After reading a studious account of Imam Feisal Rauf’s Malaysian activities by my journalist colleague Alyssa Lappen, and listening to an interview of the courageous investigative reporter Steven Emerson, who has compiled recorded evidence of Rauf’s Islamic radicalism based upon hours of audio taped lectures and statements, I read Anne Barnard’s New York Times piece, entitled “Balancing Act for Imam in Muslim Center Furor.”

Reading Ms. Barnard’s story reminded me of Arthur Koestler’s description in “The God That Failed” of working for the Soviet Agitprop EKKI as a “delegate of the Revolutionary Proletarian Writers of Germany.” Koestler was a brilliant writer, but before qualifying for this particular writing assignment, he had gradually learned from his willing Communist indoctrination,

…to distrust my mechanistic pre-occupation with facts and to regard the world around me the world around me in the light of dialectic interpretation. It was a satisfactory and indeed blissful state; once you had assimilated the technique you were no longer disturbed by facts; they automatically took on the proper color and fell into their proper place.

Extraordinarily well-paid for rather minimal effort, Koestler described how it was: (more…)

Andrew Bostom, whose trenchant scholarly work on Islam deserves more attention, rightly compares Anne Barnard’s sanitized profile in the New York Times of the Ground Zero Mosque’s originator, Imam Feisal Rauf, to Communist agitprop.

For Bostom, Barnard’s “Balancing Act for Imam In Muslim Center Furor” recalls Arthur Koestler’s account in The God That Failed of mastering, after due indoctrination, how to turn out Soviet propaganda. How cheerily oblivious, wrote Koestler:

… to distrust my mechanistic pre-occupation with facts and to regard the world around me the world around me in the light of dialectic interpretation. It was a satisfactory and indeed blissful state; once you had assimilated the technique you were no longer disturbed by facts; they automatically took on the proper color and fell into their proper place.

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We use the power of persuasion first. If it doesn’t work, we try the persuasion of power.                 – Andy Stern, SEIU

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

There are only two kinds of government. Limited Government (LG) which limits the powers of the people at the top, which limits their ability to corrupt the system, and Big Government (BG) which is designed so a small elite group at the top reap all the benefits of a society and there is no limit on what they can do with their power.

All the names for forms of government like socialism, communism, fascism, etc. are merely definitions of style. BG systems all eventually drift toward some form of tyranny until they collapse from their own corruption or revolution. The most successful and stable form of government in modern times is the LG federalist model of the United States. But that has been corrupted, and now is changing into a BG system where it is doomed to fail unless events change it back.

I’ve tried to cover the history as much as I could in the limited space I had, but today I want to explore what it all means. First I highly recommend two documentaries that will help put a lot of things in perspective if you haven’t seen them. They were both made by Adam Curtis, a British film maker. The first is The Century of Self which talks about how elites have used psychology to help manufacture consent. The other is The Trap which talks about how liberal thinking helped create the nightmare bureaucratic world we live in today. Curtis has a leftward tilt, but he’s even-handed. The information he relates is well worth your time. (more…)

“I have been affiliated with the Cuban Council of Churches since the 1980s,” boasted Rev. Jeremiah Wright in a sermon on July 16, 2006.

I have several close Cuban friends who work with the Cuba Council of Churches and you have heard me preach about our affiliation and the Black Theology Project’s trips to Cuba. The Cuban Council of Churches has been a non-partisan global mission partner for decades. I have worked with them for two decades.

“Non-partisan,” Reverend Wright? Not according to Cuban intelligence defector Juan Vives, who from hands-on experience reports that the Cuba Council of Churches is in fact an arm of Cuba’s ICAP (Instituto Cubano de Amistad con los Pueblos) itself an arm of Cuba’s DGI, Cuba’s secret police, founded and mentored by the KGB and East German STASI. The ICAP’s long-time chieftain was Rene Cruz Rodriguez, perhaps one of Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s “friends.” (more…)