Vietnam, the Media and Lies

by Bill  Laurie

“There were some worthy, honest, and intelligent reporters in Vietnam and Southeast Asia. Dickey Chapelle, Robert Shaplen, Liz Trotta, Peter Braestrup, Hugh Mulligan, Keyes Beech, Neil Davis, Denis Warner, were among those who objectively, and without resort to sensationalism, conveyed elements of truth, parts of the puzzle, to the American public. Their efforts notwithstanding, the fog of nonsense spewed out by others obscured and effectively censored honest, logical, comprehensive reporting, denying the American public information needed to develop accurately informed opinions. News media malfeasance was complemented by brilliant manipulative Hanoi propaganda, and a corresponding U.S. government inability or unwillingness to make a case for its own efforts. The American public could not hope to understand what was taking place, and does not today.

No one, least of all South Vietnamese, American, or other allied forces, was oblivious of or happy with the endemic corruption and incompetence, yet, because of flawed and narrowly focused “reporting,” the story of South Vietnam’s progress and improvement remains untold. American reporters never wrote or televised stories about DR, Phan Quang Dan, Gen. Ngo Quang Truong, Gen. Nguyen Khoa Nam, the 81st Biet Kich, the Hau Nghia RF, Col. Mach Van Truong, Gen. Le Minh Dao, Tran Ngoc Chau, Col. Ha Mai Viet, writer Nguyen Manh Con, or RVN Marine Sergeant Van Luom, who stood alone on the Dong Ha Bridge and knocked out the lead tank in an NVA armor column with a shoulder-fired antitank missile, an act, in the words of an American witness, of inspiring “defiance and bravery.”
Knowing little of this, the American public was understandably disenchanted.

The news media seldom, if ever, accompanied American or Australian troops on MEDCAPS or DENTCAPs (Dental Civic Action Projects, extremely welcome to rural people with painful tooth conditions). In the first six months of 1969, more than 200,000 villagers received medical care and 15,000 received dental care from the 3rd U.S. Marine division alone. Instead, the American public was subjected to repeated coverage of the My Lai atrocity, which, like the photo of Gen. Loan, was considered symbolic and representative of the entire war.

Wolfgang Leonhard, a Soviet communist agent before defecting to the West, was tasked with analyzing Western news media stories. He and his colleagues were puzzled over superficial news coverage predominating in the newspapers they read. “Generally, we could only shake our heads over them, and often we were exceedingly disappointed. There was usually not even mention of the really significant events that were causing endless discussions amongst ourselves and on which we were passionately eager to read a serious Western commentary. ‘They don’t seem to know what is going on’ was the main theme of our conversations when we talked to each other on the subject.”

One of the more tragic ironies of Vietnam and the news media failure is that there were many fascinating and positive stories to be told. The American people would have appreciated seeing hour-long specials on, for example, U.S. Marine Corps CAP units, a squad of 14 Marines living in one hamlet for their entire tour, working with and defending “their “ hamlet alongside local PF. USMC CAPs had a higher voluntary extension rate than among their line unit counterparts. Why? It would have made for a good story. It would have been equally enlightening to see programs showing U.S. troops helping an orphanage, or volunteering to teach English. The American public deserved to know about a VNAF Skyraider pilot who had been shot down five times, and continued flying, despite his several fused vertebrae. They deserved to know that American forces could take on the NVA, in their own backyard, and prevail. Something might have been learned from Americans who volunteered for three, four, five, six, or even seven tours as advisors, choosing to serve in Vietnam again and again, not as bloodthirsty and uncaring killers, but as very normal, decent human beings who could eloquently and convincingly explain their motivations, which was ultimately to see Vietnamese people have a life of peace and decent government. Geopolitics and the Cold War, all relatively abstract concepts, were not a primary concern, taking a back seat to basic human concerns for that which is fair.

Americans would have benefited by hearing of Captain Nguyen Quy An, Lt. Vu Tung, and Warrant Officer Nguyen Quang Hien of the famed 219 Kingbees. Were it not for the action of these men, John Litter, Bob Stratliff and Wiley L . Craney, by their own testimony, would have been killed or captured after their helicopter had been shot down in Laos. They were rescued by Captain An and his crew while under fire and surrounded by NVA. Captain An would later lose both his hands by keeping control of a burning helicopter, saving the lives of others on board who would have died had the flame-engulfed chopper fallen from the sky.

Americans were mesmerized by the NVA’s (North Vietnamese Army) 25-day hold on Hue City in 1968, and presumably would be similarly impressed by the 92nd Ranger Battalion 400-day stand at the remote base of Tong Le Chan. Completely cut off, resupplied only by air, the 92nd held, with ambulatory wounded refusing evacuation. Had an NVA unit held out for over 400 days, surrounded and cut off, it would have made headline news. The 92nd Rangers did it and nothing was said.  Had a handful of VC (Viet Cong) high school boys held off an allied attack, it would also would have made headlines. A handful of high school boys did resist VC/NVA forces at the “Truong Tieu Sinh Quan,” a junior high school military academy for sons of RVNAF (South Vietnamese) military fatalities. They resisted to the end in 1975, with twelve- and thirteen-year-old boys sending younger kids home, staying in their barricaded school and fighting on. Many of them were killed and when the Communists came in, they fought them. The Communists could not get into that academy. NVA forces eventually surrounded the school, threatened to level it with rockets, kill everyone inside, and negotiated a surrender. This last stand would presumably have had all the drama and “human interest” for a “big story,” and had VC adolescents been involved opposing RVNAF, the story would undoubtedly have been trumpeted to the American public. To this day, next to nothing has been said or printed, and the cadets at Truong Tieu Sinh Quan are not even a footnote to history.

Coverage of these stories could have gone on and should have gone side-by-side with negative reporting on corruption, civilian casualties, drug use, and other presumed universal evils of American involvement in Southeast Asia. It is neither suggested nor desired that blemishes or morally repugnant aspects be ignored or covered up. It is asserted, however, that it would have been far more honest to have contrasted examples of deplorable behavior with other aspects, not in the least rare, of which many Vietnam veterans are familiar with and participated in. Fairness and objectivity also demand that equal coverage be applied to the VC/NVA shortcomings and ruthless excesses shown in proportion to their existence and occurrence. Had all this been done, the American public would have been able to understand something, and certainly much more than the psuedo-understanding derived from the “shoot-em-up-bang-bang” reporting they were continually exposed to. For any number of reasons, “positive” news did little for a reporter’s career or ego, a career based on finding or inventing “stories” accentuating the negative while heightening public discontent.

Ignorance of military and Southeast Asia matters, of communist revolutionary warfare, fueled by potential for lucrative career advancement, unwilling or unable to report on South Vietnamese or Laotian troops except in cases of failure, apparently enthused by the visual impact of war and the destruction it causes, sometimes disdainful of South Vietnamese if not American troops while ignoring Australian, Korean, Thai, and New Zeland forces, the news media proved incapable of depicting Vietnam, and Hanoi’s War, in its entirety . The American public saw the same “bang-bang” every year, and were misled into assuming nothing had changed, nothing was accomplished. Allied temporary defeats were portrayed as permanent setbacks, while victories and accomplishments went unreported, or were, with smug theatrics, cast aside as government propaganda.

News media misrepresentation not only misled and uninformed the American public, but also prohibited its ability to think and make logical inferences on its own.

In the final analysis, Vietnam, Southeast Asia, Hanoi’s war, and American involvement could not be, and cannot be, understood, in good part because of media failings, moral, intellectual, and otherwise. Without recognizing this, and knowing that what was reported was not the all-comprehensive truth of the matter, the subject itself cannot be understood. Overall, and efforts of responsible reporters notwithstanding, the nature and extent of news media failure in Vietnam exceeds that of allied military forces who were attempting to and succeeding, despite documented lies and bumbling, to stop Hanoi’s War. Many people died and millions more have greatly suffered simply because the whole story was never told. And because what was portrayed in media reporting was demonstrably not, to use the famous Cronkite phrase, “the way it is.”  This bitter judgment is itself based on beliefs articulated by Robert Elegant, himself a journalist :

“Illusionary events reported by the press as well as real events within the press corps were more decisive than the clash of arms or the contention of ideologies. For the first time in modern history, the outcome of a war was determined not on the battlefield but on the printed page, and above all, on the television screen.”

Looking back coolly, I believe it can be said that South Vietnam and American forces actually won the limited military struggle. They virtually crushed the Viet Cong in the South, the “native” guerillas who were directed, reinforced, and equipped from Hanoi, and thereafter they threw back the invasion by regular North Vietnamese divisions. Nonetheless, the war was finally lost to the invaders after the U.S. disengagement because the political pressures built up by the media had made it quite impossible for Washington to maintain even the minimal material and moral support that would have enabled the Saigon regime to continue effective resistance.”  Elegant, a highly acclaimed British reporter on Vietnam, later added these terrible words:

“Never before Vietnam had the collective policy of the media sought by graphic and unremitting distortion, the victory of the enemies of the correspondents own side.”

Could this possibly be the truth about the performance of the U.S. media in Vietnam? In ending this series, from my extended observation and study of the media while on the home front during the war, this is certainly the way it looked to me. And many others. Said Senator Margaret Chase Smith, “The press has become more sympathetic to the enemy than to our own national interest.” (Congressional Record, June 16, 1971)

—Bill  Laurie -Vietnam War historian

The Right of War
By Z. Morad

Is the current war really the biggest mistake of all time? Are the Republicans Fascists? Imperialists? Warmongers? Is the conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan really the worst mistake in US history? Although there was a time when Americans generally agreed that their country was a force for good, that time is not now. With such a huge disconnect between knowledge of the war and the average citizen, such beliefs are seductive. After all, the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan today don’t adversely affect the average citizen; there is no draft, and no one is buying war bonds or recycling their jewelry. To the majority of the populace the war is largely a spectacle, one that is often discussed by the leftist pundits with a snide quip and casual disregard of seriousness of the situation. What is never put into perspective is the sheer and absolute horror of those that were forced to live under the regime of Saddam Hussein. I guess mass murder is a lot easier to ignore when you get all your news from the Daily Show.

Yet the term ‘war-criminal’ is not one that you will ever hear to describe Saddam; rather it is reserved for the former President and the members of the Armed Forces. Many ultimately question whether the war in Iraq was really just, and the story of the Iraq war is one that is often portrayed as another mercenary exploit in a long history of US imperialism. However, if Fareed Zakaria is to be believed in his Future of Freedom, democracies (including our Republic) never war amongst themselves due to their shared heritage of liberty, but that war between the democratic and non-democratic forms of government are not only likely but inevitable.

A close look the history of warfare, both that of United States and various European powers since their democratization suggest that this is true; democracies loath to fight each other and tend ally against these non-democracies, which are of course inevitably various forms of tyranny. Take for example WW2, a fight that is sometimes referred to the Left as the last “good” (or just) war that United States was involved in. Would the decision to stop Hitler’s warpath have met with success if the same leftist pundits that we have now been around during the 1940’s? The Great War was also a war against a murdering tyrant that resulted in a long and costly occupation, but with fall of the Berlin Wall and the perspective of history, can there be any doubt that the cost was worth it? By applying today’s sophistry to the past, we should conclude that we as a nation had no right to invade Berlin, and that intervention in Europe was simply too long and inconvenient to justify action, consequences be damned. Perhaps FDR would be the one called a “war criminal” while the press quietly ignoring Hitler’s death camps.

It might be said the so called “pacifism” that holds sway with the American public is not so much for peace as it is simply against war: no act of tyranny, oppression, or genocide is enough to justify acts of military intervention, no crime horrific or egregious enough to spur the political Left into action. As John Stuart Mill said,

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.

However, in the Golden Age of “pacifism at any cost”, no such truth can exist and there is no such thing as a Just War. To those that advocate anti-war, an immediate peace is more important than the anarchy and genocide that would ensued as result of the premature withdrawal of a US presence, yet the anti-war crowd insists that they are ultimately moralists. No, instead conflict itself is seen as the great evil, and those with the conviction strong enough to fight against injustice in lands abroad are considered fools, murderers, and pawns; completely deserving of any harm or ill fate that comes their way.

However, the truth is that United States has a history of engaging with foreign powers as civilizing acts of a morally superior foreign policy; we can see clear examples of moral axioms dictating US intervention in the decision to help the Allied forces during WW2, and in the conceptualization of the Monroe Doctrine and Nixon’s policy of Détente. Iraq and as result Afghanistan are no exceptions. Perhaps I am wrong however, and it was presumptuous of the United States to infringe upon Saddam Hussein’s right to torture and gas his own people. Those that believe that the war in Iraq is a moral failing of the United States must ultimately ask themselves the following, “Do tyrannies have a moral right to exist?”

If the answer is no, than how can waging war against a dictatorship be unjust? As the Greek philosopher and military writer Tacitus once said, “A bad peace is worse than war”. In the time of Antiquity it was correctly understood that war was not the greatest of evils, that there are moral principles worth fighting for, and that quietly tolerating despotism and injustice is far worse than the bloodiest of battles. Bare with me for the sake of argument and ignore for the moment the accusations of war profiteering and the confusion over WMD’s; was it really wrong to end the repressive and murderous reign of psychopathic tyrant? With all the spin and political maneuvering, it is easy to ignore the sheer magnitude of Saddam Hussein’s crimes against humanity. Or could it that dictators have an inalienable right to oppress, and the United States really is in the wrong? —ZM

by Leonard Magruder

Following in the footsteps of Rep. Joe Wilson  who is now famous for his “You Lie!” outburst during Pres. Obama’s speech.  The universities and media are still promoting the same Leftist views about the current War on Terror, as they did, and continue to do on the War in Vietnam.  Let’s review their record on Vietnam to see if they can be trusted now.

We have in our archives a rare book, although some libraries have it, containing 118 of the most important pieces of literature handed out by the antiwar movement between the years 1964 and 1974. Mutiny Does Not Happen Lightly: the Literature of the American Resistance to the Vietnam War. Edited by G. Louis Heath, a professor of sociology at Illinois State University, it was published in 1976 in a limited edition, “selected so as to present an accurate cross-section of the American resistance to the Vietnam War during 1964-1974.”

Containing mostly information on Who, What, Where of the various demonstrations and marches, we, however, are interested in the Why. We carefully went through all 597 pages of this book for all material that focused on the reasons for the anti-war protests. Here are all the statements of that type that we found. The essence of what the anti-war movement told others as to what the war was all about, is found here.

FROM THE LITERATURE OF THE WAR PROTESTS OF THE 60’S (0ur comments added):

“The May 2nd movement is launching an anti-induction campaign on the campuses. …based on the refusal to fight against the people of Vietnam. Some chapters of May 2 plan to campaign to donate blood and other medical aid to the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (Viet Cong) to concretely show our support for national liberation struggles. Receiving blood from U.S. college students will be a terrific morale booster for the Vietnamese people.”

May 2nd Movement- Sept. 8, 1965

(comment: a little aid and comfort from a U.S. branch of the Viet Cong)

“The game of the rich has caught up to Pig America. The Vietnamese have kicked ass out of U.S. occupational troops. More and more G.I.’s will no longer listen to Pig Nixon’s orders and are turning their guns around on the real enemy. The Provisional Revolutionary Government in Vietnam (Viet Cong) has led the Vietnamese people to complete victory.”

Roxboro School SDS- Cleveland Heights – June 4, 1972

(comment: by 1972 the Americans had won all five major offensives at a KIA (killed in action) ratio of 15 to 1, and South Vietnam was 95% pacified. After the Americans fought the enemy to a peace treaty and left, South Vietnam defended itself for two years until bitter anti-war Democrats in Congress betrayed them by cutting off their ammunition. These are the kinds of elementary facts that students never seem to know.)

“Recently many articles have appeared in the movement press expounding the virtues of deserting and going AWOL. ‘Come to Canada and be a man.’ ‘Soldiers are pigs.’ ‘To remain in the imperialist U.S. Army rather than leaving is comparable to being a Nazi.’ Last year there were, by Pentagon counts, 250,000 AWOL’s and over 53,000 deserters. This has not made much of a dent in the fighting strength of the U.S.Army. That dent has clearly come from the heroic struggle of the Vietnamese people under the leadership of the NLF and the Provisional Revolutionary Government.”

New York Regional SDS distributed at Boston University – Feb. 22, 1969

(comment: you really had to be gullible to join the anti-war movement)

Letter from Ho Chi Minh to a radical activist in Youth Against War and Fascism, Free University of New York:

“My Dear ——-

I have received your letter. You and the progressive American people, especially the youth, feel indignant at the barbarous crimes perpetrated in Vietnam by the U.S. imperialists who have thus besmeared the honor of the American people and the noble traditions of the United States. I am glad to learn that you and many other young Americans are actively endeavoring under varied forms to help push forward the movement against the war of aggression in Vietnam and in support of the Vietnamese people. With affectionate greetings, Signed, Uncle Ho”

June 18, Nov. 25, 1965

(comment: congratulations on your treason from Uncle Ho)

“The U.S. government is planning shortly to order the bombing of Haipong, an industrial city of half a million people, which is Hanoi’s seaport, and of Hanoi itself. The U.S. also plans to bomb the system of dikes in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam which keeps the North Vietnamese from drowning and starving. Just as the U.S. is attempting to drown in blood the liberation struggle of the South Vietnamese people because it is the model for liberation struggles everywhere, so North Vietnam is being bombed to bits because it shows all colonial and former colonial countries, by living example, that Socialism can solve their problems.”

Youth Against War and Fascism, Free University of New York – Aug. 27, 1966

(comment: no one bombed any dikes. Leftist editor Harrison Salisbury started this myth.)

“As far as the Vietnamese are concerned , we are fighting on the side of Hitlerism, and they hope we lose. Most people support the NLF. Why? The war in Vietnam is not being fought according to the rules. Prisoners are tortured. Our planes drop incendiary bombs on civilian villages. Our soldiers shoot at women and children. Your officers will tell you that it is all necessary, that we couldn’t win the war any other way. We believe that the atrocities which are necessary to win this war against the people of Vietnam are inexcusable.”

Vietnam Day Committee, San Francisco – Aug. 2, 1966.

(comment: spreading atrocity lies was a specialty.)

“It is important for us to tell people why the demands of the NFL and the PRG represent the only hope for peace, independence and unity in Vietnam. To anyone who knows the political-military situation in Vietnam, to declare for immediate withdrawal is to support the NLF without saying it. What is important…is to show that Vietnam is only a place where U.S. policies of neocolonialism have met with active resistance.”

Stanford University – November 15, 1969

(comment: hypocrisy was another specialty)

“Just when Westmoreland was boasting that there were only small guerrilla groups left, he was hit in October 1967 with a division-sized unit. While he was explaining that this was a desperate last fling, he was hit by another division- sized unit. The U.S. forces never recovered from this. Westmoreland started panic measures. Forced to disperse, he opened the way for the NLF’s mighty Tet offensive in late January that sealed the fate of the ‘limited war’ because from then on Westmoreland, and General Abrams after him were forced onto the strategic and tactical defensive.”

Radical Student Union – Univ. of California- Berkeley- Dec. 11, 1969

(comment: in the “mighty” Tet Offensive the enemy lost 40,000 dead, half his forces, and the Viet Cong was decimated, never again a credible force. The allies lost 1,231. This is what CBS’s Walter Cronkite called a “stalemate.”)

“I want Spiro Agnew to know that I bring this assembly a message of greetings and solidarity with the American people from the Viet Cong. I want Agnew to know that this generation is establishing its own diplomatic relations, because we are not at war with the people of Vietnam. Our war is with the Pentagon, Wall Street, and Spiro T. Agnew. Nixon plans to win…by withdrawing enough troops to deflate antiwar sentiments at home , while fortifying major cities like Hue and Saigon and from this position of fortification carry out the raging air war against the countryside that most students of Vietnam now understand is controlled by some 80% of the National Liberation Front.”

Speech by Rennie Davis, San Francisco Peace Rally – Nov. 15, 1969

(comment: 80% !! ole’ Rennie in solidarity with Viet Cong lies. Could subversion be more obvious? Student leaders just made up things and everybody, like sheep, believed them.)

“The resistance of the people of South Vietnam is an indigenous movement of politically and religiously diverse groups and individuals which was organized in response to years of oppression and illegal action by the U.S. government and its various ‘puppet’ regimes in Saigon. In order to counter the U.S. government’s propaganda –which falsely teaches the public that the ‘enemy’ is an outside, ‘communist’ aggressor – we will continue to make use of various educational means. The U.S. government is trying to stifle, at tremendous cost and risk, a liberation struggle which is setting the example for all oppressed peoples.”

The U.S. Committee to aid the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (Viet Cong) New York City,- May 10, 1966

(comment: apparently professors forgot to tell them there was an “outside enemy,” called the Communist North)

By the simple device of charging American soldiers with aggression against the “freedom fighters” of the Viet Cong, legions of students, using this excuse to justify their “moral outrage” (and avoid the draft), engineered a movement that spread to the gullible throughout the nation, helping to defeat a noble cause to bring freedom to others. Not a single one of these attacks on the war mentions that America was helping South Vietnam to fight Communist aggression.

As Jamie Glazov, noted historian, once pointed out on FrontPageMag:

“The most putrid lie of the Left – was the assumption that the U.S. was somehow fighting the people of South Vietnam, when it in fact was actually fighting the Communists who were seeking to imprison them.”

And today they are crawling back in bed with those same old toothless hags of the 60’s—“aggression,” “immoral,” “imperialism”—and re-cycling the same old lies.

As late as the thirtieth anniversary of the Vietnam War, Stephen Young could write, “Our national recollection of the war matches that of the New Left.” Because that is what is preserved and taught in our universities. For thirty years, for example, they have continued to use Karnow’s, “Vietnam: A History”, a work so biased that when presented as a PBS series people who had been there rioted in Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, Houston, and Paris.

The election of 2004 was a massive repudiation by Vietnam vets of the New Left version of the war. The new Vietnam Veterans Legacy Foundation says they lied. The above article makes it very clear that they lied.

So how can they be trusted to tell the truth now? In the end we do not want your views on war: “You Lie!”

magruder44 <@> aol  com

Why Mexico is Important

by ME Leclerc

The U.S. must stay engaged with Mexico in the war on drugs

Mexico’s potential for fragmentation is a serious threat to US national security however, there is a low level of preoccupation that the phenomenon of OTM (Other than Mexicans) persons and the spillover of drug-related violence into the US. The threat of incursion by terrorist groups via the southern border is frequently downplayed in the media, such as the recent series of arrests in Mexico of several individuals suspected of being involved in terrorism have not inspired much of a response for action as would an arrest in the US. Mexico claimed that even though the men arrested are indeed tied to a terrorist group they were not actively identified as being part of a plot. US national security is threatened by this instability even more so as Mexico’s fate hangs on a fine line and has been infective in controlling its own borders.

This is a two-dimensional responsibility; the US has a duty to control human traffic through its borders yet Mexico’s inability to combat the drug cartels has opened the doors to intra-national gangs, smaller pockets of indigenous insurgency movements and also invited groups linked to radical Islam-ism. The problem in dealing with Mexico is that it has been receiving help from the US at a lower level than that of Colombia’s drug war while Mexico struggled to contain its own problems. Basically Mexico has been relegated to a secondary place of relevance even though they are our closest neighbor. This is not to say that preserving Colombia’s side in eradication operations in a consistent manner will not at least slow the flow of drugs out of the country however Mexico holds a more relevant threat to the American way of life.

Stratfor reports of increase violence in Mexico’s Northern provinces (Ciudad Juarez, Tijuana, Chihuahua) posing a serious threat to individuals and tourism. The US State department has issued a warning for Americans to stay clear of these areas[i]. Kidnapping for ransom and contract killing cases are a huge problem and a source of anger held by Mexicans and recent public demonstrations show that the rampant violence must be dealt with but there are bigger problems ahead. Violence is believed to be almost as high as that of insurgent groups in Iraq and casualty numbers are rising, making Mexico’s national security problems our own. President Felipe Calderon has the right idea to slowly work a pull-out of military units from the troubled provinces and replace with capable police forces however this is a tough job. The only possible way this situation could improve is through comprehensive political reform, the modernization of Mexican police forces and removal of military forces from drug interdiction and law enforcement operations. Removing military troops from the drug war equation will help protect the armed forces from the same corruption found in police agencies but producing capable and a professional police force takes years and much critical time has been wasted. Calderon’s effort to purge the police of over 40,000 officers by conducting comprehensive background checks is commendable however if his new police and military operations do not handle the surge of violence that will have serious political consequences. For one, any new leadership following Calderon’s presidency could either choose to be friendly and receptive to US aid. Another possible outcome would be that Mexico could become more hostile just as Hugo Chavez’s foreign policy keeps the rest of Latin America from accepting that assistance does not mean a potential US invasion or political meddling and violation of their sovereignty.

Plan Mexico

Funding must be offered to rebuild or replace government services or programs and a more expanded law enforcement presence instead of focusing on modernizing the Mexican Army though there is a great need for Mexico to bring up their military standards. The drug war has been fought so that the military, even if it is successful in their interdiction operations, its image will suffer greatly as the public may see the Army as oppressors rather than saviors. At this point it appears the Mexican public just wants the violence to go away however the root of the problem is becoming more obvious to people. Organizational corruption and drug money are great impediments to achieving rule of law. Unlike the US many countries struggle to keep the parts from separating from the whole and are often the source of such violence; spilling across borders. In essence Plan Mexico will help augment police forces as well as military but more emphasis should be placed on continuing the long-term investigation of police personnel to include prosecution and incarceration. Increasing the number of officers on patrol cannot be accomplished quickly enough to contain the violence and illegal drug trafficking activities and restore order.

Policing in Mexico is not parallel to that in the US in spite of optimistic outlook from law enforcement experts. Bratton and Andrews conducted a study of law enforcement methodologies in Latin America which they believed compatible with US methods. It is doubtful that police-to population ratios can be achieved in Latin American countries as would NYC or any other modern US city. Mexican populations – as is the case throughout South America – are distributed in scattered patterns due to their unique topography and vast segments of land that are uninhabited and hard to reach which are prime areas for drug traffickers and armed insurgencies. These are hardly problems encountered in the US where there are more tolerable levels of law and order and policing large populations is a more achievable goal. Their assessment was not completely off the mark in identifying Latin American inability to establish good relations with the public and conduct investigations.

Their suggestion that police departments break down threats by sectors is a good idea consistent with their theory and could be applicable to the Mexican situation but we must bear in mind that the environment is completely different than that of the US and will require military support until these problems are resolved. This is more a social experiment than political reform which will have to continue in order to afford improvements in policing. The funding from Plan Mexico could supplement the State Department’s law enforcement academies already in place, help support background checks on officers and establish a platform for building pride and professionalism in police forces. Promotion boards and salary scales must be implemented to make the job more desirable to officers not just officials. Force protection measures are also an important consideration as many high-level officials are being targeted for assassination and a personnel security program should be established.

Our focus must be strong in keeping Mexico from falling apart so that its internal troubles do not reach the US is many years behind. The time and place for reforms in this sector must be undertaken now as Mexico’s problems are quickly becoming our own.

Sources consulted

Library of Congress Federal Research Division, Country Profile Mexico, http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/profiles/Mexico.pdf

White, Bobby, The Wall Street Journal, Pot Crop Infiltrates Vineyards, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122145024251835201.html?mod=hps_us_inside_today

William Bratton and William Andrews, Driving out The Crime Wave: The police methods that worked in New York City can work in Latin America http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/_time-driving_out_crime.htm

Hall, Kevin McClatchy Newspapers online, Mexico’s drug traffickers set their sights on top officials, http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/46971.html

Root, Jay, McClatchy Newspapers online, Mexican army can’t stop drug lords’ war on cops, http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/36404.html

Today We Were Rock Stars.

We shut the aircraft down and what we saw was 350 plus people ranging in ages from 6 months to old and gray standing silently at a fence watching our every movement. I walked around the nose of my aircraft a mere 150 feet away from this crowd, I gave a simple smile and raised my arm up over my head and was greeted with the most substantial roar of levity that I have ever heard in my life. 350 plus people were cheering. Not because I play an instrument in some notable band, acted in a big Hollywood movie, or wrote some famous novel. They were cheering because I am part of something bigger than that. I am part of a team made up of men and women who all wear a uniform of some kind symbolized by a colorful patch known as the Stars and Stripes. A team that helped liberate an entire culture of people almost killed off because they were different. Like the Americans were to the Jews we are to the Kurds.

Before I ramble anymore about this occasion I feel that I am obligated to expose you to what happened to these people. Halajba, the town we flew too, sits directly on the Iranian border. In fact almost a one quarter of the town is in Iran. During the 1980s there was a conflict known as the Iran/Iraq war. This city was at the frontlines of this battle. Historically speaking the Kurdish people have been oppressed and looked down upon by their Arab counterparts in Iraq because they are not Arabic. They are different. They are a melting pot of many different beliefs; their cultural heritage stems across every religion known to man. This diversity sets them apart and makes them great. Well Islamic Arabs known as Sunni and Shia don’t have a good history of liking people who are different. The perfect illustration of this is the fact that the Sunni and Shia can’t even agree on their own religion. Minor differences between these two branches such as how many times a day they pray, certain important figures in their history, and different holidays is grounds enough for them to not even like each other. Now the Kurds have always been at the bottom of this hierarchy; Saddam was a Sunni and for many years the Sunni Arabs had a good life. The Shia and Kurds were oppressed by this regime quite fiercely with the The Kurds receiving the brunt of it. During the Iran/Iraq war Saddam bombed many cities like this without remorse simply because they were Kurdish. Many ruined cityscapes still litter this country side from that conflict. If that wasn’t enough in 1987 Saddam organized an operation completely aimed at eradicating or otherwise imprisoning every Kurd in the country. It began with interment into concentration style camps outside of the major cities. This was followed by the bombing of Kurdish cities. All this climaxed in 1988 when Saddam launched a massive chemical weapons attack which left over 5,000 fatalities in Halajba alone. The final toll of Kurdish fatalities ranged from 300,000 to 500,000 killed. Thousands more wounded and imprisoned. All this was because they were different.

Today was a side of the war that I had never before seen. I saw the fighting last time I was here. The tracers illuminating the night skies, the bombs and hellfires being dropped on insurgents while inserting fresh troops and pulling out the dead and wounded ones. I saw the fear and terror that people can leash upon one another. The awesome horrific sight of what firepower can do to soft skin targets of both friendlies and enemies. I was prepared to go to war again. To see and experience those horrific moments not often spoken about by those who were there. Today I stood in awe as I was thanked, not by a passerby at the airport or some restaurant I was eating at, but by an entire nation of people that we as a team helped save and preserve. Because of our efforts, which started after the first Gulf War to present, these people have emerged as a supreme culture of individuals at once on the brink of extinction. This is no longer a war as far as a traditional definition would go; it is about the people of Iraq now. It’s not about bullets and bombs but handshakes and smiles. We have done our job and we did it well and I don’t care what any peace loving tree hugging hippy says after watching CNN because today I was personally thanked by more people of another country then that of my own country. If that is not a testament to the job that we have done here than I do not know what is. These are free people who have lived with 3,000 years of oppression. They are free because of our efforts. They are free because of our sacrifice.

Feel free to pass this story and pictures along to every American. It is our duty to make sure that they know the truth about what we are doing over here and the results of those efforts. The liberal media would try and disgrace our sacrifice or otherwise downplay the importance of our mission in Iraq and that is just not fair to the fighting men and women of the United States of America. This is a reminder to those liberal hippies that sometimes there are people in this world who need a good ass kicking to help save the little guy and no one does it better than an American Soldier. Hooah!

SGT Christopher A. Hoffert
Afghanistan ‘04-’05, Iraq ‘06-’07, and ‘09-’10
Alpha Company 3rd Battalion 25th Combat Aviation Brigade
FOB Diamondback, Iraq
3 Oct 2009

God, Murder, and Ft. Hood
by Leonard Magruder

The landlady came up the stairs all upset. “There has been a mass killing at Fort Hood. Who would do such a thing ?”. “A Muslim terrorist”, I told her.

Not having heard about this I turned on Fox News, and sure enough, Smith and O’Reilly were already using the terms “Muslim” and “terrorist.” Turning then to CNN, for two hours nothing along these lines was mentioned. Turning back to Fox I saw the killer dressed in Muslim garb, found out that he had shouted out the pre-massacre shout “Allahu Akbar”, had handed out copies of the Koran shortly before the killings and that medical colleagues had reported that he had given shocking lectures at Walter Reed on how the American war on terror was actually a war on Islam. Back to CNN. For a long time nothing about all this, but then there were interviews with generals Clark and McCafferty which gave Campbell Brown, Larry King, and Anderson Cooper plenty of openings to ask probing questions leading to the possibility of terrorism – but they never did. Meanwhile, back at Fox former agent Michael Scheurer and military expert Ralph Peters were speculating freely that this had been a terrorist attack. “The worst terrorist attack since 9/11.” said Peters.

Back again to CNN. By now so much had poured in that they were beginning to consider the word “terrorist”, but it was clear throughout the whole day that they preferred to believe that it was a case of harassment of Hassad because he was a Muslim. On the question of “why”, “American bigotry, harassment,” was what they clearly hoped would come out of this. Checking CNN the next day they were still pursuing the idea that it was an emotional problem, probably connected with his work. At no time would they consider that it may have been based on the command of Allah in the Koran to, “Kill the unbeliever wherever you find them.” (Sura 9:5)

At the end CNN was still wailing, “What could the motive for this possibly be ?”, while all the rest of America had a pretty good idea what this was.

Right before our eyes we watched CNN betray the dead of Fort Hood to further the multiculturalist and “politically correct” interpretations preferred by both the media elite and our academics, making huge contributions to American vulnerability to terrorist attack. We saw the same thing last 9/11. Multiple times we sat through the horror of that day, yet no one in the media was allowed to mention the enemy. A few people in Times Square were shown raging against somebody, but the media made sure we never heard the world “Islam.”

In the following article we delve into this phenomenon.The question of what is the “root cause” of terrorism has created a divide that runs right straight through America. We once more lay out the case for Islam as the cause. We lay the groundwork with a review of the issue by Shmuel Bar as found in his article,”The Religious Sources of Islamic Terrorism.”

“It cannot be ignored that the lion’s share of terrorist acts and the most devastating of them in recent years have been perpetrated in the name of Islam. This fact has sparked a fundamental debate both in the West and within the Muslim world regarding the link between these acts and the teachings of Islam. Most Western analysts are hesitant to identify such acts with the bona fide teachings of one of the world’s great religions and prefer to view them as a perversion of a religion that is essentially peace-loving and tolerant. Their “root-cause” explanations include political causes (the Israeli-Arab conflict); cultural causes (rebellion against Western cultural colonialism or decadence); and social causes (alienation, poverty). While no public figure in the West would deny the imperative of fighting the war against terrorism, it is equally politically correct to add the codicil that, for the war to be won, these grievances pertaining to the root causes of terrorism are justified and should be addressed. An interpretation which places the blame for terrorism on religious and cultural traits, they claim, runs the risk of being branded as bigoted and Islamophobic.”

To treat Islamic terrorism as the consequence of political and socioeconomic factors would not do justice to the significance of the religious culture in which this phenomenon is rooted and nurtured. In order to comprehend the motivation for these acts and to draw up an effective strategy for a war against terrorism, it is necessary to understand the religious-ideological factors – which are deeply embedded in Islam. Insofar as religious establishments in most of the Arabian peninsula, in Iran, and in much of Egypt and North Africa are concerned, the radical ideology does not represent a marginal and extremist perversion of Islam but rather a genuine and increasingly mainstream interpretation. Even after 9-11, the sermons broadcast from Mecca cannot be easily distinguished from those of al Qaeda.

(An article on this on the Internet today begins, “This week in Mecca we can watch on Memri video at the height of the Muslim spiritual Hajj, the holiest time and holiest site of all Islam, Muslims screaming for the death and mutilation of all infidels, but specifically Americans and Jews. They cry to their god for our hands to be chopped off and to be murdered, while thanking Allah for his greatness.” These are not terrorists visiting from the caves of Pakistan. These are ordinary Muslims from all over the world, drunk with hatred from the Koran.)

Andrew C. McCarthy of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, who prosecuted the mastermind of the first Towers attack, explains how jihad radiates throughout the Muslim world.

“The principal challenge of al-Qaeda is that it spearheads the spread of a strong, though noxious, ideology. The group does not purport to give directions only to its own members, it presumes to be guiding all Muslims toward that which Islam compels. This is abundantly clear from bin Laden’s infamous 1998 fatwa. “The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies – civilian and military – is an individual’s duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty God.”

The direction is to everyone. In bin Laden’s mind he is merely the medium, the direction comes from Allah. He cites verses from the Koran to show Muslims that it is the ideology itself which announces these commands, compelling every Muslim, not just al-Qaeda operatives, to perform. But the ideology indisputably springs from Islam.”

Analysts David R. Frum and Richard Perle sum up the issue in their new book, “An End to Evil:”

“The terrorists kill and will accept death for a cause with which no accommodation is possible. That cause is militant Islam. Moreover, these beliefs are not really confined to a radical fringe, but infect even ordinary Muslims. Even though it is comforting to deny it, all the available evidence indicates that militant Islam commands wide support , and even wider sympathy, among Muslims worldwide, including Muslim minorities in the West. The roots of Muslim rage are to be found in Islam itself. While there are multiple terrorist groups, the common element of Islam makes the threat monolithic. The ideology that justifies the terrible crimes of Hamas and Hezbollah is the same ideology that justifies the crimes of al-Qaeda. The result is the unlimited threat to dominate the world through Jihad.The aim is to overthrow our civilization and remake the nations of the world into Islamic societies , imposing on the whole world its religion and law.The result is an unlimited threat to dominate the world through Jihad.”

But Sam Harris in, “The End of Faith,” probably put it best:

“There is no question that, at this point in history, Islam represents a unique danger to all of us. Many Muslims are basically rational and tolerant of others. But these virtues are not likely to be the products of their faith. Insofar as a person is observant of the doctrines of Islam- that is, insofar as he really believes it – he will pose a problem for us. Men like bin Laden actually believe what they say they believe.They believe in the literal truth of the Koran, and that is the default position in Islam. Most people of leadership in this country will say there is no direct link between the Muslim faith and terrorism. It is clear, however, that Muslims hate the West because of their faith and that the Koran mandates such hatred. It is widely claimed by the “moderates” that the Koran mandates nothing of the kind and that Islam is a “religion of peace.” You need only read the Koran to see that this is untrue. The basic thrust of Islam is undeniable; convert, subjugate or kill unbelievers, kill apostates, and conquor the world.Frum and Perle pinpointed the heart of the problem. “The roots of Muslim rage are to be found in Islam itself. While there are multiple terrorist groups ,the common element of Islam makes the threat monolithic.”

Media and academia are keeping America from understanding this, and that is what will lead to catastrophe. The message that now needs to be heard everywhere is, “There is something wrong with Islam.” And the Muslim world must do somethng before there is a world-wide cataclysm.  There is no need for the words “radical” or “militant” before “Islam”. For centuries the violence at the heart of Islam has lain dormant. It has resurfaced in our time making many think this is something new, something “radical’ and “militant “.  It is not. It is the true Islam resurging at this time because of the new hope of world domination contained in new technology, such as nuclear weapons. Repeatedly in our articles on this subject since our first on July 31, 2003 we have listed the verses inciting murder in the Koran. In this article just out from “The American Thinker,” by Amil Imani, a Muslim convert and expert on the Koran, you see some of them again:

November 12, 2009
Does Islam Breed Violence?
By Amil Imani

There is a division of the house. On one side are the politically correct in government, the leftist mainstream media, and a raft of Islamist apologists. One and all are tripping over each other in reassuring us the mass murderers such as Maj. Nidal Hasan and suicide-bombers who detonate their explosive vests in crowded marketplaces and even mosques are individual anomalies and Islam is not responsible for what they do. On the other side are those fed up with the innumerable daily horrific acts throughout the world that are clearly committed under the banner of Islam…Here is the truth, as bitter as it may be: Islam is the culprit. Islam is anything but a religion of peace. Violence is at the very core of Islam. Violence is institutionalized in the Muslims’ holy book, the Koran, in many suras (verses)

9:5 “Fight and kill the disbelievers wherever you find them, take them captive, harass them, lie in wait and ambush them using every stratagem of war.”

9:112 “The Believers fight in Allah’s cause; they slay and are slain, kill and are killed.”

8:39 “So fight them until there is no more disbelief and all submit to the religion of Allah alone in the whole world.”

8:65 “O Prophet, urge the faithful to fight. If there are twenty among you with determination they will vanquish two hundred; if there are a hundred then they will slaughter a thousand unbelievers, for the infidels are a people devoid of understanding.”

47:4 “When you clash with the unbelieving Infidels in battle smite their necks until you overpower them, killing and wounding many of them. At length, when you have thoroughly subdued them, bind them firmly, making (them) captives. Thus are you commanded by Allah to continue carrying out Jihad against the unbelieving infidels until they submit to Islam.”

And the Koran is considered by Muslims to be the word-for-word literal edicts of their god, Allah.

Islam, by the very nature of its doctrine, appeals to man’s base nature. It promotes intolerance, hatred, discrimination, and much more. In reality, Islam is like a deadly, contagious disease. Once it invades the mind of its victim, it is capable of transforming him to a helpless pawn that has no choice but to execute what he is directed to do.

Of the reported 1.3 billion Muslims in the world, millions are already trapped in the terminal stages of this affliction, while millions of others are rapidly joining them. The people enslaved with the extreme cases of Islamic mental disease are highly infectious. They actively work to transmit the disease to others, while they themselves engage in horrific acts of mayhem and violence to demonstrate their unconditional obedience to the dictates of the Islamic cult…The savagery and variety of the actions of these Islamic captives are seen daily around the globe. Many of these acts, committed under the banner of Islam, have become so commonplace that the world has come to view them as part and parcel of a troubled humanity. And, from time to time, the world is shocked into a passing and momentary realization of the evil deeds these Islamist robots commit. However, people quickly get over it, and they do nothing to seriously address this affliction.
.
Humanity is facing a deeply troubling dilemma. On the one hand is the desire of enlightened people to forge a diverse world into one society ruled by peace and justice, while on the other hand, Islamists are hell-bent on imposing their stone-age system on everyone.  Truth be told, violence is the animating force of Islam. Islam is a religion born through violence, raised by violence, thrives on violence, and would die without violence.
But the recent and dastardly mass murder at Fort Hood, committed by Maj. Nidal Hasan, will be forgotten by the public before long.”

This incident has unleashed a tsunami of exposes’ of the horror at the heart of Islam.  Fox News had a special on the hatred being taught in American mosques. And  Switzerland voted to prohibit the building of any more mosques.

We have waited 8 years. We have 22 articles on the “horror at the heart of Islam”, at v-v-a-r.org, with 24 more up to today on wmdterror.com. For eight years these usually six page documented articles were distributed in each case throughout the nation, through Media Guide at Congress.org throughout the newswires, and here in Lawrence, Kansas, to the university, the local papers, the pastors, and city hall, prompting no dialogue with anyone. Total denial.

In one article we told how in the course of raising this subject, people, friends, simply disasppeared, how those who are supposed to know the most about this issue, Emergency Management and the Chief of Police, show no interest in pooling our knowledge. How, when as a chapter at the University of Kansas we commented on the silence, the faculty advisor to “The Daily Kansan” yelled “Shove it up your butt”, how, when we wanted to show Steve Emerson’s “Terrorists Among Us: Jihad in America,” showing a terrorist recruiting right here in Lawrence, no student showed up because faculty told them to stay away. That terrorist is seen later in the film in Atlanta, screaming “Blood must flow, there must be widows, there must be orphans, hands and limbs must be cut and blood spread everywhere in order that Allah’s religion stands on its own feet.” Islam at work. But faculty didn’t want students to see this, so they had K.U. Security send me a message prohibiting me, under penalty of law, from sending any further articles to students. Repression here is so bad that Professor of Anthropology Felix Moos said on the front page of the local newspaper recently, “I find that people at K.U. are oblivious to the fact we are at war.” Lawrence, Kansas, the national epicenter of repression. But conditions are very much the same at all American universities, dominated as they are by left-leaning faculty and thereby by definition repressive.

As recently appointed Academic Advisor to Veterans for Academic Freedom I will then start a chapter of this new organization at the University. That will void the ban and I will again send articles to students, beginning with the five documenting Islam as the root cause of terrorism that they missed because of the ban. I’ll also give lectures on the subject at the Student Union, and show films such Geert Wilder’s “Fitna”, also “Obsession” and “What the West Needs to Know.” An examination of the books available to students and those that are required reading in classes at the University of Kansas show clearly that the subject of Islam and its pathologies has been completely erased from campus awareness.

We hope the many veterans of the Iraq, Afghanistan and other recent wars attending the university will join us, and we may need them to provide security at lectures as here is what happens on campuses these days.  When Brigette Gabriel, a Muslim convert well acquainted with the horrors of Islam spoke on the Muslim jihad threat at the University of Memphis recently it took ten policemen to get her safely off stage when Muslim students charged her.

On May 6, 2006, Dutch parliamentarian Pim Fortuyn was murdered for speaking out against Islam. His life and death testified to a grim reality: speak the truth about Islam in the Western world today and you’re a marked man. And those who paint the target on your back will be the cultural elite – the professors and the media. This murder can be recognized, in retrospect, as marking the resumption of the jihadist campaign to silence the criticism of Islam that began with the infamous Rushdie fatwa, the world-wide call by Muslim clerics to murder him for criticising Islam. The lesson is this. We are not up against a “tiny’ number of “extremists” who have “hijacked” a “great and peaceful religion” and who are committed to “militant” acts motivated by legitimate economic and/or geopolitical grievances, but are rather, facing a considerable percentage of the world’s Muslims, many of them born and raised and resident in the West, who do indeed despise our freedoms, and who in trying to destroy those freedoms are being entirely consistent with the tenets of their faith. -and who have countless non-Muslim allies steeped in PC and multicultural dogma and prepared, in the name of tolerance, to serve the jihadist effort to stifle Islam’s critics.

There is no phenomenon in history more lethal to mankind than when a religion mixes God and murder.

The last great example of this is the Aztec religion, where, because of religious reasons they thought it necessary to tear the hearts out of fully conscious human beings on the towers of Tenochtitlan, up to 20,000 in one week. Islam is the Aztec religion of our times. Their specialty – cutting peoples heads off. It’s right there in the Koran, Sura 47:4

At an April 2005 meeting of the UN Human Rights Commission, its Islamic members refused to condemn those who kill in the name of religion, and in fact said that criticism of Muslim terrorists amounted to “defamation of religion.”
There it is, for the whole world to see. Insisting on the right to murder in the name of God. God and murder. “We are Muslims and this is what it means.”

As part of their efforts to to control speech about Islam, governments as well as various non-governmental authorities have sought to restrict or forbid the use of certain words and expressions. At one point in 2007 , President George W. Bush dared to use the expression “war on Islamofascism” , but after Muslims and dhimmis protested he quickly reverted to the meaningless term “war on terror.” This marks the intensification of an already colossal act of irresponsibility (that has become even worse under Obama) the refusal to make clear to Americans the nature of the enemy’s beliefs and motives. The very least that a president owes people whom he is asking to fight a war, after all, is a clear, honest, and complete explanation of whom and what they are up against, and why.

So here you see the bind the world is in. There is a large percentage of Muslims that just go by the five pillars of faith and know little about what is in the Koran, or chose to ignore it. But there is also a significant percentage that does know, and takes it seriously believing the Koran to be the literally true words of God.The world’s problem is how to separate the two and stop the violent ones. One answer is that it can’t be done, the only solution then being to eliminate Islam from the face of the earth, as happened to the Aztec religion. This should not be a shocking idea. Hundreds of religions have come and gone. There is no reason to attach any importance to the claim by someone that God gave them a “final revelation” through an angel. The other solution is to keep the violent ones at bay, threatening catastrophic retaliation, but that would involve huge collateral damage. The remaining solution is to change what the Koran says, everyone accept a more benign interpretation. That is the pipe dream of “moderates.”
Meantime, the problem for America is the need to bring the issue out in the open. As it is, media and academia , and even our new government, are disarming America in the face of the greatest threat it has ever faced.

Chapters 7, 8, and 9 of Diana West’s, “The Death of the Grown-Up.” “a compelling case against the childishness that is subverting the struggle aganst jihadist Islam”, contain the most penetrating analyisis of the world crisis with Islam that we have. Here is a sample:

“It may be that the only faith on earth more messianic than Islam is multiculturalism. Maybe that is because its irrational faith in the chimera of universalism relies on a perpetual suspension of disbelief that contradicts
inescapable Western traditions of logic and analysis. If distinctions between the West and Islam were articulated, if the “meeting of cultures” were recast as a conflict of cultures , if the incompatibility of Western secular logic and Islamic divine revelation were evaluated, if Islamization were perceived as a threat to the West, if clash were to allowed to ring out – Islam itself would remain unchanged , but the whole multicultural project would come tumbling down. And to the multiculti priesthood, that would be apostasy,Western style.

The penalty of such apostoasy is not death, as in Islam, but the resulting abysss is an existential crisis that the multiculturalists will avoid at any cost. Better to put faith in “fruitful exchanges.” Better to preach “universal values”. Better to tolerate the intolerant .Better to pretend. Better to lie. Better to barricade the public square , and station guards at synagogues and churches. Better to dispense bulletproof vests to civil servants. Better to guard public buildings with gauntlets of metal detectors and Jersey walls. Better to search granny’s purse. Better to search granny.”

In other words, the real reason our secular elities in media and academia won’t tell America why nuclear attack is coming, can’t face the fact of the bankruptcy of multiculturalism, is ultimately metaphysical in nature. One needs to go back to Tillich, and bone up on “ontological anxiety” to understand a betrayal as complete as this one.

They would rather die and take all of us with them, than turn to God ?

As Gregory Davis says this in ending his book, “Religion of Peace ?’”

“It seems that the secular West is determined not to hear the bad news. It is hoping against hope that things are not as bad as they seem. It is hoping that the myriad acts of violence around the world done in the name of Allah are somehow not indicative of “real” Islam. It is hoping that Muslims throughout the world calling for the destruction of America and Europe are just blowing hot air. Hoping that Islam – a religion founded by one of history’s great warlords; a religion that waged wars of aggression and conquest for over a thousand years, that slaughtered and enslaved untold millions and invented modern genocide, and that today is the only force in the world that produces terrorism, suicide bombings, hostage-taking, organized rape, and massacres on a massive scale, that this strange, seething, violent mass, is somehow a “religion of peace .” Rejecting this fiction and standing up to be counted will determine whether or not we survive the twenty-first century.”

“Stand up and fight ! Stand up and fight ! ” -McCain

Magruder44 < at > aol  com

There is no need to recount the events at Ft. Hood, or 9/11, or the 1993 WTC bombing, Iran Hostage Crisis, etc. There is no need to recount the thousands of acts of terror for the last 1400 years since Mohammad created Islam. No need to mention the sixty-seven campaigns of Mohammad, the invasions of the Moors, the sacking of Constantinople, etc. Nor is it necessary to remind anyone of Islamic terror in the Philippines, or how Thomas Jefferson sent in the Marines to end Islamic piracy at Tripoli. Because the liberal media, Leftist professors, and Muslim apologists have all told us that the study of history is a useless endeavor, unless it is the history of the horrors of the Catholic Crusades over 800 years ago. Then history is all that matters.

When it comes to how and what people believe–their ideology, or theology–that too is unnecessary, since multiculturalism tells us to suspend all judgment against anyone’s belief system. If you see a faith or culture that teaches a barbaric system of justice, or advocates the beating of women, or killing of non-believers, or other acts of barbarism, it is intolerant to impose your values upon them. The major exception to that rule is Christianity, which is a judgmental ideology. It is therefore judged evil and should been banned. The Ten Commandments must never be displayed at a school, prayer should not be said, and a not a single head must bow, except on a prayer rug. That is why the U.S. Military burned bibles in Afghanistan, because someone in that country might read it and convert.

We can also thank the Left for giving us the freedom not to worry about passages in the Koran such as 9.5: So when the sacred months have passed away, then slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them captives and besiege them and lie in wait for them in every ambush…, because no matter what those passages say we cannot understand them; but anyone who is a Muslim can somehow understand them perfectly, even without any formal training; whereas scholars in the U.S. are complete buffoons.

We are also free from 3000 years of western philosophy from Socrates to Edmund Burke. No longer do we need to study social contract theory, Aristotle’s pursuit of happiness, or Kohlberg’s stages of moral development. We can dispense with the Magna Carta, the Constitution, case law, and all of state law, as all we need is Sharia law to solve all of our problems.

Nor do we need to wonder why, if Islam is so great why it cannot police its own people? Why are there so many “rouge” mullahs, teachers that teach the “wrong path of Islam?” We are told that since there are 1.5 billion Muslims in the world and if they were all radical they could take over the world. This explains why those same 1.5 billion are never able to stop any of the terrorists, or wrong-headed teachers who “high-jack” Islam.

Yes, I’m getting to the Jihad at Fr. Hood, but please give me just a bit of your time.

Because of this new freedom we can now ignore people like Michael Savage, David Horowitz, Robert Spenser, or any of the others who warn us about Islam as Churchill warned us of a coming storm—the rising of Nazi Germany. We no longer have to listen to them, because World War II never happened either, Chamberlin was able to sit down and talk with Chancellor Hitler and reach a peace agreement thus saving us all from a horrible war.

No need to question the “Ft. Dix Six” and their plot to kill as many soldiers as possible, or Sgt. Asan Akbar, a member of the 101st Airborne Division who killed two U.S. soldiers in a grenade attack in 2003. We can ignore Thailand’s military warning of infiltrations. The French armed forces fears of the large numbers of Muslims within their ranks, currently at 15%. The Dutch and Austrians are now trying to investigate radical Muslims with their ranks. But, it is not necessary to worry that radical Muslims would ever do anything wrong, or infiltrate our ranks, so as to tap into our communications, learn our tactics, steal our secrets, because no enemy force has ever done this before.

Now when people are gunned down in cold-blood we can turn a blind eye, pretend to care and return to important matters like creating a socialist system of government, or worry about what Hollywood starlets are wearing. We can now cast-off all feelings of patriotism or sentiment toward our long history as a force for good, because Michael Moore told us, “There is no terrorist threat.” Thus, no one was killed at Ft. Hood. There was no shooter who is a devout, observant Muslim. Nothing bad is happening, there was no Jihad at Ft. Hood. There is no reason to stand up and say enough with political correctness, no reason to review history, no reason to learn western philosophy, no reason to examine the teachings of Islam—because nine people were not killed at Ft. Hood. Thirteen graves were not filled, thirteen flags were not folded, and thirteen families did not weep bitterly. There is no need for examination, go back to sleep, it was just a dream.

Dan Rather (left)

In light of the scandal  involving Dan Rather and Democratic Party fundraising, we decided to share an incident involving him in l986. Mr. Magruder, President of V.V.A.R., because of his long involvement with Vietnam veterans, was invited by Dr. Theodore Kennedy, Professor of Anthropology at the New York State University at Stony Brook, to help him put together the largest symposium on Vietnam ever assembled. “As National Coordinator, Mr. Magruder has responsibilities for helping design the program and contacting and inviting some of the leading figures of the Vietnam period to speak.” (Lawrence Journal World, Oct. 10, 1986) “The first of its kind in the country and a model for other universities.” (Newsday, Sept. 6, 1986.) It was the most comprehensive, in-depth examination of both the war in Vietnam and the “war on the home front” ever put together, unique because of the participation of some 800 Vietnam veterans.

There were 60 speakers from all over the country, representing the military, the media, the protestors, the government, and academia. Among those invited and who spoke were Bruce Hare, Prof. of Philosophy, Stony Brook Univ.; Kenneth Steadman, Director, VFW; General William C. Westmoreland; Jan Scruggs, Vietnan Veterans Memorial; Leroi Jones (Baraka), activist and poet; Florynce Kennedy, Co-founder, N.O.W; Allen Ginsburg, poet and activist; Senator Eugene McCarthy; David Horowitz, co-editor,Ramparts; Hung Van Ho, Army of South Vietnam; and William Gibbons, National Defense Division.

The media was singularly under-represented. In the beginning, Dr. Kennedy spent hours on the phone with representatives of the New York national media emphasizing the national significance of the Symposium and the need for them to cover it. When this failed, Mr. Magruder wrote the following open letter to Dan Rather, reviewing the performance of CBS during the war and challenging him to a debate at the Symposium. Copies of the letter were hand-delivered by students throughout the New York media community.

Dear Mr. Rather:

As you are probably aware, numerous sociological studies have documented the fact that during the 60’s the television networks were strongly biased on the subject of Vietnam in the same left/liberal direction as the universities that educated their reporters. One of the best of these studies is The News Twisters, by Edith Efron, a book that CBS desperately tried to suppress. The quantitative data in this and other studies show that the networks consistently misinformed and even lied to the American people. Reporting by CBS, ABC, and NBC over an extended period in 1968 show a steady drumbeat of anti-government voices, unified in an assault on the war. Little or no opinion in support of the war was allowed on any of the three networks even though as late as Oct. 1969 the majority of Americans, according to pollster Lou Harris, still supported a military victory in Vietnam.

The data also shows that the networks never allowed the true neo-fascist views and tactics of the New Left and the S.D.S. to be known, protecting them as part of a larger body of “harmless” or “idealistic” youth and using them to project an image of “youth in revolt against the war” and in general actively helping to promote their Marxist version of the war. The data shows how, through biased editorial selection, the views of the left had a virtual stranglehold on opinion on the war. If fact, reporter and enemy opinion constituted a majority of opinion advocating a unilateral bombing halt. Out of 37 such statements, one third came from enemy sources. Said Senator Margaret Chase Smith, “The press has become more sympathetic to the enemy than to our own national interest.” (Congressional Record, June 16, 1971). Said Theodore White, the highly respected author of The Making of the President series, “There is a new avante garde which dominates the heights of national communication and has come to despise its own countrymen and its traditions.”

On occasion, as in the case of the Vietnam War, the university and the media act as an unelected counter-government, certain that they only know what is best for the nation. But if the world view that they share is in fact closer in its basic philosophical assumptions to those of totalitarianism than to those of the Judeo-Christian majority, the danger is obvious, they can misinform and mislead the country. There is, therefore, great fear abroad in the land that in another time of crisis, the university and the media, unless reformed, may again allow themselves to be manipulated by enemy propaganda or exploit the crisis to further ideological interests hostile to the national interest.

One of the most significant consequences of the Vietnam conflict was its exposure of the breakdown that has occurred in intellectual and journalistic circles with regard to objectivity and truth. The truth is that the left-liberal media, informed in its analysis of world events by the impoverished moral sensibility of secularism and hostile to traditional American values, and wanting to see Hanoi win the war to prove those values wrong withheld information from the American people throughout the war. In particular, it created a “disaster” image of the Tet Offensive (perpetrated 15 years later in The Uncounted Enemy – CBS) because it served its ideological purposes, even in the face of incoming victorious reports from the battlefield. Said Ronald Reagan, “CBS under World War II circumstances would have been charged with treason.”

The philosophy of life that allows for such blatant disregard for truth is rampant throughout the New York media and Eastern academic circles. Said Theodore White in Newsweek, “I regard the growing gap between the cult that dominates New Yorkintellectual thought today, and the reality perceived by thoughtful people elsewhere, as a political fact of enormous importance and danger.”

Part of the problem was no doubt touched upon by Carolyn Lewis, former Associate Dean of the Columbia School of Journalism when she wrote in The Washington Monthly recently, “So lacking in intellectual substance is the Columbia curriculum in journalism that students can go through the entire program without having to read a book.”

Another part of the problem is revealed in two well-known studies done by Columbia University and George Washington University that show that media persons, almost all college educated and liberal, “not only differ sharply on moral issues from attitudes of the general public, but shun religion and actively seek to reform society towards their views.” Search Institute, in its landmark study of the importance of religion on Capitol Hill said, “An important factor in our national ignorance of religion on Capitol Hill…is the national press. A predominant characteristic of the media elite is its secular outlook. Perhaps the reporters and commentators are unable to recognize religious influence when they see it.”

It follows that they would also not be able to recognize the true danger of an ideology such as atheistic Communism. It is no accident that Howard K. Smith, the noted television newscaster, warned during the 60’s that “the media is not giving a true picture of Vietnam,” and that the reporters are “especially naïve about Communist intentions and Ho Chi Minh.” Bias in the media, he said, was “massive” and “anti-American.”

The facts seem to be clear. Television networks are dominated by a world-view contemptuous of majority traditional values and they actively seek to impose their views on the rest of America. In this they serve as the propaganda arms of the academic establishment. In summary, it seems that “liberal” today means uneducated, uninformed, and naïve. For the media, with the power it yields, to have no understanding of the significance of contemporary events makes it a very dangerous force in American society and clearly in need of a thorough airing of the problem.

I hope you will accept my invitation to join me in airing the problem at the Symposium – Courage.”

Leonard Magruder

Mr. Rather did not respond to the letter. And when the Symposium ended, the press release prepared by Mr. Magruder summarizing the findings of the Symposium was uniformly boycotted by the New York media. More on that in Part 2.

Leonard Magruder

Academic Advisor VAF

Magruder44 <at> aol <dot> com

by Leonard Magruder

October 23, 2006

In the 60’s-70’s, my thing was walking out in the middle of a campus anti-war protest and handing out literature showing that they were idiots. One of these protests took place at the University of Nevada in 1968, the year of the Tet Offensive. Vets returning home told me the media was lying about it coming and going.

The last of these protests took place at the University of Colorado on June 22, 1972. A Special Consultant on Mental Retardation with the State of Colorado at the time, I denounced the university for “their indoctrination of students and the manipulation by liberal faculty of students to influence national policy on Vietnam,” (Boulder Daily Camera, June 23, 1972) and charged that the American university had become nothing but “a breeding ground for indoctrination, irrationality, and subversion.” (United Press International, June 23, 1972).

Actually, this is still going on, worse than ever, with the university still producing reporters misrepresenting or hiding the ideology behind what they are reporting.

Although the Colorado protest was covered by three newspapers, four television stations, the United Press and the Associated Press, the Washington news gatekeepers would not let any of this get out to the people. Dissenters were not allowed to join the debate on the issues of the hour . Only liberals could play. The event was suppressed as incompatible with the “advocacy journalism” of the day. And that is still the way it is today.

But it was exactly this suppression of opinion contrary to their views of the war by left/liberals in the university and the media that created the polarization and breakdown in national debate in the 60’s and led directly to the loss of South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. And if we don’t speak out this time, and let this happen again, we are in trouble.

Years later, on May 10, 1981, at the nation’s first rally on any campus to honor the Vietnam veteran, organized with my students, I resigned my position as professor of Psychology at the college to protest “the damage done to the Vietnam veteran by the erroneous views of liberals in the university and the media in the 60’s and their perpetuation of these views.” (The Compass,” the college newspaper, May 11, 1981)

“Newsday had been notified of the rally in advance, and although a reporter was present , the newspaper did not publish the event.”(The Compass.)

It was this betrayal by the media of their rally to honor the veterans that led my students, working with local vets, to the formation of Vietnam Veterans for Academic Reform, the Manifesto of which I delivered to the White House by appointment some time during that May.

The subsequent story of our many battles with media and university versions of the Vietnam War, generally supported by Vietnam vet groups and some noted by General William C. Westmoreland, can be seen in the 10-part series, Vietnam and the Media. In response to my 31-page exposé of the lies in the CBS prime-time TV program, The Uncounted Enemy, Westmoreland wrote, “You have done an exhaustive bit of research, and I congratulate you. I am sending this to my lawyer,” (letter, September 13, 1982). Westmoreland filed a $21 million lawsuit over the program against CBS.

But the high point of our long campaign against the campus and media lies of the 60’s came in the election of 2004. The American people, by a significant majority, rejected the anti-war movement as represented by the candidacy of Senator John Kerry. But neither media nor campus accepted the defeat graciously. Nothing changed. They are still lying, and Karnow’s notorious 35-year-old history of the Vietnam War is still used at universities all over the nation, even though the bias in it triggered off riots all over the world when it appeared in TV form.

As columnist Stephen Young wrote on the 30th anniversary of the Vietnam War, “Our national recollection of the war still matches that of the New Left. No wonder certain questions are no longer asked, chief among them the question, a central one thirty years ago, of whether the U.S. involvement resulted from a tissue of lies from Washington or whether its assessment of conditions and consequent policy response to the plight of the South Vietnamese people was rational and justifiable.”

How the campus and the media lied about Vietnam is the one great trauma in the tissue of American history that has never been dealt with.

That this issue of lying about Vietnam has continued to be a problem up to today is shown by the fact that even as Kerry was being nominated at the Democratic Convention in Boston, right next door at Simmons College some of the nation’s top historians and military experts on Vietnam were holding a symposium, Examining the Myths of the Vietnam War. Out of this came the Vietnam Veterans Legacy Foundation, “A non-profit educational organization to expose the myths about Vietnam and those who perpetrate them.” The President of the group, Col. George E. Day, said in a press release, “A false history of Vietnam had been used to endanger and demoralize our troops in combat, undermine the public confidence in U.S. foreign policy and weaken our national security. Leftists lied about the war 35 years ago and are lying about it today. Our goal is to counter more than three decades of misinformation and propaganda and set the record straight.”

The media at the Convention next door knew all about this, but did not report on it to the American people. Not long after, the group published a booklet to be used on college campuses, Whitewash/Blackwash – Myths of the Vietnam War, by Bill Laurie, who is a member of our Board of Advisors, and R. J. Del Vecchio (available at TechConsultServ@Juno.com).

The truth is that even though there is now nothing that opponents of the war can point to that vindicates their position, they continue in our universities and the media to urge the nation to ignore the correct historical conclusions. To admit to having been wrong would be to face, not only guilt, but disproof of their ideological assumptions. But it is these same assumptions that are causing the wave of anti-Semitism on campus, the dangerous “Islam is peaceful” mythology, and the anti-Americanism being pressed on students: “It is because of something we did to them.”

Our contribution to the 2004 election was a number of critical articles on Kerry that may be seen at v-v-a-r.org, plus a poll we put together from data sent us by 32 Vietnam vet organizations showing that 80% of Vietnam vets were going to vote against Kerry. This story was covered in an article by United Press International.

Sometime in 1972, the American soldier having fought the war successfully to a peace treaty left South Vietnam, leaving the South Vietnamese army to fight the North alone, which they did successfully for two years until a Democratic majority in Congress, led by Senator Ted Kennedy of Chappaquiddick fame, in a totally gratuitous betrayal of an ally, cut off all their ammunition and drowned them in the South China Sea.

The American soldier won the war, but it was thrown away by the Democrats. Is this about to happen again?

The biggest uproar in the 60’s over media bias came over its reporting of the Tet Offensive. Unbelievably, as if totally unaware of this uproar charging the media with lying about the offensive, and apparently also unaware that the 2004 election was a repudiation of the anti-war position on Vietnam, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman set off a firestorm last week by asking if the recent violence in Iraq could be seen as another Tet Offensive. In other words he was still clinging to the media interpretation that Tet had been a loss for America that so disheartened the nation that it then turned against that war.

There is a problem here. The Tet Offensive was a victory for America, but portrayed by the media as a defeat. I was there and I remember it all well. Here is the true story about that:

The Tet Offensive, which was portrayed by the New York liberal media as a defeat for the U.S., was in fact, as Westmoreland and all historians agree, an almost disastrous defeat for the North Vietnamese. Not only did they lose half of the 90,000 troops they had committed to battle, the Viet Cong was virtually destroyed.

Contrary to the expectations of the North, the people of the South took not one step to assist the invaders. Instead, they rose up in revulsion and resistance, with the government and the people galvanized into unity for the first time and volunteers for the South Vietnamese army almost doubling.

In the U.S., the facts that finally came out about the offensive, that the war was not just a “civil war,” that the South clearly did not wish to live under Communist rule and welcomed American aid, and that it was the North Vietnamese who were engaged in “genocide” and “aggression” with the mass murders at Hue and the rocket attacks on helpless civilian populations, should have ended the arguments of the “peace” movement. It was the moment of truth for those in the universities and the media. They failed the test. The lying continued with renewed fury.

The New York media, recognizing an opportunity to manipulate the news to effectively impose its view of the war on the American people created, and deliberately sustained, an image of “disaster,” even in the face of incoming battlefield reports that contradicted that image. This image was taken seriously by advisors to President Johnson, totally altering the outcome of the war at the very moment when victory might have been possible. The liberal media robbed the United States government and the American people of the ability to make critical judgments about their most vital security interests in a time of war. We need to make absolutely sure that is not what they are up to now. Wolf Blitzer and the folk at CNN are beginning to sound awfully funny to me.

In one of the most incredible phenomenon in the history of warfare, there was during this Tet period, thanks to the media, no logical connection between what was actually happening in Vietnam and response on the home front. The response to victory was despair. This is what the media calls the enemy’s “psychological victory,” which they themselves created.

And to their everlasting shame, the “peace” movement responded to any hint of success by American forces at Tet with panic, fearing that their own country might win the war. As presidential candidate George McGovern said to Vietnam vet and former Sec. of the Navy James Webb, “What you don’t understand is that I didn’t want us to win that war.” (American Enterprise Magazine, May/June 1997)

The media has always tried to dismiss the charge of having lied about the Tet Offensive as a right-wing fantasy, but in material I once distributed to Congress asking for an investigation, I quoted from 21 standard histories and commentaries on the Vietnam War, some of which follow:

“The enemy has been hurt badly, he committed a total of about 84,000 men. He lost 40,000 killed.” (Report of General Earle G. Wheeler, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the Tet Offensive. February 27, 1968) [Note: the allies lost 927. This is the disaster for the North Vietnamese that CBS called a “stalemate.”]

“The Allied counter-offensive following Tet destroyed the Viet Cong based in the South and was a major defeat for the North. Yet despite this victory the press in the United States turned Tet into an American defeat.” (Great Battles of the 20th Century – Sir Basil Liddell Hart)

“The North Vietnamese regulars and the Viet Cong guerrillas were defeated utterly on the battlefield. Granted the American superiority at that time, there is at least the probability that North Vietnam forces could have been destroyed.” (Crossroads of Modern Warfare – Drew Middleton)

“Newsmen countered official claims of a Communist defeat by saying that even if it were true (which they refused to accept as they did the official account of enemy losses) the communists had achieved a psychological victory.” (The Vietnam War – an international panel of historians)

“This is the only war lost in the columns of The New York Times. They created an image of South Vietnam that was as distant from the truth as not even to be a good caricature. There were those who invented, distorted, and lied. (Certain Victory - Dennis Warner)

“Visitors to the Lyndon Johnson Library are told, “While the President was reading reports from the war that made it clear that the enemy had suffered a severe military loss (Tet), newspaper and TV gave the impression that the loss was ours and that defeat was imminent.” (New York Times News Service)

“COSVN, Viet Cong Headquarters, in its internal report #6, March 1968, admitted the Tet Offensive had been a failure. ‘We failed to seize a number of primary objectives. We also failed to hold the occupied areas. In the political field we failed to motivate the people to stage uprisings.’”(The Magruder Expose – Leonard Magruder)

“For the first time in modern history, the outcome of a war was determined not on the battlefield but on the printed page and television screens – never before Vietnam had the collective policy of the media sought, by graphic and unremitting distortion, the victory of the enemies of the correspondents own side.” (Encounter-British journalist Robert Elegant)

“Jack Fern of NBC suggested to producer Robert Northfield that NBC do a documentary showing that Tet was indeed a decisive military victory for the United States. ‘We can’t,’ said Northfield, ‘Tet is already established in the public mind as a defeat.’ (Between Fact and Fiction – Edward J. Epstein)

“When General Westmoreland publicly announced that the Tet Offensive had been a major defeat for the Communists and a major victory for the Allied forces, a fact obvious to anyone who viewed the events dispassionately, he was treated like a self-deluding fool by the news media.” (Battles and Campaigns – Tom Carhart)

“The Tet Offensive proved catastrophic to our plans. It is a major irony of the Vietnam War that our propaganda transformed this debacle into a brilliant victory. The truth was that Tet cost us half our forces. Our losses were so immense that we were unable to replace them with new recruits.”(Truong Nhu Tang – Minister of Justice – Viet Cong Provisional Revolutionary Government - The New York Review, October 21, 1982)

“If there is to be an inquiry related to the Vietnam War, it should be into the reasons why enemy propaganda was so widespread in this country, and why the enemy was able to condition the public to such an extent that the best educated segments of our population (that is, media and university elite) gave credence to the most incredible allegations.” (Final Report – Chief of Military History – U.S. Government)

The suggestion that the media and university may once again be setting the stage for another, even more deadly betrayal, to forward their philosophical agendas, is seen in this article by German Munoz, professor of international relations at Miami Dade College. He recently wrote:

“The story being missed, or purposively kept away from the American people, is the direct connection between the actions of Muslim terrorists and the commands of Allah and Muhammad in the Koran. Our secularized elites do not want us to understand or discuss the religious base underlying the terrorists’ political agenda for world domination. If they would read the Koran, they would find out that Allah wants Muslims to kill the infidels (Koran 9:5) wherever they are found. That the heads and fingers of unbelievers should be cut off, and that Muslims should fight and humiliate Jews and Christians.

“Why are the establishment media and academia keeping all this information from the American public? These are the types who sacrifice national security on the altar of political correctness and of a self-righteousness and irresponsible tolerance. They cannot be trusted to provide America the accurate information Americans need to protect themselves. These killers have not ‘hijacked’ Islam as our elites argue absurdly. They are implementing verses found in the Koran itself.

“The crucial thing now is how to inform the American people about the religious threat to their existence. The first step is to tell the truth about the Koran and its impact on the present jihad.”

The point:

We know the media lied about Vietnam to further the goals of the leftist anti-war movement. We know Dan Rather and others lied about Bush to help the Democrats in 2004. Is it lying again to further an agenda of defeating the Republicans and getting the U.S. to abandon Iraq?

Under no circumstances should the media ever use the case of Vietnam to make a point about the war in Iraq. For the simple reason that the Vietnam War they have in mind is a fiction they invented. It never existed.

The importance of still trying to tell the truth about Vietnam, that it was a noble cause betrayed to tyranny and genocide by the student left on campus in the 60’s, is that this would discredit and throw into disarray the left that is tyrannizing our universities and creating a polarization on the war against terrorism that could lead the nation down the path to destruction.

***

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Leonard Magruder

Academic Advisor VAF

Magruder44@aol.com

By Michael Fowler

Edmund Burke said, “All that is necessary for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing.” Whereas pacifism—as promoted by Leo Tolstoy, the moral hero of the left—demands that good men do nothing even in the face of genocide.

Liberal pacifism is subversive theology designed to disarm Christians from ethics. It is rhetoric expounded to Christians not to fight against evil by people who reject Christianity, rather than a moral code. Christians can and must fight when fighting is more ethical than not fighting. It was ethical to fight the Nazi’s to free the world from Hitler’s jack-booted brutality; it was ethical to fight the North Vietnamese Army to prevent the killing and enslavement of millions of Vietnamese.

Iraqi woman at mass grave in Iraq

When the history of the Liberal pacifists is examined all that is seen is blood. Anti-war activists successfully protested and forced the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam that resulted in the killing of 1.4 million Vietnamese by Ho Chi Min’s forces. Vietnamese “boat people” were dying in the Pacific, while President Jimmy Carter did nothing. As Serbians attempted to fight off the Islamic Crusade, the left made up false reports of genocide, needlessly destroyed bridges, hospitals, and defended the bombing on Easter. When American Forces freed Kuwait from Saddam, the pacifists cried foul. Iraqis were freed from Saddam’s genocide of over 400,000 and leftists wanted the United States to pull out and leave them to the wolves as President Barack Obama’s administration is doing as we speak. Yes, they are pacifists, with other people’s blood.

Fr. Stanley S. Harakas, dean emeritus of Holy Cross School of Theology in Boston stated, “The just war theory holds that war is an evil, and seeks to make it less so.” This was Patrick Henry’s appeal in his Give me Liberty or Give me Death speech, “Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace– but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! …Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle?” When war exists, fighting it or standing in ethical opposition to it is to reduce its effects. To prove this, I need only submit millions of Russian Orthodox corpses killed by those who earlier extorted Tolstoy’s pacifism. Moral authority cannot be claimed when standing aside in permissiveness to allow murder.

Liberal pacifism is the soothing lie of communists who know that so long as people still believe in God and ethics, communism cannot win. They have learned that killing millions will not effectively change culture. They now believe that the best way to change culture is to corrupt its theology rather than eliminate it outright, because man is a “religious animal.”

Pacifism cannot be justified from Christian ethics, so they corrupt them. Pacifists will point to the Old Testament teaching of “Thou shall not kill.” Yet, they show themselves hypocrites when three pages later the explanation of the law is, “Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death.” (Exodus 21:17), a law they will reject. Thus, “Thou shall not kill” refers to murder and manslaughter.

Pacifists proclaim, “Turn the other cheek” as Christ taught. Christ also approved of the Law of Moses, and when Roman soldiers confronted him and asked the open question, “What about us?” He did not tell them to lay down their weapons of war and killing, rather “your pay is enough,” do not use extortion. (Luke 3:14) When Christ says turn the other cheek, this is not permission to allow others to murder, rape and pillage, nor is it the end of civil authority.

Liberal pacifism is not the pacifism of Quakers who refuse to be involved and separate from society. Quakers believe in the totality of scripture. Whereas Liberals only use “thou shall not kill” as the one law they wish to use to fetter all that resist them. Meaning “thou shall not kill me.”

The faith of a Liberal pacifist is one who has abandoned all of God’s tenets and adopted the law of witchcraft, “harm none, and do what thou will.” They erroneously assert themselves as the highest moral authority and above Christianity because “small-minded Christians still believe in killing. Therefore we, the pacifists, are superior in our morals;” morals that only extend as far as their own noses.
Pacifism of liberals is merely a weapon to disarm their opponents in order to take control of the levers of power. They are not truly interested in morals but in the acquisition of power over the people. How else can their actions be justified? Thinking that liberals believe in pacifism is as foolish as Neville Chamberlain’s belief in Adolf Hitler’s peace treaty. Pacifism as preached by liberals is only a seduction to allow the promulgation of evil, whereas love as preached by Christians is to destroy evil.

-Michael Fowler is the director of Veterans for Academic Freedom, a former Force Recon Marine, instructor of Christian apologetics, author and talk-radio host.

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