The Federal government’s track record of fixing things is not good.  The near bankruptcy  of  Social Security and Medicare  prove that the government is an undependable administrator of these programs.  Years ago the Supreme Court ruled that payments into Social Security are just a tax, thereby allowing Congress and Administrations to use Social Security money in any way  they like. 
The Federal government refuses to enforce laws that would protect our borders and then it lures illegal immigrants by giving them Social Security benefits and other benefits of citizenship.

ObamaCare is about power. Just look at the mandates throughout the versions in Congress. Note that those seeking the power have exempted themselves from the plan. The choices are stripped from everyone else. Anyone attempting to fix the real problems with health care in the US would be trying to fix just the problems—-not creating a one-size-fits-all mandated plan.

Below is a summary by WORLD magazine of the mandates in  HR3200:

  The government will audit your books if you self-insure: The newly created Commissioner will submit a report to the government that includes “any recommendations the Commissioner deems appropriate to ensure that the law does not provide incentives for small and mid-size employers to self-insure.” (21.23-23.3)

  The government will define your “health benefits”: “[Establish] a private-public advisory committee . . . of medical and other experts to be known as the Health Benefits Advisory Committee” to recommend what will be in the “covered benefits” and what are “essential, enhanced, and premium plans.” (30.13-30.18)

  The government will ration your care: Establish an annual limitation on cost sharing to ensure that “the cost-sharing incurred . . . with respect to an individual (or family) for a year does not exceed the applicable level specified–$5,000 for an individual and $10,000 for a family.” (29.4-29.16)

  The government will establish and administer a public health insurance option: “The Secretary’s primary responsibility is to create a low-cost plan without compromising quality or access to care.” (page 116, lines 1-17)

  The government will define how doctors manage their time: “The Secretary shall establish a process” to assign value units to “components and elements” of a doctor’s health care work, basing the relative value on “time, mental effort and professional judgment, technical skill and physical effort, and stress due to risk.” (page 253, lines 10-18)

  The government will tax employers for not providing healthcare: If an employer does not provide health insurance coverage, a contribution “shall be paid to the Health Choices Commissioner for deposit into the Health Insurance Exchange Trust Fund.” The rate will be 8 percent for a large employer payroll (over $400,000), 6 percent and lower for a small employer payroll. (page 149, line 14–page 151, line 5)
  The government will tax individuals unless you are a foreign resident: “Tax on individuals without acceptable health care coverage…imposed tax equal to 2.5 percent of the [gross income].” (page 167, line 17–page 168, line 4) This “shall not apply to any individual who is a non-resident alien.” (page 170, lines 1-3)

  The government will order you to get end-of-life counseling and show proof: “[An ] advance care planning consultation between the individual and a practitioner . . . [is required if] the individual involved has not had such a consultation within the last 5 years,” including an explanation by the practitioner of “end-of-life services.” (page 424, line 20–page 425, line 23) “A consultation . . . may include the formulation of an order regarding life sustaining treatment or a similar order,” including end-of-life services. (page 429, lines 1-3). “Orders regarding life sustaining treatment,” including “end of life” directions, can be signed either by a physician or “a nurse practitioner or physician’s assistant who has the authority under State law.” (page 429, line 8-16)

  The government will limit your hospital readmissions by penalizing hospitals: “The Secretary shall reduce the payments” to any hospital with “excess re-admissions,” based upon a ranking of hospitals by a national readmission ratio to be developed by the Secretary. (280.10-288.22) The Secretary “shall conduct a study to determine how the readmissions policy described in the previous subsections could be applied to physicians . . . [including] a payment reduction for physicians who treat the patient during the initial admission that results in a readmission.” (page 297, line 17–page 298, line 14)

  The government will restrict coverage of special needs patients: Restrict enrollment of new “special needs plans” within Social Security, beginning January 1, 2011, and “the Secretary shall submit to Congress a report” on recommendations regarding the treatment of existing plans, “as the Secretary deems appropriate.” (page 353, line 13–page 355, line 6)

  The government will not let you sue over coverage limits and costs decisions: “There shall be no administrative or judicial review of a payment rate or methodology established under this section or under section 224.” (page 124, line 4–page 125, line 2)

  The government will mandate what physicians make: The Secretary “shall provide for” physician participation under the public health insurance option, “for which payment may be made for services furnished during the year. . . .” (page 127, lines 1-16)

  The government will have access to your bank accounts: “Require the use of a standard electronic transaction with which health care providers may quickly and efficiently enroll with a health plan to conduct the other electronic transactions provided for in this part.” (page 59, line 21–page 60, line

  The government will not call the fees it imposes taxes: “The tax imposed under this section shall not be treated as tax imposed by this chapter for purposes of determining the amount of any credit under this chapter or for purposes of section 55.” (page 203, lines 13-18)
  The government will issue you a health ID card: “include utilization of a machine-readable health plan beneficiary identification card.” (page 58, lines 5-13)

  The government will enlist or create outreach programs like ACORN to sign-up individuals to government-run plan: “The Commissioner shall conduct outreach activities . . . for enrollments in Exchange-participating health benefits plans . . . through means such as the mail, by telephone, electronically, and in person.” (page 95, line 3–page 96, line 9)

  The government will create a new bureaucracy to include phone healthcare: “The Secretary shall appoint a Telehealth Advisory Committee to make recommendations to the Secretary on policies of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services regarding telehealth services. . . .” (page 379, line 8–page 380, line 14)

April 2009

Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.

MARK STEYN’S column appears in several newspapers, including the Washington Times, Philadelphia’s Evening Bulletin, and the Orange County Register. In addition, he writes for The New Criterion, Maclean’s in Canada, the Jerusalem Post, The Australian, and Hawke’s Bay Today in New Zealand. The author of National Review’s Happy Warrior column, he also blogs on National Review Online. He is the author of several books, including the best-selling America Alone: The End of The World as We Know It. Mr. Steyn teaches a two-week course in journalism at Hillsdale College during each spring semester.

The following is adapted from a lecture delivered at Hillsdale College on March 9, 2009.

MY REMARKS are titled tonight after the words of General Stark, New Hampshire’s great hero of the Revolutionary War: “Live free or die!” When I first moved to New Hampshire, where this appears on our license plates, I assumed General Stark had said it before some battle or other—a bit of red meat to rally the boys for the charge; a touch of the old Henry V-at-Agincourt routine. But I soon discovered that the general had made his famous statement decades after the war, in a letter regretting that he would be unable to attend a dinner. And in a curious way I found that even more impressive. In extreme circumstances, many people can rouse themselves to rediscover the primal impulses: The brave men on Flight 93 did. They took off on what they thought was a routine business trip, and, when they realized it wasn’t, they went into General Stark mode and cried “Let’s roll!” But it’s harder to maintain the “Live free or die!” spirit when you’re facing not an immediate crisis but just a slow, remorseless, incremental, unceasing ratchet effect. “Live free or die!” sounds like a battle cry: We’ll win this thing or die trying, die an honorable death. But in fact it’s something far less dramatic: It’s a bald statement of the reality of our lives in the prosperous West. You can live as free men, but, if you choose not to, your society will die.

My book America Alone is often assumed to be about radical Islam, firebreathing imams, the excitable young men jumping up and down in the street doing the old “Death to the Great Satan” dance. It’s not. It’s about us. It’s about a possibly terminal manifestation of an old civilizational temptation: Indolence, as Machiavelli understood, is the greatest enemy of a republic. When I ran into trouble with the so-called “human rights” commissions up in Canada, it seemed bizarre to find the progressive left making common cause with radical Islam. One half of the alliance profess to be pro-gay, pro-feminist secularists; the other half are homophobic, misogynist theocrats. Even as the cheap bus ‘n’ truck road-tour version of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, it made no sense. But in fact what they have in common overrides their superficially more obvious incompatibilities: Both the secular Big Government progressives and political Islam recoil from the concept of the citizen, of the free individual entrusted to operate within his own societal space, assume his responsibilities, and exploit his potential.

In most of the developed world, the state has gradually annexed all the responsibilities of adulthood—health care, child care, care of the elderly—to the point where it’s effectively severed its citizens from humanity’s primal instincts, not least the survival instinct. Hillary Rodham Clinton said it takes a village to raise a child. It’s supposedly an African proverb—there is no record of anyone in Africa ever using this proverb, but let that pass. P.J. O’Rourke summed up that book superbly: It takes a village to raise a child. The government is the village, and you’re the child. Oh, and by the way, even if it did take a village to raise a child, I wouldn’t want it to be an African village. If you fly over West Africa at night, the lights form one giant coastal megalopolis: Not even Africans regard the African village as a useful societal model. But nor is the European village. Europe’s addiction to big government, unaffordable entitlements, cradle-to-grave welfare, and a dependence on mass immigration needed to sustain it has become an existential threat to some of the oldest nation-states in the world.

And now the last holdout, the United States, is embarking on the same grim path: After the President unveiled his budget, I heard Americans complain, oh, it’s another Jimmy Carter, or LBJ’s Great Society, or the new New Deal. You should be so lucky. Those nickel-and-dime comparisons barely begin to encompass the wholesale Europeanization that’s underway. The 44th president’s multi-trillion-dollar budget, the first of many, adds more to the national debt than all the previous 43 presidents combined, from George Washington to George Dubya. The President wants Europeanized health care, Europeanized daycare, Europeanized education, and, as the Europeans have discovered, even with Europeanized tax rates you can’t make that math add up. In Sweden, state spending accounts for 54% of GDP. In America, it was 34%—ten years ago. Today, it’s about 40%. In four years’ time, that number will be trending very Swede-like.

But forget the money, the deficit, the debt, the big numbers with the 12 zeroes on the end of them. So-called fiscal conservatives often miss the point. The problem isn’t the cost. These programs would still be wrong even if Bill Gates wrote a check to cover them each month. They’re wrong because they deform the relationship between the citizen and the state. Even if there were no financial consequences, the moral and even spiritual consequences would still be fatal. That’s the stage where Europe is.

America is just beginning this process. I looked at the rankings in Freedom in the 50 States published by George Mason University last month. New Hampshire came in Number One, the Freest State in the Nation, which all but certainly makes it the freest jurisdiction in the Western world. Which kind of depressed me. Because the Granite State feels less free to me than it did when I moved there, and you always hope there’s somewhere else out there just in case things go belly up and you have to hit the road. And way down at the bottom in the last five places were Maryland, California, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and the least free state in the Union by some distance, New York.

New York! How does the song go? “If you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere!” If you can make it there, you’re some kind of genius. “This is the worst fiscal downturn since the Great Depression,” announced Governor Paterson a few weeks ago. So what’s he doing? He’s bringing in the biggest tax hike in New York history. If you can make it there, he can take it there—via state tax, sales tax, municipal tax, a doubled beer tax, a tax on clothing, a tax on cab rides, an “iTunes tax,” a tax on haircuts, 137 new tax hikes in all. Call 1-800-I-HEART-NEW-YORK today and order your new package of state tax forms, for just $199.99, plus the 12% tax on tax forms and the 4% tax form application fee partially refundable upon payment of the 7.5% tax filing tax. If you can make it there, you’ll certainly have no difficulty making it in Tajikistan.

New York, California… These are the great iconic American states, the ones we foreigners have heard of. To a penniless immigrant called Arnold Schwarzenegger, California was a land of plenty. Now Arnold is an immigrant of plenty in a penniless land: That’s not an improvement. One of his predecessors as governor of California, Ronald Reagan, famously said, “We are a nation that has a government, not the other way around.” In California, it’s now the other way around: California is increasingly a government that has a state. And it is still in the early stages of the process. California has thirtysomething million people. The Province of Quebec has seven million people. Yet California and Quebec have roughly the same number of government workers. “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation,” said Adam Smith, and America still has a long way to go. But it’s better to jump off the train as you’re leaving the station and it’s still picking up speed than when it’s roaring down the track and you realize you’ve got a one-way ticket on the Oblivion Express.

“Indolence,” in Machiavelli’s word: There are stages to the enervation of free peoples. America, which held out against the trend, is now at Stage One: The benign paternalist state promises to make all those worries about mortgages, debt, and health care disappear. Every night of the week, you can switch on the TV and see one of these ersatz “town meetings” in which freeborn citizens of the republic (I use the term loosely) petition the Sovereign to make all the bad stuff go away. “I have an urgent need,” a lady in Fort Myers beseeched the President. “We need a home, our own kitchen, our own bathroom.” He took her name and ordered his staff to meet with her. Hopefully, he didn’t insult her by dispatching some no-name deputy assistant associate secretary of whatever instead of flying in one of the bigtime tax-avoiding cabinet honchos to nationalize a Florida bank and convert one of its branches into a desirable family residence, with a swing set hanging where the drive-thru ATM used to be.

As all of you know, Hillsdale College takes no federal or state monies. That used to make it an anomaly in American education. It’s in danger of becoming an anomaly in America, period. Maybe it’s time for Hillsdale College to launch the Hillsdale Insurance Agency, the Hillsdale Motor Company and the First National Bank of Hillsdale. The executive supremo at Bank of America is now saying, oh, if only he’d known what he knows now, he wouldn’t have taken the government money. Apparently it comes with strings attached. Who knew? Sure, Hillsdale College did, but nobody else.

If you’re a business, when government gives you 2% of your income, it has a veto on 100% of what you do. If you’re an individual, the impact is even starker. Once you have government health care, it can be used to justify almost any restraint on freedom: After all, if the state has to cure you, it surely has an interest in preventing you needing treatment in the first place. That’s the argument behind, for example, mandatory motorcycle helmets, or the creepy teams of government nutritionists currently going door to door in Britain and conducting a “health audit” of the contents of your refrigerator. They’re not yet confiscating your Twinkies; they just want to take a census of how many you have. So you do all this for the “free” health care—and in the end you may not get the “free” health care anyway. Under Britain’s National Health Service, for example, smokers in Manchester have been denied treatment for heart disease, and the obese in Suffolk are refused hip and knee replacements. Patricia Hewitt, the British Health Secretary, says that it’s appropriate to decline treatment on the basis of “lifestyle choices.” Smokers and the obese may look at their gay neighbor having unprotected sex with multiple partners, and wonder why his “lifestyle choices” get a pass while theirs don’t. But that’s the point: Tyranny is always whimsical.

And if they can’t get you on grounds of your personal health, they’ll do it on grounds of planetary health. Not so long ago in Britain it was proposed that each citizen should have a government-approved travel allowance. If you take one flight a year, you’ll pay just the standard amount of tax on the journey. But, if you travel more frequently, if you take a second or third flight, you’ll be subject to additional levies—in the interest of saving the planet for Al Gore’s polar bear documentaries and that carbon-offset palace he lives in in Tennessee.

Isn’t this the very definition of totalitarianism-lite? The Soviets restricted the movement of people through the bureaucratic apparatus of “exit visas.” The British are proposing to do it through the bureaucratic apparatus of exit taxes—indeed, the bluntest form of regressive taxation. As with the Communists, the nomenklatura—the Prince of Wales, Al Gore, Madonna—will still be able to jet about hither and yon. What’s a 20% surcharge to them? Especially as those for whom vast amounts of air travel are deemed essential—government officials, heads of NGOs, environmental activists—will no doubt be exempted from having to pay the extra amount. But the ghastly masses will have to stay home.

“Freedom of movement” used to be regarded as a bedrock freedom. The movement is still free, but there’s now a government processing fee of $389.95. And the interesting thing about this proposal was that it came not from the Labour Party but the Conservative Party.

That’s Stage Two of societal enervation—when the state as guarantor of all your basic needs becomes increasingly comfortable with regulating your behavior. Free peoples who were once willing to give their lives for liberty can be persuaded very quickly to relinquish their liberties for a quiet life. When President Bush talked about promoting democracy in the Middle East, there was a phrase he liked to use: “Freedom is the desire of every human heart.” Really? It’s unclear whether that’s really the case in Gaza and the Pakistani tribal lands. But it’s absolutely certain that it’s not the case in Berlin and Paris, Stockholm and London, New Orleans and Buffalo. The story of the Western world since 1945 is that, invited to choose between freedom and government “security,” large numbers of people vote to dump freedom every time—the freedom to make your own decisions about health care, education, property rights, and a ton of other stuff. It’s ridiculous for grown men and women to say: I want to be able to choose from hundreds of cereals at the supermarket, thousands of movies from Netflix, millions of songs to play on my iPod—but I want the government to choose for me when it comes to my health care. A nation that demands the government take care of all the grown-up stuff is a nation turning into the world’s wrinkliest adolescent, free only to choose its record collection.

And don’t be too sure you’ll get to choose your record collection in the end. That’s Stage Three: When the populace has agreed to become wards of the state, it’s a mere difference of degree to start regulating their thoughts. When my anglophone friends in the Province of Quebec used to complain about the lack of English signs in Quebec hospitals, my response was that, if you allow the government to be the sole provider of health care, why be surprised that they’re allowed to decide the language they’ll give it in? But, as I’ve learned during my year in the hellhole of Canadian “human rights” law, that’s true in a broader sense. In the interests of “cultural protection,” the Canadian state keeps foreign newspaper owners, foreign TV operators, and foreign bookstore owners out of Canada. Why shouldn’t it, in return, assume the right to police the ideas disseminated through those newspapers, bookstores and TV networks it graciously agrees to permit?

When Maclean’s magazine and I were hauled up in 2007 for the crime of “flagrant Islamophobia,” it quickly became very clear that, for members of a profession that brags about its “courage” incessantly (far more than, say, firemen do), an awful lot of journalists are quite content to be the eunuchs in the politically correct harem. A distressing number of Western journalists see no conflict between attending lunches for World Press Freedom Day every month and agreeing to be micro-regulated by the state. The big problem for those of us arguing for classical liberalism is that in modern Canada there’s hardly anything left that isn’t on the state dripfeed to one degree or another: Too many of the institutions healthy societies traditionally look to as outposts of independent thought—churches, private schools, literature, the arts, the media—either have an ambiguous relationship with government or are downright dependent on it. Up north, “intellectual freedom” means the relevant film-funding agency—Cinedole Canada or whatever it’s called—gives you a check to enable you to continue making so-called “bold, brave, transgressive” films that discombobulate state power not a whit.

And then comes Stage Four, in which dissenting ideas and even words are labeled as “hatred.” In effect, the language itself becomes a means of control. Despite the smiley-face banalities, the tyranny becomes more naked: In Britain, a land with rampant property crime, undercover constables nevertheless find time to dine at curry restaurants on Friday nights to monitor adjoining tables lest someone in private conversation should make a racist remark. An author interviewed on BBC Radio expressed, very mildly and politely, some concerns about gay adoption and was investigated by Scotland Yard’s Community Safety Unit for Homophobic, Racist and Domestic Incidents. A Daily Telegraph columnist is arrested and detained in a jail cell over a joke in a speech. A Dutch legislator is invited to speak at the Palace of Westminster by a member of the House of Lords, but is banned by the government, arrested on arrival at Heathrow and deported.

America, Britain, and even Canada are not peripheral nations: They’re the three anglophone members of the G7. They’re three of a handful of countries that were on the right side of all the great conflicts of the last century. But individual liberty flickers dimmer in each of them. The massive expansion of government under the laughable euphemism of “stimulus” (Stage One) comes with a quid pro quo down the line (Stage Two): Once you accept you’re a child in the government nursery, why shouldn’t Nanny tell you what to do? And then—Stage Three—what to think? And—Stage Four—what you’re forbidden to think . . . .

Which brings us to the final stage: As I said at the beginning, Big Government isn’t about the money. It’s more profound than that. A couple of years back Paul Krugman wrote a column in The New York Times asserting that, while parochial American conservatives drone on about “family values,” the Europeans live it, enacting policies that are more “family friendly.” On the Continent, claims the professor, “government regulations actually allow people to make a desirable tradeoff-to modestly lower income in return for more time with friends and family.”

As befits a distinguished economist, Professor Krugman failed to notice that for a continent of “family friendly” policies, Europe is remarkably short of families. While America’s fertility rate is more or less at replacement level—2.1—seventeen European nations are at what demographers call “lowest-low” fertility—1.3 or less—a rate from which no society in human history has ever recovered. Germans, Spaniards, Italians and Greeks have upside-down family trees: four grandparents have two children and one grandchild. How can an economist analyze “family friendly” policies without noticing that the upshot of these policies is that nobody has any families?

As for all that extra time, what happened? Europeans work fewer hours than Americans, they don’t have to pay for their own health care, they’re post-Christian so they don’t go to church, they don’t marry and they don’t have kids to take to school and basketball and the 4-H stand at the county fair. So what do they do with all the time?

Forget for the moment Europe’s lack of world-beating companies: They regard capitalism as an Anglo-American fetish, and they mostly despise it. But what about the things Europeans supposedly value? With so much free time, where is the great European art? Where are Europe’s men of science? At American universities. Meanwhile, Continental governments pour fortunes into prestigious white elephants of Euro-identity, like the Airbus A380, capable of carrying 500, 800, a thousand passengers at a time, if only somebody somewhere would order the darn thing, which they might consider doing once all the airports have built new runways to handle it.

“Give people plenty and security, and they will fall into spiritual torpor,” wrote Charles Murray in In Our Hands. “When life becomes an extended picnic, with nothing of importance to do, ideas of greatness become an irritant. Such is the nature of the Europe syndrome.”

The key word here is “give.” When the state “gives” you plenty—when it takes care of your health, takes cares of your kids, takes care of your elderly parents, takes care of every primary responsibility of adulthood—it’s not surprising that the citizenry cease to function as adults: Life becomes a kind of extended adolescence—literally so for those Germans who’ve mastered the knack of staying in education till they’re 34 and taking early retirement at 42. Hilaire Belloc, incidentally, foresaw this very clearly in his book The Servile State in 1912. He understood that the long-term cost of a welfare society is the infantilization of the population.

Genteel decline can be very agreeable—initially: You still have terrific restaurants, beautiful buildings, a great opera house. And once the pressure’s off it’s nice to linger at the sidewalk table, have a second café au lait and a pain au chocolat, and watch the world go by. At the Munich Security Conference in February, President Sarkozy demanded of his fellow Continentals, “Does Europe want peace, or do we want to be left in peace?” To pose the question is to answer it. Alas, it only works for a generation or two. And it’s hard to come up with a wake-up call for a society as dedicated as latterday Europe to the belief that life is about sleeping in.

As Gerald Ford liked to say when trying to ingratiate himself with conservative audiences, “A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.” And that’s true. But there’s an intermediate stage: A government big enough to give you everything you want isn’t big enough to get you to give any of it back. That’s the position European governments find themselves in. Their citizens have become hooked on unaffordable levels of social programs which in the end will put those countries out of business. Just to get the Social Security debate in perspective, projected public pension liabilities are expected to rise by 2040 to about 6.8% of GDP in the U.S. In Greece, the figure is 25%—i.e., total societal collapse. So what? shrug the voters. Not my problem. I want my benefits. The crisis isn’t the lack of money, but the lack of citizens—in the meaningful sense of that word.

Every Democrat running for election tells you they want to do this or that “for the children.” If America really wanted to do something “for the children,” it could try not to make the same mistake as most of the rest of the Western world and avoid bequeathing the next generation a leviathan of bloated bureaucracy and unsustainable entitlements that turns the entire nation into a giant Ponzi scheme. That’s the real “war on children” (to use another Democrat catchphrase)—and every time you bulk up the budget you make it less and less likely they’ll win it.

Conservatives often talk about “small government,” which, in a sense, is framing the issue in leftist terms: they’re for big government. But small government gives you big freedoms—and big government leaves you with very little freedom. The bailout and the stimulus and the budget and the trillion-dollar deficits are not merely massive transfers from the most dynamic and productive sector to the least dynamic and productive. When governments annex a huge chunk of the economy, they also annex a huge chunk of individual liberty. You fundamentally change the relationship between the citizen and the state into something closer to that of junkie and pusher—and you make it very difficult ever to change back. Americans face a choice: They can rediscover the animating principles of the American idea—of limited government, a self-reliant citizenry, and the opportunities to exploit your talents to the fullest—or they can join most of the rest of the Western world in terminal decline. To rekindle the spark of liberty once it dies is very difficult. The inertia, the ennui, the fatalism is more pathetic than the demographic decline and fiscal profligacy of the social democratic state, because it’s subtler and less tangible. But once in a while it swims into very sharp focus. Here is the writer Oscar van den Boogaard from an interview with the Belgian paper De Standaard. Mr. van den Boogaard, a Dutch gay “humanist” (which is pretty much the trifecta of Eurocool), was reflecting on the accelerating Islamification of the Continent and concluding that the jig was up for the Europe he loved. “I am not a warrior, but who is?” he shrugged. “I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.” In the famous Kubler-Ross five stages of grief, Mr. van den Boogard is past denial, anger, bargaining and depression, and has arrived at a kind of acceptance.

“I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.” Sorry, doesn’t work—not for long. Back in New Hampshire, General Stark knew that. Mr. van den Boogard’s words are an epitaph for Europe. Whereas New Hampshire’s motto—”Live free or die!”—is still the greatest rallying cry for this state or any other. About a year ago, there was a picture in the papers of Iranian students demonstrating in Tehran and waving placards. And what they’d written on those placards was: “Live free or die!” They understand the power of those words; so should we.

The health bills coming out of Congress would put your care in the hands of presidential appointees who would decide what the plans cover, what leeway doctors have, and what treatments seniors get under Medicare.

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel (brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel) has been appointed Health policy adviser at the office of Management and Budget,  and he was also appointed a member of Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research.

He says savings will require doctors to look beyond the needs of their patients and to consider social justice — such as whether the money could be better spent on somebody else.  He believes that “communitariansim” should guide decisions on who gets care.

He says medical care should be reserved for the non-disabled, not given to those “who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens. . . An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia” (Hastings Center Report, Nov-Dec. ‘96).  Examples would be people with Parkinson’s or a child with cerebral palsy.

He explicitly defends discrimination against older patients: “Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age.  Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years” (Lancet, Jan. 31, 2009).

But not to worry.  Those with terminal illnesses will get counseling sessions every five years on how to choose different ways of ending their lives.  It’s mandatory.

The bills being pushed through Congress will be paid for largely by a $500 billion-plus cut in Medicare over 10 years. Peter Orszag, the President’s budget director, urged Congress this week to delegate its own authority over Medicare to a new, presidentially-appointed bureaucracy (that wouldn’t be accountable to the public).

Since the time Medicare began in 1965, senior citizens’ lives have been transformed by new medical treatments like angioplasty, bypass surgery, and hip and knee replacements.   Referring to these treatments, Emanuel criticizes Americans for being too “enamored with technology” and is determined to reduce access to it.

David Blumenthal, appointed by the President to be national coordinator of health-information technology, agrees.  He recommends slowing medical innovation to control health spending.  His job involves making sure doctors obey electronically delivered guidelines about what care the government deems appropriate and cost effective.

In the April 9 New England Journal of Medicine, Blumenthal predicted that many doctors would resist “embedded clinical decision support” (a euphemism for computers telling doctors what to do).

But don’t think that just because you have money to pay your own health-care costs you will avoid the system.  That is not permitted under the plan because it would be unequal.  But guess who can avoid the government plan —- you’ve got it — members of the government.

How much chance do we have avoiding the plan?  Here’s the Chicago-style arm-twisting that citizens are up against.  In a Health Care Watch column (Nov. 16, 2008) Emanuel explained how the bill should be passed: “Every favor to a constituency should be linked to support for the health-care reform agenda.  If automakers want a bailout, then they and their suppliers have to agree to support and lobby for the administration’s health-reform effort.”

http://www.defendyourhealthcare.us/

Here is a recent partial transcript of FOX News Shep Smith with Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group cashing in on “hate” and serving as an outsourced government-Inquisition. Thanks to Mike Tuggle at www.dixienet.org blog:

Beirich: The Department of Homeland Security report got savaged, but they were on to something there. We’ve had several examples of domestic terrorism just in the last few months. We had a crazed cop killer in Pittsburgh who was motivated by racism and anti-government views, who killed three people in his front yard. We had a guy who was actually found with the components of a dirty bomb according to the FBI in January in Bangor, Maine, who had a whole bunch of anti-government beliefs. We’ve had two assassination plots against the president by some skinheads.
Smith: How are you handling that through your organization? I’m sure you’re getting busier.
Beirich: We’ve been very busy! Our biggest concern right now is we’re making sure we’re getting the right information into law enforcement’s hands so they can deal with these problems, so we’re monitoring all these web sites and publications from these folks, all these racists and anti-government types, and when we see something frightening, we’re passing it on to law enforcement.

In case you didn’t notice, Beirich is telling us that the Department of Homeland Security report alerting Americans to the terror threat posed by activists supporting gun rights, border security, and Ron Paul was correct. And you can’t ignore the drumbeat pounding in the idea that anyone who questions the government suffers from irrational hatred of others.
Shep bids adieu to Heidi by wishing the best of luck to her “terrific organization.” Fair and balanced.
In a must-read post on Lew Rockwell today, William Norman Grigg discusses how the old Soviet Union also equated dissent with “crazed” behavior:

This was the logic – if that word applies – behind the political use of psychiatry in the Soviet Union: Only someone clinically deranged could hate socialism, and since such people were a danger to themselves and society, they had to be incarcerated in the psiushka (psychiatric gulag) and forcibly cured of their anti-social(ist) tendencies. The heroic former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky recounts his own experience in the Soviet psycho-gulag in his memoir, To Build a Castle.

The Soviet use of psychiatry was an outgrowth of the Regime’s longstanding policy of pre-emption: Threats to “stability” and “social order” had to be recognized and aborted before they reached maturity.

We haven’t reached the point where we must turn in our friends and family to prove our loyalty and rationality. At least, not yet.

President Obama has nominated Judge Sonia Sotomayor to fill the forthcoming vacancy on the Supreme Court.  She fits the President’s desire to have an “empathetic” Justice in the Court— one who is more interested in subjective and personal experience than in a rigorous following of the Constitution and law.                                     

The New York Times reported that the prominent cause of Judge Sotomayor’s career has been advancing persons of color, over whites, based on race and national origin.  Consequently, there has been criticism from some conservatives who identify her rulings as just another form of racial bigotry.

Patrick Buchanan says, “Down the path Sotomayor would take us lies an America where Hispanic justices rule for Hispanics, black judges rule for blacks and white judges rule for white folks.”  Mr. Buchanan adds that “Obama would not have selected Sotomayor if he did not share her convictions. And there is nothing in his writings or career to hint at disagreement.”

An analysis by Andy McCarthy (“The Corner,” NRO) puts a little different light on the subject.  He says forget whether she is too racist to be a Supreme Court Justice; would Judge Sotomayor qualify as a juror? 

He says citizens who are called to jury duty “have a sworn obligation to decide cases objectively—without fear or favor.”  McCarthy says that Judges at every single trial solemnly instruct prospective jurors “that if the person believes he or she has a bias or prejudice, especially one based on a belief that people are inferior or superior due to such factors as race, ethnicity, or sex, the person is not qualified to be a juror.”

Mr. McCarthy then gives a standard set of instructions used by a judge in selecting a jury:

You have two duties as a jury. Your first duty is to decide the facts from the evidence in the case. This is your job, and yours alone. Your second duty is to apply the law that I give you to the facts. You must follow these instructions, even if you disagree with them…. Perform these duties fairly and impartially. Do not allow sympathy, prejudice, fear, or public opinion to influence you. You should not be influenced by any person’s race, color, religion, national ancestry, or sex.

Would Judge Sotomayor be qualified to serve as a juror?  She has gone on record as saying that she believed a wise Latina makes better judgments than a white male; that she doubts it is actually possible to “transcend [one's] personal sympathies and prejudices and aspire to achieve a greater degree of fairness and integrity based on the reason of law”; and that there are “basic differences” in the way people “of color” exercise “logic and reasoning.”

McCarthy then asks:  “If, upon hearing that, would it not be reasonable for a lawyer for one (or both) of the parties to ask the court to excuse her for cause? Would it not be incumbent on the court to grant that request?  Should we have on the Supreme Court, where jury verdicts are reviewed, a justice who would have difficulty qualifying for jury service?”

The Department of Homeland Security has written and is circulating within the Federal Government a document that has all the markings of an attempt to suppress dissent and freedom of speech.  It attempts to do this through intimidation.  The document is printed below.

The paper is based on pure supposition and has, by its own admission, no evidence of unlawful activities—that is, unless free speech is considered a crime.  The fanciful labeling of any speech which is a dissent from the Government’s own line of propaganda is considered throughout the paper as evidence of “rightwing extremism.”  The term is used repeatedly to paint all sorts of Americans as threats to the country and as potential recruits for violence against the Government. 

It is a variation on thought policing  designed to prevent any criticism of the central government’s policy.  And it is a strawman tactic that  resembles Obama’s repeated references during the campaign to racism when he was the only one dealing in the language of racism at the time.

U//FOUO)( Rightwing Extremism: Current
Economic and Political Climate Fueling
Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment
7 April 2009
(U) Prepared by the Extremism and Radicalization Branch, Homeland Environment Threat Analysis
Division. Coordinated with the FBI.

(U) Scope
(U//FOUO) This product is one of a series of intelligence assessments published by the
Extremism and Radicalization Branch to facilitate a greater understanding of the
phenomenon of violent radicalization in the United States. The information is
provided to federal, state, local, and tribal counterterrorism and law enforcement
officials so they may effectively deter, prevent, preempt, or respond to terrorist attacks
against the United States. Federal efforts to influence domestic public opinion must be
conducted in an overt and transparent manner, clearly identifying United States
Government sponsorship.

(U) Key Findings
(U//LES) The DHS/Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) has no specific
information that domestic rightwing* terrorists are currently planning acts of violence,
but rightwing extremists may be gaining new recruits by playing on their fears about
several emergent issues. The economic downturn and the election of the first
African American president present unique drivers for rightwing radicalization and
recruitment.

— (U//LES) Threats from white supremacist and violent antigovernment groups
during 2009 have been largely rhetorical and have not indicated plans to carry
out violent acts. Nevertheless, the consequences of a prolonged economic
downturn—including real estate foreclosures, unemployment, and an inability
to obtain credit—could create a fertile recruiting environment for rightwing
extremists and even result in confrontations between such groups and
government authorities similar to those in the past.

— (U//LES) Rightwing extremists have capitalized on the election of the first
African American president, and are focusing their efforts to recruit new
members, mobilize existing supporters, and broaden their scope and appeal
through propaganda, but they have not yet turned to attack planning.
(U//FOUO) The current economic and political climate has some similarities to the
1990s when rightwing extremism experienced a resurgence fueled largely by an
economic recession, criticism about the outsourcing of jobs, and the perceived threat to
U.S. power and sovereignty by other foreign powers.

— (U//FOUO) During the 1990s, these issues contributed to the growth in the
number of domestic rightwing terrorist and extremist groups and an increase in
violent acts targeting government facilities, law enforcement officers, banks,
and infrastructure sectors.

— (U//FOUO) Growth of these groups subsided in reaction to increased
government scrutiny as a result of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and
disrupted plots, improvements in the economy, and the continued U.S. standing
as the preeminent world power.

(U//FOUO) The possible passage of new restrictions on firearms and the return of
military veterans facing significant challenges reintegrating into their communities
could lead to the potential emergence of terrorist groups or lone wolf extremists
capable of carrying out violent attacks.

(U) Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and
adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups),
and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or
rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a
single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.
UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY
UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY
Page 3 of 9

— (U//FOUO) Proposed imposition of firearms restrictions and weapons bans
likely would attract new members into the ranks of rightwing extremist groups,
as well as potentially spur some of them to begin planning and training for
violence against the government. The high volume of purchases and
stockpiling of weapons and ammunition by rightwing extremists in anticipation
of restrictions and bans in some parts of the country continue to be a primary
concern to law enforcement.

— (U//FOUO) Returning veterans possess combat skills and experience that are
attractive to rightwing extremists. DHS/I&A is concerned that rightwing
extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to
boost their violent capabilities.

(U) Current Economic and Political Climate

(U//FOUO) DHS/I&A assesses that a number of economic and political factors are
driving a resurgence in rightwing extremist recruitment and radicalization activity.
Despite similarities to the climate of the 1990s, the threat posed by lone wolves and small
terrorist cells is more pronounced than in past years. In addition, the historical election of
an African American president and the prospect of policy changes are proving to be a
driving force for rightwing extremist recruitment and radicalization.

— (U) A recent example of the potential violence associated with a rise in rightwing
extremism may be found in the shooting deaths of three police officers in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on 4 April 2009. The alleged gunman’s reaction
reportedly was influenced by his racist ideology and belief in antigovernment
conspiracy theories related to gun confiscations, citizen detention camps, and a
Jewish-controlled “one world government.”

(U) Exploiting Economic Downturn

(U//FOUO) Rightwing extremist chatter on the Internet continues to focus on the
economy, the perceived loss of U.S. jobs in the manufacturing and construction sectors,
and home foreclosures. Anti-Semitic extremists attribute these losses to a deliberate
conspiracy conducted by a cabal of Jewish “financial elites.” These “accusatory” tactics
are employed to draw new recruits into rightwing extremist groups and further radicalize
those already subscribing to extremist beliefs. DHS/I&A assesses this trend is likely to
accelerate if the economy is perceived to worsen.

(U) Historical Presidential Election

(U//LES) Rightwing extremists are harnessing this historical election as a recruitment
tool. Many rightwing extremists are antagonistic toward the new presidential
administration and its perceived stance on a range of issues, including immigration and
citizenship, the expansion of social programs to minorities, and restrictions on firearms
UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY
UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY
Page 4 of 9

(U//FOUO) Perceptions on Poverty and Radicalization

(U//FOUO) Scholars and experts disagree over poverty’s role in motivating violent radicalization or
terrorist activity. High unemployment, however, has the potential to lead to alienation, thus increasing
an individual’s susceptibility to extremist ideas. According to a 2007 study from the German Institute
for Economic Research, there appears to be a strong association between a parent’s unemployment
status and the formation of rightwing extremist beliefs in their children—specifically xenophobia and
antidemocratic ideals.
ownership and use. Rightwing extremists are increasingly galvanized by these concerns
and leverage them as drivers for recruitment. From the 2008 election timeframe to the
present, rightwing extremists have capitalized on related racial and political prejudices in
expanded propaganda campaigns, thereby reaching out to a wider audience of potential
sympathizers.

— (U//LES) Most statements by rightwing extremists have been rhetorical,
expressing concerns about the election of the first African American president,
but stopping short of calls for violent action. In two instances in the run-up to the
election, extremists appeared to be in the early planning stages of some
threatening activity targeting the Democratic nominee, but law enforcement
interceded.

(U) Revisiting the 1990s

(U//FOUO) Paralleling the current national climate, rightwing extremists during the
1990s exploited a variety of social issues and political themes to increase group visibility
and recruit new members. Prominent among these themes were the militia movement’s
opposition to gun control efforts, criticism of free trade agreements (particularly those
with Mexico), and highlighting perceived government infringement on civil liberties as
well as white supremacists’ longstanding exploitation of social issues such as abortion,
inter-racial crimes, and same-sex marriage. During the 1990s, these issues contributed to
the growth in the number of domestic rightwing terrorist and extremist groups and an
increase in violent acts targeting government facilities, law enforcement officers, banks,
and infrastructure sectors.

(U) Economic Hardship and Extremism

(U//FOUO) Historically, domestic rightwing extremists have feared, predicted, and
anticipated a cataclysmic economic collapse in the United States. Prominent
antigovernment conspiracy theorists have incorporated aspects of an impending
economic collapse to intensify fear and paranoia among like-minded individuals and to
attract recruits during times of economic uncertainty. Conspiracy theories involving
declarations of martial law, impending civil strife or racial conflict, suspension of the
U.S. Constitution, and the creation of citizen detention camps often incorporate aspects of
a failed economy. Antigovernment conspiracy theories and “end times” prophecies could
motivate extremist individuals and groups to stockpile food, ammunition, and weapons.
These teachings also have been linked with the radicalization of domestic extremist
individuals and groups in the past, such as violent Christian Identity organizations and
extremist members of the militia movement.
UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY
UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY
Page 5 of 9

(U) Illegal Immigration

(U//FOUO) Rightwing extremists were concerned during the 1990s with the perception
that illegal immigrants were taking away American jobs through their willingness to
work at significantly lower wages. They also opposed free trade agreements, arguing that
these arrangements resulted in Americans losing jobs to countries such as Mexico.

(U//FOUO) Over the past five years, various rightwing extremists, including militias and
white supremacists, have adopted the immigration issue as a call to action, rallying point,
and recruiting tool. Debates over appropriate immigration levels and enforcement policy
generally fall within the realm of protected political speech under the First Amendment,
but in some cases, anti-immigration or strident pro-enforcement fervor has been directed
against specific groups and has the potential to turn violent.

(U//FOUO) DHS/I&A assesses that rightwing extremist groups’ frustration over a
perceived lack of government action on illegal immigration has the potential to incite
individuals or small groups toward violence. If such violence were to occur, it likely
would be isolated, small-scale, and directed at specific immigration-related targets.

— (U//FOUO) DHS/I&A notes that prominent civil rights organizations have
observed an increase in anti-Hispanic crimes over the past five years.

— (U) In April 2007, six militia members were arrested for various weapons and
explosives violations. Open source reporting alleged that those arrested had
discussed and conducted surveillance for a machinegun attack on Hispanics.

— (U) A militia member in Wyoming was arrested in February 2007 after
communicating his plans to travel to the Mexican border to kill immigrants
crossing into the United States.

(U) Legislative and Judicial Drivers

(U//FOUO) Many rightwing extremist groups perceive recent gun control legislation as a
threat to their right to bear arms and in response have increased weapons and ammunition
stockpiling, as well as renewed participation in paramilitary training exercises. Such
activity, combined with a heightened level of extremist paranoia, has the potential to
facilitate criminal activity and violence.

— (U//FOUO) During the 1990s, rightwing extremist hostility toward government
was fueled by the implementation of restrictive gun laws—such as the Brady Law
that established a 5-day waiting period prior to purchasing a handgun and the
1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act that limited the sale of
various types of assault rifles—and federal law enforcement’s handling of the
confrontations at Waco, Texas and Ruby Ridge, Idaho.
UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY
UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY
Page 6 of 9

— (U//FOUO) On the current front, legislation has been proposed this year
requiring mandatory registration of all firearms in the United States. Similar
legislation was introduced in 2008 in several states proposing mandatory tagging
and registration of ammunition. It is unclear if either bill will be passed into law;
nonetheless, a correlation may exist between the potential passage of gun control
legislation and increased hoarding of ammunition, weapons stockpiling, and
paramilitary training activities among rightwing extremists.
(U//FOUO) Open source reporting of wartime ammunition shortages has likely spurred
rightwing extremists—as well as law-abiding Americans—to make bulk purchases of
ammunition. These shortages have increased the cost of ammunition, further
exacerbating rightwing extremist paranoia and leading to further stockpiling activity.
Both rightwing extremists and law-abiding citizens share a belief that rising crime rates
attributed to a slumping economy make the purchase of legitimate firearms a wise move
at this time.

(U//FOUO) Weapons rights and gun-control legislation are likely to be hotly contested
subjects of political debate in light of the 2008 Supreme Court’s decision in District of
Columbia v. Heller in which the Court reaffirmed an individual’s right to keep and bear
arms under the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but left open to debate the
precise contours of that right. Because debates over constitutional rights are intense, and
parties on all sides have deeply held, sincere, but vastly divergent beliefs, violent
extremists may attempt to co-opt the debate and use the controversy as a radicalization
tool.

(U) Perceived Threat from Rise of Other Countries

(U//FOUO) Rightwing extremist paranoia of foreign regimes could escalate or be
magnified in the event of an economic crisis or military confrontation, harkening back to
the “New World Order” conspiracy theories of the 1990s. The dissolution of Communist
countries in Eastern Europe and the end of the Soviet Union in the 1990s led some
rightwing extremists to believe that a “New World Order” would bring about a world
government that would usurp the sovereignty of the United States and its Constitution,
thus infringing upon their liberty. The dynamics in 2009 are somewhat similar, as other
countries, including China, India, and Russia, as well as some smaller, oil-producing
states, are experiencing a rise in economic power and influence.

— (U//FOUO) Fear of Communist regimes and related conspiracy theories
characterizing the U.S. Government’s role as either complicit in a foreign
invasion or acquiescing as part of a “One World Government” plan inspired
extremist members of the militia movement to target government and military
facilities in past years.

— (U//FOUO) Law enforcement in 1996 arrested three rightwing militia members
in Battle Creek, Michigan with pipe bombs, automatic weapons, and military
UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY
UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY
Page 7 of 9

(U//FOUO) Lone Wolves and Small Terrorist Cells

(U//FOUO) DHS/I&A assesses that lone wolves and small terrorist cells embracing violent rightwing extremist ideology are the most dangerous domestic terrorism threat in the United States. Informationfrom law enforcement and nongovernmental organizations indicates lone wolves and small terrorist cells have shown intent—and, in some cases, the capability—to commit violent acts.

— (U//LES) DHS/I&A has concluded that white supremacist lone wolves pose the most
significant domestic terrorist threat because of their low profile and autonomy—separate from any formalized group—which hampers warning efforts.

— (U//FOUO) Similarly, recent state and municipal law enforcement reporting has warned of the dangers of rightwing extremists embracing the tactics of “leaderless resistance” and of lone wolves carrying out acts of violence.

— (U//FOUO) Arrests in the past several years of radical militia members in Alabama, Arkansas,and Pennsylvania on firearms, explosives, and other related violations indicates the emergence of small, well-armed extremist groups in some rural areas.
ordnance that they planned to use in attacks on nearby military and federal
facilities and infrastructure targets.

— (U//FOUO) Rightwing extremist views bemoan the decline of U.S. stature and
have recently focused on themes such as the loss of U.S. manufacturing capability
to China and India, Russia’s control of energy resources and use of these to
pressure other countries, and China’s investment in U.S. real estate and
corporations as a part of subversion strategy.

(U) Disgruntled Military Veterans

(U//FOUO) DHS/I&A assesses that rightwing extremists will attempt to recruit and
radicalize returning veterans in order to exploit their skills and knowledge derived from
military training and combat. These skills and knowledge have the potential to boost the
capabilities of extremists—including lone wolves or small terrorist cells—to carry out
violence. The willingness of a small percentage of military personnel to join extremist
groups during the 1990s because they were disgruntled, disillusioned, or suffering from
the psychological effects of war is being replicated today.

— (U) After Operation Desert Shield/Storm in 1990-1991, some returning military
veterans—including Timothy McVeigh—joined or associated with rightwing
extremist groups.

— (U) A prominent civil rights organization reported in 2006 that “large numbers
of potentially violent neo-Nazis, skinheads, and other white supremacists are now
learning the art of warfare in the [U.S.] armed forces.”

— (U//LES) The FBI noted in a 2008 report on the white supremacist movement
that some returning military veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have
joined extremist groups.
UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY
UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY
Page 8 of 9

(U) Outlook
(U//FOUO) DHS/I&A assesses that the combination of environmental factors that echo
the 1990s, including heightened interest in legislation for tighter firearms restrictions and
returning military veterans, as well as several new trends, including an uncertain
economy and a perceived rising influence of other countries, may be invigorating
rightwing extremist activity, specifically the white supremacist and militia movements.
To the extent that these factors persist, rightwing extremism is likely to grow in strength.
(U//FOUO) Unlike the earlier period, the advent of the Internet and other informationage
technologies since the 1990s has given domestic extremists greater access to
information related to bomb-making, weapons training, and tactics, as well as targeting of
individuals, organizations, and facilities, potentially making extremist individuals and
groups more dangerous and the consequences of their violence more severe. New
technologies also permit domestic extremists to send and receive encrypted
communications and to network with other extremists throughout the country and abroad,
making it much more difficult for law enforcement to deter, prevent, or preempt a violent
extremist attack.

(U//FOUO) A number of law enforcement actions and external factors were effective in
limiting the militia movement during the 1990s and could be utilized in today’s climate.

— (U//FOUO) Following the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal
building in Oklahoma City, the militia movement declined in total membership
and in the number of organized groups because many members distanced
themselves from the movement as a result of the intense scrutiny militias received
after the bombing.

— (U//FOUO) Militia membership continued to decline after the turn of the
millennium as a result of law enforcement disruptions of multiple terrorist plots
linked to violent rightwing extremists, new legislation banning paramilitary
training, and militia frustration that the “revolution” never materialized.

— (U//FOUO) Although the U.S. economy experienced a significant recovery and
many perceived a concomitant rise in U.S. standing in the world, white
supremacist groups continued to experience slight growth.

(U//FOUO) DHS/I&A will be working with its state and local partners over the next
several months to ascertain with greater regional specificity the rise in rightwing
extremist activity in the United States, with a particular emphasis on the political,
economic, and social factors that drive rightwing extremist radicalization.
UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY
UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY
Page 9 of 9

Ten years ago this article in the New York Times described what was then developing in Fannie Mae practices that led to the mortgage catastrophe we have today.  The article includes the following warning:

“From the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift industry growing up around us,” said Peter Wallison a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.”

Fannie Mae Eases Credit To Aid Mortgage Lending

By STEVEN A. HOLMES
Tuesday, September 30, 1999

In a move that could help increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders.

The action, which will begin as a pilot program involving 24 banks in 15 markets — including the New York metropolitan region — will encourage those banks to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit is generally not good enough to qualify for conventional loans. Fannie Mae officials say they hope to make it a nationwide program by next spring.

Fannie Mae, the nation’s biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.

In addition, banks, thrift institutions and mortgage companies have been pressing Fannie Mae to help them make more loans to so-called subprime borrowers. These borrowers whose incomes, credit ratings and savings are not good enough to qualify for conventional loans, can only get loans from finance companies that charge much higher interest rates — anywhere from three to four percentage points higher than conventional loans.

“Fannie Mae has expanded home ownership for millions of families in the 1990’s by reducing down payment requirements,” said Franklin D. Raines, Fannie Mae’s chairman and chief executive officer. “Yet there remain too many borrowers whose credit is just a notch below what our underwriting has required who have been relegated to paying significantly higher mortgage rates in the so-called subprime market.”

Demographic information on these borrowers is sketchy. But at least one study indicates that 18 percent of the loans in the subprime market went to black borrowers, compared to 5 per cent of loans in the conventional loan market.

In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980’s.

“From the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift industry growing up around us,” said Peter Wallison a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.”

Under Fannie Mae’s pilot program, consumers who qualify can secure a mortgage with an interest rate one percentage point above that of a conventional, 30-year fixed rate mortgage of less than $240,000 — a rate that currently averages about 7.76 per cent. If the borrower makes his or her monthly payments on time for two years, the one percentage point premium is dropped.

Fannie Mae, the nation’s biggest underwriter of home mortgages, does not lend money directly to consumers. Instead, it purchases loans that banks make on what is called the secondary market. By expanding the type of loans that it will buy, Fannie Mae is hoping to spur banks to make more loans to people with less-than-stellar credit ratings.
Fannie Mae officials stress that the new mortgages will be extended to all potential borrowers who can qualify for a mortgage. But they add that the move is intended in part to increase the number of minority and low income home owners who tend to have worse credit ratings than non-Hispanic whites.

Home ownership has, in fact, exploded among minorities during the economic boom of the 1990’s. The number of mortgages extended to Hispanic applicants jumped by 87.2 per cent from 1993 to 1998, according to Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. During that same period the number of African Americans who got mortgages to buy a home increased by 71.9 per cent and the number of Asian Americans by 46.3 per cent.
In contrast, the number of non-Hispanic whites who received loans for homes increased by 31.2 per cent.

Despite these gains, home ownership rates for minorities continue to lag behind non-Hispanic whites, in part because blacks and Hispanics in particular tend to have on average worse credit ratings.

In July, the Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed that by the year 2001, 50 percent of Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s portfolio be made up of loans to low and moderate-income borrowers. Last year, 44 percent of the loans Fannie Mae purchased were from these groups.

The change in policy also comes at the same time that HUD is investigating allegations of racial discrimination in the automated underwriting systems used by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to determine the credit-worthiness of credit applicants.

Southern National Congress Denounces “False Stimulus” Bill

Rome, GA; February 10, 2009. On behalf of the fourteen State Delegations to the Southern National Congress (SNC), the SNC Board of Governors announced today its strong opposition to the stimulus-and-bailout bills now making their way through the U.S. Congress.

We are deeply concerned about our fellow Southerners who have lost their jobs, their homes, or the value of their retirement accounts. We pledge ourselves to help wherever we can, and we encourage all Southerners to help relieve the suffering of the jobless and homeless.

However, no so-called “stimulus bills” solve our economy’s problems. In fact, more government pork-and-spending will make things worse. Government spending will impede a genuine recovery by further weakening the U.S. dollar and increasing the growing risk of hyper-inflation. Make no mistake, the two bills on the table are spending bills, pure and simple. They contain “so much pork that you’d think Jimmy Dean wrote them himself.”

President Obama said on Monday that America can no longer afford the old failed policies that got us into the mess. But that’s exactly what he proposes – the same old failed spending, gargantuan government debt, and phony money created by the Federal Reserve that brought us here.

Thomas Moore, SNC Chairman, noted, “This is classic Washington folly. In response to the crisis that the Federal Government itself created, it demands more of our money and more power over us. President Obama’s approach may create a temporary stimulus. But it will be a false one – in the same way a junkie gets a ‘stimulus’ when he shoots up with heroin. He may feel good for a little while, but he will eventually crash from this high and runs the very real risk of ultimately dying from his addiction.”

“The U.S. is also addicted – to a lethal mix of loose credit, runaway debt, and profligate spending. This is made possible by fiat money – money the Federal Reserve creates from nothing and backs with nothing. We denounced this practice at the First Congress on December 6, 2008, and we continue to abhor it.”

(See www.southernnationalcongress.org/resolutionsindex.shtml)

“Professional politicians who live by pandering to special interests and un-elected and unaccountable bureaucrats are simply unqualified to address the deepening economic meltdown. The current crisis was largely caused by these same people. We loathe putting our economic security and that of our families into the hands of these incompetents. If this continues, these people will obliterate the America most of us were born into. We are now clearly threatened by domestic, internal decisions which will ultimately destroy the country.”

The American people are sick of being plundered by Wall Street and Washington. Calls to Capitol Hill are reportedly running seven to one against the so-called stimulus package. Yet the Feds appear determined to produce a bill by the end of this week. Pat Hines, Board Member for South Carolina, reports, “70% of Americans nationally, and 90% of South Carolinians, are opposed to this and every so-called bail out bill so far, even though South Carolina’s unemployment rate is soaring. By continually ignoring the will of the people we can all now plainly see the basic disconnect between the national government and the governed. This government is broken and cannot be repaired.”

The SNC Board laments the absence of any effective opposition to the Obama crusade to socialize the U.S. economy. The Republicans were eager supporter of the $700 billion Bush-Paulson payoff to Wall Street back in October 2008 and now lack all credibility. Their formerly abandoned but newly discovered commitment to free enterprise convinces no one. Indeed, the critical votes to pass the Senate version of the monstrosity came from Republicans. Any effective opposition to the juggernaut of socialist spending bearing down on us must now come from us – the States and from the people. We must act for ourselves and our families.

This irresponsible legislation proves that career politicians of both parties have failed us; or worse, actively betrayed us. But the people still need representatives who will defend their interests. That’s why it’s up to citizen-leaders – folks like us – the delegates to the Southern National Congress, to step into the breach. When the stimulus bill brings about its inevitable havoc and destruction, remember who really spoke out for our benefit.

The Board of Governors of the Southern National Congress is the oversight body of the SNC and comprises one Member elected from each of the fourteen State Delegations. The Board is authorized to speak for the Congress when it is not in session.

More information about the SNC can be found on the website, www.southernnationalcongress.org, or by contacting the Chairman of the SNC Media Committee Jonathan Ingram, at jonathaningram@juno.com

###

A Wise Warning from Europe about America’s Future
Author : Geert Wilders on Oct 06, 2008 – 02:13 AM

Geert Wilders

I come to America with a mission. All is not well in the old world. There is a tremendous danger looming, and it is very difficult to be optimistic. We might be in the final stages of the Islamization of Europe. This not only is a clear and present danger to the future of Europe itself, it is a threat to America and the sheer survival of the West. The danger I see looming is the scenario of America as the last man standing. The United States as the last bastion of Western civilization, facing an Islamic Europe. In a generation or two, the US will ask itself: who lost Europe? Patriots from around Europe risk their lives every day to prevent precisely this scenario from becoming a reality.

My short lecture consists of four parts.

First, I will describe the situation on the ground in Europe. Then, I will say a few things about Islam. Thirdly, if you are still here, I will talk a little bit about the movie you just saw. To close, I will tell you about a meeting in Jerusalem.

The Europe you know is changing. You have probably seen the landmarks. The Eiffel Tower and Trafalgar Square and Rome’s ancient buildings and maybe the canals of Amsterdam. They are still there. And they still look very much the same as they did a hundred years ago.

But in all of these cities, sometimes a few blocks away from your tourist destination, there is another world, a world very few visitors see – and one that does not appear in your tourist guidebook. It is the world of the parallel society created by Muslim mass-migration. All throughout Europe a new reality is rising: entire Muslim neighbourhoods where very few indigenous people reside or are even seen. And if they are, they might regret it. This goes for the police as well. It’s the world of head scarves, where women walk around in figureless tents, with baby strollers and a group of children. Their husbands, or slaveholders if you prefer,walk threesteps ahead. With mosques on many street corners. The shops have signs you and I cannot read. You will be hard-pressed to find any economic activity. These are Muslim ghettos controlled by religious fanatics. These are Muslim neighbourhoods, and they are mushrooming in every city across Europe. These are the building-blocks for territorial control of increasingly larger portions of Europe, street by street, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, city by city.

There are now thousands of mosques throughout Europe. With larger congregations than there are in churches. And in every European city there are plans to build super-mosques that will dwarf every church in the region. Clearly, the signal is: we rule.

Many European cities are already one-quarter Muslim: just take Amsterdam, Marseille and Malmo in Sweden. In many cities the majority of the under-18 population is Muslim. Paris is now surrounded by a ring of Muslim neighbourhoods. Mohammed is the most popular name among boys in many cities. In some elementary schools in Amsterdam the farm can no longer be mentioned, because that would also mean mentioning the pig, and that would be an insult to Muslims. Many state schools in Belgium and Denmark serve only halal food to all pupils. In once-tolerant Amsterdam, gays are beaten up almost exclusively by Muslims. Non-Muslim women routinely hear “whore, whore.”

Satellite dishes are not pointed to local TV stations, but to stations in the country of origin. In France school teachers are advised to avoid authors deemed offensive to Muslims, including Voltaire and Diderot; the same is increasingly true of Darwin. The history of the Holocaust can in many cases no longer be taught because of Muslim sensitivity. In England, Sharia courts are now officially part of the British legal system. Many neighbourhoods in France are no-go areas for women without head scarves. Last week a man almost died after being beaten up by Muslims in Brussels, because he was drinking during the Ramadan. Jews are fleeing France in record numbers, on the run for the worst wave of anti-Semitism since World War II. French is now commonly spoken on the streets of Tel Aviv and Netanya, Israel. I could go on forever with stories like this. Stories about Islamization.

A total of fifty-four million Muslims now live in Europe. San Diego University recently calculated that a staggering 25% of the population in Europe will be Muslim just 12 years from now. Bernhard Lewis has predicted a Muslim majority by the end of this century.

Now these are just numbers. And the numbers would not be threatening if the Muslim-immigrants had a strong desire to assimilate. But there are few signs of that. The Pew Research Center reported that half of French Muslims see their loyalty to Islam as greater than their loyalty to France. One-third of French Muslims do not object to suicide attacks. The British Centre for Social Cohesion reported that one-third of British Muslim students are in favour of a worldwide caliphate. A Dutch study reported that half of Dutch Muslims admit they “understand” the 9/11 attacks.

Muslims demand what they call “respect.” And this is how we give them respect. Our elites are willing to give in. To give up. In my own country we have gone from calls by one cabinet member to turn Muslim holidays into official state holidays, to statements by another cabinet member that Islam is part of Dutch culture, to an affirmation by the Christian-Democratic attorney general that he is willing to accept Sharia in the Netherlands if there is a Muslim majority. We have cabinet members with passports from Morocco and Turkey.

Muslim demands are supported by unlawful behaviour, ranging from petty crimes and random violence, for example against ambulance workers and bus drivers, to small-scale riots. Paris has seen its uprising in the low-income suburbs, the banlieus. Some prefer to see these as isolated incidents, but I call it a Muslim intifada. I call the perpetrators “settlers.” Because that is what they are. They do not come to integrate into our societies; they come to integrate our society into their Dar-al-Islam. Therefore, they are settlers.

Much of this street violence I mentioned is directed exclusively against non-Muslims, forcing many native people to leave their neighbourhoods, their cities, their countries.

Politicians shy away from taking a stand against this creeping sharia. They believe in the equality of all cultures. Moreover, on a mundane level, Muslims are now a swing vote not to be ignored.

Our many problems with Islam cannot be explained by poverty, repression or the European colonial past, as the Left claims. Nor does it have anything to do with Palestinians or American troops in Iraq. The problem is Islam itself.

Allow me to give you a brief Islam 101. The first thing you need to know about Islam is the importance of the book of the Koran. The Koran is Allah’s personal word, revealed by an angel to Mohammed, the prophet. This is where the trouble starts. Every word in the Koran is Allah’s word and therefore not open to discussion or interpretation. It is valid for every Muslim and for all times. Therefore, there is no such a thing as moderate Islam. Sure, there are a lot of moderate Muslims. But a moderate Islam is non-existent.

The Koran calls for hatred, violence, submission, murder, and terrorism. The Koran calls for Muslims to kill non-Muslims, to terrorize non-Muslims and to fulfil their duty to wage war: violent jihad. Jihad is a duty for every Muslim, Islam is to rule the world – by the sword. The Quran is clearly anti-Semitic, describing Jews as monkeys and pigs.

The second thing you need to know is the importance of Mohammed the prophet. His behaviour is an example to all Muslims and cannot be criticized. Now, if Mohammed had been a man of peace, let us say like Ghandi and Mother Theresa wrapped in one, there would be no problem. But Mohammed was a warlord, a mass murderer, a pedophile, and had several marriages – at the same time. Islamic tradition tells us how he fought in battles, how he had his enemies murdered and even had prisoners of war executed. Mohammed himself slaughtered the Jewish tribe of Banu Qurayza. He advised on matters of slavery, but never advised to liberate slaves. Islam has no other morality than the advancement of Islam. If it is good for Islam, it is good. If it is bad for Islam, it is bad. There is no gray area or other side.

Quran as Allah’s own word and Mohammed as the perfect man are the two most important facets of Islam. Let no one fool you about Islam being a religion. Sure, it has a god, and a here-after, and 72 virgins. But in its essence Islam is a political ideology. It is a system that lays down detailed rules for society and the life of every person. Islam wants to dictate every aspect of life. Islam means ‘submission’. Islam is not compatible with freedom and democracy, because what it strives for is sharia. If you want to compare Islam to anything, compare it to communism or national-socialism, these are all totalitarian ideologies.

This is what you need to know about Islam, in order to understand what is going on in Europe. For millions of Muslims the Quran and the live of Mohammed are not 14 centuries old, but are an everyday reality, an ideal, that guide every aspect of their lives. Now you know why Winston Churchill called Islam “the most retrograde force in the world,” and why he compared Mein Kampf to the Koran.

Which brings me to my movie, Fitna.

I am a lawmaker, and not a movie maker. But I felt I had the moral duty to educate about Islam. The duty to make clear that the Koran stands at the heart of what some people call terrorism but is in reality jihad. I wanted to show that the problems of Islam are at the core of Islam, and do not belong to its fringes.

Now, from the day the plan for my movie was made public, it caused quite a stir, in the Netherlands and throughout Europe. First, there was a political storm, with government leaders, across the continent in sheer panic. The Netherlands was put under a heightened terror alert, because of possible attacks or a revolt by our Muslim population. The Dutch branch of the Islamic organisation Hizb ut-Tahrir declared that the Netherlands was due for an attack. Internationally, there was a series of incidents. The Taliban threatened to organize additional attacks against Dutch troops in Afghanistan, and a website linked to Al Qaeda published the message that I ought to be killed, while various muftis in the Middle East stated that I would be responsible for all the bloodshed after the screening of the movie. In Afghanistan and Pakistan the Dutch flag was burned on several occasions. Dolls representing me were also burned. The Indonesian President announced that I will never be admitted into Indonesia again, while the UN Secretary General and the European Union issued cowardly statements in the same vein as those made by the Dutch Government. I could go on and on. It was an absolute disgrace, a sell-out.

A plethora of legal troubles also followed, and have not ended yet. Currently the state of Jordan is litigating against me. Only last week there were renewed security agency reports about a heightened terror alert for the Netherlands because of Fitna.

Now, I would like to say a few things about Israel. Because, very soon, we will get together in its capitol. The best way for a politician in Europe to lose votes is to say something positive about Israel. The public has wholeheartedly accepted the Palestinian narrative, and sees Israel as the aggressor. I, however, will continue to speak up for Israel. I see defending Israel as a matter of principle. I have lived in this country and visited it dozens of times. I support Israel. First, because it is the Jewish homeland after two thousand years of exile up to and including Auschwitz, second because it is a democracy, and third because Israel is our first line of defense.

Samuel Huntington writes it so aptly: “Islam has bloody borders.” Israel is located precisely on that border. This tiny country is situated on the fault line of jihad, frustrating Islam’s territorial advance. Israel is facing the front lines of jihad, like Kashmir, Kosovo, the Philippines, Southern Thailand, Darfur in Sudan, Lebanon, and Aceh in Indonesia. Israel is simply in the way. The same way West-Berlin was during the Cold War.

The war against Israel is not a war against Israel. It is a war against the West. It is Jihad. Israel is simply receiving the blows that are meant for all of us. If there would have been no Israel, Islamic imperialism would have found other venues to release its energy and its desire for conquest. Thanks to Israeli parents who send their children to the army and lay awake at night, parents in Europe and America can sleep well and dream, unaware of the dangers looming.

Many in Europe argue in favor of abandoning Israel in order to address the grievances of our Muslim minorities. But if Israel were, God forbid, to go down, it would not bring any solace to the West. It would not mean our Muslim minorities would all of a sudden change their behavior, and accept our values. On the contrary, the end of Israel would give enormous encouragement to the forces of Islam. They would, and rightly so, see the demise of Israel as proof that the West is weak, and doomed. The end of Israel would not mean the end of our problems with Islam, but only the beginning. It would mean the start of the final battle for world domination. If they can get Israel, they can get everything. Therefore, it is not that the West has a stake in Israel. It IS Israel.

It is very difficult to be an optimist in the face of the growing Islamization of Europe. All the tides are against us. On all fronts we are losing. Demographically the momentum is with Islam. Muslim immigration is even a source of pride within ruling liberal parties. Academia, the arts, the media, trade unions, the churches, the business world, the entire political establishment have all converted to the suicidal theory of multiculturalism. So-called journalists volunteer to label any and all critics of Islamization as a ‘right-wing extremists’ or ‘racists’. The entire establishment has sided with our enemy. Leftists, liberals and Christian-Democrats are now all in bed with Islam.

This is the most painful thing to see: the betrayal by our elites. At this moment in Europe’s history, our elites are supposed to lead us. To stand up for centuries of civilization. To defend our heritage. To honour our eternal Judeo-Christian values that made Europe what it is today. But there are very few signs of hope to be seen at the governmental level. Sarkozy, Merkel, Brown, Berlusconi; in private, they probably know how grave the situation is. But when the little red light goes on, they stare into the camera and tell us that Islam is a religion of peace, and we should all try to get along nicely and sing Kumbaya. They willingly participate in what President Reagan so aptly called: “the betrayal of our past, the squandering of our freedom.”

If there is hope in Europe, it comes from the people, not from the elites. Change can come only from a grass-roots level. It has to come from the citizens themselves. Yet these patriots will have to take on the entire political, legal and media establishment.

Over the past years there have been some small, but encouraging, signs of a rebirth of the original European spirit. Maybe the elites turn their backs on freedom, the public does not. In my country, the Netherlands, 60% of the population now sees the mass immigration of Muslims as the number one policy mistake since World War II. And another 60 percent sees Islam as the biggest threat to our national identity. I don’t think the public opinion in Holland is very different from other European countries.

Patriotic parties that oppose Jihad are growing, against all odds. My own party debuted two years ago, with 5% of the vote. Now it stands at 10% in the polls. The same is true of all similarly-minded parties in Europe. They are fighting the liberal establishment, and are gaining footholds on the political arena, one voter at the time.

Now, for the first time, these patriotic parties will come together and exchange experiences. It may be the start of something big. Something that might change the map of Europe for decades to come. It might also be Europe’s last chance.

This December a conference will take place in Jerusalem. Thanks to Professor Aryeh Eldad, a member of Knesset, we will be able to watch Fitna in the Knesset building and discuss the jihad. We are organizing this event in Israel to emphasize the fact that we are all in the same boat together, and that Israel is part of our common heritage. Those attending will be a select audience. No racist organizations will be allowed. And we will admit only parties that are solidly democratic.

This conference will be the start of an Alliance of European patriots. This Alliance will serve as the backbone for all organizations and political parties that oppose jihad and Islamization. For this Alliance I seek your support.
This endeavor may be crucial to America and to the West. America may hold fast to the dream that, thanks to its location, it is safe from jihad and Sharia. But seven years ago to the day, there was still smoke rising from ground zero, following the attacks that forever shattered that dream. Yet there is a danger even greater danger than terrorist attacks, the scenario of America as the last man standing. The lights may go out in Europe faster than you can imagine. An Islamic Europe means a Europe without freedom and democracy, an economic wasteland, an intellectual nightmare, and a loss of military might for America – as its allies will turn into enemies, enemies with atomic bombs. With an Islamic Europe, it would be up to America alone to preserve the heritage of Rome, Athens and Jerusalem.

Dear friends, liberty is the most precious of gifts. My generation never had to fight for this freedom, it was offered to us on a silver platter, by people who fought for it with their lives. All throughout Europe, American cemeteries remind us of the young boys who never made it home, and whose memory we cherish. My generation does not own this freedom; we are merely its custodians. We can only hand over this hard won liberty to Europe’s children in the same state in which it was offered to us. We cannot strike a deal with mullahs and imams. Future generations would never forgive us. We cannot squander our liberties. We simply do not have the right to do so.

This is not the first time our civilization is under threat. We have seen dangers before. We have been betrayed by our elites before. They have sided with our enemies before. And yet, then, freedom prevailed.

These are not times in which to take lessons from appeasement, capitulation, giving away, giving up or giving in. These are not times in which to draw lessons from Mr. Chamberlain. These are times calling us to draw lessons from Mr. Churchill and the words he spoke in 1942:

“Never give in, never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”

FSM Editor’s note: This is the transcript from a speech given by Mr. Wilders at the Four Seasons, New York, last week.

Courtesy of familysecuritymatters.org

The long-term threat to western civilization is Jihad.  It has already been going on for decades. This post is about a few instances of the assault of  Muslims against non-Muslims.  Strangely, many influential leaders in the west have refused to believe that such a threat exists.  But several  authors have described what is at stake in this clash of cultures.  I have relied on the work of Serge Trifkovic.  Anyone who wants to know more about the dangers of Jihad  should read his books The Sword of the Prophet and Defeating Jihad.  Direct quotes below are from the Sword of the Prophet.

Because of a failure of leaders in the United States to understand Islamic jihad, on several occasions our country has actually aided the Muslims in their jihad against non-Muslims.  One notable example is the aid that the United States gave Indonesia in its invasion of East Timor after the disintegration of the Portuguese empire. Beginning in the 1970’s the United States supplied arms and, in other ways, encouraged the Indonesians to take East Timor although Indonesia had no rightful claim to that country. 

“At the same time Indonesian military forces linked to the carnage in East Timor were trained in the United States under a covert program sponsored by the Clinton Administration, which continued until 1998. . . . Through two and a half subsequent years of that campaign—leading to the death of about a third of the population— The New York Times ran only two brief stories about the ‘problem of East Timorese refugees.’”

In the motivation, patterns, and perceptions of the actors on the ground—-killers and victims alike—East Timor was an Islamic jihad against Christian infidels, identical in form and purpose to other tragedies caused by Islam’s insatiable appetite for other people’s lands, property, bodies, and souls. Dili’s bishop, Mgr. Coste Lopez, later stated: “The soldiers who landed started killing everyone they could find.  There were many dead bodies in the street.”  They [the soldiers] had been told that they were fighting a jihad, and whole villages—-for example Remexo and Aileu— were slaughtered.  In Dili, hundreds of Chinese were shot and thrown off the wharf into the sea.  In Maubara and Luiquica, the entire Chinese populations were wiped out.  Nineteen ships were moored in Dili harbor [by the Indonesians] to remove looted cars, radios, furniture, tractors, and whatever else could be ransacked.  Churches and the seminary were looted and their books burnt.

The Bosnian crisis started in 1990 after the post-communist election when political parties representing Serbs, Croats, and Muslims formed a coalition government.  The Muslim leader, Alija Izetbegovic, caused the breakup of that coalition by reneging on an agreement arranged by the European Union that provided for continued power-sharing in Sarajevo.   He declared a unilateral declaration of independence.  He was supported in this decision by the U.S. Ambassador in Belgrade, Warren Zimmerman.  Of course, the Clinton- led NATO forces also helped the Muslims in their fight against the Serbs.

Alija was the author of an “Islamic Declaration” (first published in 1974 and republished in 1990) which proclaimed, “there can be no peace or coexistence between the Islamic faith and non-Islamic societies and political institutions.”

The Declaration continues: The Islamic movement should and must start taking power as soon as it is morally and numerically strong enough not only to overthrow the existing non-Islamic power structure, but also to build a great Islamic federation spreading from Moroco to Indonesia, from tropical Africa to Central Asia.

Proof that Alija meant business arose a few years later when President Clinton was still in the White House.  A State Department report warned that the Muslim-controlled parts of Bosnia were a staging area and a safe haven for Islamic terrorism.  A later Israeli intelligence report said that “about 6,000 fighters in Bosnia and Herzegovna, Kosovo, Albania, and Macedonia are ready to do Bin Laden’s bidding”and that “a nucleus of Bin Laden followers in the Balkans could balloon into an army of about 40,000 men.”

Iran had already obtained a foothold of its own in Bosnia, when the Clinton Administration asked for—-and obtained—Teheran’s help in supplying the Muslim army with weapons.  This was done in violation of the arms embargo initially demanded by the U. S. and behind the back of its European allies.

Today, ten years later, politicians in the United States and the leaders of European countries are still in denial about Islamic doctrine which is, in reality, not just a religion. For example, mosques have been used as military headquarters since the time of Mohammad.  Muslims owe an unthinking obedience to the Koran: for them, it is heresy even to analyze a passage from the Koran.  Muslims themselves cannot recommend or make changes in the objectives of Islam without being guilty of  heresy and facing the death penalty.  In the United States the mainstream media are silent on the subject and are unwitting supporters of jihad by their multicultural and political correctness mumbo–jumbo which is replacing the Constitutional rights of Americans.

(or You’ve Let the Fox into the Hen House, Old Chap)

A momentous thing happened this last week in England.  The Labour government of the UK let the word get out that it has been quietly allowing Sharia law to become a part of  the country’s legal system.  Five major cities have been approved as places to let Sharia law courts be established—where decisions about justice will be made by Muslims, but whose decisions will be enforced by the state. The cities are London, Birmingham, Bradford and Manchester with the network’s headquarters in Nuneaton, Warwickshire. Two more courts are being planned for Glasgow and Edinburgh.

So what does that mean? you may ask.  In a post on The Chronicles website, Serge Trifkovic says, “To a devout Muslim the incorporation of shari’a into British law is by no means the end of the affair. It is merely a major milestone on the road that cannot stop short of subjecting all Britons, regardless of faith, to the strictures of Allah’s commandment and Muhammad’s example.”

In the short term, it means that Muslim men in the UK will get twice as much inheritance from parents as their sisters will.   It means that family disputes in Muslim neighborhoods will not be handled by UK police.  A man there will be allowed to beat his wife if he thinks she deserves it.  And punishment for other crimes like pedophilia in Muslim neighborhoods will be in the hands of imams and residents.  In short, there will be two systems of justice in the UK: those derived from English Common Law and those prescribed by Allah in the Quran.

To see the importance of this development, consider that Sharia law, if okayed in United States cities, would mean that some of the Bill of Rights in the U. S. Constitution would not apply everywhere.  The good news is that a group of Americanized Muslims in the United States have formed an organization called Muslims Against Sharia. It has gone on record as opposing the introduction of Sharia law into democratic countries.   Linda Ahmed, a spokesperson for that group has said,

Any person from a country where a substantial part of the population is pro-Sharia should not be allowed in the West, not only as an immigrant, but even as a visitor with a few exceptions, i.e., political asylum or as a diplomat etc. … Every legal immigrant should be allowed to stay only if he/she did not display desire to establish a Sharia state in a host country. Any naturalized citizen who displays a desire to establish a Sharia state in a host country should have his/her citizenship revoked and be promptly deported. I think the latter two groups is where the real danger lies. (FrontPage Magazine, July 24, 2008)

More recently, Khalim Massoud, a member of Muslims Against Sharia said, “Anyone who proclaims Islamic extremist views should be tried for sedition, since we are at war with radical Islam, or at the very least, promptly deported.” (FrontPage Magazine, September 9, 2008)

Responding to developments in England, U. S. Representative Tancredo (Colorado) has introduced a bill he calls “Jihad Prevention Act” which would bar the entry of foreign nationals who would advocate Sharia law.  In addition the legislation would make the advocacy of Sharia law by radical Muslims already in the United States a deportable offense.  Muslims Against Sharia have endorsed Tancredo’s bill, referring to their earlier recommendations.

In 1990 The Organization of the Islamic Conference (which has now 57 members including Turkey which calls itself a “secular” state) ratified “Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Islam.”     In February 1990 the courageous Senegalese jurist Adama Dieng (a Muslim, who subsequently became a United Nations special rapporteur), then serving as secretary-general to the International Commission of Jurists, declared that the Cairo Declaration, under the rubric of the Shari’a,

…gravely threatens the inter-cultural consensus on which the international human rights instruments are based; introduces, in the name of the defense of human rights, an intolerable discrimination against both non-Muslims and women; reveals a deliberately restrictive character in regard to certain fundamental rights and freedoms..; [and] confirms the legitimacy of practices, such as corporal punishment, that attack the integrity and dignity of the human being.

Unfortunately, here in the United States most of the Muslim academics in our universities and mainstream Muslim advocacy groups want to impose Sharia law on our democracy.  They say that too much is made of the incompatibility of Sharia law and human rights.  Khaled Abou El Fadl and Roy Mottahedeh say that Muslims have spent too much time trying to reconcile Sharia with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.   That is so, they say, because the human rights advocates refuse to concede Islamic supremacy over a universal standard based on the US Bill of Rights.  Left-wing politicians in the United States are either maliciously or foolishly aiding and supporting these views. They  are also obstructing efforts to make our borders secure.

Now is the time for those who oppose Sharia law being imposed on our nation to let members of Congress know what’s at stake and to urge Congress to support Rep. Tancredo’s bill.

Some people would have us believe that it’s the current President Bush and the Iraq invasion that have provoked ire against the USA in the foreign press. Not so, as the excerpt from the article below (written in November 2001) proves.  On September 11, 2001, Bush had been President just nine months. So the bashing by the foreign press must have been reaction to policies of the Clinton years.

And I’m not talking about the usual suspect, the French. No, it was the left-wing press in England, our supposed ally.

What the piece really shows is that England (and much of Europe) were already—at that time—feeling the effects of multiculturalism. The Muslim populations were large enough in England to have a significant influence on British perceptions of reality. At that time Americans had reason to expect  sympathy from even the left-wing press in England.   Remember that terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center and the USS Cole had already occurred during the Clinton presidency, before the events of September 11, 2001.

But, as the title of Mark Steyn’s book America Alone suggests, Europe is well on its way to being  Muslimized, and by mid-century the United States will likely be the last western nation representing individual rights like those enumerated in the first ten amendments of our Constitution.  Freedom of the press in the case of Steyn’s writing is already under attack in Canada where several politically correct organizations are bringing suit to have his writing banned. In several European countries,  free speech has already been canceled by the passage of so-called “hate-speech” laws.

From “Another painful lesson”
The New Criterion (November 2001)

by John Gross
On the British press’s coverage of the atrocities of September 11.

You start thinking you can’t be surprised anymore—not when it comes to left-wing
opinion-makers, at least—but you end up being surprised nonetheless. Most of their
reactions are predictable in broad outline; but reality has a way of going one better,
or one worse.

Two days after the assault on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, BBC television
broadcast that week’s edition of the current affairs program ‘Question Time,’ a panel
discussion with questions and comments from the floor. Almost at once it became
clear that the audience contained a large contingent of Muslim extremists and
left-wing sympathizers, who proceeded to hijack the program. Instead of questions,
there were anti-American diatribes; members of the panel (who included a former
American ambassador to Britain) were shouted down.

While what happened wasn’t entirely inconsistent with the slant of recent BBC
coverage in general, and its bias against Israel in particular, it is far more likely to
have been the result of ineptitude. No one had bothered to check up on the audience.
But that didn’t make the incident any less ugly, and there were many protests.
For a day or two the BBC huffed and puffed. Then the Director General, Greg Dyke
(of whom more later), issued an apology. It was fairly half-hearted, and one suspects
it might not have been issued at all if offence hadn’t been given at an ambassadorial level.
Still, it was better than nothing.

Two days later, a headline in the London Times caught my eye: ‘Dyke strives to
quell revolt over ‘Question Time.” For a moment, I felt mildly elated. So the old BBC spirit
wasn’t dead; there were still executives in the corporation capable of feeling ashamed of
the previous week’s lapse. Then I read on and saw what a fool I had been. There had indeed been ‘uproar’ inside the BBC, as the Times explained. What had provoked it, however, had been not the program, but Dyke’s apology: he had been obliged to send an e-mail to his staff, defending his decision.

It was a reminder that, while the world may have changed on September 11, the priorities of the media elite hadn’t. But perhaps such a lesson was no longer needed, since by this
stage left-wing interpretations of the current crisis had hardened and were being widely
voiced. From the first, there had been mutterings that it was all America’s fault. While the initial horrors were still unfolding, the New Statesman published an editorial in which it
argued the need for moral distinctions: ‘American bond dealers, you may say, are as
innocent and undeserving of terror as Vietnamese or Iraqi peasants. Well, yes and no.’

But it was left to the Guardian newspaper to play all the main anti-American tunes.
First we were told that while the atrocities of September 11 were a bad thing, their
very horror was an index of how bitter the victims of American foreign policy felt, how
much they had suffered. Then the grand old doctrine of equilateralism was wheeled out:
the atrocities were a bad thing, but America had done equally bad things (and more of them).

Then even the show of compassion was dropped, and we were told, repeatedly, that the
Americans had had it coming to them. Before long, equilateralism began to be applied to
the future as well as the past: there was talk of ‘an American jihad’ and ‘Bush’s holy war.’ At every stage, in fact, it was made clear that America’s duty was to do nothing—except
mend its ways. What it had been offered, if it only knew how to take advantage of it,
was (immortal phrase) ‘a painful lesson.’ So the atrocities weren’t such a bad thing after all.
Detailed instances of these approaches are hardly called for, but one observation by a
Guardian writer has achieved enough popularity for it to deserve to be singled out: ‘a bully with a bloody nose is still a bully.’ And I can’t resist quoting an example of the extremes
to which another contributor to the paper was driven in the quest for equilateralist parallels:

The smile on the face of the suicide bomber has as much to do with true humour and
laughter as the rictus incantation ‘Have a nice day’ in the supermarket checkout. Both
are debased forms of totalitarianism.

The Guardian has been far from alone in promulgating such attitudes, and the smaller but
influential Independent has run it a close second. To mark the replacement of the admittedly infelicitous name ‘Operation Infinite Justice’ by ‘Operation Enduring Freedom,’ for instance, it published a cartoon showing a dwarfish Bush in conference with the chiefs of staff—thick-necked cigar-chomping brutes. Lying on the table around which they were sitting were crumpled scraps of paper with some of the other names for the campaign against terrorism which had been considered—’Operation Ubiquitous Cheeseburger,’ ‘Operation My-Dad’s- Bigger-than-Your-Dad,’ ‘Operation Let’s-Have-Us-a-Lynching.’

The burden of proof is on the accused when it comes to libel rulings in British courts.  So when Cambridge University Press was threatened with a suit over publishing Alms for Jihad: Charity and Terrorism in the Islamic World, it capitulated before going to court.  In doing so the Cambridge UP agreed to shred all unsold copies of the book.

The book had been written by two Americans who continued to stand by its accuracy, but to no avail.  The book had shown how oil sheiks and the very rich in Saudi Arabia were financing terrorism around the world.  That prompted a billionaire Saudi banker, Khalid bin Mahfouz, to threaten the libel suit.

Cambridge UP also agreed to make a public apology, pay substantial damages, legal fees, and make a pledge to contact libraries worldwide with a request that they remove Alms for Jihad from their shelves.  Some people feared that American colleges and universities would comply with the request from Cambridge UP.  Consequently there was a rush to check out the book. Many libraries reported missing copies.  Soon the book was sold out at vendors like Amazon.com and was unavailable at even high prices.

Stanley Kurtz, in an article for The New Criterion’s special publication, “Free speech in an age of jihad,” says it is not an isolated case.  “Not one book, but possibly as many as thirty-six books containing passing mentions of bin Mahfouz’s financial activities, have been suppressed by the threat or reality of British libel suits.”  And worse, the chilling effect of the threats of suits “has rendered publishers worldwide reluctant to accept material that touches upon terror-network financing.”

Closer to home, Canada’s Human Rights Commissions heard a complaint against Maclean’s, a leading magazine in Canada, for publishing an article by Mark Steyn, a best-selling Canadian author.   The  article, excerpted from Steyn’s book America Alone, expresses “concerns about the cultural impact of large and relatively unassimilated Muslim immigrant populations on the West.”  

The Human Rights Commissions were “founded in the 1970s to deal with cases of job and housing discrimination.”  But a provision in the establishment of that law “similar to Europe’s hate-speech laws soon permitted these commissions to hear cases involving speech ‘likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt.’ “

Kurtz says the “complaint filed against Mark Steyn is a totalitarian document.” It is “not really levied against any particular factual claim or rhetorical move.  It is instead a request that vast sections of heretofore legitimate reporting and opinion journalism be banned.”  Even if the complaint fails, says Kurtz, it still will have a “chilling effect on public discourse. . . .The mere threat of the spectacle and its cost suffices to shut down debate on controversial issues, especially for outlets and commentators less prominent than Steyn and Maclean’s.”

My mother’s father, Whit Horn, was born in 1866. He was the eleventh and youngest child of a family that had first lived in Pike County, Alabama. The head of that family, my Great-grandfather Daniel H. Horn, was serving in the State Senate of Alabama when the State seceded from the Union. He left the Senate and formed a company of soldiers which eventually became Company K, 33rd Regiment Alabama Infantry.

My grandfather was not born until after the War, but his brother, Augustus B. Horn, born in 1845, enlisted on November 23, 1863. He served as a private in Company A, Fifth Battalion of the Florida Cavalry. His name appears on a list of Paroled Confederate Soldiers for the month of June 1865.

About the time the War for Southern Independence ended, Daniel moved his family from Alabama to Florida. They settled on the shores of Hicks Lake and Lucas Lake in Northwest Florida where the oldest son, Augustus, rejoined the family. My grandfather described the setting of their new home in his autobiography, as follows:

My father kept a boat in each lake and fished as much in one as in the other. Friends frequently visited him and spent much of their time in the forest hunting or on the lakes fishing. There were lots of turkeys, bear, and wild cats in the forest then. My father kept some good hunting hounds that were noted deer dogs. One pair I well remember. These two, Cheatum and Venus.

The surrounding forest was so wild and unsettled that the family’s livestock was allowed to roam untethered and feed on whatever plants and nuts they could find. But these domestic animals were at risk of being attacked by wild predators. One morning the dogs ran barking across the yard. “My father had a sow with a bed of young pigs which he had located the day before. The dogs led off barking in their direction.” He took his gun and followed them toward the swamp near Hicks Lake. When he came to the sow, he found that one of the pigs was missing. “About that time he heard the dogs treeing. He went to them and found them barking at the foot of a big cypress, and out on a limb he saw a large wild cat” which he dispatched.

One Sunday morning in April of 1867, members of the family were dressing for church when they heard the dogs which had struck the trail of a deer on the far side of the two lakes. His father urged Augustus to take a rifle, mount one of their horses, and intercept the deer as it came along the edge of the lakes. To do this, Augustus had to cross a slough that linked the two bodies of water.

He quickly bridled the horse but did not take time to put on a saddle. As he was crossing, Augustus slipped off and was kicked by the horse as it swam. The young man’s body and rifle were retrieved from the slough which was about nine feet deep. The family soon moved away from that homestead. “My mother could not bear to look at the lakes after his death.”

As a year ends, news organizations often make a list of superlatives: the most important news story of the year; the best book of the year; the man or woman of the year. Pundits frequently err in choosing the year’s most important news story. At the end of the year in which the Soviet Union collapsed, Bryant Gumbel said that the state of the economy was the news story of the year. But who remembers anything about the economy that year?

At the end of the twentieth century there was discussion of what person in the century had made the greatest impact on human history. It was an interesting question. But it was difficult to answer because we tend to see our own times as more important than the past or the future. We are preoccupied with the present.

Our heroes are show-business people who enjoy fifteen minutes of fame and then are replaced by others of the same kind. Our political leaders lack a vision of what life should be, or they lack the will to pursue that vision because they serve constituents who are not interested.

Against this tendency in us, the truth is that duration is the best test of human achievement. The wise have often observed that accomplishments of a particular political leader cannot be assessed fairly by contemporaries. Time tends to strip away the extraneous–the personal passions and prejudices. Most political thought fades in a generation because it is tied to self-serving or silly notions of the day. Even dramatic political acts rarely outlive the people who perform them, except as historical curiosities.

On the other hand, great ideas continue to be meaningful to society long after their creators are dead. Once ideas become operative, they are not wedded to their creators but permeate the whole of human thought. They are great ideas precisely because they affect many generations of people who may not even remember who created those ideas. That’s why, among twentieth-century people, Einstein will have a more lasting effect on history than Hitler.

That is why Socrates is more important to us than the Athenians who condemned him to death; why Aristotle is more important to us than Alexander the Great, his pupil; Shakespeare than Elizabeth I; and Darwin than queen Victoria.

The political figures paired above with Socrates, Aristotle, Shakespeare, and Darwin are museum pieces because the issues they were passionate about were transitory. Most politicians believe ardently in their own importance, but they may truly say with Shelley’s Ozymandias, “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.” Still, at any given moment, politicians attract all the attention. It’s not surprising, then, that the most valuable human achievements typically go unappreciated by contemporaries. Somewhere today great things are being thought and done, but they don’t usually make the headlines.

The Margrave of Brandenburg, as far as we can determine, never had his musicians perform the six concerti sent to him by Johann Sebastian Bach. Undoubtedly, he was too busy and thought that what he was doing and saying was of overwhelming importance. But the only thing history remembers about this prince of Brandenburg is that he neglected Bach’s concerti.