In pointing out recently that Geert Wilders confounds Americans with his fearless clarity, one of the incidents I had in mind was an interview he sat for in May with The Daily Caller's Jamie Weinstein (photo above).

Because it so perfectly encapsulates the point at which sparkly-brittle delusions about Islam crack up against obdurate reality, this interview is well worth revisiting, if only to bear witness to the plight of the determined delusionist as he gathers his shards of fantasy and retreats to a vaccuum where he will reassemble them, far from the buffeting facts.

The interview...

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This past week's syndicated column:

Every time I see Dutch Party for Freedom leader Geert Wilders interact with America, I am struck anew by how deeply he confounds us. We aren't used to hearing the truth, particularly about Islam, expressed by a politician -- of all people! -- who not only says what he's found to be true, but also acts on it. For this same reason, however, by Islamic decree (Fatwa), Wilders has been "marked for death," which is the title of his terrific new book. "Marked for Death: Islam's War Against the West and Me" (Regnery Publishing, $27.95) informs and inspires in an elegantly concise but also comprehensive volume. Including an excellent foreword by Mark Steyn, "Marked for Death" is the best single book on Islam and its impact on the West -- a book every American should read. After all, Wilders, a Dutchman with great affection and admiration for the USA (especially the First Amendment and Ronald Reagan), has written this book for us. Many chapters open with an epigraph...

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This (we are told) is a picture of Sheikha Safaa, the new general manager of Marya, a new Egyptian television channel (named for a Coptic concubine "gifted" to Mohammed -- yick)  is staffed entirely by fully and blackly veiled -- no, obstructed -- women, both behind and in front of the camera.

"Veiled" doesn't begin to describe the "niqab" treatment -- a winding sheet with a peep hole.

Lest we forget...

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This week's syndicated column:

Here I am again in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces in Washington, D.C., the highest appeals court for the U.S. military. Last month, I was here to cover Army 1st Lt. Michael Behenna's final appeal. Now I am waiting for Army Sgt. Evan Vela's final appeal to begin. I glance over at Evan's father, Curtis Carnahan, and Evan's wife, Alyssa, sitting together in the otherwise empty first row, and I can't believe it's been more than four years since Curtis first emailed me: "I am Sgt. Evan Vela's father. I do not know if you have followed my son's case, but some people have drawn similarities between the Luttrell situation and Evan's." Curtis was referring to Marcus Luttrell, whose 2007 best-seller "Lone Survivor"...

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Again -- as in the case of yesterday's breaking news from Breitbart News that Obama's literary agency bio described him as "born in Kenya" -- the equally fascinating story is the media relationship with this new piece of evidence.

To be sure, the appearance of the "born in Kenya" bio raises more questions than it answers. Who provided the original information? Was it all a "simple mistake," as the agency's booklet editor Miriam Goderich now claims? Was it even a mistake?

We have no idea -- yet. With Breitbart following the story today, however, we now know...

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Don't get me wrong -- kudos to Breitbart for publishing its report on a 1991 promotional booklet from a literary agency that describes client Barack Obama as "born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii," emphasis on "born in Kenya."

But what a strange apologetic the Breitbart team has produced in presenting this hot story.

The story,  now the lead report at Drudge, opens with an explanatory note, kind of an how-to-read-this-story guide which is almost as notable as the story itself.

Thus:

Note from Senior Management:

Andrew Breitbart was never a "Birther," and Breitbart News is a site that has never advocated the narrative of "Birtherism." In fact, Andrew...

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Omar Bakri, for decades a fomenter of jihad in Britain from inside Hizb ut Tahrir and al-Mahajiroun until he was banned from the country following the 7/7/05 Underground attacks, is, like President Bush and assorted neocons, an enthusiast of "Arab Spring." He is also a clear proponent of sharia. In fact, in this video, Bakri makes the job of the incomparable Wafa Sultan all the easier by his straightfoward description of our "choices" under Islam, all accoring to its most authoritative and accepted texts.    

Ali Musa Daqduq, Hezbollah terrorist killer of five American servicemen in Iraq, is free today, thanks to President Obama's decision to turn him over to an Iraqi court, which has just released him.

Michael Behenna, Evan Vela, John Hatley, Corey Clagett and the rest of the Leavenworth Ten, not to mention Lawrence Hutchins and now Derrick Miller and I'm sure others remain in US military prisons, most of them having served four, five, six years already for "fog of battle" killings that were prosecuted as murder in the military justice system, all too often, it seems to me, with an eye toward appeasement of our Iraqi "allies." Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan terrorists with innocent blood on their hands have been given clemency by the US government and our Iraqi and Afghan "allies."

This is a US government travesty of epic proportions.

With Daqduq walking free, Rep. Allen West (R-FL) has now called out the President on this gross stain on America's honor.

West wrote:

...

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Pakistan agrees to re-open supply roads to NATO forces in Afghanistan. But there's a price.

Christian Science Monitor reports:

The accord, which the Pakistani government announced late Tuesday, would revive the transport of vital supplies of food and equipment from Pakistani ports overland to land-locked Afghanistan. In return, the US-led coalition will pay Pakistan a still-to-be-fixed fee of $1,500 to $1,800 for each truck carrying supplies, a tab that officials familiar with negotiations estimated would run nearly $1 million a day. ...

Pakistan closed the land route to supplies headed to the coalition after American aircraft mistakenly attacked two Pakistani border outposts Nov. 26, killing 24 Pakistani soldiers. Since then, supplies for coalition forces in Afghanistan have passed through one of two routes that stretch from Afghanistan through central Asia and Siberia to Georgia on the Black Sea. One of the routes is nearly 6,000 miles long. The Pakistan route is less than 500 miles....

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At the end of a detailed account in today's NYT about an assault by three Afghan Army members against American troops inside the wire on March 1 which left two Americans killed and one hit (in body armor and unwounded), the report says:

Why had three men attacked American soldiers they barely knew? Was it a personal grudge against Americans? Or had they turned to the Taliban? The detainee has since presumably been asked those questions. But in a reflection of the official reticence to discuss green-on-blue attacks, his answers remain shrouded in secrecy. It is not even clear whose custody he is in.

The reporter has posed a series of questions that politely, fearfully and inadequately skirts the central question for investigators, strategists, military leaders, elected officials and citizens: Does Islamic ideology, particularly the core Islamic tenet of aggression (jihad) against those who do not believe in Allah -- the kufar, the infidel, the dhimmi, the slave -- have anything to do with this heinous pattern of attacks on armies hailing from what used to be known as Christendom? (Hint: yes.)

...

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From today's New York Times, a story about Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the lone American POW in Afghanistan. We still don't know the circumstances under which he was captured in 2009, but we do know something about his outlook on the counterinsurgency (COIN) disaster as conceived and executed by Gens. Petraues and McChrystal under Presidents Bush and Obama.

From the story:

Sergeant Bergdahl was assigned to the First Battalion, 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment, Fourth Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division, based at Fort Richardson, Alaska. He deployed as a machine gunner in early May 2009 to a small combat outpost in Paktika Province, at a time when American forces were extremely sparse in the area. At first his e-mails home were effusive. “He was happy as a clam,” Mr. Bergdahl said. He wrote of “how beautiful it was, how wonderful the people were.” But the tone of his son’s e-mails soon darkened, Mr. Bergdahl said, although he declined to say specifically what set off the change. Mr. Bergdahl would say only that he himself had become disillusioned by the military’s doctrine of counterinsurgency, aimed at winning over the Afghan population by building roads, schools and good governance while protecting them from insurgents. As part of the strategy, American troops often travel on roads planted with homemade bombs, or improvised explosive devices, to meet with villagers during the day to collect information about their needs — and to ask the whereabouts of insurgents so they can target them in night raids.

...

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This is making the rounds, as it should:

Remember the sci-fi cult classic “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”? The 1956 movie is about a small town where extraterrestrial “pods” take over the townspeople. Even pillars of the community change into zombielike clones, as revealed by their blank stares and abnormal impulses. Outwardly, though, the “pod people” remain unchanged. The town doctor, played by Kevin McCarthy, figures out what’s going on, but, as the movie progresses, there are fewer real people to warn. Soon, they’ve all gone over to the Other Side! The climactic sequence features McCarthy, the last free man, running across a rugged landscape and onto a crowded highway to warn the rest of humanity. “Let him go – they’ll never believe him,” say his erstwhile neighbors, now pod people. “Stop! Listen to me! You’re next!” he shouts to people in cars, barely dodging traffic. Brakes squeal, horns blare. Angry drivers...

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Raymond Ibrahim has written a very important if thoroughly revolting piece tracing the movement in the Egyptian parliament to legalize "farewell intercourse" straight back to the traditions (hadiths) of Islam's perfect man, Mohammed. I'm sorry to say it's essential reading.

To call such Islamic practices barbaric gives barbarism a bad name. To fund them, as the United States does, through $1.3 billion in recently released aid, is much, much, worse.

By Raymond Ibrahim

Aside from provoking shock, disgust, and denial, last week's news of Egyptian parliamentarians trying to pass a "farewell intercourse" law legalizing sex with one's wife up to six hours after she dies has yet to be fully appreciated.

To start, consider the ultimate source of this practice: it's neither the Muslim Brotherhood nor the Salafis; rather, as with most of Islam's perversities—from adult breastfeeding to pedophilia marriage—Islamic necrophilia is traced to the fount of Islam, its prophet Muhammad, as found...

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This week's syndicated column:

To keep former Army 1st Lt. Michael Behenna behind bars until 2024 for the "unpremeditated murder" of an insurgent during the war in Iraq, U.S. military prosecutors have resorted to strange and disturbing twists of law, logic and morality. They were all on display again this week in Behenna's final plea before the military's highest court of appeals in Washington, D.C. It was enough to make the gold eagle on top of the American flag in the courtroom shake and then hang its head. Or so I imagined while listening intently as questions from the five civilian judges began to drill into a central argument advanced by the military prosecutor: that Lt. Behenna had "lost his right to self-defense" in the war zone when he embarked on an unauthorized interrogation of Ali Mansur, a suspected al-Qaida cell leader. Lost his right to self-defense? What does that mean to our soldiers at war, where extenuating circumstances are facts of life?...

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While Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey is busy, busy, busy ensuring that jihad, the enemy threat doctrine, as elucidated by Maj. Stephen Coughlin (USAR) among others, does not blow Islamispeace's reputation by entering the pure (ignorant) minds of our senior staff officers, that which Dempsey unconscionably calls "additional risk" marches on.

Never mind that a working knowledge of jihad, which is what Coughlin expertly imparts, would blow COIN sky high, making possible the strategy review necessary to save these American and NATO lives from Dempsey's "additional risk."

From the AP:

KABUL,...

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Nazis disposing of "objectionable material" that undermined Big Lies of the Third Reich

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It's probably fair to call Spencer Ackerman of Wired.com the king of the see-no-Islam beat. Whenever the government -- first, the FBI, now, "the entire US military" -- decides to purge training materials about Islam that undermine the Big Lie that "Islam is a religion of peace," Ackerman seems to be the one to break the story. Something to be proud of in the coming caliphate -- probably good for a pasha-ship, at least.

The latest from the Voice of Submission:

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Tuesday ordered the entire U.S. military to scour its training material to ensure it doesn’t contain anti-Islamic content, Danger Room has learned. The order came after the Pentagon suspended a course for senior officers that was found to contain derogatory material about Islam.

...

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On Wednesday evening, I will be on live with Glenn Beck to discuss "Rumors of War III," a new documentary Glenn's documentary unit, Mercury Radio Arts, has produced, and which I had the pleasure of appearing on along with such luminaries as my Team B II colleagues Gen. William G. "Jerry" Boykin, Andrew C. McCarthy, John Guandolo, Frank Gaffney, and also CBN's esteemed Erick Stackelbeck. Gen Boykin, Andy and I will all be be on the post-documentary show, along with Buck Sexton, National Security Editor of The Blaze.

The show starts at 7pm EST.

If, as the Obama administration is saying, the "war on terror" -- counter-jihad -- "is over," then why are we civilians still manning the front lines?

Image 1) Barricades 2012, pre-assault:

Image 2) Barricades 1916, pre-assault:



It's another Big Lie. Trust your eyes and the evidence; not the spin (lies) and image-making of "authority."

As noted here, Frank Gaffney, and Gens. Boykin and Soyster will today be at the National Press Club at 9:30am, live-streaming at www.MuslimBrotherhoodinAmerica.com, to discuss not that we have won the "war on terror," as the Obama administration absurdly claims, but rather why we are losing.





...

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Look, Ma -- no birth certificate!

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I am not a lawyer but I hereby solicit free legal opinions as to whether, in the folllowing bit of courtroom back and forth that I have unofficially jotted down from video of this month's New Jersey ballot challenge, Admininstrative Law Judge Jeff Masin led President Obama's counsel, Alexandra Hill, into stating her case more strongly before actually cutting her off at the moment the young lawyer introduced the national release of the online Obama birth certificate into the court record. It seems to me that despite Judge Masin's blunt intercession, Hill's introduction of the nationally (internationally) accessible online birth certificate provided the objectors, represented by attorney Mario Apuzzo, with a rationale for calling an expert witness to testify about the evidence of forgery in the online image....

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Frank Gaffney, LTG William G. "Jerry"  Boykin (USA ret.) and LTG Harry Edward Soyster (USA ret.)

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The Center for Security Policy announces:

On Tuesday, April 24th, Center for Security Policy President Frank Gaffney and two former top leaders of the U.S. intelligence community will hold a press conference to address a question millions of Americans have pondered:   Why, despite more than ten years of efforts – involving, among other things, the loss of thousands of lives in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, well-over a trillion dollars spent, countless man-years wasted waiting in airport security lines and endless efforts to ensure that no offense is given to seemingly permanently aggrieved Islamist activists – are we no closer to victory in the so-called “war on terror” than we were on 9/11?   In fact, such a prospect is becoming more remote by the day--and no one seems able to explain the reason why.   The missing answer will be revealed tomorrow at the National Press Club at 9:30...

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Burqa-ready: the new Afghan ambassador to the United States?

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Outrage upon outrage: Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) has been denied entry into Afghanistan. Worse, SecState Hillary Clinton served as conduit to Rorhabacher of Karzai's decision to designate Rorhabacher persona non grata. In other words, instead of Hillary telling Client Karzai some variant of "Nuts!" on hearing the Tinpot Corruptocrat Taliban Stooge's outrageous plan to prevent an elected American official from visiting Afghanistan, Hillary simply conveyed the Pashtun pasha's wishes to the Congressman. His wishes, apparently, are her command.

The Guardian has the story:

Relations between the US and Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, came under renewed strain after a senior Congressman highly critical of the Kabul government was barred from entering Afghanistan.

Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, Republican chairman of the House foreign affairs subcommittee on oversight and investigation, has been an outspoken opponent of Karzai. Rohrabacher has engaged with other Afghan leaders about a more decentralised form of government for Afghanistan and called for a US investigation into alleged government corruption.

...

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America texts while the world burns

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Today's dots start here:

1) Egypt terminates gas deal with Israel.

2)100.000 girls are genitally mutliated in Britain.

3) And we text, saying, hearing nothing, incessantly. Sherry Turkle, the author of today's trenchant New York Times article about the texting habit, part emotional wasteland, part nervous tick. describes what the article's title describes as "the flight from conversation." The syndrome is also and above a manifestation of the flight from reality.

They all connect.

...

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Good news.

Gates of Vienna reports:

The Danish historian and journalist Lars Hedegaard was acquitted today in the Danish Supreme Court. Seven justices voted to overturn, and none voted to uphold the earlier verdict.

The vote, led by Chief Justice Børge Dahl, acquitted the defendant of intended racism and hate speech.

“Denmark is still a free society,” said Mr. Hedegaard.

More details are expected later.

Below is this week's syndicated column: "Is Obama Disowning His Online Birth Certificate?" It takes in the shifting strategy of the Obama defense team in fending off challenges to Obama's eligibility to appear on presidential primary ballots. Obama's eligibility is a signal concern for the nation which should be the subject of informed, serious debate on the front pages, on news shows, and also, most important, in the Congress. Such debate is non-existent. Such concern is non-existent, too. It doesn't seem to matter to the citizenry that a fraudster may be completing one term in the White House while seeking another.

I recently had the occasion to discuss the matter with a very famous American conversative.

Famouse Conservative...

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Illustration by Pat Crowley

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Today, I am posting a contribution from a longtime email correspondent, George W. Ford, who opens with a simple, vital question:

Will we ever read in the  media -- even in the conservative media -- that President Obama is a fraud? 

Will we ever read an article that opens, for example: "In  2008, we elected a man who turned out to be a fraud.  Barack Obama deliberately misled the country about his origins, implying that he was eligible to hold the office of the Presidency."  The Webster's definitions of fraud include: intentional deception to cause a person to give up ... some lawful right; something said or done to deceive; or, colloquially, a person who deceives or is not what he pretends to be.   President Obama is a fraud, not "may be" a fraud.  But media, elected officials, and, worst of all, conservatives avoid drawing this...

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"Which way to Mecca, Jack?"

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When I read that a new UK website had come out billing itself as the "largest and most comprehensive survey of anti-Muslim and Islamophobic organisations to date [featuring] over 300 organizations and key individuals," my first thought was: if I don't make the cut, I'll buy a prayer rug. That is, if literally hundreds of weekly columns and a book devoted to chronicling the disconnect between facts about Islam and the blanker recesses of the Western mind, the first US newspaper interview with Geert Wilders, raclette with Oskar Freysinger in the Alps, extensive writings on Bat Ye'or's historical research, Filip Dewinter's political fights, and Lars Hedegaard's legal woes, a signed Kurt Westergard Motoon, a blurb on Fjordman's book, and Elisabeth Sabadistch-Wolff's wienerschnitzel recipe don't count among the...

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US service members preparing to deploy to the Afghanistan war zone learn proper tree pruning techniques.

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Welcome to "Agricultural Development for Afghanistan Pre-Deployment Training" (or ADAPT -- cute!), Uncle $ucker's latest stupid, totally wasteful, life-and-limb-risking idea for taming the Afghan beast via agricultural improvement. We already tried that, embarking on a massive, thirty-plus-year effort to modernize the Helmand Valley, to create "an America in Asia," between 1946 and 1979. It was a total failure.

Naturally, we continue to repeat the policy blunder -- only this time while fighting a war.

From the Sac Bee:

When Sgt. 1st Class Darrell Rowe's Army bosses told him they were sending him for...

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The differences are greater than any similarities, but there is nontheless some overlap between the topsy-turviness of this story -- Britain's first Muslim life peer, Lord Ahmed, has placed a L10,000,000 bounty on the heads of both Presidents Obama and Bush due to the US placing a similar bounty on the head of Hafiz Saeed, founder of L-e-T -- and the the topsy-turviness of the Sharpton-Holder nexus.

Let me see if I can get it across. In the world ordered by gravity, parliamentary democracy and Greenwich Mean Time,  British peers do not align themselves with Mumbai jihadists against the United States.

But now there...

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Karl Marx's birth certificate

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This week's syndicated column:

Now that Election 2012 is shaping up as a contest between President Obama and Mitt Romney, an observation and a prediction.

Our nation heads into a presidential campaign with an incumbent whose online birth certificate and Selective Service registration card are almost certainly forgeries, and this is a nonissue. (Don’t ask about the subpoena from a Georgia court that Obama ignored. Everyone else did, too.)

That’s the observation. The prediction is that unless voters come to view Barack Obama as a “socialist” – even a “democratic socialist” – and, as such, an existential threat to our (in theory) constitutional republic, President Obama, funny papers and all, will be re-elected in November.

The two stories are related. Both turn on the relative power of “evidence” vs....

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As you may have heard ... John Derbyshire is out at National Review for committing an offending act opinion writing at Taki's Magazine.

I am not preparing to embark on a dissection and  division of the piece into points I might admire or points I might disagree with as a means of determining whether John Derbyshire is fit to be associated with National Review and there's a reason. Parsing the piece in such a way reminds me of what ideological commissars do, what Thought Police do. Indeed, in the hot-frothing wake of the serial, overlapping, looping and repeating two-minute hates against the accomplished writer that went viral recently, this very exercise was conducted time and time again by an army of such commissars, from established media to small blogs. It was done time and again, not to engage with or even refute the arguments Derbyshire set down with frankness and cogent purpose, but to pass judgment on whether he as a lifelong contributor to public discourse should be banished from what passes for polite journalistic company. It was an odious exercise.

...

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Who would bet the farm -- or even a sawbuck -- that George Zimmerman will get justice in a Florida courtroom that is sure to be ringed by a baying, panting media cum lynch mob that now includes not just the New Black Panther Party, Al Sharpton, NBC, ABC, the President and the Attorney General, but also the United Nations High Commisioner for  Human Rights (so-called)? About the case, the UN official Navi Pillay recently said:  I will be awaiting an investigation and prosecution and trial and of course reparations for the victims concerned.

"I"????  Guess what, Mr. and Mrs. America. Your US Justice system is now expected to answer to the UN.

Discussing the charges brought this week against Zimmerman, an astutely pessimistic commenter at View from the Right brought up a similiar case that took place in New York in 1996. He wrote:

Some of the commenters on your blog seem to think the likelihood is that Zimmerman will be acquitted. I would not be so confident of that. To begin...

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Roger Kimball writes (via Ruthfully):

This morning, a friend sent me this image of a painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme. Some say that it depicts Napoleon III and Eugenie receiving the Siamese embassy. Recent historical research, however,  suggests that it actually depicts the liberal media at an Obama press conference. (Chris Matthews may be third from the front.)

It's 2012 and the PrObamedia are back, not that they ever left, of course. But now, as Mitt Romney emerges as the main obstacle between the PrObamedia and their collectivist heart's desire -- Obama, Term II -- their work gets serious. I hereby initiate an occasional feature, the PrObamedia Sweepstakes, to recognize the hard work and dedication it takes to get the bottom of the tank.

Yesterday, was "Buffet Rule" Day for Obama in Florida, where, as the non-prObamedia Washington Times led off, the President wedged a campaign-style presidential speech in between two $10,000/plate campaign fundraisers, where, funny thing, he neglected to mention the millionaire-taxing Buffet Rule, at least at the first fund-raiser (no word on No. 2). Meanwhile, thanks for the campaign ride on Air Force One, taxpayers. The New York Times, on the other hand, very obediently colored inside the lines, highlighting the Obama Message of the Day, the "Buffet Rule" as Obama delivered it in a "rousing speech"...

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Pastor Terry Jones continues to fight for free speech against sharia in America, taking his battle back to one of the most Islamic enclaves in America -- Dearborn, Michigan. There. in Dearborn's latest sharia-complying outrage, the city actually asked Jones to sign a legal agreement to forfeit his legal rights regarding any harm that might befall him during his latest lawful protest. Jones filed suit, and a Detroit federal judge ruled last week in his favor. 

What is notable about the Detroit Free Press account (below) of what happened when Jones recently returned to Dearborn is the way the story is constructed. It's not so much that pieces are missing, but rather that pieces appear out of order. In the newspaper report, 1) Jones warns about Islamic domination and sharia; 2) the mosque is on "lockdown" surrounded by 30 police cars and traffic into the area is halted; and 3) a sign at the Islamic Center reads "Happy Easter."

How's that for topsy-turvy? Then, finally, a partial...

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AP photo: Wounded American soldiers, dazed, hurt, unassisted, moments after a suicide bomber detonated in a park in Maimanah, Faryab Province, April 4, 2012.

American soldiers should not be dying for COIN's parks and bazaars in Afghanistan.

On January 18, 2012, a suicide bomber blew himself up around a bridge in Kajaki Sofla bazaar. There were, as expected, many terrible casualties, but what was especially disturbing about this incident was that the military failed to acknowledge any US military casualties. Local US media outlets, quoting family members, reported that Marine Cpl. Philip McGeath, 25, was killed in the Kajaki Sofla explosion. Marine Cpl. Chrisopher Bordoni, 21, was also grievously injured. Uncle Sam stayed mum. This was something I paid particular attention to, given an alarming report on January 17, 2012 in USA Today on...

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On January 18, 2012, Marine Cpl. Christopher Bordoni was grievously injured in a suicide bombing in Kajaki Sofla bazaar.

On April 3, 2012, the 21-year-old died of his wounds in a military hospital.

Not two weeks earlier, Marine Cpl. Christopher Bordon's mother Carol posted the following account of her 21-year-old son's medical condition. It is, among other things, an example of clear and affecting expository writing that Americans should read to understand what the nation has asked and continues to ask of our military, too often without heed and care for the cost.

March 22, 2012

We have been in San Antonio for 60 days now. We realize that since the moment of the "incident", there have been amazing people every step of the way that brought Chris home to us, and have since kept him here with us. We don’t ever ask why this happened to him, for that would be a wasted use of our energy and distract us from our focus of getting Christopher through this. We believe in...

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I don't know if this is what Kipling had in mind but ...

From the New York Daily News, February 14, 2012:

A harrowing 911 call captured a terror suspect with ties to Al Qaeda screaming a final prayer to Allah during a 100 mph suicide run across the Whitestone Expressway.

“There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger!” defendant Adis Medunjanin howls in Arabic during the 33-second recording from January 2010.

The unrattled police operator replies, “Hello? Do you need the police, fire department or the ambulance?”

He bolted from his Queens home in his Nissan Ultima within an hour after an NYPD detective detailed Medunjanin’s alleged ties to Al Qaeda and the bomb...

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Would this man lie?

No -- better question: How will we feel if/when we find out we wasted all that blood and treasure standing up a Hezb-i-Islami government in Afghanistan?

From The Wall Street Journal :

American officials are pressing the Afghan government to prosecute a former governor for what U.S. investigators say is involvement in the killings of an American lieutenant colonel and a U.S. servicewoman, as well as other alleged crimes.

President Hamid Karzai's administration has rejected requests to prosecute Ghulam Qawis Abu Bakr (photo above) for the killings and for alleged corruption, saying evidence is lacking.

That seems to be because, as reported later in the story, wiretaps are illegal in Afghanistan! (Meanwhile, a trusted military source tells me that in his experience, lie detectors are not used in Afghanistan due to Afghans' proven capacity to lie convincingly.)

Mr. Abu Bakr, who remains a power broker in his province of Kapisa just north of Kabul,...

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French Army Captain Christophe Schnetterle, 45, died on March 27 from injuries sustained on January 20, 2012, when he and other French soldiers came under attack on their base in Kapisa, Afghanistan by one of their "partners," an Afghan Army member. The attack initially drove French soldiers to surround their base and refuse to permit Afghans to enter. Later, French Prime Minister Sarkosy announced that France would withdraw earlier than scheduled from Afghanistan -- at the end of 2013, not the end of 2014. According to a February 12 BBC account, the French left Kapisa province altogether...

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On page 330 of the 2002 book Islam and Dhimmitude, the great historian Bat Ye'or writes:

It was in the early 1970s, with the outbreak of Arab Palestinian terrorism worldwide that dhimmitude erupted on European soil through violence and death deliberately inflicted on one category: the Jews, who were singled out as in the Nazi period by their religion. Security precutions and instructions posted on synagogues and Jewish community buildings implied that being Jewish and practicing the Jewish religion in Europe might again incur the risk of death, and that the freedom of religion and freedom of thought had been restricted.

For me, reading this was an epiphany. Let me borrow from my book to explain:

So that's how it started. When I first read that passage a few months after 9/11, something clicked. I remembered a visit to Brussels in December 1990, during which I saw armed guards posted outside a city synagogue. Such security precautions in Europe, as Bat Ye'or writes, were by then routine, but it was the first time I had witnessed them. And it was only after 9/11 that I realized what they really meant: It wasn't that government authorities were preparing to target a specific, limited threat of violence to battle and eliminate it; on the contrary, the authorities were responding to an ongoing threat that reflected the permanent fact that Jewish citizens in Belgium (and elsewhere) were no longer able to exercise their religion freely. And why weren't they able to exercise their religion freely? As in the 1970s, the reason in 1990 was Arab Palestinian terrorists. In retrospect -- namely, post- 9/11 -- it seems odd that these terrorists have always been called "Arab terrorists," or "Arab Palestinian terrorists," and have never been labeled according to the animating inspiration of their religion as "Muslim" terrorists. Such coyness has buried a relevant part of the story: the Islamic context. Just as a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, it was Muslim terrorism that had come to Europe, and, as a result, Jews were worshipping, if they dared, at their own fearsome risk.

...

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This week's syndicated column:

Is there any interest in discovering the facts about the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman? Facts, after all, can undermine ideology. They have the power to dispel fantasy. They can put the brakes on error. They lead, sometimes, to logical conclusions. All of which means, in this particular case, that when the facts come out, they might well undermine "the cause."

We simply don't know all of the facts yet. We can say with certainty, however, that the cause is not justice, no matter what the protesters, agitators and officials say. The cause is not truth, either. The cause is social strife, division, leverage, power and -- you never know -- violence and revolution, all of it drawn and driven by an outrage-stoked engine of racial grievance.

Even if the facts of this case were to prove that Zimmerman acted in self-defense when he killed Martin -- a scenario supported by a police report obtained by the Orlando Sentinel that says Zimmerman had a bloody or broken nose and a head wound, and that an eyewitness "unequivocally" identified Zimmerman as having been under assault by Martin -- that wouldn't change the cause.

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Jerome Corsi has all the details on the latest twist on the Obama-eligibility-turned-forgery story at WND.com, the uniquely indefatigable news site advancing this amazingly, shockingly, unconscionably non-covered story. WND.com, of course, also runs my syndicated column, and thank goodness since some undetermined number of my regular outlets declined to print (spiked) last week's entry, "Silence of the Lapdogs." Stalwarts newspapers who have bucked the self-censoring trend so far range from the Galesburg, Il. Register-Mail to the Pottstown, PA Mercury (Pottstown was the hometown of John O'Hara, a favorite of mine) to the folklorically named Black Hills Pioneer and Weekly Prospecter in Spearfish, SD.

Actually, those three are the only first newspapers to show up with last week's column in the Google news search. Then again, that search engine never indicates more than a few of the roughly 100  newspapers that run the column weekly. If any readers come across the Arpaio Posse column in their local papers, I'd be interested in hearing about it (email me at: deathofthegrownup@verizon.net).

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US Army Sgt. William R. Wilson III with his mother Kim. Sgt. Wilson was gunned down on Monday, March 26, 2012, by a member of the Afghan police force. Wilson and his family have paid the ultimate price for what JCC Gen. Dempsey is now calling "the additional risk" of"partnering" with Afghan Muslims subject to jihad's call.

RIP.

Two British troops were also killed by Afghan security forces on Monday. Since I last updated my quite unofficial figures on January 20 with the murders of four French troops, seven more Americans and two Albanians were murdered by Afghan security forces. The Albanian incident, which took place on February 20, occurred as Albanian troops were accompanying a USAID team for a meeting about opening two schools and a health center, when 11 Afghan policemen opened fire. They were all arrested. ...

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Hilton Kramer, whose life work was an inspiration for seekers of light and truth, has died at age 84.

Roger Kimball writes:

It is with great sadness that I report the death of my dear friend and longtime colleague Hilton Kramer, who died early this morning, age 84 (his birthday was just two days ago). I will have more to say at The New Criterion — the magazine Hilton co-founded with the pianist Samuel Lipman in 1982 — soon.  But here let me record my deep personal and professional debt to a man who not only employed me at The New Criterion — I began writing for the magazine in 1983, joined the staff in 1989 — but who also was for me a model of everything a critic should be: independent, forthright, well-informed, and above all incorruptible. Hilton always told it exactly as he saw it, and he generally saw it with...

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