A grinning Saudi teenager gratuitously whips an expat garbage collector:

Obama took a leading role in causing the subprime housing crisis which triggered the recession, but he blames it on the financial institutions which he forced to provide the bad loans.

This is an editorial from Investor’s Business Daily:

Obama pushed thousands of credit-poor blacks into homes they couldn’t afford. As a civil-rights attorney, he sued banks to rubberstamp mortgages for urban residents.

Many are now in foreclosure. …

Obama focused on “housing rights” when he worked as a lawyer-activist and community organizer in South Side Chicago. His mentor — the man who placed him in his first job there — wasthe father of the anti-redlining movement: John McKnight. He coined the term “redlining” to describe the mapping off of minority neighborhoods from home loans.

McKnight wrote a letter for Obama that helped him get into Harvard. After he graduated, [Obama] worked for a Chicago civil-rights law firm that worked closely with McKnight’s radical Gamaliel Foundation and National People’s Action, as well as Acorn, to solicit lending-discrimination cases.

At the time, NPA and Acorn were lobbying the Clinton administration to tighten enforcement of anti-redlining laws.

They also dispatched bus loads of goons trained by Obama to the doorsteps of bankers to demand more home loans for minorities. Acorn even crashed the lobby of Citibank’s headquarters in New York and accused it of discriminating against blacks.

The pressure worked. In 1994, Clinton’s top bank regulators signed a landmark anti-redlining policy that declared traditional mortgage underwriting standards racist and mandated banks apply easier lending rules for minorities.

Also that year, Attorney General Janet Reno and her aide Eric Holder filed a mortgage discrimination case against a Washington-area bank that forced it to target minority neighborhoods for subprime loans. Reno and Holder also encouraged civil-rights lawyers like Obama to file local lending-bias cases against banks.

The next year, Obama led a class-action suit against Citibank on behalf of several Chicago minorities who claimed they were rejected for home loans because of the color of their skin. …

Which was untrue. Would-be borrowers, whatever their race, who can provide no deposit and have no job are  - obviously, you may think – not eligible for loans.

But Citibank eventually settled, despite the weak case. Under the 1998 settlement, Citibank vowed to pay the alleged victims $1.4 million and launch a program to boost home lending to poor blacks in the metro area. …

Citibank underwrote thousands of shaky subprime mortgages to satisfy the court in Obama’s case. Defaults were common. When home prices collapsed, most of the loans went bust.

By putting them on the hook for loans they couldn’t pay, Obama did them no favors. Blacks have been hit hardest by foreclosures. But what does Obama care …  he pocketed at least $23,000 from the Citibank case.

Today, he blames the devastating wealth drain in black communities on [the very] subprime mortgages [he insisted upon]. He says “greedy,” “predatory” lenders tricked poor minorities into paying higher fees and interest rates. …

His closest economic advisers also promoted subprime lending. … [His] Chicago pal Austan Goolsbee, who later became his top economist, sang the praises of subprime loans in a New York Times column. He argued they allowed poor blacks “access to mortgages.”

One of Obama’s top bank regulators, Gary Gensler, once bragged that thanks to subprime mortgages, banks made home loans to minorities at “twice the rate” they made to other borrowers … “A subprime loan is a good option when the alternative is no access to credit,” he said years before the crisis.

Obama hasn’t learned from his mistakes.

Far from it … The mammoth credit watchdog agency he created (with input from NPA radicals) will dust off Clinton’s 1994 minority lending guidelines to crack down on stingy lenders. And he’s ordered Holder, now acting as his attorney general, to prosecute banks that don’t open branches in blighted urban areas.

Not only has Obama scapegoated banks for the crisis he helped cause, he’s exploited minority suffering to continue reckless policies that hurt those he claims to champion.

But the bankers do have a share in the blame. Only it is their weakness, not their economic might, that should be held against them.

Now, against their better judgment and common sense, they are letting themselves be forced by Obama into yet another money-squandering scheme. While he has learnt nothing from the subprime disaster, they have failed to acquire a spine.

His new demand is that the banks throw masses of moola down the gullet of Gaia, the Goddess of the Green religion.

And again, though it couldn’t be more obvious that Obama’s demands are a recipe for bankruptcy, they meekly comply!

Obama’s goal is to wreck the capitalist system. Can the bankers not see this? Or have they decided it’s a jolly good idea?

This also comes from from IBD:

First the affordable housing crowd shook down banks for mortgage payola for the poor. Now the environmental lobby is shaking them down for cash to underwrite President Obama’s risky green agenda.

Risky? More like a dead cert loser.

In a strange announcement, Bank of America this week pledged an eye-popping $50 billion in loans for “renewable energy” projects — windmills, solar panels and hybrids — over the next 10 years.

The Charlotte, N.C.-based bank joins a number of other large banks making green commitments amid complaints from environmental groups that they finance coal extraction, the new bugaboo of the left.

Wells Fargo has already committed $30 billion in green payola. JPMorgan Chase has pumped nearly $7 billion into renewable energy projects.

Just as they bowed to bullying by Obama-supported NPA and ACORN into giving loans to borrowers who could not possibly repay them, they are now bowing to the same tactics used by greenies.

BofA upped the ante just one month after five radical greenies climbed Bank of America stadium in Charlotte, N.C., and unfurled a 70-foot-wide banner rebranding the stadium the “Bank of Coal.”

A group called Rainforest Action Network took credit for the stunt. A San Francisco-based green version of ACORN, founded by an anti-capitalist Obama donor [who no doubt became rich enough to be a donor through capitalist enterprise], RAN wanted to highlight BofA’s funding of coal plants, which it claims cause global warming. …

RAN sent its goons to BofA’s annual meeting. They demanded the bank stop funding coal mining — specifically mountaintop clearing — and “expand investments in renewable energy.”

BofA … agreed to stop funding mountaintop mining and start funding windmills, even though coal is a more cost-efficient energy source — and far more profitable than alternatives. …

What mysterious perversion of their minds drives the beneficiaries of capitalism to wreck it?

Why would the nation’s largest bank let tree huggers dictate its investments? The same reason it agreed to underwrite billions in risky mortgages in response to threats from ACORN and other housing shakedown groups: to protect its corporate brand.

Is that why? How is its corporate brand protected by its heading for bankruptcy?

Just like banks didn’t want to be labeled “racists” then, they don’t want to be branded “polluters” now.

And extortionists like RAN, who play dirty, attacking bankers on vacation and at graduation speeches, prey on that fear. Their subversive tactics work. They know CEOs will pay them off if they apply enough pressure.

Only, BofA, Wells Fargo, Citibank and other banking giants already paid off housing-rights groups literally trillions of dollars in mortgage commitments in the run-up to the housing crisis. Yet, they’re all being sued now for lending discrimination.

Now they’re falling into the next trap. Obama and his pals are using the banking system to finance their illusory Green Economy. …

Put plainly, these are socialists trying to destroy our free enterprise system.

These Giants of Finance are not evil as Obama and the “Occupy” revolutionaries like to pretend, they are merely fools and cowards. But if many of those who have their hands on the levers of power are foolish and cowardly, they can ruin a nation.

The IBD advises them to “unapologetically defend your business and the capitalist system, make it clear your obligation is to customers and shareholders — not radical activists.”

We doubt they’ll take such sensible advice.

Alexander Aan has been sentenced to 30 months imprisonment for denying the existence of God.

This is from the MailOnline:

An Indonesian man was jailed for 30 months after writing “God doesn’t exist” on his Facebook page.

Alexander Aan, 30, was imprisoned on Thursday for sharing explicit material about the Prophet Mohammed online.

He started an atheist group on Facebook on which he shared comic strips of the prophet having sex with his servant …

He was found guilty of “deliberately spreading information inciting religious hatred and animosity”, presiding judge Eka Prasetya Budi Dharma told the Muaro Sijunjung district court in western Sumatra.

Aan also uploaded three articles on his Facebook account, including one describing the prophet being attracted to his daughter-in-law.

“Under the Electronic Information and Transactions law, we sentence him to prison for a length of two years and six months,” Dharma said. “‘What he did has caused anxiety to the community and tarnished Islam.’

Caused anxiety to the community? The sensitive community beat him up.

Aan was beaten by an angry mob and arrested by police in his hometown of Pulau Punjung in western Sumatra in January after posting the material online and declaring himself an atheist.

“Tarnished” Islam? What could possibly be said about this cruel, primitive belief-system that would make Islam look worse than it is?

The court had earlier indicted Aan with two other charges – persuading others to embrace atheism and blasphemy. …

But the court convicted him of the most serious charge and dropped the other two. …

Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation, guarantees freedom of religion in its constitution and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, but only recognises six faiths: Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Catholicism, Protestantism and Confucianism.

And what it doesn’t “recognize”, it won’t tolerate.

Its courts have in recent years given light sentences to perpetrators of violent attacks on Christians and Islamic minority Ahmadis, some of which have been fatal.

Has anything made by man caused as much hurt and grief as religion has done and continues to do?

Greek fury, British candor.

See a video clip of Greek politicians slapping each other here. A male member of the Nazi “Golden Dawn” party and a female member of the Communist Party come to blows on a TV show, after the Nazi throws water (or something) at another leftist lady.

And here Nigel Farage of the United Kingdom Independence Party “tells it like it is” in the European parliament. ( A talking shop merely, it has no powers. The EU is run by the diktat of bureaucrats. It is not a democracy.)

The English author Wyndham Lewis wrote this (in a Foreword to Rotting Hill, a book of his stories published in 1951):

Socialism as a final product of bible-religion.

Conscience is at the root of the principle of Social Justice – without it what would be there? … It is all that remains of Protestant Christianity …

Let me try and show in a few words how absolutely impossible socialism would have been without the Christian religion. … Liberalism was an early stage of socialism. … The logical conclusion of … [the] preachers of social fair play, of social justice, was for the classes possessed of money and power to surrender them, and, of course, for England itself as a nation owning a quarter of the globe to surrender everything – as has recently been done in the case of England’s greatest possession, India – except this island; and even that must in the end not be looked upon with too possessive an eye.

Now, without the teaching of the New Testament – and we must not forget the Old, and that the Jews were the most moral nation the world has ever seen – or some similar teaching such as Stoicism (and there are exceedingly few teachings of this type), no man gives up anything he has acquired whether it be wealth or land or goods. Why should he? He will fight to defend them with desperation. If you informed him that “Property is theft” he would laugh at you. Such a saying, in the first instance, to be successful, had to appear with a supernatural sanction. To test the accuracy of what I am saying, you only have to consider whether you would give up anything but a small fraction of your property in order to share it with your less fortunate fellows. There are very few of us who would willingly do so. But a long process of religious conditioning (latterly operating through such words as “decency”, “fair play”, etc. etc.) has led us to a point at which we empower the State to deprive us of practically everything. This is the work of Jesus.

Actually, no, not Jesus. Though we agree with his point that Christianity bred socialism, we need to correct him there. It is the work of St. Paul.

St. Paul invented the sentimental morality of Christianity.

St. Paul invented Christianity.

St. Paul invented Jesus.

(See our ongoing series of essays on the origins and early history of Christianity: A man named Jesus or something like that (September 23, 2011); The invention of Christianity (October 28, 2011); Tread on me: the making of Christian morality (December 22, 2011); St.Paul: portrait of a sick genius (January 7, 2012); Pauline Christianity: a mystical salad (February 26, 2012); The fictitious life of Jesus Christ (April 7, 2012).)

President Barack Obama’s deputies are holding “hundreds” of closed-door meetings with a jihad-linked lobbying group that is widely derided by critics as a U.S. arm of the theocratic Muslim Brotherhood.

So The Daily Caller reports.

The admission of meetings with the Council on American-Islamic Relations came from George Selim, the White House’s new director for community partnerships, which was formed in January to ensure cooperation by law enforcement and social service agencies with Muslim identity groups in the United States.

“There is [sic] hundreds of examples of departments and agencies that meet with CAIR on a range of issues,” he told The Daily Caller …

CAIR is especially controversial because of its many links to the theocratic Muslim Brotherhood, whose political wing is set to dominate Egyptian politics since the 2011 departure of Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak.

In 2009, a judge confirmed the Justice Department’s decision to name CAIR as an unindicted conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation conspiracy to smuggle funds to HAMAS, which is a jihadi affiliate of the Egypt-based brotherhood. Five men in the smuggling ring were sentenced to jail in 2009, including two who were given 65-year sentences.

We often ask, why does CAIR remain forever “unindicted” if it is known to be a conspirator in felonious activities? But answer comes there none.

The House of Representatives last month prodded the Department of Justice to end all contacts with CAIR. “The [appropriations] committee understands that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has an existing policy prohibiting its employees from engaging in any formal non-investigative cooperation with CAIR [and] the committee encourages the attorney general to adopt a similar policy for all department officials,” said the committee report accompanying the 2013 Commerce, Justice, Science Appropriations bill, passed in mid-May by the House..

Janet Levy writes at Family Security Matters:

The Muslim Brotherhood is well entrenched throughout the government and government agencies at the federal, state and local levels. They have taken hold of the FBI, the DHS, the military, the State Department, and other government organizations. The Muslim Brotherhood determines U.S. counterterrorism policy and its operatives meet regularly with Janet Napolitano as well as the Department of Justice staff.

Recently, the DoJ joined the Muslim Brotherhood in an investigation of NYPD counterterrorism interventions that have protected Americans from jihadist attacks.

Ask yourself why Major Hasan’s trial has been delayed and why he hasn’t received the death penalty almost three years after he committed the Fort Hood massacre?

Also, why has Hasan’s murderous rampage been officially designated as “workplace violence” and “nothing to do with Islam”?

What about the order to destroy the cell phone videos taken by Pfc. Lance Aviles showing Hasan shouting “Allahu Akbar” and Hasan’s private business cards that identified him as a “Soldier of Allah, Glory to God” … ?

Why were two Al Qaeda fundraisers – Al Munia and Muntasser – just set free? How was the federal judge in this case able to rule that references to Osama bin Laden were off-limits during their criminal trial?

Last month, one of the MB subsidiaries – CAIR – successfully eliminated 900 pages of close to 400 FBI training presentations that they deemed “offensive to Islam.” FBI agents will no longer learn anything about the enemy except that they are followers of “the religion of peace.”

In 2009, all references to “jihad,” “Islam” and the “Muslim Brotherhood” were expunged from the FBI lexicon and the National Intelligence Strategy of the U.S. Contrast this with the 9-11 Commission report issued in 2004 which mentioned “Islam” 322 times and “jihad” 126 times.

Recently, the U.S. State Department removed an entire section of a human rights report that dealt with the persecution of Christians throughout the Muslim world.

For over a decade, the State Department has been actively facilitating higher levels of Muslim immigration to the U.S.

Our military has been busy learning to respect Islam and our troops are well schooled in the proper handling of Islamic religious materials. They also know not to urinate or spit in the direction of Mecca. At a once prominent military academy deemed the “West Point of the South” – VMI – cadets now celebrate the 771 A.D. Muslim conquest of Spain.

All because America has elected a lover of Islam as its president. Americans learnt on 9/11 (if they did not know it sooner) that Islam is America’s enemy. But no one whose duty it was – media reporters, politicians – found out and published, in the election year of 2008, the fact that candidate Obama loves Islam.

Now it is known, can the information be widely enough spread to keep the voters from re-electing him?

This is from Family Security Matters, by Clare M. Lopez:

Quietly, behind the scenes, the Muslim Brotherhood is enforcing censorship of all U.S. government training about Islam and the forces of Islamic jihad. Under the co-opted direction of National Security Council official, Quintan Wiktorowicz, key Cabinet Departments, including Defense, Homeland Security, Justice and State are purging their curriculum materials of any references about Islam that their Muslim Brotherhood advisors find objectionable.

In effect, the national security policy of the U.S. government is being brought into compliance with Islamic law on slander.

Under Islamic law (sharia), “slander” means “to mention anything concerning a person [a Muslim] that he would dislike.” Telling the whole truth about Islamic doctrine, law and scriptures – especially the Muslim obligation to conduct warfare against non-Muslims, subjugate them and force them to live under Islamic law – would reveal the very essence of sharia Islam. For obvious reasons, it’s not the part of Islam that its Brotherhood vanguard wants Americans to know about.

There is a campaign against imaginary “Islamophobia,” which is, Clare Lopez writes, “designed and promoted by the Muslim Brotherhood to silence those who would speak truth about Islam.”

She goes on:

Farah Pandith is the Special Representative to Muslim Communities for the U.S. Department of State. … She repeatedly has associated with groups and individuals that are known affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood and its equally jihadist off-shoot, HAMAS. In an interview with the Gulf Times at the conclusion of the May 2012 9th U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Qatar, Pandith confirmed that it has been the policy of the Obama administration since its inception “to put the priority of engaging with one fourth of humanity [Islam] front and centre.” …

There’s never before been an American president who so unashamedly and deliberately has sought to empower those who’ve openly and repeatedly declared themselves the sworn enemies of this country. … Muhammad Badi, the Muslim Brotherhood Supreme Guide, effectively declared war on the U.S. in October 2010, about nine months before the Obama administration granted formal diplomatic recognition to the jihadist group. …

With the Obama presidency that the deep Brotherhood penetration of U.S. national security leadership is moving unafraid into the open, at last confident of its acceptance and backing. …

On October 19, 2011, an op-ed piece, written by Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) President Salam al-Marayati, was published in the Los Angeles Times and threatened the FBI that the Muslim community would withhold cooperation against terrorism if the Justice Department (DoJ) didn’t purge its training materials “immediately.”

“Co-operation against terrorism”? By the MPAC? Who would have guessed it was happening? Who will believe it that it ever did or ever will?

Justice must have gotten the message very quickly, immediately in fact, because that very afternoon, Thomas E. Perez, the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, represented the Department at a George Washington University summit in Washington, D.C. to confirm its capitulation to the Muslim Brotherhood.

In attendance to accept the surrender was Mohamed Magid, president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) …  [The] DoJ earlier named ISNA an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2008 Holy Land Foundation HAMAS terror funding trial.

Another criminal organization remaining “unindicted”.

In fact, FBI Director Robert Mueller appeared to anticipate the al-Marayati blackmail piece when he appeared before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence earlier on October 6, 2011, to offer his mea culpa for FBI training material that … taught accurately that “Jihad is motivated by the strategic themes and drivers in Islam.”

By February 15, 2012, the FBI was announcing that it would be taking its curriculum purge and revision advice from a panel that apparently includes Muslim Brotherhood associates ISNA and MPAC (although the FBI refuses to say for sure). Under the watchful eyes of its jihadist mentors, the FBI subsequently pulled over 700 documents and 300 presentations from its training materials.

Also in October 2011, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) published its Training Guidance & Best Practices for Countering Violent Extremism (CVE), a term that deliberately erases any hint that Islamic terrorism derives its motivation from the doctrine, law and scriptures of Islam.

It’s no surprise that DHS Secretary Napolitano’s CVE Working Group includes the Obama administration’s favorite Imam, Mohamed Magid (of ISNA and Muslim Brotherhood association), plus Dalia Mogahed, who sports her own jihadist leanings, and one of the Muslim Brotherhood’s all-time favorite law enforcement officials, the LAPD’s Deputy Chief, Michael Downing. …

The final bastion of America’s defense against Islamic jihad and sharia, the Pentagon, fell to the enemy in April 2012, with the issuance of a letter from General Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, re-issuing his earlier order that all Department of Defense (DoD) course content be scrubbed to ensure no lingering remnant of disrespect to Islam.

All U.S. military Combatant Commands, Services, the National Guard Bureau and Joint Staff are under Dempsey’s Muslim Brotherhood-dictated orders to ensure that henceforth no U.S. military course will ever again teach truth about Islam that the jihadist enemy finds offensive (or just too informative). To all intents and purposes, DoD Secretary Leon E. Panetta likewise has acquiesced to a Muslim Brotherhood takeover of U.S. military education.

One cannot help wondering: if Muslims  find it “offensive” for the cruelties of Islamic law and practice to be revealed, why do they continue to uphold them and practice them? If they’re proud of amputating limbs, stoning women to death, killing apostates and homosexuals, beating women and treating them as slaves, waging  jihad against the rest of the world, why not trumpet those ideals of justice throughout every land? Hushing them up does suggest they’re ashamed of them. Why can’t they see this? Why can’t the administration see it?

The Great Purge represents a huge victory for the jihadist enemy, who told us in the Muslim Brotherhood’s Explanatory Memorandum more than 20 years ago of its plan for “eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house …  ”

Without the willing assistance of America’s most senior leadership figures – at DHS, DoD, DoJ, the State Department and White House – this enemy triumph could never have happened. Reversing the disastrous effects of the Great Purge before the Republic slips further under the censorship of the Muslim Brotherhood is the critical task before us now.

Three Head Socialism

Or Three Head Fascism?

See Thomas Sowell on the fascism of the Left here.

The UN must be destroyed because (to put it very mildly, coolly, and objectively):

• It does no good to anyone
• It does much harm to many
• It is unreformable
• It was a colossal mistake of wishful thinking from its beginning
• It is kept going only because it is a gravy train for its bureaucrats and diplomats at enormous expense to tax-payers, especially Americans

A documentary film made recently by Ami Horowitz and Matt Groff, UN Me, exposes the worst incidences of its uselessness and corruption, violent and cruel actions, and refusals to do what it purportedly came into existence to do.

The following extracts are from an excellent article on the film by Bruce Bawer at Front Page. (It is well worth reading in full.)

UN Me begins by according us a few brief glimpses of the sheer sloth that characterizes the whole shebang. Old UN hands describe the short working days, long lunches, and frequent midday naps that characterize the everyday life of many of its functionaries. Wandering the halls of UN headquarters in New York shortly after 5 PM on a weekday, Horowitz … encounters a virtual ghost town: almost everybody has long since cleared out for the day. This institutional torpor is, he makes clear, emblematic of the whole worldwide enterprise. …

Horowitz reminds us that countries like Libya, Sudan, Zimbabwe, and China have sat on the UN Human Rights Commission – and, later, on the Human Rights Council that was meant to be an improvement on that comically corrupt agency.

In 2010, Iran was elected to the UN Commission on the Status of Women.

At one point in the film, Horowitz asks Navi Pillay, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and director of the UN’s 2009 anti-racism conference in Geneva, why Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, of all people, was named keynote speaker at that event. That question, she replies in a small voice, is “not for me to answer.” (No, you don’t get far at the UN by providing honest answers to reasonable questions like that one.)

Horowitz informs us that Article 6 of the UN Charter actually “calls for the expulsion of any nation that consistently violates the principles of the charter.” Yet no member country has ever been expelled under Article 6. Shashi Tharoor, UN information chief, cheerfully explains that it’s best to have everybody “under the same tent.” …

The  film covers some of the more egregious scandals involving UN peacekeeping …  anecdotes about peacekeepers in various countries who, in their interactions with the people they were there to protect, acted like thugs, got rich trafficking drugs, spent their time whoring, and sexually abused minors. Peacekeepers in the Congo committed literally thousands of rapes. At least one ran a pedophilia ring.

We’re shown video of UN bureaucrats solemnly vowing that errant peacekeepers will be caught and punished. But in fact almost no UN peacekeeper has ever been held accountable for anything.

In Côte d’Ivoire, peacekeepers actually fired on peaceful, unarmed protestors.

They were standing together, men women and children, singing happily when UN sharp shooters fired on them. One of the few times the “peacekeepers”  have actually used their arms.

But was anyone punished? No; that’s just not the UN way. When Horowitz, in a sit-down interview with Abou Moussa, head of the UN mission in Côte d’Ivoire, asks about the episode, Moussa gets up and leaves.

The film moves on to the absurdity that is the International Atomic Energy Agency – which, tasked with preventing nuclear-arms proliferation, has actually helped North Korea, Iran, India, and Pakistan to acquire nuclear technology, purportedly for peaceful purposes. Since, as the film notes, the IAEA can only perform inspections in countries that invite it to do so, it spends more than 80% of its $380 million annual budget inspecting facilities in – believe it or not – Germany, Japan, and Canada. …

Iran carries on towards making nuclear weapons. The UN and its agencies can do nothing about it, nor would if they could. Iran’s President Ahmadinejad is one of the most honored, ecstatically applauded gasbags in the UN General Assembly, he who has homosexuals hanged and women stoned to death. Ahmadinejad is the perfect personification of the spirit of the United Nations Organization.  

Then there’s terrorism. After 9/11, the UN passed Resolution 1373, which was supposedly designed to fight terrorism. It would appear to be as toothless a measure as was ever ratified by a deliberative body. Horowitz interviews Javier Ruperez, whose title is – get this – Executive Director of the Counter-Terrorism Executive Directorate of the Counter-Terrorism Committee of the Security Council. Asked what the committee actually does to fight terrorism, Ruperez speaks blandly of the production of reports. Member countries, you see, are asked to file reports indicating whether or not they’re aiding terrorists. The directorate, or committee, or whatever it is also sends inspectors for, oh, a week or so to various countries to find out whether anything fishy is going on there. None of this, of course, actually accomplishes anything. Asked whether the UN has official lists of terrorist groups and of countries that support terror, Ruperez says no: “This is not the practice of the UN.” …

Another question: how does the UN define terrorism? This, Ruperez declares, is still a “pending matter.” …

The UN will not define terrorism because the General Assembly is dominated by terrorism-sponsoring states.

Next up: the Oil for Food scandal – which, as Claudia Rosett, the top-notch UN expert and eloquent UN critic, tells Horowitz, was absolutely “designed to produce corruption.” Allegedly, the objective of the program was to provide food, medical supplies, and so forth to the Iraqi people in exchange for oil; in reality, a bunch of UN big shots, up to and including Security Council representatives … lined their pockets with kickbacks. But, again, the UN did nothing – it was, as Rosett says, “the biggest scam in the history of human relief,” but nobody was fired or jailed. As always, the UN proved that nothing could be more alien to its institutional culture than the idea of accountability.

The Rwanda genocide gets its own sad chapter in UN Me. The head of the UN peacekeepers in that country, General Romeo Dallaire, actually wanted to do the right thing. But when he asked Kofi Annan, then in charge of all UN peacekeeping forces, for authority to take relatively modest action to prevent a looming genocide, Annan said no. Why? Because it was more important to protect the UN’s “image of impartiality” than to protect people from genocide. UN forces were even ordered to withdraw from a school where they were the only thing standing between Tutsi refugees – many of them children and old people – and Hutus with machetes. Result: a brutal massacre for which – yet again – no UN personnel were punished.

Live footage of what happened there is one of the most heart-rending scenes in the film.

While this nightmare was unfolding in Rwanda, Boutros-Boutros Ghali, then secretary-general of the UN, was on a European tour, which he refused to cancel in order to deal with Rwanda.

He had urgently to attend a string of universities bestowing honorary degrees on him for being such a benefactor of mankind.

When he did return to New York, he denied that Tutsi were being exterminated. …  Horowitz and Groff even got Jean-Marie Guéhenno, former Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, on camera smoothly asserting that in the wake of the Rwanda genocide, it’s best not to “allocate the blame to one actor or the other.”

Horowitz also interviews Jody Williams, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who was invited by the UN to examine the situation in Darfur and who ended up livid at the UN’s palpable discomfort with her undiplomatic conclusions and its failure to act on her urgent recommendations. …

At film’s end, Horowitz and Graff pose a simple question: what, given all these unpleasant facts, does the UN stand for? The answer, alas, is clear. It stands for itself – period. Like many other pointless bureaucracies, it is about perpetuating its own existence and enhancing its own image – and about seeking to squelch the truth about its fecklessness, incompetence, and absolute lack of a moral compass. It’s also … about providing hack politicians from around the world with yet another career steppingstone, once they’ve risen to the top of the ladder in their own crummy little countries and finished emptying their own citizens’ pockets.

Please watch the film!

These quotations come from The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House by Edward Klein*:

Michelle is the president’s most important political adviser and the one he listens to above all others before he makes major decisions. (Page 107)

Michelle Obama is further to the Left politically  than her husband. And that’s saying a lot. (Page 107)

Everyone in Michelle’s family is afraid of her … Despite her fiery reputation among friends and family, stories about Michelle’s temper have rarely appeared in the liberal mainstream media, which have gone out of their way to protect her. (Page 113)

Chicago-style cronyism marked Michelle’s tenure at the University of Chicago Medical Center. … [E]veryone expected Michelle to promote programs to assist the underprivileged denizens of the black South Side. Instead, she helped launch a program … to save the hospital millions of dollars by reducing poor and uninsured patients from its emergency room to surrounding community hospitals in the South Side. The University of Chicago’s Medical Center beds were reserved for prosperous patients who used profitable procedures. The president of the American College of Emergency Physicians, Dr. Nick Jouriles, released a statement saying Michelle’s program came “dangerously close to ‘patient dumping’, a practice made illegal by the emergency Medical Labor and Trade Treatment Act, and reflected in an effort to ‘cherry pick’ wealthy patients over poor.”  (Pages 117-118)

Michelle’s personality … is acquisitive and materialistic by nature. For her forty-fourth birthday, Obama bought his wife … a set of diamond earrings. He spent $5,000. She promptly returned them in exchange for bigger diamonds that cost $12,000. (Page 124)

The conclusions we draw from these passages are:

• Michelle Obama is a too-powerful influence – for the worse – on her weak and indecisive husband.
• She is loaded with the moral vanity, and indulges in the bleeding-heart self-dramatization, that characterize the elite of the Left.
• She is a shrew.

Above all -

But first some clarification. We are heartily for maximizing profit. We are delighted to know that there are people who can pay $12,000 for a pair of earrings, because we consider poverty, not affluence, to be a problem. We do not believe in a “sin” of greed; we do believe in – and despise – the “sin” of envy. But the Left in theory disagrees with us on all these counts.

So our point in quoting the last two items is that -

• Michelle Obama is a hypocrite, in this too being typical of the Leftist elite.

*The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House by Edward Klein, Regnery, Washington DC, 2012.

There is a Republican faction, a very large one, which we disdain as much as we do Democrats and collectivists in general.

Here’s part of a report from the Freethinker, by Barry Duke, which demonstrates who these Republicans are, and why we despise them and fear what they do with power when it’s put in their hands:

Schools run along faith guidelines have hit the jackpot big time following Louisiana’s decision to siphon tens of millions of tax dollars out of public schools and into religious institutions where only creationism will be taught.

In what is described here as “the nation’s boldest experiment in privatizing public education”, the state will pay private industry, businesses owners and church pastors to educate children.

That should read: “miseducate children”.

Starting this fall, thousands of poor and middle-class kids will get vouchers covering the full cost of tuition at more than 120 private schools across Louisiana, including small, Bible-based church schools.

Said Governor Bobby Jindal, a Republican who muscled the plan through the legislature this spring over fierce objections from Democrats and teachers unions:

We are changing the way we deliver education. We are letting parents decide what’s best for their children, not government.

We are for private education. We are for parental choice of schools. We know that the teachers unions are a hindrance to good education. We do not like the voucher system because it is a way of redistributing wealth. We are vehemently against tax-payers’ money being spent on teaching children superstition and lies. Christianity’s (which is to say Judaism’s) account of the origins of the universe is a lie.

Jindal is a devout Catholic, and this is what he believes:

As Christians, we’re secure in the knowledge that in the Book of Life, our God wins. He gets off that cross. He beats Satan. We’re not called to be despondent. We are called to be salt and light and to be planting the seeds of the gospel.

Small religious schools, including some that are just a few years old and others that have struggled to attract tuition-paying students, are cock-a-hoop over the plan. New Living Word in Ruston is especially chuffed over the scheme, and is willing to accept the highest number of voucher students – 314.

New Living Word has a top-ranked basketball team but no library. Students spend most of the day watching TVs in bare-bones classrooms. Each lesson consists of an instructional DVD that intersperses Biblical verses with subjects such as chemistry or composition.

The Upperroom Bible Church Academy in New Orleans, a bunker-like building with no windows or playground, also has plenty of slots open. It seeks to bring in 214 voucher students, worth up to $1.8 million in state funding.

At Eternity Christian Academy in Westlake, pastor-turned-principal Marie Carrier hopes to secure extra space to enroll 135 voucher students, though she now has room for just a few dozen.

Her first- through eighth-grade students sit in cubicles for much of the day and move at their own pace through Christian workbooks, such as a beginner’s science text that explains “what God made” on each of the six days of creation. They are not exposed to the theory of evolution. Heaven forbid, NO! Said Carrier: “We try to stay away from all those things that might confuse our children.”

Other schools approved for state-funded vouchers use social studies texts warning that liberals threaten global prosperity, …

They do. With that we have no quarrel.

…  Bible-based math books that don’t cover modern concepts such as set theory, …

Even mathematics to be “Bible-based”? How? Please don’t answer!

…  and biology texts built around refuting evolution.

How they can “refute evolution” without “exposing” the children to it is a puzzle.

Angrily we declare: Better that children have no schooling at all than be taught to believe these absurd, gruesome, and immoral fabrications of primitive minds.

(Hat-tip, reader and commenter Frank.)