06/25/16

Leftists Find a Socialist They Don’t Like

By: Cliff Kincaid | Accuracy in Media

Fresh from their attendance at the Left Forum gathering of socialists and communists in New York, officials of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) have finally found a socialist they can hate: Brexit murder suspect Thomas Mair, the alleged killer of British MP Jo Cox. The SPLC says Mair has been linked to the “once-prominent American neo-Nazi group” known as the National Alliance.

But strangely enough, the SPLC neglected to mention that William Pierce, the head of the National Alliance, was also the editor of a publication called National Socialist World.

The SPLC seems to believe there is a significant moral difference between socialism based on race—the Nazi version—and socialism based on class, the Marxist version. Otherwise, why would they find one form objectionable and the other worthy of a conference featuring Evelyn Schlatter, deputy director of research of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project?

In fact, however, Adolf Hitler’s National Socialism was based on Marxism. “In public,” notes George Watson, author of The Lost Literature of Socialism, “Hitler was always anti-Marxist…” However, Watson notes that Hitler privately “acknowledged his profound debt to the Marxian tradition” and stated explicitly that “I have learned a great deal from Marxism…” Watson cites the book, Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant, by Otto Wagener, who was Hitler’s economic advisor.

In the case of the British Brexit attacker, who allegedly killed Cox because she favored keeping Britain in the European Union, the SPLC cites the British press in saying that Nazi regalia and literature, including a manual with instructions on building a pistol, were found after searching Mair’s home.

All of this is very disturbing. The neo-Nazi movement here and abroad is full of dangerous characters. But years before the SPLC advertised itself as an authority on such groups as the neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan, the FBI was monitoring and even infiltrating these groups. Leftist objections to government “surveillance” forced the FBI to curtail the monitoring of extremists.

The FBI used to infiltrate the far-right and the far-left, including such groups as the Weather Underground of Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers. A Weather Underground bomb factory discovered by the FBI in San Francisco in 1971 turned up bombs, killing instruments, and communist literature, including books by Lenin and Mao.

And yet, the SPLC’s “Teaching Tolerance” project ran an article praising Bill Ayers, who never repented for his crimes, as a “civil rights organizer, radical anti-Vietnam War activist, teacher and author.” It also claimed he had become “a highly respected figure in the field of multicultural education.”

President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice has refused to prosecute Ayers and/or Dohrn for their alleged involvement in the bombing murder of San Francisco police Sergeant Brian V. McDonnell in 1970. Dohrn has adamantly denied involvement in the bombing.

The softball treatment of Ayers and Dohrn demonstrates that the media’s designated “experts” on right-wing extremism have a big blind spot. In fact, the SPLC helped inspire an actual terrorist attack on the Washington, D.C. offices of the conservative Christian Family Research Council (FRC). This occurred after a homosexual militant discovered the location of the FRC on an SPLC “hate map.” A security guard was wounded before he took down the attacker.

Using Thomas Mair and his link to the National Alliance in their latest successful attempt to drum up some favorable media attention, the SPLC says Pierce turned the group into the most dangerous and best organized neo-Nazi formation in America. But it is not considered very significant these days. By contrast, as demonstrated by the thousands in attendance at the recent Left Forum in New York, the organized pro-communist movement, which is based on Marxism, is very much alive. Yet the SPLC mixes among and with them.

What’s more, some groups in the U.S. today considered to be pro-white are aligned with the Russian government of Vladimir Putin and his one-time influential adviser, Alexander Dugin. In fact, former KKK leader David Duke once traveled to Russia and met with Dugin.

Interestingly, the Charleston church shooter, Dylann Roof, had declared in his alleged manifesto, that “We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the Internet,” when it came to racist support groups for his planned massacre of black people. The drug-abusing 21-year-old was complaining about a lack of organized support for his views. But the SPLC tried to transform Roof into a global right-wing terrorist by linking him, without any substantial evidence, to a “worldwide white supremacist movement.”

An Internet search by Carrie Devorah determined that Roof’s website was hosted by a Russian server. This was the only evidence of an international connection to the massacre.

Nevertheless, Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, was invited to address “the scope of radicalization, and assess what steps can be taken to mitigate the rise of terror via lone wolf attacks and organized terrorist plots” in a June 23 hearing conducted by the Subcommittees on National Security and Government Operations of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

In his testimony, Cohen mentioned how he had previously testified before the House Committee on Homeland Security and had served on the Department of Homeland Security’s Countering Violent Extremism Working Group.

He said, “We must ensure that the government’s attention to the threat of Islamic extremism does not cause it to fail to devote the resources necessary to combat homegrown violent extremism based on other ideologies.” He added that “All forms of extremist violence are dangerous to our nation and must be vigorously confronted.”

But there was no mention of whether these “other ideologies” included Marxist groups like the ones the SPLC associated with at the Left Forum, or whether “extremist violence” from Marxist-oriented groups is a potential problem.

One of the participants in the Left Forum was pro-terrorist lawyer Lynne Stewart, freed from prison by the Obama administration.

As we noted previously, the SPLC employs the tactic of “partisan tolerance,” meaning that the conservatives who want to protect America and its allies from Islamic terrorists, or even from Russian aggression, have become, in their eyes, the problem.

Cliff Kincaid

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.

12/16/15

Weekly Featured Profile – Chris Crass

KeyWiki.org

Chris Crass

Chris Crass (formerly known as Chris Day) is aNashville, Tennessee, “anti-racist” activist, writer and speaker.

Crass, then known as Chris Day, was a member of the United Anarchist Front in Whittier in the early 1990s, which was part of the Love and RageRevolutionary Anarchist Federation. The United Anarchist Front mobilized against the Gulf War in 1991 and played a leading role organizing other white people to stand for immigrant rights and Ethnic Studies in Orange County, California. They worked in alliance with Chicano students fromMEChA and Crass worked on the underground student newspaper, the Molotov Cocktail.

Many Love and Ragers joined the Maoist/Gramsciist Freedom Road Socialist Organization in the early 2000s and Day/Crass has long been associated with that group.

Chis Day spent two years working in Zapatista occupied Chiapas on the construction of a clinic in the village of Benito Juarez-Miromar. He wrote an article about his Mexican experience for the Freedom Road Socialist Organization website, “The Zapatistas’ Long March,” Posted on October 1st, 2001.

In 2001, Day was also involved with the ultra-radical Ruckus Society.

Crass was an organizer and educator with the Catalyst Project from 2000 through 2011. The Catalyst Project, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, grew out of theChallenging White Supremacy workshop. Crass worked with Challenging White Supremacy after the 1999 WTO mass actions in Seattle, Washington to help strengthen anti-racist politics and practice in the mostly white sections of the Global Justice Movement. Movement elders and long time Maoists Elizabeth Martinez andRoxanne Dunbar-Ortiz were key mentors to the younger generation organizers in theCatalyst Project.

In 2000, Crass helped form the Colours of Resistance network, which served as a think tank and clearinghouse of anti-racist feminist analysis and tools for activists in the U.S. and Canada.

After Sept. 11th, 2001, he helped to found the Heads Up Collective which brought together white anti-racist organizers in the San Francisco, Bay Area, building alliances between the majority white anti-war movement and locally-based economic and racial justice struggles in communities of color. He was also a member of the Against Patriarchy Men’s Group that “supported men in developing their feminist analysis and their feminist leadership.”

In January 2002, a group of San Francisco leftists, mainly involved with Van Jones‘ neo-Maoist Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement or the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, founded a national anti-Iraq War newspaper War Timesunder the leadership of former Weatherman Eric Mann.

Since moving to Tennessee, Crass has worked closely with local Freedom Roaders, who have a big presence in the Volunteer State.

Crass was part of the founding of the national white anti-racist network, Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), and served on the leadership team in 2011. In Knoxville, TN in 2012 he helped initiate Knoxville United Against Racism to bring communities together across races to protest racial profiling, the killing of Trayvon Martin and for immigrant rights. SURJ has played a very active role in galvanizing white “progressive” support for the Black Lives Matter movement, which was essentially created by BlackFreedom Road Socialist Organization supporters.

Crass’ essays have been translated into half a dozen languages, taught in hundreds of classrooms and included in over a dozen anthologies including Globalize Liberation: How to Uproot the System and Build a Better World, On the Road to Healing: An Anthology for Men Ending Sexism, and We Have Not Been Moved: Resisting Racism and Militarism in 21st Century America. During Occupy Wall Street in 2011, he co-edited along with the Catalyst Project the Catalyzing Liberation Toolkit: Anti-Racist Organizing to Build the 99% Movement.

Crass has given talks and led workshops with thousands of people in colleges and communities around the country. As a Unitarian Universalist, he has also worked with dozens of faith-based communities around these issues including Divinity Schools and Seminaries.

(more…)

05/6/15

Liberal Media Work With Jihadists

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

It’s strange that the liberals in the media who always complain about Joe McCarthy once having a list of communists in government are so quick to cite the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of so-called right-wing extremists or “haters.”

With the help of the media, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is setting people up for terrorist attacks inside the United States. Pamela Geller is the latest on the list of the SPLC that has now been targeted for death by the jihadists. ISIS says “…we will send all our Lions to achieve her slaughter.”

ISIS is angry that Geller, an opponent of jihad, has defended the First Amendment right of free speech against Islamic Sharia law.

In response, ISIS tried to massacre people at Geller’s Muhammad cartoon contest in Texas on Sunday. Two terrorists were killed and an unarmed security guard protecting the event was shot in the leg.

It’s an open secret that ISIS can get locations for its targets from the SPLC website. That’s how homosexual militant Floyd Corkins discovered the location of the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C. and showed up at its headquarters, opening fire on a security guard. He had hoped to conduct a massacre of FRC staff.

Indeed, Corkins told the FBI after the shooting that he intended to “kill as many as possible” and smear the 15 Chick-fil-A sandwiches he was carrying in the victims’ faces. Chick-fil-A had been in the news because its CEO had defended traditional marriage.

As we noted in a previous column, “The SPLC targets its critics by name…labeling them ‘hate groups’ and running photographs of officers and employees so they can more easily be identified.”

The SPLC sends its “intelligence reports” around the country, listing people and groups by name with their locations. This puts the leaders of these groups and their families at risk of terrorist attack.

Rather than express disgust with this tactic, the media regard the SPLC as somehow a credible source of information.

This brings a human face to the slogan “if it bleeds, it leads,” and makes the media complicit in the planned jihad on American soil and its victims.

The SPLC exercises what journalist James Simpson calls “partisan tolerance,” which means conservatives and Christians must be demonized and destroyed. On the other hand, anyone on the left is acceptable. That’s why the SPLC hailed the “educational” work of Weather Underground terrorist bomber Bill Ayers.

As the leading spear-carrier in the cultural Marxist war on America, the SPLC is one of the most despicable groups on the political scene these days, and yet it is accepted by the media as somehow authoritative and respectable.

No matter how many times the group is exposed for sloppy research and money-making scams, it is still considered a source of legitimate information by some in the media.

That’s why its apparent role in the targeting for death of Pamela Geller has to be highlighted and exposed. News organizations are helping terrorist groups by giving the SPLC unwarranted sympathy and publicity.

ISIS has figured out that all it has to do in order to identify their critics is go to the SPLC website and search its “hate map” and various “lists” of so-called extremists. The SPLC makes it easy for terrorists to wage jihad on American soil.

Yet, for a time, the Obama/Holder Justice Department and its FBI openly collaborated with the SPLC. For example, Judicial Watch discovered that SPLC head Morris Dees had appeared as the featured speaker at a “Diversity Training Event” on July 31, 2012, at the Department of Justice. The FBI has even listed the SPLC as a credible source of information on “hate crimes.”

The SPLC tends to focus its critical attention on opponents of radical Islam and critics of the homosexual agenda.

The media’s reliance on this organization was disclosed publicly by the hapless Bob Schieffer on a recent “Face the Nation” episode when he interviewed Tony Perkins of the FRC and began by noting, “You and your group have been so strong in coming out…against gay marriage that the Southern Poverty Law Center has branded the Family Research Council an anti-gay hate group. We have been inundated by people who say we should not even let you appear because they, in their view, quote, ‘You don’t speak for Christians.’ Do you think you have taken this too far?”

This comment proves that Schieffer has lost it as a newsman. Did he even bother to investigate the SPLC? Was he aware of the terrorist attack on the FRC offices inspired by the SPLC?

Simply because the homosexuals inundated the CBS switchboard, Schieffer felt compelled to take their objections seriously. This is not the usual way journalism is done. But it’s the way liberals in the media operate. Their ignorance is astounding.

Geller understands what is happening and frames the issue this way: “Truth is the new hate speech.”

The media need to educate themselves quickly about how they are playing into the hands of not only the SPLC but the terrorists who are targeting enemies on American soil.

This assumes, of course, that the media do not want to inspire more violence in America.

Typically, the liberal media describe the SPLC as a “civil rights organization.”

For those in the media who want to avoid violence and report the facts, for a change, Jim Simpson’s recent talk on “cultural Marxism” is required viewing.

In a report, Simpson defines partisan tolerance as expressing “partisan hatred for everything non-leftist,” noting that it “seeks to actively muzzle the views of the majority.” This lies behind the labeling of conservatives and Christians as extremists or “haters.”

He notes that the concept of partisan tolerance is associated with cultural Marxist Herbert Marcuse and is based on “an extreme arrogance that assumes they are infallible in their utopian fantasies, and have the right to impose their will on us no matter what we think.” The notion that all positions incompatible with leftist designs can and must be suppressed is at “the heart” of their worldview, Simpson points out.

He adds, “The idea was further developed in Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, especially rule 13: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Alinsky popularized the tactic, but Marcuse invented the concept.”

In the ISIS message targeting Geller for death, the group said, “The next six months will be interesting…May Allah send his peace and blessings upon our prophet Muhammad and all those who follow until the last Day.”

It’s time for the media to stop encouraging the bloodshed.

01/13/15

Why Was Putin a No-show in Paris?

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

With good reason, media attention has been focused on President Barack Obama’s curious absence from the Paris march against terrorism. Obama became a “Where’s Waldo?” character, whose whereabouts were unknown. Observers looked for him at the march of world leaders in France, hoping to spot him somewhere. But where was Russian leader Vladimir Putin? This may have been the bigger story.

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, a source of concern in Europe, may have been a factor in his absence. But it’s also true that Putin has documented pro-terrorist credentials that should have made him persona non grata at any such event. Instead, Putin sent Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to Paris to represent his regime.

Putin was a KGB spy for many years and ran the FSB, the successor to the KGB, which trained the notorious terrorist once based in France known as Carlos the Jackal. Carlos, a name given to him because of his roots in Latin America, has been linked to communist-run international terror networks that always had an Islamic component and a strategy in the Middle East that includes the destruction of Israel.

The name “Carlos the Jackal” is well-known globally because he was the reported godfather behind such attacks as the murders of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972, and the seizure of hostages at a meeting of the oil-producing countries, known as OPEC, in Vienna in 1975. But less well-known is the international terrorist support network organized by the Soviet Union and Cuba which backed him.

President Obama may want people to believe that Russia and Cuba are no longer involved in terrorism, but hearings conducted by Congress in the 1980s, such as “The Role of Cuba in International Terrorism and Subversion,” cannot be ignored. Castro was given a role in the “Liberation of Palestine” account made by the KGB, the hearings showed, as well as promoting communism in Latin America and Africa.

Before that, in 1974, the House Committee on Internal Security produced a report, “Terrorism: A Staff Study,” analyzing Soviet, Chinese and Cuban support for international terrorism.

Today, the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) now runs the West Bank, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) continues to call Israel the “Zionist/Imperialist Project,” a typical Soviet term.

Tragically, the Senate and House committees or subcommittees on security and terrorism were dismantled and there is no such body in Congress today that specifically examines international terrorist activity and its U.S. support networks.

Former KGB officers and intelligence analysts say the PLO was created by the Soviet KGB, and that the PLO’s long-time chairman, Yasser Arafat, was an agent of the Soviet intelligence service.

Indeed, Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking defector from the former Soviet bloc, says KGB dissident Alexander Litvinenko, who was living in London, was killed by the KGB because he spilled the beans on how Soviet intelligence spawned Islamic terrorism and trained al-Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri.

But there is another fascinating aspect to the story that brings this matter up to date. Although a Marxist terrorist for much of his life, Carlos converted to Islam and is now serving a life sentence in a prison in France. He announced in 2003 that he had pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden.

While Obama seems preoccupied with the rights of terrorists and whether they are being treated properly, French Special Forces kidnapped Carlos in Sudan in 1994 using a practice known as “rendition,” a practice used by the Bush administration against terrorists that has only reluctantly been embraced by the Obama administration.

In what Obama might describe as a violation of his terrorist “rights,” Carlos was reportedly injected with a tranquilizer, bound, stuffed into a sack, and transferred to France, where he was put on trial, convicted of murder, and sentenced to life in prison.

Putin, in response to the Charlie Hedbo massacre, said through a spokesman, “Moscow strongly condemns terrorism in all its manifestations,” adding, “Moscow is sure that no terrorist acts can be justified.”

Moscow’s words need to be “parsed,” as the saying goes.

The American author Claire Sterling’s 1981 book, The Terror Network: The Secret War of International Terrorism, still stands as the authoritative analysis of the international terror networks that emerged in the late 1960s under the sponsorship of Russia and Cuba. Carlos was a key Soviet KGB operative in this effort.

Sterling identifies Carlos as someone who was under KGB control and running a terror network directly out of Paris in 1974 and 1975. He killed two French agents who tried to capture him and fled France, moving around in various Arab countries and what was then East Germany, where a young KGB spy by the name of Vladimir Putin would be based. Carlos continued carrying out attacks in France and other nations through his terror network.

Carlos was born in Venezuela as Ilich Ramirez Sanchez. His first name was given by his Marxist parents as a tribute to Soviet communist leader Vladimir Ilych Lenin. Carlos “studied” at Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, notes Jill Dougherty, once CNN’s Moscow Bureau Chief.

In fact, according to former KGB officers, the “university” was essentially run by the KGB, which used it to recruit foreign students as agents or terrorists.

The authoritative Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, which was published in France, states categorically that Carlos worked for the KGB, carrying out terrorist activities on its behalf.

Carlos also “studied” at the Tricontinental Conference in Havana in 1966. A conference of this kind and scope, Sterling wrote, “had never been seen since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and the world would never be the same.” She noted that its “General Declaration” urged close collaboration between the Soviet-style “Socialist countries” and the “national liberation movements,” in order to mount “a global revolutionary strategy” against “American imperialism.”

This is the strategy that resulted in hundreds of acts of terrorism across Europe and in the United States through such groups as the Weather Underground and the Puerto Rican FALN.

Numerous reports put Carlos at the KGB-supervised Cuban terrorist training camp known as Mantanzas, where he “studied” guerrilla warfare, sabotage techniques and bomb-making.

Former KGB agents, including Alexander Litvinenko and Konstantin Preobrazhensky, confirmed published accounts that Carlos was in fact an agent of the KGB. The 1991 book, KGB: The Inside Story, by Christopher Andrew and former KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky, also confirms his terrorist training by the Soviets and Cubans.

Interestingly, when a TV movie was aired in 2010 about Carlos the terrorist, the Kremlin propaganda channel Russia Today (RT) ran a story saying his KGB connections were murky and had been “questioned” by the movie director. However, the director of the film did say, “He (Carlos) grew up in a Marxist family in Venezuela; his parents sent him to Lumumba University in Moscow; then he was expelled from the university for bad behavior. Then he re-emerges with a gun in his hand in Jordan at the side of the Palestinian from the PFLP, led by Wadih Haddad, who was a KGB agent. So what exactly were the KGB connections of Carlos? It’s a very difficult subject.”

The director was quoted as saying, “it is debatable whether Carlos the Jackal, a supporter of radical Islamism, had KGB connections.”

Such a claim only makes sense from the perspective of a network that serves Putin’s propaganda interests and wants to distance Moscow from the carnage the Soviets inflicted, with the collaboration of the Cuban communists, on Europe and the United States.

The KGB connections of Carlos went far beyond the PFLP. What’s more, the late Herbert Romerstein, an expert on security and terrorism, had noted that the “expulsion” from Lumumba University was a diversion. He said that Carlos had left Moscow with a letter of introduction from a representative of the PFLP stationed in Moscow, and had joined that Soviet-backed Arab terrorist organization.

Carlos is in prison, but Mahmoud Abbas, the chairman of the PLO, has a similar background. . Abbas, who is also president of the Palestinian Authority, did his Ph.D. work at the KGB’s Patrice Lumumba University, where he wrote a report claiming that there was no Holocaust, and that the Jews murdered during World War II were actually killed by Zionists working with the Nazis.

The Obama and Putin no-shows in Paris were eclipsed by the attendance of Abbas, who is now seen internationally as someone opposed to the terrorism his organization has sponsored and carried out for decades. It was a clever propaganda display that Putin must have enjoyed.

01/5/15

Republicans Must Investigate Where the Media Fear to Tread

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

On Saturday and Sunday, The Washington Post’s liberal reporters warned that Republican victories in November on the national and state levels have given the GOP the opportunity this year to become “aggressive” and pass their own legislation and initiatives. “GOP will flex muscles in the states” ran on Saturday, with an article, “Eager GOP sets its goals,” about their national effort running on Sunday. But there is something else the Republicans could do to really strike fear into the hearts of liberals—restore internal security panels that once examined “un-American” activities.

The liberal media are terrified that Republicans will actually do something with their power. On foreign policy, the Post feared that Republicans could put in jeopardy President Obama’s “outreach to Cuba and Iran.” The term “outreach” implies that Obama is pursuing a wise and correct approach to our enemies in the communist and Muslim worlds. This is how a major liberal paper attempts to intimidate Republicans into letting Obama and the far-left have their way. Let’s hope the Republicans are smart enough to see through this propaganda disguised as “news.”

The liberals are worried indeed, because, as the Post notes, there are 246 Republicans in the House, the party’s largest majority since just after World War II, and the GOP now controls 31 governorships and 68 of 98 partisan legislative chambers.

On the national level, there is no formal process underway to re-establish a House or Senate internal security panel, but the need is clearly there. The proceedings of old House and Senate panels on un-American Activities or internal security have proven to be absolutely essential in understanding the rise of Barack Obama and the modern “progressive” movement. Hearings into communist activities in America were cited by such books such as Jerome Corsi’s The Obama Nation and David Freddoso’s The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media’s Favorite Candidate. That’s because Obama’s Marxist mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, and his lawyer, Harriet Bouslog, had figured so prominently in the investigations of Soviet-sponsored networks on American soil. Bouslog defended Davis against charges that not only was he a member of the Communist Party, but a suspected Soviet espionage agent.

The Republicans have controlled the House and conducted some worthwhile investigations. The Post refers to these as probes into “alleged” wrongdoing at the IRS, the Department of Justice, and the Environmental Protection Agency. Such hearings were necessary because of the media’s failure to aggressively investigate the Obama administration. Congress has failed, however, to investigate such topics as Muslim Brotherhood penetration of the executive branch. That’s why panels looking at internal security are so desperately needed.

The failure of the House to investigate the Muslim Brotherhood lies at the feet of House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), who denounced his fellow Republicans when they sought a probe of Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin’s controversial foreign Muslim connections. Boehner was also slow to embrace a special committee to investigate Benghazi.

Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy notes that the Muslim Brotherhood’s influence is so pervasive within the U.S. government and civil institutions “that a serious, sustained and rigorous investigation of the phenomenon” is in order. He adds, “To that end, we need to establish a new and improved counterpart to the Cold War-era’s HUAC [House committee on Un-American Activities] and charge it with examining and rooting out anti-American—and anti-constitutional—activities that constitute an even more insidious peril than those pursued by communist Fifth Columnists fifty years ago.”

The House Homeland Security Committee, under the chairmanship of Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX) has proven to be a major disappointment. He even refused to investigate the expansion of the Muslim Brotherhood channel, Al Jazeera, into the U.S. through the purchase of Al Gore’s Current TV.

The Senate once had a Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism that held hearings in 1982 on such topics as “The role of Cuba in international terrorism and subversion.” Such a subcommittee is badly needed today, as the Obama administration wants to drop Cuba from the official list of state sponsors of terrorism. Cuban dictator Raul Castro said of Obama’s announcement: “His decision to review the unjustifiable inclusion of Cuba on the list of state sponsors of international terrorism is encouraging.” It is time for Congress to once again document how Cuba sponsored such groups as the Weather Underground and the Puerto Rican FALN, and their bombing campaigns on American soil. The role of the Weather Underground in facilitating the prison escape of cop-killer Joanne Chesimard and her arrival in Cuba, where she remains, should be a prime topic of inquiry. She is living in Cuba with such fugitives as William Morales, the notorious FALN bomb-maker who also escaped from prison and fled.

In the same speech, Castro referred to the release from U.S. prison of the “Cuban Five” spies, saying, “I must reiterate our profound, sincere gratitude to all the solidarity movements and committees which struggled to obtain their freedom, and innumerable governments, parliaments, organizations, institutions and figures who made a valuable contribution.”

These “solidarity movements and committees” have been active on American soil for many years. I covered one of their conferences last year at a Baptist church just a few blocks from the White House. It was orchestrated by the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, D.C. and the Workers World Party, a Marxist-Leninist group. It is time for hearings into these activities and their role in the change in Obama’s Cuba policy. If Cuba is given a full-fledged embassy in Washington, D.C., we can anticipate more spying and subversion on American soil. Is that in America’s national interest?

The Post notes that, in the Senate, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Bob Corker (R-TN), plans a “rigorous hearing process” on Obama’s recognition of the communist regime in Cuba. But the hearings will prove to be inadequate unless the pro-Castro network in the U.S. is identified and examined—and we find out what the FBI knows about these “solidarity movements and committees.”

Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) can do some good work as the new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere. But a subcommittee on internal security could be revived and do a lot of specialized work into the activities of the pro-Castro lobby.

In addition to re-establishing a congressional panel on internal security, Republican-controlled states can work in the same area. Some of the best hearings into internal subversion were conducted years ago by the state legislature in California through the California Un-American Activities Committee. The Golden state is no longer in the Republican camp, but a number of states now under Republican control could decide to form legislative committees or panels and open hearings in this area.

The creation of these committees would lead to cries of “McCarthyism.” Papers like the Post would say that Republicans are being too “aggressive” and “partisan.” But the conservative base is clearly demanding action to stem the tide of Obama’s “fundamental transformation” of America. They know they can’t count on the major media to investigate the Obama administration. Another opportunity like this may never happen again.