The Iranian government is mounting a campaign to disrupt independent media organisations and websites that air doubts about the validity of the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the nation’s president, according to various sources.
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Supporters of Mir Hussein Moussavi, the presidential challenger whom President Ahmedinejad claims to have defeated with 63.4 per cent of the vote, have emulated the internet campaign techniques used by Barack Obama to appeal to the young generation of Iranians who make up the majority of his support base.
But reports from Tehran say that social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter, the micro-blogging website, were taken down after Mr Ahmadinejad claimed victory. SMS text messaging, a preferred medium of communication for young Iranians, has also been disabled. This is widely suspected to be the result of government interference, but could equally be caused by the poor quality of the network and the heavy demand it is experiencing.
“Readers of the nation’s press over the last six months might have been forgiven for believing that there was an economic recession. Headlines like: Doom Britain, It’s Worse Than The Great Depression and Mothers Start Selling Children For Food might have led casual readers to conclude that Britain was in a very severe financial crisis. We would like to make it clear that there was not a jot or tittle of truth in these reports and that the British economy is bouncing back, house prices are booming and happy days are here again. On behalf of all newspapers and politicians, we would like to apologise for any confusion. Mr Robert Peston of the BBC has agreed to a 40% salary reduction, which he will donate to charity.”
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It is the most dramatic turnaround in economic history: from bust to boom in a matter of weeks. The pound is up, oil prices are up, consumer confidence is up, bank lending is up and house prices rose 2.6% in May. That last figure is the most astonishing, since hardly any houses are actually being sold right now, and the vast majority of mortgages require a 25% deposit. But who am I to argue with the green shoots consensus? Killjoys might point out that unemployment is still growing fast, that most of our manufacturing industry is collapsing, and that personal and public debt levels remain at intolerable levels. You could point out that the Baltic Dry Shipping index – a measure of world trade – has collapsed again. But the word has gone out that the recession has “bottomed out” and anyone who departs from it is seen as talking down the economy.
Editor’s note: Ezra Levant’s revelations about the Canadian Jewish Congress organizing the Canadian Nazi Party has a corollary in the United States. Although not covered by the corporate media, Morris Dees’ Southern Poverty Law Center played a role in the OKC bombing, as revealed in the following declassified FBI memo:
(Name redacted) telephone call from (name redacted) on or about 4/17/95, two days prior to the OKBOMB attack, when (name redacted) of the SPLC, was in the white supremacist compound at (redacted), Oklahoma, notes the director.”
The Daily Gazette reports, “References to an informant working for the SPLC at Elohim City on the eve of the Oklahoma City bombing raises serious questions as to what the SPLC might know about McVeigh’s activities during the final hours before the fuse was lit in Oklahoma City — but which the SPLC has failed to disclose publicly.”
Dees confirmed the presence of an informant at Elohim City at a recent press conference, the paper reported.
“If I told you what we were doing there, I would have to kill you,” Dees replied when asked to explain.
Dees has been critical of the so-called right-wing militia movement in the U.S., having written books and articles about the subject. His critics believe the attacks have been exploitive and designed to raise donations for his tax-exempt foundation.
The memo and its revelations should be taken into consideration now that corporate media hysteria concerning alleged Holocaust museum shooter James von Brunn has reached a fever pitch and CBS journalists are calling for a round-up of “right-wing extremists.”
In 1965 and 1966, the Canadian Jewish Congress helped organize the fledgling Canadian Nazi Party. That sounds crazy, but it’s true, and I wrote about it in Shakedown, my new book about Canada’s human rights commissions.
In a letter to the editor in the Citizen last week, the CJC’s current co-president, Rabbi Reuven Bulka, called my book’s description of the CJC’s role “fiction.” He said all the CJC did for the Nazis was buy them a bottle of rum.
It’s true that the CJC did buy drinks for Nazis in the 1960s. That’s pretty strange in itself, and I’d like to hear more of Rabbi Bulka’s thoughts on spending Jewish charitable donations that way. But the CJC did a lot more than that: they hired an ex-cop named John Garrity to go to work for the Canadian Nazi Party.
Garrity helped organize that rag-tag band of losers, though they never amounted to anything except for fodder for the press.
There were only a dozen active Nazis when Garrity joined them and they weren’t really a political party. He called them “harmless misfits,” and they were — their leader, John Beattie, was a nervous, gaunt, unemployed 24-year-old clerk who spent much of his time dodging angry Jews who tried to beat him up. (One of Garrity’s jobs was to help Beattie escape street fights.)
Garrity brought more than just rum to the Nazis. He brought with him pretty much the only organizational talent the group had. They put him in charge of membership. Garrity called himself the “Heinrich Himmler” of the party, and a “Nazi leader for the Jewish Congress.”
I’d like Rabbi Bulka’s thoughts on that, too.
Of course, Garrity helped his paymasters at the CJC, too, giving them information about the names of party members and donors. And when Garrity finally quit the Nazis, he wrote a tell-all about his adventure in Maclean’s magazine.
Garrity larded that report with personal insults toward Beattie and the Nazis. But he did acknowledge that they had never done, or even contemplated doing, anything illegal. All of the violence he witnessed was directed at Beattie, usually by Jewish vigilantes. “Sadly, it is the … anti-Nazi extremists who, in their attempts to destroy Beattie, provide him with most of the publicity he craves. If it weren’t for the riots and the assaults and the public protest meetings they hold, there’d be no real news in Beattie,” Garrity wrote.
And that is the importance of this story and why I put it in my book about human rights commissions. Beattie hadn’t done anything illegal. He was just a loser who believed in a discredited ideology. But the CJC wanted to bring in political censorship laws and I believe they needed to build up the threat to persuade Parliament to abridge Canada’s freedom of speech.
Garrity puffed up a group of Nazi nobodies into a national menace, first through organizational support and then through spectacular media publicity. And, sure enough, Parliament enacted section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, which censors offensive speech.
That’s become a pattern. Twenty years after the Canadian Nazi Party vanished, CSIS, Canada’s spy agency, inserted an operative named Grant Bristow into another rag-tag racist group called the Heritage Front.
Unlike Garrity, Bristow didn’t play second-fiddle.
He became the boss, turning the Heritage Front into Canada’s leading white supremacist group. This time it wasn’t just Jewish money that was spent propping up neo-Nazis — all taxpayers paid for it.
Which brings us to the present day — and back to Rabbi Bulka and the section 13 censorship law. Canada’s largest customer of section 13 is Richard Warman, who has been the complainant in all but two cases heard by the tribunal this decade. The CJC was so impressed that they gave Warman an award.
But, in a stunning human rights tribunal ruling last month, Warman himself was rebuked for posting anti-Semitic comments on Stormfront, a neo-Nazi website, including a message calling Jews “scum.” Warman has stated that he was attempting to gather information on real Nazis, but the tribunal called his actions “disappointing and disturbing,” and ruled that he risked encouraging more hateful messages himself.
Warman’s actions appalled the tribunal, but apparently not the CJC. Just as the CJC did with Garrity, Nazi opponents continue to stir up neo-Nazi incidents — as if there aren’t enough real threats to Jews as it is.
Perhaps Rabbi Bulka can explain that one, too. (End of letter)
I’m pleased that the Citizen gave me so much room to reply. In doing my research I found out a lot more about the CJC’s role in building up the Nazi Party — one of the craziest stories I’ve ever come across. I think it’s fascinating from so many angles: politically; religiously; legally; historically. It really is stranger than fiction. I think there’s enough material there to form an entire book in itself — especially when added to the CJC’s discreditable conduct in the Grant Bristow affair, and their ongoing, unseemly relationship with Stormfront member Richard Warman. Incredibly, the CJC still stands by Warman even after the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal condemned him for his anti-Semitic propaganda. You’d think that would be something the Jewish Congress might care about.
My only quibble with the Citizen is with the headline they put over the op-ed: “Neo-Nazis are best simply ignored”. I don’t believe that and that’s not the message of my op-ed. It’s a false dichotomy to set up the only two alternatives as “ignoring” Nazis, or doing what the CJC does (building them up, then getting the government to prosecute them). I think there are plenty of other options, such as rebutting and debating neo-Nazis, campaigning against them, teaching against them, politicking against them, etc. That takes more work than the lazy CJC would do — they’re too busy campaigning against global warming.
Part of me hopes that Burny [CJC CEO Bernie Farber] will write another historically revisionist reply for Rabbi Bulka to sign, so I can take another whack at them. But the more collegial part of me hopes that Rabbi Bulka will cut his losses and stop covering for his organization’s bad behaviour 40 years ago — and their bad behavior today.
On Sunday, vice president Joe Biden, appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press, said the United States is determined to enforce new U.N. penalties (resolution 1874) against North Korea.
“It is important that we make sure those sanctions stick and those sanctions prohibit them from exporting or importing weapons,” Biden said. “This is a matter of us now keeping the pressure on.”
The U.N. Security Council resolution gives member states the authority to inspect all cargo heading to or from North Korea. It also bans weapons exports from the North and tightens financial restrictions.
In response to the sanctions, North Korea said on Saturday it will “weaponize” its supply of plutonium and will soon begin enriching uranium in order to build more nuclear weapons, the VOA reported.
On Monday, South Korean president Lee Myung-bak will meet with Obama in Washington. It is said the talks with focus on the North’s nuclear and missile programs. “The trip comes after North Korea’s Foreign Ministry threatened war with any country that stops its ships on the high seas under new sanctions approved by the U.N. Security Council in response to its May 25 nuclear test,” reports the Associated Press.
A commentary published Saturday in the North’s state-run Tongil Sinbo weekly claimed the U.S. has deployed a vast number of nuclear weapons in South Korea and Japan. Kim Yong-kyu, a spokesman at the U.S. military command in Seoul, denied the allegation, saying the U.S. no longer has nuclear weapons in South Korea.
North Korea “is completely within the range of U.S. nuclear attack and the Korean peninsula is becoming an area where the chances of a nuclear war are the highest in the world,” the newspaper claimed.
In April, Bruce Klinger of The Heritage Foundation said Obama must impose sanctions on North Korea, otherwise he will risk a repeat of “Kennedy’s disastrously weak performance during a 1961 meeting with Nikita Khrushchev that inspired the Soviet leader to engage in the Berlin Crisis and the Cuban Missile Crisis.”
Klinger did not bother to mention that Khrushchev demanded that the U.S. withdraw its Jupiter and Thor ICBMs from Turkey on the Soviet (Georgia) border or that there was ample evidence the U.S. planned to invade Cuba. Air Force General Curtis LeMay presented to Kennedy a pre-invasion bombing plan — including nuclear sites — in September, 1962, while spy flights and military harassment from the United States Guantanamo Naval Base were the subject of continual Cuban diplomatic complaints to the U.S.
LeMay had earlier proposed Operation Northwoods urging Kennedy to order a variety of false flag attacks to create a rationale for invading the communist island nation. Kennedy rejected the secret plan.
North Korea’s ailing Stalinist leader, Kim Jung Il, is no Khrushchev and is unlikely to negotiate with the U.S. if North Korean ships are intercepted and searched at sea. At one point the reclusive Korean leader had requested direct dialogue with Obama but this offer was rebuffed.
It is said Kim’s youngest son, Kim Jong Un, described as “The Ever-Victorious Iron-Willed Brilliant Commander,” will soon replace his father.
In the meantime, North Korea and The U.S., with the ever-compliant United Nations in tow, continue a dangerous game of nuclear brinkmanship.
Russia is taking the threat of nuclear war seriously. According to official news agencies, the Russian Federation has begun preparations of limiting damages it may receive following a nuclear war. The eastern part of Russia will be especially vulnerable to either direct damage, or nuclear fallout, and several state agencies have been placed on alert to limit the potential effects of atomic explosions.
On Saturday, the Asia Times posted the following by Kim Myong Chol, considered to be the unofficial spokesman of Kim Jung Il:
Nuclear war is Kim Jong-il’s game plan
By Kim Myong Chol
Our military first policy calls for an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, retaliation for retaliation, ultra-hardline for hardline, war for war, total war for total war, nuclear war for nuclear war.”– Kim Jong-il
TOKYO – A little-noted fact about the second nuclear test conducted on May 25 by the Kim Jong-il administration of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) is that it was a highly successful fission trigger test for multi-megaton warheads.
These types of warheads can be detonated in outer space, far above the United States, evaporating its key targets. This is a significant indication of the supreme leader’s game plan for nuclear war with the crippled superpower and its allies, Japan and South Korea.
The North Korean Foreign Ministry on April 29 announced its plan to test-fire what it termed a long-awaited “intercontinental ballistic missile” (ICBM), the first public ICBM test after numerous missile tests, short-range, medium-range, and long-range, were conducted without notice.
On March 9, the General Staff of the nuclear-armed Korean People’s Army had begun preparing to launch simultaneous retaliatory strikes on the US, Japan and South Korea in response to their act of war.
Although no appropriate test site for a thermonuclear bomb is available on the Korean Peninsula, North Korean scientists and engineers are confident, as a series of computer simulations have proved that their hydrogen bombs will be operational. The North Korean message is that any soft spots of the US, Japan and South Korea’s defense lines will be used as the testing grounds for their thermonuclear weapons.
The Korean Central News Agency said on May 25 that the underground nuclear test was carried out at the request of nuclear scientists and engineers and reported:
The current nuclear test was safely conducted on a new higher level in terms of its explosive power and technology of its control and the results of the test helped satisfactorily settle the scientific and technological problems arising in further increasing the power of nuclear weapons and steadily developing nuclear technology.
John Pike, the founder and director of globalsecurity.org, told the Weekly Standard on October 19, 2006, that the North Korean nuclear test that year may have been a test of a “trigger device” for a much larger hydrogen bomb. Writing in the New York Times on April 7, 2009, he revealed that “North Korea’s low-yield nuclear test in October 2006 did “coincide with the sub-kiloton tests of the fission trigger for a hydrogen bomb”. He added, “possibly North Korea’s hydrogen bombs can be easily fitted on missiles”.
The Kim Jong-il administration has developed its global nuclear strike capability primarily as a deterrent to US invasion to keep the Korean Peninsula out of war. Secondly, it needs operational nuclear missiles targeted at US and Japanese targets in the event of a DPRK-US war.
The North Korean state-run newspaper, Minjo Joson, vowed on June 9 to use nuclear weapons in war as “merciless means of offense to deal retaliatory strikes” against anyone who “dares infringe upon the dignity and sovereignty of the DPRK even a bit”.
Scenario for nuclear war
After shifting to a plan B, Supreme Leader Kim Jong-il has put in place a nuclear game plan as a part of the plan’s military first policy to deal with nuclear rogue state America and its allies South Korea and Japan. (See Kim Jong-il shifts to plan B, Asia Times Online, May 21)
The nuclear game plan is designed firstly to militarily prevent the US from throwing a monkey wrench into the plans of the Kim Jong-il administration for economic prosperity by 2012 – the centenary of the birth of founding father Kim Il-sung – in a bid to complete its membership of the three elite clubs of nuclear, space and economic powers.
Its second aim is to win the hearts and minds of the 70 million Korean people, North, South and abroad, and leave little doubt in their eyes that Kim Jong-il has what it takes to neutralize and phase out the American presence in Korea. This will hasten the divided parts of ancestral Korean land – bequeathed by Dankun 5,000 years ago and Jumon 2,000 years ago – coming together under a confederal umbrella as a reunified state.
It is designed to impress upon the Korean population that Kim Jong-il is a Korean David heroically standing up to the American Goliath, that he can lead the epic effort to settle long-smoldering moral scores with the US over a more than 100-year-old grudge match that dates as far as the 1905 Taft-Katsura Agreement and the 1866 invasion of Korea by the USS General Sherman.
Third, Kim Jong-il has described the shift to plan B as a stern notice for the governments of the US and its junior allies that they cannot get away with their hostile behavior any longer, unless they are prepared to leave their booming economies consumed in a great conflagration of retaliatory thermonuclear attacks.
The game plan assumes that the US is unlikely to shake off its aggressive behavior until it is wiped off this planet. The Barack Obama administration has not taken much time to reveal its true colors, which are no different from the George W Bush administration. There have been four compelling signs:
First, the March 9-20 Key Resolve (Team Spirit) joint war games between the US and South Korea.
Second, the US-led United Nation Security Council’s (UNSC) condemnation of an innocuous April 5 satellite launch.
Third, the rehashing of counterfeit money charges that the US has failed to produce compelling evidence to support. As Newsweek wrote in its June 8 issue, “The Treasury Department couldn’t find a single shred of hard evidence pointing to North Korean production of counterfeit money.”
A d v e r t i s e m e n t
Fourth, the presence of Bush holdovers in the Obama administration, such as Stuart Levy, the architect of Bush-era financial sanctions intended to criminalize the DPRK.
Four types of hydrogen bomb raids
The game plan for nuclear war specifies four types of thermonuclear assault: (1) the bombing of operating nuclear power stations; (2) detonations of a hydrogen bombs in seas off the US, Japan and South Korea; (3) detonations of H-bombs in space far above their heartlands; and (4) thermonuclear attacks on their urban centers.
The first attack involves converting operating nuclear power plants on the coastline of the three countries into makeshift multi-megaton H-bombs.
The New York Times on January 24, 1994, quoted Paul Leventhal, president of the Nuclear Control Institute, warning that North Korea could easily launch de-facto hydrogen bomb attacks on South Korea.
“North Korean retaliation to bombing could result in vastly more fallout in the South than in the North … North Korean retaliatory bombing could bring Chernobyls multiplied.”
If bombed, one average operating nuclear power station is estimated to spew out as much deadly fallout as 150-180 H-bombs. Bombing one nuclear power station would render the Japanese archipelago and South Korea uninhabitable. Doing the same to the US may require bombing one plant on its west coast and another on its east coast.
Nothing is easier than bombing a power plant on a coastline. There is no need to use a ballistic missile. Primitive means will do the job.
The US has 103 operating nuclear power stations with onsite storage of a huge quantity of spent fuel rods and Japan has 53 operating atomic power stations. Japan has a stockpile of weapons-grade plutonium – enough to assemble more than 1,000 atomic bombs in a short period of time. South Korea has 20 operating nuclear power stations with onsite storage of a huge quantity of spent fuel rods.
The detonation of sea-borne or undersea H-bombs planted on the three countries’ continental shelves will trigger nuclear tsunamis with devastating consequences.
A 2006 RAND study of a ship-based 10-kiloton nuclear blast on the Port of Long Beach had some harrowing conclusions:
“Within the first 72 hours, the attack would devastate a vast portion of the Los Angeles metropolitan area. Because ground-burst explosions generate particularly large amounts of highly radioactive debris, fallout from the blast would cause much of the destruction. In some of the most dramatic possible outcomes:
• Sixty thousand people might die instantly from the blast itself or quickly thereafter from radiation poisoning.
• One hundred and fifty thousand more might be exposed to hazardous levels of radioactive water and sediment from the port, requiring emergency medical treatment.
• The blast and subsequent fires might completely destroy the entire infrastructure and all ships in the Port of Long Beach and the adjoining Port of Los Angeles.
• Six million people might try to evacuate the Los Angeles region.
• Two to three million people might need relocation because fallout will have contaminated a 500-square-kilometer area.
• Gasoline supplies might run critically short across the entire region because of the loss of Long Beach’s refineries – responsible for one-third of the gas west of the Rocky Mountains.
RAND projects that the economic costs would exceed $1 trillion.
The third possible attack, a high-altitude detonation of hydrogen bombs that would create a powerful electromagnetic pulse (EMP), would disrupt the communications and electrical infrastructure of the US, the whole of Japan, and South Korea.
Many of the essential systems needed to survive war would be knocked out, as computers are instantly rendered malfunctioning or unusable. Military and communications systems such as radars, antennas, and missiles, government offices, would be put out of use, as would energy sources such as nuclear power stations and transport and communications systems including airports, airplanes, railways, cars and cell phones.
Ironically the ubiquity of high-tech computing gadgets in the US, Japan and South Korea has made them most vulnerable to EMP attacks.
The last and fourth attack would be to order into action a global nuclear strike force of dozens of MIRVed ICBMs – each bearing a thermonuclear warhead on a prefixed target.
The Yongbyon nuclear site has always been a decoy to attract American attention and bring it into negotiations on a peace treaty to formally end the Korean War. Since as far back as the mid-1980, North Korea has assembled 100-300 nuclear warheads in an ultra-clandestine nuclear weapons program. The missiles can be mounted on medium-range missiles designed to be nuclear capable.
A prototype ICBM was assembled by the end of the 1980s. Two prototype ICBMs were test-fired on May 29, 1993, with one splashing down off Honolulu and the other off Guam. The Kim Jong-il administration gave an advance notice to the US government of the long-range missile test. But the American reaction was skeptical.
In April 2001, the Associated Press quoted Navy representative Mark Kirk’s “terrifying encounter in 1993 with what seemed possible nuclear attack” from North Korea. He recalled:
It was a no notice, no warning missile launch out of North Korea, and for the first and only time in my career in the NMJIC [National Military Joint Intelligence Center], I got to see all of the panoply of the United States military wake up in a few seconds.
We did not know what kind of missile it was, so the impact area, at the beginning, was the entire United States, and you thought about what we might be doing in the next 12 minutes: would we be notifying the president that we had lost an American city? We were going to know the answer in 12 minutes.
At first it still included the Pacific Coast, then it included Hawaii.
AP added: “Little was made of the 1993 launch at the time because it wasn’t determined until later that it likely flew over Japan and landed in the Pacific Ocean, Kirk said.”
It was not until 1998 that the US notified the Japanese government of the flyover of a North Korean long-range missile before splashing down off Hawaii. The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration quietly labeled the 1998 satellite launch a success.
According to a February 12, 2003, AP report, US intelligence had concluded a few years earlier that North Korea has a ballistic missile capable of hitting the western United States and possibly targets farther inland.
A recently released police dash camera video reveals the truth about a May 24 “altercation” between Oklahoma Highway Patrolman Daniel Martin and EMT worker Maurice White on May 24.
Released dash cam video
The video, released by the Oklahoma Department of Public Safety, clearly shows Martin assaulting White on the side of the road in Okfuskee County, Oklahoma. A cell phone video of the assault posted on YouTube received well over a million views and was the second most-watched video on May 30.
Cell phone video of the incident
Fox 23 in Tulsa filed a Freedom of Information request for the dash cam but the OHP stonewalled the request. Late on June 12, the department finally released the video. It was posted on YouTube on June 13. Earlier reports in the media claimed police had turned off the dash cam before Martin assaulted the EMT worker.
“We’ve been well aware of the fact that this incident has drawn enormous attention, but made the decision to protect the integrity of the investigation, any and all relevant evidence, as well as the rights of the department employees,” Oklahoma Highway Patrol spokesman Capt. Chris West told Fox.
In fact, police did not release the video because it shows Martin assaulting White without provocation. After threatening White and putting him in a chokehold, Martin called for backup. He repeatedly threatened the EMT operators, unleashed obscenities, and pinned White against the EMT vehicle.
The police video confirms what witnesses on the scene reported — Martin was out of control and assaulted the EMT worker.
Police initially said the EMT vehicle failed to yield and this was the reason Martin confronted White, assaulted him and threatened to arrest him. But the police video reveals that the EMT was unable to immediately yield due to a car pulling over in the breakdown lane on the side of the road.
A d v e r t i s e m e n t
“He slowed down, and as the car was getting over, that’s when he passed us,” Kenyada Davis told News 9 in Oklahoma City. The EMT was transporting Davis’ elderly mother to the hospital when the incident occurred.
Martin claims the paramedics not only failed to yield but they also flipped him off. White and EMT driver Paul Franks said it was a gesture of surprise and Martin misunderstood.
Martin claimed he was responding to a stolen car report. It was later revealed his wife was in the police car. After the cell phone video appeared on YouTube and the OHP came under withering criticism, Martin was put on paid leave.
The Okfuskee County District Attorney’s Office initially said it would charge White with obstructing a police officer. On June 5, however, Okfuskee County decided not to charge the EMT or the trooper and announced the case would be dropped. The dash cam video clearly shows White did not obstruct Martin and the cop assaulted the EMT worker.
“After careful consideration off all fact and circumstance, it does not appear it would be appropriate to file charges against (Maurice) White or any other person involved. Although, I do not condone their actions, I do not believe that filing charges at this time would serve the best interests of the public or interests of justice. It has been my experience that emergency service providers generally work well together, and it was disappointing to see a situation where that clearly did not happen,” district attorney Max Cook told KTUL 8.
The OHP attempt to stonewall requests for the police video demonstrate the lengths the state will go to cover up the violent behavior of police officers who are nothing more than jackbooted thugs ruthlessly preying on not only emergency workers but the public at large. Increasingly, police departments around the country are hiring thugs – many veterans of the war in Iraq – who are expected to act like brownshirted gangsters and react violently when citizens question or resist their criminal behavior.
Trooper Daniel Martin needs to be fired and a message sent that this sort of behavior will not be tolerated. If you believe Martin should be fired, sign the “Fire Oklahoma Highway Patrolman Daniel Martin” petition and send the OHP and police around the country a strong message.
Thanks to your generous support, the Infowars Moneybomb has exceeded expectations. As of Saturday, the moneybomb has raised more than $275,000 and supporters continue to pledge.
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Thousands of people clashed with police on Saturday after the disputed election victory of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sparked the biggest protests in Tehran since the 1979 Islamic revolution.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told Iranians to respect Ahmadinejad’s victory in a presidential election that his closest challenger described as a “dangerous charade.”
Ahmadinejad’s triumph in Friday’s vote upset expectations that reformist candidate Mirhossein Mousavi might win the race.
Thousands of Mousavi supporters took part in the protests, some chanting, “What happened to our vote?.” Others chanted anti-Ahmadinejad slogans, bringing traffic to a standstill. “We are Iranians too,” and “Mousavi is our president,” they shouted.
China will not make a binding commitment to reduce carbon emissions, putting in jeopardy the prospects for a global pact on climate change.
A d v e r t i s e m e n t
Officials from Beijing told a UN conference in Bonn yesterday that China would increase its emissions to develop its economy rather than sign up to mandatory cuts.
The refusal is a setback for President Obama’s efforts to drum up support for an agreement at Copenhagen in December on a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol. As argument erupted between rich and poor nations at the Bonn talks, Yvo de Boer, the UN climate change chief, said that a worldwide pact to prevent global warming was “physically impossible”.
Hopes that Copenhagen might deliver tougher carbon reduction targets were dashed further when Japan failed to make a significant commitment to reduce emissions. Taro Aso, the Japanese Prime Minister, said on Wednesday that Japan would cut greenhouse gas emissions by 15 per cent by 2020 from levels in 2005. The Japanese commitment is a mere 2 per cent improvement on its commitment under Kyoto.
The tenuous, gossamer link of distant association described by Dark Helmet works as a piece of throw-away satirical comedy. Under the doctrine of collective guilt being promoted by our would-be cultural commissars, that relationship would also be sufficient to serve as a “ink” connecting Lone Star to the crimes committed by Dark Helmet.
Partisan hack and hypocritical ideologue: During the reign of Bush the Lesser, Keith Olbermann routinely — and properly — condemned the Regime for inflating the threat of Islamic terrorism. Now he’s leading the chorus of alarm regarding the supposed threat of domestic “right-wing” terrorism.
Lest it be thought that I’m exaggerating, consider Keith Olbermann’s effort to connect Ron Paul — a man devoted to peace and protecting the individual rights of everybody, a man who seems biologically incapable of malice — to James von Brunn, the troubled 88-year-old man accused of carrying out the murderous shooting rampage at the Holocaust Museum.
Olbermann, who looks like one of Eugene Levy’s SCTV caricatures and (to my disappointment) appears to have the soul of an East German prosecutor, grimly informed his viewing audience that “von Brunn switched his website domain on May 1 to a man who shares a phone number with a woman who was listed as the Michigan coordinator for former presidential candidate Ron Paul.”
What does that make the actual relationship between von Brunn and Dr. Paul?
As Dark Helmet would say: Absolutely nothing.
But this is a “link,” or at least can be forged into one by people whose reserves of silliness and dishonesty are adequate to that task, and Olbermann — who, like most pathologically self-important asses, has an apparently bottomless supply of silliness — easily qualifies.
Niewert is author of the recent book The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right. For the most part a porridge of self-contradictory partisan talking points, Neiwert’s book does offer the occasional useful disclosure.
For example, Neiwert points out (pg. 126) that during its revival in the early decades of the 20th century, the Ku Klux Klan acted as “an auxiliary police outfit” to enforce laws against bootlegging — which is to say that the Klan acted as government sub-contractors in carrying out the deranged policy of Prohibition. There’s a potent seed of an important realization here regarding the role of the state in cultivating hate groups. Regrettably, that seed requires fertile soil in which to flourish, and where such uncomfortable thoughts are concerned, Neiwert’s mind is barren and rocky ground.
Similarly, Neiwert provides a well-researched and detailed chapter on “Eliminationism in America” (no, it’s not devoted to matters of digestive tract health) which deals with the long and tragic history of the State’s war against the Indians, as well as other forms of State-enforced racial discrimination.
In that survey the author takes due notice of the depredations carried out against the Plains Indians by Union “war heroes” like Phil Sheridan and William Sherman. He then he spends the rest of the book excoriating “neo-Confederates.” That category presumably includes anyone who recalls with horror the eliminationist campaigns against the Shenandoah Valley and civilian populations in Georgia as a prelude to the crimes committed against the Indians.
David Neiwert
One of the most useful passages in Neiwert’s book (see pages 97-98) is a critical treatment of the embittered, authoritarian nationalism that passes for contemporary conservatism.
What is “conservative,” asks Neiwert, about permitting “torture, rape, and the killing of civilians under the guise of interrogating prisoners in the nation we now occupy as a result of the Bush Doctrine?… Is it conservative to issue hundreds of `signing statements’ that place the president outside congressional purview and above the law? To blatantly flout federal surveillance laws nad proceed with the wiretapping of thousands of American citizens?” Is “conservatism” defined entirely by support for aggressive war abroad and presidential dictatorship abroad?
Movement conservatism, Neiwert concludes, “has come to resemble nothing genuinely conservative at all but rather something starkly radical: profligate spending and economic recklessness; incautious and expansionary wars, pursued unilaterally; exaltation of religious fervor and assaults on science; and the undermining of the civil rights of minorities.”
Although this is an incomplete and flawed summation, it’s a good place to begin in discussing the dangers of contemporary conservatism, as opposed to the genuine article.
That being the case, why does Neiwert go out of his way to implicate Ron Paul, who — but Neiwert’s analysis — would appear to be the only genuine conservative of any stature within the GOP?
In his book Neiwert accused Dr. Paul of helping to “mainstream” the ideas of the “Radical Right” — the same ideas, he insists on the same page (136, for those who are interested), that propelled “the rampages of Eric Rudolph, Buford Furrow, and … Jim David Adkisson.” This is because Ron Paul’s presidential campaign promoted what Neiwert dismisses as “classical Patriot monetary and taxation theories” — that is, an understanding of the need for hard money (gold and silver) and of the destructive influence of the Federal Reserve on our economic and social health as a country.
(Neiwert carefully avoided mentioning Dr. Paul’s emphatic and courageous stand against the Iraq War and the demented policy of “pre-emption,” including nuclear aggression against “rogue” countries. He likewise omitted mention of Dr. Paul’s eagerness to work with congressional Democrats — such as Dennis Kucinich and Barney Frank — on issues of common interest where this was compatible with his principles. Oversights of this sort attest to an abundance of bad faith on Neiwert’s part.)
A d v e r t i s e m e n t
Like a dog returning to its vomit, Neiwert returned to this smear against Dr. Paul in the wake of the Holocaust Museum shooting. Noting that von Brunn was arrested for attempting either a “citizen’s arrest” or kidnapping (depending on your perspective) ofPaul Volcker at the Federal Reserve Building in Washington, Neiwert wove a tangled skein of guilt-by-astronomically distant association:
“Von Brunn … was an adherent of the white-supremacist/far-right movement called Posse Comitatus, and was acting on those beliefs. More to the point, this is precisely the same belief system that today fuels the cottage industry in conspiracy theories — promulgated by the likes of Ron Paul and Alex Jones — that the Fed is part of a massive conspiracy of `international [read: Jewish] bankers’ to enslave Americans and destroy the country. It’s been around quite awhile, but lately it’s been gaining the patina of being regurgitated for mainstream consumption on right-wing media. ”
Leaving aside the unappetizing mental image of a “patina” that is acquired through regurgitation, Neiwert’s argument — if that word can be tortured into applying here — is a crude and dishonest syllogism: The anti-Semite James von Brunn opposed the Federal Reserve; Ron Paul and many others oppose the Federal Reserve; therefore, opponents of the Federal Reserve are anti-Semites.
Thus, any time you hear someone unbosom himself of sentiments like the following, you can know that you’re in the presence of a certifiable Right-Wing nutbar, a “one Wolf” terrorist just waiting the trigger word to go on an anti-Semitic murder jag:
“From time immemorial, inflation is how governments have wiggled out of repaying what they owe. Back in the days when all money was copper, silver, or gold, its purchasing power was lessened by minting coins with less precious metal in them. Next came printing more dollar bills. Nowadays debasing the currency is accomplished by a few computer keystrokes…. From 2005 to 2006 the dollar in your purse lost 4 percent of its purchasing power. So unless you got a 4 percent raise to compensate, you are working for less than you were a year ago. A four percent rate may not sound like much, but thanks to the `miracle of compound interest,’ it can postpone your retirement or keep you on the job till you drop dead…. When you see your money evaporating in front of your eyes, don’t call the weather bureau. Call the politicians.”
The same demagogue — a mock-populist most likely animated by para-fascist sentiments, one supposes — offered a denunciation of the Federal Reserve that James von Brunn would have endorsed:
“The last time a professor of economics was installed as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, in 1970, the country went to hell. The nation drowned in an inflationary decade that washed away jobs, businesses, life savings and the futures of millions. Arthur Burns, the Columbia University professor President Richard Nixon appointed, entered office with credentials more impressive than [Benjamin] Bernanke’s and left having swamped the country with cheap money, rising prices and turmoil.”
You just know the guy who wrote those words is smart enough to know that his dog-whistle rhetoric will be understood and acted on by extremists across the country. Surely, Mr. Neiwert will indict this fellow for his role in cultivating the “climate” from which hate crimes and acts of “Right-Wing” terrorism precipitate like a rainshower from a low-pressure system?
Try as I might, I can’t find a single instance in which Neiwert or others of his ilk have used their Dark Helmet-like gift for charting distant associations to implicate Nicholas von Hoffman or other left-leaning critics of the Federal Reserve as ideological accomplices to “Right-Wing” terrorists and “hate criminals.”
I suspect that this is because people of Neiwert’s persuasion, like (as I’ve pointed out) an increasing number of people on the nominal Right, define their politics entirely by Lenin’s kto/kogo formula: What matters isn’t who’s right or wrong, or what’s true or false, but who does what to whom.
For all their supposed enlightenment, the left’s “anti-hate” crusaders are just as tribal and intolerant as the racial collectivists upon whom they rely for their regular fix of high-yield indignation. There’s a kind of co-dependence at work here between these contending versions of collectvism, as well as a potentially murderous competition for the power to isolate, disenfranchise, and — if deemed necessary — annihilate the other faction.
Does that gesture seem familiar? French revolutionary artist Jacques-Louis David’s famous Oath of the Horatii, depicting three sons of Horace who pledged to kill and die for their government. The stiff-armed salute was later immortalized in David’s depiction of the Tennis Court Oath. Its more recent uses need no elaboration here.
Let there be no misunderstanding here. There’s no secret about the purposes to which neo-Nazis and their associates would put the power of the State were they to seize control.
But the outcome wouldn’t be that much different if the Left were put in the same position of unchallenged dominance. The capacity for mass extermination of political enemies is inscribed in the ideological DNA of the activist Left.
In 1791, years before the regime he served took his head, French revolutionary leader Georges Danton described the Revolution’s agents as “exterminating angels.”
Even though the revolutionary assembly in 1791 grandly declared the whole of humanity to be one political family (surely, the apex of Kumbahyah, “We Are The World”-style liberalism), four years later it was involved in a campaign of wholesale slaughter against the refractory peasants and priests of the Vendee” for the supposed crime of seeking to worship God rather than the regime, and refusing to permit the State to conscript their young to kill fellow Catholics abroad.
This resistance prompted the monstrous Bertrand Barrere in August 1793 to call for “measures to exterminate this rebel race.”
That word, once again, was “race.” Yes, the Jacobin-led Revolution, which gave us the Fascist/Nazi salute, also pioneered race-based mass murder.
By 1795 the slaughter carried out by the broad-minded progressives in Paris had become so intense that Gracchus Babeuf (who, ironically enough, was a proto-Communist in his outlook and tactics) accused the government of “turning the scythe of death” against the Vendeans, in the pursuit of “populicidal” objectives.
A proverbial monster: So expansive was the appetite of French revolutionary Bertrand Barrere for the blood of his enemies that for generations his name was used to frighten French children into eating their brussels sprouts. I’m not kidding. Well, maybe about the brussels sprouts.
We know enough from post-1789 history to assume that egalitarian objectives wedded to total power lead ineluctably to mass murder.
By making that observation, am I seeking to implicate the likes of Keith Olberman and David Neiwert in the crimes of totalitarian-minded leftists? Of course not. I am, however, trying to disabuse them of the notion that the potential for political violence is somehow exclusive to the “Right,” as they perceive and define it.
I’m also urging them to understand the lethal potential of the politics of collective guilt before the learn — as people like Danton and Robespierre did long ago — that nobody can really control that monster once it’s been unleashed.
UPDATE: What time is it, kids? That’s right — it’s time to start filling the gulag!
“Let Terror be the order of the day!” exclaimed Robespierre as the Revolutionary regime began its blood-purge in earnest. In 1918, at a similar juncture in the Soviet revolution, Lenin called for the slaughter of the state’s enemies by the hundreds and thousands (and eventually, of course, by the millions). “et them drown themselves in their own blood,” exclaimed the founding Soviet dictator; “et there be floods of the blood of the bourgeois — more blood, as much as possible.”
Commentator Bonnie Erbe, a shrill collectivist shrike, has yet to endorse the slaughter of counter-revolutionaries by the millions. She’ll get there eventually, however, if she follows the lethal logic of her call for preventive imprisonment of “hate criminals.”
Referring to the murders of abortionist (not “doctor”) George Tiller, security guard Stephen Johns, and military recruiter William Long, Erbe decrees: “It’s not enough to prosecute these murders as murders. They are hate-motivated crimes and each of these men [meaning the alleged perpetrators] had been under some sort of police surveillance prior to their actions. Isn’t it time we started rounding up promoters of hate before they kill?”
(Thanks to commenter 5-Pillar Scribe for tipping me to Erbe’s screed.)
Controversy has erupted over President Obama’s firing of Inspector General Gerald Walprin, a Bush appointee who was tasked with investigating fraud and misuse inside of the Corporation for National and Community Service, an umbrella organization for service under Homeland Security that includes AmeriCorps and many other related groups.
Although Obama has complained that Walprin was “exercising his power as president,” questions have been raised as to whether Obama’s real motive centers around an ongoing investigation into friend and fellow ’service’ advocate Kevin Johnson, mayor of Sacramento and founder of youth program ‘Hood Corps.’
Inspector General Walprin alleged that Kevin Johnson misused AmeriCorps funds allocated to Hood Corps.
The IG found that Johnson, a former all-star point guard for the Phoenix Suns, had used AmeriCorps grants to pay volunteers to engage in school-board political activities, run personal errands for Johnson and even wash his car.
Walpin has also charged that Johnson took AmeriCorps members to New York “to promote the expansion of St HOPE operations in Harlem,” a purpose, he says, that was not authorized by the grant.
It may have been a desire to avoid negative press about AmeriCorps-related programs that drove the president to axe the Investigator General, and with it the investigation. Obama has clearly worked to expand AmeriCorps and may have reacted to shut down embarrassment about improperly used funds within the program.
The removal of Gerald Walpin, the current Inspector General who investigates AmeriCorps and other national service programs by the President himself is interesting in itself. More interesting, the change comes after his friend was cited for misuse of funds through his nonprofit group.
National Service has been curiously at the forefront of Obama’s presidency and a part of the former community organizer’s image. His now WH Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel gained attention for his 2006 ‘The Plan,’ a policy book advocating compulsory service. Already, his administration has passed the GIVE Act, which extends AmeriCorps funding, and a further bill for mandatory service has now been introduced in Congress.
During his presidential campaign, Obama appeared at the Service Nation-sponsored9/11 Presidential Forum on National Service, where the expansion of the national service agenda was made clear. His stated plans included a civilian expeditionary force which would back up military and assist in nation building overseas in places like Afghanistan. This force has been announced in the Obama administration under DoD 1404.10.
TV ads for AmeriCorps-affiliated City Year are also now running major promotion for the service agenda, which has been pushed not only by Obama and Emanuel, but high-level advisors such as David Gergen. City Year has announced plans to mobilize service activities around the September 11 anniversary.
Mayor Kevin Johnson had reportedly settled the dispute over funds with the U.S. Attorney’s office as of April 9, 2009, at a time when he was working closely with the Obama Administration about receiving stimulus funds.
Sacramento Bee reported that Walprin “has no doubt he acted properly in investigating the Sacramento mayor.” Other investigators “said Walpin had identified millions of dollars in AmeriCorps funds that were wasted or misspent” and that “it appears he has been doing a good job.”
The investigation has been on-going for sometime, and Walprin himself brought embarrassing questions to Johnson during his run for mayor in 2007.
Walpin’s office made repeated public comments just before the Sacramento mayoral election, prompting the U.S. attorney’s office to inform the media that it did not intend to file any criminal charges.
For his part, Johnson has denied any wrongdoing. Instead, the AP reported, he “blamed unnamed political enemies for the investigation and criticized the federal government for having grant requirements he said are too difficult to follow.”
Mayor Johnson was also instrumental in “helping” Governor Schwarzenegger force Sacramento’s homeless out of tent cities and relocating them to the Cal Expo, where strict policy, including in & out privileges, limit the freedom of its temporary residents.
Although 
For his part, Johnson has denied any wrongdoing. Instead, the 
PortalScape 