Well, at least a few journalists are doing their jobs and finding previously published words of the proposed-WTC mosque backer, Imam Feisel Abdul Rauf. Here’s the WSJ:
In a letter published on November 27, 1977, Mr. Rauf commented on Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s historic trip to Israel and encouraged his fellow Muslims to “give peace a chance.” That John Lennon lyric sounds good. But he added: “For my fellow Arabs I have the following special message: Learn from the example of the Prophet Mohammed, your greatest historical personality. After a state of war with the Meccan unbelievers that lasted for many years, he acceded, in the Treaty of Hudaybiyah, to demands that his closest companions considered utterly humiliating. Yet peace turned out to be a most effective weapon against the unbelievers.”
He’s referring to a treaty in the year 628 that established a 10-year truce between the Prophet Muhammad and Meccan leaders and was viewed by Muslims at the time as a defeat. But Muhammad used that period to consolidate his ranks and re-arm, eventually leading to his conquest of Mecca. Imam Rauf seems to be saying that Muslims should understand Sadat’s olive branch in the same way, as a short-term respite leading to ultimate conquest.
To drive that point home, he added in the same letter that “In a true peace it is impossible that a purely Jewish state of Palestine can endure. . . . In a true peace, Israel will, in our lifetimes, become one more Arab country, with a Jewish minority.”
Nice, eh? There’s more at the link.
It’s reminiscent of a quote, the author whom I cannot remember, who basically stated, “If the Palestinians unilaterally disarmed tomorrow there would be peace and their own state. If the Israelis unilaterally disarmed tomorrow there would be no Israel or Jews remaining.” Time and again so many “moderate” Islamist political figures say one thing to the West but hide their true feelings when the spotlight is upon them.
I’d be curious to see the retorts from every Hollywood Chavez loving Leftist:
Venezuela, More Deadly Than Iraq, Wonders Why
By SIMON ROMERO
CARACAS, Venezuela — Some here joke that they might be safer if they lived in Baghdad. The numbers bear them out.
In Iraq, a country with about the same population as Venezuela, there were 4,644 civilian deaths from violence in 2009, according to Iraq Body Count; in Venezuela that year, the number of murders climbed above 16,000.
Even Mexico’s infamous drug war has claimed fewer lives…
Venezuela is struggling with a decade-long surge in homicides, with about 118,541 since President Hugo Chávez took office in 1999, according to the Venezuelan Violence Observatory, a group that compiles figures based on police files. (The government has stopped publicly releasing its own detailed homicide statistics, but has not disputed the group’s numbers, and news reports citing unreleased government figures suggest human rights groups may actually be undercounting murders).
There have been 43,792 homicides in Venezuela since 2007, according to the violence observatory, compared with about 28,000 deaths from drug-related violence in Mexico since that country’s assault on cartels began in late 2006.
Caracas itself is almost unrivaled among large cities in the Americas for its homicide rate, which currently stands at around 200 per 100,000 inhabitants, according to Roberto Briceño-León, the sociologist at the Central University of Venezuela who directs the violence observatory.
That compares with recent measures of 22.7 per 100,000 people in Bogotá, Colombia’s capital, and 14 per 100,000 in São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city. As Mr. Chávez’s government often points out, Venezuela’s crime problem did not emerge overnight, and the concern over murders preceded his rise to power.
But scholars here describe the climb in homicides in the past decade as unprecedented in Venezuelan history; the number of homicides last year was more than three times higher than when Mr. Chávez was elected in 1998.
“I can’t imagine that Muslims [actually] want a mosque at this particular location, because it will become an arena for the promoters of hatred, and a monument to those who committed the crime. Moreover, there are no practicing Muslims in the area who need a place to worship, because it is a commercial district. Is there anyone who is [really] eager [to build] this mosque?…
“Those pushing to build this mosque may be construction companies, architect firms, or political groups who want to exploit this issue. The individual who submitted the building application – I do not know whether he [really] wants [to build] a mosque that will promote reconciliation, or whether he is [just] an investor looking for quick profits. Because the idea of a mosque right next to a site of destruction is not at all an intelligent one. The last thing Muslims want today is to build a religious center that provokes others, or a symbolic mosque that people will visit as a [kind of] museum next to a cemetery.
“What the citizens of the U.S. fail to understand is that the battle against the 9/11 terrorists is not their battle. It is a Muslim battle – one whose flames are still raging in more than 20 Muslim countries… I do not think that the majority of Muslims want to build a monument or a place of worship that tomorrow may become a source of pride for the terrorists and their Muslim followers, nor do they want a mosque that will become a shrine for the haters of Islam… This has already started to happen: [the Islamophobes] are claiming that a mosque is being built over the corpses of 3,000 U.S. citizens who were buried alive by people chanting ‘Allah akbar‘ – the same call that will be heard from the mosque…”
In and interview with the Daily Caller, Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, president and founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy went even further, basically affirming that the attempt to put an unnecessary mosque at Ground Zero goes so against any attempt to foster goodwill that it can only be a planned and purposeful confrontation.
“This is not a humble Islamic statement. A mosque such as this is actually a political structure that casts a shadow over a cemetery, over hallowed ground. 9/11 was the beginning of a kinetic war, it is not an opportunity for cultural exchange. It was the beginning of a conflict with those who want to destroy our way of life… Jasser said that the building of this mosque is ‘fitna,’ a religious term meaning mischief-making, which is severely frowned upon in Islam. “‘Fitna’ is anything that causes chaos in society,” he said. “This mosque is causing chaos, it is causing ‘fitna’ and that is not the Islamic thing to do … This is ‘fitna’ and ‘fitna’ is wrong.”
[Tarek Fatah, founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress] Fatah agreed saying that ‘fitna’ is an ethical and moral issue that ought not be taken lightly. “If a step taken by an individual causes disharmony then it is ‘fitna.’ [The mosque] has caused so much pain. There are many mosques already in New York, nobody has ever opposed a mosque, if there is opposition to a mosque on grounds of hatred I would be the first to confront it. But over here it is a matter of sensitivity and there is no residential community even near the community center.”
[NY Times] WASHINGTON — President Obama delivered a strong defense on Friday night of a proposed Muslim community center and mosque near ground zero in Manhattan, using a White House dinner celebrating Ramadan to proclaim that “as a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country.”
As usual, the great “uniter” in chief, misses the point. One cannot throw a stone in downtown New York City without it hitting a church, temple or mosque, and thus nobody is arguing that Muslims have no right to practice their religion. But conversely, as recently pointed out by Charles Krauthammer, nobody is proposing we build a theme park at Gettysburg, a German cultural center at Normandy or Auschwitz, or a Japanese embassy at Pearl Harbor. Or for that matter, since there’s this whole supposed separation of church and state — but only when it’s convenient — why not build a shrine to atheism at Ground Zero?
(And as the State Department recently sent the Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf abroad as part of a taxpayer-funded government outreach program, I’m sure Obama supporters everywhere would have no problem whatsoever if the State Department sent some fire and brimstone Baptists abroad too, right? Once again, the sheer hypocrisy of the “church-state separation” Leftists never ceases to amaze me.)
NYC Mayor Bloomberg’s offer to build the mosque at any other number of locations — echoed similarly by many others — has been rebuffed, and this underscores that the objective of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf has nothing to do with outreach or building bridges. He may as well be proposing to build a fountain filled with urine that can perpetually desecrate the graves of the 3,000 Americans buried there.
So, here we are then. As long as we wrap something up in the garb of “diversity” apparently anything that defies common sense or courtesy is fair game.
I wonder if the president would support the offer to — “in an effort to break down barriers and reduce deadly homophobia in the Islamic world” — build a gay Islamic bar right next to the proposed Ground Zero mosque.
The world is laughing at the Great Uniter’s lack of unifying ability. And at the rest of us as well.
If you want to succinctly summarize the economic illiteracy of liberals just watch Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan make his Democrat counterpart (who is apparently still running against Bush) and Meet The Press host Chris Matthews look foolish.
Here’s an excerpt that shows that Matthews in defining the “rich” has zero knowledge of business and our tax code.
MATTHEWS: Let me ask you, Congressman Ryan — you have no problems defending tax cuts for people who make over a quarter a million a year?
RYAN: Small businesses — go to Wisconsin.
(CROSSTALK)
MATTHEWS: No, no, individuals. It`s an individual tax cut.
RYAN: No, no. You have to understand, Chris, 75 percent of those people who pay that tax rate are small businesses who file as individuals, not corporations. That`s the problem with this economic argument, Chris, is when you think you`re just taxing rich people like Bill Gates, what you`re end up doing is you`re hitting successful small businesses. When we tax our employers more than our foreign competitors tax theirs, they get our jobs and we lose in global competition.
So, we ought to be keeping our eye in economic growth and job creation, what`s necessary to do, and that means low tax rates on businesses and small businesses in certainty. We have a whole new tax on certainty that`s hurting economic growth. We need to give taxpayers certainty that they`re not going to have a huge wave of tax increases in 2011 and then another in 2013.
MATTHEWS: OK.
Oh… Okay…. most business in America is small business, and the vast majority of small business FILE THEIR INCOME TAX AS INDIVIDUALS, NOT AS CORPORATIONS… gosh… there goes my argument… there goes my class warfare… I’m no longer demonizing Enron or BP but that mom & pop store down the street… Hmmm… Can we go back to the race card..? Can we go back to Shirley Sherrod or did that 15 minutes already end..?
It’s amazing. I’m never surprised by the complete ignorance liberal democrats display on economics.
They perpetually demonize business never realizing that:
* c-type corporations, businesses liberals say is okay to hate, make up just 2 million (or 7.5%) of the almost 27 million businesses in the United States.
* s-type corporations (3.3 million, or 12.3%), limited-liability companies (LLCs: 2.3m, 8.6%), and sole proprietorships/partnerships (19 million, 71.6%) conversely, mostly pay their taxes AS INDIVIDUALS.
* 75% of all businesses file as individuals (some non c-type corporations may file as c-types, which is why the figure drops from 92.5% above to 75%).
* 99% of all business in America is small business, categorized by the IRS as less than 500 employees.
* That 99% of 500 or less employees, according to the Small Business Association, nonetheless employ just over half of all private sector employees.
* They Pay 44 percent of total U.S. private payroll.
* They have generated 64 percent of net new jobs over the past 15 years.
* They create more than half of the nonfarm private gross domestic product (GDP).
* They hire 40 percent of high tech workers (such as scientists, engineers, and computer programmers).
* They are 52 percent home-based and 2 percent franchises.
* They made up 97.3 percent of all identified exporters and produced 30.2 percent of the known export value in FY 2007.
* They produce 13 times more patents per employee than large patenting firms; these patents are twice as likely as large firm patents to be among the one percent most cited.
But don’t tell any of that to Chris Matthews (and taken from a government website at that!). And despite the repetitive and tired verbal talking-point nonsense from Rep. Joe Crowley in the video, letting the Bush tax cuts expire will far from just affect the “top 1%” of income earners.
As was recently summarized in Investors Business Daily, on January 1 the following tax increases will occur. As you peruse these figures as yourself how much that will help an economy that’s already at 10% unemployement:
* The death tax returns — at a rate of 55 percent on estates of $1 million or more.
* The lowest bracket for the personal income tax, for instance, moves up 50 percent — to 15 percent from 10 percent.
* The next lowest bracket — 25 percent — will rise to 28 percent, and the old 28 percent bracket will be 31 percent.
* At the higher end, the 33 percent bracket is pushed to 36 percent and the 35 percent bracket becomes 39.6 percent.
* The marriage penalty also makes a comeback, and the capital gains tax will jump 33 percent — to 20 percent from 15 percent.
* The tax on dividends will go all the way from 15 percent to 39.6 percent — a 164 percent increase.
* Both the capital gains and dividend taxes will go up further in 2013 as the health care reform adds a 3.8 percent Medicare levy for individuals making more than $200,000 a year and joint filers making more than $250,000.
* Other tax hikes include halving the child tax credit to $500 from $1,000 and fixing the standard deduction for couples at the same level as it is for single filers.
* Letting the Bush cuts expire will cost taxpayers $115 billion next year alone, according to the Congressional Budget Office, and $2.6 trillion through 2020.
It’s no wonder Democrats are seeing their flow of campaign money from businesses evaporate.
Here’s the whole video. Get a good laugh at the expense of the Economic Idiot party:
Here’s one thing you won’t find in the 2,300-page financial-overhaul legislation that passed the Senate Thursday afternoon: any serious reform of housing giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the longtime “government-sponsored enterprises” (GSEs), both of which have been in federal conservatorship since September 2008. Last summer, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the cost of subsidizing the GSEs would amount to $389 billion through 2019. This figure accounted for “substantial losses on the entire outstanding stock of mortgages held or guaranteed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac at that time.” In January, the CBO updated its forecast, projecting a total price tag of at least $373 billion through 2020. By comparison, it now expects the much-maligned Troubled Asset Relief Program to cost just $109 billion.
Those numbers help put the GSE bailout in perspective, yet they tell only part of the story. Fannie and Freddie currently own or guarantee roughly $5.5 trillion worth of mortgages — over half the residential market. If these liabilities were included in the federal budget, Americans would better appreciate the true fiscal impact of rescuing the GSEs.
But Fannie and Freddie are not counted in the budget, a maneuver “worthy of Enron’s playbook, except not quite so hidden,” as Bloomberg columnist Jonathan Weil has written. Their exclusion “makes a joke” out of the U.S. balance sheet, says former SEC commissioner Paul Atkins. The argument for bringing them on budget became even more compelling in December, when the Obama administration removed a cap on their Treasury Department credit line, essentially giving the GSEs a blank check. A few months later, after House Financial Services Committee chair Barney Frank (D., Mass.) suggested that GSE debt obligations were not backstopped by the federal government, Treasury spokeswoman Meg Reilly affirmed that “there should be no uncertainty about Treasury’s commitment to support Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as they continue to play a vital role in the housing market.”
… In December 2008, mortgage-finance consultant Edward Pinto, who served as Fannie’s chief credit officer from 1987 to 1989, told Congress that “Fannie and Freddie went from being the watchdogs of credit standards and thoughtful innovators to the leaders in default-prone loans and poorly designed products. They introduced mortgages which encouraged and extended the housing bubble, trapped millions of people in loans that they knew were unsustainable, and destroyed the equity savings of tens of millions of Americans.”
In a new paper, George Mason University economist Russell Roberts points out that the GSEs bought roughly twice as many home-purchase loans made to below-median-income buyers in 2003 as they had in 1997. It was during this period — from the late 1990s through 2003 — that “Fannie and Freddie played an important role in pushing up the demand for housing at the low end of the market. That in turn made subprime loans increasingly attractive to other financial institutions as the prices of houses rose steadily.” From 2004 to 2006, Roberts adds, commercial and investment banks played a larger direct role in the subprime market than the GSEs did, though Fannie and Freddie were still very active in the mortgage markets in ways that contributed to the subprime problem. In 2006, they bought 390,000 loans with less than 5 percent down, compared with just under 269,000 two years earlier. In 2007, they purchased more than 608,000 such loans.
Hey, we can say no, but other countries will say yes. And, similarly, foolish governments and politicos, such as Florida’s Charlie Crist, can write legislation all they want denying American companies the ability to drill offshore, but that won’t do a damn thing for companies based in the UK, or China for that matter. Here’s Greg Pollowitz:
Bloomberg reports that the Congo project is expected to generate $234 million in total revenue — revenue and jobs that should have been created in the Untied States.
Each drilling platform averages 90 to 140 employees at any one time (2 shifts per day), and 180 to 280 for 2 2-week shifts
Each E&P [exploration and production] job supports 4 other positions
Therefore, 800 to 1400 jobs per idle rig platform are at risk
Wages for those jobs average $1,804/weekly; potential for lost wages is huge, over $5 to $10 million for 1 month—per platform.
Wages lost could be over $165 to $330 million/month for all 33 platforms
There are also impacts to people who supply the rigs:
Supply boats — 2 boats per rig with day rates of $15,000/day per boat — $30,000/day
Impacts to other supplies and related support services (i.e., welders, divers, caterers, transportation, etc.)
This is the problem with the Administration’s overly restrictive moratorium. Rigs are portable and they will go where the work is. When a rig leaves the Gulf, not only the jobs on the rig are endangered, but also the jobs of those who supply the rig. As noted above, each job in oil and gas exploration and production supplies 4 other positions.
Here’s Avik Roy on American’s aversion to socialized medicine (Also, it can summarized in one word via an older post — Cancer):
Liberals find it odd, and perhaps slightly irrational, that Americans so heavily criticize the British National Health Service. This has been of particular relevance in light of Donald Berwick’s “love affair” with the agency.
Britain’s Conservative prime minister, after all, often talks “of how proud we in Britain are of the NHS.” Just as with Medicare in the U.S., British politicians who talk of dismantling the NHS get hammered in the polls. (Despite Her Majesty’s Government’s surprise announcement this week of incremental market-oriented reforms to the program, the Tories under David Cameron have repeatedly pledged to preserve its funding.)
But describing the NHS as “popular” with British voters is a bit like describing cocaine as “popular” with crack addicts. Once people become dependent on heavy state subsidies, it is natural for them to feel insecure at the thought of losing them. Tocqueville long ago articulated how this problem inevitably arises from majoritarian democracies. And people who live under a single-payer regime have no way, short of moving abroad, of appreciating that there are better alternatives.
Having said that, Britons are frustrated by the indifference and inhumanity of the National Health Service. Its problems are covered widely in the British press. Here are some examples (and readers are welcome to provide others):
NHS expert guidelines on the management of high cholesterol are intentionally out of date, putting patients at serious risk, in order to save money.
When the government approved an innovative new treatment for elderly blindness, the NHS initially decided to reimburse for the treatment only after patients were already blind in one eye — using the logic that a person blind in one eye can still see, and is therefore not that badly off.
While most NHS patients expect to wait five months for a hip operation or knee surgery, leaving them immobile and disabled in the meantime, the actual waiting times are even worse: 11 months for hips and 12 months for knees. (This compares to a wait of 3 to 4 weeks for such procedures in the United States.)
One in four Britons with cancer is denied treatment with the latest drugs proven to extend life.
Those who seek to pay for such drugs on their own are expelled from the NHS system, for making the government look bad, and are forced to pay for the entirety of their own care for the rest of their lives.
Britons diagnosed with cancer or heart attacks are more likely to die, and more quickly, than those of most other developed nations. Britain’s survival rates for these diseases are “little better than [those] of former Communist countries.”
These problems are not an accidental side effect of socialized medicine — they are inherent to socialized medicine. Liberals who believe that technocratic experts can rationally allocate health care resources ignore the real-world examples, like Britain’s, of how that model fails in practice.
The American health-care system has its flaws, and real reform is urgently needed. But the reason why Obamacare is so unpopular is that most people would never trade our approach, warts and all, for that of Donald Berwick’s NHS.
Here’s Kevin Williamson on the curious (0ver) reaction by liberal lamestream media in condemnation of gun ownership.
People have a visceral reaction to guns, which is why the reactions to the Supreme Court’s recent decision in McDonald v. City of Chicago have been so emotional. One extraordinarily telling reaction came from David Ignatius of the Washington Post, whose response was headlined: “The Supreme Court Gun Decision Moves Us Toward Anarchy.” Mr. Ignatius wrote: “My biggest worry with Monday’s Supreme Court decision is that by ruling, in effect, that every American can apply for a gun license, the justices will make gun ownership much more pervasive in a society that already has too many guns. After all, if I know that my neighbor is armed and preparing for Armageddon situations where law and order break down (as so many are — just read the right-wing blogs) then I have to think about protecting my family, too. That’s the state-of-nature, everyone for himself logic that prevails in places such as Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Mr. Ignatius here is remarkably forthcoming: He is not worried about guns in the hands of criminals, but about guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens, people who are willing to apply for a permit and jump through the bureaucratic hoops required of gun buyers. His nightmare is not an America in which criminals run amok with Glocks, or even an America in which gun permits are handed out liberally, but an America in which “every American can apply for a gun license.” Never mind the approval of licenses, the mere application gives Mr. Ignatius the howling fantods. It is wonderfully apt that he references the “state of nature” in his criticism, imagining a Hobbesian version of life in these United States: solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, permeated by the aroma of cordite. Mr. Ignatius, like Thomas Hobbes, is casting his lot with Leviathan and makes no apology for it.
That is the essence of 21st-century progressivism: In matters ranging from financial derivatives to education to gun control, the Left believes that we face a choice between a masterful state and a Hobbesian war of all against all. For all of the smart set’s vaunted and self-congratulatory nuance, it is this absolutist vision, this Manichean horror, that forms the foundation of progressivism.
Be sure to check out Tom Gross’ Mideast Dispatch Analysis and his coverage of a new mall opening in Gaza. Let’s just say it’s a far cry from the typical Lamestream media reports about the impoverished in Gaza. Here’s an excerpt worth highlighting:
“On a day when (because EU Foreign Policy Chief Baroness Ashton is in Gaza) the BBC and other media have featured extensive reports all day long on what they term the dire economic situation in Gaza, why are they not mentioning the new shopping mall that opened there yesterday?
“When leading news outlets mention the so-called humanitarian flotillas from Turkey, why do they omit the fact that life expectancy and literacy rates are higher, and infant mortality rates are lower in Gaza than corresponding rates in Turkey? Have they considered that perhaps the humanitarian flotillas ought to be going in the other direction, towards Turkey?”
In Turkey, life expectancy is 72.23 and infant mortality is 24.84 per 1,000 births.
In Gaza, life expectancy is 73.68 and infant mortality is 17.71 per 1,000 births.
Turkey has a literacy rate of 88.7% while in Gaza it is 91.9%. (It is much lower in Egypt and other Arab countries where Israel did not establish colleges and universities in the 1970s and 1980s.)
Gaza’s GDP is almost as high as Turkey’s and much, much higher than most of Africa that gets 1,000th of the aid per capita that Gaza gets from the West. (Source for above info: CIA World Factbook)
World hunger organizations report that 10-15 million children below the age of 5 die each year, and 50,000 people die daily. One-third of all deaths in the world are due to poverty.
While famine kills millions of children in Africa, India, and elsewhere, life expectancy for Gaza Arabs, at 72 years, is nearly five years higher than the world average. In Swaziland, for example, life expectancy is less than 40 years, and it is 42 years in Zambia.
Meanwhile Western governments, misled by Western media, continue to pour more and more money into Gaza for people that don’t need it, while allowing black Africans to starve to death.
As the correspondent for one of Japan’s biggest newspapers said to me last week, “Gaza and the West Bank are the only places in the world where I have seen refugees drive Mercedes.”