Paleocon head-in-the-sand writer smears FDI event all over

JIHAD WATCH.COM

How interesting that the same "reporter," Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, who filed this biased and shoddy FoxNews report about my FDI event last Friday at CPAC has now written two broadsides against the event, both at antisemitic paleocon sites: Antiwar.com and The American Conservative. The three pieces are similar -- Kelley Beaucar Vlahos knows how to double-dip and triple-dip -- but since she is plastering the Internet with this nonsense, responses are in order.

First, from Fox:

"Everyone knows Islam is a religion of peace that has been hijacked by a tiny minority," said Robert Spencer, sarcastically and to a great amount of applause and guffaws. Spencer, executive director of Jihad Watch and associate director of the Freedom Defense Initiative, which he recently founded with Atlas Shrugged blogger Pamela Geller, told his audience everyone believes that "like they believe in Santa Claus though no one has ever seen it."

Sloppiness Alert: Pamela Geller's blog is Atlas Shrugs, not Atlas Shrugged.

He declared that "conservative media leaders even parrot this line" that Islam is a peaceful religion at its core.

While holding up my statements as examples of some egregious falsehood -- something she does only implicitly in the Fox article but explicitly in her other iterations of it -- Kelley Beaucar Vlahos cannot and does not produce any mainstream sect of Islam or school of Islamic jurisprudence that does not teach the necessity to wage war against and subjugate unbelievers. But she probably isn't even aware that that's the case.

So defined the event, which repeated the group's message, that political correctness was preventing the American people -- elected officials and the government included -- from acknowledging -- in Geller's words -- that Islamists "have infiltrated at every level of society and all levels of government."

Re that infiltration, see here for information from two former government officials.

Spencer called recent complaints that full body scanners at airports violate the privacy and modesty of Muslim women according to Islamic law and attempts to accommodate them a "perversity," since Muslims "themselves made (scanners) necessary."...

Sloppiness Alert: I said "absurdity," not "perversity." But in any case, Kelley Beaucar Vlahos might be hard-pressed to explain why the full-body scanners are deemed necessary if it is not because of Islamic jihad terrorists like Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab, the Christmas day underwear bomber on Flight 253, whose attempted attack is precisely the reason why the full body scanners are being contemplated.

Others speakers included Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, who is being investigated for hate speech in Austria for her critical seminars on Islam; Simon Weng, a former slave in Sudan; Anders Gravers, a Dane who wrote Stop the Islamization of Europe; and Lt. Col Allen West (Ret.), a candidate for congress in Florida.

Sloppiness Alert: Stop the Islamization of Europe is a group, not a book. Gravers did not "write" it, he is one of its leaders.

On to Antiwar.com:

[...] Even worse were the CPAC events this year in which the very loyalty of Americans was questioned and entire religions were deemed a threat to global security.

There is a worldwide movement waging war against the United States in the name of a religion, and with no significant opposition from those members of that religion who are not participating in that war. Yet if I point this out, I am "Orwellian":

If there was ever a manifestation of the radical impulses of these political events, it was the simply Orwellian experience of "Jihad: the Political Third Rail," presented by the Freedom Defense Initiative, the latest venture of jihad-hunters Pamela Geller (Atlas Shrugs) and Robert Spencer (Jihad Watch).

Attendees at this "unofficial" CPAC panel (yes, even among this crowd, Geller and friends are pretty radioactive) were forced to show picture identification at the door. Bodyguards roamed the capacity crowd, some of which donned lapel pins featuring crossed American and Israeli flags (meanwhile, new Muslim-American envoy Rashad Hussain should be put to a loyalty test to see if he is Muslim or American first, suggested one panelist)....

Radioactive? Sure. But because of moral and intellectual cowardice, and worse, among those doing the radiation tests.

Rashad Hussain defended a jihad terrorist, as he himself now admits having done. And Kelley Beaucar Vlahos actually likens this to supporting an American ally.

And does Kelley Beaucar Vlahos actually think that bodyguards and ID checks weren't necessary? Of course, her jihad-enabling and antisemitism are fashionable on campuses today, but if she really were an "American conservative" and ventured on to an American university campus without bodyguards today, she might suddenly be awakened to the need for them, emanating from the peace-loving Left and the jihadis whose peaceful religion she insists I was maligning.

Antiwar.com and its panel of apostates were duly dismissed from the outset of the "Third Rail" forum as an "outrageous" affront to the conservative ideas held at CPAC, just before Geller and Spencer went on to blame Islam for 9/11 and charged that Islamists "have infiltrated at every level of society and every level of government" in the United States. The Koran (which Rashad Hussain has supposedly memorized - the horror!) is to blame for global terrorism. If we do not act now, went the message, Shariah law will soon prevail in the U.S.

Yes, we're imagining all that. We're imagining all this also:

The Muslim Brotherhood "must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and 'sabotaging' its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah's religion is made victorious over all other religions." -- Mohamed Akram, "An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America," May 22, 1991, Government Exhibit 003-0085, U.S. vs. HLF, et al. P. 7 (21).

"We reject the U.N., reject America, reject all law and order. Don't lobby Congress or protest because we don't recognize Congress. The only relationship you should have with America is to topple it. . . . Eventually there will be a Muslim in the White House dictating the laws of Shariah." -- Muhammad Faheed, Muslim Students Association meeting, Queensborough Community College, 2003

"Let us damn America, let us damn Israel, let us damn them and their allies until death." -- former University of South Florida professor and Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Sami al-Arian

"Very soon, Allah willing, Rome will be conquered, just like Constantinople was, as was prophesized by our Prophet Muhammad. Today, Rome is the capital of the Catholics, or the Crusader capital. . . . This capital of theirs will be an advanced post for the Islamic conquests, which will spread through Europe in its entirety, and then will turn to the two Americas." -- Hamas MP and Islamic cleric Yunus al-Astal, 2008

"I have complete faith that Islam will invade Europe and America, because Islam has logic and a mission." -- Muslim Brotherhood leader Muhammad Akef, 2004

"Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth." -- CAIR cofounder and longtime Board chairman Omar Ahmad, 1998 (denial noted and full story explained at link)

"I wouldn't want to create the impression that I wouldn't like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future." -- CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper, 1993

"If only Muslims were clever politically, they could take over the United States and replace its constitutional government with a caliphate." -- prominent American Muslim leader Siraj Wahhaj, 2002

Back to Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, who prefers to pretend that we are making all that up:

Fortunately, many of us still consider standing up to the government for doing things like detaining people indefinitely without charge, or presuming suspects guilty until proven innocent, or trying to prevent the persecution of an entire population based on religious beliefs, to be "constitutional correctness," plain and simple.

Of course, no one is advocating the "persecution of an entire population based on religious beliefs," but by means of that dishonest little reductio Kelly Beaucar Vlahos hopes to bamboozle people into thinking that there is no violent or supremacist imperative in Islam, and that those who think there is a jihad against the U.S. are just imagining it. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, Nidal Hasan, and so many others would beg to differ.

And finally, Kelley Beaucar Vlahos at The American Conservative, where her crying need for an attentive editor is especially in evidence:

[...] The Newsmax alert included a headline, "Pope Warns about Full Body Scanners." Indeed, Pope Benedict XVI told an audience of aerospace industry types this week that while he is aware of the terrorist threat that has prompted enhanced screening at airports, "the primary asset to be safeguarded and treasured is the person, in his or her integrity," and that plans to implement devices that present screeners with "virtually naked" images of individual travelers compromises that integrity. [...]

But at CPAC friday [sic!], at an "unofficial" panel sponsored by jihad-hunters Pamela Geller (Atlas Shrugs) and Robert Spencer (Jihad Watch), called "Jihad: the Political Third Rail," participants balked at these religious arguments against full body scanners -- particularly because those concerns had been raised earlier, not by Catholics, but by Muslims. According to a group of Islamic scholars who posted a statement online, the intrusive images taken by full body scanners fly in the face of Koranic teachings on modesty. The group, the Figh [sic! It's Fiqh] Council of North America (FCNA), issued a fatwah, or religious edict, preventing Muslims from going through such scanners at airports.

Of course, as it stands now, anyone can opt out of a full body scan by agreeing to a "pat down." But Spencer roundly mocked these Muslims, because as far as he was concerned, Islam was responsible for 9/11 and Muslims themselves "made (full body scanners) necessary." In fact, the entire thrust of the panel was that Islam is a violent religion, a plague in fact, that needed to be cured. So any idea that Muslims would consider their faith a reason to deny airport screening was rich. "Former Muslim" and speaker Wafa Sultan, cheered the full body scan, suggesting that it would be so repulsive to Muslims -- and thanks to the fatawa [sic! This is plural of "fatwa," but there was only one], inconvenient -- that they might stop trying to bombing airplanes....

Interestingly enough, you can add Jewish law to the fatwahs and papal declarations on full body scans...

There are two things I am taking away from this issue: one, the full body scans are creepy and intrusive and violate basic civil liberties of all individuals -- on a global scale. Secondly, the sneering tenor of Robert Spencer about Muslim women and their "modesty" cannot hide the fact that the three major religions of the world -- Christianity, Judaism and Islam -- all regard modesty a prevailing virtue and, especially in the conservative observances of all three, it cannot be compromised by either the individual or the state.

Politics and the people who practice them can be so crude and reactionary- but all three religions, and the people who practice them, have much more in common outside of those political prejudices than they would care to admit. All three could create a united front on the issue of full body scans, but because one side blames the other for the use of the screening in the first place, they will remain divided....

One wonders if Kelley Beaucar Vlahos is willfully missing the point. She did not bother to speak to me, of course, before compiling this triplicate report; if she had, she might have discovered that on February 11, a week before the FDI event, I wrote that "there may be plenty of reasons to oppose body scanners." I was not expressing scorn for the modesty of Muslim women, as Kelley Beaucar Vlahos suggests, but for the idea that Muslims should be exempt from these scanners when it was the actions of jihadis that made them necessary.

But if Kelley Beaucar Vlahos is as inattentive a listener as she is a speller and writer, it is perhaps understandable that this point escaped her.

Posted by Robert on February 23, 2010 11:20 AM

Creeping Islamism: the erosion of free speech. 'Ignorance is death.'

FamilySecurityMatters.com

and

Examiner.com

http://www.examiner.com/x-5740-San-Jose-Republican-Examiner~y2010m2d20-The-erosion-of-free-speech

CPAC is certainly kicking off in high gear. On the menu this year? Islam and Free Speech, a session inviting more than a few whiners from CAIR.

An upcoming panel relating to jihad has spokesthug Ibrahim 'Doug' Hooper's panties twisted into a wad. It's been a rough year for CAIR; the publication of 'Muslim Mafia;' their flurry of lawsuits and frustrated PR wave in an effort to squash what they're referring to as 'the 'outrageous lies spread about the religion of peace!' big smile. note: the lawsuits have been unsuccessful. They are baseless.

It's only going to get worse for these folks as Americans nationwide have been alerted to jihad, dualism, roots of terror, including comparisons between the Nazis and modern radicals http://http://97.74.65.51/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=20831 The boys in the Mo's Brotherhood probably thought much of the 'efforts' to educate America would die down once they 'rid themselves' of Stephen Coughlin from his position at the Pentagon for being too 'strong' in his opinions against radical Islam. (I hate that Coughlin was fired but the idea that the pro-Islam dolts within the system thought that somehow this might make him 'less' potent truly makes me smile)

You guessed it. Coughlin is the featured presenter for the jihad event at CPAC this year. I'm thrilled and joining him will be; Lt. Colonel Allen West, War Hero and Candidate for Congress,Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, Austria, Activist, Anders Gravers, Danish Leader, SIOE, Simon Deng, Ex-Slave, Sudan, Human Rights Activist.

I can only imagine that Hooper and his fellow mosque dwellers are wondering how this could have happened and see this as ultimate betrayal.

Coughlin's message must be heard. He warns of the threat, the western penetration of Islam that sounds far-fetched to most Americans and when writing about it, invokes cries of 'fear-mongering' or 'inciting hatred' or 'writing offensive material' (that last one applies to one of my articles recently) This is not uncommon and often the result of pressure from the 'offended' community who engages in dualism; a passive-aggressive slow-growing societal cancer that is difficult to put one's finger on unless you're trained to 'see' it or truly understand the underlying elements and can clip them quickly and efficiently, each time they're encountered in everyday life.

As it is, Townhall published my article and it ended up with far more exposure then it would have had it not 'offended' individuals. (what first amendment?)

It's critical to press on, as without people willing to stomach the criticism of others, jihad prevails. Geert Wilders is on trial for his life for refusing to stay silent. He's been desperate to warn America that it's time to stop with the concerns of political correctness, especially when the muslims of Europe are throwing around ridiculous terms such as Islamophobia' although there is no such thing. It's a similar principle to theft. If you 'knew' someone was going to steal from you eventually, you'd watch your wallet around them or avoid them altogether, right? Would that make you 'greedy?' no. Islam calls for the destruction of infidels. The definition of 'infidel' is Jew or Christian. Therefore, avoiding muslims, being distrustful of them, even the 'nice' ones is not islamaphobia.

it's called rational thought.

Spencer and Geller are leading the fight (Re.: CAIR)

Israpundit.com

CAIR Smears CPAC Event
by Pamela Geller

At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) 2010, Robert Spencer and I are launching a new organization, the Freedom Defense Initiative (FDI), by presenting a conference entitled “Jihad: The Political Third Rail — What They Are Not Telling You.” The conference is designed to speak the truths that others will not speak – and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is enraged.

The conference is designed to educate Americans about the Muslim Brotherhood’s infiltration at the highest levels of the U.S. government, as well as its war on free speech: its attempt to silence and discredit those who speak up against the jihad and Sharia encroachment in the West. Emphasis will be on the international character of the jihad against the West and on how the Islamic war on free speech (and the media’s self-imposed blackout on this issue, as in the Fort Hood massacre) is part and parcel of the same jihad against the West that terrorists are pursuing by violent means.

And that’s too much for CAIR. Ibrahim Hooper, the spokesman for the unindicted co-conspirator and front for the Muslim Brotherhood CAIR (the Council on American-Islamic Relations), said, “They’re free to be anti-Muslim bigots if they like, but it’s really up to the organizers of CPAC to determine if they’re going to allow their conference to be associated with the hate-filled views of those who will be speaking.”

Why doesn’t FOX explain what CAIR is? As Robert Spencer explained at Jihad Watch:

“CAIR is an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case — so named by the Justice Department. CAIR operatives have repeatedly refused to denounce Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist groups. Several former CAIR officials have been convicted of various crimes related to jihad terror. CAIR’s cofounder and longtime Board chairman (Omar Ahmad), as well as its chief spokesman (Honest Ibe Hooper), have made Islamic supremacist statements. CAIR has warred against free speech in the past.”

Why doesn’t FOX read the documents from the Holy Land trial, which exposed the Muslim Brotherhood’s agenda of “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within,” and made plain CAIR’s connection to the Brotherhood? Why does FOX cover for this subversive organization? And why do they run everything they say unchallenged while smearing me in every other paragraph?

Why am I called a bigot by a vocal anti-Semite, unchallenged?

The FOX article also makes this accusation: “organizers of the ‘Jihad’ session have been trying to stir the pot with what they call a blunt and objective discussion of Muslims’ attempts to harm the West while silencing criticism.” FOX acts as if this is just some claim we’re making. Did they try to find out if there really were any Muslim attempts to “harm the West while silencing criticism.” Spencer commented on this that the FOX reporter, Judson Berger, “probably has no idea that the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), to which Obama just sent a special envoy, has for years now spearheaded an effort at the UN to compel member states to criminalize what it calls ‘defamation of religions,’ but by which it clearly means any honest discussion of the texts and teachings of Islam that jihadists invoke to justify violence and supremacism.”

This FOX article is more proof of why this conference is so very necessary. All you have to do is utter jihad and the smear merchants and their handmaidens come out shooting.

The Islamic supremacists are trying to shut down free speech, and especially speech that reveals who they are, what they are doing, and how they are infiltrating America at senior levels of the Pentagon, the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Homeland Security.

Lisa DePasquale of CPAC said: “We have different perspectives among the co-sponsor events and we don’t want to censor any group from being able to invite people to attend their forums.”

Be there, folks. This event is supplying truth that you will not hear elsewhere, and on which hangs the very future of our nation. You can see from this FOX article how much powerful people don’t want you hearing the things we are going to be discussing at this conference. It will be held at the Mariott Wardman Park Hotel, the site of CPAC, on February 19, from 10AM to noon.

In the war of ideas, this is the battleground.

Conservatives Pack Largest-Ever CPAC

Newsmax

Thursday, February 18, 2010 10:39 AM

By: Ronald Kessler

This time last year, pundits were predicting the end of conservatism and the Republican Party.

So-called conservative columnists like David Frum, formerly of National Review, and David Brooks of The New York Times were warning conservatives that something was wrong with their beliefs.

But Dave Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, was predicting that President Obama would overreach and help Republicans return to power.

As the elections in Massachusetts, Virginia, and New Jersey demonstrated, Keene was dead on.

This week, Keene presides over the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), where a 28 percent increase in registrations over last year underscores his optimism. With more than 10,000 conservative activists attending this year, CPAC has moved to Washington’s Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, where the ballroom holds 2 1/2 times more people than at the previous location.

Besides speeches by the likes of Mitt Romney, Marco Rubio, Newt Gingrich, Glenn Beck, Michele Bachmann, Liz Cheney, and George Will, CPAC features panels focusing on issues, workshops on campaign techniques, booths run by 96 co-sponsors, and receptions and dinners.

“The difference between this year and previous years is that we really are in the midst of a revitalization of commitment to conservative ideals at the grass roots,” Keene tells Newsmax. “The town-hall meetings, the tea parties, the sort of unwillingness of conservatives at the local level to be directed by establishment politicians and establishment parties, while being dedicated to the very values that national conservatives have been arguing for years, is really a rebirth of the conservative movement.”

In contrast, “All you have to do is think back a year or so, when Barack Obama and the Democrats and the liberals were riding high and we were told that the days of conservative ascendancy had ended, that the conservative philosophy was no longer saleable,” Keene says. “Even some within our own midst were saying that this dedication to limited government just wouldn’t sell in the modern world, that we needed to abandon those kinds of things and get with the program.”

Now, Keene says, “It is precisely those traditional values, that traditional view that individuals rather than the state ought to be making decisions, that has revitalized the movement all the way down to every locality that you can imagine. And that is now flowing in and strengthening the movement nationally as well.”

Looking back, Keene says he underestimated just how much Obama would overreach.

In Keene’s view, Obama “really does seem to believe that the American people really want him to do what he wants to do. And to the extent that they don’t get lined up behind him, it’s either a result of some conspiracy from the right or the influence of cable news and talking heads, or it’s because for some reason the public isn’t smart enough to absorb what he really wants to do for them.”

As it turns out, Obama “misread the public,” Keene says. “In a democratic system, if you misread the public and you try to take people out into a direction they don’t want to go, and you push it enough, you’re going to get just the kind of push-back that Obama’s gotten. And that push-back may not only spell troubled days for him, but it could doom his party in the next election.”

The public’s growing disenchantment with Obama has helped spawn the tea party movement, which strengthens this revitalization of the conservative movement, Keene says.

“You’ve got a boiling ferment at the local level as people who’ve never been involved in politics before are saying, We’re scared,” Keene observes. "They say the country’s off track, something needs to be done, the government’s spending too much money, nobody’s listening to us. And they have become a movement on their own.”

As a result, “We’ve got a spontaneity that is most probably reminiscent of the way the movement developed in the late ’60s and early ’70s before the national victories that began the centralization of the movement in Washington,” Keene says.

While Sarah Palin has positioned herself as a spokesperson for grass-roots activists, she has so far declined to speak at CPAC.

“We’ve invited her, and she’s been unable to make it for the last three years,” Keene says. “She said last year she was going to make it and then wasn’t able to. This year she’s been on her book tour, and she’s got other things, and she did the so-called tea party convention, and I don’t know what she’s doing right now. But we’re hoping that she’ll be with us next time.”

As in the past, the ACU’s foundation, which actually runs CPAC, has priced tickets so students can buy them.

“The first CPAC was held in 1973,” Keene says. “It had about 125 people attending, and Ronald Reagan was the speaker.”

Reagan proved to be a loyal fan of CPAC, speaking at 17 of them. At one of the dinners, the president mentioned to Keene that he could talk to rich people and establishment Republicans any time.

“But,” Reagan said, “this is the only place that I can come to and talk to the people that got me to where I am today, the people who make up this movement. It’s the only place where they get together annually. It’s the only place they can afford to attend, because they’re not the rich people, they’re not the grandees.”

Reagan asked Keene to promise that he will never change CPAC so that it becomes impossible for those people to come.

“Keep the price low, make sure that you’re bringing in new people, and keep CPAC what it’s become and what it ought to always be,” Reagan said.
Given that half the attendees this year will be college students, CPAC has remained true to that request.

Ronald Kessler is chief Washington correspondent of Newsmax.com. View his previous reports and get his dispatches sent to you free via e-mail. Go here now.




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