12/7/13

The day that shall live in infamy

The U.S. Navy battleship USS California (BB-44) slowly sinking alongside Ford Island, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii (USA), as a result of bomb and torpedo damage, 7 December 1941(US Navy photo)

Today we remember the 72nd anniversary of the attack at Pearl Harbor, and those famous words spoken by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

On that sunny Hawaiian Sunday morning, America was viciously attacked as part of a deceptive action by the Imperial Empire of Japan. Americans immediately stood up and answered the call to defend this nation and indeed the world against the aggression of Nazism, fascism, and Japanese imperialism.

Young American men lied about their age to be able to do their part, and we came to know them as the “Greatest Generation.” I am proud my own dad was part of that heroic generation that ensured the light of freedom would not go dim.

America clearly identified the enemy and took every measure to defeat them soundly, in complete and total warfare of annihilation. We honor those men who survived that day 72 years ago, and sadly remember those who lost their lives.

Let us not forget that the reason why our flags are flying at half-mast today is for them, for Pearl Harbor. If there is a remembrance event anywhere near you, please attend. If not, then take the time to teach your children and grandchildren why this day must never be forgotten.

Explain to them so they will understand the relevance of Pearl Harbor Day to 9-11, the significant event of this current generation. And as those Americans did then, there are those who have answered the nation’s call once again.

However, today we struggle to clearly identify the enemy and decide what our objective of warfare should be — assimilation, attrition, or annihilation. How shall we defeat Islamic totalitarianism?

Today, we remember and honor the past, but let us not forget the recent past, the present, and the impact that a failure to secure victory will have for our future.

God bless those heroic men and women of Pearl Harbor.

12/7/13

Rep. Trey Gowdy: Can Obama Suspend Election Laws Too?

12/7/13

Egyptians’ right of protest is now regulated or obstructed?

By: Ashraf Ramelah
Voice of the Copts

Egypt’s new protest law went into use last week. The law has been divisive. Muslim Brotherhood thugs and Islamists are flat-out against it preferring chaos and spontaneity. Families are pleased because it safeguards their well-being. Pro-democracy protesters see the value in a law to protect citizens and don’t appear to be threatened, but there is disagreement.

Once Egypt’s interim government submitted their new protest law to the country’s interim president, Adly Monsour, and received approval on November 24, supporters and opponents of this law collided in the streets. The new law sparked a new wave of protests on November 26, two days later, when opponents, mostly Muslim Brotherhood and Morsi advocates, clashed with supporters who demanded the new law to be enforced.

The new law was immediately enforced when the military and police cleared out protesters on the basis of Article 8 of the new protest regulation, which requires organizers to submit a written request to the local police at least three days in advance stating proposed location, time, purpose and estimated number of participants. Opponents of this law consider Article 8 to be an obstacle and a violation of their right to protest. Despite the current Islamist-leaning government, Brotherhood protesters fear the non-issuance of permits because on their record of violence and use of weapons during protests.

The first article of the thousand-word protest regulation just signed into law states that no weapons are allowed. Article 5 forbids protests at places of worship or to use them as gathering points. So, in the future, gathering from mosques to attack churches can be curtailed by this law. Article 7 keeps roads clear and uninterrupted, which means that protests will not conflict with routine traffic and conflict with the livelihood of others. Article 14 allows veto powers for the Interior Minister to potentially “forbid” demonstrations in front of Parliament buildings, foreign offices, military compounds, hospitals and airports.

Egypt’s critical post-Morsi transition period acquired through massive and continuous uprisings is a struggle for democratic principles against an embedded Islam. Regulating protests by use of permits as practiced in civil, democratic countries may serve now in Egypt as a hindrance to the democratic process considering that the power of freedom fighters completely resides in this method. In fact, Egypt’s freedom coalition movement will likely protest again against the recently released constitution draft — a less than perfect model for democratic rights.

During the Mubarak era, protests were held in spite of the President’s permanent emergency law. Dissent was limited and violence was practically nonexistent. When the uprising against Mubarak began by freedom fighters in January 2011, it was peaceful as well. When the Muslim Brotherhood galloped camels and horses into the crowds protesting on February 2, 2011, it marked the turning point for nonviolent protests in Egypt.

A second tragic incident followed on October 9, 2011 when Egypt’s military and Brotherhood-influenced SCAF (the governing power) attacked with armored cars and tanks the Maspero organization of Christians protesting peacefully in Tahrir Square. For nearly three more years, protests occurring against the corrupted SCAF and then the Morsi presidency were marked by vandalism, sexual harassment, injuries and murders.

Law abiding citizens and freedom fighters who have been critical of the current interim government’s incapacity to control street violence now welcome this new law, long overdue since the arrest of Morsi on July 3 this year when violence increased severely. During a TV program on December 1, Interim President Monsour said, regarding the new protest law, that it was “designed to be executed and be respected, and there is no way that it will be reversed.”

The Muslim Brotherhood’s claim of holding nonviolent, peaceful protests is belied by their complaints of the new protest regulation which now injects law and order. Pro-democracy supporters of the new law consider it a weak attempt by an interim government that should have taken bolder steps earlier to shut down the dangerous Brotherhood gangs. Gangs run rampant unchecked by law and for some time the freedom coalition movement has considered the government’s delay suspicious.
The interim government formed within weeks of Morsi’s arrest allowed to remain Morsi’s removal of the country’s 32 year-old emergency law needed so desperately to restrain the Muslim Brotherhood backlash. Egyptians, worried about their safety, blame the interim government and the military and police forces unable to keep up with the outbreaks of violence.

It was not unreasonable to expect the newly instated temporary leadership of the interim government to target Brotherhood thugs and round up the criminals released from jails by former President Morsi. Yet this did not happen. Freedom fighters would have been heartened to see the outlawing of religion-affiliated political parties en route to establishing a modern secular state.

The banning of the Muslim Brotherhood organization — reverting to past policy — coming as late as three months after Morsi’s removal turned out to be a hollow gesture coming from a government body comprised of religionists. Sympathy alive in the interim government for the El Noor party (Salafists holding the strictest fundamental Islamic religious views) is also evident in the makeup of the select constituent assembly chosen by this government to draft the new constitution. (At the same time, this assembly’s lack of experts in constitutional law weakened its purpose.)

In the five months since Morsi’s arrest in the name of liberty and the pursuit of a secular state, there has been no real effort to rid Egypt of the effects of Morsi’s rule and the Brotherhood’s hyper-religious focus to further Islamic supremacy. The reason for this is that following General Al Sisi alignment of the military with freedom fighters and arrest of Morsi in early July in accordance with majority sentiment, he appointed Egypt’s High Constitutional Court president, Adly Monsour, to lead the country. Al Sisi took his direction from Egypt’s former Sadat-Mubarak constitution ignoring Morsi’s constitution as a debacle.

Monsour then appointed Dr. El Baradei, a Muslim Brotherhood sympathizer, as his vice-president. The two proceeded to appoint the president of the new interim government, Prime Minister Hazem Beblawi — another Islamist sympathizer. The Prime Minister chose his cabinet – the majority with roots in the Islamic cause. They are insiders doing the bidding inside the government for the Muslim Brotherhood and are receptive to foreign interference pursuing the return of the Muslim Brotherhood to power.

The one question no one seems to be asking is what will happen if a protest permit is denied. Will the courts function to provide timely recourse upon appeals of the denials and fairness regarding the right to assemble and protest or will the courts be tied to the Islamist viewpoint held by the interim government and the President of Egypt? Monsour is also currently the president of the High Constitutional Court. The risk is that no permits will be issued for political protests in the future.

12/7/13

Comrade Mandela’s Secret Life

By: Cliff Kincade
Accuracy in Media

The South African Communist Party is admitting Nelson Mandela was a high-ranking member. Will the media report these facts? Or will the “myth” continue to prevail?

My friend Victor Lasky used to write books about liberal or left-wing figures that carried the name of the person and the subtitle, “The Man and the Myth.” He would compare the coverage of a political figure with the truth. The coverage of the death of Nelson Mandela has focused mostly on the myth. Key facts are being omitted, including Mandela’s secret membership in the South African Communist Party (SACP), which may shed light on the future of South Africa.

It’s very rare in all of the coverage, from Fox News to MSNBC, to find any reference to the central role that communism played in Mandela’s life. The evidence shows not only that he was a secret member of the South African Communist Party, but that he continued to deny membership in the party throughout his life. The cover-up is relevant to South Africa’s future and the role the SACP plays in the current government.

Mandela is being credited with trying to avoid a bloodbath after the black majority took power. But his denial of membership in the South African Communist Party, which turned out to be a lie, deserves attention and comment. What was he trying to hide? And was there more to it than mere membership in the SACP?

The SACP itself is not hiding the truth. In a tribute to “a true revolutionary,” its website declares, “At his arrest in August 1962, Nelson Mandela was not only a member of the then underground South African Communist Party, but was also a member of our Party’s Central Committee. To us as South African communists, Cde [Comrade] Mandela shall forever symbolize the monumental contribution of the SACP in our liberation struggle. The contribution of communists in the struggle to achieve the South African freedom has very few parallels in the history of our country. After his release from prison in 1990, Cde Madiba became a great and close friend of the communists till his last days.”

As president of South Africa, Mandela spoke to the South African Communist Party on its 75th anniversary, referring to its “alliance” with the African National Congress and others ruling South Africa.

Some of the truth about Mandela’s secret life as a communist has emerged in various books over the years.

In Mandela: The Authorized Biography, Anthony Sampson writes that Mandela started out as an anti-communist but “was impressed by The Communist Manifesto and by the biographies of South African Marxists like Paul Bunting and Bill Andrews.” Sampson went on to write, “He was struck by the Soviet Union’s support for liberation movements throughout the world, and by the relentless logic of dialectical materialism, which he felt sweeping away the superstitions and inherited beliefs of his childhood…” One of those beliefs was Christianity, and Sampson writes that Mandela “experienced some pangs at abandoning the Christian beliefs that had fortified his childhood…”

A photo in the book shows Mandela and his second wife, Winnie, at a 1958 wedding ceremony “attended by a few close friends, including the communist writer Michael Harmel.”

Harmel “joined our Party in 1939 and for the rest of his life the Party was his master,” states a tribute on the website of the South African Communist Party. It goes on, “As a dedicated internationalist he saw anti-Sovietism as a deadly weapon of the most reactionary circles; a weapon which imperialism, and its ally Zionism, use in their frenzied efforts to undermine and disrupt the underlying unity of national liberation movements and the Socialist countries…”

Mandela, Sampson wrote, studied communist revolution. “But it was the Cuban revolution which most inspired him and many of his colleagues.”

Sampson says that Mandela “recruited” Joe Slovo to Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the African National Congress, for a “campaign of sabotage” in South Africa. Slovo, in turn, “brought in a small group of communist experts” who knew about explosives. Slovo, a white communist, was dubbed “the KGB colonel” by those who considered him an agent or member of Soviet intelligence.

In the 2010 book Young Mandela: The Revolutionary Years, David James Smith writes about Mandela being “present at a secret meeting of the Communist Party in December 1960 when it decided to begin its own armed struggle, six months before Mandela even raised the subject with the ANC [African National Congress].” In 1961, he continued, the South African Communist Party “was still accepting funds from Moscow, using a Johannesburg travel agent as a conduit for the money. Mandela himself never fled from communism, though neither does it appear he was ever actually a party member…” He added, “One or two people have claimed he actually joined the party but Mandela himself always denied it…There is no doubt, however, that Mandela embraced communism and communists, considering them among his closest friends and political allies…”

Stephen Ellis, author of the 2012 book, External Mission, found minutes of an SACP meeting at which a member of the central committee, John Motshabi, reminisced about Mandela’s recruitment. He also reported, “Evidence of Mandela’s SACP membership includes his participation in the Party’s December 1960 conference, where the decision was made to launch the organization later known as Umkhonto we Sizwe. Furthermore, at least seven prominent members of the SACP, in addition to Joe Mathews, have testified to Mandela’s party membership.”

Now, of course, we have the SACP itself admitting Mandela’s membership in the party and its important central committee.

But that’s not the message Mandela himself was sending just a few years ago.

President Barack Obama wrote the foreword to the 2010 book, Nelson: Conversations with Myself, by Mandela. The book includes dialogue with Richard Stengel, the former editor of Time magazine who is going to work full-time at the Obama State Department. Mandela once again denied being a Communist Party member or being sympathetic to communism in any way. He told Stengel he had been “anti-communist” and only went to the SACP meetings because he was “invited.” He said he “attacked the communists,” and “I thought Marxism was something that actually was subjecting us to a foreign ideology.”

Now we know all of this was a lie, designed to fool foreign audiences and create the myth of Mandela. Our media have been part of the deception. Will they now correct the record and tell the truth before the communists acquire even more power in South Africa?

Interestingly, President Obama used the foreword to describe Mandela as “a liberation figure” who worked for “equality, opportunity and human dignity.” But he said Mandela had acknowledged “that he has not been a perfect man” and had “his flaws.” Obama says the lesson is that we have to be “honest with ourselves” in the personal and political realms.

Clearly, Mandela was not honest with the public about his deep involvement with communism, including membership in the South African Communist Party. Then, again, Obama was never honest with the American people about his mentor, Communist Party operative Frank Marshall Davis, a member of the Soviet espionage apparatus in Hawaii.

Do we see a pattern developing here?

Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at [email protected]. View the complete archives from Cliff Kincaid.

12/7/13

Obama Operative Masquerades as Catholic Expert

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

Christopher Hale, of a group called Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, has emerged on CNN and Fox News as a defender of Pope Francis against Rush Limbaugh’s charges that the pontiff spews Marxism.

The stories on CNN and Fox News cited Hale as a critic of Limbaugh and defender of the pope without noting his group’s connections to George Soros, the billionaire atheist, and that Hale worked on the “National Faith Vote Team” for the “Obama for America” 2012 presidential campaign organization.

Hale was also an intern in the Obama White House and worked for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).

Frank Walker of the conservative Pewsitter website labels the group a religious and political Trojan Horse designed to mislead Catholics and produce votes for the Democratic Party. Soros, the major financial backer of the Democratic Party’s “progressive” base, also supports such causes as drug legalization, the rights of “sex workers” and felons, euthanasia, radical feminism, abortion rights and homosexual rights.

The Fox story by Lauren Green, which aired on Bret Baier’s “Special Report” on Wednesday night, highlighted Hale’s criticism of Limbaugh and defense of the pope, without noting that the papal document “The Joy of the Gospel” had criticized conservative economic policies, dubbed “trickle-down” by the Vatican. Green misidentified the papal document as “The Gospel of Joy.”

Hale told Fox that the pope only wants “human-centered capitalism” promoting “people over profits,” and that he is challenging both liberals and conservatives. But that is not how Limbaugh and other conservatives are seeing it.

The Vatican document is emerging as cannon fodder for the Obama administration as it tries to change the subject from the pitfalls of socialized medicine to “inequality,” low paid workers and other social problems.

On Wednesday, in a speech to the Center for American Progress, another Soros-funded group, President Obama favorably cited the pope’s remarks. Obama said, “Some of you may have seen just last week, the pope himself spoke about this at eloquent length. ‘How can it be,’ he wrote, ‘that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?’”

But conservative Catholic writer Victor Biorseth countered, “We are already seeing how collectivism kills right here in America with the bare beginnings of Obamacare, which is a government controlled redistribution of both health care itself and health care insurance. In all likelihood people have already died, and many, many more will die, due to the critically ill losing their doctors, losing their health care facilities, being required to start treatment procedures all over again, not being able to, and losing their insurance coverage.”

Biorseth calls it “trickle-down collectivism.”

As AIM has reported, Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good received at least $200,000 from George Soros and offered a “Health Care Reform Prayer,” asking for God’s help in passing Obamacare.

We noted that the executive director of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good (CACG) at the time was Victoria Kovari, a former organizer for the Gamaliel Foundation, the same group that helped launch Barack Obama’s career as a community organizer in Chicago. She had also served as co-chair of Catholics for Obama.

The chairman of CACG is Alfred M. Rotondaro, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

How Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good became a source for stories attacking Limbaugh on Fox News and CNN is itself an interesting story.

It was first promoted as a “Catholic” group that is opposed to Limbaugh, by Media Matters, which is also Soros-funded. Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good had launched a campaign to “Tell Rush Limbaugh: We support Pope Francis!” It went on, “To call the Francis a proponent of ‘pure marxism’ is both mean spirited and naive. Francis’s critique of unrestrained capitalism is in line with the Church’s social teaching.”

While he found parts of the document on evangelism to be worthwhile, Catholic writer Biorseth also took issue with the pope’s statement that Islam is a peaceful religion. The pope had declared that “authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence.”

Biorseth countered, “No they are not. All the Koran’s violent verses instructing disciples to either convert us all to the religion of Islam, subjugate us all under Islamic law, or kill us all, were the later verses, after the flight to Medina, abrogating and replacing all the earlier more peaceful verses written at Mecca. Ask an Imam. Violent jihad is preached in virtually every Mosque on earth; all good Moslems will, at the very least, give moral support and not oppose terrorist acts done in the name of jihad. That’s just the way it is.”

Before he issued his document on “The Joy of the Gospel,” Pope Francis met in the Vatican with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the former KGB officer who now claims to be a Christian.

Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at [email protected]. View the complete archives from Cliff Kincaid.

12/7/13

South African Communists Finally Admit Nelson Mandela’s Party Leadership Role

By: Trevor Loudon
New Zeal

After decades of denials by both Mandela and the Party, the South African Communist Party has at last admitted Nelson Mandela‘s leading role in their organization.

Mandela-African-Communist-1990

Mandela wasn’t just a member of the Moscow-controlled party. He was a secret leader of the SACP’s Central Committee.

From the SACP’s Umsebenzi Online:

Last night the millions of the people of South Africa, majority of whom the working class and poor, and the billions of the rest of the people the world over, lost a true revolutionary, President Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, Tata Madiba.

The South African Communist Party (SACP) joins the people of South Africa and the world in expressing its most sincere condolences to Ms Graca Machel and the entire Mandela family on the loss of what President Zuma correctly described as South Africa’s greatest son, Comrade Mandela. We also wish to use this opportunity to express our solidarity with the African National Congress, an organisation that produced him and that he also served with distinction, as well as all his colleagues and comrades in our broader liberation movement. As Tata Madiba said: “It is not the kings and generals that make history but the masses of the people, the workers, the peasants…”

The passing away of Cde Mandela marks an end to the life of one of the greatest revolutionaries of the 20th century, who fought for freedom and against all forms of oppression in both their countries and globally. As part of the masses that make history, Cde Mandela’s contribution in the struggle for freedom was located and steeled in the collective membership and leadership of our revolutionary national liberation movement as led by the ANC – for he was not an island. In Cde Mandela we had a brave and courageous soldier, patriot and internationalist who, to borrow from Che Guevara, was a true revolutionary guided by great feelings of love for his people, an outstanding feature of all genuine people’s revolutionaries.

At his arrest in August 1962, Nelson Mandela was not only a member of the then underground South African Communist Party, but was also a member of our Party’s Central Committee. To us as South African communists, Cde Mandela shall forever symbolise the monumental contribution of the SACP in our liberation struggle. The contribution of communists in the struggle to achieve the South African freedom has very few parallels in the history of our country. After his release from prison in 1990, Cde Madiba became a great and close friend of the communists till his last days….

In honour of this gallant fighter the SACP will intensify the struggle against all forms of inequality, including intensifying the struggle for socialism, as the only political and economic solution to the problems facing humanity.

Would a sane world honor a covert Stalinist, who on Moscow’s orders, set up a terrorist organization known for setting bombs in railway stations, nightclubs and supermarket carparks?

A man who fought an obviously immoral Apartheid system, in order to replace it with even worse Soviet style socialism?

12/7/13

NROL – Nothing Is Beyond Our Reach

By: Terresa Monroe-Hamilton

Seriously? Having created an uber tense surveillance climate, the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office decided this was the perfect time to unveil their new logo of the squid who spied on me. It’s a monster octopus with tentacles that encircle the globe. I share Doug Ross’ sentiments… I’m all for a strong U.S. intelligence capability, as long as it is not used against Americans. But after the whole NSA kerfluffle (which by the way, is ridiculous since everyone is spying on everyone else and then screaming over the US doing it), this is a giant ‘F’-you moment to the world. Boy, talk about poking the Russian bear and the Chinese dragon – you might as well flash neon saying: “Please attack me.” You know, like the sign on Biden’s back that he sports during his foreign policy comedy tour.

Sometimes, The Register approaches Godhood in their prose:

The NRO are totally embracing their menacing Big Brother persona and putting it out there for world+dog to see, having launched a bunch of satellites and a mysterious payload on a spacecraft yesterday – complete with the logo of a creepy octopus sucking the life out of our world.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) tweeted pictures of an Atlas 5 rocket bearing the NROL-39 getting ready for launch yesterday, which it said was carrying a “classified NRO payload” along with some cubesats.

The NRO is the agency in charge of designing, building, launching and maintaining America’s spy satellites. The DNI said that its latest rocket would carry a dozen mini satellites co-funded by NASA as well as its unknown primary payload.

The DNI did not say just why the NRO thought that a good logo for its spy-craft would be a hugely evil-looking octopus with its tentacles wrapped around the Earth and the inscription “Nothing is beyond our reach”.

Thursday’s launch was the second time an Atlas 5 rocket has lifted off from the West Coast this year. Hmmm… Wonder what is in that payload? Nothing good, I would imagine. Looks like the surveillance state is not lacking for funding and is reaching out to touch everyone. Look out boys, your evil intentions are showing. You are taking the ‘Intelligence’ out of ‘Intelligence Agency.’

From Fox News:

The U.S. National Reconnaissance Office launched a new spy satellite Thursday evening on mission NROL-39 — and the new logo and tagline are quite an eye opener.

The new logo features a giant, world-dominating octopus, its sucker-covered tentacles encircling the planet while it looks on with determination, a steely glint in its enormous eye. The logo carries a five-word tagline: “Nothing is beyond our reach.”

Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist and senior policy analyst with the ACLU, raised a quizzical eyebrow at the new slogan.

“Advice to @ODNIgov: You may want to downplay the massive dragnet spying thing right now. This logo isn’t helping,” he wrote.

An agency spokeswoman told Forbes that there’s a very good reason for the symbol: The octopus is intelligent, and therefore a good emblem for an intelligence agency.

“NROL-39 is represented by the octopus, a versatile, adaptable, and highly intelligent creature. Emblematically, enemies of the United States can be reached no matter where they choose to hide,” said Karen Furgerson, a spokeswoman for the NRO. “‘Nothing is beyond our reach’ defines this mission and the value it brings to our nation and the warfighters it supports, who serve valiantly all over the globe, protecting our nation.”

The NROL-39 mission was classified, as are nearly all missions and satellites launched by the secretive NRO. It was carried aloft by a United Launch Alliance rocket from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California at 11:13 p.m. PST, according to NASAspaceflight.com. Because the launch trajectory matched that used by other launches, it was likely carrying a third satellite for the agency’s radar reconnaissance fleet, the site said.

Along with its secretive payload, the rocket also carried the Government Experimental Multi-Satellite (GEMSat) payload, which contained 12 “nanosatellites” that will perform a variety of science missions.

The NRO mission is to design, build, launch, and maintain America’s intelligence satellites.

Twice in one week, I’ve had to agree with the commies at the ACLU. This is getting surreal. Depicting a weakened America as a sea monster that has the planet in her 8-armed embrace is laughable. They’ve turned us into a cartoon character with just about as much menace. Seriously, who isn’t afraid of the Russian bear waiting to tear you apart? Or the Chinese dragon that could burn you to ashes while eviscerating you? We get an octopus? It’s like getting Obama instead of Reagan. It’s a joke. Next, really cool makeup for the military and snappy uniforms – oh, wait…