900 officers –—who might otherwise have been engaged in homeland defense efforts were tied up handling these “civil disobedience” protests.[47] If al Qaeda or some other foreign terrorist organization had been able to mount attacks in these cities coinciding with the outbreak of the war, the activities of domestic radicals could have obstructed ambulances and other Homeland Security defense services. It was this kind of political support for terror that the legal radicals were determined to protect.

Any legislation as comprehensive and complex as the Patriot Act inevitably has gray areas over which legal jurists might reasonably disagree when striking an appropriate balance between security requirements and civil liberty needs. The principal organizations opposed to the Patriot Act, however, were not “civil libertarians” in a primary sense. They were radical activists whose agendas went well beyond their expressed concerns about constitutional issues, and whose concern for constitutional issues was subordinate to the “higher” goals of their radical agendas. These ulterior agendas were the inspiration for their blanket condemnation of the Patriot Act and the near hysteria with which they expressed their objections to its specific provisions.

When it had been put to a congressional vote, the Patriot Act was passed overwhelmingly by both parties in Congress with only one dissenting vote in the Senate and only 66 in the House. Its terms were far milder than measures that had been adopted in America’s previous wars by revered historical figures like Lincoln who suspended habeas corpus and by Franklin Roosevelt who relocated and interned Japanese Americans away from coastal areas as a security measure during World War II.[48] The Patriot Act stayed well within the parameters of established law. Its enforcement provisions, including extraordinary searches, were made subject to judicial review and required judicial writs and warrants to authorize them. Yet the attacks on the Act described it in extreme terms as “unpatriotic” and a “war on our freedoms,” misrepresenting it as, “arguably the most far-reaching and invasive legislation passed since the espionage act of 1917 and the sedition act of 1918.”[49]

Directed by organizations like the ACLU, the National Lawyers Guild, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, and People for the American Way, radicals mobilized legislators in local and state governments to obstruct the enforcement of the law. As of June 2004, 320 cities towns and counties and, as well as four states had adopted resolutions condemning the Patriot Act, many refusing to cooperate with Homeland Security officials in the enforcement of its security measures.[50] The ACLU’s model resolution—posted on its website and designed for municipalities to copy—came close to incitement to sedition:

Therefore, be it resolved that the council of the city of ______ …
Directs the Police Department of the City of _________ to:
(a) refrain from participating in the enforcement of federal immigration laws;
(b) seek adequate written assurances from federal authorities that residents of the City of _____who are placed in federal custody will not be subjected to military detention; secret detention; secret immigration proceedings; or detention without access to counsel, and refrain from assisting federal authorities to obtain custody of such individuals absent such assurances.
(c) refrain, whether acting alone or with federal or state law enforcement officers, from collecting or maintaining information about the political, religious or social views, associations or activities of any individual, group, association, organization, corporation, business or partnership unless such information directly relates to an investigation of criminal activities, and there are reasonable grounds to suspect the subject of the information is or may be involved in criminal conduct;
(d) refrain from the practice of stopping drivers or pedestrians for the purpose of scrutinizing their identification documents without particularized suspicion of criminal activity;…[51]

No opposition to the Patriot Act was more revealing than the determination of the leftist legal groups to prevent security officials from scrutinizing radical Islamic religious groups and political organizations aligned with radical Islam and its terrorist jihad. Their zeal in this matter revealed how the legal battle was really a frontline of the war on terror itself. During the 1970s, there had been more than a thousand domestic bombings connected with the protests against the Vietnam War. One terrorist cult, the Weather Underground, had collaborated with adversary governments in Cuba and North Vietnam and carried out dozens of bombings of targets that included the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol. Moreover, they had been able to do so with relative impunity. Despite the fact that the Weather leaders had declared “war” on the United States in official “communiques” and law enforcement knew their identities, the FBI was never able to arrest their leadership or interdict its operations. In part this was because of the support and protection these terrorists received from American leftists and in part because the FBI was hamstrung in its investigations by restrictions on its activities in the name of civil liberties. If the Weather bombers had been in league with Islamic radicals and their arsenal had included biological and chemical weapons, the consequences of their violence might have been catastrophic.[52]

Such considerations carried no weight with the radical legal organizations opposing the Patriot Act for the simple reason that they and their members identified with the political movement that spawned the terrorist group. Indeed, the principal (and unrepentant) leader of the Weather Underground (America’s first terrorist cult) is now a prominent member of the legal left and its opposition to the Patriot Act. Bernardine Dohrn is a law professor at Northwestern University, a prominent figure in the American Bar Association,[53] and a vocal defender of the terror she pursued in the Vietnam era. In an article written in the spring of 2003 for the Marxist periodical Monthly Review (“Homeland Imperialism: Fear and Resistance”), Dohrn characterizes the “war at home” as a “resistance” to U.S. imperialism, and describes counter-terrorism efforts as a McCarthy witch-hunt and “the USA Patriot Act and now the bill creating the Homeland Security Department as … the actual tools of repression.”[54] According to Dorhn: “Prosecutions are underway that are reminiscent of the indictments of the early-fifties McCarthy period and the conspiracy indictments of the early seventies pre-Watergate Mitchell Department of Justice, the two most recent periods of overtly political repression. For example, [Attorney General] John Ashcroft has orchestrated a series of high profile indictments against Islamic charities, including the Holy Land Foundation in Texas … ”

In fact, the indictment against the Holy Land Foundation and other “charities” had nothing to do with their political advocacy or Islamic identity. The Holy Land Foundation had been launched with seed money provided by Moussa Abu Marzouk, the leader of the terrorist organization, Hamas. Marzouk had been arrested in the United States in 1995 with documents that established his Hamas position and detailed “a $10 million commercial and non-profit empire in the United States, which he controlled allegedly to finance Hamas operations.”[55] Like other Islamic radicals, Marzouk’s defense was provided by the Center for Constitutional Rights and one of its lead lawyers, Stanley Cohen, who was an attorney and an advocate for both Hamas and the Syrian government. Marzouk was eventually deported and wound up in Syria as head of Hamas’s terrorist operations there.[56]

As with Al-Arian, when the Holy Land Foundation was raided, the legal left rallied to its defense. They were joined in their protests by the radical Muslim “civil liberties” fronts, the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the American Muslim Council (AMC) which claimed the raid was part of “an anti-Muslim witch-hunt promoted by the pro-Israel lobby in America.”[57] Documents seized in the raid, revealed that the Holy Land Foundation was part of a large network of organizations that Hamas had created through Marzouk’s efforts, and that linked the Islamic Association for Palestine, CAIR, the Muslim Students Association and al Qaeda.[58]

The common political agendas of the legal left and their terrorist clients are exemplified by Lynne Stewart, the attorney for the “blind sheik,” Omar Abdel Rachman. Since her indictment by the Ashcroft Justice Department, Stewart has become their martyr and icon.

Lynne Stewart is a protégé of William Kuntsler and Ramsey Clark. Clark had originally suggested that Stewart sign on as attorney for the blind sheik.[59] Following her indictment for providing material support for the sheik’s terrorist activities, Stewart—like Sami al-Arian before her—received full support from her political comrades. Her decision to aid and abet her terrorist client was defended as a civil liberties matter by the ACLU, the American Bar Association, the National Lawyers Guild and the Center for Constitutional Rights. She was invited by radical law professors to speak at law schools across the country including Stanford, Seattle, and William Mitchell where she addressed a “Social Justice Dinner” sponsored by the National Lawyers Guild. These accolades encouraged leftist law students at the City University of New York to attempt to present her with the school’s Public Interest Lawyer of the Year Award at graduation ceremonies in 2003. A petition including 73 names—more than half the graduating class—was sent to administrators. But after the award was leaked to the press, CUNY law school dean Kristin Booth Glen informed students via e-mail that Stewart would not be honored. The reason given was not that she had betrayed her country or broken the law, but that the award “could lead to consequences that could be damaging.”[60]

Stewart was a speaker at the Socialist Scholars Conference, an annual gathering of the intellectual left, where she shared a panel with Columbia professor Todd Gitlin and others. She was a featured speaker at the anti-war demonstration sponsored by United for Peace and Justice on February 15, 2003. The sentiments she expressed on these occasions were the banal and vulgar clichés of the anti-American and Communist left. As the final keynote speaker at the National Lawyers Guild National Convention in 2003, Stewart described the enemy—corporate capitalism—as “a consummate evil that unleashes its dogs of war on the helpless; an enemy motivated only by insatiable greed … In this enemy there is no love of the land or the creatures that live there, no compassion for the people. This enemy will destroy the air we breathe and the water we drink as long as the dollars keep filling up their money boxes.… ”[61] The enemy was the Great Satan, the same enemy that motivated Stewart’s client to plot the destruction of the World Trade Center and the Lincoln and Holland tunnels.

Lynne Stewart’s rant reflects not only the shared anti-American agendas of Islamic jihadists and the radical left, but also the hypocrisy it displays in its complaint against the Patriot Act—that it violates First Amendment rights. In her Monthly Review interview, Stewart was asked to imagine that she was part of a revolutionary government that had “liberated” its people from the horrors of capitalism. If Stewart herself were to become part of such a government, the interviewer wanted to know, was there a point at which she would think that monitoring and controlling the counter-revolutionary adversaries of that government was acceptable? Her answer: “I don’t have any problem with Mao or Stalin or the Vietnamese leaders or certainly Fidel locking up people they see as dangerous. Because so often, dissidence has been used by the greater powers to undermine a people’s revolution.”[62] In other words, totalitarian repression—complete with firing squads and gulags—is fine for Communist states, but criminalizing acts that aid and abet terrorists in a democracy is not.

In their defense of America’s terrorist enemies, the organizations of the legal left are reminiscent of Communist Party fronts of the Cold War era. One of these was the National Lawyers Guild itself. Another was the Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born, which was created by the Communist Party to defend its leaders and organizers—many of whom were immigrants—from being deported because of their activities in behalf of the Soviet empire. Even though the Communist Party was a totalitarian organization whose goal was the establishment of a political dictatorship in the United States, it was able to recruit many prominent liberals to sit on the board of the Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born and to argue that in defending the internal enemies of American democracy, the organization was actually defending the Constitution itself. [63]

In a symposium on homeland security measures that appeared in the Boston Review of Books, a group of left-wing legal experts commented on a paper by Georgetown law professor David Cole. The Cole paper was an assault on the Patriot Act, as were most of the commentaries. These included essays by Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe and Juliette Kayyem, a former Clinton Justice Department official.[64]

Among the participants in the symposium was another Georgetown law professor, Mari Matsuda, an advisory board member of the ACLU. This is an interesting fact since Mari Matsuda is one of the legal architects of the notorious “speech codes,” that were imposed by college administrations in the 1980s and 1990s to suppress wo