05/17/15

MORE and OBS, Next Revolution Fellowship

By: Denise Simon
FoundersCode.com

OBS Ferguson

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There is MORE, Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment, and OBS.

Remember Ella Baker? If not, then you may remember Van Jones, the Green Czar that was exposed by Glenn Beck and snuck out of the White House in the middle of the night. Yes, that guy. Van Jones carries the torch for Ella Baker.

So, this OBS and MORE with Next Revolution is based on Ella Baker’s legacy and you saw their work in Ferguson, Missouri.

Does this logo appear rather militant?

Or this one?

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Do you wonder about their application and approval by the IRS?

There is paid training, travel expenses and protest instructions. Enter OBS…

OBS, Organization for Black Struggle has some interesting partners. They include: Advancement Project, Black Workers for Justice, Black Youth Project, Black Lives Matter, Dream Defenders, Jobs with Justice, Justice for Reggie, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Million Hoodies Movement for Justice, Ohio Student Association, Peace Economy Project, Sankofa, SisterSong and there are more as listed here.

Oh joy, they have a fellowship program too. But apply quickly, the next class begins on May 22, 2015.

Parameters:

1. By joining the program, fellows agree to go through a 5-week long organization building module, to be supervised by a Youth Director.

2. Each week of the program covers crucial knowledge on how to build an organization, develop programs and campaigns, and create coalitions using Black Liberation framework.

3. Each fellow will schedule twice weekly sessions with a mental health counselor for the duration of the program. We’ve all been through a lot these past few weeks and we have to care ourselves if we hope to transform our communities.

4. Each fellow will complete weekly benchmarks.

5. After each successfully completed week, each fellow will receive a $100 stipend.

6. At the end of program, each fellow gets $500 to start an organization or project.

7. To get the start up, each fellow must meet each weekly benchmark. If all benchmarks are not successfully met during the program, they must be met within 30 days of program end date, without the stipend.

8. This program is limited to 12 fellows per session.

At the end of this program, fellows will be fully equipped to take their skill-sets back into their communities and start to organize for the change that they want to see. The hope is that during the program, fellows will become familiar enough each other so that at the end of the program, some may decide to work together, pool their resources, or create organizations with their peers.

02/4/15

Terrorists and Our Idiot President

By: Alan Caruba
Warning Signs

TerroristsYou know something is terribly wrong when three former Secretaries of State, Henry Kissinger, George Schultz and Madeleine Albright tell a Senate Armed Services Committee that the President of the United States is an idiot with no idea how to conduct foreign affairs. Well, they didn’t say it in those words, but that was pretty much the message. That was January 29.

Two days earlier retired 4-Star General James Matthis, former head of U.S. Central Command, former Army Vice Chief of Staff and 4-Star General Jack Keane, and Navy Admiral William Fallon, also a former CentCom chief, had also testified before the Committee. They had a similar message as the diplomats. Obama and the other idiots in the White House are completely clueless regarding the threat of radical Islam in general and a potential nuclear Iran in particular.

This is, after all, a White House that is trying to call those intent on taking over the entire Middle East and, after that, the rest of the world anything other than “terrorists.” They have used terms such as “insurgents”, “activists” and “militants.” Here at home, they are still referring to the killings at Fort Hood as “workplace violence.” Don’t any of these idiots understand that the terrorists, whether they call themselves al Qaeda or the Islamic State, Hezbollah, Hamas or any other name all constitute the same threat?

That’s what the generals addressed. They told the Senate committee that absence of a White House strategy makes the ISIS, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan wars “unwinnable.” I have been around since the end of World War II and that stretch of U.S. history is one in which we fought to a stalemate in Korea and a loss in Vietnam. After we won the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, Obama pulled out and now they are lost too. There was a time when Americans and their leaders knew how to win wars.

Indeed, there was a time when Americans preferred to elect generals to be their President, starting with George Washington. Among those with that rank were Andrew Jackson, Zachary Taylor, Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, Ruther P. Hayes, James A. Garfield. Chester A. Arthur. Benjamin Harrison, and Dwight D. Eisenhower. All the others had also served in the military in some capacity…except Barack Hussein Obama.

Obama not only doesn’t have experience in the military, he doesn’t seem to like them much. He has done everything he can to reduce our military capacity to fight a war anywhere or to show any genuine respect for the troops on active duty. The only uniform he ever wore was as an Indonesian Boy Scout.

Obama Foreign PolicyRetired Marine Gen. Jim Mattis told the Congress “America needs a refresh national security strategy. We need to come out from our reactive crouch and take a firm, strategic stance in defense of our values.” Apparently those values don’t matter to the White House or to those left-wingers who wet their pants over the popularity of “Sniper”, a film that pays tribute to our troops who fought the war in Iraq.

Under Obama’s term in office, radical Islam has increased four-fold in the past five years, ISIS ten times since 2012 and Iran has masterminded control of the capitols in Beirut, Lebanon, Damascus, Syria, Baghdad, Iraq, and now in Sanaa, Yemen. It has been the power behind Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

Gen. Keane described Obama’s withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan as an “absolute strategic failure.” He called radical Islam “the major security challenge of our generation.”

Regarding Iran, Gen. Keane said, “In 1980, Iran declared the United States as a strategic enemy and its goal is to drive the United State out of the region, achieve regional hegemony, and destroy the state of Israel.”

“Is there any doubt that Iran is on the march and is systematically moving toward their regional hegemonic objective?” asked Gen. Keane. “Iran has been on a 20-year journey to acquire nuclear weapons, simply because they know it guarantees preservation of the regime and makes them, along with their partners, the dominant power in the region, thereby capable of expanding their control and influence. Add to this their ballistic missile delivery system and Iran is not only a threat to the region, but to Europe, as well.” The U.S. in time will be in missile range.

“We have no comprehensive strategy to stop it or defeat it,” said Gen. Keane.

Thanks to Barack Obama, the United States of America can no longer be seen as the world leader, opposing the forces that seek to impose control. Former allies, particularly in the Middle East, no longer have any confidence that we would come to their defense if they were attacked.

Thanks to Barack Obama, our enemies have been emboldened and our allies confused, but it is not that confusing. He is an idiot who lacks any grasp of history’s lessons and he is a coward who cannot be expected to seriously respond to our own and our allies’ enemies.

© Alan Caruba, 2015

12/17/14

The Compassion of the Religion of Peace is Fatal

By: Richard Cameron
Blasted Fools

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One of the main issues that commenced my fallout with George W. Bush, was the incredible statement he made that “Islam is a religion of peace”. From that moment forward, I began to see the fiction of the ‘War On Terror’ in an entirely new light. There could be no war on terror if the ideology behind the terrorists was being redefined by the leader of the free world as something other than the vicious, hateful and divisive creed that it is.

It was my first, but not last clue that regards whatever war we were conducting –  defeating terror and opposing the foundational beliefs inspiring it, wasn’t the object of our mission. If the Koran and the other related commentaries of Islam were dictating attacks on infidels and we weren’t at war with it, just what were we at war with?

Later, our government stripped away all pretense of such a purpose, by mothballing the expression ‘War on Terror’ altogether.

It’s interesting to hear apologists for Islam claim that hateful behavior of Muslims is not mainstream, but only from radical groups that have “hijacked the faith”.  As a rationale for dismissing the likelihood that Islam contains within itself something inherently toxic, progressives will argue that the actions of certain individuals bombing abortion clinics, demonstrate that there are extremists in all religions.

The obvious problem with that argument is that if persons representing themselves as Christians committed even a tiny fraction of the number of barbaric acts that Muslims perpetrate, we would be inundated with reports of them in the mass media.

Islamic hate crimes are the statistical norm among the followers of that religion, whereas, sectarian crimes by Christians, Buddhists, Jews and Hindus are anomalies by comparison.

From Africa to Syria to Pakistan and Egypt and throughout the Islamic world, the conditions of fear and terror that Christians and other religious minorities live under on an hour to hour basis, defy imagination.

One can only read the testimonies of the survivors to begin to conceive of the atrocities committed by Islam’s faithful – and a full accounting of the thousands of such attacks would fill several volumes. What’s more, these would be in addition to the well publicized activities of the Islamic State.

According to one estimate, a Christian is martyred every five minutes. Of 50 countries where Christians are under attack, 42 have either a Muslim majority or have sizable Muslim populations. That would indicate to any reasonable observer that there is something in the Islamic ‘water’.

Most people have heard the accounts of school children in Nigeria abducted by the hundreds by the Islamic militant group Boko Haram. Garnering less publicity are the distressing accounts of ethnic cleansing being perpetrated by the group.

It was reported in August by Voice of the Martyrs that Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram beheaded a six-year-old boy on June 1 because he was a Christian. The attack occurred in Attagara, Gwoza district, Borno State – a predominately Christian community. Over 100 militants descended upon the village, slaughtering men, women, and children.

In this incident, a man named Sawaltha Wandala witnessed children being murdered on his way to church service. A six-year-old boy had been slashed and thrown into a ditch, but was alive. Wandala picked him up to carry him to a hospital in Cameroon, when he was confronted by a gang of terrorists. They took the child from Wandala, cut his head off then beat 55 year old Wandala and struck him over the head with a large stone, leaving him to die.

During another attack on Attagara, John Yakubu returned to his family’s home to gather their animals so his family wouldn’t starve in the refugee camp in Cameroon. He was spotted by Boko Haram members and taken captive.

“We know you’re John,” they said to him, according to Voice of the Martyrs. “You must convert to Islam or else you will die a painful death.” When Yakuba refused to denounce Christ, they tied his arms and legs to a tree, and hacked his hands with a knife.

“Can you become a Muslim now?” “You can kill my body, but not my soul,” Yakubu cried out. The men continued to cut his feet and back with a machete and knife to torture him. “We will show you.”  Yakuba’s head was slashed, and an axe was driven into his knee, reaching the bone. He lost consciousness and was left tied to the tree for three days before someone found him, after which he was taken to the hospital in a coma.

In another incident,  a teacher of a school for boys in Northeast Nigeria described the group’s killing of 29 young men. The militants locked the door of one dormitory where male students were sleeping and then set it ablaze, slitting the throats of those who tried to clamber out of windows and gunning down those who ran away, said teacher Adamu Garba.

Rape of Christian women and girls is widespread in Muslim countries such as Pakistan –  one of America’s counterfeit ‘allies’. The attorney of one victim –  a 12 year old, who was raped by a gang of Muslim men, describes the government’s collusion with Islamic criminals:

“In Pakistan rape is used as an instrument of arbitrary power over Christian girls, who come from poor and marginalized families. It is a form of violence that wants to reiterate the submission to Muslims. The rest of society is not outraged because the victims mostly belong to religious minorities, who are the most vulnerable. Rarely rapists are punished. Furthermore, rape victims face terrible difficulties; they do not receive adequate medical treatment for sexual assault. Many girls are traumatized and become depressed and in need of psychological assistance.”

No one, whether it be a Catholic nun, a small child, a baby, a young girl not yet in puberty, or the elderly – are spared the ferocity of hate and spiteful treatment from these denizens of Hell. Their targets are not limited to just those of the Christian faith. Jews, Hindus, Yazidis and others are subject to their wrath as well.

Kirsten Powers of USA Today recounts an interview with Human rights lawyer Nina Shea, in which Shea described the horror in Mosul . “(The Islamic State) took the Christians’ houses, took the cars they were driving to leave. They took all their money.

One old woman had her life savings of $40,000, and she said, ‘Can I please have 100 dollars?’, and they said no. They took wedding rings off fingers, chopping off fingers if they couldn’t get the ring off.  “We now have 5,000 destitute, homeless people with no future,” Shea said. “This is a crime against humanity.”

The men of faith who have stood in the eye of the Islamic storm have a message to us in the West.  Patriarch Ignace Joseph III Younnan, head of the Syrian Catholic Church in Lebanon, describes the campaign against Christians as religious cleansing:

“I want to tell American Christians to stand up, wake up and no longer be a silent majority. American-elected representatives need to stand up for their principles on which the U.S. has been founded: the defense of religious freedom … and respect for human rights.”

The exiled Chaldean Catholic archbishop of Mosul, Iraq, warned the West that its turn will come.  Archbishop Amel Shimoun Nona, writes:

Our sufferings today are the prelude of those you, Europeans and Western Christians, will also suffer in the near future. I lost my diocese. The physical setting of my apostolate has been occupied by Islamic radicals who want us converted or dead. But my community is still alive.

Please, try to understand us. Your liberal and democratic principles are worth nothing here. You must consider again our reality in the Middle East, because you are welcoming in your countries an ever growing number of Muslims. Also you are in danger. You must take strong and courageous decisions, even at the cost of contradicting your principles.

You think all men are equal, but that is not true: Islam does not say that all men are equal. Your values are not their values. If you do not understand this soon enough, you will become the victims of the enemy you have welcomed in your home.

And Archbishop Nona’s warning has unfolded as reality in the U.K, America and in Europe, wherever followers of ‘The Prophet’ have migrated. Breitbart reports that school health services in the small Swedish city of Norrköping have found 60 cases of female genital mutilation (FGM) among schoolgirls since March, with evidence of mutilation found in all 30 girls in one class, 28 of the most severe form.

And in England, Muslim men have committed thousands of rapes of children which the public authorities have taken great pains to ignore and cover up. The courts have so made themselves instruments of permissiveness that the U.K.’s military is forbidden to even raise their voice to militants during questioning.

In a follow up report, we will examine how American foreign policy has made religious minorities, particularly in the Middle East, more vulnerable to the savagery of the ‘religion of peace’.