Ethnic Ashkenazim Against Zionist Israel

Holocaust Guilt-Tripping from MTV

2010-01-05T09:42:00.004-05:00

The subtext of the following two video-shorts from MTV is Zionist.

They train the Western non-Jewish viewer that he must identify primarily with the alleged Jewish victims of the Holocaust to the exclusion of any other identification that might decrease sympathy with Jews anywhere in the world or - to be more specific - with Israeli Zionists.

The clips are impressively ahistorical.

The Holocaust could have happened to people of other ethnic groups if outrageously disproportionate numbers of people belonging to such ethnic groups were

engaging in massive worldwide financial fraud and white slaving as well as
committing targeted assassinations, sabotage, terrorism, mass murder, ethnic cleansing and genocide on epic scale

throughout the Czarist and Soviet empires or in historic Palestine while they were simultaneously

subverting or
spying on

governments throughout Central Europe, Western Europe and the Americas.

In reality the false narratization of the Holocaust corresponds almost exactly to the Jewish-Zionist-incited treatment of Arab and Muslim immigrants to the West over the last decade.

The videoclips also recall Pastor Niemöller's superficial and decontextualized sound-bite analysis of German Nazi policy.

The idea that the Holocaust happened to people just like us was an implicit theme of The Holocaust series in which Meryl Streep starred. This trite Hollywood TV production had such a large impact on German pop culture that it tremendously affected German domestic and international politics.

Without such constant ongoing Jewish Zionist propagandization, decent human beings would certainly sympathize entirely with the native population of Palestine and with those non-Jews, whom Jews have historically abused and exploited since the beginning of the Middle Ages.

The entire human race should scorn racist murderous genocidal Jewish Zionists, who have no problems with support, participation, or benefit from the conquest, the ethnic cleansing, and the plundering of Palestine.

Drôle de message qu'a voulu faire passer MTV avec cette Vidé

by gloubi77

Drôle de message 2 qu'a voulu faire passer MTV avec cette..
by gloubi77

[JSF] Uncritical Consumers of Zionist Propaganda

2010-01-05T12:12:00.007-05:00

Followup to Noa does a 'Benny Morris,' calls Hamas 'Nazi-like'

Next to Christian Zionists Israeli Jews of Arab background are some of the most uncritical consumers of Zionist propaganda.

BTW, to my non-native understanding of Modern Israeli Hebrew, I have the impression that the language is much harsher than it is being translated. For example when the speaker says "son of a whore," the English rendering gives "son of a bitch." Modern Israeli Hebrew distinguishes the two phrases, "son of a whore" is a worse slur than "son of a bitch."

"Hitler was right", so say two angry (and ignorant) Israelis

Do you remember the controversy about the messaging of protests of the Gaza massacre one year ago?

So watch this.

What you see is passer-bys responding to Jewish protesters against the evictions of Palestinian families from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in Jerusalem. They shout "Hitler was right," express regret that the protesters have not been exterminated, and do the Nazi salute.

This is more complicated that it sounds to those not into Israeli sociology. The two Israelis, Jews of Arab origins, identify the protesters as Ashkenazi (Jews of European origin), and clearly intend their words as a slur for Ashkenazis. In Israel, Jews of Arab origins have been systematically discriminated against and oppressed since the beginning of the state. The great success of the Ashkenazi dominated Labor Party was to create a linkage between peace with Palestinians and intensified racism against Jews of Arab origin. This is the foul fruit of that achievement.

I wonder if the Anti Defamation League will have something to say about it. But I won't hold my breath.

PS. They also heap insults on the Oslo architect Yossi Beilin, with whom the protesters have in fact very little in common. With these insults I am in agreement.

[Malaysia Insider] ‘Allah’ ruling is not a challenge to Islam — Leslie Lau

2010-01-03T07:34:00.005-05:00

Followup to [Herald Malaysia] Malaysia, Allah, and God.

‘Allah’ ruling is not a challenge to Islam — Leslie Lau

KUALA LUMPUR, Jan 3 — Amid the uproar over the Kuala Lumpur High Court’s ruling allowing Catholics to describe the Christian God as “Allah” is the implication made by some Muslim leaders that the Islamic faith is under threat.

The underlying theme of the criticisms against the High Court ruling is that Muslims will be confused by the use of the word “Allah” by Catholics and that it is an insult to Islam to allow non-Muslims the right to utter the word “Allah.”

This morning’s Mingguan Malaysia suggested that it is is because Muslims are not united that they have come under this major threat to their way of life.

Many of these critics are missing the point, perhaps disingenuously so.

The point is that East Malaysians and some communities in peninsular Malaysia have been using the word to describe the Christian God for years.

This is because a large majority of East Malaysians use Bahasa Malaysia during their worship as the national language is the lingua franca of the region.

For most Malay-Muslims in West Malaysia, the exposure they have to Catholic and Christian churches has perhaps led many to somehow conclude that Christianity is a Western concept.

After all, many churches they see appear to only use English in their services. So why can’t they continue using English words like “God” or “Lord” in their services?

Herein lies the problem when there is not enough effort made to ensure inter-faith understanding. In this regard both Christians and Muslims alike should strive harder to understand each other and their respective beliefs.

The fact is Christian services in Malaysia are conducted in various languages, including Bahasa Malaysia, English, Chinese, Tamil and even French, to serve the different communities.

If there was an Arabic Christian community in Malaysia, there would be no doubt that Arabic language services would have been started by the churches. And the word “Allah” would indeed be used to describe the Christian God as it is used in churches in the Middle East.

The fact is Islam, Christianity and Judaism are the three major Abrahamic religions with common origins and values.

Instead of stoking the fires, it would be perhaps wise for both Muslim and Christian leaders to live up to their respective religious values to ensure there is no strife over the use of the word “Allah.”

It is important to note that the court ruling does not mean that the Christian hordes are at the city gates ready to subsume and take over all that Islam and Muslims value and treasure.

There is no war or crusade that is about to happen.

The Christian churches in Malaysia do not have any plans to bombard young Muslims with Christian literature using the word “Allah” to confuse and attract Muslims to leave their faith.

On New Year’s Day, millions of Muslims attended Friday prayers a day after the court ruling. They went to the mosque just as they have been doing for years.

Today is Sunday and hundreds of thousands of Catholics in Malaysia attended Mass just as they have been doing for years. And in Bahasa Malaysia services they used the word “Allah”.

In English services the word “God” was used. In Tamil and Chinese services the respective words for God was used.

This has been going on for many years since before the country gained independence, until the authorities got into the act and issued restrictions.

The Catholic Church then went down the legal route and the High Court has ruled in its favour.

Many Umno leaders, and even some from PAS, are now trying to portray this issue as a great challenge by the non-Muslims against the Malay/Muslims. It is incredible that Umno politicians consider Sabah and Sarawak as a vote bank but they are now supporting a denial of the constitutional rights of East Malaysians.

Suggestions have also been made that a lack of Malay unity has caused this court ruling to happen.

But simply put, one has got nothing to do with the other.

The Christians and Catholics are just asking that they be allowed to use the word “Allah” during their services and in their literature in Bahasa Malaysia. “Allah” will not be used in any other language.

Because for the Christians, this has been an issue about language — in Bahasa Malaysia the word for God is “Allah” while the word for Lord is “Tuhan”.

Instead of raising the alarm over the matter, politicians must now consider toning down their rhetoric.

Leslie Lau is consultant editor to The Malaysian Insider

[Herald Malaysia] Malaysia, Allah, and God

2010-01-03T01:19:00.005-05:00

Sheila Musaji mentions a sort of convergence of Islamophobic and Muslim chauvinist thinking in the article below.

Columbia Professor Joseph Massad has described a similar sort of convergence of Gay International (Umgeschlechtungsbewegung) ideology with modern conservative Islamic thought in the context of homosexual identity politics. See Origins: Zionist Gay Pubic Diplomacy.

Malaysia, Allah, and God
Published On December 30 , 2009
by Sheila Musaji

Back in 2007 when Malaysia The Malaysian Catholic Herald, a publication by and for Catholics in the country, was told that it could no longer use the word “Allah” to mean God because Allah was a “Muslim” term for God, The American Muslim (TAM) published a number of articles about this ridiculous non-issue. It is amazing that both Muslim extremists and Islamophobes hold the same beliefs on so many issues including this one. It seemed likely at that time that the government of Malaysia would be so embarrassed by the world reaction to this ban that the case would be dropped.

Backgrounder on the word “God” in Arabic and English, Joachim Martillo

Do Malaysian Muslims understand what ‘Allah’ means?, Farish A. Noor

Do Malaysian Muslims understand what ‘Allah’ means? Part 2, Farish A. Noor

Islamic Marcionism in Malaysia: Is Allah Equivalent to God?, Joachim Martillo

Just this week, this sad saga has a new chapter - The publisher of the Malaysian Catholic Herald has been told that it cannot challenge the home minister’s prohibition on the use of the word “Allah” in its publication, the High Court heard today.

The Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS) says it supports the Catholic Church’s fight to overturn a government ban on the use of the term ‘Allah’ to describe God in Christian texts. “I personally believe and PAS as well believe the way forward for a mutually respecting religious relationship, especially in a plural, multi-racial and multicultural society like Malaysia, is not to deny the right of others to use the name of Allah,” Zulfikar Ahmad, a PAS official, said.

The Malaysia High Court is to issue a final ruling on this Christian ‘Allah’ Case on December 30th. The government of Malaysia needs to hear from as many American Muslims as possible to let them know that there is no justification for such a ban. Please send them an email.

Embassy of Malaysia, Washington, D.C.

Malaysian Consulate, NYC

Malaysian Consulate, LA

Permanent Mission of Malaysia to the U.N.

In Re: الاهتمام الغربي بما نقوله عنه: مازن مطبقاني أنموذجاً

2009-12-13T06:46:00.007-05:00

Islamophobes Studying Arabs Studying America

I noticed that Daniel Pipes's organization has expanded its operations to include rock-throwing at Arab academics in Arab countries.

I sent the following email to Professor Mazen Mutabagani, who is assistant professor of Orientalism at King Saud University in Riyadh as well as head of the Occidental Studies Unit in the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies.

As-Salam Alaikum Professor Mutabagani,

I noticed your article posted at Mazin al-Mutabaqani: A Saudi View of Orientalism.

It was interesting to me because as a Jewish studies expert I have been studying the David Project and occasionally working to thwart its efforts here in the Boston area.

Despite the editors' preface I thought your piece was an accurate summary.

Because the study of the Jewish role in ME Studies probably belongs more to Jewish Studies than to ME Studies, you might be interested in my blog entitled Ethnic Ashkenazim Against Zionist Israel, which I created as a resource to help Jews and non-Jews stand up to Zionist manipulation and intimidation.

The following blog entries are possibly of relevance to your article:

Jewish, Christian, and Palestinian Holidays (search for Bernays -- Jewish academic distortions hardly started with Zionism)
Corrupt Jewish Social Networking Rules!
Zionist Infestation Causes US Incompetence
Gladwell Supports Hegemonic Zionist Discourse
Long Version of Tenure Wars
Singing HaTikvah while inciting a disastrous US invasion (a short piece my wife wrote about the David Project)
jewish social networking goes supreme!
Introduction: Jewish Historical Political Economics

There is probably a non-ideological component to the struggle by Jewish Zionist groups to control academic ME studies departments. Every job a non-Jew obtains in this field is one less for a Jew, and there is a feeling among Jewish endowers of academic chairs in Jewish in ME studies that these positions should be reserved for pro-Zionist Jews.

Nadia Abu el-Haj was particularly upsetting to Jewish donors and academic job seekers because she was a Palestinian American, who in effect specialized in Jewish or Israel studies even if she does not describe her focus in this way.

Wa'al Salam,

Joachim Martillo

President

Ethnic Ashkenazim Against Zionist Israel

In response Professor Mutabagani posted an article الاهتمام الغربي بما نقوله عنه: مازن مطبقاني أنموذجاً which along with some followup discussion can be found here.

[Bloomberg.Com] Obama's Incompetent Jewish Zionist Economists

2009-12-21T10:18:00.005-05:00

I have been too busy working on some finance software to pay much attention to this blog over the last week or so, but I really have to include this article as a followup to Summers' Incompetence: Washington, Harvard, Washington. The analysis fails to explain clearly both

how truly imbecilic Summers was and also
how elementary the risk management errors were that he and his colleagues made.

In a nutshell, former Harvard President Larry Summers, whom Obama appointed to be Director of the White House's National Economic Council, made investment decisions of such gross stupidity during his tenure that they almost blew away the University.

Most of Harvard's losses related to auction-rate securities. The blog entry Cornucopia of Conspiracy, Corruption, Manipulation discusses the trial of Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin, who were among other things accused of fraud in auction-rate securities deals.

Harvard Swaps Are So Toxic Even Summers Won’t Explain (Update3)

By Michael McDonald, John Lauerman and Gillian Wee

Dec. 18 (Bloomberg) -- Anne Phillips Ogilby, a bond attorney at one of Boston’s oldest law firms, on Oct. 31 last year relayed an urgent message from Harvard University, her client and alma mater, to the head of a Massachusetts state agency that sells bonds. The oldest and richest academic institution in America needed help getting a loan right away.

As vanishing credit spurred the government-led rescue of dozens of financial institutions, Harvard was so strapped for cash that it asked Massachusetts for fast-track approval to borrow $2.5 billion. Almost $500 million was used within days to exit agreements known as interest-rate swaps that Harvard had entered to finance expansion in Allston, across the Charles River from its main campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The swaps, which assumed that interest rates would rise, proved so toxic that the 373-year-old institution agreed to pay banks a total of almost $1 billion to terminate them. Most of the wrong-way bets were made in 2004, when Lawrence Summers, now President Barack Obama’s economic adviser, led the university. Cranes were recently removed from the construction site of a $1 billion science center that was to be the expansion’s centerpiece, a reminder of Summers’s ambition. The school said last week they will suspend work on the building early next year.

‘Case Study’

“For nonprofits, this is going to be written up as a case study of what not to do,” said Mark Williams, a finance professor at Boston University, who specializes in risk management and has studied Harvard’s finances. “Harvard throws itself out as a beacon of what to do in higher learning. Clearly, there have been major missteps.”

Harvard panicked, paying a penalty to get out of the swaps at the worst possible time. While the university’s misfortunes were repeated across the country last year, with nonprofits, municipalities and school districts spending billions of dollars on money-losing swaps, Harvard’s losses dwarfed those of other borrowers because of the size of its bet and the length of time before all its bonds would be sold.

In December 2004, Harvard completed agreements that locked in interest rates on $2.3 billion of bonds for future construction in Allston, with plans to borrow $1.8 billion in 2008 after they broke ground and the remaining $500 million through 2020. At the time, the benchmark overnight interest rate set by the U.S. Federal Reserve was 2.25 percent. The agreements backfired last year after central banks slashed lending rates to zero and the value of the contracts plunged, forcing the school to set aside cash.

‘Education Business’

Borrowers use swaps to match the type of interest rates on their debt with the rates on their income, which can help reduce borrowing costs. Lenders and speculators use swaps to profit from changes in the direction of interest rates. A bet on higher rates, for example, means paying fixed rates and receiving variable. At Harvard, nobody anticipated some interest rates going to zero, making the university’s financing a speculative disaster.

Harvard’s woes stemmed from misunderstanding its role, said Leon Botstein, president of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

“We shouldn’t be in the banking business, we should be in the education business,” Botstein said in a telephone interview.

Making Sense

The financing plan using the swaps was developed by the university’s financial team and discussed with the Debt Asset Management Committee, an oversight group, according to James Rothenberg, a member of the President and Fellows of Harvard College, or Harvard Corp., and the school’s treasurer, a board position.

The swaps plan was then approved by Harvard Corp. and implemented and monitored by the financial team, Rothenberg said in an e-mail.

Summers, who left Harvard in 2006, declined to comment. As president and as a member of the Harvard Corp., the university’s seven-member ruling body, Summers approved the decision to use the swaps.

The strategy made sense in the economic climate of the time, Rothenberg said in another e-mail. Rothenberg is chairman of Capital Research & Management Co., the investment advisory unit of Capital Group Cos. in Los Angeles.

“Rates were at then-historic lows, and the university was contemplating a major, multibillion-dollar campus expansion,” Rothenberg said. “In that context, locking in our financing costs so that we would achieve some budgetary certainty had definite advantages.”

Demanding Cash

Harvard’s failed bet helped plunge the school into a liquidity crisis in late 2008. Concerned that its losses might worsen, the school borrowed money to terminate the swaps at the nadir of their value, only to see the market for such agreements begin to recover weeks later.

Harvard would have avoided paying the costs of its swap obligations by waiting. Its banks, including JPMorgan Chase & Co., headed by James Dimon, were demanding cash collateral payments -- ultimately totaling almost $1 billion -- that Harvard in 2004 had agreed to pay if the value of the swaps fell. At least $1.8 billion of the swaps the school held were with JPMorgan, said a person familiar with the agreements. Dimon, a 1982 Harvard Business School alumnus, declined to comment on the agreements through a spokeswoman, Jennifer Zuccarelli.

Darkest Days

Drew Faust, Harvard’s president since 2007, said in an interview about the financial crisis she experienced some of her darkest days as she watched the collapse of U.S. markets that deepened the school’s losses.

“Someone would say that this happened, that had happened, they were going to bail out AIG or Lehman is failing,” Faust recalled in an interview, referring to the September 2008 bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in New York and the subsequent government bailout of American International Group Inc. in New York. “We were wondering what was going to happen tomorrow.”

Harvard speculated in the swap market as early as 1994, according to rating companies’ reports. Under Jack Meyer, former chief executive of Harvard Management Co., the school’s endowment used swaps to profit from interest-rate changes. The university also used them to fix borrowing costs for capital projects.

Summers became president in July 2001, after serving as U.S. Treasury Secretary. He earned a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard, and became a tenured professor there at age 28. He served from 1991 to 1993 as chief economist at the World Bank, which initiated the first interest-rate swap with International Business Machines Corp. in 1981.

Feeling Flush

In the 1990s, Harvard began amassing 220 acres (89 hectares) for construction near Harvard Business School and its football stadium, located in Allston. In June 2005, Summers unveiled his vision for a campus expansion replete with new laboratories, dormitories and classrooms, renovated bridges and a pedestrian tunnel beneath the water. The Allston project was to transform an industrial and working-class neighborhood of two-family wood homes and small shops by building two 500,000- square-foot (46,000-square-meter) science complexes and a redrawn street grid.

Harvard was flush at the time, with an endowment of $22.6 billion that had returned an average of 16 percent during the previous 10 fiscal years. Summers told Faculty of Arts & Sciences professors in May 2004 that he hoped they wouldn’t be “preoccupied with the constraints imposed by resources, for Harvard was fortunate to have many deeply loyal friends,” according to minutes of a faculty meeting.

Forward Swaps

“Harvard would be able to generate adequate resources,” according to the minutes. “The only real limitation faced by the Faculty was the limit of its imagination.”

When the plan was made public in 2005, Harvard’s financial team had been busy for more than a year behind the scenes, devising a financing strategy for the project using interest- rate swaps. These derivatives enable borrowers to exchange their periodic interest payments. They typically involve the exchange of variable-rate payments on a set amount of money for another borrower’s fixed-rate payments.

In 2004, Harvard used swaps for $2.3 billion it planned to start borrowing four years later. The AAA-rated school would have paid an annual average rate of 4.72 percent if it had borrowed all the money for 30 years in December 2004, according to data from Municipal Market Advisors. The swaps let it secure a similar rate for bonds it planned to sell as it constructed the campus expansion during the next two decades.

‘Relatively Rare’

The agreements were so-called forward swaps, providing a fixed rate before the bonds were actually sold. Harvard was betting in 2004 that interest rates would rise by the time it needed to borrow. The school was also assuming the expansion would proceed on the schedule set by Summers and his advisers.

While the university could have paid banks for options on the borrowing rates, the swaps required no money up front.

That time frame, along with the size of the position, was unusual, said Peter Shapiro, an adviser at Swap Financial Group Inc. in South Orange, New Jersey.

“There have been lots of forward swaps, but out longer than three years is relatively rare,” Shapiro said in a telephone interview. That duration increases the risk, because the longer the term of the contract, the more volatile the value of the swap, he said.

Columbia, Yale

Columbia University is breaking ground on a $6.5 billion expansion in New York City, and last year used an interest-rate swap for its borrowing of $113 million of bonds sold seven months later. Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, is also AAA-rated. It had 32 separate swap agreements totaling $975 million as of Oct. 31, hedging the school’s $1.4 billion variable rate debt and commercial paper, according to Moody’s Investors Service Inc.

Corporations might use derivatives to lower their borrowing costs as many as four years before a bond sale, according to bankers who sell derivatives. Anadarko Petroleum Corp. used the swap market in December 2008 and January 2009 to secure rates for $3 billion it plans to refinance in October 2011 and October 2012, according to the Houston, Texas-based company’s third- quarter report from Nov. 3. Matt Carmichael, a company spokesman, declined to comment.

Key Player

Rothenberg, a Harvard College and Harvard Business School graduate, said he was among the key players involved in developing the financing strategy. His Los Angeles-based company, Capital Group, operates American Funds, the second- biggest family of stock and bond mutual funds in the U.S. He had been Harvard’s treasurer for six months when the school arranged the Allston swaps in December 2004.

Ann Berman, Harvard’s chief financial officer at the time, also played a role in developing the plan, Rothenberg said. Berman declined to be interviewed. She stepped down in 2006 when she was named an adviser to the president, according to the school’s Web site. A certified public accountant, Berman got her master’s in business administration at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business in Philadelphia and had earlier served as a financial planner and adviser for Harvard’s dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences.

Rubin, Reischauer

Other members of Harvard Corp. in 2004 and 2005, who served with Summers and Rothenberg, were former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, Summers’s previous boss and predecessor at the U.S. Treasury, who was an instrumental supporter of his bid for the Harvard presidency; Robert D. Reischauer, former director of the Congressional Budget Office, who was a colleague of Summers and Rubin’s in Washington; Conrad K. Harper, a lawyer at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP in New York; Hanna Gray, former president of the University of Chicago; and James R. Houghton, chairman of Corning Inc., the world’s biggest maker of glass for flat-panel televisions, in Corning, New York.

All except Rothenberg declined to comment or didn’t return telephone calls.

Harvard University’s finance staff worked with JPMorgan to develop the size and the length of the forward-swap agreements, said a person familiar with the contracts. Final negotiations to set the rates were left to Harvard Management, which oversees the endowment, because it had swap contracts in place with JPMorgan dating back to 1996 that set terms for the agreements, according to a copy of the agreement obtained by Bloomberg News.

The original swap contract between Harvard Management and JPMorgan was approved by Michael Pradko, the endowment’s risk manager, the copy shows. Pradko left Harvard Management in 2005, along with Jack Meyer, the endowment’s head, to join Convexity Capital Management LP in Boston, the hedge fund Meyer started. Pradko declined to comment.

Impeccable Timing?

When Harvard Management completed its swap contracts for the school, the timing was encouraging. U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan had just begun raising the overnight target rate as the economy rebounded from the bursting of the technology bubble. In the second half of 2004, he lifted it to 2.25 percent from 1 percent.

For more than 20 years, investment banks such as Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan, and Citigroup Inc., all based in New York, have been selling swaps as a way for schools, towns and nonprofits to reduce interest costs and protect against rising interest payments on variable-rate debt. The swap agreements can be terminated if either the bank or the issuer is willing to pay a fee, which varies with interest rates.

Posting Collateral

“Swaps have become widely accepted by the rating agencies as an appropriate financial tool,” according to a slide entitled “Swaps Can Be Beneficial” that was used in a 2007 Citigroup presentation to the Florida Government Finance Officers Association. Debt issuers can “easily unwind the swap for a market-based termination payment/receipt,” the slide said.

Rothenberg said officials throughout Harvard were monitoring the school’s swap position, including members of the financial office, the budget office, the controller’s office and Harvard Management. Although the contracts required Harvard to post collateral, or set aside cash when the values reached certain thresholds, such provisions weren’t unusual, Rothenberg said.

“I think there are lots of swaps with collateral postings,” Rothenberg said in an interview. “From fiscal years 2005 through 2008, these swaps were in place and there were collateral postings. It was not a pressing concern for the University, even though you can look at the financial statements and see that there was at least an unrealized loss in certain years.”

‘Rapid Meltdown’

“I think the unusual nature of these swaps were two things,” Rothenberg said. “One, they were large, but the anticipated capital spending program was large; and two, they were longer-dated than most people are used to thinking about, because the capital spending program was expected to last over a number of years. The problem resulted from the rapid meltdown in the markets, which culminated in November when short-term interest rates and swaps rates collapsed.”

After credit markets seized up in 2007, central banks worldwide pushed some bank lending rates to zero in their effort to rescue the financial system.

While Harvard Corp. is ultimately responsible for the school’s financial decisions, the losses sustained by the school in almost every financial domain -- the endowment, cash account and swaps -- suggest that oversight was lax, said Harry Lewis, a Harvard alumnus, computer science professor and former dean of Harvard College.

‘Structural Problem’

Harvard not only lost money on the swaps last year. The value of its endowment tumbled a record 30 percent to $26 billion from its peak of $36.9 billion in June 2008, and its cash account lost $1.8 billion, according to Harvard’s most recent annual report.

“They have a structural problem,” Lewis said in a telephone interview. “There’s something systemically wrong with Harvard Corp. It’s too small, too secretive, too closed and not supported by enough eyeballs looking at the risks they are taking.”

Summers’s departure as president came in 2006, after he questioned women’s innate aptitude for math and science. Summers apologized formally and repeatedly for the remarks made in a speech, which he said were misconstrued, and the school said it would spend $50 million to help women succeed in science and engineering. He resigned after the faculty passed a no- confidence motion against him.

Successor Faust

That left Faust, the Civil War historian and prize-winning author who succeeded Summers as president in July 2007, to manage the Allston plans. Faust committed to its first phase: beginning construction of a $1 billion science center that would house researchers from the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, the Harvard School of Public Health and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.

By June 2005, the value of the swaps tied to Harvard’s debt was negative $460.8 million, meaning that’s how much it would have to pay the banks to terminate the agreements, according to the school’s annual report that year.

By 2008, Harvard had 19 swap contracts on $3.5 billion of debt with JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, New York-based Morgan Stanley, and Charlotte, North Carolina-based Bank of America Corp., including the swaps for Allston, according to a bond- ratings report by Standard & Poor’s released on Jan. 18, 2008.

Financial Burden

The swaps became a financial burden last year as their value fell and collateral postings rose. In a contract with Goldman Sachs, the school agreed to post cash if the swaps’ value fell below $5 million, according to a copy obtained by Bloomberg News. The collateral postings with the banks approached $1 billion late last year as central banks slashed their target rates, according to people familiar with the situation.

Michael Duvally, a spokesman for Goldman Sachs, Mary Claire Delaney, a spokeswoman for Morgan Stanley and Kerrie McHugh, a spokeswoman for Bank of America, all declined to comment.

Harvard wasn’t alone in being forced to set aside cash last year to meet such margin calls. The difference was the scale.

Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, posted $38 million of collateral on $1.5 billion of swaps, according to a Moody’s report on the Ivy League School. Hanover, New Hampshire-based Dartmouth College, also in the Ivy League, didn’t post collateral on their swaps because their investment banks agreed to waive the requirement to win the business, according to a person familiar with the contracts. The Ivy League is a group of eight elite schools in the northeast U.S., including Harvard.

Markets Unravel

After a year during which central banks provided an unprecedented amount of money to rescue financial institutions, the credit markets unraveled along with the stock market in September 2008. Lehman Brothers filed the largest bankruptcy in history on Sept. 15. Two weeks later, the House of Representatives rejected a $700 billion bailout plan, sending the Dow Jones Industrial Average down 778 points, its biggest point drop ever.

The value of Harvard’s swaps plunged and its need for cash soared. Under contracts signed in 2004, Harvard had to post larger and larger amounts of collateral to cover the negative value of the swaps; the total amount would approach $1 billion.

At the same time, the usual sources the university relied on to generate cash -- the endowment and its operating cash account -- were hemorrhaging. The school’s endowment tumbled, losing 22 percent from July 2008 through October 2008.

Asset Allocation

The Harvard endowment had more than 50 percent of its assets allocated to private equity, hedge funds and other hard- to-sell assets. The university already had borrowed to amplify gains, with leverage targeted at 3 percent of assets as of last year. When Jane Mendillo took over as chief executive officer of Harvard Management on July 1 last year, one of her top priorities was to raise cash. The school couldn’t get acceptable prices from the $1.5 billion of private equity stakes Mendillo tried to sell.

Outside managers investing Harvard’s endowment were either performing poorly or preventing Harvard from withdrawing cash. Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit shut down Old Lane Partners in June 2008. Ospraie Management, in New York, closed its biggest hedge fund in September and Farallon Capital Management, in San Francisco, put up a so-called gate, prohibiting clients from taking out cash.

Checkbook Fund

Making matters worse, Harvard disclosed Oct. 16 that its checkbook fund, the general operating account, lost $1.8 billion in the year ended June 30. Lumping the cash account with the endowment was risky, said Louis Morrell, who managed the endowment for Radcliffe College, which is part of Harvard, until 1990.

“They put the operating funds in the endowment --it’s like the guy who has his retirement income in company stock,” said Morrell, who is also the former treasurer of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Rothenberg, Mendillo and Daniel Shore, Harvard’s chief financial officer, decided last year as the credit crisis deepened that the school needed to borrow money. Shore became acting CFO last year after Elizabeth Mora, who was Berman’s successor, stepped down in May 2008. Shore was named to the position permanently in October 2008.

It was at this point, in October, that Harvard officials contacted Ogilby, their bond lawyer at Ropes & Gray LLP in Boston. A 1980 Harvard College graduate, Ogilby is head of the firm’s Public Finance Group. E-mails show that Craig McCurley, the director of Harvard’s treasury management office, and his associate director, Tom Balish, contacted Ogilby, who in turn reached out to the Massachusetts Health & Educational Facilities Authority, which sells bonds for the state’s nonprofits. Ogilby declined to comment.

Needing Cash

Harvard needed cash to pay bills, refinance outstanding debt and break its money-losing swap agreements, according to a series of e-mails beginning on Oct. 31 last year between Ogilby and staff members of the state authority that were obtained by Bloomberg News. School officials asked whether the agency could omit from a public hearing that some of the bonds would finance swap termination payments.

“There is some sensitivity at Harvard about not specifically flagging the swap interest unwind payments,” Ogilby wrote on Nov. 12 to Deborah Boyce, an analyst at the authority. “They still would like the ability to finance them, but would prefer to delete those references if they can do so.”

Timely Information

Benson Caswell, the bond authority’s executive director responded Nov. 13 that the swap agreements would have to be identified and that the authority needed “timely, accurate and unfiltered information, including a balanced presentation,” from issuers. Harvard disclosed the use of the bond proceeds, and only wanted to avoid telegraphing potential activity in the swap market, said Christine Heenan, a school spokeswoman.

“The spirit of our inquiry was whether prematurely disclosing plans for what are inherently market transactions would in any way jeopardize the execution of those transactions,” she said in an e-mail.

At its Nov. 13 monthly meeting in Boston’s financial district, the agency’s seven-member board approved a Harvard bond issue of up to $2.5 billion, about the amount of debt it sells for all schools and borrowers in a typical year. The board usually takes two meetings to approve a bond sale. In Harvard’s case it took just one meeting.

Nothing Special

“I can assure you that Harvard doesn’t get any special treatment,” Caswell said. “Other borrowers have received the same service.”

Caswell said one board member, Marvin Gordon, is a Harvard graduate and that as long as there is no conflict of interest between his business and the use of the bond proceeds, a board member may vote on approval of a bond sale.

Gordon said while he didn’t have a conflict in voting to approve Harvard’s bond issue, “they never should have been in the position where they had to get out” of the swaps.

Harvard unwound the swaps at possibly the worst moment in the history of financial markets, said Shapiro, the municipal swap adviser. Just as Harvard’s request for approval to sell tax-exempt bonds arrived in the state offices, the swap market began sliding, according to Bloomberg data. While the school waited for permission to raise money, the price to break the swap agreements escalated.

Tumbling Index

On Nov. 13, the index used to value the agreements, the U.S. dollar 30-year swap rate, closed at 4.247 percent. By the time Harvard held its bond sale Dec. 8, the swap index had tumbled to 2.7575 percent. Harvard exited three of its swaps tied to $431 million debt on Dec. 9, when the benchmark fell again to 2.6885 percent. The interest-rate swap market reached a record low of 2.363 percent on Dec. 18.

Harvard’s decision to borrow money came at a time when the difference, or spread, between yields on corporate and U.S. Treasury securities was the widest since at least 1990, according to data from Barclays Plc. That meant AAA-rated Harvard was selling bonds when the market was demanding the biggest premium in at least 18 years.

“December 2008 was, by an enormous amount, the worst time in history” to terminate the swaps by borrowing money, said Shapiro.

Harvard sold $1.5 billion of taxable and $1 billion of tax- exempt bonds, using $497.6 million of the proceeds to pay investment banks to extract itself from $1.1 billion of interest-rate swaps, according to its annual report released Oct. 16. Separately, the school agreed to pay another $425 million over 30 years to 40 years to the banks to terminate an additional $764 million of the swaps, Harvard’s Shore said.

Unwinding Swap

The school on Dec. 12 paid JPMorgan $34.5 million from the tax-exempt bond proceeds to unwind a swap tied to $205.9 million of variable-rate bonds it sold for capital projects, according to documents obtained from the Massachusetts financing authority. It also paid Goldman Sachs $41.6 million on Dec. 9 and $23.2 million on Dec. 11 to end agreements on another $226.8 million of existing debt. Harvard didn’t disclose recipients of the other termination payments because it paid them from the taxable bonds.

The timing was “less than ideal, but the surrounding context was less than ideal as well,” said Shore.

Harvard and JPMorgan celebrated the bond issue by hosting a cocktails-and-dinner party at the French restaurant Mistral, in Boston’s South End neighborhood, where appetizers start at $15 and entrees cost about $40, according to e-mails obtained from the state finance agency. JPMorgan invoiced the agency $388.78 for three employees who attended: Caswell, Marietta Joseph and Danielle Manning.

Recovering Values

Since then, some of the values in the swap market have recovered to their levels of December 2004 when Harvard signed the forward contracts.

“If Harvard had waited, the cost of terminating may well have been lower, but they weren’t willing to take that risk,” said Matt Fabian, managing director at Municipal Market Advisors in Westport, Connecticut.

Shore said that he, Mendillo and “a lot of us in senior management” contributed to the decision to break the swap agreements. That group included Ed Forst, the former executive vice president, who returned to Goldman Sachs after less than a year at Harvard, Shore said. Shore also cited Harvard Corp.’s role as bearing the school’s ultimate fiduciary responsibility. Forst didn’t return calls seeking comment.

Waiting didn’t appear to be an option at the time, Shore said.

Stability, Safety

“In evaluating our liquidity position, we wanted to get ourselves some stability and some safety,” he said in an Oct. 16 interview this year at Harvard. “It was to take the losses now rather than run the risk of having further losses if we continued to hold on to the positions.”

No one expected the indexes used for valuing swaps to fall as fast and as much as they did, said Chris Cowen, managing director of Prager, Sealy & Co. in San Francisco.

“What we ended up with was an outlier event,” said Cowen, who advised Harvard as it unwound its position last year. “I was taken by surprise by the falling rates.”

Harvard, in the meantime, has cut its capital spending estimate for the next four years in half to about $2 billion. Before the credit crisis, it planned on spending $10 billion over a decade on capital projects, including Allston. Faust is building a team to study “financially and structurally” how Harvard can expand, she said in an e-mail announcing the planned work stoppage in Allston.

Opposing Regulation

Summers, along with Rubin and Greenspan opposed the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s attempt in 1998 to regulate so-called over-the-counter derivatives, which included agreements like interest rate swaps. At the time, Summers was Rubin’s deputy secretary.

Now Summers is leading the Obama administration’s effort to write stricter rules for the derivatives market “to protect the American people,” he said in October at a conference in New York sponsored by The Economist magazine.

Universities would have been better served if they had stayed away from the more complicated financial instruments being sold by Wall Street, said David Kaiser, a Harvard class of 1969 alumnus who has been critical of the high salaries paid to managers of the school’s endowment.

“They used many of the investment strategies of the big banks and hedge funds, and when things went badly they could not get a bailout,” said Kaiser, a history professor at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. “It would clearly be better for any nonprofit on whom many people depend to pursue safer, more stable strategies.”

Taxpayer Funds

Pennsylvania State Auditor General Jack Wagner said Nov. 18 that the state should ban local governments from entering into derivative contracts tied to bond issues, a practice he termed “gambling” with taxpayer funds.

Harvard might have considered it a conservative step to lock in rates when they were low, said Shapiro, the New Jersey- based swap adviser.

“You can be very big and very rich and very smart and still get things wrong,” Shapiro said.

To contact the reporters on this story: John Lauerman in Boston at jlauerman@bloomberg.net; Michael McDonald in Boston at mmcdonald10@bloomberg.net; Gillian Wee in New York at gwee3@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: December 18, 2009 16:28 EST

[SAIFULLAH.NL] Moslimkamerleden voor raamprostitutie

2009-12-07T08:34:00.009-05:00

Despite the simplistic assertion of the article, historic sharia treatment of prostitution can be quite nuanced as is indicated by fetva collections and shari`a manuals published by senior judiciary officials of the Ottoman Empire.

From State, Society, and Law in Islam, Ottoman Law in Comparative Perspective by Haim Gerber, p. 73:

Another appropriate context in which to analyze the relations between the different systems of law in Bursa is the handling of sexual offenses mentioned in the kadi records. As noted earlier, a large number of cases involve prostitutes, all said to have been apprehended in the act of committing the crime. The relevant penalty for such a violation is, of course, the had penalty of stoning to death (if the violator is or has been married) or at least one hundred strokes. But none of the cases ends with such severe punishment. In most cases the culprit is banished from the neighborhood or gets the tazir (discretionary punishment by the kadi), which is never specified exactly. This kind of treatment is again a sort of compromise between custom and shari`a.

Moslimkamerleden voor raamprostitutie

Naïma Azough (GL) en Fatma Koser Kaya (D66) willen ramen behouden

Raamprostitutie in Groningen.

DEN HAAG - Prominente moslimkamerleden van GroenLinks en D66 zijn voorstander van raamprostitutie. Dat hebben zij woensdagavond in een uitzending van EénVandaag gezegd.

Fatma Koser Kaya, kamerlid voor D66, is tegen de voornemens van burgemeesters om ramen te sluiten. Prostitutie kan niet effectief bestreden worden, volgens de politica, en door het toestaan van raamprostitutie kan het in ieder geval gecontroleerd worden.

"Het is buitengewoon lucratief [voor criminelen]. Maar dat los je niet op door raamprostitutie onmogelijk te maken. Het gaat dan ondergronds" zei Koser Kaya tegen EénVandaag.

Naïma Azough, kamerlid voor GroenLinks, vindt dat het vrouwen makkelijker wordt gemaakt om misstanden aan te kaarten als raamprostitutie wordt toegestaan.

"Overlast bestrijden lijkt me vanzelfsprekend. Maar als je daarmee zegt 'die prostitués willen we niet meer zien', dat vind ik een beetje hypocriet" aldus Azough.

"Ze verdwijnen niet. Ze zijn onzichtbaar geworden, en moeilijk te vinden" voegde de politica eraan toe.

GroenLinks heeft twee moslimkamerleden - Tofik Dibi en Naïma Azough - ondanks dat de partij Islam een probleem vindt. D66 heeft één moslimkamerlid.

Prostitutie is verboden in Islam. Volgens het Islamitisch recht (Sharia) wordt het bestraft met honderd zweepslagen.

(SAIFULLAHNL)

[Michtavim blog] Barukh Dayan Ha-Emet: Prof. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi passed away earlier today in New York

2009-12-11T04:38:00.005-05:00

I read Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi's book From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto, Isaac Cardoso, A Study in Seventeenth-Century Marranism and Jewish Apologetics back when it appeared in 1971. It may have established Yerushalmi as a Jewish historian, but I remember that it was frustrating in its old-fashioned exceptionalist view of Jewish history.

I will have to go back to reread it, but as I remember, Yerushalmi discusses the equation Cristãos-novos (New Christians) with homens de negócios (businessmen) but never quite fully analyzes the interrelationship of business, finance, imperialism, marranism, 16th/17th century economic developments, Jewish social networking, and Sabbatianism.

Yerushalmi did not provide enough information to determine definitively whether Cardoso decided to return to Judaism in Italy from genuine religious conviction or perhaps more plausibly from considerations of quality of life.

In other words Cardoso may simply have preferred to be a well-compensated big fish in a small pond than to be part of the large crowd surrounding the Spanish court, whose policies toward Christian descendants of Iberian Jews were often problematic to say the least.

Yerushalmi's book and scholarship are deficient overall because of his refusal to look seriously or fully at the Spanish imperial context, in which the distinction between New and Old Christians was only part of a larger categorization system that distinguished criollos from peninsulares and that created extremely baroque racial categories of blood among whites, native Americans, and Africans within the Spanish Empire.

Barukh Dayan Ha-Emet: Prof. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi passed away earlier today in New York

It is with deep sadness that I share with you the news of the passing of Prof. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi. Two of his leading students, Profs. Elisheva Carlebach and David N. Myers, have shared some thoughts on Prof. Yerushalmi, which I have reproduced in the post-script below, in memory of their mentor.

Specifically related to Prof. Yerushalmi, among the chapters included in Elisheva Carlebach, John M. Efron, and David N. Myers, eds., Jewish History and Jewish Memory: Essays in Honor of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (London and Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1998), see John M. Efron, "Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi: The Teacher," 453-455; and David N. Myers, "Of Marranos and Memory: Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and the Writing of Jewish History," 1-21.

[Click here to read the entire article.]

Open Letter: ATFP President Asali

2009-12-13T05:47:00.008-05:00

This blog has occasionally covered the American Task Force on Palestine (ATFP) mostly because ATFP Senior Fellow Hussein Ibish likes to fling accusations of anti-Semitism at anti-Zionists.

Because I just noticed that ATFP President Ziad Asali recently endorsed a book by Zionist subversive and fanatic Jewish racist Ziad Asali, I sent him the following letter.

Dear Dr. Asali,

I am aghast that you would endorse a book by Matthew Levitt.

In From Epistemic to Bureaucratic Islamophobia, I pointed out:
Although Ehrenfeld is a clown that has made a career of scaremongering and defaming Arabs and Muslims, Congress continues to take her testimony as if she has actually has information of value. In contrast, the efforts of Neocon Zionist Matthew Levitt in the Bush administration have been far more dangerous and insidious. He served President Bush as Deputy Assistant Treasury Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis. He developed a logically specious formalism, which is described in detail in his book entitled Hamas, Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad. Levitt worked hard to indoctrinate Treasury and Justice Department officials with the idea that practically any Muslim charitable giving can be equated to material aid to terrorism because nothing is more fungible than money, and his text has been an important Zionist tool to demonize Islamic finance or charity just as Raphael Patai's book The Arab Mind served Zionists as means to spread a false understanding of Arab culture or society.

Levitt worked closely with Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Stuart Levey, who has been retained by the Obama administration to the delight of Zionists inside and outside of government and who has received many accolades from the AJCommittee. By background, Levey is a lawyer specializing in the defense of white collar financial criminals. Thus he knows a tremendous amount about framing accusations of financial crime in the strongest way possible. Levey has slavishly implemented Levitt's program by adding Muslim charity after Muslim charity to the list of officially designated terrorist organizations. Yet despite the extraordinary history of Israeli military terrorism, he failed to add the IDF and charities or individuals giving to the IDF to the list of officially designated terrorist organizations even though the Iranian Revolutionary Guard has been added to the list without any comparable history of terrorism.
Matthew Levitt was instrumental in obtaining a conviction of good decent, patriotic Arab and Muslim US citizens in a political prosecution that undermined the US legal system: [khaleej times] us charities paying for sending aid to Palestinians.

You don't have to take my word that Levitt's politics and thinking are problematic. Read the review of Levitt's book by Harvard Senior Research Scholar Sarah Roy: BOOK REVIEW.

Sincerely yours,

Joachim Martillo
President
Ethnic Ashkenazim Against Zionist Israel

Here is a recent appearance of Dr. Asali on the BBC.

Responsible Arab and Muslim American leaders need to show some awareness that American Judaism is a major vector of Arabophobia and Islamophobia.

Not only are subversive Zionists like Matthew Levitt desperate to make sure that Israel and its supporters will be able to continue to parasitize the USA, but as extremist Jewish racists they are the enemies of every single Arab and Muslim American citizen as well as every single Arab and Muslim in the world.

Here is an example of modern American synagogue Islamophobia. (Item 6 below is a doozy. Item 4 is historical delusion. See Esau's Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews by Albert S. Lindemann.)

"Saving Israel" Expert says American Jews key to Israel's survival
By Fredric Leder
Published: Thursday, December 10, 2009 12:45 PM EST
WESTPORT - A standing-room only crowd of close to 300 people filled the small sanctuary at The Conservative Synagogue in Westport on Sunday, Dec. 6 to hear Dr. Daniel Gordis, senior vice president of the Jerusalem-based research and educational institute, The Shalem Center, discuss the future of Israel, Zionism and the U.S.-Israel alliance. The author of "Saving Israel: How the Jewish People Can Win A War That May Never End" delivered a message that was a mixture of hope and warning; a message that stressed the key role of American Jewry in ensuring the survival of the Jewish state.

Here are some of Gordis' key points:

1. Israel has survived all conventional military attacks and frustrated their aims, and Israel has reduced terrorism to a minor threat.

2. There is one potent attack by the Arabs against Israel that is capable of succeeding and against which Israel has no defense:. That is the direct assault that Israel is now under by the Arabs via appeals to the world community. This coordinated effort aims to delegitimize the Jewish state and cause it to be treated as an international pariah, whose products and scholars will be boycotted and ostracized from the international community.

3. In order to survive this new attack American Jews must fight it in the halls of Congress and on the American campuses. This means getting involved with organizations willing to present Jewish arguments, e.g. the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC).

4. If Israel were to be destroyed, American Jewry would be reduced to the bleak existence they experienced years ago in Poland or Russia.

5. Israel cannot accept a nuclear-armed Iran because the basic Zionist ethic was to relieve Jews of existential threats. The Iranian threat could easily have been stopped by Presidents Bush or Obama, via bombings by the United States Air Force. Since, clearly, this didn't and won't happen, the Israel Defense Force (IDF) will have to do it. [Gordis noted that his prediction was not based on any special inside information, but on his own analysis of the situation.] In the event of such an attack, it is likely that Hezbollah, Hamas and Iran would retaliate with massive rocket assaults on the Jewish state.

6. We are at war with Islam and any denials to the contrary may be politically correct, but are wholly inaccurate. Of course, there are Muslims who are not Jihadists, but they represent a small percentage and are irrelevant. Militant Islam is succeeding in Europe, the Middle East and is coming to America.

Fred Leder is a retired oil company executive living in Westport who writes periodically for the Ledger.

I don't know much about the Westport Connecticut synagogue, which seems to be far more focused on Israel than on God, but I have attended presentations of this sort of Islamophobic nonsense in Newton Massachusetts at Temple Emanuel, to which several local billionaire Jewish Zionists belong. (See Report on Robert Spencer and the Boston Anti-Islamic Controversy. Spencer is closely associated with racist Jewish Islamophobe David Horowitz.)

American Jewish synagogues and community centers are the main disseminators of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab racism in the USA today.

[Why is Ahavath Torah Synagogue Inviting Wafa Sultan? provides another example of synagogue Islamophobia from the Boston area.]

[Global Research] Obama's Big Sellout

2009-12-11T07:30:00.003-05:00

I have previously discussed a lot of the same issues in the blog entries listed at the end of Summers' Incompetence: Washington, Harvard, Washington and in Against Whom Did Paulson Bet?

I am irritated that Taibbi has yet to address the Jewish Zionist aspect of the Wall Street coup against America.

Because Jewish Zionist social networks are strongest on Wall Street just as Jewish Communist social networks were strongest in the early days of the Soviet Union, Wall Street (especially mega-firms like Goldman Sachs) has become more Jewish with the financial meltdown just as the Soviet government became more (not less) Jewish with the purges of the 1930s.

[Andrew Leonard responds to Taibbi in Matt Taibbi goes Obama scalp hunting but does not refute the major points. Neither addresses the growing Jewish-Zionist domination of the US finance industry.]

Obama's Big Sellout The president has packed his economic team with Wall Street insiders by Matt Taibbi

Global Research, December 10, 2009

The president has packed his economic team with Wall Street insiders intent on turning the bailout into an all-out giveaway

Barack Obama ran for president as a man of the people, standing up to Wall Street as the global economy melted down in that fateful fall of 2008. He pushed a tax plan to soak the rich, ripped NAFTA for hurting the middle class and tore into John McCain for supporting a bankruptcy bill that sided with wealthy bankers "at the expense of hardworking Americans."

Obama may not have run to the left of Samuel Gompers or Cesar Chavez, but it's not like you saw him on the campaign trail flanked by bankers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. What inspired supporters who pushed him to his historic win was the sense that a genuine outsider was finally breaking into an exclusive club, that walls were being torn down, that things were, for lack of a better or more specific term, changing.

Then he got elected.

What's taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history. Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy.

What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside.

How could Obama let this happen? Is he just a rookie in the political big leagues, hoodwinked by Beltway old-timers? Or is the vacillating, ineffectual servant of banking interests we've been seeing on TV this fall who Obama really is?

Whatever the president's real motives are, the extensive series of loophole-rich financial "reforms" that the Democrats are currently pushing may ultimately do more harm than good. In fact, some parts of the new reforms border on insanity, threatening to vastly amplify Wall Street's political power by institutionalizing the taxpayer's role as a welfare provider for the financial-services industry. At one point in the debate, Obama's top economic advisers demanded the power to award future bailouts without even going to Congress for approval — and without providing taxpayers a single dime in equity on the deals.

How did we get here? It started just moments after the election — and almost nobody noticed.

'Just look at the timeline of the Citigroup deal," says one leading Democratic consultant. "Just look at it. It's fucking amazing. Amazing! And nobody said a thing about it."

[Click here to read entire article.]

Zionist Control of Digg

2009-12-09T07:23:00.006-05:00

My Digg account was turned off about 10 days ago.

The support staff finally replied to my questions about this action.

Here is the response.

Subj: Re: : Digg Feedback Received

Date: 12/06/2009 10:12:00 PM Eastern Standard Time

From: Digg Support [support@digg.com]

To: ThorsProvoni
Hi from Digg.com,

Your account was reported to us as being in violation of our Terms of Service (http://digg.com/tos) for spamming Digg submissions with solicitations for donations. Because we must be vigilant in protecting against activities that compromise the Digg community, this decision is final and irreversible.

Thank you,

-Digg Support

ThorsProvoni@aol.com wrote:
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Login: ThorsProvoni
> Name: Joachim Martillo
> Email: ThorsProvoni@aol.com
> Registration Email: ThorsProvoni@aol.com
> IP: 207.180.191.115
> Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US)
> AppleWebKit/532.0 (KHTML, like Gecko)
> Chrome/3.0.195.33 Safari/532.0
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Why has my account been deactivated? Joachim Martillo
> ThorsProvoni@aol.com
> President
> Ethnic Ashkenazim Against Zionist Israel

It is probably needless to say that I never solicited donations via Digg, but Jewish Zionist staff probably find such an accusation to be a convenient excuse for kicking off people that are saying things Zionists don't like.

I have run into this problem previously with Gather.

[Salon] Where the bitter turns sweet: The story of Vietnamese coffee

2009-12-07T09:18:00.004-05:00

Obviously, Lam is expressing a little whimsy below, but it is worthwhile to remember that Austria, Italy and France did not need to be colonized by Arabs or Turks to develop coffee culture.

Where the bitter turns sweet: The story of Vietnamese coffee

Colonialism had its discontents, but this is worth keeping around

By Francis Lam

Salon/Francis Lam

My 20-year-old self would give me an open hand across the face for saying this, but: You know, colonialism wasn't all bad. It gave rise, for instance, to Vietnamese coffee.

I understand if you need to walk away right now to get a cup, because even just the mention of this stuff has that effect on people.

But for those still with us, imagine a short glass with a hard dose of sweetened condensed milk, the color of ivory and the texture of hot fudge. The glass wears a metal top hat, a filter with grounds and water, which dribbles in drops of thick coffee, crude-oil black and nearly as bitter. They sit, stacked in two layers, until you take a spoon and give it a turn. For a moment, the coffee and milk swirl around each other, hesitating before coming together, a phenomenon smarter people than me call sensitive chaos. You take a sip, and the sweetness hits first, full and rich. Then your mouth dries a bit, like the tide pulling back, and coffee leaves a mellow bitterness. You take another sip, and suddenly everything is right with the world.

[SAKMONGKOL] Melayu Ketuanism and Islamism

2009-12-06T10:51:00.005-05:00

Because I have a slight Malaysian connection through my first wife, who was Chinese from Malaysia, I often follow the political discussions among Malaysians.

The article below reminds me of the discourse among citizens of Poland during the inter bellum period when Polish political thinkers where trying to define the relationship between the multinational or multiethnic Polish state and the Polish Nation or Polonism. In addition, the development problems of Polish peasants even today in many regards parallel those of village Malays not least because large sections of both populations function in an essentially subsistence economy.

Pro-Palestinian activists cannot help but see similarity in the demand for Melayu Ketuanism (properly Ketuanan Melayu -- Malay dominance) with the Zionist insistence on maintaining the Jewish character of the Israeli State, but Malays are unlike Israeli Zionists an indigenous population of Malaysia.

In addition, village Malays like Polish peasants have been relatively disadvantaged in the modern period while Jews insist on privilege after a millennium of relative advantage and after a century of overreaching. (See Esau's Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews by Albert S. Lindemann.)

The author asks why Islamic countries seem to lag behind states dominated by European Caucasian populations.

One must be careful with such questions because there is a wide range of modernization levels among European populations while successful development has generally correlated strongly with a connection to the historic Anglo-French-Rhenish modernizing centers.

The key modernizing center of the Islamic world lay in the Ottoman Empire's European regions, which were gradually lost during the 19th century even before the Ottoman state was vivisected at the end of WW2.

Malaysian national symbols show at least a subconscious awareness of the importance of the Ottoman Empire to the Islamic world because the crescent of the Malaysia flag is not as much a symbol of Islam as of the Ottoman Byzantine heritage that characterized the world's most highly evolved Sharia state.

Yet Malays also lag relative not only to non-Muslim Malaysians but also relative to India-origin Muslim Malaysians.

Such differential development probably relates to significant differences in the sophistication of social networking.

Chinese and Indian Malaysians often participate in longstanding social networks that are often transnational and that generally reach into many academic, economic, and political sectors. Village Malays are only just beginning to build such networks of trust.

Melayu Ketuanism and Islamism

From Nationalism to Islamism.

Before any one goes into an incoherent rage about the statement 'religion being the opium of the masses', please read the last part of this essay. I was expecting these off base responses. The phrase opium of the masses is often associated with Karl Marx. His ideas are no longer in vogue today. One by one, the countries which adopted his thinking have fallen to capitalism. It seems those people, in those counties where the 'opium' is widely adopted have prospered. Meanwhile those countries which adopted his 'godless' doctrines have fumbled.

In my own not too distant past, I came across this very phrase that resulted in very extreme agitation and violent responses from certain quarters. That is not the meaning I applied in my previous essay. Accordingly, I am not going to be drawn into an argument on a topic or subject I did not sponsor. I have to politely decline the invitation to get into the subject in that context.

My object of interest was the combustible issue raised in the Dewan Rakyat a few days ago.

A few days ago, the MP from Ipoh Barat made a statement that caused ruckus and din in the Dewan Rakyat. The MP from Sri Gading demanded the minister in charge of we don't know what, to answer.

Many others and I find this strange- something was said about Ketuanan Melayu being a stumbling block to meaningful national unity, yet we expect and even demand a Chinese Minister to answer on our behalf?

Why don't those clever Malay MPs other than those from Sri Gading and Pasir Mas answer or challenge the assumption stated by the Ipoh Barat MP?

The MP from Pasir Mas was quick off his seat with his usual trademark stock in trade- berating anyone touching on the issue of Malayness. Ibrahim's Ali overt and at times combative defense of Malayness or all things Malay does not prove he is more Malay than other Malays. If at all, he has proven not to be beneath out-shouting other people or jumping on the bench.

It means nothing to skeptical and thinking people who do not care a hoot about how one declares his 'patriotism'. The manner in which he expressed his, is not the only one. This isn't a shouting contest where the one who shouts loudest is the winner.

Both the MP from Sri Gading and Pasir Mas were united in a very fundamental but non productive and therefore, less clever obsession- that of spending time on fighting for and fighting off over what we Malays already had- which is the protection of Malay interests by the constitution.

Why are we fighting over something we already have in our hands? Shouldn't our energy, efforts and resources be directed to acquiring for instance what we haven't got such as technological progress and finding ways how to increase productivity?

[Click here to read the entire article.]

[Al-Arabiya & Aljazeera] إسرائيلي يدهس فلسطينيا ثم تعود للخلف لتدهسه من جديد قبل أن تتوقف عليه أصابه الجيش بعيارات نارية

2009-12-05T06:44:00.006-05:00

Al-Arabiya reports from Hebron (al-Khalil) that an Israeli settler crushed a Palestinian in front of Israeli medics and soldiers, who did nothing until after the second time the perpetrator ran over the victim.

Here is the English language version.

From Aljazeera English:

Violence erupted in the occupied West Bank on Wednesday when a Palestinian man entered a petrol station at the Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba in the occupied West Bank and stabbed two settlers.

But that was not the end of the story. According to the Israeli army, the Palestinian was then shot by a soldier, after which a car, apparently driven by a settler, ran over the wounded Palestinian, twice, with Israeli soldiers all around.

Jacky Rowland reports.

*Viewers may find some of the images disturbing.

Aljazeera provides Arabic language text and video in مستوطن يدهس فلسطينيا أمام الجنود.

Against Whom Did Paulson Bet?

2009-12-04T07:50:00.004-05:00

I listened to the following report on NPR as I was driving my kids to Brigham & Women's hospital where my wife had given birth.

Maybe John Paulson made the smartest Wall Street bet ever, but

if he really believed that CDOs (Collateralized Debt Obligations) and mortgage debt were outrageously overvalued while CDSs (Credit Default Swaps) were tremendously underpriced and
if he realized that banks carrying toxic mortgage assets on the books were still selling CDSs (Credit Default Swaps),

shouldn't he have worried that the institutions against which he was betting would collapse and not make good on the bet?

A responsible banker-speculator would have to have thought twice about placing the wager.

Thus, Paulson did not so much bet against the CDOs but for the willingness or stupidity of the US government to make good on the bets of the losers.

Does Paulson really differ much from the guy

that stakes an illegal craps game and
that sends some thugs out to break the legs of a player for failing to pay up after losing everything?

Because Paulson won his gamble only because the government bailed out the banks with taxpayer money, in Paulson's scenario the thugs broke the legs of the US taxpayer metaphorically.

In a Sholem Aleichem story set in a time period before Jewish Zionist Wallstreeters managed to subvert both government and the banking industry, Paulson would have been the speculator that outsmarted himself.

Unrecoverable gambling winnings made good because of the bank bailout constitute income that is as unearned as income possibly can be and should be taxed at confiscatory rates.

Welcome Amal Victoria Martillo!

2009-12-03T09:42:00.005-05:00

Just to let readers know that I have been quiet for the past few days because we had a new baby, Amal Victoria Martillo.

New babies can be somewhat overwhelming.

Heartbreak Kid vs Legally Blonde

2009-09-07T18:26:00.005-04:00

Film History of American Elites

by Joachim Martillo

Not only do The Heartbreak Kid (1972) and Legally Blonde (2001) paired together look like the beginning screenwriter exercise of rewriting a screenplay from the stand point of different characters, but they also show the transition from the America of the old WASP elite to the America of the new Jewish elite.

In The Heartbreak Kid Jewish Lenny Cantrow (Charles Grodin) dumps brunette Jewish wife Lila Kolodny (Jennie Berlin) over dinner at 58' 28" -- while they are on their honeymoon -- so that he can pursue the desirable blonde gentile goddess college student Kelly Corcoran (Cybil Shepherd) back to Minnesota. This scene is the turning point of the movie.

Legally Blonde has the essentially the same scene as inciting incident at 6'00". (See trailer below.) Gentile Warner Huntington III* (Matthew Davis) dumps blond gentile Elle Woods (Reese Witherspoon) for fellow Harvard Law School student and brunette Jewish preppette Vivienne Kensington** (Selma Blair), whose name would certainly have indicated Jewish arriviste background back in the 70s but today indicates membership in the new Jewish elite. Warner has already given Vivienne an engagement ring.

At the first turning point, Elle unlike Lila decides to get her man back by pursuing him to Harvard Law School.

In a sense Legally Blonde is Lila's revenge especially -- even if Lila is now a gentile -- because in the end she (i.e. Elle) finds Mr. Right and realizes that Warner (Lenny reincarnated) doesn't deserve her.

The thirty year gap between the two films provides a window on social changes between the 1970s and the 2000s. Lenny and Lila forego pre-marital sex despite Lenny's wishes while Warner and Elle have been in a long term sexual relationship. In The Heartbreak Kid, the blonde gentile wife is the trophy while in Legally Blonde the brunnette preppette professional Jewish wife represents high status and is the appropriate wife for the senator to be.

As Patterns of Boston Jewish Power points out, 1990 seems to be the year when elite status shifted to Jews in the Boston area and probably throughout the country. The George H. W. Bush presidency was unmade by conflict with the Israel Lobby. His son President George W. Bush groveled to Jewish Zionist power as does Barack Obama. Legally Blonde in general reflects the Jewish-non-Jewish power relations and optimistically expresses the hope that gentiles can win even though the social deck of cards is now stacked against them.

For further discussion of The Heartbreak Kid and gentile-Jewish relations see the following blog entries:

I tried my hand at depicting gentile-Jewish relations in my own version of The Heartbreak Kid, but the protagonist gentiles in Devorah's Two Weddings are Muslims, Arabs, and Palestinians. Because my Heartbreak Kid is female and a harsh break-up did not really work, Devorah Goren dumps her husband Martin Mordkhe Dressler over the course of several scenes from the honeyman through the final confronation at the Harvard Hillel (script pp. 21 - 61, Adobe pp. 22-62).

Notes
* Warner mentioned that 5 members of his family had been senators. There are a few gentile but no Jewish families that can make such a claim. The agnomen III is practically impossible for most American Jews, who have a custom of not naming a child after a living relative. To do so would express the wish for that relative to die.

** Vivienne Kensington would be recognized as Jewish in NY, NJ, CT prep schools because Vivienne is used by Jews and practically no one else. It substitutes for the Hebrew name Chaya. Kensington would be identified as the Jewish name Keningsburg (Koeningsburg) with -burg translated as -ton and the s moved forward to create a WASPish sounding name. The mothers association at my prep school in the 70s used to spend hours in name-analysis to determine which students came from Jewish families trying to pass as WASPs in order to make sure that the crypto-Jews were not invited to affairs at the WASPs-only country clubs. They invariably invited poor gentiles in order to make the crypto-Jews understand that wealth and social quality were completely independent. Of course, nowadays with Jews on top, the situation is totallydifferent, and the non-Jews often affect Yiddishisms and some sort of Jewish connection in order to be part of the elite crowd.

Trailers

Note that The Heartbreak Kid trailer does not even include an excerpt from the breakup scene.

Below is the breakup scene from the musical version of Legally Blonde.

Summers' Incompetence: Washington, Harvard, Washington

2009-11-29T23:23:00.005-05:00

The following Boston Globe article detailing the financial incompetence of Lawrence Summers, who serves as Director of the National Economic Council in the Obama administration.

Before reading it, keep in mind that corruption associated with real estate purchased for university expansion is endemic in the Boston area academic community.

In addition, it is also worth mentioning that the Roxbury Mosque controversy, which had a real estate component, started among academic Zionists both associated with Roxbury Community College and also closely connected with Summers.

The article neglects to mention that Summers' mentor mega-financial clown Robert Rubin is probably the dominant personality among the members of the Harvard Corporation.

Harvard ignored warnings about investments

Advisers told Summers, others not to put so much cash in market; losses hit $1.8b

By Beth Healy Globe Staff / November 29, 2009

It happened at least once a year, every year. In a roomful of a dozen Harvard University financial officials, Jack Meyer, the hugely successful head of Harvard’s endowment, and Lawrence Summers, then the school’s president, would face off in a heated debate. The topic: cash and how the university was managing - or mismanaging - its basic operating funds.

Through the first half of this decade, Meyer repeatedly warned Summers and other Harvard officials that the school was being too aggressive with billions of dollars in cash, according to people present for the discussions, investing almost all of it with the endowment’s risky mix of stocks, bonds, hedge funds, and private equity. Meyer’s successor, Mohamed El-Erian, would later sound the same warnings to Summers, and to Harvard financial staff and board members.

“Mohamed was having a heart attack,’’ said one former financial executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of angering Harvard and Summers. He considered the cash investment a “doubling up’’ of the university’s investment risk.

But the warnings fell on deaf ears, under Summers’s regime and beyond. And when the market crashed in the fall of 2008, Harvard would pay dearly, as $1.8 billion in cash simply vanished. Indeed, it is still paying, in the form of tighter budgets, deferred expansion plans, and big interest payments on bonds issued to cover the losses.

So how did one of the world’s great universities err so badly in something so basic? It is a story with many actors, the story of an institution that grew complacent as its endowment soared ever higher - an institution that, when the crunch hit, was operating on financial auto-pilot, with many key players gone, and those remaining inattentive, in retrospect, to the risks ahead.

“Investing cash alongside the endowment was a long-held strategy that we didn’t decide to change until early 2008,’’ said James F. Rothenberg, Harvard’s treasurer - a part-time, unpaid role. He said the biggest mistake was not to have taken some of the cash off the table, and placed it in safer accounts, as trouble started brewing in the markets and the economy. “We all can look back now and say we wish we did something different,’’ he said.

In the Summers years, from 2001 to 2006, nothing was on auto-pilot. He was the unquestioned commander, a dominating personality with the talent to move a balkanized institution like Harvard, but also a man unafflicted, former colleagues say, with self-doubt in matters of finance.

Certainly, when it came to handling Harvard’s cash account, the former US Treasury secretary had no doubts. Widely considered one of the most brilliant economists of his generation, Summers pushed to invest 100 percent of Harvard’s cash with the endowment and had to be argued down to 80 percent, financial executives say. The cash account grew to $5.1 billion during his tenure, more than the entire endowment of all but a dozen or so colleges and universities.Continued...

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Jewish Shysters Without Borders

2009-11-29T05:12:00.003-05:00

The latest Zionist legal reasoning

used to prove legality of Zionist settlements in Palestine and
described in NGO to Clinton: Settlements are legal

is so specious that I had to laugh when I read it.

As I remember, the South African government put very similar arguments before the International Court of Justice in 1971 to prove the legality of continued South African rule over South-West Africa (Namibia). Guess how much sympathy the South African case received.

Then just when I thought I had reached the limit for my quota of psychotic racist Zionist stupidity for the day, I read Why Aliyah Is Important For You?

The article is yet another Jewish Zionist paean to ethnic narcissism and tells ethnic Ashkenazim that they have the right to steal Palestine from the native population because it makes them feel good to be able express their Jewishness so completely.

By the same logic it must have been wonderful for whites to move to the Old South where they could own blacks and fully express their racial supremacy.

[Dunedin School] Ten Reasons for Dating Deuteronomy to the Late Persian or Hellenistic Periods

2009-11-28T09:53:00.004-05:00

According to the article below Biblical scholar Juha Pakkala has proposed an important hypothesis that helps elucidate the development of Judaic identity in the Persian and early Hellenistic period. My blog entries relevant to the topic are:

Ten Reasons for Dating Deuteronomy to the Late Persian or Hellenistic Periods

2009 November 27

tags: Deuteronomy, Elephantine, Josiah, Judah, Juha Pakkala, Urdeuteronomium

by Deane Galbraith

Juha Pakkala has a fine article in the latest ZAW outlining his ten reasons why Urdeuteronomium – the earliest edition of the book of Deuteronomy – dates later than Josiah and the Judean Kingdom, that is after 586 BCE. In fact, his reasons point to a period no earlier than the 300s BCE.

It’s a splendid thing having exactly ten reasons: everyone likes such a fine round number. Do have a read of the article, if you are interested in his more detailed reasoning.

[Click here to read Deane Galbraith's entire article.]

Most Likely False Flag Operation

2009-11-28T10:54:00.004-05:00

One can argue LIHOP or MIHOP with respect to 9/11 forever, but the anthrax scare looks like the real false flag operation because it was so simple and so focused with a high return in terms of public and official fear.

Glen Greenwald does not mention it in his article below, but we should remember

that Jewish Zionist Neocon subversives took control of the Pentagon from the start of the Bush administration,
that these subversives thus had use not only of Israeli but also of Pentagon military or intelligence resources,
that they had long mobilized hyper-wealthy Jewish Zionist plutocrats with direct or indirect control of numerous private and University laboratories, and
that they could engage in high-volume scare-mongering through numerous Jewish Zionist dominated media outlets.

[Note that the blog has addressed a previous Greenwald article on this subject in vital unresolved anthrax questions and abc news.]

A key British official reminds us of the forgotten anthrax attack

By Glenn Greenwald

(updated below)

Britain is currently engulfed by a probing, controversial investigation into how their Government came to support the invasion of Iraq, replete with evidence that much of what was said at the time by both British and American officials was knowingly false, particularly regarding the unequivocal intention of the Bush administration to attack Iraq for months when they were pretending otherwise. Yesterday, the British Ambassador to the U.S. in 2002 and 2003, Sir Christopher Meyer (who favored the war), testified before the investigative tribunal and said this:

Meyer said attitudes towards Iraq were influenced to an extent not appreciated by him at the time by the anthrax scare in the US soon after 9/11. US senators and others were sent anthrax spores in the post, a crime that led to the death of five people, prompting policymakers to claim links to Saddam Hussein. . . .

On 9/11 Condoleezza Rice, then the US national security adviser, told Meyer she was in "no doubt: it was an al-Qaida operation" . . . It seemed that Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's deputy, argued for retaliation to include Iraq, Meyer said. . . .

But the anthrax scare had "steamed up" policy makers in Bush's administration and helped swing attitudes against Saddam, who the administration believed had been the last person to use anthrax.

I've written many times before about how the anthrax attack played at least as large of a role as the 9/11 attack itself, if not larger, in creating the general climate of fear that prevailed for years in the U.S. and specifically how the anthrax episode was exploited by leading media and political figures to gin up intense hostility towards Iraq (a few others have argued the same). That's why it's so striking how we've collectively flushed this terrorist attack down the memory hole as though it doesn't exist.

[Click here to read entire article.]

[Voz iz Neias] Mumbai - Indian Newspaper: American Suspect Eyed In Chabad House Attack, Might Be A CIA Double Agent

2009-11-28T08:27:00.002-05:00

Two readers of this blog have suggested that Mumbai - Indian Newspaper: American Suspect Eyed In Chabad House Attack, Might Be A CIA Double Agent should be read as a followup to Chabad Lubavitch' Dangerous Game.

[American Lamentations] Understanding and defeating the war on radicalization

2009-11-28T08:10:00.002-05:00

Three previous blog entries relate to Anisa Abdel-Fattah's article below:

Some quotations from the late Senator Barry Goldwater created are perhaps more relevant or truer today than in his lifetime:

I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue! -- Acceptance Speech as the 1964 Republican Presidential candidate. Variants and derivatives of this that are often quoted include:
1. Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Tolerance in the face of tyranny is no virtue.
2. Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.
3. Moderation in the protection of liberty is no virtue; extremism in the defense of freedom is no vice.

I think every good Christian ought to kick Falwell right in the ass -- said in July 1981 in response to Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell's opposition to the nomination of Sandra Day O'Connor to the Supreme Court, of which Falwell had said, "Every good Christian should be concerned." as quoted in Ed Magnuson, "The Brethren's First Sister," Time Magazine, (20 July, 1981)

On religious issues there can be little or no compromise. There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God's name on one's behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both.

I'm frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in "A," "B," "C" and "D." Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me?

And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of "conservatism." -- Speech in the US Senate (16 September 1981)

Understanding and defeating the war on radicalization

The new approach to suppressing rights to free speech, and political expression is to call any speech or attitude that conveys disgust or moral outrage over the very obvious US and our ally’s violations of international law that have come to characterize the so called war on terrorism, radicalization.

If, when you hear that a drone has killed ten or twenty innocent people or more at a wedding or funeral in Pakistan in a military attempt to supposedly kill just one supposed terrorist, and you criticize that disproportionate and immoral use of force, you might be called radical, and extreme. It’s not because your gut instincts are naturally repulsed by what happened, that’s fine. You simply are not supposed to criticize or suggest that what happened was wrong, a violation of international law, or that it creates a desire and an excuse that justifies a similar use of violence by our supposed adversaries, in ways that might also be illegal and immoral.

If, when you hear that more than 1 million innocent people have been killed in a war where we were not fighting an army, or an enemy, but an insurgency that had a right to fight against a foreign invading and occupying military force, and that we not only killed those people, but also tortured them, raped them and destroyed their homes and then sent missionaries to provide them with Bibles in exchange for food and comfort. If you hear that, and you feel morally outraged that a certain faction in our country has used our troops and our money in this way, and you say or write anything critical about it, you might be considered by the powers that be, Democrats and Republicans and some so called independents, a person that has become radicalized.

Becoming radicalized can be compared to getting infected with rabies. If you hang out with, read, or agree with people who have already been infected with radicalism, and who write, speak, and do radical things like write letters critical of the war to newspaper editors, or submit op-eds to newspapers suggesting that the US is committing war crimes in these wars, etc., you can, and might also become radicalized. Like rabies, radicalization makes you appear angry. It can cause you to froth at the mouth as you debate simple concepts like human decency, law and justice and fair play with people who have been inoculated against radicalization. Such people are immune to radicalization due to injections of cash, jobs, appearances on cable TV, a mention in mainstream media as good people, and other perks, and pay offs.

The inoculated are absolutely incapable of understanding things like, you can’t lie your way into an illegal military invasion of a sovereign country, kill off its people, send in para-military groups to carry out slaughters, and then claim to be justified by the deaths of 3000 people, many of whom were foreign nationals and not even Americans, who were killed by other people, and not the people whose country you invaded and subsequently destroyed. Not only will the ambivalence and distorted sense of justice of the inoculated cause people who have been radicalized to froth at the mouth, it has been known to occasionally boil the blood to the point that a radicalized person will simply shut down, refuse to ever speak again and go into seclusion.

Radicalization, if it leads to frustration, can kill the spirit of even the strongest among us, when it reaches the point that logic shuts down, causing a person to believe the entire world has gone mad, and that it’s useless to say anything more, or to expect that anyone gives a damn, or that things will ever change. In such cases, the radicalized person might resort to bingo, and refuse to read newspapers or even to watch TV anymore.

Now, those who are involved in detecting radicalization and wiping it out or curing it, are not concerned that radicals might actually do anything violent, since it almost never happens. Yet, they must, and do suggest that radicalization leads to violence because it is the only way that they can get money to fight radicalization, or rather to fight free speech and expression and also the US Constitution that guarantees such rights as free speech and political expression. You see, no one can get government money to overtly undermine the US Constitution, or to violate our Constitutional rights. They can get millions, even billions to protect our country from the threat of terrorism.

This is why radicalization experts claim that the inevitable consequence of the dreaded disease, radicalization is politically motivated violence, or terrorism. Like rabies, it supposedly gives the appearance of mental illness, but can only be diagnosed as such if it is found in Zionists. Their violence and extremism is always the result of mental illnesses, or its self defense, while the common person’s moral outrage must be the result of radicalization. It is similar to a neurological disorder that prevents a person from being able to see evil as goodness, and goodness as weakness.

Radicakization is a type of moral dissonance that will not allow an infected person to believe that we are actually seeing our government and military act as an immoral and barbaric conquering force, completely ignoring the laws that we helped to impress upon the world as right and good and essential to peaceful co-existence. Laws like the Geneva Conventions. Yet, since moral dissonance has not been recognized by the AMA as a real mental illness, radicalization remains like rabies, a contagious neurological like disease that supposedly can only lead to violence, and so according to the experts, including the established religious experts who condone and support the war on radicalization, it must be eradicated.

Since aside from the Wall Street robber barons, our government is the only institution that can never run out of money, so long as it has a press that can print money, those who are part of the anti-terrorism industry must always have an angle whereby they can parlay their deep insights into the hearts and souls of the American sheeple, into cold hard government cash, formerly known as taxpayer money. Without much research or study, they know intuitively that enough outrageous behavior by our government and military will lead to the moral outrage of many American people. Eureka! What better way to make a buck than to bank on the fact that a free people will use their rights to free speech and political expression to criticize a government that claims to be representative, yet has clearly adopted a set of values and created for itself a law that is completely opposite of the values and laws of the people it claims to represent.

There is a cure for radicalization, but it doesn’t get much attention. You will almost never hear the word cure even mentioned by radicalization experts. Just like conspiracy theories surrounding cancer research and cures for other deadly diseases, the idea is that if radicalization is cured, the anti-radicalization industry will go out of business, and even worse, all of their lies will be exposed and they will lose credibility, maybe even be put in jail for lying to Congress and other crimes.

The obvious cure for radicalization is truth and accountability. To cure its radicalized citizenry, our government needs only reform, and to respond to the urgings of its people, and also the international community. End these wars; stop supporting dictators and violent despots who oppress their people in exchange for hand outs. Get rid of the double standards, the lying and the greed for power and replace it with common sense and a desire to co-exist peacefully in the world with others of varied cultures, skin colors, languages, religions, etc. Stop coveting the natural resources of others to the extent that rather than to depend upon free market economics, you will stoop to any level in smash and grab operations for oil and other resources that always fail miserably, leaving only hatred, death and destruction behind them.

Unfortunately, there is little hope that our government will opt for the cure anytime soon. So, we the people are left with two options. 1). Shut up and refuse to criticize the government, hide our moral outrage, and just go along hoping that the wars will eventually end and gas prices will one day be 1.50 a gallon or cheaper forever, or 2). Refuse to shut up, and demonstrate our moral outrage in every legal way possible, keeping in mind that the anti-radicalization forces in our Congress are at work trying to find ways to criminalize dissent, which is what radicalization was called previous to the wars. Since word dissent implies some type of patriotism and noble intent, it has been exchanged for the dreaded word, radicalization.

Keep in mind that if you adopt #2, that it is a war after all. If we adopt the mentality of our government and the insane faction of warmongers and imperialists now controlling our government, we will realize that there are no rules. They will either shut us all up, or we will shut their insane arses down. Power to the people.

Mauri' Saalakhan to speak in Detroit again today (Saturday)

2009-11-27T23:12:00.003-05:00

THE PEACE AND JUSTICE FOUNDATION

11006 Veirs Mill Rd, STE L-15, PMB 298

Silver Spring, MD. 20902

DHUL HIJJAH 1430 AH

(Yesterday, Nov. 27, 2009)

Assalaamu Alaikum (Greeting of Peace):

I pray that my brothers and sisters in Islam have enjoyed a blessed day of Eid, and that there will be more blessed days to come. I was invited to serve as guest khatib for the first jumah (in English) at the Islamic Center of Detroit earlier today. Despite the fatigued state I was in, I was blessed to deliver a somewhat fragmented address that ended up being well received.

Insha'Allah, I will continue where I left off this (Saturday) evening following salatul isha (about 7pm) at the same location – Islamic Center of Detroit (ICD) on Tireman St. By that time I should be well rested, and my address will include a special message for the young adult Muslims (male and female) in attendance, insha'Allah.

Before departing Detroit, I also plan to honor the invitation that I received from Imam Elahi to join his community (The Islamic House of Wisdom) on Sunday morning for their Eid Breakfast, insha'Allah. I look forward to seeing some warm and familiar faces from the Shi'a branch of my religious tribe/family.

With that said, please be advised that the Interfaith Dialogue on War and Peace will be moved to a later date (it will NOT take place this coming Thursday). There are a number of Muslim leaders that could not be in attendance because of the Hajj. The new date (which will be decided by the middle of next week, insha'Allah) will also give us more time to work with.

We expect this upcoming dialogue forum to be well attended and well covered; and far more substantive then the average "interfaith dialogue" that most of us have become accustomed to.

On a final note, the trial of Br. Fahad Hashmi is fast approaching in New York City (see below); the sentencing of Ehsanul Islam Saddaque (aka, Shifa) is also fast approaching in Atlanta, GA; and the trial of Dr. Aafia Siddique is not far behind (also in NYC).

And speaking of our sister Aafia, I had a very disturbing (yet importantly revealing) experience last weekend in both New York and Connecticut when I attempted to address two large audiences of people (predominantly Muslims) on the sister's case. More on this later, insha'Allah.

El-Hajj Mauri' Saalakhan

---------------------------------------

Br Syed Fahad Hashmi

as-Salamu 'alaykum wa rahmatullaahi wa barakaatuh

As some of you may know, our respected brother Fahad's trial is set to begin on the 6th of January and this trial is scheduled to last for three weeks, inshaa'Allaah.

So, why does Fahad need YOU?- Fahad and his family have been waiting 3.5 years for this day to begin and how many of us have been aware of our brother's situation or even bothered to help him or his family and make du'aa for him all those 3.5 years?

- Did you know that Fahad is on a 23-hour solitary-confinement lockdown and 24-hour surveillance including when he showers and goes to the bathroom. He has not been allowed family visits for months. Now, he can see one person for an hour and a half, every other week.

- Did you know that Fahad is permitted to write one letter a week to a single member of his family, but he cannot use more than three pieces of paper per letter. Within his own cell, he is restricted in his movements and he is not allowed to try to talk guards or other inmates?

- Our brother who hasn't even been trialed yet is forbidden any contact - directly or through his attorneys - with the news media. He can read newspapers, but only those portions approved by his jailers - and not until 30 days after publication. He is forbidden to listen to news radio stations or to watch television news channels.

- Imagine being under a 24-hour electronic monitoring inside and outside of a cell. Fahad is only allowed ONE hour of recreation every day - which is periodically denied - and not given fresh air but must exercise alone inside a cage.

'No calamity befalls, but with the Leave [i.e. decision and Qadar (Divine Preordainments)] of Allâh, and whosoever believes in Allâh, He guides his heart [to the true Faith with certainty, i.e. what has befallen him was already written for him by Allâh from the Qadar (Divine Preordainments)], and Allâh is the All-Knower of everything.' [Surah Taghabun]

As you make duaa these upcoming days of Dhul Hijjah (the best amongst the days created by Allaah) for forgiveness and Allaah's (unlimited) Mercy- do not forget to make duaa for Fahad Hashmi (& Dr Aafia Siddiqui, and the many more like them)

"The dua of a Muslim for his brother in his absence (i.e. the person is not present and is not aware that you are making dua for him) is answered. An angel is appointed to be at his side. Every time that he prays for some good for his brother, the angel says: "Aameen. And may the same be granted to you." (Muslim)

AND PLEASE ATTEND HIS COURT CASE, BE A REASON FOR THE SMILE ON HIS FACE THAT HIS MUSLIM BRETHREN HASNT FORGOTTEN HIM, For Court Details www.FREEFAHAD.com

www.MuslimsForJustice.org
__________________________________________________________________________________

Here is a poem written by Ammar AlShukry and dedicated to Fahad Hashmi titled,

My Brother

12 miles away in a cell is my brother
24 hour confined hell for my brother
They try to separate me with fear from my brother
But things arent as they appear with my brother
They call him a terrorist, I call him my brother
Tell me why they had to go take my brother
Because he says his Lord is Allah and no other?
Was it because he cared enough to teach did my brother
Or was it the hearts he used to reach did my brother
Was it that he was different from the crowd was my brother
Was it that he is a Muslim that is proud is my brother
They say that he's heartless, I say- my brother?
When they have him sitting in darkness, my brother
I ask Allah to pour out on him patience, my brother
3 years without trial he's waited, my brother

12 miles away in a cell is my brother
Sensory deprived hell for my brother
But I won't allow them to defeat my brother
As long as I can stand on my feet for my brother
As long as I can stand up and speak for my brother
I will not be afraid nor weak for my brother
I will not sit on the fence for my brother
I will stand up in defense for my brother

No effort too small or immense for my brother
I have no doubt they will clear my brother
And Allah will dry a mothers tears for my brother
But what I want to say here for my brother
If you're not willing to stand for your brother
Then this will only expand to your brothers
If you choose to forget or ignore my brother
I wont beg and I wont implore for my brother
I've seen the light emanate from the core of my brother
So It doesn't matter what they have in store for my brother
For Allah is my Lord... and He's the Lord of my brother

---------------------------

SENTENCE HEARING for SHIFA - DECEMBER 14, 2009

AT 9:30 AM

LOCATION :

RICHARD B. RUSSEL FEDERAL BUILDING

ROOM 1721, JUDGE DUFFEY

75 SPRING STREET SW

ATLANTA, GA 30303

READ THE POST-TRIAL REFLECTION LETTER BY HARIS AHMED, SHIFA'S CO-DEFENDANT

PLEASE ATTEND THE HEARING AND SHOW YOUR SUPPORT TO THE FAMILIES

WRITE LETTER TO THE JUDGE

CALL TO ACTION

Free Shifa! Free Haris!

Please take action on this important social justice issue by writing letters and helping spread the word.

A young Atlanta man has been convicted unfairly and is about to be

sentenced on four counts of conspiracy and attempt to provide

material support to foreign terrorist organizations. He has committed

no physical acts of violence. As he said himself at his trial in August:

"I was not then, and am not now a terrorist." He will be sentenced on DECEMBER 14, 2009

URGE JUDGE DUFFEY to SENTENCE SHIFA FAIRLY
Shifa faces up to 60 years in prison for crimes he did not commit.

Shifa will be 83 years old before he gets out, if the judge throws the

book at him which is likely.

Student movements across Bangladesh sent over 2500 letters in

support of Shifa. In the U.S., over 400 letters have been sent to Judge

Duffey, urging him to reduce the sentencing to time served

(best case scenario) or the lowest sentencing possible in accordance

with federal sentencing guidelines.

For additional info: www.freeshifa.com

Amayreh: Israel's Sisyphean Demographic War

2009-11-27T14:46:00.002-05:00

Khalid Amayreh:

"Within 5 years there will be as many Palestinians as Jews in Mandatory palestine. In 20 years there will be 600 million Muslims around Israel"

"Demographics are working against Israel, therefore it is in Israel's interest to make a dignified solution with the palestinians now."

More interviews like the one above can be found here.

PressTV Interviews the Interviewer