Family Security Matters Briefings - Week of 9/1/08

Who Vetted Obama?
By Cliff Kincaid

The Washington Post reported that John McCain's vetting process for picking Governor Sarah Palin included an FBI background check. Other reports dispute this. But when did the FBI investigate Obama? Who vetted him? We are living witnesses to an incredible media double standard, whereby a Republican vice-presidential candidate's personal life is being torn apart, while the Democrat presidential candidate continues to get a free ride. Obama has a 30-year history of associating with unsavory characters, beginning with communist Frank Marshall Davis and continuing with Jeremiah Wright and communist terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, which should disqualify him from getting a security clearance in the government that he wants to run. But the media would rather talk about Republicans and sex. [more...]

Joe Biden: Obama's 'Evil Twin'
By Gregory D. Lee

Despite Sen. Joe Biden's denial on Meet the Press and other media outlets that he was not interested, it seems as though his insider supporters lobbied heavily for him to be Sen. Barack Obama's pick for vice president. I hardly think these supporters did this without the knowledge and consent of Sen. Biden. According to the Wall Street Journal, Sen. Biden's "team" sold Sen. Obama on Joe's "humble roots" by pitching his poverty compared to other senators, and his strong foreign policy experience. His team would like you to believe that commuting by train to and from Delaware to the nation's capital means he's not a Washington insider despite being a U.S. senator since he was 30 years old. [more...]

How Would You Like It, Sen. Biden?
By Harvey Kushner

Campaigning yesterday in Toledo, Ohio, Joe Biden began what is sure to become standard Biden attack language. In calling attention to what he sees as a big difference between himself and Sarah Palin, the loose-lipped Biden snapped, "She's good-looking." Yup, you're right, Sen. Biden; Rush Limbaugh summed it up best for all us conservatives when he said that "we're the ones that have the babe on the ticket." Rush was not just commenting on Palin's looks but also her social conservative views that frame her as an individual. Your remark, Sen. Biden, was clearly meant to diminish Gov. Palin's credibility and dismiss her as just another attractive brainless female. How would you like it, Sen. Biden, had John McCain stated that the difference between himself and Obama "was black and white?" [more...]


Newspaper Whitewashes Story of Man Linked to Palestinian Islamic Jihad
By Steve Emerson

It's no secret newspapers are struggling financially. Virtually every week brings new reports about vast layoffs and cutbacks. There are fewer pages with fewer stories. So it's more than a little confusing to see a major metropolitan daily send a reporter halfway around the world to tell half a story. The St. Petersburg Times on Monday offered readers just that in a heart-tugging update on Mazen Al-Najjar and his new life in Egypt. Al-Najjar, whose sister is Sami Al-Arian's wife, was deported by the U.S. in 2002 after a five-year fight in which he was held without bond for more than four years based in part on secret evidence linking him to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. [more...]

Family Security Matters Briefings - Week of 7/21/08

Are Voters Who Don't Support Obama Racists? The Twisted Logic of Political Correctness
By KT McFarland

New York Governor David Paterson gave one of the keynote addresses at the NAACP's 99th annual convention at Cincinnati last week. According to one newspaper account he "suggested that the defeat of Senator Obama in the presidential election would be a victory for racism in America."

Huh? Is Governor Paterson implying that anyone who votes against Barack Obama is a racist? Can't someone vote against him because they don't trust his flip-flopping on major issues? Or they worry a President Obama will join the ranks of Presidents Hoover and Carter and raise taxes during a recession? Or they think Senator Obama's plan for immediate withdrawal from Iraq would snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? Or they suspect his brand of "aggressive diplomacy" with Iran would result in an Iranian nuclear arsenal? Or they believe he's too inexperienced and untried to be president in these precarious times?

Is this what political correctness has brought us to? That we are now a nation of people who are assumed to cast our votes, not on the basis of a candidate's record or policies, but merely on the basis of his race and ethnicity? [more...]

Israeli Strike Highlights Rogue-State Axis
By Joel Himelfarb

While the details of Israel's September 6th airstrike inside Syria remain a closely guarded secret, this much is clear: The Israeli raid has focused plenty of attention on the longstanding military relationship between Syria and North Korea, and the connections between rogue regimes in Damascus, Pyongyang and Tehran. North Korea has long been involved in helping Syria develop and improve its Scud missile force. For example, Syria is believed to have purchased more than 100 Scud-C missiles from the DPRK regime, which may be capable of carrying chemical or biological warheads. Another missile that North Korea may have helped the Syrians develop is the Scud-D; that missile, with a range of well over 400 miles, has the capability to reach pretty much anywhere in Israel and Jordan and Lebanon, in addition to U.S. forces based in Iraq and Turkey, a NATO ally. Syrian strongman Bashar Assad's regime is widely believed to have chemical and biological weapons, including mustard gas, sarin, and anthrax. And it maintains this arsenal in part through the acquisition of dual-use equipment (items with both military and civilian uses) from North Korea. [more...]

How Britain Helps Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood: Part One of Two
By Adrian Morgan

This week, the annual British event known as "Islam Expo" came to a close. In 2006, this "celebration" of Islamic heritage and identity gathered criticism as the event - then held in Alexandra Palace in North London - took place while relatives were commemorating the first anniversary of the 7/7 attacks. Additionally, some of the proposed speakers at that 2006 event were known to hold extremist views. [more...]

Family Security Matters Briefings - Week of 7/14/08

Sudan: The Beginning of the End
By J. Peter Pham, Ph.D.

On Monday the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Luis Moreno-Ocampo, presented evidence to a panel of judges asking for the issuance of an arrest warrant against Sudanese President Umar Hassan al-Bashir on charges of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes for his role in the conflict in Darfur. While it is highly unlikely that a legal indictment from a tribunal sitting at The Hague will have much immediate effect on what the United Nations has termed "the worst humanitarian crisis in the world" - if anything, as some critics of the move have already argued, it might worsen the situation, at least in the short-term - the proceedings initiated signal the beginning of the end, not only for Bashir and his Arab-dominated Islamist regime, but for the geopolitical monstrosity that has been Sudan. [more...]

Jews, Persians at Swords' Points
By Clare M. Lopez

Iranian missile tests sent shock waves across the Middle East this past week, with the clerical regime's spokesmen leaving no doubt the demonstration was aimed squarely at Israel. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's representative to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Ali Shirazi, threatened to "burn" Tel Aviv while IRGC Commander Mohammed Ali-Jafari's comments took aim directly at Israel's nuclear facilities at Dimona. Iran's Great Prophet III military exercises were touted as a reaction to Israel's own war games of June, during which over 100 Israeli Defense Force F-15's and F-16's, supported by aerial refueling tankers, demonstrated their ability to cover the distance between Israel and Iran's key uranium enrichment center at Natanz. [more...]

'Ya Doesn't Hafta Call Me Hussein'
By Dr. Harvey Kushner

Back in the 1970s, comedian Bill Saluga made it big with a zoot-suited character named Raymond J. Johnson Jr. If called Johnson, Saluga erupted, "Ahh, ya doesn't has to call me Johnson! You can call me Ray, or you can call me Jay, or you can call me Johnny or you can call me Sonny, or you can call me RayJay, or you can call me RJ... but ya doesn't hafta call me Johnson." Who would have thought that Saluga's tirade would characterize reaction to the mention of the middle name of the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, Barack Hussein Obama? Dropping the "H" bomb when referring to him gets more than a comical rant - it gets you labeled racist. Why should this surprise anyone? The terminology Gestapo activated itself less than a week after the attacks of September 11, 2001, when the President stated that we would be waging a crusade against a new kind of evil. [more...]

Jesse Helms: The Indispensable Man Who Made President Reagan Possible
By Joel Himelfarb

Aside from Ronald Reagan, no one did more than Sen. Jesse Helms to advance the cause of freedom in the world in the past 30 years. President Reagan's contributions - staving off a communist takeover in Central America, denying trade credits and technology to the Communist Bloc, and overseeing a military buildup that ultimately won the Cold War - are well known. But the indispensable role played by the North Carolina Republican, who died July 4th at age 86, may as well be ancient history to many Americans, especially to members of the under-30 You Tube generation, many of whom were not even born when Helms began his Senate career in 1973. It's time for that to change. Helms was a giant in late 20th century American politics, and aside from Ronald Reagan, the most important figure in the modern American conservative movement. You cannot understand American politics today - particularly the sorry state of the Senate - without understanding the contributions of Jesse Helms and the enormous vacuum created by his retirement five and a half years ago. [more...]

Family Security Matters Briefings - Week of 6/16/08

Al Qaeda: Weakened, Not Defeated
By W. Thomas Smith, Jr.

Is Al Qaeda in its death throes? Hardly, say terrorism experts: The Al Qaeda network has been temporarily weakened on a few fronts, to be sure, but it is far from defeated. Nevertheless, the authors of a recent spate of end-of-terror essays would have us believe otherwise. Paul Cruickshank writing for the New York Daily News, even goes so far as to suggest that the likelihood of "terror returning to New York's streets" may be "significantly lower" within a few years. We all hope so. But the prediction, some say, is either wishful thinking or perhaps a bit of politics. The essays -- written by Cruickshank and his compatriots Peter Bergen, Lawrence Wright, and others -- come on the heels of CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden's recent statements that "Al Qaeda is on the verge of a strategic defeat in Iraq," and suggesting (though in broad, cautious terms) that the international terrorist network is suffering setbacks elsewhere in the world. [more...]


Exclusive: Obama and Iran - The Democrats Select a Modern-Day McGovern
By Joel Himelfarb

Judging from last week's address to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Sen. Barack Obama doesn't want voters to see him as soft on Iran and its genocidal President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. And he certainly doesn't want people to see him for what he is: part of the far-left fringe of the Democrat Party, an ideological ally of former Sen. George McGovern. McGovern, who lost 49 states to President Richard Nixon in 1972 (and his South Dakota Senate seat eight years later) has endorsed Obama this year. [more...]


Exclusive: George H.W. Bush: More than Meets the Eye
By KT McFarland

Last week my husband and I were fortunate enough to spend some time with former President George H. W. Bush and Mrs. Bush in Kennebunkport, ME. The first evening, a group of us gathered at Walker's Point, the Bush family compound that sits on a rocky outcrop on the Maine coast. As former President Bush showed us around, I was struck by how many times this man had contributed to the nation, in position after position, crisis after crisis. Yet many, even those in his own party, have tended to overlook his extraordinary accomplishments. [more...]


Exclusive: Indonesia - A Civil War Between Islamists and Moderates?: Part Two of Two
By Adrian Morgan

In Part One I described how the Front Pembela Islam (Islamic Defenders' Front or FPI) had threatened to make war on the minority Islamic sect called the Ahmadiyah. On June 1st, FPI members violently attacked a procession of the National Alliance for Freedom of Religion and Faith (AKKBB), who support the rights of the Ahmadiyah. Several FPI members, including leader Habib Rizieq Shahib were arrested on Wednesday June 3rd in a police operation that involved 1,500 officers. Most FPI members were released shortly afterwards but Habib Rizieq Shahib and seven others remain in police custody. The Ahmadiyah (also called Ahmadi or Ahmadiyya) revere their founder Mirza Ghulam Ahmad - with many regarding him as a prophet. This places them into the category of Muslim "heretics," as traditionally Mohammed is the last prophet of Islam. The Indonesian Ahmadiyah have recently officially claimed that they regard their founder not as a prophet but as a pious Muslim. Their protestations have been ignored by the Indonesian government. [more...]


Rising Sun and Dark Continent: Japan's Courtship of Africa
By J. Peter Pham, PhD

On May 28th, 40 African heads of state and government trooped into the Pacifico Conference Centre in the Japanese port city of Yokohama to join their host, Prime Minister Yasuo Fukada, in kicking off the Fourth Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD). First held in 1993 in collaboration with the United Nations, the quinquennial TICAD meetings are officially intended to "promote high-level policy dialogue between African leaders and development partners" and "provide fundamental and comprehensive policy and guideline on African development." More to the point perhaps, the recently-concluded TICAD IV was another indication of the global recognition of the increasing strategic significance of Africa - in this case to the economic and political ambitions of the land of the rising sun. [more...]