Sent to me by a fellow Marine about another Marine's poignant reflections. I spent less than two years in the Marine Corps but it was one of the best and proudest times of my life but then, fortunately, I did not see combat. Semper Fi! (See 1 below.) --- Bernanke is not as concerned about inflation as some of the district Fed Presidents. Time will tell who is right. (See 2 below.) --- Avi Jorisch writes about how Turkey is continuing to assist Iran. (See 3 below.) --- Even the IMF, of which we are the largest contributor, is worried and warns about our deficit. (See 4 below.) -- Clifford May reminds the reader Jihad is not so much about Israeli West Bank settlements and American support, it is about Christianity surviving. (See 5 below.) --- As I feared and have suggested. (See 6 below.) --- Coming apart at the seams? Rich Lowry thinks so. (See 7 below.) In the ongoing months Obama is going to have to energize black voters. The unemployment for black citizens is extremely high so Obama and his Attorney General are going to be undertaking some high profil;e actions that will send a signal to the black community. Obama has begun with his recent embrace of Al Shaprton. Another effort is trying to force New York to lower test standards and make exams easier for blacks seeking to join the city's fire and police department. Obama still has a lot of race cards to play in his deck. Also, always suspected Obama was a fraud and a liberal friend, who was enamored with his two books, begged me to read them which I did. The more I read the more vapid I found them and I dutifully reported same. My former friend is no longer on speaking terms with me and so be it. Now there seems validation of my belief. (See 8 below.) --- --- Dick ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1)Reflections on Life from a Marine’s Perspective.What I've Learned. By Alexander Martin "Esquire Magazine's" monthly column 'What I've Learned' is an excellently composed editorial on the meaning of life from the perspective of some of the world's most intriguing statesmen, artists, and philosophers. I am neither>statesman, nor artist, nor philosopher (and if you ask any woman who has ever dated me, hardly intriguing) but I am a Marine who just left active duty service. After 11 years since having first raised my right hand, and in the spirit of Esquire's eminent feature, I spent the first day of my terminal leave reflecting...on what it is I've learned. On Life. (in general) Life's much easier when you read wonderful books and stare at inconceivable art and listen to transcendent music and watch inspiring movies. When you allow the great authors and poets and filmmakers and musicians and artists to help sort things out for you, life just becomes easier, I think. Perhaps this is because you realize you are not the first person that has ever felt that he had no clue what's going on, or what's to come. You realize you are not alone. And you say to yourself humble things like, "how small I am." And you become stronger. But even with the nod of the greats, it's important we each tell our own story in our own way. It's therapy, for one. But it also preserves the memory. I never want to forget any of the Marines I ever walked alongside. They are my heroes. Chapters. (and why a father is always right) On the last afternoon of my active duty service I met my old man for a drink. We sat in deep couches in a familiar bar and ordered the old fashioned. We first toasted the great naval service of which we had both served, and next the adventure that I had just lived. We sat in that bar for hours and told stories of the great men we knew back then and how I wish the VA would cover the Propecia prescription for my hair loss and finally did what it is a father and a son do after one has come back from war and the other had already been, which is change the subject and talk about mom. And at some point that afternoon, I can't be sure exactly at which time, I looked at my dad, who had flown three tours in Vietnam and whose one Marine son had fought in Afghanistan and whose other in Iraq, and asked him what he was thinking about just then. He told me he was thinking about life's chapters and how important it is to recognize when they start and when they finish. He told me to enjoy this moment. And that was all he said. My dad's lesson was simple that afternoon: It's essential to sincerely differentiate between "time" and "moments" because life's shade, import and value are defined by moments and time is just what we have left. My father the Scotsman was right. But then again, it's been my experience that a father is always right. On Love. (swimming in the ocean, Shakespeare and everything else) Pool workouts are straightforward, comfortable and humdrum. But working out in the water is about heart and when you swim in the ocean you have the environment to compete with and the climate and God. And so I prefer to do my swim workouts in the open ocean. This weekend I did my usual La Jolla Cove to La Jolla Shores and back swim. The water was cold and the sand sharks off the Shores, harmless though they are, did their best to frighten me (but how I love that they take 30 seconds off my 500 meter split). The only difference between this swim and the countless others I've done these past few years is that this was the first ocean swim I'd done since being off active duty. For the first time this workout was about me wanting to look and feel good, instead of about preparation for training (or not wanting to fall behind my Force Recon Marines during a swim exercise) and, quite frankly, I hated that feeling. My mind was everywhere during the swim. But at around the 1,000 meter mark it settled on one thing: how much I love the Marine Corps. It came to me out there that my experience in the Marine Corps was the most wonderful, transformative, rich experience a man could ever hope to have. And this is what I learned... The Marine Corps taught me the sort of practical things that all men should know but don't these days like how to shoot a weapon, survive in the wilderness, navigate by compass and map, and take care of your feet. The Marine Corps taught me the true meaning of words I had only before read about in Shakespeare: honor, obligation, courage, fidelity and sacrifice. These were no longer merely a part of some story from an epic script on war, but real memories about real men in war. In the Marine Corps I learned what it means to be truly happy and what it feels like to be truly sad. And I realized neither had anything to do with me but both had everything to do with the unit and the definition of a meaningful life. In my travels I learned that life isn't very easy for most people in this world. And that we are blessed to have won life's lottery and to have been born in this country. I learned that freedom is impossible without sacrifice and neither matters very much without love. I learned that it's not what's on your chest that counts, but what's in your chest. I learned that standards matter. I was taught the importance of discipline. And of letting go from time to time. I learned that all it takes is all you got. I learned a good NCO is worth his weight in gold...a good Staff NCO is absolutely priceless. I learned it is important to write letters to yourself along the way because the details will escape you. I learned there is a difference between regret and remorse. Phase lines help you eat an elephant. Which is true with so much in life I suppose. I learned that apathy is the evil cousin of delegation. The Marine Corps taught me about physical courage, team work, the absolute virtue of a human being's great adventure and that all men fall. With respect to tactics, I've found it most critical to never say never, and never say always. I learned the importance of a good story shared among friends. Or a good glass of scotch enjoyed in solitude. Or of the importance of sailing away until you cannot see the coastline anymore...and then coming home, a better man. I learned that faith matters. And that aside from the importance of believing the universe is so much bigger than any one man could ever comprehend, I learned that I truly believe in the power of a great bottle of wine, the courage of the enlisted Marine and the tenets of maneuver warfare. I discovered my morality. I learned how to fight in the Marine Corps...and my time in bars with my brother-Marines has taught me that contrary to our own self-perpetuated mythology, not all blood that Marines shed together is on the battlefield. The Marine Corps taught me how to think aggressively. How to respond under pressure. How to perform. How to live excellently and that nothing is more important than the mission or the Marine. The Marine Corps taught me how to laugh - deeper than I ever thought imaginable - and how to cry. And that a warrior's tears reflect his soul. Finally, the Marine Corps did more for me than I could have ever done for it...it gave me an extraordinary adventure to live that is mine and that I will never for the rest of my life forget. And then there's this last irony... That I would have the honor of spending these years studying and practicing the discipline of warfighting alongside the wonderful modern Marine-hoplite only to realize that what I learned had so much less to do with war and so much more to do with love. How do I feel in the 72 hours since I've left the Marine Corps? I miss it already." And you will continue to miss it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) EXACTLY Why the U.S. Is Printing Money By Dr. Steve Sjuggerud America's central bank is printing money… to purposely create inflation. Meanwhile in Europe, the central bank is doing the opposite… It's taking actions to prevent inflation from ever appearing. So who's doing the right thing? The problem is essentially the same in America and in Europe. Why – when faced with the same problem – are the U.S. and Europe pursuing opposite solutions? I think I have the answer… Each central bank is trying to prevent a repeat of its worst mistake in history. Let me explain… The Great Depression was the worst economic crisis in American history. The big issue in the Great Depression was DEFLATION – falling prices. The U.S. central bank is typically given the blame for the Depression, for not fighting deflation hard enough – for not printing enough money. Ben Bernanke, the head of our central bank, has made it his life's mission to prevent a repeat of the Great Depression. Bernanke is a student of the Depression. He will do everything in his power to prevent falling prices from happening. Bernanke won't stop once inflation appears… because he knows a deflation "aftershock" could hit. Inflation started to rise again in the mid-1930s… then a deflation "aftershock" hit. The chart shows the story:
Bernanke believes this was the worst policy failure by the U.S. central bank. He won't let it happen again. So expect inflation to arrive at some point. And expect it to stay, to ward off a potential deflation aftershock. The European Central Bank (the ECB) is also well aware of its greatest economic failure of all time. That was hyperinflation in the early 1920s.
Inflation in Europe just hit 2.6%, above the ECB's acceptable rate of 2%. So last week, the ECB raised interest rates. The goal was to contain inflation. While Europe is raising interest rates to slow the risk of inflation, the U.S. is expected to keep interest rates where they are for the foreseeable future. The U.S. is also continuing its "quantitative easing program" which is essentially printing money, by another name. So what can you do with this knowledge? If Bernanke won't stop, you can expect more of the same… higher commodities prices (particularly precious metals) and a lower value for the U.S. dollar and U.S. government bonds. This conclusion isn't shocking… What is shocking is just how far these trends will go if Bernanke keeps his promise to prevent deflation. In short, in the U.S., asset prices could soar higher and the dollar and government bonds could fall lower than most anyone can imagine. Good investing, Steve ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3)AVI JORISCH Will a nuclear Iran be good or bad for Turkey? If Iran goes nuclear, it will become the regional hegemon, extinguishing Ankara’s hopes of becoming a key player in the Middle East. Recently, however, Turkey has helped Iran circumvent international sanctions that target its nuclearization. Turkish companies and banks regularly abuse the financial system to facilitate payments to the Islamic republic, perhaps unwittingly assisting its effort of becoming a nuclear power. Turkey’s failure to prevent this type of abuse not only pokes a finger in the eye of the West, but also allows a rogue regime to fill its coffers with hard currency and materiel as it attempts to become the dominant power in the region – at Turkey’s expense. The Turkish-Iranian relationship has revolved around bilateral trade. In 2008, the two countries conducted $10 billion of business, and officials from both countries have called for an increase to $20 billion by 2012. Iran exports mostly oil and gas to the Turkish market. Naturally, Turkey wants to fuel its economy, and Turkish officials have made it clear that they will look to all available sources of energy, including Iran. The international community has assured Ankara of its commitment to Turkish energy needs, and has pointed out that in the past, Iran has proven to be an unreliable partner in this regard. Since other sources of energy are available to Turkey, Ankara’s insistence on buying oil from a rogue regime seems to demonstrate a strong desire to do business with Iran. What is really behind Ankara’s insistence on developing and strengthening its relationship with Tehran? There appear to be two primary motivating factors: an aversion to regional instability and a desire to get closer to the Tehran regime. Ankara seems to fear new American or coalition military action in the region, including an attack on Iran, more than it fears a nuclear-armed Iran. Turkey’s present reality is shaped by the instability in Iraq caused by the second Gulf War, and the low-intensity conflict that continues to the present. According to a recent poll, 43 percent of Turks consider the biggest threat to Turkey to come from the United States, while only 3 percent believe it comes from Iran. There are those who people believe that the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, has an ideological agenda that favors Tehran’s regime. One way of determining whether this is true is the party’s stance on Tehran; Iran should serve as a litmus test for the leanings of the AKP. If seen in this light, the Turkish government’s stance on Iran is telling. Ankara has consistently expanded its financial ties to Iran. For instance, Iranian Bank Mellat, blacklisted by both the United States and the United Nations, has been operating openly in Turkey. Mellat branches conduct business in Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir, despite the U.N. restrictions on the bank for facilitating payments tied to Iran’s nuclear program. Mellat was also designated by the U.S. Treasury Department for allowing weapons of mass destruction to spread. Subsidiaries of the bank around the globe have reportedly been involved in the Iranian missile industry, spreading terrorism and assisting Iran’s nuclear regime. In addition, Mellat has agreed to facilitate trade between Turkey and Iran using Turkish Liras and/or Iranian rials, which helps them avoid the use of euros and dollars. International financial regulators and sanction-watchers cannot easily detect payments that bypass the European or American financial systems. Unfortunately, Iran’s ability to secure nuclear materiel has also, in part, been secured through Turkish territory. As an example, this past February, U.S. authorities disclosed that a Turkish company headed by an Iranian national, Milad Jafari, purchased millions of dollars’ worth of equipment for the Iranian nuclear and missile programs. The Jafari network exploited the lenient Turkish export rules to import proscribed materiel into Turkey from the European Union, the U.S., and elsewhere, then sent it on to Iran. Wittingly or unwittingly, Turkey seems to be helping Iran go nuclear. This is bad news for Ankara, for once an authoritarian country becomes a nuclear power, its neighbors are subject to abuse. The example of North Korea is telling in this regard. Since becoming a nuclear power, Pyongyang has fired rockets over Japan and sunk South Korean ships. Does Ankara want a nuclear Iran next door that can flout international law at Turkey’s expense? *Avi Jorisch, a former U.S. Treasury Department official, is president of Red Cell, a Washington, D.C.-based national security firm (
http://www.redcellig.com/) and the author of ‘Iran’s Dirty Banking: How the Islamic Republic is Skirting International Financial Sanctions’ (2010). -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------5) The Muslim's "Christian Problem." By Clifford May In one of his many magnificent books, Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis notes that in 641 C.E., the Caliph Umar "decreed that Jews and Christians should be removed from all but the southern and eastern fringes of Arabia, in fulfillment of an injunction of the Prophet uttered on his deathbed: 'Let there not be two religions in Arabia.'" I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that this had nothing to do with Jewish settlements in the West Bank or American support for Israel. Fast-forward a few centuries: Today, many Muslims believe in peaceful and even cordial coexistence among Muslims, Christians and Jews. But such tolerant views are far from universal. In January, Dr. Imad Mustafa, a professor at Cairo's prestigious al-Azhar University, set out the justifications for jihad, or holy war. Among them: "To remove every religion but Islam from the Arabian peninsula." And, he said, jihad is also legitimate "to extend God's religion to people in cases where the government does not allow it"—in other words, to spread Islam and sharia, Islamic law. Such rulings are not of merely theological interest. They lend legitimacy to violence directed at religious minorities. And indeed, in recent months, there has been a wave of attacks against Christians across what we have come to call the Muslim world. Churches have been bombed in Egypt, Iraq, Nigeria and the Philippines. In Indonesia, a mob of 1,000 Muslims burned two churches to the ground. In Iran, scores of Christians have been arrested on various pretexts. In Afghanistan, a man has been jailed and is expected to be tried for converting to Christianity. Capital punishment is a real possibility. In Pakistan, a Christian woman was sentenced to death for the crime of making remarks that were regarded as insulting to Islam. The moderate governor of Punjab promised to pardon her and sharply criticized the blasphemy laws. But he was assassinated by a member of his own security detail, who afterward called his action "the punishment for a blasphemer." Hundreds of Pakistani Islamic clerics praised the killer's "courage" and religious zeal. French president Nicolas Sarkozy has connected these dots and called the picture that emerges "religious cleansing." Pope Benedict XVI urged Christian communities in Muslim-majority lands to respond nonviolently to what he termed "a strategy of violence that has Christians as a target." The pontiff implored the governments of the Middle East to adopt "effective measures for the protection of religious minorities." The clerics at al-Azhar University called the pope's remarks "insulting" and suspended dialogue with the Vatican. Most of the media have been ignoring this story or, in some cases, insisting that there is no story. If Christians are suffering in places where they are the minority, the root cause must be economics or politics or culture or misunderstanding—anything but intolerance and oppression based on Islamic religious doctrine. To believe this requires ignoring much evidence, not least the instances where, when a church is burned or a Christian murdered, the perpetrators yell, "Allahu Akbar!" Investor's Business Daily recently quoted James Zogby, head of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, offering a creative analysis. "The guy who gets up on the plane and says 'Allah!' or whatever and then blows the plane up is not making a statement about his faith," Zogby told congressional staffers. Zogby explained that it's like a Christian hitting his thumb with a hammer and exclaiming "Jesus Christ!" "The comparison is absurd," IBD comments. "Muslims say 'Allah is greatest' to exalt their God. When Christians mutter 'Jesus Christ,' they are in contrast taking their Lord's name in vain." Why should Jews care about Muslim persecution of Christians? Youssef M. Ibrahim, an Egyptian-born Coptic Christian and a fellow reporter back when we were both at The New York Times, puts it succinctly: "In the 1950s and '60s, they kicked the Jews out of the Middle East—everywhere but Israel, and, of course, they haven't given up there. Now, they are kicking out the Christians, too. It was inevitable." What is not inevitable is the final outcome. Thirty years from now will the Muslim world—from Morocco to Indonesia—be "religiously cleansed"? Will other groups, for example the Kurds and Darfuris—Muslims but ethnic minorities—also be decimated or even exterminated? What about homosexuals—now facing severe persecution in Iran, Gaza and other places? What about women's rights? Religious cleansing and the persecution of minorities in the Muslim world is not an easy problem to tackle. But surely the first step is to acknowledge that it is a problem—a major problem—and to begin talking about it candidly, understanding that some will complain they have been insulted or will level accusations of bigotry and "Islamophobia." Long ago, there were Jewish communities in the heart of Arabia. They were exterminated by their neighbors, adherents to a dynamic, expansive and ambitious new religion. Not so long ago, there were Jewish communities throughout the broader Middle East. But in the second half of the last century, most Jews fled Muslim lands. Today, there is Israel, a refuge for the Jewish people and an oasis of diversity and tolerance. If you think it's lonely and difficult for Israel now, consider what it will be like if all the nations surrounding Israel rid themselves of Christians and other minorities while the rest of the world—out of misplaced sensitivity or cowardice or some combination—averts its gaze. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 6) The coming geopolitical upheaval Erstwhile U.S. ally Egypt is moving toward Shariah law By
Arnaud de Borchgrave - Take the last two digits of the year in which you were born, then add the age you will be this year - and the result will be 111 for everyone born before 2000. This year will also experience four unusual dates: 1/1/11, 1/11/11, 11/1/11/, 11/11/11. October will have five Sundays, five Mondays and five Saturdays. This happens only every 823 years. A geopolitical upheaval in Egypt sans war: every 59 years. In Cairo, the latest conventional wisdom sees a groundswell of Islamist fundamentalism cloaked in moderate colors moving adroitly center stage. Following elections in the fall, the Muslim Brotherhood is expected to deliver about 40 percent of the vote, possibly even a majority. Either way, it will change the geopolitical calculus for the world’s major players. In Cairo, the street has spoken. Prudently, a majority of Egypt’s small class of billionaires are abroad. Some of the elder brothers of the Brotherhood are closer to Iran’s theocrats than they are to America’s democrats. Differences between Sunni and Shiite Islam are lacquered to exploit geopolitical opportunities, e.g., Iran and Hamas in Gaza, Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Behind Cairo’s political stage, says one ranking Egyptian on a private visit to Washington, Iran’s mullahs and Egypt’s Brothers are unobtrusively sidling up. Four weeks ago, Turkish President Abdullah Gul, a former Islamist, flew to Cairo for a brief meeting with Gen. Hussein Tantawi, chairman of the military council ruling Egypt pending elections, followed by a two-hour huddle with Brotherhood leader Mohamed Badie. Recently reborn as the “Party of Freedom and Justice,” the Brotherhood is being led by Mr. Badie in an election campaign that is already under way. The Obama administration now backs a role for the Brotherhood in a reformed Egyptian government on the condition that it “reject violence and recognizes democratic goals.” But it would be terminally naive to expect a friendly bunch of Muslim Brothers on good terms with U.S. diplomats. In one of his weekly sermons last year, Mr. Badie displayed his baddie colors: “Arab and Muslim regimes are betraying their people by failing to confront the Muslims’ real enemies, not only Israel but also the United States. Waging jihad against both of these infidels is a commandment of Allah that cannot be disregarded.” “Governments have no right to stop their people from fighting the United States,” Mr. Badie said. And those who do “are disregarding Allah’s commandment to wage jihad for His sake with [their] money and [their] lives, so that Allah’s word will reign supreme over all non-Muslims.” Mr. Badie’s title for this sermon: “The U.S. is Now Experiencing the Beginning of its End.” On other occasions, Mr. Badie has reminded his combative flock that “waging jihad is mandatory.” The Egyptian military receives $1.3 billion yearly in U.S. defense aid and equipment. Its role in a Brotherhood-dominated Egyptian foreign policy will be closely monitored by Congress. Political Islam is bound to play a larger role than it has for decades. Will Egypt’s generals then begin planning their return to full power? Mohamed Ghanem, one of the principal Brotherhood leaders in Egypt, called on Egypt to stop pumping gas into Israel and prepare the Egyptian army for war. Other Brothers have deplored the fact that the peace treaty with Israel precludes Egyptian troops in the Sinai, now an integral part of Egypt. For Israel, a return of Egyptian troops to the Sinai Peninsula would be a casus belli. Twice since the creation of Israel, in 1967 and 1973, Egyptian troops were decimated by the Israeli Defense Force in the Sinai. Nonspiritual secularism, according to the Brothers, is tantamount to abandoning Shariah law, “a denial of divine guidance, and a rejection of Allah’s injunctions.” Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the organization’s senior spiritual adviser, elaborated that “our integrated Islamic philosophy - properly understood and applied - can replace Western capitalism.” On Jan. 30, 2009, Sheik al-Qaradawi called Adolf Hitler’s final solution for the Jews something that “Allah throughout history has imposed upon the Jewish people to punish them for their corruption. And the last punishment was carried out by Hitler.” There is little doubt in his mind that more punishment is in the offing. Sheik Qaradawi was banned from both the United States and the United Kingdom after supporting violence against the Western powers when he said, “Those fighting American forces are martyrs given their good intentions since they consider these invading troops an enemy within their territories but without their will.” On April 1, some 3,000 Salafists from Egypt, Turkey, Yemen, Somalia, Kenya and Pakistan, led by the brother of President Anwar Sadat’s assassin, crowded outside Al Ahram, Egypt’s authoritative daily, to demonstrate solidarity with Egypt’s religious revolutionaries. Near Luxor, in Upper Egypt, Cairo newspapers reported the story of a Salafist slicing an ear off a Christian in upper Egypt who, his accusers said, was running a house of prostitution. Local law enforcement didn’t arrest anyone, saying “state law should handle this.” No state law was available. Salafists are known as “Early Muslims,” descendants of those who died within the first three generations of the prophet’s demise. Everyone else has strayed from the true tenets of Islam. They believe in a literal reading of the Koran and maintain a lifestyle that replicates the early days of the prophet. Salafi-a-Saaleh, or Pious Predecessors, is what they call themselves. To give themselves plausible deniability for acts of street violence, the “nonviolent” Brotherhood uses Salafists as shock troops for demonstrations and ensuing riots. The Muslim Brotherhood already has notified companies that handle some 12 million tourists a year that henceforth, all tourism must be “clean” - i.e., no booze. Asked how he compared the Egyptian and the Libyan crises, an Egyptian veteran of the past 30 years, replied, “Libya is now Somalia on the Med. What’s happening in Egypt is a major game-changer for the United States. Warning: Watch three ships of state - Egypt, Turkey and Iran - change direction to sail roughly parallel courses. Iran has seen what happened to Libya after it relinquished its nuclear paraphernalia in 2004. It is not about to make the same mistake. On April 1, some 3,000 Salafists from Egypt, Turkey, Yemen, Somalia, Kenya and Pakistan, led by the brother of President Anwar Sadat’s assassin, crowded outside Al Ahram, Egypt’s authoritative daily, to demonstrate solidarity with Egypt’s religious revolutionaries. Near Luxor, in Upper Egypt, Cairo newspapers reported the story of a Salafist slicing an ear off a Christian in upper Egypt who, his accusers said, was running a house of prostitution. Local law enforcement didn’t arrest anyone, saying “state law should handle this.” No state law was available. Salafists are known as “Early Muslims,” descendants of those who died within the first three generations of the prophet’s demise. Everyone else has strayed from the true tenets of Islam. They believe in a literal reading of the Koran and maintain a lifestyle that replicates the early days of the prophet. Salafi-a-Saaleh, or Pious Predecessors, is what they call themselves. To give themselves plausible deniability for acts of street violence, the “nonviolent” Brotherhood uses Salafists as shock troops for demonstrations and ensuing riots. The Muslim Brotherhood already has notified companies that handle some 12 million tourists a year that henceforth, all tourism must be “clean” - i.e., no booze. Asked how he compared the Egyptian and the Libyan crises, an Egyptian veteran of the past 30 years, replied, “Libya is now Somalia on the Med. What’s happening in Egypt is a major game-changer for the United States. Warning: Watch three ships of state - Egypt, Turkey and Iran - change direction to sail roughly parallel courses. Iran has seen what happened to Libya after it relinquished its nuclear paraphernalia in 2004. It is not about to make the same mistake. Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor-at-large of The Washington Times and United Press International.is editor-at-large of The Washington Times and United Press International. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 7)'Coming Apart at the Seams' By
Rich Lowry The size of government threatens the American way of life as we know it. The solution is straightforward - cut government. A vibrant grassroots movement insists that it happen, and Washington is lousy with rival plans for how to go about it. The social threat to the American way of life is as dire, if not more so. But it is more insidious, and more complicated. No grassroots movement has mobilized against it, and no high-profile bipartisan commission is suggesting remedies. Yet it proceeds apace, all but ignored except in the lives of Americans. Among those trying to sound the alarm is Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute, an author and a thinker who has a well-earned reputation for prescience and fearlessness. In a bracing lecture on "The State of White America," he notes that America has long had an exceptional civic culture. "That culture is unraveling," he warns. "America is coming apart at the seams. Not the seams of race or ethnicity, but of class." Murray takes whites as his subject to avoid the question of whether racism is responsible for the problem he describes, namely the "emergence of classes that diverge on core behaviors and values." Murray identifies what he calls the "founding virtues," such as marriage, industriousness, and religiosity, which have always been considered the social basis of self-government. He looks at whites aged 30-49 and divides them into the top 20 percent socio-economically and the bottom 30 percent. The top tier is basically the upper middle class, the bottom the working class. He finds two worlds, increasingly separate and unequal. In 1960, everyone was married - 88 percent of the upper middle class and 83 percent of the working class. In 2010, 83 percent of the upper middle class is married and only 48 percent of the working class. This gap "amounts to a revolution in the separation of classes." In 1960, births to single mothers in the working class were just 6 percent; now they are close to 50 percent. When it comes to industriousness, there's the same divergence. In 1960, 1.5 percent of men in the upper middle class were out of the workforce; it's 2 percent now. In 1968, the number for working-class men hit a low of 5 percent; even before the spike in unemployment after the financial crisis, it was 12 percent in 2008. "The deteriorations in industriousness," Murray notes, "have occurred in labor markets that were booming as well as in soft ones." Although secularization has long been on the rise, it's more pronounced in the working class. Among the upper middle class, 42 percent say they either don't believe in God or don't go to church. In the working class, it's 61 percent. In other words, a majority of the upper middle class still has some religious commitment, while a majority of the working class does not. These trends mean, just as it is suffering economically, the working class is getting cut off from the richest sources of social capital: marriage, two-parent families, and church-going. More people are falling into a lower class characterized by men who can't make a minimal living and single women with children. Murray argues that America can maintain its national power even if these trends continue. With a growing lower class "increasingly unsuited for citizenry in a free society," though, it will no longer be the country we once knew. He quotes the 19th-century observer of American life Francis Grund: "The American Constitution is remarkable for its simplicity; but it can only suffice a people habitually correct in their actions, and would be utterly inadequate to the wants of a different nation. Change the domestic habits of the Americans, their religious devotion, and their high respect for morality, and it will not be necessary to change a single letter of the Constitution in order to vary the whole form of their government." When it comes to saving the American way, balancing the budget is the easy part. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 8)Simon & Schuster's Revenge By
Douglas Hackleman In 1993, thirty-three-year-old Barack Obama stiffed Poseidon Press, then an imprint of Simon & Schuster -- producing absolutely nothing for the publisher that in November 1990 had given the new graduate of Harvard Law School a $125,000 advance to write a book about race relations in America. Eighteen years later, Simon & Schuster has achieved a modicum of revenge (intended or not) by contracting with literary and intellectual sleuth Jack Cashill to impose on Obama a little of the transparency he so disingenuously promised during the campaign of 2008. Given Obama's approach to truth, the title of Cashill's sometimes impertinent sounding imposition -- Deconstructing Obama: The Life, Loves, and Letters of America's First Postmodern President -- suggests an appropriate methodology. In this ever so readable and informative book, Cashill has taken great pains to corral probative evidence for two interesting matters: (1) the truth about who finally wrote Dreams From My Father, the essay-cum-memoir that Random House -- providing its own advance of $40,000 -- eventually published; and (2) very reasonable questions about the paternity of the current president of the United States. It had not occurred to Cashill in the autumn of 2008 to wonder who wrote Dreams, until a friend's query about the political significance of some passages from the book led him to purchase a copy. As one who writes for a living, who teaches writing, who has been the book doctor to the publications of others and who is the author of a recent book, Hoodwinked, about literary and intellectual fraud, Cashill has antennae finely tuned to assess the writing quality of any text he reads. Of the thousand-plus portfolios of professional writers Cashill had read in his twenty-five-year career in advertising and publishing, "not a half dozen among them wrote as well as the author of" Dreams' "best passages." Accusations denied by Obama in April 2008 that he and William Ayers had a significant relationship in the 1990s led Cashill to purchase Ayers' terrorist memoir, Fugitive Days. The writing was excellent, he noticed, and a couple of passages reminded the curious sleuth of Obama's Dreams. Unaware at the time of Ayers' considerable literary output, Cashill wondered if perhaps the two Chicago residents -- Ayers and Obama -- had seen and patronized the same ghost. But then he acquired two published articles by Obama: one, "
Breaking the War Mentality," an essay from his senior year at Columbia (1983), and another, "
Why Organize?" written five years later. Cashill provides several examples of unworthy sentences from the two Obama originals in which nouns and verbs do not even agree. The two essays make obvious that when Obama does his own writing, it is on a par with his golf; and anyone who has seen the
president's swing on YouTube knows he should drag his clubs to the Tidal Basin and drown them. One of the early tells that for Cashill appeared to tie Ayers' writing to Obama's was the considerable and deft salting of nautical metaphors that seasoned the logs of Fugitive Days and Dreams, as if both authors had drunk the same grog. And then Cashill learned that right out of college Ayers had spent a pre-terrorism year in the Merchant Marine. What even the dullest readers of Dreams and Fugitive Days could stipulate to was that both the young Honolulu landlubber and the old Chicago salt yawed consistently to port. Because it is a common practice for politicians to utilize ghosts for their speeches and books (Ted Sorensen wrote Jack Kennedy's Profiles in Courage, Cashill reminds us), Obama's employment of a literary shade would be of little consequence had he not claimed so publicly to having written both Dreams for My Father and Audacity of Hope
himself and had his proxy penman not turned out to be former (and unrepentant) Weather Underground communist radical and bomber William Ayers. Unaware of Ayers' involvement, Time magazine's Joe Klein (author of Primary Colors) called Dreams "the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician." And British author Jonathan Raban named Obama "the best writer to occupy the White House since Lincoln." As Cashill writes, while Obama was pursuing the Democratic Party's nomination, "the literati had already embraced Obama as one of their own." The assumption that Obama had authored the books that appeared over his name snookered even the worldly-wise Christopher Buckley into voting for the man. As the 2008 election neared, the mounting evidence made it increasingly clear that Obama had not authored his own memoir; and the Dreams account of the president's childhood appeared less and less reliable. Cashill had not approached the Obama corpus as a bitter birther who suspected Obama was born outside the United States. It was the careful exploration of Dreams -- especially the facts and timeline pertaining to his paternity -- that eventually led the sleuth to doubt that Barack Obama, Sr., the Kenyan graduate student after whom Ann Dunham's son was named, could be his father. And the chances seem awfully slim that the three were ever together as a family. "If Obama was born on August 4, 1961 ... Ann [Dunham Obama] was in Seattle two weeks later," writes Cashill, registered at the University of Washington for two evening classes that began August 19, 1961 -- "Anthropology 100, 'Introduction to the Study of Man,' and Political Science 201, 'Modern Government.'" That is just one of many problems with the story of Barry's early childhood provided in Dreams and contradicted at so many points by the family and friends of Obama's mother and putative father. What adds to the pleasure of reading this very well written exposé is the manner of its presentation. Readers get to ride along with a masterful literary detective, watch him tag interesting items, and appreciate how he arranges them on the evidence table. To many readers, the initial clues that caught Cashill's attention may seem picayune or indicative of little or nothing. But as the evidence accumulates, it becomes obvious that it is the author's perfect pitch that enabled him to recognize the ruse.Deconstructing Obama contains a lot of facts related to Obama that his acolytes have never found interesting. Just a few from the highlight reel: Dreams does not contain a single sentence about campus life during the five years combined Obama spent at Columbia and Harvard -- nearly 17 percent of his life when the book was first proposed. Readers cannot learn from Dreams that as a twenty-year-old Obama took a trip to Pakistan, why, or on whose dime. Obama dropped the agent that acquired for him two advances (totaling $165,000) for the myth-making book, before his swearing in as senator in 2004 and the signing of a deal with Crown Books for a paperback version of Dreams and the production of Audacity of Hope. Since 2004, Obama's two books have earned him royalties of around $8.3 million. (Imagine the piece of that action his original agent missed out on!) Obama appears to have learned nothing about literary ethics while serving as a research assistant to plagiarizing Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe. Obama has admitted rather privately but explicitly that he was "someone who has undoubtedly benefitted from affirmative action programs during my academic career." Christopher Hitchens was not impressed with Michelle Obama's Princeton thesis: "To describe [the thesis] as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be 'read' at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn't written in any known language." Not only is Cashill's hunt inherently riveting, but the detective's sometimes cynical voice leads to impish, politically incorrect fun with language. Three examples: "Newsweek made Obama its cover boy under the heading 'The Color Purple.'" "Obama's fellow progressives, the party's base, understand that the long march through the institutions will have many strategic stalls." "As Obama would soon learn, the pastor [Jeremiah Wright] did not exactly cotton to a public spanking by a protégé." For this reviewer, the most fascinating chapters in an engrossing book are the two -- "Gramps" and "Frank" -- that describe the radical, poet, and pornographer Frank Marshall Davis and his disturbingly close relationship to the pre-and post adolescent Barry Obama. When Jack Cashill is finished deconstructing Barack Obama, we are left with a very different image from the one portrayed in Dreams and by the Obama presidential campaign. When our sleuth has put this puzzle together, the pieces accumulate to reveal an image -- but it is not the one on the box cover. Cashill's book demonstrates that the president's 2008 campaign was not about the audacity of hope; it was about the audacity of Obama. His dogged detective work also demonstrates that in no previous American presidential election has the press so abysmally failed to meet its professional obligation. In no national election of memory was the vote so singularly based on such a dearth of data about the candidate who won. If the fourth estate looked anything like America, the preliminary findings Cashill attempted to share with the press in October 2008 would have established Ayers publicly as the ghost of Obama's Dreams, and Sarah Palin most likely would be the first female vice president of the United States. Had the press done its own digging and reporting much earlier in the campaign of 2007-2008 for the Democratic Party nomination, Hillary Clinton would be the first pants-suited president of the United States. Michelle Obama's assertions about Ayers' work on Dreams in Christopher Andersen's book, Barack and Michelle, puts a cap on the independent evidence that Obama lied about writing the memoir himself, and that he had another cock-crowing moment when he said Bill Ayers was just "
a guy who lives in my neighborhood." Beyond working with Obama on Dreams, Obama's first political campaign was launched in 1995 at the home of William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn; and Ayers' maneuvering of Obama onto the $50 million Chicago Annenberg Challenge that same year indicates unavoidably that during the middle years of the Clinton presidency the two were thick as thieves. Cashill's demonstration that misrepresentations unexamined by the press lead to fraud-based outcomes is the most disturbing part of the story. For a democratic republic, nothing is so sacrosanct as the right to vote; and that is why women's suffrage through the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1920 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were (and remain) such emotional and precious victories. When enabled by a complacent, cowardly, or complicit press, an audacious political hustler can disenfranchise the voters of an entire nation. The integrity of "by the people" is desecrated and voided no less by a candidate who succeeds in totally misrepresenting himself and his policies to voters than by the wholesale stuffing of ballot boxes. Most unfortunately, the deconstruction of congenial myths is often received with the same enthusiasm as a stool specimen in the baptistery. While Jesus of the gospels said that the truth will set you free, one of his most poetically ardent defenders recognized that "nations grown corrupt" would rather take "bondage with ease than strenuous liberty." This fact is made obvious by the struthious apologetics that day by day through the popular media continue to anchor the myths of Dreams and Audacity. Somehow the damning facts exposed in Deconstructing Obama must saturate the electorate before the 2012 elections, so that those who voted for the Barry of Dreams or the Barack of Audacity can see that what they voted for in 2008 was a cunningly devised fable. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bernanke believes this was the worst policy failure by the U.S. central bank. He won't let it happen again. So expect inflation to arrive at some point. And expect it to stay, to ward off a potential deflation aftershock. The European Central Bank (the ECB) is also well aware of its greatest economic failure of all time. That was hyperinflation in the early 1920s. 
Inflation in Europe just hit 2.6%, above the ECB's acceptable rate of 2%. So last week, the ECB raised interest rates. The goal was to contain inflation. While Europe is raising interest rates to slow the risk of inflation, the U.S. is expected to keep interest rates where they are for the foreseeable future. The U.S. is also continuing its "quantitative easing program" which is essentially printing money, by another name. So what can you do with this knowledge? If Bernanke won't stop, you can expect more of the same… higher commodities prices (particularly precious metals) and a lower value for the U.S. dollar and U.S. government bonds. This conclusion isn't shocking… What is shocking is just how far these trends will go if Bernanke keeps his promise to prevent deflation. In short, in the U.S., asset prices could soar higher and the dollar and government bonds could fall lower than most anyone can imagine. Good investing, Steve ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3)AVI JORISCH Will a nuclear Iran be good or bad for Turkey? If Iran goes nuclear, it will become the regional hegemon, extinguishing Ankara’s hopes of becoming a key player in the Middle East. Recently, however, Turkey has helped Iran circumvent international sanctions that target its nuclearization. Turkish companies and banks regularly abuse the financial system to facilitate payments to the Islamic republic, perhaps unwittingly assisting its effort of becoming a nuclear power. Turkey’s failure to prevent this type of abuse not only pokes a finger in the eye of the West, but also allows a rogue regime to fill its coffers with hard currency and materiel as it attempts to become the dominant power in the region – at Turkey’s expense. The Turkish-Iranian relationship has revolved around bilateral trade. In 2008, the two countries conducted $10 billion of business, and officials from both countries have called for an increase to $20 billion by 2012. Iran exports mostly oil and gas to the Turkish market. Naturally, Turkey wants to fuel its economy, and Turkish officials have made it clear that they will look to all available sources of energy, including Iran. The international community has assured Ankara of its commitment to Turkish energy needs, and has pointed out that in the past, Iran has proven to be an unreliable partner in this regard. Since other sources of energy are available to Turkey, Ankara’s insistence on buying oil from a rogue regime seems to demonstrate a strong desire to do business with Iran. What is really behind Ankara’s insistence on developing and strengthening its relationship with Tehran? There appear to be two primary motivating factors: an aversion to regional instability and a desire to get closer to the Tehran regime. Ankara seems to fear new American or coalition military action in the region, including an attack on Iran, more than it fears a nuclear-armed Iran. Turkey’s present reality is shaped by the instability in Iraq caused by the second Gulf War, and the low-intensity conflict that continues to the present. According to a recent poll, 43 percent of Turks consider the biggest threat to Turkey to come from the United States, while only 3 percent believe it comes from Iran. There are those who people believe that the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, has an ideological agenda that favors Tehran’s regime. One way of determining whether this is true is the party’s stance on Tehran; Iran should serve as a litmus test for the leanings of the AKP. If seen in this light, the Turkish government’s stance on Iran is telling. Ankara has consistently expanded its financial ties to Iran. For instance, Iranian Bank Mellat, blacklisted by both the United States and the United Nations, has been operating openly in Turkey. Mellat branches conduct business in Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir, despite the U.N. restrictions on the bank for facilitating payments tied to Iran’s nuclear program. Mellat was also designated by the U.S. Treasury Department for allowing weapons of mass destruction to spread. Subsidiaries of the bank around the globe have reportedly been involved in the Iranian missile industry, spreading terrorism and assisting Iran’s nuclear regime. In addition, Mellat has agreed to facilitate trade between Turkey and Iran using Turkish Liras and/or Iranian rials, which helps them avoid the use of euros and dollars. International financial regulators and sanction-watchers cannot easily detect payments that bypass the European or American financial systems. Unfortunately, Iran’s ability to secure nuclear materiel has also, in part, been secured through Turkish territory. As an example, this past February, U.S. authorities disclosed that a Turkish company headed by an Iranian national, Milad Jafari, purchased millions of dollars’ worth of equipment for the Iranian nuclear and missile programs. The Jafari network exploited the lenient Turkish export rules to import proscribed materiel into Turkey from the European Union, the U.S., and elsewhere, then sent it on to Iran. Wittingly or unwittingly, Turkey seems to be helping Iran go nuclear. This is bad news for Ankara, for once an authoritarian country becomes a nuclear power, its neighbors are subject to abuse. The example of North Korea is telling in this regard. Since becoming a nuclear power, Pyongyang has fired rockets over Japan and sunk South Korean ships. Does Ankara want a nuclear Iran next door that can flout international law at Turkey’s expense? *Avi Jorisch, a former U.S. Treasury Department official, is president of Red Cell, a Washington, D.C.-based national security firm (http://www.redcellig.com/) and the author of ‘Iran’s Dirty Banking: How the Islamic Republic is Skirting International Financial Sanctions’ (2010). -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------5) The Muslim's "Christian Problem." By Clifford May In one of his many magnificent books, Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis notes that in 641 C.E., the Caliph Umar "decreed that Jews and Christians should be removed from all but the southern and eastern fringes of Arabia, in fulfillment of an injunction of the Prophet uttered on his deathbed: 'Let there not be two religions in Arabia.'" I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that this had nothing to do with Jewish settlements in the West Bank or American support for Israel. Fast-forward a few centuries: Today, many Muslims believe in peaceful and even cordial coexistence among Muslims, Christians and Jews. But such tolerant views are far from universal. In January, Dr. Imad Mustafa, a professor at Cairo's prestigious al-Azhar University, set out the justifications for jihad, or holy war. Among them: "To remove every religion but Islam from the Arabian peninsula." And, he said, jihad is also legitimate "to extend God's religion to people in cases where the government does not allow it"—in other words, to spread Islam and sharia, Islamic law. Such rulings are not of merely theological interest. They lend legitimacy to violence directed at religious minorities. And indeed, in recent months, there has been a wave of attacks against Christians across what we have come to call the Muslim world. Churches have been bombed in Egypt, Iraq, Nigeria and the Philippines. In Indonesia, a mob of 1,000 Muslims burned two churches to the ground. In Iran, scores of Christians have been arrested on various pretexts. In Afghanistan, a man has been jailed and is expected to be tried for converting to Christianity. Capital punishment is a real possibility. In Pakistan, a Christian woman was sentenced to death for the crime of making remarks that were regarded as insulting to Islam. The moderate governor of Punjab promised to pardon her and sharply criticized the blasphemy laws. But he was assassinated by a member of his own security detail, who afterward called his action "the punishment for a blasphemer." Hundreds of Pakistani Islamic clerics praised the killer's "courage" and religious zeal. French president Nicolas Sarkozy has connected these dots and called the picture that emerges "religious cleansing." Pope Benedict XVI urged Christian communities in Muslim-majority lands to respond nonviolently to what he termed "a strategy of violence that has Christians as a target." The pontiff implored the governments of the Middle East to adopt "effective measures for the protection of religious minorities." The clerics at al-Azhar University called the pope's remarks "insulting" and suspended dialogue with the Vatican. Most of the media have been ignoring this story or, in some cases, insisting that there is no story. If Christians are suffering in places where they are the minority, the root cause must be economics or politics or culture or misunderstanding—anything but intolerance and oppression based on Islamic religious doctrine. To believe this requires ignoring much evidence, not least the instances where, when a church is burned or a Christian murdered, the perpetrators yell, "Allahu Akbar!" Investor's Business Daily recently quoted James Zogby, head of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, offering a creative analysis. "The guy who gets up on the plane and says 'Allah!' or whatever and then blows the plane up is not making a statement about his faith," Zogby told congressional staffers. Zogby explained that it's like a Christian hitting his thumb with a hammer and exclaiming "Jesus Christ!" "The comparison is absurd," IBD comments. "Muslims say 'Allah is greatest' to exalt their God. When Christians mutter 'Jesus Christ,' they are in contrast taking their Lord's name in vain." Why should Jews care about Muslim persecution of Christians? Youssef M. Ibrahim, an Egyptian-born Coptic Christian and a fellow reporter back when we were both at The New York Times, puts it succinctly: "In the 1950s and '60s, they kicked the Jews out of the Middle East—everywhere but Israel, and, of course, they haven't given up there. Now, they are kicking out the Christians, too. It was inevitable." What is not inevitable is the final outcome. Thirty years from now will the Muslim world—from Morocco to Indonesia—be "religiously cleansed"? Will other groups, for example the Kurds and Darfuris—Muslims but ethnic minorities—also be decimated or even exterminated? What about homosexuals—now facing severe persecution in Iran, Gaza and other places? What about women's rights? Religious cleansing and the persecution of minorities in the Muslim world is not an easy problem to tackle. But surely the first step is to acknowledge that it is a problem—a major problem—and to begin talking about it candidly, understanding that some will complain they have been insulted or will level accusations of bigotry and "Islamophobia." Long ago, there were Jewish communities in the heart of Arabia. They were exterminated by their neighbors, adherents to a dynamic, expansive and ambitious new religion. Not so long ago, there were Jewish communities throughout the broader Middle East. But in the second half of the last century, most Jews fled Muslim lands. Today, there is Israel, a refuge for the Jewish people and an oasis of diversity and tolerance. If you think it's lonely and difficult for Israel now, consider what it will be like if all the nations surrounding Israel rid themselves of Christians and other minorities while the rest of the world—out of misplaced sensitivity or cowardice or some combination—averts its gaze. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 6) The coming geopolitical upheaval Erstwhile U.S. ally Egypt is moving toward Shariah law By Arnaud de Borchgrave - Take the last two digits of the year in which you were born, then add the age you will be this year - and the result will be 111 for everyone born before 2000. This year will also experience four unusual dates: 1/1/11, 1/11/11, 11/1/11/, 11/11/11. October will have five Sundays, five Mondays and five Saturdays. This happens only every 823 years. A geopolitical upheaval in Egypt sans war: every 59 years. In Cairo, the latest conventional wisdom sees a groundswell of Islamist fundamentalism cloaked in moderate colors moving adroitly center stage. Following elections in the fall, the Muslim Brotherhood is expected to deliver about 40 percent of the vote, possibly even a majority. Either way, it will change the geopolitical calculus for the world’s major players. In Cairo, the street has spoken. Prudently, a majority of Egypt’s small class of billionaires are abroad. Some of the elder brothers of the Brotherhood are closer to Iran’s theocrats than they are to America’s democrats. Differences between Sunni and Shiite Islam are lacquered to exploit geopolitical opportunities, e.g., Iran and Hamas in Gaza, Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Behind Cairo’s political stage, says one ranking Egyptian on a private visit to Washington, Iran’s mullahs and Egypt’s Brothers are unobtrusively sidling up. Four weeks ago, Turkish President Abdullah Gul, a former Islamist, flew to Cairo for a brief meeting with Gen. Hussein Tantawi, chairman of the military council ruling Egypt pending elections, followed by a two-hour huddle with Brotherhood leader Mohamed Badie. Recently reborn as the “Party of Freedom and Justice,” the Brotherhood is being led by Mr. Badie in an election campaign that is already under way. The Obama administration now backs a role for the Brotherhood in a reformed Egyptian government on the condition that it “reject violence and recognizes democratic goals.” But it would be terminally naive to expect a friendly bunch of Muslim Brothers on good terms with U.S. diplomats. In one of his weekly sermons last year, Mr. Badie displayed his baddie colors: “Arab and Muslim regimes are betraying their people by failing to confront the Muslims’ real enemies, not only Israel but also the United States. Waging jihad against both of these infidels is a commandment of Allah that cannot be disregarded.” “Governments have no right to stop their people from fighting the United States,” Mr. Badie said. And those who do “are disregarding Allah’s commandment to wage jihad for His sake with [their] money and [their] lives, so that Allah’s word will reign supreme over all non-Muslims.” Mr. Badie’s title for this sermon: “The U.S. is Now Experiencing the Beginning of its End.” On other occasions, Mr. Badie has reminded his combative flock that “waging jihad is mandatory.” The Egyptian military receives $1.3 billion yearly in U.S. defense aid and equipment. Its role in a Brotherhood-dominated Egyptian foreign policy will be closely monitored by Congress. Political Islam is bound to play a larger role than it has for decades. Will Egypt’s generals then begin planning their return to full power? Mohamed Ghanem, one of the principal Brotherhood leaders in Egypt, called on Egypt to stop pumping gas into Israel and prepare the Egyptian army for war. Other Brothers have deplored the fact that the peace treaty with Israel precludes Egyptian troops in the Sinai, now an integral part of Egypt. For Israel, a return of Egyptian troops to the Sinai Peninsula would be a casus belli. Twice since the creation of Israel, in 1967 and 1973, Egyptian troops were decimated by the Israeli Defense Force in the Sinai. Nonspiritual secularism, according to the Brothers, is tantamount to abandoning Shariah law, “a denial of divine guidance, and a rejection of Allah’s injunctions.” Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the organization’s senior spiritual adviser, elaborated that “our integrated Islamic philosophy - properly understood and applied - can replace Western capitalism.” On Jan. 30, 2009, Sheik al-Qaradawi called Adolf Hitler’s final solution for the Jews something that “Allah throughout history has imposed upon the Jewish people to punish them for their corruption. And the last punishment was carried out by Hitler.” There is little doubt in his mind that more punishment is in the offing. Sheik Qaradawi was banned from both the United States and the United Kingdom after supporting violence against the Western powers when he said, “Those fighting American forces are martyrs given their good intentions since they consider these invading troops an enemy within their territories but without their will.” On April 1, some 3,000 Salafists from Egypt, Turkey, Yemen, Somalia, Kenya and Pakistan, led by the brother of President Anwar Sadat’s assassin, crowded outside Al Ahram, Egypt’s authoritative daily, to demonstrate solidarity with Egypt’s religious revolutionaries. Near Luxor, in Upper Egypt, Cairo newspapers reported the story of a Salafist slicing an ear off a Christian in upper Egypt who, his accusers said, was running a house of prostitution. Local law enforcement didn’t arrest anyone, saying “state law should handle this.” No state law was available. Salafists are known as “Early Muslims,” descendants of those who died within the first three generations of the prophet’s demise. Everyone else has strayed from the true tenets of Islam. They believe in a literal reading of the Koran and maintain a lifestyle that replicates the early days of the prophet. Salafi-a-Saaleh, or Pious Predecessors, is what they call themselves. To give themselves plausible deniability for acts of street violence, the “nonviolent” Brotherhood uses Salafists as shock troops for demonstrations and ensuing riots. The Muslim Brotherhood already has notified companies that handle some 12 million tourists a year that henceforth, all tourism must be “clean” - i.e., no booze. Asked how he compared the Egyptian and the Libyan crises, an Egyptian veteran of the past 30 years, replied, “Libya is now Somalia on the Med. What’s happening in Egypt is a major game-changer for the United States. Warning: Watch three ships of state - Egypt, Turkey and Iran - change direction to sail roughly parallel courses. Iran has seen what happened to Libya after it relinquished its nuclear paraphernalia in 2004. It is not about to make the same mistake. On April 1, some 3,000 Salafists from Egypt, Turkey, Yemen, Somalia, Kenya and Pakistan, led by the brother of President Anwar Sadat’s assassin, crowded outside Al Ahram, Egypt’s authoritative daily, to demonstrate solidarity with Egypt’s religious revolutionaries. Near Luxor, in Upper Egypt, Cairo newspapers reported the story of a Salafist slicing an ear off a Christian in upper Egypt who, his accusers said, was running a house of prostitution. Local law enforcement didn’t arrest anyone, saying “state law should handle this.” No state law was available. Salafists are known as “Early Muslims,” descendants of those who died within the first three generations of the prophet’s demise. Everyone else has strayed from the true tenets of Islam. They believe in a literal reading of the Koran and maintain a lifestyle that replicates the early days of the prophet. Salafi-a-Saaleh, or Pious Predecessors, is what they call themselves. To give themselves plausible deniability for acts of street violence, the “nonviolent” Brotherhood uses Salafists as shock troops for demonstrations and ensuing riots. The Muslim Brotherhood already has notified companies that handle some 12 million tourists a year that henceforth, all tourism must be “clean” - i.e., no booze. Asked how he compared the Egyptian and the Libyan crises, an Egyptian veteran of the past 30 years, replied, “Libya is now Somalia on the Med. What’s happening in Egypt is a major game-changer for the United States. Warning: Watch three ships of state - Egypt, Turkey and Iran - change direction to sail roughly parallel courses. Iran has seen what happened to Libya after it relinquished its nuclear paraphernalia in 2004. It is not about to make the same mistake. Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor-at-large of The Washington Times and United Press International.is editor-at-large of The Washington Times and United Press International. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 7)'Coming Apart at the Seams' By Rich Lowry The size of government threatens the American way of life as we know it. The solution is straightforward - cut government. A vibrant grassroots movement insists that it happen, and Washington is lousy with rival plans for how to go about it. The social threat to the American way of life is as dire, if not more so. But it is more insidious, and more complicated. No grassroots movement has mobilized against it, and no high-profile bipartisan commission is suggesting remedies. Yet it proceeds apace, all but ignored except in the lives of Americans. Among those trying to sound the alarm is Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute, an author and a thinker who has a well-earned reputation for prescience and fearlessness. In a bracing lecture on "The State of White America," he notes that America has long had an exceptional civic culture. "That culture is unraveling," he warns. "America is coming apart at the seams. Not the seams of race or ethnicity, but of class." Murray takes whites as his subject to avoid the question of whether racism is responsible for the problem he describes, namely the "emergence of classes that diverge on core behaviors and values." Murray identifies what he calls the "founding virtues," such as marriage, industriousness, and religiosity, which have always been considered the social basis of self-government. He looks at whites aged 30-49 and divides them into the top 20 percent socio-economically and the bottom 30 percent. The top tier is basically the upper middle class, the bottom the working class. He finds two worlds, increasingly separate and unequal. In 1960, everyone was married - 88 percent of the upper middle class and 83 percent of the working class. In 2010, 83 percent of the upper middle class is married and only 48 percent of the working class. This gap "amounts to a revolution in the separation of classes." In 1960, births to single mothers in the working class were just 6 percent; now they are close to 50 percent. When it comes to industriousness, there's the same divergence. In 1960, 1.5 percent of men in the upper middle class were out of the workforce; it's 2 percent now. In 1968, the number for working-class men hit a low of 5 percent; even before the spike in unemployment after the financial crisis, it was 12 percent in 2008. "The deteriorations in industriousness," Murray notes, "have occurred in labor markets that were booming as well as in soft ones." Although secularization has long been on the rise, it's more pronounced in the working class. Among the upper middle class, 42 percent say they either don't believe in God or don't go to church. In the working class, it's 61 percent. In other words, a majority of the upper middle class still has some religious commitment, while a majority of the working class does not. These trends mean, just as it is suffering economically, the working class is getting cut off from the richest sources of social capital: marriage, two-parent families, and church-going. More people are falling into a lower class characterized by men who can't make a minimal living and single women with children. Murray argues that America can maintain its national power even if these trends continue. With a growing lower class "increasingly unsuited for citizenry in a free society," though, it will no longer be the country we once knew. He quotes the 19th-century observer of American life Francis Grund: "The American Constitution is remarkable for its simplicity; but it can only suffice a people habitually correct in their actions, and would be utterly inadequate to the wants of a different nation. Change the domestic habits of the Americans, their religious devotion, and their high respect for morality, and it will not be necessary to change a single letter of the Constitution in order to vary the whole form of their government." When it comes to saving the American way, balancing the budget is the easy part. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 8)Simon & Schuster's Revenge By Douglas Hackleman In 1993, thirty-three-year-old Barack Obama stiffed Poseidon Press, then an imprint of Simon & Schuster -- producing absolutely nothing for the publisher that in November 1990 had given the new graduate of Harvard Law School a $125,000 advance to write a book about race relations in America. Eighteen years later, Simon & Schuster has achieved a modicum of revenge (intended or not) by contracting with literary and intellectual sleuth Jack Cashill to impose on Obama a little of the transparency he so disingenuously promised during the campaign of 2008. Given Obama's approach to truth, the title of Cashill's sometimes impertinent sounding imposition -- Deconstructing Obama: The Life, Loves, and Letters of America's First Postmodern President -- suggests an appropriate methodology. In this ever so readable and informative book, Cashill has taken great pains to corral probative evidence for two interesting matters: (1) the truth about who finally wrote Dreams From My Father, the essay-cum-memoir that Random House -- providing its own advance of $40,000 -- eventually published; and (2) very reasonable questions about the paternity of the current president of the United States. It had not occurred to Cashill in the autumn of 2008 to wonder who wrote Dreams, until a friend's query about the political significance of some passages from the book led him to purchase a copy. As one who writes for a living, who teaches writing, who has been the book doctor to the publications of others and who is the author of a recent book, Hoodwinked, about literary and intellectual fraud, Cashill has antennae finely tuned to assess the writing quality of any text he reads. Of the thousand-plus portfolios of professional writers Cashill had read in his twenty-five-year career in advertising and publishing, "not a half dozen among them wrote as well as the author of" Dreams' "best passages." Accusations denied by Obama in April 2008 that he and William Ayers had a significant relationship in the 1990s led Cashill to purchase Ayers' terrorist memoir, Fugitive Days. The writing was excellent, he noticed, and a couple of passages reminded the curious sleuth of Obama's Dreams. Unaware at the time of Ayers' considerable literary output, Cashill wondered if perhaps the two Chicago residents -- Ayers and Obama -- had seen and patronized the same ghost. But then he acquired two published articles by Obama: one, "Breaking the War Mentality," an essay from his senior year at Columbia (1983), and another, "Why Organize?" written five years later. Cashill provides several examples of unworthy sentences from the two Obama originals in which nouns and verbs do not even agree. The two essays make obvious that when Obama does his own writing, it is on a par with his golf; and anyone who has seen the president's swing on YouTube knows he should drag his clubs to the Tidal Basin and drown them. One of the early tells that for Cashill appeared to tie Ayers' writing to Obama's was the considerable and deft salting of nautical metaphors that seasoned the logs of Fugitive Days and Dreams, as if both authors had drunk the same grog. And then Cashill learned that right out of college Ayers had spent a pre-terrorism year in the Merchant Marine. What even the dullest readers of Dreams and Fugitive Days could stipulate to was that both the young Honolulu landlubber and the old Chicago salt yawed consistently to port. Because it is a common practice for politicians to utilize ghosts for their speeches and books (Ted Sorensen wrote Jack Kennedy's Profiles in Courage, Cashill reminds us), Obama's employment of a literary shade would be of little consequence had he not claimed so publicly to having written both Dreams for My Father and Audacity of Hope himself and had his proxy penman not turned out to be former (and unrepentant) Weather Underground communist radical and bomber William Ayers. Unaware of Ayers' involvement, Time magazine's Joe Klein (author of Primary Colors) called Dreams "the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician." And British author Jonathan Raban named Obama "the best writer to occupy the White House since Lincoln." As Cashill writes, while Obama was pursuing the Democratic Party's nomination, "the literati had already embraced Obama as one of their own." The assumption that Obama had authored the books that appeared over his name snookered even the worldly-wise Christopher Buckley into voting for the man. As the 2008 election neared, the mounting evidence made it increasingly clear that Obama had not authored his own memoir; and the Dreams account of the president's childhood appeared less and less reliable. Cashill had not approached the Obama corpus as a bitter birther who suspected Obama was born outside the United States. It was the careful exploration of Dreams -- especially the facts and timeline pertaining to his paternity -- that eventually led the sleuth to doubt that Barack Obama, Sr., the Kenyan graduate student after whom Ann Dunham's son was named, could be his father. And the chances seem awfully slim that the three were ever together as a family. "If Obama was born on August 4, 1961 ... Ann [Dunham Obama] was in Seattle two weeks later," writes Cashill, registered at the University of Washington for two evening classes that began August 19, 1961 -- "Anthropology 100, 'Introduction to the Study of Man,' and Political Science 201, 'Modern Government.'" That is just one of many problems with the story of Barry's early childhood provided in Dreams and contradicted at so many points by the family and friends of Obama's mother and putative father. What adds to the pleasure of reading this very well written exposé is the manner of its presentation. Readers get to ride along with a masterful literary detective, watch him tag interesting items, and appreciate how he arranges them on the evidence table. To many readers, the initial clues that caught Cashill's attention may seem picayune or indicative of little or nothing. But as the evidence accumulates, it becomes obvious that it is the author's perfect pitch that enabled him to recognize the ruse.Deconstructing Obama contains a lot of facts related to Obama that his acolytes have never found interesting. Just a few from the highlight reel: Dreams does not contain a single sentence about campus life during the five years combined Obama spent at Columbia and Harvard -- nearly 17 percent of his life when the book was first proposed. Readers cannot learn from Dreams that as a twenty-year-old Obama took a trip to Pakistan, why, or on whose dime. Obama dropped the agent that acquired for him two advances (totaling $165,000) for the myth-making book, before his swearing in as senator in 2004 and the signing of a deal with Crown Books for a paperback version of Dreams and the production of Audacity of Hope. Since 2004, Obama's two books have earned him royalties of around $8.3 million. (Imagine the piece of that action his original agent missed out on!) Obama appears to have learned nothing about literary ethics while serving as a research assistant to plagiarizing Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe. Obama has admitted rather privately but explicitly that he was "someone who has undoubtedly benefitted from affirmative action programs during my academic career." Christopher Hitchens was not impressed with Michelle Obama's Princeton thesis: "To describe [the thesis] as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be 'read' at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn't written in any known language." Not only is Cashill's hunt inherently riveting, but the detective's sometimes cynical voice leads to impish, politically incorrect fun with language. Three examples: "Newsweek made Obama its cover boy under the heading 'The Color Purple.'" "Obama's fellow progressives, the party's base, understand that the long march through the institutions will have many strategic stalls." "As Obama would soon learn, the pastor [Jeremiah Wright] did not exactly cotton to a public spanking by a protégé." For this reviewer, the most fascinating chapters in an engrossing book are the two -- "Gramps" and "Frank" -- that describe the radical, poet, and pornographer Frank Marshall Davis and his disturbingly close relationship to the pre-and post adolescent Barry Obama. When Jack Cashill is finished deconstructing Barack Obama, we are left with a very different image from the one portrayed in Dreams and by the Obama presidential campaign. When our sleuth has put this puzzle together, the pieces accumulate to reveal an image -- but it is not the one on the box cover. Cashill's book demonstrates that the president's 2008 campaign was not about the audacity of hope; it was about the audacity of Obama. His dogged detective work also demonstrates that in no previous American presidential election has the press so abysmally failed to meet its professional obligation. In no national election of memory was the vote so singularly based on such a dearth of data about the candidate who won. If the fourth estate looked anything like America, the preliminary findings Cashill attempted to share with the press in October 2008 would have established Ayers publicly as the ghost of Obama's Dreams, and Sarah Palin most likely would be the first female vice president of the United States. Had the press done its own digging and reporting much earlier in the campaign of 2007-2008 for the Democratic Party nomination, Hillary Clinton would be the first pants-suited president of the United States. Michelle Obama's assertions about Ayers' work on Dreams in Christopher Andersen's book, Barack and Michelle, puts a cap on the independent evidence that Obama lied about writing the memoir himself, and that he had another cock-crowing moment when he said Bill Ayers was just "a guy who lives in my neighborhood." Beyond working with Obama on Dreams, Obama's first political campaign was launched in 1995 at the home of William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn; and Ayers' maneuvering of Obama onto the $50 million Chicago Annenberg Challenge that same year indicates unavoidably that during the middle years of the Clinton presidency the two were thick as thieves. Cashill's demonstration that misrepresentations unexamined by the press lead to fraud-based outcomes is the most disturbing part of the story. For a democratic republic, nothing is so sacrosanct as the right to vote; and that is why women's suffrage through the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1920 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were (and remain) such emotional and precious victories. When enabled by a complacent, cowardly, or complicit press, an audacious political hustler can disenfranchise the voters of an entire nation. The integrity of "by the people" is desecrated and voided no less by a candidate who succeeds in totally misrepresenting himself and his policies to voters than by the wholesale stuffing of ballot boxes. Most unfortunately, the deconstruction of congenial myths is often received with the same enthusiasm as a stool specimen in the baptistery. While Jesus of the gospels said that the truth will set you free, one of his most poetically ardent defenders recognized that "nations grown corrupt" would rather take "bondage with ease than strenuous liberty." This fact is made obvious by the struthious apologetics that day by day through the popular media continue to anchor the myths of Dreams and Audacity. Somehow the damning facts exposed in Deconstructing Obama must saturate the electorate before the 2012 elections, so that those who voted for the Barry of Dreams or the Barack of Audacity can see that what they voted for in 2008 was a cunningly devised fable. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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