If Americans are free and not under Sharia, however, then the church can do this if it wants, and their freedom and rights should be protected.

Blaming Obama for this is conspiracy paranoia at its finest.

"Afghans protest US church's plans to burn Quran," by Rahim Faiez for AP, September 6:

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Hundreds of Afghans railed against the United States and called for President Barack Obama's death at a rally in the capital Monday to denounce an American church's plans to burn the Islamic holy book on 9/11.

The crowd in Kabul, numbering as many as 500, chanted "Long live Islam" and "Death to America" as they listened to fiery speeches from members of parliament, provincial council deputies, and Islamic clerics who criticized the U.S. and demanded the withdrawal of foreign troops from the country. Some threw rocks when a U.S. military convoy passed, but speakers shouted at them to stop and told police to arrest anyone who disobeyed.

The Gainesville, Florida-based Dove World Outreach Center announced plans to burn copies of the Quran on church grounds to mark the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but has been denied a permit to set a bonfire. The church, which made headlines last year after distributing T-shirts that said "Islam is of the Devil," has vowed to proceed with the burning.

"We know this is not just the decision of a church. It is the decision of the president and the entire United States," said Abdul Shakoor, an 18-year-old high school student who said he joined the protest after hearing neighborhood gossip about the Quran burning.

The U.S. Embassy in Kabul issued a statement condemning Dove World Outreach Center's plans, saying Washington was "deeply concerned about deliberate attempts to offend members of religious or ethnic groups."

Protesters, who gathered in front of western Kabul's Milad ul-Nabi mosque, raised placards and flags emblazoned with slogans calling for the death of Obama, while police looked on. They also held up a cardboard effigy of Dove World Outreach Center's pastor Terry Jones....

The Syrian government is now leading the pack in its about-face crackdown against Islamic Extremism, targeting mosques, universities and charities.

The government has asked imams for recordings of their Friday sermons and started to strictly monitor religious schools. Members of an influential Muslim women’s group have now been told to scale back activities like preaching or teaching Islamic law. And this summer, more than 1,000 teachers who wear the niqab or the face veil, were transferred to administrative duties.     New York Times

Imagine the Obama Administration asking imams for recordings of their Friday sermons  and strictly monitoring all religious schools?

Not a chance. Obama instead endorses the building of the Ground Zero Mosque saying the country’s founding principles demanded no less.

As a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practise their religion as anyone else in this country

What Obama is failing to realize is that a slow process of hijacking America’s freedom of religion is unfolding and that Radical Islam is the culprit.  The Ground Zero Mosque developers have downright refused to answer questions on whether they are receiving funding from Saudi Arabia and Iran, the latter a designated sponsor of terrorism.  It isn’t recent news that such countries have been actively financing and facilitating the cause of Jihad in the West for some time, while our resolve continues to weaken under the current administration.

A report two years ago by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom stated that the Virginia-based Islamic Saudi Academy was continuing to use textbooks to teach hatred to its 1000 students from kindergarten through Grade 12.  Yet the U.S. State Department refused to shut it down.

A dire warning appeared the year before:

“it has been estimated that 80 percent of American mosques are under Wahhabi influence, described by both scholars and U.S. officials as a radical, violent philosophical platform used by terrorists and their supporters to justify violence against Christians, Jews and other “non-believers.”

So while Jihadists are at war with America, the Obama administration has banned words like “Jihad” and “Islamic Extremism” from the American National Security Strategy.  In the face of  Obama’s Invisible Islam the advancement goals of the most radical forms of Islamic Extremism are protected and assisted by Obama to fly under the radar:

Last year, the Department of Homeland Security Domestic Extremist Lexicon, which was pulled out of circulation in the wake of controversy with other department publications, listed Jewish extremism and various forms of Christian extremism as threats but made no mention of any form of Muslim extremism. Washington Times

According to Canadian Political Science Professor and columnist Salim Mansur (who is also a Sunni Muslim) it’s time to get serious about implementing measures to stem the spread of Radical Islam.  He addresses the issue of homegrown terrorists:

There is ample evidence, if proof is still needed, that homegrown terrorists in the post-9/11 world are predominantly Muslim males primed by Islamist ideology.

Since Muslims have failed to effectively counter Islamism, it is long overdue for governments in the West to implement more robust measures of information gathering about that segment of the Muslim immigrant population most susceptible to Islamist ideology.

In other words, time to quibble over “profiling” is long past.

So while Syria of all places implements its “robust” measures to crack down on Radicalism, Obama should take note in the face of his poor record.  He has supported the 9/11 mosque, bowed to the Saudi King, snubbed Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu on a visit to the White House, banned words like “Jihad” and “Islamic Extremism,” and aims to reduce America’s nuclear capabilities. As midterm elections approach and Obama frantically gropes for an economic strategy to score points, he would do well to make an about face like Syria in the security interests of all Americans.

This church's plan to burn the Qur'an on September 11 is stupid; I disapprove of it and of many other things about the pastor, the church, and the church's approach to the jihad threat. I don't support the burning of books; it's tactically stupid, as it will make the mainstream media portray the church as a bunch of Nazis, and it's wrong in principle: the antidote to bad speech is not censorship or book-burning, but more speech. Open discussion. Give-and-take. And the truth will out. There is no justification for burning books.

At the same time, Pamela Geller puts it best: "Islamic supremacists can't whine about 'insensitivity' while planning to erect a 15-story mega mosque on Ground Zero." And the people who are burning the Qur'an on the 11th are, by doing so, placing themselves in much greater physical danger than Muslims are experiencing in this country, despite the recent spate of handwringing articles about a rise of "Islamophobia" and Muslims living in fear. As obnoxious as they may be, they deserve the protections that any American citizen deserves. American authorities should once again stand up for freedom, even if people are using that freedom in a manner of which they disapprove, and against Islamic supremacist intimidation.

But they won't, of course.

"Indonesian Muslims Protest Plans to Burn Koran on September 11," by Sara Schonhardt for VOA News, September 5:

Thousands of mostly Muslim protesters rallied around Indonesia Saturday in opposition to an American church's plan to burn copies of the Koran on September 11.

During the weekend rallies in Indonesia, cities protested an event planned by a small Florida church to mark the ninth anniversary of the September 11 terror attacks in the United States.

Religious leaders of all denominations have condemned the plan by the Dove World Outreach center in Gainesville, Florida, whose pastor, Terry Jones, has written a book called Islam is of the Devil. The phrase also appears on t-shirts and a Facebook page promoting the event at the church estimated to have about 50 members.

The chairman of the Islamic group Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia that planned the protests, Rokhmat Labib, says the plan to burn the Islamic holy book is a provocation.

He says if the event happens Muslims will certainly fight back, and he cannot predict what form the retaliation will take.

Relations between Christians and Muslims are generally peaceful in secular Indonesia. But in recent months hardline groups have staged attacks against churches, stirring concerns of escalating conflict that would damage relations between Christians and Muslims in the world's most populous Muslim nation.

The Pluralism Care Movement, a group comprising interfaith organizations and representatives from moderate Christian and Muslim centers, has called for the U.S. government to prevent the burning. It says the reaction from Indonesia should be one that shows the country's tolerance for religious differences.

Labib sees it differently. He says Muslims must not stay silent when their faith is threatened.

He says Hizbut Tahrir does not accept the argument that the reason for burning the Koran is because it is the source of Islamist violence.

Labib says Muslims do not have any problem with Christians as long as they do not spread their beliefs in Muslim areas. And since Muslims are not forcing their beliefs on Christians, he says there is no reason why they should feel threatened.

No reason at all! Never mind all those attacks on churches!

Mark Steyn, whose book “America Alone” provoked a flurry of quasi-judicial activity in Canada from the usual human rights sock puppets, must be feeling these days like his only mistake was underestimating the speed and scope of the problem he described.

Steyn’s essential point was when a moribund secularized society – unsure of what it believes in and equally uninterested in reproducing itself – accepts into its midst large numbers of prolific, zealous and inherently hostile members of another society, it doesn’t work out well for that first society.

This is a lesson that was driven home with some force in ancient Rome sometime around 400 A.D. As bad as that was, the Islamization of Europe, once it is come to full fruition, will make the Visigoths look like a friendly merger. (The other salient difference is, for all their obvious distress, the Romans didn’t have to endure togaed apparatchiks prattling on about “the moderate Visigoth community” while throwing open the gates — but I digress.)

If Steyn were looking for further validation of this thesis – and there’s no good reason he’d require it – he need only look at recent videos of mass Muslim prayer gatherings conducted on the streets of Paris in open defiance of the law.

A hidden camera shows streets blocked by huge crowds of Muslim worshippers and enforced by a private security force.

This is all illegal in France: the public worship, the blocked streets, and the private security. But the police have been ordered not to intervene.

Presumably President Obama – Citizen of the World and  frequent pontificator on matters not remotely connected to his office – was unavailable for comment. Otherwise he might have reminded us, with that stern expression and sibilant “s” we all find so convincing, that thousands were guillotined in the French Revolution so that people like this could enjoy the right of illegal public assembly, or whatever.

Those of us without Obama’s Spengler-like command of world history might have to settle for a more modest explanation, which is that the Stealth Jihad Robert Spencer so eloquently describes in his book of the same name, is progressing more or less unimpeded in Europe, and is a harbinger of what will inevitably befall the United States if we don’t stop shooting messengers like Spencer and Pamela Geller and start calling things by their real names.

It would also be beneficial – notwithstanding the Left’s well-documented contempt for concepts like “restoring honor” – to do some deep thinking about what actually made America the greatest nation on earth, just how far we’ve wandered off that particular path, and how best to return to it. Otherwise, as Steyn argues so convincingly, the invaders we so decry will win by default.

There is at least one civic official in New York City who should take a long hard look at this video, not that I have the slightest confidence he would either comprehend, or wish to comprehend, its contents. He’s one of those benighted souls, like Diogenes with his lamp, wandering the streets of lower Manhattan looking for a moderate Muslim.

(HT: Trevor Loudon @ New Zeal)

In the counter-revolutionary year 1989, on the anniversary of the Revolution, a group of protesters raised a banner in Red Square that summed up an epoch: Seventy Years On The Road To Nowhere. They had lived the socialist future and it didn’t work.

This epic of human futility reached a climax the same year, when the socialist state formally decided to return the land it had taken from its peasants half a century before. The collectivization of agriculture in the Thirties had been the very first pillar of the socialist Plan and one of the bloodiest episodes of the revolutionary era. Armies were dispatched to the countryside to confiscate the property of its recalcitrant owners, conduct mass deportations to the Siberian gulag, liquidate the ‘kulaks’Â� and herd the survivors into the collective farms of the Marxist future.

In this ‘final’Â� class struggle, no method was considered too ruthless to midwife the new world from the old. “We are opposed by everything that has outlived the time set for it by history” wrote Maxim Gorky in the midst of battle: “This gives us the right to consider ourselves again in a state of civil war. The conclusion naturally follows that if the enemy does not surrender, he must be destroyed.” The destruction of the class enemy — the most numerous and productive element of Soviet society at the time — was accomplished by massacres, by slow deaths in concentration camps and by deliberately induced genocidal famine. In the end, over 10 million people were killed, more than had died on all sides in World War I.[25]

But the new serfdom the Soviet rulers imposed in the name of liberation only destroyed the peasants’ freedom and incentive, and thus laid the foundations of the final impasse. Before collectivization, Russia had been the “breadbasket of Europe,” supplying 40% of the world’s wheat exports in the bumper years 1909 and 1910.[26] But socialism ended Russia’s agrarian plenty and created permanent deficits — not merely the human deficit of those who perished because of Stalinist brutalities during the collectivization, but a deficit in grain that would never be brought to harvest because of the brutality inherent in the socialist idea. Half a century after the socialist future had been brought to the countryside, the Soviet Union had become a net importer of grain, unable to produce enough food to feed its own population.

These deficits eventually forced the state to allow a portion of the crop to be sold on the suppressed private market. Soon, 25% of Soviet grain was being produced on the 3% of the arable land reserved for private production. Thus necessity had compelled the Soviet rulers to create a dramatic advertisement for the system they despised. They had rejected the productive efficiencies of the capitalist system as exploitative and oppressive. Yet, the socialist redistribution of wealth had produced neither equity nor justice, but scarcity and waste. At the end of the 1980s, amidst growing general crisis, Soviet youth were using bread as makeshift footballs because its price had been made so low –  (to satisfy the demands of social equity) that it was now less than the cost of the grain to produce it. This was a microcosm of socialist economy. Irrational prices, bureaucratic chaos, and generalized public cynicism (the actually existing socialist ethos in all Marxist states) had created an environment in which 40% of the food crop was lost to spoilage before ever reaching the consumer. And so, half a century after 10 million people had been killed to “socialize the countryside,â€Â� those who had expropriated the land were giving it back.

The road to nowhere had become a detour. (Soviet joke: What is socialism? The longest road from capitalism to capitalism.) Now the Soviet rulers themselves had begun to say that it had all been a horrible “mistake.” Socialism did not work. Not even for them.

– The Road to Nowhere from The Politics of Bad Faith

–

If you have a favorite Horowitz quote you want to highlight for others then please email it to DavidSwindle {@} Gmail.com. Please include:

1. “Horowitz Quote of the Day”Â� in subject line.
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National Review’s Rich Lowry on Sunday had a classic debate with Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne about whether or not the tax cuts implemented by former President George W. Bush should be allowed to expire.

Dionne agrees with President Obama that they should only be extended for folks making less than $250,000 a year; Lowry thinks that raising anyone’s taxes right now could send the country back into recession.

Read the whole thing.

This is one of the ways you can tell when news organizations get lazy and simply regurgitates a press release. Recently, the Daily Caller ran a story Labor and liberal groups to hold Oct. 2 rally on Mall to counter Beck, Tea Party. A similar article with the same quotes was released by Bloomberg. The article is a whitewash of a “get out the vote� rally run by an organization whose priorities include; social justice, globalization, the plight of the Palestinian people against the “Apartheid policies of the government of Israel,� justice for the Iraqi people against the American politicians who committed war crimes, and advocating there is nothing more evil than multi-national American Corporations.

“Labor leaders, liberal religious leaders and the NAACP will hold a rally on the National Mall on October 2, one month before the fall midterm elections, in an attempt to show they too have political clout and momentum in response to last Saturday’s massive gathering of Tea Party types led by Fox News host Glenn Beck.

Read the whole thing.

It is a matter of no small amusement for the journalist and agitator Nicholas von Hoffman that his beloved mentor, Saul Alinsky, learned the craft of “organizing� at the feet of Chicago’s most notorious mobsters. This was nearly eighty years before the self-proclaimed radical became a household name, having posthumously inspired an up-and-coming organizer who went on to become the forty-fourth president of the United States. Alinsky’s entrée to the Al Capone gang (which, tellingly, he called a “public utility�) was neither his ruthlessness nor his penchant for rabble-rousing, though a surfeit of both qualities surely impressed his friend Frank (“the Enforcer�) Nitti. It was, instead, his academic credentials.

A freshly minted doctor of criminology from the University of Chicago, Alinsky sought out, bonded with, and closely studied anti-social types. His experience proved invaluable in his lifelong pursuit of “social justice,� the organizer’s panacea. Alinsky even found a Depression-era job at Joliet’s hard-knocks penitentiary, assessing the suitability of inmates for parole. Not every crook had the panache of the Enforcer, and the work soon bored Alinsky, whose promiscuous mind was easily given to boredom. Yet there was an oasis in this desert: the evaluation of an occasional con man. In an unintentionally hilarious vignette, von Hoffman relates that “one of the flim-flam men initiated Alinsky into the secrets of his trade.� We’re never told to which “his� the trade-secrets in question belonged—the flim-flammer or the organizer. It turns out not to matter. They’re both frauds.

Read the full article.

The Obama administration and the Federal Reserve want to fix the United States economy by spending more money. But while that approach might work for Europe, it is risky for the US. The nation would be better off embracing traditional American values like self-reliance and small government.

There’s no question about it: The 20th century was America’s era. The United States rose rapidly from virtually nothing to become the most politically powerful and economically strongest country in the world. But the financial crisis and subsequent recession have now raised doubts about its future. Are we currently witnessing the beginning of the end of the American era?

Read the full article.