WASHINGTON (March 10, 2010) — After the collapse of the Senate amnesty bill in 2007, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) joined with the National Council of La Raza and others to launch a campaign to smear the three largest mainstream groups making a case for tighter enforcement and lower immigration. At the center of this campaign was the designation of the Federation for American Immigration Reform as a ‘hate group’ and the spread of that taint to Numbers USA and the Center for Immigration Studies. The announced goal was to pressure journalists and policymakers not to meet or speak with these organizations. Touted as an effort to ’stop the hate,’ it was a thinly disguised move to stifle debate.

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By Fern Sidman

Chants of “Free, Free Palestine” and “Israel Is Here To Stay” resounded along New York City’s Park Avenue, as both anti-Israel forces and pro-Israel supporters squared off in front of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel on Tuesday evening, March 9th, while inside the hotel the organization known as The Friends of the Israel Defense Forces gathered for their annual gala fund-raising dinner. The guest of honor and keynote speaker for this year’s dinner was Lt. General Gabi Ashkenazi, Chief of Staff of the IDF.

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Written by Stephanie Miles, a freelance writer for Guide to Online Schools, an accredited online degrees and online college website.

From major blogs like the Huffington Post and Daily Kos to the smaller, more niche sites like FiveThirtyEight, it is impossible to ignore the impact that bloggers have had on politics over the course of the past few years.

From 2003 to 2005, the number of Americans who reported that they regularly read one or more blogs increased from 11 percent to 58 percent, according to surveys done by the Pew Research Group. These figures reflect just how quickly the medium has expanded in a short period of time.

Still, despite the sheer number of niche websites that are run by individual writers out of their own homes, a relatively small number of bloggers still comprise the top echelon of online political power players — and research has found that less than a dozen bloggers account for 20 percent of all incoming links to political websites in The United States.

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by Cinnamon Stillwell*

In the wake of the horrific attack at the Fort Hood military base in Texas earlier this month, and the mounting evidence that the shooter, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, was motivated by Islamist beliefs, the media has turned to Middle East studies “experts” for enlightenment. Instead, what the media, and, by extension, the American public, has received is the moral relativism and obfuscation that too often meets any effort to address Islamism or jihadism in an intellectually honest manner.

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By Phyllis Chesler

In our time, a speaker must face a gauntlet of hostility and a menacing crowd if she wishes to speak in favor of Israel or to tell the truth about Islam.

That’s if she’s lucky. Most such speakers never get invited or when they do, their invitations are canceled.

Nonie Darwish, the author of Cruel and Usual Punishment: The Terrifying Global Implications of Islamic Law and Now They Call Me Infidel: Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel, and the War on Terror, has faced on-campus hostility and disruption before. Over the years, I have interviewed her about this a number of times. Like many of us, she has also sometimes been forced to have security guards with her when she speaks. Continue reading…

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By Phyllis Chesler

The Center for Social Cohesion, a distinguished British think tank, has just released a major expose of the radical Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT), which is targeting the West, “including the United States, and (which) supports violent jihad.” Britain has just suspended government support for some HT nursery and primary schools which function to indoctrinate unsuspecting Muslim children into dreaming of a global caliphate.

And yes, they veil the little, little girls at ever-younger ages. Well-meaning parents who themselves may not be religiously well-versed may believe that what this group does, represents “authentic” rather than dangerously “radical” Islam. Continue reading…

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By Phyllis Chesler

The outpouring of support for my position in favor of universal women’s rights both humbles and strengthens me. This struggle is not about me nor is it about Naomi Wolf who so unwisely went to war over one blog of mine which critiqued her written views about the Islamic veil and the oppression/repression of Muslim women.

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Thanks to the scrutiny of groups like HonestReporting, “the BBC Trust, which oversees complaints to the British state broadcaster, has ruled that [Mideast Editor Jeremy] Bowen’s coverage of Israel in an article on the BBC’s Web site and a radio broadcast was partially inaccurate and that aspects of the Internet article lacked impartiality.” HonestReporting has the whole story, including background history of Israel-phobes like Bowen and Robert Fisk; information on an investigation conducted by the BBC into its own coverage to determine whether the network maintains an anti-Israel bias — a report the media giant refuses to release publicly; and an online petition which urges the BBC to release its own report. Here’s a snippet, but you should read the whole story:

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PHILADELPHIA — The Middle East Forum is proud to announce that Ruth Malhotra, Campus Watch Research Assistant at the Middle East Forum, is the 2009 co-recipient of the Ronald Reagan Award from the American Conservative Union, the highest award given by the ACU.

The award honors a conservative activist who best exemplifies the Reagan spirit of outstanding achievement and selfless contributions to the advancement of liberty. Presented on February 27, 2009 at the 36th annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), it includes a $10,000 cash stipend.

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by Daniel Pipes*

For the past year, there’s been a concerted push within the U.S. government to ban frank talk about the nature of the Islamist enemy. It began with the Department of Homeland Security, then moved to the National Counter Terrorism Center and the departments of State and Defense. Already in May 2008, I heard an excellent analysis of the enemy by Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Thomas Mahnken in which he bizarrely never once mentioned Islam or jihad.

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by Brooke M. Goldstein and Aaron Meyer*

On Wednesday, freedom of speech in Europe took a new and devastating turn, as a Dutch appellate court ordered the prosecution of Geert Wilders, parliamentarian and filmmaker, charging him with “inciting hatred and discrimination” against Muslims for his film exposing the threat of radical Islam.

This ruling comes a mere six months after the public prosecutor’s office found Wilders’ dialogue contributed to the debate on Islam and that he had not committed any criminal offense. Now, curiously, the court has done an about-face and decreed that charges may be brought against the politician, and that prosecuting him is somehow in “the public interest.”

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by Pam Meister*

Those of us who get the bulk of our news from the Internet are probably aware of pro-Hamas rallies that have taken place across the nation over the last couple of weeks. To name just a couple: in Los Angeles, the Islamists chanted “Heil Hitler,” “death to the Jews,” “death to Israel” and “down, down, USA!” In Fort Lauderdale, Jews were exhorted to “go back to the ovens.” As Spencer noted, “Never before in American history have we seen people openly, on American soil, and in full light of video cameras, saying that they want to see a renewal of a genocidal ambition, and they want to see a whole people exterminated.”

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by David J. Rusin*

When President Roosevelt addressed Congress after Pearl Harbor, he cited Japan fifteen times in a speech of five hundred words. When President Bush did the same after 9/11, he uttered “Islam” or “Muslim” more sparingly — just eleven times in a speech of three thousand words. And when Senators Obama and McCain spoke at the respective conventions and debates, asking to be entrusted with America’s security, not a single reference to Islam could be found.

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By Walid Phares*

Over the past nine months, a major campaign promoted by member-states in the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) and its Secretariat General has been aiming at forcing a declaration on “defamation of religion” on the United Nations. The OIC, influenced by radical ideologues including the International Union of Clerics headed by Sheikh Yusuf Qardawi, wants the UN to vote a law banning and punishing any criticism of religion in general and of critical debates about Islam in particular. Aside from obstructing reformers and suppressing democratic movements within Muslim societies, the OIC move will be used by Jihadi Terror networks to further their ideological indoctrination.

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From David Horowitz’s Freedom Center

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - Any time the Left’s grip on our universities can be loosened, even slightly, it is a major victory.  That’s why I want to tell you about something the Freedom Center accomplished at the College of DuPage, a prominent Community College in Illinois.

As background I should remind you of our nationwide campaign to get universities around the country to adopt our Academic Bill of Rights.  I wrote this document to end the political abuse of the university and to restore integrity to the academic mission as the objective and truthful pursuit of knowledge.  The key provision was the one demanding that faculty not use their courses for political, ideological, religious or anti-religious indoctrination.

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