This video has very, very graphic images. This video may truly disturb you. I could barely stomach this myself.
So, we’re going to stick our heads in the sand, are we? With the distribution of of these videos it would be very hard for anyone to plead the I-don’t-know-I-never-heard-it schtick.
Neither immediate withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan nor surrender is an option. That is, unless you submit to Islam…
UPDATE
Well, it shouldn’t come as any surprise to you by now that the Jihadists have successfully shut down LIVELEAK.com’s broadcast of FITNA. This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone following the thuggish chicanery of the Jihadists since it their modus operandi to censor, intimidate, or otherwise kill those who don’t agree with them. They have done just the former two to LIVELEAK.com and haven’t resorted to the latter just yet.
The Muslims protested this movie by calling it anti-Muslim and that it’s spreading lies and stirring up hatred. The movie said that Islam is a violent religion that condones hatred, lies and violence.
So, what did the Muslims do to protest?
Spewed hatred, violence and lies… A burnt effigy of a person they dislike is now acceptable TV entertainment, I suppose.
Has anyone heard Barack Obama specifically denounce, repuidate, or otherwise condemn the remarks made by Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright?
I have not, and I doubt anyone has either in public or in private. Because I think the simple fact of the matter is Obama hasn’t done it.
One can easily get lost in Obama’s soaring rhetoric, his wide smile and his sonorous hypnotic voice and not notice he hasn’t yet denounced his “former” pastor. it is no accident that Jeremiah Wright has canceled speaking engagements in Texas and Florida, and it speaks to collusion between Obama and Wright.
Just look at Wright, the man. If Obama truly denounced, I do not think he would hesitate to denounce Obama as an Uncle Tom. He did just as much to Colin Powell and Condi Rice. He also denounced Oprah after she left his church.
And yesterday, far from distancing himself from Wright and the Trinity United Church of Christ, whose new pastor is continuing on in the Wright tradition of utter obscenities from the pulpit, Obama praised his church and defended Wright.
Although the question he had asked would not have required him to touch on Wright, Obama praised his church.
“Everybody is welcome to come to Trinity United Church of Christ on 95th Street. It is a wonderful, welcoming church,” he said. “If you were there on any given Sunday, folks would be doing the same things in church at Trinity as they do everywhere else. They’re praising Jesus. They’ve got a choir singing. It’s a very good choir. And the pastor is trying to teach a lesson to connect scripture to our everyday lives.”
Obama said Wright had said some “very objectionable things when I wasn’t in church on those particular days.”
This is, of course, rubbish. People have heard about Wright’s extremist, racist remarks all across the country since the 1980’s. It’s just well-known that you don’t get ahead in Chicago politics unless you get the nod from “Reverend” Wright. So much for playing the misunderstood victim.
“I do have to remind people though this is somebody who was preaching three sermons at least a week for 30 years and got boiled down and found five or six of his most offensive statements and boiled that down to…half minute sound clip and just played it over and over again partly because it spoke to some of the racial divisions that we have in this country and tapped into those divisions.”
Those “cherry picked” comments that Obama accused his critics of using in an endless loop is not the creation of his critics, but some of those offensive comments were in the DVD’s Obama SOLD to churches around the country at his campaign stops. These comments were his church’s compilations of what they’re proud of.
It is clear that Obama has not rejected Wright or his Black Nationalist Church. And if anyone has any doubts about what Obama’s church is about please visit their website and read their lauded “The Black Values System“, of which they’re are adherents.
THE BLACK VALUE SYSTEM
Trinity United Church of Christ adopted the Black Value System, written by the Manford Byrd Recognition Committee, chaired by the late Vallmer Jordan in 1981.
Dr. Manford Byrd, our brother in Christ, withstood the ravage of being denied his earned ascension to the number one position in the Chicago School System. His dedication to the pursuit of excellence, despite systematic denials, has inspired the congregation of Trinity United Church of Christ. Prayerfully, we have called upon the wisdom of all past generations of suffering Blacks for guidance in fashioning an instrument of Black self-determination, the Black Value System.
Beginning in 1982, an annual Black Value System – Educational Scholarship in the name of Dr. Byrd was instituted. The first recipient of the Dr. Manford Byrd Award, which is given annually to the man or woman who best exemplifies the Black Value System, was our brother, Dr. Manford Byrd.
These Black Ethics must be taught and exemplified in homes, churches, nurseries and schools, wherever Blacks are gathered. They consist of the following concepts:
1. Commitment to God. “The God of our weary years” will give us the strength to give up prayerful passivism and become Black Christian Activists, soldiers for Black freedom and the dignity of all humankind.
2. Commitment to the Black Community. The highest level of achievement for any Black person must be a contribution of strength and continuity of the Black Community.
3. Commitment to the Black Family. The Black family circle must generate strength, stability and love, despite the uncertainty of externals, because these characteristics are required if the developing person is to withstand warping by our racist competitive society.
Those Blacks who are blessed with membership in a strong family unit must reach out and expand that blessing to the less fortunate.
4. Dedication to the Pursuit of Education. We must forswear anti-intellectualism. Continued survival demands that each Black person be developed to the utmost of his/her mental potential despite the inadequacies of the formal education process. “Real education” fosters understanding of ourselves as well as every aspect of our environment. Also, it develops within us the ability to fashion concepts and tools for better utilization of our resources, and more effective solutions to our problems. Since the majority of Blacks have been denied such learning, Black Education must include elements that produce high school graduates with marketable skills, a trade or qualifications for apprenticeships, or proper preparation for college.
Basic education for all Blacks should include Mathematics, Science, Logic, General Semantics, Participative Politics, Economics and Finance, and the Care and Nurture of Black minds.
5. Dedication to the Pursuit of Excellence. To the extent that we individually reach for, even strain for excellence, we increase, geometrically, the value and resourcefulness of the Black Community. We must recognize the relativity of one’s best; this year’s best can be bettered next year. Such is the language of growth and development. We must seek to excel in every endeavor.
6. Adherence to the Black Work Ethic. “It is becoming harder to find qualified people to work in Chicago.” Whether this is true or not, it represents one of the many reasons given by businesses and industries for deserting the Chicago area. We must realize that a location with good facilities, adequate transportation and a reputation for producing skilled workers will attract industry. We are in competition with other cities, states and nations for jobs. High productivity must be a goal of the Black workforce.
7. Commitment to Self-Discipline and Self-Respect. To accomplish anything worthwhile requires self-discipline. We must be a community of self-disciplined persons if we are to actualize and utilize our own human resources, instead of perpetually submitting to exploitation by others. Self-discipline, coupled with a respect for self, will enable each of us to be an instrument of Black Progress and a model for Black Youth.
8. Disavowal of the Pursuit of “Middleclassness.” Classic methodology on control of captives teaches that captors must be able to identify the “talented tenth” of those subjugated, especially those who show promise of providing the kind of leadership that might threaten the captor’s control.
Those so identified are separated from the rest of the people by:
1. Killing them off directly, and/or fostering a social system that encourages them to kill off one another.
2. Placing them in concentration camps, and/or structuring an economic environment that induces captive youth to fill the jails and prisons.
3. Seducing them into a socioeconomic class system which, while training them to earn more dollars, hypnotizes them into believing they are better than others and teaches them to think in terms of “we” and “they” instead of “us.”
4. So, while it is permissible to chase “middleclassness” with all our might, we must avoid the third separation method – the psychological entrapment of Black “middleclassness.” If we avoid this snare, we will also diminish our “voluntary” contributions to methods A and B. And more importantly, Black people no longer will be deprived of their birthright: the leadership, resourcefulness and example of their own talented persons.
9. Pledge to Make the Fruits of All Developing and Acquired Skills Available to the Black Community.
10. Pledge to Allocate Regularly, a Portion of Personal Resources for Strengthening and Supporting Black Institutions.
11. Pledge Allegiance to All Black Leadership Who Espouse and Embrace the Black Value System.
12. Personal Commitment to Embracement of the Black Value System. To measure the worth and validity of all activity in terms of positive contributions to the general welfare of the Black Community and the Advancement of Black People towards freedom.
Take this church at their word. I am so glad that the great majority of Blacks in our country reject this excrement out of hand, but this is Obama’s church, the same church he’s just recently praised.
Is it any wonder that his church has deep affinities with Louis Farrakhan?
As the MSM goes through epileptic-like ecstasy over Obama’s speech and as Obama’s campaign are becoming more and more critical of whoever criticizes Obama, we have Charles Krauthammer writing this bit of sanity and rationality into the national discourse.
He raises good questions. Let’s see if Obama can answer them in a straightforward manner.
His defense rests on two central propositions: (a) moral equivalence and (b) white guilt.
(a) Moral equivalence. Sure, says Obama, there’s Wright, but at the other “end of the spectrum” there’s Geraldine Ferraro, opponents of affirmative action and his own white grandmother, “who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.” But did she shout them in a crowded theater to incite, enrage and poison others?
“I can no more disown [Wright] than I can my white grandmother.” What exactly was Grandma’s offense? Jesse Jackson himself once admitted to the fear he feels from the footsteps of black men on the street. And Harry Truman was known to use epithets for blacks and Jews in private, yet is revered for desegregating the armed forces and recognizing the first Jewish state since Jesus’s time. He never spread racial hatred. Nor did Grandma.
Yet Obama compares her to Wright. Does he not see the moral difference between the occasional private expression of the prejudices of one’s time and the use of a public stage to spread racial lies and race hatred?
(b) White guilt. Obama’s purpose in the speech was to put Wright’s outrages in context. By context, Obama means history. And by history, he means the history of white racism. Obama says, “We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country,” and then he proceeds to do precisely that. What lies at the end of his recital of the long train of white racial assaults from slavery to employment discrimination? Jeremiah Wright, of course.
This contextual analysis of Wright’s venom, this extenuation of black hate speech as a product of white racism, is not new. It’s the Jesse Jackson politics of racial grievance, expressed in Ivy League diction and Harvard Law nuance. That’s why the speech made so many liberal commentators swoon: It bathed them in racial guilt while flattering their intellectual pretensions. An unbeatable combination.
But Obama was supposed to be new. He flatters himself as a man of the future transcending the anger of the past as represented by his beloved pastor. Obama then waxes rhapsodic about the hope brought by the new consciousness of the young people in his campaign. Then answer this, Senator: If Wright is a man of the past, why would you expose your children to his vitriolic divisiveness? This is a man who curses America and who proclaimed moral satisfaction in the deaths of 3,000 innocents at a time when their bodies were still being sought at Ground Zero. It is not just the older congregants who stand and cheer and roar in wild approval of Wright’s rants, but young people as well. Why did you give $22,500 just two years ago to a church run by a man of the past who infects the younger generation with precisely the racial attitudes and animus you say you have come unto us to transcend?
This is one of those either/or situations. Either Chris Matthews is correct when he said that Obama’s speech was…
… a speech worthy of Abraham Lincoln
… the best speech ever given on race in this country. One that went beyond “I have a dream,” to “I have lived the dream but have also lived in this country.
… I think this is the kind of speech I think first graders should see, people in the last year of college should see before they go out in the world. This should be, to me, an American tract. Something that you just check in with, now and then, like reading Great Gatsby and Huckleberry Finn.
OR it is what Charles Krauthammer said. That Obama’s speech was a sophisticated Harvardly exercise in duplicity.
All three major presidential candidates have had their passport files breached, the State Department confirmed Friday.
Both Hillary Clinton and John McCain were informed that their files were improperly accessed, after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice apologized to Barack Obama for a similar violation.
“We do feel that the system worked, but the system isn’t perfect,” State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said at a briefing Friday afternoon.
Obama’s campaign called the breach of his records “outrageous” when the news was first brought to their attention Thursday, and even suggested political motives were behind it. But Friday morning the case swiftly expanded.
McCormack said the individual who accessed Obama’s files also reviewed McCain’s file. This contract employee has been reprimanded, but not fired.
The State Department already fired two contract employees for inappropriately examining Obama’s file on three separate dates this year.
My first thought about this entire business is, “Why do outside government contractors have access to these files in the first place?”
My second thought stems from State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, “We do feel that the system worked”. No, sir, the system did not work. These are very high level, very public people. Indeed, the breach occurred with all three Presidential candidates, and it is very disturbing the laxity in which this occurred. “Contractors”, not government employees viewed these files. Heck, one of them viewed them on something as casual as a training exercise.
I personally don’t like how our government has outsourced so much of its duties to “contractors”. We do it to defense technologies, to our military by hiring mercenaries— it seems to be the trend on multiple levels of government. And when something goes wrong, as it almost invariably will, it’s not the government’s fault for resorting to contractors. It’s the contractors’ fault for not behaving as the government would have them behave.
I listened attentively to Obama’s speech earlier this week. It was in the early morning hours for me when Obama began his speech. I was sipping black Folgers coffee and trying to down a bowl of maple sugar oatmeal. Normally, I would go about this mechanically, half awake, but not that day.
Barack Obama was to give the speech of his political life in response to the controversy surrounding the racist, inflammatory statements of his pastor and his relationship with him. In a word, this speech could make or break him as a political figure in America.
As he gave the speech, I was uplifted in his soaring eloquence. This man can make the most mundane of statements full of profundity. I thought to myself, “You know, perhaps this is what America needs. A black man to bridge the partisanship and the vindictiveness of these past few years. Who knows?” I was riding high on the flowery words of this man, by his seemly candor and the gravity of his hypnotic voice.
And then I listened to the content of his speech. I paused. I paused again.
The longer I listened, and the more I thought about it afterward, the more angry I became. Not because of the injustice and the eloquence with which he described race relations in America, but because I found his speech deplorable and outrageous. And I wasn’t appalled and angry about just one of the things he said earlier this week. Indeed, much of what I found utterly offensive had a layered, a compound nature.
Gosh, where do I begin? Perhaps, I can begin with where this controversy began. At feet of Pastor Wright. Here is an assortment of offensive statements from this pastor.
In response to Pastor Wright’s bigoted statements being splashed all across the Internet and on TV, Obama made gave this interview at MSNBC:
Apparently, Obama’s stumbling half-hearted response at MSNBC wasn’t enough to quell the growing controversy. In fact, it fueled the controversy as it increased in circulation around the net and on TV. Obama’s polling numbers plummeted double digits in less than a week. Politically, Obama had to do something or else he’s sunk.
Barack Obama enters the stage Tuesday morning and gives his “Race Speech”.
Let me be the first to say that I am also minority. I am a Vietnamese-American man, and if I heard my priest or preacher say these kinds of remarks, I’d get up and leave at the very least. This is a hot button issue with me. I have lost good friends over these issues of race and anti-American hatred.
There is no excuse for it. Period. Any rationalizations to excuse this sort of venom could be, if I were generous, at best self-serving.
I have to admit, though. The man has audacity, but he does not offer much hope. He basically stood on stage for roughly forty-five minutes and lectured America like a schoolmaster to a bunch of grubby children.
This is simply outrageous!
Obama has befriended a pastor and has attended a church who has spilled bigotry and racism for the twenty years and he has the audacity to lecture America on the issue of race? Even as he has been caught in a boldfaced LIE?
As the video above clearly shows, Obama said he has never heard Wright say these inflammatory, racist remarks either personally or in the pews. He repeated this statement on at least one of his stump speeches. However, in his speech on race, he admitted to hearing Pastor Wright say these things.
“Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely — just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.”
Not only did he just freely confess he lied to his supporters, to the Democratic Party and to the entire nation, he went on to contradict himself again in the same speech by reasserting his original lie. He said:
Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions — the good and the bad — of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.
But in his legalistic, lawyerly mannerisms, he phrased it to where people can rationalize his double contradictions away.
He said, “Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes.”
Note that he didn’t delineate what “controversial” was. Was it Wright’s hatred of America? Was it Wright’s assertion that America created AIDS to commit genocide against Blacks? Was it his statement that America deserved 9/11? Was it All Of The Above? Given that Wright has made incredible accusations against white people and is well-known for his extremist tirades, one must come to only a few possible conclusions about Obama’s statements.
Either Obama is so woefully ignorant of what his pastor has consistently said for the past twenty years that his blindness is comparable to having rose-colored glasses super-glued to his eyes— which disqualifies him for the Presidency off the top since good judgment is his sole basis for running— or, Obama is lying through his teeth to America.
In my estimate, man who graduated from Harvard Law School, who served in the Illinois Legislature, who has served in the US Senate and whose political acumen is shrewd enough to best the Clinton Machine in most of the primaries thus far— it is improbable that a man with all these qualities should be so blind to what his intimate friend says from the pulpit. It’s possible he didn’t know. But either way, this should disqualify him from the Presidency.
There are just so much arrogance and mendacity and duplicity in what he said Tuesday morning. Many bloggers and pundits noted the ease in which he chucked his white grandma under the train when it became politically expedient to do so.
No, actually throwing her under the train wasn’t political expedient in the sense that she became a liability to his campaign. It was worse. He equated his grandmother with Jeremiah Wright and his racist tirades simply because he knew her and she happened to be white. How else was he going to make pastor Wright’s statements morally equivalent?
He said, “I can no more disown him [Wright] than I can my white grandmother — a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.“
But as Steve Sailer pointed out on his blog, according to Senator Barack Obama’s own words, his reference to his grandma was… well, misleading.
Well, no, according to Obama’s 1995 book, it is not at all true that she “once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street.” Instead, she once confessed her fear of one aggressive black beggar who didn’t pass by her but instead confronted her, demanded money, and then gave her — an intelligent, level-headed woman who had worked her way up to a mid-level corporate management position — good reason to believe he would have violently mugged her if her bus hadn’t pulled up.
If this was some doofus politician like Bush or Biden who retold the story in a misleading fashion, you might view it as just their usual struggle with using the English language to get across what they really kind of, sort of mean. But Obama is so superb with words that it’s perfectly reasonable to hold him accountable for choosing to slander his own living grandmother for his political advantage.
So, in responding to the new controversy, not over what Wright said but what he said about his grandmother, Obama said this:
“The point I was making was not that my grandmother harbors any racial animosity, but that she is a typical white person. If she sees somebody on the street that she doesn’t know - there’s a reaction in her that’s been bred into our experiences that don’t go away and sometimes come out in the wrong way and that’s just the nature of race in our society. We have to break through it. What makes me optimistic is you see each generation feeling less like that. And that’s pretty powerful stuff.”
So, on Tuesday she was the grandmother “who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe,” and on Thursday she’s not racist (unlike his pastor) and doesn’t hold any “racial animosity”. Nope, according to him, she’s just ” typical white person”.
Surely Obama didn’t mean that a “typical white person” was a person who “on more than one occasion” would “utter racial or ethnic stereotypes” that’s just plain embarrassing, right?
Listening to Barack Obama talk is like trying to see through squid ink. He piles contradictions upon contradictions; asserting one thing now, then asserting it’s opposite later. And if someone quotes one statement or its contradiction, he’s accused of “cherry picking” his comments, and once that accusation is lodged, he’ll frame the whole issue in another way. Thus, you have three different stances from Obama. And you’re not allowed to quote any of them without fear of being charged a racist.
For instance, he’s called the attention going to his pastor’s comments “a distraction”. Days later in his speech on race, he said, “race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now.” (Of course, not. How else is he going to play the race card?) Maybe tomorrow, he’ll assert once again that while race is an important issue, it’s a distraction from his policies on health care, the war, etc, etc.
When you explicate all his flowery language and excise all his pseudo-heroic stances behind the podium, when you take his speech in total, what you’re left with is a man telling the American people that the hatred of black extremists against America is legitimate. Obama made it clear that he disagrees with “God Damn America” (To what degree, he didn’t really say, and disagree is a very soft, ambiguous term, isn’t it?), but he also rationalized such hatred, and insisted that we must find its roots.
He said, “to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.”
This is psychobabble hogwash.
Hatred is hatred. Bigotry is bigotry. Neither I nor anyone has the obligation in life to understand another person’s hatred and bigotry, and we certainly don’t have the obligation to vivisect another person’s psychological makeup in order to treat them as an immortal being made in the image of God.
And what about the person doing the hating? Does he get a pass because we are being asked to look at his “roots” and not what he does and says?
Here’s the word of the day. A friend emailed me this definition today and I thought it would be useful, if not insightful, to see how prevalent you think this word is in our society.
Crimestop
Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity. But stupidity is not enough. On the contrary, orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control over one’s own mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist over his body.
This definition is from George Orwell’s famous book 1984, which, by the way, isn’t taught in many Southern California schools anymore.
It is probably lost on many, if not most, Americans that the U.S. military is not a democratic institution. And IT SHOULDN’T BE.
For centuries and still to this day across the entire face of the globe, military juntas and generals and warlords rule countries and regions. They mash the civilian populace under their thumbs and brutally aggregate power and resources onto themselves. It’s called a dictatorship.
It is the singular achievement and glory of America and the Anglo-Saxon tradition that we have created a system of government where the military serves the people and not the other way around. Dissent in the military to civilian rule, or for military officers to question their civilian masters should not be tolerated in any way, shape or form.
This is what makes Senator Harry Reid’s criticisms of Admiral Fallon’s resignation and other criticisms from Democrats so breathtakingly ignorant and dangerous. For political one-up-manship, Reid and others have ignored the long-standing traditions of absolute civilian rule in this Republic.
Reid called Admiral Fallon’s presumed forced resignation “yet another example that independence and the frank, open airing of experts’ views are not welcomes in this administration.”
An article at the American Chronicle wrote, “So goes the loss of another excellent military expert that did not agree with our “all hat / no cattle” President.”
This article and Senator Reid’s comments have missed the point entirely. They presume that the military has the implicit right to challenge, dissent and contradict their Commander-in-Chief. No, they don’t have that right. PERIOD. To allow it would bring us closer to losing our democracy.
Any politician, Democrat or Republican, should be zealous in maintaining our centuries old tradition of civilian rule.