Category Archives: Religion

In preparation for this week’s release of the third of the “Twilight Saga” films (entitled “Eclipse”), I recently watched the first two. The “Twilight” films (as well as the books they’re...

View Original Post

It seems that that at least one person took exception to a certain billboard A billboard that was put up by an atheist group that purposely omitted references to God has been defaced — and had the words ‘under God’ added. The billboards were put up in Charlotte and across North Carolina the week [...]

—– CMI: During the interview, Garofalo also expressed disappointment in President Obama. “It’s a drag that he’s such a conservative,” she lamented.  Garofalo’s made her disdain for...

View Original Post

Sometime-comedian Janeane Garofalo never passes up an opportunity to slam conservatives or, apparently, Christianity. The Huffington Post gave her an opportunity June 24 to kill two birds with one stone.

In an interview promoting her upcoming special on a network called EPIX, Garofalo compared the most widely-read book of all time, the Bible, to a Bill O'Reilly autobiography and a children's book authored by former President Bush.

When asked by a Huffington Post reader which of those three publications she'd rather read, Garofalo said, "Actually that's like six and one half, that is six and one half right there." Presumably, she meant to use the popular idiom, "six of one, half a dozen of the other."

"That's just three works of fiction targeted to a child-like audience so any, all, any one, none," Garofalo said. "I don't know how to read either, so that's kind of a drag."

During the interview, Garofalo also expressed disappointment in President Obama. "It's a drag that he's such a conservative," she lamented.

Garofalo's made her disdain for religion clear in the past. During a June 16 appearance on "The Joy Behar Show" on Headline News, she called prayer "anti-intellectual." Behar later defended Garofalo on ABC's "The View," saying the comedian should have said prayer was "un-intellectual."

Garofalo has also built a long resume of attacking conservatives. She has compared the GOP to neo-Nazis and called Tea Party protestors "functionally retarded," and "racist backward motherf***ers." She has called the stable of Fox News anchors and hosts, as well as conservative talk radio hosts, liars.

8: The Mormon Proposition is a major let-down.  It’s not nearly the laugh riot the trailer promised. All about the vast, Mormon conspiracy to nip gay marriage in the bud – by sneakily...

View Original Post

Of the more than 300 corporate sponsors who have sponsored Comedy Central in the past, not a single one has indicated their intention to buy advertising time on the planned "JC" program should it ever be set to go to broadcast.

That's the victorious announcement today from Citizens Against Religious Bigotry (CARB), a group co-founded by NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell and a handful of other social conservative activists.

"The sponsors understand what the programming department at Comedy Central does not: Religious bigotry is bad business," Bozell noted in a statement. "With literally zero advertiser support for this program, the only reason Comedy Central would put it on their broadcast schedule is in an effort to offend Christianity and Christians. There is no valid business reason for airing 'JC,'" the Media Research Center founder argued. 

Full the full press release, click here.

For a complete listing of member organizations, and advertisers that were petitioned, visit www.CitizensAgainstReligiousBigotry.org.

Oh, Joy of little faith.

On the June 22 episode of "The View," co-host Joy Behar criticized prayer, saying it "takes the place of logical thinking, then I think that's dangerous."

Behar's attack on prayer came as she defended comedian Janeane Garofalo, who during a June 16 appearance on Behar's Headline News show called prayer "anti-intellectual" in criticizing President Obama's reference to prayer during his speech about the Gulf oil spill. Behar said Garofalo should have said prayer was "un-intellectual," not "anti-intellectual."

"Faith is something that you feel," Behar said. "Thinking is something that you do with your brain. It's different."

Behar's criticism of prayer riled co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck, who challenged the attack.

BEHAR: When prayer takes the place of logical thinking, then I think it's dangerous.

            HASSELBECK: Prayer's not illogical.

            BEHAR: No. But it takes the place of thinking.

HASSELBECK: No it doesn't. That's a complete bigoted statement to say that when I'm praying, I'm not thinking.

            BEHAR: How dare you say that to me! Excuse me!

After Behar clarified her statement by saying that intellectual people can pray, she called for people to pray preemptively for regulation.

Behar has a history of criticizing prayer. Behar never challenged Garofalo when she ridiculed people who pray on her own show; she only clarified the statement almost a week after the interview. Last April during a discussion with Phil Donahue on "The Joy Behar Show," she made an outlandish comparison of President Bush's prayers to God with a terrorist's prayers to Allah.

Behar has also claimed that prayer hinders medical and scientific advances, calling it a "distraction."

The folks at the Hebrew language opinion and news site Latma have done it again. A new effort revealing the hypocrisy of the Palestinians and their slavish supporters across the world are skewered in yet another parody video. Based on Funiculi Funicula Sung by the Three Terrors: Erdogano Pavarotti, Assad Carreras and Ahmedido Domingo Erdogan. Lyrics: I say [...]

The Chicago Tribune has a long lament of an article bellyaching about how so many wonderful and devout Muslim grocery store owners in Chicago are somehow forced to sell liquor, lottery tickets and pork products in their stores. The article worries over their Muslim souls for having to violate their un-American Shariah codes. Naturally, a [...]

Author and blogger Frank Schaeffer really, really doesn't like what he calls "evangelical/fundamentalist" Christians. In the past, he's suggested that their "hatemongering" was responsible for the "continuing ugliness of the response to President Obama." And now, in a new blog on The Huffington Post, he's calling for the "eradication" of fundamentalist Christianity.

"The next great task for the human race is to wean ourselves off literal interpretations of religion. We need to eradicate fundamentalism in all its forms," Schaeffer wrote. "Atheism is no help," he later added.

It is no surprise that he feels this way toward Christianity. After all, it flies in the face of liberal ideology, which promotes gay marriage and heterosexual cohabitation before marriage.

Right on cue, Schaeffer used the blog promote the gay agenda, beginning in the fifth paragraph.  Killing two birds with one stone he attacked the Church in America and promoted the homosexual lifestyle. Schaeffer praised, "Those of us who have no problem with celebrating the fact that some people are created gay, or that other people live with a girlfriend or boyfriend because marriage isn't always the best way to relate to a lover" as having a wider circle of acceptance.

While co habitation before marriage may be a "better way to relate to a lover," it certainly does not always produce a healthy and successful relationship.

Psychology Today reported the findings of Yale University sociologist Neil Bennett that cohabiting women were 80% more likely to separate or divorce than were women who had not lived with their spouses before marriage. The National Survey of Families and Households indicates that "unions begun by cohabitation are almost twice as likely to dissolve within 10 years compared to all first marriages: 57% to 30%."

Similarly, a study by the National Council on Family Relations of 309 newlyweds found that those who cohabited first were less happy in marriage.

The blog waged war on Christianity and many of its principles, mocking the faith at every turn.  Schaeffer made the argument that no one reads or even cares about the Bible anyway.

"Admit it: the Bible is nuts in many places. Who follows this stuff? No one! So why stick it to people for choosing to not follow homophobic nonsense?" Schaeffer said.

According to the largest, most comprehensive surveys on religious identification, a many people follow the Bible. The study, conducted at the City University of New York, found that Christians comprise 76.5% of the American population.

"The big "Moral Teachings" fundamentalists love so much because they provide a stick with which religious bullies may beat their fellow human beings into submission, are meaningless. If these same anti-gay or anti-abortion advocates actually took their Bibles literally they would be weighing people at their church door to check for gluttony and excommunicating half the parish for being overweight," Schaeffer said.

From this statement it is apparent that Schaeffer has both a biased and distorted view of fundamental Christianity. The insults did not end there.

"Well, there goes the whole of American God-is-their-belly porkers-for-Jesus evangelicalism with its consumer-oriented free enterprise "ethic" and overeating!" Schaeffer said.

Schaeffer arbitrarily pulled sensational passages of Scripture, none of which related to another, apparently in an effort to provide readers with some shock value.

Schaeffer's conclusion about fundamentalists who read the Bible literally: relativism. "To find the spiritual truth that is hidden within the Bible it must be mentally ‘edited' by people of goodwill who are informed by the spiritual truth we carry within our evolving ethical selves," Schaeffer said.

Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, was The Washington Post’s “On Faith” guest columnist on June 21. Predictably, she used the opportunity to bash the Catholic Church’s abortion policy. In “Should Church control access to health care?” Northup charged that the Catholic Church wields too much influence over policy decisions dealing with abortion.

Northup complained, “This year at home, we saw the U.S. government give the Conference on Catholic Bishops veto power over the health-care reform bill, and in the end, millions of American women were left with a policy that restricts insurance coverage for abortion services even for those who pay for their insurance with their own hard-earned dollars.”

She also sympathized with Sister Margaret McBride, who was demoted and excommunicated when she gave permission for an ill woman to have an abortion at a hospital. Northup questioned why more people didn’t wonder about her “secular punishment.”

And the problem, Northup suggested, was world-wide.

She wrote in other countries, “we repeatedly confront the tragic consequences of the Catholic Church’s sustained hostility to reproductive health service when it imposes its theology on public policy and the provision of health services to the public.”

In Kenya, she wrote, Catholic leaders are considering halting a new constitution because of a clause that would allow abortions in some circumstances. She stated, “But the Church would prefer to preserve the narrower exception on the books today, which criminalize abortion except to save the woman’s life.”

She warned that unplanned pregnancies bring “poverty, a dearth of sexuality education, and sexual violence,” but never mentioned the consequences or risks associated with aborting a fetus.

Northup made it seem as though abortion was only risky if only done illegally. When women attempt abortions themselves or get them illegally, she wrote, “tens of thousands die or suffer debilitating damage to their health.”

But abortions done legally carry plenty of risks for the mother, including death.

Northup also disliked the Catholic Church’s influence in the Philippines, where contraception is frowned upon. She wrote, “the policy banning modern methods of contraception causes irreparable damage.”  She also worried that in Europe that Church’s influence has caused, “backsliding on access to reproductive health services.”

In an industry filled with quislings, appeasers, moral cowards, and politically correct, multicultural, progressive fascists, Rush Limbaugh’s pal is quite the breath of heroic fresh air.  You...

View Original Post

Comedy Central just can't stop attacking Christianity.

On June 16, comedian Louis C.K. appeared on the network's popular "fake news" program, "The Daily Show," where he launched into an attack on the pope over the sexual abuse scandal plaguing the church.

"I was going to say that the pope f***ed boys and I didn't have time," C.K. blurted out as host Jon Stewart started wrapping up the interview. "I do think he does. Can I defend that before we go away?"

Stewart attempted to minimize the unprovoked attack saying, "I don't think that that's true, although, they bleeped it. I don't think that that's true."

But C.K. persisted. "Well here's the thing, he lets other people do it," he said of the pope. "And I guess my feeling is this: there's only two kinds of people. There's people who are horrified and reviled by child touching with penises, and then there's people who can't stop having sex with children. There's no in-between. There's nobody like, ‘I don't do it, but I get it.'"

The comic suggested the Pope Benedict XVI was complicit, if not an active participant, in sexual abuse of boys in the church. He didn't mention that Benedict has spent much of the year meeting with victims, apologizing for church leaders' sins, and pledging to fix the problems that made such abuse possible. Or that Benedict himself, as Cardinal Ratzinger, was instrumental in improving how the church addressed abuse allegations.

"We, too, insistently beg forgiveness from God and from the persons involved, while promising to do everything possible to ensure that such abuse will never occur again," Benedict said in a June 11 homily.

C.K. was on "The Daily Show" to promote his new show on the FX network, which is known for "edgy" storylines and frequent use of vulgar language in shows such as "Rescue Me" and "Sons of Anarchy."

The "jokes" were the latest in a long line of attacks on Christians aired by Comedy Central. The assault continued even after the network refused to allow its popular "South Park" show to criticize, or even mention, the Muslim prophet Muhammad. The most recent attack before C.K.'s came on June 11, when in a stand-up special comedian Paul F. Tompkins called Catholicism "crazy junk" and "ridiculous."

Like this article? Sign up for "Culture Links," CMI's weekly e-mail newsletter, by clicking here.

 

[Ed. Note: Big Hollywood is proud to be among only a handful of film sites chosen to premiere the new "Narnia" trailer: "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader," which won't be officially released until...

View Original Post

[Ed. Note: Big Hollywood is proud to be among only a handful of film sites chosen to premiere the new "Narnia" trailer: "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader," which won't be officially released until...

View Original Post

The same weekend “Sex and the City 2” hit theatres, the email copied below (which was leaked to Big Hollywood), titled: Is Sex & the City 2 Bad For America’s Brand?,‏ made the...

View Original Post

"You have been weighed in the balances and found wanting." That's how the biblical prophet Daniel interpreted the writing on the wall that heralded the imminent demise of the Babylonian Empire.

It could also sum up journalist Sarah Pulliam Bailey's take on Lisa Miller's "Saint Sarah" piece in Newsweek (emphases mine):

Journalists have long been puzzled over Sarah Palin’s popularity. In November, Newsweek took a stab at the trend with its provocative cover of Palin in running clothes: “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Sarah Palin: How Sarah Palin Hurts the GOP And the Country.”

[...]

Lisa Miller’s thesis is compelling if it is true, but journalists usually rely on hard facts, polls, maybe interviews with political scientists to prove their points. Unfortunately, Miller’s article contains none of these to support her theory that Palin is somehow the new leader of the Christian Right. Instead, she strings together a bunch of anecdotes and quotes to prove what she thinks is happening. 

Pulliam Bailey devoted most of her June 14 Get Religion blog post to fisking Miller's argument. Here's just a sample (emphases are the author's):

The story leads with Palin’s classic story of how she decided to give birth to her son Trig.

Palin has already overshared: nothing makes a person, let alone a politician, appear more vulnerable, more ordinary, and more unambiguously female than a scene in a bathroom where she pees on a stick. But then she defies a generation of pro-life activists who preached that the life of the fetus is sacred, no matter what an individual woman wants.

Is there any indication that Palin doesn’t think the fetus is sacred? Lots of women who chose to give birth give testimonies about their decision-making process. Is she actually defying other activists?

Let’s face it: the Trig story is a women’s story, the kind girlfriends share over coffee or in church. It has all the familiar elements of evangelical testimony: tribulation and dread; trust in God; and, finally, great blessings. Many Christian women loathe Palin,

Who? Why?

of course, and many men love her,

Who? Why?

but a certain kind of conservative, Bible-believing woman worships her.

Who? Is it only Bible-believing women who worship her? And really? Worships her?

To a smaller number, she is a prophet, ordained by God for a special role in the cosmic battle against the forces of evil.

What forces of evil? Who thinks she was ordained by God? Does this smaller number think the political arena is the cosmic battle?

Perhaps the biggest failure on Miller's part? Pulliam Bailey notes that Miller insisted that

Palin has her faults, but the left is partially to blame for her ascent. Its native mistrust of religion, of conservative believers in particular, left the gap that Palin now fills.

The GetReligion.org writer then argued that, "Perhaps Miller should have spent more time writing about this part of the story. It would be more compelling to read more about the left’s mistrust of religion that left a gap."

Given Newsweek's cutesy take on "Saint Sarah," it was only fitting that an analysis critical of it should end with a biblical allusion. Pulliam Bailey didn't disappoint with the observation that the financially-struggling magazine is intent on "making Palin in its own image":

If Palin is really leading the religious right, has anyone captured photo evidence of Palin’s flock? The accompanying slideshow, titled “Cult of Palin,” features Palin condoms, porn movies and strip clubs. The slideshow does nothing to back Miller’s thesis about Palin’s new found leadership of the religious right. Maybe that’s because Newsweek is making Palin in its own image.

—– St. Petersburg Times: A St. Petersburg Times investigation found their experiences were not unique. More than a dozen women said the culture in the Sea Org pushed them or women they...

View Original Post

This week-end, Paypal dropped the hammer on Atlas Shrugs. Here’s Pamela Geller explaining what happened, The little money that Atlas generates (I have no large donors) is about to be cut off. Apparently the jihad is hard at work trying to kill free speech (and the bus ads and the 911 no mosque movement), preventing the [...]

This week-end, Paypal dropped the hammer on Atlas Shrugs. Here’s Pamela Geller explaining what happened, The little money that Atlas generates (I have no large donors) is about to be cut off. Apparently the jihad is hard at work trying to kill free speech (and the bus ads and the 911 no mosque movement), preventing the [...]

This week-end, Paypal dropped the hammer on Atlas Shrugs. Here’s Pamela Geller explaining what happened, The little money that Atlas generates (I have no large donors) is about to be cut off. Apparently the jihad is hard at work trying to kill free speech (and the bus ads and the 911 no mosque movement), preventing the [...]

In the week following the Israeli boarding of boats piloted by Turkish “peace activists” off the coast of Gaza Caroline Glick and the good folks at the Hebrew language Israeli news site Latma created a parody video skewering the violent actions perpetrated by those “peace activists” against members of the Israeli authorities attempting to enforce [...]

Not this again. There is obviously not enough going on in the world for Newsweek magazine this week because once again Sarah Palin is on the cover.

Palin, the former governor of Alaska and the 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee was also on the cover of Newsweek back in November 2009, in running shorts. This time she is featured as "Saint Sarah: What's Palin's appeal to conservative Christian women says about feminism and the future of the religious right" in Newsweek's June 21 issue. Palin is depicted with halo on the cover for the story written by Lisa Miller, which attempts to rationalize Palin's convictions about the issue of abortion and her Christian faith.

However, Palin didn't think too highly of Newsweek's gesture. She responded on Fox News' June 11 broadcast of "On the Record with Greta van Sustren."

"Haven't seen it, but if the title and what I hear about the content is any indication of where Newsweek is going, it is no wonder Newsweek is doing so poorly," Palin said. "People are not reading that stuff. It is not relevant. It's not interesting stuff that they are making up and writing and that's why they are going down."

Video Below Fold

Another incredible charge that has surfaced in left-wing media outlets as of late was that Palin had gotten breast implants. Palin responded to host Greta van Sustren, but not without first taking a few shots at those who propagated the rumor.

"Well, first Greta, you know why we love you?" Palin said. "Because you're not afraid to ask the questions and I got to respect you for asking that question because I know that Boob-gate is all over the Internet right now because there are a lot of, I guess bored idle bloggers and reporters with nothing else to talk about. And I think some of those folks, too - they need to perhaps grab a shovel, go down to the Gulf, volunteer to help cleanup and save a whale or something instead of reporting on such stupid things like that."

And as for the implants? She cleared that up with very explicit answer.

"No, I have not had implants," she said. "I can't believe we are even talking this. I think a report like that is about as real and truthful as those reports that Todd and I are divorcing or that I bought a place in the Hamptons or that Trig is not my own child. And we still put up with that kind of garbage, too - even the mainstream media, Greta. It is amazing."

MSNBC’s Savannah Guthrie thinks the Vatican has “minimized” the clergy abuse scandals for months, before Pope Benedict’s Friday apology. And MSNBC seemed to do their level best to “minimize” that, during the 9a.m. EDT news hour.

Guthrie reported that the Vatican publicly apologized for the sex abuse scandals within the Catholic clergy Friday,  “after months of minimizing” the scandals.

“I have to ask,” Guthrie said to NBC correspondent Jim Maceda, “what prompted this apology?”

As Newsbusters reported earlier this afternoon, CNN one-upped MSNBC during its 9a.m. EDT news hour, with network anchor Kyra Phillips falsely claiming that the world still hasn’t heard the words “I’m sorry” from Pope Benedict XVI.

As Matthew Balan of Newsbusters pointed out in that post, Pope Benedict did actually use those two words in a recent letter to the Church in Ireland, where he expressed that he was “truly sorry” to the victims and their families; in addition, he expressed that he was “deeply sorry” back in the summer of 2008 at World Youth Day in Australia in a homily there.

Aside from those instances, the Pope has publicly expressed his sorrow many times for the for the clergy abuse scandals.

Jim Maceda acknowledged that the Pope asked forgiveness from God and from the victims and their families in his Friday homily; however, he added that “this was very similar to previous apologies,” and that there has been “no new ground broken.”

Maceda also noted that this year is “ironically, the Year of the Priest.”

The transcript of the segment which aired at 9:07a.m. EDT is as follows:

SAVANNAH GUTHRIE: There's news out of the Vatican this morning. After months of minimizing, the Pope made a public apology regarding the sex scandal plaguing the Catholic Church. NBC’s Jim Maceda is in Rome for us this morning. And Jim, I have to ask, what prompted this apology?

JIM MACEDA: Well, you know, rumors have been flying around for several weeks, Savannah, that he would, the Pope would be making some kind of announcement. We expected it to happen in this three-day jamboree. This is ironically the Year of the Priest. And these three days mark the very end of that festival. Some had suggested even that the Pope would make a personal apology for his own role–alleged role perhaps–in the scandal, or come out like his predecessor did ten years ago and make an institutional apology for the church as a whole. You'll recall that JPII apologized for hundreds of years of anti-semitism.

In the end he did comment on the crisis. It was about two lines on a five-page single-spaced homily. But still, he did beg forgiveness for God, and of the victims, and he said that he pledged that he would do everything to prevent this from happening again. But this was very similar to previous apologies. You’ll recall in the United States in 2008, in Malta, in Portugal; no new ground broken. But the context of speaking before 15,000 priests here gathered to get some spiritual guidance: that was highly symbolic.

SAVANNAH GUTHRIE: And Jim, how is this going over with victims?

JIM MACEDA: Well, the victim support groups are very frustrated to say the least. They were hoping–they're not against apologies, they think those are good gestures– but they want to see concrete action and they were here hoping to hear something positive, that the Pope would talk, for instance about an international registry like the United States has done, putting all accused or convicted pedophile priests on a list that everyone could see, or release the 4,000 plus files that the Vatican put together itself investigating its own potential criminals that is sitting in vaults inside the Vatican. Those, they say, should be released to the priests. But there–again, no new ground, another apology, but they say, empty because it hasn't been followed by concrete action. Back to you.

CNN's Kyra Phillips completely got it wrong on Friday's Newsroom as she reported on Pope Benedict XVI's latest apology for the priestly sex abuse scandal. Even after she reported that Pope was "begging for forgiveness," Phillips repeatedly claimed that "there are two simple words we haven't heard: I'm sorry." The Pope has actually used those words and has made multiple apologies.

The CNN anchor led the 9 am Eastern hour with the pontiff's request for forgiveness, which he made at a Mass in St. Peter's Square to close out the Catholic Church's Year for Priests, which began on June 19, 2009 and ends June 19 this year: "Here's what we're working on right now. Sex abuse in the Catholic Church- the Holy Father begs forgiveness, promises never again. But why is it that being Pope means never having to say, I'm sorry." Despite the continuing the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico and other top stories, Phillips highlighted the Pope's comments, along with the teenager stranded at sea and the opening of the World Cup in South Africa.

After her promos for those three stories, the anchor introduced a live report from CNN correspondent Paula Newton and included a clip from Benedict XVI's homily:

PHILLIPS: We begin with Pope Benedict XVI is begging for forgiveness. Today, he told thousands of his followers gathered at the Vatican that he will never allow priests to abuse children ever again. But is this plea for forgiveness enough? Well, not for critics. Here's what the Pope said.

POPE BENEDICT XVI (through translator): We too insistently beg forgiveness from God and from the persons involved, while promising to do everything possible to ensure that such abuse will never occur again. And that in admitting men to priestly ministry and in their formation, we'll do everything we can to weigh the authenticity of their vocation.

PHILLIPS: Okay. As you just heard, the Pope is asking for forgiveness, but still, there are two simple words we haven't heard: I'm sorry.

CNN's Paula Newton, live in Rome- so Paula, why can't the Pope just say, I'm sorry for this global sex scandal?

Actually, Kyra, Benedict XVI did use those "two simple words" in his March 19 pastoral letter to the Catholics of Ireland, and added an extra word when he directly addressed those who were abused by priests: "You have suffered grievously and I am truly sorry. I know that nothing can undo the wrong you have endured....It is understandable that you find it hard to forgive or be reconciled with the Church. In her name, I openly express the shame and remorse that we all feel." Moreover, isn't "begging for forgiveness" another way of saying "sorry"? The Pope also met with some of the victims of abuse during his April 2008 visit to the U.S., and addressed the scandal during a homily in New York City. Later that year, he apologized again, this time for the sex abuse in Australia while he visited that country.

Phillips's colleague Jessica Yellin made the same false claim nearly two months earlier during a April 16 segment. Yellin asked, "Why is he [the Pope] having such a hard time saying he's sorry?"

Newton then compounded Phillips's falsehood by answering, "Centuries of theology says that he can't. A very formal mea culpa was really not going to happen here, Kyra, although that's what victims' groups said that they wanted." She spent the rest of the report delivering the talking points of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP):

NEWTON: You know, in listening to what the Pope said, victims' groups we spokes to said- look, they were gratified that at least he was speaking about it openly. And he said- he asked for forgiveness in a way that he has done privately, but not so publicly, in front of the audience of priests the way he did.  

But, you know, I spoke with a Barbara Doris, of the survivors' network SNAP, and she was quite critical. I want you to listen to this, Kyra. She said to me, ‘This was not very meaningful without the reform. The words ring hollow. It's like I slapped you, I say I'm sorry, and I continue to slap you.’ Her bottom line, Kyra: not one child is any safer today because of those words. Her point is that reform- true reform at the Vatican has not been started. What she wanted to hear was the Pope address- say I'm sorry, do the mea culpa, which would have been historical, and then also, tell priests- look, if you know of anyone who has abused children around the world, turn them in right now, whether it was in the past or going on right now. Beyond that, they believe the Vatican has a corrupt bureaucracy, and they want that reformed. They say the Pope is a long way from doing that. Kyra?

PHILLIPS: Corruption that has to be dealt with- Paula Newton, thanks.

Phillips has made no secret that she supports left-wing changes to the Catholic Church. During a March 26, 2010 segment, she brought on three heterodox Christians who advocate the acceptance of homosexual behavior and the ordination of women without anyone from the opposing side and endorsed their agenda: "I think all three of you need to head to the Vatican and institute some change." The anchor brought back two of those guests nearly a month later on April 21.

It’s hard to imagine how the subversion of the Church of England could get any worse — yet it will, should Prince Charles ascend to the throne. The effective head of the Church of England is the dhimmified, sharia-promoting, anti-American, tradition-bashing Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. If that isn’t bad enough, the titular head — [...]

Lady Gaga’s Alejandro is mesmerizing in its decadence, shamelessly in debt to Christopher Isherwood’s Cabaret, Rudolf Valentino, any number of tales about Latin Lovers, Alexander the Great and,...

View Original Post

On last night's "O'Reilly Factor," host Bill O'Reilly and guest analyst Arthel Neville discussed the possibly impending Comedy Central show "JC" - as in Jesus Christ.

Given the network's past treatment of Christianity, the portend for this show is hardly positive.

Which is why the Media Research Center has put together a coalition to ask advertisers to publicly pledge to not underwrite/support the show. 

Citizens Against Religious Bigotry (CARB) (which Ms. Neville graciously mentioned by name) is made up of many organizations - made up of Christians, Jews and Muslims - who would like to see religion not be the butt of raunchy/tasteless jokes, and who don't think America's advertisers should help fund said alleged humor.

A petition to advertisers (to be found on the CARB website) has garnered more than 115,000 signatures thus far.

And if you aren't familiar with how Comedy Central does Christianity, watch this video and you'll get an idea of what can be expected should JC ever make it to the airwaves.

It's not just members of the media standing up to support disgraced journalist Helen Thomas after her unscheduled retirement caused by anti-Semitic remarks she made on camera last week.

The rabbi that caught her disgusting comments on videotape and put them on the Internet has received 25,000 hate-email messages - and counting.

Hours after MSNBC's Keith Olbermann actually called Rabbi David Nesenoff one of his "Worst Persons in the World," CBS-TV in New York reported the vicious electronic attacks streaming into the rabbi's inbox like a "ticker tape" (video follows with partial transcript, h/t HotAirPundit):

ROB MORRISON, CBS2 NEW YORK: Four days ago Long Island Rabbi David Nesenoff launched his new website with these now-infamous comments from legendary journalist Helen Thomas. [...]

MORRISON: The veteran newswoman apologized and then retired. Since then, Rabbi Nesenoff says the hate mail has been pouring in. 

RABBI DAVID NESENOFF: As we're talking here, right now, the emails on my email are like a ticker tape. It's been this way for a week. It's going, going, going. 

MORRISON: 25,000 and counting -- messages like: 

"The Jews need to go home just like the filthy illegals that plague America, same (expletive)." 

"I know your type you gentile hating Jew boy. Come and face me turd. I'll smash u under my boot." 

"Hitler was right. Time for you to go back in the oven." 

Most of the senders not even bothering to hide their email addresses. 

NESENOFF: These are people that feel very mainstream about anti-Semitism and hate. They feel so proud of it. There is an arrogance about it. There is no shame.

There certainly isn't, nor is there any shame from media members likely missing what the real story is here: rampant anti-Semitism in America and how it goes largely over-looked by our press. In this instance, so-called journalists in their zeal to support Thomas are even defending it.

By contrast, any incident of possible racism towards minorities will get great attention by the affirmative action supporting press. Take for example the CNN.com report Wednesday that blamed white people for President Obama's pathetic response to the Gulf Coast oil spill.

Since Obama threw his name into the ring as a presidential candidate back in February 2007, his adoring press have tried to bring race into the discussion whenever possible. 

Consider how quickly the Cambridge police department was labeled racist during last July's Henry Louis Gates Jr. episode. Media then conveniently called it a "teachable moment" about race relations in this country.

So why isn't the nation's longest living member of the White House press corps making disgustingly anti-Semitic remarks to a rabbi a "teachable moment?"

Far from it, as NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell noted Tuesday, "[T]he only soundbites came from sympathetic media colleagues, wishing her well."

So what did Americans learn from THIS moment?

If you're a journalist that makes an anti-Semitic remark, your colleagues will support you.

Isn't that a nice lesson as anti-Semitic acts of violence around the world continue to rise? Or hadn't you heard that such attacks more than doubled last year?

Oh. That's right. You couldn't have known that, for our media chose NOT to report it. 

Wasn't that convenient? 

Add it all up, and just as our press exploit real or imagined racism to advance their agenda ESPECIALLY if it can help an elected official they support, anti-Semitic acts are not only regularly ignored but also excused if need be.

Why this is still the case 65 years after the few surviving Jews were liberated from Nazi death camps after World War II is truly astounding. 

The whole idea of having a mosque at Ground Zero is an abomination. It’s nothing less than an attempt by radical Muslims to celebrate the death of 3,000 Americans at the hands of Al-Qaeda while laughing at the stupidity of Americans who are willing to give them a pass in the name of political   correctness. So, [...]

I was sitting in Church-Lady Helen’s living room. Someone commented on the illegal immigration problem. I said, “For some strange reason our government doesn’t know that illegal...

View Original Post

As other media outlets have given Helen Thomas the kid glove treatment in light of her "trailblazing" career, media consumers may be forgiven for assuming that Helen Thomas's anti-Israel, arguably anti-Semitic comments were an aberration in an otherwise unblemished career of assertive but fair journalism.

To his credit, Washington Post's media reporter Howard Kurtz made note of other incidents, such as the time Thomas blamed Israel for inspiring "99 percent" of terrorism and the time in 2002 when she exclaimed "Thank God for Hezbollah," the Iran-backed terror group that murdered 241 U.S. servicement in 1983 and has plagued Israel for decades.

As the excerpt below shows, it's not just conservatives who have had complaints about Thomas (emphases mine):

"She asked questions no hard-news reporter would ask, that carried an agenda and reflected her point of view, and there were some reporters who felt that was inappropriate," said CBS correspondent Mark Knoller. "As a columnist she felt totally unbound from any of the normal policies of objectivity that every other reporter in the room felt compelled to abide by, and sometimes her questions were embarrassing to other reporters."

But few called her out for such conduct -- until Nesenoff, who heads a Long Island synagogue, posted the video on his site RabbiLIVE.com. Commentators on the right and left quickly eviscerated Thomas.

"She's always said crazy stuff," said National Review Online columnist Jonah Goldberg. "One reason she gets a pass is that there's an entrenched system of deference to seniority in the White House press corps. . . . This newfound horror and dismay that people are expressing about Helen Thomas are beyond a day late and a dollar short."

Jeffrey Goldberg, an Atlantic reporter who specializes in the Middle East, said: "Helen Thomas offered the official Hamas position, as far as I can tell. There's a level of insensitivity that's almost comical in what she said, to tell Jews to go back to Germany, where things worked out so well for them."

[...]

In 2002, Thomas asked Fleischer: "Does the president think that the Palestinians have a right to resist 35 years of brutal military occupation and suppression?"

Four years later, Thomas told Fleischer's successor, Tony Snow, that the United States "could have stopped the bombardment of Lebanon" by Israel, but instead had "gone for collective punishment against all of Lebanon and Palestine." Snow tartly thanked her for "the Hezbollah view."

Mark Rabin, a former freelance cameraman for CNN, said that in a 2002 conversation at the White House, Thomas said "thank God for Hezbollah" for driving Israel out of Lebanon, adding that "Israel is the cause for 99 percent of all this terrorism."

The Daily Caller Web site noted that during a 2004 speech to the Al-Hewar Center, a Washington-based Arab organization, Thomas likened Palestinian protesters resisting the "tyrannical occupation" by Israel to "those who resisted the Nazi occupation."

A handful of journalists questioned her role over the years. In a 2006 New Republic piece, Jonathan Chait accused Thomas of "unhinged rants," noting that she had asked such questions as: "Why are we killing people in Iraq? Men, women, and children are being killed there. . . . It's outrageous."

"Why are we killing people in Iraq?" may be a question that warms the hearts of Code Pinkers, but it's hardly the caliber of question one would expect from a seasoned journalistic veteran. 

Remember, we're talking about a woman with a half-century of experience in Washington journalism, certainly someone who knows quite a bit about how policy is made and how Washington works, yet her questions were incredibly simplistic, even Manichean in their outlook on all manner of policy matters. 

It's amazing how much adulation the media are giving a woman who practically phoned it in the last nine years of her career.

Kudos to Howard Kurtz for highlighting critical voices, and not just conservative ones.

MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, Chuck Todd, and Savannah Guthrie on Tuesday’s “The Daily Rundown” were in “anguish” over the forced retirement of Helen Thomas, but showed little sympathy for the Israelis that the Hearst columnist so odiously disrespected.

“I think a lot of people feel some anguish about this because the comments were beyond the pale,” lamented Guthrie. “And yet it tarnishes a career that otherwise people would be celebrating because she was indeed a trailblazer.”

Glossing over the longtime reporter’s comments that Israelis should “get the hell out of Palestine” and go back to Germany or Poland, Mitchell lauded Thomas’s career as “storied” and proceeded to hearken back to a time when Washington was an “all-male town” and Thomas was blazing the trail for women.

“When I first arrived here, after dinner, at political dinners, women went to one room, men went to another to smoke cigars and have brandy,” recalled Mitchell. “This was a very traditional place–not like New York or other East Coast cities.”

In an attempt to make excuses for Thomas while appearing to condemn her remarks, contradictions ran rampant. First up, Mitchell:

And just to put it in context, there’s no way to explain, excuse what she said because she’s apologized for it and we all know having been in that briefing room that Helen has very passionate views on this subject and has said things that are not what you would expect from a reporter. But she hasn’t been a reporter for 10 years; she has been a columnist.

Dismissing the offensive comments as “passionate views,” Mitchell made absolutely no excuses for Thomas except to make the distinction that columnists are entitled to a measure of leeway not afforded to reporters.

Then Guthrie–referring to Thomas’s role as a “trailblazer”–presented another puzzling contradiction: “It doesn’t mitigate what she said, but she’s also 89-years-old.” To put it another way, her comments are inexplicable, but give her a break because she’s old and cranky.

“And by the way, she’s not the only person in that press briefing room who asks offensive questions,” reminded Guthrie. Yes, Thomas is not the only cantankerous liberal journalist to use her platform in the White House briefing room to advance her radical agenda. But that doesn’t excuse Thomas for insulting a democratic nation besieged by extremist groups who do not recognize its right to exist. Indeed, Thomas's blanket "get the hell out" statement sounds a lot like the viewpoint of some of those groups which believe that Israel's very existence is illegitimate.

As MRC Research Director Rich Noyes has chronicled, over the course of her “storied” career, Helen Thomas has consistently railed against conservatives with inflammatory rhetoric even before she became a columnist, demonstrating to an entire generation of future liberal journalists how to pummel conservatives. A trailblazer indeed.

A full transcript of the segment can be found below:

CHUCK TODD: Well the front row in the White House briefing room is not going to be the same. Veteran correspondent Helen Thomas is calling it quits in the wake of an uproar over her comments that Israelis should “get the hell out of Palestine.”

SAVANNAH GUTHRIE: And she also said they should go back to Germany and Poland and the US, among other places. This ends a career that spanned more than six decades and 10 presidents. With us now, NBC’s chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell with the story.

I think a lot of people feel some anguish about this because the comments were beyond the pale, and yet it tarnishes a career that otherwise people would be celebrating because she was indeed a trailblazer.

ANDREA MITCHELL: A storied career. And just to put it in context, there’s no way to explain, excuse what she said because she’s apologized for it and we all know having been in that briefing room that Helen has very passionate views on this subject and has said things that are not what you would expect from a reporter. But she hasn’t been a reporter for 10 years; she has been a columnist. You know this better than I being there everyday though. But I have to take us back just to give you the context of Helen Thomas. We can talk about trailblazers, I can’t describe to you what it was like for women in this profession. Helen was the first–

TODD: Just 30 years ago, not 50 years ago when she started, just 30 years ago, correct?

MITCHELL: She became the first woman president of the Gridiron club. There were no women in the Gridiron club. I can remember the day when, in the 70's, Kay Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post, and her top editorial writer, Meg Greenfield, drove around the hotel where the Gridiron was taking place, just to watch the women protesting out front. Katharine Graham could not be invited. This was an all-male town. When I first arrived here, after dinner, at political dinners, women went to one room, men went to another to smoke cigars and have brandy. This was a very traditional place–not like New York or other East Coast cities. Helen went through a lot, and so some understanding of context, without explaining or understanding or apologizing–

GUTHRIE: It doesn’t mitigate what she said, but she’s also 89-years-old.

TODD: And there is a question as to whether a couple of things that are going to get sparked by this debate. Number one, you know, was “Hearst” aware–if one of her bosses had been in that briefing room for the last two years–none of this would have come as a surprise to them. She’s been unfiltered for quite some time.

MITCHELL: Those briefings are carried live.

TODD: There was no excuse. Two, the question is, who belongs in the White House press corp at this point? And the thing is, as much as everybody’s going to say, “well you can’t have columnists.” Well what’s the line these days? There’s activist journalists–what’s the difference between an activist journalist who’s got an agenda versus a reporter.

GUTHRIE: And by the way, she’s not the only person in that press briefing room who asks offensive questions.

MITCHELL: Ronald Reagan used to have his aides–Mike Deaver used to tell him that if you’re in trouble at a press conference, call on one of the “crazies,” one of the activist journalists.

TODD: Joe Lockhart admitted to us that one of the people who’s typically hostile to Democrats would be used as a rescue valve for him.

MITCHELL: Because it would make the president look more sympathetic and change the subject.

GUTHRIE: Andrea Mitchell, great perspective, thank you for coming on today, we appreciate it.

--Alex Fitzsimmons is a News Analysis intern at the Media Research Center. Click here to follow him on Twitter.

 

MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, Chuck Todd, and Savannah Guthrie on Tuesday’s “The Daily Rundown” were in “anguish” over the forced retirement of Helen Thomas, but showed little sympathy for the Israelis that the Hearst columnist so odiously disrespected.

“I think a lot of people feel some anguish about this because the comments were beyond the pale,” lamented Guthrie. “And yet it tarnishes a career that otherwise people would be celebrating because she was indeed a trailblazer.”

Glossing over the longtime reporter’s comments that Israelis should “get the hell out of Palestine” and go back to Germany or Poland, Mitchell lauded Thomas’s career as “storied” and proceeded to harken back to a time when Washington was an “all-male town” and Thomas was blazing the trail for women.

“When I first arrived here, after dinner, at political dinners, women went to one room, men went to another to smoke cigars and have brandy,” recalled Mitchell. “This was a very traditional place–not like New York or other East Coast cities.”

In an attempt to make excuses for Thomas while appearing to condemn her remarks, contradictions ran rampant. First up, Mitchell:

And just to put it in context, there’s no way to explain, excuse what she said because she’s apologized for it and we all know having been in that briefing room that Helen has very passionate views on this subject and has said things that are not what you would expect from a reporter. But she hasn’t been a reporter for 10 years; she has been a columnist.

Dismissing the offensive comments as “passionate views,” Mitchell made absolutely no excuses for Thomas except to make the distinction that columnists are entitled to a measure of leeway not afforded to reporters.

Then Guthrie–referring to Thomas’s role as a “trailblazer”–presented another puzzling contradiction: “It doesn’t mitigate what she said, but she’s also 89-years-old.” To put it another way, her comments are inexplicable, but give her a break because she’s old and cranky.

“And by the way, she’s not the only person in that press briefing room who asks offensive questions,” reminded Guthrie. Yes, Thomas is not the only cantankerous liberal journalist to use her platform in the White House briefing room to advance her radical agenda. But that doesn’t excuse Thomas for insulting a democratic nation besieged by extremist groups who do not recognize its right to exist. Indeed, Thomas's blanket "get the hell out" statement sounds a lot like the viewpoint of some of those groups which believe that Israel's very existence is illegitimate.

As MRC Research Director Rich Noyes has chronicled, over the course of her “storied” career, Helen Thomas has consistently railed against conservatives with inflammatory rhetoric even before she became a columnist, demonstrating to an entire generation of future liberal journalists how to pummel conservatives. A trailblazer indeed.

A full transcript of the segment can be found below:

CHUCK TODD: Well the front row in the White House briefing room is not going to be the same. Veteran correspondent Helen Thomas is calling it quits in the wake of an uproar over her comments that Israelis should “get the hell out of Palestine.”

SAVANNAH GUTHRIE: And she also said they should go back to Germany and Poland and the US, among other places. This ends a career that spanned more than six decades and 10 presidents. With us now, NBC’s chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell with the story.

I think a lot of people feel some anguish about this because the comments were beyond the pale, and yet it tarnishes a career that otherwise people would be celebrating because she was indeed a trailblazer.

ANDREA MITCHELL: A storied career. And just to put it in context, there’s no way to explain, excuse what she said because she’s apologized for it and we all know having been in that briefing room that Helen has very passionate views on this subject and has said things that are not what you would expect from a reporter. But she hasn’t been a reporter for 10 years; she has been a columnist. You know this better than I being there everyday though. But I have to take us back just to give you the context of Helen Thomas. We can talk about trailblazers, I can’t describe to you what it was like for women in this profession. Helen was the first–

TODD: Just 30 years ago, not 50 years ago when she started, just 30 years ago, correct?

MITCHELL: She became the first woman president of the Gridiron club. There were no women in the Gridiron club. I can remember the day when, in the 70's, Kay Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post, and her top editorial writer, Meg Greenfield, drove around the hotel where the Gridiron was taking place, just to watch the women protesting out front. Katharine Graham could not be invited. This was an all-male town. When I first arrived here, after dinner, at political dinners, women went to one room, men went to another to smoke cigars and have brandy. This was a very traditional place–not like New York or other East Coast cities. Helen went through a lot, and so some understanding of context, without explaining or understanding or apologizing–

GUTHRIE: It doesn’t mitigate what she said, but she’s also 89-years-old.

TODD: And there is a question as to whether a couple of things that are going to get sparked by this debate. Number one, you know, was “Hearst” aware–if one of her bosses had been in that briefing room for the last two years–none of this would have come as a surprise to them. She’s been unfiltered for quite some time.

MITCHELL: Those briefings are carried live.

TODD: There was no excuse. Two, the question is, who belongs in the White House press corp at this point? And the thing is, as much as everybody’s going to say, “well you can’t have columnists.” Well what’s the line these days? There’s activist journalists–what’s the difference between an activist journalist who’s got an agenda versus a reporter.

GUTHRIE: And by the way, she’s not the only person in that press briefing room who asks offensive questions.

MITCHELL: Ronald Reagan used to have his aides–Mike Deaver used to tell him that if you’re in trouble at a press conference, call on one of the “crazies,” one of the activist journalists.

TODD: Joe Lockhart admitted to us that one of the people who’s typically hostile to Democrats would be used as a rescue valve for him.

MITCHELL: Because it would make the president look more sympathetic and change the subject.

GUTHRIE: Andrea Mitchell, great perspective, thank you for coming on today, we appreciate it.

--Alex Fitzsimmons is a News Analysis intern at the Media Research Center. Click here to follow him on Twitter.

 

MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, Chuck Todd, and Savannah Guthrie on Tuesday’s “The Daily Rundown” were in “anguish” over the forced retirement of Helen Thomas, but showed little sympathy for the Israelis that the Hearst columnist so odiously disrespected.

“I think a lot of people feel some anguish about this because the comments were beyond the pale,” lamented Guthrie. “And yet it tarnishes a career that otherwise people would be celebrating because she was indeed a trailblazer.”

Glossing over the longtime reporter’s comments that Israelis should “get the hell out of Palestine” and go back to Germany or Poland, Mitchell lauded Thomas’s career as “storied” and proceeded to harken back to a time when Washington was an “all-male town” and Thomas was blazing the trail for women.

“When I first arrived here, after dinner, at political dinners, women went to one room, men went to another to smoke cigars and have brandy,” recalled Mitchell. “This was a very traditional place–not like New York or other East Coast cities.”

In an attempt to make excuses for Thomas while appearing to condemn her remarks, contradictions ran rampant. First up, Mitchell:

And just to put it in context, there’s no way to explain, excuse what she said because she’s apologized for it and we all know having been in that briefing room that Helen has very passionate views on this subject and has said things that are not what you would expect from a reporter. But she hasn’t been a reporter for 10 years; she has been a columnist.

Dismissing the offensive comments as “passionate views,” Mitchell made absolutely no excuses for Thomas except to make the distinction that columnists are entitled to a measure of leeway not afforded to reporters.

Then Guthrie–referring to Thomas’s role as a “trailblazer”–presented another puzzling contradiction: “It doesn’t mitigate what she said, but she’s also 89-years-old.” To put it another way, her comments are inexplicable, but give her a break because she’s old and cranky.

“And by the way, she’s not the only person in that press briefing room who asks offensive questions,” reminded Guthrie. Yes, Thomas is not the only cantankerous liberal journalist to use her platform in the White House briefing room to advance her radical agenda. But that doesn’t excuse Thomas for insulting a democratic nation besieged by extremist groups who do not recognize its right to exist. Indeed, Thomas's blanket "get the hell out" statement sounds a lot like the viewpoint of some of those groups which believe that Israel's very existence is illegitimate.

As MRC Research Director Rich Noyes has chronicled, over the course of her “storied” career, Helen Thomas has consistently railed against conservatives with inflammatory rhetoric even before she became a columnist, demonstrating to an entire generation of future liberal journalists how to pummel conservatives. A trailblazer indeed.

A full transcript of the segment can be found below:

CHUCK TODD: Well the front row in the White House briefing room is not going to be the same. Veteran correspondent Helen Thomas is calling it quits in the wake of an uproar over her comments that Israelis should “get the hell out of Palestine.”

SAVANNAH GUTHRIE: And she also said they should go back to Germany and Poland and the US, among other places. This ends a career that spanned more than six decades and 10 presidents. With us now, NBC’s chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell with the story.

I think a lot of people feel some anguish about this because the comments were beyond the pale, and yet it tarnishes a career that otherwise people would be celebrating because she was indeed a trailblazer.

ANDREA MITCHELL: A storied career. And just to put it in context, there’s no way to explain, excuse what she said because she’s apologized for it and we all know having been in that briefing room that Helen has very passionate views on this subject and has said things that are not what you would expect from a reporter. But she hasn’t been a reporter for 10 years; she has been a columnist. You know this better than I being there everyday though. But I have to take us back just to give you the context of Helen Thomas. We can talk about trailblazers, I can’t describe to you what it was like for women in this profession. Helen was the first–

TODD: Just 30 years ago, not 50 years ago when she started, just 30 years ago, correct?

MITCHELL: She became the first woman president of the Gridiron club. There were no women in the Gridiron club. I can remember the day when, in the 70's, Kay Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post, and her top editorial writer, Meg Greenfield, drove around the hotel where the Gridiron was taking place, just to watch the women protesting out front. Katharine Graham could not be invited. This was an all-male town. When I first arrived here, after dinner, at political dinners, women went to one room, men went to another to smoke cigars and have brandy. This was a very traditional place–not like New York or other East Coast cities. Helen went through a lot, and so some understanding of context, without explaining or understanding or apologizing–

GUTHRIE: It doesn’t mitigate what she said, but she’s also 89-years-old.

TODD: And there is a question as to whether a couple of things that are going to get sparked by this debate. Number one, you know, was “Hearst” aware–if one of her bosses had been in that briefing room for the last two years–none of this would have come as a surprise to them. She’s been unfiltered for quite some time.

MITCHELL: Those briefings are carried live.

TODD: There was no excuse. Two, the question is, who belongs in the White House press corp at this point? And the thing is, as much as everybody’s going to say, “well you can’t have columnists.” Well what’s the line these days? There’s activist journalists–what’s the difference between an activist journalist who’s got an agenda versus a reporter.

GUTHRIE: And by the way, she’s not the only person in that press briefing room who asks offensive questions.

MITCHELL: Ronald Reagan used to have his aides–Mike Deaver used to tell him that if you’re in trouble at a press conference, call on one of the “crazies,” one of the activist journalists.

TODD: Joe Lockhart admitted to us that one of the people who’s typically hostile to Democrats would be used as a rescue valve for him.

MITCHELL: Because it would make the president look more sympathetic and change the subject.

GUTHRIE: Andrea Mitchell, great perspective, thank you for coming on today, we appreciate it.

--Alex Fitzsimmons is a News Analysis intern at the Media Research Center. Click here to follow him on Twitter.

 

MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, Chuck Todd, and Savannah Guthrie on Tuesday’s “The Daily Rundown” were in “anguish” over the forced retirement of Helen Thomas, but showed little sympathy for the Israelis that the Hearst columnist so odiously disrespected.

“I think a lot of people feel some anguish about this because the comments were beyond the pale,” lamented Guthrie. “And yet it tarnishes a career that otherwise people would be celebrating because she was indeed a trailblazer.”

Glossing over the longtime reporter’s comments that Israelis should “get the hell out of Palestine” and go back to Germany or Poland, Mitchell lauded Thomas’s career as “storied” and proceeded to harken back to a time when Washington was an “all-male town” and Thomas was blazing the trail for women.

“When I first arrived here, after dinner, at political dinners, women went to one room, men went to another to smoke cigars and have brandy,” recalled Mitchell. “This was a very traditional place–not like New York or other East Coast cities.”

In an attempt to make excuses for Thomas while appearing to condemn her remarks, contradictions ran rampant. First up, Mitchell:

And just to put it in context, there’s no way to explain, excuse what she said because she’s apologized for it and we all know having been in that briefing room that Helen has very passionate views on this subject and has said things that are not what you would expect from a reporter. But she hasn’t been a reporter for 10 years; she has been a columnist.

Dismissing the offensive comments as “passionate views,” Mitchell made absolutely no excuses for Thomas except to make the distinction that columnists are entitled to a measure of leeway not afforded to reporters.

Then Guthrie–referring to Thomas’s role as a “trailblazer”–presented another puzzling contradiction: “It doesn’t mitigate what she said, but she’s also 89-years-old.” To put it another way, her comments are inexplicable, but give her a break because she’s old and cranky.

“And by the way, she’s not the only person in that press briefing room who asks offensive questions,” reminded Guthrie. Yes, Thomas is not the only cantankerous liberal journalist to use her platform in the White House briefing room to advance her radical agenda. But that doesn’t excuse Thomas for insulting a democratic nation besieged by extremist groups who do not recognize its right to exist. Indeed, Thomas's blanket "get the hell out" statement sounds a lot like the viewpoint of some of those groups which believe that Israel's very existence is illegitimate.

As MRC Research Director Rich Noyes has chronicled, over the course of her “storied” career, Helen Thomas has consistently railed against conservatives with inflammatory rhetoric even before she became a columnist, demonstrating to an entire generation of future liberal journalists how to pummel conservatives. A trailblazer indeed.

A full transcript of the segment can be found below:

CHUCK TODD: Well the front row in the White House briefing room is not going to be the same. Veteran correspondent Helen Thomas is calling it quits in the wake of an uproar over her comments that Israelis should “get the hell out of Palestine.”

SAVANNAH GUTHRIE: And she also said they should go back to Germany and Poland and the US, among other places. This ends a career that spanned more than six decades and 10 presidents. With us now, NBC’s chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell with the story.

I think a lot of people feel some anguish about this because the comments were beyond the pale, and yet it tarnishes a career that otherwise people would be celebrating because she was indeed a trailblazer.

ANDREA MITCHELL: A storied career. And just to put it in context, there’s no way to explain, excuse what she said because she’s apologized for it and we all know having been in that briefing room that Helen has very passionate views on this subject and has said things that are not what you would expect from a reporter. But she hasn’t been a reporter for 10 years; she has been a columnist. You know this better than I being there everyday though. But I have to take us back just to give you the context of Helen Thomas. We can talk about trailblazers, I can’t describe to you what it was like for women in this profession. Helen was the first–

TODD: Just 30 years ago, not 50 years ago when she started, just 30 years ago, correct?

MITCHELL: She became the first woman president of the Gridiron club. There were no women in the Gridiron club. I can remember the day when, in the 70's, Kay Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post, and her top editorial writer, Meg Greenfield, drove around the hotel where the Gridiron was taking place, just to watch the women protesting out front. Katharine Graham could not be invited. This was an all-male town. When I first arrived here, after dinner, at political dinners, women went to one room, men went to another to smoke cigars and have brandy. This was a very traditional place–not like New York or other East Coast cities. Helen went through a lot, and so some understanding of context, without explaining or understanding or apologizing–

GUTHRIE: It doesn’t mitigate what she said, but she’s also 89-years-old.

TODD: And there is a question as to whether a couple of things that are going to get sparked by this debate. Number one, you know, was “Hearst” aware–if one of her bosses had been in that briefing room for the last two years–none of this would have come as a surprise to them. She’s been unfiltered for quite some time.

MITCHELL: Those briefings are carried live.

TODD: There was no excuse. Two, the question is, who belongs in the White House press corp at this point? And the thing is, as much as everybody’s going to say, “well you can’t have columnists.” Well what’s the line these days? There’s activist journalists–what’s the difference between an activist journalist who’s got an agenda versus a reporter.

GUTHRIE: And by the way, she’s not the only person in that press briefing room who asks offensive questions.

MITCHELL: Ronald Reagan used to have his aides–Mike Deaver used to tell him that if you’re in trouble at a press conference, call on one of the “crazies,” one of the activist journalists.

TODD: Joe Lockhart admitted to us that one of the people who’s typically hostile to Democrats would be used as a rescue valve for him.

MITCHELL: Because it would make the president look more sympathetic and change the subject.

GUTHRIE: Andrea Mitchell, great perspective, thank you for coming on today, we appreciate it.

--Alex Fitzsimmons is a News Analysis intern at the Media Research Center. Click here to follow him on Twitter.

 

Editor's Note: The following originally appeared at Andrew Breitbart's Big Hollywood.

Sometimes it’s just so easy. I mean if I really wanted to, I could find all the material needed to expose the folly of the far left just by watching Bill Maher every week and picking apart the claims he offers as “fact” while urged on with hosannas by his trained seals in the Real Time audience. 

The comedian/pundit is a legend in his own studio—and it appears that his embarrassing stint at the big people’s table on This Week a while back, where he was dissected by George Will wielding the carving knife of the Socratic method, did little to humble Maher into questioning his own command of the issues.  “Facts are stubborn things,” said John Adams.  Of course, Mr. Adams never met a left-wing zealot with a worldview for whom reality is often an inconvenience to be waved away like curling pot smoke in a back grotto at the Heff mansion.

Okay, okay…I realize that picking apart Maher isn’t even sporting.  After all, making up his own historical narrative on the fly to support his far-left delusions is fast becoming his hallmark.  Still, let’s have a look-see at a recent Real Time discussion between Bill and two of his panelists, Newark mayor Cory Booker, a devout Baptist, and fellow atheist S.E. Cupp—although Cupp, a conservative commentator, is as respectful of believers as Maher is openly contemptuous (which is another topic).  With hackneyed predictability, and a shameless shortfall of historical grounding, Maher once again goes off on a rant against his favorite bogeyman: religion.  This time about the nexus between past wars and spirituality.  But as we will see, when Maher speaks of “religion” he quickly gets flummoxed about what he even means by the term.

MAHER: [Religion] causes most wars: The Crusades, the inquisition, 9/11, honor Killings…

CUPP: No that’s factually not true.

BOOKER: Humans…humans cause war.

CUPP: Religion doesn’t kill people…people kill people.

BOOKER: We’ve been known to start wars over everything from natural resources to land, to religion—

CUPP: Colonialism, tribalism.

BOOKER: —we start wars.

MAHER: The justification for most of that is religion.

CUPP: No it’s not.

MAHER: Of course it is…What gets normal people to think it’s okay to kill other people is religion…very little else….

CUPP: Or colonialism, or land power grabs, or nativism…

MAHER: Mostly religion. Ethnic cleansing, honor rape…

CUPP: Hitler, Pol Pot Mao, Stalin, not in the name of religion.

MAHER: Were state religions. [Puzzled looks from panel]  Of course they were.

CUPP: Communism is a state religion?

MAHER: Absolutely.  You never heard that? 

CUPP:  I think we’re talking about different things.

MAHER: We’re not.  We’re just talking different labels.

Bzzzz!  Time-out,  Bill.  I thought religion, as you have so condescendingly referred to it in the past, is a deluded belief in a “magical man” who makes things happen?  But suddenly when cornered with the historical record that refutes your indictment of religion as the chief culprit in most wars and instead places the blame on some decidedly baser human expressions be they communism, Nazism, nationalism, conquest, raw materials, etc. you suddenly switch gears to re-categorize such a secular socio-economic concept as communism as religion, too? 

Really Bill?  Really?

So to be clear Maher considers Sino and Soviet communism—ideologies which seek to replace God with The State—to be their own religions?  Gee, wouldn’t even a casual observer conclude that their codified atheism as the very antithesis of religion?  His is a conveniently elastic definition of the word to say the least.  By Maher’s logic then secular humanism, of which he is an outspoken devotee, is a religion as well because it exalts man.  Man as god.  Is capitalism then a “religion” because it exults profit?  Money as god?  Heck, in Maher’s little mind, are not the fans at Yankee Stadium in reality a congregation in a temple worshiping Jeter and A-Rod? 

You get the gist.  Still so unaccustomed to cross-examination by the learned, the satirist offers up to Cupp a line of argument to back up his ad hoc thesis of which Clarence Darrow would have been proud: “You never heard that?” Well said, sir.  Well said indeed.

So here we can see that, when called out once again on one of his ready-shoot-aim inanities our cock-sure pontificator simply dodges and weaves in a pathetic attempt to wriggle out of a fundamentally inaccurate statement by re-defining “religion” on the spot. 

Phew!  Dodged that bullet eh, Bill?

Well, not really.  Let’s look closer at his argument that religion is the cause of most wars. According to the ol’ encyclopedia here, some of the bloodiest wars in the last century were World War II, World War I, the Second Congo War, Korea, Vietnam, the Iran-Iraq War.  Raise your hand if you can tell me the religious zealotry driving these conflicts.  Anyone? Anyone?  Bueller? Maher? Anyone?

Unfortunately for Maher’s proposition, the causes of these wars were as earthly as they come:  land, power, profit, raw materials, conquest, balance of power, regional domination.  The closest intrusion of theology into these many conflicts may be a hint of honoring a deity in the case of the Japanese reverence of the ceremonial Mikado…but that was just a façade as the hegemonic Japan’s true motivation was a quest for fuel, rubber and ore.   As for the Iran-Iraq War, sure sunni/shiah tensions helped fuel the flames, but the real engine driving this conflict was crude oil.

So perhaps Bill should have said:

“Religion causes most wars with the following minor exceptions: (Deep breath) The Second Congo War, the Gulf War, the Vietnam War, the Korean War,  World War II, the Russo-Finish War, the Sino-Japanese war ,World War I, the Russo-Japanese War, the Boer War, the Spanish-American war, the Spanish Civil War , the US Civil War, the Napoleanic Wars, etc, etc.”

There is a marked difference between going to war explicitly for one’s God and hoping that God is rooting for you as you go off to war to fight for something else.  As the old saying goes: “There are no atheists in foxholes.”

Has religion been the cassis belli in past conflicts?  Of course it has and to deny that is to ignore history…which is Maher’s forte, not mine.  But “some” or “one of many” as opposed to most is in terms of meaning and implication about as yawning a chasm as exists between the minds of C.S. Lewis and Bill Maher.  But this concept is beyond the funny-man-turned-left-wing-crusader for commenting on war and its complex antecedents requires a rudimentary knowledge of the historical record from which opinions should emerge…not the other way around. 

I don’t know what happened to Maher during his life to turn him so caustic on religion — a subject about which he demonstrates week after week he has only a child-like understanding.  But I would recommend that if he is going to speak with such conviction about the causal relationship between belief in a higher power and the world at war, he should at least crack open a history book first before opening his mouth -– preferably one written by someone other than Noam Chomsky.  Otherwise this man will just continue to make himself to look more and more the fool…his howling enablers in the stacked peanut gallery notwithstanding.

Well that didn't take long. The folks at the left-wing MoveOn.org are practically in mourning over Helen Thomas's "retirement."

Just a few hours after news broke that Hearst columnist Helen Thomas is calling it quits after a viral video of her anti-Semitic comments led to widespead condemnation of the White House press corps dean.

Sam Stein of the Huffington Post has the story:

The abrupt retirement of Helen Thomas from her perch as the ranking member of the White House press corps was essentially accepted as a fait accompli by supporters and detractors alike after her controversial remarks urging Jews to leave Israel surfaced.

Indeed, if there was any defense made of Thomas's comments, it wasn't done persuasively or at an influential level. But that didn't stop the progressive community -- many hearing about her retirement while at the Campaign for America's Future conference in D.C. -- from collectively fretting on Monday about what the loss of her voice bodes for the day-to-day interaction between the White House and the Fourth Estate.

Her absence will be felt "significantly," said Ilyse Hogue, Communications Director of Moveon.org. "The burden will fall on the rest of the press corps to make sure the administration feels the need to be transparent about its plans to get us out of Iraq and Afghanistan."

Of course, Stein found a way to work in a swipe at the Bush administration for "marginalizing" Thomas:

It was her intense skepticism of the dual wars (and her subsequent marginalization by the Bush administration) that helped make her an iconic figure in the progressive, anti-war community, which felt reporters had abdicated their responsibilities in the early 2000s. 

But Thomas's questions, both during the Bush and Obama administrations, were often little more than anti-war screeds, not legitimate efforts at soliciting information to report to the public. It could be understandably tiresome for any press secretary to deal with that on a daily basis, much less the journalists in the briefing room, which Stein seemed to concede:

So predictable were the questions she asked that fellow reporters would practically ad-lib Robert Gibbs's answers. Grumbling had started well before her firing that the purpose of sitting her in the front row (a prime piece of real estate in the media world) no longer seemed so evident.

Via Politico, Hearst Newspapers columnist Thomas issued a statement today: "I deeply regret my comments I made last week regarding the Israelis and the Palestinians. They do not reflect my heart-felt belief that peace will come to the Middle East only when all parties recognize the need for mutual respect and tolerance. May that day come soon." 

Michael Calderone at Yahoo! News reports that a second half of the Thomas interview is yet to come from Rabbi David Nesenoff and his site RabbiLive.com, and the first half was delayed while the rabbi's 17-year-old webmaster son finished his finals: 

Although she's apologized, Nesenoff said Thomas should do more, and "the only way to fix it is to become a poster child for tolerance and non-hatred."

Next, Nesenoff said that in a day or so, he'll release part two of the interview, but was tight-lipped about what else Thomas said that day.

"Part two will be very interesting to watch," he said, adding that Thomas is in it "100 percent" of the time.  

Here's how Calderone relayed that the rabbi actually sat on the big scoop for a week:  

On May 27, Nesenoff attended the Jewish Heritage Celebration at the White House with his son Adam and a friend of Adam's. While walking across the front lawn Nesenoff and the boys saw Thomas, and decided to ask her about her thoughts on Israel. 

Nesenoff, speaking Monday with Yahoo! News, said he didn't know about Thomas's strident views on Israel but approached the 89-year-old journalist for an interview because she "is an icon of the White House." So when Thomas responded, and suggested Jews leave the dispute lands for Germany or Poland, the rabbi said he was "shocked."

Even though Nesenoff had the story, he still need to get it online. But Adam, the webmaster for RabbiLive, had to get through finals first. "So we waited, and of course, during the waiting of it, the flotilla happened," Nesenoff said, referring to the deadly siege of a Gaza-bound ship last week.

The video was posted online last Thursday night, and since, has been viewed more than a million times on YouTube. The ensuing controversy over Thomas's remarks has raised questions about whether Thomas should keep her seat in the briefing room or even her job at Hearst Newspapers.  

Nesenoff said that Hearst has "got to get rid of her," adding that he's spoken with the newspaper chain since the video aired.

"I was contacted by Hearst, and I'll just say that I'm interested in continuing the conversation with them and interested in putting my advice into the mix," Nesenoff said.

For a summary of liberal and vicious eruptions from Mount St. Helen, see this post from Rich Noyes. 

Plus: "She has poured mud all over my family's name," Christian evangelist Victoria Hearst told World Net Daily. "I've never heard any Hearst family member make an anti-Semitic remark, and none of them would be in agreement with Helen Thomas."

Managing Editor's Note: The following was originally published today at the Washington Post/Newsweek "On Faith" page. Mr. Bozell was asked to contribute this "Guest Voice" column to explain his complaints about Comedy Central's planned "JC" cartoon.

Comedians often pride themselves on being irreverent, and in today's popular culture a favorite thing to ridicule is religion. The network Comedy Central has made laughing at religion its bread and butter. Their irreverence has limits, however, and it has nothing to do with taste. When radical Muslims wrote ominously online that the creators of "South Park" could end up like Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh - shot eight times on the street - mockery of Muhammed was formally and publicly censored.

Within weeks of that very public retreat, Comedy Central announced plans to work up a series laughing at Jesus Christ called "JC," a half-hour animated show about Jesus trying to live a normal life in New York City to escape the "enormous shadow" of his "powerful but apathetic father." God the Father is preoccupied with playing video games while Christ is the "ultimate fish out of water."

Beyond the glaring double standard there is this question: Where is the market demand for an entire television series dedicated to attacks on Jesus Christ? What did Jesus Christ do to Comedy Central that they must relentlessly mock Him by portraying him defecating and talking about his "yummy, yummy crap" on "South Park" and roast him on specials titled "Merry F--ing Christmas"? Why the visuals of Jesus Christ being stabbed to death? Of the Blessed Virgin Mary menstruating? To call these attacks "juvenile" is an insult to juveniles.

Enough is enough. Citizens Against Religious Bigotry, a coalition of some 20 organizations and leaders, some Christian, some Jewish and some secular, in all representing millions of Americans, has come together to demand that the advertising community withhold their sponsorship dollars from this show, based on Comedy Central's documented history of anti-Christian bigotry. To sponsor this show is to support that anti-Christian bigotry. In reply, network spokesman Tony Fox declared that this show is only a vague idea and perhaps our group "should save their energy for the moment if and when this series ever makes air." But if "JC" is too vague to deserve comment, why did Comedy Central announce it with flagrant God-bashing fanfare?

It's amazing that the Comedy Central folks consider this putrid material to be "art" and wrap themselves with the blanket of artistic freedom of expression. Said programming head Kent Alterman: "The beauty of working at a place like Comedy Central is you can empower people to actualize their vision in a really unfiltered way."

Unless, of course, the "vision" is an attack on Muhammed, in which case there will be immediate self-imposed censorship.

Comedy Central loves the idea that irreverence is the highest value that inspires the biggest laughs. Christians are called to love the opposite idea: that reverence to God is the highest value. We are called to take up the cross of Jesus daily, and that as a result people will "utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account."

We will not be silent. This anti-Christian bigotry must stop.

Time's Joe Klein, no fan of the present Israeli government he, has weighed in on Helen Thomas's now infamous "get the hell out of Palestine" comments.

Writing for his magazine's Swampland blog yesterday, Klein denounced the Hearst columnist's comments as "odious," but stopped short of demanding her ouster from the White House press briefing room. Instead, Klein urged in his June 6 post that Thomas should forego her front row seat and get pushed towards the back of the room:

[I]t's not unprecedented for journalists with odious views to have access to the press room. What is unprecedented is for such a journalist to have a front-row center seat. Thomas should no longer have that privilege. The front row should be occupied by working reporters, not columnists. The WHCA should sanction Thomas by sending her back to the cheap seats. This would accurately reflect her current status as a journalist while preserving her First Amendment right to be as obnoxious as she wants.

By now if you are a political junkie you know that the Queen of the White House press corps, Helen Thomas, was heard to voice the anti-Semitic sentiment that all the Jews in Israel should “go back to Germany and Poland” where they came from. So far, the tepid response from the oh, so racially [...]

Sometimes it’s just so easy. I mean if I really wanted to, I could find all the material needed to expose the folly of the far left just by watching Bill Maher every week and picking apart the claims...

View Original Post

I was in Normandy in June 2004 for the 60th anniversary of D-Day when I picked up a souvenir front page of the New York Times from June 7, 1944, which reported on the invasion of the day before.

I keep a copy of it in my office (and the PDF on my website) because it’s a fascinating and illuminating piece of American history.

One, it provides a clear window into the role that Christianity and Judeo-Christian values played in American culture on that “Day of Days.” Two, it proves, in no uncertain terms, how radically the New York Times, the Democrats and their kindred political spirits have shifted to the left in the 66 years since our nation’s finest hour.

The Times’ lead story in the left column of the June 7, 1944 edition was headlined “Country in Prayer.” Reporter Lawrence Resner wrote: “Led by President Roosevelt, the entire country joined in solemn prayer yesterday for the success of the United Nations armies of liberation.”

We learn in the piece that church bells rang across the land, including in Boston’s Old North Church, and that Americans flooded their houses of worship. New York governor Thomas Dewey attended services at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Albany, while in Manhattan, some 50,000 people jammed Madison Square for a prayer led by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia.

It pays to remember that D-Day was a Tuesday.

Next to Resner’s piece, front and center on page one, was a dutiful transcription of President Roosevelt’s national prayer:

“Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity … Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom.”

Roosevelt asked, with Lincolnian faith, that the Americans at home “rededicate ourselves in renewed faith in (Almighty God) in this hour of great sacrifice.” (You can listen to his prayer here.)

If President Bush had invoked the kingdom of Almighty God, the radicals at the contemporary N.Y. Times would have savaged him mercilessly. But on D-Day, the left’s greatest icon prayed for the grace of God on page one of the N.Y. Times.

Page one was not the only place in the Times that you’d find prayers to a Christian God on D-Day. In fact, these prayers appeared on the editorial pages, too.

The Times editorial board, led by Arthur Hays Sulzberger, grandfather of current publisher Pinch Sulzberger, published these words on June 7, 1944, under the headline “Let us Pray.”

“This nation was born in the only revolution in history made in the name of God. It was born of the conception that the rights of man … are given him by God as the inalienable birthright of the human being.”

The piece continued: “We pray for the boys … we pray for our country … the cause prays for itself, for it is the cause of the God who created men free and equal.” (See the page here.)

It’s a far, far cry from the secular and anti-Christian screeds that dominate op-ed pages today. In fact, it’s hard to believe those words come from the same publication we know today.

Historian Stephen Ambrose chronicled the way a proudly religious nation reacted to the invasion of Europe in “D-Day, June 6, 1944: the Climactic Battle of World War II.”

“The impulse to pray was overwhelming. Across the United States and Canada church bells rang … as a solemn reminder of national unity and a call to formal prayer. Special services were held in every church and synagogue in the land. Pews were jammed with worshipers.”

The Liberty Bell rang on D-Day for the first time in 109 years. “Philadelphia mayor Bernard Samuel tapped the bell … sending its voice throughout the country,” wrote Ambrose. “Then he offered a prayer.”

Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower called D-Day “a great crusade.” President Roosevelt called for “faith in our united crusade.” Media that crucified a president for uttering the word “crusade” in 2001 offered no criticism in 1944.

Remember, too, that 9,387 Americans are buried above Normandy’s “bloody” Omaha Beach, where so many were slaughtered on D-Day. They’re not buried beneath trite “co-exist” bumper stickers. They’re buried beneath 9,387 pristine white marble symbols of Western faith: Stars of David and crosses of Jesus Christ.

Contemporary leftists tell us that the right side of the political spectrum has grown too rigidly conservative. They “cling to their guns or religion” as President Obama said so condescendingly of his countrymen while on the campaign trail in 2008.

The truth, though, is that Americans in the anxious hours of D-Day embraced their Judeo-Christian God. The truth is that the left has abandoned these core American values since D-Day. The truth is that, in 1944, a conservative people clinging to guns and religion saved the world.

We know all this is true, simply by reading the N.Y. Times of June 7, 1944.

Christians and conservatives have not abandoned America’s roots. Today’s “right-wing radicals” believe what ordinary Americans believed on D-Day: that their God and their country are unique, liberating powers for the good of mankind.

The N.Y. Times, Democrats and other leftists once shared this view of God and country, back in our nation’s finest hour.

Nearly two months ago, atheist feminist and PBS "To the Contrary" host Bonnie Erbe insisted that the pro-life movement is essentially a church pew-packing conspiracy:

What is the religious right doing by campaigning against abortion? First and foremost, its efforts seem aimed at trying to keep church pews filled by bringing more and more poor people into the world.

She's still at it. In her June 4 Thomas Jefferson Street blog entry at USNews.com. Erbe lamented the results of a new survey about teens and sex:

Today's culture is certainly part of the reason why more teen girls think unwed motherhood is OK. But churches that lobby teens heavily not to have abortions are also giving the ones who do get pregnant no choice other than to bring those pregnancies to term. The churches benefit by increasing the number of followers. The teens do not. Their lives would have been much more rewarding if they postponed parenthood until after they were educated and married.

Of course, Erbe never bothered to explain just why churches would want to deluge their ranks with poor people who can't contribute much into the offering plate. Since Erbe thinks religion is a bunch of hooey, surely she can't think that churches are solely concerned with the spiritual state of those in its pews. Wouldn't that be an irrational business model?

Indeed, Erbe appears to not understand that biblically faithful churches will both show compassion towards teenage mothers while also remaining firmly committed to encouraging parishioners to see their sexuality as a gift to be shared only with their spouses and only in the bonds of marriage.

That balance of compassion and fidelity to biblical sexual ethics stands in stark contrast to Erbe's secular humanist sentiments which certainly sound harsher and more judgmental  than anything coming from pro-life religious circles.

It seems when John Lennon sang "Imagine" (aka. The Worst Song of All Time) he was talking about ... Denmark. That must be the point of a curious piece on The Washington Post's ever-more ironically named "On Faith" blog.

In an article titled "One nation Under God and a lot of stress," Alyce M. McKenzie, professor of homiletics at the Perkins School of Theology, was quite taken with her son's description of life in Copenhagen, where he'd studied for a semester. She furnished a laundry list of admirable aspects of Danish society - mostly the usual stuff American liberals cite to illustrate Europe's superiority:

...riding a bike or walking just about everywhere, having lights that go on and off automatically, recycling all glass bottles, drinking tap water, being able to let your baby in its stroller bask in the sun a bit while you go in and pick up a few groceries for tonight's meal, beautiful public spaces, green parks where people enjoy leisure time, high-speed and clean trains [what is with the liberal obsession with trains?], not being obsessed with work to the point that family and leisure are devalued, and, by all accounts, a happiness factor that exceeds ours.

And -- big bonus for a liberal trapped by "the convenience oriented, car-driven culture in suburban Texas" -- Denmark even has an exotic word that captures a concept we dull Americans couldn't have originated (think "feng shui"). "[H]ygge, which translates [as] ‘coziness,' or, more accurately, ‘tranquility,' is a complete absence of anything annoying, irritating, or emotionally overwhelming, and the presence of and pleasure from comforting, gentle and soothing things."

That's cat nip to liberals who dream of being swathed in bubble wrap and bike helmets by the nanny state. And for McKenzie, "This started me wondering why, in the Bible belt, my own life doesn't have as much hygge as the Danes." Her answer: the Danes aren't burdened with all that God baggage.

She quoted approvingly from a 2008 book by Phil Zuckerman called "Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Tell us about Contentment." Zuckerman, McKenzie wrote, "seeks to account for the fact that Denmark and Sweden have such high contentment quotients in light of the fact that worship of God and church attendance are minimal." The book is also a slap at conservatives "who swear that a society without God is hell on earth."

Zuckerman found that in marginalizing religion, as most of the rest of Europe has, the Danes have essentially sidelined the existential questions of life and death. "His basic findings," wrote McKenzie, "are that Danes seem to focus on gratitude for the pleasures and gifts of life right now: family, work, and the beauties of the natural world. They are more interested in their family, home, bikes, careers, weather, and favorite British or Brazilian soccer players than questions of the meaning of life and the existence of heaven and hell."

So the secular paradise Lennon sang about -- "Imagine there's no heaven ... No hell below us ... Imagine all the people Living for today" -- turns out to have been blonde, blue-eyed and rather more prosaic than the song's whispy, dope-addled strains hint at.

On the other hand, it does go with the song's plodding lifelessness. Marxism (and make no mistake, "Imagine" is an ode to the old dialectic materialism) is predicated on a denial of human nature. Nothing is more human than inquiring into the meaning of life and death, of man's relationship to the universe - all the Big Questions that sound clichéd because they have been central to human existence for as long as there've been humans. It's wonderful that the Danes love their families and friends and take time to hug the earth and sort their garbage. But McKenzie never questions whether, in banishing the questions that religion always has helped humans answer, they're not a little less ... human.

McKenzie wrote of herself that, "I spend just about all my time thinking about the meaning of life and the significance of the Bible and better ways to share the good news of Jesus Christ. I derive meaning, joy and purpose from my faith." Therefore, it's odd that she's untroubled by the notion of an entire society that has willfully gone deaf to the good news she loves so much.

But there's a simple answer. As a Christian whose profession is homiletics, McKenzie has, perhaps out of habit, dragged God into otherwise standard-issue liberal griping about modern American society; too big, too hectic, too competitive, too individualistic. That's it. Not spiritual, not even particularly thoughtful.

Her son, she wrote, just three days home from Denmark, complained, "I feel more stressed since I've gotten back." Tough life, kid. But not to worry, Mom has hope for you. And you may say she's a dreamer, but she's not the only one.

"Denmark has had an impact on my son," McKenzie wrote. "I predict that he will seek a life that is more communal and relational than the life of individual-achievement-at-all-costs that is a popular version (or perversion) of the American Dream." ["Imagine all the people Sharing all the world"] "I don't think he's going to lose his initiative, but I think he is going to seek a life that is more about experiencing hygge and less about being harried."

No word on whether his hygge has to come at the expense of his religion.

 

White House press corps dean Helen Thomas -- on the day that the White House hosted a Jewish Heritage Celebration, no less -- said that Jews who live in Israel should "get the hell out of Palestine" and go "home."

When asked where home was for Israeli Jews, Thomas offered "Poland, Germany... and America and everywhere else" that the founding generation of the State of Israel originally hailed.

Breitbart.tv has the video, which was released by RabbiLive.com (h/t Gateway Pundit) and is embedded at right.

It's been centuries decades since anyone believed Helen Thomas was anywhere near an objective journalist, but this makes it clear that she's at best tactless and unreasonable and at worst an anti-Semite.

Question to mull over in the comments section: Should Thomas lose her coveted seat in the White House press briefing room over this?

White House press corps dean Helen Thomas -- on the day that the White House hosted a Jewish Heritage Celebration, no less -- said that Jews who live in Israel should "get the hell out of Palestine" and go "home."

When asked where home was for Israeli Jews, Thomas offered "Poland, Germany... and America and everywhere else" that the founding generation of the State of Israel originally hailed.

Breitbart.tv has the video, which was released by RabbiLive.com (h/t Gateway Pundit) and is embedded at right.

It's been centuries decades since anyone believed Helen Thomas was anywhere near an objective journalist, but this makes it clear that she's at best tactless and unreasonable and at worst an anti-Semite.

Question to mull over in the comments section: Should Thomas lose her coveted seat in the White House press briefing room over this?

NewsBusters Publisher Brent Bozell appeared on WMAL's "Grandy Group" shortly after 8 a.m. this morning.

The Media Research Center President discussed the media's anti-Israel bias flaring up afresh after the Gaza flotilla incident (click image at right for MP3 audio):

FRED GRANDY, host:  You follow this more closely than do I. Um, over the last three or four days, has al-Jazeera acquired NBC, CBS, ABC, all the major outlets, because it seems there's such a clear media bias against what Israel did that it's hard for the truth to get out. Who ever thought that Benjamin Netanyahu and Joe Biden would be the two guys speaking truth to power on this?!

BRENT BOZELL:  You know, it's very sad but this is a continuation of a narrative we've seen since the late 1980s with the intifadas that Palestine was launching against Israel where Palestine was always the innocent one and Israel was always the aggressor. You've got to put the story into context.

The coverage that is being given is completely against Israel from the standpoint that there's no context.

[...]

Between 2001 and 2009 -- just think about this for a second -- 8,600 rockets have been launched from the Gaza Strip against Israel, over the border of Israel. Israel has every right to do whatever they need to do to defend themselves from these attacks. They instituted a blockade because they knew that these weapons were coming in.

There's a long history of this. Last November, Israeli Navy officials intercepted a fraudulent civilian ship packed with 500 lbs. of weaponry. That was 100 miles off Israel's coast.

[...]

GRANDY: But absent you,  and Joe Biden, to his credit, and of course Prime Minister Netanyahu, this story isn't getting out. Why?

BOZELL: It's not, it's not. Because the decision  [by the media] has been made that Israel is in the wrong and her enemies are in the right, which is why, by the way, they [the radicals on the MV Marmara] did what they did, because they know they can get away with it.

Look at the video, the video that shows these, by the way, let's stop calling them activists, at the very least they're militants or radicals, or something, they're not activists.

After this exchange, co-host Bryan Nehman shifted topics to the Arizona anti-illegal immigration bill, noting that despite the media's constant trashing of the law, polls show a majority of Americans support the bill. "Is the media losing its influence?" the co-host asked Bozell, who replied:

Oh yeah, guys, there's obviously cracks, there are big, big cracks in this monopoly.... What's happening is that there's a new media, there's you guys in talk radio, and there's the Internet, and those, both those forces are growing while the old media are all dying. Now, they're still very powerful, they're more powerful than any other outlet that the new media have, but collectively, the new media are as big as they are, it just takes an awful lot more work to get our story out. But if we work hard at it, if we tell our story, the story will get out.

Towards the end of the segment, Bozell explained his complaint about the "JC" cartoon program planned for Comedy Central:

BOZELL: What cowards they are. They [the executive at Comedy Central] have a policy that they will not do anything that might be offensive to Muslims, and on the other hand they are talking about producing a show designed uniquely, specifically, and formally to do nothing but insult Christianity. 

"Don't you think you're jumping the gun a little bit? I mean, the show's not even on the air."

That's how MSNBC's Contessa Brewer opened her June 3 interview with Rabbi Daniel Lapin, who appeared via satellite to discuss his work with the newly-formed Citizens Against Religious Bigotry (CARB) to get advertisers on Viacom's Comedy Central to publicly pledge to not support or underwrite a show currently in pre-production entitled "JC" for Jesus Christ. For full disclosure, NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell is a founding member of CARB.

"Just playing devil's advocate here, because I am the daughter of a Baptist preacher, don't you think Jesus Christ is tough enough to withstand it?" Brewer prodded Lapin. After all, "he's a big guy," Brewer argued. [MP3 audio available for download here; WMV video for download here]

Given the irreverent and downright blasphemous treatment Jesus Christ and God have gotten at the hands of "South Park" and Sarah Silverman, Brewer later asked Lapin, in all seriousness, "What if this turns out to be more like a Sunday School lesson than the worst imaginings of you and Bill Donohue of the Catholic League and on and on?"

Really, Contessa? Here's the reported premise of the show:

The cable network has announced that it's developing a series called "JC" -- a half-hour animated show about a dude named Jesus "JC" Christ who wants to escape his dad's (aka God) considerable shadow to chill in New York as a regular guy.

Things have changed on earth over the last 2,000 years and JC quickly discovers that he's a fish (and possibly a few loaves of bread) out of water. He gets little sympathy from a "powerful but apathetic" God, who prefers playing video games to listening to junior blabbering about life in the city.

That's a far cry from the Jesus of the Bible -- "not my will but yours be done" -- as taught in Sunday School.

A preacher's daughter most certainly should know that much.

The newly formed Citizens Against Religious Bigotry launched a pre-emptive strike against Comedy Central today. The coalition formally announced its opposition to “JC,” a new animated comedy in the...

View Original Post

Young evangelicals seem to be cut from a different cloth than their forbearers, and that's got the secular media praising the Lord.

In "Young Evangelicals: Expanding Their Mission," Time contributor Amy Sullivan celebrated that the younger generation of evangelical Christians represent a "kinder and gentler" Christianity that defies the "fire-and-brimestone conservatism" associated with the older generation of evangelicals.

Sullivan reported that the applications to secular organizations like Teach for America have tripled among Christian universities, a much faster increase than from secular universities. "Internal surveys showed that more than half of incoming corps members said they were motivated by their faith to join Teach for America," Sullivan pointed out.

But Sullivan's piece on Teach for America turned into a critique of traditional evangelical leaders. She said younger Christian's emphasis on caring for the less fortunate represents a "remarkable cultural shift" for the movement. This "remarkable shift" involves the increase in younger evangelicals' activity in "nonideological causes" like fighting against sex-trafficking and solving poverty relief.

Young evangelicals no longer rely on churches and private charities to do good deeds, Sullivan said. Unlike their predecessors, they are open to partnering religious organizations with the government to accomplish what the church has traditionally viewed as missions work.

While their parents' exposure to third-world poverty was mainly limited to slideshows from visiting missionaries, Sullivan described younger evangelicals' exposure as "more direct and sustained," ranging from downloaded videos about the Invisible Children movement to short-term summer missions trips.

Sullivan cited a Public Religion Research poll from October 2008 which showed that young evangelicals are less opposed to the expansion of social services than older generations. This generational gap difference also extends to positions on same-sex marriage and military strength.

Young evangelicals favor expanding government's role in providing social services and abandoning traditional social policies, but Sullivan described them as "nonideological," "socially-conscious, cause-focused and controversy-averse." In fact, "liberal" seemed to be the only label Sullivan refused to apply, instead insisting that young evangelicals still remain "fairly conservative."

Sullivan quoted Don Miller, Christian author of "Blue Like Jazz," who said that using labels takes away from their true identity. "We're not like Pat Robertson. We're not like Republicans. We're not like our parents." Miller certainly isn't like Republicans. As Sullivan noted, he's a registered Democrat who campaigned for Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign.

NewsBusters Publisher and Media Research Center President Brent Bozell and five other members of the Citizens Against Religious Bigotry (CARB) coalition will hold a tele-news conference tomorrow at 9:30 a.m. EDT to ask advertisers on Viacom's Comedy Central to publicly pledge to not support/underwrite a show currently in pre-production.  The show is entitled "JC" - as in Jesus Christ. 

[More information on how to join the call-in appears below the page break]

Joining Bozell on the call will be Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, syndicated radio host Michael Medved, Catholic League president Bill Donohue, Parents Television Council president Tim Winter, and Rabbi Daniel Lapin of the American Alliance of Jews and Christians. 

For the conference call, Bozell will unveil an exclusive, four-minute video mash-up of some of the network's many offensive clips referencing Jesus Christ and God, as evidence of what we can most likely expect from "JC."

The CARB leaders will reconvene for another tele-press conference call on June 17th, to announce the names of the companies that have publicly pledged to not sponsor religious bigotry.  And to discuss further action for those who fail to do so.

Mr. Bozell:

“After we reveal the vile and offensive nature of Comedy Central’s previous characterizations of Jesus Christ and God the Father, we expect these advertisers to agree wholeheartedly to end their advertising on Comedy Central and discontinue their support for unabashed, anti-Christian discrimination.  Why should they be supporting a business that makes a habit of attacking Christianity and yet has a formal policy to censor anything considered offensive to followers of Islam? This double standard is pure bigotry, one from which advertisers should quickly shy away. After all, there are other avenues to redirect their advertising dollars in places that do not offend and alienate viewers. We will reconvene in the coming weeks to share the results of our appeal and the next steps we will take.”

For access to the dial-in for the tele-news conference, please contact Colleen O'Boyle (ext. 122) or Mary Beth Hutchins (ext. 105) at 703-683-5004. For a complete list of of Coalition Against Religious Bigotry members, visit: www.CitizensAgainstReligiousBigotry.org.

PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler on Tueday addressed Tavis Smiley's claim that Christian terrorists commit far more violence than Muslim ones. Smiley also issued a statement that defended his comments, though it misrepresented what those comments actually were.

"I don't think he made his case, or even came close," Getler said. He rightfully noted that the 2000 Columbine massacre, Smiley's only example of supposed Christian terrorism, "had nothing to do with Christianity." In fact, as Brent Bozell noted in his column today, the shooters even "mocked students who cried out for God to save them."

Though Getler should be applauded for noting Smiley's total failure to offer a convincing argument, he seems to suggest that a convincing case could be made, but simply wasn't in this instance. "One would think," Getler states, "that Smiley would have been better prepared to make what was certain to be a controversial case."

But the point of objection is not that the case is controversial, it's that there is no case to be made in the first place. There are no grounds whatsoever to claim that more Christians than Muslims commit terrorist acts (motivated primarily by their respective religions) in the United States. Whether by the sheer number of attacks, body count, scale of destruction, or impact on policy and our way of life, Muslim terrorists have wrecked havoc on the United States on a scale far beyond the occasional Scott Roeder.

Getler chastised Smiley's "equating the occasionally deranged individual in this country with religiously fanatic suicide bombers and those like Maj. Nidal M. Hasan at Fort Hood in Texas." Smiley did conflate murderers who are Christians with people who murder in the name of Christianity--a logical fallacy in itself.

But the larger issue is Smiley's primary argument (though he apparently considers it a given) that Christian terrorism is more widespread than Muslim terrorism.

That is an argument that should be dismissed outright, but Getler subtly avoids it. Instead, he notes that "there are no doubt people who kill in the name of different religions" and shifts the issue to whether Smiley's examples served to support his argument. But the argument itself is invalid.

For his part, Smiley replied to his critics in a statement that completely misrepresented both his exchange with Ali and the argument that riled up his critics. Smiley stated:

Ms. Hirsi Ali and I were talking about violence perpetrated in the name of religion or by people who claim to be religious. We agreed that there is extremism in Christianity just as there is in Islam and other faiths. We agreed that people have always found ways to use religion to justify heinous acts. Where we disagreed was that followers of any one religion are predisposed to violence. Unfortunately, history has shown us that believers of all stripes have been misguided.

Actually, the disagreement arose not out of a claim that any one religion is "predisposed" to violence, as Smiley disingenuously states. Ali told Smiley "I think you and I disagree" on Smiley's contention that "There are so many more examples" of acts of terrorism perpetrated by Christians than Muslims.

Either Smiley does not understand his viewers' objections, or he realizes how outrageous his statement was, and is trying to shift attention to a completely different argument (that there are violent followers of all religions).

Without a mention from Smiley or Getler, however, was the former's claim that Tea Party activists are comparably dangerous to jihadists. Their collective silence is quite troubling.

Though Smiley made the comment towards the end of the segment in question, he clearly meant to suggest that Tea Partiers--who, he claimed, "are being recently arrested for making threats against elected officials, for calling people 'nigger' as they walk into Capitol Hill, for spitting on people"--can justly be compared to Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Ft. Hood shooter, and Faisal Shahzad, the would-be Times Square bomber.

I'll let Bozell take point in dismantling that assertion:

Put aside the thoroughly unproven accusations, now that Rep. Emanuel Cleaver has backed off the story of conservative spitters, and there is no audio, or corroboration of the accusation of N-words being thrown. Had those events actually happened, would they in any way have been comparable to murder?

It isn't just the pro-Palestinian press that is attempting to distort the reality behind the recent flotilla incident off the coast of Gaza. 

Former Democratic Congresswoman, and 2008 Green Party candidate for President of the United States, Cynthia McKinney, has voiced her own version of reality through an anti-Israeli rant in Arab News.  McKinney is of course, a reliable source on the topic, having been involved in her own little attempts at defying and breaking an Israeli blockade of Gaza (translation - aiding and abetting a terrorist regime).

In her column for Arab News, McKinney expresses outrage over ‘Israel's needless, senseless act against unarmed humanitarian activists.'  Having been involved in previous attempts to defy the authority of the Israeli Navy, McKinney knows full well that the Free Gaza Movement, organizers of this flotilla, consists of anything but unarmed humanitarian activists.  In case memory has failed her, here is a handy reminder:

• A report from the Intelligence & Terrorism Information Center highlights the link between flotilla organizers and radical human rights violators.
• The Jerusalem Post points out that ‘soldiers encountered fierce resistance from the passengers who were armed with knives, bats and metal pipes.' The article then goes on to say that the already armed protestors upgraded their arsenal by ‘stealing two handguns from soldiers', opening fire, and ultimately escalating the violence that they themselves had already started.

More after the break...

• The Jawa Report features an image of an alleged peace activist on board the Turkish ship prior to the skirmish. The activist is holding a rather large knife that some people with eyes and an adequate fear of sharp objects would consider a weapon. They also have video footage of the violence perpetrated by the demonstrators, along with a clip showing the weapons used.
• Michelle Malkin's site has a video clip from the Palestinian Media Watch which shows flotilla participants chanting about the return of ‘The Army of Mohammed' and invoking the killing of Jews through martyrdom.

Yet to McKinney and much of the mainstream media, they were nothing more than humanitarian activists.  This distorted view gets worse in the article, and highlights McKinney's personal and long-running anti-Semitic views.

She states her point of view (emphasis mine throughout):

"But I'm even more outraged that once again, Israel's actions have been aided and abetted by a US political class that has become corrupted beyond belief due to its reliance on Zionist finance and penetration by Zionist zealots for whom no US weapons system is too much for the Israeli war machine, and the silence of the world's onlookers whose hearts have grown cold with indifference."

Where have we seen McKinney blame Zionists for the ills of the world before?  Her concession speech back in 2006, at which members of her Black Panther Party security entourage spewed racist, anti-Semitic comments, including a claim that her election loss was directly due to ‘the Zionists'.

Referring to her personal encounter with the Israeli Navy, McKinney makes a laughable attempt to change the history of her own law-breaking activity:

"During my imprisonment in Israel for attempting to take crayons to the children of Gaza, I called Israel a failed state."

Unless crayons are now considered medical supplies, she was most definitely not detained for taking crayons to the children of Gaza.  According to Fox News in July of 2009:

"In a press release from the Green Party, McKinney said the form states that the Spirit of Humanity, a Greek-flagged relief boat carrying 21 activists, medical supplies, cement, olive trees and children's toys en route to Gaza, was violating the Israeli blockade and trespassing the country's territorial waters."

If the only thing being delivered here is humanitarian aid, then why misstate your intentions?  Why cherry pick the supplies being mentioned?  Why leave out medical supplies (to aid Hamas), and cement (to possibly build bunkers)?

In a previous Gaza-bound mission, via the Atlanta Journal Constitution in December of 2008:

"The activists, organized by the Free Gaza Group, said their 66-foot yacht called ‘SS Dignity' would defy an Israeli blockade of Gaza and ferry 16 activists and three tons of Cypriot-donated supplies. The supplies are intended to help treat the wounded from Israeli bombings against targets in Gaza, in retaliation for rocket fire aimed at civilians in southern Israeli towns."

Again, they were delivering medical aid for terrorists - no mention of any boxes being labeled with the word ‘Crayola'.

Later on in her article, McKinney shifts from having delivered crayons for the children to a much different commodity:

"...the Israelis could very well conclude that they can do anything - imprison me for trying to take love to the children of Gaza and kill humanitarian activists trying to do the same..."

Those children who were expecting a delivery of love but received crayons instead, were probably just a bit disappointed.

McKinney's article is a roller coaster ride of random statements and hyperbole, putting it directly in line with the main stream media reports of this and past incidents with Israel.  That said, a little advice for the MSM:

Being fair and balanced means presenting both sides of the story, not simply taking the account of a lunatic fringe protest group who is trying to promote a cause - a cause that directly harms an ally of the United States.   

- Send comments or tips to rustyweiss@verizon.net. Please join me on Facebook.

It isn't just the pro-Palestinian press that is attempting to distort the reality behind the recent flotilla incident off the coast of Gaza. 

Former Democratic Congresswoman, and 2008 Green Party candidate for President of the United States, Cynthia McKinney, has voiced her own version of reality through an anti-Israeli rant in Arab News.  McKinney is of course, a reliable source on the topic, having been involved in her own little attempts at defying and breaking an Israeli blockade of Gaza (translation - aiding and abetting a terrorist regime).

In her column for Arab News, McKinney expresses outrage over ‘Israel's needless, senseless act against unarmed humanitarian activists.'  Having been involved in previous attempts to defy the authority of the Israeli Navy, McKinney knows full well that the Free Gaza Movement, organizers of this flotilla, consists of anything but unarmed humanitarian activists.  In case memory has failed her, here is a handy reminder:

• A report from the Intelligence & Terrorism Information Center highlights the link between flotilla organizers and radical human rights violators.
• The Jerusalem Post points out that ‘soldiers encountered fierce resistance from the passengers who were armed with knives, bats and metal pipes.' The article then goes on to say that the already armed protestors upgraded their arsenal by ‘stealing two handguns from soldiers', opening fire, and ultimately escalating the violence that they themselves had already started.

More after the break...

• The Jawa Report features an image of an alleged peace activist on board the Turkish ship prior to the skirmish. The activist is holding a rather large knife that some people with eyes and an adequate fear of sharp objects would consider a weapon. They also have video footage of the violence perpetrated by the demonstrators, along with a clip showing the weapons used.
• Michelle Malkin's site has a video clip from the Palestinian Media Watch which shows flotilla participants chanting about the return of ‘The Army of Mohammed' and invoking the killing of Jews through martyrdom.

Yet to McKinney and much of the mainstream media, they were nothing more than humanitarian activists.  This distorted view gets worse in the article, and highlights McKinney's personal and long-running anti-Semitic views.

She states her point of view (emphasis mine throughout):

"But I'm even more outraged that once again, Israel's actions have been aided and abetted by a US political class that has become corrupted beyond belief due to its reliance on Zionist finance and penetration by Zionist zealots for whom no US weapons system is too much for the Israeli war machine, and the silence of the world's onlookers whose hearts have grown cold with indifference."

Where have we seen McKinney blame Zionists for the ills of the world before?  Her concession speech back in 2006, at which members of her Black Panther Party security entourage spewed racist, anti-Semitic comments, including a claim that her election loss was directly due to ‘the Zionists'.

Referring to her personal encounter with the Israeli Navy, McKinney makes a laughable attempt to change the history of her own law-breaking activity:

"During my imprisonment in Israel for attempting to take crayons to the children of Gaza, I called Israel a failed state."

Unless crayons are now considered medical supplies, she was most definitely not detained for taking crayons to the children of Gaza.  According to Fox News in July of 2009:

"In a press release from the Green Party, McKinney said the form states that the Spirit of Humanity, a Greek-flagged relief boat carrying 21 activists, medical supplies, cement, olive trees and children's toys en route to Gaza, was violating the Israeli blockade and trespassing the country's territorial waters."

If the only thing being delivered here is humanitarian aid, then why misstate your intentions?  Why cherry pick the supplies being mentioned?  Why leave out medical supplies (to aid Hamas), and cement (to possibly build bunkers)?

In a previous Gaza-bound mission, via the Atlanta Journal Constitution in December of 2008:

"The activists, organized by the Free Gaza Group, said their 66-foot yacht called ‘SS Dignity' would defy an Israeli blockade of Gaza and ferry 16 activists and three tons of Cypriot-donated supplies. The supplies are intended to help treat the wounded from Israeli bombings against targets in Gaza, in retaliation for rocket fire aimed at civilians in southern Israeli towns."

Again, they were delivering medical aid for terrorists - no mention of any boxes being labeled with the word ‘Crayola'.

Later on in her article, McKinney shifts from having delivered crayons for the children to a much different commodity:

"...the Israelis could very well conclude that they can do anything - imprison me for trying to take love to the children of Gaza and kill humanitarian activists trying to do the same..."

Those children who were expecting a delivery of love but received crayons instead, were probably just a bit disappointed.

McKinney's article is a roller coaster ride of random statements and hyperbole, putting it directly in line with the main stream media reports of this and past incidents with Israel.  That said, a little advice for the MSM:

Being fair and balanced means presenting both sides of the story, not simply taking the account of a lunatic fringe protest group who is trying to promote a cause - a cause that directly harms an ally of the United States.   

- Send comments or tips to rustyweiss@verizon.net. Please join me on Facebook.

It isn't just the pro-Palestinian press that is attempting to distort the reality behind the recent flotilla incident off the coast of Gaza. 

Former Democratic Congresswoman, and 2008 Green Party candidate for President of the United States, Cynthia McKinney, has voiced her own version of reality through an anti-Israeli rant in Arab News.  McKinney is of course, a reliable source on the topic, having been involved in her own little attempts at defying and breaking an Israeli blockade of Gaza (translation - aiding and abetting a terrorist regime).

In her column for Arab News, McKinney expresses outrage over ‘Israel's needless, senseless act against unarmed humanitarian activists.'  Having been involved in previous attempts to defy the authority of the Israeli Navy, McKinney knows full well that the Free Gaza Movement, organizers of this flotilla, consists of anything but unarmed humanitarian activists.  In case memory has failed her, here is a handy reminder:

• A report from the Intelligence & Terrorism Information Center highlights the link between flotilla organizers and radical human rights violators.
• The Jerusalem Post points out that ‘soldiers encountered fierce resistance from the passengers who were armed with knives, bats and metal pipes.' The article then goes on to say that the already armed protestors upgraded their arsenal by ‘stealing two handguns from soldiers', opening fire, and ultimately escalating the violence that they themselves had already started.

More after the break...

• The Jawa Report features an image of an alleged peace activist on board the Turkish ship prior to the skirmish. The activist is holding a rather large knife that some people with eyes and an adequate fear of sharp objects would consider a weapon. They also have video footage of the violence perpetrated by the demonstrators, along with a clip showing the weapons used.
• Michelle Malkin's site has a video clip from the Palestinian Media Watch which shows flotilla participants chanting about the return of ‘The Army of Mohammed' and invoking the killing of Jews through martyrdom.

Yet to McKinney and much of the mainstream media, they were nothing more than humanitarian activists.  This distorted view gets worse in the article, and highlights McKinney's personal and long-running anti-Semitic views.

She states her point of view (emphasis mine throughout):

"But I'm even more outraged that once again, Israel's actions have been aided and abetted by a US political class that has become corrupted beyond belief due to its reliance on Zionist finance and penetration by Zionist zealots for whom no US weapons system is too much for the Israeli war machine, and the silence of the world's onlookers whose hearts have grown cold with indifference."

Where have we seen McKinney blame Zionists for the ills of the world before?  Her concession speech back in 2006, at which members of her Black Panther Party security entourage spewed racist, anti-Semitic comments, including a claim that her election loss was directly due to ‘the Zionists'.

Referring to her personal encounter with the Israeli Navy, McKinney makes a laughable attempt to change the history of her own law-breaking activity:

"During my imprisonment in Israel for attempting to take crayons to the children of Gaza, I called Israel a failed state."

Unless crayons are now considered medical supplies, she was most definitely not detained for taking crayons to the children of Gaza.  According to Fox News in July of 2009:

"In a press release from the Green Party, McKinney said the form states that the Spirit of Humanity, a Greek-flagged relief boat carrying 21 activists, medical supplies, cement, olive trees and children's toys en route to Gaza, was violating the Israeli blockade and trespassing the country's territorial waters."

If the only thing being delivered here is humanitarian aid, then why misstate your intentions?  Why cherry pick the supplies being mentioned?  Why leave out medical supplies (to aid Hamas), and cement (to possibly build bunkers)?

In a previous Gaza-bound mission, via the Atlanta Journal Constitution in December of 2008:

"The activists, organized by the Free Gaza Group, said their 66-foot yacht called ‘SS Dignity' would defy an Israeli blockade of Gaza and ferry 16 activists and three tons of Cypriot-donated supplies. The supplies are intended to help treat the wounded from Israeli bombings against targets in Gaza, in retaliation for rocket fire aimed at civilians in southern Israeli towns."

Again, they were delivering medical aid for terrorists - no mention of any boxes being labeled with the word ‘Crayola'.

Later on in her article, McKinney shifts from having delivered crayons for the children to a much different commodity:

"...the Israelis could very well conclude that they can do anything - imprison me for trying to take love to the children of Gaza and kill humanitarian activists trying to do the same..."

Those children who were expecting a delivery of love but received crayons instead, were probably just a bit disappointed.

McKinney's article is a roller coaster ride of random statements and hyperbole, putting it directly in line with the main stream media reports of this and past incidents with Israel.  That said, a little advice for the MSM:

Being fair and balanced means presenting both sides of the story, not simply taking the account of a lunatic fringe protest group who is trying to promote a cause - a cause that directly harms an ally of the United States.   

- Send comments or tips to rustyweiss@verizon.net. Please join me on Facebook.

It isn't just the pro-Palestinian press that is attempting to distort the reality behind the recent flotilla incident off the coast of Gaza. 

Former Democratic Congresswoman, and 2008 Green Party candidate for President of the United States, Cynthia McKinney, has voiced her own version of reality through an anti-Israeli rant in Arab News.  McKinney is of course, a reliable source on the topic, having been involved in her own little attempts at defying and breaking an Israeli blockade of Gaza (translation - aiding and abetting a terrorist regime).

In her column for Arab News, McKinney expresses outrage over ‘Israel's needless, senseless act against unarmed humanitarian activists.'  Having been involved in previous attempts to defy the authority of the Israeli Navy, McKinney knows full well that the Free Gaza Movement, organizers of this flotilla, consists of anything but unarmed humanitarian activists.  In case memory has failed her, here is a handy reminder:

• A report from the Intelligence & Terrorism Information Center highlights the link between flotilla organizers and radical human rights violators.
• The Jerusalem Post points out that ‘soldiers encountered fierce resistance from the passengers who were armed with knives, bats and metal pipes.' The article then goes on to say that the already armed protestors upgraded their arsenal by ‘stealing two handguns from soldiers', opening fire, and ultimately escalating the violence that they themselves had already started.

More after the break...

• The Jawa Report features an image of an alleged peace activist on board the Turkish ship prior to the skirmish. The activist is holding a rather large knife that some people with eyes and an adequate fear of sharp objects would consider a weapon. They also have video footage of the violence perpetrated by the demonstrators, along with a clip showing the weapons used.
• Michelle Malkin's site has a video clip from the Palestinian Media Watch which shows flotilla participants chanting about the return of ‘The Army of Mohammed' and invoking the killing of Jews through martyrdom.

Yet to McKinney and much of the mainstream media, they were nothing more than humanitarian activists.  This distorted view gets worse in the article, and highlights McKinney's personal and long-running anti-Semitic views.

She states her point of view (emphasis mine throughout):

"But I'm even more outraged that once again, Israel's actions have been aided and abetted by a US political class that has become corrupted beyond belief due to its reliance on Zionist finance and penetration by Zionist zealots for whom no US weapons system is too much for the Israeli war machine, and the silence of the world's onlookers whose hearts have grown cold with indifference."

Where have we seen McKinney blame Zionists for the ills of the world before?  Her concession speech back in 2006, at which members of her Black Panther Party security entourage spewed racist, anti-Semitic comments, including a claim that her election loss was directly due to ‘the Zionists'.

Referring to her personal encounter with the Israeli Navy, McKinney makes a laughable attempt to change the history of her own law-breaking activity:

"During my imprisonment in Israel for attempting to take crayons to the children of Gaza, I called Israel a failed state."

Unless crayons are now considered medical supplies, she was most definitely not detained for taking crayons to the children of Gaza.  According to Fox News in July of 2009:

"In a press release from the Green Party, McKinney said the form states that the Spirit of Humanity, a Greek-flagged relief boat carrying 21 activists, medical supplies, cement, olive trees and children's toys en route to Gaza, was violating the Israeli blockade and trespassing the country's territorial waters."

If the only thing being delivered here is humanitarian aid, then why misstate your intentions?  Why cherry pick the supplies being mentioned?  Why leave out medical supplies (to aid Hamas), and cement (to possibly build bunkers)?

In a previous Gaza-bound mission, via the Atlanta Journal Constitution in December of 2008:

"The activists, organized by the Free Gaza Group, said their 66-foot yacht called ‘SS Dignity' would defy an Israeli blockade of Gaza and ferry 16 activists and three tons of Cypriot-donated supplies. The supplies are intended to help treat the wounded from Israeli bombings against targets in Gaza, in retaliation for rocket fire aimed at civilians in southern Israeli towns."

Again, they were delivering medical aid for terrorists - no mention of any boxes being labeled with the word ‘Crayola'.

Later on in her article, McKinney shifts from having delivered crayons for the children to a much different commodity:

"...the Israelis could very well conclude that they can do anything - imprison me for trying to take love to the children of Gaza and kill humanitarian activists trying to do the same..."

Those children who were expecting a delivery of love but received crayons instead, were probably just a bit disappointed.

McKinney's article is a roller coaster ride of random statements and hyperbole, putting it directly in line with the main stream media reports of this and past incidents with Israel.  That said, a little advice for the MSM:

Being fair and balanced means presenting both sides of the story, not simply taking the account of a lunatic fringe protest group who is trying to promote a cause - a cause that directly harms an ally of the United States.   

- Send comments or tips to rustyweiss@verizon.net. Please join me on Facebook.

It isn't just the pro-Palestinian press that is attempting to distort the reality behind the recent flotilla incident off the coast of Gaza. 

Former Democratic Congresswoman, and 2008 Green Party candidate for President of the United States, Cynthia McKinney, has voiced her own version of reality through an anti-Israeli rant in Arab News.  McKinney is of course, a reliable source on the topic, having been involved in her own little attempts at defying and breaking an Israeli blockade of Gaza (translation - aiding and abetting a terrorist regime).

In her column for Arab News, McKinney expresses outrage over ‘Israel's needless, senseless act against unarmed humanitarian activists.'  Having been involved in previous attempts to defy the authority of the Israeli Navy, McKinney knows full well that the Free Gaza Movement, organizers of this flotilla, consists of anything but unarmed humanitarian activists.  In case memory has failed her, here is a handy reminder:

• A report from the Intelligence & Terrorism Information Center highlights the link between flotilla organizers and radical human rights violators.
• The Jerusalem Post points out that ‘soldiers encountered fierce resistance from the passengers who were armed with knives, bats and metal pipes.' The article then goes on to say that the already armed protestors upgraded their arsenal by ‘stealing two handguns from soldiers', opening fire, and ultimately escalating the violence that they themselves had already started.

More after the break...

• The Jawa Report features an image of an alleged peace activist on board the Turkish ship prior to the skirmish. The activist is holding a rather large knife that some people with eyes and an adequate fear of sharp objects would consider a weapon. They also have video footage of the violence perpetrated by the demonstrators, along with a clip showing the weapons used.
• Michelle Malkin's site has a video clip from the Palestinian Media Watch which shows flotilla participants chanting about the return of ‘The Army of Mohammed' and invoking the killing of Jews through martyrdom.

Yet to McKinney and much of the mainstream media, they were nothing more than humanitarian activists.  This distorted view gets worse in the article, and highlights McKinney's personal and long-running anti-Semitic views.

She states her point of view (emphasis mine throughout):

"But I'm even more outraged that once again, Israel's actions have been aided and abetted by a US political class that has become corrupted beyond belief due to its reliance on Zionist finance and penetration by Zionist zealots for whom no US weapons system is too much for the Israeli war machine, and the silence of the world's onlookers whose hearts have grown cold with indifference."

Where have we seen McKinney blame Zionists for the ills of the world before?  Her concession speech back in 2006, at which members of her Black Panther Party security entourage spewed racist, anti-Semitic comments, including a claim that her election loss was directly due to ‘the Zionists'.

Referring to her personal encounter with the Israeli Navy, McKinney makes a laughable attempt to change the history of her own law-breaking activity:

"During my imprisonment in Israel for attempting to take crayons to the children of Gaza, I called Israel a failed state."

Unless crayons are now considered medical supplies, she was most definitely not detained for taking crayons to the children of Gaza.  According to Fox News in July of 2009:

"In a press release from the Green Party, McKinney said the form states that the Spirit of Humanity, a Greek-flagged relief boat carrying 21 activists, medical supplies, cement, olive trees and children's toys en route to Gaza, was violating the Israeli blockade and trespassing the country's territorial waters."

If the only thing being delivered here is humanitarian aid, then why misstate your intentions?  Why cherry pick the supplies being mentioned?  Why leave out medical supplies (to aid Hamas), and cement (to possibly build bunkers)?

In a previous Gaza-bound mission, via the Atlanta Journal Constitution in December of 2008:

"The activists, organized by the Free Gaza Group, said their 66-foot yacht called ‘SS Dignity' would defy an Israeli blockade of Gaza and ferry 16 activists and three tons of Cypriot-donated supplies. The supplies are intended to help treat the wounded from Israeli bombings against targets in Gaza, in retaliation for rocket fire aimed at civilians in southern Israeli towns."

Again, they were delivering medical aid for terrorists - no mention of any boxes being labeled with the word ‘Crayola'.

Later on in her article, McKinney shifts from having delivered crayons for the children to a much different commodity:

"...the Israelis could very well conclude that they can do anything - imprison me for trying to take love to the children of Gaza and kill humanitarian activists trying to do the same..."

Those children who were expecting a delivery of love but received crayons instead, were probably just a bit disappointed.

McKinney's article is a roller coaster ride of random statements and hyperbole, putting it directly in line with the main stream media reports of this and past incidents with Israel.  That said, a little advice for the MSM:

Being fair and balanced means presenting both sides of the story, not simply taking the account of a lunatic fringe protest group who is trying to promote a cause - a cause that directly harms an ally of the United States.   

- Send comments or tips to rustyweiss@verizon.net. Please join me on Facebook.

It isn't just the pro-Palestinian press that is attempting to distort the reality behind the recent flotilla incident off the coast of Gaza. 

Former Democratic Congresswoman, and 2008 Green Party candidate for President of the United States, Cynthia McKinney, has voiced her own version of reality through an anti-Israeli rant in Arab News.  McKinney is of course, a reliable source on the topic, having been involved in her own little attempts at defying and breaking an Israeli blockade of Gaza (translation - aiding and abetting a terrorist regime).

In her column for Arab News, McKinney expresses outrage over ‘Israel's needless, senseless act against unarmed humanitarian activists.'  Having been involved in previous attempts to defy the authority of the Israeli Navy, McKinney knows full well that the Free Gaza Movement, organizers of this flotilla, consists of anything but unarmed humanitarian activists.  In case memory has failed her, here is a handy reminder:

• A report from the Intelligence & Terrorism Information Center highlights the link between flotilla organizers and radical human rights violators.
• The Jerusalem Post points out that ‘soldiers encountered fierce resistance from the passengers who were armed with knives, bats and metal pipes.' The article then goes on to say that the already armed protestors upgraded their arsenal by ‘stealing two handguns from soldiers', opening fire, and ultimately escalating the violence that they themselves had already started.

More after the break...

• The Jawa Report features an image of an alleged peace activist on board the Turkish ship prior to the skirmish. The activist is holding a rather large knife that some people with eyes and an adequate fear of sharp objects would consider a weapon. They also have video footage of the violence perpetrated by the demonstrators, along with a clip showing the weapons used.
• Michelle Malkin's site has a video clip from the Palestinian Media Watch which shows flotilla participants chanting about the return of ‘The Army of Mohammed' and invoking the killing of Jews through martyrdom.

Yet to McKinney and much of the mainstream media, they were nothing more than humanitarian activists.  This distorted view gets worse in the article, and highlights McKinney's personal and long-running anti-Semitic views.

She states her point of view (emphasis mine throughout):

"But I'm even more outraged that once again, Israel's actions have been aided and abetted by a US political class that has become corrupted beyond belief due to its reliance on Zionist finance and penetration by Zionist zealots for whom no US weapons system is too much for the Israeli war machine, and the silence of the world's onlookers whose hearts have grown cold with indifference."

Where have we seen McKinney blame Zionists for the ills of the world before?  Her concession speech back in 2006, at which members of her Black Panther Party security entourage spewed racist, anti-Semitic comments, including a claim that her election loss was directly due to ‘the Zionists'.

Referring to her personal encounter with the Israeli Navy, McKinney makes a laughable attempt to change the history of her own law-breaking activity:

"During my imprisonment in Israel for attempting to take crayons to the children of Gaza, I called Israel a failed state."

Unless crayons are now considered medical supplies, she was most definitely not detained for taking crayons to the children of Gaza.  According to Fox News in July of 2009:

"In a press release from the Green Party, McKinney said the form states that the Spirit of Humanity, a Greek-flagged relief boat carrying 21 activists, medical supplies, cement, olive trees and children's toys en route to Gaza, was violating the Israeli blockade and trespassing the country's territorial waters."

If the only thing being delivered here is humanitarian aid, then why misstate your intentions?  Why cherry pick the supplies being mentioned?  Why leave out medical supplies (to aid Hamas), and cement (to possibly build bunkers)?

In a previous Gaza-bound mission, via the Atlanta Journal Constitution in December of 2008:

"The activists, organized by the Free Gaza Group, said their 66-foot yacht called ‘SS Dignity' would defy an Israeli blockade of Gaza and ferry 16 activists and three tons of Cypriot-donated supplies. The supplies are intended to help treat the wounded from Israeli bombings against targets in Gaza, in retaliation for rocket fire aimed at civilians in southern Israeli towns."

Again, they were delivering medical aid for terrorists - no mention of any boxes being labeled with the word ‘Crayola'.

Later on in her article, McKinney shifts from having delivered crayons for the children to a much different commodity:

"...the Israelis could very well conclude that they can do anything - imprison me for trying to take love to the children of Gaza and kill humanitarian activists trying to do the same..."

Those children who were expecting a delivery of love but received crayons instead, were probably just a bit disappointed.

McKinney's article is a roller coaster ride of random statements and hyperbole, putting it directly in line with the main stream media reports of this and past incidents with Israel.  That said, a little advice for the MSM:

Being fair and balanced means presenting both sides of the story, not simply taking the account of a lunatic fringe protest group who is trying to promote a cause - a cause that directly harms an ally of the United States.   

- Send comments or tips to rustyweiss@verizon.net. Please join me on Facebook.

It isn't just the pro-Palestinian press that is attempting to distort the reality behind the recent flotilla incident off the coast of Gaza. 

Former Democratic Congresswoman, and 2008 Green Party candidate for President of the United States, Cynthia McKinney, has voiced her own version of reality through an anti-Israeli rant in Arab News.  McKinney is of course, a reliable source on the topic, having been involved in her own little attempts at defying and breaking an Israeli blockade of Gaza (translation - aiding and abetting a terrorist regime).

In her column for Arab News, McKinney expresses outrage over ‘Israel's needless, senseless act against unarmed humanitarian activists.'  Having been involved in previous attempts to defy the authority of the Israeli Navy, McKinney knows full well that the Free Gaza Movement, organizers of this flotilla, consists of anything but unarmed humanitarian activists.  In case memory has failed her, here is a handy reminder:

• A report from the Intelligence & Terrorism Information Center highlights the link between flotilla organizers and radical human rights violators.
• The Jerusalem Post points out that ‘soldiers encountered fierce resistance from the passengers who were armed with knives, bats and metal pipes.' The article then goes on to say that the already armed protestors upgraded their arsenal by ‘stealing two handguns from soldiers', opening fire, and ultimately escalating the violence that they themselves had already started.

More after the break...

• The Jawa Report features an image of an alleged peace activist on board the Turkish ship prior to the skirmish. The activist is holding a rather large knife that some people with eyes and an adequate fear of sharp objects would consider a weapon. They also have video footage of the violence perpetrated by the demonstrators, along with a clip showing the weapons used.
• Michelle Malkin's site has a video clip from the Palestinian Media Watch which shows flotilla participants chanting about the return of ‘The Army of Mohammed' and invoking the killing of Jews through martyrdom.

Yet to McKinney and much of the mainstream media, they were nothing more than humanitarian activists.  This distorted view gets worse in the article, and highlights McKinney's personal and long-running anti-Semitic views.

She states her point of view (emphasis mine throughout):

"But I'm even more outraged that once again, Israel's actions have been aided and abetted by a US political class that has become corrupted beyond belief due to its reliance on Zionist finance and penetration by Zionist zealots for whom no US weapons system is too much for the Israeli war machine, and the silence of the world's onlookers whose hearts have grown cold with indifference."

Where have we seen McKinney blame Zionists for the ills of the world before?  Her concession speech back in 2006, at which members of her Black Panther Party security entourage spewed racist, anti-Semitic comments, including a claim that her election loss was directly due to ‘the Zionists'.

Referring to her personal encounter with the Israeli Navy, McKinney makes a laughable attempt to change the history of her own law-breaking activity:

"During my imprisonment in Israel for attempting to take crayons to the children of Gaza, I called Israel a failed state."

Unless crayons are now considered medical supplies, she was most definitely not detained for taking crayons to the children of Gaza.  According to Fox News in July of 2009:

"In a press release from the Green Party, McKinney said the form states that the Spirit of Humanity, a Greek-flagged relief boat carrying 21 activists, medical supplies, cement, olive trees and children's toys en route to Gaza, was violating the Israeli blockade and trespassing the country's territorial waters."

If the only thing being delivered here is humanitarian aid, then why misstate your intentions?  Why cherry pick the supplies being mentioned?  Why leave out medical supplies (to aid Hamas), and cement (to possibly build bunkers)?

In a previous Gaza-bound mission, via the Atlanta Journal Constitution in December of 2008:

"The activists, organized by the Free Gaza Group, said their 66-foot yacht called ‘SS Dignity' would defy an Israeli blockade of Gaza and ferry 16 activists and three tons of Cypriot-donated supplies. The supplies are intended to help treat the wounded from Israeli bombings against targets in Gaza, in retaliation for rocket fire aimed at civilians in southern Israeli towns."

Again, they were delivering medical aid for terrorists - no mention of any boxes being labeled with the word ‘Crayola'.

Later on in her article, McKinney shifts from having delivered crayons for the children to a much different commodity:

"...the Israelis could very well conclude that they can do anything - imprison me for trying to take love to the children of Gaza and kill humanitarian activists trying to do the same..."

Those children who were expecting a delivery of love but received crayons instead, were probably just a bit disappointed.

McKinney's article is a roller coaster ride of random statements and hyperbole, putting it directly in line with the main stream media reports of this and past incidents with Israel.  That said, a little advice for the MSM:

Being fair and balanced means presenting both sides of the story, not simply taking the account of a lunatic fringe protest group who is trying to promote a cause - a cause that directly harms an ally of the United States.   

- Send comments or tips to rustyweiss@verizon.net. Please join me on Facebook.

It isn't just the pro-Palestinian press that is attempting to distort the reality behind the recent flotilla incident off the coast of Gaza. 

Former Democratic Congresswoman, and 2008 Green Party candidate for President of the United States, Cynthia McKinney, has voiced her own version of reality through an anti-Israeli rant in Arab News.  McKinney is of course, a reliable source on the topic, having been involved in her own little attempts at defying and breaking an Israeli blockade of Gaza (translation - aiding and abetting a terrorist regime).

In her column for Arab News, McKinney expresses outrage over ‘Israel's needless, senseless act against unarmed humanitarian activists.'  Having been involved in previous attempts to defy the authority of the Israeli Navy, McKinney knows full well that the Free Gaza Movement, organizers of this flotilla, consists of anything but unarmed humanitarian activists.  In case memory has failed her, here is a handy reminder:

• A report from the Intelligence & Terrorism Information Center highlights the link between flotilla organizers and radical human rights violators.
• The Jerusalem Post points out that ‘soldiers encountered fierce resistance from the passengers who were armed with knives, bats and metal pipes.' The article then goes on to say that the already armed protestors upgraded their arsenal by ‘stealing two handguns from soldiers', opening fire, and ultimately escalating the violence that they themselves had already started.

More after the break...

• The Jawa Report features an image of an alleged peace activist on board the Turkish ship prior to the skirmish. The activist is holding a rather large knife that some people with eyes and an adequate fear of sharp objects would consider a weapon. They also have video footage of the violence perpetrated by the demonstrators, along with a clip showing the weapons used.
• Michelle Malkin's site has a video clip from the Palestinian Media Watch which shows flotilla participants chanting about the return of ‘The Army of Mohammed' and invoking the killing of Jews through martyrdom.

Yet to McKinney and much of the mainstream media, they were nothing more than humanitarian activists.  This distorted view gets worse in the article, and highlights McKinney's personal and long-running anti-Semitic views.

She states her point of view (emphasis mine throughout):

"But I'm even more outraged that once again, Israel's actions have been aided and abetted by a US political class that has become corrupted beyond belief due to its reliance on Zionist finance and penetration by Zionist zealots for whom no US weapons system is too much for the Israeli war machine, and the silence of the world's onlookers whose hearts have grown cold with indifference."

Where have we seen McKinney blame Zionists for the ills of the world before?  Her concession speech back in 2006, at which members of her Black Panther Party security entourage spewed racist, anti-Semitic comments, including a claim that her election loss was directly due to ‘the Zionists'.

Referring to her personal encounter with the Israeli Navy, McKinney makes a laughable attempt to change the history of her own law-breaking activity:

"During my imprisonment in Israel for attempting to take crayons to the children of Gaza, I called Israel a failed state."

Unless crayons are now considered medical supplies, she was most definitely not detained for taking crayons to the children of Gaza.  According to Fox News in July of 2009:

"In a press release from the Green Party, McKinney said the form states that the Spirit of Humanity, a Greek-flagged relief boat carrying 21 activists, medical supplies, cement, olive trees and children's toys en route to Gaza, was violating the Israeli blockade and trespassing the country's territorial waters."

If the only thing being delivered here is humanitarian aid, then why misstate your intentions?  Why cherry pick the supplies being mentioned?  Why leave out medical supplies (to aid Hamas), and cement (to possibly build bunkers)?

In a previous Gaza-bound mission, via the Atlanta Journal Constitution in December of 2008:

"The activists, organized by the Free Gaza Group, said their 66-foot yacht called ‘SS Dignity' would defy an Israeli blockade of Gaza and ferry 16 activists and three tons of Cypriot-donated supplies. The supplies are intended to help treat the wounded from Israeli bombings against targets in Gaza, in retaliation for rocket fire aimed at civilians in southern Israeli towns."

Again, they were delivering medical aid for terrorists - no mention of any boxes being labeled with the word ‘Crayola'.

Later on in her article, McKinney shifts from having delivered crayons for the children to a much different commodity:

"...the Israelis could very well conclude that they can do anything - imprison me for trying to take love to the children of Gaza and kill humanitarian activists trying to do the same..."

Those children who were expecting a delivery of love but received crayons instead, were probably just a bit disappointed.

McKinney's article is a roller coaster ride of random statements and hyperbole, putting it directly in line with the main stream media reports of this and past incidents with Israel.  That said, a little advice for the MSM:

Being fair and balanced means presenting both sides of the story, not simply taking the account of a lunatic fringe protest group who is trying to promote a cause - a cause that directly harms an ally of the United States.   

- Send comments or tips to rustyweiss@verizon.net. Please join me on Facebook.

PBS station managers made a big push last year to drive any trace of “sectarian” Christianity out of the taxpayer-funded broadcasting system, banning any church services or religious lectures that appeared on a handful of stations. They ultimately compromised and banned any new church programming. But on at least one program, PBS sounds like it’s declaring war on Christianity, including smears on Christianity that are not based on reality.

If that sounds shocking, imagine what the average Christian PBS viewer might have thought as he watched Tavis Smiley’s weeknight talk show on May 25. The guest was ex-Muslim and atheist author Ayaan Hirsi Ali, there to promote her latest book, “Nomad.” Smiley claims to be a Christian, but he attacked Ms. Ali for “idealizing Christianity” and recklessly turning people away from Islam.

Right out of the box, Smiley was out to make a point. “You say unapologetically and rather frankly that your mission here is to inform the West about the danger of Islam,” he began. “What danger do we need to be made aware of?”

What? Did Tavis Smiley somehow sleep through 9/11? Is PBS keeping him locked in a closet where he remains unaware of the ongoing terrorist attacks on Americans – successful and unsuccessful – made by Islamic radicals? When Ali brought up the deaths of 13 at Fort Hood and the failed Times Square bomber, Smiley unloaded a literally unbelievable statement: “But Christians do that every single day in this country.”

Ali replied: “Do they blow people up?” Smiley: “Yes. Oh, Christians, every day, people walk into post offices, they walk into schools, that's what Columbine is -- I could do this all day long.”

Tavis Smiley is not only wrong, he’s perversely wrong. The boys who shot up Columbine High School were not Christians, they were just violent psychopaths who, among other evils, mocked students who cried out for God to save them. There aren’t Christians walking into post offices or schools every single day in America and blowing people up. Anyone in charge of journalistic integrity at PBS should see this as a blazing inaccuracy, in addition to a religious smear. Men this dishonest should be kept from microphones, not hired to speak into them.

But Smiley kept going, insisting Christians were far worse than Muslim terrorists: “There are so many more examples of Christians -- and I happen to be a Christian. That's back to this notion of your idealizing Christianity in my mind, to my read. There are so many more examples, Ayaan, of Christians who do that than you could ever give me examples of Muslims who have done that inside this country, where you live and work.”

Who would have thought that anyone would outdo Rosie O’Donnell, who insisted radical Christianity was “just as threatening” as radical Islam?

Ali calmly explained that Christians are far more tolerant. They take abuse on television programs without threatening to blow up Comedy Central offices or promise Daniel Pearl-style decapitations for executives. She acknowledged “not all Muslims are terrorists, we must emphasize that, but almost all terrorist activities that take place today in our time are done and justified in the name of Islam.”

This caused another burst of illogic from Smiley, who compared the Fort Hood attack to the Tea Party activists protesting ObamaCare on Capitol Hill. “There are folk in the Tea Party, for example, every day who are being recently arrested for making threats against elected officials, for calling people ‘nigger’ as they walk into Capitol Hill, for spitting on people.”

Put aside the thoroughly unproven accusations, now that Rep. Emanuel Cleaver has backed off the story of conservative spitters, and there is no audio, or corroboration of the accusation of N-words being thrown. Had those events actually happened, would they in any way have been comparable to murder? 

PBS has an ombudsman now to receive public complaints. Michael Getler should hear from across the country, from Christians and non-Christians alike, that Tavis Smiley must provide a retraction and an apology for his scurrilous and bigoted remarks against Christians and the billions that practice that faith. PBS stations across the country accept millions in funding from good-hearted Christian taxpayers who don’t deserve to see allegedly “public” broadcasting attacking their integrity.

Seventy-seven percent of Americans call themselves Christian.

People in public broadcasting boast in their pledge drives and their direct-mail fundraising letters and in their congressional testimony that they are an oasis of civility and intelligent discourse. But they host, and help fund, the unintelligent, inaccurate garbage coming out of the mouth of Tavis Smiley. This trash belongs in the dumpster. 

—– Here’s a snarky report from James Hibberd of the Hollywood Reporter. No doubt if this was a gay group mobilizing against a show that mocked them, or the NAACP or CAIR protecting...

View Original Post

Calling your political opponents Nazis can get old after a while.

That's why one needs to mix it up, perhaps by suggesting that they're akin to the radical Islamic clerics that inspire terrorism.

Just ask MSNBC's Chris Matthews.

During the "Political Sideshow" segment of his June 1 program, the "Hardball" host compared Sarah Palin's Facebook page posting about author Joe McGinniss renting the house next door to a "fatwa" aimed at "rev[ving] up anger at the author" from amongst her "mob" of followers [MP3 audio available here]:

CHRIS MATTHEWS: A thrillah in Wasilla.  Sarah Palin's got a new neighbor out in Wasilla, Alaska, journalist Joe McGinniss, who's writing a book on the  ex-governor set to come out next year.

MATTHEWS: In the past week, Palin's taken to Facebook and conservative radio to rev up anger at the author after he rented a house that's next to her property. Here's McGinniss who wrote that great book, "The Selling of the President," on the "Today" show saying he has no intention of spying on the Palins.

JOE McGINNISS: I am not observing them at all. I'm here to talk to people who have known them for 40 years in Wasilla. 

MCGINNISS:  I think this is probably a lesson for the American people of the power Palin has to incite hatred, and her willingness and readiness to do it. She has pushed a button and unleashed the hounds of Hell and now they're out there slabbering and barking and growling.

MATTHEWS: Wow. Well, Palin, who knows how to stir up a mob, has issued a fatwa against McGinniss for daring to rent that vacant house next door.

Here's the full text of her May 25 Facebook "fatwa" that Matthews and McGinniss are all riled up about:

Spring has sprung in Alaska, and with this beautiful season comes the news today that the Palins have a new neighbor! Welcome, Joe McGinniss!

Yes, that Joe McGinniss. Here he is – about 15 feet away on the neighbor’s rented deck overlooking my children’s play area and my kitchen window. Maybe we’ll welcome him with a homemade blueberry pie tomorrow so he’ll know how friendly Alaskans are.

We found out the good news today. Upon my family’s return this morning from endorsement rallies and speeches in the Lower 48 states, I finally got the chance to tackle my garden and lawn this evening! So, putting on the shorts and tank top to catch that too-brief northern summer sun and placing a giddy Trig in his toddler backpack for a lawn-mowing adventure, I looked up in surprise to see a “new neighbor” overlooking my property just a stone’s throw away. Needless to say, our outdoor adventure ended quickly after Todd went to introduce himself to the stranger who was peering in...

Joe announced to Todd that he’s moved in right next door to us. He’s rented the place for the next five months or so. He moved up all the way from Massachusetts to live right next to us – while he writes a book about me. Knowing of his many other scathing pieces of “journalism” (including the bizarre anti-Palin administration oil development pieces that resulted in my Department of Natural Resources announcing that his work is the most twisted energy-related yellow journalism they’d ever encountered), we’re sure to have a doozey to look forward to with this treasure he’s penning. Wonder what kind of material he’ll gather while overlooking Piper’s bedroom, my little garden, and the family’s swimming hole?

Welcome, Joe! It’ll be a great summer – come borrow a cup of sugar if ever you need some sweetener. And you know what they say about “fences make for good neighbors”? Well, we’ll get started on that tall fence tomorrow, and I’ll try to keep Trig’s squeals down to a quiet giggle so we don’t disturb your peaceful summer. Enjoy!

- Sarah Palin

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has a bad habit of inappropriate flippancy, and it's on display in his review of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's new memoir "Nomad," introduced with the headline "The Gadfly," that efficiently captures Kristof's condescending tone.

Hirsi Ali is a feminist intellectual born Muslim in Somalia, raised in Saudi Arabia, escaped an arranged marriage, fled to the Netherlands and began speaking out against Islam's treatment of women. She now lives in the United States and is a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, which is perhaps why her story does not delight liberals like it should on the surface.

As historian Andrew Roberts wrote in an attack at The Daily Beast, Kristof sounded condescending. Hirsi Ali's brave fight for women's rights against fundamentalist religious bigotry certainly sounds like something to be admired without reservation by any sincere liberal. Yet liberals often seem too afraid of sounding like anti-Islamic conservatives to applaud Hirsi Ali without criticism. Kristof makes it sound as if Hirsi Ali shared the blame for the threats on her life because "she has managed to outrage more people...," as if her goal is to provoke anger, not to expand freedom for women under Islam.

If there were a "Ms. Globalization" title, it might well go to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali woman who wrote the best--selling memoir "Infidel." She has managed to outrage more people -- in some cases to the point that they want to assassinate her -- in more languages in more countries on more continents than almost any writer in the world today.

Now Hirsi Ali is working on antagonizing even more people in yet another memoir. "Nomad" argues that Islam creates dysfunctional families -- like her own -- and adds that these distorted families constitute "a real threat to the very fabric of Western life." Western countries, she says, should be less tolerant of immigrants who try to preserve their lifestyles in their new homelands. It might seem presumptuous to write another memoir so soon, but Hirsi Ali is a remarkable figure who has plenty of memories to record.

If two memoirs weren't "presumptuous" for Barack Obama, why would it be for Hirsi Ali, who has suffered far more in her life without becoming a liberal icon like Obama has?

Kristof eventually admitted to enjoying the book and admiring Hirsi Ali, but not before clearing his throat several times with anguished liberal caveats about her "ferocity" in her denouncing Islam (as if she doesn't have a right to feel that way).

That's partly because she is by nature a provocateur, the type of person who rolls out verbal hand grenades by reflex. After her father's death, Hirsi Ali connects by telephone with her aging and long-estranged mother living in a dirt-floor hut in Somalia. Hirsi Ali asks forgiveness, but the conversation goes downhill when her mother pleads with her to return to Islam. Near tears, her mother asks: "Why are you so feeble in faith? . . . You are my child and I can't bear the thought of you in hell."

....

Since Hirsi Ali denounces Islam with a ferocity that I find strident, potentially feeding religious bigotry, I expected to dislike this book. It did leave me uncomfortable and exasperated in places. But I also enjoyed it. Hirsi Ali comes across as so sympathetic when she shares her grief at her family's troubles that she is difficult to dislike. Her memoir suggests that she never quite outgrew her rebellious teenager phase, but also that she would be a terrific conversationalist at a dinner party.

Historian Andrew Roberts, writing at The Daily Beast, found Kristof terribly condescending, and was critical of Kristof describing Ali as a "provocateur."

The word "provocative" is often a term of approbation; here it is clearly intended pejoratively. The only people who could possibly be "provoked" by Nomad are Islamic fundamentalists who abuse women and beat children; much of the book is a passionate denunciation of the way violence is routinely used against children in the Muslim world.

Russell Shorto's Sunday NYT Magazine profile of Job Cohen, the leftist mayor of Amsterdam, also mentioned Hirsi Ali, and used the same tone suggesting she had gone too far:

Ayaan Hirsi Ali -- from her position at the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative U.S. policy center at which she became a fellow after she fled the Netherlands -- criticizes Cohen's approach using the same dire language about Islam that put her at the center of the Dutch political and social debate.

The Times has a history of criticism. Reviewer and author Ian Buruma's March 4, 2007 review of her first memoir "Infidel" was mostly supportive of Hirsi Ali, but ended with criticism of her "absolutist view."

Hirsi Ali is quite right that this force must be resisted. Enlightened reform of religious practices that clash with liberal democratic freedoms is necessary. But much though I respect her courage, I'm not convinced that Ayaan Hirsi Ali's absolutist view of a perfectly enlightened West at war with the demonic world of Islam offers the best perspective from which to get this done.

And the Times's own book reviewer, William Grimes, included this stunning criticism of Hirsi Ali in his review of a related book by Buruma, "Murder in Amsterdam The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance."

Enlightenment absolutists like Ms. Hirsi Ali and Mr. van Gogh turned apoplectic at any efforts to appease or accommodate Muslims on, say, gay rights or women's rights, and they were not alone in their fears.

A Times book critic criticizing someone for being too tolerant of gays and women, and for not taking the radical Muslim view into consideration? Can you imagine a liberal chiding other liberals for failing to "appease or accommodate Christians" on "gay rights or women's rights"?

The June 7 Time magazine cover blared, “Why Being Pope Means Never Having To Say You’re Sorry,” and the article explored the sexual abuse that has occurred in the Catholic Church and how the church might overcome the scandal. But the authors, Jeff Israely and Howard Chua-Eoan, left little doubt that they viewed Pope Benedict XVI as already guilty in the sexual abuse scandal.

The article tried to build that case. The pair wrote, “Over the past two months, the Pope has led the Holy See's shift from silence and denial to calls to face the enemies from within the church. What is still missing, however, is any mention of the Holy Father's alleged role in the scandal.” The story was very one-sided – filled with abuse victims and critics of the church, but included virtually no experts defending the pope or the Catholicism.

Israely and Chua-Eoan presumably based their article in part on a New York Times report alleging that as archbishop, Benedict protected the church over children by transferring priests when abuse occurred in the United States, Germany, and Ireland. Another Times article accused Pope Benedict XVI of allowing priests to remain in Wisconsin after they abused deaf boys, although this is report has been strongly questioned.

Continuing to negatively portray Pope Benedict XVI, they wrote, “Ratzinger, both in his role as the local bishop in Munich from 1977 to 1981 and as the overseer of universal doctrine in Rome, was very much part of a system that had badly underestimated and in some cases enabled the rot of clergy abuse that spread through the church in the past half-century.”

It didn’t stop there. Israely and Chua-Eoan claimed that the Pope “mismanaged the assignment of an accused pedophile priest under his charge.” They also wrote that as archbishop, he “personally authorized the transfer of an abusive priest.”

They did manage to acknowledge that some of Pope Benedict’s policies have caused a “decline in new incidents of clerical sex abuse.” The piece also ignored the impact of Catholic doctrine on the whole crisis since Catholics view confession and forgiveness for sins as a sacrament. The article also left out the secular push to return molesters to their previous roles, assuming that psychiatric treatment had cured them.

None of that mattered to Israely and Chua-Eoan.To them, Pope Benedict XVI is clearly not innocent until proven guilty.

The authors also suggested how the pope could repair the church. They recommended he give a mea culpa, an “acceptance of personal guilt.” The pope did apologize for the sexual abuse in Ireland, but that wasn’t good enough for Time. The article complained he only apologized for the “errors committed by the hierarchy” and not for himself.

A penance was also suggested. But they sneered, “But what kind of penance would a pope with fingerprints on the controversy have to perform?”

While they did credit the Pope for meeting with victims and answering reporter’s questions, it was clear he was supposed to do more. Israely and Chua-Eoan explained, “The pope has yet to address this period of his career explicitly. But if he is to satisfy victims and their families, he will have to do so one day.”

The authors, however, couldn’t resist sarcastically asking if, “Or is this just a more effective public relations strategy?”

Israely and Chua-Eoan did make it known they didn’t just blame Pope Benedict’s for the crisis – it was the church’s structure too. They explained, “The Catholic Church believes it is Christ's representative on earth, with all the sinlessness and omnipotent authority of its Savior. The statesmen of the church have always known that to preserve that authority, the realm of the Popes could not simply be an otherworldly City of God.”
The Time story was just the latest of many media attacks on both the pope and the Catholic church. During Holy Week, the broadcast networks featured 26 stories about Pope Benedict’s assumed role and 69 percent of the stories assumed that he was guilty.

I had high expectations for the series finale of LOST.  That’s because I’m an addict – I’ve seen every episode (yes, including Season 6’s brutal What Kate Did) several times; I’m a subscriber to LOST...

View Original Post

Newsweek's Lisa Miller again lashed out against the Catholic Church in her column on Thursday, defending an excommunicated Catholic nun in Arizona for her "compassionate and impossible decision" in supporting a hospital patient's abortion. Miller also condemned a Vatican cardinal's investigation into American nuns as a whole as "authoritarian meddling."

The religion editor for the dwindling magazine began her column, "Female Troubles," by sympathizing with Sister Margaret McBride, an administrator at St. Joseph's Hospital in Phoenix, who ruled with her hospital's ethics committee that a first-trimester abortion which took place in late 2009 was medically necessary:

Earlier this month, in something of a surprise, a nun at a Catholic hospital in Phoenix was excommunicated for approving a first-trimester abortion last year at that hospital to save the life of a critically ill patient....The irony here is thick: it has taken years, sometimes decades, to bring sex-abusing priests to justice, but this observant sister, Margaret McBride, was excommunicated in a matter of months for making a compassionate and impossible decision for one of her parishioners.

Bishop Thomas Olmsted of the Phoenix Diocese condemned the hospital's support of the abortion in a May 14, 2010 statement. In a separate statement a few days later, his diocese made it clear that "since she [Sister McBride] gave her consent and encouraged an abortion she automatically excommunicated herself from the church." So Miller is misrepresenting the circumstances of the case. It didn't take "a matter of months" for Sister McBride to be excommunicated. That took place in 2009 as soon as she approved the abortion, and Bishop Olmsted and his diocese merely acknowledged that status in May. Also, if any of the members of the hospital's ethics committee are Catholic, they also automatically excommunicated themselves at the time of the approval.

Miller then used the Phoenix case as a jumping off point to lament the wider investigation into all American nuns by the Vatican:

This decisive action against one nun in one ethically murky case comes as an "apostolic visitation," or investigation, of all of America's 60,000 religious sisters is underway. Its purpose is unclear, though the man who ordered it, Cardinal Franc Rode, is well known for his views about 'irregularities' in post–Vatican II religious life....Anxious observers and commentators worry that, as a result of the inquiry, nuns will be forced to take steps backward—into the head coverings and habits, for example, that were made optional after the Second Vatican Council in 1965. They worry further that sisters who have worked more or less independently for decades will have their independence curtailed....At a time when the male leadership can be blamed for leading the church to a state of crisis—a time when the voices of women are needed more than ever—even the modest roles accorded to female clerics have come under attack. The specific reasons for the investigation are unclear (or, more probably, not public), but the suspicion, clearly, can be put in the crassest terms: too many American nuns have gone off the reservation.

There can be little doubt the "anxious observers and commentators" that she has in mind are dissenting Catholics and their liberal allies. Miller's subsequent concern, that "nuns will be forced to take steps backward—into the head coverings and habits...that were made optional after the Second Vatican Council," is misleading, because up to this day, nuns are supposed to "wear the habit of their institute," according to the Church's Code of Canon Law. Also, in the strictest sense, the Newsweek editor is wrong to label nuns "female clerics" as they aren't deacons, priests, or bishops. But, then again, she is on the record as supporting the ordination of women, so we could chalk that up as a Freudian slip.

Miller actually cited her pro-women's ordination column from April later in her column. According to her own account, an unnamed nun wrote the editor two days after its publication and bemoaned the apostolic visitation and agreed with her: "The apostolic visit, 'punitive by definition, demonstrates…that male church leaders are seeking to keep modernity at bay, keep women in a secondary place…It is so true that if women had any influence at all in our Church, the Church would be so much more whole and healthy.'"

The religion writer, who also raged against the American bishops for daring to stand against the pro-abortion aspects of ObamaCare and labeled the practice of celibacy by priests and bishops a "whiff of freakishness" earlier in 2010, spent the rest of her column expanding on some of her earlier anti-Catholic arguments and citing notorious dissenters from the Church, such as Sister Joan Chittister:

Many religions, including and especially Catholicism, consider obedience—to God and to religious authorities—a crucial value. The life of a Catholic is explicitly a kind of human sacrifice, an extraordinary act of submission. When a nun takes vows, she promises to God that she will remain chaste, that she will relinquish worldly things (that’s the vow of poverty), and that she will submit to her abbess, to the church, and to God. But modern democratic society puts such vows to the test, for in our world, blind submission to authority is not a virtue but a vice. Just as modernity doesn’t want to accommodate insular groups of men who live behind guarded walls and make decisions that affect the domestic lives of half a billion people, it will also eventually reject what amounts to a kind of patriarchal apartheid, in which female clerics are given no voice in the power structure and yet are expected to submit to it.

"Churches that cling to sexism in the name of God will find themselves ignored on other issues," wrote Sister Joan Chittister, a popular Catholic spiritual writer and advocate for women’s ordination, in The Huffington Post earlier this year. "Young women will begin to wonder how it is that churches that teach equality are the last bastions of sexism in the modern world. People of faith will be hard pressed to explain how it is that the question of equality of the sexes is being led by secular institutions rather than by ministers who proclaim the Good News and then stop it from coming." Indeed, Chittister may represent just the kind of "feminist spirit" that Cardinal Rode derides. When Chittister speaks, the Vatican rebukes her, yet she remains as popular as ever, selling books, drawing standing ovations, opining in print and online.

Similarly, the thousands of American nuns who recently voiced their support for the health-care-reform bill—in defiance of the bishops’ position against it—may be just the kind of thing Cardinal Rode hopes to suppress. "When I’m drafting right-to-life language, I don’t call up the nuns," Rep. Bart Stupak said dismissively of the sisters' activism. Their point, in short: that granting health care to the nation's poor and needy—especially children—dramatically outweighed the abortion controversy and, further, was in keeping with the church's broad theology of respecting life. The sisters, it turned out, had the upper hand: they rode the wave of support for reform right to the president's desk.

For more than a thousand years, becoming a nun was the best—and often the only—way for a young woman to get an education and to earn a modicum of independence. In the modern West, though, women have other options. In the United States, the number of religious sisters has shrunk by two thirds since 1965, to 59,600. (Worldwide, the collapse is not as dramatic: the number of sisters has dwindled by just one third over the same period, to 750,000.) And while sisters still outnumber priests across the globe, women's desire to become nuns is plummeting. Less than 4 percent of American Catholic women have ever "seriously" considered becoming a nun, according to 2008 data by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, compared with 9 percent in 2003. And those numbers have been in decline since Vatican II. It's no wonder, really. When men have all the power, and they "investigate" women who seem to disrespect their authority, why not become a doctor, or a lawyer, or a stay-at-home mom, and submit to God without the authoritarian meddling?

It seems, however, that the nuns who are faithful to the Church are having the last laugh. An August 2009 article by none other than the New York Times cited another study by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (which is at the infamously heterodox Georgetown University) which noted that the "more modernized religious orders are attracting the fewest new members. 'We've heard anecdotally that the youngest people coming to religious life are distinctive, and they really are,' said Sister Mary Bendyna, executive director of the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. 'They’re more attracted to a traditional style of religious life, where there is community living, common prayer, having Mass together, praying the Liturgy of the Hours together. They are much more likely to say fidelity to the Church is important to them. And they really are looking for communities where members wear habits.'" Right now, Miller and Sister Joan must be shuddering at the thought.

Tavis Smiley has apparently been asleep for the last ten years. That, at least, is the only logical explanation for his claim that Christains engage in terrorism far more often than Muslims. He also thinks the Tea Party is a comparably dangerous force to radical Islam.

"There are so many more examples of Christians who do that," Smiley claimed, referring to terrorism, "than you could ever give me examples of Muslims who have done that inside this country where you live and work." He was discussing terrorism with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born writer and former member of the Dutch Parliament.

Ali claims it is her mission to "inform the West about the danger of Islam," but Smiley was more concerned with the danger posed by Tea Party protesters, who "are being recently arrested for making threats against elected officials, for calling people 'nigger' as they walk into Capitol Hill, for spitting on people." None of those claims are true, but then again the segment was replete with falsehoods (Full video and transcript below the fold - h/t Greg Hengler).


For her part, Ali pushed back against Smiley's absurd claims. Though she acknowledged that some have used Christianity to justify violence, she insisted that mainstream Christians are "accepting of other religions and tolerant."

As for Smiley's claims regarding the Tea Party, I am unaware of any protester being arrested for threatening an elected official. Perhaps he is referring to the Hutaree Militia, but they had exactly zero connections to the Tea Party movement (in fact, one militiaman is a registered Democrat). The n-word/spitting claims have been thoroughly discredited elsewhere.

Of course Smiley is hardly a paragon of journalistic objectivity. Most notably, he dubbed President Bush a "serial killer," but he has a long history of toeing the liberal line on virtually every issue.

Transcript of the segment, with Smiley's most outrageous remarks in bold:

SMILEY: When you were last here - I'm here every day - (laughter) when you were last here we were starting to have a conversation about your view of Christianity. We'll come back to that a little bit later in the conversation because I want to pick up on that conversation. I've been waiting for months to continue that dialogue.

Before we do that, though, in this book, the new one, you say unapologetically and rather frankly that your mission here is to inform the West about the danger of Islam. What danger do we need to be made aware of?

ALI: And when I say "Islam" I'm talking about Islam as a theology and as a political theory. Islam has different aspects. It has a spiritual aspect but it also has a political and a social aspect.

The spiritual aspect of praying and fasting, I have no problems with that. The political and social aspects have to do with concepts such as jihad - waging a holy war to either persuade people to become Muslim or to kill them.

The social aspect has to do with the treatment of women, and given the fact that we are now living in a world that is fast globalizing - people are coming from all different parts of the world, living here; people are leaving here and going elsewhere - I think it's very, very important to note that not only are people moving but ideas are also moving.

So people with ideas who feel that they should introduce Sharia law, a theocracy based on Islam such as Iran, such as what the Taliban have attempted in Afghanistan, that these people with these ideas, resources, convictions, can sometimes be successful.

What I tried to do with the book as an individual who grew up with Islam and I was once myself - considered myself a member of the Muslim brotherhood, I want to say that these ideas are really not only dangerous but a lot of people are subscribing to theSMILEYm.

SMILEY: I guess no one would argue that jihad is a dangerous and deadly political philosophy to have and to engage. I guess the question is whether or not jihad is the only way that that political involvement is expressed. Isn't it just an example of how policy, of how people engage politically and not the whole of the activity, politically?

ALI: Well, it's very important to note that not all Muslims subscribe to jihad.

SMILEY: Precisely, yeah.

ALI: That's really important. I don't ever want to make the impression that all Muslims are potential terrorists or potential jihadists. But there is a movement that wants to have Islamic Sharia or Islamic war introduced, through persuasion sometimes, without using violence, and sometimes by using violence. The society that they're aspiring to is a society that is modeled around a place like Saudi Arabia or Iran.

The point I want to make in this book is the majority of Muslims don't even read the Qur'an. They've just been told what is in there is good, it's God's word, it's perfect. The majority of Muslims don't know what Muhammad exactly said.

So these people who are coming to them are building - the agents of radical Islam, the agents of jihad, the agents of Sharia are just building on the fact that most Muslims have only been told the Qur'an is great, Muhammad is infallible, and then radicalizing them. It's very important for us to realize that.

If we do realize that, we are then able to compete with the radical agents of Islam, with the agents of jihad, for the hearts and minds of individuals who identify themselves as Muslim.

SMILEY: We compete by doing what? By, as you suggest in the book, converting them as Christians?

ALI: Well, I'm not a Christian. I would like to introduce to them critical thinking and the enlightenment and secular thought. But I've also met, through my last years here, a number of Christians, and I've realized that their concept of God differs very much from that of Islam. I've had people who've read "Infidel" and who write to me saying, "I just cannot be, I just can't fathom being an atheist. I can't. There is a force out there, it's a good force. I don't want to be with Allah or Muhammad, but I just need a different kind of -" and most of them convert to Christianity.

SMILEY: Are you at all concerned or are you ever concerned, put another way, that the mission, to use your word, that you are on is turning people against Islam, turning people against Muslims, because you're so - I don't want to say radical, but so aggressive in your approach?

ALI: Well, the mission is not to turn people against Muslims. My mission is to include Muslims into finding out that there are alternative sources of morality other than what the jihadists are offering them.

A lot of money made from oil in Saudi Arabia, in other parts in the Middle East that have that money, are using a very violent narrative, a very human-unfriendly narrative, and they're taking it to people who are sometimes poor, sometimes middle class, and people are subscribing to those ideas.

Right now there's no competition. There isn't a competing propaganda. We talk about it only in terms of national security. We talk about military means, we talk about what the FBI can do, but we don't talk about what you and I can do. Why can't we just reach out to Muslim-Americans living here and say, "Hey, do you really believe in practicing what is in chapter 4, verse 34 of the Qur'an - "Beat the disobedient wife?" I'll tell you most Muslims don't want to beat their wives and don't want to compel them to do that.

But with that justification, with that narrative, with that propaganda, more and more men are finding a reason to justify to themselves something that is truly abominably wrong.

SMILEY: As I got into reading your story, and it's obviously a very powerful narrative, I was left ultimately with this question, Ayaan, which is on the one hand you have moved away, for your own reasons, as you've expressed here now, you've moved away from practicing Islam. You don't practice the Muslim faith on the one hand, so you moved from that.

On the other hand, you, to my mind, at least, and I could read any number of passages to point this out, to my mind, again, you almost idealize Christianity on the other hand. But here you are in the middle an atheist, and I'm trying to juxtapose all that.

You don't want to practice the Muslim faith, you idealize Christianity, and yet you remain an atheist. That's the part of your journey I don't quite get. Maybe you can enlighten me.

ALI: It's a bundle of contradictions.

SMILEY: Yeah, it is. (Laughs)

ALI: Like all human individuals, I am a bundle of contradictions. I was very much, after I had written "Infidel," very much on the side of people who say all religions are the same and all religions are inherently evil. But again, what I learned from the enlightenment is when the fact change, change your mind, and the evidence I'm seeing - and this is what I admire about some Christians, not all of them. I'm not blind to extremist Christianity.

But what I admire about Christians today is - and I would like it for the Muslims too - is that many of them have come to grapple with their faith, have come to acknowledge that there are things in the bible and things that the institution, that different churches have done that are hostile to humanity, that are hostile to gay people, hostile to women, have justified slavery, for instance.

They have come not only to grapple with it and to understand it and to acknowledge that it's all in there, but they've also learned to distance themselves from that. That's what I admire about moderate Christians. I say in the book right now we cannot speak of moderate Muslims because they still cling to the absolute idea that everything in the Qur'an is the true word of God and cannot be changed by human beings, and that the prophet Muhammad, the founder of Islam, left a moral guidance behind and all we can do is follow it, not question it.

SMILEY: Where is the evidence for you that, for those Muslims who live in the West, that we need to challenge them, we need to convert them, we need to change them? If what we're afraid of is jihad, all of that, at least until this present time, all of that attack, that terrorist activity, has come inside of this country from persons connected to that faith.

I guess I'm trying to understand where the evidence is that suggests that all of us who happen to be Christians or enlightened in some other way need to take on Muslims here in the West.

ALI: Okay, I think first and foremost what we have to acknowledge is we're not going to get a monster with horns, blue in the face, looking like a dragon called jihad coming in and terrorizing us. The people who are engaged in terrorist activities look like you and me. They look like everybody else here.

Major Nidal Hasan, the military guy who in November shot 13 of his colleagues and injured 32, he's going to be on trial pretty soon, I think this week, the young man, Faisal Shahzad, in Times Square who tried to blow innocent people that he doesn't know up, these guys are acting on conviction. Somehow, the idea got into their minds that to kill other people is a great thing to do and that they would be rewarded in the hereafter.

SMILEY: But Christians do that every single day in this country.

ALI: Do they blow people up (unintelligible)?

SMILEY: Yes. Oh, Christians, every day, people walk into post offices, they walk into schools, that's what Columbine is - I could do this all day long. There are so many more examples of Christians - and I happen to be a Christian. That's back to this notion of your idealizing Christianity in my mind, to my read. There are so many more examples, Ayaan, of Christians who do that than you could ever give me examples of Muslims who have done that inside this country, where you live and work.

ALI: Well, I think you and I disagree, not so much on is there extremism in Christianity - I fully acknowledge that. There are people who want to take the bible and use passages from the bible as justification for violent behavior. I'm not denying that in the least. But mainstream Christians in the 21st century are more like you.

I'm an atheist, I'm not a Christian, but they are more like you - accepting of other religions and tolerant. The latest example, "South Park," where Jesus Christ was made fun of, watching pornography, people, Christians, maybe have been annoyed by it but the producers of "South Park" were not threatened by Christians.

They were not threatened by Buddhists. They showed Buddha snorting cocaine. Muhammad, whose picture wasn't shown, there was a line saying "censored" and he was imagined to be in a Teddy bear, some of the followers of Muhammad got very angry. A few of them posted threats about the producers, and this is very mild.

There are today - I don't want to say, and it's been established, not all Muslims are terrorists, we must emphasize that, but almost all terrorist activities that take place today in our time are done and justified in the name of Islam.

Now to acknowledge that, the point I'm trying to make is is it possible, is it imaginable, that we can compete with the radical jihadists for the hearts and minds of young men like Faisal Shahzad or like Nidal Malik Hasan, and I believe we can, before they get to that stage.

SMILEY: I hear that point and I accept it. The only point I'm making is there are folk in the Tea Party, for example, every day who are being recently arrested for making threats against elected officials, for calling people "nigger" as they walk into Capitol Hill, for spitting on people. That's within the political - that's within the body politic of this country. So I accept your point and my time is up so we won't debate that.

Let me ask as an exit question, and this is no secret; I just was reading about this in "The New York Times" the other day, an interview you gave to the magazine, so it's no secret here, but you travel with security because there is a constant cloud, at least, of a threat against your life because of your outspokenness. Is it worth it, living under these conditions? Is it worth it?

ALI: I ask myself that question every day, and I think it's worth fighting those who intimidate me. Those who threaten, those who try to kill people who disagree with them, I think it's worth it. I think it's worth continuing to fight.

SMILEY: I accept that. It's the new book from perennial now "New York Times" best-selling author Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The book is called "Nomad: From Islam to America, a Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations." Ayaan, always glad to have you on this program.

ALI: Thank you so much, Tavis. Thanks for having me.

SMILEY: Thank you for your time.

***SPOLIERS, for those of you who haven’t seen the LOST finale yet… …And—dare I say—thank God. It seemed we were being led down a directionless path for a season or two. Every time we tried to get...

View Original Post

Did Hollywood finally see at a least a sliver of the light? Sure, Sex and the City isn’t really Feminist Hawk-y. They promulgate that whole “sexual empowerment” meme that is actually harmful to women and demeaning to them. As such, they generally fit the liberal Feminist (Femisogynist) role. That’s where this movie gets [...]

On 9/11  radical Muslims murdered almost 3,000 Americans in the name of Islam. Now, Islam is going to be allowed to profit from those attacks? Manhattan liberals say “yes,” A New York community board has resoundingly backed a controversial plan for an Islamic cultural center and mosque two blocks from Ground Zero. The non-binding vote by the [...]

On Tuesday’s Lopez Tonight on TBS, magicians Penn and Teller appeared as guests, and, while discussing their controversial program on Showtime, and the show’s history of criticizing religion, Penn Jillette conceded a compliment to American Christians that they are "the most tolerant people worldwide." He also admitted that it was a "shock" to discover the relative tolerance of American Christians after the airing of the show from last August attacking the Catholic Church, as he compared reaction from Christians to that from other groups the show has attacked, such as 9/11 conspiracy theorists. Jillette:

Well, you know, we've done heavy stuff. I mean, we've done the Vatican. We've done Mother Teresa. We've done the Dalai Lama. We've done really, really heavy subjects. And I've got to say it was actually a shock doing the show, the religious communities in the United States of America are the most tolerant people worldwide. I mean, we did really aggressive stuff we believe strongly, and mostly got letters from Christians and Catholics saying we really like how passionately and clearly you put out your ideas. Very few nut cases.

But it could also be argued that Jillette’s account makes American Christians sound almost too accepting of the show’s criticism of Christianity and downplays the fact that there was legitimate criticism of the show leveled from high-profile Catholics such as Bill Donohue of the Catholic League.

Below is a transcript of the relevant portion of the Tuesday, May 25, Lopez Tonight on TBS:

GEORGE LOPEZ: Congratulations on eight years of Bullshit on Showtime. Eight years! (AUDIENCE APPLAUSE) Great consequence show, too, to take on people’s ideas. Tell everybody a little bit about what Bullshit is about.

PENN JILLETTE: Well, it’s just essentially a pro-science show and a skeptical show, but, comedically, you know, it's stated in the negative, but it really is just a celebration of what human beings know and know to be true, just said in a really negative way with a lot of obscenity and nudity.

LOPEZ: Well said.

JILLETTE: What more do you want?

LOPEZ: And have you gotten any shit for stuff that you guys have covered that people have been upset about?

JILLETTE: Well, you know, we’ve done heavy stuff. I mean, we've done the Vatican. We've done Mother Teresa. We've done the Dalai Lama. We've done really, really heavy subjects. And I've got to say it was actually a shock doing the show, the religious communities in the United States of America are the most tolerant people worldwide. I mean, we did really aggressive stuff we believe strongly, and mostly got letters from Christians and Catholics saying we really like how passionately and clearly you put out your ideas. Very few nut cases. However, the nut cases were the 9/11 conspiracy people, who we thought, you know, they're kind of nerdy, they'll be okay. They actually showed up at the offices to attack some of the writers, you know, verbally. And the chiropractors, chiropractors, we did the show on chiropracty, and they went absolutely bug nutty, and like 75 chiropractors showed up at our show at Rio, watched our whole show, then came up after and said we want you to know because of your Bullshit show we are boycotting you. And I went, 75 of you have just bought tickets in order to tell us, I guess not only is your medical science bad, your math really sucks. When you're doing a boycott, you don't give the people money. You don't show up, give them money, and then say now we're boycotting.

Left-wing film site Cinematical: Here’s a film I expect to annoy some religious groups: Sweet Baby Jesus, which will star Bette Midler, Kim Cattrall and British actress/singer Pixie Lott...

View Original Post

A battle is raging in Texas over our children’s minds. One of the focal points is the “wall of separation” between church and state. It’s a wall based on a false assumption, one that has distorted religious freedom in this country.

The Texas Board of Education must approve textbooks taught in Texan public schools. Its members are the gatekeepers who determine whether a textbook meets curriculum requirements. That board recently met to approve the next generation of books.

But as goes Texas, so goes the nation, because Texan standards are then adopted for textbooks sold all over America. So publishers take drafts to Texas for consultation and approval, making changes as necessary.

One of the changes that conservatives are pushing is for these textbooks to include a discussion of the “wall of separation between church and state.” More specifically, they are pushing for a discussion of what the Founding Fathers thought of this wall.

That is a worthwhile classroom discussion, because the Founding Fathers never created such a wall. That’s why it’s not mentioned in the Constitution.

On January 1, 1802, President Thomas Jefferson sent a letter to the Danbury Baptists of Connecticut, in response to their congratulations upon his winning the presidency. In it, Jefferson referred to a “wall of separation between church and state.”  He wrote this in the context of perceived threats the Baptists felt were coming from the state, not the other way around.

After writing that letter, Jefferson went on attending church, at services held in the House chamber of the U.S. Congress. (On Sundays, the Capitol was a church building.) He also went on to approve legislation for the federal government to undertake the construction of churches in the frontier regions, and helping pay pastors to preach in these churches, to carry the Christian faith to the native peoples there.

Clearly, what Jefferson was describing was not a rigid barrier between faith and public policy, but denominational allegiance by the state.  As the Constitution says, the federal government was not to “establish religion,” that is, to select a particular denomination as a national church.

That’s all the wall is. And Jefferson was among the most secular of the Founding Fathers, who did not believe in miracles, such as the virgin birth or resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The wall of separation nowhere appears in American law until the 1947 case Everson v. Board of Education, when the Supreme Court considered whether a New Jersey law allowing school districts to arrange daily transportation for children to religious schools was constitutional. Although declaring the wall, the Court went on to say that school boards expending public funds getting students to and from religious schools wasn’t unconstitutional—such accommodations were fine.

Later in 1952, the Supreme Court clarified itself in Zorach v. Clauson, saying Americans, “are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being …. When the state encourages religious instruction or cooperates with religious authorities … it follows the best of our traditions. For it then respects the religious nature of our people and accommodates the public service to their spiritual needs.”

But in recent decades, this wall has become a hammer used to bludgeon people of faith in a concerted effort to purge the public square of references to faith, silencing those who express faith in a public setting.

With the resurgent interest in the original meaning of the Constitution that began in the 1980s and continues today, using this “wall” as the basis for applying the First Amendment has increasingly been criticized.

One such example came from Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Writing in dissent in Wallace v. Jaffree while still an associate justice, Renhquist wrote, “It is impossible to build sound constitutional doctrine upon a mistaken understanding of constitutional history, but unfortunately the Establishment Clause has been expressly freighted with Jefferson’s misleading metaphor for nearly 40 years. Thomas Jefferson was, of course, in France at the time the… Bill of rights [was] passed in Congress and ratified by the states. His letter to the Danbury Baptist Association was a short note of courtesy, written 14 years after the Amendments were passed by Congress. He would seem to any detached observer as a less than ideal source of contemporary history as to the meaning of the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment.”

America got along just fine without this wall for 158 years, and even afterwards. It’s only been in recent years that it has been twisted into a secularizing influence in our society.

These are historical facts. Children should be taught facts in history class.

Ken Klukowski is special counsel with the Family Research Council and coauthor of the bestselling book The Blueprint: Obama’s Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency.

Around the same time they were caving in to pressure to delete all Mohammed references from an episode of "South Park," the geniuses at Comedy Central posted an online video game containing truly staggering anti-Semitic images.

This abomination was originally called "I.S.R.A.E.L. Attack!" due to the lead character being a murderous robot named "I.S.R.A.E.L." -- "Intelligent Smart Robot Animation Eraser."

As the game opens, the villain says, "You lied to me, Jew Producer" (video follows with lots of commentary, h/t Weasel Zippers):

This disgusting farce was first discovered by the website HonestReporting which wrote on May 16:

The character openly calls the robot by its acronym - ISRAEL - and the association created by those behind this game is unmistakable - Israel the child killer.

The game then involves the robot destroying everything and everyone in its path, including children and animals.

The Sidney Morning Herald reported a few days later:

The game is part of a promotional campaign for the DVD release of the now cancelled animated television series Drawn Together.

The game opens with an evil looking, long-nosed character screaming at a faceless figure, "You lied to me, Jew producer". The blabbering, squirming, frightened "Jew producer" at first denies the accusation and then admits that he's "busted".

And what did the "Jewish producer" fail to do? He did not kill each one of the Drawn Together cartoon characters after the show was taken off the air.

So, to finish the job the "Jew producer" was supposed to carry out, the giant robot I.S.R.A.E.L - Intelligent Smart Robot Animation Eraser - is dispatched by the villainous mastermind to wipe out every character. Forever.

The blue and white (the colours of the Israeli flag) murderous female robot, equipped with machine-gun, a rocket and eraser bombs goes on a rampage and destroys everything in its path, including animals and plants in addition to children.

Got it? ISRAEL is the cold, efficient, homicidal automaton that is programmed to indiscriminately annihilate without mercy. The game borrows heavily from the classic anti-Semitic blood libel of Jews as baby-killers. [...]

Interestingly, as the game loads a line on the right side of the screen informs us that the Drawn Together DVD was released on April 20. In case the date's significance has escaped you - April 20th is Hitler's birthday. Must be a coincidence.

The unmistakable message is that when there's any slaughtering of children to be done, it's I.S.R.A.E.L that does the job. According to the creative team at Comedy Central, that's the natural association we should all make when we think of the Jewish state and its people.

The Jewish daily Forward reported the following day:

In a letter written to Comedy Central and obtained by the Forward, Abraham Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League, wrote: "We agree with complaints that this video game and other video clips and trailers featuring the ‘Jew Producer' character play into and encourage offensive anti-Semitic and anti-Israel stereotypes. While that may not have been the intent, the fact that your site caters to and potentially influences such a wide audience, including children and young adults, is especially troubling to us." The letter concludes by requesting that Comedy Central remove the game from its site, or alternatively put it behind a protective wall so that minors cannot access it. 

Pretty stunning to say the least. HonestReporting updated readers Sunday:

Comedy Central was evidently not insensitive to the negative publicity and the protests. The offensive introduction to the game was edited to remove the "Jew Producer" line. The title of the game itself was also changed to "Drawn Together: The Movie: The Game", making it far more difficult to locate on Comedy Central's website. The graphic featuring the original title "I.S.R.A.E.L. Attack!" is still there, however. 

Maybe the oddest twist in this bizarre story was reported by the Jewish Week on May 18:

The creators and executive producers of "Drawn Together," Dave Jeser and Matt Silverstein, describe themselves as "Jews" in their joint biography on Comedy Central's website. At the end of the bio they conclude with a self-written obituary: "In lieu of flowers, please send a donation to the Jewish National Fund (800-762-9273). Israel needs us now more than ever." 

Despite the religious affiliation of the executive producers, the folks at Comedy Central should certainly have known better. 

President Barack Obama's statement just before he signed the Freedom of the Press Act on Monday painfully avoided reality to the point of giving offense. If it became widely known, it would likely become very problematic.

Here is what the President said that was particularly offensive (bolds are mine):

And obviously the loss of Daniel Pearl was one of those moments that captured the world’s imagination because it reminded us of how valuable a free press is, and it reminded us that there are those who would go to any length in order to silence journalists around the world.

Two key administration-protecting original news disseminators picked up on the need to keep the bolded words out of their news coverage of the event. The Associated Press, which usually (i.e., almost always) quotes the president in related stories, provided no quotes in its terse five-paragraph report, the first four of which follow (for fair use and discussion purposes, of course):

Obama signs Freedom of Press Act

President Barack Obama has signed a law intended to provide more protections for a free press around the world.

The law, the Daniel Pearl Freedom of Press Act, expands efforts to identify countries where press freedom is being violated. The law is named after Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter who was beheaded by militants in Pakistan in 2002.

The law expands an annual report on human rights practices to include information about media treatment, and identify countries where the media is being repressed.

Obama said the law would be a signal to governments around the world that their actions, including treatment of the media, are being watched.

The New York Times's five-paragraph story quoted other portions of Obama's statement:

U.S. to Promote Press Freedom

President Obama signed legislation on Monday intended to promote a free press around the world, a bipartisan measure inspired by the murder in Pakistan of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter, shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

... The new law “puts us clearly on the side of journalistic freedom,” Mr. Obama said, praising Mr. Pearl’s family for being “outspoken and so courageous” in pursuing the cause. With the law, the president added, “his legacy lives on.”

The less influential wire service AFP must not have gotten the memo, as carried it the statement quoted above. Its 10-paragraph story also provided historical context AP and the Times avoided, as well as a clearly superior headline:

Obama signs law honoring slain reporter Daniel Pearl

..."The loss of Daniel Pearl was one of those moments that captured the world's imagination because it reminded us how valuable a free press is," Obama said.

... Pearl, 38, was the South Asia bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal when he was abducted in Karachi on January 23, 2002 while researching a story about Islamist militants.

A graphic video showing his decapitation was delivered to the US consulate in the city nearly a month later.

Mariane Pearl was pregnant with their son when her husband was murdered.

In 2007, she filed a lawsuit Wednesday against 23 individuals and organizations over the abduction and murder of Pearl, naming Al-Qaeda, the group's alleged mastermind kingpin Khalid Sheikh Mohammed -- who claimed responsibility for beheading Pearl and is now in US custody -- and Pakistan's Habib Bank among the defendants.

In his column today, Mark Steyn finishes the job AFP only began. As usual with Steyn, read the whole thing. Here are selected paragraphs:

... its clumsiness and insipidness is most revealing. First of all, note the passivity: "The loss of Daniel Pearl." He wasn't "lost." He was kidnapped and beheaded. He was murdered on a snuff video. He was specifically targeted, seized as a trophy, a high-value scalp. And the circumstances of his "loss" merit some vigor in the prose. Yet Obama can muster none.

Even if Americans don't get the message, the rest of the world does. This week's pictures of the leaders of Brazil and Turkey clasping hands with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are also monuments to American passivity.

But what did the "loss" of Daniel Pearl mean? Well, says the president, it was "one of those moments that captured the world's imagination." Really? Evidently it never captured Obama's imagination because, if it had, he could never have uttered anything so fatuous. He seems literally unable to imagine Pearl's fate, and so, cruising on autopilot, he reaches for the all-purpose bromides of therapeutic sedation: "one of those moments" – you know, like Princess Di's wedding, Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction, whatever – "that captured the world's imagination."

Notice how reflexively Obama lapses into sentimental one-worldism: Despite our many zip codes, we are one people, with a single imagination. In fact, the murder of Daniel Pearl teaches just the opposite – that we are many worlds, and worlds within worlds. Some of them don't even need an "imagination." Across the planet, the video of an American getting his head sawed off did brisk business in the bazaars and madrassahs and Internet downloads. Excited young men e-mailed it to friends, from cell phone to cell phone, from Karachi to Jakarta to Khartoum to London to Toronto to Falls Church, Virginia. In the old days, you needed an "imagination" to conjure the juicy bits of a distant victory over the Great Satan. But in an age of high-tech barbarism the sight of Pearl's severed head is a mere click away.

And the rest of "the world"? Most gave a shrug of indifference. And far too many found the reality of Pearl's death too uncomfortable, and chose to take refuge in the same kind of delusional pap as Obama.

I daresay that if a Republican or conservative president had suggested that the "loss" of Dr. Martin Luther King had "captured the world's imagination," the AP and the Times would not have so deliberately avoided such a statement, and would instead have eagerly sought out others to criticize it.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.

It would not surprise me if the Associated Press's April Castro has spent the last 10 weeks gritting her teeth non-stop.

In March (covered at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), she was clearly peeved at the Texas State Board of Education. In a supposedly objective news story entitled "Texas ed board vote reflects far-right influences," she decried a "faction" (actually a nearly two-thirds majority) of Board members for "injecting conservative ideals into social studies, history and economics lessons."

I will take that as an admission that such ideals have previously been absent or barely present.

Friday, non-appreciative April was tasked with covering the Board's final adoption vote that ratified proposed curriculum changes. If we are to believe her (I know, that's dangerous), improvements (my word, certainly not hers) in the meantime appear to have been strengthened the reality basis, if you will, of the curriculum.

Here are the first five paragraphs of Ms. Castro's report (link is dynamic and subject to change). There are lots of errors in those paragraphs alone; readers are invited to see if they can catch the big cahuna:

So many errors, so little time. I'll hit the three biggest.

First, Ms. Castro is clever in saying that the curriculum "amends or waters down" the teaching of religious freedoms, but that shouldn't fool anyone here. She's distressed about alleged "watering down." The fact is, if the curriculum really does go back to the constitutional basis for religious freedoms, it will make it clear that public expressions of religious belief are not forbidden, or even unwelcome, as they clearly are today (that is, if they are conservative or prolife; religious pronouncements from the likes of Nancy Pelosi on the religious basis for having an open-borders policy on immigration are of course more than welcome).

Second, Castro states the degree of influence the Texas Board's guidelines will have on textbooks elsewhere as if it's an established fact. Sadly, it's not (sadly, because they're badly in need of improvement in so many other states). As Brian Thevenot at the Texas Tribune explained at post entitled "The Textbook Myth" in late March:

... liberal-to-moderate contemporaries in other states need not fret, textbook industry experts say. Though Texas has been painted in scores of media reports as the big dog that wags the textbook industry tail, that’s simply no longer true — and will become even less true in the future, as technological advances and political shifts transform the marketplace, said Jay Diskey, executive director of the Association of American Publishers. Diskey calls the persistent reports of Texas dominating the market an “urban myth.” Yet the myth persists.

“I’ve been in this job about three and a half years, and I see it reported all the time,” Diskey said. “I give my explanation to reporters, and about half of them believe me and half of them don’t.”

On the other hand, the easier ability to self-publish could lead to greater selection of available textbooks from nontraditional publishers who, if they pursue the historical truth, would tend to put on works that are more accurate and constitutionally based than the offerings so many students must currently endure. The biggest hurdle for all of them would be getting approved by left-dominated boards of education in other states.

That's two major errors, but by no means the biggest, which is this statement:

... the board dilutes the rationale for the separation of church and state in a high school government class, noting that the words were not in the Constitution ...

I hope Ms. Castro is being "clever" and not ignorant. The words involved ARE NOT in the Constitution, and never have been. Either April is "cleverly" implying that they used to not be there but are now (wrong), or she just doesn't have her grammar down.

Other examples of things that bother Ms. Castro about the Lone Star State's newly adopted curriculum:

• "... (it) strengthened requirements on teaching the Judeo-Christian influences of the nation's Founding Fathers and required that the U.S. government be referred to as a 'constitutional republic,' rather than 'democratic.'" Facts are stubborn things, dear.
• "Students will be required to study the decline in the value of the U.S. dollar, including the abandonment of the gold standard." Oh the humanity.
• "They also required students to evaluate efforts by global organizations such as the United Nations to undermine U.S. sovereignty." Can you say "Copenhagen," April?

As I noted in March, the real question should be why items such as these haven't been taught all along. The answer is that school curricula have been politicized by commission and omission for decades. The Texas Board appears, finally, to be injecting a whiff of sanity into things.

Especially as it concerns religious freedom, it's time for Ms. Castro to consider going back to school to catch up on her history. In Texas.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.

The Wrap’s Sharon Waxman: Here are two names you don’t expect to see together: Moammar Gadhafi. Hollywood. But guess what – they’re in bed, making movies. Hollywood’s latest financial backer is...

View Original Post

The government of Pakistan has blocked social networking site Facebook due to a page encouraging users to "Draw Mohammed." The page, and the larger movement, have outraged Muslims, who believe it is blasphemous to physically depict Islam's prophet.

"Death to Facebook!" shouted protesters in Karachi, demonstrating against a group called "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day," designed to further the cause of "free expression." The movement was a backlash against recent threats of violence against, among others, the creators of the popular animated show South Park, which showed Mohammed in a bear mascot suit.

The "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" page has been taken down -- though Facebook categorically denies any attempt at censorship or involvement in its removal -- and Facebook has been "indefinitely" blocked by the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority. All in all, it's been a rough couple days for the social network.

"We are very disappointed with the Pakistani Courts' decision to block Facebook without warning, and suspect our users there feel the same way," Facebook said in a statement. But it added that the company is "analyzing the situation and the legal considerations, and will take appropriate action, which may include making this content inaccessible to users in Pakistan."

Though Facebook's policy is to only remove content if it makes serious and credible threats against individuals, the statement noted that it could "restrict certain content from being shown in specific countries" in order to comply with laws in those counties.

A Facebook spokesperson told me in an email that the company "has not taken any action" on the "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" page, which is no longer accessible. A Google cache of the page -- courtesy of Ed Driscoll -- shows that it was still active at 10:40 PM GMT last night.

There has been much speculation on whether Facebook censored the page. But at this point there is no evidence that that is the case. A person with first-hand knowledge of Facebook's investigation told me that nothing had been discovered that would indicate foul play, and that all signs currently point towards the page's administrators removing it voluntarily, though possibly due to threats of violence.

Mimi Sulpovar, who created the page last month, told Fox News that "she and others in the group have received death threats, but she has no plans to stop anytime soon." I was not able to find contact information for Sulpovar.

Such threats are in fact what started the "Draw Mohammed" movement, which sought to designate May 20 an annual day to protest violence censorship by Islam's radical elements.

The backlash to the movement is hardly unexpected, but few could have predicted Facebook being banned by an entire nation for a single page. Pakistan has also blocked YouTube for what it deems offensive content.

Facebook is also facing challenges to its privacy policy. Four US Senators have demanded that the Federal Trade Commission look into the legality of those policies.

In the 1960s and 70s, as Hollywood toiled to advance the hip, socio-sexual (yet gender-neutral) agenda of the “me” generation, a dogged morality often seeped into its censorship-busting...

View Original Post

Freedom. Freedom of expression even when it makes someone else uncomfortable, is part of being American. That’s why, when someone burns the flag, I blanch a bit, but I grimace and take it. The God of our Judeo-Christian culture says in Deuteronomy 30:19: “Today I have given you the choice between life and death, between blessings and [...]

View Original Post

Censorship must die!

View Original Post

As a Christian, I find it extremely annoying when people make fun of my religion. Yet, when the people at the New York Times or Comedy Central show an image that offends my religious sensibilities, I don’t cut their heads off as an example to others. I also don’t threaten to murder people over cartoons [...]

Many people have asked if I am supporting “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day” tomorrow, May 20th.  I am and two of the most moving arguments of why you should too come from the Huffington Post and Reason...

View Original Post

It's a popular argument used by many in the global warming alarmist activist community - that there's a Christian basis for combating the threat of so-called anthropogenic global warming. In 2008, former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean admitted as much - that his party use this issue in particular to win over the Christian community.

And it is one that has been echoed by the media as well. From The Washington Post to CNN, the press has propagated the belief that Holy Scripture teaches that man has a responsibility to combat global warming. But that's not the case, according to Dr. Calvin Beisner of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation. Beisner, speaking at the Heartland Institute's International Conference on Climate Change on May 18 in Chicago, was asked if there was any Biblical basis that would lead evangelical Christians to assume they had a duty to join the anti-global warming bandwagon.

"I don't think they have any good Biblical basis at all," Beisner said. "What they do is they jump quickly from the Biblical teaching that we're supposed to be caring for the poor to ‘global warming is going to hurt the poor more than it hurts anybody else,' which by the way is true of every problem. You know, poverty makes you vulnerable, period. Wealth makes you less vulnerable, period. There's even a proverb in the book of Proverbs that says essentially that."

According to Beisner, the belief that fighting global warming was a component of helping the poor was specifically used by the Evangelical Environmental Network and endorsed by others to make this case.

"They jump quickly from, ‘We need to help the poor,' to ‘global warming is going to hurt the poor, therefore we need to fight global warming,'" Beisner said. "In 2006, a group - the Evangelical Environmental Network launched a new project called the Environmental Climate Initiative, which put out a statement, ‘Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action.' And that statement was endorsed by 86 different leading evangelicals - presidents of the evangelical colleges, admission organizations. And I went down the list of endorsers. There was no list of authors of that. I later found out the main author was an ethics professor named David Gushee. When I debated him over that at this university, he told me before the debate, ‘You know when I was preparing for this debate, I found out the science was a whole more nuanced than I realized when I wrote the paper.' I thought, ‘David, you should have known that before you wrote.'"

Beisner explained this desire stems from a misunderstanding of the science and the economic consequences of acting on this alleged threat.

"But, I asked and various reporters asked a number of different people who endorsed that statement why they endorsed it and what did they know about the science," Beisner said. "None of them knew anything about the science. I could recognize that because I knew most of them. But I knew that they didn't have the background in either the science or the economics to assess what claims are being made. One of them, a president of a very well known evangelical college said, ‘I just wanted to make it clear I wanted to help the poor.'"

The bottom line: The Bible doesn't suggest Christians have a duty to in their day-to-day behavior to limit their carbon output.

"That's about the extent of it," he continued. "There is no Biblical basis. In fact, we don't argue for a very strong Biblical world view that resists the notion that the minute change in atmospheric chemistries - CO₂ going from 28,000^ths of a percent of the atmosphere to 54,000^ths of a percent is going to cause devastation that's going to put human civilization at risk. I just don't think that fits a Biblical world view at all and we give a number of reasons why we think so."

The barbaric Muslim practice of mutilating the genitals of little girls apparently is A’OK with the American Academy of Pediatrics, at least just a little bit, anyway. In an act of political correctness gone mad the AAP has announced that it thinks it’s a good idea to mollify Muslims and gloss over their barbaric practice [...]

The barbaric Muslim practice of mutilating the genitals of little girls apparently is A’OK with the American Academy of Pediatrics, at least just a little bit, anyway. In an act of political correctness gone mad the AAP has announced that it thinks it’s a good idea to mollify Muslims and gloss over their barbaric practice [...]

While viewers might have expected to see the latest on the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico or Tuesday's electoral primaries, CNN's Campbell Brown devoted the first two segments on her program on Monday to highlighting the apparent religious bigotry inside the U.S. Army - specifically, the upcoming lawsuit of a Muslim who alleges he was harassed and ridiculed due to his religion.

Brown played the interview of the soldier, Specialist Zachari Klawonn, during the first full segment, which began 2 minutes into the 8 pm Eastern hour. Klawonn was joined by his lawyer, Randal Mathis, as well as the commanding officer of his battalion, Colonel Jimmy Jenkins. As she introduced the segment, the anchor emphasized how the specialist is "a model soldier," "exactly what the Army says it is looking for," and how he "has an exemplary service record, and has earned the praise of both his commanders and his Army buddies."

During the interview, Brown asked Klawonn about the alleged anti-Muslim harassment he has received, and questioned his commanding officer about the actions he took to solve the issue. After the specialist gave some general examples of the offending behavior, Colonel Jenkins detailed his responsibility as brigade commander: "...My sole goal is to make sure he and the other 2,200 soldiers in the brigade- their safety is paramount. I'm charged with the combat readiness of the brigade, and if my soldiers don't feel safe, then I have failed. So, I have worked personally with Specialist Klawonn on a quite a few occasions to see what I could do to make him feel safer."

The specialist also mentioned during the interview that he was "working with the Military Religious Freedom Foundation" in filing his lawsuit. The CNN anchor brought on the founder and president of the MRFF, Michael Weinstein, along with Thomas Kenniff, a former Army JAG, during the second segment.

Brown mentioned Weinstein's role with the MRFF, but omitted his connections to past lawsuits against the military. Earlier in 2010, the president demanded the military remove the "Bible codes" on rifle scopes used in Afghanistan and asked the Army to change the emblem of the Evans Army Community Hospital in Colorado, which has the motto "For God and humanity" written in Latin, as well as a cross.

More egregiously, The Philadelphia Jewish Voice newspaper interviewed Weinstein in February 2008, and the MRFF president used anti-Christian language several times in his answers. He referred to Mel Gibson's "Passion of the Christ" as the "Jesus Chainsaw Massacre" and denounced the Officers' Christian Fellowship and the Christian Military Fellowship as "variances of this Christian Taliban and the Christian al-Qaeda." He even compared the "Christian Taliban" supposedly inside the military to the members of the Nazi Party who supported Hitler, or the Communist Party members who aided Stalin. Brown didn't bring up any of this during her interview of Weinstein.

Kenniff, the anchor's other guest, on the other hand, expressed his concerns over the specialist's lawsuit:

KENNIFF: One thing that concerns me, though, is what I see as- you know, somewhat of a lack of specificity in the allegations made by Specialist Klawonn. You know, for instance, he cites numerous cases of harassment. What I would like to know is- you know, does he have the names of the soldiers who are harassing him? Was it reported? Did he name names? Was there an investigation? Because the type of conduct that he at least alleges in some of the complaints- I mean, the destruction of his Koran, the threatening note left on his door or on his truck- I mean, that would certainly give rise, if not to full-blown criminal conduct within the military, then to non-judicial punishment....

The transcript of Brown's interview of Weinstein and Keniff, which began 12 minutes into the 8 pm Eastern hour of Monday's Campbell Brown program, starting with the anchor's first question to the MRFF president:

BROWN: So, Michael, it's not exactly in the Army's interest here to have soldiers being harassed. So, I mean, what possible motivation, I guess, do they have to not act to protect their soldiers?

WEINSTEIN: Well, I think part of the problem is, is that there is such a tremendous inherent- you know, bias against Muslim-Americans in the military. We see it every day with the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. For instance, at some military installations, when you walk into the military clothing store, the only books that they're selling, religious books, are the camouflage Bible and then another book called 'The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam,' which is an absolute slam on the entire faith.

BROWN: So- so-

WEINSTEIN: When you hear- wait. Let me just say one other thing.

BROWN: Yeah.

WEINSTEIN: When you hear soldiers running in formation- you know, they're often- they will have marching chants or running chants. They'll use the word 'hajji,' which is a- as negative to a Muslim-American as the N-word is to an African-American or the K-word to a Jewish-American or an S-word to an Hispanic-American, and it's done with reckless and complete- total abandon. And- you know, fish in an aquarium never see the water.

BROWN: So, let me ask you both this question, and here's the challenge- is during a time when we are fighting two wars in Muslim countries, and when we face a threat of Islamic terrorism, how much can the Army really do to control what soldiers think of Muslims or Islam? Tom, you answer first.

KENNIFF: Yeah- you know, I think that's a great question, Campbell. It's also one of the concerns I had with- you know, Mikey's client's lawsuit, because a lot of the allegations seem to rail against a hostile culture within the military. And, look, I don't doubt for one second- in fact, I can speak firsthand to the fact that that does exist in certain instances with respect to Muslim-Americans within the military. I would hope that it's the exception and not the rule, and I know Mikey may have a different take on that. But- you know, it's very difficult in the context of a discrimination lawsuit, which is what I think this probably is.

WEINSTEIN: No.

KENNIFF: Okay. Well, you can tell us what it will be, because I- frankly, I haven't seen the complaint. I don't even know that it's filed yet.

WEINSTEIN: Right.

KENNIFF: But- you know, exactly what is the remedy that your client seeking? I mean, if it's a situation where- you know, there's hostility within the enlisted ranks or the officer ranks among fellow soldiers, that's one thing. If it's a situation where it's a top-down- you know, pattern of discrimination meant to oppress- you know, Muslim-American soldiers, then I think that's quite another.

BROWN: All right, Mikey?

WEINSTEIN: Well, and, Tom, let me be specific. What we're looking at doing is filing a federal mandamus action. We believe that all of the internal regulations and instructions and laws within the Pentagon are already fine. They're just being ignored with impunity and there's no penalty for that. What we want to do-

BROWN: But, again, go back to the question of how you get the military to address this, given the world that these soldiers are living in.

WEINSTEIN: Let me make it very clear. You never get anybody to change their minds, Campbell, because they suddenly see the light. They have to feel the heat. We need leaders that will impose the laws that currently exist. This is old-school prejudice, old-school discrimination, old-school bigotry, and it cannot be allowed-

BROWN: Gentlemen, we are going to have to leave it there. Tom Kenniff and Mikey Weinstein, I do appreciate both of you joining us tonight- really interesting conversation. Thanks so much.

CNN founder Ted Turner, who thinks Christianity is a "religion for losers," apparently believes that the Gulf oil spill could actually be God sending us a message that drilling for oil is bad. Will media liberals read him the riot act as they have Sarah Palin for making similar claims?

"I'm just wondering if God's telling us he doesn't want us to drill offshore," Turner told a CNN interviewer. Recent coal mine disasters, Turner said, may also be signs that "the Lord's tired of having the mountains of West Virginia  -- the tops knocked of of 'em so they can get more coal. Maybe we ought to just leave the coal in the ground and just use solar and wind power."

So far the legacy media have been completely silent on Turner's claims (shown in a video below the fold), in stark contrast to Sarah Palin's statement that the construction of an Alaska natural gas pipeline was God's will.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd mockingly wrote, "When the phone rings at 3 a.m., will she call the Wasilla Assembly of God congregation and ask them to pray on a response, as she asked them to pray for a natural gas pipeline?"

"If god prefers Sarah Palin's specific Alaskan pipeline idea," MSNBC's Rachel Maddow asked, "why hasn't construction started? You think that god could just like zip, zip, you know."

"Like the Governor, I now also believe that my will is perfectly aligned with God's will," wrote Singer/Songwriter Roseanne Cash sarcastically in a Nation op/ed headlined "Why I'd Be a Better VP than Sarah Palin."

"When Governor Palin said that it was God's will for the Alaska pipeline to be built and asked for people to pray for that to happen," Cash added, "I was really inspired by her confidence in the absolute, seamless integration of her will and God's will."

Numerous others in the media used Palin's statement to question whether she could keep her religious beliefs and her political preferences and actions separate. Yet Turner's statement has not undergone such scrutiny.

Palin's statement, said Anderson Cooper, "got a lot of people wondering about Palin's church and the role of religion in her political decision-making." Apparently Cooper does not believe his boss's statement merits the same attention or skepticism.

Palin was dogged for her statement since it fit the media narrative of a right-wing "jesus freak," to use Turner's characterization of Christians. But Turner, openly hostile towards Christianity, is getting a pass for making a strikingly similar statement.

CNN founder Ted Turner, who thinks Christianity is a "religion for losers," apparently believes that the Gulf oil spill could actually be God sending us a message that drilling for oil is bad. Will media liberals read him the riot act as they have Sarah Palin for making similar claims?

"I'm just wondering if God's telling us he doesn't want us to drill offshore," Turner told a CNN interviewer. Recent coal mine disasters, Turner said, may also be signs that "the Lord's tired of having the mountains of West Virginia  -- the tops knocked of of 'em so they can get more coal. Maybe we ought to just leave the coal in the ground and just use solar and wind power."

So far the legacy media have been completely silent on Turner's claims (shown in a video below the fold), in stark contrast to Sarah Palin's statement that the construction of an Alaska natural gas pipeline was God's will.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd mockingly wrote, "When the phone rings at 3 a.m., will she call the Wasilla Assembly of God congregation and ask them to pray on a response, as she asked them to pray for a natural gas pipeline?"

"If god prefers Sarah Palin's specific Alaskan pipeline idea," MSNBC's Rachel Maddow asked, "why hasn't construction started? You think that god could just like zip, zip, you know."

"Like the Governor, I now also believe that my will is perfectly aligned with God's will," wrote Singer/Songwriter Roseanne Cash sarcastically in a Nation op/ed headlined "Why I'd Be a Better VP than Sarah Palin."

"When Governor Palin said that it was God's will for the Alaska pipeline to be built and asked for people to pray for that to happen," Cash added, "I was really inspired by her confidence in the absolute, seamless integration of her will and God's will."

Numerous others in the media used Palin's statement to question whether she could keep her religious beliefs and her political preferences and actions separate. Yet Turner's statement has not undergone such scrutiny.

Palin's statement, said Anderson Cooper, "got a lot of people wondering about Palin's church and the role of religion in her political decision-making." Apparently Cooper does not believe his boss's statement merits the same attention or skepticism.

Palin was dogged for her statement since it fit the media narrative of a right-wing "jesus freak," to use Turner's characterization of Christians. But Turner, openly hostile towards Christianity, is getting a pass for making a strikingly similar statement.

Unsurprisingly, this story appears nowhere on any of the sites run by folks on the left, including all the rights and women’s rights groups, who have mostly ignored the plight of women in Muslim countries It was a scene Saudi women’s rights activists have dreamt of for years. When a Saudi religious policeman sauntered about an amusement [...]

View Original Post

HonestReporting: Currently appearing on Comedy Central’s website is a game called “I.S.R.A.E.L. Attack!”. The premise of this game has nothing to do with Israel and, as such, is...

View Original Post

On HBO's Real Time Friday, Bill Maher fought with conservative atheist S.E. Cupp and claimed the news magazines weren't hostile to religion, but were overflowing with religion coverage. His exaggerations were wild, more than just for comic effect:   

Are you kidding? Jesus or Mary is on the cover of Newsweek or Time like every other week. If Jesus had an office on Sunset Boulevard, and you walked down the corridor, he'd have his magazine covers on every wall. We did a mockup! There! This is the last few years.

If Maher or his underlings at HBO were really careful about facts about "the last few years," they'd know how far off this is: use the cover search on Time's website for "Jesus" and see how many Jesus covers since the 1900s ended: I count four. That's hardly "every other week."

There's "The Opus Dei Code" (April 24, 2006, not included on Maher's screen, since it might seem less than devout, slinging Da Vinci Code myths), "Secrets of the Nativity" (December 13, 2004), "Why Did Jesus Have to Die?" (April 12, 2004), and "What Jesus Saw" (April 16, 2001).

This is where Maher's claim about the gazillion Jesus covers "in the last few years" really lies. Maher's graphic included "Jesus at 2000" (December 6, 1999), "The Shroud of Turin" (April 20, 1998), "Jesus Online" (December 16, 1996), and "The Search for Jesus" (April 8, 1996). For most viewers, "the last few years" and "14 years" are not in the same ball park. 

The same championing-old-as-new pattern holds for other covers on Maher's montage: "Who Was Moses?  December 14, 1998. “Is The Bible Fact or Fiction?” December 18, 1995. "The Bible and the Apocalypse." July 1, 2002. Does Heaven Exist? March 24, 1997.

The search for Mary is even more depressing. I found just two covers since 1990: "Hail, Mary" is from January 21, 2005, but "The Search for Mary" (on Maher's screen, believe it or not) is from December 30, 1991. As in a child born when that magazine came out could vote.

But that's not the oldest Time cover on Maher's screen: That's "One Nation Under God" from three weeks earlier: December 9, 1991.

PS: There were only four Newsweek covers in the montage, and "What Would Mary Do?" is a nasty piece of anti-Catholicism from a few weeks ago. Their other three covers were from 2005 and 2006.

Some Hollywood films are built on the idea of suspense on a grand scale — "The Last Days of Pompeii", and the story of the Titanic are both perennials for filmmakers, because the audience knows the characters are doomed, and thus watching their otherwise everyday quotidian details takes on a whole new dimension, as we await the tragic denouement. Photos of the Middle East in the 1970s take on a similar look these days.

On Friday night's Real Time, HBO talk-host Bill Maher berated conservative (and fellow atheist) S.E. Cupp for her new book Losing Our Religion: The Liberal Media's Attack on Christianity. “Liberals are not atheists any more than conservatives are. Michael Moore is religious! Chris Matthews is religious! Al Sharpton is religious!” Maher went so far as to insist the liberal media has “never” attacked religion:

MAHER: But this is your premise, that the liberal media is attacking religion.

CUPP: They are.

MAHER: Where?

CUPP: Every day.

MAHER: Never. Never.

CUPP: Never?

MAHER: Never.

CUPP: Do you watch TV?

MAHER: I do. Do you?

CUPP: Do you read magazines?

MAHER: Let me give you your examples. This is, I'm reading, this is the ending, “A Decade of Lowlights From the Liberal Media.” These are your first three examples. Here's Joy Behar. This is one of your examples. She's talking about evolution –

CUPP: And she's a friend. I've done her show.

MAHER: “You have to teach them both. Darwinism is not some kind of a religious fervor thing” – Teach both? So she's for teaching both –

CUPP: No, what she said was that teaching creationism to kids should be akin to child abuse.

MAHER: No, she said you have to teach both.

CUPP: She said that facetiously.

MAHER: Well, that's interesting you can divine that.

CUPP: She said on The View that teaching creationism should be akin to child abuse.

The actual clip from May 5, 2009 (video on The Huffington Post) is Behar badgering Sherri Shepherd into making sure her son Jeffrey hears the scientific proof, that she teaches both, not that the school does:

JOY BEHAR: Sherri, you're going to teach your son science, aren't you? I mean Darwinism is a proven – pretty much --

SHERRI SHEPHERD: I would like Jeffrey to know about other things.

BEHAR: You have to teach both.

SHEPHERD: He will learn about both, but he's going to learn what I'm teaching about my faith.

ELISABETH HASSELBECK: How come some people want to learn about both only when it's what they want to be taught?

BEHAR: Because Darwinism is not some kind of a religious fervor thing. There's proof, scientific proof. And you want your children to go into the world being ignorant of that? That's child abuse, in my opinion.

After playing games with only a fraction of the quote, Maher then read the more limited quotation Cupp's book offered, and agreed with it:

MAHER: Yes, she did. She said “You have to teach them both. Darwinism is not some kind of a religious fervor thing. You want your children to go into the world being ignorant? That's child abuse.” Yeah, it is.

CUPP: I don't think that's true. I think, and –

MAHER: That's not an anti-religious statement.

CUPP: – and people who teach their kids creationism because it's a nice Christian allegory I don't think are guilty of child abuse.

So doesn't that disprove Maher's “never” boast? Isn't mocking the biblical story of the world's creation as “ignorance” proof of an attack on Christianity? Several times in this segment, when Maher was proven wrong that media figures “never” said something anti-religious, he would simply agree with it, without acknowledging he was disproven. Maher plowed ahead:

MAHER: The second one you quote is Jon Meacham, the editor of Newsweek.He's a religious guy!

CUPP: Yes he is.

MAHER: He doesn't –

CUPP: Newsweek declared the death of Christianity on Easter. I mean, really! It's preposterous.

But Maher started making wild assertions about the religiosity of news magazines, judging the books by their (occasional) covers:

MAHER: Are you kidding? Jesus or Mary is on the cover of Newsweek or Time like every other week. If Jesus had an office on Sunset Boulevard, and you walked down the corridor, he'd have his magazine covers on every wall. We did a mockup! There! This is the last few years.

Maher's collection of “religious” covers included stories with neutral titles like “Does Heaven Exist?” and “Is The Bible Fact or Fiction?” and “Spirituality in America.” Having a cover story with a religious topic is hardly an endorsement of religion. But again, he plowed ahead:

MAHER: This is the liberal media that hates – [Applause]

CUPP: One of those –

MAHER: It's crazy.

CUPP: One of those stories was actually saying you can actually read, if you read the Bible correctly, it actually supports gay marriage. I mean, it's one thing to show these covers, but come on. [That Newsweek cover on the biblical case for gay marriage was not in HBO's graphic.]

MAHER: You're picking out one little raisin in a giant piece of bread there, lady.

JOHN AVLON, CNN: There may be one example of, you know, the death of God, but clearly the overall trend is not that. I think what angers a lot of people and the larger thing is that, this arrogance that any one political party owns the Bible or the American flag, or the concept of freedom. That's what pisses people off.

After arguing with Newark Mayor Cory Booker about Christianity – where in one spot Booker suggested all roads lead to Heaven and Maher kept insisting that Jesus said he was the only way – Maher returned to his point about media bias:

MAHER: The things I talk about are things like questioning “Is faith good?” or that prayer doesn't work. That's the things I say. It's just me and a couple of cartoons.

CUPP: No! You're so wrong!

MAHER: Tell me one other person –

CUPP: I will go down –

MAHER: – in the media who ever questioned if faith was good or prayer worked. Brian Williams?

CUPP: I will –

MAHER: Keith Olbermann?

CUPP: I will go right now.

MAHER: Katie Couric? None of them.

CUPP: Oh my God! I can give you those examples right now. Chris Matthews said –

MAHER: Chris Matthews is a devout Catholic!

CUPP: Chris Matthews said that Sarah Palin and Michael Steele praying on big decisions was not normal. Rachel Maddow said the National Day of Prayer infringes on her right to religious freedom.

MAHER: It does.

CUPP: Keith Olbermann called pro-lifers religious jihadists. I could go down the line.

Avlon insisted these were just quotes of opinion, and Cupp said “I can give you news reports where religion is completely assailed.” Maher protested “They're not questioning the essence of religion. This is a country that worships religion.” Cupp replied: “Of course they are, Bill. Of course they are.”

Disclosure: MRC president Brent Bozell offers a dust-cover blurb for Cupp's book. He wrote: "How vicious is the secular media's all-out assault on the Judeo-Christian underpinnings of America? it is ugly enough, and dishonest enough that a professed atheist has risen to Christianity's defense. one needn't agree with Cupp's views on religion (I don't) to admire her courage in writing Losing Our Religion, a terrific contribution to the much-needed national discussion."