War on Terror

New on NewsReal – Peter Beinart Recycles Trash Talk of Republicans as Islamophobes

Calvin Freiburger bigotry, dishonesty, GOP, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, Islamofascism, Left, national security, NewsReal, War on Terror

My latest NewsRealBlog post:

The nice thing about being on the Left is that your arguments never become stale. Regardless of what the facts say, whether or not a claim has been soundly refuted in the public arena, or how many times you’ve said it, you can always recycle the same smears. Today’s recycler is Peter Beinart, who takes to the Daily Beast to bemoan the Republican Party’s descent into bigotry:

I once ate a Shabbat meal in Salt Lake City, where my hosts—staunch Republicans and Orthodox Jews—talked with wonder about the extreme courtesy with which their Mormon neighbors accommodated their religious needs. Conservatives, they explained, were actually more tolerant of minority faiths than liberals. I’d like to believe that a Muslim family in Utah or Alabama could say the same today. In a sense, the Republican Party’s honor depends on it.

My, that does sound serious! Whatever could have been the catalyst for this clarion call?

[Rep. Peter] King, a Long Island Republican, will hold hearings this week on terrorism by American Muslims. Think about that for a second. King isn’t holding hearings on domestic terrorism; he’s holding hearings on domestic terrorism by one religious group.


Yes, think about that for a second—and you’ll apparently have reflected on the issue more than Peter Beinart. As Center for Security Policy President Frank Gaffney explains, one of the reasons King’s hearings are so important is that they present the opportunity to “explore the extent to which virtually every prominent group that purports to speak for that community is a front for the Muslim Brotherhood or sympathetic to its agenda.” And if you know anything about the Brotherhood or other Islamist organizations, you know this is hardly an answer in search of a problem. Gaffney makes the following point:

[C]onfusion about the true nature and intentions of the Muslim Brotherhood is much in evidence at the moment.  The Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, contributed to it, first by testifying last month that the Brotherhood is “a largely secular organization.”  He subsequently recanted that preposterous characteri­zation, but nonetheless downplayed concerns about the group by insisting that it is “heterogeneous,” has “eschewed violence” and is engaged in good works, like hospitals and day care.

Such contentions are, presumably, contributing to the Obama administration’s intention – as reported on the front page of the Washington Post last Friday – to establish relations with Muslim Brotherhood-dominated or other Islamist governments emerging from the revolutions sweeping the Middle East.  The implications of that decision would be incalculably problematic for our homeland security, as well as our foreign policy interests.

Read the rest at NewsRealBlog.

New on NewsReal – Peter Beinart Confuses "Democracy" with "Freedom" in the Middle East

Calvin Freiburger Afghanistan, conservatism, democracy, Egypt, foreign affairs, freedom, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, Iraq, Islam, Islamofascism, Left, liberalism, NewsReal, War on Terror

My latest NewsRealBlog post:

At CPAC 2011, Ann Coulter made the following claim:

Democrats are all for meddling in other countries –- but only provided a change of regime will harm U.S. national security interests.

It probably wasn’t his intention, but this week the Daily Beast’s Peter Beinart has set out to prove her right. Beinart (who, recall, doesn’t think the War on Terror is a war and says conservatives only support profiling because we don’t believe people who look like us are capable of bad things) has chosen to lecture us about “the hypocrisy of the right’s shallow rhetoric on liberty and human freedom,” allegedly displayed by those of us who aren’t all that optimistic that a post-Mubarak Egypt will be any more free or humane:

[T]he people with the biggest megaphones on the American right—people like Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and Newt Gingrich—are not preaching democratic idealism. They’re warning that Egypt and Bahrain are about to become Iranian- or Taliban-style theocracies. They’re comparing Barack Obama to Jimmy Carter for not standing behind our favored strongmen. And they’re suggesting that, at the very least, America should demand that Islamist parties be banned. When it comes to Muslims and democracy, much of the supposedly idealistic American right turns out to be pretty pessimistic. It turns out that the people uninterested in the human rights of Muslims at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay aren’t all that concerned about them in Egypt or Bahrain either.


What human-rights disinterest are you referring to, Peter? The way I remember it, conservatives overwhelmingly condemned the actual abuse and the military punished those responsible all on its own, while waterboarding has saved American lives. And Beck, Palin and Gingrich’s doubts are far from groundless—the radical Muslim Brotherhood is among the factions vying for control of Egypt’s new government, and as David Horowitz sarcastically pointed out to Bill Kristol, recent history doesn’t suggest great odds for Egypt:

Perhaps the elections in Egypt will turn out better than those in Gaza where Hamas now rules a terrorist state; Iraq, which has instituted an Islamic Republic; Lebanon, where Hezbollah now rules a terrorist state; and Afghanistan, which is a kleptocracy wooing the terrorist theocracy in Iran.

Read the rest on NewsRealBlog.

New on NewsReal – "WikiLeaks: The Movie(s)," Coming Soon to a Theater Near You

Calvin Freiburger classified information, foreign affairs, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, Julian Assange, media, media bias, national security, New York Times, NewsReal, secrecy, treason, War on Terror

My latest NewsRealBlog post:

The enemies of liberty may be gaining steam in Egypt right now, but Hollywood doesn’t seem to notice. No, to them we’re still our own worst enemy. Mike Fleming at Deadline reports that no less than seven potential film projects based on cyber-anarchist Julian Assange and his whistle-blowing organization WikiLeaks are under consideration:

The Hurt Locker screenwriter Mark Boal and Management 360 have partnered with financier/producer Megan Ellison to option The Boy Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, an article about WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange in The New York Times Magazine written by the newspaper’s executive editor Bill Keller. Ellison, an exec producer of True Grit, will finance development through her Annapurna Pictures and she, Boal and Management 360 will produce. Boal might write the film, but that will depend on if he has time […]


His is just the latest in a growing number of Julian Assange/WikiLeaks movies that should continue to swell as more books about the controversial figure get published. I’ve heard DreamWorks is circling Inside WikiLeaks, a book that will be released February 15. It is written by Daniel Domscheit-Berg, Assange’s number 2 at WikiLeaks who defected because he wanted WikiLeaks to apply journalistic discretion in the dispersal of secret government documents while Assange wanted to release as many as he could get his hands on.

There is also the $1.5 million memoir by Assange. Movie/TV rights will be handled by CAA for lit agency Peters Fraser & Dunlop, and rumors are that The Bourne Ultimatum director Paul Greengrass might come attached (insiders said that’s not definitive). Among the other Assange movies that have already mobilized, Universal  Pictures will finance and distribute an Alex Gibney-directed documentary on Assange and WikiLeaks that will be produced by Gibney and former Universal Pictures chairman Marc Shmuger, and HBO is in talks with BBC to collaborate on a pic that would be based partly on  Raffi Khatchadourian’s New Yorker article No Secrets: Julian Assange’s Mission for Total Transparency. Another documentary, WikiLeaks: War, Lies and Videotape has been picked up to be distributed by Zodiak. There are two more books available for movies: WME is handling Megaleaks by Andy Greenberg, and there is also WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War On Secrecy is coming from David Leigh and Luke Harding, two reporters from UK’s The Guardian who were the first to receive leaks from Assange and then shared them with Der Spiegel and The New York Times.

All of this is to be expected, of course—Hollywood has a track record of presenting the United States government as the bad guy in our conflicts abroad, from Vietnam onward. They pretty consistently bomb at the box office, but Hollywood keeps churning them out anyway, their left-wing ideology drowning out whatever good business sense or understanding of what the audience wants they may have.

Read the rest at NewsRealBlog.

New on NewsReal – Al-Jazeera Is Basically Like Fox News, Right?

Calvin Freiburger Fox News, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, Islamofascism, Left, liberalism, NewsReal, propaganda, War on Terror

My latest NewsRealBlog post:

The moral equivalency leftists are capable of never fails to sicken. Whether driven by intolerance of opposition or cluelessness about the real world, many think nothing of comparing those with whom they disagree—often unfavorably—to the most heinous monsters on the planet. Case in point: our old friend Ellen of the loser-packed Fox-hating blog NewsHounds is outrageously outraged that Bill O’Reilly would dare impugn the patriotism of left-wingers like Sam Donaldson and Alan Colmes for their defense of…er, Al-Jazeera:

It’s not as though Donaldson praised Al Jazeera for saying anything anti-American or attacking America. No, attacking an American or Americans is something that Fox News does every day whenever a Democrat or liberal is discussed.


Apparently, praising Al Jazeera for doing something right is completely wrong (and anti-American) because, according to O’Reilly, “Al Jazeera makes a living blaming most problems in the Middle East on the USA and Israel.”

That must be completely different from the way Fox News pundits like Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Sarah Palin and yes, Bill O’Reilly blame most problems on American liberals.

“Talking Points can provide hundreds, hundreds of examples of anti-Semitism and hate-America rhetoric displayed on Al Jazeera, the network Sam Donaldson admires,” O’Reilly sneered.

And we can provide just as many examples of anti-Semitism and hate-America rhetoric on Fox News. In addition to the hate mongering against Americans, there’s Sean Hannity’s friendly interview with anti-Semite Andy Martin (for which Hannity has never apologized), another lapdog interview with Mel Gibson and Glenn Beck’s anti-Semitic dogwhistles about George Soros. In fact, those dogwhistles were so offensive to so many Jews that 400 rabbis recently wrote to Rupert Murdoch asking him to rein in Beck. Fox News’ response? Calling the rabbis “a George Soros backed left-wing political organization.”
Colmes did not apologize or hedge or try to curry favor as so many other Democrats on Fox do. Noting that Egypt had shut down Al Jazeera, he said to O’Reilly, “I would think a populist like you would support Al Jazeera and freedom of the press… I would think that as a journalist, you would take the side of Al Jazeera.”

O’Reilly claimed that his beef with Al Jazeera was its lack of balance, that there was never anyone on to counter its anti-American message.

Oh, you mean the way there’s never anyone on to counter Glenn Beck’s attacks on President Obama, his former advisor Van Jones, George Soros or 78 year-old Frances Fox Piven?

First, let’s dispense with the usual stuff: the lack of balance at Fox News is a lie, and so is the anti-Semitism garbage.

No, what’s noteworthy is that Ellen doesn’t even try to argue that Al-Jazeera isn’t an anti-American, Jew-hating mouthpiece for Islamic radicalism, but says that Fox News is just as bad anyway.

Read the rest on NewsRealBlog.

Around the Web

Calvin Freiburger blogosphere, GOP, health care, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, Julian Assange, Kirsten Powers, Left, Michael Steele, movies, NewsReal, patriotism, Star Wars, War on Terror

Happy New Year, everyone!

Kirsten Powers gets thrown off balance by a nasty run-in with the truth.

“I admire those who join armies, whether America’s or the Taliban’s.” Just don’t question their patriotism.

RedState has a troubling rundown of the problems with Michael Steele’s would-be RNC successors.

Some pinhead named Tad Lumpkin shills for Julian Assange on Big Government. Andrew Breitbart, call your office; this guy’s gotta go.

Another day, another debate about social issues on NewsReal. Do you think there’s a “true” definition of conservatism?

The internet is abuzz with acclaim for Red Letter Media’s third and final takedown of the Star Wars prequel trilogy. These reviews have been amusing (if extremely off-color), and made some fair points, but they’re drastically overrated, and seem to mostly coast on people’s raw, blind hatred of the prequels. (More here.)

New on NewsReal – Television Turned Against Women’s Rights in Afghanistan. Where’s Cultural Imperialism When You Need It?

Calvin Freiburger Afghanistan, foreign affairs, Islam, Left, NewsReal, political correctness, War on Terror

My latest NewsRealBlog post:

Television can be a force for liberty in totalitarian and theocratic societies, but it can be used to thwart liberty, as well. Case in point: Gayle Tzemach Lemmon’s Daily Beast report on disturbing events in Afghanistan:

In the past several weeks, controversial television presenter Nasto Naderi has stepped up a campaign he began this year accusing women’s shelters of supporting prostitution and other behavior considered immoral. In December, Naderi showed footage of a family guidance center run by the organization Women for Afghan Women, followed by pictures of family guidance and women’s shelter staff entering their offices. According to Naderi, women’s shelters encourage behavior that violates Islam, though he has yet to offer any evidence to support his allegations.
The unwanted attention has sent a chill through women’s rights supporters in Kabul and created an environment of both fear and defiance among shelter workers. In a conservative country with little history of providing safe havens for domestic-violence victims, the concern is that Naderi’s charges could do great harm—and put shelter workers at risk.

“By these kinds of programs, people’s minds may be swayed, and they may think negatively about these kinds of safe houses,” said Selay Ghaffar of the organization HAWCA, which offers legal aid and temporary shelter to Afghan women seeking to escape domestic abuse.

Naderi makes no bones about what’s really driving his propaganda campaign, boasting that his people “have fought 30 years to put the word ‘Islam’ in front of Afghanistan […] But some NGOs come and want to make another way for our country.” It certainly isn’t concern for the shelters’ quality—“Mr. Nadiri says he hasn’t visited any of the 17 shelters officially registered with the government.”

Women’s defenders fear the legitimization of the Taliban could mean the end of the shelters:

Read the rest on NewsRealBlog.

WikiLeaks Scoop: Bush Was Right

Calvin Freiburger Bush, Iraq, Julian Assange, Larry Elder, Plame, Townhall, War on Terror, WikiLeaks, Wilson, WMDs, yellowcake

Those of us who were paying attention already knew this, but it’s always good to have more voices and revelations corroborating the same thing. From Larry Elder:

Wired magazine’s contributing editor Noah Shachtman — a nonresident fellow at the liberal Brookings Institution — researched the 400,000 WikiLeaked documents released in October. Here’s what he found: “By late 2003, even the Bush White House’s staunchest defenders were starting to give up on the idea that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But WikiLeaks’ newly-released Iraq war documents reveal that for years afterward, U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins and uncover weapons of mass destruction (emphasis added). … Chemical weapons, especially, did not vanish from the Iraqi battlefield. Remnants of Saddam’s toxic arsenal, largely destroyed after the Gulf War, remained. Jihadists, insurgents and foreign (possibly Iranian) agitators turned to these stockpiles during the Iraq conflict — and may have brewed up their own deadly agents.”

In 2008, our military shipped out of Iraq — on 37 flights in 3,500 barrels — what even The Associated Press called “the last major remnant of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program”: 550 metric tons of the supposedly nonexistent yellowcake. The New York Sun editorialized: “The uranium issue is not a trivial one, because Iraq, sitting on vast oil reserves, has no peaceful need for nuclear power. … To leave this nuclear material sitting around the Middle East in the hands of Saddam … would have been too big a risk.”

Now the mainscream media no longer deem yellowcake — the WMD Bush supposedly lied about — a WMD. It was, well, old. It was degraded. It was not what we think of when we think of WMD. Really? Square that with what former Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean said in April 2004: “There were no weapons of mass destruction.” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow goes even further, insisting, against the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that “Saddam Hussein was not pursuing weapons of mass destruction”!

Bush, hammered by the insidious “Bush Lied, People Died” mantra, endured one of the most vicious smears against any president in history. He is owed an apology.

When Hollywood makes “The Vindication of George W. Bush,” maybe Sean Penn can play the lead. 

Still doesn’t make Julian Assange any less of a cretinous wretch. Throw the book at him.

Of Course: Traitor Ron Paul Shills for WikiLeaks Scumbag

Calvin Freiburger anti-American, dishonesty, foreign affairs, GOP, Julian Assange, libertarianism, Ron Paul, treason, War on Terror, WikiLeaks

Not that we need any more proof that Texas GOP Congressman Ron Paul is a lying degenerate whose love of America is a total sham, but today we’ve got more anyway. Not surprisingly, Paul is defending Julian Assange, the puffed-up pimp whose WikiLeaks outfit has been exposing sensitive classified information with reckless abandon for a while now:

“In a free society we’re supposed to know the truth,” Paul said. “In a society where truth becomes treason, then we’re in big trouble. And now, people who are revealing the truth are getting into trouble for it.”

Hot Air’s commenters have some simple-yet-effective takedowns of the stupidity:

Doughboy: “Well then hell, Ron, let’s just tell the world where we hide our nuclear weapons and what the arming codes are. You know, since we live in a free society and all.”

Good Solid B-Plus: “Well, Ron, since it’s a free society and all, can you e-mail me your bank account # and PIN? Thanks a bunch.”

But this goes well beyond stupid, and into disgraceful. First, “revealing the truth” isn’t what Assange does. Has Congressman Paul forgotten that this punk released edited footage that falsely made American soldiers look like reckless killers? Or does he just not care?

Second, Julian Assange has the blood of innocent people on his hands, as a direct result of his “truth-revealing”:

The Taliban has issued a warning to Afghans whose names might appear on the leaked Afghanistan war logs as informers for the Nato-led coalition. 
In an interview with Channel 4 News, Zabihullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, said they were studying and investigating the report, adding “If they are US spies, then we know how to punish them.”
The warning came as the US military’s top officer, Admiral Mike Mullen said that Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, may already have blood on his hands following the leak of 92,000 classified documents relating to the war in Afghanistan by his website.

“Mr Assange can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family,” he said.

Information from the documents could reveal:

  • Names and addresses of Afghans cooperating with Nato forces
  • Precise GPS locations of Afghans
  • Sources and methods of gathering intelligence

Does Ron Paul remember that? Was he paying attention at the time?

Does Ron Paul even care?

We already know the answer.

Note to Jonah Goldberg: Don’t Waste Your Time With John Guardiano

Calvin Freiburger airport security, American Spectator, blogosphere, conservatism, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, Jonah Goldberg, National Review, national security, privacy, TSA, War on Terror

Jonah Goldberg doesn’t like the TSA’s new security measures (neither do I), but he thinks some of the outrage over them is disproportionate and misdirected:

I’d bet that the vast majority of TSA employees do not want to touch your junk — or mine. And if any TSA agent gives the slightest indication that junk-touching is his or her favorite part of the job, he or she should be fired immediately.

Obviously, the first people to blame for this mess are the murderers. Without them, flying wouldn’t be the soul-killing experience it is.

Yesterday, he objected to an example of that outrage from our old pal, John Guardiano, who summaries the matter as a dispute between “liberty-loving” conservatives who “see the TSA as it really is” and “authority-loving” conservatives who “see the TSA as they want it to be”:

And that’s really what rankles: the glib assertion of bad faith. How does he know his policy opponents are ensorceled by their love of authority?  Wait five minutes for the next controversy to erupt and many of Guardiano’s liberty lovers may well be on the side of authority and some of the authority lovers will be on the side of liberty.

Fundamentally, Guardiano’s argument is indistinguishable from Obama’s claims that his opponents blindly cling to their bigotry and religion and that liberals are on the side of facts and logic and reason. Only this time the blinkered ideologues are “authority-loving cons” and the intrepid empircists are “liberty loving cons.”

Why can’t Danielle Pletka and Marc Thiessen (colleagues of mine at the American Enterprise Institute for the record) simply be weighing the costs and benefits differently? Why can’t they have concluded such measures are the best way to defend liberty? How does Guardiano know what’s in their hearts?

Today, the American Spectator’s biggest hiring mistake responds with his trademark arrogance:

I’m sorry, Jonah, but if the shoe fits — and it surely does in this case — wear it!

I don’t know if Jonah intends to respond or not. On the one hand, it’s always enjoyable to see somebody like Guardiano slapped down by a more principled conservative. On the other hand, it’s probably not worth Goldberg’s time – Guardiano is, after all, a lap dog for one of the most dishonorable character assassins to ever call himself a “conservative,” and he’s already on the record having lied about one of Goldberg’s National Review colleagues, Andy McCarthy.

Thoughts on 9/11

Calvin Freiburger 9/11, appeasement, evil, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, Islamofascism, national tragedies, War on Terror

On September 11, I was still in middle school. Around the middle of an otherwise-unremarkable school day, we began to hear unsettling murmurs of a plane hitting a skyscraper somewhere. Near the end of the day, our English teacher told us that it was the World Trade Center, and two planes had been deliberately rammed into it, causing the towers to collapse and kill God knows how many people.

It was a sickening wake-up call. Such monstrosities simply didn’t happen on American soil outside of the movies. I had been starting to develop a mild interest in politics prior to 9/11 (due in large part to abortion), but the sudden death of 3,000 civilians for nothing more than getting on a plane or showing up to work in the morning drove home the urgency of political involvement. It wasn’t just far-away bickering; what our country did or didn’t do could have serious real-world implications. I was no soldier, but if I could use the skills I did have to prevent this from happening to anyone else again, I was in.

Nine years later, the political landscape isn’t as neatly divided between right and wrong, problem and solution as it once seemed – as admirably steadfast as he was in the beginning, George W. Bush’s execution of the Iraq War and his failure to root out political correctness in the military may have disastrous long-term ramifications for the war, and the libertarian trends in the Tea Party movement are threatening to take the Right’s eye off the ball entirely. Even so, the broad strokes are still there:

Either we believe in fighting those who wish us harm, or we don’t.

Either we believe in denying them the means to cause mass destruction, or we don’t.

Either we believe in honestly examining their motives – including religious – or we don’t.

Either we understand that endlessly talking to the irrational is itself irrational, or we don’t.

Either we understand that those who want us dead will accept no concession other than our death, or we don’t.

Either we see 9/11 for what it was – pure, unadulterated evil – and understand the ramifications for our future, or we don’t. 

We don’t need new investigations into what “really” happened. We don’t need hand-wringing about whether or not we deserved it in some way, or whether or not we’re becoming the bad guys in response. We don’t need to keep indulging those who insist on lying about us and about our enemies. We simply need to ask ourselves whether or not we’re prepared to pay any price or bear any burden to prevent it from happening again.