Category: The Opposition

Free speech under attack at Temple University

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

We’ve been following the hate campaign against Geert Wilders, the Dutch politician who speaks out against militant Islam, for a while. Our posts on him are here. David Horowitz reports at FrontPage Magazine here and here on an attempt to stop Wilders speaking at Temple University in Philadelphia. (Temple is my alma mater so I’m especially interested in this.)

As part of its Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, and its campaign to Stop the Campus War Against Israel and the Jews, the David Horowitz Freedom Center is sponsoring  appearances by Dutch Parliamentarian Geert Wilders at Temple and Columbia universities (October 20 and 21). The Muslim Students Association has issued a statement condemning the event and calling on the Temple Administration to close it down.

Here is part of the MSA’s statement:

Temple MSA speaks for the many Muslims and socially conscious students and faculty on campus when we say that the presence of Geert Wilders on our campus is a breech of Temple University’s pledge to ensure the wellbeing and safety of all students and faculty on campus. The Muslim population at Temple feels attacked, threatened, and ultimately unsafe that Mr. Wilders has been invited to voice his hate-driven opinions. The fact alone that backpacks are prohibited for entry to this event reinforces our argument that this creates an unsafe atmosphere where prejudiced, racist and vehemently hateful words will be disguised under the veil of academia.

Got that? Prohibiting backpacks shows that there will be hate speech. The only reason for the ban must be that people hate Muslims, not that any Muslim has ever carried anything dangerous in a backpack. But these Muslim students are lucky: they’ve gotten university administrators to do their work for them:

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the attempts to shut down the Temple speech of Geert Wilders which is being sponsored by a student organization called Temple University Purpose is the role played by three Temple University administrators who run the student activities program and who at a meeting last week pressured the TUP students to close down their event….These administrators told TUP leader Brittany Walsh that Wilders did not have free speech rights at Temple or in America because he was a foreigner.

I’m going to reproduce Brittany Walsh’s reply in full because it is so eloquent. We are fortunate to have students like her standing up for our rights.

“[You} stated in our meeting that Mr. Wilders is not an American citizen and therefore the First Amendment does not apply to him. The American Bill of Rights is not written to confer rights on Americans as to what they can do, but rather these American rights are conceived as limitations on government.  The Bill of Rights says Congress shall make no law abridging free speech and not once claims this only applies to American born citizens, but rather to all of man kind. Freedom of Speech has proved an essential tool in providing a medium for progressive social change in the United States; ie: Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Equal Rights Movement, Vietnam War protests, and even the Equal Human Rights Movement occurring right now in the U.S. advocating on behalf of the LGBT community. Throughout world history, we have witnessed the devastation caused when individuals are deprived of this Right to advocate on behalf of themselves. Many men and women have sacrificed their life or suffered severely to allow you and I to be free; thousands are still doing so today.
Furthermore, I would never dream of telling the Muslim Students Association that they may not practice their religion or espouse their beliefs, but I expect that same respect and consideration to be extended to all individuals and/or groups.  As was stated previously in our meeting, regardless of how I may, or may not, feel about what Mr. Wilders believes, I do believe it is his right to say it. Temple University Purpose will defend Mr. Wilders, and anyone else for that matter, against institutions and communities who attempt to silence them. The Right to Freedom of Speech is a fundamental right upon which this country was founded. Our founding fathers found that tyrants will always seek to silence those in opposition in an effort to squash non compliant beliefs and felt it to be of vital importance that men and women alike are protected from future governments, mob rule, and tyrants who seek to steal their voice. All of this being said, it would be a disservice to the Temple community, hypocritical of TUP’s mission, and a disrespect to all of those who have sacrificed for our right to invite Mr. Wilders to Temple, to rescind his invitation. The Temple community is being provided with a rare opportunity to have an open forum with a highly intelligent, though controversial, politician. Moreover, it is my hope that the community will come together, let their voices be heard, and participate in this educational experience being provided for them. Temple University Purpose plans to go ahead with the event on the 20th of October and hope we may do so with your support.” 

David Horowitz puts the matter in context:

Everywhere you look these days Americans’ most basic freedom is under attack by the jihadists of the international left. The infamous UN Human Rights Commission which includes the worst human rights violators on the planet (now joined by the Obama Administration) has recently passed a resolution against religious defamation — defined as linking Islamists to terrorism. At home Democrats have attached a “hate crimes” amendment which would make thinking a crime to the new defense appropriations bill. Radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh has been banned from owning a National Football League team on the grounds that he is a conservative and conservatives are hateful.

The speech is scheduled for today. I’ll give you an update when I find out what happened.

Update from Gateway Pundit, 10/21/09:  Radical leftists shouted down Geert Wilders at Temple University last night. The good little indoctrinated leftists chanted, “Hey Hey, HO, HO, this racist bull—-’s got to go.” They forced the university to shut down the event early.

Refugees International President, Ken Bacon, has died

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I have written very critically about Ken Bacon on these pages and at first thought it might not even be appropriate to write about him after his untimely death from cancer, but since the Washington Post has opened the can of worms, I’ll tell you what the WaPo says.

Kenneth H. Bacon, 64, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who was top spokesman at the Pentagon during the Clinton administration and later became a prominent advocate on behalf of international refugees, died Aug. 15 of melanoma at his vacation home on Block Island, R.I. His primary residence was in Washington.

[….]

After leaving the Pentagon in 2001, Mr. Bacon became president of the D.C.-based advocacy group Refugees International and emerged as one of the strongest voices for the dispossessed around the globe. His organization, which accepts no funding from governments or the United Nations, estimates that there are 12 million international refugees.

Faithful readers of RRW will be interested to note that he too has the Columbia University connection.

He received dual master’s degrees, in business administration and journalism, from Columbia University in 1968.

The Washington Post calls it his only ‘blemish’ but in my opinion it suggests a major character flaw.  Bacon, by his illegal act of releasing Linda Tripp’s personel file at the Defense Department during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, with that one move directed the media dogs off Bill Clinton’s porch and onto ordinary citizen Tripp’s front yard.  Bacon obviously also understood Alinsky’s admonition to pick a target and destroy it.

The one blemish in Mr. Bacon’s career came in 1998, when he was briefly embroiled in the scandal surrounding President Bill Clinton and onetime White House intern Monica Lewinsky. In 1996 and 1997, Lewinsky was an assistant in Mr. Bacon’s office at the Pentagon. One of her friends was an employee in the department, Linda Tripp, who had tape-recorded telephone conversations in which Lewinsky said she was having an affair with Clinton.

In March 1998, Mr. Bacon authorized a deputy to release parts of Tripp’s personnel record to a reporter from the New Yorker magazine, revealing that Tripp had not disclosed on an employment application that she had been arrested for theft when she was 19. The charge was reduced to loitering.

The episode touched off a firestorm in conservative circles, as critics accused Mr. Bacon of breaking federal privacy laws to damage Tripp’s reputation. He quickly admitted he had handled the situation poorly, and a Pentagon inspector general concluded in 2000 that Mr. Bacon had not followed Defense Department procedures. Then-Defense Secretary Cohen sent Mr. Bacon a letter expressing “disappointment” over his “hasty and ill-conceived” actions. [Note that Bacon must never have expressed remorse, or apologized to Tripp or surely the WaPo would have mentioned that.]

Despite that incident, Cohen said in an interview with The Washington Post last week, Mr. Bacon “was always extraordinarily well prepared.”  [“well prepared?” sounds like a rather weak comment.]

“He was a special guy,” Cohen added. “But for that Linda Tripp issue, I have nothing but accolades.”

Here is what Hillary Clinton said about Bacon (who saved her husband’s bacon, clever huh!) on learning of his death.  

The United States and the world lost a great humanitarian leader with the passing today of Ken Bacon, President of Refugees International. Most Americans remember Ken as the unflappable civilian voice of the Department of Defense, where he served with distinction as spokesperson for many years. But for millions of the world’s most vulnerable people – refugees and other victims of conflict – Ken was an invaluable source of hope, inspiration and support. From Central Africa to South Asia to the Americas, Ken shone the spotlight on the causes of humanitarian suffering, and served as an impassioned yet reasoned advocate for the principles of humanitarian protection and assistance. We will miss Ken, but we will be inspired by the contributions he has made and the example he has set.

What do we know about Refugees International?   The organization Bacon headed is a lobbying shop advocating among other things for more refugees to be brought to the US.  I have suggested in past posts that they have been predisposed to promoting resettlement of Muslim refugees as they lobbied for both Iraqi Palestinians and Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar. 

They aren’t government funded like so many other non-profits in the same field, but I have not been able to figure out who does fund them.   Although we know it’s mostly individuals and foundations, who exactly they are, I don’t know.  We do know that George Soros was previously on the Board of Directors, so that might be a hint where some of their funding originates.  I note today that their website “partners” page is blank.

Here is their 2007 Form 990 where you can see how they spent their money and who they employ.   Their Chairman of the Board is Muslim activist Farooq Kathwari (also CEO of Ethan Allen Furniture).

Note to new readers:  For everything we have written (and its extensive) use our search function for ‘Refugees International,’ ‘Ken Bacon,’ and ‘Farooq Kathwari.’

They are all finally catching on to Alinsky, but there is one understanding they haven’t come to, yet!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Thanks to reader Paul, I see that across the conservative spectrum the powers-that-be are catching on to the Alinsky strategy and how his strategy powered Obama’s rise to the Presidency of the United States of America.    I’m not saying I was the first to catch on, not by any stretch, others tipped me off, but we have been writing about Alinsky since last November.

It seems that next week Glenn Beck is going to do some more work exposing Alinsky and here David Horowitz says he will be doing a series on his blog about Rules for Radicals in advance of being a guest on Beck’s show.   Because Horowitz himself was a radical leftist in the 1960’s this surely isn’t the first time he has delved into the strategy.  Alinksy travelled from university to university during those turbulent times teaching community organizing  and surely Horowitz would have been aware of him, maybe even met him.

This is what Horowitz said yesterday:

Glenn Beck will be on vacation this week but when he returns on the 24th he has invited me to come to New York to talk to him on camera about Saul Alinsky, the strategy guru of the Obama era. For the Hillary-Soros generation of johnny-come-lately radicals and their ACORN footsoldiers Alinsky is their Sun-Tzu and his book Rules for Radicals is the field manual for their struggle. I thought while I’m refreshing my acquaintance with this destructive fellow and re-reading his text, I would share my thoughts with readers of NewsrealBlog serially over the next week.

For this first post (which I am also posting here), let’s just focus on the dedication of the book—to Satan.

Read on.

Andrew Breitbart has a column today on Alinsky, Bush and Obama  also. (Read Breitbart before proceeding)

Horowitz notes that he will serialize about Alinsky on his blog this week.  We did a serialization I called Alinskyism starting in early November 2008.   My model was one of the supposedly humorous calendars with Bushisms (you know quotes in which he misspoke) that one of my kids gave me just to annoy me.  Little did I know that that sort of calendar was following Alinsky’s Rule #5—destroy your enemy with ridicule.   See our whole category on Community Destabilization here.  There are 70 posts; so scroll back to November and start at the beginning as each builds on the previous one and our ability to spot Alinsky matured as we went along.

So what haven’t the conservatives figured out yet?   In order for there to be a community to organize, one needs angry poor people.   One needs “Have-nots!”  The chaos that leads to change, requires the “Have-nots” to fight the “Haves.”   The American poor I heard so much about in the 1950’s from my very Leftist father were the people living in places like Appalachia.  But, those people mostly joined the middle class, sent their kids off to the city, to the military and many off to college.  The ethnic groups Alinsky organized in Chicago also joined the middle class and became proud and patriotic Americans.  So where would the army of “have-nots” come from asked the radical left?   Obviously—immigration!  

Leaders of the Democratic Party (Senator Ted Kennedy!), some of them Alinsky radicals themselves, knew the only way to continue to march toward socialism was to import ethnically diverse, angry, demanding poor people and to keep them that way as long as possible.

I know anyone with any sense of decency would dismiss this concept as downright evil—this idea of using poor angry people as pawns and hiding what they are doing under a patina of humanitarianism.   But, don’t forget, as Horowitz tells us above, Alinsky dedicated his book to Satan.

Endnote:  Where the radicals, including Obama, have misjudged badly is with their enthusiastic encouragement of Muslim immigration and the importation of radical Islamists seeking to get their own form of control — Shariah law.   They are working side-by-side now, but in the end the Islamists will destroy the radical Leftists.  If we let it get that far!

Cloward-Piven and the art of manufactured crisis

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday Judy heard from Jim Simpson, a blogger and writer we have mentioned previously, here.  He has assiduously researched the Cloward-Piven strategy that has now been exposed by many on talk radio and by Glenn Beck on his TV show as an important underpinning of the present Administration’s mode of operation.   Mr. Simpson will be on a radio program today to discuss how Cloward and Piven created the concept of flooding our welfare system in order to crash our present form of government and bring about a socialist one.   Here is what Mr. Simpson said at his blog, Truth or Consequences, yesterday:

For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, the Crisis Strategy was the brainchild of two radical socialist college professors [at COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, OBAMA’S ALMA MATER], Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. The idea was to overwhelm government with demands for services to the point where the system would collapse and provide an opening for the socialists to take over.

Regular readers will recognize the ideas of Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals, in here as well.  One must bring about a crisis (chaos!) to bring about “change.”  Incidentally another ‘rule’ of Alinsky’s is to make fun of the enemy and paint them as crazy, don’t fall for it!

I note that Mr. Simpson mentions immigrants.   I have been contending for months that the push to allow more and more legal and illegal immigrants into the US is to purposefully add millions more poor and angry people demanding the government help them.   Frankly it is the only explanation why leftists throughout the government  and the non-profit community don’t slow the inflow of refugees at this critical juncture in our economic downturn and it is why people like Charles Rupp (President of the International Rescue Committee and former Pres. of COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY) are demanding more welfare for refugees while lobbying for more refugees to be resettled.  This is a strategy and the poor immigrants are pawns.

Simpson goes on:

Their strategy was behind creation of the National Welfare Rights Organization in the 1960s and 1970s which dramatically increased the welfare roles and caused the near bankruptcy of New York City in 1975; creation of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), prime instigators of the mortgage meltdown; the national Motor Voter law signed by President Clinton in 1993, which opened the floodgates to vote fraud by ACORN and similar groups; and the illegal immigrant amnesty movement. As we all should know by now, Barack Obama worked with and trained ACORN workers for many years.

Healthcare nationalization is a major component of this strategy. As Lenin said, “Medicine is the keystone of the arch of socialism.” The Left has agitated as far back as the 1930s for some kind of socialized healthcare system. Their dream was partially realized with creation of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. The stated goal of these programs was to provide comprehensive healthcare for seniors and the poor. As the programs grew, the Left clamored for ever more benefits to these groups and ever expanding definitions of covered individuals. Illegal immigration, also encouraged by the Left, has contributed to a rapidly growing pool of beneficiaries.

When can you hear Mr. Simpson?  Note in the lefthand sidebar of his website today he gives information on when he will be interviewed.

This post is filed in our ‘community destabilization’ category which now contains 70 posts on the strategies being used against average Americans (aka “the mob”) by the Left.

Cash for flat screens! New welfare fraud scheme going on in Rochester, NY

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Your stimulus dollars at work:

Regular readers know that one of my side interests is welfare/health care/food stamp fraud and abuse.  I got interested in it when we had a food stamp scam bust where I live (just type ‘food stamp fraud’ into our search function for the many cases involving immigrants around the country).   Today in my fraud alerts appeared this article from Rochester, NY.   Although there is no mention of immigrants in the article, we have written about Rochester on several previous occasions as a “welcoming” city for refugees.

You, federal taxpayers, and George Soros (LOL!) were ripped off.

I’m actually not sure you can call this fraud when every welfare recipient (with children) in Rochester received $200 extra (per child!) this month ostensibly for school supplies with no strings attached.  Big surprise!   Many went on wild shopping binges as wealth is redistributed.

(Rochester, N.Y.) – Monroe County Executive Maggie Brooks said the state school supply grants handed out to New York State food stamp and welfare recipients are not being used as intended by many families. She said the program has “widespread, rampant abuse.”

“There were better ways–You don’t have to support families to buy school supplies by giving them cash,” she said.

Brooks said the county has been overwhelmed by reports, some of them from store owners, of people using the money to buy TVs and other luxury items.

“We actually received a telephone call from WalMart on Hudson Avenue suggesting that there was welfare fraud, and indicating they were going to call the FBI because people were going in and buying X-boxes, Wii systems, flat-screen television sets,” said Kelly reed, the county’s commissioner of social services. “Wegmans has indicated people are buying tickets to Darien Lake.”

The $200 per child grants showed up in welfare accounts this week. Many recipients had no idea the money was coming, and flooded area stores and ATMs.

The money is a combination of $140 million in federal stimulus funds and a $35 million donation from philanthropist George Soros. About $6.5 million went to more than 32,400 children in Rochester. Critics have said the program invited waste and abuse, because there are no strings attached to the grant money.

Actually I have been wondering if Soros (who surely helped collapse the economy last fall) is out trying to prop up the economy now because they have to be getting desperate to show that Obama’s stimulus plan is working.  This article answers my question.