Anti-Israel, Pro-Hamas Muslim Leader Is US Delegate to Warsaw Human Rights Conference
His most infamous statement was during a radio interview on September 11, 2001, accusing Israel of the attack on the WTC
Great teeth
For two weeks every year, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe holds what it refers to as the world's largest human rights and democracy conference, called the Human Dimension Implementation Meeting. Organized by the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, this year's meeting is taking place in Warsaw, and it began last week. Special attention is focused this year on freedom of religion and belief, the rights of Roma (formerly called gypsies) women and the rights of national minorities in OSCE countries.
The head of the U.S. delegation to the conference this year is Ambassador Avis Bohlen, a retired foreign service officer whose career included serving as Ambassador to Bulgaria from 1996 - 1999.
There are three public members of the U.S. delegation. Nida Gelazis, of the Woodrow Wilson Center, is a scholar of international human rights, international law and citizenship policies and protection of national minorities.
Dr. Ethel Brooks, professor of sociology at Rutgers University, is the second representative of the U.S. at the conference. Brooks has published many articles on her research areas which include child labor in third world countries, globalization and political economies.
The third public member chosen to attend the human rights conference as a representative of the U.S. is Salam Al-Marayati, president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council.
While two out of three of the U.S. representatives are scholars whose fields suggest expertise in human rights and democratization, and are entirely consistent with the themes of the OSCE and, specifically, human rights and democracy, Al-Marayati's appointment raises serious questions.
Counter-terrorism expert Steve Emerson told The Jewish Press that
Al-Marayati's appointment is not just scandalous but also does incalculable damage to our values as a nation whose core principles categorically reject the legitimization of a racist supporter of terrorism, and an incendiary proponent of paranoid conspiracies that provides the motivation for radical Muslims to carry out terrorism.
Al-Marayati is not a scholar. His only graduate degree is in business and his undergraduate degree is in science. He has been involved with MPAC since its founding in 1986. Without any scholarly article to his credit, his expertise is in matters concerning the role of Islam and Muslims in America and elsewhere.
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Jobs, Taxes, Oil, Investment and Debt
This week Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post writes that cutting taxes has no effect on economic growth. Hit the rich she says. Larry Kudlow of National Review writes that cutting taxes expands economic growth and creates jobs through private investment. Who is right?
Kudlow. Hands down. Slam dunk. Ms. Marcus fails to examine a simple proposition: when did the past four recoveries begin, when did tax rate cuts kick in, and how many jobs were thus created by new private investment.
Mr. Kudlow connects the job growth with the tax rate cuts and makes the case. Let's look it up.
In 1983, Reagan's tax rate cuts fully kicked in. Private investment soared to $177 billion or by 33%, and exceeded the previous four years by a factor of ten. 4.9 million Jobs were created over the next year. 11 million over 3 years. Government spending was kept at 20% of GDP. Reagan eliminated price controls on oil and prices dropped $17 a barrel.
In 1997, the Clinton administration cut taxes on capital gains, increased the child tax credit, reformed welfare and adopted a plan to cut government spending to 18% of GDP and balance the budget. In 1997, private investment increased by $148 billion, the largest amount in the eight years of the Clinton administration. 3.3 million jobs were created that year. Oil production increased and oil prices averaged $16 a barrel.
In 2003, President Bush secured a cut in tax rates, with 80% of the cuts occurring in that year. Private investment into the economy soared to $250 billion, a record, and next year 2.3 million jobs were created. By 2009, spending was 21% of GDP, at the historical average.
But oil prices reached $145 a barrel in 2008 and as Secretary of the Treasury Geithner explains, that killed the US economy. Fracking technology was just beginning to take hold but not soon enough to rescue the US economy.
In 2009-10, private investment into the US economy increased only a combined $100 billion. Government spending soared to 25% of GDP, far above the historical average. Since the June 2009 recovery began, a paltry 100,000 jobs a month have been created over three years. If one combined 1983, 1997 and 2004, job creation hit 11.5 million, more than three times faster than 2009-12.
Oil production on Federal lands declined 40%. Yet state and private lands-using American fracking technology-- have doubled gas production.
But the regulators want to kill fracking. And fracking is banned on Federal lands. Trillions of barrels of oil remain right beneath our feet and we cannot touch it. And oil tops $100 a barrel, an increase of $70 since January 2009.
The n Senator Obama campaigned in 2008 in Ohio and charged the Bush administration was immoral to have increased our debt by $4 trillion and cut household income $2000. He said we were buying too much oil from overseas. And thus no Republican deserved to be elected to the White House.
Since the 2009 recovery began, US household income is down 8% or over $4000. The national debt has climbed nearly $6 trillion. Oil has averaged near $100 a barrel, nearly triple what it was in 2009, and we are sending $300 billion overseas to buy it. While OPEC is getting rich, we are going broke.
The administration's policies are driving spending up to trillions of new debt. Today's spending of $3.8 trillion is projected to rise to $5.5 trillion in ten years. This is driven in part by Obama Care, which will cost $2.7 trillion, with only $500 billion in new taxes to pay for it. Yet 30 million will remain uninsured.
By 2020, deficits remain over $1 trillion according to the administration's own budget numbers. Oil and energy costs are being deliberately increased, because this administration believes we consume too much energy. His Energy Secretary wants the US to have European gas prices-that's $10 bucks a gallon.
More people have been added to the welfare and poverty rolls since 2009 than have been put to work. 591,000 people left the work force last month, giving up looking for work, losing hope.
The President says the private sector is doing fine. He says the deficit is only a problem for the "long term". He says "shovel ready"" jobs really were never available.
Washington Post writer Bob Woodward says that we are in a period of maximum peril, that our debt is "beyond unsustainable", and the President remains ambivalent even though his Treasury Secretary warns him "You have to fix it". There was a bipartisan deal on the table in 2011, but the President said no.
Under the President's own rules he used in the 2008 campaign, his policies have failed, they have not worked. Doing over the next four years what he has done in the past four years will not turn failure into success. As his Secretary of the Treasury said to Congress: "We have no plan but we do not like yours".
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Government training , included exercise in which employees were told to chant "our forefathers were illegal immigrants."
The U.S. government paid a Chicago consultant hundreds of thousands of dollars to put on diversity training workshops that, according to one watchdog, included an exercise in which employees were told to chant "our forefathers were illegal immigrants."
Conservative group Judicial Watch made the claim this week as it released a handful of documents pertaining to the program -- and alleged that the sessions held by the Department of Agriculture ended up enforcing political views more than promoting tolerance.
"Instead of being diversity-oriented or tolerance-oriented, it's more about adopting a mindset," said Lisette Garcia, a senior investigator with the group. "It seemed to go so far as to encourage illegal immigration."
But the USDA denied that the workshop was anything more than a training exercise to "examine stereotypes."
"Participants did not chant during these workshops," a department official said. "In one portion of the session, the presenter had participants repeat provocative and potentially offensive phrases as part of an exercise to examine stereotypes. The statements were not reflective of USDA or its policy."
Judicial Watch began to investigate the sessions earlier this year after being approached by a tipster at USDA who was "offended" by them, Garcia said. Judicial Watch claims it has identified at least $200,000 spent by the USDA over the last two years on the company Souder, Betances & Associates.
The USDA later confirmed that amount.
The tipster, Garcia said, described one session in which the speaker led workers in chanting "our forefathers were illegal immigrants" while pounding on the table and getting others in the room to join in. "How does that fit into the USDA mission at all?" she said. "The price tag makes it more egregious."
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‘Mainstream’ Media Making A Desperate Last Stand?
In a particularly noxious September 30 article entitled "Tired Cries of Bias Don't Help Romney," New York Times columnist David Carr made a ludicrous effort to deflect conservative animosity towards the "mainstream" media. He contended that it is misplaced, and likely just an outgrowth of the frustration ostensibly felt by those on the right who want to see Barack Obama defeated in November. Carr attempts to make a case that the abundance of modern alternative media somehow negates the total lack of objectivity by "reporters" in the nation's major newspapers and on the nightly news. But by his very methodology in articulating his case, he proves the indictment of the decidedly liberal press.
Nor is Carr alone. On a PBS broadcast the following day, commentators Mark Shields and Nina Totenberg did their best to ridicule anyone who would dare contend that liberal bias exists among prominent media figures. Their scorn (embellished with forced laughter), represented a flailing version of the standard Alinsky tactic of mocking an argument that cannot be substantively refuted. This approach has often worked in the past. Act like it is an absurd point, and that those who ascribe to it are dim-witted, and hopefully others will be dissuaded from publicly agreeing with them.
Unfortunately for leftists, the ruse is no longer even remotely credible. Their attempts to execute a preemptive strike are becoming embarrassingly obvious. A pattern is emerging of media liberals seeking to bolster their integrity in the midst of a presidential campaign in which they have been anything but believable. Like the proverbial kid who cries out from the rear of the classroom with an unsolicited declaration of his total innocence, the rising fervor with which they try to exonerate themselves makes them look increasingly guilty. Indeed this is an old debate, but it is one that liberals are dredging up with a degree of coordination suggesting an agenda.
Even a cursory glance at the New York Times' evaporating circulation yields ample evidence that the numbers who find Carr, Shields, and their kind believable are dwindling. Yet this is a critical time for those on the left, who consider this November's elections to be game, set, and match. A loss by Barack Obama will represent an absolute repudiation of every aspect of the liberal/socialist utopia that society's most gullible have been eagerly anticipating since the days of Karl Marx. An electoral rout will put liberals in full retreat, not only on the political front, but in the ideological and philosophical realm as well. It is not surprising that, with so much at stake, they are making every effort to sway the outcome in their favor, and in particular, they are working overtime to thoroughly control the flow of information to the public.
Nevertheless, to their dismay, the conservative media flourishes. Though it takes more effort to root out information on the Internet or other alternative sources, for those who are sufficiently motivated, the avenues to truth exist. So it is incumbent upon the liberal/Democrat political propagandists to rail and accuse with sufficient volume to drown out all other information among those who still passively receive their daily news and accept it at face value.
That liberal "journalists" are able to engage in such behavior while professing, with totally straight faces, to embody objectivity and professionalism is a testament to their consuming devotion to their real cause, which is a wholly political one. They simply cannot be so pathologically naive or delusional to not recognize the bias that permeates every sentence they utter. So they must be deliberately and purposefully lying.
Entire organizations, such as Reed Irvine's "Accuracy In Media" and Dr. Brent Bozell's "Media Research Center" have been established for the purpose of calling the "mainstream news outlets" to account. And the incriminating evidence of their shady reporting exists in abundance. Yet they still cling tenaciously to their assertions of neutrality, and caterwaul with indignation at the merest suggestion that they might be less than such.
Though it may be stating the glaringly obvious to assert liberal media bias, their constant professions of angelic innocence must be countered. The many successes of the liberal propaganda onslaught during the last several decades has inarguably proven that a lie incessantly repeated must be just as diligently refuted, or it will eventually be accepted as "self-evident" truth. So a few examples of their ongoing moral and ethical bankruptcy should serve to remind Americans of just who they are, and more importantly, what manner of leaders they consider worthy to govern the nation.
Imagine how devastating Barack Obama's "You didn't build that" comment would be to his reelection efforts, if the nightly news anchors had delivered it with even a fraction of the fervency and outrage with which they relentlessly excoriated Mitt Romney for his "Forty Seven Percent" remark. Yet the major networks were at first virtually silent on Obama's outlandish assertion, though later, upon realizing how severely Real America was outraged by it, they felt compelled to defend their dear leader on the standard grounds that he was "taken out of context."
Going all the way back to Nancy Reagan's tenure as First Lady, the press has kept a sharp eye on Republican Presidents' wives and children, gleefully informing the public of any supposed lapses in decorum. In Nancy Reagan's case, a huge and ongoing "controversy" was concocted after her decision to upgrade White House dinnerware, as if that episode constituted an unforgivable breach of the public trust. In contrast, the lavish and exorbitantly expensive lifestyle enjoyed by Michelle Obama, involving innumerable vacations with enormous supporting "staff," are rarely discussed by liberal "reporters."
What if the media were to pursue the truth of the "Fast and Furious" disaster and the obvious complicity of Attorney General Erik Holder with a determination similar to their efforts to indict George Bush advisor Karl Rove over the manufactured Valerie Plame ruckus? It is noteworthy that Rove was fully exonerated of any wrongdoing in the affair. Yet in the wake of his acquittal, those "unbiased" news reporters refused to accept such a verdict. In contrast Holder, and indeed the entire Obama Administration, have clearly stonewalled every effort to get to the bottom (or, more accurately, the "top") of Fast and Furious. This time however, the media yawns.
Only the constraints of space impose a limit on the number of other examples that could be given, though a cursory mention of the treasonous Benghazi cover-up, and its implications to national security, is definitely warranted. In short, an unbiased media, primarily concerned with honestly informing the American people, would long ago have declared Obama's tenure in office a dismal failure. Instead, they rally to him and in the process make his shortcomings their own.
The people of the Heartland are correct to recognize that the dangers posed to them by a deceitful press are no less grave than those of an unscrupulous and ideologically blinded leftist administration whose sedition is empowered by their media minions.
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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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