Islamic Charity Drops Suit Against Terrorism Analyst

Post below lifted from Jihad Watch. See the original for links

Legal intimidation fails again. "Charity Drops Suit Against Terrorism Analyst," by Josh Gerstein in the New York Sun:

A children's charity that funnels money to Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon, Kinder USA, has dropped a libel suit it brought against a prominent terrorism analyst who suggested that the group was funding a terrorist organization, Hamas. In April, Kinder USA, formally known as Kids in Need of Development, Education, and Relief, Inc., sued Matthew Levitt over a brief passage about the group in his book, "Hamas: Politics, Charity and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad." The suit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, also named the book's publisher, Yale University Press, and Mr. Levitt's employer from 2001 to 2005, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

On Tuesday, Kinder USA moved to withdraw the case with prejudice, meaning it cannot be refiled.

"I conducted three years of careful research for Hamas, and the book was the subject of academic peer review," Mr. Levitt said in a statement issued yesterday by the Washington Institute, which he returned to this year after a stint as a top Treasury Department official. "I am pleased that this suit has been dismissed with prejudice, vindicating my free speech rights."

In the passage that led to the suit, Mr. Levitt wrote: "Even after the closure of the Holy Land Foundation in 2001, other America-based charities continue to fund Hamas. One organization that has appeared to rise out of the ashes of the HLFRD is Kinder USA." ......

"We view this early, voluntary, and full dismissal as a complete victory," the executive director of the Washington Institute, Robert Satloff, said. The defendants said no payments or promises were made to Kinder USA. Mr. Levitt, a former terrorism analyst for the FBI, lectures widely on terrorism financing issues. Last month, he testified at a criminal trial in which federal prosecutors have accused officers of the Texas-based Holy Land Foundation of being a front for Hamas.

The real practitioners of genocide today are Muslims

Throughout most of the Muslim world, in madrassas and mosques, in the press and on television, with hardly a voice countering the calumnies, the United States is charged, tried and convicted as the world's modern leader in genocide aimed at Muslims. President Bush, supported by his accomplice Israel, supposedly leads this Muslim massacre. America is berated for heinous crimes, minimizing whatever may have been done by the regimes of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein and, currently, Sudanese President and Field Marshal Omar al-Bashir.

This propaganda campaign seeks to distract the world's attention from the real murderers, the true ethnic and religious cleansers. For the truth is, the perpetrators to an overwhelming degree are the Muslims themselves. Simultaneously, the accusations are calculated to inflame the credulous Arab/Muslim street, in order to justify murderous Muslim terrorism, to recruit gullible suicide bombers and to attract covert support from Saudi Arabia, once a stalwart U.S. ally.

Statistics from publicly available sources decimate what fanatical Islamists are telling the world about the two terrible, sadistic "Satans" and reveal that Muslims have slaughtered millions of their fellow Muslims, for political, religious or ethnic reasons. Not incidentally, this frightening phenomenon is a principal danger in premature U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.

In Indonesia, with the world's largest Muslim population, 400,000 were murdered in 1965-66. Adding East Timor, between 1975 and 1999, another 100,000 to 200,000 Muslims and Christians were killed by the Indonesian army.

The Bangladeshi fight for independence from Pakistan in 1971 led to between 1.4 million and 2 million Muslims deaths.

In Somalia's long-running civil war, at least 550,000 Muslims have perished. Just one 1988 aerial bombardment ordered by dictator Siad Barre flattened Somaliland's regional capital, Hargeisa, and slaughtered 50,000.

Sudanese Muslim regimes have conducted 50 years of genocide in the south of blacks, Nubians and other Muslims, resulting in 2.6 million to 3 million fatalities, including 2.4 million civilian deaths, with Darfur the current killing field.

In Afghanistan, the Soviet Union's 1979 invasion and subsequent occupation produced between 1 million and 1.5 million civilian Muslim murders over 10 years, plus another 90,000 Mujahedeen and Taliban fighters, equally split between Soviet and warring Muslim factions.

The American invasion in 2001 created perhaps 10,000 fatalities, interrupting the estimated 1.2 million additional deaths generated by Muslim militias' protracted civil war following Soviet withdrawal. The Taliban's current one-by-one assassinations of two dozen Korean Christian aid workers are a ghastly exception from routine murders of fellow Afghan Muslims.

In Iraq, the 1980-88 war with Iran produced more than 1.5 million Muslim deaths. Saddam's endless domestic purges added another million, mostly Shia and Kurd deaths. The current Sunni-Shia confrontation is estimated to have caused another 100,000 deaths to date.

Neighboring Iran suffered between 450,000 and 970,000 deaths during the 1980-88 Iraq-Iran war, plus unknown thousands of dissidents killed by Iran's secret police since 1979.

In Syria, the late President Hafez al-Assad attacked the city of Hama in 1982, murdering 20,000 Muslim Brotherhood members and innocent civilians ... not to mention one murderous action after another in Lebanon, accounting for at least 130,000 deaths.

The foregoing does not consider lethal activities in Chad, Jordan, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Turkey, Yemen and Zanzibar, Tanzania's island province. Expert estimates total up to 600,000 mostly Muslim fatalities in these areas since 1960.

Who are the real perpetrators of this genocide, the people committing these religious and ethnic cleansings - these massacres? Overwhelmingly, Muslim murderers have massacred their co-religionists, and continue to do so. Were we to leave Iraq precipitately, it is very likely hundreds of thousands - possibly millions - of Muslims would be killed by fellow Muslims, goaded on by Iran to the east and Syria to their west, in a full-scale sectarian civil war. Should such a tragedy occur, would the world correctly consider the United States an accomplice to genocide? In such a situation, sadly, yes.

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The Peace Racket

An anti-Western movement touts dictators, advocates appeasement-and gains momentum

If you want peace, prepare for war." Thus counseled Roman general Flavius Vegetius Renatus over 1,600 years ago. Nine centuries before that, Sun Tzu offered essentially the same advice, and it's to him that Vegetius's line is attributed at the beginning of a film that I saw recently at Oslo's Nobel Peace Center. Yet the film cites this ancient wisdom only to reject it. After serving up a perverse potted history of the cold war, the thrust of which is that the peace movement brought down the Berlin Wall, the movie ends with words that turn Vegetius's insight on its head: "If you want peace, prepare for peace."

This purports to be wise counsel, a motto for the millennium. In reality, it's wishful thinking that doesn't follow logically from the history of the cold war, or of any war. For the cold war's real lesson is the same one that Sun Tzu and Vegetius taught: conflict happens; power matters. It's better to be strong than to be weak; you're safer if others know that you're ready to stand up for yourself than if you're proudly outspoken about your defenselessness or your unwillingness to fight. There's nothing mysterious about this truth. Yet it's denied not only by the Peace Center film but also by the fast-growing, troubling movement that the center symbolizes and promotes. Call it the Peace Racket.

We need to make two points about this movement at the outset. First, it's opposed to every value that the West stands for-liberty, free markets, individualism-and it despises America, the supreme symbol and defender of those values. Second, we're talking not about a bunch of naive Quakers but about a movement of savvy, ambitious professionals that is already comfortably ensconced at the United Nations, in the European Union, and in many nongovernmental organizations. It is also waging an aggressive, under-the-media-radar campaign for a cabinet-level Peace Department in the United States. Sponsored by Ohio Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich (along with more than 60 cosponsors), House Resolution 808 would authorize a Secretary of Peace to "establish a Peace Academy," "develop a peace education curriculum" for elementary and secondary schools, and provide "grants for peace studies departments" at campuses around the country. If passed, the measure would catapult the peace studies movement into a position of extraordinary national, even international, influence.

The Peace Racket's boundaries aren't easy to define. It embraces scores of "peace institutes" and "peace centers" in the U.S. and Europe, plus several hundred university peace studies programs. As Ian Harris, Larry Fisk, and Carol Rank point out in a sympathetic overview of these programs, it's hard to say exactly how many exist-partly because they often go by other labels, such as "security studies" and "human rights education"; partly because many "professors who infuse peace material into courses do not offer special courses with the title peace in them"; and finally because "several small liberal arts colleges offer an introductory course requirement to all incoming students which infuses peace and justice themes." Many primary and secondary schools also teach peace studies in some form.

Peace studies initiatives may train students to be social workers, to work in churches or community health organizations, or to resolve family quarrels and neighborhood disputes. At the movement's heart, though, are programs whose purported emphasis is on international relations. Their founding father is a 77-year-old Norwegian professor, Johan Galtung, who established the International Peace Research Institute in 1959 and the Journal of Peace Research five years later. Invariably portrayed in the media as a charismatic and (these days) grandfatherly champion of decency, Galtung is in fact a lifelong enemy of freedom. In 1973, he thundered that "our time's grotesque reality" was-no, not the Gulag or the Cultural Revolution, but rather the West's "structural fascism." He's called America a "killer country," accused it of "neo-fascist state terrorism," and gleefully prophesied that it will soon follow Britain "into the graveyard of empires."

No fan of Britain either, Galtung has faulted "Anglo-Americans" for trying to "stop the wind from blowing." If the U.S. and the U.K. oppose a dangerous development, in his view, we're causing trouble-Milosevi?, Saddam, and Osama are just the way the wind is blowing. Galtung's kind of thinking leads inexorably to the conclusion that one should never challenge any tyrant. Fittingly, he urged Hungarians not to resist the Soviet Army in 1956, and his views on World War II suggest that he'd have preferred it if the Allies had allowed Hitler to finish off the Jews and invade Britain.

Though Galtung has opined that the annihilation of Washington, D.C., would be a fair punishment for America's arrogant view of itself as "a model for everyone else," he's long held up certain countries as worthy of emulation-among them Stalin's USSR, whose economy, he predicted in 1953, would soon overtake the West's. He's also a fan of Castro's Cuba, which he praised in 1972 for "break[ing] free of imperialism's iron grip." At least you can't accuse Galtung of hiding his prejudices. In 1973, explaining world politics in a children's newspaper, he described the U.S. and Western Europe as "rich, Western, Christian countries" that make war to secure materials and markets: "Such an economic system is called capitalism, and when it's spread in this way to other countries it's called imperialism." In 1974, he sneered at the West's fixation on "persecuted elite personages" such as Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov. Thirty years later, he compared the U.S. to Nazi Germany for bombing Kosovo and invading Afghanistan and Iraq. For Galtung, a war that liberates is no better than one that enslaves.

His all-time favorite nation? China during the Cultural Revolution. Visiting his Xanadu, Galtung concluded that the Chinese loved life under Mao: after all, they were all "nice and smiling." While "repressive in a certain liberal sense," he wrote, Mao's China was "endlessly liberating when seen from many other perspectives that liberal theory has never understood." Why, China showed that "the whole theory about what an `open society' is must be rewritten, probably also the theory of `democracy'-and it will take a long time before the West will be willing to view China as a master teacher in such subjects."

Nor has Galtung changed his tune over the decades. Recently he gave a lecture that was a smorgasbord of wild accusations about America's refusing to negotiate with Saddam, America's secret plans to make war in Azerbaijan, Nazis in the State Department, the CIA's responsibility for 6 million covert murders, and so on. Galtung called for a Truth and Reconciliation Committee in Iraq-to treat America's crimes, not the Baathists'.

Galtung's use of the word "peace" to legitimize totalitarianism is an old Communist tradition. In August 1939, when the Nazis and Soviets signed their nonaggression pact, the same Western Stalinists who had been calling for war against Germany did an about-face and began to praise peace. (After Hitler invaded Russia, the Stalinists reversed themselves again, demanding that the West help Stalin crush the Third Reich.) The peace talk, in short, was really about sympathizing with Communism, not peace. And it continued after the war, when Stalin's Western supporters whitewashed his monstrous regime and denounced anti-Communists as warmongering crypto-fascists. "Peace conferences" and "friendship committees" drew hordes of liberal dupes, who didn't grasp that their new "friends" were not ordinary Russians but the jailers of ordinary Russians-and that the committees were about not "friendship" but deception, exploitation, and espionage.

The people running today's peace studies programs give a good idea of the movement's illiberal, anti-American inclinations. The director of Purdue's program is coeditor of Marxism Today, a collection of essays extolling socialism; Brandeis's peace studies chairman has justified suicide bombings; the program director at the University of Missouri authorized a mass e-mail urging students and faculty to boycott classes to protest the Iraq invasion; and the University of Maine's program director believes that "humans have been out of balance for centuries" and that "a unique opportunity of this new century is to engage in the creation of balance and harmony between yin and yang, masculine and feminine energies." (Such New Age babble often mixes with the Marxism in peace studies jargon.)

What these people teach remains faithful to Galtung's anti-Western inspiration. First and foremost, they emphasize that the world's great evil is capitalism-because it leads to imperialism, which in turn leads to war. The account of capitalism in David Barash and Charles Webel's widely used 2002 textbook Peace and Conflict Studies leans heavily on Lenin, who "maintained that only revolution-not reform-could undo capitalism's tendency toward imperialism and thence to war," and on Galtung, who helpfully revised Lenin's theories to account for America's "indirect" imperialism. Students acquire a zero-sum picture of the world economy: if some countries and people are poor, it's because others are rich. They're taught that American wealth derives entirely from exploitation and that Americans, accordingly, are responsible for world poverty.

If the image of tenured professors pushing such anticapitalist nonsense on privileged suburban kids sounds like a classic case of liberals' throwing stones at their own houses, get a load of this: America's leading Peace Racket institution is probably the University of Notre Dame's Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies-endowed by and named for the widow of Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald's, the ultimate symbol of evil corporate America. It was the Kroc Institute, by the way, that in 2004 invited Islamist scholar Tariq Ramadan to join its faculty, only to see him denied a U.S. visa on the grounds that he had defended terrorism.

Peace studies students also discover how to think in terms of "deep culture." How to prevent war between, say, the U.S. and Saddam's Iraq? Answer: examine each country's deep culture-its key psychosocial traits, good and bad-to understand its motives. Americans, according to this bestiary, are warlike and money-obsessed; Iraqis are intensely religious and proud. Not surprisingly, the Peace Racket's summations of deep cultures skew against the West. The deep-culture approach also avoids calling tyrants or terrorists "evil"-for behind every atrocity, in this view, lies a legitimate grievance, which the peacemaker should locate so that all parties can meet at the negotiating table as moral equals. SUNY Binghamton, for instance, offers a peace studies course that seeks to "arrive at an understanding of contemporary violence in its ideological, cultural, and structural dimensions in a bid to move away from `evil,' `inhuman,' and `uncivilized' as analytical categories."

For the Peace Racket, to kill innocents in cold blood is to buy the right to dialogue, negotiation, concessions-and power. So students learn to identify "insurgent" or "militant" groups with the populations they purport to represent. A few years ago, a peace organization called Transcend equated the demands of the Basque terrorist group ETA with "the desires of the Basque people"-as if a "people" were a monolithic group for whom a band of murderous thugs could presume to speak. The complaints that Transcend made about the Spanish government's "blockade positions"-its refusal to cave to terrorist demands-and the Spanish media's lack of "objectivity"-their refusal to take a middle position between Spanish society and ETA terrorists-are standard Peace Racket fare. Similarly, during Saddam's dictatorship, "peace scholars" wrote as if Iraq were equivalent to Saddam and the Baath party, entirely removing from the picture the Shiites and Kurds whom Saddam's regime subjugated, tortured, and slaughtered.

The recipes for peace that flow from such thinking seem designed not only to buttress oppression but to create more of it. For if democracies consistently followed the Peace Racket's recommendations, what they'd eventually reap would be the kind of peace found today in Havana or Pyongyang....

More here



Australia: African refugee numbers slashed for Iraqi intake

Hallelujah! The do-gooding Australian Feds created a previously unknown problem in Australia by allowing large numbers of unassimilable African refugees in over recent years, many of whom are Muslims. It now seems that the Feds have finally woken up to some extent. There is of course a great veil of silence over the high rate of crime and welfare dependancy among Africans (Americans will recognize the pattern) but official admissions do sometimes leak out. And Christians from Arab lands are certainly a most endangered and most deserving group with every prospect of assimilating successfully. Lebanese Christians have a long history of prospering in Australia. It is a credit to Australia that it has moved to the forefront in rescuing the Arab Christians

THE Federal Government will dramatically cut its intake of refugees from Africa, while lifting the number of refugees from the Middle East, including large numbers of Christian Iraqis. Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews yesterday announced the Refugee and Humanitarian Intake for 2007-08. It will cut the number of immigrants from Africa by 30 per cent. Only a few years ago Africa accounted for up to 70 per cent of the entire humanitarian program. But integrating African refugees, particularly from war-ravaged Sudan, has been very expensive. It is believed the Government is hoping to help consolidate the African communities and families who are already here.

"The intake from the Africa region reflects an improvement in conditions in some countries and an increase in the number of people returning to their country of origin," Mr Andrews said. The overall number of refugee places will remain stable at 13,000. But the intake from the Middle East and Asia will increase to about 35 per cent each.

Mr Andrews said the increased intake of Iraqis who had fled their country follows an international conference on Iraq convened by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in April. The conference discussed the plight of refugees from Iraq, many Christian.

The most recent Budget saw an additional $209 million over four years allocated to helping refugees settle into Australian life. Mr Andrews said the increased intake from Asia was largely because of resettlement programs for Burmese refugees in Thailand and Bhutanese refugees in Nepal.

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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