Are Cowards Doing America’s Thinking?

Photo credit:  Jon Campbell/Village Voice

On Wednesday evening in New York City’s Fort Greene Park, anarchists gathered to burn the American flag near the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument.  The monument is a memorial to the more than 11,500 American prisoners who died in captivity aboard British prison ships of disease and malnutrition during the Revolutionary War.

The group, Disarm NYPD, was expecting 300 protesters to participate in their rally.  When criticism began to mount against them they issued the following statement:

“…many people are rather offended by our decision to burn the American flag. We find it a sign of the times that people can care so much about a piece of cloth, while at the same time be so quiet about black churches being burned all over the country. Perhaps this is the great difference between us and the so-called ‘patriots’. While they express their loyalty to symbols, we express our loyalty to the lives of the oppressed.

We do not believe the ideals of America are anything to be revered. We are building something that will be much better than America…We dream of what real freedom looks like:  freedom from paramilitaries occupying our communities, beating and killing our sons and daughters; freedom from our communities being destroyed by the speculative capital of gentrification; freedom from mass surveillance; and freedom from systemic racism.

So, we will burn the American flag, a symbol of oppression and genocide, and in the same action, dismantle our stunted, cynical expectations of what is possible in the world…We, the dreamers, are the true realists. We know things can’t continue this way, so we commit to building a better world. A world better than America.”

When the dozen or so activists began burning the flag, a group of counter-protesters approached them and they scattered like scalded dogs.  One man, John Carroll, a resident of Ridgewood, Queens rescued the flag and challenged the little pricks calling them cowards.  Watching the video warmed my heart.

 JOHN CARROLL   Photo credit:  Andy Katz/Demotix

Betrayals come easily.

On Wednesday, June 24, 2015 “Calypso Louie” Farrakhan told congregants at the Metropolitan AME Church in Washington, DC, “I don’t know what the hell the fight is about over the Confederate flag!  We need to put the American flag down because we’ve caught as much hell under that as the Confederate flag!  Who are we fighting today? It’s the people that carry the American flag.  What flag do the police have?  What flag flies over the non-Justice Department?  What flag flies over the White House?”

This quote from Daniel Greenfield seems particularly germane:

“The left will destroy the things you care about, because you care about them. It will destroy them because that gives them power over you. It will destroy them because these things stand in the way of its power. It will destroy them because a good deal of its militant activists need things to destroy and if they can't attack you, they'll turn on the left in a frenzy of ideologically incestuous purges.”

These are the people who find the Confederate Battle Flag offensive.
Photo credit:  Lee Vanden Brink

Recoiling In Horror

The burning news of the day, besides the racial animus and anarchy gripping Ferguson, is the 5-minute snuff video of the beheading of freelance Global Post journalist James Wright Foley.  The video made a short appearance on YouTube™ before being scrubbed, but the video can still be viewed at Live Leak.  I will echo the warning that accompanies the video:  Missing journalist James Foley reportedly beheaded by ISIL might contain content that is not suitable for all ages.

A spokesman for YouTube™ said the company had "clear policies that prohibit content like gratuitous violence, hate speech and incitement to commit violent acts, and we remove videos violating these policies when flagged by our users".

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that social media users including the US Muslim Public Affairs Council are begging people not to share the graphic images.  They argue that sharing these images would only “help the terrorists deliver their propaganda.” Doing so might, just might, make people extremely angry.

I vehemently disagree with that sentiment and here is why.  This is a teachable moment for Americans who have a media that emasculates the English language using only “permissible” words to sanitize the emergence of a caliphate that closely resembles the Third Reich.  They have slaughtered, buried alive, crucified and beheaded Shiites, Kurds, Christians and anyone else it can find by the untold thousands.

Daniel Greenfield warns, “We can see the larger problem flying Jihadist flags in London and New Jersey. We can see it trooping through Australian and Canadian airports to join ISIS. We can see it in the eyes of the Sunni Arabs murdering their Yazidi neighbors. ISIS is an expression of the murderous hate within Islam. We are not only at war with an acronym, but with the dark hatred in the hearts of men, some of whom are in Iraq and Pakistan. And some of whom live next door.”  [Emphasis mine]

The release of the video came a day after IS militants threatened to attack US targets in another video where they warned "we will drown all of you in blood".

“A Message to America” is meant to evoke revulsion, to taunt and intimidate.

Arlette Saenz and Jonathan Karl of ABC News report that The White House had been aware of the threat to kill Foley prior to the video’s release but The World’s Most Dangerous Community Organizer partied on at an engagement party for MSNBC host Alex Wagner.

Today the president, in a bland, meaningless ritualism spoke at a new conference saying, “the entire world is appalled by the brutal murder of Jim Foley by the terrorist group ISIL” He continued, “Jim Foley’s life stands in stark contrast to his killers. Let’s be clear about ISIL. They have rampaged across cities and villages killing innocent, unarmed civilians in cowardly acts of violence. They abduct women and children and subject them to torture and rape and slavery. They have murdered Muslims, both Sunni and Shia, by the thousands. They target Christians and religious minorities, driving them from their homes, murdering them when they can, for no other reason than they practice a different religion.”

“They declared their ambition to commit genocide against an ancient people. So ISIL speaks for no religion. Their victims are overwhelmingly Muslim, and no faith teaches people to massacre innocents. No just god would stand for what they did yesterday and what they do every single day. ISIL has no ideology of any value to human beings. Their ideology is bankrupt. They may claim out of expediency that they are at war with the United States or the West, but the fact is they terrorize their neighbors and offer them nothing but an endless slavery to their empty vision and the collapse of any definition of civilized behavior.”

Contrast those remarks to those of President Bush when a video was released in February 2002 by a Pakistani group that beheaded Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl: 

Laura and I, and the American people, are deeply saddened to learn about the loss of Daniel Pearl's life.  And we're really sad for his wife and his parents, and his friends and colleagues, who have been clinging to hope for weeks that he be found alive.  We are especially sad for his unborn child, who will now know his father only through the memory of others.

All Americans are sad and angry to learn of the murder.  All around the world, American journalists and humanitarian aid workers and diplomats and others do important work in places that are sometimes dangerous.  Those who would threaten Americans, those who would engage in criminal, barbaric acts, need to know that these crimes only hurt their cause and only deepen the resolve of the United States of America to rid to world of these agents of terror.  May God bless Daniel Pearl.

De Mortuis Nihil Nisi Bonum

Will the savage death of Foley open the eyes of liberal apologists? 

According to Daniel Greenfield and Bare Naked Islam, “Foley came to Syria to support the Sunni Islamist rebels against the Syrian government. He often voiced his disdain for Mitt Romney.  He didn’t travel to report on a story, but to promote an agenda, a parallax view if you will, that was obvious from his Twitter feed.”  No other reporters, it would appear, bothered to read through his timeline.  Mr. Greenfield included many of those tweets in his post and here are two that demonstrate his political leanings:

Dear #Syrians don't believe that Romney will help you acquire surface to air missiles. He's just saying that to prove Obama's "weak".
— James W. Foley (@jfoleyjourno) October 8, 2012

@HalaJaber is killing it today #arabspring
— James W. Foley (@jfoleyjourno) September 16, 2012

good analysis on what a more liberal Senate could mean http://t.co/2nKykG4c
— James W. Foley (@jfoleyjourno) November 7, 2012

Romney's got a hangman's row of potential advisors... http://t.co/X8KCSdSY
— James W. Foley (@jfoleyjourno) October 27, 2012

UPDATE:  According to the White House travel pool, The World's Most Dangerous Community Organizer arrived at Vineyard Golf Club at 1:05 p.m., following his statement on the Foley beheading.