Terror expert: Tsarnaev brothers are part of a cell

'THIS PSYCHOPATH': Professor Recalls Emailing With Bombing Suspect

foxnews

The Boston bombing suspect who is the subject of a massive manhunt reached out to a Massachusetts professor two years ago for help on research "rediscovering his Chechen origins," the professor told FoxNews.com Friday. 

Professor Brian Glyn Williams, who teaches the only course in the U.S. on the Chechen wars, said Dzhokhar Tsarnaev emailed him in the spring of 2011, asking questions on Chechen history for a research project he was doing at the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. 

Williams said that based on conversations with a friend who taught Tsarnaev -- and who recommended he reach out to Williams -- he learned that Tsarnaev was "studying his past." 

"He was sort of in the process of vicariously rediscovering his Chechen origins," the professor told FoxNews.com. 

Williams said that after the student contacted him, he emailed back a syllabus. He said he didn't even remember the interaction until he talked to a friend. 

"It freaked me out," he said. "I couldn't believe I communicated with this psychopath." 

The detail comes amid swirling questions about the suspect's motivations and roots. Tsarnaev is thought to be of Chechen origin, though his family may be from the neighboring region of Dagestan. Chechnya, a region in Russia, is known for its bloody conflict with the Russian government -- but the region is also home to Islamic extremists. 

It remains unclear what may have motivated the suspects. Their uncle, in an impassioned and impromptu press conference Friday, downplayed their Chechen ties and said the situation has "nothing to do with Chechnya." 

FBI investigators are scouring records to find out where and when the suspects might have been radicalized. The other brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed in a shootout with police overnight in the Boston suburbs, traveled to Russia last year, Fox News has learned. 

Fox News has also learned that the younger brother was granted asylum in 2002, obtained a green card in 2004 and was granted citizenship in 2012. The elder brother had an arrest for domestic violence in 2009. 

Williams teaches at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, where Tsarnaev is also a registered student. Williams said he's never formally had Tsarnaev as a student -- but said a colleague who does told him he was supposed to be in class Friday. 

Details are still emerging about both suspects. The older brother told a photographer in 2009 that: "I don't have a single American friend, I don't understand them." He worked out in a gym and dreamed of making the U.S. Olympic boxing team, according to an online photojournalism slideshow that chronicled his training. 

Tamerlan Tsarnaev previously studied at Bunker Hill Community College for three semesters -- fall 2006, spring 2007 and fall 2008 -- in hopes of becoming an engineer. 

The brothers' background has also raised questions about ties between Chechnya and Islamic radicalism. 

Williams described a complicated picture. He said "there's a jihad element that has grown larger and more important" inside of Chechnya in the wake of bloody wars with the Russians. 

He said the official leadership is more secular and moderate, but there is an extremist element that sees the Russians as "infidels." He said the Al Qaeda links are tenuous, though Al Qaeda "sympathizes" with them. 

Williams said he is publishing a book on the subject next year called "Inferno in the Caucus." 

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/04/19/prof-says-boston-bombing-suspect-sought-help-rediscovering-chechen-roots/#ixzz2Qxru5VoX

Boston bombers radicalized on U.S. soil?

CBS News

LONDON A federal law enforcement source tells CBS News investigators are working to determine whether the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings, brothers Tamerlan, 19, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 26, have links to other terrorist cells, foreign or domestic.

Officials are trying to determine whether the brothers, who lived for at least a short period near Russia's restive Chechnya region, were acting independently or directed by a broader conspiracy. The source told CBS News producer Pat Milton that investigators and the intelligence community are pressing to determine if the two men were directed by a central player or someone overseas.

According to a former teacher at a school in the Russian region of Dagestan, the brothers were two of four siblings who came to the area with their parents as refugees from Kazakhstan in 2001. They lived only about one year in Dagestan, a region next door to Chechnya. Both regions have a long history of Islamic extremism and a number of well-established terrorist groups.

Ethnic Chechens live across the region, and it is still believed that the Tsarnaevs belong to that ethnic group.

Dzhokhar, born in 1994 as a war began between Chechen separatists and the Russian government, had most recently viewed videos on YouTube depicting atrocities from the front lines of Syria's civil war and of Chechen separatist propaganda.

There has been no indication that the Tsarnaev brothers are linked, however, to Chechen terror groups operating in the region now. The former head of the school who spoke to the Reuters news agency in Dagestan said the family left for the U.S. in 2002.

Chechnya's leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, dismissed any links between the brothers and Chechnya.

"Any attempt to draw a connection between Chechnya and Tsarnaevs -- if they are guilty -- is futile. They were raised in the United States, and their attitudes and beliefs were formed there," he said in a statement Friday.

Even America's top diplomat, Secretary of State John Kerry, cautioned against drawing links to the troubled region, saying Friday that, "it would be inappropriate," to talk about any Chechnya connection to the bombing suspects.

Neil Doyle, a British author and expert in online extremism and radicalization, told CBSNews.com on Friday that the young man's recent viewing "would suggest perhaps a large degree of self radicalization, but we can't rule out the possibility that there may have been someone local to them, an imam or someone, who influenced the process."

Charles King, a professor at Georgetown University and an expert in the Caucus region, where Chechnya is located, says links to Chechen radicals in the U.S. are also unlikely, as there are simply too few of them.

He describes the ethnic Chechen community in the U.S. as "very, very small," and scattered across the country. "I really think the American angle on this story is much more powerful than the Chechen one," adds King. "It's a story of how young people get radicalized."

As Doyle points out, there is no shortage of jihadist propaganda available on the Internet, courtesy of al Qaeda and its various branches and like-minded organizations.

The bombs used in the Boston attack were made using pressure cookers -- not a new practice, by any means, but one which was laid out in a detailed how-to manual published online by al Qaeda's Yemen branch in the last two years.

Chechnya and Dagestan, predominantly Muslim regions of Russia, have seen decades of war and internal violence as separatists vie for independence from Moscow and for internal power.

The most prominent Islamic terror group in Chechnya is called the Islamic Emirates of the Caucuses, led by Doku Umarov.

While the group is not believed to have direct, operational cooperation with al Qaeda's central leadership, it shares the same jihadist ideology. In 2011, the United Nations Security Council added Umarov to a list of people officially linked to al Qaeda.

Umarov's group was behind the March 2010 Moscow metro bombing carried out by two female suicide bombers which left 40 people dead. It was also blamed for a 2011 attack on the Domodedovo airport, near Moscow, which took 36 lives.

More recently, Chechen jihadists have joined various rebel militias fighting against President Bashar Assad in Syria's two-year civil war.

Thus far, there have been no terrorist attacks on the U.S. or other Western nations planned or carried out by Chechen groups -- their focus has been exclusively on Russia.

A Tale of Two Terrorists

Fox Nation

By JOHN M. MURTAGH, New York Post

Somewhere near Boston early Monday morning, he packed a bomb in a bag. It was by all accounts relatively crude — a pressure cooker, explosives, some wires, ball bearings and nails . . . nails which, hours later, doctors would struggle to remove from the flesh of bleeding victims.

His motive is unclear. His intent is not: It was to maximize injury, suffering, pain, trauma and, yes, death.

Perhaps Monday’s bomber will be caught, perhaps not.

Perhaps Monday’s bomber will be offered a teaching job at Columbia University.

pjmedia.com

Forty-three years ago last month, Kathy Boudin [photo], now a professor at Columbia but then a member of the Weather Underground, escaped an explosion at a bomb factory operated in a townhouse in Greenwich Village. The story is familiar to people of a certain age.

Three weeks earlier, Boudin’s Weathermen had firebombed a private home in Upper Manhattan with Molotov cocktails. Their target was my father, a New York state Supreme Court justice. The rest of the family, was presumably, an afterthought. I was 9 at the time, only a year older than the youngest victim in Boston.

One of Boudin’s colleagues, Cathy Wilkerson, related in her memoir that the Weathermen were disappointed with the minimal effects of the bombs at my home. They decided to use dynamite the next time and bought a large quantity along with fuses, metal pipes and, yes, nails. The group designated as its next target a dance at an Officer’s Club at Fort Dix, NJ.

Despite the misgivings of some, it is reported that Kathy Boudin urged the use of “anti-personnel bombs.” In other words, she wanted to kill people not just damage property. Before they could act, her fellows were killed in the townhouse explosion. The townhouse itself collapsed; Boudin fled.

She reappeared over a decade later driving the getaway car for the rag tag mix of Weathermen and Black Panthers who held up a Rockland County bank in 1981, murdering three in the process. Survivors of the ambush along the New York State Thruway recount how Boudin emerged from the driver’s door, arms raised in surrender, asking the police to lower their guns. When they did, her accomplices burst from the back of the van guns blazing.

As I said, people of a certain age remember this history. For those that don’t, Robert Redford is kindly about to release a movie recounting the Rockland robbery (albeit relocated to Michigan). By all accounts, the film lionizes the Weather Underground terrorists, Boudin and her accomplices.

Read more: http://nation.foxnews.com/columbia-university/2013/04/18/opinion-tale-two-terrorists?cmpid=NL_foxnation#ixzz2Qptvjg1X

Canada will ‘recommit’ to combating homegrown terrorism, Foreign Affairs Minister

Sun news

Toronto Star

By Tonda MacCharles 

OTTAWA — Canada is not the only country to confront the problem of radicalized youth who mount terror attacks at home or abroad, said Conservative Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird.

Baird, on a Middle Eastern tour, spoke to reporters by teleconference from Abu Dhabi Tuesday, the day after CBC revealed the identities of two young London, Ontario adults killed in a January attack on a gas plant in Algeria.

The CBC named Ali Medlej and Xristos Katsiroubas [photo], two high school friends, as the men whose remains were identified, and it suggested police are investigating potential ties to others in this country.

The well-coordinated siege — believed carried out by an Al Qaeda-affiliated group with insider knowledge of the plant compound — and the subsequent counterattack by Algerian security forces left some 37 hostages and 29 militants dead.

The involvement of two Canadians was first revealed by the Algerian Prime Minister Abdelmalek Sellal who said they were among those killed in the fiery military assault.

Baird, who initially demanded proof, disputed the notion Tuesday that he had challenged the Algerian government and insisted that Canadian and Algerian authorities were working co-operatively.

“We never said there weren’t Canadians, we never challenged the Algerian government, what we simply said was we didn’t have proof of Canadian involvement,” Baird said in the call from the United Arab Emirates. “I can say that our intelligence service and the RCMP worked closely with Algerian officials.”

“Canada is far from the only country that has had to deal with this challenge of radicalization. I think it goes without saying that we all want to recommit ourselves to do more to combat this real challenge that many countries in the west have.”

He specifically named the United States, the United Kingdom and Sweden as western democracies that have been forced to confront the reality of terrorist actors within their citizens’ ranks.

But he declined to say whether the Conservative government had exhausted its legislative tools or had any other ideas on how to increase law enforcement surveillance and investigative powers.

“As these have just happened obviously my colleagues and I will discuss what to do with it in the days and weeks ahead.”

CBC revealed that at least one of the two London men were on the radar of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service as early as 2007. Baird referred any other comments to the RCMP and to CSIS, saying he was not prepared to discuss it.

The RCMP again Tuesday refused comment, saying only that its investigation is continuing. It has refused to explain why it is not releasing the names of the dead.

Jews face down new extremism from Hungary’s far-right

Bernadett Szabo / Reuters

Balint Nogradi holds his son Shalom Doveber before the Sabbath in their home in Budapest November 30, 2012.

By Reuters

BUDAPEST - A week after a leader of Hungary's far-right Jobbik party called for lists of prominent Jews to be drawn up to protect national security, Janos Fonagy stepped forward.

"My mother and father were Jewish, and so am I, whether you like it or not," the state secretary of the Development Ministry told parliament, explaining he did not have dual citizenship with Israel and was not religious.

"I cannot choose, I was born into this. But you can choose, and you have chosen this path," he said, addressing Jobbik deputies. "Bear history's judgment."

It is only relatively recently that Hungary's Jews have celebrated their identity as openly as they did when Europe's largest synagogue was built in Budapest in the 1850s. More >>

America's 'ally': Osama bin Laden a great man

WND/ John Rosenthal

thepunch.com.au

While Obama administration sources continue to suggest that the Sept. 11 anti-American attacks in Benghazi were the work of a “rogue” Libyan militia with links to al-Qaida, a new French documentary reveals just how thoroughly and openly the mainstream of last year’s Libyan rebellion was inspired by al-Qaida and its founder, Osama bin Laden.

Filmmaker Kamal Redouani’s “The Arab Spring: Springboard for Radicals?” was first aired in late October on the French pay channel Canal+ and was recently rebroadcast by the Belgian public broadcaster RTBF.

The film documents the resurgence of radical Islamic forces in three of the main countries of the so-called Arab Spring – Tunisia, Libya and Syria – as well as in Lebanon.

As part of the film, Redouani traveled to the Libyan city of Derna, some 150 miles east of Benghazi. While Benghazi was the political capital of last year’s rebellion against the rule of Moammar Gadhafi, Derna was in the many ways the military epicenter of the rebellion. It was in Derna that a leading rebel commander by the name of Abdul-Hakim al-Hasadi is known to have assembled a battalion of some thousand rebel fighters in the early days of the rebellion.

Al-Hasadi was commonly described in American publications, like the New York Times, as the rebel commander in charge of the “defense” of Derna. The description is odd, since Derna was well behind the frontlines for the entirety of the conflict.

The many European reporters who crossed paths with al-Hasadi during the war discovered a different reality: the rebel commander was using Derna as the staging grounds for offensive forays further to the West. On at least two occasions, for instance, al-Hasadi’s forces seized control of the strategic coastal town of Ajdabiya – namely, after NATO bombing had driven back Gadhafi-loyalist Libyan army troops.

According to Kamal Redouani, Derna is today run by al-Hasadi and his family as an Islamic emirate. On arriving at the outskirts of Derna, Redouani and his team were stopped at a roadblock by armed men making sure that no alcohol or unveiled women entered the city.

Redouani was accompanied into town by none other than Ahmed al-Hasadi, one of Abdul-Hakim’s brothers. Redouani was prohibited from speaking to any women and noted that all the women he saw in Derna were wearing the niqab: a facial veil that merely leaves a slit for the wearer’s eyes.

Ahmed al-Hasadi explained to Redouani that the population of Derna is famous for its piety and, furthermore, that the small city of just over 100,000 inhabitants is the “cradle of jihad.”

A 2007 study of al-Qaida personnel records by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point found that Derna sent more foreign fighters to al-Qaida in Iraq than any other city or town and far more in per capita terms. In a March 2011 interview with the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore, Abdul-Hakim al-Hasadi admitted to having personally recruited many such fighters.

As Kamal Redouani puts it, “the political and religious reference point for the al-Hasadi family is the founder of al-Qaida,” Osama bin Laden. As proof, he offers an interview with the Ahmed’s and Abdul-Hakim’s younger brother, Ashraf. Asked what he thinks of bin Laden, Ashraf replies that bin Laden is an “extraordinary person, a real jihadist and a real resistance fighter.” Ashraf notes, moreover, that “without September 11, there would not have been any revolution in the Arab world.”

There is no need to wonder whether Ashraf’s more famous elder brother, Abdul-Hakim, agrees with these sentiments. Already in April 2011, in speaking with Sara Daniel of the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur, al-Hasadi described bin Laden and current al-Qaida chief Ayman al-Zawahiri as “great heroes of the Ummah [the Islamic community].”

He never was “lucky enough” to fight alongside bin Laden, al-Hasadi explained, but he had frequently spent time with al-Zawahiri in Afghanistan. Asked about the aerial support that his forces were at the time receiving from NATO, al-Hasadi replied, “When a man is drowning, he’ll reach out to anyone, even to the devil.”

It is notable that a recent New York Times report portrays al-Hasadi as a moderate in contrast to Sufian bin Qumu, another Derna-based jihadist veteran. Bin Qumu’s name has been repeatedly evoked by the mainstream media in connection with the Benghazi attacks.

But many far more prominent Libyan militia leaders have ties to Islamic extremism that are at least equally clear. These include both al-Hasadi and Wisam bin Hamid, the leader of Deraa Libya or “Libya Shield,” nowadays the most powerful of the Eastern Libyan militias.

Libya Shield operates under the authority of the Libyan ministry of defense. As shown in a prior WND report, its units are known to fly the black flag of jihad. According to a biography that appears in Arabic on the Islamist website al-Fetn.com, Wisam bin Hamid is a veteran of jihad in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

According to the same al-Fetn.com post, in late October 2011 bin Hamid became the head of a newly formed “supreme board of the [Libyan] mujahideen.” In this capacity, he is reported to have declared that the application of the Shariah is a “red line” and that the Libyan mujahideen would “not cede one rule of it.” He also vowed that the mujahideen would use their weapons to protect Libyans from “foreign machinations.”

An unclassified U.S. diplomatic cable, which was released by the House Oversight Committee, shows that U.S. officials met with bin Hamid in Benghazi only two days before the Benghazi attacks. (Bin Hamid is misidentified in the cable as Wisam “bin Ahmed.”) Administration officials and Democratic members of Congress have criticized committee chair Darrell Issa for releasing Benghazi-related diplomatic cables without redacting the names of Libyans who met with U.S. officials. The ostensible grounds for their criticism is that the publication of the Libyans’ names could put them at risk of attack from radical groups.

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John Rosenthal writes on European politics and transatlantic security issues. His “The Jihadist Plot: The Untold Story of Al-Qaida and the Libyan Rebellion” is forthcoming from Encounter Books. You can follow his work at trans-int.com or on Facebook. The translations from Arabic are by Maureen Millington-Brodie.

Obama to Complete Conquest of America in 2nd Term

TheAlexJonesChannel Alex covers the latest outrages against the Constitution and common decency by an out of control federal government as an outlaw TSA continues to sexually molest citizens and government officials grill target shooters practicing their Second Amendment right.

How Did Obama Get Into Occidental College?

The Blaze.com
Charles C. Johnson

Of the many enduring questions about Barack Obama’s past, perhaps none figures more than that of his still-unreleased academic records. But a series of articles written in Occidental College’s student newspaper, The Occidental, in 1978-1979 sheds new light on how Obama may have been admitted through the liberal arts college’s renewed, “hard nosed” and “rigorous” commitment to increasing the numbers of black and Chicano students and faculty on campus.

Federal privacy laws prohibit anyone, save Obama, from releasing material from his academic years, but contemporaneous documentation from the time gives strong indication of how he might have been admitted to the Southern California liberal arts college, despite an admitted lackluster academic performance at Punahou School, an elite Hawaiian prep school.

Fortunately for Obama, he applied to Occidental during a time of declining enrollment of blacks and Latinos and an invigorated commitment to increase the racial diversity of the faculty, student body, and “diversify” the curriculum. The year that Obama applied to Occidental College the numbers of black and Hispanic students was at an eight-year low. Indeed, only eighteen blacks matriculated at Occidental in the fall of 1978, down seven from 1977.

“In recent years, a marked decrease in the number of minority students attending college has provoked complaints from black and Chicano leaders as well as concerned college administrators,” wrote The Occidental’s Bill Davis and Tom Hammitt in “Minority enrollment plummets” on January 19, 1979. “The number of students of minority background at Occidental has declined sharply over the past two years. Fewer blacks and Chicanos attend the college than at any time during the past eight years. Current admissions reports show a 10% decline in the number of minority applicants compared to this date last year.”

The student union on the campus of Occidental College. (Photo: Occidental College website)

The decline in admissions came as Occidental was increasing its standard for admission. “Efforts to upgrade the academic standards for minority students accepted by Occidental are another cause of the decline in representation of minority students on campus,” the same article reported. “It used to be that we’d take (minority applicants) if there was any chance of them succeeding. Now we’re being more selective,” Dean Benjamin Culley said.  To help attract a higher quality minority student, Culley awarded financial aid differently based upon race. “Black and Chicano students, who comprise 10.2% of the student body, will receive approximately 33% of the funds available through his office,” Culley told the student newspaper.

Associate Dean of Students Yolanda Garcia suggested that the college had been race-norming, or adjusting scores on standardized test to have separate curves for different racial groups. Davis and Hammitt wrote that “some ethnic distinctions are made in the admissions process, particularly with regard to SAT scores” in regards to their interview with Garcia. It still wasn’t enough. As part of the consequences of a phenomenon that would later be known as the “mismatch effect,” Occidental was having difficulty attracting a quality minority student body, in large measure because the students eligible for admission to Occidental were going to higher ranked schools, like Stanford, instead. Fewer blacks and Latinos were completing their academic careers at Occidental than whites.

Hiring Based on Race

Meanwhile, a controversy over how diverse Occidental would be in the future was reaching a boiling point, and how Occidental could diversify its professorial pool. John C. Drew, the Marxist-turned-conservative, wrote on October 13, 1978 that some activists for affirmative action wanted the college to pay a premium for minority professors.

“Students at the [affirmative action] retreat also argued that minority professors were a scarce commodity and that having an ethnic background or being a woman should be considered as part of the qualities that Occidental College wants in a professor. If economics professors had to have higher salaries to attract them to Oxy, minority professors should be treated in a similar manner,” he wrote.

After the retreat and the year before Obama arrived on campus, a faculty meeting took place that decided the future of affirmative action. Norman Cohen, a Marxist who headed the Affirmative Action Committee, concluded that there was “no progress” on racial diversity on campus — the lack of which prompted black art professor, Mary Jane Hewitt, to resign in protest.

Hewitt’s departure, however, had profound consequences for Occidental’s approach to racial matters in hiring and student enrollment. Hewitt’s resignation ultimately made “people more willing (to diversify). It’s amazing how this dominates the campus. There’s interest. There’s concern. There’s willingness to work,” said Jane Jaquette, who became the co-chair of the Affirmative Action Committee with Anne Howells after Cohen left for a sabbatical in England. (Howells would go on to teach Obama Introduction to Literary Theory and to write his letter of recommendation for transfer to Columbia, because Obama, in her words, “wanted a wider urban experience.”)

The new chairs brought new attention to affirmative action on campus. “The Affirmative Action Committee promises more minority profs,” ran the headline in The Occidental on February 9, 1979. (Bill Davis and Tom Hammitt, “Affirmative Action Committee promises minority profs,” The Occidental, February 9, 1979.)

While neither Howells, nor Jaquette used the word “quotas,” there was little doubt that quotas were what was being considered. The Occidental laid out the numbers:

In American Studies, all four candidates being considered in the final selection are black. Religious Studies reports two black males among the five final candidates for the appointment. Economics includes one black PhD in its short list. Language and Linguistics two blacks and one Chicano candidate, and Art one Chicano applicant…”

Sometimes blacks made it into the final consideration simply because they were black. In the same article, the papers says the college ws searching for a “‘radical,’ non-Keynesian economist,” and economics Chairman Woody Studenmund admitted that sometimes racial considerations were preeminent. “In all honesty, [a black candidate] wouldn’t be in the top twelve [for a position] if he were not a minority,” he told the paper.

Thorne Hall, the college’s main auditorium. (Photo: Occidental College website)

The committee even proposed paying minority professors more money to attract them to the campus as part of an “agreement…to go outside of the normal bounds on salaries,” the February 9 article makes clear.

“(Black and Chicano professors) are bringing a quality to the campus that we want to have. You pay for that quality, based on what the job market is,” Jaquette explained.

“In six academic departments currently hiring new professors, nine black and two Chicano candidates have progressed to the semi-final selection rounds,” wrote Davis and Hammitt. “Estimates from the department sources guarantee the hiring of at least one minority candidate and possibly more this year…The increased number of black and Chicano candidates in faculty applicant pools can be attributed to growing faculty commitment, the coordinating efforts made by the Affirmative Action Committee and the Dean of Faculty[.]”

Recruiting more black and Chicano professors was necessary to attract more black and Chicano students, explained Howells.

“A ‘critical mass’ of minority instructors is necessary to establish a multi-cultural base to the college,” she told the article’s authors.  A “nucleus of minority faculty members here makes it easier to attract more [minority faculty] after that. It’s the same thing as with minority students.” How many blacks and Hispanics would be enough for a critical mass? “We’d like to have as many as we can,” said Howells. “I’m sure we’ll see an increase over the next five years,” Howells said. “People are really going on this direction.”

Unsurprisingly, the numbers of blacks and Latinos in the 1979-1980 school year grew to 25 black and 29 Chicano freshmen, according to The Occidental College Magazine. Of the total number of black freshmen, 19 were granted a total of $51,878 ($184,000 in today’s money) in scholarships; of the Chicano freshmen, 22 were granted a total of $39,100 (138,000 in today’s money). State assistance and funds from the institutions themselves make up more than 50 percent of all financial aid and more than 70 percent of grant aid to minorities, noted an admissions officer at the time.

“Occidental Couldn’t Give a Damn if It Returned to All [Anglo]”

More black and Chicano students and professors also meant more black and Chicano courses. “I think the curriculum is changing with respect to openness to so-called minority courses,” Jaquette told the paper on February 9. “If we can get minority people on campus, the curriculum will change. The departments have shown themselves willing, and these people will come here with an interest in diversifying.”

To help that process along, Occidental created an official “Minority Recruitment Day” on March 28, 1979, where it brought approximately 400 black, Chicano, and Asian high school students from 12 Los Angeles inner-city schools to present them with a “very down to earth view on why to go to college, and why to come to Occidental,” according to administrator Jim Reskin. (Tom Hammitt, “ASOC schedules Minority Recruitment Day,” The Occidental, February 16, 2012)

Unlike other school recruitments, this one was led by two activist organizations on campus, MeCha for Latinos and UJIMA, for blacks. “We want it to be student run because this is something which nobody else is doing,” Reskin told the paper. “The visiting students will not be badgered by people wearing suits and ties.”

Ironically, UJIMA’s executive coordinator, Michael Harris, and administrative coordinator, Sara-Etta Harris, may not have encouraged many blacks to attend. “Racism in an institutional arrangement definitely exists here,” Michael Harris told The Occidental. “For many black students, the Occidental experience is a very alienating experience. It really detaches you from your community. It really drains you. I’ve known students who left Occidental and refused ever to come back.” Sata-Etta Harris agreed. “From what I’ve seen in my three years here, Occidental couldn’t give a damn if it returned to all [Anglo].”

Both Harrises encouraged the college to go out of its way to recruit more black and minority faculty. According to the same Occidental article, “Recruiting such a faculty, said Michal Harris, demands a different approach to departmental hiring than is generally used—qualified blacks and Chicano instructors often suffered roadblocks in their careers that make them appear on their resumes to be less qualified and talented than their white competitors.”

Occidental’s Racial History and the Black Student Caucus

The decision to admit more blacks came as part of the tumult of the ‘60s. Occidental began concerted efforts at minority recruitment in the spring of 1964, with the aid of $275,000 granted by the Rockefeller Foundation,” wrote Hammitt in the second installment on minority students at Occidental called, “Turbulent past of minority student radicalism reviewed.” The grant was to be “seed money” to recruit more blacks and Latino students and similar amounts were given to other liberal arts colleges throughout America. The numbers of blacks on campus increased in 1967, growing to 44 black and 33 Chicano students, but that was not satisfactory for the Black Student Caucus.

“There is a growing desire for identity in the Negro community. We are telling ourselves that we are going to develop as Negroes,” a BSC spokesman told The Occidental in November 1967. “We intend to accumulate as much information as we can, in any form, concerning ourselves and that which affects us particularly as blacks.”

On January 27, 1968, the BSC held a forum titled, “Black-White Confrontation,” which drew over three hundred members of the Occidental community and where a BSC leader upbraided the school for not offering jazz, African art, Negro history, or courses on black politics, like Malcolm X. “The forum also revealed a growing cultural awareness and unity among black Occidental students,” the paper reported at the time.

The Black Student Caucus was a forerunner of UJIMA, a black radical group whose meetings Barack Obama would later attend. He would also later attend meetings long into the night at Columbia’s Malcolm X Lounge, a place intended for blacks and christened by Eric Holder Jr., his future attorney General.

Obama at the dinner. The New Yorker’s caption reads: “Obama with his friend and roommate Hasan Chandoo at the Ujima dinner.”

Dissatisfied with the numbers of blacks on campus, the Black Student Caucus led forty students and a few faculty members into the president’s office on May 28, 1968. Though the students and faculty were thrown out of the president’s office, many of their demands carried the day. “The demands included requests for more intense minority student recruitment, a more ethnically diverse faculty, and the expansion of the academic curriculum to include courses more sensitive to black students’ needs and interests,” wrote Tom Hammitt in the “Turbulent” article.

Obama as a Student

Perhaps Barack Obama was actually brilliant around the time of his college years, but his own words about his schooling at Punahou and Occidental give us reason to doubt that. In his first book, “Dreams from My Father,” Obama describes himself as a lackluster high school student whose mother criticized him for being a “loafer” (142). He describes his attitude toward schoolwork as “indifferent” (146), calling himself a “bum” who abused drugs (138) and who partied all weekend (165).  He “settled on Occidental College mainly because I’d met a girl from Brentwood while she was vacationing in Hawaii with her family.” (146) That girl has never turned up.

There are reasons to doubt his testimony, however. He had fibbed about a “transfer program” between Occidental College and Columbia University, which he described and which has never existed. In fact, Obama was recruited to Occidental by Kraig King, Class of ’77, who ran recruitment for Occidental College in Hawaii at the time.

Obama, King explained, came from Punahou, a school that King described on the phone as “the best high school in Hawaii.” King, now an executive in Minnesota, recalled in a phone conversation with TheBlaze meeting “Barry Obama” in Hawaii. And though Obama was interested in basketball, King said he knew that Obama wasn’t going to be interested in playing for the team. Though King didn’t say so, it seems obvious Obama’s status as a black student from a top prep school would have helped his chances of admittance at Occidental even if he were a terrible student at Punahou.

 Obama’s Role in Affirmative Action Protest on Campus

If Obama did benefit from affirmative action, it might certainly explain his interested in the policy while at Occidental. I wrote earlier this year about how the first political speech Barack Obama ever gave was at a rally against apartheid and in favor of affirmative action.  Recently released photographs taken by Obama’s friend, Tom Grauman and published by Margot Mifflin, another Obama friend now at the New Yorker, confirm that the rally was about racial preferences.

Student newspaper records which I uncovered from Occidental (excerpted below) reveal that the protest wasn’t just about South Africa: it was also about increasing racial preferences for black and Latino students and faculty at Occidental–a history that has been utterly missing from Obama’s political record.

From top to bottom, the rally was planned, promoted, and performed by Obama and his friends, including Professor of English Eric Newhall, who served as the co-chair of the faculty committee on multicultural education, and who supported the campus’s affirmative action program with especial gusto. Newhall was a veteran of campus activism of the ‘60s and he, like many Occidental professors, continued his activism on campus as a professor. He was also a draft-dodger who had spent ten months in prison for draft evasion in 1968-1969 — a fact that gave him a certain gravitas that the more politically active of his students appreciated. While Newhall never taught Obama during his two years at Occidental, the two were close socially and played basketball together.

In an article written on February 20, 1981 in The Occidental, Professor Newhall worried that Occidental College would become especially white given that several minority administrators were leaving the college at the end of 1981, and that that would, he said, have a deleterious effect on student education. These departures included administrators Romelle Rowe and the aforementioned Yolanda Garcia, who had been tasked with recruiting more blacks and Hispanics to Occidental’s campus, respectively.

Obama himself was planning to join that exodus of minorities from the campus and likely filed out a transfer application to Columbia in January 1981.

Many of the campus’s student activist leaders graduated in 1981, but Obama still had two more years to go before he, too, would graduate. Could he have been motivated by the alleged lack of diversity on Occidental’s campus? He writes in “Dreams” of his desire to find his “community,” and later moved to Morningside Heights and Harlem. The diminishing numbers of minority faculty and the graduation of many of his minority friends at Occidental provided the final push, especially given Obama’s interest in racial issues.

Obama at the rally, according to pictures published by the New Yorker. That outlet’s caption reads: “Closeup: Organizers and speakers at the rally. Wahid Hamid and Barack Obama are seated at left. Hasan Chandoo is seated and Caroline Boss is standing at center. Sara-Etta Harris is standing at right. Laurent Delanney is in the white T-shirt, lower right.”

At the rally, Professor Newhall argued that the decision of minorities to leave Occidental, as well as the number of minority students dropping out, was indicative of persistent bias on the part of Occidental students and administrators. From a February 1981 Occidental article:

“I’ve recently become aware that there is presently developing on this campus, an attitude of suspicion and intolerance towards certain groups,” [Eric Newhall, professor of English] announced, “mainly against blacks, Chicanos, Jews, and gays.” These prejudices he said, result from the frustration that many are feeling such problems as a spiraling inflation rate, high unemployment, and a high crime rate. Such conditions lead people to “search for scapegoats.” But he added “if we can’t stop harassment on this campus, we really don’t stand much of a chance of stopping it anywhere else.”

Newhall also said he realized that the school’s affirmative action program was in trouble and fretted that there might not be a single Chicano on the faculty or administration and made an explicit call for racial quotas:

[Newhall] admitted that “we all say we want affirmative action but we don’t want to pay what it apparantly [sic] will cost. Minorities with PhDs are in scarce supply, and thus will cost more to hire.” He said that he doesn’t like the idea of “someone else being paid more than I am for doing the same work I’m doing,” but that he liked even less having a “virtually all white faculty.”
Newhall then presented a plan designed to help increase minority enrollment. This spring, the Multicultural Education Committee, along with the admissions office, is planning to invite all accepted minority applicants to campus for a reception, in hopes that they can be convinced into choosing Occidental. I’m specifically asking the student body and the SCC to support our efforts, both emotionally and financially,” he said.

The rally continued with remarks about race from Latina freshman Becky Rivera [pictured here], who described Occidental as a “picture perfect campus. It’s quiet and beautiful, and no one has to worry about the students getting upset. Well, we’re upset.” She then accused the administration of “playing off one (minority) group against another,” and its plan is to “divide and conquer.” She warned that “a few of us ignorant minorities have got us some education,” and are “demanding answers and demanding action.” She added that “students are responsible for revolutions. Students have power. It starts on the campuses.”

(Obama was likely referring to Rivera when he mentioned his fictionalized “Regina” in his autobiography. There were only two women that spoke during that rally—Becky Rivera, a Latina girl, and Caroline Boss, a white member of the Democratic Socialist Alliance—and Obama seems to have compressed them both into one black student—Regina.)

The last to speak was Earl Chew, president of UJIMA, a black activist group on campus, and friend to Barack Obama. Chew called Occidental’s idea of a multicultural liberal arts institution “a farce,” and saw investment as “taking our tuition and investing it in the oppression of our ancestral people.”

Neither Chew nor Newhall were alone in linking the divestment issue with affirmative action efforts on campus. Shortly before the protests in February, “Members of the Student Coalition Against Apartheid” (which Obama had joined) and the “Third World Coalition,” among others, signed a letter (which I have reviewed) calling Occidental’s “commitment” to affirmative action “questionable”:

1. It was overlooked to ask for any minority representation on the Dean of Faculty Search Committee. We find the position of the Dean of Faculty a viable one for the encouragement of Affirmative Action.
2. Taking into consideration the geographic location of Occidental College, we would expect that Occidental would be more conducive to an ethnic and cultural atmosphere. Yet, we have only two full time Hispanic and only two full time Black faculty members.
3. Over the past couple years, minority enrollment has increased, yet the attrition rate of minority students has also increased. The entering classes of 1970 and 1980 have had a decreasing enrollment of Black students.

It’s possible that this unsigned letter may very well have been written by Obama. As part of the campus protest movement, he describes himself as “drafting letters to the faculty” as part of his “larger role.” (“Dreams,” p. 160). The official history of Occidental mentioned the affirmative action protests as having taken place on February 18, 1981, writing:

Increased attention to minority rights, begun in the 1960s, also continued to command attention. Seeking greater minority representation, students and faculty members on February 18, 1981 held a rally in front of Coons Hall during a meeting of the trustees. A “Minority Caucus” sought more multicultural courses, to be taught by minority members. The faculty and administration, however, decided against tokenism that would admit students of marginal abilities to enlarge minority representation. Although aptitude tests would henceforth be weighted more lightly in the case of minority applicants, the college, as a small institution, did not possess the resources to service deeply-disadvantaged students.

The activists were ultimately effective in getting what they wanted passed:

A faculty committee on multicultural education, in 1982, became the committee on minority issues, consisting of faculty members, students, administrators, staff members, and alumni. This group sought to identify problems faced by campus ethnic minorities. An outgrowth of meetings of minority administrators and of a faculty caucus, the committee advised expansion of the minority presence on campus, although the college had already expanded its commitment to “Affirmative Action.” In 1984 President Gilman said about the effort:
The College has been engaged for 20 years in an effort to increase diversity among the student body and faculty. In the ‘60s we received three quarters of a million dollars to provide assistance to minority students. And we have been actively seeking more minorities since ’64. Because of this, the College has been strengthened and enriched. (See Andrew F. Rolle, “Occidental College: A Centennial History,” 1887-1987)

 “I Got Into Politics at Occidental”

So what does this all mean? It’s clear Occidental had been in favor of affirmative action ever since the 1960s, and that could explain how it was that Obama, an admittedly poor student in high school, had been admitted to Occidental.

In addition, Obama shared Prof. Newhall’s politics and fought for those very racial preferences. And could it be that part of the reason he fought so hard for them was because he was a beneficiary?

“I got into politics at Occidental,” Obama told Occidental in a 2004 interview with Occidental magazine. “I made a conscious decision to go into public policy.” Now, it seems, we know that racial preferencing was one such policy that played a roll in his life And maybe that explains why, in Dreams, Obama describes the divestment issue itself as a “subconscious end run around issues closer to home.”

​Editor’s note: You can see more pictures of Obama’s time at Occidental here.

Michelle Obama's Radical Past

TheBlaze/ Charles C. Johnson

Princeton, 1984.

Michelle Obama attends and promotes a “Black Solidarity” event for guest lecturer Manning Marable, who was, according to Cornel West, probably “the best known black Marxist in the country.” The event is the work of the Third World Center (TWC), a campus group whose board membership is exclusively reserved for minorities.

A classmate of Michelle’s identified her to TheBlaze as the second person on the left. Article/photograph taken from The Daily Princetonian – Vol. CVIII, No. 107 November 6, 1984

Michelle Obama (Robinson at the time) was one of those 19 board members and a leader of the organization. She helped to dispense what was, in today’s dollars, a $30,000 budget. Of the 19 elected positions on the board, there were two reserved spots for each of the five ethnic groups TWC purported to represent: Asian, Black, Chicano, Puerto Rican, and Native American.

Copy of TWC constitution showing board member requirements. (The Princeton Archives)

The board also had representatives from the various minority organizations on campus, including Accion Puertorriquena y Amigos, the Asian-American Students Association, the Black Graduate Caucus, and the Chicano Caucus, among others. She also fundraised for the TWC by participating in its African-themed fashion show and fundraisers (see picture here).  It was a controversial and racially-charged organization. And in looking at the group’s racial focus before and during Michelle’s tenure, we get a glimpse of her priorities while at Princeton.

Daily Princetonian article showing Michelle as a board member.

“White Students on This Campus Are Racist”

If ever there was an example of the TWC governing board’s obsession with race, an editorial from October 21, 1981 is it. The members took great offense to an op-ed titled “Rebuilding Race Relations,” calling the article “racist, offensive, and inaccurate” for daring to question the group’s true commitment and to present a thesis on race relations counter to its own.

“The word RE-building implies that race relations once existed and, for some mysterious reasons, fell apart … ,” the board wrote in a scathing letter to the editor. “We, on the other hand, believe that race relations have ​never​ been and still are not at a satisfactory level. We are not RE-building. We cannot RE-build something that never existed in the first place.”

“Don’t hide behind excuses such as a lack of effort [to integrate with the Princeton campus] on our part,” the revealing letter added.“The bottom line is that white students on this campus are racist, but they may not realize it.” [Emphasis added]

Princeton itself, however, was concerned about the self-segregation by black students and proposed reforms to counter it, including no longer permitting black students to all room together in one dorm and integrating black freshmen into the general student body.  The TWC strenuously opposed all of these reforms, arguing that integration of non-white students would harm the “support system” available to them, especially blacks. (Julie Newton, “TWC criticizes CURL plan: Minority strife would worsen,” The Daily Princetonian, October 21, 1981).

While Michelle was not a part of the board in 1981, as a board member of the Third World Center starting on April 7, 1983 she joined in a different racially-charged statement reproaching the college for not doing enough to hire “Latino administrators.” In a letter a few weeks later, the TWC attacked Princeton’s administration for not replacing Hector Delgado, a minority dean of students.

“This search needs to produce another experienced individual who is of minority background, preferably Latino, and who will be responsive to the concerns of Third World Center as well as the student body at large,” the TWC’s governing board wrote.

Others on campus took notice of the group’s calls and expressed concern.

For example, Fred Foote — the editor of Prospect magazine, a conservative monthly publication — criticized the TWC and Delgado for their obsessive focus on race.

“[Delgado’s] penchant for drawing campus issues along racial lines—a penchant shared by the TWC and The Daily Princetonian—is the chief cause of racial strife on campus,” he wrote.

A Culture of Racial Focus

The TWC’s racialism extended beyond who could become an officer in the group . Although the TWC served a number of roles on campus and was a hangout spot for minorities, its focus was mostly political. Its various constitutions make this clear. To quote the 1983 version:

The term ‘Third World’ implies[,] for us, those nations who have fallen victim to the oppression and exploitation of the world economic order. This includes the peoples of color of the United States, as they too have been victims of a brutal and racist economic structure which exploited and still exploits the labor of such groups as Asians, Blacks, and Chicanos, and invaded and still occupies the homelands of such groups as the Puerto Ricans, American Indians, and native Hawaiian people. We therefore find it necessary to reeducate ourselves to the various forms of exploitation and oppression. We must strive to understand more than just the basics of human rights. We must seek to understand the historical roots and contemporary ramifications of racism if Third World people are to liberate themselves from the economic and social chains they find themselves in.

An early copy of the TWC’s constitution. (The Princeton Archives)

It adds in another version:

“The Center is not only a social facility, it has become a place of educational and cultural activity in conjunction with its political purpose. Because the term Third World is inherently political, it is necessary that we be active in political work and in educating ourselves to the various forms of exploitation and oppression. We must strive to understand more than just the basics of human rights. We must look for the underlying conditions faced by our peoples and seek alternative modes of economic and political structures so that Third World peoples and their nations will no longer be agents and pawns of the two superpowers (the United States and Russia.)”

Another copy of the constitution and the preamble. (The Princeton Archives) 

The Center also opposed the “ruling class values and culture that characterizes Princeton University.”

In November 1984, TWC’s board demanded that non-white students should have the right to bar whites from their meetings on campus. They also demanded minorities-only meetings with the deans. (John Hurley, “Black students, university debate closed meeting policy,” The Daily Princetonian, November 29, 1984). The ban was frankly unnecessary, since whites were made to feel unwelcome at the meetings if they were invited at all, but the TWC continued to press for it, arguing, too, that blacks ought to be able to bar whites from attending events aimed at discussion of “sensitive” racial issues.

“The administration, by denying us these [blacks-only] meetings, is saying that we don’t have specific needs that have to be addressed this way,” David Jackson, ’87, a fellow TWC member, told the Daily Princetonian after the university officials finally rejected its proposal to hold racially limited meetings.

But despite the radical and racialist character of the TWC, Michelle Robinson was an active participant and may have been attracted by that very radicalism.

“The Third World Center was our life,” Angela Acree, her best friend at Princeton, told The Boston Globe in June 2008. “We hung out there, we partied there, we studied there [in Liberation Hall].”

“Not a day went by that I did not see Michelle at the Center,” Czerni Brasuelle, TWC’s director at the time, told the Daily Princetonian in its November 5, 2008 issue.

Brasuelle, director of the Third World Center from 1981 to 1983 and a friend and mentor to Michelle during and after Princeton, was herself no stranger to controversy. According to a Daily Princetonian columnist, she described the campus climate as “racist” and worried about “a lack of understanding of Third World [non-white] people.” (Barton Gellman, “Rebuilding Race Relations,” Daily Princetonian, October 16, 1981). In May 1983, Brasuelle joined calls for a minority dean, writing that “[Princeton] cannot afford to ignore our commitment to Affirmative Action with token representation of Latinos on the administrative level.” Michelle’s mentor left Princeton for a position as vice president of academic affairs at Kentucky State University at the end of 1983.

In April 1983, the Third World Center held an emergency meeting where it approved a draft statement, prepared jointly with the student government’s race relations committee, calling for racial preferences and set-asides in the hiring of administrators.

“There should be someone representing Third World views in the administration,” explained Raghu Murthy ,’85, who sat on the board with Michelle. (Daily Princetonian, May 6, 1983). The TWC wanted one of its board members to be given a vote and a voice in the administrative hiring process. (Daily Princetonian, September 20, 1983). Ultimately, Dean of Students Eugene Lowe caved, agreeing he would “make an effort to identify some candidates who are of Latino background.” (Daily Princetonian,  September 20, 1983.)

For the TWC, this departure set off alarm bells because it meant someone more moderate might be appointed to run the Center. TWC members demanded that they be given representation on its board. Michelle Robinson joined a statement saying that students associated with the center be given a role in picking its director and was quoted in the Daily Princetonian as demanding that the dean place more TWC members on the search committee.  More >>

Canadian freedom of expression: Pastor Terry Jones denied entry into Canada

freedom of expression canadian style. extremist muslims & refugees are welcome. please more  Khadrs

GlobalToronto Thu, Oct 11: Florida Pastor Terry Jones has been denied entry into Canada on Thursday, hours before a scheduled debate on free speech in Toronto.

Eric Holder participated in ‘armed’ takeover of former Columbia University ROTC office

The Daily Caller

Future U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is seen in the 1973 yearbook of Columbia University in New York City. He graduated from the Ivy League school that year. (Image courtesy of "University Archives, Columbia University in the City of New York)

As a freshman at Columbia University in 1970, future Attorney General Eric Holder participated in a five-day occupation of an abandoned Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) headquarters with a group of black students later described by the university’s Black Students’ Organization as “armed,” The Daily Caller has learned.

Department of Justice spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler has not responded to questions from The Daily Caller about whether Holder himself was armed — and if so, with what sort of weapon.

Holder was then among the leaders of the Student Afro-American Society (SAAS), which demanded that the former ROTC office be renamed the “Malcolm X Lounge.” The change, the group insisted, was to be made “in honor of a man who recognized the importance of territory as a basis for nationhood.”

Black radicals from the same group also occupied the office of Dean of Freshman Henry Coleman until their demands were met. Holder has publicly acknowledged being a part of that action.

The details of the student-led occupation, including the claim that the raiders were “armed,” come from a deleted Web page of the Black Students’ Organization (BSO) at Columbia, a successor group to the SAAS. Contemporary newspaper accounts in The Columbia Daily Spectator, a student newspaper, did not mention weapons.

Holder, now the United States’ highest-ranking law enforcement official, has given conflicting accounts of this episode during college commencement addresses at Columbia, but both the BSO’s website and the Daily Spectator have published facts that conflict with his version of events.

Holder has bragged about his involvement in the “rise of black consciousness” protests at Columbia.

Also: Juarez drug cartel leader 'El Diego' was captured with Fast and Furious weapons

9/11’s Aftermath of Lethal Tolerance

Canada Free Press/  Alan Caruba

The one thing I have never understood is the way Americans seem to refuse to accept the fact that the worst attack on the homeland since Pearl Harbor was planned, funded, carried out by Muslims, and was celebrated by Muslims around the world.

Perhaps the reluctance to relate the attack to “a religion” had to do with the way whole generations of Americans since the 1960s have passed through schools that indoctrinated them to believe that America has been invading other nations wrongly, supporting allies like Israel wrongly, and deserved to be attacked because of it.  More >>

Islam, Authoritarianism and Intolerance

Why Nations Fail/

thedailybeast.com

Yesterday’s news might be seen as a confirmation of Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations idea, pitting Islam against the West.

First was the headline news that Islamist militants, angered by a trailer posted on YouTube depicting Prophet Muhammed as a sexual predator, homosexual and child molester, attacked the US Consulate in Benghazi, set the Consulate ablaze, and killed ambassador Christopher J. Stevens and three members of his staff. There were violent protests elsewhere, including in Egypt.

Second was the perhaps equally disturbing news from Pakistan of an 11-year-old illiterate Christian girl (described as “slow” by the news reports) now freed from jail but still running from the mob, threatening to kill and burn her and her family, because of “blasphemy” (she’s accused of burning pages from an Islamic textbook).

Add to this the general poverty and authoritarianism of the Middle East and North Africa and other Islamic countries (especially if you leave out oil wealth), the case seems open and shut.

There are many versions of why Islam is at the root of authoritarianism, backwardness and poverty in these countries. Perhaps the most famous one argues that Islam, by failing to recognize the separation of religion and state, naturally leads to authoritarianism. In a now famous book, What Went Wrong, historian Bernard Lewis popularized a version of this idea. He wrote, for example:

The idea that any group of persons, any kind of activities, any part of human life is in any sense outside the scope of religious law and jurisdiction is alien to the Muslim thought (page 100).

He went on to compare Islam to Christianity in this regard:

From the beginning, Christians were taught, both by precept and practice, to distinguish between God and Caesar and between the different duties owed to each of the two. Muslims received no such instruction. (Page 103).

Though popular, this view doesn’t seem entirely well grounded in history or scripture.

First, as we argued in Why Nations Fail, there is another obvious explanation for extractive economic and political institutions in the Middle East and North Africa: the legacy of Ottoman rule and institutions.

Second, the close relationship between politics and religion is not confined to Islam. Rulers have used religion to cement their power or support their attempts to conquer new lands throughout the ages. For example, though colonialism was not a religious endeavor, religious rhetoric and the project of converting heathens to Christianity did play a role in motivating the Spanish and the English alike and provided a pretty good “cover story”.

Third, it is true that secularism, in any of its forms, has been all but absent in Muslim lands, but this is at least as much because politics has co-opted religion rather than the other way around.

Fourth, there is really nothing in the Koran or even the Hadith about constitutions or how the government should be organized and operated.

But the question remains: it’s unlikely to be a coincidence, nor easily explained by the Ottoman legacy, that most Muslim countries are not democratic and almost totally lack civil society, and most branches of political Islam are intolerant and often violent.  More >>

Ofensiva de los extremistas

Espinaxiones/

El cadaver de Chris-Stevens arrastrado por las calles

Con el crimen del embajador en Libia se han anotado un gooooool los extremistas.

Ya alguien recordaba los tiempos de Jimmy Carter cuando solamente falto ponerle un par de plumas en el culo y venderlo como guanajo en el primer mercado agropecuario.

Obama, aunque quieran pensar que ha utilizado los drones y liquidado a Osama Bin Laden tiene muchas debilidades junto con todos los democratas cuando no y debilidades, es un cobarde apaciguador nato (Netanyau visita la ONU y Hussein no puede atenderlo por asuntos de "agenda", lease simpatias mayores con los arabes que con los judios) y ademas parece dificil que no salga para la desgracia de otros 4 años.

Un amigo que conoci despues que salio de prision me contaba cuando ganaron la primera huelga de hambre del presidio politico historico, Aquella duro 25 dias y por supuesto estaban muchos conocidos entre los cuales Pedro Luis Boitel que al parecer siempre estaba de huelga en huelga. Cuando aquello les hicieron algunas concesiones y en particular movieron a Ramiro Valdes y pusieron a Sergio del Valle.

Hubo posteriormente otra huelga que duro 37 dias. En esa algun obispo o cardenal visito en la carcel al Padre Loredo y debiendo recibir las pleitesias por su mayor jerarquia se le arrodillo llorando a Loredo para pedirle que intercediera y se suspendiera aquella huelga a la cual no se le haria ninguna concesion.

Opinaba mi amigo que habia estado en ambas por compromisos de amistad presidiaria mas que por convencimiento que en el caso de la huelga de los 37 dias las demandas y razones para declararla no permitian que fueran hechas ningun tipo de concesiones. Era el fracaso por el fracaso aunque hubiera llegado a costar alguna vida.

A los españoles no les interesa el caso de Cuba ideologicamente, solamente tienen un interes practico (economia e intereses de grandes empresas) y hasta politico si de tal cosa pueden obtener ventajas para el partido de cada cual.

Carromero va a poner el preso y la carta de cambio y es mucho menos importante que Alan Gross asi que, que se joda. Y Paya, ya muerto o asesinado, es un obstaculo de seriedad y honestidad ademas de su trayectoria cristiana inconstestable que ha sido eliminado y la memoria de la gente es muy corta.