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Former British Prime Minister Liz Truss spoke Monday at The Heritage Foundation about how the United States and the United Kingdom are facing very challenging forces in the global Left, not just in terms of their extremist activists, but also in the power they hold in our institutions. (Heritage founded The Daily Signal in 2014.)
She warned that conservatives must create a stronger infrastructure to take on the Left—which is well-funded, activist, and has many friends in high places—by recruiting more conservative activists and candidates who can fight in the trenches in the ideological war that we now face.
Excerpts from her remarks are below.
Why am I launching “Ten Years to Save the West” in the United States as well as in the United Kingdom? Well, I like to think of the United States of America as Britain’s greatest invention, albeit a slightly inadvertent invention. And if you look at our history, from Magna Carta to the Bill of Rights to the American Constitution, we have developed and perfected representative democracy.
And if you look at what is going on in our societies, first of all, the Brexit vote back in 2016 and then the election of President Donald Trump later that year, you can see the same desires of our people for change and the same desires for those conservative values and that sovereignty.
And if you look at the battle for conservatism now and the frequency with which we get new prime ministers in the United Kingdom and the frequency with which you get new speakers of the House here in the United States, we can see again that there is a battle for the heart and soul of conservatism on both sides of the Atlantic. And I think that battle is very important. Because, let’s be honest, we have not been winning against the global Left.
If you look at the history since the turn of the millennium, the Left have had the upper hand. And it’s not the old-fashioned Left who used to argue about the means of production and economic inequality. It’s the new Left who have insidious ideas that challenge our very way of life.
Whether it’s about climate extremism that doesn’t believe in economic growth, whether it’s about challenging the very idea of a man and a woman and biological sex, whether it’s about the human rights culture that’s been bedded into so much of our society that makes us unable to deal with illegal immigration—those new ideas have been promulgated by the global Left and they have been successful in infiltrating quite a large proportion of society and a large part of our institutions.
Let’s just look at the state of economics. I am a supply-sider. I know that it works. We saw it work under [U.S. President Ronald] Reagan and [U.K. Prime Minister Margaret] Thatcher, and yet we’ve seen the domination of Keynesian economics in recent years, bloated size of government, huge debts in both of our countries.
On the immigration and human rights culture, look at what is going on now on American university campuses where it is not safe anymore to be Jewish, or the streets of London where a Jewish man could not cross the road during yet another appalling protest, or the fact that we can’t seem to deport illegal immigrants either from your southern border or the small boats that are crossing the channel.
Or take wokery, another bad neo-Marxist idea developed from [Michel] Foucault and all those crazy post-modernists in the 1960s, the idea that biological sex is not a reality.
We now have President [Joe] Biden introducing regulations around Title IX, which means that girls could see biological boys in their changing rooms, in their locker rooms, in their school restrooms and not be able to do anything about it. And if they complain about it, they could be the ones guilty of harassment. How on earth can that be happening in our society?
Or the climate extremists who aren’t satisfied with just stopping coal-fired power stations here in America, [liquefied natural gas] terminals being built, fracking in the United Kingdom, but want to go further. Whether it’s imposing electric vehicles or air-source heat pumps or extra taxes on the public. Meanwhile, our adversaries in China are busy building coal-fired power stations every week.
I see that as unilateral economic disarmament in the middle of what is a various, serious threat to the West.
So how has it ended up that after the turn of the millennium, despite the fact that we have many conservative intellectuals and politicians, why have our institutions, why has so much of our public discourse shifted to the Left?
Well, first of all, too many conservatives have not been making the argument. Now, I call them conservatives in name only, CINOs. I know in America you call them RINOs. But these conservatives in name only, rather than taking on those ludicrous ideas, instead have tried to appease and meet them halfway.
Why have they done this? Well, first of all, they don’t want to look mean. They don’t want to look like they’re against human rights. They don’t want to look like they’re against the environment. They don’t want to be mean to transgender people. They’ve allowed those arguments to affect their views on what is right and wrong. But it’s also more cynical than that.
If you want to get a good job after politics, if you want to get into the corporate boardroom, there are a group of acceptable views and opinions that you should hold. And most of them are on that list. If you want to be popular and get invited to a lot of dinner parties in Washington, D.C., or London, there are reviews on that list that you should hold. And people have chosen dinner parties over principle.
But the other thing I think we’ve missed on the conservative side of the argument, and I put my hands up to this, is the rising power of the administrative state. The fact that power—which previously lay in the hands of democratically elected politicians, like them or not they can be voted out of office—is now in the hands of so-called independent bodies, whether it’s central banks, whether it’s government agencies, or whether it’s the civil service themselves.
And what we’re seeing in bureaucracy in the United Kingdom, and I think here in the United States as well, is a growing activist class of civil servants who have views on transgender ideology or climate or human rights, which they are keen to promote in their roles.
I saw this firsthand and one of the key points the book is about is my battles that I had with that institutional mindset. And there’s a phrase that we use in Britain called “consent and evade.” Quite often the officials will be very polite on the request, but it will take a very long time to do if it’s something like helping deport illegal immigrants or sort out the Rwanda scheme. If it’s something that they like, like dealing with climate change, that will be expedited.
And I think it’s very difficult for people who haven’t worked in government to understand just how cumbersome and how treacle-like it has become. And I don’t know if that’s a product of the modern era, if it’s a product of the online society, but it is very, very difficult now to deliver conservative policies.
Now, I did many jobs in many different government departments. I was in the justice department, the environment department, the education department, the treasury, I was in trade, I was in the foreign office, and I faced battles against activist lawyers, against environmentalists, against left-wing educationalists.
But what I thought when I ran to be prime minister in 2022 is I thought I had the opportunity to change things because that was surely the apex of power. I hadn’t been able to change it as environment secretary or trade secretary, but as prime minister, surely that was the opportunity for me to be able to really change things.
Now, there’s a bit of a spoiler alert about the book. It didn’t quite work out. I ended up being the shortest-serving British prime minister as a result of trying to take on these forces. And the particular thing that I tried to take them on was the whole issue of our economy.
***
I come today with a warning to the United States of America. I fear the same forces will be coming for President Donald Trump if he wins the election this November. There is a huge resistance to pro-growth supply-side policies that will deliver economic dynamism and help reduce debt.
What the international institutions and the economic establishment want to see is they want to see higher taxes, higher spending, and more big government, and more regulation. They do not want to see that challenged. And we’ve already heard noises from the Congressional Budget Office and elements of the United States market about the financial stability situation.
So, what have I learned from my experience? What have I learned from my time in office? I have learned that we are facing really quite challenging forces of the global Left, not just in terms of their virulent activists making extremist documents, but also the power they hold in our institutions. And that leads me to believe that what conservatives need is what I describe as a bigger bazooka.
Now, what do I mean by a bigger bazooka? Well, first of all, I mean that we need really strong conservative political infrastructure to be able to take on the Left. They are well-funded, they are activists, they have many friends in high places. And we need strength and depth in our political operation.
That’s why I’m working on a new political movement in the U.K. called Popular Conservatism, which is about bringing in more activists, more candidates, more potential legislators, more operators who can actually fight in the trenches against the Left in the ideological warfare that we now face.
The second thing we need to do is we need to dismantle the administrative state. And there are lots of people I speak to who say, “It’s just because you ministers aren’t tough enough. If only you were a bit bolder in taking on things, if only you had a bit more political will, you would be able to deliver.”
Those people are not right. Until we actually change the system, we are not going to be able to deliver conservative policy such as the depths of resistance in our institutions and our bureaucracy that we do have to change things first.
And what does that mean? Well, you’re ahead of us in the United States in that the president gets to appoint 3,000 people into the government positions. In Britain it’s only 100 people. And those 100 people are relatively junior. They’re not in charge of departments. So, I believe we need to change that in Britain. We need to properly appoint senior figures in our bureaucracy.
We also need to deal with the proliferation of unaccountable bureaucratic bodies. They have to go. There has to be a real bonfire of the quangos.
But even here in the United States, policies like Schedule F are going to be very, very important in order to be able to deliver a conservative agenda. And the project that Heritage is sponsoring, Project 2025, is another vital part of building that institutional infrastructure that can actually deliver conservative policies. Having seen what I’ve seen on both sides of the Atlantic, I think both of those things are vital in order for conservative policies to deliver.
But we can’t just deal with the administrative state at a national level because what we’ve also got is the global administrative state. We have the United Nations, the World Health Organization, we have the [Conference of the Parties] process.
And one of the things I tried to do was stop Britain hosting COP in Glasgow. I failed. But I want to see us in the future abandon that process. The best people to make decisions are people that are democratically elected in sovereign nations. It is not people sitting on international bodies who are divorced from the concerns of the public.
The final thing conservatives need to do is end appeasement. And by ending appeasement, I’m talking about the appeasement of woke Orwellianism at home as well as the appeasement of totalitarianism abroad. We have to do both of those things because both of those things are threatening our way of life.
Totalitarian regimes like China, Russia, and Iran have to be stood up to, the only thing they understand is strength. And now the military aid budget has been passed through Congress. There needs to be more clarity about how Russia can be defeated and how China and Iran will also be taken on. And in order to achieve that, we are going to need a change in personnel at the White House.
Now, I worked in Cabinet whilst Donald Trump was president and while President Biden was president. And I can assure you, the world felt safer when Donald Trump was in office. 2024 is going to be a vital year, and it’s the reason that I wanted to bring my book out now. Because getting a conservative back in the White House is critical to taking on the global Left. And I hate to think what life would be like with another four years of appeasement of the woke Left in the United States, as well as continued weakness on the international stage.
But my final message is that winning in 2025 or winning in 2024 and going into government in 2025 is not enough. It’s not enough just to win. It’s not enough just to have those conservative policies. That there will be huge resistance from the administrative state and from a Left in politics that has never been more extremist or more virulent.
And that is why it will need all the resources of the American conservative movement, think tanks like Heritage, and hopefully your allies in the United Kingdom to succeed. But you must succeed because the free world needs you.
The post Former British PM Liz Truss Warns About Global Threat of the Left appeared first on The Daily Signal.
House Democrats released an agenda Thursday that includes a vow to codify a right to so-called gender-affirming care—transgender surgeries, hormones, and puberty blockers.
The promise came within the Congressional Progressive Caucus’ agenda, which House Democrats first shared with NBC News. That agenda includes a slew of left-wing interests, including promises of a higher minimum wage and stronger antitrust laws.
“If the progressive base is not excited and enthusiastic—and if they don’t feel like we are trying to earn their votes and that they are important—then I think the horrific idea of a second Donald Trump presidency could become reality,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., who chairs the progressive caucus, told NBC News in an interview. “We cannot afford to let that happen. And we won’t.”
Although NBC claims that the agenda goes “lighter on cultural issues,” under the category “advancing justice,” it promises to “codify the rights of transgender, nonbinary and intersex people, including gender-affirming care and health care.”
Jayapal did not respond to requests for comment for this article explaining what, exactly, codifying a right to “gender-affirming care” would entail.
In March 2023, she joined with other Democrats in introducing a “Trans Bill of Rights,” citing the rise in parental rights laws, laws protecting kids from gender transitions, and laws prohibiting boys from participating in girls and women’s sports.
“Day after day, we see a constant onslaught of anti-trans rhetoric and legislation coming from elected officials. Today, we say enough is enough,” Jayapal said at the time. “Our Trans Bill of Rights says clearly to the trans community across the country that we see you, and we will stand with you, to ensure you are protected and given the dignity and respect that every person should have.”
That legislation would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include gender identity as “protected characteristics.” It would also amend federal education laws to say that they protect kids from being discriminated against based on gender identity.
The Trans Bill of Rights also called for ensuring that “every child has the right to grow up in a supportive environment by having their authentic identity respected in the classroom, ensuring they can participate in school sports with their peers, and ensuring access to an inclusive curriculum.”
It further called for “expanding access” to trans surgeries, hormones, and puberty blockers and codifying rights to abortion and contraception.
Jayapal told NBC News that progressive Democrats assume “this is an agenda for a Democratic president with a Democratic Senate and a Democratic House.”
She added: “We have to excite our base. We have to show them what the path forward is—not just say, ‘This is the most important election of your life, and we expect you to vote.’ I don’t think that’s going to turn people out. And so, I think this agenda, really, speaks to the needs of poor people, working people, progressives across the country who want us to make that case to them.”
“We are not seeing the momentum that we would like to see,” she told NBC. We’re going to have a tough election. … We know we’re going to have to put together that progressive coalition. And I think this is the thing that allows us to say, “‘Look, here’s what we’re fighting for.’”
The post House Democrats Vow to Codify ‘Rights’ to Trans Surgeries, Hormones, Puberty Blockers appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Brussels authorities shuttered the National Conservatism Conference on Tuesday, sending police to block entry to the conference and announcing that those inside would be permitted to leave but not to return.
However, the action was not the result of any public disturbances or threats. It was a political action by left-progressive politicians who do not like the views being ventilated at the conference—and who fear the increasing success of nationalist and conservative ideas in European politics.
Initial coverage of the incident is posted here and here, with no doubt more to come. And see this article by Ayaan Hirsi Ali on the incident.
I am a trustee of the Edmund Burke Foundation, which is sponsoring the conference, and I have been chairman of its regular “NatCon” conferences in the U.S., U.K., and Europe for the past five years.
My colleagues and I have strong views on such urgent issues as uncontrolled immigration; the corruption of schools and cultural institutions by race and gender ideologies; the transfer of government authority from nations to international bureaucracies; and the erosion of freedoms of speech, religion, and inquiry. These are the central issues on the agenda at this week’s conference in Brussels.
All of our conferences are carefully planned to include top-tier conservative thinkers, writers, scholars, activists, and political figures, and to provide a good mix of speeches, panel discussions, and debates (with a few brave souls on the Left to keep us sharp).
Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, who agrees with some NatCon positions but disagrees with others, has given terrific addresses at earlier conferences and has been received with enthusiasm and appreciation. Several other Heritage friends are at this week’s Brussels conference, although I have had to miss it myself because of commitments in the U.S. (now to my special regret!) (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news and commentary outlet.)
That an earnest gathering of political officials, activists, and thinkers should be bullied by a mayor and sequestered by the police is, of course, outrageous and worthy of severe condemnation. And few liberal as well as conservative leaders have issued critical statements.
But there is a larger meaning to the incident. It demonstrates that forthright, unapologetic conservatism is gaining serious momentum in Europe as well as the U. S.—and that the progressive Left, in its desperation to stop us, is increasingly willing to employ means that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.
Unfortunately, the progressives’ effort to anathematize national conservatives as a “far right” threat to democracy and civil order is being adopted by others who should know better. Some on the moderate left and right are portraying the Brussels “controversy” as a case for standing on principle for freedom of speech—even for those with so-called deplorable ideas and values, as if NatCons were Nazis marching through Skokie. Thanks for your support, guys, and have a nice free-speech day yourself.
The incident is actually the latest example of establishment timorousness and liberal decay. Two fancy Brussels venues, Concert Noble and a Sofitel hotel, abruptly canceled the NatCon conference at the insistence of city officials before the no-nonsense Tunisian owner of the Claridge event hall agreed to host us, refused to back down, and treated us to warm hospitality to compensate for the hostility of the city fathers.
This gentleman is in today’s avant-garde. The progressive strategy of meeting conservative ascent with shallow demagoguery and forceful suppression, rather than forthright argument or reform of their ruinous policies, is coming in for a richly deserved political reckoning.
The post Brussels Authorities Shut Down Conservative Conference, Afraid of Conservatism Gaining Momentum in Europe appeared first on The Daily Signal.
March 25, 2018
CNN Defames Geller to Embarrass John Bolton
By Pamela Geller, American ThinkerIs there no limit to how low CNN will sink? CNN’s Don Lemon hosted a panel Thursday night featuring leftist turncoat Peter Beinart and “conservative” commentator Ben Ferguson, to discuss incoming National Security Adviser John Bolton’s supposed “anti-Muslim ties.” Beinart was on the warpath, attempting to smear Bolton by association with me, because he wrote the foreword to my 2010 book The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America, (written with Robert Spencer) and spoke at several of my rallies.
Beinart couldn’t tell the truth, which is that in The Post-American Presidency I accurately exposed Obama’s hatred for Israel, post-American internationalism, opposition to the freedom of speech, and much more — long before they became obvious to the world. So instead, Beinart, calling me “the most notorious anti-Muslim bigot,” lied repeatedly, claiming that in the book I said that Barack Obama was trying to impose Sharia law in the United States, and that Obama was a Muslim.
Neither of those claims is true. I wrote, accurately, that Obama was enabling the spread of Sharia in the U.S. by strong-arming communities into accepting mega-mosques in residential areas and using his Justice Department to fight for special privileges in workplaces and schools. He blamed the First Amendment for what he knew to be an al-Qaeda attack on our consulate in Benghazi, by falsely claiming it was a reaction to a YouTube video criticizing Muhammad. And his FBI had an undercover agent at the free speech event my organization organized in Garland, Texas in 2015, but no team there to stop the jihadis from attacking. (It was local police who stopped a potential massacre.)
Did anyone on that panel actually read my book? Almost certainly not. After Beinart lied brazenly about what the book said, the “conservative” panelist Ben Ferguson said that he would not have advised Bolton to write the foreword. Why not? Why is Ferguson sanctioning and validating the smear job of the kind that the left has carried out on every effective voice for freedom and individual rights this country? That book was prescient. I was right about everything I wrote — the book was an unheeded warning.
Ferguson should have done his homework and have been ready to tell Beinart and the CNN audience what my book actually said, and how leftist smear organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) have for years been spreading the lies that Beinart repeated Thursday night. Ferguson could have mentioned how the SPLC is trying to destroy legitimate conservative organizations by lumping them in with the KKK and neo-Nazis as “hate groups,” and that it refuses to classify the violent leftists of Antifa as a “hate group.” But don’t expect a CNN house conservative to know how to fight back hard with the truth in the face of the endless barrage of lies.
The last panelist, Keith Boykin, was even worse, asking why we should highlight Muslim extremism, and why should we even talk about it, since “we have horrible relations with Muslim countries.”
The CNN segment bordered on the comical when Beinart, with his record of anti-Israel polemic, said, “I’m saying this as a Jew” — and of course this, too, went unchallenged.
Beinart called my rallies against the Ground Zero Mosque — a project which 70% of Americans opposed — an “anti-mosque rally,” and acted as if they were some egregious offense. Another lie from Beinart was that I posted vile videos of Muslims having sex with animals. I never posted any such videos. And he also claimed that I “repeatedly called Muslims savages.” This was another outright lie. Most likely this smear merchant was referring to an ad that my organization, the American Freedom Defense Initiative, won free speech court battles several years ago to display in the New York subway system and on buses in New York City and elsewhere. The ad read: “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat jihad.”
The savages referred to in the ad, as I explained repeatedly when the ad first appeared, are clearly the Palestinian jihadis who murder Israelis on buses and in restaurants, and while enjoying a Shabbat dinner in their homes — and the other Palestinians in Gaza who pass out candies to celebrate these slaughters. If someone thinks that I was referring to all Muslims, they must think that all Muslims support this savage behavior — in which case, it is they who are “Islamophobic,” not I.
Beinart likened me to KKK leader David Duke, saying I was the “equivalent of David Duke for Muslims.” Why is that? Why wouldn’t the equivalent of David Duke for Muslims be Osama bin Laden or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi? Why are those who shine a light on Islamic texts and teachings that incite Muslim to wage jihad the enemy? We work with Muslims who wish to live free — how is that like David Duke?
Of course, CNN would never have dreamed of actually having me on to defend myself against these charges.
I demand a retraction. Don Lemon allowed a libelist to defame me repeatedly on his show. Has CNN departed so completely from any sense of fairness and accuracy that they not only air these libels without any effective opposition, but will allow them to stand unchallenged? President Trump was absolutely right when he labeled CNN “fake news,” and their lying about me and the positions I have taken in order to smear John Bolton is just the latest example among many of CNN’s cavalier attitudes toward the truth and eagerness to disseminate the wildest falsehoods in pursuit of its leftist agenda.
At this point, CNN has about as much credibility as Weekly World News, the supermarket tabloid that claims, among other things, that numerous Congressmen and Senators are space aliens.
Pamela Geller is the President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), publisher of The Geller Report and author of the bestselling book, FATWA: Hunted in America, as well as The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America and Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. Follow her on Twitter or Facebook.
Geller: Iran Arrests 29 Women for Appearing in Public Without a Hijab While Western Feminists Impose World Hijab Day
By Pamela Geller, Breitbart News, February 3, 2018:
The Daily Mail reported Thursday that “Tehran police have arrested 29 women for appearing in public without a headscarf as protests against the dress code in force since the Islamic revolution of 1979 intensify,” citing Iranian police.
“Those arrested were accused of public order offences and referred to the state prosecutor’s office, Iranian nnews [sic] agencies reported without elaborating,” the report noted.
Thursday was also “World Hijab Day,” which its organizers say is designed to “fight discrimination against Muslim women through awareness and education. It is a day on which women of diverse backgrounds and persuasions are encouraged to wear the Islamic head veil in solidarity with Muslim women.”
And so under the hashtag #StrongInHijab, Islamic supremacists and their willing gophers on the left – middle-class Western feminists – observed the first annual “World Hijab Day” yesterday. In one of the most pathetic and destructive shows of “virtue signaling,” non-Muslim women were urged to wear the garment of oppression, subjugation, and misogyny. While women are fighting and dying for their most basic rights in countries ruled under Islamic law, left-wing goons in the West are working to impose the misogyny of the sharia.
Look, no cares if you wear the hijab. No one cares if you wear purple hair, for that matter. But what about the women forced to wear the hijab. American girls like Jessica Mokdad, Amina Said, Sarah Said, Noor Almaleki, and so many others who were honor murdered for not wearing the hijab, for wanting to live free. Who speaks for them? The real world recognition day should be in tribute to women who are forced to wear the hijab, beaten and/or arrested if they don’t.
One campaign fighting against the enforced hijab in Iran set up by Ms. Masih Alinejad is My Stealthy Freedom. It is “dedicated to Iranian women inside the country who want to share their ‘stealthily’ taken photos without the veil,” and aims to be a “living archive” of their fight.
For years, my work in defense of Muslim women wanting to live free, be free, out from under the boot of sharia misogyny, was smeared, mocked, labeled “Islamophobic.” Girls such as Rifqa Bary and the now-dead girls, including Aqsa Parvez, Amina and Sarah Said, Jessica Mokdad, Noor Almaleki, et al, wanted to be free not to wear the hijab – in America. Our calls for such an elemental freedom were viciously attacked amid the constant cries of “racism” (Islam is not a race) and absurd claims that we were making it hard for Muslim women to wear the hijab. That was laughable, of course, because I never so much as addressed Muslim women and their choices, no matter how submissive and subdued, but this was uniformly repeated and chanted by Islamic supremacists and their leftwing lapdogs, most especially in the “feminist movement.”
And now we see an entire nation of women, Muslim women, standing up against the hijab. Are they, too, “Islamophobes”?
Remember: the Islamic Republic of Iran is the country that the Democrats are fighting for today, opposing President Trump’s efforts to stop Iran from arming itself with nuclear weapons.
As David Kurten in Breitbart News points out, punishments for removing a hijab can be brutal – Islamic regimes are known to physically beat women for non-compliance with their dress codes. This is true not only in the Middle East, but increasingly on a local level in the West.
A brave headteacher in a London primary school recently took action to ban children under the age of eight from wearing hijabs in her school. The school is in an area of east London that has undergone almost total population replacement of the white working-class there 50 years ago to mostly people of Bangladeshi and Pakistani Muslim origin today. The response of the local community was to organize a campaign of intimidation against her until she backed down.
World Hijab Day is a stunning indictment of the hypocrisy of the evil left as much as choosing the sharia-promoting, forced marriage advocate Linda Sarsour for their leader. The real “feminists” are the women who are fighting for a fraction, a sliver of the freedoms their Western “sisters” enjoy.
Pamela Geller is the President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), publisher of The Geller Report and author of the bestselling book, FATWA: Hunted in America, as well as The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America and Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. Follow her on Twitter or Facebook.
March 25, 2018
CNN Defames Geller to Embarrass John Bolton
By Pamela Geller, American ThinkerIs there no limit to how low CNN will sink? CNN’s Don Lemon hosted a panel Thursday night featuring leftist turncoat Peter Beinart and “conservative” commentator Ben Ferguson, to discuss incoming National Security Adviser John Bolton’s supposed “anti-Muslim ties.” Beinart was on the warpath, attempting to smear Bolton by association with me, because he wrote the foreword to my 2010 book The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America, (written with Robert Spencer) and spoke at several of my rallies.
Beinart couldn’t tell the truth, which is that in The Post-American Presidency I accurately exposed Obama’s hatred for Israel, post-American internationalism, opposition to the freedom of speech, and much more — long before they became obvious to the world. So instead, Beinart, calling me “the most notorious anti-Muslim bigot,” lied repeatedly, claiming that in the book I said that Barack Obama was trying to impose Sharia law in the United States, and that Obama was a Muslim.
Neither of those claims is true. I wrote, accurately, that Obama was enabling the spread of Sharia in the U.S. by strong-arming communities into accepting mega-mosques in residential areas and using his Justice Department to fight for special privileges in workplaces and schools. He blamed the First Amendment for what he knew to be an al-Qaeda attack on our consulate in Benghazi, by falsely claiming it was a reaction to a YouTube video criticizing Muhammad. And his FBI had an undercover agent at the free speech event my organization organized in Garland, Texas in 2015, but no team there to stop the jihadis from attacking. (It was local police who stopped a potential massacre.)
Did anyone on that panel actually read my book? Almost certainly not. After Beinart lied brazenly about what the book said, the “conservative” panelist Ben Ferguson said that he would not have advised Bolton to write the foreword. Why not? Why is Ferguson sanctioning and validating the smear job of the kind that the left has carried out on every effective voice for freedom and individual rights this country? That book was prescient. I was right about everything I wrote — the book was an unheeded warning.
Ferguson should have done his homework and have been ready to tell Beinart and the CNN audience what my book actually said, and how leftist smear organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) have for years been spreading the lies that Beinart repeated Thursday night. Ferguson could have mentioned how the SPLC is trying to destroy legitimate conservative organizations by lumping them in with the KKK and neo-Nazis as “hate groups,” and that it refuses to classify the violent leftists of Antifa as a “hate group.” But don’t expect a CNN house conservative to know how to fight back hard with the truth in the face of the endless barrage of lies.
The last panelist, Keith Boykin, was even worse, asking why we should highlight Muslim extremism, and why should we even talk about it, since “we have horrible relations with Muslim countries.”
The CNN segment bordered on the comical when Beinart, with his record of anti-Israel polemic, said, “I’m saying this as a Jew” — and of course this, too, went unchallenged.
Beinart called my rallies against the Ground Zero Mosque — a project which 70% of Americans opposed — an “anti-mosque rally,” and acted as if they were some egregious offense. Another lie from Beinart was that I posted vile videos of Muslims having sex with animals. I never posted any such videos. And he also claimed that I “repeatedly called Muslims savages.” This was another outright lie. Most likely this smear merchant was referring to an ad that my organization, the American Freedom Defense Initiative, won free speech court battles several years ago to display in the New York subway system and on buses in New York City and elsewhere. The ad read: “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat jihad.”
The savages referred to in the ad, as I explained repeatedly when the ad first appeared, are clearly the Palestinian jihadis who murder Israelis on buses and in restaurants, and while enjoying a Shabbat dinner in their homes — and the other Palestinians in Gaza who pass out candies to celebrate these slaughters. If someone thinks that I was referring to all Muslims, they must think that all Muslims support this savage behavior — in which case, it is they who are “Islamophobic,” not I.
Beinart likened me to KKK leader David Duke, saying I was the “equivalent of David Duke for Muslims.” Why is that? Why wouldn’t the equivalent of David Duke for Muslims be Osama bin Laden or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi? Why are those who shine a light on Islamic texts and teachings that incite Muslim to wage jihad the enemy? We work with Muslims who wish to live free — how is that like David Duke?
Of course, CNN would never have dreamed of actually having me on to defend myself against these charges.
I demand a retraction. Don Lemon allowed a libelist to defame me repeatedly on his show. Has CNN departed so completely from any sense of fairness and accuracy that they not only air these libels without any effective opposition, but will allow them to stand unchallenged? President Trump was absolutely right when he labeled CNN “fake news,” and their lying about me and the positions I have taken in order to smear John Bolton is just the latest example among many of CNN’s cavalier attitudes toward the truth and eagerness to disseminate the wildest falsehoods in pursuit of its leftist agenda.
At this point, CNN has about as much credibility as Weekly World News, the supermarket tabloid that claims, among other things, that numerous Congressmen and Senators are space aliens.
Pamela Geller is the President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), publisher of The Geller Report and author of the bestselling book, FATWA: Hunted in America, as well as The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America and Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. Follow her on Twitter or Facebook.
Geller: Iran Arrests 29 Women for Appearing in Public Without a Hijab While Western Feminists Impose World Hijab Day
By Pamela Geller, Breitbart News, February 3, 2018:
The Daily Mail reported Thursday that “Tehran police have arrested 29 women for appearing in public without a headscarf as protests against the dress code in force since the Islamic revolution of 1979 intensify,” citing Iranian police.
“Those arrested were accused of public order offences and referred to the state prosecutor’s office, Iranian nnews [sic] agencies reported without elaborating,” the report noted.
Thursday was also “World Hijab Day,” which its organizers say is designed to “fight discrimination against Muslim women through awareness and education. It is a day on which women of diverse backgrounds and persuasions are encouraged to wear the Islamic head veil in solidarity with Muslim women.”
And so under the hashtag #StrongInHijab, Islamic supremacists and their willing gophers on the left – middle-class Western feminists – observed the first annual “World Hijab Day” yesterday. In one of the most pathetic and destructive shows of “virtue signaling,” non-Muslim women were urged to wear the garment of oppression, subjugation, and misogyny. While women are fighting and dying for their most basic rights in countries ruled under Islamic law, left-wing goons in the West are working to impose the misogyny of the sharia.
Look, no cares if you wear the hijab. No one cares if you wear purple hair, for that matter. But what about the women forced to wear the hijab. American girls like Jessica Mokdad, Amina Said, Sarah Said, Noor Almaleki, and so many others who were honor murdered for not wearing the hijab, for wanting to live free. Who speaks for them? The real world recognition day should be in tribute to women who are forced to wear the hijab, beaten and/or arrested if they don’t.
One campaign fighting against the enforced hijab in Iran set up by Ms. Masih Alinejad is My Stealthy Freedom. It is “dedicated to Iranian women inside the country who want to share their ‘stealthily’ taken photos without the veil,” and aims to be a “living archive” of their fight.
For years, my work in defense of Muslim women wanting to live free, be free, out from under the boot of sharia misogyny, was smeared, mocked, labeled “Islamophobic.” Girls such as Rifqa Bary and the now-dead girls, including Aqsa Parvez, Amina and Sarah Said, Jessica Mokdad, Noor Almaleki, et al, wanted to be free not to wear the hijab – in America. Our calls for such an elemental freedom were viciously attacked amid the constant cries of “racism” (Islam is not a race) and absurd claims that we were making it hard for Muslim women to wear the hijab. That was laughable, of course, because I never so much as addressed Muslim women and their choices, no matter how submissive and subdued, but this was uniformly repeated and chanted by Islamic supremacists and their leftwing lapdogs, most especially in the “feminist movement.”
And now we see an entire nation of women, Muslim women, standing up against the hijab. Are they, too, “Islamophobes”?
Remember: the Islamic Republic of Iran is the country that the Democrats are fighting for today, opposing President Trump’s efforts to stop Iran from arming itself with nuclear weapons.
As David Kurten in Breitbart News points out, punishments for removing a hijab can be brutal – Islamic regimes are known to physically beat women for non-compliance with their dress codes. This is true not only in the Middle East, but increasingly on a local level in the West.
A brave headteacher in a London primary school recently took action to ban children under the age of eight from wearing hijabs in her school. The school is in an area of east London that has undergone almost total population replacement of the white working-class there 50 years ago to mostly people of Bangladeshi and Pakistani Muslim origin today. The response of the local community was to organize a campaign of intimidation against her until she backed down.
World Hijab Day is a stunning indictment of the hypocrisy of the evil left as much as choosing the sharia-promoting, forced marriage advocate Linda Sarsour for their leader. The real “feminists” are the women who are fighting for a fraction, a sliver of the freedoms their Western “sisters” enjoy.
Pamela Geller is the President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), publisher of The Geller Report and author of the bestselling book, FATWA: Hunted in America, as well as The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America and Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. Follow her on Twitter or Facebook.
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