Last Friday, the PayPal accounts for my blog AtlasShrugs.com and my organizations Stop Islamization of America (SIOA) and the Freedom Defense Initiative (FDI) were suddenly and without warning “restricted.” After a recent review of my account, Paypal said that it had been “determined” that I was “currently in violation of PayPal’s Acceptable Use Policy. Under the Acceptable Use Policy, PayPal may not be used to send or receive payments for items that promote hate, violence, racial intolerance or the financial exploitation of a crime.”

Huh?

Hate? Violence? Racial intolerance? Financial exploitation of a crime? SIOA is an advocacy group devoted to defending the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience and the equality of rights of all people. Atlas Shrugs is a news site and a political blog. I am not responsible for the bad news in the world. I just report on it. (more…)

Okay, in a fit of journo-masochism, I have been monitoring Keith Olbermann’s tweets, commentaries and Countdown over the past 24 hours for his vitriolic reaction to the New York Times report that President Obama has authorized the CIA to target and kill (read, blow into smithereens with a drone-launched missile) an American citizen suspected of having terrorist ties.

Anwar al-Awlaki

But so far . . . silence.  Plenty of inarticulate ad hominem remarks directed at Republicans, but Stone Cold Silence in response to the President authorizing the killing of an American citizen without affording him Miranda warnings, indictment, legal counsel, God forbid a jury trial, appeal, or any other trappings commonly associated with Constitutional due process.

Recall this is the same Keith Olbermann who gained a niche audience with his relentless hate-spew at President Bush over issues that included water boarding of al Qaida terrorists.  A typical example is his November 5, 2007 article “The Presidency is Now a Criminal Conspiracy,” in which Olbermann feverishly decried Bush’s authorization of water boarding as a “crime” that “wouldn’t just mean impeachment”, it “would mean George W. Bush is going to prison”, and in which he likened the Bush Administration to “Japan in the 1930s” hoping to “remake a nation into a fascist state”.

Let’s sum up, shall we class?  Bush water boarding a terrorist:  Impeachment!  Imprisonment!  Fascism!  Obama targeting and killing an American citizen:  No problemo! (more…)

The media’s reaction to the Faisal Shahzad story was quite telling.  It began with many clamoring for the idea that the would-be bomber had to be a rightwing nutjob.  It ended with many  drawing a curiously sympathetic picture of an enemy of everything we believe in.

As the narrative went, Shahzad fell on tough times due to the recession and grew ever more insular.  So he picked up the Koran and devoted himself to Islam, and then up and left for Pakistan to train with al-Qaeda.  Surely this is the natural reaction to being short the month’s mortgage payment.  I find it more plausible that it was the plight of the New York Mets that drove him to attempt to blow up a car bomb in Times Square.

Which is to say that the rationalization by the MSM for why Muslims are driven to carry out terrorist attacks is utterly incoherent.  Equally as dumbfounding is the MSM’s tortuous attempt to humanize those who would carry out the most inhuman of acts. (more…)

In Robert Wright’s May 11 New York Times essay,“The Making of a Terrorist,” we learn a very interesting and useful fact: terrorists are complicated.  No offense, Hamlet, but there needs no ghost come from the grave to tell us this.

Yet tell us Wright does. Refuting the (in Wright’s mind) simplistic takes of The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg and National Review Online’s Daniel Pipes that “jihadi intent” drove Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad, Wright writes:

I’d like to invite Pipes and Goldberg to imagine an alternative universe, a universe in which behaviors — such as planting a bomb — don’t have a single “root” cause. In this universe, bomb-planting behavior is kind of like the bombs themselves: a number of ingredients have to come together before things get explosive. If you figure out what those ingredients are, and which of them you can control, maybe you can make bomb-planting behavior less common.

Coincidentally, or perhaps not, liberal commentator Ellis Hennican espoused nearly an identically-worded theory on Fox News Channel’s News Watch program on Saturday, only Hennican used the more palatable metaphor of a cocktail of ingredients as opposed to a pipe bomb of factors. (more…)