Ronald Radosh's Blog, page 22

Kudos to ABC News for Joining the Fight for Truth: Jonathan Karl Exposes the Role of Victoria Nuland and Jay Carney in the Spreading of Lies

Brave mainstream media journalists are finally doing what they always should be doing: report the story and let readers and viewers decide the truth for themselves. Today, ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl released their top story – the headline says it all: “Exclusive: Benghazi Talking Points Underwent 12 Revisions, Scrubbed of Terror Reference.”

Karl obtained from his sources 12 different versions of the talking points, which he writes “show they were extensively edited as they evolved from the drafts first written entirely by the CIA to the final version distributed to Congress and to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice before she appeared on five talk shows.” 

Reviewing White House e-mails, Karl reports that “the edits were made with extensive input from the States Department” and, most importantly, that there were discussions “that references to the Al Qaeda-affiliated group Ansar al-Sharia be deleted as well as CIA warnings about terrorist threats in Benghazi in the months preceding the attack.” 

Karl reveals clearly how White House press chief Jay Carney lied to the media at his press conference. Karl writes:

That would appear to directly contradict what White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said about the talking points in November.

“Those talking points originated from the intelligence community. They reflect the IC’s best assessments of what they thought had happened,” Carney told reporters at the White House press briefing on November 28, 2012.  “The White House and the State Department have made clear that the single adjustment that was made to those talking points by either of those two institutions were changing the word ‘consulate’ to ‘diplomatic facility’ because ‘consulate’ was inaccurate.”

Next, Karl presents the most shocking e-mail released so far: one from State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland, who lets others in her shop know why the truth must be kept under wraps. Karl writes:

Summaries of White House and State Department emails – some of which were first published by Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard — show that the State Department had extensive input into the editing of the talking points.

State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland raised specific objections to this paragraph drafted by the CIA in its earlier versions of the talking points:

“The Agency has produced numerous pieces on the threat of extremists linked to al-Qa’ida in Benghazi and eastern Libya. These noted that, since April, there have been at least five other attacks against foreign interests in Benghazi by unidentified assailants, including the June attack against the British Ambassador’s convoy. We cannot rule out the individuals has previously surveilled the U.S. facilities, also contributing to the efficacy of the attacks.”

In an email to officials at the White House and the intelligence agencies, State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland took issue with including that information because it “could be abused by members [of Congress] to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings, so why would we want to feed that either?  Concerned …”

The paragraph was entirely deleted. (my emphasis)

Later, Nuland also told others not to name any terrorist groups, as the CIA reports had done, because “we don’t want to prejudice the investigation.” How, one wonders, is letting all the facts be presented prejudicial in any way to finding out what happened? When changes were made that did not satisfy her, Nuland referred to the latest version as not satisfying “my building’s leadership.”

Who ordered Nuland to excise these in order to protect the State Department’s reputation? How high did it go? Was it Hillary’s top aide, or the secretary of State herself? What individual in “leadership” gave Nuland her arguments? 

It is also brave of Karl to acknowledge the contribution to honest journalism of Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard. This is the first time to my recollection that a major TV network has praised the conservative journal and directly cited its top reporter. 

The MSM and Benghazi: Will Their Coverage Harm Obama Administration? (Updated)

We are in the midst of an unfolding and growing scandal, which even the New York Times has been forced to admit in an online report which raises serious doubts about the administration’s spin after the embassy attack. Indeed, they emphasized in their headline the demotion of Gregory Hicks for daring to tell the truth — that from the get-go, everyone in the Benghazi compound described the event as an attack, and never mentioned a protest or a video. Mr. Hicks testified that State Department officials disciplined him for not sticking to the phony narrative told by Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton.

The Times story, then, is a major breakthrough from the MSM’s regular pattern of ignoring the contradictions and treating the event as a non-issue.

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina is certainly correct when he states that the scandal is “every bit as damaging as Watergate.” And we know what happened as a result of that cover-up: the impeachment and resignation of the presidency by Richard M. Nixon.

What the future portends depends a great deal on how the regular media treats it.

We must remember that the entire nation does not watch Bret Baier’s nightly panel on Fox, which has given Benghazi the most complete coverage and whose panelists regularly discuss developments as they occur. Fox, as expected, led with the hearings and their importance.

Wednesday, the three major MSM networks led their nightly news reports with the kidnapping of the three women who were freed after ten years, putting the Benghazi hearings as their second story.

CBS News offered a solid report from Sharyl Attkisson, who has not shied away from news stories which do not paint the Obama administration in a good light. As the Washington Post recently noted, she has been “a persistent voice of media skepticism about Benghazi.” She again made true on that assessment: Attkisson reported on both the issue of the attribution of the attack to the video, and on the other main issue of why military reinforcements were not sent when requested. The network then shifted to another reporter whose story reflected more of the administration’s position.

NBC’s and ABC’s reports were shorter and less informative. But even they could not help but let viewers, who previously may have not thought there was any story remaining, understand that even months after the attack explanations have not been forthcoming. And further, that a cover-up may have taken place at State, and perhaps higher in the administration.

We already have seen — in the screeds offered by Rep. Elijah E. Cummings — what will undoubtedly be the Democratic talking points: that the entire hearings amount to an attempt by Republicans to “politicize” a tragedy. Of course, the politicization came from the administration which sought to neutralize and threaten potential whistle-blowers, and who wanted unanimity behind “the video was to blame” narrative.

The Times report bluntly stated the shocking revelation this way:

All three witnesses — Mr. Hicks, Mr. Nordstrom and Mark I. Thompson … insisted that the inflammatory anti-Islamic YouTube video that the White House initially blamed for the attack was something they never considered a factor in the assault on the compound.  … It has become clear that American officials on the ground and in Washington immediately believed the attackers were terrorists, not demonstrators who turned violent, as Mrs. Rice alleged in a series of Sunday talk show interviews. … “I was stunned,” Mr. Hicks said when asked what he thought when he heard Ms. Rice’s explanation. “My jaw dropped and I was embarrassed.”

How Not to Remember Kent State—Bill Ayers Gives this Year’s Keynote on May 4th

On May 4, 1970, an event took place at Kent State University in Ohio that shook our nation apart. If you were around in that era, you remember it well.

As an antiwar demonstration of thousands of students took place on the campus’ main lawn, as in the background a wooden ROTC building that an activist had torched burned to the ground, shots suddenly rang out. As the Wikipedia entry accurately states, it “involved the shooting of unarmed college students by the Ohio National Guard … The guardsmen fired 67 rounds over a period of 13 seconds, killing four students and wounding nine others, one of whom suffered permanent paralysis.

Some of the students who were shot had been protesting against the Cambodian Campaign, which President Richard Nixon announced in a television address on April 30. Other students who were shot had been walking nearby or observing the protest from a distance.

There was a significant national response to the shootings: hundreds of universities, colleges, and high schools closed throughout the United States due to a student strike of four million students, and the event further affected the public opinion—at an already socially contentious time—over the role of the United States in the Vietnam War.”

Nationally, this past anniversary- marked each year by an official commemoration at Kent State University-went relatively unnoticed. Two years ago- the 40th anniversary-was widely covered. Yet, it is etched in our national memory. You can still hear Neil Young’s song, “Ohio,” on the radio, as  recorded by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, with its refrain “Four dead in Ohio,” and “Tin Soldiers and Nixon Coming” repeated throughout the song.

There are, as is usually the case with an incident of this kind, different assessments of why the National Guard shot real bullets at peacefully demonstrating students. Even an official commission established by the Nixon administration to investigate the question concluded that “Even if the guardsmen faced danger, it was not a danger that called for lethal force. The 61 shots by 28 guardsmen certainly cannot be justified. Apparently, no order to fire was given, and there was inadequate fire control discipline on Blanket Hill. The Kent State tragedy must mark the last time that, as a matter of course, loaded rifles are issued to guardsmen confronting student demonstrators.”

The most clear-sighted and objective assessment of the incident is that written by two Kent State professors in 1998, although the debate continues. Each year, including a few days ago, an annual event is held at the University. This year, the two main speakers at the University’s official commemorations were PBS news anchor Gwen Ifill, and the leftist hero of our day, Oliver Stone.

But according to the Akron Beacon-Journal, at the rally held on the outdoor campus site where the shootings took place, the “keynote speaker at Saturday’s annual May 4 commemoration” was none other than Bill Ayers, the founder of The Weather Underground, a defender then and now of 60’s terrorism, and a man legitimized by his role in Chicago mainstream politics and as a friend of President Barack Obama.

Speaking to 350 students at the rally, Ayers argued that there was no relation between the bombings his group carried out in the 60’s and 70’s and that of the Tsarnaev brothers in Cambridge, Mass. on April 15th. Ignoring that in fact police officers were killed in still unsolved bombings attributed to Ayers’ group, he argued that unlike the recent attack in Massachusetts, no one died as a result of the Weather Underground’s bombings. Moreover, as everyone knows, had the bombs his group was assembling actually been used at their target, Fort Dix, hundreds of recruits and their dates at an army dance would have been all dead. It was not their intent to blow themselves up while making the lethal weapon that only led to the death of a few of the group’s leadership. It was in fact the mark of arrogance that led Ayers to tell the assembled Kent State students that “he lost three friends in the Weather Underground, including his lover, Diana Oughton.” As the reporter noted, Ayers “did not explain how they died.” To tell them why they died, he said, would have been “inappropriate.”

Acknowledging that had they succeeded it would “have been a catastrophe,” Ayers then turned the argument around, claiming that on that same day, “John McCain murdered civilians,” and he and others committed war crimes every day they fought in Vietnam, in an “illegal war in which 6,000 people a week [were] being killed.” For good measure, Ayers added that “The United States is the most violent country that has ever been created.”

Ayers continued to argue that his group only succeeded in creating “property damage,” while the United States was regularly committing war crimes. Calling himself an “activist” who does not believe “in the myth of the ’60s,” Ayers depicted himself as a “town crier” who tells the people that “all is not well.”

When Ayers finished, the concluding speaker was Tom Hayden, the founder of Students for a Democratic Society and principal author of its first manifesto, “The Port Huron Statement.” A former Democratic assemblyman in California, Hayden has recently emerged as an unreconstructed leftist, moving away from his years of pretense of being a liberal mainstream Democrat.

Clearly, Kent State should be remembered, and its lessons learned. The official university commemoration, however, has become something else. Rather than an occasion for remembrance and thought, it has become a vehicle for the current far left to use the event as an excuse to try and once again build an anti-American leftist political movement. The university brings Oliver Stone to help in that effort, and others, if not the university,  invited Bill Ayers and Tom Hayden to be this year’s rally keynotes.

Ayers, who still believes in the Weather Underground’s program to “bring the war home” and who advocates revolution in the United States, is not the kind of spokesman any university should be bringing to its campus to help students comprehend the tragedy of Kent State. Instead of promoting reason and understanding, the administrators of Kent State University invited a trio of leftists, who side with those unnamed and never apprehended activists who burned the ROTC building to the ground.

Who, I wonder, will they bring on May 4, 2014? I shudder at the thought.

 

 

 

 

 

A Black American Radical Is Put on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist List, and the New York Times Disapproves!

Yesterday, the  that the FBI put Joanne Chesimard — a.k.a. Assata Shakur — on its Most Wanted Terrorists list, and announced a reward of $2 million for anyone whose information leads to her capture. After being found guilty, along with two other members of the violent Black Liberation Army, of murdering a New Jersey state trooper forty years ago to the day, Chesimard fled to Cuba. The revolutionary regime of Fidel Castro granted her asylum, and honored her not as a murderer and thug but as a fellow revolutionary freedom fighter.

“She continues to flaunt her freedom in the face of this horrific crime,” State Police Superintendent Col. Rick Fuentes said at a news conference yesterday. Fuentes called the case “an open wound” for troopers in New Jersey and around the nation. The shooting of trooper Werner Foerster during a routine traffic stop, in which Shakur and her comrades quickly started firing at the police, led to Foerster’s death and the injury of his partner.

The BLA was responsible in the ’70s and ’80s for the deaths of over 12 police officers.

They considered such actions as revolutionary acts against occupiers of the ghetto, and not as illegal, but as a response to  acts of war instigated on the black community by the imperialist U.S. government. Hence, when they shot police they were acting as soldiers opposed to the U.S. that was making war against them.

While in Cuba, Chesimard has often been brought by Cuban authorities to meet with gullible revolutionary tourists, who still travel there as political pilgrims seeking to see what life in paradise is like. And in our country, black radicals still treat her as a hero.

A few years back, the rapper known as “Common” released a song praising her action. The rapper’s version of events differs significantly from that portrayed in the Newark Division of the .

While “Common” says Chesimard was lying in a puddle of blood gasping for breath, “shot twice wit her hands up/police questioned but shot before she answered,” the FBI report reveals the truth, which accords with the philosophy of the group and the proud boasts of other BLA prisoners about how they regularly sought to kill police. The report tells us the following:

On May 2, 1973, Chesimard and two accomplices were stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike by Troopers James Harper and Werner Foerster for a motor vehicle violation. All three subjects possessed fictitious identification, and, unbeknownst to the troopers, all three were armed with semi-automatic handguns. From the front passenger seat, Chesimard fired the first shot, wounding Trooper James Harper in the shoulder. As Harper moved for cover, Chesimard exited the car and continued to fire at both troopers until she was wounded by Harper’s return fire.

The rear seat passenger, James Coston, also fired at the troopers and was mortally wounded by Trooper Harper. Trooper Werner Foerster was engaged in a hand-to-hand combat with the vehicle’s driver, Clark Squire. Foerster was severely wounded in his right arm and abdomen and then executed with his own service weapon on the roadside. Chesimard’s jammed handgun was found at Foerster’s side.

Special Agent Aaron T. Ford, head of the FBI Newark Division, is certainly correct when he states that “Joanne Chesimard is a domestic terrorist who murdered a law enforcement officer execution-style.”

It is no surprise that the Left, or sections of it, still defend Chesimard/Shakur. It is another thing, however, to read the New York Times story that appears on the top news page of the paper’s website.

Salman Rushdie Brings Back “Moral Equivalence” and Reveals his own Ignorance

Leave it to Salman Rushdie to bring back the Left’s favorite stratagem: moral equivalence. During the Cold War, leftists used to say the following: “Sure, the Soviets are doing bad things, but so is the United States.” Those a bit more to the left would advance the argument, and say: “The Soviets do terrible things, but the U.S. is responsible, since its leaders view them, as Reagan did, as ‘the evil empire.’ Since we won’t accommodate their just demands, they have to respond to us with hostility.” Those even further to the left would push the analogy even further, arguing: “The Soviets may do some bad things, but at least they stand on the side of progressive change. The U.S., on the other hand, oppresses Third World peoples and supports right-wing reactionary regimes all over the world.”

A good example of the old moral equivalence was to equate the Gulag in the Soviet Union, in which hundreds of thousands were imprisoned, starved to death and executed in massive frame-ups, with McCarthyism in the United States. During the so-called McCarthy era, relatively few were imprisoned or lost their livelihoods, and many actually guilty of being actual Soviet agents portrayed themselves as innocents accused because of their political views. Yet the Left in America argued both were the same.

Now Salman Rushdie has a lot to be wary of. After the Iranian revolution, the late Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa along with a reward for anyone who murdered him. Because of his novel The Satanic Verses, Rushdie had to go into hiding in different safe houses for a number of years, while under the protection of the British government. Intellectuals and writers in the West rallied to his defense. Eventually, Rushdie came into the open, moved to the United States, and became a favorite in the celebrity world, as well as a best-selling novelist.

In his New York Times op-ed last week, Rushdie complained that political courage is “almost always ambiguous,” and that those who stand against abuses of power or dogma are viewed suspiciously. Chinese dissidents are deemed subversive by the state’s Communist leaders and are imprisoned; critics of Putin in Russia like the women’s band “Pussy Riot” are sentenced to prison terms and are viewed as improper by the Russian public, and a Pakistani governor who defended a Christian woman sentenced to death for blasphemy ends up murdered by his own security guards.

His examples are correct, and telling. Rushdie must identify with the plight of a Saudi poet and journalist, whom he reports tweeted something not liked by religious leaders in his country about Muhammad, and as a result, was imprisoned. But then, Rushdie writes the following, and it deserves letting you see his own words, because they are so preposterous:

America isn’t immune from this trend. The young activists of the Occupy movement have been much maligned (though, after their highly effective relief work in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, those criticisms have become a little muted). Out-of-step intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and the deceased Edward Said have often been dismissed as crazy extremists, “anti-American,” and in Mr. Said’s case even, absurdly, as apologists for Palestinian “terrorism.” (One may disagree with Mr. Chomsky’s critiques of America but it ought still to be possible to recognize the courage it takes to stand up and bellow them into the face of American power. One may not be pro-Palestinian, but one should be able to see that Mr. Said stood up against Yasser Arafat as eloquently as he criticized the United States.)

Let us take up his two major points. Occupy Wall Street protestors were handled by the authorities with kid gloves. When they took over the park in New York City over a year ago, although it was privately owned, they were allowed to camp out, disrupt and close down local businesses, and engage in completely asocial and horrendous behavior- including public defecation and rape of women-without any consequences.  Rushdie mentioned OWS for one reason alone: it shows his heart is on the Left, and he wants his comrades in that camp to listen to him about how Islamists persecute those they disdain.

It is his second point that is most ridiculous. The truth is, to use Rushdie’s words, that Noam Chomsky in particular is a “crazy extremist.” If you have a doubt, I suggest you purchase a copy of the Encounter book edited by Peter Collier and David Horowitz, The Anti-Chomsky Reader, in which various authors make the case that Chomsky is basically a charlatan.

But even if that was not the case, Chomsky does not have to show much courage at all to take on all U.S. administrations and to oppose them as oppressors and imperialists. Indeed, he has become an international intellectual super-star, applauded and heralded by the Left at home and all of our enemies abroad, who shower him with high lecture fees and give him a gigantic audience abroad and at home. He is continually on the lecture circuit, has the support of both student audiences and assorted Hollywood and music world celebrities, and writes best-selling books, for which he has no problem finding a publisher. Bellowing “into the face of American power” is hardly an offense that has landed him even in any white-collar prison, not to speak of a Gulag or Gitmo.

As for the late Edward Said, his critique of “Orientalism” became the favored paradigm to explain U.S. policy in the Middle East, and influenced scores of leftist professors of Middle Eastern politics. As for his supposed standing up to the late Yasser Arafat, anyone who recalls what Said’s complaint about Arafat really was will remember that he . was angry that Arafat appeared to play the game of engaging in negotiation with his enemies, rather than reject such posturing and commit himself exclusively to armed struggle against Palestine’s supposed oppressors. His former friend Christopher Hitchens pointed out in his own memoir that Said’s “low point was an almost uncritical profile of Yasser Arafat that he contributed to Interview magazine in the late 1980s.”

One might also recall Said’s trip to the West Bank during the first intifada, when he and his young son joined the mob in throwing rocks at Israelis, something of which he was quite proud. To Said, any action taken by Palestinians, no matter how violent, was “resistance.” Again, Hitch well summed up what Said believed, which was that “if the United States was doing something, then that thing could not by definition be a moral or ethical action.” And that is why Said eventually rejected Arafat. He thought that the PLO leader was heeding the agenda of the U.S., by his very action of negotiating with its leaders.

To equate those who are truly courageous, like the brave Chinese dissidents who risk their lives to speak up for democracy, or critics of radical Islam who speak up knowing what their future is likely to be if they live under the rule of Islamic regimes, with critics of U.S. policy who live in our democratic republic, is more than preposterous. It is the opposite of moral courage. A man of words and letters, Salman Rushdie should by this time be able to know the difference.

 

 

 

 

 

Leftist ‘Historians’ Grade Bush’s Presidency … and Come Up Failing

This has been a good week for George W. Bush. The opening of his presidential library and museum at Southern Methodist University has led to a widespread reassessment of his administration’s record. Indeed, public-opinion polls show that Bush now has a 47 percent approval rating, up from the dismal 33 percent when he left office, and the same that President Obama now has. 

The case for a positive view of Bush’s presidency has been well stated  by Charles Krauthammer and Michael Gerson, both writing in the Washington Post. 

The positive view, even the nice words about Bush spoken by President Obama at the dedication ceremony of the Bush Library, has not rubbed off on historians.  History News Network — the leading website for academic historians —  proclaims, “Historians Still Despise George W. Bush.”

Their judgment of Bush’s reign in office has little to do with a nuanced assessment of his presidency; rather, it has to do with their desire to show that they are leftists first and historians second.

The point was well-argued by historian Stephen F. Knott of the Naval War College in last Sunday’s Washington Post.  As Knott writes, few historians are having second thoughts about the Bush presidency not because of actual facts or assessment of policy successes or failures, but because “far too many scholars revealed partisan bias and abandoned any pretense of objectivity in their rush to condemn the Bush presidency.”

Knott cites two of the most prominent attacks made against Bush while he was in the White House, the first by Princeton’s Sean Wilentz, and the second by Columbia University’s Eric Foner, a man far to the left of Wilentz. Both were bested in their attacks — vicious and unbalanced as they were — by TV’s most well-known “presidential historian” (whatever that is), Doug Brinkley, who wrote in 2006 that “it’s safe to bet that Bush will be forever handcuffed to the bottom rungs of the presidential ladder” and that Bush purposely tried to “brutalize his opponents.” 

It is hard to realize, now that so many journalists who at the time hated Bush are now reevaluating their own biases, that the late Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. — always a partisan of the democratic left of the Democratic Party — actually wrote (as Knott writes) that “the Bush administration was purposefully ‘driv[ing] toward domination of the world,’ placing the constitutional system of separation of powers ‘under unprecedented, and at times, unbearable strain,’ and was intent on ‘outlawing debate.’”

Recognizing Radical Islam as Our Enemy: Lessons From the Cold War

Let us no longer speculate about the motive for the actions of the Tsarnaev brothers: despite growing up in the United States, both became adherents of radical Islam. This truth, in our politically correct age, we are not supposed to mention. To do so in liberal circles is to be accused of Islamophobia. Ignoring the truth, however, is no protection against the consequences of an extremist radical ideology.

The most interesting tidbit on Sunday’s 60 Minutes was an interview with the late Tamerlan’s neighbor, who revealed a conversation he had with him about Islam. Tamerlan told the young man that the Bible was nothing but a warmed-over Koran, and that the United States was an oppressor of not only Muslims, but of Africans and Third World peoples. America, he said, was a “colonizing power.” This point of view, as we all know, is not only held by Islamists, but is commonplace among many living in Cambridge, MA, affectionately known as “The People’s Republic of Cambridge.” Growing up in the most radical of American communities, that point of view was an accepted shibboleth among many of the Tsarnaev brothers’ friends and associates. Combined with a growing attachment to Islamic tenets, it became a lethal one.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, former Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey (2007-2009) warns that our FBI, now in charge of the interrogation of the surviving younger brother Dzhokhar, “has blowdlerized its training materials to exclude references to militant Islamism.” Mukasey wonders whether this “delicacy” has also infected the FBI’s top-level interrogation group.

Let us not forget that when radical Islamist Major Nidal Hasan went on his rampage at Fort Hood in November of 2009, the government report called his action “workplace violence,” refusing to even term it a terrorist action. With the Tsarnaev brothers, it will be much harder to repeat this error. Due to diligent reporting, the world now knows about their social media sites, their visiting of jihadist websites, and their growing radicalization at home in our country.

With all we know now, there are lessons to be learned via comparison to the Cold War and how the United States faced up to dealing with the Soviet threat, and also the ways in which KGB (then NKVD) agents stationed in the United States diligently worked to undermine our security and to engage in espionage.

The key point: like today, our nation’s security service was not up to the challenge then.

We now know that the top levels of the U.S. government during FDR’s presidency were infiltrated by Soviet agents, the most important of whom was Harry Dexter White, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, who made actual policy as he tried to tilt our country’s actions to favor the Soviet Union. As Benn Steil has written, from the 1930s on, White “acted as a Soviet mole, giving the Soviets secret information and advice on how to negotiate with the Roosevelt administration and advocating for them during internal policy debates.” Steil goes so far as to argue that White “was arguably more important to Soviet intelligence than Alger Hiss.”

To those few like the liberal anti-Communist Sidney Hook — who from the earliest days on tried to alert the liberal community and the media to the actual Soviet threat — the need to be alert and to have our country face up to the Soviet threat at home and abroad was met with disdain. When Joe McCarthy came along and exploited the failure to face reality by leveling exaggerated charges — such as calling the vigorously anti-Communist editor of the liberal New York Post, James Wechsler, a secret Red — those who were actually guilty were able to hide their actual betrayal of our country by proclaiming themselves innocent victims of McCarthyism.

I recall listening to a lecture in my college years by the then-famous dean of American historians, the late Henry Steele Commager, who told students at the University of Wisconsin “there is no Communist threat.” He received round applause.

As in the 1950s, so many of our liberal elites today refuse to acknowledge that there exists a real Islamic threat, an ideology whose adherents reveal that they can swiftly drift into a commitment to wage jihad against the inhabitants of the country in which they live and which gave them opportunities to assimilate and to advance personally.

Clues from Tamerlan’s Amazon Wish List: A Look into the Brothers’ World

While some on the Left speculated that the Boston bombing was the work of right-wing domestic groups, we now know that the two brothers who planted the bomb — the now deceased older brother Tamerlan Tzarnaev, and his younger sibling Dzhokhar — considered themselves to be religious Islamists as well as defenders of the Chechen cause.

On Dzhokhar’s Russian Facebook page, a drawing of a bomb has the heading “send a gift,” and on his sibling Tamerlan’s You Tube page, as Robert  Spencer points out, are “two videos by Sheikh Feiz Mohammed. According to a report published in The Australian in January 2007, in a video that came to the attention of authorities at the time, Mohammed ‘urges Muslims to kill the enemies of Islam and praises martyrs with a violent interpretation of jihad.’”

Now, Tamerlan’s Amazon wish list, that goes only to the year 2007, reveals his evolving interests. Since we know already that he acknowledged he had no friends and did not understand Americans, it is interesting to find that near the top of the list is Dale Carnegie’s old classic How to Win Friends and Influence People, a book which if he ever read he certainly did not take to heart.

In addition to an interest in music and voice, there is a clear interest in the Mafia, organized crime, the fall of Rome, the rule of the Ceasars, and, most significantly, the following titles: How To Make Driver’s Licenses and other ID on your Home Computer; The I.D. Forger: Homemade Birth certificates and other Documents Explained;  Secrets of a Back Alley ID Man; Face ID Construction Techniques of the Underground: Principles of Fraud Examination; Document Fraud Examination; and one titled  Document Fraud and Other Crimes of Deception. I would have expected to find the left-wing’s old classic, The Anarchist Cookbook, but evidently he did not know of this title.

Then we have his books about the Chechen cause, including Chechen Dictionary and Phrasebook; The Lone Wolfe and the Bear: Three Centuries of Chechen Defiance of Russia Rule, and the most revealing of all, Allah’s Mountains: The Battle for Chechnya, which, as the author’s introduction indicates, considers what others view as terrorism to be “resistance” of the oppressed Chechens to Russian power.

As Charles Krauthammer argues today, the term President Obama used to describe such actions, “violent extremism,” means little. So does terrorism, unless one acknowledges that the tactic is used to make a political point. So it appears that the religious view of Islam held by the brothers is that of radical Islam, and if this turns out to be obvious, as current clues indicate, then one has to be clear, and attribute their actions to a belief in jihad, even if their actions were not coordinated by an al-Qaeda cell and were undertaken on their own.

Identifying the motivation of our enemies is but a first necessary step to eventually stopping them before more carnage occurs.

Clues from Tamerlan’s Amazon Wish List: A Look into the Brother’s World

While some on the Left speculated that the Boston bombing was the work of right-wing domestic groups, we now know that the two brothers who planted the bomb — the now deceased older brother Tamerlan Tzarnaev, and his younger sibling Dzhokhar — considered themselves to be religious Islamists as well as defenders of the Chechen cause.

On Dzhokhar’s Russian Facebook page, a drawing of a bomb has the heading “send a gift,” and on his sibling Tamerlan’s You Tube page, as Robert  Spencer points out, are “two videos by Sheikh Feiz Mohammed. According to a report published in The Australian in January 2007, in a video that came to the attention of authorities at the time, Mohammed ‘urges Muslims to kill the enemies of Islam and praises martyrs with a violent interpretation of jihad.’”

Now, Tamerlan’s Amazon wish list, that goes only to the year 2007, reveals his evolving interests. Since we know already that he acknowledged he had no friends and did not understand Americans, it is interesting to find that near the top of the list is Dale Carnegie’s old classic How to Win Friends and Influence People, a book which if he ever read he certainly did not take to heart.

In addition to an interest in music and voice, there is a clear interest in the Mafia, organized crime, the fall of Rome, the rule of the Ceasars, and most significantly, the following titles: How To Make Driver’s Licenses and other ID on your Home Computer; The I.D. Forger: Homemade Birth certificates and other Documents Explained;  Secrets of a Back Alley ID Man; Face ID Construction Techniques of the Underground: Principles of Fraud Examination; Document Fraud Examination; and one titled  Document Fraud and Other Crimes of Deception. I would have expected to find the left-wing’s old classic, The Anarchist Cookbook, but evidently he did not know of this title.

Then we have his books about the Chechen cause, including Chechen Dictionary and Phrasebook; The Lone Wolfe and the Bear: Three Centuries of Chechen Defiance of Russia Rule, and the most revealing of all, Allah’s Mountains: The Battle for Chechnya, which, as the author’s introduction indicates, considers what others view as terrorism to be “resistance” of the oppressed Chechens to Russian power.

As Charles Krauthammer argues today, the term President Obama used to describe such actions, “violent extremism,” means little. So does terrorism, unless one acknowledges that the tactic is used to make a political point. So it appears that the religious view of Islam held by the brothers is that of radical Islam, and if this turns out be obvious, as current clues indicate, then one has to be clear, and attribute their actions to a belief in jihad, even if their actions were not coordinated by an al-Qaeda cell and were undertaken on their own.

Identifying the motivation of our enemies is but a first necessary step to eventually stopping them before more carnage occurs.

How Two Leftist Writers See the Middle East and Cuba, and Get It Wrong

Two recent articles reveal the mindset of the Left, and tell us more about how leftists think than they do about the topic of the articles. One is about Israel and the meaning of its 65th anniversary; the other about Cuba and the future of the totalitarian state and U.S.-Cuban relations.

The first, written by Hillel Schenker, is supposedly a celebration of Israel. The writer asks, with 65 years of Israel: “Is Zionism Still Alive?” One might think that as most Americans understand, the Jewish state is a major success story: Rightfully called the “startup nation,” a small land and democracy situated in the midst of Arab monarchies and tyrannies, Israel has a vibrant culture, a major growing high-tech industry second to none, 10 Nobel Prize winners, the revival of Hebrew as the language of the state, and major acclaimed institutions of higher education. Indeed, Schencker acknowledges all of the above. It is hard to deny these accomplishments.

But Schenker begins by making it clear that when he made aliya to Israel in 1963, he came to the country as part of what he calls “the progressive Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair.”

To many readers, that affiliation will mean very little. The euphemism “progressive” does not situate what it stood for.

It was, in essence a Leninist group whose members believed Stalin was the leader of world socialism and that the Soviet Union was right about every issue — except the Jewish question. Their goal was to create a Soviet-style state in Israel that would combine Zionism with Leninism.

Its theoretician was an intellectual named Ber Berochov, who as his Wikipedia entry rightfully explains, “became highly influential in the Zionist movement because he explained nationalism in general, and Jewish Nationalism in particular in terms of Marxist class struggle and dialectical materialism.”

What Schenker mourns for is the lost Israel of his youth, when as he writes, “there was no television,” the labor movement “was still the dominant force in Israeli politics”, and “all the progressive forces around the world identified with Israel.” He saw himself, he proudly says, as “part of a worldwide movement to change the world,” symbolized by May 1968 in Paris, Danny the Red, Joan Baez, “the anti-Vietnam war demonstrators and the counter-culture.”

There is no realization that the Israel which strives today is largely the result of the turn away from the bankrupt socialist model of the Kibbutz and labor control of industry, which prevented the economy from taking off.

So he sees, not unexpectedly, that once Israel won its fight with the Arab invaders in the 1967 War, this turn of events made him sad. It was not in his eyes a victory, but rather, the “beginning of the occupation.” The Left he loved and identified with turned en masse against Israel. The German New Left sided with neo-Nazis and Arab terrorists who sought to massacre Jews and destroy Israel. In the United States, his comrades sided with the black radicals and extremists, whose support was for the PLO and other Arab extremist organizations, all dedicated to Israel’s destruction.

So like other leftists, he sees Israel “living in denial,” ignoring the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and refusing to take steps that he believes will result in peace.

He lives in a dream world. He argues that when Sadat came to Israel in 1977, it proved “peace was indeed possible.” So — no surprise — his belief is that pressure must be put on Israel, which needs a return to the Oslo accords which failed to do anything, but which he sees as the remaining source of hope.

Who is really in denial?